When William Came/Chapter III

CHAPTER III: &ldquo;THE METSKIE TSAR&rdquo; &ldquo;I was in the early stages of my fever when I got the first inkling of what was going on,&rdquo; said Yeovil to the doctor, as they sat over their coffee in a recess of the big smoking-room; &ldquo;just able to potter about a bit in the daytime, fighting against depression and inertia, feverish as evening came on, and delirious in the night. My game tracker and my attendant were both Buriats, and spoke very little Russian, and that was the only language we had in common to converse in. In matters concerning food and sport we soon got to understand each other, but on other subjects we were not easily able to exchange ideas. One day my tracker had been to a distant trading-store to get some things of which we were in need; the store was eighty miles from the nearest point of railroad, eighty miles of terribly bad roads, but it was in its way a centre and transmitter of news from the outside world. The tracker brought back with him vague tidings of a conflict of some sort between the &lsquo;Metskie Tsar&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Angliskie Tsar,&rsquo; and kept repeating the Russian word for defeat. The

&lsquo;Angliskie Tsar&rsquo; I recognised, of course, as the King of England, but my brain was too sick and dull to read any further meaning into the man&rsquo;s reiterated gabble. I grew so ill just then that I had to give up the struggle against fever, and make my way as best I could towards the nearest point where nursing and doctoring could be had. It was one evening, in a lonely rest-hut on the edge of a huge forest, as I was waiting for my boy to bring the meal for which I was feverishly impatient, and which I knew I should loathe as soon as it was brought, that the explanation of the word &lsquo;Metskie&rsquo; flashed on me. I had thought of it as referring to some Oriental potentate, some rebellious rajah perhaps, who was giving trouble, and whose followers had possibly discomfited an isolated British force in some out-of-the-way corner of our Empire. And all of a sudden I knew that &lsquo;Nemetskie Tsar,&rsquo; German Emperor, had been the name that the man had been trying to convey to me. I shouted for the tracker, and put him through a breathless cross-examination; he confirmed what my fears had told me. The &lsquo;Metskie Tsar&rsquo;

was a big European ruler, he had been in conflict with the &lsquo;Angliskie Tsar,&rsquo; and the latter had been defeated, swept away; the man spoke the word that he used for ships, and made energetic pantomime to express the sinking of a fleet. Holham, there was nothing for it but to hope that this was a false, groundless rumour, that had somehow crept to the confines of civilisation. In my saner balanced moments it was possible to disbelieve it, but if you have ever suffered from delirium you will know what raging torments of agony I went through in the nights, how my brain fought and refought that rumoured disaster.&rdquo; The doctor gave a murmur of sympathetic understanding. &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; continued Yeovil, &ldquo;I reached the small Siberian town towards which I had been struggling. There was a little colony of Russians there, traders, officials, a doctor or two, and some army officers. I put up at the primitive hotel-restaurant, which was the general gathering-place of the community. I knew quickly that the news was true. Russians are the most tactful of any European race that I have ever met; they did not stare with insolent or pitying curiosity, but there was something changed in their attitude which told me that the travelling Briton was no longer in their eyes the interesting respect-commanding personality that he had been in past days. I went to my own room, where the samovar was bubbling its familiar tune and a smiling red-shirted Russian boy was helping my Buriat servant to unpack my wardrobe, and I asked for any back numbers of newspapers that could be supplied at a moment&rsquo;s notice. I was given a bundle of well-thumbed sheets, odd pieces of the Novoe Vremya, the Moskovskie Viedomosti, one or two complete numbers of local papers published at Perm and Tobolsk. I do not read Russian well, though I speak it fairly readily, but from the fragments of disconnected telegrams that I pieced together I gathered enough information to acquaint me with the extent of the tragedy that had been worked out in a few crowded hours in a corner of North-Western Europe. I searched frantically for telegrams of later dates that would put a better complexion on the matter, that would retrieve something from the ruin; presently I came across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novoe

