ADVENTURES 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JAMES DOUGLAS
 
 <ClCo
 
 ADVENTURES IN LONDON
 
 ADVENTURES 
 IN LONDON 
 
 By 
 
 JAMES DOUGLAS 
 
 Cassell and Company, Limited 
 
 London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 
 
 1909
 
 Copyright, igoq, by 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED 
 
 All Rights Reserved
 
 TO 
 MY WIFE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION, . . , 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT MIST 
 
 IN THE FOG, 3 
 
 STORM BEFORE SUNRISE, 7 
 
 IN NUBIBUS, 1 1 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT HOLIDAYS 
 
 HAMPSTEAD HEATH, 17 
 
 RECOVERING FROM WHITSUNTIDE, 21 
 
 HALF A MILLION, 26 
 
 THE CHRISTMAS CURMUDGEON, 30 
 
 THE KING OF THE JEHUS 35 
 
 SEEING THE SIGHTS 38 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT DANCING 
 
 AT A COVENT GARDEN BALL, 45 
 
 BEHIND THE SCENES, . 50 
 
 ADELINE GENKE, 54 
 
 LILY ELSIE, 58 
 
 FLEUR DESLYS 62 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT EATING 
 
 IN DEPTFORD MARKET, 69 
 
 THE CATTLE SHOW, - 73 
 
 DINNER, 77 
 
 A TRAGEDY IN PORRIDGE, 81 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEER, 84 
 
 TEA, 88 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT MIMES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 DON COQUELIN, 95 
 
 SIR JOHN HARE, 99 
 
 SIR CHARLES WYNDHAM 103 
 
 BEERBOUM TREE 107 
 
 GEORGE ALEXANDER, 112 
 
 LEWIS WALLER, 116 
 
 FORBES-ROBERTSON 120 
 
 MARIE TEMPEST, 124 
 
 MARTIN HARVEY, 128 
 
 EVELYN MILLARD, 132 
 
 HARRY LAUDER, 136 
 
 ALBERT CHEVALIER, 140 
 
 ADA REEVE, 144 
 
 SEYMOUR HICKS 148 
 
 LITTLE TICH, 152 
 
 ETHEL IRVING, 156 
 
 THE NEW KNOWLES 160 
 
 CHARLES HAWTREY, 164 
 
 THE NEW LYCEUM, 169 
 
 DRURY LANE, 173 
 
 AT THE OPERA, 177 
 
 AMONG THE PHILISTINES, 181 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT THE RIVER 
 
 IN ROTTEN Row, 187 
 
 LOVE UNDER THE LEAVES 191 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT POLITICS 
 
 A STUDY m ICE 197 
 
 A STUDY IN VELVET, 200 
 
 A STUDY IN HOMESPUN, . . 204 
 
 A NIGHT WITH BURNS, 208 
 
 WILL CROOKS 212 
 
 THE WONDERFUL WINSTON, 216 
 
 THE GAME OF BOWLES, 220 
 
 THE DECAY OF ORATORY, 223 
 
 SPRING GARDENS, 227 
 
 AN ARMY WITH BANNERS 231
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT POVERTY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE THIN GREY LINE, 237 
 
 OUR LADY POVERTY, 241 
 
 IN WEST HAM, 245 
 
 PETTICOAT LANE, 249 
 
 A PENNY FAIR, 253 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT CHILDREN 
 
 LONDON-ON-SERPS, 250 
 
 SQUITS AT PLAY, 263 
 
 HAT-BOXES AND PLAY-BOXES, 267 
 
 THE NEUROPATH IN KNICKERS, 270 
 
 IN KENSINGTON GARDENS, 273 
 
 IN THE PARK, 277 
 
 THE CHARM OF A CHILD, 281 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT LAW 
 
 THE HALO, 289 
 
 THE OLD BAILEY, 293 
 
 THE POLICE-COURT 297 
 
 CRIME AND THE CROWD, 301 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT ELD 
 
 THE EAST INDIA HOUSE, 307 
 
 TILTING IN TUDOR TIMES, 311 
 
 HAMPTON COURT, 315 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT SPORT 
 
 THE DERBY, 321 
 
 THE STRONG, RESPECTABLE BARGE, 325 
 
 BUSHIDO AT LORD'S, 328 
 
 THE ALL-BLACKS, 332 
 
 THE HORSE SHOW, 336 
 
 WHEELS, 339 
 
 THE AGONY OF DORANDO, 343
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT SPORT (Continued) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 AT RANELAGH, 347 
 
 THE POETRY OF BILLIARDS, . . 351 
 
 AT THE NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB, 355 
 
 "WONDERLAND," 360 
 
 THE AGONY OF GOLF, 364 
 
 MAINLY ABOUT EVERYTHING 
 
 IN THE READING ROOM, 373 
 
 THE AGE OF POSTCARDS, . .' 377 
 
 LIVING CARICATURES, 381 
 
 THE QUEST OF JOY, 385 
 
 THE PLEASURES OF INSANITY, 389 
 
 A COMEDY OF FRIENDSHIP, 393 
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES, 397 
 
 YOM KIPPUR, 403 
 
 HELIOTROPE AND ROSES, 408 
 
 INDIGNANT SPRING, 412
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 WHAT the whale was to Jonah, London is to the Londoner. 
 When I first set foot in London I felt as Jonah felt when he 
 first set foot in his whale. I felt the sensation of being splen- 
 didly swallowed. For many years I have been walking up 
 and down in my whale, feeling its sombre sides, groping along 
 its gloomy ribs, and desperately trying to imagine what it is 
 doing or dreaming as it voyages through the seas of time. 
 After all my fumbling and stumbling I know as little about 
 my London as Jonah knew about his whale. I have achieved 
 a comfortable familiarity with a few of its streets and a few 
 of its passions, but my familiarity is not tinged with contempt. 
 It is the familiarity of fear. 
 
 Jonah may have despised the whale after he crawled out of 
 its belly, but while he lived in its belly the whale was his uni- 
 verse. Its back to him was more awful than the spacious 
 firmament on high. Its head and its tail to him were more 
 majestic than the ends of the earth. What must have broken 
 Jonah's heart was the august indifference of the whale. The 
 whale did not know Jonah was there. He did not give the 
 whale even an attack of indigestion. London is like that. It 
 does not know you are there. It swallows and digests you 
 as it swallows and digests millions of other small fry. Jonah 
 may have beaten the whale with his fists and stamped upon 
 it with his feet. He may have cursed it. Just so have many 
 
 men beaten London and stamped on London and cursed 
 
 zi
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 London as they writhed in its belly. But London is too huge 
 to be hurt by a pigmy rage or a puny wrath; it can hardly feel 
 a riot; it would scarcely notice an insurrection; it would ignore 
 an earthquake. 
 
 London is so gigantic that she can see herself and feel 
 herself only in fragments. Other towns know their own busi- 
 ness, but London lives on vague rumours about herself. If 
 she heard that a mile of her had been burnt, she would not 
 trouble to go and look at her own ashes. She would send a 
 New Zealander to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's from a broken 
 arch of London Bridge. If she were told that the House of 
 Commons had been blown into the Thames, she would not miss 
 it from her oblivious heart. The insensibility of London 
 is more dreadful than the insensibility of the sea. The indif- 
 ference of London is more dire than the indifference of the 
 Sahara. The sea is made out of drops of salt water, but 
 London is made out of human tears. The Sahara is made 
 out of blown grains of sand, but London is made out of 
 the blown souls of men. The impassivity of dead matter 
 is a very horrible thing, so horrible that you would go mad 
 if you thought steadily about the stars. But the impassivity 
 of the living millions of living London is infinitely more hor- 
 rible. It is the tragedy of a dead soul in a quick body. You 
 can touch the living body of London that lies stretched out 
 from one horizon to another, you can hear the beating of its 
 heart of hearts, you can see the sulphurous breath of its smoke- 
 blackened lungs, but you cannot feel its soul, for it is a city 
 without a soul, a nation without a nationality, an energy without 
 a will. 
 
 There is a flower called London Pride, but where is the 
 Pride of London ? In vain do visionaries strive to lash London 
 into a civic vitality. London maintains her stony lethargy.
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 Against her granite vastness our visions break into spray, and 
 our dreams are shattered^into vapour on her league-long bastions. 
 No passion is powerful enough to fuse her massed towns into 
 a glowing glory of faith and purpose. She is a mighty city 
 made out of many mean cities, an imperial metropolis made out 
 of petty parishes. Her greatness is a chaos of trifles, and her 
 immensity is a welter of splendid vulgarities. She is a kaleido- 
 scope of broken glass and diamond-dust and powdered jewels, 
 gorgeous as a whole, but squalid when they are spilt on the 
 ground. She afflicts the imagination with a nightmare of 
 smoking stone surging wearily against the sky, breaking sadly 
 in grey billows over the shores of the inundated earth. No 
 angel stands up out of the heaving waste of architecture to cry 
 aloud its import and its aim, its grandeur and its grace. 
 
 London is too great to possess her soul. She means so 
 much and so many things that she is meaningless. She is a 
 Town of Towns, a City of Cities, an amorphous monster 
 whose whole is greater than its parts, and yet not great enough 
 to be unipersonal. A citizen of London is a citizen of No- 
 where. A citizen of Bayswater or Battersea is a citizen of 
 Nothing. London is too formlessly huge to love or to be loved, 
 too vaguely vast to inspire devotion or to give allegiance. Her 
 immeasurable girth baffles our affection and evades our 
 caress. She is too big to belong to us and we are too small 
 to belong to her. She is a wilderness without a conscience, 
 a desert without an ideal, a solitude without a soul. What 
 she needs is a dream large enough to strike along her brain 
 and flush her limbs with passionate life, a colossal dream 
 that would transcend her material necessities and weld her 
 millions into one spiritual will. Dreamers have often dreamed 
 that dream, dreamed it in an agony of pity and sympathy and 
 yearning as they sat gazing down on the sorrowfully inarticu-
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 late city as Christ gazed down on Jerusalem. Dreams of 
 social equality, dreams of brotherhood, dreams of beauty, 
 dreams of tolerance, dreams of service and sacrifice they 
 rise and fade over London like her wreaths of smoke, they 
 are coloured and discoloured like her clouds, they are beauti- 
 ful in their rash unreality, lovely in their daring fragility. But 
 some day the dreams of the generations of dreamers will come 
 true, and the soul of London will be born. 
 
 In the meanwhile, we can but watch the enduring passion 
 of London, with its titanic farce rising into a titanic comedy, 
 and its titanic comedy rising into a titanic tragedy that de- 
 feats every analysis and defies every synthesis. No brush 
 can paint the passion of London. All the bewildered spec- 
 tator can do is to make little monuments of little moments. 
 The great show hurries by and sheds only a faint image on the 
 mirror of the mind, a blurred breath on the polished steel of 
 the imagination. These adventures of mine are only a masque 
 of driven shadows and ghostly mists. They are the footprints 
 of forgotten sensations. They are the drops that the storm 
 of London flings against the window-pane. They are tiny 
 sparks blown out of the roaring furnace of her life, with its 
 turmoil of work and pleasure, its tumult of hope and despair, 
 its chorus of laughter and tears, its chant of delight and despair, 
 its clamour of anger and resignation, its riot of terror and wonder, 
 its war of wisdom and folly, its clash of men and things. They 
 are the adventures of a vagrant wandering in a labyrinth of 
 sensations, some of them ephemeral, but most of them a part 
 of the ordinary life of the ordinary Londoner. What I have 
 felt in my way most Londoners have felt in theirs, for the life 
 of London is made out of my feelings and yours, and the pas- 
 sion of London is merely the passion of one man multiplied 
 by six millions. The spectacle is bewildering, but I see it as
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 you see it, darkly and dimly, and what I see I try to say. The 
 movement of London may be meaningless, but at least it is 
 amusing and at least it moves. There is some inscrutable 
 energy behind the gestures of London, whether they are the 
 gestures of the statesman on the platform or the gestures of 
 the actor on the stage, whether they are the gestures of the 
 hungry man who begs for bread or the gestures of the athlete 
 striving for victory. Time is a gesture of eternity, and life is 
 a gesture of time, and these little gestures of London are a part 
 of the great gesticulation which is the universe.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT MIST
 
 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 IN THE FOG 
 
 I LOVE fog. I hate the Smoke Abatement Society. They 
 want to rob the poor poet of his visions and the poor painter 
 of his dreams. They are ready to sacrifice the whimsies of 
 six mystics to the comfort of six millions. It is an outrage. 
 A Whistler symphony is cheaply purchased at the price of six 
 million sneezes. Fog costs London five millions a year. Is 
 not a sonnet in smoke worth fifty millions ? Is not a madrigal 
 in mist worth a crore of rupees ? 
 
 Let us sally forth into the fog that is blindfolding London. 
 Yes, London is playing a gigantic game of Blindman's Buff. 
 With one foot planted on the south side of the Thames, and the 
 other on the north side, her left hand gropes round the Crystal 
 Palace and her right hand fumbles at Harrow-on-the-Hill. 
 Her broad, fair brows are bound with fog- wreaths. She is a 
 ghostly maiden whose limbs shimmer through soft tissues of 
 vaporous silver. 
 
 Let us walk up Fleet Street. It is fognoon. The news- 
 paper offices are muffled to the eyes, and the Griffin at Temple 
 Bar flaps its wings in the porous gloom. It is the Genius 
 of Fog, breathing sulphurous breath up Ludgate Hill into 
 the face of St. Paul's, choking the lawyers in Chancery-lane 
 and the Temple, stifling Justice in the Law Courts, and turning 
 everything into a dim fantasy. 
 
 The fog sprite is the only wizard left us. His enchant- 
 ments defy the march of reason. He laughs at science. The 
 Law Courts yesterday were new, hard, and hideous. Now 
 they seem to be as old as the Tower, and they peer through 
 
 3
 
 4 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the mist like palaces of dream. Going down the Strand we 
 see two great battleships plunging through the fog wall in 
 single line ahead. They are the churches of St. Clement Danes 
 and St. Mary le Strand. There is the stern wraith of Glad- 
 stone walking on waves of vapour, a violent sword gesticulating 
 at his feet. In Aldwych there is a vast chasm of fog fenced 
 with hoardings. The courtyard of Somerset House is a caul- 
 dron of boiling fumes and tormented phantoms that were 
 statues once. The Gaiety Theatre looks gigantic in its mantle 
 of mist. Its curves seem to stretch into infinity. 
 
 Waterloo-bridge is like the mouth of Hades spewing out 
 of its formless lips a groaning multitude of vehicles, coming 
 out of nowhere through nothing into nowhere. In an alcove a 
 man is roasting chestnuts. He seems absurdly solid compared 
 to these phantoms of men and horses. The bridge is like 
 the bridge of Mirza, for the ghosts seem to fall through broken 
 arches into the river that seems to be a fog moving under a 
 fog, as one cloud moves under another. 
 
 Down the greasy steps we dive, and wander along the 
 Embankment. Leaning over the parapet we see the flat sur- 
 face of the water sliding stealthily along. It is caked and 
 crusted with the breath of the fog, for the fog breathes on it 
 as you breathe on a polished mirror, filming its fluent shield 
 with slimy whorls and trails and spirals. Through the fog 
 a sea-gull flies like a shadow, and in the blurred water casts a 
 shadow of a shadow. But for the rough, cold, hard granite 
 under our elbows we should doubt the reality of the bird and 
 its shadow, and of the river that seems to be the shadow of the 
 fog. 
 
 Life is very vague here. Cleopatra's Needle floats elu- 
 sively in the grey like a spectre on the wharves of Acheron. 
 Its sphinxlets smile their bland satiric smile, and protrude 
 their malignantly placid paws. A green, iridescent sheen 
 shifts in the hollows of their brazen haunches. They look 
 like evil monsters that have crept out of the curdling leprosy 
 of the Stygian stream below. 
 
 But a band of sparrows dispels our vision, and our eyes
 
 IN THE FOG 5 
 
 rest with delight on a white sea-mew nestling on the water, 
 its snowy plumage unsoiled by watery fog or foggy water. 
 It is a symbol of humanity drifting through the fog of life 
 along the river of death. 
 
 Up the steps we climb and we walk along to Hungerford- 
 bridge. We meet the Witch of Endor, an old woman in a rusty 
 cloak, bent double on two crutches, and carrying three leathern 
 wallets that are doubtless full of spells and charms, love phil- 
 tres and potions, poisons and talismans, waxen men and 
 candles made of human fat. Only in the fog shall you en- 
 counter such. 
 
 Again the sombre water draws us into a dream. Without 
 a ripple it flows under the fading arches, flecked with flotsam 
 and jetsam, sullenly dreeing its weird in a sad silence that 
 is shattered now and then by the stroke of a distant hammer, 
 by faint fog-signals, sounding against the background of the 
 muted traffic-moan of London. Suddenly a dog barks incon- 
 gruously, and then through the grey vagueness a grotesque 
 lion appears, as if some giant had cut it with great scissors out 
 of the fog. For a moment we stare at it in stupefaction, and 
 then we remember the lion on the roof of the Brewery. Grif- 
 fins, sphinxlets, dogs, and lions are strange beasts when you 
 meet them in a mist. 
 
 But now Charon himself breaks through the gloom. He 
 is standing in the bows of his shadowy barge, pulling two 
 gigantic oars that dip with a soft plash in the phantom river. 
 But the Ferryman has no passengers; his face is pink, and a 
 white collar gleams coldly under his chin. Does Charon 
 wear a collar ? Look ! What is that shadowy shallop shooting 
 out of the arch ? It is a Thames police boat, patrolling in the 
 fog for casual suicides. Are there many? A fog-bound 
 policeman tells us that there are few suicides in winter. The 
 water is colder than life! 
 
 Back across the bridge we go, down the steps, past the 
 Playhouse and Charing-cross station, up Northumberland 
 Avenue into a Trafalgar Square that is peopled with ghosts 
 of kings and generals. Charles I. on his long-tailed charger
 
 6 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 and Gordon with his folded arms seem to be listening to the 
 music of the invisible fountains. The National Gallery looks 
 like a cardboard toy. The Nelson column is strangely unsub- 
 stantial, a shaft of shadow without beginning or end, base or 
 apex, a mere slit in the curtain of fog. 
 
 In Leicester Square the leafless trees are sharply silhou- 
 etted against the grey, and the Mauresque fafade of the Alham- 
 bra glimmers romantically through the fog-rack. In Piccadilly 
 Circus Gilbert's Mercury seems to be hurrying over the clouds 
 with a billet-doux to Leda. Frail, fragile, and filmy seem the 
 hansoms and omnibuses that stumble along Regent Street. 
 The finger of the fog dissolves the most solid realities. Even 
 the London policeman it turns into a faint, wan phantom, a 
 belted ghost.
 
 STORM BEFORE SUNRISE 
 
 BED is the safest place except the grave. When you are in 
 bed you know that you cannot be killed by a motor-car. There- 
 fore as a rule your mind is at rest when you are in bed. The 
 only peril which threatens you in bed is lightning. The other 
 night I was roused out of my slumbers by lightning of the most 
 intrusive brand. I tried to ignore it for some minutes, but at 
 last I found it was useless to pretend any longer that I was 
 asleep; so I opened my eyes and watched the lightning. 
 
 I have seen all sorts of lightning in all sorts of places. I 
 have seen lightning on the top of a mountain. I have seen 
 lightning at sea. But this lightning was the most vicious 
 lightning I ever saw. It seemed to light up my brain as well 
 as the sky. It seemed to trickle along my nerves and down 
 my spine. Perhaps I was in a supersensitive state of mind 
 and soul, but I confess the lightning worried me and vexed 
 me and irritated me. 
 
 At last I could bear it no longer, so I got up and watched 
 the pranks of the lightning. From my window I could see a 
 vast tract of sky. The lightning was busy all over it. Some- 
 times it swept over the sky in a soft wash of shining flame, 
 making all the clouds seem as solid as houses. Tidal lightning 
 is not terrifying. It wears a benignant and benevolent aspect, 
 as if some good-humoured electrician were manipulating a gigan- 
 tic limelight in the clouds. The thunder was dim and distant. 
 It rolled and rumbled lazily, and to the ear it seemed like a 
 misty range of remote mountains, dark peaks and ridges rising 
 and falling in a continuous rhythm of muffled sound. 
 
 But gradually the reverberating ranges came nearer, the 
 noise grew sharper and clearer. Then the lightning began 
 to fork itself. Jagged spurts of yellow fire began to blaze in 
 
 7
 
 8 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 all directions. The blackness of the night was roughly torn 
 into horrible rents of darting flame. The silence seemed to 
 thicken until it became almost a tangible thing, a kind of coarse 
 texture that was split by the thunder. The thunder began to 
 lose its soft, musical drum-note. It began to rip and crack, 
 and I felt that it was exploding rather than booming. The 
 lightning seemed to grow angrier, and the flashes gradually 
 grew malignant and malevolent. There was a vehement 
 caprice in their headlong riot. The space between the flashes 
 grew less until they became continuous. The whole sky was 
 alive with every variety of irregular fulguration. There were 
 long flashes that seemed to run from the very height of heaven 
 down to the chimney-pots that stood out against the sky. There 
 were short fierce jabs of fire that looked like furious thrusts 
 delivered by invisible swordsmen ambushed in banks of cloud. 
 
 As I watched the interplay of the flashes it seemed as if 
 there were an army of giants waging an Armageddon in the 
 air. The giants were fighting with swords a mile long, and as 
 their great blades crossed and clashed the lightning sprang 
 like sparks from steel. It was like a duel of gods. The light- 
 nings were the swords of the gods and the thunder was the voice 
 of their artillery. The clamour and tumult seemed strangely 
 inhuman. I felt that man was not concerned in the conflict 
 that raged in the firmament. The combatants were engaged 
 in a combat which made the combats of men seem trivial and 
 unimportant. The whole business of life appeared to be a 
 little thing. Our civilization and its affairs were suddenly 
 dwarfed and belittled by the savage forces let loose in the night. 
 
 As the lightning crept closer and closer I felt the presence 
 of invisible danger. My eyes grew weary of the blinding illumi- 
 nation. I longed for the cool dark and the cool silence. The 
 swift flame with its sharp speed seemed to brush my flesh as it 
 plunged down the dizzy sky. The thunder seemed to split 
 over my head, with a rasping, tearing violence that shook my 
 nerves and made my heart sick with faintness. The din 
 appeared to make the windows rattle and the very walls round 
 me seemed to reel and totter. I began to wonder what I should
 
 STORM BEFORE SUNRISE 9 
 
 feel if the lightning struck me. I tried to argue against the 
 possibility of being struck. I assured myself that death by 
 lightning is a rare sort of death, and that the odds against my 
 death by lightning were enormously great. But in spite of the 
 reasonings of reason I felt a sharp terror creeping through 
 my brain. Surely all that pageantry of peril could not be 
 utterly innocuous. Surely somebody was being slain by some 
 of those cruel spears of death. Although I knew that I was 
 safe I felt horribly unsafe. The crashing of the thunder out- 
 argued me. Mere noise is a thing against which reason is 
 useless. 
 
 The thunder grew steadily noisier. It seemed more and 
 more menacing, and as it roared in my ears my courage oozed 
 away. I was indignant with myself for feeling afraid. I 
 denounced myself as a coward. But nevertheless my cow- 
 ardice grew, and I became feverishly impatient. I wished 
 that the whole thing would stop. "How much longer is it 
 going on?" I asked. I built up a great grievance in my soul. 
 Why all this pother about nothing ? Why could not the thunder 
 thunder and the lightning lighten somewhere else, and let me 
 alone? I actually resented the thing. I took it as a personal 
 affront. 
 
 Then the rain came, and I welcomed the rain as if it were 
 a friend. It fell like a lake edgeways in great silver showers 
 through which the lightning played hide-and-seek. Amid 
 my terror I found room for delight in the beauty of the illumi- 
 nated rain that glittered like diamonds on fire. Slowly the rain 
 seemed to sponge the lightning out of the sky. The thunder 
 retreated sulkily and sullenly. Then a great darkness and 
 a great silence crept across the sky. I felt the blackness and 
 the stillness like the touch of a hand in the night. After a 
 while the darkness began to whiten into dawn. The sky grad- 
 ually paled and cleared, and an ineffable peace came lapping 
 and lipping the roofs. The London sparrows began to twitter 
 sleepily, and their twitterings sounded strangely soft and gentle 
 and companionable after all the rattle and racket and riot of 
 the storm.
 
 10 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Creeping back to bed, I felt utterly worn and weary. My 
 head ached with noise and my eyes were hard and dry with 
 the glare. My flesh was tired as if it had been beaten with 
 rods. At last I fell asleep. Next morning I eagerly read the 
 newspapers to see what damage had been done by the rioters 
 of heaven. Nothing! All that row had been meaningless. 
 Really, thunder and lightning are theatrical impostors. They 
 overdo their business. The storm, after all, was only a storm 
 in a teacup.
 
 IN NUBIBUS 
 
 O! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, 
 
 Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, 
 To make the shifting clouds be what you please, 
 
 Or let the easily persuaded eyes 
 Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould 
 
 Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low 
 And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 
 
 'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go 
 From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land! 
 
 THE roof of London is the loveliest in the world, yet few 
 of our six million Londoners have ever seen it. They walk 
 along the streets without lifting up their eyes to the most gor- 
 geously painted ceiling that ever glorified mortal dreams and 
 desires. 
 
 The sky is the only unexplored and unexploited region of 
 the earth. The pageantry of sea and land has been lavishly 
 painted by poets and prosemen, but the sky has been scurvily 
 treated as a casual quarry for similists and metaphoricians. 
 Now that the age of the airship has dawned, and man has 
 tardily embarked upon the conquest of the kingdom of the clouds, 
 it is time to protest against this immemorial ostracism. Words- 
 worth rediscovered the lyrical loveliness of the land. Swin- 
 burne rediscovered the lyrical loveliness of the sea. The world 
 now waits for the advent of a great bard who shall rediscover 
 the lyrical loveliness of the sky. If Swinburne had not dedi- 
 cated his music to the sea, he might have been the laureate of 
 the sky, but it is not given to even our prince of poets to become 
 regent of the moving roof as well as regent of the moving floor. 
 
 The changeful splendours of the London sky are wrought 
 out of the breath of her body, for her breath is smoke. Out of 
 the myriad chambers in her great lungs she sends forth a 
 mystery of wreathing shapes that are transfigured into innu- 
 merable fantasies by the light of the sun and moon and stars. 
 
 11
 
 12 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 I marvel that a painter like Sir William Richmond should lead 
 the vandals who long to banish the gnomes of smoke and the 
 elves of fog, and who would cover London with a harsh canopy 
 of steely blue, as blatantly brilliant as the roof of Paris and the 
 ceiling of Rome. Let us worship our Lady of Smoke, our 
 divinely grimy London, who scatters every day before our win- 
 dows her largesse of filmy glory. 
 
 I hate the Philistines who seek to rob the London poet of 
 the one realm which consoles him for the loss of the windy 
 vistas of dale and valley, moor and mountain, hill and heather, 
 shining river and flaw-roughened sea. I loathe a pure and 
 vacant sky, a depopulated inane. The empty horror of the 
 smokeless ether affrights me. I shrink from the bare, inhos- 
 pitable wastes wherein the stars go voyaging in lonely splen- 
 dour. Give me the homely curls and whorls of human smoke, 
 the cursive vocabulary of mortal hearths, warm with the comedy 
 and tragedy of men and women. I can decipher in these 
 dissolving runes and melting hieroglyphs the chronicles of a 
 million firesides, the abstracts and biographies of loves innu- 
 merable, of pathetic labouring souls, dark with failure or bright 
 with obscure patience. Often our London sky flames like an 
 old missal, illuminated with all the colours of the human 
 comedy, and engrossed with the scripture of life. 
 
 It is this companionable friendship of the humanised sky 
 that I love beyond the alien austerities of the smokeless air. 
 It takes you with a tender embrace as you return from a so- 
 journ amid the inhuman grandeurs of untempered Nature. 
 The married comradeship of these chimnied and steepled 
 clouds lessens your dread of the illimitable spaces that deride 
 your little dreams. They shelter you from the irony of the 
 stars. Eternity is broken into tolerable fragments by the as- 
 saulting towers and storming spires of London; and the up- 
 ward surge of her billowing stones drowns the thunder of 
 infinity. This celestial impermanence poised upon human per- 
 manence, heavenly change balanced upon mortal immutability, 
 can calm and fortify the spirit troubled by its own unstable 
 state, and the spectacle of enduring streets with hoary names
 
 IN NUBIBUS 13 
 
 silhouetted against the vanishing brevity of skyey thoroughfares 
 steadies the dizzy imagination. 
 
 The sense of beauty does not starve in London, for at any 
 moment its hunger may be appeased by an upward glance 
 at the travelling procession of atmospheric angels trailing their 
 many-coloured robes from east to west. The vexed heart 
 can escape from its prison of toil and pleasure in the twinkling 
 of an eye. The fretted brain can set a tiny nerve in motion 
 and soothe its lassitude with fairy shapes and hues beyond 
 the divinest dreams of man. For London is the supreme 
 alchemist of beauty who can transmute the heavy lead of 
 reality into the filigree gold of romance. 
 
 Can the average sensual man see these aerial epics? Well, 
 I think we all underrate the romantic spark in ourselves and 
 in others. We conceal our wonder and mask our imagination. 
 It is habitude. We are wont to keep our eyes low. We do 
 not welcome the spiritual surprise of the white Alps that soar 
 above the Strand, the unclimbed peaks that look down upon 
 Pall Mall. We do not bathe in the Mediterranean waters 
 whose foam-flecked blue washes Saffron Hill and the straits 
 of Little Italy. But these delights are ours if we look up 
 between the gorges and ravines of brick and stone into the 
 unsellable heavens. 
 
 For most of us sunrises are luxuries. Have you ever seen 
 a London sunrise? Have you walked through the streets 
 during a long summer dawn ? Have you seen London slough- 
 ing the night, her lamps paling slowly in the pearly, luminous 
 whiteness that creeps out of the grey like an angel out of the 
 arms of a ghost? Have you overheard the colourless silences 
 that seem to fall like invisible snowflakes of soundless sound 
 on the roofs of the sleeping houses and the dust of the deso- 
 late streets? 
 
 Well, perhaps these ecstasies are for the few. But the 
 sunsets of London are for us all. There are many ways of 
 seeing them. I like to watch them from any of the bridges 
 across the Thames between Richmond and the Tower. The 
 Serpentine bridge is also an ideal haunt for the lover of sun-
 
 14 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 sets, for you can watch the clouds over a tender foreground of 
 water and trees and roofs. But it is best to let the London 
 sunset ravish you unawares, on foot, at a window, in a train, 
 or on the top of a 'bus. Perhaps the 'bus is the best of all. I 
 love the 'bus. If the hansom is the London gondola, the 'bus 
 is the London galleon. Do not travel inside a 'bus. Outside 
 is the place, and I like it better than the box-seat on a coach. 
 Seated high above the crawling traffic, you can breathe the 
 bracing air and see the wonderful clouds from the Bank to the 
 World's End. Many a magical sunset may be seen from the 
 'bus going westward along Holborn and Oxford Street, along 
 Piccadilly and the Knightsbridge Road, violent conflagrations 
 of the sky roaring and seething strangely above the familiar 
 jingling of hansom bells, the clear clatter of iron-shod hoofs, 
 the rattle of harness, the hoot of motor horns, the cries of news- 
 boys, and the dumb-show of pedestrians.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT HOLIDAYS
 
 HAMPSTEAD HEATH 
 
 Come, come, come and make eyes at me, 
 
 Down at the Old Bull and Bush. 
 Come, come, drink some port wine with me, 
 
 Down at the Old Bull and Bush. 
 Hear the little German Band, 
 Just let me hold your hand, 
 De-e-e-ar! 
 
 Do, do, come and have a drink or two. 
 Down at the Old Bull and Bush. 
 
 SING hey for Whit Monday on Hampstead Heath ! Here 
 is your true Bartholomew Fair, the fat humour of jolly London 
 rolling between green, leaves and green grass, richly tickled 
 with the great cockney joke of being alive. 
 
 Hard by Jack Straw's Castle the holiday harlequinade is 
 at its hottest, and we are bewildered by the grotesquery of this 
 cauldron boiling and bubbling over with variegated faces; 
 health jostling disease, filth elbowing freshness; maids in snowy 
 muslin beside hags in rags; rosy, high-collared clerks; new- 
 shaven workmen; natty, bepowdered shopgirls; greasy knaves 
 and grimy rogues; nursemaids in fragrant butcher's blue with 
 stainless children, and trollops trailing muddy urchins. Heart- 
 ily Dame Nature stirs this broth-pot of humanity, and as she 
 lets its multifarious odour steam into the nostrils of the sun, 
 the Gargantuan paunch of St. Paul's at our feet seems to shake 
 with laughter, and the far under-growl of London mellows 
 into a gigantic chuckle. 
 
 Grotesque is the multitude, and still more grotesque its 
 food and drink. No roast oxen, no boar's head, no foun- 
 tains spouting wine, but a chaos of comic comestibles, jaundiced 
 plumcake, bananas, oranges, hunks of bread, torrents of sickly 
 biscuits, glass tubs of amber lemonade siphoned sweating 
 into tumblers, forged ales, and terrible tea; ghastly sweetmeats, 
 2 17
 
 18 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 and fearful shellfish fainting in the dust and heat; American 
 maizypop, livid ices, and that good democratic champagne, 
 ginger beer. 
 
 Grotesque, too, are our amusements. Paramount is the 
 hairy cocoanut, astonished target of many missiles. Like a 
 gibbet rises the Strengthometer, luring Thor to wield the ham- 
 mer and ring the bell that registers 1,760 units of virility. 
 "The Game of Fair Play" is seductive. Eight skittles en- 
 circle a pillar from whose crest hangs a ball. You set the ball 
 swinging round the pillar. It curls and uncurls itself, and 
 "every time you hit the 8 you get a penny." Has anybody 
 ever hit the " 8 " ? Behold the noble game of " Hand Billiards ! " 
 There, too, is the pigeon-hole game. Round a horizontal nest 
 of pigeon-holes ramps an orgy of felonious delf and criminal 
 crockery. If you can pot a ball, you can choose a crime. A 
 wisp of a man is bowling with the craft of a Bosanquet. He 
 does the hat trick, and promptly sells his three prizes to the 
 dejected proprietress for eighteenpence and three balls. Footer, 
 too, is possible. You kick a tethered football through a hole 
 in a screen. Fiercest is the fun round the living target, a grin- 
 ning black face thrust through a hole in a white sheet, at which 
 you may hurl three balls for a penny. 
 
 But all these delights shrivel as you reach the heart and 
 hub of the lusty carnival. Towering high above a swaying tide 
 of heads are three polychromatic booths " ranged in royal rank 
 a-row." One is the Palace of Pugilism, where you may see 
 "The Hero of Two Hundred Fights," and sigh over the 
 vanished splendour of the Ring. 
 
 Beside the last of the bruisers is the latest tremor of mod- 
 ernity, the cinematograph. We pay our twopence and plunge 
 into the dark tent. ("Don't!") A battlefield shivers on the 
 sheet. ("How dare you?") The wounded are neatly ar- 
 ranged in rows ("Oh-h-h!") and over each man bends 
 a neat nurse in spotless uniform (Disturbance) her cap 
 streamers fluttering in the breeze. (Loud Kisses.) 
 
 All this is humorous, but the highest flight of comedy is 
 the gaudy menagerie, with its thunder-throated steam organ,
 
 HAMPSTEAD HEATH 19 
 
 whose iron cadences batter out of hearing all rival blares and 
 blasts of sound. On the platform stands the showman; mole- 
 skin jacket with leopard skin collar; oiled curls; saw- voice 
 tearingly vociferous. A rouged girl dances absently, her 
 physical agility colliding violently with her inert and weary 
 gaze. Her bespangled skirt of flaming plush shows a thready 
 fringe of lamentable lingerie, and she wears white buckskin 
 boots laced nearly knee-high. On each side of her are living 
 gargoyles, down whose cheeks run rivers of grease-paint. 
 One clown belabours a drum, and between the drum and the 
 steam-organ stands on one leg a dirty stuffed pelican which 
 crowns the incongruity of all this violently exploding movement 
 and colour and sound. 
 
 I mount the steps, and as I pass the stuffed bird I start. 
 It is not stuffed. It is alive. Its small, cold, round eye is 
 open, and as I stare it winks. For me the whole bacchanal 
 is focussed in the pelican's impassive eye. The organ shrieks, 
 the drum blatters, the crowd sways and sweats; yet this abomin- 
 able dusty bird stands on its webbed foot immovably aloof, 
 imperturbably disdainful, stiff and still as stone, an image of 
 carven scorn. 
 
 And so into the menagerie, where I find the pelican's 
 haughty indifference duplicated in every cage. Two dole- 
 ful dromedaries gaze at us in velvet-eyed contempt flecked 
 with pity. A row of seedy waxworks glare with glassy curios- 
 ity, making us wonder whether they have paid twopence to 
 see us. Monkeys lounge and loll beside a dingo dog; a mourn- 
 ful half-bald lion blinks blearily behind his bars; a blase" bear 
 wobbles rhythmically like a furry pendulum ; a wan and weary 
 wolf yawns at a bored hyena. Also, behind a curtain, ''The 
 Giant Rat and the Bloodsucker" a luscious pennyworth of 
 horror. 
 
 But enough! It is time to obey the call chorussed in our 
 ears all day. Let us go to "the old Bull and Bush." We 
 trudge along the Spaniards Road, meeting melodious maenads, 
 with arms interlaced, dancing four abreast. We pass per- 
 forming soldier-dogs, one, with grey moustache, ludicrously
 
 20 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 like "Bobs." Here a sturdy fellow, with beer-glazed eyes, 
 marches along playing a mouth-organ. 
 
 Now the riot and the revel smite ear and eye amain. It 
 is the "Bull and Bush." An organ-grinder is grinding out the 
 "Come, Come" chorus, and inside a packed ring (like the 
 quadrille rings in Paris) four laughing girls are dancing daintily. 
 Their hats feathered from brow to ear; their hair stuffed out 
 in huge rolls over either cheek; their velvet gowns delicately 
 lifted to show the stiff starched white petticoat; round their 
 plump throats massy pearl necklaces; in their ears ponderous 
 earrings; their young faces flushed, their eyes bright with 
 gaiety; their tiny feet delicately shod, toes pointed, heels high 
 and curved they are the fairest and freshest of naiads and 
 dryads. Under the tightening cambric bodice the young bosom 
 swells as the lithe young body sways back in a wild cake- 
 walk. "Go on, Annie!" cries a cockney youth. The dancers 
 shriek and laugh and sing. The wine of life is on their rosy 
 lips. In them we see the rhythmic undulation of all the pas- 
 sions in the world. We catch the old ecstasy that is always 
 young. As for me, my eyes fill with hot tears, my flesh tingles 
 with wonder. I see the eternal romance of eternal life while 
 the organ gurgles into a languid waltz, and the couples swing 
 and sway with half-closed eyes. 
 
 As I depart I see a poor hunchback under a dusty tree. 
 He is teasing a tethered donkey. Oh, my brethren, the mad 
 pity and the wild beauty of you and me!
 
 RECOVERING FROM WHITSUNTIDE 
 
 WHITSUNTIDE is over, and at this moment several million 
 hearts are bowed down. If I were asked to say what is the 
 most miserable in the life of a man, I should reply that it is 
 the mood in which a man comes back from a brief holiday. It 
 is easy to return to the desk after a long holiday. You have 
 tired yourself out with amusement, and you feel a blithe relief 
 at the prospect of flinging yourself into your daily round and 
 common task. Work has become almost a novelty to your 
 sated soul. The long days on the beach or the moor have 
 grown wearisome, and the strain of protracted idleness has 
 become unbearable. You yearn to escape from the monotony 
 of indolence and the perpetual proximity of your friends. The 
 holiday appetite does not grow with eating. It is glutted with 
 frivolity and cloyed with piers and Pierrots. But the Whit- 
 suntide holiday is not long enough to satiate the pleasure-seeker. 
 He has not had time to turn away with disgust from the feast 
 of liberty. He is torn from the joy of doing nothing before he 
 has begun to fret and fume at the bore of having nothing to 
 do. He is a slave who has not discovered the tedium of free- 
 dom. For a few jolly days he has tried to forget the existence 
 of his chain, but just as he is beginning to succeed it is sud- 
 denly tightened, and the tyrant of duty drags him back from 
 the sea-front, the golf-links, or the trout-stream. With a groan 
 he returns, and unpacks his portmanteau with a bilious frown. 
 
 It is of no avail at this crisis to preach to him the gospel 
 of work. He has tasted the bread of idleness, and he declines 
 to listen patiently to your homily on the beauty of industry. 
 The primal curse blackens his spirit. The greyness of life 
 wounds him. Work is a habit, and he has got out of it. He 
 finds it as hard to get into it as a diver who is getting into a 
 
 21
 
 22 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 diving-suit for the first time. The blessing of habit is that 
 it prevents you from seeing the trivial details of life. It nar- 
 cotises your critical faculty. It keeps you from brooding over 
 the ridiculous absurdity of the necessary unnecessary. It 
 bathes you in oblivion. But a short holiday opens your eyes 
 to everything. You have stayed at a hotel where the routine 
 of life is different from the routine of home. You get up at 
 a different hour in a different bedroom. You shave before a 
 different glass. You splash in a different bath. You drink 
 different coffee out of a different cup. You eat your dinner 
 off different plates with different knives and forks. You see 
 different faces. You feel a new man in a new world. You 
 do not catch the s? me old train in the morning and the same 
 old train in the evening. You do not eat the same old lunch in 
 the same old restaurant. You do not wear that horrible old 
 top-hat and those too familiar patent boots. You are in 
 tweeds or flannels, and probably you have half a dozen new 
 ties. You read a new newspaper and you doze over a new 
 novel. You do not see the same old London sky leaning on 
 the same old London roofs. You do not smell the same old 
 motor-buses, trailing their noisome clouds of vapour along the 
 City asphalt. Your eyes open wide as you gaze at blue clouds 
 that do not stink and at sky that is not decorated with tele- 
 phone wires and chimney-cowls. 
 
 It is bitterly hard to come back to all the old things that 
 you had never noticed before you went away. You are filled 
 with hatred of your very doormat and hallstand. Your um- 
 brella annoys you, and the patient aspect of your furniture 
 infuriates you. The chairs in your dining-room stand as 
 if they had no desire to do anything else but stand for ever. 
 The clock ticks as if it had no ambition to achieve anything 
 higher than ticking. The pictures hang on the wall as if they 
 cared for nothing but hanging. The old wall-paper is content 
 to stick to the old wall in the old way. The old carpet is 
 resigned to its lot. It does not ask to be a wall-paper any more 
 than the wall-paper asks to be a carpet. The ornaments on 
 the mantelpiece show no symptoms of rebellion. The stair-
 
 RECOVERING FROM WHITSUNTIDE 23 
 
 rods on the stairs are cheerfully doing what they have always 
 done. Everything save you is sunk in acceptance of fate. 
 The stupendous patience of inanimate objects maddens you. 
 Must you be even as they? Must you school yourself to emu- 
 late the fortitude of your fender, and the phlegm of your coal- 
 scuttle? Must you lead the uneventful life of your door- 
 knocker? Ah, it is too much. Your soul sickens within you 
 as you stare down a vista of duplicated days. Your habits 
 howl at you like a ring of wild beasts watching a man who 
 is nodding over a fire. By and by you will fall asleep, and 
 they will devour you. 
 
 How long does the post-holiday gloom last? It depends 
 upon your temperament. The first day is usually the worst. 
 Everything goes wrong. When you open your eyes in the 
 morning you forget that you have come back, until the things 
 in the bedroom begin to talk. They chuckle over your dis- 
 comfiture. "My boy," they say, "we have got you again." 
 It is no use grumbling. They have got you. Everything 
 has got you, from the postman's knock to the breakfast bell. 
 Your bacon and eggs have got you. Heavens! How often have 
 you eaten that rasher, and yet here it is again, not in the least 
 fatigued with being eaten. Here, too, is the marmalade. 
 Good gracious ! You must have swallowed seas of marmalade. 
 The assault of the usual rages all day with unabated fury. 
 Your office stool does not betray the faintest spasm of sur- 
 prise when you sit down on it. Little it recks of holidays. 
 It is a passionless creature. It does not care whether you 
 sit on it or not. It is complacently happy or unhappy, or 
 whatever it is the nature of office stools to be. Your pens are 
 callously calm, and your ink-pot allows you to take off its hinged 
 hat without comment. There is a little dust on the collar of your 
 office coat, but if you ask it how it spent Whitsuntide, it will 
 give your soul a dusty answer. Perhaps it is unreasonable 
 to look for solace from a round ebony ruler or a pincushion. 
 But your coat is an old friend to whom you naturally look 
 for sympathy and consolation. What your body is to your soul 
 your coat is to your body. You have grown to fit it and it has
 
 24 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 grown to fit you. It is a rough mould of your torso,*and as you 
 slip your arms into the sleeves you feel the years that the locust 
 has eaten in the lining. It is a part of your hopes and fears, 
 your exultations and despairs. To it you will turn in your 
 dejection. Surely its old buttons will whisper a word of com- 
 fort. It is a fond delusion. Your old coat is as indifferent 
 as your blotting-pad. It is not moved by your sorrows. It 
 would not feel a pang if you never wiped your pen on it again. 
 It is at ease on its peg. It has no more heart than your 
 nail-brush. 
 
 Fortunately, the bloom of the holiday wears off very quickly. 
 You rapidly repetrify yourself. Perchance you stay your 
 desolate soul with a game of chess or draughts or dominoes 
 in an A. B. C. or a Mecca. The Double Six, the Knight, 
 and the Bishop are always ready to obey your orders. The 
 King and the Queen are your very humble and most obedient 
 servants. In your hour of need you can fall back with con- 
 fidence upon your Castle. Wonderful are the gentle devices 
 wherewith the hungry spirit appeases its passion for variety. 
 A game of billiards quells many a revolt against the heavy 
 irony of life. It does not matter very much what you do so 
 long as you do something else. The sense of escape is cheaply 
 purchased. Even street accidents are useful, and a horse 
 never falls without breaking the monotony of existence for a 
 small crowd. When all else fails you can read the newspaper, 
 which reveals every day the existence of strange beings who are 
 privileged to murder or be murdered, to marry or to be di- 
 vorced, to steal hatfuls of diamonds in Hatton Garden, to own 
 racehorses or theatres, to live in Mayfair and die in motor 
 smashes. Thus, by slow degrees, you forget your temporary 
 nostalgia, and regain your customary affection for the usually 
 usual and the as-you-were-ness-of-as-you-are. You button 
 your braces without regret and lace your boots without remorse. 
 The fairyland, where men always do what they please and are 
 always pleased by what they do, fades far away like the song 
 of the nightingale, and you become your good grey self. You 
 are like Thackeray's retired captain who "surveyed the storm
 
 RECOVERING FROM WHITSUNTIDE 25 
 
 as being another gentleman's business." You cease to make 
 overdrafts on the bank of life. Your imagination turns over 
 and goes asleep. You do your duty without knowing it, and 
 you no longer feel the spur of incongruity. It is upon honest 
 fellows like you that the stability of the State is based. You 
 are a part of the gyroscope that keeps civilisation running on 
 its mono-rail. There is a great faculty of patience in you, 
 in spite of your Whitsuntide insurrection. Deep is the divine 
 contentment of the serene lamp-post and the imperturbable 
 pillar-box, but after all it is not deeper or more divine than 
 yours. For they are never called upon to recover from a holi- 
 day, while you perform that miracle at least four times in the 
 year.
 
 HALF A MILLION 
 
 A GOOD newspaper might be made every day out of the 
 things that are not in the newspapers. We are so accustomed 
 to take the news in our newspapers for granted that we forget 
 that the news depends to a great extent upon the news-gather- 
 ers. News is like the manna in the wilderness. It must be 
 gathered. If it is not gathered it melts away. Newspapers 
 are always empty on Bank holidays, not because the supply 
 of news has failed, but because the newsmakers are idle. There 
 are some events which report themselves. There are others 
 which must be excavated by trained excavators. The appetite 
 for news is quite modern. Like all other appetites it grows 
 with what it feeds on. The supply increases the demand. 
 It is a curious fact that the collection of news depends upon 
 the activity of a very small class. The ordinary man does not 
 send news to newspapers. 
 
 I happened to be in town on Bank Holiday, and it occurred 
 to me that it would be interesting and exciting to go to the 
 Exhibition to see the holiday crowd. If it had not been a 
 Bank Holiday the newspapers would have photographed and 
 described the stupendous multitude. The mobilisation of 
 nearly half a million people in one spot is a sensational occur- 
 rence. I doubt whether it has ever been seen in London before. 
 But it was baldly and briefly dismissed for the simple reason 
 that journalists, like other people, like to take a holiday when 
 they can. Such a spectacle as I saw will not be seen again 
 for many a year. 
 
 When I entered the Exhibition in the afternoon I found 
 it in a submerged condition. The White City was blotted out 
 with human beings. The walls were visible, but no more. 
 The broad avenues and spacious courts were covered with 
 
 26
 
 HALF A MILLION 27 
 
 dense, sluggishly heaving masses of humanity. The density 
 of the moving multitude was extraordinary, It was not a 
 motionless density, but a thick, clotted, treacly fluid that seemed 
 to be stirred heavily round and round by an unseen giant 
 spoon wielded by an unseen giant. Round and round the 
 viscous rivers of humanity turned and twisted. There was no 
 sane or coherent plan or purpose in their movement. They 
 swirled and eddied to and fro, back and forth, up and down, 
 across and along. 
 
 Viewed as a whole, the multitude looked like a flowing 
 and ebbing tide, troubled and tormented by some mysterious 
 force that drew it hither and thither. The vague vastness of 
 it stunned the mind. One felt that this was the appearance 
 of mankind as an aggregate, not a lovely apparition, but a 
 dull, oppressive, drowsy monster, wallowing and groping and 
 fumbling and stumbling in a dream. 
 
 The sun beat down with sullen fierceness upon the moving 
 acres of humanity. The lungs of the strange, writhing crea- 
 ture seemed to suck the clean air out of the small cup of hot 
 blue sky laid against its enormous mouth. It may sound 
 incredible, but the air in the vast White City was as foul as 
 the air in a theatre or a dosshouse. It tasted bad, as if it had 
 been breathed and rebreathed for hours by hundreds of thou- 
 sands. The pure air above could not force its way down into 
 that huge hollow dish of human beings. The polluted air 
 in the dish could not force its way out or up. By some freak 
 of the atmospheric conditions the multitude was stifled with 
 its own breath. There was no relief and no alleviation. 
 
 As there were only a few seats, the multitude could not sit 
 down. It was compelled to move, and as it moved wearily 
 it sweated in the sickening sunlight. The human smell was 
 overpowering, overwhelming, almost appalling. It pene- 
 trated the Garden Club. It saturated Paillard's. It hung 
 like a damp pall over the waterways. It rose to the height 
 of the Flip-Flap. I have smelled all sorts of crowds, from the 
 Cup crowd at the Crystal Palace to the Derby crowd. But 
 the odour of this crowd was quite different. It was not the
 
 28 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 odour of the unwashed, but simply the concentrated odour 
 of humanity, a sharp, salt, pungent odour as distinctive as the 
 odour of cows in a byre or of horses in a stable or of dogs in 
 a kennel. It struck me as strange that humanity should have 
 an odour of its own, though I have no doubt animals are famil- 
 iar with it. 
 
 The multitude was infinitely weary, horribly tired. I do 
 not know how many people fainted, but I do know that I 
 saw ambulances being hurried to and fro by anxious police- 
 men. Before my own eyes a strong young man suddenly 
 fell like a poleaxed ox. He was lifted to his feet. An ambu- 
 lance man came up, felt his pulse, and without a second's 
 hesitation slung him across his shoulders like a sack of flour, 
 his head and hands dangling down over his right shoulder, his 
 trunk resting on his shoulder-blades, and his legs dangling over 
 his left shoulder. With wonderful skill the ambulance man ran 
 through the parting crowd with his heavy burden. The man 
 carrying the man was he not a symbol of civilisation, in which 
 every man is carrying another man on his shoulders ? 
 
 The longer I studied that immense multitude the more 
 keenly I felt its pathos. It was composed of very simple folk, 
 capable of only the simplest moods and emotions. Their 
 silence and their sobriety amazed me. I did not see one 
 drunken man or one drunken woman. Nay, I failed to detect 
 even the vaguest vestige of intoxication. The decorum of 
 the people was touching. Their gentle acquiescence was in 
 a way almost tragic. 
 
 It suggested the patience the divine patience the resig- 
 nation the sublime resignation of humanity. There were 
 many pale mothers carrying fatigued infants, whose thin 
 pendant legs told the old tale of malnutrition. As I watched 
 these weary mothers I wondered why the poor consent to 
 carry on the business of providing citizens for the State. Then 
 I thought of the scanty pleasures of the poor, and marvelled 
 at their fortitude and their forbearance. Those mild, meek 
 masses, moving heavily hour after hour, were only a projec- 
 tion of the immeasurable bulk of humanity whose days are
 
 HALF A MILLION 29 
 
 grey with toil. Behind the white towers I could see in a vision 
 the innumerable host of common, drab, obscure men and 
 women' and children winding round the world. The pity of 
 it was unbearable, because they were unconscious of the pity. 
 Humanity would be less tragic if it were less ignorant. The 
 crowning touch of tragedy was the music. They drank it 
 as dry soil drinks rain. And they all went home with a beau- 
 tifully patient gentleness. Half a million of them!
 
 THE CHRISTMAS CURMUDGEON 
 
 ARE you a curmudgeon? If so, you are out of season. 
 Curmudging cannot be tolerated in London at Christmas. 
 Let them curmudge all the year round, but there must be no 
 curmudging at Yuletide. The curmudgeon, like Toussaint 
 L'Ouverture, is "the most unhappy man of men." He has a 
 full purse and an empty heart. I am always sorry for the poor 
 curmudgeon at this time of the year. Father Christmas is 
 very hard on him. He robs him right and left. He makes 
 his money run out at the heels of his boots. He prises open 
 his closed fists with a red-hot chisel. He cuts holes in his 
 pockets. He drags him into toy-shops and forces him to buy 
 expensive gifts for his nephews and nieces. And the more 
 the curmudgeon spends the more miserable he becomes. It 
 is not always more blessed to give than to receive. The cur- 
 mudgeon is generous without joy. He neither eats his cake 
 nor has it. His gifts leave an open wound in his heart. He 
 is too mean to taste the flavour of gratitude. He cannot feel 
 the joy of anticipated joy. We need a word to express the 
 emotion of the true gift-giver before and after he gives his gift. 
 His frame of mind is enviable. It is good-nature gazing at 
 itself in the glass, and revelling in the happiness it is about 
 to create. It is more than magnanimity. It is Yulanimity. 
 It is Yuleficence. It is Yulevolence. Let us all be unani- 
 mously Yulanimous, and Yuleficent, and Yulevolent. 
 
 There are many kinds of curmudgeons. There is the old- 
 fashioned curmudgeon that Dickens drew in his "Christmas 
 Carol." I like the old-fashioned curmudgeon. Scrooge's 
 bark was worse than his bite. "If I could work my will," 
 he said, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' 
 on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding with a stake 
 of holly in his heart." A glorious death! How could a man 
 
 30
 
 THE CHRISTMAS CURMUDGEON 31 
 
 die better ? But, bless my soul, Scrooge was only pretending to 
 curmudge. He was only playing up to Dickens. He knew all 
 the time that he was going to buy that prize turkey, and raise 
 Bob Cratchit's salary, and be a second father to Tiny Tim. 
 
 I wish we had more curmudgeons like Mr. Scrooge. But 
 Dickens is dead and Scrooge is no more. Those fierce old 
 screws who suddenly burst into a shower of Christmas boxes 
 are obsolete. Dead and gone are all those quixotic misers 
 and extravagant skinflints. I drink to their memory. I sigh 
 for their stingy prodigality and genial ferocity. They were 
 all Father Christmases in disguise. 
 
 The modern curmudgeon does not play up to Dickens. 
 He sneers at him. He has a heart like a dried pea. His nose 
 is not pointed, his cheek is not shrivelled, his lips are not blue, 
 and there is no frosty rime on his head. He is plump and 
 sleek. He does not pinch and scrape. He spends his money 
 freely on himself. He is a very superior person. He thinks 
 that the humour of Dickens is low and his sentiment maudlin. 
 He regards Christmas as a vulgar bore. His delicate taste 
 is offended by the corpses of cows that garland with scarlet 
 and ivory the aisles of Smithfield Market. He shudders as 
 he passes a butcher's shop. He pooh-poohs the gospel of good 
 cheer. He gibes at the good old times. He says that holly 
 is a middle-class shrub, and he regards the mistletoe as a 
 badge of Philistia. 
 
 He curmudges against Christmas fare. He is an epicure 
 who shudders at roast beef and plum-pudding. He prefers 
 plovers' eggs and ortolans, caviare and quails. He is eaten 
 up with selfishness. He is covertly insolent to his host and 
 his hostess. He is rude to women who are not rich or young 
 or pretty. He has no use for the obscure or the poor. He 
 worships success and tramples on failure. He declaims against 
 indiscriminate charity. He does not subscribe to the Charity 
 Organisation Society, but he approves of its frigid principles. 
 He hates organ-grinders, crossing-sweepers, newsboys, itin- 
 erant musicians, beggars, and blind men with dogs. He 
 loathes the practice of tipping, and writes to the "Times"
 
 32 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 to Denounce dustmen and postmen who dare to ask him for 
 a Christmas box. He has never a good word for a cabman 
 or a railway porter or a waiter. 
 
 He detests carol-singers. They spoil his appetite. He 
 does his best to kill everything that is picturesquely unreason- 
 able and romantically illogical. A merry rout of boys with 
 their Guy on the Fifth of November provokes his wrath. He 
 never flings a copper to a cab-tout or a messenger-boy. He 
 accepts little services without acknowledgment. Three ghosts 
 sufficed to soften the heart of Scrooge, but three hundred 
 ghosts would not mollify the selfishness of the modern cur- 
 mudgeon. It would be a pity not to pity him. 
 
 The modern curmudgeon at his worst is a literary prig. 
 He is incapable of simple happiness. He smiles with lofty 
 disdain upon domestic joys. "There is no place like home," 
 he says, "and a good job, too." He sneers at the husband 
 who does not neglect his wife. He informs you that relatives 
 are a nuisance. He has no Lares and no Penates. To him 
 the fireside is a symbol of ennui. He will tell you that chil- 
 dren are little savages. He calls them brats. All the year 
 round he can keep the children in their place, but when Christ- 
 mas comes the children overwhelm him. Christmas is Child- 
 mas. The tyranny of life is for a while suspended. The 
 chains are shaken off the rosy limbs, and the gags taken out 
 of the rosy mouths. From a hundred thousand schools the 
 boys and girls come laughing and leaping, their eyes bright 
 with hope, their hearts bounding with expectation. I can 
 see these jolly regiments of infantry marching gaily through 
 merrie England. They are blowing tin trumpets and beating 
 tiny drums. They are waving flags. They have broken out 
 of gaol, and they are moving in long, glittering, undulating 
 columns to the conquest of Toyland, Candyland, Pieland, 
 and Fairyland. Father Christmas is striding at the head of 
 this frolicsome army. He is cracking jokes with his young 
 Field Marshals and his baby Brigadiers, his toddling Colonels 
 and his creeping Captains. The literary curmudgeon hears 
 the rhythmical tramp of this great host. His heart sinks.
 
 THE CHRISTMAS CURMUDGEON 33 
 
 He curses. He flies to Monte Carlo, and is plucked cleaner 
 than the turkey he did not send to his poor relations. 
 
 But I hope there are not many of these curmudgeons, after 
 all. I wish the Census would throw some light upon the 
 point. The worst of the Census is that it tells you everything 
 that you do not want to know. It is silent on all the furiously 
 interesting subjects. I beg the Registrar- General to rule a 
 column in his next Census paper, and put at the head of it 
 this question: "Are you a curmudgeon?" The Americans, 
 in their charmingly childish way, have made a bright start 
 in this branch of sociology. They ask their guests to answer 
 exciting riddles, such as "Are you a Polygamist?" "Are 
 you an Anarchist?" "Are you a Mormon?" These are 
 genuine, old-fashioned Christmas riddles. They are modelled 
 on the clown's poser, "Do you still beat your wife?" And, 
 by the way, let me plead for a renascence of the riddle. 
 A Christmas without riddles is a starveling affair. The charm 
 of a riddle is that it fills a Christmas gathering with the spirit 
 of nonsense. Children are ecstatically right in their love of 
 nonsense, and we ought to emulate them. It is very sad to 
 see a merry boy vainly imploring a fish-eyed, over-fed uncle 
 to tell him a story or ask him a riddle. The fat-minded old 
 fool cannot think of a silly tale or a foolish riddle. His imagi- 
 nation is clotted. Heaven help him! 
 
 There is another old joy of which children ought not to be 
 robbed the joy of games. I grieve over the decadence of our 
 old Christmas games. They are fast fading from our mem- 
 ory. The modern father and mother do not play with their 
 children. They leave the lonely youngsters to the nurse, who, 
 as a rule, has no lore of nursery rhymes or nursery games. 
 It is not enough to fill the nursery with dolls and dolls' houses, 
 rocking-horses, steam-engines, and woolly bears. More precious 
 than all these mechanical toys is the human toy. It ought 
 to be the ambition of every man and every woman to be a worthy 
 toy for some imperious child. A real father with real hair 
 and a real beard is much more amusing than a Jack-in-the- 
 box or a Golliwog or a monkey. And, in spite of her un- 
 3
 
 34 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 wieldy size, a mother has eyes that open and shut more sat- 
 isfactorily than a doll's. At Christmas we ought to allow 
 our children to play with us as roughly as they like. If you 
 are a true man you will not object to have your nose pulled 
 or your beard uprooted. 
 
 Try to get rid of your sense of superiority. You are not 
 really superior to a child. You are only a little nearer death. 
 It will do the children good to play with you, but it will do 
 you more good. It will freshen any youth you have left in 
 you. It will start the withered pulse of wonder throbbing 
 in your stodgy mind. It will lead you back into the clime 
 of miracles. It is not easy to invent pleasure for grown-ups, 
 but it is very easy to invent pleasure for children, and you feel 
 a rarer delight in pleasing a child. There is no gross motive 
 in your cajoleries. You can serve without being servile, and 
 kneel without being abject. Every town ought to have a 
 Toy Fund. Nay, every Board School ought to be a distrib- 
 uting agency for Santa Claus. I went on a toy-buying expe- 
 dition the other day. I worked steadily through all the toy- 
 shops from Holborn Circus to Oxford Circus, and glued 
 against every window I found crowds of ragged children, their 
 envious breath steaming on the plate-glass, their eyes spark- 
 ling with wonder and desire. My heart ached for these tiny 
 outcasts, tantalised by an unattainable Paradise. I fancied 
 that the glass eyes of the dolls grew dim with tears as they 
 gazed at these small London Rachels, weeping for their chil- 
 dren, and yearning in vain to take them in their arms and 
 hush them to sleep. The doll without a child-mother is a 
 pitiful sight, but it is not more pitiful than the child without 
 a doll-daughter. Have compassion, good folk, on the mother- 
 less doll and the childless child. Fill those little empty arms. 
 Comfort those little lonely hearts. Shall their treasure of tender- 
 ness be wasted on a knotted towel ? Give them golden tow and 
 waxen cheeks, a body with a squeak and fat jointed limbs, and 
 clothes that can be taken off. Perhaps you will be rewarded on 
 Christmas Eve with a heavenly vision of a sleeping angel with a 
 one-and-elevenpenny infant clasped to her passionate breast.
 
 THE KING OF THE JEHUS 
 
 IT is a mistake to suppose that the Lord Mayor is the most 
 important figure in the Lord Mayor's Show. I do not wish 
 to belittle the sublimity of the Lord Mayor. I do not desire 
 to speak disrespectfully of him. London without the Lord 
 Mayor would be a wen in a wilderness. No other city in 
 the world has a Lord Mayor who is worthy of being men- 
 tioned in the same breath as the Lord Mayor of London. 
 But while I recognise the grandeur and the greatness of the 
 Lord Mayor, I cannot admit that he is the true hero of the 
 Lord Mayor's Show. The true hero of the Lord Mayor's 
 Show is the Lord Mayor's Coachman. He is the crown and 
 culmination of all the pomp and pageantry which disorganises 
 the traffic of London so gloriously once a year. It is for his 
 sake, and for his sake alone, that torrents of vehicles are dammed. 
 It is in his honour, and in his honour alone, that our men 
 of business utter their annual imprecations. He, and he only, 
 can lift a magnificent hand to arrest the rolling of a million 
 wheels and to silence the thunder of a million hoofs. His voice, 
 and his voice alone, can say to the tides of traffic, "Thus far, 
 and no farther!" He is greater than King Canute. 
 
 The Lord Mayor's Coachman is the prop and stay of the 
 Lord Mayor. Without him the Lord Mayor could not defy 
 the claws of time. It is he who sheds upon the Lord Mayor 
 the glamour of romance. There are many Lord Mayors, 
 but there is only one Lord Mayor's Coachman. The Lord 
 Mayors come and go, but he goes on for ever. They are but 
 transient and embarrassed phantoms, but he is a solid and 
 indestructible monument of flesh, compared to which St. Paul's 
 Cathedral is a bride cake, the Tower of London an ice pud- 
 ding, and Nelson's Pillar a stick of barley sugar. 
 
 35
 
 36 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 The Lord Mayor is a dignity and a function, but the Lord 
 Mayor's Coachman is more. He is a Man. He is a Person- 
 ality. He is an Exalted Personage. Anybody could be a 
 Lord Mayor, but is there one person in the world who could 
 take the place of the Lord Mayor's Coachman ? Speaking for 
 myself, I should not shrink with terror from the task of being 
 Lord Mayor. I can calmly contemplate a vista of eating and 
 drinking steadily from November to November. I can bear 
 the thought of having Kings and Prime Ministers as my guests. 
 But I could not face the awful responsibilities of the Lord 
 Mayor's Coachman. It may be that I am a coward, but I 
 suspect that our best and our bravest would tremble if they 
 were invited to take the reins of governance from those majes- 
 tic hands. 
 
 The splendour of the Lord Mayor's Coach demands a 
 Coachman of heroic dimensions. The Coach is vast, but the 
 Coachman must be vaster still. I have never seen any man 
 so vast as the Lord Mayor's Coachman. He is built out of 
 innumerable generations of roast beef. The eye dwells joy- 
 ously on his illimitable features, rolling and undulating like 
 a rich landscape. His is not a haggard face. There is no care 
 or anxiety in its gentle downs and benignant slopes. It is 
 the face of a man who has achieved the summit of his ambition, 
 and who possesses his soul in peace. Such a countenance, I 
 imagine, was the countenance of Jove, what time he sat upon 
 Olympus, gods and mortals trembling at his nod. But, with 
 all due respect, I may be permitted to doubt whether the legs 
 of Jove were as sublime as the peerless legs which London 
 salutes once a year. There are many kinds of calf in this 
 wonderful world, but there are no calves like the calves of 
 the Lord Mayor's Coachman. At the risk of offending Mr. 
 Caine I declare they transcend the glories of the Calf of Man. 
 They restore our confidence in England. They assure us that 
 we are a nation yet. Upon these pillars of Hercules the British 
 Empire is securely based. 
 
 It may seem impious, but I am tempted to wonder whether 
 the Lord Mayor's Coachman has a private life. Does he
 
 KING OF THE JEHUS 37 
 
 ever doff that resplendent livery? Does he ever unbuckle 
 those effulgent shoes? Does he ever denude his legs of those 
 voluptuous silk stockings? Does he ever take off that tre- 
 mendous hat? Does he ever brush the powder from that 
 Olympian head? Alas! It is to be feared he does, but, 
 even when he is clothed in the vulgar garb of civilisation, I 
 am sure he preserves his imperial dignity. I like to think of 
 him in the act of unbending, bestowing a tolerant smile upon 
 those who have the privilege of being his friends. One may 
 even figure him as condescending to smoke a pipe. It would, 
 of course, be a pure churchwarden with a giant bowl and a 
 sweeping shank. A cigarette in those titanic lips were incon- 
 ceivable. It is not easy to decide what liquid is worthy of 
 flowing down that regal, that more than regal throat, but 
 perhaps the amber grandeur of Audit Ale would not altogether 
 desecrate it. 
 
 If I may without irreverence go further, I should like to 
 know something about the soul of the Lord Mayor's Coach- 
 man. His views of life would be profoundly interesting. I 
 think he is an optimist, for there is no tinge of pessimism in 
 his rubicund visage. There is no cynicism in that great heart 
 which beats in harmony with the genial order of nature. I 
 think the Lord Mayor's Coachman is a philosopher who belongs 
 to the school of Falstaff and Rabelais, for I am sure he be- 
 lieves that everything is for the best in the best of all possible 
 worlds.
 
 SEEING THE SIGHTS 
 
 IT is hard to realize that there was a time in the history 
 of mankind when there were no sights to be seen and no sight- 
 seers to see them. There were no guides or guide-books in 
 the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve were not compelled 
 to solve the problem of holidays. Indeed, they appear to have 
 been perfectly satisfied with their garden. They did not leave 
 it until they were driven out, and apparently it was necessary 
 to adopt elaborate precautions to prevent their return. They 
 were probably the only persons who were never bitten by the 
 asp of travel. They did not go to theatres in the evening; 
 they never yearned for supper at the Carlton or at the Savoy. 
 They did not feel the necessity of inspecting ancient churches, 
 crumbling ruins, or houses of famous men. They gave no 
 dinner parties or dances, and what they did with their evenings 
 it is difficult to imagine. They had positively no relatives 
 whatever, and neither of them had a mother-in-law. Some 
 people maintain that marriage without a mother-in-law is like 
 beef without mustard, salad without vinegar, or pancakes 
 without lemon. It certainly does seem that marriage without 
 the advice and admonition of a scarred veteran must have been 
 somewhat monotonous. But Adam and Eve appear to have 
 lived the simplest life that has ever been lived on this earth 
 without yearning for a week-end on the river or an afternoon 
 in Westminster Abbey. They do not appear to have hun- 
 gered for a week in lovely Lucerne or a month in Aix-les-Bains. 
 They managed to rub along without a visit to Venice or Os- 
 tend, and they died without seeing Mr. Hall Caine's Eternal 
 City. It is sad to think how much they missed, and one is 
 tempted to wonder how they contrived to bear up. 
 
 Modern life is somewhat different from life in the Garden 
 
 38
 
 SEEING THE SIGHTS 39 
 
 of Eden. We have discovered the virtue of variety, and the 
 charm of change. We are everywhere by turns and nowhere 
 long. We have turned toil into pleasure and pleasure into 
 toil. No one works so hard as the pleasure-seeker. London 
 is invaded every year by an army of sightseers whose feats 
 of endurance would make Hercules look like a statue of indo- 
 lence. It is easy to recognise a sightseer, for he always wears 
 a careworn, haggard, hungry look. He is fighting against 
 time and space. He is pursuing the past with nervous anx- 
 iety. He is afraid to gaze too long at St. Paul's lest he should 
 not be able to see every stone in the Tower. He hurries hys- 
 terically from the mummies in the British Museum to the 
 waxen phantoms in Madame Tussaud's. In the morning he 
 eats shrimps at Greenwich, and in the afternoon he munches 
 watercress at Kew. He can hardly masticate the delights 
 of the Crystal Palace for thinking of the raptures that await 
 him in the Zoo. Wherever he is he wishes to be somewhere 
 else, and he is always tortured by the double fear of leaving 
 too soon and arriving too late. His feverish parsimony of time 
 leads him to telescope his meals, with the result that he is 
 invariably racked by indigestion when he is not famished. 
 He is a boon and a blessing to the bun-shop. There is no 
 doubt that the Bath bun was invented for sightseers. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that sightseers do not enjoy 
 sightseeing. They enjoy it after it is over. The pleasure of 
 seeing monuments and tombs is based upon the curious pas- 
 sion of human beings for being superior to their fellow creatures. 
 The mere act of gazing at the regalia in the Tower is not thrill- 
 ing, but the gazer looks forward to the joy of telling his friends 
 who have never seen the regalia that he has seen them. He 
 knows that they will envy him, and the consciousness of their 
 future envy compensates him for the toil and trouble. A being 
 who has seen something which you have not seen can give 
 himself airs, even if the thing which he has seen is not worth 
 seeing at all. The worst of it is that the world now contains 
 more things than can be seen comfortably by the most indus- 
 trious sightseer. We have lost the habit of blotting out cities
 
 40 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 and destroying sepulchres and pulling down cathedrals. We 
 preserve everything. The consequence is that the world is 
 being choked with historical lumber. Before long we shall 
 not have room to move about, and the trail of famous men 
 will be over every brick. We have lost the gift of forgetful- 
 ness, and Oblivion finds her occupation gone. 
 
 Americans are probably the most laborious sightseers in 
 the world. They have a capacity for detail which arouses 
 my reverence. They do Europe as it has never been done 
 by any other race. As a rule a Londoner knows nothing 
 whatever about London, and I often blush with shame when 
 an American friend demonstrates that he has seen more of 
 London in a week than I have seen in a lifetime. It is hu- 
 miliating to be obliged to confess that you do not know the 
 best way to unearth Hampton Court or the Mint. The truth 
 is, London is a gigantic mistake. Its sights are too far apart. 
 It usually takes half a day to reach one of them, and half a 
 day to get back. The sights of London ought to be concen- 
 trated. It would be a public boon if the Government were 
 to bring in a bill for the collection of sights into some acces- 
 sible spot. Hyde Park would probably be the best piece of 
 'waste ground for the purpose. No doubt the expense involved 
 in the transportation of all the London sights to Hyde Park 
 would be considerable, but think of the saving of time, not only 
 for our visitors, but also for their conductors. St. Paul's 
 would look very well at the Marble Arch; beside it the Tower 
 might be placed, together with Westminster Abbey and the 
 Houses of Parliament. There would be room along the banks 
 of the Serpentine for the British Museum and the National 
 Gallery, together with a few trifles like the Guildhall, Cleo- 
 patra's Needle, the Nelson Monument, and the Crystal Palace. 
 There would be plenty of room for the Zoo in Kensington 
 Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's would add to the attrac- 
 tions of Rotten Row. Electric trams might run round the 
 circuit of the sights, and in this way it would be possible to 
 do them all in an afternoon, thus leaving the sightseer a margin 
 for the pursuit of pleasure.
 
 SEEING THE SIGHTS 41 
 
 I do not know whether there would be any space left after 
 this desirable improvement had been carried out, but if possible 
 an endeavour ought to be made to shift Stratford-on-Avon 
 nearer London. It would be very convenient for American 
 visitors in a hurry if Shakespeare's birthplace could be re- 
 moved to St. James's Park, together with Ann Hathaway's 
 cottage and any other equally authentic relics. Room might 
 also be found for a few of the stately homes of England, such 
 as Chatsworth and Haddon Hall. Edinburgh might be in- 
 duced to part with Holyrood Palace for a consideration, and 
 it is possible that Ireland might be persuaded to give up Dublin 
 Castle, together with a few yards of the Giant's Causeway. In 
 this way the strain of a visit to the old country might be ma- 
 terially lessened. 
 
 Unless something of this kind is done, and done at once, 
 I fear there is a danger that Americans may give up the habit 
 of sightseeing. I know one American who has crossed the 
 Atlantic thirteen times and visited London for thirteen suc- 
 cessive years without seeing a single sight. He spends his 
 life in his hotel, in theatres, in music-halls, and in restaurants. 
 The other day I reproached him bitterly for neglecting his 
 opportunities, but he flippantly replied that he preferred death 
 to Westminster Abbey. He pointed out that Nelson and 
 other great Englishmen did not go to Westminster Abbey 
 until they died, and added that what was good enough for 
 Nelson was good enough for him. Thereupon I asked him 
 why he took the trouble to come to London at all, seeing that 
 he lives exactly the same life as he lives in New York. He 
 retorted that he came to London to see our bad plays, but I 
 reminded him that he could see them later in New York. As 
 to our hotels and restaurants, he was obliged to admit that 
 they successfully reproduce the American atrnosphere, and 
 that when he sat down to dinner or supper in London he felt 
 quite at home. Even the "Cheshire Cheese" was full of the 
 American accent when he visited it, as is his agreeable cus- 
 tom during his stay in London. I told him that the " Cheshire 
 Cheese" had become quite an American institution, but he
 
 42 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 said he was sorry to find that the Japanese were beginning 
 to frequent it. I was surprised to find him rather sore on 
 this point. He was astonished to learn that the Japanese are 
 almost as popular in this country as Americans. He said 
 that Americans regarded the Japanese as coloured folk, and 
 predicted that it would be necessary to give them a licking 
 like the Spaniards. He said that it was a bad sign to see so 
 many Japanese in London. He complained because he had 
 met them in theatres, in restaurants, at Ranelagh, at Hur- 
 lingham, and at Henley. 
 
 "At any rate," said I, "it was plucky of them to go to a 
 wet Henley." But he shook his head grimly and declared 
 that the Japanese ought to stick to Japan. I suggested that 
 the Americans would be offended if advised to stick to America. 
 
 "Not at all," said he. "Europe is only an American 
 summer resort." 
 
 "Well," said I, "so long as you do not make it a winter 
 resort, we will not complain."
 
 MAINLY ABOUT DANCING
 
 AT A COVENT GARDEN BALL 
 
 I AM a serious person, but I am like Dr. Johnson's friend 
 who said, "I, too, have tried to be a philosopher, but cheer- 
 fulness was always breaking in." Cheerfulness, I am glad 
 to say, breaks into my honest gravity at least once a year. I 
 forget my solemn self, and for a few hours I yield to what 
 the Young Man with the Cream Tarts calls a the spirit of 
 mockery." I indulge in a "harebrain humour." Like Prince 
 Florizel, when I fall into low spirits, I sally out into the wilds 
 of Bohemia in search of adventures. The genius of whim 
 enters into me without premeditation. "Go to," he says, 
 "let us be foolish, and fool ourselves to the top of our bent." 
 It is not easy to be whimsical in London, for there is no night 
 there. Half an hour after midnight the restaurants close, 
 and the rest is silence. There is only one palace of mockery 
 which shelters the homeless hours between twelve and four 
 the Covent Garden Fancy Dress Ball. But you must not go 
 there in cold blood. You must not "make up a party." You 
 must go without knowing that you are going. You must 
 surprise yourself into the frolic. 
 
 The spirit of mockery ordains caprice. You must not 
 know one moment what you are to do the next. To be delib- 
 erate is to be lost. You must not look before you leap. There 
 were six of us. We had dined at the Carlton, and Chicot had 
 whirled us off to the Alhambra. Chicot is a young man whose 
 life is a procession of graceful absurdities. He is the perfect 
 fool, for he is droll without being ridiculous, and there is no 
 vulgarity in his wildest farce. His gaiety is mad, but his 
 gay madness looks like a sublime sanity. His airy impro- 
 priety throws doubt upon your propriety. He makes you 
 ashamed of your dignity and self-control. He inverts life. 
 
