THE HEART OF
LONDON

BY

H. V. MORTON

An ever-muttering prisoned storm,
The heart of London beating warm.
John Davidson, "Ballads and Songs"

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published ... June 11th 1925
Second Edition ... January 1926
Third Edition ... 1926

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SPELL OF LONDON
THE LITTLE GUIDE TO LONDON
THE LONDON YEAR

To
S. D. W.

CONTENTS

[THE NEW ROMANCE]
[WHERE THE EAGLES SLEEP]
[ORIENTAL (Petticoat Lane)]
[SHIPS COME HOME (The Docks)]
[TREASURE TROVE (Caledonian Market)]
[CENOTAPH]
[ROMANCE ON WHEELS]
[GHOSTS OF THE FOG]
[BATTLE (Free Cancer Hospital)]
[BABIES IN THE SUN (Kensington Gardens)]
[FACES IN THE STRAND]
[WOMEN AND TEA]
[AN OPEN DOOR (St. Martin's Church in the Fields)]
[A BIT OF BAGDAD (Club Row)]
["PRISONERS ONLY" (Bow Street)]
[BOYS ON THE BRIDGE]
[NIGHT BIRDS]
[AT THE WHEEL]
[UNDER THE DOME (St. Paul's)]
[HEARTBREAK HOUSE]
[MADONNA OF THE PAVEMENT]
[SWORD AND CROSS (Temple Church)]
[KNOCKOUT LAND]
[GHOSTS (Soane Museum)]
[ALADDIN'S CAVE]
[THAT SAD STONE (Cleopatra's Needle)]
[SUN OR SNOW]
[ROMANTIC MUTTON (Shepherd's Market)]
[LONDON LOVERS]
[IN UNCLE'S SHOP]
[HORSEY MEN]
[FROM BOW TO EALING]
[MARRIAGE]
[KINGS AND QUEENS (Westminster Abbey Waxworks)]
[LOST HEIRS (Record Office)]
[FISH (Billingsgate Market)]
[HAUNTED (Old Devonshire House)]
[ABOUT HOMES IN BONDAGE]
[ROYAL SATIN (London Museum)]
[AMONG THE FUR MEN]
[APPEAL TO CÆSAR (Privy Council)]
[TONS OF MONEY (The Royal Mint)]
[WHERE TIME STANDS STILL]
[MY LADY'S DRESS]
[ST. ANTHOLIN'S]
[NOT FOR WOMEN]
[OUR ROMAN BATH (The Strand)]
[LEFT BEHIND (Lost Property Office)]
[THE "GIRLS" (Piccadilly Circus)]

LONDON'S GROWTH

Here Herbs did grow
And Flowers sweet
But now 'tis called
Saint George's Street.

—An 18th century inscription on a London tavern

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION

These essays were written day after day, week after week, to keep pace with the relentless machines of the "Daily Express." Since this book was published many kind unknown friends have written to tell me that here they have found something that is London; but they should not thank me: they should thank the great city which, written to death generation by generation, is an undying topic, discovered age by age is still inexhaustible; stripped bare of mystery by many writers has never lost its magic.

H. V. M.
LONDON

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford.

—Dr. Johnson

THE HEART OF LONDON

The New Romance

When eight million men and women decide to live together on the same spot things are bound to happen.

London, in lineal descent from Thebes and Rome, is one of those queer massings together of humanity which Civilization dumps on a small plot of earth before handing the lease of Destiny, not knowing whether to laugh or cry about it. Great cities are strange inevitable phenomena. It is wrong to compare them with hives, for in a hive the wish of the individual has been sacrificed unquestioningly to the good of the community. Had we ascended from the bee perhaps the greatest happiness we could achieve would be an unspectacular death in the service of the London County Council. But in London, as in all modern cities, it is the individual who counts. Our eight millions split themselves up into ones and twos: little men and little women dreaming their private dreams, pursuing their own ambitions, crying over their own failures, and rejoicing at their own successes.

Fear built the first cities. Men and women herded behind a wall so that they might be safe. Then came trade; and cities grew into lucky bags in which men dipped for profit. Essentially they remain lucky bags to this day. London's millions pour into London and carry off their loot every Friday; but that, thank heaven, is not the whole story. A city develops Tradition and Pride. London has greater tradition and pride than any other city in the world.

So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate that ancient memory which is London—a thing very like family tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity—and I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed, and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through London as it has surged through every great city in the history of civilization. Here is every human emotion. Here in this splendid theatre the comedy and the tragedy of the human heart are acted day and night. Love and treachery, beauty and ugliness, laughter and tears chase one another through the streets of London every minute of the day, often meeting and mixing in the strangest fashion, because London is just a great mass of human feeling, and Man, never clearly labelled "Hero" or "Villain" as in melodrama, is capable of so much moral complexity that you might almost say that good and bad exist in him at the same moment.

Had I been born a few thousand years ago I feel sure that I could have written much the same book about Thebes or Babylon, because the only things that change radically in life are fashions and inventions. The human heart was patented long ago and the Creator has not seen fit to bring out a later model.

After dinner one night a woman fixed large eyes on me and confided that in a previous incarnation she had been Cleopatra. She was my tenth Cleopatra. She told me that there was no romance in modern life, and, looking a little withdrawn as if remembering some Alexandrian indiscretion, she said: "No surprise, no—you know what I mean?—no real poetry."

I always think it best not to argue with queens; but I believe that the surprise, the romance, and the poetry of a modern city are fiercer than they were in the past. The drama of the ancient autocracies was played with so small a cast. The rest was suffering. People with large eyes were never in their past lives anything less than queens or princes, and thus their naturally vivid memories of a small and brilliant circle dim a recollection of the dumb majority beneath their wills. In spite of the supply of desirable lamps in Bagdad the census of owner-drivers must have been quite negligible, so that the average inhabitant must have lived through the romance of those days sitting in the same patch of sun, bitten by insects and trodden on by negroes.

In London, and in the free cities of this modern world, the drama of life widens, the characters increase and the unchanging human heart, no happier perhaps in the long run, beats less timorously than it did, yet leaping in sympathy to the same old loves and fears and hates.

Every day our feelings vibrate to some stray unimportance. Life is full of portentous triviality. Is it not strange that our minds often refuse to recognize some sensation—a word like a worn-out boot—while they react immediately to something so small as to be almost foolish? You may be bored stiff by the front page of the evening paper, but you go home remembering some common thing seen or heard; some little humanity: the sight of a man and a girl choosing a child's cot, two people saying good-bye at a street corner, the quiet hatred in a man's eyes—or the love....

