Part 9

William and Mary, who attract every Dutch visitor to London, are a heavy, homely couple. She wears purple velvet over a brocaded skirt, and he was so small that some thoughtful person mounted him on a footstool so that he might match his tall wife. Queen Anne is also on view, but she, too, is rather heavy and homely. Those are the royalties.

In a corner is Frances, Duchess of Richmond, who is said to have been the Britannia of the coinage. Just think of this! Frances Teresa Stewart in wax looking across at a waxen Charles II! What irony! She, you remember, was the lady Pepys thought so lovely; and he had a good eye. What scandal a wax figure can recall. "La Belle Stewart" never cared for chatter, however, and you can imagine how Charles looked when he learned that the beautiful scandalous creature, who might have been Queen of England, had eloped one night from Whitehall with the Duke of Richmond. It must have been a bad day for everybody in St. James's Palace. The cook, I should think, was certainly sacked.

In the next case is Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham, who on her death-bed developed an enthusiasm for her funeral. She had previously arranged it in detail with the Garter King-of-Arms, and she lay there worrying if the trappings would be all right, and fearing to die before the undertakers sent the canopy for her approval.

"Why don't they send it," she cried, "even though all the tassels are not finished?"

Poor lady! Her pomp is ended, and her brocaded robes sadly in need of the dry-cleaner.

Nelson is there, modelled shortly after death, wearing his uniform, his neat, thin legs in white kerseymere breeches and silk stockings, and the Government "hat tax" stamp still to be seen inside his hat.

Full of human interest they are, but Charles is the gem. Time has been unkind to the fine point lace at his neck and at his wrists. It is almost black. His jaunty hat, with its drooping ostrich plumes, would disgrace a brawl; yet I defy you to laugh at him. His Majesty looks at you from the dust of centuries, and you are inclined to hate the people who have written their names with diamonds on the plate glass, including the author of that famous quatrain which ends:

He never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.

Still he has an air with him, and when he entered a room, his melancholy eyes burning in that sallow, set face, just think how the ostrich plumes swept the dust, and how the lovely naughtiness of his day curtseyed in gold brocade....

Lost Heirs

I wonder how many people who live in London lodgings look in the mirror during their occasional shaves and think: "There goes the rightful Duke of Brixton!"

O the wild dreams of London! The old man who starves himself that he may search year after year for a document which conceals a coronet is only less tenacious than the elderly virgin whose sole passion is the belief that somebody way back in history "did her down" over a will. There are humble, ragged people who must be positively shocked when they cut a finger and discover that their blood is just ordinary red. There are others who believe themselves to be the ground-landlords of New York or Philadelphia, who go on living in the splendid hope that some day--some day--that missing document will turn up to smooth out the injustices of time.

The Record Office in Chancery Lane is the magnet which draws all these queer people year after year. These unofficial dukes and earls go off each morning with their luncheon in paper bags to hunt up their ancestors. They are all so certain. So convincing. You can put your head quite close to theirs and never hear the bee.

Their finger nails may be in mourning for their lost departed, their collars may be greyish, and their cuffs frayed, but they have butlers and scarlet carpets in their hearts, and in their eyes a hunger most awful to see. There is a legend that one searcher who insisted on being called "my lord," became tired of trying to justify his claim and in a moment of enthusiasm hired a peer's robes and actually succeeded in entering the House of Lords during a State ceremony! What a moment!

There he stood for a moment among his peers. It must have been the greatest moment of his life. It was during the State opening of Parliament, and the House of Lords was waiting with lowered lights for that moment when the King and the Queen, with white-satined pages holding the royal trains, would enter at the precise moment, the lights leap up and send a green and fiery glitter rippling along the throats of the peeresses in the gallery. In this scene stood the peer from Bloomsbury or Brixton or Balham, watching with who knows what delicious thrills the Gentlemen-at-Arms standing at the doors holding their halberds in white gauntleted hands while the lights glanced off their golden helms. What a moment! And what, I wonder, betrayed him? Why did they ask him to go? Did he show too much confidence in his rightful surroundings, or did he say, "Granted, I'm sure," to the duke who trod on his foot? I wonder....

When I entered the Record Office yesterday the curious round room, like the smoking-room of an Atlantic liner that has taken to book-collecting, was full of students and historians poring over spidery Elizabethan script or muttering the English of Chaucer's day beneath their breath. Now and again someone with the strawberry leaf complex wanders in here, puts an old hat on the chair, and calls for documents with the air of a rather weary Malvolio. Generally speaking, the legacy and title hunters gather next door in the Legal Search Room.

