I often wonder how many Londoners have been inside No. 13, Lincoln's Inn Fields!
Here we have the most remarkable museum in this and probably any other country. Sir John Soane, the architect who designed the Bank of England, died eighty-eight years ago, and left an instruction in his will that his house, packed with treasures, should be thrown open to the public in the condition in which he left it. The furniture has hardly been moved, the pictures hang in the same positions, and if old Sir John could come back he would enter his library and go over to his desk, hardly knowing that over three-quarters of a century have intervened since he said good-bye to the things he loved with all his heart and soul.
If ever the presence of a dead man printed itself on a house, this is the house. I went there the other day and found the shutters drawn. It was after closing time, but the caretaker asked me inside and courteously took me round.
It was like entering a house when a family is away. I had to pull myself together and realize that this family was eighty-eight years away. There is a certain air about a house whose contents have been arranged by someone who loves it. No museum curator could imitate it. I could, in imagination, see Sir John pottering round with one of his latest treasures, wondering where to put it. He looks in bewilderment. The rooms are so crowded! He finds a place, not the best place, but his place; and there it has remained and will remain down the ages.
Another ghost. Lady Soane. Dear woman, she loved these things too, so the biographers say, but it must have given her feminine heart many a twinge to see Roman pillars, gigantic stone fragments from Greek temples, life-size statues, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere, and, at last, the biggest and finest stone coffin ever taken from an Egyptian tomb, enter her home one by one.
"Oh, John," her ghost said, "how full the house is. Where are we going to live?"
And John, beaming and running his hand over a smooth green bronze, replied, pointing to something new:
"Isn't that perfectly lovely. I think I'll have to knock down the dining-room wall!"
No woman in the history of housekeeping has ever endured such an overwhelming artistic invasion.
* * *
Sir John began life as the son of a bricklayer. What an encouragement to all collectors of the antique! As he got on in life he collected more precious things, spent two thousand pounds on an object the British Museum could not afford, and gradually surrounded himself with one of the choicest collections any private individual has possessed.
How many things enthusiasm can accomplish in one lifetime! It is inspiring to walk through this old house and realize that everything was collected by one man while he built up his career.
Pictures—notably Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"—antique gems, bronzes, manuscripts, books, ancient glass, bas-reliefs, the first three folio editions of Shakespeare, and thousands of other things came to him as steel to a magnet. It is not a house: it is a curio shop.
He must have puzzled over space. You would never guess unless you were shown how he made one wall do the work of two or three. He devised walls in many a room which opened like the leaves of a book, each leaf, or side, being hung with pictures. Clever Sir John; and how Lady Soane must have praised him as the tide of treasure rose higher and higher round her tea-table.
* * *
Down in the basement he kept the splendid alabaster coffin of the Pharaoh Seti I, a marvellous thing cut from one solid lump of alabaster. This was the object that Belzoni saw gleaming in the dark tomb in those days when no man could read the weird hieroglyphs with which it is entirely covered.
What a beautiful thing it is. As I looked at it I remembered Belzoni's account of its discovery in that vain, amusing, yet always interesting, "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, and Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia," published in 1820. This man's adventures among the tombs of Egypt at a time before Egyptology was a science are sufficient to make any modern archæologist lie down and howl with envy at his opportunities and burn with rage at the opportunities he missed.
After describing the location of the tomb, and how the debris of three thousand years was cleared, Belzoni pictures his entry, his progress through columned halls, his discovery of a rope that fell to dust when touched. He wandered for days like a boy in a fairy tale through this tomb, the most splendid in the Theban Necropolis.
"But the description of what we found in the centre of the saloon and which I have reserved till this place," wrote Belzoni, "merits the most particular attention, not having its equal in the world, and being such as we had no idea could exist. It is a sarcophagus of the finest Oriental alabaster, nine feet five inches long, and three feet seven inches wide. Its thickness is only two inches; and it is transparent when a light is placed inside of it. It is minutely sculptured within and without with several hundred figures which do not exceed two inches in height, and represent, as I suppose, the whole of the funeral procession and funeral ceremonies relating to the deceased.... I cannot give an adequate idea of this beautiful and invaluable piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has been brought into Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it."
Just as the reports of the late Lord Carnarvon's discovery sped through Thebes like wildfire, so did Belzoni's luck circulate, with the result that one day the Turkish authorities rode up, headed by Hamed Aga of Keneh. Then, as now, antiquities to the native meant simply gold. The Aga, after glancing vaguely round the tomb, ordered his soldiers to retire, then, turning to Belzoni he said:
"Pray where have you put the treasure?"
"What treasure?" asked poor Belzoni.
The Aga then told him a story—so like those in circulation at Luxor in 1923, when it was rumoured by natives that every woman visitor to the tomb of Tutankhamen came away with gold jewellery concealed in her skirts! Belzoni denied the rumours of fabulous wealth and of a reported large golden cock crammed with diamonds and pearls! The Aga was crestfallen.
"He seated himself before the sarcophagus," wrote Belzoni, "and I was afraid he would take it into his head that this was the treasure and break it to pieces to see whether it contained any gold."
Fortunately he did not. He merely delivered himself of the remarkable observation that the tomb of Seti I "would be a good place for a harem, as the women would have something to look at," and then, happily for Egyptology and the Soane Museum, departed.
* * *
"Is this place haunted?" I asked the caretaker, just to see what he would say.
"No, sir!" he replied scornfully. "I've heard noises, but it's mice. There isn't such a thing as ghosts, believe me."
But he's wrong; for I saw old Sir John as plainly as anything in those high, leisurely rooms, arranging things, prying into them with a cut crystal, and touching them with fingers that caressed.
As I passed through a steel door set in spiked steel railings a hefty commissionaire secretly pressed a bell that gave the alarm downstairs, so that when I appeared two equally hefty commissionaires sprang out and asked me for my password.
No; it was not the Bank of England, or the Tower of London, or Buckingham Palace: it was one of the largest safe deposit vaults in London. Each person who rents a safe there chooses a password—any word he likes; "Annie Laurie," or "Mrs. Jones's Baby," or "Good Queen Anne." Till the commissionaires know him by sight the depositor is held up every time he goes to his safe and is asked to stand and deliver. If he forgets the password he is turned away unless he can prove his identity and his right to unlock his treasures.
