Part 11
While I was in the stamping-room of the Mint all the machines were working full blast, except one which looked like a rich relation and had become muscle bound. In one corner they were making East African shillings by the hundred thousand, in another they were turning out West African currency. The men had as much as they could do to keep pace with them. No sooner had they carried away a trough full of money, with the blasé air such an occupation induces, than a second pile was lying there on the floor like a miser's hoard.
I saw enough African money made in half an hour to buy elephants, thousands of wives, guns, horses, buffaloes, and a throne or two.
The raw material of a sultanate fell out on the floor of the Mint before luncheon-time.
I could not, however, get worked up on African money. My first bucketful of sixpences gave me a much greater thrill. There must have been at least three thousand of them lying in bran. In the shilling department they were turning out a good line in high-class shillings, and the half-crown corner became positively thrilling.
"Where's the gold?" I said, feeling slightly heady.
"Ah, where?" replied my guide.
"America?" I suggested.
"Ah--um," he said reflectively.
Leading from the stamping-rooms are rooms where silver is polished, but more interesting is the room in which its sound is tested. I have often heard money talk, but I had never heard it sing before. How it sings!
Men sit at little tables picking up half-crowns and dashing them against a steel boss, with the result that the air is full of something quite like bird song; only much more interesting. It would surprise you to see how slight a defect disqualifies a coin. The smallest irregularity in its ring, and, flip! it is lying in the "rejected" basket.
I half hoped they allowed staff and visitors to have these throw-outs at bargain prices; but there was nothing doing.
* * *
In other rooms men crouched over a revolving hand covered with money, picking out any badly coloured coin as the constant stream advanced towards them. The next department was a mechanical weighing-room, in which wise-looking machines in glass cases put true coins in one slot, light ones in a second, and heavy-weights in a third.
As a climax I saw a giant machine that counts half-crowns into one hundred pound bags and never makes a mistake. I watched it count forty bagsful and then walked thoughtfully away.
* * *
"What does it feel like to make money all day long and draw a few pounds on Friday?" I asked a Mint worker.
"Oh, I dunno," he replied as he shook a thousand pounds through a bran sieve. This is a merciful frame of mind.
Where Time Stands Still
London is full of antique shops--places where Chinese Buddhas gaze pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale--but if you asked me which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which deals only in articles more than a thousand years old.
When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass. Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women busying about their day's work. You hear the sound that is London; but it means nothing in here. How can it? It is a fluid unimportance called To-day and you are surrounded by Yesterday. The Present and the Future are intangible things. The Past only can be grasped and loved. That, at least, is how they think in this queer shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned.
The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and absent-mindedness. They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack and say "yes" when they should have said "no." They often remark on the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain. They are probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of the siege of Troy. When you know them, and can pull them out of the Past a little, you realize that there is nothing more human on earth than the average archæologist, because he has learned that human men and women have always been much the same, and that a little thing like two thousand years and a pair of spats makes no real difference to human nature, its passions, its frailties, and its frequent glories. In their packed minds Thebes, Athens, Rome, London, Paris, and New York, march shoulder to shoulder with nothing to distinguish them, except, perhaps, a red omnibus going to Victoria.
It is so delightful to hear them talk about Jason as if he threw up work in Threadneedle Street to go out to Australia in search of fleeces; and once an old man told me about the marriage of his grand-daughter with such remote charm that it was three days before I realized that he had not been talking about Cupid and Psyche.
* * *
However, let us glance round this shop. The first impression is that some tidal wave of Time has swept into it all kinds of articles caught up in the ruin of the ancient world of Egypt, Greece, Rome--these three great early civilizations are the chief contributors, though, of course, Assyria and Babylon are represented too.
Nearly everything you see has come from a tomb. There are hundreds of thousands of objects from the tombs of ancient Egypt. There is blue, green, and gold glass from tombs in Cyprus; there is amazing coloured glass blown by Phœnicians at the time of the Exodus, and--to come down to quite modern times--there are lamps which lit the ancient Romans to bed a thousand years ago, and Greek vases with shaggy, horned satyrs leaping round them after flying nymphs.
There are bronzes green with age, bright gold which never loses its colour no matter how old it is, shining glazed pottery which looks as if it had come yesterday from Staffordshire, save for the fact that it is finer than modern pottery and contains a rough scratched cross and the words in Latin: "Caius, his plate."
* * *
What is the charm of it? What chains these men to the past, archæologist and collector? Most of them are poor, for there is no money in it, and most of them are intensely happy.
