earlier Cambridge. Scarcely one is really beautiful. The style is
debased. But then, it possesses the advantage of being modernized; it
has not the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong century.
And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation by its sobriety and by its
honest workmanship. It is the expression of a race incapable of looking
foolish, of being giddy, of running to extremes. It is the expression of
a race that both clung to the past and reached out to the future; that
knew how to make the best of both worlds; that keenly realized the value
of security because it had been through insecurity. You can see that all
these houses were built by people who loved "a bit of property," and to
whom a safe and dignified roof was the final ambition achieved. Why! I
do believe that there are men and women behind some of those curtains to
this day who haven't quite realized that the Indians aren't coming any
more, and that there is permanently enough wood in the pile, and that
quinine need no longer figure in the store cupboard as a staple article
of diet! I do believe that there are minor millionaires in some of those
drawing-rooms who wonder whether, out-soaring the ambition of a bit of
property, they would be justified in creeping down-town and buying a
cheap automobile!... These are the people who make the link between the
academic traditionalism of Cambridge and such excessively modern
products of evolution as their own mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of the
poor. They are not above forming deputations to parley with their own
mayor.... I loved them. Their drawing-rooms were full of old silver, and
book-gossip, and Victorian ladies apparently transported direct from the
more aristocratic parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays and
poured out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grandmother used to
keep in a green bag.
In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw revulsions against
the wholesale barracky conveniences of the apartment-house, in the shape
of little colonies of homes, consciously but superficially imitating the
Cambridge-Indianapolis tradition--with streets far more curvily winding
than the streets of Cambridge, and sidewalks of a strip of concrete
between green turf-bands that recalled the original sidewalks of
Indianapolis and even of the rural communities around Indianapolis. Cozy
homes, each in its own garden, with its own clothes-drier, and each
different from all the rest! Homes that the speculative builder, recking
not of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be picturesque at
any cost of capricious ingenuity! And not secure homes, because, though
they were occupied by their owners, their owners had not built them--had
only bought them, and would sell them as casually as they had bought.
The apartment-house will probably prove stronger than these throwbacks.
And yet the time will come when even the apartment-house will be
regarded as a picturesque survival. Into what novel architecture and
organization of living it will survive I should not care to prophesy,
but I am convinced that the future will be quite as interestingly human
as the present is, and as the past was.
IV
SOME ORGANIZATIONS
"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything in
the United States is the efficiency and fearful universality of the
telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations pierced
everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them as
being threaded, under pavements and over roofs and between floors and
ceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions of live filaments
that unite all the privacies of the organism--and destroy them in order
to make one immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed to
adopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there are no hotels with the
dreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean that
the European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared
with the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many
otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a
telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average
European middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he
has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American
is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught--a negligible
trifle--but somehow it comes into the conversation!
"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who are
wrong, through no particular fault of our own.
The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The only
occasion on which I was in really serious danger of being taken for a
madman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanently
removed the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtless
ironically) for slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicago
shuddered. In response to the prayer of a deputation from the management
I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I could
read the unspoken query: "Is it conceivable that you have been in this
country a month without understanding that the United States is
primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-cabins?" Yes, I
yielded and admired! And I surmise that on my next visit I shall find a
telephone on every table of every restaurant that respects itself.
[Illustration: AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE]
It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to a
great people whose passion is to "get results"--the instancy with which
the communication is given, and the clear loudness of the telephone's
voice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in Europe. Were I to
inhabit the United States, I too should become a victim of the telephone
habit, as it is practised in its most advanced form in those suburban
communities to which I have already incidentally referred at the end of
the previous chapter. There a woman takes to the telephone as women in
more decadent lands take to morphia. You can see her at morn at her
bedroom window, pouring confidences into her telephone, thus
combining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy freshness of
breeze and sunshine. It has happened to me to sit in a drawing-room,
where people gathered round the telephone as Europeans gather round a
fire, and to hear immediately after the ejaculation of a number into the
telephone a sharp ring from outside through the open window, and then to
hear in answer to the question, "What are you going to wear to-night?"
two absolutely simultaneous replies, one loudly from the telephone
across the room, and the other faintlier from a charming human voice
across the garden: "I don't know. What are you?" Such may be the
pleasing secondary scientific effect of telephoning to the lady next
door on a warm afternoon.
Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior aspects of
any telephone system there must be an intricate and marvelous secret
organization. In Europe my curiosity would probably never have been
excited by the thought of that organization--at home one accepts
everything as of course!--but, in the United States, partly because the
telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and partly
because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed
myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed at
the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the high
protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to a
telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-users
seldom think about and will never see.
A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school
conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim
radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long
apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely
intent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that none
of these young women had a single moment to spare; they were all
involved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping pace with it and
in it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant, lest
they should sin against it. What they were droning about it was
impossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close to any
particular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, but simply
and without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random among the thousands
of holes before her, apparently in obedience to the signaling of faint,
tiny lights that in thousands continually expired and were rekindled.
(It was so that these tiny lights should be distinguishable that the
illumination of the secret and finely appointed chamber was kept dim.)
Throughout the whole length of the apparatus the colored elastic cords
to which the pegs were attached kept crossing one another in fantastic
patterns.
We who had entered were ignored. We might have been ghosts, invisible
and inaudible. Even the supervisors, less-young women set in authority,
did not turn to glance at us as they moved restlessly peering behind the
stools. And yet somehow I could hear the delicate shoulders of all the
young women saying, without speech: "Here come these tyrants and
taskmasters again, who have invented this exercise which nearly but not
quite cracks our little brains for us! They know exactly how much they
can get out of us, and they get it. They are cleverer than us and more
powerful than us; and we have to submit to their discipline. But--" And
afar off I could hear: "What are you going to wear to-night?" "Will you
dine with me to-night?" "I want two seats." "Very well, thanks, and how
is Mrs....?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer for
those bonds." ... And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices
and drawing-rooms.... But of course I could hear and see nothing really
except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed
young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools precisely similar.
I understood why the telephone service was so efficient. I understood
not merely from the demeanor of the long row of young women, but from
everything else I had seen in the exact and diabolically ingenious
ordering of the whole establishment.
We were silent for a time, as though we had entered a church. We were,
perhaps unconsciously, abashed by the intensity of the absorption of
these neat young women. After a while one of the guides, one of the
inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the astounding
organism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making me
comprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And I
began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that I
did comprehend. We each made a little progress. I could not tell him
that, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of
genius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the
human equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as
I could sideways at those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy.
An absurd inquiry! Do _I_ look happy when I'm at work, I wonder! Did
they then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the conclusion that
they looked like most other faces--neither one thing nor the other.
Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for sociological
information in the faces of the employed than in the managerial rules.
"What do they earn?" I asked, when we emerged from the ten-atmosphere
pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew that no young
women could possibly for any length of time be as intensely absorbed as
these appeared to be. But the illusion was there, and it was effective.)
I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week. It
was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night at
a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven,
and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand on
their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hours
a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and a
day off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with
tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of
which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operator
every minute.
"Naturally," I was told, "the discipline is strict. There are test
wires.... We can check the 'time elements.' ... We keep a record of
every call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an outside place--for
instance, a hotel.... Their average stay here is thirty months."
And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, exactly
like the one I was seeing.
A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how masculine! And
how wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for another!...
Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air, and its
couches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and promiscuities of
a hotel! On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!
Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: "All this
telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power. Come away,
and I'll show you electricity in bulk."
And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman perfection
of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed. It
brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Excessively
difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service,
achieved under strictly hygienic conditions--and young women must make
their way through the world! And yet--Yes, a very human place indeed!
* * * * *
The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about in
petrol motor-cars. In the exercise of a natural and charming coquetry
they insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most modern and
soundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall under the
overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine palaces--just such
looming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may be seen in any
central street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs on the
ground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants of Italian aristocracy in
the mysterious upper stories. Having entered one of the palaces,
simultaneously with a tornado of wind, we passed through long, deserted,
narrow galleries, lined with thousands of small, caged compartments
containing "transformers," and on each compartment was a label bearing
always the same words: "Danger, 6,600 volts." "Danger, 6,600 volts."
"Danger, 6,600 volts." A wondrous relief when we had escaped with our
lives from the menace of those innumerable volts! And then we stood on a
high platform surrounded by handles, switches, signals--apparatus enough
to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant by
the unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!--and faced an enormous white
hall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be
revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of
conquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivably
tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful
ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own
vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard
produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and
solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant
spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting
columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood
nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York
was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand
horse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New York
would be immediately paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expire
beneath the eyes of a startled population. I could have gazed at it to
this day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that had
perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and
boilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an
extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of
another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was
lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the
furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by
itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million
cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these
stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror of
the steamship had been abolished here.
