XVI
In 1912, to which year I have now come in these anecdotes of journalistic life, England was not without troubles at home and abroad, but nothing had happened, or seemed likely to happen (except in the imagination of a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the foundations of her wealth, or to menace her security as a great imperial Power.
It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they had a social status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. The aristocracy of wealth still went through the social ritual of the year, in country houses and town houses, from the London season to Cowes, from the grouse moors to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it.
The great middle class, with its indeterminate boundaries, was happy, well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of ease and security, apart from the ordinary anxieties, tragedies, failures, of private and domestic life. People with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the country houses of England. Labor was getting clamorous, with mock heroic threats of revolution, but was no real menace to the forces of law and order. Women were beginning to put forward claims to political equality with men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been translated into wild action. The spirit of England was, in the mass, rooted to its old traditions, and its social habits were not overshadowed by any dread.
As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker of life (writing history and fiction in my spare time), I had, perhaps, some deeper consciousness than most people outside my trade, of dangers brewing in the cauldron of fate. I touched English life in most of its phases, high and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little morbidly, of undercurrents beating up strongly below all this fair surface of tranquility. As I shall tell later, I came face to face with three bogies of threatening aspect. One was Ireland in insurrection. Another was industrial conflict in England, linked up with that Irish menace. A third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled the small beer of English life, and described its social pageantry—royal visits, the Derby, Henley, Fourth of June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match, Ascot, Cowes, the Temple Flower Show, garden fêtes, Maud Allen’s dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls.
There was a new passion for “dressing-up,” in that England before the war. It seemed as though youth, and perhaps old age, desired more color than was allowed by modern sumptuary laws.
I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall—one of many, but the most magnificent. All “the quality” was there, the most beautiful women in England, and the most notorious. I went, superbly, as Dick Sheridan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig, white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was strange how different a man I felt in those clothes. The vulgarity of modern life seemed to fall from me. I was an eighteenth-century gentleman, not only in appearance, but in spirit. I was my own great grandfather!
London that night was a queer sight anywhere within a mile of Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy porters in old liveries, conveyed little ladies in hooped dresses and high wigs. Columbines flitted by with Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old growlers came parties of troubadours, English princesses with horned headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buccaneers, Stuart cavaliers.
At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely transfigured. They, too, were their own ancestors. One of those I encountered that night was a fellow journalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered in the form of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this life!” The next time I met him was when he wore another kind of fancy dress—khaki-colored—with high boots caked up to the tabs in the mud of the Somme fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked a while. “It’s what goes before—the mud and the beastliness.” He was killed in one of those battles, like many others of those who danced with Columbine and the ladies of the gracious past.
This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, or rich folks. There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, in which many old towns and villages of England dramatized their own history and acted the parts of their own ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still think that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave the people of England a chance of revealing their innate sense of drama and color and local patriotism. In most of these pageants the actors made their own costumes, and went to old books to learn something of ancient fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of things that had happened on their own soil and in their own cathedrals, churches, guild houses, and ruined castles, whose stones are haunted with old ghosts. The children in these pageants made fields of living flowers. Youth was lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by the massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford pageant, when Charles held his court again, and in the St. Albans pageant, when the English archers advanced behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any sense of the past, one could not help being stirred by the continuity of English life, its unbroken links with ancient customs, its deep roots in English soil. At Bury St. Edmunds there was a scene depicting the homage of twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there bore the same name and held the same soil as those who had actually bowed before the Tudor lady. It is why tradition is strong in the character of our race, and steadies it.
There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, mainly caused by the weather, which was pitiless, so that often the pageant grounds were quagmires, and ancient Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses, Stuart beauties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which bedraggled them. But that was part of the game.
London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, prohibited hours for drink, the heavy hand of war upon the pleasures and follies of youth. Was there more folly than now? Perhaps vice flaunted more openly. Perhaps temptation spread its net with less need of caution—though I doubt whether there has been much change in morals, despite the park pouncing of policemen. There was more gayety in London, more lights in London nights, more sociability, good and bad, a great freedom of spirit, in those days before the war. So it seems to us now.
