HOLIDAY FEVER
We shall always be thankful that we paid a visit to Atlantic City. It is
not, I believe, one of the places of which Americans are particularly
proud. The trains which connect it with New York have indeed the
reputation of being the fastest in the world, but that may not be
because every one is in a great hurry to get to Atlantic City. They run
at high speed both ways, and it is quite possible that some men may be
in an equal hurry to get away. Our friends were certainly a little cold
when we said we were going there. Left to ourselves, or meekly
following, as we generally do, the advice given to us by well-instructed
people, we should not have gone to Atlantic City. But we were shepherded
there by circumstance, fate, or whatever the power is called which
regulates the minor affairs of life. And we were glad we went. No one,
says Tennyson, can be more wise than destiny. Our visit to Atlantic City
went to prove the truth of that profound remark.
The mean which destiny used for getting us to Atlantic City was a play.
We had a play of our own, and it was produced there for the first time
on the west side of the Atlantic. American theatrical managers believe
in experimenting with a play in some minor place before taking the
plunge of the New York production. They call this—in a phrase not
unknown in England—"trying it on the dog." It seems to me rather a good
plan. The verdict of the dog is not indeed of great value. Dogs, human
dogs, are the same everywhere. They are afraid to say they like anything
which has not got the seal of a great city's approval set on it. They
take refuge in damning with dubious phrase; and, in fact, no one with
any experience much minds what they say. But the experimental production
has a value of its own apart from the opinion of the dog. The company
shakes down and learns to work together. The first performance in an
important place, when the time comes for it, is much more likely to go
smoothly if the actors have faced audiences, even audiences of the dog
kind, every night for a week beforehand.
We did not understand the philosophy of these dog productions at first,
and were therefore a little nervous all the time we were in Atlantic
City, but not, I am glad to say, nervous enough to have our enjoyment of
the place spoiled. Nothing would induce me to say, or for a single
moment to think, that Atlantic City is in any way a characteristic
product of American civilization. All our civilizations produce places
of this kind. But it is fair, I think, to say that America does this
particular thing better than any other country. Superior people might
say that America does it worse; but I am not superior. I recognize that
the toiling masses have a right to revel during their brief holidays in
the way that appeals to them as most delightful. I do not revel in that
way myself; but that is not because I have found better ways, but only
because I am growing older and prefer to take my humble pleasures
quietly. When I was young I enjoyed tumultuous pleasures as much as any
one. I revelled with the best of my day in the town of Douglas; and, if
I did not get as much out of it as I might now if I were young again, it
was only because there was not, in those days, nearly so much in it. The
holiday resort has been enormously developed during the last twenty-five
years, and America, judging by Atlantic City—and I am told Coney Island
is better—is in the very van of human progress.
I have seen Portrush, our humble Irish attempt at a pleasure city. I
have seen Blackpool, which far surpasses Portrush in its opportunities
for delight. I have seen the Lido, where the Germans bathe. I have seen
Brighton, which is spoiled by a want of _abandon_ and a paralyzing
respect for gentility. Atlantic City outdoes them all. Atlantic City is
Portrush, Blackpool, Brighton, the Lido, and Ostend rolled into one, and
then, in all the essential features of such places, raised to the third
power, so to speak; multiplied by itself and then multiplied by itself
again.
Our friends, as I have hinted, warned us against Atlantic City. They
said:
"You won't enjoy _that_ place."
Or, varying the emphasis in a way very flattering to our reputations for
cultivated gentility:
"_You_ won't enjoy that place."
Or, altering the emphasis once more, after we had explained
apologetically that we went there on business:
"You won't _enjoy_ that place."
When we persisted in going, they took it for granted that we wanted to
argue with them. Then they closed the discussion with an emphatic
insistence on the one word which had hitherto escaped them.
"You _won't_ enjoy that place."
One friend, mistaking us for cynical students of the weaknesses and
follies of humanity, varied the warning in another way:
"You won't," he said, "enjoy it _now_. It's not the season."
