So Tracy went home to supper. The odors in that supper room seemed more
strenuous and more horrible than ever before, and he was happy in the
thought that he was so soon to be free from them again. When the supper
was over he hardly knew whether he had eaten any of it or not, and he
certainly hadn’t heard any of the conversation. His heart had been
dancing all the time, his thoughts had been faraway from these things,
and in the visions of his mind the sumptuous appointments of his
father’s castle had risen before him without rebuke. Even the plushed
flunkey, that walking symbol of a sham inequality, had not been
unpleasant to his dreaming view. After the meal Barrow said,
“Come with me. I’ll give you a jolly evening.”
“Very good. Where are you going?”
“To my club.”
“What club is that?”
“Mechanics’ Debating Club.”
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Tracy shuddered, slightly. He didn’t say anything about having visited
that place himself. Somehow he didn’t quite relish the memory of that
time. The sentiments which had made his former visit there so
enjoyable, and filled him with such enthusiasm, had undergone a gradual
change, and they had rotted away to such a degree that he couldn’t
contemplate another visit there with anything strongly resembling
delight. In fact he was a little ashamed to go; he didn’t want to go
there and find out by the rude impact of the thought of those people
upon his reorganized condition of mind, how sharp the change had been.
He would have preferred to stay away. He expected that now he should
hear nothing except sentiments which would be a reproach to him in his
changed mental attitude, and he rather wished he might be excused. And
yet he didn’t quite want to say that, he didn’t want to show how he did
feel, or show any disinclination to go, and so he forced himself to go
along with Barrow, privately purposing to take an early opportunity to
get away.
After the essayist of the evening had read his paper, the chairman
announced that the debate would now be upon the subject of the previous
meeting, “The American Press.” It saddened the backsliding disciple to
hear this announcement. It brought up too many reminiscences. He wished
he had happened upon some other subject. But the debate began, and he
sat still and listened.
In the course of the discussion one of the speakers—a blacksmith named
Tompkins arraigned all monarchs and all lords in the earth for their
cold selfishness in retaining their unearned dignities. He said that no
monarch and no son of a monarch, no lord and no son of a lord ought to
be able to look his fellow man in the face without shame. Shame for
consenting to keep his unearned titles, property, and privileges—at the
expense of other people; shame for consenting to remain, on any terms,
in dishonourable possession of these things, which represented bygone
robberies and wrongs inflicted upon the general people of the nation.
He said, “if there were a lord or the son of a lord here, I would like
to reason with him, and try to show him how unfair and how selfish his
position is. I would try to persuade him to relinquish it, take his
place among men on equal terms, earn the bread he eats, and hold of
slight value all deference paid him because of artificial position, all
reverence not the just due of his own personal merits.”
Tracy seemed to be listening to utterances of his own made in talks
with his radical friends in England. It was as if some eavesdropping
phonograph had treasured up his words and brought them across the
Atlantic to accuse him with them in the hour of his defection and
retreat. Every word spoken by this stranger seemed to leave a blister
on Tracy’s conscience, and by the time the speech was finished he felt
that he was all conscience and one blister. This man’s deep compassion
for the enslaved and oppressed millions in Europe who had to bear with
the contempt of that small class above them, throned upon shining
heights whose paths were shut against them, was the very thing he had
often uttered himself. The pity in this man’s voice and words was the
very twin of the pity that used to reside in his own heart and come
from his own lips when he thought of these oppressed peoples.
The homeward tramp was accomplished in brooding silence. It was a
silence most grateful to Tracy’s feelings. He wouldn’t have broken it
for anything; for he was ashamed of himself all the way through to his
spine. He kept saying to himself:
“How unanswerable it all is—how absolutely unanswerable! It is basely,
degradingly selfish to keep those unearned honors, and—and—oh, hang it,
nobody but a cur—”
“What an idiotic damned speech that Tompkins made!”
This outburst was from Barrow. It flooded Tracy’s demoralized soul with
waters of refreshment. These were the darlingest words the poor
vacillating young apostate had ever heard—for they whitewashed his
shame for him, and that is a good service to have when you can’t get
the best of all verdicts, self-acquittal.
“Come up to my room and smoke a pipe, Tracy.”
Tracy had been expecting this invitation, and had had his declination
all ready: but he was glad enough to accept, now. Was it possible that
a reasonable argument could be made against that man’s desolating
speech? He was burning to hear Barrow try it. He knew how to start him,
and keep him going: it was to seem to combat his positions—a process
effective with most people.
“What is it you object to in Tompkins’s speech, Barrow?”
“Oh, the leaving out of the factor of human nature; requiring another
man to do what you wouldn’t do yourself.”
“Do you mean—”
“Why here’s what I mean; it’s very simple. Tompkins is a blacksmith;
has a family; works for wages; and hard, too—fooling around won’t
furnish the bread. Suppose it should turn out that by the death of
somebody in England he is suddenly an earl—income, half a million
dollars a year. What would he do?”
“Well, I—I suppose he would have to decline to—”
“Man, he would grab it in a second!”
“Do you really think he would?”
“Think?—I don’t think anything about it, I know it.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he’s not a fool.”
