CHAPTER XIII
Sutton’s daily programme was characteristic of young men of his sort.
He rose early enough in the morning to bolt a cup of coffee by nine o’clock, and be at his office by half-past nine.
In New York, workmen rise early; business men late—a custom that had better change before it is changed.
Sutton’s business, in common with the business of most reputable people, had suffered under the eight years’ blight of a mindless administration.
Even from the beginning, the grotesqueries of a comic-opera cabinet had alarmed the business world. Now, through eight incredible years, amid the ape-like leaps and capers of a contemptible Congress and the din of the demagogues in authority, a faint glimmer appeared in the grey obscurity.
Monstrous policies, infamous measures were nearing a climax; social unrest was approaching a boiling point; all the national and local scum from those eight miserable years was coming to the surface.
There it floated in its filth, stupidity, arrogance, incompetency—there seethed the dregs, too—national humiliation, sectional ruthlessness, class hatred, bitter consciousness of the world’s amused contempt.
There were the poisonous precipitations, too, in this hellbroth wherein the nation was stewing—enmities sown recklessly abroad; at home, the most infamous tax laws ever imposed since the day of the German King of England, George III.
And then the grotesqueries—the fanatic, rampant and victorious, imposing his will as ruthlessly as the Holy Office had dealt with any who opposed its dogmas—an entire people indicted as drunkards, and laws made to discipline everybody—laws contemplated, advocated, to regulate a people’s religious beliefs, devotional observances, spiritual requirements, minds—every inherent liberty which was theirs!
Everywhere the bigot, the despot, the mental pervert, were lifting hydra heads out of the accumulations of the last eight years. And, on this rotting culture, the crack-brain fed and battened—the parlour socialist; the ragged—and far more to be respected—anarchist; the miserable scribbler of seditious articles; the half-crazed intellectual, writing in praise of human equality—to which he must aspire in vain; the terrorist screaming in red print; the half-educated millionaire, with his mischievous efforts to start a religious pogrom; Congressmen of the “poor white” variety, appealing to sectionalism; and then the vast genus of Grafter—the contractor with his “code of practice”; the politician getting “his”; the walking delegate; the “leaders” who make the very name of “labour” a nauseating stink.
Now, in this grey, unhealthy obscurity befogging a nation, and gradually thickening during the last eight years, men’s minds and thoughts became dull and greyish, too.
Dull minds ruled and dictated the “trend of modern thought,” the cult of the commonplace made the average person duller, the stupid stupider, the intellectual morose.
It was an era of joyless dulness in literature and in art; creative work by the dull for the dull offered only what was negative and dreary. Solemnity reigned. The misty moroseness of Scandinavia and of Russia settled like a cloud over the country, clogging inspiration, tarnishing all brightness, reproving exuberance, so that in modern fiction there remained no buoyancy, no charm, no beauty, no tender frailty, nor any hint of sun and blue sky—nothing of human aspiration—no heart, no blood—only a monotony of all that is sordid, colourless, and passionless in human life.
In art, too, the plodding pedant spread the accentless cult of the commonplace, or of ugliness, physical and spiritual. That tour de force of degraded taste, The Faun, symbolised horribly the mental decadence of a sickened world.
The human-cow-school flourished: in every studio and art gallery cow-like human females suckled babies or dangled large bronze hands or marble feet over meaningless pedestals.
Architects beautified such squares as The Plaza with chunks of Indiana limestone and a series of superimposed cheeses for a fountain to face a gilded General, whose steed was led recklessly down town by a barefooted servant-girl wearing wings.
The ugliness that was New York’s!—the ugliness that was the nation’s!—physical, mental, spiritual, affronting a Creator who created nothing unlovely since the first nebulæ floated incandescent on the ocean of the night.