Chapter II (1)

When Tom Gradgrind (who had, you remember, robbed the Coketown Bank, and been saved from punishment by the amiable intervention of Sleary's Circus) was living out his exile somewhere in South America, he often longed, Charles Dickens tells us in the engaging tale called "Hard Times," to be back in England with his sister. But what phase of his dismal boyhood and wasted later years did he see in his homesick dreams? What episodes of his life in England did it give him pleasure to relive in memory?

Dickens does not tell us. But no one who has read "Hard Times" and seen a circus needs to be told. The repentant exile, toiling under the tropic sun, had no affectionate recollections of Stone Lodge, his father's dreary mansion in Coketown, with its metallurgical cabinet, its conchological cabinet, and its mineralogical cabinet. Nor was it with anything approaching happiness that he thought of the Coketown Bank, the scene of some years of dull labor and of one moment of moral catastrophe.

He remembered, we may be sure, two things. He remembered appearing, with blackened face, an immense waistcoat, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked hat, as one of the comic servants of Jack the Giant-Killer at a certain Grand Morning Performance of Sleary's Circus. At the time he had been a fugitive from justice, but not even his fear and shame could keep his heart from stirring as he smelled the exhilarating odor of tanbark, trampled grass, and horses, heard the blare of the band, saw the glaring lights and the encircling tiers of applauding people, and knew that he--he, Tom Gradgrind, the oppressed, the crushed, the scientifically educated--was really and truly a circus performer!

And the other recollections, which, after the lapse of many years, still made his heart beat more quickly, had to do with a gap in the pavilion in which Sleary's Circus once held forth in a suburb of Coketown--a gap through which young Tom Gradgrind delightedly beheld the "graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act" of Miss Josephine Sleary, and strained his astonished young eyes to watch Signore Jupe (none other than Sissy's father) "elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing dog Merrylegs."

And the reason why Sleary's Circus played so glorious a part in the memory of this broken exile was that it had brought into his most prosaic life all the poetry that he had ever known. Surrounded with facts, crammed with facts, educated and governed according to a mechanical system which was an extraordinary foreshadowing of our modern "efficiency," he was allowed two visits to an enchanted realm, two draughts of the wine of wizardry. Twice in his life he was mysteriously in communion with poetry.

There has been much talk recently about a renascence of poetry, and people have become excited over the fact that so many thousands of copies of Edgar Lee Masters' book have been sold, and so many more thousands of copies of the late Rupert Brooke's Collected Poems. This is all very pleasant, but it doesn't mean that there has been a rebirth of poetry. Poetry cannot be reborn, for poetry has never died.

The circus draws us by the thousands to watch "desperately dangerous displays of unrivaled aerialism," and "the acme of expert equitation and acrobatic horsemanship" beneath the Diana-guarded roof of Madison Square Garden; even so it drew our fathers and their fathers before them to rickety wooden benches propped against great swaying canvas walls, in the days when Robinson and Lake displayed the wonders of the world in glorious rivalry with Herrings, Cooper and Whitby. Even so will the circus flourish in the days to come, when aeroplanes are cheaper than motor cars, and the war that began in August, 1914, is but a thing of dates and names in dusty textbooks. For poetry is immortal. And the circus is poetry.

What is the function of poetry? Is it not to blend the real and the ideal, to touch the commonplace with lovely dyes of fancy, to tell us (according to Edwin Arlington Robinson), through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said? And is not this exactly what the circus does? Most of its charm is due to the fact that all its wonders are in some way connected with our ordinary life. The elephant in his enclosure at the Zoological Gardens is merely a marvel; when he dances the tango or plays the cornet he allies himself with our experience, takes on a whimsical humanity, and thus becomes more marvelous. The elephant in the Zoo is an exhibit; the elephant tangoing in the tanbark ring is poetry.

And there is Zipp, the What-is-it? most venerable of freaks, whose browless tufted head and amazing figure have entertained his visitors since Phineas Taylor Barnum engaged him to ornament his museum on Ann Street. For all I know, Zipp is a poet--his smile is lyrical, and in his roving eyes there is a suggestion of vers libre. But at any rate, Zipp is a poem--a particularly charming poem when, in the procession of freaks which opens the performance, he gallantly leads round the arena that fantastically microcephalous young woman known to fame as the Aztec Queen. The Bearded Lady and the Snake Charmer and the Sword Swallower are poems--poems in the later manner of Thomas Hardy. And that delightfully diminutive chocolate-colored person who rejoices in the name of the Princess Wee-Wee--with her, in her dainty little golden-spangled gown, what lyric of Walter Savage Landor can compare?

It is the splendor of incongruity that gives the equestrian and aerial feats of the arena their charm, that incongruity which is the soul of romance. The creatures we see are the creatures we know, but they have most poetically changed places. It would be the mere prose of our daily life for birds to fly about close to the tent's roof, and for men and women to ring bells and sit in rocking chairs. It is the poetry of the circus that men and women fly about close to the tent's roof, and birds ring bells and sit in rocking chairs.

