The Poet at the Breakfast-Table Part 6

--I was glad to hear that there were no more like it in this neighborhood, the present supply of c.o.c.kroaches answering every purpose, so far as I am concerned, that such an animal as this would be likely to serve.

--Here are my bee-parasites,--said the Scarabee, showing me a box full of gla.s.s slides, each with a specimen ready mounted for the microscope.

I was most struck with one little beast flattened out like a turtle, semi-transparent, six-legged, as I remember him, and every leg terminated by a single claw hooked like a lion's and as formidable for the size of the creature as that of the royal beast.

--Lives on a b.u.mblebee, does he?--I said. That's the way I call it.

b.u.mblebee or b.u.mblybee and huckleberry. Humblebee and whortleberry for people that say Woos-ses-ter and Nor-wich.

--The Scarabee did not smile; he took no interest in trivial matters like this.

--Lives on a b.u.mblebee. When you come to think of it, he must lead a pleasant kind of life. Sails through the air without the trouble of flying. Free pa.s.s everywhere that the bee goes. No fear of being dislodged; look at those six grappling-hooks. Helps himself to such juices of the bee as he likes best; the bee feeds on the choicest vegetable nectars, and he feeds on the bee. Lives either in the air or in the perfumed pavilion of the fairest and sweetest flowers. Think what tents the hollyhocks and the great lilies spread for him! And wherever he travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum which wanders by us is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain of melody.--I thought all this, while the Scarabee supposed I was studying the minute characters of the enigmatical specimen.

--I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length.

Do you think it really the larva of meloe?

--Oh, I don't know much about that, but I think he is the best cared for, on the whole, of any animal that I know of; and if I wasn't a man I believe I had rather be that little sybarite than anything that feasts at the board of nature.

--The question is, whether he is the larva of meloe,--the Scarabee said, as if he had not heard a word of what I had just been saying.---If I live a few years longer it shall be settled, sir; and if my epitaph can say honestly that I settled it, I shall be willing to trust my posthumous fame to that achievement.

I said good morning to the specialist, and went off feeling not only kindly, but respectfully towards him. He is an enthusiast, at any rate, as "earnest" a man as any philanthropic reformer who, having pa.s.sed his life in worrying people out of their misdoings into good behavior, comes at last to a state in which he is never contented except when he is making somebody uncomfortable. He does certainly know one thing well, very likely better than anybody in the world.

I find myself somewhat singularly placed at our table between a minute philosopher who has concentrated all his faculties on a single subject, and my friend who finds the present universe too restricted for his intelligence. I would not give much to hear what the Scarabee says about the old Master, for he does not pretend to form a judgment of anything but beetles, but I should like to hear what the Master has to say about the Scarabee. I waited after breakfast until he had gone, and then asked the Master what he could make of our dried-up friend.

--Well,--he said,--I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all his tribe. These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef.

By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a continent. But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself. I had rather be a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and sails over the seas where they have as yet built up nothing. I am a little afraid that science is breeding us down too fast into coral-insects. A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used to paint a picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, and stand back and look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel; but nowadays you have a Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, each man bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture the little bits make when they are put together. You can't get any talk out of these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you can get help from a policeman outside of his own beat.

--Yes,--said I,--but why should n't we always set a man talking about the thing he knows best?

--No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to do with him if you meet him every day? I travel with a man and we want to make change very often in paying bills. But every time I ask him to change a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencehappennies for a ninepence, or help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master's archaisms about the currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no change, says he, but this a.s.sarion of Diocletian. Mighty deal of good that'll do me!

--It isn't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would be, but you can pump him on numismatics.

--To be sure, to be sure. I've pumped a thousand men of all they could teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em; and if it comes to that, I never saw the man that couldn't teach me something. I can get along with everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don't believe there's one of them, I couldn't go to school to for half an hour and be the wiser for it. But people you talk with every day have got to have feeders for their minds, as much as the stream that turns a millwheel has. It isn't one little rill that's going to keep the float-boards turning round. Take a dozen of the brightest men you can find in the brightest city, wherever that may be,--perhaps you and I think we know,--and let 'em come together once a month, and you'll find out in the course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the hillsides. Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day, have no wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs down the street is enough for them.

