by Emily Hahn
Over on the other side of the small room a man suddenly fell down from his chair and lay against the wall, jerking and making loud moans. There were two men with him and they leaned over him and undid his collar, but the moans continued.
“Oh, oh,” said Lisbet, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth.
“Is he drunk, Alf, do you think?” I said. “Or sick?”
“An attack, I should think.”
“He’s an epileptic, isn’t he?” said Lisbet.
I twisted around in my chair to take another look, and noticed that no one else was behaving so badly. At every other table people continued to eat and to talk to one another in low, well-bred tones. They never even peeped. The waiters hurried by without looking down.
“But look here, Alf,” I said, “if he’s ill, surely we ought to help. Somebody ought to.”
“No, no,” said Alf. “He has his friends.”
Lisbet looked upset.
“Would you like to change the table to upstairs?” said Alf.
“No, no, I’m all right. Mickey, whatever happened to Tony? Have you ever heard from him?”
Our meal continued. The man stopped moaning quite so loud.
“If they would sit him up,” I said, “it wouldn’t be so hot and close for him.”
“Yes, that’s what they ought to do,” Alf said. “Have some of this lobster, Lisbet.”
After another ten minutes the two men who were helping the sick man did indeed start to hoist him up from the floor. A large man at the next table, who had until then ignored the scene at his feet, now surprised and gratified me by offering to help them. He had broken the ice. It was now, evidently, permitted everyone to turn around and take a good long look at the unfortunate fellow as he sat at the table with his head on his hands breathing hard and looking flushed. The episode was over.
“Now in any other country in the world,” I said, “there would have been a general offer of assistance from the rest of us at the beginning. You English are extraordinary.”
“Nonsense. Big crowd: would have cut off the air,” said Alf. “He wouldn’t have wanted that himself.”
“I suppose not. After all, he’s English too.”
“Of course. Much kinder to pretend it never happened.”
“Where are you living in town?” asked Lisbet.
Every evening in London when we looked at the clock—a new luxury for us; we had found a man who would actually fix our clocks—and decided it was time to go out arid eat, I felt guilty. In spite of not liking housework, I had been here long enough to know that it is criminally wasteful of money, and vaguely immoral besides, to eat in restaurants. My feeling of immorality was due to the clamor which is heard whenever the Minister of Food makes an appearance: “Ration the caterers!” cry the housewives. You’re favoring the rich! Anybody who wants to eat in restaurants and who can afford it can save up his rations.” Alas, this is true to a certain extent, but the outlines of the situation are not clear; you can only dine in a restaurant, for example, if you are somewhere near enough the restaurant to dine in it; i.e., in the city. And restaurant meals are not lavish. If you take bread and butter you can’t have a sweet; if you take fish, you can’t have meat; if you take hors d’oeuvres, you can’t have soup. Each restaurant has its price limit per meal, moreover, and the average limit is five shillings. Dutchmen complain at home, after a visit to England, that they have had no time to do their business there, as they are always rushing to some restaurant to gobble the dinner, then rushing on to the next restaurant so as to get a full meal, all before closing time.
There was nothing else for it, however, in our case but restaurants; we had found rooms to live in but they didn’t include a kitchen. Somebody brought us a tray of breakfast at eight-thirty every morning, by which time the Major was always cross because the water wasn’t warm enough for a good shave. It was not our landlady’s fault about the water. Hostel keepers are not permitted to start heating water in England until seven, I think it is, in the morning. We would have liked to drink hot coffee or tea at breakfast, instead of the lukewarm slop we got, but they looked with disfavor on that idea too. Well, never mind; we were only in town during term time. Besides, we were lucky to find a place at all. The sitting room, the bedroom, and the bath all opened into the hallway, so that we had to drift about in our dressing gowns and mingle with the landlady and other roomers, also in dressing gowns, in passing. Nevertheless we were lucky, considering the housing shortage.
It was a confusing matter to settle our rations for breakfast. First the landlady suggested that we bring one ration book each week and let her take what she needed from it, after which I was to post it back to the Conygar cook. A week later the landlady said, “Look here, I’ve just found out what this means. I’ve got to go to the Food Control office every single week with this book, and they give me a form to fill out, and then at last I get an emergency ration card for you. It’s a lot of time and trouble. Why don’t you just bring up an egg or some bacon or something from the country, and your own jam and sugar and things, and keep the book down there all the time?”
Well.… The Major can’t bear carrying tins and jars and bottles and things in his luggage, and I hesitated. But I said to myself, he’ll have to learn to do it, that’s all. On the alternate week that I didn’t accompany him to town, at any rate, he had to. I left a large amount of sugar and a tin of jam there to cover a number of weeks, but even so there were the oddments. The first time he went alone to London he made a face when I put the bacon into his pocket, but he took it, and didn’t object too strongly to a small cold-cream jar of butter as well. One morning he tried to go on strike.
“I’d rather not have the bacon,” he protested. “There’s plenty of bread and jam up there.”