Vremya publishes once a week. There was a photograph of a long-fronted building with a flag flying over it, labelled &lsquo;The new standard floating over Buckingham Palace.&rsquo; The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the flag, possibly touched up, was unmistakable. It was the eagle of the Nemetskie Tsar. I have a vivid recollection of that plainly-furnished little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and gurgling on the table, and the thrumming music of a balalaika orchestra coming up from the restaurant below; the next coherent thing I can remember was weeks and weeks later, discussing in an impersonal detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the fatigue of the long railway journey to Finland. &ldquo;Since then, Holham, I have been encouraged to keep my mind as much off the war and public affairs as possible, and I have been glad to do so. I knew the worst and there was no particular use in deepening my despondency by dragging out the details. But now I am more or less a live man again, and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of what happened. You know how much I know, and how little; those fragments of Russian newspapers were about all the information that I had. I don&rsquo;t even know clearly how the whole thing started.&rdquo;

Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has done some necessary talking, and now assumes the r&ocirc;le of listener. &ldquo;It started,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;with a wholly unimportant disagreement about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair way towards being settled. Then the negotiations over the affair began to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter of nervousness in the money world. And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing speech by one of the German Ministers, and the situation began to look black indeed. &lsquo;He will be disavowed,&rsquo; every one said over here, but in less than twenty-four hours those who knew anything knew that the crisis was on us&mdash;only their knowledge came too late. &lsquo;War between two such civilised and enlightened nations is an impossibility,&rsquo; one of our leaders of public opinion had declared on the Saturday; by the following Friday the war had indeed become an impossibility, because we could no longer carry it on.

It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough, everywhere where the pressure came. Our ships were good against their ships, our seamen were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships plus their superiority in aircraft. Our trained men were good against their trained men, but they could not be in several places at once, and the enemy could. Our half-trained men and our untrained men could not master the science of war at a moment&rsquo;s notice, and a moment&rsquo;s notice was all they got. The enemy were a nation apprenticed in arms, we were not even the idle apprentice: we had not deemed apprenticeship worth our while. There was courage enough running loose in the land, but it was like unharnessed electricity, it controlled no forces, it struck no blows. There was no time for the heroism and the devotion which a drawn-out struggle, however hopeless, can produce; the war was over almost as soon as it had begun. After the reverses which happened with lightning rapidity in the first three days of warfare, the newspapers made no effort to pretend that the situation could be retrieved; editors and public alike recognised that these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moments before we were counted out. One might liken the whole affair to a snap checkmate early in a game of chess; one side had thought out the moves, and brought the requisite pieces into play, the other side was hampered and helpless, with its resources unavailable, its strategy discounted in advance. That, in a nutshell, is the history of the war.&rdquo;

Yeovil was silent for a moment or two, then he asked: &ldquo;And the sequel, the peace?&rdquo; &ldquo;The collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite realised what one disastrous campaign would mean for an island nation with a closely packed population. The conquerors were in a position to dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their ideas of aggrandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication. There was no European combination ready to say them nay, and certainly no one Power was going to be rash enough to step in to contest the terms of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered. Annexation had probably never been a dream before the war; after the war it suddenly became temptingly practical. Warum nicht? became the theme of leader-writers in the German press; they pointed out that Britain, defeated and humiliated, but with enormous powers of recuperation, would be a dangerous and inevitable enemy for the Germany of to-morrow, while Britain incorporated within the Hohenzollern Empire would merely be a disaffected province, without a navy to make its disaffection a serious menace, and with great tax-paying capabilities, which would be available for relieving the burdens of the other Imperial States.

