Roving East and Roving West Part 8

Another difference between the games is that in cricket we use a new ball only at the beginning of a fresh inning (of which there cannot be more than four in a match) and when each 200 runs have been scored; and (this will astonish the American reader) when the ball is. .h.i.t among the people it is returned. I have seen such rapid voluntary surrenders at baseball very seldom, and so much of a "fan" have I become that the spectacle has always been accompanied in my breast by pain and contempt.

I had the gratification of receiving from the burly John McGraw an autograph ball as a souvenir of a visit to the Polo Ground. I put it in my pocket hurriedly, conscious of the risk I ran among a nation of ball-stealers in possessing such a trophy; and I got away with it. But I am sure that had it been a ball hit out of the ground by the mighty "Babe" Ruth, which--recovering it by some supernatural means--he had handed to me in public, I should not have emerged alive, or, if alive, not in the ball's company.

In cricket the wicket-keeper, who, like the baseball catcher, is protected, although he has no mask, is the most difficult man to obtain, because he has the hardest time and the least public approbation; in baseball the catcher is a hero and every boy aspires to his mitt.

In cricket no player makes more than three hundred pounds a season, unless it is his turn for his one and only benefit, when he may make a thousand pounds more. But most players do not reach such a level of success that a benefit is their lot. But baseballers earn enormous sums.

If a match could be arranged between eleven cricketers and eleven baseballers, the cricketers to be allowed to bowl and the baseballers to pitch, the cricketers to use their own bats and the baseballers their own clubs, I fancy that the cricketers would win; for the difficulty of hitting our bowling with a club would be greater than of hitting their pitching with a bat. But their wonderful fielding and far more accurate and swifter throwing than ours might just save them. Such throwing we see only very rarely, for good throwing is no longer insisted upon in cricket, much to the game's detriment. That old players should lose their shoulders is natural--and, of course, our players remain in first-cla.s.s cricket for many years longer than ball champions--but there is no excuse for the young men who have taken advantage of a growing laxity in this matter. Chief of the few cricketers who throw with any of the terrible precision of a baseball field is Hobbs. It must be borne in mind, however, that cricket does not demand such constant throwing at full speed as baseball does; for in cricket, as I have said, the batsman may choose what hits he will run for, and if he chooses only the perfectly safe ones the fieldsmen are never at high pressure. There is also nothing in cricket quite to compare with base-stealing.

When it comes to catching, the percentage of missed catches is far higher at cricket than at baseball; but there are good reasons for this.

One is that in baseball a glove is worn; another that in baseball all catches come to the fieldsmen with long or sufficient notice. The fieldsmen are all, except the catcher, in front of the batsmen; there is nothing to compare with the unexpected nimbleness that our point and slips have to display.

In the hypothetical contest that I have suggested, between baseballers and cricketers, if the conditions were nominally equal and the cricketers had to pitch like baseballers and the baseballers to use the English bat, why then the baseballers would win handsomely.

Baseball, I fancy, will not be acclimatised in England. We had our chance when London was full of American soldiers and we did not take it.

But we were very grateful to them for playing the game in our midst, for the authorities were so considerate as to let them play on Sundays (which we are never allowed to do) and I was one of those who hoped that this might be the thin end of the wedge and Sunday cricket also be permitted. But no; when the war was over and the Americans left us, the old Sabbatarianism rea.s.serted itself. If, however, we ever exchanged national games, and cricket were played in America and baseball in England, it is the English spectator who would have the better of the exchange. I am convinced that although we should quickly find baseball diverting, nothing would ever persuade an American crowd to be otherwise than bored by cricket.

SKYSc.r.a.pERS

Perhaps if I had reached New York from the sea the skysc.r.a.pers would have struck me more violently. But I had already seen a few in San Francisco (and wondered at and admired the courage which could build so high after the earthquake of 1906), and more in Chicago, all ugly; so that when I came to New York and found that the latest architects were not only building high, but imposing beauty on these mammoth structures, surprise was mingled with delight. No matter how many more millions of dollars are expended on that strange medley of ancient forms which go to make up New York's new Cathedral, where Romanesque and Gothic seem already to be ready for their divorce, the Woolworth Building will be New York's true fane. Mr. Ca.s.s Gilbert, the designer of that graceful immensity, not only gave commerce its most notable monument (to date), but removed for ever the slur upon skysc.r.a.pers. The Woolworth Building does not sc.r.a.pe the sky; it greets it, salutes it with a _beau geste_.

