During our stay in Washington the air was thick with politics, for it was the week in which the Senate were dealing with Clause Ten of the Peace Treaty. The whole of Washington, and, in fact, the whole of America, was tingling with politics, and we could not help being affected by the current emotion.
I am not going to attempt to discuss American politics, but I will say that it seemed to me that politics enter more personally into the life of Americans than with the British, and that they feel them more intensely. At the same time I had a definite impression that American politics have a different construction to ours. The Americans speak of "The Political Game," and I had the feeling that it was a game played with a virtuosity of tactics and with a metallic intensity, and the principle of the game was to beat the other fellows. So much so that the aim and end of politics were obscured, and that the battle was fought not about measures but on the advantages one party would gain over another by victory.
That is, the "Political Game" is a game of the "Ins" and "Outs" played for parliamentary success with the habitual keenness and zest of the American.
This is not a judgment but an impression. I do not pretend to know anything of America. I do not think any one can know America well unless he is an American. Those who think that America quickly yields its secrets to the British mind simply because America speaks the English language need the instruction of a visit to America.
America has all the individuality and character of a separate and distinct State. To think that the United States is a sort of Transatlantic Britain is simply to approach the United States with a set of preconceived notions that are bound to suffer considerable jarring. Both races have many things in common, that is obvious from the fact of a common language, and, in a measure, from a common descent; but they have things that are not held in common. It needs a closer student of America than I am to go into this; I merely give my own impression, and perhaps a superficial one at that. It may offer a point of elucidation to those people who find themselves shocked because English-speaking America sometimes does not act in an English manner, or respond to English acts.
America is America first and all the time; it is as complete and as definite in its spirits as the oldest of nations, and in its own way. Its patriotism is intense, more intense than British patriotism (though not more real), because by nature the American is more intense. The vivid love of Americans for America is the same type of passion that the Frenchman has for France.
The character of the American, as I encountered him in Washington, Detroit, and New York—a very limited orbit—suggested differences from the character of the Englishman. The American, as I see him, is more simple, more puritan, and more direct than the Briton. His generosity is a most astonishing thing. He is, as far as I can see, a genuine lover of his brother-man, not theoretically but actively, for he is anxious to get into contact, to "mix," to make the most of even a chance acquaintance. Simply and directly he exposes the whole of himself, says what he means and withholds nothing, so that acquaintance should be made on an equitable and genuine basis. To the more conservative Briton this is alarming; brought up in a land of reticences, the Briton wonders what the American is "getting at," what does he want? What is his game? The American on his side is baffled by the British habit of keeping things back, and he, too, perhaps wonders why this fellow is going slow with me? Doesn't he want to be friends?
Personally, I think that the directness and simplicity of the Americans is the directness and simplicity of the artist, the man who has no use for unessentials. And one gets this sense of artistry in an American's business dealings. He goes directly at his object, and he goes with a concentrated power and a zest that is exhilarating. Here, too, he exposes his hand in a way bewildering to the Britisher, who sometimes finds the American so candid in his transactions that he becomes suspicious of there being something more behind it.
To the American work is something zestful, joyous. He likes to get things done; he likes to do big things with a big gesture—sometimes to the damage of detail, which he has overlooked—for him work is craftsmanship, a thing to be carried through with the delight of a craftsman. He is, in fact, the artist as business man.
Like all artists he has an air of hardness, the ruthlessness to attain an end. But like all artists he is quick and generous, vivid in enthusiasm and hard to daunt. Like the artist he is narrow in his point of view at times and decisive in opinion—simply because his own point of vision is all-absorbing.
This, for example, is apparent in his democracy, which is extraordinarily wide in certain respects, and singularly restricted in others—an example of this is the way the Americans handle offenders against their code; whether they be I.W.W., strikers or the like, their attitude is infinitely more ruthless than the British attitude. Another example is, having so splendid a freedom, they allow themselves to be "bossed" by policemen, porters and a score of others who exert an authority so drastic on occasions that no Briton would stand it.
