People of Destiny Part 1

People of Destiny.

by Philip Gibbs.

I

THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK

I had the luck to go to New York for the first time when the ordinary life of that City of Adventure--always so vital and dynamic in activity--was intensified by the emotion of historic days. The war was over, and the warriors were coming home with the triumph of victory as the reward of courage; but peace was still delayed and there had not yet crept over the spirits of the people the staleness and disillusionment that always follow the ending of war, when men say: "What was the use of it, after all? Where are grat.i.tude and justice? Who pays me for the loss of my leg?"... The emotion of New York life was visible in its streets.

The city itself, monstrous, yet dreamlike and mystical as one sees it first rising to fantastic shapes through the haze of dawn above the waters of the Hudson, seemed to be excited by its own historical significance. There was a vibration about it as sunlight splashed its gold upon the topmost stories of the skysc.r.a.pers and sparkled in the thousand windows of the Woolworth Tower and flung black bars of shadow across the lower blocks. Banners were flying everywhere in the streets that go straight and long between those perpendicular cliffs of masonry, and the wind that comes blowing up the two rivers ruffled them. They were banners of rejoicing, but reminders also of the service and sacrifice of each house from which they were hanging, with golden stars of death above the heads of the living crowds surging there below them.

In those decorations of New York I saw the imagination of a people conscious of their own power, and with a dramatic instinct able to impress the mult.i.tudes with the glory and splendor of their achievement.

It was the same sense of drama that is revealed commercially in the genius of advertis.e.m.e.nt which startled me when I first walked down Broadway, dazzled by moving pictures of light, by flashing signs that shouted to me from high heaven to buy chewing-gum and to go on chewing; and squirming, wriggling, revolving snakes of changing color that burned letters of fire into my brain, so that even now in remembrance my eyes are scorched with the imprint of a monstrous kitten unrolling an endless reel of cotton. The "Welcome Home" of American troops was an advertis.e.m.e.nt of American manhood, idealized by emotion; and it was designed, surely, by an artist whose imagination had been touched by the audacity of the master-builders of New York who climb to the sky with their houses. I think it was inspired also by the vision of the moving-picture kings who resurrect the gorgeous life of Babylon, and re-establish the court of Cleopatra, for Theda Bara, the "Movie Queen."

When the men of the Twenty-seventh Division of New York came marching home down Fifth Avenue they pa.s.sed through triumphal arches of white plaster that seemed solid enough to last for centuries, though they had grown high, like Jack's beanstalk, in a single night; and the troops glanced sideways at a vast display of Indian trophies with tattered colors like those of sunburnt wigwams where the spears of the "braves"

were piled above the shields of fallen warriors.

"Like an undergraduate's cozy corner," said an unkind wit, and New York laughed, but liked the symbolism of those shields and went on with astonished eyes to gaze at the masterpiece of Chalfin, the designer of it all, which was a necklace like a net of precious jewels, suspended, between two white pillars surmounted by stars, across the Avenue. At night strong searchlights played upon this necklace, and at the end of those bars of white radiance, shot through the darkness, the hanging jewels swayed and glittered with a thousand delicate colors like diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Night after night, as I drove down Fifth Avenue, I turned in the car to look back at the astonishing picture of that triumphal archway, and saw how the long tide of cars behind was caught by the searchlights so that all their metal was like burnished gold and silver; and how the faces of dense crowds staring up at the suspended necklace were all white--dead-white as Pierrot's; and how the sky above New York and the tall clifflike ma.s.ses of masonry on each side of Fifth Avenue were fingered by the outer radiance of the brightness that was blinding in the heart of the city. To me, a stranger in New York, unused to the height of its buildings and to the rush of traffic in its streets, these illuminations of victory were the crowning touch of fantasy, and I seemed to be in a dream of some City of the Future, among people of a new civilization, strange and wonderful. The soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Division were not overcome by emotion at this display in their honor. "That's all right," they said, grinning at the cheering crowds, "and when do we eat?" Those words reminded me of Tommy Atkins, who would go through the hanging-gardens of Babylon itself--if the time-machine were switched back--with the same shrewd humor.

