"All right," he said, and was off.
Later on I painted him, and he was ever a good friend to me.
It took me some time to get accustomed to the outspoken ways of the American. With us the artist is a privileged being, unlike any other producer or vendor, but there everybody takes it for granted that he is quite ready to accept dollars in exchange for his work. The waiter in the café, the artist who shampooed me, or the clerk in the hotel, wanted to know my charges, and it once or twice happened that they turned their knowledge to good account.
"Now, sir," said a clerk in the Hôtel Richelieu, Chicago, where I was staying, to a wealthy senator, also a guest at the hotel—"now, sir, this is Mr. Felix Moscheles, the celebrated English artist, and I guess you had better have your portrait and your wife's portrait painted, whilst he is here to fix them up." That introduction led to commissions as acceptable from the artistic point of view as they were remunerative, and to the most cordial relations between client and artist.
But I am drifting away from New York, where I want to remain for a while. I had not been there many hours before I went for a ramble on Broadway (the American walks on the street, not in it, as we do). I always loved to explore the busy, bustling thoroughfares of a big city; it is there you can feel the throbbing feverish pulse of an active community; in the Park or on the Corso you only get that languid fashionable-doctor sort of pulse, which takes its airing in a landau or a victoria, a correct and well-regulated pulse that knows its duty to itself and to the society it is privileged to beat in.
With such predilection for high-pressure and a rattling pace, I soon found myself making friends with the Broadway. I always had a weakness, too, for shops, and there were miles of them; stores they call them, and every mortal thing is stored behind their immense panes of plate-glass, or in those outposts of business, the show-cases, that go dodging about the footpath, and look as if they were on their way to some international exhibition. Anything and everything man can desire to smooth the thorny path from the cradle to cremation, he will find in the Broadway.
Talking of the thorny path, I was much struck by the liberty, not to say licence, accorded to the paving stones, each of which acted quite independently of his neighbour. The noise, as the vehicles ploughed their way along the road, and as it was echoed by the massive stone buildings, was really appalling. Infernal, I should say, but that adjective is too good in this case, for the Inferno was at least paved with good intentions, whereas that road meant mischief and strife, and revelled in the purity of its own cussedness.
I could not help speculating as to what dear old mother Regent Street would think of it all; how she would be shocked at the way in which that transatlantic upstart hands up his goods from the basement, and pushes them just under your nose, or piles them up sky-high and block deep, before he consents to put a roof on them. Father Oxford Street, too, would be scandalised, and so would his time-honoured brother-streets, that fancy themselves arteries, as they wind their crooked way from the fashionable brick piles of the west to the golden-calf temples of the east. They do their best, suffering as they are from chronic congestion, and I have loved them since the days of my boyhood. No, I certainly mean no disrespect to the British lion and his partner the unicorn, nor to the griffin at Temple Bar, nor to the bulls and bears farther on, nor to the turtles and plovers' eggs at the Mansion House; least of all to the bank-notes opposite, good company as they always are.
America is a country of contradictions; that is a safe way of putting it, as the same can be said of all countries. Wherever he goes, the stranger sees with his own eyes, feels with his own heart, and above all, judges according to the state of his own liver. One man practises his bump of veneration on all he meets; another travels on the nil admirari principle. Golden threads traverse the road of either, and so do rotten threads. The first man seizes the golden ones and is happy; the second picks up the rotten ones and makes himself equally happy with those. Both come home triumphantly to show their threads, and to say, "Behold, that is what I found!" It must be difficult for the same hand to pick up both sorts of thread, and to present them impartially, weighing one set against the other and judging dispassionately. There are some strong men who can do it, and there would be more of them, I believe, if it were not for that liver. In my case, that organ may have been in a satisfactory condition, and have prompted me to be sociable. So I was rather disappointed when I found that there was more formality in the great Republic than under the old Monarchy, and that if I wanted to talk to somebody, I had to be introduced first.
Day after day I have sat with my wife in various hotels at some little table laid for four, sharing it with some other Mr. and Mrs., without exchanging a word. Elsewhere we should soon have been playing that stimulating parlour-game of inter-social hide-and-seek, or we might for the time being have formed a pleasant little partie carrée. Sometimes my heart went out to my neighbours, I think in a true Christian spirit, but I could have seen them starve, and yet not have dared to hand them the mustard or pass them the butter. I knew they would have looked upon me with suspicion; yet I flatter myself that, with a little discernment, they could have seen that I was not a shady character, and that neither I nor that most artless and guileless partner of mine was capable of playing off the confidence trick on the clergyman opposite, or on the charming elderly lady with the white hair and the two golden-locked grandchildren.