But over all I was struck by the vividity of the Americans I met. Business men, journalists, writers, store girls, clerks, clubmen, railway men—all of them had an air of passionate aliveness, an intellectual avidity that made contact with them an affair of delightful excitement.
There was no qualification or reservation in New York's welcome to the Prince of Wales.
In the last year or so I have seen some great crowds, and by that I mean not merely vast aggregations of people, but vast gatherings of people whose ardour carried away the emotions with a tremendous psychic force. During that year I had seen the London crowd that welcomed back the British military leader; the London and Manchester crowds, and vivid and stirring crowds they were, that dogged the footsteps of President Wilson; I had seen the marvellous and poignant crowd at the London Victory March, and I had had a course of crowds, vigorous, affectionate and lively, in Montreal, Toronto and throughout Canada.
I had been toughened to crowds, yet the New York crowd that welcomed the Prince was a fresh experience. It was a crowd that, in spite of writing continuously about crowds for four months, gave me a direct impulse to write yet again about a crowd, that gave me the feeling that here was something fresh, sparkling, human, warm, ardent and provocative. It was a crowd with a flutter of laughter in it, a crowd that had a personality, aninsouciance, an independence in its friendliness. It was a crowd that I shall always put beside other mental pictures of big crowds, in that gallery of clear vignettes of things impressive that make the memory.
There was a big crowd about the Battery long before the Prince was due to arrive across the river from the Jersey City side. It was a good-humoured crowd that helped the capable New York policemen to keep itself well in hand. It was not only thick about the open grass space of the Battery, but it was clustering on the skeleton structure of the Elevated Railway, and mounting to the sky, floor by floor, on the skyscrapers.
High up on the twenty-second floor of neighbouring buildings we could see a crowd of dolls and windows, and the dolls were waving shreds of cotton. The dolls were women and the cotton shred was "Old Glory." High up on the tremendous cornice of one building a tiny man stood with all the calm gravity of a statue. He was unconcerned by the height, he was only concerned in obtaining an eagle's eye view.
About the landing-stage itself, the landing-stage where the new Americans and the notabilities land, there was a wide space, kept clear by the police. Admirable police these, who can handle crowds with any police, who held us up with a wall of adamant until we showed our letters from the New York Reception Committee (our only, and certainly not the official, passes), and then not only let us through without fuss but helped us in every possible way to go everywhere and see everything.
In this wide space were gathered the cars for the procession, and the notabilities who were to meet the Prince, and the camera men who were to snap him. Into it presently marched United States Marines and Seamen. A hefty lot of men, who moved casually, and with a slight sense of slouch as though they wished to convey "We're whales for fighting, but no damned militarists."
Since the Prince was not entering New York by steamer—the most thrilling way—but by means of a railway journey from Sulphur Springs, New York had taken steps to correct this mode of entry. He was not to miss the first impact of the city. He would make a water entry, if only an abbreviated one, and so experience one of the Seven (if there are not more, or less) Sensations of the World, a sight of the profile of Manhattan Island.
The profile of Manhattan (blessed name that O. Henry has rolled so often on the palate) is lyric. It is asierraof skyscrapers. It is a flight of perfect rockets, the fire of which has frozen into solidity in mid-soaring. It is a range of tall, narrow, poignant buildings that makes the mind think of giants, or fairies, or, anyhow, of creatures not quite of this world. It is one of the few things the imagination cannot visualize adequately, and so gets from it a satisfaction and not a disappointment.
This sight the Prince saw as he crossed in a launch from the New Jersey side, and "the beauty and dignity of the towering skyline," his own words, so impressed him that he was forced to speak of it time and time again during his visit to the city. And on top of that impression came the second and even greater one, for, and again I use his own words, "men and women appeal to me even more than sights." This second impression was "the most warm and friendly welcome that followed me all through the drive in the city."
