VII
I Start Home, with a Stopover at London
The gentleman at the American Embassy, which I visited late yesterday afternoon, spake truth when he said it was some job to get away from this place.
“If you want to leave on Sunday,” quoth he, “you’ll have to rise early Saturday and keep going all day. See our consul first thing in the morning, and he’ll tell you all you have to do.”
So I saw our consul first thing this morning. In fact, I beat him to his office. When he came in he was cordial and unsuspicious, rare qualities in a consul. He stamped my passport “Bon pour se rendre en Amérique par Grande Bretagne” and a great deal more.
“Now,” he said, “you’ll have to be viséed by the préfet de police and approved by the British Military Control. I don’t know in what order. They change it every two or three days to keep you guessing.”
I chose the British Control first and, of course, was wrong. But it took an hour to find this out.
There was a big crowd of us, and we were all given numbers, as in a barber shop of a Saturday night. But the resemblance to the barber shop ceased with the giving, for they called us regardless of number. A guinea sitting next to me was 42 and I was 18. He preceded me into the sanctum. And I got there ahead of No. 12, a British matron.
My session was brief.
“The police visé must come first,” said the officer in charge.
Monsieur le Préfet has his office conveniently located about eight miles away from the Control, over the river. And he’s on the fourth floor of a building constructed before the invention of the elevator. From behind an untrimmed hedge of black whiskers he questioned me as to my forebears, musical tastes and baseball preferences. Then he retired into chambers and presently issued forth with my passport, on which his stamp had been added to the beautiful collection already there. It says I’m Bon for a trip to Amérique par Angleterre, so I don’t know whether I’m to go that way or through Grande Bretagne.
Thence back to Rue Napoléon Lajoie, and another long wait.
“Yes,” said the officer when my turn came again, “the visé is all right, but where is your steamship ticket? You’ll have to show that before we can pass you.”
In order to show it I had to go and buy it, and in order to buy it I had to scare up some money, which is no mere child’s play in Gay Paree these days. I called on four people before I found one who was touchable. With what he grudgingly forked over I hastened to the booking office and felt at home there, it being on Rue Scribe. There was a customer ahead of me—our president’s youngest son-in-law.
“Do you know who that was?” said the agent excitedly when the young man had departed.
“Yes,” I replied, “but we don’t speak to each other.”
“Now,” said the agent, “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you a few questions. It’s annoying, I know, but it’s the wartime rule.”
“Shoot,” I told him. “I’m thoroughly used to being annoyed.”
He ran through the familiar list and saved a new one for the windup.
“Why are you going to America?”
I could have spent an entire week replying to that, but even minutes were precious.
“Because it’s where I live,” proved satisfactory.
He apologized again for having to propound the queries, which shows he must be new on the job. The rest of them don’t care whether you like it or not. I signed six or seven pledges, gave over the bulk of my borrowed fortune, and set out again with my ticket for the Rue Jacques Johnson. I got there just in time, for they close early on Saturday. Other days the poor devils have to work right through from ten to four.
The officer also wanted to know why I was going to America. And he asked me at what hotel I would stop in London. I told him I’d never been there and knew nothing about the hotels.
“You must make a choice,” he said. “We have to know your address.”
“Is there one called the Savoy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s say the Savoy.”
“All right. You’re to stay there, then, while you’re in London, and you’re to leave England on this ship Wednesday night. Otherwise you may have trouble.”
I’ll be surprised if I don’t anyhow.
He decorated my passport with a heliotrope inscription, naming the port from which I’m to depart from France, the hotel in London, and my good ship, and sent me into the next room, where a vice-consul confirmed the military visé and relieved me of two francs.
The train leaves at seven tomorrow morning, and between now and then I have only to pack and to settle with the hotel. The former chore will be easy, for I possess just half as much personal property as when I came. Parisian laundries have commandeered the rest.
With tear-dimmed eyes, I said farewell to Paris yesterday morning at the unearthly hour of seven. There was not even a gendarme on hand to see me off.