Wherefore, why not annex? The warum nicht? party prevailed. Our King, as you know, retired with his Court to Delhi, as Emperor in the East, with most of his overseas dominions still subject to his sway. The British Isles came under the German Crown as a Reichsland, a sort of Alsace-Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead of the Rhine. We still retain our Parliament, but it is a clipped and pruned-down shadow of its former self, with most of its functions in abeyance; when the elections were held it was difficult to get decent candidates to come forward or to get people to vote. It makes one smile bitterly to think that a year or two ago we were seriously squabbling as to who should have votes. And, of course, the old party divisions have more or less crumbled away. The Liberals naturally are under the blackest of clouds, for having steered the country to disaster, though to do them justice it was no more their fault than the fault of any other party. In a democracy such as ours was the Government of the day must more or less reflect the ideas and temperament of the nation in all vital matters, and the British nation in those days could not have been persuaded of the urgent need for military apprenticeship or of the deadly nature of its danger. It was willing now and then to be half-frightened and to have half-measures, or, one might better say, quarter-measures taken to reassure it, and the governments of the day were willing to take them, but any political party or group of statesmen that had said &lsquo;the danger is enormous and immediate, the sacrifices and burdens must be enormous and immediate,&rsquo; would have met with certain defeat at the polls. Still, of course, the Liberals, as the party that had held office for nearly a decade, incurred the odium of a people maddened by defeat and humiliation; one Minister, who had had less responsibility for military organisation than perhaps any of them, was attacked and nearly killed at Newcastle, another was hiding for three days on Exmoor, and escaped in disguise.&rdquo;

&ldquo;And the Conservatives?&rdquo; &ldquo;They are also under eclipse, but it is more or less voluntary in their case. For generations they had taken their stand as supporters of Throne and Constitution, and when they suddenly found the Constitution gone and the Throne filled by an alien dynasty, their political orientation had vanished. They are in much the same position as the Jacobites occupied after the Hanoverian accession. Many of the leading Tory families have emigrated to the British lands beyond the seas, others are shut up in their country houses, retrenching their expenses, selling their acres, and investing their money abroad. The Labour faction, again, are almost in as bad odour as the Liberals, because of having hob-nobbed too effusively and ostentatiously with the German democratic parties on the eve of the war, exploiting an evangel of universal brotherhood which did not blunt a single Teuton bayonet when the hour came. I suppose in time party divisions will reassert themselves in some form or other; there will be a Socialist Party, and the mercantile and manufacturing interests will evolve a sort of bourgeoise party, and the different religious bodies will try to get themselves represented&mdash;&rdquo; Yeovil made a movement of impatience. &ldquo;All these things that you forecast,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;must take time, considerable time; is this nightmare, then, to go on for ever?&rdquo;

&ldquo;It is not a nightmare, unfortunately,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;it is a reality.&rdquo; &ldquo;But, surely&mdash;a nation such as ours, a virile, highly-civilised nation with an age-long tradition of mastery behind it, cannot be held under for ever by a few thousand bayonets and machine guns. We must surely rise up one day and drive them out.&rdquo; &ldquo;Dear man,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;we might, of course, at some given moment overpower the garrison that is maintained here, and seize the forts, and perhaps we might be able to mine the harbours; what then? In a fortnight or so we could be starved into unconditional submission. Remember, all the advantages of isolated position that told in our favour while we had the sea dominion, tell against us now that the sea dominion is in other hands. The enemy would not need to mobilise a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action; a fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Are you trying to tell me that this is a final overthrow?&rdquo; said Yeovil in a shaking voice; &ldquo;are we to remain a subject race like the Poles?&rdquo; &ldquo;Let us hope for a better fate,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;Our opportunity may come if the Master Power is ever involved in an unsuccessful naval war with some other nation, or perhaps in some time of European crisis, when everything hung in the balance, our latent hostility might have to be squared by a concession of independence. That is what we have to hope for and watch for. On the other hand, the conquerors have to count on time and tact to weaken and finally obliterate the old feelings of nationality; the middle-aged of to-day will grow old and acquiescent in the changed state of things; the young generations will grow up never having known anything different. It&rsquo;s a far cry to Delhi, as the old Indian proverb says, and the strange half-European, half-Asiatic Court out there will seem more and more a thing exotic and unreal. &lsquo;The King across the water&rsquo;

was a rallying-cry once upon a time in our history, but a king on the further side of the Indian Ocean is a shadowy competitor for one who alternates between Potsdam and Windsor.&rdquo; &ldquo;I want you to tell me everything,&rdquo; said Yeovil, after another pause; &ldquo;tell me, Holham, how far has this obliterating process of &lsquo;time and tact&rsquo; gone? It seems to be pretty fairly started already. I bought a newspaper as soon as I landed, and I read it in the train coming up. I read things that puzzled and disgusted me. There were announcements of concerts and plays and first-nights and private views; there were even small dances.

There were advertisements of house-boats and week-end cottages and string bands for garden parties. It struck me that it was rather like merrymaking with a dead body lying in the house.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yeovil,&rdquo; said the doctor, &ldquo;you must bear in mind two things. First, the necessity for the life of the country going on as if nothing had happened. It is true that many thousands of our working men and women have emigrated and thousands of our upper and middle class too; they were the people who were not tied down by business, or who could afford to cut those ties. But those represent comparatively a few out of the many. The great businesses and the small businesses must go on, people must be fed and clothed and housed and medically treated, and their thousand-and-one wants and necessities supplied. Look at me, for instance; however much I loathe coming under a foreign domination and paying taxes to an alien government, I can&rsquo;t abandon my practice and my patients, and set up anew in Toronto or Allahabad, and if I could, some other doctor would have to take my place here. I or that other doctor must have our servants and motors and food and furniture and newspapers, even our sport.

The golf links and the hunting field have been well-nigh deserted since the war, but they are beginning to get back their votaries because out-door sport has become a necessity, and a very rational necessity, with numbers of men who have to work otherwise under unnatural and exacting conditions. That is one factor of the situation. The other affects London more especially, but through London it influences the rest of the country to a certain extent. You will see around you here much that will strike you as indications of heartless indifference to the calamity that has befallen our nation. Well, you must remember that many things in modern life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international. In the world of music and art and the drama, for instance, the foreign names are legion, they confront you at every turn, and some of our British devotees of such arts are more acclimatised to the ways of Munich or Moscow than they are familiar with the life, say, of Stirling or York. For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of denationalised culture&mdash;even those of them who have never left our shores. They would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of life of some Galician gipsy dramatist, and gravely quote and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery, while they would shudder at &lsquo;D&rsquo;ye ken John Peel?&rsquo; as a piece of uncouth barbarity.

You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or downcast because the Crown of Charlemagne takes its place now on the top of the Royal box in the theatres, or at the head of programmes at State concerts. And then there are the Jews.&rdquo; &ldquo;There are many in the land, or at least in London,&rdquo; said Yeovil. &ldquo;There are even more of them now than there used to be,&rdquo; said Holham. &ldquo;I am to a great extent a disliker of Jews myself, but I will be fair to them, and admit that those of them who were in any genuine sense British have remained British and have stuck by us loyally in our misfortune; all honour to them. But of the others, the men who by temperament and everything else were far more Teuton or Polish or Latin than they were British, it was not to be expected that they would be heartbroken because London had suddenly lost its place among the political capitals of the world, and became a cosmopolitan city. They had appreciated the free and easy liberty of the old days, under British rule, but there was a stiff insularity in the ruling race that they chafed against. Now, putting aside some petty Government restrictions that Teutonic bureaucracy has brought in, there is really, in their eyes, more licence and social adaptability in London than before.

It has taken on some of the aspects of a No-Man&rsquo;s-Land, and the Jew, if he likes, may almost consider himself as of the dominant race; at any rate he is ubiquitous. Pleasure, of the caf&eacute; and cabaret and boulevard kind, the sort of thing that gave Berlin the aspect of the gayest capital in Europe within the last decade, that is the insidious leaven that will help to denationalise London. Berlin will probably climb back to some of its old austerity and simplicity, a world-ruling city with a great sense of its position and its responsibilities, while London will become more and more the centre of what these people understand by life.&rdquo; Yeovil made a movement of impatience and disgust. &ldquo;I know, I know,&rdquo; said the doctor, sympathetically; &ldquo;life and enjoyment mean to you the howl of a wolf in a forest, the call of a wild swan on the frozen tundras, the smell of a wood fire in some little inn among the mountains. There is more music to you in the quick thud, thud of hoofs on desert mud as a free-stepping horse is led up to your tent door than in all the dronings and flourishes that a highly-paid orchestra can reel out to an expensively fed audience.

But the tastes of modern London, as we see them crystallised around us, lie in a very different direction. People of the world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the present moment, herd together as closely packed to the square yard as possible, doing nothing worth doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but doing it and saying it over and over again, listening to the same melodies, watching the same artistes, echoing the same catchwords, ordering the same dishes in the same restaurants, suffering each other&rsquo;s cigarette smoke and perfumes and conversation, feverishly, anxiously making arrangements to meet each other again to-morrow, next week, and the week after next, and repeat the same gregarious experience. If they were not herded together in a corner of western London, watching each other with restless intelligent eyes, they would be herded together at Brighton or Dieppe, doing the same thing. Well, you will find that life of that sort goes forward just as usual, only it is even more prominent and noticeable now because there is less public life of other kinds.&rdquo; Yeovil said something which was possibly the Buriat word for the nether world. Outside in the neighbouring square a band had been playing at intervals during the evening. Now it struck up an air that Yeovil had already heard whistled several times since his landing, an air with a captivating suggestion of slyness and furtive joyousness running through it. He rose and walked across to the window, opening it a little wider.

He listened till the last notes had died away. &ldquo;What is that tune they have just played?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll hear it often enough,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;A Frenchman writing in the Matin the other day called it the &lsquo;National Anthem of the fait accompli.&rsquo;&rdquo;

CHAPTER IV: &ldquo;ES IST VERBOTEN&rdquo; Yeovil wakened next morning to the pleasant sensation of being in a household where elaborate machinery for the smooth achievement of one&rsquo;s daily life was noiselessly and unceasingly at work. Fever and the long weariness of convalescence in indifferently comfortable surroundings had given luxury a new value in his eyes. Money had not always been plentiful with him in his younger days; in his twenty-eighth year he had inherited a fairly substantial fortune, and he had married a wealthy woman a few months later. It was characteristic of the man and his breed that the chief use to which he had put his newly-acquired wealth had been in seizing the opportunity which it gave him for indulging in unlimited travel in wild, out-of-the-way regions, where the comforts of life were meagrely represented. Cicely occasionally accompanied him to the threshold of his expeditions, such as Cairo or St. Petersburg or Constantinople, but her own tastes in the matter of roving were more or less condensed within an area that comprised Cannes, Homburg, the Scottish Highlands, and the Norwegian Fiords. Things outlandish and barbaric appealed to her chiefly when presented under artistic but highly civilised stage management on the boards of Covent Garden, and if she wanted to look at wolves or sand grouse, she preferred doing so in the company of an intelligent Fellow of the Zoological Society on some fine Sunday afternoon in Regent&rsquo;s Park. It was one of the bonds of union and good-fellowship between her husband and herself that each understood and sympathised with the other&rsquo;s tastes without in the least wanting to share them; they went their own ways and were pleased and comrade-like when the ways happened to run together for a span, without self-reproach or heart-searching when the ways diverged.

