Part 10
It would be a waste of time to criticise the Doctor for these irrelevant verbal explosives. Indefensible as they are, they are as much parts of his individuality as the deftness of his touch and the fearlessness of his methods are parts of his surgical training.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, looked at the Doctor with a slight lifting of his upper lip and a commiserating droop of the eyelid,--an expression indicating, of course, a consciousness of that superior birth and breeding which prevented the possibility of such outbreaks. It was a manner he sometimes assumed toward the Doctor, although they were good friends. P. Wooverman and the Doctor are fellow townsmen and members of the same set, and members, too, of the same club,--a most exclusive club of one hundred. The Doctor had gained admission, not because of his ancestors, etc. (see Log of the Mayflower), but because he had been the first and only American surgeon who had removed some very desirable portions of a gentleman's interior, had washed and ironed them and scalloped their edges, for all I know, and had then replaced them, without being obliged to sign the patient's death certificate the next day.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, on the other hand, had gained admission because of--well, Todd's birth and his position (he came of an old Salem family who did something in whale oil,--not fish or groceries, be it understood); his faultless attire, correct speech, and knowledge of manners and men; his ability to spend his summers in England and his winters in Nice; his extensive acquaintance among distinguished people,--the very most distinguished, I know, for Todd has told me so himself,--and--well, all these must certainly be considered sufficient qualifications to entitle any man to membership in almost any club in the world.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, I say, elevated his upper lip and drooped his eyelid, remarking with a slight Beacon Street accent:--
"I cawn't agree with you, my dear Doctor,"--there were often traces of the manners and the bearing of a member of the Upper House in Todd, especially when he talked to a man like the Doctor, who wore turned-down collars and detached cuffs, and who, to quote the distinguished Bostonian, "threw words about like a coal heaver,"--"I cawn't agree with you, I say. It isn't the obzervar that we should criticise; it is what he finds." P. Wooverman was speaking with his best accent. Somehow, the Doctor's bluntness made him over-accentuate it,--particularly when there were listeners about. "This French critic is a man of distinction and a member of the most excloosive circles in Europe. I have met him myself repeatedly, although I cawn't say I know him. We Americans are too sensitive, my dear Doctor. His book, to me, is the work of a keen obzervar who knows the world, and who sees how woefully lacking we are in some of the common civilities of life," and he smiled faintly at me, as if confident that I shared his opinion of the Doctor's own short-comings. "This Frenchman does not lay it on a bit too thick. Nothing is so mortifying to me as being obliged to travel with a party of Americans who are making their first tour abroad. And it is quite impossible to avoid them, for they all have money and can go where they please. I remember once coming from Basle to Paris, in a first-class carriage,--it was only larst summer,--with a fellow from Indiana or Michigan, or somewhere out there. He had a wife with him who looked like a cook, and a daughter about ten years old, who was a most objectionable young person. You could hear them talk all over the train. I shouldn't have minded it so much, but Lord Norton's harf-brother was with me,"--and P. Wooverman Shaw Todd glanced, as he spoke, at a thin lady with a smelling bottle and an air of reserve, who always sat with a maid beside her, to see if she were looking at him,--"and one of the best bred men in England, too, and a man who"----
"Now hold on, Todd," broke in the Doctor, upon whom neither the thin lady nor any other listener had made the slightest impression. "No glittering generalities with me. Just tell me in so many plain words what this man's vulgarity consisted of."
"Why, his manners, his dress, Doctor,--everything about him," retorted Todd.
"Just as I thought! All you think about is manners, only manners!" exploded the Doctor. "Your Westerner, no doubt, was a hard-fisted, weather-tanned farmer, who had worked all his life to get money enough to take his wife and child abroad. The wife had tended the dairy and no doubt milked ten cows, and in their old age they both wanted to see something of the world they had heard about. So off they go. If you had any common sense or anything that brought you in touch with your kind, Todd, and had met that man on his own level, instead of overawing him with your high-daddy airs, he would have told you that both the wife and he were determined that the little girl should have a better start in life than their own, and that this trip was part of her education. Do you know any other working people,"--and the Doctor faced him squarely,--"any Dutch, or French, or English, Esquimaux or Hottentots, who take their wives and children ten thousand miles to educate them? If I had my way with the shaping of the higher education of the country, the first thing I would teach a boy would be to learn to work, and with his hands, too. We have raised our heroes from the soil,--not from the easy-chairs of our clubs,"--and he looked at Todd with his eyebrows knotted tight. "Let the boy get down and smell the earth, and let him get down to the level of his kind, helping the weaker man all the time and never forgetting the other fellow. When he learns to do this he will begin to know what it is to be a man, and not a manikin."
