“Hey, hey,” called the tall, nervous man with the fat, little wife,
waving his arms at the conductor for fear he would be carried past his
corner.
“It takes all sorts of people to make a world,” remarked the
sensible-looking woman beside me.
It is not the first time that I have been impressed with the philosophy
of those words. Who said them first, I wonder. “It takes all sorts of
people to make a world.” That is, if we only had one sort or even a
number of sorts we would have no world. To make a world there must be
all sorts, including the funniest folks we ever knew.
I looked from the sensible woman with her well-chosen clothes to
the woman across the way. This second woman was a sort of
dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go type, with a squirt of Cashmere Bouquet in
the center of her handkerchief. And nothing on that went with anything
else she had on. And a hat which one knew was a hat, because it was on
her head, otherwise it might have passed for almost anything.
The woman beside me wouldn’t have been caught dead looking like the
second woman. Yet she should have been thankful for her. For it is only
by contrast that the well-groomed look smart, and the overdressed look
fussy. Whether that is Einstein’s theory of relativity or not, I don’t
know. I only know that, “It takes all sorts of people to make a world.”
There we sit on parade in these side-seater cars, and what we are is
revealed so pitilessly to all who sit across from us. It is as though
Fate were making jokes of us and sits us down beside the antitheses of
ourselves. Such a one of Nature’s jokes I saw recently. They were
two men. The first was the sort whom one calls an “old boy.” A racy
individual, well-fed with a round front, an Elk, of course, a city man,
reeking of good cigars, and an appraising eye out for a good-looking
woman.
Beside him sat a man who had been studying birds in the Park. Berkeley
was written all over him. A thin, pure type. He was dressed in field
glasses and a bag full of green weeds and stout walking boots. There
was an ecstatic glint in his eye which meant that he had discovered a
long-billed, yellow-tailed Peruvian fly-catcher, “very rare in these
parts.”
So there they sat packed in so close and so terribly far apart, both so
necessary to the making of a world.
And as they sat a boy entered the car with a shoe-box, full of holes,
and out of the holes came a “peep” and then another. And the Berkeley
man lost his abstracted look and the man-about-town laid down his paper
and pretty soon the boy lifted the lid a bit and both men peeked in.