|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
commonplace civility.
And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They
simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem
to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you
had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me
with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment
when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
world.
I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
Lords and the Oval.
And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or
clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
“of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”
Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
pastures.
[Illustration: 0127]
[Illustration: 0128]