ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER X
For a week or two, life in Royal Avenue was rather flat after Geneva. There was a constraint about it, a sort of grey dullness. London was formal, solid, relentlessly matter-of-fact. No one sat on wicker chairs on the pavements at 9.30 A.M. drinking sticky drinks, green and orange and purple; there were no public places to dance in all night and no one danced even until 3 o'clock in the morning, except people who could afford to patronize the large hotels, or rather who were told over and over again by their publicity agents that they couldn't afford not to patronize the large hotels; no one published paper-covered novels at a shilling; no one sold magazines full of pictures of lovely ladies in chemises and shoes, or alternatively silk stockings and earrings; no one seemed to enjoy themselves, and the sun never shone.
The cricket season was over, and the great English sporting public had settled down to the contemplation of professional football. Vast crowds poured down the King's Road and the Fulham Road every Saturday afternoon to see the matches at the Craven Bridge ground. Donald went once, partly to watch the mighty, cloth-capped heart of England, sixty thousand strong, thronging the terraces of the arena, cheering on their heroes and hurling good-natured abuse at the referee, and partly because a famous fellow-countryman was due to visit the Walham Green Wanderers on behalf of the West Riding United Football Club in the North of England. This was no less a personage than the great Mr. Jock Thompson, captain and centre-forward of Scotland, possessor of sixteen international caps. Mr. Thompson had for several years captained the West Riding United, and when that team came to Craven Bridge, Donald felt that he owed it to a compatriot to spring a bob and attend the match.
He was well rewarded, for Mr. Thompson displayed all the wizardry which had raised him to the top of the football tree, and by much swerving, dodging, feinting, and dribbling he scored three inimitable goals and brought victory to his team. No captain can do more. It is true that on that very morning protracted negotiations between the managements of West Riding United and Walham Green Wanderers had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and Mr. Jock Thompson had left the former and joined the latter, on consideration of a trifle of fourteen thousand pounds paid by the latter to the former; and it is also true that at 1 o'clock on that very day, a special meeting of directors of the Walham Green Wanderers Football Club had unanimously elected Mr. Thompson to be captain of the Walham Green eleven. The fact remains that Mr. Thompson gave a superb display and won the match for his side, an exhibition of team-spirit and loyalty, felt Donald, that could not have been surpassed even by cricketers.
An incident that enlivened the tedium of those October weeks was the barefaced burglary of the Royal Avenue house. A man had come to the door and had represented himself to be an official of the Gas, Light, and Coke Company. Being young, with curly brown hair and a plausible manner, he had been cordially welcomed by Gwladys, and had requited her feminine trustfulness by marching off with a suitcase full of clothes, boots, hairbrushes, antimacassars, and a number of other valueless knick-knacks, his plausibility being vastly in excess of his artistic taste or his sense of values. The police were very sympathetic and charming. It was Donald's first personal contact with the London policeman, and he was greatly impressed. For civility and intelligence they came up to everything which he had heard about them, and if they did not actually succeed in apprehending the thief, their thoroughness and business-like methods would undoubtedly have caused him grave alarm had he chanced to remain in the vicinity. Indeed there is little doubt that they would have actually caught him red-handed, if it had not been for the extraordinary and unforeseen coincidence by which all the four policemen who were in Royal Avenue at the moment of the burglary happened to be occupied with other matters of importance to the maintenance of order. For one was at the end of the Avenue, where it joins the King's Road, directing the flow of traffic and maintaining His Majesty's highway for His Majesty's lieges. A second, in the Avenue itself, was attempting to discover, by means of a little reference book, the whereabouts of the particular one of London's twenty-three Gloucester Roads that a venerable and partly-paralysed Frenchman was trying to get to in a mechanical bath-chair. A third, almost opposite the scene of the audacious crime, was tying up with a bit of string, which he had unearthed from among his draperies, an ancient perambulator which had come to pieces under the strain of a load of howling triplets; while the fourth was entering up in a tiny note-book with a stub of blunt pencil, the particulars of the life, parentage, birthplace, age, profession, residence, place of business, religious denomination, number of children, driving-licence number, and other relevant particulars, of a miscreant whose motor-car carried number-plates that were at least three-quarters of an inch larger than the regulation size.
The guardians of the law were thus fully occupied at the moment of the dastardly outrage, and Gwladys was never called upon to testify, coyly, in a witness-box to the identity of the curly-haired young man who had smiled upon her so fetchingly.
Donald's main distraction during this period of stagnation was theatre-going on behalf of Mr. Ogilvy. For Mr. Ogilvy, the Napoleon-jawed editor, was temporarily lacking the services of his dramatic critic, Mr. Rupert Harcourt, who for some quite inscrutable reason had had a fit of artistic tantrums and had thrown a raw tomato at Mr. Ogilvy and, being a poet, had fortunately missed him (although the range was only seven feet and a few inches), and had departed in a temper to Capri.
Mr. Ogilvy bore no malice. Poets would be poets. There wasn't half enough picturesqueness in life nowadays anyway, thought Mr. Ogilvy, and even the smallest originality was a godsend in an era of beastly standardization.
