Of the several tenants after the Adolfs, Iseem to remember little save the complaints we interchanged. I tried my best to do as I would be done by and to keep out of their way, but accident was always throwing us together to our mutual indignation. There was the Bachelor whose atrocious cook filled our chambers with the rank odours of smoked herring and burnt meat, and whose deserted ladylove filled the stairs with lamentations. There was the young Married Couple into whose bathtub ours overflowed. There was the Accidental Actress whose loud voice and heavy boots were the terror not only of our house, but of the street, whose telephone rang from morning till night, whose dog howled all evening when he was left alone as he usually was, and whose rehearsals in her rooms interrupted the work in ours with ear-piercing yells of "Murder" and "Villain."
I cannot recall them all, so rapidly did they come and go. We began to fear that the life of the tenant was, as Tristram Shandy described the life of man, a shifting from sorrow to sorrow. We lived in an atmosphere of fault-finding, though when there was serious causefor complaint, not a murmur could be wrung from the tenant below or, for that matter, from a tenant in the house. All, like true Britons, refused to admit the possibility of interests in common, and would not stir a hand, however pressing the danger, so long as they were not disturbed. If our chambers reeked with smoke and the smell of burning wood, they accepted the information with calm indifference because theirs did not. Nor did it serve as a useful precedent if, as it happened, smoke and smell were traced again to a fire, smouldering as it had been for nobody knew how long, in the cellar of the adjoining house, separated from ours only by the "party wall" belonging to both: that ingenious contrivance of the builder for creating ill-will between next-door neighbours. They declined to feel the bannisters loose under their grasp, or to see the wide gap opened in the same party wall after the fall of the roof of Charing Cross Station had shaken the Quarter to its foundations and made us believe for a moment that London was emulating Messina or San Francisco. And I must add, so characteristicwas it, that the Agent dismissed our fears as idle, and that the Surveyor, sent at our request by the County Council, laughed us to scorn. But we laughed best, for we laughed last. A second Surveyor ordered the wall to be pulled down as unsafe and rebuilt, and the Agent in the end found it prudent to support the bannisters with iron braces.
When, after these trials and tribulations, Mr. Allan took the Second Floor Back we thought the Millennium had come. He was a quiet man, employed in the morning, so we were told, in writing a life of Chopin, and in the evening, as we heard for ourselves, in playing Chopin divinely. The piano is an instrument calculated to convert an otherwise harmless neighbour into a nuisance, but of him it made a delight. He was waited upon by a man as quiet, whose consideration for the tenants went to the length of felt slippers in the house, who never slammed doors nor sang, who never even whistled at his work. An eternity of peace seemed to open out before us, but, as they say in novels, it was not to be. Our confidence in Mr. Allan was first shaken by what Istill think an unjustified exhibition of nerves. One night, or rather one early morning, a ring at our door-bell startled us at an hour when, in my experience, it means either a fire or an American cablegram. It was therefore the more exasperating, on opening the door, to be faced by an irate little man in pyjamas and smoking jacket who wanted to know when we proposed to go to bed. Only after J.'s answer "when we are ready," did we know it was Mr. Allan by his explanation that his bed was under the room where we were walking about, that the floor was thin, and that he could not sleep. J. would not enter into an argument. He said the hour was not the most appropriate for a criticism of the construction of the house which, besides, was at all hours the Landlord's and not his affair, and Mr. Allan had the grace to carry his complaint no further. It may have occurred to him on reflection that it was not our fault if he had chosen a room to sleep in just below the room we used to sit and see our friends in.
Had I borne malice, I should not have had to wait long for my revenge, nor to plan itmyself. Not many days later, Mr. Allan's servant, watering the flowers on the open balcony at Mr. Allan's window, watered by mistake the new Paris bonnet of the lady of the Ground Floor Back who was coming home at that very minute. Under the circumstances few women would not have lost their temper, but few would have been so prompt in action. She walked straight upstairs to Mr. Allan's chambers, the wreck in her hand. The servant opened to her knock, but she insisted upon seeing the master.
"I have come, Allan, to tell you what I think of the conduct of your servant," she said, when the master appeared. "Yes, I call you Allan, for I mean to talk to you as man to man," which she proceeded to do.
I did not hear the talk, but it was almost a week before I heard the piano again. Poor Mr. Allan! And this proved a trifle to the worse humiliation he was soon to endure.
