PANAMA TO NEW YORK
I sailed to New York from Colon on one of those transports designed
for the use of Canal employees. When the berths are not all taken
by officials and their wives the remainder are sold to the general
traveling public. The distance of the voyage in nautical miles is
1974, in dollars it is a hundred, and in time it is six days. The
accommodation is one class only, with no steerage passengers.
It meant six more lazy days similar to those spent sailing from New
Orleans. The passengers seemed merrier going to New York than the
others did coming home. Most of them had the money for a good time in
their pockets, but the others had spent theirs and were sobered.
There is little that need be said of the voyage. Though late in
September it was sultry and breezeless. We kept expecting a coolness
and a change, but it was not until the fifth day that the North touched
us, and that was a day of packing, of coming out in "shore clothes," of
putting on unsuspected overcoats and bowler hats. The ship's company
changed itself from white-clad Central Americans into somber New
Yorkers. The sky itself grew overcast. More serious expressions crept
into people's faces as late next afternoon we steamed up the Hudson
into the presence of Manhattan, grand and gray.
I had promised to meet Wilfrid Ewart in New York and return South with
him to Santa Fe; he would buy a horse and ride with us, study the
Mexican Border, and write; I would spend some time there before going
on to Mexico. During the last few years he and I had been something
like inseparables--at least in London. I knew, as I waited in the
harbor, that he was there somewhere in the great city. I knew also that
my friend Vachel Lindsay was there, and it was a special pleasure to
think of meeting both friends. The three of us had sat at a table in a
café in Regent Street late one night two years before, and the project
of Ewart's going to America had been mooted. Lindsay drew a map of the
United States upon the table and marked Santa Fe on it and then drew
radii from it. "A mud house and a pony are all you want, and you will
see America," said the poet. Paradoxically enough, he asserted that
America could be studied to better advantage in her deserts than in her
cities.
I believe that in the ordinary course of life Ewart and Lindsay could
hardly have met for mutual benefit. I was the human link; assuring
Ewart of Lindsay's genius, assuring Lindsay of Ewart's promise. The
reserved, almost inarticulate, young Guards' officer brought forth in
due time his _Way of Revelation_ and Lindsay hailed it with delight and
advised his New Mexican friends that the author of it was coming.
The idea of America, and especially of the South, certainly fired
Wilfrid Ewart's imagination. He longed to go to New Orleans--that city
for which in a way he had been bound when later he was so tragically
killed. The idea of my journey to the Spanish Main also caused him to
crave to share in its adventures. I remember our last dinner together
in 1921--it was one night between Christmas and New Years. Wilfrid
Ewart raised his glass solemnly and pronounced a toast: "To 1922, and
may we both stand together on that Peak where in one view Pacific and
Atlantic meet!" I had been talking to him of Darien and then of Mt.
Zempoaltepec in Mexico whence at one moment you may see both oceans.
I smiled, we talked, and in my heart I doubted he would come, but he
did. Alas now for the train of circumstances! He came, and he is lost.
I was waiting in the harbor and he was in the city. It is so perhaps
still. I was answering once more those endless questions: "Are you in
favor of subverting existing government by force?" "Only in such a case
as that of Colombia in 1902," I reply. That will not be taken as an
answer. "Am I a polygamist?" "Ever been deported?"--
The questioning is interrupted by the discovery of an abduction
case--hours pass. It was nearly eight when I got free.
As I walked out of the dock gate in white coat, riding breeches, and
knapsack on my shoulders an impatient cabman cried out--"Now the
caballeros are coming." But I hastened to a street car and then to
Forty-second Street and the Hotel Commodore, that Temple of the Calf,
in which my poet had chosen to stay. And he knew where Ewart was
staying. So we were joined again, the three of us, as we had been in
London two years before.