When the Doctor is mounted on any one of his hobbies,--whether it is a new microbe, Wagner, or the rights of the working-man,--he is apt to take the bit in his teeth and clear fences. As he finished speaking, two or three of the occupants of contiguous chairs laid down their books to listen. The thin lady with the smelling bottle and the maid remarked in an undertone to another exclusive passenger on the other side of her, in diamonds and white ermine cape,--it was raining at the time,--that "one need not travel in a first-class carriage to find vulgar Americans," and she glanced from the Doctor to a group of young girls and young men who were laughing as heartily and as merrily, and perhaps as noisily, as if they were sitting on their own front porches at their Southern homes.
Another passenger--who turned out later to be a college professor--said casually, this time to me, that he thought good and bad manners were to be determined, not by externals, but by what lay underneath; that neither dress, language, nor habits fixed or marred the standard. "A high-class Turk, now," and he lowered his voice, "would be considered ill bred by some people, because in the seclusion of his own family he helps himself with his fingers from the common dish; and yet so punctiliously polite and courteous is he that he never sits down in his father's presence nor lights a cigarette without craving his permission."
After this the talk became general, the group taking sides; some supporting the outspoken Doctor in his blunt defense of his countrymen, others siding with the immaculately dressed Todd, so correct in his every appointment that he was never known, during the whole voyage, to wear a pair of socks that did not in color and design match his cravat.
* * * * *
The chief steward had given us seats at the end of one of the small tables. The Doctor sat under the porthole, and Todd and I had the chairs on either side of him. The two end seats--those on the aisle--were occupied by a girl of twenty-five, simply clad in a plain black dress with plainer linen collar and cuffs, and a young German. The girl would always arrive late, and would sink into her revolving chair with a languid movement, as if the voyage had told upon her. Often her face was pale and her eyes were heavy and red, as if from want of sleep. The young German--a Baron von Hoffbein, the passenger list said--was one of those self-possessed, good-natured, pink-cheeked young Teutons, with blue eyes, blond hair, and a tiny waxed mustache, a mere circumflex accent of a mustache, over his "o" of a mouth. His sponsors in baptism had doubtless sent him across the sea to chase the wild boar or the rude buffalo, with the ultimate design, perhaps, of founding a brewery in some Western city.
The manners of this young aristocrat toward the girl were an especial source of delight to Todd, who watched his every movement with the keenest interest. Whenever the baron approached the table he would hesitate a moment, as if in doubt as to which particular chair he should occupy, and, with an apologetic hand on his heart and a slight bow, drop into a seat immediately opposite hers. Then he would raise a long, thin arm aloft and snap his fingers to call a passing waiter. I noticed that he always ordered the same breakfast, beginning with cold sausage and ending with pancakes. During the repast the young girl opposite him would talk to him in a simple, straightforward way, quite as a sister would have done, and without the slightest trace of either coquetry or undue reserve.
When we were five days out, a third person occupied a seat at one side of the young woman. He was a man of perhaps sixty years of age, with big shoulders and big body, and a great round head covered with a mass of dull white hair which fell about his neck and forehead. The newcomer was dressed in a suit of gray cloth, much worn and badly cut, the coat collar, by reason of the misfit, being hunched up under his hair. This gave him the appearance of a man without a shirt collar, until a turn of his head revealed his clean starched linen and narrow black cravat. He looked like a plain, well-to-do manufacturer or contractor, one whose earlier years had been spent in the out of doors; for the weather had left its mark on his neck, where one can always look for signs of a man's manner of life. His was that of a man who had worn low-collared flannel shirts most of his days. He had, too, a look of determination, as if he had been accustomed to be obeyed. He was evidently an invalid, for his cheeks were sunken and pale, with the pallor that comes of long confinement.
Apart from these characteristics there was nothing specially remarkable about him except the two cavernous eye sockets, sunk in his head, the shaggy eyebrows arched above them, and the two eyes which blazed and flashed with the inward fire of black opals. As these rested first on one object and then on another, brightening or paling as he moved his head, I could not but think of the action of some alert searchlight gleaming out of a misty night.
