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 thebread 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 centuriesand 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 exhilarationonly 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.
The King was to ascend the theatre of the Abbey, and be lifted into His Throne by the Archbishops and Bishops, and other Peers of the kingdom, and being enthronized, or placed therein, all the great officers, those that bear the swords and sceptres, and the rest of the nobles, should stand round about the steps of the throne, and the Archbishop standing before the King should say the exhortation, beginning with the words, “Stand firm, and hold fast from henceforth the Seat of State of Royal and Imperial Dignity, which is this day delivered unto you in the Name and by the Authority of AlmightyGod, and by the hands of Us, the Bishops and Servants of God, though unworthy, etc, etc.”
And then the homage being offered and accepted, the King attended and accompanied, the four swords—being the sword of Mercy, the sword of Justice to the Spirituality, the sword of Justice to the Temporality, and the sword of State—were to be carried before him. He should then descend from his throne crowned, and, carrying his Sceptre and Rod in his hands, should go into the area eastward of the theatre, and pass on through the door on the south side of the altar into King Edward’s Chapel, the organ and other instruments all the while playing.
The King should then, standing before the altar, deliver the Sceptre with the Dove to the Archbishop, who would lay it upon the altar there. The King would then be disrobed of his imperial mantle, and be arrayed in his royal robe of purple velvet, by the Lord Great Chamberlain.
The Archbishop should then place the orb in his majesty’s left hand. Then his majesty should proceed through the choir to the west door of the Abbey, in the same manner as he came, wearing his crown and bearing in his right hand the Sceptre, with the Cross, and in his left the orb; all Peers wearing their coronets, and the Archbishops and Bishops their caps.
The interior arrangements in the Abbey werefamiliar. From the west door where the procession should enter to the screen which divides choir from nave, two rows of galleries were to be erected on each side of the centre aisle—the one gallery level with the vaultings, the other with the summit of the western door. These galleries should have their fronts fluted with crimson cloth richly draped at the top, and decorated with broad golden fringe at the bottom.
On the floor of the centre aisle a slightly raised platform or carpeted way, should be laid down, along which the King and Queen, in procession should pass to the choir. This was to be matted over and covered with crimson cloth. On the pavement of the aisle bordering this carpeted way should stand the soldiery as a fence against interference.
The theatre where the principal parts of the ceremony were to be enacted lies immediately under the central tower of the Abbey, and was a square formed by the intersection of the choir and the transcepts, extending nearly the whole breadth of the choir. On this square a platform was to be erected ascended by five steps. The summit of this platform and also the highest step leading to it, was to be covered with the richest cloth of gold. From that step down to the flooring of the theatre, all was covered with carpet of rich red or purple color bordered with gold. In the centre of the theatre thesumptuously draped chair was to be placed for the sovereign, in which he receives the homage of the Peers.
This interior pomp and splendor escaped the observation of Leacraft, though he was not unfamiliar with the details of the solemn pageant, but now it hardly interested him. His mind by a natural emancipation from the thrall of such spectacles, dwelt rather on the attitude of the people in this extreme peril and solicitude. He felt inquisitive to learn their feelings, their hopes, their cohesiveness in the changed estate. Were they likely to resolve into a chaos of preferences with only the cry ofsauve qui peutin their mouths, or would they follow the new destinies, and preserve the nation. At length the populace were coming into their own. It was pretty evident that a King and Queen and Regalia, and Peers, and Peeresses, and a much surpliced Clergy, would not make a nation, without the workers, the rent payers, the men of action, the bread winners, the clerks, artisans, and merchants, the householder and his family, and that the sacred classes would be suddenly subjected to areductio ad absurdum, if they formed the only inhabitants of the new regime and their titles lost theirraison d’etrewith the disappearance of the untitled mass.
After the rendering of the Homage at the Abbey, the Procession was to take place, and the King arrivingat Tilbury, with the royal family, a selection of the Peers, the highest Episcopal prelates, and certain representative men from the Commons, including the Ministry, would be received on the Dreadnought, and with a glorious escort of the largest battleships, carrying the royal equipage, the furniture of Windsor Castle, and of St. James palace, and of the Buckingham mansion, the archives of the Parliament, at least a portion, steam away from England to Australia, to Melbourne. This Nucleus of Government holding the inseparable insignia, and the actual essence of the English nation would there, with pomp and solemn allegations, with rolling music and pious prayers, with thunders of the guns by the Navy, and the salute of the Army, be as it were reinstalled.
But the route of the procession was not to be straight out of London. It comprised a broader purpose. It was proposed to circumvallate London, to impregnate it with the sentiment of the King’s leaving. It should be traversed and penetrated in all directions, gathering thus the public allegiance, and absorbing its loyalty, shedding the effulgence of the royal splendor upon the populace, and enchaining them anew to the principle and fact of English Sovreignty. It was a stupendous project. It involved stations and relays. Camps of the military were to be established at St. James Park, at Victoria Park, at Regent’s Park, at the West Endnear Paddington, at Wormwood Scrubs, and in the southern districts around Clapham Common and towards Putney.
The King was to stop at resting places, and in the largest local churches, a reduced form of the Homage was to be instituted involving theenthronization, with the displays of the Regalia, and the jubilation, and the reverence of the people expressed, as always in theshouts—
God save King Edward!Long live King Edward!May the King live forever!
God save King Edward!Long live King Edward!May the King live forever!
God save King Edward!Long live King Edward!May the King live forever!
God save King Edward!
Long live King Edward!
May the King live forever!
