THE SUNDAY OPEGOXIAX. PORTLAND, OCTOBER 8, 1923
Never J
TSODUm
.
Die
i nree re
Alexander Graham Bell Made the Phone Ring
Theodore Vail Switchboavded the Continent,
"Marse Henry" Talked Across the World,
and Robert Lincoln, Host, Got Only a Sniff of
Mr. Watierson 's Pullman Omelet on a Hot
Kentucky Morning
"V 0.0 : gap
. it twfil -
ET lETOO S. SAYFORD
IN THE nlgbt, some ten or so years
ago, I knocked at the door of Alex
ander Graham Bell In Washington.
Knocked and waited. I was about to
knock again, when the unseemliness of
th hour, which had been troubling me,"
made me forbear.
To bo sure, the occasion was im
portant. Something had happened or
threatened to happen, I do noremember
which; and the Associated Press desired
an expression from Mr. Bell.
Then, as I stood "armed in hesitance,"
the door opened. Without sound, with
out any light. And a thickset man
wrapped in ' a gray bathrobe, whom I
iimly perceived, said
"Yes?1;
I remember that be said It from the
bdttom of his chest, and the deep-toned
hearty friendliness of the word has
lingered with me.
We went together into the -library, he
retying the cord of the great, .rumpled
bathrobe And w.e talked of what I had
come about, and disposed of that. And
I said, being entranced by the man and
loath to go away: "Isn't it true that
transportation is tho one big force back
of every stride civilization has taken?"
He looked at me, his great eyes under
their shaggy cliff-brows kindled as the
windows of a lighthouse look lout into
the sea. "Let us have some coffee," he
said, "and we will talk."
We went into the kitchen. And, he
made coffee, and not too quickly, that
was very black, I remember, and very
good. And we carried our cups which
he got from a cupboard, and the coffee
pot, into the dining room, and drew up
chairs at a great table, and sat down.
He sipped greedily. I had to make
pretense; it was so scalding hot.
"Transportation," he said. And I shall
not ever forget his eyes, the deepness of
his voice. "I know what you mean
eommunication. Transportation is only
the larger word. It is the greatest word
In the lexicon. It is the label on the
very paper that science is wrapped in.
Transportation! Communication is only
its immediate fraction. Have some cof
fee." "It is good," I said.
"I have had to learn to make it well,
because It Is my dissipation. I love it."
His eyes fastened into distance. "Trans
portation," he said. "It may be the
beating of & drum across an African wil
derness. It may be the magical circle
which is a cart-wheel. It may be a ship
at sea with letters for some port. It may
bo the taking down of a telephone re
ceiver to speak and be heard across the
Invisible. Transportation! Communica
tion! It is a man laughing at the ele
ments! And we have only begun to
Jearn how to laugh! We shall sail like
the birds Into far places or near, and be
there swiftly. We shall run races with
the fishes and nose out the secrets of the
oceans. Transportation! Communica
tion! "There can be no society without con
tact. There can be no civilization with
out society. There can be no community
without intercourse. Why, commu
nication is the very blood-stream of
life! We will make some fresh cof
fee. . . .
"Where shall you look for savagery
and find It? Where there is no inter
course with states or tribes or groups
which have progressed. And how can
there be Intercourse without transporta-
tion? It is impossible. Archaeology and
ethnology are no more, in the final word,
than the record of people's efforts to
communicate. The muck-drowned vil
lages of the riorida everglades have
given up to science the evidence of trade
contracts which make us wonder how
far, in God's name, could a canoe travel
or a runner endure."
"And these ancientries that science
digs up," I said, "do they mean to you
' that we are just learning over again
a bigger way?"
"Or should we say in a small way?"
le laughed at me. "Ask me that when
I have died.
"This I know: That in human exist
ence, isolation is death, communication
la life. Transportation? We are only
fingering the tips of its wings. We are
only Just catching the beat of its breath.
We, are getting ready to begin to 'travel!
"Have some coffee."
Some time in the dead hours of the
night I came away, filled high up with
good coffee and great thoughts. And as
I walked through the silent streets of the
nation's capital than which no streets
of a big city are more utterly silent be
fore the dawn I would have been re
minded, could I have looked a few years
ahead, of another doorway," another
. huge-chested man of magic affairs, in
another city.
You knew he would be a great figure
of a man before you swung open the door
of his hotel room and entered. You knew
it, possibly, by hearsay; you knew it cer
tainly by the timbre that still reverber
ated in response to the rap-rap on the
panel.
