of the past there would be many selections as to the most thrilling
moment. This one would choose the occasion of Marc Antony's oration over
Caesar's body, that the execution of Robespierre; a third would vote for
a general's triumph at Athens; a fourth for Nelson's funeral at St.
Paul's; and still another, greatly daring, might name a certain trial
scene in Jerusalem. These, however, represent the choice of the
specialists in human emotions and historic _frissons_. Many of the more
ordinary of us would, I conjecture, elect to join the crowd of the past
at the play; for what, they would hold, could be more interesting than
to make one of the audience at the first night of "Hamlet," or "Le
Bourgeois," or "Cato" or "She Stoops to Conquer," or "The School for
Scandal"? Whether the differences or resemblances to ourselves would be
the more striking is a question; but I fancy the resemblances. And I
fancy that such would still be the case could one be spirited back
across the centuries and be set down in this Verona theatre at some gala
performance. For human nature's reluctance to change is never more
manifest than in the homes of the drama, and the audience in this
embryonic playhouse in the London street whose name escapes me and the
audience in that crumbling abode of lizards beneath the burning sun of
Verona would probably be astonishingly alike.
XII
THE GREEN AMONG THE GREY
The London plane has a special advantage over other trees in growing
where it is most wanted. The maimed elms of Kensington Gardens, for
example, grow where already there is a waste of greenery, but the plane
trees which I have particularly in my mind at this moment grow among
bricks and brush the sides of houses with their branches. From a balloon
the leaves of these trees, making--from that altitude, immediately
above--verdant pools among the red and grey of the roofs, must strike
the eye very soothingly. In no balloon have I ever set foot, and hope
not to, but having ascended St. Paul's and other eminences I am familiar
with something of the same effect.
Looking down on London from a great height in the City--from the
Monument, say--the impression received is a waste of blackened grey with
infrequent and surprising spots of herbage to lighten it. Looking down
on London from a great height in the West-end--from the campanile of
the Westminster Cathedral, for instance--the impression is of greenness
first and dark grey after, for almost immediately below are St. James's
Park and Green Park and the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and, quite
near, the rolling acres of the Hyde. That is in summer. In winter the
City prospect changes, for since most of its green is the green of the
leaf, little but the blackened grey is left through the smoke. The
western prospect, however, remains much the same, although more sombre,
for most of its green is the green of grass. If one would see both
scenes at their smilingest, but particularly the City, climb the
Monument (it has only 345 of the steepest steps) in mid May. For
London's green in mid May is the country's green in mid June, such a
hurry is the Old Lady in.
I am not sure that the occasional glimpses of her trees are not the
best. The parks can be perhaps a shade too monotonously green: they are
too big; they might be in the country; but the delicate branches that
feel for the light among the masonry have a quality all their own, given
to them largely by contrast.
How soon this forest city of ours would revert to the wild, if only her
citizens ceased to fret her and keep Nature under, we had a chance of
learning when the Aldwych site was laid bare some few years since.
Instantly from the ruins sprang a tangle of vegetation, with patches of
flowers among it, rooting themselves in a mysterious way in nothing more
nutritious than mortar, to the bewilderment and despair of all passing
gardeners who with such pains and patience coax blossoms to flourish in
prepared soil. Perhaps an even more striking instance of the fertility
of London stone was observable when the Stamford Bridge ground was
reopened towards the end of the War for the American baseball matches,
and we found that, left to their own devices, the raised platforms, all
of solid concrete, had become terraced lawns.
But the plane tree, who is my hero at the moment, awaits his eulogy. It
is as though Nature, taking pity on commercial man, had given him this
steady companion on his lonely money-making way: "Go," said she to the
plane tree, "and befriend this sordid duffer. No matter how hard the
ground, how high the surrounding houses, how smoke-covered the sun, how
shattering the traffic, how neglectful the passers-by, I will see that
you flourish. It is your mission to alleviate the stones. You shall put
forth your leaves early and hold them late to remind the money-maker
that life is sweet somewhere, and to cheer him with the thought that
some day, when he has made enough, and come to his senses, he may
breathe sweet air again."[2]
[Footnote 2: Honour where honour is due; and Nature, it must be
admitted, has very valuable allies in the Metropolitan Public Gardens
Associations.]
