Part 12

“You shall have a glimpse of _Ranelagh_ by night. We needn’t land either, for our magic is all powerful, you know. Just shut your eyes a moment and wish yourself in Ranelagh at ten o’clock in the evening.... Now open them and look.”

For a moment Betty was dazzled by glittering lights, but as she looked round her she drew a long breath of delight.

“Oh, how pretty!” she exclaimed. “It’s like fairy-land.”

The “round thing” of which she had caught sight between trees, she now saw to be a sort of dome, beneath which was a circle of gilded and painted recesses, something like the boxes in a theatre. From a pavilion in the middle of the covered part of the gardens, came the sound of music, and in every recess ladies and gentlemen were seated before little tables with glasses and cups upon them. With the dome, or _Rotunda_, as Godmother called it, as a centre, long alleys of trees stretched in every direction, like the spokes of a wheel, and were lighted by lamps hanging from the trees. The whole place indeed sparkled with lights, and in their radiance walked charming figures. Pretty ladies in gowns of brocade with powdered hair and little black patches on their faces, were escorted by gentlemen no less charming in their satin coats, flowered waistcoats and three-cornered hats. They walked up and down the leafy alleys, sometimes stopping before platforms where people were singing or acting, sometimes greeting other parties of friends with low curtsies from the ladies and deep bows from the gentlemen.

Betty was entranced by the charming scene.

“It’s very pretty, isn’t it?” said Godmother. “No wonder Dr. Johnson said, ‘_When I first entered Ranelagh it gave me an expansion and gay sensation in my mind such as I never experienced anywhere else_.’”

“I wonder if he’s here to-night?” Betty replied.

“Very likely. I see many well-known people. There’s Oliver Goldsmith in the claret-coloured velvet coat. He’s much tidier and better dressed than usual! And do you notice that little man, rather deformed, in black satin, with ruffles of lace? That’s Mr. Pope, the poet. He is very witty. You see how he is surrounded by laughing men and women? But they’re all rather afraid of him, for he’s quite likely to make fun of them in his next poem.”

“Oh, I should like to live in these times,” sighed Betty, “and go to parties in a sedan chair, and be dressed like these ladies when I grow up....”

Godmother laughed at her face of amazement when she found herself finishing the sentence in the white parlour at Westminster.

“There are advantages and disadvantages about every age,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care at all for the way most little girls of the eighteenth century were brought up. You wouldn’t have the freedom you enjoy now, I can assure you!”

Betty sighed again, but this time because she remembered with a pang that this was her last visit for a long time to the little house from which she had taken so many magic journeys. Godmother was going abroad again, and for many months her house would be closed. Before she could speak, however, the old lady went on: “Now mind you go soon to the London Museum to refresh your memory about to-day’s glimpse of the eighteenth century in this wonderful city of ours. Go into the Costume rooms, and look at the dresses. You will find there the very velvet coat we saw dear old Oliver Goldsmith wearing at Ranelagh. You will see the sedan chairs in which the fine ladies were carried, and a thousand other things belonging to eighteenth-century London which you must find for yourself.”

“I can go on Monday,” Betty said, “because holidays are beginning.”

“Do. And on your way home, try to imagine how all the changes in the streets since the eighteenth century would strike Dr. Johnson, for instance.

“You will go back by Tube, which is to you a familiar way of getting about. But think of Dr. Johnson’s face if he could suddenly walk into a lift and be lowered into the depths of the earth, and then shot through a narrow tunnel from the Bank to Marble Arch, or farther!”

Betty laughed. “And he wouldn’t recognize Marble Arch when he got there, would he?”

“Not a bit. He would expect to see a more or less country road where Oxford Street now runs, and close to the place where the Marble Arch stands to-day he would look for the gallows called Tyburn Tree, where in his time people were hanged. Think how amazed he would be to behold motor vehicles instead of coaches and sedan chairs in the streets.”

“Or to see trains, and telephones, and electric lights, and telegrams and aeroplanes,” put in Betty. “They would all be strange to him. After all, aeroplanes are still a _little_ strange to us!” she added.

“You’ll pass several Post Offices on your way to Chelsea,” Godmother went on, “and to _you_, to drop a letter this afternoon through a slit outside the office, and expect it to reach Newcastle or Exeter to-morrow morning seems quite natural. To Dr. Johnson it would appear marvellous, for in _his_ day, letters had to be carried by men on horseback from one town to another. These are only a few examples of the changes which have taken place since the eighteenth century, which in some ways seems so near us and in other respects so far away.” ...

