"Oh, if a man only could live up to the verses he cuts out of magazines!"
CHAPTER XVI.
With the Barbaric Hosts
History repeats itself so cleverly, with a variance of stage-settings and accessories so cunning, that the repetition seldom bores, and is, indeed, frequently undetected. Thus, the descent of the Barbarians upon a decadent people is a little tour de force that has been performed again and again since the oldest day. But because the assault nowadays is made not with force of arms we are prone to believe it is no longer made at all;—as if human ways had changed a bit since those ugly, hairy tribes from the Northern forests descended upon the Roman empire. And yet the mere difference that the assault is now made with force of money in no way alters the process nor does it permit the result to vary. On the surface all is cordiality and peaceful negotiation. Beneath is the same immemorial strife, the life-and-death struggle,—pitiless, inexorable.
What would have been a hostile bivouac within the city's gates, but for the matter of a few centuries, is now, to select an example which remotely concerns us, a noble structure on Riverside Drive, facing the lordly Hudson and the majestic Palisades that form its farther wall. And, for the horde of Goths and Visigoths, Huns and Vandals, drunkenly reeling in the fitful light of camp-fires, chanting weird battle-runes, fighting for captive vestals, and bickering in uncouth tongues over the golden spoils, what have we now to make the parallel convince? Why, the same Barbarians, actually; the same hairy rudeness, the same unrefined, all-conquering, animal force; a red-faced, big-handed lot, imbued with hearty good nature and an easy tolerance for the ways of those upon whom they have descended.
Here are chiefs of renown from the farthest fastnesses; they and their curious households: the ironmonger from Pittsburg, the gold-miner from Dawson, the copper chief from Butte, the silver chief from Denver, the cattle chief from Oklahoma, lord of three hundred thousand good acres and thirty thousand cattle, the lumber prince from Michigan, the founder of a later dynasty in oil, from Texas. And, for the unaesthetic but effective Attila, an able fashioner of pork products from Chicago.
Here they make festival, carelessly, unafraid, unmolested. For, in the lapse of time, the older peoples have learned not only the folly of resisting inevitables, but that the huge and hairy invaders may be treated and bartered with not unprofitably. Doubtless it often results from this amity that the patrician strain is corrupted by the alien admixture,—but business has been business since as many as two persons met on the face of the new earth.
For example, this particular shelter is builded upon land which one of the patrician families had held for a century solely because it could not be disposed of. Yet the tribesmen came, clamouring for palaces, and now this same land, with some adjoining areas of trifling extent, produces an income that will suffice to maintain that family almost in its ancient and befitting estate.
In this mammoth pile, for the petty rental of ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year, many tribes of the invaders have found shelter and entertainment in apartments of many rooms. Outwardly, in details of ornamentation, the building is said to duplicate the Chateaux Blois, those splendid palaces of Francis I. Inside are all the line and colour and device of elegant opulence, modern to the last note.