Part 11 (1/2)
From me: ”Is Mr. Allen in his room?”
From the hall boy: ”He is, sir; shall I go for him, sir?”
From me: ”If you will, please, and tell him I'm in an unG.o.dly hurry, and we have a taxi at the door chewing up money like a cornsh.e.l.ler!”
The hall boy had to find someone to go on watch. Time was moving.
The tea was at five. The Bryce apartment was a mile away, and the chug of that taxi by the door moved me impulsively toward the elevator. But the elevator was still three steps away, when the manager of the hotel sauntered out from a side door, looked me over leisurely, and asked blandly:
”You'll be going to tea with Lord Bryce this afternoon--I presume!”
My hand was on the elevator b.u.t.ton jabbing it fiercely, and my lips replied, ”Yes--yes--say--Do you know whether Mr. Allen is in our room? It is getting late and he must hurry or--”
The manager continued to look me over still leisurely, then he smiled persuasively, but spoke firmly; realizing that something would have to be done for the good name of his hotel: ”Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?” And while that taxi ground out two s.h.i.+llings, black shoes slowly but nervously enveloped two Emporia feet, while Henry stood by and chortled in ghoulish Wichita glee!
But if we made a rather poor fist of our social diversions, at least we had a splendid time at the London shows. And then there was always the prospect of an exciting adventure getting home after the performance was over. The hotel generally found a taxi which took us to the theater. But once there we had to skirmish for ourselves and London is a big town, and hundreds of thousands of Londoners are hunting taxis at eleven at night, and they are hard to catch. So we generally had the fun of walking back to Brook Street in the dark. And it is dark in London toward midnight. Paris is merely gloomy. Rome is a bit somber, but London is as black as the inside of your hat. For London has been bombed and bombed by the German airmen, until London in the prevailing mist which threatens fog becomes mere murk. Night after night we wandered the crooked streets inquiring our way of strangers, some of whom were worse lost than we; one night we took a Londoner in charge and piloted him to Leicester Square; and then got lost ourselves finding Piccadilly and Regent Street! So that whenever we went out after dinner we were never without dramatic excitement, even if it was not adequately supplied by the show. The London taste in shows seems to sheer away from the war. In the autumn last past but two shows had a war motive: One ”General Post,” a story of the fall of caste from English life during the war, telling how a tailor became a general; the other ”The Better 'Ole,” a farce comedy, with a few musical skits in it, staged entirely ”at the front.” ”The Better 'Ole”
could be put on in any American town and the fun would raise the roof! There is no story to it; the show is but a series of dialogues to ill.u.s.trate Bairnsfather's cartoons.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Well now, Sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White?”]
A soldier comes splas.h.i.+ng down the trench. His comrade cries, ”Say, Alf, take yer muddy feet out o' the only water we got to sleep in.”
Again a soldier squats s.h.i.+vering with fear in a sh.e.l.l hole, while the bombs are cras.h.i.+ng over him, and dirt threatens to bury him. A comrade looks in and to his captious remarks the squatting soldier answers, ”If you knows where there's a better 'ole, go to it!”
Three men seated on a plum jam box during a terrific bombardment.
Trees are falling, buildings crumbling, the landscape heaving, and Bert says, ”Alf--we'll miss this old war wen it's over!” As the sh.e.l.ls strike nearer and nearer and a great crater yawns at their feet they crawl into it, are all but buried alive by the dirt from another sh.e.l.l, and Bert exclaims, ”Say, Alf, scare me--I got the 'iccoughs!” And so it goes for a whole evening, while Bert, making love to an interminable string of girls at each place where he is billeted at the front, gives away scores of precious lockets with his mother's hair in them, and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, to make his cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of his wife at home who keeps a ”pub”!
The prohibitionist in America would probably insist that she keep a soda fountain or a woman's exchange; but no other alterations would be needed to get the play over the footlights in any English speaking town on the globe.
The British soldiers crowd the house where ”The Better 'Ole”
is given, but their friends don't like it. The raw rollick of the game with death, which is really Shakespearean in its directness and its horse play--like the talk of the soldiers in ”Henry IV” or the chaffing of the grave-diggers in ”Hamlet,” or the common people in any of Shakespeare's plays, offends the British home-staying sense of propriety, and old ladies and gentlemen write to the Times about it. But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl their approval.
