Your United States | Page 2

However, my desired figure was at length manifest. The man came
hurrying and a little breathless, with his salver, at once apologetic and
triumphant. My ice was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him,
in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct diners have learned
to adopt toward the alien serfs who attend them? I had not. I had neither
the right nor the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo-Saxon
as myself. He had, with all his deference, the mien of the race. When he
dreamed of paradise, he probably did not dream of the caisse of a

cosmopolitan Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English he
was not speaking a foreign language. And this restaurant was one of the
extremely few fashionable Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world,
where an order given in English is understood at the first try, and where
the English language is not assassinated and dismembered by menials
who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the patois of
Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this restaurant!...
Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air. Not only had he
most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had brought the
particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were over thirty
dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted something
that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and unheard of by
my fellow-diners. The man had hopefully said that he "would see." And
here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated him, as an equal.
And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of the hot-house, I
arose and followed in the path of the lion-breasted woman, and arrived
at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of sixteen who did
nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight (so he said) but ascend and
descend in that elevator. By the discipline of this inspiring and jocund
task he was being prepared for manhood and the greater world!... And
yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys, and even men.
Civilization is not so simple as it may seem to the passionate reformer
and lover of humanity.
Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a group
of men, most of whom had acquired fame, and had the slight agreeable
self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a background
of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifarious
reminiscent conversations that are heard only in such places. The
companion on my right would tell how he had inhabited a house in
Siam, next to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too
poor to be burned were laid out, after surgical preliminaries, to be
devoured by vultures, and how the vultures, when gorged, would flap
to the roof of his house and sit there in contemplation. And the
companion on my left would tell how, when he was unfamous and on
his beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack of influenza,
and on the day when a chance offered itself would get up and don his

only suit--a glorious one--and, fitting an eye-glass into his eye because
it made him look older, would go forth to confront the chance. And
then the talk might be interrupted in order to consult the morning paper,
and so settle a dispute about the exact price of Union Pacifics. And then
an Italian engineer would tell about sport in the woods of Maine, a
perfect menagerie of wild animals where it was advisable to use a
revolver lest the excessive noise of a fowling-piece should disturb the
entire forest, and how once he had shot seven times at an imperturbable
partridge showing its head over a tree, and missed seven times, and
how the partridge had at last flown off, with a flicker of plumage that
almost said aloud, "Well, I really can't wait any longer!" And then
might follow a simply tremendous discussion about the digestibility of
buckwheat-cakes.
And then the conversation of every group in the lounge would be
stopped by the entry of a page bearing a telegram and calling out in the
voice of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed.
And then another companion would relate in intricate detail a recent
excursion into Yucatan, speaking negligently--as though it were a
trifle--of the extraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and in the
end making quite plain his conviction that no other women were as
beautiful as the women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable Mona Lisa
would get onto the carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of Adam
mantelpieces from Russell Square, and of superb