I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I studied them in their haunts, not with gloomy or reproving eyes, being tolerant of human nature, and glad of laughter.
One wild night began when the policeman on point duty in Piccadilly Circus thought that the last revelers had gone home in the last taxis, but he was a surprised man when life seemed to waken up again and there was the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of young men walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on their way to bed, but just beginning some new adventure. They advanced upon the Grafton Galleries singing a little ballad that marks the date:
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!
It’s a different girl again!
Different hair, different clothes,
Different eyes, different nose....”
This affair had been kept a dead secret from press and public. It was a “glorious stunt” which had for its amiable object the introduction of all the prettiest girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butterfly Ball.
Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls at this assembly, and not a few of them. The university boys were, for a time abashed by so much loveliness. But they brightened up, especially when the most famous sporting peer of England—Lord Lonsdale—led off the dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a teetotum. By the time I left—a kind of Pierrot looking on at the gayety of life—there was a terrific battle in progress between groups of boys and girls, with little white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not commendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but in its wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, afterward, was heroic in self-sacrifice.... So things happened in London before the war.
A series of articles appearing in The Daily Mail, by Robert Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the democratic side of political life, disturbed the sense of security in the average mind by a slight uneasiness. Not more than that, because the average mind had its inherited faith in our island inviolability and the power of the British Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is bad German, and they professed to reveal a determination in the military and naval castes of Germany to destroy the British fleet, invade England, and smash the British Empire.
Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish in its absurdity. There were not many facts to a wealth of rhetoric. But they created a newspaper sensation, and were pooh-poohed by the government, as we now know, with utter insincerity—for there were members of that government who knew far more than Blatchford how deep and widespread was German hostility to Great Britain, and how close Europe stood to a world war.
One fantastic little incident connected with those articles of Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the time, though afterward I thought of it as a strange prophecy.
I called on W. T. Stead one day in his office of The Review of Reviews, which afterward I was to edit for a year. It was just before lunch time, and Stead had an engagement with Spender of The Westminster Gazette. But he grabbed me by the arm, in his genial way, and said, “Listen to this for a minute, and tell me what you think of it.”
It appeared that he had been rather upset by Blatchford’s articles. He could not make up his mind whether they were all nonsense or had some truth at the back of them. He decided to consult the spirit world through “Julia,” his medium.
“We rang up old Bismarck, Von Moltke, and William II of Prussia. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘Is there going to be war between Germany and England?’”
The spirits of these distinguished Germans seemed uncertain. Bismarck saw a red mist approaching the coast of England. Von Moltke said the British fleet had better keep within certain degrees of latitude and longitude—which was kind of him! One of the trio—I forget which—said there would be war between Germany and England. It would break out suddenly, without warning.
“When?” asked W. T. Stead.
A date was given. It was the month of August. The year was not named.
I laughed heartily at Stead’s anecdote, especially when he told me the effect this announcement had upon him. He was so disturbed that he went round to the Admiralty, interviewed Lord Fisher, who was a friend of his, and revealed the dread message that the German fleet was going to attack in August. (It was then May, 1912).
Fisher leaned back in his chair, smiled grimly, and said, “No such luck, my boy!”
In August of that year I was engaged in trouble which did not seem connected with Germany, though I am inclined to think now that German agents were watching it very closely—especially one German baron who posed as a journalist and was always reporting on industrial unrest in Great Britain, wherever it happened to break out. I had met him at Tonypandy, in Wales, during the miners’ riots down there, and I met him again in Liverpool, which was now in the throes of a serious strike.