The bells of the churches were to ring, the houses were to hang out their banners, flags were to cover the streets, bands stationed on prominent balconies, at points covering the entire long journey through and around the city, were to play national airs, that so there might be generated an overwhelming enthusiasm, a tumult of devotion, and thus constrain the Englishman afresh in the religion of the nation’s immortality.
It was finely conceived, this elevation of the King. It was gorgeously executed. The imagination of the people was tremendously impressed, and the Ark of the Covenant of the eternal supremacy of the English crown seemed thus visibly incorporated, and presented to them. The procession was glittering, and it was majestic. It ponderously emphasized the English idea. There were reallytwo processions, the first from Westminster to Buckingham Palace, the second through London. In the first—the King issued from Westminster, his crown borne before him, but holding in his right hand the Sceptre with the Cross, and in his left the Orb. Then began the most wonderful State ride through London. The superb chariot of the King surrounded by heralds, kings at arms, pursuivants, with judges, councillors, lords, and dignitaries, was followed by the open carriages of the nobility.
The King was immersed in color. Garter—principal King-at-arms—was a miracle of dress. He wore a frock or tabard, crimson and gold emblazoned with the quarters of the United Kingdom. Then there was the Clarencieux of the South, and Norroy of the North—and the heralds of Lancaster, Somerset, Richmond, all wonderfully bedight, and the pursuivants—Rouge Croix, Rouge Dragon, Portcullis, and Blue Mantel—looking like the genii of a Christmas pantomime. And here with the King were the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, and the Master of the Horse. And there followed this cavalcade, surrounding the King like a many colored fringe, the carriages of the nobles wherein all the signs of degree, order, rank, were sumptuously shown. Here the robes of the Peers, crimson velvet edged with miniver—the capes furred with the same—and powdered with bars or rows of ermine, according to degree, rolled togetherin a bank of oscillating glory. Beneath the mantles a court dress, a uniform, or regimentals were descried. The coronets were even worn, and as the scintillating groups passed, eager admirers separated the coronet of the baron with its six silver equidistant balls, from the coronet of a viscount with sixteen, from the coronet of an earl with eight balls raised on points, and with glistening gold strawberry leaves between the points, from the coronet of a marquis with four gold strawberry leaves alternating with four silver balls, and from the coronet of a duke with the eight gold strawberry leaves.
Nor did beauty hesitate to add its witchery to the sports of splendor, and in behalf of that ancient idea of Monarchy, which now was enlisted against a deep peril of mistrust and repudiation. The Peeresses formed part of the procession. Their scarlet kirtles over the petticoats of white satin and lace, their flowing sleeves slashed and furred, their cushioned trains heaped in confusion in the carriages, and relieved by shining plaques of silver silk, were still more bewilderingly graced by jewelry, by oceans of gems resplendently transfigured in the blazing sun. In this momentous pageant the limits of the spectacular were invaded, even distended, in which some saw not only a lack of good taste, but the pressure of a little fear.
Even the church advanced the bold bid for admirationand wonder. It sent out its archbishops, bishops, rectors, canons, prebendaries and deacons, to compose parts of the vast exhibit to be interwoven in the variegated human carpet that filled the streets. Before the churches that were passed, choirs gathered and sang melodiously; the strong religious fibre of the English men and women was sedulously appealed to, or else it was the elemental flaming forward of their powerful conviction. At this strange moment there was less of pretence and trick than sincerity. The heart of the people was steadfastly united with the old traditions; they clung unbrokenly to the inheritance of English greatness. There was no reason to doubt their faith.
The route of the second marvellous procession was from the Abbey through Bird Cage Walk past Victoria monument to Procession road, to the Strand, to Fleet street, over Ludgate hill, past St. Paul’s, to Cheapside, to Bishops street, to Shoreditch, to Hackney street, and so out to Victoria Park and Homerton. Back again to Highbury Fields, south by Essex road to Pentonville road, to Euston road, to Marylebone road, through Regents Park, through Hampstead road to Hampstead, to West Side, through Edgeware road to Hyde Park, and the Bays water to Holland park, to Hammersmith road, by Hammersmith bridge road to Castelnau; thence to Putney, to Battersea, to Clapham,to Camberwell, thence to Walworth road, by London road, by Waterloo road to Westminster bridge, to the Houses of Parliament, and on the banks of the river Thames to the Tower, and on through White Chapel, Mile End road, Bow road, to Bromley, to Stratford, to Barking, to Tilbury.
Nothing so prodigious had ever been conceived; and the resources of the empire, of the military, and the squadrons of the colonists, who should again, as at the Jubilee of Queen Victoria, present the diversified elements of English power, would be involved.
At Tilbury on the Essex bank, opposite Gravesend, where rise the low bastions of Tilbury Fort, originally constructed by Henry III, King Edward the VII, would in a fashion diverse, and with a different end in view, also declare that he “had the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too,” as had said Queen Elizabeth. But now it should be said by a King unappalled by the invasion of the powers of the air, as she was before the power of Spain, but now said with undiminished confidence and high hope, though said too with obedience to the supreme mandate of expulsion.
Before it took place, Leacraft and Thomsen began their long walk from Ludgate hill, and Leacraft intently watched the street crowds. He noted also with recording interest the groups in the balconies with lunch baskets. The expectant air everywherewas not unnoticeably mingled with a kind of frightened silence. There was not much noise, no indiscriminate hubbub in the streets, and where groups were encountered, hurrying to their destination, they were quiet and restrained. Tension was evident, a high strung expectancy verging with impalpable approach upon tears, and the agony of penitential promises. The fundamentally religious optimism of the Englishman was confounded, and his acceptance of invisible guidance made itself seen in faces desolated by the grief of tears.
