Part 6

Two beggars in a London crowd, but at the breast of one--the Future. Poor, beautiful Madonna of the Pavement....

Sword and Cross

Girls were running after omnibuses, lawyers were running after briefs, and reporters were running after things called "stories" as I turned from Fleet Street to enter that little Round Church in the Temple which is one of the most splendid things in London.

Utter peace. A dim, tinted light filtered through the east windows, and at my feet lay the stone figure of Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, bandit and excommunicate. He lies in full chain armour, his shield across his body, his spurs at his heels, and his long sword beside him, just as he might have lain eight hundred and eighty-four years ago, when they found him in the fen country and sent an arrow through his head. What trouble his death must have caused the Templars! They could not bury him in holy ground till the Pope granted him absolution, so they sealed him up in a lead coffin and hung him on a tree near Holborn. When Rome wiped out his sins they plucked him from the tree and brought him to this little Round Church that was born of the first Crusade.

As I stood over Geoffrey de Mandeville my thoughts raced across Europe, across the Mediterranean, over that sandy yellow waste known as the Desert of Sinai, and on to that city standing high on terraced rock--Jerusalem. Of what else can one think here in the Round Church? Its roots go back to Robert, Duke of Normandy, Tancred and Bohemund, Godfrey de Bouillon, and that fiery triumvirate, Frederick, Emperor of Germany, Richard Cœur de Lion of England, and Philip Augustus of France.

This quiet little church remembers Saladin; its stones have rung to the chain mail of men who saw the lances of the infidel like a forest against the sky, of men who knew how Frederick Barbarossa came like a storm out of the west to hurl his hosts on the gates of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem.... Standing there so near to the roar of London, yet centuries away from it, I recalled white nights on the Mount of Olives, the Holy City spread below over its hills, a dome rising up from violet shadow into the moonlight, a group of cypress trees pointing dark fingers to the stars, and from the faint ribbon of road the trit-trot of a donkey's hoofs going on to Bethany.

The link with Jerusalem is true and straight. It was after they returned from the First Crusade that the Templars built this church to remind them of the round church that guarded the grave of Christ. There are only three others like it in the country, at Cambridge, Northampton, and Little Maplestead, Essex. This church was conceived in Palestine. As I looked at it I recalled the waxen face of a monk whose thin beard was like black silk. I met him in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I had been torn here and there by the confused crowds of pilgrims. I had been mixed up in various sacred processions, I had seen the hungry fervour in which those anxious for salvation had kissed the end of a stick after it had been poked through a hole in an arch so that it might touch a fragment of the Column of the Scourging. And I went on towards the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, six foot by six foot, in whose tiny space hang forty-three lamps. Here I saw a poor Greek woman creep in and fall into a torrent of tears on that marble slab which hides the tombstone of Christ. The monk met me outside, such a smooth wax fellow, and led me to a little chapel in which he produced a pair of old spurs and a sword with a hilt shaped like a cross. Godfrey de Bouillon's! So he said.

I whispered the name in the Round Church. It all links up.

* * *

So quiet it is to-day in the safe keeping of the law. You would never dream that these lawns sloping to the Thames were eight hundred years ago the beginning of that long, hard road to Palestine, the nest of the Templars, those priest warriors who began their history so splendidly poor that two men rode one horse, and ended so richly and dangerously that two kings and the Pope of Rome broke them as three millionaires might smash a trust.

Nothing now remains of all this ancient fire but the Round Church and a few stone crusaders lying with their feet towards the east. A few names linger on, their meaning quite changed. The serjeant-at-law owes his title to the "Fratres Servientes," the serving brothers of the Templars; and the judges' title of "Knight" of the Common Pleas takes us back eight hundred years.

Between the crusaders lying cap-à-pie with Paynim knights beneath their spurred heels, are two brass tablets let into the floor. One is in memory of the members of the Inner Temple, and the other of members of the Middle Temple who laid down their lives in the war.

* * *

So these crusaders, with eight hundred years dividing them, are rightly commemorated together in this quiet, lovely place, whose atmosphere, once so charged with stress and strife, is now purged by time of all passion, either good or evil. But the ghosts live on, and it would not astonish me to hear that some quiet, harmless lawyer going to his chambers at night down that sloping path past the church met an armed host ready for the march, from whose throats burst like an organ note: "Deus vult!"

This was the cry that built the Temple, and, spreading out over the land like a flame, fired men's hearts, leading them into the desert in defence of the holy places of Christendom.

Knockout Land

Down Whitechapel way is a place famous for dealing out sleep by the fistful twice a week.

