herown, as she said:
"My son has already told me that you have this day rendered him andme an inestimable service. I need not say that I thank you with allmy heart."
I made light of the matter and assured her that I was under greaterobligations to her son than he was to me. Soon after we sat down todinner, a sumptuous meal, to which it seemed to me all parts of theworld had contributed. We had much pleasant conversation, for boththe host and hostess were persons of ripe information. In the olddays our ancestors wasted years of valuable time in the study oflanguages that were no longer spoken on the earth; and civilizationwas thus cramped by the shadow of the ancient Roman Empire, whosedead but sceptered sovereigns still ruled the spirits of mankind fromtheir urns. Now every hour is considered precious for theaccumulation of actual knowledge of facts and things, and for thecultivation of the graces of the mind; so that mankind has becomewise in breadth of knowledge, and sweet and gentle in manner. Iexpressed something of this thought to Maximilian, and he replied:
"Yes; it is the greatest of pities that so noble and beautiful acivilization should have become so hollow and rotten at the core."
"Rotten at the core!" I exclaimed, in astonishment; "what do youmean?"
"What I mean is that our civilization has grown to be a gorgeousshell; a mere mockery; a sham; outwardly fair and lovely, butinwardly full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. To think thatmankind is so capable of good, and now so cultured and polished, andyet all above is cruelty, craft and destruction, and all below issuffering, wretchedness, sin and shame."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"That civilization is a gross and dreadful failure for seven-tenthsof the human family; that seven-tenths of the backs of the world areinsufficiently clothed; seven-tenths of the stomachs of the world areinsufficiently fed; seven-tenths of the minds of the world aredarkened and despairing, and filled with bitterness against theAuthor of the universe. It is pitiful to think what society is, andthen to think what it might have been if our ancestors had not castaway their magnificent opportunities--had not thrown them into thepens of the swine of greed and gluttony."
"But," I replied, "the world does not look to me after that fashion.I have been expressing to my family my delight at viewing the vasttriumphs of man over nature, by which the most secret powers of theuniverse have been captured and harnessed for the good of our race.Why, my friend, this city preaches at every pore, in every street andalley, in every shop and factory, the greatness of humanity, thesplendor of civilization!"
"True, my friend," replied Maximilian; "but you see only the surface,the shell, the crust of life in this great metropolis. To-morrow wewill go out together, and I shall show you the fruits of our moderncivilization. I shall take you, not upon the upper deck of society,where the flags are flying, the breeze blowing, and the musicplaying, but down into the dark and stuffy depths of the hold of thegreat vessel, where the sweating gnomes, in the glare of thefurnace-heat, furnish the power which drives the mighty shipresplendent through the seas of time. We will visit the_Under-World_."
But I must close for tonight, and subscribe myself affectionatelyyour brother,
Gabriel
CHAPTER IV.
THE UNDER-WORLD
My Dear Heinrich:
Since I wrote you last night I have been through dreadful scenes. Ihave traversed death in life. I have looked with my very eyes onHell. I am sick at heart. My soul sorrows for humanity.
Max (for so I have come to call my new-found friend) woke me veryearly, and we breakfasted by lamp-light.
Yesterday he had himself dyed my fair locks of a dark brown, almostblack hue, and had cut off some of my hair's superfluous length. Thenhe sent for a tailor, who soon arrayed me in garments of the latestfashion and most perfect fit. Instead of the singular-lookingmountaineer of the day before, for whom the police were diligentlysearching, and on whose head a reward of one thousand dollars hadbeen placed (never before had my head been valued so highly), therewas nothing in my appearance to distinguish me from the thousands ofother gallant young gentlemen of this great city.
A carriage waited for us at the door. We chatted together as we drovealong through the quiet streets.
I asked him:
"Are the degraded, and even the vicious, members of your Brotherhood?"