As I sat with a book by my lamp one evening before dinner, shrieks from his chambers and a crash of crockery sent me rushing to the door and out upon the landing, withAugustine at my heels. Old Tom and his wife arrived there simultaneously, and, looking cautiously over the bannisters, I saw an anxious crowd looking up as cautiously from the hall on the Ground Floor. The shrieks developed into curses intermingled with more riotous crashing of china. The Housekeeper, urged by the crowd below, crept all unwilling to Mr. Allan's door and knocked. The door was flung open, and, before she ventured to "beg pardon but the noise disturbed the other tenants," Mr. Allan's hitherto well-behaved servant greeted her with a volley of blood-curdling epithets and the smash of every pane of glass in the upper panel of the door, and down she fled again. He bolted out after her, but looking up and catching a glimpse of Tom, peacefully sucking a lemon-drop, he became so personal that Tom and his wife retreated hastily, and for the first time the smile faded from the old man's face. In a moment's lull I heard Mr. Allan's voice, low and entreating, then more curses, more crashes. I should not have thought there was so much glass and crockery to be broken in the whole house.
Presently a policeman appeared, and then a second. The door was open, but the servant was busy finishing up the crockery. Mr. Allan spoke to them, and then, like a flash, the servant was there too.
"I dare you to let them come in!" he yelled, so loud he could be heard from the top to the bottom of the house. "I dare you to let them come in! I dare you to give me in charge! I dare you! I dare you!"
And Mr. Allan did not dare, that was the astonishing part of it. And he never lost his temper. He argued with the policemen, he plead with the servant, while one group on our landing and another on the Ground Floor waited anxiously. The policemen did not desert us but stood guard on the Second Floor, which was a reassurance, until gradually the yells were lowered, the crashes came at longer intervals, and at last, I suppose in sheer exhaustion, the servant relapsed into his usual calm, Mr. Allan "sported his oak," and I learned how truly an Englishman's home is his castle.
The Housekeeper spent the evening on thestairs gossiping at every door. There was not much to learn from her. A mystery was hinted—many mysteries were hinted. The truth I do not know to this moment. I only know that before the seven days of our wonder were over, the Agent, more careworn than ever if that were possible, made a round of visits in the house, giving to each tenant an ample and abject apology written by Mr. Allan. At the end of the quarter, the Second Floor Back was again to let.
We should have parted with Mr. Allan less light-heartedly could we have anticipated what was in store for us. He was no sooner gone than the Suffragettes came in.
I have no quarrel on political grounds with the Suffragettes. Theoretically, I believe that women of property and position should have their vote and that men without should not, but I think it a lesser evil for women to be denied the vote than for the suffrage to become as universal for women as for men, and to grant it on any other conditions would be an indignity. I state the fact to explain that I am without prejudice. I do not argue, for, totell the truth, shocking as it may be, I am not keen one way or the other. Life for me has grown crowded enough without politics, and years have lessened the ardour for abstract justice that was mine when, in my youth, I wrote the "Life of Mary Wollstonecraft," and militant Suffragettes as yet were not. Ours are of the most militant variety, and it is not their fault if the world by this time does not know what this means. Even so, on general principles, I should have no grievance against them. Every woman is free to make herself ridiculous, and it is none of my business if my neighbours choose to make a public spectacle of themselves by struggling in the arms of policemen, or going into hysterics at meetings where nobody wants them; if they like to emulate bad boys by throwing stones and breaking windows, or if it amuses them to slap and whip unfortunate statesmen who, physically, could easily convince them of their inferiority. But when they make themselves a nuisance to me personally I draw the line. And they are a nuisance to me.
They have brought pandemonium into theQuarter where once all was pleasantness and peace. Of old, if the postman, the milkman, a messenger boy, and one or two stray dogs and children lingered in our street, we thought it a crowd; since the coming of the Suffragettes, I have seen the same street packed solid with a horde of the most degenerate creatures in London summoned by them "to rush the House of Commons." They have ground their hurdy-gurdies at our door, Heaven knows to what end; vans covered with their posters have obstructed our crossing; motor-cars adorned with their flags have missed fire and exploded in our street; and they have had themselves photographed as sandwiches on our Terrace. Our house is in a turmoil from morning till night with women charging in like a mob, or stealing out like conspirators. Their badges, their sandwich boards, their banners lie about in our hall, so much in everybody's way that I sympathized with the infuriated tenant whom I caught one night kicking the whole collection into the cellar. They talk so hard on the stairs that often they pass their own door and come on to ours, bringing Augustine from her workand disturbing me at mine, for she can never open to them without poking her head into my room to tell me, "Encore une sale Suffragette!" In their chambers they never stop chattering, and their high shrill treble penetrates through the floor and reaches us up above. The climax came with their invasion of our roof.
