Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 28

Outside the City Hall the vast throng had waited patiently, and they seemed to let their suppressed energy go as the Prince came out of the City Hall to face the ma.s.sed batteries of photographers, who would only allow snapshots to be his "pa.s.s" to his automobile.

The throngs in financial "Down Town" gave way to the ma.s.sed ranks of workers from the big wholesale and retail houses that occupy middle New York as the Prince pa.s.sed up Broadway, the street that is not as broad as other streets, and the only one that wanders at its own fancy in a kingdom of parallels and right-angles. At the corner where stands Wanamaker's great store the crowd was thickest. Here was stationed a band in a quaint old-time uniform of red tunics, bell trousers and shakos, while facing them across the street was a squad of girls in pretty blue and white military uniforms and hats.

Soon the line of cars swung into speed and gained Fifth Avenue, pa.s.sing the Flatiron building, which is now not a wonder. Such soaring structures as the Metropolitan Tower, close by in Madison Square, have taken the shine out of it, and in the general atmosphere of giants one does not notice its freakishness unless one is looking for it.

Fifth Avenue is superb; it is the route of pageants by right of air and quality. It is Oxford Street, London, made broad and straight and clean. It has fine buildings along its magnificent reach, and some n.o.ble ones. It has dignity and vivacity, it has s.p.a.ce and it has an air. In the graceful open s.p.a.ce about Madison Square there stood the ma.s.sive Arch of Victory, under which America's soldiers had swung when they returned from the front. It was a temporary arch constructed with realism and ingenuity; the Prince pa.s.sed under it on his way up the avenue.

He went at racing pace up to and into Central Park, that convincing affectation of untrammelled Nature (convincing because it is untrammelled), that beautiful residences of town dwellers look into.

He swung to the left by the gracious pile of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and out on to Riverside Park, that hangs its gardens over the deep waters of the Hudson River. Standing isolated and with a fine serenity above green and water is General Grant's tomb, and at the wideflung white plaza of this the Prince dismounted, going on foot to the tomb, and in the tomb, going alone to deposit a wreath on the great soldier's grave.

Riverside Park had its flowering of bright people, and its mult.i.tude of motors to swarm after the Prince as he pa.s.sed along the Drive, paused to review a company of English-Americans who had served in the war, and then continued on his way to the Yacht Club jetty, where he was to take boat to the _Renown_. Lying in deep water high up in the town was this one of the greatest of the modern warships, her greatness considerably diminished by the buildings lifting above her. To her the Prince went after nearly three months' absence, and on her he lived during his stay in New York.

II

When I say that the Prince lived on board the _Renown_, I mean that he lived on her in his moments to spare. In New York the visitor is lucky who has a few moments to spare. New York's hospitality is electric.

It rushes the guest off his feet. Even if New York is not definitely engaged to entertain you at specific minutes, it comes round to know if you have everything you want, whether it can do anything for you.

New York was calling on the Prince almost as soon as he went aboard.

There was a lightning lunch to Mr. Wanamaker, the President of the Reception Committee, and other members of that body, and then the first of the callers began to chug off from the landing-stage towards the _Renown_. Deputations from all the foreign races that make New York came over the side, distinguished Americans called. And, before anybody else, the American journalist was there.

The Prince was no stranger to the American journalist. They were old friends of his. Some of them had been with him in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, and he had made friends with them at Quebec. He remembered these writers and that friendship was renewed in a pleasant chat. The journalists liked him, too, though they admit that he has a charming way of disarming them. They rather admired the adroit diplomacy with which he derailed such leading questions as those dealing with the delicate and infinite subject of American girls: whether he liked them: and how much?

He met these correspondents quite frankly, appreciating at once the fact that it was through them that he could express to the people of America his intense feeling of thanks for the singular warmth of America's greeting.

From seeing all these visitors the Prince had only time left to get into evening dress and to be whirled off in time to attend a glittering dinner given at the Waldorf-Astoria by Mrs. Henry Pomeroy Davidson on behalf of the Council of the American Red Cross. It was a vivid and beautiful function, but it was one that bridged the time before another, and before ten o'clock the Prince was on the move again, and, amid the dance of the motor-bike "cops," was being rushed off to the Metropolitan Opera House.

