I paused, with my foot on the lowest step of the Club, to mark the changes that had overtaken Pall Mall during my twenty years' absence from England.
The old War Office, of course, was gone; some of the shops on the north side were being demolished; and the Automobile Club was new and unassimilated. In my day, too, the Athenæum had not been painted Wedgwood-green. Compared, however, with the Strand or Mall, Piccadilly or Whitehall, marvellously little change had taken place. I made an exception in favour of the character and velocity of the traffic: the bicycle boom was in its infancy when I left England: I returned to find the horse practically extinct, and the streets of London as dangerous as the railway stations of America.
I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the London of 1913.... Then I wondered if I should find anything to keep me long enough to grow acclimatised. Chance had brought me back to England, chance and the "wandering foot" might as easily bear me away again. It has always been a matter of indifference to me where I live, what I do, whom I meet. If I never seem to get bored, it is perhaps because I am never long enough in one place or at one occupation. There was no reason why England should not keep me amused....
A man crossed the road and sold me a Westminster Gazette. I opened it to see what was engaging the England of 1913, remembering as I did so that the Westminster was the last paper of importance to be published before I went abroad. As I glanced at the headlines, twenty years seemed to drop out of my life. Another Home Rule Bill was being acclaimed as the herald of the Millennium; Ulster was being told to fight and be right: the Welsh Church was once more being disestablished, while in foreign politics a confederation of Balkan States was spending its blood and treasure in clearing Europe of the Turk, to a faint echoing accompaniment of Gladstone's "bag and baggage" trumpet call. At home and abroad, English politics repeated themselves with curiously dull monotony.
Then I turned to the middle page, and saw I had spoken too hastily. "Suffragette Outrages" seemed to fill three columns of the paper. My return to England had synchronised with a political campaign more ruthless, intransigeant and unyielding than anything since the Fenian outrages of my childhood. I read of unique fifteenth-century houses burnt to the ground, interrupted meetings, assaults on Ministers, sabotage in public buildings, and the demolition of plate-glass windows at the hands of an uncompromising, fearless and diabolically ingenious army of destroyers. On the other side of the account were entered long sentences, hunger-strikes, forcible feeding and something that was called "A Cat and Mouse Act." I was to hear more of that later: it was indeed the political parent of the "New Militant Campaign" whose life coincided with my own residence in England. I fancy the supporters of the bill like Roden, Rawnsley or Jefferson genuinely believed they had killed hunger-striking—and with it the spirit of militancy—when the Government assumed the power of imprisoning, releasing and re-imprisoning at will. The event proved that they had only driven militancy into a fresh channel....
It is curious to reflect that as I at last mounted the steps and entered the Club, I was wondering where it would be possible to meet the resolute, indomitable women who formed the Council of War to the militant army. It would be a new, alluring experience. I was so occupied with my thoughts that I hardly noticed the hall porter confronting me with the offer of the New Members' Address Book.
"Surely a new porter?" I suggested. At ten guineas a year for twenty years, it was costing me two hundred and ten pounds to enter the Club, and I did not care to have my expensive right challenged.
"Seventeen years, sir," he answered with the gruff, repellent stiffness of the English official.
"I must have been before your time, then," I said.
Of course he disbelieved me, on the score of age if for no other reason; and the page boy who dogged my steps into the Cloak Room, was sent—I have no doubt—to act as custodian of the umbrellas. My age is forty-two, but I have never succeeded in looking more than about eight and twenty: perhaps I have never tried, as I find that a world of personal exertion and trouble is saved by allowing other people to do my trying, thinking, arranging for me ... whatever I am, others have made me.