Every morning at the uncomfortable hour of five a man in a peaked cap rings a big bell in Billingsgate Market and the lights go up. Then the haddocks and plaice, which you eat in due course, begin their commercial career.
Shouting? Yes; most decidedly! The ozone which exudes from prostrate cod seems to have a singular effect on the lungs of the fish trade. In the old days, I am told, they used to shout definite fishy slogans such as: "Had-had-had-haddock!" or "Wink-wink-wink-winkles!" But only now and then, when some enthusiast becomes filled with the spirit of the past do you hear anything so interesting. It is mostly a swift, sharp, business-like affair, with a little violent auctioneering over in the corner. Lying in the Thames at the Wharf which is on one side of the market is a Danish trawler with North Sea salt caked on her funnel. Men run up and down the gangways carrying her cargo, while from every corner of the compass railway carts converge on that tangle of narrow streets which begins at the Monument. If you like statistics you will be interested to know that on an average eight hundred tons of fish pour into Billingsgate every day, and the majority comes by train.
I wandered between lines of dead fish. Nothing on earth can look so dead as a fish. It is, in a lavish place of this kind, difficult to believe that fish have ever lived, have ever sported gallantly in the sea, making romantic love and building homes, and generously seeing to it that we shall go on having fish after soup.
Incredibly dead codfish and inconceivably defunct skate lay strewn in rich profusion, herrings with red eyes and white-bellied plaice—all the fruit of the ocean mixed up with ice! Queer, fascinating things are apparently weeded out before they reach Billingsgate; there is none of the strange, snarling fish you see at Boulogne or Dieppe, none of the comic monstrosities with green whiskers which enchant you in Marseilles. Billingsgate is essentially an edible dump. Everything that comes into it is solemnly designed for the kitchen.
Between the flabby corpses walk men and women—fishmongers, hotel buyers, and the like—prodding, examining, comparing, now and then tasting a shrimp—at five a.m., too!—sometimes cracking an experimental mussel!
Officials of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers patrol the place. They represent one of the few old guilds which are still actively interested in the trades they represent. These inspectors have the power to condemn anything unfit for sale.
* * *
And the smell!
How many cats sniff it at the Bank, I wonder! Smell is a marvellous thing. It can awaken the most tender memories of love and passion, of moments under a red moon, blowing roses, blue nights. Were I a woman I would never allow the man I loved to go far without a bottle of my favourite scent. A photograph is a dead thing; a smell is alive. How strange, I thought, that Billingsgate should appeal to the same sense that thrills to a laced handkerchief. Here you have the harmony and discord of smell. Billingsgate in this musical metaphor is like a cat walking across a piano—worse, it is a blare of smell, an assault on the senses. I wondered if, with study, a keen nose could in time learn to disentangle the various strains that go to swell the mass effect, as a musician is able to deafen himself to a symphony and follow the steady hum of an individual 'cello. I was conscious, it is true, of the steady hum of haddock and a sharp piccolo-like movement from the plaice, but, apart from perhaps the steady drumming from the cod stalls, the finer, more subtle emanations escaped me, such as mullet.
Remembering a handkerchief I once had, so long ago that I can write of it as if it were a museum specimen, but in its time a marvellous thing that held within its creased folds all the nightingales of Monte Cattini, I asked myself this problem: Suppose a fishmonger had a passionate love-affair in Billingsgate, would fish remind him or would it not? At first I was inclined to say no, but on reflection I thought yes. He would meet the girl every day for months among the lobsters. He would see her come to him, so graceful and lissom, down an avenue of oysters. He would whisper to her above the whiting, and they would kiss among the crabs. Gradually turbot would come to have a deeper meaning for this man. He would hesitate over the whitebait, and—remember. When the first Danish herrings came in during February he would have to pull himself together and be strong. Years after, if he wished to sentimentalize, what simpler, or more poignant, than a quick sniff at a kipper? But the agony of living in this hall of memories! If you treasure a piece of scented cambric, just think how harrowing it would be to live in the perfume factory....
Such speculation is vain. Do not pity Billingsgate. I hardly like to tell you because I fear you may not believe me, but——Billingsgate smells nothing! No; not even the faintest odour as of melons. Its nose is atrophied. I discovered this by the merest chance.
"By jove," I said, "that's a pretty loud fish. What is it?"
"I don't smell anything," said the owner.
We discussed smell minutely, and I discovered that his life in Billingsgate had made him immune from fishy smells. How wonderful Nature is! Only when he returns from his holiday is he conscious of a little something in the air.
Billingsgate is perhaps the most libelled spot in London. Fifty years ago you had to wax your ears. The language was awful. To-day the Billingsgate fish porters are as polite and charming as we all are.
They are the backbone of Billingsgate, for this market is worked on the most primitive system of hard transport. The Genoese galleys which in the Middle Ages anchored near by were unloaded in exactly the same way. So were Pharaoh's galleys, and Cæsar's. These men, wearing queer-shaped leather helmets rather like stunted Burmese pagodas, carry all the fish in crates on their heads. When a man's neck "sets," as they call it, he can carry sixteen stone on his head. They do it every day and all day.
"Mind your back,please!" say the fish porters of Billingsgate.
"Shove over the hammer—if you don't mind, Jack!" I heard one say.
"Certainly!" replied Jack.
So much for that.
* * *
Then I walked out on Billingsgate Wharf and had a real thrill. This is where London began. It is probably the oldest wharf on the Thames. Old Geoffrey of Monmouth, who would have made a fine American reporter, says that it takes its name from Belin, King of the Britons four hundred years before Christ. Stowe thinks that it was once owned by a man called Biling. It is certain, however, that the Romans landed their furs and their wines here, and at this spot on the Thames the first imports of London were dumped, the first merchants gathered.
To the left I saw the bluish shadow of Tower Bridge. The brown Thames water licked the broad hull of a fish trawler. Crate after crate of herrings caught so far away in the North Sea were unloaded for London, and as I passed again through the ripe, rich tang of the market a man was buying lobsters which I suppose a lovely girl will enjoy as she makes eyes at someone over the rim of her champagne glass.
Devonshire House is dead and gone. I hope that its name may be perpetuated by the new commercial building, but I do not know.
When the workmen were performing acute surgical operations on old Devonshire House I was interested to hear people, who knew the Duke quite well by his photographs, express intimate regret at this deed. "Dear old Devonshire House!" they said. "What a shame it is that these grand old...." And so on and so forth. They were wistful. They gave the impression that they knew the pink bedroom awfully well (don't you know); they that had lingered on every inch of the famous staircase. They were like people who mourned the downfall of the old home.
