Mr American

The cab drew out of the quayside gates and up the long pier to the main street at the top, where the electric trams clanged and rumbled and a slow-moving stream of traffic, most of it horse-drawn, but with the occasional motor here and there, slowed the cab to a walk. The cabby noted that his fare was sitting forward, surveying the scene with the air of a man who is intent on drinking everything in, but giving no sign of whether he found it pleasing or otherwise. For the cabby’s money, central Liverpool was not an inspiring sight in any weather, with its bustling pavements and dirty over-crowded streets, and he was genuinely startled when after some little distance his passenger called out sharply to him to hold on. He was staring intently down the street which they were crossing, a long, grimy thoroughfare of chandlers” shops and warehouses; he was smiling, the wondering cabby noticed, in a strange, faraway fashion, as though seeing something that wasn’t there at all. He was humming, too, gently under his breath, as he surveyed the long seedy stretch of ugly buildings and cobbles on which the rain was beginning to fall.

“You want to go down there, sir?” the cabby inquired. “Takes us oot o’ the road to the Adelphi, like.”

“No,” said Mr Franklin. “Just looking.” He nodded at the street-sign, a plaque fixed high on the corner building. “Paradise Street.” And then to the cabby’s astonishment he laughed and sat back, quoting to himself in an absent-minded way:

As I was walking down Paradise Street,

Way-hay, blow the man down.

Thirty miles out from Liverpool town,

Gimme some time to blow the man down.

That had been Tracy’s song, Tracy the Irishman who had been a sailor. And there was Paradise Street itself, come on all unexpected, and nothing like the picture the song had conjured up when Tracy sang it, far from the sea. What had he imagined? Waving palms, blue water, sandy shores – and here were the cold grey stones of Liverpool’s sailortown. Very unexpected – but then England was sure to be full of unexpected, unimagined things. He became aware that the cabby, twisted round on his box, was viewing him with some concern; Mr Franklin nodded and gestured him to drive on.

A funny monkey, the driver decided; American interest in things English was, he knew from experience, liable to be eccentric, but Paradise Street …? Was this bloke one of those who might be enthused by a view of St George’s Hall, that startling showpiece of Liverpudlian architecture which they would see towards the end of their journey? Or if he didn’t care for mock Graeco-Roman temples five hundred feet long, would he respond to some useful information on the subject of the Walker Fine Art Gallery, with its striking sketch by Tintoretto and its portrait of Margaret de Valois, possibly by Holbein but more probably school of J. Clouet? The cabby, who had done his homework carefully for the benefit of tourists, stole another look at his fare’s impassive bronzed face and decided regretfully that he wouldn’t. Putting all hope of a substantial tip out of his head, he drove on to the Adelphi Hotel.

Here, he was rewarded with his shilling fare and another carefully-selected silver threepence, and Mr Franklin was escorted by porters into the luxurious marble and red plush interior of the lobby. He paused to survey the elegant little staircase leading to the main lounge, the mixed throng of affluent transit guests and local, no-nonsense business men in sober suits and watch-chains, the quiet efficiency of the Adelphi’s numerous hall staff – and was surveyed in his turn by the Irish head porter, who was as great an expert in his way as Inspector Griffin. No stick, no gloves, well-worn boots, and a decidedly colonial look to his clothing, the porter thought; his first question’ll be the price of a room.

“How much do you charge,” asked Mr Franklin quietly, “for a single room?”

“Four shillings and upwards, sir,” replied the porter. “That’s eighty cents in your own money,” and he favoured Mr Franklin with an avuncular smile, being one who had relatives in Philadelphia himself. “Just off the boat, sir? You’ll be ready for a bite of breakfast, then. In the coffee-room, sir; the gentlemen’s cloak-room is to your right. And the name, sir? Frank-lin, very good. Of –?”

“Ah … United States.”

“First-rate, sir. The boy will take up your luggage. You’ll be staying … two nights, sir. I see. Now, when you’ve breakfasted, if there’s any assistance I can give, you just inquire at my desk. Not at all, sir.” And as Mr Franklin hesitated, as though wondering whether to reach into his waistcoat pocket for another threepence, the porter generously solved the problem for him by turning to attend to an angular English lady, changing in that instant from a warm and genial father-figure into the respectfully impersonal butler to whom her ladyship was accustomed.

