Chapter II: Dr. Sullivan (3)

After being shut for some years--to protect it from certain dissatisfied ladies who in the dim and distant past took it out of pictures if they did not get the vote--the Painted Hall at Greenwich was again opened in 1919, not, I hope, to close its doors to the public any more. All people interested in our naval history and the men who made it must acquire the Greenwich habit (although whitebait and turtle soup are no longer available to sustain them at the adjacent "Ship"), but in particular should the Nelson devotees be happy, for the Painted Hall is rich in portraits of him, portraits of his friends, pictures of scenes in his life, pictures of his death, and personal relics. Indeed this Hall is to Nelson what the Invalides is to Napoleon. Sir John Thornhill (with whose daughter Hogarth ran away) may have covered its walls and its ceiling with Stuarts and allegory--at three pounds the square yard for the ceiling work and one pound for the walls--but it is not of Stuarts and allegory that one thinks, it is of the most fascinating and romantic and sympathetic of British heroes and the greatest of our admirals.

Nelson is brought very near us. Among the personal relics are the very clothes he was wearing when he died on the _Victory_, the codicil to his will, written in his big left-hand characters and witnessed by the friend, Captain Hardy, in whose arms he sank. On a neighbouring wall is Turner's great lurid painting of the _Victory_ in action, while elsewhere in the Museum will be found a model of the whole battle, with the _Victory_ closely engaged with the _Redoubtable_, from whose mizzen-top the fatal bullet is supposed to have been fired.

There are many other intimate souvenirs; and once there were more, but thieves intervened. From those stolen in a burglary many years ago (the windows have since had bars put to them) the only one to be regained was Nelson's gold watch; and this was found--where do you think? Hidden in a concertina somewhere in Australia. But after those wanderings and vicissitudes it now reposes again in safety in the Painted Hall, for all hero-worshippers to covet.

Complete as the Nelson collection appears to be, one realises, on reflection, that only as a sailor is he celebrated here. We see him in every aspect of his fighting career; we see his friends: sturdy old William Locker, who was a governor of this Hospital, and others; we see his admirals and captains. But of Emma Hamilton no trace!

The Painted Hall, from Wren's design, was built by William and Mary. The Museum fills several rooms in an adjacent building which was to have been a riverside palace for Charles II. It is notable chiefly for its relics of the other hero of Greenwich Hospital, Sir John Franklin. It is also rich in models of ships, but of models of ships I personally can very quickly have a surfeit; rather would I sit beside the Thames and watch the real vessels go by--the big tramp steamers homing laden from abroad or leaving in ballast for the open sea; the little busy tugs, with their retinue of lighters; and the brown-sailed barges moving swiftly with the stream. The other day there was a merry breeze under a cloudless sky, and the air was filled with the music of the Greenwich symphony, which is played by an orchestra entirely composed of foghorns and hooters.

But Greenwich is amphibious. The river may not be for all tastes; there is the park too, with its avenues climbing to the heights of Blackheath. The deer have gone; but the Observatory remains, for the accurate adjustment of watches, and there is the distant prospect of London of which the great landscape painters used to be so fond, from the corner of the terrace. It is much the same as when Turner and others limned it, save that to-day the dome of St. Paul's seems to rise from the very middle of the Tower Bridge.

VI

KEW IN APRIL

Kew Gardens in the old days used to be largely a German paradise, for the Teutons in our midst found them more like their own pleasaunces, although wanting in beer, than any other London resort. But when I was last there, in 1919, I heard no German tones. A few French voices mingled with the thrushes and blackbirds; and a number of American soldiers, not unaccompanied by British beauty, sat on secluded seats. The rest of us were natives, promenading with true national decorum, carefully obeying all the laws concerning birds'-nesting, throwing paper about, smoking, and (in the glass-houses) keeping to the right, without the observance of which scientific botany cannot prosper. And for some reason or other (connected no doubt with the universal advance in the cost of life which has been agreed upon as necessary or salutary) we were all forced to pay a penny for admission.

It annoys me to think that not until the Germans vacated the gardens was this entrance fee charged. To them (as to us for generations) Kew was free; now that they have disappeared, one of the results of their provocative belligerence is that it is free no longer!

Although early yet both for flower and leaf, the daffodils were already millions strong, and would be stronger; in the rock garden the saxifrage's tender mauve clusters were to be seen, and there was a patch of the lovely _Antennaria Plantagenia_ at its best. But the most beautiful object at the moment--and that which I went especially to see--was the Yulan, the Chinese magnolia, _Magnolia conspicua_, in nearly full bloom. Imagine a great tree with black boughs and twigs exquisitely disposed, from which burst ten thousand lilies of a dazzling purity. No buds, no leaves; nothing but these myriad serene white flowers springing from the hard wood. The position of the tree adds to the strangeness and beauty of it, for it is remote from anything formal, between the biggest glass-house and the edge of the arboretum. On Saturday, seen against an indigo thunderbank, it was unearthly in its luminosity.

I have to thank the rain for driving me into the Royal Palace, which, though I have known Kew for so many years, I had never entered before. In this pleasant mansion, red brick without and white panelling within, and smaller than would satisfy the requirements of any war profiteer to-day, poor old George III. passed part of the clouded evening of his long reign. The rooms retain certain of their pictures--chiefly Dutch flower and bird subjects, very gloomy and congested, and a large portrait of "Farmer George," done by the famous Miss Linwood in woolwork--and there are a few pieces of dreadful ancient furniture in one of the Queen's apartments; but otherwise they are empty.

In spite of the associations of the palace--the deranged old monarch and his stuffy Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (recollections of Fanny Burney's "Diary" and of Peter Pindar's "Lousiad" kept chasing each other through my mind)--the general feeling in it is one of cheerfulness, the result, I fancy, as much of the proportions and whiteness of the rooms as of its situation in the green sanctuary.

VII

ROYAL WINDSOR

On a Saturday in March, when the sky was of dazzling brilliance and a wind of devilish malignancy blew from the Arctic regions, I went to Windsor, in order to compare the castle as it is with the castle as Turner saw it, and to see if it is true, as a landscape expert assures me, that the heightening of the towers has ruined it. Studying the castle from various points of view, I was consistently impressed by its adequacy, its mediaeval dominance, and its satisfying solidity.

Spring being so bitterly cold, I left the streets, where there is no central heating, and where I could catch no glimpse of any one in the least like Mistress Anne Page, and took refuge first in St. George's Chapel and then in the State Apartments. The chapel as a whole grows in beauty, even though new monuments interrupt its lines. The light, coming from a sky scoured by the northern breeze, was of the most lucid, so that every detail of the lovely ceiling was unusually visible, while even in the sombre choir, with its dark stalls and hanging banners and memorials of the Knights of the Garter, one could see almost distinctly. It is interesting to have as near London as this a sacred building so like those which we normally do not enter until we have crossed the Channel.

I was alone in the chapel, but in the State Apartments made one of a party of thirty to forty, chiefly soldiers, led round by a guide. Anything less like Harrison Ainsworth than this guide I cannot imagine; or, indeed, the inside of any castle less like the fateful and romantic fortress of that storyteller's dream. Henry VIII's suit of armour we certainly saw, but the guide's hero is a later king, George IV., who subjected every room to his altering hand. Of Herne the Hunter there was not a sign. The most sinister thing there was the bed in the Council Chamber where visiting monarchs (referred to by the guide as "The Royals") sleep, one of whom not so very long ago was the Kaiser. "I wish he was in it now," a bloodthirsty tripper muttered darkly in my ear.

The King's furniture struck me as too ornate, but he has some wonderful pictures. The guide seemed to dwell with most affection upon a landscape by Benjamin West, but I remember with more vividness and pleasure a series of portraits of Henrietta, queen of Charles I., by Van Dyck: one by the door, and two others flanking the fire-place of the superb Van Dyck room. There is also a Rubens room containing, among many more pretentious things, a fascinating portrait of the painter's second wife and a family group devised on what was, to me, a new principle. The parents are here seen in the company of their ten children; but, if the guide is to be believed, on the original canvas only the parents and a small proportion of this brood were depicted, space being left for the insertion of the others as year by year they made their appearance. The scheme offers problems. Since the eldest child looks ten or eleven and the youngest is a baby, we must suppose (always if the guide is not misinformed) that the painter added ageing touches to the whole group at each new sitting.

