doesn't) and uses her lip-salve and powder-puff for the first time in
the day, she has her counterpane spread with the morning's newspapers,
which are folded into the size of small blankets. There is the New York
_Times_ for respectability, the _Tribune_ for political "pep," and the
_World_ for social reform. The little lady glances first of all at the
picture supplements while she sips her orange juice, reads the
head-lines while she gets on with the rolled oats, and with the second
cup of coffee settles down to the solid reading-matter of international
sensations (skipping, as a rule, the ends of columns "continued on page
4"), until it is time to interview the cook, who again gives notice to
leave because of the conduct of the chauffeur or the catlike qualities
of the parlor-maid, and handles the telephone to give her Orders of the
Day. For some little time after that the telephone is kept busy at both
ends, and, with a cigarette threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady
of leisure talks to several friends in New York, answers a call from the
Western Union, and receives a night-letter sent over the wire. "No, I am
absolutely engaged on Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am fixed up
that day, too. Yes, and Thursday is quite out of the question. Friday?
Oh, hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a well-worn New York joke, and
I found it funny and true to life, because it is as difficult to avoid
invitations in New York as collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little
red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the American lady puts down her
engagements and the excuses she gave for breaking others (it is useful
to remember those), and she calculates that as far as the present day's
work is planned she will have time to finish the new novel by John
Galsworthy, to get through a pamphlet on bolshevism which was mentioned
at dinner by an extremely interesting young man just back from Russia,
to buy a set of summer furs in the neighborhood of Forty-second Street
(Herbert, poor dear! says they are utterly unnecessary), to lunch at the
Ritz-Carlton with a party of friends, including the man who made such a
sensation with his lecture on France at the Carnegie Hall (she will get
a lot of first-hand knowledge about the French situation), and to look
in at the _the bavardage_ with dear Beatrice de H., where some of the
company of the French theater will meet French-speaking Americans and
pretend to understand them. Then there is a nice free evening, for once
(oh, that little white lie in the red book!), when she will wallow in
the latest masterpiece of H. G. Wells and learn all about God and
humanity as revealed by that extraordinary genius with a sense of humor.
So the American lady of leisure keeps up-to-date with the world's
lighter thought and skims the surface of the deeper knowledge, using her
own common sense as an acid test of truth when the imagination of a
novelist runs away with him, and widening her outlook on the problems of
life with deliberate desire to understand. It makes her conversation at
the dinner-table sparkling, and the men-folk are conscious that she
knows more than they do about current literature and international
history. She has her dates right, within a century or two, in any talk
about medieval England, and she knows who killed Henri IV of France, who
were the lovers of Marie de Medici, why Lloyd George quarreled with Lord
Northcliffe, and what the ambassador said to the leaders of Russian
bolshevism when he met them secretly in Holland. It is useful to know
those things in any social gathering of intellectuals, and I met several
ladies of American society in New York who had a wide range of knowledge
of that kind.
Many American ladies, with well-to-do husbands, and with money of their
own, which is very useful to them in time of need, do not regard life
merely as a game out of which they are trying to get the most fun, but
with more serious views; and I think some of those find it hard to
satisfy their aspirations, and go about with a touch, or more, of
heartache beneath their furs. I met some women who spoke with a certain
irony which reflected the spent light of old illusions, and others who
had a kind of wistfulness in their eyes, as though searching for the
unattainable happiness. The Tired Business Man as a husband has his
limitations, like most men. Often his long hours of absence at the
office and his dullness at home make his wife rather companionless, and
her novel-reading habits tend to emphasize the loss, and force upon her
mind the desire for more satisfying comradeship. Generally some man who
enters her circle seems to offer the chance of this. He has high ideals,
or the pose of them. His silences seem suggestive of deep unutterable
thoughts--though he may be thinking of nothing more important than a
smudge on his white waistcoat--he has a tenderness in his gray (or
black, or brown) eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman chilled by
the lack-luster look of the man who is used to her presence and takes
her for granted.... The Tired Business Man ought to be careful, lest he
should become too tired to enter into the interests of his wife and to
give her the minimum of comradeship which all women demand. The American
Woman of Society, outside the Catholic Church, which still insists upon
the old law, seems to me quicker than most others to cut her losses in
the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks she finds, that she is
losing too heavily for her peace of heart. Less than women in European
countries will she tolerate deceit or spiritual cruelty, and the law
offers her a way of escape, expensive but certain, from a partnership
which has been broken. Society, in New York at least, is tolerant to
women who have dissolved their married partnership, and there is no
stoning-sisterhood to fling mud and missiles at those who have already
paid for error by many tears. Yet I doubt whether, in many cases, the
liberty they find makes for happiness. There is always the fear of a
second mistake worse than the first, and, anyhow, some unattached women
I met, women who could afford to live alone, not without a certain
luxury of independence, seemed disillusioned as to the romance of life,
and the honesty of men, and their own chance of happiness. Their furs
and their diamonds were no medicine for the bitterness of their souls,
nor for the hunger in their hearts.
