Chapter 4

Fifth Avenue is handsome, the handsomest street imaginable. It is what the streets of German cities try to be. The buildings are large, square, 'imposing,' built with the solidity of opulence. The street, as a whole, has a character and an air of achievement. "Whatever else may be doubted or denied, American civilisation has produced this." One feels rich and safe as one walks. Back in Broadway, New York dropped her mask, and began to betray herself once again. A little crowd, expressionless, intent, and volatile, before a small shop, drew me. In the shop-window was a young man, pleasant-faced, a little conscious, and a little bored, dressed very lightly in what might have been a runner's costume. He was bowing, twisting, and posturing in a slow rhythm. From time to time he would put a large card on a little stand in the corner. The cards bore various legends. He would display a card that said, "THIS UNDERWEAR DOES NOT IMPEDE THE MOVEMENT OF THE BODY IN ANY DIRECTION." Then he moved his body in every direction, from position to position, probable or improbable, and was not impeded. With a terrible dumb patience he turned the next card: "IT GIVES WITH THE BODY IN VIOLENT EXERCISING." The young man leapt suddenly, lunged, smote imaginary balls, belaboured invisible opponents, ran with immense speed but no progress, was thrown to earth by the Prince of the Air, kicked, struggled, then bounded to his feet again. But all this without a word. "IT ENABLES YOU TO KEEP COOL WHILE EXERCISING." The young man exercised, and yet was cool. He did this, I discovered later, for many hours a day.

Not daring to imagine his state of mind, I hurried off through Union Square. One of the many daily fire-alarms had gone; the traffic was drawn to one side, and several fire-engines came, with clanging of bells and shouting, through the space, gleaming with brass, splendid in their purpose. Before the thrill in the heart had time to die, or the traffic to close up, swung through an immense open motor-car driven by a young mechanic. It was luxuriously appointed, and had the air of a private car being returned from repairing. The man in it had an almost Swinburnian mane of red hair, blowing back in the wind, catching the last lights of day. He was clad, as such people often are in this country these hot days, only in a suit of yellow overalls, so that his arms and shoulders and neck and chest were bare. He was big, well-made, and strong, and he drove the car, not wildly, but a little too fast, leaning back rather insolently conscious of power. In private life, no doubt, a very ordinary youth, interested only in baseball scores; but in this brief passage he seemed like a Greek god, in a fantastically modern, yet not unworthy way emblemed and incarnate, or like the spirit of Henley's 'Song of Speed.' So I found a better image of America for my sculptor than the shirt-sleeved young man.

III

NEW YORK--(_continued_)

The hotel into which the workings of blind chance have thrown me is given over to commercial travellers. Its life is theirs, and the few English tourists creep in and out with the shy, bewildered dignity of their race and class. These American commercial travellers are called 'drummers'; drummers in the most endless and pointless and extraordinary of wars. They have the air and appearance of devotees, men set aside, roaming preachers of a _jehad_ whose meaning they have forgotten. They seem to be invariably of the short, dark type. The larger, fair-haired, long-headed men are common in business, but not in 'drumming.' The drummer's eyes have a hard, rapt expression. He is not interested in the romance of the road, like an English commercial traveller; only in its ever-changing end. These people are for ever sending off and receiving telegrams, messages, and cablegrams; they are continually telephoning; stenographers are in waiting to record their inspirations. In the intervals of activity they relapse into a curious trance, husbanding their vitality for the next crisis. I have watched them with terror and fascination. All day there are numbers of them sitting, immote and vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs in the hall. They are never smoking, never reading a paper, never even chewing. The expressions of their faces never change. It is impossible to guess what, or if anything, is in their minds. Hour upon hour they remain. Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to some call or revelation incomprehensible to us, and move out through the door into the clang and confusion of Broadway.

It all confirms the impression that grows on the visitor to America that Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the light, metaphorical sense of the words. It has its ritual and theology, its high places and its jargon, as well as its priests and martyrs. One of its more mystical manifestations is in advertisement. America has a childlike faith in advertising. They advertise here, everywhere, and in all ways. They shout your most private and sacred wants at you. Nothing is untouched. Every day I pass a wall, some five hundred square feet of which a gentleman has taken to declare that he is 'out' to break the Undertakers' Trust. Half the advertisement is a coloured photograph of himself. The rest is, "See what I give you for 75 dols.!" and a list of what he does give. He gives everything that the most morbid taphologist could suggest, beginning with "splendidly carved full-size oak casket, with black ivory handles. Four draped Flambeaux...." and going on to funereal ingenuities that would have overwhelmed Mausolus, and make death impossible for a refined man.

