Chapter VI: Part 6

No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in Germany, and in Italy--poor, dear Italy!--they are worse still. That is because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad as heart could wish--the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one still went by diligence or _vettura_. The only absolutely _good_ railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express--

"But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:

Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops. But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir.

No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn, where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till it is put back into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows, with their high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the English cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and assemblies of the past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent over trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors of flowers that withered a hundred years ago.

But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle pair with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep our hunger for the table d'hôte of the dining-car; when we buy a room in the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of public land in northwestern Canada.

There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely own, has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life for the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would now want to take a bicycle, or even a "bicycle built for two." These things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splendors of life. Soon the last word in them takes on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them "with sick and scornful looks averse," and listens for the

"airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."

Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be the next word--the word that follows the last, the woman's word.

XVI

QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS

They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their native independence to something like the condition of those pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the Government's dole of beef-cattle.

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the 'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man?"

"I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them."

"Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century. There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds, didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman, before the extension of the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian."

"I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the second friend mused aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. "They had so many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not to

'enter on my list of friends the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,'

and

'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'"

"Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good."

"What do you mean," the second of the friends demanded, "by coming back to their ground?"

"Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as ignore Him----"

"I see," the second answered, sadly. "But aren't you throwing up the sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend, 'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to follow."

"Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed. But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I certainly always do."

"What, always?"

"Well, nearly always."

The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any longer without the risk of not being followed."

The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."

"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from

'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'

it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology."

"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D. C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to do and tried to do.'"

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or don't try hard enough."

The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength; wickedness is weakness."

"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."

"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"

"Well, your Stoics--"

"_My_ Stoics?"

"_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a duty coming they stepped out and did it."

"It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?"

"That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented the Christian ideal of duty."

"And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the beginning."

The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go so far as that."

The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed together again.

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady, greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with his paws.

"No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues. You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any."

"There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the boat-house with a basketful."

"But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get. That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call character-building. Get along!"

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.

"I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity included kindness to animals."

"I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged."

The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had to ask, "Where were we?"

"Cultivating force of character in squirrels."

"I thought we had got by that."

"Then we had come round to ourselves again."

"Something like that," the first friend reluctantly allowed.

"What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that's what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves."

"Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn't pamper their egotism in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to overgrow."

"That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other ways for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?"

"Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect, a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote for him."

"But you voted for him?"

The first friend nodded.

"Which man was it?"

"What's the use? He was beaten--

'That is all you know or need to know.'"

"Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him," the second friend mused. "How patient the Creator must be with the result of His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's enough to make one go in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?"

"And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with other interests and obligations?"

"Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way."

"And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a vivid thought suddenly occurs, "how it would work if one went and did exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?"

"That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or, rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered."

"You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?"

"No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. 'Thou shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown off or put on, as the case may be."

"How very hideous!" the second friend exclaimed. "It's like an emanation from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been abolished."

"And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil, we know what to do with them."

"And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?"

"Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom of such things yet. Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it literally."

"That's very interesting," the second friend said. "Then it's your idea that no one really prefers to do wrong?"

"Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority. No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any purely voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call them, do wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the last state of sinners was insanity."

"Dreadful!"

"But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that inner voice, we are æsthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them."

The second friend drew a long breath. "Then I don't see why there are so many."

"Well," the first friend suggested, "there seems to be a difficulty. Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good."

"I don't see how you make that out."

"Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very imperfect."

"And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing our duty?"

"Well, we sha'n't by not doing it."

XVII

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY

The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to greater circumstance in him. He said:

"It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance or design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence, I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother, and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was Brown, Jones, or Robinson."

"We dare say you have your self-justification," we put in at this point, "but you must own that it doesn't appear in what you are saying. As a good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you would certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door. His being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with his merit or want of it."

"Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there was something in his case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday."

"He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have done if he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered into it with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite new two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe the dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to cases of dire need, you know."

"No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to give copper."

"Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But here was an instance which involved a more extended application of alms. 'You know,' I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental arithmetic, 'there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for twenty-five cents; I don't remember whether they throw in breakfast or not.' I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved by the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake, if not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, 'I think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch, including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked making it pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the question entirely to him, and he said nothing.

"In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My overcoat,' he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and that I had no prescience of the blizzard--what the papers fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)--which was to begin the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At the same time, I gave him a quarter."

"That was magnificent, but it was not political economy," we commented. "You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not need it on shipboard."

"Well, do you know," our friend said, "I really did tell him something like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made me ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the cattle."

"It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," we said. "You can't draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down."

"I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with their poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 'Here!' and I pulled open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full of English coins, which I had been left stranded with on several returns from Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of them; and as I always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I will never go to Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do with those coins. I now took out the largest and handsomest of them: 'Do you know what that is?' 'Yes,' he said; 'it's two shillings and sixpence--what we call a half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith in him; I saw that he must be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary; very likely our name was the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart. 'Here!' I said, and I handed him the coin; it did not seem so bad as giving him more American money. 'They can change that on the ship for you. I guess you can manage now till Monday,' and my confidence in Providence diffused such a genial warmth through my steam-heated apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat. I wish I could forget about it now."

