Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

The round-faced good humor of fat, bandy-legged Swinnerton was proverbial. He was not a cavalry officer. He was a medico, and the best surgeon in the service; yet the only place where his mere passing did not provoke a smile was the operating-pavilion of his own hospital. His thin tow hair was of the unbrushable variety. Smooth and wet it as he would, it stuck out at divers angles in every conceivable form of horn and quirk and curl from a head that was of the contour of a peeled onion. His blue eyes were round, his lips seemed pursed in a perennial effort to form the letter o, and his torso was nearly spherical, with all of which grotesquery no one in the world seemed more pleased than Swinnerton himself. For with the advantage of having his laugh well launched before he had uttered a word, he had acquired an easy reputation as one of the army’s “funny men,” a thing in which he took no little pride, until between the dawn and the dark of a single day it became for him a shirt of fire which, strive as he would, he could not cast away, and which came as near as the breadth of a man’s hand from being the end of him.

Apart from these the Sixteenth is a “married” regiment, and when orders dropped from a seemingly placid sky, sending the command to the Mexican border, fifteen hundred miles away, with two hours’ notice, no one took thought of how this might affect the officers of the bachelors’ mess, and least of all Swinnerton.

At the railroad spur, where three long troop-trains lay puffing amid a debris of ammunition- and ration-cases, forage-bales, saddles, and equipment; where a regiment of soldiers swarmed, tugging and heaving supplies upon the train, leading, cajoling, and forcing frightened troop-horses up the heavy ramps to the crowded stock-cars; where sergeants swore and fretted, and orderlies ran about with belated orders for the officers who were devoting the between-times of all this to saying good-by to more or less numerous families, no one had eyes for Swinnerton. And eyes that might have seen him would not have been believed. For, fancying himself hidden behind a pile of canvas-bales of medical supplies, he was holding the two hands of a gravely beautiful girl, gazing into her tear-dimmed eyes and telling her in a hoarse and earnest voice that there was no danger, anyway, that all this could not possibly mean war, and that if it did, he, as a non-combatant, would keep well to the rear and safely out of harm’s way; that partings made no difference, anyway, so long as he loved her and she loved him, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

The shock to the Sixteenth’s credulity would not have been altogether that Swinnerton was trying to cut a serious figure; it would have sprung from the fact that the hands he was holding were those of Mary Smith--_the_ Mary Smith, the regiment called her, because every youngster in the three-regiment post of Fort Robertson had vainly dreamed the dream that absurd little Swinnerton was here actually living, and which to him was no dream at all.

That night when the lights were on in the officers’ Pullman, the Incorrigibles were sitting in the smoking-compartment over a last pipe, and Fredericks said:

“No use talking, war or no war, these sudden trapesings to the antipodes are bad for family life--blamed bad, and I’m glad I’m not in it. Go to it, Swinney; but for Heaven’s sake don’t be irreverent. It’s no time for it.”

Swinnerton had puffed out his cheeks to abnormal rotundity. He did this near the point of a story or when he was excited. It served to heighten effects.

“I think I ought to tell you, fellows, first of all,” he began bluntly, “that I--I’m leaving my heart behind, too.”

Gallipoli burst into raucous laughter, and Fredericks chuckled expectantly. Swinnerton’s face contorted in puzzlement.

“Well,” he said aggressively, “what’s funny about that?”

“_You_ are, Swinney,” said Merton; “that’s all.”

“In the first place,” began Gallipoli, didactically, “you haven’t any heart in the ordinary romantic acceptation. One of your infernal explorative incisions would disclose a two-foot layer of healthy fat, and then”--he patted Swinnerton affectionately on the pudgy shoulder--“a core of pure gold, perhaps, and you would have to conclude that it was all heart; but that, unfortunately, is not the sort of anatomical monstrosity to offer a lady.”

Swinnerton shook him off.

“Be serious, can’t you?” he said. “I am.”

“Manifestly absurd,” grinned Merton. “Get your banjo and sing that song about the chap they hired to get into the cage with the lion. You know--the one with the beller in the chorus.”

“That’s better than your fourth-dimension joke,” urged Fredericks. “Go on.”

Swinnerton was experiencing what was rare with him, anger.

“Do you people imagine,” he asked, “that because a man goes about six days in the seven making a silly ass of himself for the happiness of humanity that he pines to be placed beyond the pale of all that is beautiful and wholesome in life? I _ask_ you.”

His round eyes snapped. His quirks of hair fairly trembled. Secretly the three were wary of Swinnerton. They feared some colossal hoax, some trap. The suspicion that he was serious did not come.

“Postulate one,” growled Merton, guardedly. “Grind out the logic. We do _not_ think this thing.”

“If a good woman is blind enough to intrust her heart to me, is there any reason why I, of all men, shouldn’t accept it?”

“I should say _not_,” chuckled Fredericks, pleased with the possibilities of his own idea, “not when you can offer her an existence which is a breathing enactment of all for which the Sunday supplements are read. ‘My dear, allow me to present my esteemed confrère of the colored page, _Dippy Dick_, Mrs. Swinnerton. And _this_ is _Little Nemo_.’”

