August 9, 1924

By Gregory Clark, August 9, 1924.

Every Year a New Fashion in Youth Is Evolved, and This Season It Runs to Simplicity and Naturalness

“Pardon me, but aren’t you Miss Helen Brown, whom I met at Jackson’s Point two summers ago?”

“No.”

* * *

It is five fifteen.

The big Niagara steamer blows her exhaust, eager to be off into the wide blue water.

Yonge street belches down gay hundreds on to the wharf. The decks of the ship patter with feet. The captain appears on his high bridge. The streaming crowd from up dismissed Yonge street begins to hurry.

The captain on high addresses the wheelman. The wheelman toots a brief blast on the whistle.

The crowds begin to run.

We are off!

Always, somebody is left behind. Nearly always he is a youngish man with a bald head who looks as if he had been engaged to the girl he is with for fifteen years. He runs ahead of the girl, waving his hat. In vain. He returns to the girl with a crestfallen air and she pats his arm.

Or else, it is a couple of girls, large girls in orange dresses and white hats, who look like the girls who would naturally have bad tempered bosses, and who were held up until five ten to a couple of last minute letters.

They stand with their nice tasty boat lunches done up in candy boxes, wondering what they will do with them.

And the big ship backs out, wheels smoothly, grandly, and skims for the gap.

We are in search of the newest in youth.

Here it is midsummer of the year 1924 and youth so far has evolved nothing new. The short skirt of 1922, the knickers of 1923, the what of 1924?

Sheiks Out of Fashion

The decks are jammed with youth. Youth in pairs, sublimely alone in the midst of the crowd. Youth in groups, five girls to two fellows. Noisy youth and youth in deep silence. And then the jazz band speaks up.

It is a good band. It plays softly, with weird instruments. The trombone has a new dingus stuck into its horn which makes a sound that is new since 1916. Otherwise, it is the same African spine chiller we heard in the Savoy in 1916, when the street lights of London were dim, but the lights inside, ah, very bright.

From all decks of the white ship, troops youth. There is square of deck roped off.

They dance. Among them are the relics of the past. One sheik, his slick hair and side burns, his long coat and belled trousers strike an incongruous note. Two flappers, relics of that far distant year when a Mr. Lloyd George was known to everybody, dance about together, with little round colored caps on their bobbed heads.

The sheik, as he dances gravely and slowly about the deck, holding a slim girl at arms length, becomes ill at ease. He knows he is out of fashion. He was probably a noble sheik in his time, but his tribe has vanished.

The flappers, tiny little things with li’l girl voices and li’l girl mannerisms, are full of hope. They dance in each others arms right around the edge of the deck, where all the seated crowd of onlookers can see them best. They dance with exaggerated gestures. They show off. But not even the sheik sees them.

All eyes are seeking the newest in youth.

She – ah, yes, – she, of course, has bobbed hair. Her dress is yellow or coral or blue, plain, ankle length, short sleeved and beautiful.

She has a cool and steady gaze. She is neither bold nor coy. She is self-assured, at ease, quiet, modest, free, forthright, upright and downright.

She is the extraordinary, fortunate product of the flapper of two years ago and the neck-shaven, knickered boy of last year.

She is altogether an agreeable balm to the eye.

Graceful, Muscular Shuffling

He – there are a few he’s, but not enough to go around – is an obscure young man with no marked characteristics. The eccentricities of the sheik are missing. Only one on the whole deck wears patent leather dancing shoes. He has a tanned face. He looks as if he were taking an evening off from tennis or baseball or canoeing.

So they dance. Not in ten years has there been the slightest modification of the dance, unless it has been the elimination of all fancy steps, clutch holds and clinging.

The dance is simply a graceful shuffling around, softly, lithely, muscularly, to soft, lithe, muscular music.

If the band plays a fox trot or a waltz, there is not the slightest difference in the dancing, except that they shuffle to a slightly different beat. A deaf person could see no difference between a waltz and fox trot.

Some of the dancers affect fancy ways of holding hands, but they forget themselves and drop back after a minute into the simple, natural posture in which it is easiest to shuffle softly, lithely and muscularly.

The cling of the flapper, the fierce clutch of the sheik are gone. The heirs to the sheik and the flapper have entered a simple and wholesome estate.

The white ship reaches out into the wide blue. And long jovial rollers begin to dip the ship slowly up and down, up and down. Eccentric steps begin to appear in the dance. The taller and longer-legged dancers begin to execute rather woozy sways and unexpected side-steps.

A few elderly ladies retire from the deck with preoccupied expressions on their faces. A couple of the dancers produce raw lemons and begin sucking them as they sway about – to the confusion and embarrassment of the tall thin man sucking the saxophone.

The evening sun slopes downward, the band plays more spirited, less African tunes, the dancers shuffle with sense of adventure in every glide, and the big rollers of mid-Ontario wave the white ship gently, easily up and down, over and across.

Youth is off and away on its nightly escapade where music and coolness, color and the mysterious fall of night make the ancient and familiar setting.

Simplicity the Latest Style

Two ladies – they have on their gloves, so one can’t say whether they were maiden ladies or not – sit and watch the dancing, with shocked expressions in eyes that meet with meaning glances every minute, as regular as clockwork. But they never saw dancing since the schottische.

Two young fellows step up to two girls who are sitting:

“Pardon me, but would it be possible to ask you to dance?”

“May I introduce you to my mother, please?” replies the girl.

And an extraordinary procession – 1924, is it? – moves over the deck to where a middle aged lady is sitting amiably watching the dance.

The little flappers are still mechanically circling round and round the dancing enclosure, their little caps as pert as ever, though hours have passed, and they are unaware that they are dead and gone, and mere ghosts.

The sheik, with his slim Sheba, has departed with melancholy grace up the companionway to the top deck, where, in the darkness and wind and cinders, they can hold hands and speak in the Arabic phrases of yesterday, sotto voce, lest the deck patrol overhear.

And the newest in youth, in simple and unobtrusive costume, dances or sits about the deck, talking about this and that.

“Pardon me,” said Anthony to Cleopatra, “but are you not Phryne, whom I met two summers ago at the Villa Galata?”

“No,” replied Cleo.

But, of course, you remember your history.