This roof, built "after the fire," is a modern invention, designed for the torture of whoever lives underneath. It is flat, with a beautiful view to be had among the chimney-pots and telephone wires; it is so thin that a pigeon could not waddle across without being heard by us; and as it is covered with gravel, every sound is accompanied by a scrunching warranted to set the strongest nerves in a quiver. We had already been obliged to represent to the Agent that it was not intended for the Housekeeper's afternoon parties or young people's games of tag, that there were other, more suitable places where postmen could take a rest, or our actress recite her lines, or lovers do their courting amid the smuts. Our patience, indeed, had been so tried in one way or anotherthat at the first sound from above, at any hour of the day or night, J. was giving chase to the trespassers, and they were retreating before the eloquence of his attack. It was in a corner of this roof, just above the studio and in among wood-enclosed cisterns, that the Suffragettes elected to send off fire-balloons, which, in some way best known to themselves, were to impress mankind with the necessity of giving them the vote. The first balloon floated above the chimney-tops, a sheet of flame, and was dropping, happily into the Thames, when J., straight from his printing-press, in blouse, sleeves rolled up, arms and hands black with ink, a cap set sideways, was on the roof, and the Secretary of the Militants and a young man in the brown suit and red tie that denote the Socialist, in their hands matches and spirits of wine, were flying downstairs. I was puzzled to account for their meekness unless it was that never before had they seen anybody so inky, never before listened to language so picturesque and American. J., without giving them time to take breath, called in the Landlord's Agent, supported by the Landlord'sSolicitor, and they were convinced of the policy of promising not to do it again. And of course they did.
A week later the Prime Minister was unveiling a statue, or performing some equally innocent function in the garden below our windows, when the Suffragettes, from the roofs of near woodsheds, demanded him through a megaphone to give Votes to Women. We followed the movement with such small zest that when we were first aware something out of the common was going on in the Quarter, the two heroines were already in the arms of policemen, where of late so much of the Englishwoman's time has been spent, and heads were at every window up and down our street, housekeepers at every door, butchers' and bakers' boys grouped on the sidewalk, one or two tradesmen's carts drawn up in the gutter, battalions of police round the corner. The women no doubt to-day boast of the performance as a bold strike for freedom, and recall with pride the sensation it created.
At this point I lost sight of the conflict on the roof below, for, from the roof above, a balloonshot upwards, so high that only the angels could have read the message it bore. The familiar scrunching, though strangely muffled, was heard, and J., again in blouse and ink, was up and away on a little campaign of his own. This time he found six women, each with a pair of shoes at her side and her feet drawn up under her, squatting in a ring behind the cisterns, bending over a can of spirits of wine, and whispering and giggling like school-girls.
"It won't go off," they giggled, and the next minute all chance of its ever going off was gone, for J. had seized the balloon and torn it to tatters.
"You have destroyed our property," shrieked a venerable little old lady, thin and withered, with many wrinkles and straggling grey hair.
He told her that was what he had intended to do.
"But it cost ten shillings," she squeaked in a tremor of rage, and with an attempt at dignity, but it is as hard to be dignified, as Corporal Trim found it to be respectful, when one is sitting squat upon the ground.
A younger woman, golden-haired, in bighat and feathers, whom the others called Duchess, demanded "Who are you anyhow?" And when I consider his costume and his inkiness I wonder he had not been asked it long before.
"You can go downstairs and find out," he said, "but down you go!"
There was a moment's visible embarrassment, and they drew their stocking feet closer up under them. J., in whom they had left some few shreds of the politeness which he, as a true American, believes is woman's due, considerately looked the other way. As soon as they were able to rise up in their shoes, they altogether lost their heads. The Housekeeper and the Agent, summoned in the mean time, were waiting as they began to crawl down the straight precipitous ladder from the roof. In an agony of apprehension, the women clutched their skirts tight about them, protesting and scolding the while. The little old lady tried to escape into our chambers, one or two stood at the top of the stairs, cutting off all approach, the others would not budge from our narrow landing. A telegraph boy and a man with aparcel endeavoured to get past them and up to us, but they would not give way an inch. Finally in despair, J. gently collected them and pushed them down the stairs towards their own door.
"We will have you arrested for assault!" the little old lady shrieked.
"We charge you with assault and battery," the golden-haired lady re-echoed from below.
And we heard no more, for at last, with a sigh of relief, J. could get to our door and shut out the still ascending uproar.
But that was not the end of it. If you can believe it, they were on the roof again within an hour, getting themselves and their megaphone photographed, for the fight for freedom would not be half so sweet without the publicity of portraits in the press. And we were besieged with letters. One Suffragette wrote that an apology was due,—yes, J. replied, due to him. A second lectured him on the offence given to her "dear friend, the Duchess," for to become a Suffragette is not to cease to be a snob, and warned him that the Duchess—who was the golden-haired lady and may have had the bluest blood of England in herveins, but who looked more like one of the Gaiety girls, from whom the stock of the British nobility has been so largely replenished—and the Duke intended to consult their Solicitor if regret were not expressed. And the Landlord's Agent called, and the Landlord's Solicitor followed, and a Police Inspector was sent from Scotland Yard for facts,—and he reprimanded J. for one mistake, for not having locked the door on the inside when they were out,—and the insurance people wanted to know about the fire-balloons, and everybody with any possible excuse came down upon us, except the police officer with the warrant to arrest J. for assault and battery.
It is all over now. If the Suffragettes still hatch their plots under our roof, they are denied the use of it for carrying them out. They leave us in peace for the moment, the quiet which is the charm of an old house like ours has returned to it, and outwardly the tenants cultivate the repose and dignity incumbent upon them as the descendants of Bacon and Pepys and the inheritors of a great past.
My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine does.
Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who do not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere, and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the crowds in the near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same purpose,—the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters-shops andwarehouses and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter and approached by tunnels, so picturesque that Géricault made a lithograph of one when he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with police who turn a flashing bull's-eye upon you as you pass. Altogether, the Quarter is a "shy place" full of traps for the unwary. I have had friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on Lord Mayor's Day, get hopelessly entangled in our network; as a rule, nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.
But for all that, there is a good deal to see, and the Quarter, quiet though it may be, is never dull as I watch it from my high windows. To the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day as far as the hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along theEmbankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in winter, the great white flights of gulls. At night myriads of lights come out, and always, at all hours and all seasons, there is movement and life,—always I seem to feel the pulse of London even as I have its roar in my ears.
To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime, still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the Eighteenth Century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of the world for an American like myself.
To the west I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is built on the edge of a hill, not very high though the London horse mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls, on this side sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled, weather-worn, red-tiled roofs, and crooked gables sticking out at unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier housesbeyond, they in their turn over-shadowed by the hotels and clubs on the horizon, and in among them, an open space with the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, dark by day, a white shadow by night,—our ghost, we call it.
And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us, instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street which is the usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there was a sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds—the big, low, heavy English clouds—float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves into mountains with a splendour that might have inspired Ruskin to I do not know how many more chapters in "Modern Painters" had he lived in the Quarter. Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the sun—always provided there is a sun—sets with a dramatic gorgeousness that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londonerwould spare himself no time nor trouble to see, but that, because it is in London, remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves. And the wonder grows with the night,—the river, with its vague distances and romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent at my windows? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in it?
Hundreds of windows look over into mine: some so far off that they are mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the day-light, mere dots of light at dusk; some as carefully curtained as if the "Drawn Blinds" or "Green Shutters" of romance had not stranger things to hide from the curious. Butothers are too near and too unveiled for what goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is let out in offices and chambers, and the house that shelters but one tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists.
All these windows and the people I see through them have become as much a part of my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs. I should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at night, I missed from the attic next door to him the lamp of the artist, who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor windows of the house painted white, or frowzy women were not leaning out of the little garret windows above, or the type-writer was not clicking hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of flowers, or the manicurist notreceiving her clients behind the window with the staring, new yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery, hot-tempered, little woman who jumps up out of the attic window immediately below us, like a Jack-in-the-box, and shakes her fist at us every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually getting us into trouble with our neighbours. I should think the picture incomplete if, of an evening, the diners out were to disappear from behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more uncomfortably conscious of the "strangely mingled monster" that London is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth banquet, and the long black "hunger line" forming of a winter morning just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the daily dole of bread and soup.
I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less the associations with Garrick than the convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus,Companies, Associations, and I know not what else, that undertake the charge of everything under the sun, from ancient buildings to women's freedom; or without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet to drink tea and dabble in anarchy; where more serious citizens propose to refashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics; where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism of the one club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself becomes almost a virtue.
