The flowers heaped about the bronze fountain are for them. And so that
they may have flowers all day long, older and fatter and shabbier women
make their home round the fountain (modelled by a genius to the memory
of one whose dream was to abolish the hardships of poverty), with a
sugar-box for a drawing-room suite and a sack for a curtain; these
needy ones live there, to the noise of water, with a secret society
of newspaper-sellers, knowing intimately all the capacities of the
sugar-box and sack; and on hot days they revolve round the fountain with
the sun, for their only sunshade is the shadow of the dolphins. On every
side of their habituated tranquillity the odours of petrol swirl. The
great gaudy-coloured autobuses, brilliant as the flowers, swing and
swerve and grind and sink and recover, and in the forehead of each is a
blackened demon, tremendously preoccupied, and so small and withdrawn
as to be often unnoticed; and this demon rushes forward all day with his
life in his hand and scores of other lives in his hand, for two pounds a
week. When he stops by the fountain, he glances at the flowers unseeing,
out of the depths of his absorption. He is piloting cargoes of the
bright beings for whom the flowers are heaped.
Stand on the steps of the fountain, and look between the autobuses and
over the roofs of taxis and the shoulders of policemen, and you will see
at every hand a proof that the whole glowing place, with its flags gaily
waving and its hubbub of rich hues, exists first and last for those same
bright beings. If there is a cigar shop, if there is a necktie shop like
Joseph’s coat, it is to enable the male to cut a dash with those beings.
And the life insurance office--would it continue if there were no bright
beings to be provided for? And the restaurants I And the I chemists! And
the music-hall! The sandwich-men are walking round and round with the
names of the most beauteous lifted high on their shoulders. The leather
shop is crammed with dressing-cases and hat-boxes for them. The jeweller
is offering solid gold slave-bangles (because they like the feel of the
shackle) at six pound ten.
And above all there is the great establishment on the corner! An
establishment raised by tradition and advertisement and sheer skill
to the rank of a national institution, famous from Calgary to the
Himalayas, far more famous and beloved than even the greatest poets and
philanthropists. An institution established on one of the seven supreme
sites of the world! And it is all theirs, all for them! Coloured
shoes, coloured frocks, coloured necklaces, coloured parasols, coloured
stockings, jabots, scents, hats, and all manner of flimsy stuffs whose
names--such as Shantung--summon up in an instant the deep orientalism
of the Occident: the innumerable windows are a perfect riot of
these delicious affairs! Who could pass them by? This is a wondrous
institution. Of a morning, before the heat of the day, you can see
coming out of its private half-hidden portals (not the ceremonious
glazed doors) black-robed young girls, with their hair down their backs,
and the free gestures learnt at school and not yet forgotten, skipping
off on I know, not what important errands, earning part of a livelihood
already in the service of those others. And at its upper windows appear
at times more black-robed girls, and disappear, like charming prisoners
in a castle.
*****
The beings for whom the place exists come down all the curved vistas
towards it, on foot or on wheel, all day in radiant droves. They are
obliged at any rate to pass through it, for the Circus is their Clap-ham
Junction, and the very gate of finery. Impossible to miss it! It leads
to all coquetry, and all delights and dangers. And not only down the
vistas are they coming, but they are shot along subterranean tubes, and
hurried through endless passages, and flung up at last by lifts from the
depths into the open air. And when you look at them you are completely
baffled. Because they are English, and the most mysterious women on
earth, save the Scandinavians. You cannot get at their secret; it
consists in an impenetrable ideal. With the Latin you do come in the
end to the solid marble of Latin practicalness; the Latin is perfectly
unromantic. But the romanticism of these English is something so
recondite that no research and no analysis can approach it. Ibsen could
never have made a play out of a Latin woman; but I tell you that, for
me, every woman stepping off an autobus and exposing her ankles and her
character as she dodges across the Circus, has the look in her face of
an Ibsen heroine; she emanates romance and enigma; she is the potential
mainspring of a late-Ibsen drama, the kind whose import no critic is
ever quite sure of. This it is to be Anglo-Saxon, and herein is one of
the grand major qualities of the streets of London.
[Illustration: 0167]
They are in this matter, I do believe, all alike, these creatures. You
may encounter one so ugly and mannish and grotesque that none but an
Englishman could take her to his arms, and even she has the ineffable
romantic gaze. All the countless middle-aged women who support
circulating libraries have it; the hair of a woman of fifty blows about
her face romantically. All the nice, youngish married women have it,
those who think they know a thing or two. And as for the girls, the
young girls, they show a romantic naïveté which transcends belief; they
are so fresh and so virginal and so loose-limbed and so obsessed by a
mysterious ideal, that really (you think) the street is too perilous a
place for them. And yet they go confidently about, either alone or in
couples, or with young men at bottom as simple as themselves, and naught
happens to them; they must be protected by their idealism. And now
and then you will see a woman who is strictly and truly _chic_, in the
extreme French sense--an amazing spectacle in our city of sloppy women
who, while dreaming of dress for ten hours a day, cannot even make their
blouses fasten decently--and this _chic_ Parisianised creature herself
will have kept her idealistic gaze! They all keep it. They die with
it at seventy-five. Whatever adventure occurs to an Englishwoman, she
remains spiritually innocent and naïve. The Circus is bathed in the mood
of these qualities.
*****
Towards dark it alters and is still the same. See it after the
performances on a matinée day, surging with heroines. See it at eight
o’clock at night, a packed mass of taxis and automobiles, each the
casket of a romantic creature, hurrying in pursuit of that ideal without
a name. Later, the place is becalmed, and scarcely an Englishwoman is
to be seen in it until after the theatres, when once again it is
nationalised and feminised to an intense degree. The shops are black,
and the flower-sellers are gone; but the electric sky-signs are in
violent activity, and there is light enough to see those baffling faces
as they flash or wander by. And the trains are now bearing the creatures
away in the deep-laid tubes.
And then there comes an hour when the hidden trains have ceased, and
the autobuses have nearly ceased, and the bright beings have withdrawn
themselves until the morrow; and now, on all the footpaths of the
Circus, move crowded processions of men young and old, slowly, as though
in the performance of a rite. It leads to nothing, this tramping; it
serves no end; it is merely idiotic, in a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon way.
But only heavy rain can interfere with it. It persists obstinately. And
the reason of it is that the Circus is the Circus. And after all, though
idiotic, it has the merit and significance of being instinctive. The
Circus symbolises the secret force which drives forward the social
organism through succeeding stages of evolution. The origin of every
effort can be seen at some time of day emerging from a crimson autobus
in the Circus, or speeding across the Circus in a green taxi. The answer
to the singular conundrum of the City is to be found early or late in
the Circus. The imponderable spirit of the basic fact of society broods
in the Circus forever. Despite all changes, there is no change. I say no
change. You may gaze into the jeweller’s shop at the gold slave-bangles,
which cannot be dear at six pound ten, since they express the secret
attitude of an entire sex. And then you may turn and gaze at the face of
a Suffragette, with her poster and her armful of papers, and her
quiet voice and her mien of pride. And you may think you see a change
fundamental and terrific. Look again.
[Illustration: 0171]