Here I found an assortment of women and men. Some were solicitors and barristers looking up records, some were trying to claim funds in Chancery, and others the usual fortune and title hunters.

This is merely a fraction of the interest this building holds for us. It houses twenty-six miles of shelves packed with historic documents and millions of unhistoric documents. Here are the bones of English History. Come into the Museum known so well to those who have a _flair_ for the right things, the Americans. Here in two portly volumes is "Domesday Book," writ in a fair monkish hand. Shelves are stacked with letters from kings and queens, generals and admirals, cardinals and peers: humour, pathos, tragedy, passion. In one of these Wolsey, "the King's poore, hevy and wrechyd prest," asks Henry VIII to forgive him and take him back into favour. Queen Elizabeth's hand is set to a number of letters, and to her are missives from many men, including two who loved her. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, says in one: "I humbly kiss your foot," and the imprisoned Earl of Essex is represented by a brief letter written for the eyes of Gloriana alone.

You can read letters which recall cannon shot on the high seas, and letters which give a vision of deep political plotting and such-like villainy. "God has given us a good day in forcing the enemy so far to leeward," wrote Sir Francis Drake aboard the "Revenge." "I hope in God the Prince of Parma and the Duke of Sedonya shall not shake handes this fewe days." Quite near you will find the last confession of Guy Fawkes.

When you have enjoyed the flavour of these old days you may meet on the stairs an ordinary cat. At least so it seems. It is Felix, and he has been walking through history for centuries. It is the only cat officially on a Government staff--in spite of anything women secretaries in Whitehall may tell you! It receives a penny a day from Government funds! I believe that the terms of its appointment include a clause that it must keep itself clean, catch rats and mice, and bring up its children. If anybody killed the official cat in ancient times he had to forfeit sufficient wheat to cover the body.

* * *

The officer in charge of the Legal Search Room sits with the official list of lost money before him--the funds in Chancery, which, by the way, are only sufficient to make one decent full-blown millionaire--as millionaires go nowadays.

"Yes," he said, "there are some strange searchers.

"In the summer many good, democratic Americans come over to trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror!"

"And the lost heirs," I said--"the would-be dukes?"

"Ah!" he replied. "Ah!"

He sighed.

I noticed a shabby old man mournfully shuffling out. I felt certain that there was the ghost of ermine over him, and I hope that now and then his landlady, just to keep his poor heart up, drops a curtsy when she brings in the kippers and says: "Dinner is served--_your grace_."

Fish

Every morning at the uncomfortable hour of five a man in a peaked cap rings a big bell in Billingsgate Market and the lights go up. Then the haddocks and plaice, which you eat in due course, begin their commercial career.

Shouting? Yes; most decidedly! The ozone which exudes from prostrate cod seems to have a singular effect on the lungs of the fish trade. In the old days, I am told, they used to shout definite fishy slogans such as: "Had-had-had-haddock!" or "Wink-wink-wink-winkles!" But only now and then, when some enthusiast becomes filled with the spirit of the past do you hear anything so interesting. It is mostly a swift, sharp, business-like affair, with a little violent auctioneering over in the corner. Lying in the Thames at the Wharf which is on one side of the market is a Danish trawler with North Sea salt caked on her funnel. Men run up and down the gangways carrying her cargo, while from every corner of the compass railway carts converge on that tangle of narrow streets which begins at the Monument. If you like statistics you will be interested to know that on an average eight hundred tons of fish pour into Billingsgate every day, and the majority comes by train.

I wandered between lines of dead fish. Nothing on earth can look so dead as a fish. It is, in a lavish place of this kind, difficult to believe that fish have ever lived, have ever sported gallantly in the sea, making romantic love and building homes, and generously seeing to it that we shall go on having fish after soup.

Incredibly dead codfish and inconceivably defunct skate lay strewn in rich profusion, herrings with red eyes and white-bellied plaice--all the fruit of the ocean mixed up with ice! Queer, fascinating things are apparently weeded out before they reach Billingsgate; there is none of the strange, snarling fish you see at Boulogne or Dieppe, none of the comic monstrosities with green whiskers which enchant you in Marseilles. Billingsgate is essentially an edible dump. Everything that comes into it is solemnly designed for the kitchen.

Between the flabby corpses walk men and women--fishmongers, hotel buyers, and the like--prodding, examining, comparing, now and then tasting a shrimp--at five a.m., too!--sometimes cracking an experimental mussel!

Officials of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers patrol the place. They represent one of the few old guilds which are still actively interested in the trades they represent. These inspectors have the power to condemn anything unfit for sale.

* * *

And the smell!

