Title: Prejudices
Author: Flandrau, Charles Macomb
Language: English
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                              PREJUDICES



                              PREJUDICES


                                  BY

                        CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU

               Author of “Viva Mexico!” “The Diary of a
                  Freshman,” “Harvard Episodes,” etc.

                            [Illustration]


                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                 1911


                          COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY


                         _Published May, 1911_


                Printed in the United States of America

     These extracts from my notebook originally appeared in _The
     Bellman_. For permission to reprint them I beg to thank the editor.

                                                               C. M. F.



                          A BIRTHDAY PRESENT
                                  FOR
                               R. B. F.



CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

SOME DOGS                                                              3

LITTLE PICTURES OF PEOPLE                                             21

WANDERLUST                                                            43

TRAVEL                                                                69

FELLOW PASSENGERS                                                     87

PARENTS AND CHILDREN                                                  99

WHAT IS EDUCATION?                                                   115

JUST A LETTER                                                        131

IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP                                             151

WRITERS                                                              167

“ANN VERONICA”                                                       185

HOLIDAYS                                                             207

SERVANTS                                                             223

MRS. WHITE’S                                                         239



SOME DOGS


When the occasion is propitious, I always find it interesting to ask a
person I don’t know well if he, or she, is fond of dogs. The
propitiousness of the occasion is perfect, however, only when there is a
dog in the same room or on the same piazza, or wherever we, for the
moment, happen to be talking. The reply to this question is to me a kind
of exquisitely personal barometer. From it I have always been able to
gauge with extreme accuracy the degree to which my sympathy and
friendship with him who makes it might possibly rise. False answers to
other questions have often deceived me, but a reply to the inquiry: Are
you fond of dogs? never has. From the way in which the reply is phrased,
from the tone in which it is spoken, from the facial expression that
accompanies it, I am instinctively able to “size it up,” weigh it, and
see exactly what there is behind it.

From otherwise altogether estimable women I often elicit this: “Oh, yes,
I like dogs; but I like them in their place.” This, of course, means
that they innately loathe dogs; that they are afraid of them and have a
horror of them; that they regard a dog as something which potentially
damages furniture and carpets, ruins flower beds, and gives children
hydrophobia. By me, anyone who descends to the level of declaring that
he “likes dogs, but likes them in their place,” is simply struck from
the list. It is a most usual reply; it might, indeed, in all propriety,
be added to the bromidioms, except that a bromidiom is more a
stereotyped little collection of words that slip out with no particular
motive or intention, whereas a declaration to the effect that one likes
dogs, but likes them in their place, is charged with meanings for anyone
who looks for them. It is one of those curious and unexplained facts
that almost nobody likes openly to confess an aversion to dogs. Among
our acquaintances we all have a frank and vehement enemy of cats, but
he who hates dogs rarely permits himself to say anything more definitely
antagonistic than that he likes dogs--in their place. Under an assumed
name he does, from time to time, relieve himself in the correspondence
column of a newspaper, but it is invariably under an assumed name. If I
disliked dogs, I should not hesitate to say so, just as I do not
hesitate to admit that I am terrified by a snake, even if I know it to
be harmless, or by the mere idea of ascending to a great height and
peering over the edge. Such terrors are illogical, unreasonable,
anything you please, but they are inborn and they persist, and few
persons object to confessing to them. But no one, on the other hand,
likes to have it believed of him either that his sense of humor is not
keen, or that he is not fond of dogs. This, of course, is, in the long
run, all to the glory of dogs. Even the people who constitutionally
dislike them can rarely bring themselves openly to say so.

To me, an inability to love a dog is comprehensible only in the same
sense I can comprehend that an uncle of mine, who had a delightful
talent for drawing, was hopelessly color-blind, and that another member
of my family and two of my friends are what is called “tone-deaf.” You
might play to them the introduction to “Lohengrin” and then “Annie
Rooney” at regular intervals every day for a month, and at the end of
that time it would be impossible for them to tell which was which. In
other respects adequately equipped, they were simply born without the
apparatus necessary to distinguish between one combination of musical
sounds and another. They all hate to admit that music gives them little
or no pleasure; one of them has even gone so far as to become, in an
amateur way, an authority on the history and theory of music, but if in
his presence some one begins to play the piano, he is always
pathetically unaware as to whether he is listening to a nocturne by
Chopin, or a cakewalk sung into popularity by May Irwin.

Persons who “like dogs in their place” always seem to me to have been
born with much the same sort of defect--or perhaps it would be kinder
and truer to call it an omission. But then, my attitude toward dogs may
be abnormal. I don’t know. I can only recall a lecture by William Dean
Howells in which, when he paused to give some incidental advice to young
writers, he said, in effect, “In writing, never hesitate to express what
you feel is a thought, a sensation or a state of mind peculiar to
yourself. It never _is_ peculiar to yourself. The paragraph you shrink
from writing because you feel it will be understood by you alone, is the
one that will be read with the most sympathetic interest.” (After all
these years I cannot quote Mr. Howells verbatim, but that was his idea;
it deeply impressed me.) So here goes.

“Love” is a portentous word that we use rather recklessly, but in
considering its meaning, in employing it after the deliberation that is
its due, I can, in all seriousness, say that during my lifetime I have
loved more dogs than I have loved human beings. There are inevitably a
few humans whom we love, but, in my own case, I simply cannot evade the
fact, even if I wanted to (which I don’t), that the human beings I have
been unreservedly devoted to have been fewer than the dogs for whom I
have experienced the same sort of emotions. What, after all, do we mean,
in of course its platonic sense, by love? To me it means a state of mind
that would be tremendously upset in a purely disinterested fashion by
the sudden elimination of somebody else. It means that somebody has
become part of your life, part of your thoughts, part of your habits,
and that for the most part you think of him or her or it, as the case
may be, with satisfaction. You like to know that “they” (whoever they
are) are in the world with you. You regret your partings and look
forward to your meetings. You stop and think, sometimes, how different
life would be if they died, and when they die, a sort of hole is knocked
into your world, that you, for a long time, are unable to fill up. That
may or may not be a good definition of affection, but it expresses the
feeling I have had for a few people and a lot of dogs.

It used to be conventional and proper to bring up children in the belief
that the great difference between humans and the so-called lower animals
was that the humans had souls and that the other animals had not, but
nowadays many parents do not seem to care to assume the responsibility
for this distinction, and it is not because they believe we haven’t
souls (what a convenient word it is!), but because they are inclined to
suspect that the kindly beasts who love the children and are beloved by
them, who enjoy such intimate companionship with them, have. However
this may be, it certainly is a pleasanter, a more ennobling theory; one
that tends to reduce human vanity, to extend sympathy, to increase the
world’s happiness, and to promote a more specific and comprehensive
interest in the mysterious and beautiful ways of God.

Most unintentionally I seem to have wandered from dogs and strayed into
the domain of metaphysics--or do I mean theology? I don’t know anything
about metaphysics or theology, but I know a great deal about dogs, and
it was some dogs I had in mind when I sat down to write. Through a sad,
autumn rain I have been staring out of my window into the garden where,
side by side, some of them are buried; Friday, Thursday, Tatito, Spy,
Rowdy, and--it is but a few lonely weeks that he has been there--Boozy.
Mud, an Irish staghound, is at rest on a hillside in Dakota, and Jigger,
whom I rarely see now, as he unfortunately for me does not belong to me,
is fat, gray, capricious, but still alive, still adorable and adored.
How they emerge and come back to me as I stand and look at the
frost-bitten hollyhocks on the graves! What individuality each one had;
how absolutely different they were; how inseparable they are from any
retrospect of my youth--from, indeed, my whole life. With but few
intermissions I cannot remember the time when some one of them did not
play an intimate, an important, a memorable part in the little drama of
my existence. Scarcely any phase of it fails to comprehend one of them.
I feel myself thinking of them exactly as I think of the members of my
family whom I have cared for, who did what it was intended that they
should do and who then quietly left. To describe them, to dwell on their
traits of character, their mannerisms, their little faults and
eccentricities, the setness of their ways as they gradually grew older
and then old, would seem to me to be an indelicacy if I did not realize
that to most persons a dog is just a dog.

Jigger had, and still has, the most touching faith in the efficacy of
prayer. When he needs or wants anything, he assumes the attitude and
waits for results. If he is thirsty, one comes upon him appealing to a
washstand or to a faucet in the bathroom; if he wants a certain kind of
salted cracker he is found tired, but patient, believing, and erect on
his hind legs in front of the cupboard in which he knows the crackers
are kept. Once in the country he longed for a porcupine that seemed to
him an altogether congenial sort of companion, and begged at the foot of
a tree until the porcupine responded by coming down and shooting
twenty-four quills into Jigger’s lovely little plush muzzle. It took
about a quart of ether, a surgeon, and I forget how many dollars, to
extract the quills. Jigger also keeps strange hours. Most dogs, I have
found, adapt their hours to those of the persons they live with. They go
to bed and arise when the family does, but Jigger, although a dachshund,
is in some respects Chinese. Frequently at two or three in the morning
it occurs to him that it would be agreeable to have some fun with a golf
ball. The fun consists in somebody hiding the ball in a sufficiently
discoverable locality and then letting Jigger find it. Perhaps I ought
to be in an institution for the feeble-minded, but when Jigger, at 3 or
4 A.M., has deposited a moist golf ball on my neck and has then tugged
at my sleeve until I woke up, I have always got out of bed, made a
light, and, half dazed with sleep, gone through all the motions of his
idea of a thoroughly good time. People who don’t like Jigger--and I have
begun to suspect that they consist of the people whom Jigger cannot,
for some reason, endure--say he is selfish. No doubt he is. Most of us
are, only some of us have learned how to conceal the fact. Jigger never
conceals anything except his golf ball. That, with the air of a
conspiring sausage, he sneaks off with, hides from mortal view, and
leaves hidden sometimes for a day or two at a time.

Friday and Thursday were part of my life so long ago that I find I can
now speak of them with calmness. How shy and reticent and actually
morbid Friday was! He had none of the enthusiasms, none of the
ebullience, of other dogs. He lived with us, he knew he was one of us,
he never temporarily left us for a day, as almost all dogs do from time
to time. In his queer, rather uncomfortable way he worshiped us; I know
he did because I know it, but he never actually made a demonstration of
the fact as other dogs do. I can’t remember a single occasion on which
he kissed my hand or asked to get into my lap or my bed. Even in his
youth he was reserved and dignified and old. He had in life just one
great pleasure, one dissipation, and that was to hear my father argue a
case in court. He almost always went to the court room when my father
had a case on hand, and many a judge has angrily ordered him to be
removed; but no clerk or sheriff ever succeeded in removing him.
Probably it has been forgotten, but at one time in the legal history of
Minnesota there was no more prominent figure at the bar than a queer,
shy, reticent, morbid but determined little yellow dog named Friday!

What a completely different personality was Spy-boy! An English
greyhound with famous ancestors, he was physically a thing of perfect
beauty--all fine, steel springs covered with pale brown velvet. When he
stood between you and a bright light, the lower part of his stomach was
translucent, and you could always see the throbbing of his heart.
Although both by birth and by temperament an aristocrat, his breeding
had not impaired his intellect. He literally had a fine mind. I think of
him as a kind of canine Macaulay, except that he had about him a touch
of mysticism; he heard sounds and smelt odors and saw things that no
one else could. For hours at a time I have sat reading in the same room
with him, an absolutely silent, scentless, uninhabited room as far as my
primitive senses could discover, while he, poised on the delicate arch
of his chest, with one front foot across the other (he always assumed
that position in his moments of meditation), incessantly twitched his
sensitive nostrils, moved his ears, and followed about the room, with
his eyes, the invisible things he saw. I could see nothing except what I
knew was there; he, however, could. Sometimes he would get up, slowly
watch them until they disappeared, and then resume his position. One
day, after he had sat this way for an hour or more, he arose, rested his
head for a moment on my sister’s lap, and then fell dead.

How Rowdy admired him! Rowdy, too, was a greyhound, but poor, silly,
stupid old Rowdy’s escutcheon was simply a grille of bars sinister. His
humble, self-sacrificing attachment to Spy was as if he appreciated
that Spy was the real thing, and that he was only a clumsy imitation.
Spy was kind to him; at times it seemed to me that Rowdy’s society even
mildly amused him, but his kindness was unmistakably that of royalty for
some lowly and devoted dependent. Rowdy once chewed the front cover of
the book that, in those days, I cared for more than any other: “Sir
Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” by Jane Porter. My youthful fury was
extreme when I found the mutilated volume on the piazza, but even at
that immature epoch my emotions were hopelessly mixed. I longed to whip
Rowdy, because it seemed to me that my favorite book was ruined, but
when he came up to me with every appearance of having forgotten the
incident, I could only pat his head, as usual. His vandalism brought
tears to my eyes, and, after twenty-three years, when I now and then
look at the chewed, blue cover of “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” and
examine the little tooth marks, tears still sometimes come, but they
aren’t the same kind.

And now they are all asleep under the frost-bitten hollyhocks, which I
have turned to look at more than once since I sat down to write. Boozy’s
life, his dignified old age, and his death are, somehow, too recent to
speak of. I should like to, but I can’t.



LITTLE PICTURES OF PEOPLE


I

MR. AND MRS. PARKE

They both looked older than their years, which were respectively sixty
and fifty-seven, and this was largely due to the ingrowing life they had
always led, the influence of their fine old house on Beacon Hill, and to
the individuality, the eccentricity, of Mrs. Parke’s clothes. The house
was of mellowed red brick, with large, square, high rooms containing,
one was at first inclined to think, very little besides dignity and
refined sunlight. But a more careful inspection while waiting for Mrs.
Parke to come down disclosed a rare combination of comfort and beauty.
The sitting room in which she and Mr. Parke usually received one
belonged to no period and had no “color scheme.” It was merely quietly
perfect with mahogany, with harmonious chintz, with a few very authentic
and interesting pictures, such as an early painting, remarkably
definite, even a little hard, by Corot, a religious arrangement of
archaic reds and blues by Rossetti, some exquisitely painstaking
botanical and architectural pencil sketches by Ruskin, and a panel by
Whistler that one felt to be important without, however, knowing just
what it was intended to represent. In the center of the room was a
large, round, bare mahogany table with books arranged on it, exactly
half a foot away from the edge, in a circle. Inside the circle was
always a great crystal bowl full of flowers that were sent into town
every morning from the Parkes’ country place.

Mrs. Parke suggested a vivacious Queen Victoria, if such an image is
conceivable. She was of the same height and figure and, like her late
majesty, she wore strange clothes that were not exactly out of fashion,
because they had never been in it. They were simply the clothes of Mrs.
Parke and bore no relation or resemblance to any others. She had a great
many of them, for, often as I went there on Sunday afternoons, I never
saw the same garment twice. They were the most romantic clothes I have
ever known off the stage or outside the glass cases of a museum, for,
many years before, Mrs. Parke’s greatuncle had been an East India
merchant and, when he died, his grandniece inherited, among other
things, bale upon bale of the marvelous fabrics his ships had brought
back from the East--from India, from Burmah, from Siam, Japan and China;
silks, brocades, crêpes, cloth of silver and cloth of gold and many more
materials that no longer had names and the secret of whose dyes had been
forgotten. For almost forty years Mrs. Parke had dressed only in these
splendid, brilliant stuffs, and there were many bales still unopened.
Some of the materials rustled stiffly and some of them clung, but she
had them all made up in the same way, a kind of loose wrapper, and with
them she wore on her head a small cap of rose point, the top of which
was a bit of the dress.

On a pedestal in the hall the marble bust of a handsome young man still
faintly suggestive of her husband testified that the Parkes had been to
Italy on their wedding trip, but they had never gone abroad again. With
one exception their journeys for thirty-six or-seven years had consisted
solely of the annual trip on the ninth of April to their country place,
a distance of eighteen miles, and the annual trip back to town again on
the tenth of November. Once they had spent two weeks with a senatorial
relative in Washington, but on their return Mr. Parke had nervous
prostration for three months and they did not again indulge in so daring
an experiment.

I often wondered how all the years had slipped by without somehow
leaving them stranded, for neither of them had ever “done” anything,
even in the most prosaic interpretation of the term. Mr. Parke had
studied law, but he had never practiced it. He read widely, memoirs,
poetry, history, essays and an occasional novel, and he remembered much
of what he read, but his reading was of the desultory kind. He could
quote from all literatures but he had no literary hobbies. Mrs. Parke
did not even read. Instead she knitted soft, useless things on thick,
wooden needles, and when she was in the country armed herself with a
flat straw hat, chamois gloves, a pair of scissors, and then proceeded
to drive the Scotch gardener to drink. They had never cared much for
society. It was enough to know that its doors were open to them,
although at one period Mr. Parke must have gone to a great many small
dinners at clubs to meet celebrities, for his fund of intimate and
delightful anecdote was inexhaustible.

But the years had slipped by and they had not been stranded. They
imagined, indeed, that they always had been and still were two of the
busiest and most important persons in town. They were sixty and
fifty-seven when I first met them, and old for their ages. One scarcely
expected them to be very actively occupied with the contemporaneous,
but after I had seen them often enough to become acclimated (no other
word will quite do) I realized that they never had been, that they were
then exactly as they always had been, only more so. Their entire lives
had been spent in the deification of the unessential, in the reduction
of puttering to a science. They had puttered their lives away and were
still puttering, only, as they grew older, with a greater intensity, and
from the first their lives had been extremely happy. I had never known
two human beings who had so successfully mastered the art of
transforming molehills into mountains. It was their sole occupation.

“My dear fellow, I _am_ so glad to see you,” Mr. Parke would exclaim as
he bustled into the room when I went there to luncheon, and he meant it,
for they were both kind and hospitable. “I’m afraid I’m a minute or two
late, but this morning I’ve been driven, positively driven, from the
moment I got out of my bath--and by matters I simply can’t trust to
anyone else. They leave me no time for anything; I mean the things I
like to do and want to do. But you remember that line from Browning’s
Paracelsus, don’t you? ‘Let each task present its petty good to thee.’ I
always try to think of that.”

“You’ve worked too hard this morning, Henry,” Mrs. Parke would say,
glancing solicitously up from her needles, “and you know it always
brings on your gout. The trouble is, he _will_ overdo.” Later on, during
luncheon, it comes out that the exhausting labors of the day consisted
of Mr. Parke’s making out and sending a check to the associated
charities, writing a short letter to the _Transcript_, refusing an
invitation to dinner, and changing his clothes. Mrs. Parke had also
spent an exciting but difficult morning. A new expressman had delivered
the daily box of flowers at the wrong house, and from the dear lady’s
account of the incident one inferred that for several hours the destiny
of nations had shuddered in the balance.

“I sat and sat and sat,” she would dramatically declaim, “but no
expressman. I couldn’t understand it, and it was long, long past the
time when I ought to have been arranging the flowers. You can imagine
the state I was in.”

One of Mr. Parke’s resources was changing his clothes. In the country,
for instance, he dressed with his usual minuteness for breakfast, but if
the gardener sent word that an orchid had bloomed, or that a branch on
one of the trees was turning yellow before it ought to, or that some
Sunday tripper had left a sardine tin and two eggshells on the cliff
walk--if, in fact, he felt it imperative to leave the house even for a
short time, the act necessitated a change of costume. He would put on
tweed knickerbockers and a kind of shooting jacket. On his return he
would change again to still another suit for luncheon, afterwards the
tweeds again if he went for a walk, then something else for tea and,
finally, evening dress for dinner. They both also spent a great deal of
time in showing and explaining their two houses to visitors--the closet
doors that could not possibly slam, because their area had been exactly
adjusted to the resistance of the number of cubic feet of air inside, or
words to that effect; the ventilating apparatus that forced every
lungful they breathed through three thicknesses of sterilized cheese
cloth; the heating arrangements that did something quite uncanny, I
forget what.

“You have seen the unceasing labor of forty years,” Mr. Parke would
usually assure you when you had finished the tour of inspection. Their
greatest triumph, however, consisted of the fact that, when they left
town for the country on April the ninth, they took no luggage with them,
not even a small handbag. They drove to the station empty handed, and on
arriving at their destination resumed their existence, as it were, in
duplicate. To the least detail there were replicas of every garment,
every shoe, every toilet article, every skein of worsted and every book
the two possessed.

The last time I saw them they had both aged considerably and they were,
if possible, more “driven” than usual. A distant cousin had written
that he expected to pass through town on his way to Europe, that he
wanted to see them both and would like to stay all night at their house.
With the letter in her agitated hand Mrs. Parke despairingly appealed to
me.

“But how can we?” she wailed, as one of the two men servants who had
brought in the tea things quietly restored a book I had disarranged to
its geometric site on the mahogany table. “I don’t see how we can. We’ve
been back from the country for only three weeks, and the house is in a
perfect whirl!” I thought of the eight immense, unoccupied bedrooms
upstairs, and for a moment had visions of my own family sleeping on the
floor or in the bath-tub or on the sewing machine in order to make room
for unexpected guests. But I agreed that the distant cousin was most
inconsiderate, not to say unreasonable.

Mr. Parke came in, but could only shake my hand and apologize for
running away. For a month he had been worrying for fear the family tomb
in Mount Auburn cemetery might be “damp” and he had at last decided
that the only thing to do was to drive out there and “see for himself.”


II

THE FOURTH

Twice a day the fourth officer walked rapidly the length of the
promenade deck with an easy, swinging stride and then vanished up a
steep flight of steps that led to the bridge. These brief appearances
began to interest me, for he was extraordinarily young and good-looking,
and it seemed to me but natural that he should at least say good morning
to some of the young girls who gazed at him over the tops of their books
as he went by and who very clearly would have enjoyed making his
acquaintance. But he never stopped and he never spoke. It was not until
the fifth day out that he smiled gravely and saluted as he passed my
chair. The next day we anchored in a landlocked tropical harbor, and as
he was on duty at the top of those wobbly steps (I never am able to
remember the nautical name for anything) by which one descends against
the side of the ship to the launches, and as there was nothing for him
to do after he had assured himself that none of the fat ladies and old
gentlemen who were going ashore had fallen into the sea, he strolled out
of the broiling sun, where he had been standing, immaculate and amiable,
for two hours and a half, and came over to me.

