Poetic Justice
I
The blow fell without warning, and a typewritten notice informed the Poet that the Cabinet Committee on Accommodation required the tiny, thread-bare chambers in Stafford’s Inn, where he had lived unobtrusively for seven happy, insolvent years.
“‘There was no worth in the fashion; there was no wit in the plan,’” murmured the Poet. The rooms were too small even for a Deputy-Director-General, and he knew that not one of the silk-stockinged, short-skirted, starling-voiced young women with bare arms and regimental badges, who acted as secretaries to Deputy-Director-Generals, would consent to walk up four flights of creaking, uncarpeted stairs to the dusty sparrows’ nest on the housetop that was his home.
For a while he scented a vendetta, but—deleterious poetry apart—he had injured no man, and the personnel of the Cabinet Committee was as little known to him as his poetry to the Cabinet Committee. In general, too, he was the object of a certain popularity and pitying regard; the Millionaire sent him presents of superfluous game each year, the Iron King invited him at short notice to make a fourteenth at dinner and the Official Receiver unloaded six bottles of sample port wine when the Poet succumbed to his annual bronchitis. Even the notice of eviction was politely worded and regretful; it was also uncompromising in spirit, and the Poet made his hurried way to four house-agents. No sooner had he started his requirements to be a bed-sitting-room (with use of bath) within the four-mile radius than all four agents offered him a Tudor manor house in Westmoreland; further, they refused to offer him anything else, but on his own initiative he discovered a studio in Glebe Place and a service-flat in Victoria Street.
“I saw in the paper that you’d been turned out,” said the Millionaire that night, when the Poet trudged home, footsore and fretful, to find his chambers occupied by the Iron King, the Private Secretary, the Lexicographer, the Military Attaché and their friends. “What are you going to do about it?” he continued with the relentlessness of a man who likes a prompt decision, even if it be a wrong one. “You know nothing about business, I’m sure; leases, premiums, insurance, all that sort of thing. You’re in a hole; I don’t see what more there is to be said.”
So far the Poet, his mind wavering wearily between Glebe Place and Victoria Street, had said nothing; he turned silently to the Iron King, wondering how, without being rude, to indicate his desire for bed.
“I saw rather a decent place that might suit you,” drawled the Private Secretary, smoothing a wrinkle out of his shapely silk socks. “It’s next to my Chief’s in Belgrave Square. Of course, I don’t know what rent they want for it…”
The Iron King shook his head.
“He couldn’t afford it,” he said, speaking through and around and over the Poet. “Now I’m told that there are some very comfortable and cheap boarding-houses near Kensington Palace Gardens….”
The Poet drew the cork of a fresh bottle of whisky and collected four unbroken tumblers, a pewter mug and two breakfast cups without handles. As so often before, his destiny seemed to be slipping out of his control into the hands of the practical, strong-voiced men who filled his sitting-room to overflowing and would not let him go to bed. The Military Attaché knew of a maisonnette in Albemarle Street; the Official Receiver had been recently brought into professional contact with a fine Georgian property in Buckinghamshire, where they could all meet for a week-end game of golf at Stoke Pogis. Somewhere in Chelsea—not Glebe Place—the Lexicographer had seen just the thing, if only he could be quite sure about the drains…. With loud cheerfulness they accepted the Millionaire’s postulate that the Poet knew nothing of business; unselfishly they placed all their experience and preferences at his disposal.
“Of course, there’s the servant problem,” an undistinguished voice remarked two hours later; and the Poet, settling to an uneasy sleep in his chair, mentally ruled out the Chelsea studio.
“The ordinary surveyor’s no use,” broke in the Lexicographer, pursuing his own line of thought. “What you want is a drainage expert.”
“I know these good, honest, middle-aged couples,” cried the Iron King with the bitterness of an oft-defrauded widower. “The woman always drinks, and them man always steals the cigars…”
“I have nothing but gas in my place,” said the decorous voice of the Private Secretary, “and I have it on pretty good authority that there’ll be a great coal shortage this winter. I don’t want that to go any further, though…”
The Millionaire rose to his feet with a yawn.
