*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74324 ***







  THE HEART OF
  LONDON


  BY

  H. V. MORTON



  _An ever-muttering prisoned storm,
  The heart of London beating warm._
        John Davidson, "Ballads and Songs"


  THIRD EDITION


  METHUEN & CO. LTD.
  36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
  LONDON




  First Published ... June 11th 1925
  Second Edition ... January 1926
  Third Edition ... 1926



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE SPELL OF LONDON
  THE LITTLE GUIDE TO LONDON
  THE LONDON YEAR




  To
  S. D. W.




  CONTENTS

  THE NEW ROMANCE
  WHERE THE EAGLES SLEEP
  ORIENTAL (_Petticoat Lane_)
  SHIPS COME HOME (_The Docks_)
  TREASURE TROVE (_Caledonian Market_)
  CENOTAPH
  ROMANCE ON WHEELS
  GHOSTS OF THE FOG
  BATTLE (_Free Cancer Hospital_)
  BABIES IN THE SUN (_Kensington Gardens_)
  FACES IN THE STRAND
  WOMEN AND TEA
  AN OPEN DOOR (_St. Martin's Church in the Fields_)
  A BIT OF BAGDAD (_Club Row_)
  "PRISONERS ONLY" (_Bow Street_)
  BOYS ON THE BRIDGE
  NIGHT BIRDS
  AT THE WHEEL
  UNDER THE DOME (_St. Paul's_)
  HEARTBREAK HOUSE
  MADONNA OF THE PAVEMENT
  SWORD AND CROSS (_Temple Church_)
  KNOCKOUT LAND
  GHOSTS (_Soane Museum_)
  ALADDIN'S CAVE
  THAT SAD STONE (_Cleopatra's Needle_)
  SUN OR SNOW
  ROMANTIC MUTTON (_Shepherd's Market_)
  LONDON LOVERS
  IN UNCLE'S SHOP
  HORSEY MEN
  FROM BOW TO EALING
  MARRIAGE
  KINGS AND QUEENS (_Westminster Abbey Waxworks_)
  LOST HEIRS (_Record Office_)
  FISH (_Billingsgate Market_)
  HAUNTED (_Old Devonshire House_)
  ABOUT HOMES IN BONDAGE
  ROYAL SATIN (_London Museum_)
  AMONG THE FUR MEN
  APPEAL TO CÆSAR (_Privy Council_)
  TONS OF MONEY (_The Royal Mint_)
  WHERE TIME STANDS STILL
  MY LADY'S DRESS
  ST. ANTHOLIN'S
  NOT FOR WOMEN
  OUR ROMAN BATH (_The Strand_)
  LEFT BEHIND (_Lost Property Office_)
  THE "GIRLS" (_Piccadilly Circus_)



  LONDON'S GROWTH

  _Here Herbs did grow
  And Flowers sweet
  But now 'tis called
  Saint George's Street._

      --An 18th century inscription on a London tavern




NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION

These essays were written day after day, week after week, to keep
pace with the relentless machines of the "Daily Express."  Since this
book was published many kind unknown friends have written to tell me
that here they have found something that is London; but they should
not thank me: they should thank the great city which, written to
death generation by generation, is an undying topic, discovered age
by age is still inexhaustible; stripped bare of mystery by many
writers has never lost its magic.

H. V. M.

LONDON




_When a man is tired of London he is tired of life: for there is in
London all that life can afford._

--Dr. Johnson




THE HEART OF LONDON



The New Romance

When eight million men and women decide to live together on the same
spot things are bound to happen.

London, in lineal descent from Thebes and Rome, is one of those queer
massings together of humanity which Civilization dumps on a small
plot of earth before handing the lease of Destiny, not knowing
whether to laugh or cry about it.  Great cities are strange
inevitable phenomena.  It is wrong to compare them with hives, for in
a hive the wish of the individual has been sacrificed unquestioningly
to the good of the community.  Had we ascended from the bee perhaps
the greatest happiness we could achieve would be an unspectacular
death in the service of the London County Council.  But in London, as
in all modern cities, it is the individual who counts.  Our eight
millions split themselves up into ones and twos: little men and
little women dreaming their private dreams, pursuing their own
ambitions, crying over their own failures, and rejoicing at their own
successes.

Fear built the first cities.  Men and women herded behind a wall so
that they might be safe.  Then came trade; and cities grew into lucky
bags in which men dipped for profit.  Essentially they remain lucky
bags to this day.  London's millions pour into London and carry off
their loot every Friday; but that, thank heaven, is not the whole
story.  A city develops Tradition and Pride.  London has greater
tradition and pride than any other city in the world.

So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate
that ancient memory which is London--a thing very like family
tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity--and
I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed,
and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through
London as it has surged through every great city in the history of
civilization.  Here is every human emotion.  Here in this splendid
theatre the comedy and the tragedy of the human heart are acted day
and night.  Love and treachery, beauty and ugliness, laughter and
tears chase one another through the streets of London every minute of
the day, often meeting and mixing in the strangest fashion, because
London is just a great mass of human feeling, and Man, never clearly
labelled "Hero" or "Villain" as in melodrama, is capable of so much
moral complexity that you might almost say that good and bad exist in
him at the same moment.

Had I been born a few thousand years ago I feel sure that I could
have written much the same book about Thebes or Babylon, because the
only things that change radically in life are fashions and
inventions.  The human heart was patented long ago and the Creator
has not seen fit to bring out a later model.

After dinner one night a woman fixed large eyes on me and confided
that in a previous incarnation she had been Cleopatra.  She was my
tenth Cleopatra.  She told me that there was no romance in modern
life, and, looking a little withdrawn as if remembering some
Alexandrian indiscretion, she said: "No surprise, no--you know what I
mean?--no real poetry."

I always think it best not to argue with queens; but I believe that
the surprise, the romance, and the poetry of a modern city are
fiercer than they were in the past.  The drama of the ancient
autocracies was played with so small a cast.  The rest was suffering.
People with large eyes were never in their past lives anything less
than queens or princes, and thus their naturally vivid memories of a
small and brilliant circle dim a recollection of the dumb majority
beneath their wills.  In spite of the supply of desirable lamps in
Bagdad the census of owner-drivers must have been quite negligible,
so that the average inhabitant must have lived through the romance of
those days sitting in the same patch of sun, bitten by insects and
trodden on by negroes.

In London, and in the free cities of this modern world, the drama of
life widens, the characters increase and the unchanging human heart,
no happier perhaps in the long run, beats less timorously than it
did, yet leaping in sympathy to the same old loves and fears and
hates.

Every day our feelings vibrate to some stray unimportance.  Life is
full of portentous triviality.  Is it not strange that our minds
often refuse to recognize some sensation--a word like a worn-out
boot--while they react immediately to something so small as to be
almost foolish?  You may be bored stiff by the front page of the
evening paper, but you go home remembering some common thing seen or
heard; some little humanity: the sight of a man and a girl choosing a
child's cot, two people saying good-bye at a street corner, the quiet
hatred in a man's eyes--or the love....

Let us now go out into London.




Where the Eagles Sleep

One o'clock in the City of London.  Crowds overflow the pavement into
the narrow, twisting road.  Young men in striped trousers, ruled like
ledgers, black coats sober as a bill of lading, rush or saunter,
according to their natures, towards a quick lunch-bar, where a girl
with golden hair will give them beer and mutton.  Girls, arm-in-arm,
discuss those eternal verities--dress, love, and another woman--as
they go primly or coyly, according to their nature, towards two
poached eggs and a cup of tea.  Here and there a large man in a silk
hat, who may be a millionaire or a bankrupt, chases the inevitable
chop.  And the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders.

But behind a tall hoarding that shouts dogmatically of soap and
shirts and pills things are quiet.  Out of the chaos a great new bank
will rise.  Workmen sit around in picturesque groups eating.  On
their knees are spotted handkerchiefs in which lie gigantic
sandwiches cut by wives in the early dawn.  They carve them with
clasp-knives and carry them to their mouths, the clasp-knives upright
in their hands grazing their cheeks.  They drink from tin cans, and
wonder, in rich monosyllables, "wot" will win the three-thirty.

I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive
strata--brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement--lies the clay on
which London rests.  It is a deep, dark hole.  It is as if some
surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the
spine.  I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two
thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four
feet above the primal mud.

How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of
London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian,
Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman.  There it stops,
for there it began.  Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of
thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written
in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay;
and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green
undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree
on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet
London?

A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and
shouts up to his mate:

"Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!"

And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that
look like flat cakes of sealing wax.  I pick them up, knock off the
caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red
pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of
a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus.
F."  Just that.

What does it mean?  It means that I have seen the deep roots of
London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome.  "Fl.
Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who
lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning
"Flavius Germanus made it."  What a message to receive in modern
London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars,
throbs, and thunders!

* * *

Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a
new bank is built.  For we stand on the shoulders of Rome.  Men from
the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like
lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits
of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that
far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill.

* * *

As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still
stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius.
What do I see?  I see the first London and its colonists pegging out
their camp.  Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin.  The second London
rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the
young men; and round this London they are building a wall.

Gradually, as a vision in a crystal clears and forms out of mist, I
see a smaller, colder Rome standing with its marble feet in Thames
water.  I see rows of wood and red-tile houses running within the
walls in straight lines like tents within a castrum; I see the marble
capitals under our grey skies, the majestic circular sweep of the
theatre, the white gleam of the Forum, the gates with their statues,
the baths at the gates, the long straight streets crowded, noisy,
varied.  I see the shaggy Britons and the Gauls move to a side as the
Roman troops come clattering over the stones, their helmets shining,
swords at hips; the marvellous short sword that carved out an Empire
as a girl might cut a cake.

And the heart of this little English Rome, how did it beat?  I
imagine that it knew the enterprising business man opening up new
markets, the enthusiastic soldier always dreaming of sending the
Eagles north, the inevitable Phœnician with his galley at the
docks and his shop somewhere in the city, the bad boy sent to
colonial London to expiate, and women making the best of it, always
three months behind Rome in fashion: wives and sweethearts who had
followed their men into barbary.  O, the homesickness and heroism of
colonization!  How many old men must have wept to see their careful
vines wilt in the London clay; and I wonder if Londinium Augusta
numbered among its inhabitants the optimistic gardener who bored his
friends with a vision of olives in a neat Italian row!

There would come a time in this first London when a small boy would
say to his mother: "Tell me about Rome!"

And she would sit facing the broad Thames, talking of Italy as a
homesick woman in Winnipeg might talk of England:

"Do you see those galleys coming up under the bridge like water
beetles?  They come from Ostia--from Rome.  They bring soldiers
and--sometimes people go home in them!  Yes, dear, perhaps when you
grow up you too will go.  The sun always shines there, and it is
seldom cold as it is here.  When your father was a little boy like
you..."

So the tale would go on.

Then I see the market-place, the marvellous mixture of race which
Rome drew to her cities: the dark Iberian soldier pressed into
service for duty on the Wall, the Gaul, the German, the negro, the
merchants with their wares, the amber from the Baltic, the pearls,
the perfumes from the East, the brown fingers holding out gold chains
as the Roman ladies go by....

What chatter of a six months old scandal as the women walk to the
baths; what discussion of Rome's latest _coiffure_, her newest pin,
her smartest sandal!  At the docks the creak of timber and the
straining of a released rope, the "one, two, three" as the oarsmen
dip their great blades in the Thames; and a galley goes home with
letters to Cæsar from the Governor of London.

Londinium Augusta!  There is nothing between her and Verulamium but a
straight road through the forest, then another road, more forests,
and proud Camulodunum on its hill.  Three fortified islands in a
green sea.  So England takes shapes out of the mists of Time; so
London begins.

And I like to think, to round off the picture, that, on a cold night
of winter, when brittle green stars glitter in the sky like glass,
some grey old wolf creeps to the edge of the Hampstead woods and
licks his jaws as he looks towards the first lights of London.  Then
he yawns and blinks his eyes as a dog blinks and looks away from
something he does not understand.  So he trots softly among the trees
with the instinct that things are different; that--something has
happened to the Hill!




Oriental

A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a
butcher's shop on an upturned crate.  Her fingers are covered in
rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing
her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing
throughout the history of the Orient.

She is beautiful after her kind.  In five more years, however, she
will look like a side-show.  Her lithe grace, her round face, her
firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue.  The eye
passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her
recent beauty.  She will be like a thin girl who somehow has been
merged with a fat woman.  She will be "herself with yesterday's ten
thousand years,"--and yesterday winning all along the line.  That is
the burden of the Jewess.

However, at the moment she is ripe as a peach is ripe before it falls
naturally into the hand.  Were I a Sultan, swaying above the street
in a litter, I would roll a lazy eye in her direction, make a minute
movement of a jewelled finger, and, later at the palace, I would
address her:

"Moon of Great Beauty and Considerable Possibility," I would say,
"whither comest them, O Radiance, and who is thy father?"

Whereupon she would spit at me with her eyes and reply:

"Cancher see I'm respectable ... cancher?  You're a nice chep, you
are, sitting up there dressed like a dorg's dinner and talkin' like
thet ... lemme go..."

For though her eyes are the eyes of Ruth among the alien corn, her
larynx is that of Bill Sykes.  The street in which she sits, shedding
this varied atmosphere, is lined on either side by a row of rough
booths.  It is a mere track between two bright hedges of merchandise.
Here the fruit-sellers expose their pyramids of red-gold oranges,
their African plums, their pineapples; there the sellers of shoes
wait patiently beneath their pendulous racks.  The sellers of cloth
walk up and down with bright, stabbing colours, daringly mixed, slung
across their shoulders, and the drink merchants, with their cooling
brews--never absent from an Oriental market--stand beside their ample
golden globes.

Through this lane of bright colour moves the crowd--the women young,
straight, and mostly beautiful in a dark, passionate way; the old
women fat and round; the men sallow, bearded, and incredibly
wrinkled.  Among them crowd the abject creatures so well known in the
East, who clutch a handful of vegetables or three inferior lemons
with which they try to undersell the regular merchants.

Where is it?  It might be Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Tunis, or
Tangier, but, as a matter of fact, it is Petticoat Lane in
Whitechapel--a penny ride from Ludgate Hill!

As I walked through Petticoat Lane I thought that if we had a sunny
climate this part of Whitechapel would become one of the famous
show-places of the world.  Here you have the East without its lepers,
without small-pox, without the flies, without the impertinent stinks.
This is the scene of rich and amusing variety which, were it only a
few thousand expensive miles from London, under a blue sky, would
attract the attention of the artist and the traveller.

The attitude towards commerce is as old as barter.  I saw a neatly
bearded woman, whose brown coat looked as though it was draped over a
barrel, go up to a fishmonger, standing beside two gigantic codfish
and a number of smaller fish.

"How much?" asked the woman, indicating a nice group of still life.

"Six shillings," replied the fishmonger, with a keen glance from
small, black eyes.

"One and ten," remarked the woman, reflectively turning a plaice
upside down and prodding it with a fat finger.

Whereupon a singular change took place in the fishmonger's aloof
attitude.  He was insulted, outraged.  Suddenly, picking up a plaice
by the tail, he said with a threatening gesture:

"I'll wipe it acrost yeh face!"

The customer was not outraged as a woman would have been in Oxford
Street; she just shrugged her fat shoulders, as she would have done
in Damascus, and moved away, knowing full well that before she had
retreated very far she would be recalled--as she was.  After a brisk
argument she bought the fish for two and fourpence and they parted
friends!

I have seen exactly the same drama played on a carpet in Alexandria.

* * *

What strange foreign eatables you see here: vile-looking messy
dishes, anæmic cucumbers, queer salted meats, varied sausages of East
European origin, the inevitable onion, and, of course, olives.
Smoked salmon has customers at ten shillings a pound.

But the people are more interesting than their surroundings or their
food.  Such gnarled, lined faces, such live eyes, such a patriarchal
air.  That is the old orthodox generation.  The new?  Such smartish
young semi-Englishmen prospering in trade on an education for which
the old generation has starved itself.  They can pronounce their w's
and their th's.  They have an eye on Hampstead or even on the Golden
West.  The daughters of Israel, powdered and rouged, flit with their
dark, and often alluring, eyes from dressmaker's shop to dressmaker's
shop, pert and self-assured, well dressed even in their working
clothes.

This rift between the old and the new generations is the first thing
that strikes you.  There seem several hundred years between them.
What tragedies does it conceal, what human stories?  Many an old man
nodding over his crowded counter has sent a son to the 'varsity.
This is not fiction, and those will not believe it who do not
understand that Israel has always given over its heart to its
children.  If the elements of domestic tragedy are not here, where
are they?--for Israel, scattered in its wanderings and oppressed,
never lost the Tables of the Law, never forgot the old things, never
became quite deaf to the sounds of tents in a wind; but now the old
men can say to their children: "My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways."

* * *

In a narrow street full of jewellers' shops I saw a bent old
patriarch gazing into a window at a nine-branched candlestick; on the
opposite side of the road came a young girl in her sand-coloured silk
stockings and her tight black coat, swinging a silver bag--very far
from the flocks and herds was she!  Again I saw a limousine stop at a
tiny shop.  An old woman ran out, a young man leapt from the car to
meet her, and when he kissed her there was joy shining in her eyes.
Joseph?  The modern Prodigal Son?

* * *

I caught a penny omnibus back to England with the feeling that I
might have spent two hundred pounds and seen less of the East, less
of romance, and much less of life.




Ships Come Home

In the grey dawn liners from the Seven Seas slip into the docks of
London; and men and women gather there to meet friends.  Some even
meet their sweethearts.  They are the lucky ones.  It was not yet
light.  Dawn was a good hour away, and it was very cold.  I was
travelling away from London towards Woolwich in a jangling, dirty
workman's train.  On the platform at Fenchurch Street I had noticed
several other people obviously on their way to meet friends, but they
had been assimilated in the gloom of the long train; and I was glad,
for I was enjoying myself in a carriage full of dock workers: a
carriage that reeked of smoke and manly conversation.  The train
ploughed wearily on through the darkness, stopping at stations....
Stepney East....  Burdett Road....  Bromley....  Canning Town....
Bleak, unfriendly places under their pale lights.  More early
Londoners stormed the carriage at each station and split pleasantries
rather like roadmen hitting a spike:

"Goo' mornin', Bill...."

"It ain't a goo' mornin'.  It's a blinkin' cold mornin'!"

The laughter could not have been louder if the retort had been made
by a judge or a king!

The conversation was both technical and sporting.  The technical
discussion centred round the life and shortcomings of a certain
foreman, who, I gathered, although he knew less about a ship than a
---- ---- school-teacher, was, if not a man of iron, at least a man
of blood.  So they said.  Football and racing!  They knew the
parentage, habits, and hobbies of every League player, also the
result of contests going right back to ancient times.  They all had
"a bit" on the three-thirty.

* * *

North Woolwich!  In the still air of dawn I could feel the nearness
of shipping.  I could not see much, but I knew that I was surrounded
by ships.  The docks were not awake.  The steam winches were not
screaming, the hammers were stilled; yet over the dark docks lay the
presence of great ships home from sea....

I walked on past the shrouded cranes, standing in their straight
lines near the water's side.  I came upon a tall ship looming up like
a cliff.  I could make out a man leaning over her deck far above.  I
asked him if this was the ship I wanted.  He opened his mouth, and
there descended curious, unwilling sounds, like something trying hard
to escape from his throat and then changing its mind and trying to
get back again.  I think he was talking Japanese.

So I walked along to the stern of the ship to read the name, and
there I met a man gazing upward, too.  It turned out that we were
both looking for the same ship, so we walked on together.

"What an experience it is," he said.  "I wonder how many people in
London have ever done this.  I'm generally asleep at this time of the
morning.  How early London wakes up.  Think of those workmen's
trains...."

"Are you meeting a friend in the ----," I asked.

He coughed slightly and said, "Yes," and the way he said it told me
that it was going to be a romantic occasion.

Then dawn.  If there is anything more wonderful in London than dawn
coming up over the tangled shipping of the docks I would like to know
of it.  First a silvery light in the air, a chilly greyness, then a
flush in the east, and with startling suddenness every mast, every
funnel, every leaning crane is silhouetted jet-black against the
pearl-coloured sky....  Unreal ... still ... silent.

Gradually the docks awaken.  Men walk along the wharfside, doors are
opened.  In the depths of little ships men rise and become busy with
ropes; there is, from some, a smell of frying bacon; on tall ships
mast lights grow pale in the dawn light, men in swinging cradles yawn
and start painting a ship's hull, and from far off sounds the first
hammer of a new day.

As light grows one's sense of smell increases.  This is strange.  The
air is now full of a pungent smell of hemp and tow and tar, and even
distant docks, stored with their merchandise, seem to contribute
their part as the dawn wind blows.

High up in the sky there is a flush of pink cloud, such a delicate
flamingo pink that changes, spreads, and fades even as you look.  It
becomes gold, and you know that at any moment the sun may rise up
like a tocsin and call all the world to work.

* * *

We found the ship.  A mountain she was, towering up above us with
tiny holes in her side like the entrances to caves.  She smelt of
fried fish, bacon and eggs and coffee....

Soon after I was aboard I had to look the other way for I had seen my
friend holding a girl in his arms and I had heard him say:

"And how are you, darling?"

"Splendid!" she cried.  "Let me look at you!  Come into the light."

So you see wonderful things happen to some people when tall ships
come out of the Seven Seas and find their way to London Town.




Treasure Trove

Some things, such as umbrellas, suitcases, trousers, boots,
bedsteads, and hats, both male and female, can become so old that it
would be a decency could they disintegrate and vanish into thin air.
Nothing can be quite so old and dissipated as an umbrella.  But, no;
the effortless Nirvana which these things have earned is denied them;
they are spread out on the cobbles of the Caledonian Market (North
London) every Friday, in the hope that their pitiful pilgrimage may
continue.

When I walked into this remarkable once-a-week junk-fair I was deeply
touched to think that any living person could need many of the things
displayed for sale.  For all round me, lying on sacking, were the
driftwood and wreckage of a thousand lives: door knobs, perambulators
in extremis, bicycle wheels, bell wire, bed knobs, old clothes, awful
pictures, broken mirrors, unromantic china goods, gaping false teeth,
screws, nuts, bolts, and vague pieces of rusty iron, whose mission in
life, or whose part and portion of a whole, Time had obliterated.

It seemed that all the queer things in all the little shops in
London's by-streets had been poured out in a last desperate effort of
salesmanship, while on every hand, above the Oriental clamour of
stall-holders and the negative remarks of the public, rose the
all-prevailing cry:

"Come on, ma, take it for sixpence ... four-pence? ... twopence?  All
right, then I'll give it you...."

I must say, however, that I never observed this threat carried into
execution.

As I walked between the aisles of junk I remembered the story of a
friend who went to this market out of curiosity, and came away
unexpectedly in a taxicab with a priestess.  He had bought a mummy
for ten shillings.  And well can I believe it.  I longed for
something like this to happen to me, for that is how life should go.
When you look forward to a thing, or search for it and find it, you
are invariably disappointed because your mind has had time to
experience it and possess it and tire of it long before it comes.
But the joy of sudden, unexpected things seldom fails.  I have always
envied J., not his priestess, because she smelt like a French
third-class carriage and had to be buried at night, but his meeting
with her.  That must have been wonderful.  He was walking along
thinking about door knobs or bell wire when he saw her: "My God, a
mummy!  Man or woman?  Woman!  How romantic!  Probably she was
beautiful and young!  She used to shake a sistrum at Karnak beside
the Nile and wear a lovely pleated skirt and nothing underneath...."

For a second, perhaps two--anyhow just long enough to hand over a
ten-shilling note--I think he loved her as much as you can love a
mummy, and although his affection waned in Bloomsbury when he had to
help her out of the taxi, it must have been worth it just for the
sharp delirium of that meeting--he ardent, romantic; she a bit glazed
and fish-like in more ways than one, but eternally feminine, though,
as it were, canned.

I walked on trying not to expect that anything so wonderful would
come my way.  Near the entrance a man offered me someone's skeleton
for seven-and-sixpence, and when I said "No" he put down the box in
which it is kept and remarked to his wife: "Now, don't put your foot
through the skull, Emma."  At the next stall a young mother was
buying a cradle festooned in dusty black lace.

I watched a man buy three dentist's door plates for three and
sixpence, and the dealer generously threw in a bowler hat that looked
like the hero of a hundred brawls.

Then, here and there among the dense, moving crowds of women in
search of cheap saucepans, and those odd lengths of cloth which women
of all classes accumulate, I saw the dealers from the more
fashionable districts looking for something for five shillings to
sell later in the West End for five pounds.  There were also numbers
of treasure-seekers, men and women--smart, well dressed--collectors
of antiques, nosing round like setters for Chippendale chairs,
Japanese prints, Chinese jade, and Queen Anne silver.

Half the collectors in London make it a point to visit this place
every Friday in search of loot; and they walk round like pirate Kings
ready to pounce on the instant.

Most curious and sad to look upon were the old shoes, poor
down-at-heel, crinkly-toed things, standing dressed by the right on
their last parade, some with a remote Jermyn Street look about them,
others all that remains of someone's ancient corn-ridden aunt.  Among
a pile of boots which looked as though they had walked every yard of
the road to ruin, I saw, tall and upright, a pair of women's riding
boots, proud still in their decline.  I also saw a pair of gold
dance-slippers, somehow naked and ashamed.

A large woman was turning this way and that a slim little bride's
dress with the faded orange blossom still sewn on it.  A white veil
went with it, gashed and torn.  The fat woman moved on, lured by a
decayed washstand, and onward still to flirt a moment with an old
brass bedstead.  I saw other hands--big coarse hands--pulling this
forgotten little bride's dress about, pawing it.  What a pity it
could not melt away and save itself from this supreme insult!

* * *

In a corner lying on a sack I saw an Egyptian antiquity.  I pounced!

"How much?"

A young man answered me with an Oxford accent.

"Fifteen shillings, sir."

I wondered what on earth this superior person was doing there
standing back behind a sack spread with antiques.  Was it his hobby,
or was it a bet?

"I think," went on the Oxford voice, "you will agree with me that the
hieroglyphs were added at a later period.  Perhaps during the
Ptolemaic age, though I think the figure is much older, possibly
Eighteenth Dynasty."

I was astonished to hear this in the Caledonian Market.

"No, indeed, sir, I do not do this for fun: I do it for bread and
butter.  Since the war, you know!  Yes; I make enough to live.  I
have a _flair_ for antiques.  I buy cheaply and sell reasonably, and
collectors always come to me."

