When you ride up the Strand on top of an omnibus—and probably in rain—please remember that someone is envying you with all his heart, that someone would give six months' pay to sit in your damp seat and see the lines of traffic converge on Charing Cross.
To the west in Canada, to the south in Africa, to the east in India, and far over the sea in Australia and New Zealand, are the lonely men. Where the red border line of Empire ends on the map in an alien colour are the little outposts in which these men work and dream. At the end of day they ram down the tobacco in their pipes and think of home with the characteristic sentimentality of the exile, for solitude makes a man very like a child. "Lord to be in London now!" How many times in the twenty-four hours does this cry go up all over the earth? We who take our London carelessly as a matter of course can have no conception of its meaning to these wanderers who, feeling the ache of home-sickness, are too old to cry.
* * *
The Strand!
That means London in shack, bungalow, and camp. It means more: it symbolizes—home! Not Piccadilly, not Pall Mall, not fashionable Mayfair or Belgravia, but the curious old Victorian Strand.
What a street it is. It does not belong to London. Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Oxford Street stole its birthright long ago. It belongs to the Empire. Look at its shops. They are full of pith helmets and spine pads, veld shirts and tropical drill, ammunition belts and puttees. Your smart subaltern going out to join the Indian cavalry may buy his clothes in Savile Row, but your old colonial, who has been pegging down the flag somewhere for the best part of his life, comes back to shop in the Strand, to walk in the Strand, to exult in the Strand....
* * *
Take the faces. In days when colonials come home you will find nothing more interesting in London. The exile makes straight for the Strand; if he does not know it he makes its acquaintance at once, joyfully, reverently; for he has heard men speak of it as men speak of their mothers. As he walks along he begins to believe that he has really come home.
You will see him shouldering his way gingerly through the crowds with the gentleness of a big man not used to pavements, and he looks up at the landmarks, a shop where he bought a gun once, a restaurant where once Mary ... well, never mind, that was over long ago. Or he may be that strange thing, a tenderfoot in London, a tenderfoot from the prairies or the veld or the Afghan frontier. He is fulfilling his destiny: He is walking down the Strand! When he gets back men will say to him: "Well, and how did you find London?"
And he will start a story consciously and proudly with:
"I was walking down the Strand one morning——"
Ah, he has struck a chord at once. Surely you visualize the smile that will go round the circle of men deep in their cane chairs. "I was walking down the Strand!" Can you begin a story in the tropics in a more arresting way? You set a whole flock of memories a-flying....
What sentimental journeys the Strand has seen.
You must have been stopped at some time near the Adelphi by a burnt-up, middle-aged man who asks the way to a bar or a restaurant unknown to you. When you say you don't know it, a disappointed look creeps into his eyes, and he apologizes and goes off, very straight and lonely, in the crowd.
Conrad in quest of his youth? Perhaps. Possibly for years, while he waited for leave, he was promising himself a visit to this place. No doubt the stars saw him sitting out alone at night thinking of it, hearing the thunder of the Strand, seeing its lights, and himself slipping into his old seat at a corner table where he used to sit with old X, who was killed in "British East." ...
All the time the Strand was altering, denying such exiles their beloved landmarks.
* * *
So they drift a little sadly and disconsolately along the Strand, feeling as you feel when, after a long absence, you visit a place known to you when you were a child. Nothing is so big as you thought, nothing so impressive as once it was. That tiny paddock was once a prairie—that small house a castle.
The Strand to them is somehow different—cheaper, smaller, vaguely disappointing. Those pale-faced men hurrying along. How strange. What an altered atmosphere! And where are those lovely little faces that used to look from beneath Merry Widow hats?
* * *
Then, six months after, in a solitude of stars and palms, with a hot wind blowing over the plains:
"O Lord, to see the dear old Strand now!"
The big stars shine, the moon swings up above the distant hills, and the old love comes back into the heart of the lonely man....
A tea-shop is a delightful place. It is the milestone that marks the end of a day's work.
In the provinces, and particularly in the north and in Scotland, where men take tea with passionate sincerity, frequently starting with sardines and ending with apple tart, the tea-shop occupies an appropriately massive position in daily life. London's tea-shops are, however, talk-shops, refuges from a day's shopping, trysting-places after a terrible eight hours' separation.
O, the eyes that meet over a muffin every afternoon in London; the hands that thrill to a casual touch beneath the crumpet plate....
London's tea-shops are of many kinds, from the standardized shop to the good pull-up for millionaires constructed on the Paris plan, where slim Gruyère sandwiches hide in paper coats, and cakes taste of Benedictine, and bills have a queer habit of working out at fifteen shillings.
Then, of course, there is the cosy type of tea-shop run on amateur lines where genteel young women who do not seem to have forgotten William Morris bend wistfully over the meringues in brown or sage greencrêpe de Chinegowns and an air of shattered romance. Such places have fanciful names designed to attract those with a passion for peace. They are always opening or going smash, and there is a widespread belief in the suburbs among enterprising young women that this is the way to an enormous bank account.
"Thanks awfully!"
That's what they say when you pay the bill, and such a sad, sweet smile goes with it. Andromeda chained to a cheese cake.
* * *
I entered a large musical tea-shop in the heart of Shopland yesterday. The atmosphere was as feminine as that of a perfume store. It was No Man's Land. I steered my conspicuous way to a table through a jungle of musquash, moleskin, and beaver. The only other men there were in the toils of women, politely tapping theiréclairs, and wearing photographic faces, behaving as men never behave away from this uplifting and ennobling atmosphere.
I heard a girl describe a bridesmaid's dress; another girl was talking about a baby; a third had discovered John Galsworthy. Two young married women were discussing their husbands, how really sweet they were, how they hated cold mutton, how amusingly irritable they were, and how upset they were when their wives shingled their hair....
A slight stir was caused by the entrance of husbands to claim their wives. One, a handsome young man, was charmingly introduced with shy pride; another, an elderly, bluff, old-established husband, was received quite calmly like an over-due muffin. Then the human event that electrified the entire tea-shop happened, that marvellous touch of nature that unites Kennington with even the best parts of Kensington.
A small, smug child, distinguished only by a red balloon on the end of a string, set up a wild and awful howl. It was dramatic in its suddenness. Everybody looked round in the belief that the infant had sat on a pin. Instead they saw the red balloon drifting with a gay and careless determination towards the roof. Reaching its destination, it bumped gracefully twice and remained there, coyly nestling against a frescoed cupid.
