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Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Italienische Reise Teil 1"

Henry James - "Some Short Stories"

Anthony Trollope - "Barchester Towers"

George MacDonald - "A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul"

Worldly Ways and Byways

E >> Eliot Gregory >> Worldly Ways and Byways







CHAPTER 39 - A Race of Slaves


IT is all very well for us to have invaded Europe, and awakened
that somnolent continent to the lights and delights of American
ways; to have beautified the cities of the old world with graceful
trolleys and illuminated the catacombs at Rome with electricity.
Every true American must thrill with satisfaction at these
achievements, and the knowledge that he belongs to a dominating
race, before which the waning civilization of Europe must fade away
and disappear.

To have discovered Europe and to rule as conquerors abroad is well,
but it is not enough, if we are led in chains at home. It is
recorded of a certain ambitious captain whose "Commentaries" made
our school-days a burden, that "he preferred to be the first in a
village rather than second at Rome." Oddly enough, WE are
contented to be slaves in our villages while we are conquerors in
Rome. Can it be that the struggles of our ancestors for freedom
were fought in vain? Did they throw off the yoke of kings, cross
the Atlantic, found a new form of government on a new continent,
break with traditions, and sign a declaration of independence, only
that we should succumb, a century later, yielding the fruits of
their hard-fought battles with craven supineness into the hands of
corporations and municipalities; humbly bowing necks that refuse to
bend before anointed sovereigns, to the will of steamboat
subordinates, the insolence of be-diamonded hotel-clerks, and the
captious conductor?

Last week my train from Washington arrived in Jersey City on time.
We scurried (like good Americans) to the ferry-boat, hot and tired
and anxious to get to our destination; a hope deferred, however,
for our boat was kept waiting forty long minutes, because,
forsooth, another train from somewhere in the South was behind
time. Expostulations were in vain. Being only the paying public,
we had no rights that those autocrats, the officials, were bound to
respect. The argument that if they knew the southern train to be
so much behind, the ferry-boat would have plenty of time to take us
across and return, was of no avail, so, like a cargo of "moo-cows"
(as the children say), we submitted meekly. In order to make the
time pass more pleasantly for the two hundred people gathered on
the boat, a dusky potentate judged the moment appropriate to scrub
the cabin floors. So, aided by a couple of subordinates, he
proceeded to deluge the entire place in floods of water, obliging
us to sit with our feet tucked up under us, splashing the ladies'
skirts and our wraps and belongings.

Such treatment of the public would have raised a riot anywhere but
in this land of freedom. Do you suppose any one murmured? Not at
all. The well-trained public had the air of being in church. My
neighbors appeared astonished at my impatience, and informed me
that they were often detained in that way, as the company was short
of boats, but they hoped to have a new one in a year or two. This
detail did not prevent that corporation advertising our train to
arrive in New York at three-thirteen, instead of which we landed at
four o'clock. If a similar breach of contract had happened in
England, a dozen letters would have appeared in the "Times," and
the grievance been well aired.

Another infliction to which all who travel in America are subjected
is the brushing atrocity. Twenty minutes before a train arrives at
its destination, the despot who has taken no notice of any one up
to this moment, except to snub them, becomes suspiciously attentive
and insists on brushing everybody. The dirt one traveller has been
accumulating is sent in clouds into the faces of his neighbors.
When he is polished off and has paid his "quarter" of tribute, the
next man gets up, and the dirt is then brushed back on to number
one, with number two's collection added.

Labiche begins one of his plays with two servants at work in a
salon. "Dusting," says one of them, "is the art of sending the
dirt from the chair on the right over to the sofa on the left." I
always think of that remark when I see the process performed in a
parlor car, for when it is over we are all exactly where we began.
If a man should shampoo his hair, or have his boots cleaned in a
salon, he would be ejected as a boor; yet the idea apparently never
enters the heads of those who soil and choke their fellow-
passengers that the brushing might be done in the vestibule.

