"New York Vignette" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

There was nothing for it but to go out and wander. They say New York has
something for everyone -- you just have to know where to look. I went looking
first on Rockefeller Plaza, which never fails to do something to me. I hung over
the rail and watched the skaters moving like moths and mayflies to music that
came from nowhere, everywhere...anyone who can pass them by without a glance has
lost his sense of wonder, and I'm sorry for him. I looked for sunlight high on
the clean, clever buildings reaching into the morning and found it. I listened
to the whisper of blades on ice, tires on asphalt, of a hundred thousand heels
on paving, all blended like a great breathing. But it was only magic, its own
special kind of magic it didn't give me a story idea for you.

So I left and walked west past the place where Dave Garroway holds forth in the
early, early hours, toward the Avenue of the Americas, where stores and theaters
were beginning to wake, where men can make keys for you and you can buy crepes
suzettes and cameras and luggage and lingerie; and I slowly became aware of a
neat pair of shoulders and a smooth neat hat. I must have been following the man
for minutes without quite realizing it. The coat was one of those banker's
specials m you know, flat and formal and with a smooth narrow collar that might
be velvet and might be fur.

And the hat was what some people call a bowler and some a derby. Hat and collar
were not black, but of the darkest possible brown, and the whole aspect was --
well, neat. He was strolling along, turning his head a little from time to time,
and though I couldn't see his face I somehow knew he was smiling at storefronts,
automobiles, marquees, people --smiling at the whole, wide world. I wondered
what he was smiling about. I wondered, too, what kind of a smile it might be.
Was he smiling at? Or smiling with?

The first corner we came to was the one where the Radio City Music Hall squats
like a kneeling elephant with its big friendly mouth open, and in the entrance
stood two girls.

One of them reminded me of mint leaves and the other was as real and pretty as a
field of daisies. I saw the man in the brown bowler hat walk up to them and he
bowed from the waist, that stiff, slight, quaint little gesture that can only be
done by a certain sort of person, because it makes the rest of us look silly. He
raised the hard, neat hat a trifle and by the tilt of his head and the pleasure
just beginning on the girls' faces, I knew he was smiling a special smile. From
his pocket he drew something and handed it to one of the girls, the
field-of-daisies one, and without pausing, with never a break in his leisurely
stride, he went on.

Then it was my turn to pass the girls. They stared after the man and their
mouths were round as a thumb print. Then one of them looked down in her hand and
"Lark!" she said, "Oh, Lark, look: he gave us tickets for Jupiter's Darling! How
did he know I wanted to see it so much?" They stared after him spellbound as I
passed, and happy as Christmas. I followed the man across the avenue, thinking,
"Lark, Lark. Now what a nice name for a girl that is!" and watching him. A few
doors up from the corner is a hardware store, and the hardware man had set a
tall ladder against the building. He was up there looking at a place where his