If Winter ComesHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
If Winter Comes
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Fiction
Not that relations with Germany counted for anything in the whirl of
intensely agreeable sensations of these excellent days. Their entirely
pleasing trend prevented the scaremongers from interfering with full
enjoyment of the intensely agreeable sensations; otherwise they were,
by comparison with more serious excitements, completely negligible. The
excitements were endless and of every nature. At one moment the British
Public was stirred to its depths in depths not often touched (in 1913)
by reading of Scott's glorious death in the Antarctic; at another it was
unspeakably moved by the disqualification of the Derby winner for
bumping and boring. In one week it was being thrilled with sympathy by
the superb heroism and the appalling death-roll, four hundred
twenty-nine, in the Welsh colliery disaster at Senghenydd; in another
thrilled with horror and indignation at the baseness of a sympathetic
strike. In one month was immense excitement because the strike of eleven
thousand insufferable London taxi-drivers drove everybody into the
splendid busses; and in another month immense excitement because the
strike of all the insufferable London bus-drivers drove everybody into
the splendid taxis. M. Pegond accomplished the astounding feat of flying
upside down at Juvisy without being killed and then came and flew upside
down without being killed at Brooklands. One man flew over the Simplon
Pass and another over the Alps. Colonel Cody flew to his death in one
waterplane, and Mr. Hawker made a superb failure to fly around Great
Britain in another waterplane. The suffragists threw noisome and
inflammable matter into the letter boxes, bombs into Mr. Lloyd George's
house at Walton and into other almost equally sacred shrines of the
great, stones into windows, axes into pictures, chained their misguided
bodies to railings and gates, jammed their miserable bodies into
prisons, hunger-struck their abominable bodies out again, and hurled
their outrageous bodies in front of the sacred race for the Derby at
Epsom, and the only less sacred race for the Gold Cup at Ascot.
It was terrific!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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