The trip from Paris to England is arranged with the customary French passion for convenience. They get you out of bed at five to catch the train, which arrives in the port at noon. The Channel boat leaves port at ten o’clock at night, giving you ten solid hours in which to think. Not ten either, for the last two are consumed in waiting for your turn to be examined by the customs and viséed by the Authorities du Exit.
Customs examination in this case is a pure waste of time. The gentleman only wants to know whether you are trying to smuggle any gold money out of France. I’d like to see the departing guest who has any kind of money left to smuggle.
The Authorities du Exit are seven in number. They sit round a table, and you pass from one to the other until something has been done to you by each. One feels your pulse, another looks at your tongue, a third reads your passport right side up, a fourth reads it upside down, a fifth compares you with your photograph, a sixth inspects your visés for physical defects, and the seventh tries to throw a scare into you.
I got by the first six easily. No. 7 read both sides of the passport and then asked by whom I was employed. I told him.
“Where are your credentials?” he demanded.
“What do you mean, credentials?”
“You must have a letter from the magazine, showing that it employs you.”
“You’re mistaken. I have no such letter.”
He looked very cross. But there were others left to scare, so he couldn’t waste much time on me.
“I’ll pass you,” he said, “but if you come back to France again, you can’t leave.”
He and I should both worry.
But it does seem pathetic that the written and stamped approval, in all colors of the rainbow, of the Paris chief of police, the American consul, the British Military Control, the British consul, the French consul in New York, and nearly everybody else in the world, including our own Secretary of State, sufficeth not to convince a minor-league official that an innocent native of Niles, Michigan, isn’t related by marriage to the Hohenzollerns.
On the dark deck of our Channel boat I had a ’strawnary experience. A British colonel to whom I had not been introduced spoke to me. He wanted a light from my cigarette. And when I had given it to him he didn’t move away, but stayed right there and kept on talking.
“This is my first leave,” he said (but in his own tongue), “since last March. Last year we were let off ten days every three months. Now we get twenty days a year.”
“In 1918,” said I, for something to say, “you’ll probably have no vacation at all.”
“In 1918,” he replied confidently, “I believe we’ll get three hundred and sixty-five days.”
We settled the war in about half an hour. Then he asked me to join him in a Scotch and soda. I was too gentlemanly to refuse. The bar, we ascertained, was closed. But we might find something in the dining-room. We did, but to make it legal we had to order biscuits, alias crackers, with the beverage. We didn’t have to eat them, though. They looked to be in their dotage, like the permanent sandwiches which serve a similar purpose in certain blue-law cities of Les Etats Unis.
We settled the war all over again, and retired, the colonel politely expressing the hope that we would meet for breakfast.
The hope was not realized. I was through and out on deck by the time we docked at the British port, which was about six o’clock this morning.
No one was permitted to leave the ship till the customs officials and alien officers reported for duty, two hours later. Then we were unloaded and herded into a waiting-room, where an usher seated us. Another usher picked us out, four at a time, for examination, using a system of arbitrary selective draft. Mine was a mixed quartet, three gents and a female.
An officer looked at our passports and recorded details of them in a large book. Another officer ran the gamut of queries. And here I got into a little mess by telling the truth. When he asked me what countries I had visited, I told him France and added “Oh, yes, and for one day Belgium.” He marked this fact on a slip of paper and sent me to the next room. The slip of paper was there ahead of me and I was once more a suspect.
The young lady of our quartet, a French girl, was getting hers, and there was nothing for me to do but listen. She had a letter from her mother to a friend in England. The mother, it seems, had expected to come along, but had decided to wait three weeks, “till the submarine warfare is over.” The officers were very curious to know where the mother had picked up that interesting dope. The young lady couldn’t tell them. Well, she would not be permitted to leave town till an investigation had been made. She was led back into the waiting-room and may be there yet for all I can say.
It was my turn.
“Are you an American?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long ago were you in Belgium?”
