Part 7

If the tamarisks should come back to town I desire to be reincarnated at that time in order that I may join in archæological speculation on the fragment of an extinct animal ("probably a lion") dug up on the site of Trafalgar square! It would also be jolly to reconstruct the plan of Bush House on the strength of three window-sills, a lift bell, and a typewriter key. There are great days in store for those who will shake up our dust and worry our ghosts, and even attempt to discover our gods. I can see Macaulay's New Zealander having the time of his life among the ruins of London; and surely one of his most splendid adventures will take place at the base of Cleopatra's Needle. Did you know that beneath this famous stone is buried a kind of Victorian Tutankhamen's treasure, placed there to give some man of the future an idea of us and our times? Did you realize that the London municipal authorities could do anything so touching?

Under the obelisk sealed jars were placed in 1878 containing a man's lounge suit, the complete dress and vanities of a woman of fashion, illustrated papers, Bibles in many languages, children's toys, a razor, cigars, photographs of the most beautiful women of Victorian England, and a complete set of coinage from a farthing to five pounds. So the most ancient monument in London stands guard over this modernity, rather like an experienced old hen, waiting for Time to hatch it.

Poor sad old stone....

* * *

I went down to look at it yesterday when the Thames, in full tide, dancing in the sunlight, was giving the Embankment great slapping kisses. Tugs were chugging upstream with their ugly duckling barges; and the jet-black finger of Ancient Egypt pointed to the sky, so slim and beautifully proportioned, so tall that when I looked up it seemed to be falling against the wheeling clouds.

Two little boys were riding a sphinx. Men and women stopped, looked up at the monument, saw the pale sunlight finding its way into those funny little carvings, a few moved round to the rear of the platform and gazed with open mouths, seeing an incomprehensible stone, wondering about it perhaps, maybe feeling that there was a story behind it somewhere, somehow.

A story? Heavens! What a story. Shall I tell you what I saw as I stood there with the tramcars speeding past and the criss-cross traffic busy on its way?

* * *

I saw a great tunnel of Time three thousand four hundred years long. Imagine the time that separates us to-day from the Spanish Armada and then _multiply it by ten_: that is almost three thousand and four hundred years. London was unknown. We were probably beating our wives in the Thames marshes and eating an occasional aunt. Greece was unborn, and there was no Rome on the Seven Hills. But Egypt had thrashed its way through the mumps and measles of civilization and was already ancient. In this distant blaze of light moved epicures and artists, soldiers and priests, and in the great palace of Thebes sat the most powerful man in that time of the world, the Pharaoh Thothmes III, Lord of the Two Lands, giver of life and death.

And Pharaoh decided to perpetuate his greatness in the eye of Time. In other words, he probably remarked after dinner one night: "I want obelisks for the temple at Heliopolis. That pylon looked rather bare, I thought, the last time I was there. You might see to it, will you?"

Whereupon chariots were harnessed and messengers sped south to the red-hot granite quarries of Assuan.

* * *

Now see the architect drawing the shape of Cleopatra's Needle in the virgin rock. See hundreds of naked backs bent over the stone, pounding, pounding, pounding month after month in the savage heat with no tools but hard balls of dolomite; and the whips crack over the sweating bodies and flicker in the heat and hiss like the tongues of serpents.

In a year the whim of Pharaoh is bashed from the quarry in blood and tears. His titles are set upon it, and it stands, painted and glorious, fronting the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis. On its tip is a cap of electrum that catches the sun, so that travellers in the desert looking towards the city of On see a pillar with a fire blazing upon it.... Look!

A cloud of dust; and in the heart of it gilded chariots. The white horses are pulled up on their haunches, the nodding ostrich plumes on their head collars rise and fall, the fan bearers come forward, the troops stand at ease, and above the kneeling priests is the Pharaoh, that ancient superman, inspecting his monument from a burnished car.

"Quite good. The god is pleased."