But I found a great class of women in America too busy, too interested,
and too inspired by common sense to be worried by that kind of emotional
distress--the middle-class women who flung themselves into war-work, as
before, and now, in time of peace, the activities of charity and
education and domestic life have called to them for service. There was a
woman doctor I met who seemed to me as fine a type of American womanhood
as one could have the luck to meet, and yet, in spite of uncommon
ability, a common type in her cheery and practical character. When the
war broke out her husband, who was a doctor also, was called to serve in
the American army, and his wife, who had passed her medical
examinations in the same college with him, but had never practised,
carried on his work, in spite of four children. They came first and her
devotion to them was not altered, but that did not prevent her from
attending to a growing list of patients at a time when influenza was
raging in her district. She went about in a car which she drove herself,
with the courage and cheerfulness of a gallant soldier. In her little
battlefield there were many tragedies, because death took away the
youngest-born or the eldest-born from many American homes, and her heart
was often heavy; but she resisted all gloomy meditations and kept her
nerve and her spirit by--singing. As she drove her car from the house of
one patient to another she sang loudly to herself, over the wheel, any
little old song that came into her head--"Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and
the fiddle," or "Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old
soul was he,"--to the profound astonishment of passers-by, who shook
their heads and said, "It's a good thing there's going to be
Prohibition." But she saved the lives of many women and children in time
of plague--for the influenza reached the height of plague--and did not
lose her sense of humor or her fine, hearty laugh, or her graciousness
of womanhood. When "the army," as she called her husband, came back, she
could say, "I kept your flag flying, old man, and you'll not find any
difference at home." I saw the husband and wife in their home together.
While friends were singing round the piano, these two held hands like
young lovers, away back in a shady corner of the room.
I met another husband and wife who interested me as types of American
life, though not in their home. It was at a banquet attended by about
two hundred people. The husband was the chairman of the party, and he
had a wonderful way of making little speeches in which he called upon
distinguished people to talk to the company, revealing in each case the
special reason why that man or woman should have a hearing. He did this
with wit and knowledge, and in each case indeed it was a privilege to
hear the speaker who followed, because all the men and women here were
engaged in some social work of importance in the life of great American
cities, and were idealists who had put their theories into practice by
personal service and self-sacrifice. The little man who was the
chairman paid a compliment to his own wife, and I found she was sitting
by my side. She had gray hair, but very young, bright, humorous eyes,
and an almost terrible truthfulness of speech. I was startled by some
things she said about the war, and the psychology of men and women under
the spell of war. They were true, but dangerous to speak aloud as this
woman spoke them. Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred that had
been bequeathed by war to the people of the world. "Let us kill hatred,"
she said. "It is the survival of the cave instinct in man which comes
out of its hiding-places under the name of patriotism and justice." I do
not know what link there was between this and some other thought which
prompted her to show me photographs of two big, sturdy boys who, she
told me, were her adopted children. It was a queer, touching story,
about these children. "I adopted them not for their sake, but for mine,"
she said. She was a lonely woman, well married, with leisure and money,
and the temptation of selfishness. It was to prevent selfishness
creeping into her heart that she sent round to an orphanage for two
boy-babies. They were provided, and she brought them up as her own, and
found--so she assured me--that they grew up with a marked likeness in
feature to herself and her sisters. She had a theory about that--the
idea that by some kind of predestination souls reach through space to
one another, and find the home where love is waiting for them. I was
skeptical of that, having known the London slums, but I was interested
in the practical experience of the bright little American woman, who
"selfishly," as she said, to cure selfishness, had given two abandoned
babies of the world the gift of love, and a great chance in the
adventure of life. She was a tremendous protagonist of environment
against the influence of heredity. "Environment puts it over heredity
all the time," she said.