They were all wrong. In spite of the private anxiety which gnawed at our
hearts, we did enjoy Atlantic City. We enjoyed it all the more because
we went there out of season. It is our deliberate practice to visit
places of this kind out of season, and the date of the production of our
play at Atlantic City was a most fortunate one for us. We no longer want
to revel. The time for that is past for us, but we do want to
understand, and we seem to get nearer that when the chief side shows are
closed, when the hotels are being painted, and when the sea has given up
the attempt to sparkle and look cheerful. In one of Mr. Anthony Hope's
novels there is a statesman of great craftiness who warns a Prince
Consort that he must not think he knows the Queen, his wife, because he
is allowed to see her in her stays. I daresay there is a good deal in
the warning. But I cannot help feeling that you would understand a queen
better if you saw her frequently, let us say in her dressing gown, than
if you never saw her except in her robes of state, with the crown royal
firmly fixed on her head with hairpins. It must be the same with
pleasure cities. One knows them, not well, but a little better when they
have tucked up their skirts, put on old blouses and turned to the task
of cleaning up after the festivities.
It is more instructive to walk along the broad sea front of Blackpool
through a fine chill mist of January rain than to stand there on a
blazing August day when the colliers' week of holiday is in full swing.
Deeper thoughts come to him who gazes at the forlorn rows of notices
that lodgings are to let within than to him who hurries through street
after street, looking for some place in which to lay his head. I am sure
that I catch the essential spirit of the Lido when the November sea is
brown, when the sands are drab, when the thousands of bathing boxes
stand locked and empty, than I would if smiling wavelets enticed plump
Germans to splash in them and _bruat paars_ lingered, indecently
affectionate, in the shadows behind. I did once, accidentally, see
Portrush in the very height of its season, and it was a disappointment
to me. Bevies of girls, hatless but with hair elaborately dressed,
paraded the streets with their arms round each others' waists. Critical
young men, in well-creased suits of the kind supposed to be suitable for
yachting, watched other girls being taught to swim in a deep pool.
Nursemaids helped children to build sand castles. Mothers of forty years
of age or thereabouts sat uncomfortably knitting with their backs
against the rocks. More than five thousand people carried hand cameras
about. Lovers, united for a day or two, wrote each others' names in huge
letters on the sand, where the retiring tide had left it smooth and dry.
There was too much to feel, far too much to think about. I grew confused
and desperate. I could not understand. Out of season the observer has a
better chance. If Portrush confused me, Atlantic City, seen in its full
glory, would have bewildered me utterly. Also out of season I am not
tormented with vain regrets. I am spared the vexation of feeling that a
yachting suit, carefully creased, would no longer lift my heart up to
the skies. It is not forced upon me that my pulses no longer throb
wildly at the sight of girls who smile. I do not think how sad it is
that I shall never again want to win the applause of a crowd by taking a
header into deep water from a giddy height. I am glad that we visited
Atlantic City out of season.
I forget how many piers Atlantic City has, but it is unusually rich in
these structures, and I have no doubt that the builders of them were
wise. A pier makes an irresistible appeal to the pleasure-seeker. He
would rather dance on a pier, under proper shelter, of course, and on a
good floor, than in a well-appointed salon on solid land. He would
rather eat ices on a pier than in an ordinary shop, though he has to pay
more for them, the cost of the ice being the same and the two pence for
entry into the enchanted region being an extra. A cinematograph show
draws more customers if it is on a pier. The reason of this is that the
normal and properly constituted holiday-maker wants to get as much sea
as he can. When he is not in it he likes to have it all round him, or as
nearly all round him as possible without going in a boat. Boats, for
several reasons, are undesirable. They sometimes make people sick. They
are expensive. They demand an undivided allegiance. You cannot have a
cinematograph, for instance, in a boat. The nearest thing to a boat is a
pier. It is almost surrounded by the sea. That is why piers are a
regular feature of up-to-date pleasure cities, and why Atlantic City has
so many of them. It is all to the credit of our revelers that they love
to be near the sea, to feel it round them, to hear it splashing under
their feet. The sea is the cleanest thing there is. You can vulgarize
it, but it is almost impossible, except at the heads of long estuaries,
to dirty it. It seems as if pleasure-seekers, who are also seekers of
the sea, must be essentially clean people, clean-hearted, otherwise they
would not feel as strongly impelled as they evidently do to get into
touch with the ocean. And it is real ocean at Atlantic City. Far out one
sees ships passing, the lean three-masted schooners of the American
coasting trade, trawlers in fleets, tramp steamers, companionless
things, all of these given to the real business of the sea, not to
pleasure voyaging. The eye lingers on them, and it is hard afterwards to
adjust the focus of the mental vision to the long wooden parade, itself
almost a pier, the flaunting sky signs, the innumerable tiny shops where
every kind of useless thing is sold. Atlantic City has, indeed, some
boats of its own, boats which go out from a haven tucked away behind the
north corner of the parade, and pass up and down across the sea front.
