PREJUDICES
PREJUDICES
BY
CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU
Author of “Viva Mexico!” “The Diary of a
Freshman,” “Harvard Episodes,” etc.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Published May, 1911_
Printed in the United States of America
These extracts from my notebook originally appeared in _The
Bellman_. For permission to reprint them I beg to thank the editor.
C. M. F.
A BIRTHDAY PRESENT
FOR
R. B. F.
CONTENTS
PAGE
SOME DOGS 3
LITTLE PICTURES OF PEOPLE 21
WANDERLUST 43
TRAVEL 69
FELLOW PASSENGERS 87
PARENTS AND CHILDREN 99
WHAT IS EDUCATION? 115
JUST A LETTER 131
IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP 151
WRITERS 167
“ANN VERONICA” 185
HOLIDAYS 207
SERVANTS 223
MRS. WHITE’S 239
SOME DOGS
When the occasion is propitious, I always find it interesting to ask a
person I don’t know well if he, or she, is fond of dogs. The
propitiousness of the occasion is perfect, however, only when there is a
dog in the same room or on the same piazza, or wherever we, for the
moment, happen to be talking. The reply to this question is to me a kind
of exquisitely personal barometer. From it I have always been able to
gauge with extreme accuracy the degree to which my sympathy and
friendship with him who makes it might possibly rise. False answers to
other questions have often deceived me, but a reply to the inquiry: Are
you fond of dogs? never has. From the way in which the reply is phrased,
from the tone in which it is spoken, from the facial expression that
accompanies it, I am instinctively able to “size it up,” weigh it, and
see exactly what there is behind it.
From otherwise altogether estimable women I often elicit this: “Oh, yes,
I like dogs; but I like them in their place.” This, of course, means
that they innately loathe dogs; that they are afraid of them and have a
horror of them; that they regard a dog as something which potentially
damages furniture and carpets, ruins flower beds, and gives children
hydrophobia. By me, anyone who descends to the level of declaring that
he “likes dogs, but likes them in their place,” is simply struck from
the list. It is a most usual reply; it might, indeed, in all propriety,
be added to the bromidioms, except that a bromidiom is more a
stereotyped little collection of words that slip out with no particular
motive or intention, whereas a declaration to the effect that one likes
dogs, but likes them in their place, is charged with meanings for anyone
who looks for them. It is one of those curious and unexplained facts
that almost nobody likes openly to confess an aversion to dogs. Among
our acquaintances we all have a frank and vehement enemy of cats, but
he who hates dogs rarely permits himself to say anything more definitely
antagonistic than that he likes dogs--in their place. Under an assumed
name he does, from time to time, relieve himself in the correspondence
column of a newspaper, but it is invariably under an assumed name. If I
disliked dogs, I should not hesitate to say so, just as I do not
hesitate to admit that I am terrified by a snake, even if I know it to
be harmless, or by the mere idea of ascending to a great height and
peering over the edge. Such terrors are illogical, unreasonable,
anything you please, but they are inborn and they persist, and few
persons object to confessing to them. But no one, on the other hand,
likes to have it believed of him either that his sense of humor is not
keen, or that he is not fond of dogs. This, of course, is, in the long
run, all to the glory of dogs. Even the people who constitutionally
dislike them can rarely bring themselves openly to say so.
To me, an inability to love a dog is comprehensible only in the same
sense I can comprehend that an uncle of mine, who had a delightful
talent for drawing, was hopelessly color-blind, and that another member
of my family and two of my friends are what is called “tone-deaf.” You
might play to them the introduction to “Lohengrin” and then “Annie
Rooney” at regular intervals every day for a month, and at the end of
that time it would be impossible for them to tell which was which. In
other respects adequately equipped, they were simply born without the
apparatus necessary to distinguish between one combination of musical
sounds and another. They all hate to admit that music gives them little
or no pleasure; one of them has even gone so far as to become, in an
amateur way, an authority on the history and theory of music, but if in
his presence some one begins to play the piano, he is always
pathetically unaware as to whether he is listening to a nocturne by
Chopin, or a cakewalk sung into popularity by May Irwin.
Persons who “like dogs in their place” always seem to me to have been
born with much the same sort of defect--or perhaps it would be kinder
and truer to call it an omission. But then, my attitude toward dogs may
be abnormal. I don’t know. I can only recall a lecture by William Dean
Howells in which, when he paused to give some incidental advice to young
writers, he said, in effect, “In writing, never hesitate to express what
you feel is a thought, a sensation or a state of mind peculiar to
yourself. It never _is_ peculiar to yourself. The paragraph you shrink
from writing because you feel it will be understood by you alone, is the
one that will be read with the most sympathetic interest.” (After all
these years I cannot quote Mr. Howells verbatim, but that was his idea;
it deeply impressed me.) So here goes.
