Your United States; impressions of a first visit
Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931
\ iv \ ^ ■# 1 •■ 1 ^ I I H A R r r: > ^y hi^- ' -■•: *^ ^ f .'IK. r ' - :Xrv^ z^;:rr,^^5|^^,^^^^__^, . y;^.■, -'f<^< : ■.* . I / 1 - T H, D UNIVERSITY LIBRARY COPYRIOHT. 19ia. BY HARPER * BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED OCTOBER. ISIE M-M CONTENTS CBAP. PAGB I. The First Night 3 II. Stiieets 27 III. The Capitol and Other Sites 49 IV. Some Organizations 73 V. Transit and Hotels 99 VI. Sport and the Theater 123 VII. Education and Art 147 VIII. Citizens 171 ft. ILLUSTRATIONS THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT PronHspUce DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK Padngp. 10 THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS. BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT . .. A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO .... A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE — CHICAGO. THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO — THE CAPITOL UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL THE PROMENADE — CITY POINT, BOSTON THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB — OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR .. AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE. LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG .. ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY .... IN THE PARLOR-CAR BREAKFAST EN ROUTE IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM . .. THE STRAP-HANGERS THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED If i6 20 34 36 38 42 44 50 52 54 56 6o 64 74 86 90 94 100 io8 112 114 Ii6 THE FIRST NIGHT i ILLUSTRATIONS TfiB RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR FociNf ^ Il8 THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION . " 124 THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED THE AIR ** 130 THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD " IS4 UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS — UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA . . ** 15^ MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS — UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO *' 164 PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK . WOMAN " 172 THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE ... ** 186 THE FIRST NIGHT YOUR UNITED STATES THE FIRST NIGHT I SAT with a melting ice on my plate, and my gaze on a very distant swinging door, through which came and went every figure except the familiar figure I de- sired. The figiu'e of a woman came. She wore a pale- blue dress and a white apron and cap, and carried a dish in uplifted hands, with the gesture of an acolyte. On the bib of the apron were two red marks, and as she approached, tripping, scomftil, unheeding, along the interminable carpeted aisle, between serried tables of correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually de- veloped into features, and the two red marks on her stomacher grew into two rampant hons, each holding a globe in its ferocious paws; and she passed on, bearing away the dish and these mysterious symbols, and lessened into a puppet on the horizon of the enormous hall, and finally vanished through another door. She was suc- ceeded by men, all bearing dishes, but none of them so inexorably scornful as she, and none of them disappear- ing where she had disappeared; every man relented and stopped at some table or other. But the figure I 3 YOUR UNITED STATES desired remained invisible, and my ice continued to melt, in accordance with chemical law. The orchestra in the gallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time without whose accompaniment it was impossible, anywhere in the civilized world, to dine correctly. That rag-time, committed, I suppose, originally by some well-inten- tioned if banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over the whole tmiverse of restaurants like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive, but evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone in the elated eyes of the four himdred persons correctly dining together in this high refectory, and at the end there was honest applause! . . . And yet you never encoimtereda person who, questioned singly, did not agree and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an out- rageous nuisance! . .. However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came hurrying and a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic and triumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him, in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have learned to adopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I had neither the right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo- Saxon as myself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the race. When he dreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the caisse of a cosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English he was not speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was one of the extremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world, where an 4 THE FIRST NIGHT order given in English is understood at the first try, and where the English language is not assassinated and dismembered by menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this restaurant! . . . Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air. Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had brought the partictdar kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of coiu-se I had wanted something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and unheard of by my fellow- diners. The man had hopefully said that he ''would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated him, as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of the hot-house, I arose and followed in the path of the lion-breasted woman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of sixteen who did nothing else from 6 a.m. till midnight (so he said) but ascend and descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this inspiring and jocimd task he was being prepared for manhood and the greater world! . . . And yet, what would you ? Elevators must have boys, and even men. Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the passionate reformer and lover of humanity. Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a group of men, most of whom had ac- quired fame, and had the slight agreeable self -conscious- ness that fame gives; and I listened, against a back- grotmd of the ever-insistent music, to one of those end- less and multifarious reminiscent conversations that are 5 YOUR UNITED STATES heard only in such places. The companion on my right would tell how he had inhabited a house in Siam, next to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too poor to be burned were laid out, after surgical prelimina- ries, to be devoured by vtdtures, and how the vtdtures, when gorged, would flap to the roof of his house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my left would tell how, when he was tmfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack of influenza, and on the day when a chance offered itself would get up and don his only suit — a glorious one — ^and, fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him look older, would go forth to confront the chance. And then the talk might be interrupted in order to consult the morning paper, and so settle a dispute about the exact price of Union Pacifies. And then an Italian engineer would tell about sport in the woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animals where it was ad- visable to use a revolver lest the excessive noise of a fowling-piece should disturb the entire forest, and how once he had shot seven times at an imperturbable par- tridge showing its head over a tree, and missed seven times, and how the partridge had at last flown off, with a flicker of plumage that almost said aloud, "Well, I really can't wait any longer!" And then might follow a simply tremendous discussion about the digestibility of buckwheat-cakes. And then the conversation of every group in the lotmge would be stopped by the entry of a page bearing a tele- gram and calling out in the voice of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed. And then 6 THE FIRST NIGHT another companion would relate in intricate detail a recent excursion into Yucatan, speaking negligently — ^as though it were a trifle — of the extraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and in the end making quite plain his conviction that no other women were as beau- tiful as the women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa would get onto the carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam mantelpieces from Russell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting with damp in neglected Venetian chiu"ches, and so on and so on, tmtil one had the melancholy illusion that the whole art world was going or gone to destruction. But thi^ subject did not really hold us, for the reason that, beneath a blas6 exterior, we were all secretly preoccupied by the beauty of the women of Yucatan and wondering whether we should ever get to Yucatan. . . . And then, looking by accident away, I saw the dim, provocative faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen caps peering from without through the dark double windows of the lounge. And I was glad when somebody suggested that it was time to take a turn. And outside, in the strong wind, abaft the four fimnels of the Lasitania, a star seemed to be dancing capriciously arotmd and about the masthead light. And it was diflSctdt to believe that the masthead and its light, and not the star, were dancing. From the lofty promenade deck the Atlantic wave is a little enough thing, so far down beneath you that you can scarcely even sniff its salty tang. But when the elevator-boy — ^always waiting for me — ^had lowered me through five floors, I stood on tiptoe and gazed through the thick glass of a porthole there ; and the flying Atlantic 7 YOUR UNITED STATES wave, theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Sud^ , denly something jumped up and hit the glass of the port- hole a fearful, crashing blow that made me draw away my face in alarm ; and the solid ground on which I stood vi- brated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caress- ing. Anybody on the other side of this thin, nicely painted steel plate (I thought) would be in a rather hopeless situation. I turned away, half shivering, from the menace. All was calm and warm and reassuring within the ship. ... In the withdrawn privacy of my berth, with the curtains closed over the door and Murray Gilchrist's new novel in my hand and a poised electric lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and every- thing was still except a towel that moved gently, al- most imperceptibly, to and fro. Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star. It alone did not oscillate. Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that towel. The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let me read. I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of the enormous organism. I thought: ''This magic thing is taking me there! In three days I shall be on that shore." Terrific adventiu-e ! The rest of the passengers were merely going to America. The magic thing was much more magic than I had conceived. The next morning, being up earlier than usual and wandering about on strange, inclosed decks imfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected populations of men and women — crowds of them — a healthy, powerful, prosperous, independent, somewhat 8 THE FIRST NIGHT stem and disdainful multitude, it seemed to me. Those muscular, striding giris in caps and shawls would not yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed strongly and carelessly past me ; had I been a ghost they would have walked through me. They were, and had been, all living — eating and sleeping — somewhere within the vessel, and I had not imagined it! It is true that some ass in the saloon had already calculated for my benefit that there were ** three thousand souls on board!" (The solenm use of the word "souls" in this connection by a passenger should stamp a man forever.) But such numerical statements do not really arouse the imagina- tion. I had to see with my eyes. And I did see with my eyes. That afternoon a high oiBficer of the ship, spiriting me away from the polite flirtations and pastimes of the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting scenes. And I saw a whole string of young women inoculated against smallpox, imder the interested gaze of a crowd of men ranged on a convenient staircase. And a little later I saw a whole string of men inoculated against smallpox, tmder the interested gaze of a crowd of young women ranged on a convenient staircase. ** They're having their sweet revenge," said the high officer, indicating the yotmg women. He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker. When I reflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which was necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and con- tent, in the inelastic forward spaces of the ship, he said with a certain grimness: ''Everything has to be screwed up as tight as you can screw it. And you must 9 YOUR UNITED STATES keep to the roiind. What you do to-day you must do to-morrow. But what you don't do to-day you can't get done to-morrow." Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world, a world in which the personal equation coimted. I re- member that while some four hundred in one long hall were applauding "Home, Sweet Home," very badly fiddled by a gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home" — and half of them Scandinavians!), and another four himdred or so were sitting expectant on those multi- farious convenient staircases or wandering in and out of the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred separate berths, and a third four hundred or so in an- other long hall were consuming a huge tea oflFered to them by a cohort of stewards in white — I remember that while all this was going forward and the complex mechanism of the kitchen was in full strain a little, tmtidy woman, with an infant dragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into the breath- less kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give me a drop o' milk for this child?" And imder the mili- tary gaze of the high oflScer, too! Something awful should have happened. The engines ought to have stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out to instant execution. The engines did seem to falter for a moment. But the high oflScer grimly smiled, and they went on again. "Give me yer mug, mother," said the cook. And the tmtidy woman went off with her booty. "Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high officer said, and guided me through imcharted territories to chambers where spits were revolving in front of in- lO M.^'-'^MHHHIK^ 1 Vr^ „,W^ 4 jm^ JU fi* ^ ^ ..^b ■I /r ^^ 1 DISEMBABK1NC AT NEW YORK THE FIRST NIGHT tense heat, and where a confectionery business proceeded, night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, and potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of dock- work lifted an egg out of boiling water after it had lain therein the number of seconds prescribed by you. And there, pinned to a board, was the order I had given for a special dinner that night. And there, too, more impres- sive even than that order, was a list of the several htm- dred stewards, together with a designation of the post of each in case of casualty. I noticed that thirty or forty of them were told off "to control passengers." After all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a crisis the elevator-boys themselves would have more author- ity than any passenger, however gorgeous. A thought salutary for gorgeous passengers — that they were in the final resort mere fool bodies to be controlled! After I had seen the coimtless store-rooms, in the recesses of each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his ear and a nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the world of the second cabin, which was a surprisingly brilliant imitation of the great world of the saloon, I found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the great world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught but a thin crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly thrilling parts of the ship. It was not, however, till the next day that I realized what the most thrilling part of the ship was. Under the protection of another high oflScer I had climbed to the bridge — seventy-five feet above the level of the sea — which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by an ambitious wave a couple of years before — and had II YOUR UNITED STATES there inspected the devices for detecting and extinguish- ing fires in distant holds by merely turning a handle, and the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs, and the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and the oiBBcers* piano; and I had descended by way of the capstan-gear (which, being capable of snapping a chain that would hold two hundred and sixty tons in sus- pension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce wild animal) right through the length of the vessel to the wheel-house aft. It was comforting to know that if six alternative steering-wheels were smashed, one after another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked, chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after descending several more stories, I had seen the actual steering — the tremendous affair moving to and fro, majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the light touch of a sailor six himdred feet distant. And then I had seen the four shafts, revolving lazily one himdred and eighty-four to the minute; and got myself involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery, whizzing all deserted in a very high temperature under electric bulbs. Only at rare intervals did I come across a man in brown doing nothing in particular — as often as not gazing at a dial; there were dials everywhere, showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to the dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve himdred to the minute, and then to the turbines them- selves — ^insignificant little things, with no swagger of huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that developed as much as one-third of the horse-power required for all the electricity of New York. 12 THE FIRST NIGHT And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at the rock-bottom of the steamer, I had been instructed to descend in earnest, and I went down and down steel ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incredible cavern, where a himdred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed every ten minutes by himdreds of tiny black dolls called firemen. I, too, was a doll as I looked up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace and along the endless vista of mouths. . . . Imagine hell with the addition of electric Ught, and you have it ! . . . And up- stairs, far above on the surface of the water, confec- tioners were making fancy cakes, and the elevator- boy was doing his