The next balcony to mine had been reserved for the civil employés of British missions, and here was gathered a little knot of average English men and women—stenographers, typists, clerks, cogs of commercialism pressed into the mechanical work of post-war settlement. As the Americans moved on after one of the impressive checks of which I have just spoken, something caught my ears that made me turn my head quickly, even from a spectacle every lost moment of which I grudged. It was, of all sounds that come from the human heart, the lowest and the most ominous—the sound that makes the unwary walker through tropical long grass look swiftly round his feet and take a firmer grasp on the stick he has been wise enough to carry.
It is impossible—it is inconceivable—and it’s true. On this great day of international congratulation, one of the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was hissing the other.
* * * * *
I spoke about the matter later to a friend and former chief, whom I liked but whose position and character were no guarantee of tact or good judgment. I said I thought it rather an ominous incident, but he refused to be “rattled.” With that British imperturbability which Americans have noted and filed on the card index of their impressions he dismissed the whole thing as of slight import.
“Very natural, I dare say. Fine show all the same. Perhaps your friends on the other balcony thought they were slopping over in front.”
“‘Slopping over...?’”
“Well—going a little too far. Efficiency and all that. Bit out of step with the rest of the procession.”
I have often wondered since whether this homely phrase, uttered by a simple soldier man, did not come nearer to the root of the divergence between British and American character than all the mystifying and laborious estimates which nine out of ten of our great or near-great writers seem to think is due at a certain period in their popularity.
To achieve discord, you see, it is not necessary that two instruments should play different tunes. It is quite sufficient that the tempo of one should differ from the tempo of the other. All I want to indicate in the brief space which the scope of this work, leaves at my disposal are just a few of the conjunctures at which I think the beat of the national heart, here and across the Atlantic, is likely to find itself out of accord.
* * * * *