The anger was leaving Swinnerton’s red face. These men did not believe him, and only because he was he. His twinkling eyes dulled, his round mouth straightened. He rose, and something in his drooping attitude arrested Fredericks.

“I was only going to say,” he began a little sadly, “that to you, of all the men I love to call my friends, I wished first to tell my great happiness. I am going to marry Mary Smith.” Indignation tinged his later words and indignation straightened his shoulders as he turned and walked with an unintended burlesque of dignity from the room. For Gallipoli had laughed again.

“What’s he trying to put over?” asked Fredericks, puzzled.

“Well, I don’t know,” confessed Merton, “but I think that even Swinney shouldn’t inject the names of ladies into his buffooneries.”

In his own berth, Swinnerton, fully dressed, sat rigidly staring at his hands, his face hard and expressionless. He was considering a new need that had come to him.

“Only for her,” he was saying, “I’d only ask it for her.” Then he added reflectively, “Only one person ever took me seriously; but she--” his face softened in a little smile--“will be my wife.”

* * * * *

The regiment, its twelve troops strung along the line like beads on a string, took station at Agua Caliente, on the Arizona border, and strove to prevent filibustering. Across the border the old Mexican city of Angeles lay steeped in the strong desert sunlight, a cascade of whitewashed cubicles glistening against a yellow hill, with the bell-shaped domes of the twin-towered cathedral sharply outlined against the turquoise sky above. The Mexican town was garrisoned by a battalion of half-starved, shoddily uniformed infantry, who eyed the big American troopers with envious wonder.

There were _bailes_ and fiestas in the American town, but Swinnerton did not attend them. Every one admitted the change in him. His room at headquarters contained a field cot, a table, and two chairs. On the table were a writing-pad and a framed photograph of the face of Mary Smith. Here he spent much of his time. He carried on conversations with the girl in the picture, and his half of them he wrote down in bulky letters that sometimes had to be rolled because no envelop would hold them--pleasant fancies of a future in which he built a dream palace and furnished it from keep to turret with imaginings. He received letters done in the same spirit, and thus he strove to find refuge from the self that was daily becoming more and more intolerable to him.

Swinnerton could sing. He had an unusually facile and sympathetic baritone voice, which he accompanied well on a guitar, and it was part of his panacea to sing in Spanish, some queer, immemorial folk-lilts, passionate with the throbbing _tempo di bolero_, that sometimes ended with a plaintive little wail at the inconstancy of a _caballero_ lover, and sometimes with an impudent staccato note, like a Sevillan dancer’s final step in a whirling _jota_. It was perfectly possible to stand in the corridor and imagine the singer, who was inspired by a remembered face, to be the most gorgeous _Escamillo_ that ever stepped gracefully toward an alluring _Carmen_--until the door opened. For there would stand Swinnerton, his fat face red and wet from exertion, his hair awry, his round rabbit’s eyes inquiring, and his pudgy little body partly covered by a Japanese crape kimono, and this would bring a smile.

It was this very sort of smile that Swinnerton had been pleased to see on the faces of people for thirty years, but that irked him sorely now. It meant that he was not taken seriously, and he shrank from offering to the pride of Mary Smith in him a thing so lightly held. He desired dignity; he yearned for it more passionately than he had ever longed for anything in his whole life before. It did not come, and nothing that he could do would bring it nearer. Swinnerton’s own smile became sad, and a little of this sadness seeped into his letters. Out of this grew something very like a misunderstanding, for it had been unconscious, and in far-away Fort Robertson Mary Smith sensed it and asked about it. It disappeared, but in its place came a strange, false little note of irrelevancy. There came to Swinnerton one day a vexed letter, and then for almost a week no letter at all.

The fire of insurrection was lapping up toward the border, and at Cananea, fifty miles away, Lopez was concentrating his ragamuffin battalions with ugly menace toward Angeles. Disquieting rumors were current on the American side, and one day the colonel, with his staff, was called to Huachuca, which left only Fredericks and Swinnerton to open the official mail. There were two bills and a wedding-invitation in Swinnerton’s sack, and only the daily bulletin of conditions along the border generally for the commanding officer. Fredericks opened this, and Swinnerton, the bills placed in his pocket, the wedding-invitation still in his hand, read it over Fredericks’s shoulder.

“GAZING INTO HER TEAR-DIMMED EYES AND TELLING HER ... THAT THERE WAS NO DANGER”

DRAWN BY H. T. DUNN]

“Information from reports of secret agents of the State and Treasury departments indicate a movement of Lopez forces toward Quebrantos smelter, five miles west of Agua Caliente--”

“Phew!” whistled Fredericks. “Getting warm. We’ll see a scrap yet, eh? Who’s getting married now, Swinney?”

The telegraph orderly had entered the corridor and stood saluting. Fredericks motioned him in and took the official despatch he proffered, while Swinnerton, with a swift insertion of his dexterous fingers, tore open the creamy envelop.

“Darned if I know. This thing came sandwiched between bills for other presents. I wish people would stop it.”

