Part 13

Nothing would induce little Miss Banks to leave the house in the morning without seeing what the cards promised her, and so open and impressionable are her mind and heart that she is still interested in the colour of the romantic fellow whom the day, if kind, is to fling across her path. The cards, as you know, are great on colours, all men being divided into three groups; dark (which has the preference), fair, and middling. Similarly for you, if you can get little Miss Banks to read your fate (but you must of course shuffle the pack yourself), there are but three kinds of charmers: dark (again the most fascinating and to be desired), fair, and middling.

It is great fun to watch little Miss Banks at her necromancy. She takes it so earnestly, literally wrenching the future's secrets from their lair.

"A letter is coming to you from some one," she says. "An important letter."

And again, "I see a voyage over water."

Or very seriously, "There's a death."

You gasp.

"No, it's not yours. A fair woman's."

You laugh. "Only a fair woman's!" you say. "Go on."

But the cards have not only ambiguities, but strange reticences.

"Oh," little Miss Banks will say, her eyes large with excitement, "there's a payment of money and a dark man."

"Good," you say.

"But I can't tell," she goes on, "whether you pay it to him or he pays it to you."

"That's a nice state of things," you say, becoming indignant. "Surely you can tell."

"No, I can't."

You begin to go over your dark acquaintances who might owe you money, and can think of none.

You then think of your dark acquaintances to whom you owe money and are horrified by their number.

"Oh, well," you say, "the whole thing's rubbish, anyway."

Little Miss Banks's eyes dilate with pained astonishment. "Rubbish!"--and she begins to shuffle again.

GENTLEMEN BOTH

Not all of us have the best manners always about us. The fortunate are they whose reaction is instant; but those also are fortunate who, after the first failure--during the conflict between, say, natural and acquired feelings--can recapture their best, too.

At a certain country house where a shooting party was assembled a picture stood on an easel in a corner of the dining-room. It was a noticeable picture by reason of its beauty and also by reason of a gash in the canvas. Coffee was on the table when one of the guests, looking round the walls, observed it for the first time, and, drawing his host's attention to its excellence, asked who was the painter; and the host, who was an impulsive, hearty fellow, full of money, after supplying the information and corroborating the justice of the criticism, remarked to the whole company, "Now here's a sporting offer. You see that cut across the paint in the middle"--pointing it out as he spoke--"well, I'll give any one a thousand pounds who can guess how it was done."

They all rose and clustered before the easel; for a thousand pounds are worth having a try for, even when one is rich--as most of them were.

"It was done only last week," the host continued, "and it was such a queer business that I don't intend to have it repaired. Now then, all of you, a thousand of the best for the correct answer."

He rubbed his hands and chuckled. It was a sure thing for him, and there would be a lot of fun in the suggestions.

The guests having re-examined the cut with minuteness, one by one, seated themselves again, and pencils and paper were provided so that the various possible solutions might be written down. The real business then began--no sound but pencils writing and the host chuckling.

Now it happened that one of the party, a year or so before, had seen somewhere in Yorkshire a picture with a not dissimilar rent, caused, he had been told, by a panic-stricken bird which had blundered into the room and couldn't get out again. Remembering this, and remembering also that history sometimes repeats itself, he wrote on his piece of paper that, according to his guess, the canvas was torn by a bird which had flown into the room and lost its head.

All the suggestions having been written down, the host called on their writers to read them, a jolly, confident smile lighting up his features, which grew more jolly and more confident as one after another incorrect solution was tendered.

And then came the turn of the man who had remembered about the bird, and who happened to be the last of all. "My guess is," he read out, "that the picture was damaged by a bird."

There was a roar of laughter, which gradually subsided when it was observed that the host was very far from joining in it. In fact, his face not only had lost all its good humour, but was white and tense.

When there was silence he said, with a certain biting shortness: "Somebody must have told you."

"Nobody told me," was the reply. "But you don't really mean to say I've guessed right?"