On the subject of fresh air and heat we are also in the hands of
officials, dozens of passengers being made to suffer for the
caprices of one of their number, or the taste of some captious
invalid. In other lands the rights of minorities are often
ignored. With us it is the contrary. One sniffling school-girl
who prefers a temperature of 80 degrees can force a car full of
people to swelter in an atmosphere that is death to them, because
she refuses either to put on her wraps or to have a window opened.

Street railways are torture-chambers where we slaves are made to
suffer in another way. You must begin to reel and plunge towards
the door at least two blocks before your destination, so as to leap
to the ground when the car slows up; otherwise the conductor will
be offended with you, and carry you several squares too far, or
with a jocose "Step lively," will grasp your elbow and shoot you
out. Any one who should sit quietly in his place until the vehicle
had come to a full stop, would be regarded by the slave-driver and
his cargo as a POSEUR who was assuming airs.

The idea that cars and boats exist for the convenience of the
public was exploded long ago. We are made, dozens of times a day,
to feel that this is no longer the case. It is, on the contrary,
brought vividly home to us that such conveyances are money making
machines in the possession of powerful corporations (to whom we, in
our debasement, have handed over the freedom of our streets and
rivers), and are run in the interest and at the discretion of their
owners.

It is not only before the great and the powerful that we bow in
submission. The shop-girl is another tyrant who has planted her
foot firmly on the neck of the nation. She respects neither sex
nor age. Ensconced behind the bulwark of her counter, she scorns
to notice humble aspirants until they have performed a preliminary
penance; a time she fills up in cheerful conversation addressed to
other young tyrants, only deciding to notice customers when she
sees their last grain of patience is exhausted. She is often of a
merry mood, and if anything about your appearance or manner strikes
her critical sense as amusing, will laugh gayly with her companions
at your expense.

A French gentleman who speaks our language correctly but with some
accent, told me that he found it impossible to get served in our
stores, the shop-girls bursting with laughter before he could make
his wants known.

Not long ago I was at the Compagnie Lyonnaise in Paris with a stout
American lady, who insisted on tipping her chair forward on its
front legs as she selected some laces. Suddenly the chair flew
from under her, and she sat violently on the polished floor in an
attitude so supremely comic that the rest of her party were
inwardly convulsed. Not a muscle moved in the faces of the well-
trained clerks. The proprietor assisted her to rise as gravely as
if he were bowing us to our carriage.

In restaurants American citizens are treated even worse than in the
shops. You will see cowed customers who are anxious to get away to
their business or pleasure sitting mutely patient, until a waiter
happens to remember their orders. I do not know a single
establishment in this city where the waiters take any notice of
their customers' arrival, or where the proprietor comes, toward the
end of the meal, to inquire if the dishes have been cooked to their
taste. The interest so general on the Continent or in England is
replaced here by the same air of being disturbed from more
important occupations, that characterizes the shop-girl and
elevator boy.

Numbers of our people live apparently in awe of their servants and
the opinion of the tradespeople. One middle-aged lady whom I
occasionally take to the theatre, insists when we arrive at her
door on my accompanying her to the elevator, in order that the
youth who presides therein may see that she has an escort, the
opinion of this subordinate apparently being of supreme importance
to her. One of our "gilded youths" recently told me of a thrilling
adventure in which he had figured. At the moment he was passing
under an awning on his way to a reception, a gust of wind sent his
hat gambolling down the block. "Think what a situation," he
exclaimed. "There stood a group of my friends' footmen watching
me. But I was equal to the situation and entered the house as if
nothing had happened!" Sir Walter Raleigh sacrificed a cloak to
please a queen. This youth abandoned a new hat, fearing the
laughter of a half-dozen servants.

One of the reasons why we have become so weak in the presence of
our paid masters is that nowhere is the individual allowed to
protest. The other night a friend who was with me at a theatre
considered the acting inferior, and expressed his opinion by
hissing. He was promptly ejected by a policeman. The man next me
was, on the contrary, so pleased with the piece that he encored
every song. I had paid to see the piece once, and rebelled at
being obliged to see it twice to suit my neighbor. On referring
the matter to the box-office, the caliph in charge informed me that
the slaves he allowed to enter his establishment (like those who in
other days formed the court of Louis XIV.) were permitted to
praise, but were suppressed if they murmured dissent. In his
MEMOIRES, Dumas, PERE, tells of a "first night" when three thousand
people applauded a play of his and one spectator hissed. "He was
the only one I respected," said Dumas, "for the piece was bad, and
that criticism spurred me on to improve it."

