An American's London

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AN AMERICANOS LONDON By LOUISE CLOSSER HALE

BY

LOUISE CLOSSER HALE

Chapter I New York

BUT I love him!"

This is no way to begin a travel book ; a traveling to England and a staying there in the cold of their adored spring. Yet it is this ciy which is driving me away from all the comforts of a country to one that is supposed to be suffering from the lack of them.

It is not my loving him that sends me off on combing January seas; frankly, if I were in love with ''him," whatever him he may be, I should not go away at all. I might pretend that I would, and advise others to do so, but when the time came I should hang around his club door, hoping for one more look at him. Oh, I know us!

Still — in the words of the English, whose shores I am about to visit^I am "fed up" with Cora's complaint. A girl with a name as sophisticated as hers ought to be able to take care of herself, and not get so deeply into the mire of love that she has to drop in every morning after my breakfast, and sometimes before breakfast (and axioms come hard before coffee), to ask me for a thought to hold on to that she might get through the day.

I always give her a th«)ught. I tell her, for instance, that a man who would ogle a strange

I woman over his fiancee's shoulder in a restaurant would cause her worse misery after she married him; that discovering him in these tricks now is a pure gift from — I said Venus, for Cora thinks she is a pagan, although a member of the Baptist Church.

**How fortunate that you are able to read him aright before it is too late," I console.

''Unghuh!" sniffs Cora.

''Now you know his base self, and when you find that a man is base his fascination must sooner or later become a poor, mean thing."

"That's right," gulps the advised.

"Then go through the day," I said, "with a singing of thanksgiving in your heart that soon you will be out of bondage to him."

It is always at the end of such thoughts for the day which I offer Cora that she pipes up with :

"But I love him!"

On this especial morning in January I was about to turn on her and shout out that I was sick of love — hers and everybody else's — that a woman of forty standing with reluctant feet which pointed toward fifty had found out ways to keep her interested other than listening for the door-bell, telephone, lettercarrier, and all such modern means which pleasantly torture us in the absence of the loved but distrusted one. This speech, if fiercely delivered, would probably break our friendship and I could then go happily out into the highways and byways of life, where, of course, I would find no evidence of hymeneal pursuits.

It is as well, perhaps, that the telephone-bell rang before I had an opportunity of cutting the Gordian knot following upon Cora's, "But I love him." She is not entirely a fool, and she might have asked why

I waited until I was my present age to hand out this sort of stuff — she is a slangy girl — why I had not preached this in my youth instead of taking up at fifteen with a very young man whom I so adored that I walked home from parties with my knees bent — that he could the more comfortably keep his arm in a horizontal position around my waist.

This would have been embarrassing, for I would have had no adequate reply beyond untruthfully regretting that wisdom had not come to me earUer in life — at which Cora would have sniffed.

However, Clotho, Atropos, Lachesis, or whichever of the Three Fates had my case in charge, rang the telephone-bell, and as we were in my room Cora did not plunge for the receiver.

The message was the answer to my prayer for surcease from love — snappy over the wire — one, two, three, four, five words: ''Want to go to London?" vibrated at me.

I could then and there have put down the receiver and said to Cora, "I am offered a job by a theatrical manager to go to London to play," and if she had asked why it mightn't have been a publisher sending me across to do a book I would have replied that a publisher, or his representative, took infinite leisure over such arrangements. He enjoys (appears to enjoy) the preliminaries, and probably charges them to the firm. After an exchange of courtesies he would have suggested that if I had any time for tea, or if not tea, for lunch at the Brevoort, it would be very pleasant, as he hadn't seen me for a long time. If the firm was vei:y business-like he might end up with some such definite offer as, "Are you fond of transatlantic travel in January?"

My reply over the telephone was not that of the Complete Actress, who would immediately have responded, "Yes," and then regretted that she had not shown more indifference with a view to raising her salary. My life had become tinged with a writer's reserve, or at least with a reserve of one who tries to write and who, so far as the printed word measures a writer, has succeeded beyond her own wildest expectations. I never see a book of mine without wondering how ever I could have managed it! Still, playing in London would mean an escape from the Coras of life, and I admitted that I should like to talk it over. And at this there was no intimation of food to be offered me at any time. I was just to come over to the office immediately and "walk right through." They mean business when you "walk right through."

