manhattan stenographer

LOUIS GOLDING

a traveler discovers the united states in the person of patty, a metropolitan typist

It's an odd business. It's twice now that I've been to America, and I've met all the proper people—millionaires, political ladies, gangsters, revivalists, Harlem charmers, morticians. And the creature who stands out head and shoulders above them all is a young lady named Patty. She is a Manhattan stenographer. I met her many weltering leagues this side of the Nantucket lightship. She is more America than the whole continent I travelled through subsequently during two hectic halfyears. It's an odd business.

You see, I'm in Morocco. I feel that in this cliff-top house I can survey the things that happened to me in America and the people I met there with more detachment and completeness than I was able to achieve from the parapet of any sky-scraper in Wall Street or the last loft of any grain-elevator in Ohio. Below my feet, the Pillars of Hercules stand up in the middle day. Behind me lie all Africa and all antiquity. Westward beyond the aloes and yellow lilies of the garden, through a latticing of pines and fig-trees, the unbroken western ocean extends towards America, into a new order, into a new adventure, into the high chasm of Seventh Avenue where the antennae of the wireless station probe the morning air, into a realtor's office in Houston, Texas.

The western ocean extends into a new adventure?

No, that's precisely what I don't want to say. The pretty rhythm of the words betrayed me. Patty of Manhattan made me realise how America was to be the consummation of all my old adventures—that America was to resolve into pattern Greece and Hungary, Tunisia, Spain; how in a barber's shop in Long Island, I was to see more clearly than ever I did in Sicily the blinding salt-pans of Trapani in the unvisited north-western corner of the island, and the great limestone mass of Eryx where they worshipped the Phoenician Astarte with ten thousand maiden votaries and a hundred thousand doves; how in Pawhuska in Oklahoma, among the Osage Indians of the oilreservation in that region, the vision came to me of the reserved and secluded Samaritans in the steep town of Nablus in Palestine, between the flanks of Ebal and Gerizim. Or how in Chicago—

But I'll keep away from Chicago, lest I hardly find my way out again from the black and tan night-clubs of the South Thirties, where so frighteningly I saw again the glaring eye-balls of the Aissouias dancing in a Saharan oasis on the night of the birthday of Mohammed; where, in the great German boulevards along the lake, the whole bourgeois pageantry of Berlin was so comfortably and opulently recreated.

That's the sort of adventure to which Patty of Manhattan ushered me. I don't use the word in the sense of those gentlemen who proceed to describe their single-handed encounters with Polar bears in the Great White Silence or their beleaguerment by platoons of rattlesnakes in the desert of Arizona. I don't hope to compete with them. I confess that I'd have a poor show to put up against those other gentlemen, the wild and wooly ones, whose belts bristle with revolvers, who convey (or unmask) vast trainloads of hooch disguised as tapioca, who hold up banks with such dexterity. What have I to put up against adventures on that plane? A pipe of opium in Chinatown—but it made me sick; a knock on the head in a Chicago speak-easy—and that was even sillier; a defective carburetor on the road to Galveston, Texas, and never a bandit for leagues around. No, that is not much to put up against what has been claimed by Professor Ridgwell Cullum and Dr. Peter B. Kyne.

But I repeat I don't believe that, in the subtler sense of the word, even these perilous gentlemen ever had such an adventure as mine was when I met, on the train from St. Louis to Louisville, that very same little Albanian murderer—such a dapper little fellow he was—as I met four years ago on a little cattle-boat cruising among the Ionian Islands in a tranced turquoise sea. And when they gave me absinthe with my oysters in that dive in New Orleans (I don't like the beastly stuff, but they insisted on my swallowing it)—how vividly those green submarine glooms at the bottom of my ten-cent tea-cup brought back to me a night in Marseilles, and that gang of fierce French visionaries who pledged in absinthe the simultaneous destruction of France and Germany, Great Britain and Russia, and the immediate establishment of the United States of Europe and the Kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.

But to get back to Patty. I sometimes feel that I'd have had America clearer in my mind if I had turned back in mid-Atlantic after a few days with that young lady, and never seen the Woolworth Building climb hand over fist into Heaven. It happened quite suddenly, the moment I set eyes on her on deck. She was America triumphant, uncompromisingly America; and yet in this uncanny multiple way in which all things American seized my imagination, she was in her sole self a pageant of all the world's fair women.