Strange spot, the Caledonian Market!

As I went out I was offered another skeleton for ten shillings.




Cenotaph

Ten-thirty A.M. in Whitehall on a cold, grey February morning.

There is expectancy at the Horse Guards, where two living statues
draped in scarlet cloaks sit their patient chargers.  A group of
sightseers wait at the gates for the high note of a silver cavalry
trumpet for the click of hoofs on the cobbles and a shining cavalcade
beneath an arch, the pageantry that precedes that silent ceremony of
changing a guard that "turns out" for no man but the King.

Laden omnibuses go down to Westminster or up to Charing Cross, and as
they pass every passenger looks at the two Life Guards in their
scarlet glory, for they are one of the sights of London that never
grows stale.  Taxicabs and limousines spin smoothly left and right,
men and women enter and leave Government offices: a Whitehall morning
is moving easily, leisurely, elegantly, if you like, towards noon.

I walk on to Westminster, and in the centre of the road,
cream-coloured, dominant, stands the Cenotaph.

* * *

More than six years ago the last shot was fired.  Six years.  It is
long enough for a heart to become convalescent.  Sharp agonies which
at the time of their happening seem incapable of healing have a
merciful habit of mending in six years.  A broken love-affair that
turned the world into a pointless waste of Time has ended in a happy
marriage in six years.  A death that left so much unspoken, so much
regret, so much to atone for, falls in six years into its pathetic
perspective a little nearer Nineveh and Tyre.

I look up at the Cenotaph.  A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle
van takes off his worn cap.  An omnibus goes by.  The men lift their
hats.  Men passing with papers and documents under their arms,
attaché and despatch cases in their hands--all the business of
life--bare their heads as they hurry by.

Six years have made no difference here.  The Cenotaph--that mass of
national emotion frozen in stone--is holy to this generation.
Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it
comes alive to an accompaniment of pomp as simple and as beautiful as
church ritual, I think that I like it best just standing here in a
grey morning, with its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by,
remembering.

* * *

I look up to Charing Cross and down to Westminster.  On one side
Whitehall narrows to a slit, against which rises the thin, black
pencil of the Nelson column; on the other Westminster Abbey, grey and
devoid of detail, seems etched in smoke against the sky, rising up
like a mirage from the silhouette of bare trees.

The wind comes down Whitehall and pulls the flags, exposing a little
more of their red, white, and blue, as if invisible fingers were
playing with them.  The plinth is vacant.  The constant changing
trickle of a crowd that later in the day will stand here for a few
moments has not arrived.  There is no one here.

No one?  I look, but not with my eyes, and I see that the Empire is
here: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India
... here--springing in glory from our London soil.

* * *

In a dream I see those old mad days ten years ago.  How the wind
fingers the flags....

I remember how, only a few weeks ago, as a train thundered through
France, a woman sitting opposite to me in the dining car said, "The
English!"  I looked through the window over the green fields, and saw
row on row, sharply white against the green, rising with the hill and
dropping again into the hollows--keeping a firm line as they had been
taught to do--a battalion on its last parade.

The Cenotaph and no one there?  That can never be.

* * *

Look!  Near the mottled white and black of the War Office far up
Whitehall is a platoon of Guardsmen marching.  As they come near I
see that they are men of the Irish Guards.  They swing their arms and
stride out, carrying their rifles at a perfect "slope."  They are
very young, the "eighteen-year-olds" we used to call them in 1918
when they were called up to form the "young soldiers' battalions."  I
remember how frightened some of them were at this thing that had
happened to them, and how often, when one was orderly officer padding
round at night, a boy soldier would be crying like a child in the
darkness at some harshness or in a wave of homesickness.

The old recipe has worked with the Guards!  On they come, a platoon
of tough Irish soldiers, their solemn faces grim and set under their
peaked caps, their belts snow white with pipeclay.

They approach the Cenotaph:

"Platoon!" roars the sergeant.  "Eyes--right!"

He slaps his rifle butt, and the heads swing round.

"Eyes--front!"

* * *

The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling ... pulling like
fingers touching the Flag.




Romance on Wheels

When normal London folk have gone home to bed the coffee-stalls come
trundling out of the mysterious dark to stay at street corners and
bridge-heads till the dawn.  Ask your friends if they have ever
sought refreshment at a coffee-stall.  I wager that perhaps only the
Bad Boy of the Family or Dance Club Jane have experienced the
happiness of sausages at 3 A.M. in this temple of romance.

The coffee-stall at the street corner is the only thing left in our
modern world that approximates to the mediæval inn or guest-house.
Hotels are graded and standardized, and you know exactly the kind of
people you will find in them.  Good hotels are so much alike that
patrons often have to ask the hall porter whether they are in London
or Rome.

But the little coffee-stall, set netwise at street corners to catch
queer fish, is dramatic.  If ever I write a play the first act will
take place round a coffee-stall; but I am told that this has been
done; and no wonder.  Here it is that you, like some traveller in the
old days before the last dragon died, will meet varlets and squires,
knights on some bright errantry, damsels in distress, and many a
wandering fool: all the old characters of Romance like moths round a
flame, dropping in out of the night to snatch a sausage and then off,
mysterious, elusive, into the night.

There was a mist round the coffee-stall when I found it: one of those
strange, fugitive fogs that drift like ghosts at night in the
hollows.  In the mist the stall was a glow-worm, yellow and furry,
warm and desirable, a home to wanderers and fly-by-nights, comforting
with its smell of hot coffee and its pungent, inviting sizzle.

Six or seven people, black against the yellowness and the banked
Woodbines and the tiers of depressing cakes, gazed round suspiciously
as I came in out of the incalculable dark, for after a certain time
of morning every plain man may have the mark of the devil on him.
Round this stall were the following people:

A young man with a silk hat on the back of his head and a white
evening scarf hanging over a white shirt front.

A young girl with yellow, shingled hair and a pair of silver
dance-shoes peeping out from under a moleskin cloak.

A very arch young woman, who was making hopeless eyes at the young
man in the silk hat out of sheer enthusiasm, as she ground cigarette
stump after cigarette stump into her saucer.

Three or four workmen from neighbouring road repairs.

Two men holding little black bags, who may have been telephone
officials, burglars, printers, disguised peers, or returning prodigal
sons, but mostly they looked like uncles from Balham.

From the young man in the silk hat I eavesdropped that everything was
"topping" and that Millie was "awfully struck" on Arthur, and from
his pretty partner I gathered that coffee and buns at 3 A.M. were
awfully good fun, and that she had sprung a ladder in her stocking.

"By why," she asked, "are coffee-stalls licensed to sell stamps?"

The arch young woman looked up swiftly, and said all in one breath:

"So that men can write home and tell their wives why they were kept
late at the office.  Who's going to stand me a coffee?"

No one laughed; then, surprisingly, one of the solemn Balham uncles
put down the money and as solemnly went on talking to his companion
about horses.  The arch lady turned her back on them, drank her
coffee, borrowed a broken mirror, rouged her lips, said, "Well,
cheerio, all!" and vanished, archly.

A taxicab driver arrived with a clatter, excavated threepence from
that deep remoteness where all taxicab drivers keep their money, and
departed with the young man and the young woman.  The Balham uncles
went off with a non-committal air, which made me wonder whether they
were off to break into a house or off home to sleep beneath a
scriptural text.

"All sorts, sir, I gets here," said the coffee-stall man as he
sloshed about among the dirty plates.  "You remember that cat
burglar, him what broke into Grosvenor Gardens the other night?  I've
had him 'ere.  'Safact!  Talkin' to a reel lord, he was, too!  Yes; I
get a lord now and again, but they ain't no different from ordinary
people.  They eats their sausages like everybody else and leaves the
gristle like everybody else and only puts tuppence under the saucer.
Why, you might be a lord for all I know----"

He paused, then in case I might get proud and haughty he added:

"Or a cat burglar....  Well, as I was sayin', up comes this 'ere cat
burglar, smart as you like, puts a little black bag where your
leanin' now--full of jools it was, but I didn't know--and he asks for
a cup of coffee and a barth bun.  He chips into the conversation and
talks to 'is lordship quite the gentleman.  'Nice chap that,' says
'is nibs after he'd gone.  'What is he?'  'I dunno.'  I tell him; and
at that moment up run a couple of coppers, all hot and bothered.
''Ave you seen a dark young man wearin' a blue double-breasted suit,
height five foot ten and a narf and of a pale complexion?'
'Thousands,' I says, going on wiping up; I could see something was up
and I wasn't splitting.  Then they told me about 'im, and I told them
about 'im, and off they ran like a couple of ferrets.  Catch him?
Not likely....  Good morning, sir!"

Suddenly into the circle of light stepped a man carrying a cat that
had been born white.  A thin, melancholy cat and a thin, melancholy
man, middle-aged, rain-coated, and grim.  He placed the thin cat on
the oilcloth counter, and the man behind at once poured out a saucer
of milk.

The cat slunk to it guiltily.  The man watched it as if he had never
seen a cat before, and stroked its back.  Then he buttoned it inside
his raincoat and went away.

"Collects cats, he does," said the coffee-stall man, as he banged
about among his unwashed china.  "Says they follow him.  Most nights
he comes along with a stray cat, buys it milk, takes it home and
looks after it.  Regular walkin' cats' home, he is....  Good morning,
sir..."

Round the bend of the road swung the first gold tramcar of a new day.




Ghosts of the Fog

Fog in London.

Men are like flat figures cut in black paper.  All things become
two-dimensional.  Carts, motorcars, omnibuses are shadows that nose
their way painfully like blind beasts.  The fog has a flavour.  Many
flavours.  At Marble Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon;
at Ludgate Hill I taste coke.

Everywhere the fog grips the throat and sets the eyes watering.  It
puts out clammy fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a
ghostly grip.

Children alone love it.  They press their small faces to window-panes
and watch the lights like little unripe oranges going by in the murk.
A taxicab becomes something ogreish; a steam-lorry is a dragon
spitting flame and grunting on its evil way.  Men who sell things in
the streets become more than ever deliciously horrible and
blood-curdling; they never arrive normally; they loom; they appear,
delightfully freezing the blood, howling their wares like the lonely
wolf in a picture book.

I go out into the fog and enter an incredible underworld.  The fog
has turned London into a place of ghosts.  At one moment a man with a
red nose and a moustache like a small scrubbing-brush appears with
the startling suddenness of an apparition.  There must be millions of
such men with exactly similar moustaches, but this one is segregated
from the herd.  He seems unique in his isolation.  I am quite
prepared to believe he is the only one of that type in the world.  I
want to examine him as a learned man examines an insect on a pin.  He
seems a rare and interesting specimen.  I want to cry "Stop!  Let me
appreciate you!"  But no; in a flash he goes, fades--disappears!

There comes a girl, pale and beautiful--much more beautiful than she
would be on a fine day, because the eyes are focussed on her alone!
She has the allurement of a dream, or a girl in a poem.

What is this in Oxford Street?  Two motor-cars locked together.
Fifty grim, muffled ghosts stand round watching and blowing their
noses.  On any day but a foggy day it would be a mere nothing: an
excuse for a policeman to lick his pencil and write in a book.
To-day it is a struggle of prehistoric monsters in a death-grip.  So
must two clumsy, effete beasts of the Ice Age have fought locked in
each other's scaly arms.

"Hi, there, put a bit of beef behind it....  Come on, mate---heave!"

Deep, angry voices come from the grey nothingness.  A girl ghost says:

"Oh, isn't it awful?  My eyes smart like anything."

Two big yellow eyes bear down on the scene.  Men ghosts jump about in
the road.  They shout, they wave a red light, the monster with the
two blazing eyes swerves, there is a vision of a red-faced man in a
peaked cap and his gloved hands on a steering wheel:

"Keep your rear lights on, can't you!  You ought to be in the
cemetery.... that's where you ought to be and that's where you'll
blinkin' well end!"

He passes on with his message.

* * *

In Finsbury Square a crowd of ghosts watch ten devils.  Men are
putting down asphalt.  To-day they are not men: they are fiends
pushing flaming cauldrons about.  The roadway is a mass of tiny,
licking, orange-coloured flames.  The devils take long rakes, and the
little flames leap and jump and fall over and between the prongs of
the rakes like fluid.  Red-hot wheeled trolleys, with a blasting
flame, beneath them are dragged backwards and forwards over the
roadway, heating it, licking at it, and roaring like furnaces.

The wind blows the flames this way and that way, lighting up the
faces of the men, glittering on their belt buckles and making their
bare arms fire colour.

The ghosts stand with white faces watching.  More ghosts come.  One
little ghost has a peaked cap and an urgent message in a patent
leather pouch.  He stays a long time.

* * *

Near the Bank I come face to face with the greatest optimist of this
or any other age.  Here is a man entirely obscured by fog standing on
the kerb making a tin monkey run up and down a piece of twine.  Think
of it!  If you are sad or broke or things are going wrong, think of
this man selling tin monkeys in a thick fog.

"How many have you sold?" I ask him.

"Fower," he says.

Four tin monkeys sold in a thick fog.

Marvellous!  Incredible!




Battle

They lie in long, bright wards, which are full of that clean hospital
smell of warmth, flowers, and drugs.  A neat-waisted nurse moves
between the beds, smiling, bending, whispering, easing a pillow,
passing from weary smile to weary smile, so young by contrast with
these sufferers, so healthy, so calm, so reliable.

The women are mostly middle-aged, but their plaited hair, lying in
two little coils over their shoulders, gives them a youthful look, so
that you realize what they were like when they were eighteen.  Some
are pale, their poor, thin arms the colour of unbleached wax; many
look so well that you marvel that they should be there.  It is the
same in the men's wards.  Cancer!  That malignant, hissing word that
lurks like a spectre at the back of so many minds has brought these
men and women to one of the most noble hospitals in the world--the
Free Cancer Hospital in the Fulham Road.

I admit that when I entered my first ward I shrank, in the shameful
cowardice of my health, as I did once when a leper in the East rose
up on his stumps out of the dust and touched my arm.  To see the
unimaginable horrors which you could be called on to suffer, to see
lying there before your eyes the unthinkable depths to which your
fine, strong body could sink, is a ghastly ordeal.

Yet what did I see?  I saw greater than this black thing whose
vileness no words can mitigate, the splendid forces of Heroism and
Hope: Heroism in the long, quiet wards, Hope in the operating
theatres, in the laboratories.  Here in the middle of London, with
streams of omnibuses thundering past beyond the railings, is a day
and night battle with agony.  Tragedy and triumph follow each other
through these white halls, and over all is that fine spirit of
enthusiasm as of an army banded to fight for a cause.

* * *

Instead of shuddering at the flesh, I reverenced the spirit that
rises up and fights this unknown terror, fights it with the knife and
with the test tube and with the X-ray, and goes on fighting, goes on
hoping.  Have you ever in a storm at sea thrilled to the driving,
thrusting strength and balance of a great ship riding the tempest?
If so, you will know how I felt in this hospital that steers its
course through an ocean of suffering.

"This is the laboratory!"

A man in white overalls was bending over a microscope.  Another man
in white was examining the changing colour in a test tube.  The rigid
set of their shoulders denoted utter concentration.  Round them lay
hundreds of glass globes, bottles, ghastly exhibits from which I
swiftly turned away.

Day in and day out, year after year, the research department of this
hospital searches into the mysteries of cancer.  In one part of the
building doctors try to cure or alleviate the disease; in another
scientists work with their minds on that day when it may be possible
to prevent it.  Is there a more splendid room in London?

* * *

The chronic ward!  Through glass doors I saw in one men, in another
women.  They were away from the other patients in whom the disease
has been caught in time.  I tried not to look at the seared faces; I
turned from the broken lives with a soreness at my heart.  Some of
them have been there for years, some are there for life.  Over many
of them was a strange, still peace which made me see, but I may be
wrong, a nurse hurrying down those calm corridors with a merciful
hypodermic syringe in her hand.

* * *

Visiting day!  Can you imagine the quiet heroism of it?  The wife who
comes to see the husband who has been taken away from her, the
husband who creeps in towards a bed in which, so small and girlish
and white, she lies waiting for him?  The flowers, the little
cheerfulnesses, and, behind it all, the doubt, the wondering, the
ache, the sense of injustice.

"Well, you'll soon be well and home again, dear."

"Yes!  And how's old Johnny?  How I'd love to see that dog again!"

Then anxiously, swiftly in reply:

"But you will, you old silly, you _will_!"

"Yes, of course, perhaps I will."

"Good-bye!"

"Oh, come back, my dear.  Just once more!  How lovely your hair
smells...."

Can you imagine how often the most cheerful visitor crumples up when
the weary eyes from the bed cannot see beyond the closed door?

* * *

Who is Dr. William Marsden?

How many Londoners know?  He was the man who seventy-one years ago
founded this hospital, and behind it lies a story as tragic as any in
its wards.  When going home late one night Dr. Marsden, who was then
a young medical student, found a poor girl in a dying condition on a
doorstep near Holborn.  He took her to a hospital, where she was
refused admission because she bore no letter of introduction from a
subscriber.  The next day she died.  The young medical student
resolved that if he succeeded in life he would found a free hospital
for which there would be no qualification for admission but poverty
and suffering.

He became famous, he loved, he married.  Then his own wife was
stricken with cancer, and nothing could be done to check the disease.
Out of her death and the death of the unknown woman sprang this
splendid work that shines like a good deed over London.




Babies in the Sun

Fat babies, white dogs running, nursemaids with the wind pulling at
their snuff-coloured veils, and at least six sharp intervals of sun
strong enough to paint three shadows on the grass.  That was how
Kensington Gardens looked the other day, that delicious annexe to a
thousand nurseries, that lovely land of young things insulated from
our common world by a row of spiked railings.

I went up the Broad Walk revelling in this untroubled side of life,
joyfully appreciating other people's babies, patting other people's
dogs, admiring a smart turnout that lacked only a crest on the
dove-grey perambulator, noting with pleasure the tall, neat young
Kensington mothers with their lamp-post figures in well-cut tweed.
When the sun came through it was like a game of musical chairs.  The
nursemaids stopped perambulating.  Wind-blown walkers came to a
standstill.  They sat down on green seats.

So did I.

Next to me was a maiden of about three, a little unopened rose-bud of
a girl, whose crisp gold hair escaped from a woollen cap with a
yellow woollen tuft on top like a tangerine.  Her short legs, in grey
woollen trousers, stuck out in space so that she, sitting on a
grown-up's seat, was in exactly the same position she would have
assumed had she been sitting on a floor!  Her brother was perhaps
five.  He wore a peaked cap of corduroy, leggings, and a little fawn
coat with an absurd belt at the back.

These two were holding hands, a difficult feat, I imagine, when hands
are so small and woollen gloves so bulky and fluffy.  They were
discussing railway travel.  He said that the carriage wheels say
"lickety-lick, lickety-lick," which I thought was very true, but she,
womanlike, contradicted him, saying that they go "tell-at-a-train,
tell-at-a-train," which I thought also was very true.  Then suddenly
he said loudly three times, because his nurse was reading a novel:

"Nannie," he said, "I'm going to marry Madge!"

She looked shocked, put down the novel, and said:

"No, Master John, little boys don't marry their sisters, ever."

"I know," said Master John.  "Not now, of course, but when I grow up
and get big.  Some day when I'm----"

Here he opened his arms to denote size and maturity.

"Yes; but then you'll marry some other boy's sister," said the nurse.

"I won't--not never!" cried John furiously.  "I'll marry Madge!
Other boys' sisters are silly asses.  They play with dolls!"

The sun went in and they went away, nurse telling him that "nice
boys" don't say "silly asses"--ever!  I smiled.  Little minds in
fairy-land grappling for the first time with this incomprehensible
world!  Poor John, dear Madge!

Ten minutes in the Broad Walk make you think a lot about small
children.  How much character they show at an age when they seem
hardly to exist as reasonable beings!  See how some lag behind, how
others are unhappy unless they are in front, exploring, climbing,
meeting great dogs on which, at the last moment, they turn their
backs in fear.  Watch how some just endure a walk placidly, while
others shine with the adventure of it, seeing every detail,
wondering, questioning.  Look how some collect things busily: sticks
by the armful, stones by the pocketful!  Restless, acquisitive little
creatures.  All instinct with motives planted in them before birth.

How amusing it is to watch it all.  Such tiny, instinctive people!

* * *

The Round Pond flecked by wind.  White gulls.  Ducks with green
velvet heads.  Not one ship slanting across this ocean; not one.
Only a boy prodding the water with a stick:

"Too cold to sail a ship!" I said.

"It isn't," he replied, scowling.  "But mother thinks it is."

"And she's right!" I said, wishing to rebuke him.

"She isn't!" (Slap, slap on the water.)

"She is!"

"She isn't!"

I felt that this conversation had all the elements of eternity, so,
after delivering a last word in defence of the mothers of Kensington
who release the navies of the Round Pond at exactly the right
temperature, I left this scowling die-hard admiral to his melancholy.

* * *

Then, on a path under bare trees, I saw a fat, round fairy in salmon
pink.  Just standing, she was.  I sat down to look at her.  She
advanced slowly.  Among the bare trees someone called, "Joan, Joan!"
She reminded me of a faun I saw once on the Rock of the Loreli on the
Rhine.  It advanced in just this same doubtful, solemn manner; one
movement on my part would have sent it with beating heart into the
thicket.  So she advanced.  I smiled; she smiled.  Then she touched
my coat with one finger, laughed, and--ran unsteadily away over the
path under bare trees.  Flirt!

I left Wonderland, and caught an omnibus to Piccadilly in a
remarkably good temper....




Faces in the Strand

When you ride up the Strand on top of an omnibus--and probably in
rain--please remember that someone is envying you with all his heart,
that someone would give six months' pay to sit in your damp seat and
see the lines of traffic converge on Charing Cross.

To the west in Canada, to the south in Africa, to the east in India,
and far over the sea in Australia and New Zealand, are the lonely
men.  Where the red border line of Empire ends on the map in an alien
colour are the little outposts in which these men work and dream.  At
the end of day they ram down the tobacco in their pipes and think of
home with the characteristic sentimentality of the exile, for
solitude makes a man very like a child.  "Lord to be in London now!"
How many times in the twenty-four hours does this cry go up all over
the earth?  We who take our London carelessly as a matter of course
can have no conception of its meaning to these wanderers who, feeling
the ache of home-sickness, are too old to cry.

* * *

The Strand!

That means London in shack, bungalow, and camp.  It means more: it
symbolizes--home!  Not Piccadilly, not Pall Mall, not fashionable
Mayfair or Belgravia, but the curious old Victorian Strand.

What a street it is.  It does not belong to London.  Piccadilly,
Regent Street, and Oxford Street stole its birthright long ago.  It
belongs to the Empire.  Look at its shops.  They are full of pith
helmets and spine pads, veld shirts and tropical drill, ammunition
belts and puttees.  Your smart subaltern going out to join the Indian
cavalry may buy his clothes in Savile Row, but your old colonial, who
has been pegging down the flag somewhere for the best part of his
life, comes back to shop in the Strand, to walk in the Strand, to
exult in the Strand....

* * *

Take the faces.  In days when colonials come home you will find
nothing more interesting in London.  The exile makes straight for the
Strand; if he does not know it he makes its acquaintance at once,
joyfully, reverently; for he has heard men speak of it as men speak
of their mothers.  As he walks along he begins to believe that he has
really come home.

You will see him shouldering his way gingerly through the crowds with
the gentleness of a big man not used to pavements, and he looks up at
the landmarks, a shop where he bought a gun once, a restaurant where
once Mary ... well, never mind, that was over long ago.  Or he may be
that strange thing, a tenderfoot in London, a tenderfoot from the
prairies or the veld or the Afghan frontier.  He is fulfilling his
destiny: He is walking down the Strand!  When he gets back men will
say to him: "Well, and how did you find London?"

And he will start a story consciously and proudly with:

"I was walking down the Strand one morning----"

Ah, he has struck a chord at once.  Surely you visualize the smile
that will go round the circle of men deep in their cane chairs.  "I
was walking down the Strand!"  Can you begin a story in the tropics
in a more arresting way?  You set a whole flock of memories
a-flying....

What sentimental journeys the Strand has seen.

You must have been stopped at some time near the Adelphi by a
burnt-up, middle-aged man who asks the way to a bar or a restaurant
unknown to you.  When you say you don't know it, a disappointed look
creeps into his eyes, and he apologizes and goes off, very straight
and lonely, in the crowd.

Conrad in quest of his youth?  Perhaps.  Possibly for years, while he
waited for leave, he was promising himself a visit to this place.  No
doubt the stars saw him sitting out alone at night thinking of it,
hearing the thunder of the Strand, seeing its lights, and himself
slipping into his old seat at a corner table where he used to sit
with old X, who was killed in "British East." ...

All the time the Strand was altering, denying such exiles their
beloved landmarks.

* * *

So they drift a little sadly and disconsolately along the Strand,
feeling as you feel when, after a long absence, you visit a place
known to you when you were a child.  Nothing is so big as you
thought, nothing so impressive as once it was.  That tiny paddock was
once a prairie--that small house a castle.

The Strand to them is somehow different--cheaper, smaller, vaguely
disappointing.  Those pale-faced men hurrying along.  How strange.
What an altered atmosphere!  And where are those lovely little faces
that used to look from beneath Merry Widow hats?

* * *

Then, six months after, in a solitude of stars and palms, with a hot
wind blowing over the plains:

"O Lord, to see the dear old Strand now!"

The big stars shine, the moon swings up above the distant hills, and
the old love comes back into the heart of the lonely man....




Women and Tea

A tea-shop is a delightful place.  It is the milestone that marks the
end of a day's work.

In the provinces, and particularly in the north and in Scotland,
where men take tea with passionate sincerity, frequently starting
with sardines and ending with apple tart, the tea-shop occupies an
appropriately massive position in daily life.  London's tea-shops
are, however, talk-shops, refuges from a day's shopping,
trysting-places after a terrible eight hours' separation.

O, the eyes that meet over a muffin every afternoon in London; the
hands that thrill to a casual touch beneath the crumpet plate....

London's tea-shops are of many kinds, from the standardized shop to
the good pull-up for millionaires constructed on the Paris plan,
where slim Gruyère sandwiches hide in paper coats, and cakes taste of
Benedictine, and bills have a queer habit of working out at fifteen
shillings.

