Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

In apology for the lateness of our arrival we mentioned our difficulties in discovering that he was in. Mr. Chesterton seemed bewildered by the circumstance. He shook his head and (evidently referring to the hall-man) said he was not able to understand "that foreigner" at all. "That foreigner?" we smiled at the Englishman. I think it most likely that the explanation of his not having heard our earlier rings was that he was not familiar with the system of bells in the apartment. They had not been out, he declared; oh, yes! they had been out, too, a good while ago, to get something to eat. "We are camping here," he said, "in a rather Bohemian fashion." Didn't they enjoy that as a change from life in fashionable hotels? Oh, yes! Very much.

They wondered if Mr. Lee were not coming. Yes; he had assured me that he was, when I had seen him that afternoon at the club. In fact, we had discussed what we would wear, and had agreed on dinner jackets. Mr. Chesterton was wearing a braid-bound cutaway coat of felt-like material (very much wrinkled in the skirt) and dark striped trousers of stiffish quality, but not recently pressed. His bat-wing collar had a sharp crease extending outward at one side as though it were broken. Though it was a very warm night for early spring—a hot night, indeed—he wore uncommonly heavy woolen sox, which were very much "coming down" about his ankles. His comically small English eye-glasses, with a straight rod joining them across the top, were perpetually coming off his nose. On one finger he wore a rather large ring. I noticed that for so large a man his hands were somewhat small, and were delicately made. At one side of him were three ashtrays (one of them a huge brass bowl well filled with tobacco ash) and at the other side of him one tray.

Well, what sort of a time had he been having? How far west had he got? He had been as far as (I think) Omaha. "Halfway across," he said. He had been much mystified by a curious character he had run into there: a strange being whose waistcoat and coat front were covered by symbolic emblems, crescents, full moons and stars. This person had accosted him in the street saying, "And so you are a lecturer." The man had then informed him that he also was a lecturer. He lectured, he said, on astronomy. "Indeed, in my country," Mr. Chesterton had said, "it is not the custom for astronomers to display on their person devices symbolic of the science in which they are engaged." Next, the man had opened his coat and exhibited the badge of a sheriff, or some sort of officer of the peace. Mr. Chesterton had been astounded to discover the functions of a man of science, a lecturer and a policeman united in one and the same person. It was quite evident that this (as I assume he was) harmless lunatic had made a most decided impression upon Mr. Chesterton's mind; he took the eccentric individual with much seriousness, apparently as some kind of a type; indeed, I feared that we would never get him switched off from talking about him; and I have no doubt that, in the course of time, this ridiculous astronomer will appear as a bizarre character in some fantastic tale, a personage perhaps related to Father Brown, or something like that.

Mr. Chesterton observed that he had enjoyed the opportunity of seeing various grades of American life, that he had been in the homes of very humble people as well as in houses of persons of wealth and social and intellectual position. In a former article I noted how Mr. Chesterton had been greatly startled to find (what he then called) "wooden houses" in this country, and such multitudes of them. He now returned to this phenomenon. What was his one outstanding impression of the United States? Well, he remarked that he had said it before, but he continued to be chiefly struck by the vast number of "frame houses" here.

Mr. Lee arrived. A gentleman who looks very much as though you were looking at his reflection in one of those trick mirrors (such as they have at Coney Island) which humorously attenuate and elongate the figures before them. Or, again, perhaps more justly still, a gentleman who looks as though Daumier had drawn him as an illustration for "Don Quixote." In his evening clothes (to put it still another way), a gentleman who looks much like a very lengthened shadow dancing on a wall. Mr. Whistler would have made something very striking indeed out of Mr. Lee in a dinner coat, something beautifully strange. I do not know that I have ever seen anything finer, in its own exceedingly peculiar way, than Mr. Lee, thus attired, with a cup of tea in his hand.

"Do you like wine?" Mr. Woollcott asked Mr. Chesterton, and told him of a restaurant nearby where this could be obtained. Our prohibition, Mr. Chesterton said, did not bother him so much as might be thought, as for reasons having to do with his health he was (as you or I would say) "off the stuff" at present.

One of us, Mr. Woollcott I think, commented upon the sweep of Mr. Chesterton's fame in the United States. The opinion was advanced that the evening of the day he landed his arrival was known in every literate home in New York. Mr. Chesterton was inclined to think that his "notoriety" in large measure came from his "appearance," his "avoirdupois." Knowledge of him had spread through the notion that he was a "popular curiosity." It was contended that his writing had been well-known over here ten years before his pictures became familiar to us. (Though, of course, I myself do think that the pictorial quality of his corporeal being has been very effective publicity for him.)

Then there was another thing which Mr. Chesterton thought might to a considerable degree account for his American celebrity. That was this "tag" of "paradox." People loved "easy handles" like that, and they went a long way. Somehow or other we let this point pass, or it got lost in the shuffle, and the discussion turned to the question of whether there was an American writer living whose arrival in England would command anything like the general attention occasioned by Mr. Chesterton's entrance into the United States. We could not think of anyone.

Mark Twain, of course; yes. O. Henry, doubtless, too. And, indeed, in the matter of years O. Henry might very well be living now. Mr. Chesterton quite agreed as to the English welcome of Mark Twain or of O. Henry. Tom Sawyer and Huck, he said musingly, certainly were "universal." Then, ponderingly, he observed that English and American literature seemed to be getting farther and farther apart, or more and more distinct each from the other. That is, he remembered that when he was a boy his father and his uncles simply spoke of a new book having come out whether it had been written in England or in the United States. As in the case of the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table": when it appeared it was enjoyed and talked about by everybody in England; but not spoken of there as a new American book: it was a new book, that's all. Now, however, with Englishmen impressed by the "Spoon River Anthology," "and rightly so," or by "Main Street," "it would not be that way."

He had much liking for O. Henry. But he had begun by not liking him. He had been puzzled by the "queer commercial deals" on which so many of the stories turned—"buying towns, selling rivers." He had, even now, to re-read much of the slang to get the meaning. And so we talked awhile of slang.