THE CITY OF RECKLESSNESS
“For West is West, and East is East, and never twain shall meet”—except
in Colorado Springs!
Mountains, plains, squatters’ shanties, replicas of foreign palaces,
cowboys, Indians, ranchers, New Yorkers, Londoners. The free open-air
life and altitude of the plains, the sheltered luxurious manners and
customs of the idle rich! Across the warp of Western characteristics is
woven the woof of a cosmopolitan society.
Before coming here I had imagined the place a sort of huge sanatorium. I
had expected long lines of invalid chairs on semi-enclosed verandas, even
beds possibly, as in the outdoor wards of hospitals. I knew, of course,
that there were good hotels and many private houses; and having friends
who had come out here, I thought perhaps we might take luncheon or dinner
with them in a quiet, semi-invalid sort of way—an early simple supper,
and someone to tell us not to stay too long for fear of tiring Jim or
Mary.
As a matter of fact Mary drove her own motor up to the hotel ten minutes
after we arrived, and, telling us of half a dozen engagements that she
had made for us, including a dinner that she was giving that evening,
wanted us to come out to polo then and there.
Hadn’t she better rest? Not a bit of it!
Instead of the invalid regimen that we expected to fall into, we were
kept going at a pace we could scarcely catch up with. We dined in
extravagantly appointed houses, lunched on terraces overlooking gardens,
danced into the first hours of the morning, and led the life typical
of any fashionable pleasure resort. Of invalidism there was, _on the
surface_, not a trace. Mary herself had come out a few years ago very
ill, and Jim and L——, two men who had been sent away from home in an
almost dying condition, seemed quite as unlike invalids as Mary. L—— has
a beautiful house, run exactly as his establishment in Newport used to
be, and he leads much the same life that he used to lead there. Motoring
takes the place of yachting; he plays poker, polo, and golf, and dines
rather much, wines rather more, and has changed not at all.
Jim, not because he is different, but only because he is less rich, lives
in a little bungalow in Broadmoor. Instead of three or four footmen
standing in the hall, as in L.’s house, Jim lives alone with a Jap boy
who is cook, butler, valet, housemaid and nurse combined, but he gave us
a delicious luncheon to which he had asked a few of his neighbors.
[Illustration: CRIPPLE CREEK]
“They all have t.b.,” he whispered, otherwise we should never have known
it.
After lunch he showed me his sleeping-porch. Nothing unusual in that;
everyone has a fad for sleeping out of doors nowadays. He did, however,
happen to mention that his Jap boy was bully whenever he was ill, but
it was only in his almost emotional gladness to see us, his wistful
eagerness for every small detail of news from home that I caught a
suspicion of what might once have been homesickness. Perhaps I only
imagined that faint suspicion. Certainly he seemed cheerful and happy and
spoke of himself as a “busted lunger” as lightly as he might have said he
was six feet two inches tall! As a matter of fact, his “busted lungs” are
pretty well mended—for so long as he stays out here. Later we heard that
there was likely to be a wedding between Jim and the young quite-lately
widow who sat opposite him at table. She happily is not a member of the
t.b. fraternity, but came out some years ago with a dying husband.
“What an old fox you are! Why didn’t you tell me about her?” I said to
him afterward. He grinned until he looked almost idiotically foolish;
then he exclaimed:
“Isn’t she wonderful?” and he squeezed my hand as though I and not he had
made the remark.
Besides the conspicuous and palatial homes that one associates
instinctively with Broadmoor, there are a few little bungalows, each with
its sleeping-porch, a living-room, dining-room and a bedroom or two.
There are also, in Colorado Springs itself, many boarding-houses, and
in both of these the people do live very simply and follow more or less
the prescribed life of a health resort. But in the general impression of
Colorado Springs, one might imagine oneself in a second Newport, Monte
Carlo, or Simla in India. Not that any of these places bear much physical
resemblance to the heart of the Rocky Mountains, especially Simla, yet
this last is suggested most of all. The conditions are much the same
in that the people are there because they have been ordered to be,
rather than because it is a home they have themselves chosen. In India
the people can’t do very much because the climate is too enervating;
in Colorado the people can’t do very much because their health is
too uncertain. In both places there is an underlying recklessness of
attitude, of wanting to get all the fun out of their enforced extradition
that they can; and the “fun” consists in both places in riding, driving,
playing, or watching polo or tennis, flirting and gambling. The latter
two are the favorites, as they afford the most diversion for the least
physical effort. The Anglo-Indians plunge into whatever form of amusement
offers because the place would be deadly otherwise; the Coloradoites
lead as gay a life as health will permit and ingenuity devise, because
the deadliness may at any time be earnest. “Eat, drink and be merry, for
tomorrow——” was never more thoroughly lived up to, even in the time of
the ancients who originated the adage. Anything for excitement, anything
for amusement, anything not to realize that life is not as gay as it
seems!