No one can describe a circus in prose. The industrious press agent of the circus long ago gave up the attempt, and resorted to impressionistic free verse, characterized by an ecstasy of alliteration. No one can adequately describe the involved contortions, swings, and dashes of a "family" of silk-clad adventurers on the flying trapeze. No faithful narrative of the grotesque buffetings of the chalk-faced clowns is in itself amusing--and yet the antics of these agile mimes have always been, will always be, irresistibly mirth-compelling. The magic of the circus is compounded of so many things--movement, sound, light, color, odor--that it can never be put into words. It is absurd to attempt to reflect it in prose, and it cannot be reflected in poetry because it is itself poetry; it is the greatest poem in the world.

And just as Sleary's Circus was the cup of poetry which benevolent fate held twice to the parched lips of young Thomas Gradgrind's soul, so is the circus of our day, with its regiment of clowns, its roller-skating bears and dancing elephants, its radiant men and women who pirouette on horseback and dart above our heads like swallows, a most wholesome and invigorating tonic for a weary and prosaic generation. We who every morning at the breakfast table read of war and desolation need to cheer our hearts with the burlesque battles of the clowns; we who ride in the subway need to exult when the charioteer, with streaming toga, guides his six white horses on their thunderous course; we whose eyes are daily on our ledgers and sales records need to lift them, if not to the stars, at least to the perilous wire on which a graceful pedestrian gayly flirts with death. We whose lives are prose may well be grateful for the circus, our annual draught of poetry; for the circus, the perennial, irresistible, incomparable, inevitable Renascence of Wonder.

THE ABOLITION OF POETS

Ever since certain vivacious Frenchmen put on funny little red nightcaps and remarked "Ca ira!" the inevitability of a reform has been the chief article of its propaganda. The Socialist orator says: "Socialism is coming upon us with the speed of the whirlwind and the sureness of the dawn." Therefore he mounts a soap-box and passionately urges six small boys, the town drunkard and a policeman to accelerate the whirlwind and encourage the dawn in its commendable habit of punctuality. The suffragist tells us: "The Votes for Women movement, like a mighty ocean, will break down the barriers of prejudice and flood the country." Therefore, like a perverted Mrs. Partington, she runs out with her little broom to help the ocean along. And so, humbly following these illustrious precedents, I advocate the abolition of poets because poets are rapidly abolishing themselves.

For one thing, they have given up the uniform. In the old days it was easy to recognize them. They wore velvet jackets and sombreros, they let their hair hang over their shoulders, they were also, I believe, picturesquely ragged. When you saw M. Paul Verlaine in his great cloak, drinking absinthe at a table on the boulevard, you recognized him as a poet. But when you see Mr. Clinton Scollard in his decorous cutaway drinking a milk shake in a drug store, how are you to guess his profession?

Of course, there are people who look like poets. When your literary inclined maiden aunt from West Swansey, New Hampshire (by a sacred convention all maiden aunts are literarily inclined), visits New York, you take her to a restaurant which is supposed to be bohemian because it is near Washington Square. The macaroni is buoyantly elastic, the lettuce is wilted, the chicken tough, the wine a blend of acetic acid and aniline. But your aunt enjoys it, and she is vastly interested in the company.

She hunts for poets. "There!" she exclaims. "There is a poet! What is his name?" And she points to a romantic-looking youth with great mop of hair, a soft-collared flannel shirt, and a large black necktie.

You answer, wildly striving to keep your reputation for omniscience: "That? Why, that's Alfred Noyes." Or "That's James Whitcomb Riley." Or "That's Henry van Dyke." Your aunt is pleasantly thrilled, and she will entertain all West Swansey with the tale of this literary adventure. And you drown your lie in a beaker of acid claret.

As a matter of fact, who is this big-necktied, long-haired person? Perhaps he is a cabaret performer, and will presently give your aunt a novel insight into the habits of the literati by rising to sing with a lamentable air of gayety, "Funiculi, Funicula." Perhaps he is one of those earnest young men who have for their alma mater the dear old Ferrer School. But in all probability he is merely an innocent bystander who endeavors in his dress to commemorate a visit to East Aurora.

The two great steps in the abolition of poets were the shearing of Mr. Richard Le Gallienne and the invention of East Aurora. When Mr. Le Gallienne's hair waved, a black and curly banner, before the literary legions of the world, then poets lived up to their traditional reputation; courageously they were picturesque. But when the fell scissors did their brutal work, then poets donned the garb of burgesses.

And then the more adventurous burgesses began to dress like poets. Mr. Hubbard began the manufacture of large black neckties, and the Village Atheists all over America put them on. Everyone who had queer ideas about religion, economics, ethics or politics wore the necktie that had previously confined only lyric throats. Now when you see a man wearing two yards of black crepe in front of his collar, do not expect him to sing you a madrigal. It is probable that his decoration signifies merely that he is opposed to vaccination.

And when the poets took to wearing prosaic clothes, they took also to following prosaic occupations. Is there now living a man who does nothing but write verse? I doubt that the most thorough explorer of contemporary letters could discover such an anachronism. Poets still write poetry, but the ancient art is no longer their chief excuse for existence. They come before the public in other and more commonplace guises.

Mr. T. A. Daly was until recently business manager of a weekly paper. Messrs. Bliss Carman, Richard Le Gallienne, Ford Madox Hueffer, Nicholas Vachell Lindsay, and eight thousand other poets write literary criticisms. Dr. Henry van Dyke preaches and is a diplomat. Mr. Rudyard Kipling preaches and is not a diplomat. All the poets have regular jobs. In the good old days it was different. Then Dr. Henry van Dyke, Mr. Tom Daly, and the rest of them would have done nothing all day and all night but write poetry and read it to each other as they sat and drank anisette or some other sweet, sticky cordial in a club named the Camembert Cheese, or something of the sort. They would have scorned editing anything less precious than The Germ or The Yellow Book. And as to writing book reviews--as well ask them to get married!

