SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA
As a professional onlooker of life (and it is a poor profession, as I must admit) it has always been my habit to study national and social types in any country where I happen to be. I find an untiring interest in this, and prefer to sit in a French café, for example, watching the people who come in and out, and hearing scraps of conversation that pass across the table, to the most thrilling theatrical entertainment. And I find more interest in "common" people than in the uncommonly distinguished, by fame and power. To me the types in a London omnibus or a suburban train are more absorbing as a study than a group of generals or a party of statesmen, and I like to discover the lives of the world's nobodies, their way of thought and their outlook on the world, by the character in their faces and their little social habits. In that way one gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of drama, hideous and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell into my old habit of searching for types and studying characters. I had unusual opportunity. New York and many other cities opened their hearts and their houses to me in a most generous way, and I met great numbers of people of every class and kind.
The first people I met, before I had stepped off my ship of adventure, were young newspaper men who searched the ship like a sieve for any passenger who had something in his life or brain worth telling to the world. I was scared of them, having heard that they could extract the very secrets of one's soul by examination of the third degree; but I found them human and friendly fellows who greeted me cheerily and did not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who control the power of the press—the masters of the machine which shapes the mind of peoples—and those who feed its wheels with words. Because I had some history to tell, the word-writers lay in wait for me, found my telephone number in any hotel of any town before I knew it myself, tapped at my bedroom door when I was in the transition stage between day and evening clothes, and asked questions about many things of which I knew nothing at all, so that I had to camouflage my abysmal depths of ignorance.
They know their job, those American reporters, and I was impressed especially by the young women. There was one girl who sat squarely in front of me, fixed me with candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me through an examination about my sad past until I had revealed everything. There is nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and I should blush to meet her again. She did not take a single note—by that I knew her as a good journalist—and wrote two columns of revelation with most deadly accuracy and a beautiful style. Another girl followed me round a picture-gallery listening to casual remarks among a group of friends, and wrote an article on art-criticism which left me breathless with admiration at her wit and knowledge, of which I took the credit. One young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, boarded the train at New York, bought me a drawing-room for private conversation, and by the time we reached Philadelphia made it entirely futile for me to give a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all had an absorbing interest in the international situation after the armistice, and knew a good deal about the secret workings of European policy. A young correspondent just back from Russia made a speech summing up his experiences and conclusions, which were of a startling kind, told with the utmost simplicity and bluntness. The proprietor took me into his private room, and outlined his general policy on world affairs, of which the first item on his program was friendship with England.... I found among newspaper men a sense of responsibility with which they are not generally credited, and wonderfully alert and open minds; also, apart from their own party politics and prejudices, a desire for fair play and truth. The Yellow Press still has its power, and it is a malign influence in the United States, but the newspapers of good repute are conducted by men of principle and conviction, and their editorial and literary staffs have a high level of talent, representing much, I think, of the best intelligence of America.
A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS
The women of America seem to me to have a fair share of that intelligence, and I met many types of them who were interesting as social studies. Several states are still resisting woman suffrage, but as far as equality goes in all affairs of daily life outside political power the women of America have long claimed and gained it. During the war they showed in every class, like the women of England, that they could take on men's jobs and do them as well as men in most cases, and better than men in some cases. They drove motor-lorries and machines; they were dairy farmers and agriculturists; they became munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and elevator-girls, and the womanhood of America rallied up with a wonderful and devoted spirit in a great campaign of work for the Red Cross and all manner of comforts for the troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in transport organization, never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young whose eyes and fingers ached with so much stitching during the long evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an occasional visit to Tiffany's in Fifth Avenue for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket symbolizing success, a holiday at Palm Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a relief from boredom after office hours at the Forty-fourth Street Theater or the Winter Garden. That represents the social ambition of the average business man on the road to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile of dollars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high strain of nervous tension. Meanwhile the women are keeping themselves as beautiful as God made them, with slight improvements according to their own ideas, which are generally wrong; decorating their homes; increasing their housekeeping expenses, and reading prodigiously. They read a vast number of books and magazines, so making it possible for men like myself—slaves of the pen—to exist in an otherwise cruel world.
