CARRINGTON MEWS,
SHEPHERD MARKET,
_13th September_.
Dear Agatha,--I've got a new pal! Her name may have appeared in my
letters before, in connection with the histories of my neighbours in the
other flats, the mending of my vests and pants, and cheap lunches at
home when she provides me with a portion of her beef-steak pie for
ninepence. Her name is Darling, which necessitates the painstaking use
of the "Mrs." for fear of a misunderstanding. She is a widow, and a
person of kindly sympathies but limited intelligence outside the domain
of domestic affairs. She is Cockney to the finger tips, yet London, to
her, is as unexplored and as unknown as one of the stars. The
temptation, when one day I realised this, was irresistible. Obviously,
it was meant that _I_ was destined to take the work of her education in
hand, and to-day we made a start with our immediate surroundings.
It seems hardly credible that Mrs. Darling never went out to buy a pound
of potatoes that she did not pass "Ducking Pond Mews" in Shepherd
Street, yet it had never occurred to her to wonder how it got its title,
much less to make any effort to find out. She said she supposed there
had been a pond there, some time, and when I told her it was what, in
contemporary papers, was described as "an extensive basin of water," she
said, "A penny plain and tuppence coloured". Mrs. D. is very averse to
anything of the nature of "side" in conversation, and so I did not go on
to quote the article which spoke of a "commodious house and a good
disposure of walks". I thought, though, it would interest her to know
that, by payment of the small sum of twopence, lovers of a certain
polite and humane sport could in those old days witness the torture of
the duck when it was put in the pond and hunted by dogs who were driven
in after it. Also that Charles II and some of his nobility were in the
habit of frequenting those sports.
She said she wasn't a bit surprised. She never had thought much of
royalty; all the same, it didn't do to believe everything you were told.
This was a trifle discouraging, and we walked on in silence for a few
minutes, pausing to glance down East Chapel Street, where is the
many-paned window of the "Serendipity" shop, with its old coloured
prints and the original editions of seventeenth-century poets, bound in
vellum; then on to the East Yard, which exists exactly as it was in the
old coaching days.
Do you know, Agatha, that I live in one of the most unique spots in
London? We are hemmed in by an aristocracy of houses, places and people,
yet we are as far apart from it all as if the walls of Jericho came
between. There's no approaching by degrees. One steps through one of
those low arches in Curzon Street into this quaint little island of
loiterers in the twinkling of an eye. A world of cobbled-paved streets,
_culs de sac_, devious by-ways, and shops which in their meditative
unconcern seem to trust in Providence to send them customers. A world
from which one sometimes awakens in Piccadilly with a feeling of having
slept as long as Rip Van Winkle himself.
I suggested the wax effigies at Westminster Abbey with diffidence. To my
relief, however, the old lady received the proposal favourably, and on
our way I imparted to her a dark intention which I had cherished for
years. It was to spend a night in the Abbey. I should choose the warmest
night in summer, and I should go provided with a packet of sandwiches
and a flask of whisky. Imagine the thrill on a moonlight night, when
the figures on the tombs in the long aisles would be like creatures on a
stage frozen into stone at some moment of dramatic intensity. Pointing,
beckoning, warning, praying, weeping and exhorting. "The dust of the
dead"--a fine phrase that. One would see it rise like incense in the
moonbeams, and the vast silences would be thick with whispered thoughts.
Perhaps now and again there would come a sound which had nothing to do
with the dead--the footfall of a watchman.
Mrs. Darling asked if it had occurred to me that the watchman might give
me in charge. I assured her that I had not left such a contingency out
of my calculations. I should well tip the watchman, and a drink out of
my flask on top of the tip would make a friend of him for life. No doubt
he would be glad of a talk to relieve the monotony of his job, and the
talk of a night watchman in Westminster Abbey would be worth listening
to. He could tell me something of those suspected secret places which
are not shown to visitors. He might even let me see them for myself. He
would know the Abbey as it is impossible for the ordinary public to know
it. The ordinary public no more knows the Abbey than does a person, who
stands on the kerb to watch the King pass on his way to some State
function, know the man inside the King. The Abbey should be seen when
the voices of glib guides, and the shuffling footsteps of visitors bored
with sight-seeing, have ceased. Then, when the echoes of the last
footsteps have died away, when the last door has banged, and the last
key been turned in the last lock, _then_ the Abbey puts aside its mask
and communes with its dead. What a strange silence that must be, when
the thoughts of kings and queens, statesmen and warriors, poets and
priests, fill every corner of the ancient building with their noiseless
vigilance!
Mrs. Darling said that, even if I escaped being taken to the police
station, I should certainly get an attack of rheumatism, but I explained
that sensations invariably have their price, and that I shouldn't grudge
paying for this particular one.
We left the daylight of the Broad Sanctuary for the gloom of the vast
interior, and I suggested that we should explore the chapels before
doing the wax effigies in the Islip Chamber.
As we walked down the north transept the old lady asked me if it was
true that "Old Parr" was buried in the Abbey, and I took her to read the
inscription on the stone in Poet's Corner. "Old Parr's" qualification
for hob-nobbing with the elite in art and literature lies in the fact
that he died at the age of 152, and lived in the reigns of ten
sovereigns, an achievement great enough, it was considered, to earn him
the right to such distinguished burial. How came it, I wonder, that this
solitary human being was endowed with such powers of resistance to
natural decay? There must have been something weird about that old man.
Taylor, the poet, in his description of him, says:--
"From head to heel, his body hath all over
A quick set, thick set, natural, hairy cover."
Was Old Parr a throw-back to our ancestor the ape?
Mrs. Darling said he must have outlived all his relations and been very
lonely, and to reassure her I mentioned that if he outlived old ties he
also made new ones, marrying his second wife (only his second) at the
age of 120, and having by her one child.
Mrs. D. retorted that he ought to have been ashamed of himself, which
struck me as inconsistent. Parr's first wife had no doubt been dead a
great many years, and all those years he had presumably been waiting for
the end which never came. When, at the age of 120, he found himself
still alive, and still hale and hearty, he would begin to think it was
about time to accept things as they were and start life all over again.
That my thoughts in Poet's Corner, by the way, concerned themselves with
"Old Parr" to the exclusion of Garrick, Johnson, Thackeray, Dickens,
Coleridge, and Spenser, the "Prince of Poets," must have been Mrs. D.'s
fault.
I prefer Monday for a visit to the chapels, not because one saves
sixpence, but because I never follow in the footsteps of a guide without
a humiliating sense of being one of a hungry mob of chickens round the
man with the bag of grain. It is much more exciting to go pecking about
on your own, and on Mondays you can loiter unmolested where you will,
and for as long as you will.
The north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, where Queen Elizabeth is buried,
invariably draws me, and I led the way there, first. Strangely enough,
it is often empty, and always quiet. One's thoughts of Elizabeth mingle
curiously with those of her hated half-sister, "Bloody Queen Mary," who
is buried below Elizabeth, and who was, according to Sandford, "interred
without any monument or other remembrance".
It is strange to note the unequal distribution of favours in the matter
of burial. Charles II, for instance, has nothing more than his name and
the dates of his birth and death recorded in small letters on the
pavement of the chapel in the south aisle. Pepys says of Charles, "He
was very obscurely buried at night without any manner of pomp, and soon
forgotten after all his vanity".
Addison is near Queen Elizabeth, and close to his friend Charles
Montague, first Earl of Halifax. Reference to the fact is quaintly made
in the two concluding lines of the Addison's epitaph:--
"Oh for ever gone; take this last adieu,
And sleep in peace next thy lov'd Montague."
The place is narrow and rather dark. It would have been more befitting
Elizabeth's magnificence had she been laid amidst the colour and pomp of
the chapel of Henry VII. One would think, too, that she had a restless
neighbour in "Bloody Queen Mary". The words of the Latin inscription
perhaps make a mute appeal for charity for the latter when they say,
"Consorts both in throne and grave, in the hope of one resurrection".
Against the east wall is a sarcophagus containing bones found at the
foot of a staircase in the Bloody Tower, and supposed to be those of the
two princes who were murdered in the Tower by their uncle. Yes,
Elizabeth has eerie company, and somehow, in the cold grey light of this
dim corner of the Abbey, it is not the Elizabeth described by Green, the
historian, as that "brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth,
and the Renaissance," of whom we think, but the dying, lonely woman who,
her mind unchanged, her old courage gone, "called for a sword to be
constantly beside her, and thrust it from time to time through the
arras as if she heard murderers stirring there". What a subject for a
picture!
The quarters were struck by the chiming of the Abbey clock inside, and
the booming of Big Ben outside, and as we wandered from chapel to chapel
I was wooing those lurking beauties of the building which wait patiently
for the day, the hour, and the man who is to find out their loveliness.
The ordinary visitor is mostly too engaged in picking up crumbs of
information to have leisure to lift his eyes to the sculptured figures
which stand aloft in the blue haze of encroaching twilight. Neither does
he catch the secret flame of some obscure window which suddenly shines
out like a sinking sun through the forest of pillars and arches, nor
notice the jealous little doors to which only the privileged have the
key. I found one such this afternoon in the Chapel of Edward the
Confessor, but when I put my eye to the keyhole, nothing but darkness
rewarded my curiosity. Mrs. Darling asked me if I'd ever had any luck
with keyholes, and I was obliged to admit that I hadn't--still, one
never knows.
There was no need to peer through the keyhole of the door leading to the
Islip Chamber, because for the moderate sum of threepence we were
admitted without parley.
The guide pushed back a door into darkness, touched a button, and
behold a flight of steps leading up to the strange lodging of the
life-sized dolls.
Charles the Second was the first to confront us, his bold black eyes
meeting Mrs. Darling's inquisitive glance with a sinister challenge.
"Of a tall stature and of sable hue,
Much like the son of Kish that lofty grew."
"I wouldn't trust 'im a inch further than I could see 'im," was Mrs.
Darling's comment on the "Merry Monarch".
I complimented her on being a good judge of character. The guide had
turned on the electric lights, which were fixed to shine on the silent
company standing in their glass cases. William III and Mary in their
purple velvet and brocades, their real point de rose and imitation
jewels. The Duke of Buckingham, who died at the age of nineteen, lies on
a bier in the centre of the room. The effigy lay in state at his
mother's house, and one reads that she invited all her friends to see
it, stating that "she could carry them in conveniently by a back door".
Plain Queen Anne and "La Belle Stuart," the Duchess of Richmond, loved,
in vain, by Charles II, and jealous for the posthumous reputation of her
beauty. She left orders that her effigy, "as well done as could be,"
should be placed "under clear crown glass and none other". She should
have been content to go down to posterity as the figure of Britannia on
the coins.
Mrs. Darling thought the Duchess would "'ave a bit of a shock if she
could see 'erself now," and, indeed, I have rarely seen a more cynical
comment on the glory that passes than is to be found in these weird
figures in their dingy finery. Yet they have a dignity, and an exciting
interest. One can approach unmolested and share the privilege of the cat
who may look at a king. One may try to pierce the secrets hidden or
betrayed by those waxen masks. There is Queen Elizabeth, for instance
(to my mind the most arresting figure in the collection); the face is
taken from a death mask, and there is something disquieting in the eyes,
awful with the horror of death. A strange face, possessing in its
smallness the curiously repellant qualities of great age: a face to
which the kindly homeliness of Nelson's in the next case made reassuring
contrast.
[Illustration: WAX EFFIGIES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH AND CHARLES THE SECOND.]
Mrs. Darling said "Elizabeth didn't look 'uman," and I suppose one
touches on the tragedy of her life when one says that it is always as a
queen, rather than as a woman, one regards her. Yet she had her feminine
vanities. I have always been impressed by the account of her travelling
from Richmond to Chelsea by night because the torchlight was more
kind to her wrinkles than was the daylight.
The bell was tolling for afternoon service, the voice of a guide could
be heard echoing in the chapels below, and we had the place to
ourselves. Mrs. Darling returned and had another look at Charles II,
just, as she expressed it, to "wonder what any woman could see in him,"
and, for the moment, I was alone with those waxen men and women who
stared at me across the ages. There is something oddly intimate about a
wax figure, and I was making strides in the acquaintance of Queen
Elizabeth and Nelson when the verger returned with the intimation that
sight-seers must depart, as Evensong was about to begin. Remorselessly
he switched off the lights and we clattered down the wooden stairway,
leaving the little company of strangely assorted ghosts to their dreams,
and maybe an interchange of thoughts as the outcome of their long
broodings.
It occurred to me as we came into the sunlight again, that while we were
about it we would go and see the older figures which have been placed in
the Norman Undercroft. And so we turned into Dean's Yard, and from
thence to the cloisters, pausing now and again to read the inscriptions
on the tombstones over which we walked. The lettering on some of them
had been freshly chiselled, and the names stood out, giving, it seemed,
new life to the memories of those who lay beneath.
Mrs. Darling complained that I might have taken her to a more cheerful
place, giving it as her opinion that Westminster Abbey was "nothink more
than a bloomin' churchyard". I had to remind her that it is we who, in
that place, are the ghosts, and the ghosts who are the real people. The
present no longer exists for us. We left it, half an hour ago, to
adventure into the dim old ages.
"Speak for yourself, sir," said she. "The present's good enough for me.
You got a white mark on yer coat leaning up against the wall, and
there's the old chap waiting what you asked to take us underground."
The verger approached with a bunch of keys, leading the way through the
"dark cloister" to a door above which was an iron grating. At its
opening, a gloomy dungeon-like interior was disclosed, but he put up his
hand, and in a moment the Undercroft was flooded with electric light. It
is of spacious proportions and of Norman architecture, having a
clean-swept empty appearance. On the floor are some glass cases
containing the oldest of the effigies, the actual figures which were
carried at the funerals. Here is Katherine of Valois. I never hear her
name without remembering a passage in Pepys' Diary, where he says: "To
Westminster Abbey and there did see all the tombs very finely, having
one with us alone ... and here we did see, by particular favour, the
body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and I had the upper part of her body
in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did
kiss a queen, and that this was my birthday, thirty-six years old."
"Well, who'd er thought they'd come to this!" exclaimed Mrs. Darling, as
she gazed at the "ragged regiment". "_Wot_ a show up! Why, _this_ one
ain't decent," pointing to the nude figure of Prince Henry of Wales.
The verger explained that these historic dolls had been discovered lying
in the cellars under the Dean's house, and how I envied the finder! If
only I could get free permission to roam the Abbey and its precincts
night and day, open every door I came to, go down every cellar, explore
every passage, mount every stairway, I should want to live for ever. I
said as much to Mrs. Darling, and she remarked that it wouldn't surprise
her to hear that, when I got to heaven, I'd been given "some nosey job".
Quite an inspiring idea! and I warned her that next time she came to the
Abbey she might see my ghost peeping through a keyhole.
She shook her head. "You ain't ever likely to meet _me_ 'ere," she
said, "for if I _must_ speak the truth, sir, I think it's very dry."
I told her that was because she didn't realise the living, human side of
the people in whose likeness the effigies had been made, and I captured
her attention with gossip about Henry VII, whose mother was not quite
fourteen when she gave birth to him, and whose usurious disposition led
him to think first of marrying his own daughter-in-law, then a lady who
was insane. The information that on his death-bed he had discharged the
debts of all prisoners in London who owed no more than forty shillings,
roused a cynical comment from the old lady to the effect that Henry VII
did his devil-dodging at the expense of his heirs.
We left the dark cloister as we talked and turned into the vaulted
passage leading to the corner which I have sometimes heard described as
"The Monk's Garden". Surely there is no more peaceful spot in all
London. The little fountain in the enclosure bubbles all day long to the
silence, the huge plane tree above it spreads wide arms to the old
arcade, and ferns unfold their green fronds to the sunshine. It is a
place in which to meditate kindly on the weaknesses of poor human
nature, and to dwell with reverence on its greatness.
I felt impelled to set Henry VII right with Mrs. Darling, and suggested
we should return to visit his chapel, but the words fell on stony soil.
Mrs. D.'s face assumed the expression with which I associated "dryness,"
and I proposed instead an adjournment to one of the neighbouring
tea-shops. The old lady at once became alert, and taking the lead, towed
me reluctantly through Dean's Yard into the roar of Victoria Street.
But I could not so easily shake the dust of the Abbey from my feet. I
felt as one of those wax effigies would feel could he come to life, and
stepping from out of his glass case, take a walk to Charing Cross. Then
a strange idea occurred. Suppose I _was_ one of them? It was possible,
if the theory of a former existence holds water. I might be a Charles
II, a Henry VII, a Nelson! On second thoughts, though, I am more
inclined to class myself with the artistic fraternity--a Garrick, a
Beaumont, or a Ben Jonson--"O, rare Ben Jonson!" Yes, I find in myself
traits distinctly reminiscent of the poet who used his pen as Hogarth
used his brush----
"That's the second time you done it, sir." Mrs. Darling's voice brought
me back to the twentieth century with an unpleasant jar.
"Done what?" I asked.
"Run into somebody through not lookin' where yer goin'. That telegraph
boy didn't 'arf size you up. I shouldn't like to repeat wot 'e said."
"I wouldn't ask it of you," I hastened to assure her.
She had come to a halt before the window of an A.B.C. shop. "Look!" she
exclaimed, "_Crumpets!_ 'Ow funny!"
I told her I didn't see the joke, and she said that came of my not
keeping my ears open--the telegraph boy had referred to a certain person
being "balmy on the crumpet!"
I feigned unconsciousness of the deduction. There are occasions when
Mrs. D.'s perverted sense of humour needs keeping in check, and to quote
"Charley's Aunt," it was "such a damned silly joke".
I am sorry to have to end my yarn on this prosaic note, but that is the
way of things in an existence where the necessity to blow your nose or
change your socks breaks in on the most exalted moments.
Believe me, dear Agatha,
Your devoted,
GEORGE.