IN LONDON, FEBRUARY, 1910.
In the smoking room of the Bothwell Club, on Cheapside, back of St.
Paul’s, London, on February 12th, in the year of grace, 1910, two men
sat in attitudes of earnest attention. A third man older than either
with his back to a blazing fire, whose simulated effect of comfort
arose from the curling tendrills of gas flames that swept over another
simulation of heaped up logs, was speaking with desperate emphasis. He
seldom looked at his arrested auditors, nor indeed moved, except when
he raised his head, and his eyes, strained with a hopeless longing,
sought the gay frescoes of the ceiling, or when, in pauses of his
declamations, he walked to a window and raising the curtain looked out
upon the city, up to the dome of St. Paul’s, which rose like an Irkutsk
igloo above a plain of snow.
The man was Alexander Leacraft, the auditors were Mr. Archibald Edward
Thomsen and Jim Skaith, both familiar to the reader as rescued and
rescuing, in that awful day of November 28th, when the last little band
of citizens, led by the provost-marshal, had slipped away in the storm
from Edinburgh. Strange things had happened since then: much stranger
were in store. The train in which Sir John C-- and his companions
escaped, had made its way with painful slowness, and before the
English line was reached had stopped repeatedly until it was necessary
to desert it. And then the weary crowd of refugees had staggered on
their way to a distant station, along a country side emptied of its
inhabitants, with the low houses of the country people evident only as
mounds of snow. And, with many struggles, with mutual assistance, with
prayers and suffering, the men pushed on in the closest companionship,
brought by the terrors and dangers of the journey into the usual
unhesitating intimacy of peril. They took each other’s places in the
work of excavation, helped all to flounder and press through the
drifts, divided their company into the weak and strong, and so allotted
tasks that the co-operation of all helped their common progress. Camps
were made in which shelters were clumsily provided, with tents brought
from Edinburgh, and which only the industry of the watchers saved also
from burial in the tossing drifts.
The frugal meals snatched by chance or at the favorable moments where
inequalities of the ground permitted a more regular distribution and
preparation of food served well enough. Now and then they espied a
deserted house, and into this they crowded, enjoying the heat of fires
made of the wood-work, the floors and windows of the house itself,
while they dried their clothing, changed their shoes, and, gaining
a respite and new strength, salleyed out again into the desolate
landscape with its blue gray skies flaming with crimson, when the day
set, and the snow cleared, and a sharpened icy edge of cold vibrated
like an unseen but intensely realized cord stretched nippingly through
the air. The leaders expected to reach a place called Tway stone, where
a train was in waiting, which would carry them south of this immediate
zone of the greatest snow falls. Grewsome sights were encountered, and
the blanched faces of men turned away from the uncovered sepulchre of
a horse and rider, now a child and mother, and sometimes in the wet
morasses still unfrozen, beneath the towering ridges, the forlorn,
immured body of a young woman with blanketed face and streaming hair.
Leacraft and Thomsen, with Jim, worked unremittingly with the young
Scotch woman. They patched up a rude litter and they carried her on
this, trudging toilsomely along, and watching her needs. Their care was
affectionate and touching, and soon other strong men offered their
help, for gradually the sensation gained place--so quickly does the
human fancy cling to the vaporous skirts of superstition--that the
girl’s safety meant the rescue of all, that her security carried with
it the common weal. She became a fetich, and they rejoiced in caring
for her, as if contribution to her welfare conveyed its unseen benefits
to all who engaged in the kind ministry. Nor did she fail, with the
living hopefulness of youth, and with her fresh winning loveliness, to
establish a return. Her smile, the lingering gratitude she showed to
all, her own usefulness and ready help at the stop and waiting places
when her eager intelligence watched and directed the provisioning and
cooking, rewarded the toilers. She was quick and resourceful, cheerful
in exhortation and advice, and certainly--to Leacraft--always lovely.
Thomsen had forgotten his first resentment at Leacraft’s apparent
admiration for his cousin. The two men had become very intimate. Both
felt themselves on the edge of new events, which were in part to be
shaped by the blind forces of the earth, and in larger part as they
affected England, by the sagacity and steadfastness of men. They talked
much over these things together. Both were sombre and frightened. The
invincible powers of nature, the unconquerable ferocity of nature which
is deaf to reason, blind to suffering, made them shrink and quail.
To meet its urgency with make shifts was impossible, to resist it
madness; the line of retreat was the only line of escape. They felt
this; the thought became oppressively dominant. They began at first to
hint at it, they ended, quite quickly too, in predicting it with mutual
confessions of dismay.
Both loved Miss Tobit, yet, as far as appearances went, only the
guardian spirit of her dreams could have told the direction of her
inclinations. Perhaps both seemed to her too dear, too much involved
in the one peril with herself, to stand apart from each other in any
guise or place of preference. Thomsen was the younger man, and he
had the advantage of a handsome face, a fine form and a particularly
deferential tenderness. Cupid and his mother are not slow to give such
gifts their heartiest commendation. But Thomsen was generous to his
somewhat reticent, and, probably not greatly feared rival, the prowess
of beauty is generally undaunted and oftentimes magnanimous.
When the worst hardships of their journey were over, and in the less
afflicted regions of England, where at the time the snow falls were not
as deep, or the winds as tempestuous, Leacraft had many chances to talk
with Miss Tobit, and he found her extremely affable, well informed and
sympathetic, certainly not endowed with the mischievous drollery and
the roguish merriment of Miss Garrett, and therefore not so piquant,
tantalizing, and desirable, but very kindly and soothing.
The provost-marshal and most of the party went to Liverpool, whither,
before, many of the inhabitants of Edinburgh had fled, but Leacraft
and Thomsen kept on to London. They found conditions in London full
of fright and trepidation, and the business interests floundering and
collapsed. Leacraft took up his headquarters at the Bothwell Club, and
Thomsen and his cousin found a home at a maiden aunt’s, in Claverhouse
place.
But much as Leacraft would have craved an indulgence of sympathy and
response, the audience of sense and appreciation, and the agreeable
picture before his eyes of acquiescent if not admiring beauty, the
fatal progress of events in the world of England kept him away from
Miss Tobit more than he wished. These events were far from reassuring;
they were directly and successively catastrophic. Their logic seemed
inexorable; and Europe became rigid with attention as it watched with
most varying feelings of commiseration the tightening grasp of frost
and snow, wind and tempest, upon the destiny of England. Not that an
actual submergence beneath snowdrifts was threatened, a hyperboreal
sepulchre under which every Englishman lay, like the Excelsior youth,
“lifeless but beautiful.”
No such shocking and shattering misery as had befallen Scotland had
as yet engulfed England, especially its southern counties, but the
darkening days brought more clearly to the observation of the most
recalcitrant and obtuse, the most reluctant and temporizing, the fact
that England’s climate was approaching that of Labrador, that the
restraints of trade would soon become enormous, that its products
would be unmitigatedly diminished and restricted, and that it could
no longer raise wheat; that its railroads, for half the year, would
endure a dangerous embargo; that its population would perish; that
its industries would undergo the most serious curtailment; that
foreign ports would absorb its commerce, steal its prestige, insinuate
themselves, by its crippled resources, into the markets of the earth
in its place; that the ramifications of disaster would penetrate its
social, intellectual and political life, and cloud its mental horizon
with the gaunt and stupid spectres of Torpor and Helplessness. This
monstrous dilemma submerged all minor passions, and plunged England
into the noisiest outbreak of argument, suggestion and panic-stricken
questionings.
Leacraft buried himself in the questions that now with the more forward
and statesmanly thinkers were coming to the front with relentless
insistence. Amongst these, conspicuously outstrode and outshone
the rest, H. G. Wells, the brilliant author and prophet of the New
Republicanism, whose book had five years before roused an intense and
frightened protest from the servitors of antiquity, and the selfish
lackies of a superannuated and mythical class system. Mr. Wells, with
his trained skill in scientific deduction and the exercised powers of
imagination, with a reckless and defiant desire to unravel the future,
with the slenderest regard for the prejudices of religion or old-fogey
political conservatism, was now half-deluded himself with the sudden
dream of starting the English nation on new grounds. Released from
the impedimenta of ceremonies and ruins, names and titles, furnished
with a _tabula rasa_ where the new ideals of which he set himself up
as a sort of avatar and preacher might most keenly set and develop
themselves, he believed--as in a measure Leacraft did himself--that the
English cultus would put on those insignia of the coming eras which
meant intellectual emancipation, and a social and civil regime where
the greatest happiness and the widest material prosperity would unite,
in which, too, would not be wanting a radical rearrangement of the
relations of the sexes, hinted at in the same author’s later books,
but which again, naturally, by many who followed Mr. Wells a certain
way, was indignantly repudiated. A more dignified and august group of
men--among whom the names of Churchill, Chamberlain, Rosebery, Balfour,
Prof. Stubbs, and Bryce led--had assembled themselves in a council of
deeply concerned and profoundly patriotic advisers. These men secured
a very noble elevation above the wild and unclassified miscellany
of men and women who, with cries, denunciations, nostrums, whims,
hallucinations, guesses and queries, deluged the pages of the _Times_,
stood at the corners of the streets, where such standing was possible
in the hard weather, and preached their fantastic mental wares. A still
more obvious and ear-assailing group were the religious zealots, who
thrive at moments of peril, filling the brains of their listeners with
adjurations, exhortations, prayers, pictures and prophecies, for one
moment doleful with wailing execrations of past wickedness, and the
next piteously shrieking eloquent appeals for repentance and confession.
The singular and amazing thing in all this was the convinced assent
given to the prediction of Science. Whereas at first the geologists
and the meteorologists belittled and ridiculed the warnings of the
President, they now enlarged, extended and enforced them with a greater
authority, and more illuminated reasoning. Hardly believing that the
people of England would realize this approaching disaster, what it
meant, what steps should be contemplated to escape its worst effects,
how permanent and deep-seated were its causes, the British Association
for the Advancement of Science had resolved itself into a body of
educators. Lectures were given where practicable, leaflets circulated,
letters published in the leading dailies, and a comprehensive
educational crusade started--and with one object--to instill a deeper
dread of the future, a distrust of the possibility of the longer
occupancy of the British Islands, and yet a firm reliance that under
changed auspices of place, the same civilization, with unchanged
features, would still continue to rule the world.