Immediately the entire tea-shop, hitherto split into self-centred groups, became one in a solid endeavour to rescue the red balloon. Young men anxious to distinguish themselves stood on chairs and made wild grabs for the string with their umbrellas; dogs which till then had been asleep and unsuspected, awakened and barked.
In the centre of the stage stood the smug, small child, breathless with anxiety, pointing to the roof, grief-stricken that his balloon had played him false, yet encouraged by the stir the event was causing in so many grown-up lives.
A grim old man melted by the tragedy obtained a long pole employed in pulling down shop blinds. He succeeded in driving the balloon from its fastness and sending it fatuously bumping into another. Meanwhile the entire shop held its breath, expecting these good intentions to end in a loud plop and a worse tragedy. There was a gasp of relief as this ancient hero gave way to a man in an apron with a step-ladder.
He did the deed.
The tea-shop settled down. The smug child that had united an afternoon's assembly left unnoticed. Over the tea-tables rose again the talk of bridesmaids and husbands and shingles and Maud's hennaed hair. The orchestra played some more Puccini, and a small boy who had profited by the commotion to seize his fourthéclairgave an enormous sigh of joy.
Shortly after midnight a decently dressed young man glanced furtively round Trafalgar Square, hesitated a moment, and then ran swiftly up the broad, black steps of St. Martin's Church. I came up behind him as he tapped the door.
There was the sound of a drawn bolt, and the door swung back. The young man stammered. He was blue with cold, and—there was something else:
"I'm—I'm broke," he said. "I've never done this before. I've always had a bit of money; but—well, I've nowhere to sleep to-night, and—please can I come in?"
The door opened wider, and a pleasant, middle-aged policewoman said:
"Come along!" I followed.
* * *
Down in the crypt of St. Martin's Church, the church whose doors never close, I saw a remarkable sight. Broad, white arches spanned a dim gloom. Certain benches were set facing the east, as in the church above, and others were placed round the crypt. Lying, sitting upright, and huddled in every position of which the human body is capable, were men and women, homeless wanderers over the hard face of the earth.
There was no sound in the white crypt but variously keyed snores and the small scratch of a policewoman's pen as she kept a record of Christ's guests, for such they are; and as I looked at them these words sang in my heart: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
Sanctuary. That was it. They had the hunted air of having run hard to find this place, and, having found it, had abandoned themselves to safety. There was something else. They reminded me of a picture that used to thrill me when I was a child: troops, rolled in their cloaks beside dead fires, sleeping before a battle. Their battle was To-morrow.
* * *
There was a young girl who could not sleep. She was wrapped tightly in a blue mackintosh. She sat with her eyes wide open, gazing before her. There was a grey-haired woman sleeping upright in a pew, a poor, rakish hat on a pile of prayer-books beside her. Three or four other women slept near together, leaning against each other, as if for warmth.
Most of the men slept. Some had no overcoats, and lay huddled with their tousled heads on hassocks. Others had placed their coats over their heads. One or two wore spats, and appeared from their clothes to be prosperous. Then you looked at their boots, and read a story of tramp, tramp, tramp. One elderly man, awakened suddenly, shot out an arm to look at his wrist-watch. But there was no watch there, and he drew his hand swiftly under his coat again as though it hurt.
* * *
"Some extraordinary dramas have been acted on the steps outside in the small hours," said a young man officially connected with the church. "Once a girl was saved from white-slavers; once I brought in a boy so blue with cold that I had to open the furnace doors without delay, and thaw him. Most of the 'down-and-outs' know this church. Many of them we manage to set up again, some sink back or just disappear. Yet we never lose faith in human nature. A homeless person is allowed to shelter here only three nights in succession. After that we try to find some other abode, so you see our visitors are always changing."
He opened a door, and I found myself in a cellar full of old clothes. Boxes of collars lay on the floor. A knowing looking silk hat crowned a pile of old hats. Women's skirts and men's trousers hung from pegs. Boots and shoes stood neatly dressed by the right.
"This is our wardrobe," he said. "Our first principle is to give a homeless person food and then whatever clothes we can. You can't expect to hear the truth on an empty stomach."
"Are you often deceived by people who drift in here out of the night?"
"Now and then. It's nothing compared with the friends we make, the delightful characters we discover when the ache and pain of hardship have worn off. We divide men into three groups: Those who have been to prison and have a grudge against the world; those who went to the war as boys and came back men with boys' minds; and those who simply will not work and can't run straight. We have heard every fairy tale in the world, and we know a scrounger at sight!"
* * *
I tip-toed back through the white crypt. The pale girl was still awake. The grey-haired woman still slept—old, worn-out, uncared-for, and life gone by. Men slept and stirred uneasily as if afraid of the dawn that was stealing on to draw them again into the battle. How many would rise gloriously; how many fall? We talk of human nature in the rough, heartbeats, life. Here it is in the middle of London every night, each sleeper a real drama of struggle, each man and woman midway in that Valley of the Shadow through which all lives, spiritually or materially, must pass.
"We don't care what they are," said the young man. "If they are in trouble, that is enough."
I hardly heard him, for I was thinking that in this white place is the Spirit of Christ.
The only place where you could sell an elephant, a were-wolf, or your second best aunt without attracting the slightest curiosity is Club Row, a Sunday market famous throughout the eastern regions of London. Turn out of Shoreditch along the Bethnal Green Road and presently you see a large cloth-capped crowd. You approach.
A dramatic, sinister man who lost his razor early last year detaches himself and sidles up to you with his right hand suspiciously hidden in the breast of his coat. Is he an anarchist? Just as you expect him to bring out a bomb and cry "Down with Civilization," he quickly produces a six-ounce pom and whispers in a voice like a rusty door hinge: "Come on, half a dollar!" Other dog men approach. They offer handfuls of pups, or they submit dogs of larger growth which sit round in a circle looking up at you questioningly, hopefully. You want to buy the lot. Then an Airedale bites a collie and you find yourself the centre of a splendid battle, from which you escape into the heart of the mob.
