The Metropolis

"No," she answered. "I stayed here with a roof-garden show that failed. And I went to my old manager for a job, and he said to me, 'I can only pay you ten a week. But why are you so foolish?' 'How do you mean?' I asked; and he answered, 'Why don't you get a rich sweetheart? Then I could pay you sixty.' That's what a giri hears on the stage!"

"I don't understand," said Montague, perplexed. "Did he mean he could get money out of the man?"

"Not directly," said Toodles; "but tickets — and advertising. Why, men will hire front-row seats for a whole season, if they're interested in a giri in the show. And they'll take all their friends to see her, and she'll be talked about — she'll be somebody, instead of just nobody, as I was."

"Then it actually helps her on the stage!" said Montague.

"Helps her!" exclaimed Toodles. "My God! I've known a giri who'd been abroad with a tip-top swell — and had the gowns and the jewels to prove it — to come home and get into the front row of a chorus at a hundred dollars a week."

Toodles was cheerful and all unaware; and that only made the tragedy of it all one shade

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more black to Montague. He sat lost in sombre revery, forgetting his companions, and the blare and glare of the place.

In the centre of this dining room was a great cone-shaped stand, containing a display of food; and as they strolled out, Montague stopped to look at it. There were platters garnished with flowers and herbs, and containing roast turkeys and baked hams, jellied meats and game in aspic, puddings and tarts and frosted cakes — every Isind of food-fantasticality imaginable. One might have spent an hour in studying it, and from top to bottom he would have found nothing simple, nothing natural. The turkeys had Eaper curls and rosettes stuck over them; the ams were covered with a white gelatine, the devilled crabs with a yellow mayonnaise — and all painted over in pink and green and black with landscapes and marine views — with "ships and shoes and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings." The jellied meats and the puddings were in the shape of fruits and flowers; and there were elaborate works of art in pink and white confectionery — a barnyard, for instance, with horses and cows, and a pump, and a dairymaid — and one or two alligators.

And all this was changed every day! Each morning you might see a procession of a score of waiters bearing aloft a new supply. Montague remembered Betty Wyman's remark at their first interview, apropos of the whipped cream made into little curliques; how his brother had said, "If Allan were here, he'd be thinking about the man who fixed that cream.

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and how long it took him, and how he might have been reading 'The Simple Life'!"

He thought of that now; he stood here and gazed, and wondered about all the slaves of the lamp who served in this huge temple of luxury. He looked at the waiters — pale, hollow-chested, harried-looking men; he imagined the hordes of servants of yet lower kinds, who never emerged into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many stories underground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality — how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent them here!

From this as a starting-point his thought went on, to the hordes of toilers in every part of the world, whose fate it was to create the things which these blind revellers destroyed: the women and children in countless mills and sweatshops, who spun the cloth, and cut and sewed it; the girls who made the artificial flowers, who rolled the cigarettes, who gathered the grapes from the vines; the miners who dug the coal and the precious metals out of the earth; the men who watched in ten thousand signal-towers and engines, who fought the elements from the decks of ten thousand ships — to bring all these things here to be destroyed. Step by step, as the flood of extravagance rose,

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and the energies of men were turned to the creation of futility and corruption — so, step by step, increased the misery and degradation of all these slaves of Mammon. And who could imagine what they would think about it — if ever they came to think?

And then, in a sudden flash, there came back to Montague that speech he had heard upon the street-corner, the first evening he had been in New York! He could hear again the pounding of the elevated trains, and the shrill voice of the orator; he could see his haggard and hungry face, and the dense crowd gazing up at him. And there came to him the words of Major Thome: —

"It means another civil war !"

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CHAPTER XXI