A somewhat similar experiment was concerned with a magazine editor and a life-size mannikin made up to resemble a muckraker. The editor and the lay figure sat facing in opposite directions at a distance of about ten feet. The editor, who acted as medium, was holding the telephone receiver with one hand and signing checks with the other, so that there could be no question of manual manipulation on his part. Neither could his feet come into play, because they were in full view on his desk. The telepathy hypothesis was eliminated because, in the first place, the mannikin had no mind, of course, and in the second place, the editor changed his own mind so fast that no external mind could possibly keep up with it. The results were gratifying. The editor took a slip of paper and wrote a few words upon it. Immediately the stuffed figure began to shout, "Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder! Fire! Thieves! Help! Murder!" at intervals of two seconds. The editor wrote something on another slip of paper, and the mechanical figure went through a most complex series of movements. First it seized a pair of paint brushes and began to paint all the white objects in the room black and all the black objects white. Then it went through the motions of playing, for a few minutes, upon a typewriter. Then it seized a pair of shears and set to work clipping solid pages from books and magazines. Then it copied a long column of figures from an almanac and added them up wrong. Then it drew a memory sketch of an English statesman, and put the wrong name under it. The editor assured the Committee that he could continue the process for hours at will.
An excellent séance was one in which the medium was a man very near the top in American finance. The rest of the group forming the circle around the table were plain American citizens of the type described in the first experiment. The medium was securely roped in his chair with anti-Trust laws, anti-rebating laws, insurance laws, banking laws, franchise laws, etc. Yet no sooner were the lights turned down than the phenomena began. John Smith, on the right of the medium, suddenly felt a sharp blow on the neck. As he turned around instinctively a ghostly hand snatched away his pocket-book and the sound of mocking laughter could be plainly heard from the dark cabinet. Another weird hand pulled Thomas Jones's insurance policy out of his breastpocket, dangled it in the air just out of his reach, and then flung it back at him. Later when Jones looked at his policy he found that its face value had been cut down one-half. James Robinson all at once began to feel his shoe pinch, and could not discover the reason until he, too, caught sight of a ghostly hand hovering in the vicinity of his pocket. Soon the room was filled with a veritable chaos of flying objects. Railroads, steamship lines, national banks, trust companies, insurance companies, went hurtling through the air, but all the time our financier sat motionless in his chair. It was suggested that the force which set such ponderous objects into motion was the mysterious element known as "executive ability."
In the final experiment the subject was a popular novelist, who gave a most interesting exhibition of how a nation-wide reputation can be raised and supported without the slightest apparent reason. A painstaking examination by the Committee showed that he had concealed about him neither talent, nor imagination, nor knowledge of human nature, nor insight into life, nor an intimate acquaintance with the elements of English grammar. Nevertheless, before the eyes of the amazed observers, novel after novel went humming through the air in a direction away from the writer, while a steady stream of bank-books, automobiles, and country houses flowed in the opposite direction.
XV
THE CADENCE OF THE CROWD
I have always been peculiarly susceptible to the music of marching feet. I know of no sound in nature or in Wagner that stirs the heart like the footsteps of the crowd on the board platform of the Third Avenue "L" at City Hall every late afternoon. The human tread is always eloquent in chorus, but it is at its best upon a wooden flooring. Stone and asphalt will often degrade the march of a crowd to a shuffle. It needs the living wood to give full dignity to the spirit of human resolution that speaks in a thousand pair of feet simultaneously moving in the same direction; and particularly when the moving mass is not an army, but a crowd advancing without rank or order. I am exceedingly fond of military parades; so fond that I repeatedly find myself standing in front of ladies of medium height who pathetically inquire at frequent intervals what regiment is passing at that moment. But it is not the blare of the brass bands I care for, or the clatter of cavalry, which I find exceedingly stupid, or even the rattle of the heavy guns, but the men on foot. Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country. Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes.
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 principal's platform. When the bell rang for dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one huge assembly 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 principal 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 mass 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 assemblage of poets or scholars or thinkers, or whatever class 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.