“About ten days ago.”
“You told our officer outside that you had been in Paris five weeks.”
“I told him Paris had been my headquarters and I’d made frequent trips in and out.”
“How did you get to Belgium?”
“In an automobile.”
“An automobile!”
“Yes, sir.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was being the guest of your army.”
A great light dawned upon them.
“Oh!” said one, smiling. “He means he was behind our lines, not theirs.”
“I should hope so,” said I.
“We’re sorry to have misunderstood, sir,” said the other, and I was escorted into the baggage-room. There my sordid belongings were perfunctorily examined, the official not even troubling to open my typewriter case nor a large ungainly package containing a toy for certain parties back home.
It was eleven o’clock when the examinations were all over and we entrained for this town. I got off at Waterloo and asked a taxi to take me to the Savoy. It did and it drove on the left side of all the streets en route. I’m still quaking.
This morning I had my first experience with an English telephone. I asked the hotel’s operator to get me the office of Mr. O’Flaherty, the American correspondent I had met at the British front. In a few moments she rang back.
“Are you there?” she said, that being London for “Hello.”
“Here’s your number, then. Carry on,” she said.
But carrying on was not so easy. There is a steel spring on the combination transmitter-receiver which you must hold down while you talk. I kept forgetting it. Also I kept being electrically shocked. But in the course of half an hour, with the operator’s assistance, I managed to convey to the gentleman an invitation to call.
He came, and we started for the Bow Street police station, where every visitor has to register within twenty-four hours of his arrival. On the way we met Lew Payne, the actor, and Gene Corri, racing man and box-fight referee. Gene has friends among the bobbies, and I was put through in record time. They told me I’d have to go to the American consul for a visé and then come back for a second registration with the police. Mr. O’Flaherty opined that these jobs should be attended to at once, as my boat train was supposed to leave at nine tomorrow morning. Mr. Payne had a better idea.
“Let’s telephone the steamship office,” he said, “and find out whether your ship is really going to sail on schedule. They usually don’t these days.”
Mr. O’Flaherty did the telephoning, and, sure enough, the blamed thing’s been postponed till Saturday night.
They asked me what I wanted to do next, and I said I’d like to pay my respects to George and Mary. But I hadn’t let them know I was coming and they’re both out of town.
We went to Murray’s (pronounced Mowrey’s) Club for lunch, though no one in the party was a member and you have to sign checks to get anything. Unlike most clubs, however, you pay cash simultaneously with signing the check, so we weren’t cheating. I signed “Charles Chaplin” to one check and it went unchallenged.
Gene’s two sons are in the British army, and the conversation was confined to them. I was told they were the best two sons a man ever had, but I knew better.
Murray’s Club’s orchestra is jazz and it gave Mr. O’Flaherty and me an acute attack of homesickness.
From there we rode to the National Sporting Club, of which Mr. Corri is king. He asked me to put on the gloves with him, but I’m not one of the kind that picks on people five or six times my age.
On Mr. Payne’s advice, Mr. O’Flaherty and I purchased seats for a show called Seven Day’s Leave, and that’s where we’ve been tonight, we and another scribe, Mr. Miller of Dowagiac, Michigan, which, as everyone knows, is a suburb of Niles.
The show is a melodrama with so many plots that the author forgot to unravel two or three hundred of them. Of the fifteen characters, one is the hero and the rest are German spies, male and female. The hero is a British officer. Everybody wanted to kill him, and so far as I could see there was nothing to prevent. But he was still alive when the final curtain fell. The actors made all their speeches directly to the audience, and many of them (the speeches) were in the soliloquy form ruled off the American stage several years ago.
In the last act the hero pretends to be blotto (British for spiflicated), so that, while he is apparently dead to the world, he can eavesdrop on a dialogue between two of the boche plotters and obtain information invaluable to England. The boches were completely deceived, which is more than can be said of the audience.
Took a walk past Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace and found they looked just like their postcard pictures.
