CHAPTER VIAN AMERICAN SUMMER RESORT
I have no quarrel with American summer resorts as such—they are as good as any—but I must confess that scenes like this do not move me as they once did. I can well recall the time—and that not so many years ago—when this one would have set me tingling, left me yearning with a voiceless, indescribable pain. Life does such queer things to one. It takes one’s utmost passions of five years ago and puts them out like a spent fire. Standing in this almost operatic street, I did my best to contrast my feelings with those of twenty, fifteen and even ten years before. What had come over the spirit of my dreams? Well, twenty years before I knew nothing about love, actually—ten years before I was not satisfied. Was that it? Not exactly—no—I could not say that it was. But now at least these maidens and this somewhat banal stage setting were not to be accepted by me, at least, at the value which unsophistication and youth place on them. The scene was gay and lovely and innocent really. One could feel the wonder of it. But the stage-craft was a little too obvious.
Fifteen years before (or even ten) these gauche maidens idling along would have seemed most fascinating. Now the brow bands and diaphanous draperies and pink and blue and green slippers were almost like trite stage properties. Fifteen or twenty years before I would have been ready to exclaim with any of the hundred youths I saw bustling about here, yearning with their eyes: “Oh, my goddess! Oh, my Venus! Oh, my perfect divinity! But deign to cast one encouraging glance upon me, your devoted slave, and I will grovel at your feet. Here is my heart and hand and my most sacred vow—and mypocket book. I will work for you, slave for you, die for you. Every night for the next two thousand nights of my life, all my life in fact, I will come home regularly from my small job and place all my earnings and hopes and fears in your hands. I will build a house and I will run a store. I will do anything to make you happy. We will have three, seven, nine children. I will spade a garden each spring, bring home a lawnmower and cut the grass. I will prove thoroughly domesticated and never look at another woman.”
That, in my nonage, was the way I used to feel.
And as I looked about me I could see much the same emotions at work here. These young cubs—how enraptured they were; how truly like young puppies with still blinded eyes! The air was redolent of this illusion. That was why the windows and balconies were hung with Japanese lanterns. That was why the orchestras were playing so—divinely! To me now it tanged rather hollowly at moments, like a poor show. I couldn’t help seeing that the maidens weren’t divinities at all, that most of them were the dullest, most selfish, most shallow and strawy mannikinesses one could expect to find. Poor little half-equipped actors and actresses.
“But even so,” I said to myself, “this is the best the master of the show has to offer.Heis at most a strolling player of limited equipment. Perhaps elsewhere, in some other part of the universe, there may be a showman who can do better, who has a bigger, better company. But these——”
I returned to the hotel and waited for Franklin. We were assigned a comfortable room on the second or third floor, I forget which, down a mile of corridor. Supper in the grill cost us five dollars. The next morning breakfast in the Persian breakfast room cost us three more. But that evening we had the privilege of sitting on a balcony and watching a herd of deer come down to a wire fence and eat grass in the glare of an adjacent arc light. We had the joy of observing the colored fountains (quenched at twelve) and seeing the motoring partiescome tearing up or go flying past, wild with a nameless gayety. In the parlors, the music rooms, the miles of promenade balconies, were hosts of rich mammas and daughters—the former nearly all fat, the latter all promising to be, and a little gross. For the life of me I could not help but think of breweries, distilleries, soap factories, furniture factories, stove companies and the like. Where did all these people come from? Where did they all get the money to stay here weeks and weeks at six, eight, and even fifteen and twenty a day a person? Our poor little six dollar rooms! Good Heavens! Some of them had suites with three baths. Think of all the factories, the purpose of which (aside from supplying the world with washtubs, flatirons, sealing wax, etc.) was to supply these elderly and youthful females with plumpness and fine raiment.
While we were in the grill eating our rather late dinner (the Imperial Egyptian dining room was closed), several families strolled in, “pa,” in one case, a frail, pale, meditative, speculative little man who seemed about as much at home in his dressy cutaway coat as a sheep would in a lion’s skin. He was so very small and fidgety, but had without doubt built up a wholesale grocery or an iron foundry or something of that sort. And “ma” was so short and aggressive, with such a firm chin and such steady eyes. “Ma” had supplied “pa” with much of his fighting courage, you could see that. As I looked at “pa” I wondered how many thousand things he had been driven to do to escape her wrath, even to coming up here in August and wearing a cutaway coat and a stiff white shirt and hard cuffs and collars. He did look as though he would prefer some quiet small town veranda and his daily newspaper.