Fredericks was reading the loose scrawl of his telegram, and he heard nothing Swinnerton said. He left his chair with a suddenness that overturned it, and began yelling orders.

“Orderly, sound _to horse_! Whoop! Hurroo! It’s come, Swinney. Old Lopez and his pack of thieves have crossed the border. Hurry up, orderly!”

The trumpeter at the door glued his brass bugle to his lips and sounded the jumble of staccato notes that is the oldest of alarm-calls. The men had been forewarned. They were already swarming from their tents to the lines and saddle-racks. Fredericks turned to Swinnerton.

Poor little Swinnerton, his chubby cheeks had suddenly become flabby, his mouth hung loosely open. The square envelop had fallen to the floor; its engraved contents drooped from his fingers. Fredericks gripped him by the shoulder.

“For Heaven’s sake, what is it, Swinney? Are you sick? What is it, boy?”

Swinnerton turned a pained face, drawn in some spasm of expression that was intended for a smile.

“Devil of a funny joke, Fredericks. Best one that’s been pulled off on old fat Swinney yet. Read that, will you?”

Fredericks read:

“Mr. and Mrs. Charles Smith
request the honor of
your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Mary
to
Mr. Feldmar Brown.”

Outside, the troopers were leading into line, and a trumpeter was holding Fredericks’s impatient charger. Fredericks had only a moment. He seized his pistol and field-glasses, threw an affectionate arm across Swinnerton’s slouching shoulders, and hugged him fiercely. There was not a word that he could say.

* * * * *

Lopez’s raid across the border never occurred, but the false report of it accomplished its intended purpose. The town of Agua Caliente was stripped of its combatant garrison, and two hours after Fredericks had trotted away a lonely vaquero appeared at the crest of the hill back of Angeles, a Mexican picket fired, and was instantly answered by a sheet-like volley from the hidden rebel battle-line. It flashed through the wind-swept streets of Angeles, it knocked great sections from the adobe buildings, it ricochetted from the flagstones of the street, it shattered windows by the score; but most significant of all, it crossed the border-line, and every bullet found a resting-place in American soil. This was a contingency that no one had foreseen.

An American at the custom-house whirled, threw up his hands, and fell in an anguished heap. The halyards of the headquarters flag snapped, and the flag dropped loosely from its pulley to the ground. A bullet crashed through Swinnerton’s window and thudded in the wall behind him. He scarcely looked up. He was sitting before the photograph in his room, and talking to it, as was his custom.

“No, I don’t blame you. No one could, and least of all _I_. It was a fine thing I offered you. People may laugh at a fool, but to live with one! Tired--I’m tired of it myself.” After a full minute’s silence, he added, “Dog-tired--_pitifully_ tired.”

He rose wearily and walked toward the open window, whence he could see the long, supple slope of the tawny hillside, with the Mexican federal trenches cutting it diagonally on one flank, and the white smoke-puffs of the attackers on the other.

The mayor of Caliente came storming into the outer office, roaring at the abashed headquarters orderly:

“Where’s the commanding officer? Where is he, I say? What are you soldiers good for, anyway?”

Swinnerton quietly opened the door, to the immense relief of the trooper.

“The colonel’s gone to Huachuca,” he said, “and Captain Fredericks has taken the troop to Quebrantos under competent orders. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Do? Do? Why, those damned Greasers are firing _through this town_.” The mayor’s fingers spread as though dropping from them something not to be entertained for a moment.

“I have no military function, you know,” drawled Swinnerton; “I’m just a surgeon. And if I had, the orders are plain. We must not cross that line, whatever happens.”

“Drat your orders!” bellowed his Excellency, the mayor. A bullet came and smashed the door-lintel. It covered the mayor with a shower of dust and plaster. He ducked incontinently, and came up furious at Swinnerton’s vapid smile.

“I know _you, Doctor_ Swinnerton. You’re the regimental joker, the official fool. Gad! man, don’t you get sick of yourself? Doesn’t the sight of suffering humanity”--he waved his hand in an excited gesture that included a hurrying group of frightened non-combatants who were rushing a wounded man to shelter--“stir a spark of anger in you? Ain’t you weary of grinning and being grinned at? Ain’t you tired of it, I say?”

“Yes,” said Swinnerton, with unexpected decision, “I am tired. Get out of my way.” He walked deliberately through the door and out into the street, hatless and unarmed. The orderly at the door, a mere boy, followed him in his journey toward the plaza, to the custom-house door, and then to the line. Spiteful little dust-spots kicked up here and there in the open square, and a bullet whined close to the boy’s ear. Swinnerton turned and ordered him back.

“I ain’t goin’,” the soldier refused stolidly. “I’m a-goin’ to stay by you--an’ I know what orders is.”

Swinnerton seemed not disposed to argue the point. Perhaps he thought the hotter fire forward would drive the lad back. He walked unhesitatingly on. He did not stop at the federal trenches, though men and officers cheered him as he passed. But once he had clambered over the glacis, his and the boy’s were the only upright figures in a wide stretch of sloping, gravelly hillside. There was a sense of awful loneliness there for a moment; yet he did not hesitate.

