II
It was when the Peace Treaty had been signed but not ratified by the representatives of Germany and Austria that I met some of the friends with whom I had travelled along many roads of war or had met in scenes which already seemed far back in history. In London, after a journey to America, I came again in touch with young Harding, whom I had seen last on his way home to his pretty wife, who had fretted at his long absence, and Charles Fortune, whose sense of humour had made me laugh so often in the time of tragedy. Those were chance meetings in the eddies of the great whirlpool of London life, as I saw other faces, strange for a moment or two, until the difference between a field-cap and a bowler hat, a uniform and civil clothes, was wiped out by a look of recognition, and the sound of a remembered voice.
Not by chance but by a friendship which had followed me across the world with written words, I found myself once more in the company of Wickham Brand, and with him went again to spend some evenings with Eileen O’Connor, who was now home in Kensington, after that grim drama which she had played so long in Lille.
With “Daddy” Small I had been linked up by a lucky chain of coincidences which had taken us both to New York at the same time and brought us back to Europe on the same boat, which was the White Star liner Lapland.
My chance meeting with Harding led to a renewal of friendship which was more of his seeking than mine, though I liked him a good deal. But he seemed to need me, craving sympathy which I gave with sincerity, and companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.
It was on the night when London went mad, because of Peace, though not so mad, I was told, as on the night of Armistice. It all seemed mad to me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers of caste were to be broken that night, “society” women, as they are called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders, and diamonds, and furs, set out in motor-cars for hotels and restaurants which had arranged Peace dinners, and Peace dances. Some of them, I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women’s bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all of them provided with noise-making instruments, behaved with ironical humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with “ticklers,” blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies accepted the situation with courage and good-humour, laughing with shrill mirth at their grotesque companions. Others were frightened, and angry. I saw one girl try to beat off the hands of men clambering about her car. They swarmed into it and paid no heed to her cries of protest....
All the flappers were out in the Strand, and in Trafalgar Square, and many streets. They were factory-girls, shop-girls, office-girls, and their eyes were alight with adventure and a pagan ecstasy. Men teased them as they passed with the long “ticklers,” and they, armed with the same weapon, fought duels with these aggressors, and then fled, and were pursued into the darkness of side-streets, where they were caught and kissed. Soldiers in uniform, English, Scots, Canadians, Australians, came lurching along in gangs, arm-in-arm, then mingled with the girls, changed head-gear with them, struggled and danced and stampeded with them. Seamen, three sheets in the wind, steered an uneven course through this turbulent sea of life, roaring out choruses, until each man had found a maid for the dance of joy.
London was a dark forest with nymphs and satyrs at play in the glades and Pan stamping his hoofs like a giddy goat. All the passions let loose by war, the breaking-down of old restraints, the gladness of youth at escape from death, provided the motive-power, unconscious and primitive, behind this Carnival of the London crowds.