The Project Gutenberg eBook ofPrejudicesThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: PrejudicesAuthor: Charles Macomb FlandrauRelease date: March 27, 2023 [eBook #70393]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1911Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREJUDICES ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: PrejudicesAuthor: Charles Macomb FlandrauRelease date: March 27, 2023 [eBook #70393]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1911Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
Title: Prejudices
Author: Charles Macomb Flandrau
Author: Charles Macomb Flandrau
Release date: March 27, 2023 [eBook #70393]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1911
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREJUDICES ***
BYCHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAUAuthor of “Viva Mexico!” “The Diary of aFreshman,” “Harvard Episodes,” etc.NEW YORK AND LONDOND. APPLETON AND COMPANY1911Copyright, 1911, byD. APPLETON AND COMPANYPublished May, 1911Printed in the United States of America
These extracts from my notebook originally appeared inThe Bellman. For permission to reprint them I beg to thank the editor.C. M. F.
These extracts from my notebook originally appeared inThe Bellman. For permission to reprint them I beg to thank the editor.
C. M. F.
A BIRTHDAY PRESENTFORR. B. F.
WHEN the occasion is propitious, I always find it interesting to ask a person I don’t know well if he, or she, is fond of dogs. The propitiousness of the occasion is perfect, however, only when there is a dog in the same room or on the same piazza, or wherever we, for the moment, happen to be talking. The reply to this question is to me a kind of exquisitely personal barometer. From it I have always been able to gauge with extreme accuracy the degree to which my sympathy and friendship with him who makes it might possibly rise. False answers to other questions have often deceived me, but a reply to the inquiry: Are you fond of dogs? never has. From the way in which the reply is phrased, from the tone in which it is spoken, from the facial expression that accompanies it, I am instinctively able to “sizeit up,” weigh it, and see exactly what there is behind it.
From otherwise altogether estimable women I often elicit this: “Oh, yes, I like dogs; but I like them in their place.” This, of course, means that they innately loathe dogs; that they are afraid of them and have a horror of them; that they regard a dog as something which potentially damages furniture and carpets, ruins flower beds, and gives children hydrophobia. By me, anyone who descends to the level of declaring that he “likes dogs, but likes them in their place,” is simply struck from the list. It is a most usual reply; it might, indeed, in all propriety, be added to the bromidioms, except that a bromidiom is more a stereotyped little collection of words that slip out with no particular motive or intention, whereas a declaration to the effect that one likes dogs, but likes them in their place, is charged with meanings for anyone who looks for them. It is one of those curious and unexplained facts that almost nobody likes openly to confess an aversion to dogs. Among our acquaintances weall have a frank and vehement enemy of cats, but he who hates dogs rarely permits himself to say anything more definitely antagonistic than that he likes dogs—in their place. Under an assumed name he does, from time to time, relieve himself in the correspondence column of a newspaper, but it is invariably under an assumed name. If I disliked dogs, I should not hesitate to say so, just as I do not hesitate to admit that I am terrified by a snake, even if I know it to be harmless, or by the mere idea of ascending to a great height and peering over the edge. Such terrors are illogical, unreasonable, anything you please, but they are inborn and they persist, and few persons object to confessing to them. But no one, on the other hand, likes to have it believed of him either that his sense of humor is not keen, or that he is not fond of dogs. This, of course, is, in the long run, all to the glory of dogs. Even the people who constitutionally dislike them can rarely bring themselves openly to say so.
To me, an inability to love a dog is comprehensible only in the same sense I can comprehend that an uncle of mine, who had a delightful talent for drawing, was hopelessly color-blind, and that another member of my family and two of my friends are what is called “tone-deaf.” You might play to them the introduction to “Lohengrin” and then “Annie Rooney” at regular intervals every day for a month, and at the end of that time it would be impossible for them to tell which was which. In other respects adequately equipped, they were simply born without the apparatus necessary to distinguish between one combination of musical sounds and another. They all hate to admit that music gives them little or no pleasure; one of them has even gone so far as to become, in an amateur way, an authority on the history and theory of music, but if in his presence some one begins to play the piano, he is always pathetically unaware as to whether he is listening to a nocturne by Chopin, or a cakewalk sung into popularity by May Irwin.
Persons who “like dogs in their place” always seem to me to have been born with much the same sort of defect—or perhaps it would be kinder and truer to call it an omission. But then, my attitude toward dogs may be abnormal. I don’t know. I can only recall a lecture by William Dean Howells in which, when he paused to give some incidental advice to young writers, he said, in effect, “In writing, never hesitate to express what you feel is a thought, a sensation or a state of mind peculiar to yourself. It neverispeculiar to yourself. The paragraph you shrink from writing because you feel it will be understood by you alone, is the one that will be read with the most sympathetic interest.” (After all these years I cannot quote Mr. Howells verbatim, but that was his idea; it deeply impressed me.) So here goes.
“Love” is a portentous word that we use rather recklessly, but in considering its meaning, in employing it after the deliberation that is its due, I can, in all seriousness, say that during my lifetime I have loved more dogs than I have loved human beings. There areinevitably a few humans whom we love, but, in my own case, I simply cannot evade the fact, even if I wanted to (which I don’t), that the human beings I have been unreservedly devoted to have been fewer than the dogs for whom I have experienced the same sort of emotions. What, after all, do we mean, in of course its platonic sense, by love? To me it means a state of mind that would be tremendously upset in a purely disinterested fashion by the sudden elimination of somebody else. It means that somebody has become part of your life, part of your thoughts, part of your habits, and that for the most part you think of him or her or it, as the case may be, with satisfaction. You like to know that “they” (whoever they are) are in the world with you. You regret your partings and look forward to your meetings. You stop and think, sometimes, how different life would be if they died, and when they die, a sort of hole is knocked into your world, that you, for a long time, are unable to fill up. That may or may not be a good definition of affection, but it expressesthe feeling I have had for a few people and a lot of dogs.