Just see the way they finger a bronze that was cast when St. Paul was bearing the message of Christianity through the world. There is perhaps one part æstheticism in their love and one part association. For them an object is not only full of beauty but also full of magic; it is like a talisman that has the power to call up visions. I have no doubt that when these old men hold their treasures they can see the hosts of Pharaoh sweeping through Syria, the nodding of the plumes, the drive of arrows and all the confusion of an ancient war. They can recreate round a relic a dead empire. They feel that they possess something of the mighty personality of old times just as in millions of lives a treasured letter can call up "the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still."
In these old things the Past lives again; they release the perfume of old loves, the violence of old ambitions, the thunder of marching troops, and the sailing of galleys over a morning world.
* * *
So if you collide violently with an old man who is carefully holding a little paper parcel, do not blame him for not seeing you!
You! Good Lord--you!
My Lady's Dress
Madame requires a gown. In a building high up above a celebrated street in the heart of London, M. Flair bows her to a gold couch on which are green velvet cushions.
M. Flair has descended with dignity and charm to middle age, and every one seems to forgive him for smelling rather like an overworked jasmine grove. This apartment with the gold and black striped cushions, the dove-grey walls, the black carpet, the green jade hangings, and its scent like that of Paris is not a shop: it is a salon. If you pulled out a bunch of crackling fivers and offered in an honest straightforward way to pay M. Flair for one of his gowns--I mean "creations"--he would, I imagine, feel insulted. He would much rather sue you in the usual way. He is an artist. Lady So-and-So blazons his genius along the Côte d'Azur; Miss So-and-So does him credit on the stage, so that, as he bends over Madame, cooing slightly, the tips of his manicured fingers together, there is no condescension in him. Oh, dear, no! He is a psychologist.
Madame requires a gown.
It must, I fear, be said that Madame has been requiring gowns for well over forty years, and, lately, requiring them shorter in the skirt, with an ever-increasing touch of springtime over them. So M. Flair, after lightly discussing the season in the south of France and dismissing Switzerland with a shrug, whispers a word to a sylph in black and--more bowing--offers Madame a small brown Russian cigarette.
* * *
"Charming! delicious ... ah, exquisite!"
These words come lightly from Madame as the grey curtains part at the end of the room, and there dawn, swaying slightly, hands on narrow hips, several visions of beauty clothed, it seems, too perfectly from their neat, sharp shoes to their tight little hats.
One mannequin is fair, another is dark, a third is petite, a fourth is tall. Each one is the perfection of her type--too perfect. As each sways up to Madame over the black carpet she gives Madame one half-smiling look in the eyes, then turns, lingers, sways a little, and slowly goes. Sometimes Madame puts out a hand and touches a gown. The mannequin stands like a piece of machinery suddenly stopped. All the time M. Flair remains with one plump hand on the gold couch, explaining, expounding, and, at length, advising. Here we have thin ice. Dangerous ice. M. Flair knows Madame's age and the lines of her figure. Madame has forgotten the first and has never really appreciated the second. This is where M. Flair earns his money. Just as he is bringing her--oh, so cleverly--away from a May-time gown to one nearer August, the curtains part, and into the scented room glides a Golden Girl--sweet as April sun.
Ah, now we approach the comedy; now the plot thickens; now Madame permits the white ash of her slim brown cigarette to fall unnoticed on the black floor. That splendid, cunning fall of the cloth, revealing that which it professes to cover; that fine swing of rounded hips; those beautiful young arms, unmasked at the elbow with no wicked little wizened witch's face time puts there. Yes; a lovely gown! Madame looks at April and--sees herself!
M. Flair knows that the game is up. He realizes, with the instinct of a lifetime's experience, that no matter what he can say Madame will have nothing but the unsuitable magnificence worn by this most marvellous of mannequins. The artist in him wars with the business man. He feels that he should forbid it. Refuse to sell. Explain to Madame that she will not look like the Golden Girl; that she is deluding herself. Yet why?
Madame, with a woman's swift knowledge of unspoken things, says:
"So you think it's a bit too--too young?"
She appears frank, careless; but there is such a touch of hardiness in her voice, velvet over steel. It is a challenge to M. Flair to say "Yes," and what man would have the moral courage?
"My dear lady," he says with uplifted hands. "What a ridiculous idea!"
Then, when she has gone, he says to me: "You see how it is--O mon Dieu!"
* * *
"Yes, but the Golden Girl," I say. "How did anything so beautiful happen in the world? The racehorse lines of her, the slimness, the strength. Is she one of these exiled princesses? She must stand on a pyramid of good breeding."
