THE GIRL IN THE CROWD
England, meanwhile, remained careless of face, with faith in the old
luck; and men did their business, saying little of the knell in their
inwards. There were distraints for rent, a ballet at the Alhambra, and
marriages, and preachings in streets.
But on the night of the 29th the nation gave way to a gush of emotion.
It was a misty night, starless, with horses lying wrecked in the slime
of streets—about ten-thirty; when suddenly through Bloomsbury, Tooting,
newsboys ran clamouring in twos, startling the darkness as with news of
doomsday.
They were selling a special ten-o’clock edition of _The Evening News_,
which had in it five wild lines of pica. It had come from Paris
roundabout by Mackay-Bennett cable: and it stated that 350,000 tons of
Super-Dreadnoughts had been sold by Japan to Germany—were under weigh,
with coal-ships, store-ships.
Whereupon it was a question of postage-stamps that night, for at once
the men of London were flying with fire in their eyes to pen and paper,
writing to the papers, writing to Whitehall. To Arms! To Arms!—no talk,
no nonsense. “_To Arms!_” re-echoed every paper the next day; and white
lips in Whitehall whispered “War!”
For no one knew one atom which way God’s arm was dragging France: the
Home Fleet might be hopelessly outweighted...!
Only one dissentient letter appeared—in _The Times_. The writer advised
calm: he, for his part, did not believe that those Japanese ships would
even reach European seas, since, by putting two and two together, he
could now see that the whole scare was a piece of Chinese chicane.
But this attracted no attention: it was not divined that the writer was
the Prince of Wales, who the previous day had hastened south to town,
to speak with the Queen.
All that day the Government gave no sign, though panic was in the City,
and traffic stopped within a mile of Westminster. It was known that
the Brighton and South-Coast Railway were under Government Orders,
that the War Office, Foreign Office and Admiralty were feverishly
in intercommunication; but the people had to go home unsatisfied at
midnight: no Cabinet Minister had been present at Questions in the
Commons.
That evening, however, something was said at a house in Grosvenor Place
where the Queen was in a set of ten.
After dinner one of three men told a story of a mission-teacher in
China, who was pointing with pride to the British reds on the map, when
his crowd of boys with one voice drowned him in the shout: “You robbed
them!”
This anecdote had the effect of making Her Majesty’s eyes flash fire;
and she cried:
“Robbed them from whom? No part of a planet in space can possibly be
robbed, since the man or tribe that it is robbed from cannot possibly
have any special right to it. But let’s call it robbery, since our own
barbarous old laws call it robbery: then I say, may someone so rob from
_me_, robbing my coppers, and dropping sovereigns into my pocket! Is
it not cruel, ladies, how the mood of this country has been everywhere
misunderstood? The oceans and shores were made roomy for roaming in,
and her sons have gone out, looking the sun gallantly in the face—not
all-unconscious of the stars, I think—with harmless high hearts that
meant well to men. Is someone somewhere the worse for it? Who is not
the better? Every port on the globe would be thrown open, if England
could throw it! and we have called to all, ‘these our conquests are
yours, too: come, buy wine without money.’ What wind that blows is of
a mood more boundless than this bounty? Is the ocean, our home, larger
than our hearts? Aren’t we the fatherland of the outcast, and the ally
of the cowering and downtrodden? Why, ladies, I think that somewhere
in the universe there must surely be some Tribunal or Jury where such
action is passionately approved, and officially stamped ‘In Tune.’ And
are we to be plotted at, and potted at, and turned off the earth? Oh,
I am no Chauviniste or hiccuping Jingo: we here know that the French
are more intelligent and mentally liberated than we, the Germans more
organising and orderly: yes, but there are certain world-ideals of
conscience, of generosity, of moral pride, which are special to us, and
are very precious—we are the salt in the ham! and deserve to live. Our
friends, the French, are reckoned mightily ‘polite’ and warm, because
they bow low: they may be so; and we pretty rigid and chill: but what I
assert I know, that there’s more murmuring mercy breaking and blessing
bread in one good English breast than in any ten roods of Continental
territory. We have that: yes, and we have another quality that’s of
some value—luck!—favouritism with the Soul of Things—luck: a quality
innate in personality, I think—a mental trait: we have it. And so, on
the whole, I say, ladies, Bravo, John Bull! you’re a bit stodgy on your
stumps, but you are something of a credit, and much of a blessing to
your planet; and I say, ladies, let them all come, the whole concerted
world, and this little mole of earth is of a temper and mettle that’ll
hurl their hosts superbly off her in the name of the Eternal Purposer,
as she spurns the surfs of the oceans that churn on her shores.”
Her Majesty spoke with so gallant and angry an arrogance glancing
in her eyes, that some of the more high-strung shrank abashed and
thrilled, for Her Majesty seemed queen enough to lift her arm and order
the stars on their orbits, or bid storms submit. And at once among the
men the word went: “Oh, well, war is certain, or she wouldn’t have
spoken like that—‘let them all come.’...”
