I
IN REHEARSAL
(New York)

I
THE CAST

Thanks to the promoters of opéra bouffe we are accustomed as a universe to screw our eye to a single peep-hole in the curtain that conceals a nation, and innocently to accept what we see therefrom as typical of the entire people. Thus England is generally supposed to be inhabited by a blond youth with a top-hat on the back of his head, and a large boutonnière overwhelming his morning-coat. He carries a loud stick, and says “Ah,” and is invariably strolling along Piccadilly. In France, the youth has grown into a bad, bold man of thirty—a boulevardier, of course—whose features consist of a pair of inky moustaches and a wicked leer. He sits at a table and drinks absinthe, and watches the world go by. The world is never by chance engaged elsewhere; it obligingly continues to go by.

Spain has a rose over her ear, and listens with patience to a perpetual guitar; Austria forever is waltzing upstairs, while America is known to be populated by a sandy-haired person of no definite age or embellishments, who spends his time in the alternate amusements of tripling his fortune and ejaculating “I guess!” He has a white marble mansion on Fifth Avenue, and an office in Wall Street, where daily he corners cotton or sugar or crude oil—as the fancy strikes him. And he is bounded on every side by sky-scrapers.

Like most widely accepted notions, this is picturesque but untrue. The Americans of America, or at least the New Yorkers of New York, are not the handful of men cutting off coupons in mahogany offices “down-town”; nor the silken, sacheted women gliding in and out of limousines, with gold purses. They are the swarm of shop-keepers and “specialists,” mechanics and small retailers, newspaper reporters and petty clerks, such as flood the Subways and Elevated railways of New York morning and night; fighting like savages for a seat. They are the army of tailors’ and shirt-makers’ and milliners’ girls who daily pour through the cross-streets, to and from their sordid work; they are the palely determined hordes who batter at the artistic door of the city, and live on nothing a week. They are the vast troops of creatures born under a dozen different flags, whom the city has seduced with her golden wand, whom she has prostituted to her own greed, whom she will shortly fling away as worthless scrap—and who love her with a passion that is the root and fibre of their souls.

So much for the actual New Yorkers, as contrasted with the gilded nonentity of musical comedy and best-selling fiction. As for New York itself, it has the appearance of behind the scenes at a gigantic theatre. Coming into the harbour is like entering the house of a great lady by the back door. Jagged rows of match-like buildings present their blank rear walls to the river, or form lurid bills of advertisement for somebody’s pork and beans; huge barns of ferry terminuses overlap with their galleries the narrow streets beneath; slim towers shoot up, giddy and dazzling-white, in the midst of grimy tenements and a hideous black network of elevated railways; the domes of churches and of pickle factories, the turrets of prisons and of terra cotta hotels, the electric signs of theatres and of cemetery companies, are mingled indiscriminately in a vast, hurled-together heap. While everywhere great piles of stone and steel are dizzily jutting skyward, ragged and unfinished.

It is plain to be seen that here life is in preparation—a piece in rehearsal; with the scene-shifters a bit scarce, or untutored in their business. One has the uncomfortable sensation of having been in too great haste to call; and so caught the haughty city on her moving-in day. This breeds humility in the visitor, and indulgence for the poor lady who is doing her best to set her house to rights. It is a splendid house, and a distinctly clever lady; and certainly in time they will adjust themselves to one another and to the world outside. For the present they loftily enjoy a gorgeous chaos.

Into this the stranger is landed summarily, and with no pause of railway journey before he attacks the city. London, Paris, Madrid, may discreetly withdraw a hundred miles or more further from the impatient foreigner: New York confronts him brusquely on the pier. And from his peaceful cabin he is plunged into a vortex of hysterical reunions, rushing porters, lordly customs officials, newspaper men, express-agents, bootblacks and boys shouting “Tel-egram!” He has been on the dock only five minutes, when he realizes that the dock itself is unequivocally, uncompromisingly New York.

Being New York, it has at once all the conveniences and all the annoyances known to man, there at his elbow. One can talk by long distance telephone from the pier to any part of the United States; or one can telegraph a “day letter” or a “night letter” and be sure of its delivery in any section of the three-thousand mile continent by eight o’clock next morning. One can check one’s trunks, when they have passed the customs, direct to one’s residence—whether it be Fifth Avenue, New York, or Nob Hill, San Francisco; time, distance, the clumsiness of inanimate things, are dissipated before the eyes of the dazzled stranger.

On the other hand, before even he has set foot on American soil, he becomes acquainted with American arrogance, American indifference, the fantasy of American democracy. The national attitude of I-am-as-good-as-you-are has been conveyed to him through the surly answers of the porter, the cheerful familiarity of the customs examiner, the grinning impudence of the express-man. These excellent public servants would have the foreigner know once and for all that he is in a land where all men are indisputably proven free and equal, every minute. The extremely interesting fact that all men are most unequal—slaves to their own potentialities—has still to occur to the American. He is in the stage of doing, not yet of thinking; therefore he finds disgrace in saying “sir” to another man, but none in showing him rudeness.