fifty miles of the falls has written his or her impressions. Everybody
who has never seen the falls knows all about them, and--besides, I want
some more apples. They're good in this place, ye big fat man," I quoted.
The Professor retired into his hammock for a while. Then he reappeared
flushed with a new thought. "If you want to see something quite new
let's go to Chautauqua."
"What's that?"
"Well, it's a sort of institution. It's an educational idea, and it
lives on the borders of a lake in New York State. I think you'll find
it interesting; and I know it will show you a new side of American
life."
In blank ignorance I consented. Everybody is anxious that I should
see as many sides of American life as possible. Here in the East they
demand of me what I thought of their West. I dare not answer that it is
as far from their notions and motives as Hindustan from Hoboken--that
the West, to this poor thinking, is an America which has no kinship
with its neighbour. Therefore I congratulated them hypocritically upon
"their West," and from their lips learn that there is yet another
America, that of the South--alien and distinct. Into the third
country, alas! I shall not have time to penetrate. The newspapers and
the oratory of the day will tell you that all feeling between the
North and South is extinct. None the less the Northerner, outside his
newspapers and public men, has a healthy contempt for the Southerner
which the latter repays by what seems very like a deep-rooted aversion
to the Northerner. I have learned now what the sentiments of the great
American nation mean. The North speaks in the name of the country; the
West is busy developing its own resources, and the Southerner skulks in
his tents. His opinions do not count; but his girls are very beautiful.
So the Professor and I took a train and went to look at the educational
idea. From sleepy, quiet little Musquash we rattled through the coal
and iron districts of Pennsylvania, her coke ovens flaring into the
night and her clamorous foundries waking the silence of the woods in
which they lay. Twenty years hence woods and cornfields will be gone,
and from Pittsburg to Shenango all will be smoky black as Bradford
and Beverly: for each factory is drawing to itself a small town, and
year by year the demand for rails increases. The Professor held forth
on the labour question, his remarks being prompted by the sight of a
train-load of Italians and Hungarians going home from mending a bridge.
"You recollect the Burmese," said he. "The American is like the Burman
in one way. He won't do heavy manual labour. He knows too much.
Consequently he imports the alien to be his hands--just as the Burman
gets hold of the Madrassi. If he shuts down all labour immigration he
will have to fill up his own dams, cut his cuttings and pile his own
embankments. The American citizen won't like that. He is racially unfit
to be a labourer in _muttee_. He can invent, buy, sell and design, but
he cannot waste his time on earth-works. _Iswaste_, this great people
will resume contract labour immigration the minute they find the aliens
in their midst are not sufficient for the jobs in hand. If the alien
gives them trouble they will shoot him."
"Yes, they will shoot him," I said, remembering how only two days
before some Hungarians employed on a line near Musquash had seen fit
to strike and to roll down rocks on labourers hired to take their
places, an amusement which caused the sheriff to open fire with a
revolver and wound or kill (it really does not much matter which) two
or three of them. Only a man who earns ten pence a day in sunny Italy
knows how to howl for as many shillings in America.
The composition of the crowd in the cars began to attract my attention.
There were very many women and a few clergymen. Where you shall find
these two together, there also shall be a fad, a hobby, a theory, or a
mission.
"These people are going to Chautauqua," said the Professor. "It's a
sort of open-air college--they call it--but you'll understand things
better when you arrive." A grim twinkle in the back of his eye awakened
all my fears.
"Can you get anything to drink there?"
"No."
"Are you allowed to smoke?"
"Ye-es, in certain places."
"Are we staying there over Sunday?"
"_No._" This very emphatically.