Then, of course, there is the cosy type of tea-shop run on amateur
lines where genteel young women who do not seem to have forgotten
William Morris bend wistfully over the meringues in brown or sage
green _crêpe de Chine_ gowns and an air of shattered romance.  Such
places have fanciful names designed to attract those with a passion
for peace.  They are always opening or going smash, and there is a
widespread belief in the suburbs among enterprising young women that
this is the way to an enormous bank account.

"Thanks awfully!"

That's what they say when you pay the bill, and such a sad, sweet
smile goes with it.  Andromeda chained to a cheese cake.

* * *

I entered a large musical tea-shop in the heart of Shopland
yesterday.  The atmosphere was as feminine as that of a perfume
store.  It was No Man's Land.  I steered my conspicuous way to a
table through a jungle of musquash, moleskin, and beaver.  The only
other men there were in the toils of women, politely tapping their
_éclairs_, and wearing photographic faces, behaving as men never
behave away from this uplifting and ennobling atmosphere.

I heard a girl describe a bridesmaid's dress; another girl was
talking about a baby; a third had discovered John Galsworthy.  Two
young married women were discussing their husbands, how really sweet
they were, how they hated cold mutton, how amusingly irritable they
were, and how upset they were when their wives shingled their hair....

A slight stir was caused by the entrance of husbands to claim their
wives.  One, a handsome young man, was charmingly introduced with shy
pride; another, an elderly, bluff, old-established husband, was
received quite calmly like an over-due muffin.  Then the human event
that electrified the entire tea-shop happened, that marvellous touch
of nature that unites Kennington with even the best parts of
Kensington.

A small, smug child, distinguished only by a red balloon on the end
of a string, set up a wild and awful howl.  It was dramatic in its
suddenness.  Everybody looked round in the belief that the infant had
sat on a pin.  Instead they saw the red balloon drifting with a gay
and careless determination towards the roof.  Reaching its
destination, it bumped gracefully twice and remained there, coyly
nestling against a frescoed cupid.

Immediately the entire tea-shop, hitherto split into self-centred
groups, became one in a solid endeavour to rescue the red balloon.
Young men anxious to distinguish themselves stood on chairs and made
wild grabs for the string with their umbrellas; dogs which till then
had been asleep and unsuspected, awakened and barked.

In the centre of the stage stood the smug, small child, breathless
with anxiety, pointing to the roof, grief-stricken that his balloon
had played him false, yet encouraged by the stir the event was
causing in so many grown-up lives.

A grim old man melted by the tragedy obtained a long pole employed in
pulling down shop blinds.  He succeeded in driving the balloon from
its fastness and sending it fatuously bumping into another.
Meanwhile the entire shop held its breath, expecting these good
intentions to end in a loud plop and a worse tragedy.  There was a
gasp of relief as this ancient hero gave way to a man in an apron
with a step-ladder.

He did the deed.

The tea-shop settled down.  The smug child that had united an
afternoon's assembly left unnoticed.  Over the tea-tables rose again
the talk of bridesmaids and husbands and shingles and Maud's hennaed
hair.  The orchestra played some more Puccini, and a small boy who
had profited by the commotion to seize his fourth _éclair_ gave an
enormous sigh of joy.




An Open Door

Shortly after midnight a decently dressed young man glanced furtively
round Trafalgar Square, hesitated a moment, and then ran swiftly up
the broad, black steps of St. Martin's Church.  I came up behind him
as he tapped the door.

There was the sound of a drawn bolt, and the door swung back.  The
young man stammered.  He was blue with cold, and--there was something
else:

"I'm--I'm broke," he said.  "I've never done this before.  I've
always had a bit of money; but--well, I've nowhere to sleep to-night,
and--please can I come in?"

The door opened wider, and a pleasant, middle-aged policewoman said:

"Come along!"  I followed.

* * *

Down in the crypt of St. Martin's Church, the church whose doors
never close, I saw a remarkable sight.  Broad, white arches spanned a
dim gloom.  Certain benches were set facing the east, as in the
church above, and others were placed round the crypt.  Lying, sitting
upright, and huddled in every position of which the human body is
capable, were men and women, homeless wanderers over the hard face of
the earth.

There was no sound in the white crypt but variously keyed snores and
the small scratch of a policewoman's pen as she kept a record of
Christ's guests, for such they are; and as I looked at them these
words sang in my heart: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Sanctuary.  That was it.  They had the hunted air of having run hard
to find this place, and, having found it, had abandoned themselves to
safety.  There was something else.  They reminded me of a picture
that used to thrill me when I was a child: troops, rolled in their
cloaks beside dead fires, sleeping before a battle.  Their battle was
To-morrow.

* * *

There was a young girl who could not sleep.  She was wrapped tightly
in a blue mackintosh.  She sat with her eyes wide open, gazing before
her.  There was a grey-haired woman sleeping upright in a pew, a
poor, rakish hat on a pile of prayer-books beside her.  Three or four
other women slept near together, leaning against each other, as if
for warmth.

Most of the men slept.  Some had no overcoats, and lay huddled with
their tousled heads on hassocks.  Others had placed their coats over
their heads.  One or two wore spats, and appeared from their clothes
to be prosperous.  Then you looked at their boots, and read a story
of tramp, tramp, tramp.  One elderly man, awakened suddenly, shot out
an arm to look at his wrist-watch.  But there was no watch there, and
he drew his hand swiftly under his coat again as though it hurt.

* * *

"Some extraordinary dramas have been acted on the steps outside in
the small hours," said a young man officially connected with the
church.  "Once a girl was saved from white-slavers; once I brought in
a boy so blue with cold that I had to open the furnace doors without
delay, and thaw him.  Most of the 'down-and-outs' know this church.
Many of them we manage to set up again, some sink back or just
disappear.  Yet we never lose faith in human nature.  A homeless
person is allowed to shelter here only three nights in succession.
After that we try to find some other abode, so you see our visitors
are always changing."

He opened a door, and I found myself in a cellar full of old clothes.
Boxes of collars lay on the floor.  A knowing looking silk hat
crowned a pile of old hats.  Women's skirts and men's trousers hung
from pegs.  Boots and shoes stood neatly dressed by the right.

"This is our wardrobe," he said.  "Our first principle is to give a
homeless person food and then whatever clothes we can.  You can't
expect to hear the truth on an empty stomach."

"Are you often deceived by people who drift in here out of the night?"

"Now and then.  It's nothing compared with the friends we make, the
delightful characters we discover when the ache and pain of hardship
have worn off.  We divide men into three groups: Those who have been
to prison and have a grudge against the world; those who went to the
war as boys and came back men with boys' minds; and those who simply
will not work and can't run straight.  We have heard every fairy tale
in the world, and we know a scrounger at sight!"

* * *

I tip-toed back through the white crypt.  The pale girl was still
awake.  The grey-haired woman still slept--old, worn-out,
uncared-for, and life gone by.  Men slept and stirred uneasily as if
afraid of the dawn that was stealing on to draw them again into the
battle.  How many would rise gloriously; how many fall?  We talk of
human nature in the rough, heartbeats, life.  Here it is in the
middle of London every night, each sleeper a real drama of struggle,
each man and woman midway in that Valley of the Shadow through which
all lives, spiritually or materially, must pass.

"We don't care what they are," said the young man.  "If they are in
trouble, that is enough."

I hardly heard him, for I was thinking that in this white place is
the Spirit of Christ.




A Bit of Bagdad

The only place where you could sell an elephant, a were-wolf, or your
second best aunt without attracting the slightest curiosity is Club
Row, a Sunday market famous throughout the eastern regions of London.
Turn out of Shoreditch along the Bethnal Green Road and presently you
see a large cloth-capped crowd.  You approach.

A dramatic, sinister man who lost his razor early last year detaches
himself and sidles up to you with his right hand suspiciously hidden
in the breast of his coat.  Is he an anarchist?  Just as you expect
him to bring out a bomb and cry "Down with Civilization," he quickly
produces a six-ounce pom and whispers in a voice like a rusty door
hinge: "Come on, half a dollar!"  Other dog men approach.  They offer
handfuls of pups, or they submit dogs of larger growth which sit
round in a circle looking up at you questioningly, hopefully.  You
want to buy the lot.  Then an Airedale bites a collie and you find
yourself the centre of a splendid battle, from which you escape into
the heart of the mob.

Here life is magnificent.  Thousands of things are happening at once
in Oriental variety.  This is what Bagdad was like in the days of the
Caliph.  This is what the Mouski in Cairo is like to-day.  As you
stand wedged between people who hold sacks that writhe and cluck, a
man waves a couple of buff Orpingtons in your face and pushes past to
stand himself a glass of jellied eels.  An elderly parrot-like old
lady is marooned helplessly, with a green aloof-looking parrot,
exactly like herself, perched on her hand.  Pigeons coo, hens cackle,
cockerels crow, dogs bark, canaries sing, and you gain the impression
that anything--anything--is yours for "half a dollar."

I was interested in the little groups round contortionists,
catch-penny men, and herb doctors.  We have driven these mediæval
characters from more polite places, and it is almost with a thrill
that east of Aldgate Pump you find yourself in the hearty atmosphere
of a fair as old as England.  One man, who said that his face was as
well known as the dome of St. Paul's, walked rapidly up and down with
a mysterious paper packet over which he held a pair of dental
forceps.  Every one wanted to see what marvellous thing he would pick
out of the packet at the psychological moment.  All the time as he
walked backwards and forwards he talked, of indigestion and other
things with Elizabethan frankness.  He discussed food as if it were a
revolver.

"If the steak repeats, if the onions repeat, if the pudding repeats,
if cheese repeats...."

Then, working up to his climax, he dived the forceps into the packet
and produced a beautiful heliotrope-coloured pill!

Did he sell any?  He did!

Under a railway arch a young man with a faint Scottish accent had
been handcuffed and chained.  Round his neck he wore a steel collar;
on his head a steel cap which, he said, was "an exact replica of the
cap used for capital punishment throughout the United States of
America."  (Thrill in the audience!)

"And now," he remarked (with a touch of his Scottish accent), "before
I release myself, my partner will take the liberty of passing the hat
round!"

The fringes of the crowd melted away.  After a prolonged struggle,
interrupted by a donkey and cart bursting violently into the arena,
the young man unshackled himself, dived for the hat, looked at the
pennies, and remarked, "Well, now; if any sportsman would care...."

But the crowd had stampeded.

How delightfully childish it all is.  In order to sell chocolate one
man had taken off his coat and had put on his head an irresponsible
looking opera hat!

In side streets I came on a bicycle market.  I wondered how many were
doped like racehorses.  A stray bicycle found carelessly outside a
house becomes something quite different with the aid of a paint pot!
How many old crocks had been dressed up with new lamps and saddles I
would not care to say!  Here trade was booming.  I saw a man who had
bought a dog, a birdcage, and a pair of pink braces, treat himself to
a pair of handle-bars.  It must be wonderful to wander through Bagdad
like this, meeting things on the way, living an hour full of infinite
possibilities, not knowing whether you will arrive home with a
bullfinch or a bicycle!  After watching this market closely I realize
this: people do not go there to buy things, but to have things sold
to them!

* * *

On the way out I saw something worth while.  A melancholy bull pup
sitting in the road with all the world's troubles in his eyes was
picked up by a little girl.

"I want him because he looks so unhappy."

A chauffeur in a green coat paid out five shillings.

"Darling ... darling," said the girl, holding the squat little body.

They took him to a motor-car that had been left round the corner.  So
he left a street corner in Bagdad to be a prince among pups.

Kismet!




"Prisoners Only"

"Prisoners Only."

A door in Bow Street Police Station opens on a small tiled room in
which each morning all the prisoners on their way to the celebrated
dock gather to await the call.

It is an exclusive apartment.  Visitors are not allowed.  Unless you
break a shop window, punch a policeman in the stomach, or become
publicly full of spirit you will never see it.  It was due only to
the courtesy of Bow Street that I was allowed in for a moment
yesterday like an ordinary prisoner.  Here I found a strange
assortment of human beings gathered together by Fate--or should I say
alcohol?--for Monday morning's crime originates in a bottle!

The room is tiled and looks like an ordinary waiting-room till a
policeman opens the door that leads out to a courtyard and then you
see a second door composed of stout iron bars.  About twenty or
thirty men were sitting round the room talking to the policemen who
had arrested them.  Most of them were weary, some of those who had
been let out on bail looked smart, a few still retained traces of
their fateful debauch, and all had lost the divine afflatus which had
flung them into a pair of blue arms.  The atmosphere was rather like
that of a headmaster's study in which is gathered a group of bad boys
waiting for the cane.

A stoical old man dozed peacefully in a corner.  So might dear old
Falstaff have bared his grey hairs in a moment of regrettable trial.
A navvy with the head of a Roman emperor sat huddled in his
clay-soiled clothes, silent, grim.  He reminded me of Trajan's bust
in the British Museum.  He should have been dressed in a toga instead
of sitting in Bow Street with a fine of five shillings hanging over
him!  A young man with a mild face sat near him, the kind of young
man who keeps rabbits in a back yard.  I wondered what odd
circumstance had brought him in conflict with law and order.  Among a
group of seedy and tattered people I noticed a smart man wearing
spats and holding a neat umbrella.

It was the strangest roomful you can imagine.

* * *

How wonderfully British!  I do not imagine that the police and
prisoners of any other nation meet together as captor and captive in
the same cheery, almost social atmosphere.

In Berlin I imagine it must be exceedingly unpleasant to be a
prisoner, and in Paris, also, it cannot be exactly jolly.  In Cologne
I once saw a German policeman draw his sword and charge a little boy
who had left a banana skin on a patch of neat, cultured turf; and in
Paris once I saw a gendarme do unnecessarily unfriendly things to his
captive.  But our Roberts are not like this, and when they are face
to face with their prey in the station they seem almost apologetic
about it:

"You broke the law and I did my duty, and that's that.  Let's forget
it!"

That is the atmosphere in the "Prisoners Only" room.  Thumbs in
belts, the policemen talked with their prisoners about racing, the
weather, and, as far as I could gather, anything but drink and
brawls.  What instinctive good breeding!  Here and there a prisoner
who took his captivity lightly laughed and joked with the man who
brought him there.

"What'll I get?" one prisoner asked.

"Oh, about twenty years without option!" replied the constable.  Then
a man with a notebook became busy with the day's evil-doers, a name
was called, and as the first prisoner pulled himself together and
strode out dockwards, a flutter of interest went round the
waiting-room, and the old man awakened with a start and asked where
he was.

* * *

Under the Royal Arms sat Sir Chartres Biron, white-haired and
exceedingly wise to human nature.  He was dealing with a pathetic
collection of women prisoners who had been waiting in a "Prisoners
Only" room of their own.  Constable after constable described scenes
of revelry in which it was alleged that certain inadequate Bacchantes
in black bonnets had been urged to deeds of violence.

Some women pleaded guilty and got it all over quickly.  Others
clasped and unclasped their hands--appealing, thin, worn hands grimed
with work--and tried to impress Sir Chartres that "two glasses of
port" had been the cause of all their trouble.  They were fined and
went their way, some with an assumption of belated dignity, others
jauntily.  One old lady was so pleased with her sentence that she
danced down the corridor between two lines of policemen promising
never to look upon the wine again.

* * *

Then one by one my friends of the waiting-room came up for justice:
drunk and disorderly, drunk in charge of a motor-car, creating a
disturbance, using insulting language.  They all looked sorry for
themselves and exceedingly foolish.  Five deaf and dumb youths had,
it appeared, pushed a policeman off the pavement.  The mother of one
of them interpreted the case, talked to them in baby language, asked
them if they had really "banged" the policeman.  They nodded their
heads and tried to speak, but only vague, tortured sounds,
heart-rending to hear, came from their mouths.  They filed out, bound
over.

Then Cæsar strode into the dock, said he had been drunk, accepted his
fine without a trace of emotion, and walked from the dock with an
invisible cohort before him and--a visible bottle sticking out of his
coat-tails!

* * *

When he has done his day's work does Sir Chartres Biron feel more
like laughing or crying, I wonder?




Boys on the Bridge

Boys are always leaning over London Bridge, as right-minded boys have
been leaning these five hundred years and more.  Beneath them the
Thames, that loved river of ours, swirls and eddies round the piers,
sucking at the weathered stone as it runs seawards, out and away.

When I joined them the other day I noticed with an authentic thrill
that against the grim wharves men were doing interesting things in
ships.  No matter how trivial the act--the hauling of a rope, the
turning of a winch, the painting of a hull--it becomes somehow vital
and significant to anyone on dry land.  To a London office boy who
has been told not to linger by the wayside--ah! how exquisite, how
irresistible!

Sometimes little important jets of steam rose from a cargo boat,
marvellously suggesting departure and the imminence of great
adventure; enviable free men whose boots had never trod an office
stair popped their heads out of hatchways and lumbered up on deck; a
string of linked barges, dingy, low in the water, went by behind an
impertinent tug, which nosed the tide sideways, pulling and puffing.
On the hindmost barge a man was frying bacon in a jet-black pan.  O,
exquisite!  O, irresistible!  Was this not life?  Was this not
romance?

To me a fat white woman was singularly significant.  She appeared
from the bowels of a barge and, moving slowly to starboard with a
nautical roll, hung an intimate item of her laundry right in the eye
of London Bridge.  Then she looked round her with that composed
placidity which sustains the suburbs (just as if she were in Brixton
and not on the high seas), and after giving one of her sleeves a roll
to keep it above her fat elbow, she went below with the important air
of the busy female who believes that her industry is the hinge on
which life turns smoothly.  No cut-throats on that barge, no
swashbuckling, no silly ideas about the Spanish Main there, but
everything nice and tidy, and wipe your boots on the mat and mind you
don't stay out too long after closing time!  Wonderful how a
woman--any woman--softens a masculine scene and awakens the boy in
man to a swift respect--as if the matron had appeared suddenly on the
scene of a scrum on a dormitory landing!  The wild places of the
earth do not care much about a man.  He can't do much!  When the
woman appears the aspens shiver and the tamarisks tremble and even
the oak is fearful, for a lone man is transitory and woman is
permanent: she means a home and a whole lot more men; she is the
beginning of civilization.

So the fat woman made her barge most interesting to me: she brought
it right into society, she humanized the wild old Thames.  All this
was high above the office boys who pressed their stomachs to the
stone and clambered for a foothold in the balustrading so that they
might take a better view of all this glamour....

Thames, you muddy strip of magic, how many London heads have you
turned; how many sirens come in from sea on every tide to sing those
wicked songs against which we poor chained creatures sometimes wax
our ears in vain?

* * *

I looked at the faces of the spellbound office boys.  They gazed like
gargoyles from the parapet.  Most of them were dull and stolid; but
you never can tell!  Their cheeks bulged with sweets and their eyes
regarded the river with the same intent vacancy that they would have
given to a spectacular road repair.

One face only seemed to me to hold the hunger that burns.  It
belonged to a thin, pale lad who possessed no physical strength, the
type that would rather have been Hercules than Homer; the frail type
that dreams of swords and ambuscades and blood.  He looked out over
the water towards Tower Bridge with eyes that were wide--whether with
imagination or indigestion I cannot say!  I can only tell you this:
he was the kind of pale, useless mass of parental despair that
through history has met the turning point of existence in an idle
hour, when imagination, blazing suddenly like fired straw,
illuminates a dream on which to build a life.

What was he thinking, I wondered.  Had I asked him he would have said
sullenly, "Nothing," and have slouched away, ashamed.

I wondered if he was seeing in Thames water those things that
thousands of London boys have seen--argosies and ventures and foreign
places, the drive of water past a vessel's bows, leaning sails, and
small white towns whose palm trees stand with their feet in calm
lagoons.

Who knows?  This is the dream of London Bridge.  This is the
challenge that the Thames flings down to London every day and every
night, crying it aloud to the huddled streets and to the crowded
places, calling it softly in the marketplace.  This is the old magic.
It has given to London merchants, adventurers, sailors, poets, and
millions of poor, discontented men who must need take their burning
hearts to Balham and shut their ears.

* * *

Slowly conscience dawned in the minds of the boys.  One by one they
went away, their places immediately filled by others.

Away they went into the traffic, to become lost in the ant-hills of
commerce, carrying who knows what high resolve from that stolen
moment beside the river.

* * *

More barges came downstream slowly.  High and shrill sounded the
hoarse protest of a siren, imperative and wild, and I seemed to feel,
right in the heart of London, where all things are so ordered and
inevitable, the ancient call to the open places that comes with the
smell of tar and the sight of thin masts rising to the sky.




Night Birds

It is three o'clock in the morning.  Piccadilly Circus is empty of
life and movement--save for a prowling policeman trying shop doors,
and a group of men directing water from a giant hose over the
gleaming, empty road.

A taxicab is an event, and a stray person walking quietly into the
Circus holds dramatic possibilities.  The mind fastens on him.  Who
is he?  He may be a great criminal, or a great lover walking home
after a dance with his head full of glorious dreams, or he may be a
burglar, or a young man who has just inherited a million, or a young
man without a place to rest his head.  The emptiness of Piccadilly at
three a.m. is awful, unnatural, death-like....

Yet London is not asleep.  Hundreds of people in London never seem to
sleep.  Come into one of the all-night cafés which have sprung up
within the last year or so.  It is full.  It hums with talk and
laughter.  Waiters move about between the crowded tables.  There is a
constant clatter of cups and saucers, and the air is blue with smoke.
In contrast with the desolation of the empty streets outside, it is
an astonishing place.  At first you think there is nothing to
distinguish the café from the same place at normal hours.  You look
again and realize the difference.  The people are different.  The
woman with three or four brown paper parcels--the shopping woman--is
absent.  There are no children.  Few elderly people.

Those present are mostly young people distinguished either by an air
of lassitude or an unnatural hectic gaiety.

At the next table a girl is eating lobster salad.  Lobster at three
a.m.!

* * *

Who are these people?  You begin to wonder about them.  Some are
obvious--extremely obvious--some are mysteries.

In a corner a man in evening dress has dropped in for a cup of coffee
with the nice girl with whom he has been dancing.  She keeps her
velvet evening cloak tightly round her, and looks about at the other
people, trying to fix them.  It is to her an adventure.  Her
partner's glance at her over the broad rim of his cup suggests that
he is desperately trying to prolong the "night out."  He is a clean,
blonde young man, and he pretends to take no notice of the elderly
satyr at another table who is openly admiring the girl in the cloak.
But she sees and gives the satyr a cold Kensington eye, hard as an
eviction order.

Quite a number of other dancers seem glued to rolls and coffee,
unable to go home.  They laugh and discuss the dance.  Someone says:
"I must be in the office at nine!"  They laugh and order more coffee.

A group of men with music cases under the chairs talk in a corner.
They are a jazz band which has just finished work.  There are a
number of solemn, self-centred men smoking quietly, alone.  They may
be night-workers, post office officials, or what not, waiting for the
next tramcar.

There are inevitable Japanese students.  They sit together talking,
occasionally taking an expressionless survey of the company.  What
are they doing?  Studying night life?  Winding up an innocent party?

Most interesting are the unplaceable people: the number of
foreign-looking young men who argue together: the type of man who at
the precise crack of Doom with graves opening and the world closing,
would try to sell you a cheap pearl tiepin.  A number of night birds
are evidently in the habit of drinking coffee at three a.m.  There is
movement from table to table, group to group.  Dotted about the room
are girls who would describe themselves as dance instructresses or
cinema actresses.

Four or five men who look as though they have been celebrating a
friend's last night of bachelorhood enter with exaggerated
politeness, apologizing for occasional conflicts with chairs and
tables.  They order black coffee.  Another man comes up to their
table.  They all leap up and shake hands.

"The last time I saw you was in Bagdad!" he says.  "What's happened
to old 'Whisky Willie' of the Gunners?  You remember that night...."

This sort of talk still goes on in London where young men are linked
together by common memories of the War.

* * *

As we go from the brilliantly lit room the emptiness and the chill of
sleeping London meets us at the door.  Long lines of lights shining
on desolate pavements, a shuffling figure under a lamp, a slow
taxicab cruising near the kerb, and then, surprisingly, like a ghost
of old London, a hansom cab standing in Piccadilly, the ancient
horse, head down as if remembering past things!

In the cold air is the vague promise of a new day, a faint rumble of
market carts and vans as if London stirs in her impressive slumber.




At the Wheel

He was sitting in the acrid unpleasantness of a London fog holding a
steering-wheel and--the lives of men and women.  It was Sunday.

Inside the well-lit and almost pleasant omnibus a young man, wearing
his Sunday hat, and a young girl, completely Sundayfied, sat holding
hands as they pretended to read a newspaper.  They saw no more than
each other's eyes, and what more could they possibly have seen?
Portentous women with unnaturally clean children entered or made a
fussy exit from time to time, bent, no doubt, on that awfulness of a
London Sunday--a visit to relatives.  On some faces you could read a
kind of comfortable condescension that somehow suggested a glittering
descent on poor relations; on others a dutiful resignation--the
composure of an ordained martyr preparing to meet the lions--and you
pictured a stiff and patronizing tea in a distant but exalted suburb,
with criticism underlying an afternoon of smooth insincerity!

All the time the Man at the Wheel exhibited a broad and stocky back
to the human comedy he was carrying; sometimes his face, tense and
questioning, was turned towards the lit interior as he tried to gauge
the right moment to accelerate after the descent of an agile
passenger.  Mostly, however, he just sat there peering into the white
cotton-wool world of fog that was hung with saffron lights, his big
hands in gloves, expertly and suddenly taking his vehicle from an
unexpected near rush of light as a tramcar clanged past.  And the
passengers did not notice him.  They had paid twopence to be taken in
safety through the fog!

* * *

I sat there frankly admiring him.

I have never heard of any poet writing an ode to a London omnibus
driver, but he always strikes me as worthy subject of praise.  He may
not possess the social charm of the old horse-omnibus driver, who,
according to legend, wore a top hat and used his whip butt on London
as a lecturer uses a wand.  He is a more solemn character.  Machines
always leave their mark on men.  The big petrol engine has created a
grim, silent, crouching character who, fortunately for London and
Londoner's wives and families, has no time for social pleasantries as
he urges his great, red, double-decked steed through the thousand
perils of a crowded street.

He has, I think, developed a sixth sense.  His whole being seems
acutely conscious of inches.  Watch the way a press of omnibuses in
High Holborn or Tottenham Court Road, or any other famous hold-up,
will edge and nudge a way with a mere inch between their mudguards,
all so skilfully and calmly done as though the scarlet sides of the
vehicles had nerves--invisible feelers--that carried warning of
danger to the rough, deft hands at the wheel.