Moreover, they had separate and adequate banking accounts, which constitute, if not the keys of the matrimonial Heaven, at least the oil that lubricates them. Yeovil found Cicely and breakfast waiting for him in the cool breakfast-room, and enjoyed, with the appreciation of a recent invalid, the comfort and resources of a meal that had not to be ordered or thought about in advance, but seemed as though it were there, fore-ordained from the beginning of time in its smallest detail. Each desire of the breakfasting mind seemed to have its realisation in some dish, lurking unobtrusively in hidden corners until asked for. Did one want grilled mushrooms, English fashion, they were there, black and moist and sizzling, and extremely edible; did one desire mushrooms &agrave; la Russe, they appeared, blanched and cool and toothsome under their white blanketing of sauce. At one&rsquo;s bidding was a service of coffee, prepared with rather more forethought and circumspection than would go to the preparation of a revolution in a South American Republic. The exotic blooms that reigned in profusion over the other parts of the house were scrupulously banished from the breakfast-room; bowls of wild thyme and other flowering weeds of the meadow and hedgerow gave it an atmosphere of country freshness that was in keeping with the morning meal.

&ldquo;You look dreadfully tired still,&rdquo; said Cicely critically, &ldquo;otherwise I would recommend a ride in the Park, before it gets too hot. There is a new cob in the stable that you will just love, but he is rather lively, and you had better content yourself for the present with some more sedate exercise than he is likely to give you. He is apt to try and jump out of his skin when the flies tease him. The Park is rather jolly for a walk just now.&rdquo; &ldquo;I think that will be about my form after my long journey,&rdquo; said Yeovil, &ldquo;an hour&rsquo;s stroll before lunch under the trees.

That ought not to fatigue me unduly. In the afternoon I&rsquo;ll look up one or two people.&rdquo; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t count on finding too many of your old set,&rdquo; said Cicely rather hurriedly. &ldquo;I dare say some of them will find their way back some time, but at present there&rsquo;s been rather an exodus.&rdquo; &ldquo;The Bredes,&rdquo; said Yeovil, &ldquo;are they here?&rdquo;

&ldquo;No, the Bredes are in Scotland, at their place in Sutherlandshire; they don&rsquo;t come south now, and the Ricardes are farming somewhere in East Africa, the whole lot of them. Valham has got an appointment of some sort in the Straits Settlement, and has taken his family with him. The Collards are down at their mother&rsquo;s place in Norfolk; a German banker has bought their house in Manchester Square.&rdquo; &ldquo;And the Hebways?&rdquo; asked Yeovil. &ldquo;Dick Hebway is in India,&rdquo; said Cicely, &ldquo;but his mother lives in Paris; poor Hugo, you know, was killed in the war.

My friends the Allinsons are in Paris too. It&rsquo;s rather a clearance, isn&rsquo;t it? However, there are some left, and I expect others will come back in time. Pitherby is here; he&rsquo;s one of those who are trying to make the best of things under the new r&eacute;gime.&rdquo; &ldquo;He would be,&rdquo; said Yeovil, shortly.

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a difficult question,&rdquo; said Cicely, &ldquo;whether one should stay at home and face the music or go away and live a transplanted life under the British flag. Either attitude might be dictated by patriotism.&rdquo; &ldquo;It is one thing to face the music, it is another thing to dance to it,&rdquo; said Yeovil. Cicely poured out some more coffee for herself and changed the conversation. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be in to lunch, I suppose? The Clubs are not very attractive just now, I believe, and the restaurants are mostly hot in the middle of the day. Ronnie Storre is coming in; he&rsquo;s here pretty often these days. A rather good-looking young animal with something mid-way between talent and genius in the piano-playing line.&rdquo;

&ldquo;Not long-haired and Semetic or Tcheque or anything of that sort, I suppose?&rdquo; asked Yeovil. Cicely laughed at the vision of Ronnie conjured up by her husband&rsquo;s words. &ldquo;No, beautifully groomed and clipped and Anglo-Saxon. I expect you&rsquo;ll like him. He plays bridge almost as well as he plays the piano. I suppose you wonder at any one who can play bridge well wanting to play the piano.&rdquo; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not quite so intolerant as all that,&rdquo; said Yeovil; &ldquo;anyhow I promise to like Ronnie. Is any one else coming to lunch?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Joan Mardle will probably drop in, in fact I&rsquo;m afraid she&rsquo;s a certainty. She invited herself in that way of hers that brooks of no refusal. On the other hand, as a mitigating circumstance, there will be a point d&rsquo;asperge omelette such as few kitchens could turn out, so don&rsquo;t be late.&rdquo; Yeovil set out for his morning walk with the curious sensation of one who starts on a voyage of discovery in a land that is well known to him. He turned into the Park at Hyde Park corner and made his way along the familiar paths and alleys that bordered the Row.