For a time Mr. Alfred Noyes kept the spirit of craft-integrity. He alone, among book reviewing, story writing, magazine editing versifiers, was solely a poet. But now even he has taken up a side line. First he delivered the Lowell lectures; then he became a university professor. Over his laurel wreath he has put a mortar-board.

But the departure of the poets from a strictly professional attitude toward life is only one side of the shield. The poets have become citizens; that is bad enough. But also the citizens have become poets. They do not call themselves poets, they merely write verse as casually as they write letters.

For one thing, the rhymed advertisement is more common now than ever before. Formerly, when the proprietor or advertising manager of a manufactory of automobiles or chewing gum or some other necessity of American life desired to celebrate his wares in verse, he went to some trouble and expense. He called in an impecunious literary man, that is, a literary man, and with some trepidation made what business men quaintly call a proposition. The poet considered the matter carefully, arranged the terms of payment, and insisted upon the exclusion of his name from the published composition, was supplied with material descriptive of his subject, and departed to his conventional garret. In the course of time he brought back the desired verses, was paid, and treated with mingled curiosity and awe by the men of affairs who had made use of his talents.

Now all is changed. The advertising managers started scabbing on the unorganized and individualistic poets and actually drove them off the job. Now, when a cough drop is to be made the subject of a sonnet-sequence what happens? Does a regular professional poet get a dollar a line for the work? He does not. The advertising manager sends the office boy out for a rhyming dictionary and writes the verses himself. Or else he lets the office boy write them.

But this is only one manifestation of this lamentable state of affairs. Another is the fact that most people are the authors of books of verse. People do not buy poetry, they do not read poetry, but they write it with amazing enthusiasm and industry. There are now at least four prosperous publishers who do nothing but bring out books at the expense of the authors, and their lists contain practically nothing but volumes of verse. The country clergyman, lawyer, or school teacher who has not written a volume of verse and paid from $100 to $500 to have it printed (with his portrait as frontispiece) is a rare bird indeed. These people never buy books of verse, and, of course, almost no copies of their own books are sold. But the fact remains that nearly everybody who can read and write makes verse, carelessly, casually, without effort or emotion. The shoemaker who wishes to call the attention of the public to his new stock of canvas shoes with green leather inserts lisps in numbers and the numbers come. And the man who has nothing to advertise but his own personality seizes authoritatively upon the Muse's hair and pulls it until she shrieks his praise.

It will be objected that what these people write is merely verse, not poetry; that no one considers them poets and that they do not claim the title. But this is not a valid objection, it is thoroughly in accordance with my thesis. They write verse, and they are not poets; therefore they--all people, that is--believe that one need not be a professional poet to write verse any more than one need be a professional dishwasher to wash dishes. So poetry, as a distinct craft, utterly disappears; it does not even continue as a separate and special branch of unskilled labor.

Of course, there still exist people who take the making of verse somewhat seriously. But the loudest of them, those who most earnestly insist upon the importance of themselves and their art, are those ridiculous young people who call themselves Imagistes and Vorticists and similar queer names. And they deliberately take from poetry its characteristics of rhyme and rhythm and apply the name poetry to little chunks of maudlin prose. So they, too, are working for the abolition of poets and poetry.

There is an exquisite Socialist doctrine called "progressive poverty" or something of the sort, according to which we are to let conditions get worse and worse so that they may ultimately become unbearable. Then, it is said, the cooperative commonwealth will almost automatically come into being. Perhaps this suggests a solution for the problem now under consideration. Let the few remaining professional poets resolutely abstain from writing verse; let verse be made only by patent medicine manufacturers and grocers and Imagistes and, in general, people totally ignorant of poetry. They will produce it in abundance; they will probably perfect some mechanical device, a poem-jenny, perhaps, which will produce a standard poem in a short time and gradually do away with the home-manufactured article.

In the course of time the patents on this device will be taken over by the Standard Oil Company, and poems of uniform perfection will be furnished at small cost to every house or apartment. Then, after some twenty-five years, there will come a reaction, a sort of craftsman, back-to-nature movement. Some adventurous person will make up a real poem of his own, and his friends will say, "How quaint! That is the way they did in the old days before the poem-jenny was invented. I rather like this poem. It has strength, simplicity, a primitive quality that I cannot find in the poems the Standard Oil Company sends up every week. Go on, Rollo, and see if you can make another one."

Thus encouraged, Rollo will make another poem, and another, and rather histrionically will assume the picturesque old title of poet. Other poets will arise, and the Standard Oil Company will turn its attention to perfecting devices for the construction of novels. Poems made by hand by specialists will then be the only articles of the sort produced. In this way only can there ever be a genuine renascence of the ancient and honorable craft of poetry.

NOON-HOUR ADVENTURING

Sun worship, according to the latest religious census, is no longer a popular cult. This is a pity, for it was more respectable and more diverting than most of the forms of paganism that have superseded it.

