Chapter III: Part 3

Vergers, too, observe towards you the courtesy extended to strangers within the gate. There is a subtle difference in their manner. In their "Yes, sirs," and "No, sirs," and in their pointing and smiling you can feel the affection which churches have always, and quite rightly, extended to pilgrims. One man obviously considered me a distinguished visitor from foreign parts. He went out of his way to instruct me in history that I know quite well, and I wondered whether the only straight and honourable thing to do was to make a clean breast of it and stop him with:

"Look here, I live in Knightsbridge and work in Fleet Street, and I'm frightfully sorry about it, and all that. I know it's most unusual and you won't believe me, but there it is."

I had not the courage. I gazed insincerely into his enthusiastic eyes and said "Really!" and "By Jove!" and "How interesting," at appropriate pauses, so that when eventually I left him I went surrounded, for him, with all the beauty of a bird of passage.

Heartbreak House

In the old comic papers you will find a stock character whose nose is red, whose coat collar is Astrakhan, whose hand is always drawn in the act of conveying drink to a clean-shaven, mobile mouth--a mouth always uttering the words: "When I played Hamlet, laddie, in '84..."

He is, or rather was, the out-of-work actor. No actor has of course ever been out of work: he "rests" sometimes for so long a period that idleness becomes a habit. Lack of employment seems to cover the actor with disgrace. In most other professions men make no secret of being out of a job, but the actor acts both on and off the stage.

The out-of-work actor to-day (you find him in Leicester Square and the Charing Cross Road), has changed since the comic papers pictured a tragedian whose ambitious argosies had evidently foundered in, as Homer would put it, a wine-dark sea. To-day you find him in a bar, merely because there he will meet other actors and agents and pick up news of his heartless and overrated profession; but in his hand is a glass of ginger beer. His clothes are well-cut and he wears a public school tie. His spats draw attention to his worn boots, always the sign of a man's condition, and as he drawls lazily in his Oxford voice, real or assumed, he tries hard to give the impression that, resting as he is on the enormous profits of his genius, he must keep an important appointment in Mayfair at one-thirty or the duchess will be absolutely furious!

Poor brave people! No matter how overdue the rent may be they never lose their panache. To-day the fight to walk on in a musical comedy and say heartily: "Girls, let's go to Paris!" and the feminine fight to answer coyly in good Kensingtonian: "Oh, what a quate topping ideah!" is fiercer than ever. Added to the usual legitimate "resters" are thousands of film actors, both male and female, thrown on the streets because the British film trade is in the doldrums.

If you could only know the bitterness of the fight for the job that does not exist, the daily march round the agents' offices, the young man who puts his head round a door, smiles, says "Nothing doing"--the humiliation of not having a shilling!

What keeps them going? What encourages girls to wash their one pair of real silk stockings overnight, brush their furs carefully, and turn out each day, apparently prosperous, to try another joust with fate? It is belief in themselves, the inability to do anything else, and, above all, it is a vision of fame and a name flung high against the stars over Piccadilly--the dream that might come true. Many a man and many a maid, who feel they possess a descending lift instead of a stomach, see that name of theirs every night twinkling, glistening, beckoning, making it all seem worth while. That keeps them going.

* * *

I sat for an hour in a film agent's office which deserves the title of Heartbreak House. Six months ago the crowds of heroes, villains, heroines, and villainesses who clamoured for heroism or villainy became so great that they had to sit four deep down the stairs. Since that time the word has gone forth that there is no work to be had and no point in seeking it; but still every day they come, hopeful, bright-eyed, the girls all airs and graces, the men eager, self-reliant.

In the waiting-room were six or seven exceedingly pretty fair-haired girls of assorted ages. Some friend had once committed one of the cardinal sins and told them how like Mary Pickford they were. They were now reaping the harvest of this dangerous suggestion. There was an old man with the face of a judge, a young man cut out to be a hero, and a number of vague people who looked in restlessly, and as restlessly went away.

An enormously fat woman occupied the doorway, talking rapidly:

"No fat parts going? Oh, well, I suppose something'll turn up some day. Nothing like hope, is there? And it's not easy for me to keep my weight up with everything so dear these days. Suppose I got thin? What would I do then? Oh, what a life, what a life!"

