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THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND
The Twist in the Gulf Stream
by
L. P. GRATACAP
Author of
“The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars,”
“A Woman of the Ice Age”
New York
Brentano’S
1908
Copyright, 1908, by Brentano’s
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909 5
II. THE LECTURE 38
III. BALTIMORE, MAY 29, 1909 66
IV. GETTYSBURG, MAY 30, 1909 102
V. THE EVICTION OF SCOTLAND 131
VI. THE TERROR OF IT 170
VII. IN LONDON, FEBRUARY, 1910 195
VIII. THE EVACUATION 231
IX. THE SPECTACLE 274
X. ADDENDUM 298
THE EVACUATION OF ENGLAND
CHAPTER I.
IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909.
Alexander Leacraft was regarding with as much interest as his
constitutional lassitude permitted, the progress of a distinctly
audible altercation on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D. C. The
disputants had not felt it necessary, under the relaxing influences
of a premature spring, to interpose any screen of secrecy, such as a
less exposed position, or subdued voices, between themselves and the
news-mongering (and hungering, let it be added) proletariat of our
nation’s capital.
A small crowd, composed of the singular human compound always
pervasive and never to be avoided in Washington, which, in that centre
of political sensations, is made up of street loafers, accidental
tourists, perambulating babies, “niggers,” and presumptive statesmen,
enclosed this “argument”; and from his elevated station, within the
front parlor of the McKinley, Mr. Leacraft was afforded a very
excellent view of and an equally distinct hearing of the disagreement
and its principals.
The two disputants were themselves sufficiently contrasted in
appearance to have allured the casual passer-by to observe their
contrasted methods in debate. One--the taller--was a thin, angular
man with unnaturally long arms, a peculiar swaying habit of body, an
elongated visage, terminating in a short, stubby growth of whiskers,
and a sharp, crackling kind of voice, with unmistakable nasal faults.
He seemed to be a southern man modified by a few imitations of the
northern type.
He was addressing a bulky, rather disdainful man in a checquered
suit of clothes, who had advanced the season’s fashion by assuming a
straw hat, and whose rosy face, broad and typical features, and yet
not plethoric expansion of body, strong and stalwart frame betokened
much animal force, and reserved power of action. He might have been a
northern man. As Alexander Leacraft looked at them, it was the southern
man who was speaking, and his uplifted arm, at regular intervals, rose
and fell, as the palms of both hands met in a cadence of corroborative
whacks. It may interest the reader to know that the particular time of
this particular incident was April, 1909.
“Let me tell you this, Mr. Tompkins,” drawled the southerner with
loquacious ease, the crackle and sharpness of his intonation appearing
as his excitement increased, “the necessities of our states demand
the Canal at whatever cost. It will be the avenue for an export trade
to the east, which will convert our stored powers of production into
gold, and it will react upon the whole country north and south in a way
that will make all previous prosperity look like nothing. Our cotton
mills have grown, our mineral resources have been developed; Georgia
and Alabama are to-day competing with your shaft furnaces and steel
mills for the trade of the railroads, and builders; and for that matter
we are building ourselves. We can support a population ten times all
we have to-day; our resources have been just broached, but exhaustion
is a thousand years away. Our rival has been Cuba. She has robbed us
of trade; she has put our sugar plantations out of business; even
her iron, which I will admit is superior in quality, has scaled our
profits on raw ingots, but she can’t hold us down on cotton. Open up
this canal, and we will gather the riches of the Orient; our ships will
fill it with unbroken processions, and in the train of that commerce
in cotton, every section of the Union will furnish its contribution to
swell the argosies of trade. I tell you sir” and the excited speaker,
conscious of an admiring sympathy in the crowd around him, raised his
voice into a musical shout, in which the crackle was quite lost, “the
commerce, the mercantile integrity of these United States will be
restored, and American bottoms for American goods will be no longer a
vain aspiration; it will be a realized dream, an actual fact.”
He paused, as if the projectile force of his words had deprived him of
breath, and then at the momentary opportunity Mr. Tompkins, in a clear
and metallic voice, with a punctuative force of occasional hesitation,
undertook his friend’s refutation.
