Part 10

As we wander down the line our eyes are caught by a doll's house, relic of some distant nursery, a child's cot, or a piece of furniture with distinct personality, and we wonder how much heartache and hope this place represents. There are people living in lodgings dreaming of the home that they will build again one day, longing to surround themselves with loved things, to tear off the wrappings and see again those precious ordinary objects that mean so much in every life--those sentimental anchors.

Sentiment--that is the keynote. Without it London's store-rooms would be half empty.

"Yes, sir," says the store-man, as he pulls aside a wrapping, "people don't seem able to bring themselves to part with things. It's mighty queer. Look at this old box, now--what would you think is inside it?"

The box is an ancient nail-studded chest with a curved lid that might have contained all the gold of Treasure Island. I hazard a guess just to please him.

"No, sir. It's just full of little old bits of cloth, the kind of things that women collect and put in old baskets because they may come in useful some day. There's bits of tinsel and lace, and pretty little cases full of red and blue beads and needles by the score. But what's the sense of letting it eat its head off here? That's what I want to know. If they've paid a penny for this old box they must have paid fifty pounds, for it was here before ever I was. O yes, there's funny people about, and no mistake. Now if it belonged to me...."

As he rambles on, I examine the old box with interest. I know why it was put there; and so do you! Memories cling round it--memories so sweet that the heart revolts at the thought of burning those poor fragments.

Most people have a box of this sort. In it are queer trifles, little geometric nets on which beads are strung or sewn. Green and scarlet parrots preen themselves on half-finished trees. It is that note of half completion, as of a task suddenly put down and soon to be resumed, which makes such things so appealing. Perhaps a needle is still sticking in a corner of the fabric, waiting, it seems, for the fingers that will never come again. And when you look you see the hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance, hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen. Clever, wonderful mother....

"There's funny people about, and no mistake!" says the storeman again, giving the box a prod with his foot.

We go on. He unties the wrappings round another deposit. All these things, he explains, belong to "a divorced couple." How new they are, he comments. How quickly they must have found out their mistake; no sooner married than divorced and storing their things, and chucking away good money after bad!

I peep in with a feeling that I am eavesdropping. There, piled up sideways, is the table round which this unknown tragedy of married life was acted, the solemn, stiff chairs, witness to it all, the pictures which for a little while were gathered for this mockery of a home.

"Why they don't sell it I can't think," says the storeman.

I wonder, too, why they keep it! Neither one nor the other can bear to live with it. Then what queer sentiment, what common memory, retains this split home here in the pathetic silence of lapsed things?

We turn a corner. More avenues, sheeted, deserted.

"Some of these people are dead, we think," remarks my guide, waving his hand towards the dim roof. "This lot was put in at the beginning of the war. We had to sell quite a lot. Payments lapsed, and no one replied to advertisements. It is a mystery to know who it belongs to now, sir, and that's a fact."

* * *

As we turn into another warehouse we meet a man and woman. They have pulled aside the sheeting and are standing among chairs and tables and pictures. The woman comes out and says nervously:

"We've just come to see our things. The manager said that we might."

As we enter the next compartment we hear this man and woman talking.

"Oh, look! There it is, next to mother's writing-table. Do pick it up and let me hold it!"

There is the sound of the man walking over the stiff wrappings.

"Oh, my dear!" comes the woman's voice. "My dear!"

We go on through the silent aisles, the storeman talkative, amusing, insensible to the drama we have met, oblivious of the longing in those few words spoken by a woman, among the sheeted pathos of a home in bondage.

Royal Satin

When the Queen was married she wore a dress which I find it rather difficult to describe, because there is a special dressmakers' language for this sort of thing.

It was low in the neck, the lowness draped with white lace. The tiny inch-long sleeves were caught up at the shoulder with little bunches of orange blossom. The corsage curved inwards to a tight waist ending in a point, and the dress, cut away over a fine white underskirt, fell in a graceful, generous sweep to the floor. Over the front were draped trailing sprays of orange blossom. The going-away dress is a bit easier to describe. It covered the Queen from neck to feet. The collar was high, and braided like that of a mess uniform or a commissionaire's tunic. The sleeves, tight at the wrist and braided, rose at the shoulder, sharply and alarmingly, in a queer shape, known, I believe, as "leg of mutton." It is very stately and ornate, and, in the light of modern fashion, exceedingly stiff and strange.

Men in the early 'thirties can just remember their mothers in a dress like this, sitting calm and lovely in a victoria with a parasol in their white-gloved hands, and a perky little hat like a vegetarian restaurant poised on their puffed-up hair. So you can't help loving the Queen's going-away dress....

