CHAPTER XXIBUFFALO OLD AND NEW
We had traveled now between six and seven hundred miles, and but for a short half mile between Nicholsen and New Milford, Pennsylvania, we could scarcely say that we had seen any bad roads—seriously impeding ones. To be sure, we had sought only the best ones in most cases, not always, and there were those patches of state road, cut up by heavy hauling, which we had to skirt; but all things considered, the roads so far had been wonderful. From East Aurora into Buffalo there was a solid, smooth, red brick boulevard, thirty feet wide and twelve miles long, over which we raced as though it were a bowling alley. The bricks were all vitrified and entirely new. I know nothing about the durability of such a road, and this one gave no evidence of its wearing qualities, but if many such roads are to be built, and they stand the wear, America will have a road system unrivaled.
As we were spinning along, the factories and high buildings and chimneys of Buffalo, coming into view across a flat space of land, somehow reminded me of those older hill cities of Europe which one sees across a space of land from a train, but which are dead, dead. “Here is life,” I said to myself, “only here nothing has happened as yet, historically; whereas there, men have fought to and fro over every inch of the ground.” How would it be if one could say of Buffalo that in 2316 A. D.—four hundred years after the writing of this—there was a great labor leader who having endured many injuries was tired of the exactions of the money barons and securing a large following of the working people seized the city and administered it cooperatively, until he hadbeen routed by some capitalistic force and hanged from the highest building, his followers also being put to death? Or suppose a great rebellion had originated in New Mexico, and it had reached Buffalo and Pittsburg in its onsweep, and that here an enormous battle had been fought—an Austerlitz or a Waterloo? How we should stare at the towers as we came across this plain! How great names would rise up and flash across the sky! We would hear old war songs in our ears and dream old war dreams. Or suppose there were a great cathedral or a great museum crowded with the almost forgotten art of the twentieth, twentyfirst and twentysecond centuries!
I dream. Yet such are the things which somehow make a great city. But lacking in historic charm as Buffalo might be, the city had a peculiar interest for me, a very special one indeed, egoist that I am. For here, one springtime, twenty years before this, I entered Buffalo looking for work. Fear not, I am not going to begin a romantic and sentimental account of my youth and early struggles. It was still late March and very chilly. There was snow on the ground, but a touch of Spring in the air. I had come on from Cleveland, where I had failed to find anything to do, and was destined to go on to Pittsburg from here, for I could not make a permanent connection with any Buffalo paper. I was a lonely, lank, impossible newspaper type as I see myself now, and so sentimental and wistful that I must have seemed a fool to practical men. They never troubled to pay me a decent salary, I know that. But instead of looking briskly and earnestly for work, as you might think a boy with only a few dollars in his pocket and no friends anywhere within hundreds of miles would do, I spent my time mooning over what seemed then great streets and over the harbor waters near at hand, with their great grain elevators and ships and coal pockets. Ah, those small rivers with their boats and tugs and their romantic suggestion of the sea,—how I yearned over them!
At that time I traveled by trolley to Niagara, nearly forty miles away, and looked at that tumbling flood,which was then not chained or drained by turbine water power sluices. I was impressed, but somehow not quite so much as I thought I would be. Standing out on a rock near the greatest volume of water, under a grey sky, I got dizzy and felt as though I were being carried along, whether I wanted to or not. Farther up stream I stared at the water as it gathered force and speed, and wondered how I should feel if I were in a small canoe and were fighting it for my life. Below the falls I gazed up at the splendid spray and wanted to shout, so vigorously did the water fall and smash the rocks below. When I returned to Buffalo and my room, I congratulated myself that if I had got nothing else, so far, out of Buffalo, at least I had gained this.
Beyond having traveled from Warsaw to Chicago and thence to St. Louis and from St. Louis to this same city, via Toledo, and Cleveland, I had never really been anywhere, and life was all wonderful. No songs of Shelley, nor those strange wild lines of Euripides could outsing my mood at this time. I dreamed and dreamed here in this crude manufacturing town, roaming about those chilly streets, and now as I look back upon it, knowing that never again can I feel as I then felt, I seem to know that actually it was as wonderful as I had thought it was.
The spirit of America at that time was so remarkable. It was just entering on that vast, splendid, most lawless and most savage period in which the great financiers, now nearly all dead, were plotting and conniving the enslavement of the people and belaboring each other for power. Those crude and parvenu dynasties which now sit enthroned in our democracy, threatening its very life with their pretensions and assumptions, were just in the beginning. John D. Rockefeller was still in Cleveland. Flagler, William Rockefeller, H. H. Rogers, were still comparatively young and secret agents. Carnegie was still in Pittsburg—an iron master—and of all his brood of powerful children only Frick had appeared. William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould had only recently died.Cleveland was president and Mark Hanna was an unknown business man in Cleveland. The great struggles of the railroads, the coal companies, the gas companies, the oil companies, were still in abeyance, or just beginning. The multimillionaire had arrived, it is true, but not the billionaire. Giants were plotting, fighting, dreaming on every hand, and in this city, as in every other American city I then visited, there was a singing, illusioned spirit. Actually, the average American then believed that the possession of money would certainly solve all his earthly ills. You could see it in the faces of the people, in their step and manner. Power, power, power,—everyone was seeking power in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was almost an angry dissatisfaction with inefficiency, or slowness, or age, or anything which did not tend directly to the accumulation of riches. The American world of that day wanted you to eat, sleep and dream money and power.