"If you call it a guess--yes," said the host, whose mortification had become painful to witness.

"Well," said the other quickly and pleasantly, "'guess' perhaps isn't the right word, and, of course, I shouldn't therefore claim the reward. You see----," and he then explained how he had remembered the odd experience in Yorkshire, and in default of any inventiveness of his own had used it. "So, of course," he added, rising and moving towards the window, "the offer is off. Remembering isn't guessing; quite the reverse. What a gorgeous moon!"

The others also rose, only too willingly, for the situation had become trying; the matter dropped, at any rate as a theme of general conversation; and gradually and uncomfortably bed-time was reached.

Several of the party were at breakfast the next morning when their host made his first appearance; and they noticed that he had regained his customary gay serenity. Walking up to the guest whose memory had been so embarrassing, he handed him a slip of paper.

"I'm sorry, old man," he said, "to have been in such a muddle last night, but the accuracy of that shot of yours dazed me. Of course the offer stands. All this cheque needs is for you to fill in the name of whatever hospital or charity you prefer."

"Thanks," said the other as he put it in his pocket-book.

ON EPITAPHS

Not long ago I was staying in a village where the shortest cut to the inn lay through the churchyard, and passing and repassing so often I came to know the dead inhabitants of the place almost better than the living. Not with the penetrating knowledge of the author of "Spoon River Anthology"--that very extraordinary and understanding book,--but in a kindly superficial way. Indeed, considering that they were total strangers and their acquaintance not now to be made by any but the followers of those doughty knights of the round (or square) seance table, Sir Oliver and Sir Conan, some of these dead people were absurdly often in my thoughts; but that was because of their names. Such names! Many of course were no longer legible, for Father Time had either obliterated them with his patient finger, dipped now in lichen and now in moss, or upon them his tears had fallen too steadily. But many remained and some of them were wonderful. Has it ever been explained why the dead have more remarkable names than the living? Did any one ever meet "in the form" a Lavender Wiseways? Yet there was a Lavender Wiseways lying beneath one of those stones. There was her sister too, lying close beside--Lavinia Wiseways. Neither had married; but then how could they have performed a deed which would have lost them such distinction! And who now exchanges market greetings, with a gaitered gentleman named Paradine Ebb? Yet once there was a Paradine Ebb, farmer, not such a great distance from London, to shake by the hand, and chat to, and buy fat stock from, and, I hope, share a cordial glass with. And who--but if I continue I shall betray the village's name, and that is against good manners. Too many real names get into print in these inquisitive days.

It was not however of strange dead names that I was thinking when I took up my pen, but of the epitaphs on the tombstones, sometimes so brief and simple, sometimes so long and pompous, and almost always withholding everything of real importance about the occupants of the narrow cells beneath and almost always affecting to despise the precious gift of life. Why should not some one, greatly daring, go so far as to bid the mason engrave a tribute to the world that is being left behind? Would that be so impious? There is no indication that any of these dead ever enjoyed a moment.

Something like this, for instance--

HERE LIES

HENRY ROBINSON

WHO LIVED IN THE BELIEF--AND, WITH MANY FAILURES, DID HIS BEST TO ACT OF TO IT--THAT IF YOU SPEND YOUR TIME IN TRYING TO MAKE THINGS A LITTLE EASIER AND MERRIER IN THIS WORLD, THE NEXT CAN TAKE CARE OF ITSELF.

The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a preparation for another and better world. But we know that that is not usually the case, and we know that many lives, although unrelated to graveyard ideas of decorum and insurance, are happier than not. There is in the God's Acre of which I am writing more than one appeal to the living to be wary of earthly serenity: surely a very unfair line for the dead to take and not unremindful of the fable of the fox and his tail. An elaborate stone close by the lych gate has a series of dreary couplets warning the passer-by that the next grave to be dug may be his; and on the assumption that he is being too happy he is adjured to a morbid thoughtfulness. The dead might be kinder than that, more generous, more altruistic! I should like a headstone to bear some such motto as

"DIE AND LET LIVE."

