Then they would dive into their pocket and press a twenty-five cent piece into my hand and hurry off to catch their own car.
But New York reminds you of nothing, suggests no comparison. New York is America epitomized: fierce, tireless, blatant if you will, but great. Nature stands abashed before it. The sea crawls round it, dwarfed, insignificant. Trees, like waving grasses, spring from its crevices. The clouds are rent upon its pinnacles.
It strikes a new note. Behind the mere bigness is a new idea: something that you feel is tremendously important. You worry for a time, wondering. And then suddenly it springs upon you. In London, Paris, Rome—go where you will in the old world it is the great cathedral, the spires of a hundred churches, the minarets, towers, domes, the theatres and palaces that pierce the sky-line: that rise serene above the market place, the byways of the money-changers. In New York it is Business Triumphant that towers to heaven, dominating, unchallenged. The skyscraper alone is visible. Religion, art: they have their hiding-places, round its feet.
In a town of the middle west, a kind man put me up. He was rich and had one child, a daughter Margaret, who was the apple of his eye. She was twelve years old at the time. She had her own banking account, and drew her own cheques. I remember a conversation between them one evening. He had just returned home from his office; and she had fetched him his house shoes and was sitting on his knee.
“I brought off a good stroke of business to-day, Maggie,” he said to her, while stroking her hair. “So I paid five thousand dollars into your account. How do you propose to invest it?”
The child sat for a while with puckered brows, one arm about his neck.
“Well,” she answered at length, “if, as the papers say, there is going to be a famine in Russia this winter, hadn't I better put it into wheat?”
He kissed her.
“That's right,” he answered. “I'll fix it up for you in the morning.”
I have made three American tours. It was offered to me to make a fourth just after the war. My agent assured me there would be no difficulty about drinks; but there were other reasons also, and I shirked it. The first must be twenty years ago by now. That it was not as profitable to me as it might have been was my own fault. Never in my life have I felt so lost and lonesome as during my first days in New York. Everything was so strange, so appallingly “foreign.” I had never been outside Europe before. Never, so it seemed to me, would I be able to adapt myself to the ways and customs of the country. And then there was the language problem. In Vevey, on Lake Leman, there sits cross-legged—or used to sit—a smiling small Italian shoeblack: behind him on the wall a placard with this wording, “English spoken—American understood.” I thought of him, as I wandered bewildered through the New York streets, and wondered how long it had taken him.