None of your six thousand pounds Albert Hall fox-trots here. This is Knockout Land. It is, I imagine, the nearest thing to a bull-fight you will see in this country. Good, hard, slamming fifteen-round contests follow each other, with the ropes trembling and the fight fans howling like a pack of hungry wolves, and two half naked men with strawberry-coloured noses, hitting, gasping, reeling....

A great high hall blue with smoke, steel-girdered at the roof like a railway station. It is packed by a cloth-capped crowd, predominantly Oriental--a crowd of swift murmurs and sudden silences and sharp, instantaneous uproars. Good tempered now, but--O my!--suppose somebody started a row! There is not one woman present. The elegant girls in evening gowns who sit out Albert Hall prize fights have no place here. It is a gathering of fight fans. In the centre under bright, white lights rises the ring. The men in it are like men on a raft floating on a sea of restless, white faces.

Suddenly five or six men near the ring leap to their feet and shout "Five to one on Cohen!"

The hall becomes thick with wagers. Arms shoot out, men shout, no record is made (except that in a keen Hebrew mind), and every one is quite happy about it. Even if the Jew were not so commercially reliable, who would dare to be crooked here!

Look! The seconds in their white sweaters are busy. Two fighters enter the ring. Their bodies glisten in the light. One is white, the other olive-coloured, Eastern. They square up, crouch, dance round each other, then pat, pat-pat, pat-pat-pat--crack! A howl goes up from the crowd! That was a hit! Smash! Another one! Right! to the ropes! Back he comes, a little wild, and his opponent is driven away under the speed of his assault. Blows rain on each body, pink patches appear on chests and chins, both men dodge this way and that, a bell rings. Time!

"Chocolates!" cries a man with a tray.

I want to laugh. A less chocolate-like crowd I have never seen. Jellied eels, perhaps, beer undoubtedly, beefsteaks certainly; but milk chocolate--how astonishing!

Round fifteen! Both men are all in. They have pounded each other to pulp. I wonder if they can hear the yells and roars of the audience. Their legs drag. They are weak with hitting. You can see what they meant to do as a blow falls short, you can reach out and enter their exhausted minds, sympathize with them in their hazy world as they dog each other to plant the knock-out for which every one is waiting.

Smash! Right on the chin! The smashed one reels to the ropes, but comes back for more trouble, with his mouth sagging and something in his expression which suggests to me that he is not really here at all, but possibly wandering through some field rich with buttercups, with a little old public-house round the bend in the road.... Smash! He's taken another one! The scene in his dazed mind changes! He awakens from some stellar night, and comes alive again out of careering constellations to rush with the desperation of last strength on his opponent. Crack-crack--bang! Surely the knockout; surely he cannot stand any more? His head must be like iron, his jaws like steel.

He reels, his arms drop, his nightmare mind tries to grapple with the padded realities waiting for him, he makes an effort to hit. The other man is now ready to land him one that will lift him off his feet. He is the gladiator standing over him with lifted sword and--no appeal to the amphitheatre. It is only a question of a second now. Something brutal and masculine inside me desires to see him knocked out; something weak and feminine inside me wishes it was not necessary.

The victor draws back his head, the muscles ripple along his wet back, he shoots out an arm, and the other man crumples like a marionette at the end of a cut string. He lies in a corner of the ring, moves a leg once, and is still. I feel sure he is dead. In two minutes, with water trickling over his reddened face, he staggers to his feet, smiles a painful, swollen smile, shakes hands with the man who put him to sleep, and gropes out into the obscurity of the yelling crowd.

* * *

"And how much do they get for fighting here?"

"Oh, thirty-five bob," replies an official. "Sometimes as much as fifty."

I wonder what our elegant bruisers would think about it as I make my way out into the darkness of the wet streets.

Ghosts

I often wonder how many Londoners have been inside No. 13, Lincoln's Inn Fields!

Here we have the most remarkable museum in this and probably any other country. Sir John Soane, the architect who designed the Bank of England, died eighty-eight years ago, and left an instruction in his will that his house, packed with treasures, should be thrown open to the public in the condition in which he left it. The furniture has hardly been moved, the pictures hang in the same positions, and if old Sir John could come back he would enter his library and go over to his desk, hardly knowing that over three-quarters of a century have intervened since he said good-bye to the things he loved with all his heart and soul.

If ever the presence of a dead man printed itself on a house, this is the house. I went there the other day and found the shutters drawn. It was after closing time, but the caretaker asked me inside and courteously took me round.

