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American Notes By Rudyard Kipling
CHAPTER VII - AMERICA'S DEFENCELESS COASTS
Rudyard Kipling
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       CHAPTER VII - AMERICA'S DEFENCELESS COASTS
       JUST suppose that America were twenty days distant from England.
       Then a man could study its customs with undivided soul; but being
       so very near next door, he goes about the land with one eye on
       the smoke of the flesh-pots of the old country across the seas,
       while with the other he squints biliously and prejudicially at
       the alien.
       I can lay my hand upon my sacred heart and affirm that up to
       to-day I have never taken three consecutive trips by rail without
       being delayed by an accident. That it was an accident to another
       train makes no difference. My own turn may come next.
       A few miles from peaceful, pleasure-loving Lakewood they had
       managed to upset an express goods train to the detriment of the
       flimsy permanent way; and thus the train which should have left
       at three departed at seven in the evening. I was not angry. I
       was scarcely even interested. When an American train starts on
       time I begin to anticipate disaster--a visitation for such good
       luck, you understand.
       Buffalo is a large village of a quarter of a million inhabitants,
       situated on the seashore, which is falsely called Lake Erie. It
       is a peaceful place, and more like an English county town than
       most of its friends.
       Once clear of the main business streets, you launch upon miles
       and miles of asphalted roads running between cottages and
       cut-stone residences of those who have money and peace. All the
       Eastern cities own this fringe of elegance, but except in Chicago
       nowhere is the fringe deeper or more heavily widened than in
       Buffalo.
       The American will go to a bad place because he cannot speak
       English, and is proud of it; but he knows how to make a home for
       himself and his mate, knows how to keep the grass green in front
       of his veranda, and how to fullest use the mechanism of life--hot
       water, gas, good bell-ropes, telephones, etc. His shops sell him
       delightful household fitments at very moderate rates, and he is
       encompassed with all manner of labor-saving appliances. This
       does not prevent his wife and his daughter working themselves to
       death over household drudgery; but the intention is good.
       When you have seen the outside of a few hundred thousand of these
       homes and the insides of a few score, you begin to understand why
       the American (the respectable one) does not take a deep interest
       in what they call "politics," and why he is so vaguely and
       generally proud of the country that enables him to be so
       comfortable. How can the owner of a dainty chalet, with
       smoked-oak furniture, imitation Venetian tapestry curtains, hot
       and cold water laid on, a bed of geraniums and hollyhocks, a baby
       crawling down the veranda, and a self-acting twirly-whirly hose
       gently hissing over the grass in the balmy dusk of an August
       evening--how can such a man despair of the Republic, or descend
       into the streets on voting days and mix cheerfully with "the
       boys"?
       No, it is the stranger--the homeless jackal of a stranger--whose
       interest in the country is limited to his hotel-bill and a
       railway-ticket, that can run from Dan to Beersheba, crying:--"All
       is barren!"
       Every good American wants a home--a pretty house and a little
       piece of land of his very own; and every other good American
       seems to get it.
       It was when my gigantic intellect was grappling with this
       question that I confirmed a discovery half made in the West. The
       natives of most classes marry young--absurdly young. One of my
       informants--not the twenty-two-year-old husband I met on Lake
       Chautauqua--said that from twenty to twenty-four was about the
       usual time for this folly. And when I asked whether the practice
       was confined to the constitutionally improvident classes, he said
       "No" very quickly. He said it was a general custom, and nobody
       saw anything wrong with it.
       "I guess, perhaps, very early marriage may account for a good
       deal of the divorce," said he, reflectively.
       Whereat I was silent. Their marriages and their divorces only
       concern these people; and neither I travelling, nor you, who may
       come after, have any right to make rude remarks about them.
       Only--only coming from a land where a man begins to lightly turn
       to thoughts of love not before he is thirty, I own that playing
       at house-keeping before that age rather surprised me. Out in the
       West, though, they marry, boys and girls, from sixteen upward,
       and I have met more than one bride of fifteen--husband aged
       twenty.
       "When man and woman are agreed, what can the Kazi do?"
       From those peaceful homes, and the envy they inspire (two trunks
       and a walking-stick and a bit of pine forest in British Columbia
       are not satisfactory, any way you look at them), I turned me to
       the lake front of Buffalo, where the steamers bellow to the grain
       elevators, and the locomotives yell to the coal-shutes, and the
       canal barges jostle the lumber-raft half a mile long as it snakes
       across the water in tow of a launch, and earth, and sky, and sea
       alike are thick with smoke.
