The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

by L. P. Gratacap

“The canal has been an expensive enterprise,” suggested Leacraft. “It would be a great misfortune if it brought any kind of material reverses.”

“Rubbish,” retorted the doctor; “this prating is the madness or the envy of croakers and cranks. Do you think that a connexion between the oceans that will shorten the route from one to the other by nearly 6,000 miles, and bring our eastern seaboard, with all its tremendous agencies of production within reach of a continent that is slowly becoming itself occidentalized, and demanding every day the equipment of the west, is a mercantile delusion? We are all gainers. It is a scheme of mutualization on a world-wide scale, but America distributes the profits and holds the surplus.”

The two friends by this time had reached the entrance of the Museum, and passing through its symbolic portals, turned to the left, and found themselves in a dull room, portentously charged with an exhaustive exhibit of the commerce of all nations. Here, on tables and shelves, was displayed a wonderful assortment of primitive and modern ships, primeval dugouts, Philippine catamarans, Mediterranean pirogues, sloops, schooners, brigs, brigantines, barques, barkentines, luggers, lighters, caravals, Dutch monstrosities, models of those extraordinary ships which Motley has described as “built up like a tower, both at stem and stern, and presenting in their broad, bulbous prows their width of beam in proportion to their length, their depression amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to progress over the waves as could well be imagined,” the Latin trireme and the Greek trireme, the ironclads of France used in 1855, the monitors of the Civil War, the recent wonders in battleships, torpedo boats, and destroyers, with naphtha launches, submarine wonders, the old time American cutters, and models of the stately packets that once made the trip from New York to Portsmouth in fourteen days, with a various and diversified exhibit of yachts and pleasure boats, all burnished, japanned and varnished, and now dimly lustrous in the futile illumination of the room. Above them on the walls was a prolix illustration of the hydrography of the world; charts of currents, pelagic streams, areas of calms, submarine basins, maps of rainfalls, prevalent winds, storm regions, precipitation, barometric maxima and minima, and then still higher up on the walls, that dispensed knowledge over each square inch of their dusty and dusky surfaces, Leacraft descried the tabulations of tonnage of the merchant marine of the nations of the earth, with fabulous figures of imports and exports, and the staple products of this prolific and motherly old earth, caressed into fructification by the tireless arms of her scrambling broods of children.

Leacraft was soon deserted by the doctor, who found occasion to wander among the slowly arriving scientific gentry and politely inquire after the health of the particular scientific offspring, whose tottering footsteps each one was engaged in nurturing into a more reliant attitude before the world. Leacraft found the dim room, with its preoccupied occupants vacantly settling into the seats around him, and its motley array of picturesque models strangely congenial. It soothed, by the abrupt strangeness of its contents, the subdued intellectual placidity of the audience, and by its mere physical retirement from the outer bustle of the streets, and the iterative commonplaces of the hotel corridor. The exact process of subduction would have been hard keenly to analyze, but Leacraft seemed to forget his personal disquietude, and develop into a congenital oneness with these earnest men and women around him, eager to know, and not too patient towards sophistry or pretension. He hardly cared to know who was who. It made no matter. They all seemed freed from the petty vanities of living, and now engrossed in the triumphant tasks of thought; and he felt himself elevated into a kind of mental abstraction which eagerly carried on its functions in an atmosphere of ideas.

And yet how was it, that just above the little desk which was to receive the honorable burden of the lecturer’s manuscript, he suddenly distinctly saw the fair face, with its light blue eyes, its delicate blush of color, and the slightly mocking pout of the lips of Sally, the beloved. Leacraft almost rose upright in his astonishment at the impossible hallucination. He was leaning forward, half incredulous of the report of his own senses, and half subjected by a delicious whim that the apparition was an augury of success, when a commotion spreading on all sides of him roused his attention, and the vision fled. He would have willingly had it stay. People were rising in his vicinity, and soon the assembly was on its feet. Some one had entered who was the cause of this unusual excitement. “The President” came to his ears, murmured by a dozen persons near him, and he had hardly sprung to his own feet when, with many salutations, a strongly formed, rather bulky man, with a manner of almost nervous scrutiny passed by him moving down the aisle to the front. It was indeed President Roosevelt, and Leacraft, now startled into the most active interest, slipped forward a seat or two, to gain a position which might afford him a better view of this remarkable person. The audience remained standing until the President, escorted by a tall red-whiskered gentleman, whom Doctor M—, who had just turned up in search of his friend, whispered was Dr. George O. Smith, the distinguished Director of the Survey, had reached a seat reserved for him at the front of the hall.

