There was an unofficial ending to the day. The Prince, with several of his suite, walked in New York, viewed this exhilarating city of lights and vistas by night, got his own private and unformal view of the wonders of skyscraping townscape, the quick, nervous shuttle of the sidewalks, the rattle of the "Elevated," the sight, for the first time in a long journey, of motor-buses. And without doubt he tasted the wonder of a city of automobiles still clinging to the hansom cab.
About this outing there have been woven stories of a glamour which might have come from the fancy of O. Henry and the author of the "Arabian Nights" working in collaboration. The Prince is said to have plunged into the bizarre landscape of the Bowery, which is Whitechapel better lighted, and better dressed with up-to-date cafes, where there are dance halls in which with the fathomless seriousness of the modern, jazz is danced to violins and banjoes and the wailing ukelele.
They tell me that Ichabod has been written across the romantic glory of the Bowery, and that for colour and the spice of life one has to go further west (which is Manhattan's East End) to Greenwich Village, where life strikes Chelsea attitudes, and where one descends subterraneanly, or climbs over the roofs of houses to Matisse-like restaurants where one eats rococo meals in an atmosphere of cigarette smoke, rice-white faces, scarlet lips, and bobbed hair. But there are yet places in the Bowery to which one taxis with a thrill of hope, where the forbidden cocktail is served in a coffee cup, where wine bottles are put on to the table with brown paper wrapped round them to preserve the fiction that they came from one's own private (and legal) store, where in bare, studiously Bowery chambers the hunter of a new frisson sits and dines and hopes for the worst.
The Bowery is dingy and bright; it has hawkers' barrows and chaotic shop windows. It has the curiosity-stimulating, cosmopolite air of all dockside areas, but to the Englishman accustomed to the picturesque bedragglement of East End costumes, it is almost dismayingly well-dressed. Its young men have the leanness of outline that comes from an authentic American tailor. Its Jewesses have the neat crispness of American fashion that gives their vivid beauty a new and sparkling note. It was astonishing the number of beautiful young women one saw on the Bowery, but not astonishing when one recalls the number of beautiful young women one saw in New York. Fifth Avenue at shopping time, for example, ceases to be a street: it becomes a pageant of youth and grace.
The Prince, of course, may have gone into the Bowery, and walked therein with the air of a modern Caliph, but I myself have not heard of it. I was told that he went for a walk to the house of a friend, and that after paying a very pleasant and ordinary visit he returned to the Renown to get what sleep he could before the adventure of another New York day.
IV
The morning of Wednesday, November 19th, was devoted by the Prince to high finance; he went down to Wall Street and to visit the other temples of the gold god.
When one has become acclimated to the soaring upward rush of the skyscrapers (and one quite soon loses consciousness of them, for where all buildings are huge each building becomes commonplace), when one stops looking upward, "Down Town" New York is strangely like the "City" area of London. Walking Broadway one might easily imagine oneself in the neighbourhood of the Bank of England; Wall Street might easily be a turning out of Bishopsgate or Cannon Street. Broad Street, New York, is not so very far removed in appearance from Broad Street, London.
There is the same preoccupied congestion of the same work-mazed people: clerks, typists (stenographers), book-keepers, messengers and masters, though, perhaps, the people of the New York business quarter do not wear the air of sadness those of London wear.
And there is the same massive solidity of business buildings, great blocks that house thirty thousand souls in the working day, and these buildings have the same air as their London brothers; that is, they seem to be monuments to financial integrity (just as mahogany furniture, with a certain type, is an indication of "standing and weight") rather than offices. And if New York buildings are, on the whole, more distinguished, are characterized by a better art, they are, on the other hand, not relieved by the humanity of the shops that gives an air of brightness to the London commercial area. In New York "Down Town" the shops are mainly inside the buildings, and it is in the corridors of the big blocks that the clerk buys his magazines, papers, "candies," sandwiches and cigars.