People wanted to see the fellow whose name had become familiar to them over the breakfast table. They wanted to see what manner of man he was (and some were disappointed); they wanted to know if he could speak as he wrote (and presently they knew he didn’t); they wanted to pay back by hospitality, by booking seats for the theaters, by friendly words afterward, for some of the things he had written at a time when they had wanted to know.
One of the first little thrills I had was when I stood at the desk of the Vanderbilt hotel, ten minutes after getting away from the dockside, where scores of telegrams were waiting for me, inviting me to speak at all sorts of places with strange and alarming names, and having picked up the receiver in answer to the urgent calls, heard the voice of a telephone girl saying, “Welcome to our city, Philip Gibbs!... and here’s another call for you.” I have always remembered that little human message from the girl at the switchboard.
I was still a journalist, though about to become a lecturer, and The New York Times desired me to write a series of articles recording—rapidly!—my first impressions of New York. It still seems to me a miracle that I was able to do so, for I was caught up by the social life of New York like a straw in a whirlpool, and my head was dazed by the immensity of the city, by its noise, its light, its rush of traffic, its overheated rooms, its newspaper reporters, its camera men, and, when I staggered to my bedroom for a moment’s respite, by the incessant tinkle of the telephone which rang me up from scores of addresses in New York city, from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, the Lord knows where.
I wrote those articles, blindly, subconsciously, like a man in a nightmare, and they came out rather like that, with a sort of wild impressionism of confused scenes, which seemed to please the American people.
They were vastly amused, I was told, by one phrase which came from my nerve ganglia all quivering with the first walk through Broadway at night. I confessed that I felt “like a trench cootie under the fire of ten thousand guns.” Now a cootie is a louse, as I had lately learnt, and that simile tickled my readers to death, as some of them said, though it expressed in utter truthfulness the terror of my sensation as a traffic dodger down the Great White Way.
But that terror was easily surpassed when I faced for the first time an audience in the Carnegie Hall. As I drove up with my brother, and saw hundreds of motor cars setting down people in evening dress who had come to have a look at me (and paid good money for it), with the odd chance of hearing something worth while—poor dears!—I was cold with fright. My fear increased until I was stiff with it when, having shaken hands with my brother and received his hearty pat on the shoulder, like a man about to go over the top with the odds against him, I went through a little door and found myself on a large stage, facing a great audience. I was conscious of innumerable faces, white shirt fronts, and eyes—eyes—eyes, staring at me from the great arena of stalls, and from all the galleries up to the roof. As I made my bow, my tongue clave, literally, to the roof of my mouth, my knees weakened, and I felt (as some one afterward told me I looked) as cheap as two cents.
What frightened me excessively was a sudden movement like a tidal wave among all those people. They stood up, and I became aware that they were paying me a very great honor, but the physical effect of that movement was, for a moment, as though they were all advancing on me, possibly with intent to kill!
My chairman was my good and great comrade, Frederick Palmer, the American war correspondent. I am told he made a fine introductory speech, but I did not hear a word of it, and was only wondering with a sinking heart whether I should get through my first few sentences before I broke down utterly. It was a fearful thought, to make a public fool of myself like that!...
I had one thing in my favor—a strong, far-reaching voice, and I had been told to pitch it to the center of the top gallery. I know they heard. A young foreigner I know—not an American—a most friendly and candid soul, told me that he had heard every word, and wished he hadn’t. Attracted by the title of a book of mine, “The Soul of the War,” he had bought four tickets for himself and friends, believing that at last he would hear the inner meaning of the war and its madness, in which he had found no kind of sense. But when he heard my straightforward narrative of what the British Armies had done, he sighed deeply, and said, “Sold again!” and tried to sleep. My loud, clear-cut sentences hammered into his brain, and would not allow him even that consolation.
That first audience in the Carnegie Hall was immensely kind, extraordinarily generous and long-suffering. They applauded my stories of British heroism as though it had been their own heroes, laughed at my attempts to tell Cockney anecdotes, and did not let me know once that I was boring them excessively. Some spirit of friendship and good will reached up to me and gave me courage. Only once did they laugh in the wrong place, and then they couldn’t help themselves. It was when for the sixth time or more I glanced at my wrist watch and then in a sudden panic that it had stopped and that I had spoken an hour too long, put it to my ear!