Стивен Ликок
Further Foolishness
X. A Study in Still Life—My Tailor
He always stands there—and has stood these thirty years—in the back part of his shop, his tape woven about his neck, a smile of welcome on his face, waiting to greet me.
"Something in a serge," he says, "or perhaps in a tweed?"
There are only these two choices open to us. We have had no others for thirty years. It is too late to alter now.
"A serge, yes," continues my tailor, "something in a dark blue, perhaps." He says it with all the gusto of a new idea, as if the thought of dark blue had sprung up as an inspiration. "Mr. Jennings" (this is his assistant), "kindly take down some of those dark blues.
"Ah," he exclaims, "now here is an excellent thing." His manner as he says this is such as to suggest that by sheer good fortune and blind chance he has stumbled upon a thing among a million.
He lifts one knee and drapes the cloth over it, standing upon one leg. He knows that in this attitude it is hard to resist him. Cloth to be appreciated as cloth must be viewed over the bended knee of a tailor with one leg in the air.
My tailor can stand in this way indefinitely, on one leg in a sort of ecstasy, a kind of local paralysis.
"Would that make up well?" I ask him.
"Admirably," he answers.
I have no real reason to doubt it. I have never seen any reason why cloth should not make up well. But I always ask the question as I know that he expects it and it pleases him. There ought to be a fair give and take in such things.
"You don't think it at all loud?" I say. He always likes to be asked this.
"Oh, no, very quiet indeed. In fact we always recommend serge as extremely quiet."
I have never had a wild suit in my life. But it is well to ask.
Then he measures me—round the chest, nowhere else. All the other measures were taken years ago. Even the chest measure is only done—and I know it—to please me. I do not really grow.
"A little fuller in the chest," my tailor muses. Then he turns to his assistant. "Mr. Jennings, a little fuller in the chest—half an inch on to the chest, please."
It is a kind fiction. Growth around the chest is flattering even to the humblest of us.
"Yes," my tailor goes on—he uses "yes" without any special meaning—"and shall we say a week from Tuesday? Mr. Jennings, a week from Tuesday, please."
"And will you please," I say, "send the bill to—?" but my tailor waves this aside. He does not care to talk about the bill. It would only give pain to both of us to speak of it.
The bill is a matter we deal with solely by correspondence, and that only in a decorous and refined style never calculated to hurt.
I am sure from the tone of my tailor's letters that he would never send the bill, or ask for the amount, were it not that from time to time he is himself, unfortunately, "pressed" owing to "large consignments from Europe." But for these heavy consignments, I am sure I should never need to pay him. It is true that I have sometimes thought to observe that these consignments are apt to arrive when I pass the limit of owing for two suits and order a third. But this can only be a mere coincidence.
Yet the bill, as I say, is a thing that we never speak of. Instead of it my tailor passes to the weather. Ordinary people always begin with this topic. Tailors, I notice, end with it. It is only broached after the suit is ordered, never before.
"Pleasant weather we are having," he says. It is never other, so I notice, with him. Perhaps the order of a suit itself is a little beam of sunshine.
Then we move together towards the front of the store on the way to the outer door.
"Nothing to-day, I suppose," says my tailor, "in shirtings?"
"No, thank you."
This is again a mere form. In thirty years I have never bought any shirtings from him. Yet he asks the question with the same winsomeness as he did thirty years ago.
"And nothing, I suppose, in collaring or in hosiery?"
This is again futile. Collars I buy elsewhere and hosiery I have never worn.
Thus we walk to the door, in friendly colloquy. Somehow if he failed to speak of shirtings and hosiery, I should feel as if a familiar cord had broken;
At the door we part.
"Good afternoon," he says. "A week from Tuesday—yes —good afternoon."
Such is—or was—our calm unsullied intercourse, unvaried or at least broken only by consignments from Europe.
I say it was, that is until just the other day.
And then, coming to the familiar door, for my customary summer suit, I found that he was there no more. There were people in the store, unloading shelves and piling cloth and taking stock. And they told me that he was dead. It came to me with a strange shock. I had not thought it possible. He seemed—he should have been —immortal.
