SKIRTING THE BALKAN PENINSULA

FROM TRIEST TO CONSTANTINOPLE

THIRD PAPER: THE ENVIRONS OF ATHENS

BY ROBERT HICHENS

Author of “The Spell of Egypt,” “The Holy Land,” “The Garden of Allah,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY JULES GUÉRIN AND PHOTOGRAPHS

UPON the southern slope of the Acropolis, beneath the limestone precipices and the great golden-brown walls above which the Parthenon shows its white summit, are many ruins; among them the Theater of Dionysus and the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, the rich Marathonian who spent much of his money in the beautification of Athens, and who taught rhetoric to two men who eventually became Roman emperors. The Theater of Dionysus, in which Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their dramas, is of stone and silver-white marble. Many of the seats are arm-chairs, and are so comfortable that it is no uncommon thing to see weary travelers, who have just come down from the Acropolis, resting in them with almost unsuitable airs of unbridled satisfaction.

It is evident to any one who examines this great theater carefully that the Greeks considered it important for the body to be at ease while the mind was at work; for not only are the seats perfectly adapted to their purpose, but ample room is given for the feet of the spectators, the distance between each tier and the tier above it being wide enough to do away with all fear of crowding and inconvenience. The marble arm-chairs were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion’s feet. This is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape. Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. His rather round forehead resembles the very characteristic foreheads of the Montenegrins.

Herodes Atticus restored this theater. Before his time it had been embellished by Lycurgus of Athens, the orator, and disciple of Plato. It is not one of the gloriously placed theaters of the Greeks, but from the upper tiers of seats there is a view across part of the Attic plain to the isolated grove of cypresses where the famous Schliemann is buried, and beyond to gray Hymettus.

Standing near by is another theater, Roman-Greek, not Greek, the Odeum of Herodes Atticus, said to have been built by him in memory of his wife. This is not certain, and there are some authorities who think that, like the beautiful arch near the Olympieion, this peculiar, very picturesque structure was raised by the Emperor Hadrian, who was much fonder of Athens than of Rome.

The contrast between the exterior, the immensely massive, three-storied façade with Roman arches, and the interior, or, rather, what was once the interior, of this formerly roofed-in building, is very strange. They do not seem to belong to each other, to have any artistic connection the one with the other.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

THEATER OF DIONYSUS ON THE SOUTHERN SLOPE
OF THE ACROPOLIS

The outer walls are barbarically huge and heavy, and superb in color. They gleam with a fierce-red gold, and are conspicuous from afar. The almost monstrous, but impressive, solidity of Rome, heavy and bold, indeed almost crudely imperious, is shown forth by them—a solidity absolutely different from the Greek massiveness, which you can study in the Doric temples, and far less beautiful. When you pass beyond and this towering façade, which might well be a section of the Colosseum transferred from gladiatorial Rome to intellectual Athens, you find yourself in a theater which looks oddly, indeed, almost meanly, small and pale and graceful. With a sort of fragile timidity it seems to be cowering behind the flamboyant walls. When all its blanched marble seats were crowded with spectators it contained five thousand persons. As you approach the outer walls, you expect to find a building that might accommodate perhaps twenty-five thousand. There is something bizarre in the two colors, fierce and pale, in the two sizes, huge and comparatively small, that are united in the odeum. Though very remarkable, it seems to me to be one of the most inharmonious ruins in Greece.

The modern Athenians are not very fond of hard exercise, and except in the height of summer, when many of them go to Kephisia and Phalerum, and others to the islands, or to the baths near Corinth for a “cure,” they seem well content to remain within their city. They are governed, it seems, by fashion, like those who dwell in less-favored lands. When I was in Athens the weather was usually magnificent and often very hot. Yet Phalerum, perhaps half an hour by train from Constitution Square, was deserted. In the vast hotel there I found only two or three children, in the baths half a dozen swimmers. The pleasure-boats lay idle by the pier. I asked the reason of this—why at evening dusty Athens was crammed with strollers, and the pavements were black with people taking coffee and ices, while delightful Phalerum, with its cooler air and its limpid waters, held no one but an English traveler?

“The season is over,” was the only reply I received, delivered with a grave air of finality. I tried to argue the matter, and suggested that anxiety about the war had something to do with it. But I was informed that the “season” closed on a certain day, and that after that day the Athenians gave up going to Phalerum.

The season for many things seemed “over” when I was in Athens. Round-about the city, and within easy reach of it, there is fascinating country—country that seems to call you with a smiling decision to enjoy all Arcadian delights; country, too, that has great associations connected with it. From Athens you can go to picnic at Marathon or at Salamis, or you can carry a tea-basket to the pine-woods which slope down to the Convent of Daphni, and come back to it after paying a visit to Eleusis. Or, if you are not afraid of a “long day,” you can motor out and lunch in the lonely home of the sea-god under the columns at Sunium. If you wish to go where a king goes, you can spend the day in the thick woods at Tatoï. If you are full of social ambition, and aim at “climbing,” a train in not many minutes will set you down at Kephisia, the summer home of “the fifty-two” on the slope of a spur of Mount Pentelicus.

Thither I went one bright day. But, as at Phalerum, I found a deserted paradise. The charming gardens and arbors were empty. The villas, Russian, Egyptian, Swiss, English, French, and even now and then Greek in style, were shuttered and closed. All in vain the waterfalls sang, all in vain the silver poplars and the yellow-green pines gave their shade. No one was there. I went at length to a restaurant to get something to eat. Its door was unlocked, and I entered a large, deserted room, with many tables, a piano, and a terrace. No one came. I called, knocked, stamped, and at length evoked a thin elderly lady in a gray shawl, who seemed alarmed at the sight of me, and in a frail voice begged to know what I wanted. When I told her, she said there was nothing to eat except what they were going to have themselves. The season was over. Eventually she brought me mastika and part of her own dinner to the terrace, which overlooked a luxuriant and deserted garden. And there I spent two happy, golden hours. I had sought the heart of fashion, and found the exquisite peace that comes to places when fashion has left them. Henceforth I shall always associate beautiful Kephisia with silence, flowers, and one thin old woman in a gray shawl.

THE TEMPLE OF POSEIDON AND ATHENE AT SUNIUM

PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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LARGER IMAGE]

Greece, though sparsely inhabited, is in the main a very cheerful-looking country. The loneliness of much of it is not depressing, the bareness of much of it is not sad. I began to understand this on the day when I went to the plain of Marathon, which, fortunately, lies away from railroads. One must go there by carriage or motor or on horseback. The road is bad both for beasts and machinery, but it passes through country which is typical of Greece, and through which it would be foolish to go in haste. Go quietly to Marathon, spend two hours there, or more, and when you return in the evening to Athens you will have tasted a new joy. You will have lived for a little while in an exquisite pastoral—a pastoral through which, it is true, no pipes of Pan have fluted to you,—I heard little music in Greece,—but which has been full of that lightness, brightness, simplicity, and delicacy peculiar to Greece. The soil of the land is light, and, I believe, though Hellenes have told me that in this I am wrong, that the heart of the people is light. Certainly the heart of one traveler was as he made his way to Marathon along a white road thickly powdered with dust.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

THE PLAIN OF MARATHON

Has not each land its representative tree? America has its maple, England its oak, France its poplar, Italy its olive, Turkey its cypress, Egypt its palm, and so on. The representative tree of Greece is the pine. I do not forget the wild olive, from which in past days the crowns were made, nor the fact that the guide-books say that in a Greek landscape the masses of color are usually formed by the silver-green olive-trees. It seemed to me, and it seems to me still in remembrance, that the lovely little pine is the most precious ornament of the Grecian scene.

Marathon that day was a pastoral of yellow and blue, of pines and sea. On the way I passed through great olive-groves, in one of which long since some countrymen of mine were taken by brigands and carried away to be done to death. And there were mighty fig-trees, and mulberry-trees, and acres and acres of vines, with here and there an almost black cypress among them. But the pines, more yellow than green, and the bright blue sea made the picture that lives in my memory.