The preparations were remarkable and elaborate. The windows were filled with chairs. Platforms were erected, almost luxuriously draped with red cloth and scarlet velvet, and surging crowds in spots seemed to bely the significance of the portentous moment. From time to time as the two observers walked in the middle of the street, they stopped reluctantly to notice signs of mourning. These took on the form of trailing streamers of crape, hung upon white cloth and their singularity amid the almost bombastic surplusage of scarlet dressings, awoke protest and resentment. At one point there was a particularly conspicuous dismal challenge to the susceptibilities of the spectators in a balcony loaded with sombre trappings which gained a startling prominence because of the patriotic and cheerful decorations on either side of it. Before this lugubrious appeal a small group of malcontentshad gathered, and were indulging in incendiary criticism.
“Hits no use turning a sour face to the thing. What’s got to be, is got to be, and a little heart will keep a sour stomach from making itself sick. Hi say we’re hall in the same boat, and cheerfulness makes pleasant company. Such a show as that hought not to be tolerated, Hi say.” This belligerency came from the thick lips of a red faced man, who had his coat over his arm, and whose leathern leggings, corduroy knee breeches, and flaming weskit with a high collar strapped to his muscular neck by a pea green scarf, betokened a representative of the “fancy,” or an ostler turned out for a day’s holiday.
“Indeed I think so,” squealed a thin, short man with a red nose and a curious habit of wiping his mouth with a yellow handkerchief. “It’s hard enough for the sufferin’ masses to leave hearth, home, and, I may say, family, not to be saddened more’n than is natural with these funereal suggestions.”
“Well,” shouted a sturdy arrival on the other limit of the circle; “Let’s tear them down. The quickest way to cure trouble is to git rid of it. It’s rotten insultin’ to stick those weeds under our noses.” Under the influence of these defiant words the knot of men moved towards the objectionable drapery with evidently unfriendly intentions.But they had not been unobserved from the inside of the house on whose front these sad reminders hung. A window shot up and a tall slender woman advanced to the edge of the balcony. She was dressed deeply in black, her neck was surrounded by some white crepe stuff, and the sentiment, as Howells has it, of her dress was a pathetic suggestion of bereavement and misfortune. Her hair, yet luxuriant, was plentifully sprinkled with gray; her face had the authorized look of nobility and distinction. She was yet prepossessing, though the crowding years had brought her past middle life. The distinctive impression she made upon Leacraft, as he and Thomsen, somewhat withdrawn, watched the denouement of this street episode, was that of abiding sorrow, patiently borne, and doubtless united in her, with Christian resignation and unsullied piety. A beautiful picture of the English woman, who resolutely lives her earnest life of prayer and self-sacrifice, holding intensely to her heart some fond memory, wreathed in amaranth. And Leacraft, as an Englishman, blessed Providence there were such. The men on the street were a little abashed by the pale face and lofty mien of the lady who had recognized their purpose, and placed herself there to thwart it.
She came forward and instantly spoke; her voice was excessively clear, but an underlying mellownessimparted an extreme sweetness to its tones.
“My friends you wish these mourning signs taken away. They offend you. But when you know that they express to me the approaching loss of all my friends, you will not, I think, feel so harshly about them. The King, in a week, leaves the shores of England—the evacuation of England begins to-day—and with the King goes the great English nation and this wonderful city with all its memories, with its beauty, its historic power, its incessant interest, our common home for all our lifetimes, will dwindle and dwindle and disappear, lost in arctic snows and ice, at least so they tell us.
“But I shall stay. In this house suffering has come to me; it has never leftme. I shall not leaveit. I mourn for those who in going away die to English pride, to English love, to English devotion, and”—she leaned out over the sullen men beneath her—“and die to me. These black films are for them.”
She stopped. The men, worried and puzzled and surprised, looked a little sheepishly at each other.
“Oh, well,” said he of the hostler type, “my leddy, no offense, seein’ how you feel about it. Hi say—’ave your way.”
“Yes, yes,” squealed the preacher, “if the empty badges of mournin’ give ennyone—ennyone—satisfaction, why it’s not in reason to question their motives in this excroociating moment.”
“Gad! the lady’s right,” shouted the former belligerent, whose prompt hint had at first nearly precipitated the riot, “She’s got the right ring—and I’m damned if anyone teches the rags there I’ll bust his cock-eyed head aff his shoulders.”
This vociferous statement produced a hubbub of approval, and won many distinct admissions of entire acquiescence—and with these reassuring murmurs the lady retired, after telling her thanks, and the gathering withdrew down the street.
Leacraft and Thomsen continued their way westward. Before them suddenly, after a half-hour’s sauntering, shone an avenue of military splendor. They were in Charing Cross, having pushed down the Strand, and they were on the south side of Trafalgar Square, and not far from the equestrian statue of Charles I. Trafalgar Square was filled with troops. The effect of color was transporting. The massed regiments of infantry were broken by parks of artillery, while immediately under Nelson’s column the Nineteenth Hussars—the “Dumpies of 1759,” the Fifteenth Hussars—“Elliott’s Light Horse,” the Sixteenth Lancers—“the Queen’s,” and the Thirteenth Hussars—“the ragged brigade”—were confusedly stationed, their mingling busbies and dependent bags looking like a garden patch.
