I have not seen him for over a year, but they say he is still as blond, but not as pleasant nor talkative. He is not married, but Queen Marie, the matchmaker, is grooming a daughter.
• • •
Next in line is Alexander of Yugo-Slavia, or as the Yugo-Slavs insist it is, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Alexander is the son of King Peter of Serbia. He is no relation to the Croats and Slovenes. I saw him one night in a Montmartre resort in Paris, where he had come incognito for a last visit to the capital before his marriage. There were a number of Serbs and several Frenchmen with him, all in evening dress. Various girls were at the table. It was a big night for the wine growers. Alexander was quite drunk and very happy.
Shortly after this trip the marriage was postponed, but eventually took place.
Victor Emanuel of Italy is a very short, serious little man with a grey, goat-like beard and tiny hands and feet. His legs looked as thin but as sturdy as a jockey’s when he used to wear roll puttees with his uniform. His queen is almost a head taller than himself. The Italian king’s lack of stature is a characteristic of the ancient house of Savoy, the greatest of whose long heritage of rulers have been little taller than bantam-weight boxers.
Just at present the king of Italy is probably the most popular king in Europe. He has handed over his kingdom, his army and his navy to Mussolini. Mussolini handed them politely back with many protestations of loyalty to the house of Savoy. Then he decided to keep the army and navy himself. When he will ask for the kingdom no one knows.
I have talked to many Fascisti, the old original nucleus of the party, who have all sworn that they were republicans. “But we trust Mussolini,” they said. “Mussolini will know when the time is ripe.”
There is a chance, of course, that Mussolini will renounce his old republicanism just as Garibaldi did. He has done so temporarily, and he has a genius for making something that he is doing temporarily appear to be permanent.
But the Fascist party to exist must have action. It is getting a little satisfaction now out of Corfu and the Adriatic. If it needed a republic to hold it together it would get a republic.
As a man and a human being, there is probably no finer father or more democratic ruler on the continent than Victor Emanuel.
• • •
The King of Spain has been king ever since he can remember. He was born king, and you can trace the evolution of his familiarly photographed under-jaw on the five-peseta pieces since 1886. It’s no treat for him to be king. He’s never been anything else. He was much handsomer as a baby, if the peseta pieces are accurate, but then we all were.
Alfonso is another king whose throne rests on a volcano. But it doesn’t seem to worry him much. He is an excellent polo player and the best amateur motor car driver in Spain.
Recently the king drove his car from Santander, a summer watering place in the north of Spain, to Madrid, over mountains, hills, and along precipices at an average speed of sixty miles an hour. There was a good deal of criticism in many of the Spanish papers. “If we have responsibilities to a king does not a king have responsibilities to us to keep himself intact, etc.” The trip was not well received. But two weeks later the king opened the new motor racing track at San Sebastian by turning off two laps himself at well over one hundred kilometers an hour. His time was only four kilometers an hour behind the winner of the Grand Prix.
The day of the Grand Prix at San Sebastian there was another Spanish military disaster in Morocco in which the Spanish lost over 500 killed, there was a revolt in the barracks at Malaga, and two regiments of troops mutinied, refusing to leave Spain for the Moorish front. The desultory guerrilla warfare that has been going on in Barcelona between the labor men and the government, and which has resulted in over two hundred assassinations in less than a year continues. But there are no attempts on the life of the king. The people don’t take Alfonso too seriously. They have had him for a long time.
• • •
In the north live the respectable kings—Haakon of Norway, Gustaf of Sweden and Christian of Denmark. They are so well situated that no one ever hears much about them. Except the king of Sweden, who is an ardent and very good tennis player and plays regularly with Suzanne Lenglen as his partner every winter at Cannes.
Albert of Belgium and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, everyone knows.
John II of Liechtenstein is a ruler who has had little publicity. Prince John has ruled over the Principality of Liechtenstein since 1858. He is eighty-three years old this year.
I have always thought of Liechtenstein as a manager of prize fighters that used to live in Chicago, but it seems there is a very prosperous country of that name ruled over by John the second. John the first was his father. They’ve kept the country very much in the family for over a hundred years. Liechtenstein is all of sixty-five square miles and lies on the border between Switzerland and Austria. It had been a dependency of Austria but announced its independence on November 7th, 1918. Two years ago the gallant Liechtensteiners made a treaty with the Swiss to run their post and telegraph system for them. All of the 10,876 inhabitants were doing well at the last report except Prince John who is having a little trouble with his teeth.
So far I have only mentioned the European kings who are still holding down their jobs. Ex-kings would take an article in themselves. I have never seen the kaiser nor Harry K. Thaw nor Landru. A good many of my best friends, though, have climbed up the wall of the garden at Doorn or attempted to gain admission disguised as bales of hay, cases of lager beer or Bavarian diplomats. Even when they have seen the kaiser, however, they report the result as unsatisfactory.
Japanese Earthquake
The Toronto Daily Star • SEPTEMBER 25, 1923
THERE are no names in this story.
