Part 10

Washington is constantly in the throes of an epidemic of dedications. There are now more statues in the city than Mr. Baedeker ever can tally and each of them has undergone dedication--at least once. The President has been corralled, if possible, although Mr. Wilson has already shown a reticence for this sort of thing. If the President simply will not come, a Governor or a rather famous Senator will do as well. And in the far pinch there are many Representatives in Washington who are mighty good orators. You can almost get a Representative at the crook of your finger, and you cannot have a real dedication without a splurry of oratory. It is almost as necessary as music--or the refreshments.

As you slip by one of those statues--"the equestrian figure of General Andrew Jackson on horseback"--the gentleman from Reading demands that the car stop. He wants to ask a question and apparently he cannot ask a question and be in motion at the same time. So he demands that the car be stopped. It is one of the privileges of a man who has paid a perfectly good dollar for the trip. The car stops--abruptly.

You will probably recall that Jackson statue, standing in the center of Lafayette square and directly in front of the White House. Perhaps General Jackson rode a horse that way and perhaps he did not, but there the doughty old warrior sits, his bronze mount plunging high upon hind legs.

"What is ever going to keep that statue from falling over some day?" demands the man from Reading. He has a keen professional interest in the matter, for he has been a blacksmith up in that brisk Pennsylvania town for many a year.

The lecturer explains that the tail of the bronze horse is heavily weighted and that the whole figure is held in balance that way. But the blacksmith is Pennsylvania Dutch--of the sort not to be convinced in an instant--and he sets forth his opinion of the danger at length, to the bald-headed man from Baltimore, who sits just behind him.

The lecturer goes forward once again. You look at the proud old mansion that faces Lafayette square, and gasp when the intelligent young man with the megaphone tells you that it was given to Daniel Webster by the American people and that he gambled it away. You notice the house that Admiral Dewey got from the same source, and wonder if he could not have contrived possibly to gamble it away. You note St. John's church--"the Church of State," the young man calls it--and turn into Sixteenth street. But alas, it is Sixteenth street no longer. Through a bit of the official snobbery that frequently comes to the surface in the governing of the national capital that fine highway has been named "the Avenue of the Presidents," a name that is so out of harmony of our fine American town that it will probably be changed in the not distant future.

The lecturer points your attention to another house.

"The Dolly Madison Hotel, for women only," he announces. "No men or dogs allowed above the first floor. The only male thing around the premises is the mail-box and it is--"

He has gone too far. You fix your steely glance of disapproval upon him and he withers. He drops his megaphone and whispers into your ear once again:

"I hate to do it," he apologizes, "but I have to. The boss says:--'Give 'em wit an' humor, Harry, or back you goes to your old job on a Fourteenth street car.' Think of givin' that bunch wit an' humor! Look at that old sobersides next to you, still a-worryin' about that statue!"

Wit and humor it is then. Wit and humor and wealth and fashion. It almost seems too little to offer a mere dollar for such joys. You make the turn around the drive in back of the White House and you miss the Taft cow--which in other days was wont to feast upon the greensward. You ask the lecturer what became of Mr. Taft's cow.

"She was deceased," he solemnly explained, "a year before his term was up--of the colic."

And of that somewhat ambiguous statement you can make your own translation.

* * * * *

The sight-seeing car stops at the little group of hotels in Pennsylvania avenue, near the site of the old Baltimore & Potomac railroad station. The lecturer begins to use his megaphone to expatiate upon the advantages of a trip to Arlington which is about to begin, but Arlington is too sweetly serious a memorial to be explored by a humorous motor-car. And--in the offing--you are seeing something else. Another car of the line upon which you have been voyaging is moored at the very point from which you started, not quite two hours ago. Upon that car sit the same two young black-haired ladies. Two young men are climbing up to sit beside them. Your gaze wanders. On the rival car across the way the two very blondes in black are still holding giggling conversation. Your suspicions are roused.

Do they ever ride?

Apparently not. Tomorrow they will be upon the cars again, the blondes upon the right, the brunettes upon the left. And the day after tomorrow they will sit and wait and appear interested and in joyous anticipation. And if it rains upon the following day they will don their little mackintoshes and talk pleasantly about its being nearly time to clear up.

Now you know. Seein' Washington employs cappers. Those young ladies sit there to induce dollars--faith, 'tis seduction, pure and simple--from narrow masculine pockets. You do know, now.