When the Prince landed he seemed to me a little anxious; he was at the threshold of a great and important city, and his welcome was yet a matter of speculation. In less than fifteen minutes he was smiling as he had smiled all through Canada, and, as in Canada, he was standing in his car, formality forgotten, waving back to the crowd with a friendliness that matched the friendliness with which he was received.
He faced the city of Splendid Heights with glances of wonder at the line of cornices that crowned the narrow canyon of Broadway, and rose up crescendo in a vista closed by the campanile of the Woolworth Building, raised like a pencil against the sky, fifty-five storeys high. On the beaches beneath these great crags, on the sidewalks, and pinned between the sturdy policemen—who do not turn backs to the crowd but face it alertly—and the sheer walls was a lively and vast throng. And rising up by storeys was a lively and vast throng, hanging out of windows and clinging to ledges, perilous but happy in their skyscraper-eye view.
And from these high-up windows there began at once a characteristic "Down Town" expression of friendliness. Ticker-tape began to shoot downward in long uncoiling snakes to catch in flagpoles and window-ledges in strange festoons. Strips of paper began to descend in artificial snow, and confetti, and basket-loads of torn letter paper. All manner of bits of paper fluttered and swirled in the air, making a grey nebula in the distance; glittering like spangles of gold against the severe white cliffs of the skyscrapers when the sun caught them.
On the narrow roadway the long line of automobiles was littered and strung with paper, and the Prince had a mantle of it, and was still cheery. He could not help himself. The reception he was getting would have swept away a man of stone, and he has never even begun to be a man of stone. The pace was slow, because of the marching Marine escort, and people and Prince had full opportunity for sizing up each other. And both people and Prince were satisfied.
Escorted by the motor-cyclist police, splendid fellows who chew gum and do their duty with an astonishing certainty and nimbleness, the Prince came to the City Hall Square, where the modern Brontosaurs of commerce lift mightily above the low and graceful City Hall, which has the look of apetitemother perpetually astonished at the size of the brood she has reared.
Inside the hall the Prince became a New Yorker, and received a civic welcome. He expressed his real pride at now being a Freeman of the two greatest cities in the world, New York and London, two cities that were, moreover, so much akin, and upon which depends to an extraordinary degree the financial health and the material as well as spiritual welfare of all continents. As for his welcome, he had learnt to appreciate the quality of American friendship from contact with members of the splendid fighting forces that had come overseas, but even that, he indicated, had not prepared him for the wonder of the greeting he had received.
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 massed batteries of photographers, who would only allow snapshots to be his "pass" to his automobile.
The throngs in financial "Down Town" gave way to the massed ranks of workers from the big wholesale and retail houses that occupy middle New York as the Prince passed 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, passing 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 noble ones. It has dignity and vivacity, it has space and it has an air. In the graceful open space about Madison Square there stood the massive 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 passed 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 multitude of motors to swarm after the Prince as he passed 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 theRenown. 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.
When I say that the Prince lived on board theRenown, 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 theRenown. 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 advertisements made a fantasy of the sky, a fantasy of rococo beauty where colours on the huge pallets of skyscrapers 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 skyscraper, but in the dark there was no skyscraper, 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, butPagliacciand 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 "God bless the Prince of Wales," and the Prince, looking extraordinarily embarrassed, came to the front of the box.
At once there was no melody of "God 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 mass 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 embarrassment, indeed, made the audience more friendly, and it was with a sort of intimacy that they tittered at his familiar tricks of nervousness, his fumbling at his tie, tugging of his coat lapels, the passing 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 thepetits morceauxfrom the operas were but side-shows. Although Rosina Galli ravished the house with her dancing (how she must love dancing), opera glasses 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.
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 skyscraping 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 attitudes, 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 cocktail 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 newfrissonsits 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 theRenownto get what sleep he could before the adventure of another New York day.
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 god.
When one has become acclimated to the soaring upward rush of the skyscrapers (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 massive 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 skyscraper 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 multitude 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 spaced 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 mass towards the Prince. It was the coin he had marked.