Parliament was constantly in session, and to it the worshipful English
householder and pew-renter looked with unwavering faith, waiting for
its sublime wisdom and intrinsic patience, to devise ways and means,
and some safe policy of safety. Even the King became earnest, perhaps
a little anxious, as among the most popular doctrinaire plebiscites
was the reiterated need of an abolition of the discarded system of the
royal household.
From the midst of all this confusion, organized and disorganized
movements, the collapse of trade, the desertion of workers, the
sudden emergence of a thousand voices claiming, clamoring, debating,
the physical wreck of business, the inflamed transcendentalism that
saw ahead of the present moment, re-adjudication, rehabilitation,
renovation of all social wrongs; and with the cruel winter breathing
its desolating rigors, the snow rising in the streets, the poor dying
from starvation or exposure, the steamers crowded to their taffrails,
daily exporting the timid and selfish rich, or the pinched poor,
escaping with a bare competency, to establish themselves under less
penurious skies--from all this there suddenly grew into stalwart and
national proportions, _the resolve to leave England_.
It grew with a certain flaming ardor of noble hopes and resolves.
It grew also with an agony of doubt. The whole implication of the
idea was grievously wounding to pride, and it strained at the very
heart-string of the English nature. To go away from England was to
become _un-Englished_, to lose the rich heritage of pastoral beauty,
the treasured wealth of historic associations, the spot and home of
literary triumphs, the soil, the air, which by some impalpable union of
efficacies made the English blood and temperament, and which could not
be taken away to make the same fine product elsewhere. The pathos of
it! A nation wandering homeless with its Lares and Penates in its arms,
its face darkened with humiliation; its shoulders, that erstwhile bore
the burdens of states, bowed with the shame of enforced desertion; its
voice, that summoned the freemen of the earth to convocation, silent
with fear, or perhaps broken by the irrepressible echo wrung from its
own anguish, at turning its back on the cradle and the home of its
greatness.
_And yet it grew_--this same resolve--and eloquence, and poetry, and
prayers, and science, and statescraft united to make it strong and
beautiful, to blend in it the supernatural benisons of religion, the
purified affections of the heart, and the resolute affirmations of
conviction.
“My friends,”--it was Leacraft speaking from the fireside of the
Bothwell Club, in Cheapside, on the night of February 12th, 1910--“I
think the speech to-day of the members from Scotland in Parliament was
decisive. It leaves no alternative. We cannot hopelessly, in the face
of this modern world’s competition, fight out a narrowing chance for
existence under the conditions facing us. And it is an unmistakable
alternative. Our climate has changed, and the change is irrevocable,
and it is subversive, too. We must go away, taking all that we have
with us. The English nation has reached a sublime crisis. We transplant
our virtues; we will relinquish our failings; we have a world of our
own to choose from, and we are given an opportunity unparalleled in
history.”
“It’s a great chance to begin all over again,” expostulated Jim.
“Not at all,” resumed Leacraft, his voice rising with that peculiar
English intonation of tenuity, which often animates their sluggist
accents, if it does not soon soar into nasal squeaks;--“Not at all.
We leave England with not a thing forgotten or lost. The machinery of
our greatness is in our history, and in ourselves; the products of
industry and art, so far as they are necessary fixtures, stay. What
of it--a cathedral, a palace here and there? They often stand for
things it would be best for us to forget, and under which perhaps only
revolution and violence will make us forget, if we remain as we are.
What stirs my imagination, what grows visibly before me”--both Thomsen
and Jim watched intently the fervid Englishman, released into a sort
of mystic clairvoyance--“is a new land which is a physical unit, which
has known no political subdivision, which holds within it no inherited
rages, and taunting bitternesses, as these islands do to-day. Let it be
Australia, let it be South Africa--though there, I admit, is the memory
of a bungle--but we enter it a single people, blended into homogeneity
by adversity, and we set about the tremendously interesting task of
re-creating England, at least in all things pertaining to her that are
great and lovable.”
“I fail to see,” said Thomsen, “that the probabilities are that way. On
the contrary, freed from the geographical confinement of neighboring
islands governed from London, in a new land, Irish, Scotch, English
will segregate again, and then scatter, just as might mixed races of
birds, who, while they are in the same cage mingle, but when they fly
out, fall back into their natural groups, by the most certain of all
animal tendencies, that ‘like seeks like.’”
“Well, and what of it?” retorted Leacraft. “These elements are
together in a new country. It is one. There is no history behind it of
subjugation and ill treatment; there can be no reversion to bickerings
and recriminations where even the monuments and milestones familiarly
associated with injustice have disappeared. Besides, we leave behind
the obnoxious, shameless law of entail--at least we shall be free of
that disgrace--and at last--but,” he added, his voice again sinking to
a pained whisper, “with what a wrench!”
“Well, Mr. Leacraft,” spoke up Jim Skaith again, “it’s mair than moving
that has to be done. There’s the new land to be bought and settled.