 45
 
 46 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 He stands convention on its head. He turns wisdom into 
 folly and folly into wisdom. He is the King of Topsy-tur- 
 vydom, that realm where nothing is itself and everything 
 is something else. With the help of the magical mockery of 
 the ballet, and the magical mockery of Gaby Deslys, Chicot 
 breathed the spirit of mockery into us. We felt our cold 
 British souls thawing, and with bells of laughter ringing in our 
 throats we packed ourselves into a growler and set out for 
 Romano's. Romano's was filled with music and laughter, 
 and somehow or other we all knew in our bones that our sup- 
 per would be deliriously gay, and that there would be wit in 
 the wine and wine in the wit. It is charming when the talk 
 flashes like lightning, and jest after jest flowers and fades 
 instantly, making room on the stem of fun for its successor. 
 We were all witty, and all beautiful, and all debonair. We 
 turned everything to frolic and fantasy. We were six when 
 we took our seats at the round table, but in a trice we were 
 seven, for we called in the Merry Widow. Do you know 
 the Widow Clicquot? She has a dainty golden head and 
 delicately sloping shoulders. The southern sun sparkles in 
 her eyes, and when she kisses your lips you are swept out of 
 the land of things as they are into the land of things as they 
 are not. Hail! Veuve Clicquot! Widow of Widows! Thou 
 art spring in mid- winter, and April in December. Thy wink- 
 ing and sparkling smiles make the old young again, and the 
 dulness of life cannot live in thy bubbling mirth. Thou art 
 immortal, for the eternal sunlight feeds thy veins, and the 
 everlasting joy of the earth is in thy soul. Thou givest thy 
 ecstasy to the heavy heart and thy rapture to the melancholy 
 mind. Thou art the frivolity of the serious and the joy of the 
 lugubrious. Thy tears are the diamonds of joy. Thy breath 
 is the fragrance of folly. O, maddest and merriest of widows, 
 I salute thee! 
 
 The lights go out one by one. "Past time! gentlemen, 
 please! Past time!" Chicot raises his glass to the weary 
 waiter. "It is our Pastime, garcon! It is the Pastime of 
 Pastimes. Ohe"! Ohe"!" But the weary waiter has no palate
 
 AT A COVENT GARDEN BALL 47 
 
 for puns, and at last we emerge by a back door into a narrow 
 passage that leads into the Strand. " Whither away, good 
 folk; whither away?" cries Chicot. "Home? Home at 
 one o'clock in the morning! The proposal is outrageous. 
 No, we will go to Covent Garden. Has anybody six guineas 
 in his pocket?" Yes, by some miracle, there is a Rocke- 
 feller with a pocketful of jingling golden sovereigns. In a 
 chariot of laughter we descend on Covent Garden. The 
 vestibule is like a green-room, for it is a seething turmoil of 
 costumes, all the centuries jostling each other powder and 
 patch, doublet and hose, incroyable and macaroni, crusader 
 and cavalier, velvet and bright iron, broadcloth and brocade, 
 steel and starch. "Holvarlet! Masks for the fair!" 
 
 Reader, have you ever tied a mask on a laughing face? 
 It is a pleasant labour, and one that need not be curtailed 
 by the judicious. A woman, when she puts on a mask, is a 
 woman with a new temperament. There is a fresh audacity 
 in her eyes and a novel defiance in her smiles. Her glance 
 means more and means less. She can let her gaiety caper free 
 from the curb cf custom, for she knows that the mask covers 
 a multitude of sins against the code of manners. There is 
 an imp of elfish roguery in every pretty woman, and the mask 
 lets it loose. There is a world of difference between the un- 
 veiled face and the face with a few inches of white lace or 
 black satin over eyes or mouth. All women are coquettes 
 in the dark, and the mask is a kind of artificial darkness, a 
 sort of half -night. The coquetry of the mask is a game with 
 precise rules. The game must be played blithely and boldly, 
 without prudery or priggishness. If for one moment -you play 
 it timorously or unctuously, it is spoiled. The philosophy 
 of the mask is based on the understanding that nothing counts 
 after the game is over. While you play the game you forget 
 to remember, and after the game is over you remember to forget. 
 It is the nearest thing in life to stage love. We are mimes 
 for an hour, without solemn hearts and without sagacious 
 heads. We are not real persons. We are radiant shadows 
 dancing with radiant shadows. If a laughing shadow should
 
 48 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 kiss a laughing shadow, what matter? If the arm of a shadow 
 should steal round the waist of a shadow, what harm? It is 
 only the ghost of a kiss, only the wraith of a caress. Our 
 Lady of the Mask knows that the ghosts of kisses and the 
 wraiths of caresses melt away at dawn. Pierrot is a dream 
 and Pierrette is a dream, and to-morrow is the tomb of dreams. 
 He is only playing at half a love with half a lover. It is touch 
 and go in this fairyland of the moth and the butterfly, and 
 you must not brush the faint powder off the filmy wings. 
 
 In order to be joyous at Covent Garden you must forget 
 that you are in England. You must be "hatched over again 
 and hatched different." You must not take anything seriously. 
 You must not be stiff, and straitlaced, and stupid. You must 
 be gaily fantastic. The Englishman is apt to mistake row- 
 diness for revelry, and horse-play for humour, but I think he 
 is improving. There is now more grace in his gaiety. Chicot, 
 for example, was as fastidiously whimsical as an Italian at a 
 battle of flowers, as prodigiously flamboyant as a Parisian 
 student in a carnival. He improvised nonsense without end. 
 He stood on a seat behind the orchestra and conducted it 
 with superb gravity, parodying Sousa, and Richter, and Strauss 
 until the musicians wondered why the dancers were laughing 
 at them. He solemnly danced a cake-walk with curved spine 
 and dangling hands and a pompous face of wood. He bur- 
 lesqued Tortajada with a table-cloth for a shawl and a knife 
 and fork for castanets. He made love like George Alexander, 
 and gave good advice like Sir Charles Wyndham. He swaggered 
 like Lewis Waller, and lolled on a divan like Mr. Balfour. 
 He borrowed a false nose and caricatured Coquelin's Cyrano 
 until his impromptu Roxane became hysterical. Then he 
 fell madly in love with a dainty divinity in a short blue dress 
 and long black stockings, playing Paolo to her Francesca and 
 Romeo to her Juliet. After that, he mimicked Tetrazzini's 
 Lucia, making the mad scene uproariously mad. He wound 
 up in a box with a parody of Punch and Judy, which was so 
 droll that we all begged for mercy, being worn out and side-sore 
 with laughter.
 
 AT A COVENT GARDEN BALL 49 
 
 Suddenly the band struck up the National Anthem, and 
 we indignantly discovered that it was four o'clock. Now, 
 surely, we must all go home. And so we went to bed, as the 
 silver-paly dawn was turning the sky into mother-of-pearl over 
 the tops of the trees in the park, to sleep the sleep of the unjust, 
 to snore the clock round, to dream the spirit of mockery out 
 of our harebrain, harum-scarum harlequinade. When we 
 woke, the bells of elfland were still faintly ringing in our ears, 
 and we gloried in the thought that for once we had laughed 
 life out of countenance. There was no aftermath of repent- 
 ance, for we had laced our folly with wisdom, we had revelled 
 wisely but not too well. And we knew that we could not 
 recapture that first, fine careless rapture, and that our good 
 time was only an oasis of nonsense in the desert of common 
 sense. We are all respectable humdrummers once more, but 
 for years shall we exult in the memory of our foray into the 
 wilds of disrespectability. Alfred de Musset, after he had 
 entered the Cenacle and had declaimed his verses before Victor 
 Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, proudly cried, "I also am a poet." 
 So we can boast, as we pay our rent on quarter-day, "I also 
 have been in Bohemia." But Bohemia is a place to visit, 
 not to live in.
 
 BEHIND THE SCENES 
 
 OUR hansom jingles out of Piccadilly Circus, past the Hay- 
 market, into Leicester Square through a maelstrom of feverish 
 lights and tangled vehicles and hurrying faces. The pulse 
 of pleasure is beating fast. Through the trees flames the 
 many-windowed Alhambra, its Moorish fafade soaring like a 
 phantom palace into the sky, its pallid minarets and fiery 
 crescent moons crowning ghostly walls of ivory and gold. 
 The stars, peering through the violet gloom, seem to be a part 
 of the delicate fabric. It is a torch brandished by London in 
 the night, the torch of passion in the night of dreams. 
 
 We go through the alcoved corridors past the tall janis- 
 saries, into the promenade. It is a seraglio where man is 
 a sultan and woman a houri. It is aglow with dim lamps, 
 soft with the susurrus of silks, languorous with subtle per- 
 fumes. Miles away below us the ballet languishes in its golden 
 frame. We are in Lotus-land. The world dissolves in a 
 swoon of delight. Life is a sunshot cloud. Black care is 
 forgotten. In a trance we descend the stairs and sink into 
 a luxurious stall made for the postprandial Nirvana that muffles 
 the soul. Lolling lazily in its depths, you let your charmed 
 fancy float along the ballet's voluptuous stream of living music 
 and moving sound. 
 
 The vast theatre is tapestried with faces. The air is aro- 
 matic with the fragrance of innumerable cigars. It is a temple 
 of fumes. The pungent odour saturates you. You are a 
 leaf in the heart of a giant cheroot. The glittering dome is 
 full of ascending wreaths of smoke. Even the ballet is a 
 ballet of tobacco, "My Lady Nicotine." It is a fragile fan- 
 tasy of melting curves and woven hues and iridescent cadences, 
 sound and movement and colour kaleidoscoping into a mist 
 
 50
 
 BEHIND THE SCENES 51 
 
 of painting and music, sculpture and poetry, that shadows 
 forth the vague irregular rhythm of visionary life. The eye 
 is sated with silent colour and the ear with coloured sound. 
 The dancers are syllables in a visible song, vowels in a breath- 
 ing lyric, rhymes in a laughing villanelle. They are the ges- 
 tures of an artificial femininity. The civilised woman is 
 always artificial, but here her artificiality is multiplied. A 
 woman is natural only when she is alone. She wears the ar- 
 mour of artifice in public, and the aim of the ballet is to gen- 
 eralise her artificiality. It submerges her in a long undulation 
 of fluent femininity. As you gaze at the ballet you see life 
 responding to your desires. Your every-day self fades into a 
 paradise of ethereal rapture where the moments fall like rose- 
 leaves into the lap of time. 
 
 Let us go behind the scenes and walk in this fairyland. 
 An iron door swings open, and we stand beside the ballet- 
 mistress in a tiny nook between the edge of the proscenium 
 and the painted side-scene. There is a spy-hole in the pro- 
 jecting wing. Through it we see a fragment of the ballet 
 in profile. It shatters the illusion which we carried with us 
 from the stalls. It is like looking at an oil painting with your 
 nose on the canvas. You see the dancers in isolated patches. 
 Their maquillage is fantastic. The rouged lips, the painted 
 cheeks, the pencilled eyebrows, the bistred eyes, the black- 
 ened eyelashes, the pearl powder, the gaudy skirts, the stretched 
 texture of tights, the threads of hose, the tired mechanical 
 air, the anxious solemnity of effort, the sidelong glances, the 
 little slips and hitches, the unsubstantial scenery trembling 
 like a house of cards, the muttered admonitions of the bal- 
 let-mistress, the cryptic activities of the stage-manager and 
 his underlings, the groups of dancers waiting for their cue, 
 the wisps of French and Italian chatter, the human grotesquery 
 of the dancer who is Death on the stage and Signer Rossi off 
 it, the jumble of mimic and real life all this upsets your 
 centre of levity and plunges you into a brief insanity. You 
 begin to doubt your own reality. You lose your sense of values. 
 You are in Topsy-turvy land. Anything might happen here.
 
 52 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 You might turn into a coryphee and dive into these advancing 
 and retreating files whose limbs are flickering and wavering 
 in a meaningless maze. 
 
 Where is the magic flown? Where is the enchantment? 
 Where is the romance ? Here is nothing but whimsical reality. 
 These dancers are not conscious of the witchery which haunted 
 you in the halls. They are only the shining shuttles and the 
 gleaming yarns. There is no gaiety in their eyes. They are 
 toiling in a labyrinth of rhythms. As they swing round in 
 faultless files their eyes turn anxiously to the ballet-mistress. 
 She whispers "Go!" and the poised limbs sweep forward, 
 line after line. A little sprite loses her place in the whirlpool. 
 Her frightened eyes flash timidly towards the spyhole. She 
 hears the low rebuke, murmurs a shy appeal, and eddies off 
 again into the spray and foam of flying feet. She is a dancer 
 lost in the delirium of the dance. It is a shock to go behind 
 the scenes. It is like meeting a poet at a dinner party. Your 
 dream cracks. Here beauty is business, and business is beauty. 
 And the oddest thing is your own incongruity. You are ashamed 
 of your dress clothes. These dancers in short skirts are ab- 
 solutely unconscious. They are as natural as schoolgirls in 
 bathing-costumes, as nonchalant as babies. They are at 
 ease in their convention. Probably they I ush when they 
 don the garb of the outer world. 
 
 But let us sift our impressions. First of all, note that the 
 conventional idea of what goes on behind the scenes is false. 
 All the sensuousness is before the footlights. There is none 
 behind them. Here one finds nothing but cold order and 
 frigid discipline. Where are the gilded youth? There is 
 no room for them. Where is the fabled immodesty in these 
 tired girls who are earning their bread? They have been re- 
 hearsing all day, and one of them is sulking because she can- 
 not get a half-holiday to-morrow! Pathos, if you like, but 
 no lubricity. These little painted angels are but the colours 
 on your palette, but the threads in your woven dream. Think 
 kindly of them, and remember that evil is a maggot in the 
 imagination.
 
 BEHIND THE SCENES 53 
 
 Charity never errs. While we watch, a great humility takes 
 hold of us. We, too, are in the ballet of life. We, too, are 
 dancers moving to a tune played by an invisible orchestra 
 led by an unknown conductor. What essential difference is 
 there between these figurantes and our philosophers, our 
 statesmen, our soldiers, our lawyers, our doctors, our poets, 
 and our kings? Alas, there is none. For us all the curtain 
 will be rung down and the footlights will go out. For us all 
 the empty theatre and the silence and the going home through 
 the night. And who watches us from the wings through the 
 peephole of destiny? Who pays us our wages after our dance 
 is done? As we pass through the iron door the humour of 
 life is salt on our lips, for we taste our own tears. Well, there 
 is some solace in being able to be sorry for yourself. Man, 
 alone among the animals, has the gift of self-pity and self- 
 derision. He is both actor and spectator. He can see his own 
 absurdity. Yet perhaps the subtlest jest in the comedy is the 
 humour of humour, and the richest joke of all may be the 
 joke of seeing the joke. But there may be something higher 
 than the humour and something deeper than the joke! Per- 
 haps the ballet of this world is real, after all.
 
 ADELINE GENfiE 
 
 ART is the austerity of joy. Adeline Gene"e is a joyous aus- 
 terity. She is not bewilderingly beautiful. She is devoid of 
 sensuous charm or voluptuous appeal. You would pass her 
 in the street without suspecting her genius. She is an artist 
 who expresses herself only in the dance. As she stands in the 
 wings the strange romantic change begins to steal over her, 
 and the magic that is stored in her brain and her blood pulses 
 into her limbs. Then a birdlike swoop and she passes out of 
 prose into poetry. As she flickers like a butterfly into the 
 limelight she flashes into enchanting life. She ceases to be an 
 ordinary woman and becomes the embodiment of idyllic joy. 
 All the innocent gaiety of the sunlight sparkles in her eyes. 
 All the fresh freedom of the wind and the leaves trembles in 
 her gestures. All the careless fragrance of a wild flower seems 
 to flow from her wavering fingers. She is cool vitality with- 
 out passion, sweet grace without innuendo, elfish mirth without 
 ribaldry. There is a great gulf between her and such dancers 
 as Ote"ro and Tortajada. They are the animal appetites, the 
 hot senses, the fierce desires. They mimic the swift fury of 
 sensual delight. She is a serene sentiment, a clear fantasy, 
 an untroubled dream. Her coquetry is roguishly pure and 
 impishly chaste. She is a virginal romp with the bright energy 
 of Diana and the fleet witchery of Atalanta. She has the un- 
 corrupted archness of Rosalind and the mischievous fun of 
 Lady Teazle. Her dancing is an ebullience of unsaddened 
 youth, a spontaneous riot of girlish excitement woven into a 
 lovely pattern of merry pirouettes and flowing arabesques, 
 rounded limbs and airy attitudes, light leaps and sallies and 
 twinkling entrechats. The intricate notes of her dancing melt 
 into a visible music as the waves melt into the sea. Her tech- 
 
 54
 
 ADELINE GENEE 55 
 
 nical skill conceals itself in her temperament, for she uses her 
 temperament to express her health and her hope and her high 
 spirits, her delight in being alive, her exultation in things as 
 they are and in herself as she is. 
 
 The charm of Gene is more than the charm of rhythmical 
 movement. It is the charm of life that is at one with life, 
 of happiness that is happy, of contentment that is content. 
 From her laughing curls that toss round her laughing face 
 to the tips of her laughing ringers and the tips of her laughing 
 toes she is an image of joy. Her laughing face is a mask of 
 joy, and when I see it I always think of her as the living spirit 
 of comedy, so airy is the joy that laughs in her laughing 
 blue eyes and her laughing teeth and her laughing lips. Hers 
 is a contagious joy that catches you by the hand and whirls 
 you off into a romantic world where there is no stupidity and 
 no weariness, no tears of conscience and no sighs of memory. 
 You escape with her from the cry of the flesh as well as from 
 the cry of the soul. You are alive with life and young with youth 
 and in love with love in the land east of the sun and west of the 
 moon where all you would be you are for one breathless mo- 
 ment. You feel her calling you out of the slough of existence, 
 and you stumble clumsily after her, fascinated by her candid, 
 laughing eyes and her candid, laughing mouth, and her laugh- 
 ing valiancy of candid grace. The music seems to flow under 
 her feet like the water under the wings of a skimming swal- 
 low. It echoes her swift speed and darting lightness. It 
 follows her like a shadow. It is part of her and she is part 
 of it, and when it ceases you feel that she too should fade 
 slowly into an invisible silence, dying with the music and 
 living with it, as a shadow dies and lives with the sun. 
 
 Gene'e is a great mime as well as a great dancer. She is 
 an artist in poetic silence as well as an artist in poetic move- 
 ment. Her face is a dancing mask of moods, changing gaily 
 with the music and interpreting all its thistledown whims and 
 cobweb caprices. Her mouth can pout deliciously and her 
 eyebrows can frown adorably, but the pout and the frown 
 go as lightly as they come, for her anger and her disdain are
 
 56 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 only little parodies and tiny burlesques of passion, made but 
 to be unmade, blown into being but to be broken like bubbles 
 in the sun. Her features play pranks with life, weaving its 
 ambitions into a fairy gossamer of unreality, and mocking 
 its tragic passions with an irreverent impudence. Nothing 
 seems to matter in her travesty of human solemnity. Love 
 turns into a dreamy game as she imitates its hopes and fears 
 and yearnings and regrets in a revel of physical badinage. 
 There is a merry irony in her rapture and in her despair, and 
 she eludes the burden of pleasure as featly as the burden of 
 pain. All the emotions are fugitive in her face, and she fills 
 you with a sense of spiritual escape. The chains of time 
 fall from your soul and you glide into a vague trance of liberty 
 that is like a waking dream. It is the trance of poetry in 
 which the thorns of fact and event and environment no longer 
 wound you, for you forget that you are caught in the thicket 
 of life. For a moment you are mixed with the music of things. 
 You are free from the tyranny of thought and the cruelty of 
 knowledge. Her permanent smile is like a prolonged moment 
 of bliss. It seems for a brief while to hold life at bay and 
 fate at arm's length. She is a symbol of joy that triumphs 
 over the dulness of duty and the boredom of routine. She 
 is mockingly different and her mocking difference is reflected 
 dimly in you. With a laughing gesture she dismisses the uni- 
 verse and all its wisdom and all its folly, and you accept her 
 laughing gesture in the rare mood of Christopher Sly. "Let 
 the world slide!" Let the puzzles and the problems go. 
 Let the enigmas of the heart and the riddles of the soul fade 
 into a vapour. Let the torment of desire wane with the torture 
 of regret. Let the will to live and the will to die melt into a 
 gay acceptance of everything that is and everything that is 
 not. "Let the world slide!" 
 
 The art of Genee is based upon austerity. She is the an- 
 tithesis of the popular conception of a dancer. Her art governs 
 her life. Her beauty of gesture and grace conceals itself under 
 a robe of sackcloth. She is ascetic and severe. She is always 
 in arduous training. She practises for hours every day in a
 
 ADELINE GENEE 57 
 
 room walled with mirrors. She is a rigid teetotaler. She 
 dines frugally at three in the afternoon, and starves till mid- 
 night, allowing herself only a cup of coffee at six. That life 
 of martyrdom is the price she pays for her strength and her 
 grace. Her skill is made out of infinite self-denial. This 
 miracle of laughing joy is the product of bitter toil and iron 
 renunciation. Behind her radiant ecstasy of light gestures and 
 postures is the stern hardship of an athlete and the passionless 
 devotion of a nun. It is the paradox of the artist, for only 
 through absolute singleness of aim can supreme mastery be 
 achieved. In order to get one great thing you must give up 
 all the little things. 
 
 Here is another paradox. Genee is never tired when she 
 dances, and she dances best in summer. While she is dancing 
 her feet never blister, but if she takes a holiday, and fore- 
 goes her daily practice they are blistered in a few days. She 
 cannot dance in a ballroom, for she grows giddy after a few 
 turns in a waltz. Dancing is the only gymnastic exercise she 
 can safely indulge in, for golf or cycling or tennis would harden 
 the muscles and destroy the soft suppleness of the arms. She 
 detests long skirts because they conceal the complicated pattern 
 of the dance. She hates high heels because they destroy the 
 delicate flexibility of the ankle and the instep. For her the 
 dance is the vehicle of all delight. Her little feet are lyrical. 
 They sing in a language of their own. It is the song of the 
 throbbing lark that beats its wings in cloudland between the 
 earth and the sky. "Let the world slide!"
 
 LILY ELSIE 
 
 ONE of the most popular actresses of the hour is Lily Elsie. 
 She is the star of stars in the changing firmament of musical 
 comedy. Yesterday she was hardly known, but when she 
 appeared as "The Merry Widow" she stepped straight into 
 fame. The rumour of her charm spread magically from 
 mouth to mouth in that mysterious fashion which makes the 
 fortune of a player. It is not the newspaper that creates 
 popularity. The newspaper registers popularity: it does not 
 make it. I have seen many attempts to boom an actor into 
 fame, but the public is as obstinate as a mule. It will not 
 be dragooned into admiration. The only real popularity is 
 that which is based upon private talk. It is what men and 
 women are saying to each other in idle gossip that makes or 
 mars the fate of a player. Mr. George Edwardes is a mar- 
 vellous judge of these invisible currents of opinion. He can 
 put his finger on the pulse of the public and count its beats. 
 I have been told that he often sits in front among the audience 
 and studies its symptoms. If anything or anybody appears 
 to bore or tire or weary the audience he ruthlessly eliminates 
 the offence or the offender. He makes the play and the players 
 play up to the delicate mood of the pleasure-seekers who come 
 to the theatre to be amused. That is the sole secret of his 
 success. He is in touch with the world before the footlights 
 as well as with the world behind them. His gift of selective 
 insight enables him to fit the part to the player and the player 
 to the part. Lily Elsie is a case in point. She is more than 
 the Sonia of the opera. She is the whole opera. She is the 
 incarnation of its brightness and lightness, its amorous grace, its 
 joyous sentiment, and its slumbering passion. She appeals to 
 the erotic romance that is hidden in the heart of every playgoer, 
 
 58
 
 LILY ELSIE 59 
 
 even when it is bruised by life and battered by business, coars- 
 ened by experience and withered by adventure. Hers is the 
 glamour of beauty that fades and the pathos of youth that 
 flies. 
 
 I think it was Walter Pater who said that romance is the 
 quality of strangeness in beauty. The beauty of Lily Elsie 
 has this strangeness. I know a leather-hearted old cynic 
 who haunts Daly's in order to feast on her troubling fasci- 
 nation. He tells me that she keeps him young. He confesses 
 that he cries tears of joy over her. She revives his lost youth 
 and all his forgotten illusions. She helps him to remember 
 the brave days when he could fall recklessly and desperately 
 in love. She enables him to escape from the harshness and 
 hardness, the coldness and dulness of life. She turns the 
 grey sky of his mind into a blue dream of tender devotion and 
 yearning adoration. The rows on rows of people who sit 
 rapturously watching Lily Elsie night after night are like my 
 old cynic. They are all melting into this delightful mood. 
 You can feel the stirring of romance in the amorous audience. 
 It is rising like a tide in every heart, and blossoming like a 
 rose in every cheek, and sparkling like a diamond in every 
 eye. It fills the whole theatre like a perfumed tornado. Its 
 presence is felt by the most callous and most indifferent spec- 
 tator. It overwhelms you like a drilled whisper or an organised 
 sigh. You cannot resist it. You are forced to yield to its 
 vague enchantment. The whole house is one vast Tupman 
 dissolving in one vast desire, the desire to love and to be beloved, 
 to kiss and to be kissed, to embrace and to be embraced, to 
 adore and to be adored. 
 
 Lily Elsie is love in full blast, for her Sonia is a very am- 
 orous young lady who is wooing a very disdainful young man. 
 As a rule, love in the theatre is the other way round. It is 
 usually the amorous young man who woos the disdainful 
 young lady. The change is welcome. It is pleasant to watch 
 Joseph Coyne struggling against the undulating charms of 
 Lily Elsie, for it is obvious that he is resisting the irresist- 
 ible. No mortal man could hold out for ever against the
 
 60 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 lure of her eyes and the wiles of her smiles and the invitation 
 of her lips. The angry coyness of Danilo is heroic. He is 
 always trembling on the brink of a kiss, and always shying 
 from the verge of a caress. His lips are perpetually a hair's- 
 breadth from hers, but in the nick of time he tears his mouth 
 away with an explosive "No!" Everybody in the house is a 
 Tupman waiting for the kiss deferred that maketh the heart 
 sick. Everybody in the house is a Tupman longing for the 
 surrender of the persecuted man to the persecuting woman. 
 The theatre is saturated with Tupmanity. Every heart throbs 
 and thumps. There are all sorts of hearts throbbing and 
 thumping behind all sorts of corsets and shirt-fronts, but they 
 are all throbbing and thumping to the same tune, the old tune 
 of love. Many of these hearts are superannuated warriors 
 who are on the retired list. They are scarred and bemed- 
 alled veterans who have fought their last campaign. But they 
 like to feel their old wounds opening. They are glad to feel 
 the old ecstatic pain squirming feebly somewhere behind their 
 whalebone and their starch. Then there are the conscript 
 hearts of young girls, the blithe innocents that are only be- 
 ginning to throb and thump to the oldest music in the world. 
 Lily Elsie is the embodiment of their timid dreams. One 
 day they will be like Sonia, desirable, desiring, and desired, 
 languishing and languorous, coquettish and bewitching, slen- 
 der and supple and graceful in a wistful swoon of sentiment 
 and a dreamy waltz of romance. 
 
 This is the age of slim and slender nymphs. Lily Elsie 
 is the last word in willowy gracility. There was a time when 
 exuberance of flesh was the fashion, but to-day a woman must 
 be a bending wisp, without obtrusive curves and emphatic 
 contours. Venus is no longer voluptuous. She can hardly 
 be too thin to please her Paris. Her grace must be ethereal 
 and her wiles must be spiritual. Lily Elsie is a perfect type 
 of the current ideal. Her fragile body is the climax of that 
 frail evanescence which is now the vogue. Her delicate face 
 is like a poppy trembling on a slender stalk. When she swings 
 in the waltz with Danilo's hand supporting her waist, you are
 
 LILY ELSIE 61 
 
 afraid she will break in two. When she sways with his hand 
 upholding the nape of her neck, you shudder lest her head 
 should come off. She looks like a white rose whose petals 
 would fall in a shower if they were rudely shaken. Her dream- 
 like evanescence seems to float along the music like a lotus 
 along an indolent stream. There is no violence or vehemence 
 in her lazy charm. The slumbering passion in her lovely eyes 
 is like the visionary passion of some impossible damozel bending 
 over the gold bar of some impossible heaven. She is not a 
 creature of solid flesh and blood, but a mythical fairy fash- 
 ioned out of the stuff of dreams. She is womanhood melting 
 into the mist of poetry and the vapour of romance. The 
 long curves of her lips and her limbs recall the languid dream 
 women of Rossetti and the swooning sylphs of Burne- Jones. 
 The gliding undulations of her dancing lull the senses into a 
 brooding reverie peopled with tender reminiscences and de- 
 licious recollections of all the fair women in song and story. 
 She is a symbol of unearthly fascination and unworldly en- 
 chantment, an image of desire that hovers for ever over the 
 abyss of fulfilment, of passion that is poised for ever on the 
 precipice of disillusion. She is the mirage of unattained 
 rapture and the miracle of unachieved delight sung by Keats: 
 
 Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
 Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve, 
 
 She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
 For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! 
 
 That is the secret of the charm of the waltz that has run 
 like wildfire through the world, and that is the secret of the 
 ephemeral charm of Lily Elsie. She expresses the impossible 
 love of all the impossible lovers, the hopeless quest of the 
 human heart for a happiness that seems always within its 
 grasp and is always out of reach. She is the laughing will- 
 o'-the-wisp of life that Tracy Tupman follows till he loses 
 it in the grave.
 
 FLEUR DESLYS 
 
 THERE are many nuances of gaiety in this vale of tears, 
 and one of the most delicate is the nuance you taste at the 
 Alhambra. The Alhambra has a temperament of its own, 
 and it is not in the least British, for it is free from solemnity 
 and heavy deliberation. It has the wild grace of gaiety and 
 the laughing spirit of fastidious extravagance. There is noth- 
 ing so tragic as joy in its soul, for joy is a serious and sober 
 thing which keeps a firm foothold on the surface of reality. 
 
 The Alhambra bans reality, and breathes fantasy from the 
 very porch. When you step over its enchanted threshold you 
 leave life behind you, and you forget that you are what you 
 are. The Oriental lassitudes and languors of the corridors 
 charm you out of your workaday mood, and as you sink back 
 into your stall you sigh yourself into a mood of indolent benignity. 
 
 The Alhambra stall is a symbol of the place. It is half 
 an easy chair and half a divan. Some day I mean to beg the 
 Alhambra to give me one of these masterpieces of upholstery, 
 for if I had one by my fire I should always find the secret of 
 laziness at my elbow. It is really very hard to be lazy unless 
 you have a lazy chair. The Alhambra stall is the laziest seat 
 on earth. 
 
 Well, having adjusted your bones so that your body ceases 
 to bore your luxurious mind, you light a long Ramon Allones, 
 with all the fragrance of Havana in its tender brown slimness, 
 and as the first puff curls and drifts languidly away, you feel the 
 sea of deep content submerging you. That charming creature 
 by your side seems to be more charming than ever. A few 
 years ago men did not dare to take their womenfolk to the 
 Alhambra. They sat alone in sultanic majesty, contemplating 
 the witcheries of the ballet. We have changed all that. You 
 
 62
 
 FLEUR DESLYS 63 
 
 may now take your wife or your sister, or even your mother or 
 your grandmother. 
 
 There is a fascinating old lady two rows away from us, 
 and it is pleasant to watch the glow of youth in her ancient 
 eyes and to see the light shimmering in her silver hair. The art 
 of being a merry grandmother is a modern discovery. Peo- 
 ple of all ages seem to be in the same mood of deep, indolent 
 content, and this spirit of unanimity reacts on you, as you lie 
 back absorbing the placid peace of the place. 
 
 But there is a quiver of expectancy in the heart of all this 
 indolent satisfaction with things. We are all waiting for 
 Number 9. Who is Number 9 ? Who but Mile. Gaby Deslys ? 
 Not too soon or too late she comes, but precisely at the cul- 
 mination of the feast, at twenty-five minutes to ten. The cur- 
 tain goes up, and you feel the little thrill of suspense pulsing 
 from the floor to the roof. 
 
 For a moment the scene is empty, then a miraculously 
 dainty ecstasy flashes out of the wings, and it is filled to the 
 brim with airy, bubbling, sparkling gaiety. She is like a glass 
 alive with cool, winking champagne, which a thousand lips are 
 sipping together. Yes, Deslys is champagne. She is the 
 quintessence of the sun and the summer, and the warm light 
 of Provencal vineyards is in her wonderful eyes. There are 
 few eyes which possess the mysterious charm of hers. They 
 are large, oval things, and their largeness is audaciously ex- 
 aggerated by the art of the pencil. But their secret is not 
 in their size, but in their clear vehemence of troubling naivete. 
 
 They are the eyes of a child who knows nothing veiling the 
 soul of a woman who knows everything. Their distracting appeal 
 is a mixture of incompatibles and contradictions, the song of 
 innocence melting into the song of experience, like the light of a 
 lamp dying in the light of the dawn. Their bewildering glamour 
 is a conflagration of childish wonder ignorance in flames and 
 innocence on fire in a word, Flagrant Deslys! 
 
 This childish paradox is inconceivably fragile in every 
 feature and every limb. She looks as if she would break into 
 little pieces, like a Dresden shepherdess, if you let her fall.
 
 64 
 
 Her mouth is as tremulously sensitive as the petals of a 
 rose, and yet its blushing curves are as ripe as a September 
 grape. When it laughs you see the lights of Paris, for Deslys 
 is the triple extract of the Boulevards, and her smile has all 
 the conscious grace of Cheret or Willette. 
 
 The illusion of infantile sweetness is intensified by her 
 physical tininess. She is tiny from the tip of her nose to the 
 tips of her fingers and the tips of her toes. Rather, she seems 
 tiny, not because she is minute, but because she is fashioned 
 so daintily that she seems to be a miniature. In reality she 
 is rather tall, but she is as slim as a silver birch, and as evan- 
 escent. Her feet are irresistibly and impossibly tiny, and I 
 am sure Paragot's phrase is the only phrase that is worthy 
 of them "ces petits pieds si adores." Yes, we are all adoring 
 the little feet that touch the boards so lightly. The whole 
 theatre is breathless with adoration. 
 
 Deslys is an adorable poupee, and it is like a poupee that 
 she laughs and dances and sings. She is "The Magic Toy," 
 and "The Magic Toy" is a doll in an Easter egg, and such a 
 doll! If only one could buy dolls like Deslys in the shops for 
 one's little -nieces! Everybody would want to buy Deslys 
 and keep her on the mantelpiece. Other actresses grow quickly 
 out of the doll stage, but Deslys is still in it, and she has the true 
 unreality of the doll in every limb. 
 
 Her eyes stare a delightfully inhuman stare, and her wooden 
 grace is like expensive wax turning into flesh or flesh turning 
 into expensive wax. 
 
 Her voice is the voice of a doll, a tinkling, tiny stream 
 of clear music, without any passion or emotion nothing but 
 merry, unconscious life, and vivacious sprightliness. 
 
 But I have one fault to find with the delicious Deslys. 
 Why does she sing an English song? Why is she throwing 
 away her natural disadvantages? Is she to go the way of 
 all Parisian singers who become Anglicised? She is an article 
 de Paris. I implore her to keep her Parisian gaminerie and 
 diablerie untarnished and uncoarsened by our London fogs. 
 
 At the Alhambra you always get a bizarre clash of sen-
 
 FLEUR DESLYS 65 
 
 sations. It is a far cry from the flower-soft French fragility 
 of Deslys to the Anglo-Saxon brutality of the prize-fight be- 
 tween Tommy Burns and Gunner Moir. It is like eating roast 
 beef after the tongues of nightingales. The cinematograph 
 seems to deepen the brutality of the ring. You have all the 
 realism of the real thing without its atmosphere and environ- 
 ment. You are passive and dispassionate. In cold blood 
 you watch these two pugilists with a shudder, for they appear 
 to be fighting in cold, cold blood. It is like a silent battle 
 between two ghosts. You miss the roar of the hoarse cheers, 
 the shuffle of the feet, and the thud of the gloves on the warm, 
 shining flesh. And the blood on Moir's face is black, not red. 
 And the American is very sinister, very lithe, very slim, and 
 very imperturbable. And the contrast between Burns and 
 Moir and Deslys is so appalling that you leave the theatre 
 with your heart bruised and battered as if Burns had been 
 slugging at it. 
 5
 
 MAINLY ABOUT EATING
 
 IN DEPTFORD MARKET 
 
 LONDON is a monster with six million mouths, six million 
 throats, and six million stomachs. This monster has the 
 largest appetite on earth. It is always hungry and it is always 
 eating. At every moment of every hour of every day its teeth 
 are grinding. Try to conjure up an image of this million- 
 mouthed creature. Think of its oceans of gastric juice, its 
 enormous machinery of digestion. Figure it as one immense 
 man, with one vast mouth, and one gigantic dinner-plate. 
 Then try to imagine the Mississippi of meat which rolls cease- 
 lessly down his gullet. 
 
 The thing is a nightmare. The fairy tales which tell you 
 of the giant who drank oceans and ate continents are less as- 
 tounding. For this is a real giant. He takes a slice of roast 
 beef as large as Hyde Park, and each mouthful weighs a ton. 
 He masticates meadows of mutton. He swallows Atlantic 
 cables of sausage. He picks his teeth with an Alp. His 
 finger-bowl is the Black Sea. His serviette is Switzerland. 
 His cigar is the Nelson pillar. His coffee cup is the dome of 
 St. Paul's. 
 
 The titanic process of filling London's belly is too com- 
 plicated for any pen. I might stun you with statistics. I 
 might daze you with tonnages. But figures beyond a certain 
 point cease to stir the imagination. It is better to surprise the 
 tide of food at some strategic stage of its advance, to stand 
 above the surge of victuals, and watch its waves before they 
 pour into the bottomless pit of hunger. 
 
 Where shall we go? Well, let us choose the Foreign Cat- 
 tle Market at Deptford. London eats more foreign meat 
 than any other city in the world. When you chew your steak 
 you fondly imagine that it is home-grown. Five times out 
 
 69
 
 70 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 of ten you are eating beef that has crossed the Atlantic in a 
 cattle-boat compared to which the Ark was a cockleshell. 
 All the bullocks that come across the sea to London walk 
 ashore at Deptford. Not one of them is allowed to leave the 
 lairs alive. The procession of beasts is perpetual. They 
 march in regiments up to the mouth of London, and London 
 eats them in brigades. 
 
 It costs about thirty shillings to bring a bullock from New 
 York to London. It costs more to bring a Scotch steer to 
 Islington. You cannot carry a beast from Norwich to Lon- 
 don for less than ten shillings. In Smithfield they say that a 
 bullock arrives from America in better condition than a home- 
 bred animal. Our railways do not employ cattlemen. The 
 beasts are left to the unskilled hands of the ordinary porters. 
 
 From Cannon Street we crawl to New Cross, where we 
 find a string of hooded flys waiting in the rain. Flys, not 
 growlers. This is one of the topographical whimsies which 
 London flaunts at every turn. Under railway arches and 
 along squalid streets we go to the market gates. We pass 
 the policeman, and enter a strange land. Here aforetime 
 stood the shipbuilding yard in which Peter the Great served 
 his apprenticeship. The slips are now slaughterhouses and the 
 workshops are lairs. Instead of the multitudinous clang of 
 the shipwright's hammer there is the multitudinous roar of 
 thousands of fat kine. Our ears are filled with the lowing 
 and bellowing of oxen. We wander in a labyrinth of sheds, a 
 maze of low buildings. 
 
 At every step we encounter grotesque men. There are 
 drovers carrying rough cudgels. There are dandiacal sales- 
 men with diamond breastpins and beringed hands. There 
 are men with great wrinkled sea-boots that reach their thighs, 
 men with white coats dabbled with scarlet stains, men with 
 canvas rags bound round their trousers. They come and 
 go silently. Their step is brisk, their air crisp and precise. 
 We vaguely wonder at their activity. We grope after a key 
 to their haste. We feel incongruous. We are caught in the 
 cogs of a mysterious machine.
 
 IN DEPTFORD MARKET 71 
 
 What is behind those closed doors? Refrigerating-cham- 
 bers crammed with carcasses ready for London's dinner. We 
 stare at a vast empty shed criss-crossed with thousands of 
 wooden cat's-cradles, which are cattle-pens, with drinking- 
 troughs and fodder-racks. The building is like a chapel 
 without the congregation. In another shed we find a vast 
 concourse of shaggy red bullocks standing still, their soft eyes 
 gazing at you with that pathetic patience which is the person- 
 ality of brutes. They are blessedly free from foreknowledge. 
 
 Suddenly our nostrils are assaulted by an acrid odour 
 which overpowers the familiar farmyard smell of the lairs. 
 It invades our senses. It permeates our clothes. It is a 
 damp, sharp, stinging breath, sickly yet poignant, clammy 
 but keen. It has the clinging porousness of a sponge and 
 the hard, clean, thin precision of a razor-edge. Its pungency 
 recalls the reek of peat or the smarting savour of the sea after 
 a storm. What is it? 
 
 Blood. 
 
 It is a new smell. It comes from a hundred abattoirs. 
 It makes us giddy and faint. We gasp for breath, but even 
 in the open the air is saturated with this terrible perfume. For 
 a river of blood is flowing steadily, quietly, perpetually. As 
 we walk along the thresholds we see red, we hear red, we taste 
 red, we touch red, we smell red. It is a red world. 
 
 On one side are the living beasts. Midway are the dying 
 beasts. On the other side are the crimson and ivory sides of 
 dressed beasts. We catch glimpses of men skinning steaming 
 carcasses, of hoofs gesticulating in the air. Here are great piles 
 of horned hides. Here is a carcass hung by the heels, a white- 
 coated man chopping it gently with a cleaver. Here is a lorry 
 laden with iron cauldrons brimming with creamy fat. Here 
 is a man pushing a huge carcass, hanging from a travelling pul- 
 ley, into a shed aisled with gleaming flesh. 
 
 There are two weapons of slaughter, the Christian poleaxe 
 and the Jewish knife. If the poleaxe is the swifter, the knife 
 is the surer. The poleaxe falls, and the beast collapses like 
 a punctured tyre. A thin cane is inserted in the hole, and
 
 72 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 thrust along the spinal column, as a ramrod is thrust along 
 the gun-barrel. There is a convulsive tremor, and then 
 death. But if the blow be not skilful, there may be bungling. 
 The Jewish Shochet never bungles. The edge of his long 
 knife is keener than any razor. It must be absolutely notchless. 
 The beast is gently thrown by pulleyed heel-ropes upon a soft 
 india rubber pad, its head is pulled back, and its throat cut 
 as you cut a tense string. There is a misty explosion of san- 
 guine steam, a crimson torrent of blood, a terrible fit of coughing, 
 and then death. The process lasts about twenty-five seconds, 
 and it is inexpressibly dreadful. It stuns you with horror. 
 You set your teeth with terror. You feel sick for days at the 
 memory of it. No skill can make a slaughter-house perfectly 
 humane. . 
 
 After the Shochet, the Bodech. He "searches" the car- 
 cass. That is to say, he examines it for traces of disease. 
 He inflates the lungs, and if there is the slightest defect, he 
 condemns the meat. If the meat is pure, he seals it. The 
 seal is a tab of leather fastened by a rivet of lead. The punch 
 which closes the lead disc also stamps it with the date and the 
 word "Kosher" in Hebrew. The meat is then "Kosher," 
 namely, fit. There is no doubt that the Jewish ritual is the 
 more effective preventive against the sale of diseased meat. 
 The Gentile gourmet says that Kosher meat, being bled white, 
 is consequently tough, but the Jewish gourmet repels that 
 aspersion. 
 
 I am not a vegetarian, but I admit that the vegetarian case 
 is unanswerable. After my visit to the Deptford shambles 
 I feel that I ought to live for the rest of my life on lentils and 
 pulses, nuts and apples. But London is hungry, and its 
 mouth demands flesh. The march of the red bullocks goes 
 on ceaselessly, and will go on until the West attains the wisdom 
 of the East, or our cold climate ceases to make a flesh diet 
 desirable.
 
 THE CATTLE SHOW 
 
 TWO-PENN'ORTH of velocity in the Twopenny Tube to the 
 Bank. Then through a white-tiled pea-shooter to the mouth 
 of the pipe that leads from the Bank to the Angel. Three- 
 ha'porth of speed in the single-barrelled fowling-piece that 
 fires cartridges of humanity into Islington. Then into a 
 square box up into the grey paste which Cockneys call air. 
 
 As I wade through the grey paste I am wounded by the 
 ugliness of everything. It is the ugliest maelstrom in London. 
 The shops are down-hearted and down at heel. Cheapness 
 gnashes its teeth at you from every window. The very 'buses 
 have lost their swaggering joviality. The pavements are 
 greasily despondent. A choir of gramophones is wheezing in a 
 cave of harmony called "Funland." There is an allusion to 
 the Cattle Show in the window of a sweet-shop which is dec- 
 orated with fat sugar-pigs. There was a time when I could 
 have eaten a sugar-pig with Elian gusto. Eheu, fugaces labun- 
 tur anni! 
 
 Now the sidewalks grow bucolic. Apple-cheeked far- 
 mers with leathern leggings and strange dialects go by. The 
 Agricultural Hall is a shock to the imagination. Paris would 
 have graced this cathedral of cattle with bovine portals and 
 heroic statues of yeomen. She would have carved horned 
 heads of mighty bulls on its gigantic facade. London dis- 
 dains such symbolism. There is not even a colossal butcher 
 wielding a poleaxe to stir the fancy of the spectator. 
 
 As I go through the turnstiles I hear a gruff voice, and my 
 hand is grasped by a broad-backed, broad-shouldered, broad- 
 faced giant. With aching fingers I stare at the man. 
 
 "Don't you know me?" he roared. "I'm the Angel. 
 Come along and see my fadings." 
 
 73
 
 74 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 I had never seen the Angel before, and I confess I was 
 surprised at his appearance. I had imagined that the Angel 
 at Islington was a public-house, and I said so with some heat. 
 He bellowed out laughter that drowned the plunkety-plunk of 
 the gas-engines. 
 
 "Me a pub!" he guffawed. "Bless your soul, I'm a far- 
 mer!" And with that he clapped me on the back with a 
 hand as big as a barn-door. While my heart jangled like a 
 pendulum in an earthquake, he strode ahead into a vast hall, 
 filled with enormous oxen. 
 
 "Throw away your cigarette, my boy," he grunted. "I 
 can't let you poison my beauties with your filthy smoke. They 
 are used to the honest air of the downs and the hills. Tobacco 
 is good enough for you Londoners who don't know the flavour 
 of a breeze. My beasts know better. Look at that chap! 
 Bred and fed as not one of you whey-faced streetlings ever was!" 
 
 I blushed as I surveyed the massive masterpiece of breed- 
 ing and feeding. 
 
 "Who is he?" I stammered. 
 
 "Who is he?" growled the Angel derisively. "You may 
 well ask. Take off your hat, sir, to His Majesty. The best 
 beast in the show, sir. Bred and fed by the King at the Royal 
 Farms, Windsor. His royal sire was Royal Duke, his royal 
 dam was Jenny Lind B, and his royal grandsire was Stead- 
 fast. There's breeding and feeding for you, young man!" 
 Humbly I took off my hat, and bowed low to the august 
 potentate. 
 
 " Sire," said I, " accept my loyal congratulations." 
 
 The son of Royal Duke gazed tolerantly at me out of a mild 
 and magnificent eye. He was inured to homage and habit- 
 uated to adulation. Silently I contemplated his immeasurable 
 bulk. His back was as vast as Table Mountain, and his stu- 
 pendous sides bulged outward like a Scotch boiler. He was 
 a Himalaya of beef. No upholsterer ever stuffed a Chester- 
 field so tight with horsehair as this paragon has been stuffed 
 with solid meat. A plasterer could not plaster another ounce 
 on his bulging obesity. It seems to me impossible that this
 
 THE CATTLE SHOW 75 
 
 monarch can have eaten himself into such a glory of fat in 
 two years eleven months and two weeks. I see visions of 
 broad acres cropped close by those insatiable teeth. Is there 
 any grass left in Windsor Park? He must have devoured 
 pyramids of oil-cake and drunk oceans of mash. What chew- 
 ings of cud he must have exulted in! What feats of digestion! 
 
 I fell to wondering whether His Majesty is conscious of 
 his greatness. In his obscure babyhood did he conceive a 
 noble resolution to masticate his way to the pinnacle of bovine 
 fame? Did he foresee his future sublimity as he grazed? 
 Had he moments of presaging exultation ? Did he day by day 
 view his growing girth mirrored in some limpid pond as he 
 drank his draught at dawn or sundown ? Was he ever haunted 
 with doubts and fears? These are mysteries which baffle 
 the curious mind. 
 
 But the Angel dragged me out of my reverie of adoration. 
 He gravely presented me to steers and heifers of the noblest 
 lineage, proud Devons and haughty Herefords, lolling Short- 
 horns and shaggy Galloways, dainty Kerrys and Dexters, 
 Highland lads and lassies, fierce chieftains from the Welsh 
 hills, crossbred dignitaries in scarlet and ermine, and red- 
 polled cardinals. 
 
 "Thousands of Christmas dinners here!" chuckled the 
 Angel. "They will all be roasted before they are much older. 
 Come along and see the sheep!" 
 
 The sheep are very sheepish, and their wool is very woolly. 
 They are absurdly clean. Their backs are impossibly flat. 
 They look wisely at me with eyes framed in fluff. No carpet 
 ever had a pile so profoundly deep and soft as these Leices- 
 ters and Cotswolds, Southdowns and Suffolks, Shropshires and 
 Cheviots. Vainly I search for their buried bones: they are 
 made of fat and wool. Their silver ears gleam like mother- 
 o'-pearl. Their shelly horns curl extravagantly. It is sad 
 to think that they will soon be mutton. 
 
 "And now for the pigs," said the Angel. "Do you hear 
 them singing?" 
 
 The pigs are the comedians of the Cattle Show. The
 
 76 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 oxen seldom low and the sheep do not often bleat, but the 
 pigs grunt and squeak and squeal perpetual defiance at the 
 crowd. I fear they are teased and tormented shamefully. 
 Everybody pokes them with sticks and umbrellas. Their 
 ears are pulled by the passer-by. The ladies giggle at their 
 dilated snouts. A pig's face is one of Nature's wildest jests. 
 There is no decorum or dignity in it. 
 
 One seraphic monster amused me vastly. He was a smiler. 
 His mouth was slit preposterously far back, and his closed 
 lips curved upward in a gorgeous grin that was half human. 
 Is a pig's smile unconscious ? Does he see the humour of him- 
 self? Or is it possible that he smiles at us? I suspect that 
 he is tickled by the grotesque countenance of man. He de- 
 spises its unporcine contours. I am sure that he regards himself 
 as the type of beauty. He is proud of his wiggly tail and his 
 shining bristles. After all, what right have we to impose upon 
 him our convention of grace? Nature made both pigs and 
 men. It is only an accident that enables the one to turn the 
 other into rashers. I can conceive a world in which pigs should 
 breakfast off human sausages. Let us be humble, my brothers. 
 
 "Well," said the Angel, as I shook hands with him, "I 
 wish you a merry Christmas. Come again next year." 
 
 "I will," said I. "Do you think they will be fatter than 
 ever?" 
 
 "They will, my lad, they will." 
 
 But I am sure they won't, for they can't.
 
 DINNER 
 
 DINNER is doomed! The axe is laid at the root of the 
 Mahogany Tree. The empire of the stomach is overthrown. 
 I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. The night is broken 
 westward. The cooks are cowering. The chefs are shud- 
 dering. The wine merchants are moaning. The florists 
 are sore stricken. The fishmongers are afraid. The butchers 
 are in despair. Dinner is doomed! 
 
 The downfall of dinner has not been heralded by the news- 
 papers. The revolution has stolen upon us shod with wool. 
 It has not been compassed by leagues and societies. It is the 
 product of dim, silent forces. The gnomes of change have 
 been working craftily in the digestive machinery of man. 
 The vastest transformation in all the annals of humanity has 
 been wrought into being like snow or dawn. To-day I salute 
 the first faint shafts of the dinnerless day. I proclaim the 
 triumph of the brain over the teeth, the victory of the soul 
 over the palate. 
 
 Dinner is doomed! It is dead of dulness and indigestion. 
 Our rude Victorian forefathers would turn in their tombs if 
 they were to hear the awful news. But we are a breed of 
 iconoclasts. We are idol-breakers. We are in full revolt 
 against the paunch of the past. Ehud is slaying Eglon. Eglon, 
 as you know, "was a very fat man. Ehud came unto him; 
 and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which he had for him- 
 self alone. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dag- 
 ger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly." Our 
 Eglon is Dinner, and behold our lord is fallen down dead on 
 the earth. 
 
 Lives there a man who will lay his hand on his stomach 
 and deny this gospel? It is true that the corpse of King Eglon 
 
 77
 
 78 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 still encumbers the dining-rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia, 
 of Bloomsbury and Bayswater, of Hampstead and Kensing- 
 ton. But the brute is moribund, the cadaver is cold. Cus- 
 toms survive long after their desuetude. We still wear two 
 buttons at the back of our dress-coats. We still tolerate the 
 tabs on our boots. Our restaurants still serve toothpicks. 
 Quill pens may still be seen at Westminster, at the Law Courts, 
 and other medieval haunts. In the same spirit of reverence 
 for mouldy use and mossy wont we give and receive invita- 
 tions to dinner parties. But do we eat the dinner? Do we 
 drink the wines? No. We leave that to our menials. Din- 
 ners are no longer eaten in the dining-room. They are eaten 
 in the housekeeper's room and the servants' hall. 
 
 The other evening I dined with Lucullus. The ancient 
 ritual was solemnly maintained. The corpulent butler and 
 the slim footmen ministered unto us as of old. Two by two 
 we marched majestically out of the dimly magnificent draw- 
 ing-room down to the dimly magnificent dining-room. Twenty- 
 four of us, and not an appetite among us. We sat meek as 
 martyrs before a procession of elaborately disguised negations, 
 a banquet of cryptograms. Nature or the dentist had fur- 
 nished our twenty-four mouths with ferocious ivories, but 
 they were as idle as the molars of Triangle Camp. Masti- 
 cation? Where have I heard that word? Teeth we have, 
 but they chew not. Palates we possess, but they taste not. 
 Throats we have, but they drink not. 
 
 Our plutocratic host led the van. He toyed with his silver 
 and steel. The dishes filed past him inviolate. I avow that 
 I mourned over their virginity. The humiliation of fish and 
 flesh and fowl moved me to tears. The woe of the unquaffed 
 wines made me sad. Sherry, hock, champagne, claret, port, 
 and liqueurs wove their wanton wiles in vain. These whilom 
 conquerors were vanquished by plebeian waters with alien 
 patronymics and parvenu genealogies. 
 
 Lazarus used to starve on the crumbs that fell from the 
 rich man's table. Nowadays it is Dives who starves, and 
 the crumbs in his crumb-tray would make even Gargantua
 
 DINNER 79 
 
 replete. His heeltaps would distend Falstaff himself. As 
 for Pantagruel, he lives in Poplar. 
 
 With the decease of dinner, the art of conversation has 
 expired. The hungry dyspeptic inflated with Apollinaris 
 or Perrier is a dolorous raconteur. It is well that Christopher 
 North is bonedust. There are no Noctes Ambrosianae now. 
 Haggis went out with nightmares, rack punch, and the Caves 
 of Harmony. The interlude after the ladies leave the dining- 
 room is now a ghost of its former self. We no longer smoke 
 cigars a foot long. A whiff of the cigarette, a chestnut or two, 
 and then we stride into the drawing-room, break up the femi- 
 nine session, politely bore each other, and are politely bored. 
 Then a flat and jejune farewell, and so home, empty, to our 
 hungry bed. 
 
 Dinner is dead. We are all teetotalers now, although we 
 do not choose to have it known. The glass-blowers are bank- 
 rupt and the makers of decanters are extinct. The Tantalus 
 no longer tantalises. Port has gone. Champagne has gone. 
 Claret is going. Whisky is on its last legs. Can mighty 
 ale survive? Can beer, glorious beer, stem the flowing tide 
 of mineral waters? Can even that eloquent intemperance 
 lecturer, Mr. Chesterton, dam the ocean of abstinence ? 
 
 What can take the place of dinner? Tea? Alas, tea 
 too is in articulo mortis. Most of us are teatotalers. Shall 
 we kill alcohol to make tannin king? Coffee also is on the 
 index expurgatorius. Chocolate and cocoa are for the diges- 
 tive giant. We must eke out a tenuous life on Byron's diet, 
 soda-water and biscuits, ameliorated by Igmandi and other 
 radioactive beverages. Ere long the stomach of man will 
 wither into annihilation. He will be merely a peripatetic 
 brain, feeding on chemical emanations. He will breakfast 
 on powders, lunch on tabloids, and dine on pilules. Knives 
 and forks will be as obsolete as swords and daggers. The 
 butler will share the fate of the seneschal, and culinary imple- 
 ments will be exhibited in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame 
 Tussaud's. A silver grill will be a curio, and saucepans will 
 be as bizarre as warming-pans. Dilettanti will collect Ed-
 
 80 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 wardian cooking-ranges and soup-tureens. Finger-bowls will 
 be regarded as quaint relics of the Twentieth Century. 
 
 Yes, dinner is doomed. "Good cheer" already is a phrase 
 with a romantically archaic air, and Dickens looms like a 
 greasy cannibal. Soon we shall shudder at the thought of 
 munching a haunch of venison, a shoulder of lamb, or a leg 
 of mutton. Rump steak, ribs of beef, and marrow-bones 
 will conjure up visions of the mortuary. Imagination is 
 starving us to death. Why prolong the farce? Let us give 
 up the dinner-party as well as dinner, and die, if we cannot 
 live, like men.
 
 A TRAGEDY IN PORRIDGE 
 
 I LOVE Cranks. It is to me an ecstasy to discover a new 
 Fad and a new Faddist. Cranks and Fads are to human 
 nature what the hills and the clouds are to physical nature. 
 They relieve its monotony. If men were all conventional, 
 the world would be as dull as ditchwater. 
 
 My friend Lentilius is the Perfect Crank, the Absolute 
 Faddist. His soul is a disagreement, and his brain is a con- 
 troversy. He is happy only when he is unhappy, and he is glad 
 only when he is sad. His pastime is misery, and his pleasure 
 is self-mortification. He lusts after unprofitable martyrdoms 
 and sterile abnegations. 
 
 His chief dread is lest he should exhaust his capacity for 
 quarrelling with life. "The good God," said Heine, "will 
 forgive me. It is His business." The business of Lentilius 
 is never to forgive anybody, and never to pardon anything. 
 He eats the bread of intolerance and drinks the water of enmity. 
 But his intolerance is beautiful and his enmity is gracious. 
 His discontent is a game which helps him to endure the ironies 
 of existence. If he were afflicted with contentment for a day 
 he would die. 
 
 The other day he came to me with large tears in his frenetic 
 eyes, and deep furrows of melancholy in his sorrowful counte- 
 nance. I knew he had discovered a fresh grievance, and I 
 congratulated him upon the splendour of his despondency. 
 
 "Lentilius," said I, "what dewy wrong have you unearthed 
 in the desert of joy?" 
 
 He groaned a groan of agonised delight, and grasped my 
 hand with a spasm of funereal bliss. 
 
 "My Palace of Famine is closed," he sobbed. "My Veg- 
 etarian Restaurant is shut up." Whereat he burst into tears. 
 6 81
 
 82 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 It is terrible to see a strong man in the grip of tragic emotion. 
 Lentilius had for many years found in his Vegetarian Res- 
 taurant a refuge from the gross pleasures of life. It was, I 
 think, the first Palace of Famine which the high priests of 
 starvation erected in London. Lentilius had devoted the 
 best years of his life to its farinaceous ideals. On the altar of 
 its marble-topped tables he had sacrificed his digestion. Within 
 its gloomy walls for many a famished lustrum he had worshipped 
 the Goddess of Dyspepsia. Everything he ate in what he 
 called "The Vedge" disagreed with him, and he disagreed 
 with everything he ate. Thrice daily he found in its doleful 
 dishes the solace of complaint and the anodyne of querulous- 
 ness. Now his staff of grief was broken and his prop of sor- 
 row shattered. 
 
 "Sit down," said I, "and tell me all about it." 
 
 "It had been going down for years," he moaned. "They 
 were too hard on the weaker brethren. They imagined that 
 a Vegetarian would eat anything for the good of the Cause. 
 It was a mistake. The spirit is willing, but sometimes the 
 flesh is weak. Even the Vegetarian grows weary of well-doing 
 and tired of Welsh Rarebit. They did not give us enough 
 variety." 
 
 "Surely," said I, "variety is the soul of Vegetarianism?" 
 
 "It is," he sighed, "it is. They ought to have changed the 
 names of the dishes. The name's the thing. Even if the same 
 ingredients are used, it is a pity to call the dishes by the same 
 name. I fear the brethren grew weary of the monotony. 
 They fell away one by one. At last I only was left. But I 
 stood by 'The Vedge' to the end." 
 
 "Could nothing have been done?" I asked. "A new nut- 
 cake, for instance, or mutton made out of macaroni?" 
 
 "They tried to attract corpse-eaters by introducing fish- 
 dinners. That was fatal. The old guard of Vegetarians 
 fled. They saw the cloven hoof in the sole, and the thin end 
 of the wedge in the whiting." 
 
 "You mean the thin end of the 'Vedge,' surely?" said I, 
 with feeble facetiousness. He stared at me gloomily.
 
 A TRAGEDY IN PORRIDGE 83 
 
 "It was the end of everything. The brokers have been in 
 for a week, and the food has been getting worse and worse. 
 They tried to make us eat up the old stock. We did our best, 
 but it was hard, very hard. Last night, while I was eating a 
 very tough Welsh Rarebit, the Gas Company cut off the gas. 
 To-day the shutters are up, and I am heart-broken." 
 
 " Cheer up ! " said I. " There are other ' Vedges. ' " 
 
 "They are not the same," he sobbed. "I hate their leaded 
 panes, their white paint, their false gaiety, and their merry 
 waitresses. There is no place left where I can get the mourn- 
 ful Porridge which was the joy of my life." 
 
 "Can't you live without Porridge?" 
 
 "Live without Porridge? Why insult me? Porridge is 
 the only food which I can eat without gratifying my baser 
 appetites. Porridge is the only food which I can eat without 
 pleasure. Porridge is the only food which I can never digest 
 without pain. Porridge is the food of the martyrs." 
 
 "Why not try Rice Pudding?" I ventured. 
 
 "Rice Pudding!" he shrieked. "Why, I like Rice Pud- 
 ding. It agrees with me." 
 
 "I am sorry for it," said I. "What about Bananas?" 
 
 A slow smile of meditative woe lighted up his haggard 
 face. 
 
 "Ah!" he murmured. "There is something to be said 
 for Bananas. I have always loathed Bananas. They are 
 almost as beautifully repulsive as Porridge." 
 
 " And Tomatoes ? " I suggested. 
 
 "Yes," he said. "Since I was a child I have detested 
 Tomatoes. They are divinely nauseous. Henceforth I will 
 live on Bananas and Tomatoes." 
 
 "It will be the 'Simple Life.'" 
 
 "Yes, it will be the 'Simple Life.' Only one thing worries 
 me." 
 
 "What is that?" said I. 
 
 "I am afraid I may grow fond of Bananas and Tomatoes." 
 
 "In that case," said I, "you can change their names. You 
 can call them Tomanas and Banatoes."
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEER 
 
 "I HATE to go home," said my friend Falstaff, as we left 
 the Empire. "The night has not cut its first tooth yet. Let 
 us sup." 
 
 "Supper!" said I, scornfully. "I hate supper. It means 
 listening to music you don't want to hear, looking at people 
 you don't want to see, and paying for food you don't want to 
 eat. The man who has dined well cannot sup well. A good 
 dinner does not need a supper and a bad dinner does not de- 
 serve one." 
 
 "Degenerate weakling!" snorted Falstaff. "Supper is 
 the coping-stone of dinner. A supperless stomach is a temple 
 without a roof." 
 
 "You are an over-eater, my friend. Hence your hogs- 
 head girth." 
 
 "It is one of the great fallacies of our time," said Falstaff 
 solemnly, "to suppose that a man can eat too much. I can 
 prove that it is physically impossible to eat more than enough. 
 As my friend Blake says, 'You never know what is enough 
 unless you know what is more than enough.'" 
 
 "Well," said I, "it would be inhuman to send you to bed 
 on a fasting stomach. Take me somewhere cheap, where 
 there is no band and no cheap snobs and no dear food. You 
 shall feed and I shall watch you." 
 
 Grasping my arm, he dragged me out of Leicester Square 
 towards Piccadilly Circus. As we walked along Coventry 
 Street, he took off his vast soft hat and swept the pavement 
 with a magnificent gesture of salutation. 
 
 "Who is the lady? "said I. 
 
 " The Spirit of Joy," he cried. " Don't you see her ? She 
 is in the click and clatter of hoofs, the whirl of wheels, the 
 
 84
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEER 85 
 
 flicker of winking electric advertisements, the flare of torches 
 on the roofs of theatres, the glowing tip of a cigar, the bright 
 eyes that are the lamps of the hansom, the cry of the newsboy, 
 the muffled Mercury of the fountain." 
 
 "Falstaff," said I, "you grow lyrical." 
 
 "Nay, I am a lyric. Know, my sober friend, that you are 
 in Paris. This is the only spot in London that sparkles with 
 Lutetian gaiety. A handful of kiosks and sawdust and marble- 
 topped tables, with a mellow moan of 'So-o-ir,' and it would 
 be as bright as the terrasse of the Cafe de la Paix." 
 
 Passing the Monico, he dived into the solitude of Glass- 
 house Street. Pointing to a lantern over a narrow door, he 
 cried: 
 
 "A Berlin!" 
 
 "Berlin here," said I, "and Paris round the corner? You 
 ire absurdly fantastic to-night." 
 
 He pushed into a room, dim with smoke and crowded with 
 men and women sitting at huddled tables. Falstaff seemed to 
 know everybody, for as he led me through the maze he sent 
 salutes in all directions. His path was paved with laughter. 
 At last he flung himself into a seat, and throwing his som- 
 brero on the table, he seized a stone beer-mug and rapped a 
 postman's knock with the metal lid. A waiter, whose face 
 was slit with a wide grin, hurried up. 
 
 "Varlet," shouted Falstaff, as he smote the table with his 
 clenched fist, "let there be beer!" And there was beer. For 
 a moment his tongue ceased to wag, while he buried his nose 
 in the pale amber flood. Then he banged the lid amain, 
 and cried, "Varlet, let there be more beer!" And there was 
 more beer. 
 
 "Now," he said in a calmer voice, "let us sup." Seizing 
 a huge sheet, covered with a bewildering catalogue of German 
 delicates, he began to descant upon the glories of Teutonic 
 cookery. 
 
 "My son," said he, "the Germans alone know how to 
 create an unquenchable thirst. Every dish emblazoned on 
 this document is salt. What is salt for? It is for the stimu-
 
 86 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 lation of the divine drought that demands an ocean of beer. 
 You eat in order to drink." 
 
 "Your palate," said I, "is perverted. I decline to eat 
 and I decline to drink." 
 
 "Abject! I despise you. But I will eat for you and drink 
 for you." 
 
 "And he did. I stared in stupefaction as he devoured 
 Westphalian ham, Frankfort sausages, pig's knuckles, and 
 sauerkraut. I looked round me and I saw scores of jolly fat 
 men, who were pickling their throats in the same heroic fashion. 
 The very sight made me thirsty. Round the walls of this briny 
 temple were horns innumerable horns of the goat, the elk, the 
 buffalo, the deer, the ram, the sheep. Little horns. Big horns. 
 
 The lid clicked musically on the stone lip, and Falstaff 
 lay back at last in Gargantuan ease, his golden beard bedewed 
 with golden beerdrops. 
 
 "When I was in Heidelberg," he began dreamily, "there 
 was a fair-haired girl, with forget-me-not eyes, and . . ." 
 
 "And what?" said I. 
 
 "Ah," said he, "and what?" 
 
 He gazed sternly at me, straightened his back, squared 
 his broad shoulders, and pointed proudly to a faint scar on 
 his left cheek. 
 
 "And that," said he. "I drink to her rosy lips." He 
 dashed away a tear, and, stretching forth his hand to a tum- 
 bler, took a long crooked cigar, with a straw sticking out of 
 the thin end. He lighted it, blew a mighty volume of smoke 
 up to the ceiling, and, turning to me, put his huge paw on my 
 shoulder. 
 
 "My son," said he, with immense gravity, "the Germans 
 are the only true philosophers. They see life through a sea 
 of beer. Beer is the drink of philosophers." 
 
 "I have heard of Bass and Guinness." 
 
 "Bah!" said Falstaff. "They pall. Give me the brew 
 that keeps oblivion at bay, that nourishes thirst while it quells 
 it. The nation that can drink without being drunk is invin- 
 cible. Germany is that nation."
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEER 87 
 
 "I perceive," said I sneeringly, "that you are a sot." A 
 flush of anger mantled his clear brow. 
 
 "Creature," said he, "a sot is not a philosopher. I am 
 a philosopher. I sit at the centre of life and watch it going 
 round with the contentment of contempt. It amuses me. It 
 tickles me. It arrides me. I tolerate everything even 
 you. Yes, my son, I find a reason for the meanest of the mean. 
 Your chill sobriety pleases me. It is a bubble of contrast." 
 
 "Drink," said I, "is a curse." 
 
 "Shall we put out the sun because shallow-pates die of 
 sunstroke? Fie upon you! Look at these good cits with their 
 buxom wives. Would you begrudge them their little Paradise ? " 
 
 "It is artificial." 
 
 "Is there any Paradise that is not artificial? My son, 
 read Heine and Kant and Hegel and Haeckel and Nietzsche 
 and Spencer and Shaw, and then tell me if all their wisdom 
 is not folly. I drown them in a draught." 
 
 With that he emptied his stone tankard, and swallowed 
 all the wise men of the West in a gulp. As the waiter collected 
 his pile of papier-mache discs, and reckoned up his bill, Fal- 
 staff smiled happily. 
 
 "Beer," said he, "is wisdom, and wisdom is beer." 
 
 When we emerged, Piccadilly Circus was dark and silent. 
 
 "See," said Falstaff, "Paris has fled. London is back 
 again. The lights are out, and the strayed revellers are in 
 Vine Street Vine Street! You take the symbol?" 
 
 He doffed his gigantic hat, and once more swept the pave- 
 ment with a gorgeous gesture of salutation. 
 
 "Who is the lady now?" said I. 
 
 He pointed to the stars that winked in the blue above the 
 white curve of Regent Street. 
 
 " The Spirit of Joy ! " he bellowed. " I salute the universe ! " 
 
 But he went home in a Vanguard omnibus like a woolly 
 lamb.
 
 TEA 
 
 AT any moment in London you can dive into a new world. 
 Consider, for example, how many ways of drinking tea there 
 are in London. I could write a book about them, beginning 
 with afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace, and gradually work- 
 ing down to afternoon tea at Lockhart's. 
 
 Now and then I like to be tempted to drink tea at the Carl- 
 ton. I dare not venture to go alone. There are some places 
 where a man needs the protection of a petticoat, and this is 
 one of them. 
 
 If I were to find myself solitary among those palms and 
 waiters, I should feel like a thief in Scotland Yard. How 
 could I sit at a lonely table and pretend to wait for an imagi- 
 nary fair ? It would be obtaining tea by false pretences. 
 
 Besides, I should present the sorry spectacle of a slighted 
 Lothario, the dupe of a broken assignation. 
 
 In order to attain the mood of unruffled observation a man 
 must be chaperoned. It is an absurd error of convention that 
 provides chaperons for fearless young girls who do not need 
 them and leaves unprotected the trembling men who do. 
 
 Man is a shy creature who takes refuge in clubs. If he 
 were sure of an escort, he would come out of his shell. 
 
 This is the great secret of marriage. Most men get married 
 in order to have a chaperon who can lead them safely through 
 the pitfalls and snares of society. 
 
 But the chaperon has higher uses. She not only protects 
 you, she also teaches you the art of social vision. The natural 
 man is blind. He does not see the minute humours of life 
 until a woman opens his eyes. 
 
 A woman can see everything without looking at anything. 
 She can listen to a hundred different conversations while you
 
 TEA 89 
 
 are proposing to her. Her interest in you is never so passionate 
 that it excludes her interest in other people. Therefore, even 
 if you feel brave enough to storm the Carlton alone, I advise 
 you to get yourself taken there by an experienced woman. 
 She will show you more fun in ten minutes than you could see 
 for yourself in ten years. 
 
 Be sure to engage a table in advance. She will never for- 
 give you if you rashly expose her to pot-luck. 
 
 If you are acutely interested in her and she is acutely inter- 
 ested in you, I can recommend the secluded nook on the left 
 at the top of the steps. It is nicely umbrageous. Avoid the 
 tables on the right, for the band is cynical, and, moreover, 
 there is a continual coming and going on that side. There are 
 times when one does not yearn to see or to be seen by one's 
 dearest friends. 
 
 But if she is wearing a new hat or a new frock (and she 
 generally is), be sure to choose a table on the ground floor, 
 not too near the wall. Women like to be conspicuous. It 
 is well to humour them, and to mortify your masculine 
 modesty. 
 
 If she is an actress, the choice of a table must depend 
 partly upon her caprice and partly upon her genre. A pic- 
 turesque actress fresh from a musical comedy will naturally 
 desire the centre of the stage, which is the table at the top 
 of the steps. Here she can see everybody and everybody can 
 see her. I believe it is called the Gibson Girl Table. The 
 orchestra is hard by. There are, of course, no footlights. 
 
 One afternoon I was pleased by the vivacity of a very 
 charming girl for whom this table had been engaged by a 
 glittering young man. She was an arch rogue. She looked 
 prettier off the stage than on it, for the stage coarsens refined 
 features and refines coarse features. 
 
 Oh her face she wore her natural white and red, or, rather, 
 I should say, her natural ivory, and pink. Her eyes seemed 
 to be clear pools of innocence, and her eyelashes had a knack 
 of accomplished bewilderment. I wonder how women learn 
 these things. Do they practise demureness before a mirror?
 
 90 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 The little lady had also a gift of sudden wistfulness. I 
 know it was not connected with any inner mood, for she turned 
 it on with the technical regularity of an electric sky-sign. She 
 ate her muffin with dreamy passion, and she took a lump of 
 sugar with melting melancholy. 
 
 Her hat was a perfect face-frame. It floated on the nape 
 of her neck, a vast halo of straw and ostrich plumes. One 
 of the plumes swept past the curve of her cheek over her 
 shoulder. 
 
 It was pleasant to see all the other women staring at her. 
 She seemed (I say seemed) to be quite unconscious of this, 
 and she acted quite naturally. A woman who knows her busi- 
 ness does not need to verify her effects. She breathes them. 
 
 One little detail would have escaped my attention if my 
 chaperon had not noted it. She pointed out that the divinity's 
 hands were dirty. She added that all actresses have dirty 
 hands. (I indignantly denied this monstrous libel.) 
 
 "He has just told her . . . She is putting on her gloves." 
 
 I confess that this feat of deduction paralysed me. I 
 remonstrated. I argued that no man (except, possibly, a 
 husband) would say such a thing to a lady. 
 
 "Well," said my chaperon, "perhaps she thought of it 
 herself." 
 
 I teased her by rejoining that she would not have, in that 
 case, taken off her gloves at all. 
 
 "If she thought of it herself," retorted my chaperon, "it 
 was not her hands she thought about. She remembered that 
 the green in her gown made her arms look sallow." At that 
 I gave in. 
 
 Just then a very tall lady came in, with a very short man 
 in tow. She searched vainly for a table. Then she ascended 
 the steps, surveyed the chattering crowd, hesitated, and finally 
 vanished behind the orchestra, followed by her docile rear- 
 guard. 
 
 "They've given it up," said I. 
 
 "Not at all," said my chaperon. "She does not want to 
 come back down the steps, so she is going round."
 
 TEA 91 
 
 And so she was, for in a minute she appeared below, and 
 skilfully unearthed two vacant chairs. 
 
 " She means to wait for a table," said my chaperon. 
 
 Presently a waiter capitulated, and brought a table for our 
 tactician, planting it before her right in the crowded aisle. 
 
 "Why did she not go straight back down the steps?" 
 said I. 
 
 "Well, she's middle-aged, and her husband is awkward, 
 and she's badly dressed," said my chaperon. I ventured to 
 praise her psychology. She smiled. 
 
 "You men are simple. Why, that's nothing!" 
 
 She then began to tell me everything she had noticed. 
 Many of the ladies were habituals. How did she know? Be- 
 cause the waiters knew them. Had I not seen the band smiling 
 at the little actress? Then she asked me if I had seen Mr. 
 So-and-so? I had not. Why had she not told me? She 
 knew he did not wish to be seen, and that he thought he had 
 not been seen, and if she had told me, I would have looked, 
 and he would have seen that he had been seen. 
 
 "Fancy!" she mused, "his wife is dead only six weeks." 
 Then she added irrelevantly, "I wonder how that woman 
 got a Pom to match her gown? I suppose she dyed him." 
 
 "Good gracious!" I cried, "they don't dye dogs." 
 
 "Don't they?" said she, as she rose; "in Paris they dye 
 their husbands." 
 
 "And what about their lovers?" 
 
 "Oh, they match them!"
 
 MAINLY ABOUT MIMES
 
 DON COQUELIN* 
 
 NATURE in a capricious mood said, " I will make a man who 
 cannot possibly be an actor. I will make him ridiculous in 
 face, mean in physique, ludicrous in voice. He will be the 
 incarnation of the ordinary, the embodiment of the common- 
 place. Anything but an actor he may be a Politician or a 
 Poet, a General or a Judge, a Cardinal or a Cabman any- 
 thing but an actor." Having made him she set him free. 
 Straightway he defied her, and became Coquelin. 
 
 For Nature made one mistake. She forgot the great soul 
 in the little body. "A little soul for a little bears up this 
 corpse which is man," but a great soul bears up the corpse 
 of Coquelin. 
 
 Look! The curtain rises on the first act of "Cyrano de 
 Bergerac." The tiny stage is a world too small for the Hotel 
 de Bourgogne, for the stage within a stage, the play within a 
 play. The Precieuses are stuck like chemists' bottles on a 
 shelf, and a tall man could place one hand on the table of the 
 Distributrice and the other on the head of Montfleury. The 
 marquises, cadets, pickpockets, citizens, pages, and lackeys 
 are glued together. All is chaos until a funny little man with 
 a silly nose leaps on a chair, and in an instant the crowd is 
 shaken into coherence like iron filings round a magnet. It 
 is Coquelin. He is the most trivial figure on the stage, yet 
 he immediately detaches himself from his neighbours. 
 
 Coquelin's Cyrano is a study of the spiritual grotesque. 
 The master irony of life is the contrast between our spiritual 
 and our physical nature, between our soul and our body. 
 There is somewhere in our physical consciousness a dim pas- 
 sion which we call ourselves. It flickers behind innumerable 
 veils. There are many names for these veils, but they can 
 
 *This impression was written before the death of M. Coquelin. 
 
 95
 
 90 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 all be defined as the things that are not ourselves. These 
 things lie round us in concentric layers, from the cloth of 
 flesh to the cloth of stars. We are swaddled in blood and 
 bones, clothes and constellations. Poetry is the cry of the 
 soul smothered in its infinite shroud. 
 
 Cyrano is more than a comic lover with a comic nose. He 
 is a symbol of man's spiritual rebellion against the physical 
 grotesquery of life. His nose typifies the failure of life to 
 live up to man. We are greater than ourselves. There is no 
 dream that is not larger than its fulfilment. 
 
 Love is the finest dream of man, for love is the only dream 
 that can never come wholly true. Great lovers are the lovers 
 who have lost. Tennyson sang: 
 
 ' Tis better to have loved and lost, 
 Than never to have loved at all. 
 
 But that is only the trite half of the truth. The whole truth 
 is a far sublimer thing: 
 
 'Tis better to have loved and lost, 
 Than ever to have loved and won. 
 
 For in love gain is loss and loss is gain. And the subtlety of love 
 is this the beginning of gain is the beginning of loss, and the 
 beginning of loss is the beginning of gain. Dante loved Bea- 
 trice because she died before he won her, and Rossetti loved his 
 wife better after he lost her. The explanation is that the body 
 devours the dreams of the soul. 
 