I am not exactly a punctilious person, especially on a hot day in the
tropics, but as the Fourth did not sit down on any of the numerous
vacant chairs in my neighborhood I, somewhat to my surprise, found
myself standing up--standing up, as I rarely was inspired to do in the
presence of the captain; and the Fourth was almost, if not quite, young
enough to be my son. He took my involuntary display of respect for
himself and his white uniform as a matter of course, and as the launches
were not to return for an hour we leaned against the rail on the shady
side and talked, sometimes in English (his English was correct,
although limited) but more often in German. That was the beginning of my
acquaintance with the Fourth, one that continued under similar
circumstances for several months and proved in many respects to be
enlightening.

More than anything else, perhaps, it brought home to me the meaning of
discipline long continued. He had learned his profession on a German
training ship, starting in at the age of fourteen, and from there he had
gone to the navy. Now he was an officer on one of the great German
passenger ships. In the meanwhile he had found time to take and pass the
naval examinations that made him eligible to the command of a German
vessel in any part of the world, and his age was just twenty-four.

I confess I gasped when I heard it (it was the second officer who told
me), although I ought to have known it without being told, for from the
first I had been struck by his impeccable physical refinement, the kind
that but rarely survives a quarter of a century. After that, when he
was quietly giving orders to middle-aged quartermasters, skilfully
directing the movements of the launches, making mathematical
calculations on a slip of paper behind the compass at sunset or pacing
the bridge, I often found myself contrasting him with various other
young gentlemen of twenty-four some five or six thousand miles away.
Living night and day with his watch practically in his hand, rarely
sleeping more than four hours at a time, obeying orders and observing
regulations blindly, faithfully, without a question or even a thought,
had done something to him that was to me very curious, very interesting
and very fine. It had not crushed him, it had molded him. It had not
changed his nature, it had taken charge of it and directed it. It had
not in the least made him prematurely old, it had developed to the
fullest extent the capacities of his youth.

He was so reserved, so self-contained at first, that I wondered if he
was not perhaps just a beautiful piece of Teutonic machinery, until one
morning we steamed into a harbor where the company he served had met
with the most hideous ill luck. He pointed out to me the dismantled
hulls of two noble ships that had run ashore and were a total loss. One
of them had struck because it was impossible for anyone on board to know
that an earthquake had destroyed the lighthouse the day before; the
other lay tragically on its side among the breakers because the captain
had attempted to hit the channel in the dark without a pilot. The Fourth
had been on that ship at the time and, when he told me about it, I had
to occupy myself with my field glasses and pretend I didn’t know that
two large tears had welled up, slipped over and were finding their way
down his face. He had been off duty and asleep when the accident
happened, and knew nothing about it until the quartermaster woke him up,
told him, and said that the captain could not be found. In spite of the
fact that the captain’s room was dark, something impelled the Fourth to
enter.

“Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and when
I turned on the light--”... Well, immediately after the accident the
captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle.

“Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same
thing?” I asked the Fourth.

“Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all
the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic
German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung
and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings
and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited
boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been
trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth.

His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more
so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich,
pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the
company, he was to have no friendly relations.

“On a long voyage like this, where we stop every few days and I stand
here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get
to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the
Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six
hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way
over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own
deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to
do.”

It was also, judged by material standards, a discouraging existence.
There had been occasions when for hours at a time the Fourth had been
chiefly responsible for the safety of hundreds of lives and about a
million dollars’ worth of property; and for his expert knowledge, his
anxiety, his prolonged nervous strain he received the munificent salary
of twenty-eight dollars a month--but little more than enough in the
tropics, where he had to put on always one, and sometimes two suits of
white a day, to pay his laundry bills.

“Nobody but the stewards get rich at sea,” he laughed when we were
discussing the matter.

“Do you ever think of giving it up--of doing something else?” I asked
him.

“I think of it,” he answered, “but I know I shan’t. I like to look
forward to having a command, although I’ll probably be eighty when I get
one and too old to take it, and, besides, what could I do? I’ve been on
the bridge of a ship since I was fourteen. I don’t know how to breathe
inside of a house.”

When we were in port and he could get off, we now and then dined
together on shore and went to a show. By way of returning these small
hospitalities he did the only thing he very well could do, which was to
ask me to go to his room in the evening to have a glass of beer. This I
liked infinitely better than an evening spent in the restaurant or the
theater of some sultry South American town. His room was large and cool,
high up and forward, with neither a sound nor a vibration. It always
seemed to be detached from the world, suspended in some way between the
sea and the sky, and in it the Fourth, when he got to know me better,
felt at liberty to wear his second cleanest white ducks instead of his
first, to sprawl on the sofa, to play with his pet monkey, to talk
nonsense and to be quite frankly the kid he really was.

One evening he put the monkey in bed with its head on the pillow, drew
the cover up around its neck and stretched out beside it. A huge,
bare-footed sailor came into the room, managed in some inscrutable
fashion to take off his cap with a glass of beer for me in one hand and
a cup of coffee for the Fourth in the other, placed the things on the
table and tiptoed out. Somewhere far below us, young men and girls were
waltzing frantically in the heat, women were dripping over games of
bridge as if their souls depended on the outcome, men in the smoking
room were getting drunk and calling one another names. But where we were
it was, as always, cool and silent and peaceful. One has to lead some
kind of a life, and as I sat there thinking, it occurred to me that,
even if it was poorly paid and at times lonely, there was something
very sane and useful and good about the life of the Fourth.

In a little while he would look at his watch and exclaim a trifle
diffidently, but with an unmistakable resumption of authority:

“It’s ten o’clock, you must go now.” Then he would almost instantly fall
asleep, sleep for four hours, spend four more alone with the trackless
waters and the southern stars, bathe, breakfast and begin another day
with a clear brain, steady nerves and untroubled eyes.

As often happens when two persons have remained silent in each other’s
presence for several minutes, his train of thought was identical with
mine, for when he spoke it was to say: “After all, I do like it.”



WANDERLUST


The crew, much to its surprise, was paid off at Havana and furnished
with a variety of explanations that did not particularly explain. Most
of the men were bitter about it, but Lansing and Hayward were too
unsophisticated, too new to the ways of the sea, to realize at first
that they had been imposed upon. They had shipped on the wretched little
steamer in New York in a sudden and curiously belated access of
romanticism. For Hayward, who was twenty-three, had worked as an
electrician since he was seventeen, and Lansing, who could scarcely
remember a time when he had not driven a grocer’s wagon, was
twenty-four. The sea had never been a boyish passion with them; they,
indeed, had rarely seen it. As far as their previous relations with it
had been concerned, New York might almost have been situated in the
middle of a Dakota prairie. Their lives had always been city lives, but
not of the kind that finds its way into popular fiction. For, in
expressing themselves, they were not accustomed to employ a
semi-unintelligible jargon of new slang, and from personal experience
they knew almost as little about the Bowery as they knew about the sea.
Their vocabularies, instead of being large and florid, were small and
simple; their lapses from grammar were too usual to be interesting. They
knew a few streets of the immense place exceedingly well, but they were,
for the most part, lower-middle-class, commonplace, entirely respectable
streets. They both had lived at home and worked hard--conscientiously,
one would say, except that in the routine of their existences conscience
played but little part. They had worked hard from habit, from the
realization that they could easily be replaced and from an innate desire
to keep their “jobs.”

It was strange, or perhaps it wasn’t strange (How do I know?), that the
sea had all at once irrelevantly called to them. If they had been fond
of reading, their embarkation might plausibly have been the practical
attempt to make a dream come true. But they rarely read anything except
the larger headlines of one-cent newspapers. The voluminous literature
of adventure in foreign countries, of a wild, free life on the high
seas, was almost as unknown to them as the thing itself. And yet, one
day, they went to sea.

Early in April, an electric car smashed into Lansing’s delivery wagon
and hurt the horse, to say nothing of the wagon itself and its valuable
contents. The fault was neither Lansing’s nor the motorman’s, but the
grocer both discharged Lansing and collected two hundred and fifty
dollars from the street railway company. Out of employment, Lansing saw
something of New York. He had been faithful and careful, and in a dumb,
uncomplaining sort of way he felt aggrieved and rebellious. His long,
aimless walks, during the first few days of his idleness, sometimes
took him to the water’s edge, and one morning he found himself on a Wall
Street wharf, just as a steamer was about to leave for the tropics.
Although he didn’t precisely know what it all meant, the experience was,
somehow, a moving one. There was an army of half-savage negroes--unlike
any negroes he had ever seen--wheeling baggage on trucks and, with
incoherent yelps, filling with freight a coarse net of rope that lifted,
swung, sank, disappeared, and then reappeared limp and hungrily empty.
There were fat, inexplicable women with improbable complexions,
accompanied by lean, sallow, gesticulating men, who darted from their
trunks to the ship and back again in a frenzy of excitement; and there
were smells. Lansing did not know it (he knew very little) but it was
the smells that, vulgarly speaking, “did the business.” There was a kind
of background--a fundamental smell--of pitch, of tar, of resin; but here
and there, protruding from this, as he strolled up and down the long,
inclosed wharf, was the rank, searching smell of unroasted coffee, the
fruity fragrance of pineapples, the pungent acidity of tomatoes, the
heavy sweetness of vanilla. As each odor came to him he inhaled it
deeply, curiously, and for him, somewhat excitedly.

After the vessel had slipped away and disappeared around the corner of
the wharf, Lansing had emerged with the intention of traversing Wall
Street and taking an uptown car, but a young and slightly drunken sailor
from a warship in the harbor had, àpropos of nothing at all, thrown an
arm about his waist and led him to a saloon across the way. They had
together only a glass of beer apiece, but they had sat down to it at a
little table and the sailor had talked.

In the sphere of life to which they both belonged there is a directness
and a frankness in the matter of intercourse that would be impossible
for most persons higher in the social order. Lansing had made many
acquaintances and even a few friends by speaking or being spoken to by
detached young men of his own age standing on street corners. Most of
his acquaintances among girls had been begun in the same way. They had
spoken to him or he had spoken to them--it was immaterial--and if they
found each other congenial they sometimes met again; sometimes they
didn’t. But in any event meeting, talking, parting, involved nothing. It
was merely an incident, often a pleasant one, of the kind the so-called
upper classes know but little. It seemed perfectly natural to Lansing
that the sailor, whom he never had seen before and probably would never
see again, should offer him a glass of beer and tell him of his voyage
around the world, and that he himself should respond with his accident,
his discharge from the grocery--in a word, his “troubles,” as he finally
called them.

“A sailor _has_ no troubles,” the other declared as they got up to go;
and he altogether looked it. After that, Lansing spent most of his time
on the wharves and on Sunday afternoon he took Hayward with him.

Hayward’s experience and education was as limited as his friend’s, but
he was of finer clay. What Lansing only felt, Hayward both felt and
translated into words.

“Gee, look at them turtles!” he would exclaim at a row of the huge,
gasping tortured creatures, lying on their backs and bound to a board by
ropes punched through their bleeding flippers. “They come out of the
water to lay eggs in the sand, and then you run out of the bushes and
turn them over on their backs with a pole. I bet there’s money in
turtles.” Or, “Gosh, what a lot of pineapples! How would you like to go
down there, Lansing, where it’s always summer, and just sit around while
the niggers work, and send millions of pineapples back here to be sold
at fifty cents apiece?”

“Forty-five,” corrected Lansing, who had “delivered” them all his life,
but who, until recently, had impartially given them the same
consideration he had been accustomed to bestow upon a potato. Once they
stood for an hour in front of ten cages full of white and yellow
cockatoos. They were even more disturbing, more convincing than the
incoherent negroes, the excitement of departure, the odor of exotic
fruits.

“Down there you can see them flying around wild,” Hayward meditated
aloud. “Down there!” The words began to mean wonderful, incommunicable
things to both of them. “Down there” was the shimmering, beautiful, hot,
mysterious and seductive end of the earth that a Frenchman is always
able to evoke for an instant, when, in a certain languid, reminiscent
tone, he pronounces the words “_là bas_.”

So they shipped on a tramp steamer and after a week they had been paid
off at Havana. In Havana they spent an entrancing day and evening
(Hayward bought an imitation diamond brooch at a place on Obispo street
where the revolving electric lights in the window elicited the last
glitter), but the next day was a good deal of a bore. They had seen the
town, there was no point in seeing it over again, and they were unused
to idleness. Both of them would have jumped at the opportunity of
returning to New York, but as no opportunity of doing so presented
itself neither of them had been obliged to admit it. On the third day,
however, they did move on to Vera Cruz. To Hayward, Vera Cruz was a name
he had heard (Lansing had never even heard it), but had he been asked
what country it was in he could not have told. He had an idea that it
was near New Orleans and Galveston. In another week they were
there--paid off again and turned loose in the Plaza.

Again they spent a notable day. They wandered about the streets, they
went to a wedding in a church, they marveled at the unmolested buzzards
filching garbage from the open drains along the curbstones, they walked
at sunset to the end of the long breakwater and watched the fishermen
come in with their gorgeous catch of redsnapper. In the evening they
went to a moving-picture show where they saw a realistic bull fight and
a manufactured American train robbery. (This last gave them their first
twinge of homesickness; the Pullman cars and the passengers looked so
natural.) When it was over, they again sought the Plaza, where, in the
sultry air, a compact mass of people was slowly forcing its way around
and around to the music of an enormous band high above them among the
trees in the center. They slept at an inexpensive lodging house to which
they had been taken by one of the stokers.

But the next day was very like the second day at Havana, except that the
possibilities of Vera Cruz seemed to be fewer. They could not walk in
any direction without soon coming to the water or to a hot and dreary
stretch of sand, and in their unconsciously blasé New York fashion they
had become, by the second day, hardened to ragged Indians, enormous
straw hats and scarlet _sarapes_. They sat on a shady bench in the Plaza
and discussed an immediate return to New York. Lansing was for going
overland; he had a hazy idea that they were near the border, and he was
amazed and troubled for a moment when the stoker, whom they several
times met again, laughed and told them that the border was a half a week
away in a train. This, of course, they knew they could not afford, and
they decided to work their way back, as they had come, on a steamer.

After that they spent most of their time on the docks, or in front of
the hotels and cafés near them, waylaying skippers and mates. But places
on ships bound for New York were apparently not to be had for the
asking. The men to whom they applied were invariably curt and definite
when they weren’t, as sometimes happened, brutally abusive. This was
annoying although it was also, now and then, amusing. They, as yet, had
not begun to regard matters in the light of a “situation,” for they
still had a little money. At this period of their ebbing fortunes it
seemed to them that they were making a sort of humiliating concession
when they ceased to specify New York as their destination, and resolved
to sail on any ship bound for any American port. But here, again, they
were met with the same irritated outbursts, or brief, cold denials.

They did not know it, because outside of the little ruts in which they
had always moved back and forth, they knew nothing, but Mexico, in
winter, is one of the great goals of the American tramp. Thousands of
them, in perpetually following at the heels of summer, drift across the
border and gradually wander from Laredo to San Luis Potosi, to the City
of Mexico, to Tampico and to Vera Cruz. They approach one in the Plaza,
in the Alameda, at the doors of hotels and theaters and restaurants,
and, with an always interesting fiction, extract twenty-five cents from
one in the name of patriotism. When the spring comes and it is once more
warm at home, they haunt the seaports, endeavoring to return by water.
For short-handed ships at Vera Cruz in April and May there is an
embarrassment of choice--a glut. Without in the least suspecting it,
Hayward and Lansing had, in the eyes of the world, become tramps,
seeking a return passage.

The heat had begun to be intense and the invariable refusal of their
services was discouraging, but far more so were the interminable
mornings and afternoons and evenings when, for the time being, they
gave up their quest and sat on a bench in the Plaza, or, at sunset,
strolled down to the breakwater for the redsnappers and the evening
breeze. They had left home together and they stayed together as a matter
of course, for they did not know anyone else, but they no longer had
anything in particular to say to each other. For the most part they were
silent and listless. They spoke only when something occurred to them
relevant to what, at last, had begun to strike them as their
“situation.”

“It’ll save money if we have one room instead of two, and sleep in the
same bed,” Hayward declared one night, after a day in which they had
scarcely spoken at all.

“If we don’t get up so early--What’s the use anyhow?--We won’t have to
pay for breakfast. Two meals is enough if you’re asleep,” suggested
Lansing a day or so later. And as long as they had money they spent it
only for their bed and their two daily meals. Then came the inevitable
day when they no longer had money, when they realized that the few
cents they were spending for their supper were the last. It was
disagreeable and they had begun to hate Vera Cruz--the monotony of it,
the enforced idleness, the blistering heat, the rumor (they heard it
from some English sailors on the dock) of yellow fever, and their
inability to leave it all behind them. But although they were alarmed
they were not yet panic-stricken. They each had a dress-suit case, an
extra suit of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, some shirts and
underclothes, a hat as well as a cap, three razors and a cheap watch.

The watch went first. They didn’t need a watch. When they wished to know
the time they could glance up from their bench at the clock on the tower
of the “municipal palace.” After this they parted on two successive days
with the dress-suit cases, then the hats, the clothes and shoes and
shirts and underclothes, one by one. The disposal of two of the razors
gave them for forty-eight hours almost a sense of opulence. Lansing did
not know there was a third razor and Hayward did not tell him of it.
Hayward was an innately neat person, and at the Y. M. C. A., to which he
belonged in New York, he had grown to look upon free soap and unending
hot and cold shower-baths in a light that was spiritual as well as
physical. He was good-looking and he knew it. The thought of becoming an
unshaven thing was abhorrent to him. Starvation, just then, he felt he
could face, but the prospect of a week’s beard revolted him. So he
twisted the razor into a piece of newspaper and secreted it in his
pocket. As long as he and Lansing were together he knew he would not be
able to shave; he could not confess to the possession of anything so
convertible into money without immediately converting it. But the
sensation of guilt was at first dispelled by an anticipatory thrill at
the thought of the day when he could once more look clean and fresh and
pink under his sunburn. He did not work it out in words, but the razor
was to him a tangible symbol of self-respect, and he clung to it,
although it would have bought them both the food they had begun to
need.

“We’ve got to beat it. We’ve got to beat it right away,” he said one
morning, when they awoke to the prospect of a foodless day. “They don’t
want us on the ships, but they’ll have to take us anyhow. We’ll sneak on
board and hide. After they get started they’ll have to keep us. They
can’t throw us overboard, and we’ll work. Gee, how I want to work!”

That day they ate nothing, but in the evening they marvelously succeeded
in smuggling themselves on a steamer bound for New Orleans, and in the
prospect of getting away they forgot that they were hungry. One of the
crew, with whom they struck up an acquaintance on the dock, seemed
impressed by the sincerity with which they swore they would pay him if
he would make it possible for them to return to where they could once
more work. He agreed to help them conditionally; that is, he would get
them on board and stow them away, if he could do it without too much
risk to himself. The attendant conditions had to be just right;
sometimes it was easy enough and sometimes it couldn’t be done at all.

In their case the right conditions were unexpectedly furnished in the
fraction of a second that it takes a cable to snap and drop a large
piece of locomotive from the main deck on a dozen barrels of apples in
the hold below. In the uproar that followed and continued for five or
six minutes, the only cool and competent person was the new friend of
Hayward and Lansing. He had been waiting for something of the kind to
happen, and he took instant advantage of it. While everyone else was
screaming Spanish oaths and peering into the hatchway at the ruins, he
hustled the two on board and hid them. An hour and a half later,
Hayward, dazed and suffocated, was dragged out by the feet and kicked
down the gang plank. Lansing did not reappear. From the dock, Hayward
watched the vessel become first a black speck and then a suggestion of
low-lying smoke in the dusk.

He was all at once horribly alone and lonely, but it did not occur to
him to feel resentful. Lansing’s luck had been good; his own had been
bad. That was all there was to it. He was glad someone had been lucky.
That night he went back to the lodging house and slept in the bed--it
was the last bed he ever slept in--and as he had no money, he in the
morning gave the _patron_ his razor.

Then began for him an existence, the absolute hopelessness of which
appalled and crushed him. At first a ship to New York had seemed to him
the only solution of his predicament; then the idea of a ship to
anywhere had become a vision of paradise; now he saw that ships were an
impossibility. As the season advanced the officers became more and more
vigilant. A shabby, unshaven young man could not go within speaking
distance of a ship. He made the rounds of the hotels and asked for
work--any kind of work--but there was none. He tried to get employment
as a laborer on the dock, but the foreman, who spoke English, laughed
and asked him why he wished to commit suicide.

“An American keeping one of us out of a job would be stabbed in an
hour,” he declared, and refused to hire him. He managed for a time to
keep alive, because one day he remembered that on the little finger of
his left hand he had a gold ring. For years it had been so much a part
of him that it had not occurred to him to sell it. The discovery of it
came as a kind of revelation and made it possible for him to eat,
sparingly, for two days. Then a brisk little American woman, in a white
duck suit, approached him in the Plaza and gave him twenty-five centavos
for delivering hand bills. She was a fortune teller--a “seeress,” and
had recently opened a “Studio of the Occult” in the Hotel Segurança,
across the way. She seemed like a kind, capable little creature and
once, when he had not eaten for two days, he went to the hotel and asked
for her; but as he was unshaven and dazed and rather vague, they assumed
him to be a drunken tramp and drove him away. Then he made the
acquaintance, in the Plaza, of an utterly unreal person of no particular
age, who dragged out of the hotel and in again every afternoon for half
an hour or so, with the aid of a cane. His face was bloated and
discolored, but his body was no more than a semi-upright arrangement of
bones. Hayward at first thought he was an invalid in the last stages,
then felt sure he was a drunkard, and, finally, it came to him that the
man was a slave to some drug. He would occasionally give Hayward the
twenty-five centavos on which he could exist for several days, and then,
after a long silence on a bench, petulantly demand: “What do you do with
all the money I give you? The day before yesterday I gave you three
hundred dollars. I’m afraid you’re extravagant.” In one of his more
lucid intervals, he suggested the American consul, and Hayward went to
the consulate.

“I don’t want to beg, I want to work,” he said when the consul wheeled
from a desk and impatiently eyed him.

