At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table at
which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two vacant chairs at
it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a
theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We
hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find
travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the
range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies
dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus
of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving
_garçons_, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the
composers; the _mélange_ of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the
Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe
cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a
sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from
next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new “attraction”
there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his
conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took
the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly,
contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino
cherry in a _table d’hôte_ grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the
equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones,
he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he
would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you
on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at
Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak
swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho
ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he
would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and
how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the
_chuchula_ weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore
Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and have mailed
it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since
Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest I should
discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter. But his
opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities,
countries and continents as the winds or gravitation.
And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with
glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and
dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is
pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that “the men
that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to their
cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.” And whenever they walk
“by roaring streets unknown” they remember their native city “most
faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon
their bond.” And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling
napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no
narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all,
would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the
inhabitants of the Moon.
Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan
by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the
topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a
medley. The concluding air was “Dixie,” and as the exhilarating notes
tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands
from almost every table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be
witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons
of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have
conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to
cafés at nightfall. This applause of the “rebel” air in a Northern city
does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain,
many years’ generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners
at the New Orleans race-track, and the brilliant banquets given by the
Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have
made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp
softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman’s
in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the
war, you know.
When “Dixie” was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from
somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his
soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the
vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us
mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man
acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I
hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I
had.
“Would you mind telling me,” I began, “whether you are from—”
The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into
silence.
“Excuse me,” said he, “but that’s a question I never like to hear
asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a
man by his post-office address? Why, I’ve seen Kentuckians who hated
whiskey, Virginians who weren’t descended from Pocahontas, Indianians
who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers
with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen,
spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow-minded
Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on
the street to watch a one-armed grocer’s clerk do up cranberries in
paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t handicap him with the label of
any section.”
“Pardon me,” I said, “but my curiosity was not altogether an idle one.
I know the South, and when the band plays ‘Dixie’ I like to observe. I
have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special
violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of
either Secaucus, N.J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and
the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test
by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your
own—larger theory, I must confess.”
And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident
that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves.
“I should like to be a periwinkle,” said he, mysteriously, “on the top
of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.
“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau
in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a
goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food
puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another
in Yokohama all the year around. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a
tea-house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ’em how to cook my eggs
in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a mighty little old world. What’s
the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the
old manor house in the dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s
Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It’ll
be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or
ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”
“You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite,” I said admiringly. “But it also
seems that you would decry patriotism.”
“A relic of the stone age,” declared Coglan, warmly. “We are all
brothers—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the
bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one’s city or
State or section or country will be wiped out, and we’ll all be
citizens of the world, as we ought to be.”
“But while you are wandering in foreign lands,” I persisted, “do not
your thoughts revert to some spot—some dear and—”
“Nary a spot,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. “The terrestrial,
globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles,
and known as the Earth, is my abode. I’ve met a good many object-bound
citizens of this country abroad. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a
gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage
canal. I’ve seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of
England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information
that his grand-aunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the
Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for
ransom by some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and
he came back to Kabul with the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the natives said
to him through an interpreter. ‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh,
I don’t know,’ says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver
at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied
down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down
as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere.”
My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought he saw
some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with
the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger without further
ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit
of a valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how the poet
had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I believed in him. How
was it? “The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but
cling to their cities’ hem as a child to the mother’s gown.”