Just before I came home to America in the Spring of 1919, I went to Essex for a week-end in one of those splendid old estates which are the pride of England.
It was not my first visit, but I was awed anew by the immensity of the place, its culture and wealth which seemed to have existed always, its aged power and pride. Whole lives had been woven into its window curtains and priceless rugs; centuries of art lived in the great tapestries; successive generations of great artists had painted the ancestors of the present owner.
All three sons of that house went into the war. One never returned from Egypt, another is buried in Flanders. Only the youngest returned.
At first glance the smooth life seemed unchanged in the proud old house. But before sundown of my first day there, I knew that life had put its acid test to the shield and proved it pure gold.
War taxes had fallen heavily on the estate and it was to be leased to an American. Until then, the castle was a home to less fortunate buddies of the owner's sons.
But these were not the tests I mean, neither these nor the courage and the poise of that family in the face of their terrible loss, nor their effort to make every one happy and comfortable.
It was an incident at tea time that opened my eyes. The youngest son, now the only son, came in from a cross-country tramp and brought with him a pleasant faced young woman whom he introduced as “one of my pals in the war.”
That was enough. Lady R. greeted her as one of the royal blood. The girl was the daughter of a Manchester plumber. She had done her bit, and it had been a hard bit, in the war, and now she was stenographer in a near-by village. Later in the afternoon the story came out. She had been clerk in the Q. M. corps and after her brother's death she asked for service near the front, something hard. She got it. The mules in the supply and ammunition trains must be fed and it was her job to get hay to a certain division. The girl had ten motor trucks to handle and twenty men, three of them noncommissioned officers.
After four days, during which trucks had disappeared and mules gone unfed, she asked the colonel for the rank of first sergeant, with only enlisted men under her.
Her first official orders were: All trucks must stay together. If one breaks down, the others will stop and help.
The second day of her new command, she met our young host, who needed a truck to move supplies and tried to commandeer one of hers. When she refused, he ordered her. He was a captain.
“I am under orders to get those ten loads of hay to the mules,” was her reply.
“What will you do if I just take one of them?” asked the captain.
“You won't,” said the girl confidently.
“I must get a truck,” he insisted. “What can you do about it if I take one of yours?”
“England needs men,” she answered. “But if you made it necessary I'd have to shoot you. If the mules are n't fed, you and other men can't fight. If you were fit to be a captain, you'd know that.”
The young captain told the story himself and his family enjoyed it, evidently admiring the Manchester lassie, who sat there as red as a poppy. They did not bend to the plumber's daughter, nor seem to try to lift her to the altars of their ancient hall.
Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death together. It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a fish knife to sever. There was no consciousness of ancient class. There was only to-day and to-morrow.
It was the America I love—that spirit. The best America—valuing a human being for personal worth. Then I sailed for home. I went to Newport, to the Atlantic coast resorts. They were all the same.
The world had changed but not my own country.
I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness, more reckless morals than ever before, and—horrible to contemplate—springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards which war had torn from the old.
Social lines tightened. Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or “family.” The “doughboy shavetail”, a hero before the armistice, or the aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.
I was heartsick. I thought often of those splendid men I had met in France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians. I wondered if any one back home was “just nodding” to them.
Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.
New money always glitters. I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and gold fittings, diamonds big as birds' eggs, ermine coats in the daytime—jeweled heels at night.
Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner. At private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat with comfort.
One day I went to market—the kind of a market to which my mother would have gone—and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy any but porterhouse steaks—merely because porterhouse steak stood for prosperity.
In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up suddenly like an evil toadstool. It is a fungous disease that spreads. Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings, all of it is snobbish and offensive. It wears foreign clothes and affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents. It chops and mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly. Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from foreign secretaries and servants. These new Americans try to appear superior and distinctive by scorning all things American. They want English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won prizes in Europe since 1912. An American manufacturer told me he has to stamp his cretonne “English style print” to sell it in this country.
This new species of American apes royalty. It goes in for crests. It may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a genealogist to dig up a shield. Fine, if you are entitled to a crest. But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.
There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the silver, the toilet articles—there are sometimes even crests on the servants' buttons and on linen and underclothes!
Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to other lies. The next step is ancestors.
Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. And the public swallows it. They swallow each other's ancestors. Even old families take these new descendants as a matter of course.
One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion. The only simple thing in the house was the mind of the hostess. That night it was a tangled skein.
I saw she was worried. Her house was full of potentates, the wives of two cabinet officers, and Mrs. Coolidge. She left the room twice after the dinner hour had arrived, and it was late when dinner was finally announced.
Later in the evening one of the servants whispered to the hostess that she was wanted on the telephone—the State Department.
She returned to the drawing-room looking as if she had just heard of a death in the family. The guests began considerately to leave.
Her expensive party was a dismal failure. As I have known her husband for years, I asked if I could be of any use.
“It 's too late, now,” he said. “She had the Princess Bibesco and the Princess Lubomirska here and the wife of the Vice President, and she didn't know the precedence they took. She held up dinner half an hour trying to get the State Department and now they tell her she guessed wrong. It 's a tragedy to her.”
I confess I did not feel very sorry for that woman. I remembered my little Indiana girl who introduced the captain to the Queen of Belgium.
I began to feel as if all America were like the De Morgan jingle:
“Great fleas have little fleas
On their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitum.”
Then I took a trip across the continent, stopping off in Indiana to see my little Y friends. It was like a bath for my soul. Brains count out West. Anybody who tries to show off is snubbed.
You must do something to be anything in the Middle West; just to have something doesn't count. You don't list your ancestors as you must in Virginia or the Carolinas, but to feel self-respecting you must do something.
I was happy to renew my wartime friendships. Those who have not shared a great work or a greater tragedy will not understand these bonds.
The same young friend who served tea to the king took me to a musicale. She wore her war medal. One of the guests, a lady from Virginia who claims four coats of arms, was impressed by the girl's medal and the fact that she had entertained the king.
The girl had married since the war, a fine young Irish lawyer, with a family name which once belonged to a king but which, since hard times hit the old sod, has been a butt for song and jest.
The name did not impress the lady from Virginia. “You have such an interesting face,” she said. “What was your name before your marriage?”
“Oh, it was much less interesting than my husband's,” answered my young Y friend, and lifting the conversation out of the personal she asked, “Have you read Mr. Keynes' 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace?'”
“I had n't read it myself,” she confided to me later, “but it was the first new book I could think of!”
That is good American manners and what the French call savoir faire.
The Far West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted hospitality and its provincialism. The West has inherited some of the finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay, Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up into its mother's finest child.
“No church west of Chicago, no God west of Denver,” we used to hear when I was a child. But to-day, the churches are part of the community and even men go. People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like to. Churches and schools are important places in the West.
President Harding has said that he hopes more and more people will learn to want to pray in a closet alone with God. There are many people like that in our Middle West. I say this, because I hope it may help other American women who love their country to fight for honesty and purpose in our national life, and for tolerance and respect for the simple things in our private lives.
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