He was swung down Broadway where the advertis.e.m.e.nts made a fantasy of the sky, a fantasy of rococo beauty where colours on the huge pallets of skysc.r.a.pers danced and ran, fused and faded, grouped and regrouped, each a huge and coherent kaleidoscope.

Here a gigantic kitten of lights turned a complete somersault in the heavens as it played with a ball of wool. There six sky-high manikins with matchstick limbs, went through an incandescent perpetual and silent dance. In the distance was a gigantic bull advertising tobacco--all down this heavenly vista there were these immense signs, lapping and over-lapping in dazzling chaos. And seen from one angle, high up, unsupported, floating in the very air and eerily unsubstantial, was a temple lit by bale-fires that shone wanly at its base. It was merely a building superimposed upon a skysc.r.a.per, but in the dark there was no skysc.r.a.per, and the amazing structure hung there lambent, silent, enigmatic, a Wagnerian temple in the sky.

Broadway, which sprouts theatres as a natural garden sprouts flowers, was jewelled with lights, lights that in the clear air of this continent shone with a lucidity that we in England do not know. Before the least lighted of these buildings the Prince stopped. He had arrived at the austere temple of the high arts, the Metropolitan Opera House.

Inside Caruso and a brilliant audience waited impatiently for his presence. The big and rather sombre house was quick with colour and with beauty. The celebrated "Diamond Horseshoe," the tiers of the galleries, and the floor of the house were vivid with dresses, shimmering and glinting with all the evasive shades of the spectrum, with here a flash of splendid jewels, there the slow and sumptuous flutter of a great ostrich fan.

Part of the program had been played, but _Pagliacci_ and Caruso were held up while the vivid and ardent people craned out of their little crimson boxes in the Horseshoes and turned and looked up from the bright mosaic of the floor at the empty box which was to be the Prince's.

There was a long roll of drums, and with a single movement the orchestra marched into the melody of "G.o.d bless the Prince of Wales,"

and the Prince, looking extraordinarily embarra.s.sed, came to the front of the box.

At once there was no melody of "G.o.d bless the Prince of Wales"

perceptible; a wave of cheering and hand-clapping swept it away. The whole of the people on the floor of the house turned to look upward and to cheer. The people under the tiers crowded forward into the gangways until the gangways were choked, and the floor was a solid ma.s.s of humanity. Bright women and men correctly garbed imperilled their necks in the galleries above in order to look down. It was an unforgettable moment, and for the Prince a disconcerting one.

He stood blushing and looking down, wondering how on earth he was to endure this stark publicity. He was there poised bleakly for all to see, an unenviable position. And there was no escape. He must stand there, because it was his job, and recover from the nervousness that had come from finding himself so abruptly thrust on to this veritable pillar of Stylites in the midst of an interested and curious throng.

The interest and the curiosity was intensely friendly. His personality suffered not at all from the fact that he had lost his calm at a moment when only the case-hardened could have remained unmoved. His embarra.s.sment, indeed, made the audience more friendly, and it was with a sort of intimacy that they t.i.ttered at his familiar tricks of nervousness, his fumbling at his tie, tugging of his coat lapels, the pa.s.sing of the hand over his hair, even the anxious use of his handkerchief.

And this friendly and soft laughter became really appreciative when they saw him tackle the chairs. There were two imposing and pompous gilt chairs at the front of the box, filling it, elbowing all minor, human chairs out of the way. The Prince turned and looked at them, and turned them out. He would have none of them. He was not there to be a superior person at all; he was there to be human and enjoy human companionship. He had the front of the box filled with chairs, and he had friends in to sit with him and talk with him when intervals in the music permitted. And the audience was his friend for that; they admired him for the way he turned his back on formalities and ceremonials. General Pershing, who gratifies one's romantic sense by being extraordinarily like one's imaginative pictures of a great General, came to sit with him, and there was another outburst of cheering. I think that the _pet.i.ts morceaux_ from the operas were but side-shows. Although Rosina Galli ravished the house with her dancing (how she must love dancing), opera gla.s.ses were swivelled more toward the Royal box than to the stage, and the audience made a close and curious study of every movement and every inflection of the Prince.