They said the worry of his business had helped to kill him. I could not have believed it. It always seemed so still and tranquil—weaving his tape about his neck and marking measures and holding cloth against his leg beside the sunlight of the window in the back part of the shop. Can a man die of that? Yet he had been "going behind," they said (however that is done), for years. His wife, they told me, would be left badly off. I had never conceived him as having a wife. But it seemed that he had, and a daughter, too, at a conservatory of music —yet he never spoke of her—and that he himself was musical and played the flute, and was the sidesman of a church—yet he never referred to it to me. In fact, in thirty years we never spoke of religion. It was hard to connect him with the idea of it.
As I went out I seemed to hear his voice still saying,
"And nothing to-day in shirtings?"
I was sorry I had never bought any.
There is, I am certain, a deep moral in this. But I will not try to draw it. It might appear too obvious.
Peace, War, and Politics
XI. Germany from Within Out
The adventure which I here narrate resulted out of a strange psychological experience of a kind that (outside of Germany) would pass the bounds of comprehension.
To begin with, I had fallen asleep.
Of the reason for my falling asleep I have no doubt. I had remained awake nearly the whole of the preceding night, absorbed in the perusal of a number of recent magazine articles and books dealing with Germany as seen from within. I had read from cover to cover that charming book, just written by Lady de Washaway, under the title Ten Years as a Toady, or The Per-Hapsburgs as I Didn't Know Them. Her account of the life of the Imperial Family of Austria, simple, unaffected, home-like; her picture of the good old Emperor, dining quietly off a cold potato and sitting after dinner playing softly to himself on the flute, while his attendants gently withdrew one by one from his presence; her description of merry, boisterous, large-hearted Prince Stefan Karl, who kept the whole court in a perpetual roar all the time by asking such riddles as "When is a sailor not a sailor?" (the answer being, of course, when he is a German Prince)—in fact, the whole book had thrilled me to the verge of spiritual exhaustion.
From Lady de Washaway's work I turned to peruse Hugo von Halbwitz's admirable book, Easy Marks, or How the German Government Borrows its Funds; and after that I had read Karl von Wiggleround's Despatches and Barnstuff's Confidential Letters to Criminals.
As a consequence I fell asleep as if poisoned.
But the amazing thing is that, whenever it was or was not that I fell asleep, I woke up to find myself in Germany.
I cannot offer any explanation as to how this came about. I merely state the fact.
There I was, seated on the grassy bank of a country road.
I knew it was Germany at once. There was no mistaking it. The whole landscape had an orderliness, a method about it that is, alas, never seen in British countries. The trees stood in neat lines, with the name of each nailed to it on a board. The birds sat in regular rows, four to a branch, and sang in harmony, very simply, but with the true German feeling.
There were two peasants working beside the road. One was picking up fallen leaves, and putting them into neat packets of fifty. The other was cutting off the tops of the late thistles that still stood unwithered in the chill winter air, and arranging them according to size and colour. In Germany nothing is lost; nothing is wasted. It is perhaps not generally known that from the top of the thistle the Germans obtain picrate of ammonia, the most deadly explosive known to modern chemistry, while from the bulb below, butter, crude rubber and sweet cider are extracted in large quantities.
The two peasants paused in their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on his head until I had finished looking at him.
I felt quite certain, of course, that it must only be a matter of a short time before I would inevitably be arrested.
I felt doubly certain of it when I saw a motor speeding towards me with a stout man, in military uniform and a Prussian helmet, seated behind the chauffeur.
The motor stopped, but to my surprise the military man, whom I perceived to be wearing the uniform of a general, jumped out and advanced towards me with a genial cry of:
"Well, Herr Professor!"
I looked at him again.
"Why, Fritz!" I cried.
"You recognize me?" he said.
"Certainly," I answered, "you used to be one of the six German waiters at McCluskey's restaurant in Toronto."
The General laughed.
"You really took us for waiters!" he said. "Well, well. My dear professor! How odd! We were all generals in the German army. My own name is not Fritz Schmidt, as you knew it, but Count von Boobenstein. The Boobs of Boobenstein," he added proudly, "are connected with the Hohenzollerns. When I am commanded to dine with the Emperor, I have the hereditary right to eat anything that he leaves."
