第10章 II(4)

And he will not disappear.He will continue as a problem.His friends will urge that he is as good as the white man.His enemies--well,you can guess what his enemies will do from a little incident that followed on a recent appointment by the President.He made a negro an assistant in a post-office where--think of it!--he had to work at the next desk to a white girl,the daughter of a colonel,one of the first families of Georgia's modern chivalry,and all the weary,weary rest of it.

The Southern chivalry howled,and hanged or burned some one in effigy.Perhaps it was the President,and perhaps it was the negro--but the principle remains the same.They said it was an insult.It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But this is nothing to do with San Francisco and her merry maidens,her strong,swaggering men,and her wealth of gold and pride.They bore me to a banquet in honor of a brave lieutenant--Carlin,of the "Vandalia"--who stuck by his ship in the great cyclone at Apia and comported himself as an officer should.On that occasion--'twas at the Bohemian Club--I heard oratory with the roundest of o's,and devoured a dinner the memory of which will descend with me into the hungry grave.

There were about forty speeches delivered,and not one of them was average or ordinary.It was my first introduction to the American eagle screaming for all it was worth.The lieutenant's heroism served as a peg from which the silver-tongued ones turned themselves loose and kicked.

They ransacked the clouds of sunset,the thunderbolts of heaven,the deeps of hell,and the splendor of the resurrection for tropes and metaphors,and hurled the result at the head of the guest of the evening.

Never since the morning stars sung together for joy,I learned,had an amazed creation witnessed such superhuman bravery as that displayed by the American navy in the Samoa cyclone.Till earth rotted in the phosphorescent star-and-stripe slime of a decayed universe,that god-like gallantry would not be forgotten.Igrieve that I cannot give the exact words.My attempt at reproducing their spirit is pale and inadequate.I sat bewildered on a coruscating Niagara of blatherum-skite.It was magnificent--it was stupendous--and I was conscious of a wicked desire to hide my face in a napkin and grin.Then,according to rule,they produced their dead,and across the snowy table-cloths dragged the corpse of every man slain in the Civil War,and hurled defiance at "our natural enemy"(England,so please you),"with her chain of fortresses across the world."Thereafter they glorified their nation afresh from the beginning,in case any detail should have been overlooked,and that made me uncomfortable for their sakes.How in the world can a white man,a sahib,of our blood,stand up and plaster praise on his own country?He can think as highly as he likes,but this open-mouthed vehemence of adoration struck me almost as indelicate.My hosts talked for rather more than three hours,and at the end seemed ready for three hours more.