When one hunts in packs there is little opportunity to examine crowded walls, and there were many pictures of which I should like to see more at leisure. Among them was a Rembrandt, a Correggio, a Titian, a Honthorst, and two Canalettos. There are the punctual carvings by Grinling Gibbons in Charles II.'s dining-room and elsewhere. Other outstanding articles are the jewelled throne once belonging to the King of Candy; the armour of the King's Champion, that obsolete but picturesque functionary; and the portraits of all the winners of Waterloo, at home and in the field, except any private soldiers.

On leaving the castle I walked an incredible number of miles down an impeccably straight road to the equestrian statue that stands out so bravely against the sky on the hill that closes the vista: Snow Hill. The statue is of George III., and it is a fine bold thing. Not in the same class with Verrocchio's bronze horseman in Venice, or Donatello's bronze horseman in Padua, but impressive by its bigness and superior to either of those masterpieces in its site, which is not, however, so commanding as that eminence at Valley Forge which is dominated by Anthony Wayne on his metal steed. And then I found a really good confectioner's, whose first two initials correspond startlingly to my own, and, in the company of frozen Etonians not less greedy than I, ate little pots of jam until it was time to catch the train.

VIII

THREE LITTLE BACKWATERS

I was saying just now something in praise of the museum of London's streets: how much entertainment it offered to the eyes of soldiers on leave. But whether or not soldiers valued it, there is no such inveterate or more curious wanderer in that museum than myself, and I wish I had more time to spend in it. So many discoveries to make! I have, for example, but now stumbled upon Meard Street. I was passing through Wardour Street, and noting how the old curiosity shops are giving way to cinema companies (in the window of one of which a waxen Charlie Chaplin in regal robes is being for ever photographed by a waxen operator whose hand turns the wheel from dawn to dusk--a symbol of perpetual "motion"), when suddenly I noticed, running eastwards, a little row of pure eighteenth-century facades. It was Meard Street, and, passing along it, I examined these survivals of the London of Johnson and Sterne with delight, so well preserved are they, with their decorated portals intact, and in two or three cases the old pretty numbers still remaining. Why I mention Sterne is for the reason that it was in Meard Street (according to the invaluable Wheatley and Cunningham's "London, Past and Present," which sadly needs expanding) that Kitty Fourmantel, the fair friend of the author of "Tristram Shandy," lived; and it does not decrease the pleasure of dallying here to see, in fancy, the lean figure of that most unclerical of clerks in Holy Orders hurrying along to pay her his respects. Wheatley and Cunningham can tell us only of two old Meard Streetians, the other being an architect, new to me, named Batty Langley, and even then their house numbers are not given. It would be no unamusing task for an antiquary with human instincts to dig and delve until he had re-peopled every residence.

My second little street--disregarded by Wheatley and Cunningham altogether--has only just come into my own consciousness: Goodwin's Court, which runs from St. Martin his lane to Bedfordbury. It is not a street at all, merely an alley, one side of which, the south, is the least Londonish row of dwellings you ever saw, and the other side is the back doors of the houses on the south of New Street--that busiest and cheerfullest of old-world shopping centres, where Hogarth's ghost still walks. New Street is famous in literature by reason of the "Pine Apple" eating-house where Dr. Johnson in his penury dined regularly for eightpence: six-pennyworth of meat, one pennyworth of bread, and a penny for the waiter, receiving better attention than most of the clients because the penny for the waiter was omitted by them. Take it all round, New Street (which has not been new these many decades) is not so different now, the small tradesman being the last thing in the world to change.

But it was of Goodwin's Court that I was going to write, and of its odd houses--for each one is like the last, not only architecturally but through the whim of the tenants too, each one having a vast bow window, and each window being decorated with a muslin curtain, in front of which is a row of pots containing a flowerless variety of large-leaved plant, created obviously for the garnishing of such unusual spaces. Where these strange plants have their indigenous homes I cannot say--I am the least of botanists--nor do I particularly care; but what I do want to know is when their beauty, or lack of it, first attracted a dweller in Goodwin's Court and why his taste so imposed itself on his neighbours. But for this depressing foliage I should not mind living in Goodwin's Court myself, for it is quiet and central--not more than a few yards both from the Westminster County Court and several theatres. But it would be necessary for peace of mind first to find out who Goodwin was.