Passing among these business people and driving amid the quick crowds, the Prince had been consolidating the sense of intimate friendship that had sprung up on the previous day. A wise American pressman had said to me on Tuesday:
"New York people like what they've read about the Prince. They'll come out today to see if what they have read is true. Tomorrow they'll come out because they love him. And each day the crowds will get better."
This proved true. The warmth of New York's friendliness increased as the days went on. The scene at the lunch given by the New York Chamber of Commerce proved how strong this regard had grown. The scene was remarkable because of the character and the quality of the men present. It was no admiration society. It was no gathering of sentimentalists. The men who attended that lunch were men not only of international reputation, but of international force, men of cautious fibre accustomed to big encounters, not easily moved to emotion. And they fell under the charm of the Prince.
One of them expressed his feelings concerning the scene to me.
"He had it over us all the time," he said, laughing. "There we were, several hundreds of grey-headed, hardened old stiffs, most of us over twice his age, and we stood up and yelled like college freshmen when he had finished speaking to us.
"What did he say to us? Nothing very remarkable. He told us how useful we old ones in the money market had been as a backbone to the boys in the firing line. He told us that he felt that the war had revealed clearly the closeness of the relationship between the two Anglo-Saxon nations, how their welfare was interlocked and how the prosperity of each was essential to the prosperity of the other, and he agreed with the President of the Chamber's statement that British and American good faith and good will would go far to preserve the stability of the world. There's nothing very wonderful to that. It's true enough, but not altogether unknown.... It was his manner that caught hold of us. The way he speaks, you see. His nervousness, and his grit in conquering his nervousness. His modesty; his twinkle of humour, all of him. He's one fine lad. I tell you we've had some big men in the Chamber in the last two years, but it's gilt-edged truth that none of the big ones had the showing that lad got today."
From the Chamber of Commerce the Prince went to the Academy of Music where there was a picture and variety show staged for him, and which he enjoyed enormously. The thrill of this item of the program was rather in the crowd than in the show. It was an immense crowd, and for once it vanquished the efficient police and swarmed about His Royal Highness as he entered the building. While he was inside it added to its strength rather than diminished, and in the face of this crisis one of those men whose brains rise to emergencies had the bright idea of getting the Prince out by the side door. The crowd had also had that bright idea and the throng about the side door was, if anything, more dense than at the front. Through this laughing and cheering mass squads of good-humoured police butted a thread of passage for the happy Prince.
The throng inside Madison Square Garden about the arena of the Horse Show was more decorous, as became its status, but it did not let that stifle its feelings. The Prince passed through from a cheering crowd outside to the bright, sharp clapping of those inside. He passed round the arena between ranks of Salvation Army lassies, who held, instead of barrier ropes, broad scarlet ribbons.
There was a laugh as he touched his hair upon gaining the stark publicity of his box, and the laugh changed to something of a cheer when he caught sight of the chairs of pomp, two of them in frigid isolation, elbowing out smaller human fry. All knew from his very attitude what was going to happen to those chairs. And it happened. The chairs vanished. Small chairs and more of them took their place, and the Prince sat with genial people about him.
The arena was a field of brightness. It was delightfully decorated with green upon lattice work. Over the competitors' entrance were canvas replicas of Tudor houses. In the ring the Prince saw many beautiful horses, fine hunters, natty little ponies pulling nattier carriages, trotters of mechanical perfection, and big lithe jumpers. In the middle of the jumping competition he left his box and went into the ring, and spent some time there chatting with judges and competitors, and watching the horses take the hurdles and gates from close quarters.
Leaving the building there happened one of those vivid little incidents which speak more eloquently than any effort of oratory could of the kinship of the two races in their war effort. A group of men in uniform who had been waiting by the exit sprang to attention as he came up. They were all Americans. They were all in British uniform—most of them in British Flying Corps uniform. As the Prince came up, they clicked round in a smart "Left turn," and marched before him out of the building.
