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[Illustration: THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT]
YOUR UNITED STATES
IMPRESSIONS OF A FIRST VISIT
BY
ARNOLD BENNETT
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK CRAIG
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXII
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1912
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE FIRST NIGHT 3
II. STREETS 27
III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES 49
IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS 73
V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS 99
VI. SPORT AND THE THEATER 123
VII. EDUCATION AND ART 147
VIII. CITIZENS 171
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT _Frontispiece_
DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK _Facing p._ 10
THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWED SKY-SCRAPERS 16
BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT 20
A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET 34
A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER 36
THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT 38
A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO 42
A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE--CHICAGO 44
THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL 50
ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 52
ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO--THE CAPITOL 54
UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL 56
THE PROMENADE--CITY POINT, BOSTON 60
THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB--OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR 64
AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE 74
LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB 86
A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG 90
ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY 94
IN THE PARLOR-CAR 100
BREAKFAST EN ROUTE 108
IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM 112
THE STRAP-HANGERS 114
THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED 116
THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR 118
THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION 124
THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED THE AIR 130
THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD 134
UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 156
MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS--UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 164
PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK WOMAN 172
THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE 186
YOUR UNITED STATES
I
THE FIRST NIGHT
I sat with a melting ice on my plate, and my gaze on a very distant
swinging door, through which came and went every figure except the
familiar figure I desired. The figure of a woman came. She wore a
pale-blue dress and a white apron and cap, and carried a dish in
uplifted hands, with the gesture of an acolyte. On the bib of the apron
were two red marks, and as she approached, tripping, scornful,
unheeding, along the interminable carpeted aisle, between serried tables
of correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually developed into
features, and the two red marks on her stomacher grew into two rampant
lions, each holding a globe in its ferocious paws; and she passed on,
bearing away the dish and these mysterious symbols, and lessened into a
puppet on the horizon of the enormous hall, and finally vanished through
another door. She was succeeded by men, all bearing dishes, but none of
them so inexorably scornful as she, and none of them disappearing where
she had disappeared; every man relented and stopped at some table or
other. But the figure I desired remained invisible, and my ice
continued to melt, in accordance with chemical law. The orchestra in the
gallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time without whose accompaniment it
was impossible, anywhere in the civilized world, to dine correctly. That
rag-time, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-intentioned if
banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over
the whole universe of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of
the sensitive, but evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone in
the elated eyes of the four hundred persons correctly dining together in
this high refectory, and at the end there was honest applause!... And
yet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree
and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous
nuisance!...
However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came hurrying
and a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic and
triumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him,
in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have learned to
adopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I had neither
the right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo-Saxon as
myself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the race. When he
dreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the _caisse_ of a
cosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English he was
not speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was one of the
extremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world,
where an order given in English is understood at the first try, and
where the English language is not assassinated and dismembered by
menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the
patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this
restaurant!... Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air.
Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had
brought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were
over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted
something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and
unheard of by my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he
"would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated
him, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of
the hot-house, I arose and followed in the path of the lion-breasted
woman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of
sixteen who did nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight (so he said) but
ascend and descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this inspiring
and jocund task he was being prepared for manhood and the greater
world!... And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys, and even
men. Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the passionate
reformer and lover of humanity.
Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a group
of men, most of whom had acquired fame, and had the slight agreeable
self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a background
of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifarious
reminiscent conversations that are heard only in such places. The
companion on my right would tell how he had inhabited a house in Siam,
next to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too poor to
be burned were laid out, after surgical preliminaries, to be devoured by
vultures, and how the vultures, when gorged, would flap to the roof of
his house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my left
would tell how, when he was unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay
in bed with a sham attack of influenza, and on the day when a chance
offered itself would get up and don his only suit--a glorious one--and,
fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him look older, would
go forth to confront the chance. And then the talk might be interrupted
in order to consult the morning paper, and so settle a dispute about the
exact price of Union Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tell
about sport in the woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animals
where it was advisable to use a revolver lest the excessive noise of a
fowling-piece should disturb the entire forest, and how once he had shot
seven times at an imperturbable partridge showing its head over a tree,
and missed seven times, and how the partridge had at last flown off,
with a flicker of plumage that almost said aloud, "Well, I really can't
wait any longer!" And then might follow a simply tremendous discussion
about the digestibility of buckwheat-cakes.