But not only do the epitaphs suggest that life below is a snare; they are by no means too encouraging about the life above. The spirit they proclaim is a very poor one. Nothing can make death attractive; but even if some golden-mouthed advocate should arise whose eloquence half persuaded, the churchyard would beat him: the damp of it, the gloom of it, the mouldiness of it, the pathetic unconvincing efforts at resignation which the slabs record! We ought to be braver; more heartening to others. A rector who allowed none but cheerful epitaphs would be worth his tithes.

Would there be any very impossible impropriety in such an inscription as this--

HERE LIES

JOHN SMITH

WHO FOUND EARTH PLEASANT AND REJOICED IN ITS BEAUTIES AND ENJOYED ITS SAVOURS; WHO LOVED AND WAS LOVED; AND WHO WOULD FAIN GO ON LIVING. HE DIED RELUCTANTLY, BUT WISHES WELL TO ALL WHO SURVIVE HIM.

CARPE DIEM.

Reading that, the stranger would not necessarily (I hope) be transformed into a detrimental Hedonist.

And now and then a human foible might be recorded by the stonemason without risk of undermining society's foundations. When our friends are dead why should we not disclose a little? Some secrets are better out. Here for example--

HERE LIES

(in no expectation of immortality)

THOMAS BROWN

HE WAS NO FRIEND OF THE CHURCH, BUT HE PAID HIS WAY, INTERFERED WITH NONE OF HIS NEIGHBOURS, AND HIS WORD WAS HIS BOND.

What would happen if Thomas Brown's friends paid for such lapidary style as that? Would the world totter? Again--

HERE LIES

MARY JONES

THE WIFE OF WILLIAM JONES. HONOUR HER MEMORY, FOR SHE WAS LENIENT WHEN HER HUSBAND WAS IN LIQUOR.

I should also like to see memorial verses beginning:

Physicians sore Long time I bore.

IN AND ABOUT LONDON

I

A LONDON THRILL

The scene was Gerrard Street: a rather curious thoroughfare notable for possessing three or four restaurants dear to Bohemia, the great West End telephone exchange, the homes of Dryden and Edmund Burke, a number of cinema offices, and many foreign inhabitants.

The time was three o'clock in the afternoon.

In the middle were two or three big vans, loading or unloading and filling the roadway, thus cutting the street into two so effectively that I, approaching from the east, had no knowledge of anything happening in the western half. I therefore attached no significance to the hurrying steps of a policeman in front of me, but was a little surprised to see him pick his way almost on tiptoe between the vans--yet not sufficiently surprised to anticipate drama.

But the drama was there, awaiting me, on the other side of the vans, and the policeman--this being London drama--was naturally one of the performers. For there never was a street play yet--comedy, tragedy, or farce--without a policeman in the cast. It is a convention to say--as every one has in his time said and will say again--that a policeman is never there when he is wanted; but that is true only in the dull sense: what we mean is that the policeman is never there before the curtain rises, or, in other words, in time to prevent the performance altogether. How tame if he were! As a matter of fact, by delaying his arrival until the affair is in good train he takes his proper part as a London entertainer; that is to say, he is there when he is wanted--wanted to complete the show.

It was thus on the present occasion.

On passing the vans I was suddenly aware that the curtain had risen; for on the south pavement were some fifteen or twenty people watching two women at the house opposite, one of whom, a young one in a long brown overcoat, was trying to get past the half-opened door, while the other, an older one, in black, repulsed her from within. Just as I arrived the policeman darted from between the vans, seized the young woman's arm, and said, "That's enough of that. You come along with me." Her reluctance was intense, but she did not resist; in fact, she had about her a suggestion of having expected it.

One of the spectators remarked, "Quite time, too"; another added, "She was arstin' for it." The other woman disappeared into the house, and we all began to move in a westward direction.