Let us now go out into London.

Where the Eagles Sleep

One o'clock in the City of London. Crowds overflow the pavement into the narrow, twisting road. Young men in striped trousers, ruled like ledgers, black coats sober as a bill of lading, rush or saunter, according to their natures, towards a quick lunch-bar, where a girl with golden hair will give them beer and mutton. Girls, arm-in-arm, discuss those eternal verities—dress, love, and another woman—as they go primly or coyly, according to their nature, towards two poached eggs and a cup of tea. Here and there a large man in a silk hat, who may be a millionaire or a bankrupt, chases the inevitable chop. And the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders.

But behind a tall hoarding that shouts dogmatically of soap and shirts and pills things are quiet. Out of the chaos a great new bank will rise. Workmen sit around in picturesque groups eating. On their knees are spotted handkerchiefs in which lie gigantic sandwiches cut by wives in the early dawn. They carve them with clasp-knives and carry them to their mouths, the clasp-knives upright in their hands grazing their cheeks. They drink from tin cans, and wonder, in rich monosyllables, "wot" will win the three-thirty.

I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive strata—brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement—lies the clay on which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the spine. I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four feet above the primal mud.

How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian, Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman. There it stops, for there it began. Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay; and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet London?

A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and shouts up to his mate:

"Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!"

And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that look like flat cakes of sealing wax. I pick them up, knock off the caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus. F." Just that.

What does it mean? It means that I have seen the deep roots of London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome. "Fl. Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning "Flavius Germanus made it." What a message to receive in modern London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders!

* * *

Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a new bank is built. For we stand on the shoulders of Rome. Men from the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill.

* * *

As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius. What do I see? I see the first London and its colonists pegging out their camp. Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin. The second London rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the young men; and round this London they are building a wall.

Gradually, as a vision in a crystal clears and forms out of mist, I see a smaller, colder Rome standing with its marble feet in Thames water. I see rows of wood and red-tile houses running within the walls in straight lines like tents within a castrum; I see the marble capitals under our grey skies, the majestic circular sweep of the theatre, the white gleam of the Forum, the gates with their statues, the baths at the gates, the long straight streets crowded, noisy, varied. I see the shaggy Britons and the Gauls move to a side as the Roman troops come clattering over the stones, their helmets shining, swords at hips; the marvellous short sword that carved out an Empire as a girl might cut a cake.

And the heart of this little English Rome, how did it beat? I imagine that it knew the enterprising business man opening up new markets, the enthusiastic soldier always dreaming of sending the Eagles north, the inevitable Phœnician with his galley at the docks and his shop somewhere in the city, the bad boy sent to colonial London to expiate, and women making the best of it, always three months behind Rome in fashion: wives and sweethearts who had followed their men into barbary. O, the homesickness and heroism of colonization! How many old men must have wept to see their careful vines wilt in the London clay; and I wonder if Londinium Augusta numbered among its inhabitants the optimistic gardener who bored his friends with a vision of olives in a neat Italian row!

There would come a time in this first London when a small boy would say to his mother: "Tell me about Rome!"

And she would sit facing the broad Thames, talking of Italy as a homesick woman in Winnipeg might talk of England:

"Do you see those galleys coming up under the bridge like water beetles? They come from Ostia—from Rome. They bring soldiers and—sometimes people go home in them! Yes, dear, perhaps when you grow up you too will go. The sun always shines there, and it is seldom cold as it is here. When your father was a little boy like you..."

So the tale would go on.

Then I see the market-place, the marvellous mixture of race which Rome drew to her cities: the dark Iberian soldier pressed into service for duty on the Wall, the Gaul, the German, the negro, the merchants with their wares, the amber from the Baltic, the pearls, the perfumes from the East, the brown fingers holding out gold chains as the Roman ladies go by....

What chatter of a six months old scandal as the women walk to the baths; what discussion of Rome's latest coiffure, her newest pin, her smartest sandal! At the docks the creak of timber and the straining of a released rope, the "one, two, three" as the oarsmen dip their great blades in the Thames; and a galley goes home with letters to Cæsar from the Governor of London.

Londinium Augusta! There is nothing between her and Verulamium but a straight road through the forest, then another road, more forests, and proud Camulodunum on its hill. Three fortified islands in a green sea. So England takes shapes out of the mists of Time; so London begins.

And I like to think, to round off the picture, that, on a cold night of winter, when brittle green stars glitter in the sky like glass, some grey old wolf creeps to the edge of the Hampstead woods and licks his jaws as he looks towards the first lights of London. Then he yawns and blinks his eyes as a dog blinks and looks away from something he does not understand. So he trots softly among the trees with the instinct that things are different; that—something has happened to the Hill!

Oriental

A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a butcher's shop on an upturned crate. Her fingers are covered in rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing throughout the history of the Orient.

She is beautiful after her kind. In five more years, however, she will look like a side-show. Her lithe grace, her round face, her firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue. The eye passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her recent beauty. She will be like a thin girl who somehow has been merged with a fat woman. She will be "herself with yesterday's ten thousand years,"—and yesterday winning all along the line. That is the burden of the Jewess.

However, at the moment she is ripe as a peach is ripe before it falls naturally into the hand. Were I a Sultan, swaying above the street in a litter, I would roll a lazy eye in her direction, make a minute movement of a jewelled finger, and, later at the palace, I would address her:

"Moon of Great Beauty and Considerable Possibility," I would say, "whither comest them, O Radiance, and who is thy father?"

Whereupon she would spit at me with her eyes and reply:

"Cancher see I'm respectable ... cancher? You're a nice chep, you are, sitting up there dressed like a dorg's dinner and talkin' like thet ... lemme go..."

For though her eyes are the eyes of Ruth among the alien corn, her larynx is that of Bill Sykes. The street in which she sits, shedding this varied atmosphere, is lined on either side by a row of rough booths. It is a mere track between two bright hedges of merchandise. Here the fruit-sellers expose their pyramids of red-gold oranges, their African plums, their pineapples; there the sellers of shoes wait patiently beneath their pendulous racks. The sellers of cloth walk up and down with bright, stabbing colours, daringly mixed, slung across their shoulders, and the drink merchants, with their cooling brews—never absent from an Oriental market—stand beside their ample golden globes.