And then the conversation of every group in the lounge would be stopped
by the entry of a page bearing a telegram and calling out in the voice
of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed. And then
another companion would relate in intricate detail a recent excursion
into Yucatan, speaking negligently--as though it were a trifle--of the
extraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and in the end making
quite plain his conviction that no other women were as beautiful as the
women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa would get onto the
carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam mantelpieces from
Russell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting with damp in
neglected Venetian churches, and so on and so on, until one had the
melancholy illusion that the whole art world was going or gone to
destruction. But this subject did not really hold us, for the reason
that, beneath a blasé exterior, we were all secretly preoccupied by the
beauty of the women of Yucatan and wondering whether we should ever get
to Yucatan.... And then, looking by accident away, I saw the dim,
provocative faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen caps peering from
without through the dark double windows of the lounge. And I was glad
when somebody suggested that it was time to take a turn. And outside, in
the strong wind, abaft the four funnels of the _Lusitania_, a star
seemed to be dancing capriciously around and about the masthead light.
And it was difficult to believe that the masthead and its light, and not
the star, were dancing.
From the lofty promenade deck the Atlantic wave is a little enough
thing, so far down beneath you that you can scarcely even sniff its
salty tang. But when the elevator-boy--always waiting for me--had
lowered me through five floors, I stood on tiptoe and gazed through the
thick glass of a porthole there; and the flying Atlantic wave,
theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Suddenly something jumped up
and hit the glass of the port-hole a fearful, crashing blow that made me
draw away my face in alarm; and the solid ground on which I stood
vibrated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caressing. Anybody on
the other side of this thin, nicely painted steel plate (I thought)
would be in a rather hopeless situation. I turned away, half shivering,
from the menace. All was calm and warm and reassuring within the
ship.... In the withdrawn privacy of my berth, with the curtains closed
over the door and Murray Gilchrist's new novel in my hand and a poised
electric lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and everything was
still except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly, to and
fro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone did
not oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that
towel. The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let me
read. I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faint
straining noises of the enormous organism. I thought: "This magic thing
is taking me _there_! In three days I shall be on that shore." Terrific
adventure! The rest of the passengers were merely going to America.
* * * * *
The magic thing was much more magic than I had conceived. The next
morning, being up earlier than usual and wandering about on strange,
inclosed decks unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected
populations of men and women--crowds of them--a healthy, powerful,
prosperous, independent, somewhat stern and disdainful multitude, it
seemed to me. Those muscular, striding girls in caps and shawls would
not yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed strongly and
carelessly past me; had I been a ghost they would have walked through
me. They were, and had been, all living--eating and sleeping--somewhere
within the vessel, and I had not imagined it! It is true that some ass
in the saloon had already calculated for my benefit that there were
"three thousand _souls_ on board!" (The solemn use of the word "souls"
in this connection by a passenger should stamp a man forever.) But such
numerical statements do not really arouse the imagination. I had to see
with my eyes. And I did see with my eyes. That afternoon a high officer
of the ship, spiriting me away from the polite flirtations and pastimes
of the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting scenes. And I saw a
whole string of young women inoculated against smallpox, under the
interested gaze of a crowd of men ranged on a convenient staircase. And
a little later I saw a whole string of men inoculated against smallpox,
under the interested gaze of a crowd of young women ranged on a
convenient staircase.
"They're having their sweet revenge," said the high officer, indicating
the young women. He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker. When I
reflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which was
necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in idleness,
cleanliness, health, peace, and content, in the inelastic forward spaces
of the ship, he said with a certain grimness: "Everything has to be
screwed up as tight as you can screw it. And you must keep to the
round. What you do to-day you must do to-morrow. But what you don't do
to-day you can't get done to-morrow."
Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which the
personal equation counted. I remember that while some four hundred in
one long hall were applauding "Home, Sweet Home," very badly fiddled by
a gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home"--and half of them
Scandinavians!), and another four hundred or so were sitting expectant
on those multifarious convenient staircases or wandering in and out of
the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate berths, and
a third four hundred or so in another long hall were consuming a huge
tea offered to them by a cohort of stewards in white--I remember that
while all this was going forward and the complex mechanism of the
kitchen was in full strain a little, untidy woman, with an infant
dragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into
the breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give me
a drop o' milk for this child?" And under the military gaze of the high
officer, too! Something awful should have happened. The engines ought to
have stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out to instant
execution. The engines did seem to falter for a moment. But the high
officer grimly smiled, and they went on again. "Give me yer mug,
mother," said the cook. And the untidy woman went off with her booty.
"Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high officer said, and
guided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits were
revolving in front of intense heat, and where a confectionery business
proceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, and
potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clockwork lifted an
egg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of seconds
prescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order I had
given for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more impressive
even than that order, was a list of the several hundred stewards,
together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty. I
noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off "to control
passengers." After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a
crisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more authority than any
passenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeous
passengers--that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be
controlled! After I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses
of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a
nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second
cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world
of the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the
great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin
crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the
ship.
It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most
thrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another high
officer I had climbed to the bridge--seventy-five feet above the level
of the sea--which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an
ambitious wave a couple of years before--and had there inspected the
devices for detecting and extinguishing fires in distant holds by merely
turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs,
and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and the officers'
piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear (which, being
capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons
in suspension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wild
animal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft.
It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels were
smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked,
chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several more
stories, I had seen the actual steering--the tremendous affair moving to
and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light
touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the four
shafts, revolving lazily one hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and
got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing
all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only at
rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in
particular--as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials
everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to the
dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve hundred to the minute,
and then to the turbines themselves--insignificant little things, with
no swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that
developed as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all the
electricity of New York.
And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock-bottom
of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I went
down and down steel ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incredible
cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed
every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny black dolls called firemen. I,
too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace
and along the endless vista of mouths.... Imagine hell with the addition
of electric light, and you have it!... And up-stairs, far above on the
surface of the water, confectioners were making fancy cakes, and the
elevator-boy was doing his work!... Yes, the inferno was the most
thrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the ship could hold a
candle to it. And I remained of this conviction even when I sat in the
captain's own room, smoking his august cigars and turning over his
books. I no longer thought, "Every revolution of the propellers brings
me nearer to that shore." I thought, "Every shovelful flung into those
white-hot mouths brings me nearer."
* * * * *
It is an absolute fact that, four hours before we could hope to
disembark, ladies in mantles and shore hats (seeming fantastic and
enormous after the sobriety of ship attire), and gentlemen in shore hats
and dark overcoats, were standing in attitudes of expectancy in the
saloon-hall, holding wraps and small bags: some of their faces had never
been seen till then in the public resorts of the ship. Excitement will
indeed take strange forms. For myself, although I was on the threshold
of the greatest adventure of my life, I was unaware of being excited--I
had not even "smelled" land, to say nothing of having seen it--until,
when it was quite dark, I descried a queerly arranged group of
different-colored lights in the distance--yellow, red, green, and what
not. My thoughts ran instantly to Coney Island. I knew that Coney was an
island, and that it was a place where people had to be attracted and
distracted somehow, and I decided that these illuminations were a device
of the pleasure-mongers of Coney. And when the ship began to salute
these illuminations with answering flares I thought the captain was a
rather good-natured man to consent thus to amuse the populace. But when
we slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres of foam, and
the whole entire illuminations began to approach us in a body, I
perceived that my Coney Island was merely another craft, but a very
important and official craft. An extremely small boat soon detached
itself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a most extraordinary
leisureness toward a white square of light that had somehow broken forth
in the blackness of our side. And looking down from the topmost deck, I
saw, far below, the tiny boat maneuver on the glinting wave into the
reflection of our electricity and three mysterious men climb up from her
and disappear into us. Then it was that I grew really excited,
uncomfortably excited. The United States had stretched out a tentacle.