"But I don't understand!" I said. "Why were you in Toronto?"
"Perfectly simple. Special military service. We were there to make a report. Each day we kept a record of the velocity and direction of the wind, the humidity of the air, the distance across King Street and the height of the C.P.R. Building. All this we wired to Germany every day."
"For what purpose?" I asked.
"Pardon me!" said the General, and then, turning the subject with exquisite tact: "Do you remember Max?" he said.
"Do you mean the tall melancholy looking waiter, who used to eat the spare oysters and drink up what was left in the glasses, behind the screen?"
"Ha!" exclaimed my friend. "But why did he drink them? Why? Do you know that that man—his real name is not Max but Ernst Niedelfein—is one of the greatest chemists in Germany? Do you realise that he was making a report to our War Office on the percentage of alcohol obtainable in Toronto after closing time?"
"And Karl?" I asked.
"Karl was a topographist in the service of his High Serenity the King Regnant of Bavaria"—here my friend saluted himself with both hands and blinked his eyes four times—"He made maps of all the breweries of Canada. We know now to a bottle how many German soldiers could be used in invading Canada without danger of death from drought."
"How many was it?" I asked.
Boobenstein shook his head.
"Very disappointing," he said. "In fact your country is not yet ripe for German occupation. Our experts say that the invasion of Canada is an impossibility unless we use Milwaukee as a base—But step into my motor," said the Count, interrupting himself, "and come along with me. Stop, you are cold. This morning air is very keen. Take this," he added, picking off the fur cap from the chauffeur's head. "It will be better than that hat you are wearing—or, here, wait a moment—"
As he spoke, the Count unwound a woollen muffler from the chauffeur's neck, and placed it round mine.
"Now then," he added, "this sheepskin coat—"
"My dear Count," I protested.
"Not a bit, not a bit," he cried, as he pulled off the chauffeur's coat and shoved me into it. His face beamed with true German generosity.
"Now," he said as we settled back into the motor and started along the road, "I am entirely at your service. Try one of these cigars! Got it alight? Right! You notice, no doubt, the exquisite flavour. It is a Tannhauser. Our chemists are making these cigars now out of the refuse of the tanneries and glue factories."
I sighed involuntarily. Imagine trying to "blockade" a people who could make cigars out of refuse; imagine trying to get near them at all!
"Strong, aren't they?" said von Boobenstein, blowing a big puff of smoke. "In fact, it is these cigars that have given rise to the legend (a pure fiction, I need hardly say) that our armies are using asphyxiating gas. The truth is they are merely smoking German-made tobacco in their trenches."
"But come now," he continued, "your meeting me is most fortunate. Let me explain. I am at present on the Intelligence Branch of the General Staff. My particular employment is dealing with foreign visitors—the branch of our service called, for short, the Eingewanderte Fremden Verfullungs Bureau. How would you call that?"
"It sounds," I said, "like the Bureau for Stuffing Up Incidental Foreigners."
"Precisely," said the Count, "though your language lacks the music of ours. It is my business to escort visitors round Germany and help them with their despatches. I took the Ford party through—in a closed cattle-car, with the lights out. They were greatly impressed. They said that, though they saw nothing, they got an excellent idea of the atmosphere of Germany. It was I who introduced Lady de Washaway to the Court of Franz Joseph. I write the despatches from Karl von Wiggleround, and send the necessary material to Ambassador von Barnstuff. In fact I can take you everywhere, show you everything, and" —here my companion's military manner suddenly seemed to change into something obsequiously and strangely familiar—"it won't cost you a cent; not a cent, unless you care—"
I understood.
I handed him ten cents.
"Thank you, sir," he said. Then with an abrupt change back to his military manner, "Now, then, what would you like to see? The army? The breweries? The Royal court? Berlin? What shall it be? My time is limited, but I shall be delighted to put myself at your service for the rest of the day."
"I think," I said, "I should like more than anything to see Berlin, if it is possible."