“He must get an experienced woman-friend to help him with things like carpets and curtains,” he ordained with mellow benevolence. “When my wife comes back from Wales…. How soon do you have to turn out, Poet?”
The Poet woke with a start and looked at the clock. The time was a quarter to two, and he still wanted to go to bed.
“Ten days,” he murmured drowsily.
“Jove! You haven’t much time,” said the Millionaire. “Now, look here; the one thing NOT to do is to be in a hurry. Any place you take now will probably have to serve you for several years, and you’ll find moving a lot more expensive than you think. If you can get some kind of shake-down for a few days,—” he turned expansively to his friends—“we may be able to give you a few hints.”
The Poet became suddenly wakeful and alert.
“Do I understand that you’re offering me a bed until you find me permanent quarters?” he enquired with slow precision.
“Er—yes,” said the Millionaire a little blankly.
“Thank you,” answered the Poet simply. “I say, d’you men mind if I turn you out now? It’s rather late, and I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
II
A week later the Poet walked up Park Lane, followed by an elderly man trundling two compressed cane trunks on a barrow with a loose wheel. It was a radiant summer afternoon, and taxis stood idle in long ranks, when they were not drawing in to the curb with winning gestures. The Poet, however, wished to make his arrival dramatic, and it was dramatic enough to make the Millionaire’s butler direct him to the tradesman’s entrance, while the Millionaire, remembering little but suspecting all, hurried away by a side door, leaving a message that he was out of England for the duration of the war. The lot fell on the Millionaire’s wife to invent such excuses as would rid the house of the Poet’s presence before dinner. The Millionaire’s instincts were entirely hospitable, but that night’s party had been arranged for the entertainment and subsequent destruction of four men with money to invest and, like the Poet, “no knowledge of business, investments, all that sort of thing.”
“No, we have not met before,” explained the Poet coldly and uncompromisingly, abandoning the rather gentle voice and caressing manners which caused women to invite him to dinner when they could think of no one else. “Your husband and one or two of our common friends have kindly undertaken to find me new quarters, and I have been invited to stay here until something suitable has been found.”
There was silence for a few moments, and the Millionaire’s wife looked apprehensively at the clock, while the Poet laid the foundations of a malignantly substantial tea.
“H-how far have you got at present?” she asked with an embarrassed laugh.
“Your husband told me to leave it to him,” answered the Poet, “and I’ve left it to him. There was a general feeling that I didn’t know what I wanted—house or flat, north or south of the Park, all the rest of it—; they said there would be a scandal if I employed a young maid, I couldn’t afford two, and an old one would pawn my clothes to buy gin. I am quoting your husband now; I know nothing of business. Every one agreed, too, that I must have a drain of some kind. Would you say it took long to find a bed-sitting room with use of bath?”
The Millionaire’s wife hurriedly pushed back her chair?
“My husband’s going abroad for the duration of the war,” she said in loyal explanation, “but it’s just possible that he hasn’t started yet.”
The Millionaire, returning on tip-toe from the loft over the garage, had sought asylum in the library, where he was smoking a cigar and reading the evening paper. As his wife entered he looked up with welcoming expectancy.
“How did you get rid of him?” he asked.
The Millionaire’s wife pressed her hands to her temples.
“My dear! What HAVE you been promising him?” she cried.
The Millionaire swore softly, as the truth sank into his brain.
“Have another place laid for dinner,” he ordered; “book two seats for a music-hall and take him out to supper afterwards. I can’t afford to be disturbed to-night. To-morrow I must get in touch with the Iron King…. I don’t see what more there is to be said.”
Four weeks later the Poet drove in a six-cylinder car from Park Lane to Eaton Square on an indeterminate visit to the Iron King. He was looking better for the month’s good wine and food, in which the Millionaire’s house abounded; but now the Millionaire, who based his fortune on knowing the right people in every walk of life, was arranging to have his house taken over by the Red Cross authorities. In a week’s time the house was to be found unsuitable and restored to him, but henceforth the Iron King was to have the honor of entertaining the Poet.
“How you ever came to make such a promise!” wailed the Millionaire’s wife for the twentieth time, as they drove to Claridge’s. “London’s so full that you might have known it’s impossible to get ANYthing.”