We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned his excess of beneficence. "Oh, you mustn't mind giving him so much money. We can't always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as close as we ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!"

Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In fact, he seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming: "He appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for he got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to make him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested me somehow beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality; in fact, his personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that asserted any claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about the'--I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I boldly outed with--'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not exactly, but--it came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable offence.

"I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he said, sadly enough, and he went out."

Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to improve the occasion in his behalf. "Well, there you lost a great opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great opportunity."

Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting, and blazed out--we have no milder word for it--blazed out in a sort of fiery torrent which made us recoil: "Yes, I lost that great opportunity, and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years' labor it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor, it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because it had defrauded him of the money he had earned."

"But, our dear friend!" we entreated, "don't you realize that this theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?"

"And you don't think two years' prison, two years' slavery, was sanative enough without the denial of his just compensation?"

We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe, or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:

"Suppose he had a wife and children--he may have had several of both, for all I know--dependent on him, would it have been particularly sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?"

"We cannot answer these sophistries," we were exasperated into replying. "All that we can say is that anything else--anything like what you call justice to the criminal, the prisoner--would disrupt society," and we felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in this way the ideas of rejected contributors.

A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?"

Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. "He didn't sail, exactly, at least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted from him at my own door--the outside of it. It appears that the authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith, and that he refused to do so--not having the money, for one reason. I did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State in the practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the place where he went to have his half-crown changed into American money they would only give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured by an acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In fact, a half-crown is worth a little more."

"Well, what can you expect of money-changers?" we returned, consolingly. "And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary now?"

"Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled, as the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of cattle-steamers, where they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the herdsmen; I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them."

We laughed sardonically. "And do you believe he is really going?"

Our friend sighed heavily. "Well, I don't believe he's coming back. I only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don't think it will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will wish to call upon me for more."

We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, "And you still think he had been in the penitentiary?"

"I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't."

"Well, then," we retorted bitterly, again like a character in fiction, "you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this time, but an æsthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway."

Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, "It was rather a break."

"You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in jail don't turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think of the material you have lost."

We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when we reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay, we could not endure it. "Well, good-day," we said, coldly; "we are going down this way."

Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself with a mocking laugh. "Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he said."

XVIII

A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair's, sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least, fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.

"Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because, you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story; and I've just read it."

"Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to recall which story it was. "Well?"

"Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you, don't you?"

"By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story." By this time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.

"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you know yourself that it couldn't be called virile."

"No?" he returned. "What is virile?"

"Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you into the air, and trample you under foot."

"Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I'm a gentleman, even when I'm writing a novel."

"Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said, severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran Novelist to shuffle. "You can't be virile and at the same time remember that you are a gentleman. Lots of _women_ write virile books."

"Ladies?" the novelist asked.

"Don't I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the reader's attention you must let yourself go, whether you're a gentleman or a lady. Of course," she relented, "your book's very idyllic, and delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, "do you think an honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to cover?"

The novelist sighed. "I'm sure I don't know. They seem to say it--in the passages quoted in the advertisements--of all the books published. Except mine," he added, sadly.

"Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece relented again. "I didn't intend to wound your feelings, uncle."

"Oh, you haven't. I suppose I _am_ a little too easy-going at times."

"Yes, that is it. One can't say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: 'Have you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't wait to find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It's going like the wind, and you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!' Now that," his great-niece ended, fondly, "is what I should like every critic to say of your book, uncle."

The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more spiritedly, "I don't believe _I_ should, my dear."

"Then you _must_; that's all. But that's a small thing. What I really wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a stylist."

"Stylist?"

"Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram in your book from beginning to end. That's the reason the critics don't quote any brilliant sentences from it, and the publishers can't advertise it properly. It makes me mad to find the girls repeating other authors' sayings, and I never catch a word from a book of yours, though you've been writing more than a century."

"Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just what do you mean by style?"

"Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you _can_ have _passion_. Why don't you?"

"Don't I? I thought--"

"Not a speck of it--not a single speck! It's rather a delicate point, and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once, but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion. Isn't there? Think!"

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--"

"Uncle!"

"--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass them?"

"The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!"

"And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to kiss their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very well, but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help of one embrace from beginning to end."

"Uncle!" the girl vividly exclaimed, "why don't you _do_ it? It would be the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the start--just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be raving about it. Why _don't_ you do it, uncle? You know I do so want you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!"

"I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of suppressed passion, that's a story in itself."

"Tell it!" she entreated.

"The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. But I'll tell you something else. When I was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came rather in anticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the whole range of mythological topics, and then I had my knack lying idle. I observed that there was one subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but somehow I felt myself disqualified for treating it. How could I sing of Love when I had never been in love? For I didn't count those youthful affairs when I was only in the Third Reader and the first part of the Arithmetic. I went about trying to be in love, as a matter of business; but I couldn't manage it. Suddenly it managed itself; and then I found myself worse disqualified than ever. I didn't want to mention it; either to myself or to her, much less to the world at large. It seemed a little too personal."

"Oh, uncle! How funny you are!"

"Do you think so? I didn't think it much fun then, and I don't now. Once I didn't know what love was, and now I've forgotten!"

"No such thing, uncle! You write about it beautifully, even if you're not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you say so."