The Patient Observer Part 5

This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it. Any procession, no matter how humble, puts me into a state of mingled exaltation and tearfulness. It is in part the sound of human footsteps and in part the solemn idea behind them. I am not thinking of stately processions moving up the aisles of churches to the sound of music. I have in mind, rather, a band of, say, a thousand working girls on Labour Day, or of an Italian fraternal organisation heavy with plumes and banners, or even a Tammany political club on its annual outing; wherever the idea of human dependence and human brotherhood is testified to in the mere act of moving along the pavement shoulder to shoulder. Above all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I sat in state on the princ.i.p.al's platform. When the bell rang for dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one huge a.s.sembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not know which I wanted to be then, the princ.i.p.al in his magnificent chair of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their march towards freedom.

Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by getting close together and moving forward in close formation. In any case, the pathos is there. Consider a children's May party, on its way to Central Park. A fife-and-drum corps of three little boys in uniform leads the way. The Queen of the May, all in white, walks with her consort under a canopy of ribbons and flowers, a little stiffly, perhaps, and self-consciously, but not more so than older queens and kings on parade. A long line of boys and girls in many-coloured caps moves between flying detachments of mothers carrying baskets. The confectioner's wagon, laden with its precious commissariat of ice cream and cake, moves leisurely behind; for the confectioner's horse this is evidently a holiday. Is pathos conceivable in so delightful, so smiling, an event? Alas, I have watched May parties go by, and the serious little faces under the red and white caps have given me a heavier case of _Weltschmerz_ than I have ever experienced at a performance of "Tristan und Isolde." It was the fact of those little children advancing in unison; that is the word. If they had trudged or scurried along, pell-mell, I should not have minded. But May parties move forward in procession, and the movement of a compact crowd is, to me, always heavy with pathos.

But no crowd is like the afternoon crowd upon the wooden platform of the "L" station at City Hall. I don't mean to be sentimental when I say that the sound is to me like the march of human civilisation and human history. Outwardly there is little to justify my grandiose comparison.

You see only a heaving ma.s.s of men and women who are not very well clad.

The men are unshaven, the women awry with a day's labour. They move on with that beautiful optimism of an American crowd which has been trained in the belief that there is always plenty of room ahead. There is very little pushing. Occasionally a band of young boys hustle their way through the crowd; but a New York crowd seems always to be mindful of the days when we were all of us boys. It is a reading public. The men carry newspapers whose flaring headlines of red and green give a touch of almost Italian colour. The women carry cloth-bound novels in paper wrappers. But it is not an a.s.semblage of poets or scholars or thinkers, or whatever cla.s.s it is that is supposed to keep the world moving. It is that most solemn of all things--a city crowd on its way home from the day's work.

The footsteps keep up the tramp, tramp, on the board flooring, while train after train pulls out jammed within and without. The influx from the street allows no vacuum to be formed upon the platform. The patience of the modern man shows wonderfully. The tired workers face the hour's ride that lies between them and home with beautiful self-restraint and courage. And in their weariness and their patience lies the full solemnity of the scene. The morning crowd, even on the same wooden platform at City Hall, is different. The morning crowd is not so firmly knit together. You catch individual and local peculiarities. You feel that there are men and women here from Harlem, and others from Long Island, and others from Westchester and the Bronx. They are still fresh from their separate homes, with their separate atmospheres about them.

Some are brisk from the morning's exercise and the cold bath; some are still a bit sleepy from last night's pleasures; some go to the day's task with eager antic.i.p.ation; some move forward indifferent and resigned. But when these same men and women surge homeward in the evening, they are one in spirit; they are all equally tired. The city and the day's task have seized upon them and pa.s.sed them through the same set of rollers and pressed out their differences and transformed them into a single ma.s.s of weary human material. The city has had its day's work out of them and now sends them home to recruit the new supply of energy that it will demand to-morrow. The unshaven men with their newspapers and the listless women with their paper-covered novels show ascetically tight-drawn faces, as if the day had been pa.s.sed in prayer and supplication. I need not see those faces; I know they are there from the steady footfalls on the board platform. I overhear a young girl recounting what a perfectly lovely time she had last night, and how she simply couldn't stop dancing; but her foot drags a bit heavily and there sounds in her chatter and her vehemence the ground-tone of weariness.

It is not often that I hear the tramp of the late afternoon crowd upon the wooden platforms at City Hall. I find the sound of the crowd too solemn to be endured every day, and there is no comfort in the crush. I usually take pains to travel at an early hour when there are few people, and one is sure of a seat.

