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"You Are An American"
by
“Why,” he replied, “we will send the cobbler a card and he’ll send some one over for the boots and—-“
“And then, I suppose,” I said, “he will send us another card saying that the boots are done and so on. And in the meantime I could have had the boots repaired and worn out again.”
Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in a piece of newspaper and setting out straight off to find a cobbler. But my landlord would not hear of such a thing at all. “Of course you are an American,” he said.
I gathered that while such a proceeding might be all right in my country it wouldn’t do in England. He did not want lodgers, I understood, going in and out of his house with parcels under their arms. It would reflect on him. He was a man with a lively mind, and he told me a little story.
“How do you like the new lodger?” asked the first housemaid of the second.
“Oh, he’s very nice indeed,” replied the second housemaid. “But he’s not a gentleman. He helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday.”
“Could you spare me a trifle, sir?” asked the errand man in my street. “I haven’t had tea today.”
It’s a funny thing, that; isn’t it?–our just being all “Americans” (when we are not referred to as “Yankees” or “Yanks”). We are never United Statesians. It is the “American Ambassador,” and the “American Consul-General.” I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the “President of America.”
One day I saw a tourist. He was an American, a young man I knew in New York. I found him going into the Houses of Parliament. I was fond of going in there frequently, and said I would accompany him.
With an easy stride, at a speed I should say of about two miles an hour, he walked straight through the Houses of Parliament; through the Norman porch, through the King’s robing room, the Royal or Victoria gallery, the Prince’s chamber, the sumptuously decorated House of Peers, the Peers’ lobby, the spacious central hall, the Commons’ corridor and the House of Commons; glancing about him the while at art and architecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal garments and symbols of history. Returning to the central hall, we passed through St. Stephen’s and Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street.
“How long did it take us to do that?” said my friend, questioning his watch.
“Oh, about fifteen minutes,” I replied.
He said he thought he would go across the way and “do” the Abbey next while he was in the neighbourhood.
I suppose I could have helped him in the matter of despatch, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Later I heard of two Americans who drove up to the abbey in a taxi. Leaping out, one said to the other: “You do the outside and I’ll do the inside, and that way we’ll save a lot of time.”
The thing a man does in America, of course, when he gets into a railroad train is to light a cigar and begin talking to the fellow next to him. There were two of us in the railway carriage compartment on my way down into Surrey. I made a number of amiable observations; I asked a number of pleasant questions. My object was to while away the time in human companionship. “Quite so,” was his reply to observations.
In replying to questions he would commit himself to nothing; he wouldn’t even say that he didn’t know. “I shouldn’t undertake to say, sir,” was his answer. And then, certainly, there was no possibility of pursuing the subject further.
He wasn’t reading a paper; he wasn’t doing anything but gaze straight in front of him. I concluded that he was “sore” at me; I concluded that he was a surly bear, anyway. And so an hour or so passed in utter silence.