Prejudices

by Charles Macomb Flandrau

I’ve had an exceedingly good time here. Theoretically, a person who leads the kind of life I do ought to have spent his vacation otherwise. I know that if I had consulted the oracles who answer “Troubled Subscriber,” they, one and all, would have answered, “Get out into the open, or the cool, quiet depths of the forest. Get into touch with Mother Nature and commune with her. Her bosom is large (and covered with ants). She loves her tired children.” But I did nothing of the sort. Instead of getting into the forest, I got into the cool, quiet depths of a sea-going automobile, with a handful of orchids swaying in a glass-and-silver vase in front of me, and came to Newport. What I needed just then was not taking long tramps and cooking my own indigestible meals in a frying pan, reposing on a lumpy heap of pine needles and getting drowned every other night at half-past eleven, anointing mosquito bites and falling over logs. Not a bit of it. I yearned instead for an exquisite bedroom and salon overhanging a sapphire and diamond sea, a young man—whose very presence created a deeper silence—to wake me in the morning, to draw a bath, to lay out my clothes, to bring me my breakfast on china that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour. I wanted to arise late and mingle with perfectly dressed, good-looking, agreeable people, who seemed to be enjoying themselves and who, if they ever did have annoying, serious or sad moments, never let one know about it. I wanted to go to large, gay luncheons at half-past two, and larger, gayer dinners at half-past eight or nine, with golf and rides and drives, and other people and tea in between. I wanted to see lots of young girls who looked like hot-house flowers and who would decide to be charming to me because they knew that I knew it would be out of the question to try to marry them, and I wanted to talk to incredibly youthful looking old women with marvelously arranged, dyed hair, high diamond collars to conceal the wattles, and ropes of pearls, with which to run through nervous, jeweled fingers.

Well, all this I have done and seen for a month now, and, as I said, I have greatly enjoyed myself. I suppose you know, of course, that Newport, Rhode Island, does not, in the least, resemble the Newport that the American people read about in newspapers—that the Newport of the newspapers does not, in fact, exist. To multitudes of our fellow countrymen this would be not only unwelcome, but incredible news. Yet it is a curious truth. The great American people (dear, old, great, American people!) like to think of this extraordinarily healthful and beautiful spot as being, at the worst, a kind of dazzling den of vice, and, at the best, a resort where semi-idiotic families possessing great wealth may, with impunity, concoct grotesque and vulgar—and ever more vulgar—diversions for all the rest of our completely moral, intellectual, high-minded and desirable population to sneer at. Around the mythical Newport of editors and reporters has grown a tradition and a stock of phrases that the country at large eagerly swallows whole. I don’t suppose there is a paragrapher in any state of the Union who could possibly grind out four lines about Newport without employing the words “monkey dinner,” although there has never been such a thing as a monkey dinner at Newport (whatever a monkey dinner may be), and nobody who lives and entertains here in summer has the slightest idea of what the thing means. Originally, no doubt, the fiction of a reportorial mind, it has become, through repetition and the course of time, as much of an established fact to the nation as the Washington monument or the Civil War.

The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is merely a euphonious term for a debauch—but, of course, you know as well as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange state of mind known as “fashion.” Here there is sometimes—often, perhaps,—rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. In Europe I have dined at great embassies in the company of famous and important personages, with far less fuss, feathers and war paint than I have been accustomed to during the past month, when I would dine, for instance, with a man whose father had amassed millions from ready-made clothing, and whose party consisted of a few of his equally unimportant acquaintances. The whole thing (given the kind of thing) is, without question, very perfectly and beautifully done; but equally without question it is, most of the time, very much overdone. It has so often occurred to me as I made myself agreeable to the skinny, be-powdered nakedness of the lady next to me (maybe you don’t know it, but I have a reputation for an ability to amuse any woman who has passed the age of sixty-five, and I, therefore, always take in someone who looks like the galvanized remains of Rameses II), that there was no real, no justifiable reason for so much formality and splendor. There really isn’t, you know. It is not at all as it is in England, for example, where political ambitions must be furthered and the prestige of great and ancient names maintained. Here there are widely known names (that of my last night’s hostess may be seen over the entrance of a large and bad hotel), but they are neither great nor what one is accustomed to consider ancient; and as for politics, when politics become necessary to these people, they merely, and with a light heart, hire a United States senator to do whatever dirty work the situation demands. Splendor here is indulged in purely for its own sake. There is absolutely nothing behind it except unlimited means.

