Queed Part 28

"You are a failure as a sociologist," said Sharlee, immediately, "for the same reason as both your other failures: you are wholly out of relation with real life. Sociology is the science of human society. You know absolutely nothing about human society, except what other men have found out and written down in text-books. You say that you are an evolutionary sociologist. Yet a wonderful demonstration in social evolution is going on all around you, and _you don't even know it_. You are standing here directly between two civilizations. On the one side there are Colonel Cowles and my old grandmother--mother of your landlady, plucky dear! On the other there are our splendid young men, men who, with traditions of leisure and cultured idleness in their blood, have pitched in with their hands and heads to make this State _hum_, and will soon be meeting and beating your Northern young men at every turn. On one side there is the old slaveholding aristocracy; on the other the finest Democracy in the world; and here and now human society is evolving from one thing to the other. A real sociologist would be absorbed in watching this marvelous process: social evolution actually surprised in her workshop. But you--I doubt if you even knew it was going on. A tremendous social drama is being acted out under your very window and you yawn and _pull down the blind_."

There was a brief silence. In the course of it the door-bell was heard to ring; soon the door opened; a masculine murmur; then the maid Mary's voice, clearly: "Ya.s.suh, she's in.... Won't you rest your coat, Mr.

West?"

Mary entered the little back parlor, a card upon a tray. "Please draw the folding doors," said Sharlee. "Say that I'll be in in a few minutes."

They were alone once more, she and the little Doctor; the silence enfolded them again; and she broke it by saying the last word she had to say.

"I have gone into detail because I wanted to make the unfavorable impression you produce upon your little world clear to you, for once.

But I can sum up all that I have said in less than six words. If you remember anything at all that I have said, I wish you would remember this. Mr. Queed, you are afflicted with a fatal malady. Your cosmos is all Ego."

She started to rise, thought better of it, and sat still in her flowered chair full in the lamplight. The little Doctor stood at the mantel-shelf, his elbow upon it, and the silence lengthened. To do something, Sharlee pulled off her right long glove and slowly put it back again. Then she pulled off her left long glove, and about the time she was b.u.t.toning the last b.u.t.ton he began speaking, in a curious, lifeless voice.

"I learned to read when I was four years old out of a copy of the New York _Evening Post_. It came to the house, I remember, distinctly, wrapped around two pork chops. That seemed to be all the reading matter we had in the house for a long time--I believe Tim was in hard luck in those days--and by the time I was six I had read that paper all through from beginning to end, five times. I have wondered since if that incident did not give a bent to my whole mind. If you are familiar with the _Evening Post_, you may appreciate what I mean.... It came out in me exactly like a duck's yearning for water; that deep instinct for the printed word. Of course Tim saw that I was different from him. He helped me a little in the early stages, and then he stood back, awed by my learning, and let me go my own gait. When I was about eight, I learned of the existence of public libraries. I daresay it would surprise you to know the books I was reading in this period of my life--and writing too: for in my eleventh year I was the author of a one-volume history of the world, besides several treatises. And I early began to think, too. What was the fundamental principle underlying the evolution of a higher and higher human type? How could this principle be unified through all branches of science and reduced to an operable law? Questions such as these kept me awake at night while I still wore short trousers. At fourteen I was boarding alone in a kind of tenement on the East Side. Of course I was quite different from all the people around me. Different. I don't remember that they showed any affectionate interest in me, and why on earth should they? As I say, I was different. There was nothing there to suggest a conception of that brotherhood of man you speak of. I was born with this impulse for isolation and work, and everything that happened to me only emphasized it. I never had a day's schooling in my life, and never a word of advice or admonition--never a scolding in all my life till now. Here is a point on which your Christian theory of living seems to me entirely too vague: how to reconcile individual responsibility with the forces of heredity and circ.u.mstance. From my point of view your talk would have been better rounded if you had touched on that. Still, it was striking and interesting as it was. I like to hear a clear statement of a point of view, and that your statement happens to riddle me, personally, of course does not affect the question in any way. If I regard human society and human life too much as the biologist regards his rabbit, which appears to be the gist of your criticism, I can at least cheerfully take my own turn on the operating table as occasion requires. There is, of course, a great deal that I might say in reply, but I do not understand that either of us desires a debate. I will simply a.s.sert that your fundamental conception of life, while novel and piquant, will not hold water for a moment. Your conception is, if I state it fairly, that a man's life, to be useful, to be a life of service, must be given immediately to his fellows. He must do visible and tangible things with other men. I think a little reflection will convince you that, on the contrary, much or most of the best work of the world has been done by men whose personal lives were not unlike my own. There was Palissy, to take a familiar minor instance.