“Oh, I hear that twenty times a day. Get out and don’t come back,”
exclaimed the consul wearily. He “got out” and he did not go back.
Something in the man’s dumpy, coarse, dirty-fingernailed personality
told him it would be useless. Then he tried to steal a ride on a
freight train bound for the City of Mexico, and was discovered and
thrown out at the second station, twelve miles away. It merely meant his
walking back to Vera Cruz in the blistering heat over the endless sand
dunes and past the fever-stricken marshes where the mosquitoes devoured
him. He spent as much as he dared of that night on a bench in the Plaza,
but for fear the policemen might begin to think he was sitting too long
in one place, he, from time to time, aroused himself and walked down to
the docks, or to the two railway stations at opposite ends of the town.
The humiliation of it was worse, somehow, than his hunger and his
fatigue. The next night, however, the need of sleep was overpowering,
and he lay down on the beach at the edge of the town. In spite of the
ants that swarmed up under his clothes and stung him from his neck to
his ankles, he slept the sleep of exhaustion. But to sleep on the beach
at Vera Cruz is against the law, and at three o’clock in the morning he
was arrested and thrown into a vile and crowded room under the tower,
whose clock of late had struck for him so many aimless, hopeless hours.
In the morning the judge dismissed him with the reminder (a negro from
Havana translated the ultimatum) that a second offense would mean thirty
days.

Then followed a horrible week--a last nightmare. He heard from a
trainman that there was work at the machine shops of Casa Blanca, forty
miles away, and, in the incredible heat, he walked there, and when he
found the rumor was untrue, he walked back again. On the way, he lived
on poisonous water and a yellow nut that looked like dates and grew on
scrubby palm trees by the roadside. He did not know how long it had
taken him to make the journey. When he once more reached the inevitable
Plaza, he was dizzy with hunger, and as he thought he was going to die,
he reeled over to where the world was dining under the arcade on the
sidewalk. There were fifteen or twenty tables, and after passing them
all he picked out one where five Americans, three men and two women,
had finished eating and were lolling back in their chairs, waiting for
their plates of half-consumed meat to be removed.

“I’m not a beggar,” he began hurriedly, taking off his hat. “I’m not
asking you for money, but I haven’t had anything to eat to-day. Please
let me have some of what you’ve left before the waiter takes it away.”
They might have given it to him, and then again they might not have. He
never knew. The waiter came back just then and authoritatively slapped
him away with a soiled napkin.

“What pretty hair he had,” one of the women reflected. “It grows back
from his forehead in a kind of proud way. Of course he’s a fake.”

“I didn’t notice his hair, but he had perfect teeth,” said the other.
“This country’s just full of tramps.”

Late that night, when a young man skeptically gave him a Mexican dollar
he wished to get rid of, as he was sailing for New York in the morning,
Hayward suddenly burst into tears and, with his head on the back of the
bench, sobbed for half an hour. He lived on the dollar for five days. In
the meantime, the drug fiend died, and the seeress departed for the City
of Mexico.

Hayward had never read “Les Misérables,” but on the sixth day after the
young man had given him the dollar, he remembered that on one of his
teeth was a gold crown, and, without success, he asked a dentist to pull
and buy it. He had nothing to eat that day, and at night the desire to
lie down and sleep instead of hypocritically walking about as if he were
going somewhere became irresistible. So he went again to the beach and
lay down among the ants, and in the morning a policeman scared away the
buzzards that had already begun to hop about him and crane their
hideously naked necks. The American consul, greatly bored (the heat was
frightful), officially glanced at him and then they dumped him into a
hole with an Indian who had been stabbed in a drunken row the night
before.



TRAVEL


A little old man came into the steamship office where I was buying a
ticket. He had mild, kindly eyes, pink cheeks, a vague, white beard and
a deferential, rather apologetic manner.

“Have you any new literature to-day?” he inquired of the clerk after
some hesitation.

“Sure,” the clerk answered genially, and picked him out a bundle of
those prettily and skilfully illustrated pamphlets describing almost
every known country on the globe. He also gave him plans of ships, price
lists of the various staterooms and dates of sailing.

“He must be something of a traveler,” I suggested when the old man,
after many thanks, left the office.

The clerk smiled.

“The old guy and his wife have been almost everywhere,” he answered;
“but I don’t think that either of them has ever been out of this town,”
he enigmatically added, “and they’re both about a hundred and fifty.”

“Yes?” I said encouragingly.

“He comes in regularly twice a year,” the clerk went on, “and gets all
the ‘literature,’ as he calls it, about the summer and winter tours.
Then he and his wife take the trips by what I call the Easy Chair Route.
They not only know all about the railway trains and ships and
stagecoaches, they study up the places, as they go along, out of books
they get from the public library. I bet they know a darned sight more
about Europe, Arope, Irope and Sirope than most of the people who’ve
been there.”

The clerk’s remarks called up for me a charming picture. The old couple
would decide on Egypt and the Holy Land for their winter cruise, and in
the long, cold, winter evenings, seated at a table near, not a fireplace
(I saw at a glance that their little parlor would not contain a
fireplace) but one of those high, shining and most comfortable stoves
with countless little isinglass windows and a soothing red glow behind
them, they would read aloud, consult maps and pictures and time-tables
and no doubt disagree very gently here and there as to the proper
interpretation of certain passages in the Scriptures. And until the hour
arrived for “locking up,” for refilling the stove, for seeing that the
cat was comfortable for the night and for going to bed, they would
actually be in Egypt or the Holy Land--much more so, as the clerk had
shrewdly appreciated, than many of the sojourners at Shepheard’s Hotel,
or the renters of steam dahabeahs on the Nile.

It undoubtedly is one way of traveling, and by no means a bad way. In
fact I once came across a little paper in the Contributor’s Club of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ declaring it to be the best way. But then I am
convinced that all the contributions to the Contributor’s Club of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ are contributed by very cultivated and cozy,
home-loving old maids. Books of travel and portfolios of well-taken
photographs are the rails upon which the easy chair glides, the unknown
sea upon which it so placidly sails. Everyone has made voyages of this
kind and, while many of them are uneventful, some of them are thrilling.

The most memorable one (not counting books of adventure which in this
connection don’t count at all) I ever took was long ago to the Island of
Barbados. We were in college at the time and one of the requirements of
the advanced English course we were studying was that everybody should
write a story in seven chapters--plot, locality and treatment being left
to our own discretion. The scene of my narrative (it makes me blush when
I recall that little masterpiece of fiction) was in and about Boston,
and one bitterly cold sleeting afternoon I asked a friend of mine what
he was going to write about. We were in his study at the time and, as he
was absorbed at his desk in working out an architectural problem, he
merely muttered, with his nose wrinkled up, “Barbados.”

“What are they?” I inquired.

“It isn’t they, it’s it,” he replied; “it’s an island.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“I really don’t know,” he said.

“But how can you write about it if you don’t know anything about it?” I
pursued.

“Why, doesn’t the mere name convey everything to you?” he demanded.

“It conveys,” I told him, “some sort of vegetable. _Do_ help yourself to
some more of the barbados,” I added.

“To me it means--but let’s go over to the library and get a book about
it. I’ve meant to all along, just to see if my idea of it was right,” he
suggested. So we went to Gore Hall, where the man at the desk found us a
book, and that evening, in front of a grate full of hot, red coal, we
went to the Island of Barbados, drinking beer and eating crackers on the
way, and also during our residence on the exquisite little island where
“the sea assumes strange and unexpected tints; it may be violet, with
streaks of lettuce green or forget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch
of brilliant luster such as shines on a beetle’s back, or may shimmer
into a lake of lapis lazuli.” We stayed on the Island of Barbados until
half-past two in the morning. Just recently I returned there one evening
in a better book, and if anyone wishes this winter to take a cruise to
the West Indies without leaving home, I recommend him to take passage at
once on Sir Frederick Treve’s recently published “The Cradle of the
Deep,” one of the most entrancing and beautifully written books of
travel of my acquaintance.

As for actual traveling, the kind that necessitates physical as well as
mental activity, one great truth about it has at last dawned upon me. No
matter what may be your method of procedure, no matter whether your
means be modest or unlimited (here, I confess, I am drawing on my
imagination), it is always much more comfortable to stay at home. This
may sound like an undue emphasis upon an obvious fact, but judging from
the number of persons one everywhere meets who do not seem to have
grasped the fact, I don’t believe it is. All over the world, travelers
for pleasure continually complain of the hotels, the food, the trains,
boats, servants, prices, manners, customs and weather. Almost the entire
conversation of a group of fellow countrymen I once met on a steamer
consisted of enumerating the things they were going to eat when they
arrived in New York. Just recently a friend of mine, who had made a
short trip in Mexico, referred with bitterness to that rather primitive
country because a bath necessitated going out of his hotel to a bathing
establishment. Nothing he saw in Mexico apparently in any way
compensated him for this and various other minor discomforts. Without
doubt, “be it ever so humble,” there is no place like it, and I have
often wondered, this being the case, just why we usually do take a trip
whenever the opportunity offers itself. What is the psychology of the
desire to travel?

With me, at least, I think it arises from the same impulse that prompts
one to get up and take a walk after one has sat too long in the house.
The desire to travel is a kind of desire to stretch the mental legs.
There is no essential difference of intent between the little journey
“down town” and back, and a journey to Italy or India. During a
pleasant, objectless stroll on Main street my mind is in much the same
state, although perhaps in a lesser degree, that it is in when I,

    With observation and extensive view,
    Survey the world from China to Peru.

Sometimes the idea of one’s entire country becomes even as a long
occupied chair in a room, and it is then that, circumstances being
propitious, people pack up and flit to lands where everything is
different. Having voluntarily sought complete change, it always strikes
me as ungrateful and childish to quarrel with it when they get it. If
almost everything in a foreign land were not different, travel would
begin and end with locomotion, and locomotion is the least of travel.

What the most of it is, I have never been able quite to determine. No
doubt to each person, or rather to every group of persons who can be
classified under the same general head, it is something different. One
old gentlemen I knew went through Italy and Greece all but oblivious to
the scenery, the aspect of the cities, the costume, the various sounds
and the atmospheres that made one country Italian and the other Greek,
but he had a thrilling time. His delight was to read and translate every
inscription he came across on a monument. He could have found them all
in archaeological works at the public library at home, and done the same
thing. The intense pleasure, however, lay in doing it on the ground from
the original stones. I do not for a moment doubt that the thirty-six
young ladies, who recently won a newspaper “popularity contest” and
toured the continent with a steamer trunk full of assorted chewing gum,
enjoyed Italy quite as much as did my old friend. Some people I know
enjoy foreign travel almost solely because of the acquaintances they
pick up. Venice spells Smith, Sienna really means Jones; Chartres,
Amiens and Beauvais are a confused but pleasant memory of the Robinsons,
all of which is a perfectly legitimate manner of finding pleasure in
travel.

Some persons enjoy traveling in solitude; the presence of a companion
disturbs their susceptibility to receiving valuable “impressions.”
Others enjoy it intensely but would be wretched unless they were
accompanied by some one capable of supplying them with the impressions
they long to have but don’t know how. Many regard travel entirely from
an educational angle. They have a tendency to translate everything they
see into terms of dates. It pleases them to learn, for instance, that
Lucca Delia Robbia was born in 1400, and that “while Botticelli was one
of the worst anatomists he was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the
Renaissance,” but they worry a good deal for fear they’ll forget it. In
the meanwhile they rather lose sight of Delia Robbia’s “sweet, ethereal
and visionary grace,” as well as Botticelli’s anatomy and
draughtsmanship; but it’s a comfort to know that they know they’re
there. Still others travel in a pleasantly aimless fashion, quietly
reveling in their lack of obligation to see or to do anything they do
not wish to. One man I know, who belongs to this type, has a genuine
love of art and considerable knowledge of it; but although he has been
in London several times he has never seen either the National Gallery or
the Elgin marbles. When I asked him why not, he said in all sincerity
that when he was in London he had never been in the kind of mood that
made it a pleasure to look at such things, and he hated to make a duty
of what often was so great a pleasure. The pleasure of travel, in a
word, depends entirely upon the point of view. Like all the other
pleasures of life it depends, to employ the trite, true phrase, upon
what we ourselves bring to it.

I may be wrong, but it often seems to me that English people of a
certain kind are the best, the ideal, travelers. We all know, of course,
that the continent of Europe is infested with the most odious English
tourists, who cross the channel for a stay of a week or two and who
spend most of their time in disputing hotel bills, in trying to get
something for nothing and in despising the various countries they visit
because they happen to differ in many respects from the British Isles.
One hears much of “vulgar Americans,” and one often sees them; but in my
tolerably wide experience none of God’s creatures masquerading as human
beings has ever filled me with the same horror that I have in the
presence of this type of coarse, brutal, dense, provincial touring
English person--man or woman. In America we simply have never invented
such an awful type; it is inconceivable to us until we meet it in the
form of certain English people on the Continent.

These, naturally, are not the kind of English to whom I refer: the kind
who I always feel are the ideal travelers. As travelers they are ideal,
because they are (for want of a better term) so “well rounded.” They
bring to their travels in foreign lands so much--a quiet enthusiasm,
cultivated tastes, thoroughness; a mental and physical vitality that
among Americans is very rare. Unlike the American schoolma’am, they
never specialize on dates and art criticism; they usually know the dates
beforehand, and are capable of discriminating between the good and
trashy. They enjoy making agreeable acquaintances, but acquaintances are
not the sole object of their travels. They don’t like to miss anything,
and, although they are never in a hurry, nothing escapes them. While an
American family is taking an exhausted nap or hanging about a hotel
wondering what to do, these English people will be tramping five miles
to see the sunset and get up an appetite for dinner. There is something
admirably complete about them. They enjoy the churches and galleries and
appreciate them, but they are also sincerely interested in the life of
the people and in nature. The incidents of travel they take calmly as
they come, and when they complain it is only because their rights have
been infringed upon. Out of traveling they get, it always strikes me,
everything there is to get.

That they do, I have begun to believe, is simply because of what they
bring to their travels. They bring (to repeat) quiet but unflagging
enthusiasm, considerable cultivation, the habit of thoroughness in
anything they undertake, excellent digestions and equable tempers. All
of which lands us bump up against the inevitable platitude that
invariably stands guard at the other end of almost every train of
thought. Abstractly considered, travel is at best an uncomfortable
activity more often than not: strange beds, strange food, a constant,
hideous packing and unpacking of trunks too small to contain
conveniently one’s few possessions; long, dreary intervals in railway
stations, nightmare scrambles at custom-houses, steamers that bury their
noses in the sea and kick their heels in the air, sleeping cars always
either too hot or too cold. Such is travel in the abstract. Its pleasant
qualities, like the pleasant qualities of almost every other pleasure in
life, must be supplied largely by ourselves. If travel did nothing else
for us, it would be valuable by reason of its ability to drive home this
old truth. In order thoroughly to enjoy travel we must be able to give
considerably more than we get.



FELLOW PASSENGERS


The great German steamship companies have developed, one might almost
say created, a new type of American. This dawned on me last winter while
taking a three months’ cruise to South America and back. The type is
that of the retired business man who is enjoying his retirement. There
was a time, not so long ago in our history, when he scarcely existed,
for the simple reason that he never, or at least rarely, retired.
Idleness spelled boredom. If in a misguided moment mother and the girls
persuaded him to give up business he found himself confronted by an
appalling amount of leisure rather impossible for him to manipulate and
make use of.

The Germans in their wonderful way have changed all that. Now when a
middle-aged man has made enough money to live on comfortably they offer
him something very definite and delightful to do. He can at any season
of the year embark on a “floating hotel” and go to some far-away and
interesting part of the world with little or no bother to himself. Just
this I notice is what in large numbers he has of late years begun to
take advantage of. He and a placid, pleasant wife visit the
Mediterranean ports during the winter, investigate the Scandinavian
countries, including the North Cape, during the summer, encircle the
globe during the greater part of a year, and finally decide to go to
South America. Everything is made so easy for him. He lives on the ship
during the entire voyage except, perhaps, for a day or so here and there
when, for a change, the party stays on shore at a hotel. The necessity
of constantly ordering food or struggling with cabmen, waiters and
shopkeepers in a foreign language he feels himself too old to learn is
agreeably eliminated for him. He comes home with new interests, a
widened horizon, refreshed in mind and body and usually ready to start
out again the next year.

There were many of them on the first South American cruise of last
winter, and to me the type was a novel one. For one usually, in a vague
sort of a way, thinks of middle-aged Americans traveling in strange
countries for the first time as somewhat helpless, often bored, often
irritated, uncertain as to where to go and looking forward with relief
to the date of sailing homeward. Those I met last winter were anything
but that. In a quiet, restful sort of a way they seemed to be thoroughly
enjoying themselves. Their attitude toward it all was one of persons who
had placed themselves in the hands of what literally was their creator.

It was interesting for the first few days to stretch out on a chair in
the sun and, with complete detachment, examine one’s fellow passengers
as they passed by. One always hears that “a ship is such a good place in
which to study human nature.” Of course it is. Every place is if one has
the eyes and ears with which to see and hear it. But I do not believe a
ship is particularly so any more. The day for that has passed. People at
the present time travel too much to desire to become deeply intimate on
short acquaintance. They are too reserved, too experienced. Lifelong
friendships, I am inclined to believe, are not often made any more on
ocean steamers.

There were one hundred and eighty-one persons in the party, and as they
strolled about the deck I discovered myself lazily picking out those I
should like, those I “shouldn’t mind,” those that, through their sheer
lack of personality, I should never even see again, and those I should
run from. In only a few instances did I make mistakes. One was a
bouncing girl with a voice like a symphony of peacocks; she turned out
to be agreeable and clever in spite of it. Another was a German who
looked like an overfed dachshund and sat opposite me at table; another
was an old gentleman who slopped around in carpet slippers (yes, carpet
slippers really do still exist). Another was--but why enumerate?
Finding out who they all were was the next step.

There was the famous physician; the very grand old dame who held herself
much aloof because, before her marriage, she had been one of the Orioles
of Baltimore; the lady who cleared about two hundred thousand dollars a
year from the sales of a patent fly-paper--or was it a patent
flea-powder? I forget--an invention of her late uncle’s; the young man
who was being sent on the trip because he drank (he certainly did drink;
he was drunk for sixteen thousand sea-miles); the “mysterious pair” who
concealed their secret to the end; the woman who had written a book; the
melancholy man whose wife had just eloped in New York with the
chauffeur; and then the numerous nice, quiet, well-mannered persons who,
like happy nations, seemed to have no histories in particular.

By the time we had reached the Island of St. Thomas they had all begun
to find themselves as well as one another. It was evident that,
unconsciously, little groups were forming; that certain people would
ask to be put in the same carriage with certain others; and I think a
native drink called a “rum swizzle,” of which almost everybody, “just to
see what it was like,” partook during the day, did not in any way retard
the growing acquaintanceships. By the time we arrived at Bahia, our
first stopping-place in Brazil, the little groups had more or less
assumed their final form. It was a beautiful example of birds of a
feather doing just what we have always been told they do. The young
girls came together, one could clearly see, chiefly because they all
seemed to be engaged in the manufacture of silk neckties; four or five
middle-aged ladies found the knitting of fluffy white shawls a
convenient and congenial ice-pick; similarity of business interests,
past or present, was of course instrumental among many of the men.
Books, and there was on board an inexhaustible supply of them, were a
tremendous factor in the cementing of friendly relations. By merely
glancing at a book some one seemed to be enjoying you usually could tell
whether or not you could have anything in common. Anybody perusing one
of your favorite volumes offered an excuse for stopping and chatting.
The insatiable players of bridge were, from the first, so many magnets
and poles.

Not among the least important of the passengers were Elizabeth and
Peter, the ship’s cats. Peter, to the sorrow of the officers who adored
him, apparently found friends on the dock at Buenos Aires and
disembarked, but Elizabeth, for family reasons, remained with us. She
distinguished herself in various ways and on various occasions, three of
them being really notable. One night at about two in the morning (always
a somewhat Hibernian method of expression) she entered in the dark the
deck stateroom of an excitable man of fifty. A steward sent to find her
also entered and, in his search, crawled half way under the bed. The
excitable man of fifty hearing, or perhaps feeling, some one under his
bed and fearing thieves, leaped to the floor, dragged the steward out
and heroically struggled with him. As the steward spoke no English and
the man no German, this duel in the dark continued until the
strangulated cries of the former and the appeals for help of the latter
brought pretty much every one on that deck to the scene and made it
possible to throw some light, electric light, on it. In the meanwhile
Elizabeth had strolled away to the cabin of a lady from Argentina, where
she proceeded to have five kittens. Then at Pernambuco fifty-six of the
passengers rushed ashore and returned, each with a large green parrot.
Of course most of them got loose in a few days but were allowed to go
pigeon-toeing all over the deck until it was discovered that Elizabeth
had quietly chewed the heads off three.

In addition to the parrots and hundreds of other tropical birds, the
monkeys, the marmosets and the leopards that the passengers in
afterwards to be regretted moments of enthusiasm acquired, the
super-alimentated German indulged himself to the extent of a boa
constrictor. The first time he went down to feed it, the playful little
creature wound itself about his waist in several coils and was
beginning to constrict in the most successful fashion, when the man’s
shrieks brought four sailors to the rescue. It took the strength of all
of them to untie the knot, so to speak, and had the reptile been able to
find anything around which to twist its tail there would have been for
the rest of the voyage a vacant seat opposite me at table. Oh, yes, we
had some very agreeable fellow passengers.

It was the parrots, I think, that first caused dissension among them. To
get loose was to get mixed, and it was a wise owner who knew his own
bird, although, unfortunately for the ship’s peace, many thought they
did. There were claims and counterclaims.

“My parrot had a tail,” exclaimed one woman with angry, flashing eyes to
another.

“This beastly thing has just bitten my thumb,” declared a second; “my
own bird never bites. They have made a mistake and I shall complain
about it to the company.” Still another aggrieved one, who had views
different from those of the committee chosen to draw up certain
resolutions, let it be known that if they did not end by regarding the
matter from her point of view she would write to the company saying that
the ship was dirty and that the officers had been drinking heavily from
beginning to end, which was not only absolutely false but had no
relation to the matter in question. It was all very absurd but it also
meant that, toward the end of three months on one ship, nerves will be
nerves. There were a good many “coolnesses” toward the last, and in the
smoking room some angry and bitter words, but on the whole, when we, our
parrots and our other “unknown birds of brilliant plumage,” filed down
the gang plank at Hoboken we were a tolerably good-natured crowd.