Leacraft now observed more closely the character of the convocation, and realized its composite and representative elements. Dr. M—, always himself immersed in the study of the lives, achievements and distinctions of the prominent men of the country, was an enthusiastic verbal cicerone through the maze of faces which seemed suddenly to have condensed into a really crowded audience. Here was Dr. D—, the Alaskan explorer in the early days of the nineteenth century, the world recognized authority on the tertiary fossils of the east and west coasts, and a man of erudition and delightful literary skill. Beyond him sat Dr. M—, a quiet-faced man, curator of the National Museum, author of text books, and gifted with a singularly shrewd thoughtfulness. At his side sat the sphinx-featured F—, of Chicago, a gentle-minded scholar, to whom the Heavens had entrusted the secrets of their meteoritic denizens, and who, by a more fortunate circumstance, held a pen of consummate grace. Again at his side was the Jupiter-browed Ward, an erratic over the face of the globe, possessed with a transcendant enthusiasm for the same celestial visitors that F— described, and chasing them with the zeal of a lynx in their most inaccessible quarries; a man of immense conviviality, and controlling the smouldering fires of a temper that defied reason or resistance. At the front of the rows of chairs, and not far from the cynosure of all eyes—the President—were two notable students of the past life of the globe, Professors O— and S—, men whose studies in that amazing storehouse of extinct life which the West held sealed in its clays and marls, limestones and sandstones, had continued on higher and more certain levels the work of Marsh and Leidy and Cope, and who had transcribed before the whole world, in monuments of scientific precision, the most startling confessions of the fossil dead. To one side, on the same row, sat Prof. B—, known in two continents, for chemical learning, especially on that side of chemistry which mingles insensibly with the laws of matter. And whispering in his ear, with sundry emphatic nods, sat, next to him, Dr. R—, of Washington, learned in the ways of men’s digestion, and the enigmas of food and the arts of food-makers. In the row behind, the expressive head of Young, aureoled with years and honors, was seen, and at his side the face of Newcomb, who had set the seal of his genius and industry across the patterned stars. Here was A— H—, the geologist, reticent and receptive, there C—, weighted with new responsibilities in furnishing time to the rapacious biologist, and in discovering new ways of making this old world. Behind them sat M—, wise beyond belief in bric-a-brac and brachiopods, vindictively assertive, and self-sacrificingly tender and kind. There was McG— and I—, W—, A—, V—, and B— W—, bringing to the speaker the homage of archæology, of petrology, of zoology, and morphology. In a group of motionless and eager attention were A—, the sage metereologist, beloved in two continents; B—, abstruse and difficult, meditative, as a man might be who kept his hand on the pulses of matter, and B—, skillful in weighing the atoms of the air, or probing the volcanoes of the moon. In one line, mingling in conversation that reached Leacraft’s ears as a strange jargon of conflicting sciences, were G—, H— and H—k. And beyond them, mute, as if by mutual repulsion, sat F—, the agile scrutinizer of Nature’s crystals; P—, holding in his labyrinthine memory the names of half a universe of shells, and B—n, to whom each plant of the wayside bowed in recognition of a master’s knowledge of itself. Against the wall, in a triad of sympathy, was A—, the surgeon; S—, the neurologist, and R—. And alone, in an isolation that belied his intense geniality, was K—.

And through all the scientific congeries, which were far more extended than Leacraft could recognize, or even Dr. M— recall, was a more garrulous grouping of politicians, statesmen, diplomats, ministers, the well dressed circles of the rich, and the dillettantes, drawn to this unusual assemblage by the presence of the President.

The quiet and dull room, faded, and with contents tiresomely drilled into the exact alignments of a museum hall, took on an almost brilliant appearance. The fancy amused itself with the thought that it too felt, in its stagnated life, the unique occasion, and shook itself into a momentary wakefulness, to note and record its distinguished guests, that its streaked walls tried to hide their unseemly rents, and the multiplied models and charts struggled to look recent and familiar and appreciative, amid such intellectual tumult.

But now the audience was forgotten at that theatrical moment when the chairman and the lecturer advanced over the platform to assume the directive guidance of the evening. They did advance with that curious gaucherie which somehow always disables the scientific man in his official and public utterances, and seems, by some trick of compensation, the more unredeemable as the unfortunate victim of its cynical attachment is the more distinguished and renowned.

Dr. S— stepped gingerly forward, a tall, effective man with hair hardly sanguine in color, and quite conventional in arrangement, with a cerebral development, that somehow disappointingly dwarfed the lower contours of his face, domed and broad as it was, with much scholarly promise. He was followed by the speaker of the evening, Mr. Binn, who seemed half inclined to screen himself from observation behind the utterly inadequate profile of the famous Director. The two men momentarily catching the full assault of the numerous eyes, each pair among them being the visible battery of a questioning and critical mind behind it, underwent an obvious confusion of intention and movement, and became somewhat mixed up with the table and chairs, and with each other. The Director extricated himself, came forward to the edge of the platform, and in a voice of half propitiatory jocularity, introduced the subject, and the speaker. He alluded to the favorable conjunction of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and that of the National Academy of Science, which brought so many eminent thinkers and observers together, and administered an especial emphasis to the question to be considered this evening. He mentioned, with a deferential bow in the direction of the President, that they had all been deeply honored by the presence of the Chief Executive of the Nation, to whom perhaps, more than to anyone else in the brilliant audience, the grave question of the structural and geological stability of the Isthmus of Darien, was one of overshadowing interest, and he congratulated everyone that the subject was in the hand “of one whose geological fame was beyond dispute, and his carefulness of statement unimpeached,” and the Director sat down, pulling off to one side of the stage, lest his own refulgence might dim the legitimate monopoly of that article by Dr. Binn. Leacraft observed that as the lecturer unrolled his manuscript on the reading desk, the President leaned outward, adjusted his eyeglasses, and scrutinized the geologist, who, from a rather embarrassed fumbling with his sheets, seemed conscious of the inquisition. A moment later, as if satisfied with his inspection, the President leaned back, bulky and immobile, and became an absorbed listener.