“Boo-hoo,” was my only reply. And once started, I couldn’t stop. That deadly English atmosphere of indifference—and, oh—and everything!
Have you ever been homesick when you couldn’t get home? Have you ever wanted to see your mother so that every bone in your body ached? Have you ever been in the state where to see the baby for five minutes you would give everything on earth you had? That was the way I felt about Billy that grewsome night at this amusing play in an English theatre. I had on my best clothes, but after my handkerchief ceased to avail the tears slopped down on my satin gown, and the blisters will remain as a lasting tribute to the contagion of a company of English people out enjoying themselves.
My sister’s stern sense of decorum caused her to contain herself until she got home, but I am free to confess that after I once loosed my hold over myself and found what a relief it was, I realized the truth of what our old negro cook used to say when I was a child in the South, and asked her why she howled and cried in such an alarming manner when she “got religion.” She used to say, “Lawd, chile, you don’t know how soovin’ it is to jest bust out awn ’casions lake dese!”
Happy negroes! Happy children, who can “bust out” when their feelings get the better of them! Civilization robs us of many of our acutest pleasures.
That night on the way home from the theatre I learned something. Nobody had ever told me that it is the custom to give the cabby an extra sixpence when one takes a cab late at night, so, on alighting in front of our flower-trimmed lodgings, I reached up, deposited my shilling in his hand, and was turning away, when my footsteps were arrested by my cabby’s voice.
Turning, I saw him tossing the despised shilling in his curved palm and saying:
“A shillin’! Twelve o’clock at night! Two ladies in evenin’ dress! You ought to ’a’ gone in a ’bus! A cab’s too expensive for you! I wish you’d ’a’ walked and I wish it had rained!”
With that parting shot he gathered up the lines and drove off, while I leaned up against the door shaking with a laughter which my sister in no wise shared with me. Poor Bee! Things like that jar her so that she can’t get any amusement out of them. To her it was terrifying impudence. To me it was a heart-to-heart talk with a London cabby!
Oh, the sweet viciousness of that “I wish it had rained!” I wonder if that man beats his wife, or if he just converses with her as he does with a recreant fare! Anyway, I loved him.
But if I have discovered nothing else in the brief time since I left my native land, it is worth while to realize the truth of all the poetry and song written on foreign shores about home.