As soon as he took his seat, the young woman, whose face for the first time since she had been on board had lost its look of anxiety and fatigue, leaned over him smilingly and began adjusting a napkin about his throat and pinning it to his coat. He smiled in response as she finished--a smile of singular sweetness--and held her hand until she regained her seat. They seemed as happy as children or as two lovers, laughing with each other, he now and then stopping to stroke her hand at some word which I could not hear. When, a moment after, the von Hoffbein took his accustomed seat, in full dress, too,--a red silk lining to his waistcoat, and a red silk handkerchief tucked in above it and worn liver-pad fashion,--the girl said simply, looking toward the man in gray, "My father, sir;" whereupon the young fellow shot up out of his chair, clicked his heels together, crooked his back, placed two fingers on his right eyebrow, and sat down again. The man in gray looked at him curiously and held out his hand, remarking that he was pleased to meet him.
Todd was also watching the group, for I heard him say to the Doctor: "These high-class Germans seldom forget themselves. The young baron saluted the old duffer with the bib as though he were his superior officer."
"Shouldn't wonder if he were," replied the Doctor, who had been looking intently over his soup spoon at the man in gray, and who was now summing up the circumflex accent, the red edges of the waistcoat, the liver-pad handkerchief, and the rest of von Hoffbein.
"You don't like him, evidently, my dear Doctor."
"You saw him first, Todd--you can have him. I prefer the old duffer, as you call him," answered the Doctor dryly, and put an end to the talk in that direction.
Soon the hum of voices filled the saloon, rising above the clatter of the dishes and the occasional popping of corks. The baron and the man in gray had entered into conversation almost at once, and could be distinctly heard from where we sat, particularly the older man, who was doubtless unconscious of the carrying power of his voice. Such words as "working classes," "the people," "democracy," "when I was in Germany," etc., intermingling with the high-keyed tones of the baron's broken English, were noticeable above the din; the young girl listening smilingly, her eyes on those of her father. Then I saw the gray man bend forward, and heard him say with great earnestness, and in a voice that could be heard by the occupants of all the tables near our own:--
"It is a great thing to be an American, sir. I never realized it until I saw how things were managed on the other side. It must take all the ambition out of a man not to be able to do what he wants to do and what he knows he can do better than anybody else, simply because somebody higher than he says he shan't. We have our periods of unrest, and our workers sometimes lose their heads, but we always come out right in the end. There is no place in the world where a man has such opportunities as in my country. All he wants is brains and some little horse sense,--the country will do the rest."
Our end of the table had stopped to listen; so had the occupants of the tables on either side; so had Todd, who was patting the Doctor's arm, his face beaming.
"Listen to him, Doctor! Hear that voice! How like a traveling American! There's one of your ex_traw_d'nary clay-soiled sons of toil out on an educating tour: aren't you proud of him? Oh, it's too delicious!"
For once I agreed with Todd. The peculiar strident tones of the man in gray had jarred upon my nerves. I saw too, that one lady, with slightly elevated shoulder, had turned her back and was addressing her neighbor.
The Doctor had not taken his eyes from the gray man, and had not lost a word of his talk. As Todd finished speaking, the daughter, with all tenderness and with a pleased glance into her father's eyes, arose, and putting her hand in his helped him to his feet, the baron standing at "attention." As the American started to leave the table, and his big shaggy head and broad shoulders reached their full height, the Doctor leaned forward, craning his head eagerly. Then he turned to Todd, and in his crisp, incisive way said: "Todd, the matter with you is that you never see any further than your nose. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Look at his empty sleeve; off at the shoulder, too!"
II
In the smoking-room that night a new and peculiar variety of passenger made his appearance, and his first one--to me--although we were then within two days of Sandy Hook. This individual wore a check suit of the latest London cut, big broad-soled Piccadilly shoes, and smoked a brierwood pipe which he constantly filled from a rubber pouch carried in his waistcoat pocket. When I first noticed him, he was sitting at a table with two Englishmen drinking brandy-and-sodas,--plural, not singular.
The Doctor, Todd, and I were at an adjoining table: the Doctor immersed in a scientific pamphlet, Todd sipping his creme de menthe, and I my coffee. Over in one corner were a group of drummers playing poker. They had not left the spot since we started, except at meal-time and at midnight, when Fritz, the smoking-room steward, had turned them out to air the room. Scattered about were other passengers--some reading, some playing checkers or backgammon, others asleep, among them the pink-cheeked von Hoffbein, who lay sprawled out on one of the leather-covered sofas, his thin legs spread apart like the letter A, as he emitted long-drawn organ tones, with only the nose stop pulled out.