Gossip of this incident got into all the clubs that night, and
thence into the newspaper offices. The next morning—that last day of
October—war was taken for granted: war of one slight David against a
gang of Goliaths-of-Gath.
But there was no certainty, till an early eleven-o’clock fourth edition
of _The Star_ confirmed it.
This was bought up like hot cakes in the streaming streets: and it
was with a thrilling solemnity that those three little lines of print
fell upon men’s minds: “The Stock Exchange has suddenly closed.
The Government is appointing private brokers to transact necessary
business.”
This news could not reach the region of Westminster, which was already
one mass of humanity; but a medical student, who had got a copy, gored
his way like a bull to one of the lion-bases in Trafalgar Square,
dragged himself up on it, and read out the momentous thing. Which
done, he roared red-throated: “This means that you are in for it, you
beggars, are you downhearted?”
“_No!!_” howled a thousand mouths at him.
“Are you still English?”
“_Yes!!_”
“That’s all right,” he muttered, and jumped down.
“Absurd person,” murmured Richard Chinnery to his own Oyone, who stood
pressed sandwichlike to his breast. She smiled up at him, and a wild
kind of light lit her eyes an instant, and died out. But Chinnery did
not like this. He had been pulled from his house in the Horseferry Road
by Oyone to see the ado; but the fate of nations very little interested
Chinnery; and now he stood there pressed and in prison: for like a
passionate ocean lashing a shore London was dashing her multitudes,
mass on mass, toward her middle; and those who occupied the windows saw
hats that day, and caps.
This million of men, wetted all day by a steady little mizzling,
would have been pitiable in its lack of knowledge; but whoever had
telephone, tape-machine, or wireless turned themselves into newsagents;
and squares of paper in many façades told the latest, or uttered some
thought that was in all hearts.
For passion had banished for the moment the national habit of stoic
mumness. “Alone Against Europe” stood some time at “_The Christian
World_,” and “No Ally But Our Own Arm,” at a picture-shop at Charing
Cross.
And ever and anon regions of the throng would be seized with song:
yonder, then yonder, the Rule Britannia would be droning, like the
bumble-bee that becomes dumb here, but then hums out there, all a
summer’s day.
“Look,” said Eulalia Bayley at about two o’clock, she being then jammed
with a married sister not far from the Admiralty; and she pointed to a
square of paper at the Cockspur Street corner, on which had just been
written up:
“German, Austrian, Italian, and Russian Ambassadors have left Victoria.”
“Which means war with the lot of them,” said Eulalia’s sister, Alice.
A dew lay in Eulalia’s eyes, like dews in blue-bells, her bosom moved.
She was silent; but then said: “But not the French.”
“No, that’s true,” muttered Alice: “I wonder!”
The bells of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields broke out, slowly telling the
notes of “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.”
But now mounted police drove the crowd round the sisters into still
closer pressure, clearing a way down Whitehall: for the crisis had
taken the police by surprise; and Members had to pass somewhere, since
it was nearly three—a Thursday.
Before long shouts were greeting them, as they moved one by one in cabs
toward the House, with cries of “give it ’em hot!” as one or the other
was recognised. But it was hours before any certain news came out of
the House. As night fell, the Junior United Club’s paper-square had it:
“_Invincible_ and _Inflexible_ have left Lamlash westward: possibly
to convoy _Mauretania_”—making Chinnery sigh with utter _ennui_: a
night dark and thick with drizzle-spray, unlit in some places by
street-lamps, which no lamplighter’s effort could reach. There was a
paper-square statement at Haxell’s Hotel that “A Paris crowd round the
Chamber of Deputies is now singing ‘God Save the King,’” but in the
darkness there hardly anyone saw it. By that time those who had brought
no provisions had grown hungry and faint.
At seven Eulalia and her sister had been drifted in the currents and
eddies of that sea all down Birdcage Walk: and it was thus that, for
the first time, Eulalia came to see the Queen, who soon after seven
appeared with the King and Prince on the East Balcony of the palace.
A comet’s tail of luminosity, whose hazy glare shot a longish way into
the foggy gloom, illumined the group: and the sisters got a good view.
The Queen was smiling down, almost laughing, it seemed, at that ocean
whose drone of cheering rolled more and more remotely away from her
feet, and then in fresh waves rose once more, and droned, and rolled
repeatedly: and her eyes that night shone bright as with some sublime
joy, some wondrous triumph.
At her left hand stood the King dressed _en amiral_, and on his left
the Prince, looking sullen or shy, _en lieutenant_; and, vaguely
suggested behind them, a group of the royal family—among them the
German Princess Elizabeth (“Teddy’s intended”), who had been visiting
the English Court, and been caught here in the storm.
Eulalia’s eyes were nailed to the Queen. And presently she breathed:
“Isn’t she a wonderful woman!” And presently again: “One could die for
_her_.”
