Frank Baker Page 6

  But nothing has fallen. And what is it swooping down upon his upturned face, making blood-curdling noises such as he has never heard before and will certainly never hear again?

  Perfectly organized, the line of beaters advanced steadily. They heard the first and second volleys break the stillness of the early morning. Now, if ever, they would see the end of these birds. But why was there no third volley? Their hearts sank, a sickening dread overcame them, and they began to run fearfully towards the twelve sportsmen. My friend headed for the statue of the boy, since he knew the man whose stand that was. Sick with fear, he saw no birds, not even a feather; nothing but the figure of his friend lying at the foot of the statue, his clothes torn and spat­tered with blood, his face hideously unrecognizable, his eyes torn from his head. A few yards away lay his loader in the same horrible condition. His two retrievers, pitiful to see, sat on either side of his mutilated body, howling inconsolably. A miserable church bell suddenly cracked on the air; the little figure of the statue played unconcernedly on his pipe as though nothing had happened. My friend ran from the place and said he would never want to go near it again.

  The news of this attack soon reached north London. I remember I did not go to the cathedral by the river that evening. I was afraid. Of what? Birds? No. Of something far deeper which I could not attempt to define nor dared to try.

  *

  The twelve sportsmen were not the only ones who made any organized attempt to rout the birds. At least two other attempts come to my mind.

  There was the tragic and futile case of the gallant and ambitious colonel who took his courage in both hands, without waiting for authority, and launched a hurriedly organized attack with his battalion, armed with rifles, hand-grenades, machine-guns, and all the ludicrous paraphernalia of war. This attack took place on a bleak stretch of country which was reserved for teaching the pride of our forces how best to hate and kill all foreigners. All that resulted was a ghastly confusion. Many of the soldiers were badly hurt, some killed. No birds appeared to be damaged. The wretched colonel, realizing the extent of his folly, committed suicide.

  In all parts of the world, as we heard later, similar things were happening. In a place called Japan, where suicide was considered a most honourable death, a hundred young airmen dived simultane­ously in a furious headlong smash to a ground infested with birds. Their machines were soaked in some highly inflammable substance. According to plan, the airplanes burst at once into blinding flames; the men, however, had sacrificed themselves in vain. For the birds rose through the flames unscathed and apparently much amused.

  But I am pushing events too far forward. All these stories belong to the later days of September and we are still in August.

  Day followed day, wearisome and fierce with heat. London, shocked and disturbed by the sinister incident in Trafalgar Square, seemed to be waiting—waiting in unspoken fear for the birds to come again. But the days passed and they did not come.

  They were tense, heavy days; days in which I found it harder than usual to concentrate on my work in the City. It occurs to me that you know little of that work, and since it is important for you to understand the nature of my existence in those days, I should tell you something about the business of Insurance in which I was employed.

  Very well then.

  The office, Leadenhall Street.

  Leadenhall. Does it convey a picture of imprisonment masquerading under hospitality? The word seems to me appropriate. For we were chained and we had somehow to maintain a pretence of satisfaction, since we all pos­sessed what was known in those days as a “good safe job with a pension at the end.” Our work was known as marine in­surance, and it dealt entirely with the insuring of voyaging ships and their cargoes. It was not uninteresting provided imagination could carry one’s pencil beyond the boundaries of a registered voyage to the actual places—so far away, so magical in sound—that one had written down.

  Imagine several young men in a sound physical condition, seated side by side at long desks in a large room in which there is no adequate ventilation, writing such phrases as “Steamship Arlanza; Manchester to Rio; cotton goods; five thousand pounds.” If you wrote several such phrases in a day you would begin to feel somewhat envious of the cotton goods. I used to turn over the pages of an atlas in order to locate some obscure port in Scandinavia or China, and I would find myself entranced by the very shape of a country, its mountains, its rivers, its vegeta­tion, all romantically coloured on the map. For a moment I could see myself on the turret-deck of an oil tanker, my face scarred with the mark of the sea winds; heaving tipsily in a whaler in the Bering Sea, or floating placidly in the deep blue waters of the Indian isles. Suddenly a bell would ring and I would be summoned to carry a pen to the Underwriter’s desk.

  The very nature of this work tempted us to activity, emphasizing more forcibly the fact that we were bound by four thick walls. What forlorn cargoes we carried in our minds were shipped, one fortnight in the year, to some crowded seaside resort. No wonder that as time went on, all the individuality and natural yearning for adventure died out of a youth, till with advancing years he degener­ated to a querulous old dullard with a family of children for whom he could imagine no other fate than his own.