Through this lane of bright colour moves the crowd—the women young, straight, and mostly beautiful in a dark, passionate way; the old women fat and round; the men sallow, bearded, and incredibly wrinkled. Among them crowd the abject creatures so well known in the East, who clutch a handful of vegetables or three inferior lemons with which they try to undersell the regular merchants.

Where is it? It might be Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Tunis, or Tangier, but, as a matter of fact, it is Petticoat Lane in Whitechapel—a penny ride from Ludgate Hill!

As I walked through Petticoat Lane I thought that if we had a sunny climate this part of Whitechapel would become one of the famous show-places of the world. Here you have the East without its lepers, without small-pox, without the flies, without the impertinent stinks. This is the scene of rich and amusing variety which, were it only a few thousand expensive miles from London, under a blue sky, would attract the attention of the artist and the traveller.

The attitude towards commerce is as old as barter. I saw a neatly bearded woman, whose brown coat looked as though it was draped over a barrel, go up to a fishmonger, standing beside two gigantic codfish and a number of smaller fish.

"How much?" asked the woman, indicating a nice group of still life.

"Six shillings," replied the fishmonger, with a keen glance from small, black eyes.

"One and ten," remarked the woman, reflectively turning a plaice upside down and prodding it with a fat finger.

Whereupon a singular change took place in the fishmonger's aloof attitude. He was insulted, outraged. Suddenly, picking up a plaice by the tail, he said with a threatening gesture:

"I'll wipe it acrost yeh face!"

The customer was not outraged as a woman would have been in Oxford Street; she just shrugged her fat shoulders, as she would have done in Damascus, and moved away, knowing full well that before she had retreated very far she would be recalled—as she was. After a brisk argument she bought the fish for two and fourpence and they parted friends!

I have seen exactly the same drama played on a carpet in Alexandria.

* * *

What strange foreign eatables you see here: vile-looking messy dishes, anæmic cucumbers, queer salted meats, varied sausages of East European origin, the inevitable onion, and, of course, olives. Smoked salmon has customers at ten shillings a pound.

But the people are more interesting than their surroundings or their food. Such gnarled, lined faces, such live eyes, such a patriarchal air. That is the old orthodox generation. The new? Such smartish young semi-Englishmen prospering in trade on an education for which the old generation has starved itself. They can pronounce their w's and their th's. They have an eye on Hampstead or even on the Golden West. The daughters of Israel, powdered and rouged, flit with their dark, and often alluring, eyes from dressmaker's shop to dressmaker's shop, pert and self-assured, well dressed even in their working clothes.

This rift between the old and the new generations is the first thing that strikes you. There seem several hundred years between them. What tragedies does it conceal, what human stories? Many an old man nodding over his crowded counter has sent a son to the 'varsity. This is not fiction, and those will not believe it who do not understand that Israel has always given over its heart to its children. If the elements of domestic tragedy are not here, where are they?—for Israel, scattered in its wanderings and oppressed, never lost the Tables of the Law, never forgot the old things, never became quite deaf to the sounds of tents in a wind; but now the old men can say to their children: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways."

* * *

In a narrow street full of jewellers' shops I saw a bent old patriarch gazing into a window at a nine-branched candlestick; on the opposite side of the road came a young girl in her sand-coloured silk stockings and her tight black coat, swinging a silver bag—very far from the flocks and herds was she! Again I saw a limousine stop at a tiny shop. An old woman ran out, a young man leapt from the car to meet her, and when he kissed her there was joy shining in her eyes. Joseph? The modern Prodigal Son?

* * *

I caught a penny omnibus back to England with the feeling that I might have spent two hundred pounds and seen less of the East, less of romance, and much less of life.

Ships Come Home

In the grey dawn liners from the Seven Seas slip into the docks of London; and men and women gather there to meet friends. Some even meet their sweethearts. They are the lucky ones. It was not yet light. Dawn was a good hour away, and it was very cold. I was travelling away from London towards Woolwich in a jangling, dirty workman's train. On the platform at Fenchurch Street I had noticed several other people obviously on their way to meet friends, but they had been assimilated in the gloom of the long train; and I was glad, for I was enjoying myself in a carriage full of dock workers: a carriage that reeked of smoke and manly conversation. The train ploughed wearily on through the darkness, stopping at stations.... Stepney East.... Burdett Road.... Bromley.... Canning Town.... Bleak, unfriendly places under their pale lights. More early Londoners stormed the carriage at each station and split pleasantries rather like roadmen hitting a spike:

"Goo' mornin', Bill...."

"It ain't a goo' mornin'. It's a blinkin' cold mornin'!"

The laughter could not have been louder if the retort had been made by a judge or a king!

The conversation was both technical and sporting. The technical discussion centred round the life and shortcomings of a certain foreman, who, I gathered, although he knew less about a ship than a —— —— school-teacher, was, if not a man of iron, at least a man of blood. So they said. Football and racing! They knew the parentage, habits, and hobbies of every League player, also the result of contests going right back to ancient times. They all had "a bit" on the three-thirty.

* * *

North Woolwich! In the still air of dawn I could feel the nearness of shipping. I could not see much, but I knew that I was surrounded by ships. The docks were not awake. The steam winches were not screaming, the hammers were stilled; yet over the dark docks lay the presence of great ships home from sea....

I walked on past the shrouded cranes, standing in their straight lines near the water's side. I came upon a tall ship looming up like a cliff. I could make out a man leaning over her deck far above. I asked him if this was the ship I wanted. He opened his mouth, and there descended curious, unwilling sounds, like something trying hard to escape from his throat and then changing its mind and trying to get back again. I think he was talking Japanese.

So I walked along to the stern of the ship to read the name, and there I met a man gazing upward, too. It turned out that we were both looking for the same ship, so we walked on together.

"What an experience it is," he said. "I wonder how many people in London have ever done this. I'm generally asleep at this time of the morning. How early London wakes up. Think of those workmen's trains...."

"Are you meeting a friend in the ——," I asked.

He coughed slightly and said, "Yes," and the way he said it told me that it was going to be a romantic occasion.

Then dawn. If there is anything more wonderful in London than dawn coming up over the tangled shipping of the docks I would like to know of it. First a silvery light in the air, a chilly greyness, then a flush in the east, and with startling suddenness every mast, every funnel, every leaning crane is silhouetted jet-black against the pearl-coloured sky.... Unreal ... still ... silent.