Before the American lady of leisure gets up to breakfast (generally she doesn't) and uses her lip-salve and powder-puff for the first time in the day, she has her counterpane spread with the morning's newspapers, which are folded into the size of small blankets. There is the New York Times for respectability, the Tribune for political "pep," and the World for social reform. The little lady glances first of all at the picture supplements while she sips her orange juice, reads the head-lines while she gets on with the rolled oats, and with the second cup of coffee settles down to the solid reading-matter of international sensations (skipping, as a rule, the ends of columns "continued on page 4"), until it is time to interview the cook, who again gives notice to leave because of the conduct of the chauffeur or the catlike qualities of the parlor-maid, and handles the telephone to give her Orders of the Day. For some little time after that the telephone is kept busy at both ends, and, with a cigarette threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady of leisure talks to several friends in New York, answers a call from the Western Union, and receives a night-letter sent over the wire. "No, I am absolutely engaged on Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am fixed up that day, too. Yes, and Thursday is quite out of the question. Friday? Oh, hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a well-worn New York joke, and I found it funny and true to life, because it is as difficult to avoid invitations in New York as collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the American lady puts down her engagements and the excuses she gave for breaking others (it is useful to remember those), and she calculates that as far as the present day's work is planned she will have time to finish the new novel by John Galsworthy, to get through a pamphlet on bolshevism which was mentioned at dinner by an extremely interesting young man just back from Russia, to buy a set of summer furs in the neighborhood of Forty-second Street (Herbert, poor dear! says they are utterly unnecessary), to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton with a party of friends, including the man who made such a sensation with his lecture on France at the Carnegie Hall (she will get a lot of first-hand knowledge about the French situation), and to look in at the thé bavardage with dear Beatrice de H., where some of the company of the French theater will meet French-speaking Americans and pretend to understand them. Then there is a nice free evening, for once (oh, that little white lie in the red book!), when she will wallow in the latest masterpiece of H. G. Wells and learn all about God and humanity as revealed by that extraordinary genius with a sense of humor.
So the American lady of leisure keeps up-to-date with the world's lighter thought and skims the surface of the deeper knowledge, using her own common sense as an acid test of truth when the imagination of a novelist runs away with him, and widening her outlook on the problems of life with deliberate desire to understand. It makes her conversation at the dinner-table sparkling, and the men-folk are conscious that she knows more than they do about current literature and international history. She has her dates right, within a century or two, in any talk about medieval England, and she knows who killed Henri IV of France, who were the lovers of Marie de Medici, why Lloyd George quarreled with Lord Northcliffe, and what the ambassador said to the leaders of Russian bolshevism when he met them secretly in Holland. It is useful to know those things in any social gathering of intellectuals, and I met several ladies of American society in New York who had a wide range of knowledge of that kind.
Many American ladies, with well-to-do husbands, and with money of their own, which is very useful to them in time of need, do not regard life merely as a game out of which they are trying to get the most fun, but with more serious views; and I think some of those find it hard to satisfy their aspirations, and go about with a touch, or more, of heartache beneath their furs. I met some women who spoke with a certain irony which reflected the spent light of old illusions, and others who had a kind of wistfulness in their eyes, as though searching for the unattainable happiness. The Tired Business Man as a husband has his limitations, like most men. Often his long hours of absence at the office and his dullness at home make his wife rather companionless, and her novel-reading habits tend to emphasize the loss, and force upon her mind the desire for more satisfying comradeship. Generally some man who enters her circle seems to offer the chance of this. He has high ideals, or the pose of them. His silences seem suggestive of deep unutterable thoughts—though he may be thinking of nothing more important than a smudge on his white waistcoat—he has a tenderness in his gray (or black, or brown) eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman chilled by the lack-luster look of the man who is used to her presence and takes her for granted.... The Tired Business Man ought to be careful, lest he should become too tired to enter into the interests of his wife and to give her the minimum of comradeship which all women demand. The American Woman of Society, outside the Catholic Church, which still insists upon the old law, seems to me quicker than most others to cut her losses in the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks she finds, that she is losing too heavily for her peace of heart. Less than women in European countries will she tolerate deceit or spiritual cruelty, and the law offers her a way of escape, expensive but certain, from a partnership which has been broken. Society, in New York at least, is tolerant to women who have dissolved their married partnership, and there is no stoning-sisterhood to fling mud and missiles at those who have already paid for error by many tears. Yet I doubt whether, in many cases, the liberty they find makes for happiness. There is always the fear of a second mistake worse than the first, and, anyhow, some unattached women I met, women who could afford to live alone, not without a certain luxury of independence, seemed disillusioned as to the romance of life, and the honesty of men, and their own chance of happiness. Their furs and their diamonds were no medicine for the bitterness of their souls, nor for the hunger in their hearts.