“Love” is a portentous word that we use rather recklessly, but in
considering its meaning, in employing it after the deliberation that is
its due, I can, in all seriousness, say that during my lifetime I have
loved more dogs than I have loved human beings. There are inevitably a
few humans whom we love, but, in my own case, I simply cannot evade the
fact, even if I wanted to (which I don’t), that the human beings I have
been unreservedly devoted to have been fewer than the dogs for whom I
have experienced the same sort of emotions. What, after all, do we mean,
in of course its platonic sense, by love? To me it means a state of mind
that would be tremendously upset in a purely disinterested fashion by
the sudden elimination of somebody else. It means that somebody has
become part of your life, part of your thoughts, part of your habits,
and that for the most part you think of him or her or it, as the case
may be, with satisfaction. You like to know that “they” (whoever they
are) are in the world with you. You regret your partings and look
forward to your meetings. You stop and think, sometimes, how different
life would be if they died, and when they die, a sort of hole is knocked
into your world, that you, for a long time, are unable to fill up. That
may or may not be a good definition of affection, but it expresses the
feeling I have had for a few people and a lot of dogs.
It used to be conventional and proper to bring up children in the belief
that the great difference between humans and the so-called lower animals
was that the humans had souls and that the other animals had not, but
nowadays many parents do not seem to care to assume the responsibility
for this distinction, and it is not because they believe we haven’t
souls (what a convenient word it is!), but because they are inclined to
suspect that the kindly beasts who love the children and are beloved by
them, who enjoy such intimate companionship with them, have. However
this may be, it certainly is a pleasanter, a more ennobling theory; one
that tends to reduce human vanity, to extend sympathy, to increase the
world’s happiness, and to promote a more specific and comprehensive
interest in the mysterious and beautiful ways of God.
Most unintentionally I seem to have wandered from dogs and strayed into
the domain of metaphysics--or do I mean theology? I don’t know anything
about metaphysics or theology, but I know a great deal about dogs, and
it was some dogs I had in mind when I sat down to write. Through a sad,
autumn rain I have been staring out of my window into the garden where,
side by side, some of them are buried; Friday, Thursday, Tatito, Spy,
Rowdy, and--it is but a few lonely weeks that he has been there--Boozy.
Mud, an Irish staghound, is at rest on a hillside in Dakota, and Jigger,
whom I rarely see now, as he unfortunately for me does not belong to me,
is fat, gray, capricious, but still alive, still adorable and adored.
How they emerge and come back to me as I stand and look at the
frost-bitten hollyhocks on the graves! What individuality each one had;
how absolutely different they were; how inseparable they are from any
retrospect of my youth--from, indeed, my whole life. With but few
intermissions I cannot remember the time when some one of them did not
play an intimate, an important, a memorable part in the little drama of
my existence. Scarcely any phase of it fails to comprehend one of them.
I feel myself thinking of them exactly as I think of the members of my
family whom I have cared for, who did what it was intended that they
should do and who then quietly left. To describe them, to dwell on their
traits of character, their mannerisms, their little faults and
eccentricities, the setness of their ways as they gradually grew older
and then old, would seem to me to be an indelicacy if I did not realize
that to most persons a dog is just a dog.
Jigger had, and still has, the most touching faith in the efficacy of
prayer. When he needs or wants anything, he assumes the attitude and
waits for results. If he is thirsty, one comes upon him appealing to a
washstand or to a faucet in the bathroom; if he wants a certain kind of
salted cracker he is found tired, but patient, believing, and erect on
his hind legs in front of the cupboard in which he knows the crackers
are kept. Once in the country he longed for a porcupine that seemed to
him an altogether congenial sort of companion, and begged at the foot of
a tree until the porcupine responded by coming down and shooting
twenty-four quills into Jigger’s lovely little plush muzzle. It took
about a quart of ether, a surgeon, and I forget how many dollars, to
extract the quills. Jigger also keeps strange hours. Most dogs, I have
found, adapt their hours to those of the persons they live with. They go
to bed and arise when the family does, but Jigger, although a dachshund,
is in some respects Chinese. Frequently at two or three in the morning
it occurs to him that it would be agreeable to have some fun with a golf
ball. The fun consists in somebody hiding the ball in a sufficiently
discoverable locality and then letting Jigger find it. Perhaps I ought
to be in an institution for the feeble-minded, but when Jigger, at 3 or
4 <small>A.M.</small>, has deposited a moist golf ball on my neck and has then tugged
at my sleeve until I woke up, I have always got out of bed, made a
light, and, half dazed with sleep, gone through all the motions of his
idea of a thoroughly good time. People who don’t like Jigger--and I have
begun to suspect that they consist of the people whom Jigger cannot,
for some reason, endure--say he is selfish. No doubt he is. Most of us
are, only some of us have learned how to conceal the fact. Jigger never
conceals anything except his golf ball. That, with the air of a
conspiring sausage, he sneaks off with, hides from mortal view, and
leaves hidden sometimes for a day or two at a time.