Will any of the little groups ever meet again? I often wonder. It seems
like something that happened a century ago in a tropical dream.



PARENTS AND CHILDREN


When I was considerably younger than I am now, I wrote a story in which
appeared the following two sentences: “It always seemed to Haydock that
men and women, in becoming parents, somehow or other managed to forfeit
a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist
with children, if it was a provision or a perversion of nature.” I wish
I had sufficient space in which to reproduce some of the many peevish,
sarcastic letters and acrimonious reviews that these two short sentences
called forth. For some reason they seemed to hurt feelings and arouse
ire (I don’t quite know what “ire” means, but it has always seemed to me
to be a most attractive little word; so short, and yet so bristling with
importance) from the Atlantic to the Pacific. People wrote to me in the
most curiously unrestrained fashion. One man declared I had deliberately
insulted my mother and my father. For some time I was considerably
appalled. I began to think that perhaps I had said something juvenile,
thoughtless and silly, but since then a good many years have passed, a
reaction long since set in and I find that now, even if I am not
prepared exactly to stand by my original guns, my position in the matter
is at least that of an agnostic. Parents may not necessarily forfeit any
part of their intelligence, but, on the other hand, so many of them seem
to, that one pauses now and then to speculate on whether, from the
evidence, one could not with a little effort deduce a law of nature.

Not having children of my own, I of course indulge in much imaginative
bringing up, from the earliest years to the time when they “come out”
and become engaged, get married and go to live in Alaska, or Brazil, or
Chicago. Naturally, my children are much better brought up than are
those of people who actually possess them. I admit that in a
spectacular sense they don’t strike me as having made a very much
greater success of their lives, so far, than have their acquaintances
who cannot claim the advantage of having me for a parent. They are not
particularly rich, although the boys seem to be able to make a
respectable and steady living. Only one of the little tribe has as yet
an automobile, and she married it, or rather them, as her husband
happens to belong to the kind of American family that collects new kinds
of motors very much as some persons collect new kinds of picture postal
cards. As she is fond of her husband, I don’t in the least mind
confessing that I am glad he has a lot of money. For, self-reliant and
independent as I hope to be to the last, her affluence gives me the
comfortable feeling that, no matter what happens, I shall never be a
charge on the county or a bother to the good Little Sisters of the Poor.
Of course they are all crazy about me, because they realize that
everything I did was for the best and that I brought them up so
remarkably well.

But seriously, to go back to my original contention, why is it that many
persons who seemed to be endowed with normal intelligence irrevocably
mislay it when they begin to beget offspring? They do. I assert, declare
and insist that they do. A few evenings ago I went to a dinner, and at
about the time the coffee appeared the conversation turned upon this
very topic. One of the men said, with emphasis, that he had certain
ideas about the bringing up of children. He thought they were good
ideas, but his wife almost always opposed them for what, in his opinion,
was the most foolish of reasons. He went on shaking a finger at her half
in earnest, half in jest. “She often lets the children do things of
which I disapprove, because other parents are everywhere letting their
children do these things,” he said. “Now that to me is no reason at all.
I don’t care what other parents are allowing their children to do. I
know what I want my children to do, and not to do.” The wife smiled
sweetly and admiringly, and I knew that, when it came to a crisis, she
would always have her own, possibly misguided, way. She would let her
young daughter engage in the various activities her little set happened
for the moment to be engaged in, and he, to save discussion, would in
the end acquiesce. To me there was here a considerable forfeiture of
intelligence on the part of both. The man sacrificed principle to peace,
the woman allowed herself to be swayed by perhaps idiotic, if not worse,
conventions and fashions for which she secretly did not care. I
immediately began to wonder what, under the circumstances, I should do
myself. This consideration over a good cigar, while all around me the
Ballinger-Pinchot controversy was being threshed out and Dr. Cook was
sadly and with genuine regret disposed of, took me far away from the
dinner table. I began to think of my own bringing up, of the bringing up
of various local families who in the press are usually referred to as
“prominent.” And the result of the revery seemed to be that although
there was no particular scheme of education, no very definite ideas on
the subject, children in the end seemed to grow up and, as the English
say, “muddle through” somehow. But, I found myself inquiring, couldn’t
there be some way less casual, less haphazard, less at the mercy of the
trivial and the contemporaneous? Being a bachelor and knowing nothing
whatever about it, I of course feel that there could. To a great extent,
the parents I know seem to be lacking in standards; they apparently,
from day to day, trust to luck. I am convinced that, if I were blessed
with progeny, I should evolve a more definite manual to go by; that my
children wouldn’t be allowed merely to muddle through as best they
could.

In the first place, I should be extremely cautious about their reading.
Nothing, after all, is so influential as the printed word. The mere fact
that it is printed seems to carry with it a kind of unjustified
authority. Why should little boys and little girls have access to our
daily papers, full from end to end of horrible crimes, tales of
dishonesty in high places and advertisements that cause the mind to reel
at their hypocrisy and rottenness? Why should they be permitted, when
they wish to read, to take from the Public Library the latest best
seller because Sissy Jones has just read it and says it is “great”? I
should never allow a child of mine to read the daily papers, and I
should never allow it to read the thousand and one maudlin children’s
books that are printed every year at Christmas time. There is no reason
whatever why, at an early age, children should not be supplied with good
literature just as they are fed nourishing food. And yet, how
comparatively few parents think of this in time! They buy for their
children trivial, prettily illustrated, altogether unimportant little
volumes because they come across them on a counter and because other
parents are buying the same things. I shouldn’t any more supply a child
of mine with this sort of mental slop than I should feed it adulterated
milk. Why deliberately give children a taste for the second-rate and
third-rate when the first-rate is at hand and they are at an age when
they eagerly seize upon anything offered them?

This is a question for which I can think of no sensible, logical or
respectable answer. Another, to me, absolutely astounding sin of the
modern parent is the fashion in which it lets its little girls and boys
go to the theater, usually to matinées, regardless of what sort of thing
is being performed. The Saturday matinée, apparently, has become an
institution, and the child of fourteen or fifteen who is not permitted
to buy a box of caramels and sit in the parquet considers himself (much
more often herself) a martyr. About six months ago I went to an
afternoon performance of “The Merry Widow,” simply because the whole
world seemed to be talking about it and I had an erroneous idea that I
ought for this reason to hear it. The music I had become sick and tired
of; the book I found, by the end of the first act, to be hopelessly
dull. I had paid two hard-earned dollars for my seat and I stayed to the
end, to the scene at Maxim’s, which, as done in this country, is one of
the most altogether nasty things I have ever sat through in a theater. I
happen to have been at Maxim’s, on various occasions at every hour from
seven in the evening until eight the next morning, but I have never seen
there anything so common, so indecent, so beastly as the sort of debauch
that took place on the stage of our local theaters. Maxim’s, as everyone
knows, is a fashionable brothel, now owned by an English and American
stock company. It pays dividends. But never have I discovered there
anything that remotely resembled the sort of performance I saw in the
Maxim act of our greatly applauded Savage’s “Merry Widow.” I mention it
at all, only because sitting next to me was a girl of fourteen whom I
have known ever since she was born. When the indecency was at its
height, when the orgy had reached a climax, she turned to me and said
with a sweet enthusiasm, “It’s awfully good, isn’t it!” Of course she
had not the remotest idea of what the affair signified, but why should
she have been there in the first place? Why should an American girl of
fourteen be introduced to the representation of a Parisian restaurant
(to put it most conservatively) represented with infinitely more
coarseness than is ever found in the original? She was there because
her friends, her “set,” were there. Mamma, abandoning much of her
original intelligence, let her go because Muriel Smith and Gladys Jones
and Dorothy Robinson always went to the matinée when they wanted to, and
their mothers were all women of considerable social importance.

Positively I am aghast when I pause to think of the almost accidental
fashion in which so many American children are brought up. Their parents
love them and adore them, they do for them everything in the world
except what seems to me to be the right thing. Instead of endeavoring to
lash them to the good old mast, they have such a way of letting them
drift with the contemporary tide! Few things in life are to me at once
so engaging, so pathetic and so repellent as a street-car load of boys
and girls who have just come from the high school; the girls with their
pompadours and their rats, their Latin grammars, their giggling and
their ogling; the boys, nice boys, but with such grotesque trousers,
flashy shoes and absurd hats. Why doesn’t some one in authority give
them less objectionable ideas on the subject of dress, of conduct, of,
in short, life? They are really the most dreadful, trashy, tiresome
little creatures. It is a constant marvel to me that so many of them, in
a few years, without parental or outside aid, abandon their revolting
ways and become perfectly good men and women. I admit with gladness that
we do seem somehow to muddle through.

Wouldn’t it, however, be better if children were brought up as my
suppositious infants are brought up? Or would it in the long run make
any particular difference? In the first place, the mother of my children
doesn’t spend entire days at country clubs or the houses of friends
playing bridge whist. She stays at home a good deal and plays with the
children instead, because she likes to and because they like to have
her. Few sights are more depressing, give one a more nauseating
sensation, cause one to form a lower estimate of humanity, than a
roomful of overdressed American mothers hectically playing bridge; and
it is a sight one may see almost every day in the year from one end of
the country to the other.

In the second place, why should children be allowed to stuff their
little insides with candy merely because they seem to like it? A
southern cousin of mine used to pick out the best pieces in a box of
candy and eat them himself, remarking, “We shall leave the hair-oil and
lip-salve varieties for the children, as all children are natural
scavengers.” This may be true, but I should protest vehemently against
their being allowed to scavenge. That children should be permitted to
ruin their digestions, that they should ever be given any form of food
that isn’t good for them, strikes me as a parental crime. Parents have
the entire matter in their hands; they are, or ought to be, the supreme
court, the law. Why not decide for the best instead of for the slipshod
half way, or the worst?

Thirdly, I endeavor to give the little creatures for whom I am
imaginatively responsible, in addition to robust health, which, after
all, one is often inclined to consider the main, the only thing,
certain intellectual resources that, even should their health fail later
on, they can fall back upon with much enjoyment; resources that later on
it is difficult to acquire for oneself. I like them to have an
acquaintance with the best books and the greatest pictures, to know just
why they are good and great even if they have not actually seen them. I
also endeavor to give them a practical knowledge of at least two
languages not their own. Every child in our high schools makes a futile
stab at French or German. How few make of them a precious possession! As
one grows older there is almost no pleasure greater than the ability to
read with ease a book in a foreign language; to realize that, while the
medium is different, the humanity underlying it is the same. An
understanding of foreign languages, more than anything else, helps on
the universal brotherhood of man.

Fourthly, I never allow my children to go to the theater because Sissy
Jones is allowed to go. Now and then something locally happens that
strikes me as amusing, or instructive or, happily, both. We then all go
and have a grand time. But why should they be allowed to form the habit
of going to everything that comes along? At the dinner to which I have
referred, an Irish woman told me she had never been inside of a theater
until after her marriage, and she is one of the most charming, highly
educated, cultivated women of my acquaintance.

But no doubt my jewels will after all, in spite of me, be the same
source of mixed pleasure and responsibility that most jewelry is.



WHAT IS EDUCATION?


Books, the titles of which are interrogatory, always have a fascination
for me. “What is Ibsenism?” “Can You Forgive Her?” “What Shall We Do
With Our Girls?” for instance. Of course, they are invariably
unsatisfactory and, sometimes, exasperating. They never really answer
the questions they propound, and they leave one somewhat more muddled
than one was before. Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” is a most bigoted and
tedious performance. In it one of the greatest artists of modern times
elaborately tells one nothing whatever about art, and leaves one with
the impression that his claim on immortality is something of which he
has become very much ashamed. But, crafty old person though I be, I
succumb to them all, and read them because I can’t resist a title in the
form of a question.

At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What
Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days
someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with
the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a
man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the
matter--to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of
education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to
mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a
dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county
morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the
reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was
evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part
of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he
was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had
discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied “education,”
but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not
explain.

There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of
the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man
of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps,
somewhat more--well, more educated than the other? At times both these
phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then
again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but
important differences that cause first the one and then the other to
seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education.
Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off
and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being
educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the
American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something
entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who
flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be
indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she?
(Heaven forbid that _I_ should suggest anything; I merely crave
information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has
always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the
fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons”
of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to
remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at
one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied
much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his
point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of
Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear
to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political
and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means
equal to his Latin verse,” Macaulay complains in the _Edinburgh Review_
in 1843. And while Macaulay admits that “Great praise is due to the
notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third
books of the Metamorphoses,” and confess them to be “rich in apposite
references to Virgil, Stetius and Claudian,” he cannot understand
anyone’s failing to allude to Euripides and Theocritus, waxes indignant
over the fact that Addison quoted more from Ausonius and Manilius than
from Cicero, and feels positively hurt at his having cited “the languid
hexameters of Silius Italicus,” rather than the “authentic narrative of
Polybius.” In Rome and Florence--Macaulay continues, more in sorrow than
in anger--Addison saw all the best ancient works of art, “without
recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic
dramatists.”

Of course all this is very sad and leaves us quite cross with Addison
for having deluded us into believing him to be a person of considerable
erudition. How _could_ anybody in the presence of a statue be so
absent-minded as not to recall a single verse of Pindar or Callimachus?
And how hopelessly superficial must be the mind that actually prefers
the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus to the authentic narrative of
Polybius! Yet, on the other hand, if we casually referred to Polybius
while conversing with most of our educated and even so-called cultivated
acquaintances, how many of them, I wonder, would know whether we were
talking about a Greek historian or a patent medicine. Macaulay would
have considered them hopeless; we (and they) are in the habit (perhaps
it is a very bad habit--I don’t know) of regarding them as educated.

Another question that my suppositious author must devote a chapter to,
is the difference between just an education and a “liberal” education.
We used to hear much more about a “liberal” education than we do now,
although Prexy Eliot has of late endeavored to restore the phrase as
well as the thing itself. When does an education leave off being
penurious, so to speak, and become liberal? According to Mr. Eliot,
Milton’s “Areopagitica” helps a lot. I once read Milton’s
“Areopagitica” (“but not for love”) with great care, and when I had
finished it I had to procure at much trouble and expense another book
(written some hundreds of years later) that told me what it was all
about. The next day I passed an examination in the subject--and to-day I
couldn’t, if my life were at stake, recall the nature or the purpose of
the work in question or even explain the meaning of the title. It is
possible, of course, that this is more my fault than Milton’s, but
whoever is to blame, I can truthfully say that never before or since
have I read anything so completely uninteresting or that contributed so
little to the liberality of my education. In Mr. Eliot’s opinion,
however, and no one more firmly believes in the soundness of Mr. Eliot’s
opinions than I do, this ghastly, unintelligible, jaw-breaking relic of
the seventeenth century is, if not absolutely essential to a liberal
education, at least highly conducive to one. What on earth does it all
signify?

Some persons pin their entire faith to a correct use of the pronouns _I_
and _me_. They cheerfully commit every other form of linguistic
violence, but as long as they can preserve sufficient presence of mind
boldly to say once in so often something like, “He left James and me
behind,” instead of resorting to the cowardly “James and myself,” or the
elegantly ungrammatical “James and I,” they feel that their educational
integrity has been preserved. Others believe that education and true
refinement begin and end with always saying, “You would better,” instead
of “You had better,” while Mr. Eliot, in musing on the career of Mr.
Roosevelt, no doubt remarks to himself, “An estimable, even an
interesting man, but is he, after all, conversant with the
‘Areopagitica’?” (I hate to admit it, but I think it highly probable
that he is.) And Macaulay, in the book review from which I have quoted,
disposes once and for all of a certain scholar named Blackmore--rips
open his intellectual back, in fact, by stating with dignified disgust:
“Of Blackmore’s attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient
to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an
apothegm.” Isn’t it all wonderful? And doesn’t it make you wish that
someone would write a work called, “What Is Education?” so you could
find out whether you were educated or not?

Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not--and
this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid”
vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard)
but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by
inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long
ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a
word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out
from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period
he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in
which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the
exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant,
I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad
luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a
prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific
meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a
simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to
pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending,
later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a
familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly
absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his
fortunes--he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to
guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what,
after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel
sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,”
employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what
it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note.

Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be
absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer for the
pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of
those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the
current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t
let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,”
as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a
noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It
sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the
tittle on--No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles
such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary
tittle--a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a
devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as
usual, I didn’t know what they were?

By this time I was beginning to be verbally groggy. What, I wondered,
was--or, rather, wasn’t--“a scintilla of evidence”? (For, oddly enough,
one is never informed that there is a scintilla of evidence, but merely
that there isn’t.) And just how did it happen, in the first place, that
a lack of evidence should have been called a “scintilla,” whereas a
certain kind of expensive gray fur was called a “chinchilla.” Scintilla
chinchilla, scintilla chinchilla--the jury was unable to find a
chinchilla of evidence, although Mrs. Vasterbolt was present at the
trial in a handsome coat of the costliest scintilla. Why not? But as
madness seemed to be lurking in that direction, I hastened feverishly on
to “adamant.” Oh, yes, I know it’s something very hard and unyielding
and, in the kind of novels that no one reads any more, someone is, at a
critical moment, always “as” it--never “like” it. But what is it? It
might be some sort of a mythological cliff against which people were
supposed ineffectually to have hurled themselves; it might be a kind of
metal, or a particularly durable precious stone, or a satisfactory
species of paving material. It might be any old thing; I don’t know.
What in the dickens does it mean to “dree your own weird”? For, as I
almost tore off a page in my anxiety to turn it, my eyes caught sight
of: “‘Everyone must dree his own weird,’ she answered, sententiously.”
Early in life it had dawned on me that to be told you must “dree your
own weird” was merely a more obscure and delicate fashion of telling you
that you must “skin your own skunk”; and yet I very much doubt if the
verb “to dree” means to skin, or if “weird,” used as a noun, has much
connection with the fragrant little denizen of our forests whom we all,
I trust, are accustomed to refer to as the _mephitis Americana_.

On and on I toiled for another hour, at the end of which time I had a
formidable list of ordinary words belonging to my own language, as to
whose real meaning I was completely in the dark. To-day I intended to
look them all up and write a charming little paper on them, primarily
designed, of course, to make dear reader gasp at the scope and
thoroughness of my education. But the day is indescribably hot, and, as
I have been away, my dictionary, unfortunately, is gritty with dust. To
get up and slap at the corpulent thing with a damp towel would be most
repulsive. I shan’t do it. Instead I shall recall that the most
intellectual nation in the world has a saying to the effect that, “_On
peut être fort instruit sons avoir d’éducation._”



JUST A LETTER


The other day I received a letter from an old friend of mine with whom I
have talked for many years now, only in long letters at long intervals.
He is a man of about thirty-seven, but he still writes long letters.
This one, like all the others, is pleasant in spots, and I have
therefore submitted it to a sort of epistolary, dry-cleaning process and
extracted some of the spots. Here they are:--

As you see, I am at Newport. I have been visiting various persons here
for almost a month now, and as the glory will have soon departed, or
rather, as _I_ shall have soon departed, I thought I should give you a
vicarious whiff of high life while I can.

It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at
a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather, and with
the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind
anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing
a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of
his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. They
probably are. Indeed, after a dinner, a late dance, and the remaining
few hours of last night spent in playing bridge, my fearless little
mirror tells me this morning that I look quite all of twenty-six. One
hears much about the follies of the rich, but I am beginning to feel
that they are as nothing compared to the follies of the poor. For the
paltry sum I last night lost to a man worth eighteen or twenty millions
is almost the exact sum I meant to distribute among the servants of my
hostess when I gracefully make room for somebody else on the day after
tomorrow. Before I began to write to you, I made no end of hectic little
calculations on the back of an envelope, but as yet they don’t seem to
be leading me anywhere except into the hands of a receiver. However--

I’ve had an exceedingly good time here. Theoretically, a person who
leads the kind of life I do ought to have spent his vacation otherwise.
I know that if I had consulted the oracles who answer “Troubled
Subscriber,” they, one and all, would have answered, “Get out into the
open, or the cool, quiet depths of the forest. Get into touch with
Mother Nature and commune with her. Her bosom is large (and covered with
ants). She loves her tired children.” But I did nothing of the sort.
Instead of getting into the forest, I got into the cool, quiet depths of
a sea-going automobile, with a handful of orchids swaying in a
glass-and-silver vase in front of me, and came to Newport. What I needed
just then was not taking long tramps and cooking my own indigestible
meals in a frying pan, reposing on a lumpy heap of pine needles and
getting drowned every other night at half-past eleven, anointing
mosquito bites and falling over logs. Not a bit of it. I yearned instead
for an exquisite bedroom and salon overhanging a sapphire and diamond
sea, a young man--whose very presence created a deeper silence--to wake
me in the morning, to draw a bath, to lay out my clothes, to bring me my
breakfast on china that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. I
wanted to arise late and mingle with perfectly dressed, good-looking,
agreeable people, who seemed to be enjoying themselves and who, if they
ever did have annoying, serious or sad moments, never let one know about
it. I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger,
gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and
drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of
young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be
charming to me because they knew that _I_ knew it would be out of the
question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly
youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high
diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which
to run through nervous, jeweled fingers.

Well, all this I have done and seen for a month now, and, as I said, I
have greatly enjoyed myself. I suppose you know, of course, that
Newport, Rhode Island, does not, in the least, resemble the Newport that
the American people read about in newspapers--that the Newport of the
newspapers does not, in fact, exist. To multitudes of our fellow
countrymen this would be not only unwelcome, but incredible news. Yet it
is a curious truth. The great American people (dear, old, great,
American people!) like to think of this extraordinarily healthful and
beautiful spot as being, at the worst, a kind of dazzling den of vice,
and, at the best, a resort where semi-idiotic families possessing great
wealth may, with impunity, concoct grotesque and vulgar--and ever more
vulgar--diversions for all the rest of our completely moral,
intellectual, high-minded and desirable population to sneer at. Around
the mythical Newport of editors and reporters has grown a tradition and
a stock of phrases that the country at large eagerly swallows whole. I
don’t suppose there is a paragrapher in any state of the Union who
could possibly grind out four lines about Newport without employing the
words “monkey dinner,” although there has never been such a thing as a
monkey dinner at Newport (whatever a monkey dinner may be), and nobody
who lives and entertains here in summer has the slightest idea of what
the thing means. Originally, no doubt, the fiction of a reportorial
mind, it has become, through repetition and the course of time, as much
of an established fact to the nation as the Washington monument or the
Civil War.