XVI

WHAT WE FORGET

The importance of knowing who my Congressman is had never occurred to me until Professor Wilson Stubbs brought up the subject at a luncheon in the Reform Club. Professor Stubbs spoke on Civic Obligations. He argued that at the bottom of all political corruption lay the average citizen's personal indifference. "For instance," he said, "how many of those present know the name of the man who represents their district at Washington?" And as it happened, while he waited for a reply, his eye rested thoughtfully on me.

I grew red under his scrutiny. I tried my best to remember and failed. I did vaguely recall the lithographed presentment of a large, clean-shaven man, with a heavy jaw. It hung in a barber-shop window between a blue-and-red poster announcing a grand masquerade and civic ball, and a papier-mache trout under a gla.s.s case. I could not bring back the man's name, although I was sure that his picture was inscribed on the top "Our Choice," and at the bottom he was characterised as somebody's friend--I could not recall whether he was the People's friend, or the Workingman's, or the Bronx's. I could not even make out his features, although, oddly enough, I could see the trout very distinctly. The fish, I recollected, had a peculiarly ferocious scowl, as if it resented the absurd blotches of green and gold with which the artist had attempted to imitate Nature's colour scheme. Gradually I found myself thinking of the trout as a member of Congress. Had I continued much longer, I should have visualised that fish in the act of addressing the Speaker of the House on the tariff bill.

Yet I could not help taking the professor's implied criticism to heart.

It would have been something even, to be able to tell whether I lived in the Eleventh Congressional District or the Fifteenth; but I didn't know.

For how long a term was the man elected? I didn't know. Was it required that he should be able to read and write? I didn't know.

That was the beginning. When luncheon was over, I sat before the fire and tried to find out how much I did know of the things I should. I found myself staring into bottomless depths of ignorance. I tried to draw up a list of State Governors. I knew there must be between forty and fifty, but I could remember only three Governors, including our own; and later I recalled that one of the three was dead.

From death my mind leaped, oddly enough, to drownings. How should one go about resuscitating a man who has been pulled out of the river? He must be rolled on a barrel, of course; that much I remembered. But was it face down or face upward? And should his arms be pumped vertically up and down, or horizontally away from the body and back? Yes, and how if some intelligent foreigner were to ask me what our five princ.i.p.al cities were, in the order of population? It would be easy enough to begin, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia--and then? Was it Boston, or Baltimore, or San Francisco? I did not know.

There was no stopping now. I was fast in my own clutches. I bit at my cigar, and tried to call the roll of the seven wise men of Greece. I stopped at the first, Solon. He, I remembered, rescued the Athenians from misgovernment and slavery, and left the city before they could experience a change of heart and hang him.

Who were the nine muses? Well, there was Terpsich.o.r.e--her disciples are spoken of every day in the newspapers. And then there was the muse of History, whose name possibly was Thalia, and the muse of Poetry, whose name I could not recall. I fared much better with the apostles: Peter and Paul, of course, and John and James, and Judas and Matthew, and Mark and Luke; eight out of twelve.

But of the seven wonders of the world I could cite with certainty only one, the Colossus of Rhodes. I was doubtful about Mount Vesuvius. I remembered not a single one of the seven deadly sins, and, at first, could place only two of the ten commandments--the ones on filial obedience and on the Sabbath. Later I thought of the newest realistic hit at the Park Theatre; that brought back one more commandment. On the other hand, it was a relief to call the three Graces straight off--Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I grew humble. I began to doubt if, after all, it is true that a modern schoolboy knows more than Aristotle did. In any case, whether Harrington's boy who is still in the grammar grades knows more than Aristotle, he certainly knows more than his father. They have a new-fashioned branch of study in the modern schools, which they call training the powers of observation. And that boy comes home with mischief in his soul, and asks Harrington which way do the seeds in an apple point. Harrington stares at the boy, and the boy smiles quizzically at Harrington, and the father grows suspicious. Are there seeds in an apple? There are seedless oranges, of course, which presupposes oranges not dest.i.tute of seeds; but an apple? Harrington tries to call up the image of the last apple he has eaten and he thinks of sweet and sour apples, apples of a waxen yellow and apples of a purple red, but he cannot visualise the seeds.

As Harrington sits there dumb, Jack asks him which shoe does he put on first when he dresses in the morning. Jack knows, the rascal. He can trace every process through which the cotton fibre pa.s.ses from the plant to the finished cloth. He knows why factory chimneys are built high. He knows how a boat tacks against the wind. And he knows that his father knows nothing of these things.

