CHAPTER LIV

ASSORTED AND RESORTED FLORIDA

"Some year or more ago, I s'pose, I roamed from Maine to Floridy, And,--see where them Palmettoes grows? I bought that little key...."

--SIDNEY LANIER ("A FLORIDA GHOST.")

Florida in winter comes near to being all things to all men. To all she offers amusement plus her climate, and in no one section is the contrast in what amusement constitutes, and costs, set forth more sharply than where, on the west coast of the State, Belleair and St. Petersburg are situated, side by side.

The Hotel Belleview at Belleair compares favorably with any in the State, and is peopled, during the cold months, with affluent golf maniacs, for whom two fine courses have been laid out.

When the pipes supplying water for the greens of his home course, at Brook, Indiana, freeze, annually, George Ade, for instance, knows that, instead of hibernating, it is time for him to take his white flannel suits, hang them on the clothesline in the back yard until the fragrance of the moth-ball has departed, pack them in his wardrobe trunk, and take his winter flight to the Belleview. He knows that, at the Belleview, he will meet hundreds of men and women who are suffering from the malady with which he is afflicted.

The conversation at Belleair is, so far as my companion and I could learn, confined entirely to comparisons between different courses, different kinds of clubs and balls, and different scores. Belleair turns up its nose at Palm Beach. It considers the game of golf as played at Palm Beach a trifling game, and it feels that the winter population of Palm Beach wastes a lot of time talking about clothes and the stock market when it might be discussing cleeks, midirons, and mashies. The woman who thinks it essential to be blond whether she is blond or not, and who regards Forty-second Street as the axle upon which the universe turns, would be likely to die of ennui in a week at Belleair, whereas, in Palm Beach, if she died in that time, it would probably be of delight--with a possibility of alcoholism as a contributing cause. And likewise, though Belleair has plutocrats in abundance, they are not starred for their wealth, as are the Palm Beach millionaires, nor yet for their social position, but are rated strictly according to their club handicap. Hence it happens that if, speaking of a Palm Beach millionaire, you ask: "How did he make it?" you will be told the story of some combine of trusts, some political grafting, or some widely advertised patent medicine; but if you ask in Belleair: "How did he make it?" the answer is likely to be: "He made it in 4, with a cleek."

Consider on the other hand, St. Petersburg, with its cheap hotels, its boarding houses, its lunch rooms and cafeterias, and its winter population of farmers and their wives from the North. The people you see in St. Petersburg are identical with those you might see on market day in a county town of Ohio or Indiana. Several thousands of them come annually from several dozen States, and many a family of them lives through the winter comfortably on less than some other families spend at Belleair in a week, or at Palm Beach in a day.

If I am any judge of the signs of happiness, there is plenty of it in the hearts of those who winter at St. Petersburg. The city park is full of contented people, most of them middle-aged or old. The women listen to the band, and the men play checkers under the palmetto-thatched shelter, or toss horseshoes on the greensward, at the sign of the Sunshine Pleasure Club--an occupation which is St. Petersburg's equivalent for Palm Beach's game of tossing chips on the green-topped tables of a gambling house. And yet--

Is it always pleasant to be virtuous? Is it always delightful to be where pious people, naïve people, people who love simple pastimes, are enjoying themselves? I am reminded of a talk I had with a negro whose strong legs turned the pedals of a wheel chair in which my companion and I rode one day through the Palm Beach jungle trail. It is a wonderful place, that jungle, with its tangled trunks and vines and its green foliage swimming in sifted sunlight; with its palms, palmettoes, ferns, and climbing morning-glories, its banana trees, gnarled rubber banyans, and wild mangoes--which are like trees growing upside down, digging their spreading branches into the ground. For a time we forgot the pedaling negro behind us, but a faint puffing sound on a slight up-grade reminded us, presently, that our party was not of two, but three. When the chair was running free again, one of us inquired of the chairman:

"What would you do if you had a million dollars?"

"Well, boss," replied the negro seriously, "Ah knows one thing Ah'd do. No mattuh how much o' dis worl's goods Ah haid, Ah'd allus get mah exuhcize."

"That's wise," my companion replied. "What kind of exercise would you take?"

"Ah ain't nevvuh jest stedied dat out, boss," returned the man. "But it sho' would be some kind o' exuhcize besides pushin' one o' dese-heah chaihs."

"When you weren't exercising would you go and have a good time?"

"No, boss."

"Why not?"

"Well, boss, y' see Ah's a 'ligious man, Ah is."

"But can't people who are religious have a good time?"

