From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book. Bangs John Kendrick
it at all; but the cooler she became the more strenuous became the efforts of the barbarians to "scrape an acquaintance."
I held an inward debate with myself as to my duty in the premises. I did not care to get into a row; but the ogling soon became so pronounced that it really seemed necessary to interfere. I reached out my hand to ring for such reinforcements as the porter and the conductor might be able to bring to our assistance, when to my astonishment the worst offender of the three rose from his seat, and stepped quickly to the lady's side – and then there was revealed to me the marvelous wisdom of the old injunction, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"; for the supposed ruffian, whom I would a moment before have willingly, and with seeming justification, thrown bodily from the train, with the manner of a Chesterfield in the rough lifted his hat and spoke.
"You will excuse me for speaking to you, ma'am," he said, and there was a wistful smile on his lips and a tenderness in his eye worthy of a seemingly better cause, "but I'm – I'm what they call a drummer, a traveling man, and I've been away from home for three months. I've got a little girl of my own at home about the same age as this kid of yours, and I tell you, ma'am, you'd ease off an awful case of homesickness if you'd let me play with the little lady just for a few minutes."
The mother's heart seemed to go right out to him, as did mine also. She smiled graciously, and handed over her little daughter to the tender mercies of that group whose presence I had fled only a short while before – and for the rest of the afternoon that Pullman sleeper was transformed into a particularly bright and joyous nursery that echoed and reëchoed to the merry laughter of happy childhood.
If there is an animal of any kind in the zoos of commerce that those men did not impersonate during the next two or three hours I do not know its name, the especially objectionable barbarian transforming himself instantly on demand into an elephant, a yak, a roaring lion, a tiger, or a leopard changing its spots as actively as a flea, and all with a graceful facility that Proteus himself might well have envied. And later, when night fell, and weariness came with it, in the dusk of the twilight it was indeed a pretty sight to me, and a sight that smote somewhat upon my conscience for my over-ready contempt of the earlier afternoon, when my gaze fell upon the figure of an exhausted drummer, his eyes half-closed, sleepily humming a tender lullaby to a tired little golden-haired stranger who lay cuddled up in his arms, fast asleep, with her head upon his breast.
I like to think that that little incident was a valuable contribution to my education in the science of brotherhood. It has not perhaps produced in my soul a larger tolerance of the intolerable in casual conversation, but it has served to warn me against the dangers of snap judgments, and has certainly broadened my sympathies in respect to my fellow man in my chance meetings with him upon the highways and byways of life, whence sometimes, in the loneliness of my wanderings, I have gathered much comfort, and reaped harvests in friendliness which otherwise I might have lost.
II
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY
In traveling about the country, and especially in the South, I have been impressed with the wisdom of the character in Owen Wister's delightful story of "The Virginian," who when another man applied an unspeakable name to him leveled a revolver in the speaker's face, and said, "When you call me that, say it with a smile!" (I quote from memory.) A moment on the road is made cheerful or difficult by the manner in which things are said, and the wanderer's homesickness is either relieved or deepened by the manner of a chance remark, which brings cheer if it be smiling, and a deeper sense of loneliness if it be otherwise.
Throughout the South I have never felt quite so far away from home as in some parts of New England less than a hundred miles from my own rooftree, and I think that this is due largely to the positive effort on the part of the average Southern man or woman to maintain the traditional courtesy and hospitality of the South toward the stranger within its gates. It is only semi-occasionally that one finds in some sour-natured relic of other days any other attitude than that of smiling welcome, and even with the thermometer ranging close to the zero mark I have learned why the Southland is in spirit anyhow the "Land of Roses."
It must be admitted, however, that when the departure from the attitude of cordiality is made it is done thoroughly, and with a sort of reckless truculence which the wary traveler will be wise to ascribe solely to its individual source.
In the winter and spring of 1913 there was a great deal of work cut out for me in the Southern territory, and during my travels there, which involved the crossing and recrossing of every State in the section except Kentucky, from the Atlantic coast to the Mexican border, I encountered much in the way of human experience that is delightful to remember, and very little that I would rather forget. It was upon this trip that two incidents occurred which showed very clearly the difference between a cutting retort smilingly administered and that other kind of peculiarly rasping repartee, born of a soured nature that has confirmed its acid qualities by pickling itself in a mixture of equal parts of gloomy self-sympathy over fancied wrongs, and – well, not grape juice.
There is a kind of tonic dispensed in certain of our prohibition States by licensed drugstores and carried by suffering patients in small black bottles, secreted in their hip pockets, like deadly weapons – which indeed they are (whence, possibly, we get the term "hipped" as descriptive of the ailment of the sufferer) – which does not exactly mellow the disposition of the consumer, whatever glow it may impart to his countenance.
One morning I found myself on my way from Natchitoches, in Louisiana, a lovely survival of a picturesque old French trading post, a perfect home of roses, both human and floral, which will ever remain a garden spot in my memory, to Shreveport. It was in the middle of May, and the whole country was a delight to the eye, with its lovely greens and lush spring coloring. I was returning from a lecture before the State Normal School, and while sitting in the smoking car enjoying my weed was introduced to a gentleman (I use the word carelessly, and without positive conviction) whom everybody had been calling "Judge." I am glad to say that I did not catch his last name. I do not even know whether or not he was really a judge, or, if he were, what he was a judge of. He reminded me more of the judges I have read of in fictional humor than any I have ever seen on the bench, and from his general attitude toward his fellows on the train I gained a tolerably clean-cut impression that he tried his "cases" in solitary state, rather than in that more open fashion which is such a bad example to the young, and productive of that ruinously extravagant disease known as "treating." I may be doing the man an injustice, but I am none the less trying to sketch him as I saw him. He had the manner and manners of the solitary reveler, and the generally "oily," but not suave, quality of his makeup confirmed my impression that any love of temperance he might manifest was purely academic, or, as one of our leading statesmen might put it, "largely psychological." Desirous of starting things along pleasantly after my introduction to the judge, I remarked upon the marvelous beauty of the country.
"Everything is beautifully green about here," I said. "It is a positive pleasure to look out on those lovely fields."
"Glad you like 'em," said the judge, helping himself to a generous mouthful of tobacco.
"Well, you see," said I, "I come from Maine, Judge, and I am particularly fond of the spring, and we don't get ours until late. I guess," I added, "that in respect to that we are about a month and a half behind you people down here."
"Yes," said he explosively, "and, by God! you are fifty years behind us in every other respect!"
It was a kindly and tactful remark, and I was duly edified. If he had said it smilingly, I should have been happier, and would have been inclined to enter upon a half-hour of jovial banter on the subject of the respective merits of our several States; but there was a truculent self-confidence about his honor's "atmosphere" that foreshadowed little in the way of a satisfactory issue had I ventured to carry the discussion further. I simply withdrew within myself, like a turtle, finished my cigar in silence, and returned to my seat in the chair car, convinced that in whatever line of action the judge was really an expert – law, history, economics, or what-not – he at least knew how to put a cork in a bottle, and jam it in so tight that nothing could get out of it – I being the bottle.
As I sat for the rest of my journey in that chair car my mind reverted to another incident that had occurred two months earlier. The inviting causes were similar;