Part 2

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!