ASSORTED AND RESORTED FLORIDA
"Some year or more ago, I s'pose,
I roamed from Maine to Floridy,
And,--see where them Palmettoes grows?
I bought that little key...."
--SIDNEY LANIER ("A FLORIDA GHOST.")
Florida in winter comes near to being all things to all men. To all she
offers amusement plus her climate, and in no one section is the contrast
in what amusement constitutes, and costs, set forth more sharply than
where, on the west coast of the State, Belleair and St. Petersburg are
situated, side by side.
The Hotel Belleview at Belleair compares favorably with any in the
State, and is peopled, during the cold months, with affluent golf
maniacs, for whom two fine courses have been laid out.
When the pipes supplying water for the greens of his home course, at
Brook, Indiana, freeze, annually, George Ade, for instance, knows that,
instead of hibernating, it is time for him to take his white flannel
suits, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard until the fragrance
of the moth-ball has departed, pack them in his wardrobe trunk, and take
his winter flight to the Belleview. He knows that, at the Belleview, he
will meet hundreds of men and women who are suffering from the malady
with which he is afflicted.
The conversation at Belleair is, so far as my companion and I could
learn, confined entirely to comparisons between different courses,
different kinds of clubs and balls, and different scores. Belleair turns
up its nose at Palm Beach. It considers the game of golf as played at
Palm Beach a trifling game, and it feels that the winter population of
Palm Beach wastes a lot of time talking about clothes and the stock
market when it might be discussing cleeks, midirons, and mashies. The
woman who thinks it essential to be blond whether she is blond or not,
and who regards Forty-second Street as the axle upon which the universe
turns, would be likely to die of ennui in a week at Belleair, whereas,
in Palm Beach, if she died in that time, it would probably be of
delight--with a possibility of alcoholism as a contributing cause. And
likewise, though Belleair has plutocrats in abundance, they are not
starred for their wealth, as are the Palm Beach millionaires, nor yet
for their social position, but are rated strictly according to their
club handicap. Hence it happens that if, speaking of a Palm Beach
millionaire, you ask: "How did he make it?" you will be told the story
of some combine of trusts, some political grafting, or some widely
advertised patent medicine; but if you ask in Belleair: "How did he make
it?" the answer is likely to be: "He made it in 4, with a cleek."
Consider on the other hand, St. Petersburg, with its cheap hotels, its
boarding houses, its lunch rooms and cafeterias, and its winter
population of farmers and their wives from the North. The people you see
in St. Petersburg are identical with those you might see on market day
in a county town of Ohio or Indiana. Several thousands of them come
annually from several dozen States, and many a family of them lives
through the winter comfortably on less than some other families spend at
Belleair in a week, or at Palm Beach in a day.
If I am any judge of the signs of happiness, there is plenty of it in
the hearts of those who winter at St. Petersburg. The city park is full
of contented people, most of them middle-aged or old. The women listen
to the band, and the men play checkers under the palmetto-thatched
shelter, or toss horseshoes on the greensward, at the sign of the
Sunshine Pleasure Club--an occupation which is St. Petersburg's
equivalent for Palm Beach's game of tossing chips on the green-topped
tables of a gambling house. And yet--
Is it always pleasant to be virtuous? Is it always delightful to be
where pious people, naïve people, people who love simple pastimes, are
enjoying themselves? I am reminded of a talk I had with a negro whose
strong legs turned the pedals of a wheel chair in which my companion and
I rode one day through the Palm Beach jungle trail. It is a wonderful
place, that jungle, with its tangled trunks and vines and its green
foliage swimming in sifted sunlight; with its palms, palmettoes, ferns,
and climbing morning-glories, its banana trees, gnarled rubber banyans,
and wild mangoes--which are like trees growing upside down, digging
their spreading branches into the ground. For a time we forgot the
pedaling negro behind us, but a faint puffing sound on a slight up-grade
reminded us, presently, that our party was not of two, but three. When
the chair was running free again, one of us inquired of the chairman:
"What would you do if you had a million dollars?"
"Well, boss," replied the negro seriously, "Ah knows one thing Ah'd do.
No mattuh how much o' dis worl's goods Ah haid, Ah'd allus get mah
exuhcize."
"That's wise," my companion replied. "What kind of exercise would you
take?"
"Ah ain't nevvuh jest stedied dat out, boss," returned the man. "But it
sho' would be some kind o' exuhcize besides pushin' one o' dese-heah
chaihs."
"When you weren't exercising would you go and have a good time?"
"No, boss."
"Why not?"
"Well, boss, y' see Ah's a 'ligious man, Ah is."
"But can't people who are religious have a good time?"
"Oh," said the negro, "dey might have deh little pleasuhs now an' den,
but dey cain't hev no sich good times like othah folks kin. A man 't 's
a 'ligious man, he cain't hev no sich good times like Mistuh
Wahtuhbe'y's an' dem folks 'at was heah up to laist week. Ah was Mistuh
Wahtuhbe'y's chaih boy. He gimme ninety-two dollahs an' fifty cents
tips one week! Yassuh! Dat might be _cha'ity_ but 't ain't 'ligion.