But, even so, neither the “entertainments” nor the persons who give them, are at all like the nation’s fixed idea of them. The former, if you like, are unnecessary and super-elaborate, but they are always beautiful in their way, and decorous; the latter, more often than not, are extremely interesting and often charming. Why shouldn’t they be? For daily, since I have been here, it has come over me with a sense of having discovered the fact that “human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.” There are intelligent, clever, sympathetic, altogether delightful men and women here, and also men and women who are, by nature, dull, narrow, tiresome or common, just as there are in every habitable region of the globe. But stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore for bore, I confess that the stupid, common bore of these regions is much less wearisome than he is in regions less splendid. He (or she) has in his favor all sorts of things that, while they do not make him interesting or worth one’s time, at least furnish him with a variety of avenues of approach—if you know what I mean. Essentially limited though he be, as far as his intellect and sympathies are concerned, mere sordid wealth had usually forced upon him certain contacts and habits and experiences that you can understand and can talk about. There is about him, somewhere, a neutral ground on which for the time being you can get together in a way you simply can’t with the same sort of nonentity who has not been subjected to the same sort of influences. Stupidity for stupidity, commonness for commonness, bore for bore, I, after all, prefer that of Newport to that of Saugdunk, Maine, or Pekin, Kansas. In the long run, of course, they are both exactly the same, and both very awful. The difference between them is the difference between taking a dose of castor oil enveloped in an expensive capsule and taking it straight.

I like many of the people I have met here more than I can tell you, but late at night, sometimes, alone in my always monotonously perfect bedroom, when all through the house not a creature is stirring, not even a—valet, I often giggle at the abysmal difference between us. And in spite of all their hospitality and millions, the laugh, I must colloquially confess, is on them. For although I am perfectly capable of meeting them on their ground, they could not possibly meet me on mine. From earliest childhood our influences and training have been as far apart as the poles, but I consider mine by far the more important and valuable; for, when I feel like it, I can go into society, while they have no idea at all of the relief and delight of getting out of it. They know their own side of life, but I am perfectly conversant with theirs and several others as well. When I am with them I can do all of their stunts just as well as they do them themselves, but I know, somewhere in the back of my head, that they couldn’t do any of mine. I don’t despise them or look down on them for this, but I do, every now and then, feel awfully sorry for them—regret for them the things they have missed and are missing. “Just what does he mean by that?” I think I can see you wonder.

Well, I mean all sorts of things, and for the most part they are, no doubt, absurd and incommunicable. I mean, for instance, that I know all about their fussy, tedious, proper, little childhoods, and that they do not know, and never will know, anything about mine. In my opinion, their childhood was a decorous tragedy; in their opinion, if they learned about it, mine would be a sensational scandal. In New York it always gives me a queer, asphyxiated feeling when I see pretty, expensively dressed little boys walking for exercise on upper Fifth avenue in charge of a maid or a footman, or being transported in an automobile or a victoria for an hour’s “romp” in the park. And here at Newport I have overheard little girls discussing with acuteness and authority the probable length of time it would take the lady who has rented the palace next door to arrive at the goal of her social ambitions.