I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called the heart of New
York!"
They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figures
were casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause the
machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million
horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other
machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that in
the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at a
signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any
given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch,
lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As that
the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred
dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three
minutes--but the current had never failed for a single second! As that
in one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had been
scrapped!... And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not
Timbuctoo.
In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrapping
process was even yet far from complete. At first sight this other seemed
to resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the former
one was as naught to this one, for here the turbine--the "strong, silent
man" among engines--was replacing the racket of cylinder and crank.
Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the imagination. I disdain
statistics, even when I assimilate them. And yet when my attention was
directed to one trifling block of metal, and I was told that it was the
most powerful "unit" in the world, and that it alone would make
electricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a quarter of a
million people, I felt that statistics, after all, could knock you a
staggering blow.... In this other palace, too, was the same solitude of
machinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively to itself. A
singularly disconcerting spectacle! And I reflected that, according to
dreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would soon be a
solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in mystic certitude,
instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and couches, and thirsting
for love. A singularly disconcerting prospect!
But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describe
telephone-exchanges and electrical power-houses? Do not these wonders
exist in all the cities of earth? They do, but not to quite the same
degree of wondrousness. Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops, exist in New
York, but not to quite the same degree of wondrousness as in Paris.
People sing in New York, but not with quite the same natural lyricism as
in Naples. The great civilizations all present the same features; but it
is just the differences in degree between the same feature in this
civilization and in that--it is just these differences which together
constitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems to me that
the brains and the imagination of America shone superlatively in the
conception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, and
of machinery, and of the two combined. By them I was more profoundly
attracted, impressed, and inspired than by any other non-spiritual
phenomena whatever in the United States. For me they were the proudest
material achievements, and essentially the most poetical achievements,
of the United States. And that is why I am dwelling on them.
* * * * *
Further, there are business organizations in America of a species which
do not flourish at all in Europe. For example, the "mail-order house,"
whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in Chicago--a
peculiar establishment which sells merely everything (except
patent-medicines)--on condition that you order it by post. Go into that
house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or a
fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to
return home and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and stamp
the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then to wait till the
article arrives at your door. That house is one of the most spectacular
and pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of the United States are thinly
scattered over an enormous area, in tiny groups, often quite isolated
from stores. On the day of my visit sixty thousand letters had been
received, and every executable order contained in these was executed
before closing time, by the co-ordinated efforts of over four thousand
female employees and over three thousand males. The conception would
make Europe dizzy. Imagine a merchant in Moscow trying to inaugurate
such a scheme!
A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open hundreds of
envelops at once. They are all the same, those envelops; they have even
less individuality than sheep being sheared, but when the contents of
one--any one at random--are put into your hand, something human and
distinctive is put into your hand. I read the caligraphy on a blue sheet
of paper, and it was written by a woman in Wyoming, a neat, earnest,
harassed, and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted all sorts
of things and wanted them intensely--I could see that with clearness.
This complex purchase was an important event in her year. So far as her
imagination went, only one mail-order would reach the Chicago house that
morning, and the entire establishment would be strained to meet it.
Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the system, and
therein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling shaft of
broad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and had
trap-doors on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was opened I
saw packages of all descriptions racing after one another down spiral
planes within the shaft. There were several of these great shafts--with
divisions for mail, express, and freight traffic--and packages were
ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects desired by
the woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers of
the day. At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest,
impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely what she wanted; it
seemed to me impossible that some mistake should not occur in all that
noisy fever of rushing activity. But after I had followed an order, and
seen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mistake would be the
most miraculous phenomenon in that establishment. I felt quite reassured
on behalf of Wyoming.
And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machines
were being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic aural
nightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be conscious that
anything bizarre was going on.... And then I was in a printing-shop,
where several lightning machines spent their whole time every day in
printing the most popular work of reference in the United States, a
bulky book full of pictures, with an annual circulation of five and a
half million copies--the general catalogue of the firm. For the first
time I realized the true meaning of the word "popularity "--and
sighed....