week-end, who read me in the smoking-car on his way up into the
country. He burned several holes in my pages with the falling ash of
his cigarettes. He read me in bits between scraps of conversation with
his seat neighbour and recesses of enjoyment of the flying scenery.
And he found it rather awkward holding me balanced on his legs crooked
up against the seat in front of him. This, my precarious position, led
to a grievous calamity. I toppled and fell, and my reader, making a
swooping clutch at me as I went, but the more scattered my pages over
the polluted floor of the car. An evil draught carried my third page
underneath a seat, the third forward from my reader. It was an
anguishing thing, but I could not cry out, I could not tell him: as my
reader, cursing me heartily (for what I cannot admit was my fault)
gathered me up, he neglected to crawl far enough under the seat before
him to perceive my page three.
But it does not fall within the scope of my present design to extend
this chronicle to the length of an autobiography. With what pain and
labour my poor parent recovered from his memory, and then very
imperfectly, of course, my third page; how he grew more melancholy of
countenance at each of my successive returns to the house of my birth
and formative years; how I sometimes remained away for months at a
time, and how once an office boy mis-addressed me to a lady in New
Jersey who very graciously herself forwarded me to my parent; how my
poor parent was obliged at length by the increasing dilapidation of my
appearance to go to the expense of having me completely re-typed by a
public typist, and how directly after this he entirely re-wrote,
expanded, and elaborated me at the instigation of one firm of
publishers; how I was read by a delightful old lady who knitted in her
office as she read; by a lady of cosmopolitan mien who had me together
with many other manuscripts sent to her home in a box, and who consumed
innumerable cigarettes as she perused me; by a young gentleman who I am
sure had a morning "hang over" at his desk; by a tough-looking customer
who wore his hat at his desk; by a young lady of futurist aspect who
took me home to her studio; by an old, old man who seemed to "see" me
quite, and by many more--all this I may merely indicate.
One very striking phenomenon I should by no means fail to mention, and
this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if
it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow,
as the case may be. One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow
object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before us?
I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black as ink." But I was
apparently exactly like such an impossible object. I was, figuratively
speaking, no colour of my own and I was all colours. One, so to speak,
saw me as green, another as white, and yet another as orange, while
some saw quite red as they looked at me. That is, my character
consisted altogether, it seemed, in the amazingly diverse reactions I
inspired in my successive readers. I was intolerably dull, I was
abundantly entertaining, I was over-subtle, I was painfully obvious, I
was exceedingly humorous, and I lacked all humour.
How, at length, a group of editorial gamblers succeeded in coming
sufficiently into harmony about me to render a composite verdict that I
would be a fair publishing risk; but how the title my poor parent had
given me it was unanimously held wouldn't do at all; and how I got
another in book committee meeting; how, after I was (wonderful thing!)
"accepted," I lay in a safe until I thought I should crumble away with
age; and how I was suddenly brought forth and hastily read by the
manufacturing department for ideas for my cover to be, and then by the
advertising department for "copy dope," before being rushed to the
composing room--of these things I have not time to speak further, as I
am now on the press, and am rapidly ceasing to be merely a manuscript.
IX
"YOU ARE AN AMERICAN"
"Lavender, sweet lavender,
Who will buy my sweet blooming lavender?
Buy it once, you'll buy it twice,
And make your clothes sweet and nice!"
She was a wretched-looking creature, with a great basket; and it was so
she sang through the street. By this you know where we are, for this
is one of the old cries of London town.
For the sake of my clothes, and for the noble pleasure of associating
for an instant with the original of a coloured print of old London
types, I bought a sprig of lavender. "Thank you, sir," she said.
I saw it coming; ah! yes, by now I knew she would. "You are an
American, sir," she added, eyeing me with interest.
You would think that since the "American invasion" first began ever so
long ago, some time after Dicky Davis "discovered" London, they, the
British, would have seen enough of us to have become accustomed to us
by now. But, as you have found, it is not so--we are a strange race
from over the sea.