* * *

The agent entered the room. All the pretty girls pursed their lips and assumed a photographic smile, putting up what they hoped would be a barrage of beauty to demolish all obstacles.

"Sorry, I can do nothing for you. There's no work!"

Slowly the smile faded, and each girl looked five years older than girls of that age have any right to look. They fussed a moment with their handbags, brushed imaginary crumbs from their knees, lingered as if hoping against hope that some producer would dash into the office and cry, "Girls, I want you!" and then, with a sigh, departed; fawn coats, moleskin, and black coats.

"Pretty awful, isn't it?" said the agent to me. "You wouldn't think they were out of work. That's part of the game: they must look smart!"

* * *

A big negro put his head round the door, took off a battered bowler, exposed his gums, and said:

"Mornin', boss. Does any guy wanter a good ord'nary nigger?"

As he went out he came into collision with a tall, pale young man who wore spats but no overcoat. He too, was sent away.

"We get lots like that," said the agent, "well-bred young fellows wearing college ties, who manage to keep their spats white though their shoes probably need soleing. In fact, we get all sorts. But all the men and women who come up here looking as though a thousand a year would be an insult would be grateful for two pound a week. They all look smart."

* * *

That is part of their tragedy.

They may be "resting," but they cannot afford to stop acting. The only consolation is that, as everybody knows, luck turns, the darkest hour precedes the dawn, and so on, and so on!

Hope has kept more people alive than all doctors ever born.

Madonna of the Pavement

How often in a London street do you try to pierce the mystery of another's life, to visualize the loves, the hates, the joys, the sorrows that have painted lines on some unknown, passing face?

I saw them in High Holborn. They stood out from the tense, jostling crowd because they seemed to have no object in life, nowhere to go, nothing to do; they were aimless, lost. They stood out also because they were so poor. Poverty is such a relative thing; but no man is really poor till life becomes a desert island that gives him neither food nor shelter nor hope. They were such obvious failures at this game of getting and keeping called success. If they had suddenly shouted in pain above the thunder of the passing wheels they could hardly have been more spectacular in their misery, this man, this woman, this child.

He slouched along a few yards in advance of the woman. He looked as though Life had been knocking him down for a long time, then waiting for him to get up so that it might knock him down again. His bent body was clothed in greenish rags and his naked feet were exposed in gashed boots. He was not entirely pathetic. He was the kind of man to whom you would gladly give half a crown to salve your conscience; but you would never allow him out of sight with your suit-case!

She carried her baby against her breast in a ragged old brown cloth knotted round her shoulders. Perhaps she was twenty-five, but she looked fifty because no one had ever taken care of her, or had given her that pride in herself which is necessary to a woman's existence. She had not even the happiness of being wanted or necessary--a condition in which the altruistic soul of woman thrives. This man of hers would obviously be better off without her. She had once been pretty.

The shame of it! To parade her woman's body draped in rags through streets full of other women in their neat clothes, to meet the pitying eyes of other wives and mothers, and to drag on, tied like a slave, behind this shambling, shifty man. Is there a crucifixion for a woman worse than this?

* * *

He walked ahead so that she had plenty of time to wonder why she married him. Now and then he would turn and jerk his head, trying to make her quicken her pace. She took no notice, just plodded on in who knows what merciful dullness?

Then the sleeping child in her old brown shawl awakened and moved with the curious boneless writhing of a young baby. The mother's arms tightened on it and held its small body closer to hers. She stopped, went over to a shop window, and leant her knee on a ledge of stone. She placed one finger so gently into the fold of cloth and looked down into it....

I tell you that for one second you ceased to pity and you reverenced. Over that tired face of chiselled alabaster, smoothed and softened in a smile, came the only spiritual thing left in these two lives: the beatitude of a Madonna. This same unchanging smile has melted men's hearts for countless generations. The first time a man sees a woman look at his child in exactly that way something trembles inside him. Men have seen it from piled pillows in rooms smelling faintly of perfume, in night nurseries, in many a comfortable nest which they have fought to build to shield their own. No different! The same smile in all its rich, swift beauty was here in the mud and the bleakness of a London street.

They went on into the crowd and were forgotten. I went on with the knowledge that out of rags and misery had come, full and splendid, the spirit that, for good or ill, holds the world to its course.

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....

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.