From a photograph, copyright by Underwood & Underwood

RUINS OF THE GREAT TEMPLE OF THE
MYSTERIES AT ELEUSIS

Not very long after we were clear of the town we passed not far from the village of “Louis,” who won the first Marathon race that was run under King George’s scepter, Marousi, where the delicious water is found that Athens loves to drink. And then away we went through the groves and the little villages, where dusty soldiers were buying up mules for the coming war; and Greek priests were reading newspapers; and olive-skinned children, with bright, yet not ungentle, eyes, were coming from school; and outside of ramshackle cafés, a huddle of wood, a vine, a couple of tables, and a few bottles, old gentlemen, some of them in native dress, with the white fustanelle, a sort of short skirt not reaching to the knees, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels, were busily talking politics. Carts, not covered with absurd but lively pictures, as they are in Sicily, lumbered by in the dust. Peasants, sitting sidewise with dangling feet, met us on trotting donkeys. Now and then a white dog dashed out, or a flock of thin turkeys gobbled and stretched their necks nervously as they gave us passage. Women, with rather dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads, were working in the vineyards or washing clothes here and there beside thin runlets of water. Two German beggars, with matted hair uncovered to the sun, red faces, and fingers with nails like the claws of birds, tramped by, going to Athens. And farther on we met a few Turkish Gipsies, swarthy and full of a lively malice, whose tents were visible on a hillside at a little distance, in the midst of a grove of pines. All the country smiled at us in the sunshine. One jovial man in a fustanelle leaned down from a cart as we passed, and shouted in Greek: “Enjoy yourselves! Enjoy yourselves!” And the gentle hills, the olive-and pine-groves, the stretching vineyards, seemed to echo his cry.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

THE ODEUM OF HERODES ATTICUS IN ATHENS

FROM THE PAINTING MADE FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

What is the magic of pastoral Greece? What is it that gives to you a sensation of being gently released from the cares of life and the boredom of modern civilization, with its often unmeaning complications, its unnecessary luxuries, its noisy self-satisfactions? This is not the tremendous, the spectacular release of the desert, an almost savage tearing away of bonds. Nothing in the Greece I saw is savage; scarcely anything is spectacular. But, oh, the bright simplicity of the life and the country along the way to Marathon! It was like an early world. One looked, and longed to live in those happy woods like the Turkish Gipsies. Could life offer anything better? The pines are small, exquisitely shaped, with foliage that looks almost as though it had been deftly arranged by a consummate artist. They curl over the slopes with a lightness almost of foam cresting a wave. Their color is quite lovely. The ancient Egyptians had a love color: well, the little pine-trees of Greece are the color of happiness. You smile involuntarily when you see them. And when, descending among them, you are greeted by the shining of the brilliant-blue sea, which stretches along the edge of the plain of Marathon, you know radiance purged of fierceness.

The road winds down among the pines till, at right angles to it, appears another road, or rough track just wide enough for a carriage. This leads to a large mound which bars the way. Upon this mound a habitation was perched. It was raised high above the ground upon a sort of tripod of poles. It had yellow walls of wheat, and a roof and floor of brushwood and maize. A ladder gave access to it, and from it there was a wide outlook over the whole crescent-shaped plain of Marathon. This dwelling belonged to a guardian of the vineyards, and the mound is the tomb of those who died in the great battle.

I sat for a long time on this strange tomb, in the shadow of the rustic watch-house, and looked out over the plain. It is quite flat, and is now cultivated, though there are some bare tracts of unfruitful ground. In all directions I saw straggling vines. Not far away was one low, red-tiled house belonging to a peasant, whose three small, dirty, and unhealthy-looking children presently approached, and gazed at me from below. In the distance a man on a white horse rode slowly toward the pine-woods, and to my left I saw a group of women bending mysteriously to accomplish some task unknown to me. No other figures could I see between me and the bright-blue waters that once bore up the fleet of Persia. Behind me were stony and not very high hills, ending in the slopes down which Miltiades made his soldiers advance “at a running pace.” One hundred and ninety-two brave men gone to dust beneath me; instead of the commemorative lion, the little watch-house of brushwood and wheat and maize, silence the only epitaph. The mound, of hard, sun-baked earth, was yellow and bare. On one side a few rusty-looking thorn-bushes decorated it harshly. But about it grew aloes, and the wild oleander, with its bright-pink flowers, and near by were many great fig-trees. A river intersects the plain, and its course is marked by sedges and tall reeds. Where the land is bare, it takes a tawny-yellow hue. Some clustering low houses far off under the hills form the Albanian village of Marathon. Just twenty-two miles from Athens, this place of an ancient glory, this tomb of men who, I suppose, will not be forgotten so long as the Hellenic kingdom lasts, seems very far away, hidden from the world between woods and waters, solitary, but not sad. Beyond the plain and the sea are ranges of mountains and the island of Eubœa.

A figure slowly approaches. It is the guardian of the vineyards, coming back to his watch-house above the grave of his countrymen, smiling, with a cigarette between his white teeth. As I go, he calls out “Addio!” Then he mounts his ladder carefully and withdraws to his easy work. How strange to be a watcher of vineyards upon the tumulus of Marathon!

If you care at all for life in the open, if you have the love of camping in your blood, Greece will call to you at every moment to throw off the dullness of houses, to come and stay under blue heaven and be happy. Yet I suppose the season for all such joys was over when I was in Greece, for I never met any citizens of Athens taking their pleasure in the surrounding country. In Turkey and Asia Minor, near any large town, when the weather is hot and fine, one may see cheerful parties of friends making merry in the open air, under trees and in arbors; or men dreaming idly in nooks that might have made old Omar’s delight, shaded, and sung to by a stream. In Greece it is not so. Once you are out in the country, you come upon no one but peasants, shepherds, goatherds, Gipsies, turkey-drivers, and, speaking generally, “sons of the soil.”

THE TEMPLE OF ATHENE, ISLAND OF ÆGINA

PAINTED FOR THE CENTURY BY JULES GUÉRIN

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LARGER IMAGE]

In the very height of summer, I am told, the Athenians do condescend to go to the pine-woods. They sleep during part of the day, and stay out of doors at night, often driving into the country, and eating under the trees or by the sea. But even in the heat of a rainless September, if I may judge by my own experience, they prefer Constitution Square and “the Dardanelles” to any more pastoral pleasures.

I did not imitate them, but followed the Via Sacra one morning, past the oldest olive-tree in Greece, a small and corrugated veteran said to have been planted in the time of Pericles, to the Convent of Daphni, now fallen into a sort of poetic decay.

Once more I was among pine-trees. They thronged the almost park-like slopes under Ægaleos. They crowded toward the little Byzantine church, which stands on the left of the road on the site of a vanished temple of Apollo, with remains of its once strongly fortified walls about it. Lonely, but smiling, as though with a radiant satisfaction at its own shining peace, is the country in whose bosom the church lies. A few sheep, small, with shaggy coats of brown and white, were grazing near it; a dog lay stretched out in the sun; and some lean, long-tailed horses were standing with bowed heads, as if drowsing. An ancient and very deep well was close by. In the marble well-head the friction of many drawn cords has cut grooves, some of them nearly an inch in depth. The court of the convent is roughly paved and is inclosed within rough walls. In it are a few trees, an acacia or two, a wild pepper-tree, and one gigantic cypress. From a branch near the entrance a big bell hung by a chain. But the only sound of bells came to me from without the walls, where some hidden goats were moving to pasture. Fragments of broken columns and two or three sarcophagi lay on the hot ground at my feet. To my right, close to the church, a flight of very old marble steps led to a rustic loggia with wooden supports, full of red geraniums and the flowers of a plant like a very small convolvulus. From the loggia, which fronted her abiding-place, a cheerful, kindly faced woman came down and let me into the church, where she left me with two companions, a black kitten playing with a bee under the gilded cupola.

