ALITTLE old man came into the steamship office where I was buying a ticket. He had mild, kindly eyes, pink cheeks, a vague, white beard and a deferential, rather apologetic manner.
“Have you any new literature to-day?” he inquired of the clerk after some hesitation.
“Sure,” the clerk answered genially, and picked him out a bundle of those prettily and skilfully illustrated pamphlets describing almost every known country on the globe. He also gave him plans of ships, price lists of the various staterooms and dates of sailing.
“He must be something of a traveler,” I suggested when the old man, after many thanks, left the office.
The clerk smiled.
“The old guy and his wife have been almost everywhere,” he answered; “but I don’t think that either of them has ever been out of this town,” he enigmatically added, “and they’re both about a hundred and fifty.”
“Yes?” I said encouragingly.
“He comes in regularly twice a year,” the clerk went on, “and gets all the ‘literature,’ as he calls it, about the summer and winter tours. Then he and his wife take the trips by what I call the Easy Chair Route. They not only know all about the railway trains and ships and stagecoaches, they study up the places, as they go along, out of books they get from the public library. I bet they know a darned sight more about Europe, Arope, Irope and Sirope than most of the people who’ve been there.”
The clerk’s remarks called up for me a charming picture. The old couple would decide on Egypt and the Holy Land for their winter cruise, and in the long, cold, winter evenings, seated at a table near, not a fireplace (I saw at a glance that their little parlor would not contain a fireplace) but one of those high,shining and most comfortable stoves with countless little isinglass windows and a soothing red glow behind them, they would read aloud, consult maps and pictures and time-tables and no doubt disagree very gently here and there as to the proper interpretation of certain passages in the Scriptures. And until the hour arrived for “locking up,” for refilling the stove, for seeing that the cat was comfortable for the night and for going to bed, they would actually be in Egypt or the Holy Land—much more so, as the clerk had shrewdly appreciated, than many of the sojourners at Shepheard’s Hotel, or the renters of steam dahabeahs on the Nile.
It undoubtedly is one way of traveling, and by no means a bad way. In fact I once came across a little paper in the Contributor’s Club of theAtlantic Monthlydeclaring it to be the best way. But then I am convinced that all the contributions to the Contributor’s Club of theAtlantic Monthlyare contributed by very cultivated and cozy, home-loving old maids. Books of travel and portfolios of well-takenphotographs are the rails upon which the easy chair glides, the unknown sea upon which it so placidly sails. Everyone has made voyages of this kind and, while many of them are uneventful, some of them are thrilling.
The most memorable one (not counting books of adventure which in this connection don’t count at all) I ever took was long ago to the Island of Barbados. We were in college at the time and one of the requirements of the advanced English course we were studying was that everybody should write a story in seven chapters—plot, locality and treatment being left to our own discretion. The scene of my narrative (it makes me blush when I recall that little masterpiece of fiction) was in and about Boston, and one bitterly cold sleeting afternoon I asked a friend of mine what he was going to write about. We were in his study at the time and, as he was absorbed at his desk in working out an architectural problem, he merely muttered, with his nose wrinkled up, “Barbados.”
“What are they?” I inquired.
“It isn’t they, it’s it,” he replied; “it’s an island.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I really don’t know,” he said.
“But how can you write about it if you don’t know anything about it?” I pursued.
“Why, doesn’t the mere name convey everything to you?” he demanded.
“It conveys,” I told him, “some sort of vegetable.Dohelp yourself to some more of the barbados,” I added.
“To me it means—but let’s go over to the library and get a book about it. I’ve meant to all along, just to see if my idea of it was right,” he suggested. So we went to Gore Hall, where the man at the desk found us a book, and that evening, in front of a grate full of hot, red coal, we went to the Island of Barbados, drinking beer and eating crackers on the way, and also during our residence on the exquisite little island where “the sea assumes strange and unexpected tints; it may be violet, with streaks of lettuce green orforget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch of brilliant luster such as shines on a beetle’s back, or may shimmer into a lake of lapis lazuli.” We stayed on the Island of Barbados until half-past two in the morning. Just recently I returned there one evening in a better book, and if anyone wishes this winter to take a cruise to the West Indies without leaving home, I recommend him to take passage at once on Sir Frederick Treve’s recently published “The Cradle of the Deep,” one of the most entrancing and beautifully written books of travel of my acquaintance.
As for actual traveling, the kind that necessitates physical as well as mental activity, one great truth about it has at last dawned upon me. No matter what may be your method of procedure, no matter whether your means be modest or unlimited (here, I confess, I am drawing on my imagination), it is always much more comfortable to stay at home. This may sound like an undue emphasis upon an obvious fact, but judging from the number of persons one everywhere meets who do notseem to have grasped the fact, I don’t believe it is. All over the world, travelers for pleasure continually complain of the hotels, the food, the trains, boats, servants, prices, manners, customs and weather. Almost the entire conversation of a group of fellow countrymen I once met on a steamer consisted of enumerating the things they were going to eat when they arrived in New York. Just recently a friend of mine, who had made a short trip in Mexico, referred with bitterness to that rather primitive country because a bath necessitated going out of his hotel to a bathing establishment. Nothing he saw in Mexico apparently in any way compensated him for this and various other minor discomforts. Without doubt, “be it ever so humble,” there is no place like it, and I have often wondered, this being the case, just why we usually do take a trip whenever the opportunity offers itself. What is the psychology of the desire to travel?
With me, at least, I think it arises from the same impulse that prompts one to get upand take a walk after one has sat too long in the house. The desire to travel is a kind of desire to stretch the mental legs. There is no essential difference of intent between the little journey “down town” and back, and a journey to Italy or India. During a pleasant, objectless stroll on Main street my mind is in much the same state, although perhaps in a lesser degree, that it is in when I,
With observation and extensive view,Survey the world from China to Peru.
With observation and extensive view,Survey the world from China to Peru.