Their sails are covered with huge advertisements of cigarettes and
chewing gums. They are manned, no doubt, by the kind of longshoremen who
cater for the trippers' pleasure. They have in them as passengers
whoever in America corresponds to the London cockney. Among ships which
sail these are surely as the women of the streets. But you cannot
altogether degrade a boat. She retains some pathetic remnant of her
dignity, even if you make her sails into advertisement hoardings. It was
good to watch these boats, their masts set far forward, after the
American catboat fashion, making short, swift tacks among the sand banks
over which the Atlantic rollers foamed threateningly.
It is easy to understand why the shops along seafronts of places like
Atlantic City are for the most part devoted to the sale of useless
things. Picture postcards I reckon to be very nearly useless. They give
a transient gleam of pleasure to the buyer, none at all to the person
who receives them. The whole class of goods called souvenirs is entirely
useless. The photographs taken by seaside artists are not such as can
give any satisfaction to the sitters afterwards. Yet the impulse to buy
these things and to be photographed is almost irresistible. We yielded,
not to the seductions of the photographers, nor to the lure of the
souvenir-sellers, but with shameless self-abandonment to the postcard
shops. I found it very hard to pass any of them without buying. I still
have many of the Atlantic City postcards, and I look at them whenever I
feel in danger of growing conceited in order to reduce myself to a
proper condition of humility. We also—moved by what strange
impulse?—bought several instruments for cutting up potatoes. Under
ordinary circumstances a potato-chopper has no attractions whatever for
me. I could pass a shop window filled with them and not feel one prick
of covetous desire. And Atlantic City, of all places in the world, was
for us—I suppose in some degree for every visitor—most unsuitable for
the purchase of kitchen utensils. We knew, even while we bought them,
that we should have to haul them with us round America and back across
the Atlantic, that they would be a perpetual nuisance to us all the
time, and in all probability no use whatever when we got them home. Yet
we bought them. If the dollar we spent on them had been the last we
possessed we should have bought them all the same. Such is the strange
effect of places like Atlantic City on people who are in other places
sane enough. I can analyze and understand the impulse well enough though
I cannot resist it. It is the holiday spirit of the place which gets a
hold on visitors. All a whole long year we commonplace people, who are
not millionaires, are spending our money warily on things of carefully
calculated usefulness. We watch each shilling and see that it buys its
full worth of something which will make life more tolerable or pleasant.
Then comes the brief holiday, and with it the sudden loosing of all
bonds of ordinary restraint. Our souls revolt against spending money on
things which are any real good to us. We want, we are compelled to fling
it from us, asking in exchange nothing but trifles light as air. In
desperate reaction against the tyranny of domestic economics we even
insist on buying things, like potato cutters, which will be an actual
encumbrance to us afterwards.
Cowper represents John Gilpin's wife as insisting on taking her own wine
on a pleasure party and writes of her that
"Though on pleasure she was bent
She had a frugal mind."
I refuse to believe that of any human being, and I count Cowper a good
poet but a bad psychologist. The man who brought a load of
potato-cutters down to Atlantic City was probably not a poet at all, but
he had a profound knowledge of human nature. He knew that he would sell
the things there. It was the place of all places in the world for his
trade. It is a high tribute to Atlantic City as a holiday resort that it
forced us to buy two of these machines. None of the other pleasure
cities we have visited have had such a drastic effect upon us. Postcards
we yield to everywhere. Even the dreariest of second-rate watering
places can sell them to us. In Blackpool I found a paper-knife
irresistible. In Portrush I once bought a colored mug. Atlantic City
alone could have sold me potato-choppers, two of them.