The Prince from thence on vanished for the day into a round of semi-social functions, but he did not escape the crowds.
Walking up Fifth Avenue with friends shortly before dinner-time, we came upon a bunched jumble of people outside the "Waldorf-Astoria." It was a crowd that a man in a hurry could not argue with. It filled the broad street, and it did not care if it impeded traffic. We were not in a hurry, so we stood and looked. I asked my friends what was happening here, and one of them chuckled and answered:
"They've got him again."
"Him? Who—you can't mean the Prince? He's onRenownnow, resting, or getting ready for a dinner. There's nothing down for him."
My friend simply chuckled again.
"Who else would it be?" he said. "How they do gather round waiting for that smile of his. Flies round a honey-pot. Ah, I thought so."
The Prince made a dash of an exit from the hotel. He jumped into the car, and at once there was a forest of hands and handkerchiefs and flags waving, and his own hand and hat seemed to go up and wave as part of one and the same movement. It was a spontaneous "Hallo, People! Hallo, Prince!" A jolly affair. The motor started, pushed through the crowd. There was a sharp picture of the Prince half standing, half kneeling, looking back and laughing and waving to the crowd. Then he was gone.
The men and women of the throng turned away smiling, as though something good had happened.
"They've seen him. They can go home now," said my friend. "My, ain't they glad about themselves.... And isn't he the one fine scout?"
When the Prince made his appearance on Thursday, November 20th, in the uniform of a Welsh Guardsman he came in for a startling ovation. Not only were many people gathered about the Yacht Club landing-stage and along the route of his drive, but at one point a number of ladies pelted him with flowers. Startled though the Prince was, he kept his smile and his sense of humour. He said dryly that he had never known what it was to feel like a bride before, and he returned this volley with his friendly salute.
He was then setting out to the Grand Central Station for his trip up the Hudson to West Point, the Military Academy of the United States.
In the superb white station, under a curved arch of ceiling as blue as the sky, he took the full force of an affection that had been growing steadily through the visit. The immense floor of the building was dense and tight with people, and the Prince, as he came to the balcony that made the stair-head was literally halted by the great gust of cheering that beat up to him, and was forced to stand at the salute for a full minute.
The journey to West Point skirted the Hudson, where lovely view after lovely view of the piled-up and rocky further shore tinted in the russet and gold of the dying foliage came and went. There was a rime of ice already in the lagoons, and the little falls that usually tumbled down the rocks were masses of glittering icicles.
The castellated walls of West Point overhang the river above a sharp cliff; the buildings have a dramatic grouping that adds to the extreme beauty of the surroundings. Toward this castle on the cliff the Prince went by a little steam ferry, was taken in escort by a smart body of American cavalrymen, and in their midst went by automobile up the road to the grey towers of West Point.
Immediately on his arrival at the saluting point on the great campus the horizon-blue cadets, who will one day be the leaders of the American army, began to march.
Paraded by the buildings, they fell into columns of companies with mechanical precision. With precise discipline they moved out on to the field, the companies as solid as rocks but for the metronomic beat of legs and arms.
They were tall, smart youths, archaic and modern in one. With long blue coats, wide trousers, shakos, broad white belts, as neat as painted lines, over breast and back, and, holding back the flaps of capes, they looked figures from the fifties. But the swing of the marching companies, the piston-like certainty of their action, the cold and splendid detachment of their marching gave them all theflare[Transcriber's note: flair?] of acorps d'élite.
Forming companies almost with a click on the wide green, they saluted and stood at attention while the Prince and his party inspected the lines. Then, the Prince at the saluting point again, the three companies in admirable order marched past. There was not a flaw in the rigid ranks as they swept along, their eyes right, the red-sashed "four year men" holding slender swords at the salute.
The Prince lunched with the officers, and after lunch the cadets swarmed into the room to hear him speak, having first warmed up the atmosphere with a rousing and prolonged college yell. Having spoken in praise of their discipline and bearing, the Prince was made the subject of another yell, and more, was saluted with the college whistle, a thing unique and distinctive, that put the seal upon his visit.