       In the old days, before the railway ran into the city, all the
       business quarters fringed the lake-shore where the traffic was
       largest. To-day the business quarters have gone up-town to meet
       the railroad; the lake traffic still exists, but you shall find a
       narrow belt of red-brick desolation, broken windows, gap-toothed
       doors, and streets where the grass grows between the crowded
       wharves and the bustling city. To the lake front comes wheat
       from Chicago, lumber, coal, and ore, and a large trade in cheap
       excursionists.
       It was my felicity to catch a grain steamer and an elevator
       emptying that same steamer. The steamer might have been two
       thousand tons burden. She was laden with wheat in bulk; from
       stem to stern, thirteen feet deep, lay the clean, red wheat.
       There was no twenty-five per cent dirt admixture about it at all.
       It was wheat, fit for the grindstones as it lay. They manoeuvred
       the fore-hatch of that steamer directly under an elevator--a
       house of red tin a hundred and fifty feet high. Then they let
       down into that fore-hatch a trunk as if it had been the trunk of
       an elephant, but stiff, because it was a pipe of iron-champed
       wood. And the trunk had a steel-shod nose to it, and contained
       an endless chain of steel buckets.
       Then the captain swore, raising his eyes to heaven, and a gruff
       voice answered him from the place he swore at, and certain
       machinery, also in the firmament, began to clack, and the
       glittering, steel-shod nose of that trunk burrowed into the
       wheat, and the wheat quivered and sunk upon the instant as water
       sinks when the siphon sucks, because the steel buckets within the
       trunk were flying upon their endless round, carrying away each
       its appointed morsel of wheat.
       The elevator was a Persian well wheel--a wheel squashed out thin
       and cased in a pipe, a wheel driven not by bullocks, but by much
       horse-power, licking up the grain at the rate of thou-sands of
       bushels the hour. And the wheat sunk into the fore-hatch while a
       man looked--sunk till the brown timbers of the bulkheads showed
       bare, and men leaped down through clouds of golden dust and
       shovelled the wheat furiously round the nose of the trunk, and
       got a steam-shovel of glittering steel and made that shovel also,
       till there remained of the grain not more than a horse leaves in
       the fold of his nose-bag.
       In this manner do they handle wheat at Buffalo. On one side of
       the elevator is the steamer, on the other the railway track; and
       the wheat is loaded into the cars in bulk. Wah! wah! God is
       great, and I do not think He ever intended Gar Sahai or Luckman
       Narain to supply England with her wheat. India can cut in not
       without profit to herself when her harvest is good and the
       Ameri-can yield poor; but this very big country can, upon the
       average, supply the earth with all the beef and bread that is
       required.
       A man in the train said to me:--"We kin feed all the earth, jest
       as easily as we kin whip all the earth."
       Now the second statement is as false as the first is true. One
       of these days the respectable Republic will find this out.
       Unfortunately we, the English, will never be the people to teach
       her; because she is a chartered libertine allowed to say and do
       anything she likes, from demanding the head of the empress in an
       editorial waste-basket, to chevying Canadian schooners up and
       down the Alaska Seas. It is perfectly impossible to go to war
       with these people, whatever they may do.
       They are much too nice, in the first place, and in the second, it
       would throw out all the passenger traffic of the Atlantic, and
       upset the financial arrangements of the English syndicates who
       have invested their money in breweries, railways, and the like,
       and in the third, it's not to be done. Everybody knows that, and
       no one better than the American.
       Yet there are other powers who are not "ohai band" (of the
       brotherhood)--China, for instance. Try to believe an
       irresponsible writer when he assures you that China's fleet
       to-day, if properly manned, could waft the entire American navy
       out of the water and into the blue. The big, fat Republic that
       is afraid of nothing, because nothing up to the present date has
       happened to make her afraid, is as unprotected as a jelly-fish.
       Not internally, of course--it would be madness for any Power to
       throw men into America; they would die--but as far as regards
       coast defence.
       From five miles out at sea (I have seen a test of her "fortified"
       ports) a ship of the power of H. M. S. "Collingwood" (they
       haven't run her on a rock yet) would wipe out any or every town
       from San Francisco to Long Branch; and three first-class
       ironclads would account for New York, Bartholdi's Statue and all.
       Reflect on this. 'Twould be "Pay up or go up" round the entire
       coast of the United States. To this furiously answers the
       patriotic American:--"We should not pay. We should invent a
       Columbiad in Pittsburg or--or anywhere else, and blow any
       outsider into h--l."
       They might invent. They might lay waste their cities and retire
       inland, for they can subsist entirely on their own produce.
       Meantime, in a war waged the only way it could be waged by an
       unscrupulous Power, their coast cities and their dock-yards would
       be ashes. They could construct their navy inland if they liked,
       but you could never bring a ship down to the water-ways, as they
       stand now.
