LONDON, A YEAR LATER
February, 1916.
A year ago you could leave the Continent and enter England by showing a
passport and a steamer ticket. To-day it is as hard to leave Paris, and
no one ever _wants_ to leave Paris, as to get out of jail; as difficult
to invade England as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To
leave Paris for London you must obtain the permission of the police,
the English consul-general, and the American consul-general. That gets
you only to Havre. The Paris train arrives at Havre at nine o'clock
at night, and while the would-be passengers for the Channel boat to
Southampton are waiting to be examined, they are kept on the wharf in
a goods-shed. An English sergeant hands each of them a ticket with a
number, and when the number is called the passenger enters a room on
the shed where French and English officials put him, or her, through a
third degree. The examination is more or less severe, and sometimes the
passenger is searched.
There is nothing on the wharf to eat or drink, and except trunks nothing
on which to sit. If you prefer to be haughty and stand, there is no law
against that. Should you leave the shed for a stroll, you would gain
nothing, for, as it is war-time, at nine o'clock every restaurant and
cafe in Havre closes, and the town is so dark you would probably stroll
into the harbor.
So, like emigrants on our own Ellis Island, English and French army and
navy officers, despatch bearers, American ambulance drivers, Red Cross
nurses, and all the other picturesque travellers of these interesting
times, shiver, yawn, and swear from nine o'clock until midnight. To make
it harder, the big steamer that is to carry you across the Channel is
drawn up to the wharf not forty feet way, all lights and warmth and
cleanliness. At least ten men assured me they would return to Havre
and across the street from the examination-shed start an all-night
restaurant. After a very few minutes of standing around in the rain it
was a plan to get rich quick that would have occurred to almost any one.
My number was forty-three. After seeing only five people in one hour
pass through the examination-room, I approached a man of proud bearing,
told him I was a detective, and that I had detected he was from Scotland
Yard. He looked anxiously at his feet.
"How did you detect that?" he asked.
"Your boots are all right," I assured him. "It's the way you stand with
your hands behind your back."
By shoving his hands into his pockets he disguised himself, and asked
what I wanted. I wanted to be put through the torture-chamber ahead of
all the remaining passengers. He asked why he should do that. I showed
him the letter that, after weeks of experiment, I found of all my
letters, was the one that produced the quickest results. It is addressed
vaguely, "To His Majesty's Officers." I call it Exhibit A.
I explained that for purposes of getting me out of the goods-shed and on
board the steamer he could play he was one of his Majesty's officers.
The idea pleased him. He led me into the examination-room, where, behind
a long table, like inspectors in a voting-booth on election day, sat
French police officials, officers of the admiralty, army, consular, and
secret services. Some were in uniform, some in plain clothes. From
above, two arc-lights glared down upon them and on the table covered
with papers.
In two languages they were examining a young Englishwoman who was pale,
ill, and obviously frightened.
"What is your purpose in going to London?" asked the French official.
"To join my children."
To the French official it seemed a good answer. As much as to say: "Take
the witness," he bowed to his English colleagues.
"If your children are in London," demanded one, "what are you doing in
France?"
"I have been at Amiens, nursing my husband."
"Amiens is inside our lines. Who gave you permission to remain inside
our lines?"
The woman fumbled with some papers.
"I have a letter," she stammered.
The officer scowled at the letter. Out of the corner of his mouth he
said: "Permit from the 'W. O.' Husband, Captain in the Berkshires.
Wounded at La Bassee."
He was already scratching his vise upon her passport. As he wrote, he
said, cordially: "I hope your husband is all right again." The woman did
not reply. So long was she in answering that they looked up at her. She
was chilled with waiting in the cold rain. She had been on a strain, and
her lips began to tremble. To hide that fact, and with no intention of
being dramatic, she raised her hand, and over her face dropped a black
veil.
The officer half rose.
"You should have told us at once, madam," he said. He jerked his head at
the detective and toward the door, and the detective picked up her
valise, and asked her please to follow. At the door she looked back, and
the row of officials, like one man, bent forward.
One of them was engaged in studying my passport. It had been viseed by
the representatives of all the civilized powers, and except the Germans
and their fellow gunmen, most of the uncivilized. The officer was
fascinated with it. Like a jig-saw puzzle, it appealed to him. He turned
it wrong side up and sideways, and took so long about it that the
others, hoping there was something wrong, in anticipation scowled at me.
But the officer disappointed them.
"Very interestin'," he said. "You ought to frame it."
