But the cold line of steel! That you have to do alone, even as you go each soul singly to the judgment gate of heaven. I grip my passport hard. It has been removed from its usual place of secure safety. Chamois bags are the eternal bother of being a woman abroad in war-time. Men have pockets, easy ones to get at informally. I have among my “most important credentials”—they are in separate packages carefully labelled like that—a special “diplomatic letter” commending me officially by the Secretary of State to the protection of all United States embassies and consulates. When they handed it to me in Washington, I remember they told me significantly: “We have just picked out of prison over there, two American correspondents whose lives we were able to save by the narrowest chance. We don’t want any international complications. Now, do be careful.”
I’m going to be. The Tower of London and some modern Bastille on the banks of the Seine and divers other dark damp places of detention over here are at this minute clearly outlining themselves as moving pictures before my mind. I earnestly don’t want to be in any of them.
We have reached the temporary wooden shack through which governments these days pass all who knock for admission at their frontiers. Inside the next room there at a long pine table sit the men with pistols in their belts and swords at their sides, whose business it is to get spies when they see them. We are to be admitted one by one for the relentless fire of their cross-questioning. They have taken “British subjects first.” Now they summon “aliens.”
To be called an alien in a foreign land feels at once like some sort of a charge. You never were convicted of this before. And it seems like the most unfortunate thing you can possibly be now. Besides, I am every moment becoming more acutely conscious of my mission. The rest of these my fellow travellers, it is true, are aliens. I am worse. For a journalist even in peace times appears a most suspiciously inquiring person who wishes to know everything that should not be found out. But in peace times one has only to handle individuals. In war-times one has to handle governments. The burden of proof rests heavier and heavier upon me. How shall I convince England that in spite of all, I can be a most harmless, pleasant person?
From the decision the other side of that door, there will be no appeal. The men in khaki there have authority to confiscate my notes—or me! And they are so particular about journalists. One friend of mine back from the front a month ago had his clothes turned inside out and they ripped the lining from his coat. Then there is the lemon acid bath, lest you carry notes in invisible writing on your skin. They do it, rumor says, in Germany. But who can tell when other War Offices will have adopted this efficiency method? Oh, dear, what is the use not to have been drowned if one must face an inquisition? And they may turn me back on the next boat. My thoughts are with the lemon acid bath. How many lemons will it take to fill the tub, I am speculatively computing, when “Next,” says the soldier. And it is I.
A battery of searching eyes is turned on me. I am face to face with my first steel line. The words of the British consul again ring warningly in my ears, “I don’t at all know what they’ll do about you over there.”
No one ever does know these days. It’s the tormenting uncertainty that keeps you literally guessing from day to day whether you’re going or coming. And on what least incidents does human judgment depend. Perhaps they’d like me better if my hat were blue instead of brown. Thank heaven I didn’t economise on the price of my travelling coat. I step bravely forward when the officer at the head of the table reaches out his hand for my passport.
In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I!
“Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy about other things to entertain strangers.”
I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may Concern.” Signed by the editor of the Pictorial Review, it states that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war. Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at all.