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.
Ive been around the world twelve times, said he. I know an Esquimau in Upernavik[25] who sends to Cincinnati[26] for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek[27] breakfast food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama[28] all the year around. Ive got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I dont have to tell em how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. Its a mighty little old world. Whats 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 Pikes Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligans Flats or any place? Itll 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[29], Patagonians[30] and the people in the bend of the Kaw River[31]. Some day all this petty pride in ones city or State or section or country will be wiped out, and well 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 spot 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. Ive met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. Ive seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. Ive seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grand-aunt on his mothers 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 dont know, says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth avenue and Broadway. Those ideas dont suit me. Im not tied down to anything that isnt 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 someone through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Würzburger 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 mothers 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 café. 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[32], 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 garçons, 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[33], he said, continued McCarthy, and he wouldnt stand for no knockin the place.
Between Rounds
The windows of Mrs. Murphys boarding-house were open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.