Part 7

The American reaches the dépôt by a trolley car ten minutes at least before the hour of departure, having sent his heavy luggage, if he has any--which is not likely--by baggage express. His only personal equipment is a slim and compact valise, which, in regard to opening and shutting, is a marvel of convenience. This he carries in his hand, and places beneath or beside the seat which he has secured two days before. He does not carry a rug because the cars are heated, nor an umbrella because it is not the rainy season. His top coat he hangs up beside his seat, as if he were in his own house; and his hat if he so please. He does not wear a travelling-cap any more than in his own drawing-room, nor gloves in the train any more than in his own office. Should his hands be soiled, he goes to the lavatory where there are large basins and an ample supply of water, and if his coat be dusty, there is a negro porter in every car to brush it. The immense repose of the English traveller is quite impossible for this mercurial man, whose blood and whose brain are ever on a stir. Very rarely will you see him reading a book, because he is not accustomed to read, and the demands of a book would lessen his time for business meditation. Boys with newspapers circulate through the cars, and he buys each new paper as it appears at the different towns. Whether it be Republican, or Democratic, or a family paper or a yellow journal, does not matter to him; he glances at the startling headings, takes an accident or a political scandal at a mouthful, skims over the business news, sees whether anything has happened at the Philippines, notes that the canard of the morning has been contradicted in the afternoon, and flings paper after paper on the floor. Three minutes or, in cases of extreme interest, five minutes suffice for each paper, and by-and-by this omnivorous reader, who consumes a paper even more quickly than his food, is knee deep in printed information or sensation. For two minutes he is almost quiet, and seems to be digesting some piece of commercial information. He then rises hurriedly, as if he had been called on the telephone, and makes for the smoking-car, where he will discuss “Expansion” with vivid, picturesque speech, and get through a cigar with incredible celerity. Within fifteen minutes he is in his place again; and, a little afterwards, wearying of idleness, he is chewing the end of a cigar, which is a substitute for smoking and saves him from being wearied with his own company. Half an hour before the train is due at his station, he is being brushed, and getting ready to alight. Before the train has reached the outskirts of the town, he has secured his place in a procession which stands in single file in the narrow exit passage from the Pullman. Each man is ready dressed for business and has his valise in his hand; he is counting the minutes before he can alight, and is envying the man at the head of the procession, who will have a start of about two seconds. This will give him a great advantage in business, and he may never be overtaken by his competitors till evening.

Suppose he lands at 6 a.m., he will find breakfast ready in a hotel, and half a dozen men eating as if their lives depended upon finishing by 6.15 a.m. Before seven he will have disposed of a pile of letters, dictating answers to a typist attached to the hotel, he will have telegraphed in all directions, and made half a dozen appointments in the town by telephone. Within the forenoon he will finish his business and depart for some neighbouring town, lunching on the cars. The second town he will dispose of in the afternoon, and that evening go on board the sleeper to travel 400 miles to a third town, where he is going to negotiate a contract at 8 o'clock next morning. If you sympathize with him, and wonder how flesh and blood can stand the speed, he accepts your sympathy as a compliment, and assures you that he never sleeps so well as on the cars. He never seems to be out of sorts or out of temper: he is always thoroughly alive and quite good-natured. Sometimes he may seem for a moment annoyed, when he cannot telegraph as often as he wants along the line, or when the train is not on time, that he may make a connection. Nothing would wound him so deeply as to “get left,” and he can only affect to be unconscious when some one declares that he is “no slouch, and that there are no flies on him.” If he is obliged to spend two hours doing nothing in a hotel, when business is over, then he rocks himself and smokes, and it is a wonderful spectacle for an indolent Englishman to look down from the gallery that commands the hall of the hotel, and to see fifty able-bodied fellow-men who have worked already twelve hours, at least, and put eighteen hours' work into the time, all in motion. (One wonders why this motion is not utilized to drive something.) He discovers how unlike cousins may be, for an Englishman never moves unless he is obliged to or unless he wants to shoot something, and these remarkable men never rest unless when they are asleep. About that even, I am not sure, and I was often tempted to draw aside the curtain from a berth in a sleeping-car, and, had I done so, I should not have been at all surprised to find our friend wide awake with a cold cigar in his cheek, and rocking his knees for want of more extensive accommodation. He has always rebelled against the ancient custom of sleep, which he regards as a loss of time and an anachronism. All that he can do is to spend the night in a sleeping car, which, as he will tell you, annihilates time and space.