Feminine shrieks of welcome: "There's Sadie!" "Why, Maimie, is that
yeou!" "Alf's in the smoker. Did you bring the baby?" and a profligate
expenditure of kisses between bonnet and bonnet told me we had struck
a gathering place of the clans. It was midnight. They swept us, this
horde of clamouring women, into a Black Maria omnibus and a sumptuous
hotel close to the borders of a lake--Lake Chautauqua. Morning
showed as pleasant a place of summer pleasuring as ever I wish to
see. Smooth-cut lawns of velvet grass, studded with tennis-courts,
surrounded the hotel and ran down to the blue waters, which were dotted
with rowboats. Young men in wonderful blazers, and maidens in more
wonderful tennis costumes; women attired with all the extravagance of
unthinking Chicago or the grace of Washington (which is Simla) filled
the grounds, and the neat French nurses and exquisitely dressed little
children ran about together. There was pickerel-fishing for such as
enjoyed it; a bowling-alley, unlimited bathing and a toboggan, besides
many other amusements, all winding up with a dance or a concert at
night. Women dominated the sham mediæval hotel, rampaged about the
passages, flirted in the corridors and chased unruly children off the
tennis-courts. This place was called Lakewood. It is a pleasant place
for the unregenerate.
"_We_ go up the lake in a steamer to Chautauqua," said the Professor.
"But I want to stay here. This is what I understand and like."
"No, you don't. You must come along and be educated."
All the shores of the lake, which is eighteen miles long, are dotted
with summer hotels, camps, boat-houses and pleasant places of rest. You
go there with all your family to fish and to flirt. There is no special
beauty in the landscape of tame cultivated hills and decorous, woolly
trees, but good taste and wealth have taken the place in hand, trimmed
its borders and made it altogether delightful.
The institution of Chautauqua is the largest village on the lake.
I can't hope to give you an idea of it, but try to imagine the
Charlesville at Mussoorie magnified ten times and set down in the
midst of hundreds of tiny little hill houses, each different from its
neighbour, brightly painted and constructed of wood. Add something of
the peace of dull Dalhousie, flavour with a tincture of missions and
the old Polytechnic, Cassell's Self Educator and a Monday pop, and
spread the result out flat on the shores of Naini Tal Lake, which you
will please transport to the Dun. But that does not half describe the
idea. We watched it through a wicket gate, where we were furnished with
a red ticket, price forty cents, and five dollars if you lost it. I
naturally lost mine on the spot and was fined accordingly.
Once inside the grounds on the paths that serpentined round the
myriad cottages I was lost in admiration of scores of pretty girls,
most of them with little books under their arms, and a pretty air
of seriousness on their faces. Then I stumbled upon an elaborately
arranged mass of artificial hillocks surrounding a mud puddle and a
wormy streak of slime connecting it with another mud puddle. Little
boulders topped with square pieces of putty were strewn over the
hillocks--evidently with intention. When I hit my foot against one such
boulder painted "Jericho," I demanded information in aggrieved tones.
"Hsh!" said the Professor. "It's a model of Palestine--the Holy
Land--done to scale and all that, you know."
Two young people were flirting on the top of the highest mountain
overlooking Jerusalem; the mud puddles were meant for the Dead Sea and
the Sea of Galilee, and the twisting gutter was the Jordan. A small boy
sat on the city "Safed" and cast his line into Chautauqua Lake. On the
whole it did not impress me. The hotel was filled with women, and a
large blackboard in the main hall set forth the exercises for the day.
It seemed that Chautauqua was a sort of educational syndicate, _cum_
hotel, _cum_ (very mild) Rosherville. There were annually classes of
young women and young men who studied in the little cottages for two
or three months in the year and went away to self-educate themselves.
There were other classes who learned things by correspondence, and yet
other classes made up the teachers. All these delights I had missed,
but had arrived just in time for a sort of debauch of lectures which
concluded the three months' education. The syndicate in control had
hired various lecturers whose names would draw audiences, and these men
were lecturing about the labour problem, the servant-girl question, the
artistic and political aspect of Greek life, the Pope in the Middle
Ages and similar subjects, in all of which young women do naturally
take deep delight. Professor Mahaffy (what the devil was he doing in
that gallery?) was the Greek art side man, and a Dr. Gunsaulus handled
the Pope. The latter I loved forthwith. He had been to some gathering
on much the same lines as the Chautauqua one, and had there been
detected, in the open daylight, smoking a cigar. One whole lighted
cigar. Then his congregation or his class, or the mothers of both of
them, wished to know whether this was the sort of conduct for a man
professing temperance. I have not heard Dr. Gunsaulus lecture, but he
must be a good man. Professor Mahaffy was enjoying himself. I sat close
to him at tiffin and heard him arguing with an American professor as
to the merits of the American Constitution. Both men spoke that the
table might get the benefit of their wisdom, whence I argued that even
eminent professors are eminently human.