"Possible?" answered my companion. "Nothing easier."
The motor flew ahead and in a few moments later we were making our arrangements with a local station-master for a special train to Berlin.
I got here my first glimpse of the wonderful perfection of the German railway system.
"I am afraid," said the station-master, with deep apologies, "that I must ask you to wait half an hour. I am moving a quarter of a million troops from the east to the west front, and this always holds up the traffic for fifteen or twenty minutes."
I stood on the platform watching the troops trains go by and admiring the marvellous ingenuity of the German system.
As each train went past at full speed, a postal train (Feld-Post-Eisenbahn-Zug) moved on the other track in the opposite direction, from which a shower of letters were thrown in to the soldiers through the window. Immediately after the postal train, a soup train (Soup-Zug) was drawn along, from the windows of which soup was squirted out of a hose.
Following this there came at full speed a beer train (Bier-Zug) from which beer bombs were exploded in all directions.
I watched till all had passed.
"Now," said the station-master, "your train is ready. Here you are."
Away we sped through the meadows and fields, hills and valleys, forests and plains.
And nowhere—I am forced, like all other travellers, to admit it—did we see any signs of the existence of war. Everything was quiet, orderly, usual. We saw peasants digging—in an orderly way—for acorns in the frozen ground. We saw little groups of soldiers drilling in the open squares of villages—in their quiet German fashion —each man chained by the leg to the man next to him; here and there great Zeppelins sailed overhead dropping bombs, for practice, on the less important towns; at times in the village squares we saw clusters of haggard women (quite quiet and orderly) waving little red flags and calling: "Bread, bread!"
But nowhere any signs of war. Certainly not.
We reached Berlin just at nightfall. I had expected to find it changed. To my surprise it appeared just as usual. The streets were brilliantly lighted. Music burst in waves from the restaurants. From the theatre signs I saw, to my surprise, that they were playing Hamlet, East Lynne and Potash and Perlmutter. Everywhere was brightness, gaiety and light-heartedness.
Here and there a merry-looking fellow, with a brush and a pail of paste and a roll of papers over his arm, would swab up a casualty list of two or three thousand names, amid roars of good-natured laughter.
What perplexed me most was the sight of thousands of men, not in uniform, but in ordinary civilian dress.
"Boobenstein," I said, as we walked down the Linden Avenue, "I don't understand it."
"The men?" he answered. "It's a perfectly simple matter. I see you don't understand our army statistics. At the beginning of the war we had an army of three million. Very good. Of these, one million were in the reserve. We called them to the colours, that made four million. Then of these all who wished were allowed to volunteer for special services. Half a million did so. That made four and a half million. In the first year of the war we suffered two million casualties, but of these seventy-five per cent, or one and a half million, returned later on to the colours, bringing our grand total up to six million. This six million we use on each of six fronts, giving a grand total of thirty six million.
"I see," I said. "In fact, I have seen these figures before. In other words, your men are inexhaustible."
"Precisely," said the Count, "and mark you, behind these we still have the Landsturm, made up of men between fifty-five and sixty, and the Landslide, reputed to be the most terrible of all the German levies, made up by withdrawing the men from the breweries. That is the last final act of national fury. But come," he said, "you must be hungry. Is it not so?"
"I am," I admitted, "but I had hesitated to acknowledge it. I feared that the food supply—"
Boobenstein broke into hearty laughter.
"Food supply!" he roared. "My dear fellow, you must have been reading the English newspapers! Food supply! My dear professor! Have you not heard? We have got over that difficulty entirely and for ever. But come, here is a restaurant. In with you and eat to your heart's content."
We entered the restaurant. It was filled to overflowing with a laughing crowd of diners and merry-makers. Thick clouds of blue cigar smoke filled the air. Waiters ran to and fro with tall steins of foaming beer, and great bundles of bread tickets, soup tickets, meat cards and butter coupons.
These were handed around to the guests, who sat quietly chewing the corners of them as they sipped their beer.
"Now-then," said my host, looking over the printed menu in front of him, "what shall it be? What do you say to a ham certificate with a cabbage ticket on the side? Or how would you like lobster-coupon with a receipt for asparagus?"
