SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT CHANGED.
When we parted with the superintendent of the paper-process factory I
said to Edith that I had taken in since that morning about all the new
impressions and new philosophies I could for the time mentally digest,
and felt great need of resting my mind for a space in the contemplation
of something--if indeed there were anything--which had not changed or
been improved in the last century.
After a moment's consideration Edith exclaimed: "I have it! Ask no
questions, but just come with me."
Presently, as we were making our way along the route she had taken, she
touched my arm, saying, "Let us hurry a little."
Now, hurrying was the regulation gait of the nineteenth century. "Hurry
up!" was about the most threadbare phrase in the English language, and
rather than "_E pluribus unum_" should especially have been the
motto of the American people, but it was the first time the note of haste
had impressed my consciousness since I had been living twentieth-century
days. This fact, together with the touch of my companion upon my arm as
she sought to quicken my pace, caused me to look around, and in so doing
to pause abruptly.
"What is this?" I exclaimed.
"It is too bad!" said my companion. "I tried to get you past without
seeing it."
But indeed, though I had asked what was this building we stood in
presence of, nobody could know so well as I what it was. The mystery was
how it had come to be there for in the midst of this splendid city of
equals, where poverty was an unknown word, I found myself face to face
with a typical nineteenth-century tenement house of the worst sort--one
of the rookeries, in fact, that used to abound in the North End and other
parts of the city. The environment was indeed in strong enough contrast
with that of such buildings in my time, shut in as they generally were by
a labyrinth of noisome alleys and dark, damp courtyards which were
reeking reservoirs of foetid odors, kept in by lofty, light-excluding
walls. This building stood by itself, in the midst of an open square, as
if it had been a palace or other show place. But all the more, indeed, by
this fine setting was the dismal squalor of the grimy structure
emphasized. It seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gloom and chill which
all the bright sunshine of the breezy September afternoon was unable to
dominate. One would not have been surprised, even at noonday, to see
ghosts at the black windows. There was an inscription over the door, and
I went across the square to read it, Edith reluctantly following me.
These words I read, above the central doorway:
"THIS HABITATION OF CRUELTY IS PRESERVED AS A MEMENTO TO COMING
GENERATIONS OF THE RULE OF THE RICH."
"This is one of the ghost buildings," said Edith, "kept to scare the
people with, so that they may never risk anything that looks like
bringing back the old order of things by allowing any one on any plea to
obtain an economic advantage over another. I think they had much better
be torn down, for there is no more danger of the world's going back to
the old order than there is of the globe reversing its rotation."
A band of children, accompanied by a young woman, came across the square
as we stood before the building, and filed into the doorway and up the
black and narrow stairway. The faces of the little ones were very
serious, and they spoke in whispers.
"They are school children." said Edith. "We are all taken through this
building, or some other like it, when we are in the schools, and the
teacher explains what manner of things used to be done and endured there.
I remember well when I was taken through this building as a child. It was
long afterward before I quite recovered from the terrible impression I
received. Really, I don't think it is a good idea to bring young children
here, but it is a custom that became settled in the period after the
Revolution, when the horror of the bondage they had escaped from was yet
fresh in the minds of the people, and their great fear was that by some
lack of vigilance the rule of the rich might be restored.
"Of course," she continued, "this building and the others like it, which
were reserved for warnings when the rest were razed to the ground, have
been thoroughly cleaned and strengthened and made sanitary and safe every
way, but our artists have very cunningly counterfeited all the old
effects of filth and squalor, so that the appearance of everything is
just as it was. Tablets in the rooms describe how many human beings used
to be crowded into them, and the horrible conditions of their lives. The
worst about it is that the facts are all taken from historical records,
and are absolutely true. There are some of these places in which the
inhabitants of the buildings as they used to swarm in them are reproduced
in wax or plaster with every detail of garments, furniture, and all the
other features based on actual records or pictures of the time. There is
something indescribably dreadful in going through the buildings fitted
out in that way. The dumb figures seem to appeal to you to help them. It
was so long ago, and yet it makes one feel conscience-stricken not to be
able to do anything."
"But, Julian, come away. It was just a stupid accident my bringing you
past here. When I undertook to show you something that had not changed
since your day, I did not mean to mock you."
Thanks to modern rapid transit, ten minutes later we stood on the ocean
shore, with the waves of the Atlantic breaking noisily at our feet and
its blue floor extending unbroken to the horizon. Here indeed was
something that had not been changed--a mighty existence, to which a
thousand years were as one day and one day as a thousand years. There
could be no tonic for my case like the inspiration of this great
presence, this unchanging witness of all earth's mutations. How petty
seemed the little trick of time that had been played on me as I stood in
the presence of this symbol of everlastingness which made past, present,
and future terms of little meaning!
In accompanying Edith to the part of the beach where we stood I had taken
no note of directions, but now, as I began to study the shore, I observed
with lively emotion that she had unwittingly brought me to the site of my
old seaside place at Nahant. The buildings were indeed gone, and the
growth of trees had quite changed the aspect of the landscape, but the
shore line remained unaltered, and I knew it at once. Bidding her follow
me, I led the way around a point to a little strip of beach between the
sea and a wall of rock which shut off all sight or sound of the land
behind. In my former life the spot had been a favorite resort when I
visited the shore. Here in that life so long ago, and yet recalled as if
of yesterday, I had been used from a lad to go to do my day dreaming.
Every feature of the little nook was as familiar to me as my bedroom and
all was quite unchanged. The sea in front, the sky above, the islands and
the blue headlands of the distant coast--all, indeed, that filled the
view was the same in every detail. I threw myself upon the warm sand by
the margin of the sea, as I had been wont to do, and in a moment the
flood of familiar associations had so completely carried me back to my
old life that all the marvels that had happened to me, when presently I
began to recall them, seemed merely as a day dream that had come to me
like so many others before it in that spot by the shore. But what a dream
it had been, that vision of the world to be; surely of all the dreams
that had come to me there by the sea the weirdest!
There had been a girl in the dream, a maiden much to be desired. It had
been ill if I had lost her; but I had not, for this was she, the girl in
this strange and graceful garb, standing by my side and smiling down at
me. I had by some great hap brought her back from dreamland, holding her
by the very strength of my love when all else of the vision had dissolved
at the opening of the eyes.
Why not? What youth has not often been visited in his dreams by maidenly
ideals fairer than walk on earth, whom, waking, he has sighed for and for
days been followed by the haunting beauty of their half-remembered faces?
I, more fortunate than they, had baffled the jealous warder at the gates
of sleep and brought my queen of dreamland through.
When I proceeded to state to Edith this theory to account for her
presence, she professed to find it highly reasonable, and we proceeded at
much length to develop the idea. Falling into the conceit that she was an
anticipation of the twentieth-century woman instead of my being an
excavated relic of the nineteenth-century man, we speculated what we
should do for the summer. We decided to visit the great pleasure resorts,
where, no doubt, she would under the circumstances excite much curiosity
and at the same time have an opportunity of studying what to her
twentieth-century mind would seem even more astonishing types of humanity
than she would seem to them--namely, people who, surrounded by a needy
and anguished world, could get their own consent to be happy in a
frivolous and wasteful idleness. Afterward we would go to Europe and
inspect such things there as might naturally be curiosities to a girl out
of the year 2000, such as a Rothschild, an emperor, and a few specimens
of human beings, some of which were at that time still extant in Germany,
Austria, and Russia, who honestly believed that God had given to certain
fellow-beings a divine title to reign over them.