Here life is magnificent. Thousands of things are happening at once in Oriental variety. This is what Bagdad was like in the days of the Caliph. This is what the Mouski in Cairo is like to-day. As you stand wedged between people who hold sacks that writhe and cluck, a man waves a couple of buff Orpingtons in your face and pushes past to stand himself a glass of jellied eels. An elderly parrot-like old lady is marooned helplessly, with a green aloof-looking parrot, exactly like herself, perched on her hand. Pigeons coo, hens cackle, cockerels crow, dogs bark, canaries sing, and you gain the impression that anything—anything—is yours for "half a dollar."
I was interested in the little groups round contortionists, catch-penny men, and herb doctors. We have driven these mediæval characters from more polite places, and it is almost with a thrill that east of Aldgate Pump you find yourself in the hearty atmosphere of a fair as old as England. One man, who said that his face was as well known as the dome of St. Paul's, walked rapidly up and down with a mysterious paper packet over which he held a pair of dental forceps. Every one wanted to see what marvellous thing he would pick out of the packet at the psychological moment. All the time as he walked backwards and forwards he talked, of indigestion and other things with Elizabethan frankness. He discussed food as if it were a revolver.
"If the steak repeats, if the onions repeat, if the pudding repeats, if cheese repeats...."
Then, working up to his climax, he dived the forceps into the packet and produced a beautiful heliotrope-coloured pill!
Did he sell any? He did!
Under a railway arch a young man with a faint Scottish accent had been handcuffed and chained. Round his neck he wore a steel collar; on his head a steel cap which, he said, was "an exact replica of the cap used for capital punishment throughout the United States of America." (Thrill in the audience!)
"And now," he remarked (with a touch of his Scottish accent), "before I release myself, my partner will take the liberty of passing the hat round!"
The fringes of the crowd melted away. After a prolonged struggle, interrupted by a donkey and cart bursting violently into the arena, the young man unshackled himself, dived for the hat, looked at the pennies, and remarked, "Well, now; if any sportsman would care...."
But the crowd had stampeded.
How delightfully childish it all is. In order to sell chocolate one man had taken off his coat and had put on his head an irresponsible looking opera hat!
In side streets I came on a bicycle market. I wondered how many were doped like racehorses. A stray bicycle found carelessly outside a house becomes something quite different with the aid of a paint pot! How many old crocks had been dressed up with new lamps and saddles I would not care to say! Here trade was booming. I saw a man who had bought a dog, a birdcage, and a pair of pink braces, treat himself to a pair of handle-bars. It must be wonderful to wander through Bagdad like this, meeting things on the way, living an hour full of infinite possibilities, not knowing whether you will arrive home with a bullfinch or a bicycle! After watching this market closely I realize this: people do not go there to buy things, but to have things sold to them!
* * *
On the way out I saw something worth while. A melancholy bull pup sitting in the road with all the world's troubles in his eyes was picked up by a little girl.
"I want him because he looks so unhappy."
A chauffeur in a green coat paid out five shillings.
"Darling ... darling," said the girl, holding the squat little body.
They took him to a motor-car that had been left round the corner. So he left a street corner in Bagdad to be a prince among pups.
Kismet!
"Prisoners Only."
A door in Bow Street Police Station opens on a small tiled room in which each morning all the prisoners on their way to the celebrated dock gather to await the call.
It is an exclusive apartment. Visitors are not allowed. Unless you break a shop window, punch a policeman in the stomach, or become publicly full of spirit you will never see it. It was due only to the courtesy of Bow Street that I was allowed in for a moment yesterday like an ordinary prisoner. Here I found a strange assortment of human beings gathered together by Fate—or should I say alcohol?—for Monday morning's crime originates in a bottle!
The room is tiled and looks like an ordinary waiting-room till a policeman opens the door that leads out to a courtyard and then you see a second door composed of stout iron bars. About twenty or thirty men were sitting round the room talking to the policemen who had arrested them. Most of them were weary, some of those who had been let out on bail looked smart, a few still retained traces of their fateful debauch, and all had lost the divine afflatus which had flung them into a pair of blue arms. The atmosphere was rather like that of a headmaster's study in which is gathered a group of bad boys waiting for the cane.
A stoical old man dozed peacefully in a corner. So might dear old Falstaff have bared his grey hairs in a moment of regrettable trial. A navvy with the head of a Roman emperor sat huddled in his clay-soiled clothes, silent, grim. He reminded me of Trajan's bust in the British Museum. He should have been dressed in a toga instead of sitting in Bow Street with a fine of five shillings hanging over him! A young man with a mild face sat near him, the kind of young man who keeps rabbits in a back yard. I wondered what odd circumstance had brought him in conflict with law and order. Among a group of seedy and tattered people I noticed a smart man wearing spats and holding a neat umbrella.
It was the strangest roomful you can imagine.
* * *
How wonderfully British! I do not imagine that the police and prisoners of any other nation meet together as captor and captive in the same cheery, almost social atmosphere.
In Berlin I imagine it must be exceedingly unpleasant to be a prisoner, and in Paris, also, it cannot be exactly jolly. In Cologne I once saw a German policeman draw his sword and charge a little boy who had left a banana skin on a patch of neat, cultured turf; and in Paris once I saw a gendarme do unnecessarily unfriendly things to his captive. But our Roberts are not like this, and when they are face to face with their prey in the station they seem almost apologetic about it:
"You broke the law and I did my duty, and that's that. Let's forget it!"
That is the atmosphere in the "Prisoners Only" room. Thumbs in belts, the policemen talked with their prisoners about racing, the weather, and, as far as I could gather, anything but drink and brawls. What instinctive good breeding! Here and there a prisoner who took his captivity lightly laughed and joked with the man who brought him there.
"What'll I get?" one prisoner asked.
"Oh, about twenty years without option!" replied the constable. Then a man with a notebook became busy with the day's evil-doers, a name was called, and as the first prisoner pulled himself together and strode out dockwards, a flutter of interest went round the waiting-room, and the old man awakened with a start and asked where he was.
* * *
Under the Royal Arms sat Sir Chartres Biron, white-haired and exceedingly wise to human nature. He was dealing with a pathetic collection of women prisoners who had been waiting in a "Prisoners Only" room of their own. Constable after constable described scenes of revelry in which it was alleged that certain inadequate Bacchantes in black bonnets had been urged to deeds of violence.
Some women pleaded guilty and got it all over quickly. Others clasped and unclasped their hands—appealing, thin, worn hands grimed with work—and tried to impress Sir Chartres that "two glasses of port" had been the cause of all their trouble. They were fined and went their way, some with an assumption of belated dignity, others jauntily. One old lady was so pleased with her sentence that she danced down the corridor between two lines of policemen promising never to look upon the wine again.