Of course his neighbors saw in him only a madman whose cosmos was all Ego. Yet people are grateful to Palissy to-day, and think little of the suffering of his wife and children. Newton was no genial leader of the people. Bacon could not even be loyal to his friends. The living world around Socrates put him to death. The world's great wise men, inventors, scientists, philosophers, prophets, have not usually spent their days rubbing elbows with the bricklayer. Yet these men have served their race better than all the good-fellows that ever lived. To each his gifts. If I succeed in reducing the principle of human evolution to its eternal law, I need not fear the judgment of posterity upon my life. I shall, in fact, have performed the highest service to humankind that a finite mind can hope to compa.s.s. Nevertheless, I am impressed by much that you say.

I daresay a good deal of it is valuable. All of it I engage to a.n.a.lyze and consider dispa.s.sionately at my leisure. Meantime, I thank you for your interest in the matter. Good-evening."

"Mr. Queed."

Sharlee rose hurriedly, since hurry was so evidently necessary. She felt profoundly stirred, she hardly knew why; all her airs of a haughty princess were fled; and she intercepted him with no remnant of her pretense that she was putting a shabby inferior in his place.

"I want to tell you," she said, somewhat nervously, "that I--I--admire very much the way you've taken this. No ordinary man would have listened with such--"

"I never pretended to be an ordinary man."

He moved, but she stood unmoving in front of him, the pretty portrait of a lady in blue, and the eyes that she fastened upon him reminded him vaguely of Fifi's.

"Perhaps I--should tell you," said Sharlee, "just why I--"

"Now don't," he said, smiling faintly at her with his old air of a grandfather--"don't spoil it all by saying that you didn't mean it."

Under his smile she colored a little, and, despite herself, looked confused. He took advantage of her embarra.s.sment to pa.s.s her with another bow and go out, leaving her struggling desperately with the feeling that he had got the best of her after all.

But the door opened again a little way, almost at once, and the trim-cut, academic face, with the lamplight falling upon the round gla.s.ses and blotting them out in a yellow smudge, appeared in the crevice.

"By the way, you were wrong in saying that I pulled down my blind on the evolutionary process now going on in the South. I give four thousand words to it in my Historical Perspective, volume one."

XIV

_In which Klinker quotes Scripture, and Queed has helped Fifi with her Lessons for the Last Time._

The tax-articles in the _Post_ had ceased after the adjournment of the Legislature, which body gave no signs of ever having heard of them. Mr.

Queed's new series dealt authoritatively with "Currency Systems of the World." He polished the systems off at the rate of three a week. But he had asked and obtained permission to submit, also, voluntary contributions on topics of his own choosing, and now for a fortnight these offerings had died daily in Colonel Cowles's waste-basket.

As for his book, Queed could not bear to think of it in these days.

Deliberately he had put a winding-sheet about his heart's desire, and laid it away in a drawer, until such time as he had indisputably qualified himself to be editor of the _Post_. Having qualified, he could open that drawer again, with a rushing access of stifled ardor, and await the Colonel's demise; but to do this, he figured now, would take him not less than two months and a half. Two months and a half wrenched from the Schedule! That sacred bill of rights not merely corrupted, but for a s.p.a.ce nullified and cancelled! Yes, it was the ultimate sacrifice that outraged pride of intellect had demanded; but the young man would not flinch. And there were moments when Trainer Klinker was startled by the close-shut misery of his face.

The Scriptorium had been degraded into a sickening school of journalism.

Day after day, night after night, Queed sat at his tiny table poring over back files of the _Post_, examining Colonel Cowles's editorials as a geologist examines a Silurian deposit. He a.n.a.lyzed, cla.s.sified, tabulated, computed averages, worked out underlying laws; and gradually, with great travail--for the journalese language was to him as Greek to another--he deduced from a thousand editorials a few broad principles, somewhat as follows:--

1. That the Colonel dealt with a very wide range of concrete topics, including many that appeared extremely trivial. (Whereas he, Queed, had dealt almost exclusively with abstract principles, rarely taking cognizance of any event that had happened later than 1850.)

