_ OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN XII
Somehow the town presents to me a bereaved appearance. Since the action of the authorities clearing the sidewalks, I seem to miss some of my best friends. The tenants of the pavement had become my companions, after a fashion, so familiar were they to me. The extravagant gentleman who stood in front of the clothing store, with his change of clothes every day and the fixed stare out of his rain-washed eyes, was one of my warmest friends. He was no fair weather friend. The dusts of March, the showers of April, made no difference with him. He was there, always there, with his waterproof for the rain, his duster for the summer heat, and his sou-wester perched on his head when the Equinox set in. He had one of the most even dispositions I ever knew and always regarded me with the same mild, far-off look, whatever uniform or decoration he wore. He was the same with a blue jumper and overalls as he was with a diagonal suit with "This style $25" flying from the button-hole. There was a great gap the morning he disappeared. The deserted street looked like a Sunday or a funeral or some other occasion of unusual sadness. I went in one day to inquire about him. I didn't have far to go; he had been tumbled into a corner with empty collar boxes, a broken coal scuttle, and some fire kindling. He appeared deeply mortified. "This is a strange fix you find me in, Mr. Boyzy," he said as he struggled to sit endwise on the bottom of the coal scuttle, "and it is a strange world we find both of ourselves in, sir. Great crimes are committed in the name of progress, sir, very great, and this is one of them. I have been a public man in this city for ten years, sir. I have guided the tastes of the public--few knew how to clothe themselves until I showed them, and few would buy their clothing until they had seen me. I have had men stand and discuss my clothes for hours, making up their minds about the spring fashions. These city authorities little know what they are doing. But what do they care? Look at their clothes and tell me how many of them fit. What is it to them that a public man and benefactor lies here in a pile of collar boxes? They say that the old ideas that admitted of my standing on the sidewalk are done away with, and that this is an age of progress. What sort of progress is this, that takes a man who has been prominent before the people for years and dumps him into a dust pile? Look at me! I have never lacked backbone. Why, I am all backbone. [He had a backbone of iron]. No man ever knew me to get out of the way of a crowd or go with it. I have been a consistent public man with a backbone for ten years and here I am in a dust-pile!" Here the coal scuttle slipped and my old friend tumbled into the collar boxes with a groan. As I left him I could not help thinking how many public men all consistency and backbone have made similar reputations with my dummy friend by never going with or getting out of the way of the crowd, and ended by being tumbled into the dust-bin just for the lack of a little wisdom. Alas, how like my dethroned friend we all are, in the respect of clamoring about our opinions and wrongs long after the public has forgotten both them and us.
* * * * *
"This is a pretty condition for me to be in now, isn't it?" asked another old friend of mine that I went to look after. "Why, don't you remember me? I'm the fish that always used to be at the door as you went by." It was true, I could hardly remember him. He used to lie in state on a board on the sidewalk on hot days, half covered with ice, and his scales looking as bright as silver. Some mornings, I am afraid I used to catch a faint whiff of his breath, but of course this was not to be remembered against him in his great trouble now. His troubles had greatly changed him. From the aristocratic exclusiveness of the ice-board he had been reduced to being strung up by a string through his gills to a nail in the wall. The brightness of his scales was gone, and as far as rank went, he looked as ordinary as the bunch of humble hickory shad that hung near him. "What do you think of this way of treating a fish that has come three hundred miles from the coast to help you out in Lent? What sort of infidel authorities has this city got, to string up the friend of repentance and reform in this sort of way? Why, such a town as this ought to have nothing but herrings to keep Lent with, and they ought to be salt." It was no use trying to comfort my noble friend, but I could not help thinking that, fish that he was, he was human in finding his great trouble not so much in being strung up now, as in having seen better days and more distinction. And very human he was, too, in taking the ill-treatment of himself as an offence against Lent. We are so prone to take a grievance directed against ourselves as an affront to our politics, our church, or something else to which we bear about the same relation that a fish does to Lent.