Mr Franklin left his cape and hat in the cloak-room, warily examined the array of flacons of lavender water, Hammam’s Bouquet, Mennen’s toilet powder, and Eno’s Fruit Salts laid out for exterior and internal refreshment, and compromised by washing his hands. He should have stayed over in New York, at the Belmont or the Clarendon, to get the feel of these places, but the city had been bursting at the seams for the Hudson-Fulton festivities celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the former’s discovery of Manhattan, and the hundredth of the latter’s steam navigation; consequently, there had been no rooms to be had. Besides, he had had a vague desire to come fresh to England from where he had been; an odd ambition which he would have had difficulty in defining.

He ate an excellent breakfast in the cosy coffee-room, sitting at a little window table and watching the constant stream of traffic and pedestrians in the street outside. He deliberately ate slowly, conscious of a mounting feeling of excitement – which he found strange in himself, for he was not normally an excitable man. Then he returned to the lobby, and questioned the attentive porter.

“Guide books to London and East Anglia, sir? Sure, now I can get those for you. And a large-scale map of the county of Norfolk?” The porter’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “You’ll want the ordnance survey – yes, I dare say I can get that, too. It may take an hour or so, but if you’re going out … you are, for a look at the town. Capital, sir.”

Mr Franklin thanked him, and set off to tour the city on foot, content to walk at random, watching and listening, standing on street corners to observe the passing crowds, trying to accustom his ear to the strange, soft mumbling accent of the Liverpudlians, observing the magisterial police on traffic duty, spending five minutes listening to an altercation between a stout woman and a street trader, riding on an electric tram and on the famous overhead railway, and generally presenting the appearance of an interested wanderer absorbing the sights and sounds around him.

He lunched in a public house off soup and sandwiches, washed down by a pint of heavy dark beer which he found rather cloyingly sweet, spent another couple of hours in apparently aimless strolling, and returned to the Adelphi as dusk was falling. There he dined, and after calculating that the five shillings, or one dollar, which the dinner cost, still left him with a comfortable balance from the ten dollars which, the Mauretania’s purser had assured him, was all that a first-class traveller need spend per day in England, retired to his room.

Here the guide books which the porter had obtained were waiting for him, but he ignored them in favour of the large ordnance survey map of Norfolk, which he spread out on the bed and began to examine with close attention. For half an hour he pored over it, the dark face intent as he traced over the fine print and symbols denoting such detailed items as railway cuttings, plantations, marshes, forest paths, churches with spires (and with towers), historic sites, and the like, and the quaint, pastoral place-names, Attleborough, Sheringham, Swaffham, Methwold, and Castle Lancing.

Mr Franklin smiled, and lay down on the bed, and for another half-hour he was quite still, stretched out, hands behind his head, the dark grey eyes staring up at the ceiling, the gentle mouth beneath the black moustache slightly open. An onlooker would have thought he was asleep, but presently he came swiftly to his feet, and went purposefully to the work of undressing and preparing himself for bed.

He unpacked his few toilet articles from his valise, took off his jacket, removed the money-belt round his waist and methodically counted its contents – one hundred and ninety-eight gold sovereigns, which was a considerable sum, even for a transatlantic passenger, and had caused the American Express clerk in New York to purse his lips doubtfully when Mr Franklin, changing his dollars, had insisted on carrying so much on his person. If Inspector Griffin, or the Irish head porter, had been privileged to peep into Mr Franklin’s room they, too, might have been mildly surprised. But they would not have thought anything particularly out of the way until the moment when Mr Franklin, having stood for several minutes contemplating his battered trunk where it stood against the wall, gave way apparently to a sudden impulse, and unbuckled the straps which secured it. Even then there was nothing strange in his behaviour, or in the way he paused, glancing round the room with its homely fittings, the shaded light, the marble wash-stand with its bowl and ewer, the floral wallpaper and patterned carpet, the little notice informing guests of mealtimes and fire precautions; nor even in the way he meditatively touched the linen pillow and embroidered bed-spread, like a man reassuring himself of his surroundings, before he turned to the trunk again and threw back the lid.