But the sun is a good-humored deity; he showered his gifts no more generously of old on Teheran, whose walls were resonant with his praise, than now on faithless New York. Daily from his meridian he stretches forth his shining scimitar and strikes the fetters from the feet of young men, setting them free to walk the golden streets of an enchanted city.

The feet, I said, of young men. For men no longer young the noon hour is a time for the comfortable but unromantic occupation of eating. The man who usually takes a car to get from Thirty-third Street to Times Square, who occasionally lets the barber rub tonic on the top of his head, who carries blocks and dolls home on Saturday, who is morbidly interested in building loans and grass-seed, regards the noon hour as at worst a time for shopping and at best a time for eating. But to the young man, particularly to the young man for the first time a wage-earner in the city, the noon hour is a time for splendid adventuring.

It may be that there are young women for whom the luncheon hour is a gay thread of romance in the dull fabric of the working day. Of this I cannot speak with certainty; my observation indicates that they regard it merely as an opportunity to go, in chattering companies, to those melancholy retreats called tea rooms to amuse themselves with gossip and extraordinary ices. But the young man leaves his desk at the appointed hour as bravely as ever pirate vessel left its wharf, and sails forth to sparkling and uncharted seas.

Consider, for example, the case of James Jones. James spent his boyhood in a town less than a hundred miles from New York. Visits to the city were great events in his young life. He was taken there to buy clothing, to go to the theater, to visit unusually exciting relatives who lived in apartment houses, rode on elevators, and drew milk from dumb-waiters. During his collegiate career James made occasional trips to New York, always with the theater and the tavern as his objectives. Triumphantly now he feels himself actually a New Yorker, a dweller in no mean city. Joyfully, therefore, he goes forth every noon to explore the territory of his new possession.

James is, let it be understood, nearer 20 than 25. He is beginning to regard his diploma with some disrespect, but he still wears his fraternity pin on an obscure corner of his waistcoat. Every Saturday morning he gets an envelope containing a $10 bill and a $5 bill, and he has already formulated in his mind an eloquent appeal which cannot fail, he believes, to increase that amount to $18.50. James endeavors to seem as sophisticated as the chauffeur of a taxicab; not for worlds would he betray the innocent delight with which he regards the city of his habitation.

With James's occupation from 9 in the morning until the luncheon hour we have no concern. Perhaps he sits on a high stool and ciphers in a great ledger, perhaps he haltingly dictates letters to a patronizing stenographer, perhaps he urges certain necessities or luxuries upon a suspicious public. The important fact of his life--for us and, in a measure, for him--is that once every day he answers the welcome summons of the unknown.

Luncheon is a tiresome obligation, quickly to be fulfilled. His mother would be vexed to see him gulp his malted milk or bolt his sandwich. On some occasions, with a pleasant sense of recklessness, he enters a bar, and, with something of a flourish, consumes beer and free lunch. With some difficulty he refrains from looking over the swinging doors before leaving, as he did in his home town, to make sure that none of his neighbors are coming down the street.

James left his desk only six minutes ago and his luncheon is already over. There remain fifty-four precious minutes. Behold him tasting rapturously of every second of these minutes! Behind a cheap but decorative cigar he walks up, perhaps, Fifth Avenue, undeniably that excellent thoroughfare's possessor. For his delight is Diana poised on her tower of purple memories; the grass of Madison Square is greener than that of his father's lawn; tulips more vivid than these never bloomed in the rich gardens of Holland.

He is considered a sympathetic person, but at noon, I fear, his attitude is that of a realist. For he watches with ingenuous interest the antics of that drunkard on a park bench, and regards the arrival of the patrol wagon and summary removal of the culprit as a drama got up solely for his entertainment. Regrettable as it may seem, it is with heightened spirits that he continues his stroll.

Now he has reached a great bookshop which even the penniless find hospitable. "Some day," says James to himself, "two hundred copies of my novel will draw a crowd around this plate glass window." Mentally he arranges an effective window display and goes on to feast his eyes on vellum and shagreen, on calf delicately tooled and parchment gay with gold leaf and many colored inks. Sometimes he enters the shop (the clerks are indulgent to James and his kind) and, over the merry pages of _Jugend_ and _La Vie Parisienne_, rejoices that his father made him study modern languages at college.

But literature must not claim too much of his fast-fleeting hour. There are shops at hand whose windows show things stranger than books; chairs and bedsteads eloquent of the genius of Adam and Heppelwhite; the massive silver platter on which old Wardle carved a Christmas goose when Mr. Pickwick was his guest; a mighty flagon that brimmed with red wine for Pantagruel; a carved jade bracelet from the brown arm of the Princess Badoura; the sword of Robert Bruce. All lands, all ages have sent their treasures to New York this noon for the entertainment of James Jones.

It may be that this square of Japanese embroidery, on which fantastic knights thrust tremendous javelins at red and green dragons under astonished willows, was made in Paterson, N. J. What of that? The colors are not therefore less bright. James is not a purchaser, he is merely a spectator of the greatest raree-show in the world. It is well for him to be deceived in the splendors displayed before him. Not so many years ago he would prefer a red glass ball to the Kohinoor and a hand organ with a monkey to a piano with Paderewski. James yet retains a receptivity almost infantile; but it would pain him to be told so.