* * * * *

If we are giving much space to the tourist view of Washington it is because the tourist plays so important a part in the life of the town. He is one of its chief assets and, seriously speaking, there is something rather pathetic in the joy that comes to the faces of those who step out from the great portals of the new station for the very first time. There is something in their very expressions that seems to express long seasons of saving and of scrimping, perhaps of downright deprivation in order that our great American mecca may finally be reached. You will see the same expressions upon the faces of the humbler folk who go to visit any of the great expositions that periodically are held across the land.

That expression of eminent satisfaction--for who could fail to see Washington for the first time and not be eminently satisfied--reaches its climax each week-day afternoon in the East Room of the White House. If President Wilson has reached a finer determination than his determination to let the folk of his nation-wide family come and see him, we have yet to hear of it. And there is not a man or woman in the land who should be above attending the simple official reception that the President gives each afternoon at his house to all who may care to come.

There is little red-tape about the arrangements in advance. The tendency to hedge the President around with restrictions has been completely offset in the present administration. A note or a hurried call upon the President's secretary in advance--a card of invitation is quickly forthcoming. And at half-past two o'clock of any ordinary afternoon you present yourself at the east wing of the White House. Your card is quickly scrutinized and you may be sure of it that the sharp-eyed Irishman who is more than policeman but rather a mentor at the gate, has scrutinized you, too. His judgment is quick, rarely erring. And unless you meet his entire approval, you are not going to enter the President's house. But he has approved and before you know it you--there are several hundred of you--are slipping forward in a march into the basement of the Executive Mansion and up one of its broad stairs. There are numerous attendants along the path.

"Single file!" shouts one of them and single file you all go--just as you used to play Indian or follow-your-leader in long-ago days. And you all step from the stair-head into the East Room, while the women-folk among you conjure imagination to their aid and endeavor to see that lovely apartment dressed for a great reception or, best of all, one of the infrequent White House weddings.

Other attendants quickly and easily form you into a great crescent, two or three human files in width and extending in a great sweep from a vast pair of closed doors which give to the living portion of the house. No one speaks, but every one takes stock of his neighbors. If it is in vacation season there are many boys and girls--for whole schools make the Washington expedition in these days--there may be several Indians in war-paint and feather making ceremonious visit to the Great White Brother. If you are traveled you will probably see New England or Carolina or Kansas or California in these folk, whose hearts are quickened in anticipation.

Suddenly--the great door opens, just a little. A thin, wiry man in gray steps into the room and takes his position near the head of the crescent. An aide in undress military uniform stands close to him, two sharp-faced young men stand a little to the left of them and act as a human Scylla and Charybdis through which all must pass. There are no preliminaries--no hint of ceremony. Within five seconds of the time when the President has taken his place, the line begins to move forward. In twenty minutes he has shaken hands with three or four hundred people and the reception is over. But in the brief fraction of a single minute when your hand has grasped that of the President you feel that he knows no one else on earth. He concentrates upon you and that, in itself, is a gift of which any statesman may well be proud. And while you are thinking of the pleasure that his word or two of greeting has given you, you awake to find yourself out of the room and hunting for your umbrella at the check-stand in the lower hall. The pleasant personal feeling is with you even after you have left the shelter of the White House roof. It is showering gently and a man under a tree is murmuring something about Secretary Bryan seeing visitors at a quarter to five but neither makes impress upon you. You are merely thinking how much easier it is to come to see the President of the greatest republic in the world than many a lesser man within it--railroad heads, bankers, even petty politicians.

In other days it was not as easy to gain admittance to the President, but the tourist who was not above guile could be photographed shaking hands with the great person. A place on that always alluring Pennsylvania avenue did the trick. You stepped in a canvas screen into the place of the enlarged image of a sailor who was once snapped shaking hands with President Taft. When the picture was finished you were where the sailor had been, and you had a post-card that would make the folks back home take notice. True you were a little more prominent in it than the President, but then Mr. Taft was not paying for the picture. In fact Mr. Taft, when he heard of the practice, grew extremely annoyed and had it stopped, so ending abruptly one of the tourist joys of Washington.

After the White House, the Capitol is an endless source of delight to those who have come to Washington from afar. A little squad of aged men, who have a wolfish scent for tourists, act as its own particular Reception Committee. These old men, between their cards and the sporting extras of the evening papers, condescend to act as guides to the huge building. We shall spare you the details of a trip through it with them. It is enough to say that they are, in the spirit at least, sight-seeing car lecturers grown into another generation. Their quarrels with the Capitol police are endless. On one memorable occasion, a captain of that really efficient police-force had decided to mark the famous whispering stone in the old Hall of Representatives with a bit of paint. You can read about that whispering stone in any of the tourist-guides which the train-boy sells you on your way to Washington. Suffice it now to say that when you have found this phonetic marvel and have stood upon it your whisper will be heard distinctly in a certain far corner of the gallery of the room. It is an acoustic freak of which the schoolboys out in Racine can tell you better than I. And it is one of the prized assets of the Capitol guides. The police captain forgot that when he set out to mark it.

