at the same time. The audience roared. It was frightfully boring. The only thing that could possibly amuse the public would be an automobile accident. As a matter of fact, that is what people came here for. At last it occurred. Suddenly, alarm signals were heard. Everyone jumped from his seat. One of the automobiles flew off the track while going full-speed. We were still pushing our way through the crowd which surrounded the stadium when we heard the frightful baying of the ambulance. Through its window-panes we managed to see the injured driver. He no longer wore his leather helmet. He sat there, holding on to his blue skull with both hands. He had an angry look. He had lost the prize for which he had risked his life.
In the intervals between heats, on a wooden platform inside the circle, circus comedians were playing a scene which portrayed four clumsy fellows building a house. Naturally, bricks fell on the four fools. They smeared each other with the cement mixture. They beat each other with hammers by mistake, and in sheer self-forgetfulness sawed off their own legs. All this concoction of tricks, which had its origin in the distant antiquity of Greece and Rome and is still brilliantly carried on by such great master clowns as Fratellini, was excellently done by the clowns of the Danbury fair. It is always pleasant to watch good circus work, and its ways, polished through ages, are never boresome.
The fair came to an end. The visitors in the wooden pavilions were few in number. On long tables in the pavilions lay large lacquered vegetables that seemed inedible. The orchestras performed farewell marches, and all the visitors en masse, raising clouds of dust over the clean dark yellow sand, made their way to their automobiles. Here were demonstrated (and sold, of course) trailers for automobiles.
Pairs of Americans, in most cases composed of man and wife, would go inside and exclaim for a long time, impressed by the trailers. They examined the enticing inside of the trailer, the comfortable beds, the lace curtains on the windows, the couch, the convenient and simple metal stove. What could be better? You attach a trailer like that to an automobile, drive out of the thundering city, and drive and drive to wherever your eyes may lead you. That is, you know where you are driving. The eyes “look into the forest,” and they see the Great Lakes, the beaches of the Pacific Ocean, the canyons, and the broad rivers.
Groaning, man and wife would crawl out of a trailer. It was too expensive. Here in Danbury were trailers at $350 and some at $700. But where can you get $700? Where can you get the time for a long trip?
The long columns of machines flew soundlessly back to New York, and after an hour and a half at a good clip we saw the flaming sky. Skyscrapers shone from top to bottom. Over the earth gleamed the flowing lights of the cinemas and the theatres?
Carried away by the storm of life, we decided to devote the evening to acquaintanceship with entertainment for common people.
A “nickel” is what Americans call a small nickel coin of five cents. With all its appearance nocturnal New York tells the pleasure-seeker:
“Give me your nickel! Drop your nickel! Part with your nickel and you will be happy!”
The clicking noise comes out of the large amusement stores. Here stand scores of pinball tables of all kinds. You drop a nickel in the proper slot; automatically a cue is liberated by a spring, and the pleasure-seeker, having decided to spend the evening in revelry, can shoot a steel ball five times. For a certain number of points won he receives a card-board certificate from the master of the establishment. A half-year spent at regular play and, in consequence of the regular dropping of nickels, the reveller has the necessary number of points to receive his prize – one of those beautiful prizes that stand on the shelf. That may be a glass vase or an aluminium cocktail-shaker, or a table clock, or a cheap fountain pen or safety razor. In brief, here are all the treasures at the mere sight of which the heart of a housewife, a child, or a gangster contracts with sweetness. Americans spend hours in such lonely entertainment, in a concentrated, indifferent manner, without anger and without exultation.
Having finished with the pinball, one may go to an automatic soothsayer. She sits in a glass case, yellow-faced and thin. Before her in semicircle lies cards. It is taken for granted that you must drop a nickel. Then the soothsayer comes to life. Her head begins to bob, her chest to heave, and a wax arm glides over the cards. This is no spectacle for impressionable people. It is all so stupid and so horrible that one is in danger of losing one’s mind. A half-minute later the fortune-teller freezes into her previous position. Now you must pull a handle. From the crack falls the prophecy of your fate. It is in most cases a portrait of your future wife and a short description of her attributes.
The stores of these idiotic wonders are disgusting even when they are located in the centre of a city full of tinsel and noise. But somewhere on the East Side, in the dark alleys, where the sidewalks and pavements are littered with the refuse of the daytime trade, among signboards which testify to the extreme poverty (here you can get a shave for five cents, lodging for fifteen), such a store, dimly lighted, dirty, where two or three figures silently and joylessly click at pinball, where by comparison an ordinary game of billiards becomes a genuine triumph of culture and intellect – there it is mortal boredom.
The head can ache from work. But it can also ache from amusement.
After the amusement stores we found ourselves in another strange amusement establishment.
The clatter of jazz imitates so far as possible the clatter of the elevated railway. People crowd around a glass booth in which sits a live cashier girl with a set, waxy smile on her face. This is a theatre called “Burlesque”. This is a variety show for thirty-five cents.
The hall was full, and the young, determined ushers placed people anywhere at all. Some did not find seats. They stood in the aisles without taking their eyes off the stage.
On the stage a woman sang. She did not know how to sing. She bad the kind of voice that did not entitle her to hold forth even at birthday parties for the most indulgent relatives. She also danced. One did not have to be a balletomane to realize that this person would never become a ballerina. Yet the public smiled approvingly. Apparently in this audience there were no fanatics of singing and no balletomanes. The audience had come here for something else.
The “something else” was explained when this singer of songs and dancer of dances suddenly began to tittup across the stage, casting off her clothes as she cut her capers. She cast them off quite slowly so that the audience might examine this artistic mise en scene in all its detail. Suddenly the jazz cackled, the music stopped, and with a bedroom scream the girl ran into the wings. The young men who filled the hall applauded enthusiastically. A master of ceremonies, a man of athletic appearance dressed in a dinner jacket, came out on the stage and made a businesslike proposition:
“If you applaud harder she will take off something else.”
Such an explosion of applause broke loose then as even Mattia Battistini or Anna Pavlova or Keane himself, the greatest of the great, could never expect in a lifetime from any audience. No! Mere talent cannot win such a public!
The performer again passed across the stage, sacrificing what little was left of her garments. To satisfy the theatre censorship, she held a bit of clothing before her with one hand.
After the first dancer and singer another came out and repeated exactly what her predecessor had done. The third one did what the second had done. The fourth, fifth, and sixth did not make any new contributions. They sang without voice and without ear, and they danced with the grace of a kangaroo. But they disrobed. The other ten girls took their turns in faithfully repeating the same performance.
The only difference between them was that some were brunettes (these were fewer in number), while others were light-haired lambs (there were more of these).
This Zulu solemnity continued for several hours. It is pornography mechanized to such an extent that it acquires a kind of industrial
