At midnight the cafe was crowded. By some chance the little
table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers, and two
vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to
the influx of patrons.
And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for
I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has
existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much
luggage, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.
I invoke your consideration of the scene--the marble-topped
tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay
company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an
exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the
sedulous and largess-loving garcons, the music wisely catering to
all with its raids upon the composers; the melange of talk and
laughter--and, if you will, the Wurzburger in the tall glass cones
that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the
beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk
that the scene was truly Parisian.
My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be
heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new
"attraction" there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And
then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and
longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak,
familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed
of a Maraschino cherry in a table d'hote grape fruit. He spoke
disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to
continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with
his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain
bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland.
Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki.
Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you
dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then
whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would
be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and
how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of
the chuchula weed. You would have addressed a letter to "E.
Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe," and
have mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to
him.
I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite
since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide discourse fearful lest
I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe-trotter.
But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to
cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravitation. And
as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with
glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world
and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there
is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that "the
men that breed from them, they traffic up and down, but cling to
their cities' hem as a child to the mother's gown." And whenever
they walk "by roaring streets unknown" they remember their native
city "most faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name
their bond upon their bond." And my glee was roused because I had
caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from
dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one
who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe
against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon.
Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore
Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was
describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the
orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was "Dixie," and
as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost
overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every
table.
It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can
be witnessed every evening in numerous cafes in the City of New
York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for
it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie
themselves to cafes at nightfall. This applause of the "rebel" air
in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable.
The war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops,
a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race-track, and the
brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who
compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a
"fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left
forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va.
Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now--the war, you
know.
When "Dixie" was being played a dark-haired young man sprang
up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically
his soft- brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped
into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.
The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of
us mentioned three Wurzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young
man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I
hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory
I had.
"Would you mind telling me," I began, "whether you are
from--"
The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was
jarred into silence.
"Excuse me," said he, "but that's a question I never like to
hear asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to
judge a man by his post-office address? Why, I've seen Kentuckians
who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from
Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who
didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the
seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded
Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were
too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed
grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man
and don't handicap him with the label of any section."
"Pardon me," I said, "but my curiosity was not altogether an
idle one. I know the South, and when the band plays 'Dixie' I like
to observe. I have formed the belief that the man who applauds that
air with special violence and ostensible sectional loyalty is
invariably a native of either Secaucus, N.J., or the district
between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this city. I was
about to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman
when you interrupted with your own--larger theory, I must
confess."
And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became
evident that his mind also moved along its own set of
grooves.
"I should like to be a periwinkle," said he, mysteriously, "on
the top of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo."
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to
Coglan.
"I've been around the world twelve times," said he. "I know an
Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and
I saw a goatherder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek
breakfast food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo,
Egypt, and another in Yokohama all the year around. I've got
slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't
have to tell 'em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle.
It's a mighty little old world. What's the use of bragging about
being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the
dale, or Euclid avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or Fairfax
County, Va., or Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better
world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten
acres of swampland just because we happened to be born
there."
"You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite," I said admiringly.
"But it also seems that you would decry patriotism."
"A relic of the stone age," declared Coglan, warmly. "We are
all brothers--Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the
people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride
in one's city or State or section or country will be wiped out, and
we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be."
"But while you are wandering in foreign lands," I persisted,
"do not your thoughts revert to some spo--some dear and--"
"Nary a spot," interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. "The
terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened
at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my abode. I've met a good
many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I've seen men
from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and
brag about their drainage canal. I've seen a Southerner on being
introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without
batting his eyes, the information that his grandaunt on his
mother's side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of
Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by
some Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he
came back to Kabul with the agent. 'Afghanistan?' the natives said
to him through an interpreter. 'Well, not so slow, do you think?'
'Oh, I don't know,' says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab
driver at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me. I'm
not tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just
put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial
sphere."
My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought
he saw some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I
was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to
Wurzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to
perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wondering how
the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I
believed in him. How was it? "The men that breed from them they
traffic up and down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to
the mother's gown."
Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for
his--
My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and
conflict in another part of the cafe. I saw above the heads of the
seated patrons E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in
terrific battle. They fought between the tables like Titans, and
glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked
down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing
"Teasing."
My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the
Earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their
famous flying wedge formation and bore them outside, still
resisting.
I called McCarthy, one of the French garcons, and asked him
the cause of the conflict.
"The man with the red tie" (that was my cosmopolite), said he,
"got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and
water supply of the place he come from by the other guy."
"Why," said I, bewildered, "that man is a citizen of the
world--a cosmopolite. He--"
"Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said," continued
McCarthy, "and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place."