2. That nearly all the Colonel's "best" articles--_i.e._, best-liked, most popular: the kind that Major Brooke and Mr. Bylash, or even Miss Miller, were apt to talk about at the supper-table--dealt with topics of a purely local and ephemeral interest.

3. That the Colonel never went deeply or exhaustively into any group of facts, but that, taking one broad simple hypothesis as his text, he hammered that over and over, saying the same thing again and again in different ways, but always with a wealth of imagery and picturesque phrasing.

4. That the Colonel invariably got his humorous effects by a good-natured but sometimes sharp ridicule, the process of which was to exaggerate the argument or travesty the cause he was attacking until it became absurd.

5. That the Colonel, no matter what his theme, always wrote with vigor and heat and color: so that even if he were dealing with something on the other side of the world, you might suppose that he, personally, was intensely gratified or extremely indignant about it, as the case might be.

These principles Queed was endeavoring, with his peculiar faculty for patient effort, to apply practically in his daily offerings. It is enough to say that he found the task harder than Klinker's Exercises, and that the little article on the city's method of removing garbage, which failed to appear in this morning's _Post_, had stood him seven hours of time.

It was a warm rainy night in early May. Careful listening disclosed the fact that Buck Klinker, who had as usual walked up from the gymnasium with Queed, was changing his shoes in the next room, preparatory for supper. Otherwise the house was very still. Fifi had been steadily reported "not so well" for a long time and, for two days, very ill.

Queed sitting before the table, his gas ablaze and his shade up, tilted back his chair and thought of her now. All at once, with no conscious volition on his part, he found himself saying over the startling little credo that Fifi had suggested for his taking, on the day he sent her the roses.

_To like men and do the things that men do. To smoke. To laugh. To joke and tell funny stories. To take a ..._

The door of the Scriptorium-editorium opened and Buck Klinker, entering without formalities, threw himself, according to his habit, upon the tiny bed. This time he came by invitation, to complete the decidedly interesting conversation upon which the two men had walked up town; but talk did not at once begin. A book rowelled the small of Klinker's back as he reclined upon the pillow, and plucking it from beneath him, he glanced at the back of it.

"_Vanity Fair_. Didn't know you ever read story-books, Doc."

The Doc did not answer. He was occupied with the thought that not one of the things that Fifi had urged upon him did he at present do. Smoking he could of course take up at any time. Buck Klinker worked in a tobacconist's shop; it might be a good idea to consult him as to what was the best way to begin. As for telling funny stories--did he for the life of him know one to tell? He racked his brain in vain. There were two books that he remembered having seen in the Astor Library, _The Percy Anecdotes_, and Mark Lemon's _Jest Book_; perhaps the State Library had them.... Stay! Did not Willoughby himself somewhere introduce an anecdote of a distinctly humorous nature?

"It ain't much," said Buck, dropping Thackeray to the floor. "I read the whole thing once.--No, I guess I'm thinkin' of _The County Fair_, a drammer that I saw at the Bee-jou. But I guess they're all the same, those Fairs."

"Say Doc," he went on presently, "I'm going to double you on Number Seven, beginning from to-morrow, hear?"

Number Seven was one of the stiffest of Klinker's Exercises for All Parts of the Body. Queed looked up absently.

"That's right," said his trainer, inexorably. "It's just what you need.

I had a long talk with Smithy, last night."

"Buck," said the Doctor, clearing his throat, "have I ever--ahem--told you of the famous reply of Dr. Johnson to the Billingsgate fishwives?"

"Johnson? Who? Fat, sandy-haired man lives on Third Street?"

"No, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the well-known English author and--character.

It is related that on one occasion Dr. Johnson approached the fishwives at Billingsgate to purchase of their wares. The exact details of the story are not altogether clear in my memory, but, as I recall it, something the good Doctor said angered these women, for they began showering him with profane and blasphemous names. At this style of language the fishwives are said to be extremely proficient. What do you fancy that Dr. Johnson called them in return? But you could hardly guess. He called H them parallelopipedons. I am not entirely certain whether it was parallelopipedons or isosceles triangles. Possibly there are two versions of the story."

Buck stared at him, frankly and greatly bewildered, and noticed that the little Doctor was staring at him, with strong marks of anxiety on his face.

"I should perhaps say," added Queed, "that parallelopipedons and isosceles triangles are not profane or swearing words at all. They are, in fact, merely the designations applied to geometrical figures."

"Oh," said Klinker. "Oh."