And I would say something similar of the Bush Building, with its alabaster chapel in the air which becomes translucent at night; and the Madison Square Tower (whose clock face, I noticed, has the amazing diameter of three storeys); and the Burroughs Welcome Building on 41st Street, with its lovely perpendicular lines; and that immense cube of masonry on Park Avenue which bursts into flower, so to speak, at the top in the shape of a very beautiful loggia. But even if these adornments become, as I hope, the rule, one could not resent the ordinary structural elephantiasis a moment after realising New York's physical conditions. A growing city built on a narrow peninsula is unable to expand laterally and must, therefore, soar. The problem was how to make it soar with dignity, and the problem has been solved.

In the old days when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on Fifth Avenue.

One has to ascend the Woolworth Building to appreciate at a blow with what discretion the original settlers of New York made their choice. It is interesting, too, to watch Broadway--which, for all I know, is the longest street in the world--starting at one's feet on its lawless journey to Albany: lawless because it is almost the only sinuous thing in this city of parallelograms and has the effrontery to cross diagonally both Fifth Avenue and Sixth. Before leaving the Woolworth Building, I would say that there seemed to me something rather comically paradoxical in being charged 50 cents for access to the top of a structure which was erected to celebrate the triumph of a commercial genius whose boast it was to have made his fortune out of articles sold at a rate never higher than 10 cents.

Having dallied sufficiently on the summit--there are a trifle of fifty-eight floors, but an express lift makes nothing of them--I continued the implacable career of the tripper by watching for a while the deafening kerb market, which presented on that morning an odd appearance, more like Yarmouth beach than a financial centre, for there had been rain, and all the street operators were in sou'westers and sea-boots. There can be spasms of similar excitement in London, in the neighbourhood of Capel Court, but we have nothing that compares so closely with this crowd as Tattersall's Ring at Epsom just before the Derby.

A PLEA FOR THE AQUARIUM

It was a relief to resume my programme by entering that abode of the dumb and detached--the aquarium in Battery Park. For the kerb uproar "the uncommunicating muteness of fishes" was the only panacea. The Bronx Zoo is not, I think, except in the matter of buffalo and deer paddocks, so good as ours in London, but it has this shining advantage--it is free. So also is the Aquarium in Battery Park, and it was pleasing to see how crowded the place can be. In England all interest in living fish, except as creatures to be coaxed towards hooks and occasionally retained there, has vanished; on the site of old Westminster Aquarium the Wesleyans now manage their finances and determine their circuits, while the Brighton Aquarium, once famous all the world over, is a variety hall with barely a fin to its name.

After seeing the aquarium in Honolulu, which is like a pelagic rainbow factory, and the aquarium in New York with all its strange and beautiful denizens, I am a little ashamed of our English apathy. To maintain picture galleries, where, however beautiful and chromatic, all is dead, and be insensitive to the loveliness of fish, in hue, in shape and in movement, is not quite pardonable.

ENGLISH AND FRENCH INFLUENCES

In essentials America is American, but when it comes to inessentials, to tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, her dependence on old England was noticeable again and again as I walked about New York. The fashion which, at the moment, the print shops were fostering was for our racing, hunting and coaching coloured prints of a century ago, while in the gallery of the distinguished little Grolier Club I found an exhibition of the work of Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. In such old bookshops as I visited all the emphasis was--just then--laid upon Keats and Lamb and Sh.e.l.ley, whose first editions and presentation copies seem to be continually making the westward journey. I had not been in New York twenty-four hours before Keats' "Lamia," 1820--with an inscription from the author to Charles Lamb--the very copy from which, I imagine, Lamb wrote his review, was in my hands; but it would have been far beyond my means even if the pound were not standing at 3.83. These "a.s.sociation" books, in which American collectors take especial pleasure, can be very costly. At a sale soon after I left New York, seven presentation copies of d.i.c.kens' books, containing merely the author's signed inscription, realised 4870 dollars. To continue, in Wanamaker's old curiosity department I found little but English furniture and odds and ends, at prices which in their own country would have been fantastically high. In the "Vanity Fair"

department, however (as I think it is called), the source was French. I suppose that French influence must be at the back of all the costumiers and jewellers of New York, but the shops themselves are far more s.p.a.cious than those in Paris and not less well-appointed. Tiffany's is a palace; all it lacks is a name, but its splendid anonymity is, I take it, a point of honour.