There’s getting there, and biding there. There’s schools to be built,
and hames and shops, and, it seems to me, with pardon for being so
forward, that if it took so many years to make a great city, it’s no
fule’s wark to sail ower the seas and pit it up again”; then, after a
pause, “An’ it’s never the auld hame.”
“No,” resumed Leacraft, “that is true. It’s not the old home, and a big
city--the greatest--cannot be boxed up in straw and packing cloth and
get set up by order in another place, with the precision of a movable
bungalow. But we need not trifle. We all know that it’s no child’s
work. We expect something very different from London. We can meet the
emergencies of place and room. Our population can be distributed.
Remember, we are on trial, and the new, strange chapter opening before
us will bring again into view the inalienable fortitude and power of
the English mind. It’s a test. The conditions are irreversible, and
mind and character will win--must win--or slowly, surely, the stars of
our ascendancy pale and disappear. Nature for a moment has thrown us
in a great peril, but was it nature or ourselves that won us footholds
throughout the world? Open coasts await us, hundreds of thousands
will welcome us. The influences of a common language, ancestry and
institutions have chained together the links of our supremacy around
the world, and made of it an inseparable girdle. Shall we falter now,
when nature again challenges our mind to quell her hostility, opposing
her impediments of sense to our invisible treasuries of thought,
invention and self-confidence? It is a new step--our best step,--in
the march of human liberty. We need to be divorced from the material
constants, amid which the long fought battle for free thought and
action has been waged. We are yet entangled in the meshes of tradition,
the stumbling blocks of convention--and now they are shattered. We rise
to splendid hopes. Or shall we say it is retribution, it is punishment
for many sins. Let it be so. A chastened pride will not hurt us, nor
will it hurt our chances.”
“Yes, Leacraft,” interrupted Thomsen, “I feel better to hear you talk
this way, but I must look at some very disagreeable facts, too. They
are not easily eliminated by words or fancies, and even seem to
evince a provoking facility to become more numerous, the more they
are considered. Take the mechanical problem of transportation. We are
some forty millions of people. The extravagant powers of assimilation
of the United States barely digests the one million of emigrants that
come to their shores each year; what conceivable powers of absorption
will dispose of our forty millions without an attack of industrial
_gastritis_ that will induce the worst political convulsions. And the
carrying skill and capacity of our whole merchant marine cannot in
less than ten years take away this monstrous human cargo, together
with all the colossal accumulation of paraphernalia, stocks, chattels,
goods, treasures, books and belongings, that have gathered in this
rich island, until they seem like a sort of pactolian alluvium that
is indigenous and irremovable. Think of the women, the children! What
method of domiciliation will you devise to accommodate these armies?
And with this removal comes the crash of all domestic values, railroad
stock, gas stock, mill stock, warehouses, land values, everything
goes with the removal of the human vitality that gives them worth. It
staggers the imagination to think how the disorganization radiates and
increases in all directions. In 1905–6 this Great Britain consumed
in one industry alone nearly four millions of bales of cotton, spun
them out into merchantable goods on her fifty million spindles. Do you
measure the almost unfathomable depths of distress the stoppage of this
one industry means? Is it not better to fight it out here, to defeat
Nature, if I may be allowed to copy your own enthusiasm, to put on our
own heads the regalia of the Ice King, and _rule him_, wrest from him
his own sceptre, and excel his power with the power of this new century
of invention?”
“Impossible.” Leacraft’s retort was quick and impetuous. “Impossible.
No expedients of man overcome the deliberate intentions of Nature. We
utilize her forces, but we may not deflect her purposes. It is the
voice of that very science which has made us such powerful masters
of her utilities that now tells us: _We must go._ To quote the words
of Prof. Darwin, spoken at the Cape Town meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘Stability is further
a property of relationship to surrounding conditions; it denotes
adaptation to environment’; there can be no adaptation to this new
environment, which will retain our former greatness. Nature opposes
us, indeed, in forcing us away, but we thwart her niggardliness by
subterfuge and endurance and courage. We can make her plastic enough
for our purposes if we do not overstep the limits of her last negation.
The practical question, the panic, the loss! Ah! Well, if all should
be as it has been, if the inequalities still remained, the very moral
significance and regeneration which I hope for could not come. It means
the levelling process by which the New Brotherhood is visibly and
violently enforced. And as to place and means, thousands upon thousands
will establish themselves in America, blessing every community they
enter, and being blessed in turn with opportunity. Australia and
South Africa, and Canada, with millions upon millions of square miles
of unused land, will furnish us with new homes. Revivification,
regeneration, rehabilitation will be rapid. We shall not see its
final outcome, but we shall know the virile impulse of self help at
its inception. If social differences, if social pageantry, vanish,
the constraining push of Christian tolerance and fellowship succeeds.
Differences may emerge later, but they will be differences of endowment
and industrious energy; no other. And as to the transportation problem,
it can be solved. We should not all go at once. It may be a slow
movement; perhaps the slower the better. But see how we become unified.