Sometimes the idea of one’s entire country becomes even as a long occupied chair in a room, and it is then that, circumstances being propitious, people pack up and flit to lands where everything is different. Having voluntarily sought complete change, it always strikes me as ungrateful and childish to quarrel with it when they get it. If almost everything in a foreign land were not different, travel would begin and end with locomotion, and locomotion is the least of travel.
What the most of it is, I have never beenable quite to determine. No doubt to each person, or rather to every group of persons who can be classified under the same general head, it is something different. One old gentlemen I knew went through Italy and Greece all but oblivious to the scenery, the aspect of the cities, the costume, the various sounds and the atmospheres that made one country Italian and the other Greek, but he had a thrilling time. His delight was to read and translate every inscription he came across on a monument. He could have found them all in archaeological works at the public library at home, and done the same thing. The intense pleasure, however, lay in doing it on the ground from the original stones. I do not for a moment doubt that the thirty-six young ladies, who recently won a newspaper “popularity contest” and toured the continent with a steamer trunk full of assorted chewing gum, enjoyed Italy quite as much as did my old friend. Some people I know enjoy foreign travel almost solely because of the acquaintances they pick up. Venice spells Smith, Sienna really means Jones; Chartres, Amiens and Beauvais are a confused but pleasant memory of the Robinsons, all of which is a perfectly legitimate manner of finding pleasure in travel.
Some persons enjoy traveling in solitude; the presence of a companion disturbs their susceptibility to receiving valuable “impressions.” Others enjoy it intensely but would be wretched unless they were accompanied by some one capable of supplying them with the impressions they long to have but don’t know how. Many regard travel entirely from an educational angle. They have a tendency to translate everything they see into terms of dates. It pleases them to learn, for instance, that Lucca Delia Robbia was born in 1400, and that “while Botticelli was one of the worst anatomists he was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance,” but they worry a good deal for fear they’ll forget it. In the meanwhile they rather lose sight of Delia Robbia’s “sweet, ethereal and visionary grace,” as well as Botticelli’s anatomy anddraughtsmanship; but it’s a comfort to know that they know they’re there. Still others travel in a pleasantly aimless fashion, quietly reveling in their lack of obligation to see or to do anything they do not wish to. One man I know, who belongs to this type, has a genuine love of art and considerable knowledge of it; but although he has been in London several times he has never seen either the National Gallery or the Elgin marbles. When I asked him why not, he said in all sincerity that when he was in London he had never been in the kind of mood that made it a pleasure to look at such things, and he hated to make a duty of what often was so great a pleasure. The pleasure of travel, in a word, depends entirely upon the point of view. Like all the other pleasures of life it depends, to employ the trite, true phrase, upon what we ourselves bring to it.
I may be wrong, but it often seems to me that English people of a certain kind are the best, the ideal, travelers. We all know, of course, that the continent of Europe is infestedwith the most odious English tourists, who cross the channel for a stay of a week or two and who spend most of their time in disputing hotel bills, in trying to get something for nothing and in despising the various countries they visit because they happen to differ in many respects from the British Isles. One hears much of “vulgar Americans,” and one often sees them; but in my tolerably wide experience none of God’s creatures masquerading as human beings has ever filled me with the same horror that I have in the presence of this type of coarse, brutal, dense, provincial touring English person—man or woman. In America we simply have never invented such an awful type; it is inconceivable to us until we meet it in the form of certain English people on the Continent.
These, naturally, are not the kind of English to whom I refer: the kind who I always feel are the ideal travelers. As travelers they are ideal, because they are (for want of a better term) so “well rounded.” They bring to their travels in foreign lands so much—aquiet enthusiasm, cultivated tastes, thoroughness; a mental and physical vitality that among Americans is very rare. Unlike the American schoolma’am, they never specialize on dates and art criticism; they usually know the dates beforehand, and are capable of discriminating between the good and trashy. They enjoy making agreeable acquaintances, but acquaintances are not the sole object of their travels. They don’t like to miss anything, and, although they are never in a hurry, nothing escapes them. While an American family is taking an exhausted nap or hanging about a hotel wondering what to do, these English people will be tramping five miles to see the sunset and get up an appetite for dinner. There is something admirably complete about them. They enjoy the churches and galleries and appreciate them, but they are also sincerely interested in the life of the people and in nature. The incidents of travel they take calmly as they come, and when they complain it is only because their rights have been infringed upon. Out of traveling theyget, it always strikes me, everything there is to get.
That they do, I have begun to believe, is simply because of what they bring to their travels. They bring (to repeat) quiet but unflagging enthusiasm, considerable cultivation, the habit of thoroughness in anything they undertake, excellent digestions and equable tempers. All of which lands us bump up against the inevitable platitude that invariably stands guard at the other end of almost every train of thought. Abstractly considered, travel is at best an uncomfortable activity more often than not: strange beds, strange food, a constant, hideous packing and unpacking of trunks too small to contain conveniently one’s few possessions; long, dreary intervals in railway stations, nightmare scrambles at custom-houses, steamers that bury their noses in the sea and kick their heels in the air, sleeping cars always either too hot or too cold. Such is travel in the abstract. Its pleasant qualities, like the pleasant qualities of almost every other pleasure in life, must be supplied largely byourselves. If travel did nothing else for us, it would be valuable by reason of its ability to drive home this old truth. In order thoroughly to enjoy travel we must be able to give considerably more than we get.
THE great German steamship companies have developed, one might almost say created, a new type of American. This dawned on me last winter while taking a three months’ cruise to South America and back. The type is that of the retired business man who is enjoying his retirement. There was a time, not so long ago in our history, when he scarcely existed, for the simple reason that he never, or at least rarely, retired. Idleness spelled boredom. If in a misguided moment mother and the girls persuaded him to give up business he found himself confronted by an appalling amount of leisure rather impossible for him to manipulate and make use of.
