A Dominie in Doubt Part 32
"Absolute terrors," declared everyone, but I liked them.
Many of the children were middle cla.s.s, children of doctors, lawyers, architects, and so on; nice kiddies they were. The bigger girls could speak English, and I used them as interpreters.
On the Monday morning the English escort took charge. The first task was medical inspection, and the two English doctors and four or five Dutch doctors prepared for action. Our job was to marshal the kiddies, help them to take their shirts off, and then bundle them into the inspection room. It sounds easy, but it was a weary business. You looked down the list for No. 258, and you found a name.
"Mitzi Dvoracek!" you called, and wondered whether a boy or a girl would appear. There was no answer . . . and an hour later you found a little girl who had lost her ident.i.ty card, and you concluded that she was Dvoracek, but she wasn't; her name was Leopoldine Czsthmkyghw, or something resembling that.
I was greatly troubled by their questions. Following a method I had used with indifferent effect while conversing with garrulous Dutchmen in railway carriages, I answered "Ja" and "Nay" alternately. Many of the children stared at me in wonder and I marvelled . . . until I discovered that most of them had been asking me the way to the lavatory. After that I just pointed to a door in the wall when a boy asked me a question, and when one lad didn't seem to understand, I took him by the back of the neck and shoved him through the door. Then I found that he had been asking the time.
I gave up replying to questions after that.
The children had all been examined, and one lad stood alone; he had no card and no one could place him. Then he confessed that he was a stowaway who had been too old to join the batch, and had boarded the train quietly at Vienna. Mrs. Ensor, the secretary of the Famine Area Committee, proved herself a sport by declaring that she would take him to England. The good Dutch folk also rose to the occasion, and went out and bought him a pair of short trousers.
In the afternoon I sat down beside a few boys. And then I did a fatal thing. A boy dropped his pencil and I picked it up, threw it over the house . . . and then produced it from another lad's pocket. That did it. In two seconds I had a hundred children round me roaring at me.
An Austrian lady explained that they were calling me a magician and asking for more. I blushingly told her to explain to them that it was my only trick. Sighs of disgust followed, and I was on the point of losing my popularity when I hastily got the lady to explain to them that I had a better talent . . . I could make anyone laugh merely by looking at him. Fifty of them at once challenged me to begin, and I had a great time. One lad beat me, but then he had toothache, a blistered heel, and was homesick.
After a time I asked them to sing to me, and they sang sweet folk songs of their home. They were delightful singers, and the boys sang as eagerly and as well as the girls. In England boys usually hate singing. I marvelled at their all knowing the same songs, and one of the girls explained to me that in Austria every school has the same songs; more than that, every school has the same cla.s.s-books, and if two children living a hundred miles apart meet on the street they can say to each other: "I'm at page 67 of my Geography. What page are you at?"
They demanded a song from me, and I sang _Now is the Month of Maying_, and, by special request, _Tipperary_. Then I asked them to sing their National Anthem, and the lady began it, but the children did not follow her. At my look of surprise the lady said: "They cannot sing it because now they feel that they have no Austria left to sing about."
A man's voice sounded from inside the building, and they rushed indoors, for it was the voice of their beloved Ministry of Health doctor, who had brought them from Vienna, and they all loved him. They forgot me at once and left me . . . all but one. Little Hansi put her wee hand in mine and snuggled closer . . . and that's why I love her so very much.
On Tuesday morning they all took up their packs, and we set off for England via the Maas boat and station. We packed into carriages and set off. There was no water on the train, but we laughed and said: "We'll be in Flushing in two hours! We are a special!" We were. We left the Maas station at one o'clock, and we travelled until three.
Then we drew up . . . and found we were back at the Maas station.
Where we had been I don't know, but it was the biggest mystery of my life. Well, we crawled along past picturesque villages where women with white caps and red arms smiled on us and gave us water to drink.
And at eight o'clock we reached Flushing all very weary and extremely dirty. The kiddies had a good meal set out on white tablecloths, and the doctor and I had the best Pilsener of our lives. We handed over the kiddies to the ship stewards and the fresh escort from England, and retired to rest.
I awoke at six and found that all the children were on deck, and the bad English boy almost in the water, for his heels were off the ground and his head far down towards the water. He was looking for fish, he said. None of the children had seen the sea before, but I think they were too tired to be excited about it. They did become excited when they saw the cliffs of Dover.
Much to my annoyance a gentleman had been teaching them _G.o.d Save the King_ on the way over. I was annoyed because I knew it was a piece of jingoism meant for the journalists at Folkestone. When we drew up at the pier, sure enough the gentleman struck up the tune, and the kiddies sang it. But the girls who could speak English sang _G.o.d Save YOUR Gracious King_. I thought it a beautiful touch; the finest piece of good taste I have ever come across.
I didn't like the well-dressed ladies who came bossing around at Folkestone. Frankly I was jealous. As I was leading the children off the steamer, one of them touched me on the arm and asked me to make way for the children. And I smiled to see that the women in rich dresses managed somehow to get in front of the camera.