But there are heights as well as depths. I have been privileged with some intimate glances into the greatest of those peculiarly American institutions, the big departmental stores. Materially it is an immense building, containing all things that any upper-middle-class person could conceivably want. Such a store includes even Art, with the same bland omnipotence. If you wander into the vast auditorium, it is equal chances whether you hear a work of Beethoven, Victor Herbert, Schonberg, or Mr Hirsch. If you are 'artistic,' you may choose between a large coloured photograph of the Eiffel Tower, a carbon print of Botticelli, and a reproduction of an 'improvisation' by Herr Kandinsky. You may buy an Elizabethan dining-table, a Graeco-Roman bronze, the latest dress designed by M. Bakst, or a packet of pins. Or you may sit and muse on the life of the employee of this place, who gets from it all that in less favoured civilisations family, guild, club, township, and nationality have given him or her. As a child he gets education, then evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training, swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under the sun, from palaeography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps, hospitals, ever-present medical attendance, and at the end a pension, and, I suppose, a store cemetery. And all for the price of a few hours' work a day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' Can human hearts desire more? And, when all millionaires are as sensible, will they? In industries and businesses like this, where the majority of the employed are women, it ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium. Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind of 'loyalty.'

In one corner of this store is the advertising department. There are gathered poets, artists, _litterateurs_, and mere intellectuals, all engaged in explaining to the upper middle-classes what there is for them to buy and why they should buy it. It is a life of good salary, steady hours, sufficient leisure, and entire dignity. There is no vulgarity in this advertising, but the most perfect taste and great artistic daring and novelty. The most 'advanced' productions of Europe are scanned for ideas and suggestions. Two of the leading young 'post-impressionist' painters in Paris, whose names are just beginning to be known in England, have been designing posters for this store for years. I stood and watched with awe a young American genius doing entirely Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings. "We give our artists a free hand," said the very intelligent lady in charge of that section; "except, of course, for nudes or improprieties. And we don't allow any figures of people _smoking_. Some of our customers object very strongly...."

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night. There comes an hour of evening when lower Broadway, the business end of the town, is deserted. And if, having felt yourself immersed in men and the frenzy of cities all day, you stand out in the street in this sudden hush, you will hear, like a strange questioning voice from another world, the melancholy boom of a foghorn, and realise that not half a mile away are the waters of the sea, and some great liner making its slow way out to the Atlantic. After that, the lights come out up-town, and the New York of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants begins to roar and flare. The merciless lights throw a mask of unradiant glare on the human beings in the streets, making each face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue. The chorus of voices becomes shriller. The buildings tower away into obscurity, looking strangely theatrical, because lit from below. And beyond them soars the purple roof of the night. A stranger of another race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlpool. He would find only this unresponsive canopy of black, unpierced even, if the seeker stood near a centre of lights, by any star. But while he looks, away up in the sky, out of the gulfs of night, spring two vast fiery tooth-brushes, erect, leaning towards each other, and hanging on to the bristles of them a little Devil, little but gigantic, who kicks and wriggles and glares. After a few moments the Devil, baffled by the firmness of the bristles, stops, hangs still, rolls his eyes, moon-large, and, in a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving only the night, blacker and a little bewildered, and the unconscious throngs of ant-like human beings. Turning with terrified relief from this exhibition of diabolic impotence, the stranger finds a divine hand writing slowly across the opposite quarter of the heavens its igneous message of warning to the nations, "Wear--Underwear for Youths and Men-Boys." And close by this message come forth a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round, vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear. Night after night they wage this combat. What gods they are who fight endlessly and indecisively over New York is not for our knowledge; whether it be Thor and Odin, or Zeus and Cronos, or Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and Ahriman, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-an-end. The ways of our lords were ever riddling and obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, stretching from the horizon to the zenith, appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may have been within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, some minor deity in the Dionysian theogony, dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to the music of the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia and her twinkling feet among the Pleiades. And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases himself from his strained posture to drive a sidereal golf-ball out of sight through the meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, and drives again.

"O Nineveh, are these thy gods, Thine also, mighty Nineveh?"

