WANDERERS
Alphonse Daudet, when analysing Tartarin de Tarascon, found in him two
Tartarins, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho. Tartarin Quixote liked
fighting, adventure, uncertainty, blood, knives, unscalable peaks,
tornadoes at sea. Tartarin Sancho liked flannel vests, long drinks
of lemonade on a hot day, chocolate in bed in the morning. No doubt,
Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho live in many of us, and certainly
I confess to desperate moods which, on the whole, I restrain, and to
self-indulgent moods which, on the whole, I encourage; but when we
consider men we know, it is curious how much more strongly Tartarin
Sancho or Tartarin Quixote is developed in them. Tartarin Sancho leads
the majority of mankind, that majority which is always looking for
a good billet, for a pension, for a nice little wife, a cat, and a
garden. Some, more ambitious, substitute for the nice little wife a
woman of title, for the cat a hunter, for the garden an estate, but
their desires, after all, are still those of Sancho, even though they
are those of Sancho become Governor of Barataria. Naturally they adopt
the wadded life. It is not a crime, and no doubt many of the Tartarin
Quixotes, who number among them tight-rope dancers, mining magnates,
card-sharpers, and cabinet ministers, often come to regret the bed
quilt of a blameless life. Only the bed quilt is not for them.
Somehow, I don’t know why, I cannot help feeling that Tartarin Sancho
is less normal than Tartarin Quixote. He does such strange things; he
enlists in a bank, grinds out his little span of life and dies; or he
becomes a barrister, pleads cases he believes in, and also others; or
Tartarin Sancho turns into a respectable stockbroker, that is to say,
he never speculates, but induces other people to gamble; or he becomes
a professional soldier, and passes the first half of his life hoping
there will be a war; if there is none, then he passes the other half in
the rather more decayed parts of Earl’s Court. These are queer trades,
for they do not seem to satisfy anything that man needs if he is to
feel complete. It is not enough that a man should, by the time he dies,
have manufactured, let us say, large quantities of office furniture,
have played golf, have gone to Eastbourne or Monte Carlo, have met the
one girl whom he wrongly imagined to be the only girl in the world,
ignoring the fact that there are thousands like her, have reproduced
the species and left them behind to do likewise. ‘Such is life,’ says
my old friend the housekeeper of Wellington Buildings, Bethnal Green;
she is right, but somehow this explanation does not satisfy me, and
I wonder whether all those respectable, clean-living people are not
really degenerates, in so far as they have lost the desire for colour
in life. It may be that Tartarin Quixote does not desire colour in
life, and that he would gladly exchange the pebbly bed of romance for
the eiderdown of the regular life; still, what a man does matters, as
well as what a man desires. It is all very well praising the mute,
inglorious Milton in the factory or the shop, but the Milton who
manages to break the silence is also important in the scheme. The idea
is greater than the fact, but to deny the fact would be to run Plato
too far.
Therein lies the charm of the queer people, in whom London is rich,
people who follow unexpected occupations, occupations that nobody
would naturally think of following. One can understand how Mrs Smith
comes to hear from one of her husband’s friends that they want an
apprentice in the printing shop; she sends little Tommy to the printing
shop, and he becomes a printer. But how does little Paolo become an
ice-cream man? There are lots of ice-cream men, and so we must believe
that some impulse directed young Paolo towards ice-cream. How did it
happen? Was it a vocation, this selling of ice-cream? Did he discover
an ice-cream opening? I don’t know; I once asked an ice-cream merchant
why he sold ice-cream. He told me that he did it because his father
did it. Then I asked him why his father sold ice-cream. He told me
that his father sold ice-cream because his grandfather sold ice-cream.
Then I saw that we might go on for a long time like this, and let him
alone, for the ice-cream merchant was growing suspicious. I am glad
that I do not know whether his grandfather sold ice-cream because
his great-grandfather sold ice-cream, for this leaves a little to my
imagination, and I am able to imagine that in the misty cinquecento,
some adventurous Florentine, some relative of Benvenuto Cellini, was
impelled to forsake a hospitable guild to push about the European
tracks the gay little carriage that to-day bears the Italian flag,
diplomatically intertwined with the flag of the country in which the
merchant happens to trade, the portrait of King Victor, and, on the
other side, some touching scene such as ‘Mother’s Last Kiss.’