The Germans in their wonderful way have changed all that. Now when a middle-agedman has made enough money to live on comfortably they offer him something very definite and delightful to do. He can at any season of the year embark on a “floating hotel” and go to some far-away and interesting part of the world with little or no bother to himself. Just this I notice is what in large numbers he has of late years begun to take advantage of. He and a placid, pleasant wife visit the Mediterranean ports during the winter, investigate the Scandinavian countries, including the North Cape, during the summer, encircle the globe during the greater part of a year, and finally decide to go to South America. Everything is made so easy for him. He lives on the ship during the entire voyage except, perhaps, for a day or so here and there when, for a change, the party stays on shore at a hotel. The necessity of constantly ordering food or struggling with cabmen, waiters and shopkeepers in a foreign language he feels himself too old to learn is agreeably eliminated for him. He comes home with new interests, a widened horizon, refreshed in mind and bodyand usually ready to start out again the next year.
There were many of them on the first South American cruise of last winter, and to me the type was a novel one. For one usually, in a vague sort of a way, thinks of middle-aged Americans traveling in strange countries for the first time as somewhat helpless, often bored, often irritated, uncertain as to where to go and looking forward with relief to the date of sailing homeward. Those I met last winter were anything but that. In a quiet, restful sort of a way they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Their attitude toward it all was one of persons who had placed themselves in the hands of what literally was their creator.
It was interesting for the first few days to stretch out on a chair in the sun and, with complete detachment, examine one’s fellow passengers as they passed by. One always hears that “a ship is such a good place in which to study human nature.” Of course it is. Every place is if one has the eyes andears with which to see and hear it. But I do not believe a ship is particularly so any more. The day for that has passed. People at the present time travel too much to desire to become deeply intimate on short acquaintance. They are too reserved, too experienced. Lifelong friendships, I am inclined to believe, are not often made any more on ocean steamers.
There were one hundred and eighty-one persons in the party, and as they strolled about the deck I discovered myself lazily picking out those I should like, those I “shouldn’t mind,” those that, through their sheer lack of personality, I should never even see again, and those I should run from. In only a few instances did I make mistakes. One was a bouncing girl with a voice like a symphony of peacocks; she turned out to be agreeable and clever in spite of it. Another was a German who looked like an overfed dachshund and sat opposite me at table; another was an old gentleman who slopped around in carpet slippers (yes, carpet slippers really do still exist). Another was—but why enumerate? Finding out who they all were was the next step.
There was the famous physician; the very grand old dame who held herself much aloof because, before her marriage, she had been one of the Orioles of Baltimore; the lady who cleared about two hundred thousand dollars a year from the sales of a patent fly-paper—or was it a patent flea-powder? I forget—an invention of her late uncle’s; the young man who was being sent on the trip because he drank (he certainly did drink; he was drunk for sixteen thousand sea-miles); the “mysterious pair” who concealed their secret to the end; the woman who had written a book; the melancholy man whose wife had just eloped in New York with the chauffeur; and then the numerous nice, quiet, well-mannered persons who, like happy nations, seemed to have no histories in particular.
By the time we had reached the Island of St. Thomas they had all begun to find themselves as well as one another. It was evident that, unconsciously, little groups were forming; that certain people would ask to be put in the same carriage with certain others; and I think a native drink called a “rum swizzle,” of which almost everybody, “just to see what it was like,” partook during the day, did not in any way retard the growing acquaintanceships. By the time we arrived at Bahia, our first stopping-place in Brazil, the little groups had more or less assumed their final form. It was a beautiful example of birds of a feather doing just what we have always been told they do. The young girls came together, one could clearly see, chiefly because they all seemed to be engaged in the manufacture of silk neckties; four or five middle-aged ladies found the knitting of fluffy white shawls a convenient and congenial ice-pick; similarity of business interests, past or present, was of course instrumental among many of the men. Books, and there was on board an inexhaustible supply of them, were a tremendous factor in the cementing of friendly relations. By merely glancing at a book some one seemed to be enjoying you usually could tell whether or not you couldhave anything in common. Anybody perusing one of your favorite volumes offered an excuse for stopping and chatting. The insatiable players of bridge were, from the first, so many magnets and poles.
Not among the least important of the passengers were Elizabeth and Peter, the ship’s cats. Peter, to the sorrow of the officers who adored him, apparently found friends on the dock at Buenos Aires and disembarked, but Elizabeth, for family reasons, remained with us. She distinguished herself in various ways and on various occasions, three of them being really notable. One night at about two in the morning (always a somewhat Hibernian method of expression) she entered in the dark the deck stateroom of an excitable man of fifty. A steward sent to find her also entered and, in his search, crawled half way under the bed. The excitable man of fifty hearing, or perhaps feeling, some one under his bed and fearing thieves, leaped to the floor, dragged the steward out and heroically struggled with him. As the steward spoke no English andthe man no German, this duel in the dark continued until the strangulated cries of the former and the appeals for help of the latter brought pretty much every one on that deck to the scene and made it possible to throw some light, electric light, on it. In the meanwhile Elizabeth had strolled away to the cabin of a lady from Argentina, where she proceeded to have five kittens. Then at Pernambuco fifty-six of the passengers rushed ashore and returned, each with a large green parrot. Of course most of them got loose in a few days but were allowed to go pigeon-toeing all over the deck until it was discovered that Elizabeth had quietly chewed the heads off three.
In addition to the parrots and hundreds of other tropical birds, the monkeys, the marmosets and the leopards that the passengers in afterwards to be regretted moments of enthusiasm acquired, the super-alimentated German indulged himself to the extent of a boa constrictor. The first time he went down to feed it, the playful little creature wound itself about his waist in several coils and wasbeginning to constrict in the most successful fashion, when the man’s shrieks brought four sailors to the rescue. It took the strength of all of them to untie the knot, so to speak, and had the reptile been able to find anything around which to twist its tail there would have been for the rest of the voyage a vacant seat opposite me at table. Oh, yes, we had some very agreeable fellow passengers.
It was the parrots, I think, that first caused dissension among them. To get loose was to get mixed, and it was a wise owner who knew his own bird, although, unfortunately for the ship’s peace, many thought they did. There were claims and counterclaims.
“My parrot had a tail,” exclaimed one woman with angry, flashing eyes to another.