Vachel, at that time engrossed by classic Art and modern
American politics, was an enigma to Ewart. The American's
enthusiasms were bewildering to the Englishman just fresh from our
"no-enthusiasm-for-anything-that-matters" atmosphere of England. One
thing, however, both admired, and that was Broadway at night all lit
up from the color reflections on the road-crowds to the stars in
the sky. But they admired it in different ways. Ewart admitted the
grandness of America but never felt its greatness. For New York he
obtained an admiration which had not learned its bounds. He knew it as
the greatest piece of human magnificence he had seen. Central Park was
his favorite haunt, and many an afternoon he walked there and watched,
in the evening, the fade-out in the dusk, and then the lighting, the
starring, the flaming, the rising of the brightness, and then at last
the fast-pouring floods of electric illumination.
Life for me in a giddy New York week changed incredibly from the
languor of the tropics to the ardor of the North. It was meetings at
luncheon, meetings at dinner, theater every night, business letters,
telephone messages in consecutive half dozens, rolling about in
"overheads" and "undergrounds" and cabs. I knew I should be glad to get
away.
Halfway through my time I had to leave the Commodore Hotel, that
Temple of the Calf, as I have called it. It had been requisitioned
for the Bankers' Conference. The poet had been installed longer than
I had--they could not turn him out. But me they could. I went across
to the quieter, old-fashioned "Murray Hill" to be still near to my two
friends. It was a great sight at the Hotel Commodore next day, when the
bankers had arrived--from every State in the Union, and every banker
wearing a crimson silken tag which told the name of his bank and his
little town. Thousands of little bankers, scores of big ones, swarmed
in and out of the vast hall of the hotel. And they all walked with
becoming gravity and aplomb. It was the greatest conference of the
century. On the table was the question of Europe's unpaid debts; the
bankers felt, and indeed they had been told by their leaders, that upon
them depended the solvency of the Old World.
One afternoon whilst we paced the stone hall and talked, the orchestra
began to play the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and this set the
thirty or forty canaries who perch in their gilded cages above the
foyer palms all a-singing. Such a joyous hubbub then ensued in that
great hall, of golden birds and bankers' tongues and tinkling brass.
Somewhere afar a bank president was orating ponderously. But added to
that a man with a megaphone upon the mezzanine balustrade described a
baseball game in the "World Series." The architecture of the place,
with its color and lighting effects, the frame of our gilded society,
was superb; the human attendance behind marble bars were busy, bowed,
attentive, all that man could wish. Every banker in America seemed
to be pulling his weight, every facial expression was at par. There
was a sense of the coffers behind them and the business and power
they represented. So the afternoon band kept playing its elaborately
orchestrated tune, child's tune, from the Chauve Souris--not exactly
the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," sometimes grander and yet
delightful, titillating, perhaps the Parade of the Little Golden
Bankers instead.
It was well to go to New York, if only to refresh one's memory as to
where the power all comes from. The cranes swing round the great crates
from the ships to the docks at Porto Rico. Or it may be, at Colon, or
Puerto Plata, or Habana, or Vera Cruz. American agents tick them off.
They go to the warehouses, thence to the shops, to the houses. The
gold that buys them goes to the banks and the banks send it on to New
York--golden New York, golden America, one may say.
To New York, the gold, and above the gold, the power. Some one may
whisper--What of Washington? Washington is New York's stenographer. Or
what of Chicago? Chicago is New York's young brother. Or San Francisco?
San Francisco is the reflection of New York's skyscrapers in the
Pacific.
With this the poet both agrees and disagrees. New York is the crown
of the America of this age. It is Babbitt's work. The bankers are the
big men now. But they have not all the power they think. A turn in
political history, and the bankers' influence might be gone. Lindsay
will demonstrate this to me if I will spend a summer harvesting
westward from Texas to Alaska. Ewart is ready to accept the idea. In
the deserts of the Southwest we shall see more of America than in New
York. That I doubt, but Ewart and I will go. My wife is at Santa
Fe and awaits us. To Santa Fe then, spiritual lodestone of artists
and poets! To the capital of the new state of New Mexico, merely a
conquered territory until 1912, now capable of being thought the
spiritual hope of the United States.