And a fine, rich, ripe old habit it is, and a precious thing in a modern, shouting world that has no habits but only impulses and vices. Let me confess: I like Brooklyn, and I like to dream of going to live there some day. And possibly I would go if it were not for the desire of keeping the project before me as one of the few ideals I have retained in life. I like Brooklyn's shapeless rotundity as contrasted with our abominable rectangular distances in Manhattan. I like it because it sprawls low against the ground instead of clawing up into the sky. Manhattan is solid with brick and steel from river to river. Brooklyn ambles on peacefully till it comes to a region of sand lots or a marsh or a creek, and stops. Half a mile further on it resumes its gentle dreams of progress and wanders north, or south, or east, as the fancy seizes it. It runs into blind corners, it debouches upon ravines and woodland strips, it hears the echoes of ocean on the beaches. It is leisure; it is peace; it is Brooklyn.
At the same time it is well to remember that Brooklyn is something more than a geographical fact. Brooklyn describes a scheme of life and a condition of the mind. The life there is like a page from yesterday. People who live in Brooklyn organise reading circles. They attend lectures on the Wagnerian music drama. They have retained progressive euchre and the strawberry festival as essential ingredients of religion. They are extremely fond of going on long excursions into the country in early spring. They make it a habit to walk across the bridge on their way home in the evening, and they speak with great feeling of the beautiful effect when New York's high buildings flash into banked masses of flame in the falling dusk. People who live in Brooklyn take pride in keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York, because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of being unsafe.
And yet, as I have said, Brooklyn is rather a condition than a concrete fact. I believe every great Babylon has its neighbouring Brooklyn. London has it; Boston has it; Paris has it; even Chicago has it. And the line of demarcation between what is Brooklyn and what is not Brooklyn is not always a sharp one. There are many people in Manhattan who at heart are residents of Brooklyn. Such people, though they live in Harlem, avoid the express trains in the Subway on account of the crush. They visit the Museum of Natural History on Sunday and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on legal holidays and extraordinary occasions. They cross the Hudson and walk on the Palisades. They bring librettos to the opera and read them in the dark, thus missing a great deal of what passes on the stage. On the other hand, you will find people in Brooklyn whose spirit is totally alien to the place. They want to boost Brooklyn and boom it and push it and make it the most important borough in Greater New York, and develop its harbour facilities, and establish a great university, and double the assessed value of real estate within five years. Such people are in Brooklyn, but not of it.
And that is why Brooklyn has so strong a hold on me. I like it because it has so many wonderful, valuable, common things in it. In Brooklyn there are people, churches, baby-carriages, bay-windows, butchers' boys carrying baskets and whistling, policemen who misdirect strangers, vacant lots where boys play baseball, small tradesmen, overhead trolleys, quiet streets tucked away between parallel lines of clanging elevated railway, an Institute of Arts, and old gentlemen who write letters to the newspapers. I like Brooklyn because it hasn't the highest anything, or the biggest anything, or the richest anything in the world.
XIV
PALLADINO OUTDONE
Harding spent one long winter night in reading the report of a select committee of the Society for Psychical Recreation which placed on record no less than half a dozen absolutely authenticated cases of material objects being moved through space by some mysterious agency other than physical. The report, as it took shape in Harding's dreams that night, was as follows:
In the first experiment the medium was an ordinary American citizen. The precautions against the slightest bodily movement on his part were perfect. Mr. Joseph G. Cannon planted both of his feet on the medium's left foot and seized his left hand in both his own. Senator Aldrich did the same on the other side. The Honourable Sereno E. Payne grasped the medium by the throat, the Honourable John Dalzell straddled on his chest, Senator Burrows of Michigan strapped his ankles to the chair, and Senator Scott of West Virginia thrust a gag into his mouth. As a further precaution, before the séance began, a representative of the Sugar Trust went through the medium's pockets. The medium struggled and groaned and made other signs of distress, but at all times remained under absolute control. Yet it is a fact that, in spite of all restraints imposed upon him, this ordinary American citizen did succeed in raising a family of two sons and a daughter and even in sending the eldest child to college. At various times one even caught sight of a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes sailing through the air, and once, for a moment, the Committee distinctly smelt roast turkey with cranberry sauce. At the end of the séance the medium was in a pitiful state of exhaustion, but declared that he was quite ready to go on.
In the second experiment the Committee made use of the Mayor of one of our large cities and of the boss of the party to which the Mayor belonged. The boss acted as medium, being securely strapped into a chair about three feet away from another chair, on which the Mayor was sitting, blindfolded. Again the standard precautions against fraud were gone through, but this time the medium's efforts met with almost immediate response. At the merest droop of the boss's right eyelid, the Mayor leaped up from his chair and turned completely around. The boss smiled faintly, whereupon the Mayor balanced himself for 3 minutes and 42 seconds on his right foot and for 2 minutes and 35 seconds on his left foot, and then began to run about the room on all-fours in an amusing imitation of a spaniel fetching and carrying for his master. The boss inserted the point of his tongue into his cheek and withdrew it again, repeating the process several times in rapid succession. In response, the Mayor's face went into a series of spasmodic smiles and frowns that aroused general laughter. At the conclusion of the performance, the boss gently clicked his tongue against his palate, and the Mayor promptly stood on his head in the middle of the floor.