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CONSIDER THE COMMUTER

When they tell us the world is getting worse and worse, and the follies and peevishness of men will soon bring us all to some damnable perdition, we are consoled by contemplating the steadfast virtue of commuters.  The planet grows harder and harder to live on, it is true; every new invention makes things more complicated and perplexing.  These new automatic telephones, which are said to make the business of getting a number so easy, will mean (we suppose) that we will be called up fifty times a day—­instead of (as now) a mere twenty or thirty, while we are swooning and swinking over a sonnet.  But more and more people are taking to commuting and we look to that to save things.

Because commuting is a tough and gruelling discipline.  It educes all the latent strength and virtue in a man (although it is hard on those at home, for when he wins back at supper time there is left in him very little of what the ladies so quaintly call “soul").  If you study the demeanour of fellow-passengers on the 8:04 and the 5:27 you will see a quiet and well-drilled acceptiveness, a pious non-resistance, which is not unworthy of the antique Chinese sages.

Is there any ritual (we cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and seasoned qualities of manhood?  It is well known that the fiercest and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been commuters.  It was a Division composed chiefly of commuters that stormed the Hindenburg Stellung and purged the Argonne thickets with flame and steel.  Their commanding officers were wont to remark these men’s carelessness of life.  It seemed as though they hardly heeded whether they got home again or not.

See them as they stand mobbed at the train gate, waiting for admission to the homeward cars.  A certain disingenuous casualness appears on those hardened brows; but beneath burn stubborn fires.  These are engaged in battle, and they know it—­a battle that never ends.  And while a warfare that goes on without truce necessarily develops its own jokes, informalities, callousnesses, disregard of wounds and gruesome sights, yet deep in their souls the units never forget that they are drilled and regimented for struggle.  We stood the other evening with a Freeport man in the baggage compartment at the front of a train leaving Brooklyn.  We two had gained the bull’s-eye window at the nose of the train and sombrely watched the sparkling panorama of lights along the track.  Something had gone wrong with the schedule that evening, and the passengers of the 5:27 had been shunted to the 5:30.  As fellow mariners will, we discussed famous breakdowns of old and the uncertainties of the commuter’s life.  “Yes,” said our companion, “once you leave home you never know when you’ll get back.”  And he smiled the passive, placable smile of the experienced commuter.