^ She was a pageant that began with a dusky girl in the sands of the Sahara, smoothing with her deft thumb a disk of unleavened bread upon a shield of black iron. I saw her, quite distinct beyond the taffrail of the liner, move to get some water from a pool under the datepalms. She moved easily under a huge waterjar. In the breaking of a foam-cap she became America again, a Manhattan stenographer swaying to a jazz rhythm on the deck of an Atlantic liner headed for her homeland. In that swift instant the two lovely ladies reached out their hands to each other, for the circuit had been completed. It did not seem unfitting that the Manhattan lady assumed the voluminous blue camel-hair garments of her desert sister, and the Saharan lady suspended from her dusky shoulders her sister's smart little frock lately bought in Paris. For the flower of the dusky girl's simplicity is a certain wild sophistication, and at the heart of the fair girl's sophistication she cherishes a wild simplicity. The first maiden was the last and the last first. Together they were Eve. The circuit, as I have said, was completed by the joining of their hands. And under the archway their hands made, a pageant of the world's maidens passed—that fair-haired English girl with blue-green eyes and that slim lamp-like creature in Genoa in the carnival season and that Greek girl in the lonely mountains of the Peloponnese and this daughter of old Nile— this maiden, that maiden, all a world's maidens.

Now this experience has come to me sooner or later in all the lands where I have wandered; that a certain girl has isolated herself from her attendant meynal, and has taken unto herself all the qualities of her people. A sort of splendour is about her. She is metaphysical. It was just So with Patty. Dancing to the strains of the Victrola she was, upon the top deck. And beholding her, her eyes, her freedom, her reality .... I can't get closer than that . . . her reality— I knew at once that she prefigured America and gave it flesh. I knew that all I should henceforth observe and learn regarding America was implicit in this, oh, this more-than-charming, person. The pale-haired lawyer from Cornell who danced with her became faint and thin as the flame of a candle at noon-day. The deck steward adjusting rugs about the prostrate figures of that girl's aunts and grandmothers fell apart like the seeds of a blown thistle. She only survived, youthful America, graceful, keen, alert, acharnée—she only, and I that observed her, and the Atlantic liner that was the theatre of this spectacle and the arched sky, and the suspended sea. And the Bedouin maiden stepped forth out of the horizon's edge where a group of six palms were etched upon an indigo-blue sky. And a bell rang. And certain phantoms conceived this to be a summons for luncheon (soup, choice of cold meats, but this damn turkey is the waste product of a tyre factory, and do you call this coffee? Coffee, I said, not shaving-water). Certain phantoms, I say, conceived the bell that rang to be a summons for luncheon. But the bell was a camel-bell slung round the neck of the camel leading the caravan into Gabes on the haunted marches of Tunisia. And the bell was the bell of a typewriter when the carriage has clicked its way forward to three spaces from the right-hand edge. And in that two-fold music Sahara and Manhattan joined hands.

(Continued on page 108)

(Continued from page 94)

I seem to be suggesting that this girl on the liner was the first American girl I had ever set eyes on. In a sense I do so deliberately, though obviously there was no land in which I had failed to meet her. But in all those other places she was divorced (so I realized now) from her own elements. She was not herself.

And Miss Manhattan, I say, was one of these, though her present duty lay with the keys of a typewriter and not the udders of the milch-cows of her tribe. When I beheld her wandering with her little red book among the three Bellinis of the Accademia at Venice or on a large charabanc doing Paris-by-Night, she was a forlorn creature, consumed with a secret nostalgia for her Broadway or her Main Street, however valiantly she disguised it from herself. Here, however, upon the great sea, on the great boat that flew her own flag, she had an assurance which gave a new brilliance to her eyes, a new rhythm to her movement. It was that brilliance and that rhythm which evoked for me the eyes of that lady who is at once so completely her antitype and her complement—the lady of the other spaces, the yellow spaces of the Sahara. I saw the brilliance in the eyes of the Bedouin maiden, all the more brilliant in that she drew her veils about her head on the approach of the white infidel, and left no more than an inch of space between her veils through which his eyes might challenge hers, and her eyes take up the challenge. And though the Manhattan girl moved in the rhythm of jazz, when I first set eyes on her that morning in mid-ocean, and though jazz is indeed the latest progeny of the rhythms which convulse the dark heart of Africa—it was not the aspect of the movement which evoked the swinging image of the Bedouin maiden, but the quality of it; its absolute freedom and naturalness; its complete adequacy to the circumstances which gave it birth.

(Continued on page 110)

(Continued from page 108)

Each of these girls was the child of a world so spacious that it eludes the scope of the imagination.

And would you ask what folly is this to utter regarding a daughter of Manhattan, that most constricted of earth's cities, I would say that Manhattan is not smaller than the camel-hair tent of a Bedouin tribesman. I would say that the camel-hair tent and the city of Manhattan are two watch-towers from which a man, or a maiden, surveys his continent. I would say also that in the solitude of the desert the things the Bedouin maiden trafficks in, her clay pots, her rugs, her twigs for the fire, become things larger than themselves; that they become symbols. Just so the quantities the Manhattan stenographer negotiates upon her typewriter (five hundred thousand bars of soap, two million pairs of suspenders) are abstractions and symbols. Fatima of Gabes, Patty of Manhattan, mistresses of space not less than its daughters, join hands, I hid you, oh my two beautiful ones, while the camel bells ring at the head of the caravan, and the typewriter bells ring at the head of the space-carriages, and the luncheon bells ring amongst the winches.