They are not gregarious, at noon, these young discoverers of New York. They are selfish in their adventuring, for a vision shared is only half a vision. James, I know, is annoyed when he finds an acquaintance gobbling a sandwich at his luncheon counter or staring in a jeweler's window that he has come to regard as his own private property. On Sundays he is sociable enough; he is glad of a companion on his journeys across and up and down Manhattan, among the Italians and negroes of the upper west side, through the loud ghetto and speciously weird Chinatown, in the deliberate sylvanity of Central Park and the Bronx Gardens. In the evening, too, he is not at all a recluse. But at noon he has no appetite for conversation; he would not have his attention taken from the strange streets by an accustomed human being.

James has never ridden on a London bus, yet I believe in the truth of his unspoken thought, that a Fifth Avenue bus is the most excellent vehicle in the world. The London bus depends for its charm on a number of non-essential qualities; on the humor of its driver (are the chauffeurs of London's electric buses also masters of epigram?), on the quaintness and antiquity of the thoroughfare, on the military efficiency of the traffic policemen, on the philmayishness of the passengers. The Fifth Avenue bus has one reason for existence: it shows its passengers Fifth Avenue. No bus can do more.

So one may (if one is young enough to be so foolish and so wise) ride, like the Gaikwar of Baroda in his swaying howdah, high above the people for a golden hour. He may start at uneasy Washington Square, where ancient respectability wars with young bohemianism. Soon he looks down on the throngs of new Americans that tramp the once proud pavement. From his high seat he sees them, the small, dark men and women who, like him, are for a time released from labor. They move slowly in great crowds, they eat frugal meals, the wares of curb-side peddlers, they talk and gesture incessantly. What does James think of them? I do not believe that his opinion is worth knowing.

But he enjoys, I know, the tour through the traffic-filled intersection of Broadway and Twenty-third Street, and he is not old enough to notice with regret the gradual deterioration of the latter street. Freed from the close company of baser vehicles, how triumphantly the bus whirrs up the broad street past the square, among the splendid shops and clubs and churches--the true New Yorker, I think, names them in this order. But James must not give too much attention to the lovely Gothic lines of St. Thomas's, or the lovely Byzantine lines of that pink chiffon lady in the landau--the luncheon hour draws to a close, and punctuality, he still believes, is a business virtue.

The brevity of this recess is essential to it. If the time be indefinitely increased, if the young adventurer be allowed all the morning and all the afternoon for his wandering, then all the zest goes out of the adventure. There is that trusted veteran employee in the corner of the office. He receives fabulous sums on pay day and may go out to luncheon whenever he desires, with no time clerk to censor him. He knows New York less than does James. But does his curiosity urge him forth to long adventures? Over his stale morning's paper in the deserted office, seated before his familiar task, he eats his sordid and wife-made luncheon!

But the noon adventurer is not limited to Fifth Avenue. The antique shops of Fourth Avenue charm him with pewter and brass, they cheer his heart with sun dials from English rose gardens and crucifixes from convents of Dante's land and time. At Twenty-third Street stalls he reads bits of forgotten writings and breathes the pleasant scent of worn calfskin. Perhaps on the 15-cent rack he comes upon a prize. Here is a little book of English verse by a Japanese poet. What is this faded inscription? "To Mary McLane from Yone Noguchi." The adventurer buys it, as the late Mr. Morgan would buy a Nuremburg Bible, and salves his economical conscience by rolling his own cigarettes for a while.

There are great sights for him, now and then. People who seemed, not so long ago, as legendary as Cuchulain and Cinderella appear to him on these noon expeditions, most startlingly human and real. He sees Mr. Roosevelt leave the Charities Building to enter a waiting taxicab. He visits the bootblack and in the chair next to him sits Mr. Bliss Carman, crowned with the huge black hat that is the livery of Vagabondia. On Fourteenth Street a big black-haired man and a little spectacled woman stop to laugh at the fortune-telling paroquets. With a delicious thrill the adventurer recognizes Mr. Ben Reitman and Miss Emma Goldman.

Nor are his adventures confined to seeing. There is plenty of action, sometimes. Once, as he stared into the windows of an Oriental rug shop, he was aware of a thin, hunted-looking man who demanded his attention.

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said the hunted-looking man, "but can you tell me where I can find a parnbroker?"

I do not know why the hunted-looking man said "parnbroker," instead of "pawnbroker," but James always tells the story this way.

"No," said James, truthfully, "I can't."

"The reason I wanna know is," said the hunted-looking man very rapidly, "I gotta very fine stone here. I got into a little trouble in a hotel uptown; I gotta sell it right away very cheap."

And from a dirty pasteboard box he drew what seemed to be a large diamond ring.

Now was the thoroughly interested James aware of yet another stranger who sought his attention, a prosperous-looking man, who smoked a fat cigar and flourished a silver-headed stick, who seemed trying to caution James against buying the diamond.

James had only 35 cents in his pocket, and was not a buyer, but a spectator of jewelry anyway. The hunted-looking man withdrew slowly. Then said the prosperous-looking man to James:

"Excuse me for buttin' in, old man, but I didn't want to see you stung. Sometimes these here fellers got real stones, sometimes they got fakes. Now I'm a professional jeweler and I got my microscope that I look at diamonds with in my pocket. Now, you call that guy back and tell him I'm a friend of yours and I'll examine that stone and tell you if it's any good."