At that point they might have taken notice, for the contents of Mr Franklin’s trunk were, to say the least, slightly unusual for a guest in a Liverpool hotel. Not that there was anything about them to excite Inspector Griffin’s professional attention; there was no contraband, no illicit goods, nothing to which, in those easygoing days, even a law officer could have taken exception, although he might have made a mental note that Mr Franklin was a man of unusual background and, possibly, behaviour.

The principal object in the trunk, taking up most of its space, was a saddle – but the kind of saddle that would have made an English hunting squire rub his eyes and exclaim with disgust. It was what the Mexicans call a charro saddle, heavily ornamented and studded with metal-work, very high both before and behind, and therefore a sure recipe (in the eyes of the English squire) for a broken pelvis if its owner were unwise enough to use it over hedges. There was also a blanket, of Indian pattern, neatly folded, and a heavy canvas slicker, or cape; a very worn and stained wideawake hat, a pair of heavy leather gauntlets, a pair of battered boots in sore need of repair, a large drinking mug of cheap metal, and several packets of papers done up in oil-skin.

Mr Franklin, squatting in front of the trunk in his long underwear – he had discarded his newly-bought nightshirt on the first day of his voyage – handled each item in turn, very carefully, running his long fingers over their surfaces, caressingly almost as a man will handle old things which are familiar friends. He spun the big rowels on the spurred boots and put them back, smiling a little, rapped his knuckle on the mug, balanced the packets of papers in his hands, and restored them to their places. There were half a dozen books in the trunk; he leafed through them slowly – Old Mortality, Oliver Twist, Humphrey Clinker, Baedeker’s Guide to England, the 1897 edition; the poetical works of Wordsworth, George Borrow’s Lavengro, Huckleberry Finn, the complete works of Shakespeare.

He read the fly-leaf on the Shakespeare, although he knew the inscription off by heart, the spidery writing in faded ink: “To Luke Franklin, in the earnest hope that he may find profit, pleasure, and peace of mind in its pages, from his affectionate father”. The signature was “Jno. Franklin, 1858”. His grandfather’s gift to his own father; he could hear the old man’s voice reading from it – Luke Franklin had loved best of all to recite Falstaff’s part, chuckling over the grosser jests, rolling Shakespeare’s rich periods over his tongue … “when I was of thy years I was not an eagle’s talon in the waist; I could have crept me into any alderman’s thumb ring.” He had wondered what an alderman was, and Luke Franklin had told him, on a soft and starry summer night when they camped on the road to El Paso; he had been just a boy then, lying staring into the fire, listening while his father explained that it was a corruption of “eolderman”, an old English word – “it’s the same as elder, an elder man, an alderman, who is a kind of city councilman back in England. They still have them there.” His father had resumed his reading aloud, and the boy had gone to sleep, to awake in the pearly dawn, beside a dead fire, with his father still croaking away through the Battle of Shrewsbury, oblivious of time and place, lost in the magic of the play.

Mr Franklin sighed. Shakespeare and he had travelled some long roads since then, into some strange places. There had been the time in the silver camp when he had read Othello to a group of amusement-starved miners, and old Davis, his partner, had burst out: “Why, that damnfool nigger! Couldn’t he have asked around? Couldn’t he see they were makin’ a jackass out of him?” Or the night in Hole-in-the-Wall when he had lent the book to Cassidy, the last man on earth who might have been expected to appreciate the Swan of Avon, but he had studied away at it, the broad, beefy face frowning as he spelled out the words, and Franklin had caught the whispered mutter: “Before these eyes take themselves to slumber, I’ll do good service, or lie in the ground for it, aye, or go to death. But I’ll pay it as valorously as I may. That will I surely do.” Yes, Cassidy might never have heard of Harfleur or the Salic Law, but he could understand that kind of talk, all right. Wonder where he was now? Where were any of them, for that matter?

Well, he was here, in Liverpool, Lancashire County, England, quarter of the way round the world from Hole-in-the-Wall, or El Paso, or the Tonopah diggings, or the Nebraska farm that he could barely remember. Already it seemed far away, that other world, in mind as well as distance. Only the instinct of the wanderer, whose home and effects travelled with him, whose whole being could be contained in one old trunk, had prompted him to hold on to all these relics – not the books, but the trail gear. Why hadn’t he abandoned it? Habit? Sentiment, perhaps? Insurance? Mr Franklin had to admit that he did not know.