The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is
merely a euphonious term for a debauch--but, of course, you know as well
as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity
everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange
state of mind known as “fashion.” Here there is sometimes--often,
perhaps,--rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and
American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. In
Europe I have dined at great embassies in the company of famous and
important personages, with far less fuss, feathers and war paint than I
have been accustomed to during the past month, when I would dine, for
instance, with a man whose father had amassed millions from ready-made
clothing, and whose party consisted of a few of his equally unimportant
acquaintances. The whole thing (given the kind of thing) is, without
question, very perfectly and beautifully done; but equally without
question it is, most of the time, very much overdone. It has so often
occurred to me as I made myself agreeable to the skinny, be-powdered
nakedness of the lady next to me (maybe you don’t know it, but I have a
reputation for an ability to amuse any woman who has passed the age of
sixty-five, and I, therefore, always take in someone who looks like the
galvanized remains of Rameses II), that there was no real, no
justifiable reason for so much formality and splendor. There really
isn’t, you know. It is not at all as it is in England, for example,
where political ambitions must be furthered and the prestige of great
and ancient names maintained. Here there are widely known names (that of
my last night’s hostess may be seen over the entrance of a large and bad
hotel), but they are neither great nor what one is accustomed to
consider ancient; and as for politics, when politics become necessary to
these people, they merely, and with a light heart, hire a United States
senator to do whatever dirty work the situation demands. Splendor here
is indulged in purely for its own sake. There is absolutely nothing
behind it except unlimited means.

But, even so, neither the “entertainments” nor the persons who give
them, are at all like the nation’s fixed idea of them. The former, if
you like, are unnecessary and super-elaborate, but they are always
beautiful in their way, and decorous; the latter, more often than not,
are extremely interesting and often charming. Why shouldn’t they be? For
daily, since I have been here, it has come over me with a sense of
having discovered the fact that “human nature is pretty much the same
everywhere.” There are intelligent, clever, sympathetic, altogether
delightful men and women here, and also men and women who are, by
nature, dull, narrow, tiresome or common, just as there are in every
habitable region of the globe. But stupidity for stupidity, commonness
for commonness, bore for bore, I confess that the stupid, common bore of
these regions is much less wearisome than he is in regions less
splendid. He (or she) has in his favor all sorts of things that, while
they do not make him interesting or worth one’s time, at least furnish
him with a variety of avenues of approach--if you know what I mean.
Essentially limited though he be, as far as his intellect and sympathies
are concerned, mere sordid wealth had usually forced upon him certain
contacts and habits and experiences that you can understand and can talk
about. There is about him, somewhere, a neutral ground on which for the
time being you can get together in a way you simply can’t with the same
sort of nonentity who has not been subjected to the same sort of
influences. Stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore
for bore, I, after all, prefer that of Newport to that of Saugdunk,
Maine, or Pekin, Kansas. In the long run, of course, they are both
exactly the same, and both very awful. The difference between them is
the difference between taking a dose of castor oil enveloped in an
expensive capsule and taking it straight.

I like many of the people I have met here more than I can tell you, but
late at night, sometimes, alone in my always monotonously perfect
bedroom, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even
a--valet, I often giggle at the abysmal difference between us. And in
spite of all their hospitality and millions, the laugh, I must
colloquially confess, is on them. For although I am perfectly capable of
meeting them on _their_ ground, they could not possibly meet me on mine.
From earliest childhood our influences and training have been as far
apart as the poles, but I consider mine by far the more important and
valuable; for, when I feel like it, I can go into society, while they
have no idea at all of the relief and delight of getting out of it.
They know their own side of life, but I am perfectly conversant with
theirs and several others as well. When I am with them I can do all of
their stunts just as well as they do them themselves, but I know,
somewhere in the back of my head, that they couldn’t do any of mine. I
don’t despise them or look down on them for this, but I do, every now
and then, feel awfully sorry for them--regret for them the things they
have missed and are missing. “Just what does he mean by that?” I think I
can see you wonder.

Well, I mean all sorts of things, and for the most part they are, no
doubt, absurd and incommunicable. I mean, for instance, that I know all
about their fussy, tedious, proper, little childhoods, and that they do
not know, and never will know, anything about mine. In my opinion, their
childhood was a decorous tragedy; in their opinion, if they learned
about it, mine would be a sensational scandal. In New York it always
gives me a queer, asphyxiated feeling when I see pretty, expensively
dressed little boys walking for exercise on upper Fifth avenue in charge
of a maid or a footman, or being transported in an automobile or a
victoria for an hour’s “romp” in the park. And here at Newport I have
overheard little girls discussing with acuteness and authority the
probable length of time it would take the lady who has rented the palace
next door to arrive at the goal of her social ambitions.

My own childhood was so wonderfully casual and different! We lived on
the outskirts of a small northwestern city--not in the country exactly,
and not exactly in the slums. In those days the place had no slums, but
it had outlying, semi-rural tracts where poor people built shanties and
“squatted.” My parents neither built a shanty nor squatted, but they
built a house that from time to time grew and rambled, and they lived
there. They were able to live where they pleased, because in the
community they were persons of importance. I, however, was not, and as
children, especially boys, always play with the most available other
children, unless they are told not to (and even then sometimes), and as
I was never told not to, my only boy companions and intimate friends,
until I was fourteen, were the boys of our neighborhood. At that time
they were known to the élite as “the Elm street gang.” The ungraded road
on which our house was situated had been named, with the usual subtlety
of municipal authorities, “Elm Street,” because all of its trees were
either scrub oak or maple. They were “the Elm street gang” in those
days; to-day they would merely be known as “muckers.” It was with them
that all my early years were spent, both in school and out. For at that
time, if I remember rightly, the parochial schools (all my friends were
Irish Roman Catholics) did not catch their pupils as young as they do
now, and we all went to a yellow brick schoolhouse named after a
Democratic president.

To you it may not seem to be a matter of importance that until I was
fourteen my only playmates and dearest friends were Irish muckers. To me
it is of a significance that I could scarcely explain. For at an
impressionable age I not only lived my own life--the life I was born
to--in my own house and family, but quite as naturally and sincerely I
lived the life of an Irish mucker. (This, to me, sounds like an
unappreciative, a clumsy, almost a brutal way of stating it, but if I
expressed it otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand.) I knew their
families and loved them. I used to share not only their meals when I
felt like it (they always tasted much better than our own), but their
sorrows and their joys. Elm street and vicinity in those days was a
little segment lifted in its entirety from the bogs of Ireland and set
down in the Northwest, and, as I lived there, I very early in life
became intimate with poverty, drunkenness and death. Before I was twelve
I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his
family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay
for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm
street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place only in Irish
fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons
I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years
I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces,
and white, crossed, emaciated hands. They used to “keen,” just as they
do, no doubt, in some parts of Ireland to-day, and it was Mrs. Smith who
always started it. To you “Mrs. Smith” may sound somewhat vague, but
there was only one Mrs. Smith at that time. She was a supernaturally old
woman, who always wore a kind of semi-sunbonnet of frilled white linen
and devoted most of her time to a flock of geese. Through her the torch,
so to speak, had been handed down. After her death there was no more
keening.

But, of course, it wasn’t all wakes. On Sunday morning I used to go up
to the Hogans where Mame was preparing dinner while the rest of the
family were at mass. At that time I looked upon Mame as grown up, even
old; but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Hogans had a
wonderful vegetable garden, and while the family was at church, Mame
and I would pull up carrots and beets, pick peas and beans, gather ears
of corn, snip off sprigs of parsley, prepare them all, and then dump
them into a rotund iron pot on the stove with a chunk of meat. After
that we would sit down outside of the shanty and talk. I forget now what
we talked about, but it must have been absorbing to me, because I was
always still there when Mrs. Hogan creaked up the hill in her Sunday
black, and I usually stayed for the soup. Never in this world will soup
again taste like that.

I knew these people intimately, and in a queer sort of way felt that I
was one of them. The opulent and well-dressed boys of the place always
avoided Elm street. They were desperately afraid of the locality, and
with reason. For there was a perpetual rumor abroad that the elm street
gang hated the “Yanks,”--as the nicely dressed, male offspring of the
fashionable districts were called by us. As I look back on it all I
think we did hate them--I, almost as heartily as the rest. Then arrived
the inevitable time when I acquired a bicycle, and the “Yanks” (I can’t
imagine why) invited me to become a member of their bicycle club. I
accepted, and from that time on I was “in society.” But I shall never
forget the first meeting of the bicycle club in front of our house when
my old friends gathered to see the start, and I felt like a renegade, a
sneak and a traitor. Even now I can remember some of the scathing and
picturesquely blasphemous comments made on that occasion by the gang.

My old friends have never forgotten me and I have never forgotten them.
Some of them are far from being desirable citizens, and spend much of
their time in the workhouse. Others of them have become part of the
valuable thing we call “the backbone of the nation.” In this they all do
not differ very widely from some of my acquaintances more recently
acquired, except that whereas the former _are_ in the workhouse, the
latter merely ought to be.

But I don’t see why I should be bombarding you with these reminiscences.
Perhaps, after all, you won’t see what they always mean to me, and
particularly here, in this wondrously unreal environment, where the
“other half” is something one merely subscribes to, or occasionally
reads about in a magazine. But, you see, I _know_ the other half; at one
period of my life I actually _was_ the other half. And when I confess to
my skinny old dinner companion that I don’t like truffles and loathe
champagne, I have the most irrelevant visions. They make a snob of me,
these visions; not a snob in the general acceptation of the term, but a
snob, none the less. For I continually feel that I know more about life
than these people know, or ever will know. It is a source of
satisfaction that I can see all around them while they are able to see
only the particular front I, for the moment, wish to display. If I could
choose between millions and my memories of Elm street, I think I should
cling to Elm street.

       *       *       *       *       *

That, practically, was the letter. It was pleasant in spots. I have
tried, as I said, to extract some of the spots.



IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP


Some time ago I went down town to buy a coffin. No, I didn’t say that to
be startling; it is merely a bald, literal statement of fact. Now and
then one goes down town to buy a book, or a pair of gloves, or some
postage stamps. On this occasion I went to buy a coffin.

The conventional idea of grief is that it is an exclusive emotion; that
it leaves no room in the mind, for the time being, for any other. Like
most of our beliefs, and most of them are erroneous, we have derived
this one from books and newspapers. “Mrs. So-and-so bore up bravely to
the end, but is now under the care of a physician, and is completely
prostrated by grief,” one almost always reads in a newspaper account of
the last hours of that altogether estimable citizen, her husband. And
she sincerely believes this--believes it even while she stands in front
of the glass, telling the young woman from the dry-goods shop that the
veil hasn’t been pinned on straight and that the skirt is at least three
inches too long in the back. There is no hypocrisy here; she does feel
acutely and deeply bereaved. But she is by no means completely
prostrated, and there is plenty of place in her intelligence for a
variety of sensations that have little or nothing to do with her sorrow.
In fact, physicians tell me that persons in ordinary “good health” are
very rarely prostrated by grief; that when they are, complete
prostration, on the part of gentlemen, is generally traceable to too
many drinks of whisky, and on the part of ladies, to the morphine pill
of the family doctor.

Some persons are so constituted that even in the case of their own
trouble they can appreciate this; other persons can’t. I happen to be
one of the kind who can, so when I went into the undertaker’s shop, it
was, after the first rather dreadful moment, easy and natural for me to
regard the place and what I saw and heard there impersonally and with
interest.

This was the less difficult, perhaps, from the fact that for several
minutes I was alone, there was no one to attend to me and I had time to
sit down and look about me--to collect myself and begin to wonder why
the person whose establishment it was, was called an “undertaker,” in
the first place. It is really a comic, a grotesque word, whether it
means that the man to whom it applies merely “undertakes” in a general
sense, or more specifically, undertakes to take one under. I decided to
look this matter up in a dictionary when I went home, but I neglected
to, of course, and it is still one of those philological mysteries
through which we write and speak and have our being. I had time also to
discover just why these places, quite aside from their associations, are
in themselves always so hideous, so offensive, so utterly repellent. It
is simply because they express in terms of furniture the characteristics
and point of view of the always very unpleasant persons who conduct
them. A being from another planet ought to be able to reconstruct an
American undertaker merely by examining the furniture of the front room
in which he transacts his business.

The locale of other trades and professions usually expresses some one
thing, and nothing else. The offices of lawyers, stockbrokers and
architects, for instance, suggest only the law, finance and
construction. There is about them an intelligible directness, an
admirable singleness of purpose. You know just where you are, and they
admit of no emotional intricacies between you and the men you consult
there. An undertaker’s office, on the other hand, is a piece of
elaborate hypocrisy. It deprecatingly shrinks from admitting that it is
one thing or the other. Over one of the most rapacious trades in all
this sad world it seeks to draw a veil of domesticity and religion. One
is repelled by the place because it is so deliberately false.

In it there is always the apparatus of business--telephones and a
roll-top desk full of billheads and ledgers and writing materials. That
corner of the room is practical to a degree. But there are always, as
well, several rocking-chairs with “tidies,” half a dozen dreary palms
and ferns, a few pictures of a semi-devotional nature in somber frames,
and, if it can possibly be managed, an imitation stained-glass window.
The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures,
the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of
mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are
not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but
lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it
is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper,
of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all
very insulting.

So, also, was the manner of the abhorrent young man who presently
appeared through a curtained doorway in the rear of the particular
establishment I happened to be visiting. In the room beyond he had been
whistling, as he approached, a popular two-step, but he instantly ceased
when he saw me and unconsciously drawing his face into a wan, smitten
smile, came forward noiselessly, almost on tiptoe. He would have shaken
hands with a slight, prolonged pressure full of regret and comprehension
if I had let him, but I saw it coming and putting my hand in my pocket
allowed his to drop back with a sad gesture that sought to say:
“Yes--yes, I understand.”

“I should like to look at coffins,” I remarked, and then coldly eyed his
discomfiture. For it was clearly not the sort of beginning he had
expected. I had been prosaic and unmoved, and the fact left him for a
moment with his trained sympathy, his professional manner, on his hands
so to speak. He didn’t exactly know what to do with it, and he couldn’t
quite bring himself, all at once, to risk anything else. In the meantime
I merely looked at him.

“Mr. Murksom” (Mr. Murksom was the proprietor; they always have names
like that) “has stepped out for a few minutes, but he’s coming right
back,” the young man at last explained in tones that tried to be
commonplace like my own. But I could see how difficult it was for him to
_be_ commonplace under the circumstances. Separated from its
traditional and odious technique, the pursuit of his vocation plainly
seemed to him neither legitimate nor altogether decent. “Mr. Murksom is
very helpful,” he added in a refined whisper, delicately averting his
eyes. He had relapsed again into the “manner”; he just couldn’t help it.
It was as if he had said: “Even if for some perverse reason _you_ refuse
to act your part, it will never be said of me that I have failed in
mine.”

“Won’t you--rest,” he then suggested, indicating one of the
rocking-chairs; and I realized, with an all but uncontrollable desire to
laugh aloud, that the slight hesitation followed by the mortuary word
“rest,” was his tribute to my presumable and complete prostration. I
took possession of the rocking-chair, but he sat down on an angular
piece of “mission” work, with a straight back, and then brought the tips
of his fingers together in a fashion that positively murmured, but
without the crudity of words: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh
away.”

“Will you have a cigarette?” I brutally inquired, for I was about to
smoke one myself. And this, I saw with relief, for the time being,
definitely broke the spell. With a cigarette in his mouth, or between
his fingers, it was impossible, even for him, to produce any of his
effects. He gave up trying to, and we talked. Among other things, I
asked him, while I waited for the return of Mr. Murksom, how he had come
to choose his occupation. All my life I had wanted to ask an undertaker
that, but I never before had been given so good an opening. His reply
was interesting, as, indeed, I knew it would be, or I shouldn’t have
asked the question.

“I didn’t exactly choose it,” he replied. “I don’t think anybody ever
does. It isn’t the kind of a job a person really chooses. I just drifted
into it, little by little. That’s what they all do, I think. I had a
friend who used to drive the wagon, and sometimes when he had to go very
far, I’d go along with him to keep him company and hold the horses while
he was inside. You get to talking, sometimes, and when you talk about
things you kind of get used to them. After awhile they seem natural.
Sometimes, when my friend had things to do here at the office, I used to
help him; you might just as well, as to sit around doing nothing. And
then someone offers you a job, and as you know a good deal about it by
that time, and don’t mind, you take it. You kind of get into it by
degrees.”

Just here Mr. Murksom appeared, and I saw at a glance that beneath _his_
spurious melancholy one might never penetrate. He had been at it for too
many years. The professional manner, thick and unctuous, enveloped him.
He couldn’t have abandoned it had he wanted to. It clung to him, I was
sure, at the lightest moments of his life. Of course, it was impossible
to imagine his life as having any light moments, but assuming that such
a thing could be, I felt that gayety with him would vaguely approximate
only the gayety of a flag at half-mast. He would have approached the
back platform of a street car in precisely the same soundless,
sympathetic, discreetly afflicted way in which he approached a sobbing
widow. It was the way, moreover, in which he at once approached me. I
had craftily evaded the hand of his assistant, but there was no escaping
the condoling pressure of Mr. Murksom. It had sought my own and gently,
lugubriously squeezed it before I had been able to take defensive
measures, and it did not, although I tried to drop it, immediately
relax. In fact, it held on, and, with a kind of ghoulish authority, led
me across the room and through the curtained doorway in the rear. The
creature had divined everything; he knew exactly why I had come long
before I had arrived to tell him. As I was drawn into the inner room I
recalled the phrase “hand in glove,” and it occurred to me that Mr.
Murksom was quite unavoidably the glove upon the hand of God. I heard
him sigh most convincingly on two notes, and although he didn’t say
anything continuous or even very coherent, I seemed to catch the words
“very sad,” and “always a shock, even when expected.”

Once beyond the curtained doorway, I disengaged myself and again
declared that I wished to look at coffins; but the manner in which Mr.
Murksom, from then on, combined the shrewd salesman with the spiritual
consoler is something my feeble pen altogether balks at recording. As
far as I could see, there were no coffins in the room in which I had
expected to find an embarrassment of choice, but, resting a protecting
palm upon my shoulder as if to shield me from a sudden shock, Mr.
Murksom pressed a button in the room’s white paneling, and lo! a natty
three hundred and fifty-dollar receptacle turned a sort of somersault
and landed, so to speak, at our feet. It was exactly like opening, or
letting down, the upper berth in a sleeping car, except that these
berths were on end instead of on their sides. Before I had made up my
mind, we had pressed buttons and lowered upper berths all around three
sides of the room.

“Now, just what is the difference between this one, which costs two
hundred, and that one, which is only ninety-eight?” I inquired, for to
me they both looked very much alike.

“This one,” Mr. Murksom replied, and I could see he thought me a
haggling, heartless person, “is something more--more permanent. That one
won’t--well, that one is, as one might say, less able to withstand
the--the inevitable conditions. Personally,” he, to my surprise,
hastened to add, “I don’t wish for anything _too_ permanent. ‘Dust to
dust,’ you know,” he murmured, as he pressed another button. This, I
confess, surprised me very much, for it seemed to me that anyone who,
for years and years, had buried several persons a day would necessarily
fall into the habit of considering himself immortal. For a moment I
thought of drawing him out on the subject; it occurred to me that a man
whose whole life consisted of death ought to have made some illuminating
reflections. Indeed, after I finally accomplished what I had come for, I
did begin to ask a question, but was interrupted in the middle of it.
For the young man suddenly appeared in the curtained doorway with
something wrapped in brown paper and tied with a pink string. He was not
exactly excited, he never could have been that, but he was, at least,
natural. After our little conversation, I think he had concluded that
there wasn’t much point in keeping it up any longer with me. This, at
any rate, is the only way in which I could account for his ignoring my
presence to the extent of making, in a moment, a most extraordinary and
startling announcement. He held the brown paper parcel toward Mr.
Murksom, who had turned inquiringly toward him, and then exclaimed, with
a pleased smile:

“They’ve found those legs.”

“Ah,” sighed Mr. Murksom, “and where were they?”

“In the wagon all the time. The horses just walked away from the house
and a policeman stopped them as they were trying to get into a vacant
lot to eat grass. Well,” he ended, in a gratified tone, “I’m glad they
found those legs.”

At this, I somewhat hurriedly said good afternoon, and withdrew. They
were very little legs. I read about them in the paper the next day.



WRITERS


I can never decide which is the more annoying to a writer: to have
people elaborately ignore the fact that he writes and has written, or to
have them assume that he can’t talk about, and isn’t interested in,
anything but books in general and his own in particular. The happy
medium is conversationally discovered by only a very few, but this no
doubt is the case with almost all happy mediums. It isn’t in the least
disconcerting to meet a person who is quite unaware of the fact that you
are the clever Mr. Snooks, author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of
To-day.” Indeed, when your new acquaintance has not even heard of either
you or your latest work, you may be able to have with him a perfectly
rational and agreeable conversation. But there is a type of person who
has read “The Swill Barrel” with interest, who knows you wrote it, and
who for some cryptic reason never alludes to it or betrays the fact that
he realizes you are the clever Mr. Snooks. This is really most trying.
You know that he knows; he knows that you know that he knows, and you
both somewhat consciously talk about other things--he, because of an
utterly misguided idea that it is “in better taste” not to speak of a
book to its author, and you, because, under the circumstances, you would
rather die than admit you recognized a pen when you saw it reposing on a
desk.