“I’m not contesting the fact, Mr. Snowden,” he said, “that the opening
of the Canal means a good deal to your portion of the country. Does it
mean as much to the rest of the country, and does it mean so much to
you for a long time. You mention cotton. Do you know that the cotton
cultivation of India and Egypt has increased enormously, and that it
is grown with cheaper labor than you can command. You have made the
negro acquainted with his value. You have raised his expectations, you
have thrust him into a hundred avenues of occupation and every one of
his new avocations adds a shilling a day to the worth per man of the
remainder, who stick to field work and cultivate your cotton fields.
The cotton of Egypt and the cotton of India, I mean its manufactured
forms, will go through that canal to Asia and Japan and Polynesia just
as surely as yours will, and it’ll go cheaper. It is poorer cotton, I
know, but that will not effect the result.
“That isn’t all. Brazil and the Argentine Republic are growing cotton,
and they are doing well at it. Europe will take the raw stuff from them
and keep up her present predominance in that market while she turns
their cotton bolls into satinettes and ginghams for the almond-eyes
of Asia. The canal, breaking down a barrier of separation between the
two oceans, turns loose into the Pacific the whole frenzied, greedy
and capable cohorts of European manufacture. It will make a common
highway for Europe, and our unbuilt clippers and tramp steamers will
stay unbuilt, or unused, to rot on their ways in the shipyards. The
west coast will be sidetracked, and our trunk railroads will cut down
their schedules and their dividends at the same time. Roosevelt put
this canal through, and your southern votes helped to elect him against
his protest, but brought to it by an overwhelming public sentiment that
applauded his power to chain or sterilize trusts; and he promised last
March to your southern rooters, at his inauguration, to see that before
his present new term was over, before 1913, the canal would be opened,
and perhaps he’ll make good.
“You southerners elected Roosevelt, and you have killed the Democratic
party. The new powers of growth of that party were most likely to
develop among you, but you shoved aside the proffered offer of
political supremacy, because you too had surrendered to the idols
of Mammon, and were willing to sell your birth-right for a mess of
pottage. Well! You’ve got the canal and you’ve got Roosevelt, and
let me tell you Mr. Snowden,” and the restrained, almost nonchalant
demeanor of Mr. Tompkins became suddenly charged with electric
earnestness, “you’ll get Hell, too.”
This admonitory expletive, uttered with a force that seemed to impart
to it a physical objectivity, caused the increasing circle of auditors
to retreat sensibly, and, without more consideration, giving a glance
of mute scorn at the flushed face of the southerner, the speaker
pressed his way through the little crowd, which, after a moment’s
suspension of judgment, seemed reluctant to let him escape, and
disappeared.
His opponent was distinctly chagrined. The wrinkled lines about his
peculiarly pleasant eyes, indicated his strained attention, and were
not altogether unrelated to a sudden muscular movement in his clenched
hands. His hopes, however, for some sort of forensic gratification
might have been sensibly raised as he discovered himself the sole
occupant of the small vacant spot on the side walk, walled in by
a human investiture, the first line of which was made up of two
pickaninnies, three newsboys, one rueful cur and some impromptu mothers
who had taken the family babies out for air and recreation, but,
overcome by the indigenous love of debate, had forgotten their mission,
and held their charges in various attitudes of somnolence or furtive
rebellion against the hedge of men behind them.
It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his
feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly
emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in
his favor.
Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal
dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to
appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the
audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not,
however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with
a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised
above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy
and the Canal.”
In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover,
if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his
enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive
deities of the epics, vanished.
There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were
quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion
then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into
little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of
business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties
interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle,
on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten
Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.
Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this
representative public _Althing_, and felt his exasperating torpor so
much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping
out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street,
and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the
various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally
animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of
objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the
northern and southern disputants.
The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own
expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president
of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of
William McKinley, who was assassinated in November, 1901, and with
whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected
in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of
a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The
campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most
extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor,
the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling
candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own
repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn
promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and
not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some
observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although
practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no
subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual
election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among
the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it
was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or
reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been
begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance
devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination
to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that
cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes on his part,
and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of
volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent
contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the
Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was
due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the
councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted,
endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority
sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who
were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in
the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers,
and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of
social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that
a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the
reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with
him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and
successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The
return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the
part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to
the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a
conflict of classes.
