Abroad At Home Part 4

Take the matter of population. Everybody knows that Cleveland is the "Sixth City" in the United States, but not everybody knows that in 1850 she was forty-third. The Chamber of Commerce told me that, but I have prepared some figures of my own which will, perhaps, give the reader some idea of Cleveland's magnitude. Cleveland is only a little smaller than Prague, while she has about 50,000 more people than Breslau.

If that does not impress you with the city's size, listen to this: Cleveland is actually twice as great, in population, as either Nagoya or Riga! Who would have believed it? The thing seems incredible! I never dreamed that such a situation existed until I looked it up in the "World Almanac." And some day, when I have more time, I intend to look up Nagoya and Riga in the atlas and find out where they are.

A Chamber of Commerce booklet gives me the further information that "Cleveland is the fifth American city in manufactures, and that she comes first in the manufacture of steel ships, heavy machinery, wire and wire nails, bolts and nuts, vapor stoves, electric carbons, malleable castings, and telescopes"--a list which, by the way, sounds like one of Lewis Carroll's compilations.

The information that Cleveland is also the first city in the world in its record, per capita, for divorce, does not come to me from the Chamber of Commerce booklet--but probably the fact was not known when the booklet was printed.

Besides being first in so many interesting fields, Cleveland is the second of the Great Lake cities, and is also second in "the value of its product of women's outer wearing apparel and fancy knit goods."

It is, furthermore, "the cheapest market in the North for pig iron."

There are other figures I could give (saving myself a lot of trouble, at the same time, because I only have to copy them from a book), but I want to stop and let that pig-iron statement sink into you as it sank into me when I first read it. I wonder if you knew it before? I am ashamed to admit it, but _I_ did not. I didn't consider where I could get my pig iron the cheapest. When I wanted pig iron I simply went out and bought it, at the nearest place, right in New York. That is, I bought it in New York unless I happened to be traveling when the craving came upon me. In that case I would buy a small supply wherever I happened to be--just enough to last me until I could get home again. I don't know how pig iron affects you, but with me it acts peculiarly. Sometimes I go along for weeks without even thinking of it; then, suddenly, I feel that I must have some at once--even if it is the middle of the night. Of course a man doesn't care what he pays for his pig iron when he feels like that. But in my soberer moments I now realize that it is best to be economical in such matters. The wisest plan is to order enough pig iron from Cleveland to keep you for several months, being careful to notice when the supply is running low, so that you can order another case.

[Ill.u.s.tration: It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet]

Apropos of this let me say here, in response to many inquiries as to what the nature of this work of mine would be, that I intend it to be "useful as well as ornamental"--to quote the happy phrase, coined by James Montgomery Flagg. That is, I intend not only to entertain and instruct the reader but, where opportunity offers, to give him the benefit of good sound advice, such as I have just given with regard to the purchasing of pig iron.

CHAPTER IV

MORE CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS

Because I have told you so much about the Chamber of Commerce you must not a.s.sume that the Chamber of Commerce was with us constantly while we were in Cleveland, for that is not the case. True, Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night. But at our rooms they left us, merely taking the precaution to lock us in. No attempt was made to a.s.sist us in undressing or to hear our prayers or tuck us into bed. Once in our rooms we were left to our own devices. We were allowed to read a little, if we wished, to whisper together, or even to amuse ourselves by playing with the fixtures in the bathroom.

On the morning of the second day they came and let us out, and took us to see a lot of interesting and edifying sights, but by afternoon they had acquired sufficient confidence in us to turn us loose for a couple of hours, allowing us to roam about, at large, while they attended to their mail.

We made use of the freedom thus extended to us by presenting several letters of introduction to Cleveland gentlemen, who took us to various clubs.

Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a club there are large windows of plate gla.s.s, back of which the pa.s.ser-by may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. Looking at the outside of the building, you know that there is a big, high-ceiled room, at the front, dark in color and containing s.p.a.cious leather chairs, which should (and often do) contain aristocratic gentlemen who have attained years of discretion and positions of importance. One feels cheated if, on entering, one fails to encounter a member carrying a malacca stick and wearing waxed mustaches, spats, and a gardenia. The Union Club of New York is such a club; so is the Pacific Union of San Francisco; so is the Chicago Club; and so, I fancy, from my glimpse of it, is the Union Club of Cleveland.

In the larger cities there is usually another club, somewhat less formal in architecture, decoration, and spirit, and given over, broadly speaking, to the younger men--though there is often a good deal of duplication of membership between the first mentioned type of club and the second. The Tavern of Cleveland is of the second category; so is the Saturn Club of Buffalo, of which I spoke in a former chapter. Almost every good-sized city has, likewise, its university club, its athletic club, and its country club. University clubs vary a good deal in character, but athletic clubs and country clubs are in general pretty true to type.

Besides such clubs as these, one finds, here and there, in the United States, a few clubs of a character more unusual. Cleveland has three unusual clubs: the Rowfant, a book collector's club; the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club, at Gates Mills, near the city, and the Hermit Club.

Were it not for the fact that I detest the words "artistic" and "bohemian," I should apply them to the Hermit Club. It is one of the few clubs outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco possessing its own house and made up largely of men following the arts, or interested in them. Like the Lambs of New York, the Hermits give shows in their clubhouse, but the Lambs' is a club of actors, authors, composers, stage managers, etc., while the Hermit Club is made up, so far as the theater is concerned, of amateurs--amateurs having among them sufficient talent to write and act their own shows, design their own costumes, paint their own scenery, compose their own music, and even play it, too--for there is an orchestra of members. I have never seen a Hermits' show, and I am sorry, for I have heard that they are worth seeing. Certainly their clubhouse is. It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet. This illusion is enhanced by the surroundings of the club, for it stands in an alley--or perhaps I had better say a narrow lane--and is huddled down between the walls of taller buildings.

The pleasant promise of the exterior is fulfilled within. The ground floor rooms are low and cozy, and have a pleasant "rambling" feeling--a step or two up here or down there. The stairway, leading to the floor above, is narrow, with a genial kind of narrowness that seems to say: "There is no one here with whom you'll mind rubbing elbows as you pa.s.s."

Ascending, you reach the main room, which occupies the entire upper floor. This room is the Hermit Club. It is here that members gather and that the more intimate shows are given. Large, with dark panels, and heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and desirable in a club building--or, for the matter of that, in a home or a human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke, nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least, overwhelm one with its magnificence; it should not chill one with its grandeur, so that one lowers one's voice to a whisper and involuntarily removes one's hat.

In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home; others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events, _look_ more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not.

The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England hamlet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west"]

The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the place took its name, is pa.s.sing a mellow old age as the house of the Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."

The Connecticut resemblance is accounted for by the fact that all this section of the country was in the Western Reserve, which belonged to, and was settled by, Connecticut. Thus travel teaches us! I knew practically nothing, until then, of the Western Reserve, and even less of hunt clubs. I had never been in a hunt club before, and my impressions of such inst.i.tutions had been gleaned entirely from short stories and from prints showing rosy old rascals drinking. Probably because of these prints I had always thought that "horsey"

people--particularly the "hunting set"--were generally addicted to the extensive (and not merely external) use of alcohol. As others may be of the same impression it is perhaps worth remarking that, while in the Hunt Club, we saw a number of persons drinking tea, and that only two were drinking alcoholic beverages--those two being visitors: an ill.u.s.trator and a writer from New York.

I mentioned that to the M. F. H., and told him of my earlier impression as to hunt-club habits.

"Lots of people have that idea," he smiled, "but it is wrong. As a matter of fact, few hunting people are teetotalers, but those who ride straight are almost invariably temperate. They have to be. You can't be in the saddle six or eight hours at a stretch, riding across country, and do it on alcohol."