Fabulous millions are locked away underground in the safe deposits of London. The companies themselves do not know how much treasure they guard day and night. Now and then the inquiry of an insurance company reveals the fact that a fourteen-inch safe holds a cool million pounds' worth of treasure.
When the commissionaires had looked me over with an expression which inferred that I probably carried on me acetylene blowpipes, a few six-shooters, and a dozen Mills bombs, they called the secretary, who had promised to take me through Aladdin's Cave. The vaults resembled the interior of a great Atlantic liner. In every direction stretched long lit corridors with doors every few feet along them. What doors! Some of them had handles like a giant's dumb-bells and locks like young cartwheels. I imagine that the door of Lord Astor's safe would laugh cheerfully at a howitzer.
The door of one vault was half open. Inside a man was sitting at a table counting diamonds. A pile of white diamonds on a piece of brown paper! Stuck on the wall with the splash of a gum brush was—surprising sight—a coy Kirchner girl adjusting the suspender at the extremity of a long, shining, slim silk leg.
On we went down the corridor, the secretary pointing out the vault of the Duke of This and Lord That, making my head reel with a story of title deeds and heirlooms and treasures beyond price. Another door opened and the owner came out. At first I thought he was about to give us some of the gold plate with which the room was vulgarly full.
"Could you," he said, "lend me a pencil?"
We gave him one.
On another floor I found the ordinary safes, much less spectacular than the vaults, but, I think, more interesting. Here it is that men and women hide their smaller treasures. You can have quite a nice little safe big enough to take a pair of shoes for twenty-five shillings a year.
I entered an avenue of them, looked at their clumsy hinges and their astonishing locks, wondering what mysteries they contain. In how many of them lie letters that would break up homes? In how many are documents that would explain why So-and-So never married? In how many of them are the riches of people whose friends think them penniless? In how many are merely silly things?
"I think the strangest thing we guarded," said the secretary, "was a penny. For thirty years a man paid three pounds a year to guard that penny. No; he was not mad—only superstitious. He believed that if he lost that penny he would have terrible ill-luck. When he first deposited it he was poor, but he died worth a hundred thousand pounds, and his executors then came and took away his mascot."
Another strange treasure was the hoof of a Derby winner. The owner made a fortune from his victory, and when the horse died his wife had the hoof mounted, and they kept it for years in a special safe.
Hundreds of safes in every deposit vault are filled with the jewels of wealthy women. Now and then the owners come and look at them, and sometimes before a ball or a reception they take them away for a night or two. Hundreds also contain the treasures of women who do not seem wealthy. What they contain no one knows. Once when a safe that had not been claimed for twenty years was broken open—it belonged to an elderly spinster—inside were found bundles of faded letters tied up with faded ribbon, all that was left of an old romance.
What other secrets lie hidden underground in such cold, tiled avenues—what strange human stories that will never be known?
In one of the waiting-rooms I saw an ancient man with a white beard. He was sitting over the contents of his safe, feebly fingering documents and poring over them, his nose almost touching the papers. The sight of him roused questions. How easy to write a dozen speculations about him, his life, and his little tray full of musty deeds and letters...
* * *
Outside over the wet pavements hurried the men and women of London, unconscious that beneath their feet lay millions and—mystery.
In two thousand years' time will there be brambles growing on Ludgate Hill, I wonder, and will a shepherd graze his sheep in Piccadilly Circus? It happened to Thebes and Carthage....
If the tamarisks should come back to town I desire to be reincarnated at that time in order that I may join in archæological speculation on the fragment of an extinct animal ("probably a lion") dug up on the site of Trafalgar square! It would also be jolly to reconstruct the plan of Bush House on the strength of three window-sills, a lift bell, and a typewriter key. There are great days in store for those who will shake up our dust and worry our ghosts, and even attempt to discover our gods. I can see Macaulay's New Zealander having the time of his life among the ruins of London; and surely one of his most splendid adventures will take place at the base of Cleopatra's Needle. Did you know that beneath this famous stone is buried a kind of Victorian Tutankhamen's treasure, placed there to give some man of the future an idea of us and our times? Did you realize that the London municipal authorities could do anything so touching?
Under the obelisk sealed jars were placed in 1878 containing a man's lounge suit, the complete dress and vanities of a woman of fashion, illustrated papers, Bibles in many languages, children's toys, a razor, cigars, photographs of the most beautiful women of Victorian England, and a complete set of coinage from a farthing to five pounds. So the most ancient monument in London stands guard over this modernity, rather like an experienced old hen, waiting for Time to hatch it.
Poor sad old stone....
* * *
I went down to look at it yesterday when the Thames, in full tide, dancing in the sunlight, was giving the Embankment great slapping kisses. Tugs were chugging upstream with their ugly duckling barges; and the jet-black finger of Ancient Egypt pointed to the sky, so slim and beautifully proportioned, so tall that when I looked up it seemed to be falling against the wheeling clouds.
Two little boys were riding a sphinx. Men and women stopped, looked up at the monument, saw the pale sunlight finding its way into those funny little carvings, a few moved round to the rear of the platform and gazed with open mouths, seeing an incomprehensible stone, wondering about it perhaps, maybe feeling that there was a story behind it somewhere, somehow.
A story? Heavens! What a story. Shall I tell you what I saw as I stood there with the tramcars speeding past and the criss-cross traffic busy on its way?
* * *
I saw a great tunnel of Time three thousand four hundred years long. Imagine the time that separates us to-day from the Spanish Armada and thenmultiply it by ten: that is almost three thousand and four hundred years. London was unknown. We were probably beating our wives in the Thames marshes and eating an occasional aunt. Greece was unborn, and there was no Rome on the Seven Hills. But Egypt had thrashed its way through the mumps and measles of civilization and was already ancient. In this distant blaze of light moved epicures and artists, soldiers and priests, and in the great palace of Thebes sat the most powerful man in that time of the world, the Pharaoh Thothmes III, Lord of the Two Lands, giver of life and death.