* * *
Then one by one my friends of the waiting-room came up for justice: drunk and disorderly, drunk in charge of a motor-car, creating a disturbance, using insulting language. They all looked sorry for themselves and exceedingly foolish. Five deaf and dumb youths had, it appeared, pushed a policeman off the pavement. The mother of one of them interpreted the case, talked to them in baby language, asked them if they had really "banged" the policeman. They nodded their heads and tried to speak, but only vague, tortured sounds, heart-rending to hear, came from their mouths. They filed out, bound over.
Then Cæsar strode into the dock, said he had been drunk, accepted his fine without a trace of emotion, and walked from the dock with an invisible cohort before him and—a visible bottle sticking out of his coat-tails!
* * *
When he has done his day's work does Sir Chartres Biron feel more like laughing or crying, I wonder?
Boys are always leaning over London Bridge, as right-minded boys have been leaning these five hundred years and more. Beneath them the Thames, that loved river of ours, swirls and eddies round the piers, sucking at the weathered stone as it runs seawards, out and away.
When I joined them the other day I noticed with an authentic thrill that against the grim wharves men were doing interesting things in ships. No matter how trivial the act—the hauling of a rope, the turning of a winch, the painting of a hull—it becomes somehow vital and significant to anyone on dry land. To a London office boy who has been told not to linger by the wayside—ah! how exquisite, how irresistible!
Sometimes little important jets of steam rose from a cargo boat, marvellously suggesting departure and the imminence of great adventure; enviable free men whose boots had never trod an office stair popped their heads out of hatchways and lumbered up on deck; a string of linked barges, dingy, low in the water, went by behind an impertinent tug, which nosed the tide sideways, pulling and puffing. On the hindmost barge a man was frying bacon in a jet-black pan. O, exquisite! O, irresistible! Was this not life? Was this not romance?
To me a fat white woman was singularly significant. She appeared from the bowels of a barge and, moving slowly to starboard with a nautical roll, hung an intimate item of her laundry right in the eye of London Bridge. Then she looked round her with that composed placidity which sustains the suburbs (just as if she were in Brixton and not on the high seas), and after giving one of her sleeves a roll to keep it above her fat elbow, she went below with the important air of the busy female who believes that her industry is the hinge on which life turns smoothly. No cut-throats on that barge, no swashbuckling, no silly ideas about the Spanish Main there, but everything nice and tidy, and wipe your boots on the mat and mind you don't stay out too long after closing time! Wonderful how a woman—any woman—softens a masculine scene and awakens the boy in man to a swift respect—as if the matron had appeared suddenly on the scene of a scrum on a dormitory landing! The wild places of the earth do not care much about a man. He can't do much! When the woman appears the aspens shiver and the tamarisks tremble and even the oak is fearful, for a lone man is transitory and woman is permanent: she means a home and a whole lot more men; she is the beginning of civilization.
So the fat woman made her barge most interesting to me: she brought it right into society, she humanized the wild old Thames. All this was high above the office boys who pressed their stomachs to the stone and clambered for a foothold in the balustrading so that they might take a better view of all this glamour....
Thames, you muddy strip of magic, how many London heads have you turned; how many sirens come in from sea on every tide to sing those wicked songs against which we poor chained creatures sometimes wax our ears in vain?
* * *
I looked at the faces of the spellbound office boys. They gazed like gargoyles from the parapet. Most of them were dull and stolid; but you never can tell! Their cheeks bulged with sweets and their eyes regarded the river with the same intent vacancy that they would have given to a spectacular road repair.
One face only seemed to me to hold the hunger that burns. It belonged to a thin, pale lad who possessed no physical strength, the type that would rather have been Hercules than Homer; the frail type that dreams of swords and ambuscades and blood. He looked out over the water towards Tower Bridge with eyes that were wide—whether with imagination or indigestion I cannot say! I can only tell you this: he was the kind of pale, useless mass of parental despair that through history has met the turning point of existence in an idle hour, when imagination, blazing suddenly like fired straw, illuminates a dream on which to build a life.
What was he thinking, I wondered. Had I asked him he would have said sullenly, "Nothing," and have slouched away, ashamed.
I wondered if he was seeing in Thames water those things that thousands of London boys have seen—argosies and ventures and foreign places, the drive of water past a vessel's bows, leaning sails, and small white towns whose palm trees stand with their feet in calm lagoons.
Who knows? This is the dream of London Bridge. This is the challenge that the Thames flings down to London every day and every night, crying it aloud to the huddled streets and to the crowded places, calling it softly in the marketplace. This is the old magic. It has given to London merchants, adventurers, sailors, poets, and millions of poor, discontented men who must need take their burning hearts to Balham and shut their ears.
* * *
Slowly conscience dawned in the minds of the boys. One by one they went away, their places immediately filled by others.
Away they went into the traffic, to become lost in the ant-hills of commerce, carrying who knows what high resolve from that stolen moment beside the river.
* * *
More barges came downstream slowly. High and shrill sounded the hoarse protest of a siren, imperative and wild, and I seemed to feel, right in the heart of London, where all things are so ordered and inevitable, the ancient call to the open places that comes with the smell of tar and the sight of thin masts rising to the sky.
It is three o'clock in the morning. Piccadilly Circus is empty of life and movement—save for a prowling policeman trying shop doors, and a group of men directing water from a giant hose over the gleaming, empty road.
A taxicab is an event, and a stray person walking quietly into the Circus holds dramatic possibilities. The mind fastens on him. Who is he? He may be a great criminal, or a great lover walking home after a dance with his head full of glorious dreams, or he may be a burglar, or a young man who has just inherited a million, or a young man without a place to rest his head. The emptiness of Piccadilly at three a.m. is awful, unnatural, death-like....
Yet London is not asleep. Hundreds of people in London never seem to sleep. Come into one of the all-night cafés which have sprung up within the last year or so. It is full. It hums with talk and laughter. Waiters move about between the crowded tables. There is a constant clatter of cups and saucers, and the air is blue with smoke. In contrast with the desolation of the empty streets outside, it is an astonishing place. At first you think there is nothing to distinguish the café from the same place at normal hours. You look again and realize the difference. The people are different. The woman with three or four brown paper parcels—the shopping woman—is absent. There are no children. Few elderly people.