In towns and rural districts where men and women live their ordinary
lives, work, love and ultimately die, it is the rarest thing possible to
see any grown person wheeled about in a perambulator or bath chair.
Occasionally some pitiful victim of a surgeon's skill is lifted out of
the door of a nursing home and placed tenderly in one of these vehicles.
He is wheeled about in the fresh air in obedience to the doctor's
orders, no doubt in hope that he will recover sufficient strength to
make another operation possible. But a bath chair, even now when surgery
has become a recognized form of sport, is a very unusual sight. In all
pleasure cities it is quite common. In Brighton, for instance, or at
Bournemouth, any one who can, with any chance of being believed,
represent himself as an invalid, takes advantage of his infirmity to get
himself wheeled about in a bath chair. At international exhibitions and
in some of the greater picture galleries which are also pleasure resorts
it is generally possible to hire a bath chair. Atlantic City, being, as
I believe, the greatest of all such places, has devised a kind of
glorified perambulator, something far more seductive than a bath chair.
It has room for two in it, and this in itself is a great advance. It has
the neatest imaginable hood, which you can pull over you in case of rain
or if you desire privacy. It looks something like a very small but
sumptuously appointed motor car.
You need not even pretend to be a cripple in Atlantic City in order to
make good your right to enter one of these chairs. All sorts of people,
brisk-looking young girls and men whose limbs are plainly sound, are
wheeled about, not only shamelessly but with evident enjoyment. There
are immense numbers of these vehicles, more, surely, than there are
invalids in the whole world. Out of season, when we saw them, they are
absurdly cheap, almost the only thing in America except oysters and
chocolates, and, curiously enough, silk stockings, which are cheap
judged by European standards. I longed very earnestly to go in one of
these vehicles, but at the last moment I always shrank from the
strangeness of it. Neither the taxi of the London streets nor the
outside car of my native land ever made so strong an appeal to me as
these perambulators of Atlantic City. I suppose it was the holiday
spirit of the place again. Girls and young men, certainly middle-aged
men, would feel like fools if they sat in perambulators anywhere else,
but it is a sweet and pleasant thing—according to a Latin poet who must
have known—to play the fool in the proper place. Atlantic City is the
proper place. Hence the enormous numbers of perambulators.
The hotels in Atlantic City are, most of them, as fantastic in
appearance as the place itself. I imagine that the architects who
planned them must, before they began their work, have been kept for
weeks on the sea-front and forced to go to all the entertainments which
offered themselves by day and night. They were probably fed on crab
dressed in various ways and given gin rickeys to drink. Then, when
allowed to drop to sleep in the early morning, they would naturally
dream. At the end of a fortnight or so of this treatment their dreams
would be imprinted on their memories and they would draw plans of hotels
suitable for Atlantic City. Only in this way, I think, can some of the
newer hotels have been conceived. They are not ugly, far from it. Crab,
dressed as American cooks dress it, does not induce nightmares, nor is a
gin rickey nearly so terrific a drink as it sounds. The architect merely
dreams, as Coleridge did when his Kubla Khan decreed a stately pleasure
dome in Xamadu. But Coleridge dreamed on opium and his visions were of
stately things. The Atlantic City hotel is less stately than fantastic.
It is a building which any one would declare to be impossible if he did
not see it in actual existence.
It will always be a source of regret to me that I did not stay in one of
these hotels which captivated me utterly. It was just what, as a boy, I
used to imagine that the palace of the Sleeping Beauty must be. A look
at it brought back dear memories of the transformation scenes of
pantomimes, in the days before transformation scenes went out of
fashion. It was colored pale green all over, and, looked at with
half-closed eyes, made me think of mermaids. I am sure that it was
perfectly delightful inside; but we did not stay there. A friend had
recommended to us another hotel, of great excellence and comfort, but
built before Atlantic City understood the proper way to treat
architects. In any case we could not have stayed in the pale green
hotel. It was closed. We were in Atlantic City out of season.