Then, as her eyes shifted to the Prince, she threw them on high, with
the sigh: “Ah, Heaven, how like!”—as she always sighed on seeing a
photograph of the Prince.
She resolved to greet her “Edward Reeks” on the morrow morning with the
words: “My Prince!”—for she had a rendezvous with him at Chinnery’s at
ten +a.m.+
But her attention was drawn away from the balcony by an extraordinary
yell of many thousands of mouths that now broke out—up Piccadilly
way, it seemed—and came roaring and roaring toward her, accompanied
by an agitation of hats shaking in the air, like agitated aspen-tops
twinkling in a wind.
“What can it be?” murmured Alice on tiptoe, with stretched chin.
“Whatever it is, the Queen knows,” said Eulalia: “look! she is
laughing!”
But the cause of this noise will be better seen before the National
Liberal Club, whither Chinnery in his chest-wrappings and his Oyone,
had now been drifted.
Chinnery by this time was in a rather pitiable way. He had brought in
his pockets two quartern bottles, one containing water, one wine; and
some moments before the tumult of that yell that Eulalia wondered at,
he had given a flying wild glance round, and drunk the last of the
water—that glance not being due to the presence of others, since he
glanced like that fifty times a day whenever he drank, though quite
alone.
At twenty-seven he was a dipsomaniac—not meaning a drunkard, for he
drank water oftener than wine; but he must ever be drinking a gulp, and
from a bottle; and before each gulp a thievish glance round!
And now both water and wine had failed him, and he was very weary and
uninterested.
Usually he was the essence of patience and sweetness; everyone said of
Chinnery: “he is such a gentleman!”—and “gentle” he was: for, though
recognised by critics of intellect as being by far the greatest brain
on the face of the globe, his goodness of heart made him such that he
could be fooled by any woman, or led by any child.
But now he was in such a mess there, that he let a peevish word escape
him. With a wrinkled forehead, he said: “This is a terrible thing! Am I
to die here among these idle people?”
Oyone, as brisk and fresh as at noon, answered: “But it amuses!”
“In that case there is nothing to be said,” said Chinnery. “But, as for
me, I doubt whether I shall get any sleep after this day. And at nine
in the morning the Prince of Wales is coming to visit me....”
She made no answer—stood there suddenly blanched, half-fainting,
pressing on his arm.
“I did not know that,” she remarked presently in a low tone.
“I had a letter this morning. He has seen something in a paper about
the air-boat, guesses that it is due to me, and wants to see it, I
suppose.”
During many moments now Oyone stood mute, meditating.
Two days before this, she had telegraphed to China part of that
letter of the Prince in _The Times_, which tried to expose the
Chinese political plot; and Li Ku Yu had recognised in the letter the
“Brockweir style”; had said: “The Prince”; had taken fright; and had
wired to Oyone a certain most sinister code-word.
Hence her faintness when she heard that the Prince was coming, of his
own accord, into her power the next morning.
After ten minutes she said: “I find that I must go.”
“But, dear, how?” asked Chinnery.
“Somehow. You come behind me.”
“Oyone, it would kill me!”
“Stay, then. See you to-morrow afternoon.”
She turned, begged her way, attacked, battled, begged her way, gained
a yard, hot, envenomed, her hand against every man, yard after yard,
ragged, streaming, unwearied—resistless.
When she had gained Tottenham Court Road, she could run here and there;
and she ran till she was in her own room in the Regent’s Park house.
There she put match to a lantern, in whose opal glamour she looked a
lovely hag in her bedraggled dress and red-hotness; and she got from a
cabinet a kokotana dagger, a god, and incense-sticks, her object being
to fumigate the dagger through the night, and thus curry favour with
gods in whom she did not believe.
And she lay writhing, wringing her hands, moaning for awe and dismay
of what lay before her, pitiably in travail with a thousand terrors:
for she was the greatest coward!—and yet one of the bravest of beings,
desperately brave at the decisive instant in spite of clammy hands
and dying heart. And even as she lay there heaving up white eyes of
appeal, grovelling, groaning, she was planning the deed she had to do.
Then, like a witch, she set to making spells and incantations over the
weapon.
Meantime, Chinnery, left by himself, had been pricked into interest
in his country, when that yell that amazed Eulalia Bayley farther
west broke out here also, as it broke out here and there all over
Central London. The National Liberal Club put up on its illuminated
paper-square the words: “France! Hurrah! our Ally!”
Up Parliament Street another façade had: “France our Ally! Hurrah!”
Even as men cheered, they looked about them for hands to wring. Before
the National Gallery steps a little Swiss barber (mistaken for French!)
was snatched to men’s shoulders and passionately exhibited amid
cheering which reached to the night’s dim sky. Men sang and danced. In
clubs men, lifting their glasses to clink, looked into one another’s
eyes, and muttered “France”; in public-houses; in hotels; or they
grasped one another’s hands, and with eyes not dry, said: “France.” The
Light had not failed....