It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness.
Behind the window I look down into atright angles from the studio, the Scientist in white apron, surrounded by bottles and retorts and microscopes, industriously examines germs from morning till midnight, oblivious to everything outside, which for too long meant, among other things, showers of soft white ashes and evil greasy smoke and noxious odours sent by the germs up through his chimneys into our studio; nor could the polite representations of our Agent that he was a public nuisance rouse him from his indifference, since he knew that the smoke was not black enough to make him one technically. It was only when J. protested, with an American energy effective in England, that the germs ceased to trouble us and I could bear unmoved the sight of the white-aproned Scientist behind his window.
In the new house with the flat roof the Inventor has his office, and I am sure it is the great man himself I so often see walking gravely up and down among the chimney-pots, evolving and planning new wireless wonders; and I am as sure that the solemn St. Bernard who walks there too is his, and, in some way it is not for me to explain, partof the mysterious machinery connecting the Quarter with the rest of the world.
Plainly visible in more rooms than one, bending over high drawing-tables not only through the day but on into the night, are many Architects, with whom the Quarter has ever been in favour since the masters who designed it years ago made their headquarters in our street, until yesterday, when the young man who is building the Town Hall for the County Council moved into it, though, had the County Council had its way, there would be no Quarter now for an Architect to have his office in. Architectural distinction, or picturesqueness, awakes in the London official such a desire to be rid of it that, but for the turning of the worm who pays the rates, our old streets and Adam houses would have been pulled down to make place for the brand-new municipal building which, as it is, has been banished out of harm's way to the other side of the river.
Busier still than the Architects are the old men who live in the two ancient houses opposite mine, where the yellow brick just showshere and there through the centuries' grime, and where windows as grimy—though a clause in the leases of the Quarter demands that windows should be washed at least once a month—open upon little ironwork balconies and are draped with draggled lace-curtains, originally white but now black. I have no idea who the old men are, or what is the task that absorbs them. They look as ancient as the houses and so alike that I could not believe there were three of them if, every time I go to my dining-room window, I did not see them all three in their chambers, two on the third floor, to the left and right of me, one on the floor below about halfway between,—making, J. says, an amusing kind of pattern. Each lives alone, each has a little table drawn up to his window, and there they sit all day long, one on an easy leather chair, one on a stiff cane-bottomed chair, one on a hard wooden stool,—that is the only difference. There they are perpetually sorting and sifting papers from which nothing tears them away; there they have their midday chop and tankard of bitter served to them as they work, andthere they snatch a few hasty minutes afterwards to read the day's news. They never go out unless it is furtively, after dark, and I have never failed to find them at their post except occasionally on Sunday morning, when the chairs by the tables are filled by their clothes instead of themselves, because, I fancy, the London housekeeper, who leaves her bed reluctantly every day in the week but who on that morning is not to be routed out of it at all, refuses to wake them or to bring them their breakfast. They may be solicitors, but I do not think so; they may be literary men, but I do not think that either; and, really, I should just as lief not be told who and what they are, so much more in keeping is mystery with the grimy old houses where their old days are spent in endless toiling over endless tasks.
If the three old men are not authors, plenty of my other neighbours are, as they should be out of compliment to Bacon and Pepys, to Garrick and Topham Beauclerk, to Dr. Johnson and Boswell, to Rousseau and David Copperfield, and to any number besides who, in their different days, belonged to or haunted the Quarterand made it a world of memories for all who came after. I have authors on every side of me: not Chattertons undiscovered in their garrets, but celebrities wallowing in success, some of whom might be the better for neglect. Many a young enthusiast comes begging for the privilege of gazing from my windows into theirs. I have been assured that the walls of the Quarter will not hold the memorial tablets which we of the present generation are preparing for their decoration. The "best sellers" are issued, and the Repertory Theatre nourished, from our midst.
The clean-shaven man of legal aspect who arrives at his office over the way as regularly as the clock strikes ten, who leaves it as regularly at one for his lunch, and as regularly in the late afternoon closes up for the day, is the Novelist whose novels are on every bookstall and whose greatness is measured by the thousands and hundreds of thousands into which they run. He does not do us the honour of living in the Quarter, but comes to it simply in office hours, and is as scrupulously punctual as if his business were with briefs rather than withdainty trifles lighter than the lightest froth. No clerk could be more exact in his habits. Anthony Trollope was not more methodical. This admirable precision might cost him the illusions of his admirers, but to me it is invaluable. For when the wind is in the wrong direction and I cannot hear Big Ben, or the fog falls and I cannot see St. Martin's spire, I have only to watch for him to know the hour, and in a household where no two clocks or watches agree as to time, the convenience is not to be exaggerated.