"No; not the criminal class," he replied, "for there is nothing intheir wretched natures on which you can build confidence or trust.Only those who have fiber enough to persist in labor, underconditions which so strongly tend to drive them into crime, can bemembers of our Brotherhood."
"May I ask the number of your membership?"
"In the whole world they amount to more than one hundred millions."
I started with astonishment.
"But amid such numbers," I said, "there must certainly be sometraitors?"
"True, but the great multitude have nothing to tell. They are thelimbs and members, as it were, of the organization; the directingintelligence dwells elsewhere. The multitude are like the soldiers ofan army; they will obey when the time comes; but they are not takeninto the councils of war."
A half hour's ride brought us into the domain of the poor.
An endless procession of men and women with pails andbaskets--small-sized pails and smaller baskets--streamed along thestreets on their way to work. It was not yet six o'clock. I observedthat both men and women were undersized, and that they all very muchresembled each other; as if similar circumstances had squeezed theminto the same likeness. There was no spring to their steps and nolaughter in their eyes; all were spare of frame and stolid orhungry-looking. The faces of the middle-aged men were haggard andwore a hopeless expression. Many of them scowled at us, with a lookof hatred, as we passed by them in our carriage. A more joyless,sullen crowd I never beheld. Street after street they unrolled beforeus; there seemed to be millions of them. They were all poorly clad,and many of them in rags. The women, with the last surviving instinctof the female heart, had tried to decorate themselves; and here andthere I could observe a bit of bright color on bonnet or apron; butthe bonnets represented the fashions of ten years past, and theaprons were too often frayed and darned, and relics of some former,more opulent owners. There were multitudes of children, but they werewithout the gambols which characterize the young of all animals; andthere was not even the chirp of a winter bird about them; their faceswere prematurely aged and hardened, and their bold eyes revealed thatsin had no surprises for them. And every one of these showed thatintense look which marks the awful struggle for food and life uponwhich they had just entered. The multitude seemed, so far as I couldjudge, to be of all nations commingled--the French, German, Irish,English--Hungarians, Italians, Russians, Jews, Christians, and evenChinese and Japanese; for the slant eyes of many, and theirimperfect, Tartar-like features, reminded me that the laws made bythe Republic, in the elder and better days, against the invasion ofthe Mongolian hordes, had long since become a dead letter.
What struck me most was their incalculable multitude and theirsilence. It seemed to me that I was witnessing the resurrection ofthe dead; and that these vast, streaming, endless swarms were thecondemned, marching noiselessly as shades to unavoidable andeverlasting misery. They seemed to me merely automata, in the handsof some ruthless and unrelenting destiny. They lived and moved, butthey were without heart or hope. The illusions of the imagination,which beckon all of us forward, even over the roughest paths andthrough the darkest valleys and shadows of life, had departed fromthe scope of their vision. They knew that to-morrow could bring themnothing better than today--the same shameful, pitiable, contemptible,sordid struggle for a mere existence. If they produced children itwas reluctantly or unmeaningly; for they knew the wretches must treadin their footsteps, and enter, like them, that narrow, gloomy,high-walled pathway, out of which they could never climb; which beganalmost in infancy and ended in a pauper's grave--nay, I am wrong, noteven in a pauper's grave; for they might have claimed,
perhaps, somesort of ownership over the earth which enfolded them, which touchedthem and mingled with their dust. But public safety and the demandsof science had long ago decreed that they should be whisked off, assoon as dead, a score or two at a time, and swept on iron tram-carsinto furnaces heated to such intense white heat that they dissolved,crackling, even as they entered the chamber, and rose in namelessgases through the high chimney. That towering structure was the solememorial monument of millions of them. Their graveyard was the air.Nature reclaimed her own with such velocity that she seemed to grudgethem the very dust she had lent them during their wretchedpilgrimage. The busy, toiling, rushing, roaring, groaning universe,big with young, appeared to cry out: "Away with them! Away with them!They have had their hour! They have performed their task. Here are abillion spirits waiting for the substance we loaned them. The