Why this theophany, or how the gods have got out to perform their various 'stunts' on the _flammantia moenia mundi_, is not asked by their incurious devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide spreads itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres and 'movies' are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' or 'She's some Daisy!' or 'Good-night, Nurse!' In houses off the streets around children are being born, lovers are kissing, people are dying. Above, in the midst of those coruscating divinities, sits one older and greater than any. Most colossal of all, it flashes momently out, a woman's head, all flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, passionless, in its simplicity and conventional representation queerly like an archaic Greek or early Egyptian figure. Queen of the night behind, and of the gods around, and of the city below--here, if at all, you think, may one find the answer to the riddle. Her ostensible message, burning in the firmament beside her, is that we should buy pepsin chewing-gum. But there is more, not to be given in words, ineffable. Suddenly, when she has surveyed mankind, she closes her left eye. Three times she winks, and then vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but portentous, terrifyingly steady, obliterating a great tract of the sky. Hour by hour she does this, night by night, year by year. That enigmatic obscuration of light, that answer that is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing in this world that a child born near here will see, and the last that a dying man will have to take for a message to the curious dead. She is immortal. Men have worshipped her as Isis and as Ashtaroth, as Venus, as Cybele, Mother of the Gods, and as Mary. There is a statue of her by the steps of the British Museum. Here, above the fantastic civilisation she observes, she has no name. She is older than the sky-scrapers amongst which she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is a trifle weary. And the only answer to our cries, the only comment upon our cities, is that divine stare, the wink, once, twice, thrice. And then darkness.

IV

BOSTON AND HARVARD

It is right to leave Boston late in a summer afternoon, and by sea. Naval departure is always the better. A train snatches you, hot, dusty, and smoky, with an irritated hurry out of the back parts of a town. The last glimpse of a place you may have grown to like or love is, ignobly, interminable rows of the bedroom-windows in mean streets, a few hovels, some cinder-heaps, and a factory chimney. As like as not, you are reft from a last wave to the city's unresponsive and dingy back by the roar and suffocation of a tunnel. By sea one takes a gracefuller, more satisfactory farewell.

Boston put on her best appearance to watch our boat go out for New York. The harbour was bright with sunlight and blue water and little white sails, and there wasn't more than the faintest smell of tea. The city sat primly on her little hills, decorous, civilised, European-looking. It is homely after New York. The Boston crowd is curiously English. They have nice eighteenth-century houses there, and ivy grows on the buildings. And they are hospitable. All Americans are hospitable; but they haven't _quite_ time in New York to practise the art so perfectly as the Bostonians. It is a lovely art.... But Boston also makes you feel at home without meaning to. A delicious ancient Toryism is to be found here. "What is wrong with America," a middle-aged lady told me, "is this _Democracy_. They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don't know how to use them, and give them only to _us_, the Educated." My heart leapt the Atlantic, and was in a Cathedral or University town of South England.

Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America in Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It is remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to Berlin. Boston and Munich were the leaders forty years ago. They can't quite make out that they aren't now. It is too incredible that Art should leave her goose-feather bed and away to the wraggle-taggle business-men. And certainly, if Berlin and New York are more 'live,' Boston and Munich are more themselves, less feverishly imitations of Paris. But the undisputed palm is there no more; and its absence is felt.

But I had little time to taste Boston itself. I was lured across the river to a place called Cambridge, where is the University of Harvard. Harvard is the Oxford and Cambridge of America, they claim. She has moulded the nation's leaders and uttered its ideals. Harvard, Boston, New England, it is impossible to say how much they are interwoven, and how they have influenced America. I saw Harvard in 'Commencement,' which is Eights Week and May Week, the festive winding-up of the year, a time of parties and of valedictions. One of the great events of Commencement, and of the year, is the Harvard-Yale baseball match. To this I went, excited at the prospect of my first sight of a 'ball game,' and my mind vaguely reminiscent of the indolent, decorous, upper-class crowd, the sunlit spaces, the dignified ritual, and white-flannelled grace of Lord's at the 'Varsity cricket match. The crowd was gay, and not very large. We sat in wooden stands, which were placed in the shape of a large V. As all the hitting which counts in baseball takes place well in front of the wicket, so to speak, the spectators have the game right under their noses; the striker stands in the angle of the V and plays outwards. The field was a vast place, partly stubbly grass, partly worn and patchy, like a parade-ground. Beyond it lay the river; beyond that the town of Cambridge and the University buildings. Around me were undergraduates, with their mothers and sisters. 'Cambridge'! ... but there entered to us, across the field, a troop of several hundred men, all dressed in striped shirts of the same hue and pattern, and headed by a vast banner which informed the world that they were the graduates of 1910, celebrating their triennial. In military formation they moved across the plain towards us, led by a band, ceaselessly vociferating, and raising their straw hats in unison to mark the time. There followed the class of 1907, attired as sailors; 1903, the decennial class, with some samples of their male children marching with them, and a banner inscribed "515 Others. No Race Suicide"; 1898, carefully arranged in an H-shaped formation, dancing along to their music with a slow polka-step, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front, and at the head of all their leader, dancing backwards in perfect time, marshalling them; 1888, middle-aged men, again with some children, and a Highland regiment playing the bagpipes.

