It was about a week from the beginning of Lent, when there would be a
lull in the city’s gaieties, and Society would shift the scene of its
activities to the country clubs, and to California and Hot Springs and
Palm Beach. Mrs. Caroline Smythe invited Alice to join her in an
expedition to the last-named place; but Montague interposed, because he
saw that Alice had been made pale and nervous by three months of
night-and-day festivities. Also, a trip to Florida would necessitate
ten or fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of new clothes; and these would
not do for the summer, it appeared—they would be faded and _passé_ by
that time.
So Alice settled back to rest; but she was too popular to be let
alone—a few days later came another invitation, this time from General
Prentice and his family. They were planning a railroad trip—to be gone
for a month; they would have a private train, and twenty five people in
the party, and would take in California and Mexico—“swinging round the
circle,” as it was called. Alice was wild to go, and Montague gave his
consent. Afterward he learned to his dismay that Charlie Carter was one
of those invited, and he would have liked to have Alice withdraw; but
she did not wish to, and he could not make up his mind to insist.
These train trips were the very latest diversion of the well-to-do; a
year ago no one had heard of them, and now fifty parties were leaving
New York every month. You might see a dozen of such hotel-trains at
once at Palm Beach; there were some people who lived on board all the
time, having special tracks built for them in pleasant locations
wherever they stopped. One man had built a huge automobile railroad
car, shaped like a ram, and having accommodation for sixty people. The
Prentice train had four cars, one of them a “library car,” finished in
St. Iago mahogany, and provided with a pipe-organ. Also there were
bath-rooms and a barber-shop, and a baggage car with two autos on board
for exploring purposes.
Since the episode of Mrs. Winnie, Oliver had apparently concluded that
his brother was one of the initiated. Not long afterward he permitted
him to a glimpse into that side of his life which had been hinted at in
the songs at the bachelors’ dinner.
Oliver had planned to take Betty Wyman to the theatre; but Betty’s
grandfather had come home from the West unexpectedly, and so Oliver
came round and took his brother instead.
“I was going to play a joke on her,” he said. “We’ll go to see one of
my old flames.”
It was a translation of a French farce, in which the marital
infidelities of two young couples were the occasion of many mishaps.
One of the characters was a waiting-maid, who was in love with a
handsome young soldier, and was pursued by the husband of one of the
couples. It was a minor part, but the young Jewish girl who played it
had so many pretty graces and such a merry laugh that she made it quite
conspicuous. When the act was over, Oliver asked him whose acting he
liked best, and he named her.
“Come and be introduced to her,” Oliver said.
He opened a door near their box. “How do you do, Mr. Wilson,” he said,
nodding to a man in evening dress, who stood near by. Then he turned
toward the dressing-rooms, and went down a corridor, and knocked upon
one of the doors. A voice called, “Come in,” and he opened the door;
and there was a tiny room, with odds and ends of clothing scattered
about, and the girl, clad in corsets and underskirt, sitting before a
mirror. “Hello, Rosalie,” said he.
And she dropped her powder-puff, and sprang up with a cry—“Ollie!” ‘In
a moment more she had her arms about his neck.
“Oh, you wretched man,” she cried. “Why don’t you come to see me any
more? Didn’t you get my letters?”
“I got some,” said he. “But I’ve been busy. This is my brother, Mr.
Allan Montague.”
The other nodded to Montague, and said, “How do you do?”—but without
letting go of Oliver. “Why don’t you come to see me?” she exclaimed.
“There, there, now!” said Oliver, laughing good-naturedly. “I brought
my brother along so that you’d have to behave yourself.”
“I don’t care about your brother!” exclaimed the girl, without even
giving him another glance. Then she held Oliver at arm’s length, and
gazed into his face. “How can you be so cruel to me?” she asked.
“I told you I was busy,” said he, cheerfully. “And I gave you fair
warning, didn’t I? How’s Toodles?”
“Oh, Toodles is in raptures,” said Rosalie. “She’s got a new fellow.”
And then, her manner changing to one of merriment, she added: “Oh,
Ollie! He gave her a diamond brooch! And she looks like a
countess—she’s hoping for a chance to wear it in a part!”
“You’ve seen Toodles,” said Oliver, to his brother “She’s in ‘The
Kaliph of Kamskatka’”.
“They’re going on the road next week,” said Rosalie. “And then I’ll be
all alone.” She added, in a pleading voice: “Do, Ollie, be a good boy
and take us out to-night. Think how long it’s been since I’ve seen you!
Why, I’ve been so good I don’t know myself in the looking-glass.
Please, Ollie!”
