I
For a lucky glimpse of the great Talbot Potter, the girls who caught it
may thank that conjunction of Olympian events which brings within the
boundaries of one November week the Horse Show and the roaring climax
of the football months and the more dulcet, yet vast, beginning of the
opera season. Some throbbing of attendant multitudes coming to the ears
of Talbot Potter, he obeyed an inward call to walk to rehearsal by way
of Fifth Avenue, and turning out of Forty-fourth Street to become
part of the people-sea of the southward current, felt the eyes of the
northward beating upon his face like the pulsing successions of an
exhilarating surf. His Fifth Avenue knew its Talbot Potter.
Strangers used to leisurely appraisals upon their own thoroughfares are
apt to believe that Fifth Avenue notices nothing; but they are mistaken;
it is New York that is preoccupied, not Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue
eye, like a policeman's, familiar with a variety of types, catalogues
you and replaces you upon the shelf with such automatic rapidity that
you are not aware you have been taken down. Fifth Avenue is secretly
populous with observers who take note of everything.
Of course, among these peregrinate great numbers almost in a stupor so
far as what is closest around them is concerned; and there are those,
too, who are so completely busied with either the consciousness of being
noticed, or the hope of being noticed, or the hatred of it, that they
take note of nothing else. Fifth Avenue expressions are a filling meal
for the prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal
appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women. For here,
on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme cases of their
whimsical disease: fledgling young men making believe to be haughty to
cover their dreadful symptoms, the mask itself thus revealing what it
seeks to conceal; timid young ladies, likewise treacherously exposed by
their defenses; and very different ladies, but in similar case, being
retouched ladies, tinted ladies; and ladies who know that they are
pretty at first sight, ladies who chat with some obscured companion only
to offer the public a treat of graceful gestures; and poor ladies
making believe to be rich ladies; and rich ladies making believe to be
important ladies; and many other sorts of conscious ladies. And men--ah,
pitiful!--pitiful the wretch whose hardihood has involved him in cruel
and unusual great gloss and unsheltered tailed coat. Any man in his
overcoat is wrapped in his castle; he fears nothing. But to this hunted
creature, naked in his robin's tail, the whole panorama of the Avenue is
merely a blurred audience, focusing upon him a vast glare of derision;
he walks swiftly, as upon fire, pretends to careless sidelong interest
in shop-windows as he goes, makes play with his unfamiliar cane only to
be horror-stricken at the flourishings so evoked of his wild gloves; and
at last, fairly crawling with the eyes he feels all over him, he must
draw forth his handkerchief and shelter behind it, poor man, in the
dishonourable affectation of a sneeze!
Piquant contrast to these obsessions, the well-known expression of
Talbot Potter lifted him above the crowd to such high serenity his face
might have been that of a young Pope, with a dash of Sydney Carton. His
glance fixed itself, in its benign detachment, upon the misty top of the
Flatiron, far down the street, and the more frequent the plainly visible
recognitions among the north-bound people, the less he seemed aware
of them. And yet, whenever the sieving current of pedestrians brought
momentarily face to face with him a girl or woman, apparently civilized
and in the mode, who obviously had never seen him before and seemed not
to care if it should be her fate never to repeat the experience, Talbot
Potter had a certain desire. If society had established a rule that
all men must instantly obey and act upon every fleeting impulse, Talbot
Potter would have taken that girl or woman by the shoulders and said to
her: “What's the matter with you!”
At Forty-second Street he crossed over, proceeded to the middle of the
block, and halted dreamily on the edge of the pavement, his back to the
crowd. His face was toward the Library, with its two annoyed pet lions,
typifying learning, and he appeared to study the great building. One
or two of the passersby had seen him standing on that self-same spot
before;--in fact, he always stopped there whenever he walked down the
Avenue.
For a little time (not too long) he stood there; and thus absorbed he
was, as they say, a Picture. Moreover, being such a popular one, he
attracted much interest. People paused to observe him; and all unaware
of their attention, he suddenly smiled charmingly, as at some gentle
pleasantry in his own mind--something he had remembered from a book,
no doubt. It was a wonderful smile, and vanished slowly, leaving a rapt
look; evidently he was lost in musing upon architecture and sculpture
and beautiful books. A girl whisking by in an automobile had time to
guess, reverently, that the phrase in his mind was: “A Stately Home for
Beautiful Books!” Dinner-tables would hear, that evening, how Talbot
Potter stood there, oblivious of everything else, studying the Library!
This slight sketch of artistic reverie completed, he went on, proceeding
a little more rapidly down the Avenue; presently turned over to the
stage door of Wallack's, made his way through the ensuing passages, and
appeared upon the vasty stage of the old theatre, where his company of
actors awaited his coming to begin the rehearsal of a new play.