NATURE, I believe, meant me to be a special reporter, only she forgot to endow me with the knack of always being on the spot to which most attention is directed. Still, sometimes the many-eyed stare is not fixed on significant scenes, only on noisy ones, and, again, sometimes so much worth noticing is going on everywhere that it does not matter much where you are. The night of August 4th was such an occasion. It does not disqualify me as a reporter that I was not in the pushing, yelling, chaffing, music-hallish crowds which thronged the Horse Guards or in the cheering ones outside the House of Commons.
I met at two in the morning, in the far and quiet west, in a shining-clean, empty residential street, an old eager, one-eyed vendor of papers with a Union Jack in his billycock. A tattered bill fluttered before him as he shuffled wearily and hurriedly forward. “Thrippence. Declaration of War,” he was shouting in a monotonous quinsied whisper. I stopped and bought. It’s not in it,” he added, confidentially, pocketing the coppers, “but it’s true; God’s truth it is – I couldn’t get the latest. I was an hour and a quarter getting through the crowd.” I looked at him and felt as if I had been in that crowd myself – yes, and could describe it, too. “If Mr. Disraeli was alive!” he croaked huskily; and after this unexpected comment he lunged on again with bent knees, leaving me under the street lamp staring at the columns of the new but already familiar heavy-leaded type.
Content from our partners