work! . . . Yes, the inferno was the most thrilling part of the ship ; and no other part of the ship could hold a candle to it. And I remained of this conviction even when I sat in the captain's own room, smoking his august cigars and turning over his books. I no longer thought, ''Every revolution of the pro- pellers brings me nearer to that shore." I thought, "Every shovelful flimg into those white-hot mouths brings me nearer." It is an absolute fact that, four hours before we could hope to disembark, ladies in mantles and shore hats (seeming fantastic and enormous after the sobriety of ship attire), and gentlemen in shore hats and dark overcoats, were standing in attitudes of expectancy in the saloon-hall, holding wraps and small bags: some of their faces had never been seen till then in the pubUc resorts of the ship. Excitement will indeed take strange forms. For myself, although I was on the threshold 13 YOUR UNITED STATES of the greatest adventure of my life, I was unaware of being excited — I had not even "smelled" land, to say nothing of having seen it — ^until, when it was quite dark, I descried a queerly arranged group of different-colored lights in the distance — ^yeUow, red, green, and what not. My thoughts ran instantly to Coney Island. I knew that Coney was an island, and that it was a place where people had to be attracted and distracted somehow, and I decided that these illuminations were a device of the pleasure-mongers of Coney. And when the ship began to salute these illtuninations with answering flares I thought the captain was a rather good-natured man to consent thus to amuse the populace. But when we slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres of foam, and the whole entire illuminations began to approach us in a body, I perceived that my Coney Island was merely another craft, but a very important and of- ficial craft. An extremely small boat soon detached itself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a most extraordinary leisureness toward a white square of light that had somehow broken forth in the black- ness of our side. And looking down from the topmost deck, I saw, far below, the tiny boat manoeuver on the glinting wave into the reflection of our electricity and three mysterious men climb up from her and disappear into us. Then it was that I grew really excited, im- comfortably excited. The United States had stretched out a tentacle. In no time at all, as it seemed, another and more formidable tentacle had folded round me — in the shape of two interviewers. (How these men had got on board 14 THE FIRST NIGHT — and how my own particular friend had got on board — I knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I had been hearing all my life about the sublime American institution of the interview. I had been warned by Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was sud- denly up against it! Beneath a casual and jaimty ex- terior, I trembled. I wanted to sit, but dared not. They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were adepts. They had the better qualities of American dentists. Obviously they spent their lives in meeting notorieties on inboimd steamers, and made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were brief, quite impretentious, and inoffensive — though one of them did let out that the most saUent part of me was my teeth, and the other did assert that I behaved like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result of timidity trying to be dignified — this alleged school-boyishness!) I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race of interviewers in the United States. There is a variety of interviewers very different from them. I am, I think, entitled to consider myself a fairly first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not only in New York but in simdry other great cities. My initiation was brief, but it was thorough. Many va- rieties won my regard immediately, and kept it; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand (perhaps not nimierous) was at times imperfect. The brand in question, as to which I was amiably IS YOUR UNITED STATES cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is usually very yoiuig, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheer- fully introduces himself or herself with a hint that of course it is an awful bore to be interviewed, but he or she has a job to do and he or she must be allowed to do it. Just so! But the point which, in my audacity, I have occasionally permitted to occur to me is this: Is this sort of interviewer capable of doing the job allotted to him ? I do not mind slips of reporting, I do not mind a certain agreeable malice (indeed, I reckon to do a bit in that line myself). I do not even mind hasty mis- representations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium is still imannounced) ; but I do object to inelBficiency — especially in America, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther than any efficiency was ever carried before. Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the operation itself by the remark that he really doesn't know what question to ask you. (Too often I have been tempted to say: **Why not ask me to write the interview for you? It will save you trouble.") Having made this remark, the interviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career, together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference to her im- portance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amoimt of her earnings. This achieved, she breaks off breathless and reproaches you: *'But, my dear man, you aren't saying anything at all. You really must say something." ("My dear man" is the favorite form of address of this sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl.) Too often I have been tempted i6 THE DOWN-TOWS DBOARWAV OF CHOWDED S THE FIRST NIGHT to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is being in- terviewed?" When he has given you a chance to talk, this sort of interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes a note. The result the next morning is the anticipated result. The average newspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or woman has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being confused in his or her presence, committed a num- ber of absturdities which offered a strong and painful contrast to the devemess and wisdom of the brilliant youth. This result apparently satisfies the average newspaper reader, but