My third little street, which also is an alley untrodden by the foot of horse, is not a new discovery but an old resort: Nevill's Court, running eastwards off Fetter Lane, the Nevill (if Wheatley and Cunningham tell the truth) being Ralph Nevill, Bishop of Chichester, in the thirteenth century: much of the property about here, it seems, being still in the possession of that see. The great charm of Nevill's Court is that it has, right in the midst of the printing world, gardens; within sound of countless printing presses, the Nevill Courtiers can grow their own vegetables. Each house has its garden, while the centre house, a stately double-fronted Jacobean mansion, has quite a big one. The Court has also a fruiterer's shop, presided over by one of the most genial and corpulent fruiterers--I almost wrote the fruitiest fruiterers--in the world (what a wonderful word "fruiterer" is!), and a Moravian chapel. But these things are as nothing. The most precious treasures of Nevill's Court that I observed as I walked through it one day in late February were its buds. On each shrub in each garden were authentic green buds: trustworthy promises that some day or other another spring was really coming. And they were the first buds I had seen. It is an exciting experience, worthy of London, that one's first earnest of the renaissance should be given by a court off Fetter Lane.

IX

A SELF-MADE STATUE

Not the least of the Zoological Gardens' many attractions is their inexhaustibility. There is always something new, and--what is not less satisfactory--there is always something old that you had previously missed. How is that? How is it that one may go to the Zoo a thousand times and consistently overlook one of its most ingratiating denizens, and then on the thousand-and-first visit come upon this creature as though he were the latest arrival?

There the quaint little absurdity was, all that long while, as ready to be seen as to-day, but you never saw him, or, at any rate, you never noticed him. The time was not yet.

Yesterday, for me, the hour of the Prairie Marmot struck.

I had been watching a group of wounded soldiers drifting round the Zoo. It was very hot, and they were bored. They stopped at each cage, it is true, but with only a perfunctory interest in most; but when suddenly one of the little free squirrels made his appearance in the middle of a path, a galvanic current ran through them, and their visit to the Zoo became an event. Every member of the company made an individual effort to coax and conciliate the little scamp; but in vain. The squirrel had the time of its life. It went through its whole repertory of rapidities and evasions. It approached, and then, with lightning swiftness, retreated. It sat up and it crouched; it waved its tail and was waved by it. It looked a thousand ways at once. It was shy and it was bold, but it was never bold enough; no soldier, with whatever outstretched bribe, could ever quite get it. There is, however, caprice in these matters, for when a lieutenant who had been looking on stooped down and held out a nut, the squirrel instantly took it and sat perfectly still beside him while eating it.

No doubt the squirrel takes a pleasure in its capricious flirtations with danger, but certain it is that it would lose very little fun and no food at all if it were always friendly; while the joy and excitement--I am sure excitement is the word--of the lords of creation and their families who visit the Zoo would be enormously greater.

Moving on, I was conscious, for the first time, of the Prairie Marmot.

Countless are the times that I have passed the enclosure which, though the Prairie Marmot shares it with the grey squirrel, its North American compatriot, really belongs to neither of them, but to pigeons and sparrows. No doubt you know this enclosure; it has on one side of it the aquarium where the diving-birds pursue their live prey with such merciless zest and punctuality every day at 12 and 5, and on the other is the sculptured group of the giant negro in conflict with the angry mother of cubs.

Coming unconsciously upon this enclosure, I was suddenly aware of the oddest statuette. Pigeons, squirrels, and sparrows were moving restlessly about in the eternal quest for food, and in their midst, obviously made of stone, although coloured to resemble fur, was the rigid effigy, some ten inches high, of as comic a creature as a human artist ever designed. There this figure stood, without a flicker. And then, a small girl with a bag approaching the railings, he came to life in a flash, the perpendicular suddenly gave way to the horizontal, and he trotted down to meet her much as any other rodent would do.