The ice-cream man sets out every day on adventure. He may have a beat,
but I prefer to think that he follows in the wake of the sun, always
where it is hottest, caring little whether the street be mean or
opulent. I like to think of him as at the mercy of a cold snap that
ruins him, while it makes the fortune of his fellow merchant, the
hot-potato man. (What a beautiful poem Tennyson would have made of that
... the golden wheel turning, and raising high, now the ice-cream, then
the hot potato ... and always above a noble voice bidding them hope
and pray.) Of course, there are no hot-potato men now. I wonder what
happened to them. Indeed, that is what oppresses the curious when he
considers the wanderers: what becomes of them when they are no longer
strong enough to ply their strange trades and to range the world? Are
our workhouses full of crossing-sweepers who sweep no more? Perhaps it
is not so tragic, after all, to have been a crossing-sweeper and to end
in the workhouse; I cannot imagine a crossing-sweeper murmuring with
Mr Kipling: ‘Me that ’ave been what I’ve been!’ for he has never been
more than what Mr Tim Healy would call a movable fixture. He has just
sat and touched his cap, and been tipped, and has occasionally swept.
But he must have meditated. No man can sit for ten hours a day in the
same place without meditating; I say this without authority, for I have
known only one crossing-sweeper who meditated to any effect; he was a
pronounced optimist, and believed that the world was getting better
and better, this because, for forty years, he had been observing the
quality of people’s boots. As he put it, when he started in life some
of them wore no boots; later on, they began to wear other people’s
cast-off boots; now they were getting on to buy their own boots, and
what with that, and what with the skirts getting shorter and shorter,
and the stocking getting thinner and thinner, by gum, he was blowed if
he knew what was going to happen next.
No, crossing-sweepers are not wanderers. They are limpets. I should
not have thought of them if they were not street folk, for it is a
distinguishing trait of the wanderer that he is a street creature,
something that appears from the stones in the early morning, and at
night into the stones seems to vanish. The London wanderer may have
a home, but only in the sense of the London sparrow. Can you imagine
the flower-girl’s home? If the flower-girl were indeed the sort of
flower-girl of whom you see half a hundred portraits every year in
the Royal Academy, a sort of pure and peach-blossom girl, she would
have a home like Mélisande, very, very small and dainty (you know,
the Charbonnel and Walker-Marcus Stone style), with chairs covered
in flowered chintzes, and a white cat. At night she would lie in her
little white bed, over the head of which would hang a text about the
lilies of the field; her fair hair would ripple over the pillow; her
rosy lips would open in a sweet smile as she dreamed of the dear little
faded flowers which she had stood for the night in her tooth-glass.
(Tooth-glass! Nasty realist touch; I shall never do this sort of thing
properly.) Ah, if it were only like that! If she were not a big, fine
woman of about forty, tied up in three thick shawls, which imperfectly
conceal her tidal bodice; if only she did not so much love a quartern
of gin. It would be much more romantic, but I should regret her if she
were to turn into a picture post card, for she is such a jolly good,
saucy sort, as a rule, and I like her thick hand terminated by five
sausages, one of these sausages strangulated by a wedding ring, the
thickness of which places one beyond all cynicism as to the permanence
of the tie. You see her in many places, by the fountain at Piccadilly
Circus, until all the nobs have bought a bunch of violets for
somebody, now that they have given up the habit of buying a flower
for themselves; then you see her near restaurant entrances, cleverly
shaming men into buying flowers for women who are already wearing
some, and who do not know what to do with the offering because it is
invariably very wet; later on, outside theatres near the queues; she is
all enterprise, and during the war I even saw her trying to sell to an
unpromising margarine queue.
[Illustration:
FLOWER-GIRL]
She grows old at her trade; it is a healthy one, and she has no home.
Some of her fellows are stranger and still more definably homeless.