As we crawled through the fog I watched his taut concentration,
admired his judgment as he executed a circling movement round a
candidate for suicide, as he jammed on the brakes within a yard of a
halted motor-car, as he put on speed over a thin patch of fog, and as
he shot ahead past a less speedy driver.

Now and then he had to crawl through a whiteness as dense as that
terrible billowing mist that rolls down a Scottish mountain.  Here
and there pin-points of fire shone out, changed swiftly on approach
into objects like long hair aflame in the wind, and, nearer still,
stood revealed as tall fog flares shooting up in fire from metal
standards.

At the terminus I watched the drivers dismount, stiff and cold, pull
off their big gloves, and hit their cold hands across their chests.
Wet particles of fog shone on their moustaches.

Pretty bad at Camden Town, and Baker Street was like a tunnel!
Couldn't see a yard at Brixton.  Fine and clear at the Crystal
Palace....  So these adventurers of the London fog compared notes
before, groping in remote recesses, they found money to buy coffee
from a stall.  Then a whistle, the roar of a chilled engine, and off
again on their perilous pilgrimages across London.

Surely every man who has driven through fog with eyes that ache and
imagine phantoms at each cross-road will be glad to raise his hat to
the bulky figure behind the wheel of a London omnibus as he steers
his living cargo to safety with no thought of praise because--it's
all in the day's work?




Under the Dome

I was cheered to find that St. Paul's looked quite firm and permanent
when I walked up Ludgate Hill the other morning.  How deceptive are
the works of man!  Who would have guessed that this mountain was
feeling its age a bit, moving ever so slightly under the weight of
its Dome?

The pigeons wheeled in flight.  A girl stood covered in them, while
less bold birds walked, nodding quickly, round her feet pecking
crumbs.  Up the fine, bold sweep of the steps walked many people.  I
think that they were perhaps Londoners paying their first visit,
hoping that they would get it over before the cathedral collapsed,
for they looked up warily as they advanced as though alarmed by
accounts of splitting piers, and then, finding nothing unusual, they
went on their way, maybe surprised to find no cant to the Dome or any
visible fissure!

As I walked over the black and white diamonds of the nave I realized
that although I have attended services normal and national in St.
Paul's I had never climbed to the Whispering Gallery.  When Americans
had talked to me about it I had lied and had pretended that I knew
it.  So I determined to wipe out my shame.

I walked down the south aisle admiring the gold shafts of light
striking through the dusk of the church, noting the number of young
women who go there to sit quietly and read sacred and profane
literature, and remarking how one appreciative beam of light had
caught a splendid head of Burne-Jones's hair, making it blaze in the
comparative darkness like fire in a lovely thorn bush.  I met all
kinds of people wandering on tiptoe with that vague, lost air people
assume in churches; and then I came to a little office near the south
transept in which I paid sixpence for a ticket--the best
sixpennyworth, as I afterwards found, in all London.

"I thought," I said to the verger, "that I'd better go up there
before it comes down here."

"That won't be for a long time, sir," he said with a reassuring
smile, a sentiment I passed on at step two hundred and forty-one to a
charming old lady, who asked if I thought it was "quite wise" to go
right to the top!

What a climb it is!  If ever I go foolishly walking or climbing in
Switzerland again I will get into training on this spiral staircase.
Once up and once down every day and no mountaineer's muscles would be
firmer, no walker's wind less treacherous.  It is a fine, free, and
uncrowded gymnasium!

Half-way up is a museum and a library, where I, puffing slightly,
prodded about among old stones, the ruins of Old St. Paul's.  I know
no greater thrill than sightseeing.  Then up, up, up and round and
round again till I came to a little door at which a quiet, churchy
man said it was the Whispering Gallery and told me to walk right
round it.

In the Whispering Gallery I was not so impressed by the man in
occupation as I was by the astonishing bird's-eye view of tiny people
walking far below on a little chess-board of a pavement.  Then
suddenly I heard a whisper.  I looked across to the other side of the
gallery.  The guide was whispering against the wall.  His message
came to me like a spirit voice from the Beyond, rather terrifying and
sepulchral: "The diameter of the dome is a hundred and eight feet,"
said the Voice, and then it plunged into an account of Sir
Christopher Wren.  I walked away, congratulated the Voice, which
seemed gratified, and said, "How dissatisfied and hard of hearing
some people are!"

High up below the dome of St. Paul's you have thrills.  As you walk
out on a large stone platform London lies below in a huddle of
buildings and smoking chimneys.  You pick out landmarks.  How narrow
even the widest streets look.  To the east over the big black bulk of
Cannon Street is the faint outline of Tower Bridge in the mist.  Only
the broad Thames has size.  Men are midgets, an omnibus is blotted
out from time to time by the flight of three pigeons; your eye rakes
offices, exploring all floors at a glance, floors packed with
typists.  You feel like a beemaster looking into a hive; and all the
time a rumble reaches you, the restless voice of the city.

* * *

Almost as wonderful as the smoky map of London spread below is the
feeling that you, so leisurely examining St. Paul's while the rest of
London is rushing about trying to pay the rent, are having a holiday
in a foreign city.

You feel a superiority over all those poor harassed people.  You
perceive a new angle to London life.  You join the idle drifting
population of sightseers and you feel rather sorry you did not bring
your camera with you, just to help out the illusion that you are in a
Florentine mood.

Vergers, too, observe towards you the courtesy extended to strangers
within the gate.  There is a subtle difference in their manner.  In
their "Yes, sirs," and "No, sirs," and in their pointing and smiling
you can feel the affection which churches have always, and quite
rightly, extended to pilgrims.  One man obviously considered me a
distinguished visitor from foreign parts.  He went out of his way to
instruct me in history that I know quite well, and I wondered whether
the only straight and honourable thing to do was to make a clean
breast of it and stop him with:

"Look here, I live in Knightsbridge and work in Fleet Street, and I'm
frightfully sorry about it, and all that.  I know it's most unusual
and you won't believe me, but there it is."

I had not the courage.  I gazed insincerely into his enthusiastic
eyes and said "Really!" and "By Jove!" and "How interesting," at
appropriate pauses, so that when eventually I left him I went
surrounded, for him, with all the beauty of a bird of passage.




Heartbreak House

In the old comic papers you will find a stock character whose nose is
red, whose coat collar is Astrakhan, whose hand is always drawn in
the act of conveying drink to a clean-shaven, mobile mouth--a mouth
always uttering the words: "When I played Hamlet, laddie, in '84..."

He is, or rather was, the out-of-work actor.  No actor has of course
ever been out of work: he "rests" sometimes for so long a period that
idleness becomes a habit.  Lack of employment seems to cover the
actor with disgrace.  In most other professions men make no secret of
being out of a job, but the actor acts both on and off the stage.

The out-of-work actor to-day (you find him in Leicester Square and
the Charing Cross Road), has changed since the comic papers pictured
a tragedian whose ambitious argosies had evidently foundered in, as
Homer would put it, a wine-dark sea.  To-day you find him in a bar,
merely because there he will meet other actors and agents and pick up
news of his heartless and overrated profession; but in his hand is a
glass of ginger beer.  His clothes are well-cut and he wears a public
school tie.  His spats draw attention to his worn boots, always the
sign of a man's condition, and as he drawls lazily in his Oxford
voice, real or assumed, he tries hard to give the impression that,
resting as he is on the enormous profits of his genius, he must keep
an important appointment in Mayfair at one-thirty or the duchess will
be absolutely furious!

Poor brave people!  No matter how overdue the rent may be they never
lose their panache.  To-day the fight to walk on in a musical comedy
and say heartily: "Girls, let's go to Paris!" and the feminine fight
to answer coyly in good Kensingtonian: "Oh, what a quate topping
ideah!" is fiercer than ever.  Added to the usual legitimate
"resters" are thousands of film actors, both male and female, thrown
on the streets because the British film trade is in the doldrums.

If you could only know the bitterness of the fight for the job that
does not exist, the daily march round the agents' offices, the young
man who puts his head round a door, smiles, says "Nothing doing"--the
humiliation of not having a shilling!

What keeps them going?  What encourages girls to wash their one pair
of real silk stockings overnight, brush their furs carefully, and
turn out each day, apparently prosperous, to try another joust with
fate?  It is belief in themselves, the inability to do anything else,
and, above all, it is a vision of fame and a name flung high against
the stars over Piccadilly--the dream that might come true.  Many a
man and many a maid, who feel they possess a descending lift instead
of a stomach, see that name of theirs every night twinkling,
glistening, beckoning, making it all seem worth while.  That keeps
them going.

* * *

I sat for an hour in a film agent's office which deserves the title
of Heartbreak House.  Six months ago the crowds of heroes, villains,
heroines, and villainesses who clamoured for heroism or villainy
became so great that they had to sit four deep down the stairs.
Since that time the word has gone forth that there is no work to be
had and no point in seeking it; but still every day they come,
hopeful, bright-eyed, the girls all airs and graces, the men eager,
self-reliant.

In the waiting-room were six or seven exceedingly pretty fair-haired
girls of assorted ages.  Some friend had once committed one of the
cardinal sins and told them how like Mary Pickford they were.  They
were now reaping the harvest of this dangerous suggestion.  There was
an old man with the face of a judge, a young man cut out to be a
hero, and a number of vague people who looked in restlessly, and as
restlessly went away.

An enormously fat woman occupied the doorway, talking rapidly:

"No fat parts going?  Oh, well, I suppose something'll turn up some
day.  Nothing like hope, is there?  And it's not easy for me to keep
my weight up with everything so dear these days.  Suppose I got thin?
What would I do then?  Oh, what a life, what a life!"

* * *

The agent entered the room.  All the pretty girls pursed their lips
and assumed a photographic smile, putting up what they hoped would be
a barrage of beauty to demolish all obstacles.

"Sorry, I can do nothing for you.  There's no work!"

Slowly the smile faded, and each girl looked five years older than
girls of that age have any right to look.  They fussed a moment with
their handbags, brushed imaginary crumbs from their knees, lingered
as if hoping against hope that some producer would dash into the
office and cry, "Girls, I want you!" and then, with a sigh, departed;
fawn coats, moleskin, and black coats.

"Pretty awful, isn't it?" said the agent to me.  "You wouldn't think
they were out of work.  That's part of the game: they must look
smart!"

* * *

A big negro put his head round the door, took off a battered bowler,
exposed his gums, and said:

"Mornin', boss.  Does any guy wanter a good ord'nary nigger?"

As he went out he came into collision with a tall, pale young man who
wore spats but no overcoat.  He too, was sent away.

"We get lots like that," said the agent, "well-bred young fellows
wearing college ties, who manage to keep their spats white though
their shoes probably need soleing.  In fact, we get all sorts.  But
all the men and women who come up here looking as though a thousand a
year would be an insult would be grateful for two pound a week.  They
all look smart."

* * *

That is part of their tragedy.

They may be "resting," but they cannot afford to stop acting.  The
only consolation is that, as everybody knows, luck turns, the darkest
hour precedes the dawn, and so on, and so on!

Hope has kept more people alive than all doctors ever born.




Madonna of the Pavement

How often in a London street do you try to pierce the mystery of
another's life, to visualize the loves, the hates, the joys, the
sorrows that have painted lines on some unknown, passing face?

I saw them in High Holborn.  They stood out from the tense, jostling
crowd because they seemed to have no object in life, nowhere to go,
nothing to do; they were aimless, lost.  They stood out also because
they were so poor.  Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is
really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither
food nor shelter nor hope.  They were such obvious failures at this
game of getting and keeping called success.  If they had suddenly
shouted in pain above the thunder of the passing wheels they could
hardly have been more spectacular in their misery, this man, this
woman, this child.

He slouched along a few yards in advance of the woman.  He looked as
though Life had been knocking him down for a long time, then waiting
for him to get up so that it might knock him down again.  His bent
body was clothed in greenish rags and his naked feet were exposed in
gashed boots.  He was not entirely pathetic.  He was the kind of man
to whom you would gladly give half a crown to salve your conscience;
but you would never allow him out of sight with your suit-case!

She carried her baby against her breast in a ragged old brown cloth
knotted round her shoulders.  Perhaps she was twenty-five, but she
looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given
her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman's existence.
She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary--a
condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives.  This man of
hers would obviously be better off without her.  She had once been
pretty.

The shame of it!  To parade her woman's body draped in rags through
streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the
pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a
slave, behind this shambling, shifty man.  Is there a crucifixion for
a woman worse than this?

* * *

He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she
married him.  Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to
make her quicken her pace.  She took no notice, just plodded on in
who knows what merciful dullness?

Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved
with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby.  The mother's
arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers.  She
stopped, went over to a shop window, and leant her knee on a ledge of
stone.  She placed one finger so gently into the fold of cloth and
looked down into it....

I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced.
Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in
a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the
beatitude of a Madonna.  This same unchanging smile has melted men's
hearts for countless generations.  The first time a man sees a woman
look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him.
Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of
perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they
have fought to build to shield their own.  No different!  The same
smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the
bleakness of a London street.

They went on into the crowd and were forgotten.  I went on with the
knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid,
the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.

Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one--the Future.
Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement....




Sword and Cross

Girls were running after omnibuses, lawyers were running after
briefs, and reporters were running after things called "stories" as I
turned from Fleet Street to enter that little Round Church in the
Temple which is one of the most splendid things in London.

Utter peace.  A dim, tinted light filtered through the east windows,
and at my feet lay the stone figure of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl
of Essex, bandit and excommunicate.  He lies in full chain armour,
his shield across his body, his spurs at his heels, and his long
sword beside him, just as he might have lain eight hundred and
eighty-four years ago, when they found him in the fen country and
sent an arrow through his head.  What trouble his death must have
caused the Templars!  They could not bury him in holy ground till the
Pope granted him absolution, so they sealed him up in a lead coffin
and hung him on a tree near Holborn.  When Rome wiped out his sins
they plucked him from the tree and brought him to this little Round
Church that was born of the first Crusade.

As I stood over Geoffrey de Mandeville my thoughts raced across
Europe, across the Mediterranean, over that sandy yellow waste known
as the Desert of Sinai, and on to that city standing high on terraced
rock--Jerusalem.  Of what else can one think here in the Round
Church?  Its roots go back to Robert, Duke of Normandy, Tancred and
Bohemund, Godfrey de Bouillon, and that fiery triumvirate, Frederick,
Emperor of Germany, Richard Cœur de Lion of England, and Philip
Augustus of France.

This quiet little church remembers Saladin; its stones have rung to
the chain mail of men who saw the lances of the infidel like a forest
against the sky, of men who knew how Frederick Barbarossa came like a
storm out of the west to hurl his hosts on the gates of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem....  Standing there so near to the roar of London, yet
centuries away from it, I recalled white nights on the Mount of
Olives, the Holy City spread below over its hills, a dome rising up
from violet shadow into the moonlight, a group of cypress trees
pointing dark fingers to the stars, and from the faint ribbon of road
the trit-trot of a donkey's hoofs going on to Bethany.

The link with Jerusalem is true and straight.  It was after they
returned from the First Crusade that the Templars built this church
to remind them of the round church that guarded the grave of Christ.
There are only three others like it in the country, at Cambridge,
Northampton, and Little Maplestead, Essex.  This church was conceived
in Palestine.  As I looked at it I recalled the waxen face of a monk
whose thin beard was like black silk.  I met him in the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  I had been torn here and there by the
confused crowds of pilgrims.  I had been mixed up in various sacred
processions, I had seen the hungry fervour in which those anxious for
salvation had kissed the end of a stick after it had been poked
through a hole in an arch so that it might touch a fragment of the
Column of the Scourging.  And I went on towards the Chapel of the
Holy Sepulchre, six foot by six foot, in whose tiny space hang
forty-three lamps.  Here I saw a poor Greek woman creep in and fall
into a torrent of tears on that marble slab which hides the tombstone
of Christ.  The monk met me outside, such a smooth wax fellow, and
led me to a little chapel in which he produced a pair of old spurs
and a sword with a hilt shaped like a cross.  Godfrey de Bouillon's!
So he said.

I whispered the name in the Round Church.  It all links up.

* * *

So quiet it is to-day in the safe keeping of the law.  You would
never dream that these lawns sloping to the Thames were eight hundred
years ago the beginning of that long, hard road to Palestine, the
nest of the Templars, those priest warriors who began their history
so splendidly poor that two men rode one horse, and ended so richly
and dangerously that two kings and the Pope of Rome broke them as
three millionaires might smash a trust.

Nothing now remains of all this ancient fire but the Round Church and
a few stone crusaders lying with their feet towards the east.  A few
names linger on, their meaning quite changed.  The serjeant-at-law
owes his title to the "Fratres Servientes," the serving brothers of
the Templars; and the judges' title of "Knight" of the Common Pleas
takes us back eight hundred years.

Between the crusaders lying cap-à-pie with Paynim knights beneath
their spurred heels, are two brass tablets let into the floor.  One
is in memory of the members of the Inner Temple, and the other of
members of the Middle Temple who laid down their lives in the war.

* * *

So these crusaders, with eight hundred years dividing them, are
rightly commemorated together in this quiet, lovely place, whose
atmosphere, once so charged with stress and strife, is now purged by
time of all passion, either good or evil.  But the ghosts live on,
and it would not astonish me to hear that some quiet, harmless lawyer
going to his chambers at night down that sloping path past the church
met an armed host ready for the march, from whose throats burst like
an organ note: "Deus vult!"

This was the cry that built the Temple, and, spreading out over the
land like a flame, fired men's hearts, leading them into the desert
in defence of the holy places of Christendom.




Knockout Land

Down Whitechapel way is a place famous for dealing out sleep by the
fistful twice a week.

None of your six thousand pounds Albert Hall fox-trots here.  This is
Knockout Land.  It is, I imagine, the nearest thing to a bull-fight
you will see in this country.  Good, hard, slamming fifteen-round
contests follow each other, with the ropes trembling and the fight
fans howling like a pack of hungry wolves, and two half naked men
with strawberry-coloured noses, hitting, gasping, reeling....

A great high hall blue with smoke, steel-girdered at the roof like a
railway station.  It is packed by a cloth-capped crowd, predominantly
Oriental--a crowd of swift murmurs and sudden silences and sharp,
instantaneous uproars.  Good tempered now, but--O my!--suppose
somebody started a row!  There is not one woman present.  The elegant
girls in evening gowns who sit out Albert Hall prize fights have no
place here.  It is a gathering of fight fans.  In the centre under
bright, white lights rises the ring.  The men in it are like men on a
raft floating on a sea of restless, white faces.

Suddenly five or six men near the ring leap to their feet and shout
"Five to one on Cohen!"

The hall becomes thick with wagers.  Arms shoot out, men shout, no
record is made (except that in a keen Hebrew mind), and every one is
quite happy about it.  Even if the Jew were not so commercially
reliable, who would dare to be crooked here!

Look!  The seconds in their white sweaters are busy.  Two fighters
enter the ring.  Their bodies glisten in the light.  One is white,
the other olive-coloured, Eastern.  They square up, crouch, dance
round each other, then pat, pat-pat, pat-pat-pat--crack!  A howl goes
up from the crowd!  That was a hit!  Smash!  Another one!  Right! to
the ropes!  Back he comes, a little wild, and his opponent is driven
away under the speed of his assault.  Blows rain on each body, pink
patches appear on chests and chins, both men dodge this way and that,
a bell rings.  Time!

"Chocolates!" cries a man with a tray.

I want to laugh.  A less chocolate-like crowd I have never seen.
Jellied eels, perhaps, beer undoubtedly, beefsteaks certainly; but
milk chocolate--how astonishing!

Round fifteen!  Both men are all in.  They have pounded each other to
pulp.  I wonder if they can hear the yells and roars of the audience.
Their legs drag.  They are weak with hitting.  You can see what they
meant to do as a blow falls short, you can reach out and enter their
exhausted minds, sympathize with them in their hazy world as they dog
each other to plant the knock-out for which every one is waiting.

Smash!  Right on the chin!  The smashed one reels to the ropes, but
comes back for more trouble, with his mouth sagging and something in
his expression which suggests to me that he is not really here at
all, but possibly wandering through some field rich with buttercups,
with a little old public-house round the bend in the road....  Smash!
He's taken another one!  The scene in his dazed mind changes!  He
awakens from some stellar night, and comes alive again out of
careering constellations to rush with the desperation of last
strength on his opponent.  Crack-crack--bang!  Surely the knockout;
surely he cannot stand any more?  His head must be like iron, his
jaws like steel.

He reels, his arms drop, his nightmare mind tries to grapple with the
padded realities waiting for him, he makes an effort to hit.  The
other man is now ready to land him one that will lift him off his
feet.  He is the gladiator standing over him with lifted sword
and--no appeal to the amphitheatre.  It is only a question of a
second now.  Something brutal and masculine inside me desires to see
him knocked out; something weak and feminine inside me wishes it was
not necessary.

The victor draws back his head, the muscles ripple along his wet
back, he shoots out an arm, and the other man crumples like a
marionette at the end of a cut string.  He lies in a corner of the
ring, moves a leg once, and is still.  I feel sure he is dead.  In
two minutes, with water trickling over his reddened face, he staggers
to his feet, smiles a painful, swollen smile, shakes hands with the
man who put him to sleep, and gropes out into the obscurity of the
yelling crowd.

* * *

"And how much do they get for fighting here?"

"Oh, thirty-five bob," replies an official.  "Sometimes as much as
fifty."

I wonder what our elegant bruisers would think about it as I make my
way out into the darkness of the wet streets.




Ghosts

I often wonder how many Londoners have been inside No. 13, Lincoln's
Inn Fields!

Here we have the most remarkable museum in this and probably any
other country.  Sir John Soane, the architect who designed the Bank
of England, died eighty-eight years ago, and left an instruction in
his will that his house, packed with treasures, should be thrown open
to the public in the condition in which he left it.  The furniture
has hardly been moved, the pictures hang in the same positions, and
if old Sir John could come back he would enter his library and go
over to his desk, hardly knowing that over three-quarters of a
century have intervened since he said good-bye to the things he loved
with all his heart and soul.

If ever the presence of a dead man printed itself on a house, this is
the house.  I went there the other day and found the shutters drawn.
It was after closing time, but the caretaker asked me inside and
courteously took me round.

It was like entering a house when a family is away.  I had to pull
myself together and realize that this family was eighty-eight years
away.  There is a certain air about a house whose contents have been
arranged by someone who loves it.  No museum curator could imitate
it.  I could, in imagination, see Sir John pottering round with one
of his latest treasures, wondering where to put it.  He looks in
bewilderment.  The rooms are so crowded!  He finds a place, not the
best place, but his place; and there it has remained and will remain
down the ages.

Another ghost.  Lady Soane.  Dear woman, she loved these things too,
so the biographers say, but it must have given her feminine heart
many a twinge to see Roman pillars, gigantic stone fragments from
Greek temples, life-size statues, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere,
and, at last, the biggest and finest stone coffin ever taken from an
Egyptian tomb, enter her home one by one.

"Oh, John," her ghost said, "how full the house is.  Where are we
going to live?"

And John, beaming and running his hand over a smooth green bronze,
replied, pointing to something new:

"Isn't that perfectly lovely.  I think I'll have to knock down the
dining-room wall!"

No woman in the history of housekeeping has ever endured such an
overwhelming artistic invasion.

* * *

Sir John began life as the son of a bricklayer.  What an
encouragement to all collectors of the antique!  As he got on in life
he collected more precious things, spent two thousand pounds on an
object the British Museum could not afford, and gradually surrounded
himself with one of the choicest collections any private individual
has possessed.

How many things enthusiasm can accomplish in one lifetime!  It is
inspiring to walk through this old house and realize that everything
was collected by one man while he built up his career.

Pictures--notably Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"--antique gems,
bronzes, manuscripts, books, ancient glass, bas-reliefs, the first
three folio editions of Shakespeare, and thousands of other things
came to him as steel to a magnet.  It is not a house: it is a curio
shop.

He must have puzzled over space.  You would never guess unless you
were shown how he made one wall do the work of two or three.  He
devised walls in many a room which opened like the leaves of a book,
each leaf, or side, being hung with pictures.  Clever Sir John; and
how Lady Soane must have praised him as the tide of treasure rose
higher and higher round her tea-table.

* * *

Down in the basement he kept the splendid alabaster coffin of the
Pharaoh Seti I, a marvellous thing cut from one solid lump of
alabaster.  This was the object that Belzoni saw gleaming in the dark
tomb in those days when no man could read the weird hieroglyphs with
which it is entirely covered.

What a beautiful thing it is.  As I looked at it I remembered
Belzoni's account of its discovery in that vain, amusing, yet always
interesting, "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries
within the Pyramids, Temples, and Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and
Nubia," published in 1820.  This man's adventures among the tombs of
Egypt at a time before Egyptology was a science are sufficient to
make any modern archæologist lie down and howl with envy at his
opportunities and burn with rage at the opportunities he missed.

After describing the location of the tomb, and how the debris of
three thousand years was cleared, Belzoni pictures his entry, his
progress through columned halls, his discovery of a rope that fell to
dust when touched.  He wandered for days like a boy in a fairy tale
through this tomb, the most splendid in the Theban Necropolis.

"But the description of what we found in the centre of the saloon and
which I have reserved till this place," wrote Belzoni, "merits the
most particular attention, not having its equal in the world, and
being such as we had no idea could exist.  It is a sarcophagus of the
finest Oriental alabaster, nine feet five inches long, and three feet
seven inches wide.  Its thickness is only two inches; and it is
transparent when a light is placed inside of it.  It is minutely
sculptured within and without with several hundred figures which do
not exceed two inches in height, and represent, as I suppose, the
whole of the funeral procession and funeral ceremonies relating to
the deceased....  I cannot give an adequate idea of this beautiful
and invaluable piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has
been brought into Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it."

Just as the reports of the late Lord Carnarvon's discovery sped
through Thebes like wildfire, so did Belzoni's luck circulate, with
the result that one day the Turkish authorities rode up, headed by
Hamed Aga of Keneh.  Then, as now, antiquities to the native meant
simply gold.  The Aga, after glancing vaguely round the tomb, ordered
his soldiers to retire, then, turning to Belzoni he said:

"Pray where have you put the treasure?"

"What treasure?" asked poor Belzoni.

The Aga then told him a story--so like those in circulation at Luxor
in 1923, when it was rumoured by natives that every woman visitor to
the tomb of Tutankhamen came away with gold jewellery concealed in
her skirts!  Belzoni denied the rumours of fabulous wealth and of a
reported large golden cock crammed with diamonds and pearls!  The Aga
was crestfallen.

"He seated himself before the sarcophagus," wrote Belzoni, "and I was
afraid he would take it into his head that this was the treasure and
break it to pieces to see whether it contained any gold."

Fortunately he did not.  He merely delivered himself of the
remarkable observation that the tomb of Seti I "would be a good place
for a harem, as the women would have something to look at," and then,
happily for Egyptology and the Soane Museum, departed.

* * *

"Is this place haunted?" I asked the caretaker, just to see what he
would say.

"No, sir!" he replied scornfully.  "I've heard noises, but it's mice.
There isn't such a thing as ghosts, believe me."

But he's wrong; for I saw old Sir John as plainly as anything in
those high, leisurely rooms, arranging things, prying into them with
a cut crystal, and touching them with fingers that caressed.




Aladdin's Cave

As I passed through a steel door set in spiked steel railings a hefty
commissionaire secretly pressed a bell that gave the alarm
downstairs, so that when I appeared two equally hefty commissionaires
sprang out and asked me for my password.

No; it was not the Bank of England, or the Tower of London, or
Buckingham Palace: it was one of the largest safe deposit vaults in
London.  Each person who rents a safe there chooses a password--any
word he likes; "Annie Laurie," or "Mrs. Jones's Baby," or "Good Queen
Anne."  Till the commissionaires know him by sight the depositor is
held up every time he goes to his safe and is asked to stand and
deliver.  If he forgets the password he is turned away unless he can
prove his identity and his right to unlock his treasures.

Fabulous millions are locked away underground in the safe deposits of
London.  The companies themselves do not know how much treasure they
guard day and night.  Now and then the inquiry of an insurance
company reveals the fact that a fourteen-inch safe holds a cool
million pounds' worth of treasure.

When the commissionaires had looked me over with an expression which
inferred that I probably carried on me acetylene blowpipes, a few
six-shooters, and a dozen Mills bombs, they called the secretary, who
had promised to take me through Aladdin's Cave.  The vaults resembled
the interior of a great Atlantic liner.  In every direction stretched
long lit corridors with doors every few feet along them.  What doors!
Some of them had handles like a giant's dumb-bells and locks like
young cartwheels.  I imagine that the door of Lord Astor's safe would
laugh cheerfully at a howitzer.

The door of one vault was half open.  Inside a man was sitting at a
table counting diamonds.  A pile of white diamonds on a piece of
brown paper!  Stuck on the wall with the splash of a gum brush
was--surprising sight--a coy Kirchner girl adjusting the suspender at
the extremity of a long, shining, slim silk leg.

On we went down the corridor, the secretary pointing out the vault of
the Duke of This and Lord That, making my head reel with a story of
title deeds and heirlooms and treasures beyond price.  Another door
opened and the owner came out.  At first I thought he was about to
give us some of the gold plate with which the room was vulgarly full.

"Could you," he said, "lend me a pencil?"

We gave him one.

On another floor I found the ordinary safes, much less spectacular
than the vaults, but, I think, more interesting.  Here it is that men
and women hide their smaller treasures.  You can have quite a nice
little safe big enough to take a pair of shoes for twenty-five
shillings a year.

I entered an avenue of them, looked at their clumsy hinges and their
astonishing locks, wondering what mysteries they contain.  In how
many of them lie letters that would break up homes?  In how many are
documents that would explain why So-and-So never married?  In how
many of them are the riches of people whose friends think them
penniless?  In how many are merely silly things?

"I think the strangest thing we guarded," said the secretary, "was a
penny.  For thirty years a man paid three pounds a year to guard that
penny.  No; he was not mad--only superstitious.  He believed that if
he lost that penny he would have terrible ill-luck.  When he first
deposited it he was poor, but he died worth a hundred thousand
pounds, and his executors then came and took away his mascot."

Another strange treasure was the hoof of a Derby winner.  The owner
made a fortune from his victory, and when the horse died his wife had
the hoof mounted, and they kept it for years in a special safe.

Hundreds of safes in every deposit vault are filled with the jewels
of wealthy women.  Now and then the owners come and look at them, and
sometimes before a ball or a reception they take them away for a
night or two.  Hundreds also contain the treasures of women who do
not seem wealthy.  What they contain no one knows.  Once when a safe
that had not been claimed for twenty years was broken open--it
belonged to an elderly spinster--inside were found bundles of faded
letters tied up with faded ribbon, all that was left of an old
romance.

What other secrets lie hidden underground in such cold, tiled
avenues--what strange human stories that will never be known?

In one of the waiting-rooms I saw an ancient man with a white beard.
He was sitting over the contents of his safe, feebly fingering
documents and poring over them, his nose almost touching the papers.
The sight of him roused questions.  How easy to write a dozen
speculations about him, his life, and his little tray full of musty
deeds and letters...

* * *

Outside over the wet pavements hurried the men and women of London,
unconscious that beneath their feet lay millions and--mystery.




That Sad Stone

In two thousand years' time will there be brambles growing on Ludgate
Hill, I wonder, and will a shepherd graze his sheep in Piccadilly
Circus?  It happened to Thebes and Carthage....

If the tamarisks should come back to town I desire to be reincarnated
at that time in order that I may join in archæological speculation on
the fragment of an extinct animal ("probably a lion") dug up on the
site of Trafalgar square!  It would also be jolly to reconstruct the
plan of Bush House on the strength of three window-sills, a lift
bell, and a typewriter key.  There are great days in store for those
who will shake up our dust and worry our ghosts, and even attempt to
discover our gods.  I can see Macaulay's New Zealander having the
time of his life among the ruins of London; and surely one of his
most splendid adventures will take place at the base of Cleopatra's
Needle.  Did you know that beneath this famous stone is buried a kind
of Victorian Tutankhamen's treasure, placed there to give some man of
the future an idea of us and our times?  Did you realize that the
London municipal authorities could do anything so touching?

Under the obelisk sealed jars were placed in 1878 containing a man's
lounge suit, the complete dress and vanities of a woman of fashion,
illustrated papers, Bibles in many languages, children's toys, a
razor, cigars, photographs of the most beautiful women of Victorian
England, and a complete set of coinage from a farthing to five
pounds.  So the most ancient monument in London stands guard over
this modernity, rather like an experienced old hen, waiting for Time
to hatch it.

Poor sad old stone....

* * *

I went down to look at it yesterday when the Thames, in full tide,
dancing in the sunlight, was giving the Embankment great slapping
kisses.  Tugs were chugging upstream with their ugly duckling barges;
and the jet-black finger of Ancient Egypt pointed to the sky, so slim
and beautifully proportioned, so tall that when I looked up it seemed
to be falling against the wheeling clouds.

Two little boys were riding a sphinx.  Men and women stopped, looked
up at the monument, saw the pale sunlight finding its way into those
funny little carvings, a few moved round to the rear of the platform
and gazed with open mouths, seeing an incomprehensible stone,
wondering about it perhaps, maybe feeling that there was a story
behind it somewhere, somehow.

A story?  Heavens!  What a story.  Shall I tell you what I saw as I
stood there with the tramcars speeding past and the criss-cross
traffic busy on its way?

* * *

I saw a great tunnel of Time three thousand four hundred years long.
Imagine the time that separates us to-day from the Spanish Armada and
then _multiply it by ten_: that is almost three thousand and four
hundred years.  London was unknown.  We were probably beating our
wives in the Thames marshes and eating an occasional aunt.  Greece
was unborn, and there was no Rome on the Seven Hills.  But Egypt had
thrashed its way through the mumps and measles of civilization and
was already ancient.  In this distant blaze of light moved epicures
and artists, soldiers and priests, and in the great palace of Thebes
sat the most powerful man in that time of the world, the Pharaoh
Thothmes III, Lord of the Two Lands, giver of life and death.

And Pharaoh decided to perpetuate his greatness in the eye of Time.
In other words, he probably remarked after dinner one night: "I want
obelisks for the temple at Heliopolis.  That pylon looked rather
bare, I thought, the last time I was there.  You might see to it,
will you?"

Whereupon chariots were harnessed and messengers sped south to the
red-hot granite quarries of Assuan.

* * *

Now see the architect drawing the shape of Cleopatra's Needle in the
virgin rock.  See hundreds of naked backs bent over the stone,
pounding, pounding, pounding month after month in the savage heat
with no tools but hard balls of dolomite; and the whips crack over
the sweating bodies and flicker in the heat and hiss like the tongues
of serpents.

In a year the whim of Pharaoh is bashed from the quarry in blood and
tears.  His titles are set upon it, and it stands, painted and
glorious, fronting the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis.  On its tip
is a cap of electrum that catches the sun, so that travellers in the
desert looking towards the city of On see a pillar with a fire
blazing upon it....  Look!

A cloud of dust; and in the heart of it gilded chariots.  The white
horses are pulled up on their haunches, the nodding ostrich plumes on
their head collars rise and fall, the fan bearers come forward, the
troops stand at ease, and above the kneeling priests is the Pharaoh,
that ancient superman, inspecting his monument from a burnished car.

"Quite good.  The god is pleased."

* * *

Time passes.  Moses, who was a priest in Heliopolis, sees the obelisk
every day.  The frogs of the Plagues hop and chirrup on its plinth.
Over a hundred years pass, and Rameses the Great, who loved himself
dearly, carves his name on the column, usurping it.  A thousand years
pass, and it is moved to Cleopatra's capital at Alexandria!  Here it
survives four great empires.  Thrones rock and fall, dynasties fade
like mists.  The world changes.  Two thousand years pass by, and a
new race of men come to power.  They pick Cleopatra's Needle out of
the sand, enclose it in a huge steel cylinder, give it a deck, a
keel, a rudder, put a crew aboard and tug it across the sea towards
England.  Prosperous winds favour the voyage for the first few weeks;
then, in the dreaded Bay of Biscay, Cleopatra's Needle pitches with
such violence that the tug's captain cuts her adrift with her crew
aboard her.  How different from her last voyage three thousand years
previously, when the Egyptian slaves floated her on the sunlit Nile
for the delight of Pharaoh!  As she rolls and tosses five sailors
from the tug volunteer to go out to the abandoned obelisk ship.  They
are swept under and are drowned.  Eventually the Cleopatra's crew are
saved and the tug watches her drift away over the stormy seas.  Sixty
days pass and then news is received that Cleopatra's Needle was
tugged into Vigo by a ship whose owners received two thousand pounds
for their services.  Eventually, tugged by an M.P.'s yacht the
Egyptian stone arrives in England.

Here, forty-seven years ago, they placed it beside a cold, grey
river, and some unknown hand penned the following epitaph to it in
the morning:

  This monument as some supposes
  Was looked on in old days by Moses;
  It passed in time to Greeks and Turks,
  And was stuck up here by the Board of Works.

* * *

Here it has remained beside the Thames, with the last great adventure
still in store.  One night the wrath of Ra, the fury of Set, the god
of evil, descended like thunderbolts from a dark sky.  Chips of the
granite pediment flew away.  The plinth was bruised as a city is
bruised in war, and overhead in the shaft of a searchlight lay a
silver fish in the sky--a fish that hummed like a hornet and laid
most devilish eggs.  What a strange night for ancient Egypt....

* * *

Sad, cold stone--the saddest monument in all London.  We are killing
it.  It was once red granite.  Now it is coal black and its glory is
being eaten away year by year.  Forty-seven years of London have done
it greater hurt than the three thousand years that went before.  It
did not deserve this; for round it centres the splendour and glory of
the past and under its feet is a message for the future.

And it seems to me that its experienced black finger is pointing to
something which may make you laugh or cry.




Sun or Snow

Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance--the
departure of the Continental boat expresses.  When the fog comes and
the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London
just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by
buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to
the snow or the sun.

I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other
people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun.  There is
always a sting in the tail of it.

* * *

When you love travel, and have lost count of the number of times the
chocolate-coloured Pullmans have whirled you through Kent to the edge
of the sea and on to far places, this morning assembly of travellers
shakes you to the heart.  You know what is in store for them.  You
follow them down to Dover; you see them in the swift Channel boat;
you hear the blue-bloused porters of Calais crying "Soixante-dix,
m'sieu.  I meet you at ze douane!"  You visualize the idiotic fight
in the French Customs; you see the long Paris Rapide waiting with
steam up, the wrinkled old Frenchwomen in white caps and knitted
black shawls who sell fruit, and you hear the funny little penny
whistle like a child's trumpet that sends this great train racketing
and thundering through France, or Basle and Switzerland, or
Marseilles, and then--oh, marvellous far places in Africa!

Which is more wonderful?  To awaken at the Swiss frontier with snow
muffling a cotton-wool world of chasms and peaks, or to awaken in the
sunlight of Southern France to a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean?

* * *

That wide, hedgeless plain with its silver-grey olive trees, its
red-roofed houses, and its vignettes of rustic activity; little men
in fields walking behind the plough, at stable doors bringing out a
solemn, ragged mule, give me that.  And give me, too, the
ever-recurring joy of the uncomfortable swinging French _wagon
restaurant_ full of various people: Englishmen who look so comically
English as soon as they cross the Channel, Frenchmen whose black
spade beards cascade over white table-napkins which they tuck into
their collars before they devour their food with Gallic avidity, and
the good-looking Parisienne with her carmine mouth and her finicky,
much-manicured hands breaking bread and salting meat while her big,
emotional eyes sweep over and beyond the bald heads of appraising
British husbands.

"Liqueur, m'sieu?"

The man with the tray of little bright bottles staggers up and,
notable sight, the elderly virgin of some distant vicarage sips an
unusual brandy.  Marvellous France!

So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with
the keenest enjoyment the other morning.  There were girls who would
be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting
in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts.  There
went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the
skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey,
and--lucky fellow--a man with a white pith helmet over his arm.

Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet.  Even socks and
shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it.  When carried with an
air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a
poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly
even an explorer.  In the Channel boat people will look at you as you
bear this symbol of the sun on your arm.  You will stand out above
all others.  Perhaps in the bar some one will say:

"Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly
and say:

"No; only to Timbuctoo!"

A great thing is a sun helmet!

Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks
full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses
which she will accumulate in Paris.  There was a pale woman who had
obviously been ordered South.  Her husband stood beside the Pullman
door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just
before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet
in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her
eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand.  Yes; there
are such husbands!

All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually
filled.  At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a
weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel
crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu
wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.

* * *

Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express
slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health
and pleasure.  A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail
coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted
by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed
on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.

As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels
seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white
roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....




Romantic Mutton

Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the
Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the
wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he
slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop.  Suppose...

This happens!  Turn down Whitehorse Street, and in two seconds bald
heads in club windows, pretty sandy-legged ladies, the flood stream
of omnibuses, are forgotten.  They have never existed.  They are two
hundred comfortable years off in the womb of Time.  You stand in the
eighteenth century, in a London of maypoles and gallantry and much
sly sin, of coaches and cavalcades, inn parlours and buxom serving
wenches.  Even your spats feel elegant.  You desire to snap an ivory
snuffbox, to wave a fine cambric handkerchief, and to kiss a
good-looking chambermaid.  Odds truth, sir, you are under the
influence of Shepherd Market!  At any moment my Lord Maxbridge may
turn the corner on the arm of Sir Timothy Strophe, poet and wit, and
you will, of course, stand, leaning on your ebony cane, promising to
look in at the Cocoa Tree to-night and to join my lord later (bow) at
his box at Vauxhall.  And did you hear what the Prince said last
night of Lady T., and how young Charles H. took it?  And did you know
that Captain X. lost nine hundred guineas at cards on a single throw
at White's, and that the Marquis de St. A. has sent his seconds to
Lord M., and that Sir Richard T. has been black-balled at Brooks'?
Gad, sir!

That, at least, is how it takes me!

Looked at with the eyes only, Shepherd Market reveals itself as a
queer, haphazard warren of streets packed with little shops whose
onions overflow on the pavement, whose cabbages sometimes collapse
into the gutter, whose fish and meat are much in evidence.  Here you
have the atmosphere of the Pantiles and the formation of any square
in any old county town you care to remember.

This is picturesque.  Behind any grand modern street you seem to see
a surveyor or an architect bending over a blue paper, drawing
straight lines.  These shops and squares have grown up naturally, as
a clump of flowers grows--some here, some there; some big, some
small.  What splendid individuality.

Here, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, shopkeepers display big
galvanized dust-bins on the pavement.  You might be in Salisbury
marketplace.  A china shop sells pretty little teapots of the kind
which spinster ladies drive into Ipswich to procure on market day.
All manner of antique shops sleep in the shadows.  In one window I
saw really good china, in others Georgian silver and rushlight
holders.

It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste.  You can people the
uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing.  No matter how
many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later
characters whom you expect to meet at every turn.  The colonel's
wife!  Where is she?  You look round anxiously.  She should be
walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling
affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt.  The bishop's
lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's
daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady
Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and
suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the
major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a
junior subaltern--all the stock characters of an English cathedral
city or garrison town.

Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart
women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their
way to their clubs.

* * *

How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London
life?  I will tell you.  They used to hold a fair here every May as
far back as Edward I.  Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle
market on the spot.  The butchers' shops had theatres on the second
storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in
fair-time amuse the crowds.  In 1750 so many regrettable things
happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal.  (It
must have been very wicked!)

So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated
essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of
Mayfair.  If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger
on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738.  I imagine that there is
here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other
street in London.

Romantic mutton!




London Lovers

When I was walking along the Embankment on a path of pale sun, I saw
a young man and a young woman leaning over the grey stone watching
the river.  There were white gulls wheeling, and the river was high;
and this man and this woman were very still and intent.  When I stood
beside them I found they were not looking at the river, they were
looking at the Future!

Under cover of their leaning arms they were holding hands.  They were
in the last stage of love, their eyes like fields full of
moon-calves.  His clothes were Sundayfied and his boots were new and
brown--the colour of a retired Indian general.

Her hat had been made at home in a hurry.  And they were standing
there lost in the illimitable wonder of each other.  They were not in
London.  They were in that aerial country on the boundaries of
paradise, from which such men and women descend to a small red box in
the suburbs and the current price of eggs.

I could compose their imaginary dialogue easily.  I could tell you
that he whispered about the fifteen pounds in the bank, that they
murmured daringly of banns, and an oak suite on the instalment
system.  But, no!  They said nothing, because they had reached that
condition when words cease to capture meaning.

And I thought how well worth writing of are the lovers of London, the
ordinary little lovers, whose sitting-out places are the parks, whose
adventures are omnibus rides to Kew, whose extravagances are tea and
buns.

Every Sunday they walk London.  Every week-day you can see them in
the solemn City snatching a half-hour at luncheon, she with an index
finger purpled by a new ribbon, he very clerkly and correct.  And you
must never think them mean when, having watched each other eat steak
and kidney pie as if they were sitting at a mystery play, they call
for separate bills.

He pays his one and threepence and she pays hers.  How significant
that is.  Had he been philandering with her they would have had a far
nicer luncheon in a very much nicer restaurant, and he would have
carelessly ordered an ice and ended up recklessly with coffee and
perhaps even a sinister _crème de menthe_.  And he would have paid
the bill, giving her the impression it was a mere nothing.  She would
not be allowed to know that his hand, groping mysteriously in his
pocket, was trying desperately to discover whether there was enough
left for seats in a cinema, whether--dash it all!--that little coin
in the dark of his slender pocket was a penny or a much-hoped-for
half-crown.

Ah, a bad sign.  The road to bankruptcy is paved with boasting and
insincerity and such little showings off!  Let him once discover the
Girl, and then with life imminent they get down to truth, and she
discovers that he is not the lordly thing he pretended to be, that he
is not earning a splendid fiver a week but a solemn two pounds ten.
Crisis?  Oh, dear, no!

There then begins a wrestle with a skeleton disguised as a bank
account.  They both stand guard over it.  An extra packet of
cigarettes is a betrayal, a reckless splash at a movie is a crime
against a new little home that exists nowhere but in two hearts.  So
he pays his bill and she pays hers, and all the time the modest
little pile grows, leading them to those helpful organizations which
give two hundred pounds worth of property for ten per cent down and
the rest over eternity.

* * *

They are happy, are these little lovers of London; as all honest,
simple things are happy.  No great winds of passion or ambition blow
like storms in their hearts.  They wish to escape from their
surroundings into something which is their very own.  They dream of
the little house, just like every other little house in the row, and
they dream of locking the front door on life and opening their arms
to each other.

In the great hive of London you can see them meeting, hungrily
snatching a moment from their separate labours which are just a means
to an end.  In the City she comes, lighting his heart with her
beauty, and she goes, leaving him feeling that the light has been
turned off inside him.  At Kew in lilac time you will find them in
sweet green avenues; the red buses bear them and their Dream to
country places; and one day you will meet them in a tube train
bending self-consciously over a furniture catalogue....

* * *

Dante and Beatrice came out of their dream beside the Thames and
walked away.  Dante's new boots squeaked.  Arm-in-arm they went along
the sun path, two ordinary little actors in the great play, with that
stillness about them that suggests how full two hearts can be.

If one could only peep into their lives again in ten years' time.
That, however, is tempting Fate.




In Uncle's Shop

Outside on its rusty supports hung the sign of the proud
Medici--three gold balls.

Inside the pawnbroker's shop nothing was proud, except perhaps a
grandfather clock that stood in a corner like an old aristocrat who
has buttoned his coat, cocked his hat, and decided to go down hill
with an air.  For the rest--just junk lingering in this sordid,
waiting-room atmosphere to be reclaimed and taken home.  I looked at
it and saw it as junk; then I looked again, knew that some of it had
been hard to part with, was, in fact, transmuted by affection so that
its very frayed unloveliness brought tears to their eyes.  Those
cheap, badly-made china shepherdesses designed to simper across a
mantelpiece at the girlish gallant whose flirtatious salute was
ruined because the hand that once held his hat had vanished--how
remarkable that anyone had made them, how remarkable that anyone had
cared sufficiently to buy them!  There they were in the pawnshop, and
perhaps some poor woman scraping up four-pence interest to keep them
hers, gazing at her bare mantelpiece, longing for their sugary
smiles, the cheap, conventional romance of them....

* * *

"Something'll happen soon," said the pawnbroker to me.  "You just
have to wait."

So I waited for comedy or pathos in the dim crowded shop that smelt
of undusted china and old boots.  Beyond the stacked window--so full
of clocks and fractious bronze horses, of watches and silly shaped
silver vases--I saw a busy London district; people passing and
repassing, tramcars at congested cross-roads, omnibuses, women
shopping and stopping to talk, their baskets over their arms.  I
became aware of a man in a blue overcoat examining the window.

"He's an old hand at 'popping' things," said the pawnbroker.

"You know him then?"

"Never seen him before; but I can tell."

"How?"

"Well, just watch the way he's going over my stock.  I bet he's sized
up every blessed thing in the window.  It's the jewellery he's
interested in.  He's wondering if I'm overstocked with gold
bracelets.  See, he's counting them.  He's not sure.  He's coming in.
You listen!"

The man in the blue overcoat entered, and spoke in a firm, rather
condescending manner.

"Look here," he said, "would you care to give me anything on this?  I
shall be getting it out some day."

He threw on the counter a gold bangle.

"Ten shillings," said the pawnbroker.

"Dirty dog!" said the man, and walked out.

"Old X. round the corner'll give him a pound for it," said the
pawnbroker calmly.  "He's rather low in bangles."

A well-dressed young man in a great hurry rushed in and detached a
watch from his chain:

"I've never done this before!" he said.  "But I want some money
quickly."

It was a good watch, thin as a wafer.  Gold.

"Two pounds?"

"Right!"  Off he rushed.

All sorts came in, reflected the pawnbroker, you could never tell.
Some needed money desperately and some just wanted it at the moment.
Young men pawn watches to pay the landlady, to back a horse, to take
a girl out to dinner, to stave off a creditor, to buy food.  A decent
coat disguises motives.  Sometimes a "real lady," who had been
playing too much bridge, "popped" something really worth while, and
always in a quiet shop like this; sometimes "flashy" people came with
diamonds, and then you had to keep your eyes open.

In came a little wisp of a woman.  She put sixpence on the counter.
I noticed her thin wrists and the criss-cross grimed lines on her
fingers.  She called the pawnbroker "sir."  When she had gone he
showed me the article on which she was paying interest.  It was a
small box with mother-of-pearl diamonds set in the lid, many of them
missing.  She had been paying interest for two years.

In every pawnshop there are thousands of things like this box: links
with happier days perhaps, things which sentiment enthrones in the
heart.  I could build up a dozen stories round this box: the gift of
a mother, a dead husband, a son?  A Pandora's box full of the winds
of old happiness?  I leave it to your imagination.

* * *

Then, at the tail of a number of people, some of whom were obviously
pledging their overcoats for a long drink of beer, came a woman with
dark rings round her eyes, and she said:

"My husband's ill ... very ill ... and I must, I simply must...."

She wrestled unhappily with her left hand and placed on the counter a
plain gold ring....

"That was horrible," I said.

"Look here," replied the pawnbroker.  He opened a drawer and ran his
fingers through a pile of wedding rings.  "They keep them to the
end," he explained, "but----"

"I understand.  I've seen quite enough.  I think I'll be moving on."




Horsey Men

Have you ever calculated how much respect you can buy with a sudden
half-crown?

A railway porter will give you quite a lot, an hotel porter will
unbend slightly, and under its influence even a taxi-cab driver, if
the fare is about seven and sixpence, will appear fairly human.  But
if you want your money's worth, go briskly into Aldridge's or
Tattersall's on the day of a horse sale, walk up to a man who wears a
white jacket and holds a whip, give him half a crown and say at the
same time: "Selling any hunters to-day?"  You know at once that you
have made a hit.  As an American would say, he reacts immediately.
In one swift eye-sweep he has made a mental note of you; he knows the
kind of horse he thinks you ride, the way you will ride it, and so
on.  He looks knowing, a quality shared by all men even remotely
connected with the sale of horseflesh, and, slightly closing one eye,
he whispers:

"Come with me, sir!"

* * *

You are in a stable facing the posteriors of many horses.  The
hunters, the aristocrats of the sale, are boxed together in a corner,
but there are big hefty carthorses and sturdy hacks of every kind.
You look down the catalogue: "Bay mare, has been ridden side-saddle
and astride."  What lovely girl rode her side-saddle and astride, you
wonder, called her "Nelly," and came to the stable every morning with
a lump of sugar?

"Look out, sir!" says your admirer, as he taps Nelly's hocks lightly
with his whip, causing her to swerve round and show you a dilated
pupil and a suspiciously poised near-side hoof.  "Now, sir, that's
your 'oss, that is!"

You don't deceive him.  You don't explain that you are only doing
this for fun, to while away a weary hour, to banish ennui.  On he
goes, a natural-born auctioneer.  She's your weight, she is, and she
has a lovely mouth, she has, and he wouldn't be surprised if she was
a marvellous jumper, he wouldn't....

For one half-crown and a minimum amount of attention you can spend
hours with this man prodding flanks, feeling hocks, and running your
hand over withers, but the best thing to do is to run down the
horses, call them "rough stuff," and go off into the yard where they
are having a sale.

Now horse fancying has created a unique type of man familiar to you
in the country, but never seen in London except at these sales.  When
you regard them _en masse_ the effect is remarkable.  You feel that
if a coach-and-four suddenly drove in they could all take seats and
drive out looking like one of Cruikshank's illustrations in Dickens.
People would say: "What are they advertising?"

They are horse-faced, thin, bow-legged, and some of them actually
suck straws--most difficult things to find in London these days if
you contract the habit.  They wear little fawn coats with pearl
buttons and tight little gaiters well up on the tops of their boots;
and they walk with a roll.  You have seen a wicked man in a night
club on the movies look at the heroine.  He screws up his eyes and
looks straight at her ankles, and then slowly insults her with his
eyes as his gaze ascends.  These horsey men look at horses just like
that: their eyes glance contemptuously at hoofs, linger sneeringly on
fetlocks, wander disparagingly over other parts of the anatomy, then
they say: "Wind sucker," or "Roarer," or "Eats her bedding," and
light a cigar.

* * *

Into the ring is led a chestnut mare.

She is a lovely thing, and you can tell by the way she trembles and
tosses her head that she is not having a good time.  She does not
understand.  There are many things she does understand.  She
understands the man into whose waistcoat it is so good to place her
moist muzzle, she understands the slightest move of him in the
saddle, and she loves to obey when, feeling the faintest pressure of
his knees, she breaks into a canter over soft grass, and falls again
into a trot, to find his hand patting her sleek neck.

Why isn't he here?  He has never let others take control of her
before!  In a moment, no doubt, he will come and drive all these men
off; and then they will go out together to their own place as they
have always done.  She looks round.  Whinnies.  But her man is not
there.

Then the auctioneer, a little fellow in a silk hat, explains that
this splendid chestnut mare, sound in wind and limb and eye, is being
sold to save her summer keep.  The horse fanciers come a step nearer,
they whisper, they begin to bid....

Bang!  The hammer descends.  The little chestnut mare starts suddenly
as if she knew that she had got a new master.

* * *

They lead her out under the wide arch of the livery stable, and in
the proud tossing of her head and her backward looks you seem to
read: "Where is that man of mine, and why--why doesn't he come?"




From Bow to Ealing

I have realized one of my first ambitions.  In the dark engine cab of
an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and
darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed
with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.

A bell rang.  The driver looked out over the track where three
gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel.  He pulled over
a lever and the train started.  It was the strangest sensation.  I
forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us.  I forgot the cargo
of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were
carrying across London.  In the semi-darkness of the driver's cab an
ordinary Underground journey had become strangely adventurous and
exciting.

The driver accelerated.  His pointer moved round a dial, and the
train answered his small movements, gathering speed and noise.  I was
conscious only of being in the grip of a tremendous force that was
hurling us over those three gleaming rails.  We took the tunnel at a
good thirty-five miles an hour, and the noise we made changed to a
hollow roar!  I could feel the train swerve and rock slightly as we
rounded a curve; but I could see nothing save here and there a green
light close to the ground.  If you can imagine that you are tied to a
projectile shot from a gun in the night, you have an idea of driving
an electric train through a tunnel.

In the underground blackness stations show first as a faint yellow
glow cut across by the jet-black semicircle of the tunnel.  The next
second you can see their curving rows of lights; they straighten out,
and then the platform at which you will pull up lies level as a knife
edge before you.  Mark Lane ... Mansion House ... Blackfriars ...
Temple ... Charing Cross.

Charing Cross is big.  As you sweep in the driver has time to collect
a lightning series of snapshots!  A bookstall, a cigarette booth, lit
and yellow, a pretty girl coming down the steps carrying a bag, a
fussy old lady asking a ticket inspector how to get to Baron's Court,
and a sudden stir and interest of Ealing-bound people who detach
themselves from the crowd of waiting passengers.  Just a flash!  All
seen in the fraction of a second!  Bells ring down the train.  A loud
one clangs in the engine cab.  And off you go again through the
blackness towards Victoria.

Few things are more uncanny in mechanical London than the system of
automatic signalling which permits a chain of electric trains to move
over the same line at minute intervals with no chance of a collision.

Little green lights beckon you on, telling you the way is clear.  As
you pass them red lights at your back change to green, beckoning on
the train behind; and so it is all the way along.  Now and then you
meet a red light.  You stop!  The light changes to green.  On you go!
The marvellous thing is that if, in a moment of colour blindness, you
tried to override a red light your train would correct you.  It would
refuse to go on!

At Kensington we shot out into the open air.  Gaily, madly, we raced
over the shining rails, marvellously, so it seemed to me, taking a
sharp bend, smoothly continuing along the straight.  It was like
flying without the perpetual anxiety of flight.  Once, with the awful
insolence of the cocksure, I thought the driver had erred.

"Good Lord!" I said.  "That was a red light, and _you've gone on_!"

Instead of kicking me out on the metals, as he should have done, he
smiled and remarked:

"Wrong signal!  That red light governs the loop line!"

Safe!  On we thundered triumphantly Ealing-wards, with the green
lights smiling a benediction on us, telling us that the next ahead
was at least a minute ahead, telling the next behind that we, in our
turn, were sixty seconds on the right side of safety.

"Do you ever get bored with driving the Ealing express?"

"No," replied the driver, "I like it!  I wanted to do this ever since
I became a conductor.  Most conductors want to be drivers.  The first
time you take a train out alone is what you might call a bit of
excitement, but it soon wears off."

"You don't feel as though you were flying?"

"No, you soon lose that feeling."

"You never get the wind up?"

"No, you can't go wrong if you keep your eyes open and your repair
bag in good order!"

* * *

In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over
which little black snakes were crawling--trains coming and trains
gone--I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways
for over thirty years!

"The changes I've seen?" he said.  "Yet it's marvellous what we did
in the old days.  Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand
people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains?  I'm not saying
that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but--we
did it!  Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better,
and--you can have the good old days!  I remember them and prefer
these!

"Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular
baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains.
Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground."

* * *

I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went
back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in
the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the little
_crème de menthe_ lights that tell him he can fly and thunder on
through the darkness.




Marriage

A striped awning leads to the church.  A narrow strip of scarlet
carpet runs from kerb to porch.  Policemen hold back the crowd.

Women--always women; and in such numbers, too, and in such remarkable
variety.  The lily livered misanthrope on a passing omnibus growls:
"Another wretched wedding....  What women see in them I cannot
imagine."  Of course he cannot.  Women with their relentless grip on
essential realities, see in them the work of the world, the
justification of all living--but, naturally, they do not reason it
out like that.  They go to "see the bride," or, dare I say, to see
themselves as the bride, either as they once were or as they hope to
be.

How remarkably they gather!  At one moment the street is normal save
for that tell-tale scarlet strip; the next, as a swarm gathers out of
the blue sky, so gather the wedding fans, ready, if need be, to prod
a policeman in the ribs with an umbrella in order to watch another
woman walk through a wedding-ring into a home....

Shall we join the ladies?

* * *

"Steady on there.  Don't push."

That is the policeman.  There is a surge and writhing of this solid
mass of womanhood.

"Officer, could you stand just a little....  Thank you."

"'Ere, Robert, can't you move your fat self?  I'm only a little one."

All kinds of women: Kensington and Balham and Clerkenwell; virgins,
matrons, and grandmothers; some happy, some, no doubt, unhappy.  What
does that matter?  Another bride is stepping out into life with the
future in her eyes, and joy and sorrow presiding over her marvellous
destiny.

* * *

"Who is it?"

"Lady Agatha Penwhistle!"

Not you see, "Who is he?"  What does he matter?  Half the women have
never heard of Lady Agatha.  To them she is not Lady Agatha.  She is
something far more important: she is a bride; she is--Everywoman.

In the dark arch of the church porch a certain anticipatory
liveliness is noted.  Pink young men in morning clothes, white
gardenias in their buttonholes, fuss helplessly, asking each other
whispered questions, pointing, hesitating, muddling.  Marriage is a
bad day for young brothers.  The boys at the porch have been tumbling
over pews and mixing up the bride's guests with those who owe
allegiance to the bridegroom.  It has been a fearful sweat for them.
The sight of Sis at the altar, too, was pretty awful.  Of course,
George is an awfully decent cove and all that; but still, you know
... so small she was, and so pathetic in white, kneeling there....

One of the young men runs down the steps and officiously opens the
door of a limousine in whose silver brackets shine white carnations.
The crowd watches every movement.  He blushes under the scrutiny.
Silly asses, they are!  Then as he runs back the doors are flung
wide.  Suddenly the church vibrates like a great cat purring.  The
stones seem to rock, as, with a crash, the hysterical triumph of
Mendelssohn bursts forth and goes galloping down the wind like a
messenger.  There are people crowding round the porch.  She is
coming....  She, the eternal, unchanging, marvellous She!

Look, there is a movement in the porch, and then...  "Oooh, isn't she
lovely!"

The Girl in White!

Her veil flung back, her straight, slim form moving down the steps,
the white satin gleaming as she moves, her bouquet against her
breast, and her silver toes peeping in and out from beneath her gown.
She smiles.

"Good luck, my dear!"

A swift turn of her head.  Who said that to her?  Her eyes brim, for
it was very lovely.  She gazes over the women's faces--those, at this
time, generous women's faces.

So she passes.

* * *

As she goes the women put away their handkerchiefs, for they have all
been crying a little, some with joy and some out of the depths of
knowledge.

To all of them standing there She represented That Which Once Was,
That Which Might Have Been, That Which May Be; and something
more--oh, much more.  For that brief second she was the Ideal.  She
was Happiness.

I think also that when the older women found themselves in tears they
were seeing through a glass darkly, through the glass of this girl's
life, and in their hearts they knew that, come weal, come woe, they
had seen a sister at the pinnacle of her life.

* * *

"Good luck, my dear!"




Kings and Queens

Nell Gwynne must have had some trying moments.  When she fell into a
red-haired woman's rage facing Charles II with clenched hands,
Charles probably stood there looking at her just as he looks at the
few people who from time to time gaze at him in the Westminster Abbey
waxwork show.

Women hate to be looked at like that, whether the man who looks is a
king or is merely someone else's husband.  "Now, Nelly!" he seems to
be saying.  "Now, Nelly!"  Cold, distant, on the apex of his pyramid
of superiority, with his sallow, cynical face framed in its cascade
of curls, how mad he must have made her--and all the others--for
women who permit themselves hysterics do detest having them against a
human granite quarry.  That sad, superior Stuart eye, that heavy,
drooping mouth, that thin, supercilious pencil line of a moustache
etched straight over, but a little above, his upper lip.  So
contemptuous, so cutting, so sarcastic.  You can positively hear the
dead beauties saying, "Charles, I never know what you are _really_
thinking," or "Charles, do smile, just once," or "Charles, dearest,
why do you look at me like that?  Have you forgotten...."
Heart-rending for them, but--also attractive, you know!

How many calculated storms must have beaten in vain tears against
that stern rock of a face as he stood there, his Majesty the King,
just waiting for the tempest to abate.  It must have been one of the
most useful expressions in history.

* * *

Waxworks?  Pooh!

That is what most visitors say as they trail round Westminster Abbey,
wrestling painfully with the past, trying to flog their imaginations
with dates.

How many realize that these waxworks were made by men who saw these
kings and queens in life?  They are authentic portraits, less
flattering perhaps than the works of greater artists, and for this
reason more interesting.  In fact, I prefer this waxwork of Charles
II to Lely's splendid portrait.  I am sure it is more like Charles.

From the time of Henry V till about 1700 every dead monarch was
modelled in wax.  This effigy was then dressed in the king's finest
suit, and was carried through the streets of London in his funeral
train.  Westminster Abbey was once full of these marvellous
relics--"The Ragged Regiment" they used to be called, or "The Play of
Dead Folks."  To-day only eleven are shown, the broken limbs of the
others, the gruesome heads and hands, are locked away from public
sight.  Poor Edward I and Eleanor, the third Edward and Philippa,
glorious Hal and Katharine, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, James
the First and Anne of Denmark, lie all jumbled together; a sight that
would have made Hamlet wince.

Was there ever a more pathetic puppet show?

Enough remained of Queen Elizabeth for a clever restorer to give us a
new idea of her.  There she stands covered in jewels, holding her
sceptre, her rich, red, velvet gown falling to a pair of surprisingly
adequate brocade shoes.  But this is not the imperious queen we know,
this is not Gloriana, who could put on a Tower of London expression
and whip men with her tongue.  This is a sad old woman.  She has
uncanny, unhappy eyes; such a lonely face.

William and Mary, who attract every Dutch visitor to London, are a
heavy, homely couple.  She wears purple velvet over a brocaded skirt,
and he was so small that some thoughtful person mounted him on a
footstool so that he might match his tall wife.  Queen Anne is also
on view, but she, too, is rather heavy and homely.  Those are the
royalties.

In a corner is Frances, Duchess of Richmond, who is said to have been
the Britannia of the coinage.  Just think of this!  Frances Teresa
Stewart in wax looking across at a waxen Charles II!  What irony!
She, you remember, was the lady Pepys thought so lovely; and he had a
good eye.  What scandal a wax figure can recall.  "La Belle Stewart"
never cared for chatter, however, and you can imagine how Charles
looked when he learned that the beautiful scandalous creature, who
might have been Queen of England, had eloped one night from Whitehall
with the Duke of Richmond.  It must have been a bad day for everybody
in St. James's Palace.  The cook, I should think, was certainly
sacked.

In the next case is Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, who on her
death-bed developed an enthusiasm for her funeral.  She had
previously arranged it in detail with the Garter King-of-Arms, and
she lay there worrying if the trappings would be all right, and
fearing to die before the undertakers sent the canopy for her
approval.

"Why don't they send it," she cried, "even though all the tassels are
not finished?"

Poor lady!  Her pomp is ended, and her brocaded robes sadly in need
of the dry-cleaner.

Nelson is there, modelled shortly after death, wearing his uniform,
his neat, thin legs in white kerseymere breeches and silk stockings,
and the Government "hat tax" stamp still to be seen inside his hat.

Full of human interest they are, but Charles is the gem.  Time has
been unkind to the fine point lace at his neck and at his wrists.  It
is almost black.  His jaunty hat, with its drooping ostrich plumes,
would disgrace a brawl; yet I defy you to laugh at him.  His Majesty
looks at you from the dust of centuries, and you are inclined to hate
the people who have written their names with diamonds on the plate
glass, including the author of that famous quatrain which ends:

  He never said a foolish thing,
  Nor ever did a wise one.


Still he has an air with him, and when he entered a room, his
melancholy eyes burning in that sallow, set face, just think how the
ostrich plumes swept the dust, and how the lovely naughtiness of his
day curtseyed in gold brocade....




Lost Heirs

I wonder how many people who live in London lodgings look in the
mirror during their occasional shaves and think: "There goes the
rightful Duke of Brixton!"

O the wild dreams of London!  The old man who starves himself that he
may search year after year for a document which conceals a coronet is
only less tenacious than the elderly virgin whose sole passion is the
belief that somebody way back in history "did her down" over a will.
There are humble, ragged people who must be positively shocked when
they cut a finger and discover that their blood is just ordinary red.
There are others who believe themselves to be the ground-landlords of
New York or Philadelphia, who go on living in the splendid hope that
some day--some day--that missing document will turn up to smooth out
the injustices of time.

The Record Office in Chancery Lane is the magnet which draws all
these queer people year after year.  These unofficial dukes and earls
go off each morning with their luncheon in paper bags to hunt up
their ancestors.  They are all so certain.  So convincing.  You can
put your head quite close to theirs and never hear the bee.

Their finger nails may be in mourning for their lost departed, their
collars may be greyish, and their cuffs frayed, but they have butlers
and scarlet carpets in their hearts, and in their eyes a hunger most
awful to see.  There is a legend that one searcher who insisted on
being called "my lord," became tired of trying to justify his claim
and in a moment of enthusiasm hired a peer's robes and actually
succeeded in entering the House of Lords during a State ceremony!
What a moment!

There he stood for a moment among his peers.  It must have been the
greatest moment of his life.  It was during the State opening of
Parliament, and the House of Lords was waiting with lowered lights
for that moment when the King and the Queen, with white-satined pages
holding the royal trains, would enter at the precise moment, the
lights leap up and send a green and fiery glitter rippling along the
throats of the peeresses in the gallery.  In this scene stood the
peer from Bloomsbury or Brixton or Balham, watching with who knows
what delicious thrills the Gentlemen-at-Arms standing at the doors
holding their halberds in white gauntleted hands while the lights
glanced off their golden helms.  What a moment!  And what, I wonder,
betrayed him?  Why did they ask him to go?  Did he show too much
confidence in his rightful surroundings, or did he say, "Granted, I'm
sure," to the duke who trod on his foot?  I wonder....

When I entered the Record Office yesterday the curious round room,
like the smoking-room of an Atlantic liner that has taken to
book-collecting, was full of students and historians poring over
spidery Elizabethan script or muttering the English of Chaucer's day
beneath their breath.  Now and again someone with the strawberry leaf
complex wanders in here, puts an old hat on the chair, and calls for
documents with the air of a rather weary Malvolio.  Generally
speaking, the legacy and title hunters gather next door in the Legal
Search Room.

Here I found an assortment of women and men.  Some were solicitors
and barristers looking up records, some were trying to claim funds in
Chancery, and others the usual fortune and title hunters.

This is merely a fraction of the interest this building holds for us.
It houses twenty-six miles of shelves packed with historic documents
and millions of unhistoric documents.  Here are the bones of English
History.  Come into the Museum known so well to those who have a
_flair_ for the right things, the Americans.  Here in two portly
volumes is "Domesday Book," writ in a fair monkish hand.  Shelves are
stacked with letters from kings and queens, generals and admirals,
cardinals and peers: humour, pathos, tragedy, passion.  In one of
these Wolsey, "the King's poore, hevy and wrechyd prest," asks Henry
VIII to forgive him and take him back into favour.  Queen Elizabeth's
hand is set to a number of letters, and to her are missives from many
men, including two who loved her.  Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
says in one: "I humbly kiss your foot," and the imprisoned Earl of
Essex is represented by a brief letter written for the eyes of
Gloriana alone.

You can read letters which recall cannon shot on the high seas, and
letters which give a vision of deep political plotting and such-like
villainy.  "God has given us a good day in forcing the enemy so far
to leeward," wrote Sir Francis Drake aboard the "Revenge."  "I hope
in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Sedonya shall not shake
handes this fewe days."  Quite near you will find the last confession
of Guy Fawkes.

When you have enjoyed the flavour of these old days you may meet on
the stairs an ordinary cat.  At least so it seems.  It is Felix, and
he has been walking through history for centuries.  It is the only
cat officially on a Government staff--in spite of anything women
secretaries in Whitehall may tell you!  It receives a penny a day
from Government funds!  I believe that the terms of its appointment
include a clause that it must keep itself clean, catch rats and mice,
and bring up its children.  If anybody killed the official cat in
ancient times he had to forfeit sufficient wheat to cover the body.

* * *

The officer in charge of the Legal Search Room sits with the official
list of lost money before him--the funds in Chancery, which, by the
way, are only sufficient to make one decent full-blown
millionaire--as millionaires go nowadays.

"Yes," he said, "there are some strange searchers.

"In the summer many good, democratic Americans come over to trace
their ancestry back to William the Conqueror!"

"And the lost heirs," I said--"the would-be dukes?"

"Ah!" he replied.  "Ah!"

He sighed.

I noticed a shabby old man mournfully shuffling out.  I felt certain
that there was the ghost of ermine over him, and I hope that now and
then his landlady, just to keep his poor heart up, drops a curtsy
when she brings in the kippers and says: "Dinner is served--_your
grace_."




Fish

Every morning at the uncomfortable hour of five a man in a peaked cap
rings a big bell in Billingsgate Market and the lights go up.  Then
the haddocks and plaice, which you eat in due course, begin their
commercial career.

Shouting?  Yes; most decidedly!  The ozone which exudes from
prostrate cod seems to have a singular effect on the lungs of the
fish trade.  In the old days, I am told, they used to shout definite
fishy slogans such as: "Had-had-had-haddock!" or
"Wink-wink-wink-winkles!"  But only now and then, when some
enthusiast becomes filled with the spirit of the past do you hear
anything so interesting.  It is mostly a swift, sharp, business-like
affair, with a little violent auctioneering over in the corner.
Lying in the Thames at the Wharf which is on one side of the market
is a Danish trawler with North Sea salt caked on her funnel.  Men run
up and down the gangways carrying her cargo, while from every corner
of the compass railway carts converge on that tangle of narrow
streets which begins at the Monument.  If you like statistics you
will be interested to know that on an average eight hundred tons of
fish pour into Billingsgate every day, and the majority comes by
train.

I wandered between lines of dead fish.  Nothing on earth can look so
dead as a fish.  It is, in a lavish place of this kind, difficult to
believe that fish have ever lived, have ever sported gallantly in the
sea, making romantic love and building homes, and generously seeing
to it that we shall go on having fish after soup.

Incredibly dead codfish and inconceivably defunct skate lay strewn in
rich profusion, herrings with red eyes and white-bellied plaice--all
the fruit of the ocean mixed up with ice!  Queer, fascinating things
are apparently weeded out before they reach Billingsgate; there is
none of the strange, snarling fish you see at Boulogne or Dieppe,
none of the comic monstrosities with green whiskers which enchant you
in Marseilles.  Billingsgate is essentially an edible dump.
Everything that comes into it is solemnly designed for the kitchen.

Between the flabby corpses walk men and women--fishmongers, hotel
buyers, and the like--prodding, examining, comparing, now and then
tasting a shrimp--at five a.m., too!--sometimes cracking an
experimental mussel!

Officials of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers patrol the place.
They represent one of the few old guilds which are still actively
interested in the trades they represent.  These inspectors have the
power to condemn anything unfit for sale.

* * *

And the smell!

How many cats sniff it at the Bank, I wonder!  Smell is a marvellous
thing.  It can awaken the most tender memories of love and passion,
of moments under a red moon, blowing roses, blue nights.  Were I a
woman I would never allow the man I loved to go far without a bottle
of my favourite scent.  A photograph is a dead thing; a smell is
alive.  How strange, I thought, that Billingsgate should appeal to
the same sense that thrills to a laced handkerchief.  Here you have
the harmony and discord of smell.  Billingsgate in this musical
metaphor is like a cat walking across a piano--worse, it is a blare
of smell, an assault on the senses.  I wondered if, with study, a
keen nose could in time learn to disentangle the various strains that
go to swell the mass effect, as a musician is able to deafen himself
to a symphony and follow the steady hum of an individual 'cello.  I
was conscious, it is true, of the steady hum of haddock and a sharp
piccolo-like movement from the plaice, but, apart from perhaps the
steady drumming from the cod stalls, the finer, more subtle
emanations escaped me, such as mullet.

Remembering a handkerchief I once had, so long ago that I can write
of it as if it were a museum specimen, but in its time a marvellous
thing that held within its creased folds all the nightingales of
Monte Cattini, I asked myself this problem: Suppose a fishmonger had
a passionate love-affair in Billingsgate, would fish remind him or
would it not?  At first I was inclined to say no, but on reflection I
thought yes.  He would meet the girl every day for months among the
lobsters.  He would see her come to him, so graceful and lissom, down
an avenue of oysters.  He would whisper to her above the whiting, and
they would kiss among the crabs.  Gradually turbot would come to have
a deeper meaning for this man.  He would hesitate over the whitebait,
and--remember.  When the first Danish herrings came in during
February he would have to pull himself together and be strong.  Years
after, if he wished to sentimentalize, what simpler, or more
poignant, than a quick sniff at a kipper?  But the agony of living in
this hall of memories!  If you treasure a piece of scented cambric,
just think how harrowing it would be to live in the perfume
factory....

Such speculation is vain.  Do not pity Billingsgate.  I hardly like
to tell you because I fear you may not believe me,
but----Billingsgate smells nothing!  No; not even the faintest odour
as of melons.  Its nose is atrophied.  I discovered this by the
merest chance.

"By jove," I said, "that's a pretty loud fish.  What is it?"

"I don't smell anything," said the owner.

We discussed smell minutely, and I discovered that his life in
Billingsgate had made him immune from fishy smells.  How wonderful
Nature is!  Only when he returns from his holiday is he conscious of
a little something in the air.

Billingsgate is perhaps the most libelled spot in London.  Fifty
years ago you had to wax your ears.  The language was awful.  To-day
the Billingsgate fish porters are as polite and charming as we all
are.

They are the backbone of Billingsgate, for this market is worked on
the most primitive system of hard transport.  The Genoese galleys
which in the Middle Ages anchored near by were unloaded in exactly
the same way.  So were Pharaoh's galleys, and Cæsar's.  These men,
wearing queer-shaped leather helmets rather like stunted Burmese
pagodas, carry all the fish in crates on their heads.  When a man's
neck "sets," as they call it, he can carry sixteen stone on his head.
They do it every day and all day.

"Mind your back, _please_!" say the fish porters of Billingsgate.

"Shove over the hammer--if you don't mind, Jack!" I heard one say.

"Certainly!" replied Jack.

So much for that.

* * *

Then I walked out on Billingsgate Wharf and had a real thrill.  This
is where London began.  It is probably the oldest wharf on the
Thames.  Old Geoffrey of Monmouth, who would have made a fine
American reporter, says that it takes its name from Belin, King of
the Britons four hundred years before Christ.  Stowe thinks that it
was once owned by a man called Biling.  It is certain, however, that
the Romans landed their furs and their wines here, and at this spot
on the Thames the first imports of London were dumped, the first
merchants gathered.

To the left I saw the bluish shadow of Tower Bridge.  The brown
Thames water licked the broad hull of a fish trawler.  Crate after
crate of herrings caught so far away in the North Sea were unloaded
for London, and as I passed again through the ripe, rich tang of the
market a man was buying lobsters which I suppose a lovely girl will
enjoy as she makes eyes at someone over the rim of her champagne
glass.




Haunted

Devonshire House is dead and gone.  I hope that its name may be
perpetuated by the new commercial building, but I do not know.

When the workmen were performing acute surgical operations on old
Devonshire House I was interested to hear people, who knew the Duke
quite well by his photographs, express intimate regret at this deed.
"Dear old Devonshire House!" they said.  "What a shame it is that
these grand old...."  And so on and so forth.  They were wistful.
They gave the impression that they knew the pink bedroom awfully well
(don't you know); they that had lingered on every inch of the famous
staircase.  They were like people who mourned the downfall of the old
home.

You see, for nearly five years Devonshire House was, in the name of
charity, thrown open to the public, so that probably more people were
acquainted with the geography of this mansion than with any other
ducal house which has not become either an hotel or a museum.  So:

"Poor old Devonshire House!"

"Yes, it looks just like a bombed château during the war!"

* * *

It did.

Workmen swarmed over it, stood on walls picking at it, sending it
earthwards in clouds of dry, white dust.  Great gashes had been cut
in the sides, windows had been knocked out, the daylight shone into
the out-buildings, exposing the discreet wall-paper of the servantry,
and that wide-walled courtyard through which swung the coaches of
Fox, Burke, and the "New Whigs" in the days when men, and many a
pretty woman, plotted against Pitt, was the loading spot for
builders' carts and a place in which anyone could light a bon-fire to
burn lath and plaster.

There was great interest in this patch of changing London.  Not one
person passing on an omnibus but remarked about it; and no wonder,
for this is Piccadilly's most dramatic assassination.  In the sound
of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age--or the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked!  These great
houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the
politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their
day.  London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and
over-whelmed them.

Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal
wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up.  Great hotels
and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there
dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock; aware, it seemed, in its
gated caution, that once upon a time highwaymen rode out of
Kensington with masks over their faces.

I admit that it was ugly--entirely gloomy in its grey, stiff,
barrack-like way; but it did mean something--it had character.
Though nobody, as far as I am aware, ever did anything splendidly bad
or remarkably good in it, Devonshire House could never be neutral.
The National Anthem is pretty bad music, but it could never be
neutral!

* * *

So, as the workmen consumed their sandwiches in halls through which
for two centuries passed a delicious trickle of royalties, as they
heard the whistle and rose heavily to grasp their picks and do some
more damage, I more than once stood there among a tangle of builders'
carts and saw visions rise out of the white dust.

What a procession!

I saw the hackney coach of Charles James Fox trundle under the
portico.  Burke, of course, was there too, the practical, wise Burke;
for here they conspired with the Coalition Whigs to hit at Pitt,
whispering and plotting with the lovely Georgiana, third Duchess of
Devonshire, who enjoyed placing her white finger into this political
pie.  There had been a tea-party at Boston.  And the French
Revolution was gathering like a storm to split them.  Among these
crumbling stones Georgiana must have heard of that scene, one of the
most dramatic the House of Commons has ever witnessed, when these
two, Fox and Burke, broke their long friendship in a thrilled hush,
Fox with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, Burke grim and
firm, and the House of Commons looking on at a quarrel that never
healed.

George IV, as Prince of Wales, with his card-table fingers also in
the Fox pie, and all the brains and elegance of that time, wits who
have been forgotten, a few who live, laughter, music, and the flash
of white shoulders, eyes above a fan....  What a procession!

All this you could see in the dust of Devonshire House--two hundred
years of it, duke succeeding duke; and all the time the new
generations of wealth, power, and art moving up to that grey old
portico.

As I passed it late one night I wondered if there are spirits--a
queer doubt to express to-day!  If so, I am certain that on calm
nights fit for a lady's walk Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire,
must have visited the ruin, looking with very straight brows and
considerable "tut-tutting" at a big board on which was printed: "The
magnificent building to be erected on this site will include offices,
restaurants, and flats."

* * *

Poor Georgiana!  Time is a queer thing, and--you, in your time, would
never have believed it, would you?




About Homes in Bondage

Do you wish to feel human emotion spring from inanimate things?  Do
you wish to meet ghosts?  Then come with me to one of London's great
furniture store-houses, in which a thousand homes lie piled to the
roof, silent, sheeted, tomb-like.

A store-man switches on a line of lights, and we see stretching to
the distance great pyramids of household goods, whole homes of
furniture, neatly stacked and carefully ticketed against the time
when a man and a woman will come to claim them.  Some of the pyramids
suggest Park Lane, others suggest Clapham Common.

Let us peep beneath this shroud, and what do we see: "Good morning,
Mrs. Everyman, and what can I do for you?  Kindly accept this cushion
as a souvenir of your visit."  There lies the gift cushion, there the
once-so-loved instalment suite that was delivered in the plain van.
Note the pictures by Watts, Rossetti, and others of the Victorians to
whom the suburbs are so loyal.  "Love's Awakening."  Ah!

What do we see in the next tomb?  Yes; here was an elegant home with
a cheque-book behind it.  The low satinwood dresser had a compartment
like a knee desk, so that she might get close up when she rouged her
lips, and three swinging mirrors in order that she might know whether
her shoulders were evenly powdered before he took her out to the
Berkeley.  Engravings, a Japanese cabinet, a good one, a beautiful
round table with a surface like that of a still pool.  Little home
and big home side by side, social differences forgotten.  Do you see
the ghosts of Mrs. Everyman and Lady Nobody meeting like sisters over
their shrouded homes crying a little on each other's arms?  I do.
The tombs go on waiting ... waiting.

Homes in bondage!

As we wander down the line our eyes are caught by a doll's house,
relic of some distant nursery, a child's cot, or a piece of furniture
with distinct personality, and we wonder how much heartache and hope
this place represents.  There are people living in lodgings dreaming
of the home that they will build again one day, longing to surround
themselves with loved things, to tear off the wrappings and see again
those precious ordinary objects that mean so much in every
life--those sentimental anchors.

Sentiment--that is the keynote.  Without it London's store-rooms
would be half empty.

"Yes, sir," says the store-man, as he pulls aside a wrapping, "people
don't seem able to bring themselves to part with things.  It's mighty
queer.  Look at this old box, now--what would you think is inside it?"

The box is an ancient nail-studded chest with a curved lid that might
have contained all the gold of Treasure Island.  I hazard a guess
just to please him.

"No, sir.  It's just full of little old bits of cloth, the kind of
things that women collect and put in old baskets because they may
come in useful some day.  There's bits of tinsel and lace, and pretty
little cases full of red and blue beads and needles by the score.
But what's the sense of letting it eat its head off here?  That's
what I want to know.  If they've paid a penny for this old box they
must have paid fifty pounds, for it was here before ever I was.  O
yes, there's funny people about, and no mistake.  Now if it belonged
to me...."

As he rambles on, I examine the old box with interest.  I know why it
was put there; and so do you!  Memories cling round it--memories so
sweet that the heart revolts at the thought of burning those poor
fragments.

Most people have a box of this sort.  In it are queer trifles, little
geometric nets on which beads are strung or sewn.  Green and scarlet
parrots preen themselves on half-finished trees.  It is that note of
half completion, as of a task suddenly put down and soon to be
resumed, which makes such things so appealing.  Perhaps a needle is
still sticking in a corner of the fabric, waiting, it seems, for the
fingers that will never come again.  And when you look you see the
hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending
over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are
a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is
the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have
heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance,
hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a
masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most
marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen.  Clever,
wonderful mother....

"There's funny people about, and no mistake!" says the storeman
again, giving the box a prod with his foot.

We go on.  He unties the wrappings round another deposit.  All these
things, he explains, belong to "a divorced couple."  How new they
are, he comments.  How quickly they must have found out their
mistake; no sooner married than divorced and storing their things,
and chucking away good money after bad!

I peep in with a feeling that I am eavesdropping.  There, piled up
sideways, is the table round which this unknown tragedy of married
life was acted, the solemn, stiff chairs, witness to it all, the
pictures which for a little while were gathered for this mockery of a
home.

"Why they don't sell it I can't think," says the storeman.

I wonder, too, why they keep it!  Neither one nor the other can bear
to live with it.  Then what queer sentiment, what common memory,
retains this split home here in the pathetic silence of lapsed things?

We turn a corner.  More avenues, sheeted, deserted.

"Some of these people are dead, we think," remarks my guide, waving
his hand towards the dim roof.  "This lot was put in at the beginning
of the war.  We had to sell quite a lot.  Payments lapsed, and no one
replied to advertisements.  It is a mystery to know who it belongs to
now, sir, and that's a fact."

* * *

As we turn into another warehouse we meet a man and woman.  They have
pulled aside the sheeting and are standing among chairs and tables
and pictures.  The woman comes out and says nervously:

"We've just come to see our things.  The manager said that we might."

As we enter the next compartment we hear this man and woman talking.

"Oh, look!  There it is, next to mother's writing-table.  Do pick it
up and let me hold it!"

There is the sound of the man walking over the stiff wrappings.

"Oh, my dear!" comes the woman's voice.  "My dear!"

We go on through the silent aisles, the storeman talkative, amusing,
insensible to the drama we have met, oblivious of the longing in
those few words spoken by a woman, among the sheeted pathos of a home
in bondage.




Royal Satin

When the Queen was married she wore a dress which I find it rather
difficult to describe, because there is a special dressmakers'
language for this sort of thing.

It was low in the neck, the lowness draped with white lace.  The tiny
inch-long sleeves were caught up at the shoulder with little bunches
of orange blossom.  The corsage curved inwards to a tight waist
ending in a point, and the dress, cut away over a fine white
underskirt, fell in a graceful, generous sweep to the floor.  Over
the front were draped trailing sprays of orange blossom.  The
going-away dress is a bit easier to describe.  It covered the Queen
from neck to feet.  The collar was high, and braided like that of a
mess uniform or a commissionaire's tunic.  The sleeves, tight at the
wrist and braided, rose at the shoulder, sharply and alarmingly, in a
queer shape, known, I believe, as "leg of mutton."  It is very
stately and ornate, and, in the light of modern fashion, exceedingly
stiff and strange.

Men in the early 'thirties can just remember their mothers in a dress
like this, sitting calm and lovely in a victoria with a parasol in
their white-gloved hands, and a perky little hat like a vegetarian
restaurant poised on their puffed-up hair.  So you can't help loving
the Queen's going-away dress....

* * *

Where can you see it?  Do you know?  It is on view with hundreds of
other royal satins in that beautiful and comparatively unknown museum
within a stone's throw of the Prince of Wales's house in St. James'
Palace--the London Museum.  This is a woman's museum.  I cannot
imagine a woman who would not be thrilled by it.  In the first place,
it is the most beautifully housed museum in the world.  Lancaster
House, which used to be the town house of the Dukes of Sutherland, is
one of the finest houses in London.  It makes you feel good all over
simply to walk up the wide, dignified staircase that leads from the
great marble entrance hall.  In the second place, the London Museum
contains rooms filled entirely with royal treasures: dolls dressed by
Queen Victoria, a tiny suit worn by King Edward, the cradle in which
the present Royal Family were rocked to sleep, the coronation robes,
intimate family relics that recall Queen Victoria, the Prince
Consort, and King Edward.  There are also beautiful, slightly-faded
dresses which Queen Alexandra wore when she came over the sea many
years ago to be the Princess of Wales.

* * *

Every day a few women can be found in a state of ecstasy before these
cases.  Sometimes the keeper, frock-coated and white-spatted and
gardeniaed, can be seen conducting a tall, stately woman through the
high magnificence of the halls a woman who looks with a smile at many
a relic of childhood; and people whisper "The Queen!"

To the Londoner this place holds more of interest than any other
museum, not excepting the unfortunately entombed Guildhall Museum.

The whole history of London, dug up out of London clay and peat, is
here for inspection.  The finest collection of Roman pottery, found
among the roofs of London, is on view.  There is a pot which dates
from perhaps A.D. 200, on which a Londoner of seventeen hundred years
ago has written: "Londini ad fanum Isidis" ("London, next door to the
Temple of Isis").  Think of it!  In Tudor Street seventeen hundred
years ago men worshipped the Egyptian goddess Isis, the goddess with
the moon on her head, the sister-wife of Osiris, who travelled from
the Nile to the Tiber, where she joined the impartial Pantheon of
Rome!  There is the skeleton of a Roman galley found in the bed of
the Thames: a great ship in which men came to build the first London.
There is the skeleton of one of the first Londoners, lying stretched
under glass as he was found, with a bronze pin under his chin and a
bronze dagger at his breast bone.

Down below in the basement is a Chamber of Horrors few people know.
Here are the great iron gates of Newgate Prison.  Here in a
frightening gloom are two prison cells.  A wax figure, who looks as
if the execution morning has dawned, writhes on his hard bed, his
hands chained to the walls.  Here are the manacles that held Jack
Sheppard.

In another room are a series of lifelike models of old London which
every Londoner should see and admire.  Old London Bridge, with its
rows of traitors' heads set on staves, is lifelike; old St. Paul's
during the Fire of London is wonderful.  A mechanical contrivance
gives the illusion that smoke is rolling up from the blazing church
over the startled city, the windows of houses show blood-red lights,
and, as you stand looking at the model, your imagination is stirred
so that you can hear the cries and the shouting, see the confused
rushes as citizens tried to save their treasures when liquid lead was
falling in a hissing stream on the red-hot pavements round St. Paul's.

* * *

One wonders what Lancaster House will be like in fifty years' time if
it keeps pace with London!  Already a hansom cab is parked in the
garden!  Some day a motor-omnibus and perhaps a tramcar will arrive.
There are crowded days ahead!




Among the Fur Men

Women must, I am glad to say, have fur coats.  It has been so since
we men set out after the ermine with clubs instead of cheque books,
and splendidly have they always repaid us with a glimpse of eyes over
soft fur and chins buried in the cosy rightness of it.

The result is that, all over the world, wherever hairy things creep,
crawl, or climb, men are ready with guns and traps.  Three times a
year the pelts of the world pour into London to be distributed.
Whenever this happens a large auction-room in Queen Street will
provide you with the strangest sight in the City of London.  You walk
in through a courtyard past a man in white overalls.  As I passed him
recently he said: "Hudson Bay Company selling now, sir!" and, do you
know, I felt young all over!  I thrilled.  Hudson Bay Company!
Shades of Fenimore Cooper!  In one swift, pregnant moment I saw the
white lands I used to know so well when I was at school, the driving
sheets of snow, the tugging sleigh dogs, and the big, square-bearded
men, with matted hair frozen under round fur hats, bending forward
against the storm, urging on their teams, taking their piled sleighs
to the trading post.

I crossed the courtyard and entered the auction-room.  What a scene!
Men who buy furs in every country in the world were present.  They
sat tier on tier, a good five hundred of them, looking like a full
session of the Parliament of the United States of Europe.  No common
auction this: it was a fur parliament, a senate of seal and musquash.
Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, French, every kind of Jew, and a
good balance of English and American.  If Sir Arthur Keith had been
with me he would have gone crazy over the marvellous skulls and cheek
bones.  It was, anthropologically, a splendid sight.

They retained their hats as they sat in the wide half-moon of the fur
theatre.  What hats!  Here and there I picked out a round astrakhan
cap, and, of course, there were fur coats.  One man unbuttoned his
coat.  Somebody had been killing leopards!

Seven men sat high up above the assembly, facing it, and in the
centre of the seven was the auctioneer:

"Any advance on three hundred?"

Instead of the nods and lifted eyebrows of any ordinary saleroom
there was a violent agitation.  To make a bid in this room a man had
to create a scene.  In two minutes the place looked like a crisis in
the French Senate.  Men desiring mink rose and shot up their arms.
The three hundred pounds advanced to five hundred, hesitated, and
spurted on to seven hundred.  Then a man with a Central European
beard rose (exposing a fine nutria lining) and carried the day.  The
hammer fell!  At least twenty more women would have fur coats next
winter!

* * *

So it went on.  Millions of potential fur coats were bought and--not
one of them in sight!  They were all lying in warehouses somewhere in
London; they had all been carefully examined before the sale.

As it proceeded it occurred to me how true it is that certain
professions take hold of a man and brand him.  There are grooms who
look like horses, dog fanciers who resemble dogs, and if certain of
these fur men had emerged from thick undergrowth nine sportsmen out
of ten would have taken a pot shot at them.  I fancied I could detect
the little rodent-like beaver merchants, the fat, swarthy seal fans,
the sharp, pale-white fox-fanciers, and a few aristocratic grey men
with whom I associated chinchilla.

* * *

The story behind it all!  That was the thing that thrilled me.
Behind this roomful of strange, intent men in a London auction-room I
seemed to see other men, the wild, uncouth men of youthful romance,
out in the savage places of the earth and in the great loneliness of
forests and ice.  Hunters, trappers!  Though we grow old and hard and
inaccessible to all soft thoughts we will never lose our love for
these.  It is in our blood.  We have all longed to be trappers, we
have all longed to blaze the trail through the Canadian wilderness,
to crack the ice on Great Whale River before we could catch our
breakfast, to win home at last in a flurry of snow to the log
cabin....

"Any advance on three hundred and fifty pounds?"

The baying of dogs in a white-sheeted world, the pine trees in
shrouds; and then--silence...

"Four hundred.  Any advance?"

The green glitter of ice and the drama of a man fighting the
elements, fighting solitude, primitive, uncouth, his mind following
the minds of beasts as a fox-hunter anticipates the mind of a fox.

"Five hundred!  Any advance?"

Blood over the snow and a limp body, the cracking of whips, the dog
team with its laden sledge, and--all in order that you, my dear, may
wrap your tall, elegant self in a lovely fur coat!

"Going, going, gone!"

Crack!




Appeal to Cæsar

In a high room overlooking Downing Street sit six solemn men at a
table piled with books.

I recognize Lord X. and Lord Y. and Lord Z. diligently reading,
saying "Ha!" or "Hum!" or looking grave, or reflectively wiping the
lenses of their spectacles.  Two attendants in evening dress, like a
couple of lost waiters, tip-toe round the apartment pulling out more
books from the well-stocked walls to place before their omniverous
lordships.  The room is carpeted with maroon felt, a few portraits in
oils gaze down on the assembly with polite indifference; and there
are four fire-places set in squares of veined marble.  The
furnishings resemble those of ideal offices in the "efficiency first"
advertisements: the inkpots are bigger and more efficient-looking
than ordinary inkpots, the desks are more prairie-like in size than
common desks, and the chairs more comfortable than less exalted
chairs.

Yes; but what is happening?  I would think if I did not know that a
millionaire's will was being read in a country house library.  A few
barristers in wigs and gowns sit quietly reading as if they were in
chambers.  Facing the peers is a barrister standing at a little
reading-desk, and in the comfortable hush his crisp voice goes on and
on.  An attendant discreetly feeds one of the four fires, pokes a
second, looks critically at a third; one of the peers calls for yet
another book ... the Voice goes on and on and on....

This is the highest court in the British Empire.  Behind that door in
the corner is, theoretically, the King.  The Voice that goes on and
on is speaking on the steps of the throne.  This is a sitting of the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Whenever that old cry, "I appeal to Cæsar!" goes up in any part of
the Empire this room becomes busy.  In this room the last word is
given on legal differences throughout the Empire.  If the courts in
Australia cannot satisfy someone about his right-of-way the trouble
is smoothed out once and for all here in Downing Street.  If there is
a row in Canada about mining rights, in New Zealand about water
supply, in India about delicate matters of caste, or even--as in a
case coming on soon--about a contract for the supply of ground nuts,
the Privy Councillors hear it on behalf of the King and give their
final and irrevocable verdict.

This room is the final appeal for four hundred million British
subjects, or nearly a third of the human race.  Legal controversies
over eleven million square miles--and strangely, throughout the
Church in this country--are settled here.  Its decisions go to the
uttermost ends of the earth.  No court in the world has ever had so
wide a jurisdiction.

When I walked in, the two attendants looked up curiously at me, for a
strange face is a novelty.  The highest court in the Empire, although
it is as public as the Law Courts, seldom attracts a visitor.

I sit down in a kind of superior pew.  Behind me are shelved the
legal records of Canada, a library in themselves.  "Revised Statutes
of Nova Scotia," I read.  "Quebec Revised Statutes," "New Brunswick
Acts," "Laws of P. E. Island," "Revised Statutes of Alberta," and so
on--the ideal bedside library!  "Canada," however, is not the
official title: the Dominion laws are catchlined "North America."

Opposite are the laws of India, Australia; and so on throughout the
Empire.

* * *

What do litigants in distant parts of the earth think of this room?
Surely they imagine the King's Privy Council sitting robed as peers
in the neighbourhood of a stained glass window, trailing ermine
sleeves over richly carved chairs, light falling on coronets, with
perhaps the King, in full Garter robes, dropping in to see how things
are going on!

Nothing of the kind!  The highest court in the Empire sits in less
state than a police court.  There is no jury and no impassioned Law
Court rhetoric.  Counsel leans over his little reading-desk and talks
to their lordships in a quiet, conversational voice.  It is more like
a directors' meeting than an Empire's appeal court.  I half expect
someone to rise and declare a dividend!

"And now," says the Voice in the quiet tone of a secretary reading an
annual report, "I would like your lordships to look at page four
hundred and two."

Their lordships comply.

What strange things go on here!  One day they discuss an obscure
passage in the Koran, the next they are debating the inner meaning of
the Hedaya.  When they deal with South Africa's Roman-Dutch law they
bandy the names of Grotius and Vinnius, authorities the Law Courts
never hear!

Stranger things than this happen.  Did you know that in parts of the
British Empire the old French law, long expelled from France, lives
on, regulating men's lives.  Appeals from Mauritius and the
Seychelles Islands refer to the Code Napoleon!  When Quebec submits
its troubles to London this room hears, like an echo from long ago,
mention of the ancient Custom of Paris; and the two men in evening
dress go tip-toeing round the room to look over the shelves for
Beaumanoir and Dumoulin!

Just think of that!

* * *

As I creep away from the Privy Council, feeling that it is one of the
most wonderful places in London, that Voice goes on and on, quiet,
conversational, and--the echo will be heard in Bombay!




Tons of Money

There is no mystery about the making of money.  The Royal Mint is
exactly like any other factory.  This surprised me.  I felt that the
manufacture of money must surely be surrounded by the unusual.  It
hardly seemed natural that this metal for whose possession we sweat
and slave, lie and slander, and even, on occasions, commit murder,
should be churned out by nonchalant machines no different in their
general attitude towards production from those machines which cut out
nails or stamp out dust bins.

It was with quite a shock that I watched a half-crown machine at
work.  What an ideal birthday present!  The thing hypnotized me.
Click-click-click-click it went, and at every click a silver-white
half-crown was born, a real good half-crown ready to be spent.  What
a generous mouth the machine had; how casual it was....

"Click-click" went the metal millionaire, shooting its lovely
children into a rough wooden trough.  The pile grew as I watched it.
It began with a taxicab fare; the next second a twin was born; they
lay together for a second before they represented a solicitor's fee,
or a dog licence; in five more seconds there was a whole pound lying
there.  So it went on hour after hour while spectators stood by
reverently feeling that the machine was grinning as it pounded away
enthusiastically producing potential ermine cloaks, motor-cars,
freehold houses, and winters in the south of France.

If only the Chancellor of the Exchequer would lend it to me for a
week!

* * *

How much easier money is to make than to earn!

The first stage in the life of a half-crown is a hot foundry where
men melt down bars of silver in crucibles.  These crucibles lie in
gas furnaces that roar like hungry lions and give out a beautiful
orange flame ending in a fringe of apple-green light.  An overhead
crane runs along, picks a red-hot crucible from the furnace, and
carries it to a place where a series of long moulds are waiting.  The
silver is poured, spluttering and blazing, into these moulds, and the
result is a number of long, narrow silver bars, which are passed
through runners till the five-foot strip of silver is the exact
thinness of a half-crown.

These strips are then passed through machines which punch out silver
discs with remarkable speed.  The next machine gives these plain
silver discs a raised edge, and the next--the machine worth
having--puts the King's head on them, mills their edges, and turns
them out into the world to tempt mankind.

* * *

While I was in the stamping-room of the Mint all the machines were
working full blast, except one which looked like a rich relation and
had become muscle bound.  In one corner they were making East African
shillings by the hundred thousand, in another they were turning out
West African currency.  The men had as much as they could do to keep
pace with them.  No sooner had they carried away a trough full of
money, with the blasé air such an occupation induces, than a second
pile was lying there on the floor like a miser's hoard.

I saw enough African money made in half an hour to buy elephants,
thousands of wives, guns, horses, buffaloes, and a throne or two.

The raw material of a sultanate fell out on the floor of the Mint
before luncheon-time.

I could not, however, get worked up on African money.  My first
bucketful of sixpences gave me a much greater thrill.  There must
have been at least three thousand of them lying in bran.  In the
shilling department they were turning out a good line in high-class
shillings, and the half-crown corner became positively thrilling.

"Where's the gold?" I said, feeling slightly heady.

"Ah, where?" replied my guide.

"America?" I suggested.

"Ah--um," he said reflectively.

Leading from the stamping-rooms are rooms where silver is polished,
but more interesting is the room in which its sound is tested.  I
have often heard money talk, but I had never heard it sing before.
How it sings!

Men sit at little tables picking up half-crowns and dashing them
against a steel boss, with the result that the air is full of
something quite like bird song; only much more interesting.  It would
surprise you to see how slight a defect disqualifies a coin.  The
smallest irregularity in its ring, and, flip! it is lying in the
"rejected" basket.

I half hoped they allowed staff and visitors to have these throw-outs
at bargain prices; but there was nothing doing.

* * *

In other rooms men crouched over a revolving hand covered with money,
picking out any badly coloured coin as the constant stream advanced
towards them.  The next department was a mechanical weighing-room, in
which wise-looking machines in glass cases put true coins in one
slot, light ones in a second, and heavy-weights in a third.

As a climax I saw a giant machine that counts half-crowns into one
hundred pound bags and never makes a mistake.  I watched it count
forty bagsful and then walked thoughtfully away.

* * *

"What does it feel like to make money all day long and draw a few
pounds on Friday?" I asked a Mint worker.

"Oh, I dunno," he replied as he shook a thousand pounds through a
bran sieve.  This is a merciful frame of mind.




Where Time Stands Still

London is full of antique shops--places where Chinese Buddhas gaze
pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale--but if you asked me
which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which
deals only in articles more than a thousand years old.

When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass.
Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the
red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women
busying about their day's work.  You hear the sound that is London;
but it means nothing in here.  How can it?  It is a fluid
unimportance called To-day and you are surrounded by Yesterday.  The
Present and the Future are intangible things.  The Past only can be
grasped and loved.  That, at least, is how they think in this queer
shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean
in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned.

The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and
absent-mindedness.  They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack
and say "yes" when they should have said "no."  They often remark on
the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain.  They are
probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of
the siege of Troy.  When you know them, and can pull them out of the
Past a little, you realize that there is nothing more human on earth
than the average archæologist, because he has learned that human men
and women have always been much the same, and that a little thing
like two thousand years and a pair of spats makes no real difference
to human nature, its passions, its frailties, and its frequent
glories.  In their packed minds Thebes, Athens, Rome, London, Paris,
and New York, march shoulder to shoulder with nothing to distinguish
them, except, perhaps, a red omnibus going to Victoria.

It is so delightful to hear them talk about Jason as if he threw up
work in Threadneedle Street to go out to Australia in search of
fleeces; and once an old man told me about the marriage of his
grand-daughter with such remote charm that it was three days before I
realized that he had not been talking about Cupid and Psyche.

* * *

However, let us glance round this shop.  The first impression is that
some tidal wave of Time has swept into it all kinds of articles
caught up in the ruin of the ancient world of Egypt, Greece,
Rome--these three great early civilizations are the chief
contributors, though, of course, Assyria and Babylon are represented
too.

Nearly everything you see has come from a tomb.  There are hundreds
of thousands of objects from the tombs of ancient Egypt.  There is
blue, green, and gold glass from tombs in Cyprus; there is amazing
coloured glass blown by Phœnicians at the time of the Exodus,
and--to come down to quite modern times--there are lamps which lit
the ancient Romans to bed a thousand years ago, and Greek vases with
shaggy, horned satyrs leaping round them after flying nymphs.

There are bronzes green with age, bright gold which never loses its
colour no matter how old it is, shining glazed pottery which looks as
if it had come yesterday from Staffordshire, save for the fact that
it is finer than modern pottery and contains a rough scratched cross
and the words in Latin: "Caius, his plate."

* * *

What is the charm of it?  What chains these men to the past,
archæologist and collector?  Most of them are poor, for there is no
money in it, and most of them are intensely happy.

Just see the way they finger a bronze that was cast when St. Paul was
bearing the message of Christianity through the world.  There is
perhaps one part æstheticism in their love and one part association.
For them an object is not only full of beauty but also full of magic;
it is like a talisman that has the power to call up visions.  I have
no doubt that when these old men hold their treasures they can see
the hosts of Pharaoh sweeping through Syria, the nodding of the
plumes, the drive of arrows and all the confusion of an ancient war.
They can recreate round a relic a dead empire.  They feel that they
possess something of the mighty personality of old times just as in
millions of lives a treasured letter can call up "the touch of a
vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."

In these old things the Past lives again; they release the perfume of
old loves, the violence of old ambitions, the thunder of marching
troops, and the sailing of galleys over a morning world.

* * *

So if you collide violently with an old man who is carefully holding
a little paper parcel, do not blame him for not seeing you!

You!  Good Lord--you!




My Lady's Dress

Madame requires a gown.  In a building high up above a celebrated
street in the heart of London, M. Flair bows her to a gold couch on
which are green velvet cushions.

M. Flair has descended with dignity and charm to middle age, and
every one seems to forgive him for smelling rather like an overworked
jasmine grove.  This apartment with the gold and black striped
cushions, the dove-grey walls, the black carpet, the green jade
hangings, and its scent like that of Paris is not a shop: it is a
salon.  If you pulled out a bunch of crackling fivers and offered in
an honest straightforward way to pay M. Flair for one of his gowns--I
mean "creations"--he would, I imagine, feel insulted.  He would much
rather sue you in the usual way.  He is an artist.  Lady So-and-So
blazons his genius along the Côte d'Azur; Miss So-and-So does him
credit on the stage, so that, as he bends over Madame, cooing
slightly, the tips of his manicured fingers together, there is no
condescension in him.  Oh, dear, no!  He is a psychologist.

Madame requires a gown.

It must, I fear, be said that Madame has been requiring gowns for
well over forty years, and, lately, requiring them shorter in the
skirt, with an ever-increasing touch of springtime over them.  So M.
Flair, after lightly discussing the season in the south of France and
dismissing Switzerland with a shrug, whispers a word to a sylph in
black and--more bowing--offers Madame a small brown Russian cigarette.

* * *

"Charming!  delicious ... ah, exquisite!"

These words come lightly from Madame as the grey curtains part at the
end of the room, and there dawn, swaying slightly, hands on narrow
hips, several visions of beauty clothed, it seems, too perfectly from
their neat, sharp shoes to their tight little hats.

One mannequin is fair, another is dark, a third is petite, a fourth
is tall.  Each one is the perfection of her type--too perfect.  As
each sways up to Madame over the black carpet she gives Madame one
half-smiling look in the eyes, then turns, lingers, sways a little,
and slowly goes.  Sometimes Madame puts out a hand and touches a
gown.  The mannequin stands like a piece of machinery suddenly
stopped.  All the time M. Flair remains with one plump hand on the
gold couch, explaining, expounding, and, at length, advising.  Here
we have thin ice.  Dangerous ice.  M. Flair knows Madame's age and
the lines of her figure.  Madame has forgotten the first and has
never really appreciated the second.  This is where M. Flair earns
his money.  Just as he is bringing her--oh, so cleverly--away from a
May-time gown to one nearer August, the curtains part, and into the
scented room glides a Golden Girl--sweet as April sun.

Ah, now we approach the comedy; now the plot thickens; now Madame
permits the white ash of her slim brown cigarette to fall unnoticed
on the black floor.  That splendid, cunning fall of the cloth,
revealing that which it professes to cover; that fine swing of
rounded hips; those beautiful young arms, unmasked at the elbow with
no wicked little wizened witch's face time puts there.  Yes; a lovely
gown!  Madame looks at April and--sees herself!

M. Flair knows that the game is up.  He realizes, with the instinct
of a lifetime's experience, that no matter what he can say Madame
will have nothing but the unsuitable magnificence worn by this most
marvellous of mannequins.  The artist in him wars with the business
man.  He feels that he should forbid it.  Refuse to sell.  Explain to
Madame that she will not look like the Golden Girl; that she is
deluding herself.  Yet why?

Madame, with a woman's swift knowledge of unspoken things, says:

"So you think it's a bit too--too young?"

She appears frank, careless; but there is such a touch of hardiness
in her voice, velvet over steel.  It is a challenge to M. Flair to
say "Yes," and what man would have the moral courage?

"My dear lady," he says with uplifted hands.  "What a ridiculous
idea!"

Then, when she has gone, he says to me: "You see how it is--O mon
Dieu!"

* * *

"Yes, but the Golden Girl," I say.  "How did anything so beautiful
happen in the world?  The racehorse lines of her, the slimness, the
strength.  Is she one of these exiled princesses?  She must stand on
a pyramid of good breeding."

"Oh, no," replies M. Flair; "her father was, I believe, a coal-porter
somewhere in London.  If only her accent were a little better she
might ... the stage ... success ... but--O _mon Dieu_, these women
who do not know themselves!"

So ends an ordinary little comedy of a London day.




St. Antholin's

I went into a City church the other day to hear a sermon that has
been going on for three hundred and twenty years!

St. Mary Aldermary (not Aldermanbury) is an attractive Wren church
tucked away on the north side of Queen Victoria Street.  When I
entered I found about forty middle-aged men and twelve women.  They
were sitting dotted about the church listening to a clergyman who was
leaning earnestly over the pulpit talking about sin, the devil, and
St. Paul.  It was luncheon-hour in the City.  It was also raining
with ghastly persistence, and I thought at first that this
congregation of fifty numbered many who might have sought refuge from
the weather.  A second glance assured me that this was an unworthy
thought; here was an audience of devout, middle-aged City men with
every mark on them of regular attendance.  The rows of bald or
grizzled heads were inclined towards the speaker, every word was
followed with deep interest, save in one corner, where a little old
man in a frock coat appeared to slumber.

"And what does St. Paul say...."

The voice echoed round the church, and I smiled to think that I was
listening to one of the longest sermons on record--a sermon that has
been in progress for three hundred and twenty years!  It happened
like this.

* * *

There was once an ancient church in Watling Street called St.
Anthonie's or vulgarly, St. Antholin's.  It must have been an
interesting church.  It was full in its later period of Presbyterian
fire and fury.  It was also full of epitaphs, one of which I cannot
resist quoting.  It covered the bones of Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of
London about 1399:

  _Here lyeth graven under this stone
  Thomas Knowles, both flesh and bone,
  Grocer and alderman, years forty,
  Sheriff and twice mayor, truly;
  And for he should not lye alone,
  Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan.
  They were together sixty year,
  And nineteen children they had in feere._


Two hundred years after this remarkable epitaph, St. Antholin's
became notorious as the head-quarters of the Puritan clergy.  The
bell used to ring at unearthly hours of the morning, and all the High
Churchmen in Cheapside turned uneasily in their beds and perhaps
politely gnashed their teeth.  In 1599 a group of citizens founded a
lectureship.  They gave certain property in London which was to pay
for a daily lecture in the pulpit of St. Antholin's.  The church
became famous as a lecture theatre.  Lilly, the astrologer, used to
go there.  Scott makes Mike Lambourne refer to it in "Kenilworth."

The great fire burned down the church but still the daily lecture
went on; it was rebuilt and the lecture was continued in the new St.
Antholin's; it was demolished in 1870, and the lecture was
transferred to St. Mary Aldermary, where I heard it yesterday!

The sermon ended.  The congregation rose.  The little old man in the
frock coat, who I imagined was deep in sleep, sprang to his feet and
boomed "Amen!"

"I've been here twenty-five years," said a verger, "and most of the
people you see here are regular attendants.  That old man in a frock
coat was here when I came."

* * *

In a solicitor's office in Cannon Street I picked up the strings of a
romance that has been acted time and again in London.  The property
bought in 1599 went on increasing in value, the St. Antholin lecture
increased from one a week to two a week.  Still the property
increased in value, and funds accumulated till it was necessary to
have a sermon every day, except Saturday.

"The conditions on which the lectures are to be delivered are all set
down in the old deeds," said one of the solicitors who administers
the lectureship.  "The clergyman who preaches must be a rector in
charge of 2,000 souls, must not live more than seven miles as the
crow flies from the Mansion House, and must not have a stipend of
over £300."

Some of the clergy who took up this three hundred and twenty year old
sermon and carried it on for a while now wear bishop's gaiters.

So in the calm of these days the Puritanical fury of three hundred
and twenty years ago, filtered through three centuries, goes on and
on and on in the City of London!  If the worthy old citizens came
back from the Shades they would not be able to find their old church,
but the Voice they subsidized still speaks, and the property they
left ... well, they would have the shock of their lives!




Not for Women

The place is generally blue with smoke and it smells strongly of
grilled chops.

It is full of men: men eating and talking.  Some do not remove their
overcoats or hats, although the rooms are uncomfortably warm.  This
spot is remarkable only for the fact that it is one of the last
eating-houses in London which does not cater for or encourage women.
Sometimes a woman finds her way in, and all the men look up
curiously, as early Victorians might have done to see a lone woman in
a chop-house.  They blink at her.  They watch her covertly as she
eats, not impudently, but with a slight pity, for she is, poor thing,
unwittingly transgressing an unwritten law.  She has no right to be
there!  Generations of males have marked this place out as a
feeding-place, and the funny thing is that no matter how you admire
women generally, and adore some individually, you feel unhappy when
you see one there.  You want to put a screen round her and forget
her.  She is all wrong there.  It is like going to your tailors and
finding a pretty girl being measured for a costume.  It surprises and
unsettles your conception of the fitness of things!

Through the smoke and the stimulating smell--which I believe is a
kind of barrage put up against the feminine--move women and girls of
a type quite different from the usual waitress.  They resemble more
the handmaids of inns in, say, the time of Sterne.  They have a
sharp, ready way with them, and they regard the zoo of hungry men
dependent on them with the faint superiority of the ministering
female.  They treat elderly barristers who inquire testily for an
overdue sausage rather like a school matron reproving a greedy boy.

How efficient they are!  They blow down a tube and order all at once
a sole, two grilled sausages, liver and bacon, a chop and apple tart,
and never do they make a mistake in their destinations.

At first sight you might think that everybody comes here because it
is cheap.  A second glance shows you a curious assortment.  There are
celebrated barristers--the Lord Chief Justice often used to go there
when he was Attorney-General--solicitors, journalists, at least one
solemn editor of a literary monthly, and a floating population of
publishers' readers, poets, authors, and others with business in the
Street of Misadventure.

On your left two barristers discuss a case, on your right two
newspaper men whisper all the things not yet printed in a murder or
conspiracy trial, and in the corner two or three men who have not
lost their undergraduate voices argue about an unpublished novel.

"Of course, the residuary legatee is in exactly the same position as
that in Rex _v._ Tolbooth, and I therefore think you will agree...."

This from the left.  From the right:

"The police know perfectly well who did it, but they daren't say
so--yet.  Of course, you've heard..."  And from the corner:

"You can't do it with your tongue in your cheek!  You must be
sincere!  You must believe in it, no matter how bad it is.  Have you
read--"

Then, slowly, peevishly, comes the inevitable Dickensian, the old man
whose collars and neckties seem deathless, whose clothes have a queer
cut, whose hat, while it does not actually challenge modernity, does
not conform to any current mode.  He is angry.  Some young upstart is
sitting at his table, the table at which he has probably eaten about
fifteen thousand chops.  Ancient kings must have looked like this
when they caught a virile baron trying on the crown!  Insolence
and--worse!  Much worse.  An awful reminder to a man of habit!  Some
day ... ah, well, that day has not come, and till it does he will sit
at that particular table and eat his chop with his particular knife
and fork.  So he stands about glowering and fidgeting, the bland
young man calmly eating, an innocent usurper.

But the clash between man and man is as nothing compared with the
drama of a woman's entrance.  Most women reach the door and
instinctively realize that they have blundered into man's last
stronghold and beat a tactful retreat, coughing slightly.  Now and
again some insensitive or ignorant man actually brings a poor woman
there.  Sex consciousness is a queer thing.  Go into a telephone
exchange where you are the only man and see how you like it.  These
women who suddenly dawn like a crime in the unwritten convention of
this place must feel it too; but women are so accustomed to scrutiny.

Is it fancy or does an uneasy silence pass like a cloud over the
babel of law, newspaper, and book talk?  I wonder.

Anyhow, it is remarkable to find any place in London in which woman
is an anachronism, and no doubt the day is coming when they will
storm even this barricade and--then we may have more comfortable
chairs and nicer tables and a change in wall-paper!




Our Roman Bath

An American once told me in Vienna that the Strand possesses a Roman
bath well worth seeing, but, being a perfectly good Londoner, I did
not believe him--till I went there.

This bath, which was constructed in A.D. 200--seventeen hundred and
twenty-five years ago--is exactly opposite Bush House, in the Strand!
Think of it!  Bush House and Rome!  It is in the basement of No. 5,
Strand Lane, an astonishing, narrow, dingy alley that in one step
takes you back to the darkest days of Victorian London, when lanterns
glimmered in passages and "Peelers" twirled truncheons and wore
stovepipe hats.  No. 5 belongs to the Rev. Pennington Bickford,
Rector of St. Clement Danes, who bought the house three years ago to
save the bath, which was--O incredible London!--in danger of
destruction.

After writing my name in a school exercise book, which contains
addresses in China, Japan, America, Canada, Australia (but few in
London), I was taken by an intelligent young man into a high-vaulted
place of red brick.  What a splendid bath!  How different from the
bath-rooms of modern London, which are tucked away in houses like
afterthoughts.  Even a rich man I know, who has ten bath-rooms in his
house, has no bath as fine as this.  It is, of course, sunk in the
floor.  It is fifteen feet six inches in length by six feet nine
inches--a proper lovable, wallowable bath, built by the only nation
that understood baths and bathing.

It is an apse-headed oblong in shape, and I have seen exactly the
same thing in the Roman ruins of Timgad, among the mountains of North
Africa.  No doubt it belonged to some rich Roman who built his villa
seventeen hundred years ago some little distance from busy London, so
that his wife and children might enjoy the flowers of the Strand, the
peace, and the river.

The young custodian took a long-handled ladle and dipped it into the
clear, limpid water which for seventeen centuries has been trickling
into the bath!  It comes from an unknown spring bubbling from a
"fault" in the London clay.

"You'd be surprised at the visitors, mostly Canadians and Americans,
who want to take off their clothes and plunge in," said the guide,
"not because it's a Roman bath, but because Dickens used to bathe
here, and mentions it in Chapter thirty-five of 'David Copperfield.'"

"And do you ever let them?"

"Not likely!  When I tell them how cold it is they change their
minds.  It's always three degrees above freezing."

"How do you know?"

"Because I fell in once," he replied simply.

* * *

I tried hard as I stood there on the level of Roman London, thirty
feet below the London of to-day, to picture this spot in its glory.
It was no doubt tiled with veined marble, and the London spring water
ran in over marble, and the roof perhaps held frescoes showing nymphs
and fauns and Pan playing his pipes.

Signor Matania, the artist, has made a fine picture of this bath as
he thinks it was when Roman ladies came there to swim without bathing
costumes.  A pretty picture, but--was the water ever deep enough?

"Some think it was a hot bath, and some think it was a cold one,"
said the guide, "but nobody knows.  Perhaps we shall know when Mr.
Bickford digs underneath, as he wants to do, in search of the heating
system."

* * *

I climbed up out of Roman London, and a few steps took me to the
sight of Bush House and omnibuses racing past to Charing Cross.




Left Behind

"What is the strangest thing a Londoner has lost?" I asked an
official of the Lost Property Office in Scotland Yard.

"Well, let's see.  Two leg bones came in last week.  They had
obviously been left in a tramcar by a medical student.  Once we had
somebody's appendix in oil; but I think the funniest thing I ever
remember a man losing--and I've been here thirty-three years--was a
tree-climbing bear!  Alive?  I should say he was alive!  You ought to
have seen him climb up to the mantelshelf.  It turned out that he had
been left in a cab by a Scotsman who owned him.  This man had been
abroad for a long time, and was paying his first visit to London
after many seafaring years abroad.  Apparently he was so excited to
be back that he forgot all about his bear.  He left it in a
four-wheeler.  He remembered next morning, and jolly glad we were,
too, for although we get all kinds of strange things in this
department it's not organized like a zoo."

During thirty-three years in the Lost Property Office this official
has seen a great change in London's crop of forgetfulness.

"Muffs have stopped coming in now," he said.  "Once we were full of
muffs; but women don't carry them nowadays.  Everything else has
increased, not because people are more absent-minded, but because the
speed of traffic has increased.  We take only objects found in
omnibuses, tramcars, and taxicabs.  In the old days you could run
after a horse omnibus and find your umbrella, but to-day as soon as
you remember you have left it the vehicle is out of sight.  Just look
here!"

We walked down a long avenue packed with umbrellas.  There must have
been over twenty thousand of them!  The avenue ended in a room full
of the more recently abandoned specimens.  Here men and women were
nosing round looking for their lost property.  What a task!  The room
was stacked to the ceiling with umbrellas, all neatly docketed.  They
lay in racks, the handles only protruding.

When handles are round and shiny this room, which is always full,
presents to the eye four walls of round and shiny knobs; when the
fashion in umbrellas changes, this room changes too.  At the moment
it is full of originality and colour.  Thousands of green jade and
red coral handles jut from the walls; thousands of check handles vary
the pattern.  Here and there you see a dog-headed handle, a handle
shaped like a bird, or a handle carved to the shape of a pierrot's
head, a pathetic white face with drooping carmine lips, which seems
crying to be claimed and taken home!

"Oh, I shall never find it in this forest of umbrellas!" cried a
girl.  "Never!  I don't think I want to.  I hate the look of
umbrellas."

Another woman picked her umbrella out in the first five minutes.
What an eye!  And all the time girls came up to the counter, rather
breathless, with:

"I've lost a lovely new umbrella on a number three omnibus; it had a
dear little green handle carved like a fish, and I said to mother----"

"Come inside, miss," said a weary official.  "I said to mother that I
think I lost it when I got off at Westminster, or it may have been
earlier in the morning, when----"

"Come inside, miss!"

More remarkable even than the jungle of lost umbrellas is the series
of rooms packed with every conceivable thing a passenger can carry in
a tramcar, an omnibus, or a taxicab.  You gain the impression when
you tour the Lost Property Office that some people would lose an
elephant between Ludgate Circus and Charing Cross.

How do they lose full-size typewriters, gigantic suit-cases packed
with clothes, gramophones, bulky parcels, crates, and small
perambulators?

There are thousands of lost shoes, mostly new, some of them dance
slippers bought by forgetful girls, or perhaps by husbands who were
thinking of something else!  There are ball dresses that have been
left in omnibuses, silk nightdresses, hats, costumes, and, of course,
jewellery.

The Lost Property Office looks like a gigantic pawnshop or a large
secondhand store.  The officials are surprised at nothing.  Have they
not taken care of skulls and the hands of mummies?  In another room I
saw October's crop of lost umbrellas being distributed to the tramcar
conductors, the omnibus conductors, and the taxicab men who found
them.  This happens every three months.  If it did not Scotland Yard
would have to build an annexe somewhere.  The finders made merry as
they were given incongruous umbrellas.  One large, red taxicab driver
drew a neat little mincing silk umbrella with a kingfisher on the
handle.

"Oh, how sweet, Bill!" said the tram conductors.

* * *

At the other end of the office other conductors were handing in
dozens of umbrellas and sticks, the ceaseless daily harvest of
London's wonderful absent-mindedness.  Most of them had wrist straps,
too!




The "Girls"

Even as I write Piccadilly is changing.  Eros, attended by the ghosts
of undergraduates, has stepped from the pinnacle, thus evacuating the
post of honour from which he has gazed upon the follies of our
fathers, those wicked men who used to wait outside stage doors with
bouquets before sneaking off somewhere to dine with a real actress.
Ah, those must have been good days....

So before the circle is squared, which seems quite unnatural, I wish
to write about the flower "girls."  Early in the morning, long before
the first pair of silk stockings had been sold in Regent Street, the
"girls" dipped their violets in the Fountain and camped out on the
steps.  What a perfect picture they made.  It always seemed to me
that some unknown admirer of Phil May was secretly subsidizing them,
paying for them, working, maybe, to stamp on the national mind a
sharp memory of plaid shawls tight over plump shoulders, apple-red
faces beneath black straw hats.  In the spring they brought the first
real news to the West End with their laughing primroses, big tight
gold bunches of them; and the Fountain was a joy to behold.

"Vi'lets pennigabunch."

That was, of course, long ago.  I believe they are sixpence or more
now; but the old cry from the Fountain has been remembered all over
the earth wherever men have thought of Piccadilly.

The flower "girls" of Piccadilly presented to London the most
marvellous study in polite indifference.  Here they were in
occupation of the very centre of the world with the feminine beauty
and elegance of every country always before their eyes.  They
remained unaffected.  They were the only women in London moving in
fashionable London circles who did not care a hang for the changing
mode.  They had sold violets to women in bustles; they had seen
skirts sweep the ground, they had seen the dawn of the leg, from the
hobble skirt to the knee skirt.  Never once in their history did they
show the instinct of their sex to imitate.

These middle-aged women who are always "girls" have become
international.  American women said: "Why, they're just sweet,"
Frenchwomen thought they were almost chic, and sometimes a grey old
man, sickened by the degeneracy of these times, would wander up from
the direction of Pall Mall to buy a buttonhole just to hear himself
called "dearie," and to know that there was still something in London
that had not changed.  They were Victorian London.

When I heard that Eros was to disappear and that the "girls" were to
be moved away I had the same kind of shock that a Roman under the
Empire might have suffered if a friend had moved his thumb in the
direction of the Palatine Hill and had remarked: "Have you heard?
The Old Man's sacked the Vestal Virgins!"

Preposterous!  The "girls" were our vestal virgins--they kindled each
day memory of a fast-vanishing London.

* * *

I found one in Piccadilly the other day.  She had taken up a stand on
a street refuge, from which she could command sight of her former
pitch.

"No, dearie," she said.  "Piccadilly's gorn to the dorgs, strite it
'as.  Life ain't what it was, nor never will be agin with this
squarin' of a plice what was meant to be a circus.  It ain't right.
Who'd 'ave thought we should leave the Fountain--ever.  Some say we
can go beck there when they've done messin' it about, but I don't
believe it.  I'm Mrs. Wise I'm am.  There ain't no green in my eye....

"And this job ain't what it once was--not by half.  No, dearie!  In
the old days every kebbie had his buttonhole, and no gent was dressed
unless he had one too.  And the drivers of the old horse omnibuses!
They were rare customers--nice, pleasant men, too, who liked to pass
the time of day with you and talk.  Now there's no time for talk or
flowers."

She nodded enigmatically.

"Young men don't like to be seen carrying flowers to-day, but I can
tell you their fathers didn't mind--and better men they were, if I'm
any judge of a man, and I ought to be, seeing I've been sat in
Piccadilly Circus all me life...."

Then she said something that sent a chill to my heart:

"My gels ain't going to waste their lives sitting here, I can tell
you.  Emma going into pickles, and Maud, she's in millinery."

This, of course, is the end!  A flower girl's calling is hereditary.
It descends through the distaff side.  The next generation of "girls"
are, it appears, going into commerce, and there will be none to
follow on.

It is sad.  If I were a millionaire I would subsidize them and buy a
hansom cab and an old pensioned cab-horse to stand there too.

* * *

For in the fret and change of these days the flower "girls" of
Piccadilly looked so permanent with the surge of London round them,
the crowds from the ends of the earth, so indifferent to change, so
typical of an easier day, as they sold their flowers in that whirl of
gladness and sadness, beauty and ugliness, which is the heart of
London; ... the heart of the world.




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