OF THE THREE DAY SUCKERS—OF TRUE SMARTNESS—AND OF THE BUCKWHEATS AND THE DEAD-LINE
WHEN the bathing hour has passed into history, the merry bathers and clothes-wearers sally forth in search of lunch. The ordinary run of Palm Beach visitors eat their lunch at their hotels. This act almost automatically stamps them as Buckwheats, or Three Day Suckers, or people who aren’t Smart. A Buckwheat is a coarse, rude, barbaric person who is addicted to the secret and loathsome vices of eating buckwheat cakes for breakfast and not spending money recklessly.
A Three Day Sucker is a person who only stays a few days at Palm Beach. As a time-killer he is not regarded with any respect. He travels so far to kill time that he hasn’t any time left to kill when he gets there. This is not regarded as smart. Any one who stays less than two weeks is not viewed with favor by people who stay a month or more, and who know how important smartness is. If one wishes to have the respect of the cigar-counter clerks and the mail clerks and the head waiters and other Palm Beach people who—as the ultra-refined advertisements say—matter, one must above all things be smart. You might as well be dead at Palm Beach as not be smart.
Certain things are smart and certain things are not smart. It is smart, for example, for a man to go without a hat. It is smart to ride a bicycle. Any article of feminine wearing apparel that is essentially useless is smart. It is smart to speak of a thing as smart. It is not at all smart to tell a Palm Beacher that you would gladly disembowel him when you hear him use the word “smart” for the fiftieth time.
None of the big Palm Beach hotels rents rooms without meals. One must pay for his meals as well. Two people at most of the big hotels pay a minimum rate of about thirty-five dollars a day for the two—which is about the amount from which the same people would have to separate themselves at any of the big New York or Chicago or Boston or Washington hotels by the time they had finished paying for their food. But if one wishes to be smart at Palm Beach, one mustn’t lunch or dine at the hotel where one’s meals are included on his bill. It is very buckwheat to do such a thing: very uncouth: very hick and very rough-neck: not, in a word, smart. That is why the desirable Palm Beach habitués, at the height of the season, find it difficult to spend less than a hundred dollars apiece per day. One can’t indulge in games of chance or keep many wheel-chairs on that amount; but if one is reasonably careful and content to be only moderately smart, one can get along fairly well for a hundred dollars a day.
The truly smart person strives always to pay for two meals where one would normally be paid for. He strives to pay for one that he eats and for one that nobody eats. If one is living at the Poinciana, one should make an effort to lunch or dine at the Breakers or at the Country Club or at the Beach Club or at the Everglades Club, or one of the cottages. It is a fascinating system, and is based on the familiar society theory that the more useless a thing is, the smarter it is.
One of the smartest—in a society sense—of all the persons that come to Palm Beach is a man who never eats at the hotel where he lives, and who keeps a flock of twelve wheel-chairs always in attendance on him. Day and night his twelve wheel-chairs are waiting for him and his friends. They are used about an hour a day—but it is very smart to keep them waiting: frightfully smart. Useless and therefore smart.
The head waiters in the restaurants become very proficient at distinguishing those who are smart from those who are not smart. In the dining-room of the largest hotel there is a cross-strip of green carpet which is known as the dead-line. The people who sit between the entrance and the dead-line have been carefully looked over by the head waiter and put in the smart class. But the people who are put on the kitchen side of the dead-line are dubs and Buckwheats in the judgment of the head waiter. Once people are put below the dead-line, they rarely have a chance to come up for air, but are doomed to stay down among the other Buckwheats for the remainder of their visit.