Your United States by Arnold Bennett

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[Illustration: THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT]

YOUR UNITED STATES

IMPRESSIONS OF A FIRST VISIT

BY
ARNOLD BENNETT

ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK CRAIG

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXII

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1912

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE FIRST NIGHT 3
II. STREETS 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

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT _Frontispiece_
DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK _Facing p._ 10
THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWED SKY-SCRAPERS 16
BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT 20
A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET 34
A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER 36
THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT 38
A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO 42
A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE--CHICAGO 44
THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL 50
ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 52
ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO--THE CAPITOL 54
UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL 56
THE PROMENADE--CITY POINT, BOSTON 60
THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB--OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR 64
AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE 74
LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB 86
A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG 90
ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY 94
IN THE PARLOR-CAR 100
BREAKFAST EN ROUTE 108
IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM 112
THE STRAP-HANGERS 114
THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED 116
THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR 118
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 134
UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS--UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 156
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

YOUR UNITED STATES

I

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 desired. The figure 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, scornful,
unheeding, along the interminable carpeted aisle, between serried tables
of correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually developed into
features, and the two red marks on her stomacher grew into two rampant
lions, 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 succeeded by men, all bearing dishes, but none of
them so inexorably scornful as she, and none of them disappearing where
she had disappeared; every man relented and stopped at some table or
other. But the figure I 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-intentioned if
banal composer in the privacy of his study one night, had spread over
the whole universe 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 hundred persons correctly dining together in
this high refectory, and at the end there was honest applause!... And
yet you never encountered a person who, questioned singly, did not agree
and even assert of his own accord that music at meals is an outrageous
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 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 particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were
over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course 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 jocund 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 acquired fame, and had the slight agreeable
self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a background
of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifarious
reminiscent conversations that are 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 preliminaries, to be devoured by
vultures, and how the vultures, 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 unfamous 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 Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tell
about sport in the woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animals
where it was advisable 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 partridge 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 lounge would be stopped
by the entry of a page bearing a telegram and calling out in the voice
of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed. And then
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 beautiful 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 churches, and so on and so on, until one had the
melancholy illusion that the whole art world was going or gone to
destruction. But this subject did not really hold us, for the reason
that, beneath a blase 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 funnels of the _Lusitania_, a star
seemed to be dancing capriciously around and about the masthead light.
And it was difficult 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 wave,
theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Suddenly 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
vibrated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caressing. 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 everything was
still except a towel that moved gently, almost 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
adventure! 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 unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected
populations of men and women--crowds of them--a healthy, powerful,
prosperous, independent, somewhat stern and disdainful multitude, it
seemed to me. Those muscular, striding girls 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 solemn 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 imagination. I had to see
with my eyes. And I did see with my eyes. That afternoon a high officer
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, under 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,
under 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 young 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 content, 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 keep to the
round. 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 counted. I remember 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 hundred or so were sitting expectant
on those multifarious 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 another long hall were consuming a huge
tea offered 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, untidy woman, with an infant
dragging at one hand and a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into
the breathless kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give me
a drop o' milk for this child?" And under the military gaze of the high
officer, 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
officer grimly smiled, and they went on again. "Give me yer mug,
mother," said the cook. And the untidy woman went off with her booty.

"Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high officer said, and
guided me through uncharted territories to chambers where spits were
revolving in front of intense 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 clockwork 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 impressive
even than that order, was a list of the several hundred 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 authority 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 countless 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
officer 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 there inspected the
devices for detecting and extinguishing 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 officers'
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 suspension, 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 hundred feet distant. And then I had seen the four
shafts, revolving lazily one hundred 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 hundred to the minute,
and then to the turbines themselves--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.

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 hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces were being fed
every ten minutes by hundreds 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 light, and you have it!... And up-stairs, far above on the
surface of the water, confectioners 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 propellers brings
me nearer to that shore." I thought, "Every shovelful flung 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 public resorts of the ship. Excitement will
indeed take strange forms. For myself, although I was on the threshold
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--yellow, 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 illuminations 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 official 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 blackness of our side. And looking down from the topmost deck, I
saw, far below, the tiny boat maneuver 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,
uncomfortably 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--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 suddenly up
against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty exterior, 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 inbound 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 unpretentious, and inoffensive--though one of
them did let out that the most salient 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 sundry other great cities. My initiation was brief,
but it was thorough. Many varieties won my regard immediately, and kept
it; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand
(perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect. The brand in question, as
to which I was amiably cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is
usually very young, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheerfully
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
misrepresentations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium is
still unannounced); but I do object to inefficiency--especially in
America, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther than
any efficiency was ever carried before.

[Illustration: THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS]

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 importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amount
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 to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is
being interviewed?" 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 number of absurdities which offered
a strong and painful contrast to the cleverness 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
interviewers.

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