An antique ruin has its privileges. The longer the period of its
crumbling, the more do the owls build their nests in it, the more do
the excursionists munch in it their sandwiches. Thus, year by year, its
fame increases, till it looks back with contempt on the days when it
was a mere upright waterproof. Local guide-books pander more and more
slavishly to its pride; leader-writers in need of a pathetic metaphor
are more and more frequently supplied by it. If there be any sordid
question of clearing it away to make room for something else, the
public outcry is positively deafening.
Not that we are still under the sway of that peculiar cult which beset
us in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. A bad poet or painter
can no longer reap the reward of genius merely by turning his attention
to ruins under moonlight. Nor does any one cause to be built in his
garden a broken turret, for the evocation of sensibility in himself and
his guests. There used to be one such turret near the summit of Campden
Hill; but that familiar imposture was rased a year or two ago, no one
protesting. Fuit the frantic factitious sentimentalism for ruins. On
the other hand, the sentiment for them is as strong as ever it was.
Decrepit Carisbrooke and its rivals annually tighten their hold on
Britannia's heart.
I do not grudge them their success. But the very fact that they are so
successful inclines me to reserve my own personal sentiment rather for
those unwept, unsung ruins which so often confront me, here and there,
in the streets of this aggressive metropolis. The ruins made, not by
Time, but by the ruthless skill of Labour, the ruins of houses not old
enough to be sacrosanct nor new enough to keep pace with the demands of
a gasping and plethoric community--these are the ruins that move me to
tears. No owls flutter in them. No trippers lunch in them. In no
guide-book or leading-article will you find them mentioned. Their
pathetic interiors gape to the sky and to the street, but nor gods nor
men hold out a hand to save them. The patterns of bedroom wall-papers,
(chosen with what care, after how long discussion! only a few short
years or months ago) stare out their obvious, piteous appeal to us for
mercy. And their dumb agony is echoed dumbly by the places where doors
have been--doors that lately were tapped at by respectful knuckles; or
the places where staircases have been--staircases down whose banisters
lately slid little children, laughing. Exposed, humiliated, doomed, the
home throws out a hundred pleas to us. And the Pharisaic community
passes by on the other side of the way, in fear of a falling brick.
Down come the walls of the home, as quickly as pickaxes can send them.
Down they crumble, piecemeal, into the foundations, and are carted
away. Soon other walls will be rising--red-brick 'residential' walls,
more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the
ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I
haunt the door of the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently
mistaken for the foreman.
A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual emotion, the
rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover Square. There were two
reasons why this rasure especially affected me. I had known the edifice
so well, by sight, ever since I was a small boy, and I had always
admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which is the
most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed it
thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of
approval that gaunt and sombre facade, with its long straight windows,
its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London
sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must perish.
For sake of what they had sheltered, my heart deplored that they must
perish. The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It had been
even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It had been
a club.
Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club. Its
demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James
Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord
Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime
had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons
without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe,
found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript
affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club's a club tho' every one's in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest
hotel has. And then there is the note-paper, and there are the
newspapers, and the cigars at wholesale prices, and the
not-to-be-tipped waiters, and other blessings for mankind. If the
members of this club had but migrated to some other building, taking
their effects and their constitution with them, the ruin would have
been pathetic enough. But alas! the outward wreck was a symbol, a
result, of inner dissolution. Through the door of the hoarding the two
pillars of the front door told a sorry tale. Pasted on either of them
was a dingy bill, bearing the sinister imprimatur of an auctioneer, and
offering (in capitals of various sizes) Bedroom Suites (Walnut and
Mahogany), Turkey, Indian and Wilton Pile Carpets, Two Full-sized
Billiard-Tables, a Remington Type-writer, a Double Door (Fire-Proof),
and other objects not less useful and delightful. The club, then, had
gone to smash. The members had been disbanded, driven out of this Eden
by the fiery sword of the Law, driven back to their homes. Sighing over
the marcescibility of human happiness, I peered between the pillars
into the excavated and chaotic hall. The porter's hatch was still
there, in the wall. There it was, wondering why no inquiries were made
through it now, or, may be, why it had not been sold into bondage with
the double-door and the rest of the fixtures. A melancholy relic of
past glories! I crossed over to the other side of the road, and passed
my eye over the whole ruin. The roof, the ceilings, most of the inner
walls, had already fallen. Little remained but the grim, familiar
facade--a thin husk. I noted (that which I had never noted before) two
iron grills in the masonry. Miserable travesties of usefulness,
ventilating the open air! Through the gaping windows, against the wall
of the next building, I saw in mid-air the greenish Lincrusta Walton of
what I guessed to have been the billiard-room--the billiard-room that
had boasted two full-sized tables. Above it ran a frieze of white and
gold. It was interspersed with flat Corinthian columns. The gilding of
the capitals was very fresh, and glittered gaily under the summer
sunbeams.
And hardly a day of the next autumn and winter passed but I was drawn
back to the ruin by a kind of lugubrious magnetism. The strangest thing
was that the ruin seemed to remain in practically the same state as
when first I had come upon it: the facade still stood high. This might
have been due to the proverbial laziness of British workmen, but I did
not think it could be. The workmen were always plying their pick-axes,
with apparent gusto and assiduity, along the top of the building;
bricks and plaster were always crashing down into the depths and
sending up clouds of dust. I preferred to think the building renewed
itself, by some magical process, every night. I preferred to think it
was prepared thus to resist its aggressors for so long a time that in
the end there would be an intervention from other powers. Perhaps from
this site no 'residential' affair was destined to scrape the sky?
Perhaps that saint to whom the club had dedicated itself would
reappear, at length, glorious equestrian, to slay the dragons who had
infested and desecrated his premises? I wondered whether he would then
restore the ruins, reinstating the club, and setting it for ever on a
sound commercial basis, or would leave them just as they were, a fixed
signal to sensibility.
But, when first I saw the poor facade being pick-axed, I did not 'give'
it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe and
pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of inexorable
Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building seemed to me a
live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it had not
committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every rhythmic blow of
those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when sunset should
bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught myself nodding to
it--a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance. Immediately, I was
ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I told myself that my pity
ought to be kept for the real men who had been frequenters of the
building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the gaping, glassless windows
through which they had been wont to watch the human comedy. There they
had stood, puffing their smoke and cracking their jests, and tearing
women's reputations to shreds.
Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman's reputation torn to
shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have
always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come
my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined
to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs
has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even
though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection
of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and
good-fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any member
is regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who looks genial and
says nothing at all. Most Englishmen find little difficulty in
conforming with this ideal. They belong to a silent race. Social clubs
flourish, therefore, in England. Intelligent foreigners, seeing them,
recognise their charm, and envy us them, and try to reproduce them at
home. But the Continent is too loquacious. On it social clubs quickly
degenerate into bear-gardens, and the basic ideal of good-fellowship
goes by the board. In Paris, Petersburg, Vienna, the only social clubs
that prosper are those which are devoted to games of chance--those
which induce silence by artificial means. Were I a foreign visitor,
taking cursory glances, I should doubtless be delighted with the clubs
of London. Had I the honour to be an Englishman, I should doubtless
love them. But being a foreign resident, I am somewhat oppressed by
them. I crave in them a little freedom of speech, even though such
freedom were their ruin. I long for their silence to be broken here and
there, even though such breakage broke them with it. It is not enough
for me to hear a hushed exchange of mild jokes about the weather, or of
comparisons between what the Times says and what the Standard says. I
pine for a little vivacity, a little boldness, a little variety, a few
gestures. A London club, as it is conducted, seems to me very like a
catacomb. It is tolerable so long as you do not actually belong to it.
But when you do belong to it, when you have outlived the fleeting
gratification at having been elected, when you...but I ought not to
have fallen into the second person plural. You, readers, are free-born
Englishmen. These clubs 'come natural' to you. You love them. To them
you slip eagerly from your homes. As for me, poor alien, had I been a
member of the club whose demolition has been my theme, I should have
grieved for it not one whit the more bitterly. Indeed, my tears would
have been a trifle less salt. It was my detachment that enabled me to
be so prodigal of pity.
The poor waifs! Long did I stand, in the sunshine of that day when
first I saw the ruin, wondering and distressed, ruthful, indignant that
such things should be. I forgot on what errand I had come out. I
recalled it. Once or twice I walked away, bent on its fulfilment. But I
could not proceed further than a few yards. I halted, looked over my
shoulder, was drawn back to the spot, drawn by the crude, insistent
anthem of the pick-axes. The sun slanted towards Notting Hill. Still I
loitered, spellbound... I was aware of some one at my side, some one
asking me a question. 'I beg your pardon?' I said. The stranger was a
tall man, bronzed and bearded. He repeated his question. In answer, I
pointed silently to the ruin. 'That?' he gasped. He stared vacantly. I
saw that his face had become pale under its sunburn. He looked from the
ruin to me. 'You're not joking with me?' he said thickly. I assured him
that I was not. I assured him that this was indeed the club to which he
had asked to be directed. 'But,' he stammered, 'but--but--' 'You were a
member?' I suggested. 'I am a member,' he cried. 'And what's more, I'm
going to write to the Committee.' I suggested that there was one fatal
objection to such a course. I spoke to him calmly, soothed him with
words of reason, elicited from him, little by little, his sad story. It
appeared that he had been a member of the club for ten years, but had
never (except once, as a guest) been inside it. He had been elected on
the very day on which (by compulsion of his father) he set sail for
Australia. He was a mere boy at the time. Bitterly he hated leaving old
England; nor did he ever find the life of a squatter congenial. The one
thing which enabled him to endure those ten years of unpleasant exile
was the knowledge that he was a member of a London club. Year by year,
it was a keen pleasure to him to send his annual subscription. It kept
him in touch with civilisation, in touch with Home. He loved to know
that when, at length, he found himself once again in the city of his
birth he would have a firm foothold on sociability. The friends of his
youth might die, or might forget him. But, as member of a club, he
would find substitutes for them in less than no time. Herding bullocks,
all day long, on the arid plains of Central Australia, he used to keep
up his spirits by thinking of that first whisky-and-soda which he would
order from a respectful waiter as he entered his club. All night long,
wrapped in his blanket beneath the stars, he used to dream of that
drink to come, that first symbol of an unlost grip on civilisation...
He had arrived in London this very afternoon. Depositing his luggage at
an hotel, he had come straight to his club. 'And now...' He filled up
his aposiopesis with an uncouth gesture, signifying 'I may as well get
back to Australia.'
I was on the point of offering to take him to my own club and give him
his first whisky-and-soda therein. But I refrained. The sight of an
extant club might have maddened the man. It certainly was very hard for
him, to have belonged to a club for ten years, to have loved it so
passionately from such a distance, and then to find himself destined
never to cross its threshold. Why, after all, should he not cross its
threshold? I asked him if he would like to. 'What,' he growled, 'would
be the good?' I appealed, not in vain, to the imaginative side of his
nature. I went to the door of the hoarding, and explained matters to
the foreman; and presently, nodding to me solemnly, he passed with the
foreman through the gap between the doorposts. I saw him crossing the
excavated hall, crossing it along a plank, slowly and cautiously. His
attitude was very like Blondin's, but it had a certain tragic dignity
which Blondin's lacked. And that was the last I saw of him. I hailed a
cab and drove away. What became of the poor fellow I do not know. Often
as I returned to the ruin, and long as I loitered by it, him I never
saw again. Perhaps he really did go straight back to Australia. Or
perhaps he induced the workmen to bury him alive in the foundations.
His fate, whatever it was, haunts me.
'273'
This is an age of prescriptions. Morning after morning, from the
back-page of your newspaper, quick and uncostly cures for every human
ill thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past.
But I would raise no false hopes of myself. I am no thaumaturgist. Do
you awake with a sinking sensation in the stomach? Have you lost the
power of assimilating food? Are you oppressed with an indescribable
lassitude? Can you no longer follow the simplest train of thought? Are
you troubled throughout the night with a hacking cough? Are you--in
fine, are you but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all the
most malignant maladies ancient and modern? If so, skip this essay, and
try Somebody's Elixir. The cure that I offer is but a cure for
overwrought nerves--a substitute for the ordinary 'rest-cure.' Nor is
it absurdly cheap. Nor is it instant. It will take a week or so of your
time. But then, the 'rest-cure' takes at least a month. The scale of
payment for board and lodging may be, per diem, hardly lower than in
the 'rest-cure'; but you will save all but a pound or so of the very
heavy fees that you would have to pay to your doctor and your nurse (or
nurses). And certainly, my cure is the more pleasant of the two. My
patient does not have to cease from life. He is not undressed and
tucked into bed and forbidden to stir hand or foot during his whole
term. He is not forbidden to receive letters, or to read books, or to
look on any face but his nurse's (or nurses'). Nor, above all, is he
condemned to the loathsome necessity of eating so much food as to make
him dread the sight of food. Doubtless, the grim, inexorable process of
the 'rest-cure' is very good for him who is strong enough and brave
enough to bear it, and rich enough to pay for it. I address myself to
the frailer, cowardlier, needier man. Instead of ceasing from life, and
entering purgatory, he need but essay a variation in life. He need but
go and stay by himself in one of those vast modern hotels which abound
along the South and East coasts.
You are disappointed? All simple ideas are disappointing. And all good
cures spring from simple ideas.
The right method of treating overwrought nerves is to get the patient
away from himself--to make a new man of him; and this trick can be done
only by switching him off from his usual environment, his usual habits.
The ordinary rest-cure, by its very harshness, intensifies a man's
personality at first, drives him miserably within himself; and only by
its long duration does it gradually wear him down and build him up
anew. There is no harshness in the vast hotels which I have
recommended. You may eat there as little as you like, especially if you
are en pension. Letters may be forwarded to you there; though, unless
your case is a very mild one, I would advise you not to leave your
address at home. There are reading-rooms where you can see all the
newspapers; though I advise you to ignore them. You suffer under no
sense of tyranny. And yet, no sooner have you signed your name in the
visitors' book, and had your bedroom allotted to you, than you feel
that you have surrendered yourself irrepleviably. It is not necessary
to this illusion that you should pass under an assumed name, unless you
happen to be a very eminent actor, or cricketer, or other idol of the
nation, whose presence would flutter the young persons at the bureau.
If your nervous breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to merely
intellectual distinction, these young persons will mete out to you no
more than the bright callous civility which they mete out impartially
to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you will be a
number, and to yourself you will have suddenly become a number--the
number graven on the huge brass label that depends clanking from the
key put into the hand of the summoned chambermaid. You are merely (let
us say) 273.
Up you go in the lift, realising, as for the first time, your
insignificance in infinity, and rather proud to be even a number. You
recognise your double on the door that has been unlocked for you. No
prisoner, clapped into his cell, could feel less personal, less
important. A notice on the wall, politely requesting you to leave your
key at the bureau (as though you were strong enough or capacious enough
to carry it about with you) comes as a pleasant reminder of your
freedom. You remember joyously that you are even free from yourself.
You have begun a new life, have forgotten the old. This mantelpiece, so
strangely and brightly bare of photographs or 'knickknacks,' is meaning
in its meaninglessness. And these blank, fresh walls, that you have
never seen, and that never were seen by any one whom you know...their
pattern is of poppies and mandragora, surely. Poppies and mandragora
are woven, too, on the brand-new Axminster beneath your elastic step.
'Come in!' A porter bears in your trunk, deposits it on a trestle at
the foot of the bed, unstraps it, leaves you alone with it. It seems to
be trying to remind you of something or other. You do not listen. You
laugh as you open it. You know that if you examined these shirts you
would find them marked '273.' Before dressing for dinner, you take a
hot bath. There are patent taps, some for fresh water, others for sea
water. You hesitate. Yet you know that whichever you touch will effuse
but the water of Lethe, after all. You dress before your fire. The
coals have burnt now to a lovely glow. Once and again, you eye them
suspiciously. But no, there are no faces in them. All's well.
Sleek and fresh, you sit down to dinner in the 'Grande Salle a'
Manger.' Graven on your wine-glasses, emblazoned on your soup-plate,
are the armorial bearings of the company that shelters you. The College
of Arms might sneer at them, be down on them, but to you they are a
joy, in their grand lack of links with history. They are a sympathetic
symbol of your own newness, your own impersonality. You glance down the
endless menu. It has been composed for a community. None of your
favourite dishes (you once had favourite dishes) appears in it, thank
heaven! You will work your way through it, steadily, unquestioningly,
gladly, with a communal palate. And the wine? All wines are alike here,
surely. You scour the list vaguely, and order a pint of 273. Your eye
roves over the adjacent tables.
You behold a galaxy of folk evidently born, like yourself, anew. Some,
like yourself, are solitary. Others are with wives, with children--but
with new wives, new children. The associations of home have been
forgotten, even though home's actual appendages be here. The members of
the little domestic circles are using company manners. They are
actually making conversation, 'breaking the ice.' They are new here to
one another. They are new to themselves. How much newer to you! You
cannot 'place' them. That paterfamilias with the red moustache--is he a
soldier, a solicitor, a stockbroker, what? You play vaguely, vainly, at
the game of attributions, while the little orchestra in yonder bower of
artificial palm-trees plays new, or seemingly new, cake-walks. Who are
they, these minstrels in the shadow? They seem not to be the Red
Hungarians, nor the Blue, nor the Hungarians of any other colour of the
spectrum. You set them down as the Colourless Hungarians, and resume
your study of the tables. They fascinate you, these your fellow-diners.
You fascinate them, doubtless. They, doubtless, are cudgelling their
brains to 'spot' your state in life--your past, which now has escaped
you. Next day, some of them are gone; and you miss them, almost
bitterly. But others succeed them, not less detached and enigmatic than
they. You must never speak to one of them. You must never lapse into
those casual acquaintances of the 'lounge' or the smoking-room. Nor is
it hard to avoid them. No Englishman, how gregarious and garrulous
soever, will dare address another Englishman in whose eye is no spark
of invitation. There must be no such spark in yours. Silence is part of
the cure for you, and a very important part. It is mainly through
unaccustomed silence that your nerves are made trim again. Usually, you
are giving out in talk all that you receive through your senses of
perception. Keep silence now. Its gold will accumulate in you at
compound interest. You will realise the joy of being full of
reflections and ideas. You will begin to hoard them proudly, like a
miser. You will gloat over your own cleverness--you, who but a few days
since, were feeling so stupid. Solitude in a crowd, silence among
chatterboxes--these are the best ministers to a mind diseased. And with
the restoration of the mind, the body will be restored too. You, who
were physically so limp and pallid, will be a ruddy Hercules now. And
when, at the moment of departure, you pass through the hall, shyly
distributing to the servants that largesse which is so slight in
comparison with what your doctor and nurse (or nurses) would have
levied on you, you will feel that you are more than fit to resume that
burden of personality whereunder you had sunk. You will be victoriously
yourself again.
Yet I think you will look back a little wistfully on the period of your
obliteration. People--for people are very nice, really, most of
them--will tell you that they have missed you. You will reply that you
did not miss yourself. And you will go the more strenuously to your
work and pleasure, so as to have the sooner an excuse for a good
riddance.