It used to be conventional and proper to bring up children in the belief that the great difference between humans and the so-called lower animals was that the humans had souls and that the other animals had not, but nowadays many parents do not seem to care to assume the responsibility for this distinction, and it is not because they believe we haven’t souls (what a convenient word it is!), but because they are inclined to suspect that the kindly beasts who love the children and are beloved by them, who enjoy such intimate companionship with them, have. However this may be, it certainly is a pleasanter, a more ennobling theory; one that tends to reduce human vanity, to extend sympathy, to increase the world’s happiness, and to promote a more specific and comprehensive interest in the mysterious and beautiful ways of God.
Most unintentionally I seem to have wandered from dogs and strayed into the domain of metaphysics—or do I mean theology? Idon’t know anything about metaphysics or theology, but I know a great deal about dogs, and it was some dogs I had in mind when I sat down to write. Through a sad, autumn rain I have been staring out of my window into the garden where, side by side, some of them are buried; Friday, Thursday, Tatito, Spy, Rowdy, and—it is but a few lonely weeks that he has been there—Boozy. Mud, an Irish staghound, is at rest on a hillside in Dakota, and Jigger, whom I rarely see now, as he unfortunately for me does not belong to me, is fat, gray, capricious, but still alive, still adorable and adored. How they emerge and come back to me as I stand and look at the frost-bitten hollyhocks on the graves! What individuality each one had; how absolutely different they were; how inseparable they are from any retrospect of my youth—from, indeed, my whole life. With but few intermissions I cannot remember the time when some one of them did not play an intimate, an important, a memorable part in the little drama of my existence. Scarcely any phase of it fails to comprehendone of them. I feel myself thinking of them exactly as I think of the members of my family whom I have cared for, who did what it was intended that they should do and who then quietly left. To describe them, to dwell on their traits of character, their mannerisms, their little faults and eccentricities, the setness of their ways as they gradually grew older and then old, would seem to me to be an indelicacy if I did not realize that to most persons a dog is just a dog.
Jigger had, and still has, the most touching faith in the efficacy of prayer. When he needs or wants anything, he assumes the attitude and waits for results. If he is thirsty, one comes upon him appealing to a washstand or to a faucet in the bathroom; if he wants a certain kind of salted cracker he is found tired, but patient, believing, and erect on his hind legs in front of the cupboard in which he knows the crackers are kept. Once in the country he longed for a porcupine that seemed to him an altogether congenial sort of companion, and begged at the foot of a tree untilthe porcupine responded by coming down and shooting twenty-four quills into Jigger’s lovely little plush muzzle. It took about a quart of ether, a surgeon, and I forget how many dollars, to extract the quills. Jigger also keeps strange hours. Most dogs, I have found, adapt their hours to those of the persons they live with. They go to bed and arise when the family does, but Jigger, although a dachshund, is in some respects Chinese. Frequently at two or three in the morning it occurs to him that it would be agreeable to have some fun with a golf ball. The fun consists in somebody hiding the ball in a sufficiently discoverable locality and then letting Jigger find it. Perhaps I ought to be in an institution for the feeble-minded, but when Jigger, at 3 or 4A.M., has deposited a moist golf ball on my neck and has then tugged at my sleeve until I woke up, I have always got out of bed, made a light, and, half dazed with sleep, gone through all the motions of his idea of a thoroughly good time. People who don’t like Jigger—and I have begun to suspect that they consist of thepeople whom Jigger cannot, for some reason, endure—say he is selfish. No doubt he is. Most of us are, only some of us have learned how to conceal the fact. Jigger never conceals anything except his golf ball. That, with the air of a conspiring sausage, he sneaks off with, hides from mortal view, and leaves hidden sometimes for a day or two at a time.
Friday and Thursday were part of my life so long ago that I find I can now speak of them with calmness. How shy and reticent and actually morbid Friday was! He had none of the enthusiasms, none of the ebullience, of other dogs. He lived with us, he knew he was one of us, he never temporarily left us for a day, as almost all dogs do from time to time. In his queer, rather uncomfortable way he worshiped us; I know he did because I know it, but he never actually made a demonstration of the fact as other dogs do. I can’t remember a single occasion on which he kissed my hand or asked to get into my lap or my bed. Even in his youth he was reserved and dignified and old. He had in life just one great pleasure,one dissipation, and that was to hear my father argue a case in court. He almost always went to the court room when my father had a case on hand, and many a judge has angrily ordered him to be removed; but no clerk or sheriff ever succeeded in removing him. Probably it has been forgotten, but at one time in the legal history of Minnesota there was no more prominent figure at the bar than a queer, shy, reticent, morbid but determined little yellow dog named Friday!
What a completely different personality was Spy-boy! An English greyhound with famous ancestors, he was physically a thing of perfect beauty—all fine, steel springs covered with pale brown velvet. When he stood between you and a bright light, the lower part of his stomach was translucent, and you could always see the throbbing of his heart. Although both by birth and by temperament an aristocrat, his breeding had not impaired his intellect. He literally had a fine mind. I think of him as a kind of canine Macaulay, except that he had about him a touch of mysticism; he heard sounds and smelt odors and saw things that no one else could. For hours at a time I have sat reading in the same room with him, an absolutely silent, scentless, uninhabited room as far as my primitive senses could discover, while he, poised on the delicate arch of his chest, with one front foot across the other (he always assumed that position in his moments of meditation), incessantly twitched his sensitive nostrils, moved his ears, and followed about the room, with his eyes, the invisible things he saw. I could see nothing except what I knew was there; he, however, could. Sometimes he would get up, slowly watch them until they disappeared, and then resume his position. One day, after he had sat this way for an hour or more, he arose, rested his head for a moment on my sister’s lap, and then fell dead.
