Tom is so enchanted he is going to have them framed for the smoking room at
Chevenix. But our hostess is too unhappy and burns to get him to deny it
publicly. "My dear lady," Tom said, "would you have me deny I've got a
green nose?" She looked so puzzled, "Oh, Lord Chevenix," she said, "why, of
course you have not. A little sunburnt, perhaps--but _green!"_ Think
of it, Mamma! Octavia and I nearly collapsed, and she is such a nice woman,
too, and not really a fool; bright and cheery and sensible; but I am afraid
out here they don't yet quite understand Tom, or Octavia either, for the
matter of that.
There is a lovely place in New York called the Riverside Drive, charming
houses looking straight out on the Hudson. But if you live in that part
none of the Four Hundred or Two Hundred and Fifty, or whatever it is, would
visit you, hardly. These people we are staying with now have a mansion
there but are soon going to move. The daughter, Natalie, told me to-day,
that after this her Poppa would also take a house at Newport, because now
they would have no difficulty in getting into the swim!
We came here for the Sunday and it was raining when we arrived--after an
odious train journey. Tom's valet and both the maids are perfectly at sea
as yet, and while burning with rage over the lack of, and indifference of,
the porters, are too scornfully haughty to adapt themselves to
circumstances; so they still bring unnecessary hand luggage and argue with
the conductor. We made a mistake in the train and there was no Pullman, so
that means there is only one class. It really is so quaint. Mamma, having
to travel as if it were third. It amused me immensely, two people on a seat
on either side and an aisle through the middle down which the ticket
collector walks, and for most of the journey a child raced backwards and
forwards, jumping with sticky hands clinging to the sides of each seat
while it sucked candy. The mother screeched, "Say, Willie, if you don't
quit that game, I'll tell your pa when we get home!" However, Willie
shouted, "You bet," and paid not the least attention!
Nearly everywhere where you have to come in contact with people in an
obviously inferior or menial position, manners don't exist. They seem to
think they can demonstrate their equality, if not superiority, by being as
rude as possible. Of course if they were really the ladies and gentlemen
they are trying to prove they are, they would be courteous and gentle. The
attitude is, "I'm as good as you, indeed better!" Either you are a
gentleman or woman, aren't you, Mamma? and you do not have to demonstrate
it, everyone can see it; or you are not, and no amount of your own
assertion that you are will make anyone believe you. So, of what use to be
rude, or clamour, or boast? Doesn't it make you laugh, Mamma? Though it
surprises me here because as a people they are certainly more intelligent
than any other people on earth, and one would have thought they would have
seen how futile and funny that side of them is.
The talk of equality is just as much nonsense in America as in every other
place under the sun. How can people be called equal when the Browns won't
know the Smiths! And the Van Brounckers won't know either, and Fifth Avenue
does not bow to the West Side, and everyone is striving to "go one better"
than his neighbour.
Station is as strictly defined as in England, where the village grocer's
daughter at Valmond no longer could speak to a school friend, a little
general servant who came to fetch treacle at the shop, when Pappa Grocer
bought a piano! So you see, Mamma, it is in human nature, whether you are
English or American, if you haven't a sense of humour. I suppose you have
to be up where we are for it all to seem nonsense and not to matter; and,
who knows? If there were another grade beyond us we might be just the same,
too; but it is trash to talk of equality. Even a Socialist leader thinks
himself above the crowd--and is, too, though I should imagine that the
American middle and lower classes would assert they have no equal but
God--if they don't actually look down on Him.
How I am rambling on, and I wanted to tell you heaps of things! I shall
never get them all into this letter.
When we arrived at this palace it was, as I say, raining, but that did not
prevent the marble steps from being decorated with three footmen at equal
distances to usher us into the care of a cabinet minister-looking butler,
and then through a porphyry hall hung with priceless tapestry and some
shockingly glaring imitation Elizabethan oak chairs--to the library, where
our hostess awaited us in a magnificent décollete tea gown, and at least
forty thousand pounds' worth of pearls. Natalie had the sweetest of frocks
possible and was quite simple and nice, and there is not the least
difference in her to the daughters of any of our "smart" friends.
The library was a library because they told us so, but there were not any
books there, only groups of impossible furniture covered with magnificent
brocade, and the finest flowers one ever saw, most perfectly put in huge
vases by a really clever gardener; no subtle arrangement of colours, but
every blossom the largest there could be in nature. The tea seemed to get
mostly poured out by the servants, and the table was covered with a cloth
so encrusted with Venetian lace one's cup was unsteady on it. That is one
of the most remarkable points here--I mean America--as far as I have seen.
The table cloths at every meal are masses of lace, and every sort of
wonderful implement in the way of different gold forks and knives for every
dish lie by your plate; and such exquisite glass; and some even have old
polished tables like Aunt Maria, but instead of the simple slips they have
mats and centrepieces and squares of magnificent lace. Only the very
highest cream of the inner elect have plain table cloths and a little
silver like we do at home. And it is always a "party"--everyone is
conscious they are there, and they either assume bad manners or good ones,
but nobody is sans gêne. Octavia says it takes as long to be that as to
look like a gentleman clean shaven in evening dress. The rooms are awfully
hot, steam heated up to about 75, and it makes your head swim after a
while. There is only the son and a married daughter and husband in the
house besides ourselves and two young men. We should call them bank clerks
at home, and that is, I suppose, what they are here; only it is all
different. Every man works just like our middle classes; it is not the
least unaristocratic to be a lawyer or a doctor or a wholesale
store-keeper, or any profession you can name, so long as it makes you rich.