Gradually the docks awaken. Men walk along the wharfside, doors are opened. In the depths of little ships men rise and become busy with ropes; there is, from some, a smell of frying bacon; on tall ships mast lights grow pale in the dawn light, men in swinging cradles yawn and start painting a ship's hull, and from far off sounds the first hammer of a new day.

As light grows one's sense of smell increases. This is strange. The air is now full of a pungent smell of hemp and tow and tar, and even distant docks, stored with their merchandise, seem to contribute their part as the dawn wind blows.

High up in the sky there is a flush of pink cloud, such a delicate flamingo pink that changes, spreads, and fades even as you look. It becomes gold, and you know that at any moment the sun may rise up like a tocsin and call all the world to work.

* * *

We found the ship. A mountain she was, towering up above us with tiny holes in her side like the entrances to caves. She smelt of fried fish, bacon and eggs and coffee....

Soon after I was aboard I had to look the other way for I had seen my friend holding a girl in his arms and I had heard him say:

"And how are you, darling?"

"Splendid!" she cried. "Let me look at you! Come into the light."

So you see wonderful things happen to some people when tall ships come out of the Seven Seas and find their way to London Town.

Treasure Trove

Some things, such as umbrellas, suitcases, trousers, boots, bedsteads, and hats, both male and female, can become so old that it would be a decency could they disintegrate and vanish into thin air. Nothing can be quite so old and dissipated as an umbrella. But, no; the effortless Nirvana which these things have earned is denied them; they are spread out on the cobbles of the Caledonian Market (North London) every Friday, in the hope that their pitiful pilgrimage may continue.

When I walked into this remarkable once-a-week junk-fair I was deeply touched to think that any living person could need many of the things displayed for sale. For all round me, lying on sacking, were the driftwood and wreckage of a thousand lives: door knobs, perambulators in extremis, bicycle wheels, bell wire, bed knobs, old clothes, awful pictures, broken mirrors, unromantic china goods, gaping false teeth, screws, nuts, bolts, and vague pieces of rusty iron, whose mission in life, or whose part and portion of a whole, Time had obliterated.

It seemed that all the queer things in all the little shops in London's by-streets had been poured out in a last desperate effort of salesmanship, while on every hand, above the Oriental clamour of stall-holders and the negative remarks of the public, rose the all-prevailing cry:

"Come on, ma, take it for sixpence ... four-pence? ... twopence? All right, then I'll give it you...."

I must say, however, that I never observed this threat carried into execution.

As I walked between the aisles of junk I remembered the story of a friend who went to this market out of curiosity, and came away unexpectedly in a taxicab with a priestess. He had bought a mummy for ten shillings. And well can I believe it. I longed for something like this to happen to me, for that is how life should go. When you look forward to a thing, or search for it and find it, you are invariably disappointed because your mind has had time to experience it and possess it and tire of it long before it comes. But the joy of sudden, unexpected things seldom fails. I have always envied J., not his priestess, because she smelt like a French third-class carriage and had to be buried at night, but his meeting with her. That must have been wonderful. He was walking along thinking about door knobs or bell wire when he saw her: "My God, a mummy! Man or woman? Woman! How romantic! Probably she was beautiful and young! She used to shake a sistrum at Karnak beside the Nile and wear a lovely pleated skirt and nothing underneath...."

For a second, perhaps two—anyhow just long enough to hand over a ten-shilling note—I think he loved her as much as you can love a mummy, and although his affection waned in Bloomsbury when he had to help her out of the taxi, it must have been worth it just for the sharp delirium of that meeting—he ardent, romantic; she a bit glazed and fish-like in more ways than one, but eternally feminine, though, as it were, canned.

I walked on trying not to expect that anything so wonderful would come my way. Near the entrance a man offered me someone's skeleton for seven-and-sixpence, and when I said "No" he put down the box in which it is kept and remarked to his wife: "Now, don't put your foot through the skull, Emma." At the next stall a young mother was buying a cradle festooned in dusty black lace.

I watched a man buy three dentist's door plates for three and sixpence, and the dealer generously threw in a bowler hat that looked like the hero of a hundred brawls.

Then, here and there among the dense, moving crowds of women in search of cheap saucepans, and those odd lengths of cloth which women of all classes accumulate, I saw the dealers from the more fashionable districts looking for something for five shillings to sell later in the West End for five pounds. There were also numbers of treasure-seekers, men and women—smart, well dressed—collectors of antiques, nosing round like setters for Chippendale chairs, Japanese prints, Chinese jade, and Queen Anne silver.

Half the collectors in London make it a point to visit this place every Friday in search of loot; and they walk round like pirate Kings ready to pounce on the instant.

Most curious and sad to look upon were the old shoes, poor down-at-heel, crinkly-toed things, standing dressed by the right on their last parade, some with a remote Jermyn Street look about them, others all that remains of someone's ancient corn-ridden aunt. Among a pile of boots which looked as though they had walked every yard of the road to ruin, I saw, tall and upright, a pair of women's riding boots, proud still in their decline. I also saw a pair of gold dance-slippers, somehow naked and ashamed.

A large woman was turning this way and that a slim little bride's dress with the faded orange blossom still sewn on it. A white veil went with it, gashed and torn. The fat woman moved on, lured by a decayed washstand, and onward still to flirt a moment with an old brass bedstead. I saw other hands—big coarse hands—pulling this forgotten little bride's dress about, pawing it. What a pity it could not melt away and save itself from this supreme insult!

* * *

In a corner lying on a sack I saw an Egyptian antiquity. I pounced!

"How much?"

A young man answered me with an Oxford accent.

"Fifteen shillings, sir."

I wondered what on earth this superior person was doing there standing back behind a sack spread with antiques. Was it his hobby, or was it a bet?

"I think," went on the Oxford voice, "you will agree with me that the hieroglyphs were added at a later period. Perhaps during the Ptolemaic age, though I think the figure is much older, possibly Eighteenth Dynasty."

I was astonished to hear this in the Caledonian Market.

"No, indeed, sir, I do not do this for fun: I do it for bread and butter. Since the war, you know! Yes; I make enough to live. I have a flair for antiques. I buy cheaply and sell reasonably, and collectors always come to me."

Strange spot, the Caledonian Market!

As I went out I was offered another skeleton for ten shillings.

Cenotaph

Ten-thirty A.M. in Whitehall on a cold, grey February morning.