From point to point issued galloping videttes, carrying their pennants on lance-heads affixed tothe stirrups, which undulated in the air, as the horses pranced and caracolled. The tramp of troops, the sighing of bugles, and the resounding surges of music, surrounded them. It was afternoon. The beginning of the first day’s procession from the Abbey doubtless was at hand. The stirring air communicated the thrills of an immense event, and the people, petrified into attention, stood crushed against each other in rows of forlorn expectancy. The suffocating excitement was unbearable, the more so because of its immobility. Leacraft decided to rush through London, and reach Victoria Park, the Hackney Marshes and Clapton, in order to determine the attitude, the action, of the poorer classes. Thomsen was unwilling to desert the fermenting throngs around Trafalgar Square, or miss, for a moment, the kaleidoscope of changing soldiery, and so Leacraft, leaving him, entered a hansom and shot off.
He was not averse to this solitude. His affections for Miss Tobit had lately warmed into a less indifferent kindliness, and he began to feel a gnawing anxiety lest the pretty Scotch woman thought less of him—in the way lovers like—than she did of her cousin, the handsome and obnoxiously unconcerned Thomsen. Thomsen knew exactly Leacraft’s feelings, and regarded them with unconcealed forbearance, and—what was more provoking—with a frank condescension of sympathy. Andyet the men had become good friends; they had talked long and seriously, with all the elements of critical guidance they could summon, about the strange reversal or revolution in the nation’s affairs. But at these moments they were in an impersonal frame of contact, and the personal exigencies which later crept between them, were all absent. Leacraft’s intellectual weight easily made itself felt in these discussions, and Thomsen, with cordial alacrity, assumed the obedient position of audience and pupil.
As Leacraft was driven eastward in the swinging vehicle, he flung himself against its cushions, and again thought of the monstrous and incredible metamorphosis in the fortunes of his people. The vigorous life of ten centuries, with all its memories, the heaped up riches of its achievements, the splendid literary legacy of the past, with its art, its lineaments of beauty, its dusky shadows, the solicitous charm of its contrasted periods of history, the deep encrustation, nay, rather, the unfathomable deposits of character, and accomplishment which overlaid the Kingdom of England, and, in this city of London, the beating heart of its vast interests, thickly choked each avenue and current of its life—to abandon all this at the summons of a temperatural caprice, at the tempestuous whim of an earthquake, before the blind violence of frost and snow and ice, was the most unendurable of humiliations!It bit too deeply at the generalized assumption of the whole world, that man ruled the earth; it soured the contentment of his avid vanity, and to the Englishman it assailed the hitherto impregnable fortress of his heroic conceit. And yet—the old dream of a greater England arose, as it had arisen a hundred times before, in all these troubling and disconcerting months—an England leaping forward, as an exultant youth, bearing in his hands the trophies of new and brighter conquests, flushed under changed environments, with the inspiration of new ambitions, and new powers of creation, issuing into a greater chapter of human growth than had ever before been conceived or written.
And yet what an eviction! This glorious old England, with its sweet homes, its innumerable beauties, its convincing happiness of downs and glade and gardens, flowering into clouds of blossoms, its lakes, its gentle streams, its æsthetic softness and dimness, its manifold and opulent charm of landscape, the hurrying and constant kisses of its moist skies, in league with all the graces of the seasons—to cast this aside, and begin again, elsewhere, in regions drear and sterile of all these things; ah! that was too hard! too hard! and, as he had often done, Leacraft covered his face with his hands and sobbed.
Amid these fluctuating thoughts and feelings, the hansom swung with vehement oscillations alongthe streets, in the more deserted parts of London, and brought its occupant in sight of the Bethnal Green Museum, from which a diversion along Old Ford Road and Approach Road, flung him into Victoria Park, the huge playground of the poorer eastern section of the city. He was driven to the eastern part of the immense reservation, and was gratified to find a public meeting in progress, the exact thing he most wished to be present at, and to estimate.
In a broad and treeless area of the park, with the grass showing hesitatingly after the long winter, but vivid also in spots, in the strong light of the afternoon, with an atmosphere strangely variant from the traditional, and, to Leacraft, much loved velvety softness and mellowed obscuration of former days, were gathered a multitude of people. They surrounded a speaker, who, on some sort of improvised platform, with a knot of associated leaders, with a swaying body and occasionally outstretched hands, was engaged in a harangue which was received with attention unattended by the slightest demonstration of assent or disapproval. It looked from a short distance almost like a devotional assembly, it seemed so reverently silent, and as Leacraft approached, this impression was partially at least verified, for the speaker’s hands ceased their agitated appeal, the occasional higher cries proceeding from his lips died away, and asong or hymn burst suddenly from the still motionless multitude. It lasted for an instant, perhaps a single verse, and as Leacraft drew near, another man from the platform group stood up, and stepped to the front of the small stand. At that precise moment the cannonading, agreed upon as a signal, announced the starting of the royal cortege, and the sad beginning of the imperial evacuation of England. It was heard with far away reverberations, as it was repeated from other nearer points, and this vagueness, by a congruity of effect with the dull misery weighing on Leacraft’s heart, seemed to give to it a deeper poignancy of grievous import. It produced the impression of an irrevocable doom. As the sounds were heard by the assembled crowds, the speaker lifted his hand and raised his face skyward, as if in supplication, the heads were all uncovered by one spontaneous impulse, and, caught in the same wave of feeling, Leacraft sought the invocation of his own blessing on the King and all he stood for.