How Rowdy admired him! Rowdy, too, was a greyhound, but poor, silly, stupid old Rowdy’s escutcheon was simply a grille of bars sinister. His humble, self-sacrificing attachment to Spy was as if he appreciated thatSpy was the real thing, and that he was only a clumsy imitation. Spy was kind to him; at times it seemed to me that Rowdy’s society even mildly amused him, but his kindness was unmistakably that of royalty for some lowly and devoted dependent. Rowdy once chewed the front cover of the book that, in those days, I cared for more than any other: “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” by Jane Porter. My youthful fury was extreme when I found the mutilated volume on the piazza, but even at that immature epoch my emotions were hopelessly mixed. I longed to whip Rowdy, because it seemed to me that my favorite book was ruined, but when he came up to me with every appearance of having forgotten the incident, I could only pat his head, as usual. His vandalism brought tears to my eyes, and, after twenty-three years, when I now and then look at the chewed, blue cover of “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” and examine the little tooth marks, tears still sometimes come, but they aren’t the same kind.
And now they are all asleep under the frost-bitten hollyhocks, which I have turned to look at more than once since I sat down to write. Boozy’s life, his dignified old age, and his death are, somehow, too recent to speak of. I should like to, but I can’t.
THEY both looked older than their years, which were respectively sixty and fifty-seven, and this was largely due to the ingrowing life they had always led, the influence of their fine old house on Beacon Hill, and to the individuality, the eccentricity, of Mrs. Parke’s clothes. The house was of mellowed red brick, with large, square, high rooms containing, one was at first inclined to think, very little besides dignity and refined sunlight. But a more careful inspection while waiting for Mrs. Parke to come down disclosed a rare combination of comfort andbeauty. The sitting room in which she and Mr. Parke usually received one belonged to no period and had no “color scheme.” It was merely quietly perfect with mahogany, with harmonious chintz, with a few very authentic and interesting pictures, such as an early painting, remarkably definite, even a little hard, by Corot, a religious arrangement of archaic reds and blues by Rossetti, some exquisitely painstaking botanical and architectural pencil sketches by Ruskin, and a panel by Whistler that one felt to be important without, however, knowing just what it was intended to represent. In the center of the room was a large, round, bare mahogany table with books arranged on it, exactly half a foot away from the edge, in a circle. Inside the circle was always a great crystal bowl full of flowers that were sent into town every morning from the Parkes’ country place.
Mrs. Parke suggested a vivacious Queen Victoria, if such an image is conceivable. She was of the same height and figure and, like her late majesty, she wore strange clothes thatwere not exactly out of fashion, because they had never been in it. They were simply the clothes of Mrs. Parke and bore no relation or resemblance to any others. She had a great many of them, for, often as I went there on Sunday afternoons, I never saw the same garment twice. They were the most romantic clothes I have ever known off the stage or outside the glass cases of a museum, for, many years before, Mrs. Parke’s greatuncle had been an East India merchant and, when he died, his grandniece inherited, among other things, bale upon bale of the marvelous fabrics his ships had brought back from the East—from India, from Burmah, from Siam, Japan and China; silks, brocades, crêpes, cloth of silver and cloth of gold and many more materials that no longer had names and the secret of whose dyes had been forgotten. For almost forty years Mrs. Parke had dressed only in these splendid, brilliant stuffs, and there were many bales still unopened. Some of the materials rustled stiffly and some of them clung, but she had them all made up in the same way, a kindof loose wrapper, and with them she wore on her head a small cap of rose point, the top of which was a bit of the dress.
On a pedestal in the hall the marble bust of a handsome young man still faintly suggestive of her husband testified that the Parkes had been to Italy on their wedding trip, but they had never gone abroad again. With one exception their journeys for thirty-six or-seven years had consisted solely of the annual trip on the ninth of April to their country place, a distance of eighteen miles, and the annual trip back to town again on the tenth of November. Once they had spent two weeks with a senatorial relative in Washington, but on their return Mr. Parke had nervous prostration for three months and they did not again indulge in so daring an experiment.
I often wondered how all the years had slipped by without somehow leaving them stranded, for neither of them had ever “done” anything, even in the most prosaic interpretation of the term. Mr. Parke had studied law, but he had never practiced it. He readwidely, memoirs, poetry, history, essays and an occasional novel, and he remembered much of what he read, but his reading was of the desultory kind. He could quote from all literatures but he had no literary hobbies. Mrs. Parke did not even read. Instead she knitted soft, useless things on thick, wooden needles, and when she was in the country armed herself with a flat straw hat, chamois gloves, a pair of scissors, and then proceeded to drive the Scotch gardener to drink. They had never cared much for society. It was enough to know that its doors were open to them, although at one period Mr. Parke must have gone to a great many small dinners at clubs to meet celebrities, for his fund of intimate and delightful anecdote was inexhaustible.
But the years had slipped by and they had not been stranded. They imagined, indeed, that they always had been and still were two of the busiest and most important persons in town. They were sixty and fifty-seven when I first met them, and old for their ages. One scarcely expected them to be very activelyoccupied with the contemporaneous, but after I had seen them often enough to become acclimated (no other word will quite do) I realized that they never had been, that they were then exactly as they always had been, only more so. Their entire lives had been spent in the deification of the unessential, in the reduction of puttering to a science. They had puttered their lives away and were still puttering, only, as they grew older, with a greater intensity, and from the first their lives had been extremely happy. I had never known two human beings who had so successfully mastered the art of transforming molehills into mountains. It was their sole occupation.
“My dear fellow, Iamso glad to see you,” Mr. Parke would exclaim as he bustled into the room when I went there to luncheon, and he meant it, for they were both kind and hospitable. “I’m afraid I’m a minute or two late, but this morning I’ve been driven, positively driven, from the moment I got out of my bath—and by matters I simply can’t trust to anyone else. They leave me no time for anything; I mean the things I like to do and want to do. But you remember that line from Browning’s Paracelsus, don’t you? ‘Let each task present its petty good to thee.’ I always try to think of that.”
