"This is my boy from 'over there'! Just come back."
I heard that introduction many times, and saw the look of pride behind the glasses that were worn by a gray-eyed man, who had his hand on the arm of an upstanding fellow in field uniform, tall and lean and hard. "It's good to be back," said one of these young officers, and as he sat at table he looked round the huge salon with its cut-glass candelabra, where scores of little dinner-parties were in progress to the strident music of a stringed band, and then, with a queer little smile about his lips, as though thinking of the contrast between this scene and "over there," said, "Darned good!" In their evening frocks the women were elegant—they know how to dress at night—and now and then the fresh, frank beauty of one of these American girls startled my eyes by its witchery of youth and health. Some of them are décolleté to the ultimate limit of a milliner's audacity, and foolishly I suffered from a sense of confusion sometimes because of the physical revelations of elderly ladies whose virtue, I am sure, is as that of Cæsar's wife. The frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of life's enchanted places would envy some of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, and scream with horror at their prices. But although the American woman with a wealthy husband likes to put on the flimsy robes of Circe, it is only as she would go to a fancy-dress ball in a frock that would make her brother say: "Gee!... And where did you get that bit of fluff?" She is Circe, with the Suffrage, and high ideals of life, and strong views on the League of Nations. She makes up her face like a French comédienne, but she has, nine times out of ten, the kind heart of a parson's wife in rural England and a frank, good-natured wit which faces the realities of life with the candor of a clean mind.
I found "gay life" in New York immensely and soberly respectable. One could take one's maiden aunt into the heart of it and not get hot by her blushes. In fact, it is the American maiden aunt who sets the pace of the fox-trot and the one-step in dancing-rooms where there are music and afternoon tea. Several times I supped "English breakfast tea"—I suspect Sir Thomas Lipton had something to do with it—at five o'clock on bright afternoons, watching the scene at Sherry's and Delmonico's. It seemed to me that this dancing habit was a most curious and over-rated form of social pleasure. It was as though American society had said, "Let us be devilishly gay!" but started too early in the day, with desperate sobriety. Many couples left the tea-table for the polished boards and joined the throng which surged and eddied in circles of narrow circumference, jostled by other dancers. Youth did not have it all its own way. On the contrary, I noticed that bald-headed gentlemen with some width of waistbands were in the majority, dancing with pridigious gravity and the maiden aunts. They were mostly visitors, I am told, from other cities—Bostonians escaping from the restrictions of their Early Victorian atmosphere, senators who voted for prohibition in their own states, business men who had booked reservations on midnight trains from Grand Central Terminal. Here and there young officers of the army and navy led out pretty girls, and with linked arms, and faces very close together, danced in a kind of coma, which they seemed to enjoy, though without any sparkle in their eyes. There were also officers of other nations—a young Frenchman appealing to the great heart of the American people on behalf of devastated France, and dancing for the sake of people scorched by the horrors of war, to say nothing of the little American girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de Guerre; and young English officers belonging to the British Mission, and engaged in propaganda—oh, frightful word!—of which a thé dansant at Delmonico's was, no doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure that caught my eye gave the keynote to the moral and spiritual character of the scene. It was the figure of a stout old lady wearing a hat with a huge feather which waggled over her nose as she danced the one-step with earnest vivacity, and an old gentleman with side-whiskers. She panted as she came back to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes me feel young!" It occurred to me that she might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on a visit to New York, and anyhow her presence assured me that afternoon dancing at Delmonico's need not form the theme of any moralist in search of vice in high places. It is not only respectable, it is domestic. Savonarola himself would not have denounced such innocent amusement. Nor did I find anything to shock the sensibilities of high-souled ethics in such midnight haunts as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden, except the inanity of all such shows where large numbers of pretty girls and others disport themselves in flowing draperies and colored lights before groups of tired people who can hardly hide their boredom, but yawn laughingly over their cocktails and say, "Isn't she wonderful?" when Mollie King sings a song about a variety of smiles, and discuss the personality of President Wilson between comic turns of the Dooley brothers. That at least is what happened in my little group on the roof of the Century Theater, where a manufacturer of barbed wire—I wonder if they were his barbs on which I tore myself in Flanders fields—initiated me into the mystery of a Bacardi cocktail followed by a stinger, from which I was rescued, in the nick of time, by a kind lady on my right who took pity on my innocence. A famous playwright opposite, as sober as a judge, as courteous as Beau Brummell, passed the time of day, which was a wee small hour of morning, with little ladies who came into the limelight, until suddenly he said, with a sigh of infinite impatience, "Haven't we enjoyed ourselves enough? I want my bed"; so interrupting a serious discussion between a war correspondent and a cartoonist on the exact truth about German atrocities, to the monstrous melody of a jazz band. Human nature is the same in New York as in other cities of the world. Passion, weakness, folly, are not eliminated from the relations between American men and women. But to find vice and decadence in American society one has to go in search of it; and I did not go. I found New York society tolerant in its views, frank in its expression of opinion, fond of laughter, and wonderfully sincere. Wealth does not spoil its fresh and healthy outlook on life, and its people are idealists at heart, with a reverence for the old-fashioned virtues and an admiration for those who "make good" in whatever job to which they put their hands.
