He came, and we started for the Bow Street police station, where every visitor has to register within twenty-four hours of his arrival. On the way we met Lew Payne, the actor, and Gene Corri, racing man and box-fight referee. Gene has friends among the bobbies, and I was put through in record time. They told me I’d have to go to the American consul for a visé and then come back for a second registration with the police. Mr. O’Flaherty opined that these jobs should be attended to at once, as my boat train was supposed to leave at nine to-morrow morning. Mr. Payne had a better idea.
“Let’s telephone the steamship office,” he said, “and find out whether your ship is really going to sail on schedule. They usually don’t these days.”
Mr. O’Flaherty did the telephoning, and, sure enough, the blamed thing’s been postponed till Saturday night.
They asked me what I wanted to do next, and I said I’d like to pay my respects to George and Mary. But I hadn’t let them know I was coming and they’re both out of town.
We went to Murray’s (pronounced Mowrey’s) Club for lunch, though no one in the party was a member and you have to sign checks to get anything. Unlike most clubs, however, you pay cash simultaneously with signing the check, so we weren’t cheating. I signed “Charles Chaplin” to one check and it went unchallenged.
Gene’s two sons are in the British army, and the conversation was confined to them. I was told they were the best two sons a man ever had, but I knew better.
Murray’s Club’s orchestra is jazz and it gave Mr. O’Flaherty and me an acute attack of home-sickness.
From there we rode to the National Sporting Club, of which Mr. Corri is king. He asked me to put on the gloves with him, but I’m not one of the kind that picks on people five or six times my age.
On Mr. Payne’s advice, Mr. O’Flaherty and I purchased seats for a show called Seven Day’s Leave, and that’s where we’ve been to-night, we and another scribe, Mr. Miller of Dowagiac, Michigan, which, as every one knows, is a suburb of Niles.
The show is a melodrama with so many plots that the author forgot to unravel two or three hundred of them. Of the fifteen characters, one is the hero and the rest are German spies, male and female. The hero is a British officer. Everybody wanted to kill him, and so far as I could see there was nothing to prevent. But he was still alive when the final curtain fell. The actors made all their speeches directly to the audience, and many of them (the speeches) were in the soliloquy form ruled off the American stage several years ago.