A radical man, possibly a demagogue, would be placed in opposition to
the choice of the plutocracy. His election was also not improbable.
The powers of socialism, enormously strengthened by the adhesion of an
educated class, might be triumphant, and the succeeding steps in social
revolution would bring chaos.
This dilemma was so pertinaciously displayed, so forcibly accentuated,
that Roosevelt had yielded at the last moment, not insensibly affected
(as what spirited man would not be) by the magnificent assemblies (mass
meetings) throughout the country, tumultuously vociferating the call of
the people.
The southern people, with characteristic warmth, and through the
suddenly consummated attachment of Senator Tillman to Roosevelt, and
under the coercion of Senator Bailey’s logic and power of argumentative
persuasion, had swelled the tide of popular approval. Roosevelt
became an idol--his election was almost unanimous, a handful only of
contestants having gathered in a kind of moral protest around Governor
Hughes as a rival candidate. Governor Hughes’ nomination was achieved
through a combination of opposite political interests, as anomalous as
that which chose Roosevelt, and having precisely the same quality of
coherence.
It represented dissatisfied Republicans, an alienable remnant of
Democrats, and had drawn into it a few sporadic political elements that
barely sufficed to give it numerical significance. W. J. Bryan, who
would have been otherwise a candidate himself, had endorsed Roosevelt,
furnishing thereby an example of political abnegation which had
enormously increased his popularity, and assured him the nomination
of Nationalists, as the new fusionists were called, in 1913. This was
also deemed a wise forethought, as a provision against the possible
success of the rampant Hearstites. Hearst would have been the socialist
candidate in the last campaign, had not the principal himself, on
hearing of Roosevelt’s nomination, sapiently withdrawn, fearing defeat,
which would have too seriously discredited him in the next national
struggle.
The Prohibitionists had, by an act of virtual self-repudiation, thrown
their not inconsiderable vote to Roosevelt. The Socialists were the
only important opponents of his election, and their surprising record
made the prophetic warnings, which had convinced Roosevelt of the
necessity of his candidacy, appear like a veritable intervention of
Providence, at least this was the language commonly used with reference
to it.
Roosevelt had displayed remarkable self-control and consistent gravity,
and had even, in a very extraordinary address at his inauguration,
deprecated the unanimity of his election. He deplored the precarious
dilemma of a country which found itself forced to do violence to its
traditions in order to escape an imagined danger.
Almost synchronous with his re-election, the announcement had been made
that the Panama Canal, upon which the President in his former term, had
exerted the utmost pressure of his inexhaustible enthusiasm, energy
and exhortation, was advancing very rapidly, engineering difficulties
unexpectedly had vanished, a system of extreme precision in the
control of the work, itself largely the device of the President, had
facilitated the entire operation, and a promise of still more rapid
progress was made.
This promise had produced a storm of southern enthusiasm. The south,
completely restored in its financial autonomy, had been growing richer
and richer, and their public men had not hesitated to paint, in the
brightest colors, the further expansion of their prosperity with the
opening of this avenue of commerce between the oceans, assuring its
people the markets of Asia, and their rapid promotion to the political,
social and financial primacy in the United States.
Northern capitalists had not been incredulous to these predictions, and
in a group of railroad magnates, whose interests seemed now seriously
threatened, a sullen resentment was maintained against Roosevelt,
in which the unmistakable notes of designs almost criminal had been
detected. Mr. Tompkins, whose altercation with the southerner had led
Leacraft into this voyage of interpellation and discovery, was a paid
agent, in the employ of this cabal.
Alexander Leacraft was an Englishman, inheriting an English temperament
without English prejudices; he was fortunately free from the worst
faults of that insular hesitancy which imparts the curious impression
of timidity, and had advanced far enough in cosmopolitan observation to
get rid of the queerness of provincial ignorance. He was indeed a sane
and attractive man, and provided by nature with a forcible physique,
a good face, and a really fascinating proclivity to make the best of
things, admire his companions, and bend unremittingly to the pressure
of his environment.
He had not escaped the dangers incident to youth, and his heart had
become attached to a lady of Baltimore--one of the undeviatingly arch
and winning American girls--to whom he had been introduced by her
brother, a commercial correspondent.