* * *

Where can you see it? Do you know? It is on view with hundreds of other royal satins in that beautiful and comparatively unknown museum within a stone's throw of the Prince of Wales's house in St. James' Palace--the London Museum. This is a woman's museum. I cannot imagine a woman who would not be thrilled by it. In the first place, it is the most beautifully housed museum in the world. Lancaster House, which used to be the town house of the Dukes of Sutherland, is one of the finest houses in London. It makes you feel good all over simply to walk up the wide, dignified staircase that leads from the great marble entrance hall. In the second place, the London Museum contains rooms filled entirely with royal treasures: dolls dressed by Queen Victoria, a tiny suit worn by King Edward, the cradle in which the present Royal Family were rocked to sleep, the coronation robes, intimate family relics that recall Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, and King Edward. There are also beautiful, slightly-faded dresses which Queen Alexandra wore when she came over the sea many years ago to be the Princess of Wales.

* * *

Every day a few women can be found in a state of ecstasy before these cases. Sometimes the keeper, frock-coated and white-spatted and gardeniaed, can be seen conducting a tall, stately woman through the high magnificence of the halls a woman who looks with a smile at many a relic of childhood; and people whisper "The Queen!"

To the Londoner this place holds more of interest than any other museum, not excepting the unfortunately entombed Guildhall Museum.

The whole history of London, dug up out of London clay and peat, is here for inspection. The finest collection of Roman pottery, found among the roofs of London, is on view. There is a pot which dates from perhaps A.D. 200, on which a Londoner of seventeen hundred years ago has written: "Londini ad fanum Isidis" ("London, next door to the Temple of Isis"). Think of it! In Tudor Street seventeen hundred years ago men worshipped the Egyptian goddess Isis, the goddess with the moon on her head, the sister-wife of Osiris, who travelled from the Nile to the Tiber, where she joined the impartial Pantheon of Rome! There is the skeleton of a Roman galley found in the bed of the Thames: a great ship in which men came to build the first London. There is the skeleton of one of the first Londoners, lying stretched under glass as he was found, with a bronze pin under his chin and a bronze dagger at his breast bone.

Down below in the basement is a Chamber of Horrors few people know. Here are the great iron gates of Newgate Prison. Here in a frightening gloom are two prison cells. A wax figure, who looks as if the execution morning has dawned, writhes on his hard bed, his hands chained to the walls. Here are the manacles that held Jack Sheppard.

In another room are a series of lifelike models of old London which every Londoner should see and admire. Old London Bridge, with its rows of traitors' heads set on staves, is lifelike; old St. Paul's during the Fire of London is wonderful. A mechanical contrivance gives the illusion that smoke is rolling up from the blazing church over the startled city, the windows of houses show blood-red lights, and, as you stand looking at the model, your imagination is stirred so that you can hear the cries and the shouting, see the confused rushes as citizens tried to save their treasures when liquid lead was falling in a hissing stream on the red-hot pavements round St. Paul's.

* * *

One wonders what Lancaster House will be like in fifty years' time if it keeps pace with London! Already a hansom cab is parked in the garden! Some day a motor-omnibus and perhaps a tramcar will arrive. There are crowded days ahead!

Among the Fur Men

Women must, I am glad to say, have fur coats. It has been so since we men set out after the ermine with clubs instead of cheque books, and splendidly have they always repaid us with a glimpse of eyes over soft fur and chins buried in the cosy rightness of it.

The result is that, all over the world, wherever hairy things creep, crawl, or climb, men are ready with guns and traps. Three times a year the pelts of the world pour into London to be distributed. Whenever this happens a large auction-room in Queen Street will provide you with the strangest sight in the City of London. You walk in through a courtyard past a man in white overalls. As I passed him recently he said: "Hudson Bay Company selling now, sir!" and, do you know, I felt young all over! I thrilled. Hudson Bay Company! Shades of Fenimore Cooper! In one swift, pregnant moment I saw the white lands I used to know so well when I was at school, the driving sheets of snow, the tugging sleigh dogs, and the big, square-bearded men, with matted hair frozen under round fur hats, bending forward against the storm, urging on their teams, taking their piled sleighs to the trading post.

I crossed the courtyard and entered the auction-room. What a scene! Men who buy furs in every country in the world were present. They sat tier on tier, a good five hundred of them, looking like a full session of the Parliament of the United States of Europe. No common auction this: it was a fur parliament, a senate of seal and musquash. Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, French, every kind of Jew, and a good balance of English and American. If Sir Arthur Keith had been with me he would have gone crazy over the marvellous skulls and cheek bones. It was, anthropologically, a splendid sight.