But I found a great class of women in America too busy, too interested, and too inspired by common sense to be worried by that kind of emotional distress—the middle-class women who flung themselves into war-work, as before, and now, in time of peace, the activities of charity and education and domestic life have called to them for service. There was a woman doctor I met who seemed to me as fine a type of American womanhood as one could have the luck to meet, and yet, in spite of uncommon ability, a common type in her cheery and practical character. When the war broke out her husband, who was a doctor also, was called to serve in the American army, and his wife, who had passed her medical examinations in the same college with him, but had never practised, carried on his work, in spite of four children. They came first and her devotion to them was not altered, but that did not prevent her from attending to a growing list of patients at a time when influenza was raging in her district. She went about in a car which she drove herself, with the courage and cheerfulness of a gallant soldier. In her little battlefield there were many tragedies, because death took away the youngest-born or the eldest-born from many American homes, and her heart was often heavy; but she resisted all gloomy meditations and kept her nerve and her spirit by—singing. As she drove her car from the house of one patient to another she sang loudly to herself, over the wheel, any little old song that came into her head—"Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle," or "Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he,"—to the profound astonishment of passers-by, who shook their heads and said, "It's a good thing there's going to be Prohibition." But she saved the lives of many women and children in time of plague—for the influenza reached the height of plague—and did not lose her sense of humor or her fine, hearty laugh, or her graciousness of womanhood. When "the army," as she called her husband, came back, she could say, "I kept your flag flying, old man, and you'll not find any difference at home." I saw the husband and wife in their home together. While friends were singing round the piano, these two held hands like young lovers, away back in a shady corner of the room.
I met another husband and wife who interested me as types of American life, though not in their home. It was at a banquet attended by about two hundred people. The husband was the chairman of the party, and he had a wonderful way of making little speeches in which he called upon distinguished people to talk to the company, revealing in each case the special reason why that man or woman should have a hearing. He did this with wit and knowledge, and in each case indeed it was a privilege to hear the speaker who followed, because all the men and women here were engaged in some social work of importance in the life of great American cities, and were idealists who had put their theories into practice by personal service and self-sacrifice. The little man who was the chairman paid a compliment to his own wife, and I found she was sitting by my side. She had gray hair, but very young, bright, humorous eyes, and an almost terrible truthfulness of speech. I was startled by some things she said about the war, and the psychology of men and women under the spell of war. They were true, but dangerous to speak aloud as this woman spoke them. Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred that had been bequeathed by war to the people of the world. "Let us kill hatred," she said. "It is the survival of the cave instinct in man which comes out of its hiding-places under the name of patriotism and justice." I do not know what link there was between this and some other thought which prompted her to show me photographs of two big, sturdy boys who, she told me, were her adopted children. It was a queer, touching story, about these children. "I adopted them not for their sake, but for mine," she said. She was a lonely woman, well married, with leisure and money, and the temptation of selfishness. It was to prevent selfishness creeping into her heart that she sent round to an orphanage for two boy-babies. They were provided, and she brought them up as her own, and found—so she assured me—that they grew up with a marked likeness in feature to herself and her sisters. She had a theory about that—the idea that by some kind of predestination souls reach through space to one another, and find the home where love is waiting for them. I was skeptical of that, having known the London slums, but I was interested in the practical experience of the bright little American woman, who "selfishly," as she said, to cure selfishness, had given two abandoned babies of the world the gift of love, and a great chance in the adventure of life. She was a tremendous protagonist of environment against the influence of heredity. "Environment puts it over heredity all the time," she said.
This special charity on her part is not typical of American women, who do not, any more than women of other countries, go about adopting other people's babies, but I think that her frankness of speech to a stranger like myself, and her curious mixture of idealism and practicality, combined with a certain shrewdness of humor, are qualities that come to people in America. She herself, indeed, is a case of "environment," because she is foreign in blood, and American only by marriage.