"You are an American, sir," said the barmaid. She was a huge young
woman who could have punched my head in. I am not so delicate, either.
And she had a pug nose.
"I do not so much care for American ladies," she said. "I think they
are a bit hard, don't you?" Then, perhaps feeling that she may have
offended me, she quickly added: "Not of course that I doubt that there
are maidenlike ladies in America."
They are a curious people, these English, with their nice ideas, even
among barmaids, of the graces of a mellow society. For some time I
could not understand why she was so beautiful. Then I perceived that
it was because of her nose. She looked just like the goddesses of the
Elgin marbles, whose noses are broken, you know. Still I doubt whether
it would be a good idea for a man to break his wife's nose in order to
make her more beautiful.
I will grave her name here on the tablet of fame, so that when you go
again to London you may be able to see her. It is Elizabeth.
He was a cats' meat man. And on his arm he carried a basket in which
was a heap of bits of horse flesh (such I have been told it is), each
on a sliver of stick. There was a little dog playing about near by.
"Would you care to treat that dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat, sir?"
asked the man.
I had never before treated a dog to anything, though treating is an
American habit. So I "set up" the dog to a ha'penny's worth of meat.
"Thank you, sir," said the cats' meat man. I saw by the light come
into his eye that he had recognised me. "You are------" he began. "I
know it," I said; "I am."
I looked at the wretched dog. Would he too accuse me? But he ate his
meat and said never a word. Perhaps he was not an Englishman. No, I
think he was a tourist, too, like myself. I was glad I had befriended
him in an alien land.
"What is the price of this?" I asked. "Thri'pence?" I inquired,
reading a sign.
"Three pence," pronounced the attendant very distinctly. It was but
his way of saying, "You are an American."
I went into an office to see a man I know. "How are you?" I said in my
democratic way to the very small office boy. "You are looking better
than when I saw you last," I remarked with pleasant home humour.
"I never saw you before, sir," replied the office boy. "He is an
American," I heard him, apologising for me, tell the typist.
Some considerable while after this I went to this office again. I had
quite forgotten the office boy. I handed him my card. A bright lad,
he. "I'm feeling much better, sir," he said.
In Pall Mall there is a steamship office in the window of which is
displayed a miniature sheet of water. At opposite sides of this little
ocean are small dabs of clay, one labelled England, the other America.
Tiny ships ply back and forth between the two countries. Observers
cannot make out how it is that these little boats turn about as they
do, apparently of their own accord. And the scene has continually a
number of spectators. (This was before the war.)
One day I was looking in at this window, very much interested in this
problem. Standing next to me was a fine specimen of a Pall Mallian,
with his silk "topper," his black tail coat, his buttonhole, his
checked trowsers, his large grey spats, his shining boots, his stick
and his glass on its ribbon, apparently equally absorbed. I turned to
him after a hit--a quite natural thing to do, I thought--and, "How the
deuce do you suppose that thing works?" I said.
The tall gentleman slowly turned. Slowly, stiffly, with an
aristocratic gesture, he raised his arm and placed his glass in his
eye, for a moment. I was frozen by his blank stare, quite through.
Then he lifted his eyebrow; the glass dropped and bounded before him on
its ribbon. And he turned and walked away. Walked away, I dare say,
to his frowning club, to tell how he had just been set upon in the
street and insulted by some strange ruffian. But, you see, I didn't
know; I was an American.
To Epsom I went in a cart to see the Derby. It was at Epsom, you know,
that the King's horse was thrown several seasons ago by a suffragette
who lost her life in the act. Well, most of the fine gentlemen of
England, I think, were there, all in splendid tall grey hats and with
their field glasses slung over their shoulders. And a horde of the
cleverest crooks in Europe also.
There I had my pocket "cut" by a pickpocket. That is the way they go
through you in England, neatly lift your pocket out. I thought this
was an interesting thing, so I told it about that I had had my pocket
cut, but I did not see any international significance in the affair.