And Pharaoh decided to perpetuate his greatness in the eye of Time. In other words, he probably remarked after dinner one night: "I want obelisks for the temple at Heliopolis. That pylon looked rather bare, I thought, the last time I was there. You might see to it, will you?"
Whereupon chariots were harnessed and messengers sped south to the red-hot granite quarries of Assuan.
* * *
Now see the architect drawing the shape of Cleopatra's Needle in the virgin rock. See hundreds of naked backs bent over the stone, pounding, pounding, pounding month after month in the savage heat with no tools but hard balls of dolomite; and the whips crack over the sweating bodies and flicker in the heat and hiss like the tongues of serpents.
In a year the whim of Pharaoh is bashed from the quarry in blood and tears. His titles are set upon it, and it stands, painted and glorious, fronting the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis. On its tip is a cap of electrum that catches the sun, so that travellers in the desert looking towards the city of On see a pillar with a fire blazing upon it.... Look!
A cloud of dust; and in the heart of it gilded chariots. The white horses are pulled up on their haunches, the nodding ostrich plumes on their head collars rise and fall, the fan bearers come forward, the troops stand at ease, and above the kneeling priests is the Pharaoh, that ancient superman, inspecting his monument from a burnished car.
"Quite good. The god is pleased."
* * *
Time passes. Moses, who was a priest in Heliopolis, sees the obelisk every day. The frogs of the Plagues hop and chirrup on its plinth. Over a hundred years pass, and Rameses the Great, who loved himself dearly, carves his name on the column, usurping it. A thousand years pass, and it is moved to Cleopatra's capital at Alexandria! Here it survives four great empires. Thrones rock and fall, dynasties fade like mists. The world changes. Two thousand years pass by, and a new race of men come to power. They pick Cleopatra's Needle out of the sand, enclose it in a huge steel cylinder, give it a deck, a keel, a rudder, put a crew aboard and tug it across the sea towards England. Prosperous winds favour the voyage for the first few weeks; then, in the dreaded Bay of Biscay, Cleopatra's Needle pitches with such violence that the tug's captain cuts her adrift with her crew aboard her. How different from her last voyage three thousand years previously, when the Egyptian slaves floated her on the sunlit Nile for the delight of Pharaoh! As she rolls and tosses five sailors from the tug volunteer to go out to the abandoned obelisk ship. They are swept under and are drowned. Eventually the Cleopatra's crew are saved and the tug watches her drift away over the stormy seas. Sixty days pass and then news is received that Cleopatra's Needle was tugged into Vigo by a ship whose owners received two thousand pounds for their services. Eventually, tugged by an M.P.'s yacht the Egyptian stone arrives in England.
Here, forty-seven years ago, they placed it beside a cold, grey river, and some unknown hand penned the following epitaph to it in the morning:
This monument as some supposesWas looked on in old days by Moses;It passed in time to Greeks and Turks,And was stuck up here by the Board of Works.
* * *
Here it has remained beside the Thames, with the last great adventure still in store. One night the wrath of Ra, the fury of Set, the god of evil, descended like thunderbolts from a dark sky. Chips of the granite pediment flew away. The plinth was bruised as a city is bruised in war, and overhead in the shaft of a searchlight lay a silver fish in the sky—a fish that hummed like a hornet and laid most devilish eggs. What a strange night for ancient Egypt....
* * *
Sad, cold stone—the saddest monument in all London. We are killing it. It was once red granite. Now it is coal black and its glory is being eaten away year by year. Forty-seven years of London have done it greater hurt than the three thousand years that went before. It did not deserve this; for round it centres the splendour and glory of the past and under its feet is a message for the future.
And it seems to me that its experienced black finger is pointing to something which may make you laugh or cry.
Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance—the departure of the Continental boat expresses. When the fog comes and the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to the snow or the sun.
I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun. There is always a sting in the tail of it.
* * *
When you love travel, and have lost count of the number of times the chocolate-coloured Pullmans have whirled you through Kent to the edge of the sea and on to far places, this morning assembly of travellers shakes you to the heart. You know what is in store for them. You follow them down to Dover; you see them in the swift Channel boat; you hear the blue-bloused porters of Calais crying "Soixante-dix, m'sieu. I meet you at ze douane!" You visualize the idiotic fight in the French Customs; you see the long Paris Rapide waiting with steam up, the wrinkled old Frenchwomen in white caps and knitted black shawls who sell fruit, and you hear the funny little penny whistle like a child's trumpet that sends this great train racketing and thundering through France, or Basle and Switzerland, or Marseilles, and then—oh, marvellous far places in Africa!
Which is more wonderful? To awaken at the Swiss frontier with snow muffling a cotton-wool world of chasms and peaks, or to awaken in the sunlight of Southern France to a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean?
* * *
That wide, hedgeless plain with its silver-grey olive trees, its red-roofed houses, and its vignettes of rustic activity; little men in fields walking behind the plough, at stable doors bringing out a solemn, ragged mule, give me that. And give me, too, the ever-recurring joy of the uncomfortable swinging Frenchwagon restaurantfull of various people: Englishmen who look so comically English as soon as they cross the Channel, Frenchmen whose black spade beards cascade over white table-napkins which they tuck into their collars before they devour their food with Gallic avidity, and the good-looking Parisienne with her carmine mouth and her finicky, much-manicured hands breaking bread and salting meat while her big, emotional eyes sweep over and beyond the bald heads of appraising British husbands.
"Liqueur, m'sieu?"
The man with the tray of little bright bottles staggers up and, notable sight, the elderly virgin of some distant vicarage sips an unusual brandy. Marvellous France!
So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with the keenest enjoyment the other morning. There were girls who would be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts. There went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey, and—lucky fellow—a man with a white pith helmet over his arm.
Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet. Even socks and shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it. When carried with an air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly even an explorer. In the Channel boat people will look at you as you bear this symbol of the sun on your arm. You will stand out above all others. Perhaps in the bar some one will say:
"Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly and say:
"No; only to Timbuctoo!"
A great thing is a sun helmet!
Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there are such husbands!
All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.
* * *
Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.
As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....
Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop. Suppose...