You see, for nearly five years Devonshire House was, in the name of charity, thrown open to the public, so that probably more people were acquainted with the geography of this mansion than with any other ducal house which has not become either an hotel or a museum. So:
"Poor old Devonshire House!"
"Yes, it looks just like a bombed château during the war!"
* * *
It did.
Workmen swarmed over it, stood on walls picking at it, sending it earthwards in clouds of dry, white dust. Great gashes had been cut in the sides, windows had been knocked out, the daylight shone into the out-buildings, exposing the discreet wall-paper of the servantry, and that wide-walled courtyard through which swung the coaches of Fox, Burke, and the "New Whigs" in the days when men, and many a pretty woman, plotted against Pitt, was the loading spot for builders' carts and a place in which anyone could light a bon-fire to burn lath and plaster.
There was great interest in this patch of changing London. Not one person passing on an omnibus but remarked about it; and no wonder, for this is Piccadilly's most dramatic assassination. In the sound of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age—or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked! These great houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their day. London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and over-whelmed them.
Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up. Great hotels and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock; aware, it seemed, in its gated caution, that once upon a time highwaymen rode out of Kensington with masks over their faces.
I admit that it was ugly—entirely gloomy in its grey, stiff, barrack-like way; but it did mean something—it had character. Though nobody, as far as I am aware, ever did anything splendidly bad or remarkably good in it, Devonshire House could never be neutral. The National Anthem is pretty bad music, but it could never be neutral!
* * *
So, as the workmen consumed their sandwiches in halls through which for two centuries passed a delicious trickle of royalties, as they heard the whistle and rose heavily to grasp their picks and do some more damage, I more than once stood there among a tangle of builders' carts and saw visions rise out of the white dust.
What a procession!
I saw the hackney coach of Charles James Fox trundle under the portico. Burke, of course, was there too, the practical, wise Burke; for here they conspired with the Coalition Whigs to hit at Pitt, whispering and plotting with the lovely Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire, who enjoyed placing her white finger into this political pie. There had been a tea-party at Boston. And the French Revolution was gathering like a storm to split them. Among these crumbling stones Georgiana must have heard of that scene, one of the most dramatic the House of Commons has ever witnessed, when these two, Fox and Burke, broke their long friendship in a thrilled hush, Fox with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, Burke grim and firm, and the House of Commons looking on at a quarrel that never healed.
George IV, as Prince of Wales, with his card-table fingers also in the Fox pie, and all the brains and elegance of that time, wits who have been forgotten, a few who live, laughter, music, and the flash of white shoulders, eyes above a fan.... What a procession!
All this you could see in the dust of Devonshire House—two hundred years of it, duke succeeding duke; and all the time the new generations of wealth, power, and art moving up to that grey old portico.
As I passed it late one night I wondered if there are spirits—a queer doubt to express to-day! If so, I am certain that on calm nights fit for a lady's walk Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire, must have visited the ruin, looking with very straight brows and considerable "tut-tutting" at a big board on which was printed: "The magnificent building to be erected on this site will include offices, restaurants, and flats."
* * *
Poor Georgiana! Time is a queer thing, and—you, in your time, would never have believed it, would you?
Do you wish to feel human emotion spring from inanimate things? Do you wish to meet ghosts? Then come with me to one of London's great furniture store-houses, in which a thousand homes lie piled to the roof, silent, sheeted, tomb-like.
A store-man switches on a line of lights, and we see stretching to the distance great pyramids of household goods, whole homes of furniture, neatly stacked and carefully ticketed against the time when a man and a woman will come to claim them. Some of the pyramids suggest Park Lane, others suggest Clapham Common.
Let us peep beneath this shroud, and what do we see: "Good morning, Mrs. Everyman, and what can I do for you? Kindly accept this cushion as a souvenir of your visit." There lies the gift cushion, there the once-so-loved instalment suite that was delivered in the plain van. Note the pictures by Watts, Rossetti, and others of the Victorians to whom the suburbs are so loyal. "Love's Awakening." Ah!
What do we see in the next tomb? Yes; here was an elegant home with a cheque-book behind it. The low satinwood dresser had a compartment like a knee desk, so that she might get close up when she rouged her lips, and three swinging mirrors in order that she might know whether her shoulders were evenly powdered before he took her out to the Berkeley. Engravings, a Japanese cabinet, a good one, a beautiful round table with a surface like that of a still pool. Little home and big home side by side, social differences forgotten. Do you see the ghosts of Mrs. Everyman and Lady Nobody meeting like sisters over their shrouded homes crying a little on each other's arms? I do. The tombs go on waiting ... waiting.
Homes in bondage!
As we wander down the line our eyes are caught by a doll's house, relic of some distant nursery, a child's cot, or a piece of furniture with distinct personality, and we wonder how much heartache and hope this place represents. There are people living in lodgings dreaming of the home that they will build again one day, longing to surround themselves with loved things, to tear off the wrappings and see again those precious ordinary objects that mean so much in every life—those sentimental anchors.
Sentiment—that is the keynote. Without it London's store-rooms would be half empty.
"Yes, sir," says the store-man, as he pulls aside a wrapping, "people don't seem able to bring themselves to part with things. It's mighty queer. Look at this old box, now—what would you think is inside it?"
The box is an ancient nail-studded chest with a curved lid that might have contained all the gold of Treasure Island. I hazard a guess just to please him.
"No, sir. It's just full of little old bits of cloth, the kind of things that women collect and put in old baskets because they may come in useful some day. There's bits of tinsel and lace, and pretty little cases full of red and blue beads and needles by the score. But what's the sense of letting it eat its head off here? That's what I want to know. If they've paid a penny for this old box they must have paid fifty pounds, for it was here before ever I was. O yes, there's funny people about, and no mistake. Now if it belonged to me...."
As he rambles on, I examine the old box with interest. I know why it was put there; and so do you! Memories cling round it—memories so sweet that the heart revolts at the thought of burning those poor fragments.
Most people have a box of this sort. In it are queer trifles, little geometric nets on which beads are strung or sewn. Green and scarlet parrots preen themselves on half-finished trees. It is that note of half completion, as of a task suddenly put down and soon to be resumed, which makes such things so appealing. Perhaps a needle is still sticking in a corner of the fabric, waiting, it seems, for the fingers that will never come again. And when you look you see the hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance, hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen. Clever, wonderful mother....
"There's funny people about, and no mistake!" says the storeman again, giving the box a prod with his foot.