In no time at all, as it seemed, another and more formidable tentacle
had folded round me--in the shape of two interviewers. (How these men
had got on board--and how my own particular friend had got on board--I
knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I had been hearing all my
life about the sublime American institution of the interview. I had been
warned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was suddenly up
against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty exterior, I trembled. I wanted
to sit, but dared not. They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were
adepts. They had the better qualities of American dentists. Obviously
they spent their lives in meeting notorieties on inbound steamers, and
made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite,
conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how
to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed
stories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive--though one of
them did let out that the most salient part of me was my teeth, and the
other did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result
of timidity trying to be dignified--this alleged school-boyishness!)
I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race of
interviewers in the United States. There is a variety of interviewers
very different from them. I am, I think, entitled to consider myself a
fairly first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not only
in New York but in sundry other great cities. My initiation was brief,
but it was thorough. Many varieties won my regard immediately, and kept
it; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand
(perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect. The brand in question, as
to which I was amiably cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is
usually very young, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheerfully
introduces himself or herself with a hint that of course it is an awful
bore to be interviewed, but he or she has a job to do and he or she must
be allowed to do it. Just so! But the point which, in my audacity, I
have occasionally permitted to occur to me is this: Is this sort of
interviewer capable of doing the job allotted to him? I do not mind
slips of reporting, I do not mind a certain agreeable malice (indeed, I
reckon to do a bit in that line myself). I do not even mind hasty
misrepresentations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium is
still unannounced); but I do object to inefficiency--especially in
America, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther than
any efficiency was ever carried before.
[Illustration: THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS]
Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the operation itself by
the remark that he really doesn't know what question to ask you. (Too
often I have been tempted to say: "Why not ask me to write the interview
for you? It will save you trouble.") Having made this remark, the
interviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career,
together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference to
her importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amount
of her earnings. This achieved, she breaks off breathless and reproaches
you: "But, my dear man, you aren't saying anything at all. You really
must say something." ("My dear man" is the favorite form of address of
this sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl.) Too often I
have been tempted to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is
being interviewed?" When he has given you a chance to talk, this sort of
interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes a note.
The result the next morning is the anticipated result. The average
newspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or woman
has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being confused
in his or her presence, committed a number of absurdities which offered
a strong and painful contrast to the cleverness and wisdom of the
brilliant youth. This result apparently satisfies the average newspaper
reader, but it does not satisfy the expert. Immediately after my first
bout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of
the ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet,
modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to be
among the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York--not
interviewers.
Said one of them:
"Not every interviewer in New York knows how to _write_--how to put a
sentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don't
accurately know the difference between impudence and wit."
A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety of
interviewing upon which I have just animadverted becomes the topic,
quiet, reasonable Americans are apt to drop into causticity.
Said another:
"I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was cured of personalities at
an early stage--and by a nigger, too! I had been interviewing a nigger
prize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facial
characteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a long
letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you. But
I've seen your portraits, and let me respectfully tell you that _you're_
no Lillian Russell.'"
Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and written, from visual
observation, "Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no Lillian
Russell."
Said a third among my companions:
"No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview in
the United States."
Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice.
Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something
more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched
over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a little
agitated--for about half an hour; in about half an hour the matter had
somehow passed from their minds.
"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?" I asked, at
the saloon table.
"The interviews will appear all the same," was the reply.
My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when I
refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, but
invective.
Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand of
American interviewer. I encountered a couple of really admirable women
interviewers, not too young, and a confraternity of men who did not
disdain an elementary knowledge of their business. One of these arrived
with a written list of questions, took a shorthand note of all I said,
and then brought me a proof to correct. In interviewing this amounts
almost to genius.... I have indicated what to me seems a
defect--trifling, possibly, but still a defect--in the brilliant
organization of the great national sport of interviewing. Were this
defect removed, as it could be, the institution might be as perfect as
the American oyster. Than which nothing is more perfect.
* * * * *
"You aren't drinking your coffee," said some one, inspecting my cup at
the saloon table.
"No," I answered, firmly; for when the smooth efficiency of my human
machine is menaced I am as faddy and nervous as a marine engineer over
lubrication. "If I did, I shouldn't sleep."
"And what of it?" demanded my particular friend, challengingly.
It was a rebuke. It was as if he had said, "On this great night, when
you enter my wondrous and romantic country for the first time, what does
it matter whether you sleep or not?"
