I WALKED one bright September morning in the Strand. I love London best
in the autumn. Then only can one see the gleam of its white pavements,
the bold, unbroken outline of its streets. I love the cool vistas one
comes across of mornings in the parks, the soft twilights that linger in
the empty bye-streets. In June the restaurant manager is off-hand with
me; I feel I am but in his way. In August he spreads for me the table by
the window, pours out for me my wine with his own fat hands. I cannot
doubt his regard for me: my foolish jealousies are stilled. Do I care
for a drive after dinner through the caressing night air, I can climb the
omnibus stair without a preliminary fight upon the curb, can sit with
easy conscience and unsquashed body, not feeling I have deprived some
hot, tired woman of a seat. Do I desire the play, no harsh, forbidding
“House full” board repels me from the door. During her season, London, a
harassed hostess, has no time for us, her intimates. Her rooms are
overcrowded, her servants overworked, her dinners hurriedly cooked, her
tone insincere. In the spring, to be truthful, the great lady
condescends to be somewhat vulgar—noisy and ostentatious. Not till the
guests are departed is she herself again, the London that we, her
children, love.
Have you, gentle Reader, ever seen London—not the London of the waking
day, coated with crawling life, as a blossom with blight, but the London
of the morning, freed from her rags, the patient city, clad in mists?
Get you up with the dawn one Sunday in summer time. Wake none else, but
creep down stealthily into the kitchen, and make your own tea and toast.
Be careful you stumble not over the cat. She will worm herself
insidiously between your legs. It is her way; she means it in
friendship. Neither bark your shins against the coal-box. Why the
kitchen coal-box has its fixed place in the direct line between the
kitchen door and the gas-bracket I cannot say. I merely know it as an
universal law; and I would that you escaped that coal-box, lest the frame
of mind I desire for you on this Sabbath morning be dissipated.
A spoon to stir your tea, I fear you must dispense with. Knives and
forks you will discover in plenty; blacking brushes you will put your
hand upon in every drawer; of emery paper, did one require it, there are
reams; but it is a point with every housekeeper that the spoons be hidden
in a different place each night. If anybody excepting herself can find
them in the morning, it is a slur upon her. No matter, a stick of
firewood, sharpened at one end, makes an excellent substitute.
Your breakfast done, turn out the gas, remount the stairs quietly, open
gently the front door and slip out. You will find yourself in an unknown
land. A strange city grown round you in the night.
The sweet long streets lie silent in sunlight. Not a living thing is to
be seen save some lean Tom that slinks from his gutter feast as you
approach. From some tree there will sound perhaps a fretful chirp: but
the London sparrow is no early riser; he is but talking in his sleep.
The slow tramp of unseen policeman draws near or dies away. The clatter
of your own footsteps goes with you, troubling you. You find yourself
trying to walk softly, as one does in echoing cathedrals. A voice is
everywhere about you whispering to you “Hush.” Is this million-breasted
City then some tender Artemis, seeking to keep her babes asleep? “Hush,
you careless wayfarer; do not waken them. Walk lighter; they are so
tired, these myriad children of mine, sleeping in my thousand arms. They
are over-worked and over-worried; so many of them are sick, so many
fretful, many of them, alas, so full of naughtiness. But all of them so
tired. Hush! they worry me with their noise and riot when they are
awake. They are so good now they are asleep. Walk lightly, let them
rest.”
Where the ebbing tide flows softly through worn arches to the sea, you
may hear the stone-faced City talking to the restless waters: “Why will
you never stay with me? Why come but to go?”
“I cannot say, I do not understand. From the deep sea I come, but only
as a bird loosed from a child’s hand with a cord. When she calls I must
return.”
“It is so with these children of mine. They come to me, I know not
whence. I nurse them for a little while, till a hand I do not see plucks
them back. And others take their place.”
Through the still air there passes a ripple of sound. The sleeping City
stirs with a faint sigh. A distant milk-cart rattling by raises a
thousand echoes; it is the vanguard of a yoked army. Soon from every
street there rises the soothing cry, “Mee’hilk—mee’hilk.”
London like some Gargantuan babe, is awake, crying for its milk. These
be the white-smocked nurses hastening with its morning nourishment. The
early church bells ring. “You have had your milk, little London. Now
come and say your prayers. Another week has just begun, baby London.
God knows what will happen, say your prayers.”
One by one the little creatures creep from behind the blinds into the
streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the City’s face. The
fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the
night, kisses her stone lips, and steals away. And you, gentle Reader,
return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of the early riser.
But it was of a certain week-day morning, in the Strand that I was
thinking. I was standing outside Gatti’s Restaurant, where I had just
breakfasted, listening leisurely to an argument between an indignant lady
passenger, presumably of Irish extraction, and an omnibus conductor.
“For what d’ye want thin to paint Putney on ye’r bus, if ye don’t _go_ to
Putney?” said the lady.
“We _do_ go to Putney,” said the conductor.
“Thin why did ye put me out here?”
“I didn’t put you out, yer got out.”
“Shure, didn’t the gintleman in the corner tell me I was comin’ further
away from Putney ivery minit?”
“Wal, and so yer was.”
“Thin whoy didn’t you tell me?”
“How was I to know yer wanted to go to Putney? Yer sings out Putney, and
I stops and in yer jumps.”
“And for what d’ye think I called out Putney thin?”
“’Cause it’s my name, or rayther the bus’s name. This ’ere _is_ a
Putney.”
“How can it be a Putney whin it isn’t goin’ to Putney, ye gomerhawk?”