In New York I had the advantage of meeting one lady who seemed to me typical of the old-fashioned "leaders" of American society such as Henry James described in his novels. She lives in one of the great mansions along Fifth Avenue, and the very appearance of her butler is a guaranty of riches and respectability. She made no disguise of her wealth, and was proud of it in a simple way, as an English aristocrat is proud of his ancestry and family treasures. But she acknowledges its responsibilities and takes them seriously with a sense of duty. She had received lessons in public speaking, in order to hold her own at committee meetings, and she doles out large sums in charity to public institutions and deserving cases, with a grim determination to unmask the professional beggar and the fraudulent society. She seemed to have a broad-hearted tolerance for the younger generation and a special affection for boys of all ages, whom she likes to feed up, and to keep amused by treating them to the circus or the "movies"; but I fancy that she is a stern disciplinarian with her family as well as her servants, and that her own relatives stand in awe of this masterful old lady who has a high sense of honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and service from those who look for her favors and her money. I detected a shrewd humor in her and an abiding common sense, and at her own dinner-table she had a way of cross-examining her guests, who were men of political importance and women of social influence, like a judge who desires to get at the evidence without listening to unnecessary verbiage. She is the widow of a successful business man, but I perceived in her the sense of personal power and family traditions which belonged to the old type of dowager-duchess in England. Among butterfly women of European cities she would appear an austere and terrible figure in her virtue and her diamonds, but to small American boys, eating candies at her side in the circus, she is the kind and thoughtful aunt.
It was in Boston that I met some other types of American women, not long enough to know them well, but enough to see superficial differences of character between them and their friends of New York. Needless to say, I had read a good deal about Boston before going there. In England the Bostonian tradition is familiar to us by the glory of such masters as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, so that I had a friendly feeling when I went about the city and saw its streets and prim houses, reminiscent of Cheltenham and other English towns of ancient respectability and modern culture. After a lecture there many Bostonians came onto the platform, and I heard at once a difference in accent from the intonation of New York. It was a little more precise, with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. The people who spoke to me were earnest souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift them above the personal prejudices of party politics. I should imagine that some of them are republican rather than democratic in instinct, but those at least who were in my audience supported the idea of the League of Nations, and for that reason did not wish to see President Wilson boiled in oil or roasted at a slow fire. From my brief glimpses of Boston society I should imagine that the Puritan spirit still lingers there among the "best families" and that in little matters of etiquette and social custom they adhere to the rules of the Early Victorian era of English life.
I was convinced of this by one trivial incident I observed in a hotel at Boston. A lady, obviously in transit from New York, by the public way in which she used her powder-puff, and by a certain cosmopolitan easiness of manner, produced a gold cigarette-case from her muff, and began to smoke without thinking twice about it. She had taken just three whiffs when a colored waiter approached in the most deferential manner and begged her to put out her cigarette, because smoking was not allowed in the public rooms. The lady from New York looked amazed for a moment. Then she laughed, dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, and said: "Oh yes—I guess I forgot I was in Boston!" In that word Boston she expressed a world of propriety, conventional morality, and social austerity, a long, long way from the liberty of New York. I had been told that a Boston audience would be very cold and unenthusiastic, not because they would be out of sympathy with the lecturer, but because they were "very English" in their dislike of emotional expression. My experience was not like that, as I was relieved to find, and, on the contrary, those Bostonians at the Symphony Hall applauded with most generous warmth and even rose and cheered when I had finished my story of the heroic deeds of English soldiers. It was a Boston girl who made the apologia of her people. "I am sure," she said, "that all those men and women who rose to applaud went down on their knees that night and asked God to forgive them for having broken their rule of life."
No doubt Boston society, as far as it includes the old families rooted in it for generations, is conservative in its point of view, and looks askance at noisy innovations like modern American dances, jazz bands, and the jolly vulgarities of youth. But, judging from my passing glimpses of college girls in the town, I should say that youth puts up a healthy opposition to the "old fogy" philosophy, and breaks the conventions now and then with a crash. One girl I met suggests to me that Boston produces character by intensive culture, and is apt to be startled by the result. Her father was a well-known lawyer, and she inherited his gift of learning and logic, so that when he died she had the idea of carrying on his work. The war was on, and somewhere over on the western front was a young English soldier whom she had met on board ship and might, according to the chances of war, never meet again. Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. She decided to study for the law examinations and to be called to the bar; and to keep her company, her mother, who was her best comrade, went into college with her, and shared her rooms. I like that idea of the mother and daughter reading and working together. It seems to me a good picture. In due time she was called to the bar, and entered the chambers where her father had worked, and did so well that a great lawyer who gave her his cases to prepare spoke rare words of praise about her. Then the war ended, one day, quite suddenly, the young English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after a few preliminary inquiries as to his chance of luck, said, "When shall we get married?" He was in a hurry to settle down, and the mother of the girl was scared by his grim determination to carry her comrade away. Yet he was considerate. "I should hate to cause your mother any worry by hurrying things on so fast as Monday," he said. "Let us make it Tuesday." But the wedding took place on the Saturday before the Tuesday, and the young lady barrister of Boston was whisked away four days after the English officer came to America with a dream in his heart of which he desired the fulfilment. Boston was startled. This romance was altogether too rapid for its peace of mind. Why, there was no time to buy the girl a wedding-present!... The street boys of Boston were most startled by the English officer's best man—his brother—whose tall hat, tail-coat, and white spats were more wonderful than anything they had seen before.
