The mauve decade (1926)

It was late August of 1899 and Theodore Roosevelt, governor of New York, was concerned with a question of trousers. The burly gentleman sat, writing to a friend, and stewed the matter. He had to ride at the head of the State's militia in this parade that was coming, and there was no costume for a governor's appearance on such occasions. Well, perhaps a frock-coat and grey pantaloons made the best way out of it. It wasn't much of a dress, and the garb called for a silk hat, too. He would look a riding-master! But it couldn't be helped. . . . He sat in Albany, writing, and it may be that grossening muscles twitched around his mouth; the flat, not ugly face was already hardening into broad lines that made it, later, a writhing mask when he broke out in arguments and oratory. He had come some distance upward — or along — with a gathering strength of showmanship in store, armed with a memory that helped him over political stiles, and through his banging speeches. For, some living people say, he laughed loudly at a banquet in 1895 where John Kendrick Bangs, amusing the guests, said that "All theatrical press agents belong to a club of which Ananias is the honorary president." Whether he recalled the little witticism or not is permanently unimportant. The memory is strange: in "The Bostonians" a dozen sentences from cheap, forgotten authors whose stuff Henry James read on the beach of Newport, and an epigram of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, appear transmuted in the slow, inimitable medium projected by that scrupulous mind. Here, then, sat Roosevelt, vexed on this question of trousers and coat, the heir of a political situation arranged quietly by Mark Hanna between sandwiches at Saint Louis in 1896. Yes, the nation had invoked capitalism to save it from oratory, and now oratory would have to be noisy, appealing to the rabble and the newspapers in its forays against capitalism. This figure in warm clay, with its female tact and childish tempers and its sense for crowds, now swells a signature across the notepaper and gives to printed record its consideration of the subject of trousers and coat in the coming parade.

   The parade was first planned to pass upward along Fifth Avenue and then to wheel westward along Fifty-ninth Street. . . . Westward! . . . Odd, how all dying things turn to this West, the region of questions? So mourners on the Nile consigned the mummied citizen to the mercies of the West and soldiers of the recent muddy muss in upper France "went West" to join Hiawatha, King Arthur and the ecstatic nun Petronilla who saw God descending from the West in the shape of a fish-hook to lift her virgin soul into bliss. The great parade with its President and admiral and heroic soldiers would pass and mingle with these legends.