We took the children to Sandwich by rail and then to a camp by motor lorry. It was a tiresome job loading and unloading the lorry, but after six trips I found that every child was in camp. I went off to have a wash and some tea, and then, glowing with self-satisfaction at all I had done, I lit a cigar and walked outside. A gentleman pa.s.sed me.
"Are you a worker?" he demanded.
"I--er--I suppose I am--in a way," I said modestly.
"Well, don't you think you might find something to do?" he asked.
"There's plenty to do, you know."
Then for the first time in my life I understood the old Mons Ribbon men who used to annihilate the recruit with the terse phrase: "Afore you came up!"
The pressmen pa.s.sed by, a dozen of them with the stowaway in their midst. Presently they posed him and a dozen cameras snapped while a cinema burred. And next day the papers told a romantic story; the stowaway had crept into the train at Vienna, and, foodless, had hid until he arrived in Rotterdam. Then darkly he had crept on board the ship and had been discovered at Folkestone. Also when next day I saw in the pictorial papers a photograph of a boy violinist playing to his chums, I was not very much surprised to find the t.i.tle of the photo was: _The Stowaway Entertains His Companions_. As a matter of fact, the fiddler wasn't the stowaway at all, but this incident makes me think hard about history. If a Fleet Street reporter changes one boy into another, why, we may be all wrong in our history. Henry VIII. may only have had one wife, and the reporter who interviewed him may have had so much sack to drink that his vision along with the journalistic touch may have manufactured the other five. The tale of King Harold being shot through the eye at the Battle of Hastings may have arisen from a reporter's using the figurative expression that William the Conqueror "put his eye out." Nor, after reading the account of the landing of the Austrian children, can I believe the tale of the minstrel Taillifer who sprang into the water to lead the Normans in landing. And as for the time-honoured phrases, "Take away that bauble!" and "England expects every man to do his duty," I don't believe they were ever uttered--not now.
I am not singling out journalists as special misreporters. Not one of us can report an incident truly. There is a good example of this truth in Swift's _Psychology and Everyday Life_, just published. Swift prepared a stunt as a test for his adult cla.s.s. In the midst of a serious lecture two men and two women students created a disturbance outside in the lobby, then they burst into the room. One held a banana pistol-wise at another's head. Swift dropped a toy bomb, and one of the students staggered back crying: "I'm shot!"
One student dropped a parcel containing a brick, and all yelled and made much noise. The cla.s.s was seriously alarmed until they were a.s.sured that the whole affair was a put-up job. Each student was asked to write an account of what had happened, and the result of their attempts is so astounding that the reader becomes uncertain whether any witness in a law-court ever tells the truth. Few, if any, students could identify one of the wranglers; every account said that the banana was a real pistol; only one or two saw the brick drop. The strangest thing was that many were quite sure of the ident.i.ty of the actors . . .
and one or two of the accounts named students who had long since left the college. I write from memory, but the facts were as arresting as the ones I have given.
This makes one uneasy about the methods the police adopt to identify a prisoner. If I saw a man shoot another in Piccadilly, it is a thousand to one chance that I should not be able to identify him later. Yet many a man has been hanged on identification.
But I meant to finish my account of the Austrian kiddies. The time came when I had to leave them and return to London. I set out to find my Hansi to say good-bye to her. I saw her in the distance . . . and then I ran away, for I hate saying good-bye.
I liked those kiddies, dear wee souls, just as sweet as any English kiddies, but then children have no nationality; they are lovable for they all belong to the Never Never Land. Barrie proved himself a genius when he created Peter Pan, for Peter symbolises man's highest wish--to become a little child and never grow up. "Genius," he says, "is the power of being a boy again at will." It is true in his case.
Yet this kind of genius is retrospective; it is a regression. The genius who will help man to look forward instead of backward must not return to boyhood; he must go forward to superman. To put it psychologically, Barrie's genius comes from the unconscious, but what the world needs is a man whose genius will come from the superconscious, the divine.
XIII.
I have just been reading Jack London's _Michael, Brother of Jerry_, and I am full of righteous rage. What a picture! It is the story of how performing animals are trained, and before I had read half the book I made a vow that never again will I sit through a performance of animals.
The tale of Ben Bolt the tiger, if known by the ma.s.ses, would kill every animal turn on the stage. Ben Bolt, fresh from the jungle, is broken by the trainers. The method is unspeakable; he is lashed with iron bars and stabbed with forks until in agony he falls senseless in the arena. This treatment goes on for weeks . . . and in the end many good, kindly people see Ben Bolt, a miserable, broken animal, sit up in a chair like a human. And they laugh. My G.o.d!
Then there is Barney the good-natured mule that was once a family pet.
