第25章 VII(1)
America's Defenceless Coasts JUST suppose that America were twenty days distant from England.
Then a man could study its customs with undivided soul;but being so very near next door,he goes about the land with one eye on the smoke of the flesh-pots of the old country across the seas,while with the other he squints biliously and prejudicially at the alien.
I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to to-day I have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without being delayed by an accident.That it was an accident to another train makes no difference.My own turn may come next.
A few miles from peaceful,pleasure-loving Lakewood they had managed to upset an express goods train to the detriment of the flimsy permanent way;and thus the train which should have left at three departed at seven in the evening.I was not angry.Iwas scarcely even interested.When an American train starts on time I begin to anticipate disaster--a visitation for such good luck,you understand.
Buffalo is a large village of a quarter of a million inhabitants,situated on the seashore,which is falsely called Lake Erie.It is a peaceful place,and more like an English county town than most of its friends.
Once clear of the main business streets,you launch upon miles and miles of asphalted roads running between cottages and cut-stone residences of those who have money and peace.All the Eastern cities own this fringe of elegance,but except in Chicago nowhere is the fringe deeper or more heavily widened than in Buffalo.
The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak English,and is proud of it;but he knows how to make a home for himself and his mate,knows how to keep the grass green in front of his veranda,and how to fullest use the mechanism of life--hot water,gas,good bell-ropes,telephones,etc.His shops sell him delightful household fitments at very moderate rates,and he is encompassed with all manner of labor-saving appliances.This does not prevent his wife and his daughter working themselves to death over household drudgery;but the intention is good.
When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these homes and the insides of a few score,you begin to understand why the American (the respectable one)does not take a deep interest in what they call "politics,"and why he is so vaguely and generally proud of the country that enables him to be so comfortable.How can the owner of a dainty chalet,with smoked-oak furniture,imitation Venetian tapestry curtains,hot and cold water laid on,a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks,a baby crawling down the veranda,and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August evening--how can such a man despair of the Republic,or descend into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with "the boys"?
No,it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a railway-ticket,that can run from Dan to Beersheba,crying:--"All is barren!"Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little piece of land of his very own;and every other good American seems to get it.
It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this question that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West.The natives of most classes marry young--absurdly young.One of my informants--not the twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake Chautauqua--said that from twenty to twenty-four was about the usual time for this folly.And when I asked whether the practice was confined to the constitutionally improvident classes,he said "No"very quickly.He said it was a general custom,and nobody saw anything wrong with it.
"I guess,perhaps,very early marriage may account for a good deal of the divorce,"said he,reflectively.
Whereat I was silent.Their marriages and their divorces only concern these people;and neither I travelling,nor you,who may come after,have any right to make rude remarks about them.
Only--only coming from a land where a man begins to lightly turn to thoughts of love not before he is thirty,I own that playing at house-keeping before that age rather surprised me.Out in the West,though,they marry,boys and girls,from sixteen upward,and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband aged twenty.
"When man and woman are agreed,what can the Kazi do?"From those peaceful homes,and the envy they inspire (two trunks and a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia are not satisfactory,any way you look at them),I turned me to the lake front of Buffalo,where the steamers bellow to the grain elevators,and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes,and the canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes across the water in tow of a launch,and earth,and sky,and sea alike are thick with smoke.
In the old days,before the railway ran into the city,all the business quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was largest.To-day the business quarters have gone up-town to meet the railroad;the lake traffic still exists,but you shall find a narrow belt of red-brick desolation,broken windows,gap-toothed doors,and streets where the grass grows between the crowded wharves and the bustling city.To the lake front comes wheat from Chicago,lumber,coal,and ore,and a large trade in cheap excursionists.
It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator emptying that same steamer.The steamer might have been two thousand tons burden.She was laden with wheat in bulk;from stem to stern,thirteen feet deep,lay the clean,red wheat.
There was no twenty-five per cent dirt admixture about it at all.