The Message Part 14

That Sunday night was not one of London's black nights that have been so often described. The police began to be a little sharp with the people after nine or ten o'clock, and by midnight the streets were getting tolerably clear. For the great majority, I believe it had been a day of more or less pleasurable excitement and amus.e.m.e.nt. For the minority, who were better informed, it was a day and night of curious bewilderment and restless anxiety.

I looked in at several newspaper offices on my way home from South Kensington, but found that subordinate members of the staffs had no information to give, and that their superiors maintained an att.i.tude of strict reticence. As I pa.s.sed the dark windows of my own office I thought of our "feature" for the coming week: the demand for disarmament, in order that naval and military expenditure might be diverted into labour reform channels; Herr Mitmann's voluble a.s.surances of the friendliness of the German people; of the ability and will of the German Socialists to make German aggression impossible, for the sake of their brother workers in England.

I thought of these things, and wished I could spurn under foot my connection with _The Ma.s.s_. Then, sitting at the window of my little bed-sitting-room in Bloomsbury, I looked into my petty finances. If I left Clement Blaine I had enough to subsist upon for six or eight weeks.

It was a risky business. Then I pictured myself casually mentioning to Constance Grey that I was no longer connected with _The Ma.s.s_. I fancied that I saw the bright approval in her eyes. Before blowing my light out, I had composed the little speech to Blaine which, in the morning, should set a period to our connection.

And then I thought of Beatrice. It was barely twenty-four hours since we had parted beside Battersea Park (though it seemed more like twenty-four days), and recollection showed me Beatrice in her rather rumpled finery, with the bleakness of the gray hour that follows such pleasures as most appealed to her, beginning to steal over her handsome face, sapping its warm colour, thinning and sharpening its ripe, smooth contours. Beatrice would pout when she heard of my leaving her father. The thought showed me her full red lips, and the little even white teeth they so often disclosed.

The curves of Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, and how gaily she laughed.

In the midst of a picture of Beatrice, laughing at me across a restaurant table with a raised gla.s.s in her hand, I had a shadowy vision of Constance Grey beside the foot of the stairs in South Kensington.

There was no laughter in her face. I had gathered, when I dined there, that Constance did not care for wine. She had said: "I don't care for anything that makes me feel as though I couldn't work if I wanted to."

How Beatrice would have scoffed at that! And then, how Constance would have smiled over Beatrice's ideals--her "fluffy" evenings--in a kind of regretful, wondering way; almost as she had smiled when she first called me "d.i.c.k," in asking what had become of our staid English reserve; as she watched the noisy crowd in Fleet Street, singing its silly doggerel about England's security and England's "dibs."

And then, suddenly, my picture-making thoughts swept out across low Ess.e.x flats to the only part of East Anglia with which I was familiar, and gave me a vision of burning farmhouses, and terror-smitten country-folk fleeing blindly before a hail of bullets, and the pitiless advance of legions of fair-haired men in long coats of a kind of roan-gray, b.u.t.toned across the chest with bright b.u.t.tons arranged to suggest the inward curve to an imaginary waist-line. The faces of the soldiers were all the same; they all had the face of Herr Mitmann of Stettin. And a hot wave of angry resentment and hatred of these machine-like invaders of a peaceful unprotected countryside pulsed through my veins. Could they dare--here on English soil? My fists clenched under the bed-clothes. If it was true, by heavens, there was work for Englishmen toward!

My blood was hot at the thought. It was perhaps the first swelling of a patriotic emotion I had known; the first hint of any larger citizens.h.i.+p than that which claims and demands, without thought of giving. And, immediately, it was succeeded by a sharp chill, a chill that ushered me into one of the bitterest moments of humiliation that I can remember.

The thought accompanying that chill was this:

"What can you do? What are you fit for? What boy's part, even, can you take, though the roof were being burned over your mother's head? What of Constance, or Beatrice? Could you strike a blow for either? Work for Englishmen, forsooth! Yes, for those of them who have ever learned a man's part in such work. But you--you have never had a gun in your hand.

What have you done? You have poured out for your weekly wage so many thousands of words; words meaning--what? Why, they have meant what the roadside beggar means: 'Give! Give! Give!' They have urged men to demand more from the State, and give the State nothing; to rob the State of even its defences, for the sake of adding to their own immediate ease.

And you have ridiculed, as a survival of barbarous times, the efforts of such men as the brave old Field Marshal who gave his declining years to the thankless task of urging England to make some effort of preparation to fend off just that very crisis which has now come upon her, and found her absolutely unprepared. That is how you have earned your right to live, a citizen of the freest country in the world, a subject of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. And when you have had leisure and money to spend, you have devoted it to overeating and drinking, and helping to fill the tills of alien parasites in Soho. That has been your part. And now, now that the fatal crisis has arrived, you, whose qualification is that you can wield the pen of a begging letter-writer, who is also scurrilous and insolent--you lie in bed and clench your useless hands, and prate of work for Englishmen!"

That was the thought that came to me with a sudden chill that night; and I suppose I was one of the earliest among millions doomed to writhe under the impotent shame of such a thought. I shall never forget that night in my Bloomsbury lodging. It was my ordeal of self-revelation. I suppose I slept a little toward morning; but I rose early with a kind of vague longing to escape from the company of the personality my thought had shown me in the night.

It is natural that the awakening of an individual should be a more speedy process than the awakening of a people--a nation. I regard my early rising on that Monday morning as the beginning of my first real awakening to life as an Englishman. I had still far to go--I had not even crossed the threshold as yet.

XVII

ONE STEP FORWARD

Thy trust, thy honours, these were great; the greater now thy shame, for thou hast proved both unready and unfit, unworthy offspring of a n.o.ble sire!--MERROW'S _Country Tales_.

Five minutes after Clement Blaine reached the office of _The Ma.s.s_ that morning, he had lost the services of his a.s.sistant editor, and I felt that I had taken one step upward from a veritable quagmire of humiliation.

Blaine was almost too excited about the news of the day to pay much heed to my little speech of resignation. The morning paper to which he subscribed--a Radical journal of p.r.o.nounced tone--had observed far less reticence than most of its contemporaries, and, in its desire to lend sensational interest to its columns, had not minimized in any way the startling character of such intelligence as it had received.

"The bloodthirsty German devils!" said Blaine, the erstwhile apostle of internationalism and the socialistic brotherhood of man. "By G.o.d, the Admiralty and the War Office ought to swing for this! Here are we taxed out of house and home to support their wretched armies and navies, and German soldiers marching on London, they say, with never a sign of a hand raised to oppose 'em--d.a.m.n them! Nice time you choose to talk of leaving. By G.o.d, Mordan, you may be leaving from against a wall with a bullet through your head, next thing you know. These German devils don't wear kid gloves, I fancy. They're not like our tin-pot army. Army!--we haven't got one--lot of gold-laced puppets!"

That was how Clement Blaine was moved by the news. Last week: "Bloated armaments," "huge battalions of idle men eating the heart out of the nation through its revenues." This week, we had no army, and because of it the Admiralty and the War Office ought to "swing." In Blaine's ravings I had my foretaste of public opinion on the crisis.

On the previous day I had listened to a prominent Member of Parliament urging that our children should be preserved from the contamination of contact with those who taught the practice of the "h.e.l.lish art" of shooting.

The leading daily papers of this Monday morning admitted the central fact that England had been invaded during Sat.u.r.day night, and even allowed readers to a.s.sume that portions of the eastern counties were then occupied by "foreign" troops. But they used the word "raid" in place of "invasion," and generally qualified it with such a word as "futile." The general tone was that a Power with whom we had believed ourselves to be upon friendly terms had been guilty of rash and provocative action toward us, which it would speedily be made to regret.

It was an insult, which would be promptly avenged; full atonement for which would be demanded and obtained at once. It was even suggested that some tragic misunderstanding would be found to lie at the root of the whole business; and in any case, things were to be set right without delay. One journal, the _Standard_, did go so far as to say that the British public was likely to be forced now into learning at great cost a lesson which had been offered daily as a free gift since the opening of the century, and as steadily repudiated or ignored.

"Two things it should teach England," said this journal; "never to invite insult and contempt by a repet.i.tion of Sunday's Disarmament Demonstration or enunciation of its fallacious and dangerous teaching; and the necessity for paying instant heed to the warnings of the advocates of universal military training for purposes of home defence."

But at that time the nicknames of the "The Imperialist Banner" and "The Patriotic Pulpit," applied by various writers and others to this great newspaper, were scornful names, applied with opprobrious intent; and London was still full of people whose only comment upon this sufficiently badly-needed warning would be: "Oh, of course, the _Standard_!"

But the policy of reticence, though I have no doubt that it did save London from some terrible scenes of panic, was not to be tenable for many hours. Within half an hour of noon special editions of a halfpenny morning paper, and an evening paper belonging to the same proprietors, were issued simultaneously with a full, sensational, and quite unreserved statement of all the news obtainable from East Anglia. A number of motor-cyclists had been employed in the quest of intelligence, and one item of the news they had to tell was that Colchester had offered resistance to the invaders, and as a result had been sh.e.l.led and burned to the ground. A number of volunteers and other civilians had been found bearing arms, and had been tried by drum-head court martial and shot within the hour, by order of the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces.

Another sensational item was a copy of a proclamation issued by the German Commander-in-Chief. This proclamation was dated from Ipswich, and I think it struck more terror into the people than any other single item of intelligence published during that eventful day. It was headed with the Imperial German Arms, and announced the establishment of German military jurisdiction in England. It announced that the penalty of immediate death would be inflicted without any exception upon any British subject not wearing and being ent.i.tled to wear British military uniform who should be found:

1. Taking arms against the invaders.

2. Misleading German troops.

3. Injuring in any manner whatever any German subject.

4. Injuring any road, rail, or waterway, or means of communication.

5. Offering resistance of any kind whatsoever to the advance and occupation of the German Army.

Then followed peremptory details of instructions as to the supplies which every householder must furnish for the German soldiers quartered in his neighbourhood, and an announcement as to the supreme and inviolable authority of the German officer in command of any given place.