The interrupted speaker began his address. The man was a strong type. His face was somewhat leisurely framed in short whiskers, confined to his cheeks; his eyes were large, blue and unblinking, with a resolute look in them that had the merit of extorting, at least, a respectful recognition; his complexion met all the requirements of the English reputation for color, but it left no impression ofhaving attained its superior brilliancy through less innocent means than exercise and personal care. His broad, high forehead—a little heightened in its expansive effect through the faltering recession of the iron grey hair that stood a little stiffly above it—rose above the admirably firm nose, whose size and contour formed to the reader of physiognomies another compelling admonition to give its wearer the rational allegiance of attention. The man’s voice was musical, with a single intonation that imparted to it much carrying power, and it yielded to certain tendencies of relaxation in speaking that gave it almost a feminine sweetness. Leacraft put him down for a labor leader of a sort, character and design belonging to the best elements of the current labor thought and organization; a man of that impressive stamp in modern adjustments of self-assertion, of which John Burns was so extraordinary an example.
He had begun his speech as Leacraft, with insistent zeal, pushed his way deeply toward the centre and margins nearer the stage, of the attentive throng.
“My friends, we must think for ourselves. We are not likely to have our thinking done for us to the best advantage. Now there are some plain, undeniable facts. They are the kind of facts which cannot be hid under a bushel basket, nor, for that matter, under a king’s crown. One of the most intelligibleof these facts—and it is fundamental—is that the number of individual heads apportioned to the same number of paired legs make up the population, and units of population make nations, and nothing else can. An aggregate of gentlemen dressed in wigs, or holding truncheons sticking out of purple and gold-braided shawls never has, and, from sheer destitution, never could make a nation. By all the signs around us, and I am willing to accept them without any question, this country of ours is going to move; is about to begin housekeeping somewhere else, and I think it is an imperative necessity for the success of such a change that everyone living now on this island and calling himself an Englishman, must move also, and move to the same place (Hear, Hear,). But that moving is conditioned. It is indispensably necessary that we proclaim that condition, and insist upon its acceptance. We hold the situation in our own hands. We control the key to the future, to make or mar, or destroy the continuity of the English name. Why? Because if to-morrow the English workingman refused to follow the English flag to Australia, and took his wisdom, his tools and his savings somewhere else, that flag would lose twenty millions of subjects, and would wave over a remnant that could not ensure its protection or its support. (Hear, Hear). But the condition?”
The speaker paused, sweeping his eyes over thesea of upturned faces, as if he was hunting through the chaotic assemblage for the disclosure of some particular visage which, either as an ally or an opponent, might receive the shock of his omnipotent secret. Whether he discovered the facial invitation or not, was not revealed in his subsequent action. He wheeled sideways to the stiffened line of men behind him—doubtless expectant and impatient numbers in the afternoon’s programme—and bringing his clenched right hand into the hollowed palm of his left hand, shouted, and not discordantly: “The condition is the abolition forever of the Law of Entail that to-day makes us a servile race.”
Again he paused, as if so ponderous a statement, so fiercely declared, would elicit a demonstration—but to Leacraft’s abounding wonder, not a sound arose from the vast audience. Whether it was appalled, or thrilled, interested, or pleased, or dumbfounded, it gave no sign. Its immutable decree for the speaker to go on was its very silence. No public orator could conveniently, with respect to his own sensitive needs for public encouragement, stop there. But he had become cautious. He felt that perchance his auditors yet held mental reservations in favor of things as they were, as they wished them to continue.
“I say, with all my heart and soul,” he went on, “stay with the Flag, stay with the King, stay withour lords and ladies, but on one condition as freemen, to whose keeping now in this hour of peril they are wholly given. Into your hands the God of Nations entrusts their fate, but that fate can only be propitious as you are true to yourselves, your children, and your children’s children.”
Then came the long delayed approval. A wave of excited pleasure brushed across the crowds, and the hand-clapping, begun in many separate centres, ran together, and with shouts of acquiescence, with cheers, with central and periphera, agitation, the huge aggregate expressed its tumultuous adhesion. Leacraft felt that the loyalty of these people was not impaired, and that the logic of events would still hold them united in a consentaneous allegiance at least, to the idea of the English nation, though it was pretty evident that the democratic claims of a wider opportunity for personal, for family promotion, leavened all their feelings, and that in the new regime it might be expected, that a great deal of the present relation of the classes would be swept away, and that the old time idolatry of degree, the mere flunkeyism of homage to name and geneological prestige, among the masses, had shrunken into nothingness.
The stage was again occupied by a speaker, who was interested in very practical and urgent questions, thehowandwhereandwhen, the disposition of the emigrants to the new country, and he revelledin plans, provisions, details of occupancy, and employment. He showed conclusively the power and effectiveness of organization, and the surprising accommodations that can be extracted from the most forlorn prospects by a shrewd use of forethought and combination. Funds had been scraped together, settlements, as yet in the dream stage of realization created, and a practical socialism consummated in the confederation of a large numbers in one common venture. This aspect of the emigration was dwelt upon by the speaker with some rigor. It was a surprise to Leacraft, and lent a strange expression to the still irreconcilable spectacle of Englishmen looking for a new home.
Leacraft soon tired of sums, schedules, names, and lists, and wandered away over the park through the scattered groups, many centred around one of those popular tribunes, who, by reason of a little more leisure, perhaps a little more application, and always much more labial facility, influence their class profoundly. The broad lawns were filled with these improvised parliaments, in which too banter, argument, retort, query, admonition bore a part. The perplexing thing was the average satisfaction shown by the people, a kind of holiday anticipation, as if they were off for an excursion. To them perhaps it seemed a new start in life, with the ground less encumbered by rivals, by restrictions, less shadowed by priority, and favorsfor a few, and by the intimidation of a necessary subserviency. They almost seemed happy in the thought of change. There was bitterness in this, and yet to Leacraft with his undissembling and emancipated mind it was understood. It meantchanceto these people—this removal; and to most of them chance never came, never could come as they were. And then to linger, was starvation, loneliness, disuse, death. The business of the country had enormously shrunken, its productive power had been halved, commerce was drifting in stronger and steadier currents elsewhere, and no where so strongly as to Germany, while the over mastering pre-eminence of America loomed up in proportions that paralysed conjecture.