It was the nearest thing to civil war I have seen in any English city. I have forgotten the origin of the strike—I think it began with the dockers—but it spread until the whole of the transport service was at a standstill, and the very scavengers left their work. The Mersey was crowded for weeks with shipping from all the ports of the world, laden with merchandise, some of it perishable, which no hands would touch. No porters worked in the railway goods yards, so that trains could not be unloaded. There was no fresh meat, and no milk for babes. Not a wheel turned in Liverpool. It was like a besieged city, and presently, in hot weather, began to stink in a pestilential way, because of the refuse and muck left rotting in the streets and squares.
This refuse, among which dead rats lay, was so filthy in one of the best squares of Liverpool outside the hotel where I was staying, that a number of journalists, and myself, borrowed brooms, sallied out, swept up the rubbish heaps, and made bonfires of them, surrounded by a crowd of angry men who called us “scabs” and “blacklegs,” and threatened to “bash” us, if we did not stop work. We stuck to our job, and were rewarded by a clapping of hands from ladies and maidservants in the neighboring windows, so that our broomsticks seemed as heroic as the lances of chivalry.
Some bad things happened in Liverpool. The troops were stoned by mobs of men who were becoming sullen and savage. Shops were looted. I saw no less than forty tramcars overturned and smashed one afternoon in that sunny August, because they were being driven by men who had refused to strike.
On that afternoon I saw something of mob violence, which I should have thought incredible in England. A tramcar was going at a rapid pace, driven by a man who was in terror of his life because of a mob on each side of the road, threatening to stone him to death. Inside the car were three women and a baby. A fusillade of stones suddenly broke every window. Two of the women crouched below the window frames, and the third woman, with the baby, utterly terrified, came on to the platform outside, and prepared to jump. A stone struck her on the head, and she dropped the baby into the roadway, where it lay quite still. A gust of hoarse laughter rose from the mob, and not one man stirred to pick up the baby. Terrible, but true. It was left there until a woman ran out of a shop.... Wedged behind the men, but a witness of all that happened, I was conscious then of a cruelty lurking in the vicious elements of our great cities which, before, I had not believed to exist in England of the twentieth century. If ever there were revolution in England, it would not be made with rose water.
The troops and police were patient and splendid in their discipline, despite great provocation at times. Now and again, when the mob started looting or stone throwing, the police made baton charges, which scattered crowds of young hooligans like chaff before them, and they thrashed those they caught without mercy. At such times I had to run like a hare, for there is no discrimination in treatment of the innocent.
One afternoon the troops were ordered to fire on a crowd which made an attempt to attack an escort of prisoners, and there was a small number of casualties. That night I had an exciting narrative to dictate over the telephone to the office of The Daily Chronicle. But, in the middle of it, the sub-editor, MacKenna, who was taking down my message, said, “Cut it short, old man! Something is happening to-night more important than a strike in Liverpool. The German fleet is out in the North Sea, and the British fleet is cleared for action!”
When I put down the telephone receiver, I felt a shiver go down my spine; and I thought of Stead’s preposterous story of war in August. Had it happened?
There was nothing in next day’s papers. Some iron censorship closed down on that story of the German fleet, true or false.... As we now know, it was true. The German fleet did go out on that night in August, but finding the British fleet prepared, they went back again. It was in August of another year that Germany put all to the great hazard.
The thoughts of the English people were not obsessed with the German menace. For the most part they knew nothing about it, apart from newspaper “scares,” which they pooh-poohed, and no member of the government, getting anxious now in secret conversations, took upon himself the duty of preparing the nation for a dreadful ordeal.
England was excited by two subjects of sensational interest and increasing passion—the mania of the militant suffragettes, and the raising of armed forces in Ireland, under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson, to resist Home Rule.
I saw a good deal of both those phases of political strife in England and Ireland. The suffragette movement kept me in a continual state of mental exasperation, owing to the excesses of the militant women on one side, and the stupidity and brutality of the opponents of women’s suffrage on the other. I became a convinced supporter of “Votes for Women,” partly because of theoretical justice which denied votes to women of intellect, education, and noble work, while giving it to the lowest, most ignorant, and most brutal ruffians in the country, partly because of a sporting admiration—in spite of intellectual disapproval—of cultured women who went willingly to prison for their faith, defied the police with all their muscular strength, risked the brutality of angry mobs (which was a great risk), and all with a gay, laughing courage which mocked at the arguments, anger, and ridicule of the average man.
