Look Me Up

The Complaint of a Retiring American in Search of Solitude Abroad

NANCY BOYD

MY days, gentle reader, are a headlong flight before the onrushing hordes of the socially-minded.

I flee from border to border, from rural fastness to urban looseness.

I gather no moss.

No grass, not even a mushroom, grows under my feet.

I am seeking a place where I may be alone.

With the money I have expended in keeping my passport in order, I could have bought myself a nice little house just like everybody else's nice little house in Pelham Bay.

I have preferred to collect visas.

And Pelham Bay has turned out as one man, checked its croquet-set, laid straw at the roots of its Dorothy Perkins, and followed the mark of my French heel in the mud through fourteen countries and into the jaws of Monte Carlo.

Why people should pursue me, no one knows.

I am neither rich nor beautiful.

I have stolen no jewels, kidnapped no babies, founded no religion, built no mouse-traps.

I have simply made the mistake of starting to run. And everybody is chasing me.

I am a hen that has scuttled to a distant corner of the barnyard in order that she may be hungry by herself.

And every hen for farms around is convinced I have a kernel of corn.

Most people, I have noted in passing, observing them as I do fleetingly from the decks of steamers, from the platforms of trains, from behind lamp-posts, around corners and through thick veils, are afraid to be alone in the dark.

They are always forming themselves into clubs.

In order that they may smoke together.

Drink together.

Narrate improprieties together.

Look out of windows at taxis together.

And grow bald together.

They imagine that the volume of fatigue and the avoirdupois of doom become in this way divided by the number of the .club's membership.

And that no member receives more than he can nicely bear.

AS for me, I was never a joiner.

The feeling which stirs a mob to applause, to derision, to violence or to tears, stirs me only to uneasiness of the alimentary canal.

Over me, no less than another, bend the malign forces of Providence.

But I may honestly say that I fear no catastrophe save that of the companionship of tiresome people. I refuse to be one of a group.

It chafes me when people say, comprising me in their remark, "Us Americans."

It rubs me when women, recruiting me by their glance, declaim, "We women feel—"

It irks me even that I have a life membership in that degenerate sporting-club known as the Human Race.

Persons are constantly making the mistake of supposing that just because they once lived in the same street, because they both are strangers in a foreign capital, because they have attended the same Keeley-Cure, or because they have married the same woman, they must perforce have a world of things in common.

As a matter of fact, most people have nothing at all in common, beyond that cold perspiration budding from the strong man's brow at the thought that some day or other he may find himself spending a half-hour alone.

For my part, I fail to feel necessarily a choking surge of affection for the butcher, the baker, the gas-fixture-maker who happened to buy the house next-door to the house I rented.

For the Belgian who, at the time of his birth, chanced to be traveling with his mother in my home town.

Or for the forty thousand or so estimable and active women who received their degrees at the university from which I was at one time expelled.

I wish them no harm.

I merely desire that they may enjoy their felicities well out of my sight and earshot.

I have at home a dog, a charming animal.

We have the same tastes.

We prefer the country to the city.

When we sally forth for a walk, we insist on going by way of the hedge, the gutter, the pasture, and the bit of pine-wood.

We do not like cats, but we are a little jealous of them.

We like to lie on the rug and look at the fire.

And we prefer our meat a little underdone.

I have much more in common with my dog than I have with my neighbor.

Who is a celibate.

A Christian Scientist.

A vegetarian.

And plays talking records on the Victrola.

I RECEIVED today a letter from a young woman who went to boardingschool with me. At least, she says she went to boarding-school with me. I do not remember her.

And on the strength of her having been to boarding-school with me, she wishes me to come and take tea with her, and talk over old times. ^

Whose old times, hers or mine? Our past is not in common.

If she should talk over her old times, I should very likely fall asleep.

Should I talk over mine, she would undoubtedly leave the room.

I had an enemy.

He was a very good enemy.

. I felt that I could rely on his hostility as on few things in this shifting life.

He was invariably inimical to my ideals, my aspirations, my opinions, even my welfare.

He publicly disparaged my work, my mental capacities, my moral stamina, my habits, and my figure.

In short, he hated my vitals.

Today, as I stood on my balcony, looking out over the Seine, I saw the postman cross the street and disappear in the doorway beneath me. A moment later there came a knock at my door, and the maid entered with an urgent note.

"After all—we are both Americans in a strange city—why not let bygones be bygones?"

—will I take luncheon witlThim on Tuesday?

No, I will not.

I will lunch alone on Tuesday, with an open book beside my plate.

In the first place, the fact that we both are Americans has nothing to do with it.

Had I wished to spend my life lunching with Americans, I need not have come to Paris.

In the second place, Paris is not a strange city.

If he feels it to be so, he might much better go back to Wichitaw at once.

In the'third place, if I let bygones be bygones he is no longer my enemy.

And the fact that he is no longer my enemy not constituting him my friend, he becomes thus automatically a stranger to me.

And a stranger who has written me a presumptuous note.

(Continued on page 114)

(Continued from page 44)

BESIDES, I shall not be here on Tuesday.

It is now four o'clock in the afternoon.

At seven thirty-two, dear reader, I board the Orient Express for Constantinople.

But don't think for a moment I am going to Constantinople.

Ah, no.

The most awful experience of my life was in Constantinople.

Four girlhood friends, their husbands, their babies, their nurse-maids, and their incessant and insufferable conversation, all, all at the same hotel as myself.

And me flat on my back with a broken ankle, as helpless as a cat in paper shoes.

Ah, no.

Somewhere between Paris and Constantinople, in the dead of night, in the silence of an uninhabited and uninhabitable land, at some lone and uncharted pumping-station, I shall lower myself softly forth from the window of my wagon-lit, and prayerfully watch the tail-lights winking on into the darkness.

And it will be days and days—

Possibly a week—

Before the virgin niece of the cannedcorn-king

Who married my father's dypsomaniac cousin's epileptic widow

Gaily parts the poison ivy curtaining the door of my cave and cries,

"Oh, here you are at last! I've had the awfulest time finding you! Do be a dear and come out with me while I buy some dress-shields!"