Nature's choice was very wise, for the plane tree, above all others,
seems to have the gift of distributing a pervading greenness. As well as
being green itself, it tinges the circumambient atmosphere with green.
If one doubts this, let him visit Pump Court in the Temple, where two
trees absolutely flood with leaves a parallelogram of masonry. But if
Pump Court is more than lit by two plane trees, Cheapside in the summer
takes heart from one only--that famous tree which springs from a tiny
courtyard at the corner of Wood Street, and, although lopped back almost
to a sign-post some few years ago, is again a brave portent of the open
world to all the merchants of Chepe and their customers. It has been
suggested that it was the greenness of this tree, a century and more
earlier, that at this same Wood Street corner set Wordsworth's Poor
Susan upon her dream of rural joys. Whether it is old enough for that, I
know not; but I like the idea.
Such is the value of her ground that London City proper has necessarily
to be content with minute oases, and travelling eastwards one must go a
long way before one comes to a real expanse comparable with the
pleasures of the west. The cemetery of Bunhill Fields is the largest
until Victoria Park is reached--that really necessary park which has
such hard usage that there are acres of it without a blade of grass
left. Here the East both apes the West and instructs it. There is one
lake here on which rowing boats incessantly ply, and a motor launch used
to make continual trips round an island with a Japanese temple on it for
a penny a voyage; and there is another lake where thousands of little
East-end boys bathe in the summer all day long. Now, the Serpentine in
Hyde Park never had a motor launch, and bathing is allowed in it only
before breakfast and at eve.
The best known of London's parks come where they are not wanted
exceedingly. Hyde and St. James's and the Green Park and Kensington
Gardens are all open spaces in areas where the streets are wide and the
rooms large and light, and the poor can use and enjoy them only by
walking some distance to do so and then would probably rather be on
Hampstead Heath with its absence of restrictions. But Victoria Park is
emphatically the right park in the right place. The West-enders, even
without their parks, would still be healthy and moderately happy; but
Victoria Park must literally have kept thousands upon thousands of
children alive. So, to a smaller extent, must Battersea Park. And not
long ago there was a movement afoot--now perhaps only suspended--to make
yet another park where it is wanted: at Shadwell, on the site of a
disused fish market adjoining the river and the docks, where the
curiously squalid homes of Wapping may send forth their children for sun
and air. The idea was to link the park with the memory of King Edward
VII., and there could not be a wiser or more beneficent scheme. It is
one, moreover, which he with his practical sympathy would have been the
first to support. This park, if it becomes a reality, will be in one way
the best of them all, for it will have a frontage on the busy part of
the Thames, below the Pool, to give the children the sight of the great
ships going by and thus unlock the world for them.
Victoria Park's very special attraction, to me, is its bathing lake: one
of the wonderful sights of London which very few central Londoners and
no Americans have even seen. Here boys rollick and frolic in their
thousands, all stark and all more than happy, with the happiness that
has to be expressed by action--in shouts and leaps and pursuit. On the
hot August afternoon that I was last there, the sun, sinking through a
haze, turned these ragamuffins to merboys and their skin to glory. The
water is surrounded by trees; so that the mean and grimy streets which
gave these urchins forth and were waiting to reclaim them again might
have been as remote as Japan.
It was not only the most surprising spectacle--there, in the
East-end--but the completest triumph of nakedness I ever dreamed of, for
with nakedness had come not only beauty, but an ecstasy and
irresponsibility as of the faun. "Time has run back and fetched the Age
of Gold," I murmured as I watched them in their joy, gleaming and
glistening. And then, half an hour after, as I sat by the path outside
this enchanted pool and watched them returning home, with their so
lately radiant bodies covered with dirty clothes, and their little
sleek, round heads shapeless with half-dried hair, and the horse-play of
the arid park taking the place of the primeval gaieties and raptures of
the water, I knew that the Age of Gold had passed.