After all, hotel life, and restaurant life, and the glamorous world of the Great White Way, do not reveal the real soul of New York. They are no more a revelation of normal existence than boulevard life in Paris represents the daily round of the average Parisian. They are the happy hunting-grounds of the transient, and the real New-Yorker only visits them in hours of leisure and boredom.
Another side of the adventure of life in New York is "downtown," where the subways and the overhead railways pour out tides of humanity who do not earn their dollars without hard work and long hours of it. I should never have found my way to Bowling Green and Wall Street without a guide, because the underground world of the subways, where electric trains go rushing like shuttles through the warp and woof of a monstrous network, is utterly confusing to a stranger. But with the guide, who led me by the hand and laughed at my childlike bewilderment, I came into the heart of New York business life and saw its types in their natural environment. It is an alarming world to the wanderer who comes there suddenly. I confess that when I first walked through those deep gorges, between the mighty walls of houses as high as mountains in a surge of humanity in a hurry, I felt dazed and cowardly. I had a conviction that my nerve-power would never survive the stress and strain of such a life in such a place. I nearly dislocated my neck by gazing up at the heights of the skyscrapers, rising story on story to fifty or sixty floors. In a House of a Thousand Windows I took the elevator to the top story and wished I hadn't when the girl in charge of the lift asked, "What floor?" and was answered by a quiet gentleman who said, "Thirty-one." That was our first stop, and in the few seconds we took to reach this altitude I had a vision of this vast human ant-heap, with scores of offices on each floor, and typewriters clicking in all of them, and girl-clerks taking down letters from hard-faced young men juggling with figures which, by the rise or drop of a decimal point, mean the difference between millions of dollars in the markets of the world. Each man and woman there in this House of a Thousand Windows had a human soul, with its own little drama of life, its loves and hopes and illusions, but in the vastness of one skyscraper, in the whirlpool of commerce, in the machinery of money-making, the humanities of life seemed to be destroyed and these people to be no more than slaves of modern civilization, ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there was pandemonium. The outside brokers—the curb men—were bidding against one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange—the Standard Oil Company among them—and their hoarse cries mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This particular house was a narrow, not very tall, building of reddish brown brick, like a Georgian house in London, and out of each window, which was barred, poked two rows of faces, one above the other, as though the room inside were divided by a false floor. In the small window-frames sat single figures, in crouched positions, with telephone receivers on their ears and their faces staring at the crowd in the street below. Each one of those human faces, belonging to young men of healthy appearance, was making most hideous grimaces, and each grimace was accompanied by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the man's fingers. With a thumb and two fingers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked through the windows with violent efforts to attract the notice of individuals in the street. I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had some hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I had first taken them to be were signaling messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps of different colors in order to be distinguished from their fellows. Up and down the street, and from the topmost as well as from the lower stories of many buildings, I saw the grimaces and the gestures of the window-men, and the noise and tumult in the street became more furious. It was a lively day in Wall Street, and I thanked God that my fate had not led me into such a life. It seemed worse than war....
Not really so, after all. It was only the outward appearance of things that distressed one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all these young men on the curb seemed very cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves as much as boys in a Rugby "scrum." There was nothing wrong with their nerves. There was nothing wrong with a crowd of young business men and women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our fighting-men who were always less gloomy than the fellows at the rear in the safe back-waters of war. Business men and lady-clerks, typists, and secretaries, were all mingled at the little tables where the backs of chairs touched, and there was a loud, incessant chatter like the noise of a parrot-house. I overheard some fragments of conversation at the tables close to me.
"They don't seem to be getting on with the Peace Conference," said a young man with large spectacles. "All the little nations are trying to grab a bit of their neighbors' ground."
"I saw the cutest little hat—" said a girl whose third finger was stained with red ink.
"Have you seen that play by Maeterlinck?" asked an elderly man so like President Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be the twin brother of that much-discussed man.