American Adventures Part 34

Behind the imposing marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know that he affected me as hotel clerks in braided cutaways and white carnations always do. While I spoke he stood a little way back from the counter, his chin up, his gaze barely missing the top of my hat, his nostrils seeming to contract with that expression of dubiousness a.s.sumed by delicate noses which sense, long before they encounter it, the aroma of unworthiness.

"Not a room in the house," he said. Then, as though to forestall further parley, he turned and spoke with gracious lightness to one of his own rank and occupation who, at the request of my companion, was ascertaining whether letters were awaiting us.

"But we telegraphed two days ago!" I protested desperately.

"Can't help it. Hardware Convention. Everything taken."

Over my shoulder I heard from my companion a sound, half sigh, half groan, which echoed the cry of my own heart.

"I felt this coming!" he murmured. "Didn't you notice all these people with ribbons on them? There's never any room in a hotel where everybody's wearing ribbons. It's like a horse show. They get the ribbons and we get the gate."

"Surely," I faltered, "you can let us have one small room?"

"Impossible," he answered brightly. "We've turned away dozens of people this evening."

"Then," I said, abandoning hope, "perhaps you will suggest some other hotel?"

I once heard a woman, the most perfect parvenu I ever met, speak of her poor relations in a tone exactly similar to that in which the clerk now spoke the names of two hotels. Having spoken, he turned and pa.s.sed behind the part.i.tion at one end of the marble counter.

My companion and I stood there for a moment looking despondently at each other. Then, without a word, we retreated through that gorgeous lobby, feeling like sad remnants of a defeated Yankee army.

Again we motored through the bright streets, but only to successive disappointments, for both hotels mentioned by the austere clerk were "turning 'em away." Our chauffeur now came to our aid, mentioning several small hotels, and in one of these, the Granada, we were at last so fortunate as to find lodgings.

"It begun to look like you'd have to put up at the Roden," the chauffeur smiled as we took our bags out of the car and settled with him.

"The Roden?"

"Yes," he returned "Best ventilated hotel in the United States."

Next day when the Hotel Roden was pointed out to us we appreciated the witticism, for the Roden is--or was at the time of our visit--merely the steel skeleton of a building which, we were informed, had for some years stood unfinished owing to disagreements among those concerned with its construction.

As for the Granada, though a modest place, it was new and clean; the clerk was amiable, the beds comfortable, and if our rooms were too small to admit our trunks, they were, at all events, outside rooms, each with a private bath, at a rate of $1 per day apiece. Never in any hotel have I felt that I was getting so much for my money.

Next morning, after breakfast, we set out to see the city. Having repeatedly heard of Birmingham as the "Pittsburgh of the South," we expected cold daylight to reveal the sooty signs of her industrialism, but in this we were agreeably disappointed. By day as well as by night the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean--the reason for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into the very center of Atlanta's business and shopping district.

Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of Georgia. The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even squares. From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy, graceful grades into the hills to the southward. Because of these grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills, and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon--which is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in the United States.

Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching off to one side, and here and there a small munic.i.p.al park occupying an angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly wooded golf links, above the road.

Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road, which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building.

The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial equivalent for autumn haze.

At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the mineral rights of mining companies.

The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of "cutting in"

at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger--realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind--Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.

Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet with one partner in Birmingham. Nor did my companion.

Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite pulchritude and State-wide terpsich.o.r.ean reputation, but we would start to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly s.n.a.t.c.hed from us by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six months ago.

As we would start to dance the lady would say:

"You-all ah strangehs, ahn't you?"

We would reply that we were.

"Wheh do you come from?"

"New York."

Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the time, she would continue:

"Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?"

But that was as far as the conversation ever got. Just about the time that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be laid upon us, and before we had time to defend ourselves against the hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some predatory youth who ought to have been at home considering _pons asinorum_.

Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us, they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.

Up in the hills, some miles back of the Country Club, on the banks of a large artificial lake, stands the new clubhouse of the Birmingham Motor and Country Club, and around the lake runs the club's two-and-a-half-mile speedway. Elsewhere is the Roebuck Golf Club, the links of which are admitted ("even in Atlanta!") to be excellent--the one possible objection to the course of the Birmingham Country Club being that it is suited only to play with irons.

I mention these golfing matters not because they interest me, but because they may interest you. I am not a golfer. I played the game for two seasons; then I decided to try to lead a better life. The first time I played I did quite well, but thence onward my game declined until, toward the last, crowds would collect to hear me play. When I determined to abandon the game I did not burn my clubs or break them up, according to the usual custom, but instead gave them to a man upon whom I wished to retaliate because his dog had bitten a member of my family.

Small wonder that all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it--not, at least, at bars.

Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch rooms, and though her club bars still look like real ones, the drinks served are so soft that no splash occurs when reminiscent tears drop into them.

When we were in Alabama each citizen who so desired was allowed by law to import from outside the State a small allotment of strong drink for personal use, but the red tape involved in this procedure had already discouraged all but the most ardent drinkers, and those found it next to impossible, even by h.o.a.rding their "lonesome quarts," and pooling supplies with their convivial friends, to provide sufficient alcoholic drink for a "real party."

We met in Birmingham but one gentleman whose cellars seemed to be well stocked, and the tales of ingenuity and exertion by which he managed to secure ample supplies of liquor were such as to lead us to believe that this matter had become, with him, an occupation to which all other business must give second place.

It was this gentleman who told us that, since the State went dry, the ancient form, "R.S.V.P.," on social invitations, had been revised to "B.W.H.P.," signifying, "bring whisky in hip pocket."

To the "B.W.H.P." habit he himself strictly adhered. One night, when we chanced to meet him in a downtown club, he drew a flask from a hip pocket, and invited us to "have something."

"What is it?" asked my companion.

"Scotch."

When my companion had helped himself he pa.s.sed the flask to me, but I returned it to the owner, explaining that I did not drink Scotch whisky.

"What do you drink?" he asked.

"Bourbon."

"Here it is," he returned, drawing a second flask from the other hip pocket.

How well, too, do I remember the long, delightful evening upon which my companion and I sat in an Atlanta club with a group of the older members, the week before Georgia went bone dry. There, as in Alabama before 1915, there had been pretended prohibition, but now the bars of leading clubs were being closed, and convivial men were looking into the future with despair. One of the gentlemen was a justice of the Supreme Court of the State, and I remember his wistful declaration that prohibition would fall hardest upon the older men.