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. A clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun—"
"I know that paper."
"— what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man to be good in New York."
"I fear I should subscribe to The Sun," said John Mayrant. He took his hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.
For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian of the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in some trifling activity among the flowers — perhaps picking off the faded blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for something — either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or his own delayed decision to utter it at all.
"Mas' John!" he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot a swift look at the bruise on Mayrant's forehead, and another look, equally swift, at me.
"Well, Daddy Ben, what is it?"
The custodian shunted close to the gate which separated him from us. "Mas' John, I speck de President he dun' know de cullud people like we knows 'um, else he nebber bin 'pint dat ar boss in de Cussum House, no, sah."
After this effort he wiped his forehead and breathed hard.
To my astonishment, the effort brought immediately a stern change over John Mayrant's face; then he answered in the kindest tones, "Thank you, Daddy Ben."
This answer interpreted for me the whole thing, which otherwise would have been obscure enough: the old man held it to be an indignity that his young "Mas' John" should, by the President's act, find himself the subordinate of a member of the black race, and he had just now, in his perspiring effort, expressed his sympathy! Why he had chosen this particular moment (after quite obvious debate with himself) I did not see until somewhat later.
He now left us standing at the gate; and it was not for some moments that John Mayrant spoke again, evidently closing, for our two selves, this delicate subject.
"I wish we had not got into that second volume of yours."
"That's not progressive."
"I hate progress."
"What's the use? Better grow old gracefully!
"'Qui no pas l'esprit de son age
De son age a tout le malheur.'"
"Well, I'm personally not growing old, just yet."
"Neither is the United States."
"Well, I don't know. It's too easy for sick or worthless people to survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast. Philanthropists don't seem to remember that you can beget children a great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe universal suffrage will kill us off before our time."
"Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is like the appendix — useful at an early stage of the race's evolution but to-day merely a threat to life."
He thought this over. "But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you know."
"It'll be done by absorption. Why, you've begun it yourselves, and so has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white — and I shouldn't much fear surgery. We're not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause at maturity."
"That is the old, old story," he said.
"Yes; is there anything new under the sun?"
He was gloomy. "Nothing, I suppose." Then the gloom lightened. "Nothing new under the sun — except the fashionable families of Newport!"
This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Worship Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until it had come. He began pointing out, as we passed them, certain houses which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many relatives: "My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there," he would say; or, "My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War"; and once, "The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first."
So I asked him a riddle. "What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?"
This he, of course, gave up.
"Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce."
"That's true!" he cried, "that's very true. I met the most embarrassingly cater-cornered families."
"Oh, they weren't embarrassed!" I interjected.
"No, but I was," said John.
"And you told me you weren't innocent!" I exclaimed. "They are going to institute a divorce march," I continued. "'Lohengrin' or 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies."
He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.
"Did you ever notice," I now said, "what a perpetual allegory 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' contains?"
"I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing."
"Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get — well, you get poor Titania."
"She fell in love with a jackass," he remarked. "Puck bewitched her."
"Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that never happen in Kings Port?"
He began smiling to himself. "I'm afraid Puck isn't all dead yet."
I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. "Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!"