I saw the point. I drank the coffee. The romantic sense, which had been
momentarily driven back by the discussion of general ideas, swept over
me again.... In fact, through the saloon windows could be seen all the
Battery end of New York and the first vague visions of sky-scrapers....
Then-the moments refused to be counted--we were descending by lifts and
by gangways from the high upper decks of the ship down onto the rocky
ground of the United States. I don't think that any American ever set
foot in Europe with a more profound and delicious thrill than that which
affected me at that instant.... I was there!... The official and
unofficial activities of the quay passed before me like a dream.... I
heard my name shouted by a man in a formidably severe uniform, and I
thought, "Thus early have I somehow violated the Constitution of these
States?" But it was only a telegram for me.... And then I was in a most
rickety and confined taxi, and the taxi was full to the brim with
luggage, two friends, and me. And I was off into New York.
At the center of the first cross-roads I saw a splendid and erect
individual, flashing forth authority, gaiety, and utter smartness in the
gloom. Impossible not to believe that he was the owner of all the
adjacent ground, disguised as a cavalry officer on foot.
"What is that archduke?" I inquired.
"He's just a cop."
I knew then that I was in a great city.
[Illustration: BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT]
The rest of the ride was an enfevered phantasmagoria. We burst
startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade--on the floor of it long
and violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with commissionaires
at the doors, vehicles dipping and rising out of holes in the ground,
vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which ran deafening,
glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above all that, a layer of
darkness; and above the layer of darkness enormous moving images of
things in electricity--a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread,
an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water being emptied
and filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an incredible
heraldry of chewing-gum.... Sky-signs! In Europe I had always inveighed
manfully against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head, vanquished. These
sky-signs annihilated argument. Moreover, had they not been made
possible by the invention of a European, and that European an intimate
friend of my own?...
"I suppose this is Broadway?" I ventured.
It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways. There are several
different ones. What could be more different from this than the
down-town Broadway of Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? And
even this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew later on an
election night.... I was overpowered by Broadway.
"You must not expect me to talk," I said.
We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into the bar, huge and
gorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegated
population of men-about-town. I had never seen such a bar.
"Two Polands and a Scotch highball," was the order. Of which
geographical language I understood not a word.
"See the fresco," my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, at
once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that
nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of
New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found
it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight,
took my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the
European reads--generously loaded, and much freer than the air.
"Have something?"
I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they could
not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven
o'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me.
We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening three
of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole
in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of
them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went
scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived at a terminus.
And it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place.
And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest
comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the
significance of American hospitality--that combination of eager
good-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time to
spare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for
all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to
descry. I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel.
No sooner said than done. I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We
went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeable
and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars.
Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe of
bank-notes, whatever their value.
Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. And every few
seconds it shot past the end of a long, straight, lighted
thoroughfare--scores upon scores of them, with a wider and more
brilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at
what hundredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New
York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metropolitan city. I thought,
"Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the
best of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew
the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And I
was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysterious
generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together,
girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then,
this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its baseness,
its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life. I
liked New York irrevocably.
II
STREETS
When I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of
Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish
gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare
I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain European capitals
has forced me to modify this judgment; but I still think that Fifth
Avenue, if not unequaled, is unsurpassed.
One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the company of an
architectural expert who, with the incredible elastic good nature of
American business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in order
to go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as to get
some basis of understanding or disagreement, what building in New York
had pleased me most. I at once said the University Club--to my mind a
masterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our automobile; in
which peace we expanded. He asked me what building in the world made the
strongest appeal to me, and I at once said the Strozzi Palace at
Florence. Whereat he was decidedly sympathetic.
"Fifth Avenue," I said, "always reminds me of Florence and the
Strozzi.... The cornices, you know."
He stopped the automobile under the Gorham store and displayed to me
the finest cornice in New York, and told me how Stanford White had put
up several experimental cornices there before arriving at finality.
Indeed, a great cornice! I admit I was somewhat dashed by the
information that most cornices in New York are made of cast iron; but
only for a moment! What, after all, do I care what a cornice is made of,
so long as it juts proudly out from the façade and helps the street to a
splendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither read nor heard a word of
the cornices of New York, and yet for me New York was first and last the
city of effective cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes differ!) The
cornice must remind you of Italy, and through Italy of the Renaissance.