"Now, for goodness' sake, behave yourself," said the Professor.
"You are not to ask the whereabouts of a bar. You are not to laugh
at anything you see, and you are not to go away and deride this
Institution."
Remember that advice. But I was virtuous throughout, and my virtue
brought its own reward. The parlour of the hotel was full of committees
of women; some of them were Methodist Episcopalians, some were
Congregationalists, and some were United Presbyterians; and some were
faith healers and Christian Scientists, and all trotted about with
notebooks in their hands and the expression of Atlas on their faces.
They were connected with missions to the heathen, and so forth, and
their deliberations appeared to be controlled by a male missionary. The
Professor introduced me to one of them as their friend from India.
"Indeed," said she; "and of what denomination are you?"
"I--I live in India," I murmured.
"You are a missionary, then?"
I had obeyed the Professor's orders all too well. "I am not a
missionary," I said, with, I trust, a decent amount of regret in
my tones. She dropped me and I went to find the Professor, who had
cowardly deserted me, and I think was laughing on the balcony. It is
very hard to persuade a denominational American that a man from India
is not a missionary. The home-returned preachers very naturally convey
the impression that India is inhabited solely by missionaries.
I heard some of them talking and saw how, all unconsciously, they were
hinting the thing which was not. But prejudice governs me against my
will. When a woman looks you in the face and pities you for having to
associate with "heathen" and "idolaters"--Sikh Sirdar of the north, if
you please, Mahommedan gentlemen and the simple-minded _Jat_ of the
Punjab--what can you do?
The Professor took me out to see the sights, and lest I should be
further treated as a denominational missionary I wrapped myself in
tobacco smoke. This ensures respectful treatment at Chautauqua.
An amphitheatre capable of seating five thousand people is the
centre-point of the show. Here the lecturers lecture and the concerts
are held, and from here the avenues start. Each cottage is decorated
according to the taste of the owner, and is full of girls. The
verandahs are alive with them; they fill the sinuous walks; they hurry
from lecture to lecture, hatless, and three under one sunshade; they
retail little confidences walking arm-in-arm; they giggle for all the
world like uneducated maidens, and they walk about and row on the lake
with their very young men. The lectures are arranged to suit all
tastes. I got hold of one called "The Eschatology of Our Saviour." It
set itself to prove the length, breadth and temperature of Hell from
information garnered from the New Testament. I read it in the sunshine
under the trees, with these hundreds of pretty maidens pretending to
be busy all round; and it did not seem to match the landscape. Then
I studied the faces of the crowd. One-quarter were old and worn; the
balance were young, innocent, charming and frivolous. I wondered how
much they really knew or cared for the art side of Greek life, or the
Pope in the Middle Ages; and how much for the young men who walked with
them. Also what their ideas of Hell might be. We entered a place called
a museum (all the shows here are of an improving tendency), which had
evidently been brought together by feminine hands, so jumbled were the
exhibits. There was a facsimile of the Rosetta stone, with some printed
popular information; an Egyptian camel saddle, miscellaneous truck
from the Holy Land, another model of the same, photographs of Rome,
badly-blotched drawings of volcanic phenomena, the head of the pike
that John Brown took to Harper's Ferry that time his soul went marching
on, casts of doubtful value, and views of Chautauqua, all bundled
together without the faintest attempt at arrangement, and all very
badly labelled.