It was like entering a house when a family is away. I had to pull myself together and realize that this family was eighty-eight years away. There is a certain air about a house whose contents have been arranged by someone who loves it. No museum curator could imitate it. I could, in imagination, see Sir John pottering round with one of his latest treasures, wondering where to put it. He looks in bewilderment. The rooms are so crowded! He finds a place, not the best place, but his place; and there it has remained and will remain down the ages.

Another ghost. Lady Soane. Dear woman, she loved these things too, so the biographers say, but it must have given her feminine heart many a twinge to see Roman pillars, gigantic stone fragments from Greek temples, life-size statues, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere, and, at last, the biggest and finest stone coffin ever taken from an Egyptian tomb, enter her home one by one.

"Oh, John," her ghost said, "how full the house is. Where are we going to live?"

And John, beaming and running his hand over a smooth green bronze, replied, pointing to something new:

"Isn't that perfectly lovely. I think I'll have to knock down the dining-room wall!"

No woman in the history of housekeeping has ever endured such an overwhelming artistic invasion.

* * *

Sir John began life as the son of a bricklayer. What an encouragement to all collectors of the antique! As he got on in life he collected more precious things, spent two thousand pounds on an object the British Museum could not afford, and gradually surrounded himself with one of the choicest collections any private individual has possessed.

How many things enthusiasm can accomplish in one lifetime! It is inspiring to walk through this old house and realize that everything was collected by one man while he built up his career.

Pictures--notably Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"--antique gems, bronzes, manuscripts, books, ancient glass, bas-reliefs, the first three folio editions of Shakespeare, and thousands of other things came to him as steel to a magnet. It is not a house: it is a curio shop.

He must have puzzled over space. You would never guess unless you were shown how he made one wall do the work of two or three. He devised walls in many a room which opened like the leaves of a book, each leaf, or side, being hung with pictures. Clever Sir John; and how Lady Soane must have praised him as the tide of treasure rose higher and higher round her tea-table.

* * *

Down in the basement he kept the splendid alabaster coffin of the Pharaoh Seti I, a marvellous thing cut from one solid lump of alabaster. This was the object that Belzoni saw gleaming in the dark tomb in those days when no man could read the weird hieroglyphs with which it is entirely covered.

What a beautiful thing it is. As I looked at it I remembered Belzoni's account of its discovery in that vain, amusing, yet always interesting, "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, and Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia," published in 1820. This man's adventures among the tombs of Egypt at a time before Egyptology was a science are sufficient to make any modern archæologist lie down and howl with envy at his opportunities and burn with rage at the opportunities he missed.

After describing the location of the tomb, and how the debris of three thousand years was cleared, Belzoni pictures his entry, his progress through columned halls, his discovery of a rope that fell to dust when touched. He wandered for days like a boy in a fairy tale through this tomb, the most splendid in the Theban Necropolis.

"But the description of what we found in the centre of the saloon and which I have reserved till this place," wrote Belzoni, "merits the most particular attention, not having its equal in the world, and being such as we had no idea could exist. It is a sarcophagus of the finest Oriental alabaster, nine feet five inches long, and three feet seven inches wide. Its thickness is only two inches; and it is transparent when a light is placed inside of it. It is minutely sculptured within and without with several hundred figures which do not exceed two inches in height, and represent, as I suppose, the whole of the funeral procession and funeral ceremonies relating to the deceased.... I cannot give an adequate idea of this beautiful and invaluable piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has been brought into Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it."

Just as the reports of the late Lord Carnarvon's discovery sped through Thebes like wildfire, so did Belzoni's luck circulate, with the result that one day the Turkish authorities rode up, headed by Hamed Aga of Keneh. Then, as now, antiquities to the native meant simply gold. The Aga, after glancing vaguely round the tomb, ordered his soldiers to retire, then, turning to Belzoni he said:

"Pray where have you put the treasure?"

"What treasure?" asked poor Belzoni.

The Aga then told him a story--so like those in circulation at Luxor in 1923, when it was rumoured by natives that every woman visitor to the tomb of Tutankhamen came away with gold jewellery concealed in her skirts! Belzoni denied the rumours of fabulous wealth and of a reported large golden cock crammed with diamonds and pearls! The Aga was crestfallen.

"He seated himself before the sarcophagus," wrote Belzoni, "and I was afraid he would take it into his head that this was the treasure and break it to pieces to see whether it contained any gold."

Fortunately he did not. He merely delivered himself of the remarkable observation that the tomb of Seti I "would be a good place for a harem, as the women would have something to look at," and then, happily for Egyptology and the Soane Museum, departed.