it does not satisfy the expert. Immediately after my first bout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of the ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to be among the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York— not inter- viewers. Said one of them: **Not every interviewer in New York knows how to write — ^how to put a sentence together decently. And there are perhaps a few who don't accurately know the difference between impudence and wit." A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that when the variety of interviewing upon which I have just animadverted becomes the topic, quiet, reasonable Americans are apt to drop into causticity. Said another: "I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was ciu^d of personalities at an early stage — and by a nigger, too! 2 17 YOUR UNITED STATES I had been interviewing a nigger ^rize-fighter, and I'd made some remarks about the facial characteristics of niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a long letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never seen you. But I've seen your portraits, and let me re- spectfully tell you that you! re no Lillian Russell.*" Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and writ- ten, from visual observation, "Let me respectfully tell you that you! re no Lillian Russell." Said a third among my companions: "No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview in the United States." Which I foimd, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice. Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a little agitated — ^for about half an hour; in about half an hotu* the matter had somehow passed from their minds. "Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of inter- viewer?" I asked, at the saloon table. "The interviews will appear all the same/' was the reply. My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when I refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, but^vective. Let me not be misimderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand of American interviewer. I en- cotmtered a couple of really admirable women inter- viewerSi not too young, and a confraternity of men who z8 THE FIRST NIGHT did not disdain an elementary knowledge of their busi- ness. One of these arrived with a written list of ques- tions, took a shorthand note of all I said, and then brought me a proof to correct. In interviewing this amounts almost to genius. ... I have indicated what to me seems a defect — ^trifling, possibly, but still a defect — in the brilUant organization of the great national sport of interviewing. Were this defect removed, as it could be, the institution might be as perfect as the American oyster. Than which nothing is more perfect. "You aren't drinking your coffee," said some one, inspecting my cup at the saloon table. '*No," I answered, firmly; for when the smooth ef- ficiency of my human machine is menaced I am as faddy and nervous as a marine engineer over lubrication. "If I did, I shouldn't sleep." "And what of it?" demanded my particular friend, challengingly. It was a rebuke. It was as if he had said, "On this great night, when you enter my wondrous and romantic cotmtry for the first time, what does it matter whether you sleep or not?" I saw the point. I drank the coffee. The romantic sense, which had been momentarily driven back by the discussion of general ideas, swept over me again. ... In fact, through the saloon windows could be seen all the Battery end of New York and the first vague visions of sky-scrapers. . . . Then — ^the moments refused to be counted — ^we were descending by lifts and by gangways from the high upper decks of the ship down onto the 19 YOUR UNITED STATES rocky ground of the United States. I don't think that any American ever set foot in Europe with a more pro- found and delicious thrill than that wiiich affected me at that instant. ... I was there! . . . The official and un- official activities of the quay passed before me like a dream. ... I heard my name shouted by a man in a formidably severe uniform, and I thought, "Thus early have I somehow violated the Constitution of these States?" But it was only a telegram for me. . . . And then I was in a most rickety and confined taxi, and the taxi was full to the brim with luggage, two friends, and me. And I was off into New York. At the center of the first cross-roads I saw a splendid and erect individual, flashing forth authority, gaiety, and utter smartness in the gloom. Impossible not to believe that he was the owner of all the adjacent ground, disguised as a cavalry officer on foot. "What is that archduke?" I inquired. "He's just a cop." I knew then that I was in a great city. The rest of the ride was an enf evered phantasmagoria. We burst startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade — on the floor of it long and violent surface-cars, a few open shops and bars with commissionaires at the doors, vehicles dipping and rising out of holes in the ground, vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which ran deafening, glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above all that, a layer of darkness ; and above the layer of dark- ness enormous moving images of things in electricity — a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread, an umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water 20 THE FIRST NIGHT being emptied and filled, gigantic horses galloping at full speed, and an incredible heraldry of chewing-gum. . .. Sky-signs ! In Europe I had always inveighed manf tilly against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head, van- quished. These sky-signs annihilated argument. More- over, had they not been made possible by the invention of a European, and that European an intimate friend of my own? . .. ''I suppose this is Broadway?" I ventured. It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways. There are several different ones. What could be more different from this than the down-town Broadway of Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? And even this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew later on an election night. ... I was overpowered by Broadway. ''You must not expect me to talk," I said. We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into the bar, huge and gorgeous to match, shimmering with white bartenders and a variegated population of men- about-town. I had never seen such a bar. ''Two Polands and a Scotch