“You’ve worked too hard this morning, Henry,” Mrs. Parke would say, glancing solicitously up from her needles, “and you know it always brings on your gout. The trouble is, hewilloverdo.” Later on, during luncheon, it comes out that the exhausting labors of the day consisted of Mr. Parke’s making out and sending a check to the associated charities, writing a short letter to theTranscript, refusing an invitation to dinner, and changing his clothes. Mrs. Parke had also spent an exciting but difficult morning. A new expressman had delivered the daily box of flowers at the wrong house, and from the dear lady’s account of the incident one inferred that for several hours the destiny of nations had shuddered in the balance.
“I sat and sat and sat,” she would dramatically declaim, “but no expressman. Icouldn’t understand it, and it was long, long past the time when I ought to have been arranging the flowers. You can imagine the state I was in.”
One of Mr. Parke’s resources was changing his clothes. In the country, for instance, he dressed with his usual minuteness for breakfast, but if the gardener sent word that an orchid had bloomed, or that a branch on one of the trees was turning yellow before it ought to, or that some Sunday tripper had left a sardine tin and two eggshells on the cliff walk—if, in fact, he felt it imperative to leave the house even for a short time, the act necessitated a change of costume. He would put on tweed knickerbockers and a kind of shooting jacket. On his return he would change again to still another suit for luncheon, afterwards the tweeds again if he went for a walk, then something else for tea and, finally, evening dress for dinner. They both also spent a great deal of time in showing and explaining their two houses to visitors—the closet doors that could not possibly slam, because their area had been exactly adjusted to the resistance of the number of cubic feet of air inside, or words to that effect; the ventilating apparatus that forced every lungful they breathed through three thicknesses of sterilized cheese cloth; the heating arrangements that did something quite uncanny, I forget what.
“You have seen the unceasing labor of forty years,” Mr. Parke would usually assure you when you had finished the tour of inspection. Their greatest triumph, however, consisted of the fact that, when they left town for the country on April the ninth, they took no luggage with them, not even a small handbag. They drove to the station empty handed, and on arriving at their destination resumed their existence, as it were, in duplicate. To the least detail there were replicas of every garment, every shoe, every toilet article, every skein of worsted and every book the two possessed.
The last time I saw them they had both aged considerably and they were, if possible,more “driven” than usual. A distant cousin had written that he expected to pass through town on his way to Europe, that he wanted to see them both and would like to stay all night at their house. With the letter in her agitated hand Mrs. Parke despairingly appealed to me.
“But how can we?” she wailed, as one of the two men servants who had brought in the tea things quietly restored a book I had disarranged to its geometric site on the mahogany table. “I don’t see how we can. We’ve been back from the country for only three weeks, and the house is in a perfect whirl!” I thought of the eight immense, unoccupied bedrooms upstairs, and for a moment had visions of my own family sleeping on the floor or in the bath-tub or on the sewing machine in order to make room for unexpected guests. But I agreed that the distant cousin was most inconsiderate, not to say unreasonable.
Mr. Parke came in, but could only shake my hand and apologize for running away. For a month he had been worrying for fear the family tomb in Mount Auburn cemetery mightbe “damp” and he had at last decided that the only thing to do was to drive out there and “see for himself.”
TWICE a day the fourth officer walked rapidly the length of the promenade deck with an easy, swinging stride and then vanished up a steep flight of steps that led to the bridge. These brief appearances began to interest me, for he was extraordinarily young and good-looking, and it seemed to me but natural that he should at least say good morning to some of the young girls who gazed at him over the tops of their books as he went by and who very clearly would have enjoyed making his acquaintance. But he never stopped and he never spoke. It was not until the fifth day out that he smiled gravely and saluted as he passed my chair. The next day we anchored in a landlocked tropical harbor, and as he wason duty at the top of those wobbly steps (I never am able to remember the nautical name for anything) by which one descends against the side of the ship to the launches, and as there was nothing for him to do after he had assured himself that none of the fat ladies and old gentlemen who were going ashore had fallen into the sea, he strolled out of the broiling sun, where he had been standing, immaculate and amiable, for two hours and a half, and came over to me.
I am not exactly a punctilious person, especially on a hot day in the tropics, but as the Fourth did not sit down on any of the numerous vacant chairs in my neighborhood I, somewhat to my surprise, found myself standing up—standing up, as I rarely was inspired to do in the presence of the captain; and the Fourth was almost, if not quite, young enough to be my son. He took my involuntary display of respect for himself and his white uniform as a matter of course, and as the launches were not to return for an hour we leaned against the rail on the shady side and talked, sometimes in English (his English was correct, although limited) but more often in German. That was the beginning of my acquaintance with the Fourth, one that continued under similar circumstances for several months and proved in many respects to be enlightening.
More than anything else, perhaps, it brought home to me the meaning of discipline long continued. He had learned his profession on a German training ship, starting in at the age of fourteen, and from there he had gone to the navy. Now he was an officer on one of the great German passenger ships. In the meanwhile he had found time to take and pass the naval examinations that made him eligible to the command of a German vessel in any part of the world, and his age was just twenty-four.
I confess I gasped when I heard it (it was the second officer who told me), although I ought to have known it without being told, for from the first I had been struck by his impeccable physical refinement, the kind that but rarely survives a quarter of a century. Afterthat, when he was quietly giving orders to middle-aged quartermasters, skilfully directing the movements of the launches, making mathematical calculations on a slip of paper behind the compass at sunset or pacing the bridge, I often found myself contrasting him with various other young gentlemen of twenty-four some five or six thousand miles away. Living night and day with his watch practically in his hand, rarely sleeping more than four hours at a time, obeying orders and observing regulations blindly, faithfully, without a question or even a thought, had done something to him that was to me very curious, very interesting and very fine. It had not crushed him, it had molded him. It had not changed his nature, it had taken charge of it and directed it. It had not in the least made him prematurely old, it had developed to the fullest extent the capacities of his youth.
