Greenwich Village Part 19

There are Villagers who while scarcely celebrities are characters so well known, locally, as to stand out in bizarre relief even against that variegated background of personalities. There is Doris, the dancer, slim, strange, agile, with a genius for the centre of the Bohemian stage, an expert, exotic style of dancing, and a singular and touching pa.s.sion for her only child. At the Greenwich masquerades she used to s.h.i.+ne resplendent, her beautiful, lithe body glorious with stage-jewels, and not much else; for the time being she has flitted away, but some day she will surely return like a darkly brilliant b.u.t.terfly, and the Village will again thrill to her dancing. There is Hyppolite, the anarchist, dark and fervid; there is "Bobby" Edwards, the Village troubadour, with his self-made and self-decorated _ukelele_, and his cat, Dirty Joe; there is Charlie-immortal barber!--whose trade is plied in sublime accordance with Village standards, and whose "ad" runs as follows:

"The only barber shop in the Village where work is done conforming to its ideals.... Four barbers in attendance supervised by the popular boy-proprietor--CHARLIE."

There is Peggy, the artist's model, who has posed for almost every artist of note, and who is as pretty as a pink carnation.

There is Tiny Tim--of immense proportions--who keeps the Tiny Tim Candy Shop; an impressive person who carries trays of candy about the Village, and who swears that he has sweets to match your every mood.

"If they don't express your character, I'll take them back!" he declares. Though how he could take them back.... However, in the Village you need not be too exact. There is "Ted" Peck's Treasure Box.

Here all manner of charming things are sold; and here Florence Beales exhibits her most exquisite studies in photography.

There is the strong-minded young woman, who is always starting clubs; there is the Osage Indian who speaks eight languages and draws like a G.o.d; there are a hundred and one familiar spirits of the Village, eccentric, inasmuch as they are unlike the rest of the world, but oh, believe me, a goodly company to have as neighbours.

People have three mouthpieces, three vehicles of expression, besides their own lips. We are not talking now about that self-expression which is to be found in individual act or word in any form. We are speaking in a more practical and also a more social sense. In this sense we may cite three distinct ways in which a community may become articulate: through its press; through its clubs or a.s.sociations; through its entertainments and social life. Greenwich has a number of magazines, an even larger number of clubs and an unconscionable number of ways of entertaining itself--from theatrical companies to b.a.l.l.s!

Of course the best known of the Greenwich magazines is _The Ma.s.ses_, owned by Max Eastman and edited by Floyd Dell. It has, in a sense, grown beyond the Village, inasmuch as it now circulates all over the country, wherever socialistic or anarchistic tendencies are to be found. But its inception was in Greenwich Village, and in its infant days it strongly reflected the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. In those days it was poor and struggling too (as is altogether fitting in a Village paper) and lost nothing in freshness and spontaneity and vigour from that fact.

"You might tell," said Floyd Dell, with a twinkle, "of the days when _The Ma.s.ses_ was in Greenwich Avenue, and the editor, the business manager and the stenographer played ball in the street all day long!"

It is, perhaps, symbolic that _The Ma.s.ses_ in moving uptown stopped at Fourteenth Street, the traditional and permanent boundary line. There it may reach out and touch the great world, yet still remain part of the Village where it was born.

Here is one man's views of the Liberal Club. I am half afraid to quote them, they sound so heretical, but I wish to emphasise the fact that they are quoted. They might be the snapping of the fox at the sour grapes for all I know! Though this particular man seemed calm and dispa.s.sionate. "The Liberal Club Board," he said, "is a purely autocratic inst.i.tution. It is collectively a trained poodle, though composed of nine members. The procedure is to make a few long speeches, praise the club, and re-elect the Board. Perfectly simple.

But--did you say _Liberal_ Club?" He used to sit on the Board himself, too!

A visiting Scotch socialist proclaimed it, without pa.s.sion, a "h.e.l.l of a place," and some of its most striking anarchistic leaders, "vera interestin' but terrible d.a.m.n fools"! But he was, doubtless, an eccentric though an experienced and dyed-in-the-wool socialist who had lectured over half the globe. It is recorded of him that once when a certain young and energetic Village editor had been holding forth uninterruptedly and dramatically for an hour on the rights of the working-man, etc., etc., the visiting socialist, who had been watching his fervent gesticulations with absorbed attention, suddenly leaned forward and seized the lapel of his coat.