“This beastly thing has just bitten my thumb,” declared a second; “my own bird never bites. They have made a mistake and I shall complain about it to the company.” Still another aggrieved one, who had views different from those of the committee chosen to draw up certain resolutions, let it be knownthat if they did not end by regarding the matter from her point of view she would write to the company saying that the ship was dirty and that the officers had been drinking heavily from beginning to end, which was not only absolutely false but had no relation to the matter in question. It was all very absurd but it also meant that, toward the end of three months on one ship, nerves will be nerves. There were a good many “coolnesses” toward the last, and in the smoking room some angry and bitter words, but on the whole, when we, our parrots and our other “unknown birds of brilliant plumage,” filed down the gang plank at Hoboken we were a tolerably good-natured crowd.
Will any of the little groups ever meet again? I often wonder. It seems like something that happened a century ago in a tropical dream.
WHEN I was considerably younger than I am now, I wrote a story in which appeared the following two sentences: “It always seemed to Haydock that men and women, in becoming parents, somehow or other managed to forfeit a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with children, if it was a provision or a perversion of nature.” I wish I had sufficient space in which to reproduce some of the many peevish, sarcastic letters and acrimonious reviews that these two short sentences called forth. For some reason they seemed to hurt feelings and arouse ire (I don’t quite know what “ire” means, but it has always seemed to me to be a most attractive little word; so short, and yet so bristling with importance) from the Atlantic to the Pacific.People wrote to me in the most curiously unrestrained fashion. One man declared I had deliberately insulted my mother and my father. For some time I was considerably appalled. I began to think that perhaps I had said something juvenile, thoughtless and silly, but since then a good many years have passed, a reaction long since set in and I find that now, even if I am not prepared exactly to stand by my original guns, my position in the matter is at least that of an agnostic. Parents may not necessarily forfeit any part of their intelligence, but, on the other hand, so many of them seem to, that one pauses now and then to speculate on whether, from the evidence, one could not with a little effort deduce a law of nature.
Not having children of my own, I of course indulge in much imaginative bringing up, from the earliest years to the time when they “come out” and become engaged, get married and go to live in Alaska, or Brazil, or Chicago. Naturally, my children are much better brought up than are those of people who actually possess them. I admit that in a spectacular sense they don’t strike me as having made a very much greater success of their lives, so far, than have their acquaintances who cannot claim the advantage of having me for a parent. They are not particularly rich, although the boys seem to be able to make a respectable and steady living. Only one of the little tribe has as yet an automobile, and she married it, or rather them, as her husband happens to belong to the kind of American family that collects new kinds of motors very much as some persons collect new kinds of picture postal cards. As she is fond of her husband, I don’t in the least mind confessing that I am glad he has a lot of money. For, self-reliant and independent as I hope to be to the last, her affluence gives me the comfortable feeling that, no matter what happens, I shall never be a charge on the county or a bother to the good Little Sisters of the Poor. Of course they are all crazy about me, because they realize that everything I did was for the best and that I brought them up so remarkably well.
But seriously, to go back to my original contention, why is it that many persons who seemed to be endowed with normal intelligence irrevocably mislay it when they begin to beget offspring? They do. I assert, declare and insist that they do. A few evenings ago I went to a dinner, and at about the time the coffee appeared the conversation turned upon this very topic. One of the men said, with emphasis, that he had certain ideas about the bringing up of children. He thought they were good ideas, but his wife almost always opposed them for what, in his opinion, was the most foolish of reasons. He went on shaking a finger at her half in earnest, half in jest. “She often lets the children do things of which I disapprove, because other parents are everywhere letting their children do these things,” he said. “Now that to me is no reason at all. I don’t care what other parents are allowing their children to do. I know what I want my children to do, and not to do.” The wife smiled sweetly and admiringly, and I knew that, when it came to a crisis, she would alwayshave her own, possibly misguided, way. She would let her young daughter engage in the various activities her little set happened for the moment to be engaged in, and he, to save discussion, would in the end acquiesce. To me there was here a considerable forfeiture of intelligence on the part of both. The man sacrificed principle to peace, the woman allowed herself to be swayed by perhaps idiotic, if not worse, conventions and fashions for which she secretly did not care. I immediately began to wonder what, under the circumstances, I should do myself. This consideration over a good cigar, while all around me the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy was being threshed out and Dr. Cook was sadly and with genuine regret disposed of, took me far away from the dinner table. I began to think of my own bringing up, of the bringing up of various local families who in the press are usually referred to as “prominent.” And the result of the revery seemed to be that although there was no particular scheme of education, no very definite ideas on the subject, childrenin the end seemed to grow up and, as the English say, “muddle through” somehow. But, I found myself inquiring, couldn’t there be some way less casual, less haphazard, less at the mercy of the trivial and the contemporaneous? Being a bachelor and knowing nothing whatever about it, I of course feel that there could. To a great extent, the parents I know seem to be lacking in standards; they apparently, from day to day, trust to luck. I am convinced that, if I were blessed with progeny, I should evolve a more definite manual to go by; that my children wouldn’t be allowed merely to muddle through as best they could.
In the first place, I should be extremely cautious about their reading. Nothing, after all, is so influential as the printed word. The mere fact that it is printed seems to carry with it a kind of unjustified authority. Why should little boys and little girls have access to our daily papers, full from end to end of horrible crimes, tales of dishonesty in high places and advertisements that cause the mind to reel at their hypocrisy and rottenness? Why shouldthey be permitted, when they wish to read, to take from the Public Library the latest best seller because Sissy Jones has just read it and says it is “great”? I should never allow a child of mine to read the daily papers, and I should never allow it to read the thousand and one maudlin children’s books that are printed every year at Christmas time. There is no reason whatever why, at an early age, children should not be supplied with good literature just as they are fed nourishing food. And yet, how comparatively few parents think of this in time! They buy for their children trivial, prettily illustrated, altogether unimportant little volumes because they come across them on a counter and because other parents are buying the same things. I shouldn’t any more supply a child of mine with this sort of mental slop than I should feed it adulterated milk. Why deliberately give children a taste for the second-rate and third-rate when the first-rate is at hand and they are at an age when they eagerly seize upon anything offered them?