There had been no appointment. Yet
Theodore N. Vail, rising, rising, rising
( like some ' mighty-chested forbear of
Kipling's Little Mildred in "The Man
Who Came Back"), at the writing-table
dragged to the light of a window, said at
once with outstretched hand:
"You are of the press. I am glad to
see you. Sit down."
One observes, in going nither and yon
about the world asking other people
things about other people's business and
thereby making a living, that there, are
several kinds of big men ranging loose,
and that a limited number of them are
of the bigness of the fourth dimension
a measurement which through all the
sentient ages has been abroad in our
midst while scientists have been harrying
the flanks of the universe, like persistent
fleas, to discover it.
Yet the thing is so absurdly apparent
when you set to measuring an all-and-all
big man. He is high, he Is wide, he
is thick; and for the fourth dimension
his brain and treaxt and soul are of a
bigness that finite instruments cannot
measure. And there's your fourth di
mension right under your nose. It's so
simple even Einstein might have thought
of it relatively.
Now there was, as well I recall It on
that sunny-wind Texas afternoon beside
a gulf shore there was, I say, a certain
personal space in this fourth dimension
of Theodore N. Vail, and by the grace of
what gods there be ,4t was filled with
something thicker than ether. By his
hearty invitation w at onoe investigated
it.
"It is of the best, sir," I said, setting
down my glass reluctantly. "Do you,
may I ask, carry It with you?" He was
upon one of his long and rather frequent
trips required of him as president of the
American Telephone & Telegraph com
pany). "I. did this time," he twinkled. His
dark, brilliant eyes gleamingblack at
times shone with a whimsical friendli-
ness through the polished lenses of his
spectacles. "I no more believe, and I
rpeak for myself, not having sufficient
wisdom to speak in such matters for the
rest of mankind. I no more believe in
total abstinence than I believe in excess.'
he said. I enjoy good liquor Just as I
enjoy a well-prepared meal and a prop
erly selected cigar, ivow these," he said,
pushing forward on the table a partly
emptied box of exceedingly fragrant Ha
vanas. "these may be to your liking. '
They were. " You are too polite. ' I
said, "to think that I came only to par
take of your fine hospitality. Aside from
wishing the privilege of meeting -ou.
. shall I tell you what I did come for?
Now that."' beamed Theodore Vail.
' would be quite in Crder: though I am
content to enjoy the pleasure of this com
panionship. "I believe that Important men. very
busy men. do not say such things so read
ily without rather meaning them, ' I re
torted. ' and I thank you. I came to ask
you. sir. what you would do if you were
a telephone girl and some delayed, male
at the other end of the line lost his tem
per and swore at you completely?
"Id swear back at him like hell:
snapped Theodore Vail. Then he leaned
back until the hotel chair creaked, and
laughed his great, reverberating laugh.
"No," he said, slipping off his spectacles
to polish them because the quick mist of
fun had quite blurred the bright lenses;
"no, being a lady, I couldn't do that,
could I?"
"And being a company employe you
couldn't either, because you'd be fired,"
I suggested.
"As to that part," twinkled the big
man, "I might forget and take a chance.
But you did put your finger on some
thing there. It affords me an oppor
tunity I'm glad of to pay tribute to the
almost universal patience of the tele
phone operator, her remarkable self
control in the matter of civility under
hours-long strain which the public but
faintly comprehends, it the public thinks
about.it at alt. More and more each year
it is coming to be a tradition of the tele
phone service that efficiency wherever
mechanically possible, and politeness al
ways, are to prevail on 'Central's' part as
something . bigger, broader, finer than
mere rules whose volation justifies dis
cipline. "There are times when delay, unex
plained or explained, is almost madden
ing to the party calling -I say that not
as a telephone official but as one of the
millions -pf the public who frequently use
the phone; but I say, too, as a telephone
official now, that in the very large ma
jority of such annoyances the cause is
mechanical rather than human, due to
some technicality of the elements or of
the mechanical instrumentality, rather
than to Indifference upon the part of an
employe. And in both fields, conditions
are improving yearly, I believe. Now, a
little of this -?"
"By all means," I said. "If you had
not asked me I might have been tempted
to do what you said you would-but-
would-not do if you were a hello girl.
You know."
I had wanted to hear that deep, tim
bred laugh again, and it came.
