SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 2

explanations to understand that this shop had, in ready-made
shirts, only one sleeve-length for each size of collar. The
clerk pointed out that their shirts were made properly, for proper-
sized people, and it really wasn't his fault if the Lord had made
me so curiously that I didn't fit their model.

"In America," I said, "we have a number of sleeve-lengths for
each size of collar."

"Oh yes, I dare say you do very curious things in America,"
he sniffed.

Well! At about that time a certain Englishman was beginning
to do these same "curious things" in London. He had spent
several years in America. He got the notion that the fifteen
shillings paid by a man who has lost his luggage and needs a shirt
right now is almost as good as the fifteen shillings paid by a man
to his custom shirt-maker a month before he needs the thing. He
opened a shop in which you could buy many sleeve-lengths for each
size collar, buy quarter-size collars, and in which the shop
assistants did not look at new customers as one who should growl,
"Sir, have we been introduced?"

And the indication of the new business England is that this
man's shop so prospered that he now has a chain of shops, over a
dozen; and the Englishman who once, if he was going to a dinner
party and found himself without a clean shirt would quietly and
decently have committed suicide to solve the frightful social
problem, now quite blatantly goes to one of these shops, and gets
a shirt that fits.

That is the new business England, which believes that it is
not less but more pleasant to treat the customer as though he
knows what he wants.

I had that experience in giving the order for the caravan in
which I am traveling -- in which I am now writing, looking out
through a hedge at a lane in Surrey.

I wanted an ice box. The caravan manufacturers had never

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 2.

made a caravan containing an ice box. Twenty years ago, the man who took my order would have said firmly, "Very sorry, sir, but we don't have ice boxes in our caravans," with an emphasis on the "our" which would have indicated that people who did make caravans with ice boxes were certainly idiots and probably immoral. But in this new era he studied the plan he was making, and mused, "We've never tried that, sir, but I think an ice box would fit in this corner very nicely."

I got my ice box.

The old tradition of English business, that a manufacturer should make only what seemed right to him, and if the customer wanted something different, then the customer was a fool, is passing rapidly. Partly, of course, the new fashion was created by the war. Partly, I believe, it was the influence of America.

I am sorry that America ever invented in the first place, and ever gave to England in the second, the twin curses of cocktails and jazz. But I am glad to believe that American influence has had much to do with the new belief in England that to supply, and supply pleasantly, meat and bread, shoes and typewriters, is quite as important as to preach at men, kill men, or send men to jail.

I close with a story which may be typical of the whole thing. A shoe-manufacturer, one of two brothers who were partners, went to America on a matter unconnected with the making of shoes. Being there, he thought that he might as well look over a Yankee factory.

The next day, his brother in London had a cable, "Join me America at once must change whole factory system." The recipient couldn't decide whether the other had gone crazy or was merely laid out with bootleg whisky.

But there was such an earnest succession of cables that the stay-at-home hastily sailed. His brother met him at the dock, rushed him to a train for Massachusetts, and with him went through a modern American shoe factory.

The first shock of the new arrival was to find that the

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 2.

American manufacturers, instead of concealing their processes, welcomed visitors. The second was to find that the factory employees, in clean, shining, well-lighted rooms, were apparently really excited over raising output and working for bonuses.

The two brothers returned to England and, risking every shilling they had, changed their factory from attic to cellar. They introduced machinery in place of hand processes. They tripled the number of windows. They gave the girl hands cheery uniforms, in place of the dingy street dresses in which they had always worked. And after the change, they found that they were obtaining a double output, from an infinitely more contented staff, at almost the same cost.

Is that a sordid achievement? Should Britain and America exchange only works of art -- and lecturers? I suspect that even MICHEL ANGELO was happier in shoes that did not pinch!

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 3.

Too confoundedly cheerful altogether!

At seven-thirty that same evening, coming down to dinner, I saw the much desired trunk in the hall.

Now Oxford is sixty miles from London. In two hours and a
half, lacking five minutes, I had got the London hotel on the
telephone; the head porter had gone or sent to the trunk room
and picked out exactly the right one from three of mine; rushed
it to the Paddington station -- which can be, in rush hours, as
much as a twenty minute taxi drive from the London hotel; and
got it on the train. It had gone the sixty miles, been by some
magic captured by the Oxford hotel porter; and brought another
fairish distance to the Oxford hotel.

In two hours and a half!

Try doing that between Bridgeport and New York, then decide
whether we Americans have altogether cornered the world's efficien-
cy.

But then -- BUT THEN -- on the other hand there are the
genteel lady crows who sit drinking tea behind the hotel desks
from four-thirty to five-thirty all over Great Britain, and who
resent to fury any motorist who comes in to inquire whether he
may be permitted to have a room for the night.

English hotel-keepers are more mysterious than any E. Phillips
Oppenheim spy. At least half of them -- and not merely in pro-
vincial towns but equally in select and dismaying Family Hotels in
London -- spend fortunes for rent, and for making fifteenth-
century hotels look modern, and modern ones look fifteenth-century.
They install wonderful beds, and pictures of the Duke of Wellington
on the tapestry wallpaper in the corridors, and they have even
been known to put in running water -- though not central heating,
naturally, for no Englishman would feel heroic and happy unless he
felt chilly and wretched.

They provide such efficient hall porters as those who played
catch with my trunk, waiters who serve deftly and who understand,

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 3.

even if they do not speak, the American language, and agreeable
barmen who can tell you the road from Leighton Buzzard to King's
Langley or from Crianlarich to Lochgilphead. They have even
been known to send out a press gang and capture a cook who is
willing, if you show an American, German or French passport, to
provide you with human food, instead of the Brussels sprouts,
kippers, custard, and cold roast beef with which the English
wisely keep down any heat of the blood which may have crept in
despite the lack of furnace heating.

But, having created these really admirable inns, they put at
the bottle neck of the traffic those unparalleled creatures, the
English Hotel Manageresses.

I don't know their origin. They are ladies -- dreadfully.
Perhaps they are decayed gentility, related to the hotel-keepers.
But I suspect, from their astonishing sameness from Cornwall to
Caithness, that they come from an especial training school in which
some schoolmistress who hates all travel -- perhaps she had a bad
Channel crossing the first time she left home, and then a bad snail
in Calais -- inspires them to put all travellers in their place,
which is a very low place indeed.

You stop the car in front of an inn with such carved
monastic stonework, such fictional latticed windows, that you
squeal, "How wonderful to be staying at an historic shrine like
this!" Your delight is the greater as you enter a hallway with
a stone floor hollowed by centuries, ancient oak panelling -- and
a Canadian Pacific advertisement.

Then the Lady Manageress is snipping, "Don't know, 'm suah."

If she is your first specimen, you are frightened -- I have
known even pukka Englishmen who were frightened. If she is your
fiftieth, why, you are more frightened than ever, because you
realize with what perfect poise she can stand between you and
anything you may dare to want.

They are all alike. They are slim, neat, and as suave as

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 3.

butter well iced yet gone slightly rancid. They have ladylike
and patient voices -- the voice of an exasperated governess. They
always dress in black. And none of them ever understand why
they should be disturbed in keeping their accounts -- the Manageress
of a hotel with seven guest rooms can put in eleven hours a day
adding the accounts of her five guests -- by uninvited persons who
dare to assume they are worthy of a lodging. And they never
understand why travellers ask such foolish questions.

Here is a man who asks whether she has a room vacant. The
Manageress knows perfectly well that there is a vacant room, and
she has never pretended to be any seeress. She admits that she
is quite stupid, compared with the Vicar, the Member, or Lady Smith
Brown-Smith. Well then! If she knows about the rooms, why
shouldn't this pretentious male, who thinks he is so elegant with
his Rolls-Suiza?

And who knows what might happen to a Lady Manageress if she
encouraged strangers in their flippant conversation? A motorist
pretends to want to know at what hour the bar opens. Well, in the
first place, the Manageress is a lady, and has nothing to do with
the bar. That is the affair of the barmaid, a nasty young woman.
In the second place, the Manageress has read fiction, and she
perceives that if she answered politely, the whole horrible incident
might end with her being found drugged in a gilded gambling hell
in Monte Carlo -- a thing that has never happened to her in forty-
six years of decent spinsterhood.

I don't suppose the thoughts of a Lady Manageress are really
so complicated or so reasonable as this. I suppose they merely
resent having to work. But I give the dizzy effect they produce
on a motorist, particularly one so low as to have a caravan. I
merely, as a fellow Rotarian, hint to the grand old inn-keepers of
Britain one reason why they do not prosper more.

I give three examples.

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 3

In the same Oxford hotel in which the porter had been so
capable in the matter of my trunk, a man called to see me in the
evening. One of the Lady Manageresses assured him that no one
of my name was registered. The next morning he came again.
There was another crew of Manageresses on desk, and when he asked
for me they murmured Yes, of course, I had been there for four
days.

Now I had actually been there less than a day -- yet I had
been there for four days -- yet the evening before I had never
been there. That is the logic of Lady Manageresses in otherwise
excellent hotels.

And, while caravanning in the pleasant county of Surrey, after
lunch at a hotel in a fair-sized town (for even the stoutest
caravanners should sneak away from dish-washing for one meal a
day), I asked the Manageress whether there was a good garage near-
by.