The nature of his affairs--he was the secretary of an English company
which operated some copper mines in Arizona and Canada--had made him a
frequent visitor to the shores of the New World, and he had not been
unwilling to express his hope that the United States would become his
final home. These sentiments were quite honest, though it might have
elicited the cynical observation that the capture of his affections by
Miss Garrett had done more to weaken his loyalty to the crown than
any dispassionate admiration of a Republican form of government. But
the imputation would have been malicious. Leacraft did feel an earnest
admiration for the American people, and yielded a genial acquiescence
to the claims of popular suffrage. His connexion with America had been
fortunate, and he had come in contact with men and women whose natures
by endowment, and whose manners and habits, conversation and tastes, by
inheritance and cultivation, were elevating and engaging--men and women
whose nobility of sympathy with all things human was reflected in an
art of living not only always decorous and refined, but guided, too, by
the principles of urbanity and justice.
The Garretts of Baltimore were a widely connected, and in numbers an
imposing social element, and none of the various daughters of light
and loveliness who bore that name more merited consideration in the
eyes of manly youth than the capricious, captivating and elusive Sally.
Her graces of manner were not less delightful than her conversation
was spirited and roguish, and her assumption of a demure simplicity
had often driven Alexander Leacraft to the limits of his English
matter-of-fact credulity in explaining to her the relations of the King
to Parliament, or the municipal acreage of the old City of London.
All of which information this very well read and much travelled
young woman, as might be expected, was possessed of, but just for the
purposes of her feminine and cruel fancy, not too well disposed towards
her patient suitor, disingenuously concealed. Sally really enjoyed
the painstaking gravity with which the young Englishman explained the
eternal principles of English rule, and the never-to-be-forgotten
superiorities of London.
Mr. Leacraft had met Sally under circumstances the most provocative of
admiration. In her own home; where the sincerity of hospitality and the
urgency of an American’s deference to the best instincts of courtesy,
did not altogether mitigate her coquetry and mirthful affectations,
and even, by the faintest gloss of repression, made them the more
delicious. The Englishman was bewitched, and his infatuation declared
itself so plainly that Sally--whose heart was quite untouched by his
distress--tried the resources of her ingenuity to avoid meeting him
alone.
Leacraft, on the morrow of the day, whose close had so deeply inducted
him into a study of American politics, expected to make a deferred
visit to the Garretts at Baltimore, and he had quite firmly resolved
that he would reveal his desperate extremity to Sally, and plead his
best to show her how empty life would be to him without her, and that
it would be shockingly obdurate in her to decline to regard him as the
goal of her marital ambitions.
He felt some fear of her revolting gayety, and his fears were not
assuaged by the remembrance of any particular occasion when her conduct
towards him permitted him to indulge in hopes. Still the thing must
be done. His unrest must be quieted. To know the worst was better
than this feverish anxiety of doubt. And besides, with a prudence not
altogether British, he thought he could endure repulse better now than
later, and in the event of that evil alternative, he could cast about
him for alleviating resources which might be more easily found now,
than if he waited longer, and if he continued to expose himself to the
perilous encounter of her eyes, and the tantalizing caresses of her wit.
When Leacraft returned to the hotel, he found a letter waiting for him,
which he saw at once was from his friend, Ned Garrett. He tore it open
and discovered, to his considerable discomfiture, that it postponed the
event of his momentous proposal.
It read:
Dear Leacraft:
Aunt Sophia is very sick at Litchfield, Conn. Mother and Sally have
gone on. Can you put off your visit until May, say the 28th? You will
find it dull here without Sally and Mother. I shall go with them as
far as New York. We all intend, if Aunt Sophy concludes to remain in
this bright world a little longer, and the Dr. endorses her good
intentions, to visit Gettysburg on Memorial Day (Decoration old style).
The President will deliver a memorial oration. Come with us and see the
great battlefield, which is a wonderful monument to the nation’s dead,
a beautiful picture itself, and probably you will see and hear things
worth remembering besides. Write to the house, and I will get your
letter when I return in two weeks. But do come.
Yours sincerely,
Edward T. Garrett.
Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to
the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before,
and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to
have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip
distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected
interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily
accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all
the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little
sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened
by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the
little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce
conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory.
