Boys are always leaning over London Bridge, as right-minded boys have
been leaning these five hundred years and more. Beneath them the
Thames, that loved river of ours, swirls and eddies round the piers,
sucking at the weathered stone as it runs seawards, out and away.
When I joined them the other day I noticed with an authentic thrill
that against the grim wharves men were doing interesting things in
ships. No matter how trivial the act--the hauling of a rope, the
turning of a winch, the painting of a hull--it becomes somehow vital
and significant to anyone on dry land. To a London office boy who
has been told not to linger by the wayside--ah! how exquisite, how
irresistible!
Sometimes little important jets of steam rose from a cargo boat,
marvellously suggesting departure and the imminence of great
adventure; enviable free men whose boots had never trod an office
stair popped their heads out of hatchways and lumbered up on deck; a
string of linked barges, dingy, low in the water, went by behind an
impertinent tug, which nosed the tide sideways, pulling and puffing.
On the hindmost barge a man was frying bacon in a jet-black pan. O,
exquisite! O, irresistible! Was this not life? Was this not
romance?
To me a fat white woman was singularly significant. She appeared
from the bowels of a barge and, moving slowly to starboard with a
nautical roll, hung an intimate item of her laundry right in the eye
of London Bridge. Then she looked round her with that composed
placidity which sustains the suburbs (just as if she were in Brixton
and not on the high seas), and after giving one of her sleeves a roll
to keep it above her fat elbow, she went below with the important air
of the busy female who believes that her industry is the hinge on
which life turns smoothly. No cut-throats on that barge, no
swashbuckling, no silly ideas about the Spanish Main there, but
everything nice and tidy, and wipe your boots on the mat and mind you
don't stay out too long after closing time! Wonderful how a
woman--any woman--softens a masculine scene and awakens the boy in
man to a swift respect--as if the matron had appeared suddenly on the
scene of a scrum on a dormitory landing! The wild places of the
earth do not care much about a man. He can't do much! When the
woman appears the aspens shiver and the tamarisks tremble and even
the oak is fearful, for a lone man is transitory and woman is
permanent: she means a home and a whole lot more men; she is the
beginning of civilization.
So the fat woman made her barge most interesting to me: she brought
it right into society, she humanized the wild old Thames. All this
was high above the office boys who pressed their stomachs to the
stone and clambered for a foothold in the balustrading so that they
might take a better view of all this glamour....
Thames, you muddy strip of magic, how many London heads have you
turned; how many sirens come in from sea on every tide to sing those
wicked songs against which we poor chained creatures sometimes wax
our ears in vain?
* * *
I looked at the faces of the spellbound office boys. They gazed like
gargoyles from the parapet. Most of them were dull and stolid; but
you never can tell! Their cheeks bulged with sweets and their eyes
regarded the river with the same intent vacancy that they would have
given to a spectacular road repair.
One face only seemed to me to hold the hunger that burns. It
belonged to a thin, pale lad who possessed no physical strength, the
type that would rather have been Hercules than Homer; the frail type
that dreams of swords and ambuscades and blood. He looked out over
the water towards Tower Bridge with eyes that were wide--whether with
imagination or indigestion I cannot say! I can only tell you this:
he was the kind of pale, useless mass of parental despair that
through history has met the turning point of existence in an idle
hour, when imagination, blazing suddenly like fired straw,
illuminates a dream on which to build a life.
What was he thinking, I wondered. Had I asked him he would have said
sullenly, "Nothing," and have slouched away, ashamed.
I wondered if he was seeing in Thames water those things that
thousands of London boys have seen--argosies and ventures and foreign
places, the drive of water past a vessel's bows, leaning sails, and
small white towns whose palm trees stand with their feet in calm
lagoons.
Who knows? This is the dream of London Bridge. This is the
challenge that the Thames flings down to London every day and every
night, crying it aloud to the huddled streets and to the crowded
places, calling it softly in the marketplace. This is the old magic.
It has given to London merchants, adventurers, sailors, poets, and
millions of poor, discontented men who must need take their burning
hearts to Balham and shut their ears.
* * *
Slowly conscience dawned in the minds of the boys. One by one they
went away, their places immediately filled by others.
Away they went into the traffic, to become lost in the ant-hills of
commerce, carrying who knows what high resolve from that stolen
moment beside the river.
* * *
More barges came downstream slowly. High and shrill sounded the
hoarse protest of a siren, imperative and wild, and I seemed to feel,
right in the heart of London, where all things are so ordered and
inevitable, the ancient call to the open places that comes with the
smell of tar and the sight of thin masts rising to the sky.