Part 19

But Shaw's Gardens still exist, although their founder lived to a ripe old age and has now been dead a quarter of a century. Older folk of St. Louis remember him distinctly, a vigorous and seemingly lonely man, unmarried, but who seemed to be content to live alone in his great house in the Gardens, giving a loving and a personal care to his flowers and then, as dusk came on, invariably sitting in his room and reading far into the night. They will show you his will when you go to the museum in the Gardens, a curious old document, keenly prepared and devising to the remaining members of his family, servants and intimates, everything from immensely valuable real estate in the very heart of St. Louis down to the port and sherry from his cellars. But the part that interested St. Louis most was that part which gave the Gardens to the town, although not without restrictions. And the old Missouri town made Shaw's Gardens quite as much a part of its existence as its County Fair.

The St. Louis Fair was a real institution. There have been far greater shows of the kind in our land, but perhaps none that ever entered more thoroughly into the hearts of the folk to whom it catered. Every one in St. Louis used to go to the Fair. It had a social status quite its own. When, after the hot and gruelling summer which causes all St. Louis folk who possibly can to flee to the ocean or to the mountains, they came home again in the joys of Indian summer there was the Fair--up under the trees of Grand avenue in the north part of the town--to serve for a getting together once again. It had served that way since long before wartime. And with it ran that mighty social bulwark of St. Louis, the Procession of the Veiled Prophet. One night in "Fair Week"--locally known as "Big Thursday"--was annually given to this pageant, frankly modeled upon the Mardi Gras festivities at New Orleans. Through the streets of the town the pageant rolled its triumphal course, all St. Louis came out to see it, and afterwards there was a ball. To be bidden to that ball was the social recognition that the city gave you.

But in 1904 there came that greater fair--the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, to which the world was bidden. It was a really great fair and it has left a permanent impress upon the town in the form of a fine Art Gallery and the splendid group of buildings at the west edge of the city which are being devoted to the uses of Washington University. But the big fair spelled the doom of the smaller. The town had grown out around its grounds and they were no longer in the country. So the career of the old St. Louis Fair ended--brilliantly in that not-to-be-forgotten exposition. Although some attempts have recently been made to reëstablish it in another part of the town, the older folk of St. Louis shake their heads. They very well know that you cannot bring the old days back by the mere waving of a wand.

Upon a crisp October evening, the Veiled Prophet still makes his way through the narrow streets of the town. The preparations for his coming are hedged about with greatest secrecy, and the young girls of St. Louis grow expectant just as their mothers and their grandmothers before them used to grow expectant when October came close at hand. At last, expectancy rewarded--out of the unknown an engraved summons to attend the court of a single night--with the engraved summons some souvenir of no slight worth; the prophet's favor is a generous one.

Absurd, you say? Not a bit of it. It is a pity that we do not have more of it in our land. We have been rather busy grubbing; given ourselves rather too much to utility and efficiency, to the sordid business of merely making money. A Veiled Prophet is a good thing for a town, a Mardi Gras a tonic. It is an idea that is spreading across America, and America is profiting by it.

* * * * *

This is a personality sketch of St. Louis and not a guide-book. If it were the latter, it would recount the superb commercial position of the city, each of the bulwarks of its financial fortresses. The river-trade is dead indeed; even the most optimistic of those who are most anxious to see it revived doubt, in their heart of hearts, if ever it can be revived. But commerce is not dead at St. Louis. As St. Paul and Minneapolis are gateways to the Northwest remember that she is one of the great gateways to the Southwest. To the man in Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas she is another New York; she stands to him as London stands to the folk of the English counties. And this relation she capitalizes and so grows rich. She is solid and substantial--the old French town of the yesterdays has taken her permanent place among the leading cities of America.

15

THE OLD FRENCH LADY OF THE RIVERBANK

At the bend of the river she stands--this drowsy old French lady of the long ago. They have called her the Crescent City. But the Mississippi makes more than a single turn around the wide-spreading town. And the results are most puzzling, even to those steadyminded folk who assert that they are direction-wise. In New Orleans, east seems west and north seems south. It must almost be that the Father of Rivers reverses all the laws of Mother Nature and runs his course up-stream.

New Orleans is upon the east bank of the Mississippi. All the guide-books will tell you that. But in the morning the sun arises from over across the river, and in the cool of evening his reddish radiance is dying over Lake Ponchartrain, directly east from the river--at least, so your direction-wise intelligence seems to tell you. But east is east and west is west and Old Sol has made such a habit of rising and setting these many thousand years that his reliability is not to be trusted. As to the reliability of the Father of Waters--there is quite another matter.