We go on. He unties the wrappings round another deposit. All these things, he explains, belong to "a divorced couple." How new they are, he comments. How quickly they must have found out their mistake; no sooner married than divorced and storing their things, and chucking away good money after bad!
I peep in with a feeling that I am eavesdropping. There, piled up sideways, is the table round which this unknown tragedy of married life was acted, the solemn, stiff chairs, witness to it all, the pictures which for a little while were gathered for this mockery of a home.
"Why they don't sell it I can't think," says the storeman.
I wonder, too, why they keep it! Neither one nor the other can bear to live with it. Then what queer sentiment, what common memory, retains this split home here in the pathetic silence of lapsed things?
We turn a corner. More avenues, sheeted, deserted.
"Some of these people are dead, we think," remarks my guide, waving his hand towards the dim roof. "This lot was put in at the beginning of the war. We had to sell quite a lot. Payments lapsed, and no one replied to advertisements. It is a mystery to know who it belongs to now, sir, and that's a fact."
* * *
As we turn into another warehouse we meet a man and woman. They have pulled aside the sheeting and are standing among chairs and tables and pictures. The woman comes out and says nervously:
"We've just come to see our things. The manager said that we might."
As we enter the next compartment we hear this man and woman talking.
"Oh, look! There it is, next to mother's writing-table. Do pick it up and let me hold it!"
There is the sound of the man walking over the stiff wrappings.
"Oh, my dear!" comes the woman's voice. "My dear!"
We go on through the silent aisles, the storeman talkative, amusing, insensible to the drama we have met, oblivious of the longing in those few words spoken by a woman, among the sheeted pathos of a home in bondage.
When the Queen was married she wore a dress which I find it rather difficult to describe, because there is a special dressmakers' language for this sort of thing.
It was low in the neck, the lowness draped with white lace. The tiny inch-long sleeves were caught up at the shoulder with little bunches of orange blossom. The corsage curved inwards to a tight waist ending in a point, and the dress, cut away over a fine white underskirt, fell in a graceful, generous sweep to the floor. Over the front were draped trailing sprays of orange blossom. The going-away dress is a bit easier to describe. It covered the Queen from neck to feet. The collar was high, and braided like that of a mess uniform or a commissionaire's tunic. The sleeves, tight at the wrist and braided, rose at the shoulder, sharply and alarmingly, in a queer shape, known, I believe, as "leg of mutton." It is very stately and ornate, and, in the light of modern fashion, exceedingly stiff and strange.
Men in the early 'thirties can just remember their mothers in a dress like this, sitting calm and lovely in a victoria with a parasol in their white-gloved hands, and a perky little hat like a vegetarian restaurant poised on their puffed-up hair. So you can't help loving the Queen's going-away dress....
* * *
Where can you see it? Do you know? It is on view with hundreds of other royal satins in that beautiful and comparatively unknown museum within a stone's throw of the Prince of Wales's house in St. James' Palace—the London Museum. This is a woman's museum. I cannot imagine a woman who would not be thrilled by it. In the first place, it is the most beautifully housed museum in the world. Lancaster House, which used to be the town house of the Dukes of Sutherland, is one of the finest houses in London. It makes you feel good all over simply to walk up the wide, dignified staircase that leads from the great marble entrance hall. In the second place, the London Museum contains rooms filled entirely with royal treasures: dolls dressed by Queen Victoria, a tiny suit worn by King Edward, the cradle in which the present Royal Family were rocked to sleep, the coronation robes, intimate family relics that recall Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, and King Edward. There are also beautiful, slightly-faded dresses which Queen Alexandra wore when she came over the sea many years ago to be the Princess of Wales.
* * *
Every day a few women can be found in a state of ecstasy before these cases. Sometimes the keeper, frock-coated and white-spatted and gardeniaed, can be seen conducting a tall, stately woman through the high magnificence of the halls a woman who looks with a smile at many a relic of childhood; and people whisper "The Queen!"
To the Londoner this place holds more of interest than any other museum, not excepting the unfortunately entombed Guildhall Museum.
The whole history of London, dug up out of London clay and peat, is here for inspection. The finest collection of Roman pottery, found among the roofs of London, is on view. There is a pot which dates from perhaps A.D. 200, on which a Londoner of seventeen hundred years ago has written: "Londini ad fanum Isidis" ("London, next door to the Temple of Isis"). Think of it! In Tudor Street seventeen hundred years ago men worshipped the Egyptian goddess Isis, the goddess with the moon on her head, the sister-wife of Osiris, who travelled from the Nile to the Tiber, where she joined the impartial Pantheon of Rome! There is the skeleton of a Roman galley found in the bed of the Thames: a great ship in which men came to build the first London. There is the skeleton of one of the first Londoners, lying stretched under glass as he was found, with a bronze pin under his chin and a bronze dagger at his breast bone.
Down below in the basement is a Chamber of Horrors few people know. Here are the great iron gates of Newgate Prison. Here in a frightening gloom are two prison cells. A wax figure, who looks as if the execution morning has dawned, writhes on his hard bed, his hands chained to the walls. Here are the manacles that held Jack Sheppard.
In another room are a series of lifelike models of old London which every Londoner should see and admire. Old London Bridge, with its rows of traitors' heads set on staves, is lifelike; old St. Paul's during the Fire of London is wonderful. A mechanical contrivance gives the illusion that smoke is rolling up from the blazing church over the startled city, the windows of houses show blood-red lights, and, as you stand looking at the model, your imagination is stirred so that you can hear the cries and the shouting, see the confused rushes as citizens tried to save their treasures when liquid lead was falling in a hissing stream on the red-hot pavements round St. Paul's.
* * *
One wonders what Lancaster House will be like in fifty years' time if it keeps pace with London! Already a hansom cab is parked in the garden! Some day a motor-omnibus and perhaps a tramcar will arrive. There are crowded days ahead!
Women must, I am glad to say, have fur coats. It has been so since we men set out after the ermine with clubs instead of cheque books, and splendidly have they always repaid us with a glimpse of eyes over soft fur and chins buried in the cosy rightness of it.
The result is that, all over the world, wherever hairy things creep, crawl, or climb, men are ready with guns and traps. Three times a year the pelts of the world pour into London to be distributed. Whenever this happens a large auction-room in Queen Street will provide you with the strangest sight in the City of London. You walk in through a courtyard past a man in white overalls. As I passed him recently he said: "Hudson Bay Company selling now, sir!" and, do you know, I felt young all over! I thrilled. Hudson Bay Company! Shades of Fenimore Cooper! In one swift, pregnant moment I saw the white lands I used to know so well when I was at school, the driving sheets of snow, the tugging sleigh dogs, and the big, square-bearded men, with matted hair frozen under round fur hats, bending forward against the storm, urging on their teams, taking their piled sleighs to the trading post.