This happens! Turn down Whitehorse Street, and in two seconds bald heads in club windows, pretty sandy-legged ladies, the flood stream of omnibuses, are forgotten. They have never existed. They are two hundred comfortable years off in the womb of Time. You stand in the eighteenth century, in a London of maypoles and gallantry and much sly sin, of coaches and cavalcades, inn parlours and buxom serving wenches. Even your spats feel elegant. You desire to snap an ivory snuffbox, to wave a fine cambric handkerchief, and to kiss a good-looking chambermaid. Odds truth, sir, you are under the influence of Shepherd Market! At any moment my Lord Maxbridge may turn the corner on the arm of Sir Timothy Strophe, poet and wit, and you will, of course, stand, leaning on your ebony cane, promising to look in at the Cocoa Tree to-night and to join my lord later (bow) at his box at Vauxhall. And did you hear what the Prince said last night of Lady T., and how young Charles H. took it? And did you know that Captain X. lost nine hundred guineas at cards on a single throw at White's, and that the Marquis de St. A. has sent his seconds to Lord M., and that Sir Richard T. has been black-balled at Brooks'? Gad, sir!
That, at least, is how it takes me!
Looked at with the eyes only, Shepherd Market reveals itself as a queer, haphazard warren of streets packed with little shops whose onions overflow on the pavement, whose cabbages sometimes collapse into the gutter, whose fish and meat are much in evidence. Here you have the atmosphere of the Pantiles and the formation of any square in any old county town you care to remember.
This is picturesque. Behind any grand modern street you seem to see a surveyor or an architect bending over a blue paper, drawing straight lines. These shops and squares have grown up naturally, as a clump of flowers grows—some here, some there; some big, some small. What splendid individuality.
Here, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, shopkeepers display big galvanized dust-bins on the pavement. You might be in Salisbury marketplace. A china shop sells pretty little teapots of the kind which spinster ladies drive into Ipswich to procure on market day. All manner of antique shops sleep in the shadows. In one window I saw really good china, in others Georgian silver and rushlight holders.
It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste. You can people the uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing. No matter how many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later characters whom you expect to meet at every turn. The colonel's wife! Where is she? You look round anxiously. She should be walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt. The bishop's lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a junior subaltern—all the stock characters of an English cathedral city or garrison town.
Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their way to their clubs.
* * *
How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London life? I will tell you. They used to hold a fair here every May as far back as Edward I. Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle market on the spot. The butchers' shops had theatres on the second storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in fair-time amuse the crowds. In 1750 so many regrettable things happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal. (It must have been very wicked!)
So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of Mayfair. If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738. I imagine that there is here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other street in London.
Romantic mutton!
When I was walking along the Embankment on a path of pale sun, I saw a young man and a young woman leaning over the grey stone watching the river. There were white gulls wheeling, and the river was high; and this man and this woman were very still and intent. When I stood beside them I found they were not looking at the river, they were looking at the Future!
Under cover of their leaning arms they were holding hands. They were in the last stage of love, their eyes like fields full of moon-calves. His clothes were Sundayfied and his boots were new and brown—the colour of a retired Indian general.
Her hat had been made at home in a hurry. And they were standing there lost in the illimitable wonder of each other. They were not in London. They were in that aerial country on the boundaries of paradise, from which such men and women descend to a small red box in the suburbs and the current price of eggs.
I could compose their imaginary dialogue easily. I could tell you that he whispered about the fifteen pounds in the bank, that they murmured daringly of banns, and an oak suite on the instalment system. But, no! They said nothing, because they had reached that condition when words cease to capture meaning.
And I thought how well worth writing of are the lovers of London, the ordinary little lovers, whose sitting-out places are the parks, whose adventures are omnibus rides to Kew, whose extravagances are tea and buns.
Every Sunday they walk London. Every week-day you can see them in the solemn City snatching a half-hour at luncheon, she with an index finger purpled by a new ribbon, he very clerkly and correct. And you must never think them mean when, having watched each other eat steak and kidney pie as if they were sitting at a mystery play, they call for separate bills.
He pays his one and threepence and she pays hers. How significant that is. Had he been philandering with her they would have had a far nicer luncheon in a very much nicer restaurant, and he would have carelessly ordered an ice and ended up recklessly with coffee and perhaps even a sinistercrème de menthe. And he would have paid the bill, giving her the impression it was a mere nothing. She would not be allowed to know that his hand, groping mysteriously in his pocket, was trying desperately to discover whether there was enough left for seats in a cinema, whether—dash it all!—that little coin in the dark of his slender pocket was a penny or a much-hoped-for half-crown.
Ah, a bad sign. The road to bankruptcy is paved with boasting and insincerity and such little showings off! Let him once discover the Girl, and then with life imminent they get down to truth, and she discovers that he is not the lordly thing he pretended to be, that he is not earning a splendid fiver a week but a solemn two pounds ten. Crisis? Oh, dear, no!
There then begins a wrestle with a skeleton disguised as a bank account. They both stand guard over it. An extra packet of cigarettes is a betrayal, a reckless splash at a movie is a crime against a new little home that exists nowhere but in two hearts. So he pays his bill and she pays hers, and all the time the modest little pile grows, leading them to those helpful organizations which give two hundred pounds worth of property for ten per cent down and the rest over eternity.
* * *
They are happy, are these little lovers of London; as all honest, simple things are happy. No great winds of passion or ambition blow like storms in their hearts. They wish to escape from their surroundings into something which is their very own. They dream of the little house, just like every other little house in the row, and they dream of locking the front door on life and opening their arms to each other.
In the great hive of London you can see them meeting, hungrily snatching a moment from their separate labours which are just a means to an end. In the City she comes, lighting his heart with her beauty, and she goes, leaving him feeling that the light has been turned off inside him. At Kew in lilac time you will find them in sweet green avenues; the red buses bear them and their Dream to country places; and one day you will meet them in a tube train bending self-consciously over a furniture catalogue....
* * *
Dante and Beatrice came out of their dream beside the Thames and walked away. Dante's new boots squeaked. Arm-in-arm they went along the sun path, two ordinary little actors in the great play, with that stillness about them that suggests how full two hearts can be.
If one could only peep into their lives again in ten years' time. That, however, is tempting Fate.
Outside on its rusty supports hung the sign of the proud Medici—three gold balls.
Inside the pawnbroker's shop nothing was proud, except perhaps a grandfather clock that stood in a corner like an old aristocrat who has buttoned his coat, cocked his hat, and decided to go down hill with an air. For the rest—just junk lingering in this sordid, waiting-room atmosphere to be reclaimed and taken home. I looked at it and saw it as junk; then I looked again, knew that some of it had been hard to part with, was, in fact, transmuted by affection so that its very frayed unloveliness brought tears to their eyes. Those cheap, badly-made china shepherdesses designed to simper across a mantelpiece at the girlish gallant whose flirtatious salute was ruined because the hand that once held his hat had vanished—how remarkable that anyone had made them, how remarkable that anyone had cared sufficiently to buy them! There they were in the pawnshop, and perhaps some poor woman scraping up four-pence interest to keep them hers, gazing at her bare mantelpiece, longing for their sugary smiles, the cheap, conventional romance of them....
* * *
"Something'll happen soon," said the pawnbroker to me. "You just have to wait."
So I waited for comedy or pathos in the dim crowded shop that smelt of undusted china and old boots. Beyond the stacked window—so full of clocks and fractious bronze horses, of watches and silly shaped silver vases—I saw a busy London district; people passing and repassing, tramcars at congested cross-roads, omnibuses, women shopping and stopping to talk, their baskets over their arms. I became aware of a man in a blue overcoat examining the window.
"He's an old hand at 'popping' things," said the pawnbroker.
"You know him then?"
"Never seen him before; but I can tell."
"How?"
"Well, just watch the way he's going over my stock. I bet he's sized up every blessed thing in the window. It's the jewellery he's interested in. He's wondering if I'm overstocked with gold bracelets. See, he's counting them. He's not sure. He's coming in. You listen!"
The man in the blue overcoat entered, and spoke in a firm, rather condescending manner.
"Look here," he said, "would you care to give me anything on this? I shall be getting it out some day."
He threw on the counter a gold bangle.
"Ten shillings," said the pawnbroker.
"Dirty dog!" said the man, and walked out.
"Old X. round the corner'll give him a pound for it," said the pawnbroker calmly. "He's rather low in bangles."
A well-dressed young man in a great hurry rushed in and detached a watch from his chain:
"I've never done this before!" he said. "But I want some money quickly."
It was a good watch, thin as a wafer. Gold.
"Two pounds?"
"Right!" Off he rushed.
All sorts came in, reflected the pawnbroker, you could never tell. Some needed money desperately and some just wanted it at the moment. Young men pawn watches to pay the landlady, to back a horse, to take a girl out to dinner, to stave off a creditor, to buy food. A decent coat disguises motives. Sometimes a "real lady," who had been playing too much bridge, "popped" something really worth while, and always in a quiet shop like this; sometimes "flashy" people came with diamonds, and then you had to keep your eyes open.
In came a little wisp of a woman. She put sixpence on the counter. I noticed her thin wrists and the criss-cross grimed lines on her fingers. She called the pawnbroker "sir." When she had gone he showed me the article on which she was paying interest. It was a small box with mother-of-pearl diamonds set in the lid, many of them missing. She had been paying interest for two years.
In every pawnshop there are thousands of things like this box: links with happier days perhaps, things which sentiment enthrones in the heart. I could build up a dozen stories round this box: the gift of a mother, a dead husband, a son? A Pandora's box full of the winds of old happiness? I leave it to your imagination.
* * *
Then, at the tail of a number of people, some of whom were obviously pledging their overcoats for a long drink of beer, came a woman with dark rings round her eyes, and she said:
"My husband's ill ... very ill ... and I must, I simply must...."
She wrestled unhappily with her left hand and placed on the counter a plain gold ring....
"That was horrible," I said.
"Look here," replied the pawnbroker. He opened a drawer and ran his fingers through a pile of wedding rings. "They keep them to the end," he explained, "but——"
"I understand. I've seen quite enough. I think I'll be moving on."
Have you ever calculated how much respect you can buy with a sudden half-crown?
A railway porter will give you quite a lot, an hotel porter will unbend slightly, and under its influence even a taxi-cab driver, if the fare is about seven and sixpence, will appear fairly human. But if you want your money's worth, go briskly into Aldridge's or Tattersall's on the day of a horse sale, walk up to a man who wears a white jacket and holds a whip, give him half a crown and say at the same time: "Selling any hunters to-day?" You know at once that you have made a hit. As an American would say, he reacts immediately. In one swift eye-sweep he has made a mental note of you; he knows the kind of horse he thinks you ride, the way you will ride it, and so on. He looks knowing, a quality shared by all men even remotely connected with the sale of horseflesh, and, slightly closing one eye, he whispers:
"Come with me, sir!"
* * *
You are in a stable facing the posteriors of many horses. The hunters, the aristocrats of the sale, are boxed together in a corner, but there are big hefty carthorses and sturdy hacks of every kind. You look down the catalogue: "Bay mare, has been ridden side-saddle and astride." What lovely girl rode her side-saddle and astride, you wonder, called her "Nelly," and came to the stable every morning with a lump of sugar?
"Look out, sir!" says your admirer, as he taps Nelly's hocks lightly with his whip, causing her to swerve round and show you a dilated pupil and a suspiciously poised near-side hoof. "Now, sir, that's your 'oss, that is!"
You don't deceive him. You don't explain that you are only doing this for fun, to while away a weary hour, to banish ennui. On he goes, a natural-born auctioneer. She's your weight, she is, and she has a lovely mouth, she has, and he wouldn't be surprised if she was a marvellous jumper, he wouldn't....
For one half-crown and a minimum amount of attention you can spend hours with this man prodding flanks, feeling hocks, and running your hand over withers, but the best thing to do is to run down the horses, call them "rough stuff," and go off into the yard where they are having a sale.
Now horse fancying has created a unique type of man familiar to you in the country, but never seen in London except at these sales. When you regard themen massethe effect is remarkable. You feel that if a coach-and-four suddenly drove in they could all take seats and drive out looking like one of Cruikshank's illustrations in Dickens. People would say: "What are they advertising?"
They are horse-faced, thin, bow-legged, and some of them actually suck straws—most difficult things to find in London these days if you contract the habit. They wear little fawn coats with pearl buttons and tight little gaiters well up on the tops of their boots; and they walk with a roll. You have seen a wicked man in a night club on the movies look at the heroine. He screws up his eyes and looks straight at her ankles, and then slowly insults her with his eyes as his gaze ascends. These horsey men look at horses just like that: their eyes glance contemptuously at hoofs, linger sneeringly on fetlocks, wander disparagingly over other parts of the anatomy, then they say: "Wind sucker," or "Roarer," or "Eats her bedding," and light a cigar.
* * *
Into the ring is led a chestnut mare.
She is a lovely thing, and you can tell by the way she trembles and tosses her head that she is not having a good time. She does not understand. There are many things she does understand. She understands the man into whose waistcoat it is so good to place her moist muzzle, she understands the slightest move of him in the saddle, and she loves to obey when, feeling the faintest pressure of his knees, she breaks into a canter over soft grass, and falls again into a trot, to find his hand patting her sleek neck.
Why isn't he here? He has never let others take control of her before! In a moment, no doubt, he will come and drive all these men off; and then they will go out together to their own place as they have always done. She looks round. Whinnies. But her man is not there.
Then the auctioneer, a little fellow in a silk hat, explains that this splendid chestnut mare, sound in wind and limb and eye, is being sold to save her summer keep. The horse fanciers come a step nearer, they whisper, they begin to bid....
Bang! The hammer descends. The little chestnut mare starts suddenly as if she knew that she had got a new master.
* * *
They lead her out under the wide arch of the livery stable, and in the proud tossing of her head and her backward looks you seem to read: "Where is that man of mine, and why—why doesn't he come?"
I have realized one of my first ambitions. In the dark engine cab of an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.
A bell rang. The driver looked out over the track where three gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel. He pulled over a lever and the train started. It was the strangest sensation. I forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us. I forgot the cargo of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were carrying across London. In the semi-darkness of the driver's cab an ordinary Underground journey had become strangely adventurous and exciting.
The driver accelerated. His pointer moved round a dial, and the train answered his small movements, gathering speed and noise. I was conscious only of being in the grip of a tremendous force that was hurling us over those three gleaming rails. We took the tunnel at a good thirty-five miles an hour, and the noise we made changed to a hollow roar! I could feel the train swerve and rock slightly as we rounded a curve; but I could see nothing save here and there a green light close to the ground. If you can imagine that you are tied to a projectile shot from a gun in the night, you have an idea of driving an electric train through a tunnel.
In the underground blackness stations show first as a faint yellow glow cut across by the jet-black semicircle of the tunnel. The next second you can see their curving rows of lights; they straighten out, and then the platform at which you will pull up lies level as a knife edge before you. Mark Lane ... Mansion House ... Blackfriars ... Temple ... Charing Cross.
Charing Cross is big. As you sweep in the driver has time to collect a lightning series of snapshots! A bookstall, a cigarette booth, lit and yellow, a pretty girl coming down the steps carrying a bag, a fussy old lady asking a ticket inspector how to get to Baron's Court, and a sudden stir and interest of Ealing-bound people who detach themselves from the crowd of waiting passengers. Just a flash! All seen in the fraction of a second! Bells ring down the train. A loud one clangs in the engine cab. And off you go again through the blackness towards Victoria.
Few things are more uncanny in mechanical London than the system of automatic signalling which permits a chain of electric trains to move over the same line at minute intervals with no chance of a collision.
Little green lights beckon you on, telling you the way is clear. As you pass them red lights at your back change to green, beckoning on the train behind; and so it is all the way along. Now and then you meet a red light. You stop! The light changes to green. On you go! The marvellous thing is that if, in a moment of colour blindness, you tried to override a red light your train would correct you. It would refuse to go on!
At Kensington we shot out into the open air. Gaily, madly, we raced over the shining rails, marvellously, so it seemed to me, taking a sharp bend, smoothly continuing along the straight. It was like flying without the perpetual anxiety of flight. Once, with the awful insolence of the cocksure, I thought the driver had erred.
"Good Lord!" I said. "That was a red light, andyou've gone on!"
Instead of kicking me out on the metals, as he should have done, he smiled and remarked:
"Wrong signal! That red light governs the loop line!"
Safe! On we thundered triumphantly Ealing-wards, with the green lights smiling a benediction on us, telling us that the next ahead was at least a minute ahead, telling the next behind that we, in our turn, were sixty seconds on the right side of safety.
"Do you ever get bored with driving the Ealing express?"
"No," replied the driver, "I like it! I wanted to do this ever since I became a conductor. Most conductors want to be drivers. The first time you take a train out alone is what you might call a bit of excitement, but it soon wears off."
"You don't feel as though you were flying?"
"No, you soon lose that feeling."
"You never get the wind up?"
"No, you can't go wrong if you keep your eyes open and your repair bag in good order!"
* * *
In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over which little black snakes were crawling—trains coming and trains gone—I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways for over thirty years!
"The changes I've seen?" he said. "Yet it's marvellous what we did in the old days. Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains? I'm not saying that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but—we did it! Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better, and—you can have the good old days! I remember them and prefer these!
"Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains. Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground."
* * *
I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the littlecrème de menthelights that tell him he can fly and thunder on through the darkness.
A striped awning leads to the church. A narrow strip of scarlet carpet runs from kerb to porch. Policemen hold back the crowd.
Women—always women; and in such numbers, too, and in such remarkable variety. The lily livered misanthrope on a passing omnibus growls: "Another wretched wedding.... What women see in them I cannot imagine." Of course he cannot. Women with their relentless grip on essential realities, see in them the work of the world, the justification of all living—but, naturally, they do not reason it out like that. They go to "see the bride," or, dare I say, to see themselves as the bride, either as they once were or as they hope to be.
How remarkably they gather! At one moment the street is normal save for that tell-tale scarlet strip; the next, as a swarm gathers out of the blue sky, so gather the wedding fans, ready, if need be, to prod a policeman in the ribs with an umbrella in order to watch another woman walk through a wedding-ring into a home....