"Oh, no," replies M. Flair; "her father was, I believe, a coal-porter somewhere in London. If only her accent were a little better she might ... the stage ... success ... but--O _mon Dieu_, these women who do not know themselves!"
So ends an ordinary little comedy of a London day.
St. Antholin's
I went into a City church the other day to hear a sermon that has been going on for three hundred and twenty years!
St. Mary Aldermary (not Aldermanbury) is an attractive Wren church tucked away on the north side of Queen Victoria Street. When I entered I found about forty middle-aged men and twelve women. They were sitting dotted about the church listening to a clergyman who was leaning earnestly over the pulpit talking about sin, the devil, and St. Paul. It was luncheon-hour in the City. It was also raining with ghastly persistence, and I thought at first that this congregation of fifty numbered many who might have sought refuge from the weather. A second glance assured me that this was an unworthy thought; here was an audience of devout, middle-aged City men with every mark on them of regular attendance. The rows of bald or grizzled heads were inclined towards the speaker, every word was followed with deep interest, save in one corner, where a little old man in a frock coat appeared to slumber.
"And what does St. Paul say...."
The voice echoed round the church, and I smiled to think that I was listening to one of the longest sermons on record--a sermon that has been in progress for three hundred and twenty years! It happened like this.
* * *
There was once an ancient church in Watling Street called St. Anthonie's or vulgarly, St. Antholin's. It must have been an interesting church. It was full in its later period of Presbyterian fire and fury. It was also full of epitaphs, one of which I cannot resist quoting. It covered the bones of Sir Thomas Knowles, Mayor of London about 1399:
_Here lyeth graven under this stone Thomas Knowles, both flesh and bone, Grocer and alderman, years forty, Sheriff and twice mayor, truly; And for he should not lye alone, Here lyeth with him his good wife Joan. They were together sixty year, And nineteen children they had in feere._
Two hundred years after this remarkable epitaph, St. Antholin's became notorious as the head-quarters of the Puritan clergy. The bell used to ring at unearthly hours of the morning, and all the High Churchmen in Cheapside turned uneasily in their beds and perhaps politely gnashed their teeth. In 1599 a group of citizens founded a lectureship. They gave certain property in London which was to pay for a daily lecture in the pulpit of St. Antholin's. The church became famous as a lecture theatre. Lilly, the astrologer, used to go there. Scott makes Mike Lambourne refer to it in "Kenilworth."
The great fire burned down the church but still the daily lecture went on; it was rebuilt and the lecture was continued in the new St. Antholin's; it was demolished in 1870, and the lecture was transferred to St. Mary Aldermary, where I heard it yesterday!
The sermon ended. The congregation rose. The little old man in the frock coat, who I imagined was deep in sleep, sprang to his feet and boomed "Amen!"
"I've been here twenty-five years," said a verger, "and most of the people you see here are regular attendants. That old man in a frock coat was here when I came."
* * *
In a solicitor's office in Cannon Street I picked up the strings of a romance that has been acted time and again in London. The property bought in 1599 went on increasing in value, the St. Antholin lecture increased from one a week to two a week. Still the property increased in value, and funds accumulated till it was necessary to have a sermon every day, except Saturday.
"The conditions on which the lectures are to be delivered are all set down in the old deeds," said one of the solicitors who administers the lectureship. "The clergyman who preaches must be a rector in charge of 2,000 souls, must not live more than seven miles as the crow flies from the Mansion House, and must not have a stipend of over £300."
Some of the clergy who took up this three hundred and twenty year old sermon and carried it on for a while now wear bishop's gaiters.
So in the calm of these days the Puritanical fury of three hundred and twenty years ago, filtered through three centuries, goes on and on and on in the City of London! If the worthy old citizens came back from the Shades they would not be able to find their old church, but the Voice they subsidized still speaks, and the property they left ... well, they would have the shock of their lives!
Not for Women
The place is generally blue with smoke and it smells strongly of grilled chops.
It is full of men: men eating and talking. Some do not remove their overcoats or hats, although the rooms are uncomfortably warm. This spot is remarkable only for the fact that it is one of the last eating-houses in London which does not cater for or encourage women. Sometimes a woman finds her way in, and all the men look up curiously, as early Victorians might have done to see a lone woman in a chop-house. They blink at her. They watch her covertly as she eats, not impudently, but with a slight pity, for she is, poor thing, unwittingly transgressing an unwritten law. She has no right to be there! Generations of males have marked this place out as a feeding-place, and the funny thing is that no matter how you admire women generally, and adore some individually, you feel unhappy when you see one there. You want to put a screen round her and forget her. She is all wrong there. It is like going to your tailors and finding a pretty girl being measured for a costume. It surprises and unsettles your conception of the fitness of things!