Like refugees or shipwrecked outcasts, we shall help each other, and
every man’s hand will help his neighbor, but also we shall organize on
the basis of each man’s aptitude; the farmer to his ploughshare, the
mechanic to his workshop, the preacher to his pulpit, the artist to his
easel, the banker to his counting room; at last, an ideal assortment
of talents.”
Thomsen hid a slight yawn, and made a smile of incredulity serve
the ends of a salutation of encouragement. “There’s no denying the
contagion of your confidence, Leacraft, but really I think that we
are all mournfully in the dark as to what we best can do; and in the
meanwhile it’s a matter of positive terror what we are going to live
on. I brought all the available cash I could for Ethel and myself, but
already famine has unfurled its banners, and you know how cramped and
shrunk our living has become in London. The Thames alone saves us from
starvation. It’s no longer a question of having a bank balance, but the
more definite and fundamental one of finding something to buy.
“By the by, Balfour closes the debate at ten to-night. You have
admission to the gallery of the Commons. Let us go down. It promises to
be a fine effort. I only hope it’s not going to be a funeral oration.”
Leacraft pulled out his watch and found the time a half-hour after
nine. Yes, he would go; in fact he had already engaged a boatman at
Blackfriars’ Bridge, to be in waiting for him at almost that very
moment. Jim stepped to the window and looked out. The night was pure
and clear. Huge hummocks of snow encumbered the streets below, and the
moon blazed in the keen sky like some target of disaster.
“Weel, Mr. Leacraft, you won’t want me along, and somehow I’d rather
sit here and think over your own words, little as I believe it will all
come oot so gude-like.”
“No, Jim, keep the fire on, and watch out for us, and you might
remember to brew us a stiff snack after your own heart; it won’t
come amiss.” Jim assented with alacrity, and Leacraft and Mr.
Thomsen, muffled up to their ears, and almost hermetically enclosed
in fur ulsters, left the room, descended the stairs, and appeared at
the doorway on the street. A tolerable path led through a part of
Cheapside, but it was not their intention to follow that thoroughfare;
they turned towards the church and clambered along a devious footway,
that imitated the sinuous and irregular wanderings of a mountain
trail. It led them to Ludgate Hill, where they encountered a few other
travellers like themselves making their way to the bridge for the same
purpose. Bridge street was just passable, and soon the ice-laden waters
of the river were seen, blazoned like some spectacle of enchantment
in the deluge of argent light. They found the boatman in the basement
of the Hotel Royal, which was dead, to the last stories of its
ornamented facade, silent and dark. It was a part of the indications
that London already had lost its visitors. The barge men stole out of
their retreat, and Leacraft and Thomsen followed them, the shadows of
the party printed in ink on the winnowed snow. Two men accompanied
the boat; one rowed and the other stood at the prow, pushing off
the cakes of ice, and correcting the passage of the boat through
the lanes of water, flowing like limpid threads of molten silver
between the crunching and veering floes. Leacraft and Thomsen watched
with fascinated eyes the broad terrace of the Victoria Embankment,
illuminated with the moon’s effulgence, whose unchecked glory met a
feeble rivalry in a few sickly gas mantels, and a solitary electric
lamp. The noble houses of legislation--and to the eyes of Leacraft
they never seemed more imbued with a supremely delicate and elevating
beauty--rose from the water’s edge, like some creation of an inspired
dreamer, woven of splintered rays of light, with pencilled lines of
ebony filched from the darkest night. It embodied a loveliness past
even the powers of thought to measure or describe. The houses flamed
with light, and the strong light on the clock tower, announced the
sitting of Parliament, sent back to the moon a terrestrial radiance,
that resembled the pulsations of a fallen star. As they passed the
Westminster Bridge, their eyes caught the distant lights of Lambeth
Palace. Both knew that to-night the King dined with the Archbishop.
Slowly their boat drew near the landing, and the two men who guided it
motioned to its occupants to get ready to disembark, as the landing
was deprived of its usual outfit, owing to the clogging cakes of ice
which clung to the wall. The heavy nose of the boat was pushed into the
wall, and Leacraft and Thomsen scrambled up the steps, and gained the
walk which led to the Victoria Arch, and the entrance of the Parliament
House. Here a jam was encountered, and the news was soon learned that
Balfour had begun his speech an hour before the announced time, and was
now engaged in the closing appeal on the motion before the house.
And what was this motion? To explain it, it is necessary to rehearse
some of the preceding events, which had finally eventuated in this
most marvellous situation; a debate in the House of Parliament as to
whether the English people should evacuate England. This momentous
and world-moving spectacle was now actually contemplated by the
fixed attention of every nation on the earth. Its awful solemnity,
the convulsing pathos of it, the immense commercial dislocation it
involved, its social agony, the calamitous doubts it summoned as to
the stability of Europe itself, and the fiercer sudden question of
the meaning of human existence on this planet, it aroused, made the
debate of the English Parliament then pending the most extraordinary
discussion ever known in human annals.
The occasion for it had practically been forced or precipitated by the
coercive power of scientific opinion. And the curious thing about this
same scientific opinion was that it first resisted the overwhelming
proof of the subsidence of the isthmus and the elevation of the
Caribbean wall of transgression, and then fervently accepted it, with
not one scintilla more of demonstration, and in accepting it proposed
for itself the unwelcome task of convincing the English people that
they should evacuate their country.