It came back to him the evening of that day, however, when the building had been cleared. He chanced to cross the old hall and, looking for his marker, found three of the guides upon their knees carefully restoring it to absolute uniformity with its neighbors. And the captain nearly lost his job. He had sought to interfere with prerogative, and prerogative is a particularly sacred thing at the Federal capital--as we shall see in a little while.

* * * * *

Late in a pleasant afternoon all Washington seems to walk in F street. The little girls come out of the matinees, the bigger girls drift out from the tea-rooms, there is a swirl of motor vehicles--gasoline and electric--but the tourist knows not of all this. The gay flammeries of Pennsylvania avenue hold him fascinated. Souvenir shops rivet him to their counters. Post-cards--grave, humorous, abominable--urge themselves upon him. But if all these fail--they have post-cards nowadays of the high schools in each of the little Arizona towns--here upon a counter are the little statuettes of pre-digested currency.

Mr. Lincoln in $10,000 of greenbacks. And yet that money today could not buy one drop of gasoline, let alone an imported touring automobile, for once it has passed through the government's macerating machine it is only fit for the sculptor. Three thousand dollars go into a Benjamin Harrison hat, fifteen thousand into a model of the Washington Monument that looks as if it were about to melt beneath a summer sun. Twenty thousand doll--stay, there is a limit to credulity. And you refuse to buy without a signed certificate from the Treasury Department as to these valuations.

Most of the tourists do buy, however. They seem to be blindly credulous--these folk who feel their way to Washington. It was not so very many spring-times ago that a rumor worked afloat of a dull Sabbath to the effect that the Washington Monument was about to fall. That rumor slipped around the town with amazing rapidity--Washington is hardly more than a gossipy, rumor-filled village after all. Two or three thousand folk went down to the Mall to be present at the fall. No two of them could agree as to the direction in which the shaft would tumble and they all made a long and cautious line that completely encircled it--at a safe distance. After long hours of waiting they all went home. Yet no one was angry. They all seemed to think it part of the day's program.

* * * * *

There is another side of Washington not so funny and tourists, even of the most sedate sort, who stop at the large hotels and who ride about in dignified motor-cars, do not see it. It is the side of heart-burnings. For in no other city of the land is the social code more sharply defined--and regulated. There are many cities in the country and we are telling of them in this book, who draw deep breaths upon exclusiveness. But in none of these save Washington do the folk who do obtain flaunt themselves in the faces of those who do not. The fine old houses of Beacon street, in Boston, and of the Battery down at Charleston may draw themselves apart, but they do it silently and unostentatiously. In the very nature of things in Washington much modesty is quite out of the question.

For here at our Federal capital we have a strange mixture of real democracy and false aristocracy as well as real--if there be any such thing as real aristocracy. The fact that almost every person in the town works, more or less directly, for Uncle Sam makes for the democracy. And that self-same fact seems to fairly establish the aristocracy--you can frankly call much of it snobbishness--of the place. To understand the whys and wherefores of this paradox one would need, himself, to be an employé of the government, of large or small degree. They are many and they are complicated. But an illustration or two will suffice to show what we mean:

A rule, which no one nowadays seems very desirous of fathering, but nevertheless a rule of long standing, states that when a department chief enters an elevator in any of the department buildings it must carry him without other stops to his floor. The other passengers in the car must wait the time and the will of the chief, no matter how urgent may be their errands or how short the time at their command. A gradual increase of this silly rule has made it include many assistants, sub-chiefs and assistants to sub-chiefs. Only the elevator man knows the rank at which a government employé becomes entitled to this peculiar privilege. But he does know, and woe be to that little stenographer who enters the Department of X---- at just three minutes of nine in the morning, with the expectation of being at her desk with that promptness which the Federal government demands of the folk in its service. The second assistant to a second assistant of a sub-chief of a sub-division may have entered. The little stenographer's desk is upon the third floor; the gentleman whose official title spelled out reaches almost across a sheet of note paper is upon the seventh. There are folk within the crowded elevator-car for the fourth and fifth and sixth floors as well. But they have neither title nor rank and the car shoots to the seventh floor for the benefit of the Mr. Assistant Somebody. If there is another Assistant Somebody there to ride down to the ground floor--and there frequently is--you can imagine the consternation of the clerks. And yet it is part of the system under which they have to work when they work for that most democratic of employers--Uncle Samuel.