The church, like almost all the Byzantine churches I saw in Greece, is very small, but it is tremendously solid and has a tall belfry. The exterior, stained by weather, is now a sort of earthy yellow; the cupola is covered with red tiles. The interior walls look very ancient, and are blackened in many places by the fingers of Time. Made more than eight hundred years ago, the remains of the Byzantine mosaics are very curious and interesting. In the cupola, on a gold ground, is a very large head of a Christ (“Christos Pantokrator”), which looks as though it were just finished. The face is sinister and repellent, but expressive. There are several other mosaics, of the apostles, of episodes in the life of the Virgin, and of angels. None of them seemed to me beautiful, though perhaps not one looks so wicked as the Christos, which dominates the whole church. Until comparatively recent times there were monks attached to this convent, but now they are gone.

I passed through a doorway and came into a sort of tiny cloister, shaded by a huge and evidently very ancient fig-tree with enormous leaves. Here I found the remains of an old staircase of stone. As I returned to the dim and massive little church, glimmering with gold where the sunlight fell upon the mosaics, the eyes of the Christos seemed to rebuke me from the lofty cupola. The good-natured woman locked the door behind me with a large key, handed to me a bunch of the flowers I had noticed growing in the loggia, and bade me “Addio!” And soon the sound of the goat-bells died away from my ears as I went on my way back to Eleusis.

There is nothing mysterious about this road which leads to the site of the Temple of the Mysteries. It winds down through the pine-woods and rocks of the Pass of Daphni into the cheerful and well-cultivated Thriasian plain, whence across a brilliant-blue stretch of water, which looks like a lake, but which is the bay of Eleusis, you can see houses and, alas! several tall chimneys pouring forth smoke. The group of houses is Eleusis, now an Albanian settlement, and the chimneys belong to a factory where olive-oil soap is made. The road passes between the sea and a little salt lake, which latter seems to be prevented from submerging it only by a raised coping of stone. The color of this lake is a brilliant purple. In the distance is the mountainous and rocky island of Salamis.

When I reached the village, I found it a cheery little place of small white, yellow, and rose-colored houses, among which a few cypress-trees grow. Although one of the most ancient places in Greece, it now looks very modern. And it is difficult to believe, as one glances at the chimneys of the soap factory, and at two or three black and dingy steamers lying just off the works to take in cargo, that here Demeter was worshiped with mysterious rites at the great festival of the Eleusinia. Yet, according to the legend, it was here that she came, disguised as an old hag, in search of her lost Persephone; here that she taught Triptolemus how to sow the plain, and to reap the first harvest of yellow wheat, as a reward for the hospitable welcome given to her by his father Celeus.

The ruins at Eleusis are disappointing to the ordinary traveler, though interesting to the archæologist. They have none of the pathetic romance which, notwithstanding the scoldings of many vulgar persons set forth in a certain visitors’ book, broods gently over poetic Olympia. Above the village is a vast confusion of broken columns, defaced capitals, bits of wall, bits of pavement, marble steps, fallen medallions, vaults, propylæa, substructures, scraps of architraves carved with inscriptions, and subterranean store-rooms. In the pavement of the processional way, by which the chariots came up to the Temple of Demeter, the chief glory and shrine of Eleusis, are the deep ruts made by the chariot-wheels. The remnants of the hall of the initiated bears witness to the long desire of poor human beings in all ages to find that peace which passeth our understanding. Of beauty there is little or none. Nevertheless, even now, it is not possible in the midst of this tragic débâcle to remain wholly unmoved. Indeed, the very completeness of the disaster that time and humanity have wrought here creates emotion when one remembers that here great men came, such men as Cicero, Sophocles, and Plato; that here they worshiped and adored under cover of the darkness of night; that here, seeking, they found, as has been recorded, peace and hope to sustain them when, the august festival over, they took their way back into the ordinary world along the shores of sea and lake. Eleusis is no longer beautiful. It is a home of devastation. It is no longer mysterious. A successful man is making a fortune out of soap there. But it is a place one cannot easily forget. And just above the ruins there is a small museum which contains several very interesting things, and one thing that is superb.

This last is the enormous and noble upper part of the statue of a woman wearing ear-rings. I do not know its history, though some one assured me that it was a caryatid. It was dug up among the ruins, and the color of it is akin to that of the earth. The roughly undulating hair is parted in the middle of a majestic, goddess-like head. The features are pure and grand; but the two things that most struck me, as I looked at this great work of art, were the expression of the face and the deep bosom, as of the earth-mother and all her fruitfulness. In few Greek statues have I seen such majesty and power, combined with such intensity, as this nameless woman shows forth. There is indeed almost a suggestion of underlying fierceness in the face, but it is the fierceness that may sometimes leap up in an imperial nature. Are there not royal angers which flame out of the pure furnaces of love? This noble woman seems to me to be the present glory of Eleusis.

The mountainous island of Salamis, long and calm, with gray and orange rocks, lies like a sentinel keeping guard over the harbor of the Piræus. It is so near to the mainland that the sea between the two shores looks like a lake, lonely and brilliant, with the two-horned peak called “the throne of Xerxes” standing out characteristically behind the low-lying bit of coast where the Greeks have set up an arsenal. Whether Xerxes did really watch the famous battle from a throne placed on the hill with which his name is associated is very doubtful. But many travelers like to believe it, and the kind guides of Athens are quite ready to stiffen their credulity.

The shores of this beautiful inclosed bit of sea are wild. The water is wonderfully clear, and is shot with all sorts of exquisite colors. The strip of mainland, against which the liquid maze of greens and blues and purples seems to lie motionless, like a painted marvel, is a tangle of wild myrtle and dwarf shrubs growing in a sandy soil interspersed with rocks. Gently the land curves, forming a series of little shallow bays and inlets, each one of which seems more delicious than the last as you coast along in a fisherman’s boat. But, unfortunately, the war-ships of Greece often lie snug in harbor in the shadow of Salamis not far from the arsenal, and, as I have hinted already, their commander-in-chief has little sympathy with the inquiring traveler. I shall not easily forget the expression that came into his face when, in reply to his question, “What did you come here for?” I said, “To visit the scene of the celebrated battle.” A weary incredulity made him suddenly look very old; and I believe it was then that, taking a pen, he wrote on the margin of his report about me that I was “a very suspicious person.”

It is safer, especially in war-time, to keep away from Salamis; but if you care for smiling wild places where the sea is, where its breath gives a vivid sense of life to the wilderness, you may easily forget her myrtle-covered shores and the bays of violet and turquoise.

Of the many wonderful haunts of the sea which I visited in Greece, Cape Sunium is perhaps the most memorable, though I never shall forget the glories of the magnificent drive along the mountains between Athens and Corinth. But Sunium has its ruined temple, standing on a great height. And in some of us a poet has wakened a wondering consciousness of its romance, perhaps when we sat in a Northern land beside the winter fire. And in some of us, too, an immortal painter has roused a longing to see it, when we never thought to be carried by our happy fate to Greece.

In going to Sunium I passed through the famous mining district of Laurium, where now many convicts work out their sentences. In ancient times slaves toiled there for the benefit of those citizens who had hereditary leases granted by the state. They worked the mines for silver, but now lead is the principal product. It happened that just as we were in the middle of the dingy town, or village, where the miners and their families dwell, for only some of them are convicts, a tire of the motor burst. This of course delayed us, and I was able to see something of the inhabitants. In Athens I had heard that they were a fierce and ill-mannered population. I found them, on the contrary, as I found almost all those whom I met in Greece, cheerful, smiling, and polite. Happy, if rather dirty, children gathered round us, delighted to have something to look at and wonder about. Men, going to or coming from the works, paused to see what was the matter and to inquire where I came from. From the windows of the low, solid-looking houses women leaned eagerly out with delighted faces. Several of the latter talked to me. I could not understand what they said, and all they could understand was that I came from London, a circumstance which seemed greatly to impress them, for they called it out from one to another up the street. We carried on intercourse mainly by facial expression and elaborate gesture, assisted genially by the grubby little boys. And when I got into the car to go we were all the best of friends. The machine made the usual irritable noises, but from the good people of Laurium came only cries of good-will, among them that pleasant admonition which one hears often in Greece: “Enjoy yourself! Enjoy yourself!”