It would be hard to conceive of anything to the English mind less
conceivable than such a desertion. Its mere mention raised the most
violent denunciation and poured a torrent of abuse upon the unfortunate
advisors. The thought of it sapped the very foundations of the English
sense of existence. It seemed the vertigo of madness. It deranged the
most obvious assertions of common sense. It was an impeachment of the
English reality. To think of it was a betrayal of trust, a breach of
faith, a succinct defiance of the Almighty, a blasphemous rejection
of the lessons of history, a timorous surrender to the threats of the
weather.
But later, when the Scottish population began to throw its inundating
tides of people into England, and the Englishman read at his breakfast
table of the floes of ice in the Clyde, and the buried Grampians, the
insurmountable drifts about Stirling, and the incipient neve masses on
Scuir-na-Gillean, in Skye, the reluctant embarkation of the merchants
of Aberdeen, the closing of its great University, the shrinkage of
business in Glasgow; when they realized that in truth the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans had become united by a broad gateway through which
the Gulf Stream, which erstwhile transported the heat of the equator
to Europe, now emptied its torrid waters, bathing the western coasts
of North America as far north as Alaska, and bringing to that Arctic
country almost the same blessing of fructifying warmth with which it
had before endowed England; when still further they began to hear, and
to realize, by private letters, the affectionate summons and offers
of the colonies, the overwhelming loyalty of the brothers across the
sea, their frenzied eagerness to place their lands almost gratuitously
in the hands of the mother people, and assume towards them the role
of honored beneficiaries, then a strange, unwonted wondering began,
as to whether it might not be best to look into the matter. And then
intelligence aroused, with continued inspection, the impression grew,
that indeed the prospects were alarming. The English mind, once
startled in a certain direction, soon takes on an impetus proportionate
to the inertia of its first movements, and therefore by a natural
law of psychology and mechanics gains in accelerated velocity with
each succeeding moment. So it was now. The industry of the scientific
propaganda, its inventive persistency, was followed by the conversion
of the large financial and commercial interests, and then a panic
seized the great masses of the nation. Parliament took it up, the
papers bulged and teemed with information, discussion, advice, and
reports. A determining influence with the large trading classes was
the decline, in some instances the positive disappearance of business,
while to others not chained in insular possessions, a new world of
adventure and chance seemed not altogether undesirable.
The pressure of popular approval hastened, in the Parliament, the
formulation of a plan for the slow and careful removal of the
population. The Law of Exodus, as it was termed, was a thoroughly
English legislative work. And that meant a wise, adequate and
deliberate evacuation. It involved a re-tabulation, so to speak, of
the wealth and occupations of the individuals of the country, and
so adjusted their departure, their association, their duties, their
facilities and trades, that the least competition would arise in the
new quarters, and then they were also so distributed in the colonies,
that they met the requirements of these, as it was ascertained, from
the authorities, the latter demanded. Thousands upon thousands had
already sailed away, forming for themselves combinations as their
acquaintances and connexions permitted, and still other thousands, with
property invested abroad made a home in the land in which their support
lay. A singular consequence of the situation was the speculative
gale it produced in America, where large amounts of unemployed or
released capital took flight. It settled tumultuously in Wall Street,
voraciously attacking every variety of security, and driving stock
values out of sight in a tremendous boom that disconcerted the tried
veterans of the famous mart.
All the time the Londoner was himself gaining some convincing insight
into the dread nature of the climatic change about him. The snows
covered the greater part of the streets of London, the parks became
desolate tracts, deserted, uncleared, unused, swept over by the
freezing winds, and chased from end to end with buffeted wreaths of
snow, whose ghostly swirling columns ran over the wintry exposures like
a race of Titanic spirits, crossing each other in cyclonic confusion,
or meeting in shivering collisions, dissolving in cloud-bursts of
microscopic and penetrating needles of ice. The Thames was almost
closed, the shipping stayed idle at the wharfs, almost unmitigated
suffering spread among the poor, for miles the streets were only
traversed by foot-paths worn by their occupants, and the strangest
sights occurred in the smaller reservations like Lincoln Inn Fields,
St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Temple Gardens, the Artillery Grounds,
Finsbury Circus and other confined spaces. By a freak of circumstances,
and the curious and entirely unexpected vagary of the winds, the snow
piled up and up in these quarters, because of a peculiar inrush of
wind from the converging streets around, and this sweeping effect
continued until the mound of snow, circumvallating the buildings,
reached to their windows or overtopped them, while in enclosures
not pre-empted by buildings, as Highbury Fields, and the various
cemeteries, the hills of snow formed colossal billows, which seemed
like a phalanx of rigid waves tortured into fantastic pinnacles by
the storms of wind. Such spectacles turned back the life-blood of the
bravest, and converted the most recalcitrant objectors to the new view
of the necessity of leaving the immemorial splendors of England’s
Capital.
