HALFWAY HOUSE
Where, Oh, where is the West that Easterners dream of—the West of
Bret Harte’s stories, the West depicted in the moving pictures? Are
the scenes no longer to be found except in the pages of a book, or
on a cinematograph screen? We have gone half the distance across the
continent and all this while we might be anywhere at home. Omaha is a big
up-to-date and perfectly Eastern city, and the Fontanelle is a brand-new
hotel where we are going to stay over a day in order to luxuriate in our
rooms.
One act of cruelty, however, I hereby protest against; they sent to our
rooms a tempting bill of fare—a special and delicious-sounding luncheon
at only sixty cents! When we hurried down to order it, we were told it
was served solely to the traveling men in their café, Celia and I not
admitted. E. M. said it was as good as it sounded—much interest was
that to us! Also that he sat at a table with a traveler for the Ansco
Photographic Company. E. M. had some very poor films we had taken, and
after luncheon his new friend made him some prints. The results were
little short of marvellous. If it was the paper,—why does anyone ever use
any other? If it was the man, Oh, why doesn’t he open a hospital for the
benefit of weak and decrepit amateur films.
On the subject of food, the cumulative effect of a traveling diet is
queer. After many days of it you feel as though you had been interlined
with a sort of paste. Everything you eat is made of flour, flour,
and again flour. A friend of ours took a trip around the world going
by slow stages. After a month or two her letters were nothing except
dissertations on the state of the cleanliness of hotels and the quality
of the food. Alas! We are getting the same attitude of mind. Ordinarily
the advantage of motoring is that if you don’t like the appearance of
the hotel you come to, you can go on. Out here where one stopping-place
is fifty or a hundred miles away from the other, that is not possible,
unless you are willing to drive nights and days without a pause, or sleep
along the roadside and be independent of hotels altogether. We are not
traveling that way—yet.
Omaha, as everyone knows, is divided from Council Bluffs by the
coffee-colored Missouri. How can as much mud as that be carried down
current all the time and leave any land above, or any river below?
It seemed to us that Council Bluffs and Omaha were comparatively not
unlike Brooklyn and Manhattan. Council Bluffs is much the smaller
city and the Bluffs from which it takes its name are not steep river
embankments as we had supposed, but a high residence-crowned hill behind
and above its innumerable railroad stations. Nothing, by the way, seems
more typical of American towns than to have a “residential district” on
the“heights.”
Omaha, as I said before, is an impressively up-to-date city with many
fine new buildings, important dwellings and beautiful avenues on which,
last but not least, motors are made hospitably welcome. In nearly all
Eastern cities automobiles are treated as though they were loitering
tramps; continually ordered by the police to “keep moving along.” In
Omaha the avenues are so splendidly wide that they can afford chalked-off
parking-places in the center of the streets where motors can stand
unmolested and indefinitely. If only New York and Boston had the space to
follow their example!
Much as New Yorkers go to Sherry’s or the Ritz, Omaha society seems to
come to the Fontanelle to dine. On Sunday evenings, we are told, it is
impossible to secure a table unless ordered long in advance. Even on
an ordinary evening, the dining-room of the Fontanelle looked like an
“Importers’ Opening.” A few women looked smart, but a number suggested
the probability of their having arrayed themselves to take part in
tableau vivants, or an amateur fashion parade.
A young girl with pink tulle draped around the lower half of her face
bent the top edge down gingerly while she ate a few mouthfuls, and then
carefully arranged it across the tip of her nose again. It seemed to be
another example beside that of banting for thinness, of _faut avoir faim
pour etre belle_.
A quite plump matron had on a high-necked dress of white satin
hooped round the hips, and trimmed with black velvet; another wore
black charmeuse, the neck and sleeves and picture hat outlined with
three-quarter inch diameter pearl beads, but the prize for eccentricities
of costumes belonged to a man in a black-and-white checked suit,
black-and-white striped socks and tie, and a white stiff shirt with black
mourning border on the collar and cuffs and down the front seam. You
can’t get away from the black-and-white craze anywhere; people will paint
the fronts of their houses in black-and-white stripes if the obsession
goes any further.
Among the appropriately and well-dressed women one was superlatively
smart. This one was really perfect, from the direction in which her hair
was brushed to exactly suit the outline of her hat, to her perfectly
shaped patent-leather shoes. Her costume is not much to describe: a
severely simple gun-metal-colored taffeta one-piece dress with a white
organdie collar and sleeves of self-colored chiffon, a wide-brimmed
black straw hat turned up at one side of the back with a black bird.