He stepped to the window. The view from it was always pleasing, at
this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the
vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed
an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington
monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming
skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was
always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but
fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations
of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the
still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as
the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again
discernible as a dull and stony pile.
That evening Leacraft felt particularly restless and detached. He
felt the need of entertainment, and of entertainment of a sort that
would fix his faculty of thought, awaken speculation, and immerse him
in reasonings and the intricacies of argument. The few theatrical
bills presented no attractions more weighty than a clever comedian
in a musical farce, a sensational melodrama (“much better,” said
Leacraft), and vaudeville. Music was shunned; there was nothing quite
serious offered, and then music has so many painful influences on the
apprehensive mind, and is turned to such cruel uses in the economy of
nature, for making uneasy lovers more agitated. No! he didn’t wish
music. Baffled for an instant, he concluded to walk. Muscular exercise,
mere translation on one’s legs, is a marvellous remedy for the
diabolical blues, and then it can never be told what the Unseen holds
for you, if you only go out to meet It in the streets, and amongst
other people, hunting, perhaps, like yourself, diversion from their own
inscrutable megrims. It--the Unseen--may quite divertingly mix you up
in a comedy or a tragedy, or consolingly give you a glimpse of other
human miseries immeasurably greater than your own.
So walk it was. He had hardly covered two blocks towards the White
House, when he met Dr. M--, the most amiable and accomplished editor
of the National Museum, and one of those multi-facetted gentlemen
who respond to every scientific thrill around them, and hold in the
myriad piled up cells of their cerebral cortex the knowledge, selected,
labelled and accessible, of the world. Leacraft knew the Doctor; had
indeed consulted him upon a chemical reaction, in the elimination of
cadmium from zinc. The Doctor, with genial fervor, grasped his hand,
persuasively put his own disengaged hand on Leacraft’s back, and
dexterously turned him around with the observation: “You are going the
wrong way. Binn reads a paper to-night before the Geographical Society,
over at the Museum, on a live subject. It’s about earthquakes and
the Panama Canal. The matter has a good deal of present interest. The
President may be there. It’s worth your while. Come along.”
Leacraft jumped with pleasure, if an Englishman may be said ever
to respond so animatedly to a welcome alternative. This met his
requirements exactly. He would, in these surroundings and under the
stimulation of an intellectual effort, in listening to a lecture
which he hoped might possess literary merit as well, quite forget his
immediate solicitudes.
“It is curious,” resumed Dr. M--, as they directed their steps
towards the umbrageous solitudes of the Reservation, “how inevitably
many practical questions demand an answer at the hand of geology or
physiography, which are however never consulted, and disaster follows.
In the spring of 1906 a destructive outbreak of Vesuvius occurred,
and much of the ensuing loss of life might have been prevented by
reliance upon scientific warnings. Indeed, the loss of life on this
last occasion of the volcano’s activity was greatly reduced through
the premonitions of its approach by delicate instruments. For that
matter, from the beginning, the vulcanologist, at least as soon as
such a being was a more or less completed phenomenon in our scientific
life, would have pointed out the considerable risk of living on the
flanks of that querulous protuberance. But it can hardly be expected,
I suppose, that large populations can effect a change in habitation as
long as the dangers that threaten them occur at long intervals, and the
human fatality of unreasoning trust in luck remains unchanged. Take
for instance the case of the village of Torre del Greco, four and a
half miles from the foot of Vesuvius. It has been overwhelmed seventeen
times, but the inhabitants, the survivors, return after each extinction
to renew their futile invocations for another chance.”
“I suppose,” queried Leacraft, “that we are to be informed to-night
whether the Canal from the scientific point of view is a safe
investment?”
“Perhaps,” doubtfully returned the doctor. “You see, it’s this way. In
the spring of the year that saw the outpouring of lava that invaded
the villages of southern Italy, San Francisco suffered from a serious
earthquake that ruptured the public structures of the city, dislocated
miles of railroad tracks, ruined the beautiful Stanford University,
shook out the fronts of buildings, and precipitated a fire that all
but wiped out the Queen City of the Pacific coast. It has been feared
that some such seismic terror might demolish the superb structures of
the canal, and we are to learn to-night whether these earth movements
threaten the new waterway at the isthmus.”