But I would rather have Harrington's boy quiz me on things that I can pretend are not worth knowing, like the seeds in an apple, than on things that cannot be waved aside. I tried to explain one day how the revolution of the earth about the sun produces the seasons, and I succeeded only in proving that when it is winter in New York it is daylight in Buenos Ayres. Thereupon, Jack asked me what an unearned increment was. When I finished he said his teacher had told them that views like those I had just expressed were common among ill-informed people. The following day he came in and said to Harrington, "Papa, name six female characters in d.i.c.kens, in three minutes." Well, Harrington did, but it was a strain, and in order to make up the total he had to count in the anonymous, elderly, single woman whom Mr. Pickwick surprised in her bedroom. Jack insisted that, as she was nameless, it was not fair to call her a character, but Harrington put his foot down and refused to argue the matter.

And as I sit there before the fire, smiling over Harrington and Jack and myself, my cigar goes out, and I signal Thomas to bring me another.

Thomas has the ascetic countenance of a tragedian, and the repose of an archbishop. Now, Thomas--and it comes to me with a shock--what do I know about Thomas, the man, as distinguished from the hired servant whom I have been aware of this year and more? Is he married or single? And if he is married, do his children resent their father's wearing livery?

Does Thomas himself like to be a servant? Are there ideals and speculations behind that close-shaven mask? Has he any views on the future life? Has he ever thought on the subject of vivisection? Does he vote the Republican ticket? Does he earn a decent wage?

I could only answer, with an aching sense of isolation, with the wistful longing of one who looks into unfathomable depths, that I didn't know.

Oh, Thomas, fellow man, brother! We have rubbed elbows for months and I do not know whether you are a man or only a lackey; whether you drink all night, or pray; whether you love me or hate me. How can you hold the cigar box so impa.s.sively, so single-mindedly?

I said to myself that I would make amends to Thomas, that it was never too late. And, quietly, genially, I asked him, "How do you like your place here, Thomas?" Thomas grew uneasy, and smiled in a sickish fashion, and entreated me with his eyes to pick my cigar and let him go.

But I was in the full swing of new-found righteousness. "There's nothing wrong, is there, Thomas?" And he replied, "I beg pardon, sir; but Henry's my name. Thomas was my predecessor. He left, you will remember, sir, a year ago last May." "But everybody calls you Thomas." "The gentlemen were used to the other name, sir."

Might Professor Wilson Stubbs be wrong, after all, I thought. Perhaps no one is really expected to know what everybody ought to know. I don't know the name of my Congressman. But neither do I know the name of my butcher and my grocer; and my butcher and my grocer can slay me with typhoid or ptomaines, whereas the utmost my Congressman can do is to misrepresent me. I don't know the man who makes my cigars; he may be consumptive. I don't know the critic who supplies me with literary opinions, and the scholar who gives me my outlook upon life. I don't know the man who lives next door. From the decent silence that reigns in his apartment, I gather that he does not beat his wife; but that is all.

Yet he and I are supposed to be bound up in a community of interests. We both belong to the cla.s.s whose income ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a year, of which we spend 38 per cent. on food; and we raise an average of 2-2/3 children to the family, and are both responsible for the wide prevalence of musical comedy on the American stage. But I have seen my neighbour twice in the last three years.

So that was the end of it. And because it was late in the afternoon, I thought I would telephone to the office that I was not coming back. But for the life of me, I could not think of my telephone number; and Henry looked me up in the directory.

XVII

THE CHILDREN THAT LEAD US

The mayor sat before his library fire and shivered, and kept wondering why there was no clause in the city charter prescribing a minimum of common sense for presidents of the Board of Education. A man thus qualified would know more than to suggest an increase of three million dollars for school sittings. The city's comptroller was crying bankruptcy; the newspapers were a.s.serting that the mayor's nephew was head of a favoured contracting firm not entirely for his health; and the Board of Education wanted three million dollars. The mayor had a touch of fever. The steep rows of figures in the Education Board's memorandum curled up into little arabesques under his eyes, which were closing with fatigue. Only he did not wish to sleep. In the perfect stillness he could hear his own rapid heartbeat. The clatter of sleety rain against the windows made him restless.

If only O'Brien were here, O'Brien, who was a good chief of police, and a matchless personal aide-de-camp. They would then put on boots and oilskins and go out into the night on one of their frequent Harun-Al-Rashid expeditions. The mayor's wife? Yes, it is true that before leaving for the theatre she had cautioned him not to stir from the house. But she could not possibly have known how great was his need of a breath of air. But O'Brien was not here. Was it because he had just been appointed president of the Board of Education and comptroller in one and was a busy man? Perhaps. And yet a person might step to the telephone and ring up O'Brien if it were not that one's legs were weighted down with the weight of centuries and of dozens of new school buildings all in reinforced concrete. Was it concrete? The mayor was not quite sure, and he turned to ask O'Brien, who stood there at one side of the fireplace, erect and attentive.