Foreigners travelling in the States in their innocence are amazed that a delicate-minded nation, like the Americans, should be willing to sleep after the fashion of the Pullman cars, and should not insist upon the Continental cabin-car. The reason for the Arcadian simplicity of the sections is not really economy, for no American would ever think twice of spending a dollar; it is simply their abounding and dominant energy. If you sleep in cabins at night, you must sit in cabins by day; and this would mean a seclusion and repose which are very distasteful to the high-strung American temperament. It would be like bottling up a volatile gas; and one imagines that it might lead to an explosion, which some day would break down the partitions and break up the car from end to end. The American must see everything in his car and hear everything, for which he depends upon the peculiar quality of the local voice; and he must be at liberty to prowl about his car, and to sit with his friends here and there. The car is his little world for the time, and he is not going to live in a backwater.

There seems no doubt that an American workman will do from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent, more than an Englishman in the same time, and that the higher wages of the American have their compensation for the capitalist in a workman's quickness of mind and sleight of hand. Everything goes at an accelerated speed, with wonderful inventions in labour-saving machinery and devices to economize time. If the great end of a nation be to do as much as possible in as short a time as possible, then the American climate has been practically arranged for that end. An Englishwoman living in the States becomes effervescent, and the native American is the brightest woman on the face of the earth. While the English atmosphere is heavy and soothing, and lends itself to thought and quietness, the American climate is exciting and exhilarating, and quickens both mind and body to the highest activity. It is an electric climate, and the electricity has passed into the people, who are simply vessels charged up to a certain number of volts. These vessels as sources of motive power can then be attached to pulpits, or offices, or workshops or politics. Of course, a day is apt to come when the vessels will have been completely discharged, and it arrives very frequently without warning. A little confusion in the head, and a slight numbness in the limbs, and the man has to go away a year to Colorado Springs or to Los Angeles. If he is fortunate, he can be recharged and run for another five or ten years; then nature does not give any warning, but simply stops the heart or darkens the brain, and you must get another man.

No one, unless he leaves the country or becomes a crank, can escape from this despotism of activity; he is part of the regiment and must march with his fellows. The idea of making a competency and then retiring, say, into the country, never crosses a man's mind. When you urge economy upon a man for this end, you have injured your case, and are pleading on the other side. With such a prospect before him, he is more than ever resolved to be a spendthrift. To seclude an active American in an old-fashioned country house, with ivy climbing round its Tudor windows, even although there should be a library of black oak inside and a rose garden outside, would be cruelty; it would be to imprison a squirrel in a golden cage. What greatly impresses the traveller in the United States is that the rich men work as hard and as long as the poor, and that they cannot even give attention to the affairs of their country, but are willing to leave them to the very doubtful management of the “Boss,” because it would not pay them to leave their business and go into politics. If the end of life be riches, then the clever American is a successful man, for in no country does a respectable man become so very rich, or rich so soon, and if not respectable he still may do fairly well. You cannot have everything, however, and one notes that the average rich man has paid a price for his dollars. He has read very little--his wife reads for him; he has travelled very little--his daughters travel for him. He has no voice in the State--professional politicians speak for him; he has no amusements, unless you include speculation; and he has no pleasant periods of rest, unless you accept as an equivalent comparatively early and sudden death, which often arises from acute indigestion. He has not time to stop and realize himself, unless, but this is a large exception, when he has dyspepsia. One reason, perhaps, why Americans do not rest is that given to me by a bright woman: “We are all so tired,” and the American is the victim of his own qualities.

One, of course, acknowledges the advantages of this amazing energy, and there are times when a stolid Englishman grows envious. A university in America is created in ten years and endowed to the extent of millions sterling, and equipped with chairs of which a European never dreamt, and laboratories which border upon palaces. Libraries and picture galleries are rising in every city, for which the treasuries of Europe have been ransacked; and, were it not for the restriction of governments, the Old Masters would have to be sought, not in Italy and England, but in New York and Chicago. New towns are designed upon a scale of magnificence, as if each were to be the capital of an empire, and are at least outlined in building within a few years. Should it be necessary, an army can be created within a few months, and in a couple of years a new trade can be established which will kill its European rivals. An English farmer with fifteen hundred acres is a considerable man, but an American can have fifteen thousand acres and his different farm buildings will be connected by telephone. A self-made man in England marries his daughter to a baronet and is much lifted; but the daughter of a self-made man in America will marry an English duke, and consider she has conferred a benefit. When you go to a Western town, you may be taken to see a university; if not, you are taken to a dry-goods store; each, in its own way, is the largest of its kind. Certainly, there are stores in America which have no rival in the Old World, and which you are expected to visit with the same appreciation as the Duomo of Florence.