I crossed the courtyard and entered the auction-room. What a scene! Men who buy furs in every country in the world were present. They sat tier on tier, a good five hundred of them, looking like a full session of the Parliament of the United States of Europe. No common auction this: it was a fur parliament, a senate of seal and musquash. Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, French, every kind of Jew, and a good balance of English and American. If Sir Arthur Keith had been with me he would have gone crazy over the marvellous skulls and cheek bones. It was, anthropologically, a splendid sight.
They retained their hats as they sat in the wide half-moon of the fur theatre. What hats! Here and there I picked out a round astrakhan cap, and, of course, there were fur coats. One man unbuttoned his coat. Somebody had been killing leopards!
Seven men sat high up above the assembly, facing it, and in the centre of the seven was the auctioneer:
"Any advance on three hundred?"
Instead of the nods and lifted eyebrows of any ordinary saleroom there was a violent agitation. To make a bid in this room a man had to create a scene. In two minutes the place looked like a crisis in the French Senate. Men desiring mink rose and shot up their arms. The three hundred pounds advanced to five hundred, hesitated, and spurted on to seven hundred. Then a man with a Central European beard rose (exposing a fine nutria lining) and carried the day. The hammer fell! At least twenty more women would have fur coats next winter!
* * *
So it went on. Millions of potential fur coats were bought and—not one of them in sight! They were all lying in warehouses somewhere in London; they had all been carefully examined before the sale.
As it proceeded it occurred to me how true it is that certain professions take hold of a man and brand him. There are grooms who look like horses, dog fanciers who resemble dogs, and if certain of these fur men had emerged from thick undergrowth nine sportsmen out of ten would have taken a pot shot at them. I fancied I could detect the little rodent-like beaver merchants, the fat, swarthy seal fans, the sharp, pale-white fox-fanciers, and a few aristocratic grey men with whom I associated chinchilla.
* * *
The story behind it all! That was the thing that thrilled me. Behind this roomful of strange, intent men in a London auction-room I seemed to see other men, the wild, uncouth men of youthful romance, out in the savage places of the earth and in the great loneliness of forests and ice. Hunters, trappers! Though we grow old and hard and inaccessible to all soft thoughts we will never lose our love for these. It is in our blood. We have all longed to be trappers, we have all longed to blaze the trail through the Canadian wilderness, to crack the ice on Great Whale River before we could catch our breakfast, to win home at last in a flurry of snow to the log cabin....
"Any advance on three hundred and fifty pounds?"
The baying of dogs in a white-sheeted world, the pine trees in shrouds; and then—silence...
"Four hundred. Any advance?"
The green glitter of ice and the drama of a man fighting the elements, fighting solitude, primitive, uncouth, his mind following the minds of beasts as a fox-hunter anticipates the mind of a fox.
"Five hundred! Any advance?"
Blood over the snow and a limp body, the cracking of whips, the dog team with its laden sledge, and—all in order that you, my dear, may wrap your tall, elegant self in a lovely fur coat!
"Going, going, gone!"
Crack!
In a high room overlooking Downing Street sit six solemn men at a table piled with books.
I recognize Lord X. and Lord Y. and Lord Z. diligently reading, saying "Ha!" or "Hum!" or looking grave, or reflectively wiping the lenses of their spectacles. Two attendants in evening dress, like a couple of lost waiters, tip-toe round the apartment pulling out more books from the well-stocked walls to place before their omniverous lordships. The room is carpeted with maroon felt, a few portraits in oils gaze down on the assembly with polite indifference; and there are four fire-places set in squares of veined marble. The furnishings resemble those of ideal offices in the "efficiency first" advertisements: the inkpots are bigger and more efficient-looking than ordinary inkpots, the desks are more prairie-like in size than common desks, and the chairs more comfortable than less exalted chairs.
Yes; but what is happening? I would think if I did not know that a millionaire's will was being read in a country house library. A few barristers in wigs and gowns sit quietly reading as if they were in chambers. Facing the peers is a barrister standing at a little reading-desk, and in the comfortable hush his crisp voice goes on and on. An attendant discreetly feeds one of the four fires, pokes a second, looks critically at a third; one of the peers calls for yet another book ... the Voice goes on and on and on....
This is the highest court in the British Empire. Behind that door in the corner is, theoretically, the King. The Voice that goes on and on is speaking on the steps of the throne. This is a sitting of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
Whenever that old cry, "I appeal to Cæsar!" goes up in any part of the Empire this room becomes busy. In this room the last word is given on legal differences throughout the Empire. If the courts in Australia cannot satisfy someone about his right-of-way the trouble is smoothed out once and for all here in Downing Street. If there is a row in Canada about mining rights, in New Zealand about water supply, in India about delicate matters of caste, or even—as in a case coming on soon—about a contract for the supply of ground nuts, the Privy Councillors hear it on behalf of the King and give their final and irrevocable verdict.
This room is the final appeal for four hundred million British subjects, or nearly a third of the human race. Legal controversies over eleven million square miles—and strangely, throughout the Church in this country—are settled here. Its decisions go to the uttermost ends of the earth. No court in the world has ever had so wide a jurisdiction.
When I walked in, the two attendants looked up curiously at me, for a strange face is a novelty. The highest court in the Empire, although it is as public as the Law Courts, seldom attracts a visitor.
I sit down in a kind of superior pew. Behind me are shelved the legal records of Canada, a library in themselves. "Revised Statutes of Nova Scotia," I read. "Quebec Revised Statutes," "New Brunswick Acts," "Laws of P. E. Island," "Revised Statutes of Alberta," and so on—the ideal bedside library! "Canada," however, is not the official title: the Dominion laws are catchlined "North America."
Opposite are the laws of India, Australia; and so on throughout the Empire.
* * *
What do litigants in distant parts of the earth think of this room? Surely they imagine the King's Privy Council sitting robed as peers in the neighbourhood of a stained glass window, trailing ermine sleeves over richly carved chairs, light falling on coronets, with perhaps the King, in full Garter robes, dropping in to see how things are going on!
Nothing of the kind! The highest court in the Empire sits in less state than a police court. There is no jury and no impassioned Law Court rhetoric. Counsel leans over his little reading-desk and talks to their lordships in a quiet, conversational voice. It is more like a directors' meeting than an Empire's appeal court. I half expect someone to rise and declare a dividend!