  I worked in a room called the underwriting room, the place where the main business of the marine department was conducted. There were about twenty of us; I, the youngest, called junior-clerk. Amongst other duties I had to copy what were known as declaration policies into large registers. I cannot remember many details of that labour; I have a distinct impression, however, that practically all the arduous work I thus executed was of little or no advantage to the firm, and that my carefully written records were rarely, if ever, referred to. At first, sensible of my fortunate position—for a desk in the underwriting room was something in the nature of an honour—I was conscientious, making my entries with scrupulous care. Later, when I realized they were never looked at but only lodged away in some basement strong-room where, year in year out, they grew thick with dust—I grew reckless, wrote quickly and illegibly, and only entered half what I was supposed to. I had been to the strong-room one day. Discovering old records of the firm’s transactions dating back nearly two hundred years and by now entirely useless even as antiques, I had been seized with a frenzy of impatience for such a shameful waste of youth’s energy. I took bundle after bundle of ancient claims documents in long yellow envelopes, foreign registers from branches all over the world, account books, and ledgers—all written by hands long ago dead—and thrust them into the great furnace that heated the water-pipes all over the building. How vivid that scene is! I trembled at my temerity, standing over that deep, white-hot pit, tumbling stack after stack of mildewed papers into the heart of that clean flame. I have always felt that I did the firm a great service in thus ridding them of many of their unwanted records.

  I shall not enter into much description of the men who worked with me in that underwriting room. I can recall one who was permanently under the drowsing influence of alcohol. In the afternoon he could be depended upon to sign any risk in the firm’s name, however precarious it may have been. To him, brokers with doubtful slips (pieces of paper on which rough details of the merchant’s risk were given) flocked assiduously. It was a source of endless enjoyment to us younger clerks to watch this blithe inebriate, his black, glossy head swaying over the desk, scrawl his initials across a slip he had not even seen. If the ship he had so guaranteed on the firm’s behalf were to founder within five minutes of his signing his initials, the firm would have eventually to pay the amount stated as value of the ship or cargo. The bare initials con­stituted a promise.

  They all seem much the same to me, those men of all ages from twenty to sixty, cooped like scrabbling hens in one room. I close my eyes. I see wads of policies dropped on a desk before me; I see at the end of the day, baskets full of waste paper; I see a row of impatient brokers waiting for the Underwriter wh
o will not emerge from his private sanctum; I see a powerful, exquisitely manicured hand turning over the pages of a massive scarlet book known as Lloyd’s Register, wherein the details of every ship in the world are entered; I see a slip of pale-green paper which bears the announcement that such and such a ship is stranded and a total wreck off the Land’s End.

  They were all the same, I said. And so they were; essentially in­offensive men whose youth had been trapped in the beginning as mine had been trapped.

  But there is one, who even to this day stands out as a type of humanity from whom selfish ambition had squeezed every noble principle that might originally have been present. This is the Under­writer. I cannot remember his name. He was always simply, the Underwriter: a creature of power who controlled the whole department; whose word or gesture might lose a man his position; whose total earnings were more than the sum amount of all the other men in the room.

  The Underwriter. . . .

  Picture a small bow-legged man with a wrinkled epicene face in which two eyes seem to press inwards to a thin slot above a flat nose; a yellow wig ill-concealing a head hairless as an egg; lips that curve inwards to a dry mouth; a body which would appear to be composed of some substance neither bone nor muscle, yet resilient as rubber; hands dry and as inexpressive as pieces of leather. A man who reserves a succulent smile for brokers who have been known to bring him good business; a man who encourages men to grovel before him, then suddenly kicks them away with a snarl. A man whose knowledge of the world is confined to figures on a blue slip of paper; a man who is the quintessential type of that odious being who flourished in our day under the name of capitalist.

  To me that man is conspicuous as a sort of monster; a bloodless leech, sucking youth dry and bloating himself with its sweated energy. He was loathed by us all, yet nobody dared to disobey him.

  Such was the Underwriter, a man honoured by his high position as head of one of the oldest marine insurance firms in the City of London; a man with the mentality of a fly and the power of a spider whose web has been built for him. We could not breed such a type to-day; were he by chance to appear amongst us we should treat him with compassion.

  I will draw one picture for you, then I will cease for to-day.

  It is midday of a hot summer morning, and the heat in the under­writing room is grossly oppressive. The junior clerk as he deals with the queue of brokers’ boys at his desk is borne up and refreshed in his task by the slight breath of fresh air which finds its way in from an area through a half-open window near him. The Underwriter, however, who is at the other end of the room, thinks very differently about this stimulating little breeze. A soot has blown in and settled on his clean blotting-paper. He rings his bell and the junior clerk runs immediately to his desk, thus delaying his own pressing work. “Shut that window,” says the Underwriter, without looking up. The junior clerk goes to the window and, whether accidentally or deliberately he never knows, lets it down on its cord with a sharp bang that echoes jarringly through the sanctimonious silence of the room. The silence that follows this unexpected noise seems empha­sized. The Underwriter again rings his bell and the junior clerk again attends. “Let that happen again,” says the Underwriter, “and I will have you removed.”

  The junior clerk stumbles back to his desk in a blind rage, won­dering whether it would not be better to be removed.

  *

  About a week after the birds had appeared in Trafalgar Square the newspapers brought them before us with increased animation. Previously their visits had been confined to London. They had disappeared as miraculously as they had appeared; the last that had been seen of them, a smoky patch in the sky over the North Sea.