 The splendour of Cyrano is the splendour of successful 
 failure in love. His love for Roxane is the perfect gain of 
 perfect loss. His spiritual despair is never sullied with phys- 
 ical hope, for his only hope is a perpetual despair. He knows 
 that his body caricatures his soul. He is content to express 
 his soul through the body of his friend, joyously divorcing 
 himself from his own flesh, and loving Roxane in a disembodied 
 ecstasy. He loves only his dream, and Roxane loves only hers. 
 As their dreams are never broken by physical reality their 
 love endures. They love by proxy. 
 
 The poetry of Cyrano, like all great poetry, is iridescent.
 
 DON COQUELIN 97 
 
 Just as Hamlet is more to one imagination than he is to another, 
 so Cyrano is more. He delights the prosaic mind that sees the 
 play of light and colour on the surface. He also delights the 
 poet who sees deep in the depths of the jewel an image of life. 
 The genius of Coquelin shows itself in his presentment of the 
 simple as well as the subtle in Cyrano. He can gasconade 
 superbly. He can D'Artagnanise divinely. He Can fling 
 before you Dumas as well as Cervantes. But it is in the sad 
 humour of Don Cyrano that he touches me most. I do not 
 know anything more pathetic than his gentle acquiescence in 
 life's absurdity, his serene acceptance of love's ridicule, unless 
 it be his unconquerable contempt for death, his high scorn of 
 compromise, his proud hatred of policy, his fearless fidelity 
 of friendship, and his self-sufficing defiance of the world's 
 derision. 
 
 Coquelin does more than interpret Cyrano. He recreates 
 him. He makes out of his own ludicrous flesh the very ges- 
 tures of the man, so that as the play unrolls we see him in a 
 series of attitudes that are more vivid than the poet's imagina- 
 tions. The real Cyrano could not have been so sublimely 
 grotesque as this mimic shadow. As Rostand created Cyrano 
 out of Don Quixote, so Coquelin, in his turn, creates Don 
 Quixote out of Cyrano. The infinite tenderness of Cervantes 
 is poured into his transmigrated soul, and we see in him the 
 very quintessence of Spanish pride, that wistful grandeur of 
 the spirit which transfigures humanity with the humour of 
 clear pity and the irony of serene knowledge. 
 
 There is a rare quality in the comic genius of Coquelm 
 which soars far above the common art of the actor. It is a 
 kind of visible imagination. The imagination of the great 
 poet expresses itself in verbal rhythms. The imagination of 
 the great actor expresses itself in physical rhythms. He makes 
 the body express the soul. Coquelin's physical poetry is in- 
 finitely rich. His dramatic humour is born before our eyes, 
 and while we watch its birth we see its death. The eye and 
 the ear are poor chroniclers. I can hardly see one of those 
 gestures and postures that passed in a dazzling procession 
 7
 
 98 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 across the stage. The feet that stood so defiantly, the hand 
 on the sword-hilt, the arrogantly poised head, the mocking 
 bow, the vain simplicity of the flattered smile, the air of gor- 
 geous empanachement, the yearning timbre of the voice, the 
 glance that depicts a whole mood where are these ? Coquelin 
 can paint the air with passions, but swiftly they fade, and 
 eyes and ears forget. It is the tragedy of the actor. His work 
 is undone in the doing. 
 
 The pathos of Coquelin is strangely mixed with the pathos 
 of Cyrano during the balcony scene. Coquelin has been 
 prompting Christian in the wooing of Roxane. But when he 
 begins to impersonate Christian, the mimic prompter is prompted 
 by the real prompter in the prompter's box. Coquelin breaks 
 down. Real emotion invades his mimic emotion. He trem- 
 bles more violently. His hands shake more passionately. 
 His knees knock together. He stands in an agony within an 
 agony. We share his double distress. We feel the double 
 anguish of the baffled lover and the baffled actor. Hours seem 
 to pass. We long to shout or stamp, and so break the tension. 
 Then the loud whisper of the prompter is heard, and we see 
 a long, unpremeditated reverberation of the prompting scene 
 that Coquelin has just played. I wonder what is the precise 
 state of Coquelin's mind during this ordeal. Is he Don Coque- 
 lin or Don Cyrano? Or both? Or neither?
 
 SIR JOHN HARE 
 
 SIR JOHN HARE is still in the heyday of his first farewell 
 and the bloom of his first good-bye. His threat of retirement 
 is a promise of return. He must prolong his departure, and 
 make the end of one career the beginning of another. Gold- 
 smith said that Garrick acted only when he was off, but Hare 
 acts only when he is on, and while he lives he can never be 
 permanently off. He does not exist except in his characters, 
 for he is what they are. Without him they never could have 
 been, and without him they never can be again. 
 
 Hare is the Dickens of acting. What Dickens did with 
 his words he has done with his own flesh. He has made his 
 lean little body dance itself into our imagination and into our 
 memory. He has clothed his meagre frailty with all kinds of 
 queer humours and quaint foibles. You taste the flavour of 
 Dickens in every Dickensian character, and you taste the 
 flavour of Hare in every part he plays. The flavour of Hare 
 is a rich blend of pathos and humour, brewed by squeezing tears 
 out of smiles and smiles out of tears. 
 
 When Hare was made nothing was wasted. He could 
 not be thinner without becoming invisible. There is no pad- 
 ding in either his body or his soul. He is sharpened and 
 whittled down almost to the verge of annihilation. It is his na- 
 ture to be thin, just as it is the nature of Mr. Bourchier to be 
 fat. You cannot think of a fat Hare or a thin Bourchier. 
 They are contradictions in terms. Hare is spare because he 
 is eaten up with nervous energy and restless eagerness. He 
 is like a steam gimlet or an electric bradawl. There is a keen 
 edge and a fine point on everything he says and everything 
 he does. His voice is a razor and his glance a spear. His 
 gestures are needles and his smiles are lances. The sharpness 
 
 99
 
 100 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 of his genius is almost painful, but it cuts you so clean that 
 you do not feel the wound until you see the blood. His violent 
 alertness alarms you, for it makes you feel that you are half 
 awake, and that the other actors on the stage are half asleep. 
 Everything he does is eager and quick and impatient. His 
 briskness is almost morbid. He is as lively as a squib and 
 as nimble as a shrimp. Ten or fifteen years ago in "Diplo- 
 macy" I saw him sniffing about his desk for traces of perfume. 
 I can see him sniffing now, like an excitable fox terrier. I 
 have forgotten everything else, but I can never forget his 
 sniffs. 
 
 Hare is a master of lightning effects. He talks like light- 
 ning. He smiles like lightning in flashes that light up his 
 face and leave it instantly. His elocution is a kind of forked 
 lightning. The words leap and dart and zigzag out of his 
 teeth. They appear to be released rather than uttered. If 
 he did not keep them in order, they would fall over each other 
 and trample on each other and crush each other to death. I 
 could listen to Hare for ever out of pure delight in his stac- 
 cato diction. The charm of his voice is hard to define. It is 
 charming because it expresses his temperament. If you try, 
 you will find that you can think of his voice as if it were a 
 thing apart from himself. No doubt every actor, and, indeed, 
 every human being, has a different voice from every other 
 actor and every other human being. Just as there are no two 
 leaves that are absolutely alike, so there are no two voices that 
 are absolutely alike. But as a rule it is necessary to hear the 
 voice in order to recognize it. Only a few voices have a sep- 
 arate existence. But when you think of Hare you think first 
 and foremost of that crisp, irritable, nervous, peevish, quer- 
 ulous voice. It is like the voice of a man who is suffering from 
 perpetual toothache or inveterate gout. Even when he is 
 genial it is exasperated, and there is vinegar in its good humour. 
 If you heard his voice in the dark you would mutter, " I know 
 that voice." 
 
 Hare is a master of whimsical humour. By a grimace, a 
 tone of the voice, and a flick of the fingers he can make you
 
 SIR JOHN HARE 101 
 
 see into the soul of a character, laying bare its eccentricity, 
 revealing with an airy twist its point of view and its frame of 
 mind. His best parts are delicate caricatures and dainty 
 grotesques. He can exaggerate life without making it inhuman, 
 he can turn a crude sketch into a breathing portrait. His 
 most famous part is Benjamin Goldfinch in "A Pair of Spec- 
 tacles." Without Hare the character is a dull puppet, and the 
 play is a lifeless machine. He has turned Benjamin Goldfinch 
 into a figure as lovable as Mr. Pickwick, and as adorable as 
 Uncle Toby. We love Mr. Pickwick and his spectacles be- 
 cause he is a divine fool. We adore Uncle Toby because he 
 is an inspired simpleton. Benjamin Goldfinch is both a 
 divine fool and an inspired simpleton. Hare shows us in him 
 the charm of a man who has the heart of a child. He reveals 
 the fascination of an unworldly credulity and the beauty of 
 an indiscriminate benignity. His charity is insane, but it is 
 delightful. His gentle folly is preposterous, but it is good 
 for the soul. When I see Hare as Benjamin Goldfinch my 
 heart softens, and I think tenderly of Oliver Goldsmith and 
 Don Quixote, of Mr. Pickwick and Uncle Toby, and of all the 
 wise fools in the world. 
 
 Humanity is a belief in human nature. Hare touches the 
 very quick of humanity in this loving study of fatuous pity and 
 blind compassion. He shows us a man who is happy only 
 when he is deluded and miserable only when his delusions 
 are taken away. We know he is deceived, but we love him 
 because he is deceived, and we wish we could deceive our- 
 selves. When he mimics the cynical worldliness of Gregory, 
 we are spiritually hurt. It is as if we saw an angel taking 
 a mud bath. But the actor makes us feel that the worldly 
 mood is not real, and when the good man recovers his illu- 
 sions and his spectacles we are glad. Hare helps us to for- 
 get the creaking apparatus of the play, and to see nothing but 
 the goodness of being good and the kindness of being kind. 
 It is the soft philosophy of Shakespeare and Cervantes, 
 Sterne, and Dickens. No other actor could have wrought this 
 magical spell, for no other actor possesses the Hare touch that
 
 102 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 prevents the sentiment from melting into mawkishness, and the 
 humour from declining into burlesque. 
 
 Hare acts with every part of his body, for he expresses 
 character by gesture. His hands are his chief mannerisms. 
 If he were to thrust his hand through a hole in the curtain and 
 snap his fingers, the whole house would say, "I know that 
 hand." Nobody can snap fingers like Hare. The whole man 
 is in that electric snap, all his dry vitality and all his parched 
 vivacity. Another mannerism is the long, lean, white mina- 
 tory forefinger. There never was such an index. It seems 
 to lengthen as it points. If it were to point long enough it 
 would pierce the walls of the Garrick, pass the lions in Tra- 
 falgar Square, cross the Thames, and enter the House of 
 Commons. The Speaker would say, "I know that finger." 
 He would name it. Then there is the steely eye, like the eye 
 of a ferret, that stabs in all directions like a rapier. If it 
 were to look at you through a keyhole, you would say, " I know 
 that eye." 
 
 Hare paints character as Dickens paints it. He makes 
 men live on the stage, as they live in life, by means of their 
 oddities and their eccentricities. He exaggerates us as nature 
 exaggerates us. Character acting is now almost obsolete. 
 The rage for natural acting is only underacting, which means 
 being monotonous in every part. Life is various, and Sir 
 John Hare imitates the variety of life.
 
 SIR CHARLES WYNDHAM 
 
 SIR CHARLES WYNDHAM was born at Liverpool on March 
 23, 1837, became stage-struck shortly afterwards, and in order 
 to kill his craving for the theatre he became a doctor. He 
 served as a surgeon with the Federal Army in the American 
 Civil War. Tiring of the theatre of war, he tried his luck 
 as an actor in New York with John Wilkes Booth, the actor, 
 who subsequently assassinated President Lincoln. Having 
 been dismissed for incompetency by the future murderer, he 
 went back to the army in 1864. Next winter he joined Mrs. 
 John Wood's company at the Olympic Theatre, New York. 
 It is curious that one of those long speeches for the delivery of 
 which in later years he became so famous brought about his 
 downfall. It tormented and tortured the young actor, making 
 his days miserable and his nights sleepless. He was playing 
 a hero who was desperately in love with the heroine, and who 
 apologised for his infatuation in an interminable utterance 
 which commenced with the words, " I am drunk with love and 
 enthusiasm." Paralysed by stage fright, he broke down. 
 "I am drunk," he stammered, and there he stuck, while the 
 audience tittered. Again the young actor was dismissed for 
 incompetency, but, just as Disraeli avenged himself upon the 
 House of Commons for laughing at his maiden speech, so Wynd- 
 ham persevered in the teeth of his second failure. 
 
 He came back to England in 1865, and obtained an en- 
 gagement at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in "Her Lady- 
 ship's Guardian," Madge Robertson (now Mrs. Kendal) play- 
 ing the heroine. His Irish brogue in " Arrah-na-Pogue " was 
 declared to be bad enough to justify a Fenian rising. He 
 toured with Miss Herbert in old English comedy, playing 
 Charles Surface to Henry Irving' s Joseph. He first appeared 
 
 103
 
 104 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 in London in 1866 as Sir Arthur Lascelles in "All That Glitters 
 Is Not Gold." He made a hit as Hatchett in Burnand's bur- 
 lesque of "Black-eyed Susan." At that time he was a won- 
 derful dancer. Then he played in "Idalia" at the St. James's, 
 Irving being the heavy villain, and a very charming heavy 
 villain, it seems. His next success was as Captain Hawksley 
 in " Still Waters Run Deep," with Ellen Terry as Mrs. Mildmay. 
 In 1867 Irving joined the company, being followed by John 
 L. Toole the year after. It must have been a company of 
 angels, for, in addition to Irving, Wyndham, and Toole, it 
 included John Clayton, Lionel Brough, and Henrietta Hodson 
 (Mrs. Labouchere). In 1869 Wyndham played Charles Sur- 
 face in New York, and toured in "Caste," with Louisa Moore 
 as Esther and George Giddens as Sam Gerridge. In 1873 
 he was back at the St. James's, afterwards touring with the 
 Bancrofts. But his first real triumph was won in 1874, at 
 the old Court Theatre, in "Brighton," where he created the 
 part of Bob Sackett. "Brighton" was the forerunner of that 
 long procession of rollicking farces which made Charles Wynd- 
 ham famous as the lightest of light comedians. It ran for a 
 year at the Court, was transferred to the St. James's, and went 
 to Berlin in 1875, where Wyndham played Bob Sackett in 
 German. The Criterion Theatre had long been an unlucky 
 house, but it brought luck to Wyndham. It had suddenly 
 closed after a fiasco, but Wyndham undertook to open it in 
 three days with "Brighton," and open it he did on Boxing Day, 
 1875, inaugurating then and there a succession of triumphs 
 which lasted for more than twenty-three years. He made the 
 Criterion a palace of laughter. He took most of his plays 
 from the Palais Royal, and they were all merry farces crammed 
 with risky situations, and packed with audacious dialogue. 
 "The Great Divorce Case" and "Hot Water," in 1876, paved 
 the way for "Pink Dominoes" in 1877. But it was not the 
 plays which made the reputation of the Criterion for fast and 
 furious fun. It was the mercurial acting of Wyndham. 
 
 Wyndham had not knocked about the provinces for ten 
 years in stock companies for nothing. He had perfected his
 
 SIR CHARLES WYNDHAM 105 
 
 comic manner. He had, it is true, roughened and hoarsened 
 his fine voice by incessant rehearsing and perpetual playing, 
 but what his voice lost in tone it had gained in flexibility. He 
 could do anything with it. He had mastered the art of natural 
 gesture. He had practised patiently before a mirror and before 
 all sorts of audiences, aiming always at being natural. His 
 scapegrace husbands and gay dogs may not have been morally 
 edifying, but they were irresistibly entertaining. He redeemed 
 vice from dulness and wickedness from monotony. His touch 
 was as light as a feather, and he flew like a bird over the thin- 
 nest ice. His debonair gaiety was exquisitely irresponsible, 
 and his daring wit was delicately nimble. He made his faith- 
 less spouses seem to be fascinating creatures from an artificial 
 paradise, where morals were nothing and manners everything. 
 Charles Lamb's defence of the Restoration dramatists might 
 be applied to the old Criterion farce. Nobody took those 
 laughing scapegraces seriously. They were merely vehicles 
 for after-dinner laughter, excuses for postprandial merriment. 
 Wyndham's light-hearted grace covered their wildest misdoings, 
 and veiled their maddest improprieties. But after ten years of 
 "Pink Dominoes" and "Betsy" and "Wild Oats," the actor 
 sighed for higher themes, and in a happy moment he hit upon 
 his greatest part in his greatest play, "David Garrick." He 
 has played "David Garrick" thousands of times in England 
 and America. It ran at the first go-off for over two years, and 
 it has been revived over and over again. The public never 
 wearies of it, and the actor never tires of it. Sir Charles has 
 played it at Sandringham and at Windsor, in Berlin, in St. 
 Petersburg, and in Moscow. "David Garrick" is to Wynd- 
 ham what "Rip Van Winkle" was to Jefferson. When all 
 Wyndham's other parts are forgotten, his David Garrick will 
 be remembered. 
 
 The Garrick period was followed by the Jones period. 
 Sir Charles Wyndham has produced a long series of comedies 
 by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, including "The Bauble Shop," 
 "The Case of Rebellious Susan," "The Physician," and "The 
 Liars." His success in modern comedy was as great as in
 
 106 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Palais Royal farce, for he developed a delightful vein of hu- 
 morous sentiment that gave body to the famous Wyndham 
 charm. He revels in the unravelling of a hopelessly entangled 
 situation which enables him to air his gift of worldly tenderness 
 and philosophic cynicism and humorous wisdom. He is at 
 his best when things are at their worst, and his powers of gentle 
 persuasion have triumphed over the most insuperable obstacles 
 and the most appalling difficulties. The propensity of young 
 lovers for getting themselves into an "awful mess" provides 
 him with opportunities for exercising his genius for soothing 
 and smoothing and straightening out and coaxing and ca- 
 joling. You realize that anybody would do anything on earth 
 to oblige that winning smile, those persuasive eyes, that poetic 
 mass of iron-grey hair flung picturesquely across that broad, 
 amiable brow, and those low, confidential syllables that rise 
 and fall without a touch of monotony during a long expostu- 
 lation or a labyrinthine exposition. No matter what the play 
 may be, whether it is "The Tyranny of Tears" or "The 
 Mollusc," the Wyndham charm is always the same and always 
 different. Everything goes down before it, players and play- 
 goers, author and audience. The deep, husky voice, with its 
 high, feminine, plaintive notes, vanquishes us all, and we are 
 willing to be anything and do anything it pleases. The charm 
 of Wyndham is like the charm of Gladstone. It convinces us 
 even against our will. It is as easy to explain the charm of 
 Wyndham as it is to explain the charm of Gladstone. That 
 is to say, it is impossible. Like Father O'Flynn, Sir Charles 
 Wyndham has a wonderful way with him, and there's an 
 end on't.
 
 BEERBOHM TREE 
 
 I HOPE Mr. Tree will always provoke violent blame as well 
 as vehement praise. It is only the man of genius who can 
 goad the Philistine out of his indifference to art. Whether the 
 Philistine fawns or fumes, the value of his voice is the same. 
 Whether the artist draws from him execration or adulation, he 
 is doing only what was done by Disraeli in the world of politics 
 and by Whistler in the world of paint. The Philistine fails 
 to understand Mr. Tree completely, just as he failed to under- 
 stand the other artists completely, but he is fascinated by Mr. 
 Tree much as he was fascinated by them. His admiration of 
 Mr. Tree is tinged with terror. His eye, as he watches Mr. 
 Tree, is full of respectful suspicion and distrustful admiration. 
 The Philistine fears the caprice and the contempt of the artist, 
 for every artist is born with a gift of wild caprice and a talent 
 of ungovernable contempt. 
 
 Mr. Tree is one of the most absolute artists who ever lost 
 themselves in Philistia or found themselves in Bohemia. He 
 lives in a fine frenzy of impassioned contemplation. His vision 
 is perpetually fixed on something faint and far and unearthly. 
 Although our friendship has bred in us both an affectionate 
 irreverence for each other, I can never talk to him without 
 feeling as if I were intruding on a private conversation. He 
 may not be a haunted man, but he always seems to me to go 
 about with a retinue of importunate ghosts. I am sure they are 
 always whispering to him when he is not whispering to them. 
 Who are these ghosts? I think I know. They are the char- 
 acters he has played, and the characters he intends to play. 
 They are the emanations of his brain, the vapours of his per- 
 sonality, and I fancy he is often so bemused and bewildered 
 by their silent voices that he does not know whether they are 
 
 107
 
 108 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 more real than he, or whether he is more real than they. He 
 gives so much of his soul to his pet vampires that he must now 
 and then feel himself fading away into a dim nothingness. 
 
 The effect of Mr. Tree upon me is nearly as dreadful as 
 the effect of his ghosts upon him. He makes me feel that I 
 am not a real person. He switches me on and off, as if I were 
 a human limelight. When he is drowning in his dreams, 
 I gasp in a swoon of sympathetic negation until he comes to 
 the surface again, and then, as we exchange greetings, I also 
 come back to the self-credulity of self-consciousness. There 
 is something very bizarre in Mr. Tree's power of mental iso- 
 lation. He is always marooning himself on some enchanted 
 isle, and he is always being rescued by the practical mariners 
 who cruise in the offing. I could not live more than a few hours 
 in his company. I am sure in a day he would drain me of belief 
 in my own past, and in a week he would convince me that I 
 had no future. The explanation is simple. The world out- 
 side the theatre does not exist for Mr. Tree. As I am a part 
 of that world, I do not exist for him, and if I were to let him 
 have his way, I should not exist for myself. The world outside 
 the theatre may sometimes disturb his sleep, but it never dis- 
 turbs his dreams, for he is the most incorrigible dreamer who 
 ever dreamed dreams with his eyes wide open. He acts in 
 a dream, walks in a dream, talks in a dream, eats in a dream, 
 drinks in a dream, and smokes in a dream. He is what Mr. Hall 
 Caine would call "The Dreamster." Once he got into a cab. 
 "Where to, sir?" quoth the cabman. "Home!" he murmured, 
 waving his hand vaguely towards the setting sun. He expected 
 the cabman to know that His Majesty's Theatre is his home, 
 and that his home is His Majesty's Theatre. 
 
 There are some actors who look out of place on the stage, 
 and there are some actors who look out of place everywhere. 
 Mr. Tree never looks out of place, for wherever he is he creates 
 his own atmosphere. He makes the whole earth a background, 
 and all the world a stage. I have seen him making a real funeral 
 look like a stage funeral, and transforming a real cemetery 
 into a set scene. It is only the great actor who can make the
 
 BEERBOHM TREE 109 
 
 real life of men appear artificial. The more completely he 
 creates illusion when he is on the stage, the more completely 
 he destroys it when he is off the stage. 
 
 The wonderful art of Mr. Tree in creating Shylock is shown 
 by the fact that his Jew reminds you of all the Jews you have 
 ever known. His Shylock is more than one Jew, more than 
 a generalisation of the various types of Jew. He is every Jew 
 in turn. He is mean in one mood and noble in another. Some- 
 times he is a monster of unclean avarice and foul greed, but in 
 a moment he soars into Hebrew poetry and becomes a prophet 
 and a seer. He seems to writhe out of one nuance of passion 
 into another, as the actor shows you the dim soul squirming 
 in the flesh like a serpent in a sack, now falling into the fiend- 
 ishness of vile maleficence, now rising into the majesty of de- 
 fiant martyrdom. Loathsome and leprous as his Shylock is, 
 he never becomes inhuman, and his prophetic pride never de- 
 generates into rhetorical sentiment. You abhor him, even 
 while you pity him, for you see in his blind agony a represen- 
 tation of the blind agony that turns every human soul into a 
 house of sorrow and a place of pain. Shylock is thus made 
 universal. He is a man as well as a Jew. 
 
 It is in the trial scene that Mr. Tree's Shylock attains its 
 sublimest height of imaginative splendour. The broad sim- 
 plicity of the acting helps you to forget the crudities of the 
 plot. You forget the bigotry of Shakespeare, and you see 
 nothing but the tragic symbolism of the character, with all 
 its chill craft, and all its cold cunning of malevolent ecstasy. 
 The most appalling thing in the character is the cruel malignity 
 of Shylock's hungry eyes. By some wizardry of make-up, 
 Mr. Tree fashions out of his own eyes the eyes of a devil. 
 They appear to be coloured a repulsively greenish grey, and one 
 sickens as one watches their baleful glances. It is not easy to 
 describe the horrible abomination of their malignity, but it 
 sits in them like a slimy snake. It is not the make-up that fills 
 the eyes with the light of unspeakable evil. The actor puts 
 the unspeakable evil into his eyes by compelling himself to feel 
 as Shylock feels. He communicates to the spectator a sense
 
 110 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 of evil, which makes Shylock not merely credible or plausible, 
 but which makes him real. No mere external mimicry could 
 achieve this illusion. Mr. Tree is making his flesh feel what 
 his soul feels. I am sure he is for the moment capable of any 
 crime. I should not care to play Antonio to his Shylock. 
 
 The fact that Mr. Tree "goes" for everything in the whole 
 range of human emotions which Shakespeare calls Shylock, 
 makes his triumph all the more tremendous. He compels 
 us to tremble where other actors would compel us to laugh. 
 He knows that when Shylock is not terrible he is grotesque, 
 and he makes him a wonderful mixture of the terrible and the 
 grotesque. He makes him grotesque without making him 
 ridiculous. He makes him terrible without making him 
 grandiloquent. His Shylock has dignity without pomp, sublim- 
 ity without magnanimity. Irving's Shylock was inconceivably 
 august and impossibly austere. Tree's Shylock is a Shylock 
 of the Ghetto. You can smell him across the footlights. Yet 
 his moral squalor is never vulgar, for the racial fury in him 
 is always lifting him far above his mean mind. He is half a 
 god and half a dog. 
 
 Another fine thing is Mr. Tree's caricature of the Jewish 
 voice. It is not the voice of the actor you hear, but the husky 
 servility of centuries, for the woes of the ages have made the 
 voice of the Jew an echo of his anguish. There is for me 
 something awful in this ancestral voice, which issues out of the 
 throat of every Jew in the world, whatsoever language he may 
 speak and howsoever earnestly he may strive to acquire the 
 intonation of the Gentile. It always lashes me like a knout 
 when I hear it, for it calls up all the moans of all the persecutions 
 that defile across the wilderness of history. Just as you catch 
 the murmur of the seven seas in the shell at your ear, so you 
 can hear the sighs of all the tribes of Israel in every word uttered 
 by every Jewish mouth. The tragedy of this cry lies in its 
 unconsciousness. It will never be silenced until the last Jewish 
 mother cries the last cry of travail. 
 
 The Jewish voice of Shylock is not more characteristic 
 than the Jewish gait and the Jewish gestures. Mr. Tree not
 
 BEERBOHM TREE 111 
 
 only talks like a Jew, but he also walks like one. He moves 
 with that dreadfully furtive shuffle which the Jew has never 
 forgotten since he hung the first harp on the first willow by the 
 waters of the first Babylon. It is the shambling shuffle of the 
 serf and the slave. It is the slithering motion of feet that have 
 learned the horrible art of going delicately in dangerous paths. 
 The bent back, the recoiling elbows, the deprecative hands, 
 the flabby suppleness of the beseeching knees all the physical 
 helotry of the Jew is found in this marvellous portrait. And 
 behind it all is the deathless insolence, the indomitable hate, 
 and the unconquerable vision, which have made the Jew in 
 all ages a poet, a painter, and an artist. Yes, Mr. Tree's 
 Shylock has in him a spark of the artist who is, after all, the 
 eternal outcast. He is an epitome of the rebel soul at war 
 with things as they are.
 
 GEORGE ALEXANDER 
 
 LONDON is no longer a metropolis. It is a cosmopolis. 
 Foreign faces are seen everywhere. The Englishman has 
 ceased to be the rule: he is almost the exception. The con- 
 trast between him and the other races of the earth is perpet- 
 ually forced upon the observant eye. We see him more clearly 
 now that his characteristics do not dominate the London 
 scene. He used to be so inevitable that we took him for granted. 
 He was the solid background against which we saw the Amer- 
 ican, the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Spaniard, 
 the Russian, and the Japanese. Now he has ceased to be the 
 background. We see him against a solid background of other 
 races. 
 
 John Bull has been dead for many a long day, in spite of 
 the efforts of the caricaturists to pretend that he is still alive. 
 That pathetic old fellow is now a phantom. George Alex- 
 ander has killed him. He has discarded the whole parapher- 
 nalia of top-boots and irascibility, rural simplicity, and short 
 temper. He has created a new John Bull. Year after year 
 he has perfected his portrait of the Englishman, until now 
 it is a life-like presentment. If you desire to see what other 
 nations conceive to be the typical Englishman, you must study 
 George Alexander. The whole Englishman is there, immacu- 
 late body and immaculate soul, immaculate mind and immac- 
 ulate clothes, immaculate taste and immaculate trousers, im- 
 maculate heart and immaculate waistcoat. The actor has 
 crept inside the immaculate skin of the immaculate English- 
 man. He shows you his triumphant elimination of the vul- 
 garities of life, his gift of universal uniformity. The ambition 
 of the Englishman is to suppress every evidence of personality 
 and every symptom of temperament. He toils to be like his 
 
 H2
 
 GEORGE ALEXANDER 113 
 
 fellows, and his fellows toil to be like each other. Where 
 he fails to achieve this ideal Mr. Alexander succeeds. On the 
 stage he displays in play after play the flawless Englishman 
 who never deviates from the unwritten laws of conduct and 
 deportment, of passion and emotion, of garb and grace. He 
 is the apostle of good taste, the evangelist of good form, the 
 arbiter of good breeding. 
 
 There is no blemish of rude humanity in him. He is 
 exquisitely colourless and delicately drab. He crushes his 
 own vitality in order to interpret the cold, hard, impassive 
 propriety of the ordinary man you meet in the club and in the 
 House of Commons, in the pavilion at Lord's and at Church 
 Parade. He is not by nature a conventional man. His art is 
 a victory over his own vivid personality. His magnificent 
 head is violently carved and vehemently chiselled. It rebels 
 against the smooth conformity of fashion. It is as rough 
 and rude as a rock in its heavy angles and its massive strength. 
 Its stack of grey hair is always in insurrection against effemi- 
 nate compromise. His face is robustly square, with its granite 
 brow and adamantine jaw and iron mouth and its hammered 
 virile surface. His body is ruggedly masculine, grim in its 
 geometrical rigidity, almost uncouth in its harsh vigour. There 
 is no suppleness or subservience in his limbs. His whole frame 
 is a protest against trivial plasticity and petty compliance. 
 But he knows that art is the enemy of nature, and he merci- 
 lessly polishes his physical roughness. He tailors himself 
 out of existence. He planes away his crags and cliffs into a 
 decent commonplace of masculine propriety. He makes the 
 actor trample on the man. After innumerable experiments 
 he has evolved the average Englishman, the wonderful being 
 who is only himself when he is like everybody else. 
 
 The Englishman has a passionate fear of being conspic- 
 uous or salient or odd or original. That is to say, he fears to 
 be what the theatre demands him to be. Mr. Alexander is 
 the only actor who has the courage to act up to what the Eng- 
 lishman lives up to. In every situation he is resolutely correct 
 and obstinately well-bred. The consequence is that he appears 
 8
 
 114 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 to be impeccably natural in every part. He behaves as the 
 perfect Englishman behaves. It is not easy to conceive the 
 possibility of the perfect Englishman floundering in the frenzy 
 of love. Good form is the antithesis of passion, for passion is 
 essentially eccentric and wayward and violent and picturesque. 
 Mr. Alexander shows that it is possible to make love like a 
 gentleman. He puts love into its proper place, treating it 
 as a subsidiary department in the business of propriety. The 
 plain truth is that love is antagonistic to the English tempera- 
 ment, for love makes a man look ridiculous. The unknown 
 jester who invented love took care to invest it with every sort 
 of absurdity. The lover ought really to have a planet to him- 
 self, for he cannot expect other people to sympathise with his 
 state. Love is not a passion that appeals to the spectator. 
 It is purely an affair for the person concerned. At most it 
 is bilateral, but the spectacle of two persons in love with each 
 other is even more droll than the spectacle of one person 
 in love with another. The healthy Englishman realises the 
 comic figure he cuts when he is in love, and he tones down 
 the public aspect of his condition. Mr. Alexander does like- 
 wise. He tones love down. 
 
 There is a great gulf fixed between the love-making of Mr. 
 Alexander and the love-making of Signor Grasso. The sight 
 of an Italian actor or a French actor in love is apt to disgust 
 the polite Englishman, if it does not send him into convul- 
 sions of laughter. Mr. Alexander knows that it is necessary 
 to refine the whole thing and to make it proper and presenta- 
 ble. He is careful to make love dignified, even at the risk of 
 making it tepid. He prefers to be cold rather than comic. 
 It is delightful to watch him handling passion as if it were 
 egg-shell china. It is inspiring to see how delicately he walks 
 through the debris of erotic rhetoric and amorous eloquence. 
 One feels that he is giving all lovers a wholesome lesson in 
 tactful moderation and courteous reserve. He demonstrates 
 the possibility of robbing love of its fatuity and passion of its 
 stupidity. He makes it clear that you can woo and win without 
 sacrificing your self-possession. He proves that you can gain
 
 GEORGE ALEXANDER 115 
 
 a lady's hand without losing your head. He tempts one to 
 hope that civilisation will soon complete the transformation 
 of love out of an insane absurdity into an elegant and almost 
 majestic commonplace. 
 
 But love is not the only passion which Mr. Alexander has 
 improved out of existence. He reforms nature all round. 
 He has taught us how to be politely furious and tastefully 
 indignant. He has shown us that it is a pleasant thing to be 
 in a rage. He has revealed to us the nice side of anger. He 
 has caught the modern gift of treating life with indulgent tol- 
 erance and bland amusement. His smile is the keynote of 
 his method. It is a contracted smile, the twisted sidelong 
 smile of the discreet man of the world who takes the tragic 
 enormities of romance very lightly. His eyes match his smile, 
 for they, too, are fond of narrow sidelong glances at the imma- 
 terial comedy of life. Too seldom does Mr. Alexander break 
 out of life into literature, but he has always at all risks broken 
 out whenever our dramatists gave him a chance. He has no 
 prejudice against culture and no grudge against imagination. 
 He is not afraid of poetry, and his fastidious temper often leads 
 him to encourage men of genius. The better the play the bet- 
 ter he plays, and, when he gets a character with red blood in 
 it, he throws off his disguise and lets himself go. He revels 
 in the violence of Bernstein and the vigour of Sutro. He is 
 superb in the .romantic sentiment of Anthony Hope. He has 
 unearthed many fine plays, but his immortal achievement was 
 the production of the greatest comedy written in English 
 since the humour of Goldsmith and the wit of Sheridan went 
 out. He it was who persuaded Oscar Wilde to write "The 
 Importance of Being Earnest." Another great artistic feat 
 stands to his credit, the production of "Paolo and Francesca." 
 The literary drama owes him so much already that I hope it 
 will soon owe him more.
 
 LEWIS WALLER 
 
 WHETHER he swaggers in coat and trousers or swashbuckles 
 in sword and cape, Lewis Waller is the curled darling of ro- 
 bustious romance. When I am tired of seeing life steadily and 
 seeing it whole, I always turn to him, and he never fails to restore 
 my sense of disproportion. When I grow utterly weary of the 
 world as it is, he triumphantly shows me the world as it ought 
 to be. He shovels the grey facts of existence into the gutter 
 and puts into their places a glittering array of impossible 
 dreams. He charges my soul with sentiment as Mr. Idris 
 charges his siphons with soda-water. He cures me of the 
 disease of common sense and he delivers me from the tyranny 
 of reason. He drags me neck and crop out of the world I 
 know into a world that nobody ever knew and that nobody 
 will ever know. It is a world in which love is a tornado and 
 manhood is a typhoon. There martyrdom is the chief busi- 
 ness of life and self-sacrifice is the ruling passion. There 
 for ever roars and rages the unfathomable ocean of everlasting 
 despair. There heroic hearts are regularly broken to the 
 sound of slow music. There beauty is more beautiful and 
 manly valour is more valiant, sobs and sighs are more sorrow- 
 ful, tears are more tremendous, indignation is more indignant, 
 scorn is more scornful, wrath is more wrathful, and gestures 
 are more sublime. It is the realm of the romantic hero, and 
 of that realm Lewis the Well-beloved is the uncrowned king. 
 
 No mortal man was ever so manly and so masculine as 
 Lewis Waller. He revives one's faith in one's sex. He makes 
 one feel that, in spite of the Suffragettes, there is something 
 to be said for Man. In real life the manly man is rare. It 
 would be well if our decaying and degenerate sex were to 
 take lessons in virility at the feet of Mr. Waller. His virility 
 
 116
 
 LEWIS WALLER 117 
 
 terrifies our conquerors into adoration. When his voice thun- 
 ders on the stage you can hear the heart of Woman thumping 
 in the stalls in an ecstasy of fascinated fright. I am not nat- 
 urally a timid being, but I confess that the spectacle of Mr. 
 Waller tearing a passion to tatters makes me tremble in my 
 boots. I know he is not angry with me, but I feel that it is 
 not safe even to behold his anger or to be under the same roof 
 as his fury. If he were to leap across the footlights, I am 
 sure the whole audience would be plunged into a panic, so 
 dreadful is the clang of his rhetoric. I maintain that his 
 passions ought to be regulated by the County Council. But 
 what safety curtain could defend inflammable girlhood against 
 his fire? All the water in all the hoses of the world could not 
 extinguish his flames. 
 
 The worst of Mr. Waller is his capacity for breaking all 
 the records in love. There never has been such a lover on 
 this earth. After beholding his prowess the most accomplished 
 amorist realises that he is a bungling amateur. He makes 
 you feel that it is a blasphemous impertinence for an ordinary 
 mortal to fall in love. Even a millionaire with a lifetime of 
 leisure on his hands can never hope to suffer as Mr. Waller 
 suffers every night of the week, not to mention matinees. He 
 has been suffering for as long as I can remember. Indeed, 
 I believe he has been suffering for exactly a quarter of a century. 
 Yet the quality of his suffering does not deteriorate. On the 
 contrary, it seems to improve every year, and I have no doubt 
 that Mr. Waller will go on suffering for another quarter of a 
 century if the cruel and relentless fates should not deign to 
 reprieve him. There is a certain grandeur in the noble joy 
 and sublime alacrity with which Mr. Waller treads his path 
 of pain. He does not grumble over his melancholy lot. He 
 never rebels against his interminable misfortunes. He is al- 
 ways ready to be misunderstood and to be betrayed. He 
 carries his trampled heart from one cruel heroine to another, 
 and the more brutally it is trodden on, the better he is pleased. 
 Over and over again romance has tried to break his heart, 
 but it has consistently failed. I begin to fear that he has broken
 
 118 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the heart of romance. He has exhausted its possibilities. It 
 cannot provide him with any new form of anguish or any new 
 variety of agony. He has worn out romance, and his eagle 
 eye is sweeping the world in the hopeless quest of a new idea 
 in martyrdom or a fresh notion in renunciation. 
 
 It is not easy to fit Mr. Waller with a part which he will 
 not smash to pieces the moment he expands his lungs. It 
 takes a Hotspur or a King Henry to hold him. He is at his best 
 in the armour-plated rhetoric of the eve of Agincourt. The 
 words explode in his mouth like shells. The martial resonance 
 of his brazen eloquence sends electric shivers down your spine 
 and makes your heart grow hot and your eyeballs bulge with 
 patriotic pride and pugnacious fury. You long to go straight 
 out into the street and slay somebody for the pure pleasure 
 of living up to the emotions that he has roused. The explosive 
 magnetism of the man is quite irresistible. It brings a lump 
 into your throat and tears into your eyes. I am by profession 
 a cynic, but I am not Waller-proof. He can make me weep 
 bitterly even while I am jeering at him. He can make my 
 heart sit on my head. 
 
 I like Mr. Waller best in costume, for he is as elegant as 
 he is heroic. His manhood is polished, and he knows how to 
 be graceful without being effeminate, to be a dandy without 
 being a coxcomb. There is always a magnificent dignity in 
 his grief and a careless majesty in his woe. The more deeply 
 he is wronged, the more godlike he becomes. His attitudes 
 look like romantic illustrations. Every posture is perfectly 
 thought out and absolutely flawless in his outline. To see him 
 in a play is to see every movement in the gymnastics of romance. 
 Whether he stands in profile or with his fine features facing 
 the limelight, every limb is in place and every eyelash is in order. 
 All his gestures are finely filed and neatly fitted to the phrase 
 and the situation. His superb eyes are admirably trained. 
 They flash with the rhythmical regularity of a lighthouse. I 
 think my favourite movement is the sidelong glance which comes 
 into action as a rule in moments of intense passion and appall- 
 ing danger. The whites of the eyes scintillate and coruscate.
 
 LEWIS WALLER 119 
 
 You can see their lightnings plunging deep into the heaving 
 breast of the heroine or into the false heart of the villain. 
 
 Mr. Waller is an artist in scowls. He has been scowling 
 for the greater part of his life. When he knits his brows you 
 feel his strong and silent strength of character. I am sure the 
 trade of romantic hero is good for the soul. I am convinced 
 that the habit of being magnanimous and noble gradually 
 affects the lineaments. I do not think Mr. Waller could pos- 
 sibly have been born with features so gloriously heroic as those 
 he now wears. I have no doubt that every hero he plays 
 increases the haughty grandeur of his countenance and the cold 
 fury of his resolution. He gives me great pleasure when he 
 moves his jaw to one side and looks diabolical. Then I know 
 that he is becoming really dangerous. I am also fond of him 
 when he fights a duel. I love him when he is desperately, 
 but not mortally, wounded. I adore him when he is taking 
 snuff. I cringe before him when he takes off his plumed hat 
 with a gesture that brushes the flies off the horizon. I envy 
 him when he displays his glorious calves clad in black silk 
 stockings with golden clocks. I sigh over his inimitably 
 romantic feet shod in black shoes with silver buckles. I am 
 jealous when I behold him kneeling at the feet of a ravishingly 
 lovely lady, making love to her in a voice that would melt the 
 heart of a stone. But my envy is appeased and my jealousy 
 is allayed by the solemn thought that Lewis the Well-beloved 
 is a father. Nay, he is a father-in-law.
 
 FORBES-ROBERTSON 
 
 MR. FORBES-ROBERTSON is the most romantic actor of 
 our time. By romance I do not mean wig and patch, sword 
 and cape, velvet and bright iron. I mean the spirit of beauty, 
 the soul of loveliness, the ghost of grace. There are many 
 pseudo-romantic actors who can interpret the tawdry banali- 
 ties of pseudo-romance. But Forbes-Robertson alone can 
 interpret the deeper mysteries of the higher romance, the 
 romance of the poets, the romance of the mystics, the romance 
 of the dreamers. He alone has a face that is a mirror of the 
 soul troubled with 
 
 the dreams the drowsy gods 
 Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world 
 And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh. 
 
 His voice vibrates with the mysteries of spiritual know- 
 ledge and the secrets of imaginative experience. His eyes are 
 filled with the light that never was on sea or land. His lonely 
 nobility makes you think of mighty poets in their misery dead, 
 of Shelley and Keats and Rossetti and Francis Thompson, 
 for he is the incarnation of romantic poetry, the embodiment 
 of gentle fantasy, the image of visionary mystery. In all other 
 actors there is a taint of worldliness. Forbes-Robertson is 
 not only unworldly, he is unearthly. He is a supernatural 
 being, an angel masquerading as a man. If an angel were 
 to impersonate an actor, he would look exactly like Forbes- 
 Robertson in "The Passing of the Third Floor Back." He 
 could not look more beatific, more benignant, more ineffable, 
 more celestial. Indeed, I doubt whether any angel could 
 possibly be so angelical. Some critics cavil at his automatic 
 conversion of automatic sinners. I find it wholly convincing. 
 Who could resist that beautiful smile, that ravishing voice, 
 
 120
 
 FORBES-ROBERTSON 121 
 
 that enchanting gaze? It is possible that he failed to convert 
 the critics, but I know he converted me. I left the St. James's 
 Theatre feeling impossibly virtuous, inconceivably innocent, 
 and incredibly good. 
 
 We have many handsome actors, but as a rule the handsome 
 actor has no soul. The beauty of William Terriss was reso- 
 nantly empty. The beauty of Forbes-Robertson is more than 
 a physical endowment. All the variety of life moves behind 
 the noble mask, and you are enraptured by what Mr. Henry 
 James calls its "strange irregular rhythm." It steals through 
 you like odorous music, awakening dim echoes of vanquished 
 aspirations and defeated aims, abashing everything in you 
 that is mean and low and little. The temperament of the man 
 permeates the technique of the actor, saturating his look, his 
 voice, his gestures and his whole corporeal presence with a 
 vague charm that is the living poetry of the flesh, and forcing 
 upon you a vision of human nature that transcends the ordinary 
 aspect of mortality. The temper of our time is cynically 
 hard and metallically material. We are born and bred to deny 
 and to disbelieve, to doubt and to deride. We shiver in an 
 atmosphere of chilly contempt for the nobleness of life. Com- 
 ing out of that polar clime we are shocked by the serenity and 
 simplicity and reverence of an actor whose sole ideal is the 
 quest of gracious nobility and delicious beauty. That is 
 why Forbes-Robertson is an anachronism. That is why his 
 golden voice is a voice crying in the wilderness. That is why 
 he roams through the provinces casting his pearls before play- 
 goers who are not so viciously vulgarised as the playgoers of 
 London. 
 
 I would rather see Forbes-Robertson in a bad play than 
 another actor in a good one, for no part can destroy his high 
 seriousness and his poetic glamour. I never weary of looking 
 at his wonderful face, of basking in his wonderful smile, of 
 listening to his wonderful voice. When he was a young man, 
 Rossetti painted him as the youthful Dante, as Love speaking 
 to Beatrice. To-day he is more Dantesque than ever. The 
 years have not coarsened his ethereal lineaments. They
 
 122 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 have only enriched his rather effeminate sweetness with aus- 
 terity and glorified his womanly tenderness with melancholy. 
 There is no bitterness in the trenches Time has dug in his 
 forehead and his cheeks. There is no malevolence in the 
 shadows that have gathered round his eyes. His appealing 
 spirituality has grown more masculine without losing its ex- 
 quisite plasticity. Life has added a beseeching dignity to 
 his solemn fascination and an imploring pathos to his plaintive 
 charm. His eyes haunt you with a rarer passion, for they 
 seem to suggest more and more subtly the cruelly baffling 
 complexity of life. As a rule, one is not acutely conscious 
 of an actor's eyes. They do not dominate the whole field of 
 physical emotion. But the eyes of Forbes-Robertson follow 
 your thought, emphasizing hints and shades of meaning too 
 delicate for the voice and too intangible for the flesh. He 
 acts with his eyes, letting the tide of his own imagination flow 
 out of them in an irresistible rush of spiritual energy. This 
 is rare even in real life, for men lack the candour and the sim- 
 plicity which can prevent a film of reserve or hypocrisy from 
 forming like a cataract over the windows of the soul. Sometimes 
 you find this clear spiritual transparency in the eyes of a child, 
 and in certain moods it afflicts you with a sense of loss and 
 bereavement, as if you had caught a glimpse of what you might 
 have been if life had not pillaged and plundered you. You 
 find it also in the eyes of animals, notably in the eyes of a faith- 
 ful dog. Rossetti bought a white bull because it had eyes 
 like Janie Morris's. I would buy a crocodile if it had eyes 
 like Forbes-Robertson's. 
 
 I cannot describe the voice of Forbes-Robertson. It is a 
 voice that ought to be jealously reserved for splendid poetry 
 and sublime prose. Its tremulous fastidiousness plays on words 
 as the bow of a great violinist plays on the strings of a Stradi- 
 varius. Whatever it touches it turns into sweet music. It 
 has echoing deeps in it like velvet darkness where the syllables 
 move like soft plumes of sound. Its modulations are innumer- 
 able, and it can pick its way through every mood and emotion 
 with unfaltering felicity. The gift of tenderness is very precious,
 
 FORBES-ROBERTSON 123 
 
 for in order to speak tenderly it is necessary to pour sincere 
 feeling into all the tones and cadences. Forbes-Robertson 
 is miraculously sincere, and his voice is the utterance of his 
 emotional sincerity. He can breathe a glow of reality into 
 pinchbeck and a gleam of truth into paste. His impassioned 
 whisper can transmute sham sentiment into the very cry of 
 love. His voice is not detached from his soul. You can feel 
 the shaping caress of his spirit on the dead words as they 
 come alive on his lips. You can hear him creating beauty out 
 of ugly phrases as a poet builds his lofty rhymes out of the 
 debris of language* The miracle is wrought in your ears as you 
 listen, without apparent effort or artifice. The lovely edifice 
 of sound is raised like a dream, and before it melts away its 
 site is covered with a new palace, whose towers and pinnacles 
 are made of dying reverberations. The thing is sheer magic. 
 It is the romance of the voice. As you listen you fall into a 
 drowsy reverie, and you fade away from the play and the player 
 into a visionary trance until you forget "the weariness, the 
 fever, and the fret," the ugliness and the squalor of life. After- 
 wards you wonder whether it was " a vision or a waking dream," 
 and mixed with your memory of the wonderful voice is your 
 memory of the wonderful eyes and the wonderful smile.
 
 MARIE TEMPEST 
 
 THERE are no dull moments in Marie Tempest, for she 
 seems to have been made without melancholy. Born in London 
 the day before yesterday, her maiden name was Etherington. 
 She was educated in a Belgian convent school, where she may 
 have picked up her perfect French accent but not her Parisian 
 sparkle. In some respects her career resembles that of Lady 
 Bancroft, for Marie Tempest is really a modern Marie Wilton. 
 Macready saw Marie Wilton when, as a child of five, she 
 played her first part. Lifting her on to his knee, he said, "I 
 suppose you want to become a great actress?" "Yes, sir," 
 said Marie. " And what part do you want to play ? " " Juliet," 
 said the child. Macready burst out laughing. "Then," 
 said he, "you'll have to change those eyes of yours." Marie 
 Tempest is like Marie Wilton, for she can never change those 
 eyes of hers. Her eyes are her life and soul. When you 
 think of Marie Tempest you think of the incomparable eyes 
 in which all the imps of humour and all the gnomes of mis- 
 chief are always dancing. The Americans call her "Dresden 
 China," and George Meredith would call her "a dainty rogue 
 in porcelain." She is a Puck in petticoats, and an Ariel in 
 stockings. She has the heart of a tomboy with the brain of 
 a coquette. She is all impulse and impudence, lightness and 
 levity, insouciance and elegance, frolic and fun. She can be 
 gracefully gauche and wittily vulgar. She is a bundle of fas- 
 cinating contradictions and charming incongruities. Her 
 maddest whims are never coarse, and her wildest pranks never 
 degenerate into tomfoolery, for she is an artist to the tip of 
 the adorable little tip-tilted nose which is always turning itself 
 up at everything in this solemn old humbug of a world. 
 
 But let me try to describe what the Irish would call the 
 
 124
 
 MARIE TEMPEST 125 
 
 " divilment " in her eyes. There is no other word for it. They 
 are full of pure "divilment" even in the mock repose of gravity, 
 when she is holding back the lightnings of laughter that are 
 ready to flash in all directions. Her bottled fun is always 
 bursting to break loose. You can see the drollery struggling 
 behind her half-shut eyelids. You wait breathlessly for some- 
 thing to give and to go. As you watch her, you anticipate 
 the explosion of humour before it explodes somewhere in the 
 world of comedy behind her eyes. You see it coming long be- 
 fore it comes. A little ripple of fun wavers over her eyes like 
 a flicker of light on still water. Then the ripple breaks into 
 waves and the waves break into a surging foam of merriment. 
 The eyebrows go up and up and up, and the eyelids crinkle 
 and twist and crumple into a thousand twinkling twinkles, 
 till the summer storm of humour turns into a summer tempest 
 of roguishness. Marie Tempest's eyes are merrily droll. 
 You cannot resist their irresistible onslaught. Their charging 
 laughter takes you off your feet and whirls you into a delirious 
 stampede of joyous emotions and capering moods and irre- 
 sponsible frivolities and gay audacities. 
 
 Her mouth collaborates with her eyes. It is the very 
 mouth of comedy. It is an instrument on which she plays the 
 whole scale of mockery with subtle variations. Most mimes 
 have a stock smile which they turn on and off like gas. Marie 
 Tempest has many smiles, from the strangled smile that plays 
 peekaboo in the corners of her lips to the jolly smile that broad- 
 ens from ear to ear. Her pet smile ties her mouth in a knot, 
 as if her lips were trying to screw themselves up as tight as 
 her eyes. Her smile contracts and expands, passing through 
 tones and shades of humour which correspond with their 
 moods. 
 
 Her humour runs lightly and swiftly along her lips, as the 
 ringers of a pianist run along the keyboard of a piano. She 
 is an artist in smiles, for her grins and grimaces are spontane- 
 ous and her volleying laughter rings true. This is the secret of 
 her freshness, for she bathes her acting in personality. Her 
 own radiant temperament breaks through all the theatrical
 
 126 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 barriers. You do not think of her as an actress, for she is 
 like a schoolgirl playing a boisterous game and not a part. 
 
 She has the eyes of comedy and the mouth of comedy. 
 She has also the voice of comedy. Her diction is vividly clear 
 and quick. Nobody can talk more rapidly than Marie Tempest. 
 The words trip over each other on her tongue. In this she 
 resembles the French, but I would back her against even them. 
 Her volubility is bewildering. It leaves you, but not her, 
 breathless. The velocity of her talk is due to the velocity of 
 her brain. She thinks faster than the play. She hustles the 
 words and the gestures until all the other players seem half 
 asleep. She is exuberantly alive. She has a picturesque 
 knack of vocal caricature. She croaks and grunts, and squeaks 
 and squeals, and shrieks and screams and squawks in a hundred 
 different ways. There are hordes of little devils in her voice, 
 all trying various tunes of cackling derision and chuckling 
 mockery. Sometimes she is Granier and Coquelin rolled into 
 one. The breadth of her comedy is almost masculine. Her ges- 
 tures are her own, for her quick personality dances in every 
 limb. Her very fingers talk, and she can carry off a mood with 
 a flourish of her arms or a toss of her head or a shrug of her 
 shoulders or a wriggle of her hips. There is always human 
 emotion in her comedy. She keeps derisively in touch with 
 life. When she is most grotesque there is in her fun a faint 
 appeal for sympathy. Her humour is imperceptibly flavoured 
 with pathos, and her drollery has in it a spoonful of cracked 
 sentiment. 
 
 Marie Tempest is the last cry in the comedy of feminine 
 artifice. Eve would stare and gasp at her frocks. What she 
 does not know about hats and frocks is not knowledge. It 
 is very easy to buy clothes, but it is not very easy to put them 
 on. English actresses can clothe themselves, but very few 
 of them can dress. The art of dressing usually comes late 
 in life. The older a woman grows the better she dresses. 
 This is a tragedy, for it is hard to live down a dowdy youth. 
 Marie Tempest is ineffably artificial and divinely meretricious, 
 from the jaunty hat on her saucy head to the red-gold wave-
 
 MARIE TEMPEST 127 
 
 lets of her hair; from the naughty ruff round her naughty ears 
 to the tempestuous hang of her tempestuous skirt. She be- 
 longs to her clothes, whereas your clothes, dear lady, barely 
 belong to you. It is not enough to own your hat: your hat 
 must own you. A hat does not begin to be a hat until it be- 
 comes a part of you and you become a part of it. Otherwise 
 it is merely a heap of things hung on your head. Marie 
 Tempest is a blend of Longchamps and the Rue de la Paix, 
 of Trouville and Monte Carlo, of Dieppe and Dinard. She 
 adds a new terror to simplicity. She makes every woman in 
 the theatre feel a frump. Her polished brightness is inhuman, 
 for she has improved nature out of existence. Her brilliant 
 sureness kills your last lingering belief in the physical superi- 
 ority of man. No man was ever turned out like that. No 
 man ever harnessed his soul to his body so accurately, for she 
 is an absolute amalgamation of the body and the soul, a miracu- 
 lous union of all the senses, everything in working order, from 
 the first hair to the last eyelash, a continual, effervescing triumph 
 of calculated harmony and sharp design and flawless symmetry. 
 But this is not all. There is dancing life in the depths of 
 the diamond. And what life! The wayward force of it plays 
 on the play and the players and the spectators in a sparkling 
 stream of personality. The darting brilliance of it blinds you 
 and dazzles you. You forget the wheezing mechanism of the 
 plot. You forget the puppetry of the puppets. You forget 
 the pinchbeck glitter of the wit. You forget that the thing 
 before you is a wooden doll, for Marie Tempest can make a 
 marionette come alive when she gets inside it. She can turn 
 farce into comedy, horseplay into laughter, and sawdust into 
 blood.
 
 MARTIN HARVEY 
 
 MR. MARTIN HARVEY knows that "nothing is so dainty 
 sweet as melancholy." He has established a monopoly in 
 misery and a corner in sorrow. It is a mistake to imagine that 
 gloom is unpopular, and that pathos is unprofitable. Sadness 
 is a great theatrical asset. There is something in human 
 nature that is gratified by a powerful display of grief. The 
 pleasure caused by tears is quite as real as the pleasure caused 
 by laughter. I have no doubt that Martin Harvey and Harry 
 Lauder work on the same nerve, and fiddle on the same string. 
 The one makes you feel funnily uncomfortable, and the other 
 makes you feel uncomfortably funny. It is probable that 
 sorrow is simply joy walking backwards. We all know people 
 who are happy only when they are unhappy. They have 
 crape souls. They are the sots of sorrow. But the healthy 
 man desires misery only in his hours of ease. He is melancholy 
 only in his amusement. He goes to the theatre in order to 
 escape from the monotonous gaiety of life. 
 
 There is a good deal of real trouble in the world, but there 
 is also a good deal of real happiness. It is a pity that there is not 
 enough real trouble to go round. Many of us are fobbed off with 
 artificial tribulation. Our days caper cheerfully along without 
 any first-class anguish. Our digestions are prosaically good. 
 We have enough money to pay our butcher and our barber. 
 As we cannot manufacture moral spasms, spiritual aches, 
 and sentimental pains, we are compelled to buy them. We are 
 so hopelessly contented that we are forced to hire a little dis- 
 content to relieve the cheerful sameness of our cosy existence. 
 As most playgoers belong to the sorrowless classes, it is easy 
 to understand why Martin Harvey is popular. He is a pur- 
 veyor of woe for the woeless, of tears for the tearless, of sighs 
 
 128
 
 MARTIN HARVEY 129 
 
 for the sighless, of moans for the moanless. He flushes tear- 
 passages which would otherwise be blocked with dry bliss. 
 How many happy persons owe to him the rapture of second- 
 hand desolation. He has saved multitudes from the doom 
 of dying without having shed a tear. He helps us to forget 
 the carking carelessness we leave behind us at home. He 
 saddens our joy-worn faces and smoothes away our smiles. 
 He relieves our minds from the pressure of pleasure. He 
 takes us into a world where happiness is not compulsory and 
 where misery is not an idle dream. If we have not enough 
 imagination to be melancholy, he can saturate us with it. He 
 is a mill of misery, filled with roaring looms of lamentation. 
 It is good that we can fly to him from a world devastated by 
 bliss. If you wish to escape for a whole evening from all 
 the joys that flesh is heir to, I advise you to go and see Martin 
 Harvey. 
 
 I dote on Martin Harvey. He is an artist in romantic 
 melancholy. He learned all the tricks of the trade during the 
 thirteen years which he spent with Irving. But the melancholy 
 of Irving was barbed with irony. It was an intellectual melan- 
 choly. The melancholy of Martin Harvey is emotional. He is a 
 handsome tear. When an ugly man is melancholy he is ridicu- 
 lous. Martin Harvey is not an ugly man. He is beautiful 
 with a Byronic beauty. His sable locks and his sable eyes 
 match his sable voice. It is curious that all sorrowful souls 
 are sombre. You cannot conceive the possibility of a sorrow- 
 ful blonde. It is necessary to be black in order to be blue. 
 The blackness of Martin Harvey is more than characteristic; 
 it is a property. Fair hair and blue eyes would ruin him. 
 Black hair is sometimes cheerful. Now and then it is comic. 
 Dan Leno's hair was black. But there is blackness and 
 blackness. There is the blackness of a well-varnished boot, 
 and there is the blackness of a hearse. There is the black- 
 ness of a top-hat, and there is the blackness of a coffin. But 
 the blackness of Martin Harvey is different from all these. 
 It is the blackness of romantic dejection and poetic despair. 
 It is the blackness of art. 
 9
 
 130 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of Martin 
 Harvey's hair. I do not desire to say that its blackness is 
 to him what blacking is to Day and Martin. I do not suggest 
 that he is like Samson, whose strength was in his hair. But I 
 am as sure that he could not act without his hair as I am sure 
 that his hair could not act without him. The hair is the man. 
 The state of his hair betrays the state of his soul, just as the 
 barometer betrays the state of the weather. His hair is very 
 sensitive, for it feels every breath of the stormy emotions 
 that blow across his brow. It always rises to the occasion, 
 and it expresses every shade of grief and terror, rage and 
 despair, wrath and rhapsody. It is capable of everything 
 that is within the compass of hair. It can do anything that 
 hair can do. Nothing could be more disorderly than its dis- 
 order. Nothing could be more riotous than its riot. It out- 
 rages the finest instincts of the hairdresser. It laughs at the 
 brush and gibbers at the comb. It is the last word in the 
 unkempt. 
 
 But the hair of Martin Harvey is not his only virtue. His 
 eyes are even more soulful. It is his soul that blackens his 
 hair, and it is his soul that blackens his eyes. The ebony 
 sorrow of his soul brims over in his eyes. They are Cimmerian 
 pools of gloom. They are the dark deltas of an inky Amazon 
 of grief. When you see these raven orbs gazing into the depths 
 of eternity, you know that all is for the worst in the worst 
 of all possible worlds. You are soothed by the thought that 
 the reservoirs of misery are inexhaustible and that the pipe 
 lines of woe are infinite. You feel that you can face once 
 more the levity of life and the frivolity of work, for the memory 
 of the unfathomable melancholy in those lustrous moons will 
 assuage your mirth and alleviate your gladness. 
 
 The mortuary grace of Martin Harvey is based on white- 
 ness as well as blackness. His black hair and his black eyes 
 are the antithesis of his white face. He is all black and white, 
 like a mourning envelope. I do not know why a white face 
 with a border of black hair should be mournful and why a 
 black face with a border of white hair should be comical. I
 
 MARTIN HARVEY 131 
 
 do not know why a red face should be ridiculous and why a 
 white face should be romantic. They are conventions due to 
 the fact that we have been taught to regard niggers and drunk- 
 ards as drolleries. If the civilised majority of men had black 
 faces, then men with white faces would be grotesque. Mr. 
 Kipling would not talk about "The White Man's Burden." 
 He would talk about "The Black Man's Burden." It is 
 all an accident of colour, a freak of Nature's paint-pot. If 
 we were all born with red faces and alcohol turned our noses 
 white, then we should laugh at a man with a white nose. If 
 sorrow painted our cheeks purple instead of making them pale, 
 then purple faces would be poetic, and Martin Harvey would 
 be a lion comique. But a corpse-like pallor is romantic, and 
 Sydney Carton is the only serious rival of the Corsican Brothers. 
 Even the snow is romantic. The duel in the snow would be 
 spoiled if Nature had not decided to make snow white instead 
 of black. After all, there is no earthly reason why snow should 
 be white. Nature could have made black snow if she had chosen. 
 She might have given us white coal and black snow. But 
 Nature thought of Christmas and Martin Harvey, for Nature 
 is a melodramatist. She knew that white snow would go 
 well with Martin Harvey's white face and white shirt, making 
 a romantic background for his black hair and his black eyes, 
 to say nothing of his black voice, with its dark, funereal rhythm, 
 his black smile with its sorrowful undulations, and his sombre 
 soul with its bottomless sea of inky agony.
 
 EVELYN MILLARD 
 
 Miss EVELYN MILLARD has been our idol ever since we fell 
 in love with her Ursula and her Flavia. She will always 
 be our idol. Like Ephraim, we are fond of idols, and it would 
 be well if all our idols were as lovely and as gracious and as 
 sweet as she. We do not care a straw what part she plays, 
 for to us she is always the idolised idol we all love on the other 
 side of idolatry. We are simple, honest, plain folk, and we 
 are not ashamed of our enslavement. We do not worship 
 Evelyn Millard merely as an actress. No: we worship her as 
 a woman. We worship her, as we worshipped Mary Anderson 
 and Lily Langtry, because she is our ideal Englishwoman. 
 She gathers up into her stately and majestic person all the 
 traditional charms of all our traditional charmers. 
 
 They say she is the daughter of Professor John Millard, 
 the elocutionist. She is nothing of the sort. She is a daughter 
 of the gods, divinely tall and most divinely fair. You will 
 find her in all the poems of Tennyson. She is that very Maud 
 whose lover in one mood implored her to come into the garden 
 and in another mood denounced her as being faultily faultless, 
 icily regular, splendidly null. You will find her in the novels of 
 Dickens and Thackeray, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Mere- 
 dith and Hardy. She smiles her placid smile in the pictures 
 of Millais and Marcus Stone. Bless my soul! she crops up 
 wherever you choose to look for her in our drama, our poetry, 
 our fiction, and our painting. 
 
 Evelyn Millard is as delightfully English as Sarah Bern- 
 hardt is delightfully French. You cannot think of a British 
 Bernhardt or a French Millard. The gulf between the English 
 actress and the French actress is profound. After her mar- 
 riage, Miss Millard threw up her part in a play by Mr. Henry 
 
 132
 
 EVELYN MILLARD 133 
 
 Arthur Jones, because certain lines in it seemed to her to be 
 indecorous in the mouth of a bride. That point of view would 
 be impossible across the Channel, but here the woman is more 
 important than the actress, and we prefer to think of the 
 woman first and the actress afterwards. Where the dignity 
 of a woman clashes with the dignity of dramatic art, it is dram- 
 atic art that must give way. The charm of Sarah Bernhardt 
 is her incorrigible artifice, but the charm of Evelyn Millard 
 is her incorrigible innocence. After eighteen years of stage 
 traffic, she is utterly unspoiled and absolutely unsophisticated. 
 The girl still holds the woman at arm's length. She obstinately 
 refuses to grow up. She indignantly declines to mature. 
 She satisfies our conservative instincts, and we rejoice in the 
 certainty that there is at least one national institution which 
 cannot be destroyed. 
 
 It is good to know that we can renew our first thrill every 
 time we see her. We may change, but she does not. Her 
 Flavian smiles and her Flavian tears are undimmed and un- 
 dammed by time. The wine of Anthony Hope grows drier 
 and drier in its bin, but his Flavia grows sweeter and sweeter 
 in an age that urges womanhood to grow sourer and sourer. 
 There are many melancholy young men among us who have 
 never seen a womanly woman. I advise them to go and 
 behold Evelyn Millard displaying triumphantly the bewil- 
 dering fascinations of that extinct creature. They are lucky 
 to have the chance, for there will never be another specimen 
 so bewitching of the wonderful darlings our happy ancestors 
 adored. 
 
 There is nothing that is not lovable in Evelyn Millard. 
 Her lofty beauty is free from the fashionable taint of fierce 
 masculinity. Her face has the surrendering softness that 
 infuriates Mr. Bernard Shaw. There is no battling arrogance 
 in her large, beseeching eyes. There is no pugnacious defiance 
 in the delicate curves of her caressing mouth. Her lips do not 
 suggest the platform and the polling-booth. She is frankly 
 and shamelessly unmanly. She flaunts her helpless loveliness 
 and rejoices in her clinging fragility. She exults in her tender
 
 134 
 
 inadequacy. She is not in the least humiliated by the frailty 
 of her sex. On the contrary, she likes to exaggerate its tremu- 
 lous fears, its delicate sighs, and its beautiful anxieties. She 
 is a flower that does not pretend to be a rock, and she realises 
 that it is as much the duty of the flower to be flower-like as it 
 is the duty of a rock to be rocky. 
 
 The prevalent type of womanhood is the cat. As a rule 
 it is the wild cat and not the domestic cat. There is no cattish- 
 ness in Evelyn Millard. I am not sure that we deserve her, 
 for she is almost too sweet and good for human nature's daily 
 food. Her kindness is too mellifluously kind. Her gentleness 
 is too cloyingly gentle. She makes real men dissatisfied with 
 real women. She sets an impossible example to her harsher 
 sisters. It is all very well for her to arouse wild hopes of a 
 reasserted sovereignty in the male breast, but it is rather 
 hard on the strong, silent women who have to live up to her 
 swooning weakness and fainting gracility. How on earth can 
 they vie with her beaming virtue after they leave the theatre? 
 To do them justice, they do not try, for no ordinary woman 
 could scale the Alps of amiability over which she trips like a 
 fairy martyr. 
 
 There is no doubt that the' profession of martyr agrees with 
 Evelyn Millard. She is at her best when the male is at his 
 worst. She revels in being wronged by a lover, and she thrives 
 upon masculine misunderstanding. Like an April day, she 
 sparkles most irresistibly when she is dressed in tears. When 
 she is heartbroken her voice fills us with a sacred joy, and we 
 forgive her male tormentors for the sake of her sweet and 
 sugary grief. The more she suffers the more we enjoy our- 
 selves. We would not flinch if she sobbed continuously through 
 three acts. Yet we are not callous brutes. Off the stage the 
 spectacle of a weeping woman unmans us, but we gloat like 
 emotional fiends over the vibrating agonies of our champion 
 Niobe. 
 
 Her liquid moans fill us with holy rapture and her fluent 
 sobs plunge us into an ecstasy of celestial delight. Can you 
 explain this paradox? Why do we shudder at real tears and
 
 EVELYN MILLARD 135 
 
 exult in sham tears? Are we monsters? Why do we ex- 
 tract aesthetic pleasure from the anguish of our beloved Evelyn ? 
 She cannot suffer enough to sate our thirst for suffering. What 
 is stranger still, we not only like to see her weeping Niagaras of 
 woe, but we also like to weep with her, until the theatre is 
 damp with her tears and ours. 
 
 In most modern plays love is an ugly passion. Evelyn 
 Millard reminds us that love was once a romantic sentiment. 
 Her innocence almost amounts to ignorance. She helps us 
 to remember the good old times when even a stage woman 
 was an angel transfigured by a spiritual devotion. She com- 
 pels us to believe in her goodness, for she exhibits an imagination 
 that is clear and pure and radiant. Her heroines not only 
 do no evil they think no evil. They are glowingly stainless 
 and brightly serene. They are morally healthy without being 
 cold, valiantly amorous without being sensuous. They fall 
 in love without losing their dignity. They give their hearts 
 without losing their souls. There is a fine reserve in their affec- 
 tion, like ice in the sunlight. Even when they melt they are 
 cool, and their tenderest kisses are fresh with reluctance. In 
 a word, they are English heroines, loving with their spirit more 
 than with their blood, and apter at loyalty than at allurement. 
 There is a noble beauty in their fidelity. They move like 
 sorrowful queens who are glad to suffer and endure rather 
 than to exact and extort. They are careless of their rights 
 and they glory in their wrongs. Their throne is the hearth 
 and their kingdom is the home.
 
 HARRY LAUDER 
 
 WHAT is the secret of Harry Lauder? An astute expert 
 who has his finger on the pulse of the public tells me that it 
 is in his Scots blood. Wherever he sings, Scotsmen rally 
 round him, and the rest follow like sheep. This may be a 
 part of the truth, for the clannishness of Scotsmen is a tre- 
 mendous force. It counts for much in literature, as every- 
 body knows. But it is not sufficient to account for the vogue 
 of Harry Lauder. Other Scottish comedians have failed to 
 charm the fickle taste of the music-halls. Indeed, when Lauder 
 first appeared in London he was laughed at. He was forced 
 to fight against anti-Scottish prejudice. I heard him at the 
 Tivoli nine or ten years ago. He came on as an extra turn. 
 He was absolutely unknown, and although his comic power 
 was then overwhelming, it was unrecognised by the audience. 
 I was instantly impressed by his genius and was disappointed 
 when I was told that he was a singer of no importance. I 
 found it was not easy even to learn his name. Since then he 
 has sung himself into the hearts of the people. What is the 
 meaning of it? 
 
 Well, in the first place, it is the man's personality. He 
 possesses that strange quality which Mr. Barrie calls "bloom." 
 Just as the charm of a woman may be called the bloom on her, 
 so the charm of Harry Lauder may be called the bloom on him. 
 You feel the bloom on him as soon as he comes on the stage. 
 He is queerly different from other comedians, just as Dan 
 Leno was queerly different. He has the something more which 
 distinguishes the great artist from the small artist. Other 
 singers have the technical gifts, the voice, the gestures, the 
 eccentricities of dress and make-up, but they lack the indefi- 
 nable magic that transfigures them out of the commonplace. 
 
 136
 
 HARRY LAUDER 137 
 
 Other singers can achieve grotesquery, extravagance, carica- 
 ture, drollery, whimsicality, mannerism, but they miss the strange 
 beauty which fills these superficial artifices with meaning. There 
 is a power in Harry Lauder which resembles the power you 
 find in Albert Chevalier. But it cuts deeper than Chevalier's 
 genius. Lauder lacks the plastic variety of Chevalier, the 
 wonderful gift of painting character in various ways. But 
 in some way he is more intensely human. He rouses in you 
 deeper emotions. He utters a more moving heart-cry. 
 
 There is in the art of Chevalier at its very root a touch 
 of staginess. His effects are cunningly veiled, but you feel 
 that they are skilfully prepared. Lauder is simpler and 
 more spontaneous. His effects are produced by a kind of 
 natural vitality of the emotions. He makes you feel his feel- 
 ings. He fills you with a fresh sense of reality. He puts you 
 into touch with life. There is the secret. He is poignantly 
 human. There is in his features and in his voice the common 
 tumult of the common heart, the vague, homely disturbance 
 and trouble and tears and laughter of the ordinary man, with 
 his ordinary work and his ordinary affections and his ordinary 
 failings. Harry Lauder comes straight from the people, and 
 he sings the rough feelings of the people straight out of his heart. 
 It is a mistake to imagine that the people are vulgar. Vul- 
 garity is not the vice of poverty; it is the vice of wealth. I 
 find more vulgarity in our theatres than in our music-halls. 
 The rich man can hardly help being vulgar; the poor man can 
 hardly be vulgar if he tries. There is no vulgarity in the art 
 of Harry Lauder, although he sings in the vulgar tongue about 
 the vulgar joys and sorrows of the vulgar. In a very profound 
 sense he is too vulgar to descend to vulgarity. He is the crowd 
 bursting into song. 
 
 He might serve as a model for the great, rough, genial, 
 good-humoured multitude. He is the epitome of homeliness. 
 His face is large and loose-featured, every part of it clumsily 
 exaggerated, and yet heavily balanced and harmonised with the 
 other parts. There is no stupid beauty in it, no symmetry, 
 no softness. It is the face of a peasant or a labourer, with the
 
 138 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 robust rudeness of the earth in its uncouth angles and corners. 
 In this way rocks and hills are made with a magnificent care- 
 lessness and brutal extravagance. His face is ludicrously 
 original, like the faces of peasants. You feel the horseplay 
 of life in it. You know that it is not a copy but an original 
 sketch, left unfinished and unsophisticated by the vigorous 
 hand of nature. The features are quite primitive in their 
 enormous simplicity of huge protuberances and fleshy wastes. 
 The nose is more than a nose: it is a headland. The mouth 
 is more than a mouth : it is an abyss. The cheeks are more than 
 cheeks: they are prairies that laugh in a thousand furrows. 
 The eyes are also built on a large scale, and the wrinkles of 
 laughter radiate from them in an explosion of drollery. The 
 ordinary face is small, and timid, and toned down. His face 
 is gigantically shameless, immensely naked, uproariously nude. 
 It offers itself boldly to the eye. When it smiles it smiles like 
 a county or a hippopotamus. It is hard to resist a smile that 
 rolls across acres, that billows over miles of creased flesh. 
 The joviality of the earth breaks loose and comes out in it. 
 The roaring fun of the eternal jest of life sounds in its con- 
 vulsions. As you watch Harry Lauder you feel something 
 rising inside you that warms you, and exhilarates you, and 
 mellows you. It is the very sap of good humour which is the 
 milk and honey, the sweetness and the light of life. It is the 
 jolly force that makes the lambs gambol, and the kids frisk, 
 and the colts scamper, and the puppies play the fool. It is 
 humanity in touch with human nature, man in touch with life. 
 Harry Lauder paints life as a jolly business. There is 
 not a breath of cynicism in his body. He sings the elemental 
 simplicities with tremendous vigour love, friendship, and 
 conviviality. His hold on the people is based chiefly upon 
 his homely, clean sentiment. His most popular song, "I love 
 a Lassie," is a song that has not a taint of sensuality in it. 
 It is a lyric of homely love, the love of the peasant lad for the 
 peasant lass, fresh and clear as the wind that blows across the 
 bonny purple heather, "pure as the lily in the dell." The 
 music-halls adore this simple love song, for they are sworn
 
 HARRY LAUDER 139 
 
 worshippers of youth and the ideals of youth. They are 
 children with a childish innocence of heart which eagerly 
 responds to a picture of innocent love and romantic sentiment. 
 They joyously turn from lower thoughts to the sweet image 
 of "Mary, my Scotch Bluebell," which the singer has put 
 into their hearts by some magic witchery of music. Harry 
 Lauder has a wonderful gift of wistfulness. He can breathe 
 a gentle yearning tenderness into the smoke-laden air of the 
 tawdriest music-hall. 
 
 His humour and his tenderness are blended in a very curi- 
 ous way. Take, for instance, his song, "He was very kind to 
 me." He appears dressed as a poor Scots widow, grotesque 
 in her bonnet and shawl. He paints her character to the life, 
 and shows you her grief in the arms of her absurdity. There 
 is no mawkish or maudlin sentiment in this queer creature, 
 but somehow or other he fills her with the pathos and the 
 humour of life. "He was very, very, very, very, very, very 
 kind to me." Into each "very" he slips a new note of pathetic 
 reminiscence, infinitely compassionate and delicate, until you 
 do not know whether to laugh or to cry, and end in doing both. 
 The subtlety with which he draws out of the commonest and 
 tritest words a deeper meaning is extraordinary. It is the per- 
 fection of emotional art. At bottom Harry Lauder is a gentle 
 humorist who coaxes the squalid facts of life into something 
 beautiful. His laughter laughs with human nature, not at it. 
 He makes you feel that life is queer but good, grotesque but 
 glorious.
 
 ALBERT CHEVALIER 
 
 ALBERT ONESIME BRITANNICUS GWATHVEOED Louis 
 CHEVALIER that is the real name of Albert Chevalier. It 
 is a magnificent name. It is even more magnificent than 
 the great rolling name of Paragot Berzelius Nibbidard Poly- 
 dore Pradel Paragot. It suggests the polychromatic genius 
 of the many-coloured coster mime who has French and Italian 
 and Welsh blood in his veins. Albert Chevalier was born in 
 1862 in Netting Hill. His father was a French master in the 
 Kensington Grammar School. He began his theatrical ad- 
 ventures as a boy of eight when he recited a poem by Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes in the Cornwall Hall, Notting Hill. Henry 
 Compton, smoking a long clay pipe, heard the boy reciting 
 in his house in Kensington Square, patted him on the back, 
 and said, "Very good! Come and see me again when your 
 voice breaks!" His voice broke in due time, and he has 
 been making us laugh and cry with that broken voice for nearly 
 twenty years. His long drill and discipline would have broken 
 many a smaller man's heart as well as his voice, for he learned 
 his magical art in the old, hard school that produced Sir Charles 
 Wyndham and Sir John Hare, and many another great actor. 
 His voice to-day is as richly broken as Wyndham's. You can 
 hear thirty years of touring in it. It is the true, rich fruity 
 actor's voice. 
 
