The box from japan, p.19
The Box from Japan, page 19
“Yes,” said Harwood. “It is. It—but do proceed, Sir Alfred.”
“Well, the second scene of the prologue brings out something that has never been generally known at any time either in England or America—namely, that America’s title to that concession was not exactly—by Jove—100 percent perfect! For the scene shows the Ministers of Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras making their final protests before the Judges of the Central American Court of Justice against ratification of this treaty, and the decision of the Judges upholding their objection. Good lines in it, though not so much of a curtain there.
“But now, unfortunately for its present chances of production, the play jumps to modern times. And the gilt of drama, therefore, hasn’t had a chance to form upon it. The playwright continues, however, with his rich line-up of characters.
“The next episode is laid in Old Bailey prison here, in 1932, and portrays old Eben Smith, the wrinkled, aged, American tramp geologist, with bloodshot eyes and nose purple and bulbous from swilling liquor on the London docks, in conference with Stephen Kennington, our then Secretary of Foreign Relations, who has heard in a London club some distant echo of certain theories held by this old ragged, vermin-infested crank, and who has driven to Old Bailey to talk to him. Kennington himself, as given in the script, is just about as Kennington himself was, here in our London life: a dignified, thoughtful man, in his later 30’s so far as age went, ever trying seemingly, as suggested by the intensive far-seeing gaze in his gray eyes, to pierce through the hazy mysteries provided by the Future, yet with a terrific loyalty to old England showing itself in every gesture, every line given him to speak. The old geologist, ever scratching himself as the countless creatures on his body bite and plague him, portrays to Kennington, with a piece of chalk, on the gray cement wall of the interviewing room in Old Bailey, a remarkable geological picture—a complicated chart of internal earth faults and stresses—together with a maze of statistics on past slippages and quakes that quite dazzles Kennington. And by Jove, how the author must have had to study up on geology to write that scene! At any rate he proves—or presumably so—that America’s Panama Canal—ever open to us, of course, in peace or war, through the Hay-Pauncefote treaty—is not by any means immune to earthquakes, and that should a fault ever occur anywhere around longitude 79º 45´ it must inevitably take place at latitude 9º 07´, and moreover on a 45-degree slant from north-west to south-east—being, therefore, of maximum destructiveness so far as the Panama Canal is concerned. The guard says to Stephen Kennington ‘The owld bloke’s barmy, guv’nor; you don’t need to p’y no attenching to ’is bloomin’ blitherin’s’, but the scene, Harwood, nevertheless brings out exactly how the idea is born in Stephen Kennington that night in Old Bailey that not only is this old wreck of an Eben Smith one of the greatest geologists the world has ever known, but that he has predicted a possible eventuality. It ends with Stephen Kennington, after Eben Smith has been removed to his cell, surveying the map chalked over the whole wall and saying, to himself: ‘So Old Earth herself threatens one of the Gateways of our Empire?’”
Sir Alfred paused a moment, as though to lend proper dramatic effect to the thing he was narrating. And Halsey touched his companion on the arm. “This ought to be interesting to you, Mr. Braisted?”
“It sure is, for a certainty,” the other replied in the darkness below that lighted open area peopled to all intents and purposes with living beings. “I’d—” He stopped, for Sir Alfred was again speaking.
“The next scene—oh I say, Harwood, you’ve had enough now, I daresay?”
“No, no. Go on, Sir Alfred. I never knew our Ditch was born in Old Bailey?”
“That’s what makes the play int’resting in its earlier episode—its illuminating characteristics. Distinct craftsmanship there, I say. For pending the development of the necessary human interest, it leans for dramatic quality solely on the bringing out of the curious hidden factors back of our Canal’s birth—and then later, when there are no more hidden factors, at least today in 1942, it shifts its dramatic coach over upon the legitimate railway line of vicarious sympathetic human emotion towards its chief character. It—but Harwood, I’d better carry on!” Sir Alfred paused again. “The next episodes show Stephen Kennington’s efforts in the House of Commons—the House of Lords—before the Cabinet itself—to obtain for England a trans-Isthmian canal—his hopeless agitation that England, having spent £11,600,000 on her great Singapore base—should spend £34,000,000 on a foolish, useless Nicaraguan Canal. The roar of derision that greets him—hisses, catcalls—and the whitefaced speaker himself trying to down the tumult. Even a mob, Harwood, representing impoverished Londoners, East Side cockney costermongers, unkempt riff-raff and rabble from all of Whitechapel, hooting at the same moment outside the House of Commons in Old Palace Yard against any further taxation of England for further improvements. That scene ends with Stephen Kennington standing in one of the windows of the House of Commons and shaking his fist out at the horde of grimy shrieking loafers who believe that their dole is threatened: ‘You dolesters,’ he cries, ‘who have loafed for years, sucking England dry, before I’m done, by God, all of you—all of you, I say—will get calluses on your palms earning your dole—and giving England something she needs!’
“But the odds are hopelessly against him. And the play carries on his seemingly futile struggle. Love interest? Yes, of course, Harwood. With Alicia Livingstone, the blonde blue-eyed daughter of our own late Lord Telemachus Livingstone. There is a scene interpolated somewhere around that section of the script showing the library in Lord Livingstone’s mansion at 13, Queen Anne’s Gate, just off St. James Park. Lord Livingstone himself is presented, tall, austere, gelid, uncompromising—very much I fear, Harwood, as he was in real life—and the one person who recognizes this man Kennington’s indefatigable energy and power to put over the impossible—providing that impossible thing fulfils some idealistic inner dream of the man. From the lines assigned to Lord Livingstone, he is obviously afraid of Kennington’s potentialities. It develops, in a short conversation between him and Alicia, that he is one of the heaviest holders in the United Kingdom of American preferred income-producing securities—and that his income in England is so large that it is one of the five which are in the super-surtax class. If England does any more building, however, he tells his daughter, the income surtax will rise far, far above its present figure, and he will be held down to expenditures of an—er—paltry £20,000 a year. He commands Alicia to divert this man Kennington from his objective. She tries, more or less reluctantly, and obviously from a sense of filial piety, to do that—but Kennington will not be swayed from his dream. Alicia leaves the scene. Lord Livingstone enters. He, then, tries—he offers to obtain for Kennington a position in the English cabinet if he will forever drop his Nicaraguan canal scheme. Kennington refuses. Lord Livingston then holds Alicia as a last lever over Kennington’s head. He will refuse to allow her to marry Kennington unless Kennington drops his scheme. And still the younger man refuses. He says: ‘She may go according to your will today, Lord Livingstone, but ultimately—ultimately she will come to me.’ Lord Livingstone then, in a most vitriolic denunciation, says that he will personally break Kennington if it takes him forever. And with the dropping of the curtain on that episode, the note is struck which sounds the birth of a personal force against Kennington, an enemy, relentless, inexorable, implacable, blocking his every move, watching his every step to trip him.
“Thus,” continued Sir Alfred, a little hesitantly now, as though he had gotten too deep, “the play carries on Kennington’s hopeless struggles. His arguments to the Cabinet in the spring of 1933 that a great part of the money, now being spent on the dole, might as well go into a canal as into ten thousand pubs. His further trump card, played in a further meeting before the Cabinet, in which he presents the tacky, shiny-suited Swede marine engineer, Lundbergh, who has invented some sort of a crazy, but allegedly rapid, helical digging machine, and a patent canal lock, reasonably cheap and easy to install, and a queer kind of lock gate involving shifting pivots and worked automatically by some weird arrangement of tumblers within itself, like—like a Yale lock cylinder. I don’t know just what it was, Harwood. The author had looked it all up to the last mechanical detail, and the lines assigned to the Swedish engineer had the points all nicely—though selectively—incorporated. A comical character, the Lundbergh character, Harwood, with his quaint Swedish dialect and his big teeth, and his big ideas—and the package of ham sandwiches he carried under his coat tail. I understand that today he’s quite wealthy, but he’s shown in the play just as he was back in late 1933.”
Lord Alfred paused for a deep breath
“And so it continues,” he went on, “but ever against Kennington. An episode shows how he brings, in September of 1933, an entire corps of South American engineers to London at his own expense, mortgaging on extremely short-term conditions, his home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea—oh yes, that was a good little scene in itself, showing old Samuel Izenstein, the land-broker of Old Bond Street, with his long white beard and his diamond-studded velvet skull cap—and how these engineers showed how, of the 156 miles between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, at Southern Nicaragua, there would be—I say, Harwood, I am boring you, am I not?”
“By no means, Sir Alfred. Plays are my livelihood, you know. I’m keen for every word you’re saying. Even Mary and Hacker there have quit work!”
Sir Alfred glanced hastily back over his shoulder, and faced Harwood again, smiling a bit. Hacker hit the wood on the edge of the grave-trap a hurried tap with his hammer, and Mary commenced diligently to soap her brush.
“Well,” Sir Alfred continued, “the engineers show before the House of Commons how, of the 156 miles the proposed canal would have to cover, one-third alone of these 156 are taken up by Lake Nicaragua itself, a stretch of water some 3000 square miles in area—oh, this chap Key had all the statistics looked up!—and 200 feet deep; and that the canal from it to the Atlantic Ocean can be created by dredging and widening the already existent San Juan River, and that only 28 miles of excavation are necessary to reach the Pacific ocean from the other side of the lake. The scene concludes dramatically with the cheers of the members of the House of Commons—most of the cheers being off stage, of course—and a trial vive voce vote of those visible in the actual setting, in which the conglomeration of ‘Ayes’ would have called for a hundred supers at one-shilling the night! Kennington has won—hut has mortgaged his home and all—to win.
“The next episode shifts to Washington, D. C. Time: Fall of 1933. Setting: A room of State in the Capitol Building. Darkies singing the Suwanee River off stage. Kennington himself, selected as Britain’s emissary—plenipotentiary—call it what you will—to Uncle Sam to gain, if possible, the transfer of America’s concession in Nicaragua, is shown at rise of curtain, with his secretary. Stephen Kennington now faces the last and perhaps most difficult hurdle of all. In the preliminary conversation with his own secretary, at his elbow, it develops that his triumph thus far has been very much a moral one only—for his home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, is foreclosed and lost. The principal character-type in this scene is, of course, the American Acting-Secretary of State Jeremiah Joskins, a New England Yankee, and—I believe—but am not sure, Harwood—a direct blood connection to the shrewd Calvin Coolidge who once held the presidential chair over there. Joskins, in the play, is a typical Uncle Sam himself, just as he was in real life: long legged, gangling-kneed, in tight pin-striped trousers and ill-fitting cutaway coat, with sharp long nose, a rather stubbornly set little mouth curving down at the ends, and shrewd half-closed blue eyes. The dramatic flavor to the act is given by the bargaining and—and—well poker-playing which takes place between Kennington, the idealist, and Joskins, the materialist. Uncle Sam is obdurate. He will not release his concession. But Uncle Sam has no concession, Kennington thunders; it was never ratified by the Central American Court of Justice. But, by Jupiter, Joskins thunders back, there is a concession now, for the time for England to have protested it was in 1914 or 1915, not today in late 1933. To clinch his argument Joskins comes back with another: Permit England a Nicaraguan Canal, which she will naturally have to fortify by completely militarizing the narrow several-mile-wide strip of land through which mast of it will cross the Nicaraguan isthmus, and she will virtually have a powerful base from which ever to threaten the Panama Canal, only 300 miles to the south-east; to attack it, even, if things ever came to that which, says Joskins, ‘God forbid!’ But Kennington is ready for this argument. England, he says, by virtue of Bermuda, literally the fulcrum of the Empire’s naval position on Uncle Sam’s side of the Atlantic, holds and ever has held the Panama Canal completely at her mercy. True, Kennington admits, the great 16-inch guns on the Pacific side, with their ranges of from 43,000 to 47,000 yards, have amazingly proven themselves in test after test capable of holding off the mightiest battleships nearing or converging on Panama City. But Bermuda, alas, is not on that side! Nearly as impregnable as Gibraltar itself, its Irish Island naval base protected by the most deadly reefs, in which the one artificial entrance channel is commanded by the heaviest of heavy coast artillery stationed on St. Catherine’s Point, 10,000-ton cruisers from Bermuda, Kennington says, such as the Suffolk, the Kent, the Cumberland, can reach any of America’s Eastern ports in 24 hours. Which includes Colon! And, if that is not enough, Kennington points out, British naval seaplanes of the Fairey-Atlanta, Rohrbach, or Short-Cromarty type can complete any of the passages in six hours. Still more, the proposed new deadly British ‘robot-terror’ or air-torpedo, operating reasonably accurately at a range such as from Kingston, Jamaica, to Panama, with its mechanism working by clockwork, and its hull filled with high-explosives, makes possible a terrific and possibly successful air attack on Panama. Vide, says Kennington, the United States’ own experimental maneuvers on the Atlantic side, not so long ago, where ten searchlights sweeping the sky failed to keep their light sufficiently on attacking planes to permit anti-aircraft defense suppositionally, at least, to do effective work, with the result that theoretically the Gatun locks, spillway and dam were blown up, draining the lake and emptying the Canal.
“To which,” Sir Alfred went on, “Jeremiah Joskins can but stroke his sharp chin, knowing that Kennington is—er—hammering him with hard facts. And Kennington follows up that last card he has thrown down. He plays a truly startling one now. He shows a tentative tender of a concession from Colombia, replete with seals of state and signatures of the Colombian: president and officials, offering to give England the actual permission to build a canal across the northern neck of Colombia, from the Gulf of Darien, by way of the Atrato River, to the Pacific Ocean. This attitude on Colombia’s part, Harwood, was, it seems, known to people who interested themselves in such matters, so far back actually as 1930; but the author here dramatized it just a wee bit—used it as an unexpected card—to bring out the full dramatic value inherent in his act. But the shrewd Joskins bluffs, as the term is known in the game called poker. England, he says, can’t finance nor maintain a canal of that length. Kennington, too, of course, personally knows that the Atrato River project is utterly unfeasible in the as yet unsettled financial condition of that day. The Nicaraguan route, via Lake Nicaragua, is the only possible one, and, as he has explained to his secretary shortly before Joskins’ entrance—and therefore made clear to the audience!—is the one the United States herself would have had originally to utilize had she not been able to buy out, for a song, the entire work done in Panama under De Lesseps, the French engineer and promoter, who squandered a gigantic fortune subscribed by French investors. But Joskins, it can be seen, is just a bit shaken by that Colombian grant with its seals, lying on the table between them. One proper play now, by Kennington, and he has won. He plays it—his trump card—his ace of trumps. He has obtained, before leaving England, the right to play it—if he must. You know, Harwood, what that card was. If Uncle Sam will relinquish his canal concession in Nicaragua, Britain will grant to the United States of America, for 99 years, the right to use Singapore, greatest Asiatic naval base of all times, as a base for America’s entire naval and aeronautical forces if any foreign power—get that, Harwood—any!—could there be any other than one?—declares war against America or makes any overt act constituting a declaration of war. A remarkable piece of diplomacy! A whole change in the status quo—for America—in the Pacific Ocean—without either America or England making a single overt physical move or naming any power—for the status quo, in this case, would be—if it came to that—changed only by Japan herself. In other words, Japan trips over her own feet—if she does trip! The bait—it costs Britain nothing—is too great. Joskins gives in. The Yank has obtained what to him is a huge bargain—and the Britisher the same. The curtain drops with the ultimate certainty of Congress and Parliament ratifying this agreement, which you’ll remember they did in the Chesfield-Ponsford treaty of early 1934.