   The whole nineteenth century had been rotten with the disease of greatness and its wretched successor seems unwilling to get rid of this malady. Greatness, to be sure, has existed ever since fear first made gods in this world and men invoked them to witness the twin vulgarities of success and failure. "To have had our little quality" isn't enough and there come the passion for a following flicker of heads that turn in the smoke of restaurants, the monthly necessity of a visit to the photographers, that willingness to flood admirers with correspondence, to be seen at banquets, to fuss a trifle about a costume in the great parade. . . . The nineteenth century had been prolific of parades and ached in its last ten years with news of them. Earthen figures sat in carriages or on horses and, granted an apex of greatness, lay in hearses and paraded while troops with reversed muskets lined gutters and sweated, being base creatures, in their uniforms. . . . A tall young Philadelphian saw much of this tinselled movement and will have, one day, a second value. He was expensively hired to tell the world about Nicholas Romanov setting the crown of Russia askew on his thick head in a torpor of incense and in such a reflected dazzle of golden cloth that Richard Harding Davis's eyes reddened. Ladies, that night in Moscow, went hunting lotions from hotel to hotel jammed with Americans, all for R.H.D. His life was spent in a hurry from show to show and names were tagged to sights: "Sarah Bernhardt" — a woman whose Empire bonnet is drawn down to her painted eyebrows, lying in a phaeton banked with white roses that glides through the flower battle in Paris. Nursemaids and virgins stare after the great courtesan with frightened admiring eyes — or, being our mother's son, we think the eyes were frightened. "Julia Ward Howe" — an old, stooping woman declaiming "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in a drawing-room of Commonwealth Avenue, in dying Boston. "Oscar Wilde" — a tall man pent into a right coat at luncheon in London who tries to trip him into criticizing a French painter and then sits sulking when the American is not tripped. After some years an English doctor comes to a hotel in Paris and asks if Mr. Davis can let him have a few hundred francs for Oscar Wilde "the great dramatist," and gets mauve bills stuffed in an envelope. "William Dean Howells" — a quiet, grey little man who denied genius altogether, whose talk wandered easily from the colours of Venice to the making, in primitive Ohio, of a terrible sweetmeat known as "peach leather," who, alone in the literary republic, had the courage to ask mercy for the anarchists officially murdered in Chicago. . . . His dislike of assassination was instinctive. He once stood at a reception listening while a female humorist destroyed the arts of Thomas Hardy, George Moore and Henry James and suddenly he began to tell anecdote after anecdote of his alarmed provincialism when he first came from Boston to New York. At the twentieth recital of his tremours and bewilderments, the lady bulkily withdrew her humours into another room. Her public greatness had been subtly rebuked, without a word addressed to her. "Queen Victoria" - a turtle-shaped person nodding in a huge carriage down the streets of London at her Jubilee, a little figure drowsy under a parasol at Ascot in the Royal Enclosure with a tall Hindu servant constantly picking up the scarf that droops from her shoulders. . . . The gowns at Ascot seem monotonous and badly worn, and parading celebrities have a look of caged animals. Mr. Davis yawns a little. He cannot manage to be wholly taken in by this Europe, and he winces, in the land of sportsmanship, when big policemen swim out, hand over hand, in a yelling crowd at the Derby, to rescue a bookmaker, half naked and bloody, from disappointed creditors, "Carnot — something in a black and silver catafalque with Casimir-Perier walking behind its wheels, unguarded. A stand collapses at the corner of the Rue Castiglione and Mr. Davis winces when the French soldiery scuttle from the crackling noise. Greasy papers float on the asphalt after the long funeral has passed. Mr. Henry James, otherwise delighted with "About Paris," is vexed by those greasy paper and gently scolds Davis at dinner in London. "Réjane" — an ugly, graceful woman screaming and weeping in an artist's garden when she is shown Aubrey Beardsley's poster of her face with its Cytherean grin. Mr. Davis leaves the scene in his unprinted notes and, later, tells it on a condition of silence, for Réjane is then still alive and one does not tell unkind stories about women. "Yvette Guilbert" — tall, red-haired, strolls down the stage at a daylit rehearsal at the Ambassadeurs. Other actresses smile civilly with half-closed eyes and men stir as though a whip had touched them. "William McKinley" — men link their hands and make a long aisle through the swarm of the inaugural ball in Washington. The little President goes by, with his pretty, invalid wife on his arm. "Alexandre Dumas" — a dark, small-eyed man who sits during an inane speech at the Institute, staring up at women in the gallery. Mr. Davis is impressed by the grace of manner and the air of tired reserve. . . . He has an odd feeling for manner. Is there not an element of vulgar fraud surrounding Aristide Bruant, the "new Villon" in his café where guests are pillage for copies of songs and photographs of the people's champion? But Bruant sings:

and he sings well. But isn't he putting some of this on? Other, older and more cultivated Americans will accept Bruant at his own stated pretensions and write grave paragraphs on him in Scribner's and Harper's. The new Villon will die and his greatness will have been forgotten by journalists who write his obituaries in American newspapers. "Franz Joseph" — a stagnant old thing in a chair, watching the procession of Hungarian nobles in outrageously wonderful clothes parading on Saint Stephen's day in Buda Pesth. "Theodore Roosevelt" — the burly figure of earth with its blue neckerchief hurries ahead of Davis in the hot olive woods at Las Guasimas and stands in a prodigy of sunlight below the hills outside Santiago de Cuba, talking a good deal to reporters. . . . Then great ladies, backing the war in South Africa, chatter in verandas at Capetown, and the astonishing nineteenth century ends its list of parades and consequences. Mr. Davis has not criticized its last decade, but he has seen the greatness and parades, and they remain, glitteringly stored in his swift, smooth sketches and long reports.

   Another tall young American had missed all the sights and figures, although he had early seen greatness and had even smelled it, for the dimness that picked up a child of four from the nursery's floor in Saint Cyr smelled of tobacco, and that is all that Charles Maurice recalls of Gustave Flaubert. However, the smiling "Monsieur Guy" who taught him French tennis at Arcachon was naturally clear in his mind, and among his multitudinous rejected manuscripts is one saying that he thought Guy de Maupassant dull in many things. Chicago smoking air tormented the boys lungs; he stood with Stevenson's face haloed in straggling furs before him in the lane at Saranac and eight years later saw, for a wet second, a yellow skeleton in waterproof fighting an umbrella on steps of a chapel in Mentone, and recognized Aubrey Beardsley. . . . But this was his last greatness until doctors pronounced his lungs able to stand unselected airs and he cautiously spent a month in Buffalo with his sister, in 1899. There was no greatness around there, but he went out to call on Elbert Hubbard in East Aurora.