* * *

Time passes. Moses, who was a priest in Heliopolis, sees the obelisk every day. The frogs of the Plagues hop and chirrup on its plinth. Over a hundred years pass, and Rameses the Great, who loved himself dearly, carves his name on the column, usurping it. A thousand years pass, and it is moved to Cleopatra's capital at Alexandria! Here it survives four great empires. Thrones rock and fall, dynasties fade like mists. The world changes. Two thousand years pass by, and a new race of men come to power. They pick Cleopatra's Needle out of the sand, enclose it in a huge steel cylinder, give it a deck, a keel, a rudder, put a crew aboard and tug it across the sea towards England. Prosperous winds favour the voyage for the first few weeks; then, in the dreaded Bay of Biscay, Cleopatra's Needle pitches with such violence that the tug's captain cuts her adrift with her crew aboard her. How different from her last voyage three thousand years previously, when the Egyptian slaves floated her on the sunlit Nile for the delight of Pharaoh! As she rolls and tosses five sailors from the tug volunteer to go out to the abandoned obelisk ship. They are swept under and are drowned. Eventually the Cleopatra's crew are saved and the tug watches her drift away over the stormy seas. Sixty days pass and then news is received that Cleopatra's Needle was tugged into Vigo by a ship whose owners received two thousand pounds for their services. Eventually, tugged by an M.P.'s yacht the Egyptian stone arrives in England.

Here, forty-seven years ago, they placed it beside a cold, grey river, and some unknown hand penned the following epitaph to it in the morning:

This monument as some supposes Was looked on in old days by Moses; It passed in time to Greeks and Turks, And was stuck up here by the Board of Works.

* * *

Here it has remained beside the Thames, with the last great adventure still in store. One night the wrath of Ra, the fury of Set, the god of evil, descended like thunderbolts from a dark sky. Chips of the granite pediment flew away. The plinth was bruised as a city is bruised in war, and overhead in the shaft of a searchlight lay a silver fish in the sky--a fish that hummed like a hornet and laid most devilish eggs. What a strange night for ancient Egypt....

* * *

Sad, cold stone--the saddest monument in all London. We are killing it. It was once red granite. Now it is coal black and its glory is being eaten away year by year. Forty-seven years of London have done it greater hurt than the three thousand years that went before. It did not deserve this; for round it centres the splendour and glory of the past and under its feet is a message for the future.

And it seems to me that its experienced black finger is pointing to something which may make you laugh or cry.

Sun or Snow

Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance--the departure of the Continental boat expresses. When the fog comes and the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to the snow or the sun.

I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun. There is always a sting in the tail of it.

* * *

When you love travel, and have lost count of the number of times the chocolate-coloured Pullmans have whirled you through Kent to the edge of the sea and on to far places, this morning assembly of travellers shakes you to the heart. You know what is in store for them. You follow them down to Dover; you see them in the swift Channel boat; you hear the blue-bloused porters of Calais crying "Soixante-dix, m'sieu. I meet you at ze douane!" You visualize the idiotic fight in the French Customs; you see the long Paris Rapide waiting with steam up, the wrinkled old Frenchwomen in white caps and knitted black shawls who sell fruit, and you hear the funny little penny whistle like a child's trumpet that sends this great train racketing and thundering through France, or Basle and Switzerland, or Marseilles, and then--oh, marvellous far places in Africa!

Which is more wonderful? To awaken at the Swiss frontier with snow muffling a cotton-wool world of chasms and peaks, or to awaken in the sunlight of Southern France to a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean?

* * *

That wide, hedgeless plain with its silver-grey olive trees, its red-roofed houses, and its vignettes of rustic activity; little men in fields walking behind the plough, at stable doors bringing out a solemn, ragged mule, give me that. And give me, too, the ever-recurring joy of the uncomfortable swinging French _wagon restaurant_ full of various people: Englishmen who look so comically English as soon as they cross the Channel, Frenchmen whose black spade beards cascade over white table-napkins which they tuck into their collars before they devour their food with Gallic avidity, and the good-looking Parisienne with her carmine mouth and her finicky, much-manicured hands breaking bread and salting meat while her big, emotional eyes sweep over and beyond the bald heads of appraising British husbands.

"Liqueur, m'sieu?"