The cheering broke out again, from people who crowded afresh into the gangways, when the Prince left, and in a mighty wave of friendliness the official program of the first day closed.

III

There was an unofficial ending to the day. The Prince, with several of his suite, walked in New York, viewed this exhilarating city of lights and vistas by night, got his own private and unformal view of the wonders of skysc.r.a.ping townscape, the quick, nervous shuttle of the sidewalks, the rattle of the "Elevated," the sight, for the first time in a long journey, of motor-buses. And without doubt he tasted the wonder of a city of automobiles still clinging to the hansom cab.

About this outing there have been woven stories of a glamour which might have come from the fancy of O. Henry and the author of the "Arabian Nights" working in collaboration. The Prince is said to have plunged into the bizarre landscape of the Bowery, which is Whitechapel better lighted, and better dressed with up-to-date cafes, where there are dance halls in which with the fathomless seriousness of the modern, jazz is danced to violins and banjoes and the wailing ukelele.

They tell me that Ichabod has been written across the romantic glory of the Bowery, and that for colour and the spice of life one has to go further west (which is Manhattan's East End) to Greenwich Village, where life strikes Chelsea att.i.tudes, and where one descends subterraneanly, or climbs over the roofs of houses to Matisse-like restaurants where one eats rococo meals in an atmosphere of cigarette smoke, rice-white faces, scarlet lips, and bobbed hair. But there are yet places in the Bowery to which one taxis with a thrill of hope, where the forbidden c.o.c.ktail is served in a coffee cup, where wine bottles are put on to the table with brown paper wrapped round them to preserve the fiction that they came from one's own private (and legal) store, where in bare, studiously Bowery chambers the hunter of a new _frisson_ sits and dines and hopes for the worst.

The Bowery is dingy and bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly well-dressed. Its young men have the leanness of outline that comes from an authentic American tailor. Its Jewesses have the neat crispness of American fashion that gives their vivid beauty a new and sparkling note. It was astonishing the number of beautiful young women one saw on the Bowery, but not astonishing when one recalls the number of beautiful young women one saw in New York. Fifth Avenue at shopping time, for example, ceases to be a street: it becomes a pageant of youth and grace.

The Prince, of course, may have gone into the Bowery, and walked therein with the air of a modern Caliph, but I myself have not heard of it. I was told that he went for a walk to the house of a friend, and that after paying a very pleasant and ordinary visit he returned to the _Renown_ to get what sleep he could before the adventure of another New York day.

IV

The morning of Wednesday, November 19th, was devoted by the Prince to high finance; he went down to Wall Street and to visit the other temples of the gold G.o.d.

When one has become acclimated to the soaring upward rush of the skysc.r.a.pers (and one quite soon loses consciousness of them, for where all buildings are huge each building becomes commonplace), when one stops looking upward, "Down Town" New York is strangely like the "City"

area of London. Walking Broadway one might easily imagine oneself in the neighbourhood of the Bank of England; Wall Street might easily be a turning out of Bishopsgate or Cannon Street. Broad Street, New York, is not so very far removed in appearance from Broad Street, London.

There is the same preoccupied congestion of the same work-mazed people: clerks, typists (stenographers), book-keepers, messengers and masters, though, perhaps, the people of the New York business quarter do not wear the air of sadness those of London wear.

And there is the same ma.s.sive solidity of business buildings, great blocks that house thirty thousand souls in the working day, and these buildings have the same air as their London brothers; that is, they seem to be monuments to financial integrity (just as mahogany furniture, with a certain type, is an indication of "standing and weight") rather than offices. And if New York buildings are, on the whole, more distinguished, are characterized by a better art, they are, on the other hand, not relieved by the humanity of the shops that gives an air of brightness to the London commercial area. In New York "Down Town" the shops are mainly inside the buildings, and it is in the corridors of the big blocks that the clerk buys his magazines, papers, "candies," sandwiches and cigars.

