It was a cosmopolitan crowd which gathered that evening after dinner about the big fireplace in the smoking-room, where a most welcome and comforting wood fire blazed and crackled. The weather had turned very cold, and Betty and I were dressed as warmly as we had been at any time during the winter, though it was the fifth of June, and the papers were running long columns about the fearful heat wave which had America in its grip. There was a sturdy, red-faced old Scotchman in carpet slippers, and a sallow, heavy-lidded ancient whom the others addressed as "colonel," and just such a close-clipped, stiff-backed sporting squire as is Canon Hannay's Major Kent, of near Ballymoy; and there were two or three other Englishmen with no outstanding characteristic except their insularity; and the talk was of flies and rods and casts, and everybody was indignant at the suffragette who had rushed out on the track and tried to stop the Derby; and there was a steady emptying of tall glasses and a steadily-deepening cloud of tobacco smoke, and everybody was very comfortable and cosy. And presently the old Scotchman took pity on me as a mere American who knew nothing about the high mysteries of sport.
"It must be a great pleasure for you to sit before an open fire like this," he said.
"It is," I agreed. "There's nothing more pleasant than a wood fire."
"Ye may well say so. But of course in America you have nothing like it."
"Nothing like it?" I repeated, looking at him.
"Why no," he said. "You never see an open fire in America. All you have is steam pipes running all around the room."
I looked at him again to see if he was in earnest; and then I tried gently to disabuse his mind of that idea. But it was no use. Indeed, he got rather huffy when I said I had never seen a room with steam pipes running all around it.
The savage insularity of the average Englishman is matter for never-ending amusement, once one has grown accustomed to his contempt. He believes that all American men are money-grubbers, and all American women social climbers, who chew gum and talk loudly, while their daughters are forward minxes who call their fathers "popper," and that men, women, and children are alike wholly lacking in culture and good-taste. The peculiar thing about it is that he never for an instant doubts his own good taste in telling one all this frankly to one's face.
This is no fancy sketch. My own opinion is that the average Englishman has no genuine feeling of friendship for America, and his ignorance of things American is abysmal. One day, on the boat coming home, a well-educated Englishman whom I had got to know, asked me the name of a man with whom I had been talking.