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It could be seen all too plainly, but when I reached to touch it it was not there — only the glass could be felt, this glass that had been glazed by the years since I left. If I could only get through the glass, and touch the real live thing that called me back to London. But I couldn't."
Later, he took some of his friends to one or two of the haunts of his childhood, including one of the dingy attics where once he had lived with Syd and his mother. Worm-eaten stairs with a creaking greasy banister led to a small dark room lit by an oil lamp and furnished with the barest necessities. Crumbling walls, a sullen fire on the small hearth, an indescribable atmosphere of poverty and want struck them all into silence while Chaplin, with trembling lips and tear-filled eyes, stared into the past. Almost immediately, with a sudden change of mood, he was looking for the hole in the floor through which he and Syd in turns watched the woman below undressing. He chatted for a while with the present tenant, a bedridden old lady, and when they all left, he made a pretext for returning, and slipped some money into her hand, knowing to the last farthing what it would mean to her; so small a sum now to the boy from Kennington; such unimaginable wealth to the old lady who lived there still.
At the other end of the scale was as fantastic a social life. Chaplin discovered that he was the most sought-after man in London, with an entree to the most distinguished houses, a welcome guest, accepted on equal terms with the greatest personalities of the time in literature, politics, art and society. It was on this visit that he began one of his rare lasting friendships — with Sir Philip Sassoon. It was a real relationship of a kind that have been few indeed in Chaplin's life.
He met, in the course of his visit, E. V. Lucas, J. M. Barrie, Squire Bancroft, Bruce Bairnsfather, Thomas Burke, H. G. Wells, Gerald du Maurier, St. John Ervine and Lady Astor, and was royally entertained by them.
It was an exhausting and enthralling visit. On the one hand, the nostalgia of the past, on the other the continuous social engagements; throughout, the colossal evidence of astonishing fame and popularity. His fan mail was so enormous that numerous secretaries were called in to deal with it. In the first three days of his visit he received seventy-three thousand letters and cards; over a third of them were begging letters. And he discovered from them that he had nearly seven hundred relatives in London that he knew nothing about, nine of whom claimed to be his mother.
He was entirely captured by the charms of The Albany, where Knoblock had an apartment. The dignity and grandeur of the old building, its historic associations, impressed him, as did Knoblock's