The Patient Observer Part 12

"Homer!" I cried. "An _editio princeps_!"

"Nearly one hundred and fifty years old," he said. "The Rev. Henry Homer deserved well of his British countrymen when he gave to the world--it was in 1767--his 'Inquiry Into the Measures of Preserving and Improving the Publick Roads of this Kingdom.'"

Cooper sat down and eyed me doubtfully, as if awaiting an unfavourable opinion. His face quite lit up when I hastened to a.s.sure him that his library was one of the most impressive collections it had ever been my good fortune to know.

"Very few collections," I told him, "bear the impress of a personality.

As a rule they are shopfuls of costly masterpieces such as any multi-millionaire may have if he doesn't prefer horses or monkey dinners. But how often does one find a treasure-house like yours, Cooper, revealing an exquisitely discriminating taste in co-operation with the bold originality of the true amateur?"

x.x.xII

CHOPIN'S SUCCESSORS

"It is his own composition, the final word in modern music," I had been told. "He does not merely play the concerto; he lives it. Be sure to watch his face." It was not a very impressive face as artists go. It was rather heavy, rather sullen, and seemingly incapable of mirroring more than the elementary pa.s.sions. The great pianist entered the hall almost unwillingly, and wound his way among the musicians with consummate indifference to the roar of applause that greeted him. You might have said that he was once more a little boy being scourged to his piano day after day by parents who had been told that they had brought forth a genius. He half-dropped into his seat, glanced wearily about him, then let his eyes sink expressionless on the keyboard and his hands fall flat on his knees, nerveless, heavy, apathetic.

The orchestra leader poised his baton and the two-score strings under his command swung into a n.o.ble andante. The artist at the piano slowly raised his eyes to a level with the top of his instrument, his lips just parted as if in halting wonder at something he alone in the great hall could see, the hands made as if to lift themselves from his knees. "Look at his face," my neighbour said. I looked and saw that the dull mask was slightly changing, that some emotion at last was rising to the surface of that stolid countenance, striking its cloudy aspect with the first antic.i.p.ations of breaking light. Would that cloud dissolve? Would the light completely break and irradiate player, piano, and audience, all equally keyed up to the delayed climax? Would those ma.s.sive hands rise slowly, slowly, and hanging aloft an instant crash down in a rage of harmony upon keyboard and auditors' hearts? No. The clouds once more swept over that ma.s.sive face. The player moistened his lips with his tongue, half-turned on his chair, and slowly swept the hall with an indifferent, almost a disdainful eye. Then he sank into his former la.s.situde. His hands dropped to his side without striking the keys.

Evidently the time had not come. The violins in the orchestra sang on.

My neighbour was not the only one to fall under the spell of such masterly musicianship. Twenty-four ladies in the parquette shrank back into their seats with a half-sob of br.i.m.m.i.n.g emotion, and implored their escorts to look at the artist's face. Eleven ladies in the lower boxes interrupted their conversation to remark that it was wonderful what soul those Slavs managed to put into their playing. In the upper balconies listeners strained forward in their seats so that from below it seemed as if they were about to precipitate themselves over the railings. What expert opinion had described as the sublimest ten minutes in the great pianist's greatest concerto had just begun. The conductor slightly raised himself on his toes. Instantly through the weaving of the violins the voices of the wood instruments began to break out. The contest between the two came quickly to its climax. The strings were forced back and back, wailing an ineffective protest against the shrilling advance of the woods. A solitary 'cello made dogged resistance, knowing its cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes sang a paean of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, swept down a hurricane of bra.s.ses and shook the hall with its resonant thunders.

That was the moment our artist at the piano had been waiting for. His heavy figure straightened up; it seemed to swell to monstrous proportions, forcing orchestra and leader out of the vision and consciousness of his listeners. His face now was all eloquence. A divine wrath almost made his eyes blaze as he prepared to hurl himself at the silent, yet quivering instrument. His huge hands hovered over the keyboard ready to fall and destroy. His eyes ran over the keys as if searching for the vulnerable, for the vital spot. Back and forth his eyes ran, and his outstretched fingers kept pace with them in the air.

But those fingers could find no resting-place. Still the piano remained silent. And then came the inevitable reaction. Such pa.s.sion could not last without crushing player and audience alike. Seven ladies in the parquette were grasping the arms of their chairs, and three women in the upper balcony had seized the arms of their escorts, as the bra.s.ses crashed once and died out. The flutes for an instant reappeared, to make way in turn for the violins, which now began timidly to peep out from their hiding-places. They grew bolder; they joined hands, and once more their insistent story quivered and sang throughout the house. And as they sang, the player at the piano, exhausted by his supreme effort, sank more and more into his indifferent former self. His form collapsed, the fire in his eyes died out, and the powerful hands wearily drooped and drooped till they rested once more on the player's knees. A sigh of relief swept over the hall. Human emotion could stand no more. The audience could hardly wait for the last throb of the violins, to break out in rapturous applause. The master rose, bowed sorrowfully towards n.o.body in particular, and walked off.

