Introducing the American Spirit Part 9

It was Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky who compelled some of us to see our own guilt, and they, not the Russian Church, united our voices with those of the Russian people in the chief note of their Ma.s.s, "Lord have mercy! O Lord have mercy!" The Russian peasant always knew that men are stricken by crime as by a disease; and when he pa.s.sed those consigned to prison, he cried out incessantly: "Lord have mercy! O Lord have mercy!" And for the man who escaped, he never hunted with the bloodhound's pa.s.sion, as we do; he put a crust of bread upon the window, to help him on his way.

It was news to the secretary that Judge Lindsay, the "Kid's Judge," as he is affectionately called, received his inspiration from Tolstoy, and that the tendency to change our prisons into Social Clinics was originally suggested by Dostoyewsky, a name quite unfamiliar to him.

The Herr Director spoke of the inadequacy of these same Russians when they try to put their theories into practice, and what prosaic, impossible preachers they make. To which I replied that their failures are due to their preponderance of soul and their lack of the practical spirit with which we are so super-abundantly endowed.

The secretary could scarcely believe that his practical, matter-of-fact, card-indexed, efficient-from-top-to-bottom, result-bringing, tabulated, report-making, American Y. M. C. A. might be benefited by an infusion of Russian Soul. He almost doubted that the delving miners whom we saw coming home from the mines, sooty and begrimed, possessed that soul. Nor did the Herr Director realize that all his Germanic searching and cla.s.sifying, all his minute, painstaking investigation into the innermost of everything, left him where the Russian had long ago preceded him: in the holy presence of the unknowable, unsearchable wisdom of G.o.d.

The American has great reverence for results, and it is hard for him to be patient with failure. The German respects authority, and has scant respect for the individual. The Russian respects man and knows what it means to love him in his weakness, and to be humble in the presence of another's failure.

I had a long, intimate talk with my friend the priest, who has never spent a happy day since he has been in America which he hates, or rather, despises, and so hurts me more than he knows.

Throwing open the well-thumbed, poorly kept register, in such striking contrast to the Y. M. C. A. secretary's card index, he said: "Look how many I have buried this month," and he counted them, and there were eighteen, "all of them slain in that dreadful mine, and no one in the Company or in the town cares how they were buried. These Americans have no souls. They send an undertaker who wants to bury them like dogs, and the quicker the thing is done the better. They sent me notice shortly after I came here that the funerals lasted too long and kept the men from work. Look how those men walk! My _mujiks_, who walked like princes, now bend their backs before your dirty coal, and walk like slaves."

His complaint was not altogether unreasonable. In some things he was right, in many things he was wrong; but to argue with a Russian is as hopeless as to try to argue with Niagara Falls. I did tell him that while the Russian here must bend his back over his work, he does not have to bend it at every corner before the _icon_ or before every policeman he meets; that here, by virtue of the American Spirit, his soul may be freed from superst.i.tion and his mind from darkness.

When in parting the priest embraced and kissed me, he said: "No, even you don't understand the Russian Soul."

The Herr Director suffered his embrace with good grace, but when the secretary's turn came he fled. To be kissed by a man is a sentimentality which the American cannot endure.

"We don't understand the Russian Soul," I said to him, "neither you nor I, but one thing I do know. When the coal has been dug out of these hills and these cities shall have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, and your churches and Y. M. C. A. may have vanished because it did not pay to keep them going, this Russian Soul will endure; and the sooner we learn to understand it the better for us and for them and for our country."

When we left the Russian church and its faithful priest, the Frau Directorin told us that the children were incredibly filthy, and that she had spent the time we wasted in argument cleaning them up, good _hausfrau_ that she is. The secretary was thinking deeply, and when he deposited us at the hotel, he thanked me for revealing something which, although so near, he would never have discovered. The Herr Director kept me up until midnight talking about the Slavic menace to Germany, and the intellectual poison of its modern literature.

We reached Niagara Falls the next afternoon, and, as I had feared, neither of my guests showed any surprise nor felt any thrill. I could understand the Herr Director's coolness towards our natural wonder, for he had seen it thirty years before; but his wife's att.i.tude was inexplicable, until she told me what I had all along antic.i.p.ated. Her capacity for receiving impressions had been exhausted by the city of New York, and after seeing the "high-sc.r.a.ps" nothing astonished her.