Shall we join the ladies?
* * *
"Steady on there. Don't push."
That is the policeman. There is a surge and writhing of this solid mass of womanhood.
"Officer, could you stand just a little.... Thank you."
"'Ere, Robert, can't you move your fat self? I'm only a little one."
All kinds of women: Kensington and Balham and Clerkenwell; virgins, matrons, and grandmothers; some happy, some, no doubt, unhappy. What does that matter? Another bride is stepping out into life with the future in her eyes, and joy and sorrow presiding over her marvellous destiny.
* * *
"Who is it?"
"Lady Agatha Penwhistle!"
Not you see, "Who is he?" What does he matter? Half the women have never heard of Lady Agatha. To them she is not Lady Agatha. She is something far more important: she is a bride; she is—Everywoman.
In the dark arch of the church porch a certain anticipatory liveliness is noted. Pink young men in morning clothes, white gardenias in their buttonholes, fuss helplessly, asking each other whispered questions, pointing, hesitating, muddling. Marriage is a bad day for young brothers. The boys at the porch have been tumbling over pews and mixing up the bride's guests with those who owe allegiance to the bridegroom. It has been a fearful sweat for them. The sight of Sis at the altar, too, was pretty awful. Of course, George is an awfully decent cove and all that; but still, you know ... so small she was, and so pathetic in white, kneeling there....
One of the young men runs down the steps and officiously opens the door of a limousine in whose silver brackets shine white carnations. The crowd watches every movement. He blushes under the scrutiny. Silly asses, they are! Then as he runs back the doors are flung wide. Suddenly the church vibrates like a great cat purring. The stones seem to rock, as, with a crash, the hysterical triumph of Mendelssohn bursts forth and goes galloping down the wind like a messenger. There are people crowding round the porch. She is coming.... She, the eternal, unchanging, marvellous She!
Look, there is a movement in the porch, and then... "Oooh, isn't she lovely!"
The Girl in White!
Her veil flung back, her straight, slim form moving down the steps, the white satin gleaming as she moves, her bouquet against her breast, and her silver toes peeping in and out from beneath her gown. She smiles.
"Good luck, my dear!"
A swift turn of her head. Who said that to her? Her eyes brim, for it was very lovely. She gazes over the women's faces—those, at this time, generous women's faces.
So she passes.
* * *
As she goes the women put away their handkerchiefs, for they have all been crying a little, some with joy and some out of the depths of knowledge.
To all of them standing there She represented That Which Once Was, That Which Might Have Been, That Which May Be; and something more—oh, much more. For that brief second she was the Ideal. She was Happiness.
I think also that when the older women found themselves in tears they were seeing through a glass darkly, through the glass of this girl's life, and in their hearts they knew that, come weal, come woe, they had seen a sister at the pinnacle of her life.
* * *
"Good luck, my dear!"
Nell Gwynne must have had some trying moments. When she fell into a red-haired woman's rage facing Charles II with clenched hands, Charles probably stood there looking at her just as he looks at the few people who from time to time gaze at him in the Westminster Abbey waxwork show.
Women hate to be looked at like that, whether the man who looks is a king or is merely someone else's husband. "Now, Nelly!" he seems to be saying. "Now, Nelly!" Cold, distant, on the apex of his pyramid of superiority, with his sallow, cynical face framed in its cascade of curls, how mad he must have made her—and all the others—for women who permit themselves hysterics do detest having them against a human granite quarry. That sad, superior Stuart eye, that heavy, drooping mouth, that thin, supercilious pencil line of a moustache etched straight over, but a little above, his upper lip. So contemptuous, so cutting, so sarcastic. You can positively hear the dead beauties saying, "Charles, I never know what you arereallythinking," or "Charles, do smile, just once," or "Charles, dearest, why do you look at me like that? Have you forgotten...." Heart-rending for them, but—also attractive, you know!
How many calculated storms must have beaten in vain tears against that stern rock of a face as he stood there, his Majesty the King, just waiting for the tempest to abate. It must have been one of the most useful expressions in history.
* * *
Waxworks? Pooh!
That is what most visitors say as they trail round Westminster Abbey, wrestling painfully with the past, trying to flog their imaginations with dates.
How many realize that these waxworks were made by men who saw these kings and queens in life? They are authentic portraits, less flattering perhaps than the works of greater artists, and for this reason more interesting. In fact, I prefer this waxwork of Charles II to Lely's splendid portrait. I am sure it is more like Charles.
From the time of Henry V till about 1700 every dead monarch was modelled in wax. This effigy was then dressed in the king's finest suit, and was carried through the streets of London in his funeral train. Westminster Abbey was once full of these marvellous relics—"The Ragged Regiment" they used to be called, or "The Play of Dead Folks." To-day only eleven are shown, the broken limbs of the others, the gruesome heads and hands, are locked away from public sight. Poor Edward I and Eleanor, the third Edward and Philippa, glorious Hal and Katharine, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, James the First and Anne of Denmark, lie all jumbled together; a sight that would have made Hamlet wince.
Was there ever a more pathetic puppet show?
Enough remained of Queen Elizabeth for a clever restorer to give us a new idea of her. There she stands covered in jewels, holding her sceptre, her rich, red, velvet gown falling to a pair of surprisingly adequate brocade shoes. But this is not the imperious queen we know, this is not Gloriana, who could put on a Tower of London expression and whip men with her tongue. This is a sad old woman. She has uncanny, unhappy eyes; such a lonely face.
William and Mary, who attract every Dutch visitor to London, are a heavy, homely couple. She wears purple velvet over a brocaded skirt, and he was so small that some thoughtful person mounted him on a footstool so that he might match his tall wife. Queen Anne is also on view, but she, too, is rather heavy and homely. Those are the royalties.
In a corner is Frances, Duchess of Richmond, who is said to have been the Britannia of the coinage. Just think of this! Frances Teresa Stewart in wax looking across at a waxen Charles II! What irony! She, you remember, was the lady Pepys thought so lovely; and he had a good eye. What scandal a wax figure can recall. "La Belle Stewart" never cared for chatter, however, and you can imagine how Charles looked when he learned that the beautiful scandalous creature, who might have been Queen of England, had eloped one night from Whitehall with the Duke of Richmond. It must have been a bad day for everybody in St. James's Palace. The cook, I should think, was certainly sacked.
