It is, perhaps, symbolic that The Masses in moving uptown stopped at Fourteenth Street, the traditional and permanent boundary line. There it may reach out and touch the great world, yet still remain part of the Village where it was born.
Here is one man's views of the Liberal Club. I am half afraid to quote them, they sound so heretical, but I wish to emphasise the fact that they are quoted. They might be the snapping of the fox at the sour grapes for all I know! Though this particular man seemed calm and dispassionate. "The Liberal Club Board," he said, "is a purely autocratic institution. It is collectively a trained poodle, though composed of nine members. The procedure is to make a few long speeches, praise the club, and re-elect the Board. Perfectly simple. But—did you say Liberal Club?" He used to sit on the Board himself, too!
A visiting Scotch socialist proclaimed it, without passion, a "hell of a place," and some of its most striking anarchistic leaders, "vera interestin' but terrible damn fools"! But he was, doubtless, an eccentric though an experienced and dyed-in-the-wool socialist who had lectured over half the globe. It is recorded of him that once when a certain young and energetic Village editor had been holding forth uninterruptedly and dramatically for an hour on the rights of the working-man, etc., etc., the visiting socialist, who had been watching his fervent gesticulations with absorbed attention, suddenly leaned forward and seized the lapel of his coat.
"Mon!" he exclaimed earnesly, "do ye play tennis?"
Just what is the Liberal Club?
You may have contradictory answers commensurate with the number of members you interrogate. One will tell you that it is a fake; one that it is the only vehicle of free speech; Arthur Moss says it is "the most il-liberal club in the world"! Floyd Dell says it is paramountly a medium for entertainment, and that it is "not so much a clearing house of new ideas as of new people"!
The Liberal Club goes up, and the Liberal Club goes down. It has its good seasons and its bad, its fluctuations as to standards and favour, its share in the curious and inevitable tides that swing all associations back and forth like pendulums.
There is a real passion for dancing in the Village, and it is beautiful dancing that shows practice and a natural sense of rhythm. The music may be only from a victrola or a piano in need of tuning, but the spirit is, most surely, the vital spirit of the dance. At the Liberal Club everyone dances. After you have passed through the lounge room—the conventional outpost of the club, with desks and tables and chairs and prints and so on—you find yourself in a corridor with long seats, and windows opening on to Nora Van Leuwen's big, bare, picturesque Dutch Oven downstairs. On the other side of the corridor is the dance room—also the latest exhibition. Some of the pictures are very queer indeed. The last lot I saw were compositions in deadly tones of magenta and purple. The artist was a tall young man, the son of a famous illustrator. He strolled in quite tranquilly for a dance,—with those things of his in full view! All the courage is not on battlefields.
Said a girl, who, Village-like, would not perjure her soul to be polite: