On the trip up from London we scored a decisive verbal victory over the submarines and formulated the terms of peace. Captain Baltimore and Lieutenant Rockford said farewell at the Liverpool dock and started for wherever they were going. We found seats in the inspection room and waited. Mr. Hanson grew impatient at length. He flashed his passport, a diplomatic one, on the usher and was sent through in a hurry. Not so with this well-known suspect. I was among the last to be called. My passport, strangely enough, was approved, but the baggage examination was yet to come.
I found my four pieces—two containers of clothes and such, a typewriter, and the ungainly toy—and had them hoisted on to the inspection counter. The most curious man I ever knew went at them.
The typewriter came first.
“What is this?” he asked when he had opened the case.
“A typewriter.”
“Where did you buy it?”
“In Chicago.”
“What do you use it for?”
“For typewriting.”
“Typewriting what?”
“Stuff for newspapers and magazines.”
“Pretty handy, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“Have you written any articles over here?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
“Some are in America by this time; others are in the censors’ hands.”
He wanted to know what publications I was connected with, and I told him. He allowed me to close up the typewriter case, and next launched an offensive against a young trunk. He examined my collars one by one and found them all the same size. He came upon a package containing five or six hundred sheets of blank copy paper. He inspected every sheet, holding many of them up to the light. He gave individual attention to each of the few bits of lingerie the Parisians had not considered worth keeping. He exhibited an amazing interest in my other suit. He fondled a beautiful gray sweater for fully five minutes. He went through a copy of the Chu Chin Chow score, page by page. I wondered he didn’t sing it. Holding out only the blank paper, he repacked, and tackled the suitcase.
He counted the bristles in the toothbrush. He found two French dictionaries and a French grammar and studied them for approximately one semester. He opened a nest of shirts and handkerchiefs and spread them out for a thorough review. I should hate to be a clerk in a gents’ furnishing store and have him wished on me as a customer.
In the lower southeast corner he discovered an unopened box of shaving cream. As everyone knows, this commodity comes in a tube, which is wrapped in transparent paper, and the tube, thus wrapped, is contained in a pasteboard box for protection or something. Old Curiosity opened the box and extracted the tube. He gazed at it through the wrapper, then removed the wrapper and stared at the nude tube.
“Where is this made?” he asked.
“In America. It comes out like a ribbon and lies flat on the brush.”
Without comment, he reclothed the tube as well as he could in its mutilated wrapper, put it back in its box, and repacked the suitcase and shut it.
“Is that all you have?” he inquired.
“No,” I said. “There’s that big square package containing a toy.”
Now about this toy. It’s a complete but ridiculously impractical system of trenches. French soldiers of leaden composition are resisting a boche attack. Some are supposed to be throwing bombs. Others are fighting with bayonets. A few are busy with the trench guns. There are threads to represent barbed-wire entanglements and a few Huns enmeshed in them. Other Huns are prone, the victims of the sturdy poilu defense.
The package had been opened for private exhibition purposes in London, and as I am an awful washout (British slang) at doing up bundles, I had left the job to a chambermaid, who had discarded the Parisian wrapping paper and used some on which no firm name appeared.
Well, Mr. Question Mark now laboriously untied the cord, took off the paper and the cover of the box, and exposed the toy to the public and official view. Instantly two British officers, whom we shall call General Bone and Major Thick, flitted up to the counter and peered at the damning evidence.
“What is this gentleman’s name?” asked the general.
He was told.
“When did you make this thing?” he demanded.
“I didn’t,” said I. “It was bought in a shop in Paris.”
“What shop?”
“You can’t expect a person to remember the name of a Parisian shop.”
“Where is the firm’s name on the paper?”
I explained that the original wrapper had been left in London.
“What is your business?” demanded the major.
“He’s a correspondent,” replied the inspector.
There ensued the old familiar cross-examination and the request for credentials I didn’t have. The major asked the inspector whether I was carrying any papers.
“These,” said the latter, and showed him the pile of blank copy sheets.
The major dived for it.
“It’s all blank paper,” said the inspector, and the major registered keen disappointment.
Next to my suitcase lay a bag belonging to a gentleman named Trotter, and on it was a Japanese hotel label. The general glimpsed it and turned on me. “When were you in Japan?” he asked.
I told him never.
“That piece isn’t his,” said the inspector. “It belongs to a Mr. Trotter.”
“His first name is Globe,” said I, but it was a wild pitch.
The major and the general had a whispered consultation. Then the former said: “Well, I guess he’s all right. Let him go.”
Some devil within me suggested that I say goodbye to them in German, which I learned in our high school. I cast him out, and here I am, aboard ship, sitting still in the middle of the river. But I don’t like being indefinitely bottled in bond and I appeal to you, Mr. Captain—
Take me somewhere west of Ireland where they know I’m not a spy,
Where nobody gazes at me with a cold, suspicious eye—
To the good old U.S.A.,
Where a gent can go his way
With no fear of being picked on forty thousand times a day.