Many of the methods of the “militants” were outrageous, and loosened, I think, some of the decent restraints of the social code, for which we had to pay later in a kind of sexual wildness of modern young women. But they were taunted into “direct action” by Cabinet Ministers, and exasperated by the deliberate falsity and betrayal of members of Parliament, who had pledged themselves at election time to support the demand of women for the suffrage, by constitutional methods.
A number of times I watched the endeavors of the “militants” to present a petition to the Prime Minister or invade the Houses of Parliament. Always it was the same scene. The deputation would march from the Caxton Hall through a narrow lane in the midst of a vast crowd, and then be scattered in a rough and tumble scrimmage when mounted police rode among them.
Often I saw a friend of mine walking by the side of these deputations, as a solitary bodyguard. It was H. W. Nevinson, the war correspondent, with his fine ruddy face and silvered hair, a paladin of woman suffrage as of all causes which took “liberty” for their watchword. The crowd was less patient of men sympathizers of militant women than with the women themselves, and Nevinson was roughly handled. At a great demonstration at the Albert Hall, he fought single-handed against a dozen men stewards who fell upon him, when he knocked down a man who had struck a woman a heavy blow. Nevinson, though over fifty at the time, could give a good account of himself, and some of those stewards had a tough time before they overpowered him and flung him out.
Round the Houses of Parliament, on those nights of attack, there were strong bodies of police who played games of catch-as-catch-can with little old ladies, frail young women, strong-armed and lithe-limbed girls who tried to break through their cordon. One little old cripple lady used to charge the police in a wheel chair. Others caught hold of the policemen’s whistle chains, and would not let go until they were escorted to the nearest police station. One night dozens of women chained and padlocked themselves to the railings of the House of Commons, and the police had to use axes to break their chains.
There was a truly frightful scene, which made me shiver, one night, when those “militants” refused to budge before the mounted police and seized hold of their bridles and stirrup-leathers. The horses, scared out of their wits by these clinging creatures, reared, and fell, but nothing would release the grip of those determined and reckless ladies, though some of them were bruised and bleeding.
The patience and good humor of the police were marvelous, but I was sorry to see that they made class distinctions in their behavior. They were certainly very brutal to a party of factory girls brought down from the North of England. I saw them driven into a narrow alley behind Westminster Hospital, and the police pulled their hair down, wound it round their throats, and flung them about unmercifully. It was not good to see.
I had several talks at the time with the two dominant leaders of the militant section, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, and I was present at their trial, when they were indicted for conspiracy to incite a riot. Mrs. Pankhurst’s defense was one of the most remarkable speeches I have ever heard in a court of law, most eloquent, most moving, most emotional. Even the magistrate was moved to tears, but that did not prevent him from setting aside an unrepealed statute of Charles II (which allowed a deputation of not more than thirteen to present a petition, without let or hindrance, to the King’s ministers) and sentencing Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter to two years’ imprisonment.
I saw Christabel Pankhurst during the course of the trial, and she asked me whether I thought she would be condemned. I told her “Yes,” believing that she had the strength to hear the truth, and afterward, when she asked me how much I thought she would get, I said “Two years.” I had an idea from her previous record that she was ready for martyrdom at any cost, but to my surprise and dismay, she burst into tears. Her defense and cross-examination of witnesses were also marred by continual tears, so that it was painful to listen to her. Her spirit seemed quite broken, and she never took part again in any militant demonstrations, although she was liberated a short time after the beginning of her imprisonment. She worked quietly at propaganda in Paris.
One nation watched the mania of the “wild, wild women” with a growing belief in England’s decadence, as it was watching the Irish affairs, and industrial unrest. German agents found plenty to write home about.