Friday and Thursday were part of my life so long ago that I find I can
now speak of them with calmness. How shy and reticent and actually
morbid Friday was! He had none of the enthusiasms, none of the
ebullience, of other dogs. He lived with us, he knew he was one of us,
he never temporarily left us for a day, as almost all dogs do from time
to time. In his queer, rather uncomfortable way he worshiped us; I know
he did because I know it, but he never actually made a demonstration of
the fact as other dogs do. I can’t remember a single occasion on which
he kissed my hand or asked to get into my lap or my bed. Even in his
youth he was reserved and dignified and old. He had in life just one
great pleasure, one dissipation, and that was to hear my father argue a
case in court. He almost always went to the court room when my father
had a case on hand, and many a judge has angrily ordered him to be
removed; but no clerk or sheriff ever succeeded in removing him.
Probably it has been forgotten, but at one time in the legal history of
Minnesota there was no more prominent figure at the bar than a queer,
shy, reticent, morbid but determined little yellow dog named Friday!
What a completely different personality was Spy-boy! An English
greyhound with famous ancestors, he was physically a thing of perfect
beauty--all fine, steel springs covered with pale brown velvet. When he
stood between you and a bright light, the lower part of his stomach was
translucent, and you could always see the throbbing of his heart.
Although both by birth and by temperament an aristocrat, his breeding
had not impaired his intellect. He literally had a fine mind. I think of
him as a kind of canine Macaulay, except that he had about him a touch
of mysticism; he heard sounds and smelt odors and saw things that no
one else could. For hours at a time I have sat reading in the same room
with him, an absolutely silent, scentless, uninhabited room as far as my
primitive senses could discover, while he, poised on the delicate arch
of his chest, with one front foot across the other (he always assumed
that position in his moments of meditation), incessantly twitched his
sensitive nostrils, moved his ears, and followed about the room, with
his eyes, the invisible things he saw. I could see nothing except what I
knew was there; he, however, could. Sometimes he would get up, slowly
watch them until they disappeared, and then resume his position. One
day, after he had sat this way for an hour or more, he arose, rested his
head for a moment on my sister’s lap, and then fell dead.
How Rowdy admired him! Rowdy, too, was a greyhound, but poor, silly,
stupid old Rowdy’s escutcheon was simply a grille of bars sinister. His
humble, self-sacrificing attachment to Spy was as if he appreciated
that Spy was the real thing, and that he was only a clumsy imitation.
Spy was kind to him; at times it seemed to me that Rowdy’s society even
mildly amused him, but his kindness was unmistakably that of royalty for
some lowly and devoted dependent. Rowdy once chewed the front cover of
the book that, in those days, I cared for more than any other: “Sir
Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” by Jane Porter. My youthful fury was
extreme when I found the mutilated volume on the piazza, but even at
that immature epoch my emotions were hopelessly mixed. I longed to whip
Rowdy, because it seemed to me that my favorite book was ruined, but
when he came up to me with every appearance of having forgotten the
incident, I could only pat his head, as usual. His vandalism brought
tears to my eyes, and, after twenty-three years, when I now and then
look at the chewed, blue cover of “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” and
examine the little tooth marks, tears still sometimes come, but they
aren’t the same kind.
And now they are all asleep under the frost-bitten hollyhocks, which I
have turned to look at more than once since I sat down to write. Boozy’s
life, his dignified old age, and his death are, somehow, too recent to
speak of. I should like to, but I can’t.
LITTLE PICTURES OF PEOPLE
I
MR. AND MRS. PARKE
They both looked older than their years, which were respectively sixty
and fifty-seven, and this was largely due to the ingrowing life they had
always led, the influence of their fine old house on Beacon Hill, and to
the individuality, the eccentricity, of Mrs. Parke’s clothes. The house
was of mellowed red brick, with large, square, high rooms containing,
one was at first inclined to think, very little besides dignity and
refined sunlight. But a more careful inspection while waiting for Mrs.
Parke to come down disclosed a rare combination of comfort and beauty.
The sitting room in which she and Mr. Parke usually received one
belonged to no period and had no “color scheme.” It was merely quietly
perfect with mahogany, with harmonious chintz, with a few very authentic
and interesting pictures, such as an early painting, remarkably
definite, even a little hard, by Corot, a religious arrangement of
archaic reds and blues by Rossetti, some exquisitely painstaking
botanical and architectural pencil sketches by Ruskin, and a panel by
Whistler that one felt to be important without, however, knowing just
what it was intended to represent. In the center of the room was a
large, round, bare mahogany table with books arranged on it, exactly
half a foot away from the edge, in a circle. Inside the circle was
always a great crystal bowl full of flowers that were sent into town
every morning from the Parkes’ country place.
Mrs. Parke suggested a vivacious Queen Victoria, if such an image is
conceivable. She was of the same height and figure and, like her late
majesty, she wore strange clothes that were not exactly out of fashion,
because they had never been in it. They were simply the clothes of Mrs.