--Do you mean you can always see the sources from which a man fills his mind,--his feeders, as you call them?

-I don't go quite so far as that,--the Master said.--I've seen men whose minds were always overflowing, and yet they did n't read much nor go much into the world. Sometimes you'll find a bit of a pond-hole in a pasture, and you'll plunge your walking-stick into it and think you are going to touch bottom. But you find you are mistaken. Some of these little stagnant pond-holes are a good deal deeper than you think; you may tie a stone to a bed-cord and not get soundings in some of 'em. The country boys will tell you they have no bottom, but that only means that they are mighty deep; and so a good many stagnant, stupid-seeming people are a great deal deeper than the length of your intellectual walking-stick, I can tell you. There are hidden springs that keep the little pond-holes full when the mountain brooks are all dried up. You poets ought to know that.

--I can't help thinking you are more tolerant towards the specialists than I thought at first, by the way you seemed to look at our dried-up neighbor and his small pursuits.

--I don't like the word tolerant,--the Master said.--As long as the Lord can tolerate me I think I can stand my fellow-creatures.

Philosophically, I love 'em all; empirically, I don't think I am very fond of all of 'em. It depends on how you look at a man or a woman. Come here, Youngster, will you? he said to That Boy.

The Boy was trying to catch a blue-bottle to add to his collection, and was indisposed to give up the chase; but he presently saw that the Master had taken out a small coin and laid it on the table, and felt himself drawn in that direction.

Read that,--said the Master.

U-n-i-ni United States of America 5 cents.

The Master turned the coin over. Now read that.

In G.o.d is our t-r-u-s-t--trust. 1869.

--Is that the same piece of money as the other one?

--There ain't any other one,--said the Boy, there ain't but one, but it's got two sides to it with different reading.

--That 's it, that 's it,--said the Master,--two sides to everybody, as there are to that piece of money. I've seen an old woman that wouldn't fetch five cents if you should put her up for sale at public auction; and yet come to read the other side of her, she had a trust in G.o.d Almighty that was like the bow anchor of a three-decker. It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at. I don't think your ant-eating specialist, with his sharp nose and pin-head eyes, is the best every-day companion; but any man who knows one thing well is worth listening to for once; and if you are of the large-brained variety of the race, and want to fill out your programme of the Order of Things in a systematic and exhaustive way, and get all the half-notes and flats and sharps of humanity into your scale, you'd a great deal better shut your front door and open your two side ones when you come across a fellow that has made a real business of doing anything.

--That Boy stood all this time looking hard at the five-cent piece.

--Take it,--said the Master, with a good-natured smile.

--The Boy made a s.n.a.t.c.h at it and was off for the purpose of investing it.

--A child naturally snaps at a thing as a dog does at his meat,--said the Master.--If you think of it, we've all been quadrupeds. A child that can only crawl has all the instincts of a four-footed beast. It carries things in its mouth just as cats and dogs do. I've seen the little brutes do it over and over again. I suppose a good many children would stay quadrupeds all their lives, if they didn't learn the trick of walking on their hind legs from seeing all the grown people walking in that way.

--Do you accept Mr. Darwin's notions about the origin of the race?--said I.

The Master looked at me with that twinkle in his eye which means that he is going to parry a question.

--Better stick to Blair's Chronology; that settles it. Adam and Eve, created Friday, October 28th, B. C. 4004. You've been in a s.h.i.+p for a good while, and here comes Mr. Darwin on deck with an armful of sticks and says, "Let's build a raft, and trust ourselves to that."

If your s.h.i.+p springs a leak, what would you do?