The hunted-looking man gave rather too dramatic a start of surprise when called back by the suspicious but curious James.

"It's worth $500," he said, "but I'll sell it for $50. I got into a little trouble at a hotel uptown, and I gotta sell it cheap."

Professionally, elaborately, impressively, the prosperous-looking man screwed a glass into his eye and squinted at the stone. Then, taking James several yards away from the hunted-looking man, he said: "That's a genuine stone worth easy $500 if it's worth a cent. I know a place they'll give us $500 for it this afternoon on account of me being in the trade. Now, you keep him here while I go round the corner and get $25 from my bank and then we'll buy that stone together and make $225 apiece before two hours is gone. I'll be right back."

And the prosperous-looking man vanished.

Then--as might have been expected--the hunted-looking man offered James the diamond for $25. "You can put one over on that big-guy," he said. "Slip me $25 and we beat it before he gets back. You can clean up $450 on it. I'm afraid of that big guy; I think he's gone after a cop."

Now, these two confidence men had worked hard with James. He should not have taken such delight in their discomfiture as he climbed the steps of a bus and bade them farewell.

When he met the hunted-looking man and the prosperous-looking man together on Broadway a few days later they cut him, and I do blame them. But they gave him a real adventure, at any rate, an adventure not to be met by those who squander their noon hour sitting dully in sedate restaurants.

Then there was the adventure of the picture gallery. James went on one occasion to a futurist exhibition in a tiny room not far from Madison Square. Galleries are not crowded at noon, but from the room that James approached came sounds not to be accounted for even by the crazy canvases on its walls. Of course James went in, and found a futurist painter wrestling with the agent of a collection agency. The combatants rose, and demanded James's name and address, that he might be summoned to court as a witness to assault and battery. But he never received either summons. Perhaps it was because he gave his name as Henry Smith of Yonkers.

Episodes like these have little charm for the middle-aged or for young men prematurely aged by spending their childhood in New York. These have their compensations, no doubt; their lives are not utterly bleak. But not for them is the daily romance of the young man who has just come to the city, who enjoys the proud novelty of working for wage, to whom every noon come sweet and strange the streets' compelling voices.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

Those people whom an hostile fate has made both athletes and reformers have among their aversions one which they proclaim with an enthusiasm so intense as to be almost infectious. They dislike passionately the harmless, unnecessary sign board when it has been so placed as to become a feature of the rural landscape. Wooden cows silhouetted against the sunset only irritate them by their gentle celebrations of malted milk; the friendliest invitation to enjoy a cigarette, a corset or a digestive tablet fills them with anger if it comes from the face of a sea-shadowing cliff or from among the ancient hemlocks of a lofty mountain.

There is, of course, a modicum of reason in their attitude. It is wrong to paint the lily at all; it is doubly wrong to paint "Wear Rainproof Socks" across its virgin petals. It is wrong to mar beauty; that is an axiom of all aesthetics and of all ethics. It would be wrong, for example (although it would be highly amusing), to throw by means of a magic lantern great colored phrases against Niagara's sheet of foam; it would be wrong to carve (as many earnest readers of our magazines believe has been done), an insurance company's advertisement on the Rock of Gibraltar.

But the aesthete-reformer, in condemning such monstrosities as these, condemns merely an hypothesis. And since the hypothesis obviously is condemnable, he starts a crusade against the innocent facts upon which the purely hypothetical evil is based. It is wrong to mar the snowy splendor of the Alps; therefore, he says, the Jersey meadows must not bear upon their damp bosom the jubilant banner of an effective safety-razor. The sylvan fastness of our continent must be saved from the vandal; therefore, he says, you may not advertise breakfast food on a hoarding in the suburbs of Paterson.

If the aesthete-reformers in question would examine the subject dispassionately they would see that there is really nothing in the sign board as it stands to-day about which they may justly complain. Advertisers do not deliberately annoy the public; they would not be so foolish as to seek to attract people by spoiling what was beautiful. It must be remembered that a landscape may be rustic and yet not beautiful.

The aesthete does not dislike, instead he hails with enthusiasm, a worn stone bearing the dim inscription "18 Mil. To Ye Cittye of London." Why then should he shudder when he sees a bright placard which shouts "18 Miles to the White Way Shoe Bazaar, Paterson's Pride"? To my mind there is a vivacity and a humanness about the second announcement utterly lacking in the first. The aesthete dotes upon the swinging boards which with crude paintings announce the presence of British inns. If "The Purple Cow, by Geoffrey Pump. Entertainment for Man and Beast" delights his soul, why does he turn in angry sorrow from "Stop at the New Mammoth Hotel when you are in Omaha--500 Rooms and Baths--$1.50 up--All Fireproof"? It is a cheerful invitation, and it should bring to jaded travelers through the track-pierced wastes a comfortable sense of approaching welcome and companionship.

There are many things which might be said in favor of urban sign boards, especially in favor of those elaborate arrangements in colored lights which make advertisements of table waters and dress fabrics as alluringly lovely as the electrical splendor of the first act of Dukas' "Ariane et Barbe Bleu." But in the city the sign board is always something supererogatory; it may be decorative, but it is not necessary. One does not need a six-yard announcement of a beer's merit when there are three saloons across the street; even the placards of plays line almost uselessly the thoroughfares of a district in which the theaters are conspicuous.