“Ain’t you an Hirishwoman?” retorted the conductor. “Course yer are.
But yer aren’t always goin’ to Ireland. We’re goin’ to Putney in time,
only we’re a-going to Liverpool Street fust. ’Igher up, Jim.”
The bus moved on, and I was about cross the road, when a man, muttering
savagely to himself, walked into me. He would have swept past me had I
not, recognizing him, arrested him. It was my friend B—, a busy editor
of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared able
to struggle out of his abstraction, and remember himself. “Halloo,” he
then said, “who would have thought of seeing _you_ here?”
“To judge by the way you were walking,” I replied, “one would imagine the
Strand the last place in which you expected to see any human being. Do
you ever walk into a short-tempered, muscular man?”
“Did I walk into you?” he asked surprised.
“Well, not right in,” I answered, “I if we are to be literal. You walked
on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you would have walked over
me.”
“It is this confounded Christmas business,” he explained. “It drives me
off my head.”
“I have heard Christmas advanced as an excuse for many things,” I
replied, “but not early in September.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” he answered, “we are in the middle of our
Christmas number. I am working day and night upon it. By the bye,” he
added, “that puts me in mind. I am arranging a symposium, and I want you
to join. ‘Should Christmas,’”—I interrupted him.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “I commenced my journalistic career when I was
eighteen, and I have continued it at intervals ever since. I have
written about Christmas from the sentimental point of view; I have
analyzed it from the philosophical point of view; and I have scarified it
from the sarcastic standpoint. I have treated Christmas humorously for
the Comics, and sympathetically for the Provincial Weeklies. I have said
all that is worth saying on the subject of Christmas—maybe a trifle more.
I have told the new-fashioned Christmas story—you know the sort of thing:
your heroine tries to understand herself, and, failing, runs off with the
man who began as the hero; your good woman turns out to be really bad
when one comes to know her; while the villain, the only decent person in
the story, dies with an enigmatic sentence on his lips that looks as if
it meant something, but which you yourself would be sorry to have to
explain. I have also written the old-fashioned Christmas story—you know
that also: you begin with a good old-fashioned snowstorm; you have a good
old-fashioned squire, and he lives in a good old-fashioned Hall; you work
in a good old-fashioned murder; and end up with a good old-fashioned
Christmas dinner. I have gathered Christmas guests together round the
crackling logs to tell ghost stories to each other on Christmas Eve,
while without the wind howled, as it always does on these occasions, at
its proper cue. I have sent children to Heaven on Christmas Eve—it must
be quite a busy time for St. Peter, Christmas morning, so many good
children die on Christmas Eve. It has always been a popular night with
them.—I have revivified dead lovers and brought them back well and jolly,
just in time to sit down to the Christmas dinner. I am not ashamed of
having done these things. At the time I thought them good. I once loved
currant wine and girls with towzley hair. One’s views change as one
grows older. I have discussed Christmas as a religious festival. I have
arraigned it as a social incubus. If there be any joke connected with
Christmas that I have not already made I should be glad to hear it. I
have trotted out the indigestion jokes till the sight of one of them
gives me indigestion myself. I have ridiculed the family gathering. I
have scoffed at the Christmas present. I have made witty use of
paterfamilias and his bills. I have—”
“Did I ever show you,” I broke off to ask as we were crossing the
Haymarket, “that little parody of mine on Poe’s poem of ‘The Bells’? It
begins—” He interrupted me in his turn—
“Bills, bills, bills,” he repeated.
“You are quite right,” I admitted. “I forgot I ever showed it to you.”
“You never did,” he replied.
“Then how do you know how it begins?” I asked.
“I don’t know for certain,” he admitted, “but I get, on an average,
sixty-five a year submitted to me, and they all begin that way. I
thought, perhaps, yours did also.”
“I don’t see how else it could begin,” I retorted. He had rather annoyed
me. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how a poem begins, it is how it goes on
that is the important thing and anyhow, I’m not going to write you
anything about Christmas. Ask me to make you a new joke about a plumber;
suggest my inventing something original and not too shocking for a child
to say about heaven; propose my running you off a dog story that can be
believed by a man of average determination and we may come to terms. But
on the subject of Christmas I am taking a rest.”
By this time we had reached Piccadilly Circus.
“I don’t blame you,” he said, “if you are as sick of the subject as I am.
So soon as these Christmas numbers are off my mind, and Christmas is over
till next June at the office, I shall begin it at home. The housekeeping
is gone up a pound a week already. I know what that means. The dear
little woman is saving up to give me an expensive present that I don’t
want. I think the presents are the worst part of Christmas. Emma will
give me a water-colour that she has painted herself. She always does.
There would be no harm in that if she did not expect me to hang it in the
drawing room. Have you ever seen my cousin Emma’s water-colours?” he
asked.
“I think I have,” I replied.
“There’s no thinking about it,” he retorted angrily. “They’re not the
sort of water-colours you forget.”
He apostrophized the Circus generally.
“Why do people do these things?” he demanded. “Even an amateur artist
must have _some_ sense. Can’t they see what is happening? There’s that
thing of hers hanging in the passage. I put it in the passage because
there’s not much light in the passage. She’s labelled it Reverie. If
she had called it Influenza I could have understood it. I asked her
where she got the idea from, and she said she saw the sky like that one
evening in Norfolk. Great Heavens! then why didn’t she shut her eyes or
go home and hide behind the bed-curtains? If I had seen a sky like that
in Norfolk I should have taken the first train back to London. I suppose
the poor girl can’t help seeing these things, but why paint them?”