The secretary of an important department who entered the cabinet with the present administration stayed very late at his office one evening, but found the elevator man awaiting him when he stepped out into the hallway of the deserted building. It was only a short flight of stairs to the street, and the secretary--it was Mr. Bryan--asked the man why he had not gone home.

"My orders are to stay here, sir, until the secretary has gone home for the night," was the reply.

It is hardly necessary to say that right there was one order in the State department that was immediately revoked, while some twenty thousand clerks and stenographers who form the working staff of official Washington sent up little prayers of thanksgiving. These clerks and stenographers make up the every-day fiber of the town life. They go to work in the morning at nine--for a half-hour before that time you can see human streams of them pouring toward the larger departments--and they quit at half past four. The closing hour used to be five, but the clerks decided that they would have a shorter lunch-time and so they moved their afternoon session thirty minutes ahead. Half an hour is a short lunch-time and so official Washington carries its lunch to its desk, more or less cleverly disguised. The owners of popular priced downtown restaurants have long since given up in utter disgust.

But official Washington does not care. Official Washington ends its day at half-past four and official Washington is such a power that matinées, afternoon lectures and concerts of any popular sort are rarely planned to begin before that hour. And on the hot summer afternoons of the Federal capital the wisdom of such early closing is hardly to be doubted. On such afternoons, matinée or concert, a cup of tea or a walk along the shop windows of F street are all forgotten. For beyond the heat of the city, within easy reach by its really wonderful transportation system, are playgrounds of infinite variety and joy. True it is that the really fine parts of Rock Creek Park are rather rigidly held for those folk who can afford to ride in motor cars, but there is the river, innumerable picnic-grounds in every direction, fine bathing at Chesapeake beach, not far distant--and the canal.

Of all these the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal is by far the most distinctive. And how the Washington folk do love that old waterway! What fun they do have out of it with their motor boats and their canoes. If that old water-highway, almost losing its path in the stretches of thick wood and undergrowth, had been created as a plaything for the capital city, it could hardly have been better devised. The motor boats and the canoes set forth from Georgetown--on holidays and Sundays in great droves. They go all the way up to Great Falls--and even beyond--working their passage through the old locks, exchanging repartee with the lock-tenders, loafing under the shadows of the trees, drinking in the indolence of the summer days.

* * * * *

But Shafer's Lock or Cabin John's Bridge is not the Chevy Chase Club and official Washington knows that. It reads in the daily papers of that other life, of the folk who wear white flannels and dawdle around great porches all day long; hears rumors brought, Lord knows how, from the gossipy Metropolitan Club; almost touches shoulders with its smart breakfasts and lunches and dinners when it comes in and out of the confectioners' and the big hotels. But it is none the less apart, hopelessly and irrevocably apart. Uncle Sam may take the office folk of his capital and give them the assurance of a livelihood through long years, but that is all. He gives them no chance to step out of the comfortable rut into which they have been placed. The good positions, the positions that mean rank and title and entrance to the hallowed places, rarely come through promotions. They are the gifts of fortune, gifts even to strange folk from Cleveland or Madison or Stockton. They are not the reward of faithful service at an unknown desk.

And so official Washington, as we have seen here, is quite helpless. The other official Washington--the official Washington of the society columns--little cares. It is not above noticing the twenty thousand, but it is mere notice and nothing more. And as for interest or graciousness or kind-heartedness--they are quite out of the question. Washington is being rebuilt, in both its physical and its social structure. The architects of its social structure are not less capable than those folk who are working out marvels in steel and marble. These first see the Washington of tomorrow, modeled closely after the structures of European capitals. Already our newly created class of American idle rich is establishing its _habitat_ along the lovely streets of our handsomest town. That is a beginning. In some of the departments they have begun to serve tea at four of an afternoon--just as they do on the terrace of the House of Commons. That is another beginning. We are starting.

The structure of European capitals is largely built upon class distinctions. Washington is being builded close to its models.

For ourselves, we prefer the touch of Europe as the architects work them in steel and in marble. A man who has been to Washington and who has not returned within the decade will be astonished to see the change already worked in its appearance. From the moment he steps across the threshold of the fine new station--itself a revelation after the old-time railroad terminals of the town--he will see transformation. Washington is still in growth. They are tearing down the ugly buildings and building upon their sites the beautiful, weaving in the almost gentle creations of the modern architects, a new city which after a little time will cease to be modeled upon Europe but which will serve, in itself, as a model capital for the entire world to follow.

7

THE CITY OF THE SEVEN HILLS