It was over. The House of Commons had ordered the evacuation of England; the House of Peers would follow their lead, and while that evacuation would take place slowly, covering a long space of time, and permit the recreant forces of nature to reform—if they would—the face of the world as it had been, while it had consideration for all the conflicting interests involved, and was so skillfully framed as to cause the least shock of derangement to the immense business agencies, still it was a surrender of the proudest people on the face of the earth to the blind powers of nature, and it meant for Englishmen a new heaven and a new earth.
Leacraft and Thomsen returned that night to their lodgings at the Bothwell Club, through Pall Mall, where but a few of the clubs were still in action and as they moved painfully along over the debris and dirt, the disturbed and shapeless heaps of snow, the abandoned articles of furniture, in front of some houses, and saw the darkened fronts of others, with broken windows, and broached and falling doors, noted the signs of interior commotion in the treasury, the admiralty, the foreign and Indian offices, the war office and the horse guards, they felt that Parliament had already been forestalled, and that the evacuation of London and with it all England had already begun.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE EVACUATION.
Events were moving rapidly. Ever since the Parliament, by a legislative decree, had authorized the desertion of England, and the eventful day approached when the King and his household, the Parliament itself, and the Church and the Titled Estate should, in a formal and expressive manner, leave England’s shores, the mass of the population had been diligently hunting about for refuge and occupation. Steamers and ships had scattered in all directions the fleeing multitudes. Relatives abroad, friends and even acquaintances offered homes and employment, no utility now was too small to be considered, nor any designation too insignificant to merit attention. This scampering was largely among those who felt the pinch already of idleness and the diminishing chance of work, among operatives and workmen, clerks and the bread winners of the middle class. The nobleman and the pauper did not stir.
The English nation had decreed through its legislature, that the evacuation of the country should be conducted with pageantry, that the solemn parting should be enrolled in all time honored ceremony and stately pomp with which kings had been crowned, and for which, with all its heart and mind, the English nature cries out with unappeasible hunger. So the moment for the King’s departure, which meant the official desertion of the Old Home, might be justly compared to the flight of the queen bee in the bee colony when her faithful followers swarm after and upon her, and with resolute constancy create a new city about her inviolable person.
The King was to leave England in June, 1910, and when he left with sumptuous and melancholy observance, with splendor of color and depth and power of music, with uniform and ritual, with prayer and chorus and prophecy, with august and intolerable grandeur, with the art of tradition and the ornaments of invention, he was to pass down to Tilbury and sail away beyond Gravesend to the new realm of his possession on the shores of Australia. It was a pretty hard thing to believe; it was a harder thing to do.
But it was to be done with all the gorgeous effectiveness which accumulated traditions of centuries and the practice of every day and the mere resources in artifices and equipment of a magnificent realm could display. The day came with splendid beauty, the sun shone over an England which somewhat returned to the flowery loveliness of its olden sweet estate. The city had been cleared, though the snowfalls had reached the most unexpected depth, and the severity of the winter had been appalling. The meteorologists discovered the fact that the western and northwestern zones of extreme precipitation, those of eighty inches had moved inward, and had even exceeded this maximum, and the condition of the country was really extraordinary and desperate. The immense accumulations of snow in the outlying districts had risen to such heights that the low, long houses of the peasantry were covered and the aspect of the country was that of a Labrador landscape transplanted to southern latitudes, where trees, stone walls and villages assumed the place of the more familiar tundra, plains and stone floored plains. Suffering had been very general, and the importunity of nature had done more to convince the people that the necessity of removal was an actual threat, not to be avoided or placated, than the speeches, the tracts of the scientific societies, or the deliberations of statesmen and editors.
But in London, on this twentieth of June, though the air bore the strange traces of the changed climate, in its tingling sharpness, yet this exhilaration only served the purpose of adding swiftness to the movement of the hosts of people in the streets, and a new and wonderful tremor of excitement to their eagerness in awaiting the development of the day’s great preparations.
In the morning the King was to be enthroned in Westminster Abbey, and to receive the homage of the Peers, and, as usual at a coronation, the day itself was inaugurated with the firing of a royal salute at sunrise. A measure of the august and overpowering rites and observances that mark the assumption of a King’s rule was now to be gone through with, as a symbol and memento, before the King transferred his throne to another land; and this ceremonial was emblematic of the unbroken allegiance of the English nation to his removed majesty.