So Mr. Harcourt retired to Capri and bought five hundred litres of white wine and a two-piece bathing-suit, and Donald visited the theatres of London in his stead. It was a curious experience, and, at first, he found it almost impossible to get any sort of notion about the state of what is usually called the English Drama. For one thing Donald was very unsophisticated about many phases of life, and the stage was one of them. Any sort of theatre gave him a thrill before ever the curtain went up, so that dramatists started with a big advantage so far as he was concerned. His experience of theatre-going was limited to pre-War Christmas visits to Aberdeen of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, led by Henry Lytton and the divine Miss Clara Dow; and, during the War, an occasional comedy or revue. So that, at the period when Mr. Ogilvy was dodging tomatoes at a range of seven feet and a few inches, a play would have had to be a very bad play indeed to have displeased Donald.
Another thing which made it difficult for him to get his perspective right was the universally acknowledged fact that the English Drama, as acted in London, is the lowest form of theatrical art in the world, because the Public will only go to visit trash and would religiously boycott any of the really first-class plays which are growing dustier and dustier in the cupboards of disillusioned playwrights, even if any manager was so insane as to produce them on the commercial stage. It is left, Donald soon discovered, to Societies, Clubs, Groups of Intelligent Theatre-Lovers, and Private Associations of Patrons of the Drama to produce these first-class plays on Sunday evenings for one performance only. Hardly a Sunday in the year goes by without the appearance of a masterpiece by Pirandello, Kaiser, Toller, Tchehov, Savoir, Lenormand, Martinez Sierra, or Jean Jacques Bernard, dazzling the eyes for a single day and then dying like the may-fly. Sundays have been on which no fewer than three separate Clubs or Societies have been performing Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, while on five Sundays out of eight in February and March of one year it was possible to see Toller's Hoppla. Donald, who was conscientious and painstaking, spent a lot of time in the Chelsea Free Library going through the files of The Times and the Manchester Guardian in order to learn the technique of dramatic criticism from the two heads of the craft, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Brown, and he was surprised to discover that in the first seven years of the Peace, twenty-eight of these Sunday Producing Societies had been formed, and that of these twenty-eight, no fewer than twenty-three had started their career with Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.
It was to these Sunday performances of dramatic masterpieces that Donald was looking forward with especial eagerness. He was quite ready to put up with any number of adulteries and murders and high-kicks during the week for the sake of the works of genius, and it was with a real thrill that he presented himself one Sunday evening, thirty-three minutes before the scheduled hour, at the theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue where he was to see, for the first time, a dramatic masterpiece.
There was no orchestra, and the audience came filtering into the stalls in a queer silence, broken only by the gay greetings of celebrities. For each member of the Club seemed determined to recognize, and be recognized by, as many fellow-members as possible. It was almost like a competition, so fiercely did the necks twist, the eyes wander, and the lorgnettes focus. Sixteen people, all total strangers, bowed to Donald, and one man, an elderly, baldish bird with an eyeglass, went so far as to rise in his seat in order to bow more impressively. Donald blinked nervously and tried to nod in such a way that, if he really had met the other party somewhere, the movement would pass for a greeting and, if not, for a twinge of rheumatism in the neck. But the strain became too great, and after a bit Donald concentrated passionately upon his programme.
The piece to be given was the translation of a German masterpiece by Herr Rumpel-Stilzchen, the great exponent of the new Illusionist Symbolism, and it appeared from the programme that the scene was laid throughout in a gallery of a salt-mine in Upper Silesia. It was called, simply, The Perpetuation of Eternity. The producer was Herr von Pümpernikkel, described on the back of the programme as "the Rheinhardt of Mecklenburg-Schwerin," and the incidental choreography was by Dripp. Donald was just wondering what part choreography played in life in Upper Silesian salt-mines when a gong was struck somewhere in the theatre and the lights went out. A pause of seven or eight minutes followed, and then the curtain rose, revealing the eagerly awaited gallery and the exquisite lighting effects of von Pümpernikkel, although actually the latter were not easily detectable at first, as the play opened in complete darkness, and for twenty minutes continued in complete darkness. This period of twenty minutes was occupied by a soliloquy by the Spirit of Polish Maternity which, in Rumpel-Stilzchen's original, was written in Polish. The translators, in order to preserve the sense of strangeness, of exoticism, had, rather cleverly, translated this part into Italian, and the delivery of the soliloquy was punctuated by frequent bursts of applause from those of the audience, apparently about one hundred per cent, who understood Italian. This applause grew more and more marked in emphasis and volume as von Pümpernikkel's lighting gradually illumined the stage and it became possible to distinguish, even as far as the back rows of the stalls, between those who did, and those who did not, pick up the finer points of the Italian language. It appeared that Donald alone did not, until a big, burly man with a sardonic look on his face, who was sitting by himself a few seats away, observed loudly, "Beastly peasant dialect," whereupon everyone within ear-shot of him stopped applauding and sneered vigorously. At the end of the soliloquy the lights, now flooding the stage with alternate purple and green, lit up the backs of a row of salt-workers who dug and chanted dismally as they worked. The foreman of the gallery then came forward and shot two of the workers, whether for bad chanting or for bad digging was not made clear, and immediately all the lights went out except for an illuminated screen of salt background upon which was thrown a cinematograph-picture of New York skyscrapers as observed from a Zeppelin. Then the Chrysler Building and the Woolworth Building and the rest of them vanished suddenly and were followed by a ten-minute reel from the Oberammergau Passion play, during which a negro with a megaphone, stationed in the wings, sang with great gusto a song that was popular during the War and was called, "When that Midnight Choo-choo leaves for Alabam." The curtain came down on the end of the second verse and the middle of The Last Supper. Subdued but sincere clapping greeted the end of the act, and the more senior of the critics went moodily out for drinks.