The achievement, however, I discovered was much relished by my hearers
in England. I, an American, had come over there and had my pocket cut.
He, the crook, an Englishman very probably, had been "cuter" than I; he
had "had" me, an American.
It is a curious thing, and a fact not generally known, I believe, that
all decayed taxicab drivers in London, those who are unfortunate, have
fallen from a high estate. Each and every one of them used to drive
the London to Oxford coach in the days of 'orses.
I met a number of these personages, fat, with remarkably red faces and
large honeycombed noses. Not at all like the alert, athletic lads, a
type of mechanical engineer, who have arisen as cabbies with the advent
of taxis. What do they know about 'orses?
It was such an old boy who drove me from the neighbourhood of Russell
Square, where I was stopping, to Chelsea, where I went into lodgings.
He frequently had the pleasure of driving Americans, he remarked.
"Thank you, sir," he said.
I required to have my shoes repaired, and I inquired of my landlord
where might be found a good cobbler. He told me that there was an
excellent one in Battersea. "In Battersea!" I said. "Is there none in
Chelsea? How am I to get my shoes clear over to Battersea?"
"Why," he replied, "we will send the cobbler a card and he'll send some
one over for the boots and----"
"And then, I suppose," I said, "he will send us another card saying
that the boots are done and so on. And in the meantime I could have
had the boots repaired and worn out again."
Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in a piece of newspaper and
setting out straight off to find a cobbler. But my landlord would not
hear of such a thing at all. "Of course you are an American," he said.
I gathered that while such a proceeding might be all right in my
country it wouldn't do in England. He did not want lodgers, I
understood, going in and out of his house with parcels under their
arms. It would reflect on him. He was a man with a lively mind, and
he told me a little story.
"How do you like the new lodger?" asked the first housemaid of the
second.
"Oh, he's very nice indeed," replied the second housemaid. "But he's
not a gentleman. He helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday."
"Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asked the errand man in my street.
"I haven't had tea today."
It's a funny thing, that; isn't it?--our just being all "Americans"
(when we are not referred to as "Yankees" or "Yanks"). We are never
United Statesians. It is the "American Ambassador," and the "American
Consul-General." I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the
"President of America."
One day I saw a tourist. He was an American, a young man I knew in New
York. I found him going into the Houses of Parliament. I was fond of
going in there frequently, and said I would accompany him.
With an easy stride, at a speed I should say of about two miles an
hour, he walked straight through the Houses of Parliament; through the
Norman porch, through the King's robing room, the Royal or Victoria
gallery, the Prince's chamber, the sumptuously decorated House of
Peers, the Peers' lobby, the spacious central hall, the Commons'
corridor and the House of Commons; glancing about him the while at art
and architecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal garments and
symbols of history. Returning to the central hall, we passed through
St. Stephen's and Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street.
"How long did it take us to do that?" said my friend, questioning his
watch.
"Oh, about fifteen minutes," I replied.
He said he thought he would go across the way and "do" the Abbey next
while he was in the neighbourhood.
I suppose I could have helped him in the matter of despatch, but I
didn't think of it at the time. Later I heard of two Americans who
drove up to the abbey in a taxi. Leaping out, one said to the other:
"You do the outside and I'll do the inside, and that way we'll save a
lot of time."
The thing a man does in America, of course, when he gets into a
railroad train is to light a cigar and begin talking to the fellow next
to him. There were two of us in the railway carriage compartment on my
way down into Surrey. I made a number of amiable observations; I asked
a number of pleasant questions. My object was to while away the time
in human companionship. "Quite so," was his reply to observations.
In replying to questions he would commit himself to nothing; he
wouldn't even say that he didn't know. "I shouldn't undertake to say,
sir," was his answer. And then, certainly, there was no possibility of
pursuing the subject further.
He wasn't reading a paper; he wasn't doing anything but gaze straight
in front of him. I concluded that he was "sore" at me; I concluded
that he was a surly bear, anyway. And so an hour or so passed in utter
silence.
