When William Came, Saki [red scrolls of magic .txt] 📗

a spirit of restlessness and expectancy.  The long-awaited Aufklärung dealing with the new law of military service had not yet appeared; at any moment he might meet the hoarse-throated newsboys running along with their papers, announcing the special edition which would give the terms of the edict to the public.  Every sound or movement that detached itself with isolated significance from the general whirr and scurry of the streets seemed to Yeovil to herald the oncoming clamour and rush that he was looking for.  But the long endless succession of motors and ’buses and vans went by, hooting and grunting, and such newsboys as were to be seen hung about listlessly, bearing no more attractive bait on their posters than the announcement of an “earthquake shock in Hungary: feared loss of life.”

The Green Park end of Piccadilly was a changed, and in some respects a livelier thoroughfare to that which Yeovil remembered with affectionate regret.  A great political club had migrated from its palatial home to a shrunken habitation in a less prosperous quarter; its place was filled by the flamboyant frontage of the Hotel Konstantinopel.  Gorgeous Turkey carpets were spread over the wide entrance steps, and boys in Circassian and Anatolian costumes hung around the doors, or dashed forth in un-Oriental haste to carry such messages as the telephone was unable to transmit.  Picturesque sellers of Turkish delight, attar-of-roses, and brass-work coffee services, squatted under the portico, on terms of obvious good understanding with the hotel management.  A few doors further down a service club that had long been a Piccadilly landmark was a landmark still, as the home of the Army Aeronaut Club, and there was a constant coming and going of gay-hued uniforms, Saxon, Prussian, Bavarian, Hessian, and so forth, through its portals.  The mastering of the air and the creation of a scientific aerial war fleet, second to none in the world, was an achievement of which the conquering race was pardonably proud, and for which it had good reason to be duly thankful.  Over the gateways was blazoned the badge of the club, an elephant, whale, and eagle, typifying the three armed forces of the State, by land and sea and air; the eagle bore in its beak a scroll with the proud legend: “The last am I, but not the least.”

To the eastward of this gaily-humming hive the long shuttered front of a deserted ducal mansion struck a note of protest and mourning amid the noise and whirl and colour of a seemingly uncaring city.  On the other side of the roadway, on the gravelled paths of the Green Park, small ragged children from the back streets of Westminster looked wistfully at the smooth trim stretches of grass on which it was now forbidden, in two languages, to set foot.  Only the pigeons, disregarding the changes of political geography, walked about as usual, wondering perhaps, if they ever wondered at anything, at the sudden change in the distribution of park humans.

Yeovil turned his steps out of the hot sunlight into the shade of the Burlington Arcade, familiarly known to many of its newer frequenters as the Passage.  Here the change that new conditions and requirements had wrought was more immediately noticeable than anywhere else in the West End.  Most of the shops on the western side had been cleared away, and in their place had been installed an “open-air” café, converting the long alley into a sort of promenade tea-garden, flanked on one side by a line of haberdashers’, perfumers’, and jewellers’ show windows.  The patrons of the café could sit at the little round tables, drinking their coffee and syrups and apéritifs, and gazing, if they were so minded, at the pyjamas and cravats and Brazilian diamonds spread out for inspection before them.  A string orchestra, hidden away somewhere in a gallery, was alternating grand opera with the Gondola Girl and the latest gems of Transatlantic melody.  From around the tightly-packed tables arose a babble of tongues, made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering of Spanish, and a North American rendering of English, with here and there the sharp shaken-out staccato of Japanese.  A sleepy-looking boy, in a nondescript uniform, was wandering to and fro among the customers, offering for sale the Matin, New York Herald, Berliner Tageblatt, and a host of crudely coloured illustrated papers, embodying the hard-worked wit of a world-legion of comic artists.  Yeovil hurried through the Arcade; it was not here, in this atmosphere of staring alien eyes and jangling tongues, that he wanted to read the news of the Imperial Aufklärung.