I was not long enough in many towns of America to detect their various characteristics. Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that it was safe for people to fall out of windows—they just wafted down like gossamer—but I found it a pleasant, bustling place, with a delightful Old World atmosphere, like a bit of Queen Anne-England, round Independence Hall.... Pittsburgh by night, looking down on its blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared to me like a town behind the battle-lines under heavy gun-fire, and I am convinced that the workers in those factories are in the front-line trenches of life and deserve gold medals for their heroism. I had not been in the town ten minutes before a young lady with the poetical name of Penelope rang me up on the telephone and implored me to take a walk out by night to see this strange and wonderful picture, and I was glad of her advice, though she did not offer to go as my guide. Another girl made herself acquainted, and I found she has a hero-worship for a fellow war correspondent, once of Pittsburgh, whose career she had followed through many battlefields.
I saw Washington in glamorous sunlight under a blue sky, and found my spirit lifted up by the white beauty of its buildings and the spaciousness of its public gardens. I had luncheon with the British ambassador, curious to find myself in an English household, with people discussing America from the English point of view in the political heart of the United States; and I visited the War College and met American generals and officers in the very brain-center of that great army which I had seen on the roads of France and on the battlefields. This was the University of War as far as the American people are concerned, and there were diagrams on the blackboards in the lecture-hall describing the strategy of the western front, while in the library officers and clerks were tabulating the history of the great massacre in Europe for future guidance, which by the grace of God and the League of Nations will be unnecessary for generations to come. I talked with these officers and found them just such earnest, serious scientific men as I had met in American Headquarters in France, where they were conducting war, not in our casual, breezy way, but as school-masters arranging a college demonstration, and overweighted by responsibility. It was in a room in the Capitol that I met one little lady with a complete geographical knowledge of the great halls and corridors of that splendid building, and an Irish way with her in her dealings with American Congressmen and Senators. Before the war I used to meet her in a little drawing-room not far away from Kensington Palace, London, and I imagined in my innocence that she was exclusively interested in literature and drama. But in one of the luncheon-rooms of the Capitol—where I lined up at the counter for a deep-dish pie from a colored waitress—I found that she was dealing with more inflammable articles than those appearing in newspaper columns, being an organizing secretary of the Sinn Fein movement in the United States. She was happy in her work, and spoke of Irish rebellion in that bright and placid way which belongs, as I have often noticed, to revolutionary spirits who help to set nations on fire and drench the world in blood. Anybody looking at her eating that deep-dish pie in the luncheon-room of the American Houses of Parliament would have put her down as a harmless little lady, engaged, perhaps, in statistical work on behalf of Prohibition. But I knew the flame in her soul, kindled by Irish history, was of the same fire which I saw burning in the eyes of great mobs whom I saw passing one day in procession down Fifth Avenue, with anti-English banners above their heads.