"Did you watch his face?" asked my neighbour. "Have you ever come across such utterly overpowering individuality? I have played for fifteen years, but if I played for fifty years I could never even approach art like this."

x.x.xIII

THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT

"The arguments for and against woman suffrage," said Harding, "seem to me very evenly balanced. I agree with Dr. Biddle of the Society for the Promotion of Beautiful Manners, that it is unseemly for a woman to climb a truck and demand the ballot. Dr. Biddle maintains that if woman wants the ballot she should wait until every one is asleep and then go through somebody's pockets for it. Woman, Dr. Biddle thinks, has her own peculiar sphere, which, as the latest Census figures show, includes the nursery, the kitchen, the vaudeville stage, college teaching, stenography, the law, medicine, the ministry, as well as the manufacture of agricultural implements, ammunition, artificial feathers and limbs, automobiles, axle-grease, boots and shoes, bread-knives, brooms, brushes, b.u.t.tons, carriages and wagons, charcoal, cheese, cigars, clocks, clothing and so on to x, y, and z.

"Can anything be more fatal to our ideals of true womanliness, Dr.

Biddle asks, than a suffragette who throws stones? In reply to this, Miss Annabelle Bloodthurst a.s.serts that if we count the number of successful suffragette hits woman is never so true to her s.e.x as when she is heaving bricks at a British prime minister.

"Professor Tumbler lays particular stress on the outrageous conduct of the English suffragettes. He recalls how the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, while eating a charlotte russe, felt his teeth strike against a hard object, which turned out to be a cardboard cylinder inscribed 'Votes for Women.' The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster was about to light his after-dinner cigar the other day when the cigar suddenly expanded into a paper fan bearing the legend, 'Tyrants, beware!' The newest Dreadnought with the First Lord of the Admiralty on board was preparing to set out on her trial trip when it was discovered that the boilers were not making steam. When the furnace doors were opened two dozen suffragettes, concealed within, began to shout, 'We want votes!'

The leader of the Opposition is known to have walked all the way down Piccadilly with a tag tied to his coattails inscribed: 'I see no reason for bestowing the suffrage on women.'

"But perhaps the most dastardly outrage occurred at the baptism of the youngest child of a prominent treasury official. It seems that the nurse, who was a suffragette in disguise, had removed the child, a girl, and subst.i.tuted a mechanical doll, with a phonographic attachment. The clergyman was in the middle of his discourse when the doll began to scream, 'Votes for women.' The father gasped, 'What! So early?' and fainted.

"The more you weigh the reasons pro and con," continued Harding, as he lit one of my cigars, "the harder it is to decide. Mrs. Cadgers has pointed out that under our present system the wife of a college professor is not allowed to vote, whereas an illiterate Greek fruit peddler may. But Mr. Rattler replies that the college professor, too, seldom votes, and if he does he spoils his ballot by trying to split his ticket. Why, demands Mrs. Cadgers, should women who pay taxes be refused a voice in the management of public affairs? Because, replies Mr.

Rattler, the suffrage and taxes do not necessarily go together. In our country at the present day many millionaires who regularly cast their votes never pay their taxes.

"Mr. Rattler is particularly afraid that woman suffrage will break up the family. 'Imagine,' he says, 'a family in which the husband is a Democrat and the wife a Cannon Republican. Imagine them constantly fighting out the subject of tariff revision over the supper-table, and conceive the dreadful effect on the children, who at present are accustomed to see father light his cigar after supper and fall asleep.

Or suppose the wife develops a pa.s.sion for political meetings. That means that the husband will have to stay at home with the baby.' 'Well,'

replies Mrs. Cadgers, 'such an arrangement has its advantages. It would not only give the wife a chance to learn the meaning of citizenship, but it would give the husband a chance to get acquainted with the baby.' And besides, Mrs. Cadgers goes on to argue, a woman's political duties need not take up more than a small fraction of her time. That, retorts Mr.

Rattler, with a sneer, is because woman derives her ideas on the subject from seeing her husband fulfil his duties as a citizen once every two years when he forgets to register.