The man with the tray of little bright bottles staggers up and, notable sight, the elderly virgin of some distant vicarage sips an unusual brandy. Marvellous France!

So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with the keenest enjoyment the other morning. There were girls who would be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts. There went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey, and--lucky fellow--a man with a white pith helmet over his arm.

Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet. Even socks and shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it. When carried with an air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly even an explorer. In the Channel boat people will look at you as you bear this symbol of the sun on your arm. You will stand out above all others. Perhaps in the bar some one will say:

"Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly and say:

"No; only to Timbuctoo!"

A great thing is a sun helmet!

Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there are such husbands!

All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.

* * *

Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.

As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....

Romantic Mutton

Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop. Suppose...

This happens! Turn down Whitehorse Street, and in two seconds bald heads in club windows, pretty sandy-legged ladies, the flood stream of omnibuses, are forgotten. They have never existed. They are two hundred comfortable years off in the womb of Time. You stand in the eighteenth century, in a London of maypoles and gallantry and much sly sin, of coaches and cavalcades, inn parlours and buxom serving wenches. Even your spats feel elegant. You desire to snap an ivory snuffbox, to wave a fine cambric handkerchief, and to kiss a good-looking chambermaid. Odds truth, sir, you are under the influence of Shepherd Market! At any moment my Lord Maxbridge may turn the corner on the arm of Sir Timothy Strophe, poet and wit, and you will, of course, stand, leaning on your ebony cane, promising to look in at the Cocoa Tree to-night and to join my lord later (bow) at his box at Vauxhall. And did you hear what the Prince said last night of Lady T., and how young Charles H. took it? And did you know that Captain X. lost nine hundred guineas at cards on a single throw at White's, and that the Marquis de St. A. has sent his seconds to Lord M., and that Sir Richard T. has been black-balled at Brooks'? Gad, sir!

That, at least, is how it takes me!

Looked at with the eyes only, Shepherd Market reveals itself as a queer, haphazard warren of streets packed with little shops whose onions overflow on the pavement, whose cabbages sometimes collapse into the gutter, whose fish and meat are much in evidence. Here you have the atmosphere of the Pantiles and the formation of any square in any old county town you care to remember.

This is picturesque. Behind any grand modern street you seem to see a surveyor or an architect bending over a blue paper, drawing straight lines. These shops and squares have grown up naturally, as a clump of flowers grows--some here, some there; some big, some small. What splendid individuality.

Here, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, shopkeepers display big galvanized dust-bins on the pavement. You might be in Salisbury marketplace. A china shop sells pretty little teapots of the kind which spinster ladies drive into Ipswich to procure on market day. All manner of antique shops sleep in the shadows. In one window I saw really good china, in others Georgian silver and rushlight holders.

It is Georgian or Victorian, according to taste. You can people the uneven pavements with ghosts of your own choosing. No matter how many gallants and dames you discover, there are a few later characters whom you expect to meet at every turn. The colonel's wife! Where is she? You look round anxiously. She should be walking stiffly round with her cane, a couple of Sealyhams rolling affectionately at the hem of her tailor-made skirt. The bishop's lady, too, a tall, lined woman in a religious black hat; the dean's daughter, romantic and anæmic and addicted to green velvet; Lady Potts, from "The Hall," in a dog-cart, large, florid, and suspiciously golden; the three hefty unmarriageable daughters of the major-general (retired), with their bicycles; the pretty wife of a junior subaltern--all the stock characters of an English cathedral city or garrison town.

Instead, so strange is this rural atmosphere, go London folk, smart women from flats in Curzon Street, and men passing through on their way to their clubs.

* * *

How did this patch become insulated from the fierce current of London life? I will tell you. They used to hold a fair here every May as far back as Edward I. Then, in 1738, a Mr. Shepherd built a cattle market on the spot. The butchers' shops had theatres on the second storeys, so that the dwarfs and drolls and vagabonds might in fair-time amuse the crowds. In 1750 so many regrettable things happened here that the fair was suppressed as a public scandal. (It must have been very wicked!)