The characters in it are a reporter, a girl reporter, a quite beautiful daughter in a Japanese kimono, and a mother. There is a small chorus of friends who spend some time talking in the next room, and get up as the reporter and the girl reporter go through the room and out of the door.
At four o’clock in the afternoon the reporter and the girl reporter stood on the front porch. The front door bell had just rung.
“They’ll never let us in,” said the girl reporter.
Inside the house they heard someone moving around and then a voice said, “I’ll go down. I’ll attend to them, Mother.”
The door opened one narrow crack. The crack ran from the top of the door to the bottom, and about half way up it was a very dark, very beautiful face, the hair soft and parted in the middle.
“She is beautiful, after all,” thought the reporter. He had been sent on so many assignments in which beautiful girls figured, and so few of the girls had ever turned out to be beautiful.
“Who do you want?” said the girl at the door.
“We’re from The Star,” the reporter said. “This is Miss So and So.”
“We don’t want to have anything to do with you. You can’t come in,” the girl said.
“But—” said the reporter and commenced to talk. He had a very strong feeling that if he stopped talking at any time, the door would slam. So he kept on talking. Finally the girl opened the door. “Well, I’ll let you in,” she said. “I’ll go upstairs and ask my mother.”
She went upstairs, quick and lithe, wearing a Japanese kimono. It ought to have some other name. Kimono has a messy, early morning sound. There was nothing kimonoey about this kimono. The colors were vivid and the. stuff had body to it, and it was cut. It looked almost as though it might be worn with two swords in the belt.
The girl reporter and the reporter sat on a couch in the parlor. “I’m sorry to have done all the talking,” whispered the reporter.
“No. Go on. Keep it up. I never thought we’d get in at all,” said the girl reporter. “She is good-looking, isn’t she?” The reporter had thought she was beautiful. “And didn’t she know what she was doing when she got that kimono!”
“Sh—. Here they come.”
<
br /> Down the stairs came the girl in the Japanese kimono. With her was her mother. Her mother’s face was very firm.
“What I want to know,” she said, “is where you got those pictures?”
“They were lovely pictures, weren’t they?” said the girl reporter.
Both the girl reporter and the reporter denied any knowledge of the pictures. They didn’t know. Really, they didn’t know. It was a fact. Eventually they were believed.
“We won’t say anything. We don’t want to be in the newspapers. We’ve had too much already. There are plenty of people that suffered much worse than we did in the earthquake. We don’t want to talk about it at all.”
“But I let them in, mother,” said the daughter. She turned to the reporter. “Just exactly what is it you want to know from us?”
“We just want you to tell us as you remember it just what happened,” the reporter said.
“If we talk to you and tell you what you want to know will you promise that you won’t use our names?” asked the daughter.
“Why not just use the names,” suggested the reporter.
“We won’t say a word unless you promise not to use the names,” said the daughter.
“Oh, you know newspaper reporters,” the mother said. “They’ll promise it and then they’ll use them anyway.” It looked as though there wasn’t going to be any story. The remark had made the reporter violently angry. It is the one unmerited insult. There are enough merited ones.
“Mrs. So and So,” he said, “the president of the United States tells reporters things in confidence which if known would cost him his job. Every week in Paris the prime minister of France tells fifteen newspaper reporters facts that if they were quoted again would overthrow the French government. I’m talking about newspaper reporters, not cheap news tipsters.”
“All right,” said the mother. “Yes, I guess it’s true about newspaper reporters.”
Then the daughter began the story and the mother took it up.
“The boat [the Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Australia] was all ready to sail,” said the daughter. “If mother and father hadn’t been down at the dock, I don’t believe they would have escaped!”
“The Empress boats always sail at noon on Saturday,” said the mother.
“Just before twelve o’clock, there was a great rumbling sound and then everything commenced to rock back and forth. The dock rolled and bucked. My brother and I were on board the boat leaning against the rail. Everybody had been throwing streamers. It only lasted about thirty seconds,” said the daughter.
“We were thrown flat on the dock,” said the mother. “It was a big concrete dock and it rolled back and forth. My husband and I hung on to each other and were thrown around by it. Many people were thrown off. I remember seeing a rickshaw driver clambering back up out of the water. Cars and everything else went in, except our car. It stayed on the dock right alongside the Prince de Bearn’s, the French consul’s car, till the fire.”
“What did you do when the shock was over?” asked the reporter.
“We went ashore. We had to climb. The dock was crumbled in places and great chunks of concrete broken off. We started up the Bund along the shore and could see that the big go-downs, the storage houses, were all caved in. You know the Bund. The driveway straight along the waterfront. We got as far as the British consulate and it was all caved in. Just fallen in on itself like a funnel. Just crumbled. All the walls were down and we could look straight through from the front of the building to the open compound at the back. Then there was another shock and we knew it wasn’t any use going on or trying to get up to our house. My husband heard that the people had been out of the office and there was nothing you could do about the men that had been working in the go-downs. There was a big cloud of dust all over everything from the buildings that had caved in. You could hardly see through it, and fires were breaking out all over.”