I also learned from the M. F. H. certain interesting things regarding a fox's scent. Without having thought upon the subject, I had somehow acquired the idea that hounds got the scent from the actual tracks of the animal they followed. That is not so. The scent comes from the body of the fox and is left behind him suspended in the air. And, other conditions being equal, the harder your fox runs the stronger his scent will be. The most favorable scent for following is what is known as a "breast-high scent"--meaning a scent which hangs in suspension at a point sufficiently high to render it unnecessary for the hounds to put their heads down to the ground. Sometimes a scent hangs low; sometimes, on the other hand, it rises so that, particularly in a covert, the riders, seated upon their horses, can smell it, while the hounds cannot.

But I think I have said enough about this kind of thing. It is a dangerous topic, for the terminology and etiquette of hunting are even more elaborate than those of golf. Probably I have made some mistake already; indeed, I know of one which I just escaped--I started to write "dogs" instead of "hounds," and that is not done. I have a horror of displaying my ignorance on matters of this kind. For I take a kind of pride--and I think most men do--in being correct about comparatively unimportant things. It is permissible to be wrong about important things, such as politics, finance, and reform, and to explain them, although you really know nothing about them. But with fox hunting it is different. There are some people who really _do_ know about that, and they are likely to catch you.

Two other Cleveland organizations should be mentioned.

Troop A of the Ohio National Guard is known as one of the most capable bodies of militia in the entire country. It has been in existence for some forty years, and its membership has always been recruited from among the older and wealthier families of the city. The fame of Troop A has reached beyond Ohio, for under its popular t.i.tle, "The Black Horse Troop," it has gone three times to Washington to act as escort to Presidents of the United States at the time of their inauguration.

Cleveland is, furthermore, the headquarters for trotting racing. The Cleveland Gentlemen's Driving Club is an old and exceedingly active body, and its president, Mr. Harry K. Devereux, is also president of the National Trotting a.s.sociation.

A curious and characteristic thing which we encountered in no other city is the Three-Cent Cult--a legacy left to the city by the late Tom Johnson. Cleveland's street railway system is controlled by the city and the fare is not five cents, but three. But that is not all. A munic.i.p.al lighting plant is, or soon will be, in operation, with charges of from one to three cents per kilowatt hour. Also the city has gone into the dance-hall business. There, too, the usual rate is cut: fifteen cents will buy five dances in the munic.i.p.al dance halls, instead of three. No one will attempt to dispute that dancing, to-day, takes precedence over the mere matter of eating, yet it is worth mentioning that the Three-Cent Cult has even found its way into the lunch room.

Sandwiches may be purchased in Cleveland for three cents which are not any worse than five-cent sandwiches in other cities.

Perhaps the finest thing about the Three-Cent Cult is the fact that it runs counter to one of the most p.r.o.nounced and pitiable traits of our race: wastefulness. Sometimes it seems that, as a people, we take less pride in what we save than in what we throw away. We have a "There's more where that came from!" att.i.tude of mind. A man with thousands a year says: "h.e.l.l! What's a hundred?" and a man with hundreds imitates him on a smaller scale. The humble fraction of a nickel is despised. All honor, then, to Cleveland--the city which teaches her people that two cents is worth saving, and then helps them to save it. Two points, in this connection, are interesting:

One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the savings banks pay 4 per cent.

We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in the s.p.a.ce of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand.

Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track, only to s.n.a.t.c.h the next one and repeat the operation.

Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down into the vessel's hold, s.n.a.t.c.h them up filled with tons of the precious product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is held by the steamer _Corry_, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the _George F. Perkins_, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.

Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel sh.e.l.l more than six hundred feet long, with a little s.p.a.ce set aside at the bows for quarters and a little s.p.a.ce astern for engines. The deck is a series of enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement.

It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States and Canada _lies_ within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."

I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of homes.

Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real beauty--most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity--it is nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.

I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo, and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans.

Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.