When Laurium was left behind, we were soon in wild and deserted country. Now and then we passed an Albanian on horseback, with a gun over his shoulder, a knife stuck in his belt, or we came upon a shepherd watching his goats as they browsed on the low scrub which covered the hills. All the people in this region are Albanians, I was told. They appeared to be very few. As we drew near to the ancient shrine of Poseidon we left far behind us the habitations of men. At length the car stopped in the wilderness, and on a height to my left I saw the dazzling white marble columns of the Temple of Sunium.

Almost all the ruins I saw in Greece were weather-stained. Their original color was mottled with browns and grays, with saffron, with gold and red gold. But the columns of Sunium have kept their brilliant whiteness, although they stand on a great, bare cliff above the sea, exposed to the glare of the sun and to the buffeting of every wind of heaven. They are raised not merely on this natural height, but also on a great platform of the famous Poros-stone. In the time of Byron there were sixteen columns standing. There are now eleven, with a good deal of architrave. These columns are Doric, and are about twenty feet in height. They have not the majesty of the Parthenon columns, but, on the contrary, have a peculiar delicacy and even grace, which is lacking both in the Parthenon and in the Theseum. They do not move you to awe or overwhelm you; they charm and delight you. In their ivory-white simplicity, standing out against the brilliant blue of sea and sky on the white and gray platform, there is something that allures.

Upon one of the columns I found the name of Byron carved in bold letters. But I looked in vain for the name of Turner. Byron loved the Cape of Sunium. Fortunately, nothing has been done to make it less wonderful since his time. It is true that fewer columns are standing to bear witness to the old worship of the sea-god; but such places as Sunium are not injured when some blocks of marble fall, but when men begin to build. Still the noble promontory thrusts itself boldly forward into the sea from the heart of an undesecrated wilderness. Still the columns stand quite alone. All the sea-winds can come to you there, and all the winds of the hills—winds from the Ægean and Mediterranean, from crested Eubœa, from Melos, from Hydra, from Ægina, with its beautiful Doric temple, from Argolis and from the mountains of Arcadia. And it seems as though all the sunshine of heaven were there to bathe you in golden fire, as though there could be none left over for the rest of the world. The coasts of Greece stretch away beneath you into far distances, curving in bays, thrusting out in promontories, here tawny and volcanic, there gray and quietly sober in color, but never cold or dreary. White sails, but only two or three, are dreaming on the vast purple of Poseidon’s kingdom—white sails of mariners who are bound for the isles of Greece. Poets have sung of those isles. Who has not thought of them with emotion? Now, between the white marble columns, you can see their mountain ranges, you can see their rocky shores.

Behind and below me I heard a slight movement. I got up and looked. And there on a slab of white marble lay a snow-white goat warming itself in the sun. White, gold, and blue, and far off the notes of white were echoed not only by the mariner’s sails, but by tiny Albanian villages inland, seen over miles of bare country, over flushes of yellow, where the pines would not be denied.

There is an ineffable charm in the landscape, in the atmosphere, of Greece. No other land that I know possesses an exactly similar spell. Wildness and calm seem woven together, a warm and almost caressing wildness with a calm that is full of romance. There the wilderness is indeed a haven to long after, and there the solitudes call you as though with the voices of friends.

As I turned at last to go away from Poseidon’s white marble ruin, a one-armed man came up to me, and in English told me that he was the guardian of the temple.

“But where do you live?” I asked him, looking over the vast solitude.

Smiling, he led the way down to a low whitewashed bungalow at a little distance. There, in a rough but delicious loggia, paved and fronting the sea, I found two brown women sitting with a baby among some small pots of flowers. Remote from the world, with only the marble columns for neighbors, with no voice but the sea’s to speak to them, dwell these four persons. The man lived and worked for many years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lost his arm in some whirring machinery. Now he has come home and entered the sea-god’s service. Pittsburgh and the Hellenic wilderness—what a contrast! But my one-armed friend takes it philosophically. He shrugs his shoulder, points to his stump, and says, “I guess I couldn’t go on there like this, so I had to quit, and they put me here.”

They put him “here,” on Cape Sunium, and on Cape Sunium he has built himself a house and made for himself a loggia, white, cool, brightened with flowers, face to face with the purple sea, and the isles and the mountains of Greece. And at Sunium he intends to remain because, unfortunately, having lost an arm, he is no longer wanted in Pittsburgh.

I gave him some money, accepted the baby’s wavering but insistent hand, and left him to his good or ill fortune in the exquisite wilderness.

(To be continued)

THE TACHYPOMP[8]

A MATHEMATICAL DEMONSTRATION

(NOTEWORTHY STORIES OF THE LAST GENERATION)

BY EDWARD P. MITCHELL

WITH A PORTRAIT, AND NEW DRAWINGS BY REGINALD BIRCH

THERE was nothing mysterious about Professor Surd’s dislike for me. I was the only poor mathematician in an exceptionally mathematical class. The old gentleman sought the lecture-room every morning with eagerness, and left reluctantly. For was it not a thing of joy to find seventy young men who, individually and collectively, preferred x to XX; who had rather differentiate than dissipate; and for whom the limbs of the heavenly bodies had more attractions than those of earthly stars upon the spectacular stage?

So affairs went on swimmingly between the professor of mathematics and the junior class at Polyp University. In every man of the seventy the sage saw the logarithm of a possible La Place, of a Sturm, or of a Newton. It was a delightful task for him to lead them through the pleasant valleys of conic sections, and beside the still waters of the integral calculus. Figuratively speaking, his problem was not a hard one. He had only to manipulate and eliminate and to raise to a higher power, and the triumphant result of examination day was assured.

But I was a disturbing element, a perplexing unknown quantity, which had somehow crept into the work, and which seriously threatened to impair the accuracy of his calculations. It was a touching sight to behold the venerable mathematician as he pleaded with me not so utterly to disregard precedent in the use of cotangents; or as he urged, with eyes almost tearful, that ordinates were dangerous things to trifle with. All in vain. More theorems went on to my cuff than into my head. Never did chalk do so much work to so little purpose. And, therefore, it came that Furnace Second was reduced to zero in Professor Surd’s estimation. He looked upon me with all the horror which an unalgebraic nature could inspire. I have seen the professor walk around an entire square rather than meet the man who had no mathematics in his soul.

For Furnace Second were no invitations to Professor Surd’s house. Seventy of the class supped in delegations around the periphery of the professor’s tea-table. The seventy-first knew nothing of the charms of that perfect ellipse, with its twin bunches of fuchsias and geraniums in gorgeous precision at the two foci.

This, unfortunately enough, was no trifling deprivation. Not that I longed especially for segments of Mrs. Surd’s justly celebrated lemon pies; not that the spheroidal damsons of her excellent preserving had any marked allurements; not even that I yearned to hear the professor’s jocose table-talk about binomials, and chatty illustrations of abstruse paradoxes. The explanation is far different. Professor Surd had a daughter. Twenty years before, he made a proposition of marriage to the present Mrs. S. He added a little corollary to his proposition not long after. The corollary was a girl.

Abscissa Surd was as perfectly symmetrical as Giotto’s circle, and as pure withal as the mathematics her father taught. It was just when spring was coming to extract the roots of frozen-up vegetation that I fell in love with the corollary. That she herself was not indifferent I soon had reason to regard as a self-evident truth.

