For myself, I had avoided the ground-level press enclosure to occupy a window on the second floor of a warehouse right on the pierhead and from here I could look out upon the entire scene, the better to describe to readers of the American just what happened.
Aboard the Lorraine herself the first-class passengers stared down from the upper decks, having themselves a grandstand view but prevented from disembarking until the civic welcome was over. In the lower portholes I could see the faces of the steerage-class passengers peering out and up to see what was going on.
At a few minutes before ten there was a hubbub on the Lorraine as the captain and a group of officers escorted a single figure towards the head of the gangway. After cordial farewells to her French compatriots, Mme de Chagny began her journey down the gangway to her first-ever contact with American soil. Waiting to greet her was Mr Oscar Hammerstein, the impresario who owns and runs the Manhattan Opera and whose tenacity of purpose has succeeded in enticing both the vicomtesse and Nellie Melba across the Atlantic in winter to sing for us.
With an old-world gesture seen with increasing rarity in our society, he bowed and kissed her extended hand. There was a loud ‘Ooooooh’ and some whistles from the workers clinging to the surrounding derricks but the mood was joyful rather than mocking and a round of applause greeted the gesture - it came from the ranks of the silk top hats grouped around the podium.
Reaching the red carpet Mme de Chagny turned and, on the arm of Mr Hammerstein, proceeded along the length of the quay towards the dais. As she did so, and with a flair that would certainly put her in the running for Mayor McClellan’s job, she waved and flashed a beaming smile at the dockers atop the packing-crates and hanging from the girders of the cranes. They replied with even more whistles, this time of great appreciation. As none of them will ever hear her sing, this gesture went down extremely well.
Through powerful glasses I could bring the lady into focus from my upper window. At thirty-two she is very beautiful, trim and petite. Opera-lovers have been known to wonder how such a magnificent voice could be contained in such a lissom frame. She wore from shoulder to ankles - for despite the sun the temperature was just above zero - a tight-waisted and befrogged coat in burgundy velvet, trimmed with mink at throat, cuffs and hem, with a circular Cossack-style hat of the same fur. Her hair was tucked into a neat chignon behind her head. The ladies of fashion of New York City will have to look to their laurels when this lady saunters down Peacock Alley.
Behind her I could see her remarkably small and non-fussy entourage descending the gangway: her personal maid and former colleague Mlle Giry, two male secretaries to handle her correspondence and traveling arrangements, her son Pierre, a handsome boy of twelve, and his traveling tutor, an Irish priest in black soutane and broad-brimmed hat, youthful himself, with a wide and open grin.
As the lady was helped up to the podium Mayor McClellan shook her hand, American style, and launched into his formal welcome, something he will have to repeat in ten days’ time for the Australian Nellie Melba. But if there were any fears that Mme de Chagny might not understand what was being said, these were soon dispelled. She needed no translation and indeed when the Mayor had finished she stepped to the front of the dais and thanked us all most prettily in fluent English with a delightful French accent.
What she had to say was both surprising and flattering. After her thanks to the Mayor and the city for a most touching reception, she confirmed that she had come to sing for one week only in the inaugural opera at the Manhattan Opera House and that the work in question would be an entirely new opera, never heard before, by an unknown American composer.
Then she revealed new details. The story was set in the American Civil War and entitled The Angel of Shiloh, concerning the struggle between love and duty besetting a Southern belle in love with a Union officer. She would sing the role of Eugenie Delarue. She added that she had seen the lyric and score in Paris in handwritten form, and it was the sheer beauty of the work that had caused her to change her itinerary and cross the Atlantic. Clearly her implication was that money had played no part in her decision, a poke in the eye for Nellie Melba. The working men on the cranes around the pier, silent while she spoke, let out a prolonged cheer and many whistles which would have been ill-mannered if they were not so obviously admiring. Again she waved at them and turned to descend the steps on the other side in order to board her waiting coach.
At this point, in a hitherto carefully staged and flawless ceremony, two things happened which were emphatically not on the foreseen scenario. The first was puzzling and seen by few; the second caused a roar of amusement.
For some reason I let my glance stray from the dais below me while she was speaking and saw, standing on the roof of a great warehouse directly opposite mine, a strange figure. It was of a man, standing quite motionless and staring down. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and was otherwise wrapped in a flowing cloak that flapped about him in the wind. There was something strange and vaguely sinister about the lone figure, standing high above us, looking down on the lady from France as she spoke. How did he get up there unseen? What was he doing? Why was he not with the rest of the crowd?
I adjusted my eyeglasses for the new focus; he must have seen the sun glint on the lenses for he suddenly looked up and stared straight back at me. Then I saw that he wore a mask over his face and through the eyeholes it seemed as if he gazed fiercely at me for a couple of seconds. I heard a few shouts from the dockers clinging still to the cold steel of the derricks, and saw pointing fingers. But by the time those below started to look up, he was gone, with a speed that defies explanation. One second he was there, the next the skyline was empty. He had vanished as if he had never been.