The adventure of life in New York, always startling and exciting, I am certain, to a man or woman who enters its swirl as a stranger, was more stirring at the time of my first visit because of this eddying influence of war's back-wash. The city was overcrowded with visitors from all parts of the United States who had come in to meet their home-coming soldiers, and having met them stayed awhile to give these boys a good time after their exile. This floating population of New York flowed into all the hotels and restaurants and theaters. Two new hotels--the Commodore and the Pennsylvania--were opened just before I came, and, with two thousand bedrooms each, had no room to spare, and did not reduce the population of the Plaza, Vanderbilt, Manhattan, Biltmore, or Ritz-Carlton. I watched the social life in those palaces and found it more entertaining than the most sensational "movie" with a continuous performance. The architects of those American hotels have vied with one another in creating an atmosphere of richness and luxury. They have been prodigal in the use of marble pillars and bal.u.s.trades, more magnificent than Roman. They have gone to the extreme limit of taste in gilding the paneled walls and ceilings from which they have suspended enormous candelabra like those in the palace of Versailles. I lost myself in the vastness of tea-rooms and lounges, and when invited to a banquet found it necessary to bring my ticket, because often there are a dozen banquets in progress in one hotel, and there is a banqueting-room on every floor. When I pa.s.sed up in the elevator of one hotel I saw the different crowds in the corridors surging toward those great lighted rooms where the tables were spread with flowers, and from which came gusts of "jazz" music or the opening bars of "The Star-spangled Banner."

In all the dining-rooms there rises the gusty noise of many conversations above the music of an orchestra determined to be heard, and between the bars of a Leslie Stuart waltz, or on the last beat of the "Humoreske," a colored waiter says, "Chicken okra, sah?" or "Clam chowder?" and one hears the laughing words of a girl who asks, "Do you mind if I powder my nose?" and does so with a glance at a little gold mirror and a dab from a little gold box. The vastness, and the overwhelming luxury, of the New York hotels was my first and strongest impression in this city, after I had recovered from the sensation of the high fantastic buildings; but it occurred to me very quickly that this luxury of architecture and decoration has no close reference to the life of the people. They are only visitors in _la vie de luxe_--and do not belong to it, and do not let it enter into their souls or bodies. In a wealthier, more expansive way, they are like the city clerks and their girls in London who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble halls at Lyon's Popular Cafe and sit around a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it wonderful ... and shall we go home by tram?" There are many rich people in New York--more, I suppose, than in any other city of the world--but, apart from cosmopolitan men and women who have luxury beneath their skins, there is no innate sense of it in the social life of these people. In the hotel palaces, as well as in the private mansions along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all their outward splendor does not alter the simplicity and honesty of their character. They remain essentially "middle-cla.s.s" and have none of the easy licentiousness of that European aristocracy which, before the war, flaunted its wealth and its vice in Paris, Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts where the cocottes of the world a.s.sembled to barter their beauty, and where idle men went from boredom to boredom in search of subtle forms of pleasure.

American women of wealth spend vast sums of money on dress, and there is the glitter of diamonds at many dinner-tables, but most of them have too much shrewdness of humor to play the "vamp," and the social code to which they belong is swept clean by common sense. "My dear," said an American hostess who belongs to one of the old rich families of New York, "forgive me for wearing my diamonds to-night. It must shock you, coming from scenes of ruin and desolation." This dowager d.u.c.h.ess of New York, as I like to think of her, wore her diamonds as the mayor of a provincial town in England wears his chain of office, but as she sat at the head of her table in one of the big mansions of New York I saw that wealth had not c.u.mbered the soul of this masterful lady, whose views on life are as direct and simple as those of Abraham Lincoln. She was the middle-cla.s.s housewife in spite of the footmen who stood in fear of her.

Essentially middle-cla.s.s in the best sense of the word were the crowds I met in the hotels. The men were making money--lots of it--by hard work.

They had taken a few days off, or left business early, to meet their soldier-sons in these gilded halls where they had a sense of satisfaction in spending large numbers of dollars in a short time.

"This is my boy from 'over there'! Just come back."

