Part 14

A little boy, aged about eight, with nearly all his front teeth gone, came down early for breakfast this morning while I was having mine. He asked me where the waiters were, and rang. When one arrived, the little boy discovered that he could speak no French. However, the waiter said “Café?” and he said “One”; but he told me that he also wanted buns. While breakfasting, he said to me that he had got up early because he was going down into the town that morning by the Funicular, as his mother was to buy him his Christmas present, a silver lever watch. He said: “I hate to be hurried for anything. Now, at home, I have to go to school, and I get up early so that I shan’t be hurried, but my breakfast is _always_ late; so I have too much time before breakfast, and nothing to do, and too little time after breakfast when I’ve a lot to do.” In answer to my question, he said gravely that he was going into the Navy. He knew the exam, was very stiff, and that if you failed at a certain age you were barred out altogether; and he asked me whether I thought it was better to try the exam, early with only a little preparation, or to leave it late with a long preparation. He thought the first course was the best, because you could go in again if you failed. I asked him if he didn’t want some jam. He said no, because the butter was so good, and if he had jam he wouldn’t be able to taste the butter. He then rang the bell for more milk, and explained to me that he couldn’t drink coffee strong, and the consequence was that he had a whole lot of coffee left and no milk to drink it with.. . . He said he lived in London, and that some shops down in the town were better than London shops. By this time a German had descended. He and I both laughed. But the child stuck to his point. We asked him: “What shops?” He said that jerseys and watches were nicer in the town than in London. In this he was right, and we had to admit it. As a complete résumé, he said that there were fewer things in the town than in London, but some of the things were nicer. Then he explained to the German his early rising, and added an alternative explanation, namely, that he had been sent to bed at 6.45, whereas 7.15 was his legal time.

Later in the day I asked him if he would come down early again to-morrow and have breakfast with me. He said: “I don’t know. I shall see.” There was no pose in this. Simply a perfect preoccupation with his own interests and welfare. I should say he is absolutely egotistic. He always employs natural, direct methods to get what he wants and to avoid what lie doesn’t want.

I met him again a few afternoons later on the luge-track. He was very solemn. He said he had decided not to go in for the single-luge race, as it all depended on weight. I said: “Put stones in your pocket. Eat stones for breakfast.”

He laughed slightly and uncertainly. “You can’t eat stones for breakfast,” he said. “I’m getting on fine at skating. I can turn round on one leg.”

“Do you still fall?” (He was notorious for his tumbles.)

“Yes.”

“How often?”

He reflected. Then: “About twelve times an hour.... If I skated all day and all night I should fall twelve twelves--144, isn’t it?”

I said it would be twenty-four twelves.

“Oh! I see----”

“Two hundred and----”

“Eighty-eight,” he overtook me quickly. “But I didn’t mean that. I meant all day and all _night_, you know--‘evening. People don’t generally skate all _through_ the night, do they?” Pause. “Six from 144--138, isn’t it? I’ll say 138, because you’d have to take half an hour off for dinner, wouldn’t you?”

He became silent, discussing seriously within himself whether half an hour would suffice for dinner, without undue hurrying.

III--THE BLAND WANDERER

In the drawing-room to-night an old and solitary, but blandly cheerful, female wanderer recounted numerous accidents at St. Moritz: legs broken in two places, shoulders broken, spines injured; also deaths. Further, the danger of catching infectious diseases at St. Moritz. “One _very_ large hotel, where _everybody_ had influenza,” etc. These recitals seemed to give her calm and serious pleasure.

“Do you think this place is good for nerves?” she broke out suddenly at me. I told her that in my opinion a hot bath and a day in bed would make any place good for nerves. “I mean the nerves of the _body_,” she said inscrutably. Then she deviated into a long set description of the historic attack of Russian influenza which she had had several years ago, and which had kept her in bed for three months, since when she had’ never been the same woman. And she seemed to savour with placid joy the fact that she had never since been the same woman.

