“Ah, no, you need a big racer like the —— (naming a car which neither Franklin nor I had ever heard of). Then you can make it in a day. There’s nothing to see. You don’t wanta stop.”
He patronized us so thoroughly from the vantage point of his youth (say eighteen years), and his knowledge of all the makes of machines and the roads about Buffalo, that I began to feel that perhaps as a boy I had not lived at all. Such shoes, such a tie, such rings and pins! Everything about him seemed to speak of girls and barbers and florists and garages and tailors. The Buffalo white light district rose up before me, and all the giddy-gaudy whirl of local rathskellers and the like.
“What a rowdy-dow boy it is, to be sure,” I observed to Franklin.
“Yes, there you have it,” he replied. “Youth and inexperience triumphing over any possible weight of knowledge. What’s the Encyclopedia Britannica compared to that?”
Our lunch at one of the big (I use the word advisedly) restaurants, was another experience in the same way. Speed had gone off somewhere with the car to some smaller place and Franklin and I ambled into the large place. It was as bad as the Roycroft Inn from the point of view of pretentiousness and assumed perfection, but from another it was even worse. When we try to be luxurious in America, how luxurious we can really be! The heaviness of our panelings and decorations! the thickness of our carpets! the air of solidity and vigor and cost without very much taste! It is Teutonic without that bizarre individuality which so often accompanies Teutonic architecture and decoration. We are so fine, and yet we are not—a sort of raw uncouthness showing like shabby woodwork from behind curtains of velvet and cloth of gold.
Sometimes, you know, I remember that we are a mongrel race and think we may never achieve anything of great import, so great is my dissatisfaction with the shows and vulgar gaucheries to be seen on all sides. At other times, viewing the upstanding middle class American with his vivid suit, yellow shoes, flaring tie and conspicuous money roll, I want to compose an ode in praise of the final enfranchisement of the common soul. How much better these millions, I ask you, with their derby and fedora hats, their ready made suits, their flaring jewelry, automobiles and a general sense of well being, and even perfection, if you will, than a race of slaves or serfs, dominated by grand dukes, barons, beperfumed and beribboned counts, daimios and lords and ladies, however cultivated and artistic these may appear! True, the latter would eat more gracefully, but would they be any the more desirable for that, actually? I hear a thousand patrician minded souls exclaiming, “Yes, of course,” and I hear a million lovers of democracy insisting “No.” Personally, I would take a few giants in every field, well curbed, and then a great and comfortable mass such as I see about me in these restaurants, for instance, well curbed also. Then I would let them mix and mingle.
But, oh, these restaurants!
And how long will it be before we will have just a few good ones in our cities?
CHAPTER XXII
ALONG THE ERIE SHORE
If anyone doubts that this is fast becoming one of the most interesting lands in the world, let him motor from Buffalo to Detroit along the shore of Lake Erie, mile after mile, over a solid, vitrified brick road fifteen feet wide at the least, and approximately three hundred miles long. As a matter of fact, the vitrified brick road of this description appears to be seizing the imagination of the middle west, and the onslaught of the motor and its owner is making every town and hamlet desirous of sharing the wonders of a new life. Truly, I have never seen a finer road than this, parts of which we traversed between Buffalo and Cleveland and between Cleveland and Sandusky. There were great gaps in it everywhere, where the newest portions were in process of completion, and the horrific “detour” sign was constantly in evidence, but traveling over the finished sections of it was something like riding in paradise. Think of a long, smooth red brick road stretching out before you mile after mile, the blue waters of Lake Erie to your right, with its waves, ships and gulls; a flat, Holland-like farming land to your left, with occasional small white towns, factory centers, and then field upon field of hay, corn, cabbages, wheat, potatoes—mile after mile and mile after mile.