"Mon!" he exclaimed earnesly, "do ye play tennis?"

Just what is the Liberal Club?

You may have contradictory answers commensurate with the number of members you interrogate. One will tell you that it is a fake; one that it is the only vehicle of free speech; Arthur Moss says it is "the most _il_-liberal club in the world"! Floyd Dell says it is paramountly a medium for entertainment, and that it is "not so much a clearing house of new ideas as of new people"!

The Liberal Club goes up, and the Liberal Club goes down. It has its good seasons and its bad, its fluctuations as to standards and favour, its share in the curious and inevitable tides that swing all a.s.sociations back and forth like pendulums.

There is a real pa.s.sion for dancing in the Village, and it is beautiful dancing that shows practice and a natural sense of rhythm.

The music may be only from a victrola or a piano in need of tuning, but the spirit is, most surely, the vital spirit of the dance. At the Liberal Club everyone dances. After you have pa.s.sed through the lounge room--the conventional outpost of the club, with desks and tables and chairs and prints and so on--you find yourself in a corridor with long seats, and windows opening on to Nora Van Leuwen's big, bare, picturesque Dutch Oven downstairs. On the other side of the corridor is the dance room--also the latest exhibition. Some of the pictures are very queer indeed. The last lot I saw were compositions in deadly tones of magenta and purple. The artist was a tall young man, the son of a famous ill.u.s.trator. He strolled in quite tranquilly for a dance,--with those things of his in full view! All the courage is not on battlefields.

Said a girl, who, Village-like, would not perjure her soul to be polite:

"Why so much magenta?"

And said he quite sweetly:

"Why not? I can paint people green if I like, can't I?"

With which he glided imperturbably off in a fox trot with a girl in an "art sweater."

Harry Kemp says: "They make us sick with their scurrilous, ignorant stories of the Village. Pose? Sure!--it's two-thirds pose. But the rest is beautiful. And even the pose is beautiful in its way. Life is rotten and beautiful both at once. So is the Village. The Village is big in idea and it's growing. They talk of its being a dead letter.

It's just beginning. First it--the Village, as it is now--was really a sort of off-shoot of London and Paris. Now it's itself and I tell you it's beautiful, and more remarkable than people know.

"Uptowners, outsiders, come in here and insist on getting in; and, fed on the sort of false stuff that goes out through 'novelists' and 'reporters,' think that anything will go in the Liberal Club! They come here and insult the women members, and we all end up in a free fight every week or so. All the fault of the writers who got us wrong in the first place, and handed on the wrong impression to the world...."

The studio quarters of the Village are located in various places--the South Side of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, the little lost courts and streets and corners everywhere, and--Macdougal Alley, Was.h.i.+ngton Mews, and the new, rather stately structures on Eighth Street, which are almost too grand for real artists and yet which have attracted more than a few nevertheless. I suppose that the Alley,--jutting off from the famous street named for Alexander Macdougal,--is the best known.

I remember that once, some years ago, I was hurrying, by a short cut, from Eighth Street to Waverly Place, and saw something which made me stop short in amazement. As unexpectedly as though it had suddenly sprung there, I beheld a little street running at right angles from me, parallel with Eighth, but ending, like a _cul de sac_, in houses like those with which it was edged. It was a quaint and foreign-looking little street and seemed entirely out of place in New York,--and especially out of place plunged like that into the middle of a block.

But that was not the oddest part of it. In that street stood talking a girl in gorgeous Spanish dress and a man in Moorish costume. The warm reds and greens and russets of their garments made an unbelievable patch of colour in the grey March day. And this in New York!

A friendly truck driver, feeding his horses, saw my bewilderment, and laughed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GREENWICH STUDIO. Choosing models.]

"That's Macdougal's Alley," he volunteered.

That meant nothing to me then.

"What is it?" I demanded, devoured by curiosity; "the stage door of a theatre,--or what?"

He laughed again.

"It is just Macdougal's Alley!" he repeated, as though that explained everything.

So it did, when I came to find out about it.