Later he becomes the celebrated bucking mule, and a prize is offered to anyone who will keep on his back for one minute. Audiences go into fits of laughter at his antics. But the audiences do not know that Barney was trained with a spiked saddle, and that for months life was one long agony of pain.
Is my anger due to the cruelty I am repressing in myself? I don't care whether it is sadism or the spark of the divine in me. All I care about is that this inferno of pain must cease.
Never has any book affected me as this one has done. By word of mouth and by my pen I shall try my hardest to send dear old Jack London's message round the world. Public opinion is the only thing that can stop the misery of these broken creatures, and I suggest that the anti-vivisectionists turn their energies to this infinitely worse evil.
The vivisectionists, at any rate, are working for humanity, but the brutes who break performing animals are merely amusing crowds of good people who know nothing about what goes on behind the scenes.
I see in the newspaper that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks held up the traffic in Piccadilly. They appeared on a balcony at the Ritz, and the crowd went frantic. The super-hero and the super-heroine of the cinema drew the crowd's emotion to them, and Tagore the Indian poet arrived in town at the same time unnoticed. It would seem that the crowd responds to the presence of the unimportant person only. London went mad over Hawker and Jack Johnson, and Georges Carpentier; and if Charlie Chaplin were to come over, I fancy London would take a general holiday.
No one will contend that these people are of supreme importance in the scheme of life. Charlie is a funny little man; Douglas Fairbanks is a fine lump of a fellow; Mary Pickford is a sweet little woman. But Tagore will live longer; Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud are of greater moment to humanity, yet each could walk out of Paddington Station and be unrecognised by the crowd.
The morning paper shows well that the crowd is interested only in unessentials. "Punish the profiteers!" was the press cry a few months ago. Well, they punished the profiteers . . . and prices continued to rise. A few years ago the cry was: "Flog the white slave traffickers!"
They flogged them, and yet I still see thousands of white slaves in the West End of London. And while Europe is sinking into anarchy and bankruptcy to-day, the only remedies the crowd representatives--the press--can think of are remedies of the Hang-the-Kaiser type. I believe that the crowd still thinks that juvenile crime is mainly caused by cinema five-part dramas.
The crowd is rather like the individual unconscious; it is primitive, and like the unconscious it can only wish. The crowd that welcomed Mary and Douglas was closely akin to the personal unconscious. Douglas stands to each individual in the crowd as the eternal hero, the man who always wins. Each man in the crowd sees in Douglas his own ideal self, so that when the office boy cheers Douglas he is cheering himself.
Mary has been well named "the world's sweet-heart"; she is the ideal heroine, beautiful, wronged, protected by six foot of masculinity.
Both come from the world of make-believe, the world of phantasy. Their arrival in England simply made a dream come true.
Now I am certain that if any individual in the great Piccadilly crowd had met Douglas and Mary on the boat, he or she would have looked at them with interest, but there would have been no cheering and throwing of roses. What the crowd does is to raise an emotion to a superlative degree. In a full hall you will laugh at a joke that would not bring a smile to your face in a room. You become absorbed in your crowd, and you are fully open to your crowd's suggestion. I generally laugh at Charlie Chaplin, but one night a cinema manager, a friend of mine, gave me a private view of Charlie's latest production. I sat alone in the large cinema palace . . . and I couldn't even smile. Had a crowd been there to share my laugh, I should have roared.
The Douglas-Mary episode makes me pessimistic about the future of democracy. For democracy is crowd rule, and the crowd is a baby when it isn't a savage. Yet we have no real democracy in this country. We have a slave state, the exploiters and the exploited, the "haves" and the "have nots." Douglas and Mary came over, and the poor beauty-starved populace forgot for the moment its poverty, and showered all its pent-up emotion on the people from picture-book land.
In Elizabethan times the world was a place of wonder; every mariner was coming home with wondrous tales of Spanish gold and men with necks like bulls. All you had to do to find a reality that was more wonderful than fancy was to sail away across the sea. But to-day the world holds no mystery; there are no pirates to overcome, no prisoned maidens to rescue. Reality means toil and taxes and trouble. But there is a land where men are dew-lapped like bulls . . . the land of phantasy. There is a society where the villain always gets his deserts . . . the land of film pictures. And when your hero and heroine walk out of the picture and become real flesh and blood, what are you to do? After all, you cannot pour all your emotion into your looms and office-desks and counters. Sweet-faced Mary does not know it, but she is one of the best allies that our capitalist system could have; for if the crowd were not showering its emotion on her it might well be using it up in the smashing of all the ugly things in our civilisation.
I have been thinking of the crowd in another aspect. Last year in a merry mood I sat down to write a novel. I meant it to be a comedy, but, having no control over the characters, I found that they insisted in making the story a farce. The result was _The Booming of Bunkie_.
I thought it a very funny book, and I laughed at some of my own jokes and murmured, "Good!" I impatiently awaited the book's appearance, and when the day of publication came I sat down hopefully to await the press notices. The first one to come in was lukewarm.