There is nothing finer in the story than this, perhaps nothing quite so good, though all of Pensieri-Vani’s journeys are fruitful in minute incidents of a pleasant and picturesque quality. It is curious, too, to see how the Chevalier, who, except for that catlike scratching about the Aldines, is the gentlest and least hurtful of men, manifests at times a positive impatience of his own refined and peaceful civilization, a breathless envy of sterner races and of stormier days. When he discovers the tomb of the old Etrurian warrior, he is abashed and humbled at the thought of that fierce spirit summoned from thirty centuries of darkness to see the light of this invertebrate and sentimental age; requested to forget his deep draughts of blood and iron, and to contentedly “munch the dipped toast of a flabby humanitarianism, and sip the weak tea of brotherly love.” When he stands in the dim cathedral of Anagni, and contemplates the tombs of the illustrious Gaetani family, and the mosaics which blazon forth their former splendors, he shrinks with sudden shame from the contrast between his feeble, forceless will and the rough daring of that mighty clan. “The stippling technique of his own day seemed immeasurably poor and paltry compared with the broad, free, sketchy touch with which these men dashed off their stirring lives; and he stood confounded before that fiery and robust intensity which, so gloriously indifferent to the subtilties of the grammarian, the niceties of the manicure, and the torments of the supersensitive self-analyst, could fix its intent upon some definite desire, and move forward unswervingly to its attainment. Poor moderns! he sighed, who with all our wishing never reach our end, and with all our thinking never know what we really think.”
These unprofitable musings of the Chevalier’s seem to reflect some recurring discontent, some restless, unchastened yearnings on the part of the author himself; but they find no echo in the serene breast of the Prorege. He at least is as remote from envying the hostilities of the past as he is innocent of aspiring to the progressiveness of the future. He is fully alive to the merits of his own thrice-favored land, where the evil devices of a wrong-headed generation have never been suffered to penetrate: “Arcopia, the gods be praised, was exempt from the modern curse of bigness. One chimney was not offensive; but a million made a London. One refuse-heap could be tolerated; but accumulated thousands produced a New York. A hundred weavers in their own cottages meant peaceful industry and home content; a hundred hundred, massed in one great factory, meant vice and squalor and disorder. Society had never courted failure or bid for misery more ardently than when it had accepted an urban industrialism for a basis.... Happily the Arcopian population, except a fraction that followed the arts and another fraction that followed the sea, was largely agricultural, and exhibited in high union the chief virtue and the chief grace of civilized society—order and picturesqueness. The disturbing and ungracious catch-word, ‘Égalité,’ had never crossed the Arcopian sea; if the Prorege had not been tolerably sure that his mild sway was to be undisturbed by the clangor of cantankerous boiler-makers and the bickerings of a bumptious, shopkeeping bourgeoisie, he would never have undertaken the task at all. He regarded himself as a just, humane, and sympathetic ruler, but he believed that every man should have his own proper place and fill it.”
Such are the views smilingly detailed to the puzzled and outraged Occident, who, having been nourished in boyhood on the discourses of rustic theologians, and the forensics of Shelbyville advocates, finds it difficult to assimilate his own theories of life with a civilization he so imperfectly understands. He doubts his ability to take the European attitude, he doubts the propriety of the attitude when taken, and the struggle ends in the usual manner by his marrying a wife, and going back to Shelby County to be a good citizen for the rest of his days. Hors-Concours, mindful of the duties entailed on the proprietor of a small patrimony and an ancient name, espouses with becoming gravity and deliberation the Princess Altissimi. The Prorege retires to Arcopia the blessed, whither we would fain follow him if we could; and Pensieri-Vani, left desolate and alone, consoles himself with the reflection that life has many sides, and that Italy has not yet given up to him all she has to give: “Others might falter; but he was still sufficient unto himself, still master of his own time and his own actions, and enamored only of that delightful land whose beauty age cannot wither, and whose infinite variety custom can never stale.”
COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE
There is no place in the world where human nature is so thoroughly human or so purely natural as on the New York docks, when a great steamer load of returning travelers are being put through the peine forte et dure of the United States custom house. Everybody is striving to play a part, to assume an air of indifference which he does not feel, and of innocence which he knows to be fallacious; and, like Mrs. Browning’s Masker, everybody betrays too plainly in his “smiling face” and “jesting bold” the anxiety that preys upon his vitals. Packed snugly away in that wilderness of trunks and boxes are hundreds, nay, thousands, of pretty trifles, which it is the painful duty of every man, and the proud ambition of every woman, to carry in unscathed and undetected. The frank, shameless delight which a woman takes in smuggling has long puzzled the male moralist, who, following the intricacies of the feminine conscience, can find no satisfactory explanation of this by-path. He cannot bring her to understand why, when she has purchased and paid for an article, it should not be hers to take where she likes, to deal with as she pleases; and a dozen discourses on political economy and the laws of nations leave her unshaken in this simple and primitive conception. As the English are said to argue best in platoons, so a woman argues best in action; and, while her husband or brother is proving to her in the clearest possible fashion that a high protective tariff is a blessing to the land, she is assiduously storing away embroidered table covers, and silk stockings, and silver spoons, and tortoise-shell combs, and tiny jeweled pins, and bits of frail Venetian glass, wherever her practiced eye tells her they will best escape detection. In the abstract, of course, dear Edwin is right—he always is—but she is far too busy with her task to enter into abstractions just now. Whatever mental subtlety she possesses is reserved for a much more important ordeal—that of getting clear, with a clean conscience, from the searching questions of the inspector. “When I am asked if I have any presents I always answer no,” said a devout, church-going woman to me one day, “because I do not consider them presents until I give them away.”
The grim, perplexed seriousness with which the customs officers play their part makes a delightful foil (for the spectators) to the nimble, elusive mental movements of their adversaries; and it is in the conflict between aggressor and aggrieved, between invader and invaded, that the humors of our great national institution develop their choicest bloom. The fortunes of war which recently delayed my own boxes and my hoped-for escape, gave me, by way of compensation, an easy opportunity of observing and enjoying the experiences of other people, and I was encouraged in my diversion by the too evident glee of one of the minor actors in the strife. She was a very pretty girl, this gay young combatant, not more than sixteen years old, and she sat kicking her heels on somebody else’s trunk, while she watched with enviable composure the overhauling of her own. I had seen her often during the homeward voyage, and had spoken to her once or twice as she tripped endlessly up and down the deck in company with every man and boy on board; taking them impartially, one by one, and seeming to be on the same mysterious terms of intimacy with all. She had a traveling companion in the shape of a mother who adored her fretfully, and whom she treated with finely mingled affection and contempt. She never spoke of this relative without the prefix “poor.” “Poor mother is awfully sick to-day,” she would say in her shrill, high-pitched voice, with a laugh which showed all her little white teeth, and sounded a trifle unsympathetic in our ears. But five minutes later she was helping “poor mother” to her steamer chair, wrapping her up skilfully in half a dozen rugs and shawls, bullying the deck steward to bring her some hot bouillon, bullying her to drink the bouillon when brought, listening to her manifold complaints with an indulgent smile, and flatly refusing to obey, when entreated to put on a warmer jacket.
“Poor mother is always worrying about wraps,” was her only acknowledgment of the maternal solicitude; and even this remark was made, not to her prostrate parent, but to the youth who was waiting to bear her away.
The pair had been traveling alone all summer, but were met on the docks by a person whom they both called “cousin Jim,” and who assured them in a hearty, offhand manner that he would have them safe through the custom house in five minutes; a miscalculation, as it turned out, of quite three-quarters of an hour. Malignant fate assigned them an inspector who settled down to his search like an Indian to the war trail, and who seemed possessed with the idea that the wealth of the Indies lay secreted somewhere in those two shabby, travel-worn boxes. Whether this man was really enamored of his disagreeable task, whether he conscientiously believed that the United States would be impoverished and her industries crippled by the contents of that modest luggage, or whether he had been too pliable on former occasions, and seized this chance to assert his general incorruptibility, it would be hard to determine; but while older and less ardent officials lifted out trays and turned over corners in a purely perfunctory manner, seeing nothing, and seeking to see nothing of what lay beneath, this red-hot zealot went thoroughly and exhaustively to work upon the limited materials before him. Now the particular irritation of the custom house lies, not in the fact of your trunk being searched, but of your neighbor’s trunk escaping; and the sharpest sting is when you chance to know that your neighbor is carrying in unmolested ten times the value of your dutiable articles. If Miss Maisie, kicking her heels and smiling affably, did not realize the hardship of her position, Miss Maisie’s mother—she never had any other name, her sole claim to distinction resting on her daughter—felt it very keenly. She stood, anxious and angry, by the side of the inspector, protesting fretfully at each new in-road, and appealing for sympathy to her companions.
“It’s a perfect shame, the way he has rumpled your dresses, Maisie, and upset that tray you packed so nice and close. You will never be able to get the things back again in the world, and, if you do, one half of them will be broken before we reach home. And there’s your new fur cape all out of fold. I told you to wear it, or carry it in on your arm. No! that is not a present; at least I think not, is it, Maisie?” as a small brown paper parcel, carefully tied, was held up by the inspector for scrutiny.