There is expectancy at the Horse Guards, where two living statues draped in scarlet cloaks sit their patient chargers. A group of sightseers wait at the gates for the high note of a silver cavalry trumpet for the click of hoofs on the cobbles and a shining cavalcade beneath an arch, the pageantry that precedes that silent ceremony of changing a guard that "turns out" for no man but the King.

Laden omnibuses go down to Westminster or up to Charing Cross, and as they pass every passenger looks at the two Life Guards in their scarlet glory, for they are one of the sights of London that never grows stale. Taxicabs and limousines spin smoothly left and right, men and women enter and leave Government offices: a Whitehall morning is moving easily, leisurely, elegantly, if you like, towards noon.

I walk on to Westminster, and in the centre of the road, cream-coloured, dominant, stands the Cenotaph.

* * *

More than six years ago the last shot was fired. Six years. It is long enough for a heart to become convalescent. Sharp agonies which at the time of their happening seem incapable of healing have a merciful habit of mending in six years. A broken love-affair that turned the world into a pointless waste of Time has ended in a happy marriage in six years. A death that left so much unspoken, so much regret, so much to atone for, falls in six years into its pathetic perspective a little nearer Nineveh and Tyre.

I look up at the Cenotaph. A parcels delivery boy riding a tricycle van takes off his worn cap. An omnibus goes by. The men lift their hats. Men passing with papers and documents under their arms, attaché and despatch cases in their hands—all the business of life—bare their heads as they hurry by.

Six years have made no difference here. The Cenotaph—that mass of national emotion frozen in stone—is holy to this generation. Although I have seen it so many times on that day once a year when it comes alive to an accompaniment of pomp as simple and as beautiful as church ritual, I think that I like it best just standing here in a grey morning, with its feet in flowers and ordinary folk going by, remembering.

* * *

I look up to Charing Cross and down to Westminster. On one side Whitehall narrows to a slit, against which rises the thin, black pencil of the Nelson column; on the other Westminster Abbey, grey and devoid of detail, seems etched in smoke against the sky, rising up like a mirage from the silhouette of bare trees.

The wind comes down Whitehall and pulls the flags, exposing a little more of their red, white, and blue, as if invisible fingers were playing with them. The plinth is vacant. The constant changing trickle of a crowd that later in the day will stand here for a few moments has not arrived. There is no one here.

No one? I look, but not with my eyes, and I see that the Empire is here: England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India ... here—springing in glory from our London soil.

* * *

In a dream I see those old mad days ten years ago. How the wind fingers the flags....

I remember how, only a few weeks ago, as a train thundered through France, a woman sitting opposite to me in the dining car said, "The English!" I looked through the window over the green fields, and saw row on row, sharply white against the green, rising with the hill and dropping again into the hollows—keeping a firm line as they had been taught to do—a battalion on its last parade.

The Cenotaph and no one there? That can never be.

* * *

Look! Near the mottled white and black of the War Office far up Whitehall is a platoon of Guardsmen marching. As they come near I see that they are men of the Irish Guards. They swing their arms and stride out, carrying their rifles at a perfect "slope." They are very young, the "eighteen-year-olds" we used to call them in 1918 when they were called up to form the "young soldiers' battalions." I remember how frightened some of them were at this thing that had happened to them, and how often, when one was orderly officer padding round at night, a boy soldier would be crying like a child in the darkness at some harshness or in a wave of homesickness.

The old recipe has worked with the Guards! On they come, a platoon of tough Irish soldiers, their solemn faces grim and set under their peaked caps, their belts snow white with pipeclay.

They approach the Cenotaph:

"Platoon!" roars the sergeant. "Eyes—right!"

He slaps his rifle butt, and the heads swing round.

"Eyes—front!"

* * *

The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling ... pulling like fingers touching the Flag.

Romance on Wheels

When normal London folk have gone home to bed the coffee-stalls come trundling out of the mysterious dark to stay at street corners and bridge-heads till the dawn. Ask your friends if they have ever sought refreshment at a coffee-stall. I wager that perhaps only the Bad Boy of the Family or Dance Club Jane have experienced the happiness of sausages at 3 A.M. in this temple of romance.

The coffee-stall at the street corner is the only thing left in our modern world that approximates to the mediæval inn or guest-house. Hotels are graded and standardized, and you know exactly the kind of people you will find in them. Good hotels are so much alike that patrons often have to ask the hall porter whether they are in London or Rome.

But the little coffee-stall, set netwise at street corners to catch queer fish, is dramatic. If ever I write a play the first act will take place round a coffee-stall; but I am told that this has been done; and no wonder. Here it is that you, like some traveller in the old days before the last dragon died, will meet varlets and squires, knights on some bright errantry, damsels in distress, and many a wandering fool: all the old characters of Romance like moths round a flame, dropping in out of the night to snatch a sausage and then off, mysterious, elusive, into the night.

There was a mist round the coffee-stall when I found it: one of those strange, fugitive fogs that drift like ghosts at night in the hollows. In the mist the stall was a glow-worm, yellow and furry, warm and desirable, a home to wanderers and fly-by-nights, comforting with its smell of hot coffee and its pungent, inviting sizzle.

Six or seven people, black against the yellowness and the banked Woodbines and the tiers of depressing cakes, gazed round suspiciously as I came in out of the incalculable dark, for after a certain time of morning every plain man may have the mark of the devil on him. Round this stall were the following people:

A young man with a silk hat on the back of his head and a white evening scarf hanging over a white shirt front.

A young girl with yellow, shingled hair and a pair of silver dance-shoes peeping out from under a moleskin cloak.

A very arch young woman, who was making hopeless eyes at the young man in the silk hat out of sheer enthusiasm, as she ground cigarette stump after cigarette stump into her saucer.

Three or four workmen from neighbouring road repairs.

Two men holding little black bags, who may have been telephone officials, burglars, printers, disguised peers, or returning prodigal sons, but mostly they looked like uncles from Balham.

From the young man in the silk hat I eavesdropped that everything was "topping" and that Millie was "awfully struck" on Arthur, and from his pretty partner I gathered that coffee and buns at 3 A.M. were awfully good fun, and that she had sprung a ladder in her stocking.

"By why," she asked, "are coffee-stalls licensed to sell stamps?"

The arch young woman looked up swiftly, and said all in one breath:

"So that men can write home and tell their wives why they were kept late at the office. Who's going to stand me a coffee?"

