I. ON MY WAY

1. QUALMS

New York, November, 1940

A small voice came in the night and said, “Go.”

And when I put it up to the boss he leaned back in his chair and said, “Go.”

And when I sat alone with my so-called conscience and asked it what to do, it pointed and said, “Go.”

So I’m on my way to London.

Never before have I set out on a long trip with anything but elation in my heart. It is not so with this trip. This one is no lark. It will be tough and I know it.

I will be scared. I know I will feel small and in the way among a people who are doing a job of life and death.

2. CROSSING

Aboard S.S. Exeter, December, 1940

The sailing of a ship, the world over, is a gay event. A ship carries people out of reality, into illusion. People who go away on ships are going away to better things. But that was not true as we sailed for Europe. There was no gayety on the Exeter. Never, on any ocean or in any climate, have I seen a ship sail so drearily. I doubt there is a single person on board who goes joyously. Certainly no one is going for the fun of it. The Exeter takes its human cargo into the land of heavy reality, rather than from it.

There were no farewell parties aboard ship. What few people had visitors to see them off sat in the lounges in small, quiet groups, talking seriously.

That Girl came to the ship with me. And so did an old friend we hadn’t seen for years—Jim Moran, the fellow who hunted the needle in the public haystack, and who sold an icebox to an Eskimo. Maybe you’ve read about him. We knew Moran back when he was just an amateur crazy-man. He was a gay fellow to have around this day, and we were grateful for him. He tried his best to add a touch of joviality to the long-faced atmosphere of departure.

“Look at these passengers,” Moran said. “Spies all over the place. Secret Agent Y-32. There goes Mata Hari of 1940. Everybody trying to eavesdrop on everybody else.

“Ernie, you need a dispatch case. Get an important-looking dispatch case and stuff it full of newspapers. Put a big padlock on it. Carry it everywhere with you. Carry it to meals. Walk the deck with it. Never put it down. Then, about four days out, walk away from your deck chair and leave it lying there. I’ll bet half the people on board would get maimed in the rush to grab it.”

And I said, “Oh Moran, shut up.”

We were to sail at 11 A.M. But the word passed around that we wouldn’t get away till several hours later. The uncomfortable quiet of anticlimax went over the ship.

Moran sat down and wrote four postcards for me to mail in Lisbon, so his friends would think he was over there.

They left the ship at noon—Moran and That Girl. We couldn’t sit there any longer, just waiting for the last moment to come. I walked out into the pier shed with them. She slipped me a note she had written, and I put it in my pocket. We have known each other a long time.

We didn’t try to say anything but just good-bye. And we made it quick. For a minute I watched them walking away, down the long pier shed. Then I went to my cabin and shut the door.

Finally, at two o’clock, we sailed. Everybody had gone. The dock was empty and dead. There was no shouting, no confetti, not even a handkerchief waved. The lonely dock simply drew away. Nothing more, as we sailed on a cold gray afternoon in November toward the darkness of Europe.

We have just thirty-one passengers aboard. That is only a quarter of the ship’s normal capacity, and only a sixth of what it carries on the return trips. Coming back, they put cots in the lounge and pack in 180 or 190 people. But there are so few of us that everybody has a cabin to himself. Mine is a big one with two beds, a sofa-couch, a private bathroom and two portholes. Furthermore, it has a sunny veranda just outside the door. It is, I believe, the most comfortable cabin I’ve ever had aboard ship. All I need to set up housekeeping is a base-burner and a side of bacon.

We weren’t two hours out of New York when we had boat drill.

There wasn’t any monkey business about it, either. They swung out the boats, and tested the radio in No. 1 boat.

I figured that, due to the instability of world conditions (as some people call it), we would have boat drill every day. But there wasn’t another until the seventh day out, when the whistle blew and the bells rang at eleven o’clock in the morning.

It turned into quite an experience for a British girl on board. She had just got up, and was taking a shower. When she heard the bells it never occurred to her that it might be a drill. She said to herself, “My God, this is it!” So she jumped out of the shower and into slacks and sweater without even drying. The lifebelts are on racks under the beds, and she got her lifebelt stuck and practically had to tear the bed down to get it out. She couldn’t find her money, so she ran off without it. She tarried not for lipstick nor rouge. She arrived on deck pale and breathless—to find that we were only playing.

We are now getting into waters where ships do get sunk occasionally. But there is no anxiety on board about our safety. We are fully lighted at night, and on each side of the ship is painted a big American flag, with a spotlight rigged to shine on it. Every night I’ve been meaning to lay out my heavy clothes on the other bed and have everything all ready to jump into—just in case. But we’re almost there now, and I haven’t got around to it.

Some of the passengers have been hoping something exciting would happen. One favors picking up a couple of lifeboats from a sunken ship. Another wants a raider to stop us and search. One extremist even favors being fired at mistakenly by a submarine—on condition that the torpedo misses. As for me, I don’t want to see anything in this ocean but waves. And on second thought I don’t even want to see waves. For I’m seeing them right now; and to put it bluntly, they make me sick.

The run to Lisbon is tough these days for the dining room and cabin stewards. Going over, there are so few people their tips don’t amount to much. And coming back, although the ship is loaded to the hilt, everybody is broke, so the tips are still small. But the crew does get a war bonus of $1 a day for working this run.

We have one Englishman aboard who is the most satisfactory listener I’ve ever talked with. He considers everything you say the most fascinating thing he’s ever heard, and says so with a repertoire of ejaculations completely new to me.

For instance, you say you’ve been at sea a month this year, and he almost jumps out of his chair and says, “No! How extraordinarily remarkable!” You say something else, and he says, “God save us! Would you believe it?” You remark that planes are landing completely blind by radio beam these days, and he leans forward as if about to leap, and comes out with: “God’s teeth! You don’t say it!”

That last one is worth the whole voyage to me.

3. WAY STATION

Lisbon, December, 1940

You must call it “Leeze-bone,” this only free seaport city left in Europe. If you say “Leeze-bone,” then you’re a bona-fide European traveler. If you say “Leeze-bo-ah” you’re a Portuguese and live here. If you say “Liz-bun” you’re a plain American.

Today Lisbon is the temporary pasture for all those of Europe fortunate enough to escape. It is the needle’s eye through which must pass all non-fighting travel between Europe and anywhere else. A month ago it was estimated there were 20,000 refugees in Portugal. There are probably fewer now, for they are being worked out gradually, and Portugal has tightened her borders against newcomers. You can’t get a visa for Portugal today unless you can show a ticket to take you on beyond.

Most of the refugees are in or around Lisbon. A good portion of them hope some day to get to North America. Others go to South America and the Belgian Congo; and since our arrival a whole shipload of Greeks has left for the Dutch East Indies. The majority of the refugees had money originally, or they couldn’t have greased their flight from their home countries. But most of them couldn’t bring much with them. And living costs in Lisbon, although low by our standards, are high by European standards. So the refugees live close to their belts. Lisbon is not a gay place of high night life.

The staff of the American consulate has been greatly enlarged, yet they are working as intensely as newspapermen just before edition time. All day long thick groups of people shove and push and wave papers before the consulate counters, trying to be next in line to argue for a visa for that haven of havens—America. Desperation drives people to many ruses. The consulate clerks have heard so many phony stories that they practically suspect everybody. Yet they seem to have an attitude of tenderness toward them all, too, as if to say “You poor devils!”

Most of the refugees are German Jews and people from the Balkan countries. But now there are a large number of Belgians and French too. Many of them are trying to get to England. And England will take them in, if they can get there.

Restaurants in Lisbon are excellent. There are half a dozen that would satisfy any international epicure. Last night I had the best steak since Buenos Aires, and with all the trimmings it came to only eighty cents. Food abounds here; they pile it on, they even waste it—while the rest of Europe draws closer to starvation.

This is a hilly city—a beautifully hilly city. There are streets here nearly as steep as those in San Francisco. It is very white, and from a distance it glistens. And it is vastly larger than I had expected—nearly a million people—and there are traffic jams just as at home.

The sidewalks are made of flat-topped stones, walnut size, laid in weird designs of black and white as are the sidewalks in Rio. The streets are practically all of cobblestone. The city is dotted with parks and circles and statues.

There are some palm trees, and the other trees still have their leaves on them. But don’t let such greenery, and such bright sun, and such blue skies, pull any wool over your eyes. A friend’s description of southern California fits Lisbon perfectly right now. He said, “You can lie down under a rosebush in full bloom and freeze to death.” That’s Lisbon too, in December.

Three great warring nations all run regular passenger air lines into Lisbon. You can see planes take off every day for Berlin and Rome; and several times a week for England and the U.S. The downtown ticket offices of the English and German lines are next door to each other. In fact, I got into the German office by mistake, and naively asked about planes to London. The young man behind the counter directed me, in excellent English, to the British Overseas offices next door.

Theoretically, the air line to England is a commercial line. But the British Air Attaché here tells them whom to take, and when. When you arrive from the United States, England-bound, you register in a book at the ticket office of British Overseas Airways. That’s all there is for you to do. That’s all you can do. Some afternoon maybe a week later, maybe two months later, the ticket office will call up and tell you to get ready.

Passengers are chosen in the order of their “priority.” Nobody goes without priority. This is arranged in London only, and the average traveler can’t get priority at all. Being a newspaperman, I have priority. If I didn’t have, I might as well go home. But when it will get me to London is anybody’s guess. All you can do is wait.

What applies to us, applies to thousands here awaiting transportation. Trains are crowded. The Rome plane is booked three weeks ahead. Time is heavy on people’s hands, and as the weeks drag on they draw their financial belts closer and closer. But at cocktail hour the bars are crowded, and you hear a dozen different tongues. Americans mostly gather at the Avenida, and give each other the day’s developments—if any—in their struggle to get wherever they’re going.

Even transportation to America is difficult. They say three hundred people are sitting here waiting for the Clipper. Seats on the Clipper have been “scalped” for $1000—and then the buyer finds he has bought nothing, for Panair doesn’t permit transfer of reservations. The American Export Line runs a weekly steamer to the United States, and it is booked two months ahead. But many of these bookings are for people who haven’t even arrived from their home countries yet. Hundreds who have made reservations will never get their papers to go. They say that when the weekly boat sails, carrying out about two hundred people, it pretty well clears out those who are free to leave.

As far as I can tell, sentiment in Portugal is overwhelmingly pro-British. Some friends say they sense a lot of feeling for Germany here, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. True, you see an occasional German army uniform on the streets. And you hear a good many people speaking German. But there is no way to tell whether these latter are fifth columnists or refugees.

Along with George Lait of the International News Service, who was a fellow passenger on the Exeter, I put up for several days at a pension, which is something halfway between a boarding house and a hotel. And from my slight experience with pensions in this and other countries, you can have them, and welcome. But by pulling wires, the two of us finally got a room in a hotel.

The new room is about twenty feet square, and it has two big windows that look onto a narrow street. Early each morning they bring all the newsboys and street vendors of Lisbon up to this street and test their lungs. If they can’t wake us up, then they are weak and sick and are sent home for the day with a black mark.

Our room is old-fashioned, yet quite comfortable (except for temperature). The ceiling is far, far above us, and is covered with colossal scrollwork in purple plaster. The bathroom is simply one corner of the room walled off by movable panels, which stop five feet short of the ceiling. Our bathtub has three faucets, one marked cold, and two marked hot. The point is that one is a little hotter than the other. I don’t know why it’s done this way. All I care about is that one or the other should give off hot water; and they really do—plenty hot. But our radiator does not have the same virtue. It is a centuries-old custom not to have heat over here. All radiators are vaguely warm; none is ever hot. They have no effect at all on the room’s temperature.

I’ve been cold all over the world. I’ve suffered agonies of cold in Alaska and Peru and Georgia and Maine. But I’ve never been colder than right here in this room. Actually, the temperature isn’t down to freezing. And it’s beautiful outside. Yet the chill eats into you and through you. You put on sweaters until you haven’t any more—and you get no warmer.

The result is that Lait and I take turns in the bathtub. I’ll bet we’re the two most thoroughly washed caballeros in Portugal. We take at least four hot baths a day. And during the afternoon, when I’m trying to write, I have to let the hot water run over my hands about every fifteen minutes to limber them up. I’m telling the truth.

We went down to see the Exeter sail. You’d never have recognized it as the placid and sparsely populated ship we came over on. In the lounge stood row after row of cots. Two-by-fours, with holes bored in them, had been laid over the rugs. The cot legs were set in these holes, to keep them from sliding in rough weather. Down below, every cabin was jammed. Cabins with three beds had four people in them. The ship was alive with children. Luggage was stacked everywhere.

The stewards were about to go completely crazy. Everybody was wanting something. And nobody could understand anybody. Bernie Garland, my steward coming over, said he could recognize about every language in Europe but he had a cabinful speaking something he’d never heard before.

On these homebound trips you’re lucky to be aboard at all. Which made the request of one haughty woman sound ridiculous. I overheard it myself. She was in one of the best cabins, but she didn’t like it. She came to the steward and asked if she was in first class. He told her there was only one class. So she said, “Well, you must have better cabins. Change my cabin right away, even if I pay more for it.” She wanted to change—and with eighty people sleeping in public on cots!