His calm decision seemed, without qualification, good to Swinnerton. He expected to be killed. No one could look out across the bullet-spattered front and hope for less. The air was filled with gruesome sounds--the screams and whines and whistles of deflected rifle-balls. He did not yearn for the shot that would be the end, and yet he did not shrink from it. The very proximity of death caused nervous little shivers along his spine and in the pit of his stomach, but no regret. He was tired of disappointment, and glad to end it. There was an unavoidable trifle of revengeful school-boy thought, “They’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” and another that brought real pleasure, “There can never be any joke about _this_ thing I am doing.”

A gentle breeze was sweeping down the hill with the fire; it ruffled in his hair and cooled his temples. Yes, it was all pleasant, all good, all desirable. He had forgotten the boy who had so faithfully followed him.

Swinnerton was just enough to see the terrible selfishness of what he had done. A cry came from behind. The lad was down, writhing and clawing at the gravelly soil, a bullet through his intestines. Calmness and self-satisfaction left Swinnerton between two pulse-throbs, and as he knelt beside the soldier and examined the wound, anger came to him--anger with himself at first, and then a bullet covered them with trash and another seared Swinnerton’s forehead like a red-hot iron. The rebels were firing at them both. His blood flowed down into his eyes. Blinded with this and rage, he rose and ran forward. He was no doubt absurd, but he was not unterrifying, as with lumbering gait he stumbled and ran straight on to the very muzzles of the firing-line. If he was grotesque, it was with the grotesquery of the bizarre and sinister figures of the first French Empire, and he was standing where vehemence commanded respect.

“Stop that infernal firing!” he yelled, purple with rage, his arms pumping in frantic gesture. And then he broke into a perfect tirade of English and Spanish. “I’ll bring the American troops across and hunt every hound of you to his hole and shoot him like the dog he is,” he screamed.

Your Mexican is not at his best in the psychology of bluff. Half the rifles were already raised. Swinnerton directed his words at the evil-faced little firing-director, who had lived a replete life with the reformed bandits of the _Rurales_, but who had yet to hear or see a thing like this.

“Do you imagine that you may fire into American territory, kill American soldiers, and escape the troops?”

The self-commissioned officer blew his firing-whistle.

“Señor,” he said, “igscouse. We do no know our fire offend. We will make attack from other quarters.”

Swinnerton wasted neither words nor time. He hurried back, and knelt at the side of the wounded orderly. He threw one of the boy’s arms about his own neck and lifted him, his voice running on like a mother’s crooning.

“Never mind, Felker; it’s not a bad wound. If I’m a surgeon at all, I’ll mend it. There, is that easy, boy? Then here we go.”

A special train had hurried the general and the colonel and staff back from Huachuca. Fredericks, good soldier that he was, had marched to the sound of the guns. From the time he had trotted out at the head of his troop, an absurd suspicion had been troubling Fredericks, and the moment of his return he verified it. He found and examined the envelop in Swinnerton’s room, and he was even ahead of the general in greeting Swinnerton when the latter came staggering under his heavy burden toward the custom-house steps. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the general smiled, the colonel chuckled, and Fredericks laughed aloud.

Swinnerton’s hair was rumpled like the ruffled crest of a cockatoo. Dust had blackened the caking streaks on his face, which was red from exertion. He was wheezing and puffing like a donkey-engine, and at every expiration of breath his cheeks bulged prodigiously. And what is more than mere words of description can ever convey, he was simply Swinnerton, at whom and with whom people smiled. He did not smile this time. He set his burden down and glared murderously at Fredericks.

“Well, Fredericks,” he gasped, with no thought of the deference due to the general’s stars, “what is there about this so infernally _funny_?”

“This is, Swinney,” said Fredericks, waving the wedding-card. “It isn’t even postmarked Fort Robertson. The last census found twenty-three thousand four hundred and five Mary Smiths. This is just one of the others, my boy.”

Swinnerton made a full confession to Fredericks before the week was over. He had received three delayed love-letters and a congratulatory telegram from the President of the United States, though it was significant that every admiring newspaper sensed the humor of a single fat surgeon waddling up to a firing-line and bluffing it into submission.

“I reckon,” he smiled a little ruefully, “that it’s written in the books that I’m to be a silly ass of sorts for all my mortal days. But I’m cured of minding it, and I’m a most uncommonly happy one, Freddie.”

AN UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER IN LONDON

BY THEODORE DREISER

Author of “Sister Carrie,” “Jennie Gerhardt,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY W. J. GLACKENS

After a few days I went to London for the first time,--I do not count the night of my arrival, for I saw nothing but the railway terminus,--and, I confess, I was not greatly impressed. I could not help thinking on this first morning, as we passed from Paddington, via Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Piccadilly, and other streets to Regent Street and the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, that it was beautiful, spacious, cleanly, dignified, and well ordered, but not astonishingly imposing. Fortunately, it was a bright and comfortable morning, and the air was soft. There was a faint, bluish haze over the city, which I took to be smoke; and certainly it smelled as though it were smoky. I had a sense of great life, but not of crowded life, if I manage to make myself clear by that. It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important. At every turn, X. was my ever-present monitor. We must have passed through a long stretch of Piccadilly, for X. pointed out a line of clubs, naming them the St. James’s Club, the Savile Club, the Lyceum Club, and then St. James’s Palace.

