With the French in France and Salonika Part 14

Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in his inside coat pocket and, with intense surprise, as though he had performed a conjuring trick, produced a paper that creaked and crinkled.

"That's it!" he cried.

"You come with me," commanded Scotland Yard, "before you lose it again."

Two nights later, between the acts at a theatre, I met a young old friend. Twenty years before we had made a trip through Central America and Venezuela. To my surprise, for I had known him in other wars, he was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat and lawn tie and tail-coat. He looked as though he had on his hand nothing more serious than money and time. I complained that we had not met since the war.

"It's a chance, our meeting to-night," he said, "for I start for Cairo in the morning. I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and arrived here only to-day."

"Wednesday!" I exclaimed. "How could you do it?"

"Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta," he explained, "transport to Ma.r.s.eilles, troop train to Calais, and there our people shot me across the Channel on a hospital s.h.i.+p. Then I got a special to town."

"You _are_ a swell!" I gasped. "What's your rank?"

"Captain."

That did not explain it.

"What's your job?"

"King's messenger."

It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti-treating law would not let me give him a drink, but I led him to where one was. For he had restored my faith. He had replaced on his pedestal my favorite character in fiction.

On returning to London for the fourth time since the war began, but after an absence of months, one finds her much nearer to the field of operations. A year ago her citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes from living on an island. Compared with Paris, where at Claye the enemy was within fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Montmorency, within ten miles, London seemed as far removed from the front as Montreal. Since then, so many of her men have left for the front and not returned, so many German air-s.h.i.+ps have visited her, and inhumanly a.s.sa.s.sinated her children and women, that she seems a part of it. A year ago an officer entering a restaurant was conscious of his uniform. To-day, anywhere in London, a man out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki armlet, is as conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box. A year ago the lamps had been so darkened that it was not easy to find the keyhole to your street door.

Now you are in luck if you find the street. Nor does that mean you have lingered long at dinner. For after nine-thirty nowhere in London can you buy a drink, not at your hotel, not even at your club. At nine-thirty the waiter whisks your drink off the table. What happens to it after that, only the waiter knows.

A year ago the only women in London in uniform were the nurses. Now so many are in uniform that to one visitor they presented the most surprising change the war has brought to that city. Those who live in London, to whom the change has come gradually, are probably hardly aware how significant it is. Few people, certainly few men, guessed that so many positions that before the war were open only to men, could be filled quite as acceptably by women. Only the comic papers guessed it.

All that they ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and "equal rights"

women ever hoped for seems to have come true. Even women policemen.

True, they do not take the place of the real, immortal London bobby, neither do the "special constables," but if a young girl is out late at night with her young man in khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and sent home. And her young man in khaki dare not resist.

In Paris, when the place of a man who had been mobilized was taken by his wife, sister, or daughter, no one was surprised. Frenchwomen have for years worked in partners.h.i.+p with men to a degree unknown in England.

They helped as bookkeepers, shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always handled the money; in the theatres the ushers and box openers were women; the government tobacco-shops were run by women. That Frenchwomen were capable, efficient, hard working was as trite a saying as that the j.a.panese are a wonderful little people. So when the men went to the front and the women carried on their work, they were only proving a proverb.

But in England careers for women, outside those of governess, typist, barmaid, or show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis, were as few as votes. The war has changed that. It gave woman her chance, and she jumped at it. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" he will find he must look for a man's job, and that men's jobs no longer are sinecures.

In his absence women have found out, and, what is more important, the employers have found out that to open a carriage door and hold an umbrella over a customer is not necessarily a man's job. The man will have to look for a position his sister cannot fill, and, judging from the present aspect of London, those positions are rapidly disappearing.

That in the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and sn.o.bbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a mechanical one, is no difficult task. It never was absolutely necessary that a butler and two men should divide the labor of serving one cup of coffee, one lump of sugar, and one cigarette. A healthy young woman might manage all three tasks and not faint. So the innovation of female butlers and footmen is not important. But many of the jobs now held in London by women are those which require strength, skill, and endurance.

Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and closing the steel gates for eight hours a day require strength and endurance; and yet in all the big department stores the lifts are worked by girls. Women also drive the vans, and dragging on the brake of a brewery-wagon and curbing two draft-horses is a very different matter from steering one of the cars that made peace hateful. Not that there are no women chauffeurs. They are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, business cars, private cars, taxicabs, ambulances.