I heard that introduction many times, and saw the look of pride behind the gla.s.ses that were worn by a gray-eyed man, who had his hand on the arm of an upstanding fellow in field uniform, tall and lean and hard.

"It's good to be back," said one of these young officers, and as he sat at table he looked round the huge _salon_ with its cut-gla.s.s candelabra, where scores of little dinner-parties were in progress to the strident music of a stringed band, and then, with a queer little smile about his lips, as though thinking of the contrast between this scene and "over there," said, "Darned good!" In their evening frocks the women were elegant--they know how to dress at night--and now and then the fresh, frank beauty of one of these American girls startled my eyes by its witchery of youth and health. Some of them are _decollete_ to the ultimate limit of a milliner's audacity, and foolishly I suffered from a sense of confusion sometimes because of the physical revelations of elderly ladies whose virtue, I am sure, is as that of Caesar's wife. The frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of life's enchanted places would envy some of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, and scream with horror at their prices. But although the American woman with a wealthy husband likes to put on the flimsy robes of Circe, it is only as she would go to a fancy-dress ball in a frock that would make her brother say: "Gee!... And where did you get that bit of fluff?" She is Circe, with the Suffrage, and high ideals of life, and strong views on the League of Nations. She makes up her face like a French _comedienne_, but she has, nine times out of ten, the kind heart of a parson's wife in rural England and a frank, good-natured wit which faces the realities of life with the candor of a clean mind.

I found "gay life" in New York immensely and soberly respectable. One could take one's maiden aunt into the heart of it and not get hot by her blushes. In fact, it is the American maiden aunt who sets the pace of the fox-trot and the one-step in dancing-rooms where there are music and afternoon tea. Several times I supped "English breakfast tea"--I suspect Sir Thomas Lipton had something to do with it--at five o'clock on bright afternoons, watching the scene at Sherry's and Delmonico's. It seemed to me that this dancing habit was a most curious and over-rated form of social pleasure. It was as though American society had said, "Let us be devilishly gay!" but started too early in the day, with desperate sobriety. Many couples left the tea-table for the polished boards and joined the throng which surged and eddied in circles of narrow circ.u.mference, jostled by other dancers. Youth did not have it all its own way. On the contrary, I noticed that bald-headed gentlemen with some width of waistbands were in the majority, dancing with pridigious gravity and the maiden aunts. They were mostly visitors, I am told, from other cities--Bostonians escaping from the restrictions of their Early Victorian atmosphere, senators who voted for prohibition in their own states, business men who had booked reservations on midnight trains from Grand Central Terminal. Here and there young officers of the army and navy led out pretty girls, and with linked arms, and faces very close together, danced in a kind of coma, which they seemed to enjoy, though without any sparkle in their eyes. There were also officers of other nations--a young Frenchman appealing to the great heart of the American people on behalf of devastated France, and dancing for the sake of people scorched by the horrors of war, to say nothing of the little American girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de Guerre; and young English officers belonging to the British Mission, and engaged in propaganda--oh, frightful word!--of which a _the dansant_ at Delmonico's was, no doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure that caught my eye gave the keynote to the moral and spiritual character of the scene. It was the figure of a stout old lady wearing a hat with a huge feather which waggled over her nose as she danced the one-step with earnest vivacity, and an old gentleman with side-whiskers. She panted as she came back to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes me feel young!"

It occurred to me that she might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on a visit to New York, and anyhow her presence a.s.sured me that afternoon dancing at Delmonico's need not form the theme of any moralist in search of vice in high places. It is not only respectable, it is domestic.

Savonarola himself would not have denounced such innocent amus.e.m.e.nt. Nor did I find anything to shock the sensibilities of high-souled ethics in such midnight haunts as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden, except the inanity of all such shows where large numbers of pretty girls and others disport themselves in flowing draperies and colored lights before groups of tired people who can hardly hide their boredom, but yawn laughingly over their c.o.c.ktails and say, "Isn't she wonderful?"