The pretty landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels
(more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and
then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails,
rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran
out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman
altogether. Till at length we came to his station.
When he had got out he turned to latch the door, and putting his head
in at the window, he said to me in the pleasantest manner possible:
"Good aufternoon, sir." He wasn't sore at me a bit! That was simply
his fashion of travelling, in silence.
I was going into the countryside, to the country places where the old
men have pleasant faces and the maidens quiet eyes. To fare forth upon
the King's highway, to hedgerows and blossoms and the old lanes of
Merrie England, to mount again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and
dip the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the heath, brother,
to hills and the sea, to lonely downs, to hold converse with simple
shepherd men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to seek some
ancient inn for warmth in the inglenook, and bite and drop, and where,
when the last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would rest my
weary bones until the sweet choral of morning birds called me on my way.
There was an ancient character going along the road. He walked with a
staff, a crooked stick. His coatless habit was the colour of clay; his
legs were bound about just below the knee by a strap (wherein, at one
side, he carried his pipe), so that his trowsers flared at the bottom
like a sailor's; over his shoulder he bore a flat straw basket. Under
his chin were whiskers; his eyes were merry and bright and his cheeks
just like fine rosy apples, with a great high light on each. I asked
of him the way and we trudged along together. "You are from Mericy,"
he said with delight.
He told me about himself. He was seventy-four and he had never had "a
single schooling" in his life. Capel was his home, a village of about
twenty houses which we were approaching, thirty miles or so from
London. The last time he been to London was when he was fifteen. He
had then seen some fireworks there. No fireworks in Capel, he said,
had ever been able to touch him since. He had been pushing on, he
said, pushing on, pushing on all the while.
"You were not born in Capel, then?" I said.
Born in Capel! Why, he had been born seven miles from Capel.
The difficulty was that I had overlooked the fact that everybody goes
out of London town at Whitsuntide. Village and county town I tried and
I could not find where to lay my head. Everything was, as they say in
England, "full up." It was coming on to rain and the night fell chill
and black. Would I have to use my rucksack for a pillow and sleep in
the fields?
At length I found a man--it was at quaint Godalming, I think, where the
famous Charterhouse School is--who could not give me a room, but
offered me a bed and breakfast at half a crown. "There's another
fellow up there," he said. "But he's a nice, quiet fellow; something
like yourself," he said. "I think you'll like him."
"You are an American," remarked my landlord. I sat with him in his
little parlour behind the bar. It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a
great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed birds in a glass
case. He asked me if I liked reading, because, if I did, he had an old
dictionary to which I was welcome at any time.
At length it was the hour for bed. I followed my heavy host with his
candle up difficult stairs. "I think they're all asleep," he said.
"They're all asleep!" I exclaimed. "Who are?"
"Why," replied my landlord, "there are five of them, you know. But
they are nice quiet fellows. Something like yourself," he added. "I
think you will like them."
In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises of many sunk in slumber.
Well, they were, I found in the morning, rather inoffensive young
fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether unlike myself. It was
after my bacon and eggs that I found on my way a place for a "wash and
brush up, tuppence."
"Traveller, sir?" inquired the publican, in response to my knock and
peering cautiously out at his door. For it was Sunday, after three
o'clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to obtain refreshment at
a public house at that hour one must be a "traveller over three miles'
journey." "I'm a traveller all the way from the U.S.A.," said I.
I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a corner and looked out again
from my window over the old red roofs and at the back of the house
where he dwelt who when the Queen had commanded his presence said, "I'm
an old man, ma'am, and I'll take a seat." When Annie, the maid, had
brought my "shaving water, sir," in a kind of a tin sprinkling can and
when I had used it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out to see
how old Father Thames was coming on.
I thought I would buy some writing paper and I went into a drug store
kind of a place. "I see you are an American, sir," said the shopman.
"This is a chemist's shop," he explained; "you get paper at the
stationer's, just after the turning, at the top of the street."
