Even as I write Piccadilly is changing. Eros, attended by the ghosts of undergraduates, has stepped from the pinnacle, thus evacuating the post of honour from which he has gazed upon the follies of our fathers, those wicked men who used to wait outside stage doors with bouquets before sneaking off somewhere to dine with a real actress. Ah, those must have been good days....
So before the circle is squared, which seems quite unnatural, I wish to write about the flower "girls." Early in the morning, long before the first pair of silk stockings had been sold in Regent Street, the "girls" dipped their violets in the Fountain and camped out on the steps. What a perfect picture they made. It always seemed to me that some unknown admirer of Phil May was secretly subsidizing them, paying for them, working, maybe, to stamp on the national mind a sharp memory of plaid shawls tight over plump shoulders, apple-red faces beneath black straw hats. In the spring they brought the first real news to the West End with their laughing primroses, big tight gold bunches of them; and the Fountain was a joy to behold.
"Vi'lets pennigabunch."
That was, of course, long ago. I believe they are sixpence or more now; but the old cry from the Fountain has been remembered all over the earth wherever men have thought of Piccadilly.
The flower "girls" of Piccadilly presented to London the most marvellous study in polite indifference. Here they were in occupation of the very centre of the world with the feminine beauty and elegance of every country always before their eyes. They remained unaffected. They were the only women in London moving in fashionable London circles who did not care a hang for the changing mode. They had sold violets to women in bustles; they had seen skirts sweep the ground, they had seen the dawn of the leg, from the hobble skirt to the knee skirt. Never once in their history did they show the instinct of their sex to imitate.
These middle-aged women who are always "girls" have become international. American women said: "Why, they're just sweet," Frenchwomen thought they were almost chic, and sometimes a grey old man, sickened by the degeneracy of these times, would wander up from the direction of Pall Mall to buy a buttonhole just to hear himself called "dearie," and to know that there was still something in London that had not changed. They were Victorian London.
When I heard that Eros was to disappear and that the "girls" were to be moved away I had the same kind of shock that a Roman under the Empire might have suffered if a friend had moved his thumb in the direction of the Palatine Hill and had remarked: "Have you heard? The Old Man's sacked the Vestal Virgins!"
Preposterous! The "girls" were our vestal virgins—they kindled each day memory of a fast-vanishing London.
* * *
I found one in Piccadilly the other day. She had taken up a stand on a street refuge, from which she could command sight of her former pitch.
"No, dearie," she said. "Piccadilly's gorn to the dorgs, strite it 'as. Life ain't what it was, nor never will be agin with this squarin' of a plice what was meant to be a circus. It ain't right. Who'd 'ave thought we should leave the Fountain—ever. Some say we can go beck there when they've done messin' it about, but I don't believe it. I'm Mrs. Wise I'm am. There ain't no green in my eye....
"And this job ain't what it once was—not by half. No, dearie! In the old days every kebbie had his buttonhole, and no gent was dressed unless he had one too. And the drivers of the old horse omnibuses! They were rare customers—nice, pleasant men, too, who liked to pass the time of day with you and talk. Now there's no time for talk or flowers."
She nodded enigmatically.
"Young men don't like to be seen carrying flowers to-day, but I can tell you their fathers didn't mind—and better men they were, if I'm any judge of a man, and I ought to be, seeing I've been sat in Piccadilly Circus all me life...."
Then she said something that sent a chill to my heart:
"My gels ain't going to waste their lives sitting here, I can tell you. Emma going into pickles, and Maud, she's in millinery."
This, of course, is the end! A flower girl's calling is hereditary. It descends through the distaff side. The next generation of "girls" are, it appears, going into commerce, and there will be none to follow on.
It is sad. If I were a millionaire I would subsidize them and buy a hansom cab and an old pensioned cab-horse to stand there too.
* * *
For in the fret and change of these days the flower "girls" of Piccadilly looked so permanent with the surge of London round them, the crowds from the ends of the earth, so indifferent to change, so typical of an easier day, as they sold their flowers in that whirl of gladness and sadness, beauty and ugliness, which is the heart of London; ... the heart of the world.
PRINTED BYJARROLD AND SONS LTD.NORWICH