I was duly impressed. I was seeing things which, after all, I thought, did not depend so much upon their exterior beauty or vast presence as upon the distinction of their lineage and connections. They were beautiful in a low, dark way, and certainly they were tinged with an atmosphere of age and respectability. After all, since life is a figment of the brain, such built-up notions of things are in many cases really far more impressive than the things themselves. London is a fanfare of great names; it is a clatter of vast reputations; it is a swirl of memories and celebrated beauties and orders and distinctions. It is almost impossible any more to disassociate the real from the fictitious or, better, the spiritual. There is something here which is not of brick and stone at all, but which is purely a matter of thought. It is disembodied poetry, noble ideas, delicious memories of great things; and these, after all, are better than brick and stone. The city is low, generally not more than five stories high, often not more than two, but it is beautiful. And it alternates great spaces with narrow crevices in such a way as to give a splendid variety. You can have at once a sense of being very crowded and of being very free. I can understand now Browning’s desire to include “poor old Camberwell” with Italy in the confines of romance.

“X. WAS MY EVER-PRESENT MONITOR”]

The thing that struck me most was that the buildings were largely a golden yellow in color, quite as if they had been white, and time had stained them. Many other buildings looked as though they had been black originally and had been daubed white in spots. The truth is that it was quite the other way about. They had been snow-white and had been sooted by the smoke until they were now nearly coal-black. Only here and there had the wind and rain whipped bare white places which looked like scars or the drippings of lime. At first I thought, “How wretched!” Later, “This effect is charming.”

We are so used to the new and shiny and tall in America, particularly in our larger cities, that it is very hard at first to estimate a city of equal or greater rank, which is old and low and, to a certain extent, smoky. In places there was more beauty, more surety, more dignity, more space than most of our cities have to offer. The police had an air of dignity and intelligence such as I have never seen anywhere in America, and it was obvious at a glance. The streets were beautifully swept and clean, and I saw soldiers here and there in fine uniforms, standing outside palaces and walking in the public ways. That alone was sufficient to differentiate London from any American city. We rarely see our soldiers. They are too few. I think what I felt most of all was that I could not feel anything very definite about so great a city, and that there was no use trying.

The first thing that took my attention in the stores was the clerks, but I may say the stores and shops themselves, after New York, seemed small and old. New York is new; the space given to the more important shops is considerable. In London it struck me that the space was not much and that the woodwork and walls were dingy. One can tell by the feel of a place whether it is exceptional and profitable, and all of these were that; but they were dingy. The English clerk, too, had an air of civility, I had almost said servility, which was different. They looked to me like persons born to a condition and a point of view, and I think they are. In America any clerk may subsequently be anything he chooses, ability guaranteed, but I’m not so sure that this is true in England. Anyhow, the American clerk always looks his possibilities, his problematic future; the English clerk looks as though he were to be one indefinitely.

X. and I were through with our first impressive round of sight-seeing by one o’clock, and he explained that we would go to a popular, hotel grill. All my life, certainly all my literary life, I had been hearing of this hotel, its distinction, its air; and now I said to myself, “Here I am, and I shall be able to judge it for myself.” We stopped at a barber’s for a few minutes to be shaved, and, to my astonishment, I saw a barber-shop which anywhere in America would be considered ridiculous. It was not a dirty barber-shop; you could see plainly that it was clean, well-conditioned, and probably enjoyed a profitable patronage: but for smallness, meanness, the age of the woodwork and the chairs, commend me to America of, say, 1865. It was the poorest little threadbare thing I have yet seen in that line. X. spoke of it as “his barber’s.”

The hotel, after its fashion,--the grill,--was another blow. I had fancied that I was going to see something on the order of the new, luxurious hotels in New York; certainly as resplendent, let us say, as our hotels of the lower first class. Not so. It can be compared, and I think fairly so, only to our hotels of the second or third class. There is the same air of age here that there is about our old, but very excellent, hotels in New York. The woodwork is plain, simple (I am speaking of the grill); the coat-room commonplace; the carpets are red and a little worn in spots. Several of the stair-steps squeaked as we went down. “Just like our old and popular hotels,” I said to myself over and over in descending; and the cuisine and the general appearance of the dining-room reminded me of the same type of room in these hotels.

While we were sipping coffee X. told me of a Mrs. W., a friend of his, whom I was to meet. She was, he said, a lion-hunter. She tried to make her somewhat interesting personality felt in so large a sea as London by taking up with promising talent before it was already a commonplace. I believe it was arranged over the telephone then that I should lunch there the following day at one, and be introduced to a certain Lady B., who was known as a patron of the arts, and to a certain Miss N., an interesting English type. I was pleased with the idea of going. I had never seen an English lady lion-hunter. I had never met English ladies of the types of Miss N. and Lady B. There might be others present, I was told. I was also informed that Mrs. W. was really not English, but French, though she and her husband, who was also French and a wealthy merchant, had resided in London so long that they were to all intents and purposes English, and besides they were in rather interesting standing socially.