XIII
THE FATHERLY FORCE
London may be "the stony-hearted step-mother" that De Quincey called her
but Londoners are not necessarily neglected orphans because of that. So
long as one policeman remains, we shall never be fatherless.
If I were Miss Jane Taylor of Ongar I should put the following questions
into melodious and easily-memorised verse; but instead they are in
prose. Who is it, when we are lost, that tells us the way, always
extending an arm as he does so? The policeman. Who is it that knows
where the nearest chemist's is? The policeman. Who, when we are in
danger of being run over if we cross the road, lifts a hand like a York
ham and cleaves a path for us? The policeman. At night, when we have
lost the latch-key, who is it that effects an entrance (I borrow his own
terminology) through a window? The policeman. The tale of his
benefactions is endless.
Two American girls recently in London spent much of their time in
pretending to an ignorance of the city, entirely (they confessed) in
order to experience the delight of conversing with constables; and a
lady once told me that the nicest men she had ever met (and she saw them
every week) were the policemen in the Lost Umbrella Office on the
Embankment. I believe it. I have the same feeling when I go there, and
it bewilders me, remembering these fascinating officials, to think that
the Foreign Office ever has any difficulty in appointing Ambassadors.
Yet these too, with all their sympathy and suavity and sweet
reasonableness, are policemen _au fond_. For the dark blue uniform is
very powerful and every man who dons the white worsted glove finds his
hand turning to iron beneath it. Whatever he may have been before the
Force absorbed him, he will henceforward side with order against
disorder, with respectability against Bohemianism, with sobriety against
vinous jollity. And yet the policemen make their allowances. I watched
four of them the other day frog-marching a very "voilent" (as they
always say in their evidence the next morning) reprobate from Burleigh
Street to Bow Street. During the struggle he distributed some vicious
kicks, but I could not determine by the constables' attitude, though
they would, no doubt, have preferred a more tractable captive, that they
felt any grudge towards him or thought him any worse than a meeker
delinquent.
Although in real life the policeman is so monumentally respectable and
solid, on the stage he is never anything but comic. _A kiss for
Cinderella_ to some extent qualifies this; for the constable there with
the "infalliable" system was romantical as well. But, generally
speaking, a policeman's part is a comic part, and must be so. Tradition
is too strong for anything else. Too many clowns in too many
harlequinades have wreaked their mischievous will on him. Hence,
whatever the play, directly we see him we begin to laugh; for we know
that though the uniform is honourable the voice will be funny. But in
real life the police are serious creatures, while during the first three
days of Armistice week, when they had to stand by and watch all kinds of
goings-on for which no one was to be whopped, they were pathetic, too.
Seldom can they have been so unhappy as when the bonfire was burning in
the middle of Cockspur Street, and nothing could be done, or was
permitted to be done.
London, I maintain, has few sublimer sights than a policeman doing his
duty. I saw one yesterday. The window of the room which is principally
devoted to my deeds of inkshed looks upon a point where four roads meet,
on three of which are omnibus routes. This means that there is never
any lack of moving incident whenever I look out. Sometimes there is a
moving accident, too. Yesterday, for example, hearing a warning call and
a crash, I was at the window in time to see an omnibus and a small wagon
inextricably mixed, and to watch with what celerity a crowd can
assemble. But it was not that which drew the eye; it was the steady
advance from a distant point of one of our helmeted fathers. He did not
hurry: nothing but pursuit of the wicked fleeing makes a policeman run;
but his onset was irresistible. Traffic rolled back from him like the
waters of the Red Sea. When he reached the scene of trouble, where the
motor-driver and the driver of the wagon were in ecstasies of _tu
quoque_, while the conductor was examining the bonnet for damage and the
passengers were wondering whether it was better to wait and work out
their fares or change to another bus--when he reached the scene of
trouble, he performed an action which never fails to fascinate me: he
drew forth his pocket-book. There is something very interesting in the
way in which a policeman does this. The gesture is mainly pride, but
there is misgiving in it, too: the knowledge that the pen is not as
mighty as the truncheon. But the pride is very evident: the satisfaction
of Matter being seen in association with Mind, like a voter whose hand
has been shaken in public by a titled candidate. Policemen as a rule are
laborious writers, and this one was true to type, but there is none that
comes nearer the author of the Book of Fate. What a policeman writes,
goes.
