These people were human all through, not at all dehumanized, after all, because they lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a New York skyscraper. I dare say also that their work is not so strenuous as it looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than business men and women of their own class in England, so that they have more margin for the pleasures of life, for the purchase of a "cute little hat," even for a play by Maeterlinck.
After business hours many of these people hurry away from New York to suburbs, where they get quickly beyond the turmoil of the city in places with bustling little high streets of their own and good shops and, on the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden framework, in gardens where flowers grow between great rocks which crop out of the soil along the Connecticut shore. They are the "commuters," or, as we should say in England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I did some "commuting" myself during a ten weeks' visit to America, I used to see them make a dash for their trains between five and six in the afternoon or late at night after theater-going in New York. I never tired of the sight of those crowds in the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal or in the Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very spirit of the United States in those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by nobility of design and imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, color, and silence. It is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast floor space below a high dome—painted blue like a summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling—uplifted on enormous arches. It is like entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height, in which all sound is lost, and there is no noise of footsteps and only a low murmur of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central Terminal, where I found myself many times before the last train left. There is no sign of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of sidings and sheds. All that is hidden away until one is admitted to the tracks before the trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls and flower-stalls bright with color, and book-stalls piled high with current literature from which every mind can take its choice, and candy-stalls where the aching jaw may find its chewing-gum, and link up meditation with mastication, on the way to New Rochelle—"forty-five minutes from Broadway"—or to the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, and Port Chester, this side of high life in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Some of the male commuters have a habit of playing cards between New York and New Rochelle, showing an activity of mind not dulled by their day's work in town. But others indulge in conversational quartets, and on these journeys I heard more than I wanted to know about the private life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by will-power and a fighting spirit. "Don't hit often," said one of these philosophers, who began life as an errand-boy and now designs the neckwear of society, "but, when you do, hit hard and clean. No man is worth his salt unless he loses his temper at the right time."
In the last train to Greenwich were American soldiers and mariners just back from France, who slept in corners of the smoking-coach and wakened with a start at New Rochelle, with a dazed look in their eyes, as though wondering whether they had merely dreamed of being home again and were still in the glades of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening. Two typist-girls with their mothers had been to a lecture by Captain Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zeebrugge. They were "crazy" about him. They loved his description of the "blunt end" and the "pointed end" of the ship. They had absorbed a lot of knowledge about naval tactics; and they were going to buy his photograph to put over their desks....
Part of the adventure of life in New York is the acquisition of unexpected knowledge by means of lectures; and Carnegie Hall is the Mecca of lecturers. Having been one of the lecturers, I can speak from personal experience when I say that a man who stands for the first time on the naked desert of that platform, looking toward rows of white faces and white shirt-fronts to the farthest limit of the topmost galleries, feels humility creep into his soul until he shrinks to the size of Hop-o'-My-Thumb and is the smallest, loneliest thing in the whole wide world. A microbe is a monster to him, and he quakes with terror when he hears the first squeak of his tiny voice in the vast spaciousness under that high, vaulted roof. On that first night of mine I would have sold myself, with white shirt, cuff-links, and quaking body, for a two-cent piece, if any one had been fool enough to buy me and let me off that awful ordeal. And yet, looking back on it now, I know that it was the finest hour of my life, and a wonderful reward for small service, when all those people rose to greet me, and there came up to me out of that audience a spiritual friendship so warm and generous that I felt it like the touch of kindly hands about me, and recovered from my fright. Afterward, as always happens in America, there was a procession of people who came onto the platform to shake hands and say words of thanks, so that one gets into actual touch with all kinds of people and their friendship becomes personal. In that way I made thousands of friends in America and feel toward them all a lasting gratitude because of the generous, warm-hearted, splendid things they said as they passed with a quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in America is deep-rooted and widespread. Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is in competition with every other town near by for lecturers who have some special fame or knowledge. In New York there is an endless series of lectures, not only in places like Carnegie Hall and Æolian Hall, but in clubs and churches. Great audiences, made up of rich society people as well as the "intellectuals" and the professional classes, gather in force to hear any man whose personality makes him interesting or who has something to say which they want to hear. In many cases personality is sufficient. People of New York will cheerfully pay five dollars to see a famous man, and not think their money wasted if his words are lost in empty space, or if they know already as much as he can tell them about the subject of his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need to prepare orations. When he said, "Messieurs et mesdames" they cheered him for ten minutes, and when, after that, he said, "je suis enchanté" they cheered him for ten minutes more. They like to see the men who have done things, the men who count for something, and to study the personality of a man about whom they have read. If he has something to tell them, so much the better, and if he is not renowned he must tell them something pretty good if he wants their money and their patience. I have no doubt that the habit of lecture-going is one of the greatest influences at work in the education of the American people. The knowledge they acquire in this way does not bite very deep, and it leaves, I fancy, only a superficial impression, but it awakens their intelligence and imagination, directs their thoughts to some of the big problems of life, and is a better way of spending an evening than idle gossip or a variety entertainment. The League for Political Education which I had the honor of addressing in Carnegie Hall has a series of lectures—three times a week, I think—which are attended by people engaged in every kind of educative and social work in New York, and at a luncheon afterward I listened to a number of speeches by public men and women more inspiring in their sincerity of idealism than anything I have heard in similar assemblies. All these people were engaged in practical work for the welfare of their fellow-creatures, as pioneers of progress in the adventure of life in New York, and the women especially, like Jane Addams, impressed me by the real beauty of their personality.
