Then a letter from Kurt in Stubendorf. He had a second son, and enclosed a snapshot. He was working hard on his first symphony, and sketched the opening theme, resolute and bold, alla marcia. He congratulated Lanny on his marriage, and hoped it would bring him happiness; he added that such great amounts of money put a heavy strain on the strongest character. Kurt might have said: “I know that yours will be equal to the test.” But Lanny knew that Kurt didn’t think that. Lanny himself wasn’t sure about it, and he hoped that German newspapers didn’t report the doings of cafe society in New York.
Kurt wrote: “I have just come back from Munich, where I met our Fuhrer and heard him deliver a most inspiring speech. I have no hope that it will do any good to tell you about it, but mark my word that we have the movement of the future, and the man to lead Europe out of its present mess. If you don’t find what you are looking for among the New York plutocracy, bring your wife and spend Christmas with us, and give Heinrich a chance to tell you about the youth movement he is helping to build.” Lanny thought about that in the brief intervals when he had time to think about anything; he certainly wasn’t satisfied with what he was finding among the aforesaid “plutocracy.”
Also a letter from Lincoln Steffens, who was in San Francisco, writing his autobiography. Stef wrote notes to his friends in a tight little script that was as good as a crossword puzzle; if you once got going you might have quite a run of luck, but if you stopped for any single word you were lost. Stef said he had just met his little boy after quite an interval and found it exciting. He advised Lanny to have a boy as soon as possible. He said that he had known J.P. very well in the old days, and was indebted to him for taking him on the inside of the “merger racket.” He concluded by saying: “If you are in the market, take my advice and get out, for the tower is now so high and leaning so far that one more stone may send it toppling. You are too young to remember the panic of 1907, but after it was over a friend of mine explained it by saying: ‘Somebody asked for a dollar.’ Wall Street is in a condition now where it would break if somebody asked for a dime.”
Lanny wasn’t “in the market”; he was in pictures and matrimony, and that was enough. He forwarded this letter to his father, with a transcription written on the back. Robbie’s reply was: “Just to show how much I think of your Red friend’s judgment, I have purchased another thousand shares of telephone stock. It was up to 304 and I got it at 287 and a half, which looks mighty good to me!”
That was the way they all felt, and the way they were acting; it was a phenomenon currently known as the “Great Bull Market,” and people laughed at you if you tried to restrain them. Everywhere you went they were talking about stocks; everywhere they told about profits they had made, or were going to make next week. There was a “Translux,” a device by which the ticker figures were shown on a translucent screen, in nearly every branch broker’s office; such an office was to be found in most of the hotels where the rich gathered, and you would see crowds of men and women watching the figures. If it were during market hours, one after another would hurry off to a telephone to give an order to his broker. It was the same in every city and town; hardly one without a broker’s office, and market quotations were given over the radio at frequent intervals. Farmers and ranchers were phoning their buying and selling orders; doctors and lawyers and merchants, their secretaries and errand boys, their chauffeurs and bootblacks—all were following the market reports, reading what the newspapers told them, eavesdropping for “tips” or following their “hunches.” The country had got used to hearing about “five-million-share days” on the stock exchange, and took that for “prosperity.”
VIII
Irma had become rather tired of listening to people saying the same things about the paintings of Marcel Detaze; and so, to tell the truth, had Lanny. One morning Irma said: “Mother’s on the way to town and we’re going to see what’s in the shops. Would you like to go with us?” Lanny replied: “What I want is to take a long walk and look at New York. I don’t see enough from the window of a limousine.”
He set out from that temple de luxe, the Ritzy-Waldorf, in the direction where he knew the sun rose, though he couldn’t see it from the bottom of these artificial canyons. He had learned how one half lived, and now he would observe the other half. In London it was the East End, here it was the East Side. What tropism guided the poor toward the rising sun? Was it because they got up early and saw it, while the rich didn’t begin life till afternoon?
Anyhow, here were swarms of people; in O. Henry’s day the Four Million, now the Seven Million. What was the limit to their crowding onto this narrow island? What was the force that would stop them? Fire, or earthquake, or bombs, perhaps? Or just plain suffocation? Some wit had said that the aim of every country boy was to get enough money to go and live in New York so that he could get enough money to go and live in the country.
Baghdad on the Subway! Lanny had read stories about it when he was young, and now he looked for the types, and it seemed to him that all were types. Nearly everybody walked fast; to stroll meant either a down-and-out or a policeman. Everybody was intent upon his own affairs, and stared straight ahead out of a thin, pale, intense face. If anybody bumped into you he didn’t have time to excuse himself, he just dodged and went on. If you were in trouble, and stopped somebody to ask the way, he would come out of his trance of money-making, and tell you in a friendly enough manner where you were and how to get to the place of your desire; but as a rule it was understood that nobody had time for politeness.
Lanny came to the river, which he had seen from the deck of the Bessie Budd. The frontage had been given up to dingy tenements and sheds, but now the rich were taking sections for their penthouses. It made an immediate and rather startling juxtaposition of riches and poverty. Not so wise of the rich, Lanny thought—but doubtless they would get the poor cleared out very soon. If they wanted anything, they took it. What else did it mean to be rich?