“But this is your ration, your only bacon ration for a whole fortnight. Now don’t be silly, Charles.”
“Well, it stinks,” he grumbled. “Why can’t I just take a tin of fish? That would do for the whole five days, wouldn’t it?”
A chorus of outraged howls came from his womenfolk. “Don’t you know it won’t keep?”
Sadly he pocketed the sliver of bacon and went out to the taxi.… No, really, I did wish we had a kitchen in town.
The day of the lecture dawned muggy and reasonably warm. The Major seemed quite calm and unmoved, though I thought his careless air as he adjusted the Homburg hat was a bit phony.
“We’ll meet at the tea, then, at five o’clock,” he said. “By the way”—and now for the first time he looked definitely apprehensive —”what hat were you thinking of wearing?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought,” I lied. He was not deceived.
“I shouldn’t wear that big red one if I were you.”
The battle was joined.
“Why not? It just goes with my new dress.”
“Then don’t wear the new dress. It’s just a lecture; you needn’t wear a new dress to a lecture. Really, darling, one doesn’t wear picture hats to lectures.”
“It’s not a picture hat, Charles Boxer. It’s not nearly that big.”
“What you had on the other day looked very nice. You know, that little one with the veil. The dress too.”
I cried out in anguish. “That old navy thing!”
I wore the old navy thing, just the same; I was really as much awed by the occasion as he was.
In spite of the Major’s earnest exhortations to everyone not to come, the lecture room was crowded. It was astonishing, I reflected, looking at them, how many people in London are interested enough in Hispanic history to come all the way to King’s College, and at five-thirty too. One would expect the Portuguese Ambassador to be at the first one, I suppose, as well as his entourage of young men and dark-eyed ladies, but all those others—There were, of course, the retiring professor and his wife, and a sprinkling of our friends, the claque. But there were many other people, too, and even, in the back row, two students, one taking notes.
What with t
he tea party first, and the other professors in their gowns, and everyone taking it so for granted, I wasn’t afflicted with a sense of unreality until Sir William Halliday made his introductory speech. He reviewed the history of the Camoens Chair, mentioned the other men who had held it, and then talked about the Major, whose work, of course, he said, was too well- known to the scholars present to need describing. All this seemed in order until he said, “Many members of our faculty have worn uniform during the recent war, but I am sure I am right in saying this is the first time in her history that the University has drawn one of her professors from the ranks of the Regular Army.” He smiled. I smiled, too, but the whole thing suddenly struck me as so very odd that I was afraid to meet the Major’s eye, for fear of upsetting him.
I needn’t have worried. He did his piece well, without hurrying too much, and the audience was surprised and gratified, I should think, to discover amusing things in his translations. I know I was. Then there were congratulations from the Duke of Palmella and the professors, and reunion with some old friends, and dinner at the Spanish restaurant, and all the time it felt unreal.
“I want to go somewhere for a drink,” said the Major when we were alone after dinner. “All that talking.” We sat in the Cafe Royale for a while, drinking beer and going over things. I thought about his library in Hong Kong and the first time he told me he’d almost been a don instead of an officer, and the memory got mixed up with the Café Royale where I used to sit years and years ago at that same table. I thought about other days when I’d had similar memories, but under very different conditions, and when I’d wondered in Hong Kong, with the Japs in occupation, if we would ever dine together in London, or if I’d ever be able to take him to lunch in New York at Twenty-One. We’d lunched in Twenty-One, after all, and now we were sitting at my old table at the Cafe Royale, and he was a don. We were both reading at the Museum every morning. It was a confusing mixture of old sensations and new: old in London, new in Dorset, old in China, new in New York.…
“Your glass, please, madam,” said the waiter. “Closing time.”
“Damn,” said the Major. “Oh, is it really eleven?”
“They close at ten-thirty now.”
Everyone in Piccadilly was going toward the tube station, and we went too. What with the lights and everything, the Circus looked nearly normal for that time of night, except that the crowds were all going home, like us. We walked as fast as we could under the arches of Regent Street, pushing through all the people. My feeling of unreality grew stronger.
“I don’t believe it,” I burst out. “None of it is true. I think the Japs really did cut your head off, and tomorrow morning I’ll wake up in Kennedy Road, Hong Kong. This is ridiculous.”
The Major smiled. We passed a newspaper pitch and I saw a headline;
WORSE OFF THAN
WE WERE DURING WAR,
ALLEGES M.P.
14. WESTMINSTER
“And what do you think, madam?” asked the man in the shop, where I was trying to buy handkerchiefs for Charles in a hurry.
“Think?” I repeated, handing out my coupon book for him to take the necessary bits of paper.
“How long is all this foolishness going on?” he said, waving the book accusingly at my nose. Most shopkeepers hate coupons and rations, of course, even more than their customers do; it makes for so much paper work. Besides, this shopkeeper ran a luxury business in Bond Street. That was why he was asking my opinion; he thought I was an American tourist who would give the right Tory answers.
