“See here,” he explained to members of the company who tried to compete with his stellar supremacy. “The public pays to see Diomed Olver and Marcia Neville; they don’t care a damned cent for anything else in creation. Got me? That’s good. Now we’ll go along together fine.”
Mr. Charles Fitzherbert assisted no more at rehearsals, but occupied himself entirely with the box-office. Mr. Wade Fortescue was very fierce about 2 A.M. in the bar of his hotel, but very mild at rehearsals. Mr. Marchmont Hearne hibernated during this period, and when he appeared very shyly at the opening performance in Brooklyn the company greeted him with the surprised cordiality that is displayed to some one who has broken his leg and emerges weeks later from hospital without a limp.
New York made a deep and instant impression on Sylvia. No city that she had seen was so uncompromising; so sure of its flamboyant personality; so completely an ingenious, spoiled, and precocious child; so lovable for its extravagance and mischief. To her the impression was of some Gargantuan boy in his nursery building up tall towers to knock them down, running his clockwork-engines for fun through the streets of his toy city, scattering in corners quantities of toy bricks in readiness for a new fit of destructive construction, scooping up his tin inhabitants at the end of a day’s play to put them helter-skelter into their box, eking out the most novel electrical toys of that Christmas with the battered old trams of the Christmas before, cherishing old houses with a child’s queer conservatism, devoting a large stretch of bright carpet to a park, and robbing his grandmother’s mantelpiece of her treasures to put inside his more permanent structures. After seeing New York she sympathized very much with the remark she had heard made by a young New-Yorker on board the Minneworra, which at the time she had thought a mere callow piece of rudeness.
A grave doctor from Toledo, Ohio, almost as grave as if he were from the original Toledo, had expressed a hope to Sylvia that she would not accept New York as representative of the United States. She must travel to the West. New York had no family life. If Miss Scarlett wished to see family life, he should be glad to show it to her in Toledo. For confirmation of his criticism he had appealed to a young man standing at his elbow.
“Well,” the young man had replied, “I’ve never been fifty miles west of New York in my life, and I hope I never shall. When I want to travel I cross over to Europe for a month.”
The Toledo doctor had afterward spoken severely to Sylvia on the subject of this young New-Yorker, citing him as a dangerous element in the national welfare. Now, after seeing the Gargantuan boy’s nursery, she understood the spirit that wanted to enjoy his nursery and not be bothered to go for polite walks with maiden aunts in the country; equally, no doubt, in Toledo she should appreciate the point of view of the doctor and recognize the need for the bone that would support the vast bulk of the growing child.
Sylvia had noticed that as she grew older impressions became less vivid; her later and wider experience of London was already dim beside those first years with her father and Monkley. It had been the same during her travels. Already even the Alhambra was no longer quite clearly imprinted upon her mind, and each year it had been growing less and less easy to be astonished. But this arrival in New York had been like an arrival in childhood, as surprising, as exciting, as terrifying, as stimulating. New York was like a rejuvenating potion in the magic influence of which the memories of past years dissolved. Partly, no doubt, this effect might be ascribed to the invigorating air, and partly, Sylvia thought, to the anxiously receptive condition of herself now within sight of thirty; but neither of these explanations was wide enough to include all that New York gave of regenerative emotion, of willingness to be alive and unwillingness to go to bed, and of zest in being amused. Sylvia had supposed that she had long ago outgrown the pleasure of wandering about streets for no other reason than to be wandering about streets, of staring into shops, of staring after people, of staring at advertisements, of staring in company with a crowd of starers as well entertained as herself at a bat that was flying about in daylight outside the Plaza Hotel; but here in New York all that old youthful attitude of assuming that the world existed for one’s diversion, mixed with a sharp, though always essentially contemptuous, curiosity about the method it was taking to amuse one, was hers again. Sylvia had always regarded England as the frivolous nation that thought of nothing but amusement, England that took its pleasure so earnestly and its business so lightly. In New York there was no question of qualifying adverbs; everything was a game. It was a game, and apparently, by the enthusiasm with which it was played, a novel game, to control the traffic in Fifth Avenue—a rather dangerous game like American football, in which at first the casualties to the policemen who played it were considerable. Street-mending was another game, rather an elementary game that contained a large admixture of practical joking. Getting a carriage after the theater was a game played with counters. Eating, even, could be made into a game either mechanical like the automatic dime lunch, or intellectual like the free lunch, or imaginative like the quick lunch.
Sylvia had already made acquaintance with the crude material of America in Carlos Morera. New York was Carlos Morera much more refined and more matured, sweetened by its own civilization, which, having severed itself from other civilizations like the Anglo-Saxon or Latin, was already most convincingly a civilization of its own, bearing the veritable stamp of greatness. Sometimes Sylvia would be faced even in New York by a childishness that scarcely differed from the childishness of Carlos Morera. One evening, for instance, two of the men in the company who knew her tastes invited her to come with them to Murden’s all-night saloon off Sixth Avenue. They had been told it was a sight worth seeing. Sylvia, with visions of something like the dancing-saloon in Buenos Aires, was anxious to make the experiment. It sounded exciting when she heard that the place was kept going by “graft.” After the performance she and her companions went to Jack’s for supper; thence they walked along Sixth Avenue to Murden’s. It was only about two o’clock when they entered by a side door into a room exactly like the bar parlor of an English public house, where they sat rather drearily drinking some inferior beer, until one of Sylvia’s companions suggested that they had arrived too near the hours of legal closing. They left Murden’s and visited a Chinese restaurant in Broadway with a cabaret attached. The prices, the entertainment, the food, and the company were in a descending scale; the prices were much the highest. Two hours later they went back to Murden’s; the parlor was not less dreary; the beer was still abominable. However, just as they had decided that this could not be the right place, an enormous man slightly drunk entered under the escort of two ladies of the town. Perceiving that Sylvia and her companions had risen, the new-comer waved them back into their chairs and called for drinks all round.
“British?” he asked.
They nodded.