The distinctive effect was due more to the way it was worn than to
the costume. You felt that it belonged to her almost in the way that
a collie’s fur belongs to him; it was as much a part of her, as her
perfectly done hair or her polished fingernails. How few women pay
attention to the effect or outline that their heads make! Nine women
out of ten—more, forty-nine out of fifty—seemingly gather their hair
up on a haphazard spot on their heads and fasten it there almost any
way. Sit in any theater audience and look at them! And yet a paradox; a
really chic woman never gives the appearance of having made an effort.
Her hair suggests dexterity, not effort, and though she may have on a
four-hundred-dollar creation of jet or white velvet she looks as though
she happened to put on a black dress or a white one, but never as though
she had put on _the_ black or _the_ white one! This dissertation, by
the way, belongs by no means solely to Omaha, but to every city where
women follow fashions. New York women are quite as prone to be content
with being mannequins for the display of their clothes rather than take
greater pains to select clothes that are a completion of their own
personalities—the last leaf left for the American woman to take out of
the book of her Parisian sister.
* * * * *
Quite by chance on our last evening, we ran across Mrs. K. in the
corridor of the Fontanelle; and the next moment found ourselves in a
little fragment of Omaha Society—with a capital S. Had it not been for
one topic of conversation I should probably not mention the incident, as
we had merely a glimpse of a few well-bred people that offered little
matter for comment. The topic was the famous cyclone of three years
ago. Among the stories they told us, was one of Mrs. R., the one whose
appearance I had so much admired earlier in the evening. Three years ago
she arrived home from Paris with seventeen trunks full of trousseau, and
as soon as her things could be unpacked she spread them around a big
room, in imitation of a bazaar, so that her particular friends might view
them. Instead of her friends, however, arrived the Cyclone! It tore off
the entire bay window; caught up dresses, hats, lingerie, wraps; whisked
them through the open space where the window had been, and festooned the
topmost branches of the trees all down Farnum Avenue with fragments of
French finery.
Scarcely a garment was ever worth rescuing, as each was pierced through
and through by the branches that skewered it fast.
Mrs. K.’s own story of the cyclone, I give as she told it. “It did not
seem very amusing at the time, but one of the funny things to look back
upon was what happened to Father! The storm came from the south. Father
started across the living-room, which has both north and south windows,
just as the cyclone struck. The windows burst out, the furniture flew
around the room and literally out of the north window. Father made a
sort of vortex in the middle and everything swirled like a whirlpool
around him. When we got to him he was tightly bound up in the rugs,
portières, and curtains, which completely prevented his moving; but also
protected him snugly from flying glass. He was prostrate, of course, and
lightly resting on his chest was a large picture of the Doge’s palace.”
Whatever damage the cyclone did has long been obliterated, and Omaha now
presents a beautifully in order exterior and enjoys an evidently gay
social life; two features of which are the new Hotel, and the Country
Club—neither of them likely to grow much moss on their ballroom floors.
But to go from the triviality of the mere social side to the deeper
characteristics of the Omahans. There is something very inspiring, very
wonderful in the attitude of the West. The pride in their city, the
personal caring, that we met first in Chicago, is also the underlying
motive here. One hears much of the ambitious Western towns, but I think
the word not quite right; it is not mere ambition, but aspiration, that
is carrying them forward. One of the editors of a leading paper said
yesterday:
“The making of a great city depends less on the men who are in office
than on those who have no office, and who want none. It is the spirit of
the people that makes a city go forward or leaves it standing still. The
spirit that is essential to progress, in Omaha as everywhere, is one of
unity, harmony and good will. Combined with this there must be energy,
enterprise, confidence in the future, civic pride and devotion. No city,
however well favored otherwise, can make the progress its opportunities
call for, if its people are forever quarreling among themselves, envious
of one another’s good fortune, seeking each to build himself up by
tearing some other down. It is shoulder to shoulder, in mass formation,
that great armies advance. Rancor, hatred, suspicion, pettiness, that
cause division in the ranks, are as deadly as the other extreme where
indifference, greed, lack of respect for the other man’s rights, produce
dry rot.”
Nor are these merely editorial embroideries of speech. They are the
actual sentiments, not only thought, but for the most part lived up to.