when Mollie King sings a song about a variety of smiles, and discuss the personality of President Wilson between comic turns of the Dooley brothers. That at least is what happened in my little group on the roof of the Century Theater, where a manufacturer of barbed wire--I wonder if they were his barbs on which I tore myself in Flanders fields--initiated me into the mystery of a Bacardi c.o.c.ktail followed by a stinger, from which I was rescued, in the nick of time, by a kind lady on my right who took pity on my innocence. A famous playwright opposite, as sober as a judge, as courteous as Beau Brummell, pa.s.sed the time of day, which was a wee small hour of morning, with little ladies who came into the limelight, until suddenly he said, with a sigh of infinite impatience, "Haven't we enjoyed ourselves enough? I want my bed"; so interrupting a serious discussion between a war correspondent and a cartoonist on the exact truth about German atrocities, to the monstrous melody of a jazz band. Human nature is the same in New York as in other cities of the world. Pa.s.sion, weakness, folly, are not eliminated from the relations between American men and women. But to find vice and decadence in American society one has to go in search of it; and I did not go. I found New York society tolerant in its views, frank in its expression of opinion, fond of laughter, and wonderfully sincere. Wealth does not spoil its fresh and healthy outlook on life, and its people are idealists at heart, with a reverence for the old-fashioned virtues and an admiration for those who "make good" in whatever job to which they put their hands.

After all, hotel life, and restaurant life, and the glamorous world of the Great White Way, do not reveal the real soul of New York. They are no more a revelation of normal existence than boulevard life in Paris represents the daily round of the average Parisian. They are the happy hunting-grounds of the transient, and the real New-Yorker only visits them in hours of leisure and boredom.

Another side of the adventure of life in New York is "downtown," where the subways and the overhead railways pour out tides of humanity who do not earn their dollars without hard work and long hours of it. I should never have found my way to Bowling Green and Wall Street without a guide, because the underground world of the subways, where electric trains go rushing like shuttles through the warp and woof of a monstrous network, is utterly confusing to a stranger. But with the guide, who led me by the hand and laughed at my childlike bewilderment, I came into the heart of New York business life and saw its types in their natural environment. It is an alarming world to the wanderer who comes there suddenly. I confess that when I first walked through those deep gorges, between the mighty walls of houses as high as mountains in a surge of humanity in a hurry, I felt dazed and cowardly. I had a conviction that my nerve-power would never survive the stress and strain of such a life in such a place. I nearly dislocated my neck by gazing up at the heights of the skysc.r.a.pers, rising story on story to fifty or sixty floors. In a House of a Thousand Windows I took the elevator to the top story and wished I hadn't when the girl in charge of the lift asked, "What floor?"

and was answered by a quiet gentleman who said, "Thirty-one." That was our first stop, and in the few seconds we took to reach this alt.i.tude I had a vision of this vast human ant-heap, with scores of offices on each floor, and typewriters clicking in all of them, and girl-clerks taking down letters from hard-faced young men juggling with figures which, by the rise or drop of a decimal point, mean the difference between millions of dollars in the markets of the world. Each man and woman there in this House of a Thousand Windows had a human soul, with its own little drama of life, its loves and hopes and illusions, but in the vastness of one skysc.r.a.per, in the whirlpool of commerce, in the machinery of money-making, the humanities of life seemed to be destroyed and these people to be no more than slaves of modern civilization, ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there was pandemonium. The outside brokers--the curb men--were bidding against one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange--the Standard Oil Company among them--and their hoa.r.s.e cries mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This particular house was a narrow, not very tall, building of reddish brown brick, like a Georgian house in London, and out of each window, which was barred, poked two rows of faces, one above the other, as though the room inside were divided by a false floor. In the small window-frames sat single figures, in crouched positions, with telephone receivers on their ears and their faces staring at the crowd in the street below.

Each one of those human faces, belonging to young men of healthy appearance, was making most hideous grimaces, and each grimace was accompanied by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the man's fingers.

With a thumb and two fingers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked through the windows with violent efforts to attract the notice of individuals in the street. I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had some hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I had first taken them to be were signaling messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps of different colors in order to be distinguished from their fellows. Up and down the street, and from the topmost as well as from the lower stories of many buildings, I saw the grimaces and the gestures of the window-men, and the noise and tumult in the street became more furious. It was a lively day in Wall Street, and I thanked G.o.d that my fate had not led me into such a life. It seemed worse than war....