It’s almost as bad crossing streets here as in Paris. The taxis don’t go as fast, but their habit of sticking to the left side keeps an American on what are known as tenterhooks.
Mr. O’Flaherty loomed up at noon and guided me to the office of a friend with money. This rara avis honored a check on an American bank, and now I think there’s enough cash on hand to see me through. The only trouble is that my education in English money has been neglected and I don’t know when I’m being short-changed. Constantly, I presume.
Living conditions here have it on those in Paris. There are no meatless days, and a hot bath is always available. The town is dark at night, but it’s said to be not for the purpose of saving fuel, but as a measure of protection against air raids.
One of those things was staged last week and a bomb fell uncomfortably close to ye hotel. The dent it made in Mother Earth is clearly visible to the naked eye. I trust the bombers take every other week off. At dinner we met two American naval officers—a captain from Baltimore and a lieutenant from Rockford, which is in Illinois. What they told us was the most interesting stuff I’ve heard yet. But, like all interesting stuff, it’s forbidden to write it.
The American naval officers took me to luncheon. After luncheon I went to the American consul’s where I was viséed. Thence to the Bow Street station for final registration.
This evening to The Boy, a musical play which could use some of the plot so prodigally expended in Seven Days’ Leave. But the music isn’t bad.
The naval officers and three of us holdup men had a bitter argument over the respective merits of Baltimore, Dowagiac, Rockford, Niles, and What Cheer, Iowa, of which Mr. O’Flaherty is a native, and, so far as I know, the only one. It was finally voted to award What Cheer first prize for beauty of name, Dowagiac for handsome young men, Niles for scenic grandeur, Rockford for social gaieties, and Baltimore for tunnels.
I wanted to do some work, but the rest of the crowd seemed to think my room was open house for the balance of the day, and here they stuck despite all efforts to oust them.
Tonight it was Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s Theater. You have to keep going to theaters in London. They’re the only places that are lit up.
Chu Chin Chow is a musical comedy based on The Forty Thieves, and the music, according to our unanimous opinion, is the best since The Merry Widow. I seem to have resigned as war correspondent to accept a position as dramatic critic. But, as Mr. O’Flaherty says, there’s nothing to write about the war, and what you do write the censors massacre.
Our ship still thinks it’s going to sail tomorrow night, and the train leaves at nine-thirty in the morning. I am to be convoyed to port by the captain and the lieutenant, whose holiday is over.
We’re anchored in the middle of the river and have no apparent intention of moving tonight. And everybody’s out of cigarettes, and it’s illegal to sell them while we’re in bond, whatever that may mean. But I guess I’d rather be in it than in a spy’s cell, which seemed to be my destination at one time today.
The United States naval gentlemen were down at the train early and commandeered the best compartment on it. They had saved a seat for me and an extra one on general principles. This was awarded to Mr. Hanson, one of the active members of the French Line conspiracy which caused my arrest in Bordeaux. I hope he’s seasick all the way home.
On the trip up from London we scored a decisive verbal victory over the submarines and formulated the terms of peace. Captain Baltimore and Lieutenant Rockford said farewell at the Liverpool dock and started for wherever they were going. We found seats in the inspection room and waited. Mr. Hanson grew impatient at length. He flashed his passport, a diplomatic one, on the usher and was sent through in a hurry. Not so with this well-known suspect. I was among the last to be called. My passport, strangely enough, was approved, but the baggage examination was yet to come.
I found my four pieces—two containers of clothes and such, a typewriter, and the ungainly toy—and had them hoisted on to the inspection counter. The most curious man I ever knew went at them.
The typewriter came first.
“What is this?” he asked when he had opened the case.
“A typewriter.”
“Where did you buy it?”
“In Chicago.”
“What do you use it for?”
“For typewriting.”
“Typewriting what?”
“Stuff for newspapers and magazines.”
“Pretty handy, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Have you written any articles over here?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
“Some are in America by this time; others are in the censors’ hands.”
