The chamois bag that for months has bulged beneath is gone. As regularly as I fastened my garters every morning I have been wont to buckle the safety belt about my waist and straighten the bag at my side and feel with careful fingers for its tight shut clasp. You have to be thoughtful like that when you’re carrying credentials on which at any moment your personal safety, even your life may depend. As faithfully as I looked under the bed at night I always counted them over: my letter of credit for $3,000, my blue enveloped police book, and my passport criss-crossed with visés in the varied colours of all the rubber stamps that must officially vouch for me along my way. Ah, they were still all there. And with a sigh of relief I was wont to retire to my pillow with the sense of one more day safely done.
The long steel lines I have passed, I cannot forget. “Who goes there?” These that speak with authority are men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides. And there are rows of them, O rows and rows of them along the way to the front. See the cold glitter of them! I still look nervously first over one shoulder and then over the other. This morning at breakfast a waiter only drops a fork. And I jump at the sound as if a shot had been fired. You know the feeling something’s going to catch you if you don’t watch out. Well, you have it like that for a long time after you’ve been in the war zone. Will it be a submarine or a Zeppelin or a khaki clad line of steel?
It was on a summer’s day in 1916 that I rushed into the office of the Pictorial Review. “Look!” I exclaimed excitedly to the editor at his desk. “See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!”
He brushed aside the magazine “lay out” before him, and lifted his eyes to the horizon of the world. And he too saw. Among the feminists of New York he has been known as the man with the vision. “Yes,” he agreed, “you are right. It is the wonder that is coming. Will you go over there and find out just what this terrible cataclysm of civilisation means to the woman’s cause?”
And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe, you see, without meeting some military person who must know.
Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.”
But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment. And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted lines as you’re told.
They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the Pictorial Review said to me that day in his office, with just a note of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.
The gangway lifts in Hoboken. We are cutting adrift from the American shore. Standing at the steamship’s rail, I am gazing down into faces that are dear. Slowly, surely they are dimming through the ocean’s mists. Shall I ever again look into eyes that look back love into mine?
I think, right here, some of the sparkle begins to fade from the great adventure on which I am embarked. We are steaming steadily out to sea. Whither? It has commenced, that anxious thought for every to-morrow, that is with a war zone traveller even in his dreams. A cold October wind whips full in my face. I shiver and turn up my coat collar. But is it the wind or the pain at my heart? I can no longer see the New York sky line for the tears in my eyes. And I turn in to my stateroom.