Who's Got the Button?

For some time the world has smiled brightly on me — and when I say the world, I speak less in the poetic sense of one who visualizes laughing brooks and things, and more as a prosaist who thinks of mankind as the world. From the earliest, morning until latest afternoon, my chance meetings with strangers are attended with good cheer.

To be sure, I have a bland, unsuspicious, and helpless facial expression that stimulates people of all sorts to be good to me. Taxi-drivers, on my emergence from a railroad train, have offered to drive me almost gratuitously to a hotel that I know to be opposite the station. Chance acquaintances, friends, even, have volunteered to take me in at the basement of golden investment opportunities; and members of my immediate family have gone freely out of their way to laud to me the blessings and felicities of the wedded state. All these kindnesses I accept as the meed of one born under a friendly star.

But I speak quite without indirection when I say that recently I have been the recipient of an unusual amount of cordiality. Not long since, a girl in a passing runabout glanced keenly at me as I stood waiting for a car in an outlying portion of the city; then stopped and offered to take me to my destination — ‘ that is, if you’re not going too far out of my way.’ During a short but welcome ride she talked brightly of the weather, and she left me at my corner with the kindliest ‘Not at all.’ I had observed her glancing at the lapel of my jacket, but not once did she spoil the delightful impersonality of our contact by a reference to the cut of my ante-bellum clothes.

One day in the Elevated I was aroused from complete absorption in the political campaign by the remark of a train-guard, which led to a chummy conversation. I now recall that his utterance bore some faint resemblance to ‘Chatham Square,’ but at the time it sounded like ‘Château-Thierry,’and I rose from the seat, and asked him if he had been a marine. Perhaps the guilelessness of my question, coupled with the physiognomic ingenuousness to which I have already referred, disarmed the guard, for he entered cheerfully into a protracted conversation, interrupted only occasionally by a perfunctory supplication to other passengers to watch their step. He told me about the late war, with many spirited lapses into profane vernacular, which seemed tacitly to imply that I also had sounded the depths of the service vocabulary; and from time to time he glanced as if for assurance at the left lapel of my jacket.

By force of example my own gaze was directed to my lapel, and there I beheld what I had affixed with casual fingers and more than half forgotten — the button of a national order of WorldWar veterans. A light dawned upon me! This button, then, to which I am entitled by Mediterranean sub-chaser service, was the begetter of smiles, the open sesame to conversations, which had hitherto been denied me. It explained why persons who trod on my toes in the subway were willing to forgive my carelessness in taking my toes there to be trod upon; why one girl had broken the rule of motorists to give me a lift, and why other drivers had looked in passing as if only very important engagements prevented them from doing me a similar kindness.

After arriving at this amazing deduction, I terminated my conversation with the L guard, and left the train to walk the streets, as they do in literature, and think the matter out. It was true, then, that the war had had a profound influence on human nature. It had purged the New York public (if no other) of its indecent incivility, its disregard of others’ rights, its lamentably discourteous treatment of the stranger. My little button had fused the assorted hearts and dissimilar souls of America’s people into a vast organ of kindness and altruism. To those who wore the insignia of this veterans’ order, the best which might be offered in casual, passerby fellowship (and, no doubt, in the deeper exchanges of true friendliness) was not half enough. And among us of the order—I recalled then that the train-guard had worn the button, enfiladed on one side by the inevitable celluloidal glare of a presidential candidate — there was that spirit of camaraderie w hich exists elsewhere only among the Bolsheviki. Rank and caste had been thrown aside, and former officers and men were now men together.

So I thought in my solitary, lucubratory walk, and marveled no more that bank presidents, ex-yeomen (F), policemen, fatigued bartenders, and social leaders paused in their various occupations to flash a smile of greeting at me. True democracy, wherein everyone is the friendly equal of every other, had been achieved. Gone were the ascending rungs of the social ladder, and we were all blood-brothers in spirit.

But now it is my sorry business to shatter a train of thought that I had so hoped augured approach to Utopia.

Only yesterday I entered a shop, and was greeted by a salesman with the smile I have become accustomed to. ‘Go’n’ ter march in the parade?’ he asked, glancing at my left lapel.

I have been a little out of touch with metropolitan affairs for the last five or six days and I was obliged to reveal my ignorance by asking what parade.

‘Why, the bonus parade.’

‘Oh, the bonus,’ I replied, somewhat shortly, I must confess. ‘I’m not in sympathy with the agitation, Taxes are high enough already.’

The ready smile left the salesman’s face, and I saw in its place a half-light of thinly disguised scorn creep from uplifted eyebrows to down-curled lips. ‘Taxes,’ he snorted. ‘Wot ’er they got to do with it? We done our bit, and we rate the bonus.’

‘As to that,’ I remarked, feeling that we should best retain our mutual respect by keeping out of argument, ‘you ’re entitled to your opinion. — I’d like a couple of cells for my pocket flash.’

This clash of ideas between members of an organization rather jarred my sense of rightness with the world, but there was worse to come. As I waited for change, I heard the buttonnaire whisper to a fellow clerk: —

‘D’yer see that big simp with the button? He don’t want no bonus, and I ’ll bet a month’s pay he had a soft job in Washington and don’t need none. Them reserve officers always had the gravy, and as long as we got ’em in the outfit, we’ll never get ours. Don’t talk to me about men and officers bein’ buddies now that it’s all over. I don’t want ’em to chow in my mess.’