You make a similar escape, a few hours later, with a Wedgwood tea-caddy, whose delicate color the pottery has never been able to duplicate—and with Sheffield plate your suit-case runneth over!
And your emotions while doing all this? Why, you've never before known what "calm content" could mean.
In the first place, you never feel countrified and unpopular in London, as you do in New York. Your clothes have a way of brightening up and looking noticeably smart as if they'd just enjoyed a sojourn at the dry cleaner's—and everybody you meet seems to care particularly for Americans. You are at home there—not merely with the at-home feeling which a good hotel and agreeable society give—but there's a feeling of satisfaction much deeper than this. Something in you, which has always known and loved England, is seeing familiar faces again—the something which made you strain your eyes over Mother Goose by firelight years ago, and thrill over Ivanhoe and anything which held the name "Sherwood Forest" on its printed page. It's something congenial—or prenatal—who knows?
(Oh yes! I answer very readily "Present!" when any one calls: "Anglomaniac!")
It was only natural that I should let my adoration for Great Britain show through in the copy I sent home to The Oldburgh Herald, and as if to prove that honesty is the best policy, I received a letter of praise from Captain Macauley.
"Anybody can run a foreign country down," he wrote, "but you've proved that you're original by praising one! Stay there as long as you have an English adjective left to go upon, then forget your sorrows, chase away down to Italy and show us what you can do with 'bellissimo.'"
But I didn't do this, for the letter overtook me only after I had reached Bannerley, and was seeing things which I could hope for no words, either English or Italian, to describe.
I left London on Friday—which I ought to have had better sense than to do, having been properly brought up by a black mammy—hoping to reach the home of my shipboard friends early enough Saturday morning to hear the pigeons coo under the eaves of Bannerley Hall. All my life I had cherished an ambition to hear pigeons coo under eaves of an ancestral place, and with this thought uppermost in my heart, I packed my suit-case and drove to Paddington Station. I received my first damper at the ticket window.
"Bannerley?" the agent repeated, looking at me with a shade of pity, as I mentioned my destination. "Bannerley?"
"Certainly, Bannerley!" I insisted, with some effort toward a dignified bearing, but the first glance at his doubtful face caused my spirits to sink. Being by nature an extremist, they sank to the bottom. All in a twinkling the cooing of pigeons in my mental picture was changed to the croaking of ravens. "It's not so very difficult to get to Bannerley, is it?"