Fifth Avenue

EDGAR SALTUS

HEREABOUTS, nowadays, if you did not know better, you would think you were in Chicago. Relatively, as things go, it seems but the day before yesterday when there was not a shop on the Avenue. It was then rather a smart promenade. Now it is all trade and all motors. Whether it is the trade that brings the motors or the motors that bring the trade or both that bring each other, are so many problems of which you may take your choice without paying your money and not to pay your money is a feat which, in this neighborhood, is nothing less than wizardry. While you are at it you may find it advisable to keep an eye on the motors. Precisely as they have contributed to the transformation of Fifth Avenue, so may they contribute to yours. If they can, they will take away your trousers.

RELATIVELY, as other things go, it is but another day before yesterday since the first pair of pressed trousers appeared. The man who first carried an umbrella was thought ridiculous. The man who first wore a high hat was thought insane. The man who first appeared in trousers set a fashion. Meanwhile, since that crusade which, years ago, was inaugurated by Lord Ronald Gower, the high hat has been going. Umbrellas have too. We lose them with our illusions and our hair. The time is not remote when we shall lose our trousers also. Whatever has a beginning must have an end. Trousers have both. They will pass. For that we may bless or curse the motor. Had the bicycle propulsion progressed in the ratio with which it began we should all be in knickers to-day. But there has to be something for every taste however unfastidious. The bicycle was ousted by the motor. Unless the latter is ousted by the aeroplane we assume without effort that one of these days lap robes will be the thing to wear and that from them there will be a return to togas. Togas used to be white. They had to be. There was a law on the subject. But that law is not on our statutes. There is therefore no reason why they should not be rainbow. In which case, when they return — when they do — man will become quite the peacock that he would like to be and it is the ladies who will wear his trousers.

PERHAPS, though, it is all a question of taste. On Fifth Avenue men still cling to their trousers. Some of them, though less frequently, thank God! still cling to high hats, saffron gloves, purple ties, gardenias, and stick pins. In that region which a geographer catalogued as the golden, remote wild West, a man who presumed to appear in any such fashion would be set upon and done for. Not for the sin of it, but because his appearance would represent prolonged meditations together with the means and the leisure to express them which the beholder might envy yet could not share. In the golden remote that would be ground for assault; in Fifth Avenue for repartee. "How shall I go to So-and-So's fancy ball?" a beautiful youth last winter asked of his uncle. "Go as you are," the uncle replied, "you are fancy enough already." Whenever any correction in taste seems needful, that sort of thing will do up a chap twice as quick as a brickbat.

FIFTH AVENUE, meanwhile, which has changed in so much, is, at night at least, still sedately suggestive. The horrors of Broadway's scintillant cereals, glittering corsets, coruscating gum, fiery cats and blazing drinks, have not yet disturbed it. At night the Avenue still retains something of its former charm. Frequented mainly by the ghosts of departed residents, the lights come from clubs and taverns that were once their homes. It is like living in the past to talk of them now and yet it would be mighty lucky if one could live there, since living in the present is so expensive, particularly in this neighborhood where the poverty of the rich has become really appalling. To what that is due we have not an idea, though recently we heard a man about town attribute it to an exhaustion of capital which beginning with him, had, he said, extended up and down the Avenue. But that view is perhaps unnecessarily profound. In any case it will hardly help to change the condition of things for which

the one remedy is to tie a knot in your handkerchief as a reminder that it exists and then forget all about it.

PARTICULARLY in Fifth Avenue taverns. There the main problem in political economy is like bread and butter, marked on the bill and dismissed with a tip. Besides it is always stupid to count your money. The wise thing is to count your dishes. It is wiser still not to let the headwaiter tell you what dishes you want. On that subject headwaiters are very imaginative. One wonders why they are not poets. Perhaps they are. If not, it is through no fault of the chefs. The chefs are regular troubadours. One of them, a bard from the boulevards, once strummed and sang that we Americans have a hundred religions, and but a single sauce — inferior at that he might have added and probably would have had not the inspiration failed. But that now is all over and done for here. We still have a hundred religions and have developed another, the worship of self, but the good, plain American fare than which nothing anywhere ever was viler, has departed with Fifth Avenue residents, one of whom seeing somewhere inscribed the legend: "God bless our home," exclaimed with enthusiasm, "Yes, and damn our cook."

THAT righteous prayer has been granted, at least in these inns where you may, if you like, have aubergine mousaka, which is the only way eggplant should be cooked, and, with it, a filet of antelope seasoned with vanilla, circled with quinces and served on a sofa of marjolaine and thyme, which, of course, is the only way it could be served. Moreover that is enough. On the Continent the gourmet sits down without an appetite and gets up with one. Here the proceeding is reversed. But then here there are so few gourmets, so few, that is, who know that a table which an epicure has supervised never groans. The epicure leaves groans to the headwaiter, to whomever pays the bill or to the imbecile who believes in terrapin because he sees it on the menu. There is no terrapin any more. Under the same name and with the same flavor you may, if you care for it have muskrat. Otherwise the terrapin is quite mythical. But though it has vanished from these regions, in its place is something quite as gastronomic and even more succulent — the pretty girls that turkey trot and who, in so doing, cater to that highest form of epicureanism which is the gastronomy of the eye.

TALKING of gastronomics, a chef recently confided to us that there are but thirty-six legitimate ways of cooking potatoes. The number seemed to us cabalistic and even capricious. Yet granting that the legitimate ways are but thirty-six, why should not a few extra-legal modes be permitted? What has the potato done to be sacred? None the less, as it is with the potato, so it is with life. Psychologists have demonstrated that the latter comports but thirty-six emotions. Personally we have tried to find more and failed to find as many. But granting the validity of the statement, it follows that if life comprises but thirty-six emotions, the drama can have just that many situations and no more. These premises accepted, it will be seen that potatoes and plays fall under the same general law and that the sum of energy constant in the one is present in the other — or should be and, now that the theatres are about to open, ought to be. The spectacle of thirty-six emotions vigorously displayed is what every man about town is looking for.

IN DEFAULT of anything so uplifting, it is always a pleasure to look in at the shop windows and see how many extraordinary things there are for which you have no use whatever. It is not only a pleasure, it is sound philosophy and that is very beneficial to us all. If you have the money, it will enable you to buy whatever you want most for the ladies of your household who need it least and, if you lack the money for such mere necessities, philosophy will enable you to realize that you will be better off anywhere than just right here.