To refrain from speaking to a writer of his books because you think it
in better taste not to, because “he must be so tired of having people
talk to him about that book,” is to display a not particularly keen or
sympathetic understanding of human nature. A writer, whether he be a
novelist, a historian, a writer of essays, a writer of editorials, a
poet, a reporter, a message indicting President of the United States, or
the secretary of a charitable organization, invariably hopes that what
he writes will be read; that it will please, amuse, instruct, inform,
divert,--that, in a word, it will _interest_ somebody, or rather, a
group of somebodies. With many writers the commercial aspect of the
transaction is, of course, always prominent, but their commercial
success depends, after all, upon their ability to charm. Once having
grasped the pen and set out to do any of these things, it is only human
and natural to be gratified on learning that you have succeeded, and if
the people you from time to time meet don’t tell you that you have, you
remain in dreadful doubt. To the ears of a writer no music on earth is
sweeter than intelligent praise, and even praise that is not intelligent
is sweet if it has the ring of sincerity. I remember once taking in to
dinner a young girl who assured me that she had very much enjoyed a
certain story of mine because it had made her “cry and cry and cry.”
Most insincerely, as I knew which story it must have been, I asked her
the name of it. She thereupon adorably declared that she didn’t remember
the name, she couldn’t recall where she had come across it, and she had
forgotten what it was about, but she had “cried and cried and cried.”

Occasionally writers have assured me that it bored them to receive
enthusiastic letters about their books, and I have at once, mentally,
replied “You’re a liar.” No writer is ever anything but pleased to learn
that some one has found something, anything, of interest or value in one
of his efforts. One may write primarily for money, to make a living, but
no matter to what trashy and flashy depths a writer may descend, there
is always in his books something of himself. However hard he might try,
he could not keep it out, and it immensely pleases him to have it
discovered and commented upon, either in a letter from an unknown reader
or in a five minutes’ conversation. To me few incidents are as
agreeable, as altogether gratifying and satisfactory, as is the incident
of opening an envelope addressed in an unknown handwriting and finding
inside a letter that begins, “I have never written to an author before,
but I feel that I must write to tell you that,” etc., etc. And any one
who has written a book and declares that letters like this do not please
him, is simply a _poseur_ or untruthful, or both.

In the case of the great and famous it no doubt now and then ceases to
be a pleasure. A daughter of Longfellow told me that her father had once
received an imperative note from some woman, worded about as follows:
“Dear Sir: I have issued invitations for a ladies’ luncheon a week from
next Wednesday. There will be about fifty present and I wish to present
each of them with your autograph as a souvenir. Kindly send me at once
fifty autographs to the address given below.” Longfellow was the kindest
and most courteous of men, but this was a little more than even he could
“stand for,” as we would express it to-day. The luncheon was
unautographic.

On the other hand, many persons not only do not ignore the fact that a
writer is a writer, they have an inexplicable habit of regarding him and
his books as a kind of legitimate prey. When they hear they are going
to meet him at some gathering they make a point of refreshing their
memories on the subject of his various volumes, if they have read them
before, or endeavor to skim through one or two if they have not already
made their acquaintance. They then have a comfortable feeling that their
conversational equipment is complete, and they relentlessly talk to the
poor wretch about nothing but his works. They ask him how he came to
think of certain characters, if they were drawn from life, how long it
takes him to write a novel, has he any regular hours for working or does
he wait for an “inspiration,” how much does he get for a short story in
such and such a magazine, has his latest book been selling well, doesn’t
he find writing a delightful, a fascinating occupation, what is he
writing now, when will it be finished, who is going to publish it, and
does he get a lump sum for it or a royalty on every copy? I don’t
exaggerate; in fact, I have omitted a long list of searching and
personal questions to which a writer is constantly subjected. The
ordinary attitude toward a person who makes his living by grinding out
books has always been to me an inexplicable one. Nobody with the
smallest grain of sense or tact is ever impelled to cross-question a
lawyer about his cases in court or a doctor about his cases in the
hospital. The thing is almost inconceivable, and when it does very
occasionally happen, the thoughtless interlocutor is very properly
snubbed. One would experience a certain delicacy in asking even a tailor
about the various garments he was cutting and sewing, but comparatively
few persons have scruples against putting a writer through the third
degree. To me this has always been remarkable, because I realize that in
almost every lawsuit, however trivial, and in almost every case of
illness, there is more emotion, more hope and fear, more ingenuity, more
drama, more “human interest,” than in all the novels and stories put
together. And yet lawyers and doctors and tailors and real estate men
seem to escape, while writers are everywhere lashed to the interrogatory
mast.

It also has always seemed strange that a man or woman who writes books,
however thin and lacking in importance, is invariably given, wherever he
goes, a luncheon, a dinner, or that altogether horrible form of human
intercourse known as a “tea.” Other men and women who from every point
of view have made a success of their lives can enter a town, stay for
two weeks and depart without being noticed. But when Richard Thyng
Snooks (author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day,” a very poor
story I beg to assert) arrives, innumerable festivities are arranged in
his honor. He is asked to luncheon and dinner, it is hoped that he can
be prevailed upon to “say something,” anything, at some entertainment
during his all too brief stay. The local branch of the Federated Women’s
Clubs invariably tries to lasso him, and is terribly disappointed if it
doesn’t succeed. Knowing many writers of books, as by accident I happen
to, this is something I have never been able to comprehend.

Personally, my feeling toward my various scribbling friends is that I
like them, not because they write, but in spite of it. We meet and
gossip about a thousand things, but I can scarcely remember talking with
any of them on the subject of writing. It is only with the kind of
person who looks upon a printed and launched book as a sort of
achievement (which of course it isn’t) that one talks about the making
of books. Men and women who write, I have learned, are usually grateful
when they can temporarily be made to forget about it.

It is conventional to think of writers as eccentric creatures who live
apart in a world of their own. I have known many, but I have not found
this to be the fact. As a rule I have discovered that the anecdotes
about them have been built upon the most slender foundations, either by
well-meaning admirers who imagined for them an interesting atmosphere of
which they themselves were guiltless, or by malicious gossips who hoped
to do them harm. The things printed about writers in newspapers are
usually half truths ingeniously distorted, or absolute falsehoods. The
actual peculiarities of writers, the little prejudices and habits and
superstitions they almost all have to a greater or less degree, rarely
find their way into type, because they are so rarely spoken of. One
knows, of course, that Fénelon was able to write in comfort only when
dressed in court costume, with fine, clean lace falling over his
slender, aristocratic hands; that Balzac, in the agonies of composition,
consumed quarts of strong coffee and wore a kind of monastic dressing
gown; that Dickens always had upon his desk, wherever he went, a little
collection of valueless ornaments he was used to seeing there, and
without which he felt ill at ease and unable to begin his task; that
Thackeray usually hated to write and, as a rule, dragged himself to his
pen and ink with extreme repugnance; that Schiller kept in the drawer of
his writing table half a dozen rotten apples, the smell of which he
inhaled deeply before he was able to compose. Such instances, and
hundreds of others, are authentic and historic. They have become known
because the writers who were responsible for them are famous the world
over, and nothing in their lives seems to be too insignificant to be
ferreted out and proclaimed.

It is interesting to know that lesser scribes are everywhere, in all
sincerity, the victims of much the same whims and unaccountable,
innocent manias. A talented and successful woman novelist of my
acquaintance once confided in me that she never felt like writing unless
her hands were dirty. In winter, before sitting down to write, she
always dusts a room, a shelf of books, or builds a fire. In summer she
spends half an hour or so pulling up weeds in the garden. Her hands are
then dirty and comfortable, and she can write with comparative
enjoyment. A man I know, however, always scrubs his hands with hot water
and soap before beginning to write, and then squirts a drop or two of
cologne on them. This sounds as if he wrote highly romantic fiction or
lackadaisical poetry. As a matter of fact, his subjects are history and
political economy, and he is regarded as an authority upon those serious
matters. But these are queer, intensely personal little traits that
emerge diffidently, almost reluctantly, only when one knows a writer
very well indeed. They are not the sort of stuff that finds its way into
the newspapers.

My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have
dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and
justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to
chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less
accidentally had one story accepted by _Scribner’s_, _Harpers’_ or the
_Century_, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who
insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the
conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a
well-known name. Real writers usually go about their business calmly,
methodically and with little or no enthusiasm. It is rarely writing that
they find “delightful and fascinating”; it is the having written. Those
I have known intimately have without exception admitted that they could
always re-read with interest certain passages from their own books when
other diversions failed them, and while they often were conscious of
opportunities lost, of having gone astray, of having failed to achieve
the effect at which they aimed, they on the other hand were more than
compensated by the discovery of certain phrases, paragraphs and whole
pages they had almost forgotten and that struck them as being
surprisingly skilful.

One hears much of the long, discouraging struggle for acceptance and
recognition waged by young authors, how their manuscripts are returned
unread by the editors of great magazines because their names are
unknown, and so on. Having been a reader on a magazine myself, I listen
to such tales with an exceedingly skeptical ear. In the United States,
at least, it is much more difficult to keep out of print than to get
into it. Editors and publishers read, or have their readers read, with
the most painstaking care, absolutely everything submitted to them. Not
to do so would be fatal; it would incur the risk of missing something,
of failing to make the occasional big killing. Being human, they
naturally make mistakes they bitterly regret; and it seems to me that
this usually happens when the manuscripts sent in have about them a
touch of genius. Genius is always somewhat ahead of its time, and
publishers are invariably a little afraid of it. They have toward it
much the same attitude that a nice old lady might have toward an
invitation from Wilbur Wright to take a spin with him in his flying
machine. They prefer something more reliable, more within their
experience. It is said that Kipling’s “Plain Tales” made the rounds of
all our magazines and publishing houses before they found any one
sufficiently daring to print them. They were “different,” both in matter
and in manner; they were not of the old reliable, tried and true
variety; they had about them something very like genius. But it seems
incredible that anyone nowadays, who can borrow a respectable plot and
unfold it in a style sufficiently lacking in originality, should be
denied admittance to the magazines and the publishers’ catalogues. I
don’t believe it. And at present the field appears to offer unusual
opportunities, for not long ago Laura Jean Libbey decided (at least so I
read in a New York paper) “to lay down her tired pen and give other
women writers a chance.” Miss Libbey is furthermore said to have
declared to the reporter who interviewed her on her retirement from the
active world of letters, that in looking back upon her busy career she
had but one regret; she sometimes feared that the name of one of her
books was too long. When asked which one it could have been, she replied
that it was the novel entitled, “You Would Not Have Blamed Her for Going
Wrong, if You Had Known What the Conditions Were at Home.”



“ANN VERONICA”


About an hour ago I finished reading the latest novel of Mr. H. G.
Wells. I laid it aside and since then I have been thinking about it.
During the past month a great many other persons apparently have been
doing precisely the same thing. For whatever may be one’s verdict on the
novels of Mr. Wells, and the verdicts are absorbingly different, it
cannot be said that these volumes do not incite one to think. The
ordinary American and English novel does not. It may be, and often is,
skilful and diverting; it holds the attention and “passes the time,” but
on finishing it one immediately begins to think of something else. It
almost never seems to be the cause of the slightest kind of mental
result. Personally, I cannot, for instance, conceive of one’s reading a
book by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Chambers, Richard Harding Davis,
Hamlin Garland, Robert Hichens, not to mention hundreds of others, and
having, subsequently, any kind of mental reaction. They all without
doubt write more or less well, amuse a great many people for a few
hours, and incidentally make a good and honest living. But there it all
ends. They are trained performers, and entirely justified because they
are so well trained. They do things we are all accustomed to having well
done and they do them better than most. Almost invariably I applaud the
industrious Mrs. Ward when she produces still another work of fiction;
it is usually so neat, so competent, so adequate, so professional. She
once wrote with not much skill an important book, “Robert Elsmere,” and
since then she has made an enormous income by writing with extreme skill
books of no importance whatever. Toward the ordinary “good” writer of
contemporary novels I confess that I feel very much as one feels at the
theater devoted to vaudeville, when a lady hops along an almost
invisible wire on one leg, or a gentleman gracefully promenades about
the stage on his hands or his head. It is all rather difficult to do; it
has taken time and training; it is diverting to watch and it is well
paid for. But when the curtain descends one begins to think about the
performing seals or the ventriloquist who is advertised to appear next.
As soon as the act is over, it is over. There is nothing to reflect
upon, to take home with one, so to speak. I should dislike to give the
impression that for this reason I depreciate the act or “look down” on
it. Such is not the case. I merely beg, superfluously, perhaps, to
state, that it has its place in the world, fulfills its little destiny,
and that its destiny has nothing to do with the progress, or even the
activity, of human thought.

The novels of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, are quite different. I am
not going to review them, criticise or appraise them. That has been
done, and will be done, by far more able pens than mine. I simply have
an irresistible desire to record that whatever one thinks about them
they are, after all, first and last, novels about which it is impossible
not to think. This seems to me to be a great deal at the outset. I am
unable to recall more than three other English-writing novelists of the
present day who inspire me with the same sensations. To sit for awhile
and reflect on this volume leads me far away from it into a tortuous
maze of thought about all kinds of things--about life, about art, about
literary style in general, and then about certain specific aspects and
corners and byways, disputed boundaries and quaking bogs of these
subjects, in particular. The book has been discussed in my presence by
several persons, all of whom are unusually intelligent, and I think my
only reason for mentioning it is because it got these good minds
started, got them going with, to me, distinctly interesting results. The
discussions shed a light and also erected a perfect barricade of
question marks at the end of every path I have, in considering the
matter, attempted to tread.

The story, like the stories of most great writers (and it gives me
pleasure to be able to say that I happen to consider Mr. Wells a great
writer), is exceedingly simple. The unupholstered skeleton of it is
this: A young English girl of an upper-middle-class family lives with
her father and her aunt in a pleasant, comfortable London suburb. The
temperaments, ideas and activities of the father and the aunt are
absolutely mid-Victorian. The girl, however, has inhaled the atmosphere
of the twentieth century. She has gone to lectures at a college and
studied biology; in an immature fashion she inevitably belongs to a
world entirely different from that of her estimable and tedious father,
from that of her refined and intellectually unawakened aunt. One evening
she wishes to go to a fancy-dress party with some artistic friends of
hers who live in the same suburb. Her father, with his vague, natural
and perfectly comprehensible horror of anything “artistic,” forbids her
to go, makes it, in fact, impossible to go; whereupon the daughter,
revolting from her sheltered, commonplace, mentally stultifying
domesticity, leaves the paternal hearth and undertakes to lead a life
of her own in London. The rest of the story has to do with the
development of the mind and soul of the girl who is both essentially
feminine and essentially modern.

Of course I was intensely interested in the comments to which I have
referred, not so much because they threw light on the book (the book
speaks for itself), but because of the light they threw on the persons
who made them and the questions they evoked.

“Yes, I read the book and I consider it objectionable from almost every
point of view,” declared Smith.

“What you really mean is that you consider it objectionable from every
point of view which you are by temperament and education capable of
taking,” replied Jones. “There are other points of view in the world; no
one person is able to possess them all. I, for instance, do not consider
the book objectionable in any way. It strikes me as being a theme, or
rather several themes, of vital interest treated by a master in a
masterly fashion.”

“But I cannot feel that such themes are legitimate in a work of
fiction--a work of art,” protested Smith; “especially,” he went on,
“when they are treated so mercilessly--with so much--so much----”

“So much truth,” Jones interposed in a tone of superiority and triumph.
“You will have to admit, I am sure, that there isn’t a false note in the
whole story; it has the ring of relentless truth from the first page to
the last. Do you mean to say that you shrink from the truth--that you
don’t prefer truth always to prevail?”

Smith squirmed a trifle, but held his ground. “I am not at all sure
that, in a work of fiction (and a work of fiction should be a work of
art), absolute truth should be sought for. I see the difference between
art and science. Why should one endeavor to be the other?” he inquired.

“But a novel purports to be a picture of life.”

“Yes, exactly--a picture; and a picture isn’t life itself; it is, or
ought to be, after all, a picture,” said Smith, momentarily triumphant
in turn. “The human body, for instance, has been painted and sculptured
from the beginning of civilization, and, indeed, before it, but even
to-day, with all our modern passion for fact or verity or whatever you
choose to call it, even the most realistic of sculptors and painters has
a tendency to grope toward beauty of form, to portray human beings
without clothes more as they ought to look rather than as they actually
do. This, it seems to me, is the wonderful privilege and function of
art. It should embellish life, not perpetuate its ugliness. Toward the
writing of novels I feel much the same. There are entire sides of life
that do not strike me as a proper field of exploitation in a tale, a
narrative, a novel.”

“But what is a poor, unhappy man of talent to do?” exclaimed Jones.
“Here is Wells. He has observed with microscopic fidelity a young girl
whose character, habit of thought, conception of life, her attitude
toward the entire universe, in short, has developed and been formed in
an epoch grotesquely different from that in which her father and aunt
received their indelible impressions. The result is a domestic tragedy.
It interested Wells; he sees all around it; it strikes him as being of
immense value in the history of human shift and change; he wants to
record it; he does so with the marvelous vividness and truthfulness of
which he almost alone is at present master, and then you go and call him
offensive and objectionable and a lot of other things. What do you want
a man like that to do? Ought he to observe and reflect merely for his
own instruction, and then when he puts pen to paper, perpetrate a new
series of the ‘Elsie Books’ or ‘Dottie Dimple’?”

“Now, of course, you have become extreme and unfair,” objected Smith. “I
need hardly say that even during my earliest years I couldn’t endure the
‘Dottie Dimple’ and ‘Elsie’ tendencies of fiction. Besides, you know
perfectly well the sort of books I enjoy. You know that, strangely
enough, I revel in both Thackeray and Dickens. I have read ‘Middlemarch’
six times and hope to read it many times more. I can always re-read the
Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell and Meredith and Hardy. Howells has rarely
failed me. Henry James used to charm and enchant me and he still always
interests me even when I have to work hard to translate him. But what’s
the use of naming any others? The list is sufficiently comprehensive to
show that I am not narrow-minded.”

“The list is admirable as far as it goes,” Jones agreed; “I have but one
fault to find with it, which is that you have read this and several
other books by Wells with interest, and yet you will not accept him and
enroll his name. The man is important in the world of letters; if he
were not, you and I could not possibly spend so much time in talking
about him. Tacitly you admit this. Why do you refuse to admit it
positively? It makes me feel that you are not quite keeping in step with
your epoch, your age, your time, your period. This is a marvelous age,
and aren’t you rather deliberately falling behind it? By the way, where
does Balzac come in? You haven’t mentioned Balzac.”

“I have read nearly everything of Balzac with sincere interest,” Smith
admitted. “He is a literary wonder, a giant; sometimes he seems to me to
be a kind of intellectual monster.”

“Yet Balzac was anything but squeamish in his choice of subject or his
fashion of treating it. He, too, had his microscope. He stuck the end of
it in his eye and looked at life and wrote accounts of his
investigations. Surely they cannot always have pleased you!”

“No, they don’t. And here, you may laugh if you want to, but I can’t
help confessing that I have entirely different feelings when I read
awful things about French people. It is no doubt illogical, absurd,
anything you please; but somehow I can’t be upset and disgusted by the
turpitude of a hero named, for example, ‘Lucien de Rubempré,’ as I
should be if he did the same things and his name was Peter Jackson.”

“How splendidly limited you are!” reflected Jones. “It does not occur to
you that human life is human life; that the fact of its being English
or French, American or Norwegian, is a mere accident. In the end it is
always just the same. You can, in a word, endure the naked truth about
persons who are not of your own nationality and whose language is not
very familiar to you, but you hate to have the truth told about your
neighbors and acquaintances and friends. You hate to have a writer of
English tackle either the fundamental questions of existence, or any of
the ugly, gross, squalid, frightful, real aspects that can be found
without any trouble whatever in every well-regulated family.”

“George Eliot tackled a tragic and ugly incident in ‘Adam Bede,’ but I
think ‘Adam Bede’ is a great and beautiful book,” declared Smith. “You
see, it isn’t altogether a question of subject; it is largely a question
of treatment.”

“How differently Wells would have treated ‘Adam Bede’!” mused the other.

“Yes, and in my opinion he would have ruined it,” Smith hastened to add.
“George Eliot wrote with a pen; Wells writes with a clinical
thermometer and a stethoscope. I may be behind the times, but I prefer
novels to be written with a pen. In the long run I firmly believe that
for the purposes of literature the pen is mightier than the surgical
instrument.”

“That may be,” conceded Jones with reluctance, “but why not keep one’s
mind open to every sincere and interesting experiment in the world of
letters or the world of anything else? And there can be no question at
all of Wells’s sincerity. With a most extraordinary intellectual
equipment and gift for expression through the medium of words, he has
undertaken in his novels to examine the Anglo-Saxon mind and heart and
soul; to strip them of every vestige of their conventional garments and
to display them quivering, real, naked. It is not only an attempt
entirely new in English fiction, which in itself attracts my literary
attention; it is, in the case of Wells, a successful attempt which both
attracts my attention and firmly holds it.”

“But I hate and detest and loathe ‘quivering’ souls and minds and hearts
running around loose in fiction,” Smith almost shrieked. “I don’t wish
to encounter them there; as a matter of fact, I don’t wish to encounter
them anywhere. Sometimes on the journey through life one has to; the
meeting is unavoidable, but I declare and protest that I have never
sought an introduction to them. I don’t want them to be thrust upon me,
ever.”

At this point Mrs. Robinson suddenly tossed aside the doily she had been
all along crocheting in receptive silence, and exclaimed:

“I’ve read the book you two helpless and rather ridiculous men have been
trying to discuss, and I think you have both missed the entire point of
it. You’ve been chattering and gabbling about art and literature and
morality but you haven’t touched at all on what is the backbone of the
book. I’ve been listening to you, and you both express yourselves with
conviction and some force; but both of you have missed the point.” Mrs.
Robinson smiled at us wisely and maternally, including me, although I
had kept out of the discussion. She is a woman of sixty-five. She has
known the world, she has lived and she has thought, and on the subject
of “Ann Veronica” she spoke as follows:

“I read the book. It of course interested me; if it hadn’t I should not
have finished it. Now listen, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, to an old woman
and try to realize where she rises intellectually above you both. To Mr.
Smith the book is out of the question, impossible. To Mr. Jones it is an
important, perhaps a great study of certain phases of contemporary life.
Neither of you will concede an inch, and neither of you seem to be aware
of the fact that the interest of the book does not consist in its
frankness of phrase, in its matter-of-fact acceptance of
unconventionality. What the story crystallizes, in a fashion that will
make the average middle-aged parent sit up and gasp, is the tragic
impossibility of a parent comprehending and sympathizing with its own
offspring. As you know, I have long been a mother of grown-up children,
and my family is remarkably ‘united,’ as the saying is; but if you take
your courage in your hands, open wide your eyes and honestly,
pitilessly examine almost any family however theoretically, technically
‘united,’ what do you discover? I am not talking of the idealist and the
sentimentalist. I am referring to cool and calm investigators like, let
us say, this man Wells you both have been talking about. He has examined
a certain family. It is just one small family, but the writer has
succeeded to an astonishing degree in typifying the modern family in
general, although to admit that he has may be repellent.