       They could not, with an ordinary water patrol, despatch one
       regiment of men six miles across the seas. There would be about
       five million excessively angry, armed men pent up within American
       limits. These men would require ships to get themselves afloat.
       The country has no such ships, and until the ships were built New
       York need not be allowed a single-wheeled carriage within her
       limits.
       Behold now the glorious condition of this Republic which has no
       fear. There is ransom and loot past the counting of man on her
       seaboard alone--plunder that would enrich a nation--and she has
       neither a navy nor half a dozen first-class ports to guard the
       whole. No man catches a snake by the tail, because the creature
       will sting; but you can build a fire around a snake that will
       make it squirm.
       The country is supposed to be building a navy now. When the
       ships are completed her alliance will be worth having--if the
       alliance of any republic can be relied upon. For the next three
       years she can be hurt, and badly hurt. Pity it is that she is of
       our own blood, looking at the matter from a Pindarris point of
       view. Dog cannot eat dog.
       These sinful reflections were prompted by the sight of the
       beautifully unprotected condition of Buffalo--a city that could
       be made to pay up five million dollars without feeling it. There
       are her companies of infantry in a sort of port there. A gun-boat
       brought over in pieces from Niagara could get the money and get
       away before she could be caught, while an unarmored gun-boat
       guarding Toronto could ravage the towns on the lakes. When one
       hears so much of the nation that can whip the earth, it is, to
       say the least of it, surprising to find her so temptingly
       spankable.
       The average American citizen seems to have a notion that any
       Power engaged in strife with the Star Spangled Banner will
       disembark men from flat-bottomed boats on a convenient beach for
       the purpose of being shot down by local militia. In his own
       simple phraseology:--"Not by a darned sight. No, sir."
       Ransom at long range will be about the size of it--cash or crash.
       Let us revisit calmer scenes.
       In the heart of Buffalo there stands a magnificent building which
       the population do innocently style a music-hall. Everybody comes
       here of evenings to sit around little tables and listen to a
       first-class orchestra. The place is something like the Gaiety
       Theatre at Simla, enlarged twenty times. The "Light Brigade" of
       Buffalo occupy the boxes and the stage, "as it was at Simla in
       the days of old," and the others sit in the parquet. Here I went
       with a friend--poor or boor is the man who cannot pick up a
       friend for a season in America--and here was shown the really
       smart folk of the city. I grieve to say I laughed, because when
       an American wishes to be correct he sets himself to imitate the
       Englishman. This he does vilely, and earns not only the contempt
       of his brethren, but the amused scorn of the Briton.
       I saw one man who was pointed out to me as being the glass of
       fashion hereabouts. He was aggressively English in his get-up.
       From eye-glass to trouser-hem the illusion was perfect, but--he
       wore with evening-dress buttoned boots with brown cloth tops!
       Not till I wandered about this land did I understand why the
       comic papers belabor the Anglomaniac.
       Certain young men of the more idiotic sort launch into dog-carts
       and raiment of English cut, and here in Buffalo they play polo at
       four in the afternoon. I saw three youths come down to the
       polo-ground faultlessly attired for the game and mounted on their
       best ponies. Expecting a game, I lingered; but I was mistaken.
       These three shining ones with the very new yellow hide boots and
       the red silk sashes had assembled themselves for the purpose of
       knocking the ball about. They smote with great solemnity up and
       down the grounds, while the little boys looked on. When they
       trotted, which was not seldom, they rose and sunk in their
       stirrups with a conscientiousness that cried out "Riding-school!"
       from afar.
       Other young men in the park were riding after the English manner,
       in neatly cut riding-trousers and light saddles. Fate in
       derision had made each youth bedizen his animal with a checkered
       enam-elled leather brow-band visible half a mile away--a
       black-and-white checkered brow-band! They can't do it, any more
       than an Englishman, by taking cold, can add that indescribable
       nasal twang to his orchestra.
       The other sight of the evening was a horror. The little tragedy
       played itself out at a neighboring table where two very young men
       and two very young women were sitting. It did not strike me till
       far into the evening that the pimply young reprobates were making
       the girls drunk. They gave them red wine and then white, and the
       voices rose slightly with the maidens' cheek flushes. I watched,
       wishing to stay, and the youths drank till their speech thickened
       and their eye-balls grew watery. It was sickening to see,
       because I knew what was going to happen. My friend eyed the
       group, and said:--"Maybe they're children of respectable people.