Truth to tell, the Mississippi river is probably the most utterly unreliable thing within the North American continent. He has shifted his course so many times within the brief century that the white-skinned men have known him, that the oldest of them have lost all trace of his original course. And so to steer a vessel up and down the stream is a doubly difficult art. The pilot does not merely have to know his steering-marks--the range between that point and this, the thrust of some hidden and fearfully dangerous reef, the advantage to be gained between eddies and currents for easy running--he has to learn the entire thing anew each time he brings a craft up or down the river. Mark Twain has long since immortalized the ample genius of the Mississippi pilots. The stories of the river's unreliability, of its constant tendency to change its channel are apocryphal--almost as old as the oldest of the houses of old New Orleans. And this is not the story of the river.

Yet it must not be forgotten that the river almost is New Orleans, that from the beginning it has been the source of the French lady's strength and prosperity. Before there was even thought of a city the river was there--pouring its yellow flood down from an unknown land to the great gulf. Bienville, the real founder of New Orleans, saw with the prophetic sight of a really great thinker what even a river that came to the sea from an unexplored land might mean in years to come to the city of his creation. His prophecy was right. When the river, with the traffic upon its bosom, has prospered, New Orleans has prospered. And in the lean years when the river traffic has dwindled, New Orleans has felt the loss in her every fiber. There are old-timers in the city who shake their heads when they tell you of the fat river-boats crowding in at the levee, of the clipper-ships and the newer steam-propelled craft at the deeper docks, of the crowds around the old St. Louis and the St. Charles Hotels, the congested narrow streets, the halcyon days when the markets of the two greatest nations in the world halted on the cotton news from Factors Row. And New Orleans awaits the opening of the Panama canal with something like feverish anticipation, for she feels that this mighty nick finally cut into the thin neck of the American continents, her wharves will again be crowded with shipping--this time with a variety of craft plying to and from the strange ports of the Pacific. So much does her river still mean to her.

Factors Row still stands, rusty and somewhat grimed. No longer is it consequential in the markets of the world. In fact, to put a bald truth baldly, no longer is New Orleans of supreme consequence in the cotton problem of all nations. A great cotton shipping port she still is and will long remain. But the multiplication of railroad points and the rapid development of such newer cotton ports as Galveston, to make a single instance, have all worked against her preëminence.

This is not a story of the commercial importance of New Orleans, either. There are plenty who are willing to tell that story, with all of its romantic traditions of the past and its brilliant prophecies for the future. This is the story of the New Orleans of today, the city who with an almost reverential respect for the Past and its monuments still holds her doors open to the Present and its wonders.

Of the Past one may know at every turn. North of Canal street--that broad thoroughfare which ranks as a dividing path with Market street in San Francisco--the city has changed but little since the Civil War. South of Canal--still called the "new" part of the city--there has been some really modern development. Prosperous looking skyscrapers have lifted their lordly heads above the narrow streets and the compactly built "squares" which they encompass; there are several modern hotels with all the momentary glory of artificial marbles and chromatic frescoes, department stores with show windows as brave and gay as any of those in New York or Chicago or Boston. But even if the narrow streets were to be widened, New Orleans would never look like Indianapolis or Kansas City or St. Paul--any of the typical cities of the so-called Middle West. Too many of her stout old structures of the fifties and the sixties still remain. And hung upon these, uncompromising and triumphant, are the galleries.

The galleries of New Orleans! They are perhaps the most typical of the outward expressions of a town whose personality is as distinct as that of Boston or Charleston or San Francisco. They must have been master workmen whose fingers and whose ancient forges worked those delicate and lacelike traceries. And it has been many thankful generations who have praised the practical side of their handicraft. For in the long hot summer months of New Orleans these galleries furnish a shade that is a delight and a comfort. On rainy days they are arcades keeping dry the sidewalks of the heart of the town. And from the offices within, the galleries, their rails lined with growing things, are veritable triumphs. Once in a great while some one will rise up and suggest that they be abolished--that they are old-fashioned and have long since served their full purpose. That some one is generally a smart shopkeeper who has drifted down from one of these upstart cities from the North or East. But New Orleans is smarter still. She well knows the commercial value of her personality. There are newer cities and showier within the radius of a single night's ride upon a fast train. But where one man comes to one of these, a dozen alight at the old French town by the bend of the yellow river.

"Give J---- a few French restaurants, some fame for its cocktails or its gin-fizzes--just as New Orleans has--and I will bring a dozen big new factories here within the next three years," said the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of a thriving Texas town the other day. He knew whereof he spake. And now, we shall know whereof we speak. We shall give a moment of attention to the little restaurants and the gin-fizzes.