highball," was the order. Of which geographical language I understood not a word. ' * See the fresco, ' ' my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, at once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that ntu^ery-rhjmae fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure qtiarter of New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon hunter, as a. sight, took my fancy more. Here it was, 21 YOUR UNITED STATES the free-luncheon counter of which the European reads — generously loaded, and much freer than the air. "Have something?" I would not. They could shame me into drinking coflfee, but they could not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven o'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me. We swept perilously bflf again into the welter. That same evening three of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole in the grotmd in the middle of New York, with the result that one of them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went scatheless. Such are the hazards of life. . .. We arrived at a terminus. And it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place. And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the significance of American hospitaUty — that combination of eager good-nature, Oriental lavish- .^ ness, and sheer brains. We had time to spare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose stunmit, for all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been tmable to descry. I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel. No sooner said than done. I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agree- able and lively yotmg dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars. Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe of bank-notes, whatever their value. Then we were in the train, and the train was moving. 22 THE FIRJiT NIGHT And every few seconds it liot -oast the end of a long, straight, lighted thoroughfare- -scores upon scores of them, with a wider and r^^;^^ hrilliant street interspersed among them at intervals. And I forgot at what htm- * dredth street the train paused before rolling finally out of New York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metro- politan city. I thought, ** Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the best of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew the proud and the shameful immistakable marks of the real thing. And I was aware of a poignant sym- pathy with those people and those mysterious genera- tions who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its baseness, its rectitude and its mournful errors, its colossal sense of life. I liked New York irrevocably. II STREETS II STREETS WHEN I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in the tranquillity of Sunday morning, and when I last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish gloom of a busy sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain European capitals has forced me to modify this judg- ment; but I still think that Fifth Avenue, if not un- equaled, is tinsurpassed. One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the company of an architectural expert who, with the in- credible elastic good nature of American business men, had abandoned his affairs for half a day in order to go with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as to get some basis of tmderstanding or disagreement, what building in New York had pleased me most. I at once said the University Club — to my mind a masterpiece. He approved, and a great peace filled our automobile; in which peace we expanded. He asked me what build- ing in the world made the strongest appeal to me, and I at once said the Strozzi Palace at Florence. Whereat he was decidedly sympathetic. "Fifth Avenue," I said, ** always reminds me of Florence and the Strozzi. . . . The cornices, you know." He stopped the automobile tmder the Gorham store 27 YOUR UNITED STATES and displayed to me the finest cornice in New York, and told me how Stanford White had put up several experimental cornices there before arriving at finality. Indeed, a great cornice ! I admit I was somewhat dashed by the information that most cornices in New York are made of cast iron; but only for a moment! What, after all, do I care what a cornice is made of, so long as it juts proudly out from the fagade and helps the street to a splendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither read nor heard a word of the cornices of New York, and yet for me New York was first and last the city of effec- tive cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes differ!) The cornice must remind you of Italy, and through Italy of the Renaissance. And is it not the boast of the United States to be a renaissance ? I always felt that there was something obscurely symbolic in the New York cornice — symbolic of the necessary qualities of a renaissance, half cruel and half htunane. The critical European excusably expects a very great deal from Fifth Avenue, as being the principal shopping street of the richest community in the world. (I speak not of the residential blocks north of Fifty-ninth Street, whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short of their pretensions.) And the critical European will not be disappointed, imless his foible is to be disappointed — as, in fact, occasionally happens. Except for the miserly splitting, here and there in the older edifices, of an in- adequate grotmd floor into a mezzanine and a shallow box (a device employed more frankly and usefully with an outer flight of steps on the East Side) , there is noth- ing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Wash- 28 STREETS ington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecture there is, of course — the same applies inevitably to every long street in every capital — ^but the general effect is homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous. And the alternation of high and low buildings produces not infrequently the most agreeable architectural acci- dents : for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street, the pale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker Trust against a background of the lofty red of the iEolian Building. . . . And then, that great white store on the opposite pavement ! The single shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are im- pressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuine imagina- tion and faith. 