Death is the one word never mentioned. If by chance they speak of one who
has gone, they say he has “crossed the great divide.” If someone leaves
to go home hopelessly, the women say good-by as casually as they can;
a few men at the club drink to him—once. That is all. They are people
facing the grim specter always, yet never allowing their eyes to see.
Personally I should have had no inkling of the sadder side; I should
have taken everything at its happy face value had it not been for one
awakening incident.
I was sitting in the wide, cheerfully homelike hall of the Antlers
Hotel when the people from an arriving train came in. Among perhaps a
dozen indiscriminate tourists one in particular attracted my attention
and interest. He was little more than a boy—twenty-two perhaps or
twenty-three—good-looking, well-bred, and well off if one might judge
of these things by his manner and appearance, and the pigskin bags,
golf clubs, polo mallets and other paraphernalia that two porters were
carrying in his wake.
“There’s a lucky young person,” I thought, “evidently fond of sport and
with the ability, wealth and leisure to gratify his taste.” I saw him
register and give a stack of extra baggage checks to the clerk, and then
on his way to the elevator he passed close to me. He was moderately tall
with a graceful, well-built frame, but his step lagged and his shoulders
drooped, and in his drawn face I caught a lost, helpless, despairing
expression that I recognized unmistakably. Near where I often go in
the autumn is a boys’ school and I have seen little new boys on the
first evening of their arrival look just so—livid and lost, poor little
chaps—but you know that in a day or two they will be running about as
happy as grigs in the excitement of school events and the exhilaration of
football. But the look in my “fortunate” youth’s face went deeper and an
illuminating word flashed to my mind: life termer! Homesick? He looked as
though he would die of it.
A moment before the big splendidly kept hotel with its broad white
hallways, wide verandas and sunny terrace under the very shoulder of
Pike’s Peak, rising in snow-crowned glory above all the lesser glorious
mountains, had seemed so beautiful. Suddenly, though, I saw it not
merely with the eyes of one broken-hearted, homesick youth, but with
some realization of the thousands of tear-filled eyes that have looked
about its commonplace stations. What must it be like to be weak and ill,
when the strongest clings like a little child to the ones he loves best,
and then to be sent far away to live always, or to die, perhaps, among
strangers?
[Illustration: IN THE GARDEN OF THE GODS]
After this I became more observing of the lives about us, and people
told me many things—quite simply, as though it were all in the day’s
work. The greatest number who are sent out here are young, and strapping
athletes are the most usual type. Sometimes they get well soon, and
go back happily to their families; sometimes their families move out
too, and in that way bring “home” with them, but the majority come and
stay alone, and never leave again except for short annual furloughs.
One of these latter lives here at the hotel. A friend of his told me
that “Harry could never go home, poor chap,” but the adverb “poor”
scarcely seemed to qualify that young man from what I saw of him. He is
always laughing, always shoving his shoulders through the atmosphere;
inquisitive as _Ricki-ticki_ and quite as full of life and vim; he seems
ready to seize every opportunity of hazard or engagement that the moment
offers. He plays all games recklessly; the more dangerous as to stakes or
excitement, the better. He drives a powerful motor-car and he is flirting
outrageously with one of the prettiest women imaginable, whose invalid
husband seems to care very little how much attention she accepts from her
frivolous though ardent admirer.
But a little while ago I was in my window and he was on the terrace just
below, close enough for me to see him without his seeing me. His face was
turned toward the glory of the snow-capped mountains but his unseeing
eyes too, had the exact look of the little homesick boys at school. I
saw then why his friend had called him “poor chap” and I also a little
better understood the exaggeration of his recklessness, the over-swagger
of his shoulders, the laugh and flippancy with which, like Jim, he speaks
of “t.b.” I wonder if anywhere in the world the moon looks down upon more
tear-stained pillows than here!
And this is enough of the black side of the picture—the blackest side
there is. For by no means all of the people are homesick, unhappy or in
any way ill. Families who have come out originally for the sake of a sick
member have stayed because they loved the place and made it their home.
And of the others, many who have been lonely and homesick at first have
found the place an Eden because they have also found the “one in all the
world.”
In fact, meeting the “one” is the almost inevitable thing they do.
Supposing the newcomers live in little bungalows in Broadmoor;
opportunity need go no further. He, for instance, sits on his little
porch in the sunshine, and she sits on her little porch across the way.
Hours and hours and days and days, they sit on their little porches in
the sunshine. Then by and by they sit together on the same little porch.
It is quite simple.