"And now," says the Voice in the quiet tone of a secretary reading an annual report, "I would like your lordships to look at page four hundred and two."
Their lordships comply.
What strange things go on here! One day they discuss an obscure passage in the Koran, the next they are debating the inner meaning of the Hedaya. When they deal with South Africa's Roman-Dutch law they bandy the names of Grotius and Vinnius, authorities the Law Courts never hear!
Stranger things than this happen. Did you know that in parts of the British Empire the old French law, long expelled from France, lives on, regulating men's lives. Appeals from Mauritius and the Seychelles Islands refer to the Code Napoleon! When Quebec submits its troubles to London this room hears, like an echo from long ago, mention of the ancient Custom of Paris; and the two men in evening dress go tip-toeing round the room to look over the shelves for Beaumanoir and Dumoulin!
Just think of that!
* * *
As I creep away from the Privy Council, feeling that it is one of the most wonderful places in London, that Voice goes on and on, quiet, conversational, and—the echo will be heard in Bombay!
There is no mystery about the making of money. The Royal Mint is exactly like any other factory. This surprised me. I felt that the manufacture of money must surely be surrounded by the unusual. It hardly seemed natural that this metal for whose possession we sweat and slave, lie and slander, and even, on occasions, commit murder, should be churned out by nonchalant machines no different in their general attitude towards production from those machines which cut out nails or stamp out dust bins.
It was with quite a shock that I watched a half-crown machine at work. What an ideal birthday present! The thing hypnotized me. Click-click-click-click it went, and at every click a silver-white half-crown was born, a real good half-crown ready to be spent. What a generous mouth the machine had; how casual it was....
"Click-click" went the metal millionaire, shooting its lovely children into a rough wooden trough. The pile grew as I watched it. It began with a taxicab fare; the next second a twin was born; they lay together for a second before they represented a solicitor's fee, or a dog licence; in five more seconds there was a whole pound lying there. So it went on hour after hour while spectators stood by reverently feeling that the machine was grinning as it pounded away enthusiastically producing potential ermine cloaks, motor-cars, freehold houses, and winters in the south of France.
If only the Chancellor of the Exchequer would lend it to me for a week!
* * *
How much easier money is to make than to earn!
The first stage in the life of a half-crown is a hot foundry where men melt down bars of silver in crucibles. These crucibles lie in gas furnaces that roar like hungry lions and give out a beautiful orange flame ending in a fringe of apple-green light. An overhead crane runs along, picks a red-hot crucible from the furnace, and carries it to a place where a series of long moulds are waiting. The silver is poured, spluttering and blazing, into these moulds, and the result is a number of long, narrow silver bars, which are passed through runners till the five-foot strip of silver is the exact thinness of a half-crown.
These strips are then passed through machines which punch out silver discs with remarkable speed. The next machine gives these plain silver discs a raised edge, and the next—the machine worth having—puts the King's head on them, mills their edges, and turns them out into the world to tempt mankind.
* * *
While I was in the stamping-room of the Mint all the machines were working full blast, except one which looked like a rich relation and had become muscle bound. In one corner they were making East African shillings by the hundred thousand, in another they were turning out West African currency. The men had as much as they could do to keep pace with them. No sooner had they carried away a trough full of money, with the blasé air such an occupation induces, than a second pile was lying there on the floor like a miser's hoard.
I saw enough African money made in half an hour to buy elephants, thousands of wives, guns, horses, buffaloes, and a throne or two.
The raw material of a sultanate fell out on the floor of the Mint before luncheon-time.
I could not, however, get worked up on African money. My first bucketful of sixpences gave me a much greater thrill. There must have been at least three thousand of them lying in bran. In the shilling department they were turning out a good line in high-class shillings, and the half-crown corner became positively thrilling.
"Where's the gold?" I said, feeling slightly heady.
"Ah, where?" replied my guide.
"America?" I suggested.
"Ah—um," he said reflectively.
Leading from the stamping-rooms are rooms where silver is polished, but more interesting is the room in which its sound is tested. I have often heard money talk, but I had never heard it sing before. How it sings!
Men sit at little tables picking up half-crowns and dashing them against a steel boss, with the result that the air is full of something quite like bird song; only much more interesting. It would surprise you to see how slight a defect disqualifies a coin. The smallest irregularity in its ring, and, flip! it is lying in the "rejected" basket.
I half hoped they allowed staff and visitors to have these throw-outs at bargain prices; but there was nothing doing.
* * *
In other rooms men crouched over a revolving hand covered with money, picking out any badly coloured coin as the constant stream advanced towards them. The next department was a mechanical weighing-room, in which wise-looking machines in glass cases put true coins in one slot, light ones in a second, and heavy-weights in a third.
As a climax I saw a giant machine that counts half-crowns into one hundred pound bags and never makes a mistake. I watched it count forty bagsful and then walked thoughtfully away.
* * *
"What does it feel like to make money all day long and draw a few pounds on Friday?" I asked a Mint worker.
"Oh, I dunno," he replied as he shook a thousand pounds through a bran sieve. This is a merciful frame of mind.
London is full of antique shops—places where Chinese Buddhas gaze pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale—but if you asked me which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which deals only in articles more than a thousand years old.
When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass. Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women busying about their day's work. You hear the sound that is London; but it means nothing in here. How can it? It is a fluid unimportance called To-day and you are surrounded by Yesterday. The Present and the Future are intangible things. The Past only can be grasped and loved. That, at least, is how they think in this queer shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned.
The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and absent-mindedness. They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack and say "yes" when they should have said "no." They often remark on the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain. They are probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of the siege of Troy. When you know them, and can pull them out of the Past a little, you realize that there is nothing more human on earth than the average archæologist, because he has learned that human men and women have always been much the same, and that a little thing like two thousand years and a pair of spats makes no real difference to human nature, its passions, its frailties, and its frequent glories. In their packed minds Thebes, Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and New York, march shoulder to shoulder with nothing to distinguish them, except, perhaps, a red omnibus going to Victoria.
It is so delightful to hear them talk about Jason as if he threw up work in Threadneedle Street to go out to Australia in search of fleeces; and once an old man told me about the marriage of his grand-daughter with such remote charm that it was three days before I realized that he had not been talking about Cupid and Psyche.
* * *
However, let us glance round this shop. The first impression is that some tidal wave of Time has swept into it all kinds of articles caught up in the ruin of the ancient world of Egypt, Greece, Rome—these three great early civilizations are the chief contributors, though, of course, Assyria and Babylon are represented too.
