Two of my guests who overheard me tell Anna offered to take the matter up with the manager of the hotel if the head waiter refused to keep me on. This frightened me stiff. Ten days more at the Sea Foam was more than I could look forward to with equanimity. There was genuine pathos in my voice when I begged them not to interfere.
My description of my discharge so affected Mary, my roommate, that she insisted on taking me for an outing. In fact, nothing but my positive refusal to get into a wheel-chair prevented her from indulging in that extravagant attention. Truthfully assuring her that it would be much more enjoyable to sit and watch the crowd, we found comfortable seats under a pavilion and there spent the afternoon.
Perhaps it was the weather, or maybe the reaction following the emotional elation caused by the incident of my discharge. Whatever the reason, I have never before or since experienced such a virulent attack of discouragement as I did while watching that moving throng. Not for myself alone, but for the human race. While watching the people passing in front of us—two steady streams of walkers with two packed lines of wheel-chairs between—I suddenly realized them as an endless succession of pygmies.
Not one of them nor all of them could stop the incoming nor the outgoing of the sea that over the beach had the look of dirty bilge-water as creeping in higher and higher it slapped the sand. Nor could one of them nor all of them sweep aside the mist that like a dingy white curtain cut off our view of the ocean and rendered indistinct the end of the boardwalk.
What were they trying to do, these pygmies? For what were they struggling? Here they were tramping futilely up and down the shore, working hard to digest the food with which they had just stuffed themselves—while in the rear of the hotels I knew there were ten times as many working even harder to get food to support life.
What did it all mean—this endless, unceasing struggle between human cooties and human drudges? What did it all amount to—the lives of these pygmies? Where had they come from? Where were they going? What were they trying to do?
Then, my thoughts turning inward, I demanded of myself:
“What are you trying to do? Granting that these pygmies crawling along the beaches are human cooties and those working in the hotels are human drudges, what then? The cooties are no more to blame for our economic system than the drudges. You’ve been a human cooty and you know that you did not give any more thought to the human drudges who slaved for your comfort than these people do to you. Remember the time you stopped at the Ardale-Stratton? Spent money like water.”
Thus reminded of my first visit to this resort, my mind slipped back more than ten years. I had come down from New York City under the chaperonage of one of the most distinguished women in the country. We planned to remain two weeks. Before the end of that time she had been taken seriously ill, and, though her own relatives and friends left her and returned to their homes, I remained. Bored by the monotony of hotel life, with the knowledge of spending too much money perpetually nagging at my consciousness, I dreaded to leave the old lady among strangers and attended only by her maid. Our visit stretched from two weeks to five months. Day after day I had loafed along the beach, watching the water—the threatening, the greedy, the sullen, the laughing, the beautiful, the peaceful, the soothing sea.
With a throb of pride I recalled that every Sunday morning during that tedious visit I had tipped my waiter and chambermaid one dollar each. Though I recalled that the service they gave me was always the best, I could not remember the name of either. Were they to meet me face to face I would not be conscious of ever having seen them before. I had never realized them as fellow human beings. I had never considered their convenience. I had never considered their feelings. In extenuation I told myself that it was because I had not understood.