Often the story ends as it should. They get well and marry and live happy
ever afterward. Sometimes, of course, it ends sadly. But nearly always
love brings its compensation of joy, and nearly all who have ever lived
out here keep afterward in their hearts an unfading flower of romance.
Colorado Springs is a place unique in the world. Filled with people
unhappy to come, deserted by people unwilling to go. And nearly always
their coming and going is through no wish or will of their own. Sometimes
their going is as sudden and tragic as their coming.
A friend of ours whom we had expected to find out here had only the
week before been obliged to pack up on a few hours’ notice and go to
California. She had just built a new house and had been in it hardly two
months and now she has to begin in a new environment all over again. The
great tragedy in this case is that the husband cannot stay long away from
a high altitude and the wife must probably always live at a low one.
Of the fashionable element in the Springs a certain elderly lady told me
with bated breath:
“It is the fastest society on earth! They just live for excitement, and
they don’t attend church half as regularly as they go to each other’s
houses to dance or gamble. If you see a woman out walking or driving with
a man, it’s more likely another woman’s husband than her own. My dear,
you may call such a state of affairs modern and up to date, but I call it
shocking—that’s what I call it!”
She, dear soul, is from Salem, Massachusetts, and I can well believe that
she thinks as she spoke. There is also a younger woman, the wife of a
prosperous manufacturer whose home is in Omaha. The old lady from Salem
I had known in York Harbor, Maine, but the Omaha lady we “picked up an
acquaintance with” through the offices of E. M. in saving the life of an
attenuated specimen of a dog from the grip of one whose looks were more
flattering to the species.
Apparently the old lady and the younger one sit and exchange opinions all
day, a rather needless effort, as they share the same in the first place.
At almost any hour that you pass them the old lady is saying:
“My dear, that is Mrs. Smith talking to Mr. Baldwin!”
And the younger, aghast, echoes, “Well, who’d have thot it!” (“Thot” is
not a misprint, that is the way she pronounces it.) And then in unison
they wonder where Mr. Smith can be and why Mrs. Baldwin is not out
walking with her husband.
[Illustration: COLORADO. PIKE’S PEAK IN THE DISTANCE]
The point of view of the old lady and the younger one represent not
unfairly the attitude of the majority of wives in the two thousand miles
we had come through since leaving the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and
Fifth Avenue, New York. An opposed attitude jumps from Central Park
East to Colorado Springs. Central Park West is curiously like the gap
between. On Fifth Avenue and South and East and again in Colorado Springs
a wife does not believe the happiness of family life dependent upon her
husband’s never speaking to another woman but herself. More often is
the shoe on the other foot. The husband generally goes from his office
to his club, the wife more than likely goes with an agreeable young man
to a dancing tea. Parlor Snake is the New York vernacular for the ideal
type of a five-o’clock young man! Once west of Fifth Avenue and for
two thousand miles thereafter nothing like this at all! For Mr. X. to
cross the threshold of Mrs. B.’s house unless accompanied by Mrs. X—and
sometimes several little X.’s—would be just cause for storms and tears,
if not for divorce. Even we as strangers could see wives trailing like
veritable shadows behind their husbands. Let Mr. X. stop for a second
to speak to any Mrs. W., Y. or Z. and Mrs. X. sidles up and clings to
husband’s sleeve as though a few sentences uttered apart from a general
conversation were affronts upon the security and dignity of a wife.
In the small circle of Chicago’s smart set this wifely attitude of “speak
to him not; he is mine” is certainly not apparent. A very opposite
attitude, however, is very noticeable in Colorado Springs where a
perfectly adoring wife said to Celia, who is one of the most attractive
women imaginable: “For Heaven’s sake, do take Fred out on the veranda and
talk to him; he has been here two years without seeing a new face, and
scarcely anyone to talk to about home but me!”
Just how the pioneers and cowboys affect the place is hard to define, and
yet they undoubtedly do. Colorado people love the very name “cowboy”
with an almost personal sentiment, just as, in their love for them,
they seem personally to appropriate the “mountains,” and from both, in
spite of the luxury which many have brought from Europe or the Atlantic
coast, and in contrast to their mere recklessness, they have acquired
directness of outlook, fearless, open-air customs of living, and an
unhampered freedom from unimportant trifles. The spirit of going through
with what you undertake and not being stopped by a little mud that we
first met with in Rochelle is here much intensified. In Illinois they
prided themselves on surmounting obstacles; out here they are so imbued
with the attitude of the men who live out on the plains and through the
mountains—the pioneers whose adventures the most frivolous social leader
knows by heart—that they don’t even recognize an obstacle when they see
it.
