Your United States, Arnold Bennett [ebook reader browser .TXT] 📗

huge male animal follows, and as he passes her, infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head against her little one and says, threateningly, "What's the matter with you, anyway?" He could crush her like a butterfly, and, moreover, she is about ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger, she lifts that tiny gloved hand and catches the huge male animal a smart smack in the face. "Can't you be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back, blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man throw the aghast male animal violently out of the car, and then salute her with: "Madam, I take off my hat to you." And the tired car settles down to apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of the dailiness of New York.

The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a man in the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she relates the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next to hers. "For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband," she implores. "If he knew he'd leave me forever!" And the young husband comes home, after his own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry, demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to behave as though she had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa. Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband's wrath, the temptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather fine thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring male flattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck to slap a brute's face. She tells the young husband. It is an error of tact on her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such an excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is outraged--as she had said he would be. What--his wife, _his_-etc., etc.!

A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumbling cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbled street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense of other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the left and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are too many people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the wakings after the febrile doze that ends such a night? The nerves like taut strings; love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator damnably tapping, tapping!... The young husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is afoot, too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives far below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant influence.... Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!... Eggs are demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...

Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken and horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a passion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man's suit is ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Last evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket. "Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer hungry. "I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says she, tragic. And she hurries....

A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are young; they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all that! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York--a New York more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.

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You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for the time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the "finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frame and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner in such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody who possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest. If one said, "By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in my pocket," every eye would reply immediately: "Out with it, man--or woman!--and don't pretend you don't always carry the photograph with you on purpose to show it off!" In such a house it is proved that children are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And the conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamed children-children fully aware of their supremacy--prowling to and fro unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.

"We are keen on children here," says the youngish father, frankly. He is altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent, and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would recognize in him the youth who howled murderously at university football matches and cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing colors: "Kill him! Kill him for me! I can't stand his red stockings coming up the field!" Yet it is the same man. And this father, too, is the fruit of university education; and further, one feels that his passion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interest in education. He and his like are at the root of the modern university--not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to hear it stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of Chicago University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.

Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-class apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken out of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-house ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in American life. As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in its native land. It is anti-social because it works always against the preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobody can be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it fosters bribery and because it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims. It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the expression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because it favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself. It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and because often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls are a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is and must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy cannot be prepared wholesale.

Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvels of organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape the indictment. The institution itself, though it may well be a natural and inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienced dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house which I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for board, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hot for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry. Everything is an extra. Telephone--lights--tips--especially tips. I tip everybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that, when I am utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he will choose me an eatable chop or steak. And that's how things go on!"

My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in apartment-houses, was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man. And it is therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social immorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an act calculated to undermine the _chef's_ virtue. If all the other experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend's proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him into the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, he ought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, until the management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks utterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest performance of duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would have dawned upon the management that inedible food was just as much out of place in the restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-desk. The proper course would have been difficult and tiresome. The proper course often is. My friend took the easy, wicked course. That is to say, he exhibited a complete lack of public spirit.

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An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic is the republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one may conceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do positively think that American education does not altogether succeed in the very important business of inculcating public spirit into young citizens. I judge merely by results. Most peoples fail in the high quality of public spirit; and the American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps all I ought to say is that according to my own limited observation public spirit is not among the shining attributes of the United States citizen. And even to that statement there will be animated demur. For have not the citizens