Parke and bore no relation or resemblance to any others. She had a great
many of them, for, often as I went there on Sunday afternoons, I never
saw the same garment twice. They were the most romantic clothes I have
ever known off the stage or outside the glass cases of a museum, for,
many years before, Mrs. Parke’s greatuncle had been an East India
merchant and, when he died, his grandniece inherited, among other
things, bale upon bale of the marvelous fabrics his ships had brought
back from the East--from India, from Burmah, from Siam, Japan and China;
silks, brocades, crêpes, cloth of silver and cloth of gold and many more
materials that no longer had names and the secret of whose dyes had been
forgotten. For almost forty years Mrs. Parke had dressed only in these
splendid, brilliant stuffs, and there were many bales still unopened.
Some of the materials rustled stiffly and some of them clung, but she
had them all made up in the same way, a kind of loose wrapper, and with
them she wore on her head a small cap of rose point, the top of which
was a bit of the dress.
On a pedestal in the hall the marble bust of a handsome young man still
faintly suggestive of her husband testified that the Parkes had been to
Italy on their wedding trip, but they had never gone abroad again. With
one exception their journeys for thirty-six or-seven years had consisted
solely of the annual trip on the ninth of April to their country place,
a distance of eighteen miles, and the annual trip back to town again on
the tenth of November. Once they had spent two weeks with a senatorial
relative in Washington, but on their return Mr. Parke had nervous
prostration for three months and they did not again indulge in so daring
an experiment.
I often wondered how all the years had slipped by without somehow
leaving them stranded, for neither of them had ever “done” anything,
even in the most prosaic interpretation of the term. Mr. Parke had
studied law, but he had never practiced it. He read widely, memoirs,
poetry, history, essays and an occasional novel, and he remembered much
of what he read, but his reading was of the desultory kind. He could
quote from all literatures but he had no literary hobbies. Mrs. Parke
did not even read. Instead she knitted soft, useless things on thick,
wooden needles, and when she was in the country armed herself with a
flat straw hat, chamois gloves, a pair of scissors, and then proceeded
to drive the Scotch gardener to drink. They had never cared much for
society. It was enough to know that its doors were open to them,
although at one period Mr. Parke must have gone to a great many small
dinners at clubs to meet celebrities, for his fund of intimate and
delightful anecdote was inexhaustible.
But the years had slipped by and they had not been stranded. They
imagined, indeed, that they always had been and still were two of the
busiest and most important persons in town. They were sixty and
fifty-seven when I first met them, and old for their ages. One scarcely
expected them to be very actively occupied with the contemporaneous,
but after I had seen them often enough to become acclimated (no other
word will quite do) I realized that they never had been, that they were
then exactly as they always had been, only more so. Their entire lives
had been spent in the deification of the unessential, in the reduction
of puttering to a science. They had puttered their lives away and were
still puttering, only, as they grew older, with a greater intensity, and
from the first their lives had been extremely happy. I had never known
two human beings who had so successfully mastered the art of
transforming molehills into mountains. It was their sole occupation.
“My dear fellow, I _am_ so glad to see you,” Mr. Parke would exclaim as
he bustled into the room when I went there to luncheon, and he meant it,
for they were both kind and hospitable. “I’m afraid I’m a minute or two
late, but this morning I’ve been driven, positively driven, from the
moment I got out of my bath--and by matters I simply can’t trust to
anyone else. They leave me no time for anything; I mean the things I
like to do and want to do. But you remember that line from Browning’s
Paracelsus, don’t you? ‘Let each task present its petty good to thee.’ I
always try to think of that.”
“You’ve worked too hard this morning, Henry,” Mrs. Parke would say,
glancing solicitously up from her needles, “and you know it always
brings on your gout. The trouble is, he _will_ overdo.” Later on, during
luncheon, it comes out that the exhausting labors of the day consisted
of Mr. Parke’s making out and sending a check to the associated
charities, writing a short letter to the _Transcript_, refusing an
invitation to dinner, and changing his clothes. Mrs. Parke had also
spent an exciting but difficult morning. A new expressman had delivered
the daily box of flowers at the wrong house, and from the dear lady’s
account of the incident one inferred that for several hours the destiny
of nations had shuddered in the balance.
“I sat and sat and sat,” she would dramatically declaim, “but no
expressman. I couldn’t understand it, and it was long, long past the
time when I ought to have been arranging the flowers. You can imagine
the state I was in.”
One of Mr. Parke’s resources was changing his clothes. In the country,
for instance, he dressed with his usual minuteness for breakfast, but if
the gardener sent word that an orchid had bloomed, or that a branch on
one of the trees was turning yellow before it ought to, or that some
Sunday tripper had left a sardine tin and two eggshells on the cliff
walk--if, in fact, he felt it imperative to leave the house even for a
short time, the act necessitated a change of costume. He would put on
tweed knickerbockers and a kind of shooting jacket. On his return he
would change again to still another suit for luncheon, afterwards the
tweeds again if he went for a walk, then something else for tea and,
finally, evening dress for dinner. They both also spent a great deal of
time in showing and explaining their two houses to visitors--the closet
doors that could not possibly slam, because their area had been exactly
adjusted to the resistance of the number of cubic feet of air inside, or
words to that effect; the ventilating apparatus that forced every
lungful they breathed through three thicknesses of sterilized cheese
cloth; the heating arrangements that did something quite uncanny, I
forget what.
