just given with regard to the purchasing of pig iron.
CHAPTER IV
MORE CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS
Because I have told you so much about the Chamber of Commerce you must not assume that the Chamber of Commerce was with us constantly while we were in Cleveland, for that is not the case. True, Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night. But at our rooms they left us, merely taking the precaution to lock us in. No attempt was made to assist us in undressing or to hear our prayers or tuck us into bed. Once in our rooms we were left to our own devices. We were allowed to read a little, if we wished, to whisper together, or even to amuse ourselves by playing with the fixtures in the bathroom.
On the morning of the second day they came and let us out, and took us to see a lot of interesting and edifying sights, but by afternoon they had acquired sufficient confidence in us to turn us loose for a couple of hours, allowing us to roam about, at large, while they attended to their mail.
We made use of the freedom thus extended to us by presenting several letters of introduction to Cleveland gentlemen, who took us to various clubs.
Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a club there are large windows of plate glass, back of which the passer-by may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. Looking at the outside of the building, you know that there is a big, high-ceiled room, at the front, dark in color and containing spacious leather chairs, which should (and often do) contain aristocratic gentlemen who have attained years of discretion and positions of importance. One feels cheated if, on entering, one fails to encounter a member carrying a malacca stick and wearing waxed mustaches, spats, and a gardenia. The Union Club of New York is such a club; so is the Pacific Union of San Francisco; so is the Chicago Club; and so, I fancy, from my glimpse of it, is the Union Club of Cleveland.
In the larger cities there is usually another club, somewhat less formal in architecture, decoration, and spirit, and given over, broadly speaking, to the younger men—though there is often a good deal of duplication of membership between the first mentioned type of club and the second. The Tavern of Cleveland is of the second category; so is the Saturn Club of Buffalo, of which I spoke in a former chapter. Almost every good-sized city has, likewise, its university club, its athletic club, and its country club. University clubs vary a good deal in character, but athletic clubs and country clubs are in general pretty true to type.
Besides such clubs as these, one finds, here and there, in the United States, a few clubs of a character more unusual. Cleveland has three unusual clubs: the Rowfant, a book collector's club; the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club, at Gates Mills, near the city, and the Hermit Club.
Were it not for the fact that I detest the words "artistic" and "bohemian," I should apply them to the Hermit Club. It is one of the few clubs outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco possessing its own house and made up largely of men following the arts, or interested in them. Like the Lambs of New York, the Hermits give shows in their club-house, but the Lambs' is a club of actors, authors, composers, stage managers, etc., while the Hermit Club is made up, so far as the theater is concerned, of amateurs—amateurs having among them sufficient talent to write and act their own shows, design their own costumes, paint their own scenery, compose their own music, and even play it, too—for there is an orchestra of members. I have never seen a Hermits' show, and I am sorry, for I have heard that they are worth seeing. Certainly their club-house is. It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet. This illusion is enhanced by the surroundings of the club, for it stands in an alley—or perhaps I had better say a narrow lane—and is huddled down between the walls of taller buildings.
The pleasant promise of the exterior is fulfilled within. The ground floor rooms are low and cozy, and have a pleasant "rambling" feeling—a step or two up here or down there. The stairway, leading to the floor above, is narrow, with a genial kind of narrowness that seems to say: "There is no one here with whom you'll mind rubbing elbows as you pass." Ascending, you reach the main room, which occupies the entire upper floor. This room is the Hermit Club. It is here that members gather and that the more intimate shows are given. Large, with dark panels, and heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and desirable in a club building—or, for the matter of that, in a home or a human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke, nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least, overwhelm one with its magnificence; it should not chill one with its grandeur, so that one lowers one's voice to a whisper and involuntarily removes one's hat.
In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home; others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events, look more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not.
The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England hamlet.
The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the place took its name, is passing a mellow old age as the house of the Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."
The Connecticut resemblance is accounted for by the fact that all this section of the country was in the Western Reserve, which belonged to, and was settled by, Connecticut. Thus travel teaches us! I knew practically nothing, until then, of the Western Reserve, and even less of hunt clubs. I had never been in a hunt club before, and my impressions of such institutions had been gleaned entirely from short stories and from prints showing rosy old rascals drinking. Probably because of these prints I had always thought that "horsey" people—particularly the "hunting