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A LONDON MOSAIC
* * * * * *
WRITINGS OF W. L. GEORGE
_NOVELS_
CALIBAN
BLIND ALLEY
THE STRANGERS’ WEDDING
THE SECOND BLOOMING
A BED OF ROSES
THE CITY OF LIGHT
ISRAEL, KALISCH
(_American Title_: UNTIL THE DAY BREAK)
THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN
(_American Title_: THE LITTLE BELOVED)
OLGA NAZIMOV (SHORT STORIES)
_MISCELLANEOUS_
WOMAN AND TO-MORROW
DRAMATIC ACTUALITIES
ANATOLE FRANCE
THE INTELLIGENCE OF WOMAN
A NOVELIST ON NOVELS
(_American Title_: LITERARY CHAPTERS)
EDDIES OF THE DAY
* * * * * *
[Illustration:
HYDE PARK]
A LONDON MOSAIC
Text by
W. L. GEORGE
Pictures by
PHILIPPE FORBES-ROBERTSON
New York
Frederick A. Stokes Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1921
Manufactured in Great Britain
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. PRELUDE 1
II. PLAYGROUNDS 13
III. THE FRIENDLY BOWL 35
IV. WANDERERS 43
V. SOUPS AND STEWS 61
VI. IN SEARCH OF VICE 75
VII. THE POOR 85
VIII. STONES 99
IX. CAFÉ ROYAL 119
ILLUSTRATIONS
HYDE PARK _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
THE REGENT CANAL AT MAIDA HILL 6
CUMBERLAND HAY-MARKET 9
THE PUB 38
FLOWER-GIRL 48
THE HEART OF THE CITY 56
SOHO MARKET 64
THE SAVOY 68
SHOPPING 72
THE CHELSEA ARTS BALL 84
SHEPHERD’S MARKET 92
THE TUBE, 9.30 A.M. 103
AN ABSENT DESERT: THE CROMWELL ROAD 109
BEASTS AT THE ZOO 113
THE CAFÉ ROYAL 122
PRIVATE VIEW: THE A.A.A. 126
THE GOOD INTENT, CHELSEA 131
I
PRELUDE
CHAPTER I
PRELUDE
The first thing that impresses me as I begin this short book on London
is the large number of subjects of which I will say nothing. There are
many reasons for this. One is that a title such as _A London Mosaic_
is as difficult to compose to as _Life_ or _Love_. (Two novels are
still on sale under these somewhat atlasian titles, but as an author
does not wish to be unkind in the first paragraphs of a book, they need
not be reviewed.) Another reason is that Mr E. V. Lucas, Mrs E. T.
Cook, John o’ London, Mr G. R. Sims, have compiled various volumes of
passionate Baedeker, and I hesitate to set my feet in their mighty
footprints. For so much of this London is unknown to me, and I have
learnt little of her, indeed, learned little except to love her. Thus,
in this book, you will find no lists of houses where famous people
lived. This may seem strange, but it wakes in me no thrill to see a
circular plate of debased wedgwood imposed by a maternal L.C.C. upon a
wall of innocent stucco coated with eternal dirt. To read that William
Hazlitt died here, or lived there, does not add much to the fact that
William Hazlitt lived. It may be interesting to know that Hazlitt chose
that sort of house, though it is likely that he did not choose it, but
accepted it; a house does not define a man of worth, for men of worth
are mostly poor, and their houses reflect them not. Many must have
hated them. Yet, I happen to know Huxley’s house in St John’s Wood,
and Carlyle’s house in Chelsea (there is no getting over that one when
friends arrive from America), but it is not exciting knowledge, and I
incline to rejoice with Kingsley that it is not the house one lives
in matters, but the house opposite. Unfortunately, the house opposite
is generally just as bad: the only thing that reconciles one to one’s
house is that the people opposite see most of it.
I shall not tell you anything of ‘quaint corners,’ or ‘picturesque
bits.’ I will not cut up and pickle London. Ever since the days of
Dickens (or is it since those of Dr Syntax?) people have ranged our
unfortunate town armed with a butterfly-net: swoop! caught Cloth Fair!
Another swoop! Staple Inn lies in the butterfly-net. Quick, into the
pickle-jar. Now for the cyanide. Here they are, London butterflies,
ready for delineation by Mr Hugh Thompson. No, I will pickle you no
living strips of London Town, and I promise that not once will I
portray a humorous bus-conductor. One reason is that there are no
humorous bus-conductors; there are only raucous brutes, working long
hours, and maintained in a state of pessimism because these long hours
separate them from the public-house. They do not, however, separate
them enough.
