Part 12

It is an apse-headed oblong in shape, and I have seen exactly the same thing in the Roman ruins of Timgad, among the mountains of North Africa. No doubt it belonged to some rich Roman who built his villa seventeen hundred years ago some little distance from busy London, so that his wife and children might enjoy the flowers of the Strand, the peace, and the river.

The young custodian took a long-handled ladle and dipped it into the clear, limpid water which for seventeen centuries has been trickling into the bath! It comes from an unknown spring bubbling from a "fault" in the London clay.

"You'd be surprised at the visitors, mostly Canadians and Americans, who want to take off their clothes and plunge in," said the guide, "not because it's a Roman bath, but because Dickens used to bathe here, and mentions it in Chapter thirty-five of 'David Copperfield.'"

"And do you ever let them?"

"Not likely! When I tell them how cold it is they change their minds. It's always three degrees above freezing."

"How do you know?"

"Because I fell in once," he replied simply.

* * *

I tried hard as I stood there on the level of Roman London, thirty feet below the London of to-day, to picture this spot in its glory. It was no doubt tiled with veined marble, and the London spring water ran in over marble, and the roof perhaps held frescoes showing nymphs and fauns and Pan playing his pipes.

Signor Matania, the artist, has made a fine picture of this bath as he thinks it was when Roman ladies came there to swim without bathing costumes. A pretty picture, but--was the water ever deep enough?

"Some think it was a hot bath, and some think it was a cold one," said the guide, "but nobody knows. Perhaps we shall know when Mr. Bickford digs underneath, as he wants to do, in search of the heating system."

* * *

I climbed up out of Roman London, and a few steps took me to the sight of Bush House and omnibuses racing past to Charing Cross.

Left Behind

"What is the strangest thing a Londoner has lost?" I asked an official of the Lost Property Office in Scotland Yard.

"Well, let's see. Two leg bones came in last week. They had obviously been left in a tramcar by a medical student. Once we had somebody's appendix in oil; but I think the funniest thing I ever remember a man losing--and I've been here thirty-three years--was a tree-climbing bear! Alive? I should say he was alive! You ought to have seen him climb up to the mantelshelf. It turned out that he had been left in a cab by a Scotsman who owned him. This man had been abroad for a long time, and was paying his first visit to London after many seafaring years abroad. Apparently he was so excited to be back that he forgot all about his bear. He left it in a four-wheeler. He remembered next morning, and jolly glad we were, too, for although we get all kinds of strange things in this department it's not organized like a zoo."

During thirty-three years in the Lost Property Office this official has seen a great change in London's crop of forgetfulness.

"Muffs have stopped coming in now," he said. "Once we were full of muffs; but women don't carry them nowadays. Everything else has increased, not because people are more absent-minded, but because the speed of traffic has increased. We take only objects found in omnibuses, tramcars, and taxicabs. In the old days you could run after a horse omnibus and find your umbrella, but to-day as soon as you remember you have left it the vehicle is out of sight. Just look here!"

We walked down a long avenue packed with umbrellas. There must have been over twenty thousand of them! The avenue ended in a room full of the more recently abandoned specimens. Here men and women were nosing round looking for their lost property. What a task! The room was stacked to the ceiling with umbrellas, all neatly docketed. They lay in racks, the handles only protruding.

When handles are round and shiny this room, which is always full, presents to the eye four walls of round and shiny knobs; when the fashion in umbrellas changes, this room changes too. At the moment it is full of originality and colour. Thousands of green jade and red coral handles jut from the walls; thousands of check handles vary the pattern. Here and there you see a dog-headed handle, a handle shaped like a bird, or a handle carved to the shape of a pierrot's head, a pathetic white face with drooping carmine lips, which seems crying to be claimed and taken home!

"Oh, I shall never find it in this forest of umbrellas!" cried a girl. "Never! I don't think I want to. I hate the look of umbrellas."

Another woman picked her umbrella out in the first five minutes. What an eye! And all the time girls came up to the counter, rather breathless, with:

"I've lost a lovely new umbrella on a number three omnibus; it had a dear little green handle carved like a fish, and I said to mother----"

"Come inside, miss," said a weary official. "I said to mother that I think I lost it when I got off at Westminster, or it may have been earlier in the morning, when----"

"Come inside, miss!"

More remarkable even than the jungle of lost umbrellas is the series of rooms packed with every conceivable thing a passenger can carry in a tramcar, an omnibus, or a taxicab. You gain the impression when you tour the Lost Property Office that some people would lose an elephant between Ludgate Circus and Charing Cross.

How do they lose full-size typewriters, gigantic suit-cases packed with clothes, gramophones, bulky parcels, crates, and small perambulators?

There are thousands of lost shoes, mostly new, some of them dance slippers bought by forgetful girls, or perhaps by husbands who were thinking of something else! There are ball dresses that have been left in omnibuses, silk nightdresses, hats, costumes, and, of course, jewellery.