Curiously enough in musical programs one finds no prejudice against German music in London as one finds it in Paris. To get Beethoven in Paris one had to lower the windows, close the shutters, pull down the shades and pin the curtains tight. At the symphony concerts in London one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wagner, who is almost modern in his aggressive Teutonism. But the English have little music of their own, and so long as they have to be borrowing they seem to borrow impartially of all their neighbours, the French, the Slavs, the Germans, and the Italians. Indeed, even when British opinion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Symphony Orchestra put in an afternoon with Tschaicovsky's Fourth Symphony. And yet if, in a few months we could form even a vague notion of the public minds of England, and of France, one might say that England seemed more implacable than France. In France, where one heard no music but French and Italian music in the concerts, at the parks, in opera, one heard a serious discussion going on among school teachers about the history to be taught after the war.
Said one side: ”Let's tell the truth about this war and its horrors.
Let's tell of murdered women and children, of ravished homes, of pillaged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down to their very milestones! Let's tell how German rapacity for land began the war, and kept it up to its awful end.”
Says the other side: ”Germany is our permanent neighbour. Our children will have to live with Germany, and our children's children to the end of time. War is a horrible thing. Hate breeds war. Why not then let the story of this war and its barbarities die with this generation? Why should we for ever breed hate into the heart of our people to grow eternally into war?”
England has no such questions in her mind. England will surely tell the truth and defy the devil. But the Briton in matters of music and the other arts is like 'Omer when he ”smote 'is bloomin' lyre”; the Briton also will go and take what he may require, without much sentiment in the matter.
But the things that roll off the laps of the G.o.ds, after humanity has put its destinies there, sometimes are startlingly different from the expected fruits of victory. We fight a war for one thing, win the war and get quite another thing. The great war now waging began in a dispute over spheres of influence, market extensions, Places in the Sun and Heaven knows what of that sort of considerations.
Great changes in these matters, of course, must come out of the war. But boundaries and markets will fluctuate with the decades and centuries. The important changes that will come out of this war--a.s.suming that the Allies win it--will be found in the changed relations of men. The changes will be social and economic and they will be inst.i.tutional and lasting. For generally speaking, such changes as approach a fair adjustment of the complaints of the ”have nots” against the ”haves” in life, are permanent changes. Kings, overlords, potentates, politicians, capitalists, high priests--masters of various kinds--find it difficult to regain lost privileges and perquisites. And in this war Germany stands clearly for the ”haves.”
If Germany wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all over the world. For the same autocracy in Berlin lives in Wall Street, and in the ”city” in London, and in the caste and cla.s.s interests of Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany alone among the nations of the earth rests on the divine right of kings that is the last resort of privilege. In America we have the democratic weapons to break up our plutocracy whenever we desire to do so. In England they are breaking up their caste and economic privileged cla.s.ses rapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a motheaten relic. And when junkerdom in Germany is crushed, then at least the world may begin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself free. In the lands of the Allies the autocracy will be weakened by an allied victory. In Germany the junkers will be strong if they win the war, and their strength will revive junkerism all over the earth.
If the Allies win, it will weaken junkerdom everywhere. Germany, it is true, treats her working cla.s.ses better than some of the Allies treat their working people. But it is with the devilish wisdom of a wise slaveholder, who sees profit in fat slaves. The workers get certain legal bonuses. They have economic privileges, not democratic rights of free men under German rule. And the roaring of the big guns out at the front, seemed to Henry and me to be the cras.h.i.+ng walls of privilege in the earth.
Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one sees and hears in Europe may pa.s.s with the dawn of peace--woman, for instance, may return indoors and come out only on election day, yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment have come to stay. They are the most important salvage that will come out of the wreck and waste of this war. In England, for instance, the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes. They provide virtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for women over thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided for men. So revolutionary are the political changes in England that after the war, it is expected--conceded is hardly too strong a word, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalition cabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet. Certainly if labour does not actually dominate the British government, labour will control it indirectly. And the labour gains during the war will not be lost. Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the allied countries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not by compet.i.tive rates. ”The labour market” has pa.s.sed with the slave market. Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, but upon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence.
This change, of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order in the world. And the labour party of England recently adopted a program which provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen, independent of the ”labour market,” but also provides for the democratic control of industry: national railways, national mines, national electricity, national housing, and national land tenure.
And as if that were not enough the demands of the labour party include the permanent control of the prices of all the necessaries of life, without relation to profits and independent of supply and demand. Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis.
Labour demands that they be done permanently. And still further to press home its claims upon society, British labour demands a system of taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bring their incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above the common level--a rise in some relation to the actual differences of mind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a difference based on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing. It is, of course, revolution. But Labour now has political rights in England, and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in every part of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather determined, and probably will have its way. In France and in Italy where for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlled a.s.semblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the English are being made.