It was in Boston that I met some other types of American women, not long enough to know them well, but enough to see superficial differences of character between them and their friends of New York. Needless to say, I had read a good deal about Boston before going there. In England the Bostonian tradition is familiar to us by the glory of such masters as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, so that I had a friendly feeling when I went about the city and saw its streets and prim houses, reminiscent of Cheltenham and other English towns of ancient respectability and modern culture. After a lecture there many Bostonians came onto the platform, and I heard at once a difference in accent from the intonation of New York. It was a little more precise, with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. The people who spoke to me were earnest souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift them above the personal prejudices of party politics. I should imagine that some of them are republican rather than democratic in instinct, but those at least who were in my audience supported the idea of the League of Nations, and for that reason did not wish to see President Wilson boiled in oil or roasted at a slow fire. From my brief glimpses of Boston society I should imagine that the Puritan spirit still lingers there among the "best families" and that in little matters of etiquette and social custom they adhere to the rules of the Early Victorian era of English life.
I was convinced of this by one trivial incident I observed in a hotel at Boston. A lady, obviously in transit from New York, by the public way in which she used her powder-puff, and by a certain cosmopolitan easiness of manner, produced a gold cigarette-case from her muff, and began to smoke without thinking twice about it. She had taken just three whiffs when a colored waiter approached in the most deferential manner and begged her to put out her cigarette, because smoking was not allowed in the public rooms. The lady from New York looked amazed for a moment. Then she laughed, dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, and said: "Oh yes—I guess I forgot I was in Boston!" In that word Boston she expressed a world of propriety, conventional morality, and social austerity, a long, long way from the liberty of New York. I had been told that a Boston audience would be very cold and unenthusiastic, not because they would be out of sympathy with the lecturer, but because they were "very English" in their dislike of emotional expression. My experience was not like that, as I was relieved to find, and, on the contrary, those Bostonians at the Symphony Hall applauded with most generous warmth and even rose and cheered when I had finished my story of the heroic deeds of English soldiers. It was a Boston girl who made the apologia of her people. "I am sure," she said, "that all those men and women who rose to applaud went down on their knees that night and asked God to forgive them for having broken their rule of life."
No doubt Boston society, as far as it includes the old families rooted in it for generations, is conservative in its point of view, and looks askance at noisy innovations like modern American dances, jazz bands, and the jolly vulgarities of youth. But, judging from my passing glimpses of college girls in the town, I should say that youth puts up a healthy opposition to the "old fogy" philosophy, and breaks the conventions now and then with a crash. One girl I met suggests to me that Boston produces character by intensive culture, and is apt to be startled by the result. Her father was a well-known lawyer, and she inherited his gift of learning and logic, so that when he died she had the idea of carrying on his work. The war was on, and somewhere over on the western front was a young English soldier whom she had met on board ship and might, according to the chances of war, never meet again. Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. She decided to study for the law examinations and to be called to the bar; and to keep her company, her mother, who was her best comrade, went into college with her, and shared her rooms. I like that idea of the mother and daughter reading and working together. It seems to me a good picture. In due time she was called to the bar, and entered the chambers where her father had worked, and did so well that a great lawyer who gave her his cases to prepare spoke rare words of praise about her. Then the war ended, one day, quite suddenly, the young English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after a few preliminary inquiries as to his chance of luck, said, "When shall we get married?" He was in a hurry to settle down, and the mother of the girl was scared by his grim determination to carry her comrade away. Yet he was considerate. "I should hate to cause your mother any worry by hurrying things on so fast as Monday," he said. "Let us make it Tuesday." But the wedding took place on the Saturday before the Tuesday, and the young lady barrister of Boston was whisked away four days after the English officer came to America with a dream in his heart of which he desired the fulfilment. Boston was startled. This romance was altogether too rapid for its peace of mind. Why, there was no time to buy the girl a wedding-present!... The street boys of Boston were most startled by the English officer's best man—his brother—whose tall hat, tail-coat, and white spats were more wonderful than anything they had seen before.