He was so reserved, so self-contained at first, that I wondered if he was not perhaps just a beautiful piece of Teutonic machinery, until one morning we steamed into a harbor wherethe company he served had met with the most hideous ill luck. He pointed out to me the dismantled hulls of two noble ships that had run ashore and were a total loss. One of them had struck because it was impossible for anyone on board to know that an earthquake had destroyed the lighthouse the day before; the other lay tragically on its side among the breakers because the captain had attempted to hit the channel in the dark without a pilot. The Fourth had been on that ship at the time and, when he told me about it, I had to occupy myself with my field glasses and pretend I didn’t know that two large tears had welled up, slipped over and were finding their way down his face. He had been off duty and asleep when the accident happened, and knew nothing about it until the quartermaster woke him up, told him, and said that the captain could not be found. In spite of the fact that the captain’s room was dark, something impelled the Fourth to enter.
“Just inside the door, my foot slipped on something,” he said, “and whenI turned on the light—”... Well, immediately after the accident the captain had blown the top of his head off with a rifle.
“Under exactly the same circumstances would you have done the same thing?” I asked the Fourth.
“Oh, yes,” he answered simply, “but I should have waited until I got all the passengers safely on shore.” He was far from being a phlegmatic German machine. As I grew to know him well I saw that he was high-strung and nervous, that he was after all just twenty-four with the longings and aspirations, the excellent discontent of an intelligent and spirited boy. It was all there but it was under admirable control. It had been trained to obey, and not to command, the Fourth.
His existence was in many ways an extremely lonely one, and all the more so because it was passed within touching distance of a gay, rich, pleasure-seeking crowd, with which, it was an understood thing by the company, he was to have no friendly relations.
“On a long voyage like this, where we stopevery few days and I stand here on duty, it’s different. I can talk to people now and then and get to know them, just as I know you, but on the seven-day trips across the Atlantic I never speak to a soul. Often, when there are five or six hundred passengers on board, I never even see one of them all the way over. I’m either on the bridge, or asleep, or in my room, or on our own deck. We’re supposed to stay on our own deck when we have nothing to do.”
It was also, judged by material standards, a discouraging existence. There had been occasions when for hours at a time the Fourth had been chiefly responsible for the safety of hundreds of lives and about a million dollars’ worth of property; and for his expert knowledge, his anxiety, his prolonged nervous strain he received the munificent salary of twenty-eight dollars a month—but little more than enough in the tropics, where he had to put on always one, and sometimes two suits of white a day, to pay his laundry bills.
“Nobody but the stewards get rich at sea,” he laughed when we were discussing the matter.
“Do you ever think of giving it up—of doing something else?” I asked him.
“I think of it,” he answered, “but I know I shan’t. I like to look forward to having a command, although I’ll probably be eighty when I get one and too old to take it, and, besides, what could I do? I’ve been on the bridge of a ship since I was fourteen. I don’t know how to breathe inside of a house.”
When we were in port and he could get off, we now and then dined together on shore and went to a show. By way of returning these small hospitalities he did the only thing he very well could do, which was to ask me to go to his room in the evening to have a glass of beer. This I liked infinitely better than an evening spent in the restaurant or the theater of some sultry South American town. His room was large and cool, high up and forward, with neither a sound nor a vibration. It always seemed to be detached from the world, suspended in some way between the sea andthe sky, and in it the Fourth, when he got to know me better, felt at liberty to wear his second cleanest white ducks instead of his first, to sprawl on the sofa, to play with his pet monkey, to talk nonsense and to be quite frankly the kid he really was.
One evening he put the monkey in bed with its head on the pillow, drew the cover up around its neck and stretched out beside it. A huge, bare-footed sailor came into the room, managed in some inscrutable fashion to take off his cap with a glass of beer for me in one hand and a cup of coffee for the Fourth in the other, placed the things on the table and tiptoed out. Somewhere far below us, young men and girls were waltzing frantically in the heat, women were dripping over games of bridge as if their souls depended on the outcome, men in the smoking room were getting drunk and calling one another names. But where we were it was, as always, cool and silent and peaceful. One has to lead some kind of a life, and as I sat there thinking, it occurred to me that, even if it was poorly paid and at times lonely, therewas something very sane and useful and good about the life of the Fourth.
In a little while he would look at his watch and exclaim a trifle diffidently, but with an unmistakable resumption of authority:
“It’s ten o’clock, you must go now.” Then he would almost instantly fall asleep, sleep for four hours, spend four more alone with the trackless waters and the southern stars, bathe, breakfast and begin another day with a clear brain, steady nerves and untroubled eyes.
As often happens when two persons have remained silent in each other’s presence for several minutes, his train of thought was identical with mine, for when he spoke it was to say: “After all, I do like it.”
THE crew, much to its surprise, was paid off at Havana and furnished with a variety of explanations that did not particularly explain. Most of the men were bitter about it, but Lansing and Hayward were too unsophisticated, too new to the ways of the sea, to realize at first that they had been imposed upon. They had shipped on the wretched little steamer in New York in a sudden and curiously belated access of romanticism. For Hayward, who was twenty-three, had worked as an electrician since he was seventeen, and Lansing, who could scarcely remember a time when he had not driven a grocer’s wagon, was twenty-four. The sea had never been a boyish passion with them; they, indeed, had rarely seen it. As far as theirprevious relations with it had been concerned, New York might almost have been situated in the middle of a Dakota prairie. Their lives had always been city lives, but not of the kind that finds its way into popular fiction. For, in expressing themselves, they were not accustomed to employ a semi-unintelligible jargon of new slang, and from personal experience they knew almost as little about the Bowery as they knew about the sea. Their vocabularies, instead of being large and florid, were small and simple; their lapses from grammar were too usual to be interesting. They knew a few streets of the immense place exceedingly well, but they were, for the most part, lower-middle-class, commonplace, entirely respectable streets. They both had lived at home and worked hard—conscientiously, one would say, except that in the routine of their existences conscience played but little part. They had worked hard from habit, from the realization that they could easily be replaced and from an innate desire to keep their “jobs.”
It was strange, or perhaps it wasn’t strange (How do I know?), that the sea had all at once irrelevantly called to them. If they had been fond of reading, their embarkation might plausibly have been the practical attempt to make a dream come true. But they rarely read anything except the larger headlines of one-cent newspapers. The voluminous literature of adventure in foreign countries, of a wild, free life on the high seas, was almost as unknown to them as the thing itself. And yet, one day, they went to sea.