My neighbour from the house on the river-front, next to Peter the Great's, who often drops in for a talk and whom Augustine announces asle Monsieur du Quartier, is the American Dramatist, author of the play that was the most popular of the season last year in New York. I should explain, perhaps, that Augustine has her own names for my friends, and that usually her announcements require interpretation. For instance, few people would recognize my distinguished countryman, the Painter, inle Monsieur de la Dame qui ne monte jamais les escaliers, or the delightfulLady Novelist inla Demoiselle aux chats, or—it is wiser not to say whom inle Monsieur qui se gobe. But I have come to understand even her fine shades, and when she announcesles Gens du Quartier, then I know it is not the American Dramatist, but the British Publicist and his wife who live in Garrick's house, and who add to their distinction by dining in the room where Garrick died.
The red curtains a little further down the street belong to the enterprising Pole, who, from his chambers in the Quarter, edits the Polish Punch, a feat which I cannot help thinking, though I have never seen the paper, must be the most comic thing about it. In the house on one side, the author who is England's most distinguished Man of Letters to-day, and who has become great as a novelist, began life as an architect. From the house on the other side, the Poet-Patriot-Novelist of the Empire fired, or tried to fire, the Little Englanders with his own blustering, knock-you-down Imperialism, and bullied and flattered them, amused and abused them, called them names they would not have forgiven from any other manliving and could not easily swallow from him, and was all the while himself so simple and unassuming that next to nobody knew he was in the Quarter until he left it. The British Dramatist close by, who conquers the heart of the sentimental British public by sentiment, is just as unassuming. He is rarely without a play on the London stage, rarely without several on tour. He could probably buy out everybody in the Quarter, except perhaps the Socialist, and he can lose a little matter of sixteen thousand pounds or so and never miss it. But so seldom is he seen that you might think he was afraid to show himself. "You'd never know 'e was in the 'ouse, 'e's that quiet like. Why, 'e never gives no trouble to nobody," the Housekeeper has confided to me. He shrinks from putting his name on his front door, though by this time he must be used to its staring at him in huge letters from posters and playbills all over the world. Perhaps it is to give himself courage that he keeps a dog who is as forward as his master is retiring, and who is my terror. I am on speaking terms with most of the dogs of the Quarter, but with theDramatist's I have never ventured to exchange a greeting. I happened to mention my instinctive distrust, one day, to a friend who has made the dog's personal acquaintance.
"He eats kids!" was my friend's comment. Then he added: "You have seen dozens of children go up to the Dramatist's room, haven't you?"
"Yes," I answered, for it was a fact.
"Well, and have you ever seen one come down again?" And if you will believe it, I never have.
A door or so from the Dramatist, but on the opposite side of the street, the Socialist's windows face mine. I cannot, with any respect for truth, call him unassuming; modesty is not his vice. It is not his ambition to hide his light under a bushel,—or rather a hogshead; on the contrary, as he would be the first to admit, it could not flare on too many housetops to please him. When I first met him, years before we again met in the Quarter, the world had not heard of him, but he was quite frank in his determination that it should, though to make it hear, he would have to play a continuous soloon his own cornet, until he impressed somebody else with the necessity of blowing it for him. Besides, he has probably never found other people as entertaining as himself, which is an excellent reason why he should not keep himself out of his talk and his writing,—and he is talking and writing all the time. His is a familiar voice among the Fabians, on public platforms, and at private meetings, and for a very little while it was listened to by bewildered Borough Councillors. He has as many plays to his credit as the British Dramatist, as many books as the Novelist, and I recall no other writer who can equal him in the number and length of his letters to the press. As he courts, rather than evades, notice, I doubt if he would be embarrassed to learn how repeatedly I see him doing his hair and beard in the morning and putting out his lights at night, or how entirely I am in his confidence as to the frequency of his luncheon parties and the number of his guests. Were I not the soul of discretion I could publish his dailymenuto the world, for his kitchen opens itself so aggressively to my view that I see into it as often as into my own.