She must have heard the question a dozen times a week. It
is a hotel that invites motorists.

She looked at me without seeing me, and murmured, "Sorry,
afraid I don't know."

I found, on the same street with the hotel, not three
minutes walk away, an excellent garage.

And a year ago, on a tramping trip through Cornwall, I
stopped at a large, very well-known hotel. Next day, I wanted to
go on by train to Shropshire. The hotel was six miles from any
railway station, and as I could not find the hall porter, there
seemed to be no one of whom I could inquire about trains save
the Manageress.

She said forgivingly, "I'm afraid I don't know anything about
them, but I can have them looked up for you -- in the course of the
morning!"

That was at eight-thirty in the morning. At eleven I was on
a train for Shrewsbury, having telephoned to a person who was not

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 3.

a ladylike, select, and literate Manageress but merely a low
male station agent.

Efficient?

Once, in an English town of 30,000 inhabitants, I was unable
to get a perfectly good British five pound note changed in any
of four banks, each a branch of a great national organization.
But then again, Great Britain is the only country I know in which,
in ninety-five cases out of a hundred, if something you have
ordered has been promised for Wednesday noon, you can be certain
that you will have it on Wednesday noon -- or Wednesday morning.
In fact, as I said at the beginning, "The British can be as
swiftly efficient as -----"

Oh, they can, can they? Ever try to order a porterhouse
steak at an English butcher shop?

It's all too much for me. I wish I were one of these bright
yet profound sociologists like Philip Guedalla or Struthers Burt
or Belloc or Alfred Kerr, who can take one look at a country and
make lovely unanswerable generalizations and put them all down in
large, respectable books.

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NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before

SATURDAY,

1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 4.

MAIN STREETS AND BARRITTS OF BRITAIN,

By Sinclair Lewis.

(World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved.)

Why a caravan?

It is, for idle travellers like myself, the best way to see
Great Britain -- or France, America, Italy, Austria, or any other
country which has reasonably good roads and a population which
does not rush out and beamingly assassinate the stranger.

But there are four kinds of travellers. There are the
department store buyers, whose most incandescent joy during six
weeks in Paris is to discover a place where you buy for $1583.61
a gross, duty included, handbags that by golly will go, oi! like
hot cakes for twenty-five dollars apiece. Not for them the
simple-hearted ways of caravanners, who breakfast on bacon and
eggs, lunch on eggs and bacon, and wash their own dishes. Buyers
would miss their night clubs, here, and the snails. (Not that
they ever go so far as to eat the snails, but it pleases them to
dine in cosmopolitan places where, probably, sometimes, people do
eat snails.)

The second sort go abroad -- from Scandinavia, Germany,
England quite as much as from America -- to be fashionable. They
may hate ocean-crossing and loathe baccarat, but if the smart
world is at Monte Carlo or the Lido and they were not there, they
would not have their pictures in *Vogue* or the *Tatler*, and with
one piteous yowl they would crash from the social ladder they have
with such edifying industry mounted. Caravans for such travel-
lers ----- Don't be low!

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 4.

The third sort travel to see, or rather to be able to say they have seen, only the sites marked by Baedeker or by Martell with three stars: Shakespeare's birthplace, John Roach Stratton's birthplace, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the house where Dr. Crippen murdered his wife, the Adlon Bar, the Roman Forum, or the Tomb of Juliet -- which is one of the nicest of the antique watering-troughs preserved in Verona. Then they go home and lecture, at the men's luncheon club, the ladies' literary society, or the parish guild.

For such really earnest and high-minded investigators, a caravan would be a hindrance. It might compel them to take three whole months to cover Europe thoroughly, if they included Estonia and the Isle of Man.

But there is a fourth sort of traveller, an idle and eccentric fellow, who avoids the postcarded "sights" and likes to amble about unprofitably, learning what people say and eat and wear and read in city side streets, on little struggling farms, in village shops. For him, the caravan is perfect. He escapes from main roads, from railways, from the ruined castle which, Professor Osman T. Igfelt estimates, was kodaked 1,656,387 times in 1927 alone. He can halt at village greens, on a high bleak moor, or behind a cotton mill, yet have for the night a house more comfortable than any inn to be found off the highroads.

But there is another reason for caravanning which, since it is fundamental in all human beings, must a little tempt even the slaves of smartness and the slaves of women's club culture. The caravan answers the gipsy instinct which is in all of us, however covered up; the instinct which makes small boys sneak off to roast potatoes, the English milord go elephant hunting in Africa, and Babbitt desert his snug home, go camping, and pretend that he really likes underdone bacon and overdone rain. That desire for freedom and simplicity -- and some pleasant degree of tolerated

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