When these had passed to the seats allotted for them, I had time to observe the players, who were practising about the ground, and I was shocked. They wear dust-coloured shirts and dingy knickerbockers, fastened under the knee, and heavy boots. They strike the English eye as being attired for football, or a gladiatorial combat, rather than a summer game. The very close-fitting caps, with large peaks, give them picturesquely the appearance of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to watch, and in outline easy to understand, as it is merely glorified rounders. A cricketer is fascinated by their rapidity and skill in catching and throwing. There is excitement in the game, but little beauty except in the long-limbed 'pitcher,' whose duty it is to hurl the ball rather further than the length of a cricket-pitch, as bewilderingly as possible. In his efforts to combine speed, mystery, and curve, he gets into attitudes of a very novel and fantastic, but quite obvious, beauty. M. Nijinsky would find them repay study.

One queer feature of this sport is that unoccupied members of the batting side, fielders, and even spectators, are accustomed to join in vocally. You have the spectacle of the representatives of the universities endeavouring to frustrate or unnerve their opponents, at moments of excitement, by cries of derision and mockery, or heartening their own supporters and performers with exclamations of 'Now, Joe!' or 'He's got them!' or 'He's the boy!' At the crises in the fortunes of the game, the spectators take a collective and important part. The Athletic Committee appoints a 'cheer-leader' for the occasion. Every five or ten minutes this gentleman, a big, fine figure in white, springs out from his seat at the foot of the stands, addresses the multitude through a megaphone with a 'One! Two! Three!' hurls it aside, and, with a wild flinging and swinging of his body and arms, conducts ten thousand voices in the Harvard yell. That over, the game proceeds, and the cheer-leader sits quietly waiting for the next moment of peril or triumph. I shall not easily forget that figure, bright in the sunshine, conducting with his whole body, passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding in the frenzy of his inspiration from side to side, contorted, rhythmic, ecstatic. It seemed so wonderfully American, in its combination of entire wildness and entire regulation, with the whole just a trifle fantastic. Completely friendly and befriended as I was, I couldn't help feeling at those moments very alien and very, very old--even more so than after the protracted game had ended in a victory for Harvard, when the dusty plain was filled with groups and lines of men dancing in solemn harmony, and a shouting crowd, broken by occasional individuals who could find some little eminence to lead a Harvard yell from, and who conducted the bystanders, and then vanished, and the crowd swirled on again.

Different enough was the scene next day, when all Harvard men who were up for Commencement assembled and, arranged by years, marched round the yard. Class by class they paraded, beginning with veterans of the 'fifties, down to the class of 1912. I wonder if English nerves could stand it. It seems to bring the passage of time so very presently and vividly to the mind. To see, with such emphatic regularity, one's coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!.... Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency become apparent and poignant. In five minutes fifty years of America, of so much of America, go past one. The shape of the bodies, apart from the effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways of wearing hair and beard and moustaches, all these change a little decade by decade, before your eyes. And through the whole appearance runs some continuity, which is Harvard.

The orderly progression of the years was unbroken, except at one point. There was one gap, large and arresting. Though all years were represented, there seemed to be nobody in the procession between fifty and sixty. I asked a Harvard friend the reason. "The War," he said. He told me there had always been that gap. Those who were old enough to be conscious of the war had lost a big piece of their lives. With their successors a new America began. I don't know how true it is. Certainly, the dates worked out right. And I met an American on a boat who had been a child in one of the neutral States. He used to watch the regiments forming in the main street of his town, and marching out, some north and some south. He said it felt as though pieces of his body were being torn in different directions. And he was only nine.