One of the best stories of the fatherliness of the Fatherly Force that I
ever heard was told to me by that elvish commentator on life, and most
tireless of modern Quixotes, the late Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde's devoted
friend. He brought it, oddly enough, from Russia, and, when I urged him
to write it, with characteristic open-handedness he presented it to me.
The heroine was a famous member of the Russian Imperial Ballet who,
though she had not then danced in London--her genius being too precious
in her own country--had been here unprofessionally as a sightseer; and
it was here that the adventure which is the foundation of this narrative
befell. From her own lips, at a supper party in St. Petersburg or
Moscow, Ross had the tale, which now, but lacking all his personal
enrichments, I tell again.
The dancer when in London had witnessed one of our processions: the
opening of Parliament, the Lord Mayor's Show--I can't say what--and she
had found herself at a disadvantage in the crowd. It is unusual for
_premieres danseuses_ to be tall, even when they are poised on the very
tips of their conquering toes; and this lady was no exception. The
result was that she could not see, and not to be able to see is for any
woman a calamity, but for a foreign woman a tragedy: particularly so
when she is in her own country a queen, accustomed to every kind of
homage and attention. The _ballerina_ was at the height of her despair
when one of the policemen on duty took pity on her, and lifting her in
his arms held her up long enough to enjoy the principal moments of the
pageant. From that day onwards, she said, the London policeman was, for
her, the symbol of strength and comfort and power. Gigantic Cossacks
might parade before her all day, but her true god out of the machine was
from Scotland Yard....
A time came when, to the grief of her vast public, she fell ill. The
Tsar's own physicians attended her, but she became no better, and at
last it was realised that an operation was inevitable. Now, an operation
is an ordeal which a _premiere danseuse_ can dread with as much
intensity as any one else, and this poor little lady was terrified.
Empresses of the ballet should be exempted from such trials. No, she
vowed, she could never go through with it. The idea was too
frightening.
"But," said the first physician, "you must. It will only be a slight
affair; you will come out of your convalescence better than before."
"Yes," said the second physician, "and more beautiful than before."
"And," urged the third physician, "more popular than before."
"And," added the surgeon, "you will live for ever."
But she still trembled and refused.... It was impossible,
unthinkable....
What then?
Well, let me say at once that, as a matter of fact, she underwent the
operation with perfect fortitude, and it was a great success. But how do
you think she brought herself to face it? Only by tightly holding the
white gloved hand of a specially constructed doll of massive, even
colossal, proportions, dressed in the uniform of a London policeman.
XIV
MY FRIEND FLORA
"How much is this bunch?" I asked of the flower-woman at the corner.
"A shilling," she replied, "but you can have it for sixpence. I hate the
sight of it."
Now here was an oddity in a world of self-centred, acquisitive
tradespeople: a dealer who decried her own wares. Obviously flower-women
can have temperaments.
I asked her what there was about palm, as we call those branches of
willow with the fluffy, downy buds on them, that so annoyed her.
"It's such stupid stuff," she explained. "I can understand people buying
daffodils or tulips or violets, because they're pretty or sweet, but not
this dried-up stuff with the little kittens."
The remark set me wondering to what extent dealers in other articles are
perplexed by their customers' preferences. (Some milliners, I hope.) For
the most part we are encouraged by the shopkeeper to follow our own
inclinations. His taste may be utterly different, but he doesn't impose
it on us; he ventures to suggest only when there are varying prices and
we seem unduly inclined to the lowest. But this old lady was prepared,
long before the bargaining stage had set in, to knock off fifty per
cent. and traduce the goods as well. Surely a character.