A man who does nothing is not considered to "amount to anything," and he
generally doesn't, either! And I suppose it must be the climate, because
directly they get immensely rich, so that the sons need not work, when it
gets to the third generation, they often are invalids or weaklings, or have
some funny vice or mania, and lots of them die of drink; which shows it is
intended in some climates for men to work. Octavia says it takes centuries
of wielding battle-axes and commanding vassals to give the consciousness of
superiority which enables people to be idle without being vicious; but Tom
says it is because they don't hunt and shoot, and go to the bench, and
attend to their estates and county business; so instead they have to go
crazy over fast motoring or flying machines, or any fad which is uppermost,
not having any traditions of how their forefathers passed their time.
Last night there was a dinner party and some such clever men came. They
were great financiers or business men or heads of Trusts. That means you
have a splendid opportunity to speculate, only if anything goes wrong you
have to chance all your other associates on the trust turning against you
and saying it was all your fault, and then you generally have to commit
suicide; but while you are head you can become frightfully rich and
respected. I sat between two of the most successful of different things,
and they talked all the time. They don't want to hear what you have to say,
only to tell you about themselves and their ideas, so it is most
interesting. They are not the least cultivated in literature or art or
anything decorative, but full of ideas upon the future evolution of schemes
and things; really intensely clever, some of them. Only the odd part of it
is they don't seem to speculate upon what the marvellous conglomeration of
false proportions, unbalance and luxury are going to bring their nation to,
if they are not careful.
Mr. Spleist (that is our host's name) is so kind! He spoils his wife and
Natalie more even than Harry spoils Ermyntrude; and the son-in-law is just
the same to his wife. American husbands fetch and carry and come to heel
like trained spaniels, and it is perfectly lovely; everything is so simple.
If you happen to get bored with your husband, or he has a cold in his head,
or anything that gets on your nerves, or you suddenly fancy some other man,
you have not got all the bother and subterfuge of taking him for a lover
and chancing a scandal like in England. You simply get your husband to let
_you_ divorce _him,_ and make him give you heaps of money, and
you keep the children if you happen to want them; or--there is generally
only one--you agree to give that up for an extra million if he fancies it;
and then you go off and marry your young man when he is free; because all
American men are married, and he will have had to get his wife to divorce
him. But when it is all "through," then it is comfortable and tidy, only
the families get mixed after a while, and people have to be awfully careful
not to ask them out to dinner together. One little girl at a dancing class
is reported to have said to another: "What do you think of your new Papa? I
think he is a mean cuss. He gave me no candy when he was mine."
Octavia says, from a morality standard, she does not see there is the least
difference to our lovers in England and France, but I do, because here they
have the comforting sense of the law finding it all right. The only
tiresome part of it is, it must quite take away the zest of forbidden fruit
that European nations get out of such affairs.
Our bedrooms are marvels. Mine is immense, with two suites of impossible
rococo Louis XV. furniture in it; the richest curtains with heaps of
arranged draperies and fringe, grand writing table things, a few
embroidered cushions; but no new books, or comfy sofas, or look of cosy
anywhere. The bathrooms to each room are superb; miles beyond one's ideas
of them in general at home. Tom says he can't sleep because the embroidered
monograms on the pillows and things scratch his cheek, and the lace frills
tickle his nose, while he catches his toes in the Venetian insertion in the
sheets. The linen itself is the finest you ever saw, Mamma, and would be
too exquisite plain. Now one knows where all those marvellously over-worked
things in the Paris shops go to, and all the wonderful gold incrusted
Carlsbad glass. You meet it here in every house.
The gardens are absurd, as compared with ours in England, but they have far
better glass houses and forcing processes and perfection of each plant;
because you see even the gardener would feel his had to be just one better
than the people's next door. They are far prouder of these imported things
than their divine natural trees, or the perfectly glorious view over the
Hudson, and insisted upon us examining all that, while Mr. Spleist told us
how much it all cost and would not let us linger to get the lovely picture
of the river and the opposite shore; until Octavia said we had a few
greenhouses at home and some fairly fine gardens, but nowhere had we so
noble a river or so vast a view, and he seemed to be quite hurt at all
that, because he had not bought them, I suppose! And yet, Mamma, I cannot
tell you what kind, nice people the Spleists really are; only the strange
quality of boast and application of personal material gain is most
extraordinary.
The outside of the house is brownish red sandstone, and is a wonderful
mixture of all styles.
There is no room in it where there is any look of what we call "home," and
not one shabby thing. Mrs. Spleist has a "boudoir"--and it is a boudoir! It
is as if you went into the best shop and said, "I want a boudoir;" just as
you would, "I want a hat," and paid for it and brought it home with you.
Natalie has a sitting-room, and it is just the same. They are not quite far
enough up yet on the social ladder to have every corner of the
establishment done by Duveen, and the result is truly appalling.
The food is wonderful, extraordinarily good; but although the footmen are
English they don't wait anything like as well as if they had remained at
home; and Octavia's old maid, Wilbor, told her the hurly burly downstairs
is beyond description; snatching their meals anywhere, with no time or
etiquette or housekeeper's room; all, everyone for himself, and the devil
take the hindmost. And the absolutely disrespectful way they speak of their
master and mistress--machines to make money out of, they seem to
think--perfectly astonished Wilbor, who highly disapproves of it all.
Agnès, having a French woman's eye to the main chance, says, "N'importe,
ici on gagne beaucoup d'argent!" So probably she will leave me before we
return.
What volumes I have written, dearest Mamma!
Best love from your,
Affectionate daughter,
ELIZABETH.