Through the smoke and the stimulating smell--which I believe is a kind of barrage put up against the feminine--move women and girls of a type quite different from the usual waitress. They resemble more the handmaids of inns in, say, the time of Sterne. They have a sharp, ready way with them, and they regard the zoo of hungry men dependent on them with the faint superiority of the ministering female. They treat elderly barristers who inquire testily for an overdue sausage rather like a school matron reproving a greedy boy.
How efficient they are! They blow down a tube and order all at once a sole, two grilled sausages, liver and bacon, a chop and apple tart, and never do they make a mistake in their destinations.
At first sight you might think that everybody comes here because it is cheap. A second glance shows you a curious assortment. There are celebrated barristers--the Lord Chief Justice often used to go there when he was Attorney-General--solicitors, journalists, at least one solemn editor of a literary monthly, and a floating population of publishers' readers, poets, authors, and others with business in the Street of Misadventure.
On your left two barristers discuss a case, on your right two newspaper men whisper all the things not yet printed in a murder or conspiracy trial, and in the corner two or three men who have not lost their undergraduate voices argue about an unpublished novel.
"Of course, the residuary legatee is in exactly the same position as that in Rex _v._ Tolbooth, and I therefore think you will agree...."
This from the left. From the right:
"The police know perfectly well who did it, but they daren't say so--yet. Of course, you've heard..." And from the corner:
"You can't do it with your tongue in your cheek! You must be sincere! You must believe in it, no matter how bad it is. Have you read--"
Then, slowly, peevishly, comes the inevitable Dickensian, the old man whose collars and neckties seem deathless, whose clothes have a queer cut, whose hat, while it does not actually challenge modernity, does not conform to any current mode. He is angry. Some young upstart is sitting at his table, the table at which he has probably eaten about fifteen thousand chops. Ancient kings must have looked like this when they caught a virile baron trying on the crown! Insolence and--worse! Much worse. An awful reminder to a man of habit! Some day ... ah, well, that day has not come, and till it does he will sit at that particular table and eat his chop with his particular knife and fork. So he stands about glowering and fidgeting, the bland young man calmly eating, an innocent usurper.
But the clash between man and man is as nothing compared with the drama of a woman's entrance. Most women reach the door and instinctively realize that they have blundered into man's last stronghold and beat a tactful retreat, coughing slightly. Now and again some insensitive or ignorant man actually brings a poor woman there. Sex consciousness is a queer thing. Go into a telephone exchange where you are the only man and see how you like it. These women who suddenly dawn like a crime in the unwritten convention of this place must feel it too; but women are so accustomed to scrutiny.
Is it fancy or does an uneasy silence pass like a cloud over the babel of law, newspaper, and book talk? I wonder.
Anyhow, it is remarkable to find any place in London in which woman is an anachronism, and no doubt the day is coming when they will storm even this barricade and--then we may have more comfortable chairs and nicer tables and a change in wall-paper!
Our Roman Bath
An American once told me in Vienna that the Strand possesses a Roman bath well worth seeing, but, being a perfectly good Londoner, I did not believe him--till I went there.
This bath, which was constructed in A.D. 200--seventeen hundred and twenty-five years ago--is exactly opposite Bush House, in the Strand! Think of it! Bush House and Rome! It is in the basement of No. 5, Strand Lane, an astonishing, narrow, dingy alley that in one step takes you back to the darkest days of Victorian London, when lanterns glimmered in passages and "Peelers" twirled truncheons and wore stovepipe hats. No. 5 belongs to the Rev. Pennington Bickford, Rector of St. Clement Danes, who bought the house three years ago to save the bath, which was--O incredible London!--in danger of destruction.
After writing my name in a school exercise book, which contains addresses in China, Japan, America, Canada, Australia (but few in London), I was taken by an intelligent young man into a high-vaulted place of red brick. What a splendid bath! How different from the bath-rooms of modern London, which are tucked away in houses like afterthoughts. Even a rich man I know, who has ten bath-rooms in his house, has no bath as fine as this. It is, of course, sunk in the floor. It is fifteen feet six inches in length by six feet nine inches--a proper lovable, wallowable bath, built by the only nation that understood baths and bathing.