“All right,” said he, “maybe I will.”
“I’m not going to let you get away from me,” she cried. “I’ll come
right over the footlights after you!”
“You’d better get dressed,” said Oliver. “You’ll be late.”
He pushed aside a tray with some glasses on it, and seated himself upon
a trunk; and Montague stood in a corner and watched Rosalie, while she
powdered and painted herself, and put on an airy summer dress, and
poured out a flood of gossip about “Toodles” and “Flossie” and “Grace”
and some others. A few minutes later came a stentorian voice in the
hallway: “Second act!” There were more embraces, and then Ollie brushed
the powder from his coat, and went away laughing.
Montague stood for a few moments in the wings, watching the
scene-shifters putting the final touches to the new set, and the
various characters taking their positions. Then they went out to their
seats. “Isn’t she a jewel?” asked Oliver.
“She’s very pretty,” the other admitted.
“She came right out of the slums,” said Oliver—“over on Rivington
Street. That don’t happen very often.”
“How did you come to know her?” asked his brother.
“Oh, I picked her out. She was in a chorus, then. I got her first
speaking part.”
“Did you?” said the other, in surprise. “How did you do that?”
“Oh, a little money,” was the reply. “Money will do most anything. And
I was in love with her—that’s how I got her.”
Montague said nothing, but sat in thought.
“We’ll take her out to supper and make her happy,” added Oliver, as the
curtain started up. “She’s lonesome, I guess. You see, I promised Betty
I’d reform.”
All through that scene and the next one Rosalie acted for them; she was
so full of _verve_ and merriment that there was quite a stir in the
audience, and she got several rounds of applause. Then, when the play
was over, she extricated herself from the arms of the handsome young
soldier, and fled to her dressing-room, and when Oliver and Montague
arrived, she was half ready for the street.
They went up Broadway, and from a group of people coming out of another
stage-entrance a young girl came to join them—an airy little creature
with the face of a doll-baby, and a big hat with a purple feather on
top. This was “Toodles”—otherwise known as Helen Gwynne; and she took
Montague’s arm, and they fell in behind Oliver and his companion.
Montague wondered what one said to a chorus-girl on the way to supper.
Afterward his brother told him that Toodles had been the wife of a
real-estate agent in a little town in Oklahoma, and had run away from
respectability and boredom with a travelling theatrical company. Now
she was tripping her part in the musical comedy which Montague had seen
at Mrs. Lane’s; and incidentally swearing devotion to a handsome young
“wine-agent.” She confided to Montague that she hoped the latter might
see her that evening—he needed to be made jealous.
“The Great White Way” was the name which people had given to this part
of Broadway; and at the head of it stood a huge hotel with flaming
lights, and gorgeous marble and bronze, and famous paintings upon the
walls and ceilings inside. At this hour every one of its many
dining-rooms was thronged with supper-parties, and the place rang with
laughter and the rattle of dishes, and the strains of several
orchestras which toiled heroically in the midst of the uproar. Here
they found a table, and while Oliver was ordering frozen poached eggs
and quails in aspic, Montague sat and gazed about him at the revelry,
and listened to the prattle of the little ex-sempstress from Rivington
Street.
His brother had “got her,” he said, by buying a speaking part in a play
for her; and Montague recalled the orgies of which he had heard at the
bachelors’ dinner, and divined that here he was at the source of the
stream from which they were fed. At the table next to them was a young
Hebrew, whom Toodles pointed out as the son and heir of a great
clothing manufacturer. He was “keeping” several girls, said she; and
the queenly creature who was his vis-a-vis was one of the chorus in
“The Maids of Mandalay.” And a little way farther down the room was a
boy with the face of an angel and the air of a prince of the blood—he
had inherited a million and run away from school, and was making a name
for himself in the Tenderloin. The pretty little girl all in green who
was with him was Violet Pane, who was the artist’s model in a new play
that had made a hit. She had had a full-page picture of herself in the
Sunday supplement of the “sporting paper” which was read here—so
Rosalie remarked.
“Why don’t you ever do that for me?” she added, to Oliver.
“Perhaps I will,” said he, with a laugh. “What does it cost?”
And when he learned that the honour could be purchased for only fifteen
hundred dollars, he said, “I’ll do it, if you’ll be good.” And from
that time on the last trace of worriment vanished from the face and the
conversation of Rosalie.
As the champagne cocktails disappeared, she and Oliver became
confidential. Then Montague turned to Toodles, to learn more about how
the “second generation” was preying upon the women of the stage.