Had this young woman, the nature of whose offence I did not learn, been a malefactor of any importance she would have been hustled into a cab and lost to sight. Happily, however, she was only a common brawler or disturber of the peace, and therefore there was no cab. I say happily, because it is rarely that one sees people so cheered up on a dull cold day as every one seemed to be who caught sight of her between Gerrard Street, where the policeman put that deadly grip upon her, and Vine Street, where she vanished into the station. Watching the effect of her impact on the street, "Captured to make a London holiday" is the form of words that ran through my mind.

When we turned from Gerrard Street into Wardour Street we were about thirty strong. When we turned from Wardour Street into Shaftesbury Avenue we were forty-five strong, for as the glad news spread we increased amazingly. It is a point of honour with Londoners to accompany the fallen on their way. Not to jeer at them, although our absence would be kinder, nor to sympathize with them; merely to be in whatever is going on. If our prevalent expression is one of amusement, that is because we are being entertained, and entertained free. No malice.

And so we proceeded. Every now and then the young woman, who had one of those thin white faces that often mark the excitable and even the not quite sane, and who, I fancy, had been drinking, would have stopped, to enlarge upon her grievance; but the policeman urged her ever onward, always with those terrible official fingers encircling her arm.

The retinue became alarming, like a food queue on the march. Little boys who a moment ago had no hopes of any such luck screamed the tidings to other little boys in the by-ways and these, in their turn, shrieked out to others, so that reinforcements scampered down Rupert Street and Great Windmill Street to swell the concourse. In one little boy I watched horror struggle with joy. "They've pinched a lady!" he exclaimed in shocked tones, and then hurried to the head of the line to miss nothing of the outrage. The people on the tops of motor-buses stood up. At Piccadilly Circus the traffic was suspended.

A pathetic young woman in a long brown overcoat having tried for just a few moments too long to enter a house in Gerrard Street (to which, for all I know, she had a perfect right), all London was disorganised!

And so she crossed Regent Street, passed the Piccadilly Hotel, and at the alley leading to Vine Street was swallowed up. The most eager of the adults and all the small boys penetrated the alley too, but the rest, with one last longing look, melted away and resumed the ordinary tedium of life. The thrill was over....

But the squalor of that march! What she had done I have no notion, but she was well punished for it long before Vine Street was reached. I hope that magistrates sometimes take these distances into consideration.

II

A DOOR-PLATE

But for having lived in London long enough to know the rules, or, in other words, to be aware that nothing is out of place there, I might have thought of the door-plate which, in Fetter Lane, suddenly caught my eye as an incongruity. But no; I am inured, and therefore I merely looked at it twice instead of only once, and passed on with a head full of mental and intensely uncivic pictures of undauntable men, identical in patience and hopefulness, standing hour after hour at the ends of piers all round ours coasts, watching their lines. For the words on the door-plate were these: "British Sea Anglers' Society."

I shall continue to deny that the notice was out of place, but a certain oddity (not uncommon in London) may be conceded, for Fetter Lane otherwise has less marine association than any street that one could name; and angling is too placid, too philosophic, too reclusive a sport to be represented by an office absolutely on the fringe of that half-square mile of the largest city in the world given over to fierce, feverish activity; where printing presses are at their thickest, busy and clattering, day and night, in the task of providing Britons with all--and a little more--of the news, and a fresh sensation for every breakfast table. Except that upon the breakfast table is often to be found the herring in one or other of its posthumous metamorphoses, there is no connecting link whatever. And why one has to belong to a society with a door-plate in Fetter Lane before drawing mackerel from Pevensey Bay, or whiting from the Solent, is a question to answer which is beside the mark; although that fish can be caught from the sea without membership of this fraternity I myself can testify--for was I not once in the English Channel in a small boat in the company of two conger eels and a dogfish, whose noisy and acrobatic reluctance to die turned what ought to have been a party of pleasure into misery and shame; and shall I ever forget the look of dismay (a little touched by triumph) on the face of a humane English girl visiting Ireland, when, after she had pulled in an unresisting pollock at the end of a trawl line and the boatman had taken it from the hook and beaten it sickeningly to death with an iron thole pin, she heard him say, as later, he handed the fish to a colleague on the landing-stage, "The young lady killed it"?