“I feel that we have exhausted this subject,” answered the Millionaire with the bruskness of a man whose nerves have worn thin; with the menace, too, of one who, having divorced his first wife, would divorce the second on small provocation.
The Iron King was not at home when the Poet arrived in Eaton Squire, but a pretty, young secretary, cultured to the point of transforming all her final “g’s” into “k’s” received him with every mark of welcome. She admired the Iron King romantically and was in the habit of writing his surname after her own Christian name to see how the combination looked; and, when he had departed each morning to contest his latest assessment for excess profits, she would wander through the house, planning little changes in the arrangement of the furniture and generally deploring the sober, colorless taste of the first Iron Queen. So far her employer returned none of her admiration. He addressed her loosely as “Miss—er” and forgot her name; he never noticed what clothes she was wearing or the pretty dimples that she made by holding down the inside flesh of her cheeks between her eye-teeth; further, he criticized her spelling spitefully and, on the occasion of the Millionaire’s second marriage, had dictated a savage half sheet beginning, “A young man may marry once, as he may get drunk once, without the world thinking much the worse of him; habitual intemperance is, on first principles, to be deplored….”
The pretty young secretary knew from fiction and the drama that the Iron King would never appreciate her until he stood in danger of losing her. She welcomed the Poet as a foil and misquoted his poetry twice before tea was over; then she invited him to accompany her to a picture palace, but the Poet, once inside the citadel, was reluctant to leave it until his position was more firmly established.
Scarcely entrenched at Claridge’s, the Millionaire telephoned derisively to the city, so that the Iron King returned home half an hour before his usual time, prepared to deal with the Poet as he dealt with querulous or inquisitive shareholders at General Meetings. The Poet, however, was long and painfully accustomed to combat with enraged editors and lost no time in assuming the offensive, demanding indignantly in a high head-voice, before the Iron King had crossed his own threshold, why no quarters had been found for him and how much longer any one imagined that he would put up with the indignity of being bandied from one wretched house to another.
The flushed cheeks and hysterical manner put the Iron King temporarily out of countenance.
“My dear fellow!” he interrupted ingratiatingly.
“I’m not a business man,” continued the Poet hotly. “You all of you told me that, and I’m disposed to say: ‘Thank God, I’m not.’”
The Iron King put his hat carefully out of reach and forced a smile.
“You mustn’t take it like that, old chap,” he said soothingly. “I—we—all of us are doing our best. Now we won’t bother about dressing; let’s go straight in and thrash the thing out over a bottle of wine.”
Instructing his butler very audibly to open a bottle of the 1906 Lanson, he slipped his arm through the Poet’s and led him, sullenly murmuring, into the dining-room. With the second bottle of champagne, his guest ceased to be aggrieved and became quarrelsome; when the port wine appeared, he had the Iron King cowed and broken in moral.
“If you find fault with everything, why do you come here, why stay here?” complained the Iron King with a last flickering effort to recover his independence.
“Why don’t you find me some other place to go to, as you promised?” the Poet retorted, as he made his way to the morning-room and sat down to order a month’s supply of underclothes from his hosier.
III
The Iron King always boasted that honesty was the best policy and that he was invariably willing to put his cards on the table. The Millionaire had once professed himself likely to be satisfied if the Iron King would only remove the fifth ace from his sleeve, and a certain coolness between the two men resulted. In general, however, he had the reputation of a frank, bluff fellow.
On the morrow of the Poet’s arrival, he remained in bed and announced in the quavering pencil-strokes of a sick man, that he was suffering from anthrax, which, he might add, was not only painful but infectious. The Poet scrawled across one corner of the note that anthrax was usually fatal, but that, as he himself had twice had it, he would risk taking it a third time in order to be with his friend. Thereupon the Iron King departed to the city, leaving the Poet to dictate blank verse to the pretty young secretary, who curled both feet round one leg of her chair, told him that she “loved his potry more’n anythink she’d ever read” and asked how all the hard words like “chrysoprase” and “asphdel” were spelt. That night a telegram arrived shortly before dinner, and the Iron King announced that the Ministry of Munitions was sending him to America to stabilize iron prices.
