Part 8

Inside the pawnbroker's shop nothing was proud, except perhaps a grandfather clock that stood in a corner like an old aristocrat who has buttoned his coat, cocked his hat, and decided to go down hill with an air. For the rest--just junk lingering in this sordid, waiting-room atmosphere to be reclaimed and taken home. I looked at it and saw it as junk; then I looked again, knew that some of it had been hard to part with, was, in fact, transmuted by affection so that its very frayed unloveliness brought tears to their eyes. Those cheap, badly-made china shepherdesses designed to simper across a mantelpiece at the girlish gallant whose flirtatious salute was ruined because the hand that once held his hat had vanished--how remarkable that anyone had made them, how remarkable that anyone had cared sufficiently to buy them! There they were in the pawnshop, and perhaps some poor woman scraping up four-pence interest to keep them hers, gazing at her bare mantelpiece, longing for their sugary smiles, the cheap, conventional romance of them....

* * *

"Something'll happen soon," said the pawnbroker to me. "You just have to wait."

So I waited for comedy or pathos in the dim crowded shop that smelt of undusted china and old boots. Beyond the stacked window--so full of clocks and fractious bronze horses, of watches and silly shaped silver vases--I saw a busy London district; people passing and repassing, tramcars at congested cross-roads, omnibuses, women shopping and stopping to talk, their baskets over their arms. I became aware of a man in a blue overcoat examining the window.

"He's an old hand at 'popping' things," said the pawnbroker.

"You know him then?"

"Never seen him before; but I can tell."

"How?"

"Well, just watch the way he's going over my stock. I bet he's sized up every blessed thing in the window. It's the jewellery he's interested in. He's wondering if I'm overstocked with gold bracelets. See, he's counting them. He's not sure. He's coming in. You listen!"

The man in the blue overcoat entered, and spoke in a firm, rather condescending manner.

"Look here," he said, "would you care to give me anything on this? I shall be getting it out some day."

He threw on the counter a gold bangle.

"Ten shillings," said the pawnbroker.

"Dirty dog!" said the man, and walked out.

"Old X. round the corner'll give him a pound for it," said the pawnbroker calmly. "He's rather low in bangles."

A well-dressed young man in a great hurry rushed in and detached a watch from his chain:

"I've never done this before!" he said. "But I want some money quickly."

It was a good watch, thin as a wafer. Gold.

"Two pounds?"

"Right!" Off he rushed.

All sorts came in, reflected the pawnbroker, you could never tell. Some needed money desperately and some just wanted it at the moment. Young men pawn watches to pay the landlady, to back a horse, to take a girl out to dinner, to stave off a creditor, to buy food. A decent coat disguises motives. Sometimes a "real lady," who had been playing too much bridge, "popped" something really worth while, and always in a quiet shop like this; sometimes "flashy" people came with diamonds, and then you had to keep your eyes open.

In came a little wisp of a woman. She put sixpence on the counter. I noticed her thin wrists and the criss-cross grimed lines on her fingers. She called the pawnbroker "sir." When she had gone he showed me the article on which she was paying interest. It was a small box with mother-of-pearl diamonds set in the lid, many of them missing. She had been paying interest for two years.

In every pawnshop there are thousands of things like this box: links with happier days perhaps, things which sentiment enthrones in the heart. I could build up a dozen stories round this box: the gift of a mother, a dead husband, a son? A Pandora's box full of the winds of old happiness? I leave it to your imagination.

* * *

Then, at the tail of a number of people, some of whom were obviously pledging their overcoats for a long drink of beer, came a woman with dark rings round her eyes, and she said:

"My husband's ill ... very ill ... and I must, I simply must...."

She wrestled unhappily with her left hand and placed on the counter a plain gold ring....

"That was horrible," I said.

"Look here," replied the pawnbroker. He opened a drawer and ran his fingers through a pile of wedding rings. "They keep them to the end," he explained, "but----"

"I understand. I've seen quite enough. I think I'll be moving on."

Horsey Men

Have you ever calculated how much respect you can buy with a sudden half-crown?

A railway porter will give you quite a lot, an hotel porter will unbend slightly, and under its influence even a taxi-cab driver, if the fare is about seven and sixpence, will appear fairly human. But if you want your money's worth, go briskly into Aldridge's or Tattersall's on the day of a horse sale, walk up to a man who wears a white jacket and holds a whip, give him half a crown and say at the same time: "Selling any hunters to-day?" You know at once that you have made a hit. As an American would say, he reacts immediately. In one swift eye-sweep he has made a mental note of you; he knows the kind of horse he thinks you ride, the way you will ride it, and so on. He looks knowing, a quality shared by all men even remotely connected with the sale of horseflesh, and, slightly closing one eye, he whispers:

"Come with me, sir!"

