|To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles
long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm.
There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above,
the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph
operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for
messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without
“stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether
they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night
editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window,
sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the
ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear
the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the
murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman
must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand
submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory
departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and
the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety.
His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of
the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a
field-marshal's baton.
And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make
a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates
or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand,
but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting,
or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in
the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can
light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as
he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a
realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes
without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will
not care.
And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock
and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me
as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life
until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have
heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the
swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its
unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the afternoon
when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are
crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air
is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide
of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work,
and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of
the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come
thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle
through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag
of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral
that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it
arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as
industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as
one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
known its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and
foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except
that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many
battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations
go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little
severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the
enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service
also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street of
memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling
its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom
too.
Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
the Chambered Nautilus, I
... seal up the idle door,
Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or
sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous
clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will
come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults
of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not
hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that
has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future
stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander
till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend
my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the
apples ripen.
And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him
a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his
orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys,
bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in
the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to
their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water,
took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
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