It was the apotheosis of Popular Information. I told the Professor
so, and he said I was an ass, which didn't affect the statement in
the least. I have seen museums like Chautauqua before, and well I
know what they mean. If you do not understand, read the first part of
_Aurora Leigh_. Lectures on the Chautauqua stamp I have heard before.
People don't get educated that way. They must dig for it, and cry for
it, and sit up o' nights for it; and when they have got it they must
call it by another name or their struggle is of no avail. You can get
a degree from this Lawn Tennis Tabernacle of all the arts and sciences
at Chautauqua. Mercifully the students are women-folk, and if they
marry the degree is forgotten, and if they become school-teachers they
can only instruct young America in the art of mispronouncing his own
language. And yet so great is the perversity of the American girl that
she can, scorning tennis and the allurements of boating, work herself
nearly to death over the skittles of archæology and foreign tongues, to
the sorrow of all her friends.
Late that evening the contemptuous courtesy of the hotel allotted me
a room in a cottage of quarter-inch planking, destitute of the most
essential articles of toilette furniture. Ten shillings a day was the
price of this shelter, for Chautauqua is a paying institution. I heard
the Professor next door banging about like a big jack-rabbit in a very
small packing-case. Presently he entered, holding between disgusted
finger and thumb the butt end of a candle, his only light, and this in
a house that would burn quicker than cardboard if once lighted.
"Isn't it shameful? Isn't it atrocious? A dâk bungalow _khansamah_
wouldn't dare to give me a raw candle to go to bed by. I say, when you
describe this hole rend them to pieces. A candle stump! Give it 'em
hot."
You will remember the Professor's advice to me not long ago. "'Fessor,"
said I loftily (my own room was a windowless dog-kennel), "this
is unseemly. We are now in the most civilised country on earth,
enjoying the advantages of an Institootion which is the flower of the
civilisation of the nineteenth century; and yet you kick up a fuss over
being obliged to go to bed by the stump of a candle! Think of the Pope
in the Middle Ages. Reflect on the art side of Greek life. Remember
the Sabbath day to keep it holy, and get out of this. You're filling
two-thirds of my room."
* * * * *
_Apropos_ of Sabbath, I have come across some lovely reading which
it grieves me that I have not preserved. Chautauqua, you must know,
shuts down on Sundays. With awful severity an eminent clergyman has
been writing to the papers about the beauties of the system. The
stalls that dispense terrible drinks of Moxie, typhoidal milk-shakes
and sulphuric-acid-on-lime-bred soda-water are stopped; boating is
forbidden; no steamer calls at the jetty, and the nearest railway
station is three miles off, and you can't hire a conveyance; the
barbers must not shave you, and no milkman or butcher goes his rounds.
The reverend gentleman enjoys this (he must wear a beard). I forget
his exact words, but they run: "And thus, thank God, no one can supply
himself on the Lord's day with the luxuries or conveniences that he has
neglected to procure on Saturday." Of course, if you happen to linger
inside the wicket gate--verily Chautauqua is a close preserve--over
Sunday, you must bow gracefully to the rules of the place. But what are
you to do with this frame of mind? The owner of it would send missions
to convert the "heathen," or would convert you at ten minutes' notice;
and yet if you called him a heathen and an idolater he would probably
be very much offended.
Oh, my friends, I have been to one source of the river of missionary
enterprise, and the waters thereof are bitter--bitter as hate, narrow
as the grave! Not now do I wonder that the missionary in the East is at
times, to our thinking, a little intolerant towards beliefs he cannot
understand and people he does not appreciate. Rather it is a mystery
to me that these delegates of an imperious ecclesiasticism have not
a hundred times ere this provoked murder and fire among our wards.