“I have reason to believe,” rejoined Leacraft, “that this canal has
been itself a source of political disturbance, and that it is likely
to effect convulsions in your body politic as dangerous in a social way
as those which brought about the financial and physical upset at San
Francisco.”
“Don’t worry on that score,” replied his companion. “I can tell you
that the political texture of this country is not to be worn to a
frazzle by any collision of interests. Such things adjust themselves,
and the way out only means a new entrance to brighter prospects and
bigger undertakings. Yes, I guess someone will be hurt, but individuals
don’t count if the whole people are benefited.”
“Still,” remonstrated Leacraft, “the people is made up of individuals,
and it’s simply a fact that you can’t disturb the equilibrium of one
part of society without jostling the rest.”
“In a way, yes,” slowly answered the doctor. “But it is quite clear to
my mind that the enormous advantages of the canal will hide from sight
the losses that may be inflicted on the railroads, in the dislocation
of rates, and even that will be temporary, as the new business raises
our population, and their passenger traffic touches higher and higher
averages.”
“The canal has been an expensive enterprise,” suggested Leacraft.
“It would be a great misfortune if it brought any kind of material
reverses.”
“Rubbish,” retorted the doctor; “this prating is the madness or the
envy of croakers and cranks. Do you think that a connexion between the
oceans that will shorten the route from one to the other by nearly
6,000 miles, and bring our eastern seaboard, with all its tremendous
agencies of production within reach of a continent that is slowly
becoming itself occidentalized, and demanding every day the equipment
of the west, is a mercantile delusion? We are all gainers. It is a
scheme of mutualization on a world-wide scale, but America distributes
the profits and holds the surplus.”
The two friends by this time had reached the entrance of the Museum,
and passing through its symbolic portals, turned to the left, and found
themselves in a dull room, portentously charged with an exhaustive
exhibit of the commerce of all nations. Here, on tables and shelves,
was displayed a wonderful assortment of primitive and modern ships,
primeval dugouts, Philippine catamarans, Mediterranean pirogues,
sloops, schooners, brigs, brigantines, barques, barkentines, luggers,
lighters, caravals, Dutch monstrosities, models of those extraordinary
ships which Motley has described as “built up like a tower, both
at stem and stern, and presenting in their broad, bulbous prows
their width of beam in proportion to their length, their depression
amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to
progress over the waves as could well be imagined,” the Latin trireme
and the Greek trireme, the ironclads of France used in 1855, the
monitors of the Civil War, the recent wonders in battleships, torpedo
boats, and destroyers, with naphtha launches, submarine wonders, the
old time American cutters, and models of the stately packets that
once made the trip from New York to Portsmouth in fourteen days,
with a various and diversified exhibit of yachts and pleasure boats,
all burnished, japanned and varnished, and now dimly lustrous in the
futile illumination of the room. Above them on the walls was a prolix
illustration of the hydrography of the world; charts of currents,
pelagic streams, areas of calms, submarine basins, maps of rainfalls,
prevalent winds, storm regions, precipitation, barometric maxima and
minima, and then still higher up on the walls, that dispensed knowledge
over each square inch of their dusty and dusky surfaces, Leacraft
descried the tabulations of tonnage of the merchant marine of the
nations of the earth, with fabulous figures of imports and exports, and
the staple products of this prolific and motherly old earth, caressed
into fructification by the tireless arms of her scrambling broods of
children.
Leacraft was soon deserted by the doctor, who found occasion to wander
among the slowly arriving scientific gentry and politely inquire after
the health of the particular scientific offspring, whose tottering
footsteps each one was engaged in nurturing into a more reliant
attitude before the world. Leacraft found the dim room, with its
preoccupied occupants vacantly settling into the seats around him, and
its motley array of picturesque models strangely congenial. It soothed,
by the abrupt strangeness of its contents, the subdued intellectual
placidity of the audience, and by its mere physical retirement from
the outer bustle of the streets, and the iterative commonplaces of
the hotel corridor. The exact process of subduction would have been
hard keenly to analyze, but Leacraft seemed to forget his personal
disquietude, and develop into a congenital oneness with these earnest
men and women around him, eager to know, and not too patient towards
sophistry or pretension. He hardly cared to know who was who. It made
no matter. They all seemed freed from the petty vanities of living, and
now engrossed in the triumphant tasks of thought; and he felt himself
elevated into a kind of mental abstraction which eagerly carried on its
functions in an atmosphere of ideas.