Thus the muffin-man, killed, perhaps, by the war. It is a long time
since I heard his bell, and was thereby assured that Sunday was getting
on nicely, and would be over by-and-by. There is the travelling
accountant, a real wanderer, that one, who, every day and night,
goes from little shop to little factory, continually confronted with
new names, new deals, and, perhaps, new and complicated methods of
dishonesty. There are the queerest and most incomprehensible of all,
the guides. I do not know what turns a man into a guide, but if you
stand awhile near Charing Cross, and make a noise like a Jugo-Slav,
it is likely that a seedily, respectably dressed man, with a badly
rolled umbrella, will offer to show you the town. Once it is clear
that he does not want to exchange pocket-books with you to show his
confidence, he may lead you to Henry V.’s chapel, to Westminster
Abbey, to Carlyle’s house, and so on, reciting as he goes, something
like this: ‘The painted ’all was originally planned by King John the
same who signed that Magna Charta in the year 1215 but the plans being
lost in the Wash the project did not come to take form before the year
1533 when King Henry VIII. after his marriage with Anne Boleyn laid
the foundations on the plans of Sir ’Erbert ’Opkins who was also the
architect of the golden tower of Muswell ’Ill where Nell Gwynn ...’
and so on. That man is a gramophone; I once let him show me Saragossa,
but he shall never show me anything more. For one thing, I believe he
is respectable at heart, and there is no profit in his company. The
only good guide is the amateur guide. I met one in Brussels once, a
cab-driver, who stopped before the café where I was having a drink;
he so many times cried out to me, ‘Hi, Englishman! you’re a sportsman,
come along!’ that I fell a prey to his flattery. (Who told him that
every Englishman wants to be thought a sportsman?) He knew his Brussels
pretty well, but I will not tell you the rest of the story, for he also
knew his Englishman pretty well.
There are many more of these strange people. A strange one was a woman
who offered to give me a thousand guesses at her profession; I declined
the proposal and found out that she was a pearl-threader. Few of us
know that the silken thread, on which collars of pearls are strung,
wears out, and that, from time to time, pearls have to be re-strung.
All women do not care to send their pearls to the jeweller, for the art
of Tecla is profound. Nor do they care to re-thread them themselves,
for the holes are so small that the work is infinitely wearisome.
So my pearl-threader, who looked like the most respectable type of
retired maid, spent her life in Mayfair and Belgravia, where she sat
re-threading pearls while the owner read a novel. The pearl-threader
smiled as she told this: ‘One of them,’ she said, ‘read a newspaper
upside down all the time while I was doing her pearls. And there
is another, so unsuspicious; she turns her back on me and smokes a
cigarette, and stares into the looking-glass, dreamy-like.’
But that is a high walk of wanderer. There are others more tragic.
There used to be a terrible creature, the runner, who followed
four-wheelers laden with luggage, and arrived at the end of his long
run too blown to be red in the face, but lead white, his right hand
gripped to his heart, his left hand spasmodically touching the greasy
brim of his cap. I have seen no greater agony than the hungry desire
in those filmy eyes, half-obscured by the wet, dust-laden eyelids. I
used to stop the runners when I could; often they persisted, their open
mouth close to the wheel; they could not see me wave them away, or they
could not hear me call out, as if all the energy of their poor senses
had passed into those eternally running legs. One of them seized my
trunk as we arrived, before I could ransom myself, hating my opulence,
full of shame. It is fifteen years ago, but I remember him, a big body,
but little flesh; I remember his eyes like glass, and the awful stagger
of him as he bent under the weight of the trunk, as he tottered, and as
I leaped to seize it when it fell. Then the door opened, and the hotel
waiter came out with the air of black hostility which the house dog
has for the street dog. The runner looked at us without anger, without
misery, though he understood very well that the job was not for him;
he was like a Greek peasant patiently encountering fate. But, as he
turned away, clasping my shilling in his hand, and I saw the foot in
the broken boot fumble for the step, a wave of self-hatred rose in me.
I told myself: ‘You have crucified him.’
They are not so tragic, all of them, unaccountable people, or even
people who have adopted trades one thinks queer because one would
not have adopted them oneself. Some are merely disgusting, such as
the bus-conductor. I have met a civil bus-conductor; I have even met
an optimistic one, but nowadays, especially, he stands exposed by
comparison with the girl-conductor. Oh, it is natural enough that the
girl should have been friendly, civil, clean, obliging, for to her the
job was new, varied, faintly exciting, probably better paid than her
previous work. But still, she made the man terrible. He seems to be
nearly always a rather grimy, ill-shaven, misanthropic man; something
of the watch-dog and of the bureaucrat has crept into his constitution;
he cannot gently ask for fares; the demand must come with a snap and
a snarl, pitched on a high note that shall reach the recesses of the
omnibus and of the traveller’s consciousness. When he yelps: ‘Fares!’
I feel for my ticket as if I were guilty; when he looks at me, his
little, hard eye suggests that I am bilking the company, and then I
hate him so that, if I can, I do bilk the company, and get off four
hundred yards to the good, bursting with an unexpelled shout of ‘Yah!’
I hate him above all because, so often, he companions my journey with
a snarly chorus, addressed sometimes to the wretched nearest occupant.
One hears him run on: ‘Some people can’t learn where buses stop; seem
to think it’s the Lord Mayor’s coach; pulling the string themselves,
too; might as well be no conductor.’ Or it is something like this:
‘Chucking their half-crowns about; taking about four hours finding ’em,
too; come into the bus and expect to get change as if it was a blooming
bank; gave her twenty-four ha’pennies though, that’ll learn her.’ Or,
during a shower: ‘Plenty room on top. Drop o’ rain won’t ’urt yer. When
it’s fine they all want to get on top.’ And so on, a regular orgy of
grace and charm. Growl, grouse, snap, snarl, grumble, yap, and long,
dirty moustaches, filthy hands, and if it is not a grudging black hand
to help a white sleeve on to the bus, it is a hand that has to restrain
itself not to shove the white shoulder off. All that because the poor
brute is not happy. I know I ought to be sympathetic, for it must be
dreadful to travel all day from Camden Town to Brixton and back, to
sell so small a variety of goods, never to feel steady ground under
your feet when you look for change, to answer the same idiotic question
seventy times a day, to tread on feet, to have your feet trodden on.
The bus-conductor is a nasty man because he is an unhappy man, because
he has no prospect in life, save that of growing older and, for all I
know, retiring without a pension. Those monotonous occupations, such
as the hellish one of lift-man, ought not to be human occupations, and
they will not be such some day. Meanwhile, they rack by boredom people
to whom has not been given the free expanse of the pedlar. What a brute
Charon must have become by now!
Those people who range freely street and field are indeed of another
kind; there is in them less civilisation and more civility. They are
detached from their fellows; they lead lives of their own within the
beating life of the world. Many of the newspaper-sellers are pleasant,
ironic people, with a capacity for estimating character, with a quick
interest in the news they retail. Citizens of the world, they are
often so stimulated by their news that, as you buy, they must tell
you the contents of the stop-press. It is a hard trade. Before the
war they used to pay ninepence for twenty-seven halfpenny papers:
fourpence-halfpenny profit for selling twenty-seven papers! Still,
there is a nomadic satisfaction in their movable beat. They are not
locked up. They are in the midst of life, other people’s life, but yet
life.
To quite another class belong the beggars, not the pseudo-beggars who
profess to sell laces or matches, or the blind, for these are inanimate
beggars and nobody knows what goes on behind their faces, but the
adventurous beggars, the old woman who follows you, shrilly asking
for the price of a cup of tea, or the well-known teacher of French,
who stops you in the street and asks you what chance he has of a
professorship at King’s College. Those adventurers are amusing because
they are coloured, because, if you stop, they will tell you where they
come from, the number and names of their children, the diseases from
which they suffer, and, indeed, recite you the shameless novel of their
lives.
Of the same kind, but more offensive, is the fern-seller who is nearly
always (or was before the war) a particularly burly brute, carrying a
couple of potted ferns under each arm. He haunts the quieter streets
of the West End, and when a woman alone meets him late at night, she
will do well to make for the nearest policeman, the proper method being
to ask the fern-seller to carry the ferns home for her: a policeman
will doubtless be encountered on the way. I remember a fern-seller,
who accosted me once in Portman Square. It was about six o’clock
in the evening; I told the man that I wanted no ferns; he followed
me, rumbling abuse which I could hardly hear. As it happened, I was
looking for lodgings, and stopped at a likely house in Portman Street.