There will be no East in the West, nor West in the East. There will be
no list of statues, for nobody ever looks at statues. There is a statue
of George Stephenson at Euston, and one of William Pitt in Hanover
Square. That is very interesting, isn’t it? It is a terrible commentary
upon fame that when you erect a statue to a man he becomes invisible.
You pass a statue every day, but you never look at it, you pass it.
Nobody cares for statues, except the birds, who make them a venue for
love and war. Christopher Wren did say that if you required a monument
you should look about you; thus does the London population. Those who
have noticed Mr Peabody, miraculously encased in a frock coat several
sizes too small, Mr Huskisson stark naked, and one of the Georges on
his little horse, trotting to nowhere in particular, as was the way of
his dynasty, will agree that it is no wonder statues fail to arouse
even merriment.
No, there are no statues in this book. There are no pictures either.
I shall not tell you how to find the Madonna degli Ansidei in the
National Gallery, nor direct you to the Flaxmans of University College.
The catalogues can do that. That is, if you want to know, and are not
one of the ordinary beings who use the museums to get out of the rain
or for the innocent purposes of courtship. (I recommend the Geological;
chilly, but leads to concentration). Sometimes, in remorseful mood,
when the word ‘ought,’ which as a rule means little to me, suddenly
assumes material shape to the extent of a faint mist, I tell myself
that I am very uneducated, and regrettably unrepentant, that I ‘ought’
to care that Swift lived in Bury Street and Sir Isaac Newton in Jermyn
Street, and that I ‘ought’ to find desecration in the fact that where
the dog Diamond barked, the plates of Jules’s Balkan waiters clatter.
And I go to Jules’s to lunch and to meditate on gravitation. But Jules
can cook, and while eating his meats you do not meditate; and he is so
popular that as soon as you have finished those meats, you are driven
out by the eyes of some young couple, beaming with love and appetite.
Nor may you meditate opposite the houses of the great; it annoys the
police. So, after this faint attempt, the slender ‘ought’ evaporates.
Perhaps because of that I have not yet succeeded in visiting the Tower,
the Roman Bath, the Foundling, the Soane Museum, the Mint, and many
other places which doubtless would improve my mind.
I am not a student, but a lover of London; it amuses me much more to
notice that one man shouts: ‘Paw Maw! Exper! Paw Maw!’ while another
does it like this: ‘Per Mer! Gateshpozervenment!’ than to bask in the
knowledge that Johnson lived in Gough Square. This arises, I suppose,
from having taken London as I found her, and from not being a Londoner.
The first twenty years of my life having been spent in another country,
I did not treat London as a relation, but as some one whom I liked.
Everything of her was interesting, and there is to-day no mews where I
cannot hear the footsteps of her smutty nymphs. The entry into London
is such a romantic march; I say march because it is worth doing on
foot. But as I speak to Londoners, we had better do it by train, for
they would grow tired of her. When Londoners say ‘London,’ they mean
Piccadilly, Selfridges, Covent Garden, that sort of thing, and that is
not London. London is Tottenham and Chiswick, the ‘Paragon,’ Mile End,
Walker’s Court and what it sells, and the black doss places under the
railway arches. London is Houndsditch, where everybody looks bad, and
Cornwall Gardens where everybody looks good. London is a congress-house
of emotions.
When one looks at the map, particularly if it is on a large scale,
London looks like a splash, rather longer than it is broad, with
railway lines radiating in all directions, rather like a spider’s web,
the centre being tenanted by whoever you like. And one thinks of Dick
Whittington gaily treading in the spider’s web. But, in fact, one does
not come out of the everywhere into the here of London. One melts into
London, and one hardly knows how one comes to abandon the rest of the
world. There is a moment when the Essex or Kentish marsh ceases to lap
so uniformly against Medway or Thames. One has a sense of population,
of rather large houses set rather far apart, but not yet so far apart
as in the counties; of grounds less richly endowed with the high walls
crowned with broken glass which announce that respectable people live
inside. One reads names on the platforms: ‘Brentwood,’ or ‘Malling,’
and there is a sprinkling of villas, with plenty of white paint and
concrete, and red roofs and leaded panes. One glimpses cerise curtains,
and one knows with painful accuracy where to look for the back of the
swing mirror. Then, again, gaps, cows. It must have been a mistake, it
is not London after all! But there come more platforms and more villas,
then a row of shops, shops not branded with the names one would expect
to find, such as ‘Boots’ or ‘Home and Colonial,’ but brisk, individual
little shops belonging to Smith, and to Jones, yet strangely alike in
build, furnished by the same shopfitter, just as the owners will be
buried by the same undertaker. (He is quite ready, for he owns one of
the shops.) That is individualism, which, like the camomile plant, is
ever bruised and ever arises.