The sagacious reader will already recognize nearly all the elements necessary to a well-ordered plot. We have introduced a heroine, inferred a hero, and constructed a hostile parent after the most approved model. A movement for the story, a deus ex machina, is alone lacking. With considerable satisfaction I can promise a perfect novelty in this line, a deus ex machina never before offered to the public.

It would be discounting ordinary intelligence to say that I sought with unwearying assiduity to figure my way into the stern father’s good-will; that never did dullard apply himself to mathematics more patiently than I; that never did faithfulness achieve such meager reward. Then I engaged a private tutor. His instructions met with no better success.

My tutor’s name was Jean-Marie Rivarol. He was a unique Alsatian, though Gallic in name, thoroughly Teuton in nature; by birth a Frenchman, by education a German. His age was thirty; his profession, omniscience; the wolf at his door, poverty; the skeleton in his closet, a consuming but unrequited passion. The most recondite principles of practical science were his toys; the deepest intricacies of abstract science, his diversions. Problems which were foreordained mysteries to me were to him as clear as Tahoe water. Perhaps this very fact will explain our lack of success in the relation of tutor and pupil; perhaps the failure is alone due to my own unmitigated stupidity. Rivarol had hung about the skirts of the university for several years, supplying his few wants by writing for scientific journals or by giving assistance to students who, like myself, were characterized by a plethora of purse and a paucity of ideas; cooking, studying, and sleeping in his attic lodgings; and prosecuting queer experiments all by himself.

We were not long discovering that even this eccentric genius could not transplant brains into my deficient skull. I gave over the struggle in despair. An unhappy year dragged its slow length around. A gloomy year it was, brightened only by occasional interviews with Abscissa, the Abbie of my thoughts and dreams.

Commencement day was coming on apace. I was soon to go forth, with the rest of my class, to astonish and delight a waiting world. The professor seemed to avoid me more than ever. Nothing but the conventionalities, I think, kept him from shaping his treatment of me on the basis of unconcealed disgust.

At last, in the very recklessness of despair, I resolved to see him, plead with him, threaten him if need be, and risk all my fortunes on one desperate chance. I wrote him a somewhat defiant letter, stating my aspirations, and, as I flattered myself, shrewdly giving him a week to get over the first shock of horrified surprise. Then I was to call and learn my fate.

During the week of suspense I nearly worried myself into a fever. It was first crazy hope, and then saner despair. On Friday evening, when I presented myself at the professor’s door, I was such a haggard, sleepy, dragged-out specter that even Miss Jocasta, the harsh-favored maiden sister of the Surds, admitted me with commiserate regard, and suggested pennyroyal tea.

Professor Surd was at a faculty meeting. Would I wait?

Yes, till all was blue, if need be. Miss Abbie?

Abscissa had gone to Wheelborough to visit a school-friend. The aged maiden hoped I would make myself comfortable, and departed to the unknown haunts which knew Jocasta’s daily walk.

Comfortable! But I settled myself in a great uneasy chair, and waited with the contradictory spirit common to such junctures, dreading every step lest it should herald the man whom, of all men, I wished to see.

I had been there at least an hour and was growing right drowsy.

At length Professor Surd came in. He sat down in the dusk opposite me, and I thought his eyes glinted with malignant pleasure as he said, abruptly:

“So, young man, you think you are a fit husband for my girl?”

I stammered some inanity about making up in affection what I lacked in merit, about my expectations, family, and the like. He quickly interrupted me.

“You misapprehend me, sir. Your nature is destitute of those mathematical perceptions and acquirements which are the only sure foundations of character. You have no mathematics in you. You are fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils—Shakspere. Your narrow intellect cannot understand and appreciate a generous mind. There is all the difference between you and a Surd, if I may say it, which intervenes between an infinitesimal and an infinite. Why, I will even venture to say that you do not comprehend the Problem of the Couriers!”

I admitted that the Problem of the Couriers should be classed rather without my list of accomplishments than within it. I regretted this fault very deeply, and suggested amendment. I faintly hoped that my fortune would be such—

“Money!” he impatiently exclaimed. “Do you seek to bribe a Roman senator with a penny whistle? Why, boy, do you parade your paltry wealth, which, expressed in mills, will not cover ten decimal places, before the eyes of a man who measures the planets in their orbits, and close crowds infinity itself?”

I hastily disclaimed any intention of obtruding my foolish dollars, and he went on:

“Your letter surprised me not a little. I thought you would be the last person in the world to presume to an alliance here. But having a regard for you personally,”—and again I saw malice twinkle in his small eyes,—“and still more regard for Abscissa’s happiness, I have decided that you shall have her—upon conditions. Upon conditions,” he repeated, with a half-smothered sneer.

“What are they?” cried I, eagerly enough. “Only name them.”

“Well, sir,” he continued, and the deliberation of his speech seemed the very refinement of cruelty, “you have only to prove yourself worthy an alliance with a mathematical family. You have only to accomplish a task which I shall presently give you. Your eyes ask me what it is. I will tell you. Distinguish yourself in that noble branch of abstract science in which, you cannot but acknowledge, you are at present sadly deficient. I will place Abscissa’s hand in yours whenever you shall come before me and square the circle to my satisfaction. No, that is too easy a condition. I should cheat myself. Say perpetual motion. How do you like that? Do you think it lies within the range of your mental capabilities? You don’t smile. Perhaps your talents don’t run in the way of perpetual motion. Several people have found that theirs didn’t. I’ll give you another chance. We were speaking of the Problem of the Couriers, and I think you expressed a desire to know more of that ingenious question. You shall have the opportunity. Sit down some day when you have nothing else to do and discover the principle of infinite speed. I mean the law of motion which shall accomplish an infinitely great distance in an infinitely short time. You may mix in a little practical mechanics, if you choose. Invent some method of taking the tardy courier over his road at the rate of sixty miles a minute. Demonstrate me this discovery (when you have made it!) mathematically, and approximate it practically, and Abscissa is yours. Until you can, I will thank you to trouble neither myself nor her.”

I could stand his mocking no longer. I stumbled mechanically out of the room and out of the house. I even forgot my hat and gloves. For an hour I walked in the moonlight. Gradually I succeeded to a more hopeful frame of mind. This was due to my ignorance of mathematics. Had I understood the real meaning of what he asked, I should have been utterly despondent.

Perhaps this problem of sixty miles a minute was not so impossible, after all. At any rate, I could attempt, though I might not succeed. And Rivarol came to my mind. I would ask him. I would enlist his knowledge to accompany my own devoted perseverance. I sought his lodgings at once.

The man of science lived in the fourth story back. I had never been in his room before. When I entered, he was in the act of filling a beer-mug from a carboy labeled aqua fortis.

“Seat you,” he said. “No, not in that chair. That is my Petty-Cash-Adjuster.”

But he was a second too late. I had carelessly thrown myself into a chair of seductive appearance. To my utter amazement, it reached out two skeleton arms, and clutched me with a grasp against which I struggled in vain. Then a skull stretched itself over my shoulder and grinned with ghastly familiarity close to my face.

Rivarol came to my aid with many apologies. He touched a spring somewhere, and the Petty-Cash-Adjuster relaxed its horrid hold. I placed myself gingerly in a plain cane-bottomed rocking-chair, which Rivarol assured me was a safe location.

“That seat,” he said, “is an arrangement upon which I much felicitate myself. I made it at Heidelberg. It has saved me a vast deal of small annoyance. I consign to its embraces the friends who bore, and the visitors who exasperate, me. But it is never so useful as when terrifying some tradesman with an insignificant account. Hence the pet name which I have facetiously given it. They are invariably too glad to purchase release at the price of a bill receipted. Do you well apprehend the idea?”

While the Alsatian diluted his glass of aqua fortis, shook into it an infusion of bitters, and tossed off the bumper with apparent relish, I had time to look around the strange apartment.