“A chorus-girl got from ten to twenty dollars a week,” said Toodles;
and that was hardly enough to pay for her clothes. Her work was very
uncertain—she would spend weeks at rehearsal, and then if the play
failed, she would get nothing. It was a dog’s life; and the keys of
freedom and opportunity were in the keeping of rich men, who haunted
the theatres and laid siege to the girls. They would send in notes to
them, or fling bouquets to them, with cards, or perhaps money, hidden
in them. There were millionaire artists and bohemians who kept a
standing order for seats in the front rows at opening performances;
they had accounts with florists and liverymen and confectioners, and
gave _carte blanche_ to scores of girls who lent themselves to their
purposes. Sometimes they were in league with the managers, and a girl
who held back would find her chances imperilled; sometimes these men
would even finance shows to give a chance to some favourite.
Afterward Toodles turned to listen to Oliver and his companion; and
Montague sat back and gazed about the room. Next to him was a long
table with a dozen, people at it; and he watched the buckets of
champagne and the endless succession of fantastic-looking dishes of
food, and the revellers, with their flushed faces and feverish eyes and
loud laughter. Above all the tumult was the voice of the orchestra,
calling, calling, like the storm wind upon the mountains; the music was
wild and chaotic, and produced an indescribable sense of pain and
confusion. When one realized that this same thing was going on in
thousands of places in this district it seemed that here was a flood of
dissipation that out-rivalled even that of Society.
It was said that the hotels of New York, placed end to end, would reach
all the way to London; and they took care of a couple of hundred
thousand people a day—a horde which had come from all over the world in
search of pleasure and excitement. There were sight-seers and “country
customers” from forty-five states; ranchers from Texas, and lumber
kings from Maine, and mining men from Nevada. At home they had
reputations, and perhaps families to consider; but once plunged into
the whirlpool of the Tenderloin, they were hidden from all the world.
They came with their pockets full of money; and hotels and restaurants,
gambling-places and pool-rooms and brothels—all were lying in wait for
them! So eager had the competition become that there was a tailoring
establishment and a bank that were never closed the year round, except
on Sunday.
Everywhere about one’s feet the nets of vice were spread. The head
waiter in one’s hotel was a “steerer” for a “dive,” and the house
detective was “touting” for a gambling-place. The handsome woman who
smiled at one in “Peacock Alley” was a “madame”; the pleasant-faced
young man who spoke to one at the bar was on the look-out for customers
for a brokerage-house next door. Three times in a single day in another
of these great caravanserais Montague was offered “short change”; and
so his eyes were opened to a new kind of plundering. He was struck by
the number of attendants in livery who swarmed about him, and to whom
he gave tips for their services. He did not notice that the boys in the
wash-rooms and coat-rooms could not speak a word of English; he could
not know that they were searched every night, and had everything taken
from them, and that the Greek who hired them had paid fifteen thousand
dollars a year to the hotel for the privilege.
So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places
of prostitution which did a telephone-business exclusively, and would
send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class
assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the
services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern
doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were
gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and
drinking-places which catered especially for them. In the “orange room”
of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and
type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and gold-embossed wine cards.
In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and
the hotel paid a rental of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not
far away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours
of the morning, you might see richly-gowned white women drinking.
In this seething caldron of graft there were many strange ways of
making money, and many strange and incredible types of human beings to
be met. Once, in “Society,” Montague had pointed out to him a woman who
had been a “tattooed lady” in a circus; there was another who had been
a confederate of gamblers upon the ocean steamships, and another who
had washed dishes in a mining-camp. There was one of these great hotels
whose proprietor had been a successful burglar; and a department-store
whose owner had begun life as a “fence.” In any crowd of these
revellers you might have such strange creatures pointed out to you; a
multimillionaire who sold rotten jam to the people; another who had
invented opium soothing-syrup for babies; a convivial old gentleman who
disbursed the “yellow dog fund” of several railroads; a handsome
chauffeur who had run away with an heiress. ‘Once a great scientist had
invented a new kind of underwear, and had endeavoured to make it a gift
to humanity; and here was a man who had seized upon it and made
millions out of it! Here was a “trance medium,” who had got a fortune
out of an imbecile old manufacturer; here was a great newspaper
proprietor, who published advertisements of assignations at a dollar a
line; here was a cigar manufacturer, whose smug face was upon every
billboard—he had begun as a tin manufacturer, and to avoid the duty, he
had had his raw material cast in the form of statues, and brought them
in as works of art!