Business for me, but not for those anxious ones gathered in the waiting-room through whom you walk — over whom you walk — your entrance into the inner office meaning the exit of all those of your type who stand without the gate.

"Many are called, but few are chosen," cried one of my shabby contemporaries. She nodded cheerfully, but I knew the bitterness of her cup. I have tasted of it myself.

The sight of those men and women — waiting — waiting — never ceases to appal me. For years I was one of those who gather in the outer offices, and when I am an older woman I may be one of those again. "Learn a trade!" I want to cry to those waiting women. "Sew, tat, cook, write bad stories, but develop some other means of making money, however

slight. Don't go through life feeling that your bread and butter depends solely upon the favor of the theatrical office-boy."

But they will not learn a trade, and they furbish up their finery and each morning make the weary round of managerial offices. We of the theater know the tragedy of Broadway. I wonder the visitor to New York can find a charm in that wide, sparkling street. Must they not hear the footfalls of those many thousands on the treadmill — does not the weight of heavy hearts unconsciously make sightseeing a burden? It doesn't seem so. The buses for the strangers trundle their freight, the barker calls through the megaphone, "This is the Rial to where the actresses walk up and down." The visitors laugh — and stare at us in search of work.

When I had ** walked right through" I was in another office — not yet the "holy of holies," but one full of those who had also been invited to share my privilege or who, with more courage than the other waiting ones, had pushed their way in and were keeping their eye on the closed door where undoubtedly sat some splendid god. Typists were rattling madly on their machines, the office-boy (with two sets of manners, one for the outer and one for the inner rooms) ran about accomplishing nothing; various attaches of different theaters tore around in the squirrel-cage, and the whole effect of "big business" served to reduce the timid artist to an insignificant creature which the manager could do entirely without.

Indeed, if the sensitive player does not stop to analyze this senseless confusion, he begins to feel that not only can they do without him, but without all artists — that plays can be freely acted by the managers, the stenographers, and the bill-posters, and unless they cut their salaries immediately this new order of things will be put through. For these moments before the Zero Hour it may be well to bear in mind that the playhouse would go on if the actor wrote his own plays, sold his own tickets, beat his own drum, painted his own scenery, and rang his curtain up and down himself. Every element that goes to make up a production can be dispensed with except the actor himself. And he would not be without an audience, for, while all the appendages of the present-day performance were in the earliest periods of history entirely lacking, the mimic art was — somehow or other — expressed to a public seeking this form of diversion.

I wondered — to give myself courage, no doubt — how long certain theatrical firms, who are looked upon by the little unbusiness-like people with whom they traffic as marvels of astuteness, would last if competing in Wall Street against the able minds of those large, quiet, courteous offices. I maintain they would find themselves entangled in the clauses of the first contract drawn up by the Wall Street gentlemen, caught by little cunning traps such as they had never thought to set for the simple-minded player. Since they do business largely with men and women who couldn't learn Double Entry in a lifetime, they are acknowledged by us to be masters of high finance. No one has found them out — but me^ — and if they read this I am lost! Yet they will not read it — there is no possibility of a play in this rambling discussion upon English life from which I seem at present far removed.

Once beyond the door where the god sits the amenities of life are resumed. Hands are shaken, a chair is offered, a baby photograph is displayed, soUcitude on my part is shown for the welfare of wives. He is not a god at all, but a very decent sort of a fellow, and I wonder why I was making incendiary speeches against the whole regime a few moments ago. Managerial charm is creeping over me. Moreover, as one becomes a part of that management, and about to play under it, one becomes partizan to their cause.

I hope I am going to be strong when "Now, as to salary," begins. But I feel I am not going to be — that it would not be pally to ask for too much. We are now pals. Besides, I want to go to London. That is the worst of the actor. What he wants to do is always overcoming what he ought to do, and he gi'ows so bored with business technicalities that he will sign anything. It was after I had shaken hands again and gone out that the arguments I should have advanced came limping up like a delayed relief party : the cost of high living, the income tax, the cold of English theaters, and, perhaps, the loneliness.