There is almost nothing that the United States does not possess, except political purity, and nothing which an American cannot do, except rest; and in the conflict with foreign competition, he has almost discounted victory. Whether he be able, that is, patient and thorough in the discovery of principles, may be a question; that he is clever, by which one means bright and ingenious in turning principles to account, is beyond all question. If America has not yet had time to produce a Lord Kelvin, it has given us telephones; and if Professor Dewar has astonished the world with his liquid air, an American trust is, it is said, being formed to handle it for commercial purposes. If we are thought to be dull and slow, as we travel among the most stimulating and hospitable people on the face of the earth, let some excuse be made for us and let our hosts share the blame. An Englishman in the United States is half dazed, like one moving amid the ceaseless din and whirling wheels of a huge manufactory, where the voice has to be raised to a shriek, and a sentence compressed into a single word. He goes home greatly humbled in his estimation of himself, and in low spirits about the commercial future of his country. He has no bitterness, however, within his heart, for are not these people of his own blood, and are not their triumphs his, even if they threaten to outrun his own nation in the race of productive commerce? And when he comes back to England, has he not his compensations, Stratford-on-Avon, and Westminster Abbey, and the greenery of the Home Counties, and the lights and shadows of the Scots Lochs, and the musical voices of the English women, and the quiet, contented, cultured English homes?

XII.--A SCOT INDEED

HE had demanded that afternoon to be told the truth, and the doctor, himself a young Scot, had told him plainly that he could not recover, and then he had asked, as one man speaking to another, both being brave and honest men, when he would die, and the doctor thought early next morning.

“Aboot daybreak,” said the Scot, with much satisfaction, as if, on the whole, he were content to die, and much pleased it would be at the rising of the sun. He was a characteristic type of his nation, rugged in face and dry of manner, an old man, who had drifted somehow to this English city and was living there alone, and now he was about to die alone, without friends and in a strange land. The nurse was very kind to him, and her heart went out to the quiet, self-contained man. She asked him whether he would like to see a clergyman, and explained that the chaplain of the infirmary was a good man.

“A've nae doubt he is,” said the Scot, “and that his meenistrations would be verra acceptable to English fouk, but a've never had ony dealin's wi' Episcopalians. He micht want to read a prayer, and I couldna abide that, and mebbe I couldna follow the texts in his English tongue.”

The nurse still lingered by his bed. He looked up to her and assured her he was in no need of consolation. “Saxty year ago my mither made me learn the wale (choice portions) o' the Bible, and they're cornin' up ane by ane to my memory, but I thank ye kindly.”

As the nurse went back and forward on her duties she heard her patient saying at intervals to himself, “I know whom I have believed.”

“I am persuaded that neither life nor death.” Once again she heard him, “Although the mountains depart and the hills be removed,” but the rest she did not catch.

During the afternoon a lady came into the ward whose service to the Lord was the visitation of the sick, a woman after the type of Barnabas and Mary of Bethany. When she heard of the old man's illness and his loneliness, whom no friend came to see or comfort, she went to his bedside. “You are very ill,” she said, “my friend.”

“A'm deein',” he replied, with the exactness of his nation, which somewhat fails to understand the use of graceful circumlocution and gentle phrases.

“Is there anything I can do for you? Would you wish me to sing a few verses of a hymn? Some sick people feel much comforted and soothed by singing; you would like, I think, to hear 'Rock of Ages,'” and she sat down by his bedside and opened her book, while a patient beyond, who had caught what she said, raised his head to enjoy the singing.

“Ye're verra kind, mem, and a'm muckle obleeged to ye, but a'm a Scot and ye're English, and ye dinna understand. A' my days have I been protestin' against the use o' human hymns in the praise o' God; a've left three kirks on that account, and raised my testimony in public places, and noo would ye send me into eternity wi' the sough of a hymn in my ears?”

For a moment the visitor had no reply, for in the course of all her experiences, during which she had come across many kinds of men and women, she had never yet chanced upon this kind of Scot. The patients in the infirmary were not distinguished by their religious scruples, and if they had scruples of such a kind they turned on large and full-blooded distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, and never entered into subtleties of doctrine.

“You'll excuse me, mem, for a'm no ungratefu',” he continued, “and I would like to meet yir wishes when ye've been so kind to me. The doctor says I canna live long, and it's possible that my strength may sune give way, but a'll tell ye what a'm willin' to do.”

The visitor waited anxiously to know what service he was going to render her and what comfort she might offer to him, but both were beyond her guessing.