* * *

You are in a stable facing the posteriors of many horses. The hunters, the aristocrats of the sale, are boxed together in a corner, but there are big hefty carthorses and sturdy hacks of every kind. You look down the catalogue: "Bay mare, has been ridden side-saddle and astride." What lovely girl rode her side-saddle and astride, you wonder, called her "Nelly," and came to the stable every morning with a lump of sugar?

"Look out, sir!" says your admirer, as he taps Nelly's hocks lightly with his whip, causing her to swerve round and show you a dilated pupil and a suspiciously poised near-side hoof. "Now, sir, that's your 'oss, that is!"

You don't deceive him. You don't explain that you are only doing this for fun, to while away a weary hour, to banish ennui. On he goes, a natural-born auctioneer. She's your weight, she is, and she has a lovely mouth, she has, and he wouldn't be surprised if she was a marvellous jumper, he wouldn't....

For one half-crown and a minimum amount of attention you can spend hours with this man prodding flanks, feeling hocks, and running your hand over withers, but the best thing to do is to run down the horses, call them "rough stuff," and go off into the yard where they are having a sale.

Now horse fancying has created a unique type of man familiar to you in the country, but never seen in London except at these sales. When you regard them _en masse_ the effect is remarkable. You feel that if a coach-and-four suddenly drove in they could all take seats and drive out looking like one of Cruikshank's illustrations in Dickens. People would say: "What are they advertising?"

They are horse-faced, thin, bow-legged, and some of them actually suck straws--most difficult things to find in London these days if you contract the habit. They wear little fawn coats with pearl buttons and tight little gaiters well up on the tops of their boots; and they walk with a roll. You have seen a wicked man in a night club on the movies look at the heroine. He screws up his eyes and looks straight at her ankles, and then slowly insults her with his eyes as his gaze ascends. These horsey men look at horses just like that: their eyes glance contemptuously at hoofs, linger sneeringly on fetlocks, wander disparagingly over other parts of the anatomy, then they say: "Wind sucker," or "Roarer," or "Eats her bedding," and light a cigar.

* * *

Into the ring is led a chestnut mare.

She is a lovely thing, and you can tell by the way she trembles and tosses her head that she is not having a good time. She does not understand. There are many things she does understand. She understands the man into whose waistcoat it is so good to place her moist muzzle, she understands the slightest move of him in the saddle, and she loves to obey when, feeling the faintest pressure of his knees, she breaks into a canter over soft grass, and falls again into a trot, to find his hand patting her sleek neck.

Why isn't he here? He has never let others take control of her before! In a moment, no doubt, he will come and drive all these men off; and then they will go out together to their own place as they have always done. She looks round. Whinnies. But her man is not there.

Then the auctioneer, a little fellow in a silk hat, explains that this splendid chestnut mare, sound in wind and limb and eye, is being sold to save her summer keep. The horse fanciers come a step nearer, they whisper, they begin to bid....

Bang! The hammer descends. The little chestnut mare starts suddenly as if she knew that she had got a new master.

* * *

They lead her out under the wide arch of the livery stable, and in the proud tossing of her head and her backward looks you seem to read: "Where is that man of mine, and why--why doesn't he come?"

From Bow to Ealing

I have realized one of my first ambitions. In the dark engine cab of an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.

A bell rang. The driver looked out over the track where three gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel. He pulled over a lever and the train started. It was the strangest sensation. I forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us. I forgot the cargo of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were carrying across London. In the semi-darkness of the driver's cab an ordinary Underground journey had become strangely adventurous and exciting.

The driver accelerated. His pointer moved round a dial, and the train answered his small movements, gathering speed and noise. I was conscious only of being in the grip of a tremendous force that was hurling us over those three gleaming rails. We took the tunnel at a good thirty-five miles an hour, and the noise we made changed to a hollow roar! I could feel the train swerve and rock slightly as we rounded a curve; but I could see nothing save here and there a green light close to the ground. If you can imagine that you are tied to a projectile shot from a gun in the night, you have an idea of driving an electric train through a tunnel.

In the underground blackness stations show first as a faint yellow glow cut across by the jet-black semicircle of the tunnel. The next second you can see their curving rows of lights; they straighten out, and then the platform at which you will pull up lies level as a knife edge before you. Mark Lane ... Mansion House ... Blackfriars ... Temple ... Charing Cross.