I returned to the little room in my club and looked about me. Well, he had said one thing truly, and gently, ''You have nothing now to keep you over here." No, nothing to keep me over here or over there, nor the necessity of anything in life but a branch to ^erch upon. ^^ Sur la Branche'' indeed. In a passion of abnegation which has brought me more pleasure than discomfort, my home is let to strangers while I have worked for the war. They are kind strangers who speak of the happy spirits which seem to penetrate the rooms. Two spirits. Let the gentle wraiths stay on in those sunny rooms, but the body of one must go about the earth for a little

2 7 while longer and find a reason for enduring. Not only a reason, but a joy in enduring. Once when I was young I wrote, ''There is nothing sadder than a full moon shining upon a spinster." That was wrong: one must learn to love the moon for its own beauty, not for the young man it is shining upon. I expect some spinsters have found that out, but I am sure they had to work for it.

Still, when once grasped, the moon will not go back on us — which the young man is apt to do at any moment. Cora's orbit this month will be very pale and largely eclipsed by her woe. She will find some, later, beautifully soft and mellow, and again they will fail her because "he" is not there. But there is one thing I am certain of: my man must be in the moon — no nearer — for real complacency. That attribute is not for the young, but I find it an easy word, like old slippers when we come home from the dance. I claim it for the woman of forty — we have got to have something all our own!

My name was cabled to England to see if the war-time powers approved of it, and Britain roared no protest. Yet, ere I went down to that grim finality, the Passport Building, I found my feet straying automatically to the office of my War Relief. Strange, how in eighteen months a sense of obligation greater than any mere necessity of earning your living comes to one! In my small partitioned office I gazed reflectively at the desk-chair in which I had so often writhed with uncertainty. Fear for my imperfect judgment! Fear for improper administration of the offerings of others! Fear that I could not appear with dignity in meeting my appointments for the day!

Trying to inject into my work a love for it suflScient

s to make up for my shortcomings; trying, above all things, to keep in mind the men for whom we were working that we might not swamp their dear interests in proud executive accomplishment.

Invention during this period had left me. Only lame stories came from my pen in those few leisure hours I had for writing. The wolf, having no door of mine to howl outside of, followed me in the streets snapping at my heels. Yet I could not lay down my unremunerative occupation had not this departure been encouraged, insisted upon by those with whom I worked. The fingers of war had clutched me by the tliroat and I had grown accustomed to them. I found in them a sustaining force, and some other than myself must loosen their fierce grip.

Chapter II New York

I HAD begun to get my digestion out of order with positively my last farewell dinner before my passport came.

It is hard to tell why you feel distinctly embarrassed when the usual ten days have elapsed and this certificate of a decent life has not arrived. You put on a jesting air when your friends question you and tell them, ''You don't want it generally known, but you're a German." Away down in your heart you are wondering if the government has found out anything about you, or your family, that you didn't know yourself — or any mild escapade that you had known, but had never told a soul. You cut across the street to avoid members of the company who have already received their little green books. They have a smug, settled look which is irritating. You stare at boots in a window, wavering in your intention to buy an extra pair for England. Some one has sent you a steamer-rug, when you get home, and its stern, rectangular plaids are looking you squarely in the face. "Do I return to Scotland or do I not?" it asks. Toward the end the management becomes anxious, calling up daily to ask for news. There is no evasion about a passport. You either have it or haven't it. It would be the only lie you would be sure to be caught in.

*' Funny!" grumbled the manager over the 'phone.

''AH of those with foreign blood got theirs immediately."

''Glad to get them out of the country," I replied, trying to be jaunty. "They want to keep me/"

"Yah!" He hung up. He didn't seem to care whether he kept me or not. I was wanting most awfully to go to London.

I had my passport by late evening. Goaded by the managerial "Yah," I called up Washington on the long-distance and flung myself upon the mercies of a delightful creature whom I would deem to be dehghtful even had he refused to assist me. There was no reason why he should put on his military cap and go over to the Passport Office "for such a worm as I." There was no reason why he should feel kindly toward me. A crowd had laughed at him and I had occasioned it. A fortnight before he had come up from Washington to a private showing of a moving picture in one of those down-town buildings where little projecting-rooms, all along in a row, are rented for such occasions. I nabbed him as he came along the public hall, for in my pride over my own War Relief featurefiJm, it never occurred to me that he could come a distance to see any other. The picture was being run and he stoopingly made his way through the darkness to a front seat. Our story unreeled itself. Our greatest American stage director appeared upon the screen. His priest-like mien and recognized white collar received a fine burst of applause. Upon the white sheet he was directing a drama within a drama.

The major peered at me through the blackness. His voice traveled. "Ai'e these the Armenian atrocities?" he timidly asked.