This is a question for which I can think ofno sensible, logical or respectable answer. Another, to me, absolutely astounding sin of the modern parent is the fashion in which it lets its little girls and boys go to the theater, usually to matinées, regardless of what sort of thing is being performed. The Saturday matinée, apparently, has become an institution, and the child of fourteen or fifteen who is not permitted to buy a box of caramels and sit in the parquet considers himself (much more often herself) a martyr. About six months ago I went to an afternoon performance of “The Merry Widow,” simply because the whole world seemed to be talking about it and I had an erroneous idea that I ought for this reason to hear it. The music I had become sick and tired of; the book I found, by the end of the first act, to be hopelessly dull. I had paid two hard-earned dollars for my seat and I stayed to the end, to the scene at Maxim’s, which, as done in this country, is one of the most altogether nasty things I have ever sat through in a theater. I happen to have been at Maxim’s, on various occasions at everyhour from seven in the evening until eight the next morning, but I have never seen there anything so common, so indecent, so beastly as the sort of debauch that took place on the stage of our local theaters. Maxim’s, as everyone knows, is a fashionable brothel, now owned by an English and American stock company. It pays dividends. But never have I discovered there anything that remotely resembled the sort of performance I saw in the Maxim act of our greatly applauded Savage’s “Merry Widow.” I mention it at all, only because sitting next to me was a girl of fourteen whom I have known ever since she was born. When the indecency was at its height, when the orgy had reached a climax, she turned to me and said with a sweet enthusiasm, “It’s awfully good, isn’t it!” Of course she had not the remotest idea of what the affair signified, but why should she have been there in the first place? Why should an American girl of fourteen be introduced to the representation of a Parisian restaurant (to put it most conservatively) represented with infinitely more coarsenessthan is ever found in the original? She was there because her friends, her “set,” were there. Mamma, abandoning much of her original intelligence, let her go because Muriel Smith and Gladys Jones and Dorothy Robinson always went to the matinée when they wanted to, and their mothers were all women of considerable social importance.
Positively I am aghast when I pause to think of the almost accidental fashion in which so many American children are brought up. Their parents love them and adore them, they do for them everything in the world except what seems to me to be the right thing. Instead of endeavoring to lash them to the good old mast, they have such a way of letting them drift with the contemporary tide! Few things in life are to me at once so engaging, so pathetic and so repellent as a street-car load of boys and girls who have just come from the high school; the girls with their pompadours and their rats, their Latin grammars, their giggling and their ogling; the boys, nice boys, but with such grotesque trousers, flashy shoesand absurd hats. Why doesn’t some one in authority give them less objectionable ideas on the subject of dress, of conduct, of, in short, life? They are really the most dreadful, trashy, tiresome little creatures. It is a constant marvel to me that so many of them, in a few years, without parental or outside aid, abandon their revolting ways and become perfectly good men and women. I admit with gladness that we do seem somehow to muddle through.
Wouldn’t it, however, be better if children were brought up as my suppositious infants are brought up? Or would it in the long run make any particular difference? In the first place, the mother of my children doesn’t spend entire days at country clubs or the houses of friends playing bridge whist. She stays at home a good deal and plays with the children instead, because she likes to and because they like to have her. Few sights are more depressing, give one a more nauseating sensation, cause one to form a lower estimate of humanity, than a roomful of overdressed Americanmothers hectically playing bridge; and it is a sight one may see almost every day in the year from one end of the country to the other.
In the second place, why should children be allowed to stuff their little insides with candy merely because they seem to like it? A southern cousin of mine used to pick out the best pieces in a box of candy and eat them himself, remarking, “We shall leave the hair-oil and lip-salve varieties for the children, as all children are natural scavengers.” This may be true, but I should protest vehemently against their being allowed to scavenge. That children should be permitted to ruin their digestions, that they should ever be given any form of food that isn’t good for them, strikes me as a parental crime. Parents have the entire matter in their hands; they are, or ought to be, the supreme court, the law. Why not decide for the best instead of for the slipshod half way, or the worst?
Thirdly, I endeavor to give the little creatures for whom I am imaginatively responsible, in addition to robust health, which, after all,one is often inclined to consider the main, the only thing, certain intellectual resources that, even should their health fail later on, they can fall back upon with much enjoyment; resources that later on it is difficult to acquire for oneself. I like them to have an acquaintance with the best books and the greatest pictures, to know just why they are good and great even if they have not actually seen them. I also endeavor to give them a practical knowledge of at least two languages not their own. Every child in our high schools makes a futile stab at French or German. How few make of them a precious possession! As one grows older there is almost no pleasure greater than the ability to read with ease a book in a foreign language; to realize that, while the medium is different, the humanity underlying it is the same. An understanding of foreign languages, more than anything else, helps on the universal brotherhood of man.
Fourthly, I never allow my children to go to the theater because Sissy Jones is allowed to go. Now and then something locally happens that strikes me as amusing, or instructive or, happily, both. We then all go and have a grand time. But why should they be allowed to form the habit of going to everything that comes along? At the dinner to which I have referred, an Irish woman told me she had never been inside of a theater until after her marriage, and she is one of the most charming, highly educated, cultivated women of my acquaintance.
But no doubt my jewels will after all, in spite of me, be the same source of mixed pleasure and responsibility that most jewelry is.
BOOKS, the titles of which are interrogatory, always have a fascination for me. “What is Ibsenism?” “Can You Forgive Her?” “What Shall We Do With Our Girls?” for instance. Of course, they are invariably unsatisfactory and, sometimes, exasperating. They never really answer the questions they propound, and they leave one somewhat more muddled than one was before. Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” is a most bigoted and tedious performance. In it one of the greatest artists of modern times elaborately tells one nothing whatever about art, and leaves one with the impression that his claim on immortality is something of which he has become very much ashamed. But, crafty old person though I be, I succumb to them all, and read them because I can’t resist a title in the form of a question.