As we stood at the bottom of the American Falls, watching the Maid of the Mist making her journeys into their very spray and returning, only to begin her journey again, I suggested that it was like the American Spirit in its daring; but the Herr Director, with truer insight, said that it was "like the Russian Soul, mystical, elusive, on the verge of destruction always, but of little practical service."

That same day we were in a power-house, which looked more like a temple than the utilitarian thing it is, and peered into the depths of a shaft which creates power enough to move the street railways of half a dozen cities, and change the night of a million people into day. As we listened to the engineer's account of almost miraculous achievement, I said triumphantly, "_This is the American Spirit!_" and the Herr Director replied deliberately, and without sarcasm, "This is the one time when you are right."

IX

_Chicago_

What the foreigner thinks of the American Pullman, if he has to spend a night in it, may be found in any volume of the extremely voluminous and interesting literature upon the United States, written by visitors to this country; but more interesting still would be what they have not written about it, and that I have had frequent chances of hearing. The most picturesque and exhaustive comments I ever heard were those made by the Herr Director the evening we left Buffalo, and as he finally determined not to retire at all, we spent the greater part of the night in the smoking-room, much to the dismay of the porter who had no prejudice against sleeping on a Pullman, and whom we cheated out of his irregular but necessary naps.

One of the chief diversions of travellers the world over is to complain against the particular transportation company over whose road they have the ill luck to be going; so it happened that the Herr Director had plenty of company during part of his vigil, and an opportunity to come in touch with one phase of the American Spirit, where it was closely related to his own; for "one 'kicker' makes the whole world 'kick.'"

The small room was so crowded that some of the men were sitting on the wash-stands, and the rest were so close to each other as to make conversation easy and general. This was an extra fare train supposed to be unusually comfortable and speedy; although thus far it had been losing time. It was natural under those conditions that the railroad should come in for its share of blessings, couched in language such as is often heard in smoking compartments of Pullman cars. Had all the pious wishes expressed that night been fulfilled, that railroad and our particular train would have travelled much more swiftly, but to a destination not indicated in the time-tables.

The question under discussion was, which is the worst railroad in the United States, and as some of the men were stock-brokers they knew our roads from their most vulnerable side. The tales they told of the manipulation of stocks and the fleecing of the public, with their consequent effect upon the service, were as startling as they were humiliating; because, in the last a.n.a.lysis, the railroads reflect the general business ethics of the country.

I kept out of the discussion, for not only have I but a hazy notion of economics; my mind was busy cla.s.sifying the pa.s.sengers' racial origin, a very diverting exercise and one which always brings me in touch with people on their really human side.

It happened that two of the men were Polish Jews from Cleveland, who had risen from poverty to where they could travel in Pullman cars, and who confessed that they knew as little of railroad stocks as I, although they were engaged in as risky a business as stocks, that of manufacturing women's cloaks. They were not far removed from the Ghetto either in speech or ideals, and so were of little interest to me.

A third fellow traveller, who bore the hallmarks of the average American, both in dress and behavior, told me his business without much urging. "I am not selling stock, nor manufacturing women's cloaks, and I am not a gambler. I have a sure thing; I am a bookie." Forced to confess myself ignorant as to what "a bookie" is, he explained to me the intricacies of his calling, the problems of evading the law, and if it cannot be evaded, how it may be bought; incidentally showing what an inveterate gambler and what an easy mark the average American is.

The Herr Director was all attention, to my great consternation; for the conversation was as different from that which he had heard at Lake Mohonk, or in our rounds of the Eastern colleges, as one could conceive.

As one by one the pa.s.sengers sought their berths, the Herr Director thanked me for arranging this uncomfortable night journey, saying that though he was sure he could not sleep, he was "so glad to have come in contact with the American Spirit as it is," and not as I had tried to make it appear. With that kindly thrust he too retired, and I was at liberty to do likewise.

It was not long before I had auricular evidence that the Herr Director was asleep, so I was very much astonished to hear him say the next morning that he had not slept a wink, and that the engineer must bear him a grudge; for he tried to jerk the berth from under him, and "_Gott sei dank_" that the most uncomfortable night of his life was over. I certainly was as grateful as he. It was with no small satisfaction, though, that upon reaching Chicago two hours late, I collected four dollars from that much abused railroad, and handed the same to the Herr Director, a.s.suring him that even in a railroad office the American Spirit of fairness is operative.

