25

Containing a Fruitless Search for American Vulgarity

I noticed more and more in America that vulgarity (which one finds, of course, all over the world, even in the South Sea Islands), seemed to be in inverse ratio to wealth. The people who were really tiresome, who talked about their automobiles and their incomes, and their emeralds, and their trips to Europe, were nearly always the people with comparatively small incomes. They might be rich, but they weren’t ‘rolling,’ like the Goulds or the Vanderbilts.

For example, a perfectly appalling little woman to whose box at the opera I was once unwillingly lured, suddenly, during an entr’acte, produced from her stocking a cheque for a hundred thousand dollars, and waved it in my face, saying, ‘Say, what d’you think of that for a birthday present?’ A most unsavoury proceeding, and as I afterwards discovered, a complete fake. The woman’s husband had not a hundred thousand dollars in the world, and went bankrupt only a few weeks later.

How entirely different are the super-millionaires! They have enough money to roof their houses in gold and diamonds, but they behave with the simplicity of an English parson. It seems foolish to have to say it, and one’s only excuse is that there is still in England a ridiculous prejudice against rich Americans.

It would be a good thing if people who have such a prejudice could meet a man like, for example, Jack Pierpont Morgan. No nicer creature ever trod the earth, in spite of his mansions in New York, Grosvenor Square, Scotland, Cannes, and a few other places. He was one of the last people I saw in New York, and one of the best.

One cannot think of Jack Morgan, of course, without thinking of his library, although it is somewhat depressing for an Englishman to think of it, since so vast a multitude of English treasures have found their way there. When he showed me over it I was absolutely staggered by the collection of our manuscripts which he has amassed. There is hardly a novelist or poet of any repute whose faded pages are not treasured in this house. And not only their manuscripts, but their portraits, their personal belongings, in fact anything of interest that is even vaguely connected with them.

I was browsing round among these treasures when I suddenly saw, under a glass case, a thrilling object. It was a little lock of hair, bound together with a piece of ribbon, and underneath was a label which read: ‘A lock of the hair of Keats. Given to Shelley by Keats’ friend—’ And then there was a description of the time and place at which the lock had been given.

This object so excited me that I could not drag myself away from it.

Jack Morgan came up.

‘What are you looking at?’ he said. ‘Keats’ hair? Like to hold it for a minute?’

He produced a key from his pocket, undid the case and put the precious thing into my hand. I felt an almost schoolboy emotion at the thought that this hair had grown from the head in which the Ode to a Grecian Urn had been conceived.

Suddenly Morgan said, ‘Give it to me for a moment.’ Reluctantly I handed it over. And then, marvel of marvels, he extracted a single hair from the lock—(a long, curly one) put it on a piece of paper, dropped a spot of sealing wax on one end of it and then wrote, as a sort of testimony:

‘Keats’ hair. From a lock in my possession. J. P. Morgan.’

This hair he gave to me, and, as all writers of autobiographies so constantly assert, ‘it is one of my most treasured possessions.’ After he had done that, he took off the key from its ring, handed it to his secretary and said:

‘That’s the last hair from that lock that I give away. If we take any more we shan’t have a lock, we’ll have a bald patch. Don’t you let me have that key—not if a dozen young Englishmen come along and beg for it on their bended knees.’

Morgan is like a father among his children when he moves among these marvels. He pretends to know nothing very much about them, but he knows a great deal. He knew, for example, what I had never quite understood—the exact sequence in which Poe had written ‘The Bells.’ Poe’s manuscripts seemed to convey a special charm for him, as indeed they might, since Poe was incomparably the greatest creative genius that America has produced. His manuscripts were the very reverse of what one would have expected. There were no wild scrawls, no blotches, no hasty writing. On the contrary, they were all beautifully transcribed on clean paper, in a hand that would have won a prize in the copybook of a schoolboy.

I fell quite in love with American newspapers—bad taste, I suppose—but quite comprehensible if you have strength enough to survive the first shock of them. Everybody has written everything that there is to be written about American journalism, and I won’t add to it. But one episode does deserve to be recorded as a classic example of New World enterprise.

The two ladies of our Mission, after a few weeks of racket and bustle and sleeping-cars, arrived at Detroit in such a state of exhaustion that they retired straight to their rooms, refusing to see anybody, whether they were professors, or journalists, or presidents, no matter, in fact, how distinguished they might be. There arrived on the scene a young man with a speckled face who demanded an immediate interview with these ladies.

‘Impossible,’ I said.

‘I’ve got to get it.’

‘Can’t help that.’

‘I shall get it.’

‘You won’t.’

Pause. The speckled gentleman spat on the floor, sniffed, and then said, ‘Well, we shall see.’

What he meant I did not even guess. But the next day there appeared an immense interview, together with pictures of the two ladies in question, under a head-line that informed all and sundry that ‘Dishpans Lose Their Lure For Female Sex in England Say Prominent British Women Educators.’

To an American reader, this must sound quite dull. Its only value, as a story, is that, to an Englishman, it sounds almost impossible. The ladies, rising refreshed, and eating a hearty breakfast, looked up from over their grape-fruit to see this astounding account of the interview which they had never given, and choked with fury.

‘How dare they?’ said one.

‘How monstrous!’ said the other. ‘Barbarism, savagery!’ they cried.

‘Not at all.’ It was imperative to soothe the ladies a little. ‘Don’t you see that it’s really extraordinarily funny? A speckled young man demands an interview and doesn’t get one. He therefore invents it. You ought to feel flattered that your views are so much sought after.’

They did not feel flattered, however.

‘Besides,’ I added, ‘it is probably perfectly true that Dishpans have Lost their Lure. Haven’t they?’

‘Dishpans have no more to do with the case than the flowers that bloom in the spring,’ said the ladies.

******

And there, I am going to leave America. I am well aware that these few pages represent only a very small and quite superficial fragment of a great many exciting happenings. The truth, however, is that I was too young to pick out what Americans call the ‘high spots.’ The rest of this book will, I trust, be different.