* * * * *
The mature young woman who stood in front of the millinery store, and whom I have seen wear six different overcoats of various styles in one day, was among the victims of the new law. Her figure was one of the few that may correctly be termed wiry, but it was perfect. I may say that I have never seen a waist so slender, or a bust more perfect. But all of us have our defects; she had hers. In a fearful wind one day I made the discovery by her being blown over. She had no feet! I don't think she was the same woman after that terrible day, nor do I remember that the nose, that was turned awry by the fall, was ever straightened. When I spoke to her of the new law and her removal to a stand near the counter, she said it was a good thing. "No woman of proper feeling," she said with some asperity, "would have borne it as long as I did. I never wanted to stand there and be gazed at by men, it looked so bold. As for those women of brass that like it, it is all very well, but I couldn't stand it. Admiration can never compensate a right-minded woman for the staring of men. A woman must be very bold indeed to enjoy it. I like this retired corner much better than out on the walk. It has a home feeling about it, and the domestic sphere is always a true woman's choice." It was borne in upon me somehow, as I listened to her, that a woman with a broken nose and no feet will always think the woman with a pretty nose and two feet bold. There is a good deal in this saying if you will only ponder over it. Ponder it.
* * * * *
Ignominiously stowed away in a back yard I saw an old friend that always brought many reflections to my mind when exhibited on the sidewalk--a coop of chickens. The most humiliated of all my old acquaintances--a dominiquer rooster--had his head up through the slats to explain the situation. "Here's a pretty howdy do!" he remarked. "What sort of treatment is this? I can't see anything here except old whiskey barrels and clothes lines and dry goods boxes. I can hardly tell when it is daybreak in this miserable old yard. Why, this morning I commenced crowing two hours too soon, and a Chinaman over there raised the window and fired a tin can at my head. I can't attend to my business in a place like this; there is another rooster around the corner been crowing all day and I can't get at him. Look you, I'm no common rooster; I'm no chicken just raised for the Town Authorities to eat; I'm a warrior. Just look at these legs and these spurs--." And just as my friend was struggling to get his foot up through the slats, a washwoman in the second story emptied her soapsuds over the coop. He disappeared under the shower, amid the wild screaming of the hens. A moment later a bedraggled head, with one eye closed by suds, looked out through the side bars and remarked in a saddened voice--"I suppose the city authorities would be satisfied now--if they could see this." The sudden change in my old friend from a warrior to a bundle of wet feathers shocked me into graver thoughts.
Somehow, I have never seen a coop of chickens in all its glory on the sidewalk, that I did not think of the French Revolution and the Bastile. You have seen the picture--I cannot think of the painter's name now--of the members of the old regime in the prison amusing themselves, not knowing whose name was to be called next for the guillotine? To me there is a miniature human world in a chicken coop. All under sentence of death, and all eating and drinking, and clucking and crowing as if they were going to last forever. All scrambling and fighting over the grains of daily corn, even though the hand of the fatal purchaser is already descending into the mouth of the coop. Like their human brethren who do not wear feathers, the tallest and the strongest gets his head up through the slats and gets wider views of the world. He often mistakes the single street he can see for the Universe and crows out his discovery until he is picked out of the coop and hurried off to lose his head, an operation which teaches him that in fact he has discovered nothing. How like his brother, man!
All his speculations, all his telescopic philosophies, all his discoveries, find plausible support until he stumbles on an open grave. There, man and chickens are dumb. Somehow, those who write and talk about the future never impress me so much with how much they know, as with how little. How absolutely nothing they can tell. How echoless is the Awful Silence into which they toss their petty pebbles of theories and hopes and speculations. It seems to me that if it were not for that sensitive disc, the Conscience, which conveys to us the 'still small voice,' from a country far beyond the reach of our petty theories, the Silence that envelops this planet would be intolerable. It is unbroken even by the second great event of Life--Death. It must be a strange sight viewed from elsewhere--this terrestrial chicken coop of ours, so small that if each of its inhabitants were to touch hands they would make a ring around it, sailing through the unbroken silence of Space. A thin crust over a molten centre whirling at a thousand miles an hour. A collision, a jar, just enough to move it out of its orbit would wreck it--its surface covered with ignorant human chickens, knowing neither where they came from nor where they are going to, scratching, fighting, crowing, clucking, smoothing their feathers in vanity, and cocking their telescopes at the firmament in hungry curiosity! It is a sight that must make the Angels weep. _