One o'clock in the City of London. Crowds overflow the pavement into
the narrow, twisting road. Young men in striped trousers, ruled like
ledgers, black coats sober as a bill of lading, rush or saunter,
according to their natures, towards a quick lunch-bar, where a girl
with golden hair will give them beer and mutton. Girls, arm-in-arm,
discuss those eternal verities--dress, love, and another woman--as
they go primly or coyly, according to their nature, towards two
poached eggs and a cup of tea. Here and there a large man in a silk
hat, who may be a millionaire or a bankrupt, chases the inevitable
chop. And the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders.
But behind a tall hoarding that shouts dogmatically of soap and
shirts and pills things are quiet. Out of the chaos a great new bank
will rise. Workmen sit around in picturesque groups eating. On
their knees are spotted handkerchiefs in which lie gigantic
sandwiches cut by wives in the early dawn. They carve them with
clasp-knives and carry them to their mouths, the clasp-knives upright
in their hands grazing their cheeks. They drink from tin cans, and
wonder, in rich monosyllables, "wot" will win the three-thirty.
I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive
strata--brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement--lies the clay on
which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some
surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the
spine. I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two
thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four
feet above the primal mud.
How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of
London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian,
Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman. There it stops,
for there it began. Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of
thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written
in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay;
and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green
undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree
on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet
London?
A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and
shouts up to his mate:
"Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!"
And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that
look like flat cakes of sealing wax. I pick them up, knock off the
caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red
pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of
a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus.
F." Just that.
What does it mean? It means that I have seen the deep roots of
London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome. "Fl.
Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who
lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning
"Flavius Germanus made it." What a message to receive in modern
London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars,
throbs, and thunders!
* * *
Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a
new bank is built. For we stand on the shoulders of Rome. Men from
the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like
lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits
of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that
far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill.
* * *
As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still
stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius.
What do I see? I see the first London and its colonists pegging out
their camp. Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin. The second London
rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the
young men; and round this London they are building a wall.
Gradually, as a vision in a crystal clears and forms out of mist, I
see a smaller, colder Rome standing with its marble feet in Thames
water. I see rows of wood and red-tile houses running within the
walls in straight lines like tents within a castrum; I see the marble
capitals under our grey skies, the majestic circular sweep of the
theatre, the white gleam of the Forum, the gates with their statues,
the baths at the gates, the long straight streets crowded, noisy,
varied. I see the shaggy Britons and the Gauls move to a side as the
Roman troops come clattering over the stones, their helmets shining,
swords at hips; the marvellous short sword that carved out an Empire
as a girl might cut a cake.
And the heart of this little English Rome, how did it beat? I
imagine that it knew the enterprising business man opening up new
markets, the enthusiastic soldier always dreaming of sending the
Eagles north, the inevitable Phœnician with his galley at the
docks and his shop somewhere in the city, the bad boy sent to
colonial London to expiate, and women making the best of it, always
three months behind Rome in fashion: wives and sweethearts who had
followed their men into barbary. O, the homesickness and heroism of
colonization! How many old men must have wept to see their careful
vines wilt in the London clay; and I wonder if Londinium Augusta
numbered among its inhabitants the optimistic gardener who bored his
friends with a vision of olives in a neat Italian row!
There would come a time in this first London when a small boy would
say to his mother: "Tell me about Rome!"
And she would sit facing the broad Thames, talking of Italy as a
homesick woman in Winnipeg might talk of England:
"Do you see those galleys coming up under the bridge like water
beetles? They come from Ostia--from Rome. They bring soldiers
and--sometimes people go home in them! Yes, dear, perhaps when you
grow up you too will go. The sun always shines there, and it is
seldom cold as it is here. When your father was a little boy like
you..."
So the tale would go on.
Then I see the market-place, the marvellous mixture of race which
Rome drew to her cities: the dark Iberian soldier pressed into
service for duty on the Wall, the Gaul, the German, the negro, the
merchants with their wares, the amber from the Baltic, the pearls,
the perfumes from the East, the brown fingers holding out gold chains
as the Roman ladies go by....
What chatter of a six months old scandal as the women walk to the
baths; what discussion of Rome's latest _coiffure_, her newest pin,
her smartest sandal! At the docks the creak of timber and the
straining of a released rope, the "one, two, three" as the oarsmen
dip their great blades in the Thames; and a galley goes home with
letters to Cæsar from the Governor of London.
Londinium Augusta! There is nothing between her and Verulamium but a
straight road through the forest, then another road, more forests,
and proud Camulodunum on its hill. Three fortified islands in a
green sea. So England takes shapes out of the mists of Time; so
London begins.
And I like to think, to round off the picture, that, on a cold night
of winter, when brittle green stars glitter in the sky like glass,
some grey old wolf creeps to the edge of the Hampstead woods and
licks his jaws as he looks towards the first lights of London. Then
he yawns and blinks his eyes as a dog blinks and looks away from
something he does not understand. So he trots softly among the trees
with the instinct that things are different; that--something has
happened to the Hill!