And yet how was it, that just above the little desk which was to
receive the honorable burden of the lecturer’s manuscript, he suddenly
distinctly saw the fair face, with its light blue eyes, its delicate
blush of color, and the slightly mocking pout of the lips of Sally,
the beloved. Leacraft almost rose upright in his astonishment at the
impossible hallucination. He was leaning forward, half incredulous
of the report of his own senses, and half subjected by a delicious
whim that the apparition was an augury of success, when a commotion
spreading on all sides of him roused his attention, and the vision
fled. He would have willingly had it stay. People were rising in his
vicinity, and soon the assembly was on its feet. Some one had entered
who was the cause of this unusual excitement. “The President” came
to his ears, murmured by a dozen persons near him, and he had hardly
sprung to his own feet when, with many salutations, a strongly formed,
rather bulky man, with a manner of almost nervous scrutiny passed
by him moving down the aisle to the front. It was indeed President
Roosevelt, and Leacraft, now startled into the most active interest,
slipped forward a seat or two, to gain a position which might afford
him a better view of this remarkable person. The audience remained
standing until the President, escorted by a tall red-whiskered
gentleman, whom Doctor M--, who had just turned up in search of his
friend, whispered was Dr. George O. Smith, the distinguished Director
of the Survey, had reached a seat reserved for him at the front of the
hall.
Leacraft now observed more closely the character of the convocation,
and realized its composite and representative elements. Dr. M--,
always himself immersed in the study of the lives, achievements and
distinctions of the prominent men of the country, was an enthusiastic
verbal _cicerone_ through the maze of faces which seemed suddenly to
have condensed into a really crowded audience. Here was Dr. D--, the
Alaskan explorer in the early days of the nineteenth century, the
world recognized authority on the tertiary fossils of the east and
west coasts, and a man of erudition and delightful literary skill.
Beyond him sat Dr. M--, a quiet-faced man, curator of the National
Museum, author of text books, and gifted with a singularly shrewd
thoughtfulness. At his side sat the sphinx-featured F--, of Chicago,
a gentle-minded scholar, to whom the Heavens had entrusted the
secrets of their meteoritic denizens, and who, by a more fortunate
circumstance, held a pen of consummate grace. Again at his side was the
Jupiter-browed Ward, an erratic over the face of the globe, possessed
with a transcendant enthusiasm for the same celestial visitors that
F-- described, and chasing them with the zeal of a lynx in their most
inaccessible quarries; a man of immense conviviality, and controlling
the smouldering fires of a temper that defied reason or resistance.
At the front of the rows of chairs, and not far from the cynosure
of all eyes--the President--were two notable students of the past
life of the globe, Professors O-- and S--, men whose studies in that
amazing storehouse of extinct life which the West held sealed in its
clays and marls, limestones and sandstones, had continued on higher
and more certain levels the work of Marsh and Leidy and Cope, and who
had transcribed before the whole world, in monuments of scientific
precision, the most startling confessions of the fossil dead. To one
side, on the same row, sat Prof. B--, known in two continents, for
chemical learning, especially on that side of chemistry which mingles
insensibly with the laws of matter. And whispering in his ear, with
sundry emphatic nods, sat, next to him, Dr. R--, of Washington, learned
in the ways of men’s digestion, and the enigmas of food and the arts of
food-makers. In the row behind, the expressive head of Young, aureoled
with years and honors, was seen, and at his side the face of Newcomb,
who had set the seal of his genius and industry across the patterned
stars. Here was A-- H--, the geologist, reticent and receptive, there
C--, weighted with new responsibilities in furnishing time to the
rapacious biologist, and in discovering new ways of making this old
world. Behind them sat M--, wise beyond belief in bric-a-brac and
brachiopods, vindictively assertive, and self-sacrificingly tender and
kind. There was McG-- and I--, W--, A--, V--, and B-- W--, bringing
to the speaker the homage of archæology, of petrology, of zoology,
and morphology. In a group of motionless and eager attention were
A--, the sage metereologist, beloved in two continents; B--, abstruse
and difficult, meditative, as a man might be who kept his hand on
the pulses of matter, and B--, skillful in weighing the atoms of the
air, or probing the volcanoes of the moon. In one line, mingling in
conversation that reached Leacraft’s ears as a strange jargon of
conflicting sciences, were G--, H-- and H--k. And beyond them, mute,
as if by mutual repulsion, sat F--, the agile scrutinizer of Nature’s
crystals; P--, holding in his labyrinthine memory the names of half a
universe of shells, and B--n, to whom each plant of the wayside bowed
in recognition of a master’s knowledge of itself. Against the wall, in
a triad of sympathy, was A--, the surgeon; S--, the neurologist, and
R--. And alone, in an isolation that belied his intense geniality, was
K--.