And is it not the boast of the United States to be a renaissance? I
always felt that there was something obscurely symbolic in the New York
cornice--symbolic of the necessary qualities of a renaissance, half
cruel and half humane.
The critical European excusably expects a very great deal from Fifth
Avenue, as being the principal shopping street of the richest community
in the world. (I speak not of the residential blocks north of
Fifty-ninth Street, whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short of
their pretensions.) And the critical European will not be disappointed,
unless his foible is to be disappointed--as, in fact, occasionally
happens. Except for the miserly splitting, here and there in the older
edifices, of an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallow
box (a device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight of
steps on the East Side), there is nothing mean in the whole street from
the Plaza to Washington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecture
there is, of course--the same applies inevitably to every long street in
every capital--but the general effect is homogeneous and fine, and,
above, all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high and low
buildings produces not infrequently the most agreeable architectural
accidents: for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street, the
pale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a
background of the lofty red of the Æolian Building.... And then, that
great white store on the opposite pavement! The single shops, as well as
the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in the
lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither stores nor shops could
have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuine
imagination and faith.
And the glory of the thoroughfare inspires even those who only walk up
and down it. It inspires particularly the mounted policeman as he reigns
over a turbulent crossing. It inspires the women, and particularly the
young women, as they pass in front of the windows, owning their contents
in thought. I sat once with an old, white-haired, and serious gentleman,
gazing through glass at Fifth Avenue, and I ventured to say to him,
"There are fine women on Fifth Avenue." "By Jove!" he exclaimed, with
deep conviction, and his eyes suddenly fired, "there are!" On the whole,
I think that, in their carriages or on their feet, they know a little
better how to do justice to a fine thoroughfare than the women of any
other capital in my acquaintance. I have driven rapidly in a fast car,
clinging to my hat and my hair against the New York wind, from one end
of Fifth Avenue to the other, and what with the sunshine, and the flags
wildly waving in the sunshine, and the blue sky and the cornices jutting
into it and the roofs scraping it, and the large whiteness of the
stores, and the invitation of the signs, and the display of the windows,
and the swift sinuousness of the other cars, and the proud opposing
processions of American subjects--what with all this and with the
supreme imperialism of the mounted policeman, I have been positively
intoxicated!
And yet possibly the greatest moment in the life of Fifth Avenue is at
dusk, when dusk falls at tea-time. The street lamps flicker into a
steady, steely blue, and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throw
a yellow radiance; all the shops--especially the jewelers' shops--become
enchanted treasure-houses, whose interiors recede away behind their
façades into infinity; and the endless files of innumerable vehicles,
interlacing and swerving, put forth each a pair of glittering eyes. Come
suddenly upon it all, from the leafy fastnesses of Central Park, round
the corner from the Plaza Hotel, and wait your turn until the arm of the
policeman, whose blue coat is now whitened with dust, permits your
restive chauffeur to plunge down into the main currents of the city....
You will have then the most grandiose impression that New York is, in
fact, inhabited; and that even though the spectacular luxury of New York
be nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty as any
imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a boon to be alive
therein!... In half an hour, in three-quarters of an hour, the vitality
is clean gone out of the street. The shops have let down their rich
gathered curtains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is no
longer perilous. And nothing save a fire will arouse Fifth Avenue till
the next morning. Even on an election night the sole sign in Fifth
Avenue of the disorder of politics will be a few long strips of
tape-paper wreathing in the breeze on the asphalt under the lonely
lamps.
* * * * *
It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York to get away from
Fifth Avenue. The street seems to hold him fast. There might almost as
well be no other avenues; and certainly the word "Fifth" has lost all
its numerical significance in current usage. A youthful musical student,
upon being asked how many symphonies Beethoven had composed, replied
four, and obstinately stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four.
Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus, the C minor, the
Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth. "Ninth" had lost its numerical
significance for that student. A similar phenomenon of psychology has
happened with the streets and avenues of New York. Europeans are apt to
assume that to tack numbers instead of names on to the thoroughfares of
a city is to impair their identities and individualities. Not a bit! The
numbers grow into names. That is all. Such is the mysterious poetic
force of the human mind! That curt word "Fifth" signifies as much to the
New-Yorker as "Boulevard des Italiens" to the Parisian. As for the
possibility of confusion, would any New-Yorker ever confuse Fourteenth
with Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street, or Twenty-third with Twenty-second
or Twenty-fourth, or Forty-second with One Hundred and Forty-second, or
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth with anything else whatever? Yes, when the
Parisian confuses the Champs Elysées with the Avenue de l'Opéra! When
the Parisian arrives at this stage--even then Fifth Avenue will not be
confused with Sixth!
One day, in the unusual silence of an election morning, I absolutely
determined to see something of the New York that lies beyond Fifth
Avenue, and I slipped off westward along Thirty-fourth Street, feeling
adventurous. The excursion was indeed an adventure. I came across
Broadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue, with its barbaric
paving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth!
Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly
wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them:
jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicion
that in a saloon shindy they might prove themselves my superiors. (I was
told in New York, and by the best people in New York, that Tammany was a
blot on the social system of the city. But I would not have it so. I
would call it a part of the social system, just as much a part of the
social system, and just as expressive of the national character, as the
fine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative business
organizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A civilization is
indivisibly responsible for itself. It may not, on the Day of Judgment,
or any other day, lessen its collective responsibility by baptizing
certain portions of its organism as extraneous "blots" dropped thereon
from without.) To continue--after Seventh Avenue the declension was
frank. In the purlieus of the Five Towns themselves--compared with which
Pittsburg is seemingly Paradise--I have never trod such horrific
sidewalks. I discovered huge freight-trains shunting all over Tenth and
Eleventh Avenues, and frail flying bridges erected from sidewalk to
sidewalk, for the convenience of a brave and hardy populace. I was
surrounded in the street by menacing locomotives and crowds of Italians,
and in front of me was a great Italian steamer. I felt as though Fifth
Avenue was a three days' journey away, through a hostile country. And
yet I had been walking only twenty minutes! I regained Fifth with
relief, and had learned a lesson. In future, if asked how many avenues
there are in New York I would insist that there are three: Lexington,
Madison, and Fifth.
* * * * *
The chief characteristic of Broadway is its interminability. Everybody
knows, roughly, where it begins, but I doubt if even the topographical
experts of Albany know just where it ends. It is a street that inspires
respect rather than enthusiasm. In the daytime all the uptown portion of
it--and as far down-town as Ninth Street--has a provincial aspect. If
Fifth Avenue is metropolitan and exclusive, Broadway is not. Broadway
lacks distinction, it lacks any sort of impressiveness, save in its
first two miles, which do--especially the southern mile--strike you with
a vague and uneasy awe. And it was here that I experienced my keenest
disappointment in the United States.
[Illustration: A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET]
I went through sundry disappointments. I had expected to be often asked
how much I earned. I never was asked. I had expected to be often
informed by casual acquaintances of their exact income. Nobody, save an
interviewer or so and the president of a great trust, ever passed me
even a hint as to the amount of his income. I had expected to find an
inordinate amount of tippling in clubs and hotels. I found, on the
contrary, a very marked sobriety. I had expected to receive many hard
words and some insolence from paid servants, such as train-men,
tram-men, lift-boys, and policemen. From this class, as from the others,
I received nothing but politeness, except in one instance. That
instance, by the way, was a barber in an important hotel, whom I had
most respectfully requested to refrain from bumping my head about.
"Why?" he demanded. "Because I've got a headache," I said. "Then why
didn't you tell me at first?" he crushed me. "Did you expect me to be a
thought-reader?" But, indeed, I could say a lot about American barbers.
I had expected to have my tempting fob snatched. It was not snatched. I
had expected to be asked, at the moment of landing, for my mature
opinion of the United States, and again at intervals of about a quarter
of an hour, day and night, throughout my stay. But I had been in America
at least ten days before the question was put to me, even in jest. I had
expected to be surrounded by boasting and impatient vanity concerning
the achievements of the United States and the citizens thereof. I
literally never heard a word of national boasting, nor observed the
slightest impatience under criticism.... I say I had expected these
things. I would be more correct to say that I _should_ have expected
them if I had had a rumor--believing mind: which I have not.