He turned back into the interior and strolled south. Block after block, and they all seemed alike; mile after mile of dingy houses with brownstone fronts; if it hadn’t been for the sun, and the signs at each corner, he might have thought he was walking in circles—or, rather, in rectangles. Everywhere streets crowded with traffic, sidewalks swarming with humans. How did they live? How could they bear to live? Why should they want to live? Indubitably they did all these things. You saw few faces that indicated happiness, but nearly all revealed an intense determination to live. It was the miracle of nature, repeated over and over, in antheaps, in beehives, in the slums of great cities.
So mused the young philosopher; an elegantly dressed philosopher, wearing the proper morning clothes, with only one button to his coat, and a small gardenia on the large lapel—it was one of the duties of the hotel valet to provide it. In the old days the saunterer would have been jeered at as a “dude,” and some small boy might have shied a stale turnip at him; but now the boys were all in school, and anyone who had ten cents could see people like Lanny in a near-by motion-picture theater. No longer was there anything strange or annoying about a slender, erect figure with regular features, a little brown mustache, and clothes from Savile Row, London.
There was an Italian section, and stout brown women chaffering for dried garlic and strings of red peppers in front of tiny shops. Then it became a Jewish city, with signs in strange oriental characters. The tenements were obviously of the oldest, covered with rusty iron fire-escapes having bedding and wash hanging on them. The streets were filthy with litter—what taxpayers would consent to keep such streets clean? Old men with long coats and long black beards stood in the doorways of the shops, and the curbs were lined with little pushcarts having neckties and suspenders, hats and slippers, cabbages, apples, and dried fish. Women with baskets poked into the merchandise, examining it and bargaining in Yiddish, a kind of comical German of which Lanny had learned many words from his friends the Robins. Certainly everybody here was determined to live. How they did hang on! With w
hat ferocity they asserted their right not to go under!
IX
Lanny knew that somewhere in front of him was the City Hall district, now at the height of a hot election campaign; also the Wall Street district, where for days the market had been in a state of instability. Lanny had started out with the idea of seeing these places, but they were farther away than he thought. He knew that there were subways by which, for a nickel, he could be whirled back to the hotel district in a few minutes; so he was in no hurry. He thought it might be interesting to talk to some of these people, to find out what they thought about the state of the world, and of their confused and bewildering city. People who didn’t know that he was Mr. Irma Barnes!
A vague discontent had been in Lanny’s mind; he was missing something in New York, and now, wandering among these dingy tenements, he realized what it was; he had no Uncle Jesse here, no Longuet or Blum, no Reds or Pinks of any shade. Nobody to point out to him the evils of the capitalist system and insist that it was nearing its collapse! Not even a Rick or other intellectual to tell him in highbrow language how wasteful was the system of competitive commercialism, and how diligently it was digging the foundations from under itself! Lanndy had learned to require this mental stimulus, as much so as his glass of orange juice in the morning and his glass of wine at lunch.
There were bound to be some Reds in New York; where would one look for them? Lanny’s thoughts turned to his old friend Herron, who had died a couple of years ago in Italy—one might say of a broken heart, because he could no longer bear the aspect which Europe presented to him. But his spirit lived on in a Socialist school which he had started in New York, with money left by the mother of that wife with whom he had fled from America. This had happened more than twenty-five years ago, while Lanny had been a toddler on the beach at Juan. Herron had told him about the school, but the young visitor racked his brains and couldn’t remember its name.
It occurred to him that there must be a Socialist paper of some sort in this great metropolis, and a neighborhood like this would be the place to look for it. He stopped at a stand and inquired, and a copy of the New Leader, price five cents, was thrust into his hands. In format it was different from Vorwärts, Le Populaire, and the London Daily Herald, but its soul was the same, and Lanny, strolling along and looking at the headlines, was comforted at once. An editorial on the front page denounced Mayor Walker, Tammany candidate for re-election, as a waster and corruptionist, a frivolous playboy, a night-club habitue. Large headlines described a mass meeting at which Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, had promised to reduce the price of milk.
Lanny examined the few advertisements, and, sure enough, there was a box reporting the activities of the Rand School of Social Science. He recalled the name at once; Carrie Rand had been the name of Herron’s wife. They were having lectures, courses, meetings of various sorts. Lanny walked to the nearest north and south avenue, hailed a taxicab, and got in, saying: “Seven East Fifteenth.”
The driver gave him a second look, and grinned. “You a comrade?”
“Not good enough for that,” was the modest reply; “but I know some of them.”
“Fellow-traveler, eh?”
“I believe that’s a Communist term, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I am, buddy.”
So the ice was broken, and all the way up Third Avenue the driver would turn and explode his ideas at his fare. There is nobody more free-spoken than a New York taxidriver, and he doesn’t have to be a Red, though of course that helps. His license on the dashboard has his photograph on it, so that you can look and make sure that he is the licensee; it is supposed to help control his driving, if not his tongue. This driver told Lanny about Tammany, and the crookedness of its politicians; also of the labor-skates and others who rode on the backs of the workers. “Incidentally, between you and me,” said he, “that bunch at the Rand School are yellow labor-fakers. You don’t have to believe what I tell you, but look out for yourself.”