"This afternoon reminds me," I said,
standing and looking out the hotel win
cow and down upon the scraggly bit of
shore that did duty below the sea-wall
as "beach," "of a certain occasion some
AST -W"
J7 Oct -- -
years ago very much farther north but
still very much in the south." ' .
"What was that occasion?" he de
manded, with the quick, interested curi
osity which was a very part of the man's
life he handled huge things, thought
immense thoughts, but details passing
observations-were not, to him, petty
because by chance they might be small.
I have always considered that was one
of the unhidden secrets of Theodore
Vail's greatness in life.
"It is about Henry Watterson and Rob
ert T. Lincoln and a private car of the
Pullman company and a breakfast and
an unspeakably hot summer day in mid
Kentucky and a flag-draped village
square where the sun blazed and "
"But," he interrupted eagerly, mo
tioning to the cigars and helping him
self, "why does such an occasion remind
jou of this?"
"Because," I said, daring to look ( a
great man In the eyes and tell him an
honest compliment, "because the setting
was so different and the momentary
companionship holds so much in com
mon." He looked at me very steadily,
very inspectingly through the bright
spectacles in 'whose lens I caught by a
freak of the window-light a reflection of
his white hair that was far whiter and.,
finer than spun white-gold. And then
very slightly, very understanding, I
thought, he bowed. "Will you tell ma
about Mr. Watterson and the rest?"
ha asked.
"The train," I said, accepting the of
fered match, "was bound from Louisville
to Hodgenville, and at Hodgenvllle was
to be unveiled in the early afternoon
Gutzon Borglum's heroic statue of Abra
ham Lincoln. The train carried the "pri
vate car of Mr. Robert Lincoln, then
president of the Pullman company .'
president's
"That was 'Tad,' " I answered. "Marse
Henry was to deliver the oration, and he
was Mr. Lincoln's guest. I went to their
' car to get the possible manuscript of the
speech which, as a thorough news
paper man, the editor had with him in
maifold; and I was invited to come in."
"Don't stop," said Mr. Vail. "I want
ft all I like contact with these intimate
things. Go on!"
"It was early forenoon, and breakfast
was being served in the car. Marse
Henry, I remember, had Just begun to
remove into himself his portion of a
Spanish omelet. I can see that omelet
yet though it was disappearing with
precision. It was the largest, most gor
geously bedecked funeral meat of yellow
eggs I ever up to that time had looked
upon. I think not fewer than six of the
best hens must have contributed at least
two offerings apiece to it. There was
that faintly wedded odor of garlic and
onions which can arise nly when there
has been on the immediate Job some
'delicate, white-handed, dilettante priest'
of a chef to bless the breaking of egg
shells with Incantations, There were
cther-
The big president of the American
Telephone & Telegraph company
leaned back again, and again the hotel
chair creaked its anguish, and boomed
rr i ',1 S w
,5
t
y AMzo
Ik
1A iS.
t
again like a chime of chimes, that deep
laugh, this time muted to something like
a cathedral chuckle. "Now just a bit
of "
"Surely. Thank you," I said. "I
thought by the tale to whet your appe
tite; in return, you are excellently whet
ting mine."
"Now I want to ask you something
.in strictest confidence," said Mr. Vail,
and bent upon roe through his spectacles
a tell-the-truth gaze that brought the
answer at once, unhesitant: "No, sir," I
said, "to the best of my recollection and
belief Mr. Robert Lincoln did not get any
of that omelet if I recall, he preferred
to breakfast on fruit."
Again the chimes struck. "I guessed
it!" laughed Theodore Vail. "Marse
Henry was aa great a feeder as he was a
writer that's one of the reasons he
wrote so mightily."
"There's food for thought In that," I
reflected.
"There was for Marse Henry,"
twinkled my host.. "Well, you got to
Hodgenville? and ?"
"We got to Hodgenville, and no
caterpillar tank traversing a place of
many ruins ever made faster time than
that Kentucky train getting there. That
Is God's truth on a hot day.
"And then the statue!
"The meager, straggling village within
rifleshot of the log-cabin birth-roof; the
scores upon scores of hitched buggies
and saddle-horses around the four sides
of the square; the simple country square
itself, a-flutter with nncounted flags lap
ping listlessly at the hot breeze that
barely blew; the rude and rustic crowds;
the ribboned, blossom-strewing school
children in white; the gray and weather
sunken roofs about all, all faded alike
into pae background ct simple dignity
"That was Tad' of
days," said Mr. Vail.
when the lanyards were twitched, and
there sat looking out beyond the scn
In all the mighty majesty of bronze the
great and humble Lincoln. Looking, a
It were. Into that inaerutable !rn!tr
Into which his soul, which he ever cp
talned, had gone. . Metal breathed Into
by genius, at though the dead had re
turned again to hi own lowly birthplace,
to live.