Charing Cross is big. As you sweep in the driver has time to collect a lightning series of snapshots! A bookstall, a cigarette booth, lit and yellow, a pretty girl coming down the steps carrying a bag, a fussy old lady asking a ticket inspector how to get to Baron's Court, and a sudden stir and interest of Ealing-bound people who detach themselves from the crowd of waiting passengers. Just a flash! All seen in the fraction of a second! Bells ring down the train. A loud one clangs in the engine cab. And off you go again through the blackness towards Victoria.

Few things are more uncanny in mechanical London than the system of automatic signalling which permits a chain of electric trains to move over the same line at minute intervals with no chance of a collision.

Little green lights beckon you on, telling you the way is clear. As you pass them red lights at your back change to green, beckoning on the train behind; and so it is all the way along. Now and then you meet a red light. You stop! The light changes to green. On you go! The marvellous thing is that if, in a moment of colour blindness, you tried to override a red light your train would correct you. It would refuse to go on!

At Kensington we shot out into the open air. Gaily, madly, we raced over the shining rails, marvellously, so it seemed to me, taking a sharp bend, smoothly continuing along the straight. It was like flying without the perpetual anxiety of flight. Once, with the awful insolence of the cocksure, I thought the driver had erred.

"Good Lord!" I said. "That was a red light, and _you've gone on_!"

Instead of kicking me out on the metals, as he should have done, he smiled and remarked:

"Wrong signal! That red light governs the loop line!"

Safe! On we thundered triumphantly Ealing-wards, with the green lights smiling a benediction on us, telling us that the next ahead was at least a minute ahead, telling the next behind that we, in our turn, were sixty seconds on the right side of safety.

"Do you ever get bored with driving the Ealing express?"

"No," replied the driver, "I like it! I wanted to do this ever since I became a conductor. Most conductors want to be drivers. The first time you take a train out alone is what you might call a bit of excitement, but it soon wears off."

"You don't feel as though you were flying?"

"No, you soon lose that feeling."

"You never get the wind up?"

"No, you can't go wrong if you keep your eyes open and your repair bag in good order!"

* * *

In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over which little black snakes were crawling--trains coming and trains gone--I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways for over thirty years!

"The changes I've seen?" he said. "Yet it's marvellous what we did in the old days. Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains? I'm not saying that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but--we did it! Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better, and--you can have the good old days! I remember them and prefer these!

"Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains. Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground."

* * *

I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the little _crème de menthe_ lights that tell him he can fly and thunder on through the darkness.

Marriage

A striped awning leads to the church. A narrow strip of scarlet carpet runs from kerb to porch. Policemen hold back the crowd.

Women--always women; and in such numbers, too, and in such remarkable variety. The lily livered misanthrope on a passing omnibus growls: "Another wretched wedding.... What women see in them I cannot imagine." Of course he cannot. Women with their relentless grip on essential realities, see in them the work of the world, the justification of all living--but, naturally, they do not reason it out like that. They go to "see the bride," or, dare I say, to see themselves as the bride, either as they once were or as they hope to be.

How remarkably they gather! At one moment the street is normal save for that tell-tale scarlet strip; the next, as a swarm gathers out of the blue sky, so gather the wedding fans, ready, if need be, to prod a policeman in the ribs with an umbrella in order to watch another woman walk through a wedding-ring into a home....

Shall we join the ladies?

* * *

"Steady on there. Don't push."

That is the policeman. There is a surge and writhing of this solid mass of womanhood.

"Officer, could you stand just a little.... Thank you."

"'Ere, Robert, can't you move your fat self? I'm only a little one."

All kinds of women: Kensington and Balham and Clerkenwell; virgins, matrons, and grandmothers; some happy, some, no doubt, unhappy. What does that matter? Another bride is stepping out into life with the future in her eyes, and joy and sorrow presiding over her marvellous destiny.

* * *

"Who is it?"

"Lady Agatha Penwhistle!"

Not you see, "Who is he?" What does he matter? Half the women have never heard of Lady Agatha. To them she is not Lady Agatha. She is something far more important: she is a bride; she is--Everywoman.

