Westward with the Prince of WalesNewton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
History
Westward with the Prince of Wales
Newton, W. Douglas (Wilfrid Douglas)
Canada -- Description and travel; Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
The Prince was no stranger to the American journalist. They were old
friends of his. Some of them had been with him in the Maritime
Provinces of Canada, and he had made friends with them at Quebec. He
remembered these writers and that friendship was renewed in a pleasant
chat. The journalists liked him, too, though they admit that he has a
charming way of disarming them. They rather admired the adroit
diplomacy with which he derailed such leading questions as those
dealing with the delicate and infinite subject of American girls:
whether he liked them: and how much?
He met these correspondents quite frankly, appreciating at once the
fact that it was through them that he could express to the people of
America his intense feeling of thanks for the singular warmth of
America's greeting.
From seeing all these visitors the Prince had only time left to get
into evening dress and to be whirled off in time to attend a glittering
dinner given at the Waldorf-Astoria by Mrs. Henry Pomeroy Davidson on
behalf of the Council of the American Red Cross. It was a vivid and
beautiful function, but it was one that bridged the time before
another, and before ten o'clock the Prince was on the move again, and,
amid the dance of the motor-bike "cops," was being rushed off to the
Metropolitan Opera House.
He was swung down Broadway where the advertisements made a fantasy of
the sky, a fantasy of rococo beauty where colours on the huge pallets
of skyscrapers danced and ran, fused and faded, grouped and regrouped,
each a huge and coherent kaleidoscope.
Here a gigantic kitten of lights turned a complete somersault in the
heavens as it played with a ball of wool. There six sky-high manikins
with matchstick limbs, went through an incandescent perpetual and
silent dance. In the distance was a gigantic bull advertising
tobacco--all down this heavenly vista there were these immense signs,
lapping and over-lapping in dazzling chaos. And seen from one angle,
high up, unsupported, floating in the very air and eerily
unsubstantial, was a temple lit by bale-fires that shone wanly at its
base. It was merely a building superimposed upon a skyscraper, but in
the dark there was no skyscraper, and the amazing structure hung there
lambent, silent, enigmatic, a Wagnerian temple in the sky.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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