“Why can’t you finish one thing before starting another?” demanded the Poet hectoringly. “You haven’t YET found me any quarters, and you call yourself a business man. I shall of course stay on here till your return…”
The Iron King shook his head gravely.
“That’s impossible,” he interrupted. “My young secretary…”
“You must take her with you,” answered the Poet obstinately.
The subject was not pursued, but at bed time the Iron King roundly asked the Poet how much he would take to go away.
“I require a home,” answered the Poet frigidly, remembering the weary day spent by him in discovering the Glebe Place studio and the weary night spent by the Iron King in recommending Kensington boarding houses. “I do not want your money.”
“We shan’t fall out over a pound or two,” urged the Iron King with a meaning motion of the hand towards his breast pocket.
“A thing is either a promise or it is not a promise,” replied the Poet, as he turned on his heel. “I know nothing of business or what people are pleased to term ‘commercial morality.’”
Four weeks later the Poet left Eaton Square for the Private Secretary’s rooms in Bury Street. He looked thin and anemic after his month of privations, for the Iron King, improving in morale and recapturing something of the old strike-breaking spirit, had counter-attacked on the third day of the Poet’s visit. The chauffeur, butler and two footmen, all of military age, had been claimed on successive appeals as indispensable, but on their last appearance at the Tribunal the Iron King had unprotestingly presented them to the Army. This he followed by breakfasting in bed, lunching in the city, dining at his club and leaving neither instructions nor money for the maintenance of the household. For a time the Poet was saved from the greater starvation by the care of the pretty young secretary, but without an Iron King there was no need for a foil. Sharp words were exchanged one morning over the propriety of grounds in coffee; the pretty young secretary declared that she would “have nothink more to do with him or his old potry”; and in the afternoon he packed his trunks with his own hands and with his own hands dragged them downstairs on to the pavement, leaving the pretty young secretary biting viciously at the corner of a crumpled handkerchief drenched in “White Rose.”
The Private Secretary received him in a manner different from that adopted by either the Millionaire or the Iron King. The two men were of nearly the same age, but in a deferential, if mis-spent life the Private Secretary had learned to be non-committal. Well he knew that he had but one bedroom; well he knew that, on admitting it, the Poet would claim it from him.
“A spare bed?” he echoed, when the Poet dragged his trunks into the middle of a tiny sitting room. “Really, I have no statement to make.”
“At least you will not deny,” said the Poet with truculent emphasis, “that you undertook to find me suitable accommodation and to supply me with a bed until it was found.”
“I must refer you to the reply given to a similar question on the twenty-third ultimo,” answered the Private Secretary loftily. for a rich reward he could not have said where he had been or what he had done on the twenty-third ultimo, but to the Poet the reply was new and disconcerting.
“Where’s my flat anyway?” he pursued doggedly.
“I have no statement to make,” reiterated the Private Secretary.
After an awkward silence, during which neither yielded an inch of ground, the Poet dragged his trunks destructively downstairs and drove to the flat of the Official Receiver. Glowing with the consciousness of victory, the Private Secretary dressed for dinner and started out to his club. His good-humor was impaired, when he observed in his hall a pendant triangle of wall-paper flapping in the draught of the open door through which the Poet had dragged his trunks. Further on, the paint was scarred on the stairs, and the carpet of the main hall was rucked and disordered; there was also a lingering suggestion of escaping gas, and the Secretary observed a bracket hanging at a bibulous angle.
“This,” he murmured through grimly set teeth, “is sheer frightfulness.”
Returning to his rooms, he drawled a friendly warning by telephone to the Millionaire, who instantly gave orders that no one of any sex or age was to be admitted. Next he called up the Iron King and repeated the warning; then the Lexicographer, the Official Receiver and the Military Attaché were similarly placed on their guard, and there was nothing to do but to proceed to his belated dinner.
The Great War, which had converted staff officers into popular preachers, novelists into strategical experts and everyone else into a Minister of the Crown, had left the Poet (in name, at least) a poet and in nothing else anything at all. He acted precisely as the Private Secretary had intended him to act, driving first to the Lexicographer’s house, where he was greeted by a suspiciously new “TO LET” board, and thence to the Official Receiver’s flat, where a typewritten card informed him that this bell was out of order. Embarrassed but purposeful, he directed his four-wheeler to Eaton Square, but the blinds were down, and a semblance of mourning draped the Iron King’s house. In Park Lane a twenty-yard expanse of straw, nine inches thick, prayed silence for the Millionaire’s quick recovery.