* * *

"Is this place haunted?" I asked the caretaker, just to see what he would say.

"No, sir!" he replied scornfully. "I've heard noises, but it's mice. There isn't such a thing as ghosts, believe me."

But he's wrong; for I saw old Sir John as plainly as anything in those high, leisurely rooms, arranging things, prying into them with a cut crystal, and touching them with fingers that caressed.

Aladdin's Cave

As I passed through a steel door set in spiked steel railings a hefty commissionaire secretly pressed a bell that gave the alarm downstairs, so that when I appeared two equally hefty commissionaires sprang out and asked me for my password.

No; it was not the Bank of England, or the Tower of London, or Buckingham Palace: it was one of the largest safe deposit vaults in London. Each person who rents a safe there chooses a password--any word he likes; "Annie Laurie," or "Mrs. Jones's Baby," or "Good Queen Anne." Till the commissionaires know him by sight the depositor is held up every time he goes to his safe and is asked to stand and deliver. If he forgets the password he is turned away unless he can prove his identity and his right to unlock his treasures.

Fabulous millions are locked away underground in the safe deposits of London. The companies themselves do not know how much treasure they guard day and night. Now and then the inquiry of an insurance company reveals the fact that a fourteen-inch safe holds a cool million pounds' worth of treasure.

When the commissionaires had looked me over with an expression which inferred that I probably carried on me acetylene blowpipes, a few six-shooters, and a dozen Mills bombs, they called the secretary, who had promised to take me through Aladdin's Cave. The vaults resembled the interior of a great Atlantic liner. In every direction stretched long lit corridors with doors every few feet along them. What doors! Some of them had handles like a giant's dumb-bells and locks like young cartwheels. I imagine that the door of Lord Astor's safe would laugh cheerfully at a howitzer.

The door of one vault was half open. Inside a man was sitting at a table counting diamonds. A pile of white diamonds on a piece of brown paper! Stuck on the wall with the splash of a gum brush was--surprising sight--a coy Kirchner girl adjusting the suspender at the extremity of a long, shining, slim silk leg.

On we went down the corridor, the secretary pointing out the vault of the Duke of This and Lord That, making my head reel with a story of title deeds and heirlooms and treasures beyond price. Another door opened and the owner came out. At first I thought he was about to give us some of the gold plate with which the room was vulgarly full.

"Could you," he said, "lend me a pencil?"

We gave him one.

On another floor I found the ordinary safes, much less spectacular than the vaults, but, I think, more interesting. Here it is that men and women hide their smaller treasures. You can have quite a nice little safe big enough to take a pair of shoes for twenty-five shillings a year.

I entered an avenue of them, looked at their clumsy hinges and their astonishing locks, wondering what mysteries they contain. In how many of them lie letters that would break up homes? In how many are documents that would explain why So-and-So never married? In how many of them are the riches of people whose friends think them penniless? In how many are merely silly things?

"I think the strangest thing we guarded," said the secretary, "was a penny. For thirty years a man paid three pounds a year to guard that penny. No; he was not mad--only superstitious. He believed that if he lost that penny he would have terrible ill-luck. When he first deposited it he was poor, but he died worth a hundred thousand pounds, and his executors then came and took away his mascot."

Another strange treasure was the hoof of a Derby winner. The owner made a fortune from his victory, and when the horse died his wife had the hoof mounted, and they kept it for years in a special safe.

Hundreds of safes in every deposit vault are filled with the jewels of wealthy women. Now and then the owners come and look at them, and sometimes before a ball or a reception they take them away for a night or two. Hundreds also contain the treasures of women who do not seem wealthy. What they contain no one knows. Once when a safe that had not been claimed for twenty years was broken open--it belonged to an elderly spinster--inside were found bundles of faded letters tied up with faded ribbon, all that was left of an old romance.

What other secrets lie hidden underground in such cold, tiled avenues--what strange human stories that will never be known?

In one of the waiting-rooms I saw an ancient man with a white beard. He was sitting over the contents of his safe, feebly fingering documents and poring over them, his nose almost touching the papers. The sight of him roused questions. How easy to write a dozen speculations about him, his life, and his little tray full of musty deeds and letters...

* * *

Outside over the wet pavements hurried the men and women of London, unconscious that beneath their feet lay millions and--mystery.

That Sad Stone

In two thousand years' time will there be brambles growing on Ludgate Hill, I wonder, and will a shepherd graze his sheep in Piccadilly Circus? It happened to Thebes and Carthage....