If they were true to the iron teachings of Centreville or Petumna or
Chunkhaven, when they came they would have done so. For Centreville or
Smithson or Squeehawken teach the only true creeds in all the world,
and to err from their tenets, as laid down by the bishops and the
elders, is damnation. How it may be in England at the centres of supply
I cannot tell, but shall presently learn. Here in America I am afraid
of these grim men of the denominations, who know so intimately the will
of the Lord and enforce it to the uttermost. Left to themselves they
would prayerfully, in all good faith and sincerity, slide gradually,
ere a hundred years, from the mental inquisitions which they now
work with some success to an institootion--be sure it would be an
"institootion" with a journal of its own--not far different from what
the Torquemada ruled aforetime. Does this seem extravagant? I have
watched the expression on the men's faces when they told me that they
would rather see their son or daughter dead at their feet than doing
such and such things--trampling on the grass on a Sunday, or something
equally heinous--and I was grateful that the law of men stood between
me and their interpretation of the law of God. They would assuredly
slay the body for the soul's sake and account it righteousness. And
this would befall not in the next generation, perhaps, but in the next,
for the very look I saw in a Eusufzai's face at Peshawar when he turned
and spat in my tracks I have seen this day at Chautauqua in the face of
a preacher. The will was there, but not the power.
The Professor went up the lake on a visit, taking my ticket of
admission with him, and I found a child, aged seven, fishing with a
worm and pin, and spent the rest of the afternoon in his company. He
was a delightful young citizen, full of information and apparently
ignorant of denominations. We caught sun fish and catfish and pickerel
together.
The trouble began when I attempted to escape through the wicket on the
jetty and let the creeds fight it out among themselves. Without that
ticket I could not go, unless I paid five dollars. That was the rule to
prevent people cheating.
"You see," quoth a man in charge, "you've no idea of the meanness of
these people. Why, there was a lady this season--a prominent member of
the Baptist connection--we know, but we can't prove it that she had two
of her hired girls in a cellar when the grounds were being canvassed
for the annual poll-tax of five dollars a head. So she saved ten
dollars. We can't be too careful with this crowd. You've got to produce
that ticket as a proof that you haven't been living in the grounds for
weeks and weeks."
"For weeks and weeks!" The blue went out of the sky as he said it. "But
I wouldn't stay here for one week if I could help it," I answered.
"No more would I," he said earnestly.
Returned the Professor in a steamer, and him I basely left to make
explanations about that ticket, while I returned to Lakewood--the nice
hotel without any regulations. I feared that I should be kept in those
terrible grounds for the rest of my life.
And it turned out an hour later that the same fear lay upon the
Professor also. He arrived heated but exultant, having baffled the
combined forces of all the denominations and recovered the five-dollar
deposit. "I wouldn't go inside those gates for anything," he said. "I
waited on the jetty. What do you think of it all?"
"It has shown me a new side of American life," I responded. "I never
want to see it again--and I'm awfully sorry for the girls who take it
seriously. I suppose the bulk of them don't. They just have a good
time. But it would be better----"
"How?"
"If they all got married instead of pumping up interest in a
bric-à-brac museum and advertised lectures, and having their names in
the papers. One never gets to believe in the proper destiny of woman
until one sees a thousand of 'em doing something different. I don't
like Chautauqua. There's something wrong with it, and I haven't time to
find out where. But it is wrong."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: No. XXXIX appeared in the "Pioneer Mail," Vol. XVII, No.
14, April 2, 1890.]
THE BOW FLUME CABLE-CAR[19]
"See those things yonder?" He looked in the direction of the Market
Street cable-cars which, moved without any visible agency, were
conveying the good people of San Francisco to a picnic somewhere
across the harbour. The stranger was not more than seven feet high.
His face was burnished copper, his hands and beard were fiery red and
his eyes a baleful blue. He had thrust his large frame into a suit of
black clothes which made no pretensions toward fitting him, and his
cheek was distended with plug-tobacco. "Those cars," he said, more to
himself than to me, "run upon a concealed cable worked by machinery,
and that's what broke our syndicate at Bow Flume. Concealed machinery,
no--concealed ropes. Don't you mix yourself with them. They are
ontrustworthy."
"These cars work comfortably," I ventured. "They run over people now
and then, but that doesn't matter."