Further Foolishness Part 16

Yet the bill, as I say, is a thing that we never speak of. Instead of it my tailor pa.s.ses to the weather. Ordinary people always begin with this topic. Tailors, I notice, end with it. It is only broached after the suit is ordered, never before.

"Pleasant weather we are having," he says. It is never other, so I notice, with him. Perhaps the order of a suit itself is a little beam of suns.h.i.+ne.

Then we move together towards the front of the store on the way to the outer door.

"Nothing to-day, I suppose," says my tailor, "in s.h.i.+rtings?"

"No, thank you."

This is again a mere form. In thirty years I have never bought any s.h.i.+rtings from him. Yet he asks the question with the same winsomeness as he did thirty years ago.

"And nothing, I suppose, in collaring or in hosiery?"

This is again futile. Collars I buy elsewhere and hosiery I have never worn.

Thus we walk to the door, in friendly colloquy. Somehow if he failed to speak of s.h.i.+rtings and hosiery, I should feel as if a familiar cord had broken;

At the door we part.

"Good afternoon," he says. "A week from Tuesday--yes --good afternoon."

Such is--or was--our calm unsullied intercourse, unvaried or at least broken only by consignments from Europe.

I say it _was_, that is until just the other day.

And then, coming to the familiar door, for my customary summer suit, I found that he was there no more. There were people in the store, unloading shelves and piling cloth and taking stock. And they told me that he was dead. It came to me with a strange shock. I had not thought it possible. He seemed--he should have been --immortal.

They said the worry of his business had helped to kill him. I could not have believed it. It always seemed so still and tranquil--weaving his tape about his neck and marking measures and holding cloth against his leg beside the sunlight of the window in the back part of the shop.

Can a man die of that? Yet he had been "going behind,"

they said (however that is done), for years. His wife, they told me, would be left badly off. I had never conceived him as having a wife. But it seemed that he had, and a daughter, too, at a conservatory of music --yet he never spoke of her--and that he himself was musical and played the flute, and was the sidesman of a church--yet he never referred to it to me. In fact, in thirty years we never spoke of religion. It was hard to connect him with the idea of it.

As I went out I seemed to hear his voice still saying, "And nothing to-day in s.h.i.+rtings?"

I was sorry I had never bought any.

There is, I am certain, a deep moral in this. But I will not try to draw it. It might appear too obvious.

Peace, War, and Politics

XI. Germany from Within Out

The adventure which I here narrate resulted out of a strange psychological experience of a kind that (outside of Germany) would pa.s.s the bounds of comprehension.

To begin with, I had fallen asleep.

Of the reason for my falling asleep I have no doubt. I had remained awake nearly the whole of the preceding night, absorbed in the perusal of a number of recent magazine articles and books dealing with Germany as seen from within. I had read from cover to cover that charming book, just written by Lady de Washaway, under the t.i.tle _Ten Years as a Toady, or The Per-Hapsburgs as I Didn't Know Them_. Her account of the life of the Imperial Family of Austria, simple, unaffected, home-like; her picture of the good old Emperor, dining quietly off a cold potato and sitting after dinner playing softly to himself on the flute, while his attendants gently withdrew one by one from his presence; her description of merry, boisterous, large-hearted Prince Stefan Karl, who kept the whole court in a perpetual roar all the time by asking such riddles as "When is a sailor not a sailor?" (the answer being, of course, when he is a German Prince)--in fact, the whole book had thrilled me to the verge of spiritual exhaustion.

From Lady de Washaway's work I turned to peruse Hugo von Halbwitz's admirable book, _Easy Marks, or How the German Government Borrows its Funds_; and after that I had read Karl von Wiggleround's _Despatches_ and Barnstuff's _Confidential Letters to Criminals_.

As a consequence I fell asleep as if poisoned.

But the amazing thing is that, whenever it was or was not that I fell asleep, I woke up to find myself in Germany.

I cannot offer any explanation as to how this came about.

I merely state the fact.

There I was, seated on the gra.s.sy bank of a country road.

I knew it was Germany at once. There was no mistaking it. The whole landscape had an orderliness, a method about it that is, alas, never seen in British countries.

The trees stood in neat lines, with the name of each nailed to it on a board. The birds sat in regular rows, four to a branch, and sang in harmony, very simply, but with the true German feeling.

There were two peasants working beside the road. One was picking up fallen leaves, and putting them into neat packets of fifty. The other was cutting off the tops of the late thistles that still stood unwithered in the chill winter air, and arranging them according to size and colour. In Germany nothing is lost; nothing is wasted.

It is perhaps not generally known that from the top of the thistle the Germans obtain picrate of ammonia, the most deadly explosive known to modern chemistry, while from the bulb below, b.u.t.ter, crude rubber and sweet cider are extracted in large quant.i.ties.

The two peasants paused in their work a moment as they saw me glance towards them, and each, with the simple gentility of the German working man, quietly stood on his head until I had finished looking at him.

I felt quite certain, of course, that it must only be a matter of a short time before I would inevitably be arrested.

I felt doubly certain of it when I saw a motor speeding towards me with a stout man, in military uniform and a Prussian helmet, seated behind the chauffeur.

The motor stopped, but to my surprise the military man, whom I perceived to be wearing the uniform of a general, jumped out and advanced towards me with a genial cry of:

"Well, Herr Professor!"

I looked at him again.

"Why, Fritz!" I cried.

"You recognize me?" he said.

"Certainly," I answered, "you used to be one of the six German waiters at McCluskey's restaurant in Toronto."

The General laughed.

"You really took us for waiters!" he said. "Well, well.

My dear professor! How odd! We were all generals in the German army. My own name is not Fritz Schmidt, as you knew it, but Count von b.o.o.benstein. The b.o.o.bs of b.o.o.benstein," he added proudly, "are connected with the Hohenzollerns. When I am commanded to dine with the Emperor, I have the hereditary right to eat anything that he leaves."

"But I don't understand!" I said. "Why were you in Toronto?"

"Perfectly simple. Special military service. We were there to make a report. Each day we kept a record of the velocity and direction of the wind, the humidity of the air, the distance across King Street and the height of the C.P.R. Building. All this we wired to Germany every day."

"For what purpose?" I asked.