he Doctor closed the book with an angry gesture and handed it to me as I lay in my steamer chair, my eyes on the tumbling sea. He had read every line in it. So had P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, whose property it was, and who had announced himself only a moment before as heartily in sympathy with the pessimistic views of the author, especially in those chapters which described domestic life in America.
The Doctor, who has a wrist of steel and a set of fingers steady enough to adjust a chronometer, and who, though calm and silent as a stone god when over an operating table, is often as restless and outspoken as a boy when something away from it touches his heartstrings, turned to me and said:—
"There ought to be a law passed to keep these men out of the United States. Here's a Frenchman, now, who speaks no language but his own, and after spending a week at Newport, another at New York, two days at Niagara, and then rushing through the West on a 'Limited,' goes home to give his Impressions of America. Read that chapter on Manners," and he stretched a hand over my shoulder, turning the leaves quickly with his fingers. "You would think, to listen to these fellows, that all there is to a man is the cut of his coat or the way he takes his soup. Not a line about his being clean and square and alive and all a man,—just manners! Why, it is enough to make a cast-iron dog bite a blind man."
It would be a waste of time to criticise the Doctor for these irrelevant verbal explosives. Indefensible as they are, they are as much parts of his individuality as the deftness of his touch and the fearlessness of his methods are parts of his surgical training.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, looked at the Doctor with a slight lifting of his upper lip and a commiserating droop of the eyelid,—an expression indicating, of course, a consciousness of that superior birth and breeding which prevented the possibility of such outbreaks. It was a manner he sometimes assumed toward the Doctor, although they were good friends. P. Wooverman and the Doctor are fellow townsmen and members of the same set, and members, too, of the same club,—a most exclusive club of one hundred. The Doctor had gained admission, not because of his ancestors, etc. (see Log of the Mayflower), but because he had been the first and only American surgeon who had removed some very desirable portions of a gentleman's interior, had washed and ironed them and scalloped their edges, for all I know, and had then replaced them, without being obliged to sign the patient's death certificate the next day.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, on the other hand, had gained admission because of—well, Todd's birth and his position (he came of an old Salem family who did something in whale oil,—not fish or groceries, be it understood); his faultless attire, correct speech, and knowledge of manners and men; his ability to spend his summers in England and his winters in Nice; his extensive acquaintance among distinguished people,—the very most distinguished, I know, for Todd has told me so himself,—and—well, all these must certainly be considered sufficient qualifications to entitle any man to membership in almost any club in the world.
P. Wooverman Shaw Todd, Esquire, I say, elevated his upper lip and drooped his eyelid, remarking with a slight Beacon Street accent:—
"I cawn't agree with you, my dear Doctor,"—there were often traces of the manners and the bearing of a member of the Upper House in Todd, especially when he talked to a man like the Doctor, who wore turned-down collars and detached cuffs, and who, to quote the distinguished Bostonian, "threw words about like a coal heaver,"—"I cawn't agree with you, I say. It isn't the obzervar that we should criticise; it is what he finds." P. Wooverman was speaking with his best accent. Somehow, the Doctor's bluntness made him over-accentuate it,—particularly when there were listeners about. "This French critic is a man of distinction and a member of the most excloosive circles in Europe. I have met him myself repeatedly, although I cawn't say I know him. We Americans are too sensitive, my dear Doctor. His book, to me, is the work of a keen obzervar who knows the world, and who sees how woefully lacking we are in some of the common civilities of life," and he smiled faintly at me, as if confident that I shared his opinion of the Doctor's own short-comings. "This Frenchman does not lay it on a bit too thick. Nothing is so mortifying to me as being obliged to travel with a party of Americans who are making their first tour abroad. And it is quite impossible to avoid them, for they all have money and can go where they please. I remember once coming from Basle to Paris, in a first-class carriage,—it was only larst summer,—with a fellow from Indiana or Michigan, or somewhere out there. He had a wife with him who looked like a cook, and a daughter about ten years old, who was a most objectionable young person. You could hear them talk all over the train. I shouldn't have minded it so much, but Lord Norton's harf-brother was with me,"—and P. Wooverman Shaw Todd glanced, as he spoke, at a thin lady with a smelling bottle and an air of reserve, who always sat with a maid beside her, to see if she were looking at him,—"and one of the best bred men in England, too, and a man who"——
"Now hold on, Todd," broke in the Doctor, upon whom neither the thin lady nor any other listener had made the slightest impression. "No glittering generalities with me. Just tell me in so many plain words what this man's vulgarity consisted of."
"Why, his manners, his dress, Doctor,—everything about him," retorted Todd.