The four corners of the room were occupied respectively by a turning-lathe, a Rhumkorff coil, a small steam-engine, and an orrery in stately motion. Tables, shelves, chairs, and floor supported an odd aggregation of tools, retorts, chemicals, gas-receivers, philosophical instruments, boots, flasks, paper-collar boxes, books diminutive, and books of preposterous size. There were plaster busts of Aristotle, Archimedes, and Compte, while a great drowsy owl was blinking away, perched on the benign brow of Martin Farquhar Tupper. “He always roosts there when he proposes to slumber,” explained my tutor. “You are a bird of no ordinary mind. Schlafen Sie wohl.”

Through a closet door, half open, I could see a human-like form covered with a sheet. Rivarol caught my glance.

“That,” said he, “will be my masterpiece. It is a microcosm, an android, as yet only partly complete. And why not? Albertus Magnus constructed an image perfect to talk metaphysics and confute the schools. So did Sylvester II; so did Robertus Greathead. Roger Bacon made a brazen head that held discourses. But the first named of these came to destruction. Thomas Aquinas got wrathful at some of its syllogisms and smashed its head. The idea is reasonable enough. Mental action will yet be reduced to laws as definite as those which govern the physical. Why should not I accomplish a manikin which will preach as original discourses as the Rev. Dr. Allchin, or talk poetry as mechanically as Paul Anapest? My android can already work problems in vulgar fractions and compose sonnets. I hope to teach it the Positive philosophy.”

Out of the bewildering confusion of his effects Rivarol produced two pipes, and filled them. He handed one to me.

“And here,” he said, “I live and am tolerably comfortable. When my coat wears out at the elbows, I seek the tailor and am measured for another. When I am hungry, I promenade myself to the butcher’s and bring home a pound or so of steak, which I cook very nicely in three seconds by this oxy-hydrogen flame. Thirsty, perhaps, I send for a carboy of aqua fortis. But I have it charged, all charged. My spirit is above any small pecuniary transaction. I loathe your dirty greenbacks and never handle what they call scrip.”

“But are you never pestered with bills?” I asked. “Don’t the creditors worry your life out?”

“Creditors!” gasped Rivarol. “I have learned no such word in your very admirable language. He who will allow his soul to be vexed by creditors is a relic of an imperfect civilization. Of what use is science if it cannot avail a man who has accounts current? Listen. The moment you or any one else enters the outside door this little electric bell sounds me warning. Every successive step on Mrs. Grimler’s staircase is a spy and informer vigilant for my benefit. The first step is trod upon. That trusty first step immediately telegraphs your weight. Nothing could be simpler. It is exactly like any platform scale. The weight is registered up here upon this dial. The second step records the size of my visitor’s feet. The third his height, the fourth his complexion, and so on. By the time he reaches the top of the first flight I have a pretty accurate description of him right here at my elbow, and quite a margin of time for deliberation and action. Do you follow me? It is plain enough. Only the A B C of my science.”

EDWARD P. MITCHELL

From a photograph taken in 1872, the year in which
he wrote “The Tachypomp.” Mr. Mitchell is
now the editor of the New York “Sun.”

“I see all that,” I said, “but I don’t see how it helps you any. The knowledge that a creditor is coming won’t pay his bill. You can’t escape unless you jump out of the window.”

Rivarol laughed softly. “I will tell you. You shall see what becomes of any poor devil who goes to demand money of me—of a man of science. Ha! ha! It pleases me. I was seven weeks perfecting my Dun-Suppressor. Did you know,” he whispered exultingly—“did you know that there is a hole through the earth’s center? Physicists have long suspected it; I was the first to find it. You have read how Rhuyghens, the Dutch navigator, discovered in Kerguellen’s Land an abysmal pit which fourteen hundred fathoms of plumb-line failed to sound. Herr Tom, that hole has no bottom! It runs from one surface of the earth to the antipodal surface. It is diametric. But where is the antipodal spot? You stand upon it. I learned this by the merest chance. I was deep-digging in Mrs. Grimler’s cellar to bury a poor cat I had sacrificed in a galvanic experiment, when the earth under my spade crumbled, caved in, and, wonder-stricken, I stood upon the brink of a yawning shaft. I dropped a coal-hod in. It went down, down, down, bounding and rebounding. In two hours and a quarter that coal-hod came up again. I caught it, and restored it to the angry Grimler. Just think a minute. The coal-hod went down faster and faster, till it reached the center of the earth. There it would stop were it not for acquired momentum. Beyond the center its journey was relatively upward, toward the opposite surface of the globe. So, losing the velocity, it went slower and slower till it reached that surface. Here it came to rest for a second, and then fell back again, eight thousand odd miles, into my hands. Had I not interfered with it, it would have repeated its journey time after time, each trip of shorter extent, like the diminishing oscillations of a pendulum, till it finally came to eternal rest at the center of the sphere. I am not slow to give a practical application to any such grand discovery. My Dun-Suppressor was born of it. A trap just outside my chamber door, a spring in here, a creditor on the trap—need I say more?”

“But isn’t it a trifle inhuman,” I mildly suggested, “plunging an unhappy being into a perpetual journey to and from Kerguellen’s Land without a moment’s warning?”

“I give them a chance. When they come up the first time I wait at the mouth of the shaft with a rope in hand. If they are reasonable and will come to terms, I fling them the line. If they perish, ’tis their own fault. Only,” he added, with a melancholy smile, “the center is getting so plugged up with creditors that I am afraid there soon will be no choice whatever for ’em.”

By this time I had conceived a high opinion of my tutor’s ability. If anybody could send me waltzing through space at an infinite speed, Rivarol could do it. I filled my pipe and told him the story. He heard with grave and patient attention. Then for full half an hour he whiffed away in silence. Finally he spoke.

“The ancient cipher has overreached himself. He has given you a choice of two problems, both of which he deems insoluble. Neither of them is insoluble. The only gleam of intelligence old Cotangent showed was when he said that squaring the circle was too easy. He was right. It would have given you your Liebchen in five minutes. I squared the circle before I discarded pantalets. I will show you the work; but it would be a digression, and you are in no mood for digressions. Our first chance, therefore, lies in perpetual motion. Now, my good friend, I will frankly tell you that, although I have compassed this interesting problem, I do not choose to use it in your behalf. I, too, Herr Tom, have a heart. The loveliest of her sex frowns upon me. Her somewhat mature charms are not for Jean-Marie Rivarol. She has cruelly said that her years demand of me filial rather than connubial regard. Is love a matter of years or of eternity? This question did I put to the cold, yet lovely, Jocasta.”

“Jocasta Surd!” I remarked in surprise, “Abscissa’s aunt!”

“The same,” he said sadly. “I will not attempt to conceal that upon the maiden Jocasta my maiden heart has been bestowed. Give me your hand, my nephew, in affliction as in affection!”

Rivarol dashed away a not discreditable tear, and resumed:

“My only hope lies in this discovery of perpetual motion. It will give me the fame, the wealth. Can Jocasta refuse these? If she can, there is only the trap-door and—Kerguellen’s Land!”

I bashfully asked to see the perpetual-motion machine. My uncle in affliction shook his head.

“At another time,” he said. “Suffice it at present to say that it is something upon the principle of a woman’s tongue. But you see now why we must turn in your case to the alternative condition, infinite speed. There are several ways in which this may be accomplished theoretically. By the lever, for instance. Imagine a lever with a very long and a very short arm. Apply power to the shorter arm which will move it with great velocity. The end of the long arm will move much faster. Now keep shortening the short arm and lengthening the long one, and as you approach infinity in their difference of length, you approach infinity in the speed of the long arm. It would be difficult to demonstrate this practically to the professor. We must seek another solution. Jean-Marie will meditate. Come to me in a fortnight. Good night. But stop! Have you the money—das Gelt?”

“Much more than I need.”