I recall the next day, Sunday, with as much interest as any date, for on that day I encountered my first London drawing-room. When I reached the house of Mrs. W., which was in one of those lovely squares that constitute a striking feature of the West End, I was ushered up-stairs to the drawing-room, where I found my host, a rather practical, shrewd-looking Frenchman, and his less obviously French wife.

“Oh, Mr. Der_riz_er,” exclaimed my hostess on sight, as she came forward to greet me, a decidedly engaging woman of something over forty, with bronze hair and ruddy complexion. Her gown of green silk, cut after the latest mode, stamped her in my mind as of a romantic, artistic, eager disposition.

“You must come and tell us at once what you think of the picture we are discussing. It is down-stairs. Lady B. is there, and Miss N. We are trying to see if we can get a better light on it. Mr. X. has told me of you. You are from America. You must tell us how you like London, after you see the Degas.”

I think I liked this lady thoroughly at a glance and felt at home with her, for I know the type. It is the mobile, artistic type, with not much practical judgment in great matters, but bubbling with enthusiasm, temperament, life.

“Certainly; delighted. I know too little of London to talk of it. I shall be interested in your picture.”

“‘I LIKE IT,’ HE PRONOUNCED. ‘THE NOTE IS SOMBER, BUT IT IS EXCELLENT WORK’”]

We had reached the main floor by this time.

“Mr. Der_riz_er, the Lady B.,” said Mrs. W., as she brought me forward to meet the ladies.

A modern suggestion of the fair _Jehanne_, tall, astonishingly lissome, done, as to clothes, after the best manner of the romanticists, such was the Lady B. A more fascinating type, from the point of view of stagecraft, I never saw. And the languor and lofty elevation of her gestures and eyebrows defy description. She could say, “Oh, I am so weary of all this!” with a slight elevation of her eyebrows a hundred times more definitely and forcefully than if it had been shouted for her in stentorian tones through a megaphone.

She gave me the fingers of an archly poised hand.

“It is a pleasure.”

“And Miss N., Mr. Der_riz_er.” Again it was Mrs. W. who spoke.

“I am very pleased.”

A pink, slim lily of a woman of twenty-eight or thirty, seemingly very fragile, very Dresden-china-like as to color, a dream of light and Tyrian blue with some white interwoven, very keen as to eye, the perfection of hauteur as to manner, so well-bred that her voice seemed subtly suggestive of it all--that was Miss N.

To say that I was interested in this company is putting it mildly. The three women were distinct, individual, characteristic each in a different way. The Lady B. was all peace and repose, statuesque, weary, dark. Miss N. was like a ray of sunshine, pure morning light, delicate, gay, mobile. Mrs. W. was of thicker texture, redder blood, more human fire. She had a vigor past the comprehension of either, if not their subtlety of intellect, which latter is often much better.

“Ah, yes, Degas. You like Degas, no doubt,” interpolated Mrs. W., recalling us. “A lovely pigture, don’t you think? Such color, such depth, such sympathy of treatment! Oh!”

Mrs. W.’s hands were up in a pretty artistic gesture of delight.

“Oh, yes,” continued the Lady B., taking up the rapture, “it is saw human--saw perfect in its harmony! The hair it is divine! And the poor man! He lives alone now in Paris, quite dreary, not seeing any one. Aw, the tragedy of it! The tragedy of it!” Her delicately carved vanity-box of some odd workmanship--blue-and-white enamel, with points of coral in it--was lifted in one hand as expressing her great distress. I confess I was not much moved, and I looked quickly at Miss N. Her eyes, it seemed to me, held a subtle, apprehending twinkle.

“And you?” It was Mrs. W. addressing me.

“It is impressive, I think. I do not know as much of his work as I might, I am sorry to say.”

“Aw, he is marvelous, wonderful! I am transported by the beauty and the depth of it all.” It was Mrs. W. talking, and I could not help rejoicing in the quality of her accent. Nothing is so pleasing to me in a woman of culture and refinement as that additional tang of remoteness which a foreign accent lends. If only all the lovely, cultivated women of the world would speak with a foreign accent in their native tongue I should like it better. It lends a touch of piquancy not otherwise obtainable.

Our luncheon party was complete now, and we would probably have gone immediately into the dining-room except for another picture--by Picasso. Let me repeat here that before X. called my attention to Picasso’s cubical uncertainty in the London exhibition, I had never heard of him. Here in a dark corner of the room was the nude torso of a consumptive girl, her ribs showing, her cheeks colorless and sunken, her nose a wasted point, her eyes as hungry and sharp and lustrous as those of a bird. Her hair was really no hair--strings; and her thin, bony arms and shoulders were pathetic, decidedly morbid in their quality. To add to the morgue-like aspect of the composition, the picture was painted in a pale bluish-green key.

