In my simple world a cablegram is so rare that I should treasure the
mere envelope. I should not be likely to resurrect it. It would be
buried in a bureau, like a political badge or a cigar-cutter--but there
is a silly magpie in every man, and a cable I would preserve. To discuss
cablegrams or even cut-rate wireless, however, would be an affectation.
These are the orchids of communication. It is the ordinary telegram I
sing.
There was a magnificence about a quick communication in the days before
the Western Union. Horsemen went galloping roughshod through scattering
villages. It was quite in order for a panting messenger to rush in, make
his special delivery, and drop dead. This has ceased to be his custom.
In Mr. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class there is one omission. He
neglected to deal with that great adept in leisure, the messenger-boy.
"Messenger-boy" is a misnomer. He is either a puling infant or a tough,
exceedingly truculent little ogre of uncertain age and habit. His life
is consecrated. He cares for nothing except to disprove the axiom that a
straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Foreseeing
this cult of the messenger service, the designers of the modern American
city abandoned all considerations of beauty, mystery, and suggestion in
an heroic effort to circumvent the boy in blue. But the boy in blue
cannot be beaten. By what art he is selected I know not. Whether he is
attributable to environment or heredity I dare not guess. But with a
possible inferiority to his rival, the coat-room boy, and, of course,
nature's paradox the crab, he is supreme.
It is not a telegram in its last stages that has magic. Much better for
the purposes of drama to have Cleopatra receive a breathless minion, not
a laconic imp with a receipt to be signed. Yet a telegram has magic. If
you are hardened you do not register. It is the fresh who have the
thrill. But no one is totally superior to telegrams. Be you ever so
inured, there is one telegram, _the_ telegram, which will find your
core.
Sometimes at a hotel-desk I stand aside while an important person,
usually a man but occasionally a woman, gets a handful of mail without
any sign of curiosity, and goes to the elevator without even sorting out
the wires. Such persons are marked. They are in public life. It is
pardonable. There must be public men and public women. I should not ask
any one to give up his career for the peculiar ecstasies of the
telegram. But no one can deny that these persons have parted with an
essence of their being. What if I find a solitary notice? "It is under
your door." I bolt for the elevator, thrilled, alive.
It may be suggested that my over-laden predecessors are not in public
life; that they are very distinguished, very wealthy personages,
receiving private advices as to their stocks, their spouses, their
children, their wine-bin, their plumbing, or any other of their
responsibilities, accessories, possessions. With every deference I
answer that you are mistaken. Unless their riches are in a stocking,
these are the custodians of tangible goods and chattels. Their title may
be secure, but not their peace of mind. Whatever they wish, they are
obliged to administrate. Whoever their attorney, the law of gravitation
keeps pulling, pulling at their chandeliers. And so in some degree they
are connected with, open to, shared by, innumerable people. Without
necessarily being popular, they are in the center of populace. They have
to meet, if only to repel, demands. I do not blame them for thus being
public characters. It is often against their desires. But being called
upon to convert a part of their souls into a reception-room, a place
where people can be decently bowed out as well as in, it follows that
they give up some of their ecstatic privacy in order to retain the rest.
This I do not decry. For certain good and valuable considerations one
might be induced to barter some of one's own choice stock of privacy,
but for myself I should insist on retaining enough to keep up my
interest in telegrams. To be so beset by Things as to be dogged by
urgent brokers and punctilious butlers, no.
"There's a telegram upstairs for you, sir." "A telegram? How long has it
been here?" "It came about half an hour ago." "Ah, thank you.... No,
never mind, I'm going upstairs." What may not this sort of banality
precede? Perhaps another banality, in ink. But not always. A telegram is
an arrow that is aimed to fly straight and drive deep. Whether from
friend or rival, whether verdict or appeal, it may lodge where the heart
is, and stay. From an iron-nerved ticker the message has come, singing
enigmatically across the country. But there is a path that leaps out of
the dingy office to countless court-rooms, business buildings, homes,
hospitals. That office is truly a ganglion from which piercing
nerve-fibers curve into the last crevices of human lives. When you enter
it to send a telegram it may depress you. You submit your confidence
across a public counter. But what does it matter to a creature glazed by
routine? He enumerates your words backwards, contemptuous of their
meaning. To him a word is not a bullet--just an inert little lump of
lead.
Some messages come with a force not realizable. Tragedy dawns slowly.
The mind envisages, not apprehending. And then, for all the customary
world outside, one is penned in one's trouble alone. One remembers those
sailors who were imprisoned in a vessel on fire in the Hudson. Cut off
from escape, red-hot iron plates between them and the assuaging waters
on every side, they could see the free, could cry out to them, could
almost touch hands. But they had met their fate. It is strange that by a
slip of paper one may meet one's own. There are countries to-day where
the very word _telegram_ must threaten like a poisoned spear. And such
wounds as are inflicted in curt official words time is itself often
powerless to heal. As some see it, dread in suspense is worse than
dreadful certainty. But there are shocks which are irreparable. It is
cruel to break those shocks, crueler to deliver them.
All urgency is not ominous. If, like a religion, the telegram attends on
death, it attends no less eagerly on love and birth. "A boy arrived this
morning. Father and child doing well"--this is more frequently the tenor
of the wire. And the wire may be the rapier of comedy. Do you remember
Bernard Shaw's rebuff to Lady Randolph Churchill for asking him to
dinner? He had the vegetarian view of eating his "fellow-creatures." He
chided her for inviting a person of "my well-known habits." "Know
nothing of your habits," came the blithe retort, "hope they're better
than your manners."
The art of the telegram is threatened. Once we struggled to put our all
in ten words--simple, at least, if not sensuous and passionate. Now the
day-letter and night-letter lead us into garrulity. No transition from
Greek to Byzantine could be worse than this. We should resist it. The
time will doubtless come when our descendants will recall us as austere
and frugal in our use of the telegram. But we should preserve this sign
of our Spartan manhood. Let us defer the softness and effeminacy of
long, cheap telegrams. Let us remain primitive, virginal, terse.