Not really so, after all. It was only the outward appearance of things that distressed one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all these young men on the curb seemed very cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves as much as boys in a Rugby "scrum." There was nothing wrong with their nerves. There was nothing wrong with a crowd of young business men and women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our fighting-men who were always less gloomy than the fellows at the rear in the safe back-waters of war. Business men and lady-clerks, typists, and secretaries, were all mingled at the little tables where the backs of chairs touched, and there was a loud, incessant chatter like the noise of a parrot-house. I overheard some fragments of conversation at the tables close to me.

"They don't seem to be getting on with the Peace Conference," said a young man with large spectacles. "All the little nations are trying to grab a bit of their neighbors' ground."

"I saw the cutest little hat--" said a girl whose third finger was stained with red ink.

"Have you seen that play by Maeterlinck?" asked an elderly man so like President Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be the twin brother of that much-discussed man.

These people were human all through, not at all dehumanized, after all, because they lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a New York skysc.r.a.per. I dare say also that their work is not so strenuous as it looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than business men and women of their own cla.s.s in England, so that they have more margin for the pleasures of life, for the purchase of a "cute little hat," even for a play by Maeterlinck.

After business hours many of these people hurry away from New York to suburbs, where they get quickly beyond the turmoil of the city in places with bustling little high streets of their own and good shops and, on the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden framework, in gardens where flowers grow between great rocks which crop out of the soil along the Connecticut sh.o.r.e. They are the "commuters," or, as we should say in England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I did some "commuting"

myself during a ten weeks' visit to America, I used to see them make a dash for their trains between five and six in the afternoon or late at night after theater-going in New York. I never tired of the sight of those crowds in the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal or in the Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very spirit of the United States in those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by n.o.bility of design and imagination is inspired by s.p.a.ciousness, light, color, and silence. It is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast floor s.p.a.ce below a high dome--painted blue like a summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling--uplifted on enormous arches. It is like entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height, in which all sound is lost, and there is no noise of footsteps and only a low murmur of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central Terminal, where I found myself many times before the last train left. There is no sign of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of sidings and sheds.

All that is hidden away until one is admitted to the tracks before the trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls and flower-stalls bright with color, and book-stalls piled high with current literature from which every mind can take its choice, and candy-stalls where the aching jaw may find its chewing-gum, and link up meditation with mastication, on the way to New Roch.e.l.le--"forty-five minutes from Broadway"--or to the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, and Port Chester, this side of high life in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Some of the male commuters have a habit of playing cards between New York and New Roch.e.l.le, showing an activity of mind not dulled by their day's work in town. But others indulge in conversational quartets, and on these journeys I heard more than I wanted to know about the private life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by will-power and a fighting spirit. "Don't hit often," said one of these philosophers, who began life as an errand-boy and now designs the neckwear of society, "but, when you do, hit hard and clean. No man is worth his salt unless he loses his temper at the right time."

In the last train to Greenwich were American soldiers and mariners just back from France, who slept in corners of the smoking-coach and wakened with a start at New Roch.e.l.le, with a dazed look in their eyes, as though wondering whether they had merely dreamed of being home again and were still in the glades of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening.

Two typist-girls with their mothers had been to a lecture by Captain Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zeebrugge. They were "crazy" about him. They loved his description of the "blunt end" and the "pointed end"

of the ship. They had absorbed a lot of knowledge about naval tactics; and they were going to buy his photograph to put over their desks....

Part of the adventure of life in New York is the acquisition of unexpected knowledge by means of lectures; and Carnegie Hall is the Mecca of lecturers. Having been one of the lecturers, I can speak from personal experience when I say that a man who stands for the first time on the naked desert of that platform, looking toward rows of white faces and white shirt-fronts to the farthest limit of the topmost galleries, feels humility creep into his soul until he shrinks to the size of Hop-o'-My-Thumb and is the smallest, loneliest thing in the whole wide world. A microbe is a monster to him, and he quakes with terror when he hears the first squeak of his tiny voice in the vast s.p.a.ciousness under that high, vaulted roof. On that first night of mine I would have sold myself, with white shirt, cuff-links, and quaking body, for a two-cent piece, if any one had been fool enough to buy me and let me off that awful ordeal. And yet, looking back on it now, I know that it was the finest hour of my life, and a wonderful reward for small service, when all those people rose to greet me, and there came up to me out of that audience a spiritual friendship so warm and generous that I felt it like the touch of kindly hands about me, and recovered from my fright.