“Good! Let us strike hands. Gold and knowledge, science and love, what may not such a partnership achieve? We go to conquer thee, Abscissa. Vorwärts!”

When at the end of a fortnight I sought Rivarol’s chamber, I passed with some little trepidation over the terminus of the air line to Kerguellen’s Land, and evaded the extended arms of the Petty-Cash-Adjuster. Rivarol drew a mug of ale for me, and filled himself a retort of his own peculiar beverage.

“Come,” he said at length, “let us drink success to the Tachypomp.”

“The Tachypomp?”

“Yes. Why not? Tachu, quickly, and pempo, pepompa, to send. May it send you quickly to your wedding-day! Abscissa is yours. It is done. When shall we start for the prairies?”

“Where is it?” I asked, looking in vain around the room for any contrivance which might seem calculated to advance matrimonial prospects.

“It is here,” and he gave his forehead a significant tap. Then he held forth didactically.

“There is force enough in existence to yield us a speed of sixty miles a minute or even more. All we need is the knowledge how to combine and apply it. The wise man will not attempt to make some great force yield some great speed. He will keep adding the little force to the little force, making each little force yield its little speed, until an aggregate of little forces shall be a great force, yielding an aggregate of little speeds, a great speed. The difficulty is not in aggregating the forces; it lies in the corresponding aggregation of the speeds. One musket-ball will go, say, a mile. It is not hard to increase the force of muskets to a thousand, yet the thousand musket-balls will go no farther and no faster than the one. You see, then, where our trouble lies. We cannot readily add speed to speed, as we add force to force. My discovery is simply the utilization of a principle which extorts an increment of speed from each increment of power. But this is the metaphysics of physics. Let us be practical or nothing.

“When you have walked forward on a moving train from the rear car toward the engine, did you ever think what you were really doing?”

“Why, yes, I have generally been going to the smoking-car to have a cigar.”

Drawn by Reginald Birch

“THAT SHE HERSELF WAS NOT INDIFFERENT I SOON HAD
REASON TO REGARD AS A SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH”

“Tut! tut! not that! I mean did it ever occur to you on such an occasion that absolutely you were moving faster than the train? The train passes the telegraph-poles at the rate of thirty miles an hour, say. You walk toward the smoking-car at the rate of four miles an hour. Then you pass the telegraph-poles at the rate of thirty-four miles. Your absolute speed is the speed of the engine, plus the speed of your own locomotion. Do you follow me?”

I began to get an inkling of his meaning, and told him so.

“Very well. Let us advance a step. Your addition to the speed of the engine is trivial, and the space in which you can exercise it, limited. Now, suppose two stations, A and B, two miles distant by the track. Imagine a train of platform cars, the last car resting at station A. The train is a mile long, say. The engine is therefore within a mile of station B. Say the train can move a mile in ten minutes. The last car, having two miles to go, would reach B in twenty minutes, but the engine, a mile ahead, would get there in ten. You jump on the last car at A in a prodigious hurry to reach Abscissa, who is at B. If you stay on the last car, it will be twenty long minutes before you see her. But the engine reaches B and the fair lady in ten. You will be a stupid reasoner and an indifferent lover if you don’t put for the engine over those platform cars as fast as your legs will carry you. You can run a mile, the length of the train, in ten minutes. Therefore you reach Abscissa when the engine does, or in ten minutes—ten minutes sooner than if you had lazily sat down upon the rear car and talked politics with the brakeman. You have diminished the time by one half. You have added your speed to that of the locomotive to some purpose. Nicht wahr?”

I saw it perfectly; much plainer, perhaps, for his putting in the clause about Abscissa.

He continued:

“This illustration, though a slow one, leads up to a principle which may be carried to any extent. Our first anxiety will be to spare your legs and wind. Let us suppose that the two miles of track are perfectly straight, and make our train one platform car, a mile long, with parallel rails laid upon its top. Put a little dummy engine on these rails, and let it run to and fro along the platform car, while the platform car is pulled along the ground track. Catch the idea? The dummy takes your place. But it can run its mile much faster. Fancy that our locomotive is strong enough to pull the platform car over the two miles in two minutes. The dummy can attain the same speed. When the engine reaches B in one minute, the dummy, having gone a mile atop the platform car, reaches B also. We have so combined the speeds of those two engines as to accomplish two miles in one minute. Is this all we can do? Prepare to exercise your imagination.”

I lit my pipe.

“Still two miles of straight track between A and B. On the track a long platform car, reaching from A to within a quarter of a mile of B. We will now discard ordinary locomotives and adopt as our motive power a series of compact magnetic engines, distributed underneath the platform car all along its length.”

“I don’t understand those magnetic engines.”

“Well, each of them consists of a great iron horseshoe, rendered alternately a magnet and not a magnet by an intermittent current of electricity from a battery, this current in its turn regulated by clockwork. When the horseshoe is in the circuit, it is a magnet, and it pulls its clapper toward it with enormous power. When it is out of the circuit, the next second, it is not a magnet, and it lets the clapper go. The clapper, oscillating to and fro, imparts a rotatory motion to a fly-wheel, which transmits it to the drivers on the rails. Such are our motors. They are no novelty, for trial has proved them practicable.

“With a magnetic engine for every truck of wheels, we can reasonably expect to move our immense car, and to drive it along at a speed, say, of a mile a minute.

“The forward end, having but a quarter of a mile to go, will reach B in fifteen seconds. We will call this platform car number I. On top of number I are laid rails on which another platform car, number II, a quarter of a mile shorter than number I, is moved in precisely the same way. Number II, in its turn, is surmounted by number III, moving independently of the tiers beneath, and a quarter of a mile shorter than number II. Number II is a mile and a half long; number III a mile and a quarter. Above, on successive levels, are number IV, a mile long; number V, three quarters of a mile; number VI, half a mile; number VII, a quarter of a mile, and number VIII, a short passenger-car on top of all.

“Each car moves upon the car beneath it, independently of all the others, at the rate of a mile a minute. Each car has its own magnetic engines. Well, the train being drawn up with the latter end of each car resting against a lofty bumping-post at A, Tom Furnace, the gentlemanly conductor, and Jean-Marie Rivarol, engineer, mount by a long ladder to the exalted number VIII. The complicated mechanism is set in motion. What happens?

Drawn by Reginald Birch

“‘THIS IS THE TACHYPOMP. DOES IT JUSTIFY THE NAME?’”

“Number VIII runs a quarter of a mile in fifteen seconds, and reaches the end of number VII. Meanwhile number VII has run a quarter of a mile in the same time, and reached the end of number VI; number VI, a quarter of a mile in fifteen seconds, and reached the end of number V; number V, the end of number IV; number IV, of number III; number III, of number II; number II, of number I. And number I, in fifteen seconds, has gone its quarter of a mile along the ground track, and has reached station B. All this has been done in fifteen seconds. Wherefore, numbers I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII come to rest against the bumping-post at B, at precisely the same second. We, in number VIII, reach B just when number I reaches it. In other words, we accomplish two miles in fifteen seconds. Each of the eight cars, moving at the rate of a mile a minute, has contributed a quarter of a mile to our journey, and has done its work in fifteen seconds. All the eight did their work at once, during the same fifteen seconds. Consequently we have been whizzed through the air at the somewhat startling speed of seven and a half seconds to the mile. This is the Tachypomp. Does it justify the name?”

Drawn by Reginald Birch

“IN FRONT OF ME STOOD PROFESSOR SURD HIMSELF, LOOKING
DOWN WITH A NOT UNPLEASANT SMILE”

Although a little bewildered by the complexity of cars, I apprehended the general principle of the machine. I made a diagram, and understood it much better. “You have merely improved on the idea of my moving faster than the train when I was going to the smoking-car?” I said.