Yet, even after that, over a clear wire came the answer from him that my passport had been snowed under and was now shoveled out and on its registered, controlled way. At the instigation of my management, now thoroughly humbled, I was then besought to ask of him a search for the remaining reluctant permit of the company. And this was accomplished. One would think that a man entering upon official life would put a cheerful sign over his door, ''I am without friends," and pursue his duties with comparative ease. Yet I notice that it is the busiest men who are most importuned and who find time — make time — for kindnesses. A member of the Morgan firm will write a letter of recommendation for an eighteendollar-a-week stenographer, but such a request will lie unnoticed on the desk of a woman who has no pursuit but that of getting through the day.

Sometimes she neither writes nor reads. Recently in a fashionable hotel I saw two well-clad women renew an old friendship. ''I wrote you three weeks ago," reproached one.

*'0h my goodness! Did you? I open my letters only about once a month," the other actually explained.

The friendship was not getting along very well when I left them.

Now the passport is here, the British consul has approved it and I have sat in a row with soiled Greeks at the Custom House, waiting for my dock-pass. And all of a sudden I don't want to go to London!

Why must one seek strange adventures in illheated lands when one can sit by the steam-radiator and reflect comfortably upon more enlivening experiences that have passed! What is memory for if

not to spare us the physical effort of new exploits?

Why the mind's eye if not to fill it with past visions? Countless pleasant happenings can be recalled; there was the season you made the hit in that light comedy — it was a splendid year — your clothes fitted you, and you always just caught a car and never just missed them. It was spring, too. There was that young man ('way, 'way back, of course) who wanted to die for you — but was persuaded not to. There was the one you reformed, and who never drinks heavily even to this day without speaking freely to everybody on the street of your goodness. There was the year you sold eveiything you wrote. And could not lunch without magazine editors, because you had enough work, anyway ! For me there were many lands already visited to reflect upon: glittering Tunis, Taormina faint with beauty, soft Tuscany, the Tyrol and its good cofTee, grim Spain, the white roads of France, the singing birds of the Old Dominion, the drooping elms of New England, the vast quiet of the Grand Canon.

I settled down in my chair — deep down for deeper thought. Why had I not appreciated before this great heritage! When it seemed for a time that my life was dismembered I had figured myself poor in any kind of goods from which one could derive profit. It had come to me as curious that more had not been translated from those wide travels into a definite moneyed crystallization. With us two we saw a country and paid for the seeing. I had thought from time to time we paid a great deal for all we saw. I had been left without the protection which money can buy, and once or twice in my enforced elimination of the few luxuries which myself and one other had shared, I felt unshielded from the world.

Now, in my small rented room, philosophizing from the depths of my chair, I could have clapped my hands with joy at my discovery. I was the richest of women. Provision had been made by these happy wanderings for a life of luxiuy for my inner self. I would never be poor or lonesome — nor would the mental retina be empty of pictures. It was the greatest of all dowering. The daily meals for the physical creature were the slight instances of life which I knew could always be managed. I breathed happily. I would not go to London. I would stay at home and rest. And begin reflecting to-night — upon that jaunt in the Pyrenees, perhaps. Then to-morrow night —

The sudden bounding into mechanical life of many engines in the street below brought me to a realization of other motor-cars than a small ghost roadster which wound around far mountains. I arose and looked down upon the oblong, shining limousinetops — new roof-trees for the traveling rich. Far up the street two of the theaters had flashed the electric signal to make ready; the engines labored and coughed, for the night was cold; some sank into rest again. The whir of the self-starters, with that irritating suggestion of chance response, brought hoots of derision from the chauffeurs. The cars in action wheeled out and ahead of those so retarded.

Husky-voiced, shabby men were now running along

the pavement and in and out among the cars, calling

their numbers in the hope of a chance quarter. It

was a method of livelihood pursued only from custom.

The figures ^hone out brightly from the electric

carriage-call over the theater. One wretch clung to

the running-board of a great machine. ''Get down,

you coke fiend !" yelled the driver. The wretch stepped down. He was too thoroughly a victim of cocaine even to curse.

I myself was contemptuous of him. He was of those who shrugged off realities to live the more easily among dreams. My brain made a little zigzag — quite tangible — I could have drawn its course with a pencil. He lived among dreams — a cowardly way of getting out, wasn't it, then, this dear dreaming? His physical life, starved for beauty, made an effort to create images of loveliness — we were not unlike.

