Further, the potential bitterness of the recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her mistress’s cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny. She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid. On assuming the white woman’s clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also to the white woman’s dignity. The duskier race stands at the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought of his own discarded independence.
I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,—that period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,—sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy, uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.
No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes. At last one is one’s self and belongs not to another man’s coat, or another woman’s gown. It is a period of expansion, of pride: when one’s clothes are altogether one’s own, one’s pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes.
It was not alone for the new coat’s intrinsic sake that we desired it; we coveted still more the experience of giving it away when we were done with it. There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of giving away something that you no longer want. The pain of a recipient’s feelings on receiving a thing which you can afford to give away, but which he himself cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride in presenting him with something that you can’t use.
The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It follows that the best way to restore a pauper’s self-respect is to present him with some old clothes to give to some one still poorer; for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test of character. It was the custom of epics to represent the king as bestowing upon his guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old clothes. If you could picture some Homeric monarch in the act of giving away his worn-out raiment, in that moment you would see his kingliness dwindle.
The man who can receive another man’s old clothes without thereby losing his self-respect is fit to be a prince among paupers, but the man who can give another man his old clothes without wounding that man’s self-respect is fit to be the king of all philanthropists.
IV
Luggage and the Lady
I WRITE as one pursued through life by the malevolence of inanimate objects. My singular subjection to things was never brought so painfully home to me as during four months in Europe. Of course, my soul had been to Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I was taking it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage for its journey. I chained up my soul and held it under lock and key while I took counsel with certain seductive guidebooks. These paternal manuals left no detail untouched, until there was no fear left for me of cabs or custom-houses, of money-tables or time-tables. It was all as simple as bread and milk. One thing all my guides inveighed against, a superfluity of baggage; with them I utterly agreed. A trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign railways: there stood ready always an army of porters to escort one’s handbags. A lady could travel gayly with a single change of raiment; after a day’s dust and soil, merely the transformation of a blouse, and behold a toilet fit for any table d’hôte. Moreover, so remarkable were foreign laundry facilities that on tumbling to bed all you had to do was to summon an obliging maid, deliver, sleep, and on the morrow morn, behold yourself all crisply washed and ironed. As to the expense of a trunk and the battalions of porters, the guidebooks were correct; as to the rest, they lied. The single blouse theory is all very well if you don’t wear out or tear out by the way; and as to the laundry fallacy, do I not still see myself roaming the streets of Antwerp searching vainly for one single blanchisserie? My conclusion is that one needs clothes and a right mind about as much on one side of the Atlantic as on the other.
But I had not reached this conclusion when I bought my baggage, therefore I limited myself to two hand-pieces. For the first of these I had not far to search. It was that frail, slim, dapper thing, a straw suitcase. It was very light, just how light I was afterwards to discover, but before embarkation I regarded it with joy; it seemed to me suitable and genteel, with its sober gray sides and trim leather corners. With it I was satisfied, whereas from the first I felt misgiving about my second article of impedimenta. There was nothing genteel or ladylike about this, that was certain, but perhaps I am not the first traveler who has yielded to the mendacious promises of a telescope. It looks as if it would so obligingly yield to the need either of condensation or expansion. You may inflate or contract at will, and it’s all the same to the telescope. My telescope was peculiarly unbeautiful. Its material was a shiny substance looking like linoleum, called wood fiber, and having a bright burnt-orange color. Its corners were strengthened with sheet iron, lacquered black. You have seen the same in use by rural drummers, but rarely in a female hand. I don’t know why I bought it. It is part of my quarrel with inanimate objects that they always exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the shop, and always excite loathing so soon as they arrive at my home. In this instance it was both the saleswoman and the purchase that excited the hypnotism. She was of that florid, expansive, pompadoured type that always reduces my mind to feebleness. Moreover, she jumped up and down on my prospective telescope, bouncing before my eyes in all her bigness. Now, in my sober senses I do know that one’s primary motive in purchasing a handbag is not that one may dance upon it; but at that moment, as I watched her pirouetting as if on a springboard, I felt that no piece of luggage was anything worth unless you could jump upon it. I bought.
Almost at once that tawny bedemoned box began its career of naughtiness. The first thing it did on shipboard was to disappear. It stopped just long enough to be entered in the agent’s book, and then it leaped down into the hold and hid. I searched; the purser searched; so did six several stewards and stewardesses. The stewards searched the staterooms; I searched the passages; together we searched the hold, penetrating even the steerage to see if the missing article were congregating with the motley collection down there. We were four days out when, in a passage repeatedly searched, on a ledge near a porthole, behold my tawny telescope leering at me! My steward was genuinely superstitious over it. So was I.