At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the matter—to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied“education,” but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not explain.
There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps, somewhat more—well, more educated than the other? At times both these phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but important differences that cause first the one and then the other to seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education. Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she? (Heaven forbid thatIshould suggest anything; I merely crave information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons” of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin verse,” Macaulay complains in theEdinburgh Reviewin 1843. And while Macaulay admits that “Greatpraise is due to the notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses,” and confess them to be “rich in apposite references to Virgil, Stetius and Claudian,” he cannot understand anyone’s failing to allude to Euripides and Theocritus, waxes indignant over the fact that Addison quoted more from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero, and feels positively hurt at his having cited “the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus,” rather than the “authentic narrative of Polybius.” In Rome and Florence—Macaulay continues, more in sorrow than in anger—Addison saw all the best ancient works of art, “without recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists.”
Of course all this is very sad and leaves us quite cross with Addison for having deluded us into believing him to be a person of considerable erudition. Howcouldanybody in the presence of a statue be so absent-minded as not to recall a single verse of Pindar or Callimachus? And how hopelessly superficialmust be the mind that actually prefers the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus to the authentic narrative of Polybius! Yet, on the other hand, if we casually referred to Polybius while conversing with most of our educated and even so-called cultivated acquaintances, how many of them, I wonder, would know whether we were talking about a Greek historian or a patent medicine. Macaulay would have considered them hopeless; we (and they) are in the habit (perhaps it is a very bad habit—I don’t know) of regarding them as educated.
Another question that my suppositious author must devote a chapter to, is the difference between just an education and a “liberal” education. We used to hear much more about a “liberal” education than we do now, although Prexy Eliot has of late endeavored to restore the phrase as well as the thing itself. When does an education leave off being penurious, so to speak, and become liberal? According to Mr. Eliot, Milton’s “Areopagitica” helps a lot. I once read Milton’s “Areopagitica” (“but not for love”) with great care, and when I had finished it I had to procure at much trouble and expense another book (written some hundreds of years later) that told me what it was all about. The next day I passed an examination in the subject—and to-day I couldn’t, if my life were at stake, recall the nature or the purpose of the work in question or even explain the meaning of the title. It is possible, of course, that this is more my fault than Milton’s, but whoever is to blame, I can truthfully say that never before or since have I read anything so completely uninteresting or that contributed so little to the liberality of my education. In Mr. Eliot’s opinion, however, and no one more firmly believes in the soundness of Mr. Eliot’s opinions than I do, this ghastly, unintelligible, jaw-breaking relic of the seventeenth century is, if not absolutely essential to a liberal education, at least highly conducive to one. What on earth does it all signify?
Some persons pin their entire faith to a correct use of the pronounsIandme. Theycheerfully commit every other form of linguistic violence, but as long as they can preserve sufficient presence of mind boldly to say once in so often something like, “He left James and me behind,” instead of resorting to the cowardly “James and myself,” or the elegantly ungrammatical “James and I,” they feel that their educational integrity has been preserved. Others believe that education and true refinement begin and end with always saying, “You would better,” instead of “You had better,” while Mr. Eliot, in musing on the career of Mr. Roosevelt, no doubt remarks to himself, “An estimable, even an interesting man, but is he, after all, conversant with the ‘Areopagitica’?” (I hate to admit it, but I think it highly probable that he is.) And Macaulay, in the book review from which I have quoted, disposes once and for all of a certain scholar named Blackmore—rips open his intellectual back, in fact, by stating with dignified disgust: “Of Blackmore’s attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apothegm.” Isn’t it all wonderful? And doesn’t it make you wish that someone would write a work called, “What Is Education?” so you could find out whether you were educated or not?
Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not—and this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid” vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard) but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant, I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending, later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his fortunes—he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what, after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,” employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note.
Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer forthe pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,” as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the tittle on—No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary tittle—a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as usual, I didn’t know what they were?
By this time I was beginning to be verbally groggy. What, I wondered, was—or, rather, wasn’t—“a scintilla of evidence”? (For, oddly enough, one is never informed that there is a scintilla of evidence, but merely that thereisn’t.) And just how did it happen, in the first place, that a lack of evidence should have been called a “scintilla,” whereas a certain kind of expensive gray fur was called a “chinchilla.” Scintilla chinchilla, scintilla chinchilla—the jury was unable to find a chinchilla of evidence, although Mrs. Vasterbolt was present at the trial in a handsome coat of the costliest scintilla. Why not? But as madness seemed to be lurking in that direction, I hastened feverishly on to “adamant.” Oh, yes, I know it’s something very hard and unyielding and, in the kind of novels that no one reads any more, someone is, at a critical moment, always “as” it—never “like” it. But what is it? It might be some sort of a mythological cliff against which people were supposed ineffectually to have hurled themselves; it might be a kind of metal, or a particularly durable precious stone, or a satisfactory species of paving material. It might be any old thing; I don’t know. What in the dickens does it mean to “dree your own weird”? For, as I almost tore off a page in my anxiety to turn it, myeyes caught sight of: “‘Everyone must dree his own weird,’ she answered, sententiously.” Early in life it had dawned on me that to be told you must “dree your own weird” was merely a more obscure and delicate fashion of telling you that you must “skin your own skunk”; and yet I very much doubt if the verb “to dree” means to skin, or if “weird,” used as a noun, has much connection with the fragrant little denizen of our forests whom we all, I trust, are accustomed to refer to as themephitis Americana.
On and on I toiled for another hour, at the end of which time I had a formidable list of ordinary words belonging to my own language, as to whose real meaning I was completely in the dark. To-day I intended to look them all up and write a charming little paper on them, primarily designed, of course, to make dear reader gasp at the scope and thoroughness of my education. But the day is indescribably hot, and, as I have been away, my dictionary, unfortunately, is gritty with dust. To get up and slap at the corpulentthing with a damp towel would be most repulsive. I shan’t do it. Instead I shall recall that the most intellectual nation in the world has a saying to the effect that, “On peut être fort instruit sons avoir d’éducation.”