Those present are mostly young people distinguished either by an air of lassitude or an unnatural hectic gaiety.
At the next table a girl is eating lobster salad. Lobster at three a.m.!
* * *
Who are these people? You begin to wonder about them. Some are obvious—extremely obvious—some are mysteries.
In a corner a man in evening dress has dropped in for a cup of coffee with the nice girl with whom he has been dancing. She keeps her velvet evening cloak tightly round her, and looks about at the other people, trying to fix them. It is to her an adventure. Her partner's glance at her over the broad rim of his cup suggests that he is desperately trying to prolong the "night out." He is a clean, blonde young man, and he pretends to take no notice of the elderly satyr at another table who is openly admiring the girl in the cloak. But she sees and gives the satyr a cold Kensington eye, hard as an eviction order.
Quite a number of other dancers seem glued to rolls and coffee, unable to go home. They laugh and discuss the dance. Someone says: "I must be in the office at nine!" They laugh and order more coffee.
A group of men with music cases under the chairs talk in a corner. They are a jazz band which has just finished work. There are a number of solemn, self-centred men smoking quietly, alone. They may be night-workers, post office officials, or what not, waiting for the next tramcar.
There are inevitable Japanese students. They sit together talking, occasionally taking an expressionless survey of the company. What are they doing? Studying night life? Winding up an innocent party?
Most interesting are the unplaceable people: the number of foreign-looking young men who argue together: the type of man who at the precise crack of Doom with graves opening and the world closing, would try to sell you a cheap pearl tiepin. A number of night birds are evidently in the habit of drinking coffee at three a.m. There is movement from table to table, group to group. Dotted about the room are girls who would describe themselves as dance instructresses or cinema actresses.
Four or five men who look as though they have been celebrating a friend's last night of bachelorhood enter with exaggerated politeness, apologizing for occasional conflicts with chairs and tables. They order black coffee. Another man comes up to their table. They all leap up and shake hands.
"The last time I saw you was in Bagdad!" he says. "What's happened to old 'Whisky Willie' of the Gunners? You remember that night...."
This sort of talk still goes on in London where young men are linked together by common memories of the War.
* * *
As we go from the brilliantly lit room the emptiness and the chill of sleeping London meets us at the door. Long lines of lights shining on desolate pavements, a shuffling figure under a lamp, a slow taxicab cruising near the kerb, and then, surprisingly, like a ghost of old London, a hansom cab standing in Piccadilly, the ancient horse, head down as if remembering past things!
In the cold air is the vague promise of a new day, a faint rumble of market carts and vans as if London stirs in her impressive slumber.
He was sitting in the acrid unpleasantness of a London fog holding a steering-wheel and—the lives of men and women. It was Sunday.
Inside the well-lit and almost pleasant omnibus a young man, wearing his Sunday hat, and a young girl, completely Sundayfied, sat holding hands as they pretended to read a newspaper. They saw no more than each other's eyes, and what more could they possibly have seen? Portentous women with unnaturally clean children entered or made a fussy exit from time to time, bent, no doubt, on that awfulness of a London Sunday—a visit to relatives. On some faces you could read a kind of comfortable condescension that somehow suggested a glittering descent on poor relations; on others a dutiful resignation—the composure of an ordained martyr preparing to meet the lions—and you pictured a stiff and patronizing tea in a distant but exalted suburb, with criticism underlying an afternoon of smooth insincerity!
All the time the Man at the Wheel exhibited a broad and stocky back to the human comedy he was carrying; sometimes his face, tense and questioning, was turned towards the lit interior as he tried to gauge the right moment to accelerate after the descent of an agile passenger. Mostly, however, he just sat there peering into the white cotton-wool world of fog that was hung with saffron lights, his big hands in gloves, expertly and suddenly taking his vehicle from an unexpected near rush of light as a tramcar clanged past. And the passengers did not notice him. They had paid twopence to be taken in safety through the fog!
* * *
I sat there frankly admiring him.
I have never heard of any poet writing an ode to a London omnibus driver, but he always strikes me as worthy subject of praise. He may not possess the social charm of the old horse-omnibus driver, who, according to legend, wore a top hat and used his whip butt on London as a lecturer uses a wand. He is a more solemn character. Machines always leave their mark on men. The big petrol engine has created a grim, silent, crouching character who, fortunately for London and Londoner's wives and families, has no time for social pleasantries as he urges his great, red, double-decked steed through the thousand perils of a crowded street.
He has, I think, developed a sixth sense. His whole being seems acutely conscious of inches. Watch the way a press of omnibuses in High Holborn or Tottenham Court Road, or any other famous hold-up, will edge and nudge a way with a mere inch between their mudguards, all so skilfully and calmly done as though the scarlet sides of the vehicles had nerves—invisible feelers—that carried warning of danger to the rough, deft hands at the wheel.
As we crawled through the fog I watched his taut concentration, admired his judgment as he executed a circling movement round a candidate for suicide, as he jammed on the brakes within a yard of a halted motor-car, as he put on speed over a thin patch of fog, and as he shot ahead past a less speedy driver.
Now and then he had to crawl through a whiteness as dense as that terrible billowing mist that rolls down a Scottish mountain. Here and there pin-points of fire shone out, changed swiftly on approach into objects like long hair aflame in the wind, and, nearer still, stood revealed as tall fog flares shooting up in fire from metal standards.
At the terminus I watched the drivers dismount, stiff and cold, pull off their big gloves, and hit their cold hands across their chests. Wet particles of fog shone on their moustaches.
Pretty bad at Camden Town, and Baker Street was like a tunnel! Couldn't see a yard at Brixton. Fine and clear at the Crystal Palace.... So these adventurers of the London fog compared notes before, groping in remote recesses, they found money to buy coffee from a stall. Then a whistle, the roar of a chilled engine, and off again on their perilous pilgrimages across London.
Surely every man who has driven through fog with eyes that ache and imagine phantoms at each cross-road will be glad to raise his hat to the bulky figure behind the wheel of a London omnibus as he steers his living cargo to safety with no thought of praise because—it's all in the day's work?
I was cheered to find that St. Paul's looked quite firm and permanent when I walked up Ludgate Hill the other morning. How deceptive are the works of man! Who would have guessed that this mountain was feeling its age a bit, moving ever so slightly under the weight of its Dome?
The pigeons wheeled in flight. A girl stood covered in them, while less bold birds walked, nodding quickly, round her feet pecking crumbs. Up the fine, bold sweep of the steps walked many people. I think that they were perhaps Londoners paying their first visit, hoping that they would get it over before the cathedral collapsed, for they looked up warily as they advanced as though alarmed by accounts of splitting piers, and then, finding nothing unusual, they went on their way, maybe surprised to find no cant to the Dome or any visible fissure!
As I walked over the black and white diamonds of the nave I realized that although I have attended services normal and national in St. Paul's I had never climbed to the Whispering Gallery. When Americans had talked to me about it I had lied and had pretended that I knew it. So I determined to wipe out my shame.
I walked down the south aisle admiring the gold shafts of light striking through the dusk of the church, noting the number of young women who go there to sit quietly and read sacred and profane literature, and remarking how one appreciative beam of light had caught a splendid head of Burne-Jones's hair, making it blaze in the comparative darkness like fire in a lovely thorn bush. I met all kinds of people wandering on tiptoe with that vague, lost air people assume in churches; and then I came to a little office near the south transept in which I paid sixpence for a ticket—the best sixpennyworth, as I afterwards found, in all London.
"I thought," I said to the verger, "that I'd better go up there before it comes down here."
"That won't be for a long time, sir," he said with a reassuring smile, a sentiment I passed on at step two hundred and forty-one to a charming old lady, who asked if I thought it was "quite wise" to go right to the top!
What a climb it is! If ever I go foolishly walking or climbing in Switzerland again I will get into training on this spiral staircase. Once up and once down every day and no mountaineer's muscles would be firmer, no walker's wind less treacherous. It is a fine, free, and uncrowded gymnasium!
Half-way up is a museum and a library, where I, puffing slightly, prodded about among old stones, the ruins of Old St. Paul's. I know no greater thrill than sightseeing. Then up, up, up and round and round again till I came to a little door at which a quiet, churchy man said it was the Whispering Gallery and told me to walk right round it.
In the Whispering Gallery I was not so impressed by the man in occupation as I was by the astonishing bird's-eye view of tiny people walking far below on a little chess-board of a pavement. Then suddenly I heard a whisper. I looked across to the other side of the gallery. The guide was whispering against the wall. His message came to me like a spirit voice from the Beyond, rather terrifying and sepulchral: "The diameter of the dome is a hundred and eight feet," said the Voice, and then it plunged into an account of Sir Christopher Wren. I walked away, congratulated the Voice, which seemed gratified, and said, "How dissatisfied and hard of hearing some people are!"
High up below the dome of St. Paul's you have thrills. As you walk out on a large stone platform London lies below in a huddle of buildings and smoking chimneys. You pick out landmarks. How narrow even the widest streets look. To the east over the big black bulk of Cannon Street is the faint outline of Tower Bridge in the mist. Only the broad Thames has size. Men are midgets, an omnibus is blotted out from time to time by the flight of three pigeons; your eye rakes offices, exploring all floors at a glance, floors packed with typists. You feel like a beemaster looking into a hive; and all the time a rumble reaches you, the restless voice of the city.
* * *
Almost as wonderful as the smoky map of London spread below is the feeling that you, so leisurely examining St. Paul's while the rest of London is rushing about trying to pay the rent, are having a holiday in a foreign city.
You feel a superiority over all those poor harassed people. You perceive a new angle to London life. You join the idle drifting population of sightseers and you feel rather sorry you did not bring your camera with you, just to help out the illusion that you are in a Florentine mood.
Vergers, too, observe towards you the courtesy extended to strangers within the gate. There is a subtle difference in their manner. In their "Yes, sirs," and "No, sirs," and in their pointing and smiling you can feel the affection which churches have always, and quite rightly, extended to pilgrims. One man obviously considered me a distinguished visitor from foreign parts. He went out of his way to instruct me in history that I know quite well, and I wondered whether the only straight and honourable thing to do was to make a clean breast of it and stop him with:
"Look here, I live in Knightsbridge and work in Fleet Street, and I'm frightfully sorry about it, and all that. I know it's most unusual and you won't believe me, but there it is."
I had not the courage. I gazed insincerely into his enthusiastic eyes and said "Really!" and "By Jove!" and "How interesting," at appropriate pauses, so that when eventually I left him I went surrounded, for him, with all the beauty of a bird of passage.
In the old comic papers you will find a stock character whose nose is red, whose coat collar is Astrakhan, whose hand is always drawn in the act of conveying drink to a clean-shaven, mobile mouth—a mouth always uttering the words: "When I played Hamlet, laddie, in '84..."
He is, or rather was, the out-of-work actor. No actor has of course ever been out of work: he "rests" sometimes for so long a period that idleness becomes a habit. Lack of employment seems to cover the actor with disgrace. In most other professions men make no secret of being out of a job, but the actor acts both on and off the stage.
The out-of-work actor to-day (you find him in Leicester Square and the Charing Cross Road), has changed since the comic papers pictured a tragedian whose ambitious argosies had evidently foundered in, as Homer would put it, a wine-dark sea. To-day you find him in a bar, merely because there he will meet other actors and agents and pick up news of his heartless and overrated profession; but in his hand is a glass of ginger beer. His clothes are well-cut and he wears a public school tie. His spats draw attention to his worn boots, always the sign of a man's condition, and as he drawls lazily in his Oxford voice, real or assumed, he tries hard to give the impression that, resting as he is on the enormous profits of his genius, he must keep an important appointment in Mayfair at one-thirty or the duchess will be absolutely furious!
Poor brave people! No matter how overdue the rent may be they never lose their panache. To-day the fight to walk on in a musical comedy and say heartily: "Girls, let's go to Paris!" and the feminine fight to answer coyly in good Kensingtonian: "Oh, what a quate topping ideah!" is fiercer than ever. Added to the usual legitimate "resters" are thousands of film actors, both male and female, thrown on the streets because the British film trade is in the doldrums.
If you could only know the bitterness of the fight for the job that does not exist, the daily march round the agents' offices, the young man who puts his head round a door, smiles, says "Nothing doing"—the humiliation of not having a shilling!