Early in April, an electric car smashed into Lansing’s delivery wagon and hurt the horse, to say nothing of the wagon itself and its valuable contents. The fault was neither Lansing’s nor the motorman’s, but the grocer both discharged Lansing and collected two hundred and fifty dollars from the street railway company. Out of employment, Lansing saw something of New York. He had been faithful and careful, and in a dumb, uncomplaining sort of way he felt aggrieved and rebellious. His long, aimless walks, during thefirst few days of his idleness, sometimes took him to the water’s edge, and one morning he found himself on a Wall Street wharf, just as a steamer was about to leave for the tropics. Although he didn’t precisely know what it all meant, the experience was, somehow, a moving one. There was an army of half-savage negroes—unlike any negroes he had ever seen—wheeling baggage on trucks and, with incoherent yelps, filling with freight a coarse net of rope that lifted, swung, sank, disappeared, and then reappeared limp and hungrily empty. There were fat, inexplicable women with improbable complexions, accompanied by lean, sallow, gesticulating men, who darted from their trunks to the ship and back again in a frenzy of excitement; and there were smells. Lansing did not know it (he knew very little) but it was the smells that, vulgarly speaking, “did the business.” There was a kind of background—a fundamental smell—of pitch, of tar, of resin; but here and there, protruding from this, as he strolled up and down the long, inclosed wharf, was the rank, searching smellof unroasted coffee, the fruity fragrance of pineapples, the pungent acidity of tomatoes, the heavy sweetness of vanilla. As each odor came to him he inhaled it deeply, curiously, and for him, somewhat excitedly.
After the vessel had slipped away and disappeared around the corner of the wharf, Lansing had emerged with the intention of traversing Wall Street and taking an uptown car, but a young and slightly drunken sailor from a warship in the harbor had, àpropos of nothing at all, thrown an arm about his waist and led him to a saloon across the way. They had together only a glass of beer apiece, but they had sat down to it at a little table and the sailor had talked.
In the sphere of life to which they both belonged there is a directness and a frankness in the matter of intercourse that would be impossible for most persons higher in the social order. Lansing had made many acquaintances and even a few friends by speaking or being spoken to by detached young men of his own age standing on street corners. Most of hisacquaintances among girls had been begun in the same way. They had spoken to him or he had spoken to them—it was immaterial—and if they found each other congenial they sometimes met again; sometimes they didn’t. But in any event meeting, talking, parting, involved nothing. It was merely an incident, often a pleasant one, of the kind the so-called upper classes know but little. It seemed perfectly natural to Lansing that the sailor, whom he never had seen before and probably would never see again, should offer him a glass of beer and tell him of his voyage around the world, and that he himself should respond with his accident, his discharge from the grocery—in a word, his “troubles,” as he finally called them.
“A sailorhasno troubles,” the other declared as they got up to go; and he altogether looked it. After that, Lansing spent most of his time on the wharves and on Sunday afternoon he took Hayward with him.
Hayward’s experience and education was as limited as his friend’s, but he was of finer clay.What Lansing only felt, Hayward both felt and translated into words.
“Gee, look at them turtles!” he would exclaim at a row of the huge, gasping tortured creatures, lying on their backs and bound to a board by ropes punched through their bleeding flippers. “They come out of the water to lay eggs in the sand, and then you run out of the bushes and turn them over on their backs with a pole. I bet there’s money in turtles.” Or, “Gosh, what a lot of pineapples! How would you like to go down there, Lansing, where it’s always summer, and just sit around while the niggers work, and send millions of pineapples back here to be sold at fifty cents apiece?”
“Forty-five,” corrected Lansing, who had “delivered” them all his life, but who, until recently, had impartially given them the same consideration he had been accustomed to bestow upon a potato. Once they stood for an hour in front of ten cages full of white and yellow cockatoos. They were even more disturbing, more convincing than the incoherentnegroes, the excitement of departure, the odor of exotic fruits.
“Down there you can see them flying around wild,” Hayward meditated aloud. “Down there!” The words began to mean wonderful, incommunicable things to both of them. “Down there” was the shimmering, beautiful, hot, mysterious and seductive end of the earth that a Frenchman is always able to evoke for an instant, when, in a certain languid, reminiscent tone, he pronounces the words “là bas.”
So they shipped on a tramp steamer and after a week they had been paid off at Havana. In Havana they spent an entrancing day and evening (Hayward bought an imitation diamond brooch at a place on Obispo street where the revolving electric lights in the window elicited the last glitter), but the next day was a good deal of a bore. They had seen the town, there was no point in seeing it over again, and they were unused to idleness. Both of them would have jumped at the opportunity of returning to New York, but as no opportunity of doing so presented itself neither of them had been obliged to admit it. On the third day, however, they did move on to Vera Cruz. To Hayward, Vera Cruz was a name he had heard (Lansing had never even heard it), but had he been asked what country it was in he could not have told. He had an idea that it was near New Orleans and Galveston. In another week they were there—paid off again and turned loose in the Plaza.
Again they spent a notable day. They wandered about the streets, they went to a wedding in a church, they marveled at the unmolested buzzards filching garbage from the open drains along the curbstones, they walked at sunset to the end of the long breakwater and watched the fishermen come in with their gorgeous catch of redsnapper. In the evening they went to a moving-picture show where they saw a realistic bull fight and a manufactured American train robbery. (This last gave them their first twinge of homesickness; the Pullman cars and the passengers looked so natural.) When it was over, they againsought the Plaza, where, in the sultry air, a compact mass of people was slowly forcing its way around and around to the music of an enormous band high above them among the trees in the center. They slept at an inexpensive lodging house to which they had been taken by one of the stokers.