“Sae lang as a've got strength and my reason continues clear, a'm prepared to argue with you concerning the lawfulness of using onything except the Psalms of David in the praise of God either in public or in private.”

Dear old Scot, the heir of many a covenanting tradition and the worthy son of covenanting martyrs, it was a strange subject of discussion for a man's last hour, but the man who could be true to the jots and tittles of his faith in pain of body and in face of death was the stuff out of which heroes and saints are made. He belonged to a nation who might sometimes be narrow and over-concerned with scruples, but which knew that a stand must be taken somewhere, and where it took a stand was prepared to die.

The visitor was a wise as well as gracious woman, and grasped the heart of the situation. “No, no,” she said, “we will not speak about the things wherein we differ, and I did not know the feeling of the Scots about the singing of the hymns. But I can understand how you love the Psalms and how dear to you is your metrical version. Do you know I have been in the Highlands of Scotland and have heard the Psalms sung, and the tears came into my eyes at the sound of the grave, sweet melody, for it was the music of a strong and pious people.”

As she spoke the hard old Scot's face began to soften, and one hand which was lying outside the bedclothes repeated the time of a Scots Psalm tune. He was again in the country church of his boyhood, and saw his father and mother going into the table seats, and heard them singing:

“O thou, my soul, bless God the Lord, And all that in me is Be stirred up His holy name To magnify and bless.”

“More than that, I know some of your psalm tunes, and I have the words in my hymn book; perhaps I have one of the Psalms which you would like to hear.”

“Div ye think that ye could sing the Twenty-third Psalm--

'The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want'?

for I would count it verra comfortin'.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can, and it will please me very much to sing it, for I think I love that psalm more than any hymn.”

“It never runs dry,” murmured the Scot.

So she sang it from beginning to end in a low, sweet voice, slowly and reverently, as she had heard it sung in Scotland. He joined in no word, but ever he kept time with his hand and with his heart, while his eyes looked into the things which were far away.

After she ceased he repeated to himself the last two lines:

“And in God's house for evermore My dwelling place shall be.”

“Thank ye, thank ye,” he said, after a little pause, and then both were silent for a few minutes, because she saw that he was in his own country, and did not wish to bring him back by her foreign accent.

“Mem, ye've dune me the greatest kindness ony Christian could do for anither as he stands on the banks of the Jordan.”

For a minute he was silent again, and then he said: “A'm gaein' to tell ye somethin', and I think ye'll understand. My wife and me wes married thirty-five years, and ilka nicht of oor married life we sang a psalm afore we gaed to rest. She took the air and I took the bass, and we sang the Psalms through frae beginning to end twal times. She was taken frae me ten year ago, and the nicht afore she dee'd we sang the Twenty-third Psalm. A've never sung the psalm since, and I didna join wi' ye when ye sang it, for a'm waitin' to sing it wi' her new in oor Father's hoose the momin's momin', where there'll be nae nicht nor partin' evermore.”

And this is how one Englishwoman found out that the Scot is at once the dourest and the tenderest of men.

XIII.--HIS CROWNING DAY

WE will leave the main road which runs through the Glen between oak trees which were planted fifty years ago, but are only now beginning to join their branches, and take our way up the hillside till we come to the purple sea of heather whose billows rise and fall, broken only here and there by an oasis of green or a running burm. Our goal is this little cottage which is so low that its roof merges into the hill behind, and upon whose thatch the wild flowers have encroached. Stoop, if you please, for it is not wise to have high doorways where the winter storm beats so fiercely, and being respectable people, we shall be taken into the inner room, where strangers of high degree are received and the treasures of the family are kept. It will not take long to give an inventory of the furniture, and the value will not run to two figures. A box bed, a small table, four ancient chairs, what they called a chest of drawers, and on the mantelpiece some peacocks' feathers by way of decoration, and certain china ornaments representing animals which never have been seen in this creation, and are never likely to emerge in any process of evolution. Were this all, I should not have troubled you to climb so far, or to leave even for five minutes the glory of the open moor. There is something else in the lowly room which you might well take a journey to see, for it is a rare sight in shepherds' cottages. Here is a bookshelf, and on it, I declare, some dozen volumes bound in full calf, and bearing on one side the arms of a University. You must revise your judgment of this house, and find another measure than the height of the walls and the cubic space in the rooms. It matters not although a house have thirty chambers, with lofty ceilings and soft carpets and carved furniture; if there be no books which belong to literature within its walls it is a poor and narrow home, and the souls therein are apt to be mean and earthly.