So this is the heritage of our Shepherd Market, this concentrated essence of old England set down within sound of the wheels of Mayfair. If you visit it, notice how the old butchers' shops linger on, relics of the Shepherd Market of 1738. I imagine that there is here more prime Welsh mutton to the square yard than in any other street in London.

Romantic mutton!

London Lovers

When I was walking along the Embankment on a path of pale sun, I saw a young man and a young woman leaning over the grey stone watching the river. There were white gulls wheeling, and the river was high; and this man and this woman were very still and intent. When I stood beside them I found they were not looking at the river, they were looking at the Future!

Under cover of their leaning arms they were holding hands. They were in the last stage of love, their eyes like fields full of moon-calves. His clothes were Sundayfied and his boots were new and brown--the colour of a retired Indian general.

Her hat had been made at home in a hurry. And they were standing there lost in the illimitable wonder of each other. They were not in London. They were in that aerial country on the boundaries of paradise, from which such men and women descend to a small red box in the suburbs and the current price of eggs.

I could compose their imaginary dialogue easily. I could tell you that he whispered about the fifteen pounds in the bank, that they murmured daringly of banns, and an oak suite on the instalment system. But, no! They said nothing, because they had reached that condition when words cease to capture meaning.

And I thought how well worth writing of are the lovers of London, the ordinary little lovers, whose sitting-out places are the parks, whose adventures are omnibus rides to Kew, whose extravagances are tea and buns.

Every Sunday they walk London. Every week-day you can see them in the solemn City snatching a half-hour at luncheon, she with an index finger purpled by a new ribbon, he very clerkly and correct. And you must never think them mean when, having watched each other eat steak and kidney pie as if they were sitting at a mystery play, they call for separate bills.

He pays his one and threepence and she pays hers. How significant that is. Had he been philandering with her they would have had a far nicer luncheon in a very much nicer restaurant, and he would have carelessly ordered an ice and ended up recklessly with coffee and perhaps even a sinister _crème de menthe_. And he would have paid the bill, giving her the impression it was a mere nothing. She would not be allowed to know that his hand, groping mysteriously in his pocket, was trying desperately to discover whether there was enough left for seats in a cinema, whether--dash it all!--that little coin in the dark of his slender pocket was a penny or a much-hoped-for half-crown.

Ah, a bad sign. The road to bankruptcy is paved with boasting and insincerity and such little showings off! Let him once discover the Girl, and then with life imminent they get down to truth, and she discovers that he is not the lordly thing he pretended to be, that he is not earning a splendid fiver a week but a solemn two pounds ten. Crisis? Oh, dear, no!

There then begins a wrestle with a skeleton disguised as a bank account. They both stand guard over it. An extra packet of cigarettes is a betrayal, a reckless splash at a movie is a crime against a new little home that exists nowhere but in two hearts. So he pays his bill and she pays hers, and all the time the modest little pile grows, leading them to those helpful organizations which give two hundred pounds worth of property for ten per cent down and the rest over eternity.

* * *

They are happy, are these little lovers of London; as all honest, simple things are happy. No great winds of passion or ambition blow like storms in their hearts. They wish to escape from their surroundings into something which is their very own. They dream of the little house, just like every other little house in the row, and they dream of locking the front door on life and opening their arms to each other.

In the great hive of London you can see them meeting, hungrily snatching a moment from their separate labours which are just a means to an end. In the City she comes, lighting his heart with her beauty, and she goes, leaving him feeling that the light has been turned off inside him. At Kew in lilac time you will find them in sweet green avenues; the red buses bear them and their Dream to country places; and one day you will meet them in a tube train bending self-consciously over a furniture catalogue....

* * *

Dante and Beatrice came out of their dream beside the Thames and walked away. Dante's new boots squeaked. Arm-in-arm they went along the sun path, two ordinary little actors in the great play, with that stillness about them that suggests how full two hearts can be.

If one could only peep into their lives again in ten years' time. That, however, is tempting Fate.

In Uncle's Shop

Outside on its rusty supports hung the sign of the proud Medici--three gold balls.