A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS
The women of America seem to me to have a fair share of that intelligence, and I met many types of them who were interesting as social studies. Several states are still resisting woman suffrage, but as far as equality goes in all affairs of daily life outside political power the women of America have long claimed and gained it. During the war they showed in every class, like the women of England, that they could take on men's jobs and do them as well as men in most cases, and better than men in some cases. They drove motor-lorries and machines; they were dairy farmers and agriculturists; they became munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and elevator-girls, and the womanhood of America rallied up with a wonderful and devoted spirit in a great campaign of work for the Red Cross and all manner of comforts for the troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in transport organization, never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young whose eyes and fingers ached with so much stitching during the long evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an occasional visit to Tiffany's in Fifth Avenue for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket symbolizing success, a holiday at Palm Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a relief from boredom after office hours at the Forty-fourth Street Theater or the Winter Garden. That represents the social ambition of the average business man on the road to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile of dollars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high strain of nervous tension. Meanwhile the women are keeping themselves as beautiful as God made them, with slight improvements according to their own ideas, which are generally wrong; decorating their homes; increasing their housekeeping expenses, and reading prodigiously. They read a vast number of books and magazines, so making it possible for men like myself—slaves of the pen—to exist in an otherwise cruel world.
Before the American lady of leisure gets up to breakfast (generally she doesn't) and uses her lip-salve and powder-puff for the first time in the day, she has her counterpane spread with the morning's newspapers, which are folded into the size of small blankets. There is the New York Times for respectability, the Tribune for political "pep," and the World for social reform. The little lady glances first of all at the picture supplements while she sips her orange juice, reads the head-lines while she gets on with the rolled oats, and with the second cup of coffee settles down to the solid reading-matter of international sensations (skipping, as a rule, the ends of columns "continued on page 4"), until it is time to interview the cook, who again gives notice to leave because of the conduct of the chauffeur or the catlike qualities of the parlor-maid, and handles the telephone to give her Orders of the Day. For some little time after that the telephone is kept busy at both ends, and, with a cigarette threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady of leisure talks to several friends in New York, answers a call from the Western Union, and receives a night-letter sent over the wire. "No, I am absolutely engaged on Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am fixed up that day, too. Yes, and Thursday is quite out of the question. Friday? Oh, hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a well-worn New York joke, and I found it funny and true to life, because it is as difficult to avoid invitations in New York as collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the American lady puts down her engagements and the excuses she gave for breaking others (it is useful to remember those), and she calculates that as far as the present day's work is planned she will have time to finish the new novel by John Galsworthy, to get through a pamphlet on bolshevism which was mentioned at dinner by an extremely interesting young man just back from Russia, to buy a set of summer furs in the neighborhood of Forty-second Street (Herbert, poor dear! says they are utterly unnecessary), to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton with a party of friends, including the man who made such a sensation with his lecture on France at the Carnegie Hall (she will get a lot of first-hand knowledge about the French situation), and to look in at the thé bavardage with dear Beatrice de H., where some of the company of the French theater will meet French-speaking Americans and pretend to understand them. Then there is a nice free evening, for once (oh, that little white lie in the red book!), when she will wallow in the latest masterpiece of H. G. Wells and learn all about God and humanity as revealed by that extraordinary genius with a sense of humor.
So the American lady of leisure keeps up-to-date with the world's lighter thought and skims the surface of the deeper knowledge, using her own common sense as an acid test of truth when the imagination of a novelist runs away with him, and widening her outlook on the problems of life with deliberate desire to understand. It makes her conversation at the dinner-table sparkling, and the men-folk are conscious that she knows more than they do about current literature and international history. She has her dates right, within a century or two, in any talk about medieval England, and she knows who killed Henri IV of France, who were the lovers of Marie de Medici, why Lloyd George quarreled with Lord Northcliffe, and what the ambassador said to the leaders of Russian bolshevism when he met them secretly in Holland. It is useful to know those things in any social gathering of intellectuals, and I met several ladies of American society in New York who had a wide range of knowledge of that kind.
Many American ladies, with well-to-do husbands, and with money of their own, which is very useful to them in time of need, do not regard life merely as a game out of which they are trying to get the most fun, but with more serious views; and I think some of those find it hard to satisfy their aspirations, and go about with a touch, or more, of heartache beneath their furs. I met some women who spoke with a certain irony which reflected the spent light of old illusions, and others who had a kind of wistfulness in their eyes, as though searching for the unattainable happiness. The Tired Business Man as a husband has his limitations, like most men. Often his long hours of absence at the office and his dullness at home make his wife rather companionless, and her novel-reading habits tend to emphasize the loss, and force upon her mind the desire for more satisfying comradeship. Generally some man who enters her circle seems to offer the chance of this. He has high ideals, or the pose of them. His silences seem suggestive of deep unutterable thoughts—though he may be thinking of nothing more important than a smudge on his white waistcoat—he has a tenderness in his gray (or black, or brown) eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman chilled by the lack-luster look of the man who is used to her presence and takes her for granted.... The Tired Business Man ought to be careful, lest he should become too tired to enter into the interests of his wife and to give her the minimum of comradeship which all women demand. The American Woman of Society, outside the Catholic Church, which still insists upon the old law, seems to me quicker than most others to cut her losses in the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks she finds, that she is losing too heavily for her peace of heart. Less than women in European countries will she tolerate deceit or spiritual cruelty, and the law offers her a way of escape, expensive but certain, from a partnership which has been broken. Society, in New York at least, is tolerant to women who have dissolved their married partnership, and there is no stoning-sisterhood to fling mud and missiles at those who have already paid for error by many tears. Yet I doubt whether, in many cases, the liberty they find makes for happiness. There is always the fear of a second mistake worse than the first, and, anyhow, some unattached women I met, women who could afford to live alone, not without a certain luxury of independence, seemed disillusioned as to the romance of life, and the honesty of men, and their own chance of happiness. Their furs and their diamonds were no medicine for the bitterness of their souls, nor for the hunger in their hearts.