THE other day I received a letter from an old friend of mine with whom I have talked for many years now, only in long letters at long intervals. He is a man of about thirty-seven, but he still writes long letters. This one, like all the others, is pleasant in spots, and I have therefore submitted it to a sort of epistolary, dry-cleaning process and extracted some of the spots. Here they are:—
As you see, I am at Newport. I have been visiting various persons here for almost a month now, and as the glory will have soon departed, or rather, asIshall have soon departed, I thought I should give you a vicarious whiff of high life while I can.
It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather,and with the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. They probably are. Indeed, after a dinner, a late dance, and the remaining few hours of last night spent in playing bridge, my fearless little mirror tells me this morning that I look quite all of twenty-six. One hears much about the follies of the rich, but I am beginning to feel that they are as nothing compared to the follies of the poor. For the paltry sum I last night lost to a man worth eighteen or twenty millions is almost the exact sum I meant to distribute among the servants of my hostess when I gracefully make room for somebody else on the day after tomorrow. Before I began to write to you, I made no end of hectic little calculations on the back of an envelope, but as yet they don’t seem to be leading me anywhere except into the hands of a receiver. However—
I’ve had an exceedingly good time here. Theoretically, a person who leads the kind of life I do ought to have spent his vacation otherwise. I know that if I had consulted the oracles who answer “Troubled Subscriber,” they, one and all, would have answered, “Get out into the open, or the cool, quiet depths of the forest. Get into touch with Mother Nature and commune with her. Her bosom is large (and covered with ants). She loves her tired children.” But I did nothing of the sort. Instead of getting into the forest, I got into the cool, quiet depths of a sea-going automobile, with a handful of orchids swaying in a glass-and-silver vase in front of me, and came to Newport. What I needed just then was not taking long tramps and cooking my own indigestible meals in a frying pan, reposing on a lumpy heap of pine needles and getting drowned every other night at half-past eleven, anointing mosquito bites and falling over logs. Not a bit of it. I yearned instead for an exquisite bedroom and salon overhanging a sapphire and diamond sea, a young man—whosevery presence created a deeper silence—to wake me in the morning, to draw a bath, to lay out my clothes, to bring me my breakfast on china that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. I wanted to arise late and mingle with perfectly dressed, good-looking, agreeable people, who seemed to be enjoying themselves and who, if they ever did have annoying, serious or sad moments, never let one know about it. I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger, gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be charming to me because they knew thatIknew it would be out of the question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which to run through nervous, jeweled fingers.
Well, all this I have done and seen for amonth now, and, as I said, I have greatly enjoyed myself. I suppose you know, of course, that Newport, Rhode Island, does not, in the least, resemble the Newport that the American people read about in newspapers—that the Newport of the newspapers does not, in fact, exist. To multitudes of our fellow countrymen this would be not only unwelcome, but incredible news. Yet it is a curious truth. The great American people (dear, old, great, American people!) like to think of this extraordinarily healthful and beautiful spot as being, at the worst, a kind of dazzling den of vice, and, at the best, a resort where semi-idiotic families possessing great wealth may, with impunity, concoct grotesque and vulgar—and ever more vulgar—diversions for all the rest of our completely moral, intellectual, high-minded and desirable population to sneer at. Around the mythical Newport of editors and reporters has grown a tradition and a stock of phrases that the country at large eagerly swallows whole. I don’t suppose there is a paragrapher in any state of the Union whocould possibly grind out four lines about Newport without employing the words “monkey dinner,” although there has never been such a thing as a monkey dinner at Newport (whatever a monkey dinner may be), and nobody who lives and entertains here in summer has the slightest idea of what the thing means. Originally, no doubt, the fiction of a reportorial mind, it has become, through repetition and the course of time, as much of an established fact to the nation as the Washington monument or the Civil War.
The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is merely a euphonious term for a debauch—but, of course, you know as well as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange state of mind known as “fashion.” Here there is sometimes—often, perhaps,—rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. In Europe I have dined atgreat embassies in the company of famous and important personages, with far less fuss, feathers and war paint than I have been accustomed to during the past month, when I would dine, for instance, with a man whose father had amassed millions from ready-made clothing, and whose party consisted of a few of his equally unimportant acquaintances. The whole thing (given the kind of thing) is, without question, very perfectly and beautifully done; but equally without question it is, most of the time, very much overdone. It has so often occurred to me as I made myself agreeable to the skinny, be-powdered nakedness of the lady next to me (maybe you don’t know it, but I have a reputation for an ability to amuse any woman who has passed the age of sixty-five, and I, therefore, always take in someone who looks like the galvanized remains of Rameses II), that there was no real, no justifiable reason for so much formality and splendor. There really isn’t, you know. It is not at all as it is in England, for example, where political ambitions must befurthered and the prestige of great and ancient names maintained. Here there are widely known names (that of my last night’s hostess may be seen over the entrance of a large and bad hotel), but they are neither great nor what one is accustomed to consider ancient; and as for politics, when politics become necessary to these people, they merely, and with a light heart, hire a United States senator to do whatever dirty work the situation demands. Splendor here is indulged in purely for its own sake. There is absolutely nothing behind it except unlimited means.
But, even so, neither the “entertainments” nor the persons who give them, are at all like the nation’s fixed idea of them. The former, if you like, are unnecessary and super-elaborate, but they are always beautiful in their way, and decorous; the latter, more often than not, are extremely interesting and often charming. Why shouldn’t they be? For daily, since I have been here, it has come over me with a sense of having discovered the fact that “human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.” There are intelligent, clever, sympathetic, altogether delightful men and women here, and also men and women who are, by nature, dull, narrow, tiresome or common, just as there are in every habitable region of the globe. But stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore for bore, I confess that the stupid, common bore of these regions is much less wearisome than he is in regions less splendid. He (or she) has in his favor all sorts of things that, while they do not make him interesting or worth one’s time, at least furnish him with a variety of avenues of approach—if you know what I mean. Essentially limited though he be, as far as his intellect and sympathies are concerned, mere sordid wealth had usually forced upon him certain contacts and habits and experiences that you can understand and can talk about. There is about him, somewhere, a neutral ground on which for the time being you can get together in a way you simply can’t with the same sort of nonentity who has not been subjected to the same sort of influences. Stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore for bore, I, after all, prefer that of Newport to that of Saugdunk, Maine, or Pekin, Kansas. In the long run, of course, they are both exactly the same, and both very awful. The difference between them is the difference between taking a dose of castor oil enveloped in an expensive capsule and taking it straight.
