WHOOPING IT UP
Life these days expressed itself in a ring of automobiles around the
drive of Sard's home. Minga's coming stimulated the activities of a
certain set known as the "Bunch," and the various hulking sedans or
little roadsters lurching in the gutters were like so many beads on the
rosary of her "popularity." In the village the prestige of the maidens
was read by these signs. "Peggy Martin can't be very popular. I never
see but one car in front of her house." "The Fairs must be very dull
people. One never sees any parking on their driveway."
These machines, groomed and glossy, or in some cases dilapidated and
frankly dirty, driven by a youth never contented to stay long in one
place, had their own individual swan-songs and Iliads, their maladies,
their insides, their prowess in speed and climbing, and furnished food
for much of the conversation of Minga's associates. A tall, red-headed
lad would inquire of his feminine neighbor, lolling in the canvas
hammocks on the Judge's terrace of an evening, "Did you see her buck
coming over the hill? The old maid! Didn't want to do the stunt on
first, so I kicked her into second and she climbed it, the old girl,
spitting and blowing. Well, I thought the cranky thing would bust a
valve or something."
Then would follow serious dissertation on spark plugs and gas tanks,
the new fuels, graded lubricating oils and service fuses.
"Where do you garage now, Dave?" inquired one tan-shirted hedonist.
"Oh, I garage on the front lawn," replied the careless Dave. "Mother
hates it, says it spoils the grass, you know, but why bother about
grass? Grass isn't fashionable any more--out of date, I tell her, to
have grass and flowers and things. Cut all that out, I say, old stuff!"
Another youth, dapper, with the long-boned face of the manipulator of
social things, deftly drew attention to his own brand new roadster.
"Got Mother to jog the old gentleman some. Went out and played golf
with him a couple of times. Result!" With negligent cigarette he
indicated the graceful powerful shape. "Like that color? Not too loud,
what?" The youth appealed to the girls sitting on the stone coping that
swept the river-ward side of the house. "I don't want 'em to think I'm
Mary Pickford or anything," was his modest suggestion.
The girls, swinging their feet encased in the flat, practical tennis
shoes of the period, looked their usual momentary cold interest. Their
heads, impertinently bobbed, or spectacularly "bunned," had abundant
hair that covered bright enough little brains, but their mouths,
trained into machine talk, dealt machine-like with little well-worn
screws and cogs and belts of words, so that what they turned out was
machine like; not related thought or challenging conversation, but
trite sentences and inferences and ejaculations that made small circles
of thought.
Gertrude, the leader of the village girls, smiled dreamily at the car
in question. "It's a good make, isn't it?" she said, then--"That firm's
worth millions of dollars, they say, even in these after-the-war days."
Minga nodded authoritatively, as one who knew. They all looked at her
respectfully.
"The Mede says that to drive that car is to drive molten gold," said
Minga--it was understood that Minga spoke of her father as the Mede. No
one knew exactly what the allusion meant, but it showed somehow that
Minga was no slave to parental authority and that she "knew" history.
"I want Dad to get a new car instead of a new piano," said Cynthia.
"With the talking machine and George's cornet we don't really need a
piano--but I do need a good roadster to--to get to the library and--and
church," Cynthia inclined her head demurely.
"Yah--Yah!" they all jeered. "To get to the library and church! Some
getting, I'll say!"
Dunstan looked up. "Whew!" he whistled, "to get to the beauty parlor,
to the hashish joint, to the ice-cream palace, to the hooch chapel."
"Yah!" they all laughed, Gertrude a little more spitefully than the
others. Cynthia Bradon, a lithe, ripe blonde of sixteen, had had
experiences with many things. It was known that she had had a few
"shots" of morphine and would swallow, for a wager, many hectic and
sulphuric beverages. She had run away and been unaccounted for for a
week, she had been photographed in a bathing suit by a moving picture
man. Cynthia was not sensitive, and her beauty, peach-like and of a
glowing dewiness, seemed about the most harmless beauty in the world,
because it covered so empty and so trivial a soul. Among the elders,
she was considered a lost character. Among those who knew her she was
known to be merely silly, lazy and untidy.
Cynthia's own group accepted her without enthusiasm or criticism.