In the dark arch of the church porch a certain anticipatory liveliness is noted. Pink young men in morning clothes, white gardenias in their buttonholes, fuss helplessly, asking each other whispered questions, pointing, hesitating, muddling. Marriage is a bad day for young brothers. The boys at the porch have been tumbling over pews and mixing up the bride's guests with those who owe allegiance to the bridegroom. It has been a fearful sweat for them. The sight of Sis at the altar, too, was pretty awful. Of course, George is an awfully decent cove and all that; but still, you know ... so small she was, and so pathetic in white, kneeling there....

One of the young men runs down the steps and officiously opens the door of a limousine in whose silver brackets shine white carnations. The crowd watches every movement. He blushes under the scrutiny. Silly asses, they are! Then as he runs back the doors are flung wide. Suddenly the church vibrates like a great cat purring. The stones seem to rock, as, with a crash, the hysterical triumph of Mendelssohn bursts forth and goes galloping down the wind like a messenger. There are people crowding round the porch. She is coming.... She, the eternal, unchanging, marvellous She!

Look, there is a movement in the porch, and then... "Oooh, isn't she lovely!"

The Girl in White!

Her veil flung back, her straight, slim form moving down the steps, the white satin gleaming as she moves, her bouquet against her breast, and her silver toes peeping in and out from beneath her gown. She smiles.

"Good luck, my dear!"

A swift turn of her head. Who said that to her? Her eyes brim, for it was very lovely. She gazes over the women's faces--those, at this time, generous women's faces.

So she passes.

* * *

As she goes the women put away their handkerchiefs, for they have all been crying a little, some with joy and some out of the depths of knowledge.

To all of them standing there She represented That Which Once Was, That Which Might Have Been, That Which May Be; and something more--oh, much more. For that brief second she was the Ideal. She was Happiness.

I think also that when the older women found themselves in tears they were seeing through a glass darkly, through the glass of this girl's life, and in their hearts they knew that, come weal, come woe, they had seen a sister at the pinnacle of her life.

* * *

"Good luck, my dear!"

Kings and Queens

Nell Gwynne must have had some trying moments. When she fell into a red-haired woman's rage facing Charles II with clenched hands, Charles probably stood there looking at her just as he looks at the few people who from time to time gaze at him in the Westminster Abbey waxwork show.

Women hate to be looked at like that, whether the man who looks is a king or is merely someone else's husband. "Now, Nelly!" he seems to be saying. "Now, Nelly!" Cold, distant, on the apex of his pyramid of superiority, with his sallow, cynical face framed in its cascade of curls, how mad he must have made her--and all the others--for women who permit themselves hysterics do detest having them against a human granite quarry. That sad, superior Stuart eye, that heavy, drooping mouth, that thin, supercilious pencil line of a moustache etched straight over, but a little above, his upper lip. So contemptuous, so cutting, so sarcastic. You can positively hear the dead beauties saying, "Charles, I never know what you are _really_ thinking," or "Charles, do smile, just once," or "Charles, dearest, why do you look at me like that? Have you forgotten...." Heart-rending for them, but--also attractive, you know!

How many calculated storms must have beaten in vain tears against that stern rock of a face as he stood there, his Majesty the King, just waiting for the tempest to abate. It must have been one of the most useful expressions in history.

* * *

Waxworks? Pooh!

That is what most visitors say as they trail round Westminster Abbey, wrestling painfully with the past, trying to flog their imaginations with dates.

How many realize that these waxworks were made by men who saw these kings and queens in life? They are authentic portraits, less flattering perhaps than the works of greater artists, and for this reason more interesting. In fact, I prefer this waxwork of Charles II to Lely's splendid portrait. I am sure it is more like Charles.

From the time of Henry V till about 1700 every dead monarch was modelled in wax. This effigy was then dressed in the king's finest suit, and was carried through the streets of London in his funeral train. Westminster Abbey was once full of these marvellous relics--"The Ragged Regiment" they used to be called, or "The Play of Dead Folks." To-day only eleven are shown, the broken limbs of the others, the gruesome heads and hands, are locked away from public sight. Poor Edward I and Eleanor, the third Edward and Philippa, glorious Hal and Katharine, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, James the First and Anne of Denmark, lie all jumbled together; a sight that would have made Hamlet wince.

Was there ever a more pathetic puppet show?

Enough remained of Queen Elizabeth for a clever restorer to give us a new idea of her. There she stands covered in jewels, holding her sceptre, her rich, red, velvet gown falling to a pair of surprisingly adequate brocade shoes. But this is not the imperious queen we know, this is not Gloriana, who could put on a Tower of London expression and whip men with her tongue. This is a sad old woman. She has uncanny, unhappy eyes; such a lonely face.