Now that I was free to leave the detention camp I perversely felt a
desire to remain. Now that I was free, the sight of all the other
passengers kicking each other's heels and being herded by Tommies gave
me a feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to express this by forcing
money on the detective, but he absolutely refused it. So, instead, I
offered to introduce him to a King's messenger. We went in search of the
King's messenger. I was secretly alarmed lest he had lost himself. Since
we had left the Balkans together he had lost nearly everything else. He
had set out as fully equipped as the white knight, or a "temp. sec.
lieutenant." But his route was marked with lost trunks, travelling-bags,
hat-boxes, umbrellas, and receipts for reservations on steamships,
railroad-trains, in wagon-lits, and dining-cars.
A King's messenger has always been to me a fascinating figure. In
fiction he is resourceful, daring, ubiquitous. He shows his silver
staff, with its running greyhound, which he inherits from the days of
Henry VIII, and all men must bow before it. To speed him on his way,
railroad-carriages are emptied, special trains are thrown together,
steamers cast off only when he arrives. So when I found for days I
was to travel in company with a King's messenger I foresaw a journey
of infinite ease and comfort. It would be a royal progress. His
ever-present, but invisible, staff of secret agents would protect me.
I would share his special trains, his suites of deck cabins. But it
was not like that. My King's messenger was not that kind of a King's
messenger. Indeed, when he left the Levant, had it not been for the man
from Cook's, he would never have found his way from the hotel to the
right railroad-station. And that he now is safely in London is because
at Patras we rescued him from a boatman who had placed him unresisting
on a steamer for Australia.
[Illustration: "Very interestin'. You ought to frame it."]
I pointed him out to the detective. He recalled him as the gentleman who
had blocked the exit gate at the railroad-station. I suggested that that
was probably because he had lost his ticket.
"Lost his ticket! A King's messenger!" The detective was indignant with
me. "Impossible, sir!"
I told him the story of the drunken bandsman returning from the picnic.
"You can't have lost your ticket," said the guard.
"Can't I?" exclaimed the bandsman triumphantly. "I've lost the
bass-drum!"
Scotland Yard reproved the K. M. with deference, but severely.
"You should have told us at once, sir," he said, "that you were carrying
despatches. If you'd only shown your credentials, we'd had you safe on
board two hours ago."
The King's messenger blushed guiltily. He looked as though he wanted to
run.
"Don't tell me," I cried, "you've lost your credentials, too!"
"Don't be an ass!" cried the K. M. "I've mislaid them, that's all."
The detective glared at him as though he would enjoy leading him to the
moat in the tower.
"You've been robbed!" he gasped.
"Have you looked," I asked, "in the unlikely places?"
"I always look there first," explained the K. M.
"Look again," commanded the detective.
Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in his inside coat pocket and, with
intense surprise, as though he had performed a conjuring trick, produced
a paper that creaked and crinkled.
"That's it!" he cried.
"You come with me," commanded Scotland Yard, "before you lose it again."
Two nights later, between the acts at a theatre, I met a young old
friend. Twenty years before we had made a trip through Central America
and Venezuela. To my surprise, for I had known him in other wars, he
was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat and lawn tie and tail-coat. He
looked as though he had on his hand nothing more serious than money and
time. I complained that we had not met since the war.
"It's a chance, our meeting to-night," he said, "for I start for Cairo
in the morning. I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and arrived here
only to-day."
"Wednesday!" I exclaimed. "How could you do it?"
"Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta," he explained, "transport to
Marseilles, troop train to Calais, and there our people shot me across
the Channel on a hospital ship. Then I got a special to town."
"You _are_ a swell!" I gasped. "What's your rank?"
"Captain."
That did not explain it.
"What's your job?"
"King's messenger."
It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti-treating law would not let me give
him a drink, but I led him to where one was. For he had restored my
faith. He had replaced on his pedestal my favorite character in fiction.
On returning to London for the fourth time since the war began, but
after an absence of months, one finds her much nearer to the field of
operations. A year ago her citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes
from living on an island. Compared with Paris, where at Claye the enemy
was within fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Montmorency, within ten
miles, London seemed as far removed from the front as Montreal. Since
then, so many of her men have left for the front and not returned, so
many German air-ships have visited her, and inhumanly assassinated her
children and women, that she seems a part of it. A year ago an officer
entering a restaurant was conscious of his uniform. To-day, anywhere in
London, a man out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki armlet, is as
conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box. A year ago the lamps had been so
darkened that it was not easy to find the keyhole to your street door.
Now you are in luck if you find the street. Nor does that mean you have
lingered long at dinner. For after nine-thirty nowhere in London can you
buy a drink, not at your hotel, not even at your club. At nine-thirty
the waiter whisks your drink off the table. What happens to it after
that, only the waiter knows.
A year ago the only women in London in uniform were the nurses. Now so
many are in uniform that to one visitor they presented the most
surprising change the war has brought to that city. Those who live in
London, to whom the change has come gradually, are probably hardly aware
how significant it is. Few people, certainly few men, guessed that so
many positions that before the war were open only to men, could be
filled quite as acceptably by women. Only the comic papers guessed it.
All that they ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and "equal rights"
women ever hoped for seems to have come true. Even women policemen.
True, they do not take the place of the real, immortal London bobby,
neither do the "special constables," but if a young girl is out late at
night with her young man in khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and
sent home. And her young man in khaki dare not resist.
In Paris, when the place of a man who had been mobilized was taken by
his wife, sister, or daughter, no one was surprised. Frenchwomen have
for years worked in partnership with men to a degree unknown in England.
They helped as bookkeepers, shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always
handled the money; in the theatres the ushers and box openers were
women; the government tobacco-shops were run by women. That Frenchwomen
were capable, efficient, hard working was as trite a saying as that the
Japanese are a wonderful little people. So when the men went to the
front and the women carried on their work, they were only proving a
proverb.
But in England careers for women, outside those of governess, typist,
barmaid, or show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis, were as few as
votes. The war has changed that. It gave woman her chance, and she
jumped at it. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" he will find he
must look for a man's job, and that men's jobs no longer are sinecures.
In his absence women have found out, and, what is more important, the
employers have found out that to open a carriage door and hold an
umbrella over a customer is not necessarily a man's job. The man will
have to look for a position his sister cannot fill, and, judging from
the present aspect of London, those positions are rapidly disappearing.
That in the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and
snobbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold
lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a
mechanical one, is no difficult task. It never was absolutely necessary
that a butler and two men should divide the labor of serving one cup of
coffee, one lump of sugar, and one cigarette. A healthy young woman
might manage all three tasks and not faint. So the innovation of female
butlers and footmen is not important. But many of the jobs now held in
London by women are those which require strength, skill, and endurance.
Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and closing the steel gates for
eight hours a day require strength and endurance; and yet in all the big
department stores the lifts are worked by girls. Women also drive the
vans, and dragging on the brake of a brewery-wagon and curbing two
draft-horses is a very different matter from steering one of the cars
that made peace hateful. Not that there are no women chauffeurs. They
are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, business cars, private
cars, taxicabs, ambulances.
In men's caps and uniforms of green, gray, brown, or black, and covered
to the waist with a robe, you mistake them for boys. The other day I saw
a motor-truck clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. It was filled
with over two dozen Tommies, and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of
not more than eighteen years. How many indoor positions have been taken
over by women one can only guess; but if they are in proportion to the
out-of-door jobs now filled by women and girls, it would seem as though
half the work in London was carried forward by what we once were pleased
to call the weaker sex. To the visitor there appear to be regiments of
them. They look very businesslike and smart in their uniforms, and
whatever their work is they are intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman
attempts a man's work she is conscious. She is more concerned with the
fact that she is holding down a man's job than with the job. Whether she
is a lady lawyer, lady doctor, or lady journalist, she always is
surprised to find herself where she is. The girls and women you see in
uniform by the thousands in London seem to have overcome that weakness.
They are performing a man's work, and their interest is centred in the
work, not in the fact that a woman has made a success of it. If, after
this, women in England want the vote, and the men won't give it to them,
the men will have a hard time explaining why.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Brown Bros._
"They have women policemen now."]
During my few days in England, I found that what is going forward in
Paris for blind French officers is being carried on in London at St.
Dunstan's, Regent's Park, for blind Tommies. At this school the classes
are much larger than are those in Paris, the pupils more numerous, and
they live and sleep on the premises. The premises are very beautiful.
They consist of seventeen acres of gardens, lawns, trees, a lake, and
a stream on which you can row and swim, situated in Regent's Park and
almost in the heart of London. In the days when London was farther away
the villa of St. Dunstan's belonged to the eccentric Marquis of
Hertford, the wicked Lord Steyne of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." It was a
country estate. Now the city has closed in around it, but it is still a
country estate, with ceilings by the Brothers Adam, portraits by Romney,
sideboards by Sheraton, and on the lawn sheep. To keep sheep in London
is as expensive as to keep race-horses, and to own a country estate in
London can be afforded only by Americans. The estate next to St.
Dunstan's is owned by an American lady. I used to play lawn-tennis there
with her husband. Had it not been for the horns of the taxicabs we might
have been a hundred miles from the nearest railroad. Instead, we were
so close to Baker Street that one false step would have landed us in
Mme. Tussaud's. When the war broke out the husband ceased hammering
tennis-balls, and hammered German ships of war. He sank several--and
is now waiting impatiently outside of Wilhelmshaven for more.
St. Dunstan's also is owned by an American, Otto Kahn, the banker. In
peace times, in the winter months, Mr. Kahn makes it possible for the
people of New York to listen to good music at the Metropolitan Opera
House. When war came, at his country place in London he made it next to
possible for the blind to see. He gave the key of the estate to C.
Arthur Pearson. He also gave him permission in altering St. Dunstan's to
meet the needs of the blind to go as far as he liked.
When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and Lord Northcliffe were making
rival collections of newspapers and magazines. They collected them as
other people collect postal cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then, as
he is now, a man of the most remarkable executive ability, of keen
intelligence, of untiring nervous energy. That was ten years ago. He
knew then that he was going blind. And when the darkness came he
accepted the burden; not only his own, but he took upon his shoulders
the burden of all the blind in England. He organized the National
Institute for those who could not see. He gave them of his energy, which
has not diminished; he gave them of his fortune, which, happily for
them, has not diminished; he gave them his time, his intelligence. If
you ask what the time of a blind man is worth, go to St. Dunstan's and
you will find out. You will see a home and school for blind men, run by
a blind man. The same efficiency, knowledge of detail, intolerance of
idleness, the same generous appreciation of the work of others, that he
put into running _The Express_ and _Standard_, he now exerts at St.
Dunstan's. It has Pearson written all over it just as a mile away there
is a building covered with the name of Selfridge, and a cathedral with
the name of Christopher Wren. When I visited him in his room at St.
Dunstan's he was standing with his back to the open fire dictating to a
stenographer. He called to me cheerily, caught my hand, and showed me
where I was to sit. All the time he was looking straight at me and
firing questions:
"When did you leave Salonika? How many troops have we landed? Our
positions are very strong, aren't they?"
He told the stenographer she need not wait, and of an appointment he had
which she was not to forget. Before she reached the door he remembered
two more things she was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, still
talking, he walked briskly around a sofa, avoided a table and an
armchair, and without fumbling picked up the instrument. What he heard
was apparently very good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: "That's
fine! That's splendid!"
A secretary opened the door and tried to tell him what he had just
learned, but was cut short.
"I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has just phoned me. It's fine, isn't
it?"
He took a small pad from his pocket, made a note on it, and laid the
memorandum beside the stenographer's machine. Then he wound his way back
to the fireplace and offered a case of cigarettes. He held them within a
few inches of my hand. Since I last had seen him he had shaved his
mustache and looked ten years younger and, as he exercises every
morning, very fit. He might have been an officer of the navy out of
uniform. I had been in the room five minutes, and only once, when he
wrote on the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did not look at the pad,
would I have guessed that he was blind.
"What we teach them here," he said, firing the words as though from a
machine-gun, "is that blindness is not an 'affliction.' We won't allow
that word. We teach them to be independent. Sisters and the mothers
spoil them! Afraid they'll bump their shins. Won't let them move about.
Always leading them. That's bad, very bad. Makes them think they're
helpless, no good, invalids for life. We teach 'em to strike out for
themselves. That's the way to put heart into them. Make them understand
they're of use, that they can help themselves, help others, learn a
trade, be self-supporting. We trained them to row. Some of them never
had had oars in their hands except on the pond at Hempstead Heath on a
bank holiday. We trained a crew that swept the river."
It was fine to see the light in his face. His enthusiasm gave you a
thrill. He might have been Guy Nickalls telling how the crew he coached
won at New London.
"They were the best crews, too. University crews. Of course, our
coxswain could see, but the crew were blind. We've not only taught them
to row, we've taught them to support themselves, taught them trades.
All men who come here have lost their eyesight in battle in this war,
but already we have taught some of them a trade and set them up in
business. And while the war lasts business will be good for them. And it
must be nursed and made to grow. So we have an 'after-care' committee.
To care for them after they have left us. To buy raw material, to keep
their work up to the mark, to dispose of it. We need money for those
men. For the men who have started life again for themselves. Do you
think there are people in America who would like to help those men?"
