Part 14 (1/2)

Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in his inside coat pocket and, with intense surprise, as though he had performed a conjuring trick, produced a paper that creaked and crinkled.

”That's it!” he cried.

”You come with me,” commanded Scotland Yard, ”before you lose it again.”

Two nights later, between the acts at a theatre, I met a young old friend. Twenty years before we had made a trip through Central America and Venezuela. To my surprise, for I had known him in other wars, he was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat and lawn tie and tail-coat. He looked as though he had on his hand nothing more serious than money and time. I complained that we had not met since the war.

”It's a chance, our meeting to-night,” he said, ”for I start for Cairo in the morning. I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and arrived here only to-day.”

”Wednesday!” I exclaimed. ”How could you do it?”

”Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta,” he explained, ”transport to Ma.r.s.eilles, troop train to Calais, and there our people shot me across the Channel on a hospital s.h.i.+p. Then I got a special to town.”

”You _are_ a swell!” I gasped. ”What's your rank?”

”Captain.”

That did not explain it.

”What's your job?”

”King's messenger.”

It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti-treating law would not let me give him a drink, but I led him to where one was. For he had restored my faith. He had replaced on his pedestal my favorite character in fiction.

On returning to London for the fourth time since the war began, but after an absence of months, one finds her much nearer to the field of operations. A year ago her citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes from living on an island. Compared with Paris, where at Claye the enemy was within fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Montmorency, within ten miles, London seemed as far removed from the front as Montreal. Since then, so many of her men have left for the front and not returned, so many German air-s.h.i.+ps have visited her, and inhumanly a.s.sa.s.sinated her children and women, that she seems a part of it. A year ago an officer entering a restaurant was conscious of his uniform. To-day, anywhere in London, a man out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki armlet, is as conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box. A year ago the lamps had been so darkened that it was not easy to find the keyhole to your street door.

Now you are in luck if you find the street. Nor does that mean you have lingered long at dinner. For after nine-thirty nowhere in London can you buy a drink, not at your hotel, not even at your club. At nine-thirty the waiter whisks your drink off the table. What happens to it after that, only the waiter knows.

A year ago the only women in London in uniform were the nurses. Now so many are in uniform that to one visitor they presented the most surprising change the war has brought to that city. Those who live in London, to whom the change has come gradually, are probably hardly aware how significant it is. Few people, certainly few men, guessed that so many positions that before the war were open only to men, could be filled quite as acceptably by women. Only the comic papers guessed it.

All that they ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and ”equal rights”

women ever hoped for seems to have come true. Even women policemen.

True, they do not take the place of the real, immortal London bobby, neither do the ”special constables,” but if a young girl is out late at night with her young man in khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and sent home. And her young man in khaki dare not resist.

In Paris, when the place of a man who had been mobilized was taken by his wife, sister, or daughter, no one was surprised. Frenchwomen have for years worked in partners.h.i.+p with men to a degree unknown in England.

They helped as bookkeepers, shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always handled the money; in the theatres the ushers and box openers were women; the government tobacco-shops were run by women. That Frenchwomen were capable, efficient, hard working was as trite a saying as that the j.a.panese are a wonderful little people. So when the men went to the front and the women carried on their work, they were only proving a proverb.

But in England careers for women, outside those of governess, typist, barmaid, or show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis, were as few as votes. The war has changed that. It gave woman her chance, and she jumped at it. ”When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” he will find he must look for a man's job, and that men's jobs no longer are sinecures.

In his absence women have found out, and, what is more important, the employers have found out that to open a carriage door and hold an umbrella over a customer is not necessarily a man's job. The man will have to look for a position his sister cannot fill, and, judging from the present aspect of London, those positions are rapidly disappearing.

That in the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and sn.o.bbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a mechanical one, is no difficult task. It never was absolutely necessary that a butler and two men should divide the labor of serving one cup of coffee, one lump of sugar, and one cigarette. A healthy young woman might manage all three tasks and not faint. So the innovation of female butlers and footmen is not important. But many of the jobs now held in London by women are those which require strength, skill, and endurance.

Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and closing the steel gates for eight hours a day require strength and endurance; and yet in all the big department stores the lifts are worked by girls. Women also drive the vans, and dragging on the brake of a brewery-wagon and curbing two draft-horses is a very different matter from steering one of the cars that made peace hateful. Not that there are no women chauffeurs. They are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, business cars, private cars, taxicabs, ambulances.

In men's caps and uniforms of green, gray, brown, or black, and covered to the waist with a robe, you mistake them for boys. The other day I saw a motor-truck clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. It was filled with over two dozen Tommies, and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of not more than eighteen years. How many indoor positions have been taken over by women one can only guess; but if they are in proportion to the out-of-door jobs now filled by women and girls, it would seem as though half the work in London was carried forward by what we once were pleased to call the weaker s.e.x. To the visitor there appear to be regiments of them. They look very businesslike and smart in their uniforms, and whatever their work is they are intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman attempts a man's work she is conscious. She is more concerned with the fact that she is holding down a man's job than with the job. Whether she is a lady lawyer, lady doctor, or lady journalist, she always is surprised to find herself where she is. The girls and women you see in uniform by the thousands in London seem to have overcome that weakness.

They are performing a man's work, and their interest is centred in the work, not in the fact that a woman has made a success of it. If, after this, women in England want the vote, and the men won't give it to them, the men will have a hard time explaining why.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by Brown Bros._

”They have women policemen now.”]

During my few days in England, I found that what is going forward in Paris for blind French officers is being carried on in London at St.