Nearly everything you see has come from a tomb. There are hundreds of thousands of objects from the tombs of ancient Egypt. There is blue, green, and gold glass from tombs in Cyprus; there is amazing coloured glass blown by Phœnicians at the time of the Exodus, and—to come down to quite modern times—there are lamps which lit the ancient Romans to bed a thousand years ago, and Greek vases with shaggy, horned satyrs leaping round them after flying nymphs.
There are bronzes green with age, bright gold which never loses its colour no matter how old it is, shining glazed pottery which looks as if it had come yesterday from Staffordshire, save for the fact that it is finer than modern pottery and contains a rough scratched cross and the words in Latin: "Caius, his plate."
* * *
What is the charm of it? What chains these men to the past, archæologist and collector? Most of them are poor, for there is no money in it, and most of them are intensely happy.
Just see the way they finger a bronze that was cast when St. Paul was bearing the message of Christianity through the world. There is perhaps one part æstheticism in their love and one part association. For them an object is not only full of beauty but also full of magic; it is like a talisman that has the power to call up visions. I have no doubt that when these old men hold their treasures they can see the hosts of Pharaoh sweeping through Syria, the nodding of the plumes, the drive of arrows and all the confusion of an ancient war. They can recreate round a relic a dead empire. They feel that they possess something of the mighty personality of old times just as in millions of lives a treasured letter can call up "the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."
In these old things the Past lives again; they release the perfume of old loves, the violence of old ambitions, the thunder of marching troops, and the sailing of galleys over a morning world.
* * *
So if you collide violently with an old man who is carefully holding a little paper parcel, do not blame him for not seeing you!
You! Good Lord—you!
Madame requires a gown. In a building high up above a celebrated street in the heart of London, M. Flair bows her to a gold couch on which are green velvet cushions.
M. Flair has descended with dignity and charm to middle age, and every one seems to forgive him for smelling rather like an overworked jasmine grove. This apartment with the gold and black striped cushions, the dove-grey walls, the black carpet, the green jade hangings, and its scent like that of Paris is not a shop: it is a salon. If you pulled out a bunch of crackling fivers and offered in an honest straightforward way to pay M. Flair for one of his gowns—I mean "creations"—he would, I imagine, feel insulted. He would much rather sue you in the usual way. He is an artist. Lady So-and-So blazons his genius along the Côte d'Azur; Miss So-and-So does him credit on the stage, so that, as he bends over Madame, cooing slightly, the tips of his manicured fingers together, there is no condescension in him. Oh, dear, no! He is a psychologist.
Madame requires a gown.
It must, I fear, be said that Madame has been requiring gowns for well over forty years, and, lately, requiring them shorter in the skirt, with an ever-increasing touch of springtime over them. So M. Flair, after lightly discussing the season in the south of France and dismissing Switzerland with a shrug, whispers a word to a sylph in black and—more bowing—offers Madame a small brown Russian cigarette.
* * *
"Charming! delicious ... ah, exquisite!"
These words come lightly from Madame as the grey curtains part at the end of the room, and there dawn, swaying slightly, hands on narrow hips, several visions of beauty clothed, it seems, too perfectly from their neat, sharp shoes to their tight little hats.
One mannequin is fair, another is dark, a third is petite, a fourth is tall. Each one is the perfection of her type—too perfect. As each sways up to Madame over the black carpet she gives Madame one half-smiling look in the eyes, then turns, lingers, sways a little, and slowly goes. Sometimes Madame puts out a hand and touches a gown. The mannequin stands like a piece of machinery suddenly stopped. All the time M. Flair remains with one plump hand on the gold couch, explaining, expounding, and, at length, advising. Here we have thin ice. Dangerous ice. M. Flair knows Madame's age and the lines of her figure. Madame has forgotten the first and has never really appreciated the second. This is where M. Flair earns his money. Just as he is bringing her—oh, so cleverly—away from a May-time gown to one nearer August, the curtains part, and into the scented room glides a Golden Girl—sweet as April sun.
Ah, now we approach the comedy; now the plot thickens; now Madame permits the white ash of her slim brown cigarette to fall unnoticed on the black floor. That splendid, cunning fall of the cloth, revealing that which it professes to cover; that fine swing of rounded hips; those beautiful young arms, unmasked at the elbow with no wicked little wizened witch's face time puts there. Yes; a lovely gown! Madame looks at April and—sees herself!
M. Flair knows that the game is up. He realizes, with the instinct of a lifetime's experience, that no matter what he can say Madame will have nothing but the unsuitable magnificence worn by this most marvellous of mannequins. The artist in him wars with the business man. He feels that he should forbid it. Refuse to sell. Explain to Madame that she will not look like the Golden Girl; that she is deluding herself. Yet why?
Madame, with a woman's swift knowledge of unspoken things, says:
"So you think it's a bit too—too young?"
She appears frank, careless; but there is such a touch of hardiness in her voice, velvet over steel. It is a challenge to M. Flair to say "Yes," and what man would have the moral courage?
"My dear lady," he says with uplifted hands. "What a ridiculous idea!"
Then, when she has gone, he says to me: "You see how it is—O mon Dieu!"
* * *
"Yes, but the Golden Girl," I say. "How did anything so beautiful happen in the world? The racehorse lines of her, the slimness, the strength. Is she one of these exiled princesses? She must stand on a pyramid of good breeding."
"Oh, no," replies M. Flair; "her father was, I believe, a coal-porter somewhere in London. If only her accent were a little better she might ... the stage ... success ... but—Omon Dieu, these women who do not know themselves!"
So ends an ordinary little comedy of a London day.
I went into a City church the other day to hear a sermon that has been going on for three hundred and twenty years!
St. Mary Aldermary (not Aldermanbury) is an attractive Wren church tucked away on the north side of Queen Victoria Street. When I entered I found about forty middle-aged men and twelve women. They were sitting dotted about the church listening to a clergyman who was leaning earnestly over the pulpit talking about sin, the devil, and St. Paul. It was luncheon-hour in the City. It was also raining with ghastly persistence, and I thought at first that this congregation of fifty numbered many who might have sought refuge from the weather. A second glance assured me that this was an unworthy thought; here was an audience of devout, middle-aged City men with every mark on them of regular attendance. The rows of bald or grizzled heads were inclined towards the speaker, every word was followed with deep interest, save in one corner, where a little old man in a frock coat appeared to slumber.
"And what does St. Paul say...."
The voice echoed round the church, and I smiled to think that I was listening to one of the longest sermons on record—a sermon that has been in progress for three hundred and twenty years! It happened like this.