And terrible and vile as were the sources from which the fortunes had
been derived, they were no viler nor more terrible than the purposes
for which they had been spent. Mrs. Vivie Patton had hinted to Montague
of a “Decameron Club,” whose members gathered in each others’ homes and
vied in the telling of obscene stories; Strathcona had told him about
another set of exquisite ladies and gentlemen who gave elaborate
entertainments, in which they dressed in the costumes of bygone
periods, and imitated famous characters in history, and the vices and
orgies of courts and camps. One heard of “Cleopatra nights” on board of
yachts at Newport. There was a certain Wall Street “plunger,” who had
begun life as a mining man in the West; and when his customers came in
town, he would hire a trolley-car, and take a load of champagne and
half a dozen prostitutes, and spend the night careering about the
country. This man was now quartered in one of the great hotels in New
York; and in his apartments he would have prize fights and chicken
fights; and bloodthirsty exhibitions called “purring matches,” in which
men tried to bark each other’s shins; or perhaps a “battle royal,” with
a diamond scarf-pin dangling from the ceiling, and half a dozen negroes
in a free-for-all fight for the prize.
No picture of the ways of the Metropolis would be complete which did
not force upon the reluctant reader some realization of the extent to
which new and hideous incitements to vice were spreading. To say that
among the leisured classes such practices were raging like a pestilence
would be no exaggeration. Ten years ago they were regarded with
aversion by even the professionally vicious; but now the commonest
prostitute accepted them as part of her fate. And there was no height
to which they had not reached—ministers of state were enslaved by them;
great fortunes and public events were controlled by them. In Washington
there had been an ambassador whose natural daughter taught them in the
houses of the great, until the scandal forced the minister’s recall.
Some of these practices were terrible in their effects, completely
wrecking the victim in a short time; and physicians who studied their
symptoms would be horrified to see them appearing in the homes of their
friends.
And from New York, the centre of the wealth and culture of the country,
these vices spread to every corner of it. Theatrical companies and
travelling salesmen carried them; visiting merchants and sightseers
acquired them. Pack-pedlers sold vile pictures and books—the
manufacturing or importing of which was now quite an industry; one
might read catalogues printed abroad in English, the contents of which
would make one’s flesh creep. There were cheap weeklies, costing ten
cents a year, which were thrust into area-windows for servant-girls;
there were yellow-covered French novels of unbelievable depravity for
the mistress of the house. It was a curious commentary upon the morals
of Society that upon the trains running to a certain suburban community
frequented by the ultra-fashionable, the newsboys did a thriving
business in such literature; and when the pastor of the fashionable
church eloped with a Society girl, the bishop publicly laid the blame
to the morals of his parishioners!
The theory was that there were two worlds, and that they were kept
rigidly separate. There were two sets of women; one to be toyed with
and flung aside, and the other to be protected and esteemed. Such
things as prostitutes and kept women might exist, but people of
refinement did not talk about them, and were not concerned with them.
But Montague was familiar with the saying, that if you follow the chain
of the slave, you will find the other end about the wrist of the
master; and he discovered that the Tenderloin was wreaking its
vengeance upon Fifth Avenue. It was not merely that the men of wealth
were carrying to their wives and children the diseases of vice; they
were carrying also the manners and the ideals.
Montague had been amazed by the things he had found in New York
Society; the smoking and drinking and gambling of women, their hard and
cynical views of life, their continual telling of coarse stories. And
here, in this under-world, he had come upon the fountain head of the
corruption. It was something which came to him in a sudden flash of
intuition;—the barriers between the two worlds were breaking down!
He could picture the process in a hundred different forms. There was
Betty Wyman. His brother had meant to take her to the theatre, to let
her see Rosalie, by way of a joke! So, of course, Betty knew of his
escapades, and of those of his set; she and her girl friends were
whispering and jesting about them. Here sat Oliver, smiling and
cynical, toying with Rosalie as a cat might toy with a mouse; and
to-morrow he would be with Betty—and could anyone doubt any longer
whence Betty had derived her attitude towards life? And the habits of
mind that Oliver had taught her as a girl she would not forget as a
wife; he might be anxious to keep her to himself, but there would be
others whose interest was different.
And Montague recalled other things that he had seen or heard in
Society, that he could put his finger upon, as having come out of this
under-world. The more he thought of the explanation, the more it seemed
to explain. This “Society,” which had perplexed him—now he could
describe it: its manners and ideals of life were those which he would
have expected to find in the “fast” side of stage life.
It was, of course, the women who made Society, and gave it its tone;
and the women of Society were actresses. They were actresses in their
love of notoriety and display; in their taste in clothes and jewels,
their fondness for cigarettes and champagne. They made up like
actresses; they talked and thought like actresses. The only obvious
difference was that the women of the stage were carefully selected—were
at least up to a certain standard of physical excellence; whereas the
women of Society were not selected at all, and some were lean, and some
were stout, and some were painfully homely.
