Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

I should add that my friend's self-imposed mission of shaking hands with Mr. Harding and writing an article about his impressions of him before the President had yet given an audience to the accredited representatives of the press was more or less audacious. And I should add still further that Mr. Christian seemed genuinely reluctant to dismiss my friend without a ray of hope, and suggested that he call again after a few days. Suggestion was at Mr. Christian's own volition.

As we turned to leave the room we saw that the bevy of Catholic Fathers and several other persons had also been admitted, and were all beaming with bland cheerful confidence.

We strolled along the driveway leading by the front entrance to the White House. The baggy looking policeman lazily sunning himself beside the portico recalled to my mind with amusing contrast the snappy Redcoats who briskly pace back and forth before Buckingham Palace.

They are superbly haughty and disdainful beings. A charmingly democratic character, this policeman. "'At a fierce cloud over there," he observed to us as we paused nearby.

A splendid looking army officer together with a caped naval commander emerged with springy step from the White House door, both carrying an air of high elation. A sumptuous car rolled up and halted beneath the portico roof extending over the driveway. From it a lady leaned out extending a card. Out pranced a gleaming negro flunky to receive it with bows of elaborate courtliness. As he turned to re-enter the White House it struck me that I did not believe I had ever seen a happier looking human being. Also, in his beautiful dark blue tail coat with bright silver buttons, and delicately striped light waistcoat, he brought to my mind (incongruously enough) the waiters at Keen's Chop House. The lady rolled on.

A bumptious looking character mounted to the entrance, and sent in a card. It was evident in his bearing that he expected within a moment to stride through the doorway. A figure in a skirt coat emerged. Bumptious being springs upon him and begins to pump his hand up and down with extraordinary verve, straining the while toward the doorway. Skirt coat (his hand continuing to be pumped) deferentially edges bumptious character outward toward descending steps.

It had been an exceedingly hot day for early spring. Traffic policemen had stood on their little platforms at the centre of the street crossings under those mammoth parasols they have to shield them from the rigors of the Washington sun. As we proceeded toward our exit from the grounds, approaching to the White House came a diminutive and decrepit figure muffled in an overcoat extending to his heels, bowed under a tall top hat, a pair of mighty ear-muffs clamped over his ears.

We had that morning visited the Capitol. My friend had been much more interested in the guide-conducted touring parties than in the atrocious painting of the Battle of Lake Erie, and so on, expatiated on to them. Parties which, he said, made him feel that he was back again at the Indiana State Fair. We had sat, in the visitors' gallery of the Senate, in the midst of a delegation of some sort of religious sect, whose beards had most decidedly the effect of false whiskers very insecurely attached. Had been much struck by the extreme politeness of a new Senator who bowed deeply to each one in turn of a row of pages he passed before. Had responded within a few minutes to the command of "All out!" because of executive meeting, and sympathised with the sentiments of fellow citizens likewise ejected who went forth murmuring that they hadn't "got much."

We had wandered through the noble and immaculate Senate Office building, and been much impressed by the scarcity of spittoons there, an abundance of which articles of furniture we had since boyhood associated with all public buildings. We had sat in the outer office of our state's senator, and listened to one lady after another explain to his secretary in this wise: "I just made up my mind ... I just decided to go right after it ... I just determined ... I just thought ... Otherwise, of course, I shouldn't presume to ask it."

In the Library of Congress we had been much interested to hear an European gentleman of vast erudition connected with the Library declare that "there was more intellectual life in Washington than in any other city in America—that it was an European city, in the best sense." We had been accosted on the street by a very portly and loud-voiced man who introduced himself by inquiring where we were from; who confided that his business in Washington had to do with an alcohol permit; and who asked to be directed to Corcoran Gallery. We had run into an old actor friend who was here playing, he said, "nut stuff"; and who observed that Washington was "more of a boob town than ever." We had been assured by a newspaper friend that Washington was so full of inventors and blue law fans that if you "dropped a match anywhere a nut would step on it."