I must sign now on the dotted line before I can even go to bed. I arrange my clothing carefully on a chair within reach of my hand. You rest that way in a warring city, always ready to run. The Zeppelins may come so swiftly. In London you know your nearest cellar. In France you have selected your high vaulted entrance arch under which to take refuge when the sirens go screaming down the street, “Gardez vous, Gardez vous.”
The sense of depression that had enwrapped me in the first darkness of London was not gone when I closed my eyes in sleep. One does not throw it off. You may not be of those who are wearing crêpe. But you cannot escape the woe of the world which will enfold you like a garment.
In the morning the ordinary business of living has become one of strenuous detail. The law requires that an alien shall register with the police within 24 hours of arrival. When I have thus established a calling acquaintance at the Vine Street station, I go out into Piccadilly feeling like a prisoner politely on parole. And I face an environment strung all over with barbed wire restrictions on my movements. Every letter that comes for me from America will be read before I receive it, marked “Opened by the Censor.” If I wish to go away from this country, I must ask the permission of the Foreign Office, the consulate of the country to which I wish to proceed and my own consulate before I can so much as purchase a ticket. I may not leave London for any “restricted area” where there has been an Irish revolution or a German bombardment without the consent of Scotland Yard. I may not even leave the Ritz Hotel, which is registered as my official place of residence, for more steam-heat at the Savoy, without notifying the Vine Street Station of my departure and the Bow Street Station of my arrival. The Defence of the Realm and the Trading with the Enemy Acts and others in a land at war are lying around like bombs all over the place. Have a care that you don’t run into them!
I am alone one evening at the International Suffrage Headquarters in Adam Street, deep lost in a sociological study of carefully filed data. Do you believe in subconscious warnings? Anyhow, I am bending over a box of manila envelopes when suddenly, out of the silence of this top floor room, I am impressed with a sense of danger. It is as plain and clear as if a voice over my shoulder said “Look out.” I do look up quickly. And there on the wall before my eyes, I read Order 4 from the Defence of the Realm Act, commonly enough posted all over London, I discover later. But this is the first time I have seen it. It reads: “The curtains of this room must be drawn at sundown.” And from two windows with wide open curtains, my brilliant electric light is streaming out on the London darkness, oh, as far as Trafalgar Square for all the German Zeppelins and Scotland Yard to see! Just for an instant I am paralysed with the fear of them all. Then my hand finds the electric button and I hastily switch myself into the protecting darkness. Somehow I grope my way through the hall and down the staircase. And I slam the outer door hurriedly. There, when the police arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl’s daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 pounds for “permitting a beam of light to escape from her window.”
The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, “Silence.” In France they put it most picturesquely, “Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open.” Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody’s doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you’ve no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a visé. Wouldn’t a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the ’bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit.
So, this is not to be the simple life for research work. And though I come through all the submarines and the lines of steel, and the Zeppelins have not got me yet, what shall it profit me to save my life and lose my assignment? I am bound for the front and for certain information I am to gather on the way. Now, what should a journalist do?
Well, a journalist, I discovered, should get one’s self personally conducted by Lord Northcliffe. There were those of my masculine contemporaries already headed for the front whom he was said on arrival here to have received into the bosom of his newspaper office and put to bed to rest from the nervous exhaustion of travel, and sent a secretary and a check and anything else to make them happy. And then he asked them only to name the day they wanted to see Woolwich or to cross to France. But nothing like that was happening to me. So what else should a journalist do?
Well, evidently a journalist should get in good standing with a war office which alone can press the button to everywhere she wants to go. The short cut to a war office is through a press bureau. But a press bureau modestly shrinks from the publicity that it purveys. You do not find it on Main Street with a lettered signboard and a hand pointing: “Journalists, right this way.” And you can’t run right up the front steps of a war office and ring the bell. It would be a what-do-you-call-it, a faux pas if you did. Even for a private residence it would be that. There isn’t anywhere that I know of over here even in peace time that as soon as you reach town you can call a hostess up on the telephone and have her say, “Oh, you’re the friend of Sallie Smith that she’s written me about. Come right along up to dinner.” Why, the butler would tell you her ladyship or her grace or something like that was not at home. It just can’t be done like that outside of America. You don’t rush into the best English circles that way, much less the English government. Absolutely your only way around is through a formal correspondence.
One day I wrap myself in the rose satin down bed-quilt at the Ritz and spread out my letters of introduction to choose a journalistic lead. There are carved cupids on the walls of this bedroom, and a lovely rose velvet carpet on the floor and heavy rose silk hanging at the windows. But there isn’t any place to be warm. The tiny open grate holds six or it may be seven coals—you see why Dickens always writes of “coals” in the plural—and you put them on delicately with things like the sugar tongs. It isn’t good form to be warm in England. The best families aren’t. It’s plebeian and American even to want to be.
My soul is all curled up with the cold while I am trying to determine which letter. This to Sir Gilbert Parker was the 84th letter handed me by the editor of the Pictorial Review as I stepped on the boat. It is the one I now select first, quite by chance, without the least idea of where it is to lead me. The next evening at 6 o’clock I am on my way to Wellington House. “Sir Gilbert,” speaks the attendant in resplendent livery. And I find myself in a stately English room. There, down the length of the red velvet carpet beneath the glow of a red shaded electric lamp, a man with very quiet eyes is rising from his chair. “Do you know where you are?” he asks with a smile, glancing at the letter of introduction on his desk that tells of my mission. “This,” he says, “is the headquarters of the English government’s press bureau for the war and I am in charge of the American publicity.” Who cares for Lord Northcliffe now! Or even the King of England! Of all the inhabitants of this land, here was the man a journalist would wish to meet. The man who has written “The Seats of the Mighty” sits in them. From his desk here in the red room he can touch the button that will open all the right doors to me. He can’t do it immediately, in war-time. One has to make sure first. I must come often to Wellington House. There are days when we talk of many things, of life and of New York. He is less and less of a formal Englishman. His title is slipping away. He is beginning to be just Gilbert Parker, who might have belonged to the Authors’ League up on Forty-second Street. I half suspect he does. “I do know my America rather well,” he says at length. “I married a girl from Fifty-seventh Street. And I have a brother who lives in St. Paul.”