The English mind their own business, and we Americans are so used to interfering with each other, and minding everybody"s business as well as our own, it makes us very homesick indeed, to find that we can do precisely as we please and be let entirely alone.
The English who have been in America, or those who have a single blessed drop of Irish or Scotch blood in their veins, will quite understand what I mean. Fortunately for us we have found a few of these different sorts, and they have kept us from suicide. They warned us of the differences we would find. One man said to me: "We English do not understand the meaning of the word hospitality compared to you Americans. Now in the States--"
"Stop right there, if you please," I begged, "and say "America." It offends me to be called "the States" quite as much as if you called me "the Colonies" or "the Provinces!""
"You speak as if you were America," he said.
"I am," I replied.
"Now that is just it. You Americans come over here nationally. We English travel individually."
I was so startled at this acute a.n.a.lysis from a man whom I had always regarded as an Englishman that I forgot my manners and I said, "Good heavens, you are not all English, are you?"
"My father was Irish," he said.
"I knew it!" I cried with joy. "Please shake hands with me again. I knew you weren"t entirely English after that speech!"
He laughed.
"I will shake hands with you, of course. But I am a typical Britisher.
Please believe that."
"I shall not. You are not typical. That was really a clever distinction and quite true."
He looked as if he were going to argue the point with me, so I hurried on. I always get the worst of an argument, so I tried to take his mind off his injury. "Now please go on," I urged. "It sounded so interesting."
"Well, I was only going to say that in America you are, as hosts, quite sincere in wishing us to enjoy ourselves and to like America.
Here we will only do our duty by you if you bring letters to us, and we don"t care a hang whether you like England or not. We like it, and that"s enough."
"I see," I said, with cold chills of aversion for England as a nation creeping over my enthusiasm.
"Now in America," he proceeded, "your host sends his carriage for you, or calls for you, takes you with him, stays by you, introduces you to the people he thinks you would most care to meet, and tells them who and what you are; sees that you have everything that"s going, and that you see everything that"s going, and then takes you back to your club."
"Then he asks you if you have had a good time, and if you like America!" I supplemented.
"Oh, Lord, yes! He asks you that all the time, and so does everybody else," he said, with a groan.
"Now, you were unkind if you didn"t tell him all he wanted you to, for I do a.s.sure you it was pure American kindness of heart which made him take all that trouble for you. I know, too, without your telling me, that he introduced you to all the prettiest girls, and gave you a chance to talk to each of them, and only hovered around waiting to take you on to the next one, as soon as he could catch you with ease."
"He did just that. How did you know?"
"Because he was a typical American host, G.o.d bless him, and that is the way we do things over there."
"Now here," he went on, "we consider our duty done if we take a man to dine, and then to some reception, where we turn him loose after one or two introductions."
"What a hateful way of doing!" I said, politely.
"It is. It must seem barbarous to you."
"It does."
"Or if you are a woman we send our carriages to let you drive where you like. Or we send you invitations to go to needlework exhibitions where you have to pay five shillings admission."
I said nothing, and he laughed.
"I know they have done that to you," he exclaimed. "Haven"t they?"
"I have been delightfully entertained at luncheons and dinners and teas, and I have been introduced to as charming people in London as I ever hope to meet anywhere," I said, stolidly.
"But you won"t tell about the needlework. Oh, I say, but that"s jolly!
Fancy what you said when you began to get those beastly things!" And he laughed again.
"I didn"t say anything," I said. Then he roared. Yet he claimed to be a "typical Britisher."
"We mean kindly," he went on. "You mustn"t lay it up against us."
"Oh, we don"t. We are having a lovely time."
There are times when the truth would be brutal.
Then this oasis of a man, this "typical Britisher," went away, and my sister and I dressed for the theatre. A friend had sent us her box, and a.s.sured us that it was perfectly proper for us to go alone. So we went. Up to this time we had not hinted to each other that we were homesick. The play was most amusing, yet we couldn"t help watching the audience. Such a bored-looking set, the women with frizzled hair held down by invisible nets, mingling with their eyebrows, and done hideously in the back. Low-necked gowns, exhibiting the most beautiful shoulders in the world. Gorgeous jewels in their hair and gleaming all over their bodices, but among half a dozen emerald, turquoise, and diamond bracelets there would appear a silver-watch bracelet which cost not over ten dollars, and spoiled the effect of all the others.
English women as a race are the worst-dressed women in the world. I saw thousands of them in Piccadilly and Regent Street, and at Church Parade in the Park, with high, French-heeled slippers over colored stockings. And as to sizes, I should say nines were the average. There are some smaller, but the most are larger.
The Prince of Wales was in the box opposite to ours, and when we were not looking at him we gazed at the impa.s.sive faces of the audience.
They never smiled. They never laughed. The subtlest points in the play went unnoticed, yet it is one which has had a record run and bids fair to keep the boards for the rest of the season.
Suddenly my sister, although we had not spoken of the homesickness that was weighing us down, touched my arm and said, "Look quick!
There"s one!"
"Where? Where?"
"Down there just in front of the pit, talking to that bald-headed idiot with the monocle."
"Do you think she is American?" I said, dubiously. I couldn"t see her feet. "She might be French. She talks all over."
"No. She is an American girl. See how thin she is. The French are short and fat."
"Look at her face," I said, enviously. "How animated it is. See how it seems to stand out among all the other faces."
"Yet she is only amusing herself. See how stolid that creature looks that she is wasting all her vitality on."
"She has told him some joke and she is laughing at it. He has put his monocle in his other eye in his effort to see the point. He will get it by the next boat. Wish she"d come and tell that joke to me. I"d laugh at it."
My sister eyed me critically.
"You don"t look as if you could laugh," she said.
"I wonder what would happen if I should fall dead and drop over into the lap of that fat elephant in pink silk with the red neck," I said, musingly.