She was regarded as one who was no obstructionist and who by sheer
triviality added much to the gayety of nations. Her "line" was
silliness. Long education by the sensational type of moving picture had
removed from these young people any morbid sensitiveness. "Cinny," and
"Cinema" as they called her, wanted to find out about morphine--let
her. "Fancy," so named from Frances, was a fine swimmer, always diving
against her mother's command. She had saved a child once--moral--if
Fancy hadn't disobeyed her mother she couldn't have saved the child!
Marjorie, who was fat and too evidently made up, was a good sport and
awfully nice at picnics and sailed a boat well and was jolly and fair
in all games. Gertrude, dubbed facetiously "the road-hog," had nearly
killed an old man by running over him in breaking speed laws; but this
fact instead of making her in any way taboo, only served to add to
her interest as a rather tragic saturnine young person in extremely
abbreviated skirts.
They were all far away from the tradition and early training of the
parents who had borne them, spent incalculable money on them, scoured
the realm for the best food for them; added to their youthful desires,
their green sloths, given them leisure and opportunity and crammed
them with diversion but neglected to set them an unswerving example of
strong, frank, fearless, reverent and purposeful life. The young people
of to-day analyzed like a sort of mischievous ivy or burdock burr,
growing rank in the pure garden of our purpose, have become what they
are merely by feeding on the soil around them. They are the curious
sports of a few rather shameful vines and fruits of our own negligence.
When they speak flippantly of love and marriage, they do so with a
very accurate knowledge of the percentage of divorces and the reasons
for these divorces. When they reveal all that is legally possible
of their fine young bodies, they do so after a war which placed the
highest percentage on physical superiority and challenged the needs for
privacy, and they do so impelled by frankness and a healthy Narcissism
that is much better than our old time reticence, our concealment of
deformity and weakness, our æsthetic half-revealing and suggesting that
made so strong a desire for full revelation.
It would be rather a joke to find that in these ways youth may surpass
us one day in virtue and purity. It is quite possible that Don Juan,
about whom we whispered so much behind our hands, would make no
impression at all upon the young men and women of Minga's group. Walt
Whitman's great biologic, physiologic roaring they would frown over,
puzzled. That one man, old, too, with a white beard, should speak
familiarly of prostitutes and be so anxious to specify and catalogue
arms and legs and thighs and bones and blood and bone-sockets, they
would think "queer." But if one were to step out and say to a group
like that on the Judge's loggia, "Don Juan was over-sexed. His amours
were silly and maudlin because his great creator was an embittered and
sensitive and suffering man" there would be a low understanding comment
of "Uh, huh?--that so?" and a general cold-blooded note-taking as to
Don Juan.
To go on about Whitman and suggest that Walt was a great human comrade
who at a time when there were no "legs" and no "spades" spoken of in
the world believed in men and women recognizing the glory of sex and
helping each other; believed in something divine inside of each that
works its way through, no matter how low we sink; believed that we must
struggle and overcome, yet be honest while conquering, sincere about
life while controlled with it, that would be to receive the casual
answer, "Say, that's some little Walt. Where did he tend bar?" But
these things would strike little fire. There would be no real interest
until one mentioned a new machine, a scientific discovery, a sporting
champion or a unique crime. Then keen faces would be bent upon you,
keen eyes would interrogate--Facts, facts, facts! So youth pushes
by all your dreams, all your virtues, all your sentimentalities and
theories for its true meat--facts!
The light, the casual, the cynical, the flippant, the pondering
of rather gross realities and in the cases of the girls a very
destructive, squalid and ignorant playing with the great laws of life
as given into the hands of men and women is the expression of America
to-day. To deplore is futile, to try to train any group of children
away from these general lines of license and freedom, impossible. It
belongs to the age; that age is the aftermath of crazy luxury and
wealth. There is some great biologic secret behind it all, and this
biologic secret may be that such wealth, such leisure, such exhibition,
as opposed to inhibition, as we once deemed desirable is undesirable,
unendurable, in that it affects life with a kind of sponginess, a sort
of quicksand whereon nothing may grow or be built. It may be that such
surroundings as we have tried to give our children have made their
bodies fine, but have shrunken and vitiated their souls, that their use
of our hard-earned materialism has been to deny all our insistence upon
worth and solidity and virtue but it bears one sure portent. To the
observer of the "Minga group" all over America to-day it is apparent
that this Youth will some day take itself in hand, that it will create
a new ethic of worth and virtue that will bear more acute scanning
than does ours. That, though they must stop and go back to hard things
and solemn things, above all to recreate the things they have wasted;
they are preparing for some enormous new Scheme, some great rational
universalism; they will perform that duty ultimately, with a greater
measure of understanding than our precepts could have given them. They
will be free of all tangle and rot of the Seeming, they will know!