But the next day was very like the second day at Havana, except that the possibilities of Vera Cruz seemed to be fewer. They could not walk in any direction without soon coming to the water or to a hot and dreary stretch of sand, and in their unconsciously blasé New York fashion they had become, by the second day, hardened to ragged Indians, enormous straw hats and scarletsarapes. They sat on a shady bench in the Plaza and discussed an immediate return to New York. Lansing was for going overland; he had a hazy idea that they were near the border, and he was amazed and troubled for a moment when the stoker, whom they several times met again, laughed and told them that the border was a half a week away in a train. This, of course, theyknew they could not afford, and they decided to work their way back, as they had come, on a steamer.
After that they spent most of their time on the docks, or in front of the hotels and cafés near them, waylaying skippers and mates. But places on ships bound for New York were apparently not to be had for the asking. The men to whom they applied were invariably curt and definite when they weren’t, as sometimes happened, brutally abusive. This was annoying although it was also, now and then, amusing. They, as yet, had not begun to regard matters in the light of a “situation,” for they still had a little money. At this period of their ebbing fortunes it seemed to them that they were making a sort of humiliating concession when they ceased to specify New York as their destination, and resolved to sail on any ship bound for any American port. But here, again, they were met with the same irritated outbursts, or brief, cold denials.
They did not know it, because outside of the little ruts in which they had always movedback and forth, they knew nothing, but Mexico, in winter, is one of the great goals of the American tramp. Thousands of them, in perpetually following at the heels of summer, drift across the border and gradually wander from Laredo to San Luis Potosi, to the City of Mexico, to Tampico and to Vera Cruz. They approach one in the Plaza, in the Alameda, at the doors of hotels and theaters and restaurants, and, with an always interesting fiction, extract twenty-five cents from one in the name of patriotism. When the spring comes and it is once more warm at home, they haunt the seaports, endeavoring to return by water. For short-handed ships at Vera Cruz in April and May there is an embarrassment of choice—a glut. Without in the least suspecting it, Hayward and Lansing had, in the eyes of the world, become tramps, seeking a return passage.
The heat had begun to be intense and the invariable refusal of their services was discouraging, but far more so were the interminable mornings and afternoons and eveningswhen, for the time being, they gave up their quest and sat on a bench in the Plaza, or, at sunset, strolled down to the breakwater for the redsnappers and the evening breeze. They had left home together and they stayed together as a matter of course, for they did not know anyone else, but they no longer had anything in particular to say to each other. For the most part they were silent and listless. They spoke only when something occurred to them relevant to what, at last, had begun to strike them as their “situation.”
“It’ll save money if we have one room instead of two, and sleep in the same bed,” Hayward declared one night, after a day in which they had scarcely spoken at all.
“If we don’t get up so early—What’s the use anyhow?—We won’t have to pay for breakfast. Two meals is enough if you’re asleep,” suggested Lansing a day or so later. And as long as they had money they spent it only for their bed and their two daily meals. Then came the inevitable day when they no longer had money, when they realized thatthe few cents they were spending for their supper were the last. It was disagreeable and they had begun to hate Vera Cruz—the monotony of it, the enforced idleness, the blistering heat, the rumor (they heard it from some English sailors on the dock) of yellow fever, and their inability to leave it all behind them. But although they were alarmed they were not yet panic-stricken. They each had a dress-suit case, an extra suit of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, some shirts and underclothes, a hat as well as a cap, three razors and a cheap watch.
The watch went first. They didn’t need a watch. When they wished to know the time they could glance up from their bench at the clock on the tower of the “municipal palace.” After this they parted on two successive days with the dress-suit cases, then the hats, the clothes and shoes and shirts and underclothes, one by one. The disposal of two of the razors gave them for forty-eight hours almost a sense of opulence. Lansing did not know there was a third razor and Hayward did not tell him ofit. Hayward was an innately neat person, and at the Y. M. C. A., to which he belonged in New York, he had grown to look upon free soap and unending hot and cold shower-baths in a light that was spiritual as well as physical. He was good-looking and he knew it. The thought of becoming an unshaven thing was abhorrent to him. Starvation, just then, he felt he could face, but the prospect of a week’s beard revolted him. So he twisted the razor into a piece of newspaper and secreted it in his pocket. As long as he and Lansing were together he knew he would not be able to shave; he could not confess to the possession of anything so convertible into money without immediately converting it. But the sensation of guilt was at first dispelled by an anticipatory thrill at the thought of the day when he could once more look clean and fresh and pink under his sunburn. He did not work it out in words, but the razor was to him a tangible symbol of self-respect, and he clung to it, although it would have bought them both the food they had begun to need.
“We’ve got to beat it. We’ve got to beat it right away,” he said one morning, when they awoke to the prospect of a foodless day. “They don’t want us on the ships, but they’ll have to take us anyhow. We’ll sneak on board and hide. After they get started they’ll have to keep us. They can’t throw us overboard, and we’ll work. Gee, how I want to work!”
That day they ate nothing, but in the evening they marvelously succeeded in smuggling themselves on a steamer bound for New Orleans, and in the prospect of getting away they forgot that they were hungry. One of the crew, with whom they struck up an acquaintance on the dock, seemed impressed by the sincerity with which they swore they would pay him if he would make it possible for them to return to where they could once more work. He agreed to help them conditionally; that is, he would get them on board and stow them away, if he could do it without too much risk to himself. The attendant conditions had to be just right; sometimes it was easy enough and sometimes it couldn’t be done at all.
In their case the right conditions were unexpectedly furnished in the fraction of a second that it takes a cable to snap and drop a large piece of locomotive from the main deck on a dozen barrels of apples in the hold below. In the uproar that followed and continued for five or six minutes, the only cool and competent person was the new friend of Hayward and Lansing. He had been waiting for something of the kind to happen, and he took instant advantage of it. While everyone else was screaming Spanish oaths and peering into the hatchway at the ruins, he hustled the two on board and hid them. An hour and a half later, Hayward, dazed and suffocated, was dragged out by the feet and kicked down the gang plank. Lansing did not reappear. From the dock, Hayward watched the vessel become first a black speck and then a suggestion of low-lying smoke in the dusk.