But I found a great class of women in America too busy, too interested, and too inspired by common sense to be worried by that kind of emotional distress—the middle-class women who flung themselves into war-work, as before, and now, in time of peace, the activities of charity and education and domestic life have called to them for service. There was a woman doctor I met who seemed to me as fine a type of American womanhood as one could have the luck to meet, and yet, in spite of uncommon ability, a common type in her cheery and practical character. When the war broke out her husband, who was a doctor also, was called to serve in the American army, and his wife, who had passed her medical examinations in the same college with him, but had never practised, carried on his work, in spite of four children. They came first and her devotion to them was not altered, but that did not prevent her from attending to a growing list of patients at a time when influenza was raging in her district. She went about in a car which she drove herself, with the courage and cheerfulness of a gallant soldier. In her little battlefield there were many tragedies, because death took away the youngest-born or the eldest-born from many American homes, and her heart was often heavy; but she resisted all gloomy meditations and kept her nerve and her spirit by—singing. As she drove her car from the house of one patient to another she sang loudly to herself, over the wheel, any little old song that came into her head—"Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle," or "Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he,"—to the profound astonishment of passers-by, who shook their heads and said, "It's a good thing there's going to be Prohibition." But she saved the lives of many women and children in time of plague—for the influenza reached the height of plague—and did not lose her sense of humor or her fine, hearty laugh, or her graciousness of womanhood. When "the army," as she called her husband, came back, she could say, "I kept your flag flying, old man, and you'll not find any difference at home." I saw the husband and wife in their home together. While friends were singing round the piano, these two held hands like young lovers, away back in a shady corner of the room.
I met another husband and wife who interested me as types of American life, though not in their home. It was at a banquet attended by about two hundred people. The husband was the chairman of the party, and he had a wonderful way of making little speeches in which he called upon distinguished people to talk to the company, revealing in each case the special reason why that man or woman should have a hearing. He did this with wit and knowledge, and in each case indeed it was a privilege to hear the speaker who followed, because all the men and women here were engaged in some social work of importance in the life of great American cities, and were idealists who had put their theories into practice by personal service and self-sacrifice. The little man who was the chairman paid a compliment to his own wife, and I found she was sitting by my side. She had gray hair, but very young, bright, humorous eyes, and an almost terrible truthfulness of speech. I was startled by some things she said about the war, and the psychology of men and women under the spell of war. They were true, but dangerous to speak aloud as this woman spoke them. Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred that had been bequeathed by war to the people of the world. "Let us kill hatred," she said. "It is the survival of the cave instinct in man which comes out of its hiding-places under the name of patriotism and justice." I do not know what link there was between this and some other thought which prompted her to show me photographs of two big, sturdy boys who, she told me, were her adopted children. It was a queer, touching story, about these children. "I adopted them not for their sake, but for mine," she said. She was a lonely woman, well married, with leisure and money, and the temptation of selfishness. It was to prevent selfishness creeping into her heart that she sent round to an orphanage for two boy-babies. They were provided, and she brought them up as her own, and found—so she assured me—that they grew up with a marked likeness in feature to herself and her sisters. She had a theory about that—the idea that by some kind of predestination souls reach through space to one another, and find the home where love is waiting for them. I was skeptical of that, having known the London slums, but I was interested in the practical experience of the bright little American woman, who "selfishly," as she said, to cure selfishness, had given two abandoned babies of the world the gift of love, and a great chance in the adventure of life. She was a tremendous protagonist of environment against the influence of heredity. "Environment puts it over heredity all the time," she said.
This special charity on her part is not typical of American women, who do not, any more than women of other countries, go about adopting other people's babies, but I think that her frankness of speech to a stranger like myself, and her curious mixture of idealism and practicality, combined with a certain shrewdness of humor, are qualities that come to people in America. She herself, indeed, is a case of "environment," because she is foreign in blood, and American only by marriage.
In New York I had the advantage of meeting one lady who seemed to me typical of the old-fashioned "leaders" of American society such as Henry James described in his novels. She lives in one of the great mansions along Fifth Avenue, and the very appearance of her butler is a guaranty of riches and respectability. She made no disguise of her wealth, and was proud of it in a simple way, as an English aristocrat is proud of his ancestry and family treasures. But she acknowledges its responsibilities and takes them seriously with a sense of duty. She had received lessons in public speaking, in order to hold her own at committee meetings, and she doles out large sums in charity to public institutions and deserving cases, with a grim determination to unmask the professional beggar and the fraudulent society. She seemed to have a broad-hearted tolerance for the younger generation and a special affection for boys of all ages, whom she likes to feed up, and to keep amused by treating them to the circus or the "movies"; but I fancy that she is a stern disciplinarian with her family as well as her servants, and that her own relatives stand in awe of this masterful old lady who has a high sense of honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and service from those who look for her favors and her money. I detected a shrewd humor in her and an abiding common sense, and at her own dinner-table she had a way of cross-examining her guests, who were men of political importance and women of social influence, like a judge who desires to get at the evidence without listening to unnecessary verbiage. She is the widow of a successful business man, but I perceived in her the sense of personal power and family traditions which belonged to the old type of dowager-duchess in England. Among butterfly women of European cities she would appear an austere and terrible figure in her virtue and her diamonds, but to small American boys, eating candies at her side in the circus, she is the kind and thoughtful aunt.