It was a scene both vulgar and splendid, extravagant and tawdry, mean and aspiring. If a tidal wave washed away all but the hotels it would have a certain stark magnificence, but the miles of pigmy shops gave it the appearance of a chain of village Main Streets that made the great hotels, not themselves, look alien.
Nevertheless the ensemble was gay and exhilarating. Above the mass-murmur of voices rose the cry of the barkers and the deep surge of the Atlantic. These slowly moving smiling crowds gave to the scene an air of careless and unqualified leisure to be found nowhere else in the world.
Behind and below the Boardwalk, between the Inlet and Iowa Avenue, Atlantic City proper, a dignified town of a prevailing gray tone, rambled back to the Thoroughfares and the salt marshes, and on the south merged into the faubourg of Chelsea. It was a town with a life of its own and regarded its façade as almost if not wholly negligible. Its social life, like that of other small towns, revolved about its churches, Episcopalianism representing the flake of the crust, and its women’s clubs were often storm-centers of politics. The men had their professional and business clubs, and some sixty leading citizens met for a weekly luncheon at one of the city hotels either to talk business or forget it, and to sing, with the abandon of boys, the sentimental songs of their youth. Atlantic Avenue, a broad if unpicturesque thoroughfare, had its enormous trolleys that went from the Inlet to Longport, at the southern tip of the island; but Pacific Avenue, with its fine Public Library, its churches and reserved private houses, relied on the humble jitney.
It was not a bustling city but it had a constant surge of life, and there was no apparent poverty except in the negro quarter, whose denizens found compensation in a conscious political power. And it was a proud city, for all its streets were avenues, its shops were serenely independent of the extortionists on the Boardwalk, the best of its private houses looked like dignified old folks, well preserved but with no pretensions to youth, and its air was tonic. Visitors in the great frontal hotels, looking down on the quiet little gray city, assumed that oyster-dredging was still its main industry, and the humbler patrons of the hundreds of hotels and boarding-houses of the town accepted it as an annex to the Boardwalk and knew as little of its life as of its history.
Gita had often wandered about the town, which attracted her more than Chelsea or Ventnor, for although far from contemporary with the manor it represented the vision and enterprise of that group of men, including her great-grandfather, who had founded it in the early fifties, and now it had an elderly dignity and beauty of its own.
Her slow progress had brought her to the incline that led down into States Avenue and she edged her way to the rail and looked over at a large gray wooden house with a round pointed tower. It was on the north side of the avenue—once but a footpath leading from the old United States Hotel to the beach—and, like its neighbors, belonged to a definite and debased period of American architecture. Many of her enterprising great-grandfather’s friends had left Philadelphia to become permanent residents of the new city, either for business reasons or for fashion, and this street demonstrated their theories of comfort and grandeur. A few of their descendants had magnificent houses out on the avenues of Chelsea or Ventnor, others had succumbed to adverse fortune and quietly disappeared. A very few perhaps still lived where their fathers or grandfathers had built. Several of these old houses, once the pride of Atlantic City, were boarding-houses for the better class of vacationists who could not afford the palaces on the Boardwalk.
Gita had spent two hours on that famous promenade and not seen a familiar face. Nor was she likely to see one if she spent the day there. Polly and the girls she had brought to the manor during the past week scorned it wholeheartedly. They might exercise there in the early morning and swim off their secluded beach when the ocean recovered from the chill of winter, but to show themselves in “that crowd” had no part in their program of aristocratic democracy.
Gita, who had entertained her new friends in aired and sunny rooms from which at least a third of the furniture had been removed to the stables (by two stalwart sons of her farmers, the while Topper and Andrew muttered a continuous protest) had lost her desire for solitude, and wondered if the Pelhams were at home. Easter Sunday was no time for a formal call, but Gita, whether fundamentally a Carteret or not, ignored the conventions when it suited her purpose.
She descended the incline and strolled up the avenue to the least remunerative of her possessions. The blinds were raised and several of the windows were open. It was after twelve and if the Pelhams had attended church, as no doubt they had—the church, if not religion, playing so dominant a part in the lives of their kind—they would have returned. The midday dinner and Easter Sunday! Gita shrugged her shoulders and ran up the long flight of steps: the house, following the rule, was built above a high cellar as a precaution against the rare but always possible furies of the sea.
But the Pelhams had a late breakfast on Sunday and an early supper. When the colored maid brought up Miss Carteret’s name they were in their respective bedrooms enjoying the somnolent ease that followed a morning well spent. Chelsea had no more contempt for the Boardwalk than States Avenue.