The train rumbles on, and the houses change. They are still detached,
but less detached: they are separated by privet hedges over which a
man can look, and so they have an air of fellowship. Suddenly, one
enters a little colony of houses; one sees a postman on foot instead
of on a bicycle, a horse omnibus and no carrier’s cart; one sees a
policeman too: the world is growing less respectable; it must be London
after all. But again come gaps and cows, except that now the gaps
are described as ‘desirable freehold sites’ with loudly advertised
frontages. The earth is already torn up, and excavations are turning
into roads; one observes a solitary gas-lamp, and on a board the
words ‘Macedonia Avenue.’ No avenue is built yet, but it is foredoomed
to Macedonia.
[Illustration:
THE REGENT CANAL
AT MAIDA HILL]
All that is the overflow of London; it is the fugitive London which
has no love or understanding of the town. The movement of a Londoner
who rises in life seems to follow a definite curve; if he begins in
Whitechapel the wheel of fortune may take him to Streatham; after a
while he will dream of a place in the country and realise his dream
perhaps at Purley Oaks; by the time his son has come back from Oxford,
his wife will have been ambitious enough to remove him to South
Kensington; thence, the last step, to God’s quadrilateral between
Oxford Street and Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Park Lane. After the
bankruptcy the process is reversed. Outward, then inward, and outward
again. It is like the tide.
But the train goes on, and unexpectedly, we find age after youth,
Croydon, Sydenham, Edmonton, places where again the walls are high, the
oaks thick, where are deep lawns, heavy stucco fronts, little crowded
streets with spreading market places. We breathe the air of genteel
sleep. Genteel, perhaps, but restless sleep, for these are old villages
made into islands.
They seem vaguely annoyed among the trams; they blink at the sky-signs
and the objurgations of Bovril. But it is too late; round each little
group run fifty streets, each one comprising a hundred houses or so,
all complete, with Nottingham lace curtain and Virginia creeper. The
old house may call itself ‘The Lodge,’ but ‘Chatsworth’ and ‘Greville
Towers’ are round the corner. Indeed, we forget them as we go on, for
now, as the train roars over railway bridges, through cuttings, we look
down on the endless congestion of suburban roofs, each one separated
from its neighbour by what the builder regrettably calls a ‘worm.’
And yet it is not London. For London has yet to burst upon our eyes, in
the shape of strident Clapham Road, or Brixton Road, true London of the
black, greasy pavement and the orange peel of which Private Ortheris
babbled in his delirium. We have still to come to the giant warehouses
and their ambitious grayness, to the flat mass of gray, yellow, and
black, broken only by the washing that hangs to dry, and the narrow
gardens where droops the nasturtium. At last here is working London,
little, nestling, hard, grimy London, gritty, troglodyte London, London
of crowded shop and public-house, of tramway and clotted traffic, and
yelping children. That is London of many heads and, to me, all smiling.
It is only later, when at last we reach the river that is gray as a
cygnet, and see London rising in a hundred solemn spires, that we come
to understand London, to feel the use of that white, central pomp; as
well of that opulence as of the smiling cleanliness of the outer ring,
of the blackness of the inner ring. For all that is part of London’s
world, and it is well that she should, within herself, comprise all
ugliness and all beauty. For this makes her worth exploring.
The secret of a city’s exploration does not lie in the dutiful
following of itineraries, but rather in a lover-like submission to
its moods. One should eat in various places, not only within the
stereotyped square mile which, in London, in Paris, or in Petrograd, is
loudly labelled as the foreigner’s restaurant. One must seek culinary
adventure far afield, at Harrow, and at Tulse Hill, in Piccadilly
and Norton Folgate; and let me assure you that there exists a subtle
difference between the cooking at the Cheapside A.B.C. and its fellow
in the Brixton Road.
Also one should readily cede to the fancy that is bred by a beautiful
place name. It is true that, as a rule, the most attractive names
lead to the least attractive places, but on the way one touches
singularity often, and beauty sometimes. My Baedeker has always been
Kelly’s Directory; that is one of the books I should like to find in my
restricted library if I were wrecked on a desert island. For, sitting
under my bread-fruit tree, warm in my garment of yakskin, and smoking
an earthen pipe of dried I don’t know what leaf, Kelly’s Directory
would bring up dreams, dreams such as these: Seven Sisters’ Road,
Satchwell Rents, Beer Lane, and Whetstone Park. All those dreams have
come true, and thus a little of my fervour has been abated by their
materialisation; by the discovery of Seven Sisters’ Road as gray,
refuse-strewn, rich in Victorian goodness and in modern slum; of
Satchwell Rents as a dusty affluent into Bethnal Green Road, shuttered,
and locked, and suspicious. Whetstone Park, of course, is not at
Whetstone, but just off New Oxford Street, and there is no park there.
But still, those names, like Orme Square, that secludes itself from the
Bayswater Road behind its column and its defiant eagle, like Cumberland
Market, Hanoverian, naked, whose many iron posts await cattle that
never come, contain the seed of romance because they induce quest. And
so I will not be discouraged yet, but soon must discover what stones
have wrought Jedburgh Street and Parsifal Road.
[Illustration:
CUMBERLAND
HAY-MARKET]
Yet those streets, and roads, and squares that have their place in
Kelly are, after all, only the outer shell which the true lover must
break through. If he is a true lover, he will soon understand that
London lies behind the streets. He will realise that between two
streets there is often more than two rows of houses and of gardens or
yards. He will have discovered that in the core of those blocks of
masonry lives an inner London. Into that core there is but one way,
which I will call the slits. We all know slits, little spaces between
houses, that lead inwards, you know not whither. You pass them every
day, perhaps, and never turn aside, yet through those slits is the way
in. There is one, for instance, near Notting Hill Gate. They call it
Bulmer Place, though it is only six feet broad and is buried under an
archway. Enter; ten yards lead you to an old cottage settlement, where
no house exceeds two floors, where each has its garden, its creeper and
its cat, where washing floats undisturbed, and, on fine afternoons,
public beanoes take place. This is an old London village, caught
between the warehouses and shops, yet maintained by the magic law of
ancient lights.
There is another slit, less well known, quite near Kensington Square.
To the ordinary eye, Kensington Square is entirely civilised, and none
live there unless they have both money and good taste. In the far
south-west corner stands a convent, that stares forth blankly upon this
world. But walk south-east and turn to the right, and go on until,
past low, white cottages grown with sterile vine, you meet a brick
wall. On the way, small houses, well locked, that are quiet and green,
will have seen you pass without approval. If adventure is not for you,
you will turn back on seeing the brick wall; if, however, it is, you
will go on, and, on your right, find a slit so small that you may not
open your umbrella in it. This they call South End; if you persevere
you shall come to rustic cottages of plaster, and at last discover,
single-floored against the side of a great block of flats, the cottage
and garden where rot two old green, painted figure-heads. There live
Prunella, Mityl, Selysette, and their tribe. But go carefully to South
End, for the road is fugitive, and I cannot always find it myself. I
think I find it only on the days when I am not too impure in heart.
Wherever flows London stone the slits exist. A deep, dark archway out
of Surrey Street dives under the Norfolk Hotel; follow it, go down
Surrey Steps, and you shall come to a water-gate, on which you may
yet lean and smell the tar of Henry Fitz Alwyn’s barge. Another slit,
behind the Alexandra Hotel, will lead you through Old Barrack Yard
(I do not know what barrack) and past low, industrial cottages, to
the petrified splendours of Belgravia. I wish I knew them all, for I
discovered yet another last week, after overlooking it for over sixteen
years. It is called St James’s Market, and leads off the Haymarket,
towards the neat elegancies of Jermyn Street. That does not sound
promising; yet, lost among the backs of warehouses and restaurants,
there stands a long, low house coated with _green_ plaster; it is a
workshop, but some sense of fitness had bidden the workers relieve
its green walls with claret curtains. I choose to be sure that in
this house Axford tried to imprison Hannah Lightfoot, until the fair
Quakeress fled to her Georgian lover.
And follow the green spot on the map, on the borough map, that cares
so much for the borough, so little for the town. The borough map will
lead you to green fields where flourish the sardine tin and the wild
hyacinth. It will lead you to a churchyard, itself buried between
theatres and shops, behind St Ann’s, Soho, where King Theodore of
Corsica has laid his insurgent bones. It will lead you behind the
solemnities of South Paddington into the vast churchyard behind the
little Chapel of the Ascension. This is open to you all day; there you
will find sparse graves, vast lawns and, under the trees, friendly
seats where you may dream of death, or, if you prefer, of loves that
will companion you to that bourne.
II
PLAYGROUNDS