The interiors of the buildings are ornate, they are sleek with marble, and quite often beautiful with it. They are well arranged; the skysc.r.a.per habit makes for short corridors, and you can always find your man easily (as in the hotels) by the number of his room: thus, if his number is 1201 he is on the twelfth floor, 802 is on the eighth, and 2203 is on the twenty-second; each floor is a ten.

Up to the floors one ascends by means of one of a fleet of elevators, some being locals and some being expresses to a certain floor and local beyond. Whether the fleet is made up of two or ten lifts, there is always a man to control them, a station-master of lifts who gives the word to the liftboys. To the Englishman he is a new phenomenon. He seems a trifle unnecessary [but he may be put there by law]; he is soon seen to be one of a mult.i.tude of men in America who "stand over" other men while they do the job.

The unexpected thing in buildings so fine as this, occupied by men who are addicted to business, is that the offices have rather a makeshift air. The offices I saw in America do not compare in comfort with the offices I know in England. There is a bleakness, an aridity about them that makes English business rooms seem luxurious in comparison. I talked of this phenomenon with a friend, instancing one great office, to be met with surprise and told: "Why! But that office is held up as an example of what offices should be like. We are agitating to get ours as good as that." After this I did not talk about offices.

The "Down Town" restaurants bring one vividly back to London. They are underground, and there is the same thick volume of masculinity and masculine talk in them. They are a trifle more ornate, and the food is better cooked and of infinitely greater variety (they would not be American otherwise), but over all the air is the same.

Into the familiar business atmosphere of this quarter the Prince came early. He drove between crowds and there were big crowds at the points where he stopped--at the Woolworth building and at Trinity Church, that stands huddled and dwarfed beneath the basilicas of business. The intense interest of his visit began when he arrived at the Stock Exchange.

The business on the floor was in full swing when he came out on to the marble gallery of the vast, square marble hall of the Exchange, and the busy swarm of money-gathering men beneath his eyes immediately stopped to cheer him. To look down, as he did, was to look down upon the floor of some great bazaar. The floor is set with ranks of kiosks s.p.a.ced apart, about which men congregate only to divide and go all ways; these kiosks might easily be booths. The floor itself is in constant movement; it is a disturbed ant-heap with its denizens speeding about always in unconjectural movements. Groups gather, thrust hands and fingers upward, shout and counter-shout, as though bent on working up a fracas; then when they seem to have succeeded they make notes in small books and walk quietly away. Messengers, who must work by instinct, weave in and out of the stirring of ants perpetually. In a line of cubicles along one side of the Exchange, crowds of men seemed to be fighting each other for a chance at the telephone.

Two of the tremendous walls of this hall are on the street, and superb windows allow in the light. On the two remaining walls are gigantic blackboards. Incessantly, small flaps are falling on these blackboards revealing numbers. They are the numbers of members who have been "called" over the 'phone or in some other way. The blackboards are in a constant flutter, the tiny flaps are always falling or shutting, as numbers appear and disappear, and the boards are starred with numbers waiting patiently for the eye of the member on the floor to look up and be aware of them.

The Prince stood on the high gallery under the high windows, and watched with vivid curiosity the bustling scene below. He asked a number of eager questions, and the strange silent dance of numbers on the big blackboards intrigued him greatly. Underneath him the members gathered in a great crowd, calling up to him to come down on the floor.

There was a jolly eagerness in their demands, and the Prince, as he went, seemed to hesitate as though he were quite game for the adventure. But he disappeared, and though the Bears and the Bulls waited a little while for him, he did not reappear. Those who knew that a full twelve-hour program could only be accomplished by following the timetable with rigid devotion had had their way.

From the Stock Exchange the Prince went to the Sub-Treasury, and watched, fascinated, the miracle work of the money counters. The intricacies of currency were explained to him, and he was shown the men who went through mounds of coin, with lightning gestures separating the good from the bad with their instinctive finger-tips and with the accuracy of one of Mr. Ford's uncanny machines. He was told that the touch of these men was so exquisite that they could detect a "dud" coin instantly, and, to test them, such a coin was produced and marked, and well hidden in a pile of similar coins. The fingers of the teller went through the pile like a flash, and as he flicked the good coins towards him, and without ceasing his work, a coin span out from the ma.s.s towards the Prince. It was the coin he had marked.

V