How many cats sniff it at the Bank, I wonder! Smell is a marvellous thing. It can awaken the most tender memories of love and passion, of moments under a red moon, blowing roses, blue nights. Were I a woman I would never allow the man I loved to go far without a bottle of my favourite scent. A photograph is a dead thing; a smell is alive. How strange, I thought, that Billingsgate should appeal to the same sense that thrills to a laced handkerchief. Here you have the harmony and discord of smell. Billingsgate in this musical metaphor is like a cat walking across a piano--worse, it is a blare of smell, an assault on the senses. I wondered if, with study, a keen nose could in time learn to disentangle the various strains that go to swell the mass effect, as a musician is able to deafen himself to a symphony and follow the steady hum of an individual 'cello. I was conscious, it is true, of the steady hum of haddock and a sharp piccolo-like movement from the plaice, but, apart from perhaps the steady drumming from the cod stalls, the finer, more subtle emanations escaped me, such as mullet.

Remembering a handkerchief I once had, so long ago that I can write of it as if it were a museum specimen, but in its time a marvellous thing that held within its creased folds all the nightingales of Monte Cattini, I asked myself this problem: Suppose a fishmonger had a passionate love-affair in Billingsgate, would fish remind him or would it not? At first I was inclined to say no, but on reflection I thought yes. He would meet the girl every day for months among the lobsters. He would see her come to him, so graceful and lissom, down an avenue of oysters. He would whisper to her above the whiting, and they would kiss among the crabs. Gradually turbot would come to have a deeper meaning for this man. He would hesitate over the whitebait, and--remember. When the first Danish herrings came in during February he would have to pull himself together and be strong. Years after, if he wished to sentimentalize, what simpler, or more poignant, than a quick sniff at a kipper? But the agony of living in this hall of memories! If you treasure a piece of scented cambric, just think how harrowing it would be to live in the perfume factory....

Such speculation is vain. Do not pity Billingsgate. I hardly like to tell you because I fear you may not believe me, but----Billingsgate smells nothing! No; not even the faintest odour as of melons. Its nose is atrophied. I discovered this by the merest chance.

"By jove," I said, "that's a pretty loud fish. What is it?"

"I don't smell anything," said the owner.

We discussed smell minutely, and I discovered that his life in Billingsgate had made him immune from fishy smells. How wonderful Nature is! Only when he returns from his holiday is he conscious of a little something in the air.

Billingsgate is perhaps the most libelled spot in London. Fifty years ago you had to wax your ears. The language was awful. To-day the Billingsgate fish porters are as polite and charming as we all are.

They are the backbone of Billingsgate, for this market is worked on the most primitive system of hard transport. The Genoese galleys which in the Middle Ages anchored near by were unloaded in exactly the same way. So were Pharaoh's galleys, and Cæsar's. These men, wearing queer-shaped leather helmets rather like stunted Burmese pagodas, carry all the fish in crates on their heads. When a man's neck "sets," as they call it, he can carry sixteen stone on his head. They do it every day and all day.

"Mind your back, _please_!" say the fish porters of Billingsgate.

"Shove over the hammer--if you don't mind, Jack!" I heard one say.

"Certainly!" replied Jack.

So much for that.

* * *

Then I walked out on Billingsgate Wharf and had a real thrill. This is where London began. It is probably the oldest wharf on the Thames. Old Geoffrey of Monmouth, who would have made a fine American reporter, says that it takes its name from Belin, King of the Britons four hundred years before Christ. Stowe thinks that it was once owned by a man called Biling. It is certain, however, that the Romans landed their furs and their wines here, and at this spot on the Thames the first imports of London were dumped, the first merchants gathered.

To the left I saw the bluish shadow of Tower Bridge. The brown Thames water licked the broad hull of a fish trawler. Crate after crate of herrings caught so far away in the North Sea were unloaded for London, and as I passed again through the ripe, rich tang of the market a man was buying lobsters which I suppose a lovely girl will enjoy as she makes eyes at someone over the rim of her champagne glass.

Haunted

Devonshire House is dead and gone. I hope that its name may be perpetuated by the new commercial building, but I do not know.

When the workmen were performing acute surgical operations on old Devonshire House I was interested to hear people, who knew the Duke quite well by his photographs, express intimate regret at this deed. "Dear old Devonshire House!" they said. "What a shame it is that these grand old...." And so on and so forth. They were wistful. They gave the impression that they knew the pink bedroom awfully well (don't you know); they that had lingered on every inch of the famous staircase. They were like people who mourned the downfall of the old home.