* * *
There was once an ancient church in Watling Street called St. Anthonie's or vulgarly, St. Antholin's. It must have been an interesting church. It was full in its later period of Presbyterian fire and fury. It was also full of epitaphs, one of which I cannot resist quoting. It covered the bones of Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of London about 1399:
Here lyeth graven under this stoneThomas Knowles, both flesh and bone,Grocer and alderman, years forty,Sheriff and twice mayor, truly;And for he should not lye alone,Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan.They were together sixty year,And nineteen children they had in feere.
Two hundred years after this remarkable epitaph, St. Antholin's became notorious as the head-quarters of the Puritan clergy. The bell used to ring at unearthly hours of the morning, and all the High Churchmen in Cheapside turned uneasily in their beds and perhaps politely gnashed their teeth. In 1599 a group of citizens founded a lectureship. They gave certain property in London which was to pay for a daily lecture in the pulpit of St. Antholin's. The church became famous as a lecture theatre. Lilly, the astrologer, used to go there. Scott makes Mike Lambourne refer to it in "Kenilworth."
The great fire burned down the church but still the daily lecture went on; it was rebuilt and the lecture was continued in the new St. Antholin's; it was demolished in 1870, and the lecture was transferred to St. Mary Aldermary, where I heard it yesterday!
The sermon ended. The congregation rose. The little old man in the frock coat, who I imagined was deep in sleep, sprang to his feet and boomed "Amen!"
"I've been here twenty-five years," said a verger, "and most of the people you see here are regular attendants. That old man in a frock coat was here when I came."
* * *
In a solicitor's office in Cannon Street I picked up the strings of a romance that has been acted time and again in London. The property bought in 1599 went on increasing in value, the St. Antholin lecture increased from one a week to two a week. Still the property increased in value, and funds accumulated till it was necessary to have a sermon every day, except Saturday.
"The conditions on which the lectures are to be delivered are all set down in the old deeds," said one of the solicitors who administers the lectureship. "The clergyman who preaches must be a rector in charge of 2,000 souls, must not live more than seven miles as the crow flies from the Mansion House, and must not have a stipend of over £300."
Some of the clergy who took up this three hundred and twenty year old sermon and carried it on for a while now wear bishop's gaiters.
So in the calm of these days the Puritanical fury of three hundred and twenty years ago, filtered through three centuries, goes on and on and on in the City of London! If the worthy old citizens came back from the Shades they would not be able to find their old church, but the Voice they subsidized still speaks, and the property they left ... well, they would have the shock of their lives!
The place is generally blue with smoke and it smells strongly of grilled chops.
It is full of men: men eating and talking. Some do not remove their overcoats or hats, although the rooms are uncomfortably warm. This spot is remarkable only for the fact that it is one of the last eating-houses in London which does not cater for or encourage women. Sometimes a woman finds her way in, and all the men look up curiously, as early Victorians might have done to see a lone woman in a chop-house. They blink at her. They watch her covertly as she eats, not impudently, but with a slight pity, for she is, poor thing, unwittingly transgressing an unwritten law. She has no right to be there! Generations of males have marked this place out as a feeding-place, and the funny thing is that no matter how you admire women generally, and adore some individually, you feel unhappy when you see one there. You want to put a screen round her and forget her. She is all wrong there. It is like going to your tailors and finding a pretty girl being measured for a costume. It surprises and unsettles your conception of the fitness of things!
Through the smoke and the stimulating smell—which I believe is a kind of barrage put up against the feminine—move women and girls of a type quite different from the usual waitress. They resemble more the handmaids of inns in, say, the time of Sterne. They have a sharp, ready way with them, and they regard the zoo of hungry men dependent on them with the faint superiority of the ministering female. They treat elderly barristers who inquire testily for an overdue sausage rather like a school matron reproving a greedy boy.
How efficient they are! They blow down a tube and order all at once a sole, two grilled sausages, liver and bacon, a chop and apple tart, and never do they make a mistake in their destinations.
At first sight you might think that everybody comes here because it is cheap. A second glance shows you a curious assortment. There are celebrated barristers—the Lord Chief Justice often used to go there when he was Attorney-General—solicitors, journalists, at least one solemn editor of a literary monthly, and a floating population of publishers' readers, poets, authors, and others with business in the Street of Misadventure.
On your left two barristers discuss a case, on your right two newspaper men whisper all the things not yet printed in a murder or conspiracy trial, and in the corner two or three men who have not lost their undergraduate voices argue about an unpublished novel.
"Of course, the residuary legatee is in exactly the same position as that in Rexv.Tolbooth, and I therefore think you will agree...."
This from the left. From the right:
"The police know perfectly well who did it, but they daren't say so—yet. Of course, you've heard..." And from the corner:
"You can't do it with your tongue in your cheek! You must be sincere! You must believe in it, no matter how bad it is. Have you read—"
Then, slowly, peevishly, comes the inevitable Dickensian, the old man whose collars and neckties seem deathless, whose clothes have a queer cut, whose hat, while it does not actually challenge modernity, does not conform to any current mode. He is angry. Some young upstart is sitting at his table, the table at which he has probably eaten about fifteen thousand chops. Ancient kings must have looked like this when they caught a virile baron trying on the crown! Insolence and—worse! Much worse. An awful reminder to a man of habit! Some day ... ah, well, that day has not come, and till it does he will sit at that particular table and eat his chop with his particular knife and fork. So he stands about glowering and fidgeting, the bland young man calmly eating, an innocent usurper.
But the clash between man and man is as nothing compared with the drama of a woman's entrance. Most women reach the door and instinctively realize that they have blundered into man's last stronghold and beat a tactful retreat, coughing slightly. Now and again some insensitive or ignorant man actually brings a poor woman there. Sex consciousness is a queer thing. Go into a telephone exchange where you are the only man and see how you like it. These women who suddenly dawn like a crime in the unwritten convention of this place must feel it too; but women are so accustomed to scrutiny.
Is it fancy or does an uneasy silence pass like a cloud over the babel of law, newspaper, and book talk? I wonder.
Anyhow, it is remarkable to find any place in London in which woman is an anachronism, and no doubt the day is coming when they will storm even this barricade and—then we may have more comfortable chairs and nicer tables and a change in wall-paper!
An American once told me in Vienna that the Strand possesses a Roman bath well worth seeing, but, being a perfectly good Londoner, I did not believe him—till I went there.