“You have seen the unceasing labor of forty years,” Mr. Parke would
usually assure you when you had finished the tour of inspection. Their
greatest triumph, however, consisted of the fact that, when they left
town for the country on April the ninth, they took no luggage with them,
not even a small handbag. They drove to the station empty handed, and on
arriving at their destination resumed their existence, as it were, in
duplicate. To the least detail there were replicas of every garment,
every shoe, every toilet article, every skein of worsted and every book
the two possessed.
The last time I saw them they had both aged considerably and they were,
if possible, more “driven” than usual. A distant cousin had written
that he expected to pass through town on his way to Europe, that he
wanted to see them both and would like to stay all night at their house.
With the letter in her agitated hand Mrs. Parke despairingly appealed to
me.
“But how can we?” she wailed, as one of the two men servants who had
brought in the tea things quietly restored a book I had disarranged to
its geometric site on the mahogany table. “I don’t see how we can. We’ve
been back from the country for only three weeks, and the house is in a
perfect whirl!” I thought of the eight immense, unoccupied bedrooms
upstairs, and for a moment had visions of my own family sleeping on the
floor or in the bath-tub or on the sewing machine in order to make room
for unexpected guests. But I agreed that the distant cousin was most
inconsiderate, not to say unreasonable.
Mr. Parke came in, but could only shake my hand and apologize for
running away. For a month he had been worrying for fear the family tomb
in Mount Auburn cemetery might be “damp” and he had at last decided
that the only thing to do was to drive out there and “see for himself.”
II
THE FOURTH
Twice a day the fourth officer walked rapidly the length of the
promenade deck with an easy, swinging stride and then vanished up a
steep flight of steps that led to the bridge. These brief appearances
began to interest me, for he was extraordinarily young and good-looking,
and it seemed to me but natural that he should at least say good morning
to some of the young girls who gazed at him over the tops of their books
as he went by and who very clearly would have enjoyed making his
acquaintance. But he never stopped and he never spoke. It was not until
the fifth day out that he smiled gravely and saluted as he passed my
chair. The next day we anchored in a landlocked tropical harbor, and as
he was on duty at the top of those wobbly steps (I never am able to
remember the nautical name for anything) by which one descends against
the side of the ship to the launches, and as there was nothing for him
to do after he had assured himself that none of the fat ladies and old
gentlemen who were going ashore had fallen into the sea, he strolled out
of the broiling sun, where he had been standing, immaculate and amiable,
for two hours and a half, and came over to me.
I am not exactly a punctilious person, especially on a hot day in the
tropics, but as the Fourth did not sit down on any of the numerous
vacant chairs in my neighborhood I, somewhat to my surprise, found
myself standing up--standing up, as I rarely was inspired to do in the
presence of the captain; and the Fourth was almost, if not quite, young
enough to be my son. He took my involuntary display of respect for
himself and his white uniform as a matter of course, and as the launches
were not to return for an hour we leaned against the rail on the shady
side and talked, sometimes in English (his English was correct,
although limited) but more often in German. That was the beginning of my
acquaintance with the Fourth, one that continued under similar
circumstances for several months and proved in many respects to be
enlightening.
More than anything else, perhaps, it brought home to me the meaning of
discipline long continued. He had learned his profession on a German
training ship, starting in at the age of fourteen, and from there he had
gone to the navy. Now he was an officer on one of the great German
passenger ships. In the meanwhile he had found time to take and pass the
naval examinations that made him eligible to the command of a German
vessel in any part of the world, and his age was just twenty-four.
I confess I gasped when I heard it (it was the second officer who told
me), although I ought to have known it without being told, for from the
first I had been struck by his impeccable physical refinement, the kind
that but rarely survives a quarter of a century. After that, when he
was quietly giving orders to middle-aged quartermasters, skilfully
directing the movements of the launches, making mathematical
calculations on a slip of paper behind the compass at sunset or pacing
the bridge, I often found myself contrasting him with various other
young gentlemen of twenty-four some five or six thousand miles away.
Living night and day with his watch practically in his hand, rarely
sleeping more than four hours at a time, obeying orders and observing
regulations blindly, faithfully, without a question or even a thought,
had done something to him that was to me very curious, very interesting
and very fine. It had not crushed him, it had molded him. It had not
changed his nature, it had taken charge of it and directed it. It had
not in the least made him prematurely old, it had developed to the
fullest extent the capacities of his youth.