The Alley and Was.h.i.+ngton Mews are probably the most famous artist quarters in the city, and some of our biggest painters and sculptors once had studios in one or the other,--those, that is, that haven't them still. Of course the picturesquely attired individuals I had caught sight of were models--taking the air, or s.n.a.t.c.hing a moment for flirtation. Naturally they would not have appeared in costume in any other street in New York, but this, you see, was Macdougal Alley, and as my friend, the truck driver, seemed to think, that explains everything!

As for the Mews, they are fixing it up in great shape; and as for those Eighth-Street studios, they are too beautiful for words. You look out on Italian gardens, and you know that you are nowhere near New York, with its prose and drudgery. If for a moment it seems all a bit too perfect for the haphazard, inspirational loveliness of the Village, you will surely have an arresting instinct which will tell you that it is just consummating a Village dream; it is just making what every Villager lives to make come true: perfect artistic beauty.

As we have seen, dancing is a real pa.s.sion in the Village. So we can scarcely leave it without touching on the "Village dances" which have been so striking a feature of recent times and have proved so useful and so fruitful to the tired Sunday-supplement newspaperman. There are various sorts, from the regular pageants staged by the Liberal Club and the Kit Kat, to those of more modest pretensions given by individual Villagers or groups of Villagers.

The _Quatres Arts_ b.a.l.l.s of Paris doubtless formed the basis for these affairs; indeed, a description given me years ago by William Dodge, the artist, might almost serve as the story of one of these Village b.a.l.l.s today. And Doris, who, I believe, appeared on one occasion as "Aphrodite,"--in appropriate "costume"--recalls the celebrated model Sara Brown who electrified Paris by her impersonation of "Cleopatra"

at a _"Quatz 'Arts"_ gathering,--somewhat similarly arrayed,--or should we say decorated?

The costumes,--many of them at least,--are largely--paint! This is not nearly as improper as it sounds. Splashes of clever red and subtle purple will quite creditably take the place of more c.u.mberous and expensive dressing,--or at least will pleasantly eke it out. Colour has long been recognised as a perfectly good subst.i.tute for cloth.

Have you forgotten the small boy's abstract of the first history book--" ... The early Britons wore animals' skins in winter, and in summer they painted themselves blue." I am convinced that wode was the forerunner of the dress of the Village ball!

The Kit Kat, an artists' a.s.sociation, is remarkable for one curious custom. Its managing board is a profound mystery. No one knows who is responsible for the invitations sent out, so there can be no jealousy nor rancour if people don't get asked. If an invited guest chooses to bring a friend he may, but he is solely responsible for that friend and if his charge proves undesirable he will be held accountable and will thereafter be quietly dropped from the guest list of subsequent b.a.l.l.s. And still he will never know who has done it! Hence, the Kit Kat is a most formidable inst.i.tution, and invitations from its mysterious "Board" are hungrily longed for!

Every season there are other b.a.l.l.s, too; among the last was the "Apes and Ivory" affair, a study in black and white, as may be gathered; then there was the "Rogue's Funeral" ball. This was to commemorate the demise of a certain little magazine called the _Rogue_, whose career was short and unsuccessful. They kept the funeral atmosphere so far as to hire a hea.r.s.e for the transportation of some of the guests, _but_--

"We put the first three letters of funeral in capitals," says one of the partic.i.p.ants casually.

The proper thing, when festivities are over, is to go to breakfast,--at "Polly's," the Village Kitchen or the Dutch Oven, perhaps. Of course, nothing on earth but the resiliency, the electric vitality of youth, could stand this sort of thing; but then, the Village is young; it is preeminently the land of youth, and the wine of life is still fresh and strong enough in its veins to come buoyantly through what seems to an older consciousness a good bit more like an ordeal than an amus.e.m.e.nt!

And yet--and yet--somehow I cannot think that these b.a.l.l.s and pageants and breakfasts are truly typical of the real Village--I mean the newest and the best Village--the Village which, like the Fairy Host, sings to the sojourners of the grey world to come and join them in their dance, with "the wind sounding over the hill." My Village is something fresher and gayer and more child-like than that. There is in it nothing of decadence.

But, as John Reed says--

_"... There's anaemia Ev'n in Bohemia, That there's not more of it--_ there _is the miracle!"_