III
After this there were other places, mostly higher in the scale, and but a couple of which my memory recovers. There was also, as I recall, a snatched interlude—an associated dash into a small crammed convivial theatre, an oblong hall, bristling with pipe and glass, at the end of which glowed for a moment, a little dingily, some broad passage of a Yiddish comedy of manners. It hovered there, briefly, as if seen through a spy-glass reaching, across the world, to some far-off dowdy Jewry; then our sense of it became too mixed a matter—it was a scent, literally, not further to be followed. There remained with me none the less the patch of alien comedy, with all it implied of esoteric vision on the part of the public. Something of that admonition had indeed, earlier in the season, been sharp—so much had one heard of a brilliant Yiddish actress who was drawing the town to the East side by the promise of a new note. This lady, however, had disconcerted my own purpose by suddenly appearing, in the orthodox quarter, in a language only definable as not in intention Yiddish—not otherwise definable; and I also missed, through a like alarm, the opportunity of hearing an admired actor of the same school. He was Yiddish on the East side, but he cropped up, with a wild growth, in Broadway as well, and his auditors seemed to know as little as care to what idiom they supposed themselves to be listening. Marked in New York, by many indications, this vagueness of ear as to differences, as to identities, of idiom.
I must not, however, under that interference, lose the echo of a couple of other of the impressions of my crowded summer night—and all the less that they kept working it, as I seem to remember, up to a higher and higher pitch. It had been intimated to me that one of these scenes of our climax had entered the sophisticated phase, that of sacrificing to a self-consciousness that was to be regretted—that of making eyes, so to speak, at the larger, the up-town public; that pestilent favour of “society” which is fatal to everything it touches and which so quickly leaves the places of its passage unfit for its own use and uninteresting for any other. This establishment had learned to lay on local colour with malice prepense—the local colour of its “Slav” origin—and was the haunt, on certain evenings of the week, of yearning groups from Fifth Avenue sated with familiar horizons. Yet there were no yearning groups—none, that is, save our own—at the time of our visit; there was only, very amply and pleasantly presented, another aspect of the perpetual process of the New York intermarriage. As the Venetian Republic, in the person of the Doge, used to go forth, on occasion, to espouse the Adriatic, so it is quite as if the American, incarnate in its greatest port, were for ever throwing the nuptial ring to the still more richly-dowered Atlantic. I speak again less of the nuptial rites themselves than of those immediate fruits that struck me everywhere as so characteristic—so equally characteristic, I mean, of each party to the union. The flourishing establishment of my present reference offered distinctly its outland picture, but showed it in an American frame, and the features of frame and picture arranged themselves shrewdly together. Quiet couples, elderly bourgeois husbands and wives, sat there over belated sausage and cheese, potato-salad and Hungarian wine, the wife with her knitting produced while the husband finished his cigar; and the indication, for the moment, might have been of some evening note of Dantzig or of Buda-Pesth. But the conditioning foreign, and the visibility of their quite so happily conjugal give-and-take, in New York, is my reason for this image of the repeated espousals. Why were the quiet easy couples, with their homely café habit (kept in the best relation to the growth, under the clicking needles, of the marital stocking), such remote and indirect results of our local anecdotic past, our famous escape, at our psychological moment, from King George and his works, with all sorts of inevitable lapses and hitches in any grateful consciousness they might ever have of that prime cause of their new birth? Yet why, on the other hand, could they affect one, even with the Fatherland planked under them in the manner of the praying-carpet spread beneath the good Mahometan, as still more disconnected from the historic consciousness implied in their own type, and with the mere moral identity of German or Slav, or whatever it might be, too extinct in them for any possibility of renewal? The exotic boss here did speak, I remember, fluent East-side New Yorkese, and it was in this wonderful tongue that he expressed to us his superior policy, his refined philosophy, announced his plans for the future and presented himself, to my vision, as a possibly far-reaching master-spirit. What remains with me is this expression, and the colour and the quality of it, and the free familiarity and the “damned foreign impudence,” with so much taken for granted, and all the hitches and lapses, all the solutions of continuity, in his inward assimilation of our heritage and point of view, matched as these were, on our own side, by such signs of large and comparatively witless concession. What, oh, what again, were he and his going to make of us?
Well, there was the impression, and that was a question on which, for a certain intensity in it, our adventure might have closed; but it was so far from closing that, late though the hour, it presently opened out into a vast and complicated picture which I find myself thinking of, after an interval, as the splendid crown of the evening. Here were we still on the East side, but we had moved up, by stages artfully inspired, into the higher walks, into a pavilion of light and sound and savoury science that struck one as vaguely vast, as possibly gardened about, and that, blazing into the stillness of the small hours, dazzled one with the show of its copious and various activity. The whole vision was less intimate than elsewhere, but it was a world of custom quite away from any mere Delmonico tradition of one’s earlier time, and rich, as one might reckon it, in its own queer marks, marks probably never yet reduced—inspiring thought!—to literary notation; with which it would seem better to form a point of departure for fresh exploration than serve as tail-piece to the end of a chapter. Who were all the people, and whence and whither and why, in the good New York small hours? Where was the place after all, and what might it, or might it not, truly, represent to slightly-fatigued feasters who, in a recess like a privileged opera-box at a bal masqué, and still communing with polyglot waiters, looked down from their gallery at a multitudinous supper, a booming orchestra, an elegance of disposed plants and flowers, a perfect organization and an abyss of mystery? Was it “on” Third Avenue, on Second, on fabulous unattempted First? Nothing would induce me to cut down the romance of it, in remembrance, to a mere address, least of all to an awful New York one; New York addresses falling so below the grace of a city where the very restaurants may on occasion, under restless analysis, flash back the likeness of Venetian palaces flaring with the old carnival. The ambiguity is the element in which the whole thing swims for me—so nocturnal, so bacchanal, so hugely hatted and feathered and flounced, yet apparently so innocent, almost so patriarchal again, and matching, in its mixture, with nothing one had elsewhere known. It breathed its simple “New York! New York!” at every impulse of inquiry; so that I can only echo contentedly, with analysis for once quite agreeably baffled, “Remarkable, unspeakable New York!”