I wish to state here that now, after a little lapse of time, this conception, the thought and execution of it, is growing upon me. I am not sure that this work, which has rather haunted me, is not much more than a protest, the expression and realization of a great temperament; but at the moment it struck me as dreary, gruesome, decadent, and I said as much when asked for my impression.

“Gloomy, morbid,” Mrs. W. fired in her lovely accent, “what have they to do with art?”

“Luncheon is served, Madam.”

The double doors of the dining-room were flung open.

I found myself sitting between Mrs. W. and Miss N.

“Ah was so glad to hear you say you didn’t like it,” Miss N. applauded, her eyes sparkling, her lip moving with a delicate little smile. “You know, I abhor those things. They _are_ decadent, like the rest of France and England. We are going backward instead of forward, I am quite sure. We have not the force we once had. It is all a race after pleasure and living and an interest in subjects of that kind. I am sure it isn’t healthy, normal art. I am sure life is better and brighter than that.”

“I am inclined to think so at times myself,” I replied.

We talked further, and I learned to my surprise that she suspected England to be decadent as a whole, falling behind in brain, brawn, and spirit, and that she thought America was much better.

“Do you know,” she observed, “I really think it would be a very good thing for us if we were conquered by Germany.”

I had found here, I fancied, some one who was really thinking for herself and a very charming young lady into the bargain. She was quick, apprehensive, all for a heartier point of view. I am not sure now that she was not merely being nice to me, and that, anyhow, she is not all wrong, and that the heartier point of view is the courage which can front life unashamed, which sees the divinity of fact and of beauty in the utmost seeming tragedy. Picasso’s grim presentation of decay and degradation is beginning to teach me something--the marvelous perfection of the spirit which is concerned with neither perfection, nor decay, but with life. It haunts me.

The charming luncheon was quickly over, and I think I gathered a very clear impression of the status of my host and hostess from their surroundings. Mr. W. was evidently liberal in his understanding of what constitutes a satisfactory home. It was not exceptional in that it differed greatly from the prevailing standard of luxury. But assuredly it was all in sharp contrast to Picasso’s grim representation of life and Degas’s revolutionary opposition to conventional standards.

Another man now made his appearance--an artist. I shall not forget him soon, for you do not often meet people who have the courage to appear at Sunday afternoons in a shabby, workaday business suit, unpolished shoes, a green neckerchief in lieu of collar and tie, and cuffless sleeves. I admired the quality, the workmanship, of the silver-set scarab which held his green linen neckerchief together, but I was a little puzzled as to whether he was very poor and his presence insisted upon, or comfortably progressive and indifferent to conventional dress. His face and body were quite thin; his hands delicate. He had an apprehensive eye that rarely met one’s direct gaze.

“Do you think art really needs that?” Miss N. asked me. She was referring to the green linen neckerchief.

“I admire the courage. It is at least individual.”

“It is after George Bernard Shaw. It has been done before,” replied Miss N.

“Then it requires almost more courage,” I replied.

Here Mrs. W. moved the sad excerpt from the morgue to the center of the room that he of the green neckerchief might gaze at it.

“I like it,” he pronounced. “The note is somber, but it is excellent work.”

“HOPED FOR THE DAY WHEN THE ISSUE MIGHT BE TRIED OUT PHYSICALLY”]

Then he took his departure with interesting abruptness. Almost immediately the Lady B. was extending her hand in an almost pathetic farewell. Her voice was lofty, sad, sustained. I wish I could describe it. There was just a suggestion of _Lady Macbeth_ in the sleep-walking scene. As she made her slow, graceful exit, I wanted to applaud loudly.

Mrs. W. turned to me as the nearest source of interest, and I realized with horror that she was going to fling her Picasso at my head again, and with as much haste as was decent I, too, took my leave.

Another evening I went with an American friend to call on two professional critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were very interesting to me, representing, as they did, two fields of artistic livelihood in London, and both making moderate incomes, not large, but sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very curious riddle of existence.

These two men lived in charming, though small, quarters not far from fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Lewis was in character not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though he was the older man, artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the refined things on principle more than anything else.

It amuses me now when I think of it, for of course neither of these gentlemen cared for me in the least, beyond my momentary vogue or repute in their small world. I must have appeared somewhat boorish and supercilious, but they were exceedingly pleasant. How did I like London? What did I think of the English? How did London contrast with New York? What had I seen?

My head was ringing with what I had already seen. London was going around in a ring for me. Its vast reaches were ever in my mind. I stated as succinctly as I could that I was puzzled in my mind as to what I did think, as I am generally by this phantasmagoria called life, while Mr. Lewis served an opening glass of port, and I toasted my feet before a delicious grate-fire. Already, as I have indicated in a way, I had decided that England was deficient in the vitality which America now possesses, certainly deficient in the raw creative imagination which is producing many new things in America, but far superior in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call social organization as it relates to social and commercial interchange generally. Something has developed in the English social consciousness a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome, and the Riviera, I realized clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament of the Italian evolving to perfection under his brilliant skies. The wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. London is what it is, and the Englishmen likewise, because of the climate in which they have been reared.

