She took my arm and I escorted her to the door, she all the time protesting her eternal gratitude. If she had been seized alone by the police, that last shame would have been hers. She would have been “put on the card” and become automatically a registered prostitute.
Nothing like this happens in London. There, in the first dusk of evening, little girls hardly twelve years old walk past the Criterion Bar and the Haymarket, dressed in long skirts, smirking and smiling and proclaiming their profession to any male they happen to meet. These children are unmolested, and no one seems to object to it in the least, although their manner and language are disgusting as well as pitiable. Then again there are the old women, drunken, disorderly creatures, always ready to engage a chance loiterer in conversation and taking the opportunity to whisper vulgar remarks in his ear; their flabby bodies and flying wisps of coarse gray hair and the ages of vice in their countenances almost denying their human origin. But to all of this London is blissfully unconscious—it is merely the gross side of a male—and, as such, is ignored.
My first visit to London was when I was still a student in Paris. I was given one hundred dollars by a patron, evidently with the best intentions, to go across the Channel and paint a portrait of the last of the old-fashioned tallyho-coach drivers. I was a stranger in a strange city; I had never felt the frosted shoulder before. Every other place I had been, even in the north of California, I had been able to make myself at home almost instantly, but here in the country of my ancestors, where every man was as near to me in blood as the people of Concord, Massachusetts, I was as much an alien as if I had been of Oriental origin. I managed to locate the coachman and found him an interesting character, but I could not make any arrangements about painting him; it was impossible to do it in his house. I could not find a studio, and before I had hardly turned around I found my pile reduced to about thirty-five shillings. I decided it was about time to go back to my friends.
Choosing the longest and the cheapest trip across the Channel, I found I could just about get to St. Malo, third class, if I did not have a stateroom. I had a right to occupy one of the berths in the downstairs cabin, but, upon finding it filled with about eighty seasick butter merchants, drinking and yelling, I decided to escape the vile odors and bluff it out on deck, with my ulster to keep me warm. I have never been sick on the water before or since, but the whole situation and my worried state of mind drove me to it, and I shall never forget the pathetic picture I must have made curled up in the scuppers, trampled on by the crew, my greatcoat covering myself and a cabin boy who was making his first trip and was also in a very bad condition. There was a blinding snowstorm, and we lay to the leeward of the Isle of Guernsey, making the crossing last eight hours. Upon landing, the cabin boy recovered first and carried my grip, while I went across the gangplank on all fours and just managed to reach a hotel and telegraph my friend Frank Chadwick, who was down in Concarneau, to bail me out.
After such memories, I was rather loath to go back to the great capital of my ancestors, and have never made long visits to London. But the English are gentlemen, and, as gentlemen, have a delicate sense of humor. Punch will be stupid for six months at a time, and all of a sudden will come out with some witty picture or saying that will ring around the world and be remembered for years.
London is the center of the English-speaking race, and its opinion goes for all of us; but it seemed like a foreign land to me every time I entered, and I was glad to see that I was not alone in my feeling. I never read the travels of Robert Louis Stevenson that I do not realize that when he went to England he instantly felt himself among strangers. Be that as it may, they do not treat us as they do colonials, toward whom, if they do not ignore them, the shoulder is always hunched. They, at least, do us the honor to scrap with us, which shows they consider us worthy of much consideration. In all these arguments, it is best to get in the first blow and then you are all right.
Only once do I remember feeling perfectly at home in London, and that was the first time I visited Westminster Abbey. I must have been in a prophetic mood or else the atmosphere of so many dead warriors influenced my mind, for the friend who was with me wrote to me in 1917—more than thirty years later, saying:
We went to see the historical sights of London, and you were particularly moved in Westminster Abbey. As we stood in the corridor outside, you made a solemn prediction to this effect: “Twenty or thirty years from now, when Germany conquers France, as she surely will unless England has the sense to step in in time—she will then try to conquer England. This she can do, unless America comes to the rescue. When Americans face the destruction of Westminster Abbey, they will come to the rescue. Then at last the war of 1775 will come to an end.”
On one occasion, while entering the city by the railway (I was feeling fine from a reinforcement of several real old Scotch whiskies), I took out a coin, a penny, and said:
“This is a wonderful country. I no sooner get here than for a couple of our copper cents (with a picture of an Indian, badly done, upon the face) I receive this large, weighty, and dignified coin of pure bronze upon which is a bas-relief of Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria.”