He replaced the books, paused, and then reached under the saddle and drew out the belt with its scabbards and the two. 44 Remingtons; he unsheathed them and weighed them in his hand, one after the other, the light catching the long slim silver barrels. Like the Shakespeare, they had belonged to his father; like the Shakespeare, they were rather old and out of date; but again, he told himself, like the Shakespeare they would probably outlast most modern innovations. He rolled the cylinders, listening to the soft oily clicks of the mechanism; then he frowned, broke open the chambers, and carefully shook the little brass shells out into his palm. Loaded pistols in Liverpool were as incongruous as … as Shakespeare in Hole-in-the-Wall.

Dropping the cartridges into an old cloth, he knotted it and stowed it under the saddle with the empty pistols. Then he closed the trunk, buckled its straps securely, looked round the room again, rolled into bed, and turned out the light.

2

Mr Franklin travelled down to London on the Monday afternoon; noting that the railway company hedged its bets by giving the journey time as “from four to five and a half hours” he armed himself with every paper and periodical that the head porter could find and walked the short distance to Lime Street with his luggage borne behind him on the hotel barrow. Here he resisted the offer of a five-guinea book of rail tickets for 1000 miles-worth of first-class travel, buying only a single, and found himself an empty carriage, rather dusty and redolent of stale cigar smoke and Victorian grandeur.

For the first few miles there was nothing to see except the smoke-grimed roofs of Liverpool under heavy rain; Mr Franklin wondered why so much downpour didn’t have the effect of cleaning the city, and concluded that the rain was probably as dirty as the buildings. He turned at last to his newspapers, and settled himself comfortably to discover what England, the great mother of Empire, was concerning herself with that week-end; it seemed to him essential, if he was to accustom himself to his new surroundings.

The news was mixed and, to him, confusing. Mr Cody had crashed his aeroplane at Doncaster on Saturday and had emerged from the wreckage congratulating himself on his amazing good luck; further evidence of the flying mania was contained in a report of a race at Clapton Ladies Swimming Club, in which the fair competitors had taken the water equipped with model flying machines. There were columns about the Budget which had been introduced months before, but was still exciting heated debate, although it was all Greek to Mr Franklin – he noted a prominent advertisement on a facing page strongly recommending him to write to an insurance company for advice on how to provide against Mr Lloyd George’s new death duties. Jack Johnson, the highly unpopular black boxing champion, who had recently delighted the sporting public by his failure to defeat a rising young British heavyweight named Victor McLaglen, had somewhat restored his laurels by knocking out the formidable Stanley Ketchell in nine rounds; a French scientist, M. Flammarion, was proposing to harness the internal heat of the earth as a source of energy, Mr Bernard Shaw had made a witty speech on photography as an art form, and a Plymouth Rock hen had had its broken leg set at the London Hospital.

On the lighter side, questions had been asked in the House of Commons about the forcible feeding of suffragettes; the German army were reported to be buying flying torpedoes from Sweden, and El Roghi, a pretender to the Moroccan throne, had been exhibited in an iron cage at Fez and subsequently executed. Spain was at war with the Riffians.

Having brought himself abreast of current events, Mr Franklin studied the advertising pages. Here he was invited to subscribe to Cuban Telephones, Val d’Or Rubber, and Brazilian Railways; his custom was also solicited for Mexican Hair Renewer, Poudre d’Amour, Dr Deimel’s celebrated porous undergarments, and the new chocolate “massolettes” costing a penny-farthing each and containing “ten million beneficent microbes” guaranteed to kill all pernicious germs and ensure perfect health if taken twice daily.

For his intellectual nourishment he was offered H. G. Wells” latest novel, Anna Veronica, E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Mr Marx’s Secret and a sensational new work entitled All At Sea: a novel of Life and Love on a Liner, by none other than Lily Langtry, whose outstanding attractions, displayed in an accompanying photograph, suggested to Mr Franklin that she was liable to outsell Mr Wells and Mr Oppenheim on appearance alone, whatever her prose was like. Her most serious competitor was obviously the Countess of Cardigan, whose Recollections promised a feast of scandal and included (according to the reviewer) “at least two stories which should not have been printed”.