And through all the scientific congeries, which were far more extended
than Leacraft could recognize, or even Dr. M-- recall, was a more
garrulous grouping of politicians, statesmen, diplomats, ministers, the
well dressed circles of the rich, and the dillettantes, drawn to this
unusual assemblage by the presence of the President.
The quiet and dull room, faded, and with contents tiresomely drilled
into the exact alignments of a museum hall, took on an almost brilliant
appearance. The fancy amused itself with the thought that it too felt,
in its stagnated life, the unique occasion, and shook itself into a
momentary wakefulness, to note and record its distinguished guests,
that its streaked walls tried to hide their unseemly rents, and the
multiplied models and charts struggled to look recent and familiar and
appreciative, amid such intellectual tumult.
But now the audience was forgotten at that theatrical moment when
the chairman and the lecturer advanced over the platform to assume
the directive guidance of the evening. They did advance with that
curious _gaucherie_ which somehow always disables the scientific man
in his official and public utterances, and seems, by some trick of
compensation, the more unredeemable as the unfortunate victim of its
cynical attachment is the more distinguished and renowned.
Dr. S-- stepped gingerly forward, a tall, effective man with hair
hardly sanguine in color, and quite conventional in arrangement, with
a cerebral development, that somehow disappointingly dwarfed the lower
contours of his face, domed and broad as it was, with much scholarly
promise. He was followed by the speaker of the evening, Mr. Binn,
who seemed half inclined to screen himself from observation behind
the utterly inadequate profile of the famous Director. The two men
momentarily catching the full assault of the numerous eyes, each pair
among them being the visible battery of a questioning and critical mind
behind it, underwent an obvious confusion of intention and movement,
and became somewhat mixed up with the table and chairs, and with each
other. The Director extricated himself, came forward to the edge of the
platform, and in a voice of half propitiatory jocularity, introduced
the subject, and the speaker. He alluded to the favorable conjunction
of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and that of the National Academy of Science, which brought
so many eminent thinkers and observers together, and administered an
especial emphasis to the question to be considered this evening. He
mentioned, with a deferential bow in the direction of the President,
that they had all been deeply honored by the presence of the Chief
Executive of the Nation, to whom perhaps, more than to anyone else
in the brilliant audience, the grave question of the structural and
geological stability of the Isthmus of Darien, was one of overshadowing
interest, and he congratulated everyone that the subject was in
the hand “of one whose geological fame was beyond dispute, and his
carefulness of statement unimpeached,” and the Director sat down,
pulling off to one side of the stage, lest his own refulgence might dim
the legitimate monopoly of that article by Dr. Binn. Leacraft observed
that as the lecturer unrolled his manuscript on the reading desk, the
President leaned outward, adjusted his eyeglasses, and scrutinized the
geologist, who, from a rather embarrassed fumbling with his sheets,
seemed conscious of the inquisition. A moment later, as if satisfied
with his inspection, the President leaned back, bulky and immobile, and
became an absorbed listener.
Mr. Binn, well known for his lithological studies, and the possession
of a good style, in the scientific sense, was a short man, evincing,
under control, however, the peptic influences of years, with a face
of decided legibility, in which sense and penetration seemed equally
indicated.
He had provided himself with charts, which had been distended in an
irregular line above his head, and to these he occasionally referred.
His reading of the important pages before him was clear and audible,
but totally neglectful, of the informing appliances in elocution, of
melody of voice, accent and deliberation. The lecture was brilliant and
distinguished, and quite comparable in its qualities to the serious
people who had gathered in great intellectual force to receive its
instructions.