"And that's not all," she added. "What do you think a lady--calls
herself a lady--said to me just now when she bought threepenny worth?
She said it lasted a year. Fancy telling a poor flower-woman that!"
We went on to talk of her calling. I found her an "agreeable blend" (as
the tobacconists say) of humour and resignation; and very practical.
"Why are your flowers," I asked her, "so much better than the flowers of
the man the other side of the road?"
"Because he takes his home at night," she said. "You should never do
that. If I've got any unsold I leave them at the fire-station and then
they're fresh in the morning. But I don't often have any left over."
This was, I should say, a day of acute discomfort: it had been bitterly
raining since early morning, and yet there was no bitterness in the
flower-woman. She was merely resigned. Very damp, but cheerfully
apathetic. "When it's cold and wet like this," I asked, "is life worth
living?"
"Of course," was her splendid answer; "aren't there the nights?"
Rather fine that--even if as a commentary on the wakeful hours a little
acid. And for those who can sleep, how true! "Aren't there the nights?"
I must remember the solace when next the cynic or the misanthrope girds
at sunless noons.
Of her philosophy she then gave me another taste, for, observing a great
mass of loose coins, many of them silver, lying in the basket, I asked
if she were not afraid of a thief snatching at it. "Oh, no," she said.
"But I don't always have it there. It's because it's so wet to-day.
Counting helps."
My guess would have been that although the life of flower-women calls
for philosophy, for philosophy to respond is by no means the rule; and
her consolation and cheerfulness made me very happy. Yet what a penance
much of their lives must be! First of all, there is the weather. Wet or
fine, hot or cold, they must be out in it, and stationary at that. What
to place second and third I do not know, but there is the perishable
character of the stock-in-trade to be considered, and, when fogs and
frosts interfere, the chance of being unable to collect any
stock-in-trade at all. But exposure must be the crucial strain.
The whole question of this motionless, receptive attitude to the
elements is interesting to me, who catch cold several times a day. How
these people can stand it is a constant mystery. That blind man, for
instance, at the little door of the Temple just below the Essex Street
archway--ever since I can remember London he has been there, with his
matches, always placid, no matter what new buffetings Heaven has for
him.
The blind in particular seem to become indifferent to climatic extremes;
and there must be in every one's cognizance two or three immovable
sightless mendicants defying rain and chill. Every town in the country
has such landmarks, and all seem to retain their health. But I recollect
that the blind man who used to sit in front of the Grand Hotel at
Brighton forty years ago spelling out Holy Writ, while the dog at his
feet collected coppers in a little box, always in winter wore mittens
and a cap with ear-flaps, and had fingers red and swollen. Still, he
endured. Whether with those red and swollen fingers he really deciphered
the Evangel or merely repeated from memory, we never knew, but I can
still hear the droning voice, "And Jesus said----"
This insensitiveness to January blasts and February drenchings may be
one of the compensations that the blind enjoy. Whatever else happens to
them they never, perhaps, catch cold. And that is more than something.
But how odd that these stolid, shabby, and often rather battered old
florists should be the middle-men and middle-women between the country
and the city, but for whose indifference to pitiless skies so many
town-dwellers would never see a blossom at all! There is nothing of the
country about them, nothing of the garden--almost no Londoner less
suggests the riot of a herbaceous border--and yet it is they who form
the link between flower-bed and street.
"Well," I said, grasping the bunch of palm that the old flower-woman had
sold me at such a sacrifice, "good-bye; I hope you'll empty your
basket."
"And I hope you'll empty yours," she replied.
"Mine?" I said, "I haven't got one."
"Oh, yes, you have," said Flora; "every one's got a basket, only they
don't always know where to take it."
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Adventures and Enthusiasms, by E. V. Lucas