The Bandbox

At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at a table in the dining room of the Authors’ Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the death-in-life of sheer boredom.

A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast, he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn’t look that), and he wanted to go home. To sum up, he found himself in love and London at the same time and felt precisely as ill at ease in the one as in the other of these, to him, exotic circumstances.

Inconceivable as it may seem that any rational man should yearn for New York in August, that and nothing less was what Staff wanted with all his heart. He wanted to go home and swelter and be conned by taxicab drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; he tried to patronize the subway at peril of asphyxiation and to walk down Fifth Avenue at that witching hour when electric globes begin to dot the dusk of evening—pale moons of a world of steel and stone; he wanted to ride in elevators instead of lifts, in trolley-cars instead of trams; he wanted to go to a ball-game at the Polo Grounds, to dine dressed as he pleased, to insult his intelligence with a roof-garden show if he felt so disposed, and to see for himself just how much of Town had been torn down in the two months of his exile and what they were going to put up in its place. He wanted, in short, his people; more specifically, he wanted just one of them, meaning to marry her if she’d have him.

Now, to be homesick and lovesick all at once is a tremendously disturbing state of affairs. So influenced the most muscular men are prone to folly. Staff, for instance, had excellent reason to doubt the advisability of leaving London just then, with an unfinished play on his hands, but he was really no more than a mere, normal human being, and he did want very badly to go home. If it was a sharp struggle, it was a short one that prefaced his decision.

Of a sudden, he rose, called for his bill and paid it, called for his hat and stick, got them, and resolutely—yet with a furtive air, as one who would throw a dogging conscience off the scent—fled the premises of his club, shaping a course through Whitehall and Charing Cross to Cockspur Street, where, with the unerring instinct of a homing pigeon, he dodged hastily into the booking office of a steamship company.