In the next case is Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, who on her death-bed developed an enthusiasm for her funeral. She had previously arranged it in detail with the Garter King-of-Arms, and she lay there worrying if the trappings would be all right, and fearing to die before the undertakers sent the canopy for her approval.
"Why don't they send it," she cried, "even though all the tassels are not finished?"
Poor lady! Her pomp is ended, and her brocaded robes sadly in need of the dry-cleaner.
Nelson is there, modelled shortly after death, wearing his uniform, his neat, thin legs in white kerseymere breeches and silk stockings, and the Government "hat tax" stamp still to be seen inside his hat.
Full of human interest they are, but Charles is the gem. Time has been unkind to the fine point lace at his neck and at his wrists. It is almost black. His jaunty hat, with its drooping ostrich plumes, would disgrace a brawl; yet I defy you to laugh at him. His Majesty looks at you from the dust of centuries, and you are inclined to hate the people who have written their names with diamonds on the plate glass, including the author of that famous quatrain which ends:
He never said a foolish thing,Nor ever did a wise one.
Still he has an air with him, and when he entered a room, his melancholy eyes burning in that sallow, set face, just think how the ostrich plumes swept the dust, and how the lovely naughtiness of his day curtseyed in gold brocade....
I wonder how many people who live in London lodgings look in the mirror during their occasional shaves and think: "There goes the rightful Duke of Brixton!"
O the wild dreams of London! The old man who starves himself that he may search year after year for a document which conceals a coronet is only less tenacious than the elderly virgin whose sole passion is the belief that somebody way back in history "did her down" over a will. There are humble, ragged people who must be positively shocked when they cut a finger and discover that their blood is just ordinary red. There are others who believe themselves to be the ground-landlords of New York or Philadelphia, who go on living in the splendid hope that some day—some day—that missing document will turn up to smooth out the injustices of time.
The Record Office in Chancery Lane is the magnet which draws all these queer people year after year. These unofficial dukes and earls go off each morning with their luncheon in paper bags to hunt up their ancestors. They are all so certain. So convincing. You can put your head quite close to theirs and never hear the bee.
Their finger nails may be in mourning for their lost departed, their collars may be greyish, and their cuffs frayed, but they have butlers and scarlet carpets in their hearts, and in their eyes a hunger most awful to see. There is a legend that one searcher who insisted on being called "my lord," became tired of trying to justify his claim and in a moment of enthusiasm hired a peer's robes and actually succeeded in entering the House of Lords during a State ceremony! What a moment!
There he stood for a moment among his peers. It must have been the greatest moment of his life. It was during the State opening of Parliament, and the House of Lords was waiting with lowered lights for that moment when the King and the Queen, with white-satined pages holding the royal trains, would enter at the precise moment, the lights leap up and send a green and fiery glitter rippling along the throats of the peeresses in the gallery. In this scene stood the peer from Bloomsbury or Brixton or Balham, watching with who knows what delicious thrills the Gentlemen-at-Arms standing at the doors holding their halberds in white gauntleted hands while the lights glanced off their golden helms. What a moment! And what, I wonder, betrayed him? Why did they ask him to go? Did he show too much confidence in his rightful surroundings, or did he say, "Granted, I'm sure," to the duke who trod on his foot? I wonder....
When I entered the Record Office yesterday the curious round room, like the smoking-room of an Atlantic liner that has taken to book-collecting, was full of students and historians poring over spidery Elizabethan script or muttering the English of Chaucer's day beneath their breath. Now and again someone with the strawberry leaf complex wanders in here, puts an old hat on the chair, and calls for documents with the air of a rather weary Malvolio. Generally speaking, the legacy and title hunters gather next door in the Legal Search Room.
Here I found an assortment of women and men. Some were solicitors and barristers looking up records, some were trying to claim funds in Chancery, and others the usual fortune and title hunters.
This is merely a fraction of the interest this building holds for us. It houses twenty-six miles of shelves packed with historic documents and millions of unhistoric documents. Here are the bones of English History. Come into the Museum known so well to those who have aflairfor the right things, the Americans. Here in two portly volumes is "Domesday Book," writ in a fair monkish hand. Shelves are stacked with letters from kings and queens, generals and admirals, cardinals and peers: humour, pathos, tragedy, passion. In one of these Wolsey, "the King's poore, hevy and wrechyd prest," asks Henry VIII to forgive him and take him back into favour. Queen Elizabeth's hand is set to a number of letters, and to her are missives from many men, including two who loved her. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, says in one: "I humbly kiss your foot," and the imprisoned Earl of Essex is represented by a brief letter written for the eyes of Gloriana alone.
You can read letters which recall cannon shot on the high seas, and letters which give a vision of deep political plotting and such-like villainy. "God has given us a good day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward," wrote Sir Francis Drake aboard the "Revenge." "I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Sedonya shall not shake handes this fewe days." Quite near you will find the last confession of Guy Fawkes.
When you have enjoyed the flavour of these old days you may meet on the stairs an ordinary cat. At least so it seems. It is Felix, and he has been walking through history for centuries. It is the only cat officially on a Government staff—in spite of anything women secretaries in Whitehall may tell you! It receives a penny a day from Government funds! I believe that the terms of its appointment include a clause that it must keep itself clean, catch rats and mice, and bring up its children. If anybody killed the official cat in ancient times he had to forfeit sufficient wheat to cover the body.
* * *
The officer in charge of the Legal Search Room sits with the official list of lost money before him—the funds in Chancery, which, by the way, are only sufficient to make one decent full-blown millionaire—as millionaires go nowadays.
"Yes," he said, "there are some strange searchers.
"In the summer many good, democratic Americans come over to trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror!"
"And the lost heirs," I said—"the would-be dukes?"
"Ah!" he replied. "Ah!"
He sighed.
I noticed a shabby old man mournfully shuffling out. I felt certain that there was the ghost of ermine over him, and I hope that now and then his landlady, just to keep his poor heart up, drops a curtsy when she brings in the kippers and says: "Dinner is served—your grace."