They retained their hats as they sat in the wide half-moon of the fur theatre. What hats! Here and there I picked out a round astrakhan cap, and, of course, there were fur coats. One man unbuttoned his coat. Somebody had been killing leopards!

Seven men sat high up above the assembly, facing it, and in the centre of the seven was the auctioneer:

"Any advance on three hundred?"

Instead of the nods and lifted eyebrows of any ordinary saleroom there was a violent agitation. To make a bid in this room a man had to create a scene. In two minutes the place looked like a crisis in the French Senate. Men desiring mink rose and shot up their arms. The three hundred pounds advanced to five hundred, hesitated, and spurted on to seven hundred. Then a man with a Central European beard rose (exposing a fine nutria lining) and carried the day. The hammer fell! At least twenty more women would have fur coats next winter!

* * *

So it went on. Millions of potential fur coats were bought and--not one of them in sight! They were all lying in warehouses somewhere in London; they had all been carefully examined before the sale.

As it proceeded it occurred to me how true it is that certain professions take hold of a man and brand him. There are grooms who look like horses, dog fanciers who resemble dogs, and if certain of these fur men had emerged from thick undergrowth nine sportsmen out of ten would have taken a pot shot at them. I fancied I could detect the little rodent-like beaver merchants, the fat, swarthy seal fans, the sharp, pale-white fox-fanciers, and a few aristocratic grey men with whom I associated chinchilla.

* * *

The story behind it all! That was the thing that thrilled me. Behind this roomful of strange, intent men in a London auction-room I seemed to see other men, the wild, uncouth men of youthful romance, out in the savage places of the earth and in the great loneliness of forests and ice. Hunters, trappers! Though we grow old and hard and inaccessible to all soft thoughts we will never lose our love for these. It is in our blood. We have all longed to be trappers, we have all longed to blaze the trail through the Canadian wilderness, to crack the ice on Great Whale River before we could catch our breakfast, to win home at last in a flurry of snow to the log cabin....

"Any advance on three hundred and fifty pounds?"

The baying of dogs in a white-sheeted world, the pine trees in shrouds; and then--silence...

"Four hundred. Any advance?"

The green glitter of ice and the drama of a man fighting the elements, fighting solitude, primitive, uncouth, his mind following the minds of beasts as a fox-hunter anticipates the mind of a fox.

"Five hundred! Any advance?"

Blood over the snow and a limp body, the cracking of whips, the dog team with its laden sledge, and--all in order that you, my dear, may wrap your tall, elegant self in a lovely fur coat!

"Going, going, gone!"

Crack!

Appeal to Cæsar

In a high room overlooking Downing Street sit six solemn men at a table piled with books.

I recognize Lord X. and Lord Y. and Lord Z. diligently reading, saying "Ha!" or "Hum!" or looking grave, or reflectively wiping the lenses of their spectacles. Two attendants in evening dress, like a couple of lost waiters, tip-toe round the apartment pulling out more books from the well-stocked walls to place before their omniverous lordships. The room is carpeted with maroon felt, a few portraits in oils gaze down on the assembly with polite indifference; and there are four fire-places set in squares of veined marble. The furnishings resemble those of ideal offices in the "efficiency first" advertisements: the inkpots are bigger and more efficient-looking than ordinary inkpots, the desks are more prairie-like in size than common desks, and the chairs more comfortable than less exalted chairs.

Yes; but what is happening? I would think if I did not know that a millionaire's will was being read in a country house library. A few barristers in wigs and gowns sit quietly reading as if they were in chambers. Facing the peers is a barrister standing at a little reading-desk, and in the comfortable hush his crisp voice goes on and on. An attendant discreetly feeds one of the four fires, pokes a second, looks critically at a third; one of the peers calls for yet another book ... the Voice goes on and on and on....

This is the highest court in the British Empire. Behind that door in the corner is, theoretically, the King. The Voice that goes on and on is speaking on the steps of the throne. This is a sitting of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Whenever that old cry, "I appeal to Cæsar!" goes up in any part of the Empire this room becomes busy. In this room the last word is given on legal differences throughout the Empire. If the courts in Australia cannot satisfy someone about his right-of-way the trouble is smoothed out once and for all here in Downing Street. If there is a row in Canada about mining rights, in New Zealand about water supply, in India about delicate matters of caste, or even--as in a case coming on soon--about a contract for the supply of ground nuts, the Privy Councillors hear it on behalf of the King and give their final and irrevocable verdict.

