Of the many subjects open to the novelist none is more fertile in interests than the international theme, and none more arresting in appeal. Clash of character being the starting point of drama we have it amplified in the international by both sympathy and dissonance. Mutual attraction between individuals will sometimes overleap racial differences in point of view; and yet racial differences in point of view will always be at war with mutual attraction between individuals. All contrasts, all complexities, are focussed on this single stage, while one gets as nowhere else the conflict which each new-born generation cannot but wage against the dictation of the ages. On this crowded scene bring in that American element to which the dictation of the ages means relatively nothing and the wealth of the dramatic field becomes obvious.
It is curious, therefore, that it has been so little touched. It has been entered, but not very far. The great Russian and French novelists, with their concentration on the life immediately round them, in the main ignore it. The English have worked it a little, but not often, and not with much insight. The truth seems to be that the European nations, with their strong lines of cleavage, have difficulty in understanding each other, while they understand America not at all. Steeped and dyed in their own national prepossessions they regard other national prepossessions with indifference, amazement, or hostility. There are exceptions to this statement, of course. I speak only of general tendencies. The trend of events since the war even more than the war itself brings home to us the fact that the European mind is tribal.
The American mind is more open, as it is natural that it should be. It has its national prepossessions; but it has them less exclusively. Moreover, it is endowed to an unusual degree with the impulse of curiosity. It likes to see, to know, to explore. Beyond any other type of mind it regards a foreigner as a man and a brother, and not as a foe. To the American a foreigner’s life, habits, prejudices, and outlooks are of interest. He often likes them. He generally finds them picturesque. He may think them foolish, but he never thinks them dull. Being so busily occupied in creating a life for himself he enjoys inspecting the lives other men have created for themselves, just as a man who is building a house will examine with care the experiments of a neighbor doing the same thing.
The international attracts the American, and yet even the American has no broad international strain in his literature. The theme crops out occasionally, but is never constant. Two or three writers have made it specially their own, but they have founded no line. When we have mentioned Hawthorne in one notable book, Henry James and Marion Crawford in not a few from each, we have almost exhausted the list of the great names of the past, while of the present there is practically no one to quote.
The explanation, if we wanted one, might be found in lack of authority. Though many writers travel in foreign countries few live in them with sufficient intimacy to see below the surface. Against outsiders continental European private life is guarded like a shrine. The Latin countries in particular know little of the easy throwing open of the home instinctive to the Anglo-Saxon, so that, as a rule, a stranger steps within the seclusion of a French or Italian family only by marriage or some unusual set of conditions.
And yet both marriage and the unusual set of conditions occur.
In the case of the former we who remain in America are not greatly benefited, since few of the American women who marry into continental Europe ever tell what they know for the information of compatriots. The power of absorption of a highly organized social life, like that of Italy, France, or Spain, is such that not many who enter it ever come out of it again. They are held by a thousand social and domestic tentacles, which have no counterpart in happy-go-lucky American relationships. Amid their surroundings they may always remain alien, and yet they are enclosed by them, as insects in amber.
It is to the unusual set of conditions that we owe most, and the author of the novel of which these words are meant to be a prelude has enjoyed those conditions to an exceptional degree. Diplomatic life has the special advantage that it establishes close relations as a matter of course. It admits one to the palace of which the chance traveller sees only the windows and walls. It knows no slow approaches or apprenticeships. Not only are the barred doors thrown open, but to the most sealed society the foreigner in diplomacy is given the key.
Of this entrée not merely to foreign houses and hearths but to foreign points of view Mrs. Anderson has been always quick to perceive the potentialities. Revealed by her other books as gifted with a power of observation at once delicate and shrewd, she has shown a remarkable faculty for reaching the significance of things beyond the objective and the ceremonious. She knows the value of European stateliness as set over against our American slap-dash; and she can also throw into relief the human spontaneous qualities in our American slap-dash in contrast to the calculated efforts of European stateliness. In her game she plays the New World against the Old, and the Old World against the New, in the spirit of comedy, not without its tragic points. She uses her hemispheres like cymbals, for resonance and clash, for emotion and conflict, and also for joy, for wonder, for laughter, and for the leaping of the heart.
These letters and the journal of a young American girl travelling in Europe came to me under circumstances as strange as they themselves were unusual. Some of the letters were written on heavy blue stationery without monogram or heading; some bore the names of various continental hostelries: many were written on the embossed paper of the United States Embassy at Rome. All were faded with age and were without envelopes, definite dates, or identifying signatures.
They came into my possession in the following manner. I was in Paris on leave that terrible Good Friday night of 1918, when the spring drive was on. The Red Cross had ordered me to start for the front next morning with some other nurses, and we were to leave at an early hour, so I had paid my hotel bill, packed my bag, and gone to bed, partly-clad, as was the custom in those exciting times.