“I don’t know where to go to next,” murmured the Poet dejectedly.
“Well, I’m blest if I do,” grumbled the driver. “And it’s past my tea-time. Doncher know where yer live?”
“Years ago I had rooms in Stafford’s Inn,” began the Poet. “Then the Cabinet Committee…”
The cabman descended from his box for a heart to heart conversation.
“Now you look ’ere,” he said. “I got a boy at ’ome the livin’ image of you…”
“But how nice!” interrupted the Poet, wondering apprehensively whether an invitation was on its way to him.
The cabman sniffed.
“Not quite righ in ’is ’ead ’e ain’t. THEREfore I don’t want to be ’arsh with yer. Jump inside, let me drive yer ter Stafford’s Inn, pay me me legal fare and a bob ter drink yer ’ealth—and we’ll say no more abaht it. If yer don’t—” He made a threatening gesture towards the Poet’s precariously strapped trunks—“I’ll throw the blinkin’ lot on ter the pivement, and yer can carry ’em ’ome on yer ’ead. See?”
“I couldn’t, you know,” objected the Poet gently.
“Jump inside,” repeated the cabman.
One hope was as forlorn as another, and the Poet was too sick with hunger to think of resistance. In time the four-wheeler rumbled its way to think of resistance. In time the four-wheeler rumbled its way to Stafford’s Inn; in time and by force of habit the Poet was mounting the bare, creaking, wooden stairs; in time he found himself fitting his unsurrendered latch key into his abandoned lock.
Beyond an eight week’s layer of dust on chairs and table, the threadbare rooms were little changed. A loaf of bread, green and furred with mold, lay beside an empty marmalade pot from which a cloud of flies emerged with angry buzzing; a breakfast cup without a handle completed the furniture of the table, and in the rickety armchair was an eight-week-old “Morning Post.”
“The Cabinet Committee has neglected its opportunities,” grumbled the Poet, surveying with disfavor the dusty, derelict scene.
Then his eye was caught by a long envelope, thrust half-way under the door, from the Cabinet Committee itself. An indecipherable set of initials, later describing itself as his obedient servant, was directed to inform him on a date two months earlier that it had been decided not to requisition the offices and chambers of Stafford’s Inn. The formal notice was accordingly to be regarded as canceled.
The Poet, who knew nothing of business, wrote instructing his solicitors to claim for two months’ disturbance from the Defense of the Realm Commission on Losses and to include all legal costs in the claim.
IV
Three weeks later the Private Secretary was strolling across the Horse Guard’s Parade on his way to luncheon, when he caught sight of the Poet. Since their last altercation his conscience had been as uneasy as a Private Secretary’s conscience can be, and he strove to avoid the meeting. The Poet, however, was full of sunshine and smiles.
“I’ve not seen you for weeks!” he cried welcomingly. “How’s everybody and what’s everybody doing? Is the Millionaire all right again? I understand he’s been ill.”
The Private Secretary eyed his friend suspiciously.
“He has not left his house for three weeks,” he answered.
“And the Iron King.”
“He has not either.”
The Poet’s eyes lit up with dawning comprehension.
“What about the Lexicographer and the Official Receiver?” he asked. “The same? What an infernal nuisance! I wanted to call round and see whether they had got me a flat.”
The Private Secretary shook his head.
“It’s not the least use,” he said emphatically. “None of them has been outside his front door for three weeks, no one knows when they’ll come out again, no one is allowed inside. Last night I had a box given me for the theater, and I tried to make up a party; all their telephones were disconnected, and, when I drove round in person, I couldn’t even get the bell answered.” He paused and then enquired carelessly, “By the way, have you got into your new quarters yet? They would be interested to know.”
“I haven’t got any new quarters,” answered the Poet. “You remember that you and the others were going to find them for me. I know nothing of business—and I’m not likely to get new rooms until I see the Millionaire and the Iron King.”
