Part 8 (1/2)

”She wouldn't even wink,” said my sister, laughingly. ”But if you struck her just right you would bounce clear up here again and I could catch you.”

”It is just four o'clock in Chicago,” I said.

My sister promptly turned her back on me.

”And Billy has just wakened from his nap, and Katy is giving him his food,” I went on. (Billy is my sister's baby.) ”And then mamma will come into the nursery presently and take him while Katy gets his carriage out, and she will show him my picture and ask him who it is (because she wrote me she always did it at this time), and then he will say, 'Tattah,' which is the sweetest baby word for 'Auntie' I ever heard from mortal lips, and then he will kiss it of his own accord. Mamma wrote that he had blistered it with his kisses, and it's one of the big ones, but I don't care; I'll order a dozen more if he will blister them all. And then she will say, 'Where did mamma and Tattah go?' and he will wave his precious little square hand and say, 'Big boat,' and she says he tries to say, 'Way off'--and, oh, dear, we are 'way off'--”

”Stop talking, you fiend,” said my sister, from the depths of her handkerchief. ”You know I look like a fright when I cry.”

”Boo-hoo,” was my only reply. And once started, I couldn't stop. That deadly English atmosphere of indifference--and, oh--and everything!

Have you ever been homesick when you couldn't get home? Have you ever wanted to see your mother so that every bone in your body ached? Have you ever been in the state where to see the baby for five minutes you would give everything on earth you had? That was the way I felt about Billy that grewsome night at this amusing play in an English theatre.

I had on my best clothes, but after my handkerchief ceased to avail the tears slopped down on my satin gown, and the blisters will remain as a lasting tribute to the contagion of a company of English people out enjoying themselves.

My sister's stern sense of decorum caused her to contain herself until she got home, but I am free to confess that after I once loosed my hold over myself and found what a relief it was, I realized the truth of what our old negro cook used to say when I was a child in the South, and asked her why she howled and cried in such an alarming manner when she ”got religion.” She used to say, ”Lawd, chile, you don't know how soovin' it is to jest bust out awn 'casions lake dese!”

Happy negroes! Happy children, who can ”bust out” when their feelings get the better of them! Civilization robs us of many of our acutest pleasures.

That night on the way home from the theatre I learned something.

n.o.body had ever told me that it is the custom to give the cabby an extra sixpence when one takes a cab late at night, so, on alighting in front of our flower-trimmed lodgings, I reached up, deposited my s.h.i.+lling in his hand, and was turning away, when my footsteps were arrested by my cabby's voice.

Turning, I saw him tossing the despised s.h.i.+lling in his curved palm and saying:

”A s.h.i.+llin'! Twelve o'clock at night! Two ladies in evenin' dress!

_You_ ought to 'a' gone in a 'bus! A cab's too expensive for _you_!

_I_ wish you'd 'a' _walked_ and I wish it had _rained_!”

With that parting shot he gathered up the lines and drove off, while I leaned up against the door shaking with a laughter which my sister in no wise shared with me. Poor Bee! Things like that jar her so that she can't get any amus.e.m.e.nt out of them. To her it was terrifying impudence. To me it was a heart-to-heart talk with a London cabby!

Oh, the sweet viciousness of that ”_I_ wish it had _rained_!” I wonder if that man beats his wife, or if he just converses with her as he does with a recreant fare! Anyway, I loved him.

But if I have discovered nothing else in the brief time since I left my native land, it is worth while to realize the truth of all the poetry and song written on foreign sh.o.r.es about home.

To one accustomed to travel only in America, and to feel at home with all the different varieties of one's countrymen, such sentiments are no more than _vers de societe_. _But_ now I know what _Heimweh_ is--the home-pain. I can understand that the Swiss really die of it sometimes. The home-pain! Neuralgia, you know, and most other acute pains, attack only one set of nerves. But _Heimweh_ hurts all over.

There is not a muscle of the body, nor the most remote fibre of the brain, nor a tissue of the heart that does not ache with it. You can't eat. You can't sleep. You can't read or write or talk. It begins with the protoplasm of your soul--and reaches forward to the end of time, and aches every step of the way along. You want to hide your face in a pillow away from everybody and do nothing but weep, but even that does not cure. It seems to be too private to help materially. The only thing I can recommend is to ”bust out.”

Homesickness is an inexplicable thing. I have heard brides relate how it attacked them unmercifully and without cause in the midst of their honeymoon. Girl students, whose sole aim in life has been to come abroad to study, and who, in finally coming, have fondly dreamed that the gates of Paradise had swung open before their delighted eyes, have been among its earliest and most acutely afflicted victims. No success, no realized ambitions ward it off. Like death, it comes to high and low alike. One woman, whose name became famous with her first concert, told me that she spent the first year over here in tears.

Nothing that friends can do, no amount of kindness or hospitality avails as a preventive. You can take bromides and cure insomnia. You can take chloroform, and enough of it will prevent seasickness, but nothing avails for _Heimweh_. And like pride, ”let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” I have been in the midst of an animated, recital of how homesick I had been the day before, ridiculing myself and my malady with unctuous freedom, when suddenly Billy's little face would seem to rise out of the flowers on the dinner-table, or the patter of his little flying feet as they used to sound in my ear as he fluttered down the long hall to my study, or the darling way he used to ran towards me when I held out my arms and said, ”Come, Billy, let Tattah show you the doves,” with such an expectant face, and that little scarlet mouth opened to kiss me--oh, it is nothing to anybody else, but it is home to me, and I was only recalled to London and my dinner party when a fresh attack was made on America, and I was called once more to battle for my country.

I have ”fought, bled, and died” for home and country more times than I can count since I have been here. I ought to come home with honorable scars and the rank of field-marshal, at least. I never knew how many objectionable features America presented to Englishmen until I became their guest and broke bread at their tables. I cannot eat very much at their dinner parties--I am too busy thinking how to parry their attacks on my America, and especially my Chicago, and my West generally. The English adore Americans, but they loathe America, and I, for one, will not accept a divided allegiance. ”Love me, love my dog,” is my motto. I go home from their dinners as hungry as a wolf, but covered with Victoria crosses. I am puzzled to know if they really hate Chicago more than any other spot on earth, or if they simply love to hear me fight for it, or if their manners need improving.

I myself may complain of the horrors of our filthy streets, or of the way we tear up whole blocks at once (here in London they only mend a teaspoonful of pavement at a time), or of our beastly winds which tear your soul from your body, but I hope never to sink so low as to permit a lot of foreigners to do it. For even as a Parisian loves his Paris, and as a New Yorker loves his London, so do I love my Chicago.

III

PARIS

It was a fortunate thing, after all, that I went to London first, and had my first great astonishment there. It broke Paris to me gently.