He wanted to know what publications I was connected with, and I told him. He allowed me to close up the typewriter case, and next launched an offensive against a young trunk. He examined my collars one by one and found them all the same size. He came upon a package containing five or six hundred sheets of blank copy paper. He inspected every sheet, holding many of them up to the light. He gave individual attention to each of the few bits of lingerie the Parisians had not considered worth keeping. He exhibited an amazing interest in my other suit. He fondled a beautiful gray sweater for fully five minutes. He went through a copy of the Chu Chin Chow score, page by page. I wondered he didn’t sing it. Holding out only the blank paper, he repacked, and tackled the suitcase.
He counted the bristles in the toothbrush. He found two French dictionaries and a French grammar and studied them for approximately one semester. He opened a nest of shirts and handkerchiefs and spread them out for a thorough review. I should hate to be a clerk in a gents’ furnishing store and have him wished on me as a customer.
In the lower southeast corner he discovered an unopened box of shaving cream. As everyone knows, this commodity comes in a tube, which is wrapped in transparent paper, and the tube, thus wrapped, is contained in a pasteboard box for protection or something. Old Curiosity opened the box and extracted the tube. He gazed at it through the wrapper, then removed the wrapper and stared at the nude tube.
“Where is this made?” he asked.
“In America. It comes out like a ribbon and lies flat on the brush.”
Without comment, he reclothed the tube as well as he could in its mutilated wrapper, put it back in its box, and repacked the suitcase and shut it.
“Is that all you have?” he inquired.
“No,” I said. “There’s that big square package containing a toy.”
Now about this toy. It’s a complete but ridiculously impractical system of trenches. French soldiers of leaden composition are resisting a boche attack. Some are supposed to be throwing bombs. Others are fighting with bayonets. A few are busy with the trench guns. There are threads to represent barbed-wire entanglements and a few Huns enmeshed in them. Other Huns are prone, the victims of the sturdy poilu defense.
The package had been opened for private exhibition purposes in London, and as I am an awful washout (British slang) at doing up bundles, I had left the job to a chambermaid, who had discarded the Parisian wrapping paper and used some on which no firm name appeared.
Well, Mr. Question Mark now laboriously untied the cord, took off the paper and the cover of the box, and exposed the toy to the public and official view. Instantly two British officers, whom we shall call General Bone and Major Thick, flitted up to the counter and peered at the damning evidence.
“What is this gentleman’s name?” asked the general.
He was told.
“When did you make this thing?” he demanded.
“I didn’t,” said I. “It was bought in a shop in Paris.”
“What shop?”
“You can’t expect a person to remember the name of a Parisian shop.”
“Where is the firm’s name on the paper?”
I explained that the original wrapper had been left in London.
“What is your business?” demanded the major.
“He’s a correspondent,” replied the inspector.
There ensued the old familiar cross-examination and the request for credentials I didn’t have. The major asked the inspector whether I was carrying any papers.
“These,” said the latter, and showed him the pile of blank copy sheets.
The major dived for it.
“It’s all blank paper,” said the inspector, and the major registered keen disappointment.
Next to my suitcase lay a bag belonging to a gentleman named Trotter, and on it was a Japanese hotel label. The general glimpsed it and turned on me. “When were you in Japan?” he asked.
I told him never.
“That piece isn’t his,” said the inspector. “It belongs to a Mr. Trotter.”
“His first name is Globe,” said I, but it was a wild pitch.
The major and the general had a whispered consultation. Then the former said: “Well, I guess he’s all right. Let him go.”
Some devil within me suggested that I say goodbye to them in German, which I learned in our high school. I cast him out, and here I am, aboard ship, sitting still in the middle of the river. But I don’t like being indefinitely bottled in bond and I appeal to you, Mr. Captain—
Take me somewhere west of Ireland where they know I’m not a spy,
Where nobody gazes at me with a cold, suspicious eye—
To the good old U.S.A.,
Where a gent can go his way
With no fear of being picked on forty thousand times a day.