Nothing else yet published brought home to the public the realization of what had happened as did this coldly pompous and, in the circ.u.mstances, very brutal proclamation. And no item in it so bit into the hearts of the bewildered Londoners who read it as did the clear incisive statement to the effect that a British subject who wore no military uniform would be shot like a dog if he raised a hand in the defence of his country or his home. He must receive the invader with open arms, and provide him food, lodging, and a.s.sistance of every kind, or be led out and shot.

There were hundreds of thousands of men in London that day who would have given very much for the right to wear a uniform which they had learned almost to despise of late years; a uniform many of them had wished to abolish altogether, as the badge of a primitive and barbarous trade, a "h.e.l.lish art."

We had talked glibly enough of war, of its impossibility in England, and of the childish savagery of the appeal to arms; just as, a few years earlier, before the naval reductions, we had talked of England's inviolability, secured her by her unquestioned mastery of the sea. We had written and spoken hundreds of thousands of fine words upon these subjects; and, within the last forty-eight hours, we had demonstrated with great energy the needlessness of armed forces for England. For and against, about it and about, we had woven a mazy network of windy plat.i.tudes and catch-phrases, all devised to hide the manifest and manly duties of citizens.h.i.+p; all intended to justify the individual's exclusive concentration upon his own personal pleasures and aggrandizement, without waste of time or energy upon any claims of the commonwealth.

And now, in a few score of short, sharp words, in a single brief doc.u.ment, peremptorily addressed to the fifty million people of these islands, a German soldier had brought an end to all our vapourings, all our smug, self-interested theories, and shattered the monstrous fabric of our complaisance, as it were, with a rattle of his sword-hilt. Never before in history had a people's vanity been so shaken by a word.

In the early afternoon an unavoidable errand took me to a northeastern suburb. I made my return to town as one among an army of refugees. The people had begun flocking into London from as far north and east as Brentwood. The Great Eastern Railway was disorganized. The northern highways leading into London were occupied by unbroken lines of people journeying into the city for protection--afoot, in motor-cars, on cycles, and in every kind of horse-drawn vehicle, and carrying with them the strangest a.s.sortment of personal belongings.

At the earliest possible hour I made my way toward South Kensington. I told myself there might be something I could do for Constance Grey.

Beyond that there was the fact that I craved another sight of her, and I longed to hear her comment when she knew I had finished with _The Ma.s.s_.

A porter on the Underground Railway told me that the Southwestern and Great Western termini were blocked by feverish crowds of well-to-do people, struggling, with their children, for places in trains bound south and west. Huge motor-cars of the more luxurious type whizzed past one in the street continuously, their canopies piled high with bags, their bodies full of women and children, their chauffeurs driving hard toward the southern and western highways.

Outside South Kensington station I had my first sight of a Royal Proclamation upon the subject of the invasion. Evidently the Government realized that, prepared or unprepared, the state of affairs could no longer be hidden from the public. The King was at Buckingham Palace that day I knew, and it seemed to me that I read rather his Majesty's own sentiments than those of his Cabinet in the Proclamation. I gathered that the general public also formed this impression.

There is no need for me to reproduce a doc.u.ment which forms part of our history. The King's famous reference to the Government--"The Destroyers"--"Though admittedly unprepared for such a blow, my Government is taking prompt steps for coping in a decisive manner,"

etc.; and again, the equally famous reference to the German Emperor, in the sentence beginning: "This extraordinary attack by the armed forces of my Royal and Imperial nephew." These features of a n.o.bly dignified and restrained Address seemed to me to be a really direct communication from their Sovereign to the English people. Whatever might be said of the position of "The Destroyers" in Whitehall, it became evident, even at this early stage, that the Throne was in no danger--that the sanct.i.ty pertaining to the person of the Monarch who, as it were in despite of his Government, had done more for the true cause of peace than any other in Europe, remained inviolate in the hearts of the people.

For the rest, the Proclamation was a brief, simple statement of the facts, with an equally simple but very heart-stirring appeal to every subject of the Crown to concentrate his whole energies, under proper guidance, upon the task of repelling "this dastardly and entirely unprovoked attack upon our beloved country."

I heard many deeply significant and interesting comments from the circle of men and women who were reading this copy of the Proclamation. The remarks of two men I repeat here because in both cases they were typical and representative. The first remark was from a man dressed as a navvy, with a short clay pipe in his mouth. He said:

"Oh, yus; the King's all right; Gawd bless un! No one 'ld mind fightin'

for 'im. It's 'is blighted Gov'nment wot's all bloomin' wrong--blast 'em!"

The reply came from a young man evidently of sedentary occupation--a shop-a.s.sistant or clerk: