Читать книгу Alone - Norman Douglas Douglas - Страница 3

Table of Contents

What ages ago it seems, that "Great War"!

And what enthusiasts we were! What visionaries, to imagine that in such an hour of emergency a man might discover himself to be fitted for some work of national utility without that preliminary wire-pulling which was essential in humdrum times of peace! How we lingered in long queues, and stamped up and down, and sat about crowded, stuffy halls, waiting, only waiting, to be asked to do something for our country by any little guttersnipe who happened to have been jockeyed into the requisite position of authority! What innocents. …

I have memories of several afternoons spent at a pleasant place near St. James's Park station, whither I went in search of patriotic employment. It was called, I think, Board of Trade Labour Emergency Bureau (or something equally lucid and concise), and professed to find work for everybody. Here, in a fixed number of rooms, sat an uncertain number of chubby young gentlemen, all of whom seemed to be of military age, or possibly below it; the Emergency Bureau was then plainly--for it may have changed later on--a hastily improvised shelter for privileged sucklings, a kind of nursery on advanced Montessori methods. Well, that was not my concern. One must trust the Government to know its own business.

During my second or third visit to this hygienic and well-lighted establishment I was introduced, most fortunately, into the sanctuary of Mr. R----, whose name was familiar to me. Was he not his brother's brother? He was. A real stroke of luck!

Mr. R----, a pink little thing, laid down the pen he had snatched up as I entered the room, and began gazing at me quizzically through enormous tortoise-shell-rimmed goggles, after the fashion of a precocious infant who tries to look like daddy. What might he do for me?

I explained.

We had a short talk, during which various forms were conscientiously filled up as to my qualifications, such as they were. Of course, there was nothing doing just then; but one never knows, does one? Would I mind calling again?

Would I mind? I should think not. I should like nothing better. It did one good to be in contact with this youthful optimist and listen to his blithe and pleasing prattle; he was so hopeful, so philosophic, so cheery; his whole nature seemed to exhale the golden words: "Never say die." And no wonder. He ought to have been at the front, but some guardian angel in the haute finance had dumped him into this soft and safe job: it was enough to make anybody cheerful. One should be cautious, none the less, how one criticises the action of the authorities. May be they kept him at the Emergency Bureau for the express purpose of infusing confidence, by his bright manner, into the minds of despondent patriots like myself, and of keeping the flag flying in a general way--a task for which he, a German Jew, was pre-eminently fitted.

Be that as it may, his consolatory tactics certainly succeeded in my case, and I went home quite infected with his rosy cheeks and words. Yet, on the occasion of my next visit a week or two later, there was still nothing doing--not just then, though one never knows, does one?

"Tried the War Office?" he added airily.

I had.

Who hadn't?

The War Office was a nightmare in those early days. It resembled Liverpool Street station on the evening of a rainless Bank Holiday. The only clear memory I carried away--and even this may have been due to some hallucination--was that of a voice shouting at me through the rabble: "Can you fly?" Such was my confusion that I believe I answered in the negative, thereby losing, probably, a lucrative billet as Chaplain to the Forces or veterinary surgeon in the Church Lads' Brigade. Things might have been different had my distinguished cousin still been on the spot; I, too, might have been accommodated with a big desk and small work after the manner of the genial Mr. R----. He died in harness, unfortunately, soon after the outbreak of war.

I said to my young friend:

"Everybody tells one to try the War Office--I don't know why. Of course I tried it. I wish I had a shilling for every hour I wasted in that lunatic asylum."

"Ah!" he replied. "I feel sure a good many men would like to be paid at that rate. Anyhow, trust me. We'll fix you up, sooner or later. (He kept his word.) Why not have a whack at the F.O., meanwhile?"

"Because I have already had a whack at it."

I then possessed, indeed, in reply to an application on my part, a holograph of twelve pages in the elegant calligraphy of H.M. Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the same gentleman who was viciously attacked by the Pankhurst section for his supposed pro-Germanism. It conveyed no grain of hope. Other Government Departments, he opined, might well be depleted at this moment; the Foreign Office was in exactly the reverse position. It overflowed with diplomatic and consular officials returned, perforce, from belligerent countries, and now in search of occupation. Was it not natural, was it not right, to give the preference to them? One was really at a loss to know what to do with all those people. He had tried, hitherto in vain, to find some kind of job for his own brother.

A straightforward, convincing statement. Acting on the hint, I visited the Education Office, notoriously overstaffed since Tudor days; it might now be emptier; clerical work might be obtained there in substitution of some youngster who had been induced to join the colours. I poked my nose into countless recesses, and finally unearthed my man.