Then she flew back to St. Moritz and the prices thereof. She said you could get pretty reasonable terms, even there, “provided you didn’t mind going high up.” Upon my saying that I actually preferred being high up, she exclaimed: “I don’t. I’m so afraid of fire. I’m always afraid of fire.” She said that she had had two nephews at Cambridge. The second one took rooms at the top of the highest house in Cambridge, and the landlord was a drunkard. “My sister didn’t seem to care, but I didn’t know _what_ to do! What _could_ I do? Well, I bought him a. non-inflammable rope.” She smiled blandly.

This allusion to death and inebriety prompted a sprightly young Yorkshirewoman, with the country gift for yarn-spinning, to tell a tale of something that had happened to her cousin, who gave lessons in domestic economy at a London Board School. A little girl, absent for two days, was questioned as to the reason.

“I couldn’t come.”

“But why not?”

“I was kept.. . Please ‘m, my mother’s dead.”

“Well, wouldn’t you be better here at school? When did she die?”

“Yesterday. I must go back, please. I only came to tell you.”

“But why?”

“Well, ma’am. She’s lying on the table and I have to watch her.”

“Watch her?”

“Yes. Because when father comes home drunk, he knocks her off, and I have to put her on again.”

This narration startled even the bridge-players, and there were protests of horror. But the philosophic wanderer, who had never been the same woman since Russian influenza, smiled placidly.

“I knew something really much more awful than that,” she said. “A young woman, well-known to me, had charge of a crèche of thirty infants, and one day she took it into her head to amuse herself by changing all their clothes, so that at night they could not be identified; and many of them never _were_ identified! She was _such_ a merry girl! I knew all her brothers and sisters too! She wanted to go into a sisterhood, and she did, for a month. But the only thing she did there--well, one day she went down into the laundry and taught all the laundry-maids to polka. She was such a merry girl!”

She smiled with extraordinary simplicity.

“In the end,” the bland wanderer continued, after a little pause, “she went to America. America is such an odd place! Once I got into a car at Philadelphia that had come from New York. The conductor showed me my berth. The bed was warm. I partly undressed and got into it, and drew the curtain. I was half asleep, when I felt a hand feeling me over through the curtain. I called out, and a man’s voice said: ‘It’s all right. I’m only looking for my stick. I think I must have left it in the berth’! Another time a lot of student girls were in the same car with me. They all got into their beds--or berths or whatever you call it--about eight o’clock, wearing fancy jackets, and they sat up and ate candy. I was walking up and down, and every time I passed they _implored_ me to have candy, and then they implored each other to try to persuade me. They were mostly named Sadie. At one in the morning they ordered iced drinks ‘round. I was obliged to drink with them. They tired me out, and then made me drink. I don’t know what happened just after that, but I know that, at five in the morning, they were all sitting up and eating candy. I’ve travelled a good deal in America and it’s _such_ an odd place! It was just the place for that young woman to go to.”

IV--ON A MOUNTAIN

Last week I did a thing which you may call hackneyed or unhackneyed, according to your way of life. To some people an excursion to Hampstead Heath is a unique adventure: to others, a walk around the summit of Popocatapetl is all in the year’s work. I went to Switzerland and spent Easter on the top of a mountain. At any rate, the mountain was less hackneyed at that season than Rome or Seville, where the price of beds rises in proportion as religious emotion falls. It was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus who sent me to the mountain. To mention Marcus Aurelius is almost as clear a sign of priggish affectation and tenth-rate preciosity as to quote Omar Khayyam; and I may interject defensively that I prefer Epictetus, the slave, to Marcus Aurelius, the neurotic emperor. Still, it was Marcus Aurelius who sent me to the mountain. He advised me, in certain circumstances, to climb high and then look down at human nature.

I did so. My luggage alone cost me four francs excess in the Funicular.

*****

I had before me what I have been told--by others than the hotel proprietor--is one of the finest panoramas in Europe. Across a Calvinistic lake, whose renown is familiar to the profane chiefly because Byron wrote a mediocre poem about a castle on its shores, rose the five-fanged Dent du Midi, twenty-five miles off, and ten thousand feet towards the sky; other mountains, worthy companions of the illustrious Tooth, made a tremendous snowy semicircle right and left; and I on my mountain fronted this semi-circle. The weather was perfect.