How can we hope for any improvement in the standard of our
entertainments, the manners of our servants or the ways of
corporations when no one complains? We are too much in a hurry to
follow up a grievance and have it righted. "It doesn't pay," "I
haven't got the time," are phrases with which all such subjects are
dismissed. We will sit in over-heated cars, eat vilely cooked
food, put up with insolence from subordinates, because it is too
much trouble to assert our rights. Is the spirit that prompted the
first shots on Lexington Common becoming extinct? Have the floods
of emigration so diluted our Anglo-Saxon blood that we no longer
care to fight for liberty? Will no patriot arise and lead a revolt
against our tyrants?

I am prepared to follow such a leader, and have already marked my
prey. First, I will slay a certain miscreant who sits at the
receipt of customs in the box-office of an up-town theatre. For
years I have tried to propitiate that satrap with modest politeness
and feeble little jokes. He has never been softened by either, but
continues to "chuck" the worst places out to me (no matter how
early I arrive, the best have always been given to the
speculators), and to frown down my attempts at self-assertion.

When I have seen this enemy at my feet, I shall start down town
(stopping on the way to brain the teller at my bank, who is
perennially paring his nails, and refuses to see me until that
operation is performed), to the office of a night-boat line, where
the clerk has so often forced me, with hundreds of other weary
victims, to stand in line like convicts, while he chats with a
"lady friend," his back turned to us and his leg comfortably thrown
over the arm of his chair. Then I will take my blood-stained way -
but, no! It is better not to put my victims on their guard, but to
abide my time in silence! Courage, fellow-slaves, our day will
come!




CHAPTER 40 - Introspection *


THE close of a year must bring even to the careless and the least
inclined toward self-inspection, an hour of thoughtfulness, a
desire to glance back across the past, and set one's mental house
in order, before starting out on another stage of the journey for
that none too distant bourne toward which we all are moving.

* December thirty-first, 1888.

Our minds are like solitary dwellers in a vast residence, whom
habit has accustomed to live in a few only of the countless
chambers around them. We have collected from other parts of our
lives mental furniture and bric-a-brac that time and association
have endeared to us, have installed these meagre belongings
convenient to our hand, and contrived an entrance giving facile
access to our living-rooms, avoiding the effort of a long detour
through the echoing corridors and disused salons behind. No
acquaintances, and but few friends, penetrate into the private
chambers of our thoughts. We set aside a common room for the
reception of visitors, making it as cheerful as circumstances will
allow and take care that the conversation therein rarely turns on
any subject more personal than the view from the windows or the
prophecies of the barometer.

In the old-fashioned brick palace at Kensington, a little suite of
rooms is carefully guarded from the public gaze, swept, garnished
and tended as though the occupants of long ago were hourly expected
to return. The early years of England's aged sovereign were passed
in these simple apartments and by her orders they have been kept
unchanged, the furniture and decorations remaining to-day as when
she inhabited them. In one corner, is assembled a group of dolls,
dressed in the quaint finery of 1825. A set of miniature cooking
utensils stands near by. A child's scrap-books and color-boxes lie
on the tables. In one sunny chamber stands the little white-draped
bed where the heiress to the greatest crown on earth dreamed her
childish dreams, and from which she was hastily aroused one June
morning to be saluted as Queen. So homelike and livable an air
pervades the place, that one almost expects to see the lonely
little girl of seventy years ago playing about the unpretending
chambers.

Affection for the past and a reverence for the memory of the dead
have caused the royal wife and mother to preserve with the same
care souvenirs of her passage in other royal residences. The
apartments that sheltered the first happy months of her wedded
life, the rooms where she knew the joys and anxieties of maternity,
have become for her consecrated sanctuaries, where the widowed,
broken old lady comes on certain anniversaries to evoke the
unforgotten past, to meditate and to pray.

