iast.

V

THE AUTO-COMRADE

Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer
the ordinary man a week's vacation all alone, and he will look as
though you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing.

"There are," as Ruth Cameron truly observes, "a great many people to
whom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours
with only their own selves for company. To escape that terrible
catastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read
the most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not
only without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine
with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are
fairly frantic."

If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he
has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a
condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife
and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this
epitaph:

"Here lies the pod.
The Pease are shelled and gone to God."

Now, pod-like people such as he are always solitary wherever other
people are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressing
than solitariness. These people, however, fall through sheer ignorance
into a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude and
solitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life--to the wise
keeper of the joyful heart--there is just one difference between these
two: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, to
the artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-Comrade.

As it is the Auto-Comrade who makes all the difference, I shall try to
describe his appearance. His eyes are the most arresting part of him.
They never peer stupidly through great, thick spectacles of others'
making. They are scarcely ever closed in sleep, and sometimes make
their happiest discoveries during the small hours. These hours are
truly small because the Auto-Comrade often turns his eyes into the
lenses of a moving-picture machine--such an entertaining one that it
compresses the hours to seconds. It is through constant, alert use
that his eyes have become sharp. They can pierce through the rinds of
the toughest personalities, and even penetrate on occasion into the
future. They can also take in whole panoramas of the past in one
sweeping look. For they are of that "inner" variety through which
Wordsworth,