The familiarity vanished when he left the region of fenced-in lawns and rhododendron bushes and came to the open space that stretched away beyond the bandstand. The bandstand was still there, and a military band, in sky-blue Saxon uniform, was executing the first item in the forenoon programme of music. Around it, instead of the serried rows of green chairs that Yeovil remembered, was spread out an acre or so of small round tables, most of which had their quota of customers, engaged in a steady consumption of lager beer, coffee, lemonade and syrups. Further in the background, but well within earshot of the band, a gaily painted pagoda-restaurant sheltered a number of more commodious tables under its awnings, and gave a hint of convenient indoor accommodation for wet or windy weather. Movable screens of trellis-trained foliage and climbing roses formed little hedges by means of which any particular table could be shut off from its neighbours if semi-privacy were desired. One or two decorative advertisements of popularised brands of champagne and Rhine wines adorned the outside walls of the building, and under the central gable of its upper story was a flamboyant portrait of a stern-faced man, whose image and superscription might also be found on the newer coinage of the land. A mass of bunting hung in folds round the flag-pole on the gable, and blew out now and then on a favouring breeze, a long three-coloured strip, black, white, and scarlet, and over the whole scene the elm trees towered with an absurd sardonic air of nothing having changed around their roots. Yeovil stood for a minute or two, taking in every detail of the unfamiliar spectacle. &ldquo;They have certainly accomplished something that we never attempted,&rdquo;

he muttered to himself. Then he turned on his heel and made his way back to the shady walk that ran alongside the Row. At first sight little was changed in the aspect of the well-known exercising ground. One or two riding masters cantered up and down as of yore, with their attendant broods of anxious-faced young girls and awkwardly bumping women pupils, while horsey-looking men put marketable animals through their paces or drew up to the rails for long conversations with horsey-looking friends on foot. Sportingly attired young women, sitting astride of their horses, careered by at intervals as though an extremely game fox were leading hounds a merry chase a short way ahead of them; it all seemed much as usual. Presently, from the middle distance a bright patch of colour set in a whirl of dust drew rapidly nearer and resolved itself into a group of cavalry officers extending their chargers in a smart gallop. They were well mounted and sat their horses to perfection, and they made a brave show as they raced past Yeovil with a clink and clatter and rhythmic thud, thud, of hoofs, and became once more a patch of colour in a whirl of dust. An answering glow of colour seemed to have burned itself into the grey face of the young man, who had seen them pass without appearing to look at them, a stinging rush of blood, accompanied by a choking catch in the throat and a hot white blindness across the eyes. The weakness of fever broke down at times the rampart of outward indifference that a man of Yeovil&rsquo;s temperament builds coldly round his heartstrings.

The Row and its riders had become suddenly detestable to the wanderer; he would not run the risk of seeing that insolently joyous cavalcade come galloping past again. Beyond a narrow stretch of tree-shaded grass lay the placid sunlit water of the Serpentine, and Yeovil made a short cut across the turf to reach its gravelled bank. &ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you read either English or German?&rdquo; asked a policeman who confronted him as he stepped off the turf. Yeovil stared at the man and then turned to look at the small neatly-printed notice to which the official was imperiously pointing; in two languages it was made known that it was forbidden and verboten, punishable and straffbar, to walk on the grass. &ldquo;Three shilling fine,&rdquo; said the policeman, extending his hand for the money.

