The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned three Würzburgers 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 thats 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, Ive seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who werent descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadnt written a novel, Mexicans who didnt 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 grocers clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and dont 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.
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.
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.