By a succession of by-ways he reached Hanover Square, and thence made his way into Oxford Street.  There was no commotion of activity to be noticed yet among the newsboys; the posters still concerned themselves with the earthquake in Hungary, varied with references to the health of the King of Roumania, and a motor accident in South London.  Yeovil wandered aimlessly along the street for a few dozen yards, and then turned down into the smoking-room of a cheap tea-shop, where he judged that the flourishing foreign element would be less conspicuously represented.  Quiet-voiced, smooth-headed youths, from neighbouring shops and wholesale houses, sat drinking tea and munching pastry, some of them reading, others making a fitful rattle with dominoes on the marble-topped tables.  A clean, wholesome smell of tea and coffee made itself felt through the clouds of cigarette smoke; cleanliness and listlessness seemed to be the dominant notes of the place, a cleanliness that was commendable, and a listlessness that seemed unnatural and undesirable where so much youth was gathered together for refreshment and recreation.  Yeovil seated himself at a table already occupied by a young clergyman who was smoking a cigarette over the remains of a plateful of buttered toast.  He had a keen, clever, hard-lined face, the face of a man who, in an earlier stage of European history, might have been a warlike prior, awkward to tackle at the council-board, greatly to be avoided where blows were being exchanged.  A pale, silent damsel drifted up to Yeovil and took his order with an air of being mentally some hundreds of miles away, and utterly indifferent to the requirements of those whom she served; if she had brought calf’s-foot jelly instead of the pot of China tea he had asked for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised.  However, the tea duly arrived on the table, and the pale damsel scribbled a figure on a slip of paper, put it silently by the side of the teapot, and drifted silently away.  Yeovil had seen the same sort of thing done on the musical-comedy stage, and done rather differently.

“Can you tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet?” asked the young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbour.

“No, I have been waiting about for the last half-hour on the look-out for it,” said Yeovil; “the special editions ought to be out by now.”  Then he added: “I have only just lately come from abroad.  I know scarcely anything of London as it is now.  You may imagine that a good deal of it is very strange to me.  Your profession must take you a good deal among all classes of people.  I have seen something of what one may call the upper, or, at any rate, the richer classes, since I came back; do tell me something about the poorer classes of the community.  How do they take the new order of things?”

“Badly,” said the young cleric, “badly, in more senses than one.  They are helpless and they are bitter—bitter in the useless kind of way that produces no great resolutions.  They look round for some one to blame for what has happened; they blame the politicians, they blame the leisured classes; in an indirect way I believe they blame the Church.  Certainly, the national disaster has not drawn them towards religion in any form.  One thing you may be sure of, they do not blame themselves.  No true Londoner ever admits that fault lies at his door.  ‘No, I never!’ is an exclamation that is on his lips from earliest childhood, whenever he is charged with anything blameworthy or punishable.  That is why school discipline was ever a thing repugnant to the schoolboard child and its parents; no schoolboard scholar ever deserved punishment.  However obvious the fault might seem to a disciplinarian, ‘No, I never’ exonerated it as something that had not happened.  Public schoolboys and private schoolboys of the upper and middle class had their fling and took their thrashings, when they were found out, as a piece of bad luck, but ‘our Bert’ and ‘our Sid’ were of those for whom there is no condemnation; if they were punished it was for faults that ‘no, they never’ committed.  Naturally the grown-up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and householders, do not realise, still less admit, that it was they who called the tune to which the politicians danced.  They had to choose between the vote-mongers and the so-called ‘scare-mongers,’ and their verdict was for the vote-mongers all the time.  And now they are bitter; they are being punished, and punishment is not a thing that they have been schooled to bear.  The taxes that are falling on them are a grievous source of discontent, and the military service that will be imposed on them, for the first time in their lives, will be another.  There is a more lovable side to their character under misfortune, though,” added the young clergyman.  “Deep down in their hearts there was a very real affection for the old dynasty.  Future historians will perhaps be able to explain how and why the Royal Family of Great Britain captured the imaginations of its subjects in so genuine and lasting a fashion.  Among the poorest and the most matter-of-fact, for whom the name of no public man, politician or philanthropist, stands out with any especial significance, the old Queen, and the dead King, the dethroned monarch and the young prince live in a sort of domestic Pantheon, a recollection that is a proud and wistful personal possession when so little remains to be proud of or to possess.  There is no favour that I am so often asked for among my poorer parishioners as the gift of the picture of this or that member of the old dynasty.  ‘I have got all of them, only except Princess Mary,’ an old woman said to me last week, and she nearly cried with pleasure when I brought her an old Bystander portrait that filled the gap in her collection.  And on Queen Alexandra’s day they bring out and wear the faded wild-rose favours that they bought with their pennies in days gone by.”

“The tragedy of the enactment that is about to enforce military service on these people is that it comes when they’ve no longer a country to fight for,” said Yeovil.

The young clergyman gave an exclamation of bitter impatience.

“That is the cruel mockery of the whole thing.  Every now and then in the course of my work I have come across lads who were really drifting to the bad through the good qualities in them.  A clean combative strain in their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary anæmic routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them.  What splendid little soldiers they would have made, and how grandly the discipline of a military training would have steadied them in after-life when steadiness was wanted.  The only adventure that their surroundings offered them has been the adventure of practising mildly criminal misdeeds without getting landed in reformatories and prisons; those of them that have not been successful in keeping clear of detection are walking round and round prison yards, experiencing the operation of a discipline that breaks and does not build.  They were merry-hearted boys once, with nothing of the criminal or ne’er-do-weel in their natures, and now—have you ever seen a