"An excellent debate on the subject was the one between Mrs. Excelsior, who spoke in favour of the ballot for women, and Professor Van Doodle, who upheld the negative. Professor Van Doodle maintained that women are incapable of taking a genuine interest in public affairs. What is it that appeals to a woman when she reads a newspaper? A Presidential election may be impending, a great war is raging in the Far East, an explorer has just returned from the South Pole, and, woman, picking up the Sunday paper, plunges straight into the fashion columns! She hardly finds time to answer her husband's petulant inquiry as to what she has done with the comic supplement. Can woman take an impersonal view of things? No, says Professor Van Doodle. In a critical Presidential election, one in which the fate of the country is at stake, she will vote for the candidate from whom she thinks she can get most for her husband and her children, whereas, her husband under the same circ.u.mstances will cast aside all personal interests and vote the same ticket his father voted for. Woman, concluded the professor, is const.i.tutionally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood.

"Mrs. Excelsior made a spirited defence. She showed that woman's undeveloped sense of what truth and honesty are, would not handicap her in the pursuit of practical politics. She argued that the complicated problems of munic.i.p.al finance are no easier for the man who sets out to raise a family on fifteen dollars a week than for the woman who succeeds in doing so. She declared that a person who can travel thirty miles by subway and surface car, price $500 worth of dressgoods, and buy her lunch, all on fifteen cents in cash and a transfer ticket, would make a good comptroller for New York City.

"Professor Van Doodle claimed that under woman suffrage only a good-looking candidate would stand a chance of being elected. Mrs.

Excelsior replied that there was no reason for believing that women would be more particular in choosing a State Senator than in selecting a husband. The professor was foolish when he a.s.serted that if women went to the polls they would vote for the aldermen and the sheriffs, and would forget to vote for the President of the United States, and would insist on doing so in a postscript. This was of a piece with the other ancient jest that women are sure to vote for a Democrat when at heart they prefer a Republican, and _vice versa_.

"The whole case," concluded Harding, "was summed up by the Rev. Dr.

Hollow when he said that in theory there is no objection to the present arrangement by which man rules the earth through his reason, and woman rules man through his stomach; but unfortunately, the human reason and the average man's stomach are apt to get out of order."

x.x.xIV

THE GERMS OF CULTURE

In my afternoon paper there was a letter by Veritas who tried to prove something about the Trusts by quoting from the third volume of Macaulay's history. After dinner I took the book from the shelf and as I struck it against the table to let the dust fly up, I thought of what Mrs. Harrington said. The Harringtons had spent an evening with me. As they rose to go Mrs. Harrington ran the tip of her gloved finger across half a dozen dingy volumes and sniffed. "Why don't you put gla.s.s doors on your bookshelves?" she asked. It was a raw point with me and she knew it. "The pretty kind, perhaps," I sneered, "with leaded panes and an antique iron lock?" "Exactly," she replied. "The dust here is abominable. You must be just steeped in all sorts of infection; and perhaps if you kept your books under lock and key people wouldn't run away with them." I was a fool to have tried irony upon Mrs. Harrington.

Her outlook upon life is literal and domestic. Books are to her primarily part of a scheme of interior decoration. Harrington's views come closer to my own, but Harrington is an indulgent husband.

The incident was now a week old, but something of the original fury came back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that is swept up by trailing skirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs?

And the dust of old beliefs in which we live, my friend? And the dust that statesmen and prophets are always throwing into our eyes? None of these interfere with Mrs. Harrington's peace of mind. But when it comes to the dust on the gilt tops of my red-buckrammed Moliere she fears infection.

And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree with me that infection from book-dust is not an ign.o.ble form of death. I sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says the _Evening Star_, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after a very brief illness. Friday night he was with a merry group of diners in one of our best-known and most brilliantly lighted Broadway restaurants. He partook heartily of lobster salad, of which, his closest friends declare, he was inordinately fond. Almost immediately he complained of being ill and was taken home in a taxicab." If I were H.

Wellington Jones and it were my fate to die of poison I could frame a n.o.bler end for myself. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," I would have it read, "died yesterday of some mysterious form of bacterial poisoning contracted while turning over the pages of an old family Bible which he was accustomed to consult at frequent intervals. Mr. Smith had a cut finger which was not quite healed and it is supposed that a dust-speck from the pages of the old book must have entered the wound and induced sepsis. He was found unconscious in his chair with the book open at the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs." Yes, I sometimes find it hard to understand what Harrington, a man of really fine sensibilities, sees in Mrs. Harrington. The very suggestion of locking up books to prevent their being carried away hurts like the screech of a pencil upon a slate. I think of Mrs. Harrington and then I think of Cooper. Cooper's shelves are continuously being denuded by his friends. But if you think of Cooper as a helpless victim you are sadly mistaken. There is an elaborate scheme behind it all, a scheme of such transcendent ingenuity as only simple-hearted, sweet-natured, unpractised, purblind visionaries like Cooper are capable of.