At the steps of his club the Private Secretary paused, as though wondering whether to say that the Poet was unlikely to see the Iron King or the Millionaire until he had got his new rooms. This prolonged voluntary self-internment was a source of inconvenience, for in the peaceful days before the Cabinet Committee on Accommodation had stepped in, there were pleasant parties in Eaton Square and Park Lane. Now the Private Secretary was reduced to paying for his own dinners more often than was agreeable. He said nothing, however, for fear of concentrating the Poet’s fire on himself.
“It must be simply wrecking their business,” said the Poet to himself, as he walked to Bedford Row to see how the claim for disturbance was progressing. “It serves them right, though, for talking drains when I wanted to go to bed.”
Stephen McKenna
The Spell of the Kilties
What made the crowds turn out in their applauding thousands in New York, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, and wherever the “Kilties” from Canada appeared during their visit to the United States of America on their British Recruiting Mission, during the summer of 1917?
Or why do the inhabitants of Paris single out the kilted regiments when a March Past of the forces of the Allies is held on a National Fete Day, and press upon the soldiers with showers of flowers and tokens of admiration?
Is it simply because the dress worn is somewhat out of the common, giving a touch of color to these gray times, and bringing associations of days of old, as the men swing along, with a swish of their kilts, to the skirl of the Pipes?
Or is there not a deeper meaning in this spontaneous welcome which comes so evidently from the hearts of the onlookers, and one which is reflected in the popularity of Colonel Walter Scott’s New York kilted Highlanders, and by the many find bodies of men turned out—mostly at their own expense—by the Scottish Clan and Highland Dress Associations, in various cities of the U. S. A.?
The truth is that deep down in the hearts of the majority of the human race there exists a profound attachment to the ideals of gallantry and chivalry which were nourished by the stories we loved in childhood, and by the tales of Scottish prowess, in prose and poetry, selected for the school-books in use by the children of the English-speaking peoples.
Scotland has indeed been blessed by the possession of poets and bards who have preserved her annals and sung the deeds of her patriot heroes in so alluring a form, that her sons and daughters are assured of a welcome in any part of the world, and start with the great asset of being always expected to “make good” in every land of their adoption. Wherever they may roam, we find them occupying positions of influence, and still cherishing and promulgating the traditions and customs of the Land of the Heather, which impel to high thinking, resolute doing, and the upholding of old standards, such as build up the lives both of individuals and of nations.
And thus, when the moment of emergency arrives when “to every man and nation comes the moment to decide” you will find the men and women of Scottish descent to the forefront in every fight for liberty and righteousness in every part of the globe.
And in the midst of the clash and din of arms you will catch ever and anon the sound of the up-lifting cadence of some grand old Scottish Psalm tune, bringing comfort, and courage, and clam,—and then the call of the Pipes, inspiring war-worn troops to accomplish impossible tasks, such as the feats which have made the Gordon Highlanders and their Pipers immortal—as at Dargai, and have brought fresh glory to many a Scottish Regiment in this great war—aye, and to many a regiment of brother Gaels from Ireland also, of whose exploits we have heard as they rushed into the fray, preceded by their Irish War-Pipes.
A few weeks ago, a young widow with her two months’ old baby in her arms, was following the remains of her husband to his warrior’s grave “somewhere in France.” She was dry-eyed and rebellious in her youthful despair, as she walked at the head of the sad little procession of her husband’s comrades;—and then the party met a Highland Pipe Band, whose Pipe-Major, quick to understand the situation, halted his men, wheeled them round, and gave the signal to play the lovely Lament: “Lochaber no more!”
At the sound of the familiar strains the founts of sorrow were unsealed, and weeping, but comforted, the child-wife mother was able to commit her dead hero’s dust to the grave in sure and certain confidence of a glorious re-union, and turned to face life again with his little son, with strength and faith renewed.
This is but a little incident, but it illustrates the hold that the music of the Gael has on the hearts of its children, and of its power to evoke memories and associations full of inspiration both in joy and in sorrow.
And Is Not This the Interpertation of the Spell of the “Kilties”?
[signed] Lady Aberdeen and Temain