He was so reserved, so self-contained at first, that I wondered if he
was not perhaps just a beautiful piece of Teutonic machinery, until one
morning we steamed into a harbor where the company he served had met
with the most hideous ill luck. He pointed out to me the dismantled
hulls of two noble ships that had run ashore and were a total loss. One
of them had struck because it was impossible for anyone on board to know
that an earthquake had destroyed the lighthouse the day before; the
other lay tragically on its side among the breakers because the captain
had attempted to hit the channel in the dark without a pilot. The Fourth
had been on that ship at the time and, when he told me about it, I had
to occupy myself with my field glasses and pretend I didn’t know that
two large tears had welled up, slipped over and were finding their way
down his face. He had been off duty and asleep when the accident
happened, and knew nothing about it until the quartermaster woke him up,
told him, and said that the captain could not be found. In spite of the
fact that the captain’s room was dark, something impelled the Fourth to
enter.
“Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and when
I turned on the light--”... Well, immediately after the accident the
captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle.
“Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same
thing?” I asked the Fourth.
“Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all
the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic
German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung
and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings
and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited
boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been
trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth.
His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more
so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich,
pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the
company, he was to have no friendly relations.
“On a long voyage like this, where we stop every few days and I stand
here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get
to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the
Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six
hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way
over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own
deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to
do.”
It was also, judged by material standards, a discouraging existence.
There had been occasions when for hours at a time the Fourth had been
chiefly responsible for the safety of hundreds of lives and about a
million dollars’ worth of property; and for his expert knowledge, his
anxiety, his prolonged nervous strain he received the munificent salary
of twenty-eight dollars a month--but little more than enough in the
tropics, where he had to put on always one, and sometimes two suits of
white a day, to pay his laundry bills.
“Nobody but the stewards get rich at sea,” he laughed when we were
discussing the matter.
“Do you ever think of giving it up--of doing something else?” I asked
him.
“I think of it,” he answered, “but I know I shan’t. I like to look
forward to having a command, although I’ll probably be eighty when I get
one and too old to take it, and, besides, what could I do? I’ve been on
the bridge of a ship since I was fourteen. I don’t know how to breathe
inside of a house.”
When we were in port and he could get off, we now and then dined
together on shore and went to a show. By way of returning these small
hospitalities he did the only thing he very well could do, which was to
ask me to go to his room in the evening to have a glass of beer. This I
liked infinitely better than an evening spent in the restaurant or the
theater of some sultry South American town. His room was large and cool,
high up and forward, with neither a sound nor a vibration. It always
seemed to be detached from the world, suspended in some way between the
sea and the sky, and in it the Fourth, when he got to know me better,
felt at liberty to wear his second cleanest white ducks instead of his
first, to sprawl on the sofa, to play with his pet monkey, to talk
nonsense and to be quite frankly the kid he really was.
One evening he put the monkey in bed with its head on the pillow, drew
the cover up around its neck and stretched out beside it. A huge,
bare-footed sailor came into the room, managed in some inscrutable
fashion to take off his cap with a glass of beer for me in one hand and
a cup of coffee for the Fourth in the other, placed the things on the
table and tiptoed out. Somewhere far below us, young men and girls were
waltzing frantically in the heat, women were dripping over games of
bridge as if their souls depended on the outcome, men in the smoking
room were getting drunk and calling one another names. But where we were
it was, as always, cool and silent and peaceful. One has to lead some
kind of a life, and as I sat there thinking, it occurred to me that,
even if it was poorly paid and at times lonely, there was something
very sane and useful and good about the life of the Fourth.
In a little while he would look at his watch and exclaim a trifle
diffidently, but with an unmistakable resumption of authority:
“It’s ten o’clock, you must go now.” Then he would almost instantly fall
asleep, sleep for four hours, spend four more alone with the trackless
waters and the southern stars, bathe, breakfast and begin another day
with a clear brain, steady nerves and untroubled eyes.
As often happens when two persons have remained silent in each other’s
presence for several minutes, his train of thought was identical with
mine, for when he spoke it was to say: “After all, I do like it.”
WANDERLUST
The crew, much to its surprise, was paid off at Havana and furnished
with a variety of explanations that did not particularly explain. Most
of the men were bitter about it, but Lansing and Hayward were too
unsophisticated, too new to the ways of the sea, to realize at first
that they had been imposed upon. They had shipped on the wretched little
steamer in New York in a sudden and curiously belated access of
romanticism. For Hayward, who was twenty-three, had worked as an
electrician since he was seventeen, and Lansing, who could scarcely
remember a time when he had not driven a grocer’s wagon, was
twenty-four. The sea had never been a boyish passion with them; they,
indeed, had rarely seen it. As far as their previous relations with it
had been concerned, New York might almost have been situated in the
middle of a Dakota prairie. Their lives had always been city lives, but
not of the kind that finds its way into popular fiction. For, in
expressing themselves, they were not accustomed to employ a
semi-unintelligible jargon of new slang, and from personal experience
they knew almost as little about the Bowery as they knew about the sea.
Their vocabularies, instead of being large and florid, were small and
simple; their lapses from grammar were too usual to be interesting. They
knew a few streets of the immense place exceedingly well, but they were,
for the most part, lower-middle-class, commonplace, entirely respectable
streets. They both had lived at home and worked hard--conscientiously,
one would say, except that in the routine of their existences conscience
played but little part. They had worked hard from habit, from the
realization that they could easily be replaced and from an innate desire
to keep their “jobs.”