Notwithstanding the luxury of his own house, L. goes off into the
wilderness generally with one guide but sometimes entirely alone, sleeps
on the ground, eats what he can kill and reverts to the primitive. And
you can sit in a room the interior of which might be in the Palace of
Versailles and hear your hostess in a two-hundred-dollar simplicity of
chiffon and lace repeat to you by the hour stories beginning: “Bill
Simpson, who was punching cattle on the staked plains——” or “The Apaches
were on the warpath and Kit Carson——” Possibly even she may tell you of
a hold-up adventure of her own when as a child she was traveling in the
Denver stage.
One amusing anecdote told us one afternoon at tea was of a celebrated
plainsman who, carrying a large amount of money and realizing that he was
about to be held up, quickly stuffed his roll of money down his trouser
leg, but craftily left two dollars in his waistcoat pocket. The outlaws
finding him so ill supplied with “grub money” made him a present of a
dollar to show him that he had met with real gentlemen.
Perhaps from habit, just as when someone says, “How are you?” you say,
“Very well, thank you,” though you may be feeling wretchedly, whenever
anyone mentions the topic of motoring, I find myself saying:
“Can you tell me anything about the roads between here and ——?” Why I
keep on asking about the roads I really don’t know! Hearing that they
are good or bad is not going to help or hinder. I think I must do it for
the sake of being sociable and making conversation. So, sitting next to
one of the prominent members of the Automobile Club, yesterday, I found
myself quite parrotlike asking for details of the road to Albuquerque.
“With good brakes, and an experienced chauffeur who won’t get flustered
or light-headed, you oughtn’t to have much trouble. You will find teams
nearly always available to pull you through dangerous fords,” he said
casually.
Having ourselves withstood the mud of Iowa without injury and survived
the perils of the Platte River Valley without meeting any, we find
ourselves as commonplace as anyone who had crossed Long Island would be
to New Yorkers. These people out here talk about being hauled through
quicksand streams, or of clinging along shelf roads at the edge of a
thousand-foot drop as though it were pleasant afternoon driving. I don’t
like the sound of the word “shelf”—why not by calling them mountain-view
roads let us keep our tranquillity at least until we get to them? And
beyond the precipices is the desert, where there is no place to stop over
and Heaven alone knows what fate awaiting us should anything happen to
the car.
[Illustration: FIRST COWBOYS AND CATTLE]
My companion at luncheon volunteered further that he had unluckily never
been farther south than Pueblo himself, but he knew a drug clerk who was
the highest authority on road information. Information and ice-cream soda
at the same time was a combination too alluring to be resisted, and an
hour later saw me thirsting at the fountain. The soda clerk called to
another out of sight behind the drug screen:
“Say, Bill, there’s a lady here wants to start for Albuquerque tomorrow.
Do you know anybody that’s gone over the Raton lately?”
A long, lanky, typical “Uncle Sam,” sauntered in eating a stick of
peppermint.
“Why, yes,” he drawled, “Bullard went down. I guess he went with a team
though; it was about a month ago. But Tracey went last week and took his
bride on their wedding-trip. Of course,” he turned to me, “Tracey is
a big man. Used to work on the freight depot. He bought a good manila
towline and he is as strong as an ox. He could haul his machine out of
anything, I guess.”
At this point an outsider entered; he was labeled from head to toe
with prosperity, expensive clothes, diamond rings—one on the third
finger of each hand—a diamond scarfpin, a breezy air of “here-I-am”
self-confidence. He seemed to be a friend of the drug clerk’s and he
ordered a malted milk and sat on the stool next to me. Immediately the
clerk who had been called “Bill” appealed to him.
“This lady is going down to New Mexico. Do you know anything about the
Raton Pass?”
“Do I know anything about Raton? I was born there!” Then he laughed and
turned to me: “You needn’t tell anybody though. Want to know about Raton?
Well, I’ll tell you, they have no streets, and they have no drainage,
and when it rains the mud is so soft you can go out in a boat and sail
from house to house! There’s just a Santa Fé roundhouse and a bunch of
cottages. Oh, it’s the road over the Pass you want to know about?” He
stirred his baby beverage. “Well, they say they have fixed the road up
some since I was down there but I guess the best thing you can do is to
let your chauffeur take the automobile down, and you walk behind it with
the wreath!”
But somehow these alarms no longer terrify! Are we, too, being imbued
with the spirit of the West? Forgetting that our original intention was
to motor only so far as we could travel comfortably, we can now think of
nothing but that we have arrived merely at the gateway of the land of
adventure, where cowboys, prairie schooners, and Indians may possibly
still be found!
The Honorable Geoffrey G., an Englishman whom we met in New York last
year, says he is going with us as far as Santa Fé. He has just imported a
brand-new little foreign car and is as proud as Punch over it. It is even
lower hung than ours, and has a very delicate mechanism. He drives it
apparently well, but from various remarks he has made I don’t believe he
knows the first thing about machinery.