Pondering on all these things Leacraft, in his absorbed way, stumbled over a little girl on the edge of one of the shaded walks. He quickly stooped and picked her up, and confronted the young mother, already hastening to the rescue of her child.
“I should have been more careful,” said the embarrassed gentleman. “Well, indeed we have all good reason to be thinking more than seeing, these times,” said the smiling mother, “I wonder what we’ll all be like this time, come twelve month.”
“Oh, I dare say that we shall be doing much the same thing that we do here, in a different place—and then we shall be a year older;” the young womanlaughed, and attested a complete willingness to talk more, as she raised the ruffled child from the grass and moved nearer to Leacraft. Nor was Leacraft indifferent. He felt nettled, and willful, with a subconsciousness of disappointment and fear. This human and healthy mother, with the fresh guerdon of her blushing youth in her arms, was a helpful companion, and then she carried the solace of some new story, perhaps a new need, and Leacraft was not averse to being sympathetic or helpful.
“Willie, that’s my man, sir,” continued the girl, “is right glad to get away. Last Candlemas his mother died, and left Willie her savings, and that, and what we have, will tide us to America, and Willie he says that he can get a home, and have a little land, and Willie will be better of his sickness. He’s not here the day, because of his cough and the fever that he has. Ah! sir, it makes me chill at my heart to see him, and to think that we are going so far,” and the sweet face looked piteously at Leacraft, and the tears overran the sad gray eyes. Leacraft saw it all; a consumptive father, poor, out of work, staking everything now to reach that bourne, where the hopeless of all nations saw the welcome light of opportunity. As he thought of this he saw how great this avulsion was, what a tearing up of the roots of family and home life, and how ruthlessly they were to be planted in all sortsof soils, under alien skies, with inauspicious hands to tend and raise them. He turned to the young mother, and said, “It won’t seem so far, if a face from the old home greets you there. I shall be there also, and I will not only be glad to see you, but glad to help you, if you need it. Take this,” and opening his card case, he wrote an address in New York city. “If,” he continued, “you do not remain in New York, this will always find me. Good bye.” He extended his hand and shook with unaffected warmth the hand of the young English woman, to whom the future loomed up in misty and insecure, perhaps menacing shadows. How merciful is sympathy, with what a solacing hand it soothes the “ruffled brow of care,” and how genially it bids the springs of life still follow, and, for a moment at least, flow too in the sunlight of affection. The English woman seized Leacraft’s hand and pressed it tightly, and her face looked into his with almost an enamored thankfulness; she raised the baby girl and held it close to Leacraft, and the restrained Englishman kissed it with quaint shyness. At the instant, all the shifting helplessness about him moved him inexpressibly. Again they shook hands and the Englishman betrayed into emotional excess, walked rapidly away, reassuring her at the last that he would indeed be soon in America.
A few feet away a different encounter swept himinto a contrasted realm of emotional excitement. A rude brawling loafer, none too sober, and reckless in oaths and obscenity, had seized the small flags of two little boys—union jacks—and throwing them down on the ground, with an outburst of profanity trampled and defaced them. The Englishman inflamed and ardent, holding a wounded heart, stood stupified and insulted. The next instant and he had snatched the flags from their degradation, and with an instantaneous revulsion struck the culprit of this outrage squarely in the face. The blow was unmistakably adequate. The ruffian reeled and fell and failed to regain his feet, before a shout of applause greeted Leacraft and a concourse of men, who had hastened to the spot on the outcry of the children surrounded him with welcome salutation.
“A fine blow—well hit and straight as a gunshot man! That was the right medicine for his complaint. I’m thinking that a little water might wash it down. I say, boys, let’s duck him, souse him in the lake. A tubbing might clean his sassy mouth, and a man is none too good to be rolled in the mud himself, who treads on the English flag.” The subject of this criticism was on his feet again in rather a belligerent mood, blinking and rolling his fists in a minatory fashion, and sputtering defiance, and presenting a transient spectacle of inebriety and coarseness that would have been ludicrous, if the temper of the men behind the newspeaker had not seemed so hostile. Leacraft felt that they would do some serious mischief to the miserable delinquent, and he stepped in front of them interposing his body between the foremost of the ranks, and the, now somewhat intimidated drunkard.
“I think my friends, that you should spare yourselves the trouble to punish this miscreant just now. Let him alone. Neither he or his kind are likely to hurt our flag. He has learned his lesson. To-day my friends it becomes us to command ourselves, and hold ourselves above resentment. We are all sad, our hearts are heavy, the old Manse is to be left and new conquests across the waters made, new homes. Ah! how large the vision grows.” The men had enclosed Leacraft in a dense circle. He saw that he had their attention, while the stumbling object of their first anger effected a shuffling retreat with ignominious haste. His ruse now was to entirely capture their thoughts. “It is a vision of a new England, one made so by our devotion, the fixed quality of our patriotism, an undeviating union among ourselves, and just pride in our history, our race, our King. It may be a better England; it can not be a more beautiful England. We are deeply stricken. While we bow to this necessity, let us make the grandest display of fortitude of resource, of hope, of courage, of skill, of judgment, ever known. In our disaster we shall againconquer the world and hold it submissive at our feet.”