“What were the people doing? How were they acting?” asked the reporter.
“There wasn’t any panic. That was the strange thing. I didn’t see anyone even hysterical. There was one woman at the Russian consulate though. It stood right next to the British consulate and it hadn’t fallen in yet but was badly shaken. She came out to the front gate crying and there were a bunch of coolies sitting against the iron fence in front of the consulate yard. She begged them to help her get her daughter out of the building. ‘She’s just a little fellow,’ she said in Japanese. But they just sat there. They wouldn’t move. It seemed as though they couldn’t move. Of course nobody was going around helping anybody else then. Everybody had themselves to look after.”
“How did you get back to the boat?” asked the girl reporter.
“There were some sampans, native boats, and finally my husband found one and we started back. But the fire was going so badly then and the wind was offshore. There was an awful wind for a while. We got to the dock finally and, of course, they couldn’t get a gangplank out, but they put out a rope for us and we got on board.”
The mother didn’t need any prompting or questions now. That day and the following days and nights in Yokohama harbor had her in their grip again. Now the reporter saw why she didn’t want to be interviewed and why no one had any right to interview her and stir it all up afresh. Her hands were very quietly nervous.
“The Prince’s boy [son of the Prince de Bearn, French consul] was left in their house. He had been sick. They had just come down to the dock to see the boat off. The foreign quarter is up on a bluff where we all lived, and the bluff just slid down into the town. The Prince got ashore and made his way up to the wreck of his house. They got the boy out but his back was hurt. They worked hours getting him out. But they couldn’t get the French butler out. They had to go away and leave him in there because the fire got too close.”
“They had to leave him in there alive with the fire coming on?” asked the girl reporter.
“Yes, they had to leave the French butler in there,” said the mother. “He was married to the housemaid so they had to tell her they had gotten him out.”
The mother went on, in a dull, tired voice.
“There was a woman on the [liner] Jefferson coming home that had lost her husband. I didn’t recognize her. There was a young couple, too, that had been only out a short time. They’d just been married. His wife was down in the town shopping when it happened. He couldn’t get to where she was on account of the fire. They got the head doctor out all right from the American Hospital. They couldn’t get out the assistant doctor and his wife, though. The fire came so quick. The whole town was solid fire.
“We were on the boat of course. Part of the time you couldn’t see the shore on account of the smoke. When it was bad was when the submarine oil tanks burst and the oil caught on fire. It moved down the harbor and toward the dock. When it got to the dock we wondered if we’d been saved on board the Empress just to get burned. The captain had all the boats launched on the far side away from the fire and was all ready to put us into them. We couldn’t go on the side toward the fire of course. It was too hot. They were playing the hoses on it to drive it away. It kept coming on though.
“All the time they were working to cut through the anchor chain that had fouled in the propeller. Just to cut it away from the boat. Finally they got the Empress away from the dock. It was wonderful the way they got her away without any tug. It was something you wouldn’t have believed it was possible to do in Yokohama harbor. It was wonderful.
“Of course they were bringing wounded people and refugees on all day and all night. They came out in sampans or anything. They took them all on. We slept on the deck.
“My husband said he was relieved when we’d got outside the breakwater,” the mother said. “There’re supposed to be two old [volcanic] craters in the harbor itself, and he was worried that something was going to happen from them.”
“Was there no tidal wave?” asked the reporter.
“No. There wasn’t any at all. When we were
on our way to Kobe, after we had left Yokohama finally, there were three or four small shocks that you could feel in the boat. But there weren’t any tidal waves.”
Her mind was going back to Yokohama harbor. “Some of the people that had stood up all night in the water were very tired,” she offered.
“Oh, the people that had stood up all night in the water,” said the reporter softly.
“Yes. To keep out of the fire. There was one old woman who must have been seventy-six years old. She was in the water all night. There were lots of people in the canals, too. Yokohama’s all cut up with canals, you know.”
“Didn’t that make it more confused in the earthquake?” asked the girl reporter.
“Oh, no. They were very good things to have in a fire,” said the mother quite seriously.
“What did you think when it started?” asked the reporter.
“Oh, we knew it was an earthquake,” said the mother. “It was just that nobody knew it was going to be so bad. There’s been lots of earthquakes there. Once, nine years ago, we’d have five shocks in one day. We just wanted to get into the town to see if everything was all right. But when we saw it was so bad, we knew then it didn’t matter about things. I hadn’t intended to come home. Just my daughter and son were sailing. My husband is still in Kobe. He has a lot of work to do now re-organizing.”
Just then the telephone rang. “My mother is busy just now interviewing the reporters,” the daughter said in the next room. She was talking with some friends that had come in. It was something about music. The reporter listened with his odd ear for a moment to see if it was anything about the earthquake. But it wasn’t.
The mother was very tired. The girl reporter stood up. The reporter got up.
“You understand. No names,” said the mother.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 9