   "I admit the dramatic manner and the necktie but I must say that he seemed shrewd. He talked about a number of people very adroitly, saying things which have been said since their deaths by biographers and critics of high degree. . . . Just as I was leaving he asked me, very suddenly, what I thought of Rudyard Kipling. There was only one attitude for a young American in 1899 as to Kipling. Mr. Hubbard listened and then he remarked: 'I wonder what you will be thinking of him in twenty years. Come and tell me if we are both alive.' . . ."

   For nine years the nigromancer's coloured shadows danced out of his pot, and literary republicans watched the parade in maddened speculation. Some of them saw this: the American public, considered a nervous virgin by its guardians, was avidly buying a fiction in which everything not permitted to the native writers was done and said openly, and gave no offence.¹

1 I suggest that some historian of criticism in the United States amuse himself by comparing reviews of "The Light That Failed," to those of "McTeague," or the many discussions of "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" to those of "Maggie" and "George's Mother." Shifting from Kipling to the brilliant, luckless George Douglas, compare reviews of "The House with the Green Shutters" to adverse notices of "McTeague" and George's Mother." The reader not interested in fiction must excuse this missionary foot-note. Douglas's novel is, psychologically, an act of revenge on the environment of his boyhood. He was illegitimate, the son of a maidservant in a small Scotch village, and the characters of his story are fairly hated into life. The story involves debauchery, cancer, cowardice and, at the end, parricide — marred by a suggestion taken from "Oliver Twist," which was one of Douglas's books in his dreary childhood. But the story was reviewed respectfully by American critics who simply sent "George's Mother" and "McTeague" to the literary hell.

   Why, certainly! Rudyard Kipling wished to mention the shapelessness of a pregnant Cockney woman, howling in a street with naked breasts. It interested him to relate Love O'Women's locomotor ataxia, which, says a character in the tale, comes from being called Love O'Women, and so send the dying man back to a mistress in a brothel for the sake of a theatrical death. The subalterns flirted with married women, drank their whisky and soda, gambled and blew their brains out with some detail in lonely bungalows. The nigromancer brought a raving shadow down to roll a dead man's head and the crown of an Himalayan empire on a journalist's table in the middle of a night. Georgie Porgie's forsaken Burmese woman sobbed below his house beside the river. A drunken workman flooded the platform of an English station with his spew. Merry lads at an English school buried a cat under a floor and let its stench revenge them on a disliked master. Lalun, of the world's most ancient profession, jested with her lovers in the gay room on the city wall and had the approval of Mr. Theodore Childs, who, elsewhere, saw, regretfully, that American writers were attempting to introduce "depraved women, subjects for pity but not for literature," into the national fiction. The reporter passed through Indian slums and hauled out shadows of white women sold to the Hindu; Vice, draped in jewels, salaamed from her doorway. Salty words cropped everywhere on the verbal structure of the spreading illusion. Cheers for the sergeant's weddin'! Give 'em one cheer more. Grey gun 'orses to the lando, an' a rogue is married to an 'ore! But he talked as directly, as personally, as William Lloyd Garrison had talked to subscribers of the Liberator or as William Allen White was now talking to subscribers of the Gazette, in Emporia, Kansas. The little friend of all the world, sitting next to you on the bench in the barber's show, was not even so impersonal as George Ade, telling of the preacher who flew his kite or the fool killer's meditation at the county fair in "fables in Slang." This excusing presence, the speaking voice, so inaudible in the bewildering sharp anecdotes of Stephen Crane, or in the slow, grave narration of "McTeague," was at their ears. The Americans, under conduct of the sophisticated Methodist, went out for to admire and to see the world, and couldn't stop it if they tried. And then — rapture! — he told stories of America! and told them with none of that detached superciliousness of "The Bostonians," either! The millionaire's private car lunged from Lost Angeles to Boston, with that quite American note of pleasure at the record made, when the trip is finished. Eugene Debs and all those unsettling characters were rebuked in "The Walking Delegate," parabolically, and force and speed were sincerely admired as Henry Adams, sardonically, reverenced the dynamo in Paris. It was too good to be true. Here was somebody willing to take the American's side against European condescension and to brag with him of machinery, and to hold the balance level, in "An Error in the Fourth Dimension," between Yankee impulse and British stolidity. He had become a national fact; before 1896 he was mentioned and quoted in, at least, five hundred tales and essays in the magazines. Criticism, or what there was of it, consented to everything, after some shivering, and read "Captains Courageous" with the warm thrill that rises in the American author when he sees ten words of amiable patronage by a French journalist follow his name in a Parisian review of the third consideration. The mania grew; "The White Man's Burden" pleased imperialists, and then "Kim" commenced its devolution in McClure's. A great writer had been created. This was his longest, his most elaborately written work. Then, with a sort of gasp, the critics, and that indefinite film of literary amateurs which exists even in America, saw that here, in the gorgeous, infinitely piled fabrics of the legend, was just Dick, the Boy Detective, inevitably successful from first to last, and the illusion of ten years shredded upward. Then anger of disappointed sentimentalists snapped into fire; critics wheeled with the smartness of Mulvaneys squad at drill. Amnon loathed his Tamar, and farewell the nigromancer! But there remained the great writer of the '90's, and a coroner's jury of idolaters either called the live corpse names — "cheap journalists," "press agent of Empire," "inspired hack," and the pleasing like — or heaped wreaths. "Ten years ago," Harris Merton Lyon said in 1907, "they were all saying KIPLING, and now they say, Kipling — oh, yes!"

