SPLEISTVILLE, Up the Hudson.
Dearest Mamma,—A whole week since we landed! and we are terribly amused (“terribly” is American for “much”); and do you know that describes almost everything in comparison to at home. Everything is “colossalised”—events, fortunes, accidents, climate, conversation, ambitions—everything is in the extreme—all en-gros, not en-detail. They can’t even have a tram run off a line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its making a holocaust of half a street full. Even in their hospitality they are twice the size of other nations, simply too kind and generous for words. They have loaded us with invitations; we have been out morning, noon and night.
The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms and carts!
Now we are staying in a country palace with the family we met on the boat, whom the Americans we know in England would not speak to; in fact, I am sure they are rather hurt at our coming here; but Octavia says she prefers to see something we do not see in England. The Van Verdens, and Courtfields and Latours are almost like us, only they are richer and have better French furniture. So she says she wants to see the others, the American Americans we don’t meet at home. If people are nice in themselves how can it matter who they are or if “fashionable” or not. The whole thing is nonsense and if you belong to a country where the longest tradition is sixteen hundred and something, and your ancestor got there then through being a middle class puritan, or a ne’er-do-weel shipped off to colonise a savage land, it is too absurd to boast about ancestry or worry in the least over such things. The facts to be proud of are the splendid, vivid, vital, successful creatures they are now, no matter what their origin; but just like Hurstbridge and Ermyntrude in the nursery, the one thing they can’t have they think immensely of. Nearly everyone tells you here, their great-great-grandfather came over in the Mayflower. (How absurd of the Cunard line to be proud of the Mauretania! The Mayflower, of course, must have been twice the size.) I wonder if in Virginia they would inform us theirs were the original cavaliers. I don’t expect so, because cavaliers always were gentlemen, and puritans of any century only of the middle classes. Fancy if we had to announce to strangers that Tom’s ancestor carried the standard at Agincourt and Octavia’s and mine came over with the Conqueror!
Even in a week Tom has got so wearied about the Mayflower that yesterday at lunch when some new people came, and one woman began again, he said his father had collected rags and bones, and his great-great-grandfather was hung for sheep stealing! The woman nearly had a fit, and I heard her reproaching our hostess afterwards, as she said she had been invited to meet an English Earl! And the poor hostess looked so unhappy and came and asked me in such a worried voice if it were really true; so I told her I thought not exactly, but that the late Earl had a wonderful collection of Persian carpets and ivories which Tom might be alluding to. Even this did not comfort her, I could see she was still troubled over the sheep stealing, and the only thing I could think of to explain that was about the eighth Earl, don’t you remember, Mamma? who was beheaded for the Old Pretender.
But the exquisite part of it all is the lady Tom told the story to was interviewed directly she got home, I suppose, for this morning in most of the papers there are headlines six inches tall:
ENGLISH PEER NO CATCH
FATHER RAG AND BONE MERCHANT
GRANDFATHER HANGED
Tom is so enchanted he is going to have them framed for the smoking room at Chevenix. But our hostess is too unhappy and burns to get him to deny it publicly. “My dear lady,” Tom said, “would you have me deny I’ve got a green nose?” She looked so puzzled, “Oh, Lord Chevenix,” she said, “why, of course you have not. A little sunburnt, perhaps—but green!” Think of it, Mamma! Octavia and I nearly collapsed, and she is such a nice woman, too, and not really a fool; bright and cheery and sensible; but I am afraid out here they don’t yet quite understand Tom, or Octavia either, for the matter of that.
There is a lovely place in New York called the Riverside Drive, charming houses looking straight out on the Hudson. But if you live in that part none of the Four Hundred or Two Hundred and Fifty, or whatever it is, would visit you, hardly. These people we are staying with now have a mansion there but are soon going to move. The daughter, Natalie, told me to-day, that after this her Poppa would also take a house at Newport, because now they would have no difficulty in getting into the swim!
We came here for the Sunday and it was raining when we arrived—after an odious train journey. Tom’s valet and both the maids are perfectly at sea as yet, and while burning with rage over the lack of, and indifference of, the porters, are too scornfully haughty to adapt themselves to circumstances; so they still bring unnecessary hand luggage and argue with the conductor. We made a mistake in the train and there was no Pullman, so that means there is only one class. It really is so quaint. Mamma, having to travel as if it were third. It amused me immensely, two people on a seat on either side and an aisle through the middle down which the ticket collector walks, and for most of the journey a child raced backwards and forwards, jumping with sticky hands clinging to the sides of each seat while it sucked candy. The mother screeched, “Say, Willie, if you don’t quit that game, I’ll tell your pa when we get home!” However, Willie shouted, “You bet,” and paid not the least attention!