No one laughed; then, surprisingly, one of the solemn Balham uncles put down the money and as solemnly went on talking to his companion about horses. The arch lady turned her back on them, drank her coffee, borrowed a broken mirror, rouged her lips, said, "Well, cheerio, all!" and vanished, archly.

A taxicab driver arrived with a clatter, excavated threepence from that deep remoteness where all taxicab drivers keep their money, and departed with the young man and the young woman. The Balham uncles went off with a non-committal air, which made me wonder whether they were off to break into a house or off home to sleep beneath a scriptural text.

"All sorts, sir, I gets here," said the coffee-stall man as he sloshed about among the dirty plates. "You remember that cat burglar, him what broke into Grosvenor Gardens the other night? I've had him 'ere. 'Safact! Talkin' to a reel lord, he was, too! Yes; I get a lord now and again, but they ain't no different from ordinary people. They eats their sausages like everybody else and leaves the gristle like everybody else and only puts tuppence under the saucer. Why, you might be a lord for all I know——"

He paused, then in case I might get proud and haughty he added:

"Or a cat burglar.... Well, as I was sayin', up comes this 'ere cat burglar, smart as you like, puts a little black bag where your leanin' now—full of jools it was, but I didn't know—and he asks for a cup of coffee and a barth bun. He chips into the conversation and talks to 'is lordship quite the gentleman. 'Nice chap that,' says 'is nibs after he'd gone. 'What is he?' 'I dunno.' I tell him; and at that moment up run a couple of coppers, all hot and bothered. ''Ave you seen a dark young man wearin' a blue double-breasted suit, height five foot ten and a narf and of a pale complexion?' 'Thousands,' I says, going on wiping up; I could see something was up and I wasn't splitting. Then they told me about 'im, and I told them about 'im, and off they ran like a couple of ferrets. Catch him? Not likely.... Good morning, sir!"

Suddenly into the circle of light stepped a man carrying a cat that had been born white. A thin, melancholy cat and a thin, melancholy man, middle-aged, rain-coated, and grim. He placed the thin cat on the oilcloth counter, and the man behind at once poured out a saucer of milk.

The cat slunk to it guiltily. The man watched it as if he had never seen a cat before, and stroked its back. Then he buttoned it inside his raincoat and went away.

"Collects cats, he does," said the coffee-stall man, as he banged about among his unwashed china. "Says they follow him. Most nights he comes along with a stray cat, buys it milk, takes it home and looks after it. Regular walkin' cats' home, he is.... Good morning, sir..."

Round the bend of the road swung the first gold tramcar of a new day.

Ghosts of the Fog

Fog in London.

Men are like flat figures cut in black paper. All things become two-dimensional. Carts, motorcars, omnibuses are shadows that nose their way painfully like blind beasts. The fog has a flavour. Many flavours. At Marble Arch I meet a delicate after-taste like melon; at Ludgate Hill I taste coke.

Everywhere the fog grips the throat and sets the eyes watering. It puts out clammy fingers that touch the ears and give the hands a ghostly grip.

Children alone love it. They press their small faces to window-panes and watch the lights like little unripe oranges going by in the murk. A taxicab becomes something ogreish; a steam-lorry is a dragon spitting flame and grunting on its evil way. Men who sell things in the streets become more than ever deliciously horrible and blood-curdling; they never arrive normally; they loom; they appear, delightfully freezing the blood, howling their wares like the lonely wolf in a picture book.

I go out into the fog and enter an incredible underworld. The fog has turned London into a place of ghosts. At one moment a man with a red nose and a moustache like a small scrubbing-brush appears with the startling suddenness of an apparition. There must be millions of such men with exactly similar moustaches, but this one is segregated from the herd. He seems unique in his isolation. I am quite prepared to believe he is the only one of that type in the world. I want to examine him as a learned man examines an insect on a pin. He seems a rare and interesting specimen. I want to cry "Stop! Let me appreciate you!" But no; in a flash he goes, fades—disappears!

There comes a girl, pale and beautiful—much more beautiful than she would be on a fine day, because the eyes are focussed on her alone! She has the allurement of a dream, or a girl in a poem.

What is this in Oxford Street? Two motor-cars locked together. Fifty grim, muffled ghosts stand round watching and blowing their noses. On any day but a foggy day it would be a mere nothing: an excuse for a policeman to lick his pencil and write in a book. To-day it is a struggle of prehistoric monsters in a death-grip. So must two clumsy, effete beasts of the Ice Age have fought locked in each other's scaly arms.

"Hi, there, put a bit of beef behind it.... Come on, mate—-heave!"

Deep, angry voices come from the grey nothingness. A girl ghost says:

"Oh, isn't it awful? My eyes smart like anything."

Two big yellow eyes bear down on the scene. Men ghosts jump about in the road. They shout, they wave a red light, the monster with the two blazing eyes swerves, there is a vision of a red-faced man in a peaked cap and his gloved hands on a steering wheel:

"Keep your rear lights on, can't you! You ought to be in the cemetery.... that's where you ought to be and that's where you'll blinkin' well end!"

He passes on with his message.

* * *

In Finsbury Square a crowd of ghosts watch ten devils. Men are putting down asphalt. To-day they are not men: they are fiends pushing flaming cauldrons about. The roadway is a mass of tiny, licking, orange-coloured flames. The devils take long rakes, and the little flames leap and jump and fall over and between the prongs of the rakes like fluid. Red-hot wheeled trolleys, with a blasting flame, beneath them are dragged backwards and forwards over the roadway, heating it, licking at it, and roaring like furnaces.

The wind blows the flames this way and that way, lighting up the faces of the men, glittering on their belt buckles and making their bare arms fire colour.

The ghosts stand with white faces watching. More ghosts come. One little ghost has a peaked cap and an urgent message in a patent leather pouch. He stays a long time.

* * *

Near the Bank I come face to face with the greatest optimist of this or any other age. Here is a man entirely obscured by fog standing on the kerb making a tin monkey run up and down a piece of twine. Think of it! If you are sad or broke or things are going wrong, think of this man selling tin monkeys in a thick fog.

"How many have you sold?" I ask him.

"Fower," he says.

Four tin monkeys sold in a thick fog.

Marvellous! Incredible!

Battle

They lie in long, bright wards, which are full of that clean hospital smell of warmth, flowers, and drugs. A neat-waisted nurse moves between the beds, smiling, bending, whispering, easing a pillow, passing from weary smile to weary smile, so young by contrast with these sufferers, so healthy, so calm, so reliable.