&ldquo;Do I pay you?&rdquo; asked Yeovil, feeling almost inclined to laugh; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m rather a stranger to the new order of things.&rdquo; &ldquo;You pay me,&rdquo; said the policeman, &ldquo;and you receive a quittance for the sum paid,&rdquo; and he proceeded to tear a counterfoil receipt for a three shilling fine from a small pocket book. &ldquo;May I ask,&rdquo; said Yeovil, as he handed over the sum demanded and received his quittance, &ldquo;what the red and white band on your sleeve stands for?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Bi-lingual,&rdquo; said the constable, with an air of importance. &ldquo;Preference is given to members of the Force who qualify in both languages. Nearly all the police engaged on Park duty are bi-lingual. About as many foreigners as English use the parks nowadays; in fact, on a fine Sunday afternoon, you&rsquo;ll find three foreigners to every two English. The park habit is more Continental than British, I take it.&rdquo; &ldquo;And are there many Germans in the police Force?&rdquo; asked Yeovil.

&ldquo;Well, yes, a good few; there had to be,&rdquo; said the constable; &ldquo;there were such a lot of resignations when the change came, and they had to be filled up somehow. Lots of men what used to be in the Force emigrated or found work of some other kind, but everybody couldn&rsquo;t take that line; wives and children had to be thought of. &rsquo;Tisn&rsquo;t every head of a family that can chuck up a job on the chance of finding another. Starvation&rsquo;s been the lot of a good many what went out. Those of us that stayed on got better pay than we did before, but then of course the duties are much more multitudinous.&rdquo; &ldquo;They must be,&rdquo; said Yeovil, fingering his three shilling State document; &ldquo;by the way,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;are all the grass plots in the Park out of bounds for human feet?&rdquo;

&ldquo;Everywhere where you see the notices,&rdquo; said the policeman, &ldquo;and that&rsquo;s about three-fourths of the whole grass space; there&rsquo;s been a lot of new gravel walks opened up in all directions. People don&rsquo;t want to walk on the grass when they&rsquo;ve got clean paths to walk on.&rdquo; And with this parting reproof the bi-lingual constable strode heavily away, his loss of consideration and self-esteem as a unit of a sometime ruling race evidently compensated for to some extent by his enhanced importance as an official. &ldquo;The women and children,&rdquo; thought Yeovil, as he looked after the retreating figure; &ldquo;yes, that is one side of the problem.

The children that have to be fed and schooled, the women folk that have to be cared for, an old mother, perhaps, in the home that cannot be broken up. The old case of giving hostages.&rdquo; He followed the path alongside the Serpentine, passing under the archway of the bridge and continuing his walk into Kensington Gardens. In another moment he was within view of the Peter Pan statue and at once observed that it had companions. On one side was a group representing a scene from one of the Grimm fairy stories, on the other was Alice in conversation with Gryphon and Mockturtle, the episode looking distressingly stiff and meaningless in its sculptured form. Two other spaces had been cleared in the neighbouring turf, evidently for the reception of further statue groups, which Yeovil mentally assigned to Struwelpeter and Little Lord Fauntleroy. &ldquo;German middle-class taste,&rdquo; he commented, &ldquo;but in this matter we certainly gave them a lead. I suppose the idea is that childish fancy is dead and that it is only decent to erect some sort of memorial to it.&rdquo;

The day was growing hotter, and the Park had ceased to seem a desirable place to loiter in. Yeovil turned his steps homeward, passing on his way the bandstand with its surrounding acreage of tables. It was now nearly one o&rsquo;clock, and luncheon parties were beginning to assemble under the awnings of the restaurant. Lighter refreshments, in the shape of sausages and potato salads, were being carried out by scurrying waiters to the drinkers of lager beer at the small tables. A park orchestra, in brilliant trappings, had taken the place of the military band. As Yeovil passed the musicians launched out into the tune which the doctor had truly predicted he would hear to repletion before he had been many days in London; the &ldquo;National Anthem of the fait accompli.&rdquo;