Leacraft had enough disengagement of thought to half smile to himself at this grandiloquent pretense, but he knew his audience. It was quite British, embued with that cloutish conceit which all popular masses in every successful nation instinctively display. He had appealed to their conceit, though not only to that, and they responded enthusiastically. As he finished this mild buncombe, not without some misgivings as to his own honesty, as he intended at first to repair to the United States, the men nearest to him grasped his hand, others shouted approbation, and still others in silence moved away shaking their heads. Leacraft talked with the men about him. He found that they had been assigned places in the scheme of emigration; some were going to Australia, with a systematic dispersion over the region, which most needed their labor, others to New Zealand into socialistic farming; others to the cape and Rhodesia and still others to Canada; so that his exalted sentiment of solidarity lost a little of its impressiveness. Leacraft lingered a while longer, and as the day ended in a refulgent sunset with church bells, near and far ringing to the services, that now for a week would be held at all hours, inaugurating an unbroken intercession at the throne of grace for the guidance and protection of the people, he left his cordialacquaintances and went westward.
He reached Park Lane near the Kensington Gardens, Gloucester House, and the fountain of Thornycroft, the region of Mayfair, the dazzling centre, the illustrious apse of English social splendor, where the inherited privileges of life were not discordantly blended with the no less inherited gifts of fortune; that spot in all London which to relinquish, would seem to sound the depths of national disgrace. The moon swam in the lucent sky, the air was clear, but cold, and the familiar ravishing softness of the June nights as London knew them once, was gone; those illumined mists, the dewyness that spread from the ground to the enveloping air, and threw veil over veil of shimmering opacity upon arch and tower, sward, tree, bridge and storied palace, was all gone, too, and the beautiful neighborhood, as Leacraft wandered through it, from Cumberland Gate—where he saw snow still resting in sheltered recesses—along Park Lane to Hyde Park Corners, through Grosvenor Place to Chapel street, to Belgrave Square, was revealed in an aerial sincerity, that gave its splendor an almost scintillant loveliness, and drove still deeper into Leacraft’s heart the sense of a bewildering bereavement.
The streets were filled with flying equipages, and the mansions were ablaze, the sidewalks held few pedestrians, and as Leacraft sorrowfully movedthrough the stately purlieus, music swept out from open windows or swinging doors. Often he paused and watched the descending occupants of the carriages; they were entrancing women and peerless men, their laughter was silvery and undismayed, unchecked by tears. Could it be possible that these inner esoteric circles of London high life and unimaginable wealth indulged in revelry; could not the crash and fall of empires turn the votaries of gayety to soberer thoughts, or stifle the intoxicating voice of pleasure? Leacraft wondered, and the weariness of a great suspense weighed him down; the ingrained Puritanism of his nature raged against this heartlessness, this indecent bravado, a mockery of joy, where all should be shadowed with the sighs of penitence and supplication.
Leacraft was bitterly offended at this apparent heartlessness; it startled him beyond the limits of endurance; he looked for some representative of this foolish life, upon whom to turn with rebuke and denunciation. Leacraft wandered on in a disconsolate mood, and the growing indications, with the falling night, that the fashionable world of London was engaged, in a preconcerted way, to spend the last hours of its metropolitan sojourn in a spendthrift vortex of excitement and conviviality moved him to muttered objurgations. He had slipped past Hyde Park Corners, past the Apsley House, and had glided with hastening steps, as hispassion of revolt, at this unseemly loss of self-respect, rose to a towering indignation, into Grosvenor Square. He stood facing the long facade, where in repetitive elegance, with columned porches and mansard roofs, and wall-like chimneys, the mansions of the very rich, illumined at all their windows, poured forth a torrent of light. Aggrieved and stupefied, he shot into Berkley Square, and still no interruption to the aspect of mad revelry. Could it be a frenzied spasm of indulgence, before separation forever from the bliss of the West End, that terrestrial paradise of swelldom and financial and social glory? He wondered. And thus wondering, he came to Devonshire House, fronting Piccadilly. The comfortable home, with its small brick work, peeking chimney pots, the low entablature and triple doors behind the iron gateway, and the unbroken watch of the woman-headed sphinxes, on either side of the elevated escutcheon of the Kingdom, was there, encompassed by its imprisoning walls—and here, too, the effrontery of lavish gayety assaulted his eyes. The gates were flung wide open, powdered footmen were ranged before the doors, arriving and departing carriages threaded Piccadilly with conscienceless celerity, music uttered its delicious melodies, and in them was no requiem note, no throb of sorrow, and the guests crowding into its dazzling halls seemed untouched by thoughts less carelessthan the joys of the fleeting moments, whose hurrying steps were bringing the dawn of disaster to England. Exasperated, Leacraft turned on his heel in disgust, and was going towards Leicester Square, when a sharp report somewhere on the side of the Geological Museum, and ahead of his position, startled him, and the next instant he saw a carriage, with prancing steeds, plunging down the street, the swaying figure of the driver denoting his complete loss of control, while on one side of the equipage, that side towards Leacraft, the pale face of a gentleman was seen, and beside him the distracted visage of an elderly lady. As the carriage approached Leacraft, it crossed the street, and the front wheels collided with the curbing. This administered a slight detention, and the struggling horses turned again to the opposite side of the thoroughfare. Quick to see his advantage, Leacraft sprang to the head of the nearer horse, and exerting all his strength, which was not inconsiderable, he succeeded in tripping the beast, and as it fell the traces holding its companion broke, and the freed creature raced away down the avenue. The driver leaped to the sidewalk and held the now imprisoned horse, which, starting to its feet, stood trembling beside him, while Leacraft hastened to the door of the vehicle to liberate its occupants.