But in the country the sign boards are no luxuries but stern necessities. This the aesthete-reformers fail to see because they lack a sense of the unfitness of things. It is their incongruity which gives to rustic sign boards the magic of romance. The deliberately commercial announcement, firmly set in an innocent meadow or among the eternal hills, has exactly the same charm as a buttercup in a city street or a gray wood-dove fluttering among the stern eaves of an apartment house.

What a benefaction to humanity these rural sign boards are! To the farmer they are (in addition to being a source of revenue) a piquant suggestion of the wise and wealthy city. He loves and fears the city, as mankind always loves and fears the unknown. Once he thought that it was paved with gold. He must have thought so, otherwise how could he have accounted for the existence of gold bricks? He is less credulous now, but still the big signs down where the track cuts across the old pasture pleasantly thrill his fancy.

And what would a railway journey be without these gay and civilizing reminders? They hide the shame of black and suicidal bogs with cheery hints of vaudeville beyond, they throw before the privacy of farmhouses a decent veil of cigarette advertisements. He who speeds vacation-ward from the city is glad of them, for they remind him that he is where factories and huge shops may come only in this pictured guise, thin painted ghosts of their noisy selves. He who gladly speeds back to domesticity and the ordered comforts of metropolitan life sees them as welcoming seneschals, glorious advance-posts of civilization. They are the least commercial of all commercial things, they are as human and as delightful as explorers or valentines.

THE GREAT NICKEL ADVENTURE

Whenever I read Mr. Chester Firkins' excellent poem "On a Subway Express" I am filled with amazement. It is not strange that Mr. Firkins turned the subway into poetry, it is strange that the subway does not turn every one of its passengers into a poet.

There are, it is true, more comfortable means of locomotion than the subway; there are conveyances less crowded, better ventilated, cooler in Summer, warmer in Winter. A little discomfort, however, is an appropriate accompaniment of adventure. And subway-riding is a splendid adventure, a radiant bit of romance set in the gray fabric of the work-a-day world.

The aeroplane has been celebrated so enthusiastically in the course of its brief life that it must by now be a most offensively conceited machine. Yet an aeroplane ride, however picturesque and dangerous, has about it far less of essential romance than a ride in the subway. He who sails through the sky directs, so nearly as is possible, his course; he handles levers, steers, goes up or down, to the left or the right. Or if he is a passenger, he has, at any rate, full knowledge of what is going on around him, he sees his course before him, he can call out to the man at the helm: "Look out for that cornet's hair! Turn to the left or the point of that star will puncture our sail!"

Now, unseen dangers are more thrilling than those seen; the aeroplane journey has about it inevitably something prosaic. This is the great charm of the subway, that the passengers, the guards, too, for that matter, give themselves up to adventure with a blind and beautiful recklessness. They leave the accustomed sunlight and plunge into subterranean caverns, into a region far more mysterious than the candid air, into a region which since mankind was young has been associated with death. Before an awed and admiring crowd, the circus acrobat is shut into a hollow ball and catapulted across the rings; with not even a sense of his own bravado, the subway passenger is shut into a box and shot twenty miles through the earth.

Once there lived on West One Hundred and Eighty-second Street a man of uncompromising practicality, a stern rationalist. He was as advanced as anything! He believed in the materialistic interpretation of history, economic determinism, and radium; this, he said, with some pride, was his Creed. Often he expressed his loathing for "flesh-food," more frequently for "Middle Class morality," most frequently for faith. "Faith is stupidity," he would say. "Look before you leap! It makes me sick to see the way people have been humbugged in all ages. The capitalist class has told them something was true, something nobody could understand, and they've--blindly accepted it, the idiots! I believe in what I see--I don't take chances. I don't trust anybody but myself."

Yet every day this man would give himself up to the subway with a sweet and child-like faith. As he sat in the speeding car, he could not see his way, he had no chance of directing it. He trusted that the train would keep to its route, that it would stop at Fourteenth Street and let him off. He could not keep it from taking him under the river and hurling him out into some strange Brooklyn desert. When he started for home in the evening, he read the words "Dyckman Street" on the car window with a medieval simplicity, and on the guarantee of these printed words, placed there by minions of the capitalist class, he gave up the privilege of directing his course. The train, he believed, would not at Ninety-sixth Street be switched off to a Bronx track; the sign told him that he was safe, and he believed it.

So the subway caused him to exercise the virtue of faith, made him, for a time, really a human being. Perhaps it is the sharing of this faith that makes a subway crowd so democratic. Surely there is some subtly powerful influence at work, changing men and women as soon as they take their seats, or straps.

For one thing, they become alike in appearance. The glare of the electric light unifies them, modifying swarthy faces and faces delicately rouged until they are nearly of one hue. Then, the differences of attitude are lost, and attitudes are great instruments of subordination. The ragged bootblack does not kneel at the broker's feet; he sits close beside him, or perhaps, comfortably at rest, watches the broker clutch a strap and struggle to keep his footing.

"Tired clerks, pale girls, street-cleaners, business men, boys, priests and sailors, drunkards, students, thieves"--all gain a new sincerity. Neither the millionaire's imperiousness nor the beggar's professional humility can make the train go faster, so both are laid aside. Distinctions of race and caste grow insignificant, as in a company confronting one peril or one God. This is not theory, it is fact. The subway passenger purchases a nickel's worth of speed and he must take with it a nickel's worth of democracy.

