Part 11

Her first official orders were: All trucks must stay together. If one breaks down, the others will stop and help.

The second day of her new command, she met our young host, who needed a truck to move supplies and tried to commandeer one of hers. When she refused, he ordered her. He was a captain.

“I am under orders to get those ten loads of hay to the mules,” was her reply.

“What will you do if I just take one of them?” asked the captain.

“You won't,” said the girl confidently.

“I must get a truck,” he insisted. “What can you do about it if I take one of yours?”

“England needs men,” she answered. “But if you made it necessary I'd have to shoot you. If the mules are n't fed, you and other men can't fight. If you were fit to be a captain, you'd know that.”

The young captain told the story himself and his family enjoyed it, evidently admiring the Manchester lassie, who sat there as red as a poppy. They did not bend to the plumber's daughter, nor seem to try to lift her to the altars of their ancient hall.

Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death together. It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a fish knife to sever. There was no consciousness of ancient class. There was only to-day and to-morrow.

It was the America I love--that spirit. The best America--valuing a human being for personal worth. Then I sailed for home. I went to Newport, to the Atlantic coast resorts. They were all the same.

The world had changed but not my own country.

I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness, more reckless morals than ever before, and--horrible to contemplate--springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards which war had torn from the old.

Social lines tightened. Men who had been overwhelmingly welcome while they wore shoulder straps were now rated according to bank accounts or “family.” The “doughboy shavetail”, a hero before the armistice, or the aviator who held the stage until November eleventh, once he put on his serge suit and went back to selling insurance or keeping books, became a nodding acquaintance, sometimes not even that.

I was heartsick. I thought often of those splendid men I had met in France and of the girls who poured tea for the King of the Belgians. I wondered if any one back home was “just nodding” to them.

Everywhere was the blatant show of new wealth.

New money always glitters. I saw it in cars with aluminum hoods and gold fittings, diamonds big as birds' eggs, ermine coats in the daytime--jeweled heels at night.

Bad breeding plus new money shouted from every street corner. At private dinners, I ate foods that I knew were served merely because they were expensive, glutton feasts with twice as much as any one could eat with comfort.

One day I went to market--the kind of a market to which my mother would have gone--and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy any but porterhouse steaks--merely because porterhouse steak stood for prosperity.

In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up suddenly like an evil toadstool. It is a fungous disease that spreads. Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings, all of it is snobbish and offensive. It wears foreign clothes and affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents. It chops and mumbles its words like English servants who speak their language badly. Some of this is acquired at fashionable finishing schools or from foreign secretaries and servants. These new Americans try to appear superior and distinctive by scorning all things American. They want English chintzes in their homes, French brocades and Italian silks and do not even know that some of these very textiles from America have won prizes in Europe since 1912. An American manufacturer told me he has to stamp his cretonne “English style print” to sell it in this country.

This new species of American apes royalty. It goes in for crests. It may have made its money in gum shoes or chewing tobacco, but it hires a genealogist to dig up a shield. Fine, if you are entitled to a crest. But fake genealogists will cook up a coat for the price.

There are crests on the motor-cars, crests on the stationery, on the silver, the toilet articles--there are sometimes even crests on the servants' buttons and on linen and underclothes!

Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to other lies. The next step is ancestors.

Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. And the public swallows it. They swallow each other's ancestors. Even old families take these new descendants as a matter of course.

One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion. The only simple thing in the house was the mind of the hostess. That night it was a tangled skein.

I saw she was worried. Her house was full of potentates, the wives of two cabinet officers, and Mrs. Coolidge. She left the room twice after the dinner hour had arrived, and it was late when dinner was finally announced.

Later in the evening one of the servants whispered to the hostess that she was wanted on the telephone--the State Department.

She returned to the drawing-room looking as if she had just heard of a death in the family. The guests began considerately to leave.

Her expensive party was a dismal failure. As I have known her husband for years, I asked if I could be of any use.