What keeps them going? What encourages girls to wash their one pair of real silk stockings overnight, brush their furs carefully, and turn out each day, apparently prosperous, to try another joust with fate? It is belief in themselves, the inability to do anything else, and, above all, it is a vision of fame and a name flung high against the stars over Piccadilly—the dream that might come true. Many a man and many a maid, who feel they possess a descending lift instead of a stomach, see that name of theirs every night twinkling, glistening, beckoning, making it all seem worth while. That keeps them going.
* * *
I sat for an hour in a film agent's office which deserves the title of Heartbreak House. Six months ago the crowds of heroes, villains, heroines, and villainesses who clamoured for heroism or villainy became so great that they had to sit four deep down the stairs. Since that time the word has gone forth that there is no work to be had and no point in seeking it; but still every day they come, hopeful, bright-eyed, the girls all airs and graces, the men eager, self-reliant.
In the waiting-room were six or seven exceedingly pretty fair-haired girls of assorted ages. Some friend had once committed one of the cardinal sins and told them how like Mary Pickford they were. They were now reaping the harvest of this dangerous suggestion. There was an old man with the face of a judge, a young man cut out to be a hero, and a number of vague people who looked in restlessly, and as restlessly went away.
An enormously fat woman occupied the doorway, talking rapidly:
"No fat parts going? Oh, well, I suppose something'll turn up some day. Nothing like hope, is there? And it's not easy for me to keep my weight up with everything so dear these days. Suppose I got thin? What would I do then? Oh, what a life, what a life!"
* * *
The agent entered the room. All the pretty girls pursed their lips and assumed a photographic smile, putting up what they hoped would be a barrage of beauty to demolish all obstacles.
"Sorry, I can do nothing for you. There's no work!"
Slowly the smile faded, and each girl looked five years older than girls of that age have any right to look. They fussed a moment with their handbags, brushed imaginary crumbs from their knees, lingered as if hoping against hope that some producer would dash into the office and cry, "Girls, I want you!" and then, with a sigh, departed; fawn coats, moleskin, and black coats.
"Pretty awful, isn't it?" said the agent to me. "You wouldn't think they were out of work. That's part of the game: they must look smart!"
* * *
A big negro put his head round the door, took off a battered bowler, exposed his gums, and said:
"Mornin', boss. Does any guy wanter a good ord'nary nigger?"
As he went out he came into collision with a tall, pale young man who wore spats but no overcoat. He too, was sent away.
"We get lots like that," said the agent, "well-bred young fellows wearing college ties, who manage to keep their spats white though their shoes probably need soleing. In fact, we get all sorts. But all the men and women who come up here looking as though a thousand a year would be an insult would be grateful for two pound a week. They all look smart."
* * *
That is part of their tragedy.
They may be "resting," but they cannot afford to stop acting. The only consolation is that, as everybody knows, luck turns, the darkest hour precedes the dawn, and so on, and so on!
Hope has kept more people alive than all doctors ever born.
How often in a London street do you try to pierce the mystery of another's life, to visualize the loves, the hates, the joys, the sorrows that have painted lines on some unknown, passing face?
I saw them in High Holborn. They stood out from the tense, jostling crowd because they seemed to have no object in life, nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were aimless, lost. They stood out also because they were so poor. Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope. They were such obvious failures at this game of getting and keeping called success. If they had suddenly shouted in pain above the thunder of the passing wheels they could hardly have been more spectacular in their misery, this man, this woman, this child.
He slouched along a few yards in advance of the woman. He looked as though Life had been knocking him down for a long time, then waiting for him to get up so that it might knock him down again. His bent body was clothed in greenish rags and his naked feet were exposed in gashed boots. He was not entirely pathetic. He was the kind of man to whom you would gladly give half a crown to salve your conscience; but you would never allow him out of sight with your suit-case!
She carried her baby against her breast in a ragged old brown cloth knotted round her shoulders. Perhaps she was twenty-five, but she looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman's existence. She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary—a condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives. This man of hers would obviously be better off without her. She had once been pretty.
The shame of it! To parade her woman's body draped in rags through streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a slave, behind this shambling, shifty man. Is there a crucifixion for a woman worse than this?
* * *
He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she married him. Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to make her quicken her pace. She took no notice, just plodded on in who knows what merciful dullness?
Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby. The mother's arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers. She stopped, went over to a shop window, and leant her knee on a ledge of stone. She placed one finger so gently into the fold of cloth and looked down into it....
I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced. Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the beatitude of a Madonna. This same unchanging smile has melted men's hearts for countless generations. The first time a man sees a woman look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him. Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they have fought to build to shield their own. No different! The same smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the bleakness of a London street.
They went on into the crowd and were forgotten. I went on with the knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid, the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.
Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one—the Future. Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement....
Girls were running after omnibuses, lawyers were running after briefs, and reporters were running after things called "stories" as I turned from Fleet Street to enter that little Round Church in the Temple which is one of the most splendid things in London.
Utter peace. A dim, tinted light filtered through the east windows, and at my feet lay the stone figure of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, bandit and excommunicate. He lies in full chain armour, his shield across his body, his spurs at his heels, and his long sword beside him, just as he might have lain eight hundred and eighty-four years ago, when they found him in the fen country and sent an arrow through his head. What trouble his death must have caused the Templars! They could not bury him in holy ground till the Pope granted him absolution, so they sealed him up in a lead coffin and hung him on a tree near Holborn. When Rome wiped out his sins they plucked him from the tree and brought him to this little Round Church that was born of the first Crusade.
As I stood over Geoffrey de Mandeville my thoughts raced across Europe, across the Mediterranean, over that sandy yellow waste known as the Desert of Sinai, and on to that city standing high on terraced rock—Jerusalem. Of what else can one think here in the Round Church? Its roots go back to Robert, Duke of Normandy, Tancred and Bohemund, Godfrey de Bouillon, and that fiery triumvirate, Frederick, Emperor of Germany, Richard Cœur de Lion of England, and Philip Augustus of France.
This quiet little church remembers Saladin; its stones have rung to the chain mail of men who saw the lances of the infidel like a forest against the sky, of men who knew how Frederick Barbarossa came like a storm out of the west to hurl his hosts on the gates of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem.... Standing there so near to the roar of London, yet centuries away from it, I recalled white nights on the Mount of Olives, the Holy City spread below over its hills, a dome rising up from violet shadow into the moonlight, a group of cypress trees pointing dark fingers to the stars, and from the faint ribbon of road the trit-trot of a donkey's hoofs going on to Bethany.