They will go forward, keen, fearless, open-eyed, fit to help carry on
the destiny of the whole world.
Soon the general restlessness on the terrace communicated itself in
expression. "Where do we go from here?" asked one chap--he rose and did
a short shuffling step, the others clapping their hands and whistling
an air which ended with the plaintive refrain: "And the reason he
didn't marry me, was his four merry wives across the sea." Minga
stepped inside and slipped on the phonograph a record of Honolulu Jazz
and to this brassy whistling clangor the couples clinched, and young,
long, canvas-shoed, thin legs stepped about in one of the curious
walking dances of the time. This over, they stopped and dawdled,
staring at each other. There were a few personal sallies, one or two
lazy whoops, and then the old thirst for sensation: "Where do we go
from here?"
"I know," suggested the youth with the new car--"Dunce, listen to my
hunch, love me for my bright ideas. All hike out to Lovejoy's for
hot dogs and then back to Billy's for sundaes. Come on, be a sport,
everybody, what matter if you've got no coin? I'm cahoots with you,
I'll stand the multitude. Got me gold mine with me."
"I can't go," complained Dunstan moodily, "got a quizz coming at
eight-thirty, the infernal Latin rooster. I'd like to choke him."
"Cut it out, cut it out!" came a chorus of stern voices.... "Say,
Dunce, what's the matter with yah, gettin' queer? Hey? They only put
Latin in the cirickulum to please the wives of the trustees. Yah!
cut it out, man--say, if yuh don't have any fun, you'll go batty;
the doctors all say so. Sure they do! Everybody does go batty that's
high-brow and studies and all that drool. Say, cut it out, whoop it up
if yuh want to keep from suicide. By heck! you'll do sumpin desperate
if you keep up with this Latin, like that feller your old man is going
to put in the Can. How about that trial; when is it coming off?"
"Chuck that," muttered Dunstan, a grave significant look in the
direction of the house--"Governor is inside. Sard's coming out----"
"Sard's coming out," they chanted gibingly.
"Oh, the Mermaid Lady came out, you bet,
She was not fully dressed:
The pretty curls of her hair were wet
I leave you to guess the rest."
This gem started by the young chap with the new car was taken up and
chanted by his associates, all beating time and clapping in imitation
of negro minstrels. It was done by way of changing an unwelcome subject
and Sard, appearing at the door, put her finger on her lips. "If you
want to sing," she said laughingly, "you'll have to go in swimming or
something; Father's in his den and I'm sworn to keep things quiet."
"Getting up the data for the great day?" asked one boy saucily.
Sard shook her head at him, but Minga giggled. "Wouldn't it be fun to
go right in now, stand in a row in front of Judgie and say, 'We, the
under-signed, beg for the freedom of Terence O'Brien, given into our
hands,' you know the way they used to do in--in Bret Harte and places,"
finished Minga a little vaguely. "Get him out from under the law."
The group brightened; here was something to do, something unusual and
racy and like the movies; they saw the drama of it.
"You'd have to have a writ of habeas corpus," said one young fellow.
He wore large round glasses and looked solemn. "Who's his counsel?" he
demanded of Sard, professionally.
She gave the name of a village lawyer--"I'm afraid it's only a form,
though poor Dora's wages go for it, for I--I don't believe there is
much defense," Sard bent her brows. "It's all wrong, you know; one of
us would have the best counsel money could buy; if our own families
couldn't afford it, some rich relative would come forward to save the
name."
"That's right, she's dead right." The young faces ranged along
the terrace wall looked solemnly on Sard; from trifling, aimless
pleasure-seekers they became suddenly sober, filled with the sense of
human tragedy of inequality and unfairness.
"Well, then, come on." Minga stood on audacious toes; she bowed like a
preening butterfly. "Who'll follow? I'll lead!"