It used to be said that good Americans when they died went to Paris. The Parisian lure no doubt is still powerful; but every day I should guess that more of Paris comes to America. The upper parts of New York have boulevards and apartment houses very like the real thing, and I noticed that the architecture of France exerts a special attraction for the rich man decreeing himself a pleasure dome. There are millionaires'

residences in New York that might have been transplanted not only from the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, but from Touraine itself; while when I made my pilgrimage to Mr. Widener's, just outside Philadelphia, I found Rembrandt's "Mill," and Manet's dead bull-fighter, and a Vermeer, and a little meadow painted divinely by Corot, and El Greco's family group, and Donatello's St. George, and one of the most lovely scenes that ever was created by Turner's enchanted brush, all enshrined in a palace which Louis Seize might have built.

But America is even more French than this. Her women can be not less _soignees_ than those of France, although they suggest a cooler blood and less dependence on male society; her bread and coffee are better than France's best. Moreover, when it comes to night and the Broadway constellations challenge the darkness, New York leaves Paris far behind.

For every cabaret and supper resort that Paris can provide, New York has three; and for every dancing floor in Paris, New York has thirty. Good Americans, however, will still remain faithful to their old posthumous love, if only for her wine.

Apropos of American women, their position struck me as very different from the position of women with us. English women are deferential to their husbands; they are content to be relegated to the background on all occasions when they are not wanted. They are dependent. They seldom wear an air of triumph and rarely take the lead. But American women are complacent and a.s.sured, they do most of the talking, make most of the plans: if they are not seen, it is because they are in the background; they are either active prominently elsewhere or are high on pedestals.

With each other they are mostly or often humorously direct, whereas with men they seem to adopt an ironical or patronising att.i.tude. American women seem also to have a curious power of attracting to themselves other women who admire them and foster their self-esteem. And, for all that I know, these satellites have satellites too. Their federacy almost amounts to a solid secret society; not so much against men, for men must provide the sinews of war and other comforts, but for their own satisfaction. Both s.e.xes appear not to languish when alone.

SKY-SIGNS AND CONEY ISLAND

All visitors to New York speak of the exhilaration of its air, and I can but repeat their testimony. After the first few days the idea of going to bed became an absurdity.

Among the peculiarly beautiful effects that America produces, sky signs must be counted high. I had seen some when in San Francisco against the deep Californian night, and they captivated the startled vision; but the reckless profusion and movement of the Great White Way, as I turned out of 42nd Street on my first evening in New York, came as something more than a surprise: a revelation of wilful gaiety. We have normally nothing in England to compare with it. Nor can we have even our Earl's Court exhibition imitations of it so long as coal is so rare and costly. But though we had the driving power for the electricity we could never get such brilliance, for the clear American atmosphere is an essential ally.

In our humid airs all the diamond glints would be blurred.

For the purest beauty of traceries of light against a blue background one must go, however, not to Broadway, which is too bizarre, but to Luna Park on Coney Island. Odd that it should be there, in that bewildering medley of sound and restlessness, that an extreme of loveliness should be found; but I maintain that it is so, that nothing more strangely and voluptuously beautiful could be seen than all those minarets and domes, with their lines and curves formed by myriad lamps, turning by contrast the heavens into an ocean of velvet blue, mysterious and soft and profound.

Only periodically--when we have exhibitions at Earl's Court or at Olympia--is there in England anything like Coney Island. At Blackpool in August, and on Hampstead Heath on Bank Holidays, a corresponding spirit of revelry is attempted, but it is not so natural, and is vitiated by a self-conscious determination to be gay and by not a little vulgarity.

The revellers of Steeplechase Park seemed to me to be more genuine even than the crowds that throng the Fete de Neuilly; and a vast deal happier.