The party of Englishmen, by reason of the unlimited number of brandy-and-sodas which their comrade in the check suit had ordered for them, were more or less noisy, laughing a good deal. They had attracted the attention of the whole room, many of the old-timers wondering how long it would be before the third officer would tap the check suit on the shoulder, and send it and him to bed under charge of a steward. The constant admonitions of his companions seemed to have had no effect upon the gentleman in question, for he suddenly launched out upon such topics as Colonial Policies and Governments and Taxation and Modern Fleets; addressing his remarks, not to his two friends, but to the room at large.
According to my own experience, the traveling Englishman is a quiet, well-bred, reticent man, brandy-and-soda proof (I have seen him drink a dozen of an evening without a droop of an eyelid); and if he has any positive convictions of the superiority of that section of the Anglo-Saxon race to which he belongs,--and he invariably has,--he keeps them to himself, certainly in the public smoking-room of a steamer filled with men of a dozen different nations. The outbreak, as well as the effect of the incentive, was therefore as unexpected as it was unusual.
The check-suit man, however, was not constructed along these lines. The spirit of old Hennessy was in his veins, the stored energy of many sodas pressed against his tongue, and an explosion was inevitable. No portion of these excitants, strange to say, had leaked into his legs, for outwardly he was as steady as an undertaker. He began again, his voice pitched in a high key:--
"Talk of coercing England! Why, we've got a hundred and forty-one ships of the line, within ten days' sail of New York, that could blow the bloody stuffin' out of every man Jack of 'em. And we don't care a brass farthing what Uncle Sam says about it, either."
His two friends tried to keep him quiet, but he broke out again on Colonization and American Treachery and Conquest of Cuba; and so, being desirous to read in peace, I nodded to the Doctor and Todd, picked up my book, and drew up a steamer chair on the deck outside, under one of the electric lights.
I had hardly settled myself in my seat when a great shout went up from the smoking-room that sent every one running down the deck, and jammed the portholes and doors of the room with curious faces. Then I heard a voice rise clear above the noise inside: "Not another word, sir; you don't know what you are talking about. We Americans don't rob people we give our lives to free."
I forced my way past the door, and stepped inside. The Englishman was being held down in his chair by his two friends. In his effort to break loose he had wormed himself out of his coat. Beside their table, close enough to put his hand on any one of them, stood the Doctor, a curious set expression on his face. Todd was outside the circle, standing on a sofa to get a better view.
Towering above the Englishman, his eyes burning, his shaggy hair about his face, his whole figure tense with indignation, was the man with the empty sleeve! Close behind him, cool, polite, straight as a gendarme, and with the look in his eye of a cat about to spring, stood the young baron. As I reached the centre of the melee, wondering what had been the provocation and who had struck the first blow, I saw the baron lean forward, and heard him say in a low voice to one of the Englishmen, "He is so old as to be his fadder; take me," and he tapped his chest meaningly with his fingers. Evidently he had not fenced at Heidelberg for nothing, if he did have pink cheeks and pipestem legs.
The old man turned and laid his hand on the baron's shoulder. "I thank you, sir, but I'll attend to this young man." His voice had lost all its rasping quality now. It was low and concentrated, like that of one accustomed to command. "Take your hands off him, gentlemen, if you please. I don't think he has so far lost his senses as to strike a man twice his age and with one arm. Now, sir, you will apologize to me, and to the room, and to your own friends, who must be heartily ashamed of your conduct."
At the bottom of almost every Anglo-Saxon is a bed rock of common sense that you reach through the shifting sands of prejudice with the probe of fair play. The young man in the check suit, who was now on his feet, looked the speaker straight in the eye, and, half drunk as he was, held out his hand. "I'm sorry, sir, I offended you. I was speaking to my friends here, and I did not know any Americans were present."
"Bravo!" yelled the Doctor. "What did I tell you Todd? That's the kind of stuff! Now, gentlemen, all together--three cheers for the man with the empty sleeve!"
Everybody broke out with another shout--all but Todd, who had not made the slightest response to the Doctor's invitation to loosen his legs and his lungs. He did not show the slightest emotion over the fracas, and, moreover, seemed to have become suddenly disgusted with the baron.
Then the Doctor grasped the young German by the hand, and said how glad he was to know him, and how delighted he would be if he would join them and "take something,"--all of which the young man accepted with a frank, pleased look on his face.