I was not long enough in many towns of America to detect their various characteristics. Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that it was safe for people to fall out of windows—they just wafted down like gossamer—but I found it a pleasant, bustling place, with a delightful Old World atmosphere, like a bit of Queen Anne-England, round Independence Hall.... Pittsburgh by night, looking down on its blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared to me like a town behind the battle-lines under heavy gun-fire, and I am convinced that the workers in those factories are in the front-line trenches of life and deserve gold medals for their heroism. I had not been in the town ten minutes before a young lady with the poetical name of Penelope rang me up on the telephone and implored me to take a walk out by night to see this strange and wonderful picture, and I was glad of her advice, though she did not offer to go as my guide. Another girl made herself acquainted, and I found she has a hero-worship for a fellow war correspondent, once of Pittsburgh, whose career she had followed through many battlefields.
I saw Washington in glamorous sunlight under a blue sky, and found my spirit lifted up by the white beauty of its buildings and the spaciousness of its public gardens. I had luncheon with the British ambassador, curious to find myself in an English household, with people discussing America from the English point of view in the political heart of the United States; and I visited the War College and met American generals and officers in the very brain-center of that great army which I had seen on the roads of France and on the battlefields. This was the University of War as far as the American people are concerned, and there were diagrams on the blackboards in the lecture-hall describing the strategy of the western front, while in the library officers and clerks were tabulating the history of the great massacre in Europe for future guidance, which by the grace of God and the League of Nations will be unnecessary for generations to come. I talked with these officers and found them just such earnest, serious scientific men as I had met in American Headquarters in France, where they were conducting war, not in our casual, breezy way, but as school-masters arranging a college demonstration, and overweighted by responsibility. It was in a room in the Capitol that I met one little lady with a complete geographical knowledge of the great halls and corridors of that splendid building, and an Irish way with her in her dealings with American Congressmen and Senators. Before the war I used to meet her in a little drawing-room not far away from Kensington Palace, London, and I imagined in my innocence that she was exclusively interested in literature and drama. But in one of the luncheon-rooms of the Capitol—where I lined up at the counter for a deep-dish pie from a colored waitress—I found that she was dealing with more inflammable articles than those appearing in newspaper columns, being an organizing secretary of the Sinn Fein movement in the United States. She was happy in her work, and spoke of Irish rebellion in that bright and placid way which belongs, as I have often noticed, to revolutionary spirits who help to set nations on fire and drench the world in blood. Anybody looking at her eating that deep-dish pie in the luncheon-room of the American Houses of Parliament would have put her down as a harmless little lady, engaged, perhaps, in statistical work on behalf of Prohibition. But I knew the flame in her soul, kindled by Irish history, was of the same fire which I saw burning in the eyes of great mobs whom I saw passing one day in procession down Fifth Avenue, with anti-English banners above their heads.
I should have liked to see more of Chicago. There seemed to me in that great city an intense intellectual activity, of conscious and deliberate energy. Removed by a thousand miles from New York with its more cosmopolitan crowds and constant influx of European visitors, it is self-centered and independent, and out of its immense population there are many minds emerging to make it a center of musical, artistic, and educational life, apart altogether from its business dynamics. I became swallowed up in the crowds along Michigan Avenue, and was caught in the breeze that blew stiffly down the highway of this "windy city," and studied the shops and theaters and picture-palaces with a growing consciousness that here was a world almost as great as New York and, I imagine, more essentially American in character and views. That first morning of my visit I was the guest of a club called the Cliff-dwellers, where the chairman rapped for order on the table with a club that might have protected the home of Prehistoric Man, and addressed a gathering of good fellows who, as journalists, authors, painters, and musicians, are farthest removed from that simple child of nature who went out hunting for his dinner, and bashed his wife when she gnawed the meatiest bone. It was in the time of armistice, and these men were deeply anxious about the new problems which faced America and about the reshaping of the world's philosophy. They were generous and honest in their praise of England's mighty effort in the war, and they were enthusiastic to a man in the belief that an Anglo-American alliance was the best guaranty of the League of Nations, and the best hope for the safety of civilization. I came away with the belief that out of Chicago would come help for the idealists of our future civilization, out of Chicago, whatever men may say of its Pit, and its slaughter-yards, and its jungle of industry and life. For on the walls of the Cliff-dwellers were paintings of men who have beauty in their hearts, and in the eyes of the men I met was a look of gravity and thoughtfulness in face of the world's agonies and conflict. But I was aware, also, that among the seething crowds of that city were mobs of foreign-born people who have the spirit of revolution in their hearts, and others who demand more of the joy of life and less of its struggle, and men of baseness and brutality, coarsened by the struggle through which they have to push and thrust in order to get a living. I listened to Germans and foreign Jews in some of the streets of Chicago, and saw in imagination the flames and smoke of passion that stir above the Melting-pot.