But this is not London--far, indeed, from it!--although an excellent example of London's peculiar and precious gift of starting the mind on extra-mural adventures. The sea, however, is, in reality too, very near the city, and the closeness of London's relations with it can be tested in many delightful ways. Although, for example, the natural meeting-place of those two old cronies, Father Thames and Neptune, is somewhere about Gravesend, Neptune, as a matter of fact, comes for a friendly glass with Gog (I almost wrote Grog) and Magog right up to town. If you lean over the eastern parapet of London Bridge, just under the clock which has letters instead of numerals, you will see the stevedores unloading all kinds of wonderful sea-borne exotic merchandise. The other morning I was the guest of a skipper of one of these vessels, and sat in his cabin (which smelt, authentically, of tobacco smoke as only a cabin can,) with his first engineer, and ate ship's biscuits and heard first-hand stories of the sinking of the _Titanic_, together with details of a romance in the European quarter of a certain African port all ready to the magic hand of Mr. Conrad. Twelve minutes later I was in a club in Pall Mall!

But there is no need to enter a cabin, although that is, of course, the pleasantest way, for if you wander down to the Tower you can sit on an old cannon on the quay and have the music of cordage in your ears, and if you climb to the top of the Tower Bridge the scene below you has the elements of a thousand yarns. And there are streets near the docks which might have been cut out of Plymouth or Bristol. Now and then, indeed, London may be said to be actually on the sea.

Such excursions are for the hours of light. In the hours of darkness I used to have, years ago, a favourite river-side refuge. In those days, when cabmen asked for custom instead of repulsing it, and public-houses remained open until half-past 12 a. m., I had for fine summer nights, after a dull play or dinner, a diversion that never failed; and this was to make my way--if possible with a stranger to such sights and scenes, and an impressionable one--to the Angel at Rotherhithe and watch the shipping for an hour. The Angel is difficult of access, but once there you might be at Valparaiso. It is a quarter of a mile below the Tower Bridge on the south bank, with a wooden balcony overhanging the water, and a mass of dark creaking barges moored below. Here on the balcony we used to sit, while the great ships stole by at quarter speed, groping for their moorings, and strange lights appeared and disappeared, and voices hailed each other and were answered, and little sinister rowing boats moved here and there on unknown missions, and perhaps an excursion steamer, back very late from Margate, with its saloon all lighted and a banjo bravely making merry to the bitter end, would glide past towards London Bridge; and such is the enchantment of ships and shipping that not even she could break the spell.

May the Angel survive the deluge! If not, I must carry out the dream of my life, and make friends with the captain of a Thames tug.

III

ANGEL ADVOCACY

For more than half a century the humourist gravelled for matter has found the ugliness of the Albert Memorial an easy escape from his difficulties. To mention it is to raise a laugh.

But is it so ugly?

Conceiving that the time was ripe to put my own authentic impressions above hearsay, I have made a pilgrimage to this shrine and subjected it to the most careful examination.

I was amply repaid. Alike when resting on the comfortable seats around its enclosure, taking in the structure as a whole, or when scrutinising its sculptures at close range, I was pleasantly entertained, and I came to the decision that the Albert Memorial not only has more in it to attract than to repel, but is a very remarkable summary of the triumphs of Science and Art: as good a lesson book as bronze and stone could compile.

But even if this judgment is wrong, and the Albert Memorial really deserves the facile execration by you and me which so long has been its portion, that is not all. The subject is by no means closed. For you and I are not everybody; we are getting old and tired and exacting, and we are more disposed to complain of what we miss than to be happy with what we find. There are, in the world, others whose attitude is simpler than ours, whose views quite possibly are more important, to whose by no means foolish eyes the Albert Memorial is beyond praise--adequate, stimulating, splendid. I mean children.