"Do we go out to-night?" said the mayor.

"I should not advise it, your Honour," answered O'Brien. "You are not well enough. If it is adventure you would go in search of, I have here quite an extraordinary delegation of citizens who desire an interview with your Honour."

"Let us hear them, by all means," replied the mayor.

O'Brien drew aside the curtain which divided the library from the general reception room and there marched in, two abreast and maintaining precise step, a solemn line of children, who saluted the mayor gravely and ranged themselves in a semicircle across the room. As the mayor veered in his chair to face his visitors, a girl of some fifteen years stepped out of the line. She was still in her schoolgirl's dresses, but tall, with features of a fine, pensive cut and earnest eyes that were already peering from out the child's life into the opening doors of womanhood.

"May it please your Honour," she began, "we are a committee from the Central Bureau of Federated Children's Organisations and we have come here to protest against certain intolerable conditions of which our members are the victims."

Had they come in behalf of those additional three million dollars, the mayor wondered uneasily. "State the nature of your grievance," he said.

The leader of the delegation came a step nearer. "Your Honour, I can only attempt the merest outline of our general position. Several of my a.s.sociates will take turns in acquainting you with the details of our case. Our complaint is that we, the children of this country, are being overworked. Formerly it was supposed to be the inalienable right of children to remain free from the cares of life. That theory has long been abandoned. The task of solving the gravest problems of existence has been thrust upon us, and every day that pa.s.ses leaves us saddled with new responsibilities. But the limit of endurance has been reached at last. We feel that unless we protest now the whole structure of society--its economics, politics, art, and religion--will be shifted from the shoulders of the world's men and women to the shoulders of us children. I hope your Honour is willing to hear us."

"Of course, my dear," the mayor answered softly. He said, "My dear," and he said it tenderly because he had recognised in the speaker his own daughter Helen, whom he had supposed with her mother at the theatre.

"Step forward, Flora Binns," said Helen, and Flora Binns, who was only eight, blue-eyed, and with ringlets of gold, approached and curtsied prettily. "May it please your Honour," she said, "I am the delegate from Local No. 16 Children of Weak and Tempted Stage Mothers' Union. We wish to place on record our opposition to the modern society drama, which so frequently throws the duty of supporting the climax of a play upon children under the age of ten. Although the playwrights are fond of showing that our papa is a brute and that our mamma is an angel, they invariably shrink from the logical conclusion that our mamma is right in planning to run away with the man who has offered her years of silent devotion. So the playwrights make one or two of us appear on the stage just in time to arouse in our mamma a sense of duty to her children and to prevent the elopement. Now we submit that the office of justifying our entire modern marriage fabric is too burdensome for us. Don't you think so, Mr. Mayor?"

"Why, yes," replied the mayor, thoughtfully.

"And they make use of us in other ways, sir. In fact, whenever the grown up persons in a play are in difficulties and the audience is beginning to yawn, the author sends us to the rescue. Why, only the other day we children saved a Wild West melodrama from utter failure. It took three of us to do it, but we succeeded." Flora curtsied, started back and returned. "And when I utter these sentiments, sir, I speak also for the Union of Precocious Magazine Children, which is represented here by Mary Sparks." Mary Sparks, a dark-haired miss with dancing eyes, bowed saucily.

"Step out, Fritz Hackenschneider," said Helen, and flaxen-haired Fritz, radiantly holiday-like in his l.u.s.trously washed face and large, blue polka-dot tie, approached the mayor's chair.

"I don't have much to say, sir," he recited in a nervous, jerky voice.

"I have been sent by the Fraternal a.s.sociation of Comic Supplement Children. We wish to raise our voice against the almost universal conception that people can be made to laugh only when one of us hides a pin on the seat of grandpa's chair. The burden of an entire nation's humour is more than we can sustain. Thank you, sir," and he retired into the background, giving, as he pa.s.sed, just one tug at Mary Sparks's hair and eliciting a suppressed scream.

"Mamie O'Farrell," called out Helen. The mayor found it impossible to decide whether Mamie was thirteen or twenty-five. She was very short and flat-chested, and the colour of her face in the firelight was like a dull cardboard. She wore a long, faded automobile cloak and an enormous black hat with a trailing green feather. On a gilt chain about her neck hung a locket in the form of a heart half as large as the one that beat uneasily within her. Mamie came forward reluctantly and saluted. Then she began to squirm from side to side and to shift from foot to foot, giggling in unfathomable embarra.s.sment.