The Prairie Marmot is a rat-like creature, but blunter, stockier, twice as big, and light brown in colour. The learned, of course, after their wont, know him by a lengthier and more imposing name. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, for example, who controls the Zoo so ably and with such imagination, would never say Prairie Marmot on those occasions when he has questions to ask as to its well-being in captivity. Nothing so commonplace. "And, by the way," he would add, having been satisfied as to the good health of the elephants and the water-beetles, the avadavats and the hartebeests,--"and, by the way, how is the _Cynomys Ludovicianus_? Does he seem to thrive? Does he prosper and multiply, or is the competition of the _Columba Londiniensis_" (meaning the Metropolitan pigeon) "too much for him?" But, whatever you call him, the Prairie Marmot remains a most ingratiating creature, and when you see him with his two tiny hands holding a monkey-nut and consuming it with eager bites you feel that it must have been for him that the well-worn phrase, "to sit up and take nourishment," was coined.

In the unimportant intervals between these two actions--this vertical eating and the sudden transformation of himself into stone, which is his greatest gift and which he does so often that he has worn his poor tail into a threadbare stump--the Prairie Marmot is of no particular interest. He just creeps about or disappears into his crater in the bank. But as his own statue--so perfect as not only to be the despair but the bankruptcy of sculptors--he is terrific. And the change is so swift. One moment he is on all fours, and the next he is a rock, as though a magician had waved his wand.

Henceforth no visit to the Zoo will be, to me, complete without a few minutes' contemplation of the _Cynomys Ludovicianus_ in his quick-change turn.

X

CROWDS--AND A BAD SAMARITAN

Practical jokers wishing to collect a crowd--and this has always been one of their choicest efforts--stand still and intent, gazing upwards. Even before the aeroplane was invented no lure was so powerful as this. In a few minutes hundreds of people will assemble, all looking up, while the humorist melts away. Probably were London a city of the blind there would be no concourses at all, for it is to see that brings us together. Crowds are always looking.

I came upon two little compact knots of people the other day, in both of which I was struck by the unanimity with which every eye was, literally, fixed on the same object. Both crowds consisted wholly of men: twenty-five perhaps, watching, in Aldwych, a girl motor-mechanic at work on a broken car; while close by, another knot surrounded a Human Marvel--a red-headed boy who, lacking arms, had trained his feet to inscribe moral sentiments in coloured chalks on a slate; which, for feet, is a marvellous thing.

As I watched all these people with hungry eyes and time to spare, I reflected on the generosity of this great London of ours in the matter of side-shows, so that there is always something for the loiterer to look at. During the War the soldier on leave, with too much time on his hands and no British Museum to beguile him (for it was then closed), having to find his own British Museum in the streets, was rarely disappointed of entertainment. Armless Wonders may be rare, but there was certain to be a road-mender at work in one spot and a horse down in another, so all was well! As for me, I like to become a member of a crowd as much as anybody, but the Armless Wonder's poor toes looked so desperately cold on this particular nipping day that sheer personal discomfort urged me onwards. But for that I might be there still.

The temper of crowds indicates that mankind in the lump is genial stuff. When standing among our fellows, watching whatever "cynosure" has been provided by the Mother of Cities, even the worst of us become innocent: very children for inquisitiveness. Our community of curiosity leads to such an extreme as the exchange of remarks. The mere fact that two strangers are looking at the same thing, though it be only an asphalt-boilers' cauldron, brings them into harmony, and for the moment (or hour and a half) they are not strangers but friends. Then, at last tearing themselves away, they freeze again. Alas, for this tearing away! The saddest thing about every crowd is that it has, some time, some day, to dissolve. Roads are mended, horses get on their legs again, men recover from fits. Hence eyes that arrived expectant sooner or later will be satiated. That is our tragedy.

But crowds, although normally amiable, can be ugly too, and very changeable. A friend of mine, who is of a high adventurous impulsiveness and brimming with humanity, had a taste of the mob's caprice, when from sheer kind-heartedness he assumed one evening, in Piccadilly Circus, the care of a homing Scotch soldier who, in an expressive idiom, had become by reason of too much conviviality "lost to the wide."

Never was a brave warrior more in need of a helper, and my friend threw himself into the task with a zest and thoroughness that should place him high in any decently-constructed Honours List. With infinite difficulty the journey to Euston was performed, by lift and tube, by pullings and pushings, by shakings and holdings-up, by entreaty and threat.