Let the gin-fizzes come first, for they are nearly as characteristic of the old town as her galleries! You will find their chief habitat just across a narrow alley from the St. Charles Hotel. There is a long bar on the one side of the room, upon which stand great piles of ice-bound southern oysters--twelve months of the year, for New Orleans never reads an "R" in or out of her oyster-eating calendar. But any bar may bring forth oysters, and only one bar in the world brings forth the real New Orleans gin-fizz. Two enterprising young men stand behind the bar-keepers in a perpetual shaking of the fizzes. If it is tantalizing to shake that whereof you do not taste, they show it not. And in the hours of rush traffic there are six of the non-bar-keeping bartenders who give the correct amount of ague to New Orleans' most delectable beverage. A hustler from North or East would put in electric shakers instanter--a thousand or is it ten thousand revolutions to the minute? He would brag of his electric shakers and the New Orleans gin-fizz would be dead--forever. Romance and an electric shaker cannot go hand in hand.

"The ingredients?" you breathlessly interrupt. "The manner of the mixing?"

Bless your heart, if the Gin Fizz House published its close-held secret to the world, it would lose its chief excuse for existence and then become an ordinary drinking-place. As it is, it holds its head above the real variety of saloons, even above the polished mahogany bar of the aristocratic hotel across the narrow street. For its product, if delightful, is still gentle, although insidious, perhaps. It is largely milk and barely gin. You can drink it by the barrel without the slightest jarring of your faculties. And it is rumored that some of the men of New Orleans use it as a breakfast-food.

From the Gin Fizz House to the Absinthe House is a long way,--in more meanings than one. The Absinthe House is hardly less famed, but in these days when drinking has largely gone out of fashion and wormwood is under the particular ban of the United States statutes, it is largely a relic of the past. It stands in the heart of the old French town and before we come to its broad portal, let us study the fascinating quarter in which we are to find it.

We have already spoken of Canal street, so broad in contradistinction to the very narrow streets of the rest of the older parts of the town, that one can almost see the narrow water-filled ditch that once traversed it, as the dividing line of the city. South of Canal street, the so-called American portion of the city, with many affectations of modernity--north of that thoroughfare--curiously enough the down-stream side--the French quarter, architecturally and romantically the most fascinating section of any large city of the United States. The very names of its streets--Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Burgundy, Dauphine, St. Louis--quicken anticipation. And anticipation is not dulled when one comes to see the great somber houses with their mysterious and moth-eaten courtyards and the interesting folk who dwell within them.

We choose Royal street, heading straight away from Canal street as if in shrinking horror of electric signs and moving-picture theaters. In a single square they are behind and forgotten and, if it were not for the trolley cars and the smartly dressed French girls, we might be walking in Yesterday. The side streets groan under the same ugly, heavy patterns of Belgian block pavement that have done service for nearly a century. Originally the blocks--brought long years ago as ballast in the ships from Europe--were in a pretty pattern, laid diagonally. But heavy traffic and the soft sub-strata of the river-bank town have long since worked sad havoc with the old pavements. And a new city administration has finally begun to replace them with the very comfortable but utterly unsentimental asphalt.

Here is the Absinthe House, worth but a single glance, for it has descended to the estate of an ordinary corner saloon. Only ordinary corner saloons are not ordinarily housed in structures of this sort. You can see houses like this in the south of France and in Spain--so I am told. For below Canal street is both French and Spanish. Remember, if you please, that the French of the Southland shared the same hard fate of their countrymen in that far northern valley of the great St. Lawrence--neglect. The French are the most loyal people on earth. Their fidelity to their language and their customs for nearly two centuries proves that. That faith, steadfast through the tragedy of the indifference and neglect of their mother country, doubly proves it. And the only difference between the Frenchman of Quebec and the Frenchman of New Orleans was that in the South the Spaniard was injected into the problem. But the Frenchman in the South was not less loyal than his fellow-countryman of the North. A dissolute king sitting in the wreck of his great family in the suburbs of Paris might barter away the title of his lands, but no Louis could ever trade away the loyalty of the older French of New Orleans to their land and its institutions. In such a faith was the French quarter of the city born. In such faith has it survived, these many years. And perhaps the very greatest episodes in the history of the city were in those twenty days of November, 1803, when the French flag displaced the Spanish in the old Place d'Armes, to be replaced only by the strange banner of a newborn nation which was given the opportunity of working out the destiny of the new France.

So it was the Spaniard who took his part in the shaping of the French quarter of New Orleans. You can see the impress of his architects in the stout old houses that were built after two disastrous and wide-spread fires in the closing years of the eighteenth century--even in the great lion of the town; the Cabildo which rises from what was formerly the Place d'Armes and is today Jackson square. And the old Absinthe House, with its curiously wrought and half-covered courtyard is one of these old-time Spanish houses.