He looked me straight in the eyes for about half a minute.--If I heard the pumps going, I'd look and see whether they were gaining on the leak or not. If they were gaining I'd stay where I was.--Go and find out what's the matter with that young woman.

I had noticed that the Young Girl--the storywriter, our Scheherezade, as I called her--looked as if she had been crying or lying awake half the night. I found on asking her,--for she is an honest little body and is disposed to be confidential with me for some reason or other,--that she had been doing both.

--And what was the matter now, I questioned her in a semi-paternal kind of way, as soon as I got a chance for a few quiet words with her.

She was engaged to write a serial story, it seems, and had only got as far as the second number, and some critic had been jumping upon it, she said, and grinding his heel into it, till she couldn't bear to look at it. He said she did not write half so well as half a dozen other young women. She did n't write half so well as she used to write herself. She hadn't any characters and she had n't any incidents. Then he went to work to show how her story was coming out, trying to antic.i.p.ate everything she could make of it, so that her readers should have nothing to look forward to, and he should have credit for his sagacity in guessing, which was nothing so very wonderful, she seemed to think.

Things she had merely hinted and left the reader to infer, he told right out in the bluntest and coa.r.s.est way. It had taken all the life out of her, she said. It was just as if at a dinner-party one of the guests should take a spoonful of soup and get up and say to the company, "Poor stuff, poor stuff; you won't get anything better; let's go somewhere else where things are fit to eat."

What do you read such things for, my dear? said I.

The film glistened in her eyes at the strange sound of those two soft words; she had not heard such very often, I am afraid.

--I know I am a foolish creature to read them, she answered,--but I can't help it; somebody always sends me everything that will make me wretched to read, and so I sit down and read it, and ache all over for my pains, and lie awake all night.

--She smiled faintly as she said this, for she saw the sub-ridiculous side of it, but the film glittered still in her eyes. There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples. "Somebody always sends her everything that will make her wretched." Who can those creatures be who cut out the offensive paragraph and send it anonymously to us, who mail the newspaper which has the article we had much better not have seen, who take care that we shall know everything which can, by any possibility, help to make us discontented with ourselves and a little less light-hearted than we were before we had been fools enough to open their incendiary packages? I don't like to say it to myself, but I cannot help suspecting, in this instance, the doubtful-looking personage who sits on my left, beyond the Scarabee. I have some reason to think that he has made advances to the Young Girl which were not favorably received, to state the case in moderate terms, and it may be that he is taking his revenge in cutting up the poor girl's story. I know this very well, that some personal pique or favoritism is at the bottom of half the praise and dispraise which pretend to be so very ingenuous and discriminating. (Of course I have been thinking all this time and telling you what I thought.)

--What you want is encouragement, my dear, said I,--I know that as well, as you. I don't think the fellows that write such criticisms as you tell me of want to correct your faults. I don't mean to say that you can learn nothing from them, because they are not all fools by any means, and they will often pick out your weak points with a malignant sagacity, as a pettifogging lawyer will frequently find a real flaw in trying to get at everything he can quibble about. But is there n.o.body who will praise you generously when you do well,--n.o.body that will lend you a hand now while you want it,--or must they all wait until you have made yourself a name among strangers, and then all at once find out that you have something in you? Oh,--said the girl, and the bright film gathered too fast for her young eyes to hold much longer,--I ought not to be ungrateful! I have found the kindest friend in the world. Have you ever heard the Lady--the one that I sit next to at the table--say anything about me?

I have not really made her acquaintance, I said. She seems to me a little distant in her manners and I have respected her pretty evident liking for keeping mostly to herself.

--Oh, but when you once do know her! I don't believe I could write stories all the time as I do, if she didn't ask me up to her chamber, and let me read them to her. Do you know, I can make her laugh and cry, reading my poor stories? And sometimes, when I feel as if I had written out all there is in me, and want to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up except in a world where there are no weekly papers,--when everything goes wrong, like a car off the track,--she takes hold and sets me on the rails again all right.