The women are mostly middle-aged, but their plaited hair, lying in two little coils over their shoulders, gives them a youthful look, so that you realize what they were like when they were eighteen. Some are pale, their poor, thin arms the colour of unbleached wax; many look so well that you marvel that they should be there. It is the same in the men's wards. Cancer! That malignant, hissing word that lurks like a spectre at the back of so many minds has brought these men and women to one of the most noble hospitals in the world—the Free Cancer Hospital in the Fulham Road.

I admit that when I entered my first ward I shrank, in the shameful cowardice of my health, as I did once when a leper in the East rose up on his stumps out of the dust and touched my arm. To see the unimaginable horrors which you could be called on to suffer, to see lying there before your eyes the unthinkable depths to which your fine, strong body could sink, is a ghastly ordeal.

Yet what did I see? I saw greater than this black thing whose vileness no words can mitigate, the splendid forces of Heroism and Hope: Heroism in the long, quiet wards, Hope in the operating theatres, in the laboratories. Here in the middle of London, with streams of omnibuses thundering past beyond the railings, is a day and night battle with agony. Tragedy and triumph follow each other through these white halls, and over all is that fine spirit of enthusiasm as of an army banded to fight for a cause.

* * *

Instead of shuddering at the flesh, I reverenced the spirit that rises up and fights this unknown terror, fights it with the knife and with the test tube and with the X-ray, and goes on fighting, goes on hoping. Have you ever in a storm at sea thrilled to the driving, thrusting strength and balance of a great ship riding the tempest? If so, you will know how I felt in this hospital that steers its course through an ocean of suffering.

"This is the laboratory!"

A man in white overalls was bending over a microscope. Another man in white was examining the changing colour in a test tube. The rigid set of their shoulders denoted utter concentration. Round them lay hundreds of glass globes, bottles, ghastly exhibits from which I swiftly turned away.

Day in and day out, year after year, the research department of this hospital searches into the mysteries of cancer. In one part of the building doctors try to cure or alleviate the disease; in another scientists work with their minds on that day when it may be possible to prevent it. Is there a more splendid room in London?

* * *

The chronic ward! Through glass doors I saw in one men, in another women. They were away from the other patients in whom the disease has been caught in time. I tried not to look at the seared faces; I turned from the broken lives with a soreness at my heart. Some of them have been there for years, some are there for life. Over many of them was a strange, still peace which made me see, but I may be wrong, a nurse hurrying down those calm corridors with a merciful hypodermic syringe in her hand.

* * *

Visiting day! Can you imagine the quiet heroism of it? The wife who comes to see the husband who has been taken away from her, the husband who creeps in towards a bed in which, so small and girlish and white, she lies waiting for him? The flowers, the little cheerfulnesses, and, behind it all, the doubt, the wondering, the ache, the sense of injustice.

"Well, you'll soon be well and home again, dear."

"Yes! And how's old Johnny? How I'd love to see that dog again!"

Then anxiously, swiftly in reply:

"But you will, you old silly, you will!"

"Yes, of course, perhaps I will."

"Good-bye!"

"Oh, come back, my dear. Just once more! How lovely your hair smells...."

Can you imagine how often the most cheerful visitor crumples up when the weary eyes from the bed cannot see beyond the closed door?

* * *

Who is Dr. William Marsden?

How many Londoners know? He was the man who seventy-one years ago founded this hospital, and behind it lies a story as tragic as any in its wards. When going home late one night Dr. Marsden, who was then a young medical student, found a poor girl in a dying condition on a doorstep near Holborn. He took her to a hospital, where she was refused admission because she bore no letter of introduction from a subscriber. The next day she died. The young medical student resolved that if he succeeded in life he would found a free hospital for which there would be no qualification for admission but poverty and suffering.

He became famous, he loved, he married. Then his own wife was stricken with cancer, and nothing could be done to check the disease. Out of her death and the death of the unknown woman sprang this splendid work that shines like a good deed over London.

Babies in the Sun

Fat babies, white dogs running, nursemaids with the wind pulling at their snuff-coloured veils, and at least six sharp intervals of sun strong enough to paint three shadows on the grass. That was how Kensington Gardens looked the other day, that delicious annexe to a thousand nurseries, that lovely land of young things insulated from our common world by a row of spiked railings.

I went up the Broad Walk revelling in this untroubled side of life, joyfully appreciating other people's babies, patting other people's dogs, admiring a smart turnout that lacked only a crest on the dove-grey perambulator, noting with pleasure the tall, neat young Kensington mothers with their lamp-post figures in well-cut tweed. When the sun came through it was like a game of musical chairs. The nursemaids stopped perambulating. Wind-blown walkers came to a standstill. They sat down on green seats.

So did I.

Next to me was a maiden of about three, a little unopened rose-bud of a girl, whose crisp gold hair escaped from a woollen cap with a yellow woollen tuft on top like a tangerine. Her short legs, in grey woollen trousers, stuck out in space so that she, sitting on a grown-up's seat, was in exactly the same position she would have assumed had she been sitting on a floor! Her brother was perhaps five. He wore a peaked cap of corduroy, leggings, and a little fawn coat with an absurd belt at the back.

These two were holding hands, a difficult feat, I imagine, when hands are so small and woollen gloves so bulky and fluffy. They were discussing railway travel. He said that the carriage wheels say "lickety-lick, lickety-lick," which I thought was very true, but she, womanlike, contradicted him, saying that they go "tell-at-a-train, tell-at-a-train," which I thought also was very true. Then suddenly he said loudly three times, because his nurse was reading a novel:

"Nannie," he said, "I'm going to marry Madge!"

She looked shocked, put down the novel, and said:

"No, Master John, little boys don't marry their sisters, ever."

"I know," said Master John. "Not now, of course, but when I grow up and get big. Some day when I'm——"

Here he opened his arms to denote size and maturity.

"Yes; but then you'll marry some other boy's sister," said the nurse.

"I won't—not never!" cried John furiously. "I'll marry Madge! Other boys' sisters are silly asses. They play with dolls!"

The sun went in and they went away, nurse telling him that "nice boys" don't say "silly asses"—ever! I smiled. Little minds in fairy-land grappling for the first time with this incomprehensible world! Poor John, dear Madge!