Now forget about the absinthe--as the rest of the French folk of the land are beginning to forget it--and turn your attention to the courtyards. In another old Southern city--Charleston--the oldest houses shut the glories of their lovely-aging gardens from the sight of vulgar passers-by upon the street by means of uncompromising high fences. The old houses of New Orleans do more. Their gardens are shielded from the crowded, noisy, horrid streets by the houses themselves. And he who runs through those crowded, noisy, horrid streets, must really walk, for only so will he catch brief glimpses of the glories of those fading courtyard gardens.

Sometimes, if you have the courage of your convictions and the proper fashion of seizing opportunity by the throat you may wander into one of the tunnel-like gateways of one of these very old houses. No one will halt you.

Here it is--old France in new America. The tunnel-like way from the street is shady and cool. From it leads a stair to the right and the upper floor of the house, a stair up which a regiment might have walked, and down which the old figure of a Balzac might descend this moment without ever a single jarring upon your soul. The stair ends in a great oval hall, whose scarlet paper has long since faded but still remains a memory of the glories of the days that were. The carved entablatures over the doors, the bravado of cornice and rosette where the plaster has not finally fallen, proclaim the former grandeur of this apartment. And in some former day a great chandelier must have hung from the center of its graceful ceiling. Today--some one of the neighboring antique stores has reaped its reward, and a candle set in a wall-lantern is its sole illumination. A shabby room will not bear the glories of a gay chandelier. And the old Frenchman and his wife who live in the place have all but forgotten. They have a parrot and a sewing-machine and what are the glories of the past to them?

Of course, such a house must have its courtyard. And if the huge copper-bound tank is dry, and the water has not forced its way through the battered fountain these many years, if the old exquisite tiles of the house long since went to form the roof of the new garage of some smart new American place up the river--the magnolia still blossoms magnificently among the decay, and Madame's skill with her jessamine and her geraniums would confound the imported tricks of those English gardeners in the elaborate new places.

Here then is the old France in the new land--the priceless treasure that New Orleans wears at her very heart. And here in the very heart of that heart is an ugly old building boarded up by offensively brilliant advertising signs.

An ugly old building did we say, with rough glance at its rusty façades? Can one be young and beautiful forever? Rusty and beautiful--oh no, do not scorn the old St. Louis Hotel for following the most normal of all the laws of Nature. For within this moldering and once magnificent tavern history was made. In one of its ancient rooms a President of the United States was unmade, while in another chamber human life was bought and sold with no more concern than the old Creole lady on the far corner shows when she sells you the little statues of the Blessed Virgin.

These wonders are still to be seen--for the asking. The _concierge_ of the old hotel is a courteous lady who with her servant dwells in the two most habitable of its remaining rooms. There is no use knocking at the hotel door for she is very, very deaf indeed, poor lady. But if you will brave a stern "No Admittance" sign and ascend the graceful winding stair for a single flight--such a stair as has rarely come to our sight--you will find her--ready and willing. One by one she shows you the rooms, faded and disreputable, for the hotel is in a fearful state of disrepair. The plaster is falling here and there, and where it still adheres to the lath the old-time paper hangs in long shreds, like giant stalactites, from the ceiling. Once, for a decade in the "late eighties," an effort was made to revive the hotel and its former glories--a desperate and a hopeless effort--and the pitiful "innovations" of that régime still show. But when you close your eyes you do not see the St. Louis Hotel of that decade, but rather in those wonderful twenty years before the coming of the cruel war. In those days New Orleans was the gayest city in the new world, uptilting its saucy nose at such heavy eastern towns as New York or Boston. Its wharves were crowded with the ships of the world, the river-boat captains fought for the opportunity of bringing the mere noses of their craft against the overcrowded levee. Cotton--it was the greatest thing of the world. New Orleans was cotton and cotton was the king of the world.

No wonder then that the St. Louis Hotel could say when it was new, that it had the finest ballrooms in the world. They still show them to you, in piecemeal, for they were long since cut up into separate rooms. The great rotunda was ruined by a temporary floor at the time the state of Louisiana bought the old hotel for a capitol, and used the rotunda for its fiery Senate sessions.

All these things the _concierge_ will relate to you--and more. Then she takes you down the old main-stair, gently lest its rotting treads and risers should crumble under too stout foot-falls. Into the cavernous bottom of the rotunda she leads you. It is encumbered with the steam-pipes of that after era, blocked with rubbish, very dark withal. The _concierge_, with a fine sense of the dramatic, catches up a bit of newspaper, lights it, thrusts it ahead as a lighted torch.

"The old slave mart," she says, in a well-trained stage whisper, and thrusts the blazing paper up at full arm's length. As the torch goes higher, her voice goes lower: "Beyond the auction block, the slaves' prison."