5

XVII HOLOCAUST 312

THE BANDBOX

I

INTRODUCING MR. IFF

At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of
August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at 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 ennui.

A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast:
he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was 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 in
London at one and 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 swindled by taxicab
drivers and snubbed by imported head-waiters; he wanted to patronise 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 own 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 strongest 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 premise