   But the nigromancer's smokes had coloured, falling here and there on manuscript, much printed excellence. That final literary analyst will pluck out phrase after phrase, whole sentences and derived paragraphs from the work of men who have shrugged Rudyard Kipling into a remote vulgarity, that imaginary limbo from which authors return as annoying spectres. He has his lien on the goods of wiser writers, of men more speculative as to the awkward and insoluble; whole novels have been spun on plots which stand, in his earlier sketches, as outlines and anecdotes. The collapsing, drugged measures of the dreamed adventure in the "The Brushwood Boy, have suggested long passages in modern impressionism. His delicate notices of noise have been complacently adopted by those, the terribly superior, who so often will take a plot or an image from anybody, who write "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" for a second time in terms of William Morris plus Henry James, or tranquilly rescore the classic music of: "There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave; there are no voices, O Rhodope, that are not soon mute, however, tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. . . ." The rhetorical address, so thoroughly criticized when Harry Leon Wilson said that King Solomon composed somewhat in the crisp style of Mr. Kipling, the directness of narrative — from him to them — and the obvious smartness of epithet were copied promptly, but the evasive, frequently beautiful statements in colour and sound have too plainly haunted sensitive artists, and the nigromancer's tacit revenge will be, simply, a record of derivations and an acknowledgment of many inventions.

   He had met the unspoken, half conscious wish of Americans for an entertainment which would reverse the formulas of Louisa May Alcott. This primary sophistication admitted, by not denying, that champagne, music halls and good cigars were not evil. He had, by an accident of birth and travel, enlarged the literary map. Fans of descending vision opened from his tales; the society of Simla, an evening in Topaz Colorado, and the marriage of a princeling in Ghokral Seetarun flashed, in temporary outline, on eyes of readers in American towns growing weekly more hideous. A plane in the world showed with one expert paragraph that displays the wives of engineers and chandlers, dependent on the safety of steamers. A massive catalogue in mere geographical reference existed, and increased with every volume of the tales. The effect, necessarily, was that of implicit romance to people whose day passed in a quarrel with the cook, a conference with the book-keeper at the office, a call from the high-school superintendent and the disintegrating excitements of six-handed euchre or a meeting of the lodge after dinner. His status as apologist of Empire, the schoolboy's patriotism and the fact, not immediately visible, that he reported but seldom analysed his tremendous cast — all those objections were worthless. They saw the spinning earth, and saw it through rigidities of a temperament that defended them; unyielding wires protected the children from the wolves. Sin, with some lenities against concepts of Dwight Moody and Frances Willard, was still, sin, and God, addressed so vehemently, was clearly God.