 He has played where has he not played? To begin 
 with, he played in the old Prince of Wales's Theatre, the " Dust- 
 hole," with the Kendals and John Clayton. There he and 
 Fred Storey were boys together. In those early days he was 
 "Mr. Knight" on the playbills Knight being the English 
 equivalent of Chevalier. Later he reverted to his own name, 
 and he won his histrionic spurs as Albert Chevalier. From 
 
 140
 
 ALBERT CHEVALIER 141 
 
 1878 to 1887 he played in town and country with the Kendals, 
 with Hare, with George Alexander, with Willie Edouin, and 
 with Toole. He played all sorts of parts, from Mazzette in 
 "Don Giovanni" to the Frenchman in "The Magistrate." 
 He played in Robertson comedy, in Pinero farce, in burlesque, 
 in grand opera and in comic opera. It was in the burlesque 
 of "Aladdin" at the Strand that he sang his first coster song, 
 "The 'Armonic Club." At the Avenue he took the place of 
 Arthur Roberts for two years. It seemed that he would always 
 be an actor of the good old type, ready to play any part that 
 turned up. Luckily for him and for us he found himself 
 "out of a shop," and by a happy accident tried his coster songs 
 on a famous night in 1891 at the Pavilion. He was afraid 
 that his delicate art would not please the fidgety music-hall 
 audience, but the Pavilion leapt at it, and after singing "The 
 Coster's Serenade" he was overwhelmed with rapturous ap- 
 plause. That song is now a Cockney classic. 
 
 I say it is a classic, and classics also are many of the great 
 songs of Chevalier, such as "The Future Mrs. 'Awkins," "Wot 
 cher!" "The Coster's Courtship," "The Nipper," "My 
 Old Dutch," "Wot's the Good of Hanyfink? Why, Nuffink," 
 "Tick Tock," "The Fallen Star," and "Wot Fur Do Ee Luv 
 Oi?" They are part of the permanent folk-songs of the lan- 
 guage. They come straight from the homely joys and sorrows 
 of the people; for Chevalier has quarried them out of the hearts 
 of the London poor, shaped the words with beautifully naive 
 and simple art, and married pathetic and plaintive cockney 
 music to the words. Sometimes the tune is his own; sometimes 
 it is by his brother and manager, Auguste (known as " Charles 
 Ingle"); sometimes it is by John Crook, and sometimes it is 
 by some other composer. But the real maker of both the words 
 and the tune is Chevalier, the artist who can make London 
 cry and laugh over her own tears and laughter. 
 
 Yes, Chevalier is an artist, for he is a poet as well as a 
 comedian, a humorist as well as a mime. In the exquisite 
 beauty and delicacy of his sentiment and his humour you can 
 see the French and Italian and Celtic strain. But there is
 
 142 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 an English breadth in his comic force. The mixture of qualities 
 makes him a marvellous artist who can show you the depths 
 as well as the surface of human nature. There has never 
 been a music-hall singer so fastidiously refined and at the same 
 time so vividly realistic. He is the Hogarth of the music-halls, 
 but he is free from the bitter Hogarthian brutality. He loves 
 his characters, and that is why they are so miraculously alive 
 with the very life of life. One night while he was singing 
 "My Old Dutch" in an East End hall, an old fellow flung his 
 arms round his old wife's neck and gave her a kiss that was 
 heard over the whole house. The homely pathos of the song 
 is heartbreaking. Indeed, there is in Chevalier's simple cos- 
 ter songs something that recalls the lyric cry of Burns. You 
 feel the ache and pain of the human heart in them. You cannot 
 harden yourself against their dramatic magic. They carry 
 your soul by storm, and before you have had time to think 
 you are in tears. The tears that Chevalier makes you shed 
 are not maudlin tears. They are tears that make your soul 
 wiser and nobler, and purer and tenderer, for they are the 
 product of honest, direct, and unsophisticated emotion. This 
 magician makes you see the eternal simplicity of human nature, 
 the brave goodness of common lives, and the queer lovable- 
 ness of humble love. There is no mean malice in his mimicry 
 and his caricature, for all he does is steeped in pity and sym- 
 pathy and compassion. 
 
 The dramatic humour of Chevalier is a very wonderful 
 thing. He makes you see the very soul of the type he repre- 
 sents, and not merely the external physical mannerisms. His 
 imitators can imitate his physical mannerisms' and parody 
 his technical brilliancy, but they cannot steal his spiritual 
 magic. Gus Elen and Alec Hurley are only the husks of his 
 genius. The dramatic humour of Chevalier is a mystery, 
 for it comes from the man behind the actor. It is an imagina- 
 tive force that breaks through conventions. I saw Chevalier 
 the other day in a very conventional part, that of an old French 
 actor in a dramatic sketch called "Behind the Scenes." But 
 he made me laugh and cry over the pathetic human simplicity
 
 ALBERT CHEVALIER 143 
 
 of the character. He created Achille Talma Dufard in the 
 magical way that Dickens created Micawber and Dick Swiv- 
 eller and Mr. Pickwick. And indeed there is a rich Dick- 
 ensian quality in Chevalier's art, a strange touching power 
 of making eccentricity and extravagance appear more tear- 
 fully and more laughably human than humanity. What is 
 this power? It is the glamour of emotional sincerity, the 
 magic of feeling the human soul so honestly that others also 
 feel it honestly. Dickens made us love his fantastic carica- 
 tures because he made us wince at their simple human reality. 
 Chevalier makes us wince in the same way. Below his facial 
 drollery, his comic gestures, and his vocal mockery there is 
 the living movement of the living soul that is your soul and 
 my soul and everybody's soul. We are what he sings and what 
 he says, and as we are transfigured into the common life of 
 common humanity we find ourselves melting into a passionate 
 sympathy of human smiles and human tears. That is dra- 
 matic genius, for it makes us alive with the life of our queer 
 human brotherhood, freeing us from our sense of personal iso- 
 lation, merging our cold egoism in the warm flood of human 
 nature. Dickens does that and Burns does it, and Chevalier 
 does it, and we feel better for their doing of it. An hour with 
 Chevalier is a release of the soul, an expansion of the spirits, 
 an enlarging of the good, broad, human humour that is the very 
 breath in our lungs, and the very blood in our hearts. Dickens is 
 dead, but the characters of Dickens are alive, and will always 
 be alive. It is otherwise with the cockney masterpieces of 
 Chevalier. They will die with him, for, although his songs 
 will survive him, without his voice they are only the shadows 
 of themselves. They shrink when other singers sing them 
 into ghosts and phantoms, for they lack the final touch of 
 artistry that makes poetry everlasting. Yet their sobbing 
 humour is a very durable thing, and it will endure long after 
 the coster and the cockney have been slain by the schoolmaster 
 and the newspaper.
 
 ADA REEVE 
 
 ADA REEVE is a mime to the manner born. Her father was 
 an actor of the old school who played with Irving and the 
 Kendals, with Toole, and Sothern, and Phelps. In the early 
 seventies her mother was a popular soubrette. Ada was only 
 six when she faced the footlights for the first time at Dewsbury. 
 At twelve she was a mature comic singer and dancer. She 
 was a child-actress at the Pavilion Theatre, Mile End, where 
 she played the lachrymose Little Willie in "East Lynne," 
 and the lachrymose Eva in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." It was 
 at the Pavilion she learned from Mr. Isaac Cohen that art 
 of speaking distinctly which most English actresses never 
 learn at all. At fourteen she was famous in the music-halls 
 as one of the "Sisters Reeve," and soon afterwards she was 
 singing and dancing in single harness, making hit after hit 
 at the Pavilion, the Alhambra, the Tivoli, the Royal, and the 
 Oxford, with tomboy songs such as "What Do I Care?" "The 
 Little Puritan," "I'm a little too young to know, you know." 
 I believe she claims to have been the first actress to turn a 
 catherine-wheel on the music-hall stage. It was at the Cam- 
 bridge, and the delighted audience used to yell every night at 
 her, "Over, Ada!" She was the perfect tomboy that the 
 cockney humorist adores. In many ways she resembles 
 that darling of the gallery boys, Nellie Farren, for, in addition 
 to her gift of boisterous fun, she has the queer little streak of 
 homely pathos that the people of London love. It was this 
 streak of pathos which made Mile End sob over her Little 
 Willie, and her dying Eva, and her forlorn waif in "The Crimes 
 of Paris." She brought tears into the eyes of the sentimental 
 music-hall audiences when she sang "Only a Penny." This 
 odd mixture of wild drollery and naive sentiment is a cock- 
 
 144
 
 ADA REEVE 145 
 
 ney product, and Ada Reeve mixed the mixture almost as clev- 
 erly as Nellie Farren. By this great cockney mixture she 
 won the great cockney heart. 
 
 In 1894 the vigilant eye of Mr. George Edwardes saw the 
 cockney genius of Ada Reeve, and with his usual insight he 
 stole her from the music-halls, giving her the chief part in 
 "The Shop Girl," which ran for two years. Then she was 
 Julie Bon-Bon in "The Gay Parisienne." Since then she 
 has oscillated vigorously between musical comedy and the 
 music-halls, now and again touring in America, Australia, and 
 South Africa. For a long time she was the bright particular 
 star of the Palace. She was at her very best with Mr. Arthur 
 Roberts. To see Ada Reeve and Arthur Roberts playing 
 together was almost as delightful as it was to see Nellie Farren 
 and Fred Leslie. Their spontaneous drolleries fed each other 
 and made it very hard for playgoers to bear the physical pain 
 of incessant laughter. In those days we were almost compelled 
 to cry for mercy. It was not easy to endure the muscular toil 
 of laughing for a whole evening. I remember one night when 
 Ada and Arthur were both in their maddest and merriest mood, 
 and I went home absolutely worn out and sore with laughter. 
 Ada laughed at Arthur, and Arthur laughed at Ada, and we all 
 laughed at both of them, and both of them laughed at us. So 
 continuously did we laugh that the play could hardly get on, 
 and, in fact, it did not get on except when Ada and Arthur 
 went off the stage. There was one moment when Ada Reeve 
 was paralysed by her sense of humour. The gags and antics 
 of Arthur Roberts had reduced her to impotence. The more 
 she laughed at him the more absurdly absurd he became. I 
 fear there is no such laughing nowadays. 
 
 Mr. Barrie has told us that woman was made, not out of 
 man's rib, but out of man's funnybone. Ada Reeve is a living 
 proof of this theory. There are some people who say that 
 women have no sense of humour, but they have never seen 
 Ada Reeve. She cannot help herself. She is not an artificial 
 humorist. Her humour is quite natural. It flows out of 
 her temperament. She is incorrigibly hoydenish, and her 
 10
 
 146 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 high spirits never flag. She seems to be quite free from the 
 vice of self-consciousness, and she can let herself go in a whirl 
 of rollicking gaiety that is irresistibly infectious. She is not 
 preoccupied with her own femininity. She is able to forget 
 herself in the riot of audacious mirth. There are some ac- 
 tresses whose self-approbation makes you forget their acting. 
 They are too pretty to act. Ada Reeve trusts to her brains 
 rather than to her looks. She is not afraid to burlesque her- 
 self, and to turn to account her physical eccentricities. In 
 this vein she is as daring as Marie Tempest. She has the 
 abandon of the male comedian as well as the charm of the 
 feminine droll. She does not hesitate to make herself gro- 
 tesque, and ungainly, and ludicrous, parodying her own voice, 
 caricaturing her own face, and lampooning her own figure. 
 She shoots out her jaw and stretches out her neck in a romp 
 of self-derision. There is no stiff dignity in her gestures. She 
 throws herself into any attitude that suggests her mood, treating 
 her limbs with ironical contempt, and flinging them about in 
 a jointless revel of physical recklessness. Her fun is the 
 perfection of careless impudence. It is pure cockney fun, 
 the fun that treats the body as a splendid joke, and carica- 
 tures every feature of the face and every curve of the flesh. 
 The mobility of Ada Reeve's face is extraordinary. Liveliest 
 of all are her amazing eyes. Her drollery rampages in those 
 comical orbs. They are very large and very protuberant. 
 The ordinary eyes hide behind the eyelids, but hers come 
 right out across the footlights. They bulge with a defiantly 
 rolling sparkle. You can see them sideways. Her eye in 
 profile is as prominent as her nose. And how she uses her 
 eyes! She puts into their gyrations all her archness and all her 
 innuendo, all her piquancy and all her insolence. You cannot 
 think of her with her eyes shut. She is all eyes, just as Marie 
 Lloyd is all teeth. She deliberately exaggerates her eyes, mak- 
 ing them devour her face, until you half expect to see her 
 head turning into two rolling and rollicking globes of fun. 
 She throws her eyes at you like footballs. They grow on you 
 until they look like balloons.
 
 ADA REEVE 147 
 
 Just as Niobe was all tears, so Ada Reeve is all smiles. 
 Her mouth is the only serious rival of her eyes. It is a gen- 
 erous mouth, prodigally stocked with laughing teeth. Her 
 smile is illimitable. It begins with a tiny pout, and it slowly 
 expands until it touches each of the wings, and finally dis- 
 appears behind the scenes, ending on the one side somewhere 
 near the Tottenham Court Road, and on the other somewhere 
 near Piccadilly, leaving her teeth gleaming alone in a blinding 
 palisade of laughter. Ada Reeve is not afraid to smile, and, 
 when she smiles, the whole house smiles too. Every long 
 face grows broad, and every pursed-up mouth stretches itself 
 sideways in an india-rubber imitation and emulation of the 
 smile that has no end. An Ada Reeve audience is an orgy 
 of smiles, neatly arranged in ranks from the first row of the 
 stalls to the last row of the gallery. The other night at the 
 Apollo I watched the whole ascending scale of smiles in the 
 crowded house. There was not a break in it until the last 
 smile vanished in the roof. The theatre was decorated with 
 smiles while she was making preposterous love to Podmore, 
 driving him distracted, and driving us distracted, with her 
 harum-scarum endearments and impish coquetries. It is a 
 pity that good songs are so rare, for it as a diseuse that Ada 
 Reeve is inimitable. She has that Parisian mastery of diction 
 which enables her to combine the art of talk with the art of 
 song. She can talk and sing at the same time, making every 
 syllable tell, and every point go home. She can work such 
 wonders with a pointless song, that one rages to hear her sing 
 a song that bristles with points. She can extract so much 
 humour from humourless songs that one asks in a kind of 
 fury why nobody writes humorous songs for her. The songs 
 in "Butterflies" make me sigh for a song like "Tact." But 
 good songs are scarcer than good singers, just as good plays 
 are scarcer than good actors. The result is that Ada Reeve, 
 like Forbes-Robertson, is compelled to make bricks without 
 straw. Why on earth does she not offer a prize for a singable 
 song?
 
 SEYMOUR HICKS 
 
 MR. SEYMOUR HICKS is more than versatile; he is universal. 
 His universality frightens me. He is so clever in so many 
 ways that he paralyses the nerves of astonishment and the 
 muscles of admiration. He is still a young man, but he has 
 already packed into his life a long series of careers, one inside 
 the other, like a Japanese nest of boxes. It would be im- 
 possible to get at the last box, which contains the real man, 
 for the process of taking him to pieces would last several years, 
 and long before it was completed he would have enveloped 
 himself in new feats and fresh exploits of actorship, author- 
 ship, and managership. Seymour Hicks is a syndicate mas- 
 querading as a mercurial boy. There is one side of him which 
 is a feverish George Edwardes. There is another side of him 
 which is a popular version of Mr. J. M. Barrie. He is also 
 a nervous incarnation or caricature of Fred Leslie, with a dash 
 of William Terriss, a whiff of Arthur Roberts, a flash of Charles 
 Brookfield, a spice of Sims and Pettitt, to say nothing of a 
 frantic reminiscence of "Augustus Druriolanus." He is every- 
 body by turns and nobody long. If he had been born a cha- 
 meleon, he would have burst himself years ago. His terrifying 
 restlessness haunts the British theatre. His theatrical energy 
 makes other men of energy look like torpid tortoises. It is 
 a blessing that he is not a politician, like Mr. Winston Churchill, 
 or a President, like Mr. Roosevelt, for he would blow the world 
 to pieces with his volcanic vehemence and violence. 
 
 He broke loose very young, for he was only sixteen when he 
 played with Willard at the old Olympic. After touring for two 
 years in the provinces, he went to America with the Kendals, 
 where his natural volatility and volubility and excitability and 
 risibility and capability were dangerously intensified. What 
 
 148
 
 SEYMOUR HICKS 149 
 
 he needed was a sleeping draught. America gave him a stimu- 
 lant. Compared to him, the American hustler is a lame and 
 lethargic lobster. If he had not been a brilliant actor-author- 
 manager, he would have been a brilliant journalist. He has 
 a diabolical knowledge of the popular taste. He can tickle 
 the public palate with infallible skill. He is almost hysterically 
 sensitive and almost neurotically responsive to the whims 
 and caprices of the playgoer. He can ferret out what the 
 pleasure-seeker likes, and can give it to him with both hands 
 and with both feet. 
 
 His dashing knowingness and swaggering humour and elec- 
 trical dancing have made him an after-dinner favourite. Into 
 his musical pieces he puts his appalling vitality and merciless 
 vivacity. He not only makes himself go, but he makes every- 
 body else go. He floods the stage with light and colour and 
 music and movement. He invented, I believe, the illustra- 
 tive chorus. He forced the stolid rows of show girls to gal- 
 vanise themselves into explosive life. He even electrified 
 the stage properties, and compelled the very scenery to join 
 the dance. He is a master of scenic tricks and artifices. He 
 transforms the stage carpenter, and compels him to startle 
 the audience with mechanical jokes and jests. Impish rest- 
 lessness is the keynote of his stage-management as well as of 
 his acting. He is a man of business in every sense of the 
 word. He has a mania for interpreting and expounding 
 and emphasising and embroidering and exaggerating and 
 underlining every phrase and every song and every dance. 
 
 His personality is magnetic, or, rather, it is electric. He 
 shocks you with laughter. He explodes sensations like mines 
 under your feet. He can cater for a dozen different publics, 
 from the public of childhood that doted on " Bluebell in Fairy- 
 Land" to the public of patriots that gloated over "One of the 
 Best." He can purvey any brand of theatrical food, and he 
 has even dreamed of naturalising the Passion Play. "I'm 
 a Catholic," he once said, "and don't you think, that being 
 so, I realise the fact that there are better things than -singing 
 'A Gay Old Bird'?" One of his best feats of character-acting
 
 150 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 is Scrooge, and I should not be surprised to hear that he means 
 to play Hamlet and Romeo before he dies. But I hope he will 
 never carry out his threat of being serious, for he is inimitable 
 as an irresponsible light comedian who blazes and sparkles 
 in a tornado of gags and topical sallies and impudent bur- 
 lesques. His high spirits are higher than anybody else's, and 
 he is full of irrepressible fun and gaiety and merry audacity. 
 His vivacity is always at full pressure, and yet it seems spon- 
 taneous. His motto is: "Pallas, take thine owl away, and 
 let us have a lark instead." 
 
 Just as his wife, Ellaline Terriss, is the everlasting girl, 
 so he is the everlasting boy. His thousand and one theatrical 
 adventures have not taken the steam out of his amazing boy- 
 ishness. His shrewd sagacity in judging the taste of the public 
 has not soured or shrivelled his youthful eagerness and enter- 
 prise. Although he has a hundred irons in the theatrical 
 fire, he preserves his frisky juvenility. Although he builds 
 theatres by the dozen and launches touring companies by the 
 score, he is not withered by work or staled by success. His 
 ebullient frivolity remains untarnished and unchastened. Yet 
 there is a serious facet in his glittering pushfulness. He 
 has done the State some service. He has rushed to the rescue 
 of the British Constitution. He has breathed new life into 
 the lungs of the House of Lords. He has injected fresh blood 
 into the veins of our old nobility. He has provided an inex- 
 haustible supply of healthy and handsome mothers for our 
 future aristocracy. No longer need the eldest sons of our peers 
 turn to America for worthy mates and stalwart wives. He is 
 the universal provider of matrimonial beauty for our belted 
 earls. His show girls are the salvation of our anaemic peerage. 
 How he discovers them is a mystery, for the supply never fails. 
 It must be heartrending for Mr. Hicks to see his majestic 
 ladies carried off by heartless young lords, but he never mur- 
 murs, he never complains. He resigns them without a sigh, 
 for he feels that he is performing a public duty and a patriotic 
 service. He knows that he is regenerating a decaying insti- 
 tution, and revivifying a dying class. He is not hurt because
 
 SEYMOUR HICKS 151 
 
 the House of Lords has callously neglected to pass a resolution 
 thanking him for his self-abnegation. He is content with 
 the applause of his own conscience. He looks for no reward 
 but the silent gratitude of his country. I hope he will perse- 
 vere in his patriotic labours.
 
 LITTLE TICK 
 
 I LOVE my Little Tich nearly as well as I used to love my 
 Dan Leno. He helps me to bear the loss of Dan Leno. When 
 I saw Dan Leno I always felt the sadness of his drollery, for 
 Dan was droll in a wistful way. You knew that his humour 
 sprang from a melancholy soul. It was like a well bubbling 
 out of the sand. There was a sense of tears in Dan's voice, 
 a hint of unutterable woe in his smile. Little Tich is Dan 
 Leno without his tragic earnestness and his beseeching seri- 
 ousness. Dan was comically intense, grotesquely grave. Life 
 broke through his absurdity. Little Tich is drollery without 
 any sense of reality. There is no high seriousness in his humour. 
 He is the world turned into a jest. He makes you forget that 
 there is anything that matters. He is the epitome of London 
 levity. The true spirit of London is Little Tich, with his 
 careless irreverence and impudent irresponsibility. London 
 is the street arab of cities. It is cheeky, fickle, and capricious. 
 It does not care about great, grave things. It chuckles over 
 the broad fun of existence. It laughs at everything. Its face 
 wears a perpetual grin. London is a gigantic caricature of 
 Little Tich. Many years ago I saw Little Tich in Paris at the 
 Folies-Bergeres. Paris raved about Le Petit Tich, for Paris 
 loves a droll; but in Paris Little Tich was out of place. Only 
 in London is he at home, for he understands London, and 
 London understands him. 
 
 I saw him the other night at the Tivoli. It was a swel- 
 tering, sultry evening, and we were all limp and languid and 
 lethargic. But when he bounced upon the stage our limpness 
 and languor and lethargy vanished. We sat up. We peered 
 round the enormous hats of the ladies. We found strength 
 to laugh all together until the Tivoli was roaring with laughter. 
 
 152
 
 LITTLE TICH 153 
 
 We could not resist Little Tich, for he was in his tichest mood. 
 You see, I have been forced to coin a word in order to express 
 the quality and quiddity of his humour. It is pure tichness. 
 Tichness is simply the art of being yourself, for Tich is solely 
 himself, and nothing but himself. He enjoys being himself, 
 and you enjoy his enjoyment. He accepts himself as a joke, 
 and you accept his acceptance. He takes you into his con- 
 fidence, and admits that he is just what he is a living jest. 
 Other comedians are made. Tich is born. Mr. Dunville 
 and Mr. Robey are very fearfully and wonderfully made. 
 They are droll by art. Little Tich is droll by nature. Mr. 
 Dunville might have turned himself into a Bishop. Mr. 
 Robey might have made himself a Cabinet Minister. Little 
 Tich could not be anything but what he is, an imp of grotesque 
 drollery that lets loose all the laughter in you. He cannot 
 help being laughable, and you cannot help laughing at him. 
 He is a natural caricature of that noble animal, man, and he 
 glories in being a caricature. He makes you see the broad com- 
 edy of the human being. He shows you man from the point 
 of view of the other animals. In the eyes of a horse, or a dog, 
 or a cat, or a parrot, a man must seem a very droll creature, 
 with a queer face, queer eyes, queer eyebrows, queer nose, 
 queer mouth, queer arms, queer hands, queer body, queer 
 legs, and queer feet. Little Tich underlines the queerness 
 of the human body. He makes this odd old animal look 
 intolerably absurd. He also makes it enjoy its own absurdity. 
 He compels it to hold its sides at its own incongruity. When 
 you laugh at Little Tich, you are laughing at yourself, for 
 he is only yourself with a touch of grotesque exaggeration. 
 
 Little Tich is a droll, because he is like you in an absurd 
 way. His littleness is droll, because he is two or three feet 
 shorter than you are. The size of man is only a fashion. We 
 all happen to stand between five and six feet in our stocking 
 soles. That is only a whim of evolution. We might have 
 been designed as tall as the giraffe, or as fat as the elephant, 
 or as ungainly as the goose. The giraffe and the elephant 
 and the goose are droll, because they are not designed like
 
 154 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 us. Little Tich is droll because he is a little bit out of 
 drawing. If we were all like him, he would not be droll. 
 His tichness is mainly a matter of tininess. Enlarge him a 
 shade, and he would not be funnier than we are. He has 
 the wit to insist on his tininess. He makes the most of his 
 inches by clothing himself in a Brobdingnagian dress-coat, 
 a Brobdingnagian waistcoat, a Brobdingnagian shirt front, 
 Brobdingnagian trousers and Brobdingnagian boots. He is a 
 philosophic humorist, for he heightens the humour of his 
 body by wrapping it up in wildly incongruous garments. 
 Clothes that don't fit are always droll. Clothes that are made 
 for somebody else are always comic. Little Tich makes you 
 feel that he is a joke clad in a joke. He is the fun of the 
 flesh in the fun of the tailor. 
 
 Nature has exaggerated him backwards, and he exagger- 
 ates himself forwards. His tichest stroke of exaggeration 
 is seen in his exaggerated feet. A boot is a comic thing, be- 
 cause it covers a comic thing. If you pause after you get 
 out of your bath and seriously consider your feet, you will 
 realise that your feet are the funniest part of your body. They 
 are so helplessly stupid and so fatuously silly. You can do 
 so little with them. You cannot write with them, or play the 
 piano with them, or shake hands with them, or eat with them, 
 or take off your hat with them. All you can do is to walk 
 with them. Put your socks on, and the absurdity of your 
 feet is enhanced, for you have hidden the toes that in some 
 way relate feet to fingers. Now, put on your boots and sit 
 down and meditate upon your boots until you see their ab- 
 surdity. The socked foot is a feeble imitation of the naked foot, 
 but the booted foot is a frantic burlesque of both. Look at 
 Little Tich's boots. They are insane caricatures of your own.. 
 The soles are flabby, and they flap like the feet of a duck. 
 They are no longer human boots. They are the boots of a 
 madman in a mad dream. They do everything that boots 
 ought not to do. They bend and wobble. 
 
 Little Tich is all exaggeration. His eyes are exaggerated, 
 for they are ridiculously ridiculous. They do not look at
 
 LITTLE TICK 155 
 
 you. They grimace at you. They invite you to laugh with 
 them at the laughableness of life. They see the fun of their 
 conspicuous position in that droll face, every feature of which 
 is a different freak of drollery. Behind their sharp, keen 
 stare you can detect the tremendous force of the comic non- 
 sense that is working its way out of them and out of every 
 pore of the skin that is stretched over those grotesque limbs. 
 Little Tich breathes nonsense. His queer, worn voice is the 
 very spirit of nonsense. His confidential cockney chuckle is 
 like live sandpaper. His laugh is a quaint, dry cackle, something 
 between the parched bleat of a sheep and the dusty gargle 
 of a goat. It is the quintessence of eager frivolity and merry, 
 mad, irresponsible folly. It is man seeing the joke of humanity.
 
 ETHEL IRVING 
 
 IT is a mistake to imagine that in this world we all get 
 our deserts. It is not always enough to deserve success, for 
 it is better to be born lucky than deserving. Chance plays a 
 great part in every life, and fame is often an accident of an 
 accident. In the theatre chance is king. An actor or an actress 
 may have the magical grace of genius, but until that strange 
 grace sets the public alight it counts for nothing. The blaze 
 must come before the dead indifference of the playgoer is 
 burnt up. This is the tragedy of the player's art, and it is 
 not surprising that mimes are more superstitious than any 
 other artists. They know that sickness of the heart which 
 may last until the hair whitens and the freshness of youth 
 fades. The agony of waiting is terrible in the case of a man, 
 but it is infinitely more terrible in the case of a woman. The 
 process of growing old is always dreadful for a woman. She 
 fights against the army of years with desperate stratagems, 
 waging her lonely battle day after day in an awful silence of 
 the soul. The more beautiful she is, the more tragic is her 
 battle against time. She may delude others, but she cannot 
 delude herself. Her face is a territory which she maps out 
 and surveys with minute precision. She knows the history 
 of every line and the passion of every wrinkle. She marks 
 every stage in the war between her and her eternal enemy. 
 Her vision of herself is clear and pitiless. Her imagination 
 gives her beauty no quarter. The little defeats and repulses 
 are all registered and recorded. Ever before her is the cold 
 certainty that in the end she will be vanquished, and the nearer 
 the hour of her conquest approaches the more grimly she fights 
 her pathetic fight. 
 
 In the life of the actress there is a new element of tragedy. 
 
 156
 
 ETHEL IRVING 157 
 
 For the ordinary woman the battle is secret. She fights her 
 fight in a private shelter of friendship, and it may be of love. 
 She is not exposed to the fierce light of the public eye. But 
 the actress fights her fight before the whole world. There 
 is not much ruth or compassion in the climate of the theatre. 
 The playgoer is a cynic, and he does not see the pathos of the 
 pitiful struggle to win his favour. He is a monster who cares 
 only for his own pleasure. He devours the luckless ones who 
 miss the mark of his whims and the target of his foibles. He 
 does not guess the anguish raging in the hearts of the mimes 
 who feel that they are getting the worst of the bitter battle 
 for his smile. He does not divine the tempests of jealousy 
 and envy and hate and resentment and rebellion that sweep 
 through every dressing-room. There are some actresses who 
 are dowered with beauty and talent, and nevertheless they fail 
 year after year to step out of the icy twilight of mediocrity 
 into the sunshine of triumph. Nobody knows why they 
 hover on the chilly borderline that divides failure from success. 
 Everybody feels that they ought to arrive: yet somehow or 
 other the years go by and they do not clamber over the little 
 space that separates them from victory. 
 
 There was a time when I feared that Miss Ethel Irving 
 might be one of these wronged and injured actresses of genius. 
 I saw her many years ago in a pantomime, and I was so keenly 
 aware of her charm and brilliancy that I felt a sense of in- 
 jury at the spectacle of her wasted powers. I knew she was 
 an original, creative artist, and I rebelled against what seemed 
 to be a perversity of chance. It seemed for a while that her 
 delicate gifts would not surmount the stupidity of things. 
 Then I saw her in musical comedy, and I could have wept to 
 see her fine qualities squandered on trivialities so unworthy 
 of them. The years went by and I began to wonder whether 
 she would ever escape from the labyrinth of futility. At last 
 by some strange freak of fortune she played a tragic part in 
 a play prohibited by the Censor, "Les Trois Filles de M. Du- 
 pont" It was an English adaptation produced by the Stage 
 Society in that grotesque hall in Covent Garden dedicated to
 
 158 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the National Sporting Club. For me and for most of those 
 who saw Ethel Irving in that almost ludicrous environment 
 the occasion was unforgettable. She revealed herself sud- 
 denly as a great tragedy actress. In the culminating scene of 
 that gloomy tragedy she rose to the sublimest tragic heights, 
 sweeping through our souls with a tremendous abandonment 
 of spiritual passion and anguish and despair, shaking our 
 senses with the extreme pain of a woman in ungoverned grief 
 and uncontrollable agony. She lost all the coldness and all 
 the artifice of the actress in the tumult and storm of emotion. 
 Her hair streamed in tangled disorder, her features were dis- 
 torted with real physical suffering, her voice was torn with the 
 madness of her torment, she cried out her misery in fierce, 
 hoarse tones that were half the utterance of art and half the 
 utterance of nature. She shed real tears. She writhed in the 
 grip of passions that seemed too intolerable for the endurance 
 of mortal flesh. She terrified the audience out of its reserve 
 and its self-control, making us all suffer with her sufferings, 
 and leaving us aching and bruised and exhausted with sym- 
 pathetic pangs of the body and the soul. No tragic actress 
 of our time ever moved me more deeply, and I think no audi- 
 ence of our time was ever moved more deeply than the awed 
 and silent and tearful audience which sat that afternoon in 
 that old, incongruous building with its musty memories of pu- 
 gilism and pugilists. Even now at this distance of time I feel 
 the tragic mood then roused by Ethel Irving, and I marvel 
 that she is not to-day acclaimed as one of our greatest tragic 
 actresses. 
 
 But King Chance is a whimsical monarch, and he forbade 
 what seemed for a moment to be the inevitable outcome of a 
 memorable feat of tragic portraiture. For some years I heard 
 little of Ethel Irving, and I began to feel resigned to the stu- 
 pidity of things theatrical. Then suddenly King Chance re- 
 pented, and he permitted Ethel Irving to show the indifferent 
 public her powers as a comic actress in "Lady Frederick." 
 In a way the part of Lady Frederick is an epitome of the trag- 
 edy of womanhood, for it shows a beautiful woman on the
 
 ETHEL IRVING 159 
 
 threshold of physical ruin. A boy has fallen in love with her, 
 but she knows that the beauty which fascinates him is only the 
 mirage of simulated youth. She knows he is the victim of a 
 tragic illusion. The loveliness that enchants him is a fabricated 
 loveliness. The charm that enthrals him is a meretricious charm. 
 He is in love with tresses that are a masterpiece of the perru- 
 quier's art. He adores a cheek whose bloom is the counter- 
 feit of youth, a thing of subtle cosmetics, an achievement 
 in paint and powder. He worships rosy lips whose colour 
 is a beautiful forgery. He is enslaved by the sparkle of eyes 
 which are cunningly brightened and softened by feminine 
 devices. In order to slay his passionate delusion she forces 
 him to see her as she really is in the cold light of morning, 
 haggard and dishevelled. With bitter irony and mirthless 
 humour she compels him to watch her as she works the daily 
 miracle which so many women work every morning before 
 they venture to face the gaze of the world. He sees his divinity 
 in the act of becoming divine. He beholds his dream as it 
 is being manufactured. Ethel Irving puts into this terrible 
 scene all her pathos and all her humour, mingling the pity 
 of womanhood with its courage, its light fortitude with its 
 grievous tenderness. With infinite delicacy she depicts the se- 
 cret sorrow of fading beauty and the hidden misery of waning 
 youth. And through the whole awful process she never falters, 
 but keeps her valour unbroken and her spirit unhumbled. 
 There is no flow of mawkishness in her comedy. The jest of 
 life that laughs at its own dreary futility and rises far above 
 its own defects rings in her pathetic derision and her twisted 
 resignation. Every woman in the audience sees herself in the 
 woman she strips and lays bare. The tragedy of brittle beauty 
 stabs every feminine heart. You feel the suppressed emotion 
 of womanhood. It is all round you, for every woman in the 
 theatre recognises her own fate in the fate of Lady Frederick. 
 There is tragedy behind the comedy, and Ethel Irving makes 
 you feel the disaster of youth as a living, throbbing reality. 
 You go home sorry for the tragi-comic thing that every beautiful 
 woman is fated to be.
 
 THE NEW KNOWLES 
 
 THE lecture is an American institution. For some reason 
 or other Americans are fond of lecturing and being lectured. 
 They have an unquenchable passion for knowledge, and they 
 like to get it in capsules and tabloids. America is the land of 
 tabloids, and the lecture is tabloid knowledge. It is culture 
 in a capsule. Mr. R. G. Knowles is an American comedian 
 who has made us laugh for nearly twenty years. He has sud- 
 denly determined to give up making us laugh. He has made 
 up his mind to reform himself and to become a serious and 
 solemn person, a lecturer. The other night I laughed at him 
 in the Palace Theatre. He was then a comedian. He wore 
 his familiar tall hat, his familiar white collar, his familiar 
 black necktie, and his familiar white trousers. We know that 
 uniform by heart. We laugh at it because it is an old friend. 
 It awakens memories of forgotten laughter. 
 
 We are all getting old. We were young when we first 
 laughed at Mr. Knowles. It is sad to think how long it is 
 since we heard his hoarse voice singing " Girlie, Girlie." How 
 he gurgled out the "r" and the "1" in "Gu-r-rlie," in "Cu-r- 
 rly," and in "Ea-r-rly!" Nobody could gurgle so lusciously 
 and so glutinously as Mr. Knowles. When he came to the 
 chorus we all gurgled an accompaniment, and the hoarse chant 
 of our voices rose up to the roof in a gigantic gurgle. It was 
 like a song sung by a choir of nutmeg-graters. How it rasped 
 and grated ! How it swelled huskily in gutturals that scraped 
 and screeched through the smoke and glitter of the music-hall. 
 
 We were never tired in those days of " Girlie, Girlie." We 
 liked it because it was Knowles and because Knowles was it. 
 It seemed to express his strange charm. It disengaged his 
 quaint humour. It was pure nonsense, and he was pure non- 
 160
 
 THE NEW KNOWLES 161 
 
 sense, and as pure nonsense is the rarest thing in this wise world 
 we clung to it and to him. We knew that as soon as he be- 
 gan to gurgle in that ruined voice we should forget the dread- 
 ful solemnity of life and become delightfully absurd and deli- 
 ciously foolish. There was no taint of reason in the humour 
 of Knowles. It was sheer nonsense. The charm of it was its 
 apparent intensity, its simulated passion, its sham vehemence. 
 
 We chuckled over the breathlessness of Knowles. I think 
 he invented breathlessness. There never was a comedian so 
 divinely breathless. He sang like a man who was being 
 strangled. We loved his strangled voice with its despairing 
 gasps and frenzied spasms. No comedian was a more con- 
 summate master of the insane art of lightning patter. Arthur 
 Roberts could patter at breakneck speed, but he often be- 
 came unintelligible. Now Knowles was never unintelligible, 
 even at his swiftest. The words came out of his thin lips 
 like a volley of duckshot, but every pellet was plain and clear. 
 He never gave you time to think. 
 
 Another quality of his humour was its good nature. There 
 was always a lovable element in it. Knowles was a sunny 
 humorist. He made you feel that life was a jolly affair, and 
 that the world was a pleasant residence. His smile was a tonic. 
 It flashed rarely, but when it flashed it lighted up his sombre 
 face with a kind of warm glow. Like all humorists Knowles 
 has a melancholy face, full of dark shadows and haunted with 
 sadness. He looks like an undertaker. The contrast be- 
 tween his jests and his face is monstrous. His eyes are im- 
 mensely mournful. They are vast dark orbs desolate with 
 unknown sorrows and doleful with mysterious woes. It is 
 pleasant to see drollery coming out of a man like a grave. I 
 wonder whether it is his melancholy that makes him humorous 
 or his humour that makes him melancholy. Perhaps it is the 
 instinct of the artist which provides a funereal background 
 against which his fun is silhouetted. 
 
 From the Comedian to the Lecturer is a far cry. Knowles 
 the Comedian is not the same man as Knowles the Lecturer. 
 To begin with, the Lecturer does not wear white trousers. 
 11
 
 162 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 It is a shock to see Mr. Knowles in respectable trousers. A 
 glory has departed from him. It is heartbreaking to see him 
 without his tall hat. It is perfect pain to listen to him talking 
 without a band and without limelight. I sighed as I surveyed 
 Mr. Knowles in the garb and guise of conventional civilisation. 
 But as he began his "Picture-Chats," I realised that he was a 
 transformed and transfigured Knowles. He spoke with the 
 dignified solemnity of a moral philosopher. He was an anti- 
 quary and an archaeologist, a historian, and a topographer. 
 He fed us with facts and figures. He drenched us with pious 
 moralisings and pathetic sentiments. He told us beautiful 
 traveller's tales. We saw the true man for the first time. We 
 beheld the naked personality which the anecdotist had concealed. 
 I had conceived him as a cynic who looked upon life as 
 a jest. He unveiled his heart, and lo! it was the heart of a 
 child, delighting in ancient castles and picturesque costumes, 
 in time-worn cathedrals and weather-stained churches. I 
 wept with him over the desecrated grave of William the 
 Conqueror. I sighed with him over the ashes of Joan of Arc. 
 A man of feeling is Mr. Knowles, and a man of sentiment. 
 There is no flippancy or levity in his reverent attitude of ad- 
 miration for old unhappy far-off things. He is a learned 
 professor whom harsh fate had condemned to buffoonery 
 for the best part of his life, and who is now revenging himself 
 upon his destiny. Soon I become accustomed to the new 
 Knowles. I am awestruck by his erudition. I am humiliated 
 by his voracious memory. 
 
 It was with a horrid jar and an aching jerk that I watched 
 him as he turned himself once more out of a Lecturer into a 
 Comedian. The picture faded off the screen, the lights went 
 up, and he stood out against the huge white sheet, looking 
 dreadfully unnatural without his make-up, without his tall hat, 
 and without his white trousers. He told us tales, but they 
 were not the tales he told behind the band in the limelight. 
 He told them slowly, and we yearned for the gasping patter, 
 for the hurried walk up and down the stage. They were the 
 same tales, but virtue had gone out of them. It was not my
 
 THE NEW KNOWLES 163 
 
 Knowles. It was a Knowles I knew not. It was the Knowles 
 that is known in private life Knowles the respectable, Knowles 
 the correct. I was bewildered by the conflict between my 
 old friend and this new friend who was and was not the same. 
 I felt that I had lost more than I gained. I was hurt by the 
 effort to reconcile the old love with the new. I was furtively 
 embarrassed and I think my old friend was furtively em- 
 barrassed too. He seemed to be a kind of forgery, the Come- 
 dian impersonating himself. Perhaps the Comedian is the 
 real man; perhaps the Lecturer is only a myth. I will not 
 allow the image of the Lecturer to obliterate the image of the 
 Comedian. I cling to the quaint grotesque with the tongue of 
 lightning and the battered voice, hoarse with years of husky 
 patter and bronchial anecdote. This Lecturer is a usurper. 
 I implore him to go away. I entreat him to give me back 
 what he has stolen from me, the gurgling voice, the express 
 gabble, the tall hat, the white trousers, and the dog-trot be- 
 tween the wings.
 
 CHARLES HAWTREY 
 
 IN this chaotic world it is a pleasure to find a man who 
 can do one thing supremely well. It does not matter what he 
 does, so long as he does it better than anybody else. In his 
 own domain he is monarch of all he surveys. It is not necessary 
 to be a very great man in order to attain a position of pre- 
 eminence in one particular sphere. Indeed, it is your small 
 man who as a rule is able to bring all his being to bear on one 
 special form of activity. The greater the specialist, the smaller 
 the man. The great man is too many-sided and too myriad- 
 minded to go into a groove. Specialism may be described as 
 the small end of nothing sharpened to a point. Mr. Algernon 
 Ashton is an example of this. He has made himself famous 
 by sharpening the small end of nothing. Nothing could be 
 more microscopic than his passion for writing letters to the 
 newspapers, and yet in a few years it made him illustrious. 
 
 But perhaps a still more gorgeous specimen of triumphant 
 specialism is Mr. Charles Hawtrey. Mr. Hawtrey is the 
 greatest liar on earth I mean Mr. Hawtrey, the actor, not 
 Mr. Hawtrey, the man. I have no doubt that, in private life, 
 Mr. Hawtrey is a George Washington. Truth to him must 
 be a recreation, nay, it must be almost a dissipation, for, after 
 lying for six nights and two afternoons a week in " Dear Old 
 Charlie" at the Vaudeville, he must be dog-tired of falsehood. 
 He must take to verity as other men take to drink. Truth, I 
 am sure, to him is an intoxicant. 
 
 Other men work hard at truth, he works hard at lying. 
 He makes his living by telling lies. Therefore, for him truth 
 is a change of occupation. What exquisite pleasure he must 
 feel when he refreshes his weary mind in a bath of veracity. 
 I do not know whether he has any particular friends upon 
 
 164
 
 CHARLES HAWTREY 165 
 
 whom he pours out the vials of his verity, but I am sure it is a 
 privilege to hear him letting himself go. It is a pity that Mr. 
 Hawtrey could not be a politician in his hours of leisure. It 
 would be so easy for him to say what all the others think. He 
 might also be a wonderful journalist in his spare time. Try 
 to imagine what a newspaper edited by Mr. Hawtrey would 
 be like. There are some newspapers (not, of course, in this 
 country) which contain only one truth a day, and that is the 
 date line sometimes even that strays from the strict path 
 of terminological exactitude. But if Mr. Hawtrey were to 
 edit a newspaper for a week, what things he could say. 
 
 In praising Mr. Hawtrey 's fluent falsehood on the stage I 
 do not mean to disparage his rivals in real life. They do their 
 best. It would be cruel to blame them for their clumsy crudity. 
 Mr. Hawtrey, it must be remembered, has devoted his whole 
 life to the perfection of the fine art of lying. It is, as Voltaire 
 said about somebody else, his metier. I do not think any real 
 liar could possibly lie so well as Mr. Hawtrey. A lie is not 
 in ordinary men a beautiful thing, but he makes it as delicate 
 as a daffodil and as dreamy as a sunset. He forces you to fall 
 half in love with easeful lying and indolent falsehood. It is 
 not easy to tell a lie and it is not pleasant to tell a lie, but Mr. 
 Hawtrey makes the thing look both easy and pleasant. He 
 has what I may, without offence, call the stage liar's face. 
 Nature has endowed him with a smooth and polished suavity of 
 feature which is irresistibly fascinating. The sleek plausibility 
 of his sudden smile would deceive a money-lender. Touching is 
 the careful pathos of his look when for a second his veracity 
 is challenged by some bewildered dupe. Then, when one 
 of his lies is tottering, it is piquant to watch the thin cloud of 
 anguish which flits across his fare, to be followed instantly 
 by a smiling flash of white teeth under a trim black moustache. 
 
 As I sat watching Mr. Hawtrey lying his way through three 
 acts, I fell to wondering whether there were many undiscovered 
 liars like him in real life. It is a sad and serious thought 
 that there may be men who are so proficient in the art of lying 
 that they go through life without being detected. Perhaps
 
 166 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 some of these men may be eminent. They may have the divine 
 gift and grace of never being found out. They may dine with 
 you and borrow your money, and yet never allow you to suspect 
 the truth. I am sure I could never catch Mr. Hawtrey napping 
 if I met him in society. He would inspire me with the most 
 powerful trust and the most desperate confidence. If he 
 were to tell me that I myself am a liar I should believe him. 
 
 What I like most about Mr. Hawtrey is his silky tongue. 
 He can talk so alluringly that you feel it would be wicked to 
 doubt him. The quality of his voice is caressingly persuasive. 
 It unhinges your judgment. I am not sure that it is right to 
 allow Mr. Hawtrey to act as a public expositor of falsehood, 
 for as one listens to his lyrical lying, one feels that truth is 
 a rather dull and stupid thing. I am afraid that Mr. Haw- 
 trey must exercise a very evil influence on the young and the 
 innocent. His daring adventures in darkest falsity must inspire 
 in the breast of unsophisticated youth a wild desire to imi- 
 tate him. Like all great games, lying satisfies the human 
 craving for danger. It is as keen a stimulus as Alpine climb- 
 ing, or tight-rope dancing, or hunting. The really fine liar 
 is always on the edge of disaster, but he manages to save him- 
 self at the last moment. It must be glorious to feel that at 
 any moment you may be found out. Compared with the joy 
 of lying the joy of telling the truth is crude and coarse. It 
 is very easy to tell the plain truth, but it is very hard to tell a 
 decorative lie, a lie dyed in fast colours and warranted un- 
 shrinkable. 
 
 I often amuse myself by trying to pick out the liars who 
 are public men and the public men who are liars. It is really 
 not very difficult, because the public liar sooner or later gives 
 himself away. In the exuberance of his mendacity he makes 
 some statement which somebody can disembowel. Oddly 
 enough, one lie is not enough to ruin a statesman. Indeed, I 
 doubt whether two lies would destroy the reputation of a 
 Front Bencher. For some reason or other in politics a certain 
 moral latitude is allowed. Your statesman is permitted a 
 rivulet of truth meandering through a meadow of falsehood.
 
 CHARLES HAWTREY 167 
 
 Indeed, I doubt whether any man ever reached the highest 
 heights of politics without doing some damage to mathematical 
 accuracy. The politician who hesitates to lie is lost. 
 
 There is one thing which I admire in Mr. Hawtrey. He 
 seems to enjoy his work. All really great liars are artists. 
 They lie for the lie's sake. They yearn after the pure and per- 
 fect beauty of the ideal falsehood. They strive after a flawless 
 perfection of form in their falsehoods, chiselling them as a 
 sculptor chisels a block of marble. I am sure that the heroic 
 liar does not lie for mean and sordid ends. He wishes to 
 express himself just as a poet wishes to express himself, to 
 pour forth his soul in profuse strains of premeditated artfulness. 
 Often he lies awake in the watches of the night thinking about 
 new flights of fancy, new curves of imagination. Often with 
 rapt face he gazes at the stars, hungering for the solace of some 
 lie that will shake the universe. And I grieve to say that 
 falsehood is not nearly so decrepit as it is the fashion to assume. 
 Truth is great, and it does prevail sometimes; but falsehood 
 is one of the big facts in life. Historians know that it is as ab- 
 surd to say that truth makes history as to say that history makes 
 truth. I am sure that falsehood has made nearly as much 
 history as truth. The worst of it is that lies are more destruc- 
 tive than truth. 
 
 If you want to pay a woman a compliment, you tell her a 
 lie, for the essence of a compliment is its insincerity. If it 
 were sincere it would not be a compliment. Why a woman 
 should like a man to tell her a lie is one of those things which 
 I cannot understand. She knows it is a lie, and you know 
 it is a lie. Why, then, tell it ? For instance, a woman always 
 likes to believe a man when he says he loves her. If he tells 
 her that he does not love her, she does not respect him for 
 telling her the truth. She hates him for it. "When I was 
 young," said an old man, "if I paid a woman a compliment, 
 she took it for a declaration, but now that I am old if I make 
 her a declaration she takes it for a compliment." The social 
 relations between men and women are honeycombed with lies. 
 It is a part of the great game of sex. Why it should be so is
 
 168 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 puzzling, for it is hard to understand why love is a liar. I 
 suppose it is due to the fact that men and women are humili- 
 ated by the discovery that their moods and emotions are not 
 fixed and unchangeable. Rather than admit the possibility 
 of any variation in their frame of mind, they lie. Mr. Hawtrey 
 is a model liar who might with advantage be studied by all 
 your diseased idealists whose souls are moth-eaten with mouldy 
 chivalry and prehistoric sentiment. He will teach you how to 
 make your lies sound in wind and limb. The only person 
 who will know you are a liar is yourself.
 
 THE NEW LYCEUM 
 
 THE other night I enjoyed myself vastly at the Lyceum 
 Theatre. It was my first visit to it since the days of Irving. 
 Do not imagine that I was greatly shocked by the change in 
 the bill of fare, for when I first came to London and paid my 
 first visit to the Lyceum, the play that I saw was "The Dead 
 Heart." It is not a very far cry from "The Dead Heart" to 
 "The Midnight Wedding." Virtue in the latter may be a 
 little more virtuous, and vice may be a little more vicious, 
 but after all it is a difference without a distinction. The real 
 change in the Lyceum is in its decorations. The old Lyceum 
 was very dim and very dingy; the new Lyceum is almost hys- 
 terically gaudy and almost explosively gay. It is riotously 
 gilt from its eyebrows to its heels, and its skirts are flounced 
 with mirrors. 
 
 The audience has been transformed as completely as the 
 auditorium. The stalls have been democratised by the reduc- 
 tion of the price from half a guinea to five shillings, with the 
 result that Tom in tweeds rubs shoulders with Dick in evening 
 dress. There is a magnificent orchestra which supplies slow 
 music while the curtain is up and merry music while it is down. 
 The note of the new Lyceum is a genial informality. The 
 audience is simply a happy family composed of the worship- 
 pers of truth and the upholders of poetical justice. We all 
 weep together, we all laugh together, and we all hiss together. 
 
 I had not been in my seat ten minutes when I felt that I 
 was a member of a happy family. The hero was a young 
 gentleman with an air of sulky carelessness, tumbled black 
 locks, and a couple of remarkably fine eyes which blazed vol- 
 leys of pathos across the footlights. A dark mystery veiled 
 bis birth, but we were all pleased when he turned out to be 
 
 169
 
 170 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the morganatic son of the dashing Crown Prince of Savonia, 
 who had cruelly cast away his wife for a crown. All through 
 the play the Crown Prince ladles out remorse, which the hero 
 invariably rejects with majestic scorn. We cheer his scorn; 
 we glory in his renunciation. It is comforting to know that 
 renunciation is still popular in our family. We may not prac- 
 tise it extensively ourselves, but we adore ii in our hero. The 
 more he gives up the better we like him. A good story is told 
 of that famous manufacturer of melodramas, the late Mr. 
 Pettitt. He was conducting Mr. Frohman over his magnificent 
 country house. With a sweeping gesture he cried, "All built 
 out of self-sacrifice." I think that is a beautiful story. It 
 is not the men who appeal to the mean and ignoble passions 
 of humanity who amass great fortunes. No! It is the men 
 who glorify impossible virtues and unattainable ideals, and 
 who teach us that self-sacrifice is a good thing in itself, even 
 when it is gorgeously irrelevant and splendidly unnecessary. 
 
 In these days when all the villains of history have been 
 whitewashed, and when Mr. Campbell has taught us to dis- 
 believe even in sin, it is encouraging to find that melodrama 
 is not on the down-grade. The moral law, having been driven 
 out of the Church, has taken refuge in the Theatre. The 
 villain in "The Midnight Wedding" is steeped to the lips in 
 villainy. He has a very black moustache and a very black heart. 
 He has also very black eyes and very white teeth, which are 
 always on parade. His pursuit of the heroine is as devilish 
 and as dastardly as the heart of man could desire. We do 
 not pity him, and we do not palliate his crime. We do not 
 ascribe his depravity to heredity, although we know that every 
 villain is descended from another villain, and that the blood 
 of the first villain flows in the veins of the last. We do not 
 Lombrosoize his criminality. No, we hate him with all our 
 heart, and we hiss him with all our strength. When he climbs 
 up the wall into the heroine's bed-room, heavens! how we hiss! 
 When the hero climbs up after him (using the same footholes), 
 heavens! how we cheer! We go mad with joy when the hero 
 throttles him, throws him on the floor, and puts a revolver to
 
 THE NEW LYCEUM 171 
 
 his head. When at last, after three acts of variegated infamy, 
 he is impaled squirming on the hero's sword, our cup of bliss 
 is full, and we are grateful to the hand which keeps his corpse 
 balanced on its side till the curtain falls, so that we may con- 
 template the fate of the wicked. Our family may not be 
 wholly composed of saints, but at least we do not palter with 
 sin, or shed maudlin tears on the carcass of the sinner. 
 
 Dearly as we love the hero, and venomously as we hate the 
 villain, I think the heroine fills a larger place in our hearts. 
 It is she who opens wide the sluices of our grief. It is she 
 who wades through seas of suffering in order to stimulate our 
 sympathetic tears. She is a princess, and in our family the 
 sorrows of a princess are more moving than any others. Her 
 voice thrills us, for it vibrates with no ordinary emotions, and 
 it is enriched by the gurgling undulations of agonised rhetoric. 
 It rings and clangs and sighs and trembles with unflagging 
 intensity. Its tremendous music is accompanied by a vast 
 host of gestures and postures, bitter smiles, piercing glances, 
 clenched fists, stamping feet, tossings of the head, dishevelled 
 hair, wringing of the hands, moans and groans and wails, to 
 say nothing of sumptuous robes and a perfect dream of a night- 
 gown. Our heroine is plucky withal. Disguised in a military 
 uniform she vows to shed the last d-e-r-r-rop of her b-b-lood 
 in order to save the manly hero from the diabolical machina- 
 tions of the demoniacal villain. When the villain rushes 
 upon her with flashing sword a spasm of horror shudders 
 through our whole family, and it is with difficulty that we 
 restrain ourselves from rushing over the orchestra to her 
 rescue. 
 
 The elocution of the heroine delights us. We love her 
 trick of beginning a sentence with a gulp and ending it with a 
 gasp. We dote on her guttural vowels and her unctuously oily 
 r's. When she cries "D-e-a-r!" shivers of cold joy trickle 
 down our spines. Her "No!" is more than a negative; it is 
 an annihilation. Her tears are not drops; they are Niagaras. 
 Her sigh is a roaring gale, and her sob is a tornado. At times 
 her hoarse passion roughens her vocal cords, and her voice
 
 172 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 seems to be ploughing furrows in her throat. She is indeed 
 something like a heroine, and we are all ready to die for her. 
 
 In our family we do not care for the fine shades of char- 
 acter or the meagre ambiguities of emotion. We are plain, 
 blunt men, and we like plain, blunt passions. We do not care 
 to be titillated by evasive hints and vague suggestions. We 
 prefer to be thumped on the back and smitten on the chest. 
 We like our humour as well as our pathos hot and strong, and 
 our jokes cannot be rubbed in too well. Nobody can rub in a 
 joke more vigorously than our family melodramatist. When 
 he goes in for comic relief he relieves you over and over again. 
 Heavens! how we laugh! It is well that the Lyceum has a 
 sliding roof, for our laughter would blow any ordinary roof 
 into the sky. In our family we are not ashamed to laugh. 
 We know that laughter is good for us, and we let it roar itself 
 out of our lungs without any morbid affectation. We laugh till 
 we double up and hold our sides. We laugh the bugles off our 
 bonnets and the feathers out of our boas and the chocolates 
 out of our cheeks. 
 
 That is why we go home happy, for our Katharsis has been 
 complete. We have been purged with pity and terror, with 
 tears, hisses, and laughter.
 
 DRURY LANE 
 
 LONDON is not Paris, and a general repetition at Drury 
 Lane is vastly different from a repetition generate at a Parisian 
 theatre. To begin with, Paris could not produce a playwright 
 like our own Mr. Hall Caine, or a play like "The Bondman." 
 In saying this I do not mean to disparage Paris. It is not her 
 fault. She likes art in her immorality: we like morality in our 
 art. 
 
 Cynics may sneer at our simplicity. They may even libel 
 it or label it hypocrisy. But that need not abash us. For our 
 love of the austere moral virtues is the salt of our literature and 
 our life. When that decays England will no longer be England. 
 The popularity of Mr. Hall Caine is a guarantee of its vigour. 
 It is a certificate of its national health. In all his novels he has 
 upheld the good and the true. He has never swerved from his 
 loyalty to high principles and Christian ideals. Hence his 
 vogue. Hence also his power at Drury Lane. 
 
 Drury Lane is our national theatre. It is homely. There 
 is a deep truth in the simple song which Patti has sung all 
 over the world. In a profound sense "there is no place like 
 home." Drury Lane is the theatre of home, and there is no 
 place like Drury Lane. It is the refuge of the homely virtues. 
 It is home at home. That is why we love it. No matter how 
 fiercely the storms of decadence rage elsewhere, Drury Lane 
 is faithful to the English ideal of simple goodness. Its moral 
 tone is uncorrupted by meretricious modernity. It is im- 
 pervious alike to the blandishments of wit and the seductions 
 of irony. It denies the insolent demands of moral realism 
 and irreverent humour. It holds high in a cynical age the banner 
 of the ideal. 
 
 173
 
 174 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Drury Lane has not always been lucky enough to secure 
 the services of men of genius like Mr. Hall Caine, men who 
 combine the technique of morality with the conviction of it. 
 The Drury Lane dramatist has not always been sincere. His 
 head has sometimes been better than his heart. Mr. Caine 
 has the head as well as the heart. In this he is unique. If 
 Drury Lane was not built for him, at least he was built for 
 Drury Lane. He has the rare power of handling moral pas- 
 sion in large masses, of moving it about as Napoleon moved 
 his armies, of launching it with terrific force against the legions 
 of evil. His characters are moral Titans, convulsed with huge 
 emotions, torn by gigantic sorrows, scarred by immense hates, 
 and aureoled with infinite loves. 
 
 By coming to Drury Lane Mr. Hall Caine came to his own. 
 His ripitition generate is really an enormous At Home rather 
 than a dress rehearsal. It is a national tribute to the inspired 
 interpreter of our national ideals the ideals of domestic honour, 
 simple fidelity, and brotherly love. It is on these ideals that the 
 sweetness of home has been founded. There is no word in 
 French or in any other language which can translate the mean- 
 ing of the English word home. 
 
 As I look round old Drury this afternoon I rejoice over 
 the defeat of the little cynics and satirists who have for so 
 long sneered at the healthy sentiments of the simple. Where 
 is the hectic morbidity of Blank to-day? Where is Dashe? 
 Where is Thingumabob? Gone. Dead. Forgotten. The 
 heart of the English people is sound at the core. I can hear 
 it beating to-day in Drury Lane. It throbs in sympathy with 
 Jason, as it sees in him the triumph of the Christian ideal of 
 forgiveness over the Pagan ideal of revenge. 
 
 It may be fantastic, but I discern in the stupendous realism 
 of the sulphur-mine a divine symbol of vanquished evil and 
 victorious good. It is a moral fumigation. The fumes of the 
 sulphur have slain the microbes of immorality which have 
 been eating the heart out of our national drama. In the stalls 
 men and women are weeping. Tears fall from the gallery. 
 There are sobs in the pit and the dress circle. Even the critics
 
 DRURY LANE 175 
 
 are awed by this solfatara of wholesome sentiment. A great 
 actress is sitting behind me. Clasping her daughter in her 
 arms, she cries hysterically, "I can't bear it! I can't bear it." 
 Few dramatists could win a finer tribute than that. I doubt 
 if even Shakespeare himself has ever torn such a cry from the 
 human heart. Even Euripides, the human, with his drop- 
 pings of warm tears, could not extract a testimony more sincere. 
 
 What is more notable than the intensity of this nerve- 
 tempest is its quality. This great audience is no ordinary 
 mob. It is the cream and flower of English rank, commerce, 
 and culture. Men and women who have grown grey in the 
 various professions sit humbly in obscure corners. Even actor- 
 managers and members of Parliament do not disdain to sink 
 their fame in the sea of admiration. Great novelists and men 
 of letters, scholars and aristocrats rub shoulders with fallen 
 or forgotten stars of the stage. For Drury Lane is democratic. 
 Even the voice of a baby is heard at intervals, and although 
 the superior person may smile, I think that the presence of a 
 little child is the crown and climax of a scene that can never 
 be forgotten by those who are privileged to play even a humble 
 part in it. For is it not true that out of the mouth of babes 
 and sucklings praise may be ordained ? Home is naught with- 
 out infant prattle, and I think the cry of the little one is the 
 homeliest touch of all. It strikes the note of English pathos 
 and simplicity. Could that note be struck in Paris? 
 
 Drury Lane is the children's theatre. Its old walls are 
 tapestried with their laughter. By a happy chance the gracious 
 perfume of childhood is also wafted over the footlights. The 
 sight of the little boy and girl saying their evening prayer at 
 Mrs. Patrick Campbell's knees touches the hardest heart. 
 Every woman, whether she belongs to the "smart set" or to 
 the theatrical profession, feels a spasm of sweet pain as she 
 hears the little girl talking to her dolly: "I kiss you you not 
 cry." Not one of us but would like to kiss the girlie on the 
 spot. 
 
 It is little touches of this sort that reveal the great dramatist. 
 What pure memories are not called up by the music of the
 
 176 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 church bells, by the sound of the Harvest Hymn? Compared 
 to these delicate fragilities of sentiment, even the real cows, 
 the real haystack, and the real pump seem crude, although 
 they, too, play their part in the homely idyll of kind hearts 
 and simple faith.
 
 AT THE OPERA 
 
 THE season was singing its top-note. Fashion had not 
 yet grown feeble with dinners and dances, luncheons and 
 garden parties, theatres and concerts, races and regattas, 
 polo and tennis, croquet and cricket. Everywhere everything, 
 everybody everywhere. The wheel of pleasure spinning at 
 its maddest. The jejune boredom of July still far off. Diges- 
 tions not yet dilapidated. Dowagers fabricating marriages and 
 debutantes neck-deep in flirtations. Every afternoon a block 
 in Piccadilly. Bond Street wearing its most expensive smile. 
 The tea-rooms and the restaurants doing a roaring trade. 
 In fine, the great mundane movement going at its highest 
 speed. Little London rotating furiously. What is Little 
 London? It is the golden hub round which the huge wheel 
 of Great London revolves. 
 
 What is the diamond centre of the golden hub? Well, 
 I suppose it is the Opera. There you may see the rabble of 
 the rich, the mob of society, the rag-tag and bob-tail of be- 
 paragraphed men and women. There are divers ways of going 
 to the Opera, and each provides you with a different point of 
 view. If you go to the gallery you will hear the music better 
 than anywhere else, for there it is not garrotted by gabble. 
 The more you pay for your seat the less you hear. The gal- 
 lery has another advantage. The opera there is singer-proof 
 and fashion-proof. Punch and Judy on the stage and in the 
 boxes become marionettes. Judy's tiara gleams with the 
 desultory glitter of broken glass on a brick wall. Judy's 
 shoulders are quite remote. The opulent charms in boxes and 
 stalls are as unreal as waxworks. 
 
 In the stalls your point of view changes. You are dis- 
 tracted by the proximity of imaginary greatness and fabled 
 12 177
 
 178 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 loveliness. Don Juan in a box is more thrilling than Don 
 Juan on the stage. If you are schooled in scandal, you are 
 more anxious to fit the cap of gossip than to follow the score. 
 How pale is the artificial sin and virtue behind the footlights 
 compared to the real sin and the real virtue behind ropes of 
 pearls and cascades of diamonds. 
 
 But if you are in one of the boxes you have yet another 
 point of view. To-night Dives has lent us his Box. Let us 
 play at being Dives for a few hours. Our cab is one of the 
 joints in the crocodile of vehicles which crawls slowly round 
 Long Acre into Bow Street. Outside the Opera House, that 
 vast coal-scuttle, we are waved aside by a policeman's fat 
 white glove. Alighting, we dive between the tail of a brougham 
 and the head of a horse. In the vestibule we wait for our 
 friends. Others are waiting. We watch the great doors swing- 
 ing open, and we note that there is no janitor to open them. 
 The daintiest beauty must push her way in. One pretty girl 
 narrowly escapes a blow on her fair brow as the door swings 
 back. The smart men are all carrying canes with round knobs 
 of coloured stone. 
 
 Our Box is in the Grand Tier. As we walk round the 
 corridor we read the august names on the doors of the boxes. 
 Our Box is a stage Box, and we seem to walk miles before we 
 reach it. The attendant opens the door. We find ourselves 
 in a tiny room containing four armchairs and a sofa. Below 
 us is the orchestra, a long, deep, dark trench full of wind and 
 brass, grotesque with tangled faces and sawing arms. Instead 
 of seeing M. Messager's back, we see his keen face, with its 
 curved moustache, serious, vigilant, absorbed. We are too 
 close to the stage. We see it stripped of all illusion. So close 
 are we that we can almost shake hands with Caruso. If you 
 place a book too near your eyes you cannot read. So it is 
 with the stage. Propinquity smears the glamour, blurs the 
 mirage. The lines do not flow into each other. The spec- 
 tacle jerks. The physical effort of the singers is obtrusive. 
 We watch their lungs working like bellows. We see them stand- 
 ing in the wings, waiting for their cue. We catch glimpses of
 
 AT THE OPERA 179 
 
 the stage-manager through a secret panel that opens and shuts 
 in the scenery. We detect asides, by-play, whisperings, oeil- 
 lades among the chorus. The grease-paint is too palpable. 
 Lips are too red. Eyebrows and eyelashes are too black. We 
 see the feet of the players with absurd distinctness. Only 
 one mime retains his glamour unimpaired. It is the Com- 
 mander. Is the Statue alive? We cannot tell? His face is 
 as immobile and as expressionless as any face in the audience. 
 But the best way to see and hear the opera in a box is not 
 to look at the stage at all. On the wall of our box facing the 
 stage is a large mirror. Lean back lazily in your chair and 
 look at the procession of images in this mirror that is like the 
 magical mirror of the Lady of Shalott: 
 
 And moving through a mirror clear 
 Shadows of the world appear. 
 
 The coarse, meretricious pretences of stageland are trans- 
 formed by this enchanted shield. The breath of romance is 
 blown upon them. They infect our imagination with a sense 
 of fantasy. As the web of gestures is woven, we seem to be- 
 hold the show of shadows that is life. The music no longer 
 appears too passionate for prosaic flesh decorated by perruquier 
 and costumier. The solidity of torso and tights evanishes 
 in this soft, clear well, and in its place we gaze upon airy phan- 
 toms who are carried by the music on its crest. Gazing, we 
 dream. Time and place slip away from our souls, and we lose 
 our very egoism in a charmed bemusement. Don Giovanni 
 pursues Zerlina, and we see the jest of sex running like a scarlet 
 thread through the pearls of years that are the rosary of time. 
 He defies the Commander, and we see the eternal rebellion 
 of the eternal rebel from Prometheus to Satan, from Borgia 
 to Byron. Donna Anna and Donna Elvira weep, and we hear 
 the tears of all the women in the world. But if we turn our 
 head and look across the footlights, artifice ridicules our sen- 
 timent. Caruso's golden voice loses its subtle echoes of far 
 mysteries. All is jarred and marred. Why does nobody 
 build a mirror-theatre in which the actors are neither heard
 
 180 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 nor seen directly? We should have mirror-plays which would 
 enable us to recapture our lost illusions. Life at the third 
 instead of the second remove! 
 
 As we gaze on the play in the mirror a thought arises. 
 How many shadows have stolen across its polished surface? 
 All the operas have stepped silently over it, and yet they have 
 left no trace of footfall, no print of finger, no blur of sigh or 
 laughter. Even as these are we. We, too, pass across the mir- 
 ror of life, and are as if we had never been. Which is the 
 less real the audience or the play? Ah, let us look at the 
 audience. The curtain falls, the lights blaze up. Suddenly 
 all the glory of the great opera house glitters in our eyes. We 
 see it as the singer sees it, waves upon waves of gleaming throats 
 and marble arms, rolling in long white lines from the far roof 
 down the balcony into the stalls, and breaking into foam of 
 flesh against the footlights. The marionettes in the boxes 
 are like painted spectators at a painted tourney. How stiff 
 and straight the women sit! I am always puzzled by this 
 ability of the fragile fair. By-and-by, we grow self-conscious 
 under the converging fire of lorgnettes. What are we? Who 
 shall we be? It is but an edict of humour. Shall I be an earl ? 
 Will you be a marchioness? Nay, we are. Let us rake the 
 house. Let us receive our friends. Let us be great for ten 
 minutes. For life is only an opera, and we can cast ourselves 
 for any part we please. Let us ennoble ourselves like these 
 mimes, and demonstrate the vanity of rank by donning and 
 doffing it like a glove. In the end the mirror of Dives will 
 be as vacant as the mirror of Lazarus. We are all shadows 
 of shadows, images of images, ghosts of ghosts.
 
 AMONG THE PHILISTINES 
 
 I AM a naif. I am an innocent. I am easily taken in by 
 myself and by other people, by my own emotions and by other 
 people's emotions. I can enjoy the most preposterous non- 
 sense and the most ridiculous humbug. Vainly I struggle 
 against my innate conventionality. Hopelessly I strive to 
 conquer my ingrained Philistinism. It is useless. I am a 
 simple soul, addicted to platitude and inured to commonplace. 
 I am utterly unable to see through the shams of life. I am 
 duped by everything and everybody. I am as trustful as a 
 child and as credulous as a heathen. I bow down to wood 
 and stone every day of my life. 
 
 For instance, I know I ought to despise the Opera. My 
 best friends despise it, and they try to teach me to look down 
 with lofty contempt on its infantile follies and banal puerili- 
 ties. They implore me to regard it as one of the shams of 
 society. They beg me to boycott it in the name of art and in 
 the name of democracy. I smile feebly at their entreaties, and 
 I weakly protest that I like the Opera. I confess my fatuity. 
 I acknowledge my stupidity. But I cannot help myself. I 
 like the Opera. It amuses me. It is all they say it is, no 
 doubt, but its grace and its glamour and its glitter and its 
 garishness delight my foolish eyes. I fear I cannot sneer well. 
 I am a native of Vanity Fair, and I cannot tune my fiddle to the 
 high pitch of Tolstoy. I cannot soar to the moral altitudes 
 of Shaw. 
 
 The other night I went to see Tetrazzini in "Traviata," 
 or "Traviata" in Tetrazzini. We were four, two brave men 
 and two fair women. We were in a box in the pit tier. Now 
 let me say candidly that when I go to the Opera I am a snob. 
 
 181
 
 182 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 It is the only frame of mind which enables you to enjoy the 
 Opera. The charm of sitting in a box at the Opera is due 
 entirely to your conscious superiority to your neighbours. 
 You can indulge in the luxury of believing they believe you are 
 a person of importance. You can gloat over their envious glance 
 and their reverent regard. You are magnificent by position. 
 The man who opens the box for you treats you as if you were 
 an American millionaire or a German princelet or an Italian 
 count. Being a very humble and obscure person, this illicit 
 pride fills me with a secret ecstasy. I begin to wish I had 
 been born great. I assure myself that I should have cut a fine 
 dash as a king or a grand duke. It is easy to dramatise your- 
 self when you are in the right place among the right people. 
 I like to look across the stalls at the other great ones in the 
 other boxes. Perhaps they are the genuine article. Perhaps 
 their blood is blue. Perhaps they came over with the Con- 
 queror or crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower. Perhaps they 
 hobnob with Burke and play bridge with Debrett. Even if 
 they are bogus, like myself, they do not look bogus. They 
 have the air of aristocracy. Whether they have any right to 
 it does not matter. 
 
 What about Tetrazzini? Have I forgotten her? Bless 
 my soul! I fear I have. But let me pull myself together. I 
 must pretend to know "Traviata" by heart. I must assume 
 familiarity with every note of the music. For you see I am 
 a musical snob. I should be ashamed to admit that I do not 
 know a word of Italian. I should blush to own that I am 
 unmoved by the anguish of Tetrazzini or the agony of Alfredo 
 and his admirable father. I therefore pump up my emotions 
 and stir up my admiration. I conceal my secret conviction 
 that the supper party is dull. I stifle my amazement at the ro- 
 bust vigour of the dying soprano. I choke my vulgar sense of 
 humour and my low instinct of derision. Ah! how pathetic 
 it all is! How natural! How realistic! 
 
 But my transports of counterfeit rapture are frozen by 
 the cynical brutality of my friend. Our pet name for him is 
 the Butterfly, but he is a Butterfly with a sting. He is a hybrid
 
 AMONG THE PHILISTINES 183 
 
 Butterfly, a cross between a Butterfly and a Wasp. He laughs 
 at Alfredo. 
 
 "What a get-up!" he whispers. 
 
 "Shame!" I retort. "A most romantic costume." 
 
 The Butterfly sneers. 
 
 "He looks like a Byronic Lara got up for riding rabbits!" 
 
 I abuse the Butterfly. I tell him he has no imagination. 
 I pity him. But he is obdurate. He even mocks at the ballet. 
 He avows his preference for the Alhambra and the Empire. 
 He sighs for ten minutes of Maud Allan, or five minutes of 
 Guerrero, or two minutes of Dorgere. 
 
 "You are sound-deaf and music-blind," I cry. 
 
 "I am," he replies. "I hate music. It bores me to death. 
 Why should I pretend to like what I dislike?" 
 
 You perceive that the Butterfly is also a snob. He is 
 afraid to adopt the tastes of others. He revels in his own 
 defects. He glories in being impervious to the vocal gym- 
 nastics of Tetrazzini. But I drink her notes as I drink the 
 notes of the lark and the nightingale. To me she is a human 
 singing bird. I like to watch her throwing her notes up to the 
 roof one after the other until the air is glittering with beautiful 
 noises. I can see the notes chasing each other like swallows, 
 darting and curving and circling and swooping. She is like 
 a juggler who tosses coloured clubs into the air. I do not 
 know what is the meaning of the dancing sounds, but I amuse 
 myself by matching them with moods. Whether I make the 
 moods for the music or whether the music makes the moods for 
 me is a matter of no moment. It is pleasant to be gay and 
 amorous and wistful and tender and sorrowful and despairing 
 and heartbroken by turns. 
 
 Then the audience is very nice to look at. That girl who 
 sits in a mist of white chiffon and filmy tulle looks as if she 
 were a living lump of Turkish delight. That fat lady in red 
 is delightful, although the Butterfly calls her his Bte Rouge. 
 And between the acts it is jolly to listen to the subdued mur- 
 mur of voices. It is silky and soft, like the wash of the waves 
 or the frou-frou of the leaves. The voices are the cultivated
 
 184 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 voices of well-bred people. They blend like the instruments 
 of the orchestra. The sharp sword of a violin cuts into the 
 low susurrus as the lights are lowered. The glowing riot of 
 colour dislimns into shadowy vagueness, broken here and there 
 by a white shoulder or a glowing tiara. I like the twilight of 
 the gods. It is as delicate as a sunset. Why should we refuse 
 to appreciate the light of artifice as amiably as we appreciate 
 the light of nature? The Opera, after all, is as real as moon- 
 shine, for it is a phase of the life we live.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT THE RIVER
 
 IN ROTTEN ROW 
 
 THERE is a Rotten Row in Hyde Park. There is also a 
 Rotten Row in the Isle of Dogs. It is a Dock for dying ships, 
 a marine hospital, where the bones of old sea-pacers rest, wearily 
 waiting for the knacker. 
 
 It is a fine morning. A fresh easterly wind is blowing up 
 the Thames. All sorts of craft are coming up on the racing 
 tide that is carrying with it faint rumours of the salt sea. Sprit- 
 sail barges with tall masts and wind-worn, brown canvas are 
 heeling over as they tack smartly through the traffic, the yel- 
 low water curling into creamy fountains round their bows. 
 Here and there a moored barge tosses a mist of spars and 
 cordage into the air. The Council steamboats buzz from 
 pier to pier like bees. A waterman sculls about the front 
 door of a dock, ready to pick up the ropes of a steamer just in 
 from the River Plate, with crates of fruit from Las Palmas 
 piled up dizzily on her deck. His neat wherry is bepainted 
 with a score of flags. He blows a whistle. Is he calling a 
 hansom? No, he is signalling to the pilot. Hard by, a stout 
 white-bearded little man, with the letters "L. I. D." on his 
 peaked cap, is waiting to superintend the opening of the dock 
 gates, and the scraping and warping of the home-comer into 
 her berth. Strings of lighters laden to the lips are being towed 
 by dirty little tugs. Stray dinghys are crawling about. There 
 goes one with three customs-searchers in their dark blue livery. 
 In all directions there is bustle and fuss, hoot of sirens, clatter 
 of cranes, rattle of derricks, shriek of steam whistles. 
 
 But we are bound for Rotten Row. Leaving the waltzing 
 river craft behind us, we plunge into the labyrinth of the docks. 
 Soon we are hopelessly lost in the tangle of sheds and square 
 sheets of water with their smooth sills, their bewildering vistas 
 
 187
 
 188 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 of warehouses, roofs, slender mast-heads, fat funnels, and 
 church spires. In this queer jumble of land and water every- 
 thing seems mixed into an amphibious nightmare. We wan- 
 der round and round, and after an hour find ourselves where 
 we started. To the landlubber all ships seem the same, but 
 gradually we clutch at dim discrepancies. The President, 
 for instance, is like nothing else in this aquarium. She re- 
 minds one of Noah's Ark. She is half a house and half a ship. 
 The old President was captured from the Americans during the 
 War of Independence. Her figurehead, a jolly white-haired 
 old gentleman, was stuck on the gunboat Garnet, and now 
 stares blandly at the Naval Reserve men who come for their 
 annual drill. A queer craft she looks, a corrugated iron shed 
 glued on the top of her slim flanks, quick-firers nosing out 
 of a Humphrey iron chapel, a rough gangway running along 
 the roof, with the Union flag at one end and the white ensign 
 at the other. Inside, raw Naval Reserve officers are drilling 
 raw Naval Reserve gun crews, stolid petty officers whispering 
 hints with a sly twinkle in their eyes. 
 