Who, as the year is drawing to its close, does not open in memory
some such sacred portal, and sit down in the familiar rooms to live
over again the old hopes and fears, thrilling anew with the joys
and temptations of other days? Yet, each year these pilgrimages
into the past must become more and more lonely journeys; the
friends whom we can take by the hand and lead back to our old homes
become fewer with each decade. It would be a useless sacrilege to
force some listless acquaintance to accompany us. He would not
hear the voices that call to us, or see the loved faces that people
the silent passages, and would wonder what attraction we could find
in the stuffy, old-fashioned quarters.

Many people have such a dislike for any mental privacy that they
pass their lives in public, or surrounded only by sporting trophies
and games. Some enjoy living in their pantries, composing for
themselves succulent dishes, and interested in the doings of the
servants, their companions. Others have turned their salons into
nurseries, or feel a predilection for the stable and the dog-
kennels. Such people soon weary of their surroundings, and move
constantly, destroying, when they leave old quarters, all the
objects they had collected.

The men and women who have thus curtailed their belongings are,
however, quite contented with themselves. No doubts ever harass
them as to the commodity or appropriateness of their lodgements and
look with pity and contempt on friends who remain faithful to old
habitations. The drawback to a migratory existence, however, is
the fact that, as a French saying has put it, CEUX QUI SE REFUSENT
LES PENSEES SERIEUSES TOMBENT DANS LES IDEES NOIRES. These people
are surprised to find as the years go by that the futile amusements
to which they have devoted themselves do not fill to their
satisfaction all the hours of a lifetime. Having provided no books
nor learned to practise any art, the time hangs heavily on their
hands. They dare not look forward into the future, so blank and
cheerless does it appear. The past is even more distasteful to
them. So, to fill the void in their hearts, they hurry out into
the crowd as a refuge from their own thoughts.

Happy those who care to revisit old abodes, childhood's remote
wing, and the moonlit porches where they knew the rapture of a
first-love whisper. Who can enter the chapel where their dead lie,
and feel no blush of self-reproach, nor burning consciousness of
broken faith nor wasted opportunities? The new year will bring to
them as near an approach to perfect happiness as can be attained in
life's journey. The fortunate mortals are rare who can, without a
heartache or regret, pass through their disused and abandoned
dwellings; who dare to open every door and enter all the silent
rooms; who do not hurry shudderingly by some obscure corners, and
return with a sigh of relief to the cheerful sunlight and murmurs
of the present.

Sleepless midnight hours come inevitably to each of us, when the
creaking gates of subterranean passages far down in our
consciousness open of themselves, and ghostly inhabitants steal out
of awful vaults and force us to look again into their faces and
touch their unhealed wounds.

An old lady whose cheerfulness under a hundred griefs and
tribulations was a marvel and an example, once told a man who had
come to her for counsel in a moment of bitter trouble, that she had
derived comfort when difficulties loomed big around her by writing
down all her cares and worries, making a list of the subjects that
harassed her, and had always found that, when reduced to material
written words, the dimensions of her troubles were astonishingly
diminished. She recommended her procedure to the troubled youth,
and prophesied that his anxieties would dwindle away in the clear
atmosphere of pen and paper.

Introspection, the deliberate unlatching of closed wickets, has the
same effect of stealing away the bitterness from thoughts that, if
left in the gloom of semi-oblivion, will grow until they overshadow
a whole life. It is better to follow the example of England's pure
Queen, visiting on certain anniversaries our secret places and
holding communion with the past, for it is by such scrutiny only


THAT MEN MAY RISE ON STEPPING-STONES
OF THEIR DEAD SELVES TO HIGHER THINGS.


Those who have courage to perform thoroughly this task will come
out from the silent chambers purified and chastened, more lenient
to the faults and shortcomings of others, and better fitted to take
up cheerfully the burdens of a new year.

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