The Human Touch

Having returned from the first week-end I’ve had in two years recently, I am enabled to report that the worst thing about the country is that the Toms, Dicks and Harrys who come to it from the town are likely to take their city habits along with them. For many of us, I fear, the difference between city and country is the difference between plumbing and out-house, with the city taking the palm in this respect.

I went to the country with the expectation of retiring with the chickens and rising at cock-crow. Instead I retired close to dawn and arose at high noon. I found no chickens about whose early-to-bed example I could emulate, but, fortunately, neither were roosters about. I went to the country with the expectation of eating wholesome foods, foods such as fruit and vegetables, but the truth is that my chief diet consisted of steaks, chops and veal, with hardly any vegetables and fruits and instead of the wholesome milk of the cow I drank perhaps a little too much of the fermented fruit of the apple, a drink which makes beer taste like pap for babies.

Indeed, it was not until we had returned to the city that we returned also to a wholesome diet and, comparatively, wholesome ways of living. We celebrated our return by consuming three varieties of fruit, rigidly excluding the apple, and four varieties of really fresh vegetables, unlike those served in the country, and milk and cream. And the deep rest to obtain which we traveled so many miles into the country we obtained, after the week-end, in the city.

THE TUG OF WAR

Now it sounds churlish to say that one has suffered from hospitality, especially when it is so much easier to feel, and to say, that one might suffer more deeply from the lack of it. They who neglect you in the city, and neglect is perhaps a clumsy word, will not do so in the country. It is a pleasant thing, at the moment, to be wanted, to be pulled in separate directions, to be the center of a tug of war, even if, in the tug, one has very little of sunlight and less of greensward. In the period of our stay, twice as many appointments were made for us as we could keep, and we left the little country town with imaginary reproaches ringing in our ears.

There was, however, one party which we did attend, and there was nothing rural about it, except that, the next house being only three miles away, it was possible to have a wilder party than neighbors in an apartment house could possibly stand for. Even on Saturday night and Sunday morning there are limits to the degree of hilarity which may go unnoticed among neighbors not present. At this particular home in the woods the sky was literally the limit, and it is much more likely that the birds were kept awake by the wild songs of human beings than that birds of any feather would awake human beings at break of dawn. Had there been a rooster on the place, he would have been compelled to violate the legend by being drowsy with sleep at the hour of cockcrow.

And so, close to dawn, when we were being driven home, full of apple jack and beefsteaks, we said, a little wearily, “Ain’t Nature grand?” But it still is. Its city folks who don’t know how to enjoy it.

A NEW OFFENSE

I was talking to an old friend the other day and saying that we must have lunch together as soon as I had returned from my vacation.

“Where are you going, Harry?” he asked.

I mentioned the name of the town, a little place somewhere on the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts.

“Oh!” said he. “I know the place. Where are you stopping?”

I explained that we had made no reservations and would make none until we had arrived in town and looked about. Couldn’t he give me a lead?

“Well,” he explained, “we had to get out of the place at which we were for a number of reasons. One was that a friend visiting us used to bring her dog with her. But the chief reason was that I had been seen talking with Jews.”

I must say that this was a bit of a douche of cold water, but my friend reassured me.

“It’s really a nice place and you don’t see these swine around much except on Sundays, in the afternoon, when they get into their cars for a ride and spend the time worrying over the cost of the gasoline they have to use.”

I must say that this makes me more, rather than less, eager to visit this town and I shall, of course, bring back my own report of the place. It is a pity that I cannot apply for lodgings at the place from which my friend was ejected because he had been seen talking with Jews. I should love to pass myself off for a German, for a very short time and just for the fun of it—if I could.

From an up-state friend of mine I have just received a note concerning the human landscape at the watering place at which he is now stopping. “This town is full of rabbis, thousands of them, wearing skull caps, love locks and large beards. They also wear satin coats and black fur hats. They always walk three abreast. The place is more Jewish than Brownsville,” and this friend, although a Jew himself, does not seem to fancy Brownsville, which only shows that he’s prejudiced. It seems that watering places exert a particular fascination upon rabbis, many of whom are to be seen also, and en masse, in so famous a European watering place as Carlsbad. And I, never having visited a watering place in season, have never met rabbis en masse, only singly.