"Oh," said the negro, "dey might have deh little pleasuhs now an' den, but dey cain't hev no sich good times like othah folks kin. A man 't 's a 'ligious man, he cain't hev no sich good times like Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y's an' dem folks 'at was heah up to laist week. Ah was Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y's chaih boy. He gimme ninety-two dollahs an' fifty cents tips one week! Yassuh! Dat might be _cha'ity_ but 't ain't 'ligion. Mistuh Dodge, his chaih boy's been a-wohkin' foh 'im six weeks. I 'spec' Mistuh Dodge give dat boy fahve hund'ud dollahs if he give 'im a cent! Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y's pahty, dey haid nineteen chaihs waitin' on 'em all de time, jest foh t' drive 'em f'om de _ho-_tel to de club, an' de casino. Dat cos' 'em nineteen hund'ud dollahs a week, and de boys, dey ain't one o'em 'at git less'n hund'ud dolluhs fo' hisself. Dat's de kin' o' gen'men Mistuh Wahtuhbe'y an' his pahty is. Ah's haid sev'ul gen'men dis season dat ain't what you'd jes' say, 'ligious, but dey was, as folks calls it, p'ofuse. Dey was one ol' gen'man heah two weeks, an' deh was a young lady what he haid a attachment on, an' evvy evenin' 'e use' t' take huh foh a wheel-chaih ride in de moonlight. Fuhst night Ah took 'em out he tuhn to me, an' he says: 'Look-a-heah, boy! You sho you knows youah duties?'

"'Yassuh, boss,' Ah tell 'im. 'Deed Ah does!'

"'Den what is youah duties den?' sez 'e.

"Ah say: 'Boss, de chaih boy's duties, dey's to be dumb, an' deef, an' blin', an' dey cain't see nothin', an' dey cain't say nothin', an' dey cain't heah nothin', and dey cain't--'

"'Dass 'nuff,' he say. 'Ah sees you knows youah business. Heah's fiffy dollahs.'"

"Well," one of us asked presently, "what happened?"

"Ah took 'em ridin' through de jungle trail, boss," he returned, innocently.

"What did they do?"

"How does Ah know, boss? Di'n' Ah have ma eyes covuhed wi' dat fiffy dollahs? Di'n' Ah have ma eahs stuff' wid it? Yassuh! An' Ah got ma _mouf_ full o' it _yit_!"

The chair boys, bell boys, waiters, barbers, porters, bartenders, waitresses, chambermaids, manicures, and shop attendants one finds in Palm Beach, Belleair, Miami, and many other winter resorts, are, numerically, a not inconsiderable part of the season's population, and the lives of these people who form a background of service, of which many an affluent visitor is hardly conscious, parallel the lives of the rich in a manner that is not without a note of caricature.

When the rich go South so do the hordes that serve them; when the Florida season begins to close and the rich move northward, the serving population likewise begins to melt away; if you are in Palm Beach near the season's end, and move up to St. Augustine, or Jacksonville, or Augusta, or any one of a dozen other places, you are likely to recognize, here and there, a waiter, a bell-boy, or a chambermaid whom you tipped, some weeks earlier, preparatory to leaving a latitude several degrees nearer the Equator. When you leave the Poinciana or the Breakers at the season's close, your waiter may, for all you know, be in the Jim Crow car, ahead, and when you go in to dinner at the Ponce de Leon at St. Augustine, or the Mason at Jacksonville, you may discover that he too has stopped off there for a few days, to gather in the final tips. Nor must you fancy, when you depart for the North, that you have seen the last of him. Next summer when you take a boat up the Hudson, or go to Boston by the Fall River Line, or drop in at a hotel at Saratoga, there he will be, like an old friend. The bartender who mixes you a pick-me-up on the morning that you leave the Breakers, will be ready to start you on the downward path, at the beginning of the summer, at some Northern country club; the barber who cuts your hair at the Royal Palm in Miami will be ready to perform a like service, later on, at some hotel in the Adirondacks or the White Mountains; the neat waitress who serves you at the Belleview at Belleair will appear before you three or four months hence at the Griswold near New London; the adept waiter from the Beach Club at Palm Beach will seem to you to look like some one you have seen before when, presently, he places viands before you at Sherry's, or the Ritz, or some fashionable restaurant in London or Paris. Likewise, when you enter the barber shop of a large hostelry just off the board walk in Atlantic City, next July, you will find there, in the same generously ventilated shirt waist, the manicurist who caused your nails to glisten so superbly in the Florida sunlight; and if she has the memory for faces which is no small part of a successful manicurist's stock in trade, she will remember you, and where she saw you last, and will tell you just which of the young women from "The Follies" and the Century Theater are to be seen upon the beach that day, and whether they are wearing, here on the Jersey coast, those same surprising bathing suits which, last February, caused blasé gentlemen basking upon the Florida sands to sit up, arise, say it was time for one last dip before luncheon, and then, without seeming too deliberate about it, follow the amazing nymphs in the direction of a matchless sea--that sea which, as a background for these Broadway girls in their long silken hosiery, takes on a tone of spectacular unreality, like some fantastic marine back drop devised by Mr. Dillingham or Mr. Ziegfeld.

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