The second, third, fourth, and fifth and last acts were packed as full as the first with Illusionist Symbolism of the same brilliance and irony. It need only be said that among the "effects" was the murder by the salt-workers of a preference-shareholder of Cerebos Salt, Ltd., by throwing him into a quartz-crushing machine; the tragedy of his final screams, as his top-hat and mother-of-pearl-knobbed cane were sucked into the instrument like the last petals of a rose down a drain, was intensified by a most dramatic "throw-back" to the shareholder's early boyhood with his dear old father, a town councillor of Hesse-Darmstadt, and his dear old mother, the town councillor's wife, who both drank a good deal of light lager and crooned some folk-songs. There was also a long scene of great poignancy between the Spirit of Irony and the Soul of Upper Silesia, during which the League of Nations came in for some nasty knocks, and there was a powerful bit of the most modern sort of Symbolism in which a salt-digger's mistress was confronted with a lot of the Thoughts which she would have thought if she had been, instead, a champion tricyclist. And Dripp's choreography turned out to be the Dance of Mourners at the Funeral of a Demented House-Agent, said to be symbolical of the housing shortage during 1925 and 1926 in the Silesian towns of Kattowitz and Breslau.
In short, The Perpetuation of Eternity was, as one of the penny dailies said next morning, the most arresting piece of thought-provoking symbolism that had been produced since Ernst Toller's Hoppla had been staged on the previous Sunday, or since Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author on the last Sunday but two. The Times gave it three-quarters of a column, but Mr. Brown, to Donald's amazement, called it "a turgid Dripp from the village Pümpernikkel," and enquired "If this is Upper Silesia, what can Lower be like?"
Donald gave it a guarded notice in Mr. Ogilvy's paper.
On the Monday evening of the same week he went to the first night of a play which dealt with adultery against a background of Spiritualism, and a pair of youthful lovers who filled up the gaps with some ingenuous love-making. On the Tuesday, the subject of the play was adultery in the Straits Settlements and the successful love-making of two young jolly things, and on the Wednesday it was adultery in Mayfair with a lot of epigrams, and the two young jolly things. On Thursday there was a clash of two first-nights, and Donald had the choice of adultery among vegetarians and adultery among exponents of Simplified Spelling, and chose the latter by tossing for it. There was nothing on the Friday and Saturday, a translation from Lenormand on the Sunday, all about Freud and Jung and Oedipus, and on Monday an Edgar Wallace, full of blue lights and blackmailers and fun.
The petulant poet remained in Capri for five weeks and came back as brown as a berry, in the best of tempers. He had completely forgotten the episode of the tomato, and Mr. Ogilvy said nothing about it and welcomed him back to his post. Donald during the five weeks had visited the theatre thirty-one times and come to a rather curious conclusion about what is called "the English Theatre-Going Public." It was this: that the T.-G.P. will often flock to see a bad play provided it makes them laugh or makes them frightened—a real comedian or an ambush in Chinatown is always a winner. It will sometimes flock to see a bad play provided it is a mass of sentimentality. The old melodramas of the bad, bold Bart., and the last-minute redemption of the mortgage or discovery of the marriage-lines, had their roots very deep in the simple Teutonic Soul of London, and often survive triumphantly to this day if they are decked out in an up-to-date setting. It—that is, the T.-G.P. —will almost always go to see a good play, by which Donald meant a play that is good as a play and not as a poem, or as a piece of symbolism, or as a cinematograph, or as an essential transference of the plastic arts to histrionics, or as an interpretation of a mood, or as political propaganda, or as divorce propaganda, or as birth-control, pacifist, prohibitionist, nationalist, internationalist, bimetallist, spiritualist, economist, Bolshevist, or Fascist or any other sort of propaganda. But if a play is good as a play, then the T.-G.P. will go to see it.
And finally, Donald concluded that it would have nothing to do with pretentiousness. A low-brow sitting upon a pork pie or falling into a bran-tub would send it into an ecstasy of merriment; a high-brow doing his best would arouse respectful admiration; but a donkey aping the wise man, or a dull man aping the genius, was always detected by some curious working of mass instinct and utterly and crushingly ignored. And that was why, Donald reflected, Kaiser and Toller and the rest of them could only be acted in front of Societies and Clubs consisting of people who wanted to write like Kaiser and Toller and the rest of them. But the men and women who wrote real plays had no fear of presenting them to the Theatre-Going Public.