The Lost Property Office looks like a gigantic pawnshop or a large secondhand store. The officials are surprised at nothing. Have they not taken care of skulls and the hands of mummies? In another room I saw October's crop of lost umbrellas being distributed to the tramcar conductors, the omnibus conductors, and the taxicab men who found them. This happens every three months. If it did not Scotland Yard would have to build an annexe somewhere. The finders made merry as they were given incongruous umbrellas. One large, red taxicab driver drew a neat little mincing silk umbrella with a kingfisher on the handle.

"Oh, how sweet, Bill!" said the tram conductors.

* * *

At the other end of the office other conductors were handing in dozens of umbrellas and sticks, the ceaseless daily harvest of London's wonderful absent-mindedness. Most of them had wrist straps, too!

The "Girls"

Even as I write Piccadilly is changing. Eros, attended by the ghosts of undergraduates, has stepped from the pinnacle, thus evacuating the post of honour from which he has gazed upon the follies of our fathers, those wicked men who used to wait outside stage doors with bouquets before sneaking off somewhere to dine with a real actress. Ah, those must have been good days....

So before the circle is squared, which seems quite unnatural, I wish to write about the flower "girls." Early in the morning, long before the first pair of silk stockings had been sold in Regent Street, the "girls" dipped their violets in the Fountain and camped out on the steps. What a perfect picture they made. It always seemed to me that some unknown admirer of Phil May was secretly subsidizing them, paying for them, working, maybe, to stamp on the national mind a sharp memory of plaid shawls tight over plump shoulders, apple-red faces beneath black straw hats. In the spring they brought the first real news to the West End with their laughing primroses, big tight gold bunches of them; and the Fountain was a joy to behold.

"Vi'lets pennigabunch."

That was, of course, long ago. I believe they are sixpence or more now; but the old cry from the Fountain has been remembered all over the earth wherever men have thought of Piccadilly.

The flower "girls" of Piccadilly presented to London the most marvellous study in polite indifference. Here they were in occupation of the very centre of the world with the feminine beauty and elegance of every country always before their eyes. They remained unaffected. They were the only women in London moving in fashionable London circles who did not care a hang for the changing mode. They had sold violets to women in bustles; they had seen skirts sweep the ground, they had seen the dawn of the leg, from the hobble skirt to the knee skirt. Never once in their history did they show the instinct of their sex to imitate.

These middle-aged women who are always "girls" have become international. American women said: "Why, they're just sweet," Frenchwomen thought they were almost chic, and sometimes a grey old man, sickened by the degeneracy of these times, would wander up from the direction of Pall Mall to buy a buttonhole just to hear himself called "dearie," and to know that there was still something in London that had not changed. They were Victorian London.

When I heard that Eros was to disappear and that the "girls" were to be moved away I had the same kind of shock that a Roman under the Empire might have suffered if a friend had moved his thumb in the direction of the Palatine Hill and had remarked: "Have you heard? The Old Man's sacked the Vestal Virgins!"

Preposterous! The "girls" were our vestal virgins--they kindled each day memory of a fast-vanishing London.

* * *

I found one in Piccadilly the other day. She had taken up a stand on a street refuge, from which she could command sight of her former pitch.

"No, dearie," she said. "Piccadilly's gorn to the dorgs, strite it 'as. Life ain't what it was, nor never will be agin with this squarin' of a plice what was meant to be a circus. It ain't right. Who'd 'ave thought we should leave the Fountain--ever. Some say we can go beck there when they've done messin' it about, but I don't believe it. I'm Mrs. Wise I'm am. There ain't no green in my eye....

"And this job ain't what it once was--not by half. No, dearie! In the old days every kebbie had his buttonhole, and no gent was dressed unless he had one too. And the drivers of the old horse omnibuses! They were rare customers--nice, pleasant men, too, who liked to pass the time of day with you and talk. Now there's no time for talk or flowers."

She nodded enigmatically.

"Young men don't like to be seen carrying flowers to-day, but I can tell you their fathers didn't mind--and better men they were, if I'm any judge of a man, and I ought to be, seeing I've been sat in Piccadilly Circus all me life...."

Then she said something that sent a chill to my heart:

"My gels ain't going to waste their lives sitting here, I can tell you. Emma going into pickles, and Maud, she's in millinery."

This, of course, is the end! A flower girl's calling is hereditary. It descends through the distaff side. The next generation of "girls" are, it appears, going into commerce, and there will be none to follow on.

It is sad. If I were a millionaire I would subsidize them and buy a hansom cab and an old pensioned cab-horse to stand there too.

* * *

For in the fret and change of these days the flower "girls" of Piccadilly looked so permanent with the surge of London round them, the crowds from the ends of the earth, so indifferent to change, so typical of an easier day, as they sold their flowers in that whirl of gladness and sadness, beauty and ugliness, which is the heart of London; ... the heart of the world.

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