But I had hardly got settled for sleep when the shrieking siren announced an air raid. My room was on the top floor, and offered too good a target, so I jumped out of bed, slipped into my uniform, seized my bag, and ran out into the hall. It was in darkness, save for flashes from pocket-torches. Half-dressed people were hurrying through the corridor and groping their way down the staircase to the cellar for safety.
As I passed an open door, I heard a woman call loudly, “Oh, won’t somebody come and help me?” I went in to find, as I turned my flashlight about the room, a pretty, golden-haired lady, an American, with big deep blue eyes, struggling to get into a black dress. One of her arms was in a sling and she was having trouble. She looked ill and weak, but seemed a perfectly plucky and determined little person. I slipped her heavy coat over her shoulders, wondering, at the time, where I had seen her before. As we started for the door, she remembered something she had left, and said, “Wait—take this,” putting a small morocco bag into my hands, while she ran back to find something she wanted.
“Hurry!” I begged, for the air raid was a bad one and I was alarmed.
“I will, I will,” she assured me. “You go down and I will join you in a minute.”
“We’ll meet in the hotel cellar,” I answered.
Barely had I reached the first floor when there was a terrific crash; the front door flew open and several panic-stricken people rushed in from the street, seeking shelter. A bomb had struck near by.
Forgetting the woman upstairs (but still carrying the bags, hers and my own) I ran out to see if I could be of any use to those who had been hurt. Someone remarked as I passed, “Crazy American—imagine going out now!”
Airplanes were buzzing overhead; searchlights were meeting in the sky while anti-aircraft guns banged away. Bombs were bursting and shrapnel was falling. It was the worst raid I had seen. “‘Crazy American’ was right,” I told myself, and ducked into a low entrance marked “Cave.” It led into a wine-cellar, and a number of people were already there, all as unconcerned as if nothing had happened. The walls were lined with dusty bottles and the place was dimly lighted by candles stuck round here and there. Some of the people sat at tables playing cards, while others, wrapped in blankets, were making themselves comfortable on mattresses that lay about. The crashes continued, so I stayed there till the dawn crept into a small window before I ventured back to the hotel.
The building was still standing, but a great jagged opening had been ripped through the upper stories. A watchman was on guard. Several people had been killed, he said. The ambulance and police had come and gone. The guests had scattered. It was clear that the owner of the little bag was not there, and I had no time to search for her. The sun was rising, and I was under orders to be at the railway station to take a train that would leave in fifteen minutes. So I jumped into the Metro and set off on my journey to the front, taking the stranger’s bag with me.
During the days that followed, so busy that we could not believe anything lay outside our crowded wards, I forgot both property and owner. Only when I reached Paris several months later did I make an effort to discover her. After consulting the police and the American Embassy officials without result, I decided to break open the lock and see if there was any clue inside to her identity.
The bag proved to be full of papers which I felt obliged to read. What might they contain?—romance, scandals, and maybe military secrets? There was a clipping about a mysterious Russian Prince masquerading under the name of Kosloff, and a Red Cross badge and some secret service insignia. Did these badges belong to the blonde lady herself or to the Prince, or to her friend, the diplomat mentioned in the letters? Well, we will see. I searched the lists of American Embassy officials for the diplomat, but without success; I discovered that their names were legion, and the Prince, too, I was unable to trace.
The difficulties lay in the fact that all the letters were signed with nicknames—and with the death of so many people in the war and the length of time which had evidently passed since they were written, most of the avenues of identification had been blocked.
Nevertheless I put notices in several of the Paris papers asking for information regarding a little fair-haired American woman who had disappeared from the Grande Hotel du Nord during the night of the air raid, leaving a black morocco bag in charge of a stranger. The only three letters which I received in answer were as follows:
Dear Madame,
In reply to your advertisement in Le Matin, I would say that I think I saw the woman you refer to at the Café Russe on the Rue des Capuchins one evening in February. She was dining with a big blonde foreigner whom she addressed as Prince. Catching a word or two of their conversation that implied they knew more of the military situation than ordinary civilians should, my suspicions were aroused so when they left, I followed them. The man evidently noticed me and knew my game, for he put the lady in a taxi, telling the driver to go to the Grande Hotel du Nord, and then led me a chase, round corners and down alley ways, finally dodging into a crowded music hall where I lost him.