“Oh, Godmother, do come back soon!” Betty said, when the sad moment for saying good-bye had come. “There are hundreds and hundreds more things I want to see in London!”

“Then you don’t hate it quite so much as you did some weeks ago?” asked the old lady slyly.

“Oh, I love it! But I never should have loved it without you and the magic journeys. And now there won’t be any more magic for ages.”

“That will be your own fault then,” returned Godmother briskly. “With certain books, some of which you know already, as guides, and a certain exercise of imagination which will grow stronger if you practise it, the Present will melt into the Past, and you will be able to call it up at your pleasure. But never forget, Betty, that the Past has made the Present, and when you are grown up, try to make other people reverence the Past of London, and be unwilling, except for very pressing reasons, to destroy what is old and full of memories. London is changing before our eyes, and too much that is beautiful and interesting is being swept away, often through carelessness and indifference. I hope you’ll be one of the small group of people who help to guard the Past, and use their influence to prevent unnecessary destruction in our wonderful city. And remember that you’ve only just begun to know a tiny fraction of its history. There is enough yet left to learn to last you your lifetime.”

“I know,” said Betty. “Godmother,” she added after a moment, “you said you would read me the rhyme about London bells.”

Godmother went to the cabinet, out of which so many charms had been drawn, and took out a book which she put into Betty’s hand.

“You’ll find it in this book, which I’m going to give you in memory of our journeys, magic and otherwise. It’s called _London in Song_, and I hope it will remind you of many things we’ve seen together. The Nursery Rhyme about the bells was written by some unknown lover of London who lived in the eighteenth century, and some of it at least you’ve often sung at parties when you played ‘Oranges and Lemons.’”

* * * * *

So in the Tube on her way home to Chelsea, which she could now picture as it was before it had become just a part of London instead of a country village, Betty read the rhyme of the bells, and amused herself by counting up how many of the churches mentioned in it she knew.

“Gay go up and gay go down To ring the bells of London Town.

Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement’s.

Bull’s eyes and targets, Say the bells of St. Marg’ret’s.

Brickbats and tiles, Say the bells of St. Giles’.

Halfpence and farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin’s.

Pancakes and fritters, Say the bells of St. Peter’s.

Two sticks and an apple, Say the bells of Whitechapel.

Pokers and tongs, Say the bells of St. John’s.

Kettles and pans, Say the bells of St. Ann’s.

Old Father Baldpate, Say the slow bells of Aldgate.

You owe me ten shillings, Say the bells of St. Helen’s.

When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey.

When I grow rich, Say the bells of Shoreditch.

Pray when will that be? Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know, Says the great bell of Bow.

Gay go up and gay go down To ring the bells of London Town.”

Never again could Betty think of London as a dull, dreary place, for though she continued to forget how she actually got back into the Past, she kept a picture in her mind of London through the ages.

There was the Roman city, with its fortress and its market-place filled with the British people the Romans had conquered. Then the city of the Middle Ages, inhabited by a different race—the English race—the little city with its gabled houses encircled by fields and woods. Next came the city of Elizabeth’s day, richer and bigger now, with its ships floating up to London Bridge, its beautiful “Chepe” or market-place crowded with prosperous people.

Again she saw it a heap of ruins in Restoration days, with only a few of its buildings remaining after the Great Fire that swept it clean. Her next glimpse of it showed her London two hundred and fifty years after the Fire—a different London, of broader streets, and plainer and more healthy dwellings, with churches and public buildings, different altogether in architecture from those of the Middle Ages, or of the days of Elizabeth. Finally there was the London of her own day, the huge city of streets and factories and big modern buildings, among which there still lingered not only many rows of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses and many churches and other public buildings dating from the time when London rose from its ashes after the Great Fire, but also buildings far, far older than these. There was the Tower; there was Westminster Abbey; there was Westminster Hall. These had looked down for ages upon the city by the Thames, and watched it through its many changes from early times to the day in which Betty herself lived.

But apart from these three ancient monuments, she could scarcely now walk through any part of modern London without seeing something—if only the name of a street, which recalled a memory of the Past. London had, in fact, become for her what Godmother had once called it—the Magic City.

_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.