Mr Franklin betrayed his sad literary taste by laying the reviews aside unfinished, and taking up a recent back number of The Strand which the porter had particularly recommended, since it contained a new story by Conan Doyle which he judged would be to Mr Franklin’s taste. And it might have been, for it was a spirited piece about a young prize-fighter hired by a vengeful beauty to beat up her brute of a husband, the Lord of Falconbridge, but the train had now left the grubby environs of Liverpool, and Mr Franklin was more interested in his first view of the English countryside. A glance at Baedeker informed him that he was passing through that fertile country famous for Cheshire cheese, and that the Welsh hills might be seen to the right, and like any dutiful tourist he sat looking out on the green fields and neat hedgerows, thinking how small and tidy and well-ordered they looked, like a little model toyland that a giant might have laid out for his children to play with.

Whether he enjoyed the prospect it would have been difficult for an onlooker to say, for he sat impassively surveying it, with his eyes far away, the dark face reflected in the carriage window, and did not even stir for the best part of an hour, when the spires of Lichfield came into view. The birthplace of Dr Johnson, the scene (at the George Hotel) of the “Beaux’ Stratagem”, according to Baedeker, but any philosophic reflections which this information might have inspired were interrupted by the arrival in his carriage, when the train had halted, of a beautifully-dressed old gentleman with a glossy top hat, an impressive white moustache spreading over his claret-enriched cheeks, and a copy of The Times in his hand.

He greeted Mr Franklin with a resounding “Good afternoon to you”, spread an enormous white handkerchief on the opposite corner seat, and carefully lowered himself on to it, remarking:

“The condition of modern trains is absolutely damnable. Dust an inch thick, haven’t been cleaned since the Jubilee by the look of them, might as well travel in a coal-cart. I should have gone on the Midland, but there isn’t a dam’ thing to choose between ’em, I dare say. Why the devil can’t they have de luxe trains, like the Continentals, eh? No wonder traffic’s falling off – but it’s all of a piece, of course. Everything’s running down, as I expect you’ve noticed.”

Gathering that a reply was called for, Mr Franklin considered his informant steadily and confessed that he was not in a position to make comparisons, since he was new to the country.

“Indeed?” said the old gentleman, and gave him back an equally steady stare. “An American. I see.” He considered this. “Well, filthy as they are, I suppose our trains could be worse. No doubt the French railways aren’t a whit better, if one comes right down to it, which I for one have no intention of ever doing. I’ve no experience of your American system, of course, but I believe it’s quite extensive.”

Mr Franklin, watching the platforms slide by as the train pulled out, said he believed it was, and the old gentleman shook out his Times and remarked that he didn’t suppose railways would last much longer anyway, what with these damned motor cars, to say nothing of aeroplanes; one thing was certain, that the combination of infernal machines would certainly mean the end of decent horsemanship, and did Mr Franklin ride? Mr Franklin admitted that he did.

“Hunt?” inquired the old gentleman, hopefully.

“Occasionally.”

“Where, would you tell me?”

“Colorado, mostly.”

The old gentleman looked doubtful. “Didn’t know they had hounds there.” He frowned. “What d’you hunt?”

“Bear,” said Mr Franklin, and after a look of surprise the old gentleman laughed heartily and said, of course, he meant game, big game. Well, that was another matter; he had done something in the bear line himself, in India, and enjoyed it, in moderation, not like these damned Germans, who according to the shooting correspondent of The Field were going off to Spitzbergen and Greenland and slaughtering every bear in sight, which was just about what you would expect.

“If you’re hoping to shoot in England, I’m afraid you won’t find much sport, though,” he went on. “Bad year for grouse, you know. Too few birds. Nesting badly, as they’re bound to, of course, considering the way they’re over-driven. No one seems to know how to look after a moor these days; like everything else, going to the dogs. Sport especially – why, in my young days, if anyone had suggested to me that an American polo team – yes, sir, your own Yankee riders – could come over here and open our eyes to the game, well, I should have laughed at him. But that’s what they’ve done, sir – saw it myself, at Hurlingham. It’s this new technique – meeting the ball. Magnificent! Changed the whole game. Well, you remember what it used to be – when the ball was coming at your goal, what did you do, eh?”