"What an inscrutable people are these English," thought Donald, "for they do not like Lenormand."
CHAPTER XI
Life in London on four hundred pounds a year was in many ways pleasanter than life on a wind-swept Buchan farm in winter. There was no early rising as in the farming days at Balspindie, when a farm lassie brought the morning cup of tea and bowl of porridge punctually at 5 o'clock. There was no worrying about the absence or the excessiveness of rain, no anxious study of fluctuating prices of corn and turnips and potatoes, no depressing certainty each year that, whatever the weather or the prices, financial ruin was inevitable. Donald still subscribed to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, a new amalgamation of the famous old pair, the Aberdeen Free Press and the Aberdeen Daily Journal, and he read every week the mournful prognostications of the farming industry, which was clearly on its last legs. The tenant of Balspindie, wrote the D.S.O. advocate from Golden Square, had a melancholy tale of woe to tell when he came in on the first of every month to pay the rent. The advocate, however, guardedly advised Donald not to worry too much about it, for he added that the tenant had just bought a new Morris saloon car and had been overheard, in an incautious moment in the bar of the Imperial Hotel, to remark to a crony that, taking everything all round, by and large, it was just conceivably possible that a man of exceptionally powerful brain might be able to imagine a state of things just a fraction worse than they were at present. Anyway, the tenant was safe for the rent, and that was the main thing.
Donald, therefore, had no cares and anxieties. A net income of four hundred pounds, if properly handled, means complete independence for a young man in London. For London can be either the most expensive or the cheapest city in Europe, and four hundred pounds can be made to go a long way. There was also a little money to be made by occasional reviewing for Mr. Ogilvy and even for the great Mr. William Hodge himself. On one occasion a parcel arrived at Royal Avenue from Mr. Hodge, containing a six-volume interpretation of the Buddhist religion by a Burmese professor at the University of Minneapolis, with a pencil scrawl from Mr. Hodge asking for a thousand words about it before the following Friday. Donald, who was a conscientious soul, rushed off in a panic to Mr. Hodge's office and protested that he was totally unfit to undertake such a task.
"Why?" demanded Mr. Hodge.
"Because—I—I—know nothing about the Buddhist religion," faltered Donald.
"You will by the time you've read those six volumes," replied Mr. Hodge grimly, putting on a grey top-hat and going out.
But Mr. Hodge must have liked Donald's conscientiousness, for he sent him fairly frequent parcels after that, on such subjects as the Civilization of the Andes, Rambles in old Perugia, Ten Days in Soviet Russia, Is the Soul Immortal? the Fundamental Principles of Rugby Football, and Some Notes upon Surrey Rock-Gardens.
All of these Donald read carefully and reviewed carefully, resisting with stern determination the immoral advice of Mr. Harcourt on the subject of reviewing.
"Read the publisher's jacket first," said Mr. Harcourt, preaching his scandalous gospel. "That will usually give you the author's name and some sort of idea of what the book is about. If the jacket says that the book is an illuminating, unique, sensational, thought-provoking exposé from within of the political situation in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, then the odds are about three to one that the book is about Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. About once in four times they put the wrong cover on and you find that it's a book of short stories called Tikkity-Tonk, Old Fish! or a reprint of the Epistle to the Romans, but more often than not they get it right. Very well, then. You've got the subject. You then look at the index of chapters. That gives you the scope of the book, shows you whether it covers the religious question, or gives a list of the hotels, or has a bit about peasant costumes, or goes in for trade statistics, or touches upon the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate kids, or sketches the history of the place since Attila, and so on. By this time you've got the whole substance of the book and then all you've got to do is to read the last two paragraphs of the last chapter, to see whether the author thinks the Sub-Carpathian Ruthenians are good eggs or bad eggs, and there you are."
But Donald refused to subscribe to this pernicious doctrine, and steadily ploughed his way from cover to cover of each book that was sent to him, and his reviews, if not flashy or full of epigrams, at least arrived punctually; which is much more important from the editorial point of view than all the epigrams that ever were stolen by the twentieth-century reviewers from Wilde, and by Wilde from Whistler, and by Whistler from Octave Mirbeau.
Mr. Ogilvy usually sent novels for review, and Donald slogged through some pretty fearful stuff during these months. But the titles fascinated him, and he wrote a short article, and got it accepted by a literary weekly, on the trend of fashion in novel-titles. He himself had entered the literary profession just as one fashion was giving way to another. The dying mode had dealt in vigorous, slashing, totally irrelevant names such as The Charioteers caught Soul, Rat-riddled, bilge-bestank (an exquisite long-short story of a modern Aucassin and Nicolette), and Shame, shame, Belshazzar! The new fashion was more shadowy and elusive and emasculate, like faded ladies or very modern poets, and Donald had to review a lot of books with names like And she said so too, So they all went on, It was rather a Pity, hein? and He shrugged; he had to.
On Sundays Donald usually went for long walks in the deserted City of London, that queer centre of the financial world with its week-day population of half a million desperate workers and its week-end popula tion of ten thousand caretakers and ten thousand sleepy cats. It was at about this period that the Church of England, alive at last to the ever-increasing spread of the insidious tentacles of the Church of Rome, was forging the thunderous counter-stroke that was to revivify Anglicanism and startle the world. The Monk of Wittenberg himself could have devised no more tremendous coup de main, or in the circumstances, perhaps, the words plözlicher Anfall are more suitable, than the proposal to pull down the churches with which Sir Christopher Wren clogged and cluttered the financial heart of the world, to deconsecrate the sites, and to sell them to the Real Estate Corporations which offered the highest bids, and to devote the proceeds to the organization of another crusade against the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills.
Donald spent many happy Saturday afternoons—for they are usually closed on Sundays—in visiting these churches before it should be too late. And even after the officious interference of amateur busybodies, Architectural Clubs, painters, poets, architects, Societies for Preserving Ancient Buildings, Members of Parliament, Real Estate Corporations which were temporarily embarrassed for ready money, and scores of other individuals and associations, all, obviously, in close touch with the Vatican, had for the time being succeeded in obstructing the demolitions, he did not feel that he had wasted his time.
For nowhere else but in England's capital are there spires like those tapering silver arrows of English stone, shell-incrusted, sea-worn, glittering in the sunlight with ten thousand sparkles of tiny diamonds. English churches, built of English stone, by an Englishman, a kindly, poetical man, full of laughter, they were raised for the English people to follow their faith, not torn, like the great cathedrals, by violence and theft from Rome.
Another kindly man, a poet, full of laughter, an Englishman, has written somewhere:
Sir Christopher came to the field of the fire, And graced it with spire And nave and choir Careful column and carven tire, That the ships coming up from the sea Should hail where the Wards from Ludgate fall A coronal cluster of steeples tall, All Hallows, Barking, and by the Wall, St. Bride, St. Swithin, St. Catherine Coleman, St. Margaret Pattens, St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, St. Alban, Wood Street, St. Magnus the Martyr, St. Edmund the King, Whose names like a chime so sweetly call, And high over all The Cross and the Ball On the Riding Redoubtable Dome of Paul.
Only one trivial incident marred the pleasant passing of that first winter in London. One morning at about 9 o'clock, when he was setting out on one of these solitary excursions, Donald got a most painful fright—the most painful, in fact, since the occasion some years before when an eight-inch shell, having failed either to enter the earth or to explode, skipped and slithered along the surface of the ground and came to rest, like a huge, silvery, glistening white-hot salmon, a yard in front of him. To this day Donald swears that it winked at him. On this second occasion, in London, he felt the same clutch at his heart, the same dryness of the roof of his mouth, the same cold feeling all over his body. For in the King's Road stood three newspaper boys, with long gloomy faces and not even the heart to cry their wares. The first bore a white placard on which was planted in red letters and black letters:
EVENING NEWS
ENGLAND
OVERWHELMED
WITH DISASTER
Late Special
The second bore a yellow placard on which was printed in black letters:
STAR
IS
ENGLAND
DOOMED?
Late Special
The third bore a white placard on which was printed in black and red letters:
EVENING STANDARD
COLLAPSE
OF
ENGLAND
Late Special
Queues of men were standing in front of the boys, digging into their pockets for coins, snatching at the papers, and then stumbling away with ashen faces and quivering lips. Donald, almost numb with the cold of sheer panic, took his place in the queue. The man in front of him held out a shilling and would not even wait for the change. He grabbed the Star, glanced at it, exclaimed "Oh, God!" and reeled drunkenly away, cannoning into passers-by and bumping into a shop-window, his eyes devouring the stop-press news as he went. Donald only just succeeded in retaining his native prudence sufficiently to present a penny rather than a shilling, and drew aside with his paper from the jostling crowd.
There was no difficulty about discovering what the Star was trying to convey. There was the giant headline—IS ENGLAND DOOMED?—splashed right across the page, and under it the smaller amplifying headlines, and even they were half an inch high:
Mailey Finds A Spot
Devastating Attack at
Melbourne
Hobbs out First Ball: Hearne
9, Woolley 0
England's Appalling
Debacle
Can Hendren Save Us?
In the Underground at Sloane Square Station an elderly man in a top-hat and black, velvet-collared overcoat, with an elegant long white moustache, and carrying a rolled-up silk umbrella, said fiercely to Donald, "It all comes of treating it as a game. We don't take things seriously enough in this country, sir, damnation take it all," and he stepped heavily upon the toes of a humble, clerkly-looking person behind him.
Donald slipped away to another part of the train and read the sad story of England's shame in the Second Test Match against Australia at Melbourne.
Another interesting experience of this period was a visit to the Rugby Football Ground at Twickenham to see the Oxford and Cambridge Rugby Football Match. At about midday on a warm, misty, winter's day Donald went to Waterloo Station and secured a place with eleven other passengers in a third-class railway carriage, having bumped and struggled his way through mobs of young men all looking exactly like each other except that no two of them wore the same coloured scarves or ties.
After about three-quarters of an hour, he reached Twickenham and lunched at an inn upon beer and bread and cheese, and at 1.45 P.M. found his place in an enormous grand stand and stared down at the bright green turf so far below. The sun was making a last sickly attempt to pierce the gathering mists, and shed a kind of pallid benevolence upon the rapidly filling stands. But the game did not begin for another hour, and by the time that sixty-five thousand spectators, of whom about thirty thousand appeared to be young men, thirty thousand young women, and five thousand parsons, had packed themselves into their places, the sun had long ago given up the unequal struggle, the mists were massing darkly in the north and east, and a slight drizzle was coming down.
The players ran out to the accompaniment of frenzied cheers and counter-cheers, kicked a ball about smartly for a minute or two, sat down for the photographers, stood up for the Prince of Wales, and then set to work.
By half-time the rain was pouring steadily down, the lovely green of the ground was a dark quagmire, the players were indistinguishable from one another, and before the end of the game the gloom of winter twilight had so enveloped the ground that it was impossible for the spectators to see more than twenty or thirty yards.
After the match was over, the sixty-five thousand spectators formed themselves into a single mighty queue, and set off at a slow shuffle through the mud and rain in the direction of the station. Motor-cars, with headlights flaring, crept along with the pedestrians. At the entrance to the station a long delay took place while train after train drew up at the platform, and railway officials with megaphones informed the crowd, correctly, that the next train was a non-stop to Waterloo and, incorrectly, that there was more room in front. Donald at last got into a carriage with twenty-three others and had to stand for an hour and five minutes, including a halt of twenty minutes outside Waterloo. There were two schools of opinion in the carriage. One faction, consisting of eleven young men with bedraggled light-blue favours and one rather passionate urban dean, maintained warmly that Cambridge had won by two goals, two tries, and a penalty goal against two tries, or nineteen points to six. The rival group of partisans were handicapped by internal dissensions, for seven of them were positive that Cambridge had not scored at all, whereas they had definitely seen Oxford score three tries, convert one of them, and also score a dropped goal, thus winning by fifteen points to nil; while four of them knew for an incontrovertible fact that Oxford had scored, in addition, three penalty goals from penalties awarded, and rightly awarded, against Cambridge for dirty play in the scrums.
It was only because they were tightly wedged into the carriage and none of them could move hand or foot that prevented, so it seemed to Donald, actual violence—certainly the urban dean's language was enough to justify manslaughter—and he was astonished when the controversy dissolved into hearty laughter and they all started chaffing the dean. The dean's powers of repartee were quite devastating.
But all doubts were settled when the train at last pulled in to Waterloo at 6.25, for the evening papers were being sold on the platforms with the authoritative statement that the match had been drawn—each side having scored one try, or three points each.
Two days later Donald went to the Chelsea ground at Stamford Bridge to see Oxford play Cambridge at Association Football. The game began in bright sunshine at 2 P.M. and was played throughout in bright sunshine. A brilliantly open and fast match, resulting in a draw of three goals each, was watched by four thousand silent spectators.
It was during the winter also that Donald had a splendid opportunity of studying the way in which the Englishman sets about his home politics. He had watched at Geneva the methods of international diplomacy which have planted the Union Jack upon all really desirable spots on the surface of the globe and upon almost all the really valuable commodities except quinine in Java, nitrates in Chile, and oil in Oklahoma—and the failure to secure the third of these is considerably offset by the corresponding absence from the Empire of the Oklahomans.
He was now able to examine the psychology of the Englishman when engaged upon the task of operating the political machine which is at once the envy and the model of most of the civilized world. For the Government of the day, having been defeated by seven votes on a proposal to include raisins in the sub-section of the Retail Prices (Control) Bill which referred to currants, figs, dates, prunes, and dried apricots, decided very naturally to treat the defeat as a vote of want of confidence in their policy of Imperial Defence and Development, and, dissolving Parliament, appealed to the suffrages of all right-thinking men and women in the country. The Opposition, with a monstrous whoop of official joy and secretly furious because they had never meant to defeat the Government and were not ready for an election, also rushed into the fray with a passionate appeal for the support of all right-thinking men and women.
Donald was just wondering whether he should offer his services to one or other of the headquarters in London as a canvasser or envelope-addresser when he was delighted to receive a letter from his old Geneva chief, Sir Henry Wootton, asking him to come down to East Anglia and help him in a particularly tough fight against a young Socialist, an Independent Labour Party man, who was a brilliant speaker and was already making alarming headway by means of unscrupulous pledges which it would be utterly impossible to redeem on this side of the millennium. Donald packed a bag, called at the headquarters of the Conservative Party for a bundle of leaflets, pamphlets, handbooks, and notes for speakers, and took the next train for Lincolnshire.
Sir Henry's constituency consisted of Eldonborough, a town of about fifty thousand inhabitants, and a tract of village-dotted country round it. There were many votes in the villages, but they were harder to work than the compact town, and both candidates were concentrating upon Eldonborough.
