In one sense, at least, our function was appropriate to the night. Everybody “came prepared”—women and men both—like a country Experience Meeting. Jokes cracked like lightning through the tobacco clouds; songs of love and war trembled and roared above our heads; humor and pathos, those twin slaves of the lamp, sported and wept at our bidding; in a word, no end of youthful bombast, and kind laughter, and harmless, gratified vanity, was exhibited there. It was really more like a Montmartre cabaret than any place I ever saw in New York. Only, with humblest apologies for disparaging their worldliness, the ladies were so evidently good, sincere, faithful friends, wives, mothers, sweethearts, that some of us watched their happy gayety with grateful, pleased eyes.
A Judas came to that kindly board, and betrayed to a newspaper these merry, honest folk at their simple feast. Stupid, prosperous commercial persons pushed their way in and stared at them. They fled away, scared at last, to more inaccessible haunts.
But on one particularly jolly evening, to return to a text memories of tried friends and happy hours have beguiled me from, among a number of notable guests one who “favored,” Mr. Wilton Lackaye, then appearing as that white-eyed, hairy, awful Svengali everybody so loathed and applauded, dramatically recited a remarkable and original poem called the “Song of Broadway.” Many a time since have I remembered the scene, the song, the company; the long, wine-stained tables, the eddying cigarette smoke, the acute, lively faces. In one way or another, everyone there was a trained observer, and knew his Broadway.
It is rather a bold thing to say you know your Broadway. As I, too, sing my song about it, if I sound a note once or twice you have never heard, oh, thank Heaven, and turn away! With us, I trust, it will be but a minor chord. So every stroller there recognized the world he lives in, and the child, the mother, the cabby, gambler, pickpocket, doctor, parson, each carries off his or her own bundle of impressions.
Leaving it, then, to graver historians to trace the financial, commercial and social evolution of this tremendous street, which was a forest trail once, within whose sylvan solitudes red men roamed and wild beasts prowled, let us from our humble station, as men of the world and social philosophers, describe merely that stretch of it which begins at Madison Square and ends at Forty-fifth Street; where it is high noon at eight o’clock at night, and bedtime when the gray dawn comes shivering cold and ghastly into hotel corridors where the washerwomen are scrubbing the marble floors. “Little old Broadway,” as it is affectionately toasted in the vernacular of its habitués, wherever rye whisky is drunk, and faithful homesick hearts recall its lights, its pleasures and its crowds.
Broadway, I say, at eight o’clock at night, is the most fascinating street on earth. It is en fête every evening; and you have only to walk that mile often enough, and the whole town will display itself at leisure and at its ease, perfectly unconscious and natural and selfish. It is not the lights; it is not the brilliant hotels, and theaters, and restaurants, and shops, and tramcars, and hurrying cabs; it is not the music that floats out to you on the rippling surface of the town’s deep voice; it is not that voice itself, vibrating as it is with every emotion of the human heart, of pleasure, excitement, careless gayety, shame that has ceased to care, lust whispering its appeal, modesty’s shocked sigh, innocence’s happy prattle, kind laughter, friendly chat, unexpected hearty greetings; it is the vast, shifting, jostling, loitering, idle crowd, the multitude of a huge cosmopolitan city that is the spectacle, and that to a man who knows his town is more dramatic, and humorous, and pathetic, and fascinating than all the plays to which young ladies, and their papas, too, are hurrying, to thrill, and laugh, and cry over.
Think of a mile of street, brilliant like a drawing room almost, and swarming with all kinds of men and women from all over the world, each seeking his or her particular amusement and finding it. Pleasure is the commodity on sale here, and one can obtain it at any of those glittering signs blazing out over the crush, or traffic in it with the venders of the pavement.
Isn’t it marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful? as the conjurer says when he cuts your watch out of an onion. Mr. Conjurer returns your watch in safety, but it retains that delicate perfume which only the time it chronicles can wear away. Many an ingenious traveler has stepped out of his hotel to watch this magic spectacle for a little, and brought back with him bitter remembrances that all the tears shed secretly won’t ever wash out.
Tant pis! You are not a preacher, monsieur. There is only one church on your Broadway, and that is dark and shut and sold to a syndicate. The only religion one gets here is the Bibles in the hotel bedrooms, and at Jerry McAuley’s Cremorne Mission, round the corner in Thirty-second Street. What, then? Nobody claims Broadway to be a domestic scene, and children and nursemaids don’t constitute its charm.
Look north, from where we have turned into it, after lighting our cigars at Van Valkenburg’s, under the Albemarle Hotel, and those dazzling signs will tell you what most people come here for: Martin’s, Weber’s Music Hall, the Imperial Hotel, the Knickerbocker Theater, with Mr. Sothern in “Hamlet,” Hoster’s, Kid McCoy’s Café, Brown’s Chop House, Grand Opera, Rector’s Restaurant—to dine, to drink, to smoke, to stroll, to see the play, to watch each other. Did you ever see so much light, so much life? Halt where sedate business halts, too, at the St. James Building, frowning darkly down on gay, hoydenish Martin’s, whose roguish, Parisian eyes twinkle mischievously up at it, as if they know the tall, somber old hypocrite has a score of wicked theatrical agencies hidden away in its locked heart, and just see!