And I, to whom my future was still a mystery (would that it were so still!), was dreaming of love and power, too, but with no theory of realizing them and with no understanding, indeed, of any way in which I could achieve the happiness and pleasures which I desired. Knowing this, I was unhappy. All day, after a fifteen cent breakfast in some cheap restaurant, or some twentyfive cent dinner in another, I would wander about, staring at these streets and their crowds, the high buildings, the great hotels, uncertain whether to go on to Pittsburg or to hang on here a little while longer in the hope of getting a suitable position as a reporter. Ah, I thought, if I could just be a great newspaper man, like McCullagh of St. Louis, or Dana of New York! In my pocket was a letter from the proprietor of the St. LouisRepublic, telling all and sundry what a remarkable youth he had found me to be, but somehow I never felt courageous enough to present it. It seemed so vainglorious! Instead, I hung over the rails of bridges and the walls of water fronts, watching the gulls, or stopped before the windows of shops and stores, and outsidegreat factories, and stared. At night I would return to my gloomy room and sit and read, or having eaten somewhere, walk the streets. I haunted the newspaper offices at the proper hours, but finding nothing, finally departed. Buffalo seemed a great but hard and cold city. Spinning into it this day, over long viaducts and through regions of seemingly endless factories and cars, it still seemed quite as vigorous, only not so hard, because my circumstances were different. Alas, I said to myself, I am no longer young, no longer really poor in the sense of being uncertain and inefficient, no longer so dreamy or moony over a future the details of which I may not know. Then all was uncertain, gay with hope or dark with fear. It might bring me anything or nothing. But now, now—what can it bring as wonderful as what I thought it might bring? What youth, I said to myself, is now walking about lonely, wistful, dreaming great dreams, and wishing, wishing, wishing? I would be that one if I could. Yes, I would go back for the dreams' sake,—the illusion of life. I would take hold of life as it was, and sigh and yearn and dream.
Or would I go back if I could?
We did not stay so long in Buffalo this day, but longer than we would have if we could have discovered at once that Canada had placed a heavy license tax on all cars entering Canada, and that, because of the European War, I presume, we would have to submit to a more thorough and tedious examination of our luggage than ordinarily. Naturally there was much excitement, and on all sides were evidences of preparations being made to send armaments and men to the Mother Country. We had looked forward with the greatest pleasure to a trip into Canada, but the conditions were so unfavorable that we hesitated to chance it. We didn’t go. In spite of our plans to cross into Canada here and come out at Detroit at the west end of Lake Erie, we listened to words of wisdom and refrained. The automobile expert of the Statler assured us thatwe would have a great deal of trouble. There would be an extra tax, delays, explanations, and examination of our luggage. A very handsome cigar clerk in this same hotel—what an expensive youth he was, in a very high collar, a braided suit, and most roseate necktie!—told us with an air of condescension that made me feel like a mere beginner in this automobiling world: “It’s nothing to do now. What car have you?”
We told him.
“Ah, no, you need a big racer like the —— (naming a car which neither Franklin nor I had ever heard of). Then you can make it in a day. There’s nothing to see. You don’t wanta stop.”
He patronized us so thoroughly from the vantage point of his youth (say eighteen years), and his knowledge of all the makes of machines and the roads about Buffalo, that I began to feel that perhaps as a boy I had not lived at all. Such shoes, such a tie, such rings and pins! Everything about him seemed to speak of girls and barbers and florists and garages and tailors. The Buffalo white light district rose up before me, and all the giddy-gaudy whirl of local rathskellers and the like.
“What a rowdy-dow boy it is, to be sure,” I observed to Franklin.
“Yes, there you have it,” he replied. “Youth and inexperience triumphing over any possible weight of knowledge. What’s the Encyclopedia Britannica compared to that?”
Our lunch at one of the big (I use the word advisedly) restaurants, was another experience in the same way. Speed had gone off somewhere with the car to some smaller place and Franklin and I ambled into the large place. It was as bad as the Roycroft Inn from the point of view of pretentiousness and assumed perfection, but from another it was even worse. When we try to be luxurious in America, how luxurious we can really be! The heaviness of our panelings and decorations! the thickness of our carpets! the air of solidity and vigor andcost without very much taste! It is Teutonic without that bizarre individuality which so often accompanies Teutonic architecture and decoration. We are so fine, and yet we are not—a sort of raw uncouthness showing like shabby woodwork from behind curtains of velvet and cloth of gold.
Sometimes, you know, I remember that we are a mongrel race and think we may never achieve anything of great import, so great is my dissatisfaction with the shows and vulgar gaucheries to be seen on all sides. At other times, viewing the upstanding middle class American with his vivid suit, yellow shoes, flaring tie and conspicuous money roll, I want to compose an ode in praise of the final enfranchisement of the common soul. How much better these millions, I ask you, with their derby and fedora hats, their ready made suits, their flaring jewelry, automobiles and a general sense of well being, and even perfection, if you will, than a race of slaves or serfs, dominated by grand dukes, barons, beperfumed and beribboned counts, daimios and lords and ladies, however cultivated and artistic these may appear! True, the latter would eat more gracefully, but would they be any the more desirable for that, actually? I hear a thousand patrician minded souls exclaiming, “Yes, of course,” and I hear a million lovers of democracy insisting “No.” Personally, I would take a few giants in every field, well curbed, and then a great and comfortable mass such as I see about me in these restaurants, for instance, well curbed also. Then I would let them mix and mingle.
But, oh, these restaurants!
And how long will it be before we will have just a few good ones in our cities?