Donald found Sir Henry in the Crown Hotel, opposite his official headquarters which were in the Conservative Club, and after a warm welcome, was handed over to the Conservative agent, Commander Blinker, late R.N., for instructions. Commander Blinker was every inch a sailor. He had a clear eye, a healthy skin, a loud voice, and a breezy manner.
"Joined for duty, eh?" he shouted, as if it was blowing a tidy gale in the lounge of the Crown, at the same time hitting Donald a fearful clap between the shoulders. "That's fine. We want everyone we can get if we're going to down these damned Reds. What about a spot of talky-talky, eh? Platform stuff. You know—thumping the old soap-box."
"I'll do anything you like," said Donald nervously. He was rather alarmed by this nautical gustiness of manner.
"That's great!" roared the mariner. "First-class bundobust. We'll put you up to-morrow at the iron-works at tiffin-time. Have you got the hang of our dope?"
Donald pulled out his sheaf of literature from his various pockets, but the gallant Commander waved it all aside.
"You needn't worry about that," he cried. "You don't need facts or any tommy-rot of that sort. You stick to our three planks. One—the Empire first, foremost, and all the time. Two—down with the Reds. Three—Work for the Unemployed."
"Have we—I mean—are there—is there any stuff about how we're going to find work for the Unemployed?" ventured Donald.
Commander Blinker looked at him in astonishment.
"By backing up the Empire, of course," he bawled, and added, "That and the abolition of the dole. And now I must vamoose, old chap. Are you going to berth down here? Good. Then I'll give you your sailing-orders to-morrow. So long," and the jolly tar dashed off to continue elsewhere his organization of victory.
That evening, his duties having not yet begun, Donald attended a Conservative meeting in the Eldonborough Corn Exchange. There were about a thousand people present and there was no fewer than forty-two Union Jacks tastefully draped, some the right way up, some upside down, and some sideways, on the platform and the walls. An immense mezzotint of Mr. Gladstone hung on the wall behind the chairman, for there was no Liberal candidate and it was of paramount importance to catch the votes of all right-thinking Liberals.
The chairman, a stout, genial man, started the proceedings by stating humorously that the first duty of a chairman was to stand up, shut up, and sit down, but there were just one or two things he wanted to say. After explaining that he was only going to say those one or two things very briefly, and explaining why he was going to be brief, and coining the delightful epigram that, after all, brevity was the soul of wit, and adding that if he wasn't brief a lot of the candidate's valuable time would be wasted and they all knew what a busy man a candidate was, and especially such a good candidate as they had got in their old and trusted Member who was, if the ladies would pardon the expression, damned well going to be their Member again, the chairman then got down to the main body of his brief introductory remarks, and told a story about an Irishman whom he happened to know personally; a story which, he thought, was a very good illustration of the sterling merits of the Conservative Party, which after all had always been the true friend of Ireland, and of the affection which it inspired in all sections of the British public. The chairman sat down about twenty minutes later, and then, amid loud applause and the singing of "For he's a jolly good fellow," led by the stentorian Commander Blinker, Sir Henry got up beaming with benevolence all over his kindly face, and told them a story about an Aberdonian and a Jew, and after that said that he stood for the Empire and the dear old flag, and that he, at any rate, wasn't going to kow tow to any dirty crew of Bolshies in Moscow who never washed their necks, and said that what he meant to say, and he said it with all the emphasis at his command, frankly and definitely, was that he was in favour of the most stringent economy consistent with the immediate launching of twenty new cruisers to protect the trade routes of our far-flung Empire, that he was in favour of the abolition of the dole which was sapping their British manhood, that he was in favour of work for all, and against the policy of scuttle in India. He then launched upon a denunciation of Free Trade, which he wittily described in rather daring biblical language as an "outworn shibboleth," but was abruptly pulled up by the vigilant Blinker, who whispered, in a whisper like a steam-riveter at work, that the Liberal and Free-Trade vote was of paramount importance.
Sir Henry stopped at once and sat down amid prolonged cheering, but Donald was in an agony of nervous apprehension. He was sincerely fond of Sir Henry. He liked him and respected him as a kindly gentleman. But never in his life had he listened to such an appallingly bad speech, or one that more pathetically asked to be torn to shreds of ridicule by hecklers. Donald hid his perspiring face in his hands. He simply could not bear to watch the public humiliation of a friend. He cursed himself for having come to the meeting, for having come to Eldonborough at all. Now it was beginning—the chairman was asking for questions—the humiliation was about to start—yes, there was the first one—a snorter too.
"Mr. Chairman, when the candidate says he is in favour of work for all, how does he propose to provide it?"
Donald groaned. The very first man had put his finger on one of the vital weaknesses. Sir Henry rose.
"I am very glad indeed that the question has been asked," he said, "and I should like to take this opportunity of thanking the gentleman who asked it, and of congratulating him. Our policy, roughly speaking, is to see that jobs, and adequately paid jobs, are provided at once for everyone." He sat down again amid applause.