It was strange, or perhaps it wasn’t strange (How do I know?), that the
sea had all at once irrelevantly called to them. If they had been fond
of reading, their embarkation might plausibly have been the practical
attempt to make a dream come true. But they rarely read anything except
the larger headlines of one-cent newspapers. The voluminous literature
of adventure in foreign countries, of a wild, free life on the high
seas, was almost as unknown to them as the thing itself. And yet, one
day, they went to sea.
Early in April, an electric car smashed into Lansing’s delivery wagon
and hurt the horse, to say nothing of the wagon itself and its valuable
contents. The fault was neither Lansing’s nor the motorman’s, but the
grocer both discharged Lansing and collected two hundred and fifty
dollars from the street railway company. Out of employment, Lansing saw
something of New York. He had been faithful and careful, and in a dumb,
uncomplaining sort of way he felt aggrieved and rebellious. His long,
aimless walks, during the first few days of his idleness, sometimes
took him to the water’s edge, and one morning he found himself on a Wall
Street wharf, just as a steamer was about to leave for the tropics.
Although he didn’t precisely know what it all meant, the experience was,
somehow, a moving one. There was an army of half-savage negroes--unlike
any negroes he had ever seen--wheeling baggage on trucks and, with
incoherent yelps, filling with freight a coarse net of rope that lifted,
swung, sank, disappeared, and then reappeared limp and hungrily empty.
There were fat, inexplicable women with improbable complexions,
accompanied by lean, sallow, gesticulating men, who darted from their
trunks to the ship and back again in a frenzy of excitement; and there
were smells. Lansing did not know it (he knew very little) but it was
the smells that, vulgarly speaking, “did the business.” There was a kind
of background--a fundamental smell--of pitch, of tar, of resin; but here
and there, protruding from this, as he strolled up and down the long,
inclosed wharf, was the rank, searching smell of unroasted coffee, the
fruity fragrance of pineapples, the pungent acidity of tomatoes, the
heavy sweetness of vanilla. As each odor came to him he inhaled it
deeply, curiously, and for him, somewhat excitedly.
After the vessel had slipped away and disappeared around the corner of
the wharf, Lansing had emerged with the intention of traversing Wall
Street and taking an uptown car, but a young and slightly drunken sailor
from a warship in the harbor had, àpropos of nothing at all, thrown an
arm about his waist and led him to a saloon across the way. They had
together only a glass of beer apiece, but they had sat down to it at a
little table and the sailor had talked.
In the sphere of life to which they both belonged there is a directness
and a frankness in the matter of intercourse that would be impossible
for most persons higher in the social order. Lansing had made many
acquaintances and even a few friends by speaking or being spoken to by
detached young men of his own age standing on street corners. Most of
his acquaintances among girls had been begun in the same way. They had
spoken to him or he had spoken to them--it was immaterial--and if they
found each other congenial they sometimes met again; sometimes they
didn’t. But in any event meeting, talking, parting, involved nothing. It
was merely an incident, often a pleasant one, of the kind the so-called
upper classes know but little. It seemed perfectly natural to Lansing
that the sailor, whom he never had seen before and probably would never
see again, should offer him a glass of beer and tell him of his voyage
around the world, and that he himself should respond with his accident,
his discharge from the grocery--in a word, his “troubles,” as he finally
called them.
“A sailor _has_ no troubles,” the other declared as they got up to go;
and he altogether looked it. After that, Lansing spent most of his time
on the wharves and on Sunday afternoon he took Hayward with him.
Hayward’s experience and education was as limited as his friend’s, but
he was of finer clay. What Lansing only felt, Hayward both felt and
translated into words.
“Gee, look at them turtles!” he would exclaim at a row of the huge,
gasping tortured creatures, lying on their backs and bound to a board by
ropes punched through their bleeding flippers. “They come out of the
water to lay eggs in the sand, and then you run out of the bushes and
turn them over on their backs with a pole. I bet there’s money in
turtles.” Or, “Gosh, what a lot of pineapples! How would you like to go
down there, Lansing, where it’s always summer, and just sit around while
the niggers work, and send millions of pineapples back here to be sold
at fifty cents apiece?”
“Forty-five,” corrected Lansing, who had “delivered” them all his life,
but who, until recently, had impartially given them the same
consideration he had been accustomed to bestow upon a potato. Once they
stood for an hour in front of ten cages full of white and yellow
cockatoos. They were even more disturbing, more convincing than the
incoherent negroes, the excitement of departure, the odor of exotic
fruits.
“Down there you can see them flying around wild,” Hayward meditated
aloud. “Down there!” The words began to mean wonderful, incommunicable
things to both of them. “Down there” was the shimmering, beautiful, hot,
mysterious and seductive end of the earth that a Frenchman is always
able to evoke for an instant, when, in a certain languid, reminiscent
tone, he pronounces the words “_là bas_.”