For that matter, I have under my inspection half the kitchens in the Quarter, and the things I witness in them might surprise or horrify more than one woman who imagines herself mistress in her own house. I have assisted at the reception of guests she never invited; I understand, if she does not, why her gas and electric-light bills reach such fabulous figures; I could tell her what happens when her motor-car disappears round the corner,—for, seedy and down-at-heel as the Quarter may appear, the private motor is by no means the exception among the natives. Only the other day, when the literary family, who are as unsuspicious as they are fond of speed, started in their motor for the week-end, they could have got no further than the suburbs before the cloth was laid in their dining-room, their best china, silver, and glass brought out, flowers, bottles, and siphons in place, and their cook at the head of their table "entertaining her friends to luncheon." The party were lingering over the fruit when suddenly a motor-horn was heard in the street. There was a look of horror on all their faces, one short secondof hesitation, and then a wild leap from the table, and, in a flash, flowers, bottles, and siphons, china, glass, and silver were spirited away, the cloth whisked off, chairs set against the wall. As the dining-room door closed on the flying skirt of the last guest, the cook looked out of the window, the horn sounded again, and the motor was round the corner in the next street, for it was somebody else's, and the literary family did not return until Monday.
The Socialist, who deals in paradox and the inconsequent, also has his own car. Now that Socialism is knocking at our doors, the car tooting at his, come to fetch him from his town house to his country house or off to the uttermost ends of the earth, toots reassurance into our hearts. Under such conditions we should not mind being Socialists ourselves. However, he does make one protest against Individualism in which I should not care to join him, for he goes shares in his personality and has perpetrated a double in the Quarter,—a long lean man, with grizzled red hair and beard, who is clothed in brown Jaegers, whoseface has the pallor of the vegetarian, and who warns us of the manner of equality we may expect under the Socialist's régime. I dread to think of the complications there might be were the double not so considerate as to carry a black bag and wear knee-breeches. A glance at hands and legs enables us to distinguish one from the other and to spare both the inconvenience of a mistaken identity. The double, like the old men opposite, remains one of the mysteries of the Quarter. Nobody can explain his presence in our midst, nobody has ever spoken to him, nobody can say where he comes from with his black bag in the morning, where he goes with it in the evening, or even where he stops in the Quarter. I doubt if the Socialist has yet, like the lovers in Rossetti's picture, met himself, for surely no amount of Socialism could bear the shock of the revelation that must come with the meeting.
If many books are written in the Quarter, more are published from it, and the number increases at a rate that is fast turning it into a new Paternoster Row. I am surrounded bypublishers: publishers who are unknown outside our precincts, and publishers who are unknown in them save for the names on their signs; publishers who issue limited editions for the few, and publishers who apparently publish for nobody but themselves; and, just where I can keep an eye on his front door,thePublisher, my friend, who makes the Quarter a centre of travel and a household word wherever books are read, and uses his house as a training-school for young genius. More than one lion now roaring in London served an apprenticeship there; even Mr. Chatteron passed through it; and I am always encountering minor poets or budding philosophers going in or coming out, ostensibly on the Publisher's affairs, but really busy carrying on the Quarter's traditions and preparing more memorial tablets for its overladen walls. The Publisher and his wife live a few doors away, where they are generously accumulating fresh associations and memories for our successors in the Quarter. To keep open house for the literary men and women of the time is a fashion among publishers that did not goout with the Dillys and the Dodsleys, and an occasional Boswell would find a note-book handy behind the windows that open upon the river from the Publisher's chambers.
Associations are being accumulated also by the New York Publisher, who, accompanied by his son, the Young Publisher, and by his birds, arrives every year with the first breath of spring. It is chiefly to artists that his house is open, though he gives the literary hallmark to the legacy of memories he will leave to the Quarter. I cannot understand why the artist, to whom our streets and our houses make a more eloquent appeal than to the author, has seldom been attracted to them since the days when Barry designed his decorations in the "grand manner" for our oldest Society's lecture-hall, and Angelica Kauffmann painted the ceiling in Peter the Great's house, or since the later days when Etty and Stanfield lived in our house. Now and then I come across somebody sketching our old Watergate or our shabby little shops and corners, but only the youth in the attic below has followed the example given by J., whose studio continues theexception in the Quarter: the show-place it ought to be for the beauty of river and sky framed in by the windows.