Ten minutes in the Broad Walk make you think a lot about small children. How much character they show at an age when they seem hardly to exist as reasonable beings! See how some lag behind, how others are unhappy unless they are in front, exploring, climbing, meeting great dogs on which, at the last moment, they turn their backs in fear. Watch how some just endure a walk placidly, while others shine with the adventure of it, seeing every detail, wondering, questioning. Look how some collect things busily: sticks by the armful, stones by the pocketful! Restless, acquisitive little creatures. All instinct with motives planted in them before birth.

How amusing it is to watch it all. Such tiny, instinctive people!

* * *

The Round Pond flecked by wind. White gulls. Ducks with green velvet heads. Not one ship slanting across this ocean; not one. Only a boy prodding the water with a stick:

"Too cold to sail a ship!" I said.

"It isn't," he replied, scowling. "But mother thinks it is."

"And she's right!" I said, wishing to rebuke him.

"She isn't!" (Slap, slap on the water.)

"She is!"

"She isn't!"

I felt that this conversation had all the elements of eternity, so, after delivering a last word in defence of the mothers of Kensington who release the navies of the Round Pond at exactly the right temperature, I left this scowling die-hard admiral to his melancholy.

* * *

Then, on a path under bare trees, I saw a fat, round fairy in salmon pink. Just standing, she was. I sat down to look at her. She advanced slowly. Among the bare trees someone called, "Joan, Joan!" She reminded me of a faun I saw once on the Rock of the Loreli on the Rhine. It advanced in just this same doubtful, solemn manner; one movement on my part would have sent it with beating heart into the thicket. So she advanced. I smiled; she smiled. Then she touched my coat with one finger, laughed, and—ran unsteadily away over the path under bare trees. Flirt!

I left Wonderland, and caught an omnibus to Piccadilly in a remarkably good temper....

Faces in the Strand

When you ride up the Strand on top of an omnibus—and probably in rain—please remember that someone is envying you with all his heart, that someone would give six months' pay to sit in your damp seat and see the lines of traffic converge on Charing Cross.

To the west in Canada, to the south in Africa, to the east in India, and far over the sea in Australia and New Zealand, are the lonely men. Where the red border line of Empire ends on the map in an alien colour are the little outposts in which these men work and dream. At the end of day they ram down the tobacco in their pipes and think of home with the characteristic sentimentality of the exile, for solitude makes a man very like a child. "Lord to be in London now!" How many times in the twenty-four hours does this cry go up all over the earth? We who take our London carelessly as a matter of course can have no conception of its meaning to these wanderers who, feeling the ache of home-sickness, are too old to cry.

* * *

The Strand!

That means London in shack, bungalow, and camp. It means more: it symbolizes—home! Not Piccadilly, not Pall Mall, not fashionable Mayfair or Belgravia, but the curious old Victorian Strand.

What a street it is. It does not belong to London. Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Oxford Street stole its birthright long ago. It belongs to the Empire. Look at its shops. They are full of pith helmets and spine pads, veld shirts and tropical drill, ammunition belts and puttees. Your smart subaltern going out to join the Indian cavalry may buy his clothes in Savile Row, but your old colonial, who has been pegging down the flag somewhere for the best part of his life, comes back to shop in the Strand, to walk in the Strand, to exult in the Strand....

* * *

Take the faces. In days when colonials come home you will find nothing more interesting in London. The exile makes straight for the Strand; if he does not know it he makes its acquaintance at once, joyfully, reverently; for he has heard men speak of it as men speak of their mothers. As he walks along he begins to believe that he has really come home.

You will see him shouldering his way gingerly through the crowds with the gentleness of a big man not used to pavements, and he looks up at the landmarks, a shop where he bought a gun once, a restaurant where once Mary ... well, never mind, that was over long ago. Or he may be that strange thing, a tenderfoot in London, a tenderfoot from the prairies or the veld or the Afghan frontier. He is fulfilling his destiny: He is walking down the Strand! When he gets back men will say to him: "Well, and how did you find London?"

And he will start a story consciously and proudly with:

"I was walking down the Strand one morning——"

Ah, he has struck a chord at once. Surely you visualize the smile that will go round the circle of men deep in their cane chairs. "I was walking down the Strand!" Can you begin a story in the tropics in a more arresting way? You set a whole flock of memories a-flying....

What sentimental journeys the Strand has seen.

You must have been stopped at some time near the Adelphi by a burnt-up, middle-aged man who asks the way to a bar or a restaurant unknown to you. When you say you don't know it, a disappointed look creeps into his eyes, and he apologizes and goes off, very straight and lonely, in the crowd.

Conrad in quest of his youth? Perhaps. Possibly for years, while he waited for leave, he was promising himself a visit to this place. No doubt the stars saw him sitting out alone at night thinking of it, hearing the thunder of the Strand, seeing its lights, and himself slipping into his old seat at a corner table where he used to sit with old X, who was killed in "British East." ...

All the time the Strand was altering, denying such exiles their beloved landmarks.

* * *

So they drift a little sadly and disconsolately along the Strand, feeling as you feel when, after a long absence, you visit a place known to you when you were a child. Nothing is so big as you thought, nothing so impressive as once it was. That tiny paddock was once a prairie—that small house a castle.

The Strand to them is somehow different—cheaper, smaller, vaguely disappointing. Those pale-faced men hurrying along. How strange. What an altered atmosphere! And where are those lovely little faces that used to look from beneath Merry Widow hats?

* * *

Then, six months after, in a solitude of stars and palms, with a hot wind blowing over the plains:

"O Lord, to see the dear old Strand now!"

The big stars shine, the moon swings up above the distant hills, and the old love comes back into the heart of the lonely man....

Women and Tea

A tea-shop is a delightful place. It is the milestone that marks the end of a day's work.

In the provinces, and particularly in the north and in Scotland, where men take tea with passionate sincerity, frequently starting with sardines and ending with apple tart, the tea-shop occupies an appropriately massive position in daily life. London's tea-shops are, however, talk-shops, refuges from a day's shopping, trysting-places after a terrible eight hours' separation.

O, the eyes that meet over a muffin every afternoon in London; the hands that thrill to a casual touch beneath the crumpet plate....

London's tea-shops are of many kinds, from the standardized shop to the good pull-up for millionaires constructed on the Paris plan, where slim Gruyère sandwiches hide in paper coats, and cakes taste of Benedictine, and bills have a queer habit of working out at fifteen shillings.