spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as first-class
passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for
Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, every soul
in his first-class compartment had telegraphed ahead, and when they
arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran
ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so
that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream,
and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for
his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and
civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble servant of the
Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag.
At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in
European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not,
for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a
French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an
augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a
first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you
must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night
long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in
France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they
may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company
cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal
land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the
first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars;
or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers?
No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for
decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third
the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and
muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers
behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to
round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow
gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but
so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you
could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it
privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money
cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars
to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be
disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even
second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in
Germany, and in Italy--poor, dear Italy!--they are worse still. That is
because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or
because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have
dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear
the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will
not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad
as heart could wish--the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the
memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one
still went by diligence or _vettura_. The only absolutely _good_
railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the
Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any
class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained
perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in
simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner
than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant
sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from
the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark
antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to
Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express--
"But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than
last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend
exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:
Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering
afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of
souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But
starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since
leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is
truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for
our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty
minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was
the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been
left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our
train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and
bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there
are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when
one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as
one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton
kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's
chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at
home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and
all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops.
But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in
the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which
the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be
caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the
spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's
steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as
if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations
in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only
casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it
did pitch about a bit, sir.
No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of
your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the
comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the
happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer
train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the
English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie
with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft
endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of
the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for
his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn,
where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till it is put back
into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows, with their
high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like
receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the English
cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and assemblies of the
past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something
of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper
classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent over
trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors
of flowers that withered a hundred years ago.
But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a
condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle pair
with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To
such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not
put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the
vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority
who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the
heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point
of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native
who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of
trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line
of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn
from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep
our hunger for the table d'hote of the dining-car; when we buy a room in
the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our ticket; when
we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler
steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or
thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the
saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit
for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter
away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing
for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of
public land in northwestern Canada.
There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely own,
has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life for
the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains
between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the
Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the
fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our
first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class
German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches
at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for
whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer
ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class
vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and
would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for
them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon
not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of
European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to
the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would
now want to take a bicycle, or even a "bicycle built for two." These
things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate
in the luxuries, the splendors of life. Soon the last word in them takes
on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them "with sick and
scornful looks averse," and listens for the
"airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."
Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be
the next word--the word that follows the last, the woman's word.
XVI
QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS
They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might
be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a
bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man
feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of
the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was
holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious
not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had
been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man
could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who
pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their
native independence to something like the condition of those pauper
wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image
of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the
Government's dole of beef-cattle.
The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his
thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the
squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've
been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the
'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
of man?"
[Illustration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK]
"I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other
friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part
of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began
to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and
the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and
remembered those in bonds as bound with them."
"Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb
creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century.
There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds,
didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And
several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good
deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a
pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They
were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have
come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of
broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman, before the extension of
the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly
unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian."
"I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the second friend mused
aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very
likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. "They had so
many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste
something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in
our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not
to
'enter on my list of friends the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,'
and
'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'"
"Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to
their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last
generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see that
the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be
proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are
always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good."
"What do you mean," the second of the friends demanded, "by coming back
to their ground?"
"Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped
at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they
were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as
ignore Him----"
"I see," the second answered, sadly. "But aren't you throwing up the
sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a
tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend,
'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And
inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous
power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age
of belief is rather certain to follow."
"Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should
be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other
reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good
to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same
barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed.
But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still
care to do my duty? And I certainly always do."
"What, always?"
"Well, nearly always."
The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the
Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any
longer without the risk of not being followed."
The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went
out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."
"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is
anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from
'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'
it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined
as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology."
"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything
else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D.
C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both
owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of
another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she
stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have
wished to do and tried to do.'"
The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first
said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or
don't try hard enough."
The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength;
wickedness is weakness."
"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many
cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."
"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"
"Well, your Stoics--"
"_My_ Stoics?"
"_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure
coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and
let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a
duty coming they stepped out and did it."
"It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?"
"That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But
perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't
have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in
some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented
the Christian ideal of duty."
"And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity
in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear
of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the
beginning."
The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go
so far as that."
The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't
know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed
together again.
The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock
of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came
toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady,
greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last
where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with
his paws.
"No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the
way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues.
You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any."
"There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the
boat-house with a basketful."
"But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel
all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get.
That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call
character-building. Get along!"
The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a
moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the
feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.
"I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity
included kindness to animals."
"I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the
peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my
natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He
seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged."
The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered
foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they
sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent
so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had
to ask, "Where were we?"
"Cultivating force of character in squirrels."
"I thought we had got by that."
"Then we had come round to ourselves again."
"Something like that," the first friend reluctantly allowed.
"What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that's
what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves."
"Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn't pamper their egotism
in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our
duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals,
if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study
ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear
down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the
health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to
overgrow."
"That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other ways
for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should
feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate
development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury
incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this
beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?"
"Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect,
a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man
on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote
for him."
"But you voted for him?"
The first friend nodded.
"Which man was it?"
"What's the use? He was beaten--
'That is all you know or need to know.'"
"Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him," the
second friend mused. "How patient the Creator must be with the result of
His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we
are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate
Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does
not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate
sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's enough to make one go
in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice
which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?"
"And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with
other interests and obligations?"
"Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice
does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way."
"And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we
promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the
slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson
said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a
vivid thought suddenly occurs, "how it would work if one went and did
exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?"
"That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or,
rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered."
"You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?"
"No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to
hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. 'Thou
shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false
witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and
thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown
off or put on, as the case may be."
"How very hideous!" the second friend exclaimed. "It's like an emanation
from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been abolished."
"And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice
of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what
the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil,
we know what to do with them."
"And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the
same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?"