"Yes," I answered, "or perhaps, as our journey has made me hungry, one of these beef certificates with an affidavit for Yorkshire pudding."
"Done!" said Boobenstein.
A few moments later we were comfortably drinking our tall glasses of beer and smoking Tannhauser cigars, with an appetising pile of coloured tickets and certificates in front of us.
"Admit," said von Boobenstein good-naturedly, "that we have overcome the food difficulty for ever."
"You have," I said.
"It was a pure matter of science and efficiency," he went on. "It has long been observed that if one sat down in a restaurant and drank beer and smoked cigars (especially such a brand as these Tannhausers) during the time it took for the food to be brought (by a German waiter), all appetite was gone. It remained for the German scientists to organise this into system. Have you finished? Or would you like to take another look at your beef certificate?"
We rose. Von Boobenstein paid the bill by writing I.O.U. on the back of one of the cards—not forgetting the waiter, for whom he wrote on a piece of paper, "God bless you"—and we left.
"Count," I said, as we took our seat on a bench in the Sieges-Allee, or Alley of Victory, and listened to the music of the military band, and watched the crowd, "I begin to see that Germany is unconquerable."
"Absolutely so," he answered.
"In the first place, your men are inexhaustible. If we kill one class you call out another; and anyway one-half of those we kill get well again, and the net result is that you have more than ever."
"Precisely," said the Count.
"As to food," I continued, "you are absolutely invulnerable. What with acorns, thistles, tanbark, glue, tickets, coupons, and certificates, you can go on for ever."
"We can," he said.
"Then for money you use I.O.U.'s. Anybody with a lead pencil can command all the funds he wants. Moreover, your soldiers at the front are getting dug in deeper and deeper: last spring they were fifty feet under ground: by 1918 they will be nearly 200 feet down. Short of mining for them, we shall never get them out."
"Never," said von Boobenstein with great firmness.
"But there is one thing that I don't quite understand. Your navy, your ships. There, surely, we have you: sooner or later that whole proud fleet in the Kiel Canal will come out under fire of our guns and be sunk to the bottom of the sea. There, at least, we conquer."
Von Boobenstein broke into loud laughter.
"The fleet!" he roared, and his voice was almost hysterical and overstrung, as if high living on lobster-coupons and over-smoking of Tannhausers was undermining his nerves. "The fleet! Is it possible you do not know? Why all Germany knows it. Capture our fleet! Ha! Ha! It now lies fifty miles inland. We have filled in the canal—pushed in the banks. The canal is solid land again, and the fleet is high and dry. The ships are boarded over and painted to look like German inns and breweries. Prinz Adelbert is disguised as a brewer, Admiral von Tirpitz is made up as a head waiter, Prince Heinrich is a bar tender, the sailors are dressed up as chambermaids. And some day when Jellicoe and his men are coaxed ashore, they will drop in to drink a glass of beer, and then—pouf! we will explode them all with a single torpedo! Such is the naval strategy of our scientists! Are we not a nation of sailors?"
Von Boobenstein's manner had grown still wilder and more hysterical. There was a queer glitter in his eyes.
I thought it better to soothe him.
"I see," I said, "the Allies are beaten. One might as well spin a coin for heads or tails to see whether we abandon England now or wait till you come and take it."
As I spoke, I took from my pocket an English sovereign that I carry as a lucky-piece, and prepared to spin it in the air.
Von Boobenstein, as he saw it, broke into a sort of hoarse shriek.
"Gold! gold!" he cried. "Give it to me!"
"What?" I exclaimed.
"A piece of gold," he panted. "Give it to me, give it to me, quick. I know a place where we can buy bread with it. Real bread—not tickets—food—give me the gold—gold—for bread—we can get-bread. I am starving—gold—bread."
And as he spoke his hoarse voice seemed to grow louder and louder in my ears; the sounds of the street were hushed; a sudden darkness fell; and a wind swept among the trees of the Alley of Victory—moaning—and a thousand, a myriad voices seemed to my ear to take up the cry:
"Gold! Bread! We are starving."
Then I woke up.