Lanny didn’t object to these opinions; quite the contrary, they made him feel at home. It was the old phonograph record scratching away! “I’ve an uncle in Paris who’s a Communist,” he said. “His girl has a younger sister who is married to a Paris taxidriver, and he talks just like you.”
“Naturally,” responded the other.
“The party line,” smiled Lanny. He would have enjoyed an argument with this lively chap—but only if he would stop the car somewhere. Weaving in and out among the iron pillars of the Third Avenue El, whizzing past a street car, missing another taxi by six inches, or maybe only one—Lanny found it difficult to concentrate his mind upon the problem of expropriating the expropriators. However, this was New York, and you lived dangerously if you lived at all.
X
Seven East Fifteenth Street proved to be a moderate-sized building with a brownstone front, having a proletarian drabness; it had once been the Young Women’s Christian Association. Lanny gave his driver half a dollar for the cause, and received the reply: “Thanks, Tovarish.” He entered and strolled into a bookstore provided with the familiar literature, including some from abroad, of which he bought a few specimens, smiling to himself at the thought of how they would look in the royal suite of the Ritzy-Waldorf. Then he asked for someone who could tell him about school courses, and was introduced to a young intellectual with fair hair and alert sensitive features.
“I’m an American who’s been living abroad,” said Lanny. “I’m not a party member, but I knew George D. Herron in Paris and Geneva, so I’m interested in the school.”
There couldn’t have been a better introduction. The two sat down, and Lanny gave his name as Budd, shivering a little inside, hoping the young comrade didn’t read the capitalist press. The comrade gave no sign of having done so. Lanny knew enough about Socialist affairs by now to realize that there was one invariable rule, whether it was in Paris, London, or Berlin, in Rome, Cannes, or New York; all Socialist enterprises were running on a shoestring, and a party official who met anybody who might have money was driven automatically to think: “I wonder if he will help us!” Lanny preferred to get that part over with quickly, so he said: “I’ll be glad to make a small contribution to the work of the school, if I may.” Comrade Anderson graciously said that he might.
Seeing that the young official was well informed and companionable, Lanny remarked: “I’ve been taking a walk and I’ve got up an appetite. Would you have lunch with me?”
“We have a cafeteria in the building,” replied the other; so they went into the basement, and Lanny chose from some dishes on a counter, and had a whole meal for less than he would have paid for his small glass of iced tomato juice at the Ritzy-Waldorf. “Comrade Budd” was introduced to several young people, and they all talked about the state of the world, and presently Lanny observed that a bright-faced Jewish girl was staring at him rather hard, and his skin began to crawl and the blood to climb into his face, for he knew that he was being recognized, or at any rate suspected. They would put it in the New Leader, and from there it would break into the “tabs.” Unquestionably the prince consort was committing a major indiscretion!
But he stayed on, because Comrade Anderson was talking about the state of the market. There had been a slump in prices of late, and he said that stocks had been selling at from thirty to fifty times the amount of their normal earnings, whereas the proper ratio was less than half that. Anderson was giving a course of lectures on the present business and money situation, and had all the figures at his fingertips. “Do you realize, Comrade Budd, what the practice of installment buying has done to the country’s finances?”
“I never thought about it,” Lanny admitted.
“The American people owe seven billion dollars in the form of installment payments at the present time; and see how that has mortgaged the buying power of the country! It means that the manufacturers have got several years’ business in one year; and where are they going to find new customers? It’s the same as a man’s spe
nding several years’ income in one year; what’s he going to do the rest of the time?”
This gave Lanny a warm feeling. It had become an intellectual necessity for him to hear someone damn the capitalist system. He had fared so well under it himself that the world considered his attitude a perversity, but to Lanny it was a moral action, a tribute to the common humanity. Was he, living in the royal suite, to forget the existence of the millions in the tenements? His reason told him that the modern business structure was a house builded upon quicksand; he lacked the courage to start tearing it down—even if he had had the power—but he liked to hear some young intellectual start condemnation proceedings in the name of the working masses.
XI
After the lunch had been eaten and paid for, Lanny took his companion aside and gave him a hundred-dollar bill, perhaps the first such document that Tom Anderson had ever seen. “No, I won’t give you my address,” Lanny added. “I’ll stop in some day when I’m in town.” He made his escape quickly, because he saw the bright young Jewish girl whispering to one of her fellow-pupils, and he was pretty sure she was saying: “That must be the husband of Irma Barnes! Didn’t you see his picture in the papers?”
Lanny strolled to Fourth Avenue and stepped into a taxi, saying: “Ritzy-Waldorf,” and this time the driver didn’t call him “Tovarish.” He went into the hotel and found his wife and mother-in-law in the tea-room having avocado salad and a fruit cup. “Where on earth have you been?” said Irma.
“Oh, I had a long walk. I saw the town.”
“Where did you go?”
“All over the East Side, and away downtown.”
“What on earth made you do that? There’s nothing over there.”