In Chicago as everywhere else the friend who owned an automobile was at my command, and on a glorious May day when wind and sun had cleared the air, and a night's rain had washed the streets, we were taken from South Sh.o.r.e to North Sh.o.r.e and away out where the American city is at her best, and Chicago is striving to excel them all in her wonderful suburbs.

The Herr Director had seen Chicago over thirty-three years ago--a young, thriving, daring, ambitious city in the making; he found her still young, thriving, daring, and in the making. Unchastened by her great disasters, undismayed by her vexing problems, defying the lake, she reaches out into it and into neighboring states, leading and controlling the whole Middle West. Babylon, Capernaum, Rome, her older sisters, her ideal, and perchance her destiny. She is _par excellence_ the merchant city, and the merchant princes rule her, although that rule is not unchallenged.

While the Herr Director saw the city changed in many respects, larger, and in places beautiful, her dirt not so apparent, her wickedness subdued, and her rough corners rubbed off, she is still Chicago, a synonym for boastful bigness and ostentatious wealth.

If it had not been for the Frau Directorin, I would not have taken them where every man, woman and child is taken who visits Chicago, into the largest department store in the world.

She entered with the joyful antic.i.p.ation of engaging in that most exciting occupation--shopping--aided and abetted by my wife. The Herr Director followed with the martyr's air common to husbands who go along to pay the bill.

That type of store is no longer a novelty to city dwellers anywhere, but this one because of its size, the variety and quality of goods displayed, the courtesy to customers and, above all, the provisions for their comfort and convenience, were remarkable enough to call forth even the Herr Director's commendation. The Frau Directorin was in the seventeenth Heaven, the Biblical seventh not being an elevation high enough to be used as a simile when she was shopping in a Chicago department store.

Obliging clerks showed her plates which cost three hundred dollars apiece, cut and etched gla.s.s at more fabulous prices; she walked through miles of costly gowns, coats and millinery, and having made a few purchases to her entire satisfaction--we were about to leave the store with flying colors, figuratively speaking, when pride had a fall.

Unluckily remembering that a certain small boy needed summer underwear, my wife led our party to the bas.e.m.e.nt. When we left the elevator a polite floor man directed us to aisle 16, Wabash Building. As we were on the State Street side the cavalcade moved past what seemed like miles of commonplace merchandise and commonplace buyers to aisle 16, Wabash Building. At last we had reached our "Mecca."

"I should like to see boys' union suits," my wife said.

"Certainly. How old?"

"Twelve years."

"We have nothing here over eight years. You will find your size on the sixth floor, Washington Street side."

I think it was the sixth floor; I know we walked (crestfallen) through endless aisles and were shot up floor after floor. Landed finally, the right counter was reached after numerous conflicting directions.

The Herr Director was puffing and panting, the Frau Directorin radiant and happy, for she enjoys exercise, and my wife, her faith in the efficiency of her favorite store not yet shaken, though wavering, asking for "union suits for a twelve-year-old boy."

As the clerk reached for the desired article she asked: "Short sleeves or long sleeves?"

"Short sleeves."

"Randolph Street side, second floor, for short sleeved union suits."

The Herr Director and I did not accompany the ladies on their further voyage of discovery; we went to the rest room to avoid nervous prostration.

My wife and the Frau Directorin, with the determination and endurance which women alone possess, continued the chase to a victorious finish.

Fortunately an altogether satisfying luncheon followed this strenuous experience, after which, rested and refreshed, we repaired to the Art Inst.i.tute.

The Chicago Art Inst.i.tute, within a stone's throw of the most congested business section, at the edge of its noise and rush, is by its very being there a sort of triumph.

The Herr Director approached it somewhat condescendingly, expecting to find it and its contents big, bizarre and "_nouveau richessque_." As soon as he entered the building he felt the dignity and good taste of its arrangement, and his manner changed. After he had looked critically at some of the pictures and approved them, I knew myself for once on the way to success; for his praise was as genuine as his criticism.