Perhaps it is the youthful romanticism of America which makes our subways so much more exciting than those of Europe. The Englishman is too cautious and too conservative to trust himself away from the earth's surface more than two minutes at a time. So the trains that run through the London tube are tame, cowardly things. They timidly run underground for half a mile or so and pop their heads out into the air and sunlight or fog at every station.

But the New York subway train is ready to take a chance. It dives into the earth and "stays under," like a brave diver, for an hour at a time. And when it does emerge, what splendor attends its coming! There is a glimmer of sunshine at the One Hundred and Sixteenth Street Station; the blue and white of the walls and pillars reflect a light not wholly artificial. Then there is a brief stretch of fantastically broken darkness. Passengers in the first car can see ahead of them, at Manhattan Street, a great door of sunshine. At last there is a strange change in the rumble of the wheels, for the echoing roof and walls are gone, and the train leaves its tunnel not to run humbly over the ground, but to rise higher and higher until it comes to a sudden halt above the chimneys and tree tops. To say that the grub becomes a butterfly does not fit the case, for the grub is a slow-moving beast and a butterfly's course is capricious. Rather, it is as if, by some tremendous magic, a great snake became a soaring eagle.

And how keenly all the passengers enjoy their few seconds in the open air! When they hurried down the steps to the train, they were scornful of the atmosphere they were leaving, they had no thought of tasting wind and watching sunlight. Now they are become, for the moment, connoisseurs of these delectable things; they wish the train would linger at Manhattan Street, not inevitably plunge at once into its roaring cavern. But the train is wise, it knows brevity is essential to all exquisite things, so it gives its passengers only an evanescent glimpse of the glories they have just now learned to appreciate.

This is a part of the great conspiracy of the subway. It is regarded only as a swift and convenient and uncomfortable carrier, and it has no wish to be otherwise interpreted. But those who have studied it know the hidden purposes it constantly and effectively serves. It is showing our generation the value of mankind's commonest and most precious gifts, by taking them away.

Now, it is good for man or beast to stand on solid ground in the sunlight, breathing clean air. Also fellowship is good, and the talk of friends. We forgot the value of these, we shut ourselves up in dark rooms and we spared no time to social exercise. Then--to punish and cure our folly--came the subway, making our journeys things close and dark in which conversation is a matter of desperate effort. And now how kind and talkative are people who go home together from the subway station after their daily disciplinary ride! They are grateful, too--although it may be subconsciously--for the familiar sights and sounds of the earth, for houses and streets and light that does not come from a wire in a bottle. They take gladly the great common things; they are simple, natural, democratic.

So they spend much of their leisure out of doors, these men and women who are underground two hours every weekday. In the evenings and on Sunday afternoons, they walk the pleasant streets with eager delight. They are curious about the loveliness far beneath which they daily speed. They have learned something of the art of life.

Of course, the subway has its incidental charms--its gay fresco of advertisements, for instance, and its faint mysterious thunder when it runs near the surface of the street on which we stand. But its chief service to man--perhaps its reason for existence--is that it gives him adventure. In this adventure he meets the spirit of faith and the spirit of democracy, which is an aspect of charity. And by their influence he becomes, surely though but for a time, as a little child.

THE URBAN CHANTICLEER

If the rooster selected tree-tops for his roosting, crowed mournfully at the moon, and were a wild, unfriendly bird, every man's hand would be against him. But we forgive him his ugliness and conceit, not only because he is a dutiful citizen of the barnyard, but also because now, as in the days of the noble Horatio, he obligingly acts as "trumpet to the morn." On account of this romantic and sometimes useful custom, he wears a sentimental halo. M. Rostand has made him the hero of a drama. When will some wise playwright celebrate his urban prototype, the alarm clock?

The spirit in which this question is asked is not wholly one of mockery. For the alarm clock is close to humanity; in the city household, few bits of furniture are more personal and necessary. It is a faithful servant, this loud-voiced creature of steel and glass, obedient, punctual, patient. And its association with its owner, I had almost written its master, is so peculiarly intimate as to give it a personality and an attitude toward life.

In the first place, it is irresistibly egotistic. There are some usual possessions which become subconscious things, their identities merging with the shadows of the vague land of habit. One may, for instance, possess a watch and yet not be aware of the watch as he is aware of his alarm clock. He lifts it from and returns it to his pocket; he winds it, with a gesture almost involuntary; he takes his information from his dial as thoughtlessly as he takes his breath from the atmosphere. Though it be made of fine gold, cunningly chased and blazoned with precious stones, it is to him, after the first delight of its acquisition, the unregarded means to an important end. So long as it serves him unprotestingly, he thinks of it no more than of his soul. People do not specifically ask him to consult his watch, they ask, "What time is it?" and even "Have you the time?"

Not thus does an alarm clock sink into oblivion. At least twice in twenty-four hours its owner must be vividly aware of its existence. It imperiously demands of him conscious action. In the morning clangorously, at night dumbly, it insists on attention. He must with thought adjust its mechanism, he must give it intelligent orders. And whether he rises at its summons or instead shuts out with a pillow its voice and that of conscience, he cannot ignore it. By no effort of will could Frankenstein forget his monster.