THE CRIME

The Perfervid Professor watched with a pleasure even sensuous the slow drop of the curtain and the slow rise of the lights. "Delightful", he murmured, "Delightful." The Person In The Next Seat smiled, revealing bridgework and the brilliance thereof, smiled and nudged the Perfervid Professor.

"Say", he offered, "say, was that Russian the brother was talking?" He was really interested.

The Perfervid Professor did not faint. He was in New York. "No--no", he answered, "It was Latin." He turned to his program.

The bridgework grinned. "It's all the same to me", it gestured, and went out to smoke. Sic transit--but that again is Russian.

The fable above is not really a fable at all, for there was a Perfervid Professor. In fact there are hundreds of them. And as for People In The Next Seats, there are thousands of them. No, this is not a fable; it is an introduction. It introduces to Plympton Street and to the world at each end of Plympton Street, and even beyond, a column worthy longer and wider streets or greens or whatnot, a column which will at worst be a cenotaph, at best a pillar of salt. For, "if the salt shall lose its savor"--whereof the column? To Perfervid Professors and People In The Next Seats is it dedicated. Civilizations and columns are built on both.

There was, there is a certain satisfaction in connecting things. So when the winds of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, whirled snow and cold air and an occasional cinder about the house with the room with the brass bed with the literary occupant, the literary occupant read two books, connected enough to satisfy the greatest stickler for good connections. For both the books concerned nephews, one, the glass relative of the Gentle Cardinal Peter Bon; the other, the equally transparent kinsman of the less gentle Betsy Trotwood. Dickens and Elinor Wylie! Then came a voice from a corner, crying, "I ask you?" But the voice was unfair. Just because a lady has divorced two husbands and married a poet, she need not fear to walk with Dickens, even in a room in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In fact Dickens might rather like to talk with her, might find her rather charming--far more so than the literary occupant of the brass bed found her book. Butterfly amours on damasque lawns beneath fragile moons, center stage, are likely to pall at times, especially when there are David Copperfields to visit with as the London Mail swings down the Dover Road.

But all this is much too romantic for a realistic age. Better the gargoyled truth of Sherwood Anderson's sardonic laughter, laughter which he finally admits is--black. But if life is not an afternoon of tea and toast and silver spoons, neither is it a night of sin, sex, and sentiment, and there is no particularly cogent reason why anyone should waste it reading laboratory manuals with colored jackets.

Any more than there is a definite need for one to waste his time watching Cyril Maude and Edna Best, both charming people, struggle with the sententious sentiments of that literary milliner who has so successfully covered the wits of the reading public with his ornate and verdant cloche bonnet.

Which mention of hats reminds one to offer a plume to Philip Guedala, whose historical sketches have been a delightful condiment to the "Harper's" diet as he has rattled realities in the closets of the past and to the bold and true who recently suggested that the publishing of Miss Lowell's worst verse in all and sundry magazines does not help the sale of the "Life". There should be a Society for the Protection of the Reputations of Deceased Authors. Then literary Jerry Crunchers would have harder work, meriting their doctorates.