One very striking difference between Coney Island and the French fair is the absence of children from New York's "safety-valve," as some one described it to me. I saw hardly any. It is as though once again the child's birthday gifts had been appropriated by its elders; but as a matter of fact the Parks of Steeplechase and Luna were, I imagine, designed deliberately for adults. Judging by the popularity of the chutes and the whips, the switchbacks and the witching waves, eccentric movement has a peculiar attraction for the American holiday-maker. As some one put it, there is no better way, or at any rate no more thorough way, of throwing young people together. Middle-aged people, too. But the observer receives no impression of moral disorder. High spirits are the rule, and impropriety is the exception. Even in the auditorium at Steeplechase Park, where the _cognoscenti_ a.s.semble to witness the discomfiture of the uninitiated, there is nothing but harmless laughter as the skirts fly up before the unsuspected blast. Such a performance in England, were it permitted, would degenerate into ugliness; in France, too, it would make the alien spectator uncomfortable. But the essential public chast.i.ty of the Americans--I am not sure that I ought not here to write civilisation of the Americans--emerges triumphant.

It was at Coney Island that I came suddenly upon the Pig Slide and had a new conception of what quadrupeds can do for man.

The Pig Slide, which was in one of the less noisy quarters of Luna Park, consisted of an enclosure in which stood a wooden building of two storeys, some five yards wide and three high. On the upper storey was a row of six or eight cages, in each of which dwelt a little live pig, an infant of a few weeks. In the middle of the row, descending to the ground, was an inclined board, with raised edges, such as is often installed in swimming-baths to make diving automatic, and beneath each cage was a hole a foot in diameter. The spectators and partic.i.p.ants crowded outside the enclosure, and the thing was to throw b.a.l.l.s, which were hired for the purpose, into the holes. Nothing could exceed the alert and eager interest taken by the little pigs in the efforts of the ball-throwers. They quivered on their little legs; they pressed their little noses against the bars of the cages; their little eyes sparkled; their tails (the only public corkscrews left in America) curled and uncurled and curled again: and with reason, for whereas if you missed--as was only too easy--nothing happened: if you threw accurately the fun began, and the fun was also theirs.

This is what occurred. First a bell rang and then a spring released the door of the cage immediately over the hole which your ball had entered, so that it swung open. The little pig within, after watching the previous infirmity of your aim with dejection, if not contempt, had p.r.i.c.ked up his ears on the sound of the bell, and now smiled a gratified smile, irresistible in infectiousness, and trotted out, and, with the smile dissolving into an expression of absolute beat.i.tude, slid voluptuously down the plank: to be gathered in at the foot by an attendant and returned to its cage all ready for another such adventure.

It was for these moments and their concomitant changes of countenance that you paid your money. To taste the triumph of good marksmanship was only a fraction of your joy; the greater part of it consisted in liberating a little prisoner and setting in motion so much ecstasy.

THE PRESS

America is a land of newspapers, and the newspapers are very largely the same. To a certain extent many of them are exactly the same, for the vastness of the country makes it possible to syndicalise various features, so that you find Walt Mason's sagacious and merry and punctual verse, printed to look like prose but never disappointing the ear, in one of the journals that you buy wherever you are, in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Chicago or New York; and Mr. Montagu's topical rhymes in another; and the daily adventures of Mutt and Jeff, who are national heroes, in a third. Every day, for ever, do those and other regular features occur in certain of the papers: which is partly why no American ever seems to confine himself, as is our custom, to only one.

Another and admirable feature of certain American papers is a column edited by a man of letters, whose business it is to fill it every day, either with the blossoms of his own intelligence or of outside contributors, or a little of each: such a column as Don Marquis edits for _The Sun_, called "The Sundial," and Franklin R. Adams for _The Tribune_, called "The Conning Tower," and Christopher Morley for the New York _Evening Post_, called "The Bowling Green." Perhaps the unsigned "Way of the World" in our _Morning Post_ is the nearest London correlative.

These columns are managed with skill and catholicity, and they impart an element of graciousness and fancy into what might otherwise be too materialistic a budget. A journalist, like myself, is naturally delighted to find editors and a vast public so true to their writing friends. Very few English editors allow their subscribers the opportunity of establishing such steady personal relations; and in England, in consequence, the signed daily contribution from one literary hand is very rare--to an American observer probably mysteriously so. The daily cartoon is common with us; but in London, for example, I cannot think of any similar literary feature that is signed in full. We have C.E.B.'s regular verse in the _Evening News_ and "The Londoner's" daily essay in the same paper, and various initials elsewhere; but, with us, only the artists are allowed their names. Now, in America every name, everywhere, is blazoned forth.

Whatever bushel measures may be used for in the United States the concealing of light is no part of their programme.