He had already been forstalled by the gentlemanhimself, who pushed the door back as Leacraft reached it and stepped to the walk, followed instantly by the lady in much commotion and disorder. Their agitation was short lived, and succumbed to the exercise of their own self-control. It was the gentleman who first spoke: “I am under the deepest obligation to you, sir, for your quickness and your courage. You may readily have saved us from a miserable fate. And”—Leacraft interrupted: “You were going to somerendezvousof pleasure; this, sir, in my opinion, on the eve of the nation’s assassination deserved punishment.” The speech was crude, rude perhaps, and the bitter taunt smote the stranger like a physical blow. He recoiled from it as if the sting of a cowhide had crossed his face. His face itself was a study. He stared at Leacraft, and as the latter met his gaze unflinchingly the pale face, distinguished in outline, feature, and expression, flushed to the temples, while the eyes seated under bushy brows gazed at Leacraft with a peculiar earnestness, not relieved of the dangerous suggestion of a rising passion. His companion understood his excitement, she clutched his arm, and seemed to apprehend a physical outbreak. Then the mouth opened, and spoke, and the voice was unexpectedly calm, and the utterances measured: “We are under deep obligation to you sir, but it is difficult for me to restrain myself before the false statements youhave ventured to make. Can you explain this insult?”
He moved nearer to Leacraft who did not budge, but inspired with an increasing vigor of disgust, and eager to summarily remonstrate at the seeming cruelty of the parade about him, its grotesque wickedness, said: “I do not wish to take advantage of the accidental relations which have thus unexpectedly thrown us together. But surely it is known among men, and known bitterly among Englishmen that the shadows of an awful twilight are falling about them, and the Nation’s Day is closing. At such a crisis can it be possible for men and women, calling themselves English, in whom the memory of English fame and English glory, is still a present pride, can it be possible that at this moment they still consort for amusement, for display, for the fugitive follies of mutual admiration? This aristocracy is the head and forefront of the nation, and it should now be bowed in penitence, in supplication, in the agony of self inquiry, and it stupifies me to find them gay, when the heart of England is breaking with grief.”
A curious metamorphosis worked in the lineaments of the gentleman he was addressing. The hard lines relaxed, and a wistful smile, that drew its occult meaning from the man’s interior sadness, stole softly over his face. He put out his hand, which Leacraft accepted, and he returned Leacraft’spressure. There was an instant’s silence, and then the stranger spoke, still holding Leacraft’s hand, and retaining his undeviating inspection of Leacraft’s face, as if he would force upon himself the recognition of a friend.
“These are just words, sir,” he began: “but how much you misunderstand what is going on here. This apparent revelry is an effort to keep from swooning: it is the forced continuance of a life familiar to us, when that life is to be crushed into nothingness; it is the defiance of habit, the revolt against extinction, the mortal protest against the infamous tyranny of circumstances. It is a delirium of indulgence, to forget what is coming upon us; a moment’s arbitrary refusal to think of the future, a dance, in whose whirl we shall remit the impulses of suicide. It is unreasonable, but its monstrous unreasonableness to you sir, measures our appalling sense of the disaster we can not stop to think of, measures the intensity of the recoil from obliteration; like the dressed and garlanded victim of an Aztec immolation we taste again the festive sweets upon which perhaps our cloyed appetites are no longer to feed. We are the sufferers in this eviction; the greatest, the poor, the artisan, laborer, the vast mediocrity lose something, but it amounts to little more than the exchange of one station here, for another of the same sort somewhere else. In a material sense our loss is incalculable;half our riches disappears but with that loss goes social prestige, title, and the moral consciousness of elevation, the breath of our nostrils. I, sir, am ——.” Leacraft did not move; his astonishment was too sharply focussed upon all the astounding previous confession. “And,” continued the man, “the ruin of worldly fortune seems small, after all, compared with the sacrifice of that dignified and sheltered life, which moved serenely, with every accompaniment of joy, in these delightful abodes, and under the protecting aegis of an inexpressible separation from the rest of the world. But”—he seemed to wish to justify himself, somehow, as he noticed the still petrified stare of Leacraft—“we have not been neglectful of the matters of adjustment. Committees have been appointed, plans laid, funds appropriated, agents despatched, for the selection of our new homes, and though we take our flight with lopped wings, our plumage may in time resume its former beauty. Do not misunderstand us because of these assemblies. We too carry deeper than you the pain of an unutterable grief.”
He finished, and Leacraft drawn into a reverie over the singular confession, which was anything but reassuring, and partook, to his mind, of the dementia of the foolish victim of a depraved habit, was silent. He felt the imperious requirements of speech, but he could say nothing. He felt pity, hewas not without sympathy, though perhaps in that matter, a certain savor of self denying control, and a practical judgment interfered with his approval of the hyperbole of the speaker. And, almost dreaming, he stood there while the stranger and his lady re-entered their carriage, to which the runaway horse had been reattached, and drove off. Leacraft watched them mechanically and then turned, walked down Piccadilly, crossed Green Park, and looked at Buckingham Palace. The huge structure was partially illuminated, and the square in front of it was filled with soldiers, many of whom were at rest around the Victoria Memorial. To an officer lounging near by, Leacraft said, “Can you tell me where the King is to-night?”
“He sleeps at St. Leonards in Shoreditch,” was the laconic reply.