She was so charming that I could not believe her guilty, and yet, her companion awakened deep distrust in me. I have often wondered if by chance she were a member of our own American secret service and he a German spy. I never saw her again, though if I did, I should know her at once. Since the hotel you mentioned was her destination, it may be that your lady and mine are one and the same. This is all the information I am able to give you, but I hope that even this faintest of clues may lead you a little farther in your search. I beg to remain
Captain of —— Regiment,
—— Division of Infantry.
The second reply came from an American Y. M. C. A. worker who wrote:
I think that I talked with the little lady described in the Paris Herald while I was travelling by train from Amiens to Paris. She was in my compartment and carried a black morocco bag, like the one mentioned. She was dressed as a Salvation Army girl, but I could get nothing from her about her work or where she had been stationed, and though at the time this impressed me only as ordinary discretion, yet when I ran across her later in Paris, and found her wearing the Y. uniform, I stopped and spoke to her, and asked her if she had left off being a Sally, and why. She pretended not to know what I was talking about, and assured me she had never been anything but a Y. worker, and that she had never seen me before to her knowledge.
I was convinced that she remembered me perfectly, for all her denials, and looked her up only to find that no one answering to her description was either on the Y. books or on the Salvation Army’s. The only surmise possible is that she was in disguise for some reason. With apologies for troubling you with this trifling information, I am
The last letter was even more unsatisfactory, and came from a clerk in the Grande Hotel du Nord. Translated, it runs as follows:
Madame,
I have seen your notice in the papers about the woman very fair-haired and petite, who disappeared from our hotel during the disaster of Good Friday night. She had arrived that evening. I remember thinking it was very late for a pretty woman to come alone, but as she was tired and her arm was in a sling, I admitted her without looking at her papers, although I took them to my room to go over in the morning. They were destroyed in the fire caused by the bomb, so I can give you no more information.
I have, madame, the honor, etc., etc.
Since surely somewhere in this great world there is a man or woman to whom these letters will have poignant meaning, I have come to the conclusion that it will be well, on the whole, to publish extracts from them, hoping they will be claimed. I am doing so, leaving them much as they were written, with some excisions and few changes, but yet so no one except those concerned could possibly recognize them.
If by some miracle the little lady, who perhaps was Polly herself, and who gave me her old love letters, still lives, I believe she will want them. If she perished on that Good Friday night, or if for reasons of her own, she wishes to remain silent, I hope to be forgiven for publishing them but I feel that I have done only what was my duty.
POLLY’S JOURNAL[1]
Steamship Cleopatra,
January.
I don’t know where we are, somewhere on the Mediterranean on our way back from Egypt. It is the middle of the night, but I must write down what has happened, for it’s too exciting! Well! There’s a Russian aboard, and he is a Prince—Aunt discovered that, trust her, she’s absolutely set on my marrying a title. Anyhow we are all at the same table and last night he and I walked on deck together. There was a full moon, by the way, and really there aren’t any other nice young men on board, except Checkers, and brothers don’t count, so of course the Prince and I started a little flirtation. He’s as clever as he can be—very cosmopolitan, rather a mysterious person, and big, with a blonde moustache.
[1] Written at the age of twenty. I. A.
But when I went back to my cabin and put on my rainbow negligée, the one with the wing
sleeves, and started over to Aunt’s cabin to bid her goodnight,—why, what do you suppose? I went into the wrong stateroom! Honestly, I was sure hers was 26, but it wasn’t, and the minute I entered I saw I had made a mistake, for there stood the Russian, still dressed and staring out of the porthole. Of course he turned and looked at me; I tried to explain but stuttered in my excitement. He proved to be nice about it, but rather silly, I thought.
The worst of it was, though, that the boat lurched and swung the door shut, and then, of all things, the knob fell off! Really, I was so embarrassed and so furious with myself for being embarrassed, when it was such a chance to show what a woman of the world I was, that my hand shook and I could hardly get the knob into place again. But I did, with the Prince’s help—only I must admit his help didn’t amount to much—however he opened the door and bowed me out as if I were a great lady.
On the whole he really behaved very well, but foreigners are so different from Americans. I’m rather ashamed, so I’m going to dodge him after this if I can.
PRINCE BORIS TO POLLY
Steamship Cleopatra,
The next morning.
My dear Mademoiselle Hummingbird,
In your negligée you looked like a humming bird and I do not know your real name, so may I call you this? Here I am writing to you, weak, weak man that I am. I have no other helper than my dictionary, and it takes me a long time for the writing in English, but I feel you will like it better.
Did I fish[2] much for you last evening? Fishing is not good for going in the Heaven, they say, but I did one good action. The devil pushed me very strongly to kiss you when you came into my cabin, but I bowed you out. That was meritorious. (You can say, “Beautiful, indeed!” as said Wellington, seeing the charge of the French Imperial Guards at the battle of Waterloo.) I hope how God will give me good mark for that in his golden book.