Afterward, as always happens in America, there was a procession of people who came onto the platform to shake hands and say words of thanks, so that one gets into actual touch with all kinds of people and their friendship becomes personal. In that way I made thousands of friends in America and feel toward them all a lasting grat.i.tude because of the generous, warm-hearted, splendid things they said as they pa.s.sed with a quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in America is deep-rooted and widespread. Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is in compet.i.tion with every other town near by for lecturers who have some special fame or knowledge. In New York there is an endless series of lectures, not only in places like Carnegie Hall and aeolian Hall, but in clubs and churches. Great audiences, made up of rich society people as well as the "intellectuals" and the professional cla.s.ses, gather in force to hear any man whose personality makes him interesting or who has something to say which they want to hear. In many cases personality is sufficient.

People of New York will cheerfully pay five dollars to see a famous man, and not think their money wasted if his words are lost in empty s.p.a.ce, or if they know already as much as he can tell them about the subject of his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need to prepare orations. When he said, "_Messieurs et mesdames_" they cheered him for ten minutes, and when, after that, he said, "_je suis enchante_" they cheered him for ten minutes more. They like to see the men who have done things, the men who count for something, and to study the personality of a man about whom they have read. If he has something to tell them, so much the better, and if he is not renowned he must tell them something pretty good if he wants their money and their patience. I have no doubt that the habit of lecture-going is one of the greatest influences at work in the education of the American people. The knowledge they acquire in this way does not bite very deep, and it leaves, I fancy, only a superficial impression, but it awakens their intelligence and imagination, directs their thoughts to some of the big problems of life, and is a better way of spending an evening than idle gossip or a variety entertainment. The League for Political Education which I had the honor of addressing in Carnegie Hall has a series of lectures--three times a week, I think--which are attended by people engaged in every kind of educative and social work in New York, and at a luncheon afterward I listened to a number of speeches by public men and women more inspiring in their sincerity of idealism than anything I have heard in similar a.s.semblies.

All these people were engaged in practical work for the welfare of their fellow-creatures, as pioneers of progress in the adventure of life in New York, and the women especially, like Jane Addams, impressed me by the real beauty of their personality.

Another phase of life which interested me was the club world of the city, and in these clubs I met most of the men and many of the women who count in the intellectual activity of New York. I came in touch there with every stratum of thought and tradition which makes up the structure of American politics and ideas. I met the conservatives of the Union Club who live in an atmosphere of dignified austerity (reminding me of the Athenaeum Club in London, where the very waiters have the air of bishops and the political philosophy of the late Lord Salisbury), and who confided to me with quiet gravity their personal and unprintable opinions of Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member of the Union League Club, hardly less conservative in its traditional outlook and having a membership which includes many leading business and professional men of New York City. It was here that I saw a touching ceremony which is one of my best memories of the United States, when the negro troops of a fighting regiment marched up Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back their colors for safe-keeping to the Union League Club, which had presented them when they went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speaking from the balcony, praised them for their valor in the great conflict for the world's liberty, when they fought for the country which had given them their own freedom by no light sacrifice of blood. By their service in France they had gained a glory for their citizenship in the United States and stood equal with their white comrades in the grat.i.tude of the American people. There were tears in the eyes of colored officers when, after a luncheon in the Union League Club, they heard other words like those, giving honor to the spirit of their race.... Up the wide stairway of the club, in the softly glowing light which comes through a stained-gla.s.s window, the colors of the darky regiment hang as a memorial of courage and sacrifice....

