Bad Times, Better Manners

I HAVE never been one of those people who go around sighing over American manners. Friendliness and informality, even mixed with familiarity and vulgarisms, seem to me much more desirable than either stiffness or servility. I am one of those who are delighted with the blithe ‘O.K., lady’ of the first taxi driver at the pier after I have been ‘madamed’ all over Europe; I do not mind his cheerful male acceptance of my idiosyncrasies, such as a feeling against Third Avenue as an obstacle race course for motor vehicles. But I must admit that in the midst of our friendly American cheerfulness there has always been an occasional surly boor, and a great deal of that kind of bad manners which comes from ignorance and not bad temper. But even I, who like American taxi drivers, am delighted now to realize that New York is a much politer place to live in than it was six months ago. Heart-rending as the depression is, life in the city is in many casual ways far pleasanter than when there were plenty of jobs and plenty of money.

I notice, for instance, that the motorman of our cross-town car has stopped playing his game of catch-the-lady’s-foot-in-thefolding-door, and is much less dour when he has to change a quarter. I think perhaps he is a little cleaner, too. He has a nice new hat, at any rate, and perhaps that has made him happier.

Many times this winter I have been thanked for a ten-cent tip after a thirtycent taxi ride. And not with heavy sarcasm, either. The telegraph boys who have happened to deliver messages have not rung the doorbell for more than thirty or forty seconds at a time or bellowed at the top of their new bass voices as they entered the house. We have a new laundryman, too, from a firm I left in a pet some time ago, good and reasonable as their work was, because their drivers were rude and disagreeable. This new driver is a delightful person and I thoroughly enjoy my Monday morning ‘contact’ with him. His firm will have to ruin many more collars and lose more handkerchiefs than they have done so far to make me give up his services.

‘Better this week than last, Mis’ Wynkoop,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Only $5.43 and last week was $6.90.’ He does n’t know it yet, but just for that bit of psychology he shall have all our blankets to wash next spring. And that, for my non-housekeeping readers’ information I may add, means something.

The salespeople in the small neighborhood shops are as different as they can be. Not only do they not pursue you or crossly bang their drawers about if they do not have what you ask for, but it even seems not to be your own fault if what you want is not in stock. They are quicker and altogether nicer. In the department stores one seldom now encounters that haughty and indifferent hussy who has spoiled so many gayly anticipated shopping tours since one’s childhood. She has been trying, even when one has sympathetically imagined the aching feet, the misery in the back, and the buzzing head that she must develop before the end of every day. The self-control and sweetness of temper of the average shopgirl to-day are a new thing — incredible and touching — touching because it takes very little imagination to see behind them, not only careful training on the part of the management, but a trembling necessity of pleasing the customer and keeping the job.

Fear of losing one’s job and the cupidity that now must conciliate every possible customer arc not the noblest reasons for courtesy. I suspect that a great deal of the much-vaunted Old World courtesy is due to exactly those two motives, though there is doubtless real character behind some of it. In time, according to William James, if you smile enough, you begin to feel like smiling. If all New York grows to be polite, if only through fear and the need of selfpreservation, what a wonderfully attractive race we shall be, with not only good manners, but our gossipy, kindly friendliness besides!

As a matter of fact, all our manners were by way of being badly corrupted. New Yorkers with quite different backgrounds have been baffled into continued bad temper by that gruff, pushing, solid-shouldered obliviousness of our new fellow Americans. And it has been hard not to fall in with the common policy of even otherwise wellmannered people who say, ‘Such people do not understand decent manners. You have to shout at them. It’s the only kind of talk they understand.’ Perhaps the restriction of immigration has already made a difference in our cities, and more of the erstwhile bewildered and elbowing foreigners understand English. At any rate, I think I see a retarding of the corruption of manners among all classes of city people. There have been plenty among them who have adopted this method of dealing with their fellow men. They always jump first, as a matter of policy, and can find fault in the vernacular so loudly and fluently that it frightens their wives and little ones into speechless panic to hear a good sample of their oratory. Meanwhile the swarthy and recently hyphenated American, with what bitterness in his heart one can only guess, mutters into his grocery pushcart, his news stand, or his pressing machine, and invents, if he can, seven new ways to be annoying.

I am particularly glad of the change in atmosphere myself because my children have recently advanced to that age of rudeness which all adolescents of any spirit seem to go through. If in my efforts not to segregate them too strictly they should develop that bullying manner in their public contacts, so to speak, I should feel myself a thorough failure. At times, just that seems to be their ambition.

‘Won’t it be nice. Mother,’ said my son at the age of five, ‘when I get a big boy and play in the street and say “ Ged ouda here! ” ’

I should be sorry if after our long training in ordinary decent courtesy at home and in school they should all decide that a hardboiled, roughshod snappiness is the only way to get on in the world. The rudeness incidental to the process of growing up and getting away from one’s family is bad enough, though apparently necessary and to be borne by parents like any other passing affliction. It is a part of the children’s development of a personality, and they cannot always stop to be fair to such elderly persons as may be obliged to suggest limits to their flights. One cannot, however, even with good boarding schools taking the chief onus of their manners, adopt with one’s own children the policy of a friend of mine, who says frankly that while they are between thirteen and eighteen or so she wants to see as little as possible of the children of her friends. ‘They are delightful before and after,’ she says, ‘but impossible at that age — so critical, disagreeable, and self-centred.’

One can only hope that if they go out into a world which, even though afflicted by hard times and violent competition, is superficially a little less gruff and disagreeable than it was in their parents’ early days of struggle, they may arrive the sooner at an adult philosophy of conduct that does not involve even the simulation of bad temper as a means of dealing with other human beings.

ELIZA WYNKOOP