It was a demoralizing and distressing picture of change, to visit
the great docks on the Thames; the London docks, the Commercial and
the West India docks, and in the place of the varied throngs, the
miscellaneous rabble of laborers in which the forms, faces and even
the dresses of the people of the world made a composite aggregate,
which was a suggested reflex of the myriad-handed toil and industry of
London, a significant hint of the immense wealth and opulent indulgence
of the great metropolis--in place of all this, the harsh winds whistled
over deserted yards, shrieked through the rigging of idle ships, or
blew tempestuous volleys of rime and sleet across the river between
Wapping and Rotherhithe. Before this awful change, English fortitude
and confidence quailed, or wrapping itself in the reserve of bitterness
and distrust, turned silently away, for an instant, at least, driven to
confess that the time-honored legend of English destiny had become a
perverted and silly shibboleth.
February 12th, which has in meteorology, along with the twelfths of
November, May and August, been isolated as the period of the ice
saints, viz.: four periods characterized in an unaccountable manner by
a fall in temperature--this 12th of February, 1910, had been determined
by the Parliament for the closing of the great debate on the Motion of
Evacuation. It was this night that Leacraft and Thomsen found so clear
and cold, a keen and perilous intensity of cold probably never before
experienced in the English islands, unless one, in his inenviable task
of comparison could have found an equivalent in the Ice Age itself.
When Leacraft and his companion attained the Victoria Tower, already
the debate, on the motion which in an enlarged way had been before
the English nation for more than a month, had reached its final
stage. Balfour had been chosen to close, in a long peroration, the
tremendous forensic display which had been limited to the walls of the
Houses of Parliament. But it was only an episodic and distinguished
incident in an argument which had convulsed every household in England,
which had sent its clamorous assertions and appeals to the whole
English-speaking people throughout the world, and which would, by all
rational expectations, remain to the end of historic time the most
startling venture in language, the most dramatic performance in oratory
ever known.
The two men hurried in, past the flaming chandeliers of the beautiful
archway. Upon Leacraft showing his particular cards of admission,
an attendant escorted them through the Royal Gallery, the House of
Peers, the Peers’ Lobby, all of which were deserted. They chased in
most indecorous fashion through the marvellous rooms, only intent upon
catching the last words of the great speech whose purport and end
was to empty those glorious apartments of their human interest, and
bring expatriation upon all the memories they harbored. They passed
through the Central Hall, the Commons’ Lobby, the Division Lobby, and
were expeditiously inserted in the Reporters’ Gallery, where, backed
up against the topmost wall, they surveyed the thronged mass beneath
them. Every inch of space, every point of observation was packed, and
the scene, on which a softened flood of light fell, with an enhancing
effect of wonder, was eloquent in picturesque power and interest. Lords
and ladies--to-night no interfering screen concealed the women--earls,
dukes, baronets, the clergy, even bishops in their robes, merchants,
men of science, bankers, and the whole House of Peers, standing at
the bar of the House of Commons, were arrayed in a vast and irrelevant
assemblage, pierced by one thought, the anguish of a supreme decision.
And Balfour!
Upon an erect and stalwart figure, moved by an instinct of regnancy at
this sublime instant to stand free of his compeers in the broad way,
between the benches of the Government and those of the Opposition,
and facing the speaker--all the eyes of that assemblage were riveted.
The classic sentences of Macaulay in describing the trial of Warren
Hastings--hackneyed as they are by innumerable repetitions--might well
apply to this unwonted and intense spectacle; “the long galleries were
crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the
emulations of an orator. There were gathered together from all parts
of a great, free, enlightened and prosperous empire, grace and female
loveliness and learning, the representatives of every science and
every art.” And the comparison can be illuminatively emphasized. At
the trial of the illustrious Pro-consul, curiosity in a man, sympathy
with a race, admiration for the local splendor of a gorgeous scene,
summoned to the hall of William Rufus the resplendent galaxy. But the
motives were objective. In the present case, thought Leacraft, how
pathetic, how tragic their subjective force. It was as if the children
of a home, about to disappear in some horrible engulfment, calmly
prepared to leave its threshold, but it was that sorrow multiplied by
all the individuals of a nation, and magnified by the moral surrender
of the associations of two thousand years. A nervous tension, that was
expressed in the almost petrified stare of some faces, the startling
pallor of others, the half-open lips, the strained attitudes, the
involuntary shudders, the curious grieved looks of inattention,
overmastered the assembly. Its contagious thrill seized Leacraft,
and brought his mental receptivity up to a quickened pitch of almost
deranged alertness, while every sense seemed preternaturally awake.
He heard a woman sob somewhere in front of him, and far down the left
gallery, in the glare and glitter, he saw a noble head, white-haired,
but still wearing the flush of manhood’s prime upon his cheeks, leaning
on a hand, and turned towards him, with unchecked tears coursing
silently from its upraised eyes; he saw a little girl clasping the neck
of her mother and father, as she sat half on the laps of each, and
heard the soft lisp of her kisses on their brows; he saw the almost
saturnine face of a dowager stonily gazing at the speaker, and, most
strangely, he detected on her finger a topaz ring cut in _relievo_
with the head of Queen Victoria; and yet, while his senses reported
these trifles with startling keenness, they were also all enlisted in
catching every gesture, every movement, every accent of the man whose
plastic power of eloquence was there engaged in pleading for English
abdication.
