I
seem to recall what happened once when a certain middleweight from
this side went over there and broke the British heart by licking
the British champion; and again what happened when a Yankee boy
won the Marathon at the Olympic games in London a few years ago.
But as this man was a Briton himself these other Britons harkened
to his sputterings, for England, you know, grants the right of
free speech to all Englishmen - and denies it to all Englishwomen.
The settled Englishman declines always to be jostled out of his
hereditary state of intense calm. They tell of a man who dashed
into the reading room of the Savage Club with the announcement
that a lion was loose on the Strand - a lion that had escaped from
a traveling caravan and was rushing madly to and fro, scaring
horses and frightening pedestrians.
"Great excitement! Most terrific, old dears - on my word!" he added,
addressing the company.
Over the top of the Pink Un an elderly gentleman of a full habit
of life regarded him sourly.
"Is that any reason," he inquired, "why a person should rush into
a gentleman's club and kick up such a deuced hullabaloo?"
The first man - he must have been a Colonial - gazed at the other
man in amazement.
"Well," he asked, "what would you do if you met a savage lion loose
on the Strand?"
"Sir, I should take a cab!"
And after meeting an Englishman or two of this type I am quite
prepared to say the story might have been a true one. If he met
a lion on the Strand to-day he would take a cab; but if to-morrow,
walking in the same place, he met two lions, he would write a
letter to the Times complaining of the growing prevalence of lions
in the public thoroughfares and placing the blame on the Suffragettes
or Lloyd George or the Nonconformists or the increasing discontent
of the working classes - that is what he would do.
On the other hand, if he met a squirrel on a street in America it
would be a most extraordinary thing. Extraordinary would undoubtedly
be the word he would use to describe it. Lions on the Strand would
be merely annoying, but chipmunks on Broadway would constitute a
striking manifestation of the unsettled conditions existing in a
wild and misgoverned land; for, you see, to every right-minded
Englishman of the insular variety - and that is the commonest variety
there is in England - whatever happens at home is but part of an
orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens
beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and
exceedingly disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil
he can excuse it. He always has an explanation or an extenuation
handy. But if it happens elsewhere - well, there you are, you see!
What was it somebody once called England - Perfidious Alibi-in',
wasn't it?