Another phase of life which interested me was the club world of the city, and in these clubs I met most of the men and many of the women who count in the intellectual activity of New York. I came in touch there with every stratum of thought and tradition which makes up the structure of American politics and ideas. I met the conservatives of the Union Club who live in an atmosphere of dignified austerity (reminding me of the Athenæum Club in London, where the very waiters have the air of bishops and the political philosophy of the late Lord Salisbury), and who confided to me with quiet gravity their personal and unprintable opinions of Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member of the Union League Club, hardly less conservative in its traditional outlook and having a membership which includes many leading business and professional men of New York City. It was here that I saw a touching ceremony which is one of my best memories of the United States, when the negro troops of a fighting regiment marched up Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back their colors for safe-keeping to the Union League Club, which had presented them when they went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speaking from the balcony, praised them for their valor in the great conflict for the world's liberty, when they fought for the country which had given them their own freedom by no light sacrifice of blood. By their service in France they had gained a glory for their citizenship in the United States and stood equal with their white comrades in the gratitude of the American people. There were tears in the eyes of colored officers when, after a luncheon in the Union League Club, they heard other words like those, giving honor to the spirit of their race.... Up the wide stairway of the club, in the softly glowing light which comes through a stained-glass window, the colors of the darky regiment hang as a memorial of courage and sacrifice....
I was the guest of the Arts Club amid a crowd of painters, poets, musicians, and writing-men, who sat at long tables in paneled rooms decorated with pictures and caricatures which were the work of their own members. Clouds of tobacco smoke made wreaths above the board. A soldier-poet rose between the courses and sang his own songs to the chorus of his comrades. It was a jolly night among jolly good fellows, who had wit, and the gift of laughter, and large hearts which beat in sympathy for those who suffered in the war.... In the City Club I had a room when I wanted it, and the hall porter and the bell-boys, and the elevator-man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands with me when I went in and out, so that I felt at home there, after a splendid night when crowds of ladies joined the men to listen to my story of the war, and when a famous glee-party sang songs to me across rose garlands on the banquet table. The City Club has a number of habitués who play dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather chairs discuss the destiny of nations as men who pull the wires which make the puppets dance. It is the home of the foreign correspondents in New York, who know the inside of international politics, and whose president is (or was, at the time of my visit) a kindly, human, English soul with a genius for fellowship which has made a little League of Nations in this New York house. I met him first, as a comrade of the pen, in the Street of Adventure, where London journalists rub shoulders on their way to history; and in New York his friendship was a generous and helpful gift, and by his good words I made many other friends.
It seemed to me that New York is a city where friendship is quickly made, and I found that the best part of my adventure in the city. Day after day, when dusk was creeping into the streets and lights began to gleam in all the windows of the houses that reach up to the stars, I drove down the long highway of Fifth Avenue with a certainty that before the evening was out I should meet a number of friendly souls who would make me welcome at their tables and reveal their convictions and ideals with a candor which does not come to English people until their ice of reserve is broken or thawed. And that was always so. At a small dinner-party or a big reception, in one of the great mansions of New York, or in a suite of rooms high above the traffic of the street, conversation was free-and-easy, with or without the aid of a cocktail, and laughter came in gusts, and American men and women spoke of the realities of life frankly and without camouflage, with a directness and sincerity that touched the essential truth of things. In one room Melba sang with eternal girlhood in her voice, while painters and diplomats, novelists, and wits, famous actresses and princesses of New York, were hushed into silence for a while, until, when the spell was broken, there rose again a merry tumult of tongues. In another room a group of "intellectuals," tired of talking about war and peace, played charades like children in the nursery, and sat down to drawing games with shouts of mirth at a woman's head with the body of a fish and the legs of a bird. In another house the King's Jester of New York, who goes from party to party like a French wit—the little Abbé Morellet—in the salons of France before the Revolution, destroyed the dignity of decorous people by a caricature of German opera and an imitation of a German husband eating in a public restaurant. I knew the weakness that comes from a surfeit of laughter.... I did not tire of these social adventures in New York, and I came to see something of the spirit of the people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan city. I found that spirit touched, in spite of social merriment, by the tragedy of war, and anxious about the outcome of peace. I found these people conscious of new responsibilities thrust upon them by fate, and groping in their minds for some guidance, for some clear light upon their duty and destiny in the reshaping of the world by the history that has happened. Europe, three thousand miles away, is still a mystery to them, full of unknown forces and peoples and passions which they cannot understand, though they read all their Sunday papers, with all their bulky supplements. When I went among them they were divided by the conflict of political differences with passionate emotion, and torn between conflicting ideals of patriotism and humanity. But most of them put on one side, with a fine disdain, all meanness of thought and action and the dirty squalor of financial interests. Sure of their power among nations, the people I met—and I met many of the best—were anxious to rise to their high chance in history and to do the Big Thing in a big way, when they saw the straight road ahead.
When I left New York they were raising their fifth great Victory Loan, and the streets were draped in banners bearing the great V for Victory and for the number of the loan. Their sense of drama was at work again to make this enterprise successful, and their genius of advertisement was in action to put a spell upon the people. The face of a farmer was on the posters in many streets, and that sturdy old fellow upon whose industry the wealth of America depends so much, because it is founded in the soil, put his hand in his pocket and said, "Sure, we'll see it through!"