第27章 Midsummer-Night's Dream(4)

"I don't like that,"he said.

"Neither do I,"I returned."But Jacob got Esau's inheritance by a mean trick.""Jacob was punished for it."

"Did that help Esau much?"

"You are a pessimist!"

"Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day,alive and kicking in Wall Street,Washington,Newport,everywhere?""You're no optimist,anyhow!"

"I hope I'm blind in neither eye."

"You don't give us credit--"

"For what?"

"For what we've accomplished since Jacob."

"Printing,steam,and electricity,for instance?They spread the Bible and the yellow journal with equal velocity.""I don't mean science.Take our institutions.""Well,we've accomplished hospitals and the stock market--a pretty even set-off between God and the devil."He laughed."You don't take a high view of us!""Nor a low one.I don't play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature.We're just as noble to-day as David was sometimes,and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes,and we've every possibility inside us all the time,whether we paint our naked skins,or wear steel armor or starched shirts.""Well,I believe good is the guiding power in the world.""Oh,John Mayrant!Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses,sometimes like a tandem,taking turns in the lead.Order has melted into disorder,and disorder into new order--how many times?""But better each time."

"How can you know,who never lived in any age but your own?""I know we have a higher ideal."

"Have we?The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself.He gave his great teacher a cup of poison.We gave ours the cross."Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard."I can't answer you,but I don't believe it."This brought me to gayety."That's unanswerable,anyhow!"He still stared at the graves."Those people in there didn't think all these uncomfortable things.""Ah!no!They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national soul,before the bloom was off us.""That's an odd notion!And pray what volume are we in now?""Only the second."

"Since when?"

"Since that momentous picnic,the Spanish War!""I don't see how that took the bloom off us.""It didn't.It merely waked Europe up to the facts.""Our battleships,you mean?"

"Our steel rails,our gold coffers,our roaring affluence.""And our very accurate shooting!"he insisted;for he was a Southerner,and man's gallantry appealed to him more than man's industry.

I laughed."Yes,indeed!We may say that the Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang.And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness,for it's explored;to the Indian,for he's conquered;to the pioneer,for he's dead;we've finished our wild,romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people,and of general commercial endlessness,and playtime over."I think,John Mayrant now asserted,"that it is going too far to say the bloom is off us.""Oh,you'll find snow in the woods away into April and May.The freedom-loving American,the embattled farmer,is not yet extinct in the far recesses.But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom,and the man from the country is walking into them all the time because the poor,restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their pavements.And when he doesn't go to them,they come to him.The Wall Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles long;and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two's electric unrest.In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty.Capital and labor have cut the traces.The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him.If he disobeys,he is expelled and called a 'scab.'Don't let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on.We're all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays.Eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

"Well,"said John Mayrant,"we're not thinking about our pockets in Kings Port,because"(and here there came into his voice and face that sudden humor which made him so delightful)--"because we haven't got any pockets to think of!"This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold clouds.

He continued:"Any more lamentations,Mr.Jeremiah?""Those who begin to call names,John Mayrant--but never mind!I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye;but the other eye sees the American man himself--the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores--my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases.For stronger even than his kindness,his ability,and his dishonesty is his self-preservation.He's going to stand up for the 'open shop'and sit down on the 'trust';and I assure you that I don't in the least resemble the Evening Post."A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant's features.

"The New York Evening Post,"I repeated with surprise.Still the inquiry of his face remained.

"Oh,fortunate youth!"I cried."To have escaped the New York Evening Post!""Is it so heinous?"

"Well!...well!...how exactly describe it?...make you see it?...

It's partially tongue-tied,a sad victim of its own excesses.Habitual over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting praise;it's the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious;it's the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe;it's our Republic's common scold,the Xantippe of journalism,the paper without a country.""The paper without a country!That's very good!""Oh,no!I'll tell you something much better,but it is not mine.Aclever New Yorker said that what with The Sun--""I know that paper."