[2] Intended for flirt.
I am reading much today, trying to forget you. The language in the French books is very instructive to the mind but destructive to the moral. The vice of the French or the bragging virtue of the English—which is better? I finish this letter by begging you to walk with me again in the moonlight. Send me a line if you will. I say goodbye till tonight.
P.S. You have given me very much pleasure. It is sufficient for me to see and hear you. It make me pairfectly happy just so. I find you very charming.
How shall I say it—like or love you? In French they have only the one word, and the womans understand what they want. How you think? I like lively American girl, not afraid of anything, not even of wicked man.
PRINCE BORIS TO POLLY
Steamship Cleopatra,
The following day.
Dear Mademoiselle Avis,
Did you leave me last night when I try to join you on deck because you not like my letter or was it my foreign gesticulations which frightened you or you find my funs stupid? You angry when I kiss your hands in the moonlight perhaps? But why you not tell me your name and where you live when home?
You said me you just American girl called Polly the Pagan, and you would not interest me,—but you do interest me. Please do not be so jingoist. Is not this word one of your Franklin’s?
Ah! I believe you disappear because it is that we sail in a magic boat among the islands of the gods over water that is—what you call him—fairy water which is bewitched, and at sunset reflect the brilliant plumage of the phoenix and at night the silver of the lady moon.
Maybe men are stupid and women wicked? Was it possible to be more bad as Eve and more dull as Adam?
I say you goodbye, naughty girl.
POLLY’S JOURNAL CONTINUED
Rome,
A week later.
I’m so glad we’re going to stay here in Rome for a while! Aunt has taken the upper floor of an old palace, and we’re all nicely settled for the spring. Up on the roof is our little terrace garden, so tiny but so perfect, with its stone paths and its borders of pussy-faced pansies and violets. In the corners are huge earthen jars bubbling over with pink roses, and the trellis to one side is covered with big-leaved vines where Cæsar, the mockingbird, hangs in his yellow wicker cage in the shade and makes joyful noises.
The sky is always so blue and the sun so warm and golden up there, and yet, it makes you cool just to let your eyes wander off to the snow-capped mountains in the distance. The dome of St. Peter’s is not far off, and the Vatican—I wonder what plans the clever old Pope is devising over there.
Sometimes I stand by the stone balustrade and gaze down into the narrow dark street far below, where there are small black creatures scurrying and hurrying about, and the bad odors of the city come up, and I hear faintly the shrill cries of the vendors. It is wonderful way up there, in the sunshine, and still lovelier at night when the great moon is sailing in the sky. I hope everybody down in the street has a terrace to go to and be happy on, sometime in their lives.
There’s a little room off the roof garden where we go when the chill of late afternoon creeps over Rome and drives us indoors. After the sun has set behind the clouds, we start an open fire and make tea by candle-light. It’s an artistic little nook, with old carved furniture and brocades and sketches by well-known painters. A wonderful place for beaux!
Just as I finished writing the last entry in my journal, Louisa, our pretty Italian maid, with a great air of secrecy, brought me a sealed letter that a foreign gentleman, so she said, gave her. My Roman adventures have begun!
PRINCE BORIS TO POLLY
My leetle Pagan,
May I come up? I see you on the terrace in the sunshine and in the moonlight with arms outstretched to the heavens, worshiping the elements. But you who worship nature, you give to the world yourself the perfume of the rose, the sunshine playing among the leaves, the song of the wild bird of the woods. I can imagine you dancing in the forest to the strange notes of Pan. Nature is just, but often ruthless. I pray civilization may not bring you ruin.
JOURNAL CONTINUED
I haven’t told a soul about yesterday’s letter, nor have I yet put down my next thrilling adventure, but Aunt manages to keep a fairly watchful eye on Checkers and me. Being twins, we are much alike and always under suspicion of what Uncle John used to call “collusion.” So far we’ve behaved very well, but when we do anything we should not, she says, “There’s your uncle cropping out,” or “You’re as wild as hawks; where do you two get these ways?” and then I answer her with this song:
Checkers has a little cart and horse such as the Roman swells drive; he hunts in the Campagna, and everybody simply loves his American slang. When people remark how much we are alike, he retorts, “Sure! We’re twins, and she’s as close to me as my glove.”
But my adventure—well!. Yesterday I was out shopping alone when I noticed a man was following me at a distance. I hurried home, not daring to turn around, but he followed me all the way, and then proceeded to walk up and down outside my window in Italian fashion. I could only see the top of his silk hat, but I thought just for fun I would throw him a rose. Aunt caught me at it and she certainly was scandalized; hereafter I am never to go out alone.