Just before I came home to America in the Spring of 1919, I went to
Essex for a week-end in one of those splendid old estates which are the
pride of England.
It was not my first visit, but I was awed anew by the immensity of the
place, its culture and wealth which seemed to have existed always, its
aged power and pride. Whole lives had been woven into its window
curtains and priceless rugs; centuries of art lived in the great
tapestries; successive generations of great artists had painted the
ancestors of the present owner.
All three sons of that house went into the war. One never returned from
Egypt, another is buried in Flanders. Only the youngest returned.
At first glance the smooth life seemed unchanged in the proud old house.
But before sundown of my first day there, I knew that life had put its
acid test to the shield and proved it pure gold.
War taxes had fallen heavily on the estate and it was to be leased to an
American. Until then, the castle was a home to less fortunate buddies
of the owner's sons.
But these were not the tests I mean, neither these nor the courage and
the poise of that family in the face of their terrible loss, nor their
effort to make every one happy and comfortable.
It was an incident at tea time that opened my eyes. The youngest son,
now the only son, came in from a cross-country tramp and brought with
him a pleasant faced young woman whom he introduced as “one of my pals
in the war.”
That was enough. Lady R. greeted her as one of the royal blood. The
girl was the daughter of a Manchester plumber. She had done her bit,
and it had been a hard bit, in the war, and now she was stenographer in
a near-by village. Later in the afternoon the story came out. She had
been clerk in the Q. M. corps and after her brother's death she asked
for service near the front, something hard. She got it. The mules in
the supply and ammunition trains must be fed and it was her job to get
hay to a certain division. The girl had ten motor trucks to handle and
twenty men, three of them noncommissioned officers.
After four days, during which trucks had disappeared and mules gone
unfed, she asked the colonel for the rank of first sergeant, with only
enlisted men under her.
Her first official orders were: All trucks must stay together. If one
breaks down, the others will stop and help.
The second day of her new command, she met our young host, who needed a
truck to move supplies and tried to commandeer one of hers. When she
refused, he ordered her. He was a captain.
“I am under orders to get those ten loads of hay to the mules,” was her
reply.
“What will you do if I just take one of them?” asked the captain.
“You won't,” said the girl confidently.
“I must get a truck,” he insisted. “What can you do about it if I take
one of yours?”
“England needs men,” she answered. “But if you made it necessary I'd
have to shoot you. If the mules are n't fed, you and other men can't
fight. If you were fit to be a captain, you'd know that.”
The young captain told the story himself and his family enjoyed it,
evidently admiring the Manchester lassie, who sat there as red as a
poppy. They did not bend to the plumber's daughter, nor seem to try to
lift her to the altars of their ancient hall.
Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death
together. It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a
fish knife to sever. There was no consciousness of ancient class.
There was only to-day and to-morrow.
It was the America I love--that spirit. The best America--valuing a
human being for personal worth. Then I sailed for home. I went to
Newport, to the Atlantic coast resorts. They were all the same.
The world had changed but not my own country.
I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness,
more reckless morals than ever before, and--horrible to
contemplate--springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards
which war had torn from the old.
Social lines tightened. Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while
they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or
“family.” The “doughboy shavetail”, a hero before the armistice, or the
aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his
serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a
nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.
I was heartsick. I thought often of those splendid men I had met in
France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians.
I wondered if any one back home was “just nodding” to them.
Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.
New money always glitters. I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and
gold fittings, diamonds big as birds' eggs, ermine coats in the
daytime--jeweled heels at night.
Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner. At
private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they
were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat
with comfort.
One day I went to market--the kind of a market to which my mother would
have gone--and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy
any but porterhouse steaks--merely because porterhouse steak stood for
prosperity.
In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up
suddenly like an evil toadstool. It is a fungous disease that spreads.
Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings,
all of it is snobbish and offensive. It wears foreign clothes and
affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents. It chops and
mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly.
Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from
foreign secretaries and servants. These new Americans try to appear
superior and distinctive by scorning all things American. They want
English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and
do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won
prizes in Europe since 1912. An American manufacturer told me he has to
stamp his cretonne “English style print” to sell it in this country.
This new species of American apes royalty. It goes in for crests. It
may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a
genealogist to dig up a shield. Fine, if you are entitled to a crest.
But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.
There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the
silver, the toilet articles--there are sometimes even crests on the
servants' buttons and on linen and underclothes!
Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to
other lies. The next step is ancestors.
Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. And the public swallows it.
They swallow each other's ancestors. Even old families take these new
descendants as a matter of course.
One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington
with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion. The only simple thing
in the house was the mind of the hostess. That night it was a tangled
skein.
I saw she was worried. Her house was full of potentates, the wives of
two cabinet officers, and Mrs. Coolidge. She left the room twice after
the dinner hour had arrived, and it was late when dinner was finally
announced.
Later in the evening one of the servants whispered to the hostess that
she was wanted on the telephone--the State Department.
She returned to the drawing-room looking as if she had just heard of a
death in the family. The guests began considerately to leave.
Her expensive party was a dismal failure. As I have known her husband
for years, I asked if I could be of any use.
[Illustration: p104.jpg HER EXPENSIVE PARTY WAS A DISMAL FAILURE]
“It 's too late, now,” he said. “She had the Princess Bibesco and the
Princess Lubomirska here and the wife of the Vice President, and she
didn't know the precedence they took. She held up dinner half an hour
trying to get the State Department and now they tell her she guessed
wrong. It 's a tragedy to her.”
I confess I did not feel very sorry for that woman. I remembered my
little Indiana girl who introduced the captain to the Queen of Belgium.