Part 3

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.

Then, of course, there is the cosy type of tea-shop run on amateur lines where genteel young women who do not seem to have forgotten William Morris bend wistfully over the meringues in brown or sage green _crêpe de Chine_ gowns and an air of shattered romance. Such places have fanciful names designed to attract those with a passion for peace. They are always opening or going smash, and there is a widespread belief in the suburbs among enterprising young women that this is the way to an enormous bank account.

"Thanks awfully!"

That's what they say when you pay the bill, and such a sad, sweet smile goes with it. Andromeda chained to a cheese cake.

* * *

I entered a large musical tea-shop in the heart of Shopland yesterday. The atmosphere was as feminine as that of a perfume store. It was No Man's Land. I steered my conspicuous way to a table through a jungle of musquash, moleskin, and beaver. The only other men there were in the toils of women, politely tapping their _éclairs_, and wearing photographic faces, behaving as men never behave away from this uplifting and ennobling atmosphere.

I heard a girl describe a bridesmaid's dress; another girl was talking about a baby; a third had discovered John Galsworthy. Two young married women were discussing their husbands, how really sweet they were, how they hated cold mutton, how amusingly irritable they were, and how upset they were when their wives shingled their hair....

A slight stir was caused by the entrance of husbands to claim their wives. One, a handsome young man, was charmingly introduced with shy pride; another, an elderly, bluff, old-established husband, was received quite calmly like an over-due muffin. Then the human event that electrified the entire tea-shop happened, that marvellous touch of nature that unites Kennington with even the best parts of Kensington.

A small, smug child, distinguished only by a red balloon on the end of a string, set up a wild and awful howl. It was dramatic in its suddenness. Everybody looked round in the belief that the infant had sat on a pin. Instead they saw the red balloon drifting with a gay and careless determination towards the roof. Reaching its destination, it bumped gracefully twice and remained there, coyly nestling against a frescoed cupid.

Immediately the entire tea-shop, hitherto split into self-centred groups, became one in a solid endeavour to rescue the red balloon. Young men anxious to distinguish themselves stood on chairs and made wild grabs for the string with their umbrellas; dogs which till then had been asleep and unsuspected, awakened and barked.

In the centre of the stage stood the smug, small child, breathless with anxiety, pointing to the roof, grief-stricken that his balloon had played him false, yet encouraged by the stir the event was causing in so many grown-up lives.

A grim old man melted by the tragedy obtained a long pole employed in pulling down shop blinds. He succeeded in driving the balloon from its fastness and sending it fatuously bumping into another. Meanwhile the entire shop held its breath, expecting these good intentions to end in a loud plop and a worse tragedy. There was a gasp of relief as this ancient hero gave way to a man in an apron with a step-ladder.

He did the deed.

The tea-shop settled down. The smug child that had united an afternoon's assembly left unnoticed. Over the tea-tables rose again the talk of bridesmaids and husbands and shingles and Maud's hennaed hair. The orchestra played some more Puccini, and a small boy who had profited by the commotion to seize his fourth _éclair_ gave an enormous sigh of joy.

An Open Door

Shortly after midnight a decently dressed young man glanced furtively round Trafalgar Square, hesitated a moment, and then ran swiftly up the broad, black steps of St. Martin's Church. I came up behind him as he tapped the door.

There was the sound of a drawn bolt, and the door swung back. The young man stammered. He was blue with cold, and--there was something else:

"I'm--I'm broke," he said. "I've never done this before. I've always had a bit of money; but--well, I've nowhere to sleep to-night, and--please can I come in?"

The door opened wider, and a pleasant, middle-aged policewoman said:

"Come along!" I followed.

* * *