There was a knock at the door and one of those women I love came in. Why do we love one friend more than another? This one was not beautiful and few thought her clever. She read but little. She was not industrious and slept late always. I think I love her because she is good, and her values of life are incomparable — and she acts beautifully. I love her because we were together when war was declared and when the armistice was signed, and were together over the death-bed of a friend. There was something about her those three times as though her soul had come out where her face generally was and her rugged features were all effaced. For she was very shiny and beautiful. Then, again, she leads a sedate life, as though she prefers it, but she once cried: ''Is there no man in this world who can care for me? I don't ask anything honorable of him — just that he will care for me!" But she never spoke like that again, and went on living dully, her clear understanding not impaired by rancor. Not hard on others who were loved. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why I care so much for her. Small reason I had to care for her that night if I was to pursue a cocainized future! You had a way of telling her things — possibly because she didn't come back at you with things of her own to tell. I unfolded my beautiful plan for future diversion on an earth that must be lonely.

She sat down firmly in a chair with her hands on her knees — not graceful at all — and spoke squarely at me :

''Something like a cow ruminating as it chews its cud."

"A cow?"

"Except that you can't count on the cud, or the fields in which to chew."

"There are pastures," with dignity, from me.

"Whose?"

"My friends have many acres."

"I wasn't brought up in metaphor. I suppose you mean flats, houses, or country places?"

"Well— yes."

"You'll be an acquisition to a dinner-party." She was undoubtedly sneering at me.

"Why not? I can share my experiences."

She yawned. "I know them — the 'has-beens.' 'When I was in Calcutta — the moonlight at Riverside with the golden fruit — once I saw Vesuvius in eruption — ' Great Scott!"

I spoke. "But don't you see my life is finished?"

Her laugh in a way was gratifying. "Do you remember that American woman in France who felt her life was over, and that she must give way for the younger generation for there was no more room for her in God's plan? So she moved to a little house in the Marne Valley. That was in July, 1914. Then the troops began coming through and she found in her enormous activities that God had just begun with her — the book publishers had just begun with her, too, incidentally. Small chance she has these days to ruminate, although cud is in plenty for her now and she doesn't have to borrow a pasture to chew in, either!"

The last motor went honking up the street, the thumping of my steam pipe prefaced its retirement. The night outside grew darker, for the illuminated signs were being flipped off by unseen hands, but the looms of the city, weaving the destiny of those four millions, went on. We never stop growing, never stop growing, never stop growing — old! I reflected.

She moved to the window — a step in m;^' congested quarters. ''Look at this black world. By some terrible privilege you and I were dumped down on earth in these awful times. They are not over yet; sometimes I get discouraged and think they have just begun. I believed when peace was virtually declared that immediately everything would shake down and we'd be comfortable once more — "

''I know," I interrupted. ''I even learned a verse to recite at parties; it is all about rest after peace. It runs: ' Oh, days of ease; oh, honeyed nights of sleep ! ' "

"'Honeyed nights of sleep!' Good God! I am worrying over that League of Nations so I can't close my eyes. Aren't they going to take in Russia?"

"Yes; aren't they?" I echoed, glad of the diversion from being scolded.

But she returned to her mouton and considered my

exclamation as a point for herself. "Now, you see!

Can you imagine two women at the witching hour of

midnight talking of such a subject — having such a

subject to talk about — two decades back? Thank the

Lord you weren't forty years of age sixty years ago

with nothing to do for amusement but jump through your hoop-skirts ! Yet in the midst of all this you want to borrow a cow-lot to lie down in and think about that grape-vine over the inn door at Poitiers."

"I'm awfully tired/' I muttered, feeling sorry for myself.

She was all for me immediately. ''Of course you are, but you are not old enough to stop. Nobody can stop now. There are too many things to be worked out. Here we are playing with a cut-up puzzle and but half the picture made."

''I'm not a world power. I can't meddle with their blamed jig-saw mess," I defended.

"I don't know what you are, and I don't know what I am, but I know every one of us must try our darnedest to finish the design. I don't suppose there is even a little three-cornered piece that it is up to you as an individual to fit in. It will be the whole world straining — a concerted effort — which will complete the picture." Her deep voice trembled, again something came out through her eyes, and she had not a face — just a starry look.