I said as much without much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race, and that other nations, such as the Germans and the Americans, might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He sneered at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Lewis laughed as he spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British journals then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and possibly resented my literary actuality for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants--men against whose wits I could sharpen my own.

I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London. They went about, I was informed, to one London drawing-room and another. Mr. F. was considered an excellent judge of art; Mr. Lewis an important critic. Their mode of living constituted a touch of the better Grub Street of to-day. It was not bad.

“London sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere expression of temperament, anyhow.

New York and America are both so new, so lustful of change. Here, in these streets, when you walk out of a morning or an evening, you feel a pleasing stability. London is not going to change under your very eyes. You are not going to turn your back to find, on looking again, a whole sky-line effaced. The city is restful, naïve, in a way tender and sweet, like an old song. London is more fatalistic, and therefore less hopeful than New York.

PICCADILLY CIRCUS]

The first thing that impressed me was the grayish tinge of smoke that was over everything, a faint haze; and the next that, as a city, street for street and square for square, it was not so strident as New York, not nearly so harsh. The traffic was less noisy, the people were more thoughtful and considerate, the so-called rush, which characterizes New York, was less foolish. There is something rowdyish and ill-mannered about the street life of New York. This is not true of London. It struck me as simple, sedate, thoughtful, and I could only conclude that it sprang from a less-stirring atmosphere of opportunity. I fancy it is harder to get along in London. People do not change from one thing to another so much. The world there is more fixed in a pathetic routine, and people are more aware of their so-called “betters.” I hope not, but I felt it to be true.

I do not believe that it is given to any writer wholly to suggest a city. The mind is like a voracious fish: it would like to eat up all the experiences and characteristics of a city or a nation, but this, fortunately, is not possible. My own mind was busy pounding at the gates of fact, but during all the while I was there I got only a little way. I remember being struck with the nature of St. James’s Park, which was near my hotel, the great column to the Duke of Marlborough, at the end of the street, the whirl of life in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, which were both very near. An office I visited in a narrow street interested me, and the storm of cabs which whirled by all the corners of this region. It was described to me as the center of London, and I am quite sure it was, for clubs, theaters, hotels, smart shops, and the like were all here. The heavy trading section was farther east, along the banks of the Thames, and between that and Regent Street, where my little hotel was located, lay the financial section, sprawling about St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England. One could go out of this great central world easily enough, but it was only, apparently, to get into minor centers. It was all decidedly pleasing, because it was new and strange, and because there was a world of civility prevailing which does not exist in America.

The amazing metropolitan atmosphere in which I found myself satisfied me completely for the time being. Life here was so complex and so extended that during days and days that involved visits--breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, suppers--with one personage and another, political, social, artistic, I was still busy snatching glimpses of the great lake of life that spread on every hand. In so far as I could judge on so short a notice, London seemed to me to represent a mood--a uniform, aware, conservative state of being, neither brilliant nor gay anywhere, though interesting always. About Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and the Strand I suppose the average Londoner would insist that London is very gay; but I could not see it. Certainly it was not gay as similar sections in New York are gay. It is not in the Londoner himself to be so. He is solid, hard, phlegmatic, a little dreary, like a certain type of rain-bird or Northern loon, content to make the best of a rather dreary situation. On the other hand, I should not say that the city is depressing,--far from it,--though there are many who have told me they found it so. You have to represent a certain state of mind to be a Londoner, or a Britisher, even, a true one, and, on the whole, I think it is a more pleasant attitude than one finds in America, though not so brilliant. Creature comforts run high with this type of mind, and, after that, a certain happy acceptance of the commonplace. Nothing less than that could possibly explain the mile on mile of drab houses, of streets all alike, of doorways all alike, of chimneys all alike. That is what you feel all over England--a drab acceptance of the commonplace; and yet, when all is said and done, it works out into something so charming in its commonplaceness that it is almost irresistible. All the while I was in London I was never tired of looking at these dreary streets and congratulating myself that they composed so well. I do not wonder that Whistler found much to admire at Chelsea or that Turner could paint Thames water-scenes. I could, too, if I were an artist. As it was, I could see Goldsmith and Lamb and Gray and Dickens and much of Shakspere in all that I saw here. It must be the genius of the English people to be homy and simple, and yet charmingly idyllic in their very lack of imagination. It must be so.

One particular afternoon along the Thames it was raining. I saw the river in varying moods all the way from Blackfriars Bridge to Chelsea, and never once was it anything more than black-gray, varying at times from a pale or almost sunlit yellow to a solid leaden-black hue. It looked at times as though something remarkable were about to happen, so weirdly greenish yellow was the sky above the water; and the tall chimneys of Lambeth over the way, appearing and disappearing in the mist, were irresistible. There is a certain kind of barge which plies up and down the Thames with a collapsible mast and sail which looks for all the world like something off the Nile. They harmonize with the smoke and the gray, lowery skies. I was never weary of looking at them in the changing light and mist and rain. Gulls skimmed over the water here very freely all the way from Blackfriars to Battersea, and along the Embankment they sat in scores, solemnly cogitating the state of the weather, perhaps. I was delighted with the picture they made in places, greedy, wide-winged, artistic things.