Lounging to their feet they made ready to follow her but Sard, older
and steadier, restrained them. "That's idiotic," the girl said
abruptly--"you don't know what a rage it would put Dad in, Minga!
You've never seen him when he's really angry."
"Does he carry on some?" asked one of the boys.
Sard was silent for a moment, then, "He is quite terrible," she
said quietly; "it would make things worse in every way to go to Dad
now--besides you know as well as I do that he could officially do
nothing, but," Sard, looking at them all, spoke low, "I have an idea,
I've been thinking."
They always listened respectfully to Sard. She was the stuff of which
leaders are made. Indifferent to popularity, caring only for the
enterprise in which she was engaged, cool, controlled, just as she was
in card games or swimming and tennis, now she took charge of the group
as she had done a hundred times before.
"There's that famous lawyer who is spending the summer in the organ
builder's house on the mountain; you know about him."
"Don't I," spoke up Minga, eagerly. "He's a great friend of my Cousin
Eleanor Ledyard and her little Pudge; he writes Pudge the funniest
letters.... My!" sighed Minga. "He's frightfully important; he's been
counsel for all the millionaires and magnates, he has eyes like X-rays,
they look you through and through. Wow! I'm afraid of him."
The other girl hesitated. "He's famous and all that," she said slowly.
"Father knows him well, but I've read things he has written in the
magazines and--and--he isn't--well, you know how things are done?" The
group, curiously enough, in spite of no reading at all, did know how
things are done. How fatally the lies, the subsidizing, the political
trickery and chicanery persist in spite of the smug assumptions of
virtues; the falsity of the effort to push the world back to an age
where just the title of "Christian" would suffice instead of the more
recent challenge which insists that the Christian be like Christ. They
knew, these little sated, over-indulged, inexperienced sprouts of
materialism, somehow or other, they knew.
"The loss of innocence" which their elders so much deplored has given
them a cool fatal knowledge of the rottenness hitherto hidden from
them; they know the failures and compromises upon which that æsthetic
dream of "innocence" has been dreamed. They will have none of it.
Minga chasséd to the terrace steps; she pinned a scarf around her
head turban-fashion and her eyes shone with adventurous gleam. "Say,
listen," she said in the vernacular--"Say--listen--let's all pile in
the machines and go up there on the mountain and stand in a row before
Watts Shipman. Let's ask him to take Terence's case; let's ask him if
he could get Terry off from a life's sentence. All of us--Yes. What?
Serve Judgie right," added Minga, indignantly, "for not being willing
to talk to me about it."
"Whew!" breathed a young chap in white flannels. The youth, in large
horn-rimmed spectacles, went solemnly over to Sard and held out his
hand, "I'm with you. It will make a sensation, anyway; maybe we
couldn't get much out of Shipman but I'm with you, only what will Papa
say?"
Sard had been thinking about that; a curious look in her eyes, she
faced the boy. "Father's law is one thing," the girl said it without
a trace of disrespect or rebellion, "but mine is another and I want
to be true to mine! I don't know how you feel," she looked soberly at
the owlish one, "but I can't be happy and know that there is so much
tragedy in the world. I can't live under that law."
It was the old sad cry of youth, "Must my happiness, then, be bought
at the expense of so much human frustration and misery?" But the
owlish-eyed one repudiated this notion.
"You'll have to," he said oracularly--"somebody's always hurting
somebody--someone is always getting happiness out of someone's else
misery." The horn-rimmed eyes looked very mature and bitter.
But several of the group jumped down from the terrace and were now
tinkering with the machines in the drive. Jeering cries came from
one to another as the engines started up. "Minga goes with me!"
"Aw! go on, you animal, she does not; she goes with me; right here,
Minga, where there's a looking-glass and rouge and sachet powder and
everything--Sard goes with Thorny Croft. Hey, Nonny, Nonny, the two
nuts, the two high-brows! Cinny'll catch cold; she hasn't got enough
clothes on; Cinny never has enough clothes on. How about the dance
the other night? Well--well--well, we saw a good deal of Cinny!" Not
delicate, not pretty, not dignified, not inspiring. But it belongs to
the age, Messieur et Mesdames; what part have you had in making the age
what it is?