“The world,” declared Mrs. Robinson, “is moving with a rather
frightening, breath-taking rapidity. Even parents, comparatively young,
no longer live the lives of their children. I’m not such an old fool as
to believe for a moment that I know what my boys are doing or what my
girls are thinking. I used to consider it possible; I now am convinced
that it is impossible. Such character as I have developed and
solidified, I achieved under circumstances that do not now obtain,
although I tried, wrongly perhaps, to keep them up, to prolong them and
make them influences in the lives of the beings for whom I am
responsible. My greatest claim to modernity consists in the fact that I
have gracefully recognized and accepted defeat. My children are my
children, but they also are children of a period in the world’s history
to which I really do not in a heartfelt way belong. This in many
respects is sad, it is even at times horrible. But here we are! What are
we going to do about it? Ann Veronica belonged violently to her time.
Her father belonged tenaciously to his. To preserve a united family,
what, given these conditions, must happen? Simply concessions. To
preserve the happy family, Ann must always forfeit some of her
intelligence and modernity; Papa and Mamma must always concede to--oh,
all sorts of little things (sometimes they are dreadfully big things)
that they abominate. Parents and children have to scare up a kind of
domestic philosophy and meet one another half way. When they don’t there
is no longer a ‘united’ family. There is a drama of some sort and Mr.
Wells sits down and writes a story about it. Ann was the kind of
offspring who would not concede. Her father was the kind of parent who
would not concede. You have seen what happened. I am not so sure that
Mr. Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel,
but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding
of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as
perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All
life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make
them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude,
and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun
and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep.

“Now stop this wrangling, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones,” the good lady went
on, “and both concede a little. You, Mr. Smith, must concede that the
book is interesting and written with a skill, a gift for observation and
expression possessed by few, although I shall allow you to retain your
temperamental bias and consider the story uncalled for and the
treatment coarse.

“You, Mr. Jones, must concede that this manner of writing, of depicting
life, is an innovation in English; that although you enjoy it, it may
not be a wise one; that instead of merely amusing and doing good it may
have the power to do harm, and that Mr. Smith is entitled to his opinion
even if it doesn’t coincide with yours. There is much to be said in
favor of Mr. Smith’s opinion.”

“And what is your opinion, Mrs. Robinson?” I at this point inquired.

“Oh, I haven’t any,” she replied gayly. “A really wise old woman never
has.”



HOLIDAYS


With me, at least, holidays finally became an issue that had to be met,
faced and, once and for all, disposed of. For years I half-consciously
postponed the matter and went through many of the motions supposed to be
essential to their respective spirits. On the Fourth of July, for
instance, I would try to feel noisily inclined and patriotic, although
my patriotism is not of a blatant variety and I had begun to dread noise
almost more than I dreaded any other ill to which the human flesh is
heir. On Christmas I endeavored, in the most painstaking fashion, to
scare up a good-will-to-everybody sensation that I didn’t sincerely
possess. On Thanksgiving Day I tried to observe the convention, not of
giving thanks, for that has never become a convention, but of
pretending that I desired more than usual to eat, which I never did and
never do. But, all the while, firecrackers were becoming more and more
abhorrent, geniality around the Yule log more of a bore, the sight of
excessive food more repulsive, and, finally, I began to realize what was
happening to me. Quite simply and naturally and inevitably, darling “was
growing old; silver threads among the gold,” and not only silver threads
(they are the least of it) but a lot of other things were taking place.
It is all very interesting, and one of the most interesting things about
it is the incredibly short time in which it seems to happen. Perhaps my
memory is extremely erratic; in fact I feel sure it is, for sometimes
last week is almost a total blank, whereas twenty and occasionally even
thirty (dear Heaven!) years ago are vivid, clear-cut and intelligible.
The more ancient date often seems more real and alive than the later. I
haven’t the vaguest idea of what I did last Tuesday. There undoubtedly
was a last Tuesday, but now, as far as I am concerned, it did not exist,
although I am reasonably sure that while it ticked itself away I was
clothed and in my right mind. On the other hand, I can most accurately
recall, for example, the early morning of the Fourth of July, 1884. How
we “conspired at every pore”! I remember going to bed most respectably
and innocently at the usual time, waiting until the more mature members
of the family were sound asleep and then sneaking down to the
drawing-room and dozing restlessly on a sofa until about half-past two
A.M. At that weird and ecstatic hour we emerged from a French window,
extricated our firecrackers from the little “dog-house” in which we had
secreted them and proceeded to make the rest of the night altogether
odious. It comes back to me that an accidental spark popped into the
ammunition box and, with a heart-rending, rip-snorting crash, flash and
agonized detonation, destroyed everything in about one and a half tragic
minutes. It was astonishing and glorious while it lasted, but it lasted
such a short time that the rest of the night would have been left, so to
speak, on our hands, if someone had not reluctantly tiptoed to his
house and produced the supply he had been hoarding for the daylight
hours. Then, with a huge bonfire, we all but ruined a beautiful elm
tree, set fire to the fence, burned great chasms in the wooden sidewalk
and had a perfectly delightful time generally.

I refer to these ordinary activities of the American male child only
because I feel as if I had been engaging in them yesterday morning
instead of twenty-five years ago, and because, in spite of my
photographic recollection, so many queer things have taken place. To
begin with, whereas I still, in memory, am able to reëxperience the
exquisite thrill I had when, at the age of thirteen, I would hold a
giant firecracker in my hand until the last advisable fraction of a
second. I now have a horror of giant firecrackers, or indeed of anything
that noisily explodes with possible dire results. In Mexico, for
instance, when my brother and I are making, on mule back, a journey in
an isolated part of the country, he always insists on my carrying a
revolver in a large, visible holster. Mexicans have a most erroneous
idea that with a revolver all Americans have an accurate and deadly aim.
My brother considers this a great moral support and declares that the
idea ought to be encouraged. Well, I carry the revolver, but I don’t
mind confessing that I am much more afraid of it than I am of anything
else in Mexico. The dangerous implement keeps bumping against my hip,
reminding me that it is there and that it might tear six large holes in
me at any moment. It is always an immense relief to arrive somewhere
and, in a gingerly fashion, take it off and put it on a table or a
bureau. Yet twenty-five years ago, nothing could have made me feel so
proud, so brave, so competent to face the entire world as a revolver
bumping against my hip. The old feeling for the Fourth of July has
simply gone, disappeared, evaporated in some inscrutable fashion. It now
has become for me a day of genuine misery, unless I am happy enough to
spend it where it is not “observed.” In addition to loathing the noise
because I can’t help it, I more and more every year hate it because I am
increasingly depressed by the knowledge of all the so easily preventable
mutilations with which it is associated; I hate it because of the pain I
have known it to inflict upon the sick and dying. Even many of the lower
animals of my acquaintance, dogs and horses in particular, regularly
once a year spend twenty-four hours of mental and physical agony on the
Fourth of July. While trying to reassure an old dog who had crawled
under a bed and collapsed with a nervous chill, while trying to calm the
uncontrollable terror of a steady, sensible, intelligent horse, I have
often fervently wished that there had been no Revolution and that we had
remained a British colony.

Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I
look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward
holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the
well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of
the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in
which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of
the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest
possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the
conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall
ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious,
pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors
are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead
old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the
length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began
to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair.

If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the
day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special
attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary
time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and
nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time
during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily
agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a
club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I
have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day
usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of
life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the
result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday.

And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its
reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more
touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be
religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of
its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes
for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the
great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation.
It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must
arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous,
humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the
general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one
of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old
billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into
uncontrollable sobs.

But Christmas itself! I mean the day we have made of it. It is really a
terrible day unless, perhaps, you are pretending to relieve it with the
children which some of us don’t possess. Just as I can recall delirious
Fourths of July, I can recall Christmas days that were a scream of
delight from energetic dawn until tired and sleepy midnight. The
delicious, exciting smell of the pine tree, the feel of the “excelsior”
in which the fragile ornaments were packed, the taste of those red and
yellow animals made out of transparent candy, the taste of the little
candles (for some strange, youthful reason we always purloined several
of the candles and chewed them, even green ones, in secret. I can’t
imagine now why they didn’t poison us), the thrilling effect of cotton
batting spread on the floor at the tree’s base (there were always, of
course, acres of real snow just outside the front door but it quite
lacked the power to entrance possessed by a few square feet of cotton
batting)--for years I haven’t smelled or tasted or seen any of these
things. But how wonderful they used to be. Even the Christmas we spent
at the ages of eight and five, in Gibraltar, and where our tree
consisted of a small orange tree propped up in a slop jar, was the real
thing. Every moment of it returns palpitating with the old Christmas
sensation.

But now the day, aside from its real significance, to which apparently
no great attention is paid, has, as far as I am concerned, lost all its
old magic and charm. Of late years, when I have been sufficiently
foolish to attempt to “make merry” on Christmas, I have found the
twenty-fifth of December merely a memory that one can revive, but to
which one may not give life or even a very successful, galvanic
semblance of life. If, nowadays, I permitted Christmas to make any
particular impression on me, which I don’t, it would, I fear, be chiefly
an annoying impression that I ought to be spending more money than I can
afford in order to give, to persons I take but little interest in,
presents they don’t need. At any rate, that is the principal impression
I seem to derive from the ante-Christmas conversation of most of my
acquaintances who still conventionally observe the day.

In fact, the whole question of holidays had to be met and solved, and I
rejoice in the fact that I have at last done it as successfully as have
many other much more sensible people. It is the easier to do, I suppose,
if circumstances have often necessitated one’s spending the more
important days in an environment lacking the slightest suggestion of
domesticity. I have spent Christmas in a hotel in Athens, in a hotel in
Paris, on shipboard, on a railway train, in the desert of Sahara, in
tropical countries where it was all but impossible to recall anything
that remotely suggested the annual festival. Once I spent all of
Christmas on the back of a lame mule.

This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually
innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a
calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day
after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous
occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is,
I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when
you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the
least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you
finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some
irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping
with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but
by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on
bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are
what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which
there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say,
a certain age, but it is worth it.



SERVANTS


Polite existence seems to be composed, in part, of a warp (or do I,
perhaps, mean a woof?) of funny little pretensions and affectations, of
rather meaningless standards and conventions, make-believes and poses.
The polite world, broadly speaking, always seems to be divided into two
classes; those who swallow it all whole, who believe in it, who practice
and live up to it, and those who really don’t, but who pretend they do
for fear of forfeiting the esteem of the others. We all know persons who
quite simply have been born into the world with what might be called
aristocratic temperaments and instincts. They do not affect it; they
cannot help it; it is innate, and they automatically observe the
conventions because they like to, because it is the line of least
resistance. On the other hand, no end of us go through almost precisely
the same motions, but without conviction, and, when we feel reasonably
sure that we sha’n’t be found out, we relax and give a certain amount of
free play to what happens to be our natures.

In few human relations does this fact seem to me to be more clearly
revealed than in the attitude of the polite toward their servants. There
is really, if one pauses to think about it, a tremendous amount of
bunkum in the alleged relations between most of one’s acquaintances and
the people who attend to their various needs. I don’t say all, because
the sincere exceptions at once suggest themselves, but in the case of
most I am inclined to believe that the matter is largely regulated by
“what other people would think,” rather than by natural promptings--by
human spontaneity. How often have I heard a woman or a man scornfully
exclaim, “Servant’s gossip!” or, “She’s the sort of woman who listens to
her servants!” The first great crime apparently is to take the slightest
interest in the point of view, the ideas, the information or the
conversation of one’s servants. Conventionally they are, none of them,
supposed to have intelligence, integrity or the gift of being agreeable.
Of course no end of people converse with their servants incessantly and
derive from the proceeding much interest and amusement, but they very
rarely admit it, and when they do, it is always in a deprecating,
apologetic fashion calculated to impress you with the fact that the
incident was quite out of the ordinary--which, secretly, I never believe
it is. “Sometimes I let Mary Ann run on. For a maid she is really
rather,” etc. For some, to me inscrutable, reason, hardly anybody admits
that he ever talks to a servant on a basis of intellectual equality, and
furthermore, hardly anybody ever admits, without in some way qualifying
the admission, that a servant is good-looking; that he, or she, as the
case may be, in different clothes and removed from the yoke of
servitude, might be indistinguishable from the persons he serves, and in
many instances much more charming in appearance.

“When Connor, the second man, is dressed up, he isn’t a bad-looking man
at all. You might almost mistake him for something else,” I have had a
fat, coarse-skinned, rich, middle-aged woman half humorously assure me
in speaking of one of her footmen, whose mere presence in the room made
her entire family appear to be even more common than they actually were.
The aristocratic tendency must have been omitted from me, for I have
never been able to detect on my part the slightest desire to apologize
for either intelligence or beauty wherever I wonderfully discovered it.
If it is there, it is there, and instantly recognizable. But in the case
of servants, it, for some reason, does not seem to be quite “the thing”
to admit it.

Frankly, I like to talk to servants and always do when I feel
conversationally inclined, and one of them is available. I extremely
enjoy hearing what they have to say about their employment, their wages,
their ambitions, the kind of treatment they receive from their employers
and the characteristics of their employers. From servants I have
learned many curious and amazing things about people I thought I knew
tolerably well and really didn’t because I had never been their servant.
And I am not in the least ashamed of having learned these things by
chatting pleasantly with servants; I am glad of it, for it has added
greatly to my understanding of people and life. Nothing is more
interesting than the contemplation of our little world from as many
different angles as possible. The servant’s angle is one of the most
acute. From servants one learns how a striking variety of persons
conduct themselves under almost all the circumstances to which human
beings are subjected. It is, indeed, from them alone that one can find
out about such matters; one’s personal experience, after all, is
necessarily limited to so few intimate, human contacts and incidents. To
talk frankly with intelligent servants is to receive a great light and
to re-awaken the interest in one’s fellow-man that at times has a
tendency to doze.

Stewards on ocean steamers invariably repay one with reflections on the
world in general for whatever time one spends with them. They see such
an unending procession of human beings that, from the remarks of
smoking-room stewards, I have felt that, for them, the individual has
almost ceased to exist and is instinctively pigeonholed, as a type. They
seem to be able to take a man’s measure at a glance, and they usually
take it with astonishing accuracy. I don’t mean that their appraisal
begins and ends with the probable amount of the gentleman’s tip; they
are far from being as avaricious as they are supposed to be. They know
whether he will be exigent or easy to please, whether he will have
consideration for them, or keep them needlessly running back and forth
from a half-consciousness that it is within his right, according to the
manner in which the world is arranged, to do so. They know at once
whether he will regard them as a mere machine, or a natural enemy, or a
servant with several almost human attributes, or a human being who
chances, for the time, to be acting in the capacity of one who serves.
Those, broadly speaking, are the four ways in which servants are usually
looked upon. Personally, I never can quite comprehend the point of view
that does not see a servant in the fashion I have mentioned last. And
yet, judging from remarks that are made to one by both women and men
about their servants, and from the testimony of those engaged in this
form of labor, this manner of appreciating the servant class does not
seem to be a usual one.

Many persons I know actually employ, in speaking to a servant, an
entirely different tone of voice from the one they make use of
habitually. In giving an order, or asking a question, the sounds
ordinarily produced by their vocal chords undergo a sudden and entire
change; they become dry, hard, metallic, and as impersonal as the human
voice can sound. It is not that they are angry or irritated, or have
hard hearts; it is merely because they are speaking to a servant, and
for some reason, altogether obscure to me, this proceeding necessitates
a difference in vocal pitch, key and inflection. Several persons of
whom I am, for many reasons, extremely fond, have developed this
characteristic to such an extent that I have long since avoided dining
with them, meeting them in clubs, or, in fact, having any relations with
them that involve the presence of a so-called “inferior.” I find it too
embarrassing, too mortifying; I always have an all but irresistible
desire to exclaim to the patient, well-mannered human being who is
endeavoring to make us comfortable: “Please don’t mind him, or feel
badly about it. He isn’t at all the insufferable ass he sounds like.”
Long observation has convinced me that this fashion--it seems to be more
a fashion, after all, than anything else--is not nearly as prevalent in
the West as it is in the East. With but few exceptions, the men at the
club I most frequent in the West speak to the servants in their ordinary
tone of voice; the same natural and courteous tone they would adopt in
speaking to anyone else. Just what this proves, I can’t quite make up my
mind. It might mean that in the West we are rather more human and
kindly, or it might, perhaps, mean that we have not become so accustomed
to that unfathomable stratum of the race known as English servants.

English servants in nowise resemble the servants of other countries. The
status of everyone of them is definitely fixed; I feel sure it appears
somewhere in that unwritten constitution of England about which one
hears and reads so much. They seem to be a class apart, a caste. Their
outlines are defined with the most absolute exactitude. They never merge
or melt or even temporarily fade into other and different outlines. They
are what they are, and they know it and accept it. About them has grown
up a conventional manner of treating them, of thinking about them, and
alluding to them. It isn’t exactly a cruel manner. It is the manner to
which I have referred; one from which every personal, sympathetic,
genial quality has been carefully eliminated; one in which the necessary
words are reduced to their simplest, most direct and unadorned minimum.
“Good” English servants not only do not mind this, they are used to it
and expect it. The part they play in life includes being verbally kicked
for so much a year. It is because of the greater prevalence in the East
of English butlers and footmen, I am sometimes inclined to believe, that
one more often hears the “correct” tone in speaking to a servant in New
York and Boston, than one does in the cities of the West.

But there are other ways of making servants “know their place” of which
we in the West are by no means guiltless. One woman of my acquaintance
invariably refuses to engage a maid who possesses that all but
indispensable appurtenance known as a “gentleman friend.” Another, for
some cryptic reason, never allows a servant to take a trunk upstairs.
All trunks must be unpacked and repacked downstairs. I don’t know why;
neither do they. It is merely one of her edicts, and it has contributed
not a little to the local “servant problem.”

For the employer’s view of the local “servant problem” I have never been
able to feel the slightest sympathy, as I can imagine no proposition
more naïvely selfish. The problem, as far as I can formulate it, seems
to consist of the fact that many persons in the world are disinclined to
give up their liberty, and to consecrate their entire lives to the whims
and mandates of some tiresome woman who yearns to underpay them. How
otherwise admirable women resent having to remunerate their cooks! I
know they do, because I have frequently heard them as much as say so.
Looked at honestly, the whole problem resolves itself into just this:
servants are a luxury. Any one of us could make beds, dust, scrub, wait
on the table, open the front door, wash clothes, and cook. (As a matter
of fact, I have done, at various times, all of these things with
complete success.) But for one reason or another we prefer to have
somebody else do them for us. We could do them ourselves, but we desire
the luxury of a servant, or of half a dozen servants. Yet most persons
seem to be distinctly reluctant to part with the amount of money a
servant can once a month command. They complain bitterly that wages are
becoming higher. Why shouldn’t wages become higher if parlor maids and
cooks can command them? Servants, I repeat, are a luxury. They do
something for us that we could do ourselves, but don’t wish to. We deny
ourselves other luxuries when we can’t afford them; why not deny
ourselves servants if we can’t conveniently pay the wages they are
entitled to? It is an odd fact that we don’t. Instead, we pay the wages
and then complain and lament and get together and discuss “the servant
problem.”

A cook, who had lived for several years with a family of my
acquaintance, abruptly left them because another household offered her a
dollar a month more. In my opinion, her action was quite right. Why
shouldn’t she have done so? A dollar is, after all, a dollar. But the
family she left, a kind, almost intelligent family, at that, has never
ceased to talk of what they call her “ingratitude.” I confess I am
unable to see it. Like millions of other American families, they seem to
think that to drudge under the same roof with them was a privilege, but
if one pauses to examine the situation, it really wasn’t.

I wish I had space enough in which to recall some of the servants I have
known best, beginning, at a very early age, with one German and three
French governesses, continuing with dear Mrs. Chester, who took care of
my rooms when I was in college, and about whom I have written minutely
and affectionately elsewhere; of Miss Shedd, the washwoman, to whom I
left in my will the photograph of a Madonna she greatly admired, but who
happened to die before I did, recounting, it gave me pleasure to be
told, my various virtues in her last delirium; of the Madrassi servant I
had in India, who, for no particular reason, used to burst into tears
once a week, and declare that I was his “father and mother”; of the Jap,
who looked down on me because he was a “Master,” whereas I was only a
“Bachelor,” of Arts; of Aunt Nancy, who died last winter, after
continuous, unbroken service in our family for seventy-seven years (the
last fifteen or twenty years, I confess, did not include occupation
other than keeping alive on rye whisky and pipefuls of cut plug
tobacco); of the marvelous servant in a popular Paris restaurant, whose
only function was “to pacify the guests.” Although dressed as a waiter,
he never actually waited. He, instead, drifted about from table to table
engaging one in conversation, soothing the complainers, lulling the
impatient. He was tall and thin with a long, intelligent nose. Balzac
would have immortalized him. He had a genius for tiding over the
irritation of red-faced men in a hurry. When he saw that one had almost
reached the point of explosion, he would saunter up to the table and
begin to talk. In a few seconds the impatient, red-faced man would be
proclaiming his opinion on some burning question of the day, and before
he had finished, his belated order would be served.

Like everyone else, I have ideas for some five hundred books and fifty
plays. One of the books will be called “Servants.”