Down below me, on the edge of the lake, was a continuous chain of towns, all full and crammed with the final products of civilisation, miles of them. There was everything in those towns that a nation whose destiny it is to satisfy the caprices of the English thought the English could possibly desire. Such things as baths, lifts, fish-knives, two-steps and rag-times, casinos, theatres, rackets, skates, hot-water bottles, whisky, beef-steaks, churches, chapels, cameras, puttees, jig-saws, bridge-markers, clubs, China tea, phonographs, concert-halls, charitable societies, money-changers, hygiene, picture post cards, even books---just cheap ones! It was dizzying to think of the refined complexity of existence down there. It was impressive to think of the slow centuries of effort, struggle, discovery and invention that had gone to the production of that wondrous civilisation. It was perfectly distracting to think of the innumerable activities that were proceeding in all parts of the earth (for you could have coral from India’s coral strand in those towns, and furs from Labrador, and skates from Birmingham) to keep the vast organism in working order.

And behind the chain of towns ran the railwayline, along which flew the expresses with dining-cars and fresh flowers on the tables of the dining-cars, and living drivers on the footplates of the engines, whirling the salt of the earth to and fro, threading like torpedo-shuttles between far-distant centres of refinement. And behind the railway line spread the cultivated fields of these Swiss, who, after all, in the intervals of passing dishes to stately guests in hotel-refectories, have a national life of their own; who indeed have shown more skill and commonsense in the organisation of posts, hotels, and military conscription, than any other nation; so much so, that one gazes and wonders how on earth a race so thick-headed and tedious could ever have done it.

*****

I knew that I had all that before me, because I had been among it all, and had ascended and descended in the lifts, lolled in the casinos and the trains, and drunk the China tea. But I could not see it from the top of my mountain. All that I could see from the top of my mountain was a scattering of dolls’ houses, and that scattering constituted three towns; with here and there a white cube overtopping the rest by half an inch, and that white cube was a grand hotel; and out of the upper face of the cube a wisp of vapour, and that wisp of vapour was the smoke of a furnace that sent hot-water through miles of plumbing and heated 400 radiators in 400 elegant apartments; and little stretches of ribbon, and these ribbons were boulevards bordered with great trees; and a puff of steam crawling along a fine wire, and that crawling puff was an international express; and rectangular spaces like handkerchiefs fresh from a bad laundry, and those handkerchiefs were immense fields of vine; and a water-beetle on the still surface of the lake, and that water-beetle was a steamer licensed to carry 850 persons. And there was silence. The towns were feverishly living in ten thousand fashions, and made not a sound. Even the express breathed softly, like a child in another room.

The mountains remained impassive; they were too indifferent to be even contemptuous. Humanity had only soiled their ankles: I could see all around that with all his jumping man had not found a perch higher than their ankles. It seemed to me painfully inept that humanity, having spent seven years in worming a hole through one of those mountains, should have filled the newspapers with the marvels of its hole, and should have fallen into the habit of calling its hole “the Simplon.” The Simplon--that hole! It seemed to me that the excellence of Swiss conscription was merely ridiculous in its exquisite unimportance. It seemed to me that I must have been absolutely mad to get myself excited about the January elections in a trifling isle called Britain, writing articles and pamphlets and rude letters, and estranging friends and thinking myself an earnest warrior in the van of progress. Land taxes! I could not look down, or up, and see land taxes as aught but an infantile invention of comic opera. Two Chambers or one! Veto first or Budget first! Mr. F. E. Smith or Mr. Steel-Maitland! Ah! The tea-cup and the storm!

The prescription of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had “acted.”

*****

It is an exceedingly harmful prescription if employed long or often. Go to the top of a mountain by all means, but hurry down again quickly. The top of a mountain, instead of correcting your perspective, as is generally supported by philosophers for whom human existence is not good enough, falsifies it. Because it induces self-aggrandisement. You draw illusive bigness from the mountain. You imagine that you are august, but you are not. If the man below was informed by telephone that a being august was gazing on him from above he would probably squint his eyes upwards in the sunshine and assert with calmness that he couldn’t even see a living speck on the mountain-crest. You who have gone up had better come down. You couldn’t remain up twenty-four hours without the aid of the ant-like evolutions below, which you grandiosely despise. You couldn’t have got up at all if a procession of those miserable conceited ants had not been up there before you.

The detached philosophic mountain view of the littleness of things is a delightful and diverting amusement, and there is perhaps no harm in it so long as you don’t really act on it. If you begin really to act on it you at once become ridiculous, and especially ridiculous in the sight of mountains.

You commit the fatuity of despising the corporate toil which has made you what you are, and you prove nothing except that you have found a rather specious and glittering excuse for idleness, for cowardice, and for having permitted the stuffing to be knocked out of you.

When I hear a man say, when I hear myself say: “I’m sick of politics,” I always think: “What you want is six months in prison, or in a slum, or in a mine, or in a bakehouse, or in the skin of a woman. After that, we should see if you were sick of politics.” And when I hear a lot of people together say that they are sick of politics, then I am quite sure that politics are more than ever urgently in need of attention. It is at such moments that a man has an excellent opportunity of showing that he is a man.

ENGLAND AGAIN--1907

I--THE GATE OF THE EMPIRE

When one comes back to it, after long absence, one sees exactly the same staring, cold white cliffs under the same stars. Ministries may have fallen; the salaries of music-hall artistes may have risen; Christmas boxes may have become a crime; war balloons may be in the air; the strange notion may have sprouted that school children must be fed before they are taught: but all these things are as nothing compared to the changeless fact of the island itself. You in the island are apt to forget that the sea is eternally beating round about all the political fuss you make; you are apt to forget that your 40-h.p. cars are rushing to and fro on a mere whale’s back insecurely anchored in the Atlantic. You may call the Atlantic by soft, reassuring names, such as Irish Sea, North Sea, and silver streak; it remains the Atlantic, very careless of social progress, very rude.

The ship under the stars swirls shaking over the starlit waves, and then bumps up against granite and wood, and amid cries ropes are thrown out, and so one is lashed to the island. Scarcely any reasonable harbours in this island! The inhabitants are obliged to throw stones into the sea till they emerge like a geometrical reef, and vessels cling hard to the reef. One climbs on to it from the steamer; it is very long and thin, like a sword, and between shouting wind and water one precariously balances oneself on it. After some eighty years of steam, nothing more comfortable than the reef has yet been achieved. But far out on the water a black line may be discerned, with the silhouettes of cranes and terrific engines. Denied a natural harbour, the island has at length determined to have an unnatural harbour at this bleak and perilous spot. In another ten years or so the peaceful invader will no longer be compelled to fight with a real train for standing room on a storm-swept reef.

*****

And that train! Electric light, corridors, lavatories, and general brilliance! Luxuries inconceivable in the past! But, just to prove a robust conservatism, hot-water bottles remain as the sole protection against being frozen to death.

“Can I get you a seat, sir?”

It is the guard’s tone that is the very essence of England. You may say he descries a shilling on the horizon. I don’t care. That tone cannot be heard outside England. It is an honest tone, cheerful, kindly, the welling-up of a fundamental good nature. It is a tone which says: “I am a decent fellow, so are you; let us do the best for ourselves under difficulties.” It is far more English than a beefsteak or a ground-landlord. It touches the returned exile profoundly, especially at the dreadful hour of four a. m. And in replying, “Yes, please. Second. Not a smoker,” one is saying, “Hail! Fellow-islander. You have appalling faults, but for sheer straightness you cannot be matched elsewhere.”

One comes to an oblong aperture on the reef, something resembling the aperture of a Punch and Judy show, and not much larger. In this aperture are a man, many thick cups, several urns, and some chunks of bread. One struggles up to the man.

“Tea or coffee, sir?”

“Hot milk,” one says.

“Hot milk!” he repeats. You have shocked his Toryism. You have dragged him out of the rut of tea and coffee, and he does not like it. However--brave, resourceful fellow!--he pulls himself together for an immense effort, and gives you hot milk, and you stand there, in front of the aperture, under the stars and over the sea and in the blast, trying to keep the cup upright in a mêlée of elbows.

This is the gate, and this the hospitality, of the greatest empire that, etc.

“Can I take this cup to the train?”

“Certainly, sir!” says the Punch and Judy man genially, as who should say: “God bless my soul! Aren’t you in the country where anyone can choose the portmanteau that suits him out of a luggage van?”

Now that is England! In France, Germany, Italy, there would have been a spacious golden _café_ and all the drinks on earth, but one could never have got that cup out of the _café_ without at least a stamped declaration signed by two commissioners of police and countersigned by a Consul. One makes a line of milk along the reef, and sits blowing and sipping what is left of the milk in the train. And when the train is ready to depart one demands of a porter:

“What am I to do with this cup?”

“Give it to me, sir.”

And he planks it down on the platform next a pillar, and leaves it. And off one goes. The adventures of that thick mug are a beautiful demonstration that the new England contains a lot of the old. It will ultimately reach the Punch and Judy show once more (not broken--perhaps cracked); not, however, by rules and regulations; but higgledy-piggledy, by mutual aid and good nature and good will. He tranquil; it will regain its counter.

*****

The fringe of villas, each primly asleep in its starlit garden, which borders the island and divides the hopfields from the Atlantic, is much wider than it used to be. But in the fields time has stood still.. . . Now, one has left the sea and the storm and the reef, and already one is forgetting that the island is an island.. . . Warmth gradually creeps up from the hot-water bottles to one’s heart and eyes, and sleep comes as the train scurries into the empire.... A loud reverberation, and one wakes up in a vast cavern, dimly lit, and sparsely peopled by a few brass-buttoned beings that have the air of dwarfs under its high, invisible roof. They give it a name, and call it Charing Cross, and one remembers that, since one last saw it, it fell down and demolished a theatre. Everything is shuttered in the cavern. Nothing to eat or to drink, or to read, but shutters. And shutters are so cold, and caverns so draughty.

“Where can I get something to eat?” one demands.

“Eat, sir?” A staggered pause, and the porter looks at one as if one were Oliver Twist. “There’s the hotels, sir,” he says, finally.

Yet one has not come by a special, unique train, unexpected and startling. No! That train knocks at the inner door of the empire every morning in every month in every year at the same hour, and it is always met by shutters. And the empire, by the fact of its accredited representatives in brass buttons and socialistic ties, is always taken aback by the desire of the peaceful invader to eat.

*****

One wanders out into the frozen silence. Gas lamps patiently burning over acres of beautiful creosoted wood! A dead cab or so! A policeman! Shutters everywhere: Nothing else. No change here.

This is the changeless, ineffable Strand at Charing Cross, sacred as the Ganges. One cannot see a single new building. Yet they say London has been rebuilt.

The door of the hotel is locked. And the night watchman opens with the same air of astonishment as the Punch and Judy man when one asked for milk, and the railway porter when one asked for food. Every morning at that hour the train stops within fifty yards of the hotel door, and pitches out into London persons who have been up all night; and London blandly continues to be amazed at their arrival. A good English fellow, the watchman--almost certainly the elder brother of the train-guard.

“I want a room and some breakfast.”

He cautiously relocks the door.

“Yes, sir, as soon as the waiters are down. In about an hour, sir. I can take you to the lavatory now, sir, if that will do.”

Who said there was a new England?

One sits overlooking the Strand, and tragically waiting. And presently, in the beginnings of the dawn, that pathetic, wistful object the first omnibus of the day rolls along--all by itself--no horses in front of it! And, after hours, a waiter descends as bright as a pin from his attic, and asks with a strong German accent whether one will have tea or coffee. The empire is waking up, and one is in the heart of it.

II--AN ESTABLISHMENT