And then there was “Cerise” or “Muriel” or “Albertina” (I am sure she had some such name), sitting between her parents and obviously speculating as to her fate. Back at Wilson’s Corner there may have been some youth at some time or other who thought her divine and imploredher to look with favor on his suit, but behold “pa” was getting rich and she was not for such as him.
“Jus' you let him be,” I could hear her mother counseling. “Don’t you have anything to do with him. We’re getting on and next summer we’re going up to the Kittatinny. You’re sure to meet somebody there.”
And so here they were—Cerise dressed in the best that Scranton or Wilkes-Barré or even New York could afford. Such organdies, voiles, swisses, silk crepes—trunks full of them, no doubt! Her plump arms were quite bare, shoulders partly so, her hair done in a novel way, white satin shoes were on her feet—oh dear! oh dear! She looked dull and uninteresting and meaty.
But think of Harvey Anstruther Kupfermacher, son of the celebrated trunk manufacturer of Punxsutawney, who will shortly arrive and wed her! It will be a “love match from the first.” The papers of Troy, Schenectady, and Utica will be full of it. There will be a grand church wedding. The happy couple will summer in the Adirondacks or the Blue Ridge. If the trunk factory and the iron foundry continue successful some day they may even venture New York.
“Wilson’s Corner? Well I guess not!”
There was another family, the pater familias large and heavy, with big hands, big feet, a bursting pink complexion, and a vociferous grey suit. “Pa” leads his procession. “Ma” is very simple, and daughter is comparatively interesting, and rather sweet. “Pa” is going to show by living at the Kittatinny what it means to work hard and save your money and fight the labor unions and push the little fellow to the wall. “Pa” thinks, actually, that if he gets very rich—richer and richer—somehow he is going to be supremely happy. Money is going to do it. “Yessiree, money can do anything, good old American dollars. Money can build a fine house, money can buy a fine auto, money can give one a splendid office desk, money can hire obsequious factotums, money can make everyone pleasant and agreeable. Here I sit,” says Pa, “right in the grill room of the Kittatinny. Outside arecolored fountains. My shoes are new. My clothes are of the best. I have an auto. What do I lack?”
“Not a thing, Pa,” I wanted to answer, “save certain delicacies of perception, which you will never miss.”
“'Soul, take thine ease; eat, drink and be merry.'”
The next morning we were up bright and early for a long drive. Owing to my bumptiousness in having set aside the regular route of the trip I could see that Franklin was now somewhat depending on me to complete my career as a manager and decide when and where to go. My sole idea was to cut direct through Pennsylvania, but when I consulted a large map which hung on the wall of the baggage room of the Kittatinny I was not so sure. It was about six feet long and two feet high and showed nothing but mountains, mountains, mountains, and no towns, let alone cities of any size. We began to speculate concerning Pennsylvania as a state, but meanwhile I consulted our “Scenic Route” map. This led us but a little way into Pennsylvania before it cut due north to Binghamton, and the socalled “good roads” of New York State. That did not please me at all. At any rate, after consulting with a most discouraging porter who seemed to be sure that there were no good roads in Pennsylvania, I consoled myself with the thought that Wilkes-Barré and Scranton were west of us, and that the “Scenic Route” led through these places. We might go to Wilkes-Barré or Scranton and then consult with the local automobile association, who could give us further information. Quite diplomatically I persuaded Franklin to do that.
The difficulty with this plan was that it left us worrying over roads, for, after all, the best machine, as anyone knows who has traveled much by automobiles, is a delicate organism. Given good roads it can seemingly roll on forever at top speed. Enter on a poor one and all the ills that flesh or machinery is heir to seem at once to manifest themselves. A little mud and water and you are in danger of skidding into kingdom come. A few ruts and you feel momentarily as though you were going to bethrown into high heaven. A bad patch of rocks and holes and you soon discover where all the weak places in your bones and muscles are. Punctures eventuate from nowhere. Blowouts arrive one after another with sickening frequency. The best of engines snort and growl on sharp grades. Going down a steep hill a three-thousand-pound car makes you think always—"My God! what if something should break!" Then a spring may snap, a screw work loose somewhere.