  Now suddenly we heard of them in the remote islands of the Outer Hebrides, attention first being called to their presence by the agitation of immense flocks of gulls and other sea-birds who one morning all flew inland, screeching and wailing most dismally, and herding on to the roofs of small fishing villages. Almost simul­taneous with this report came a similar tale from the west, where several of the uninhabited isles of Scilly were invaded by the birds, who drove the gulls away over the sea and back to Cornwall. A man in the lonely Wolf Lighthouse saw, through a telescope, ranks of dark-coloured birds—more like crows he reported—who appeared to be breaking up and heading in different directions.

  Everybody was in a fever of excitement. In the office we could talk of little else, and even the Underwriter found it hard to main­tain his usual profound gravity when news came through to Lloyd’s—the great centre of marine activity where news of all shipping was received—of a British ship in which we were interested, having caught fire and exploded to a total loss somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near the Dutch East Indies. I remember the first vague report of her having been sighted in difficulties miles out to sea, nothing more than a struggling speck from which, as it seemed, a thick line of smoke uncoiled into the sky. I was told to run to Lloyd’s, a few yards from our office. In the centre of that magnificent room was a rostrum in which sat a uniformed messenger whose duty it was to call, in a loud voice, any broker who was required for business. To him I gave the name of the broker whom our Underwriter wished to see in order to reinsure, if possible, the sinking ship.

  I remember that nobody would touch that particular risk, so we could not avoid the heavy claim, both for the hull and for her cargo of arms which she had been carrying to China. Within a few hours we read on the tape-machine at Lloyd’s that she had gone down with all her crew. No further news was ever received of her, but it was supposed that the birds had in some way mastered the vessel, confused her crew, and brought about her disaster.

  Within a few days the newspapers were crowded with news of the birds’ activities in all parts of the world. There was a story of the Pope who, travelling in all his gorgeous panoply from the Vatican to some church in another part of Rome for an ecclesiastical function, was considerably agitated by the sudden collapse of the sumptuously embroidered canopy under which he was always carried. Apparently a small band of perhaps a hundred birds suddenly swooped upon it, cram­ming it down upon the venerable prelate’s head. The Swiss Guards, who were always in attendance upon the Holy Father, raised their rifles and shot without much aim or discrimination into the air. An aged cardinal was killed. The birds, however, escaped and flew away, carrying large shreds of the canopy in their beaks. The Pope with great diplomacy and tact adjusted his tall white hat, moved his ringed hand over the people in the authentic sign of the cross of Jesus, and restored order. The cardinal was hastily carried away.

  I remember that incident—though I was not, of course, present—because of the fact that although it had been strictly ordered by the Pope that no photographs were to be taken of his procession, one of our English newspapers devoted its entire back page to a misty picture of the prelate seated in his swaying throne, looking a little uneasy under a tattered canopy, surrounded by an immense crowd of soldiers, cardinals, and members of various religious orders, all in quaint costumes.

  About this time also, a detestable man who had sprung into great prominence in Germany was grievously plagued by the birds on the occasion of an important political gathering. He was prominent as persecutor of the Jews and oracle of the old imperial war-cry of his country. Every now and again he used to address great gatherings of his people, the subject of his discourse generally being concerned with his desire for peace with all nations. Nobody in our island took these ingenuous aspira­tions seriously, an attitude which was, of course, apt to make the little fellow angry.

  Once, when he was addressing such a meeting, a small bird flew over his head, casting his load with a gentle plop on to the care­fully brushed black hair. The reverent silence that had been main­tained amongst his vast audience, broke gently to a shy murmur of laughter. Stern soldiers shouted for order. Almost immediately fifty or sixty birds pounced upon the flag that fluttered by the side of the speaker, tore it to pieces, and
flew away with outrageous cries. The meeting continued with some difficulty, the Chancellor—as he was called—not wishing to draw attention to the streak of grey offal on his head by wiping it off, but continually embarrassed by its presence.

  Such incidents as these were common to most of the great capital cities of the world. And it was not many hours before Lon­don saw the birds again. This time they came, not in one massive flock but in several smaller groups, fluttering round and round the City and never landing anywhere except on roofs and tall monu­ments. A swarm draped themselves over the figure of Justice which stood on the dome of a sinister building called Bailey, a place where criminals were judged and often sentenced to death. When the birds left it, the figure was so spattered with their odious droppings, that it had to be cleaned. This, however, seemed to annoy the birds, who were observed the next morning huddled around Justice in even greater numbers. They looked very cold, pressed tight against one another as though for warmth. Nobody dared fire at them for fear of disfiguring the statue, which was held in high esteem. When eventually, after several hours, they flew away, the same offensive mess was coated thick all over the unfortunate goddess, whose scales were loaded with quantities of this disgusting offal.

  They came into the City several times, but did no more than circle round and round above the buildings, crying in thin mournful tones. One very remarkable thing about their appearance was that they were clearly larger than the birds who had first visited us. Their plumage too was gayer and more diverse, some having spotted breasts, some with larger ruffles than others, some with bright yellow tail-feathers. No doubt many that flew about the country escaped notice because of their resemblance to other birds, though I doubt myself whether they ever visited the open country; they seemed to prefer towns. Thus Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Sheffield—all had similar experiences to ours.