Hurrying for my passport, I inquired as to the location of such and
such a street--whatever the name of it is--where, I understood, the
place was where this was to be had. "Ah!" said he whom I addressed,
"you want the American Consul-General."
X
WHY MEN CAN'T READ NOVELS BY WOMEN
George Moore once presented the idea that the only thing of interest
and value about the creative art of a woman was the feminine quality of
that art. The novels of Jane Austen come readily to mind as an
argument in support of this provocative idea. Quite first among their
charms, every one will admit, is the indisputable fact that no man
could possibly have written them. They have the lightness, brightness,
sparkle, perfume, flavour, grace, fun, sensitivity of a young feminine
mind. No one more than Miss Austen has captivated the roarers among
men. A man admires, say, Conrad. He--if he is a manly man--falls in
love with Jane Austen. Very well.
Now, then, it is a curious and a paradoxical thing that no man of
masculine character can read the novels written by women to-day, unless
he has to; that is, unless he is a book-reviewer, publisher's reader,
magazine editor, proofreader, or some such thing. And the reason he
can't do it, in view of George Moore's idea and Miss Austen's renowned
magnetism, is curious indeed. It is because of the peculiarly feminine
attitude of mind of our present women-novelists. At least, this is the
arresting pronouncement delivered with much robust eloquence by my
leonine friend, Colonel Bludgeon.
The present writer (a pale, spectacled, middle-aged young man) is too
conscious of the wondrous nature of women to question their ability in
anything. But of one of whom he stands in greater awe than of anything
else in the world he is a humble friend. The dictum of this my friend
comes from a quite different character than myself. He is a great man;
he has read everything; seen everything; known everybody. Exception to
him could be taken only on one ground. He is perfectly awful. He
belongs to an old school; splenetic, choleric. He is
Sir-Anthony-Absolute-like; a critic in the spirit of the thundering
days of William Ernest Henley. His face is like a beefsteak. His
frame is like "a mountain walking." His voice, Johnsonian. He knows
more about literature than probably any other living man.
"No, sir," he rumbled, "you cannot find to-day a cigar-smoking animal"
(though the Colonel is so erudite a man, his language is terrible) "who
could be lured into the pages of our women novelists without
snorts--snorts, sir--of disgust, or bellows of derisive mirth. Why?
Because these pages no longer contain an acute transcript of life as
only a sensitive feminine mind would have the cunning to observe it,
and of a form of human life in itself highly feminine in its character,
but they now present a singularly insular travesty of man, an
unconscious caricature of man as he could only appear to a feminine
mind bound by the romantic limitations of sex, a mind, that is, devoid
of masculine understanding, unable to recognise by virtue of
affiliation of instinct that which is fine in the male character and
that which is false to type.
"Sir," continued the Colonel, "these pictures are coloured, on one
hand, by ludicrous prejudice against masculine qualities which the
feminine nature temperamentally feels to be antagonistic, or dangerous,
to itself; and, on the other hand, by sentimental worship of masculine
attributes conceived to be desirable complements to the frailty of
women. This amusing view of man springs not only from the element of
sex, as I have said, but from the very marrow of sex. We do not get
from the contemporary authoress creative literature at all; that is, a
disinterested criticism of mankind; we get in each picture of a male
character her instinctive, and intensely interested, feeling as to
whether or not he is a man whom it would be desirable, and safe, for a
young woman to marry. Paradoxically enough, it would seem that women
have less and less knowledge of the world as they have contrived to see
more of it; that as they have become more emancipated in liberty of
action they have become more clannish in thought; and that as the range
of their opportunities has widened and their interests have multiplied,
their concern with the most elemental female instinct, their
preoccupation with their immemorial business of the chase, has but
intensified. By word of mouth the modern woman tells us that in her
practical and intellectual capacities she has advanced far beyond her
sisters of an earlier day; we chance to look into that pool of fiction
wherein she mirrors her heart, and we find her the same self-centred
huntress as of yore.