I should have liked to see more of Chicago. There seemed to me in that great city an intense intellectual activity, of conscious and deliberate energy. Removed by a thousand miles from New York with its more cosmopolitan crowds and constant influx of European visitors, it is self-centered and independent, and out of its immense population there are many minds emerging to make it a center of musical, artistic, and educational life, apart altogether from its business dynamics. I became swallowed up in the crowds along Michigan Avenue, and was caught in the breeze that blew stiffly down the highway of this "windy city," and studied the shops and theaters and picture-palaces with a growing consciousness that here was a world almost as great as New York and, I imagine, more essentially American in character and views. That first morning of my visit I was the guest of a club called the Cliff-dwellers, where the chairman rapped for order on the table with a club that might have protected the home of Prehistoric Man, and addressed a gathering of good fellows who, as journalists, authors, painters, and musicians, are farthest removed from that simple child of nature who went out hunting for his dinner, and bashed his wife when she gnawed the meatiest bone. It was in the time of armistice, and these men were deeply anxious about the new problems which faced America and about the reshaping of the world's philosophy. They were generous and honest in their praise of England's mighty effort in the war, and they were enthusiastic to a man in the belief that an Anglo-American alliance was the best guaranty of the League of Nations, and the best hope for the safety of civilization. I came away with the belief that out of Chicago would come help for the idealists of our future civilization, out of Chicago, whatever men may say of its Pit, and its slaughter-yards, and its jungle of industry and life. For on the walls of the Cliff-dwellers were paintings of men who have beauty in their hearts, and in the eyes of the men I met was a look of gravity and thoughtfulness in face of the world's agonies and conflict. But I was aware, also, that among the seething crowds of that city were mobs of foreign-born people who have the spirit of revolution in their hearts, and others who demand more of the joy of life and less of its struggle, and men of baseness and brutality, coarsened by the struggle through which they have to push and thrust in order to get a living. I listened to Germans and foreign Jews in some of the streets of Chicago, and saw in imagination the flames and smoke of passion that stir above the Melting-pot.
I have memories in Chicago of a little theatrical manager who took my arm and pressed it tight with new-born affection, and said: "My dearie, I'm doing colossal business—over two thousand dollars a night! It's broken all the records. I go about singing with happiness." Success had made a poet of him. In a private suite of rooms in the most luxurious hotel of Chicago I met one of the theatrical stars of America, and studied her type as one might gaze at a rare bird. She was a queer little bird, I found, with a childish and simple way of speech which disguised a little her immense and penetrating knowledge of human nature as it is found in "one-night stands," in the jungle of life behind the scenes, and in her own grim and gallant fight for fame. Fame had come to her suddenly and overwhelmingly, in Chicago, and New York was waiting for her. The pride of her achievement thrilled her to the finger-tips, and she was as happy as a little girl who has received her first doll as a birthday-present. She talked to me about her technic, about the way in which she had lived in her part before acting it, so that she felt herself to be the heroine in body and soul. But what I liked best—and tried to believe—was her whispered revelation of her ultimate ambition—and that was a quiet marriage with a boy who was "over there," if he did not keep her waiting too long. Marriage, and not fame, was what she wanted most (so she said), but she was going to be very, very careful to make the right one. She had none of the luxurious splendor of those American stars who appear in fiction and photographs. She was a bright little canary, with pluck, and a touch of genius, and a shrewd common sense.
From her type I passed to others, a world away in mode of life—Congressmen, leaders of the women's suffrage societies, ex-governors, business magnates, American officers back from the front, foreign officers begging for American money, British propagandists—a most unlikely crowd—dramatic critics, shipbuilders, and the society of New York suburbs between Mamaroneck and Greenwich, Connecticut. At dinner-parties and evening receptions I met these different actors in the great drama of American life, and found them, in that time of armistice, desperately earnest about the problems of peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man's Land between their conflicting views, and looking forward to the future with profound uneasiness because of the threat to the "splendid isolation" of the Monroe Doctrine—they saw it crumbling away from them—and because (more alarming still) they heard from afar the first rumblings of a terrific storm between capital and labor. They spoke of these things frankly, with an evident sincerity and with a fine gravity—women as well as men, young girls as fearlessly and intelligently as bald-headed business men. Many of them deplored the late entry of the United States into the war, because they believed their people would have gained by longer sacrifice. With all their pride in the valor of their men, not one of them in my hearing used a braggart word, or claimed too great a share in the honor of victory. There was fear among them that their President was abandoning principles of vital import to their country, but no single man or woman I met spoke selfishly of America's commercial or political interest, and among all the people with whom I came in touch there was a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to help the world forward by wise action on the part of the United States. Their trouble was that they lacked clear guidance, and were groping blindly about for the right thing to do, in a practical, common-sense way. I had serious conversations in those assemblies, until my head ached, but they were not without a lighter side, and I was often startled by the eager way in which American middle-class society abandons the set etiquette of an evening party for charades, a fox-trot (with the carpets thrown back), a game of "twenty questions," or a riot of laughter between a cocktail and a highball. At those hours the youth of America was revealed. Its society is not so old as our tired, saddened people of Europe, who look back with melancholy upon the four years in which their young men perished, and forward without great hope. The vitality of America has hardly been touched by her sacrifice, and the heart of America is high.