This room is the final appeal for four hundred million British subjects, or nearly a third of the human race. Legal controversies over eleven million square miles--and strangely, throughout the Church in this country--are settled here. Its decisions go to the uttermost ends of the earth. No court in the world has ever had so wide a jurisdiction.

When I walked in, the two attendants looked up curiously at me, for a strange face is a novelty. The highest court in the Empire, although it is as public as the Law Courts, seldom attracts a visitor.

I sit down in a kind of superior pew. Behind me are shelved the legal records of Canada, a library in themselves. "Revised Statutes of Nova Scotia," I read. "Quebec Revised Statutes," "New Brunswick Acts," "Laws of P. E. Island," "Revised Statutes of Alberta," and so on--the ideal bedside library! "Canada," however, is not the official title: the Dominion laws are catchlined "North America."

Opposite are the laws of India, Australia; and so on throughout the Empire.

* * *

What do litigants in distant parts of the earth think of this room? Surely they imagine the King's Privy Council sitting robed as peers in the neighbourhood of a stained glass window, trailing ermine sleeves over richly carved chairs, light falling on coronets, with perhaps the King, in full Garter robes, dropping in to see how things are going on!

Nothing of the kind! The highest court in the Empire sits in less state than a police court. There is no jury and no impassioned Law Court rhetoric. Counsel leans over his little reading-desk and talks to their lordships in a quiet, conversational voice. It is more like a directors' meeting than an Empire's appeal court. I half expect someone to rise and declare a dividend!

"And now," says the Voice in the quiet tone of a secretary reading an annual report, "I would like your lordships to look at page four hundred and two."

Their lordships comply.

What strange things go on here! One day they discuss an obscure passage in the Koran, the next they are debating the inner meaning of the Hedaya. When they deal with South Africa's Roman-Dutch law they bandy the names of Grotius and Vinnius, authorities the Law Courts never hear!

Stranger things than this happen. Did you know that in parts of the British Empire the old French law, long expelled from France, lives on, regulating men's lives. Appeals from Mauritius and the Seychelles Islands refer to the Code Napoleon! When Quebec submits its troubles to London this room hears, like an echo from long ago, mention of the ancient Custom of Paris; and the two men in evening dress go tip-toeing round the room to look over the shelves for Beaumanoir and Dumoulin!

Just think of that!

* * *

As I creep away from the Privy Council, feeling that it is one of the most wonderful places in London, that Voice goes on and on, quiet, conversational, and--the echo will be heard in Bombay!

Tons of Money

There is no mystery about the making of money. The Royal Mint is exactly like any other factory. This surprised me. I felt that the manufacture of money must surely be surrounded by the unusual. It hardly seemed natural that this metal for whose possession we sweat and slave, lie and slander, and even, on occasions, commit murder, should be churned out by nonchalant machines no different in their general attitude towards production from those machines which cut out nails or stamp out dust bins.

It was with quite a shock that I watched a half-crown machine at work. What an ideal birthday present! The thing hypnotized me. Click-click-click-click it went, and at every click a silver-white half-crown was born, a real good half-crown ready to be spent. What a generous mouth the machine had; how casual it was....

"Click-click" went the metal millionaire, shooting its lovely children into a rough wooden trough. The pile grew as I watched it. It began with a taxicab fare; the next second a twin was born; they lay together for a second before they represented a solicitor's fee, or a dog licence; in five more seconds there was a whole pound lying there. So it went on hour after hour while spectators stood by reverently feeling that the machine was grinning as it pounded away enthusiastically producing potential ermine cloaks, motor-cars, freehold houses, and winters in the south of France.

If only the Chancellor of the Exchequer would lend it to me for a week!

* * *

How much easier money is to make than to earn!

The first stage in the life of a half-crown is a hot foundry where men melt down bars of silver in crucibles. These crucibles lie in gas furnaces that roar like hungry lions and give out a beautiful orange flame ending in a fringe of apple-green light. An overhead crane runs along, picks a red-hot crucible from the furnace, and carries it to a place where a series of long moulds are waiting. The silver is poured, spluttering and blazing, into these moulds, and the result is a number of long, narrow silver bars, which are passed through runners till the five-foot strip of silver is the exact thinness of a half-crown.

These strips are then passed through machines which punch out silver discs with remarkable speed. The next machine gives these plain silver discs a raised edge, and the next--the machine worth having--puts the King's head on them, mills their edges, and turns them out into the world to tempt mankind.

* * *