"Huge, colossal, brooding In th ma
jestic but kindly thougbttulness or one
whose Ufa bad been garlanded with
little of happiness and heaped upon with
so much of bitter care, yet played npon
from within by a grace of humor rare
'and undismayed; In its vast chair the
Figure sat, and gazed against the hills.
I do not know how any man ran rrr
pass it without baring his bead in sim
ple, homely salute."
There was a silence.
"Man!" said the deep voice of Theo
dore Vail. "I wish I could have been
there. . . . What did Watterson say?"
I could not tell him; I had forgot. But
Marse Henry can tell htm, now.
The mighty Kentucklan went out upon
the long, long way, from the lovely city
of Jacksonville, in Florida, just before
the Christmas chimes of 1921 rang be
side the sea.
I had gone down Into the south on an
editorial interview trip and was to cut
his trail In the metropolis of the palms.
He had arrived at the Seminole a fw
days betyre me, ar.d thy to'd me at the
hotel desk he was very 111.
And when breakfast was served In mr
room the next day, there came with the
tray the'Tlmes-Unlon. I opened to the
first page to scan. And Marse Henry
was dead.
It was the passing of a great soul; the
taking from the world of a warrior spirit
the world could not afford to lose. I
thought of Tennyson's lines:
"Sad as the pipe of halt-awakened
birds to dying ears, when onto dying eves
the casement slowly grows a glimmering
square." Poe has cited that pasxage,
with one from "The Faerie Queen," a
among the most perfect expressions of
poetic imagery in the language. And It
is.
I thought, too, of the massive Blaine
standing beside the bier of Gsrflrld in
the dimness of the vast rotunda in the
capltol at Washington, and closing hi
almost matchless eulogy with these,
words:
"With wan, fevered face unllfted 10
the cooling breeze he gazed out wistfully
upon the ocean's changing wonders: on
Its far sails whitening la the morning
light; on the great waves rushing shore
ward to break and die beneath the noon
day sun; on the red clonds of evening
arching low to the horizon; on the serene
and solemn pathway of the stars. Let
ns think that bis dying eyes read a mys
tic meaning which only the rapt and
parting soul may know. Let us believe
that in the silence of the receding world
be heard the great waves breaking on a
farther shore, and felt already on bis
wasted brow the breath of the eternal
morning."
India's Caste System Rigid.
THE religious laws of Brahmanism di
vide the H'ndu people In India into
four principal hereditary classes or
castes the Brahmans ..(priests), kshat
iyas (rulers and warriors), valy
(merchants and husbandmen) and sudras
(mechanics, laborers or servant"), the
first three being known as "twiceborn"
and the last as "once-born." These
original castes, however, have become
to a great extent sub-divided the men
being known by their work or trades,
as the "caste" of shoemakers and the
"caste" of sweepers so that nowadays
the Brahmans alone are said to remain
as distinct caste. Aside from all these
are the Pariahs (or outcasts) who have
no caste. According to the Cyclopedia
of India, "the effect of the caste system
Is that no man may lawfully eat with any
Individual of any other caste, or partake
of food cooked by him, or marry Into
another caste family; but he may be his
friend, his master, his servant, his part
ner." Tomboy of the Air" I'nJque.
One of the unique figures of fllmdom
Is Andre Peyre. be Is called "the tom
boy of the air," her business being to
perform risky stunts for serial thrillers.
She has been a licensed air pilot since
he was 17. That was five years ago.
She was taught the tricks of aviation by
Poulet, French flier, at Issy les Moull
ceaux and claims to be the only girl flier
who can do all the air stunts done by the
late Ormer Loeklear.
Mademoiselle Peyre appeared In sev
eral French films. She has just com
pleted her work as a stunt flier In "The
Riddle of the Range." starring Ruth Ro
land, and Is on the way to France toee
her mother. L'pon her return to America
she will probably appear in a serial star
ring Pearl White or Ruth Roland.
She's an all-round athlete, an expert
swimmer and diver. And she's good
looking.
Ancstry Begins I'p a Tme.
"Why did Percy vsn Dubb g!ve op try.
ing to trace his anretry?"
"He said that the farther back he went
the harder it was, until at last he found
himself completely sp a tree."