 A few steps, and we reach Rotten Row at last. It is a deso- 
 late oblong, silent, melancholy, forlorn. It seems to be miles 
 from the busy wharves. In a dejected row, huddled close 
 together like lepers, lie all sorts of lost ships, waiting dismally 
 for the end. Here are the Thames steamers which once 
 carried many a merry mob of trippers to Greenwich and to 
 Kew. They are rust-eaten and grimy. Their decks are 
 warped, their plates are peeling, yet here they loll, eating dock 
 dues day by day. They are like the unwashed, unshaven 
 dock loafers who lounge round The Blue Post, and whom no 
 man hires and no man pities. On the other side of Rotten 
 Row a spanking American steam yacht mocks their misery. 
 She is the toy of some New York multi-millionaire, and every 
 inch of her gleams and glistens with paint and polish. She 
 is burnished like an Exhibition model, and her white sides 
 flash in the sun. No muslined beauty in the real Rotten 
 Row is daintier, than this fine lady, her very anchor chains gal- 
 vanised into a golden glory.
 
 IN ROTTEN ROW 189 
 
 The ironic antithesis is too cruel, so we turn sadly away 
 in quest of docks less eloquent of decadence. Alas! we find 
 only empty squares of deserted water. Where is the hum of 
 trade? We walk wearily along empty sheds, and meet only 
 drowsy policemen and shabby loiterers. In South Dock our 
 spirits revive. The lonely silence here is touched with ro- 
 mance, for snuggling in a corner we find a forest of tall masts, 
 criss-crossed cordage, and tapering spars. Here are the last 
 of the wind-jammers. As we walk along the quay under the 
 jib-booms, we are assailed by the pathos of the moribund. 
 These iron fairies are also within hail of Rotten Row. They, 
 too, are waiting for the "dead-launch" that is the doom of 
 the sailing-ship. Their topsails will take the Trades no more. 
 They are dying game, for they have nailed the shark's tail to 
 their jib-booms. They have caught their sharks on the Line, 
 but the shark of steam is stalking them, and soon they will be 
 swallowed by its insatiable maw. A knot of men are talking 
 under the Wiscombe Park, under her mocking motto, Absque 
 Lahore Nihil. We edge into the yarn. They are seamen 
 looking for a berth on one of the clippers. Presently a dole- 
 ful sailor joins them. He has seen the "old man." He shakes 
 his head. She has been sold to the Italians. The new owners 
 want no British hands. A drizzle of mournful gossip drops 
 from the dreary group. They are an epitome of our mercantile 
 marine. One is an old West Indian negro, skin of shining 
 mahogany, squat nose, toothless, his crinkled wool a sooty 
 white. Another is a Swede, voluble in broken English. There 
 is also a bald old tar who talks of a famous owner, one Jolin 
 Allen. Nobody like John Allen. He would come down in 
 his snuff-coloured coat with his lunch in his pocket, and scatter 
 largesse along the quays. But he is gone, and his fleet of 
 sailing-ships is sold. White Jack and Black Peter weep over 
 John Allen. A cynical seaman jeers at these praises of past 
 times. "Why do the owners prefer foreigners? Because they 
 don't strike or drink or play Old Harry. You're cursing now. 
 Wait till the turbines come in!" 
 
 His eyes rest on men who are crawling like flies along a
 
 190 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 topsail yard. He laughs bitterly. "Well," we say, "at any 
 rate the riggers are busy." He laughs again and spits deri- 
 sively. "Riggers! Them ain't riggers; them's the crew. 
 What do the riggers do, hey? Why, walks about like the 
 rest of us. That's the only trade left in the Port o' London." 
 Is it quite so bad? Alas! everywhere the same dolorous 
 tale is told. We trudge from dock to dock, and the shipless 
 water glares at us with its glassy eye. The few vessels we see 
 are waiting for freights that tarry. Dock officials, thirty 
 years in the service, are glum and gloomy. Nothing doing. 
 Wharfingers and dock companies cutting each other's throats. 
 Suddenly it dawns upon me that Rotten Row is stretching 
 all along the river from basin to basin, wharf to wharf, quay to 
 quay. The rusting penny steamers are only one end of a chain 
 of decay. These docks are but dead lagoons mirroring a phan- 
 tom past. The Port of London is choking, not with argosies 
 of commerce, but with barnacled monopolies and out-of-date 
 methods. The fate of Tyre and Sidon is overtaking her. 
 Nothing can repeople her once populous waterside. Her 
 docks will ere long be lonely reservoirs visited only by the barren 
 tides. Her sceptre will pass to Liverpool and Southampton 
 and Antwerp. Ichabod will be written on the Tower Bridge. 
 When Macaulay's New Zealander explores the wilderness 
 of Millwall and Poplar and Wapping, he will perhaps find 
 boys sailing toy boats in the basins, and old palsied patriarchs, 
 with the letters "L. I. D." on their caps, dismally looking on. 
 Absque Lahore Nihil. Nothing without work. Without work 
 nothing. Is that the epitaph of the Port of London ?
 
 LOVE UNDER THE LEAVES 
 
 IN a London June it is well to be lazily young. It is also 
 well to be lazily in love. Youth in love and love in youth 
 is life's acme. This Sunday morning as I stand on the plat- 
 form at Paddington I slide into a golden mood of sentiment, 
 for the grey station is fragrantly aglow with laughing romance 
 in cool white ducks and fresh white serge. Trysting lovers 
 are scattering smiles in all directions. It is a parliament of 
 joys. I catch the contagion of tenderness. My heart melts. 
 I pity the cab horses and the porters, and the stuffed dog in 
 his lonely grave of glass. Why cannot youth be in love for ever 
 and love be always young? I hear the leafy Thames whisper- 
 ing across the miles to the dusty-souled Londoner, whisper- 
 ing with the sun and the wind and the water and the green 
 rustle of dipping branches and "the dreamy drip of oars" 
 in his ancient voice. And as I obey the call I sorrow for the 
 millions I leave behind in the hot and desolate City, for pity 
 is half a pleasure's pleasure. The joy of life is woven out of 
 compassion for the dead. The best cure for despondency is 
 a walk in Kensal Green. There are no suicides in cemeteries. 
 
 At Slough we see the towers and turrets of Windsor Castle 
 like a grey hole neatly cut out of the blue skirt of the sky. A 
 fluttering flag solidifies the vague pattern. The King is there. 
 What is he doing at this moment? Is he as happy as we are? 
 It is hard to think of a king apart from his treadmill of cere- 
 monial toils. Our mental image of him is a confused jumble 
 of coronations, marriages, foundation-stones, bows, and hat- 
 liftings. What is his private mood? Has he time to feel, 
 and ability to be? ... But we are at Taplow, and as we 
 flash past we see the glittering river thrust through the trees 
 
 191
 
 192 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 like the shining shield of a warrior in ambush. The gleaming 
 glimpse thrills us. We expect. 
 
 At Maidenhead the platform turns suddenly white with 
 frocks and flannels, and down the stairs we go, filling the 
 dingy tunnel with the scented swish of petticoats. Then some 
 of us whirr off in a motor, some in a natty dogcart, some in a 
 sober fly, and some on foot. But we all wend riverward. It 
 is a long, dull mile through Maidenhead to the water's edge, 
 and for the pedestrian the walk to Bray is lovelier. Only the 
 frumps and the fogeys condescend to the dreary prose of the 
 hired launch. For youth in love and love in youth there is 
 only one vessel the punt. Even the eggshell shallop that 
 leaps at each oarstroke is a kind of ferry, fit only for your Charon. 
 As for the canoe, it is a misogynistic craft, imposing a dread- 
 ful decorum and an inhuman immobility upon its rigid passen- 
 gers. The gondola is a bizarre anomaly, meet only for cloaked 
 and hooded moonlight, sharp, dense shadows, and over-peering 
 palaces. The dinghy is a squat platitude planned for mat- 
 rimonial indifference. Love in a dinghy is unimaginable. 
 You can go errands in it, waylaying the butcher and the baker 
 on the towing-path, but it is not fit for wreathed smiles. 
 
 The perfect lover must be a perfect punter. The art of 
 punting is nearly as complex as the art of love. It must be 
 learned in dark secrecy, for the novice is lamentably ludicrous, 
 and to be ludicrous in love is to be lost. There is a double dose 
 of feminine perversity in the punt. She loathes to move in 
 a parallel line with the bank. She likes to sprawl across 
 the stream. She resents violence. She must be gently be- 
 guiled with caressing touches. If you are brutal, she spins 
 derisively, blocking the traffic, and drawing down on you the 
 cold, ironical stare of scorn. Public opinion on the River is 
 intolerably pitiless. It scourges physical clumsiness with 
 scorpions of contempt. It is strange that men are more bit- 
 terly humiliated by manual than by mental incompetence. 
 I do not sweat with shame when I write a slovenly sentence. 
 I do sweat with shame when I am rebuked by a lock-keeper 
 for some breach of the River code. There is no spiritual igno-
 
 LOVE UNDER THE LEAVES 193 
 
 miny so deep as the fleshly ignominy of the wretch who gets 
 his punt askew at the lock's mouth or who inadvertently spears 
 a lady with his pole. 
 
 The most dreadful anguish of the soul is as nothing com- 
 pared to the agony of the man whose pole sticks in the Thames 
 mud, and who clings to it the millionth fraction of a second 
 too long. Then comes the triumph of the punt. She softly 
 glides away, making the acute angle of pole and man hor- 
 ribly obtuse. For a wild spasm of time the law of equilibrium 
 shudders, then the immaculate martyr flops with his pole into 
 the silver flood. Does she ever forgive him? A woman can 
 face fearful sorrows for the sake of him she loves. But this 
 crime no woman can pardon. Mental or moral turpitude 
 she can nobly extenuate; for physical shortcomings she has no 
 pity. I suppose she is still haunted by atavistic memories. 
 There is a drop of the Sabine in every woman's blood. 
 
 The River Girl is a type. She is the product of the punt. 
 She is an athletic indolence, a lithe laziness, a coquettish vigour. 
 She is Diana with a dash of Aphrodite. She uses the punt 
 alternately as a couch and as a stage. Her seductions are 
 infinite. I do not know whether she is more alluring in action 
 or in repose. Do you see that young Sultan lying luxuriously 
 on empurpled cushions, smoking the pipe of deep content? 
 His half-closed eyes gaze dreamingly past his toes at the rhyth- 
 mic girl wielding the rhythmic pole. She is a white glamour 
 of fluent curves. Her bare, dimpled arms show warm against 
 her gown, and her body whips and bends like a fishing-rod. 
 Standing straight as a reed, she plunges her pole vertically 
 into the breast of the Thames, then grasping it high above her 
 head she pushes the earth behind her well-poised feet, as she 
 slowly bends into a swelling line of melting grace, a bent bow 
 whose string is the pole. Then she is erect again, and the 
 pole comes trailing aslant through the water till it is vertical 
 once more. The drops glisten in the sun as they drip from 
 her fingers, but they fall clear away from her dress. She is 
 an artist, a wonder of delicate girlhood, a blend of strength 
 and beauty, cool and pure and gracile as Artemis or Atalanta. 
 13
 
 194 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Another picture. Two sisters are punting under the hang- 
 ing woods of Cliveden. They are silhouetted snowily against 
 the green curtain. They move in faultless time like mowers 
 swinging scythes. Their poles are always parallel. Their 
 points strike the stream at the same moment. It is a delicious 
 duet of girlhood, every limb in tune. 
 
 The River Girl in repose is more sensuous. She lies un- 
 dulating on her cushions like Goya's Maja, a Japanese parasol 
 shielding her subtle face from the sun. She, too, is an artist, 
 cosmetically groomed, a tinted Venus. Her champagne- 
 coloured shoes and slim ankles veiled with cobweb silk are as 
 daintily unreal as the faint flush on her cheek and the dull 
 bronze sheen on her carefully-rippled hair. The boy punting 
 at her feet is languidly supple, elegantly alert. His oiled hair 
 shines, not a lock awry. His broad-striped shirt, his leather 
 belt, his spotless ducks, his starched collar, and his buckskin 
 shoes vie with his clear, tanned skin in polished propriety. 
 It is a duet of the sexes. The wise river slides smoothly under 
 this and many another mated pair, and with it slide the hours 
 from noon till sundown. The trees are choral with invisible 
 birds. Here and there dense groves of monkey-flower burst 
 into flame and hawthorns scatter milky perfume. In the 
 silent backwaters where the trees dip their green branches in 
 the stream the hidden punts nestle against the bank, and as you 
 pass bright eyes look out dreamily under a superfluous parasol. 
 Was that a muffled kiss or the blurred whistle of a throstle? 
 Only a churl would press the question. On and on we glide, 
 until we come upon a browsing ass in a clover-field. His long 
 ears are mirrored in the unwrinkled water. He is Nature's 
 comment on life and youth and love. For in his own way 
 he also is happy.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT POLITICS
 
 A STUDY IN ICE 
 
 THE Prime Minister is a man of ice and iron. From my 
 perch in the Gallery I peer down at him sideways. On my 
 left hand "F. C. G." is busy sketching somebody. His fierce, 
 hairy face is curiously unlike his blandly amiable caricatures. 
 As I glance from his ferocious eyebrows down to Mr. As- 
 quith's polished steel mask, I wonder whether it also is dis- 
 crepant. What is the real Asquith? 
 
 The Asquith I look down upon is a thundercloud with a 
 silver lining; his face the thundercloud, and his white hair 
 the silver lining. White hair softens the features of other 
 men, but it hardens his. It lies chill and severe on his tem- 
 ples. He is a man of snow with a marble mouth and a jaw of 
 steel, a man of ice with frozen eyes and a frozen voice. A frost- 
 bitten man with a wintry mind and an Arctic soul. A lonely 
 man with a bitterly desolate face, and a rare smile like glacial 
 sunshine. 
 
 My eyes wander from the cold Prime Minister to his fiery 
 followers. The contrast between the leader and the led is 
 absolute. The Prime Minister is an iceberg sitting on a vol- 
 cano. The ice-cold phrases fall icily from the icy lips. They 
 are beautiful phrases, beautiful as the crystals on the window- 
 pane in winter; the best words in the best order, gleaming and 
 glittering translucently like Polar icicles. There is no redun- 
 dancy in this laconic utterance, no pleonasm, no hesitance, no 
 frayed ends of speech, no hemming or hawing, no groping 
 after reluctant felicities. His phrases are disdainfully fault- 
 less. You can see his mind working behind his words like a 
 show engine working behind clear glass, working without 
 strain or stress, fret or friction, a perfect machine, automatic- 
 ally lubricated, exquisitely balanced, a miracle of bright, smooth 
 
 197
 
 198 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 mechanism. The voice is pure, cold perfection, passionlessly 
 resonant, heartlessly melodious. It never falters or wavers, 
 but rolls out its precise cadences in measured lengths. Its 
 articulations are unerringly accurate, every vowel and every 
 consonant cut clean, as if the keen lips were sharp knives 
 and the keen tongue a guillotine. 
 
 Almost inhuman is this curving cascade of unadorned elo- 
 quence, falling upon the silent strand of listeners, without a 
 break and without a pause, poignantly isolated, seeking no 
 sustenance of sympathy, and fearing no repugnance of antag- 
 onism. Other orators appeal for replying applause, but he 
 disdains appeal as coldly as he disdains defiance. He is 
 enough for himself, and his power is a pitiless solitude. His 
 primacy is painful, for not one man behind him or beside him 
 or before him contests his iron dominion. His hard virility 
 makes the tense, attentive faces around him look like uneasy 
 shadows. The most vivid personalities grow pale and vague 
 before his arrogant imperiousness. The cowed Opposition 
 visibly shrivels away as he plunges a phrase like a dagger into 
 its heart. The fight is unequal, and in vain his sword searches 
 for a blade to bite or a shield to dint. Contempt grows on his 
 tongue as he feels the line of adversaries falling back out of 
 range. Now and then a ragged volley of interruption spurts 
 forth, and he bites it into silence. The terrible swordsman 
 is playing with his victims now, and as he flicks their flesh 
 daintily, an acid smile hovers on his lips and a chill gleam 
 of derision lights his wary eye. He presses hard on their 
 flying disorder, pins them in a corner, and then with a mocking 
 flourish leaves them gasping. His followers look on half afraid 
 to cheer and half afraid to hold their silence. Now and then 
 he wheels round and looks at his soldiery with a glance of 
 haughty generalship, menacingly confident, sternly self-re- 
 liant. He is a leader who compels fear as well as faith, obe- 
 dience as well as fidelity, respect as well as a kind of awed 
 affection. 
 
 No man ever cultivated his defects more vehemently. 
 "Max" has caricatured him in the act of "acquiring personal
 
 A STUDY IN ICE 199 
 
 magnetism," but Mr. Asquith would rather die than be other 
 than he is. He is a leader whom the led must take or leave. 
 He will not hatch himself over again and hatch himself differ- 
 ent. He scorns the arts of ingratiation and opportunism. 
 "I am I," he seems to say, and he coldly declines to alter or 
 alleviate his frigid temperament. What he is he is, and others 
 must conform to him, not he to them. He will neither bend 
 nor break. He will not be cajoled or coerced. There is no 
 suppleness in his rigid spine. There he stands like a grey 
 rock, the antithesis of his party, with its wild poetry of senti- 
 ment and sympathy, its quixotries of idealism, its gallant 
 chivalry of adventure, its love of forlorn hopes, its loyalty 
 to lost causes, its fine frenzy of pity for the weak and the poor 
 and the oppressed. His Liberalism is governed by pure 
 reason. He chains up his feelings as if they were wild beasts. 
 He habitually feels more than he says, and he habitually says 
 less than he feels. 
 
 But there is passion under his ice and fire beneath his 
 iron; and at times his austere loneliness is touched with a 
 faint wistfulness and his storm-beaten isolation with an un- 
 willing tenderness. For this hard, cold intellect is simple, 
 and whatever is simple is sincere. The secret of Asquith is 
 that he is a shy, proud Englishman, moulded by Balliol and 
 the Bar. His shyness is a kind of pride. He is armoured 
 with reserve and cased with reticence. He understates and 
 underacts because he believes that the fear of gush is the be- 
 ginning of wisdom. He would rather repel than rhapsodise. 
 For him truth is a form of good form.
 
 A STUDY IN VELVET 
 
 PLACE: Queen's Hall. Time: eight P.M. The building 
 is packed. The floor is snowy with white shoulders and 
 white shirts gleaming together. Round the balcony are battle- 
 cries: "We fight to win." " On our record we stand." There 
 is no fiscal motto, but the name of Chamberlain is hung up 
 beside the names of Balfour and Lansdowne, Beaconsfield 
 and Salisbury. The platform is crowded with a motley gath- 
 ering, ranging from Lord Hugh Cecil to Mr. Fred Homer. 
 Obscurely wedged among the congested nonentities on the 
 right is Sir Edward Clarke, fierce-eyed, his stern lips grinding 
 together like millstones. 
 
 Suddenly a tall, lithe, lean man glides into view. It is 
 Mr. Balfour. There are heavy pouches under his dark eyes. 
 Dark pouches. They make the eyes sombrely mournful 
 and delicately sad. I think of Hamlet. Yes, Mr. Balfour 
 is Hamlet. As he floats by like a shadow in a frock coat, I 
 long to see him in doublet and hose, talking to the skull of 
 Yorick instead of to Sir Edward Clarke. He has the Hamlet 
 temperament, the subtle mind playing in the subtle face, in- 
 tellect shifting in features that are carved into a tenuous preci- 
 osity of contour. The contrast between the visage of Sir 
 Edward Clarke and the visage of Mr. Balfour is violent: it is 
 the lily and the lion, the rapier and the rock. 
 
 The cheers light his face with a boyish smile that shows 
 the white teeth under the silken moustache. Hamlet becomes 
 Prince Charming. I long to see him in pantomime. How 
 exquisitely he would kiss the sleeping beauty! Stay, he is 
 Romeo and Paolo, Pelleas and Tristan, Launcelot and Lohen- 
 grin. A romantic hero! He ought to wear armour and live 
 in perpetual limelight. He is too fragile, too fine, too sweetly 
 
 200
 
 A STUDY IN VELVET 201 
 
 nice for the platform. Lord Randolph Churchill called him 
 Postlethwaite. He is Postlethwaite. Even this polite mob 
 shocks his fastidious senses. He ought to live under a rose- 
 hung pergola, singing songs to his guitar. Darnley, Rizzio, 
 and Chastelard why does Mr. Balfour's face fill my mind 
 with images of romantic phantoms and ineffectual angels? 
 He is a grizzled Rossetti lover, a weary Burne- Jones knight, 
 a fatigued figure in a Morris tapestry. 
 
 Slowly he uncoils his long legs, and we yield to his languid 
 glamour. While he speaks, my thoughts roam in the Italian 
 Renaissance among the Medicis and the Borgias. Is this 
 man modern ? Is he a twentieth-century reincarnation of some 
 suave and supple Florentine? The infinitely crafty face is 
 moulded and modelled into bland, polished surfaces and 
 fluently blended curves. The whole man is sinuous. His 
 brindled hair is pomaded sleekly down to the nape of the neck 
 in waves that end in rippling undulations. His face is oval, 
 and the line of the jaw from ear to chin is a flowing swerve. 
 The chin is daintily rounded, and the slender, tapering fingers 
 love to fondle its shaven surface. The forehead is broad and 
 slopes slightly back into the thinned hair parted neatly in the 
 middle. The ear is very small, very graceful, very delicate. 
 The nose is sensitively meagre, neurotically sharp and thin, 
 almost shrewish in its acridly keen outline. The skin is a 
 clear olive, a warm glow of colour under its fine texture. The 
 head is small, feminine in its shape and size, but the broad 
 forehead redeems the effeminacy of the lower part of the face. 
 It is an intellectual head, with pensive imagination in the 
 meditative eyes, gently tinged with faint, elusive scorn and 
 reticent derision. Amiable mockery is the dominant expres- 
 sion. Analytic in temper, the man sucks amusement from 
 the human comedy. He is Harlequin to himself, finding hu- 
 mour in his own emotions and farce in his own beliefs. Poli- 
 tics he deems a crude game, but it is the subtlest game that 
 is played on the card-table of the world, and it serves. 
 
 Naturally indolent, he holds himself up by grasping the 
 lapels of his frock coat. Though intensely self-conscious, he
 
 202 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 is no dandy, and looks old-fashioned in his low-cut Shake- 
 speare collar and prim, clerical black tie. His gestures are 
 casual and irrelevant, being mainly contrivances for the ar- 
 rangement of his hands. They seldom hammer home a point, 
 though now and then he rubs in a sneer with a scratching 
 finger on cheek or chin, and stands like an expectant comedian 
 waiting for an overdue laugh. 
 
 He is fond of the actor's pose. His oratory is theatrical, 
 studded with tricks of voice and eye. He has no fund of gen- 
 uine passion. His wrath is rhetorical, factitious, fictitious. 
 He is best in piano persiflage and meticulously modulated 
 sarcasm. His bravura passages are forced. He is indignant 
 with an effort, and you feel he could argue against his own 
 arguments. He is literary in his phrasing, and polishes his 
 periods in the air. His utterance is hesitant. He stammers 
 fluently, picking and pecking at his words, refining his re- 
 finements, splitting his split hairs. He is fastidious in his gibes, 
 gloating over his pinpricks of irony, but he is bored with his 
 simulations of emotion. He sees the absurdity latent in his 
 own opinions, and he can laugh at his friends as well as at his 
 foes. 
 
 His foible is superiority to foibles. His affectations are 
 those of the artist, the dilettante, the aristocrat. He prefers 
 to avert his eyes from his audience, and he would like to play 
 to a pit of sophists. He has a trick of rolling his eyes towards 
 the roof before an epigram, though sometimes he picks a 
 mot off his boots, at which he is fond of staring. His voice 
 is good in the lower register, but often it soars into a sour fal- 
 setto, and in pursuit of anger it is apt to crack. 
 
 He never fully clenches his fist. He merely bends his 
 long fingers back to the palm, and lays his long thumb gently 
 along the forefinger. He is a half-clenched man. He hates 
 to be downright, forthright, outright. He dotes upon ambiguity 
 and casuistry. He delights in syllogisms and labyrinthine 
 dialectical displays. He has a sure instinct of evasion and 
 a deceptive air of candour. He can stoop to claptrap and 
 fustian and empty rhetoric in order to stuff out the conven-
 
 A STUDY IN VELVET 203 
 
 tional oration. He waits artistically for applause and sips 
 water during the cheers. He can be artfully naif, and his 
 injured innocence is admirable. He is a stickler for deport- 
 ment and a purist in style. He has magnanimity and toler- 
 ance and he delivers himself like a man of this world. His 
 perorations are artificial, involved, meandering, unimpassioned. 
 He begins and ends very clumsily. His diction is good, though 
 he says "idear" for idea. He lives in an atmosphere of genial 
 condescension, and he regards enthusiasm as a vulgarity 
 practised by Irishmen and Nonconformists.
 
 A STUDY IN HOMESPUN 
 
 "WHAT is 'C.-B.' like?" Let us go to the Albert Hall 
 to-night and see for ourselves. One thing is certain he is 
 not like the portrait which hangs in the Illiberal mind a 
 fussy, feeble old fellow who is half-ogre, half-idiot, combining 
 the knavery of the knave with the foolery of the fool, the ma- 
 lignity of Machiavelli with the silliness of Simple Simon, 
 monster and nincompoop, bogey and buffoon, scourge and 
 scarecrow. 
 
 Let us see the man with our own eyes, forgetting the eulo- 
 gies of eulogists and the detraction of detractors. As he walks 
 past his brand-new Cabinet Ministers a thunderstorm of cheers 
 breaks over his grey head. He is neither elate nor aloof. 
 Where are his horns and arrow-headed tail? Alack, he is 
 neither a demigod nor a demidevil. As he stands up on the 
 right of the British water-bottle he looks the incarnation of 
 British homeliness. A homely body with a homely face, homely 
 physique, homely voice, homely eyes, homely smile, homely 
 gestures, homely manner, homely phrases the acme and 
 culmination of homeliness. "Home, Sweet Home" on its 
 legs and talking with a Scotch accent. 
 
 The middle classes rule England. They make and break 
 our Governments. We are a middle-class republic disguised 
 as a monarchy, just as France is a middle-class monarchy 
 disguised as a republic. M. Loubet is a French "C.-B." 
 and "C.-B." is a British Loubet. The bourgeoisie is the 
 modern state. It is composed of men who oscillate between 
 reform and reaction, between democracy and aristocracy. 
 It is the pendulum of the social clock. 
 
 The secret of "C.-B." is this. He is the middleman of 
 
 the middle class. The Albert Hall is a middle-class congress. 
 
 204
 
 A STUDY IN HOMESPUN 205 
 
 As I look from arena to balcony, from balcony to gallery, I 
 find it hard to say where the middle class ends and the work- 
 ing class begins. They overlap. Every workman carries 
 a frock coat in his tool-bag. His social ideal is middle-class 
 respectability. The frock coat, the starched shirt, and the 
 top hat are his ambitions. He is a homely dreamer who dreams 
 of a homely home. That is why "C.-B." pleases him. 
 
 The passions of the middle classes are not spectacular. 
 They are homely passions. Superior beings sneer at them, 
 just as they sneer at "C.-B." But homeliness wears well. 
 The frock coat is tougher than armour, the shirt front is stronger 
 than a steel breastplate, and the top hat more invincible than 
 a sword-proof casque. 
 
 Unheroically heroic is the middle-class temper. Chivalry 
 is its business. It does fine things in a humdrum way. It is 
 paradox disguised as platitude. Look at the man who has 
 stricken with terror the legions of his enemies. He is elabo- 
 rately unpicturesque. Where are the gestures of the victor 
 who has marched through deserts of derision? Where are 
 the self-conscious arts of the orator? Where is the pose of 
 power? He has no gestures, no arts, no pose. He is all 
 homespun homeliness. His personality is a scheme of neutral 
 tints. No flamboyancy. No orchidaceousness. No bragga- 
 docio. No florid sentiment. No hysteria. Nothing but 
 linsey-woolsey simplicity, drab integrity, grey honesty. 
 
 "C.-B." is the cartoonist's despair. How can you cari- 
 cature a man who has no angles, no corners, no eccentricities? 
 He eludes you. His good humour baffles you. His genial 
 rotundity is unseizable. Mr. Chamberlain's lean and hungry 
 physiognomy silhouettes itself against any background. 
 "C.-B.'s" features are jovially averaged. They blend in 
 jolly curves and convexes, converging into the homely smile 
 that plays round the homely moustache. It is a peace-and- 
 good-will Christmas face, void of malice, smallness, meanness. 
 It is a neat face, compact, orderly arranged, the grey hair 
 cropped close, the moustache sprucely trimmed: the face of 
 a British man of business. The nose is fine, small, nervous,
 
 206 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 sensitive a Celtic nose, hinting at hot temper and quick 
 emotion. But the dominant features are the square, strong, 
 sharp, outjutting brows, under which, like torches in a cave, glow 
 far-sunken dark eyes, alive with unflickering fire that reveals 
 the hidden passion and the veiled romance of the man behind. 
 "C.-B.'s" photographs are all full-face, not in profile. That 
 is why they fail to present the real "C.-B." whose side-face 
 bristles with saliences of character. The forehead is trench- 
 antly massive, suggesting the obstinate spirit that looks out 
 of the humorous eyes. The nostrils are delicately carved, 
 and the deep furrow, ploughed from nose to lip and lip to jaw, 
 indicates the wilfulness under the amiable suavity of his fea- 
 tures. His will is strong, but it acts through persuasion rather 
 than aggression. It is the diplomatic will that concentrates 
 on essentials and melts resistance in detail as the sun melts 
 an iceberg. The profile of the head is long. "C.-B." is 
 long-headed, prudent, patient, imperturbable. He has staying 
 power. He can wait. His calm fortitude is very British. 
 He does not waste his nerves on futile violences. He is taci- 
 turn, knowing the virtue of silence. He abhors ostentation. 
 He is not greatly moved by applause or execration. He can 
 discount both. He is incapable of rancour or venom. He 
 is an optimist, apt to think well of the world. He is a lovable 
 man, full of sentiment and sensibility. His good humour 
 is inexhaustible. He has the Scottish gift of distinguishing 
 between measures and men, between principles and partisans. 
 His conscience is forthright. He sees straight to the heart of 
 things, and is free from refinements and casuistries. 
 
 His balanced judgment is shown by the absence of abrupt 
 contrasts in his features. He is slow in counsel. He likes 
 time to deliberate. He is not easily hustled, and an awkward 
 man to bully. He makes up his mind cautiously, and he 
 changes it reluctantly. He delights in the golden mean and the 
 golden rule. Moderation is his foible. He would be the 
 Mirabeau of a revolution. He lacks pugnacity, and loves the 
 quiet life. He is no demagogue. He could face a mob, but 
 he could not lead one. He is no rhetorician. He does not
 
 A STUDY IN HOMESPUN 207 
 
 simulate emotions. He loves an understatement, and glories 
 in conciliation. Hence his gift of generalship. He is un- 
 selfish, empty of envy, and has craft without craftiness. He 
 disdains the wiles of popularity. His simple candour looks 
 like naivete, and his lack of artifice like artlessness. But his 
 plain tale tells, and his veracity outlasts mendacity. His use 
 of truth is direct. He wields it like Ithuriel's spear against 
 the sophist. 
 
 U C.-B." is no cynic. He has simple faith in simple things 
 and simple men. He knows right when he sees it, and when 
 he sees it he cleaves to it in scorn of consequence. He cannot 
 tack or trim, quibble or equivocate. He is proof against both 
 bluff and blandishment, cajolery and coercion. He has mulish- 
 ness in his good nature. Now and then his lower jaw is thrust 
 out and his lower lip clenched over his upper lip, revealing 
 a native resolution undauntable and immovable when provoked. 
 He shines in adversity and fights best with -his back to 
 the wall. No tonguester, his oratory is character, seasoned 
 with dry humour and racy phrase. His best speech is him- 
 self. He is the simple life of politics. He spells rest after 
 delirium, repose after turmoil, peace after war, reality after 
 sham, wisdom after waste, and stability after storm. He is 
 a sedative and a tonic for a neurotic time.
 
 A NIGHT WITH BURNS 
 
 WHERE is the General Election? That is the question 
 which dwellers in the West End of London are asking. It is 
 in the newspapers, but elsewhere it is invisible. London is 
 so large that a General Election loses itself. How can I find 
 it ? It is like hunting for a pin in the Sahara. 
 
 But I am determined to discover the General Election. 
 I want to get nearer to it than the tape-machines. What mys- 
 terious force is driving those fussy little wheels that whizz and 
 wheeze out white ribbons lettered with victory and disaster? 
 Let us track it down. Let us surprise the democracy that is 
 making another new heaven and another new earth. 
 
 Where? In Battersea. I step into the train at Victoria. 
 Leaving behind the world of palaces and pleasure-houses, 
 I alight at Battersea Park. The night is wild with rain and 
 wind. There are no hansoms. But there are Council trams, 
 and for a halfpenny I am carried swiftly to Latchmere Road. 
 Thence through the deluge along dark streets, under railway 
 bridges, to Clapham Junction. Everywhere are silent groups 
 of men and women, huddling in doorways, against walls, under 
 arches. They are waiting for the declaration of the poll. 
 At the Town Hall a dumb multitude is standing patiently under 
 the drumming downpour. Their silence is eloquently tense. 
 It is rainproof. It is a disciplined crowd, its front ranks beau- 
 tifully dressed by hundreds of policemen whose heavy leathern 
 capes glisten moistly in the white electric glare. Acres of pale 
 faces are turned towards the lighted windows behind which 
 the votes are being counted. There is no horseplay, no row- 
 dyism, no jostling, no disorder. Labour is a gentleman. 
 
 The spacious vestibule of the Town Hall, behind its well- 
 guarded doors, buzzes with chatter like the Lobby at West- 
 
 208
 
 A NIGHT WITH BURNS 209 
 
 minster. There are journalists, election agents, committee 
 men, canvassers with party rosettes in their coats. The rival 
 candidates for Clapham are talking to each other genially. 
 It is a far cry to Eatanswill. Horatio Fizkin does not shake 
 his fist in the countenance of the Honourable Samuel Slumkey, 
 nor does Mr. Slumkey defy Mr. Fizkin to mortal combat. 
 All is cold decorum. The minutes limp by lamely. Nine 
 o'clock. Ten o'clock. Outside the crowd grows and grows, 
 despite the endless rods of rain. The round oes of faces waver 
 like a sea of living ciphers, noughts of flesh drawn on the black- 
 board of night, surging to right and left like a diagram, blotting 
 out the broad street, clogging the crawling trams, and fading 
 in the opaque distance into a blur of humanity. Twenty 
 thousand men and women, waiting, waiting, waiting in the 
 rain. I begin to think I have discovered the General Election. 
 At last a short, square-shouldered man, with white ribbons 
 flying from his buttonhole, dashes down the broad staircase, 
 vanishes, reappears, and leaps lightly up the steps again, taking 
 them three at a time with the springy agility of a deer. It 
 is John Burns. His majority is over a thousand. The whis- 
 pered rumour runs like wildfire through the lobby. The 
 minutes crawl. What is that? A cheer upstairs. In a flash 
 the lobbyful of waiting men rushes past the janitor, dashes up 
 the staircase, bursts into the room where the votes have been 
 counted, and struggles madly over the desks and benches 
 towards the balcony, which is now crowded with mayor, town 
 clerk, candidates, officials, local politicians, and pressmen. On 
 an illuminated transparency the one word " Burns" is displayed, 
 and as if a button had been pressed the silent crowd turns into 
 artillery and thunders out a straight volley of iron sound. Its 
 "attack" is instantaneous, without a ragged edge. This clear 
 explosion, issuing from twenty thousand throats, does not die 
 or dwindle. The sonorous note is held. It moves through a 
 long, level space of time, neither waning nor waxing in volume. 
 The pitch is high, but not shrill, and it does not flatten. It 
 is perfectly fused, the ringing music of one vast voice made 
 out of myriads. As it rushes past the ear-drum it seems to 
 14
 
 210 
 
 become a visible, ponderous, touchable thing, having colour 
 and shape and breathing life, sweeping through the darkness. 
 It is the soul of the crowd streaming in sound across the sky, 
 charged with electric emotions, joy, pride, exultation, glory, 
 ecstasy, triumph, defiance, hope, devotion, love, hate, and 
 whatsoever moves the deep heart of man in the passion of vic- 
 tory. It is a song without words, the marching-song of democ- 
 racy, the hymn of man, beside which poetry and music are pale 
 stammerings. . 
 
 The shout beats upon a worn, grey, pock-marked face whose 
 eyes blaze with personal fire. Leaning out over the balcony 
 John Burns faces the proletarian music. The blown flare of 
 Roman candles picks out the hollows in his features and sil- 
 houettes his vehement profile against the dark stentorian masses 
 below and beyond. Only a Rodin could carve the immobile 
 speed of his poised head, its passionate angles cutting the air, 
 every line alive with passion tenser than the cheering passion 
 at his feet. The wind tosses his thinning grey locks, as he 
 vainly strives to still the storm of voices. 
 
 Let me try to hew out a rude portrait before the acclama- 
 tions let go their grip. The head is grandly built, the fore- 
 head daringly valiant in its forward thrust; the rough, curved 
 black eyebrows are smudged with grey, and the fierce, incisive 
 grey moustache and beard are smudged with black. The 
 masculine power of the man is seen in the shaggy hair covering 
 throat and cheek and chin up to the delicate line of the vividly 
 scarlet lower lip. He is an Esau. The dark, poignant eyes 
 flame in deep, sombre sockets. The nose is vigorously broad 
 yet nervously sensitive, the nostrils finely attenuated and alert. 
 Deep chest, heavy shoulders, powerful hands. The body 
 symmetrical, elastic, graceful, eagerly fluent in its posture, 
 every limb and muscle playing athletically under the neat blue 
 serge. Quick on his feet as a pugilist, he looks courage in- 
 carnate, audacious flesh drained clean of corrupting passions, 
 violently ascetic, glowingly austere. 
 
 "O-r-der-r!" The hoarsely resonant voice cuts through 
 the cheers like a sword. "Silence!" He speaks; the crowd
 
 A NIGHT WITH BURNS 211 
 
 hangs on his lips. His words ring out like iron bells, old 
 battles colouring their clang, crying the worn cry of a worn 
 man whose soul is still boyishly adventurous. Then he darts 
 back, dashes down the stairs, and flings himself into the arms 
 of Battersea. Two of the old guard, "Soldier Collins" and a 
 bricklayer, pounce upon him like tigers. They have carried 
 him through ten victories. The line of police parts. He is 
 submerged in the crowd for a second; then he is hoisted on 
 their shoulders and swept tumultuously away like a cork tossed 
 upon a raging sea. Riding the human billows like a sea-gull, 
 he vanishes down the Latchmere Road. 
 
 As the crowd rolls after him, I sigh a deep sigh of content. 
 I have discovered the General Election.
 
 WILL CROOKS 
 
 THE big hand of the clock above the tall gates of Wool- 
 wich Arsenal is moving towards one. That big hand controls 
 the lives of sixteen thousand men. It is the very fate of Wool- 
 wich. As I stand in Beresford Square watching it creeping 
 from minute to minute, I see the families in a thousand mean 
 houses in a hundred mean streets. They revolve with its 
 revolutions. On one side of the clock the women and chil- 
 dren: on the other side the men. It is the clock of toil. I 
 wish our poets would cease troping tropes about the sun and 
 the moon, and sing the romance of the industrial clock that 
 measures out life and death to the people, dividing their nights 
 and their days, their sleep and their labour, their joys and their 
 sorrows. Its inexorable visage is a silent symbol of the social 
 fate that blesses and blights with vast impersonal impartiality. 
 Doom crawls on its dial. It registers the decrees of the tyr- 
 anny behind all the tyrannies, the tyranny of economic law. 
 
 The piston-thrust of the General Election is audible in 
 Beresford Square. Here the shams and shibboleths of politics 
 turn into grim realities. Men are fighting for life. Clothes 
 for the back, boots for the feet, bread for the belly that is 
 the politics of Woolwich. This bare square is a labour parade- 
 ground. Life here is food. Round the square are eating- 
 shops and stalls. The army of labour marches on its belly. 
 
 Against the kerbstone on one side of the square a van is 
 drawn up. It is Will Crooks's platform, the labour general's 
 war-wagon. His lieutenants are waiting for him, Mrs. Crooks 
 at their head. No general could have a better aide-de-camp. 
 Buxom, clear-eyed, alert, she looks every inch a workwoman, 
 incisive vigour shining in her strong, kindly, homely face. 
 
 212
 
 WILL CROOKS 213 
 
 She is dressed with simple propriety: plain black hat, bright- 
 ened with pale blue ribbon; plain black coat and skirt; her ca- 
 pable hands grasp a plain black bag. No jewelry save her 
 wedding ring and its "keeper." A splendid woman, she in- 
 carnates the English home. Behind her I see the women of 
 England, the host of humble washers, bakers, menders, the 
 heroines of obscure rescues, the Grace Darlings of poverty. 
 
 It is one o'clock. The Arsenal vomits the lava of labour. 
 The wives meet the husbands. They have brought the food 
 to the gates so that the men may spend the dinner hour round 
 the van in the square. A huge multitude rolls forward and 
 eats while it waits. There is a shout, "Here he is!" Cheers. 
 Then, like a Jack-in-the-Box, a fierce, dark, rugged face is 
 shot up above the capped heads. It is Will Crooks. 
 
 He is like a shaggy Highland bull. He has a bull-head, 
 bull-shoulders, bull-chest, bull-body. A square rock of a man, 
 with no jelly in him. Planted firmly on his feet, he seems 
 rooted in Woolwich as immovably as the Arsenal, the very 
 mould and model of a labour leader. There is that behind his 
 piercing eyes which compels respect, the energy of will work- 
 ing in a simple mind. 
 
 A stormy face, weather-worn, scarred with battle. Be- 
 tween the black, bristling, bushy eyebrows are two deep, 
 vertical trenches. Dug across the broad, massive brow scowl 
 row on row of wrinkles. There are crow's feet round the 
 humorous, vigilant eyes, and two furrows plunge downward 
 from the precipitous nose, which is very strong and stern. 
 The swarthy skin gleams in its frame of violent black hair and 
 moustache and greying beard. The head is large, heavy, 
 almost sullen. It is furiously vehement in its gestures, aggres- 
 sively combative even in immobility. The large-lobed ear is 
 resolute in every curve of its powerful modelling. The short, 
 hirsute neck is pugnacious. The angular shoulders are jammed 
 like rocks upon the deep chest. The big, punishing hands are 
 solidly masculine, the fingers broad to the nails. The man is 
 all male strength. His physique is coarsely stalwart, all com- 
 pression and concentration, as if he had been forged in an
 
 214 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 iron-foundry, tempered in a furnace, beaten together with 
 steam-hammers, and riveted into a stockish virility. 
 
 His clothes are decent black, roughly neat. His linen is 
 spotless, the shirt-cuffs fastened with plain links. Shake- 
 speare collar, blue knotted tie, sprinkled with white horseshoes. 
 The soft black felt hat sits easily on the head. The whole 
 man is one piece of masculine symmetry taken straight out 
 of the people, a rough lump of democracy. He is London 
 to the marrow. His harsh voice is London articulate. It 
 is a 'bus-driver, cabby, costermonger voice. It is the pave- 
 ment crying aloud. It is brutally direct, rudely explosive. 
 It detonates. It rips and tears. It drops like bricks. It 
 bellows, thunders, growls. It comes through a speech without 
 an aitch, and the vowels are a pure cockney brogue. I 
 like all brogues. But the ripe, fruity cockney brogue is the 
 most delectable of them all. 
 
 Mr. Crooks is a cockney humorist. He fills Beresford 
 Square with laughter. His humour is broad, shrewd, genial. 
 He is a born mimic. Hear him parodying the accent of the 
 'Randlord'. ("'Shun! De Union Shack" is de most budivul 
 gommershal asshet in de world. God shave de King!'") 
 He revels in mellow irony. He chaffs the Unionist candidate 
 with boisterous ridicule. He does not take "The Major" 
 seriously. The Major's name is William Augustus Adams. 
 He has nicknamed him "Bill Adams." 
 
 Will is as ready in retort as a 'busman. He stops in the 
 middle of his speech and points to an empty hearse passing 
 on the fringe of the meeting. The crowd looks round. Will 
 puts both hands up to his mouth and halloos to the driver: 
 "Hi! You'll find him up there! Bury him decently, will 
 yer?" The crowd smiles one vast smile, guffaws one great 
 guffaw. 
 
 Will's pet targets are 'Randlords' and Army contractors. 
 He keeps the square roaring with tales of jampots weighing 
 twelve ounces to the pound ; of remounts called chargers " the 
 only charger was the man who got the money for 'em"; of 
 invalid wine brought back to be auctioned "Tommy 'done'
 
 WILL CROOKS 215 
 
 in South Africa, and somebody making a red nose at home"; 
 of 100 mules "thirty-one lost, sixty-nine never found, but 
 all paid for." 
 
 Mr. Crooks loves to heckle the heckler. His wit flashes 
 like lightning. Glasses on nose, he reads question after 
 question, answering each with brilliant brevity. "Favour of 
 Women's Suffrage?" "Yus!" "Will a tax on ground values 
 raise house-rent?" "We'll watch it don't!" "Favour of 
 married schoolmistresses?" "Wouldn't ye rather have a 
 decent married woman to look after your kids than a silly 
 girl?" Thus, with homely humour, Will Crooks woos Wool- 
 wich. The hand of the clock points to ten minutes to two. 
 The clang of a bell is heard. Will stops short and sharp. 
 There is a cheer, and like magic the whole crowd rushes through 
 the gates.
 
 THE WONDERFUL WINSTON 
 
 I AM more keenly interested in personality than politics, 
 and therefore I am more heartily interested in Mr. Winston 
 Churchill than in many other politicians. There are many 
 clever men in the House of Commons, but not one of them 
 stings you with the romantic excitement of adventurous am- 
 bition. It is an age of ability, rather than an age of genius. 
 Most of the flaming figures are past the climacteric of peril. 
 Mr. Churchill alone tingles with a dramatic future. 
 
 It is a curious fact that some of the youngest men in the 
 House are the oldest. Surprise is not latent in them as it is 
 latent in Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Churchill. Unhappily Mr. 
 Chamberlain's peau de chagrin is shrunken. Mr. Churchill's 
 has not yet begun to shrink. There is nothing much more 
 certain than that if he lives he will be Prime Minister. 
 
 This afternoon he is the cynosure of Westminster as he 
 unfolds the Constitution of the Transvaal. A few years ago 
 he was a prisoner in Pretoria. To-day he is outlining the 
 Magna Charta of his gaolers. The antithesis is violent, but 
 his career bristles with antitheses. A Tory yesterday, he is 
 a Liberal to-day, leading his former antagonists against his 
 former comrades. Like Gladstone and Chamberlain, he is 
 an inspired opportunist, whose luck is a kind of inconsistency, 
 and whose inconsistency is a kind of luck. He has a firm 
 grip of Fortune's forelock. Did she not once appear to him 
 in the guise of a vulture? 
 
 Statesmen are born as well as made. He is both. The 
 orotund maturity of his new Parliamentary manner is absolute. 
 He has more than style. He has the grand style. What other 
 men acquire after decades of toil he has acquired by a move- 
 ment of the imagination. He has that ductility of genius 
 
 216
 
 THE WONDERFUL WINSTON 217 
 
 which is a creative art. He is what he imagines himself to 
 be. Like all great orators, he is a consummate actor with 
 a perfect mastery over his flesh. Others see him as he sees 
 himself. You may call it hypnotism or magnetism or what 
 you will, but in essence it is purely the power to impose upon 
 others the self-painted portrait. A man is always taken at 
 his own valuation. 
 
 Clothes are the man, and Mr. Churchill dresses his part. 
 He wears the hideous uniform of the middle-aged British 
 statesman. He eschews dandyism. His frock coat is se- 
 verely pompous and his black cravat is gravely austere. His 
 collar is solemnly respectable, and its vast ears are beginning 
 to glory in the Gladstonian tradition. He begs a humble 
 colleague to fetch him a glass of water like an old parliamentary 
 hand. His mien is not merely important: it is majestic. Sir 
 William Harcourt himself in his ripest fame did not wheel 
 round to invoke the cheers of his legions with more splendid 
 assurance. Even Gladstone did not launch a more piercing 
 glance of challenge at the Leader of the Opposition. Nor was 
 Disraeli less burdened with superfluous modesty or exagger- 
 ated diffidence. His superb aplomb is native, not assumed. 
 He has the gift of spontaneous superiority, and natural domi- 
 nation. He can patronise bald veterans without an effort, 
 and accept silver-haired homage without a smile. He groups 
 famous men round his eloquence as if he were inured to adu- 
 lation, and yet he is always greater than his setting. The 
 very Sergeant-at-Arms becomes his acolyte, and the Mace 
 his sceptre. He even contrives with a delicate flicker of his 
 cold blue eye to suggest that the Speaker is not, like himself, 
 a survival of the fittest, and the House laughs with scandalised 
 awe at the audacity of an innuendo which is only a gesture. 
 
 His physique is that of a neurotic athlete. He is all nerves 
 and vigour. His frame is as lean and lithe as Mr. Cham- 
 berlain's, with something of the same impassioned intensity 
 of vigilance and sharp alertness of ear and eye. But it is 
 prematurely bent and bowed, and the square, ugly shoulders 
 tell a tale of laborious hours, which is confirmed by the thinned
 
 218 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 brown hair, the bald brow and temples, the wide parting, and 
 the white patch on the crown. The face, too, has shaken off 
 the hesitating contours of youth, and settled itself into a granite 
 fixity. It is a square face, all battlemented brows and walled 
 jaws, heavy angles and salients, with a portcullis mouth, and 
 a nose like a tower. When the hard mouth melts into a hu- 
 morous smile the lovable boyish side of his nature is visible. 
 But this is rare. 
 
 His voice is erratic. He lisps over every sibilant, and I 
 am sure he could not say "Shibboleth." His lisp is part of 
 his neurotic temperament. It will be known as the Winston 
 lisp, like the Gladstone collar, the Disraeli curl, and the Cham- 
 berlain eyeglass. He also possesses a fine stammer. The 
 Winston stammer will be popular. But not every stripling 
 can lisp himself into notoriety and stutter himself into fame. 
 
 The nervous passion of the man is visible not only in his 
 neurotic hair, in his neurotic lisp, and in his neurotic stam- 
 mer. It plays in his neurotic hands. I used to go to see Duse 
 solely for the pleasure of watching her beautiful hands. This 
 afternoon I watch the nervous hands of our young Chatham. 
 I forget the cascade of oratory that is tumbling out of his 
 mouth as I look down on the dramatic fingering of his fingers. 
 They are long, thin, white, supple, restless tentacles. They 
 coil round each other in an interlaced passion. They flicker 
 in the air, flinging electrical metaphors over the absorbed 
 faces that are fixed in an enchanted silence. They are the 
 fingers of a violinist, and they seem to draw music out of the 
 six hundred human strings of Westminster. Now they caress 
 and cajole, now they close in sudden menace, now they throttle 
 and strangle, now they mock and deride. It may be fantasy, 
 but it seems at times that these subtle fingers sweep over the 
 spellbound Parliament as the fingers of a lyrist sweep over a 
 lyre. 
 
 But stranger than neurotic hair, neurotic lisp, neurotic 
 stammer, neurotic fingers, is the neurotic flesh. Life has 
 drained it of colour, and left it a dead, cadaverous white. Its 
 waxen pallor is ghostly in the sad neutral light, but behind
 
 THE WONDERFUL WINSTON 219 
 
 the bloodless parchment glows a steady radiance of impas- 
 sioned energy, like fire in a bladder. This luminous strength 
 flames in the tired face. It is more than will and intellect. 
 It is lambent imagination leaping along the nerves into the 
 mobile features. It is a conflagration of personality, the 
 soul in action, a spiritual thunderstorm, a charged cloud stab- 
 bing the Parliamentary sky with electric flashes. Members 
 and Ministers, peers and journalists, financiers and ambas- 
 sadors, lawyers and soldiers, rigidly watch the brilliant ful- 
 gurations flame and fade. And by a prank of irony I find my 
 eye fixed upon the gold stud that fastens the back of the rhet- 
 orician's collar to his shirt. It seems to knot and knit the 
 dramatic scene into unity. The last time I saw Gladstone 
 was on that fateful night when he threw down his gauntlet 
 for the last time to the House of Lords. The only thing that 
 stuck in my memory was the black silk bows on his evening 
 pumps. So this afternoon I go away brooding over the untidy 
 collar-stud on the nape of Winston Churchill's neck.
 
 THE GAME OF BOWLES 
 
 TIME: 4 P.M. Place: the Cusack Institute, Moorfields, 
 E.G. Business: a meeting of City Electors to hear the Free 
 Trade candidate, Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, otherwise 
 known as "Tommy." The room is small not larger than the 
 stage of His Majesty's Theatre. As the electors file in the scene 
 resembles the public meeting in "The Enemy of the People." 
 There is the platform with its desk, a chair for the chairman, 
 and a chair for the candidate. The front row of seats is re- 
 served for the committee by the expedient of piling one chair 
 upside down on another. As the room fills newcomers pick 
 up these chairs, reverse them, and sit on them. A fussy little 
 man then appears, and dislodges the intruders. After arguing 
 awhile the intruder invariably yields. But as soon as the 
 fussy little man turns his back the chairs are again captured 
 \)y fresh arrivals, and the same comedy is enacted. We all smile 
 at this farce of discomfiture, and note the various forms it 
 assumes. I suppose twenty City electors lose their seats in 
 ten minutes. It is like a miniature General Election. 
 
 Now we are sardined into every corner. We gasp for air, 
 and there is a cry for open windows. Cords are pulled, and 
 windows drop down, and we breathe more freely. In the street 
 workmen are hammering something very dangerously. The 
 noise of traffic floats in, with now and then a newsboy's cry. 
 But we are a ver_y quiet, respectable box of sardines, most of 
 us silk-hatted, some of us grey-bearded, a few of us bald; 
 prosperous merchants in the main, comfortably clad, with dia- 
 mond pins, signet rings, fur coats, and gold-rimmed spectacles. 
 Presently there is a rattle of cheers outside, and through the 
 crowd at the narrow doorway, a tiny, meagre man appears, 
 convoyed by a tall fat man the Candidate and his Chairman. 
 
 220
 
 THE GAME OF BOWLES 
 
 What could we do without the Chairman ? The quality of 
 Chairmanship is British. No other race can breed it. Bald 
 obesity is not enough. Nor is prosperous stolidity. Nor is 
 conventionality. These things are important. But they are 
 as sounding brass without the one virtue which makes a perfect 
 Chairman Respectability. 
 
 Well, we have a perfect Chairman this afternoon. The 
 good electors beam on him as he utters the immemorial Chair- 
 manities. During his "remarks" we all crane our necks to 
 see "Tommy." But he has vanished behind the desk. Per- 
 haps he is under the Chairman's hat. Breathlessly we watch, 
 as an audience watches a conjurer, for the apocalypse of the 
 fiery pea. The Chairman sits down. A large voice is heard. 
 "Tommy" is up, but we cannot see him. There are cries of 
 "Take off your hat!" The hats are removed, and we see a 
 little man, looking like a lively marionette buttoned up tight 
 in a creaseless frock coat. But the little man has a big heart 
 and a big voice. He has tons of dignity in his coldly vigilant 
 eye. The dark Gladstone eye was terrible. The blue Kitch- 
 ener eye is appalling. But the steel-grey eye of "Tommy" 
 is petrifying. 
 
 It is hard to describe "Tommy's" eye. It is vulturine. 
 It swivels swiftly. It darts fire. It has no pity in its fierce 
 pupil. Just such an eye may be seen at the Zoo in an old bald 
 sea-eagle, disdainfully surveying a Bank Holiday mob. The 
 hard, bitter, remorseless soul of the man looks out of this 
 hard, bitter, remorseless orb. It is the eye of the born ravager. 
 It glitters with fury. The rest of the man is iron impassivity. 
 His face is as emotionless as a twelve-inch gun. But his eye 
 is bright with battle, and its sharp intensity makes you shiver, 
 for you can see the steel-pointed soul behind it, glittering 
 like a bayonet, ready to plunge itself into the breast of the 
 enemy. 
 
 This unblinking eye is set in horn, not flesh. It is en- 
 cased in wrinkled eyelids that roughen its menace. They are 
 like shards. The under lids are extraordinary. They bulge 
 in tough pouches that curve into violent V's on the cheek-bone.
 
 222 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 They are like inverted accents, imparting an indescribable 
 ferocity to the glance of the eye. It would be impossible to 
 caricature them. They are themselves a caricature. The 
 caricaturists always caricature "Tommy" in profile. That 
 is a mistake. He has a mild, meek, bland, deprecating pro- 
 file. It is in his full face that his truculent vehemence blazes. 
 The head is ridiculously small. The forehead is neither high 
 nor broad. But the features are all audaciously enormous. 
 There are great, writhing, horizontal trenches in his brow, and 
 the thin eyebrows are pugnaciously twisted into the temples. 
 The nose, delicate on the bridge, spreads out like a bludgeon 
 at the tip, and the great nostrils are violently indented above 
 the violent moustache. 
 
 If "Tommy" were not all eye, he would be all moustache. 
 Here, again, the caricaturists err, for in profile the moustache 
 curves in a debonair droop, but in front it is a hairy explosion, 
 all redhot wires paling into grey. The small impetuous chin 
 is sharply carved. The large ears are fixed flat to the compact 
 head. The little, lean, nervous, wiry body is made of steel 
 springs from the straight, square shoulders to the small, dainty 
 hands, and the midget boots. The whole man is like a live 
 bullet, all compressed energy and concentrated audacity. 
 
 Like most wits, his air is dreary, mournful, melancholy. 
 No mute could be more funereal. He muffles his jokes in crape. 
 He never smiles at his own epigrams. His mien is a frozen 
 desolation.
 
 THE DECAY OF ORATORY 
 
 THE orator is a picturesque but antiquated being. He be- 
 longs to the last century. He is now quite out of date. He 
 is being quietly stifled by the newspaper, just as the horse is 
 being quietly stifled by the motor-car. The other day I saw 
 a crowd in the street gaping at a dead horse. Some of these 
 days I expect to see a crowd gaping at a dead orator. I can 
 recall the time when all the newspapers printed verbatim 
 reports of political speeches. Now the tendency is to boil 
 down the orator and to feed the public on extract of eloquence. 
 Readers have grown fastidious. They do not care to graze over 
 acres of words. Oratory blights a newspaper. No ingenuity 
 can make a page of political babble look gay. Even the 
 "Times" cuts down Demosthenes and prunes Cicero. The 
 other afternoon I paid a visit to the Reporters' Gallery in the 
 House of Commons. I found its aspect curiously changed. 
 It was a big day. Mr. Birrell was about to bring in his 
 Irish Bill. I expected to find the Gallery seething with excite- 
 ment. I found it quite calm and cool. 
 
 There are still veterans in the Gallery, but I was astonished 
 to find that the average age of its occupants is greatly reduced. 
 There are more striplings and fewer patriarchs. The grand 
 manner is disappearing, and there is a subtle air of cynical 
 levity in the place. The Gallery is suffering a sea-change 
 like the House itself. It is affected by the slump in eloquence. 
 I think the austere attendant is shocked by the signs of deca- 
 dence. His solemn countenance is a protest against the new 
 fashions. He contemplated me with a jaundiced and sus- 
 picious eye, as if I were one of the iconoclasts who are con- 
 verting the sacred precinct to base uses. I trembled when I 
 met his reproving gaze. His features seemed to harden into 
 
 223
 
 224 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 contempt as he surveyed the interlopers who are breaking 
 down high traditions and trampling upon use and wont. 
 
 Mr. Birrell seemed to feel that oratory is hardly good 
 form in these days. He reminded me of what we call the 
 "natural" actor. He strove to keep down his feelings and to 
 avoid all unseemly emotion. He was almost gestureless. He 
 did not stand, like Gladstone, with every limb alive and tense. 
 He did not wheel and whirl passionately on his feet. His hands 
 and arms did not gyrate. His eye did not flash. His back 
 did not bend. He did not toss his head like a mettlesome 
 charger. He lolled and lounged on the brassbound box, a 
 staid study in black immobility. I was struck by Mr. BirrelPs 
 ebon air. He was wrapped to the chin in a tightly-buttoned 
 frock coat. Only a thin splash of white collar gleamed above 
 his black cravat. His head looked very huge as it rested low 
 down on his square shoulders. His grim, saturnine face was 
 curiously expressionless. It looked like a heavy mask. The 
 mouth never relaxed its tight severity. His voice also was 
 black, a kind of audible darkness. It pronounced his epi- 
 grams like type, and I felt as if I were reading a printed page. 
 He seemed to be writing with his lips. It was an odd sensation 
 the literary method without the literary medium. It was 
 as if a book were to begin to talk. I saw the quoted tags in 
 the air. I felt the hang of the sentences. Unconsciously, I 
 began to review him, and to mark the purple patches in my 
 mind. The incongruity was comical. Next day I chuckled 
 when I found one of his stalest quotations mangled "remote, 
 unfriendly, melancholy, slow." It was good to know that 
 somebody had tasted the pleasure of meeting that tag for the 
 first time. 
 
 Has anybody ever invented a notation for Parliamentary 
 oratory? Its rising and falling stresses are very definite. 
 They have no relation to the meaning or the mood of the orator. 
 It is hard to describe the thing, but it is a sort of false emphasis, 
 not unlike the lines in a "whip." Some of the expedients 
 of the old Parliamentary hand are amusing. At one point 
 in his speech Mr. Birrell desired to read a citation from some-
 
 THE DECAY OF ORATORY 225 
 
 body or other. He had mislaid it. He began to search for 
 it, and while he hunted among his papers, he deliberately 
 padded his phrases. You could see that his brain was doing 
 two things at once. It was extending his hand and picking 
 up papers and it was also keeping the ear of the House with 
 perfectly balanced but absolutely otiose sentences. It was a 
 charming feat of juggling, and for the life of me, I could not 
 help thinking of Cinquevalli and his cigar, his top hat, his 
 umbrella, and his gloves, all in the air together. Mr. Birrell 
 is an artist. He kept his speech in the right key from begin- 
 ning to end. It was a gun-spiking speech, all pacifist per- 
 suasiveness and wily disarmament. He did not inflate Mr. 
 Balfour. He deflated him. 
 
 I felt sorry for Mr. Balfour. He never tugged at his guy- 
 ropes. He could not soar. Mr. Birrell had quietly let out 
 all the gas. In some ways, Mr. Balfour is really, as he him- 
 self has confessed, a child. He cannot conceal his feelings. 
 He takes an unaffected pleasure in his own hits. He waits 
 till his followers rise at his points, and his delicate features 
 beam with gratification when a shaft goes home. He is one of 
 those speakers who openly enjoy their own good things. I 
 like to see a vain man who is not ashamed of his vanity. I hate 
 a man who masks his conceit. Mr. Balfour's pride is deliciously 
 ostentatious. He lets you see that he relishes his own clever- 
 ness. No doubt an inordinate self-approval has its perils. 
 Mr. Balfour would rather make a brilliant speech against his 
 own party than a vapid speech in favour of it. He would sac- 
 rifice his dearest friend to a bon mot. He prefers a subtle 
 fallacy to a tame truism. His dialectic is a disease. I have no 
 doubt he is sincere, but he carefully displays all the symptoms 
 of insincerity. When he sounds the note of passion it always 
 cracks. He is too clever to have vulgar convictions. Yet he 
 has one adoring worshipper. It is sweet to see Mr. Wynd- 
 ham's lustrous eyes rolling rapturously under the skirts of Mr* 
 Balfour's frock coat. 
 
 There is only one orator of the grand school left in the 
 House. Mr. Redmond has the old-fashioned organ-voice. 
 15
 
 226 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 His eloquence is Gladstonian. You feel it in your bones as 
 soon as he rises. His rhetorical stride is tremendous. He has 
 the gift of looking gigantic. He dwarfs the whole House. His 
 violent profile dominates the dishevelled benches. His vehement 
 nose [plunges into the flabby flesh of politicians like an eagle's 
 beak. He strikes his talons deep into the carcass of Parlia- 
 mentary unreality. In his rolling syllables there is the ring 
 of mastery. His dignity is superhuman. There is a mag- 
 nificent restraint in his coldly impassioned audacity. He is 
 like Ireland in one respect he knows what he wants. The 
 weakness of the modern politician is that he does not know 
 what he wants. The strength of Ireland is that she is never 
 in doubt about her soul. That is the secret of her amazing 
 power in the House of Commons. Mr. Redmond has caught 
 from her the accent of authority. He does not beg. He 
 demands. He does not cringe. He is free from the frailty 
 of gratitude. His eloquence is not ornate. He has no tricks 
 of voice or gesture. You feel the man behind the utterance, 
 and the nation behind the man. That is why he is an orator. 
 Oratory, like poetry, is simple, sensuous, passionate; and it is 
 because we have not the living fire of a simple, sensuous, and 
 passionate ideal that oratory is dying out. Politicians are 
 debaters. Patriots are orators.
 
 SPRING GARDENS 
 
 TRAFALGAR SQUARE. Nearly half-past two. As I pass 
 the lions that guard the waterproof capes of policemen I hear 
 them talking. 
 
 FIRST LION What's up in Spring Gardens? 
 
 SECOND LION It looks like a wedding. I saw two lords 
 going in just now. 
 
 FIRST LION There's George Alexander. It must be a 
 wedding. 
 
 THIRD LION You're a fool. It's the first meeting of the 
 new County Council. 
 
 SECOND LION How do you know ? 
 
 THIRD LION Will Crooks told me. He says they are going 
 to feed us on Canterbury lamb and Antwerp horse. No more 
 fresh joints. 
 
 GORDON I say, young man, give me a cigarette. . . . 
 Thanks. 
 
 Leaving the Christian hero blowing rings at Nelson, I 
 strolled into Spring Gardens. A man and a boy were watching 
 the arrivals. At the door of a dingy building I saw a man in 
 a gold-braided uniform. I boldly passed him and climbed 
 a meanly narrow staircase, the steps of which were sheeted 
 with zinc. At the end of a narrow corridor I found a carpeted 
 room. There I met a journalist, who told me that it was the 
 Lobby. From the walls fifteen portraits of Progressive chair- 
 men were gazing grimly at several smart young men with 
 glossy black hair brushed straight back without a parting. 
 
 "Who are these young men?" 
 
 "They are Municipal Reformers." 
 
 My friend leads me along a narrow passage, and, opening a 
 door, pushes me into the Press Gallery. Looking down, I 
 
 227
 
 228 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 see a small horseshoe-shaped chamber. Opposite is a public 
 gallery packed with ratepayers of both sexes. A round clock 
 ticks in its midriff. Rows of leather-cushioned seats run 
 round three sides of the horseshoe. Below me is the dais, a 
 platform bearing three rather ugly chairs with carved claws at 
 the ends of their arms. Before the dais is a table littered with 
 calf-bound books and official documents. Mr. Gomme, the 
 clerk, sits in the middle, flanked by his assistants. Mr. Gomme 
 is very like a professor, with his lank, dusty beard and his lank, 
 dusty hair. He has a plan of the Council Chamber before 
 him. One of his assistants is studying a set of newspaper 
 portraits of the new members. The officials must find it hard 
 to learn all the new faces. Why don't the Councillors wear 
 numbers like footballers ? It would be helpful. 
 
 Mr. Percy Harris, the new Chairman, having been elected 
 after a good deal of fuss, a glass door under the clock is opened, 
 and he emerges. He is very tall, and very spare, and very neat. 
 His features are extremely emaciated. He looks delicately 
 nervous. His chair seems a world too big for him. His 
 long, thin hands, with their long, thin, tapering fingers, trem- 
 ble as he signs a paper handed up to him by Mr. Gomme. 
 Then he delivers a fastidiously phrased speech, which he has 
 obviously learned by heart. It is full of those sonorously 
 benevolent but insincere politenesses with which Englishmen 
 love to lard each other. It is decorously applauded by both 
 sides. Then the vice-chairman is elected by the Moderates, 
 and the deputy-chairman by the Progressives. They solemnly 
 shake hands with the chairman, and solemnly sit down on his 
 right hand and his left. I begin to perceive that the Council 
 has evolved a hard, dry, punctilious ritual of its own. 
 
 Then, one by one, the Moderate aldermen emerge from 
 the glass door. As the door opens, one catches a glimpse of 
 a buffet laden with cake and bread and butter. It is the tea- 
 room. The whole scene is rather like a caricature of a paro- 
 chial Bumbledom. As each alderman advances, he is convoyed 
 by the handsome young Moderate whip, who is as exquisitely 
 groomed as the best man at a wedding. The alderman signs
 
 SPRING GARDENS 229 
 
 a paper, and is then solemnly escorted or pushed by the whips 
 round the dais to the chairman's right hand, which he solemnly 
 shakes. He is then solemnly conducted to his seat. Mr. 
 Brodrick and Mr. Hayes Fisher are lodged together against 
 the wall. Mr. Brodrick's fine teeth glitter frankly under his 
 tooth-brush moustache in a happy smile. Mr. Hayes Fisher 
 looks like a highly polished double of the Prince Consort. 
 When the two Progressive aldermen arrive, they solemnly 
 circulate round the dais in the reverse direction. Yes, the 
 Council has its ritual. Its procedure is very ably stage-man- 
 aged. Mr. George Alexander must feel quite at home, al- 
 though, for the first time in his life, he is not in the centre 
 of the stage. He looks very comely, with his silver-grey locks, 
 and his perfectly creased trousers. You could cut cheese 
 with his creases. I fear he is a little bored by the dingy debate 
 on receiving-houses for lunatics, by the controversy over a 
 site for a polytechnic, and by the fusty mysteries of the hous- 
 ing policy. At any rate, he goes off presently with a fair-haired 
 young gentleman to the tea-room. When he comes back, he 
 looks as if he felt the importance of being earnest. I idly 
 wonder whether he ate cake with his tea. 
 
 There is no lack of flamboyant personality in the new 
 Council. Sir Edwin Cornwall is a study in mournfully sleepy 
 vigilance. He is an exact double of Mr. Carl Meyer. Mr. 
 McKinnon Wood is pallidly and sombrely plump. Sir Mel- 
 vill Beachcroft looks like a cadaverous colonel. Sir John 
 Benn wrinkles his forehead very poignantly, trying hard to 
 recover from his amazement at the Moderate majority. Lord 
 Elcho is a magnificent marble dome. Lord Michelham is 
 elaborately stern. Captain Hemphill is a black moustache. 
 Mr. Gilbert is a bearded razor. The Reverend Scott Lidgett 
 is an incarnation of the Nonconformist conscience. Mr. Will 
 Crooks is sardonic labour, an arrangement in hirsute ebony. 
 Mr. Robinson is solid, grey, dull respectability. Mr. Ernest 
 Gray looks like a keen, curly black retriever. The Reverend 
 Stewart Headlam is a symphony in genial silver recalcitrance. 
 Mr. Nay lor is timidly uncomfortable in a sagging frock coat.
 
 230 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 But the dominant note of Spring Gardens is the Tea Room. 
 It yawns regularly. It distracts my attention from Mr. Sidney 
 Webb's suavely insinuating imperial and Sir Evan Spicer's 
 dulcetly snowy persuasiveness. It makes me feel that I am 
 in an A. B. C. or a Mecca. Instinctively I listen for the shuffle 
 of the dominoes and the clatter of the chess-boxes. As to 
 the debating, what strikes me is the dearth of rhetoric. The 
 speeches are pithily brief. The Council's motto seems to be, 
 "No flowers." There is no logorrhoea. It is like an unemo- 
 tional board meeting. When a Moderate indignantly protests 
 against being called a Moderate, he is tacitly ignored. The 
 Council is naively human, but it is also keenly fastidious. I 
 think the House of Commons responds more readily to bril- 
 liant claptrap and sparkling rhetoric. 
 
 It is not easy to analyse the personality of the Council, 
 but it is a sharply-marked personality. I think it hates fire- 
 works. It is cynically practical. Its ruling spirit is practical 
 business. It is ashamed of playing to the gallery. It is 
 more like a Parliamentary committee than a partisan arena. 
 It wrestles with cold facts rather than with hot opinions. It 
 respects a man who knows his subject. It does not tolerate 
 the mountebank. It reverences reality. It hates to waste 
 time. It despises the wordster and the tonguester. It is, 
 in short, a big committee rather than a Parliament. On the 
 wall to the right of the chair, hangs a huge map of London, 
 showing the tramway extension program for the coming year. 
 That map strikes the committee note. It seems to say, " Busi- 
 ness is business." Whatever party may be in power, the 
 Council hankers after its reputation as a body of business men. 
 The government of London is not a matter of sloppy sentiment. 
 It is hard, cold, dull, unemotional business. It is main drain- 
 age, trams, electric lighting, housing, parks, fire brigades, 
 water, gas, weights and measures, education, street improve- 
 ments, and rates. In spite of party duels, its bedrock is busi- 
 ness. And in the long run it is the business party which will 
 win. But which is the business party ?
 
 "AN ARMY WITH BANNERS" 
 
 I HAVE seen many processions. But they were all proces- 
 sions of men. On the Thirteenth of June, 1908, 1 saw a pro- 
 cession of women. It was more stately and more splendid 
 and more beautiful than any procession I ever saw. When 
 men march through the streets they carry huge banners with 
 ugly paintings on their glazed surface. The colours are vio- 
 lently crude. The portraits are hideous. A banner is a 
 lovely thing, but the banners borne by men are not lovely. 
 They are grotesque. The women have done what the men 
 have failed to do. They have revived the pomp and glory 
 of the procession. They have recreated the beauty of blown 
 silk and tossing embroidery. The procession that wound 
 like a gigantic serpent of a thousand hues from the Embank- 
 ment to the Albert Hall was a living miracle of gracious 
 pageantry. It was like a mediaeval festival, vivid with simple 
 grandeur, alive with an ancient dignity. 
 
 I saw it as it streamed across Trafalgar Square, a bright 
 river flowing between the banks of the jostling crowd. I think 
 the people were ready to scoff and jeer, but the flaming beauty 
 of the procession smote them into a reverent silence. Even 
 the grimy and greasy loafer with his evil, unshaven face was 
 abashed into a dull wonder as the head of the marching army 
 of women broke through the scuttling mob. The brave sim- 
 plicity of the sight struck a hush of awe into the cynical London 
 multitude. There in the front of the army walked a few quiet 
 women with a look of courage and confidence in their eyes. 
 The crowd instinctively felt the serene power of the idea in 
 their souls. The idea pierced the heavy imagination of the 
 people, wavering between curiosity and derision. In a mo- 
 ment the idea triumphed. One felt that the cause of woman- 
 
 231
 
 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 hood in that little space of time had surged over ridicule and 
 swept itself into acceptance and respect. 
 
 Marching six deep, the women moved quietly forward. 
 It was pathetic to see how many sorts of women were there, 
 shoulder to shoulder, massed in a splendid isolation of sex. 
 There were many grey-haired women, many sad-faced women, 
 many time-worn and life-worn women. But the dominant 
 note of the army was youth. The crowd stared at the bright 
 eyes and the bright hair and the rosy lips of the marching 
 maidens. The popular legend that all suffragists are either 
 old or ill-favoured crumbled away, as the flushed faces of girls 
 carrying banners and bandrols glided softly past in an un- 
 ending frieze, like the frieze on a tremendous tapestry wrought 
 by patient hands. The face of a woman is softer than the face 
 of a man, and as the crowd watched the soft faces swaying 
 like flowers under the glowing silk and the gleaming ribbons, 
 the heart of the crowd grew soft with involuntary pity for the 
 sharp pathos of the moving wall of gentle life. 
 
 Now and then the soft wistfulness of the womanly faces 
 was broken by the brazen music of brass instruments blown 
 by men. Somehow the pathos was deepened by the incon- 
 gruity of the bands. The martial sounds only served to throw 
 into relief the unwarlike aspect of those thousands of fragile 
 troops. The blood-red strains of the Marseillaise floated over 
 the line of fluttering feathers and tulle and chiffon and linen 
 and silk as the smoke of a steamer floats over its wake, but 
 the fierce sounds clashed with the peaceful appeal of the pro- 
 cession. They came out of the throat of the brutal past, 
 breathing war and violence, bloodshed and battle. The eyes 
 of the marching women were set on the fair future. They 
 looked forward to the clear day of peace and human fellowship. 
 The gay banners, emblazoned with wisdom and tolerance, 
 were not the gonfalons of a Joan of Arc, sworded and in arms. 
 They were the symbols of something stronger than physical 
 strength and mightfuller than weapons of war, the conquering 
 thought and the triumphing ideal. The names wrought upon 
 the delicate silk were the names of women whose power was the
 
 "AN ARMY WITH BANNERS" 233 
 
 power of the intellect and whose strength was the strength 
 of the soul. 
 
 As the wind wrestled with the frail banners borne by frail 
 hands, I began to feel the might of weakness and the strength 
 of simplicity. These women as they marched past, intermin- 
 ably gentle, suggested to my imagination the whole outlawed 
 nation of women, pale exiles of humanity, fragile serfs set in 
 the framework of freedom, patient helots held in the machinery 
 of citizenship. And in a flash I knew that no male barrier 
 could perpetuate their serfdom, their helotry, and their exile. 
 
 As the women doctors and graduates in their robes moved 
 by, their faces serene and grave under their black caps, over 
 their black and crimson gowns, I was stabbed by the ironic 
 injustice of their exclusion and ostracism. Tears started in 
 my eyes at the monstrous comedy of life and the terrible mock- 
 ery of civilisation. I thought of the unpaid debt the world 
 owes to the nation of women, of the undischarged obligations, 
 of the unliquidated liabilities. I realised that mankind is not 
 male, and that a state which is based solely upon male suffrage 
 is a caricature of the state of our dreams. I felt that men 
 ought to entreat women to co-operate with them in the high 
 task of making the world a nobler and holier and humaner 
 residence. It was with scorn that I contemplated the claim 
 of half the human race to usurp the government of the whole. 
 The slowness of progress stung me as I stood watching the out- 
 lawed sex marching past, and I wondered whether the wheels 
 of the chariot of life would not drag less heavily in the ruts of 
 convention if woman took her place in it beside man. 
 
 The little banners went on, beating bravely against the 
 breeze, the coloured patterns shone on their silken ground, and 
 I saw in them the beauty that is strength and the strength that 
 is beauty, the strength and the beauty of a dream.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT POVERTY
 
 THE THIN GREY LINE 
 
 IT was a bleak and bitter morning. The wind was blowing 
 in gusts down Holborn, and every gust was like the edge of a 
 razor made of blue ice. The chilly rain was full of needle- 
 points that seemed to puncture the skin. Everybody was in a 
 hurry, and everybody was miserable. The wind and the rain 
 were helping each other to torment the people on the pave- 
 ment who walked mournfully along, with bent heads, collars 
 turned up, and hands plunged deep in their pockets. The 
 wind blew umbrellas inside out, and the rain dripped from the 
 brims of hats, and crawled down the napes of necks. There 
 were icy puddles in the road, and you shuddered as the splashed 
 moisture struck your ankles. There were damp blotches on 
 the paper of your cigarette. 
 
 Along the pavement in front of the Prudential Building and 
 in front of Gamage's stood a closely packed row of men and 
 women. Their feet were rooted in the gutter, and their melan- 
 choly shoulders touched each other. You could not have put 
 a sheet of notepaper between their elbows. There they stood 
 and there they shivered, the doleful refugees who had been 
 exiled from Ludgate Hill. They had migrated to Holborn to 
 hold their Christmas Fair. They held before them wooden 
 trays filled with grotesque toys, garish trivialities upon which 
 the wind and the rain beat derisively, for the wind has no pity 
 and the rain has no compassion. 
 
 The Wind and the Rain are cynics. They gloat over the 
 woes of the weak and the pangs of the poor. They take an 
 evil delight in mocking the forlorn and the friendless. They 
 laugh at the sorrows of the desolate and the sighs of the desti- 
 tute. The Wind was very malicious as he romped up and 
 down the thin grey line of human misery. He chuckled as 
 
 237
 
 238 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 he blew his frozen breath through the tattered skirt and the 
 threadbare overcoat, and he gloated as he watched the stretched 
 skin quivering on the weary bones. "Come on," he hissed, 
 as he took the Rain by the arm, "let us charge down the line 
 again." The Rain grinned and leered. " Blow me, if I don't," 
 he growled, and away he went, fixing his dripping bayonets and 
 burying them in the sodden flesh of the outcasts. Down the 
 wretched line the demons swept merrily, and roared with 
 laughter as they felt the huddled abjects shuddering. 
 
 There were all sorts of pinched faces and all kinds of 
 twisted bodies in the thin grey line. Some of these faces were 
 very old and some were very young, but they were all unani- 
 mously despondent. Not one smile from Gray's Inn Road 
 to Holborn Circus! There was an old, old man, with white 
 hair and a long white beard. He was selling tiny magic bottles 
 that refused to lie down unless you knew the secret. For a 
 penny he would sell you a magic bottle and its magic secret, 
 but nobody desired either the bottle or the secret. Everybody 
 yearned for only one thing a warm shelter from the Wind 
 and the Rain. Everybody passed the old man, deaf to his 
 quavering cry. Poor old fellow ! He knew the secret of mak- 
 ing his bottles to lie down, but he had not discovered the secret 
 of lying down himself. Nay, he did not wish to lie down. 
 He was striving to stand up in the Wind and the Rain. He 
 had not cured himself of the lust of life, although life for him 
 was a merciless tyrant and a cruel taskmaster. 
 
 There was also a man with one arm. His face was wet and 
 wistful. His eyes were like dirty glass marbles. His boots 
 were squelchy and squdgy, and as he painfully oscillated from 
 one foot to the other, they exuded squirts of muddy moisture. 
 He was selling two lamentable mannikins who perpetually 
 saluted the shivering pedestrians, eternally taking off their 
 little tall hats, and putting them on again. The one-armed 
 mannikin pulled the string, and the flimsy puppets doffed their 
 hats in a jerky gesture of dank despair and soppy humility. 
 But the marching regiments on the pavements took no heed. 
 The living mannikin with one arm was not worth a farthing
 
 THE THIN GREY LINE 239 
 
 and the matchwood mannikins with two arms were not worth 
 a penny. The man of flesh and the men of wood were to the 
 passer-by equally null. He was not astonished at the spec- 
 tacle of humanity that was worth less than nothing. He 
 accepted it. It was there in the Wind and the Rain. It was 
 hungry and cold and trembling. There was black pain in its 
 eyes. He recked not. He was the usual, and it was the usual, 
 and they were as they had always been and always would be. 
 
 It was not good to walk up and down that thin grey line 
 of derelicts, and to stare at the curious versatility of human 
 disaster. No two faces were alike in that long, repulsive row 
 of broken bodies and shattered souls. No, they were all 
 different, and yet they were all stricken with the same physical 
 dilapidation. Many of the men wore dirty, old woollen gloves, 
 with the fingers eaten away to the knuckles till they looked like 
 mittens. Beneath the grime of their fingers there shone a 
 ghastly white pallor, the cold light of anaemia glittering through 
 the lamp of dirt. The dull faces were horribly pale beneath 
 their grey uncleanliness. It was not a pleasant paleness, 
 but a kind of corpse-like drab unhealthiness, neither white 
 nor grey, but the horrible hue of death. Some of the girls 
 were decked in squalid finery that turned one's heart sick. 
 A stringy ribbon, a bedraggled feather, a bunch of sloppy 
 roses, tossed by the Wind and bespattered by the Rain ! These 
 things seemed loathly, waving and bobbing over a ghastly 
 wan face with no gladness in its eyes, and no smile on its lips. 
 
 Pah! the thin grey line is intolerable. It hurts. It stings. 
 It stabs. Let us fly from it. Let us hurry westward. In 
 Pall Mall a cosy motor-car slides softly to the porch of the 
 Carlton. A fur-clad footman leaps lightly to the pavement and 
 opens the door. A tall man helps a pretty woman to alight. 
 Her cheeks are rosy with health and happiness. From head 
 to heels she is wrapped in a sable coat. In one of her little 
 white-gloved hands she holds a huge sable muff. Under her 
 arm is a fat dog, its dull eyes bulging with well-fed content. 
 Her tiny patent leather shoe as it peeps out beneath her brown 
 skirt is a miracle of dainty gloss and delicate curve. From
 
 240 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 her wrist dangles a bunch of golden trifles, gleaming with 
 diamonds. If you could sell her adornments you could feed 
 and clothe the thin grey line for a year. The dirty beads on 
 the human string in Holborn are not worth a penny apiece. 
 She is worth hundreds of pounds. Every inch of her grace 
 represents a pile of round yellow sovereigns, a pyramid of 
 loaves. 
 
 The glass doors revolve. You enter a palace of luxury. 
 Scores of expensive men and expensive women are eating 
 expensive morsels of food and drinking expensive throatfuls 
 of wine to the sound of expensive music. On every face there 
 sits an expensive smile. Here there is no Wind and no Rain, 
 no hunger and no cold. The champagne bubbles out of the 
 magnums, and winks in the frail glasses, and gurgles in the white 
 throats. The strong white teeth munch the quails. The 
 soft red lips sip coffee and liqueurs. A solemn waiter carries 
 a pile of cigar-boxes from table to table. The band plays 
 "The Merry Widow" waltz. And still along the Via Dolorosa 
 of Holborn the thin grey line shivers and shudders in the Wind 
 and the Rain.
 
 OUR LADY POVERTY 
 
 REMEMBER the Sixth of November. It is a vital date. 
 Historians, note it. Sociologists, record it. Almanack-makers, 
 print it in red. Chronologists, set it down. Statesmen, mark 
 it on your charts. Forget the Fifth. Gunpowder Plot and 
 Guy Fawkes are limbo-lumber. Here is a new event. Its 
 meaning stings. To-day at noon in London the Exodus 
 of Womanhood and Childhood. 
 
 Hitherto they have starved and died in their rat-holes and 
 slum-burrows, resigning the war against social lethargy to 
 husband and father, brother and son. To-day for the first 
 time the Family flings itself under the chariot of civilisation. 
 Drive on, O charioteers! Henceforward your wheels drive 
 heavily, axle-deep in blood, to the hoarse anthem-requiem, 
 "Home, Bitter Home." Drive on over Manhood, Woman- 
 hood, Childhood. But lash your steeds, look down into the 
 mire, and number your victims and count your cost. 
 
 It is high noon at Hungerford Bridge. The cold winter 
 sunlight is cutting diamonds out of the Thames. The ancient 
 river on his way to the sea passes a new river, a river of hunger, 
 a Thames of famished flesh. It rises not in far sunny meadows, 
 but out of the black depths of the city of a hundred sorrows. 
 Its main stream conies from the Pit of Poplar and the Ge- 
 henna of West Ham and the Tophet of Walthamstow. Wells 
 of want gush up under the white palaces of Mayfair and Bel- 
 gravia. There are dark subterranean springs bubbling out 
 of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. These women are the poor 
 grey parishioners of poor grey parishes whose very names are 
 a sigh and a moan upon the map of London. 
 
 "Symbols and metaphors!" you say. But they are alive. 
 Six thousand living women with living children in their arms 
 16 241
 
 242 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 crawl out of the very pavement into the sun that shines on 
 your Parliament's spires and your Abbey's towers, and, crawl- 
 ing, they stain your glory and soil your pride. 
 
 Still they come, blinking in the light, these captives, es- 
 caping from earless and eyeless dungeons of Poverty, whose 
 walls are more durable than stone and stronger than iron, 
 being quarried out of wrong and mortared with injustice. 
 Six thousand prisoners of hope! They have heard the King's 
 word of solace and they come to cast their misery at the feet 
 of the Prime Minister. They are small folk. They have 
 faith in the great. Surely the miracle will be wrought. The 
 Prime Minister will pity their desolation. He will take a pen 
 and write. There will be work, golden work, for their men. 
 They and their little ones will know cold and hunger no more. 
 There will be bread, magical bread, in the mouths of their 
 boys and girls. Ah! their anguish is well-nigh over. Their 
 woe is all but ended. Smiles dance in the creases and furrows 
 of their faces. Laughter ripples over their bloodless lips. 
 Exodus at last! 
 
 Four-deep are these miserables. Their rusty ranks creep 
 like a centipede of sorrow through the wind-swept mud. They 
 carry rude white banners like brandished shrouds bearing 
 black legends. "Bread for our Children!" "Work for our 
 Men!" The column of women and children is selvedged on 
 each side with workmen. They stare at the packed faces. 
 They say nothing. They dumbly gaze. The women gaze 
 dumbly back. It is the quiet look of dull despair. It is the 
 calm eye of poverty. As we walk along the narrow lane be- 
 tween the women and the workmen, the eye of want watches 
 us. There are twelve thousand eyes here, eyes of babes, eyes 
 of children, eyes of girls, eyes of mothers, eyes of grandmothers. 
 But all these eyes are one vast eye, and all these souls one vast 
 soul. It is life looking at life. The mystical unity of life 
 surges over every barrier. We feel that the thing behind their 
 eyes is the thing behind ours. This is more than brotherhood. 
 It is identity. 
 
 We turn from Life's Eye to Life's Flesh. Thridding again
 
 OUR LADY POVERTY 243 
 
 our alley of anguish, we survey its frieze of faces. Famine is 
 a great sculptor. He has carved each of these countenances 
 with a separate agony. It is his winter exhibition. Six thou- 
 sand statues of starvation! Are there so many nuances of pain ? 
 Has grief so many moods? These ruddled and raddled 
 visages have been harrowed by privation and ploughed by 
 distress. Haglike old women, chapfallen, loose-lipped, rheumy, 
 their knuckles gnarled, their hair grey, their backs bent. 
 Stunted girls, their locks screwed into long spills and rolls 
 from ear to temple, their skin sucked sallow, their bosoms 
 crushed flat, their gapped teeth crumbling in black and yellow 
 decay. No savages are more horribly defeatured and defaced 
 than some of these Englishwomen, stealthily mutilated by eco- 
 nomic laws that are crueller than any steel. 
 
 Sad is the starving man, and sad the starving woman, but 
 sadder than these is the starving child. There are hundreds 
 of anaemic infants in this pilgrimage of poverty, shrivelled 
 babes sleeping wanly in weary arms, their thin shanks dangling, 
 and in their blue lips what the ironic poor call a "comforter." 
 Round them the crowd roars, the trains thunder, the hansoms 
 jangle, the motor horns are blown, the horses prance. But 
 the children sleep. They are too weak and weary to keep 
 awake at noon. More dreadful than the open eyes of the 
 mother and the father are the closed eyes of the child. Yet 
 these men and women were once babes, and these babes will 
 one day be even as they, for in the land of Poverty generation 
 after generation lives and dies a living death. 
 
 Slowly the women march behind a band of boys playing 
 merry music, their brass instruments shining in the sun. Sham- 
 bling along Northumberland Avenue they go, skirting Tra- 
 falgar Square and winding down Whitehall. It is a lame and 
 lugubrious dance of death. 
 
 As the files of famine press forward, murmurs are heard 
 among the spectators. "Shocking!" . . . "Damned shame!" 
 Three cartloads of puny children rattle by. We think of the 
 tumbrils and the French Revolution. Those are our tumbrils. 
 They carry our children to the guillotine of hunger. Our Lady
 
 244 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Poverty is pitiless. The phantoms shuffle on, their white 
 flags flogged by the wintry wind. Their garments are brutally 
 grotesque. Battered straw hats, black turning white, white 
 turning black. Dingy crape bonnets, jetted and bugled: 
 grimy broken feathers, dusty faded flowers, plush capes and 
 mantles green with age, shawls, men's overcoats on women, 
 tattered skirts dabbling in the mud: lamentable feet, blobs of 
 flapping leather, caked and crusted with mire. It is the ob- 
 scenity of civilisation. O dainty ankles, hide your delicate 
 grace as these caricatures go past, dancing uncouthly their 
 minuet of death! Cover your slim insteps, O Virtue! Muffle 
 the drums of contrast. Mute the strings of paradox. Let 
 Our Lady Poverty move past in her silence and her sadness 
 and her despair.
 
 IN WEST HAM 
 
 IN the West End the east wind is blowing bitterly. Let us 
 go to its birthplace. Tube to the Bank. Thence to Fen- 
 church Street. There we take a third-class ticket to Canning 
 Town. The wooden seats in our "smoker" are greasy with 
 grime, and the floor is strewn with sawdust. From the window 
 we watch a dreary procession of dingy streets. The houses 
 are "brick boxes with slate lids." Their back yards flutter 
 with domestic bunting, melancholy flags of drying clothes. 
 We spell out the despairing signal of poverty: "The East 
 expects the West to do its duty." We glide by a congested 
 graveyard, its huddled headstones gleaming greyly through 
 the October fog. Then our train pierces some desolate flats, 
 where the scrofulous grass seems to pray for the spade. We 
 get out. We walk to Hermit Park. There we see a bandstand 
 in a green, dismal desert. Round the bandstand there is a si- 
 lent crowd of shivering men. 
 
 As we approach they eye us doubtfully. "More splits," 
 one of them mutters. There are police hovering on the fringe 
 of the crowd. A caped inspector stares at us with an ironical 
 smile. We are chilled by the tragic silence that washes round 
 the bandstand. We shrink from these haggard faces and 
 hungry glances. We feel ashamed of our warm clothes, of 
 our cigarette, of our last meal, of our boots, of our watch and 
 chain. The money in our pocket burns us. Our gloves are 
 an outrage. The sullen dejection of these slouching men 
 stabs us like a sword. There are a hundred sorts of misery. 
 Old misery. Middle-aged misery. Young misery. Misery 
 with a grey beard. Weak misery. Strong misery. The rai- 
 ment of these derelicts is like a walking rag-store. 
 
 A man climbs on the bandstand. He has a square, resolute 
 
 245
 
 246 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 face. His worn clothes are shabbily clean. He nervously 
 grips the rail, and lards the police with praise. They must 
 help the good police. "No rioting. No pillaging. Be 
 orderly." 
 
 As he ends, we wait for the cheers. There are no cheers. 
 The crowd is silent. These men have lost all heart and 
 hope. The smiling inspector has taken a shorthand note of 
 the speech. He closes his book and glances sardonically at us. 
 The crowd closes round us. We are buried in the unemployed. 
 They suffocate us. The ring of faces is like a circle in Dante's 
 Inferno. These sad, mutilated shadows, "tormented phan- 
 toms, ancient injured shades," shut out the earth, the air, and 
 the sky. 
 
 Dazed and bewildered, we tear ourselves out of this Male- 
 bolge of want. We walk in a stupefaction of despair through 
 the dolorous streets of Canning Town. As we walk our guide 
 lifts the lid of hell, and shows us its horrors. Yesterday two 
 P. and O. boats came in. Out of 2,000 men waiting for a job, 
 only 150 were needed. Eleven weeks ago the first register of 
 the unemployed showed 91 5 workless men. On these men de- 
 pended over 400 wives and 1,060 children. 
 
 We investigate the case of the orator. He is 32. Born 
 in Durham, he has lived here since 1879. He served 8 years 
 306 days in the Army. He produces his discharge. His 
 regimental number is 91,610, i24th Field Battery, Royal Field 
 Artillery. He went through the siege of Ladysmith, got en- 
 teric, and was invalided out of the service. He had a pension 
 of is.6d. a day for a year, then 8d. a day for the second year, 
 then a pair of spectacles for his injured sight. Since that 
 nothing. He produces letters peremptorily declining to do 
 more for him. He has not yet received the war medal to which 
 he is entitled. He holds an excellent testimonial from his 
 lieutenant. According to it he can "ride and drive." Up to 
 March last he worked as a plater's labourer on the Black Prince. 
 He was discharged owing to slackness of work. Until July he 
 picked up odd jobs as bricklayer's labourer. He has two 
 children. In August his wife was confined. He then got
 
 IN WEST HAM 247 
 
 tickets for meat (is.6d.), milk (is.6d.), and grocery (2s.6d.). 
 He has had only 3^ days' work in three months. He has 
 been selling his furniture overmantel 75. (cost 245.), clock 25. 
 (cost 8s.6d.), shade of birds 2s., chair 6d., and so on. He 
 owes 3 for rent of two rooms at 45. a week. He has been 
 in workhouse for two days. 
 
 Has he tried for work? Yes, he has been "through the 
 hoop." He has got up like the others at 3 A.M. and walked 
 the 21 miles to Tilbury in search of a job. Here is his itin- 
 erary for one day : 6 130 A.M. At Victoria Dock gates. Attended 
 the 7, 8, and 9 o'clock calls. No work. Came home, " signed 
 off to mother." 10 "Adverts." Walked 7 miles to Seven 
 Kings, the other side of Ilford. Tried several buildings. No 
 work. Walked round by Romford Road and Stratford. No 
 work, ii P.M. Got home. No food all day. "I'm getting 
 too shabby." Their last good meal cost 3d. Here is the 
 menu: Two cold faggots i|d., potatoes id., onions |d. What 
 is a faggot? He seems surprised at our ignorance. "It's a 
 Savoury Duck." What is a "Savoury Duck"? "A faggot." 
 You can buy a hot faggot for id., a cold faggot for fd. Boiled 
 with potatoes and onions it makes " Savoury Duck Soup." 
 
 We walk through the dusk to his home. His room is tiny, 
 but clean. His wife is a comely lass of twenty-two. The eldest 
 boy is a fair-haired little fellow of three. There is no squalor. 
 It is a cosy nest with a faded air of decency. But bit by bit 
 it is breaking up. When the landlord's patience is exhausted, 
 what will happen? Here, then, is a test case. A man who 
 starved for his country in Ladysmith should not be allowed 
 to starve in London. 
 
 His plight is better than that of hundreds. There are 
 families who have burnt or sold all their furniture. We hear 
 of one case where six children are sleeping on the bare floor. 
 The people help each other. Women are eager to wash heavy 
 articles at 6d. a dozen. Children pick the cinders off new 
 cinder-paths. The suffering of the young is piteous. At four- 
 teen the boys leave school and turn into Hooligans. At night 
 under the railway arches you can see hundreds of people sleep-
 
 248 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 ing out, most of them destitute lads. There are all sorts of 
 queer trades in this land of hunger. Some women earn cop- 
 pers as " Jew's pokers." For 2d. they light fires on the Jewish 
 Sabbath. Ghouls prowl over the battlefield. They rob the 
 wounded. We are shown a bogus 6d. raffle-ticket which is 
 being sold in the streets "for the benefit of the family of an 
 unemployed man." 
 
 West Ham reviles the new Act. It regards it as a fraud. 
 West Ham also loathes the workhouse. The women prefer 
 to starve rather than let their husbands enter it, for it is the 
 death knell of home and the black badge of shame. No land- 
 lord will let rooms to the man whose last reference is "Bill 
 Bailey," the nickname of a certain deputy labour-master. 
 
 What of the future ? Will these starving men go on meekly 
 starving through the winter? Their patience is almost invin- 
 cible. But it may snap. The other night there were 100 
 police from fourteen London divisions at a meeting of 1,000 
 workless men. But what can be done ? That is the aching rid- 
 dle. We turn our back on the anguish and the agony. We 
 get into the train. We feel the sharp pang of pity growing 
 dull. In a few hours we shall forget. Life is very implacable. 
 As we pass the grey headstones in the silent cemetery, we think 
 of Death. His hospitable house is open even to the Unemployed.
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 
 
 
 
 "PETTICOAT LANE?" says the policeman at the Bank. 
 "Take a Shoreditch 'bus." "Petticoat Lane?" says the con- 
 ductor. "Get off at Dirty Dick's." Who is Dirty Dick? 
 We wonder. We want to know, but we are ashamed to ask. 
 Perhaps it is some famous hostelry, a London landmark like 
 the Angel and the Elephant. Yes, there it is, its shameless 
 name staring from its brazen front. "Dirty Dick's!" The 
 fellow is proud of his appellation. He glories in it. He has 
 peppered his house with DD. He is as impenitent as the 
 French king who peppered the Louvre with D's in honour of 
 Diane de Poitiers, his mistress. 
 
 Well, let us not be hard on Dirty Dick. He must live up 
 to the Lane, where dirt is next to godliness. The dregs and 
 heeltaps of London are pouring into it this bright Sunday 
 morning, and as we are gulped down by its roaring gullet 
 the first thing that startles us is a shop-window stacked with 
 Passover Cakes, a granddaughter of Miriam sitting placidly 
 at the door. 
 
 Unlike Dirty Dick, Petticoat Lane is ashamed of itself. 
 It disguises itself as Middlesex Street, a miserable name, a 
 name that sticks in ear and throat. Out on it ! Petticoat Lane 
 is a true coinage of the people. It has the right smack of ver- 
 nacular romance. 
 
 Along the kerbs in two parallel lines are long rows of stalls. 
 The sidewalks and the roadway are packed with lounging 
 promenaders, mostly malodorous. The Lane has a pungent 
 smell. Its fragrance lingers in the nostrils. Like the scents 
 of Houbigant, the perfume of Petticoat Lane is made of many 
 ingredients. 
 
 High above the turbid torrent of greasy caps grins the 
 
 249
 
 250 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 violent face of a Jew. He is perched on a stall. His curved 
 beak swings through the air like a scythe. His vast mouth is 
 horribly dilated. His features are distorted by the noise of 
 barter. His eyes bulge in an agony of trade. There you 
 see the secret of the Jew intensity. This hawker is in Petti- 
 coat Lane to-day, but he may be in Park Lane to-morrow. 
 To-day he is selling old clo': to-morrow he may be selling old 
 empires. 
 
 In the Lane the Jew barters and the Gentile buys. These 
 wonderful people traffic in our absurd desires. Their wares 
 are a minute satire on our wants. They sell us gewgaws as if 
 we were savages. They exploit our stupidity. 
 
 At this swirling corner we can study types of the two races. 
 A dandified Jew is suavely selling gimcrack jewelry for shil- 
 lings. Behind him in the mire a Lancashire acrobat is bursting 
 blood-vessels for ha'pence. The one makes money with his 
 wits, the other with his muscles. I fear the brain of the Jew 
 beats the brawn of the Gentile. 
 
 There is another type who relies on noise. He is selling 
 old leather with a muscular fury that carves his face into a 
 gargoyle of sound. He foams at the mouth. He lards his 
 eloquence with saliva. His voice rips and tears the rival din 
 around it. Never have I heard speech so strident, so raucous, 
 so brazen. The man is a demon of discord, with lungs of iron 
 and throat of steel. On his right hand he wears a leathern 
 glove. With a huge bar he belabours old engine-belts, fire- 
 hose, saddlery. While he thumps he yells. With a mur- 
 derous knife he hacks off sixpenn'orths, scrapes the surface, and 
 sells them to the amateur cobbler. "Let your eyes be your 
 guide," he howls, "and your money the last thing you part 
 with." Another noisy trafficker is selling coats and vests. He 
 chants a chorus as he puts on a jacket. "Down where the 
 red poppies blo-o-w." Then he shrieks: "Six guineas! Six 
 guineas! ... Six bob! Come off a lord the Lord knows 
 who." He puts on a serge reefer: "In-di-go blue! Navy 
 blue! Bluey blue till you can't blue any more! Come off a 
 drowned sea-captain."
 
 PETTICOAT LANE 251 
 
 Flying from this ear-splitting humorist, we stumble over 
 a young gentleman who is trying on boots. Hard by, a seedy 
 old man is being measured for trousers, while his son, a jolly 
 bluejacket, looks on with a grin. 
 
 In the crowd there are men of all nations Turks, Lascar 
 seamen, Chinamen, Japanese, Hindus. These Orientals put 
 the Cockney to shame. Their clear skins and glossy beards 
 reprove his pimpled stubble. 
 
 An old blind Jew is playing tunes on his skinny hands. 
 His face is sallow parchment stretched on bones. His mouth 
 is a round O. His grey beard floats on the breeze. Hollow- 
 ing his lean hands, he claps them together, and produces a 
 strange manual music. The contrast between his rabbinical 
 face and the cockney airs he beats out of his palms is fantastic. 
 It is the East mimicking the West, Abraham mocking Kipling. 
 
 The Lane likes medicine. It has its waters as well as 
 Marienbad. Strong men drink Dutch Drops and eat Dutch 
 Eels. " Queeneenanops," an amber beverage, is very popular. 
 It cures "inward weakness, tendencies to faint, weight and 
 pressure over the eyes, dimness of sight, slightest flurry, the body 
 oppressed and the mind confused, all nervous prostrations, 
 cuts, burns, and old-standing wounds." 
 
 A Jewish fish-merchant wears a leather apron. He is like 
 a dingy merman, enamelled from head to foot with shining 
 scales. Old women are skewering cat's meat. Old men are 
 whittling horseradish. Jolly fellows are carving tricoloured 
 bars of ice cream. You lick it off the paper as you loaf along. 
 A dexterous youth is selling gyroscopes. There is a bird- 
 fancier selling canaries. In a lofty cage there is a monkey 
 that glares and jabbers horribly. It is the familiar of the fair, 
 the succubus of the Lane. 
 
 A nigger is cleaning a boy's teeth with his finger. He 
 explains that his powder would make the teeth whiter if he had 
 a "toot-brush." Polish Jews, garlanded with boots, are crying 
 "Ze more you loke, ze more you vand." Stalls festooned with 
 coats and trousers rise up like gallows, hundreds of flabby 
 arms and legs waggling in the wind. We are stunned with the
 
 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 cries of Mendozas and Assenheims, Rubinsteins and Levys, 
 Elbozes and Valentines. We are hashed in a hash of languages, 
 stewed in a stew of tongues. Our eyes are worn with gazing 
 at collars, fronts, socks, studs, boots, carpet slippers, toys, cycle 
 horns, locks, keys, trowels, brushes, whelks, "dying pigs," 
 ocarinas, alarm clocks, revolving rubber heels, albums, penny 
 cameras, goldbeater's skin, violins, crockery, opera glasses, 
 French transparencies, songs, old boots and old books, hats, 
 remnants, handkerchiefs, ribbons, bead necklaces, furs that 
 mew and bark, banjos, dulcimers, knives, forks, files, spoons, 
 saws, chisels, jockey-scales all the fads of our civilised folly. 
 
 It is one o'clock. The thud of the beer-engine is heard 
 in the taverns and Miriam is still selling Passover Cakes.
 
 A PENNY FAIR 
 
 "CHRISTMAS, Father . . . OO Fairyland." "Double oh, 
 Fairyland." There is a long silence. "Are you there?" 
 
 A loud laugh bursts out of the receiver. " Ha! Ha! Ha! " 
 I never heard such a laugh. It is a round, crimson, roast beef, 
 plum pudding, mince pie, port wine, snapdragon laugh. There 
 are holly leaves and mistletoe berries and fir-trees in it, cotton 
 wool and icing sugar, raisins and almonds, walnuts and crack- 
 ers, frost and snow, carols and church bells, bugles and chil- 
 dren's squeaking voices. I cannot tell you how many other 
 wonderful things there are in it. There are the shining eyes of 
 mothers bending over cots, and the sleepy eyes of little boys and 
 girls, and the twinkling eyes of bald old uncles, and the soft 
 eyes of rosy old aunts, and the winking eyes of fathers that 
 pretend to be very solemn and proper and indifferent and calm. 
 
 The whole world seems to be in this wonderful laugh. 
 
 "Who the Dickens are you?" 
 
 "I'm Father Christmas, and Dickens is staying with me." 
 At that I hear another laugh like the sound of a shower of new 
 sixpences. 
 
 " I thought Dickens was dead." 
 
 "Ho, Ho, Ho! Dickens dead! That is a good joke. 
 Why, he always spends me with me." 
 
 "Spends you? What do you mean?" 
 
 "Why, Christmas, you silly old buffer!" 
 
 "A-o-oh! Is that a joke? And I'm not silly, or old, or 
 a buffer." 
 
 "Well, you ask silly old questions." 
 
 " I say, Father Christmas, how do you feel this um this 
 you?" 
 
 "That's better, young 'un. I never felt better in my life." 
 
 253
 
 254 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 "Aren't you played out?" 
 
 "Bless my soul! haven't I got millions of children?" 
 
 "What's that got to do with it?" 
 
 "Well, you see I'm made of children." 
 
 "Go on! How on earth . . . ?" 
 
 " And children are made of me. Ha, Ha!" 
 
 "But you are awfully old, you know. You've got a long 
 white beard." 
 
 "Oh, that's only a disguise. I'm young inside. I have 
 got all the children in my heart." 
 
 "It must be a big heart." 
 
 "You're right, my boy. It's the biggest heart in the world." 
 
 "Room for me in it?" 
 
 "Can you laugh?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Can you cry?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Do you believe in indiscriminate charity?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then come in and warm yourself." And the old fellow 
 went off into a perfect convulsion of guffaws. 
 
 "Are you busy to-day?" 
 
 " Of course, I'm busy. Don't you know I have got millions 
 of stockings to stuff." 
 
 "Can you spare half an hour?" 
 
 "Perhaps. What do you want?" 
 
 "I want you to walk up Ludgate Hill with me and see 
 my Penny Fair." 
 
 "All right. Meet me under the railway bridge." 
 
 Sure enough, I see Father Christmas sitting in a big motor- 
 car under the bridge. His beard is longer than General Booth's. 
 He shakes hands with me and begins to laugh. The police- 
 man laughs, too, the 'bus-drivers laugh, the cabmen laugh. 
 Everybody laughs. The laughter runs up Fleet Street to the 
 Strand. Old St. Paul's fat old dome begins to laugh, too, and 
 before we know he is dancing a cake-walk up and down the hill. 
 The Mansion House joins him, and the old couple waltz along
 
 A PENNY FAIR 255 
 
 Cheapside, where Bow Bells begin to peal Noel, Noel. The 
 old city churches shake their belfries as if they were wearing a 
 cap and bells. Drowsy old Father Thames hears the noise, 
 and with a jolly chuckle he jumps right over the Monument. 
 
 "Come along," says Father Christmas, "and see my Penny 
 Fair." He takes my hand and we push through the laughing 
 crowd on the sidewalk. In the gutter on each side are hundreds 
 of gutter merchants with trays of toys. Old men, old women, 
 young men, young women, little boys and little girls, all selling 
 penny toys. 
 
 "My servants," chuckles the old chap, with a wave of his 
 fat red hand. 
 
 "They're very poor servants." 
 
 "That's why I engage them. I like them poor. The 
 poorer the better. What's the good of being rich if you have 
 no poor to give your money to? Why, my boy, I just live on 
 the poor. No poor, no Christmas." With that he digs me 
 in the ribs, and begins laughing again. 
 
 We push along the line of hawkers right up to St. Paul's. 
 There the old fellow stands chuckling. He points down the 
 Hill at the double river of toys. 
 
 "All my work," he grunts. 
 
 " Your work ! Why, they're made in Houndsditch." 
 
 "Fiddlesticks! I invents 'em, I makes 'em, I sells 'em, 
 I buys 'em, I gives 'em away, and I breaks 'em. Ho, Ho, Ho!" 
 With that he turns round, and takes off the Dome of St. Paul's. 
 
 "Paul," he says, "lend us your hat." He turns the Dome 
 upside down, and he begins to fill it with penny toys. 
 
 "All made to die," says a greasy old man with a tray of 
 dying pigs and roosters. " All made to die." 
 
 Bill Bailey's uncle, a double- jointed Zulu; Japanese drums; 
 the bull and the bear hammering each other; animauxassortis; 
 Asia paper; living pictures; motor-buses, motor-cars, motor- 
 boats; Scotch expresses; sewing machines; bicycles; musical 
 turbines and musical cigars; clocks in glass cases; gold watches; 
 lamps; suites of furniture; a Japanese farmyard in a box; dwarf 
 fir-trees; dancers, horses, and flower-pots made of paper; the
 
 256 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 smallest purse in the world; fighting cocks; photo frames; 
 brooches, "any name you like"; boy feeding a dog; thumbnail 
 saucepans, chairs, teapots, candlesticks, coal-scuttles, cameras, 
 prams caricaturing the knicknacks of the "silver table"; 
 nutcrackers; "loidy-birds"; trick bunches of "voyolets"; 
 bone studs; comb and mirror; jumping and squeaking frogs; 
 Lilliputian skittles; three brown jugs; scales; an india-rubber 
 face that puts its tongue out; wriggling snakes; china babies in 
 a walnut; brush and crumb trays; a big elephant and three 
 elephantlets "the happy family"; magnetic teetotums; crow- 
 ing cocks; cribbage pegs^masks and puppets, whose tongues and 
 arms blow out; mouth organs; "three china bybies with gowlden 
 'air"; creeping blackbeetles, crocodiles, swallows, mice 
 "all over the carpet"; jack-in-the-boxes; acrobats; flags; plates; 
 biscuit-tins; knives and forks; fans; drawing-books; expand- 
 ing glass bracelets; the eating monkey; the jumping monkey; 
 the climbing monkey; dachshunds with nodding heads; puzzle 
 corks; revolving balls. All these and millions more Father 
 Christmas tosses into the Dome. Then, tucking me under his 
 left arm, he steps off Ludgate Hill upon the top of the Nelson 
 Monument, and turns the Dome right side up, scattering the 
 toys all over London. 
 
 "Ho, Ho, Ho!" he chuckles, as the toys darken the sky 
 and tumble down the chimneys. "I must be off for another 
 Domeful." With that he hops back to his Penny Fair.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT CHILDREN
 
 LONDON-ON-SERPS 
 
 IT is seven o'clock. Let us stroll along the Knightsbridge 
 bank of the Serpentine. Between the water and the iron 
 fence there is a strip of grass several hundred yards long. It is 
 swarming with nude, half-nude, and quarter-nude boys. Hun- 
 dreds of them, squirming and wriggling, twisting and tumbling, 
 running and leaping, laughing and shouting, in a frenzy of 
 youthful mirth. As we plunge into the rout and riot, we are 
 drowned in a whirlpool of boys, seething, shrieking, jumping 
 about like landed trout, frisking like puppies, gamboling like 
 kids, freaking like kittens. All sorts and sizes of boys in all 
 sorts and sizes of jackets and trousers and boots. A grand ballet 
 of boys dancing the dance of boyhood. The lust of the boy for 
 raw noise is here let loose. Any sound is good : shriek, squeak, 
 whistle, catcall, groan, yell, scream, shout, yelp, yap, hiss, 
 hoot, howl, giggle, gurgle, chuckle, laugh. The clamour 
 mounts like brandy to the brain. One grows drunk with boy, 
 dazed with perpetual motion and perpetual noise. 
 
 At intervals vigilant policemen control the merry devilry 
 of these india-rubber imps, herding them across the fence 
 that bounds their paradise. As we walk along the outer edge 
 of their Eden, urchins with white skins and black faces ask us 
 to tell them the time. Like the sick watchers by the Pool of 
 Bethesda, they are waiting for the troubling of the waters. 
 Their angel is Policeman X. Not until half-past seven can one 
 little grimy foot enter the Serpentine. Thanks to the London 
 boy's pathetic instinct for order, no force is needed to secure 
 obedience. They beguile the leaden minutes with every 
 insanity of movement known to boyhood. One stark naked 
 skeletonette whose spine is like a string of knots, and whose 
 ribs and shoulder-blades are sharp as a razor, turns solemn 
 
 259
 
 260 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 summersaults, his thin body bending like a whip. Other 
 urchins walk on their hands. Some of them are trousered, 
 some of them wear nothing but string garters. Their inverted 
 peripateia is a humorous grotesque beyond sculptor's chisel. 
 It is the true paradox of the featherless biped, the perfect 
 topsy-turvydom of humanity. 
 
 Wisps of imp-jargon float across the fence. "I 'opes as 
 nobody don't pinch my boots." "I 'opes as nobody don't 
 pinch my trousis." What happens if the "trousis" are 
 "pinched"? Policeman X. gravely replies: "Oh, they make 
 up enough between them to take them 'ome." A golden- 
 haired cherub tells me that you can convert your jacket into 
 breeches. Soon a knot of young nudities clusters round me. 
 Can they swim? Oh, yes. They learned in the Netting 
 Hill Baths. It costs them a penny. One haughty Cupid 
 is pointed out with pride. He has swum halfway across the 
 Serps. 
 
 "Serps?" 
 
 "Yus; 'London-on-Serps,' we calls it." 
 
 "Ever been to the sea?" A chorus breaks out: "I've been 
 to Whitstable!" "I've been to Clacton!" One pretty little 
 lad opens his big blue eyes and says wistfully, "I've never 
 seen the sea." 
 
 "'Is muwer is too poor, sir." Another rogue in ivory 
 boasts: "My brother nearly won the five-mile championship 
 on the Thames; 'e got cramp six yards from the post." 
 
 A boylet with dancing brown eyes carries a life-belt made 
 of cork fragments. 
 
 "Where did you get it?" 
 
 " Off the back of a seat, sir, in a garden, sir." 
 
 The preparations for the bath are infinitely various. There 
 is a rich variety of loin-rags. A woeful lack of tape or string 
 breeds perplexity. On all sides naked gossoons are pinning 
 and knotting, twisting and tying clouts round each other. 
 
 "Aren't they allowed to bathe in their pelts?" 
 
 "Under fourteen," growls Policeman X., with laconic 
 solemnity.
 
 LONDON-ON-SERPS 261 
 
 The humour of this army of Pucks and Ariels does not 
 arride the man in blue. Nor does its pathos stir him. Noth- 
 ing could make a London policeman smile or weep. For my 
 part, as I watch this carnival of childhood, I do not know 
 whether I ought to laugh or cry. And as the sartorial secrets 
 of a hundred homes are laid bare, I feel a certain shame. Why 
 should I intrude upon the pitiful ingenuities of motherhood? 
 Are not these poor garments sacred? Is not every patch and 
 darn a holy symbol of maternal love ? Ah, the mothers of these 
 children, who can fathom their humble yearnings, their weary 
 labour, their dim ambitions? But, see! the sun-gold has been 
 hammered into a yellow doubloon, and it is falling through 
 the branches of the trees. What is that golden network of 
 filmy threads? They are the heart-strings of motherhood. 
 
 But look! Three boats put off from the station of the 
 Royal Humane Society. It is half-past seven at last. A 
 shudder of delight runs through the herds of boy. The long 
 strain of waiting in nude impatience snaps. Far as the eye 
 can see there is a frantic rush of running legs across the grass, 
 across the gravel path, into the water. The young limbs glow 
 and glitter in the rosy gold of sunset. Will their many-twink- 
 ling charge never end? Where are they springing from? 
 The running regiments seem innumerable. Minute after 
 minute goes by, and still they are leaping out of the grass 
 into the water, like grilse fresh from the sea. A saraband 
 of youth, indeed. As the foul rags fall off the young limbs, 
 they are transfigured. The horrible ugliness of civilised clothes 
 is magically sloughed, and the beauty of boyhood flashes like 
 a bright sword torn from an evil scabbard. The sad grey 
 water is furrowed with ivory laughter of dauntless youth. Its 
 grey bosom is covered with gnomes and goblins, splashing, 
 dashing, dancing, prancing, hopping, squeaking, shrieking. 
 The clamour and the din increase. We become stupefied 
 with noise. Here for one mad hour King Boy reigns supreme. 
 It is his festival. Look along the vociferous vista of whirling 
 legs and flying arms and bobbing heads. The water boils 
 over with boy. It breeds boys like bubbles and foam-bells.
 
 262 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 What music has led them out of their slums ? Have they heard 
 some Pied Piper? No, they have heard the music of the joy 
 of life, and they have come to beat it out in the cool water. 
 Why does no painter paint this lyrical incarnation of London's 
 youth? The tones of flesh cry for the brush. Why does no 
 Wagner hymn this fierce explosion of nature in the midst of 
 smoke and dust and bricks? It is the deathless chant of life 
 that rings across the Serpentine, the beautiful melody of being, 
 the chorus of the years that were and the years to be. 
 
 The Serpentine spring-board is the focus of the fun. It 
 never ceases to bend and recoil. Packed from end to end 
 with boys, each must dive in turn. Each diver vibrates vig- 
 orously before the plunge, sometimes vibrating a neighbour 
 into the water. There is a perpetual crawling and writhing 
 and wriggling tangle of flesh around this patient spring-board, 
 whose resilience is sadly enfeebled by overwork. The absurd 
 gravity of boys may be seen here at its best. The spectators 
 split with laughter at the grotesquery of the seething bathers, 
 but the bathers have reached the solemn climax of ecstasy. 
 They are too happy to laugh. One boy nearly drowns himself 
 with purple bladders. Another dives into the folds of an 
 adult obesity that practises the art of floating. Students of 
 physical degeneration ought to peruse these human documents. 
 Nearly all the boys are flat-chested, thin of arm and leg. Their 
 sharp shoulder-blades are shot, and their lean ribs strain the 
 fleshless skin. Underfed and anaemic, they cannot stay in 
 the water long. Their lips are blue, their teeth chatter, their 
 limbs shiver. Soon the grass is covered with shivering boys. 
 Few have towels. By half-past eight all is over, and bands of 
 tired urchins trail wearily homeward. 
 
 We, too, go home, for that is life.
 
 SQUITS AT PLAY 
 
 ONE generation knows little of the next, and a father is 
 the last man to ask for information about his son. There is 
 a great gap between the present and the future, and we are apt 
 to cultivate a culpable indifference to posterity. We forget 
 that posterity is not a long way off; it is here now in our nurser- 
 ies and our schools. If we please we can look at it, and talk to 
 it, and we may even try to persuade it to look at us and talk 
 to us. 
 
 The other day I went down into the country and spent an 
 afternoon watching the boys playing cricket at one of our most 
 modern preparatory schools. The sun was shining with sen- 
 sational fervour, and the sky was unseasonably blue. The 
 larks were singing as they used to sing in ancient Junes before 
 the winter had acquired the habit of breaking out in mid- 
 summer. The meadows were lakes of green and gold. The 
 hedgerows wore wild roses in their buttonholes. There was 
 real dust on the roads, and the wind was audaciously warm. 
 In the school garden there was an insurrection of colour, great 
 white roses opened their languidly sleepy petals to the un- 
 familiar sunlight, and the old, fat Yorkshire terrier snored in 
 the genial air. The boys were rolling up the practice nets, 
 and two of the masters were marking out the tennis court. Yes, 
 it was actually warm enough to play tennis without a com- 
 forter! The pavilion looked very gay in its new coat of white 
 paint, and the grass was dry enough to loll on without fear 
 of rheumatism. One almost dared to believe that summer 
 is not a poet's dream. 
 
 The boys, in their cool flannels, looked as fresh and as 
 happy as the white roses. One forgot for the moment that 
 they were orphans. As they took their places in the field, I 
 
 263
 
 264 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 imagined that I was looking at Lord's through the small end 
 of an opera-glass. It was cricket in miniature. The little 
 men settled down to their work with the solemnity of veterans. 
 They parodied the minutest ritual of the game as it is played 
 by Hayward and Hirst, Fry and Spooner, Payne and Palairet. 
 The English boy is born with a bat in his hand and pads on 
 his shins. He lisps in overs. The tradition of cricket is 
 here seen in the process of percolating out of the Blue of yes- 
 terday into the Blue of to-morrow. These "squits" of nine 
 and ten and eleven and twelve have already begun to acquire 
 the rudiments of style. Their captain is a tiny fair-haired babe 
 whose feet are already quick, whose eye is already keen, and 
 whose wrists are already flexible. He places his field with the 
 assurance of a Jackson. The tall Blue who an hour ago was 
 an austere pedagogue is now one of the eleven, towering over 
 his midgets like Gulliver in Lilliputia. He mixes praise dis- 
 creetly with reproof. "Good shot," is the reward of a neat 
 cut or a clean off -drive. A fluffy stroke earns a sharp "Hold 
 your bat tight." "That'll never do, Smith Major; why 
 didn't you play back?" "Don't turn in that right toe, my 
 man!" "Come on, Jones! Why are you slacking?" "Run 
 it out, Brown ! " " Fielded, sir ! " 
 
 The squit umpire does not wear a white coat, but he is a 
 grave person who does not hesitate to no-ball the fast bowler, 
 or to give the squit batsman out whose bat is an eighth of an 
 inch outside the crease when the bails are whipped off by the 
 squit stumper. The squits are quick to appeal, and a shrill 
 chorus of "How's that?" goes up when a squit slip takes the 
 ball smartly. The squit bowlers are very keen, although their 
 offbreaks are sometimes invisible. The fast bowler takes a 
 run nearly half as long as Knox's, and his action is vainglori- 
 ously high. There is also a squit lob-bowler who bowls in- 
 sidious lobs which the batsmen plainly detest. He has well- 
 defined mannerisms. During his run he makes circles in the 
 air as if he were turning a handle. It is his trick for bewild- 
 ering the batsman's expectant eye. Perhaps one day his con- 
 centric circles will obfuscate some Nourse or Hathorn at Lord's.
 
 SQUITS AT PLAY 265 
 
 There is not much slogging in squit cricket. That slim infant 
 whose pads seem to be a foot too long for his shanks may live 
 to wear the beard of Grace or to be photographed in bare feet 
 like Fry. He is conscientiously trying to get his strokes all 
 round the wicket. That leg-glance is quite classic, and he 
 plays with an impeccably straight bat. He has caught the trick 
 of looking behind him to see where the field is placed. " Played, 
 sir!" Most assuredly this is a scientific squit, with a sound 
 defence, and a distinct vein of Haywardian patience. His 
 score slowly creeps up by singles and two and threes, until 
 at last he puts one into the safe hands of mid-on, and strides 
 to the pavilion amid restrained hand-clappings. You con- 
 gratulate him, but he has learned the tradition of modesty. 
 "Oh, I was missed twice!" he says with a delightful air of 
 deprecation. 
 
 There are plenty of sensations in squit cricket. There 
 are hot returns and short runs. There is even a collapse and 
 a stubborn stand. An innings begins with a hat trick, and 
 the treble squeak of triumph that salutes the fall of the third 
 wicket stirs the blood as gallantly as any shout that ever made 
 the welkin (what is the welkin ?) ring at the Oval. It is true 
 that the boundary is not quite so far away, and that long-on's 
 young arm cannot throw in quite as far as the bowler. But 
 things that are equal to the same are equal to one another, 
 and the game played by the squits is the game played by the 
 giants. It is pretty to watch the machine in the field working 
 with something like classic precision, the young backs bending 
 and the small hands thrown forward in the right, real way. 
 It is jolly to see the babes backing each other up and antici- 
 pating the flight of the ball before it leaves the face of the willow. 
 And after the last ball has been bowled and the last wicket 
 has gone down, it is good to watch the squits skylarking and 
 ragging in jovial comradeship. Even the stern old Blue is 
 not above joining in the fun, and shouldering his boys with 
 nicely calculated vigour on the way to the swimming bath. 
 
 Don't shiver! Yes, even in June, an English June, it is 
 possible to dive into an open-air swimming bath without being
 
 266 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 a Polar Bear. It is a jolly swimming bath: none of your 
 glazed-tile, lukewarm, indoor abominations, but a huge con- 
 crete basin thirty yards square with a spring-board at the edge, 
 off which the lithe young bodies fly like arrows into the clear 
 cold water. In the slanting rays of the westering sun the 
 boys splash and dart like trout, with infinite laughter and 
 rollicking horseplay. By the edge stands a master with a 
 stout pole bearing a broad band of webbing with a noose at 
 the end. The noose goes round a squit's glittering ivory 
 torso, and the master holds him above water as he learns 
 to swim. There are irreverent attempts to splash (acciden- 
 tally, of course) the master's immaculate flannels. The boys 
 who display any tendency to shirk the general fun are carefully 
 attended to. One passive babe who clings to the water-tap 
 is assailed by three energetic splashers behind him. As he 
 turns round to use his heels against his tormentors, a young 
 wretch steals round on the landward side and turns on the 
 tap upon his head. Then the signal of "Cease Bathing" is 
 given, the dripping young limbs are violently towelled, and 
 soon there is a dishevelled rosy procession to the dressing- 
 room, followed by a terrific assault upon hot cocoa and bread 
 and butter. After all, the orphans seem to bear their orphan- 
 hood very merrily. There are worse things in life than being 
 a squit.
 
 HAT-BOXES AND PLAY-BOXES 
 
 THERE are some sights which can be seen in London alone, 
 and one of them is the migration of the schoolboy. The 
 London schoolboy is a bird of passage. Thrice every year 
 he spreads his wings and flies home from school for the holi- 
 days. Thrice every year he spreads his wings and flies to 
 school from home. As most of the public schools and most 
 of the preparatory schools close and open about the same time, 
 the streets of London are sprinkled with these small migrants. 
 It is easy to recognise them, for they travel in hansoms and 
 four-wheelers, on the roof of which repose the tell-tale hat- 
 box and the pathetic play-box. For some reason or other 
 the play-box is made of unpainted deal with black iron hinges. 
 On it is painted the name of the owner, and, as a rule, it is stoutly 
 roped, for the lock of the play-box has a trick of giving way 
 under the pressure of boyish treasures. There are afternoons 
 when you may see an unbroken procession of white-faced boys 
 in cabs going down Park Lane towards Victoria. Boys al- 
 ways come back from school in the morning and go back to 
 school in the afternoon. The distinction is profound. It 
 symbolises the eagerness to escape and the reluctance to return. 
 
 As a rule there is a mother beside the small boy. The men 
 of Eton and Harrow and Winchester scorn maternal escort. 
 They prefer to come and go like beings who have risen above 
 human weakness. The small boy is in the transitional stage. 
 He is torn by his secret yearning for motherly consolation. 
 He has not yet learned to wean himself from the comfort of 
 the maternal kiss. I have heard of an homunculus who con- 
 fided to his mother in a moment of frailty that the only thing 
 he longed for at school was her kiss. It was a dreadful con- 
 fession, for the code of the British schoolboy debars all dis- 
 
 267
 
 268 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 plays of sentiment. It is at school that the Briton is taught the 
 art of suppressing his feelings. Here he acquires that marble 
 face compared with which the countenance of the Red Indian 
 is a playground of the emotions. Here he trains his flesh to 
 hide his soul. Here he attains that sublime immobility of the 
 features which is the secret of England's greatness. Foreign 
 observers are often puzzled by the passionless frigidity of 
 British actors. They do not realise that it is due to the British 
 school. All our actors are old boys. They bring the expres- 
 sionless stoniness of the public school and the 'Varsity to the 
 boards. 
 
 The Irishman or the Frenchman can never outgrow his 
 astonishment at the frozen visage of the perfect Englishman. 
 Take him to Victoria Station and show him the stupendous 
 spectacle provided by the English mother parting from the 
 English child. He will expect to see tender embraces, caressing 
 endearments, and intermingled tears. That is exactly what 
 he will not see. The mothers are there and the boys are there. 
 Scores of them. But the sad business of farewell is transacted 
 without any visible sign of grief. The boys are stoically non- 
 chalant, and the mothers are nonchalantly stoical. Now 
 and then you may see a Jewish mother in tears, a Rachel 
 weeping over her large-eyed darling. But the English mother 
 sees her boy off without any public exposition of affection. 
 The luggage on the truck and the porter who puts it in the 
 van are not more imperturbable. Parting is not a sorrow. 
 It is like posting a letter. The Irishman or the Frenchman 
 views these apparently heartless mothers with indignation. 
 He regards them as unnatural beings without pity or compassion. 
 
 But he is quite wrong. The emotion is there, although 
 it expresses itself by an absence of expression. These Eng- 
 lish mothers are strangely quiet and tragically inarticulate. 
 They say a great deal by saying nothing. They carry off their 
 anguish with an heroic fortitude that deceives the superficial 
 spectator. They, too, have been disciplined into absolute 
 self-control. From their girlhood they have been drilled in 
 the art of automatic calm. They have been taught to avoid
 
 HAT-BOXES AND PLAY-BOXES 269 
 
 "scenes." They have been born and bred in the tradition of 
 icy phlegm. They know how to freeze their warm blood and 
 how to keep all their skeletons under lock and key. Their 
 pride is stronger than their passions. Their dignity masters 
 their imagination. They know that feeling exists only to be 
 crushed. Yet not without a struggle do they denaturalize them- 
 selves. Their arms are aching to clasp the boy who is eating 
 chocolates behind the glass of the carriage window. There 
 is sharp hunger in their dry eyes. Yet mixed with their bottled 
 wistfulness is a vague relief. The strain of the holiday is 
 over. For a few weeks the stress of being a mother will be 
 relaxed, and they will slide back into the safe, dull monotony 
 of dutiful frivolity. They will pack their hearts away with 
 the football boots that grow bigger every year. They will 
 file their souls with the bills that grow longer every term. It 
 is a wonderful system that is able to destroy the most powerful 
 passion in the world, the passion of motherhood. 
 
 No other nation in the world has ever based its education 
 on the principle of orphanhood. If the French Government 
 were to enact a law which would tear all French boys at the age 
 of eight from the arms of their mothers, there would be a revo- 
 lution. But the English mother cheerfully endures the torture 
 of separation. I am not sure whether the boy loses as much 
 as the mother loses. That he loses a great deal is undeniable. 
 He gains the hard and strenuous virtues, but he sacrifices the 
 grace of plasticity. He is hammered into a type, and his 
 personal idiosyncrasies are extinguished. He learns to con- 
 form and accommodate. His young imagination is nipped in 
 the bud. He becomes a splendid machine which works with- 
 out spiritual friction. Life cannot easily break him. He 
 is honest and clean and straight, but he is also narrow, inca- 
 pable of imaginative sympathy, and invincibly proof against 
 the blandishments of art. In the grey groups round the trains 
 at Victoria you see the greatness and the littleness of England, 
 all her Spartan renunciation and all her mutilative inertia. 
 
 She has a noble heart, but it beats in a block of marble.
 
 THE NEUROPATH IN KNICKERS 
 
 LAST Friday in London was a day of mourning. The 
 school-boys were going back to school. All the afternoon 
 the streets that converge on Paddington were melancholy with 
 cabs, bearing a load of beardless discontent and callow disil- 
 lusion and green dyspepsia. Faded the Christmas smiles 
 that lighted the dingy dulness of Praed Street a month ago. 
 There was no eagerness of nai've expectancy in the sullen faces 
 glowering over the shaggy bones of the cynical cabhorse. Sa- 
 tiety clouded the dismal cheek and the desolate brow. The 
 silk hat, no longer poised raffishly on the nape of the neck, 
 drooped dolefully over dreary eyes. 
 
 The exiles of Eton stare resentfully at you as they go by. 
 They hate you because you are left behind in town, with the 
 dear pavement under your feet, and the beloved fog in your 
 lungs, and the lights of London in your eyes. You are the 
 usurper. All the fun they forsake is at your elbow. The 
 perpetual feast of the city is spread before you, while Tantalus 
 Junior sees it spirited away as the rubber tyres revolve on the 
 polished wooden road. In the keen , pure country air how their 
 nostrils will hunger for the smell of blended smoke and soot and 
 dust and tar and water-carts. The pampered schoolboy feels 
 the nostalgia of London more intensely than the soldier on 
 foreign service, the sailor in the tropics, the pioneer in Rhodesia, 
 the civil servant in India. There is in his precocious heart the 
 deep hunger of the townsman for the town. There are many 
 sorts of loneliness in this lonely world, but what loneliness 
 is lonelier than the loneliness of the world-weary schoolboy as 
 he is slowly ejected by the vast mouth of London, like the pip 
 of an apple. Imagine the feelings of the pip, and you have the 
 feelings of the banished boy. 
 
 I am sure the boxes on the roof of the cab are weeping dry 
 
 270
 
 THE NEUROPATH IN KNICKERS 271 
 
 tears as they hear the mocking jingle of the brass bells on the 
 waggling head of the immemorial horse. They chuckled in 
 December when the matron packed them with term-worn rai- 
 ment. They gurgled joyously as she locked their lids. They 
 whooped with delight when she tied on the labels and they 
 spied the old familiar address. They knew they were going 
 home. But now they shrink from the imminent solitude of 
 the lumber-room and the long void of dusty silence. The 
 Play-box is sorrowful, although his stomach is swollen with a 
 giant cake, clad in perspiring sugar, and ponderous with al- 
 monds and walnuts, citron and sultanas. But the Hat-box 
 is the chief mourner. He has a vision of thirteen tall drab 
 Sundays, waiting like sombre mutes for the burial of holiday 
 mirth. He is as dreary as his master, and when the porter 
 bangs him down on the platform he utters a hollow groan. 
 
 If these are the woes of the boxes, what are the woes of their 
 lord? Napoleon on the quarter-deck of the Bellerophon was 
 not more lugubrious. Victor Hugo, singing sad songs of exile 
 in his glass cell on the roof of his house in Guernsey, was not 
 more dejected. I think the Christmas holiday is harder to 
 recover from than the others. The poison of pleasure is in 
 the blood of the returning boy. His soul is toxic with sensations. 
 For four weeks he has eaten too much and slept too little. He 
 has drenched his mind with dissipations and diversions. His 
 parents have taken him to the pantomimes and his uncles 
 have taken him to the music-halls. He has been neck-deep 
 in parties that begin early and end late. 
 
 The children's party is no longer a nursery tea: it is a 
 variety entertainment when it is not a fancy dress ball. Small 
 boys during the Christmas holidays lead the life of a man 
 about town. You meet them everywhere. They lunch at 
 the Carlton, come on from a matinee for tea at Rumpelmayer's, 
 rush home to dress for dinner at the Savoy, winding up the 
 evening at the Empire, followed by supper at Romano's. Is 
 it strange that their nerves are flayed into shreds? Is it sur- 
 prising that they go back to school in a state of mental, moral 
 and physical decrepitude?
 
 272 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 It is a mistake to imagine that the children of the well- 
 to-do are benefited by a holiday in London. They are shat- 
 tered in body and demoralised in mind. Their natural sim- 
 plicity is corrupted by the pestilence of pleasure-seeking. 
 They lose the power of tasting homely joys. They are too 
 impatient to read Scott and too indolent to read Dumas. Their 
 sole desire is to see some new thing, and to get to some fresh place. 
 They crave after continual excitement and perpetual distraction. 
 They tire of the most costly toys, and they despise the most 
 amusing amusements. An army of conjurers, clowns, drolls, 
 ventriloquists, and miscellaneous entertainers is engaged in 
 the vain effort to please these pocket sultans. In spite of the 
 whole metropolitan apparatus of recreation they are jaded and 
 blase", bored and stale. They do not know what they want, 
 and they do not want what they know. They are far more 
 pitiable than the children of the poor, whose nerve of joy is 
 still unworn and unwithered. 
 
 The disease of the day is pleasure, and the boy of the 
 period is a burnt-out sensualist at the mature age of twelve. 
 He is a caricature of his elders who have ended where he has 
 begun. He is an infant neuropath saturated with ennui and 
 soaked with discontent. I was talking the other day to a 
 pessimistic babe, who candidly confessed that he was tired 
 of everything. "I know I am lazy," he declared, "but the 
 truth is I have an inclination to do anything but work." He 
 expected amusement all day every day. Stand in the vesti- 
 bule of any London theatre during the Christmas vacation, 
 and you will see these juvenile decadents driving up in motors 
 and cabs with boredom stamped upon their weary features. 
 Senility at seven is common. For the indulgent mother the 
 problem is how to get her boys through the holidays without a 
 nervous breakdown. I heard lately of a neurasthenic boy who 
 had to be Weir-Mitchelled back to health. 
 
 What is the cure for this plague of pleasure? A return 
 to simplicity. Boys won't be boys if we permit them to be 
 men.
 
 IN KENSINGTON GARDENS 
 
 LONDON contains everything, even Arcady. Are you in the 
 mood for Arcady? Well, come with me this morning. We 
 rise at six, and, leaving the lie-a-beds to snore, we walk in 
 Kensington Gardens. I can see its ancient elms from my bed- 
 room window, and often I gather May dew under them before 
 the world is down. There is no May dew now. The grass 
 is burnt white, and the fresh green of the leaves has been so- 
 bered by the sun. But as we stroll down the noble avenue of 
 elms that borders the Broad Walk our eyes are cooled by the 
 soft light that fills the verdurous corridor. 
 
 Throstle and blackbird are singing, doves are cooing, and 
 through the branches we can watch the wind and the light 
 playing their ancient game on the waters of the Round Pond. 
 Near its silver marge there is a flock of sheep, some nibbling 
 the short herbage, some dipping their soft noses in the water, 
 some lying lazily under the trees. The only sounds in the air 
 are pastoral. A distant dog barks, a rook caws, a sparrow 
 twitters. Ducks are quacking as they waddle in the grass. 
 The heavy whirr of their wings is heard as they fly from our 
 intrusion. Then, with a level splash, they slide along the sur- 
 face of the water. 
 
 The morning air is sweet in our lungs as we move round 
 this bowl of blue embroidered with trees. London is shut 
 out by a green silence. We have surprised a rural solitude. 
 It is easy to dream as we idle indolently from tree to tree. 
 
 The quiet is populous with gentle memories. On this 
 toy sea Shelley sailed his paper boats. In these glades Mat- 
 thew Arnold rambled. Browning fled here from De Vere 
 gardens. Laying down his busy pen, Thackeray often left 
 his pot-bellied house in Young Street to smile at the children 
 18 273
 
 274 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 in the Flower Walk. Here Mr. Barrie found his Peter Pan, 
 and Mr. Max Beerbohm his "Happy Hypocrite." Yes, 
 Kensington Gardens is peopled with ghosts of genius. 
 
 The Round Pond is the Petit Trianon, without the mock 
 simplicity and the tragic aftermath. It is a toy paradise 
 untainted by a meretricious past. Kensington Palace nestles 
 cosily in its trees like a doll's house or a Noah's Ark. It might 
 have been built in a nursery by a child, so simple are its lines, 
 so naive its ornament. The very windows, with their drawn 
 blinds, are unreal. The water-tower leans against the sky 
 like a boy's plaything. The fairy spire of St. Mary Abbot's 
 stabs the toy clouds like the spires in picture-books. The 
 golden cross of the Albert Memorial peeps over the trees. I 
 am sure it was a boy who put the Speke Obelisk in that green 
 glade, and planted those two tall chimneys at the end of the 
 vista where the Serpentine hides. 
 
 The scene is set for a game. Toy palace, toy churches, 
 toy trees, toy sheep, toy ducks, and toy pond are all ready for the 
 sleeping children. 
 
 But see! Under the elms there is a burst of girlish laughter. 
 Are they dryads? Yes, London dryads, pretty little shopgirls 
 from Westbourne Grove. Country maidens, perchance, com- 
 ing to ease their nostalgia in this Arcady before the long day 
 behind the counter begins. They come, they go, and after a 
 while the white nursemaids with their white babes begin to 
 stipple the green pleasaunce. The charmed stillness is shaken 
 with childish voices. Little elves dance and gambol under the 
 trees, and the old oaks nod to the old palace, as if their lone- 
 liness were assuaged. So the ancient play goes on until the 
 luncheon hour empties the toy Eden, and the sheep and the 
 ducks are left in idyllic loneliness. 
 
 But not long. The afternoon brings a merrier rout of 
 youth. The schools are closed for the summer holidays, and 
 the children of the poor come to play beside the children of 
 the rich. There are woeful contrasts now in Arcady. Blue 
 eyes peer out of tangled golden curls and smudged features 
 at the white fairies in their white chariots. Netting Dale and
 
 IN KENSINGTON GARDENS 275 
 
 Kensington Gore stare at each other half in wonder and half 
 in envy, for the fine linen of the one is counterbalanced by 
 the fine liberty of the other. "Rags" can roll on the grass, 
 walk on his hands, turn cartwheels, fling stones, and angle 
 for sticklebacks. The "Just So" child must walk soberly 
 and solemnly round and round, chained to the skirts of watchful 
 Nanna, vigilant Fraulein, or austere Mam'zelle. 
 
 Now the gravel margin is covered with children, launching 
 all sorts of craft on all sorts of voyages. Small boys are dragging 
 penny boats through the water, the bigness of their imagina- 
 tion eking out the smallness of their vessels. 
 
 Some of the yachtsmen are white-haired old salts, ancient 
 mariners tanned with storm and tempest. One old man looks 
 like Cap'n Cuttle come to life, hook and all. He climbs the 
 iron fence with rheumatic groans, while his tiny granddaughter, 
 Little Nell in person, utters wise warnings. He has a bat- 
 tered brigantine which crawls steadily from shore to shore 
 through the crowd of disdainful yachts. The wind brings 
 the water into his dim eyes, but the old man hobbles with his 
 little girl round and round, absorbed in the voyages of his 
 tramp. 
 
 Another grotesquely pathetic figure is a workman who 
 pushes a baby in a bassinette round the Pond after an erratic 
 man-o'-war, which staggers under full sail through the Bay 
 of Biscay. He is a shrivelled little cockney, but his eye blazes 
 with sea-rapture. His feverish gaze fixed on his pocket Vic- 
 tory, he fears lest the precious ship should strike reef or rock 
 or shoal or be captured by the pirates that lurk and lie in wait 
 on this perilous coast. 
 
 A crowd is gathered at Cape Kensington. A ship is in 
 distress. Slowly she founders, and now only her mast-head 
 is seen above the cruel waves. Alas! there is no lifeboat, and 
 the weeping owner must conduct salvage operations with a 
 string tied round a stone. But see! there is a battleship in 
 the offing. It steams rapidly to the rescue. A hawser is made 
 fast, and the great ironclad, rolling realistically, steams out 
 to the rescue amid the sobs of newly widowed wives.
 
 276 DVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 There are many strange craft from Hamley's and Carnage's. 
 Clockwork submarines, electric launches, Thames steamers, 
 fire-boats, torpedo-boats, motor-boats. The odour of methy- 
 lated spirits and singed paint scents the breeze. Nautical 
 phrases punctuate the chatter. Bald old boys with huge pipes 
 and bamboo-poles thrill with rapture as keen as that which 
 makes the children shriek and shout. 
 
 Fathers monopolise the navigation of the new schooner 
 which they have bought for their sons. "Dad, you might 
 let me sail it a little!" But Dad mutters something between 
 the; teeth clenched on his pipe-stem, and goes on grimly navi- 
 gating. Well, there are less innocent pastimes for parents; 
 and the children, on the whole, are marvellously patient. "It 
 takes little to amuse a child," says the mendacious proverb. 
 But when the child is forty or fifty years old the saying is not 
 so paradoxical. 
 
 I know no prettier sight than this our Cowes in Kensington. 
 The white clouds are tumbling in the blue sky. The trees are 
 piling their massed greenery all round the little regatta. The 
 rippling water slides smoothly along the careening hulls. 
 The white spinnakers flutter and flap and swell, the main- 
 sails swing to and fro, the pennants stream at the mast-heads, 
 and the merry voices of boys and girls float across the mimic 
 ocean. After all, life is very pleasant. We smile tenderly 
 at these sailors sailing their toy ships on this toy sea. Per- 
 haps the Great Spectator smiles still more tenderly at man, 
 the everlasting child, for the Round Pond is very like the 
 world.
 
 IN THE PARK 
 
 "WHERE do you keep your Smart Set?" cries Mrs. Whim. 
 My pretty American cousin is supping with me at a smart 
 restaurant. 
 
 " Dear lady, I don't keep them. I can't afford to." 
 
 "But where are they?" 
 
 "There!" 
 
 Brushing the tables with a lazy glance she tightens her 
 lips into a rosebud of disdain. 
 
 "Won't they do?" 
 
 "No, they won't." 
 
 "We might find the Smart Set at Church Parade to-morrow." 
 
 "Yes, and we might find a needle in a haystack." 
 
 "What about Henley?" 
 
 " I don't like these haunts of the lower middle-class." 
 
 "Do parade to-morrow." 
 
 "Perhaps." 
 
 I like Mrs. Whim. She gives the moral Philistine in me 
 a holiday. She leads the strenuously idle life of the feminine 
 Roosevelt. She lives in Europe while her husband slaves 
 in America. Her pet grievance is that he makes money there 
 faster than she can spend it here. Sentenced for life to the 
 penal servitude of pleasure, her nerves are in rags. She is 
 saturated with trional and sulphonal, antipyrin and phenacetin, 
 anti-kamnia and veronal. I suspect her of chloral, and she 
 has the morphine manner. She jumps if a fly walks across the 
 ceiling. She is a panic in porcelain. She has everything 
 she wants and nothing she desires. She buys more gowns and 
 more hats and more shoes and more stockings and more of 
 
 277
 
 278 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 everything than she can wear. She is mad about colour. 
 Everything on her must "go" with everything else. 
 
 HYDE PARK, SUNDAY MORNING. 
 
 "So you came after all?" 
 
 "After all what?" 
 
 "I thought ..." 
 
 " Did you ? Well, you thought wrong, as usual." 
 
 She is in one of her white caprices. Her burnished hair 
 shines in the sun like a dull gold aureole under the mist of her 
 airy hat. She is clad in white clouds taken from the sky at 
 dawn. 
 
 "You look like iced thistledown. Let me blow to tell 
 the time." 
 
 "Any more melancholy metaphors?" 
 
 "You look like an Alpine volcano of flaming snow, O 
 daughter of Vesuvius and Jungfrau!" 
 
 " I'll erupt if you persist in walking on my frock." 
 
 " Here is a nice plane-tree for you." 
 
 We sit down under the swaying leaves. 
 
 " So this is the Smart Set. How dreadfully they are libelled ! " 
 
 "As to?" 
 
 "Oh, everything. They look like Adam and Eve before 
 the fall." 
 
 " There is such a thing as dowdy depravity." 
 
 "But these people look as if they couldn't help fearing 
 God and doing right." 
 
 "My dear lady, they fear right and they do God." 
 
 "Who is that heliotrope horror walking with that shot 
 wisp of slime?" 
 
 "I think that must be the spirit of sea-sickness bowing to 
 the demon of dyspepsia." 
 
 "Isn't she yellow?" 
 
 " Like a well-seasoned meerschaum." 
 
 "But where are the Smart Set?" 
 
 "What about that pair of undulating angels?"
 
 IN THE PARK 279 
 
 "Oh, they're Frenchwomen." 
 
 We watch them gliding over the grass, and sinking into 
 chairs like snowy sea-mews melting into the trough of a wave. 
 They carry their clothes with the subtle French simplicity, 
 learned in its elaborate innocence, delicate curves springing 
 from throat to shoulder, from chin to waist, from waist to 
 tiptoe; decorative details lost in the rhythmical harmony of 
 colour and contour; the total effect gently incisive in its suave 
 grace of flowing lines. 
 
 "Why do plain women dress better than pretty ones?" 
 
 "It's the triumph of art over nature. That's why so 
 many Englishwomen are frumps. They expect their beauty 
 to redeem their clothes." 
 
 "They do their best. The British bust, for instance, is 
 always decked out like a shop window." 
 
 The feminine kaleidoscope is now a polychromatic night- 
 mare. It shifts in the green sunlight into a writhing disso- 
 nance of effervescent rainbows. Innumerable hues clash and 
 collide in jangled chaos. Brutal primary colours butcher the 
 fainter shades. Fragile complexions fade and sicken as a 
 fairy in ferocious purple sweeps by, a human scythe mowing 
 swathes of discord. 
 
 "What is the fashionable fad this morning?" 
 
 "The filmy floating scarf that veils the roast beef of Old 
 England." 
 
 "I like the filmy scarf." 
 
 "But Englishwomen are not sylphs, and nobody but a 
 sylph should wear a scarf. Look at that girl hers is like a 
 halter." 
 
 "Anglophobe!" 
 
 "Not at all. I like Englishmen and Frenchwomen, but 
 Englishwomen are too masculine, and Frenchmen too effemi- 
 nate." 
 
 "But we are more moral than the French." 
 
 "Not a bit. You make a vice of virtue: they make a 
 virtue of vice. You are afraid of being found out: they are 
 afraid of not being found out."
 
 280 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 All this time freshets of frocks are foaming over the low 
 iron rail that skirts the path. Tiny patent shoes gleam below 
 daintily lifted gowns as they rise and poise themselves and fall 
 on the grass. There are brief glimpses of pink insteps in trans- 
 parent stockings. There are seductive flashes of foamy lingerie 
 and silken flounces. As I gaze I feel Mrs. Whim's ironical 
 smile. 
 
 "It's like a minuet," I murmur. 
 
 "Oh, you men; you dear furtive liars! Why do you look 
 at our feet before you look at our faces? Vassals of an instep! 
 Slaves of an ankle! We don't gape at your feet." 
 
 "Naturally, dear lady. A man's foot is the end of a plati- 
 tude: a woman's ankle is the beginning of a mystery." 
 
 "I suppose that is why you lie at our feet." 
 
 But the sky grows dark. A few drops of rain splash on the 
 harlequinade. Panic! There is a wild stampede. In five 
 minutes the Park is empty. Mrs. Whim whirrs off to luncheon. 
 The comedy is finished, and as I pass Byron in his suit of bronze 
 he smiles, or seems to smile.
 
 THE CHARM OF A CHILD 
 
 WITHOUT children and flowers London would grow old and 
 cold. It is hard to imagine a childless and flowerless London. 
 If we knew that there were children and flowers in the stars, I 
 think those night-lights would look less inhospitable. I fear 
 there are no children in the moon. I doubt whether there are 
 daffodils in the Pleiades. I am convinced that children and 
 flowers are the especial grace of life. It is not easy to ex- 
 plain the charm of a child or the charm of a flower. It is the 
 charm of a dying beauty that does not know it dies. It is the 
 pathos of mortality unaware. It is the sad loveliness of fading 
 sweetness. Knowledge is an ugly thing. When life begins to 
 strive against death it loses its poised freshness. A man is 
 comic, for he is full of helpless foresight. But a child is not 
 comic. Being helpless, without foresight, it is exempt from 
 the irony of existence. We who behold its exquisite incapacity 
 to look before and after are stung by a sense of contrast. We 
 feel that a gulf divides it from us. We watch its feet joyously 
 approaching the abyss of wisdom. We await its fall out of the 
 paradise of the unknown into the purgatory of the known. We 
 know that no necromancy can stay its steps. Our impotence 
 fills us with a secret tenderness. Helplessly we stretch forth 
 our arms we who have fallen to the dream about to fall. 
 The love of children is the pity of remembrance. We, too, 
 were once children in our misty past. 
 
 Another fragile grace of childhood is its delicate immorality. 
 There is no such thing as a moral child. For it the dreadful 
 machinery of morality does not exist. There is no worm of 
 conscience in its soul. It is a pity that the arrival of the worm 
 cannot be postponed. I suppose education is a necessary evil, 
 
 281
 
 282 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 but why meet it half way ? There ought to be a close time for 
 children. The torture of teaching ought to be staved off as 
 long as possible. We ought to foster healthy ignorance in the 
 young. We ought to give prizes for stupidity. We ought to 
 reward children for resisting the baneful onslaughts of the 
 schoolmaster. Their healthy hatred of learning ought to be en- 
 couraged. Clever children ought to be severely punished. 
 Precocity ought to be a nursery crime. The ambition of every 
 boy ought to be to fight his way to the foot of the class. The 
 bright child ought to be put on bread and water. 
 
 Education is a gross impertinence. We regard a child as a 
 thing that must be taught. We are wrong. We ought to allow 
 children to teach us, for we can learn more from them than 
 they can learn from us. It is adult arrogance to talk about the 
 need of forming a child's mind. We can deform it, but we 
 cannot form it. All educational aphorisms are horrible. "As 
 the twig's bent the tree's inclined." But are we fit to bend the 
 twig? Our idol is uniformity. We wish to bend every twig 
 into a parallel line with every other twig. Nature is wiser. 
 She abhors landscape gardening with its rhomboids and trape- 
 ziums of dragooned greenery. Growth is the best gardener. 
 Some ferocious surgeons put the legs of children in irons in order 
 to assist nature. It is a barbarous practice, but it is not more 
 barbarous than the education which puts the mind in irons. 
 
 The growth of a child's mind is the most wonderful thing 
 in life. Why is that growth arrested as soon as the child falls 
 into the hands of teachers? Why does a child's mind grow 
 more rapidly during the first five years of its life than during 
 the next twenty? Because it is free. The mind of a child is 
 supposed to be feeble. A man is supposed to have a powerful 
 mind. The exact opposite is the truth. Most men have weak 
 minds, whereas the childish mind is almost invincibly strong. 
 The supple play of a child's mind is marvellous. It asks un- 
 answerable questions. "Where was I before I was born?" 
 inquired a boy of four. That riddle is insoluble. "Mother," 
 said a little girl, " who is God ? " That is a poser for the theolo- 
 gian. "Why am I myself?" That question was put to me
 
 THE CHARM OF A CHILD 283 
 
 by a cherub who had not yet grasped the fearful mystery of 
 multiplication. I did not attempt to answer it. 
 
 The logic of a child is crushing. One Shrove Tuesday I 
 heard an infant of four reduce his parents to a state of mental 
 pulp. He bent over his plate and licked the sugar off his 
 pancake. 
 
 " Don't do that," said his father. 
 
 "Why? "said the child. 
 
 "It is rude to lick." 
 
 "Must I never lick anything?" 
 
 "Never," said his father. 
 
 "Then," said the child, after a thoughtful pause, "what 
 is the word 'lick' for?" 
 
 It was a triumph of the Socratic method. 
 
 Are you afraid of a child ? I am. We all are. Education 
 is based upon our fear. We are afraid of being found out. 
 Discipline is the armour of ignorance. Obedience is the sword 
 of tyranny. We lie to each other, but the lies of the adult to 
 the adult are nothing compared to the lies of the adult to the 
 child. The nursery is a palace of lies. The school is a crema- 
 torium of truth. Parents pay the schoolmaster to teach what 
 they do not believe. They hire pedagogues to assassinate the 
 mind, and they call it education. We grieve over the decay 
 of filial respect, but what about parental respect? Can we 
 ask our children to respect us when we do not respect 
 them? 
 
 It would astonish parents if they could see themselves as 
 their children see them. Children are adepts in dissimulation. 
 They swiftly learn to conceal their private opinions about their 
 elders. Have you ever surprised the look of amused contempt 
 with which a child meets the clumsy advances of a patronising 
 grown-up? He knows that the amiable idiot is doing his best, 
 but he recognises the amateur, and nobly endures his fatuities. 
 The child is all imagination, and he instinctively resents any at- 
 tempt to treat him as a harmless little lunatic. We err in try- 
 ing to stoop down to a child. We ought rather to reach up to 
 him. We ought to bring our dead imagination , into touch
 
 284 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 with his living one. I know a boy who loathes children's books. 
 He often begs for a real grown-up book. 
 
 Our publishers fusillade the nursery with books which are 
 an insult to the mind of childhood. They are careful exercises 
 in inanity. They are hideous with a revolting facetiousness. 
 I would not give these books to a puppy. They are beneath the 
 intellectual level of Bedlam. The authors of these books are 
 stickit novelists, baffled serialists, and undetected criminals. 
 The modern child-book is stuffed with realism and devoid of 
 romance. It stones imagination to death with facts. It even 
 makes animals uninteresting. I once gave a little boy "The 
 Book of Romance," and I was delighted to find him one wet 
 afternoon weeping luxuriously on the hearthrug over the death 
 of Roland at the battle of Roncesvalles. They were golden 
 tears full of Homeric magnanimity and heroic pity. The 
 same boy was staying at a farmhouse one summer. He had 
 been lying in a hammock in the orchard reading one of Mr. 
 Andrew Lang's gallant fairy books. Boylike he left the book 
 in the hammock. Next day before breakfast he found it dank 
 with dew and woefully stained and torn. A romantic cow had 
 been chewing it during the night. There was green cud on the 
 leaves. "I suppose," said the boy, "we'll have fairies in our 
 milk this morning." That conceit is a kind of wild poetry. It 
 has imaginative humour in it. 
 
 Children are very humorous. I know an elflet who is only 
 two years old, yet she bubbles over with humour. It is an 
 emanation of radiant wonder. It flickers shyly in her blue eyes. 
 It wavers in her tiny lips. It tinkles in her laugh and ripples 
 in her smile. It is a very subtle quality, full of fine gradations. 
 For example, she can distinguish between real grief and sham 
 grief. She can caricature sorrow. She can pretend to cry, 
 but her histrionic sobs and moans are quite different from her 
 real ones. There is a chuckle in them. She can also parody the 
 mannerisms of other children. She can burlesque a fellow-baby 
 in a pet. Her dear friend Marguerite has a peculiarly wrathful 
 way of saying, "No!" She can catch the very inflection of her 
 voice, and cry her friend's "No!" like a baby Bernhardt. Her
 
 285 
 
 memory is incredible. She can remember the rhyme-words of 
 her long nursery rhymes and utter them with diabolical patness. 
 I am sure education destroys the memory. This morsel seems 
 to forget nothing. The odd thing is that she takes in ideas as 
 a flower takes in sunlight. She knows things that cannot have 
 entered her little brain by any link of association. It is a sort 
 of magical absorption. 
 
 She is most inscrutable when she is silent. At times in 
 the midst of boisterous fun she suddenly glides into an im- 
 mobile rapture. Her face listens and her eyes are filmed with 
 a beautiful wonder. You can see the flower-soft soul moving 
 behind the flower-soft face, the life within whispering to the 
 life without. Her look is visible poetry. It is at once a rebuke 
 and a beckoning. It enables one to realise how ineffable life 
 can be and how coarse. 
 
 Children are dramatists. This pretty sweeting dramatises 
 everything. One day she saw a flock of sheep in Kensington 
 Gardens. For her it was a terrible adventure. She went about 
 baa-ing vigorously. A few days afterwards a sheepskin rug 
 came home from the cleaners. When she saw it she stood 
 petrified with terror. At last she baa-ed timidly, and by degrees 
 mustered up courage to toddle over to it. With valiant fool- 
 hardiness she put forth her hand to touch it, and then shuddered 
 with a fearful joy. It was another terrible adventure. Her 
 dauntless courage was visibly wrestling with her dread. As I 
 watched the little drama, I saw in it the whole history of man. 
 It was the past in miniature. There in essence was the story of 
 the human experiment, with its explorations, curiosities, and 
 conquests. And I wondered whether there is a Spectator 
 who beholds the little drama of man as I beheld the little drama 
 of the child watching with wise smiles little Man toddling 
 over his little patches of land and sea with his little toys of 
 steam and electricity, and listening tenderly to his little language. 
 Yes, and perhaps behind that Spectator there is another Spec- 
 tator an infinite ascending series of Spectators. "Baa!" 
 said the babe. After all, did Shakespeare say more ?
 
 MAINLY ABOUT LAW
 
 THE HALO 
 
 THE Forging of the Anchor is a poetic labour which has been 
 hymned by the minor bardling. Who shall hymn the Forging of 
 the Halo? I do not know how much Mr. Hooley's Halo has 
 cost in fees and refreshers, but the canonisation of a modern 
 saint is expensive. Many a king has been crowned with a 
 meaner ritual and a less elaborate ceremony. For seven months 
 the great officers of State toiled to prepare the stage for the 
 gorgeous celebration, and the sacred pageant itself lasted for 
 twenty days. 
 
 At the beginning of the ceremony strange delusions were 
 rife among the populace. There were vague suspicions with 
 regard to Saint Terah, in spite of the fact that he had taken 
 the vow of poverty known as Bankruptcy. In deference to these 
 popular legends, the functions of the Devil's Advocate were en- 
 trusted to the Solicitor-General. But Sir Edward Carson 
 failed to find a stain on Terah's robe. 
 
 When I entered the Old Bailey, I expected to find a cower- 
 ing miscreant in the dock. Instead of a criminal I found a 
 martyr. Already around his clear unsullied brow I discerned 
 the nascent gleam of the dawning aureole. When he stepped 
 out of the dock into the witness-box the celestial radiance grew 
 more golden hour by hour and day by day, until at last nothing 
 was needed save a background of stained glass, a choir of angels 
 and acolytes with swinging censers. 
 
 Hard it was to restrain one's wrath before the spectacle 
 of a just man at bay. The Crown became the culprit, and the 
 Saint of Nottingham a gentle accusing spirit. The sword sus- 
 pended above the judge's head became a sword of Damocles, 
 threatening to fall upon justice herself if she dared to injure 
 that spotless innocent, that holy victim of conspiring malignities. 
 19 289
 
 290 
 
 Squalid and sordid was the setting of the scene. The re- 
 nowned court seemed to be a morgue. Through its dingy 
 windows a sickly, sallow light leaped dismally. In the airless 
 cell all the inmates were huddled into absurd proximity. The 
 judge could have dipped his pen in the dock. Sir Edward 
 Carson could hardly gesticulate without decapitating the jury. 
 But Saint Terah triumphed over this vulgar environment, his 
 spiritual radiance transfigured the greasy walls and the grimy 
 benches. Neither Luther at Wurtemberg nor Cecil Rhodes 
 at Westminster achieved a victory so effulgent, a vindication 
 so sublime. 
 
 Let me try to paint a thumbnail portrait of the good man. 
 As he stands in the witness box he looks like a dapper owl 
 his large, round, dark eyes staring wistfully from under his 
 meagre, high-curved eyebrows, full of puzzled pathos and 
 tolerant astonishment, mild magnanimity and forgiving pity. 
 The gentle and genial soul of the man brims over in those clear 
 wells of untroubled benevolence. A simple, untutored nature, 
 void of guile and cunning and craft, gazes out of their calm 
 honesty. There is no shifty flicker in their unblinking glance, 
 no filmy evasion, no sham emotion. They are like the polished 
 plate-glass windows in Throgmorton Street; through them you 
 may inspect the orderly furniture of the great financier's shining 
 mahogany soul, with its impenetrable safes and strong rooms, 
 its spick ledgers, its respectable clerks, its clicking tape-machines, 
 and its domestic sentiment. 
 
 For me Saint Terah's eyes are an obsession, and the other 
 details of his body mere insignificances. He has carefully 
 groomed himself into a frozen aspect of convention. The close- 
 cropped, black hair, decently brushed, has a neatly ruled 
 parting; and, with a due regard for the traditions of melodrama, 
 during the ceremony of trial it has turned a pathetic iron-grey. 
 The black moustache and beard are meticulously conventional, 
 the latter cropped close to the cheeks in City fashion. The 
 only symptom of nervous eagerness in the man comes from his 
 hands, which now and then have that horrible wandering unrest 
 that reveals the hunted agony of the mind.
 
 THE HALO 291 
 
 For relief I turn from the appealing flesh to the clothes 
 which trick out its tragedy with farce. Mr. Hooley is an artist, 
 and his tailor is a man of genius. He is dressed like a jovial 
 country squire, with a deliberate smack of that honest vulgarity 
 which captures the heart of a British jury. There is a loud 
 splash of white knotted necktie on a sonorous pink shirt, while 
 below a scarlet waistcoat bellows at its blaring band of brass 
 buttons. His fingers drum on the desk, and his clothes carol 
 "A Southerly Wind and a Cloudy Sky." 
 
 But the eyes take no part in this mummery. They are 
 serenely sad and sweet, and as the rich rhythm of Sir Edward 
 Carson's Dublin brogue undulates in accusations, they grow 
 sadder and sweeter, until at last their sad sweetness overflows 
 in a torrent of tears. That torrent sweeps through the Augean 
 Court and sanctifies the grime-stained floor of the Old Bailey. 
 Justice blows her nose, and Law takes snuff, while the Press 
 turns the tears into headlines. The Old Bailey is a tear-bottle 
 in which are kept the sobs of many misunderstood men, but the 
 tears of Saint Terah are more precious than all the drops in 
 that great lachrymatory. If the saint should ever write the 
 story of his life, there must be a chapter entitled "Mes Larmes." 
 Gracious is the touch of nature which shows the kinship between 
 Mr. Hooley and Miss Blanche Amory. 
 
 After those tears I realised that the legal minuet danced 
 so elegantly by Mr. Rufus Isaacs and Sir Edward Carson could 
 only end by leading us gently towards the radiant realms of 
 rehabilitation. And the mellifluous melancholy of Mr. Hooley's 
 voice, as it groped after the finest and subtlest shades of verity, 
 filled me with admiring pity for the lonely sufferer. No sense of 
 wrong could make this patient searcher after truth weary in his 
 quest. Let us all emulate his passion for rigid veracity, his 
 fearless candour, and his fierce hatred of quibbling or equivoca- 
 tion. 
 
 But, fine as is that facet of Mr. Hooley's character, it is 
 not finer than another which flashed out during his cross- 
 examination his loyalty to his friend Lawson. "Game as a 
 linnet," he is also staunch as steel. Just as he freely forgave
 
 292 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the Treasury for prosecuting him, so he freely forgave Lavvson 
 for deceiving him, and his magnanimity culminated in his im- 
 mortal offer to bail out his old comrade. Some may prefer 
 to regard that as a stroke of absolute humour; I regard it 
 as a noble display of that generous profligacy which has wrought 
 the ruin of the man, leaving him without even the bed he made 
 to lie on.
 
 THE OLD BAILEY 
 
 LET us go to the Old Bailey and watch the closing scenes of a 
 murder trial. The famous court stands amid the desolation of 
 Newgate, on the site of which is rising a brand-new building As 
 we enter the court we pass through a lane of loafers, buzzing 
 like flies round a carcass. The court is a small, mean, dingy 
 chamber. Along one side there is a row of six desks on a dai's. 
 Above the midmost desk is an oaken canopy; fixed on its crim- 
 son panel an inverted sword of justice, gorgeous in its gilt scab- 
 bard. The six desks are strewn with sweet herbs, a quaint 
 survival of ancient custom. In old times the prisoners often 
 suffered from gaol fever, and the nostrils of the law were safe- 
 guarded by thyme and lavender, mint and rosemary. 
 
 Opposite the six desks is a large pen or pound or paddock. 
 It is the Dock. Its size is surprising. Space is lavished upon 
 the accused. The high side-walls of the Dock are furnished 
 with glass as a protection against draught. There is ironic 
 humour in the solicitude which shields from a draught a man 
 who is on trial for his life. 
 
 The Judge comes in, followed by Aldermen and Sheriffs, each 
 carrying a country nosegay of roses, carnations, and sweet peas. 
 
 The Judge bows to the Bar, the Bar bows to the Judge, and 
 the dreadful ritual of a murder trial begins to unroll itself. 
 
 As I look around the court there is something familiar which 
 puzzles me. What is it? Is it the colour of the woodwork, 
 that revolting light-oak, bilious hue which is the official tint of 
 Government furniture everywhere ? The Dock is a vast blotch 
 of it, and it looks like a horrible chancel in some hideous chapel, 
 with the Prisoner for Priest and his warders for acolytes. Ah, 
 that is the baffling resemblance which has been tantalizing me. 
 
 293
 
 294 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 The Old Bailey is like a dilapidated conventicle, and the Dock 
 is simply the largest pew, tenanted by the squire and his servitors. 
 
 As I listen to the sermon I mean the speech of counsel for 
 the defence I succumb to the illusion. I nod. The good 
 man is audibly inaudible. When a fragment of phrase reaches 
 me it is so vapid that I cease to listen. Even the Prisoner seems 
 bored by his own advocate, as if all desire for life were extin- 
 guished by this dismal dribble of forensic eloquence. I begin 
 to understand why so many mediocre minds shine at the Bar. 
 
 But the sunlight strikes the windows, and touches the pallid 
 Prisoner with rosy fingers, and in a moment I see right to the 
 heart of this tragedy. Only one man in this court is in earnest, 
 terribly, awfully, feverishly in earnest. It is the Prisoner. We 
 are all tired, Judge, Jury, Bar, Press, Police, and Public. The 
 sunlight beckons to us this summer afternoon. It whispers 
 alluring visions of cool waves and winds, bright skies, and tossing 
 cornfields. "Come," it sighs, and its voice silences pity and 
 compassion. 
 
 But for the Prisoner the sunlight is an impertinence. He 
 brushes it aside. With his eyes plunged into some vista of 
 thought, he is isolated from us all, a burning body of flaming 
 doom, every sense quickened with intense anguish of foresight. 
 As his counsel ends, he glances swiftly over his shoulder at the 
 clock. We all follow his glance, but the thought in our mind 
 is bitterly different from the thought in his. We are wondering 
 how long the last rites will take, and how much of the golden 
 afternoon will be left. Oh, life is very insatiable, and it snatches 
 its delight out of the very teeth of death. 
 
 And now the Prosecution a forensic eccentricity. His 
 twisted face is like a Reed caricature, the features writhed like 
 those of a lemon-eater. His voice is like a Punch and Judy 
 squeaker worked by steam at varying pressures. It spirts and 
 spurts and sputters in thin jets, as if the sound were being 
 squeezed through a small orifice. It is the noise of a fantastic 
 engine of agony. All the conjunctions and prepositions, articles 
 and participles, are sharply accented. When by chance he 
 emphasises an important word, he goes back and de-emphasises
 
 THE OLD BAILEY 295 
 
 it. His sentences are broken into bits, chewed into staccato 
 pieces, and spat out painfully in a tormented discord. 
 
 The Prisoner is now burning more fiercely than ever. His 
 face is like a live coal. As I watch him his eye meets mine, 
 and I shiver, for the soul of the man seems to wrestle with mine 
 for a second. There is a look 1n his eye like the look I have 
 seen in the eye of a stag dragged out of the water by the hunts- 
 men, and surrounded by yelping hounds. 
 
 Horror takes hold on me as I watch this creature struggling 
 in the toils. And as I note the frightful profile, with its zigzag 
 riot of angles, its feeble chinlessness, its dreadful lack of equi- 
 librium, its moral instability, its sharp brilliancy of intelligence, 
 I shudder. This man, surely, has inherited a heritage of moral 
 disaster. 
 
 Not in one generation was that tragic profile carved. Its 
 callous insensibility is hardly human. Its crafty intensity is 
 hardly brutal. The pointed ear, faunlike in its unnatural shape, 
 hints at something repellently hideous, a recurrence of the dim 
 evil and the dark power that curdles the blood and roughens 
 the scalp and sickens the soul. Alas! that man should be 
 made on the very verge of the ineffably obscene. 
 
 The Prisoner's iron nerves are now drawn out very fine. 
 Somebody tears a piece of paper. He starts. His small, sunken 
 eyes glance quickly round the court; then, as the Judge sums 
 up, they settle like points of flame upon the old gentleman's 
 placid face. The Judge wilts under their fire. Once he meets 
 them, but after a swift duel he flinches and averts his gaze. The 
 Judge and the Jury withdraw, the Prisoner disappears through 
 his trapdoor, and again life asserts its claims. How long? 
 Hardly have we asked the question when the Jury return. They 
 do not disguise their desire to escape from this stifling oven 
 of crime into the clean air. 
 
 The Prisoner reappears, the Judge returns, and for a second 
 there is an electric pause. The Prisoner stands like a man of 
 stone, his hands gripping the ledge of the Dock, his eyes fixed 
 on the Foreman. 
 
 "Guilty!"
 
 296 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 He does not blanch. The Judge fumbles with the Black 
 Cap, which looks like an old woman's mutch, and then, in alow 
 unemotional murmur, sentences the Prisoner to be hanged. 
 
 Still the Prisoner stands, gazing, gazing, gazing, into that 
 far vista at the end of which is what ? 
 
 The sentence has broken his continuity with a snap, but 
 still he stands, still he gazes. At last the warders seize him 
 by the arms, and he is hurried out of the sunshine and heat and 
 bustle of life. 
 
 It is not an impressive scene, but it has all the tangled 
 triviality of realism in its tragic moments. It is not theatrical, 
 save for the Black Cap, and, curiously enough, the Black Cap 
 is the one unreal episode, the one touch that stagifies the ritual. 
 
 Stay! What of the roses, carnations, sweet peas, and sweet 
 herbs ? Well, perhaps they breathe tidings of a mystic world 
 where even the murderer may rest at last.
 
 THE POLICE-COURT 
 
 THE "virtuous end" of Regent-street is very vivacious this 
 October morning. Oxford-circus is a whirl of 'buses, hansoms, 
 motors, and petticoats. The crossings are alive with ladies. 
 Every other minute the policeman in the centre of the road holds 
 up his hand and cuts the traffic in two. Piling up the tide of 
 vehicles, as Moses piled up the Red Sea, he allows the huddled 
 groups of women to dart like flurried hens from bank to bank, 
 from kerb to kerb. His gesture is quietly omnipotent. It 
 freezes and thaws the torrent of wheels like the wand of Harle- 
 quin. The shop windows are craftily dressed with feminine 
 fripperies. Their great plate-glass doors swing perpetually to 
 and fro. The liveried scouts, ruddy giants, armed with cab- 
 whistles and wheel-guards, are opening and closing the doors of 
 carriages, calling "taxies," hansoms and growlers, and escorting 
 nervous old ladies. The air is full of the hum and buzz of 
 bargain-hunters, the frou-frou of silken dessous, the chatter of 
 avid shop-gazers, the collision of a hundred perfumes. A blind 
 man, in a short, white linen jacket, his clean-shaven, square- 
 jawed, thin-lipped face thrown back in a blank, expressionless 
 vacancy, tap-taps his way through the press. Chickens, fresh 
 from the incubator, are running about in one shop-window. 
 Women with miraculous hair hanging down their back ad- 
 vertise a hair-restorer in another. In a third, paste jewelry 
 desperately strives to look like reality, its false glitter and lying 
 lustre stimulated by the forged glare of electric lights. 
 
 Everywhere we see the desire of the star for the moth, and 
 the desire of the moth for the star. The women have the tan of 
 the sea-wind on their faces. They are garlanded with golden 
 chains strung with fantastic charms. They carry purses and 
 bags woven like mail out of steel and silver and gold. They 
 
 297
 
 298 
 
 are encrusted with costly eccentricities. Round their high 
 heels silken extravagances foam and flicker with all the hues 
 of the dyer's art. Their hair gleams with fantastic combs. 
 They exhale luxury, luxury, luxury! Poverty seems to be an- 
 nihilated, but let us turn the corner and look at the other side 
 of the shield in the Marlborough-street Police-Court. Round 
 the entrance there is a knot of dingy loafers. Passing along a 
 melancholy corridor, we open a dolorous door that leads into 
 a sad-coloured room, littered with policemen. In the ceiling 
 there is an oblong skylight like an inverted glass tank, with 
 squalid blinds of striped ticking, and a whirring fan. Against 
 the further wall a tarnished lion and unicorn are stuck over a 
 bookcase full of gloomy legal tomes. Below sits a rosy old 
 gentleman, with deeply ruled wrinkles. He is the magistrate. 
 On the right is the usher, in his rusty gown. In front 
 of him is the dock, a long, low, narrow wooden pedestal, 
 fenced with crossed iron rails, its floor worn smooth by the brief 
 tramplings of innumerable malefactors. Blotches of liquid 
 stain it here and there, for its transient inmates demand deodor- 
 ization. The acrid perfume of carbolic stings the nostrils. It 
 is the scent of crime, the perfume of poverty. 
 
 The magistrate is a lightning cadi. He deals out his penal- 
 ties as suavely and swiftly as an adroit card-player deals his 
 cards. All his underlings move like the gear of a lubricated 
 machine. The prisoners are fed into and out of the dock as 
 the paper is fed into and out of a printing-machine. They are 
 extruded with the stamp of guilt or innocence on them. The 
 smart dock-policeman takes the prisoner, puts him into the dock, 
 calls out his name and number, and says, "Guilty or not 
 guilty?" Another policeman kisses the Book, mumbles his 
 name and number, and tersely gabbles the charge. Another 
 rapidly reels off a string of previous convictions. Then the 
 prisoner is asked if he wishes to put any questions, the magis- 
 trate jerks out a laconic formula ("Ten shillings or seven days"), 
 the dock-policeman shuffles him out into the mysterious back- 
 ground, repeating the penalty in a still terser formula ("Ten 
 or seven"), and the next prisoner is shot into the dock. It is
 
 THE POLICE-COURT 299 
 
 like the oiled mechanism of a self-ejecting breech-loader. The 
 process is astounding. The human cartridges are slipped in, 
 fired, and discarded with automatic precision. Now and then 
 a slight hitch impedes the volley of justice, but it is rapidly re- 
 moved, and the stream of sentenced flesh continues. 
 
 But what saddens me is the discovery that poverty is often 
 the mother of crime, and that crime is not always the mother of 
 poverty. Most of these stumps of manhood and womanhood 
 are guilty of want and convicted of starvation. A man who 
 would not be allowed to understudy a scarecrow is charged with 
 having asked a gentleman for a penny. The penalty for begging 
 seems to be three shillings or three days. It might as well be 
 three millions or three centuries, so far as the regeneration of 
 Lazarus is concerned. 
 
 One case is cruelly pathetic. A boy with a peaked and 
 pinched face confesses that he did implore a gentleman to give 
 him a penny. He is too doleful, too desolate, for protest. He 
 gasps out his despair in toneless sentences. "Been walking 
 the streets for a week no food no bed I'm destitute." He 
 is an image of ragged hunger and forlorn famine. 
 
 Another boy represents poverty in revolt. A policeman 
 heard a smash of glass, found prisoner in doorway. "What are 
 you doing?" "I'm trying to break in, an' if you hadn't come, 
 I would have been in. " " What did you do it with ? " " This." 
 The policeman holds up a bar of iron. " Any questions ?" The 
 boy hangs his head, and mutters, "All true." He is stupidly 
 indifferent. He is at war with society. He is crime in the rough 
 and raw. We see in him a grain of the grit that clogs the ma- 
 chine of civilization. The grain gets into the machine. It is 
 taken out at immense cost, kept in gaol for a few months or 
 years, flung again into the streets, gets in again and out again, 
 and so on, until it is finally arrested by Policeman Death, and 
 gaoled for ever in the grave. There is something wrong some- 
 where. Surely at some point in the process the journey of the 
 grain of grit can be diverted. Can it not be humanized and 
 moralized, or at least sterilized? What is the sense of this per- 
 petual futility of prisoning and disprisoning? Is there no better
 
 300 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 way ? Must the legal machine go on grinding its chaff for ever ? 
 Is there not a method more scientific and less inhuman ? Chem- 
 ists have taught us how to utilize the waste and refuse and 
 residuals of manufacture. We want social chemists who can 
 teach us how to utilize the waste and refuse and residuals of 
 civilization. 
 
 Another class of police-court crime rivals begging in its 
 pathos. It is the crime of trying to get into the army again. 
 The army vomits the wastrel and lodges him in gaol, where he 
 lives as the guest of the State. The army is a convalescent home 
 for the wounded soldiers of society. The harried criminal, worn 
 out with crime, tries to lose his identity by everlasting enlist- 
 ments. But his degenerate physique betrays him, and he is 
 tossed from the barracks to the gaol in a miserable game of 
 social tennis. 
 
 I am convinced that the State cannot delegate the problem 
 of criminal poverty to the Barnardos and the Booths. The true 
 method is to attack the disease at its foot the child. No child 
 should be allowed to mature in criminal penury. The State 
 ought to stand by every cradle and lead the infant up to the 
 light. In the end, it would be cheaper than this unscientific 
 prodigality of surveillance and revenge which works in a wilder- 
 ness of waste between the workhouse and the gaoL
 
 CRIME AND THE CROWD 
 
 THACKERAY speaks of "that great baby, the public," and I 
 recall his phrase as I stand outside the New Bailey, watching the 
 crowd that is waiting for the verdict in the Camden Town mur- 
 der trial. It is a child-crowd, a crowd of grown-up children. 
 
 Three o'clock in the afternoon. The crowd stands and 
 stares intently at the floridly pompous building behind whose 
 walls Robert Wood is fighting for his life. It does not talk much, 
 though here and there knots of men idly debate the mystery. 
 But, on the whole, it is a silent and moody crowd. It is com- 
 posed of all classes. Here are two black-haired actors with 
 flannel collars, fur coats, and blue chins; here a soldier daubs 
 the grey light with a splash of scarlet; here a Gordon High- 
 lander in full fig tartan plaid, silver-mounted dirk, and white 
 gaiters, with one blob of mud on them struts up and down, 
 on his arm a solemn servant girl, whose large hands are shape- 
 less lumps wrapped in white cotton gloves. Women with whey- 
 faced babies in their arms are constantly arriving and departing. 
 A dandiacal Frenchman with a bushy coal-black beard, neatly 
 combed and parted in the middle, gazes fixedly at the great door 
 and the giant policeman guarding it. A grimy hawker is selling 
 sickly bananas. Women, with purple, puffed cheeks, dull eyes, 
 and oiled hair, are bandying coarse jests with dingy loafers. 
 The cheap eating-houses are filled with unwashed men, devour- 
 ing strange messes that exude a rank savour of onions and burnt 
 lard. A dim tavern, whose signboard boasts that it has been 
 established two hundred years, is congested with rough men, 
 smoking cigarettes and clay pipes, and drinking glasses of froth- 
 ing ale and foaming stout. "The King of Denmark" has heard 
 many a murder trial threshed out over its bar. Its smoky walls 
 seem to be gloating and chuckling over its squalid memories. 
 
 301
 
 302 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 They sneer at the raw, white-grey walls opposite, which are 
 only beginning to take the leprous finger-prints of time and 
 crime. "The King of Denmark" knows the Newgate Calendar 
 by heart. 
 
 As the daylight wanes the sightseers come and go perpetually. 
 Some of them drag tired children, muffled to the ears, to gape 
 at the moving scene. There are laughing young girls in twos 
 and threes, whose gaudy hats and cheap furs contrast sharply 
 with the mouldy idlers whose coat-collars are shiny with ancient 
 grease and grime. Some of these men are filthy monsters, with 
 a fungoid evil down on their discoloured cheeks and chins. 
 There is a dull, besotted degradation in their glazed eyes, their 
 pendulous lips, their slovenly shuffle. Here is every type of 
 criminal, from the fleshy bully to the gin-soaked drab. That 
 swarthy fellow has a lower lip which protrudes horribly, an ob- 
 scenity of bruised and bitten flesh. 
 
 On the smooth asphalt there is a sticky film of slimy mire, 
 the glutinous London mire that is like no other mire on earth. 
 Men with hose-pipes flush it with clear water that liquefies 
 the mud. Up and down the sloping surface shamble and 
 shuffle the feet of the crowd, hustled to and fro by the police. 
 All sorts of feet in all sorts of boots and shoes. Flimsy, high- 
 heeled shoes of girls, brown boots, black boots, and hideous 
 boots that have been trodden out of shape. Lop-sided boots. 
 Boots with gaping rents. Boots soaked with mud. Up and 
 down, to and fro, they slither and slink. It is a nightmare of 
 boots. They haunt me with a vision of all the boots in London, 
 rising and falling day after day in the cold slush on the cold 
 stones of innumerable streets. Millions of boots moving in 
 couples, with millions of eyes and ears and hands and hearts 
 above them. Boots of the living and boots of the dead. Ugh! 
 By a trick of fancy I think of the boots worn by Phyllis Dim- 
 mock for the last time on that fatal Wednesday. I see them 
 lying dumbly in that room of horror, while the charred letter 
 lies dumbly in the grate. If they could talk to the embers of 
 the letter, what a tale they could tell! 
 
 I leave the crowd and the shiny pavement as the lamps begin
 
 CRIME AND THE CROWD 303 
 
 to see their yellow light in its foul mirror. I pass the sombre 
 policeman guarding the great glass doors. I climb the broad 
 staircase to the vast hall with its painted frescoes, its veiled 
 lights, and its waiting groups. It is curiously like the Central 
 Hall of the House of Commons. I go into Court No. i. I see 
 the sword of justice in its sheath behind the grim judge. I see 
 the prisoner sitting in the empty loneliness of the huge dock, a 
 warder on either hand, and a keen-faced doctor behind him. 
 Round three sides of the dock is a glass screen, and I can see 
 the handrail plunging down the stairs that lead to the cell and 
 to the scaffold and to the grave. The crowd in the court is not 
 like the crowd outside. It is more subtle and more cynical. In 
 it there are delicate and dainty women and cultured men 
 actors, actresses, novelists, dramatists, journalists, alienists, law- 
 yers in robe and wig. It is flippant. It is cruel. It jests. It 
 knows that the prisoner is safe. The judge knows. The law- 
 yers know. The police know. The prisoner knows. We all 
 know. Before the jury return the prisoner comes back. He is 
 chewing a last mouthful of bread and butter, for he has just 
 taken tea. He is cool, calm, almost gay. He sketches the 
 judge, while the spectators stare at him in amazement. The 
 warders stop him. He smiles. He talks to them airily. He 
 smiles. He puts both hands in his trouser pockets, and strolls 
 round the dock, surveying us all with a swagger and a smile. 
 He smiles a cheery recognition at his father. He signs auto- 
 graphs with a flourish. The jury returns. He licks his lips. 
 At the words "Not guilty" a sharp shout of exultation explodes 
 like a mine, as if a button had been pressed. The judge raises 
 his hand, and across the sudden silence is heard the muffled 
 roar of the crowd outside, like an echo of the roar within. It 
 is a superb stage-effect, electrically dramatic in its lightning 
 rapidity. 
 
 I hurry to the outer gates. They are closed. Through 
 their solidly massive bars I see a swaying, writhing, struggling 
 tidal wave of white faces, moving unsteadily under the vague, 
 shifting light of the street lamps. The numberless mouths are 
 wide open like little black holes, and out of these little black holes
 
 304 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 is pouring a torrent of bellowing discords, which blend into a 
 high, shrill, sharp-edged song without words, ringing metal- 
 lically, brazenly, in a prolonged clang of fiercely passionate 
 triumph. The iron note of the song is held without fluctuation. 
 It does not flag or falter. It drives straight on like a knife tearing 
 through paper. It does not soar or sink. It is the cry of the 
 crowd, the roar of the strange beast with a thousand throats. 
 It is horribly human, hideously alive, appallingly savage. It is 
 the howl of the beast of blood that stoned Stephen and crucified 
 Christ, that battered down the gates of the Bastille, and drank 
 blood in Cawnpore and Khartoum. It is the brazen chant of the 
 Mafficker, the iron cadence of the Commune. It is the mad- 
 dening chorus that has sacked a thousand cities. It is the dead 
 march of death that has been heard in pogrom and massacre, 
 in riot and in rapine. The hero of the mob is a man after its 
 own heart, and if he had been condemned it would have stormed 
 the New Bailey and torn its defenders limb from limb. Even 
 its exultation is hoarse with menace, even its triumph is sonorous 
 with fury. Civilization has not changed the mob. It is the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and forever.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT ELD 
 
 20
 
 THE EAST INDIA HOUSE 
 
 BEHIND Liverpool Street Station, near the Houndsditch end 
 of St. Mary Axe, there is a little lane called Cutler Street. On 
 one of the houses is the inscription, "Cutler Street, 1734," a 
 date which takes you back to the boyhood of Clive and the 
 palmy days of the East India Company. As we walk down the 
 street we pass an old-clo' shop, framed in whose doorway stands 
 a vast Jewess, her mountainous form draped with manifold furs, 
 placid, contemplative, immobile, as becomes the daughter of a 
 race older than Aurungzebe's. 
 
 Before us rises into the grey sky a huge pile of brick build- 
 ings surrounding a great courtyard. In the Post Office Direc- 
 tory it is prosaically described as "London and India Docks 
 Committee. " But under that bald name lurks all the dead ro- 
 mance of eighteenth-century adventure. These dull ware- 
 houses carry in their dusty heart a dim memory of John Company, 
 that wonderful shop out of whose ledgers came the Empire of 
 India. 
 
 Mounting some ancient steps, we ascend a gloomy old stair- 
 case, its balusters polished by centuries of human hands, and 
 enter a large official room. It seems that John Company, in its 
 magnificently opulent way, built these gigantic buildings for 
 its warriors. They were barracks in the eighteenth century, 
 and in this wing were the quarters of the officers. We see the 
 arch, now built up, which once led into the other half of the 
 room, and under which Clive walked. 
 
 But the most eloquent witness of the past is the old door, 
 with its quaint moulding and opaque glass panels. The right- 
 hand half of the door has sunk half an inch, the old brass hinges 
 having been worn away by the friction of generations; the hinges 
 of the left-hand half, being seldom used, remain in their original 
 
 307
 
 308 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 condition. These worn hinges affect us strangely. We think 
 of all the dead hands that have turned the old handle, of the 
 dead men whose feet have aroused the echoes of these buff walls. 
 The dauntless figure of Clive once stood there between the 
 gloom of that staircase landing and the light from these windows, 
 the dreams of empire playing behind his steady eyes. 
 
 Down two steps we go and stand outside another heavy door, 
 its mouldings carved out of the solid wood. We turn the handle 
 and enter a little room in which Clive worked. It is full of 
 Customs clerks. The mantelpiece is a venerable affair, the wood 
 worn into a mellow, rounded ancientry. There is a tradition 
 that once upon a time on the yellow wall over the fire there was 
 a portrait of Clive drawn by some unknown hand. No man 
 living has seen it. It is only a vague legend. But the tale goes 
 that it still survives somewhere behind the distemper, a ghostly 
 picture of a ghost. The portrait has vanished. It is only a 
 shadowy reminiscence. 
 
 Leaving the room of the invisible portrait, we stumble down 
 the stairs into Clive 's back garden. The garden is a silence 
 walled in by tall buildings that seem to be playing a solemn 
 game of hide and seek with each other. We look up at the bed- 
 room windows with their rusty iron balconies, whose criss-cross de- 
 sign wears a pathetic air of faded gaiety and gallantry, strangely 
 incongruous in this world of bonded goods, police inspectors, 
 and Custom House officers. Half-way up the building a queer 
 wooden frame with dingy windows clings despairingly to the 
 grimy wall. As we stare a sparrow flies out. We seem to smell 
 the odour of Time here, as if we had surprised him at his work 
 of decay. Perhaps he transformed himself into that phantom 
 sparrow. Well, it is no wonder that they call this nest of mem- 
 ories the East India House. The old East India House in 
 Leadenhall Street, where for three and thirty years the desk 
 vexed and fretted Charles Lamb 's gentle soul, is now a block of 
 modern offices, but surely its spirit has passed into these pre- 
 cincts. Perchance the ghost of Lamb foregathers of an evening 
 in this dreary pile, if not with the ghost of Clive, at least with the 
 shade of Chambers, Dodwell, and Plumley, those faithful part-
 
 THE EAST INDIA HOUSE 309 
 
 ners of his toils. Even the ghost of Wawd may hear once more 
 the voice of Elia stammering the couplet: 
 
 What Wawd knows, God knows, 
 But God knows what Wawd knows. 
 
 But we must leave these musty fancies and trudge through 
 the mighty labyrinth of the warehouses. It is said that if you 
 were to walk through them from top to bottom and from end to 
 end you would have traversed twenty-two miles. We must be 
 content with a shorter journey. Passing the curious old square 
 clock, with its three dials, stuck on the wall, we step into the 
 hydraulic lift that runs up and down the face of one of the 
 lofty buildings. In a moment we are far above the ground, and 
 trudging through miles and miles of vast chambers filled with 
 chests of tea. The aromatic odour stings our nostrils. We 
 pass mountains of tea, heaped up like sand, on which children 
 might play king of the castle. Tea, tea, everywhere. A hundred 
 thousand chests of it! Each chest is covered with Customs 
 hieroglyphs that reveal its history to the expert eye, strange 
 symbols gouged out of the wood. We grow weary of these 
 aisles of Assam and avenues of Orange Pekoe'. Here men are 
 shovelling tea off the floor into cases. There men are treading 
 tea down into chests. Their slow, rhythmical motion calls up 
 a vision of the winepress. 
 
 As we walk along we note a window-pane which is quartered 
 with lead strips. It is a relic of the window tax, from which 
 small panes were exempt. As we descend from floor to floor we 
 leave the realms of tea for the kingdom of silks, cashmere shawls, 
 Persian carpets, and feathers. The Orient blazes in these 
 coldly desolate rooms. The delicate odour of tea turns into 
 the pungent smell of camphor and naphthaline. Here is the 
 feather emporium of the world. The last feather sale realized 
 212,000. The total feather sales average over a million 
 pounds a year. 
 
 Here are huge packing-cases, crammed with the corpses of 
 green parrakeets from India. The other day 250,000 parra- 
 keets were sold at one sale. Here are birds from the tropics,
 
 310 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 skins of gaudy jungle-cocks mounted flat on paper, gorgeous 
 birds of paradise, humming-birds in thousands, regent birds, 
 Japanese jays, and Burmese Arguses. There is a fascinating 
 museum here, full of spoils from the seven seas, models of Chi- 
 nese junks, and oddments tingling with the rumour of traffics 
 and discoveries in the days when the tall East Indiamen patrolled 
 the path of trade. Here are cases of filmy ospreys worth ten 
 guineas an ounce. As we take up a bundle a cloud of white 
 dust floats in the air. It is rice dust, put in to increase the 
 weight. Another trade dodge is to tie needles in the heart of 
 a bunch of ospreys. We hear wonderful tales of the devices 
 adopted by smugglers, of a cabin lamp filled with tobacco, of a 
 drum of olive oil lined with pure brandy. Then we walk through 
 vast rooms filled with huge cases of ostrich feathers. In an- 
 other room the feathers are being sorted in alleys made of bins. 
 There are forty grades of feathers, all subtly different in stem and 
 flue. "Any booze?" says our guide. But he is asking for 
 tail feathers, not for drink. Once upon a time a case of ostrich 
 feathers worth ^1,000 arrived with its seal intact, but with 80 
 worth of feathers missing. A board had been ingeniously 
 removed and replaced. But the nails in it were different. 
 They were sent back to Cape Town and identified as Harbour 
 Board nails! Used tea leaves sometimes come from Germany 
 dried, curled, and dyed! But we are footsore. We have seen 
 enough, and after drinking a cup of the finest tea ever brewed 
 we depart, musing over the marvels that are hidden in the back 
 streets of London. 
 
 The vast Jewess is still wedged in her doorway as we go by.
 
 TILTING IN TUDOR TIMES 
 
 You know Hazlitt's essay on reading old books. He notes 
 how they bind together the different scattered divisions of our 
 personal identity. "They are landmarks and guides on our 
 journey through life. They are pegs and loops on which we 
 hang up, or from which we can take down at pleasure, the ward- 
 robe of a moral imagination, the relics of our best affections, 
 the tokens of our happiest hours. " An old book transports us 
 to the time when we first got a peep at the raree show of the 
 world through the glass of fiction gazing at mankind as we 
 do at beasts in a menagerie. Well, here I sit in Olympia watch- 
 ing the jousting knights, the heralds, the pursuivants, the mar- 
 shals, and the men-at-arms, and as the spears are shattered, and 
 the trumpet sounds the triumph, I am in a dream of remem- 
 brance. 
 
 It was many summers ago, and there was a boy, and there 
 were high revels. But the boy had fallen under the spell of " Ivan- 
 hoe," and he begged to be reprieved from the picnic. In vain 
 the revellers tried to bend his contumacy, and at last they left 
 him alone in the silent house alone with "Ivanhoe." What 
 a day of romance ! The hours flashed by unheard. The boy 
 ate not. The boy drank not. Lying on his stomach, with 
 elbows on the carpet and his chin in his hand, he forgot hunger, 
 solitude, and physical discomfort in the coloured splendour of 
 the romance. Not often in a lifetime can one escape for a whole 
 day from human society and meals into a tranced vision of the 
 past. 
 
 So this afternoon I am carried back to the strange delight of 
 boyhood and fall to wondering whether I can recreate the boyish 
 point of view that links "Ivanhoe" for ever in my mind with a 
 lonely house and an empty stomach. Only the boyish temper 
 
 311
 
 312 
 
 can enjoy the Military Tournament, the jousting, the housings 
 of the horses with spiked brows, the silken pavilions, the stiff 
 banners, the halberdiers, the billmen and the pikemen, the ar- 
 mourers, the esquires and the pages, the many-coloured hose, 
 the purple cloaks that flow over the haunches of the coursers, 
 the brassards and the gauntlets, the gorgets and the greaves, the 
 helms and the visors, the tossing plumes on the crest of the 
 casque, the rattle of tace on cuissard, and all the illuminated 
 pageantry and golden pomp of chivalry. 
 
 In order to taste its full savour you must be a boy. You 
 must have the gift of pretending. You must forget that you 
 live in the age of motors, top-hats, and creased trousers. You 
 must dream yourself into a dream of days when a knight and his 
 horse were encrusted with shards of steel, like a small dragon- 
 fly riding upon a large one. It was a sad, bad, mad, glad world. 
 When a knight descried another knight pricking on a plain, he 
 hurtled down upon him without ado, hewing and hacking for 
 pure joy of death. Then blood was cheap, and a whole skin 
 an indiscretion. The knights in the Morte D 'Arthur slew each 
 other as politely as we shake hands. The fashionable greeting 
 in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a spear-thrust, an 
 axe-blow, or a sword-cut. When you killed anybody you had 
 to open his visor in order to find out whether he was your 
 brother as he usually was. 
 
 The gentle knights led "the strenuous life." They carried 
 far more weight than a sandwichman, and they looked more 
 hideous than a motorist or a diver. Yes, let me make a clean 
 breast of it. "Tilting in Tudor Times" is a spectacle which 
 delights the antiquary, but which makes the poet grieve. Its 
 accuracy is depressing. Viscount Dillon knows too much to 
 descend to the ignorance of Sir Walter Scott. He presents the 
 tourney in its naked reality. It is very tame and tedious. The 
 procession round the arena is a melancholy prseludium to a 
 mournful display of inferior tent-pegging, in which the knights 
 are the pegs. There is no "go" in the march-past. Lord Dil- 
 lon is a vile misogynist. A tourney without ladies is like beef 
 without mustard, or porridge without salt. Their eyes ought
 
 TILTING IN TUDOR TIMES 313 
 
 to rain influence and adjudge the prize. The " female interest, " 
 indeed, was very strong in the age of chivalry. Lord Dillon 
 argues us out of our "Queen of Beauty." It seems that she 
 was a mediaeval Mrs. Harris. There never was no sich person. 
 He admits that Queen Katherine of Aragon presented the 
 prizes on one occasion, but he rudely remarks that she had no 
 " pretensions to the fatal gift of beauty, though of high birth." 
 What does he know about the lady's "pretensions"? Are not 
 all royal ladies "pretenders" in this sense, from Mary Queen 
 of Scots down? Do we not help them to pretend? But Lord 
 Dillon robs us of all the joys of pretending. 
 
 It is heartbreaking to be told that the jousting knight was 
 not smitten by the lance. That, it seems, is a poetical fable. 
 It was the knight that smote the lance. There was no such 
 thing as thrusting of a lance. " My tough lance thrusteth sure, " 
 sang Tennyson in error. It was the knight who thrust his 
 breastplate against the lance. The lance itself was a kind of 
 punt-pole, and dangerous only when it was broken. The splint- 
 ered end then became a deadly peril. Thus Henri II. of France 
 was slain. Young M. de Lorge, captain of the Scottish Guard, 
 gave his majesty a counterbuffe on the head which carried away 
 the pannage and panache of his headpiece. The lance broke, 
 and the splintered stump pierced the royal right eye, whereat he 
 was much " astonished," says Sir Nicholas Throckmorton. The 
 expression seems inadequate. 
 
 I suppose it would be wrong to expect to see the floor of 
 Olympia strewn with unhorsed knights. But I confess I lusted 
 for something more thrilling than two animated Dutch ovens 
 holding fountain-pens under their oxters, and riding past each 
 other on opposite sides of a red Japanese fire-screen. I longed 
 to see them charging plump into each other, to hear the crash 
 and clash of steel-clad horses hurtling breast to breast and brow 
 to brow like colliding thunderbolts. I wanted to see sparks 
 flying from sword-bitten crest or spear-struck gorgerin. I 
 yearned to behold the fiery smoke spurting from the nostrils of 
 the warhorse, to hear his hooves thudding mightily on the 
 Olympian tan.
 
 314 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 The knights struck me as being very small. They are not 
 big men of their hands. Also they are comic. It is a kind of 
 blasphemy to make this dread admission, but it is as well to 
 face the bitter truth. The knight in armour looks like a lame 
 shrimp or a lopsided lobster. His head is fishlike, and the 
 device on the crest of the helm is top-heavy. Perhaps the art 
 of wearing armour and tossing the plume has been lost. The 
 Olympian knights looked very ill at ease. Their iron waist- 
 coats and knickers seemed to nip them. I wonder how Sir 
 Grummer Grummersome managed when his backplate tickled 
 him. Did Sir Lancelot du Lake suffer from armour-galls? 
 
 Will posterity assemble at the Military Tournament of 2306 
 to gaze at a learned representation of Edwardian costume? If 
 so, what will they think of our top-hats, cutaway coats, waist- 
 coats, tubular trousers, and hide boots, our starched breast- 
 plates, our braces, and our buttons? Will their novelists ro- 
 manticise us as our novelists have romanticised the knights? 
 They will have their work cut out, I feaj,
 
 HAMPTON COURT 
 
 THE other day I spent a few pleasant hours at Hampton 
 Court/rambling through its leafy pleasaunces and storied apart- 
 ments. There is much to delight the eye in the one and much 
 to stimulate the imagination in the other. It is well, however, 
 to choose a quiet day, when the paths are not choked with 
 chattering visitors, and when the stately chambers are not littered 
 with weary lovers. Solitude and silence are things necessary 
 if you desire to feel the charm of the old palace, with its faint 
 fragrance of the romantic past. 
 
 There is something strange and bizarre in the violent con- 
 trast between the vague ghosts who look dreamily out of the 
 pictures and the solid flesh of the living. They are delicate 
 and fastidious ghosts, gallantly and gorgeously attired, and 
 they seem to gaze with a secret scorn at the hideous garb of the 
 good folk who trudge past them in an interminable procession 
 of uncomprehending bewilderment. I fear the time hangs heav- 
 ily on their painted hands, as they stare at our bowlers and our 
 boots, our cloth caps and fancy waistcoats, our ugly starched 
 collars and our prosaic neckties. The languorous beauties of 
 the Court of Charles the Second gaze with calm disdain at the 
 feverish finery of our maidens and matrons, with its baffling 
 incongruities of sham fur and dishevelled feather, screaming 
 paste and shrieking pearls. Their sins were seventy times seven, 
 and now they are punished day after day and year after year with 
 the contiguity of a generation which is without taste. Yet 
 still they smile with their voluptuous lips, still they gaze with 
 sleepy eyes that speak the sensuous soul. Their night-gowns 
 are still fastened with a single pin, and they still trail their silk 
 attire through meadows and purling streams. Their hair has 
 not been dressed for two hundred years, but time has not tumbled 
 
 315
 
 316 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 it, and its wanton tendrils still wander over their white brows 
 and painted cheeks. 
 
 It is now quite safe to fall in love with these sirens who once 
 broke so many hearts. Their beauty has lost its sting and their 
 grace its victory. It is very pleasant to flirt for five minutes 
 with the Duchess of Richmond. She still preserves her air de 
 parure, her faultless features, her dazzling complexion, and her 
 luxuriant hair. She it was who sat by command of the king 
 for the figure of Britannia which still glorifies our penny. When 
 you are tired of her, you can kill a few moments with what 
 Pepys calls "the so-much-desired-by-me picture of my Lady 
 Castlemaine, which is a most blessed picture. " When you are 
 sated with her loveliness, you can toy with the Duchess of Ports- 
 mouth, and wish that you had been with Evelyn when he saw her 
 in her dressing-room in her morning loose garment, her maids 
 combing her, newly out of her bed, his Majesty and the gallants 
 standing about her. It is not hard to lose your heart to the 
 Countess De Grammont. One can well believe that this picture 
 made the Duke of York fall in love over again with the original. 
 A charming story is told about her marriage. The Chevalier De 
 Grammont, after paying court to her in London, repented and 
 fled. At a Dover inn he was run down by her two brothers. 
 " Chevalier, have you forgotten nothing in London ? " " Pardon 
 me, gentlemen," he replied, "I have forgotten to marry your 
 sister." The chevalier thereupon returned and married the 
 lady. One wonders how he ever had the strength of mind to 
 fly from her. 
 
 It is hard to believe that the world in which these phantoms 
 moved was the same world as our own. There is a strange 
 fantasy and elaborate unreality in the expressions on their 
 features. These painted eyes seem to conceal thoughts and 
 moods and emotions which are beyond our experience. The 
 life that plays round the corners of the lips seems to be an alien 
 life with a secret mystery in it. The picture of Francis I. and 
 his wife, Eleanor of Spain, affects one very oddly. It is as 
 grotesque as a Chinese ivory or a Japanese bronze. The ironic 
 figure of the fool standing behind and holding up a mocking
 
 HAMPTON COURT 317 
 
 forefinger suggests a kind of sinister symbolism. One feels 
 that the king and the queen are helpless dolls in the nursery of 
 fate. Indeed, all the kings and queens on these walls look like 
 feeble marionettes. Even the ponderous flesh of Henry VIII. 
 does not convince us. He seems to be made of pasteboard, like 
 the king on a pack of cards, and one wonders whether real pas- 
 sion could ever have burned in his veins. Still more unreal is 
 the mysterious portrait of a mysterious woman in a marvellously 
 embroidered garment which looks like a cross between a dress- 
 ing-gown and a kimono. She is certainly not Queen Elizabeth. 
 Who was she? No one knows, and no one will ever know. 
 The secret and subtle face is alive, but we cannot interpret the 
 meaning of the pallid smile on the lips and the quiet misery in the 
 eyes. She is standing in a wood, and her right hand rests on a 
 stag with a garland of flowers round its neck. Her fingers are 
 long and fine, and on her feet are curiously wrought sandals. 
 These enigmatic verses are inscribed on a tablet at the foot 
 of the picture: 
 
 The restless swallow fits my restless mind, 
 In still reviving, still renewing wrongs; 
 
 Her just complaints of cruelty unkind 
 Are all the music that my life prolongs. 
 
 One cannot help being teased by the strange mystery in these 
 verses and in the woman's face. 
 
 I am very fond of beds, but they must be old. There is no 
 romance in the modern bed, whether it is made of cast-iron, or 
 brass, or fumed oak, or wood painted white. The state beds at 
 Hampton Court look very uncomfortable, but they are delight- 
 fully pompous. There must have been a ripe satisfaction in dy- 
 ing on a bed of crimson Genoa velvet, under a ceiling painted 
 by Verrio. One would not greatly mind being murdered in a 
 bed draped with lilac satin which had been embroidered by 
 orphans. It must have been in such a bed that Othello stran- 
 gled Desdemona. The bed of Queen Anne and the bed of 
 Queen Charlotte and the bed of William III. seem to give body 
 to history. One falls to wondering what Queen Anne looked 
 like while she slept. Did she snore? Did she sleep with her
 
 318 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 mouth open ? Did she wear a night-cap ? The sleep of Henry 
 VIII. must have been a portentous sight. I am sure he had bad 
 dreams, and I hope his murdered wives walked regularly round 
 his bed. Even more fascinating than beds royal are clocks 
 royal. There is an old clock here made by Daniel Quare, 
 which goes for a whole year without being wound up. It has 
 been telling the hours in yonder corner for nearly two hundred 
 years. It is telling the time to-day, and I suppose it will go on 
 telling the time after you and I are in our graves. I cannot 
 help looking on it with awe, for it lives with a kind of life among 
 these memorials of the dead. It makes one shiver as one feels 
 that it is ticking us to death as mercilessly as it ticked to death 
 all these kings and queens, lords and ladies, gallants and cour- 
 tiers. There is a delicate humour in Daniel Quare and his 
 clock that never runs down.
 
 MAINLY ABOUT SPORT
 
 THE DERBY 
 
 SOME things beggar description. Other things are beggared 
 by description. The Derby is both. It beggars description, 
 and description beggars it. Every year oceans of ink wash 
 over continents of paper. Every description of the Derby is 
 like every other description. It is fixed by tradition, like the 
 marriage service. Fleet Street is the most conservative highway 
 in the world. It likes to file events for reference. Somewhere 
 in the misty past a journalist saw the Derby. Perhaps it was 
 in 1780 that the first article was written about the first Derby. 
 With awe I salute the nameless creator of the Derby legend. 
 
 Still, 1780 is a long time ago, and it occurred to me that after 
 a hundred and twenty-six years Fleet Street might safely take 
 another look at the Derby. It is barely possible that there may 
 be some change since Diomed's year. So I go to compare the 
 legend with the reality. 
 
 From Epsom Town I walk a mile along a leafy road. The 
 sky is a blue bowl filled with sunlight to the brim. The chest- 
 nuts have lit their candelabra. The fields wear green mantles 
 embroidered with buttercup gold. The hawthorns glimmer in 
 rose and ivory. Shepherd's clocks shake their filmy heads. 
 Between the hedgerows drifts a blue wisp of petrol, wreathing 
 delicately round the cool, pale green leaves of lime and elm. 
 The white ribbon of dusty road is dotted with sad and silent 
 travellers. Sadness and silence on foot. Sadness and silence 
 on bicycles. Sadness and silence in vehicles. No smiles. No 
 songs. No joy. We are like dejected ants. We crawl. 
 
 Now the road leans like a ladder against the sky, and mount- 
 ing the last rung we see the skirts of the Downs. They are 
 frayed and bedraggled. They are crusted and caked with 
 splashes of human mud and mire. Woeful men are selling 
 21 321
 
 322 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 c'rect-cards, bananas, and tumblers of green tonics. A sleepy 
 child sits wearily beside a basket of cocoanuts. The verdurous 
 mystery of the paddock sheds a breath of calm romance over the 
 tortured chaos of motors, coaches, brakes, 'buses, and nonde- 
 script vehicles struggling up the hill. 
 
 Passing a lurid tavern, postered to the chimneys with liquor- 
 ish appeals, I dart through the train of tired horses and tired 
 men, and suddenly the Racecourse lifts itself up swimmingly 
 before my eyes like an apparition. The blue of the sky is pim- 
 pled with kites upholding advertising scrolls. It is like a 
 Chinese festival. The green turf is blotted out for miles by a 
 multitude that no man could number. The earth is clothed 
 with men. Far away on the sky line I can see green trees. But 
 inside the circle of sky I cannot see enough turf to sod a lark. 
 
 The movement of life here is almost intolerably huge. Its 
 hugeness is deepened by its disorder. The crowd is not like an 
 army. It has no coherence.' It is like a flat monster that is 
 eating itself, chewing itself, licking itself, twisting itself, turning 
 itself inside out and outside in. It is horribly formless and 
 shapeless. There is nothing so inhuman as humanity. 
 
 Lest I go mad with man, I plunge into the mass, and gaze at 
 its corpuscles and particles. The bookmakers are like bell- 
 buoys in a raging sea. Round them the crowd breaks in foam 
 and spray. They alone retain their personality. The others 
 are merged in each other. Their faces are like the round oes in 
 the key-plan of a coronation picture. But the bookmakers are 
 the Supermen. They strive to emphasise their isolation. They 
 wear grotesque garments, naval uniforms, white beaver top-hats, 
 long white coats, broad leathern scarves studded with glittering 
 coins, tennis flannels. On their satchels are polished brass 
 name-plates. Brass name-plates are fixed on their hat-bands. 
 Indeed, the bookmaker is all brass. He has a brass face and a 
 brass voice. I hear him say "No!" in a tone that is like the 
 cough of an iron foundry, "Na-a-o-ow!" 
 
 The crowd contains all human contrasts between wealth and 
 poverty, between the unemployables on the grand stand and 
 the unemployables on the bare ground. Over the clock under
 
 THE DERBY 323 
 
 the royal standard I can see the King's white beard. At my 
 elbow is a grimy boy yelling in a sad sing-song, " Kahmaday- 
 shun." But the livery of Lazarus is dirt rather than rags. I 
 see nobody without boots. I meet no mendicants. Even the 
 scum of the scum are clothed. Most of them are smoking or 
 eating or drinking. The food of democracy is dreadful. The 
 jellied eels affright me. Baskets of livid pastry sweat in the 
 dusty sun. Hard-boiled eggs are popular. So are acid drops. 
 
 The amusements are few and dull. There are boxers with 
 cornets and wooden rattles, swings, roundabouts, try-your- 
 strength machines, cocoanut shies, games of chance, such as ' the 
 crown and feather.' Tipsters and cardsharpers tout desperately 
 for clients. But as a rule the crowd is listless, melancholy, and 
 subdued. I see one girl in crimson satin. A cockney wife 
 reviles her husband for leaving her "in a bleedin' 'ole on the 
 bleedin' course," pulls off his imitation panama, and threatens 
 to tear it up. "Bloody" and "bleeding" are the pet intensives 
 of the cockney. There is another participle which is too ob- 
 scene to print. It is used by men and women, boys and girls 
 with absolute irrelevance. 
 
 The roar of the crowd is an amorphous din, stabbed by the 
 clang of a bell, the blast of a bugle, the whine of a concertina, 
 or the hoarse howl of the "bookie." There is a strange silence 
 before the race; then a strangled hum floats over the hill. On 
 one of the stands I see a gesture an arm is silhouetted against 
 the sky. Then the horses flash along the ridge like Valkyries 
 flash and fade. The far hum deepens into a sonorous tumult. 
 I am jammed against the rails. There is a cry of "Spearmint ! " 
 A jumbled tangle of horses with heads low and necks outstretched, 
 violent pigmies in many-coloured jackets, whips rising and 
 falling, a rapid rub-a-dub of hooves drumming on the hard turf, 
 fragments of soil tossed in the air, and all is over. It is instan- 
 taneous. I can compare it only to a handful of peas thrown 
 against a window-pane. Then the crowd magically submerges 
 the course, and the long green avenue is blotted out once more. 
 
 The dramatic tension during the race is terrible. I feel it 
 like a kind of concentrated agony. I am impassive. I do not
 
 324 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 care what horse wins. But the passion of the crowd grips my 
 heart like a vice. The communion of saints is nothing to the 
 communion of sinners. I am hypnotised by a monster with five 
 hundred thousand brains all thinking the same thought. Sud- 
 denly the monster dissolves, and the strain relaxes. It is the 
 most enormous undulation of life that this passionate planet can 
 achieve. Through it all the calm tethered horses eat their oats 
 or crop the trampled herbage, infants sleep, the wind blows, and 
 the sun shines. 
 
 One picture out of myriads remains stamped on my memory. 
 Two grinning buck niggers are being posed by an itinerant 
 photographer. 
 
 "That's a sight," says an American, "you couldn't see in 
 the States." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Wai, no white man in my country would photograph a 
 nigger."
 
 THE STRONG, RESPECTABLE BARGE 
 
 SHIP" at Mortlake is opposite the winning-post, and 
 therefore it stands knee-deep in the Boat Race Crowd. Perched 
 on its windy roof between the pale blue sky and the pale grey 
 water we look down at the moving multitude. Our lofty iso- 
 lation is not inhuman, for we are a part of the human whirlpool. 
 The Crowd is a child, even as we are children, playing with the 
 cheap toys of sensation provided by the showmen who run the 
 show of life. 
 
 At two o'clock the ebb tide has not turned, but soon a piece 
 of wood suddenly pauses as it slides seaward, hesitates a while 
 and then slowly wanders up the stream. Now the flood tide 
 is running fast, and with it comes the Crowd, in spates and 
 freshets, in turbid torrents. And what a Crowd! How richly 
 diverse ! We sigh over a haggard little mother carrying a drowsy 
 baby; at her elbow, sucking his pipe, slouches her silent man. 
 We chuckle over a fat woman, cloaked in bright Prussian blue, 
 with mock ermine toque and stole and muff, blood-red handbag, 
 white cotton gloves, and a bunch of blue ribbons under her 
 treble chin. 
 
 Below us waits the telegraph van, its pencils dangling from 
 strings, and on its roof a swarm of schoolboys, one of them 
 gloomily poring over a comic paper. On the top of a post sits 
 an urchin in agony. He has been in torture for hours. He 
 shifts his posture perpetually, now kneeling, now standing, now 
 sprawling on his stomach, a symbol of the hedonist who buys 
 a little pleasure at a great expense of pain. 
 
 There also is the Boat Race Dog. He is a doleful dog, 
 scarred with traditions, and his fur is peeling off in patches. 
 He is like a museum dog, weary with long decay. What can be 
 his frame of mind ? I fear he is a cynic. 
 
 325
 
 326 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Chattering shoals of cockney hoydens are hustling about in 
 twos and threes. They are all titivated from head to heel with 
 fripperies in every shade of blue. Their furs defy derivation, 
 and vainly we try to conjecture what strange beasts wore these 
 dyed skins that shudder in the astonished sunlight. 
 
 What is this dream in the pale-blue "Umbrella Hat" and 
 the heavily spotted veil? Her crackling silk gown is shot with 
 green and red, green tassels hang from its yellow-edged Vandykes, 
 her green-gloved hand holds a ruddy muff, and a rope of giant 
 pearls hangs like a halter round her neck. Beside this volup- 
 tuous beauty bridles a musty dame in a purple motor-cap, her 
 shoulders shawled with an old horse-rug. A despondent banana- 
 merchant leans against a wall, while his wife sells blue bead 
 necklaces at a penny a row. 
 
 "Oo'll 'ev a Stend? Yer can't beat this Barge. She's a 
 strong, respectable Barge. She'll rise wiv the Tide, and then 
 yer won't see nuffin'. Oo'll 'ev a Stend?" 
 
 Slowly the strong, respectable Barge is plastered with hu- 
 manity as a fly-paper is plastered with flies. There is music on 
 the Barge. A sad man plays sadly on a harmonium which is 
 dying of bronchial catarrh. His hands and feet move mechani- 
 cally, while his glazed eye roves in quest of coppers. On his 
 left a dingy woman wails " Annie Laurie." On his right a thick- 
 necked gentleman follows her powerful moans on a desolate 
 flute. For hours these three sad ones thump and bleat and blow 
 together on the strong, respectable Barge. Their triple misery 
 worms its way through the surging clamour of the Crowd. 
 
 Despite the discords of the doleful Three the strong, re- 
 spectable Barge is now gorged with gazers. On its very edge a 
 boy is squirming in anguish, holding on with his finger nails. 
 We tremble for him. One throb of curiosity behind him would 
 push him into the water. I forget the Crowd. I forget the Race. 
 I forget everything. The fate of that wriggling brat is more to 
 me than the fate of Oxford. I am fascinated by his "secret 
 trial." Nobody cares for him but me. It is a callous world. 
 
 But now the museum dog is barking. The Crowd is swaying 
 and lurching between the river and the brewery on whose high
 
 THE STRONG, RESPECTABLE BARGE 327 
 
 walls is emblazoned the proud boast: "Reid's Stout." The 
 Crowd is a queer beast, for it is now quite inhuman. It has been 
 boiled out of itself into something else. It has been "rendered." 
 It ferments visibly. It seethes. We smell the foul reek of it. 
 It is like a horrible flower-bed heaving in an earthquake. It 
 is a nightmare of dirty pink toadstools trembling on dusty black 
 stalks. There are sudden explosions in its smutty unrest, and 
 we see the flash of a soldier's red coat or a sailor's blue collar, 
 for only the primary colours leap from the chaos of weltering 
 hues. 
 
 The Crowd is weary. It is sad with suspense. Will they 
 never come? "Votes for Women!" The suffragists go by in 
 their little steamer, gesticulating like little marionettes. Their 
 vehement pantomime makes the Crowd laugh a big, broad, 
 jolly, brutal laugh. There is nothing mean in Mob Laughter. 
 It is hoarse and coarse, rough and rude, but it has the clean 
 honesty of life in it. 
 
 Suddenly, into this vulgar ribaldry of the sweating, shoving 
 crowd, there flashes a delicate vision of fragile and fastidious 
 charm the Eights! They skim round the bend of the river 
 like large dragonflies with gossamer wings, the slim oars daintily 
 flicking the water, and the beautiful young bodies swinging in 
 a long, slow cadence of youthful grace and youthful power. 
 
 The vision is past, and we remember our perilous boy. Alas ! 
 he is no more. Has he been drowned ? We hope not, but we 
 know not. A lady in white falls out of a boat, and is promptly 
 rescued, dripping like a mermaid. Do we pity her ? No. The 
 memory of that boy haunts us. Perhaps he had a mother. 
 Perhaps hisjnother is on the strong, respectable Barge.
 
 BUSHIDO AT LORD'S 
 
 "YEH," says my American friend. "This is my tenth trip, 
 and your shop-soiled side-shows make me tired. Can't you 
 show me something noo from the skin to the skeleton ? I'm fed 
 up with Old England. Give me a block of Noo England, if 
 you've gotten any." 
 
 "What about the Test Match at Lord's?" 
 
 "Cricket? Too slow for me. How long does it last?" 
 
 " Only three days. " 
 
 "Well, time don't seem to be money here, anyhow. Will 
 there be a crowd?" 
 
 "About thirty thousand." 
 
 "Sure? Thirty thousand folks wasting three days in one 
 week on one game. Ninety thousand days ! Why, that 's nearly 
 two centuries and a half burnt on buncombe. You are a great 
 people." 
 
 Nevertheless, we go to Lord 's. 
 
 "Have we got to sizzle here all day? Why isn't there a 
 roof?" 
 
 " We are a robust race. " 
 
 "Who's that fellow with the bad teeth and the red face and 
 the white hair?" 
 
 "That's Craig, the Surrey Poet." 
 
 "Ladies and gentlemen, " shouts Craig, " if England wins the 
 toss, I'll throw my 'at oop in the air. If Australia wins, I'll 
 joomp on it." 
 
 We watch Craig's silvery poll working steadily round the 
 great green carpet, with its sloping fringe of faces. Gasps of 
 laughter punctuate his progress. On the grey Pavilion the 
 starry Federal flag flutters above the M. C. C. colours. Op- 
 posite us the huge black scoring-board bisects the long banks 
 
 328
 
 BUSHIDO AT LORD'S 329 
 
 of silent humanity. To the right the white screen rises in front 
 of the nets. 
 
 Now the sun-soaked air is tense with the concentrated im- 
 patience of thirty thousand people. Smart femininity in its 
 multicoloured muslins and painted chiffons abdicates its flut- 
 tering and flickering charm. Sport submerges sex, even in the 
 high white boxes and the ladies' stand. 
 
 Suspense . . . See! Craig tosses [his hat high in the air, 
 and instantly the manscape round the ropes fires a ragged volley 
 of cheers. Now the crowd shakes itself into* a sharper silence. 
 Shadowy white phantoms gleam behind the dark Pavilion win- 
 dows, and break into sharp, snowy silhouettes in the doorway. 
 The crowd roars sonorous welcome. The Australian eleven, 
 led by swarthy, beetle-browed Darling, leap gaily down the steps, 
 and move alertly in twos and threes toward the stumps. The 
 scene is set with a formal etiquette as rigid as that of a Court 
 ceremony. The crowd now waits for the England batsmen. 
 Two white ghosts glimmer at the farther end of the pavilion. 
 The crowd roars with a new ring in its deep throat-music at iron- 
 grey MacLaren and heavy Tom Hayward. 
 
 Now the umpire takes the new ball from his pocket, and 
 tosses it on the turf. The batsman takes centre, the field is 
 craftily placed at cunning angles, the bowler faces his opponent, 
 runs up to the crease, and delivers the first ball. Sixty thousand 
 eyes follow its flight. Sixty thousand ears drink the music of 
 its impact on the willow. And so the great game begins with 
 Roman dignity and Olympian pomp. 
 
 A French critic has made a study of the psychology of the 
 crowd. I wish he were here. Many a crowd have I seen, but 
 never one like this. What magical spell fuses these thousands 
 into one gigantic personality? Before each man passed the 
 turnstile he was a separate ego. Now he is only a speck in the 
 grey matter of one titanic brain that thinks one thought, thrills 
 with one sense, and feels one shock through one network of 
 monstrous nerves. It is a manscape, an immense man made of 
 many men. His giant lungs are breathing multitudinous breath. 
 His colossal limbs sprawl hugely round the vast green amphi-
 
 330 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 theatre. His Atlantean arms embrace this shield of earth 
 whereon dart and dance these thirteen white pigmies. His il- 
 limitable laughter smites the tree-tops and breaks in musical 
 spray against the blue dome of cloud-splashed sky. His enor- 
 mous hands clap in sudden thunder. His Brobdingnagian 
 breast expels a surging sigh that rushes and rustles like a mighty 
 wind. My American friend is silent. I look at him. He looks 
 at me. 
 
 "There's your block of New England!" 
 
 He smiles a slow smile of deep content. 
 
 "It's great," he sighs. 
 
 What has wrought this miracle ? The spirit of sport and the 
 cult of kinship. Blood and Sport is better than Blood and 
 Iron. And as I watch England wrestling with Australia, I look 
 across the ocean to the Sea of Japan, whose waters wash the 
 ruins of the Russian Armada, halfway on the road to the Southern 
 Cross. I fall a-musing. The secret of Japan is Bushido, and 
 Bushido is the spirit of Sport, the spirit that makes one man 
 out of many men. This crowd is lifted above its lower self. It 
 feels a dim, common ecstasy. It flames with the indomitable good 
 humour of the Anglo-Saxon, with his chivalry, with his patience, 
 with his passion for fair play, with his unselfish delight in the 
 dauntless heart and the unconquerable will. 
 
 The long day dies. The crowd melts, but melts only to flow 
 again next morning into the same gigantic mould of passion. 
 The men are different, but the manscape is the same. My 
 American is magnetised by this wonderful crowd, which wants 
 both sides to win, which awards nice praise to every nuance of the 
 game, which inflects its vast voice with delicate shades of hu- 
 mour and irony, and which simultaneously exults in England's 
 triumph and aches at Australia's defeat. 
 
 But look! Victor Trumper is batting. Ah! here is our 
 hero. His romantic temper charms the magnanimous multitude. 
 Young, lithe, clean-limbed, bright-eyed, sunny of soul, gallantly 
 gay, daringly adventurous, exulting in his fresh manhood, a 
 radiant image of the happy warrior in a moment he sets our 
 pulses galloping. The manscape shivers with sheer joy as he
 
 BUSHIDO AT LORD'S 331 
 
 smites its chosen champions hip and thigh, glorying in that 
 valour so direly valiant, revelling in that disastrous mastery 
 over eye and muscle, nerve and thew. Thus in perfect knight- 
 hood this knightly crowd salutes the perfect knight, the Bayard 
 of Australia. And when all too soon he bites the dust, the noble 
 temper that glows in the ballad of Chevy Chase glows again in 
 the chivalrous crowd. It takes the vanquished Victor by the 
 hand and cries in one glad, sad shout of yielding triumph, " Wae's 
 meforthee!" That is Bushido. That is Sport. 
 
 Am I hyperlyrical ? Is Kipling's scorn of "the flannelled 
 fools at the wicket" nearer the truth? I think not. My Amer- 
 ican thinks not. 
 
 "Well," he says, as our hansom picks its way through the 
 dissolving crowd, "we have nothing like it." 
 
 As I survey the world, with its mean welter of international 
 avarices, as I touch the slime of finance and the pitch of politics, 
 I cry not for less, but for more of this clean, pure spirit of gallant 
 rivalry. An Empire of Sportsmen is what we need to-day, and 
 a World of Sportsmen to-morrow.
 
 THE ALL-BLACKS 
 
 BEING interested in everything, we set out to see the new 
 zealots from New Zealand who are revolutionising Rugby foot- 
 ball. We know nothing about football. The rules of " Rugger" 
 and " Socker " to us are as obscure as the Eleusinian mysteries or 
 the song the sirens sang. Our knowledge of the game is purely 
 literary, gleaned from the immortal description of the School- 
 house match in "Tom Brown's Schooldays." Therefore our 
 impressions will be virginal. They will be vivid with ignorance 
 and nervous with novelty. We trudge through the Richmond 
 mud amid a procession of capped, mackintoshed, knickered, 
 and puttied young men. 
 
 The green playing-ground is fringed with trees, some leafless, 
 some with their golden rags of autumnal leafage glinting in the 
 watery sunlight. There is a crowd standing round the ropes. 
 There are covered stands on each side. Inside the ropes there 
 are three lines of newly sawn benches with carpenter 's pencilled 
 marks at intervals to define each seat. Between two of these 
 marks we squat. Beside us is an Irish girl, who is frantic with 
 " footer" fanaticism. Biddy tries to expound the complexities of 
 the game for our benefit. But her exposition bewilders us, and 
 we fail to grasp the meaning of knock-on and throw-forward, 
 off-side and on-side, touch and try, drop-kick and place-kick, 
 tackle and charge, punt and fair-catch, five-eighths and three- 
 quarters, dead-ball lines and the twenty-five. 
 
 Far away over the tree-tops we recognise a landmark which 
 helps us to anchor our five wits. It is the Kew Pagoda. But 
 soon a splay-footed programme-seller makes us feel quite at 
 home. "He has often bold us the " c 'rect card " at Lord 's. Then 
 white-haired old Craig appears with his gap-toothed smile and 
 his lyric on "the gallant men from New Zealand." The other 
 
 332
 
 THE ALL-BLACKS 333 
 
 day it was a madrigal on " the gallant men from Australia." As 
 he passes he calls out, "Velocity, Santry, Dean Swift!" Roars 
 of laughter! What does he mean ? 
 
 " You are a gom, " says Biddy. "It's the big race!" Blush- 
 ing, we reply, "What big race?" Biddy turns on us with a 
 scornful eye. 
 
 "Sure, man alive, you've heard of the Cambridgeshire!" 
 We are crushed into silence. Then we venture: " But we didn't 
 know there were races at Cambridge." Biddy snorts: "Who 
 is Connie Gilchrist? Have you never heard tell av a place 
 called Newmarket?" A sudden avalanche of rain damps the 
 male grin that ripples round us. 
 
 "Ochonee!" wails Biddy, "an* me with me best pale blue 
 silk petticoat on!" We hoist her umbrella. Then we hoist our 
 own, and put it on the sodden clay to cover her knees. She 
 rewards us with a flash of her grey-blue Irish eyes. 
 
 "Can't ye sit a wee bit closer and get out o' the dhrip?" 
 
 We can and do. . . . 
 
 The crowd round the ropes is now a bank of black mush- 
 rooms. The sallow light falls from the muddy sky upon thou- 
 sands of streaming umbrellas. The rain comes down in ramrods. 
 The luminous emerald of the grass fades under the deluge. It 
 is comic to see ten thousand sane human beings solemnly soaking 
 round a bare field with a gibbet at each end. For the goal- 
 posts look like a gallows, and one would not be surprised to find 
 a corpse dangling from each crossbar. It would provide a mo- 
 tive for the funereal spectacle. We idly wonder whether a 
 referee might not be used to while away the damp languors and 
 longueurs of the prologue. 
 
 But at last the mushrooms roar, and fifteen black marionettes 
 dance out into the deluge. They look like executioners. But 
 where is the axe? Where is the mask? Where is the block? 
 They are not hangmen. They are the New Zealanders. They 
 are the "All-Blacks." They wear black jerseys, black pants, 
 black stockings, and black boots. They have, however, white 
 faces, and white hands, and between the end of their pants and 
 the beginning of their stockings there is a stripe of white flesh.
 
 334 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 That knee-stripe fascinates me. It is the oriflamme of the 
 battle. The black marionettes are very lively. They are " injia- 
 rubber idiots on the spree." They juggle with an oval ball. 
 In a twinkle they are capering down the field, the ball jumping 
 about among them like a familiar imp. 
 
 "Has the game begun?" we whisper. 
 
 "Divil a bit," says Biddy. "They're only divartin' 
 themselves. " 
 
 Now another fifteen stalk soberly out. 
 
 "That's Surrey!" says Biddy, clapping her white kid gloves 
 with terrific vigour. Again the mushrooms yell furiously. The 
 Surrey men are like Zebras, for their jerseys are striped. They 
 mingle with the Blacks. As we wait we note that on each man's 
 shoulders is pasted a large white ticket with a large black number. 
 The effect is comical. Is it a game of human dice or animated 
 teetotums ? 
 
 Surrey kicks off, the ball skims towards New Zealand, a 
 Black seizes it, a Zebra seizes him, the pair crash to the ground, 
 and there is a wild tangle of arms and legs, striped and black 
 torsos. It is a scrummage. What is a scrummage? Well, 
 it is an inverted tug-of-war, with muscles riveted to muscles 
 instead of to the rope, and with "Push devil, push baker!" for 
 its war-cry. It is a living rat-trap writhing round a dead rat. 
 The bars of the trap are locked arms and legs swaying rigidly 
 into grotesque patterns. Now it is a beehive, now a battered 
 bowler, now a brand-new parrot cage, now a squashed Gibus. 
 It opens and shuts like a concertina or a camera, or a folding 
 gate in a lift. It turns itself inside out like some strange animal 
 swallowing itself. It is a giant crab trying to walk forty thou- 
 sand ways at the same time. It is a mariner's compass with all 
 its points fighting for the needle. It is a wheel whose spokes 
 are wrestling for the hub. It is a human whale eternally spewing 
 out a dirty little egg-shaped leather Jonah. 
 
 One can have too much whale and too much Jonah. The 
 referee, however, seems to be a regular Jonah man. Whenever 
 he blows his whistle there is a scrummage. As he blows it 
 every other minute there is nothing but scrummaging. The
 
 THE ALL-BLACKS 335 
 
 dead rat is always being thrown back into the rat-trap, and the 
 dancing terriers outside the trap are not allowed to worry it and 
 each other too much. They stand round the trap bristling with 
 eagerness. When the rat comes out they fall on it with vehement 
 fury. They roll over each other in the mud. They butt like 
 goats and charge like bulls. They leap up at the ball like trout 
 at a fly. They fling themselves down on it like a cat on a mouse. 
 The Blacks swerve like swallows and zigzag like snipe. Some 
 of them are scraps of forked lightning. A Zebra is running like 
 a Devon stag before the hounds. The New Zealand goal is near. 
 Behind him a Black shoots out of the hunt like an arrow. With 
 easy grace he overtakes his quarry, flings his arms round his 
 loins, and the two plunge headlong in the mire. Ere they have 
 time to disentangle their ravelled limbs the whole pack is pouring 
 over their bodies, and before they rise the storm of speed is 
 raging at the other end of the field. 
 
 So the battle ramps and rages for eighty minutes in a per- 
 petual showerbath. Our collar is pulped. We sneeze and 
 shiver. We are tired of the whistle. Biddy's furs are like a 
 necklace of drowned cats. As the crowd streams out she picks 
 up her muddy pale blue petticoat and ploughs bravely through 
 the squelching squdge. A Zebra shoves past, on his way to the 
 baths, his stripes bemired, his face bedaubed with dirt. Biddy 
 pats him on the back. 
 
 "Good old Surrey!" she squeaks. 
 
 "Good old whistle!" says a wag. 
 
 As we wring out our gloves on the railway platform, we sym- 
 pathise with the Frenchman who said that the English take 
 their pleasures sadly. A-a-h-tchee!
 
 THE HORSE SHOW 
 
 IT is not hard to kill time in London. The trouble is to 
 choose the stone with which to kill it. There are almost too 
 many stones. Every day there are at least ten things you must 
 do, and at least ten things that you are reluctant to leave un- 
 done. And now the Horse Show completes the merry congestion 
 of June. If you please you can live at Olympia from nine in 
 the morning to midnight. 
 
 Upon the whole, it is well to go to the Horse Show after dinner. 
 If you are a lady, you will put on your head an umbrella dis- 
 guised as a hat, you will mislay your waist, and arrange your 
 figure in the shape of an ice-wafer or a hollow-ground razor 
 or a closed glove-stretcher. 
 