The link with Jerusalem is true and straight. It was after they returned from the First Crusade that the Templars built this church to remind them of the round church that guarded the grave of Christ. There are only three others like it in the country, at Cambridge, Northampton, and Little Maplestead, Essex. This church was conceived in Palestine. As I looked at it I recalled the waxen face of a monk whose thin beard was like black silk. I met him in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I had been torn here and there by the confused crowds of pilgrims. I had been mixed up in various sacred processions, I had seen the hungry fervour in which those anxious for salvation had kissed the end of a stick after it had been poked through a hole in an arch so that it might touch a fragment of the Column of the Scourging. And I went on towards the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, six foot by six foot, in whose tiny space hang forty-three lamps. Here I saw a poor Greek woman creep in and fall into a torrent of tears on that marble slab which hides the tombstone of Christ. The monk met me outside, such a smooth wax fellow, and led me to a little chapel in which he produced a pair of old spurs and a sword with a hilt shaped like a cross. Godfrey de Bouillon's! So he said.
I whispered the name in the Round Church. It all links up.
* * *
So quiet it is to-day in the safe keeping of the law. You would never dream that these lawns sloping to the Thames were eight hundred years ago the beginning of that long, hard road to Palestine, the nest of the Templars, those priest warriors who began their history so splendidly poor that two men rode one horse, and ended so richly and dangerously that two kings and the Pope of Rome broke them as three millionaires might smash a trust.
Nothing now remains of all this ancient fire but the Round Church and a few stone crusaders lying with their feet towards the east. A few names linger on, their meaning quite changed. The serjeant-at-law owes his title to the "Fratres Servientes," the serving brothers of the Templars; and the judges' title of "Knight" of the Common Pleas takes us back eight hundred years.
Between the crusaders lying cap-à-pie with Paynim knights beneath their spurred heels, are two brass tablets let into the floor. One is in memory of the members of the Inner Temple, and the other of members of the Middle Temple who laid down their lives in the war.
* * *
So these crusaders, with eight hundred years dividing them, are rightly commemorated together in this quiet, lovely place, whose atmosphere, once so charged with stress and strife, is now purged by time of all passion, either good or evil. But the ghosts live on, and it would not astonish me to hear that some quiet, harmless lawyer going to his chambers at night down that sloping path past the church met an armed host ready for the march, from whose throats burst like an organ note: "Deus vult!"
This was the cry that built the Temple, and, spreading out over the land like a flame, fired men's hearts, leading them into the desert in defence of the holy places of Christendom.
Down Whitechapel way is a place famous for dealing out sleep by the fistful twice a week.
None of your six thousand pounds Albert Hall fox-trots here. This is Knockout Land. It is, I imagine, the nearest thing to a bull-fight you will see in this country. Good, hard, slamming fifteen-round contests follow each other, with the ropes trembling and the fight fans howling like a pack of hungry wolves, and two half naked men with strawberry-coloured noses, hitting, gasping, reeling....
A great high hall blue with smoke, steel-girdered at the roof like a railway station. It is packed by a cloth-capped crowd, predominantly Oriental—a crowd of swift murmurs and sudden silences and sharp, instantaneous uproars. Good tempered now, but—O my!—suppose somebody started a row! There is not one woman present. The elegant girls in evening gowns who sit out Albert Hall prize fights have no place here. It is a gathering of fight fans. In the centre under bright, white lights rises the ring. The men in it are like men on a raft floating on a sea of restless, white faces.
Suddenly five or six men near the ring leap to their feet and shout "Five to one on Cohen!"
The hall becomes thick with wagers. Arms shoot out, men shout, no record is made (except that in a keen Hebrew mind), and every one is quite happy about it. Even if the Jew were not so commercially reliable, who would dare to be crooked here!
Look! The seconds in their white sweaters are busy. Two fighters enter the ring. Their bodies glisten in the light. One is white, the other olive-coloured, Eastern. They square up, crouch, dance round each other, then pat, pat-pat, pat-pat-pat—crack! A howl goes up from the crowd! That was a hit! Smash! Another one! Right! to the ropes! Back he comes, a little wild, and his opponent is driven away under the speed of his assault. Blows rain on each body, pink patches appear on chests and chins, both men dodge this way and that, a bell rings. Time!
"Chocolates!" cries a man with a tray.
I want to laugh. A less chocolate-like crowd I have never seen. Jellied eels, perhaps, beer undoubtedly, beefsteaks certainly; but milk chocolate—how astonishing!
Round fifteen! Both men are all in. They have pounded each other to pulp. I wonder if they can hear the yells and roars of the audience. Their legs drag. They are weak with hitting. You can see what they meant to do as a blow falls short, you can reach out and enter their exhausted minds, sympathize with them in their hazy world as they dog each other to plant the knock-out for which every one is waiting.
Smash! Right on the chin! The smashed one reels to the ropes, but comes back for more trouble, with his mouth sagging and something in his expression which suggests to me that he is not really here at all, but possibly wandering through some field rich with buttercups, with a little old public-house round the bend in the road.... Smash! He's taken another one! The scene in his dazed mind changes! He awakens from some stellar night, and comes alive again out of careering constellations to rush with the desperation of last strength on his opponent. Crack-crack—bang! Surely the knockout; surely he cannot stand any more? His head must be like iron, his jaws like steel.
He reels, his arms drop, his nightmare mind tries to grapple with the padded realities waiting for him, he makes an effort to hit. The other man is now ready to land him one that will lift him off his feet. He is the gladiator standing over him with lifted sword and—no appeal to the amphitheatre. It is only a question of a second now. Something brutal and masculine inside me desires to see him knocked out; something weak and feminine inside me wishes it was not necessary.
The victor draws back his head, the muscles ripple along his wet back, he shoots out an arm, and the other man crumples like a marionette at the end of a cut string. He lies in a corner of the ring, moves a leg once, and is still. I feel sure he is dead. In two minutes, with water trickling over his reddened face, he staggers to his feet, smiles a painful, swollen smile, shakes hands with the man who put him to sleep, and gropes out into the obscurity of the yelling crowd.
* * *
"And how much do they get for fighting here?"
"Oh, thirty-five bob," replies an official. "Sometimes as much as fifty."
I wonder what our elegant bruisers would think about it as I make my way out into the darkness of the wet streets.