“Precisely. So far we have kept within the bounds of the practicable. To satisfy the professor, you can theorize in something after this fashion: if we double the number of cars, thus decreasing by one half the distance which each has to go, we shall attain twice the speed. Each of the sixteen cars will have but one eighth of a mile to go. At the uniform rate we have adopted, the two miles can be done in seven and a half instead of fifteen seconds. With thirty-two cars, and a sixteenth of a mile, or twenty rods difference in their length, we arrive at the speed of a mile in less than two seconds; with sixty-four cars, each traveling but ten rods, a mile under the second. More than sixty miles a minute! If this isn’t rapid enough for the professor, tell him to go on increasing the number of his cars and diminishing the distance each one has to run. If sixty-four cars yield a speed of a mile inside the second, let him fancy a Tachypomp of six hundred and forty cars, and amuse himself calculating the rate of car number 640. Just whisper to him that when he has an infinite number of cars with an infinitesimal difference in their lengths, he will have obtained that infinite speed for which he seems to yearn. Then demand Abscissa.”

I wrung my friend’s hand in silent and grateful admiration. I could say nothing.

“You have listened to the man of theory,” he said proudly. “You shall now behold the practical engineer. We will go to the west of the Mississippi and find some suitably level locality. We will erect thereon a model Tachypomp. We will summon thereunto the professor, his daughter, and why not his fair sister Jocasta as well? We will take them on a journey which shall much astonish the venerable Surd. He shall place Abscissa’s digits in yours and bless you both with an algebraic formula. Jocasta shall contemplate with wonder the genius of Rivarol. But we have much to do. We must ship to St. Joseph the vast amount of material to be employed in the construction of the Tachypomp. We must engage a small army of workmen to effect that construction, for we are to annihilate time and space. Perhaps you had better see your bankers.”

I rushed impetuously to the door. There should be no delay.

“Stop! stop! Um Gottes Willen, stop!” shrieked Rivarol. “I launched my butcher this morning and I haven’t bolted the—”

But it was too late. I was upon the trap. It swung open with a crash, and I was plunged down, down, down! I felt as though I were falling through illimitable space. I remember wondering, as I rushed through the darkness, whether I should reach Kerguellen’s Land or stop at the center. It seemed an eternity. Then my course was suddenly and painfully arrested.

I opened my eyes. Around me were the walls of Professor Surd’s study. Under me was a hard, unyielding plane which I knew too well was Professor Surd’s study floor. Behind me was the black, slippery haircloth chair which had belched me forth much as the whale served Jonah. In front of me stood Professor Surd himself, looking down with a not unpleasant smile.

“Good evening, Mr. Furnace. Let me help you up. You look tired, sir. No wonder you fell asleep when I kept you so long waiting. Shall I get you a glass of wine? No? By the way, since receiving your letter I find that you are a son of my old friend Judge Furnace. I have made inquiries, and see no reason why you should not make Abscissa a good husband.”

Still, I can see no reason why the Tachypomp should not have succeeded. Can you?

THE LANDSCAPE-PAINTER

FROM THE PAINTING BY CARL MARR, IN THE MODERN GALLERY, BUDAPEST

(THE CENTURY’S AMERICAN ARTISTS SERIES)

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LARGER IMAGE]

“SCHEDULE K”
THE EFFECT OF THE TARIFF
ON THE WOOL-GROWER, THE
MANUFACTURER, THE WORKMAN,
AND THE CONSUMER

BY N. I. STONE

Formerly Chief Statistician of the Tariff Board

NO part of our tariff has been more scathingly denounced in Congress and by the press than what is known as “Schedule K.” No schedule that has received half the attention bestowed on Schedule K has managed to withstand the fierce onslaughts of the united tariff reformers of both political parties so successfully as the schedule covering wool and its manufactures. Repeatedly raised during the Civil War, when the urgent need of additional revenue was the sole motive of frequent tariff revision, slightly reduced in 1872 and 1883, scaled down still more in the Democratic Wilson act of 1894, it managed in the intervals between these acts to recover lost ground and, since 1897, to eclipse all previous records for high-tariff climbing.

The secret of this exceptional record in our tariff history is not far to seek. It lies in the peculiar interlacing of interests between the sheep-grower of the West and the manufacturer of the East, which has no parallel in other industries. Most of the farm products are either left on the free list, like cotton, or, if protected by a duty, are not affected by it. Thus we have duties on corn, wheat, oats, rye, and meat, but no one familiar with the situation has ever seriously maintained that the duty has been more than a convenient embellishment of our tariff for the use of campaign spellbinders in farm districts. As long as we produce more cereals, meats, and other farm products than we consume, and send the surplus to the world’s markets, the prices of these products, under free competition at home, will be regulated by conditions of world supply and demand, leaving the duties a dead letter on the statute-books. Wool is a conspicuous exception in the list of American farm products. After half a century of exceptionally high protection, fixed by the beneficiaries of the tariff themselves, the American wool-grower still falls short in his output to the extent of more than one third of the domestic demand. The deficit must be covered by importation from foreign countries, the price of imported wool being enhanced by the amount of the duty. Under these conditions the duty on raw wool acts as a powerful lever in increasing the price of the domestic wool furnishing the remaining two thirds of our consumption. No wonder that the wool-grower has always been an enthusiastic advocate of a duty on raw wool.

On the other hand, the New England manufacturer, himself a believer in high duties on woolen goods, has been rather skeptical as to the merits of a duty on a raw material of which we have never been able to produce enough, and are producing an ever diminishing share. Hence the New England woolen manufacturer has been as enthusiastic for free wool as the New England shoe manufacturer is for free hides, without losing at the same time his faith in high duties on woolen goods. However, the manufacturers discovered at an early stage in the game that unless they were willing to acquiesce in a duty on their raw material, the representatives from the wool-growing States in Congress could not see any advantage in high duties on woolens. This is what led to the powerful combination of these two great interests to which the late Senator Dolliver, in his memorable speech in the Senate in the extra session of Congress in 1909, referred as “that ceremony when the shepherd’s crook and the weaver’s distaff were joined together in the joyous wedlock which no man has been able to put asunder.” At that joint meeting of the representatives of wool-growers and woolen-cloth manufacturers held at Syracuse in December, 1865, when it was supposed that, with the disappearance of the need for extraordinary revenue, the war duties would be reduced, “it was agreed between them,” in the words of the late John Sherman, who had a great deal to do with the shaping of the tariff, “after full discussion, that the rates of duty reported by the Senate bill should be given them, and they were satisfied with them, and have never called them in question.”

It remained for a long-suffering public finally to call those rates in question. And when a Republican President called Congress in extraordinary session in March, 1909, to fulfil the pledges of his party for a downward revision, he found, to use his own words, uttered in the now famous Winona speech, that “Mr. Payne, in the House, and Mr. Aldrich, in the Senate, although both favored reduction in the schedule, found that in the Republican party the interests of the wool-growers of the far West and the interests of the woolen manufacturers in the East and in other States, reflected through their representatives in Congress, was sufficiently strong to defeat any attempt to change the woolen tariff, and that, had it been attempted, it would have beaten the bill reported from either committee.”

However, the President thought that Schedule K should receive the attention of Congress after the newly created Tariff Board had made a thorough investigation of the woolen industry. Taking the President at his word, the country waited two years more with great impatience for the result of the findings of his board. But once more was the country baffled by the united beneficiaries of Schedule K in its efforts looking to the lowering of the rates. When a majority in Congress composed of Democrats and Republican insurgents laid aside party differences in a common effort to reduce the woolen duties, the same leaders of whose tactics President Taft had complained were able to persuade him that the revised schedule was so much at variance with the findings of the Tariff Board as to justify his veto. Thus the country is facing the new situation in the extraordinary session of the Sixty-third Congress, with Schedule K still proudly holding the fort on the pinnacle of the American tariff wall. The present is, therefore, just the time for an analysis of the situation in which the claims of the conflicting interests may be reviewed in the light of now well-established facts.