Nearly everywhere where you have to come in contact with people in an obviously inferior or menial position, manners don’t exist. They seem to think they can demonstrate their equality, if not superiority, by being as rude as possible. Of course if they were really the ladies and gentlemen they are trying to prove they are, they would be courteous and gentle. The attitude is, “I’m as good as you, indeed better!” Either you are a gentleman or woman, aren’t you, Mamma? and you do not have to demonstrate it, everyone can see it; or you are not, and no amount of your own assertion that you are will make anyone believe you. So, of what use to be rude, or clamour, or boast? Doesn’t it make you laugh, Mamma? Though it surprises me here because as a people they are certainly more intelligent than any other people on earth, and one would have thought they would have seen how futile and funny that side of them is.
The talk of equality is just as much nonsense in America as in every other place under the sun. How can people be called equal when the Browns won’t know the Smiths! And the Van Brounckers won’t know either, and Fifth Avenue does not bow to the West Side, and everyone is striving to “go one better” than his neighbour.
Station is as strictly defined as in England, where the village grocer’s daughter at Valmond no longer could speak to a school friend, a little general servant who came to fetch treacle at the shop, when Pappa Grocer bought a piano! So you see, Mamma, it is in human nature, whether you are English or American, if you haven’t a sense of humour. I suppose you have to be up where we are for it all to seem nonsense and not to matter; and, who knows? If there were another grade beyond us we might be just the same, too; but it is trash to talk of equality. Even a Socialist leader thinks himself above the crowd—and is, too, though I should imagine that the American middle and lower classes would assert they have no equal but God—if they don’t actually look down on Him.
How I am rambling on, and I wanted to tell you heaps of things! I shall never get them all into this letter.
When we arrived at this palace it was, as I say, raining, but that did not prevent the marble steps from being decorated with three footmen at equal distances to usher us into the care of a cabinet minister-looking butler, and then through a porphyry hall hung with priceless tapestry and some shockingly glaring imitation Elizabethan oak chairs—to the library, where our hostess awaited us in a magnificent décollete tea gown, and at least forty thousand pounds’ worth of pearls. Natalie had the sweetest of frocks possible and was quite simple and nice, and there is not the least difference in her to the daughters of any of our “smart” friends.
The library was a library because they told us so, but there were not any books there, only groups of impossible furniture covered with magnificent brocade, and the finest flowers one ever saw, most perfectly put in huge vases by a really clever gardener; no subtle arrangement of colours, but every blossom the largest there could be in nature. The tea seemed to get mostly poured out by the servants, and the table was covered with a cloth so encrusted with Venetian lace one’s cup was unsteady on it. That is one of the most remarkable points here—I mean America—as far as I have seen. The table cloths at every meal are masses of lace, and every sort of wonderful implement in the way of different gold forks and knives for every dish lie by your plate; and such exquisite glass; and some even have old polished tables like Aunt Maria, but instead of the simple slips they have mats and centrepieces and squares of magnificent lace. Only the very highest cream of the inner elect have plain table cloths and a little silver like we do at home. And it is always a “party”—everyone is conscious they are there, and they either assume bad manners or good ones, but nobody is sans gêne. Octavia says it takes as long to be that as to look like a gentleman clean shaven in evening dress. The rooms are awfully hot, steam heated up to about 75, and it makes your head swim after a while. There is only the son and a married daughter and husband in the house besides ourselves and two young men. We should call them bank clerks at home, and that is, I suppose, what they are here; only it is all different. Every man works just like our middle classes; it is not the least unaristocratic to be a lawyer or a doctor or a wholesale store-keeper, or any profession you can name, so long as it makes you rich. A man who does nothing is not considered to “amount to anything,” and he generally doesn’t, either! And I suppose it must be the climate, because directly they get immensely rich, so that the sons need not work, when it gets to the third generation, they often are invalids or weaklings, or have some funny vice or mania, and lots of them die of drink; which shows it is intended in some climates for men to work. Octavia says it takes centuries of wielding battle-axes and commanding vassals to give the consciousness of superiority which enables people to be idle without being vicious; but Tom says it is because they don’t hunt and shoot, and go to the bench, and attend to their estates and county business; so instead they have to go crazy over fast motoring or flying machines, or any fad which is uppermost, not having any traditions of how their forefathers passed their time.