MRS. WHITE’S


This morning I read in the paper of the death of Mrs. White, and the
short, inadequate paragraph startled me, not exactly because Mrs. White
was dead, but rather because until yesterday afternoon she was alive. I
had assumed that the good lady (how I wish I could remember just when I
left off hating her and began to think of her as a good lady!) had died
years ago and there was something grotesque and uncanny in her suddenly
up and dying again out of a blue sky, so to speak. It was very much as
if someone should pop out of an old tomb in a cemetery, take a hasty
look around and then pop in again. If I had not long ago ceased to feel
bitterly about her, I should have told myself that it was just like Mrs.
White, that she was not a sincere woman, that she had never inspired me
with confidence. But water has been flowing under the bridge for
thirty-two years since my tears used to flow at Mrs. White’s, and it so
long ago eroded my bitterness that I now cannot recall when it was I
last had any. Had I been asked yesterday how old Mrs. White would be by
this time, I should have answered very conservatively for fear of
seeming to exaggerate, “About a hundred and ninety-six,” and the paper
tells me she “passed away” in her seventy-first year. Good heavens--then
when I knew her and regarded her as a senile monster with a gizzard of
granite, she must really have been a nice-looking young woman of
thirty-eight. How very strange.

Whenever I begin to think of Mrs. White’s I have an unusually
uncontrollable desire to write my memoirs. I’m sure I don’t know why I
have always so longed to write my memoirs. Perhaps it is because I know
that memoirs, however inane, are the only form of literature that is
absolutely sure of getting itself read. Then, too, they must be so easy
to produce. They don’t have to be by anybody in particular, and they
present no technical difficulties whatever. They have to begin
somewhere, but one need never be bothered by wondering how they ought to
end. They don’t end, they merely stop. Very often indeed they refuse to
do even that. Madame de Genlis, for instance, after minutely covering
the ground in her “Souvenirs,” trimmed a new pen and, without pausing to
separate herself into chapters or to take breath, dashed off eight obese
volumes of “Mémoires.” Like all works of this nature, they are
“perfectly fascinating” and are still read, but there is no reason
whatever why I shouldn’t produce eight volumes just as twaddlesome. For
beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the
manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an
interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time
meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. These
conditions are extremely difficult to avoid. They arise quite naturally
after one has taken the first costly and fatally easy step of being
born at all. Seventy years afterward every period of the world’s history
is intensely interesting and nowadays it is quite impossible for the
modest, the retiring, the obscure, to evade the overtures of the
celebrated. The manner in which they lie in wait for us unknown ones,
hunt us down, in fact, is pathetic but brazen. They infest otherwise
restful and pleasant clubs, they pervade dinners, they hang on the edge
of evening parties, demanding to be met and talked to when one would
rather dance or look on. They are always cropping out or “butting in” to
the interruption of one’s satisfactory routine, just as the marvels of
the Yellowstone Park impose upon the placid, smiling face of nature.
When they happen to be royal, they ruin health-resorts, make good hotels
uninhabitable, render null and void the printed schedules of railways.
One summer in Paris I spent most of five weeks in vainly endeavoring to
dodge the Shah of Persia. I hardly ever went anywhere that he and his
gentlemen in waiting didn’t arrive a few minutes later and upset my
plans for the day. On account of him a brutal and licentious soldiery
has driven me from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the Pantheon with
drawn swords, and shoved me around and around the foyers of most of the
music halls, but later on I shall, no doubt, refer to him thus: “When
not long afterward I was greatly shocked by the news of this
pleasure-loving but beneficent ruler’s assassination, I recalled his
vivacious, oriental, if at times somewhat drowsy personality with
genuine regret.” (Sunlight and Shadows of My Long Life, Vol. VI, p.
982.) And a year ago in South America, where I naïvely supposed that I
should certainly be safe, I had scarcely set foot within the city limits
of Buenos Aires before I was, metaphorically speaking, drugged,
sandbagged and introduced to Mr. William Jennings Bryan. In his
pseudo-presidential frock coat and square-toed kid shoes he looked
precisely like a portrait of himself on the front page of _Puck_ after
it has been fingered for a week in a barber shop.

“‘Yes,’ he replied with the virile hand grasp that has changed the vote
of millions, ‘yes,’ he heartily agreed, ‘the days are hot in South
America but the nights are cool, and I always maintain that cool nights
are more than half the battle.’ Except for the sorcery of his voice and
the poignant pleasure he took in making my acquaintance, I think it was
this recurrent note of the man’s wholesome optimism that most profoundly
impressed me.” (Shadows and Sunlight of My Short Life, Vol. IX, p.
1024.) I left Buenos Aires at once and went to Montevideo, but literally
in less than fifteen minutes after I disembarked and strolled up to the
principal Plaza I absent-mindedly followed two fat gentlemen in evening
dress (it was three o’clock of a fine afternoon) into a public building
of some kind, and immediately found myself eating candied pineapple and
drinking Pan-American toasts in warm, sweet champagne, with the
President of Uruguay. The distinguished, the celebrated, the notorious,
the great--from one’s earliest years it is impossible to elude them.

Presidents! I shall devote sixty-five printed pages to them, beginning
with the summer evening when on an errand of mercy (a friend of mine had
robbed the till of a grocery store and had sent for me from the police
station) I became submerged in a sea of human faces that were waiting
for the President and Mrs. Cleveland, and lost in about five minutes a
new four-dollar straw hat, a scarf pin, the left sleeve of my coat (an
intoxicated patriot pulled it out by the roots and waved it) and nearly,
my eager, useful life. For a middle-aged woman clinging to a window
below which I was helplessly imbedded suddenly fainted and fell on me.
The crowd was so solidly packed that we were unable, for an eternity, to
stuff her into an interstice--to restore her right side up to the
perpendicular, and all the time we were doing our best to control her
arms and legs, and she was kicking noses off with her heels and gouging
eyes out with her thumbs, the people in the window were throwing, first
glassfuls, then pitcherfuls, and finally pailfuls of water on us, and
beseeching with paroxysms of mirth, “Won’t somebody _please_ bring a
little water; a lady has fainted.” As for writers, opera-singers,
bishops, actors, diplomatists, Napoleons of finance and members of the
nobility, they are always scuttling about nowadays. “It were a sorrow to
count them.” I shall make them say some of the most surprising things,
but in the case of persons who have died I shall write my memoirs
conscientiously throughout and record only the remarks they would have
enjoyed making but were unable to think of at the time.

My audience at the age of eight with His Holiness Pope Leo XIII, I have
always thought would open volume the first most auspiciously. One could
draw such a charming little picture of the ivory-white, ethereal old man
laying his hand for a moment on my shock of yellow hair and smiling
affectionately at my wondering, upturned face. I remember I held the
ends of his fingers and was beginning to examine his ring when someone
prodded me in the back and in a hoarse, agitated whisper, reminded me
to kiss it. I’m sure I could do all sorts of pleasant things with that
unearthly smile and tremulous blessing and sunny hair and upturned face,
but chronologically Mrs. White’s takes precedence, although even Mrs.
White’s is not the incident in my intellectual development that I first
remember. Sometime before then the detached, austere figure of a
beautiful woman became part of my consciousness and recollection and has
marvelously remained so ever since. She was at the Centennial Exhibition
of 1876 whither I was taken almost in the arms of a fond, and in that
instance foolish, grandmother. Gone, gone is the exhibition; I recall
nothing of it except a broad, hot walk in a park, bordered by gorgeous
flowers. But at the other end of it, no doubt in “Agricultural Hall,”
alone on a platform and surrounded by the ingenuous Americans of that
day, stood the woman. Jets of ice water played gently upon her soft and
gracefully molded limbs, for they were of butter and far from acclimated
to the debilitating atmosphere of Philadelphia in July. I loved that
oleomarginal morgue and screamed to be taken back to it whenever I was,
as I had to be from time to time, forcibly removed. I can’t now remember
the appearance at that time of anything or anybody else, even of the
grandmother who chaperoned us, but I should instantly recognize the
dear, long since melted work of art in any creamery of the world.

Mrs. White’s was a parental mistake. Some children are born without the
kindergarten temperament, and when this happens the effort to develop it
is usually futile. Not that my mother consciously attempted to do so. A
short time ago I asked her why she had been guilty of sending me to Mrs.
White’s, of blighting even in the bud an originally fine mind, and she
was obliged to confess she didn’t know. There was in the act no high and
definite concept of education. I suspect her of motives as mixed as they
were worthy. By sending me to Mrs. White’s she could relieve the
household of my beloved but exhausting society for hours and hours and
hours at a time, she could “help Mrs. White along” and she could give
me the opportunity of learning “how to observe.” Mrs. White’s was the
first of Froebel’s infantile observatories to make its appearance in our
town and strange things were expected of it.

The prospectus said that “the busy baby fingers” were “trained from the
first to coördinate and keep pace with the germinating mentality” which,
I was to find out, was merely a polite paraphrase of the good old
expression “unmitigated hell.” Every morning a dire conveyance locally
known as the “White Maria,” drawn by two rusty, long-haired bay ponies
and driven by Mr. White who was likewise long-haired, rusty and bay,
careened up to our door at half-past eight and shortly afterwards,
depending on the length of time it had taken to extricate me from the
banisters of the front stairs among which I had entangled my arms and
legs and between which I had thrust my head in order to render my
removal as difficult and painful as possible for all concerned, my
father would emerge from the house flushed, panting but triumphant with
me, screaming, kicking but defeated in his arms. He would then transport
me, still howling, to the White Maria, thrust me in, slam the door (it
opened at the back) and return to exclaim to my mother, “I really don’t
see how we can keep this up much longer.” Once inside the White Maria
the busy baby fingers began straightway to coördinate and keep pace with
the germinating mentality by transforming the dusky interior into a
veritable black hole of Calcutta. I slapped faces, pulled hair, kicked
shins, threw lunch-baskets on the floor and stamped upon their contents,
while the other children, goaded on to madness and piercing shrieks, ran
amuck and did the same. Mr. White never interfered with this
perambulating inferno both because he was of an incorrigible
cheerfulness--the result of a severe sunstroke--and because he couldn’t
see it. As one of Mrs. White’s specialties was the observation of nature
in all its various, ever pleasing and instructive moods, the
superstructure of the White Maria was a kind of limousine of black
oilcloth that at any season of the year effectually shut out air, light,
the passing landscape and also Mr. White. The “precious freight” (as
Mrs. White called us) within could therefore dismember one another
undisturbed. After stopping at several more houses to recruit our spent
legions we finally arrived at the school, furious, tearful, disheveled,
hating life as we have never hated it since, and proceeded at once to
praise God in song and thank Him for our manifold and inscrutable
blessings.

    “Oh, blesséd work,
     Oh, blesséd play,
     We thank thee for
     Another day,”

was the mendacious refrain of every stanza. When sufficiently irritated
by anything I can still sometimes remember the tune. Later in the
morning we were supplied with round flat disks like poker chips and
again burst reluctantly into melody, exclaiming this time, as we shied
the disks into a basket on the floor,

    “Did you ever, ever play
     Skipping pebbles on the bay,
     On the [something-or-other] water?”

Just what kind of water it was, I have never been able to recall. The
missing adjective has worried me for years. All over the world I have
lain awake at night skipping pebbles on the bay for hours and wondering
whether the water was “shining” or “glassy” or “rippling” or “placid” or
“deep blue.” Metrical exigencies of course insist that the name shall be
writ in water of two syllables and I have often cajoled myself into a
troubled sleep by almost deciding that this particular water must have
been “pretty.” But even “pretty” lacks the certain completely vapid
authenticity that ever eludes me.

The blesséd play was ghastly enough but the blesséd work was torture. I
was endowed with neither skill nor patience and at that time I could not
lose my shyness before strangers except when I lost my temper. The
public exhibition of my inability to “coördinate” was a daily anguish,
and I do not yet understand how I ever at last achieved the unspeakably
hideous mat of magenta and yellow paper that after the death of my
grandmother I found spotlessly preserved among her most cherished
possessions. But I not only did--I furthermore succeeded after days and
days of agony in constructing a useless, wobbly, altogether horrible
little house out of wire and dried peas. It was characteristic of Mrs.
White to select from the comprehensive inventory of the world’s possible
building materials, wire and dried peas.

If Mrs. White had now and then betrayed the impatience, the annoyance,
the despair she had every reason to experience over my stupidity and
awkwardness, if at the “psychological moment” she had occasionally
spoken sharply, blown me up as did the teachers later at the public
school, the effect I am convinced would have been definite and salutary.
But hers was the haggard benevolence of the child-gardener in its most
indestructible form. All day long sweetness and light glared from her
eyes like pharos rays that faileth not because they’ve been wound up.
There was in the loving expression around her mouth something
appallingly inanimate, objective, detachable; one felt that it hadn’t
grown there, it had been put. It bore about the same relation to reality
as does the art of the confectioner. It lay against her teeth like the
thin white icing on a cake, and the hand that itched to box an ear
faltered in its flight pausing to caress a curl. It terrified me to
realize that the perishable, narrow strips of glazed, colored paper we
tried to weave into mats, and the dried peas with which I finally
builded better than I knew were, even as the hairs of our heads, all
numbered. This was for the purpose of teaching us neatness and
thrift--the husbanding of our resources. To crumple the former or
scatter the latter was, we knew, a crime, but Mrs. White’s method of
calling our attention to it was merely an insult to the intelligence.
The punishment was a deliberate misfit, an elaborately artificial
evasion of the point at issue. When, for instance, a dried pea would
slip through my clumsy fingers and rattle over the uncarpetted floor
with what sounded to me like the detonations of artillery, Mrs. White
never told me to wake up and be more careful of what I was doing.
Instead she would coo like a philandering pigeon and murmur:

“Why, laddie--what would the hungry little birds say if they were to see
_all_ that nice food wasted!” When panic-stricken at the number of my
crumpled failures I feloniously thrust them into my pocket, she would
fish them out with sweet amaze, exclaiming:

“Why, dearie--how did _these_ get here? Does any little girl or boy know
how _all_ these poor little strips of paper got into the very bottom of
Charlie’s dark pocket?” When, as once in so often happened, I would “all
alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless
cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate,” she never told me to
stop at once and behave myself; she would open her eyes to their
incredulous roundest, slightly drop her lower jaw, wonderingly scan
every face and then purr:

“Why, manny--what’s become of _all_ the smiles?”

There was invariably a reply to these inquiries and it was almost as
invariably furnished by one Adelaide Winkle, a dreadful child, but one
more sinned against, I now appreciate, than sinning. Forced to the limit
in the hothouse of the home, and deeply imbedded in the fertilizing
approval of Mrs. White, she was in all our gay little parterre the most
brilliant and the most noxious bloom. At the age of seven she already
had the executive air of a woman who has long presided over meetings.
She also played the piano, danced fancy dances, sang, recited, wore
three rings, a necklace and a red plush dress. I hated her, even more if
possible than I hated Mrs. White, for she not only kept an eye on my
shortcomings, she formulated them into ready words and by request smugly
proclaimed them. But it was the manner in which Mrs. White exploited her
before strangers that most enraged me. When visitors appeared, as they
often did, for a kindergarten under cultivation was a decided novelty,
Adelaide was called upon to execute her entire program from A to Izzard.
She sang, she elocuted “Bobolink, spink, spank, bobolink,” she played
her show piece (“Fairy Chimes”) on the-piano, she withdrew to an
adjoining room and tripped coquettishly in again, strewing, like the
springtime, an armful of tissue-paper roses, and last of all she gave
with experiments a short discourse on geography that brought tears to
the eyes of the most criminal. The experiments were evolved in sight of
the audience with the aid of a large wooden trayful of sand and a tin
dipperful of water. Under Adelaide’s precocious fingers these helpless
elements gave a presumably correct rendering of the Book of Genesis in
action, becoming at her will a continent, a river, a lake, an island, a
peninsula, a mountain. One downward thrust of an unerring thumb upon a
soggy peak and lo! the mountain was a volcano which, Adelaide always
ended the lecture by informing us, “Spouts when in a state of
ac-tiv-it-y, fire, smoke, glow-ing stones and mol-tennn law-vaw.”
Powerless to protest, and crushed beneath the weight of my own
incompetence, I have sat through the performance of this revolting rite
as often as three times in a single morning.

Revenge came slowly. It took nineteen years to arrive, but it arrived.
Unduly familiar in childhood with continents and dizzy heights,
Adelaide, as she matured, reached out, expanded, longed to become a
world-power. At the age of twenty-six, therefore, she eloped with a
French “count,” who not only failed to observe the convention of proving
to be a waiter or a hairdresser, he absolutely failed to be anything at
all and Adelaide ever since has had to support him.

At eleven o’clock we took a dejected orphan-asylum walk about the
suburban streets in two long lines led by the older pupils of the more
advanced school downstairs and followed by Mrs. White who, by constantly
running back and forth in order to satisfy herself that no one was
neglecting to “observe nature,” must have covered miles to our blocks.
How we all loathed nature! I loved animals and plants, clouds and rain,
snow and sunshine then as I do now, but “Nature” was something quite
different. I don’t believe we ever knew what it was and probably
connected the term in our minds not with the works of God themselves but
with the inescapable obligation of perpetually fussing about them. I
without doubt would have ended by becoming very fond of the White
Maria’s shaggy old ponies, but the labored pretense that we were all
dying to bring them a handful of oats for their Thanksgiving dinner and
a dozen other pretenses concerning them ended by preventing it. Birds
were really wonderful, heavenly creatures to watch and examine, but
weeks of prattle about the Christmas present (seeds, bread-crumbs and
more oats) of birds we had never seen, merely resulted in a band of
ornithological cynics. This fictitious passion for just
birds--disembodied, abstract birds, that Mrs. White entirely imagined
for us and widely advertised--was taken seriously by our families for
years. My grandmother fondly believed in it to the last and almost
embittered my young life by bequeathing in her will three beautiful
family portraits to my brothers, and to me the “nature lover,” the
unwilling product of Mrs. White’s, a set of Audubon!

On our return from the walk Mrs. White inspected our lunch-baskets,
confiscating what she considered injurious to our digestions and teeth
and allowing us to fortify ourselves against further blesséd play and
blesséd work with the remains. I have often wondered what actually
became of the cake and candy she daily took from us “for our own good,”
and I shouldn’t be surprised if she scattered it along the sidewalk or
threw it into passing carriages. It would have been a natural reaction
from her incessant official pother about “neatness and thrift,” but at
the time we all of course firmly believed that she put the loot away in
a pantry and that the whole White family lived on it for weeks.

Almost everything we learned at Mrs. White’s was sure to be incorrect to
the point of imbecility. For I don’t know how long after leaving there I
took it for granted that a thoughtful Creator had supplied dear Bossy
with a “dewlap” in order that she could wipe dry each mouthful of wet
grass before eating it.

“When Bossy goes out to the fields in the morning for her breakfast,
this long, soft fold you see here under her neck” (pointing to the
picture) “swings from side to side brushing away the damp and chilly
dew,” Mrs. White had told us, and I need scarcely dwell on the
disappointment and sense of injury I experienced when I subsequently
sought Bossy in her graminaceous lair and watched her dewlap quite
otherwise engaged. But even so, Mrs. White is no more, and anyhow I was
always a facile relenter. At times I have been even grateful for Mrs.
White’s. There was for instance the mystery of Mary Blake and the
mystery of the White Maria. I have often been grateful for them.

Mary Blake was an overgrown girl in the school downstairs. She was a
most pervasive lass--“a perfect romp.” We all knew her well. She
belonged to a family prominent in our growing town, and although my
family and hers were not intimate they no doubt would have thought they
were had they unexpectedly met for instance on the spiral stairway of 7
Rue Scribe. There were two sons and four daughters in Mary’s family and
none of them was named Jane. This is important. Years elapsed. I had
spent considerable time abroad, I had been occupied in growing up, in
going to school, in preparing for college. There were still four Blake
girls, but my interest in them was vague, collective. Then one day I
heard of the marriage of Jane Blake, which surprised me somewhat as
there had never been a Jane Blake. This led a short time later to my
expressing to Mrs. Blake a belated interest in Mary, at which Mrs. Blake
looked mystified for a moment and then said, “I think you must mean
Susan.” I didn’t mean Susan but I refrained from saying so, and since
then I have been haunted by the mystery of Mary Blake. Apparently there
is no Mary Blake and never was one, although in answer to my feverish
questionings several persons who were at Mrs. White’s with her have
assured me that they remember her perfectly. Every now and then I meet
Jane Blake and talk to her, wondering the while if she can be Mary. That
she is dark and Mary was blonde is perhaps negligible. Once I sat next
to Jane at dinner and when, after a pause in our conversation, I said,
“Come, now--aren’t you really your sister who died?” She answered coldly
that none of her sisters had ever died and immediately afterward refused
to let the servant help her to any more champagne.

The mystery of the White Maria I have never tried to solve. It is enough
to know that it was and to wonder if I shall ever again see anything so
lovely. The White Maria, as has been mentioned, was a large, square box
of black oilcloth. It’s inner surface, however, was white, soiled to a
neutral gray. On our outward journeys when I noticed this at all it was
only to feel the tragedy of life with a greater intensity. But on the
return.... To state in words what we saw when returning gives but little
idea of it. We were always tired, silent and a trifle sleepy when we
started for home, and we at once leaned back and quietly watched for It.
It often appeared but sometimes it refused to show itself for days, and
I then used to wonder if I had ever really seen it. The perpetual
fascination it had for us was a most complicated one, consisting as it
did of the mystery, the beauty, the unreality and the reality of the
thing itself, together with the fact that Mrs. White was somehow being
thwarted. The black canopy of the White Maria, in a word, sought to
imprison us, to impose an impenetrable barrier between us and the
outside world, but as we jogged along, the houses, the trees, the
horses, the wagons and the people we passed were reproduced in miniature
on one of the inside walls. The details were always clear enough to let
us know where we were; frequently they were perfect. The little
panorama, furthermore, was without color, which gave it an additional,
ghostly charm. I have never been hypnotized, but I think in staring at
this dreamlike, dissolving procession I used to be very near the
hypnotic state. At times when the White Maria drew up at our front door
I was asleep and it would take me half an hour or more to get back again
into my body--I can remember the sensation even if I can’t describe it.
The moving-picture shows of to-day seem to me like a crude and vulgar
attempt to recall and commercialize the age when we were mystics and had
visions.


THE END



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