But before we left the Water Gap what joys of observation were not mine! This was such an idle tour and such idle atmosphere. There was really no great need for hurry, as we realized once we got started, and I was desirous of taking our time, as was Franklin, though having no wish to stay long anywhere. We breakfasted leisurely while Speed, somewhere, was doctoring up our tires. Then we strolled out into this summer village, seeing the Water Gappers get abroad thus early. The town looked as kempt by day as it did by night. Our fat visitors of heavy purses were still in bed in the great hotels. Instead you saw the small town American busy about his chores; an ancient dame, for instance, in black bonnet and shawl, driving a lean horse and buggy, the latter containing three milk cans all labeled “Sunset Farm Dairy Co.”; a humpnosed, thinbodied, angular grocer, or general store keeper, sweeping off his sidewalk and dusting off his counters; various citizens in “vests” and shirt sleeves crossing the heavily oiled roads at various angles and exchanging the customary American morning greetings:
“Howdy, Jake?”
“Hi, Si, been down t' the barn yet?”
“Did Ed get that wrench he was lookin' for?”
“Think so, yep.”
“Well, look at old Skeeter Cheevers comin' along, will yuh”—this last apropos of some hobbling septuagenarian with a willow basket.
I heaved a kind of sigh of relief. I was out of NewYork and back home, as it were—even here at the Delaware River—so near does the west come to the east.
Sitting in willow chairs in front of a garage where Speed was looking for a special kind of oil which evidently the more pretentious hotel could not or would not supply, Franklin and I discussed the things we had heard and seen. I think I drew a parallel between this hotel here and similar hotels at Monte Carlo and Nice, where the prices would be no higher, if so high.
It so happened that in the morning, when I had been dressing, there had been a knocking at the door of the next room, and listening I had heard a man’s voice calling “Ma! Ma! Have you got an undershirt in there for me?”
I looked out to see a tall, greyheaded man of sixty or more, very intelligent and very forceful looking, a real American business chief.
“Yes,” came the answer after a moment. “Wait a minute. I think there’s one in Ida’s satchel. Is Harry up yet?”
“Yes, he’s gone out.”
This was at sixA. M.Here stood the American in the pretentious hall, his suspenders down, meekly importuning his wife through the closed door.
Imagine this at Nice, or Cannes, or Trouville!
And then the lackadaisical store keeper where I bought my postcards.
“Need any stamps, cap?” was his genial inquiry.
Why the “cap”? An American civility—the equivalent of Mister, Monsieur, Sir,—anything you please.
I had of late been reading much magazine sociology of the kind that is labeled “The Menace of Immigration,” etc. I was saying to Franklin that I had been fast coming to believe that America, east, west, north, and south, was being overrun by foreigners who were completely changing the American character, the American facial appearance, the American everything. Do you recall the Hans Christian Andersen story of the child who saw the king naked? I was inclined to be that child. I could not see,from the first hundred miles or so we had traveled, that there was any truth in the assertions of these magazine sociologists. Franklin and I agreed that we could see no change in American character here, or anywhere, though it might be well to look sharply into this matter as we went along. In the cities there were thousands of foreigners, but they were not unamericanizing the cities, and I was not prepared to believe that they are doing any worse by the small towns. Certainly there was no evidence of it here at the Water Gap. All was almost “offensively American,” as an Englishman would say. The “caps,” “docs,” and “howdys” were as common here as in—Indiana, for instance—so Franklin seemed to think—and he lives in Indiana a goodly part of the year. In the Water Gap and Stroudsburg, and various towns hereabout where, because of the various summer hotels and cottages, one might expect a sprinkling of the foreign element, at least in the capacity of servitors, in the streets and stores, yet they were not even noticeably dotted with them. If all that was American is being wiped out the tide had not yet reached northern New Jersey or eastern Pennsylvania. I began to take heart.