I was the guest of the Arts Club amid a crowd of painters, poets, musicians, and writing-men, who sat at long tables in paneled rooms decorated with pictures and caricatures which were the work of their own members. Clouds of tobacco smoke made wreaths above the board. A soldier-poet rose between the courses and sang his own songs to the chorus of his comrades. It was a jolly night among jolly good fellows, who had wit, and the gift of laughter, and large hearts which beat in sympathy for those who suffered in the war.... In the City Club I had a room when I wanted it, and the hall porter and the bell-boys, and the elevator-man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands with me when I went in and out, so that I felt at home there, after a splendid night when crowds of ladies joined the men to listen to my story of the war, and when a famous glee-party sang songs to me across rose garlands on the banquet table. The City Club has a number of habitues who play dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather chairs discuss the destiny of nations as men who pull the wires which make the puppets dance. It is the home of the foreign correspondents in New York, who know the inside of international politics, and whose president is (or was, at the time of my visit) a kindly, human, English soul with a genius for fellowship which has made a little League of Nations in this New York house. I met him first, as a comrade of the pen, in the Street of Adventure, where London journalists rub shoulders on their way to history; and in New York his friendship was a generous and helpful gift, and by his good words I made many other friends.

It seemed to me that New York is a city where friendship is quickly made, and I found that the best part of my adventure in the city. Day after day, when dusk was creeping into the streets and lights began to gleam in all the windows of the houses that reach up to the stars, I drove down the long highway of Fifth Avenue with a certainty that before the evening was out I should meet a number of friendly souls who would make me welcome at their tables and reveal their convictions and ideals with a candor which does not come to English people until their ice of reserve is broken or thawed. And that was always so. At a small dinner-party or a big reception, in one of the great mansions of New York, or in a suite of rooms high above the traffic of the street, conversation was free-and-easy, with or without the aid of a c.o.c.ktail, and laughter came in gusts, and American men and women spoke of the realities of life frankly and without camouflage, with a directness and sincerity that touched the essential truth of things. In one room Melba sang with eternal girlhood in her voice, while painters and diplomats, novelists, and wits, famous actresses and princesses of New York, were hushed into silence for a while, until, when the spell was broken, there rose again a merry tumult of tongues. In another room a group of "intellectuals," tired of talking about war and peace, played charades like children in the nursery, and sat down to drawing games with shouts of mirth at a woman's head with the body of a fish and the legs of a bird. In another house the King's Jester of New York, who goes from party to party like a French wit--the little Abbe Morellet--in the _salons_ of France before the Revolution, destroyed the dignity of decorous people by a caricature of German opera and an imitation of a German husband eating in a public restaurant. I knew the weakness that comes from a surfeit of laughter.... I did not tire of these social adventures in New York, and I came to see something of the spirit of the people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan city. I found that spirit touched, in spite of social merriment, by the tragedy of war, and anxious about the outcome of peace. I found these people conscious of new responsibilities thrust upon them by fate, and groping in their minds for some guidance, for some clear light upon their duty and destiny in the reshaping of the world by the history that has happened.

Europe, three thousand miles away, is still a mystery to them, full of unknown forces and peoples and pa.s.sions which they cannot understand, though they read all their Sunday papers, with all their bulky supplements. When I went among them they were divided by the conflict of political differences with pa.s.sionate emotion, and torn between conflicting ideals of patriotism and humanity. But most of them put on one side, with a fine disdain, all meanness of thought and action and the dirty squalor of financial interests. Sure of their power among nations, the people I met--and I met many of the best--were anxious to rise to their high chance in history and to do the Big Thing in a big way, when they saw the straight road ahead.

When I left New York they were raising their _fifth great Victory Loan_, and the streets were draped in banners bearing the great V for Victory and for the number of the loan. Their sense of drama was at work again to make this enterprise successful, and their genius of advertis.e.m.e.nt was in action to put a spell upon the people. The face of a farmer was on the posters in many streets, and that st.u.r.dy old fellow upon whose industry the wealth of America depends so much, because it is founded in the soil, put his hand in his pocket and said, "Sure, we'll see it through!"

From my brief visit one conviction came to me. It is that whatever line of action the American people take in the new world that is now being born out of the tumult of war, they will see it through, by any sacrifice and at any cost.