But a point was reached, in the station itself, where the man lay down with a supernatural solidity that no outside effort could affect. Such efforts as had to be made were the signal for the crowd to arrive, and arrive it did. So far, however, from giving my friend any assistance or sympathy, let alone admiration for his quixotry and public spirit, this particular crowd instantly took hold of the situation by the wrong handle and assumed an attitude of hostility and censure. "Hitting him when he's down!" said one. "I call it disgusting," said another, "giving soldiers drink like that." "That's a nice thing, to make the poor fellow drunk!" said a third. "Ought to be ashamed of himself," said a fourth, "giving drink to our brave lads!"--and the chorus grew.

My friend tells me that he was never so astonished in his life; and truly it is a comic situation--to give up one's time and strength in order to act the Good Samaritan to an unfortunate victim, and then be accused of being the victimizer. He was angry then, but he laughs now, and I wish you could hear him tell the story.

XI

BEFORE AND AFTER

To my astonishment I could find no trace of the old publishing house which I had so often visited; nothing but scaffolding and boardings. Like so many London premises it had "come down" almost in a night. But my resentment was a little softened when looking through the chinks between the boards I discovered that the supplanting building was to be a theatre. I could see the bare bones of an auditorium, the deep foundations for the stage and so forth. And as I stood peering there I tried to realise some of the excitement and fun which were to be engendered among those girders and stones, so soon to be animated by that blend of mirth and thrills which makes a theatrical night's entertainment? To-day the place was a wilderness; to-morrow crowds would be gathered there. How bright would be the lights, how gay the music, how the walls, now mere skeletons, would echo and re-echo to laughter and applause!

All new building is exciting, but there was something peculiarly attractive in the thought that this great hole in the ground was, when ultimately enclosed by its bricks and mortar and decoration, to be a friendly playhouse.

What so cheerless as iron girders and scaffold poles? What so enkindling as the overture to a play in a crowded, anticipatory theatre?

As I stood at the opening in the hoarding, thinking these thoughts and becoming every moment an object of deeper suspicion to a watchful constable, it was borne in upon me that I had not so very long ago witnessed the very antithesis of the present scene. I say not so very long ago, meaning distance in time; only three or four years. But in history a distance vast indeed; for that was before the War, in the spacious days when travellers could leave England on an impulse, as they can no more, and passports were seldom needed, and France was gay, and Italy was careless, and Louvain had a library, and sovereigns were made not of paper but of gold. Strange, remote Utopian period! At that time when I had so different a spectacle before my eyes, I was in that beautiful land where decay is lovely too--I mean, of course, Italy--and the particular part of Italy was the brown city of Verona, at which I was stopping for a few hours on the way from Venice, to see the ruins of the Roman theatre.

These ruins can for several reasons very easily be overlooked by travellers. One is that the lure of the Coliseum is so powerful; another, that the wonderful church of S. Zeno must first be visited, and there is then often little time for anything else but the tombs of the Scaligers and poor Juliet's reputed last earthly tabernacle. The Roman theatre, moreover, is rather out of the way; and, well, is not the Coliseum Roman theatre enough? So you see how easy it is not to do Verona full justice. And a further obstacle to the examination of the theatre's ruins is that they demand agility and endurance in no meagre supply, for one has to climb to great heights, and leap chasms and descend perilously, like a mountain goat. And Verona is usually exceedingly hot.

Yet no one visiting Verona should miss this ghost of a playhouse, for, having seen it, another gap in one's mental picture of Roman civilisation is filled. It is there possible to visualize the audience arriving, traversing the long passages in search of their seats, recognising their friends, jesting in their saturnine way, and then sitting down to the joys of the performance. Terence and Plautus at Westminster thereafter should become twice as interesting.

Ruined as it is, the theatre yet retains enough for the imagination to build upon, and it illustrates, too, the stationary character of dramatic architecture. Upon the ancient scheme our modern erectors of theatres have grafted only trifling inessential modifications; the main lines are the same. Possibly if anything, there has been a decline, for one thinks of a Roman architect as being thorough enough to test the view of the stage from every point of the house, whereas in England there are, I am sure, architects who have never thought it worth while to visit the gallery.

Given the opportunity of mingling in some supernatural way with a crowd 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.