But to make up for this neglect, as long a succession of artists as used to climb to Etty's chambers visit the New York Publisher in the quiet rooms with the prints on the walls and the windows that, for greater quiet, look away from our quiet streets and out upon our quieter backs and gables. Much good talk is heard there, and many good stories, and by no means the least good from the New York Publisher himself. It is strange that, loving quiet as he does, he should, after the British Dramatist, have contributed more to my disquiet than anybody in the Quarter: a confession for which I know he will think I merit his scorn. But the birds it is his fancy to travel with are monsters compared to the sparrows and pigeons who build their nests in the peaceful trees of the Quarter, and I am never at ease in their company. I still tremble when I recall the cold critical eye and threatening beak of his favourite magpie, nor can I think calmly of his raven whom, in an access of mistakenhospitality, I once invited to call with him upon William Penn. William had never seen a live bird so near him in his all too short life, and what with his surprise and curiosity, his terror and sporting instincts, he was so wrought up and his nerves in such a state that, although the raven was shut up safe in a cage, I was half afraid he would not survive the visit. I have heard the New York Publisher say of William, in his less nervous and more normal moments, that he was not a cat but a demon; the raven, in my opinion, was not exactly an angel. But thanks to the quality of our friendship, it also survived the visit and, in spite of monstrous birds, strengthens with the years.
It is not solely from my windows that I have got to know the Quarter. Into my Camelot I can not only look, but come down, without webs flying out and mirrors cracking, and better still, I might never stir beyond its limits, and my daily life and domestic arrangements would suffer no inconvenience. The Quarter is as "self-contained" as the flats advertised by our zealous Agent who manages it.Every necessity and many luxuries into the bargain are to be had within its boundaries. It may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something mended I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a Commissioner of Oaths. I go no further to get my type-writing done. Were my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our garden where the County Council's band playson summer evenings. There is a public for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel,—the house below the hill with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny-white as I see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals in a Coffee Room, and where Labour Members of Parliament, and South Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.
The Quarter has also its own population, so distinct from other Londoners that I am struck by the difference no further away than the other side of the Strand. Our housekeepers are a species apart, so are our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth. Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the pink-eyed, white-haired, dried-up little old man, with a jug in his hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our public-house; or like the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters homeward in the afternoon, a lily orchrysanthemum, according to the season, in one hand and a brown paper bag of buns in the other; or like the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the Terrace in front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to overtake at the front door,—where his nights are spent no native of the Quarter can say. Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the silk hat further west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and feathers. They have their conventions, which are strictly observed. One is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as the pavement, to thedespair of taxicabs and cycles endeavouring to toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that bound the Quarter on three sides and never to trespass into others. How the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may go back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning parade in the Row is for Mayfair.
We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm and the advantage of preserving it,—though on all others we may and do disagree absolutely and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of the beauty of its architecture and the fame of the architects who built it more than a century and a half ago, and I do not believe as a rule that London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with unceasing vigilance. Weare always on the look-out for nuisances and alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter. There is a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon one another for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises of every kind. No "German Band" would invade our silent precincts. The hurdy-gurdy is anathema,—I have always thought the Suffragettes' attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure the bell of the muffin man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants us to buy his blooming lavender, it is because both have the sanction of age. We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below my windows, the members of our frivolous Club took to shootingthemselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the noise was on the miniature scale of their pistols, we overwhelmed the unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our Territorials, in their first ardour, chose our catacombs for their evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else, must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, and least of all the lady opposite, to whom alms-giving in our street is as intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the day she pounced upon him to ask him what he meant by such an exhibition of immorality, when all he had done was to drop a penny into the hand of a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow feeling, having once been a small boy himself.
We defend the beauty of the Quarter withequal zeal. We do what we can to preserve the superannuated look which to us is a large part of its charm, and we cry out against every new house that threatens discord in our ancient harmony. Excitement never raged so high among us as when the opposite river banks were desecrated by the advertiser, and from shores hitherto but a shadow in the shadowy night, there flamed forth a horrid tout for Tea. We had endured much from a sign of Whiskey further down the river,—Whiskey and Tea are Britain's bulwarks,—but this was worse, for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters which were red and green one second and yellow the next ran in a long line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, ourcampaniliagain became chimneys. Gone was our Fairyland, gone our River of Dreams. The falling twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did,—and I reallybelieve he did,—but the other tenants were outraged, and an indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the Solicitor and the Agent of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the chair. It was of no use. We learned that our joy in the miracle of night might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm, legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring and glaring defiance at us across the river. When the Socialist gets tired of it, he goes off to his country place in his forty-horse-power motor-car, but we, in our weariness, can escape only to bed.
The Riverside PressCAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTSU. S. A.