As I had been walking rather fast, I thought that I had got rid of
him, but, seeing I was going into a house, he ran up behind me, and
once more began his pressure. While I was ordering him off the door
opened, and a fat little landlord, with a grubby little white beard and
choleric little blue eyes in a puffy little pink face, stood staring
in the doorway. ‘If you don’t go,’ I said to the man, ‘I’ll give you
in charge.’ But the man went on whining and growling and, being very
young, I was filled with awful confusion at this brawl on the step.
This was increased by the nasty little landlord, who said: ‘What do you
want?’
‘I want to see some rooms,’ I replied, and to the fern-seller: ‘Did you
hear what I said?’
‘I’ve got no rooms,’ snapped the landlord, ‘get out of it, both of you.’
‘What the devil do you mean by both of you?’ I said to the landlord,
being thoroughly enraged. Then I became paralysed at having to quarrel
on two different subjects simultaneously.
‘Mean by it!’ shouted the little landlord. ‘What do _you_ mean by
creating a disturbance on my doorstep? Let rooms to the likes of you!
You’re drunk!’
At that moment the fern-seller was breathing on me, and I saw that
the landlord’s words were well-founded, though ill-directed. Before I
could think of a reply, the little landlord slammed his door so as to
make the whole of Portman Street shake. And I remained alone with the
fern-seller, who still painstakingly and threateningly attempted to
make me buy ferns. He was the sort of man who speaks from under his
under lip. I was so ashamed that I did not say one word, but ran. Oh!
how good and free Oxford Street felt.
I have not been much annoyed or interested by the more desperate
wanderers one comes across. Only once did anything perilous come my
way, and that I will call ‘The Row in Homer Row.’ It was many years
ago. I had, one evening, made an acquaintanceship with the light
fallibility that will, I hope, always characterise youth. It did not at
once have results; some other business intervened, but I remember quite
well that I returned at nine o’clock to a little block of flats, that
were not exactly flats, but superior model dwellings. I remember the
hard, stone stairs and the iron banisters, you will soon see why. As I
left, later in the evening, I shut the door of the flat behind me, and
stood for a second in the entire blackness of the landing. Then I felt
a foot against my left ankle, and a hand grip my left arm. It was the
darkness saved me, for it is not easy accurately to seize an arm in the
dark, and the notorious ‘pull-over’ is not suited for cellar blackness.
I remember that I did not think, that I did not have time to be afraid.
I remember only the vast unchaining of a self-protective instinct,
that swung my right hand across to the left. I swear I did not will it.
And I still have unforgettably in my knuckles the sensation of crash
and give, in my ears the curious, fat sound, something like ‘kroch,’
that was made by some teeth giving way under the blow. And then there
was an immensely long pause, during which I had time to think; it may
have lasted a tenth of a second. There was a dull, muffled sound, that
of a head striking the iron banisters. That is all, except that I
remember the clatter of my feet on the stone stairs.
But to the man who wanders in London streets at night, and I am one of
these, stranger things happen. One of those cases was ‘The Poisoned
Girl of Grosvenor Square.’ It was about twelve o’clock at night. As
I turned out of Brook Street into the Square, I saw on my right two
people by the railings of an area. One was a woman dressed in black,
kneeling down and holding on to the railings by one hand. The other
was a man, who stood a few yards off, with statue-like immobility. I
remember thinking: ‘This is awkward. He has been knocking her about,
and I suppose I shall have to say something, and if he attacks me in
front no doubt she’ll attack me from behind.’ But still, there was
nothing to do but to say something. So I went up to them, and suddenly
realised that the two people had nothing to do with each other. She was
kneeling in that frozen attitude, and he was looking on. The girl was
young, very white, with masses of fair hair. She was neatly dressed in
black, and looked like a parlourmaid. Her eyes were closed, and she
seemed hardly to breathe. Two or three times I asked her what was the
matter, but she did not reply. Then only did I look at the man, who was
evidently of another class. A rather large, square man, the sort of man
whom you know to be bald, though he has his hat on, with a moustache
that was too thick, and cheeks that were too healthy, a phlegmatic,
staring man.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said the man.