   Under the stir and chromatic rippling of the general narrative, came the claim on that "uncultivated hunger for pathetics." The Pathos ranged from candid appeals to the pity of children, which is perhaps more common than affection for children, to the simplicities of a statement in misery. He had, and had in better control than any other writer of the times, a sense of the point at which an explosion of sentiment may be allowed to crash on the reader. It is singularly idle to talk, here, of his intentions, for his intentions are only to be stated by those prodigies in criticism who begin reviews by saying: "This writer means --" Who knows, pending the discovery of some admission, what Henry James intended in that last wrenched paragraph of "The Beast in the Jungle" or if he wished his audience to sympathize with the ignoble Julia Bride? There is nothing in this range of narrative comparable to "Riders to the Sea," or an understatement so mutely graceful as Jurgen, turning from his grandmother's corner of the Christian heaven. But the broken lullaby of the childless woman in "Without Benefit of Clergy" and the lama's sudden outcry before the Gates of Learning in "Kim" remain touching, until some alteration of the human mood dismisses them to that museum whose principal exhibit is the death of Little Nell. And, even in his excesses, the journalist never committed such a thing as the last chapter of Pierre Loti's "Matelot," the literary onion, as vulgar as possible, arranged by dressing a sailor's mother in her best clothes and sending her to meet news of his death in the Orient, then invoking Christ and the saints to help her out of Loti's situation, applauded in America and England as "irony." . . . This pathos in its variable quality was an additional claim of Rudyard Kipling on his enslaved population; and in this capitalist of storytelling, the Americans of the '90's had their wish. He was, in much, themselves; but, in much, an artist of extraordinary forces, he whirled before them a vision, a gleaming newspaper whose columns enclosed anecdotes of red-coated Irishmen, tougher than those of their own fiction, mundane women, notes on ships and engines, rachitic splendours of a millionaire's private car and green country-sides in the England then dominating their perplexed desire for some decoration. Is it absurd to guess that this reiterated, constant advertisement of the East, the thread of imperial thinking, and the unlimited suggestion of dominion over isles and forests, influenced plump men in Washington after Dewey had won his little battle in Manila Bay and the Orient, that immense and empty mystery of all literature, had been entered by American troops?

   Well, Theodore Roosevelt pondered his costume for the great parade and, after some weeks, somewhere in New York, put on a black coat, a pair of grey trousers and the other necessities of a cool morning. He dressed. Troops and admirals, presidents and senators, got themselves clad for high occasion. The city dressed itself from end to end. . . . An unimportant creature, here apologetic, was sternly removed from bed and had to think of trousers in a sleepy tangle of wonders about this parade. His consciousness began, once, when the grandfather who knew Sitting Bull lifted him and someone brushed down dust thickened on panes by those hot storms that smear windows in the valley of the Missouri with grey, baked powders. A parade wonderfully moved for him under blowing cottonwoods; striding giants of dust marched past the leaves and, below them, fans of plumage rippled, faces were scarred with streaks of green and red and squaws were blanketed lumps on the dragging slopes of travois behind ponies of the tribe. One naked little girl was an oily statue with a red rag about her stiff black hair, serene on a white horse, and an old chief rode with strings of shivering wampum and bright shells swaying on his stark ribs. The last of a great tribe moved so, glowed so, between two lines of troopers in blue coats. Covered wagons, stamped "U.S.A." in scarlet on the cloth of jolting hoods, spaced the parade. "Blackfeet, sonny. Going up to the new reservation." They passed along, endlessly to his awe, and a tanned trooper swung his horse over the low iron rails, to whirl down from one stirrup and catch up his hat blown among geraniums flattened by the wind. Then the colour of a guidon flared; a bugle yelled far up the street, and the dust closed down. "Time for little boys to be in bed." The World's Fair was a silver fish of wax on an elastic cord and it vanished, tragically, down the maw of an enormous English mastiff in Saint Paul where veils of thin colours shook at night and shed fugitive tones on the prodigiousness of snow that heaped the yard. The Northern Lights, and the sharp lights of Chicago seen sleepily through rain, join to lights of farms seen on so many nights as trains brought his bewildered unimportance from East to West, in a confusion between the tall grandfather mysteriously ruined in "the cattle war" and the other grandfather who sometimes drew little pictures on margins of fat law books or played a violin in jade dusk crooning out "Lord Ronald" on sorcerous strings that merely yapped, when privately investigated. This unimportance lived in chronic bewilderments of aunts. Impalpable, perhaps sinister, creatures were always somewhere on the dark edge of conversations, Populists, Pierre Loti, Richard Harding Davis, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mark McKinley, Henry James and Grover Cleveland who, at least, was adequately visible in coloured cartoons of Puck. Boys in blue shirts ran, bawling: "Hey! Coxey's army's comin'!" once, and once, incredibly, the Missouri rose and flooded a cellar so that the more Western grandmother stood wringing her thin hands on steps, lamenting preserves and jellies all afloat around a tub in which the negligible creature navigated, very wet, wet as he got to be, sitting on a grand stand opposite a white, dripping thing which was Grant's Tomb, with President McKinley very miserable above the soaked procession, bending suddenly out as a horse slipped. Even the great submitted to rains of that decade. General Miles was something tall, sliding his uniform out of the moist grace of a military cloak in a hallway at West Point, not then a bastard operatic Valhalla of cement and stone.