In men's caps and uniforms of green, gray, brown, or black, and covered to the waist with a robe, you mistake them for boys. The other day I saw a motor-truck clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. It was filled with over two dozen Tommies, and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of not more than eighteen years. How many indoor positions have been taken over by women one can only guess; but if they are in proportion to the out-of-door jobs now filled by women and girls, it would seem as though half the work in London was carried forward by what we once were pleased to call the weaker s.e.x. To the visitor there appear to be regiments of them. They look very businesslike and smart in their uniforms, and whatever their work is they are intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman attempts a man's work she is conscious. She is more concerned with the fact that she is holding down a man's job than with the job. Whether she is a lady lawyer, lady doctor, or lady journalist, she always is surprised to find herself where she is. The girls and women you see in uniform by the thousands in London seem to have overcome that weakness.

They are performing a man's work, and their interest is centred in the work, not in the fact that a woman has made a success of it. If, after this, women in England want the vote, and the men won't give it to them, the men will have a hard time explaining why.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by Brown Bros._

"They have women policemen now."]

During my few days in England, I found that what is going forward in Paris for blind French officers is being carried on in London at St.

Dunstan's, Regent's Park, for blind Tommies. At this school the cla.s.ses are much larger than are those in Paris, the pupils more numerous, and they live and sleep on the premises. The premises are very beautiful.

They consist of seventeen acres of gardens, lawns, trees, a lake, and a stream on which you can row and swim, situated in Regent's Park and almost in the heart of London. In the days when London was farther away the villa of St. Dunstan's belonged to the eccentric Marquis of Hertford, the wicked Lord Steyne of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." It was a country estate. Now the city has closed in around it, but it is still a country estate, with ceilings by the Brothers Adam, portraits by Romney, sideboards by Sheraton, and on the lawn sheep. To keep sheep in London is as expensive as to keep race-horses, and to own a country estate in London can be afforded only by Americans. The estate next to St.

Dunstan's is owned by an American lady. I used to play lawn-tennis there with her husband. Had it not been for the horns of the taxicabs we might have been a hundred miles from the nearest railroad. Instead, we were so close to Baker Street that one false step would have landed us in Mme. Tussaud's. When the war broke out the husband ceased hammering tennis-b.a.l.l.s, and hammered German s.h.i.+ps of war. He sank several--and is now waiting impatiently outside of Wilhelmshaven for more.

St. Dunstan's also is owned by an American, Otto Kahn, the banker. In peace times, in the winter months, Mr. Kahn makes it possible for the people of New York to listen to good music at the Metropolitan Opera House. When war came, at his country place in London he made it next to possible for the blind to see. He gave the key of the estate to C.

Arthur Pearson. He also gave him permission in altering St. Dunstan's to meet the needs of the blind to go as far as he liked.

When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and Lord Northcliffe were making rival collections of newspapers and magazines. They collected them as other people collect postal cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then, as he is now, a man of the most remarkable executive ability, of keen intelligence, of untiring nervous energy. That was ten years ago. He knew then that he was going blind. And when the darkness came he accepted the burden; not only his own, but he took upon his shoulders the burden of all the blind in England. He organized the National Inst.i.tute for those who could not see. He gave them of his energy, which has not diminished; he gave them of his fortune, which, happily for them, has not diminished; he gave them his time, his intelligence. If you ask what the time of a blind man is worth, go to St. Dunstan's and you will find out. You will see a home and school for blind men, run by a blind man. The same efficiency, knowledge of detail, intolerance of idleness, the same generous appreciation of the work of others, that he put into running _The Express_ and _Standard_, he now exerts at St.

Dunstan's. It has Pearson written all over it just as a mile away there is a building covered with the name of Selfridge, and a cathedral with the name of Christopher Wren. When I visited him in his room at St.

Dunstan's he was standing with his back to the open fire dictating to a stenographer. He called to me cheerily, caught my hand, and showed me where I was to sit. All the time he was looking straight at me and firing questions:

"When did you leave Salonika? How many troops have we landed? Our positions are very strong, aren't they?"

He told the stenographer she need not wait, and of an appointment he had which she was not to forget. Before she reached the door he remembered two more things she was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, still talking, he walked briskly around a sofa, avoided a table and an armchair, and without fumbling picked up the instrument. What he heard was apparently very good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: "That's fine! That's splendid!"

A secretary opened the door and tried to tell him what he had just learned, but was cut short.

"I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has just phoned me. It's fine, isn't it?"

He took a small pad from his pocket, made a note on it, and laid the memorandum beside the stenographer's machine. Then he wound his way back to the fireplace and offered a case of cigarettes. He held them within a few inches of my hand. Since I last had seen him he had shaved his mustache and looked ten years younger and, as he exercises every morning, very fit. He might have been an officer of the navy out of uniform. I had been in the room five minutes, and only once, when he wrote on the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did not look at the pad, would I have guessed that he was blind.