They were full up, said Mr. F----.

Full up?

Full up.

Then, after some further conversation as to my capacities, he thought he might find me employment as teacher of science in the country, to replace somebody or other.

The notion was distasteful to me. I am not averse to learning from the young; I only once tried to teach them--at a ragged school, long since pulled down, near Ladbroke Grove, where I soon discovered that my little pupils knew a great deal more than I did, more, indeed, than was good for body or soul. Still, this was a tangible, definite offer of unremunerative but at the same time semi-pseudo-patriotic work, not to be sneezed at. An idea occurred to me.

"Supposing I stick it out and give satisfaction, shall I be able to interchange later into this department? I am more fitted for office duties. In fact, I have had a certain experience of them."

"No chance of that," he replied. "It is the German system. Their schoolmasters are sometimes taken to do administrative work at head-quarters, and vice versâ. Our English rule is: Once a teacher, always a teacher."

Here was a deadlock. For in such matters as teaching, a man may put a strain on himself for a certain length of time; he may even be a success, up to a point. But if he lacks the temperamental gift of holding classes, the results in the long run will not be fair to the children, to say nothing of himself. With reluctance I rose to depart, Mr. F---- adding, by way of letting me down gently:

"Tried the War Office?"

I had.

If the War Office was too lively, this place was too slumberous by half. A cobwebby, Rip-van-Winkle-ish atmosphere brooded about those passages and chambers. One could not help thinking that a little "German system" might work wonders here. And this is merely one of several similar sites I explored, and endeavoured to exploit, for patriotic purposes; I am here only jotting down a few of the more important of those that occur to me.

And, oh! for the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage--British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their absence; they were otherwise engaged, in the field, the colonies, the engine-room. I can only remember one single exception to this rule, this type; it was the head of the Censorship Department.

For of course I offered my services there, climbing up that decent red-carpeted stairway, and glad to find myself among respectable surroundings after all the unseemly holes I had lately wallowed in. I sent up a card which, to my surprise, caused me to be ushered forthwith into the presence of the Chief, who may have heard of my existence from some mutual friend. Here, at all events, was a man with a face worth looking at, a man who had done notable things in his day. What a relief, moreover, to be able to talk to a gentleman for a change! I wished I could have had him to myself for five minutes; there were one or two things one would have liked to learn from him. Unfortunately he was surrounded, as such people are, by half a dozen of the characteristic masks. For the rest, His ex-Excellency seemed to be ineffably bored with his new functions.

"What on earth brings you here?" he began in a fascinatingly absent-minded style, as if he had known me all my life, and with an inimitable nasal drawl. "This is a rotten job, my dear sir. Rotten! I cannot recommend it. Not your style at all, I should say."

"But, my dear Sir F----, I am not applying for your job. Something subordinate, I mean. Anything, anything."

"What? Down there, cutting up newspapers at twenty-two shillings a week? No, no. Let's have your address, and we will communicate with you when we find something worth your while. By the way, have you tried the War Office?"

I had.

And it stands to reason that I tried the Munitions more than once.

It was my rare good fortune--luck pursued me on these patriotic expeditions--to come face to face, at the Munitions, with the fons et origo; the deputy fountain-head, that is to say; a very peculiar private-secretary-in-chief for that department. He was a perpendicular, iron-grey personality, if I remember rightly, who smelt of some indifferent hair-wash and lost no time in giving you to understand that he was preternaturally busy.

Did I know anything about machinery?

Nothing to speak of, I replied. As co-manager and proprietor of some cotton mills employing several hundred hands for spinning and weaving, I naturally learnt how to handle a fair number of machines--sufficiently well, at all events, to start and stop them and tell the girls how to avoid being scalped or having their arms torn out whenever I happened to be passing that way. This life also gave me some experience, useful perhaps at the Munitions, in dealing with factory-hands----

That was not the kind of machinery he meant. Did I know anything about banking?

Nothing at all.

"You are like everybody else," he replied with a weary sigh, as much as to say: How am I going to run the British Empire with a collection of imbeciles like this? "We have several thousands of applicants like yourself," he went on. "But I will put your name down. Come again."

"You are very kind."

"Do call again," he added, in his best private-secretary manner.

I called again a couple of weeks later. It struck me, namely, that they might have acquired a sufficient stock of bankers and mechanics by this time, and be able possibly to discover a vacancy for a public-school man with a fairish knowledge of the world and some other things--one who, moreover, had himself served in a cranky and fussy Government Department and, though working in another sphere, had been thanked officially for certain labours--once by the Admiralty, twice by the Board of Trade; and anyway, hang it! one was not so infernally venerable as all that, was one?

"I called about a fortnight ago. You have my name down."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We have such thousands of applicants. I remember you! A mechanic, aren't you?"

"No. And you asked me if I understood banking, and I said I didn't."

"What a pity. Now if you knew about banking----"

Nothing, evidently, had been done about my application, nor, for that matter, about those thousands of others. We were being played with. I began to feel grumpy. It was a lovely afternoon, and I remembered, with regret, that I had thrown over an engagement to go for a walk with a friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of being patriotic. I observed:

"Your department seems to require only bankers and mechanics. Would it not be well to advertise the fact and save trouble and time to those thousands of applicants who, you say, are in the same predicament as myself? I came here to do national work of some general kind."

"So I gather. And if you understood banking----"

"If I did, I should be a banker at my time of life--don't you see?--and lending money to you people, and giving you good advice, instead of asking you for employment. Isn't that fairly obvious? As a matter of fact, my acquaintance with banking is limited to a knowledge of how to draw cheques, and even that useful accomplishment is fast fading from my memory, under the stress of the times."

Being a Welshman--so I presume, from his name--he condescended to smile faintly, but not for long; his salary was too high. As for myself, I refrained from saying a few harsher things I was minded to say; indeed, I made myself so vastly agreeable, after my own private recipe, that he was quite touched. He remarked:

"I think I had better put your name down, although we have thousands of applicants, you know. Call again, won't you?"

For which I humbly thanked him, instead of saying, as I ought to have done:

"You go to blazes. The public is a pack of idiots to run after people who merely keep them loitering about while they feather their own nests. We are out to lick the Germans, and yours is not the way to do it."

Did I understand banking? The full ineptitude of this conundrum only dawned upon me by degrees. Manifestly, if I understood banking, I might do some specialised kind of work for the Government. But in that case I would not apply to the Munitions. Granted they wanted bankers. Well, there was my friend M----, renowned in the City as a genius for banking; he could have saved them untold thousands of pounds. They would have none of him. They sent him into the trenches, where he was duly shot.

How easy it is for a disappointed place-seeker to jibe and rail against the powers that be, especially when he is not in full possession of the data! For all I know, they may have discovered my friend M---- to be a dangerous character, and have been only too glad to remove him out of society without unnecessary fuss, in an outwardly honourable fashion, with a view to saving his poor but respectable parents the humiliating experience of a criminal trial and possible execution in the family.

If I understood banking … why did they want bankers at this institution? Ah, it was not my business to probe into such mysteries of administration. To my limited intelligence it would seem that the mere fact of a man applying at the Munitions was primâ facie evidence that banking was not one of his accomplishments. It seemed to me, furthermore, that there was no end to such "ifs"--patriotic or otherwise. If I were a woman, for instance, I would promptly aid the cause by jumping into a nurse's outfit, telling improper stories to the Tommies, and getting myself photographed for the Press every morning. But I am only a man. If I were a high-class trumpeter, I could qualify for a job in one of the Allied Armies or, failing that, on Judgment Day. But I can only strum the piano. And if the moon were made of green cheese, we might all try to get hold of a slice of it, mightn't we? …

Such was my pigheadedness, my boyish zeal, my belief in human nature or perverse sense of duty, that I actually broke my vow and returned to that ridiculous establishment. Yes, I "called again," flattering myself with the conjecture that, even if they had not yet obtained a requisite amount of bankers and mechanics, and even if persons of my particular aptitudes were still a drug in the market, there might nevertheless be room, amid the ramifications and interstices of so great a department, for a man or two who could help to count up or pack munitions, or, if that proposal were hopelessly wide of the mark, for the services of something even more recondite and exotic--an intelligent corpse-washer, for instance, or half a dozen astrologers. I felt I could distinguish myself, at a national crisis like this, in either capacity. Anyhow, it was only one more afternoon wasted--one out of how many!

This time I saw Mr. W----. Though I had never met him in the flesh, I once enjoyed the privilege of perusing a manuscript from his pen--a story about a girl in Kew Gardens. A nice-looking young Hebrew was Mr. W----. He had made himself indispensable, somehow or other, to the Minister, and would doubtless by this time have been pitchforked into some permanent and prominent job, but for that unfortunate name of his, with its strong Teutonic flavour.

This, by the way, was about the eighth official of his tribe, and of his age, I had come across in the course of my recent peregrinations. How did they get there? Tell me, who can. Far be it from me to disparage the race of Israel. I have gained the conviction--firm-fixed, now, as the Polar Star--that the Hebrew is as good a man as the Christian. Yet one would like to know their method, their technique, in this instance. How was the thing done? How did they manage it, these young Jews, all healthy-looking and of military age--how did they contrive to keep out of the Army? Was there some secret society which protected them? Or were they all so preposterously clever that the Old Country would straightway evaporate into thin air unless they sat in some comfortable office, while our own youngsters were being blown to pieces out yonder?

Mr. W----, I regret to say, was not a good Oriental. He lacked the Semite's pliability. He was graceful, but not gracious. A consequence, doubtless, of having inhaled for some time past the rarefied atmosphere of the Chief, and swallowed a few pokers during the process, his manner towards me was freezingly non-committal--worthy of the best Anglo-Saxon traditions.

Had I come a little earlier, he avowed, he might perhaps have been able to squeeze me into one of his departments--thus spake this infant: "One of my departments." As it was, he feared there was nothing doing; nothing whatsoever; not just then. Tried the War Office?

I had.

I even visited, though only twice, an offshoot of that establishment in Victoria Street near the Army and Navy Stores, where candidates for the position of translator--quasi-confidential work and passable pay, five pounds a week--were interviewed. On the second occasion, after waiting in an ante-room full of bearded and be-spectacled monsters such as haunt the British Museum Library, I was summoned before a board of reverend elders, who put me through a catechism, drowsy but prolonged, as to my qualifications and antecedents. It was a systematic affair. Could I decipher German manuscripts? Let them show me their toughest one, I said. No! It was merely a pro forma question; they had enough German translators on the staff. So the interrogation went on. They were going to make sure of their man, in whom, I must say, they took little interest save when they learnt that he had passed a Civil Service examination in Russian and another in International Law. At that moment--though I may be mistaken--they seemed to prick up their ears. Not long afterwards I was allowed to depart, with the assurance that I might hear further.

Their inquiries into my attainments and references must have given satisfaction, for in the fulness of time a missive arrived to the effect that, assuming me to be a competent Turkish scholar, they would be glad to see me again with a view to a certain vacancy.

Turkish--a language I had not mentioned to them, a language of which I never possessed more than fifty words, every one of them forgotten long years ago.

"How very War Office," I thought.

These good people were mixing up Turkish and Russian--a natural error, when one comes to think of it, for, though the respective tongues might not be absolutely identical, yet the countries themselves were sufficiently close together to account for a little slip like this.

Was it a slip? Who knows? It is so easy to criticise when one is not fully informed about things. They may have suggested my acting as Turkish translator for reasons of their own--reasons which I cannot fathom, but which need not therefore be bad ones. Chagrined office-hunters like myself are prone to be bitter. In an emergency of this magnitude a citizen should hesitate before he finds fault with the wisdom of those whom the nation has chosen to steer it through troubled waters. No carping! You only hamper the Government. The general public should learn to keep a civil tongue in its head. Theirs but to do and die.

None the less, it was about this time that I began to experience certain moments of despondency, and occasionally let a whole day slip by without endeavouring to be of use to The Cause--moments when, instead of asking myself, "What have I done for my country?" I asked, "What has my country done for me?"--moments when I envied the hotel night-porters, taxi-drivers, and red-nosed old women selling flowers in Piccadilly Circus who had something more sensible to do than to bother their heads about trying to be patriotic, and getting snubbed for their pains. Yet, with characteristic infatuation for hopeless ventures, I persevered. Another "whack" at the F.O. leading to another holograph, two more whacks at the Censorship, interpreter jobs, hospital jobs, God knows what--I persevered, and might for the next three years have been kicking my heels, like any other patriot, in the corridor of some dingy Government office at the mercy of a pack of tuppenny counter-jumpers, but for a God-sent little accident, the result of sheer boredom, which counselled a trip to the sunny Mediterranean.

Fortune was nearer to me, at that supreme moment, than she had ever yet been. For on the day prior to my departure I received a communication from the Board of Trade Labour, etc., etc., whose methods of work, it was now apparent, were as expeditious as its own name was brief. That hopeful Mr. R----, that bubbling young optimist who had so conscientiously written down a number of my qualifications, such as they were--he was keeping his promise after months, and months, and months. Never say die. The dear little fellow! What job had he captured for me?

An offer to work in a factory at Gretna Green, wages to commence at 17s. 6d. per week.

H'm.

The remuneration was not on a princely scale, but I like to think that it included the free use of the lavatory, if there happened to be one on the premises.

So luck pursued me to the end, though it never quite caught me up. For bags were packed, and tickets taken. And therefore:

"What did you do in the Great War, grandpapa?"

"I loafed, my boy."

"That was naughty, grandpapa."

"Naughty, but nice. … "