Broadway, which sprouts theatres as a natural garden sprouts flowers, was jewelled with lights, lights that in the clear air of this continent shone with a lucidity that we in England do not know. Before the least lighted of these buildings the Prince stopped. He had arrived at the austere temple of the high arts, the Metropolitan Opera House.
Inside Caruso and a brilliant audience waited impatiently for his presence. The big and rather sombre house was quick with colour and with beauty. The celebrated "Diamond Horseshoe," the tiers of the galleries, and the floor of the house were vivid with dresses, shimmering and glinting with all the evasive shades of the spectrum, with here a flash of splendid jewels, there the slow and sumptuous flutter of a great ostrich fan.
Part of the program had been played, but Pagliacci and Caruso were held up while the vivid and ardent people craned out of their little crimson boxes in the Horseshoes and turned and looked up from the bright mosaic of the floor at the empty box which was to be the Prince's.
There was a long roll of drums, and with a single movement the orchestra marched into the melody of "God bless the Prince of Wales," and the Prince, looking extraordinarily embarrassed, came to the front of the box.
At once there was no melody of "God bless the Prince of Wales" perceptible; a wave of cheering and hand-clapping swept it away. The whole of the people on the floor of the house turned to look upward and to cheer. The people under the tiers crowded forward into the gangways until the gangways were choked, and the floor was a solid mass of humanity. Bright women and men correctly garbed imperilled their necks in the galleries above in order to look down. It was an unforgettable moment, and for the Prince a disconcerting one.
He stood blushing and looking down, wondering how on earth he was to endure this stark publicity. He was there poised bleakly for all to see, an unenviable position. And there was no escape. He must stand there, because it was his job, and recover from the nervousness that had come from finding himself so abruptly thrust on to this veritable pillar of Stylites in the midst of an interested and curious throng.
The interest and the curiosity was intensely friendly. His personality suffered not at all from the fact that he had lost his calm at a moment when only the case-hardened could have remained unmoved. His embarrassment, indeed, made the audience more friendly, and it was with a sort of intimacy that they tittered at his familiar tricks of nervousness, his fumbling at his tie, tugging of his coat lapels, the passing of the hand over his hair, even the anxious use of his handkerchief.
And this friendly and soft laughter became really appreciative when they saw him tackle the chairs. There were two imposing and pompous gilt chairs at the front of the box, filling it, elbowing all minor, human chairs out of the way. The Prince turned and looked at them, and turned them out. He would have none of them. He was not there to be a superior person at all; he was there to be human and enjoy human companionship. He had the front of the box filled with chairs, and he had friends in to sit with him and talk with him when intervals in the music permitted. And the audience was his friend for that; they admired him for the way he turned his back on formalities and ceremonials. General Pershing, who gratifies one's romantic sense by being extraordinarily like one's imaginative pictures of a great General, came to sit with him, and there was another outburst of cheering. I think that the petits morceaux from the operas were but side-shows. Although Rosina Galli ravished the house with her dancing (how she must love dancing), opera glasses were swivelled more toward the Royal box than to the stage, and the audience made a close and curious study of every movement and every inflection of the Prince.
The cheering broke out again, from people who crowded afresh into the gangways, when the Prince left, and in a mighty wave of friendliness the official program of the first day closed.