II

SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA

As a professional onlooker of life (and it is a poor profession, as I must admit) it has always been my habit to study national and social types in any country where I happen to be. I find an untiring interest in this, and prefer to sit in a French cafe, for example, watching the people who come in and out, and hearing sc.r.a.ps of conversation that pa.s.s across the table, to the most thrilling theatrical entertainment. And I find more interest in "common" people than in the uncommonly distinguished, by fame and power. To me the types in a London omnibus or a suburban train are more absorbing as a study than a group of generals or a party of statesmen, and I like to discover the lives of the world's n.o.bodies, their way of thought and their outlook on the world, by the character in their faces and their little social habits. In that way one gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of drama, hideous and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell into my old habit of searching for types and studying characters. I had unusual opportunity. New York and many other cities opened their hearts and their houses to me in a most generous way, and I met great numbers of people of every cla.s.s and kind.

The first people I met, before I had stepped off my ship of adventure, were young newspaper men who searched the ship like a sieve for any pa.s.senger who had something in his life or brain worth telling to the world. I was scared of them, having heard that they could extract the very secrets of one's soul by examination of the third degree; but I found them human and friendly fellows who greeted me cheerily and did not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who control the power of the press--the masters of the machine which shapes the mind of peoples--and those who feed its wheels with words. Because I had some history to tell, the word-writers lay in wait for me, found my telephone number in any hotel of any town before I knew it myself, tapped at my bedroom door when I was in the transition stage between day and evening clothes, and asked questions about many things of which I knew nothing at all, so that I had to camouflage my abysmal depths of ignorance.

They know their job, those American reporters, and I was impressed especially by the young women. There was one girl who sat squarely in front of me, fixed me with candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me through an examination about my sad past until I had revealed everything. There is nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and I should blush to meet her again. She did not take a single note--by that I knew her as a good journalist--and wrote two columns of revelation with most deadly accuracy and a beautiful style. Another girl followed me round a picture-gallery listening to casual remarks among a group of friends, and wrote an article on art-criticism which left me breathless with admiration at her wit and knowledge, of which I took the credit.

One young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, boarded the train at New York, bought me a drawing-room for private conversation, and by the time we reached Philadelphia made it entirely futile for me to give a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all had an absorbing interest in the international situation after the armistice, and knew a good deal about the secret workings of European policy. A young correspondent just back from Russia made a speech summing up his experiences and conclusions, which were of a startling kind, told with the utmost simplicity and bluntness. The proprietor took me into his private room, and outlined his general policy on world affairs, of which the first item on his program was friendship with England.... I found among newspaper men a sense of responsibility with which they are not generally credited, and wonderfully alert and open minds; also, apart from their own party politics and prejudices, a desire for fair play and truth. The Yellow Press still has its power, and it is a malign influence in the United States, but the newspapers of good repute are conducted by men of principle and conviction, and their editorial and literary staffs have a high level of talent, representing much, I think, of the best intelligence of America.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS]

The women of America seem to me to have a fair share of that intelligence, and I met many types of them who were interesting as social studies. Several states are still resisting woman suffrage, but as far as equality goes in all affairs of daily life outside political power the women of America have long claimed and gained it. During the war they showed in every cla.s.s, like the women of England, that they could take on men's jobs and do them as well as men in most cases, and better than men in some cases. They drove motor-lorries and machines; they were dairy farmers and agriculturists; they became munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and elevator-girls, and the womanhood of America rallied up with a wonderful and devoted spirit in a great campaign of work for the Red Cross and all manner of comforts for the troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in transport organization, never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young whose eyes and fingers ached with so much st.i.tching during the long evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on Long Island or the Connecticut sh.o.r.e, an occasional visit to Tiffany's in Fifth Avenue for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket symbolizing success, a holiday at Palm Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a relief from boredom after office hours at the Forty-fourth Street Theater or the Winter Garden. That represents the social ambition of the average business man on the road to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile of dollars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high strain of nervous tension. Meanwhile the women are keeping themselves as beautiful as G.o.d made them, with slight improvements according to their own ideas, which are generally wrong; decorating their homes; increasing their housekeeping expenses, and reading prodigiously. They read a vast number of books and magazines, so making it possible for men like myself--slaves of the pen--to exist in an otherwise cruel world.

Before the American lady of leisure gets up to breakfast (generally she 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?