This bath, which was constructed in A.D. 200—seventeen hundred and twenty-five years ago—is exactly opposite Bush House, in the Strand! Think of it! Bush House and Rome! It is in the basement of No. 5, Strand Lane, an astonishing, narrow, dingy alley that in one step takes you back to the darkest days of Victorian London, when lanterns glimmered in passages and "Peelers" twirled truncheons and wore stovepipe hats. No. 5 belongs to the Rev. Pennington Bickford, Rector of St. Clement Danes, who bought the house three years ago to save the bath, which was—O incredible London!—in danger of destruction.
After writing my name in a school exercise book, which contains addresses in China, Japan, America, Canada, Australia (but few in London), I was taken by an intelligent young man into a high-vaulted place of red brick. What a splendid bath! How different from the bath-rooms of modern London, which are tucked away in houses like afterthoughts. Even a rich man I know, who has ten bath-rooms in his house, has no bath as fine as this. It is, of course, sunk in the floor. It is fifteen feet six inches in length by six feet nine inches—a proper lovable, wallowable bath, built by the only nation that understood baths and bathing.
It is an apse-headed oblong in shape, and I have seen exactly the same thing in the Roman ruins of Timgad, among the mountains of North Africa. No doubt it belonged to some rich Roman who built his villa seventeen hundred years ago some little distance from busy London, so that his wife and children might enjoy the flowers of the Strand, the peace, and the river.
The young custodian took a long-handled ladle and dipped it into the clear, limpid water which for seventeen centuries has been trickling into the bath! It comes from an unknown spring bubbling from a "fault" in the London clay.
"You'd be surprised at the visitors, mostly Canadians and Americans, who want to take off their clothes and plunge in," said the guide, "not because it's a Roman bath, but because Dickens used to bathe here, and mentions it in Chapter thirty-five of 'David Copperfield.'"
"And do you ever let them?"
"Not likely! When I tell them how cold it is they change their minds. It's always three degrees above freezing."
"How do you know?"
"Because I fell in once," he replied simply.
* * *
I tried hard as I stood there on the level of Roman London, thirty feet below the London of to-day, to picture this spot in its glory. It was no doubt tiled with veined marble, and the London spring water ran in over marble, and the roof perhaps held frescoes showing nymphs and fauns and Pan playing his pipes.
Signor Matania, the artist, has made a fine picture of this bath as he thinks it was when Roman ladies came there to swim without bathing costumes. A pretty picture, but—was the water ever deep enough?
"Some think it was a hot bath, and some think it was a cold one," said the guide, "but nobody knows. Perhaps we shall know when Mr. Bickford digs underneath, as he wants to do, in search of the heating system."
* * *
I climbed up out of Roman London, and a few steps took me to the sight of Bush House and omnibuses racing past to Charing Cross.
"What is the strangest thing a Londoner has lost?" I asked an official of the Lost Property Office in Scotland Yard.
"Well, let's see. Two leg bones came in last week. They had obviously been left in a tramcar by a medical student. Once we had somebody's appendix in oil; but I think the funniest thing I ever remember a man losing—and I've been here thirty-three years—was a tree-climbing bear! Alive? I should say he was alive! You ought to have seen him climb up to the mantelshelf. It turned out that he had been left in a cab by a Scotsman who owned him. This man had been abroad for a long time, and was paying his first visit to London after many seafaring years abroad. Apparently he was so excited to be back that he forgot all about his bear. He left it in a four-wheeler. He remembered next morning, and jolly glad we were, too, for although we get all kinds of strange things in this department it's not organized like a zoo."
During thirty-three years in the Lost Property Office this official has seen a great change in London's crop of forgetfulness.
"Muffs have stopped coming in now," he said. "Once we were full of muffs; but women don't carry them nowadays. Everything else has increased, not because people are more absent-minded, but because the speed of traffic has increased. We take only objects found in omnibuses, tramcars, and taxicabs. In the old days you could run after a horse omnibus and find your umbrella, but to-day as soon as you remember you have left it the vehicle is out of sight. Just look here!"
We walked down a long avenue packed with umbrellas. There must have been over twenty thousand of them! The avenue ended in a room full of the more recently abandoned specimens. Here men and women were nosing round looking for their lost property. What a task! The room was stacked to the ceiling with umbrellas, all neatly docketed. They lay in racks, the handles only protruding.
When handles are round and shiny this room, which is always full, presents to the eye four walls of round and shiny knobs; when the fashion in umbrellas changes, this room changes too. At the moment it is full of originality and colour. Thousands of green jade and red coral handles jut from the walls; thousands of check handles vary the pattern. Here and there you see a dog-headed handle, a handle shaped like a bird, or a handle carved to the shape of a pierrot's head, a pathetic white face with drooping carmine lips, which seems crying to be claimed and taken home!
"Oh, I shall never find it in this forest of umbrellas!" cried a girl. "Never! I don't think I want to. I hate the look of umbrellas."
Another woman picked her umbrella out in the first five minutes. What an eye! And all the time girls came up to the counter, rather breathless, with:
"I've lost a lovely new umbrella on a number three omnibus; it had a dear little green handle carved like a fish, and I said to mother——"
"Come inside, miss," said a weary official. "I said to mother that I think I lost it when I got off at Westminster, or it may have been earlier in the morning, when——"
"Come inside, miss!"
More remarkable even than the jungle of lost umbrellas is the series of rooms packed with every conceivable thing a passenger can carry in a tramcar, an omnibus, or a taxicab. You gain the impression when you tour the Lost Property Office that some people would lose an elephant between Ludgate Circus and Charing Cross.
How do they lose full-size typewriters, gigantic suit-cases packed with clothes, gramophones, bulky parcels, crates, and small perambulators?
There are thousands of lost shoes, mostly new, some of them dance slippers bought by forgetful girls, or perhaps by husbands who were thinking of something else! There are ball dresses that have been left in omnibuses, silk nightdresses, hats, costumes, and, of course, jewellery.
The Lost Property Office looks like a gigantic pawnshop or a large secondhand store. The officials are surprised at nothing. Have they not taken care of skulls and the hands of mummies? In another room I saw October's crop of lost umbrellas being distributed to the tramcar conductors, the omnibus conductors, and the taxicab men who found them. This happens every three months. If it did not Scotland Yard would have to build an annexe somewhere. The finders made merry as they were given incongruous umbrellas. One large, red taxicab driver drew a neat little mincing silk umbrella with a kingfisher on the handle.
"Oh, how sweet, Bill!" said the tram conductors.
* * *
At the other end of the office other conductors were handing in dozens of umbrellas and sticks, the ceaseless daily harvest of London's wonderful absent-mindedness. Most of them had wrist straps, too!