He was all at once horribly alone and lonely, but it did not occur to him to feel resentful. Lansing’s luck had been good; his own had been bad. That was all there was to it. Hewas glad someone had been lucky. That night he went back to the lodging house and slept in the bed—it was the last bed he ever slept in—and as he had no money, he in the morning gave thepatronhis razor.
Then began for him an existence, the absolute hopelessness of which appalled and crushed him. At first a ship to New York had seemed to him the only solution of his predicament; then the idea of a ship to anywhere had become a vision of paradise; now he saw that ships were an impossibility. As the season advanced the officers became more and more vigilant. A shabby, unshaven young man could not go within speaking distance of a ship. He made the rounds of the hotels and asked for work—any kind of work—but there was none. He tried to get employment as a laborer on the dock, but the foreman, who spoke English, laughed and asked him why he wished to commit suicide.
“An American keeping one of us out of a job would be stabbed in an hour,” he declared, and refused to hire him. He managed for atime to keep alive, because one day he remembered that on the little finger of his left hand he had a gold ring. For years it had been so much a part of him that it had not occurred to him to sell it. The discovery of it came as a kind of revelation and made it possible for him to eat, sparingly, for two days. Then a brisk little American woman, in a white duck suit, approached him in the Plaza and gave him twenty-five centavos for delivering hand bills. She was a fortune teller—a “seeress,” and had recently opened a “Studio of the Occult” in the Hotel Segurança, across the way. She seemed like a kind, capable little creature and once, when he had not eaten for two days, he went to the hotel and asked for her; but as he was unshaven and dazed and rather vague, they assumed him to be a drunken tramp and drove him away. Then he made the acquaintance, in the Plaza, of an utterly unreal person of no particular age, who dragged out of the hotel and in again every afternoon for half an hour or so, with the aid of a cane. His face was bloated and discolored, but his body wasno more than a semi-upright arrangement of bones. Hayward at first thought he was an invalid in the last stages, then felt sure he was a drunkard, and, finally, it came to him that the man was a slave to some drug. He would occasionally give Hayward the twenty-five centavos on which he could exist for several days, and then, after a long silence on a bench, petulantly demand: “What do you do with all the money I give you? The day before yesterday I gave you three hundred dollars. I’m afraid you’re extravagant.” In one of his more lucid intervals, he suggested the American consul, and Hayward went to the consulate.
“I don’t want to beg, I want to work,” he said when the consul wheeled from a desk and impatiently eyed him.
“Oh, I hear that twenty times a day. Get out and don’t come back,” exclaimed the consul wearily. He “got out” and he did not go back. Something in the man’s dumpy, coarse, dirty-fingernailed personality told him it would be useless. Then he tried to steal aride on a freight train bound for the City of Mexico, and was discovered and thrown out at the second station, twelve miles away. It merely meant his walking back to Vera Cruz in the blistering heat over the endless sand dunes and past the fever-stricken marshes where the mosquitoes devoured him. He spent as much as he dared of that night on a bench in the Plaza, but for fear the policemen might begin to think he was sitting too long in one place, he, from time to time, aroused himself and walked down to the docks, or to the two railway stations at opposite ends of the town. The humiliation of it was worse, somehow, than his hunger and his fatigue. The next night, however, the need of sleep was overpowering, and he lay down on the beach at the edge of the town. In spite of the ants that swarmed up under his clothes and stung him from his neck to his ankles, he slept the sleep of exhaustion. But to sleep on the beach at Vera Cruz is against the law, and at three o’clock in the morning he was arrested and thrown into a vile and crowded roomunder the tower, whose clock of late had struck for him so many aimless, hopeless hours. In the morning the judge dismissed him with the reminder (a negro from Havana translated the ultimatum) that a second offense would mean thirty days.
Then followed a horrible week—a last nightmare. He heard from a trainman that there was work at the machine shops of Casa Blanca, forty miles away, and, in the incredible heat, he walked there, and when he found the rumor was untrue, he walked back again. On the way, he lived on poisonous water and a yellow nut that looked like dates and grew on scrubby palm trees by the roadside. He did not know how long it had taken him to make the journey. When he once more reached the inevitable Plaza, he was dizzy with hunger, and as he thought he was going to die, he reeled over to where the world was dining under the arcade on the sidewalk. There were fifteen or twenty tables, and after passing them all he picked out one where five Americans, three men and two women, hadfinished eating and were lolling back in their chairs, waiting for their plates of half-consumed meat to be removed.
“I’m not a beggar,” he began hurriedly, taking off his hat. “I’m not asking you for money, but I haven’t had anything to eat to-day. Please let me have some of what you’ve left before the waiter takes it away.” They might have given it to him, and then again they might not have. He never knew. The waiter came back just then and authoritatively slapped him away with a soiled napkin.
“What pretty hair he had,” one of the women reflected. “It grows back from his forehead in a kind of proud way. Of course he’s a fake.”
“I didn’t notice his hair, but he had perfect teeth,” said the other. “This country’s just full of tramps.”
Late that night, when a young man skeptically gave him a Mexican dollar he wished to get rid of, as he was sailing for New York in the morning, Hayward suddenly burst into tears and, with his head on the back of thebench, sobbed for half an hour. He lived on the dollar for five days. In the meantime, the drug fiend died, and the seeress departed for the City of Mexico.
Hayward had never read “Les Misérables,” but on the sixth day after the young man had given him the dollar, he remembered that on one of his teeth was a gold crown, and, without success, he asked a dentist to pull and buy it. He had nothing to eat that day, and at night the desire to lie down and sleep instead of hypocritically walking about as if he were going somewhere became irresistible. So he went again to the beach and lay down among the ants, and in the morning a policeman scared away the buzzards that had already begun to hop about him and crane their hideously naked necks. The American consul, greatly bored (the heat was frightful), officially glanced at him and then they dumped him into a hole with an Indian who had been stabbed in a drunken row the night before.