It’s the next day now. Evening on September the second. To‐morrow will bring – what to‐morrow will bring. At the moment, to‐morrow is just like any other day except for the fact that the Prime Minister is going to speak. The atmosphere is tense, but there are no foregone conclusions.
Let’s get away from Dulcimer Street for a moment. Things are going on elsewhere as well. Liners are drawing in at the big ports. Aeroplanes are arriving at Croydon. And, if you feel like it, you can walk into any railway ticket office and book straight through to Berlin.14 Take a look at Harwich – always a good stepping‐off point. At Parkestone Quay lies the night‐boat for the Hook. Overhead in the thickening dusk, seagulls wind backwards and forwards in circles as though on strings like children’s kites. Despite the rows of suspended lamps – which swing a little in the breeze that comes straight in from the North Sea – the whole place looks bleak, desolate and a little unfriendly as dockyards always look at night. Oyster crates are piled alongside the first‐class waiting‐room.
On the other side of the harbour, the Royal Naval side, the guards have been doubled and all the destroyers have got steam up. But it’s too dark to see anything of that. Everything that’s in sight is as normal as the seagulls.
The eight o’clock train from Liverpool Street draws in, the pink table‐lamps in the Pullman cars momentarily lending a touch of almost drawing‐room comfort to the scene. Porters, the queer half‐breed race – part railway servant, part sea‐dog – that inhabit every maritime terminus – come forward from a small room that smells of paraffin and cooking. There is new life in the refreshment buffet where the young ladies, wiping their damp red hands on their black dresses, saunter along to take up their positions behind the bar. In the Customs sheds the clerks arrange their cardboard boxes of coloured crayons and hang out their notices about explosives and hashish. Two dim little men – special officers from Scotland Yard – hang around the doorway.
Then the passengers come streaming in. They are a quiet, heavy lot, with very few women among them. Mostly business men with large brief‐cases elaborately strapped and buckled. They have about them the air of extreme importance which is the birthright of commercial foreigners. When they stand up in front of their suitcases, to allow the Customs men to go carefully through their pyjamas, their toilet‐case, their change of under‐wear, a row of pink necks bulge out over their hard white collars. Then, innocent of concealed firearms, they raise their furry velours politely, show their passports which are examined as casually as though they were tram‐tickets, and pass through to the boat for a quick drink before sailing.
The small round man at the far end takes a little longer than the others. Two of the Customs men are bending low over his bag and one of the special officers from Scotland Yard approaches hopefully. But it’s nothing. Only the top of Dr Hapfel’s hair‐cream bottle that has come off. He borrows a duster to mop up his nice silk dressing‐gown and then he too hurries through to the waiting boat.
His thesis on The Leader‐Principle in Democratic Government has been accepted and, if the present trouble blows over, it will be published in London as well as in Leipzig. During the three years he has been in England he has discovered many things about the English. The first is their ignorance. Keeping themselves to themselves is the highest virtue. In consequence the entire island race knows nothing of what is happening elsewhere. And no one seems to care very much. Stupidity coupled with comfort has produced a breed that is impervious to anxiety. They sleep at night secure in the arms of the Navy that no one ever sees, supported by an Empire that no one ever mentions.
Puzzling – but to a philosopher like Dr Hapfel – also pathetic. There is a lot in England that the sentimentalist in him would like to see preserved; remodelled, of course, brought up‐to‐date and gleichgeschaltet, but preserved. But as things are there will be little, very little, nothing in fact, left of the England that he has known. Even the pleasant things like the young lady with high colouring and a lace bodice in the newsagent’s at the corner of the Euston Road, will be swept away along with Mr Chamberlain and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr Montague Norman and the Jews of the City of London.
Dr Hapfel stumbles as the mounts the gangway and someone, a stranger, standing on the quayside helps to steady him.
‘Lift ’em up,’ he says. ‘It’s only for life.’
Only for life! It is precisely this attitude that Dr Hapfel has tried to explain in his thesis. An attitude compounded of cynicism and insensitiveness and impudence. It is the same attitude that has allowed a daily paper this morning, apparently without threat of police action, to publish a cartoon of the Führer, his Führer, dressed up in the costume of Charlie Chaplin.
There must, Dr Hapfel decides as he tries to fit himself into his little cabin, be more to it than either Herr Ribbentrop or the Link have yet discovered. Perhaps English humour is really only a sublimation of the death‐urge, the suicide‐impulse. Perhaps Mr Chamberlain actually wants to impale himself.
Perhaps he is certifiable.
Undoing his sponge‐bag, Dr Hapfel, Ph.D., removes his toothbrush and his Odol and proceeds to brush his teeth.
The boat has just left and the eight o’clock train for Liverpool Street is being pushed away into a siding. The porters have shut themselves away in their paraffin closet. The young ladies in the buffet have turned out the light and left the washing‐up until to‐morrow. The Customs men have disappeared to wherever Customs men disappear to between departures. And the special officers from Scotland Yard have gone to a commercial hotel for the night. Only the seagulls are still there.
The boat, with Dr Hapfel on board, is now no more than a smudge of lights on the horizon.
Take a good look at it. It is the last gleam of brightness that will be seen in the North Sea for quite a time. There isn’t going to be a boat‐train to‐morrow, because there won’t be any boat.
By then, it will be war. And England really will be keeping herself to herself.