Suddenly, a falsetto, foppish voice began screaming hysterically: ‘Oh, look at my lovely boat, everyone! Look at my lovely boat! And the lights! Ha! ha! ha!’ The voice went into hysterics of derisive laughter. We looked to see where the effusion came from, and saw a man in a rowing-boat, dressed in white flannels, with a lady reclining in the back seat. The ensemble was like a comic illustration from Punch. Karno leaned over the rail and gave him a very loud raspberry, but nothing deterred his hysterical laughter. ‘There is only one thing to do,’ I said: ‘to be as vulgar as he thinks we are.’ So I let out a violent flow of Rabelaisian invective, which was so embarrassing for his lady that he quickly rowed away.
The idiot’s ridiculous outburst was not a criticism of taste, but a snobbish prejudice against what he considered lower-class ostentatiousness. He would never laugh hysterically at Buckingham Palace and scream: ‘Oh, look what a big house I live in!’ or laugh at the Coronation coach. This ever-present class tabulating I felt keenly while in England. It seems that this type of Englishman is only too quick to measure the other fellow’s social inferiorities.
Our American troupe was put to work and for fourteen weeks we played the halls around London. The show was received well and the audiences were wonderful, but all the time I was wondering if we’d ever get back to the States again. I loved England, but it was impossible for me to live there; because of my background I had a disquieting feeling of sinking back into a depressing commonplaceness. So that when news came that we were booked for another tour in the States I was elated.
On Sunday Sydney and I saw Mother and she seemed in better health, and before Sydney left for the provinces we had supper together. On my last night in London, emotionally confused, sad, and embittered, I again walked about the West End, thinking to myself: ‘This is the last time I shall ever see these streets.’
*
This time we arrived via New York on the Olympic second-class. The throb of the engines slowed down, signifying that we were approaching our destiny. This time I felt at home in the States – a foreigner among foreigners, allied with the rest.
As much as I like New York I also looked forward to the West, to greeting again those acquaintances whom I now looked upon as warm friends: the Irish bar-tender in Butte, Montana, the cordial and hospitable real estate millionaire of Minneapolis, the beautiful girl in St Paul with whom I had spent a romantic week, MacAbee, the Scottish mine-owner of Salt Lake City, the friendly dentist in Tacoma, and in San Francisco, the Graumans.
Before going to the Pacific Coast we played around the ‘smalls’ – the small theatres around the outlying suburbs of Chicago and Philadelphia and industrial towns such as Fall River and Duluth, etc.
As usual I lived alone. But it had its advantages, because it gave me an opportunity to improve my mind, a resolution I had held for many months but never fulfilled.
There is a fraternity of those who passionately want to know. I was one of them. But my motives were not so pure; I wanted to know, not for the love of knowledge but as a defence against the world’s contempt for the ignorant. So when I had time I browsed around the second-hand bookshops.
In Philadelphia, I inadvertently came upon an edition of Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures. That was an exciting discovery; his atheism confirmed my own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit. Then I discovered Emerson. After reading his essay on ‘Self-Reliance’ I felt I had been handed a golden birthright. Schopenhauer followed. I bought three volumes of The World as Will and Idea, which I have read on and off, never thoroughly, for over forty years. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass annoyed me and does to this day. He is too much the bursting heart of love, too much a national mystic. In my dressing-room between shows I had the pleasure of meeting Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, Irving and Hazlitt. On that second tour I may not have absorbed as much classic education as I would have desired, but I did absorb a great deal of tedium in the lower strata of show business.
These cheap vaudeville circuits were bleak and depressing, and hopes about my future in America disappeared in the grind of doing three and sometimes four shows a day, seven days a week. Vaudeville in England was a paradise by comparison. At least we only worked there six days a week and only gave two shows a night. Our consolation was that in America we could save a little more money.
We had been working the ‘sticks’ continuously for five months and the weariness of it had left me discouraged, so that when we had a week’s lay-off in Philadelphia, I welcomed it. I needed a change, another environment – to lose my identity and become someone else. I was fed up with the drab routine of tenth-rate vaudeville and decided that for one week I would indulge in the romance of graceful living. I had saved a considerable sum of money, and in sheer desperation, I decided to go on a spending spree. Why not? I had lived frugally to save it, and when out of work I would continue to live frugally on it; so why not spend a little of it now?
I bought an expensive dressing-gown and a smart over-night suitcase, which cost me seventy-five dollars. The shopkeeper was most courteous: ‘Can we deliver them for you, sir?’ Just his few words gave me a lift, a little distinction. Now I would go to New York and shed myself of tenth-rate vaudeville and its whole drab