Last night there was a dinner party and some such clever men came. They were great financiers or business men or heads of Trusts. That means you have a splendid opportunity to speculate, only if anything goes wrong you have to chance all your other associates on the trust turning against you and saying it was all your fault, and then you generally have to commit suicide; but while you are head you can become frightfully rich and respected. I sat between two of the most successful of different things, and they talked all the time. They don’t want to hear what you have to say, only to tell you about themselves and their ideas, so it is most interesting. They are not the least cultivated in literature or art or anything decorative, but full of ideas upon the future evolution of schemes and things; really intensely clever, some of them. Only the odd part of it is they don’t seem to speculate upon what the marvellous conglomeration of false proportions, unbalance and luxury are going to bring their nation to, if they are not careful.
Mr. Spleist (that is our host’s name) is so kind! He spoils his wife and Natalie more even than Harry spoils Ermyntrude; and the son-in-law is just the same to his wife. American husbands fetch and carry and come to heel like trained spaniels, and it is perfectly lovely; everything is so simple. If you happen to get bored with your husband, or he has a cold in his head, or anything that gets on your nerves, or you suddenly fancy some other man, you have not got all the bother and subterfuge of taking him for a lover and chancing a scandal like in England. You simply get your husband to let you divorce him, and make him give you heaps of money, and you keep the children if you happen to want them; or—there is generally only one—you agree to give that up for an extra million if he fancies it; and then you go off and marry your young man when he is free; because all American men are married, and he will have had to get his wife to divorce him. But when it is all “through,” then it is comfortable and tidy, only the families get mixed after a while, and people have to be awfully careful not to ask them out to dinner together. One little girl at a dancing class is reported to have said to another: “What do you think of your new Papa? I think he is a mean cuss. He gave me no candy when he was mine.”
Octavia says, from a morality standard, she does not see there is the least difference to our lovers in England and France, but I do, because here they have the comforting sense of the law finding it all right. The only tiresome part of it is, it must quite take away the zest of forbidden fruit that European nations get out of such affairs.
Our bedrooms are marvels. Mine is immense, with two suites of impossible rococo Louis XV. furniture in it; the richest curtains with heaps of arranged draperies and fringe, grand writing table things, a few embroidered cushions; but no new books, or comfy sofas, or look of cosy anywhere. The bathrooms to each room are superb; miles beyond one’s ideas of them in general at home. Tom says he can’t sleep because the embroidered monograms on the pillows and things scratch his cheek, and the lace frills tickle his nose, while he catches his toes in the Venetian insertion in the sheets. The linen itself is the finest you ever saw, Mamma, and would be too exquisite plain. Now one knows where all those marvellously over-worked things in the Paris shops go to, and all the wonderful gold incrusted Carlsbad glass. You meet it here in every house.
The gardens are absurd, as compared with ours in England, but they have far better glass houses and forcing processes and perfection of each plant; because you see even the gardener would feel his had to be just one better than the people’s next door. They are far prouder of these imported things than their divine natural trees, or the perfectly glorious view over the Hudson, and insisted upon us examining all that, while Mr. Spleist told us how much it all cost and would not let us linger to get the lovely picture of the river and the opposite shore; until Octavia said we had a few greenhouses at home and some fairly fine gardens, but nowhere had we so noble a river or so vast a view, and he seemed to be quite hurt at all that, because he had not bought them, I suppose! And yet, Mamma, I cannot tell you what kind, nice people the Spleists really are; only the strange quality of boast and application of personal material gain is most extraordinary.
The outside of the house is brownish red sandstone, and is a wonderful mixture of all styles.
There is no room in it where there is any look of what we call “home,” and not one shabby thing. Mrs. Spleist has a “boudoir”—and it is a boudoir! It is as if you went into the best shop and said, “I want a boudoir;” just as you would, “I want a hat,” and paid for it and brought it home with you. Natalie has a sitting-room, and it is just the same. They are not quite far enough up yet on the social ladder to have every corner of the establishment done by Duveen, and the result is truly appalling.
The food is wonderful, extraordinarily good; but although the footmen are English they don’t wait anything like as well as if they had remained at home; and Octavia’s old maid, Wilbor, told her the hurly burly downstairs is beyond description; snatching their meals anywhere, with no time or etiquette or housekeeper’s room; all, everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. And the absolutely disrespectful way they speak of their master and mistress—machines to make money out of, they seem to think—perfectly astonished Wilbor, who highly disapproves of it all. Agnès, having a French woman’s eye to the main chance, says, “N’importe, ici on gagne beaucoup d’argent!” So probably she will leave me before we return.
What volumes I have written, dearest Mamma!
Best love from your,
Affectionate daughter,
ELIZABETH.