Mistuh Dodge, his chaih boy's been a-wohkin' foh 'im six weeks. I 'spec'
Mistuh Dodge give dat boy fahve hund'ud dollahs if he give 'im a cent!
Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y's pahty, dey haid nineteen chaihs waitin' on 'em all
de time, jest foh t' drive 'em f'om de _ho-_tel to de club, an' de
casino. Dat cos' 'em nineteen hund'ud dollahs a week, and de boys, dey
ain't one o'em 'at git less'n hund'ud dolluhs fo' hisself. Dat's de kin'
o' gen'men Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y an' his pahty is. Ah's haid sev'ul gen'men
dis season dat ain't what you'd jes' say, 'ligious, but dey was, as
folks calls it, p'ofuse. Dey was one ol' gen'man heah two weeks, an' deh
was a young lady what he haid a attachment on, an' evvy evenin' 'e use'
t' take huh foh a wheel-chaih ride in de moonlight. Fuhst night Ah took
'em out he tuhn to me, an' he says: 'Look-a-heah, boy! You sho you knows
youah duties?'
"'Yassuh, boss,' Ah tell 'im. 'Deed Ah does!'
"'Den what is youah duties den?' sez 'e.
"Ah say: 'Boss, de chaih boy's duties, dey's to be dumb, an' deef, an'
blin', an' dey cain't see nothin', an' dey cain't say nothin', an' dey
cain't heah nothin', and dey cain't--'
"'Dass 'nuff,' he say. 'Ah sees you knows youah business. Heah's fiffy
dollahs.'"
"Well," one of us asked presently, "what happened?"
"Ah took 'em ridin' through de jungle trail, boss," he returned,
innocently.
"What did they do?"
"How does Ah know, boss? Di'n' Ah have ma eyes covuhed wi' dat fiffy
dollahs? Di'n' Ah have ma eahs stuff' wid it? Yassuh! An' Ah got ma
_mouf_ full o' it _yit_!"
The chair boys, bell boys, waiters, barbers, porters, bartenders,
waitresses, chambermaids, manicures, and shop attendants one finds in
Palm Beach, Belleair, Miami, and many other winter resorts, are,
numerically, a not inconsiderable part of the season's population, and
the lives of these people who form a background of service, of which
many an affluent visitor is hardly conscious, parallel the lives of the
rich in a manner that is not without a note of caricature.
When the rich go South so do the hordes that serve them; when the
Florida season begins to close and the rich move northward, the serving
population likewise begins to melt away; if you are in Palm Beach near
the season's end, and move up to St. Augustine, or Jacksonville, or
Augusta, or any one of a dozen other places, you are likely to
recognize, here and there, a waiter, a bell-boy, or a chambermaid whom
you tipped, some weeks earlier, preparatory to leaving a latitude
several degrees nearer the Equator. When you leave the Poinciana or the
Breakers at the season's close, your waiter may, for all you know, be in
the Jim Crow car, ahead, and when you go in to dinner at the Ponce de
Leon at St. Augustine, or the Mason at Jacksonville, you may discover
that he too has stopped off there for a few days, to gather in the
final tips. Nor must you fancy, when you depart for the North, that you
have seen the last of him. Next summer when you take a boat up the
Hudson, or go to Boston by the Fall River Line, or drop in at a hotel at
Saratoga, there he will be, like an old friend. The bartender who mixes
you a pick-me-up on the morning that you leave the Breakers, will be
ready to start you on the downward path, at the beginning of the summer,
at some Northern country club; the barber who cuts your hair at the
Royal Palm in Miami will be ready to perform a like service, later on,
at some hotel in the Adirondacks or the White Mountains; the neat
waitress who serves you at the Belleview at Belleair will appear before
you three or four months hence at the Griswold near New London; the
adept waiter from the Beach Club at Palm Beach will seem to you to look
like some one you have seen before when, presently, he places viands
before you at Sherry's, or the Ritz, or some fashionable restaurant in
London or Paris. Likewise, when you enter the barber shop of a large
hostelry just off the board walk in Atlantic City, next July, you will
find there, in the same generously ventilated shirt waist, the
manicurist who caused your nails to glisten so superbly in the Florida
sunlight; and if she has the memory for faces which is no small part of
a successful manicurist's stock in trade, she will remember you, and
where she saw you last, and will tell you just which of the young women
from "The Follies" and the Century Theater are to be seen upon the
beach that day, and whether they are wearing, here on the Jersey coast,
those same surprising bathing suits which, last February, caused blasé
gentlemen basking upon the Florida sands to sit up, arise, say it was
time for one last dip before luncheon, and then, without seeming too
deliberate about it, follow the amazing nymphs in the direction of a
matchless sea--that sea which, as a background for these Broadway girls
in their long silken hosiery, takes on a tone of spectacular unreality,
like some fantastic marine back drop devised by Mr. Dillingham or Mr.
Ziegfeld.