So they shipped on a tramp steamer and after a week they had been paid
off at Havana. In Havana they spent an entrancing day and evening
(Hayward bought an imitation diamond brooch at a place on Obispo street
where the revolving electric lights in the window elicited the last
glitter), but the next day was a good deal of a bore. They had seen the
town, there was no point in seeing it over again, and they were unused
to idleness. Both of them would have jumped at the opportunity of
returning to New York, but as no opportunity of doing so presented
itself neither of them had been obliged to admit it. On the third day,
however, they did move on to Vera Cruz. To Hayward, Vera Cruz was a name
he had heard (Lansing had never even heard it), but had he been asked
what country it was in he could not have told. He had an idea that it
was near New Orleans and Galveston. In another week they were
there--paid off again and turned loose in the Plaza.
Again they spent a notable day. They wandered about the streets, they
went to a wedding in a church, they marveled at the unmolested buzzards
filching garbage from the open drains along the curbstones, they walked
at sunset to the end of the long breakwater and watched the fishermen
come in with their gorgeous catch of redsnapper. In the evening they
went to a moving-picture show where they saw a realistic bull fight and
a manufactured American train robbery. (This last gave them their first
twinge of homesickness; the Pullman cars and the passengers looked so
natural.) When it was over, they again sought the Plaza, where, in the
sultry air, a compact mass of people was slowly forcing its way around
and around to the music of an enormous band high above them among the
trees in the center. They slept at an inexpensive lodging house to which
they had been taken by one of the stokers.
But the next day was very like the second day at Havana, except that the
possibilities of Vera Cruz seemed to be fewer. They could not walk in
any direction without soon coming to the water or to a hot and dreary
stretch of sand, and in their unconsciously blasé New York fashion they
had become, by the second day, hardened to ragged Indians, enormous
straw hats and scarlet _sarapes_. They sat on a shady bench in the Plaza
and discussed an immediate return to New York. Lansing was for going
overland; he had a hazy idea that they were near the border, and he was
amazed and troubled for a moment when the stoker, whom they several
times met again, laughed and told them that the border was a half a week
away in a train. This, of course, they knew they could not afford, and
they decided to work their way back, as they had come, on a steamer.
After that they spent most of their time on the docks, or in front of
the hotels and cafés near them, waylaying skippers and mates. But places
on ships bound for New York were apparently not to be had for the
asking. The men to whom they applied were invariably curt and definite
when they weren’t, as sometimes happened, brutally abusive. This was
annoying although it was also, now and then, amusing. They, as yet, had
not begun to regard matters in the light of a “situation,” for they
still had a little money. At this period of their ebbing fortunes it
seemed to them that they were making a sort of humiliating concession
when they ceased to specify New York as their destination, and resolved
to sail on any ship bound for any American port. But here, again, they
were met with the same irritated outbursts, or brief, cold denials.
They did not know it, because outside of the little ruts in which they
had always moved back and forth, they knew nothing, but Mexico, in
winter, is one of the great goals of the American tramp. Thousands of
them, in perpetually following at the heels of summer, drift across the
border and gradually wander from Laredo to San Luis Potosi, to the City
of Mexico, to Tampico and to Vera Cruz. They approach one in the Plaza,
in the Alameda, at the doors of hotels and theaters and restaurants,
and, with an always interesting fiction, extract twenty-five cents from
one in the name of patriotism. When the spring comes and it is once more
warm at home, they haunt the seaports, endeavoring to return by water.
For short-handed ships at Vera Cruz in April and May there is an
embarrassment of choice--a glut. Without in the least suspecting it,
Hayward and Lansing had, in the eyes of the world, become tramps,
seeking a return passage.
The heat had begun to be intense and the invariable refusal of their
services was discouraging, but far more so were the interminable
mornings and afternoons and evenings when, for the time being, they
gave up their quest and sat on a bench in the Plaza, or, at sunset,
strolled down to the breakwater for the redsnappers and the evening
breeze. They had left home together and they stayed together as a matter
of course, for they did not know anyone else, but they no longer had
anything in particular to say to each other. For the most part they were
silent and listless. They spoke only when something occurred to them
relevant to what, at last, had begun to strike them as their
“situation.”
“It’ll save money if we have one room instead of two, and sleep in the
same bed,” Hayward declared one night, after a day in which they had
scarcely spoken at all.
“If we don’t get up so early--What’s the use anyhow?--We won’t have to
pay for breakfast. Two meals is enough if you’re asleep,” suggested
Lansing a day or so later. And as long as they had money they spent it
only for their bed and their two daily meals. Then came the inevitable
day when they no longer had money, when they realized that the few
cents they were spending for their supper were the last. It was
disagreeable and they had begun to hate Vera Cruz--the monotony of it,
the enforced idleness, the blistering heat, the rumor (they heard it
from some English sailors on the dock) of yellow fever, and their
inability to leave it all behind them. But although they were alarmed
they were not yet panic-stricken. They each had a dress-suit case, an
extra suit of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, some shirts and
underclothes, a hat as well as a cap, three razors and a cheap watch.