   Bewilderments multiplied, with a cold internal shrinking as the unimportance was led along tremulous floors of a train to be seen by Mr. Hanna, a person imagined as the brother of the fearful Hanno in "Salammbô" who bathed his leproxy in blood. Mr. Hanna, though, seemed placid in his stateroom with a gang of standing gentlemen, somehow suggesting amorous dogs, who watched the hands which had played on the emotionalism of a nation as though it were a piano's keyboard. The hands stopped their movement among cards on a table and the voice said anxiously: "But you've got some other children, Beer?" Relieved, he picked up his cards again, and the train came to Washington. A Mr. Hay stooped to shake hands and left an impregnable belief that he was a decent, although elderly, person. The unimportance yawned at a piece of metal shaped as a cloaked woman who was Mrs. Henry Adams, in a cemetery, and, as she was dead, very dull to consider. . . . Frances Willard was also dead. A woman came screaming into the peace of the Ohio garden: "Girls! Girls! She's gone!" The sky had fallen, somewhere! "Run down to the barns, dear. Miss Willard's dead and poor Kate was so fond of her!" The negligible identity, sure that this corpse must be in the flat town beyond the orchard, roamed between two pastures and examined empty plots in the cemetery, a very friendly one, where a mason made the sound of a marmoreal castanet, chipping lies on stones. . . . Now he had to get into his best trousers and go to the parade, and the silver morning was sharp around him; the Hudson sparkled beside the pulsing train, and earthen figures packed the streets. Long draperies of flags and streaks of restless bunting dangled before brown fronts of that Fifth Avenue. Here was the Plaza Hotel with a charming bronze lioness on a pedestal in the midst of the lobby. He had to stop looking at this glory to shake hands with Mr. Henderson, who criticized music in the Sun, but whose hair was different, much shorter, than that of Mr. Meltzer, who criticized music, too, and sat in Bronson Howard's veranda on Nantucket Island, consulting him about the graver arts. A long room overlooked the square, not then defaced by a high metal woman waving her stupidity at the gilded image of Sherman, and flags memorably shook above bronze cliffs of hotels on the eastern side of the street. This was Central Park, northward, and a red house like the castle in "Ivanhoe" to the south, and blue policemen shoved crowds about. The parade would happen in an hour. Meantime a pretty aunt laughed excitedly and gentlemen helped themselves to glasses filled with hissing yellow liquid from a gaudy bottle close to the huge, ormolu piano.

   Somewhere down the street's thundering voices, officers were holding folk into the crossways and a victoria's horses were ordered back, back from the open space of Fifth Avenue. The curved woman in her scarf of blue feathers rose on a seat and screeched prayers to a policeman. Oh, but she must — must get across! Men recognized the goddess of the crows and began to yell: "Let Anna get across! Let her by!" A young soldier in dirty brown Khaki sprang on a step of the carriage and the crowd howled. They opened a lane for Anna Held and she crossed Fifth Avenue, laughing and blowing kisses to the herd.

   The parade was coming. A flashing lady stopped strumming the piano and a rim of people swayed on the sidewalks. A bright dust of confetti, endless snakes of tinted paper began to float from hotels that watched the street. Voices of congratulation came bubbling in these rooms. Why, you could see everything from ere! And this was the greatest parade since the Civil War! Greatness! . . . Brass of parading bandsmen flashed and columns wheeled, turning at the red house to the south. Balconies and windows showered down confetti, and roses were blown. The very generous dropped bottles of champagne and the paper streamers slid in facile twists and wreaths on the white and grey of uniforms. Cadets down from West Point seemed curious birds that wheeled and strode in oblong flocks. The little admiral was a blue and gold blot in a carriage. The President, and the plump senator from Ohio, and all these great wee tiny images of black and flesh in the buff shells of carriages in a whirling rain of paper ribbons, flowers and flakes of the incessant confetti blown everlastingly, twinkling form high blue of the sky. How they roared! Theodore Roosevelt! The increasing yell came up from the street. A dark horse showed and slowly paced until it turned where now the gilded general stares down the silly city. A blue streamer, infinitely descending from above, curled all around his coat and he shook it from the hat that he kept lifting. Theodore Roosevelt! The figure on its charger passed, and a roar went plunging before him while the bands shocked ears and drunken soldiers straggled out of line, and these dead great, remembered with a grin, went filing by.