This special charity on her part is not typical of American women, who
do not, any more than women of other countries, go about adopting other
people's babies, but I think that her frankness of speech to a stranger
like myself, and her curious mixture of idealism and practicality,
combined with a certain shrewdness of humor, are qualities that come to
people in America. She herself, indeed, is a case of "environment,"
because she is foreign in blood, and American only by marriage.
In New York I had the advantage of meeting one lady who seemed to me
typical of the old-fashioned "leaders" of American society such as Henry
James described in his novels. She lives in one of the great mansions
along Fifth Avenue, and the very appearance of her butler is a guaranty
of riches and respectability. She made no disguise of her wealth, and
was proud of it in a simple way, as an English aristocrat is proud of
his ancestry and family treasures. But she acknowledges its
responsibilities and takes them seriously with a sense of duty. She had
received lessons in public speaking, in order to hold her own at
committee meetings, and she doles out large sums in charity to public
institutions and deserving cases, with a grim determination to unmask
the professional beggar and the fraudulent society. She seemed to have a
broad-hearted tolerance for the younger generation and a special
affection for boys of all ages, whom she likes to feed up, and to keep
amused by treating them to the circus or the "movies"; but I fancy that
she is a stern disciplinarian with her family as well as her servants,
and that her own relatives stand in awe of this masterful old lady who
has a high sense of honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and service
from those who look for her favors and her money. I detected a shrewd
humor in her and an abiding common sense, and at her own dinner-table
she had a way of cross-examining her guests, who were men of political
importance and women of social influence, like a judge who desires to
get at the evidence without listening to unnecessary verbiage. She is
the widow of a successful business man, but I perceived in her the sense
of personal power and family traditions which belonged to the old type
of dowager-duchess in England. Among butterfly women of European cities
she would appear an austere and terrible figure in her virtue and her
diamonds, but to small American boys, eating candies at her side in the
circus, she is the kind and thoughtful aunt.
It was in Boston that I met some other types of American women, not long
enough to know them well, but enough to see superficial differences of
character between them and their friends of New York. Needless to say, I
had read a good deal about Boston before going there. In England the
Bostonian tradition is familiar to us by the glory of such masters as
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, so
that I had a friendly feeling when I went about the city and saw its
streets and prim houses, reminiscent of Cheltenham and other English
towns of ancient respectability and modern culture. After a lecture
there many Bostonians came onto the platform, and I heard at once a
difference in accent from the intonation of New York. It was a little
more precise, with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. The people who
spoke to me were earnest souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift
them above the personal prejudices of party politics. I should imagine
that some of them are republican rather than democratic in instinct, but
those at least who were in my audience supported the idea of the League
of Nations, and for that reason did not wish to see President Wilson
boiled in oil or roasted at a slow fire. From my brief glimpses of
Boston society I should imagine that the Puritan spirit still lingers
there among the "best families" and that in little matters of etiquette
and social custom they adhere to the rules of the Early Victorian era of
English life.
I was convinced of this by one trivial incident I observed in a hotel at
Boston. A lady, obviously in transit from New York, by the public way in
which she used her powder-puff, and by a certain cosmopolitan easiness
of manner, produced a gold cigarette-case from her muff, and began to
smoke without thinking twice about it. She had taken just three whiffs
when a colored waiter approached in the most deferential manner and
begged her to put out her cigarette, because smoking was not allowed in
the public rooms. The lady from New York looked amazed for a moment.
Then she laughed, dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, and said:
"Oh yes--I guess I forgot I was in Boston!" In that word Boston she
expressed a world of propriety, conventional morality, and social
austerity, a long, long way from the liberty of New York. I had been
told that a Boston audience would be very cold and unenthusiastic, not
because they would be out of sympathy with the lecturer, but because
they were "very English" in their dislike of emotional expression. My
experience was not like that, as I was relieved to find, and, on the
contrary, those Bostonians at the Symphony Hall applauded with most
generous warmth and even rose and cheered when I had finished my story
of the heroic deeds of English soldiers. It was a Boston girl who made
the _apologia_ of her people. "I am sure," she said, "that all those men
and women who rose to applaud went down on their knees that night and
asked God to forgive them for having broken their rule of life."
No doubt Boston society, as far as it includes the old families rooted
in it for generations, is conservative in its point of view, and looks
askance at noisy innovations like modern American dances, jazz bands,
and the jolly vulgarities of youth. But, judging from my passing
glimpses of college girls in the town, I should say that youth puts up a
healthy opposition to the "old fogy" philosophy, and breaks the
conventions now and then with a crash. One girl I met suggests to me
that Boston produces character by intensive culture, and is apt to be
startled by the result. Her father was a well-known lawyer, and she
inherited his gift of learning and logic, so that when he died she had
the idea of carrying on his work. The war was on, and somewhere over on
the western front was a young English soldier whom she had met on board
ship and might, according to the chances of war, never meet again.
Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. She decided to study for the
law examinations and to be called to the bar; and to keep her company,
her mother, who was her best comrade, went into college with her, and
shared her rooms. I like that idea of the mother and daughter reading
and working together. It seems to me a good picture. In due time she was
called to the bar, and entered the chambers where her father had worked,
and did so well that a great lawyer who gave her his cases to prepare
spoke rare words of praise about her. Then the war ended, one day, quite
suddenly, the young English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after a few
preliminary inquiries as to his chance of luck, said, "When shall we get
married?" He was in a hurry to settle down, and the mother of the girl
was scared by his grim determination to carry her comrade away. Yet he
was considerate. "I should hate to cause your mother any worry by
hurrying things on so fast as Monday," he said. "Let us make it
Tuesday." But the wedding took place on the Saturday before the Tuesday,
and the young lady barrister of Boston was whisked away four days after
the English officer came to America with a dream in his heart of which
he desired the fulfilment. Boston was startled. This romance was
altogether too rapid for its peace of mind. Why, there was no time to
buy the girl a wedding-present!... The street boys of Boston were most
startled by the English officer's best man--his brother--whose tall hat,
tail-coat, and white spats were more wonderful than anything they had
seen before.
I was not long enough in many towns of America to detect their various
characteristics. Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that
it was safe for people to fall out of windows--they just wafted down
like gossamer--but I found it a pleasant, bustling place, with a
delightful Old World atmosphere, like a bit of Queen Anne-England, round
Independence Hall.... Pittsburgh by night, looking down on its
blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared to me like a town behind
the battle-lines under heavy gun-fire, and I am convinced that the
workers in those factories are in the front-line trenches of life and
deserve gold medals for their heroism. I had not been in the town ten
minutes before a young lady with the poetical name of Penelope rang me
up on the telephone and implored me to take a walk out by night to see
this strange and wonderful picture, and I was glad of her advice, though
she did not offer to go as my guide. Another girl made herself
acquainted, and I found she has a hero-worship for a fellow war
correspondent, once of Pittsburgh, whose career she had followed through
many battlefields.
I saw Washington in glamorous sunlight under a blue sky, and found my
spirit lifted up by the white beauty of its buildings and the
spaciousness of its public gardens. I had luncheon with the British
ambassador, curious to find myself in an English household, with people
discussing America from the English point of view in the political heart
of the United States; and I visited the War College and met American
generals and officers in the very brain-center of that great army which
I had seen on the roads of France and on the battlefields. This was the
University of War as far as the American people are concerned, and there
were diagrams on the blackboards in the lecture-hall describing the
strategy of the western front, while in the library officers and clerks
were tabulating the history of the great massacre in Europe for future
guidance, which by the grace of God and the League of Nations will be
unnecessary for generations to come. I talked with these officers and
found them just such earnest, serious scientific men as I had met in
American Headquarters in France, where they were conducting war, not in
our casual, breezy way, but as school-masters arranging a college
demonstration, and overweighted by responsibility. It was in a room in
the Capitol that I met one little lady with a complete geographical
knowledge of the great halls and corridors of that splendid building,
and an Irish way with her in her dealings with American Congressmen and
Senators. Before the war I used to meet her in a little drawing-room not
far away from Kensington Palace, London, and I imagined in my innocence
that she was exclusively interested in literature and drama. But in one
of the luncheon-rooms of the Capitol--where I lined up at the counter
for a deep-dish pie from a colored waitress--I found that she was
dealing with more inflammable articles than those appearing in newspaper
columns, being an organizing secretary of the Sinn Fein movement in the
United States. She was happy in her work, and spoke of Irish rebellion
in that bright and placid way which belongs, as I have often noticed, to
revolutionary spirits who help to set nations on fire and drench the
world in blood. Anybody looking at her eating that deep-dish pie in the
luncheon-room of the American Houses of Parliament would have put her
down as a harmless little lady, engaged, perhaps, in statistical work on
behalf of Prohibition. But I knew the flame in her soul, kindled by
Irish history, was of the same fire which I saw burning in the eyes of
great mobs whom I saw passing one day in procession down Fifth Avenue,
with anti-English banners above their heads.