That is the War Office that speaks. So, with the French Government’s cordial invitation ringing pleasantly in my ears, I go on board the Channel boat. But I have no intention of returning to France right away, gentlemen. I lay out my life-preserver with a feeling of great relief that if I survive this crossing, it will not have to be done over again. And once more the boat in the darkness steals safely and silently across the Channel.
In the morning, in Southampton, the major from Salonica hands me his card: “Letters,” he says, a trifle wistfully, “will always reach me at that address.” I look at the card here before me on my desk as I write and I wonder. The major with his Irish smile may now be lying dead on the field of battle somewhere on the front. In the midst of life we are in death almost anywhere in the world to-day.
THE STAFF OF THE GREAT WOMEN’S WAR HOSPITAL IN ENDELL STREET, LONDON
This is the shining citadel that marks the capitulation the world over of the medical profession to the new woman movement.
IN COLDEST ENGLAND
I have again “established my residence” with the police in London. I feel on terms of the most intimate acquaintance with the London police. So many of them have my photograph and are conversant with all the biographical and genealogical details of my life. You have to do it, register at a police station, every time you change your hotel. I have moved so often, I am nervous lest I seem like a German spy. But at the Bow Street Station, the officer in charge just nods genially: “Oh, that’s quite all right. Looking for more heat, aren’t you? I know. You Americans are all alike.”
Have you ever shivered in London in January? Then you don’t know what it is to be cold, not even when the thermometer drops to zero and New York’s all snowed in but the subway, and the street cleaning department has to spend a million dollars to dig you out of the drifts. Yes, I know about the Gulf Stream. It does pleasantly moderate the outdoor climate so that it is never really winter in England. But the Gulf Stream does not get into their houses. I was a luncheon guest the other day at a residence with a crest on its note-paper. The hostess put on a wrap to pass down the staircase from the drawing-room to the dining-room, and with my bronchitis—all Americans get it in London—I was simply unable to remove my coat at all. This mansion, English ivy-covered, and mildewed with ages of aristocracy, has never had a real fire within its walls. There are only the tiny grate fires which are, as it were, mere ornaments beneath the mantelpiece. The drawing-room fire is lighted only just before the guests arrive: the men with lifted coat-tails back up to it, their hands crossed behind them spread to the blaze; the dog and the cat draw near to the fender; conversation about the fire becomes general in the tone of voice, well, in which one might admire a rare sunset. The dining-room fire, likewise, is lighted only just before the butler announces luncheon. And in all this grand mansion you discover there isn’t any place to be warm, unless perchance the cook in the kitchen may have it.
Well, English hotels strive to be as coldly correct as this English high life. And I have suffered cold storage in Piccadilly at the rate of ten dollars a day as long as my bronchitis will bear it. I ought to be ill in bed at this moment. But I can’t be. There isn’t a hospital bed in Europe without a wounded soldier in it. Schools, orphanages, monasteries, country residences, castles and many hotels have been turned into hospitals, all of them full of soldiers. A civilian who may be ill literally has not where to lay his head. So I set out desperately to find heat in London. I think I have searched every hotel from Mayfair to Bloomsbury Square. As a special concession to American patronage a few of them have put steam-heat on their letter heads, “central heat,” they call it. But all European radiators, when there are any, are as reluctant as their elevators. “Lifts” move under groaning protest and if they go up, they let you know they do not expect to come down. The radiators are equally as sullen about radiating. They don’t want to at all. English radiators are such toy affairs as to be incapable of any real action. They are so small they get lost behind the furniture. At the Hyde Park Hotel, the clerk and I hunted all over the place: “I’m sure we used to have them,” he said. At last our search was rewarded. We found the one that was to keep me warm. It was behind the dresser and such a miniature affair, you’d surely have guessed Santa Claus must have left it for the children at Christmas time.
Some one advised me that English hotels really didn’t do steam heat well and the best way to be warm was to go to Brown’s, which is famous for its grate fires. The Queen of Holland and the English nobility always stop at Brown’s. So I tried Brown’s. I bought all the “coals” the management would sell at one time and tipped the maid liberally to start the fire in my room. To maintain the temperature anything above fifty, I had to sit by the grate and keep putting on the coals myself. In the bathroom there was no heat at all. “Oh, yes, there was,” the management argued; “didn’t the hot-water pipe for the bath come right up through the floor?” No, they insisted, there couldn’t be any fire in the grate in the bathroom—because there never had been since Brown’s began. Why, probably the hotel would burn up with so much heat as that.
So I moved on and on. At last I came in the Strand to the Savoy, where all Americans eventually arrive. It is the only hotel in England with real steam-heat. Just pull out your dresser and your wash-stand. Concealed behind each you will discover a radiator, warm, real, life-size! Eureka! It is the only modern-comfort temperature in London. I am able to remove sundry clothing accessories of Shetland wool accumulated at Selfridge’s Department Store in Oxford Street. And for the first time since my arrival on these shores I am sitting in my hotel room unwrapped in either a rose satin down bed-quilt or a steamer-rug. My soul once more uncurls itself for work. It is wonderful to be warm to-day, even if one must be drowned by the Germans to-morrow.