These days, amid “the thunder of the captains, and the shouting,” there must be many thousands of Americans who are truly of the saving remnant, who view public matters soberly and hold as something very fine and precious our heritage of democracy. These we may suppose will witness the dawn of election day with a lively apprehension of their august responsibilities, and exercise their right of selection sanely and wisely. “They only who build upon ideas, build for eternity,” wrote Emerson.
This nation was founded on ideas, and clearly in the ideas of the fit, the earnest, the serious, lies its hope for the future. To eliminate the second-rate, to encourage the first-rate man to undertake offices of responsibility and power—such must be the immediate concern and the urgent business of all who love America.
THE LADY OF LANDOR LANE
I
“TAKE your choice; I have bungalows to burn,” said the architect.
He and his ally, the real-estate man, had been unduly zealous in the planting of bungalows in the new addition beyond the college. About half of them remained unsold, and purchasers were elusive. A promised extension of the trolley-line had not materialized; and half a dozen houses of the bungalow type, scattered along a ridge through which streets had been hacked in the most brutal fashion, spoke for the sanguine temper of the projectors of Sherwood Forest. The best thing about the new streets was their names, which were a testimony to the fastidious taste of a professor in the college who had frequently thundered in print against our ignoble American nomenclature.
It was hoped that Sherwood Forest would prove particularly attractive to newly married folk of cultivation, who spoke the same social language. There must, therefore, be a Blackstone Road, as a lure for struggling lawyers; a Lister Avenue, to tickle the imagination of young physicians; and Midas Lane, in which the business man, sitting at his own hearth side far from the jarring city, might dream of golden harvests. To the young matron anxious to keep in touch with art and literature, what could have been more delightful than the thought of receiving her mail in Emerson Road, Longfellow Lane, Audubon Road, or any one of a dozen similar highways (if indeed the new streets might strictly be so called) almost within sound of the college bell? The college was a quarter of a mile away, and yet near enough to shed its light upon this new colony that had risen in a strip of forest primeval, which, as the promoting company’s circulars more or less accurately recited, was only thirty minutes from lobsters and head lettuce.
This was all a year ago, just as August haughtily relinquished the world to the sway of September. I held the chair of applied sociology in the college, and had taken a year off to write a number of articles for which I had long been gathering material. It had occurred to me that it would be worth while to write a series of sociological studies in the form of short stories. My plan was to cut small cross-sections in the social strata of the adjoining city, in the suburban village which embraced the college, and in the adjacent farm region, and attempt to portray, by a nice balancing of realism and romance, the lives of the people in the several groups I had been observing. I had talked to an editor about it and he had encouraged me to try my hand.
I felt enough confidence in the scheme to risk a year’s leave, and I now settled down to my writing zestfully. I had already submitted three stories, which had been accepted in a cordial spirit that proved highly stimulating to further endeavor, and the first of the series, called The Lords of the Round House—a sketch of the domestic relationships and social conditions of the people living near the railroad shops—had been commented on favorably as a fresh and novel view of an old subject. My second study dealt with a settlement sustained by the canning industry, and under the title, Eros and the Peach Crop, I had described the labors and recreations of this community honestly, and yet with a degree of humor.
As a bachelor professor I had been boarding near the college with the widow of a minister; but now that I was giving my time wholly to writing I found this domicile intolerable. My landlady, admirable woman though she was, was altogether too prone to knock at my door on trifling errands. When I had filled my note-book with memoranda for a sketch dealing with the boarding-house evil (it has lately appeared as Charging What the Onion Will Bear), I resolved to find lodgings elsewhere. And besides, the assistant professor of natural sciences occupied a room adjoining mine, and the visits of strange reptilia to my quarters were far from stimulating to literary labor.