I like many of the people I have met here more than I can tell you, but late at night, sometimes, alone in my always monotonously perfect bedroom, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a—valet, I often giggle at the abysmal difference between us. And in spite of all their hospitality and millions, the laugh, I must colloquially confess, is on them. For although I am perfectly capable of meeting them ontheirground, they could not possibly meet me on mine. From earliest childhood our influences and training have been as far apart as the poles, but I consider mine by far the more important and valuable; for, when I feel like it, I can go into society, while they have no idea atall of the relief and delight of getting out of it. They know their own side of life, but I am perfectly conversant with theirs and several others as well. When I am with them I can do all of their stunts just as well as they do them themselves, but I know, somewhere in the back of my head, that they couldn’t do any of mine. I don’t despise them or look down on them for this, but I do, every now and then, feel awfully sorry for them—regret for them the things they have missed and are missing. “Just what does he mean by that?” I think I can see you wonder.
Well, I mean all sorts of things, and for the most part they are, no doubt, absurd and incommunicable. I mean, for instance, that I know all about their fussy, tedious, proper, little childhoods, and that they do not know, and never will know, anything about mine. In my opinion, their childhood was a decorous tragedy; in their opinion, if they learned about it, mine would be a sensational scandal. In New York it always gives me a queer, asphyxiated feeling when I see pretty, expensivelydressed little boys walking for exercise on upper Fifth avenue in charge of a maid or a footman, or being transported in an automobile or a victoria for an hour’s “romp” in the park. And here at Newport I have overheard little girls discussing with acuteness and authority the probable length of time it would take the lady who has rented the palace next door to arrive at the goal of her social ambitions.
My own childhood was so wonderfully casual and different! We lived on the outskirts of a small northwestern city—not in the country exactly, and not exactly in the slums. In those days the place had no slums, but it had outlying, semi-rural tracts where poor people built shanties and “squatted.” My parents neither built a shanty nor squatted, but they built a house that from time to time grew and rambled, and they lived there. They were able to live where they pleased, because in the community they were persons of importance. I, however, was not, and as children, especially boys, always play with the most available otherchildren, unless they are told not to (and even then sometimes), and as I was never told not to, my only boy companions and intimate friends, until I was fourteen, were the boys of our neighborhood. At that time they were known to the élite as “the Elm street gang.” The ungraded road on which our house was situated had been named, with the usual subtlety of municipal authorities, “Elm Street,” because all of its trees were either scrub oak or maple. They were “the Elm street gang” in those days; to-day they would merely be known as “muckers.” It was with them that all my early years were spent, both in school and out. For at that time, if I remember rightly, the parochial schools (all my friends were Irish Roman Catholics) did not catch their pupils as young as they do now, and we all went to a yellow brick schoolhouse named after a Democratic president.
To you it may not seem to be a matter of importance that until I was fourteen my only playmates and dearest friends were Irish muckers. To me it is of a significance thatI could scarcely explain. For at an impressionable age I not only lived my own life—the life I was born to—in my own house and family, but quite as naturally and sincerely I lived the life of an Irish mucker. (This, to me, sounds like an unappreciative, a clumsy, almost a brutal way of stating it, but if I expressed it otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand.) I knew their families and loved them. I used to share not only their meals when I felt like it (they always tasted much better than our own), but their sorrows and their joys. Elm street and vicinity in those days was a little segment lifted in its entirety from the bogs of Ireland and set down in the Northwest, and, as I lived there, I very early in life became intimate with poverty, drunkenness and death. Before I was twelve I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place onlyin Irish fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces, and white, crossed, emaciated hands. They used to “keen,” just as they do, no doubt, in some parts of Ireland to-day, and it was Mrs. Smith who always started it. To you “Mrs. Smith” may sound somewhat vague, but there was only one Mrs. Smith at that time. She was a supernaturally old woman, who always wore a kind of semi-sunbonnet of frilled white linen and devoted most of her time to a flock of geese. Through her the torch, so to speak, had been handed down. After her death there was no more keening.
But, of course, it wasn’t all wakes. On Sunday morning I used to go up to the Hogans where Mame was preparing dinner while the rest of the family were at mass. At that time I looked upon Mame as grown up, even old; but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Hogans had a wonderfulvegetable garden, and while the family was at church, Mame and I would pull up carrots and beets, pick peas and beans, gather ears of corn, snip off sprigs of parsley, prepare them all, and then dump them into a rotund iron pot on the stove with a chunk of meat. After that we would sit down outside of the shanty and talk. I forget now what we talked about, but it must have been absorbing to me, because I was always still there when Mrs. Hogan creaked up the hill in her Sunday black, and I usually stayed for the soup. Never in this world will soup again taste like that.
I knew these people intimately, and in a queer sort of way felt that I was one of them. The opulent and well-dressed boys of the place always avoided Elm street. They were desperately afraid of the locality, and with reason. For there was a perpetual rumor abroad that the elm street gang hated the “Yanks,”—as the nicely dressed, male offspring of the fashionable districts were called by us. As I look back on it all I think we did hate them—I, almost as heartily as the rest. Then arrived theinevitable time when I acquired a bicycle, and the “Yanks” (I can’t imagine why) invited me to become a member of their bicycle club. I accepted, and from that time on I was “in society.” But I shall never forget the first meeting of the bicycle club in front of our house when my old friends gathered to see the start, and I felt like a renegade, a sneak and a traitor. Even now I can remember some of the scathing and picturesquely blasphemous comments made on that occasion by the gang.