Donald gasped. "Good God!" he thought, "they'll start throwing things."
The man who had asked the question rose again.
"Thank you very much," he said, and sat down. Again Donald gasped.
There was only one other question. A fierce-looking young man, wearing a red-and-white handkerchief round his neck, asked aggressively:
"Mr. Chairman, I should like to know what the candidate's policy is about housing."
Sir Henry rose, thanked the gentleman who had asked the question, and congratulated him, and stated that his policy was to get the maximum number of houses built at the minimum cost in the shortest possible time.
The fierce-looking young man thanked the candidate, and the meeting diffused itself into votes of thanks, resolutions of confidence, and the National Anthem.
Donald walked out into the street in a dream.
For a few minutes he stood, irresolute, bewildered, and at last began to drift aimlessly along the unknown streets of Eldonborough, reflecting, as he went, that he was indeed a stranger in a strange land. After a little, absorbed though he was in his own thoughts, he could not help becoming gradually aware that crowds of people were hastening past him in the same direction as himself, and, increasing his speed, he came round a corner upon a large hall at the doors of which were enormous posters, stating in letters of scarlet fire:
ERNEST DODDS HERE TO-NIGHT
ERNIE FOR ELDONBOROUGH
A young man on the steps of the hall, almost concealed behind a colossal scarlet rosette, informed him that the great Champion of the People, the Crusader of the Proletariat, was going to address a mass meeting in a few minutes, and that there was still room for a few in the gallery.
Donald went in and secured a good seat in the front row of a sort of organist's loft, for the hall belonged to a Nonconformist church. There were about a thousand people in the building, and the chairman, a very thin, severe-looking man, was just rising to address the meeting. He began by saying that the audience had not come to listen to him, and that, therefore, he was going to say nothing at all. There was just a story he wanted to tell them, because he thought it illustrated very well the criminal proclivities of the Conservative Party and the depths of execration with which it was regarded throughout the country, a story about a personal friend of his, an 0 Irishman. He then proceeded to recount the anecdote which Donald had already heard that evening and which had, moreover, already appeared in that week's Punch. After that he delivered a passionate harangue against Capitalism, and then, later, luckily remembered the presence of Mr. Dodds and called upon him to say a few words.
Mr. Dodds soon proved himself to be an orator of the fieriest brand. He struck the table resounding blows. He swept the glass of water into the front row of the stalls. He leapt about from side to side as if the platform was red-hot. He shouted and he stormed. He thundered and banged. He compared the Tory Party to Judas Iscariot, and Mr. Baldwin, curiously enough, to the Crown Prince of Germany. He compared Mr. Arthur Henderson to Mr. Standfast and Lord Parmoor to St. Francis of Assisi. He compared the Socialist Party to the Angels of the Lord, and frequently alluded to the Liberals as right-thinking men and women, and he pointed several times with a torrent of eulogy to an old plaster cast of Bismarck which had been produced from somewhere and, as a counterblast to the mezzotint of Gladstone, ostentatiously labelled "Cobden."
Ernie was obviously a wizard when it came to figures. He proved in a whirlwind of arithmetic that if there were no rich there would be no poor, that if all the money was taken away from everyone, then everyone would have £317 a year, that if dividends were forbidden industry would be saved, and that the only way to avoid the imminent bankruptcy of the Bank of England was by the abolition of the Stock 0 Exchange and the suppression of Press Syndicates. In conclusion, he pledged himself to advocate the limitation of incomes to £400 a year, the raising of unemployment benefit to £4 a week, and the abolition of the beer-tax. Again Donald was aghast. It seemed impossible that this candidate also should escape being torn to bits by the hecklers. Again he was wrong.
Only two questions were asked.
The first was: "Where will you put the money above £400 a year that you take from the rich?"
And the answer was: "Into the pockets of the poor."
The second was: "Where will you get the money to pay for the raising of the dole?"
And the answer was: "Out of the pockets of the rich."
The meeting then dissolved in votes of thanks and much singing of "The Red Flag," with its stirring descriptions of open Proletarian activities in Chicago's halls in free America, and of secret Proletarian intrigues in the Tsarist vaults of Moscow.
After these two meetings, Donald realized that there was some force in Commander Blinker's sublime contempt for "facts and tommy-rot of that sort," and he tore up his sheaf of literature and confined himself on the soap-box and at the street-corner to simple eloquence about the Flag, the Throne, and the Commonwealth.
After fourteen days of oratory, the free citizens of Eldonborough and District went to the ballot-boxes, 0 and at noon on the day after polling-day, the returning-officer announced, to a crowd of some ten thousand people, that after three recounts the result of the election was: Mr. Ernest Dodds, twenty-one thousand and forty-three votes; Sir Henry Wootton, twenty-one thousand and forty-three votes—and the result was therefore a tie. Both candidates then thanked the returning-officer, both claimed the result as a smashing victory for their respective principles, both emphasized the cleanliness and true British sportsmanship of the contest, and then they shook hands amid deafening cheers.