You see, for nearly five years Devonshire House was, in the name of charity, thrown open to the public, so that probably more people were acquainted with the geography of this mansion than with any other ducal house which has not become either an hotel or a museum. So:

"Poor old Devonshire House!"

"Yes, it looks just like a bombed château during the war!"

* * *

It did.

Workmen swarmed over it, stood on walls picking at it, sending it earthwards in clouds of dry, white dust. Great gashes had been cut in the sides, windows had been knocked out, the daylight shone into the out-buildings, exposing the discreet wall-paper of the servantry, and that wide-walled courtyard through which swung the coaches of Fox, Burke, and the "New Whigs" in the days when men, and many a pretty woman, plotted against Pitt, was the loading spot for builders' carts and a place in which anyone could light a bon-fire to burn lath and plaster.

There was great interest in this patch of changing London. Not one person passing on an omnibus but remarked about it; and no wonder, for this is Piccadilly's most dramatic assassination. In the sound of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age--or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked! These great houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their day. London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and over-whelmed them.

Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up. Great hotels and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock; aware, it seemed, in its gated caution, that once upon a time highwaymen rode out of Kensington with masks over their faces.

I admit that it was ugly--entirely gloomy in its grey, stiff, barrack-like way; but it did mean something--it had character. Though nobody, as far as I am aware, ever did anything splendidly bad or remarkably good in it, Devonshire House could never be neutral. The National Anthem is pretty bad music, but it could never be neutral!

* * *

So, as the workmen consumed their sandwiches in halls through which for two centuries passed a delicious trickle of royalties, as they heard the whistle and rose heavily to grasp their picks and do some more damage, I more than once stood there among a tangle of builders' carts and saw visions rise out of the white dust.

What a procession!

I saw the hackney coach of Charles James Fox trundle under the portico. Burke, of course, was there too, the practical, wise Burke; for here they conspired with the Coalition Whigs to hit at Pitt, whispering and plotting with the lovely Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire, who enjoyed placing her white finger into this political pie. There had been a tea-party at Boston. And the French Revolution was gathering like a storm to split them. Among these crumbling stones Georgiana must have heard of that scene, one of the most dramatic the House of Commons has ever witnessed, when these two, Fox and Burke, broke their long friendship in a thrilled hush, Fox with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking, Burke grim and firm, and the House of Commons looking on at a quarrel that never healed.

George IV, as Prince of Wales, with his card-table fingers also in the Fox pie, and all the brains and elegance of that time, wits who have been forgotten, a few who live, laughter, music, and the flash of white shoulders, eyes above a fan.... What a procession!

All this you could see in the dust of Devonshire House--two hundred years of it, duke succeeding duke; and all the time the new generations of wealth, power, and art moving up to that grey old portico.

As I passed it late one night I wondered if there are spirits--a queer doubt to express to-day! If so, I am certain that on calm nights fit for a lady's walk Georgiana, third Duchess of Devonshire, must have visited the ruin, looking with very straight brows and considerable "tut-tutting" at a big board on which was printed: "The magnificent building to be erected on this site will include offices, restaurants, and flats."

* * *

Poor Georgiana! Time is a queer thing, and--you, in your time, would never have believed it, would you?

About Homes in Bondage

Do you wish to feel human emotion spring from inanimate things? Do you wish to meet ghosts? Then come with me to one of London's great furniture store-houses, in which a thousand homes lie piled to the roof, silent, sheeted, tomb-like.

A store-man switches on a line of lights, and we see stretching to the distance great pyramids of household goods, whole homes of furniture, neatly stacked and carefully ticketed against the time when a man and a woman will come to claim them. Some of the pyramids suggest Park Lane, others suggest Clapham Common.

Let us peep beneath this shroud, and what do we see: "Good morning, Mrs. Everyman, and what can I do for you? Kindly accept this cushion as a souvenir of your visit." There lies the gift cushion, there the once-so-loved instalment suite that was delivered in the plain van. Note the pictures by Watts, Rossetti, and others of the Victorians to whom the suburbs are so loyal. "Love's Awakening." Ah!

What do we see in the next tomb? Yes; here was an elegant home with a cheque-book behind it. The low satinwood dresser had a compartment like a knee desk, so that she might get close up when she rouged her lips, and three swinging mirrors in order that she might know whether her shoulders were evenly powdered before he took her out to the Berkeley. Engravings, a Japanese cabinet, a good one, a beautiful round table with a surface like that of a still pool. Little home and big home side by side, social differences forgotten. Do you see the ghosts of Mrs. Everyman and Lady Nobody meeting like sisters over their shrouded homes crying a little on each other's arms? I do. The tombs go on waiting ... waiting.

Homes in bondage!