I have memories in Chicago of a little theatrical manager who took my arm and pressed it tight with new-born affection, and said: "My dearie, I'm doing colossal business—over two thousand dollars a night! It's broken all the records. I go about singing with happiness." Success had made a poet of him. In a private suite of rooms in the most luxurious hotel of Chicago I met one of the theatrical stars of America, and studied her type as one might gaze at a rare bird. She was a queer little bird, I found, with a childish and simple way of speech which disguised a little her immense and penetrating knowledge of human nature as it is found in "one-night stands," in the jungle of life behind the scenes, and in her own grim and gallant fight for fame. Fame had come to her suddenly and overwhelmingly, in Chicago, and New York was waiting for her. The pride of her achievement thrilled her to the finger-tips, and she was as happy as a little girl who has received her first doll as a birthday-present. She talked to me about her technic, about the way in which she had lived in her part before acting it, so that she felt herself to be the heroine in body and soul. But what I liked best—and tried to believe—was her whispered revelation of her ultimate ambition—and that was a quiet marriage with a boy who was "over there," if he did not keep her waiting too long. Marriage, and not fame, was what she wanted most (so she said), but she was going to be very, very careful to make the right one. She had none of the luxurious splendor of those American stars who appear in fiction and photographs. She was a bright little canary, with pluck, and a touch of genius, and a shrewd common sense.
From her type I passed to others, a world away in mode of life—Congressmen, leaders of the women's suffrage societies, ex-governors, business magnates, American officers back from the front, foreign officers begging for American money, British propagandists—a most unlikely crowd—dramatic critics, shipbuilders, and the society of New York suburbs between Mamaroneck and Greenwich, Connecticut. At dinner-parties and evening receptions I met these different actors in the great drama of American life, and found them, in that time of armistice, desperately earnest about the problems of peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man's Land between their conflicting views, and looking forward to the future with profound uneasiness because of the threat to the "splendid isolation" of the Monroe Doctrine—they saw it crumbling away from them—and because (more alarming still) they heard from afar the first rumblings of a terrific storm between capital and labor. They spoke of these things frankly, with an evident sincerity and with a fine gravity—women as well as men, young girls as fearlessly and intelligently as bald-headed business men. Many of them deplored the late entry of the United States into the war, because they believed their people would have gained by longer sacrifice. With all their pride in the valor of their men, not one of them in my hearing used a braggart word, or claimed too great a share in the honor of victory. There was fear among them that their President was abandoning principles of vital import to their country, but no single man or woman I met spoke selfishly of America's commercial or political interest, and among all the people with whom I came in touch there was a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to help the world forward by wise action on the part of the United States. Their trouble was that they lacked clear guidance, and were groping blindly about for the right thing to do, in a practical, common-sense way. I had serious conversations in those assemblies, until my head ached, but they were not without a lighter side, and I was often startled by the eager way in which American middle-class society abandons the set etiquette of an evening party for charades, a fox-trot (with the carpets thrown back), a game of "twenty questions," or a riot of laughter between a cocktail and a highball. At those hours the youth of America was revealed. Its society is not so old as our tired, saddened people of Europe, who look back with melancholy upon the four years in which their young men perished, and forward without great hope. The vitality of America has hardly been touched by her sacrifice, and the heart of America is high.