Seconds later the small chill this apparition might have created was dispelled by a roar of applause and laughter from below. Mme de Chagny had emerged from the rear of the raised speaking-dais and was approaching the liveried brougham prepared for her by Mr Hammerstein. The Mayor and the city fathers were a few steps behind. All saw that between their guest and her carriage, beyond the range of the red carpet, lay a large pool of half-melted slush, evidently left over from yesterday’s snowfall.
A man’s stout boots would have made short shrift of it, but the French aristocrat’s dainty shoes? New York City’s government stood and stared in dismay but helpless. Then I saw a y
oung man vault over the barrier that surrounded the Press enclosure. He was wearing a coat of his own but carried over his arm something else which was soon revealed as a large evening cape. This he swung in an arc so that it landed right over the slush between the opera star and the open door of her brougham. The lady flashed a brilliant smile, stepped onto the cape and in two seconds was inside her carriage with the coachman closing the door.
The young man picked up his soaking and muddied cape and exchanged a few words with the face framed in the window before the coach rattled away. Mayor McClellan gave the young man a grateful pat on the back and as he turned I perceived it was none other than a young colleague of mine on this very newspaper.
All’s well, as the saying goes, that ends well and the welcome given by New York to the lady from Paris ended extremely well. Now she is ensconced in the finest suite at the Waldorf-Astoria with five days of rehearsals and voice-protecting before her no doubt triumphant debut at the Manhattan Opera House on 3 December.
Meanwhile, I suspect that a certain young colleague of mine from the City Desk will be explaining to one and all that the spirit of Raleigh is not entirely dead!!
9
THE OFFER OF CHOLLY BLOOM
LOUIE’S BAR, FIFTH AVENUE AT 28TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY, 29 NOVEMBER 1906
DID I EVER GET AROUND TO TELLING YOU GUYS THAT being a reporter in New York is the greatest job in the world? I did? Well, forgive me but I’m going to say it again. Anyway, you have to forgive me, ‘cause I’m buying. Barney, could we have a round of beers?
Mind you, you got to show flair, energy and ingenuity amounting almost to genius and that is why I am saying this job has got it all. I mean, take yesterday. Were any of you at Pier 42 yesterday morning? You should have been. What a spectacle, what an event. You read this morning’s coverage in the American? Good for you, Harry, at least someone here reads a decent newspaper, even if you do work for the Post.
Now, I have to say it wasn’t really my job. Our shipping man was there to give complete coverage. But I had nothing assigned for the morning so I figured I’d go anyway and, boy, did I get a break. Now, the rest of you guys would have spent the morning in bed. That’s what I mean by energy; you got to be out and about to get life’s lucky breaks. Where was I? Oh yes.
Someone told me the French liner Lorraine was docking at Pier 42 and bringing in this French singer lady who I had never heard of but who is very big bagels in the opera world. Mme Christine de Chagny. Now I have never been to an opera in my life but I thought what the hell? She’s a big star, no-one can get near her for an interview, so I’ll go and have a look anyway. Besides, the last time I tried to help a Frenchie out of a jam I damn near got a major scoop and I would have done except that our City Editor is a four-star schlemiel. I told you about that? The weird incident at the E.M. Tower. Well, listen up, this gets weirder. Would I lie? Is the Mufti a Moslem?
I went down to the pier just after nine. The Lorraine was coming in stern first. Plenty of time, these dockings always take for ever. So I wave my pass at the bulls and saunter over to the Press enclosure. Clearly it is as well I showed up. This is obviously going to be a major civic reception - Mayor McClellan, city fathers, Tammany Hall, the lot. I know the whole shindig will be covered by the Docks Correspondent whom I spot after a while in an upper window with a better view.
Well, they play the anthems and this French lady comes down the pier, and she’s waving at the crowds and they are loving it all. Then the speeches, Mayor first, then the lady and finally she steps down off the podium and makes for her carriage. Problem. There happens to be a great puddle of slush between her and the brougham, and the red carpet has run out.
You guys should have seen it. The coachman has the door open as wide as the Mayor’s mouth. McClellan and the opera man Oscar Hammerstein are each side of the French singer and they don’t know what to do.
At this point something odd happens. I feel a nudge and a jostle from behind me and someone lays something over my arm which is resting on the barrier. Whoever he was, he was gone in a second. I never saw him. But what is hanging over my arm is an old opera cape, fusty and tattered, not the sort of thing you’d be carrying or wearing at that hour of the morning, if at all. Then I remembered that as a boy I was given a coloured book called Heroes Down The Ages - with pictures. And there was one of a fellow called Raleigh - I guess they named him after the capital of North Carolina. Anyway he once took off his cape and threw it over a puddle right in front of Queen Elizabeth of England and after that he never looked back.