"What we teach them here," he said, firing the words as though from a machine-gun, "is that blindness is not an 'affliction.' We won't allow that word. We teach them to be independent. Sisters and the mothers spoil them! Afraid they'll b.u.mp their s.h.i.+ns. Won't let them move about.

Always leading them. That's bad, very bad. Makes them think they're helpless, no good, invalids for life. We teach 'em to strike out for themselves. That's the way to put heart into them. Make them understand they're of use, that they can help themselves, help others, learn a trade, be self-supporting. We trained them to row. Some of them never had had oars in their hands except on the pond at Hempstead Heath on a bank holiday. We trained a crew that swept the river."

It was fine to see the light in his face. His enthusiasm gave you a thrill. He might have been Guy Nickalls telling how the crew he coached won at New London.

"They were the best crews, too. University crews. Of course, our c.o.xswain could see, but the crew were blind. We've not only taught them to row, we've taught them to support themselves, taught them trades.

All men who come here have lost their eyesight in battle in this war, but already we have taught some of them a trade and set them up in business. And while the war lasts business will be good for them. And it must be nursed and made to grow. So we have an 'after-care' committee.

To care for them after they have left us. To buy raw material, to keep their work up to the mark, to dispose of it. We need money for those men. For the men who have started life again for themselves. Do you think there are people in America who would like to help those men?"

I asked, in case there were such people, to whom should they write.

"To me," he said, "St. Dunstan's, Regent's Park."[C]

[Footnote C: In New York, the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund for Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France, and Belgium is working in close a.s.sociation with Mr. Pearson. With him on the committee, are Robert Bacon, Elihu Root, Myron T. Herrick, Whitney Warren, Lady Arthur Paget, and George Alexander Kessler. The address of the fund is 590 Fifth Avenue.]

I found the seventeen acres of St. Dunstan's so arranged that no blind man could possibly lose his way. In the house, over the carpets, were stretched strips of matting. So long as a man kept his feet on matting he knew he was on the right path to the door. Outside the doors hand-rails guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, exercising-grounds, and kitchen-gardens. Just before he reached any of these places a bra.s.s k.n.o.b on the hand-rail warned him to go slow. Were he walking on the great stone terrace and his foot sc.r.a.ped against a board he knew he was within a yard of a flight of steps. Wherever you went you found men at work, learning a trade, or, having learned one, intent in the joy of creating something. To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, who have mastered the Braille system and come daily to teach it. There are many other volunteers, who take the men on walks around Regent's Park and who talk and read to them. Everywhere was activity. Everywhere some one was helping some one: the blind teaching the blind; those who had been a week at St. Dunstan's doing the honors to those just arrived. The place spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and cheerfulness. When first you arrived you thought you had over the others a certain advantage, but when you saw the work the blind men were turning out, which they could not see, and which you knew with both your eyes you never could have turned out, you felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for instance, measured to the twentieth of an inch, and men who were studying to be ma.s.seurs who, only by touch, could distinguish all the bones in the body. There was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I dictated a sentence to her, and as fast as I spoke she took it down on a machine in the Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised figures on a strip of paper like those that carry stock quotations. Then, reading the sentence with her fingers, she pounded it on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was faultless.

What impressed you was the number of the workers who, over their task, sang or whistled. None of them paid any attention to what the others were whistling. Each acted as though he were shut off in a world of his own. The spirits of the Tommies were unquenchable.

Thorpe Five was one of those privates who are worth more to a company than the sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He looked like John Bunny, and when he laughed he shook all over, and you had to laugh with him, even though you were conscious that Thorpe Five had no eyes and no hands. But was he conscious of that? Apparently not. Was he down-hearted? No! Some one s.n.a.t.c.hed his cigarette; and with the stumps of his arms he promptly beat two innocent comrades over the head. When the lady guide interfered and admitted it was she who had robbed him, Thorpe Five roared in delight.

"I bashed 'em!" he cried. "Her took it, but I bashed the two of 'em!"

A private of the Munsters was weaving a net, and, as though he were quite alone, singing, in a fine barytone, "Tipperary." If you want to hear real close harmony, you must listen to Southern darkeys; and if you want to get the sweetness and melancholy out of an Irish chant, an Irishman must sing it. I thought I had heard "Tipperary" before several times, and that it was a march. I found I had not heard it before, and that it is not a march, but a lament and a love-song. The soldier did not know we were listening, and while his fingers wove the meshes of the net, his voice rose in tones of the most moving sweetness. He did not know that he was facing a window, he did not know that he was staring straight out upon the city of London. But we knew, and when in his rare barytone and rare brogue he whispered rather than sang the lines:

"Good-by, Piccadilly-- Farewell, Leicester Square, It's a long, long way to Tipperary"