I asked, in case there were such people, to whom should they write.
"To me," he said, "St. Dunstan's, Regent's Park."[C]
[Footnote C: In New York, the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund for
Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France, and Belgium is working in
close association with Mr. Pearson. With him on the committee, are
Robert Bacon, Elihu Root, Myron T. Herrick, Whitney Warren, Lady Arthur
Paget, and George Alexander Kessler. The address of the fund is 590
Fifth Avenue.]
I found the seventeen acres of St. Dunstan's so arranged that no blind
man could possibly lose his way. In the house, over the carpets, were
stretched strips of matting. So long as a man kept his feet on matting
he knew he was on the right path to the door. Outside the doors
hand-rails guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, exercising-grounds,
and kitchen-gardens. Just before he reached any of these places a brass
knob on the hand-rail warned him to go slow. Were he walking on the
great stone terrace and his foot scraped against a board he knew he was
within a yard of a flight of steps. Wherever you went you found men at
work, learning a trade, or, having learned one, intent in the joy of
creating something. To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, who have
mastered the Braille system and come daily to teach it. There are many
other volunteers, who take the men on walks around Regent's Park and
who talk and read to them. Everywhere was activity. Everywhere some one
was helping some one: the blind teaching the blind; those who had been a
week at St. Dunstan's doing the honors to those just arrived. The place
spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and cheerfulness. When first you
arrived you thought you had over the others a certain advantage, but
when you saw the work the blind men were turning out, which they could
not see, and which you knew with both your eyes you never could have
turned out, you felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for instance,
measured to the twentieth of an inch, and men who were studying to be
masseurs who, only by touch, could distinguish all the bones in the
body. There was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I dictated a sentence
to her, and as fast as I spoke she took it down on a machine in the
Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised figures on a strip of paper like
those that carry stock quotations. Then, reading the sentence with her
fingers, she pounded it on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was
faultless.
What impressed you was the number of the workers who, over their task,
sang or whistled. None of them paid any attention to what the others
were whistling. Each acted as though he were shut off in a world of his
own. The spirits of the Tommies were unquenchable.
Thorpe Five was one of those privates who are worth more to a company
than the sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He looked like John Bunny,
and when he laughed he shook all over, and you had to laugh with him,
even though you were conscious that Thorpe Five had no eyes and
no hands. But was he conscious of that? Apparently not. Was he
down-hearted? No! Some one snatched his cigarette; and with the stumps
of his arms he promptly beat two innocent comrades over the head. When
the lady guide interfered and admitted it was she who had robbed him,
Thorpe Five roared in delight.
"I bashed 'em!" he cried. "Her took it, but I bashed the two of 'em!"
A private of the Munsters was weaving a net, and, as though he were
quite alone, singing, in a fine barytone, "Tipperary." If you want to
hear real close harmony, you must listen to Southern darkeys; and if
you want to get the sweetness and melancholy out of an Irish chant, an
Irishman must sing it. I thought I had heard "Tipperary" before several
times, and that it was a march. I found I had not heard it before, and
that it is not a march, but a lament and a love-song. The soldier did
not know we were listening, and while his fingers wove the meshes of the
net, his voice rose in tones of the most moving sweetness. He did not
know that he was facing a window, he did not know that he was staring
straight out upon the city of London. But we knew, and when in his rare
barytone and rare brogue he whispered rather than sang the lines:
"Good-by, Piccadilly--
Farewell, Leicester Square,
It's a long, long way to Tipperary"
--all of his unseen audience hastily fled.
There was also Private Watts, who was mending shoes. When the week
before Lord Kitchener visited St. Dunstan's, Watts had joked with him. I
congratulated him on his courage.
"What was your joke?" I inquired.
"He asked me when I was a prisoner with the Germans how they fed me, and
I said: 'Oh, they gave me five beefsteaks a day.'"
"That was a good joke," I said. "Did Kitchener think so?"
The man had been laughing, pleased and proud. Now the blank eyes turned
wistfully to my companion.
"Did his lordship smile?" he asked.
Those blind French officers at the Crillon in Paris and these English
Tommies are teaching a great lesson. They are teaching men who are
whining over the loss of money, health, or a job, to be ashamed. It is
not we who are helping them, but they who are helping us. They are
showing us how to face disaster and setting an example of real courage.
Those who do not profit by it are more blind than they.
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Minor changes have been made to correct obvious typesetters' errors;
otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's
words and intent.