As it was clear that he was the sort of man who wouldn’t know, I
turned to the girl and, taking her by the shoulder, tried to make her
stand up. I was surprised to find her limp instead of stiff, and she
fell back against my shoulder with a little groan.
‘Let me alone,’ she murmured.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked again. ‘Are you in any trouble?’
‘Let me alone,’ she said again.
I felt irritated because she did not realise that I couldn’t let her
alone, that man’s code compelled me to torture her, and that nothing in
the world could allow me to let her alone.
‘Let me help you,’ I said, feeling that I behaved like a considerable
idiot. ‘What is it?’
She opened her eyes a little, and murmured: ‘I’ve taken something.’
‘Taken something?’ I repeated, vaguely thinking of theft. ‘What do you
mean? Taken something.’
‘Poison,’ she said. Then again: ‘Let me alone.’
I hear the shrillness of my voice as I cried out: ‘Poison!’; then I
found myself hurrying her along the pavement; ‘What is it?’ I said
to her, as we went. ‘Is it laudanum? You’ve got to walk, you know,’
and to the man: ‘Hurry up. Get a cab.’ There was no cab to be seen.
‘Come along!’ I shouted. ‘Run ahead and get a cab.’ After a moment’s
hesitation he waddled away, not much faster than we. And now the girl
was almost weeping, while I tortured her with questions, tried to make
her run, this one idea of laudanum in my mind. At last she answered:
‘Spirits of salt.’
It took us very long, I think, to get up North Audley Street, and I
felt rent by her youth and her prettiness, for the fair hair was coming
unbound on my shoulder. There was a tenderness in me as I lifted her at
last into the cab. I remember saying to the man, ‘You’ve been pretty
slow about it. I hope you haven’t killed her. What were you doing
staring at her instead of doing something?’
Then he said: ‘Oh, well, one doesn’t want to be mixed up.’
[Illustration:
THE HEART OF THE CITY]
There is no end to this story. I took her to the Middlesex, and
they saved her by means of the stomach pump: to this day I cannot help
wishing that her salvation might have had a more romantic name. But
much more impressive is the man’s remark. I should not wonder if most
people go through life with a single end in view: not to be mixed up.
And one might as well be dead as not be mixed up. I have been much more
mixed up than I dare tell in this respectable volume. I stole a baby
once.
That is the story of ‘The Stolen Baby of Pimlico.’ I was waiting
for an omnibus one night at the Chippenham. A young, dark girl was
also waiting for the omnibus, but as she was showing more signs of
impatience than are usual, namely, stamping, I could not help being
interested. At last, as she passed me and flung me a look of intense
malevolence, which I felt was rather unfair, I could not help smiling
and saying: ‘I wonder whether there are any more buses.’ (Now I come to
think of it, I might have said something more soothing.) This had the
unexpected result of arousing confidence. ‘There’s got to be another
bus,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to fetch my sister’s baby.’
‘Oh!’ I remarked.
We said no more for some time, and still no omnibus came. Then a taxi
crawled up to us, and I said: ‘Well, if there are no more buses we had
better take this taxi.’ The dark girl, who was young and very pretty,
put on an expression of increased malevolence, but as I stopped the
taxi, she said: ‘Oh, all right then, but I give the cabman the address,
and not you.’ As we sat down, I gathered from this that my wanderer
was no fledgling. But, after a few minutes, as she discovered that I
made no attempt to kiss her, she became confidential. She had run away
from an evil stepmother. She had £2 10s. She had just taken a furnished
flat at £3 10s. a week. She was nineteen. She was going on the stage.
Also, she wouldn’t have gone away if it hadn’t been for her father.