“Oh well,” I said, wishing he would hurry, “they’ll get fed up with it in time, I suppose. How much?”
“They? The public, you mean,” he said knowingly. “They won’t stand for it in the next election, I promise you that, madam.”
“Oh well, I don’t know. Government haven’t lost a by-election yet, not an important one. Most people—”
“Don’t you believe it, madam, don’t you believe it. The public’s beginning to think—hard.” He gave me a long disquisition on the subject. I could have given him the same one, word for word. I hear it often enough down home. I stifled a yawn and wondered if I could possibly imitate an English accent after this, just for purposes of shopping.
“You people must be laughing at us, over on the other side,” he finished. “Now tell me, what do you think, over there, about the war? Will it be this year?”
“Oh, surely—” I began in horror.
“A friend of mine who has just come back tells me it will,” he said. “I mean to say, Russia can’t afford to wait any longer. He has it from very reliable sources that the Americans are taking all the oil produced this past two years in Palestine, and moving it—”
With his pencil he marked out things on the counter—Rumania, I think it was, and Kenya, and Persia, and all sorts of strategic points. His eyes shone. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.
“Well, yes,” I said in desperation, gathering up my things and preparing to bolt for the door. “Twenty-two shillings, I think you said? Yes, well, my husband says we’ll all be working in the salt mines of Siberia in a few years, so never mind the Government.”
“Oh, madam! Why are you Americans always so pessimistic?”
“My husband’s English.… Thank you, good afternoon. See you in the salt mines.”
No doubt the war talk coincided with a similar wave of worry in the States, but I think it was probably more knowledgeable and less frightened over here. I can only guess, as I can’t compare the newspapers of the States and of England day by day; my copy of the Sunday Times from New York arrives at least a fortnight late. But my guess is that one reason we are quieter over here is that our newspapers are so curtailed. Almost nothing gets very much space in the papers, except the iniquities of the Labour Government (if it’s a Tory paper) or the excellent accomplishments of the same, if it’s a Labour ditto. Of course there was plenty of conversation about war, but conversation doesn’t do the same mischief. One day Tom Cooper was startled by his wife. Reading the paper, he mentioned the coming war. “Within the next few months, I should say,” he said, probably in tones of relish. I don’t know why some men seem to like talking this way, but they do. They call it facing facts, but I think it’s because they like war; it excites them; whenever they are bored they look forward to the next war.
“I said it casually,” he told me later in rueful tones. “Only casually, as one does. And what do you think? Ruth burst into tears!”
Just about this time Carola brought home from school a song and a game which I had never before encountered, though Ruth tells me it is well known among English children. The players choose sides and then they sing, acting out the words:
“Have you any bread and wine?
We are the Romans.
Have you any bread and wine?
We are the Roman soldiers.
No, we have no bread and wine.
We are the English.
No, we have no bread and wine.
We are the English soldiers.
Then we will have one cup full,
We are the Romans, etc.
No, you shan’t have one cup full.
We are the English.
Then we’ll tell our king of you.
We are the Romans.
We don’t care for king or you.
We are the English.
Then we’ll send our dogs to bite,
We are the Romans.
Then we’ll send our cats to scratch.
We are the English.
Are you ready for a fight?
We are the Romans.
Yes, we’re ready for a fight!
We are the English.
Bang, crash, rattle.
Now we’ve only got one arm.
We are the Romans.
Now we’ve only got one leg.
We are the English.
Now we’ve only got one eye.
We are the Romans.
Now we dance in merry ring,
Now we dance in merry ring,
We are the Roman soldiers .”
The war talk was not a regular thing, but rather special; it rose and fell in our lives, if not like the tide, at any rate with a definite rhythm. What was regular, and what dogged our footsteps every single day when the newspapers and the mail came, was the uneasy workings of government. England has always been more “politically conscious” than the States have; this is only another way of saying England has been in business a good deal longer, and so her citizens care more about how she works. The men who drew up the Declaration of Independence and, later, the Constitution, were politically conscious all right, trained in the English school, but they did their work so well and were in such a good spot that things ran smoothly for their heirs. By the time I was born we were letting the country run itself or anyway we thought it was running itself. England, though, has never been in such a good position for forgetting. I was astonished when I first came to England, almost twenty years ago, to find young men and women all belonging to political organizations, or debating societies, actually spending a lot of their time discussing government.
Nowadays, of course, we are drawing closer together in our habits if not ideas, and quite a few Americans get het up over government too. But until the American newspapers are cut down to the bone, as English papers are over here, we will never see politics there, as here, the outstanding passion of the nation. Day after day I read politics over my lunch (which is when we get the morning papers).
Day after day the first point of interest is the rations, and not just what rations, but why rations at all? That isn’t housekeeping, but politics. Next, the coal situation—not the coal ration alone, but the nationalization of coal; how much are we producing, what is it costing, are we pulling out of the tight hole we’re in? Shouldn’t we have waited before nationalizing, until we could afford a little margin for experiment?