That night the Prince played host uponRenown, giving a brilliant dinner to his friends in New York. This was the only other ceremony of the day.
Friday, November 21st, the Prince's last day in New York, was an extraordinarily full one, and that full not merely in program, but in emotion. In that amazing day it seemed to me that the people of this splendid city sought to express with superb eloquence the regard they felt for him, seemed to make a point of trying to make his last day memorable.
The morning was devoted to a semi-private journey to Oyster Bay, in order that the Prince might place a wreath on the tomb of President Roosevelt. The Prince had several times expressed his admiration for the great and forceful American who represented so much of what was individual in the national character, and his visit to the burial-place was a tribute of real feeling.
After lunch at the Piping Rock Club he returned toRenown, where he had planned to hold a reception after his own heart to a thousand of New York's children.
OnRenowna score of "gadgets" had been prepared for the fun of the children. The capstans had been turned into roundabouts, a switchback and a chute had been fixed up, the deck of the great steel monster had been transformed into fairyland, while a "scrumptious" tea in a pretty tea lounge had been prepared all out of Navy magic.
The tugs that were to bring off the guests, however, brought few that could come under the heading of "kiddies." Those that were not quite grown up, were in the young man and young woman stage. Fairyland had to be abandoned. Roundabout and switchback and chute were abandoned, and only that "scrumptious" tea remained in the program. It was a pleasant afternoon, but not a "kiddies'" afternoon.
The evening was quick with crowds.
It began in a drive through crowds to the Pilgrims' Dinner at the Plaza Hotel, and that, in itself, was a crowd. The Plaza is none of your bijou caravanserais. It is vast and vivid and bright, as a New York hotel can be, and that is saying a good deal. But it was not vast enough. One great marble room could not contain all the guests, another and another was taken in, so that the banquet was actually spread over three or four large chambers opening out of the main chamber. Here the leading figures of America and the leading Britons then in New York met together in a sort of breezy informality, and they gave the Prince a most tremendous welcome.
And when he began to speak—after the nimble scintillations of Mr. Chauncey Depew—they gave him another. And they rose up in a body, and moved inward from the distant rooms to be within earshot—a sight for the Messenger inMacbeth, for he would have seen a moving grove of golden chair legs, held on high, as the diners marched with their seating accommodation held above their heads.
Crowds again under the vivid lights of the streets, as the Prince drove to the mighty crowd waiting for him in the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome is one of the largest, if it is not the largest, music-hall in the world. It has an enormous sweep of floor, and an enormous sweep of galleries. The huge space of it takes the breath away. It was packed.
As the Prince entered his box, floor and galleries rose up with a sudden and tremendous surge, and sent a mighty shout to him. The National Anthems of England and America were obliterated in the gust of affectionate noise. Minutes elapsed before that great audience remembered that it was at the play, and that the Prince had come to see the play. It sat down reluctantly, saving itself for his departure, watching him as he entered into enjoyment of the brave and grandiose spectacular show on the stage.
And when he rose to go the audience loosed itself again. It held him there with the power of its cheering. It would not let him stir from the building until it had had a word from him. It was dominant, it had its way. In answer to the splendid outburst the Prince could do nothing but come to the edge of his box and speak.
In a clear voice that was heard all over the building he thanked them for the wonderful reception he had received that night, and in New York during the week. "I thank you," he said, "and I bid you all good night."
Then he went out into the cheering streets.
It was an astonishing display in the street. The throng was so dense, the shouting so great that the sound of it drove into the silent houses of other theatres. And the audiences in those other theatres caught the thrill of it. They "cut" their plays, came pouring out into the street to join the throng and the cheering; it was through this carnival of affection that the Prince drove along the streets to a reception, and a brilliant one, given by Mr. Wanamaker, whose ability as Chairman of the Reception Committee had largely helped to make the Prince's visit to New York so startling a success.