       I hardly think, though, they'd be allowed out without any better
       escort than these boys. And yet the place is a place where every
       one comes, as you see. They may be Little Immoralities--in which
       case they wouldn't be so hopelessly overcome with two glasses of
       wine. They may be--"
       Whatever they were they got indubitably drunk--there in that
       lovely hall, surrounded by the best of Buffalo society. One
       could do nothing except invoke the judgment of Heaven on the two
       boys, themselves half sick with liquor. At the close of the
       performance the quieter maiden laughed vacantly and protested she
       couldn't keep her feet. The four linked arms, and staggering,
       flickered out into the street--drunk, gentlemen and ladies, as
       Davy's swine, drunk as lords! They disappeared down a side
       avenue, but I could hear their laughter long after they were out
       of sight.
       And they were all four children of sixteen and seventeen. Then,
       recanting previous opinions, I became a prohibitionist. Better
       it is that a man should go without his beer in public places, and
       content himself with swearing at the narrow-mindedness of the
       majority; better it is to poison the inside with very vile
       temperance drinks, and to buy lager furtively at back-doors, than
       to bring temptation to the lips of young fools such as the four I
       had seen. I understand now why the preachers rage against drink.
       I have said: "There is no harm in it, taken moderately;" and yet
       my own demand for beer helped directly to send those two girls
       reeling down the dark street to--God alone knows what end.
       If liquor is worth drinking, it is worth taking a little trouble
       to come at--such trouble as a man will undergo to compass his own
       desires. It is not good that we should let it lie before the
       eyes of children, and I have been a fool in writing to the
       contrary. Very sorry for myself, I sought a hotel, and found in
       the hall a reporter who wished to know what I thought of the
       country. Him I lured into conversation about his own profession,
       and from him gained much that confirmed me in my views of the
       grinding tyranny of that thing which they call the Press here.
       Thus:--I--But you talk about interviewing people whether they
       like it or not. Have you no bounds beyond which even your
       indecent curiosity must not go?
       HE--I haven't struck 'em yet. What do you think of interviewing
       a widow two hours after her husband's death, to get her version
       of his life?
       I--I think that is the work of a ghoul. Must the people have no
       privacy?
       HE--There is no domestic privacy in America. If there was, what
       the deuce would the papers do? See here. Some time ago I had an
       assignment to write up the floral tributes when a prominent
       citizen had died.
       I--Translate, please; I do not understand your pagan rites and
       ceremonies.
       HE--I was ordered by the office to describe the flowers, and
       wreaths, and so on, that had been sent to a dead man's funeral.
       Well, I went to the house. There was no one there to stop me, so
       I yanked the tinkler--pulled the bell--and drifted into the room
       where the corpse lay all among the roses and smilax. I whipped
       out my note-book and pawed around among the floral tributes,
       turn-ing up the tickets on the wreaths and seeing who had sent
       them. In the middle of this I heard some one saying: "Please,
       oh, please!" behind me, and there stood the daughter of the
       house, just bathed in tears--I--You unmitigated brute!
       HE--Pretty much what I felt myself. "I'm very sorry, miss," I
       said, "to intrude on the privacy of your grief. Trust me, I
       shall make it as little painful as possible."
       I--But by what conceivable right did you outrage--HE--Hold your
       horses. I'm telling you. Well, she didn't want me in the house
       at all, and between her sobs fairly waved me away. I had half
       the tributes described, though, and the balance I did partly on
       the steps when the stiff 'un came out, and partly in the church.
       The preacher gave the sermon. That wasn't my assignment. I
       skipped about among the floral tributes while he was talking. I
       could have made no excuse if I had gone back to the office and
       said that a pretty girl's sobs had stopped me obeying orders. I
       had to do it. What do you think of it all?
       I (slowly)--Do you want to know?
       HE (with his note-book ready)--Of course. How do you regard it?
       I--It makes me regard your interesting nation with the same
       shuddering curiosity that I should bestow on a Pappan cannibal
       chewing the scalp off his mother's skull. Does that convey any
       idea to your mind? It makes me regard the whole pack of you as
       heathens--real heathens--not the sort you send missions
       to--creatures of another flesh and blood. You ought to have been
       shot, not dead, but through the stomach, for your share in the
       scandalous business, and the thing you call your newspaper ought
       to have been sacked by the mob, and the managing proprietor
       hanged.
       HE--From which, I suppose you have nothing of that kind in your
       country?
       Oh! "Pioneer," venerable "Pioneer," and you not less honest
       press of India, who are occasionally dull but never blackguardly,
       what could I say? A mere "No," shouted never so loudly,
       would not have met the needs of the case. I said no word.
       The reporter went away, and I took a train for Niagara Falls,
       which are twenty-two miles distant from this bad town, where
       girls get drunk of nights and reporters trample on corpses in the
       drawing-rooms of the brave and the free!
       Content of CHAPTER VII - AMERICA'S DEFENCELESS COASTS
       -THE END-
       Rudyard Kipling's novel: American Notes
       _