He let me into the secret one day when he saw that I was about to find it out for myself. "I know very many dear people," he said, "who are too busy to read books or too little in the habit of it. You know them, too; they are men and women in whom the pulse of life beats too rapidly for the calm pleasures of reading. They are not insensible to fine ideas, but they must see these ideas in concrete form. If I, for instance, wish to know something about Spain, I get one of Martin Hume's books, but these people take a steamer and go to Spain. I have read everything of Meredith's and they have read almost nothing, but they saw Meredith in London and spent a week-end with him at a country-house in Suss.e.x. I avoid celebrities in the flesh. I don't want to minister to them and I want still less to patronise them. I am afraid I should be disappointed in them and I am sure they would be disappointed in me.

"However, that's not the point," says Cooper. "The problem is to make a man read who won't read of his own accord. I do it by asking such a man to dinner. I pull out a volume of Marriott's and remark, without emphasis, that after infinite exertion I have just got it back from Woolsey, who is wild over the book. The fires of envy and acquisition flash in my visitor's eye. Might he have the book for a day or two? Yes, I say after some hesitation, but he must promise to bring it back. He grows fervent. Of course he will bring it back, by Sat.u.r.day at the very latest and in person. And he is my man from that moment. I have lost the book, of course, but I have smuggled my troops within the fort, I have laid the train, I have transmitted the infection. The serpent is in the garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate, a red serpent about a golden staff.

"Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book. But if Hobson expects me to drop in at any moment, he is afraid I may find the book on his library table and ask him whether he has read it. So he hides the book in his bedroom. Then he is indeed mine. Some night he will be out of sorts and find it hard to go to sleep. His eye will fall on the book lying there on his table, and he will pick it up, at the same time lighting a cigar. I shall never see that book again. But, I leave it to you, who needs that book more, I or Hobson?"

But Cooper did not tell all. I know he has made use of shrewder tactics.

Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite inept.i.tude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day politics and science, and everything else in the present that well-informed people are supposed to know. It goes with his total inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.

How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say, has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him. Or Hobson may not be going home that night, or he may object to carrying a parcel in the subway, or for any other reason he will omit to take the book with him. "The next day," says Cooper, "I pay Hobson a return visit, and forget the book on his hall-table. Frequently Hobson may be too busy to take notice of the accident. In that case I call him up on the telephone as soon as I leave his house and ask in great agitation whether by any chance I have left a volume of Maeterlinck on his hall-table. Sometimes I add that Woolsey has been after that volume for weeks. That night, I feel sure, Hobson will carry the book up to his bedroom."

And as Cooper spoke I thought of the Smith family, whom, by methods like those I have described, Cooper succeeded in saving from themselves.

Nerves in the Smith family were badly rasped. The mother was not making great headway in her social campaigns. Her husband chafed at his children's idleness and extravagance. The children went in sullen fashion about their own business. They had no resources of their own.

There was gloom in that household and stifled rancour, and the danger of worse things to come, until the day when Cooper called and forgot at one blow a copy of "Richard Feverel," the "Bab Ballads," and the third volume of Ferrero's "Rome."

As I have said, Cooper was not blind to the good he was doing. False modesty was not one of his failings. He would continually have me admire his bookshelves. The books he was proudest of were those he had lent or given away.... "I have a larger number of books missing," he would boast, "than any man of my acquaintance. This big hole here is my Gibbon. I sent it to an interesting old chap I met at a public dinner some years ago. He was a prosperous hardware merchant, self-made, and, like all self-made men, a bit unfinished. He had read very little. I don't recall how I happened to mention Gibbon or to send him the set. I think I may have forgotten the first volume at his office the next morning. He devoured Gibbon. From him he went to Tacitus. He has since read hundreds of books on the Roman empire and he has other hundreds of volumes waiting to be read. But somehow he has never thought of sending me back my shabby old Gibbon. And that was the way with my Montaigne--gone. And here were two editions of Gulliver. I lent one to a nephew of the Harringtons and the other to a rather prim young lady from Boston who impressed me as having had too much Emerson. My Sh.e.l.ley is gone. My 'Rousseau's Confessions' is also gone." And Cooper smiled at me beatifically.

That was Cooper. But Mrs. Harrington that night saw things in quite a different light. She grumbled and sniffed, and finally grew vehement. I am not a saint like Cooper, but here and there my shelves, too, show the visitations of friends. "Not a single complete set," wailed Mrs.