“So you think that if he were a fool, he—”
“No, I don’t. Fool or _no_ fool, he would grab it. Anybody would.
Anybody that’s alive. And I’ve seen dead people that would get up and
go for it. I would myself.”
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This was balm, this was healing, this was rest and peace and comfort.
“But I thought you were opposed to nobilities.”
“Transmissible ones, yes. But that’s nothing. I’m opposed to
millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
“You’d take it?”
“I would leave the funeral of my dearest enemy to go and assume its
burdens and responsibilities.”
Tracy thought a while, then said:
“I don’t know that I quite get the bearings of your position. You say
you are opposed to hereditary nobilities, and yet if you had the chance
you would—”
“Take one? In a minute I would. And there isn’t a mechanic in that
entire club that wouldn’t. There isn’t a lawyer, doctor, editor,
author, tinker, loafer, railroad president, saint—land, there isn’t a
human _being_ in the United States that wouldn’t jump at the chance!”
“Except me,” said Tracy softly.
“Except you!” Barrow could hardly get the words out, his scorn so
choked him. And he couldn’t get any further than that form of words; it
seemed to dam his flow, utterly. He got up and came and glared upon
Tracy in a kind of outraged and unappeasable way, and said again,
“Except _you!_” He walked around him—inspecting him from one point of
view and then another, and relieving his soul now and then by exploding
that formula at him; “Except _you!_” Finally he slumped down into his
chair with the air of one who gives it up, and said:
“He’s straining his viscera and he’s breaking his heart trying to get
some low-down job that a good dog wouldn’t have, and yet wants to let
on that if he had a chance to scoop an earldom he wouldn’t do it.
Tracy, don’t put this kind of a strain on me. Lately I’m not as strong
as I was.”
“Well, I wasn’t meaning to put—a strain on you, Barrow, I was only
meaning to intimate that if an earldom ever does fall in my way—”
“There—I wouldn’t give myself any worry about _that_, if I was you. And
besides, I can settle what you would do. Are you any different from
me?”
“Well—no.”
“Are you any better than me?”
“O,—er—why, certainly not.”
“Are you as _good?_ Come!”
“Indeed, I—the fact is you take me so suddenly—”
“Suddenly? What is there sudden about it? It isn’t a difficult question
is it? Or doubtful? Just measure us on the only fair lines—the lines of
merit—and of course you’ll admit that a journeyman chairmaker that
earns his twenty dollars a week, and has had the good and genuine
culture of contact with men, and care, and hardship, and failure, and
success, and downs and ups and ups and downs, is just a trifle the
superior of a young fellow like you, who doesn’t know how to do
anything that’s valuable, can’t earn his living in any secure and
steady way, hasn’t had any experience of life and its seriousness,
hasn’t any culture but the artificial culture of books, which adorns
but doesn’t really educate—come! if _I_ wouldn’t scorn an earldom, what
the devil right have _you_ to do it!”
Tracy dissembled his joy, though he wanted to thank the chair-maker for
that last remark. Presently a thought struck him, and he spoke up
briskly and said:
“But look here, I really can’t quite get the hang of your notions—your
principles, if they are principles. You are inconsistent. You are
opposed to aristocracies, yet you’d take an earldom if you could. Am I
to understand that you don’t blame an earl for being and remaining an
earl?”
“I certainly don’t.”
“And you wouldn’t blame Tompkins, or yourself, or me, or anybody, for
accepting an earldom if it was offered?”
“Indeed I wouldn’t.”
“Well, then, whom _would_ you blame?”
“The whole nation—any bulk and mass of population anywhere, in any
country, that will put up with the infamy, the outrage, the insult of a
hereditary aristocracy which _they_ can’t enter—and on absolutely free
and equal terms.”
“Come, aren’t you beclouding yourself with distinctions that are not
differences?”
“Indeed I am not. I am entirely clear-headed about this thing. If I
could extirpate an aristocratic system by declining its honors, _then_
I should be a rascal to accept them. And if enough of the mass would
join me to make the extirpation possible, _then_ I should be a rascal
to do otherwise than help in the attempt.”
“I believe I understand—yes, I think I get the idea. You have no blame
for the lucky few who naturally decline to vacate the pleasant nest
they were born into, you only despise the all-powerful and stupid mass
of the nation for allowing the nest to exist.”
“That’s it, that’s it! You _can_ get a simple thing through your head
if you work at it long enough.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. And I’ll give you some sound advice: when you go
back; if you find your nation up and ready to abolish that hoary
affront, lend a hand; but if that isn’t the state of things and you get
a chance at an earldom, don’t you be a fool—you take it.”
Tracy responded with earnestness and enthusiasm:
“As I live, I’ll do it!”
Barrow laughed.
“I never saw such a fellow. I begin to think you’ve got a good deal of
imagination. With you, the idlest fancy freezes into a reality at a
breath. Why, you looked, then, as if it wouldn’t astonish you if you
did tumble into an earldom.”
Tracy blushed. Barrow added: “Earldom! Oh, yes, take it, if it offers;
but meantime we’ll go on looking around, in a modest way, and if you
get a chance to superintend a sausage-stuffer at six or eight dollars a
week, you just trade off the earldom for a last year’s almanac and
stick to the sausage-stuffing.”