My own childhood was so wonderfully casual and different! We lived on the outskirts of a small northwestern city—not in the country exactly, and not exactly in the slums. In those days the place had no slums, but it had outlying, semi-rural tracts where poor people built shanties and “squatted.” My parents neither built a shanty nor squatted, but they built a house that from time to time grew and rambled, and they lived there. They were able to live where they pleased, because in the community they were persons of importance. I, however, was not, and as children, especially boys, always play with the most available other children, unless they are told not to (and even then sometimes), and as I was never told not to, my only boy companions and intimate friends, until I was fourteen, were the boys of our neighborhood. At that time they were known to the élite as “the Elm street gang.” The ungraded road on which our house was situated had been named, with the usual subtlety of municipal authorities, “Elm Street,” because all of its trees were either scrub oak or maple. They were “the Elm street gang” in those days; to-day they would merely be known as “muckers.” It was with them that all my early years were spent, both in school and out. For at that time, if I remember rightly, the parochial schools (all my friends were Irish Roman Catholics) did not catch their pupils as young as they do now, and we all went to a yellow brick schoolhouse named after a Democratic president.

To you it may not seem to be a matter of importance that until I was fourteen my only playmates and dearest friends were Irish muckers. To me it is of a significance that I could scarcely explain. For at an impressionable age I not only lived my own life—the life I was born to—in my own house and family, but quite as naturally and sincerely I lived the life of an Irish mucker. (This, to me, sounds like an unappreciative, a clumsy, almost a brutal way of stating it, but if I expressed it otherwise you probably wouldn’t understand.) I knew their families and loved them. I used to share not only their meals when I felt like it (they always tasted much better than our own), but their sorrows and their joys. Elm street and vicinity in those days was a little segment lifted in its entirety from the bogs of Ireland and set down in the Northwest, and, as I lived there, I very early in life became intimate with poverty, drunkenness and death. Before I was twelve I had sat in a whitewashed room with a drowned boy, discussing with his family what they could most advantageously sell or pawn in order to pay for the expense of a funeral. And, oh! the wakes. We had wakes on Elm street; real ones; the kind that nowadays take place only in Irish fiction. And I used to go to them because they were the wakes of persons I had known, and, in a childish way, cared for. After twenty-four years I can still recall the final expression of certain pallid, waxen faces, and white, crossed, emaciated hands. They used to “keen,” just as they do, no doubt, in some parts of Ireland to-day, and it was Mrs. Smith who always started it. To you “Mrs. Smith” may sound somewhat vague, but there was only one Mrs. Smith at that time. She was a supernaturally old woman, who always wore a kind of semi-sunbonnet of frilled white linen and devoted most of her time to a flock of geese. Through her the torch, so to speak, had been handed down. After her death there was no more keening.

But, of course, it wasn’t all wakes. On Sunday morning I used to go up to the Hogans where Mame was preparing dinner while the rest of the family were at mass. At that time I looked upon Mame as grown up, even old; but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. The Hogans had a wonderful vegetable garden, and while the family was at church, Mame and I would pull up carrots and beets, pick peas and beans, gather ears of corn, snip off sprigs of parsley, prepare them all, and then dump them into a rotund iron pot on the stove with a chunk of meat. After that we would sit down outside of the shanty and talk. I forget now what we talked about, but it must have been absorbing to me, because I was always still there when Mrs. Hogan creaked up the hill in her Sunday black, and I usually stayed for the soup. Never in this world will soup again taste like that.

I knew these people intimately, and in a queer sort of way felt that I was one of them. The opulent and well-dressed boys of the place always avoided Elm street. They were desperately afraid of the locality, and with reason. For there was a perpetual rumor abroad that the elm street gang hated the “Yanks,”—as the nicely dressed, male offspring of the fashionable districts were called by us. As I look back on it all I think we did hate them—I, almost as heartily as the rest. Then arrived the inevitable time when I acquired a bicycle, and the “Yanks” (I can’t imagine why) invited me to become a member of their bicycle club. I accepted, and from that time on I was “in society.” But I shall never forget the first meeting of the bicycle club in front of our house when my old friends gathered to see the start, and I felt like a renegade, a sneak and a traitor. Even now I can remember some of the scathing and picturesquely blasphemous comments made on that occasion by the gang.