I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen in khaki all over Europe.
Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read. There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder. But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has read only four letters——
And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let her go.”
I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!
The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being chalk marked “passed.” I am here! I clutch my passport happily and convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it to the safer place. It’s the most important item in what the French call your “pieces de identité.” At any moment a policeman in the Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l’Opéra may tap an alien on the shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?
THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY
London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the black pall of darkness in which the cities over here have enveloped themselves against war. Death rides above in the sky. To-night, every to-night, it may be the Zeppelins will come. Over there on the horizon, a searchlight streams suddenly and another and another, their great fingers feeling through the black clouds for the monsters of destruction that may be winging a way above the chimney pots. Every building is tightly shuttered. The street lamps with their globes painted three-quarters black have their pale lights as it were hid beneath an inverted bushel. Pedestrians must develop a protective sense that enables them to find their way at night as a cat does in the dark. “I’m sorry,” says an apologetic English voice, and before you know it, you have bumped against another passerby. There is another sudden jolt. And you are scrambling for your balance the other side of the curb you couldn’t see was there. If you are familiar with the door knob where you’re going to stop, you will be so much the surer where you’re at.
Looking out on this darkest London from Paddington railway station at midnight I sit on my trunk and wait. Do you remember the popular song, There’s a Little Street in Heaven Called Broadway? Oh, I hope there is.
I sit on my trunk and wait. In my handbag is the card of the Englishman politely ready to look after me in London. It is the American man who is out there in the night endeavouring to commandeer a taxicab. Somehow he has done it. At last the cab comes. He has compelled the chauffeur to take us. I shall not have to sit all night on my trunk.
A small green light within the hooded entrance, picks the Ritz Hotel out of the Piccadilly blackness. Inside, after the gloom through which we have come, I gasp with relief. It is as if one discovers suddenly in a place that has seemed a graveyard, Why, people still live here! Right then at the hotel register, the voice of Scotland Yard speaks for the War Office. And before the Ritz can be permitted to give me refuge from the night, I must answer. The “registration blank” presented for me to fill in, demands certain definite information: “(1) Surname. (2) Christian names. (3) Nationality. (4) Birthplace. (5) Year of birth. (6) Sex. (7) Full residential address: Full business address. (8) Trade or occupation. (9) Served in what army, navy or police force. (10) Full address where arrived from. (11) Date of signing. (12) Signature.” And a little below, “(13) Full address of destination. (14) Date of departure. (15) Signature.” A last line in conspicuous italics admonishes: “Penalty for failing to give this information correctly 100 pounds or six months imprisonment.” Well, of course a threat like that will make even a woman tell her age as many times as she is asked. But I do it rebelliously against the Kaiser and all his Prussians. For the “registration blank” was made in Germany. I remember it before the war, at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.