How the words rang in his ears, how persuasively the voice sank and
rose, and with what a soaring melody some of the cadences seemed
to linger in the scented air. “Let us,” it said, “bow before the
revelation of our own destiny. The ordination of Nature is the express
reflection--nay, it is the objective expression of Divine will. Accept
it with submission, with the subserviency of faith, and act on that
condition with the abundance of that native resolution that from the
time of Alfred has made our path upward, outward, onward.
“I do not, sir, under-estimate the tremendous ordeal; I cannot be
blind to the colossal undertaking. It resumes in one herculean
exertion, all the efforts of our race through two thousand years. It
is without precedent, or else it shall only be reverently compared
to the exodus of the Children of God from Egypt. And in that light,
sir, without subterfuge or apology, without extenuation of rhetoric,
without ribaldry or vanity, I do regard it. We are solemnized by some
vast scheme in the order of things to carry with us the genius of our
civilization to another home, where its power and beauty shall both
benefit others, and become themselves more powerful and more beautiful.
We have lived through a stadium of progress and achievement. We
certainly advance to the opening of another. Let the gathered
multitudes of our race, here at its ancestral hearth, gird up their
loins and accept the august command to go forth.
“From the Witan of the Angles and the Saxons, through a feudal
hierarchy to Magna Charta, through the provisions of Oxford, the Model
Parliament of Edward I., by the rise in political privileges by the
Towns, by Merchant gild and Craft gild, by the Good Parliament of 1376,
by the relentless rebukes of Richard in the Merciless Parliament,
by reason of popular censure and the eloquence of common men as
with John Ball and the revolts of 1380, in the insurrection of Wat
Tyler--followed as it was by shameless, mad ventures--through Wickliff,
by the glories of the Tudors, the overthrow of the Stuarts, by Pym,
Hampden, Cromwell, by William of Orange, by parliamentary reform and
legislative extension--from the first glimmerings of civic life, to the
light of the modern day, this nation has grown in strength, in reason,
in the deliberate purpose of holding even the scales of Justice.
“But, sir, with new positions, new prospects, new opportunities in
illimitable areas of expansion, we enter upon undreamed of material
enlargements. A greater London will, in the coming centuries appear, in
which through the phase of exaltation we shall assume, will be seen the
Miracle of Time, in which all we have learned, the highest technical
skill, our loftiest constructive, creative mind will be realized.
“The social power, the redemptive agencies, the final product of
his thought, aspirations, skill, will be incorporated in this City
of Man for men--the City of the Future--and it will be ours--all
ours--_London rediviva, London redux, London sempieterna, et ne plus
ultra_. A greater England shall be gathered within its walls. It will
hold our sanctified patriotism, our emancipated reason, our ennobled,
disciplined applied science, the embodyment of our imagination, and to
its doors the world will gather, too, in fealty, in trust, in homage.
“‘O et praesidium et dulce decus meum.’”
The voice ceased, the speaker dropped dumbly into his seat, and for
an instant, held his hands over features convulsed with feeling. The
surprising thing then was--the awful silence, the deadness of that
living, throbbing, almost frantic audience, who looking out upon a
blackness of uncertainty felt the happy past, radiant with ease and
fame, ceremonial and cultured luxury, slipping out of their possession
forever, and uttered no sound.
The Speaker of the House rose; there was a shifting of heads, the
rustle of turning bodies, a simultaneous orientation, but no other
sound, and Leacraft scanned the multitude more. Again the portentous
silence; the Speaker with quite unusual ardor alluded to the imposing
power and beauty of the speech, and put the motion.
And then another thing more astonishing happened, that House of Commons
leaped to its feet and shouted in one long, vibrant roar, “Aye! Aye!
Aye!” The eager agony of the assemblage then split and tore the proud
repression that had almost strangled it. Cry upon cry started from
various points, and the clamor grew, the agitation took on the aspect
of disorder and panic, and then it resolved itself into thundering
cheers for the King, and then, with electrifying unanimity the
multitude sang the national anthem.
It was over. The House of Commons had ordered the evacuation of
England; the House of Peers would follow their lead, and while that
evacuation would take place slowly, covering a long space of time, and
permit the recreant forces of nature to reform--if they would--the
face of the world as it had been, while it had consideration for all
the conflicting interests involved, and was so skillfully framed as to
cause the least shock of derangement to the immense business agencies,
still it was a surrender of the proudest people on the face of the
earth to the blind powers of nature, and it meant for Englishmen a new
heaven and a new earth.
Leacraft and Thomsen returned that night to their lodgings at the
Bothwell Club, through Pall Mall, where but a few of the clubs were
still in action and as they moved painfully along over the debris and
dirt, the disturbed and shapeless heaps of snow, the abandoned articles
of furniture, in front of some houses, and saw the darkened fronts of
others, with broken windows, and broached and falling doors, noted the
signs of interior commotion in the treasury, the admiralty, the foreign
and Indian offices, the war office and the horse guards, they felt that
Parliament had already been forestalled, and that the evacuation of
London and with it all England had already begun.