Montague recalled cases where the two sets had met as at some of the
private entertainments. It was getting to be the fashion to hobnob with
the stage people on such occasions; and he recalled how naturally the
younger people took to this. Only the older women held aloof; looking
down upon the women of the stage from an ineffable height, as belonging
to a lower caste—because they were obliged to work for their livings.
But it seemed to Montague, as he sat and talked with this poor
chorus-girl, who had sold herself for a little pleasure, that it was
easier to pardon her than the woman who had been born to luxury, and
scorned those who produced her wealth.
But most of all, one’s sympathies went out to a person who was not to
be met in either of these sets; to the girl who had not sold herself,
but was struggling for a living in the midst of this ravening
corruption. There were thousands of self-respecting women, even on the
stage; Toodles herself had been among them, she told Montague. “I kept
straight for a long time,” she said, laughing cheerfully—“and on ten
dollars a week! I used to go out on the road, and then they paid me
sixteen; and think of trying to live on one-night stands—to board
yourself and stop at hotels and dress for the theatre—on sixteen a
week, and no job half the year! And all that time—do you know Cyril
Chambers, the famous church painter?”
“I’ve heard of him,” said Montague.
“Well, I was with a show here on Broadway the next winter; and every
night for six months he sent me a bunch of orchids that couldn’t have
cost less than seventy-five dollars! And he told me he’d open accounts
for me in all the stores I chose, if I’d spend the next summer in
Europe with him. He said I could take my mother or my sister with
me—and I was so green in those days, I thought that must mean he didn’t
intend anything wrong!”
Toodles smiled at the memory. “Did you go?” asked the man.
“No,” she answered. “I stayed here with a roof-garden show that failed.
And I went to my old manager for a job, and he said to me, ‘I can only
pay you ten a week. But why are you so foolish?’ ‘How do you mean?’ I
asked; and he answered, ‘Why don’t you get a rich sweetheart? Then I
could pay you sixty.’ That’s what a girl hears on the stage!”
“I don’t understand,” said Montague, perplexed. “Did he mean he could
get money out of the man?”
“Not directly,” said Toodles; “but tickets—and advertising. Why, men
will hire front-row seats for a whole season, if they’re interested in
a girl in the show. And they’ll take all their friends to see her, and
she’ll be talked about—she’ll be somebody, instead of just nobody, as I
was.”
“Then it actually helps her on the stage!” said Montague.
“Helps her!” exclaimed Toodles. “My God! I’ve known a girl who’d been
abroad with a tip-top swell—and had the gowns and the jewels to prove
it—to come home and get into the front row of a chorus at a hundred
dollars a week.”
Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of
it all one shade more black to Montague. He sat lost in sombre reverie,
forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.
In the centre of this dining-room was a great cone-shaped stand,
containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague
stopped to look at it. There were platters garnished with flowers and
herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and
game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes—every kind of
food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in
studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple,
nothing natural. The turkeys had paper curls and rosettes stuck over
them; the hams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs
with a yellow mayonnaise—and all painted over in pink and green and
black with landscapes and marine views—with “ships and shoes and
sealing-wax and cabbages and kings.” The jellied meats and the puddings
were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works
of art in pink and white confectionery—a barn-yard, for instance, with
horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid—and one or two alligators.
And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a
procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague
remembered Betty Wyman’s remark at their first interview, apropos of
the whipped cream made into little curleques; how his brother had said,
“If Allan were here, he’d be thinking about the man who fixed that
cream, and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading
‘The Simple Life’!”
He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all
the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury. He
looked at the waiters—pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men: he
imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged
into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who
carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces,
and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many
stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of
sensuality—how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their
corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking
liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent
them here!
From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of
toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the
things which these blind revellers destroyed; the women and children in
countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed
it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the
cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug
the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched
in ten thousand signal-towers and engines, who fought the elements from
the decks of ten thousand ships—to bring all these things here to be
destroyed. Step by step, as the flood of extravagance rose, and the
energies of the men were turned to the creation of futility and
corruption—so, step by step, increased the misery and degradation of
all these slaves of Mammon. And who could imagine what they would think
about it—if ever they came to think?
And then, in a sudden flash, there came back to Montague that speech he
had heard upon the street-corner, the first evening he had been in New
York! He could hear again the pounding of the elevated trains, and the
shrill voice of the orator; he could see his haggard and hungry face,
and the dense crowd gazing up at him. And there came to him the words
of Major Thorne:
“It means another civil war!”