(Rather mixed, this.) As we drew nearer to Pimlico I became more and
more confused, for the baby was turning into her sister-in-law’s baby,
and I swear that he became a she. We stopped in a little black street
in Pimlico, in front of an enormous Victorian house which was still
blacker than the street. ‘I must ring,’ said the girl, and promptly
took from her little bag a key. Therefore she did not ring, but
disappeared into the house, the inside of which was blacker than the
outside, leaving the door wide open. After I had waited for a moment
she came out again: ‘I say,’ she said, ‘I can’t carry him down; he’s
too heavy.’
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘now I’m in for it. But they can’t have laid much of
a trap for a young man picked up outside the Chippenham.’ So, true to
my principles, I went in. The house stank of solitude. It was the sort
of house that does not even creak. I felt my way up to the first floor,
and in a back room where there was very little besides a bed and a
couple of chairs, I found asleep a pretty boy aged about five. ‘Pick
him up,’ murmured the girl, ‘and don’t make a noise, I don’t want to
wake the woman so late.’ Obediently I picked him up, and carried him
down into the taxi. Just as the girl was about to follow me in, she
said: ‘Now I’d better pay the woman. Lend me two shillings.’ In a few
moments she came back, and some time later made me pull up the taxi at
the corner of a side street, off Elgin Avenue.
Only later did all these confusions, this mixture of sexes and
relationships, the silence in the silent house, lead me to theories.
Little by little they crystallised into this: I seem to have stolen a
baby I don’t know, belonging to somebody I don’t know, and taken it I
don’t know where, in the charge of I don’t know whom. It preyed on me
rather. I even worked up an alibi. Now I suppose it does not matter, as
the child may be a householder.
There are many other stories I should like to tell, that of ‘The
Watchmaker and the Four Pounds of Black-Lead,’ though, really, the
adventure of ‘The Two Girls from County Cork and the Lost Camisole,’
is much more remarkable, but these and others must appear in another
volume. There are many of these people, and one never discovers them
before ten o’clock or so. They live in the streets, where they have
their loves and their tragedies, and mainly in those places where
there is not too much light. They like the darkness because the light
of human understanding is not good for their peculiar affairs. We do
not think enough of the influence of light. When we stand on Primrose
Hill and, as Karl Baedeker would put it, behold before us the rich
expanse of a great and sleeping city, we do not individualise the
lights enough. When we look down upon Piccadilly Circus flaring from
every veranda, and, like the laburnum, dropping wells of fire, when in
these days we stand at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and watch
the electric signs: ‘Player’s Navy Mixture,’ ‘Meux’s London Original
Stout,’ ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ and ‘Tube,’ when we walk in all that brightness, we
do not realise that this is the spirit of our city, the rather crude,
commercial, and friendly spirit of London. Nor, in other cities at
night, say in Birmingham, where through the dirty glass falls dirty
yellow light, do we perceive in man unambitiousness. For mankind must
have light. Light alone opens the windows on life, and makes night
Arabian.
Only one creature likes the dark, and that is a wanderer, the cat. Have
you watched cats at night? If you try in the street to stroke cats when
the mood of night is on them, when they crouch under a bush, rolled
up into tight balls, their sharp heads sunk into the woolly folds of
their shoulders, when some are shadows in the shadow, spotted with two
points of fire, they will not shrink from you, nor approach you, but so
remain in static life. Or they will swiftly pass you, at that queer,
soft trot, making towards a secret direction with entire intentness.
Or, one upon the steps of a house, the other on a balustrade, they
will face each other with swishing tails, and so remain in immense
motion within the same spot, an infinity of provocation in every shiver
of their sleek flanks; you, human, shall not know whether they are
minded to love or war. If you interfere, you break the spell of their
communication, but there is no room for you in their compact. You
are the spectre of the commander, and they flee. But you shall feel
the hostility they have left behind them; it flows from the immense
cruelty of their cold eyes, that are lovely as emerald and topaz,
that can harbour no love, but only voluptuousness, calm, deep eyes
that calculate and fix only upon that which can serve them, eyes that
glimpse only things they fear and things they desire, not things for
which they may suffer. You shall stay awhile in that hostile ambiance,
while they have fled into the night, to adventures more secret and
profound than any that may be yours, even though you, too, be one of
Diana’s foresters, a gentleman of the shade, a minion of the moon.
V
SOUPS AND STEWS