 You will have a neck that ends under your ears and sleeves 
 that begin at your finger-nails. You will hang on your wrist a 
 gold bag with a fringe of coloured jewels, and you will carry a 
 gold cigarette-case in your hand. In short, you will look as 
 ephemerally expensive and as extravagantly brittle as you can. 
 You will imitate the painted frivolity of the butterfly and the 
 futile fragil ity of the moth. Over your costly evanescence you will 
 wear a kimono made of moonbeams that exaggerates your slim- 
 ness and your slenderness, hanging on your hock-bottle shoulders 
 like a veil on a hat-pin. Thus fabricated you will be invisible 
 when seen edgeways. 
 
 If you arc a man, you can marvel at the art which trans- 
 forms an hour-glass into a paper-knife, and at the skill which 
 poises an ostrich farm upon a dome of straw. You can admire 
 the indefatigable industry of the wise birds who provide moun- 
 tains of plumage for the feminine head. You can also marvel at 
 the ingenuity which has made ugly Olympia as delicately dainty 
 as sylvan Ranelagh. I really do not know the place. Its 
 
 336
 
 THE HORSE SHOW 337 
 
 glazed iron is veiled with flowers and garlands. It looks like 
 Cinderella at the ball. 
 
 The arena is a garden with hidden lights in its floral skirts. 
 The harshness of the roof is softened with pendulous green, 
 and the vast expanse of tan is lighted like a gigantic billiard- 
 table with hanging chandeliers. The tiers of seats are bright 
 with multi-coloured hats and multi-coloured dresses, shifting 
 and shimmering like a human kaleidoscope. In the seats round 
 the Royal Box you can see Burke and Debrett and the Almanach 
 de Gotha. Most of the men are smoking cigars. Some of the 
 women are smoking cigarettes. 
 
 The note of the Horse Show is informality. The tone is a 
 mixture of Ascot and Sandown, Henley and Ranelagh, with a 
 dash of Church Parade and Monte Carlo. You can sit a little 
 and look at the horses a little. Then you can walk a little and 
 talk a little and flirt a little. When you are tired of sitting 
 and looking and walking and talking and flirting, you can listen 
 to the Earl of Londsale's Private Band playing "J'aime tant 
 les militaires." 
 
 Everybody loves the militaires at Olympia. The Italian 
 officers are the curled darlings of the Show. When they are 
 not caracoling and curveting and passaging on the tan they are 
 twirling their great black moustachios in the boxes. Heavens! 
 how their fine black eyes flash as they salute the wisps of atten- 
 uated beauty languishing under acres of chip and prairies of 
 Tegal. Very dashing and debonair are the Roman dandies as 
 they click their heels together and touch the shining peaks of 
 their gallant cavalry caps. Dashing and debonair also is the 
 American Millionaire, with his slim waist and his weary smile. 
 Jolly and jovial are the judges, and the jolliest andjovialest 
 of all is Lord Lonsdale, chewing his cigar. He mounts a fine 
 black charger, after shortening the stirrup-leathers that have 
 just released Lieutenant Daufresne's long legs. He makes the 
 charger do everything a well-conducted charger ought to do in 
 time of peace. Having done so, he dismounts, with his cigar 
 between his teeth, and his air of horsey omniscience. 
 
 There is no lack of thrills at the Horse Show. It is pleasant 
 
 22
 
 338 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 to watch bold horsemen coming croppers at the high jump. 
 They come all sorts of croppers, but, bless your heart, they 
 don't seem to care a straw whether they break their necks or 
 their collar-bones. The horse and the man hover for a flash 
 in the air, then the horse comes down on his nose and his knees, 
 the man is shot over his head, turning a beautiful somersault, 
 and for a fraction of a second the picture is like a sporting print. 
 The riderless horse and the horseless rider are up again in a 
 jiffy, ready for another go, while the crowd claps its innumer- 
 able hands. 
 
 As the wooden wall grows higher there are more spills, and 
 there are more splinters in the air. Some of the jumpers appear 
 to have a prejudice against jumping. They turn their tails to 
 the wall, and pretend to be interested in the band. One horse 
 is a humorist, for he tries to climb the wall like a Zouave. When 
 his rider sadly explains to him the difference between jumping 
 a wall like a hunter and scaling it like a cat, the horse indignantly 
 tries to jump through the wooden framework at the side, scatter- 
 ing the judges right and left. But now a real jumper arrives, and 
 sails over the wall like a swallow, amid a thunder of cheers. 
 
 But it is almost Sunday morning. The Earl of Lonsdale's 
 Private Band has gone to bed. We leave the jumpers still jump- 
 ing, and the crowd still cheering. As we go home we reflect 
 that life, after all, is only a stiff fence, and we resolve to pray for 
 the heart of a good horse and a good rider. Never flinch, never 
 falter, never refuse; always ride straight, even when you do not 
 know what is on the other side. That is the right motto, whether 
 you win your rosette or come your cropper.
 
 WHEELS 
 
 IN the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Wh-ah-ah-oh-oh-oom ! Moaning her long, low, melodious 
 moan our car whirrs along the Hammersmith Road through 
 weary rows of sandwichmen. Curling round the corner she 
 glides daintily between lines of waiting cabs, carriages, and mo- 
 tors up to the gates of Motoropolis, the City of a Thousand 
 Wheels, Olympia. 
 
 The turnstile clicks, and we pass out of the m'ght of day 
 into the day of night. Outside, the London sky leaks a grey 
 gloom, but here the air is ringed, necklaced and braceleted 
 with electric jewels. Olympia is looped from floor to roof with 
 white fire. The stands brandish garlands of light, like girls in 
 a ballet. They are ranged in line of battle. It is a war of 
 lights. Famous firms are hurling spears of light at each other, 
 slashing each other with electric sabres. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Volleys of light startle us. The seething streets of Motor- 
 opolis excite us. The place is like a water-tube boiler with a 
 perpetual circulation of humanity in its labyrinthine veins. Up 
 and down, round and round, back and forth, under the galleries, 
 along the galleries, into the annexe, the flow of flesh never ceases. 
 The tormented restlessness of Motoropolis infects us. We are 
 motorious in a moment. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, W 7 heels ! 
 
 We assume a knowing air. We pretend to be veterans. We 
 cock our eye at this undecipherable machinery sleeping on its 
 mirror-bed, its secret anatomy reflected in polished glass. We 
 are boyishly hypocritical, swaggering with mechanical lore. 
 Thus we used to pose before horsey men, or anglers, or sports- 
 men. For it is the whim of man to overvalue the unknown and 
 
 339
 
 340 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 undervalue the familiar. There is a good deal of straw-chewing 
 in human nature. 
 
 A mechanical epidemic rages in Motoropolis. It is a night- 
 mare of wheels. Its streets are walled with wheels. The flies 
 on the wheels are men and women. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Behold the whirligig of time and its revenges: Ixion up to 
 date. The old Ixion bound by the old god to the old wheel. 
 Wheels within wheels. Wheels of the Cosmos. Wheels of the 
 Solar System. Wheels of the Planets. Wheels of the Stars. 
 Wheels of the World. Zeus on his cosmic wheel. Man on his 
 mundane tyre. Thus the motor mimics the universe. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels ! 
 
 Do not despise the mania of motion. It is life. Life is 
 motion. Everything is running away from everything else. 
 Motion in moon and gnat, in sun and swallow, in comet and 
 kangaroo, in lamp and lightning, in wind and fan, in sea and 
 ship, in meteor and motor. Yes, the motor is only a phase of 
 the everlasting flight, the eternal escape, the immortal hegira 
 of life. 
 
 But peace to the immensities. Let us be flippant for a 
 while. Let us toy with man 's latest toy, for Earth is a toy-shop 
 and man a child. Fools say that man is old. He is a bounding 
 boy, with Science for his Santa Claus. Every Christmas Santa 
 Science brings a new toy steam engine, telegraph, telephone, 
 wireless telegraphy, cinematograph, phonograph. We open 
 our eyes, gape at a brown-paper parcel, cut the string, tear off 
 the wrappings, and find the motor-car. We take the lid off a 
 big box, and, behold! the airship. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Olympia, then, is man 's play -box. It is good fun to play 
 with these lyrical toys. Let us play. Come, boys and girls of 
 all ages. Down on your knees and join in the game. Do not 
 imagine that play is the frivolity called work. Play is the 
 solemnest thing in the world. Look at old Ixion 's face, bent 
 over that grey chassis, with rhythmical cogs meshing like Mil- 
 tonic harmonies, its warty little cylinders, its tangle of rods and
 
 WHEELS 341 
 
 pipes, its shining shaft, its carburetter, its commutator, its live 
 axle, its internal and external brakes, its magneto-ignition, its 
 change-speed levers, its steering-wheel, its lubricator and ac- 
 celerator, its springs and sprockets, its magical clutch, its wise 
 valves, its bottled speed, its corked thunder, its tabloid lightning. 
 Note the idolatrous awe in Ixion 's eye. No babe could be more 
 serious, no schoolboy more earnest. Man may whistle over 
 his work, but he is an owl at play. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Olympia, then, is a Palace of Poetry, a Fane of Fairy Tales. 
 Here the practical man chases a dream in steel. Here the 
 business mole clasps a revolving vision. Here the materialist 
 kneels before a mechanical miracle. 
 
 Let us study these mystics. That handsome clear-eyed boy 
 is a millionaire. He buys thousand-pound cars as you buy news- 
 papers. He is buying one now. He has a stud of motors. He 
 is one end of this mystic cult. 
 
 That blue-eyed, curly-headed youngster is the other. He 
 is the Chauffeur of Croesus. He has driven Crcesus through 
 five countries France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and 
 Italy in five days. Croesus made a bet, and this Phaethon 
 won it, climbing precipices, skirting chasms, dodging avalanches, 
 playing leap-frog with glaciers, dancing on the razor-edge of 
 nothing. 
 
 He has zigzagged down a ten-thousand-foot pass with Al- 
 pine ropes twisted round his front wheels. He has nipped over 
 a level-crossing under the nose of an express. He has dived 
 out of a blazing motor-boat. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Phaethon loves his steel greyhound. He talks to her like 
 a lover. Every one of her flexible nerves and thews he knows. 
 He exults in the pulse of her pistons and the beat of her fiery 
 heart. To him her burnished levers are lovelier than a woman 's 
 arms, and the undulating wail of her siren sweeter than a 
 woman's voice. He and his millionaire master are wheel- 
 fellows. They live together, drive together, and if the god of 
 motion so decree, they will die together. Mystics both!
 
 342 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels! 
 
 Now regard the merchants of motion, the makers of four- 
 wheeled speed, the artificers of harnessed lightning. They 
 move amid a cloud of salesmen, mechanicians, motor-jockeys, 
 and typists. Grave, quiet, unostentatious, they are the cool 
 brains that evolve these steel lyrics. They are swimming in a 
 golden sea of millions, an ocean of capital. They, too, are 
 mystics, charmed paladins fighting the duel of design, warring 
 the war of invention. Hovering round them are the myriad 
 sutlers and camp-followers of a giant industry chemists, en- 
 gineers, managers, workmen, drummers, makers of motoriana, 
 costumiers, milliners, drivers, repairers, oil-refiners, petroleurs. 
 
 As we loiter in Motoropolis we hear its slang. Strange 
 phrases tantalise our ignorance. Pretty girls chatter gaily in 
 automobilious argot, as they glue their noses against a glass box 
 in which a four-cylinder engine is spitting blue sparks and 
 dancing a pas de quatre. 
 
 As night falls Motoropolis is invaded by the democracy. 
 The workman, the clerk, and the small shopkeeper come to mar- 
 vel and wonder. That is the note of this Olympiad. Demos 
 is a motorist now as well as Dives. Has he not already his 
 fleet of motor-buses? Ere long the coster will have a motor 
 moke, and the butcher's boy a steel pony. One man one motor 
 will be the motto. There will be municipal garages and national 
 motor-tracks. The king's highway will be horseless, all the 
 corners will be banked, and the double roads will be dustless, 
 soundless, deathless. There will be a motor-hearse, and its 
 name will be Mors Omnibus. There will be motor prams driven 
 by droplets of petrol and pinchlets of electricity. On Margate 
 sands there will be motor bathing-machines, motor donkeys, 
 and motor goats. 
 
 In the Name of the Prophet, Wheels!
 
 THE AGONY OF DORANDO 
 
 No one had ever heard of Dorando. He had no friends and 
 no fuglemen. He was an obscure little man, only an humble 
 Italian from Soho and Carpi, a nonentity without fame and with- 
 out prestige. Perhaps there was ancient blood in his undistin- 
 guished veins. His vanished ancestors may have been noble 
 Romans. On the other hand, they may have been slaves. No- 
 body knows. But Dorando had in his obscure breast a heart 
 worthy of Pheidippides, the noble strong man who raced like 
 a god and who died in the Akropolis with the tidings of victory 
 on his lips. If I were a Pindar I would write an Ode of Victory 
 in honour of Dorando, the Victor who lost and the Loser who 
 won. I would grave his dauntless name in deathless stanzas 
 of praise. 
 
 First of all I would sing the valiant hope that beat high in 
 his bosom as he raced along the dusty Windsor road. I would 
 chant the Roman virtue that sped his flying feet over hill and 
 dale, past town and hamlet, under leafy elms and branching 
 oaks, across railways and bridges, along avenues of alien cheers. 
 Not for him the hoarse salutations of the spectators. Not for 
 him the exultant cry of compatriots. He ran to the music of 
 his own courageous pulses and to the thunder of his own in- 
 domitable heart. The confused murmur of the people sounded 
 strange in his ears, and he heard not the mellifluous syllables 
 of his native tongue. On he ran, mile after mile, with the foreign 
 dust clogging his throat and the alien sun burning his flesh. In 
 his reeling brain, mayhap, a vision of Italy surged up now and 
 then like a mist, and he saw in a fiery trance the olives and the 
 vineyards of his najive land. 
 
 At length, after an age of agony, he heard the last rocket 
 
 343
 
 344 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 crashing in the sky, and as he staggered into the Stadium the 
 thunder of the shouting thousands smote his drumming ears. 
 The surging faces swam before his bloodshot eyes, swam in dizzy 
 curves and soaring slopes. Blind with weariness, demented 
 with fatigue, he halted in dazed bewilderment, not knowing 
 whether his long anguish was at an end. The gigantic pageant 
 was spread out before him, with its fluttering flags, and he saw 
 in a dream of pain victory and glory within his grasp. Strange 
 men speaking a strange tongue bade him press on to the goal. 
 Slowly the vague summons travelled from his distracted mind 
 to his tortured nerves, and in a delirious flash he saw what re- 
 mained of the dire task and the tragic ordeal. The wine of pas- 
 sion throbbed through his fainting flesh, and with a supreme 
 agony of endeavour he broke into a lamentable little run, his 
 worn feet tottering on the black cinderpath, and madness mount- 
 ing in his anguished brain. The lust of conquest carried him 
 forward pitifully for a few desperate strides. Only a very 
 little way, and the last word in the long litany of pain would be 
 uttered. Alas! darkness closed over him as he staggered and 
 stumbled on. The hot blue sky grew black above him. The 
 swaying faces faded away, and he fell. 
 
 There in sight of victory he lay, a victor yet not a victor. 
 He heard the far hum of voices urging him to rise. He rose in 
 blind anguish, stumbled on for a few awful yards, and then 
 fell again, his heart bursting with the very fury of impotence. 
 Behind him all the vanquished miles. Before him the pitiless 
 yards that mocked his triumph. So far, so very far, had he 
 won in the teeth of his mortal pain, and now, alas! he could win 
 no farther. Courage, Dorando ! The laurel is waiting for you. 
 The crown of wild olive is hovering over your brow. If need be, 
 creep and crawl to the goal, for there is yet time for victory. 
 The antagonists you have vanquished are still labouring far 
 behind you. Up, man, and on! 
 
 With infinite weariness the tortured hero struggles once 
 more out of the darkness of hell, and reels direfully forward. 
 Hands, foolish hands, succour his heroic limbs* Dorando does 
 not beg for aid. Nor does he spurn it. He is too far gone for
 
 THE AGONY OF DORANDO 345 
 
 either. He does not feel the fatal helping hands whose com- 
 passion is the death-knell of his desire. He totters. He stag- 
 gers. He gropes in the sunlight. He reels. He stumbles. 
 The kind,' disastrous hands prop him as he sways blindly to- 
 wards the bitter end of his anguish. His tragic face is blank and 
 blind with agony. He falls again and yet again, until at last 
 it seems that he is feebly fumbling for the latch of the door of 
 death. He has lost his way. The kind, cruel, outstretched 
 fingers thrust him onward. He cannot see plainly. He cannot 
 hear plainly. The shouting of the frantic multitude sounds 
 faint and far away. The steep mountains of faces are like hor- 
 rid phantoms. His broken body lurches from side to side. His 
 grey, ghastly face is hideous and horrible in its anguish. His 
 staring eyes are the eyes of a madman. With immeasurable 
 suffering and abominable pain he beats the air with his frenzied 
 hands. At last his sobbing breast breaks the thin thread of 
 yarn, and he falls like a corpse into the horror of his tragic 
 victory. For a while he lies on the lip of death. He is borne 
 out prone on a stretcher, and slowly, slowly, slowly he crawls 
 back from the edge of the dark abyss. But he has died a thou- 
 sand deaths. 
 
 Dorando has conquered. Dorando has not conquered. 
 Dorando has won. Dorando has not won. With a double 
 tongue the fates have spoken. His glory has been stolen from 
 him by the stupidity of things. By no act of his own is he de- 
 prived of the fame he broke his heart for. He is the victim of 
 chance, the martyr of an accident. The hands that helped him 
 to win helped him to lose. His saviours were his destroyers. 
 Dorando, it is not well that you should suffer for the errors of 
 others. It is not just, Dorando. If they had let you alone, 
 Dorando, you might have torn a few more yards out of your 
 mighty heart. Falling and rising, groping and fumbling, stag- 
 gering and stumbling, creeping and crawling, you might have 
 agonised your shattered body up to the goal. Who knows? 
 Not the careless crowd that cheered you, Dorando, and not 
 your helpers, and, above all, not the servitors who failed to keep 
 your path to victory clear. Do you know yourself, Dorando?
 
 346 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 But the tragic pity and irony of it all is intolerable, Dorando. 
 One thing we know. The agony of Dorando will gp down the 
 ages in company with the agony of Pheidippides. All hail, 
 Dorando! In you we salute the Victor who lost and the Loser 
 who won!
 
 AT RANELAGH 
 
 " HULLO!" cried a cheery voice behind me one morning in 
 June as I lay back in my chair at Philippe's in the middle of a 
 luxurious shave. With the tail of my eye I saw a sunburnt face 
 in the mirror before me, and recognised my friend The Man 
 About Town. His effulgent top-hat was cocked at that rakish 
 angle which I vainly endeavour to imitate, and his glossy black 
 moustache curled into that miraculous curl which is the envy of 
 the pavement. 
 
 Tony is a natural dandy, a perfect master of the external 
 proprieties. He is devoid of affectations and effeminacies, yet 
 he is always exquisitely right in his effect. He is half-French, 
 half -English, and the blend has produced a mellow masculinity 
 and an elegant virility beyond description or emulation. He is 
 French grace grafted on English vigour, and groomed to the 
 nines by Eton and Oxford. He is an all-round sportsman, hunts, 
 punts, rows, fences, plays polo and racquets, bridge and billiards, 
 drives his coach, shoots, fishes, and, in short, does everything 
 that can be done by a gentleman, and does it well. 
 
 He can talk, too. He knows something about everything, and 
 everything about some things. You may see him at Christie's 
 exuding connoisseurship. He is an adept in pearls and dia- 
 monds and precious stones, and knows his old china and his old 
 furniture like a Bond Street dealer. He is a good judge of a 
 horse, and at his ease in Tattersall's. He has judged and um- 
 pired and refereed all over the world. He talks politics like 
 a Greville Minor, and has always the latest phase of Mr. Balfour 
 up his sleeve. He is an expert critic of feminine frocks, frou- 
 frous, and furbelows. He smokes excellent cigars, drinks his 
 pint of champagne every night without a quiver of liver, and is an 
 omniscient gourmet who reveres his digestion. He can cook as 
 
 347
 
 348 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 well as his own chef, and he knows where to buy the best of 
 everything eatable, drinkable, smokable, and wearable. 
 
 His clothes are unobtrusively smart, brilliantly apt, incisively 
 original. His dress-coat is a lyric of clinging curves. He boasts 
 that he is the only man in London who has solved the secret of 
 a dress-shirt that does not bulge under a dress-waistcoat that 
 does not cockle. It is rumoured that he wears a straight-fronted 
 corset, but that is a slander. His trousers are the despair of 
 guardsmen and the desperation of hussars. They hang on his 
 hips without the supererogation of braces, and the sweeping line 
 from haunch to instep betrays no hint of knee and only an innu- 
 endo of calf. His boots, his hose, his gloves, his ties, and his tie- 
 pins, are subtle echoes of what the Navy calls ' the dress for the 
 day,' and his canes are barometers of occasion. He fills the 
 opera with eddies of envious admiration, and at a first night the 
 heart of the pit palpitates with awe as he glides from his stall 
 between the acts. In fine, he is the immaculate, inimitable, 
 imperturbable Man About Town, compared to whom Beau 
 Brummel was a florid bungler and D'Orsay an orchidaceous 
 amateur. 
 
 "Hullo! Doin' anything this afternoon? No? Let me 
 drive you down to Ranelagh?" 
 
 Reader, have you ever idled away an afternoon at Ranelagh ? 
 If not, you have missed one of the pastoral whimsies of the 
 season. Hurlingham is delightful, but Ranelagh is delectable, 
 with its shaven lawns, its shady trees, its leafy lakelet, and its 
 va-et-vient of fragile femininity. It is the Paradise of Ladies, 
 where men are tolerated. Its quaint old clubhouse, fragrant 
 with memories of its Kit-Cat past, is luxuriously dainty, and to 
 dine here al fresco on a summer evening is not grievous. 
 
 Of course, the soul of Ranelagh is sport, and the presiding 
 deity is the horse. Polo is the quintessence of the Englishman 's 
 passion for horseflesh. In it the rider and the horse are moulded 
 and melted into one organism, like the fabled Centaur, their 
 two hearts beating together in a fast and furious rhythm of speed 
 and grace, agility of nerve and muscle, thew and bone. Lovely 
 is the interplay of swift limbs in football, sweet is the swallow-
 
 AT RANELAGH 349 
 
 flight of a golf ball, bright is the gallop of a racehorse, but polo 
 combines the loveliness, the sweetness, and the brightness of 
 them all. Along the edge of the polo ground at Ranelagh there 
 is a glittering surf of ladies, their soft, many-coloured gowns 
 foaming along the green marge. 
 
 Now and then the eight Centaurs thunder down upon the bor- 
 der of beauty in wild pursuit of the flying white ball, but few 
 of these women have nerves, and they watch the riotous quad- 
 rille with a bored serenity. The polo-stick is half lance and 
 half sabre. It is also a croquet-mallet. Croquet on horseback, 
 tent-pegging, lemon-slicing, and pig-sticking that is polo. 
 
 But it is hard to watch all that goes on at Ranelagh. Turn 
 your back on the polo, and you will see all sorts of horse-games 
 on the green track behind you. Here the coaches are drawn up, 
 and another iridescent surf of ladies foams along the ropes. 
 Outside the little pavilion are arranged the prizes for the day 
 silver cups shining in the sun. The judges are rich in character 
 and type. Some of them are daringly flamboyant in dress, 
 flaunting gallant audacities of colour in their garb. 
 
 Here the horse still defies the all-conquering motor. Ladies 
 drive their ponies. Old weather-beaten coach-drivers display 
 their skill, manoeuvring their four-in-hands in delicate wrig- 
 glings through serpentine avenues of blocks. Polo ponies 
 swerve and gyrate, hunters leap over hurdles. In brief, all 
 sorts of horses do all sorts of things. 
 
 Then comes the climax of the afternoon tea on the lawn. 
 You buy tickets for tea and tickets for strawberries, and you 
 capture a table. 
 
 The tinkle of teacups is mingled with the tinkle of talk. In 
 the sunshine the myriad hues of hats and parasols and frocks 
 gleam and glisten like a living kaleidoscope. After tea, as the 
 shadows lengthen, the crack of the croquet-mallet is heard. 
 Lovers steal softly into sequestered nooks, or punt lazily on the 
 toy lake. The idyll is exquisite, and the golden moments slide 
 all too swiftly into the dinner-hour. 
 
 Now the perch of the club-house is congested with chiffon 
 and silk and muslin and crepe-de-chine. There is a revel and
 
 350 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 riot of vehicles, horses prancing, and motors whirring in an 
 interminable line, the orderly disorder being disentangled like 
 magic. Down the leafy lane we spin, over Hammersmith 
 Bridge, through gaping aisles of onlookers, back to Kensington, 
 Knightsbridge, the Park, and Piccadilly. 
 
 As Tony pulls up his team and I descend from my seat by 
 his side, my admiration for him culminates. He is gaily superb 
 as he flicks his feaders and swings faultlessly through the traffic. 
 Yes, The Man About Town is a wonderful being. He has style. 
 If I could write as well as he drives and dresses well, I should 
 be immortal.
 
 THE POETRY OF BILLIARDS 
 
 THE other afternoon, being afflicted by the crudity of life, 
 I drifted into Soho Square. Cabs were driving up and dis- 
 charging men in the left-hand corner as you come from Oxford 
 Street. These men stimulated my curiosity. They did not look 
 like men of business. On the contrary, they had the air of men 
 of leisure. They seemed to be in a quiet hurry. They all en- 
 tered a solemn, respectable house. Moved by a whim, I fol- 
 lowed them. In a kind of a vestibule a man was taking money. 
 " Front seats, six shillings. " What on earth is going on ? We 
 ascended some stairs, and reached a room in which a man in 
 his shirt-sleeves was playing billiards. 
 
 "Who is he?" I whispered to my neighbour. 
 
 "Stevenson," said he, reverently. 
 
 Suddenly it flashed on me that I had stumbled on a Billiard 
 Tournament. That, then, was the meaning of the gilt sign out- 
 side, "Burroughes and Watts." By pure chance I had wan- 
 dered into the Mecca of Billiards. 
 
 As I settled myself in my chair I smiled at the inexhaustible 
 variety of London. It is the city of surprises. In it there are 
 always all sorts of excitements. Idleness in London is hard 
 labour, for it provides more amusements than you can digest. 
 If a man were to do nothing but work hard at amusing himself, 
 he could not overtake the London clock. Even now, before 
 the season has got up its speed, no man could do everything 
 and go everywhere. 
 
 Here in a lazy nook, secret and sequestered, London pro- 
 vides me with the luxurious spectacle of supreme dexterity in 
 the most exquisitely subtle game on earth. The stage is dis- 
 creetly and decorously arranged. There is no crowd. Billiards 
 is a gentlemanly game. It is not a vulgar sport. There is no 
 
 351
 
 352 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 tumult and clamour of mobs around it. It is a solemn rite and 
 hieratic ceremony rather than a recreation. It is the sport of 
 philosophers. 
 
 The room is not large. It holds only a few score of mild- 
 eyed fatalists. They sit like Roman senators in their shadowy 
 seats. The lights on the walls are veiled. Only on the green 
 table is there a steady shower of illumination falling from the 
 great conical lamp-shades. A visitor from Mars might imagine 
 that these two men, with their long, tapering wands, were high 
 priests celebrating some strange mysteries, charged with occult 
 significance. He might mistake the clear, resonant tones of 
 the Marker for the voice of an invisible oracle chanting some 
 awful formula. The painted board with its changing numerals 
 he might regard as a dreadful symbol of mystical sublimities. I 
 am sure that his blood would be chilled with reverence as the 
 solemn office unrolled itself. He would gaze with awe on the 
 three inscrutable balls that dance a labyrinthine dance, tracing 
 strangely complicated lines and curves. The red ball he 
 might imagine to be the sacred symbol of the blood that is life, 
 and the white ball he might conceive to be the emblem of inno- 
 cence, and the ball with the speck of black he might regard as 
 the image of sin. The voice of the invisible Marker he might 
 mistake for the cry of Fate. "Two-seven; Five-seven; Seven- 
 all." The solemn iteration is pontifical. It fills me with rev- 
 erence for the rhythmic divinity of numbers and for the inex- 
 orable majesty of arithmetic. 
 
 The world fades away like cigarette wreaths as I watch 
 Stevenson making poetry with his cue. I am soothed by the 
 fluent ease of the artist. Here is a man whose mastery over 
 brute matter is absolute. The three balls are his helots. They 
 obey him silently, or all but silently, with ivory whispers and 
 kisses and feathery wisps of sound. I mutely worship this 
 magician who makes these spheres move in obedience to his will. 
 Thus move the planets on the billiard-table of infinity. Thus 
 rolls the earth, thus swerves the sun, thus swoops the moon. 
 This quiet, keen-eyed man has discovered the secret of motion 
 and gravitation and all the mysterious forces that lead the ions
 
 THE POETRY OF BILLIARDS 353 
 
 and electrons in their predestined waltz. Brain and finger and 
 cue and balls are one with the inviolate laws of the universe. I 
 fall to studying this necromancer. His face is an epitome of 
 concentration. It has the sharp swiftness of the hawk in its 
 fine angles and curves. It is nervously sensitive in every fea- 
 ture. It is vividly alive with serene vigilance. His lithe limbs 
 move with sinuous grace to and fro. He is a living nicety, an 
 incarnate precision. Even when he sprawls with one leg along 
 the edge of the table there is no awkward violence in his posture. 
 
 I am amazed at the apparent ease of his feats. There is no 
 evidence of difficulty overcome. He bids the balls to go and 
 they go, to come and they come. Their woven paces seem to be 
 controlled by some will within themselves. They twist and 
 swirl as if they were living things endowed with volition. Once 
 a ball seems to have erred, and a gasp of regret issues from the 
 deluded spectators as it passes its target. Then it strikes the 
 cushion and recoils and flicks the ball it had evaded, and the 
 spectators laugh in self-derision. At times the interminable 
 caresses of nursery cannons grow monotonous, and one is nar- 
 cotised by the display of perpetual artistry. But now and then 
 comes a double-baulk. With infinite care the wizard places 
 his ball, and sends it zigzagging all round the table. As it nears 
 the goal his quick eye moves with it, and as it screws in a de- 
 licious curve off one ball and off the other his glance seems to 
 swerve with it in a kind of visual harmony. It is the poetry 
 of billiards. 
 
 The contrast between the temperament of Stevenson and the 
 temperament of Dawson is delightfully sharp. Dawson is as 
 slow, dogged, and heavy as his opponent is swift, nimble, and 
 light. It is a duel between a broadsword and a rapier. The 
 skill of Stevenson makes Dawson 's skill seem clumsy. The one 
 is all ease, the other all labour. Yet it is only relative clumsi- 
 ness. Dawson is a miracle, but Stevenson out-miracles him. 
 Stevenson has the diabolical gift of making things easy for him- 
 self and difficult for Dawson. Dawson cannot make things 
 quite so easy for himself and quite so difficult for Stevenson. 
 " To him that hath shall be given. " The little margin of over- 
 23
 
 354 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 mastery becomes a vast abyss* By a freak of irony Dawson 
 seemed to be not only less skilful, but also to be forced to en- 
 counter greater difficulties. But he created these difficulties, 
 whereas Stevenson's art enabled him to avoid creating them. 
 The art of billiards is like the art of life. The artist in life con- 
 trols and circumvents and wheedles his materials. He does not 
 assault them. Dawson is all tours de force, but Stevenson is all 
 tours de grace. As I came out of the cloisters of billiards into 
 the monastic calm of Soho Square, I resolved to play the game 
 of life like Stevenson. My friends, let us cultivate the art of 
 rhythmic grace. Did not Cleopatra and Herbert Spencer play 
 billiards ? Were they not both philosophers ? And, by the way, 
 let me warn you that the story told about Herbert Spencer and 
 the young man who vanquished him at billiards is apocryphal. 
 Spencer did not say to his conqueror, " Sir, such proficiency in 
 a game of skill implies a misspent youth." The only ground 
 for the legend is the fact that Spencer played billiards and 
 played execrably. Stevenson may be a philosopher, but no 
 philosopher could be a Stevenson.
 
 AT THE NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB 
 
 THERE is a strong literary flavour in pugilism. Byron, like 
 his grandson, Lord Lovelace, was fond of slogging. Hazlitt 
 gloried in it. His description of a prize-fight is the best in the 
 language. He hailed it as "the high and heroic state of man." 
 Those were the days of the bloods, of the Fives Courts, of Jack 
 Randall's in Chancery Lane. Tom Cribb, the champion, 
 read Byron's poems. The bulldog was worshipped. There 
 was bull baiting, bear-baiting, cock-fighting. The Georgian 
 blood wore a white beaver hat, a caped overcoat, and a white- 
 and-blue spotted handkerchief, known as a "Belcher," after 
 the renowned Tom, that great man who combined pugilism 
 with landscape-painting. Then Pierce Egan wrote "Boxiana" 
 and John Hamilton Reynolds created Peter Corcoran in "The 
 Fancy," a delightful book which Mr. Masefield has edited with 
 curious care. Mr. Masefield tells us that on the morning of a 
 fight the highways out of London were thronged with gigs. The 
 road to Epsom on Derby Day is a pale parallel to the spectacle 
 that the "sports" presented, tooling down four-in-hand with 
 fifteen on top, six inside, a two-foot horn, an icehouse, two cases 
 of champagne, and sixteen boxes of cigars. Etiquette permitted 
 all coloured neck-cloths but white, all coloured hats but black. 
 The pace was the limit of the team, and God take care of the 
 turnpike. The bloods were adepts at long-distance spitting, 
 and the whips could flick off a hat with a flip of the lash. The 
 dandies ruffled it in crimson. Tom Cribb went to the battle- 
 field in a four-horse carriage, each steed gay with blue ribbons 
 and the English colours flying from the box. He was cheered 
 like a king. The bells rang in the belfries as he passed, and the 
 girls flung flowers at him. 
 
 355
 
 356 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 The ring was a white-roped square pitched on the green 
 turf, surrounded by gigs, coaches, and curricles, sports chewing 
 straws, Jews, gipsies, macers, and flash coves. The gipsies 
 beat back the mob with whips. The men tossed with a silver 
 crown for corners, and then peeled amid a gabble of chaff and 
 heavy betting. Thus Reynolds describes the "Nonpareil": 
 
 With marble-coloured shoulders, and keen eyes 
 
 Protected by a forehead broad and white, 
 
 And hair cut close lest it impede the sight, 
 
 And clenched hands, firm, and of punishing size, 
 
 Steadily held or motioned wary-wise, 
 
 To hit or stop, and kerchief, too, drawn tight 
 
 O'er the unyielding loins, to keep from flight 
 
 The inconstant wind, that all too often flies, 
 
 The Nonpareil stands! Fame, whose bright eyes run o'er 
 
 With joy to see a Chicken of her own, 
 
 Dips her rich pen in Claret, and writes down 
 
 Under the letter R, first on the score, 
 
 Randal], John, Irish Parents age not known 
 
 Good with both hands, and only ten stone four. 
 
 After Hazlitt and Reynolds came George Borrow, who dated the 
 decadence of England from the decline of boxing, and who wrote 
 in "Lavengro" that immortal battle-piece, the fight with the 
 "Flaming Tinman." Contemporary votaries of the Ring are 
 Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Watts-Dunton, and Sir Arthur Conan 
 Doyle, not to mention the Right Honourable John Burns, who 
 once used his fists with punishing effect in a Paris cafe, avenging 
 in British fashion an insult to his wife. 
 
 With all these great men to keep us in countenance, let us 
 pay a visit to that modern temple of " The Fancy," the National 
 Sporting Club. It is nine o'clock as our hansom jingles into 
 silent Covent Garden and halts at a dim, lonely building which 
 looks like a nonconformist chapel. As we enter we encounter an 
 archidiaconal old gentleman, who takes our overcoat. He lives 
 in a vast fortress of coats. Fur coats are piled round him 
 like sandbags. But he gives no ticket, for this stately conserv- 
 ative club despises new-fangled ways. Leaving the vestibule, 
 we sternly avoid the bar, and passing some billiard-tables, we 
 reach a door. Peering over packed shoulders, we see a large 
 hall hazy with smoke and dizzy with sloping rows of faces.
 
 AT THE NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB 357 
 
 There is not room here for a fly. The faces in the numbered 
 seats rise from the floor in slanting congestion up to the four 
 walls under the gallery, with its projecting boxes crammed with 
 spectators. Our first impression is that it is a congress of fat 
 men. Why are "sports" fat? 
 
 In the centre of the floor is the roped ring, a wooden isle 
 in a sea of shirt-fronts, diamond studs, and obese cigars. On a 
 raised dais sits the polished referee, groomed elegantly, his 
 glossy top-hat glittering in the gaslight. On his left sits " Peggy " 
 Bettinson, the presiding genius of the club, an austere judicial 
 figure that fills us with speculative awe. On his right and left 
 are two meagre spiral iron staircases, up and down which top- 
 hatted men are perpetually gyrating like the kerbstone mer- 
 chant's monkey. These staircases fascinate me. They are 
 puzzle staircases. I watch men groping for the first curl of 
 the spiral. They all try to climb in by the back. Were these 
 staircases designed by Mr. Theodore Cook in order to illustrate 
 his spiral theory of the universe? 
 
 Let us spiral the spiral. Being total abstainers we need not 
 dread the ordeal. Round and round, down and down you go. 
 It is hard to find space for your body in this elegant mob. You 
 are forced to push yourself down into the spectators like a match 
 into a full match-holder. Luckily you remain head up. A 
 sense of incongruity invades you. You feel like a messenger 
 from Mars. This is not your world. Its point of view is vio- 
 lently strange. Have you ever sat under the gallery in the 
 House of Commons? There you feel awkwardly amphibious, 
 neither a stranger nor an M.P. This feeling of jarred relation- 
 ship is strong now as you study these rows on rows of hatted men, 
 whose eyes are placidly fixed on the gleaming flesh of the boxers, 
 just as the eyes of members in the House are fixed on Front 
 Bench gladiators. Yes, the resemblance between the National 
 Sporting Club and the House of Commons is comforting. The 
 Referee is the Speaker. The Ring is the table, with boxing- 
 gloves for mace and buckets for dispatch-boxes. The members 
 sit on opposite sides facing each other. There is the Peers' 
 Gallery, and the Press sits behind the Referee. The proceedings
 
 358 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 are parliamentary in their frigid pomp and frozen dignity. Box- 
 ing here is a sacred and solemn ritual, governed by elaborate 
 ceremony and innumerable standing orders. There is nothing 
 so serious as sport, nothing so humourless as amusement. Men 
 can laugh over the great things of life, such as love and religion, 
 but they invest pugilism and politics with an august and majes- 
 tic awe. 
 
 I am sitting beside a benign old gentleman. Suddenly he 
 addresses a technical remark to me. I blush. I feel like a 
 trespasser. Why am I masquerading as an expert? For it 
 seems that I am sitting amid the pundits of pugilism. Humbly 
 I confess my absolute ignorance. The old gentleman casts a 
 pitying glance upon me. My blush falls on my shirt-front like 
 a Polar sunset on an icefield. I am humiliated. I do not know. 
 Why should two men flourish four large leather bags in the air ? 
 Why do they not pound each other with coke-hammers? I 
 catch myself thirsting for blood. I want a visible sequel to all 
 this dancing and gesticulating violence. I yearn for palpable 
 wounds and bruises. There is the secret of the decay of the 
 Ring. The attempt to substitute science for savagery is futile. 
 Only the erudite experts can delight in the artistic nuances of 
 a Moir or a Moran: I cannot. Indeed, I am compelled to ask 
 them to tell me who wins. I cannot detect superiority. In fact, 
 I invariably admire the worst boxers. This is a mark of my 
 low intellectual endowment. Yet I think the glory of the old 
 pugilism was its worship of moral courage, of grim endurance, of 
 the big heart that faces punishment without flinching. The new 
 pugilism worships trickery, agility, craft, cunning. It is the 
 fox instead of the lion. 
 
 The result is that pugilism is now strangled with rules 
 again like the House of Commons. A good example of this is 
 presented to us as we watch the great fight between Box and 
 Cox. Box hits his opponent below the belt to use plain Eng- 
 lish, in the belly. Cox curls up on the floor, and the subsequent 
 proceedings interest him no more. He lies as inert as a string 
 of sausages. He is counted out. His seconds apply the usual 
 restoratives, and after a while they help him to stagger out, his
 
 AT THE NATIONAL SPORTING CLUB 359 
 
 face a ghastly mask of agony. The referee awards the fight to 
 Box on the ground that the blow was aimed above the belt, but 
 its direction was changed by Cox in trying to ward it off. Thus 
 Box wins the fight by means of a foul blow evolved by an acci- 
 dent. The subtlety of the point shows how meticulously elab- 
 orate is the modern Queensberry code.
 
 "WONDERLAND" 
 
 "WONDERLAND," the last refuge of pugilism, is a hall in the 
 Whitechapel Road that holds three thousand people. To-night 
 there is a great boxing tournament, the chief battle being a fif- 
 teen-rounds contest between Pedlar Palmer (ex-Bantam Cham- 
 pion of the World) and Cockney Cohen (8-stone lo-lb. Champion 
 of the Midlands). As we step out of St. Mary's Station a crowd 
 is struggling to enter the big, bare vestibule, bisected by turn- 
 stiles. On the other side of the turnstiles the crowd is flattened 
 into a queue by close-cropped bruisers with rip-saw voices. 
 "Three, five, ten, an' a poun'!" They chant this iron chorus 
 as the East End shuffles past the pay-box. 
 
 No congregation could enter a church more quietly than this 
 variegated rascaldom. Here, indeed, the East puts the West to 
 shame. The shepherd of the flock is an alert little man in a 
 grey jacket, with black curls, black eyes, black moustache, a black 
 cigar, and a diamond ring. He owns the East London Tavern 
 next door, where, according to the programme, he is "pleased 
 to see everyone, so give him a call." He works his barking 
 sheepdogs with consummate skill. We watch him for an hour 
 with speechless awe. His mastery over this multifarious vil- 
 lainy is marvellous. No violence. No threats. No force. Noth- 
 ing but cold-drawn order. 
 
 "Three, five, ten, an' a poun'!" While to that brazen ca- 
 dence the East End marches into "Wonderland," we review it 
 with a wistful smile, watching Life fingering her rosary of faces, 
 telling these beads of battered passion, toying ironically with 
 these visages of crime. We are afraid of Life. She has no 
 reticence. Her sacred secrets are babbled publicly. We long 
 for a faceless humanity. These confessional countenances 
 affright us. There are gargoyles on crutches, pot-paunched 
 
 360
 
 " WONDERLAND " 361 
 
 topers, furtive wastrels, greasy toughs, and grimy roughs. But 
 this slum-brew is liberally laced with dandy sportsmen and 
 dapper bloods, comedians, jockeys, wrestlers, bookmakers, 
 racing men, card-sharpers, cracksmen, and magnates of the 
 swell-mob. It is a stew of society, a haggis of tastes. 
 
 " Three, five, ten, an ' a poun ' ! " In a corner there is a swarm 
 of slum-bees, some with mysterious newspaper parcels, some 
 with queer little black bags. "Boxers!" At the cry they 
 vanish, and the endless queue goes on worming its way in; for 
 "Wonderland" is very hungry, and eats and eats, yet is not full. 
 Let it eat us also. As it gulps us a sea of faces breaks out of a 
 fog of smoke. In its midst swings an anchored raft gaily fenced 
 with blue and white ropes. In the centre of the raft two naked 
 men with breech-clouts and boots, and black blobs for hands, 
 are dancing a tuneless dance. The square raft is the Ring! 
 We see it for the first time, and the impact of the impression is 
 clear and resonant. The Ring! It sets the echoes of old times 
 hallooing. It calls up famous names Tom Cribb and Teucer 
 Belcher, Heenan and Sayers, Shelton and Randall, Ned Turner 
 and Bulldog Hudson, Fearless Scroggins and Sam the Jew, 
 Broughton and Slack and Ben, Black Richmond, Purcell, and 
 Tom of Bedford, that "true piece of English stuff, sharp as 
 winter, kind as spring." 
 
 The manscape in "Wonderland" is a spiritual Caliban, a 
 mob-monster of mystics, for the Wonderlanders are hero-wor- 
 shippers. They bow before the fist. They glory in belly 
 punches, body blows, drives in the mark, smashes on the jaw. 
 They love the deep thud of leather on gleaming flesh. They 
 loathe sparring. When the bruisers are coy they "give them 
 the bird," and whistle "Dear Old Pals." Yet there is a lyrical 
 beauty in their brutishness. Those springing flanks and rip- 
 pling muscles are a sculptor's dream. A moment ago that lad 
 was a dingy loafer: now he is a Farnese Hercules, all chiselled 
 grace from shin to shoulder. Is it not fine to see the gutter 
 groping after the manly glory of Greece and the virile splendour 
 of Rome ? 
 
 Hush! The combat of the night begins. The seconds clear
 
 362 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the Ring, fanning away the smoke with flick of towels. Palmer 
 faces Cohen. The gong sounds. Their fists turn into whirling 
 drumsticks. Cohen is a Jew, Palmer is an East Ender, who 
 once sold bootlaces in the streets. Therefore he is known as 
 "The Pedlar." Pedlar Palmer is renowned for guile. Hence 
 he is called "The Box o' Tricks." The Box o' Tricks needs 
 all his craft to-night, for the Jew is younger, stronger, and in 
 finer condition. The Pedlar 's arms are rounded like a woman 's, 
 and he has welts of fat on his body. But he is an artist, subtle 
 in tactics, with a faultless eye for distance, and a gift of pro- 
 phetic evasion; his feet are oiled lightning, and his head ducks 
 and dives with the swiftness of a swallow and the elusiveness of 
 a snipe. He capers like a legion of twinkling imps. His fists 
 revolve like a racing screw. The retina cannot register their 
 gyrations. They multiply into a shower. His head turns into 
 a Hydra, in each of the hundred heads a pair of wily eyes and a 
 wicked smile. " There is nothing like Long Melford for short- 
 ness," said Isopel Berners, but Cohen's long right is useless 
 against air. It flashes out, but the feet flicker back and the 
 fist smashes nothing on the tip of Palmer's nose. Or the head 
 swoops hi a circle round the fist, and ere Cockney recovers he 
 feels the rub-a-dub of left and right. Exerting his superior 
 strength, he drives the will-o'-the-wisp right on the ropes. He 
 has him at his mercy now, but, although his head is down, 
 Palmer blindly times the blow to the fraction of a second, and 
 while Cohen is smashing the smoke he wriggles into safety. 
 Thus the pair weave spiral feints and convoluted ruses to a per- 
 petual obbligato of hoarse cries, punctuated by the official rebuke, 
 "Quiet! Quiet!" 
 
 The ding-dong fight is fast and furious. Round follows 
 round, the two-minute tussles being hyphened by one-minute 
 towel-fannings, massagings, face-spongings, garglings, each man 
 lying limp in his chair with head flung back, arms stretched 
 along the ropes, and legs extended on the second's hips. The 
 three seconds work at each man like demons, bounding on the 
 boards as the gong sounds, and packing their minute with sub- 
 divided extracts of energy. It is all a miracle of trained speed.
 
 "WONDERLAND " 363 
 
 As the battle reaches its crisis, the house is a roaring furnace 
 of howls. The Cohenites yell in Yiddish. " Let 'er go, Tom- 
 my!" "Short work, Tom!" "Go on, Tommy!" shriek the 
 Pedlar's backers, purple with passion. But the boxers are cool 
 and punctilious. , When Palmer knocks his antagonist into the 
 ropes on his knees, he allows him ample time to regain his feet 
 and begin afresh. Cohen once, it is true, tired of punching air, 
 hits in holds, but the referee cautions him, and he needs no 
 further hint. There is no brutality and no blood: only ex- 
 treme endurance and extreme skill. The issue is decided on 
 points, and only the expert can tell which man has won. But 
 the crowd knows, and when Palmer is proclaimed the victor its 
 acclamations are terrific. As I go out I pass Cohen. His 
 mouth is swollen and his smile awry. Palmer follows. His 
 hands are bandaged, and his shoulders are covered with tiny 
 scratches, the mark of the ropes. But the two bruisers are 
 virtually unscathed. Passing the Ring, I note that the corners 
 are soaked with water, and the seconds look wearier than their 
 men. As I squirm through the crowd, drinks are circulating, 
 and a man is selling Monte 's Jellied Eels. On the whole, I 
 think "Wonderland" is aptly named.
 
 THE AGONY OF GOLF 
 
 MR. BALFOUR has declared that golf is not a game for old gen- 
 tlemen. "It is," he said, "a game for young people, and unless 
 you begin it when young you will never enjoy the full glory 
 pf it when you are old." I used to be a golfophobe. I de- 
 spised golf. I sneered at mygolfophile friends. To me golf and 
 senility were synonymous. But last summer a young Irishman 
 converted me. His exuberant eulogy of the game excited my 
 curiosity, and I bought a bagful of strange weapons with strange 
 names. Instantly the devil of golf entered into my soul and 
 took possession of me. No longer was I master of myself. The 
 things which formerly engrossed me became stale and flat. For 
 nearly a year I have grieved over my wasted youth. The past 
 is past, but I bitterly repent the hours I have squandered on idle 
 work and unprofitable play. I sorrow over the memory of holi- 
 days squandered wantonly. Fiercely I think of weeks and weeks 
 and weeks that were utterly null and void, although before my 
 unseeing eyes stretched the reproaching links. Yes, I have 
 even walked ignorantly over undiscerned paradises in all parts 
 of the world. I have vacuously gazed at golfers year after 
 empty year, and in my besotted folly failed to grasp the skirts 
 of happy chance. For all my other sins I can forgive myself, 
 but for this sin, never. Reader, there is only one kind of re- 
 morse that is intolerable. It is the remorse of the golfer who 
 has not teed a ball in his teens. Other omissions may be buried 
 in oblivion. We can forget the kiss that was not taken in the 
 moonlight, the word that was not uttered in the conservatory, 
 all the women we have not married, the bargains we have not 
 bought, the sights we have not seen. But we can never forget 
 the years that might have been and were not consecrated to golf. 
 
 364
 
 THE AGONY OF GOLF 365 
 
 There is, however, one grain of sugar in your cup of gall. 
 The basis of golf is suffering, and the young golfer suffers less 
 than the mature golfer. Youth plays the game with levity, but 
 manhood plays it with the passionate solemnity of a minor 
 prophet. The fun of golf is due to the torture of mental con- 
 flict with perverse matter. Youth misses the awful joy of 
 misdirected toil. It learns golf too easily to taste the true ecstasy 
 of torment. The man who has achieved success in other forms of 
 activity, such as trade, politics, painting, literature, or football, 
 finds to his horror when he faces the tee-box that all his knowledge 
 is a vain thing. Even a King becomes a poor creature. Even a 
 Prime Minister is a bungler. Feverishly the successful merchant 
 grasps his driver and embarks upon the sea of unfathomable 
 failure. No cunning availeth. No wisdom profiteth. For he 
 who would conquer the imp of golf must become as a little child. 
 He must abase his pride in the dust. He must expose his folly 
 to the world. He must make a public laughing-stock of his 
 grey hairs. It is said that Lord Chancellor Campbell took 
 dancing lessons at the age of thirty-four, but he took them by 
 night, like Nicodemus, in stealthy privacy under an assumed 
 name. The eminent man who condemns himself to golf cannot 
 hope to learn the dreadful sport in secret. He must perform 
 his grotesque contortions in public. He must endure the fur- 
 tive grin of the caddie and the simulated gravity of the club 
 verandah. He must not only make an ass of himself, but he 
 must also feel an ass and be an ass for months and even years. 
 There is no other game which manufactures the habitually and 
 contentedly incompetent. Many men delight in golf who know 
 that they are living monuments of incapacity. Indeed, the worse 
 you play the game, the more you enjoy it. 
 
 The agony of golf is largely due to the fact that in it all the 
 natural and spiritual laws are suspended. You may do every- 
 thing right and yet everything goes wrong. Here the effect 
 does not follow the cause. The strong will and the strong sinew 
 are equally useless. Courage is valueless and determination vain. 
 Perseverance only deepens your misery and fortitude but in- 
 creases your humiliation. You realize for the first time in your
 
 366 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 life that you have hands and feet totally unfitted for the business 
 of life. It is not helpful to grip your club as you grip other 
 things. You must learn to twist your finger-joints into a horri- 
 bly unnatural series of knots. You must grasp the weapon with 
 your fingers and thumbs and not with the palms of your hands. 
 As you labour you cultivate a crop of corns and blisters. But 
 although your skin comes off you don't get on. If you clutch 
 your club tightly you are told that your grip is too tight. If you 
 clutch it loosely it is too loose. In other avocations men are 
 right-handed. In golf you must be left-handed. For mourn- 
 ful months you struggle desperately to weaken the grip of your 
 right and strengthen the grip of your left. By virtue of some 
 accursed perversity you must always do in golf exactly the op- 
 posite of what you want to do. 
 
 For instance, your infuriated heart longs to hit the ball. 
 But that is forbidden. You must not hit it. You must strive 
 to forget its existence. How can human nature compass that 
 miracle? As to the abominable rapture of the upward swing, 
 I am sure that in no circle of Dante's Inferno was there any 
 torture so fiendish. You must stand like a stone image and 
 compel your body to twist in some sections and to remain mo- 
 tionless in others. It is too much. How can a man keep his 
 feet and his head fixed while his knees bend in and his back- 
 bone revolves and his elbows and shoulders swing round? It 
 is melancholy to watch a fat gentleman who is old enough to 
 know better desperately struggling to perform these ludicrous 
 evolutions. Perhaps after ten years of ceaseless experiment he 
 discovers that by aiming carefully in one direction he is able 
 to propel the ball in another. Then he is happy, for he has 
 discovered the secret of golf. 
 
 Of other vices men have the grace to be ashamed, but the 
 golfer is a shameless voluptuary. He is the most abandoned 
 of all criminals. Take my own case. There is nothing which 
 I would not sacrifice to my dark passion. The ceiling of my 
 library is low, but that did not deter me from practising the art 
 of swinging in it. The toe of my club gashed the plaster and 
 laid bare the laths. Did I relent or refrain? No. I swung x
 
 THE AGONY OF GOLF 367 
 
 and swung until I saw the sky through my roof, and the house 
 began to tumble about my ears. Cowed by the imprecations 
 and moved by the entreaties of my fellow-creatures, I desisted 
 for a while, but soon the devouring demon drove me into fresh 
 iniquities. I swung my driver in my bedroom. For a while all 
 went well. Then suddenly I heard a crash of shattered glass, 
 and, looking guiltily over my left shoulder, I beheld the ruins 
 of an electrolier. Even this disaster did not arrest my fell 
 mania. Still I went on swinging, and now my home is in ruins. 
 My carpets are worn into holes, and my relatives are in a state 
 of gibbering despair. My sleep is no longer peaceful. I am 
 haunted by nightmares of lost balls and abysmal bunkers. 
 Often I rise from my dreams, and, seizing the poker, I putt my 
 watch into the fireplace. I can no longer eat my meals with 
 simple dignity. I drive with my knife and fork, and play 
 mashie shots with my spoon. You should see me lofting a brus- 
 sels sprout out of the rough, or laying a pea or a tomato dead, 
 or negotiating an apple stymie. 
 
 Sometimes when I shake a friend's hand he winces and turns 
 pale. I apologise, explaining that I had inadvertently used the 
 overlapping grip. I notice that my ringers are assuming bi- 
 zarre shapes. My gloves are all too small. My feet have 
 expanded, and I am becoming hen-toed and lark-heeled. In 
 fits of abstraction, I find myself pivoting on my toe and gazing 
 vacantly into the distance like a pointer. For it is an immutable 
 rule in golf that, after you have struck the ball, you must freeze 
 into a peering posture. The best golfers are those who can 
 peer longest. If I go for a walk, suddenly I pause, grasp my 
 umbrella firmly with both hands, and waggle it wildly in the 
 air. Nursemaids in the park whisper, as they push their 
 "prams" past me, "Poor fellow! He's been drinking." But 
 I have not been drinking, for the immature golfer must not yield 
 to the temptations of alcohol. Only the veteran can drink with 
 impunity. A whole volume might be written on the weird 
 beverages consumed by golfers. For some mysterious reason, 
 golfers are addicted to sloe gin. I suspect there is some con- 
 nection between sloe gin and the great golf maxim, " Slow back."
 
 368 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Cherry whisky is another golf liquid. It is a sickly medicated 
 oily syrup that seems to lubricate the golfing muscles. 
 
 It is generally believed that Ananias was an angler. I 
 don't believe it. He was a golfer. No other game places so 
 severe a strain on the moral nature. An incompetent angler is 
 a conscious liar. An incompetent golfer is an unconscious liar. 
 In the early agonies of golf two and three make four. It is too 
 much to ask the most upright man to count accurately the blows 
 he deals at a ball in a bunker. Before we idolize George Wash- 
 ington, we ought to reflect that he never played golf. After 
 three blind swipes in a bunker, you feel that man was not made 
 for arithmetic, but that arithmetic was made for man. How 
 can you count when you cannot see ? How can you add up when 
 you are a runaway windmill in a sandstorm ? 
 
 Another severe trial to the broken but sanguine heart is 
 the inadequate reward meted out by golf to industry. Golf is 
 emphatically not an infinite capacity for taking pains. In all 
 other branches of suffering severe effort produces some visible 
 result. In golf the carefully arduous toiler is beaten with many 
 stripes. You stand before your ball like a priest of Baal. You 
 gaze at it with solemn adoration. You try to remember the 
 ten thousand commandments of golf. You procrastinate in the 
 anguish of indecision. Years seem to pass before you venture 
 to push your club slowly and painfully through the air. Your 
 eyes are projected towards the fateful blade of grass behind the 
 ball until you feel that they are dangling at the end of wires. 
 Then all is over. The ball rolls feebly through the grass, scat- 
 tering the raindrops in a spray of humiliation. You have done 
 everything right, and yet everything is wrong. At that moment 
 you taste the bitterness of death. Black fury curdles in your 
 soul. That is golf. But would you exchange your deep de- 
 spair for any other joy? No. You hug your torment. You 
 hope against hope. Out of your very anguish you snatch a 
 fearful delight. With glum rapture you study Vardon's "Com- 
 plete Golfer." You pore over Braid. You sweat over Taylor. 
 You try a new driver or a new stance. You begin at the beginning 
 a thousand times. You renounce once more the pomps and van-
 
 THE AGONY OF GOLF 369 
 
 ities of this wicked world, and dedicate yourself afresh to the fickle 
 goddess of golf. And the joke is that you take pleasure in your 
 pain. Lucid intervals there are when you swear that never 
 again will you play this accursed game, but you cannot give it 
 up. Once a golfer, always a golfer. I used to wonder what 
 Keats meant when he wrote "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." I 
 know now. She was the siren of golf. 
 
 O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
 Alone, and palely loitering? 
 
 What ailed him ? He was learning golf. Why did he shut her 
 " wild, wild eyes with kisses four " ? Because four was " bogey." 
 
 I saw pale kings and princes too, 
 
 Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; 
 
 They cried, "La Belle Dame sans Merci 
 Hath thee in thrall!" 
 
 But although their lips gaped wide with horrid warning, he did 
 not heed, for death alone delivers the golfer from his devoir. 
 And when he dies he does not cry "Adsum!" In solemn and 
 sonorous tones he calls "Fore!" 
 
 24
 
 MAINLY ABOUT EVERYTHING
 
 IN THE READING ROOM . 
 
 YOUR cockney likes noise. I am sure he would go max! if 
 there were silence in London for the space of half an hour. 
 He would feel that the foundations of the earth had given way, 
 and that the bottom of the universe had dropped out. 
 
 Have you observed that a sudden silence produces the sen- 
 sation of falling through space? Thus Satan must have felt 
 during those nine days while he was executing the finest back- 
 fall ever seen on any stage. It is now, unhappily, impossible 
 to arrange for a nine days ' drop, but you can procure the equiv- 
 alent silence. Therefore, I prescribe for all sound- wounded 
 persons a sojourn in the Reading Room. 
 
 In that noiseless mausoleum they may enjoy a perfect rest- 
 cure without money and without price. It is a securer retreat 
 than any sanatorium. Its cloistral peace is more impermeable 
 than any club. The Athenasum compared to it is a gabble-den, 
 and White's a choral hell. It is a more inviolate sanctuary 
 than a Trappist monastery. It is serener than the crypt of St. 
 Paul's. 
 
 Its inmates live in a vow of silence. It is a crime even to whis- 
 per and a sin to sigh. The orchestral cough that ravages the 
 church and the theatre here is hushed, and your ears are not 
 lacerated by the rustle of newspapers and the crackle of 
 silken skirts. The human voice is not heard under this crystal 
 dome. Here the pen is wool-shod and the nose seldom becomes 
 a trumpet on which fiends blow soul-desolating strains. A fig 
 for your nursing-homes! Give me the Reading Room Cure! 
 
 But noise is not the only plague from which the Reading 
 Room provides a means of escape. It is a sure refuge against 
 fresh air. London is a City of Draughts. Its houses are caves 
 of Boreas. Its theatres are conclaves of the four winds. Its 
 
 373
 
 374 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 churches are swept by icy gales. Its "Tubes" are fit only for 
 men of stone. Through them rushes a perpetual tornado, a 
 continuous typhoon. To travel in them is like being a pea in a 
 pea-shooter. You are blown to your destination. The pier at 
 Brighton is stuffy compared to these subterranean resorts. The 
 bitter blast congeals you at all angles. It hacks and hews your 
 shivering body like the Maiden, that mediaeval instrument of 
 torture which clasped the victim with enveloping knives, cutting 
 him into little pieces before he could gasp. To such a pass has 
 the insane passion for fresh air brought us. 
 
 But, thank heaven ! there is one place in London where there 
 is no fresh air. Thank heaven for the nobly conservative 
 Trustees of the British Museum. They have kept the Reading 
 Room free from the pestilence that is making London unfit to 
 live in. Thanks to their stern conservative principles, one can 
 be as cosy as a mummy in an airtight sarcophagus, as comfort- 
 able as a corpse in a healthy old vault. Why should the dead 
 monopolise all the privileges ? It puts a premium upon suicide, 
 for the thought of the draughtless coffin makes one fall in love 
 with snug and airless death. It is as well that the Reading 
 Room helps us to endure the windy world. No fault can be 
 found with the foulness of the air. It is richly laden with those 
 germs of which Science desires to rob us. I love bacteria, and 
 microbes are my closest friends. I abhor the lonely solitude 
 of a sanitary atmosphere. It would be as bleak as the ether. 
 Filtered air and filtered water are both abominable. For me 
 the full-bodied vintage of the Thames, the fruity nectar of 'the 
 Lea, and the germ-congested air of the Reading Room. 
 
 Of late I see with boding terror dim signs of revolution in 
 the Reading Room. The hoof of reform is vaguely seen in the 
 sallow light I love. Leather tags have been attached to the 
 backs of the sedate volumes of the vastest catalogue in the world. 
 A gross indignity! I blush when I pull out a volume as if I 
 were pulling on a boot. And there is a villainous air of new- 
 ness about the whole place. Some fierce charwoman has 
 lately been let loose. The old pens and the old ink bottles have 
 been swept away from the catalogue desks, and no longer can
 
 IN THE READING ROOM 375 
 
 the eye rest lovingly upon splashes and splotches of ink. A 
 horrible tidiness infests the Reading Room. The slips on which 
 you write your application are no longer strewn on the desks. 
 They are kept, like the lodgment forms in a bank, in bilious oak 
 boxes. 
 
 I know how this ferocious charwoman will end. She will let 
 in the fresh air. She will evict my beloved microbes. Already 
 I hear of pneumatic tubes that will hurl books at your head 
 like bricks the moment you ask for them. All the dear delays, 
 the fond procrastinations, the dignified circumlocutions will be 
 rudely abolished. The large indolence of our beehive will be 
 destroyed. We shall be compelled to hustle like the Chicago 
 frog. You know the story. A Boston frog and a Chicago frog 
 fell into a basin of cream. The Boston frog resigned himself 
 to a lingering death. The Chicago frog bade him hustle. He 
 declined to hustle. The Chicago frog hustled, and in the morn- 
 ing they found the Chicago frog dead, and the Boston frog 
 sitting on a pat of butter. Now, I will hustle outside the Read- 
 ing Room, but not in it. Therefore, let the charwoman pause, 
 for many valueless lives will be lost if she blights us with fresh 
 air and pneumonia. 
 
 I like to figure the Reading Room as the Labyrinth of Liter- 
 ature. In it weird men and weird women wander, each follow- 
 ing a separate lure. Its geometrical aisles and alleys exhale 
 an ironic symbolism. In the central circle sit the minions of 
 the Minotaur who feeds on human ambition. Round them in 
 concentric eddies are the catalogue desks. The letters of the 
 alphabet preside over this silent session of clues. It is a long 
 walk from A to Z. I often make a mental obeisance to the 
 Roman alphabet whose twenty-six potentates loom here like 
 gods. Consider their empire. Out of their permutations and 
 combinations are made the millions of books that line those 
 walls and all the invisible galleries and catacombs behind them. 
 Almighty alphabet! Yet I, man, invented it casually in my 
 leisure hours. Am I not wonderful ? 
 
 Behold me .in various guises sitting at my numbered desks. 
 Rows on rows of me, hunched in all sorts of attitudes, garbed
 
 376 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 in all kinds of clothes, absorbed in all varieties of industry, 
 bees in the biggest beehive on earth. Here my bald head glows 
 like ivory under the beams of the electric lamp. There I am a 
 dreaming girl, my warm youth and fresh grace mocking the 
 printed dead. Now I am a grizzled grandmother, spectacled, 
 wrinkled, rheumy-eyed. Now I am a serious boy with smooth 
 cheek and careless curls. Are these shadows real? They glide 
 languidly to and fro like the drowsy fish that moon behind the 
 muddy glass of an aquarium. They are inhumanly unaware of 
 each other. They are unconscious of each other's absurdity. 
 The Reading Room is rich in eccentric characters, mostly 
 parasites. I have seen Micawber there and Dick Swiveller, 
 Mr. Dick and Sylvestre Bonnard. Many of these strange beings 
 are slaves of habit. They sit on the same seat day after day, 
 year after year. Samuel Butler once complained bitterly be- 
 cause he could not get Frost's "Lives of the Early Christians." 
 He had been wont to lay his papers on it, and its loss paralysed 
 him. Many of these barnacles would die if they were dislodged. 
 They are adhesive habits. Rarely do you see famous men in this 
 sepulchre. It is the haunt of dryasdusts, hacks, compilers, and 
 vampers. Yet it is a pathetic tomb. If we could catalogue the 
 hopes and despairs that have come and gone through those 
 ever-swinging doors we should have a microcosm of life, a dusty 
 sunbeam peopled with those motes of irony, the ghosts of the 
 living and the phantoms of the dead.
 
 THE AGE OF POSTCARDS 
 
 WHEN the archaeologists of the thirtieth century begin to 
 excavate the ruins of London, they will fasten upon the Picture 
 Postcard as the best guide to the spirit of the Edwardian Era. 
 They will collect and collate thousands of these pieces of paste- 
 board, and they will reconstruct our age from the strange hiero- 
 glyphs and pictures that time has spared. For the Picture 
 Postcard is a candid revelation of our pursuits and pastimes, 
 our customs and costumes, our morals and manners. It is not 
 easy to discover the creator of the first Picture Postcard. He 
 has been swallowed by oblivion. It is a pity that his lineaments 
 should remain unknown. If we were not careless custodians 
 of our own greatness, we should have erected a colossal statue 
 of this nameless benefactor, so that posterity might gaze upon 
 his features and ponder on the cut of his frock coat. 
 
 Like all great inventions, the Picture Postcard has wrought 
 a silent revolution in our habits. It has secretly delivered us 
 from the toil of letter-writing. There are men still Jiving who 
 can recall the days when it was considered necessary and even 
 delightful to write letters to one's friends. Those were times 
 of leisure. Our forefathers actually sat down and wasted hours 
 over those long epistles v/hich still furnish the industrious book- 
 maker with raw material. It is said that there are at this moment 
 in London several tons of unpublished letters written by Ruskin, 
 and it is alleged that a few hundredweights from the pen of 
 Robert Louis Stevenson have not yet seen the light. It is sad 
 to think of the books 'which dead authors might have written 
 if they had saved the hours which they squandered upon private 
 correspondence. Happily, the Picture Postcard has relieved the 
 modern author from this slavery. He can now use all his ink 
 in the sacred task of adding volumes to the noble collection in 
 
 377
 
 378 ADVENTURES IN- LONDON 
 
 the British Museum. Formerly, when a man went abroad he 
 was forced to tear himself from the scenery in order to write 
 laborious descriptions of it to his friends at home. Now he 
 merely buys a Picture Postcard at each station, scribbles on it 
 a few words in pencil, and posts it. This enhances the pleasures 
 of travel. Many a man in the epistolary age could not face the 
 terrors of the Grand Tour, for he knew that he would be obliged 
 to spend most of his time in describing what he saw or ought 
 to have seen. The Picture Postcard enables the most indolent 
 man to explore the wilds of Switzerland or Margate without 
 perturbation. 
 
 Nobody need fear that there is any spot on the earth which 
 is not depicted on this wonderful oblong. The photographer 
 has photographed everything between the poles. He has snap- 
 shotted the earth. No mountain and no wave has evaded his 
 omnipresent lens. The click of his shutter has been heard on 
 every Alp and in every desert. He has hunted down every land- 
 scape and seascape on the globe. Every bird and every beast 
 has been captured by the camera. It is impossible to gaze upon 
 a ruin without finding a Picture Postcard of it at your elbow. 
 Every pimple on the earth's skin has been photographed, and 
 wherever the human eye roves or roams it detects the self-con- 
 scious air of the reproduced. The aspect of novelty has been 
 filched from the visible world. The earth is eye-worn. It is 
 impossible to find anything which has not been frayed to a frazzle 
 by photographers. 
 
 The human face has fared like the human earth. It has 
 been stamped on pasteboard so many times in so many ways that 
 it has lost its old look of unawareness. It has grown common. 
 There is no facial expression left which affects one with the 
 sensation of surprise. The ingenious efforts of actresses have 
 familiarised the youngest office-boy with all the mysteries of 
 beauty. It is no longer possible to discover a new kind of smile. 
 There are not very many varieties of smile within the compass 
 of our facial muscles. At any rate, the Picture Postcard seems 
 to suggest that there are not more human smiles than human 
 jokes. It is said that there are only three distinct jokes in the
 
 THE AGE OF POSTCARDS 379 
 
 world. It is certain that there are not more than two smiles. 
 The most accomplished professional beauty can smile in only 
 two ways. She can smile with her mouth open and she can smile 
 with her mouth shut. The Picture Postcard has accustomed us 
 to the charms of both smiles. It is a little hard on the young 
 lover that he should start with dismay when he discovers a 
 Picture Postcard smile on the divine lips of his fair one. That 
 way lies disillusion. On the other hand, the Picture Postcard 
 fills the soul of many a maiden with innocuous romance. She 
 can moon over the features of her favourite actor without in- 
 curring the penalties of actual passion. She can gaze with 
 rapture upon the Hero of a Hundred Poses. Perhaps her 
 Postcard amours make her hard on the candidate for her heart 
 and hand. Romeo may find it rather difficult to live up to the 
 god of the camera that Juliet has adored. The modern lover 
 is seldom a hero to his sweetheart. The actors have raised 
 to too dizzy heights the standard of manly beauty. 
 
 The Postcard has always been a feminine vice. Men do 
 not write Postcards to each other. When a woman has time to 
 waste, she writes a letter; when she has no time to waste, she 
 writes a Postcard. There are still some ancient purists who 
 regard Postcards as vulgar, fit only for tradesmen. I know 
 ladies who would die rather than send a Postcard to a friend. 
 They belong to the school which deems it rude to use abbrevia- 
 tions in a letter, and who consider it discourteous to write a 
 numeral. The Postcard is, indeed, a very curt and uncere- 
 monious missive. It contains no endearing prefix or reassuring 
 affix. It begins without a prelude and ends without an envoy. 
 The Picture Postcard carries rudeness to the furthest extremity. 
 There is no room for anything polite. Now and then one can 
 write on a blue sky or a white road, but, as a rule, there is no 
 space for more than a gasp. 
 
 Men suffer dreadfully over Picture Postcards. Their wives 
 drag them into shops full of horrid revolving postcard-stacks. 
 They are forced to choose dozens of sticky, slimy postcards with 
 tissue paper over their ghastly colours. They then must help 
 to send off these atrocities. If they are in France, they must
 
 380 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 hunt for stamps. It is not easy to find stamps in a French town. 
 For some insane reason or other, stamps are sold with tobacco. 
 I suspect the real secret is this. French tobacco is so execrable 
 that nobody would smoke it if he could help it. The good 
 Government, therefore, sells stamps with tobacco, so that in 
 order to get stamps, you are tempted to buy tobacco. But the 
 French Picture Postcards are better than ours, for you can 
 write only five words on them for a halfpenny. M. Marcel 
 Prevost attributes to this stringent law the recent change in 
 French prose. The lapidary style is now the rage. Everybody 
 makes jewels five words long. I wish our Postmaster-General 
 would reduce the legal number in this country.
 
 LIVING CARICATURES 
 
 IT is a mistake to think that caricature is a malignity. True 
 caricature is a kind of poetry. It is a vision of the reality behind 
 appearances. This truth flashed upon me the other day while 
 I was looking at Mr. Max Beerbohm's caricatures in the Carfax 
 Gallery. It seemed to me that those wonderful caricatures 
 were more alive than the faces of the men themselves. The 
 dramatic genius of the artist had made the meaning of the faces 
 clear. It had dragged the soul to the surface of the skin and 
 revealed it shiningly. And as I said to myself that surely this 
 is a new kind of art, it'dawned upon me that it was the old art 
 of dramatic poetry working itself out in a new vehicle. We 
 are apt to separate art into compartments, and to think that 
 imagination can express itself only in the conventional ways. 
 But there are many languages, and some of them have no words. 
 Sometimes imagination expresses itself in life alone. Its power 
 is boundless. It may seem whimsical, but as I looked at Max's 
 caricatures, I began to wonder whether a touch of chance 
 might not have made Shakespeare a caricaturist instead of a 
 dramatist. I swiftly translated the Shakespearean characters 
 into caricatures. I saw them done in faint lines and washes. 
 Then to amuse myself, I translated Max's caricatures into 
 Shakespearean characters, and, to my amazement, they .began 
 to move and talk and live. The tiny little room at the Carfax 
 turned magically into a theatre, and the people on the walls burst 
 into the bustle and fuss of life. They were no ghosts, but hot- 
 blooded, solid fellows, stuffed with companionable passions. 
 At last in "pure .horror, I fled to steady my wits by sipping tea at 
 Rumpelmayer's,' where I found a crowd of living caricatures 
 busy at the same business. It is not often that the vision of the 
 human face as a caricature afflicts one, but it is none the less 
 a true vision. Every face is a caricature of the soul. 
 
 381
 
 382 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 If I were a theatrical manager, I should put on my stage a 
 play that would draw all London. It would be a play made of 
 living caricatures. I would hire actors to impersonate Max's 
 caricatures, and I would make them talk to each other. The 
 conversation would be ripely humorous, profoundly passionate, 
 and wistfully tender. Mr. Pinero would explain himself to Mr. 
 Shaw, and Mr. Hall Caine would unpack his heart to Mr. Wells. 
 Mr. Balfour would confide to Mr. Haldane his secret bewilder- 
 ment and gentle dismay, and they would quietly discuss the 
 virtue of politics and golf as rival anodynes for the disease of life. 
 From this deep theme I would pass to a chat between Mr, 
 George Wyndham and Mr. George Alexander on the secret of 
 manly beauty, and its relation to rhetorical grace. Then Mr. 
 Sutro might explain the commercial aspect of art to Mr. Sargent, 
 and the Marquis de Soveral might deliver a lecture to Mr. John 
 Davidson on the significance of Puritanism in English history. 
 William Shakespeare could take Mr. Sidney Lee into his con- 
 fidence with regard to the dark lady and "Mr. W. H." He 
 might even introduce him to Mr. William Hall, and he might 
 drily note the link between Mr. Hall and Mr. Hall Caine. 
 
 In the meantime, we must be satisfied with the theatre of 
 caricature whose lessee is Nature. After all it is a very jolly 
 theatre. In it every man is his own caricaturist. There is not 
 a face in these crowded streets of ours but has its own spiritual 
 humour. The highest and the lowliest are there for our diversion, 
 and as we walk along the pavement we can chuckle without 
 paying a farthing for our entertainment. The very crossing- 
 sweeper who makes philosophy with his besom is as lively as 
 King Lear. I have seen Dogberry disguised as an usher at 
 the Old Bailey, and I have started at Bully Bottom in the Royal 
 Courts of Justice. Who is Mr. Chesterton but a reformed 
 Christopher Sly ? Lord Rosebery is the best Hamlet of our day. 
 
 I have seen a marvellous portrait of General Booth in the 
 National Gallery, for Nature, like history, often repeats herself. 
 Sardou looks very like Napoleon, and Mr. Chamberlain very 
 like Pitt. This is one of the richest jests of caricature the 
 foisting of one man's face upon another man's personality.
 
 LIVING CARICATURES 383 
 
 There are satyrs who look like saints and saints who look like 
 satyrs. 
 
 I am a profound disbeliever in physiognomy. Features are 
 often false witnesses. Stupidity frequently wears a mask of 
 intelligence. I know business men who look like poets and poets 
 who look like business men. A weak chin generally conceals 
 a strong will. You will find sensualists with ascetic lips. Thin- 
 lipped voluptuaries are common. The most violent passions 
 are compatible with a cold and virtuous countenance. Men of 
 genius invariably look like idiots, and if you pick out the man 
 who looks most eminent at a party night you are sure to find 
 that he is a nobody. I always distrust men who look magnifi- 
 cent. Nature is a stingy creature. She seldom gives a man the 
 double gift of being great and looking great. She took care to 
 lame Byron and deform Pope and disfigure Johnson. But the 
 crowning example of her jealous parsimony is Shakespeare. I 
 have always been disappointed with Shakespeare's face. It does 
 not live up to his poetry. It is dull, heavy, and commonplace. 
 It suggests that Shakespeare was a fat man. Droeshout the 
 painter and Droeshout the engraver may have been bad artists, 
 but I imagine that Ben Jonson was right in congratulating " the 
 graver" on having satisfactorily "hit" the "face." Aubrey says 
 that Shakespeare was "a handsome well-shap't man," and the 
 two Droeshout portraits corroborate that description. I like to 
 think that Nature gave Shakespeare a conventionally handsome 
 face. He was too many men to look like any particular man. 
 Milton's portrait looks exactly like Milton, but Shakespeare's por- 
 trait looks like anybody you please. The most extraordinary man 
 who ever lived looks like the most ordinary man who ever lived. 
 
 I have said that caricature is a kind of poetry. It is a blend 
 of imaginative humour and imaginative irony and imaginative 
 pathos. Has it ever occurred to you that irony is a phase of 
 pathos, just as pathos is a phase of humour ? In modern prose 
 I know nothing more poignant than the pathetic ironical humour 
 of Sterne. You find the same quality, though diffused and 
 diluted, in Anatole France and Robert Louis Stevenson. You do 
 not find it in Bernard Shaw. He seems vainly to strive after it,
 
 384 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 but something is lacking in his humour and irony. I think it is 
 the humane magic that we call pathos. That humane magic 
 bubbles up waywardly and fitfully in Mr. Barrie. You seek for 
 it in vain in Mr. Pinero, but you come upon it where you least 
 expect to surprise it in Max's caricatures and in some of his 
 essays. One feels the humane magic in these caricatures as one 
 feels it in Shakespeare, in Sterne, in Stevenson, in Barrie, and 
 in Anatole France. For there is sympathy in the derision and 
 comprehension in the satire. Even in the most exuberant cari- 
 cature, the Ray Lankester, there lurks the gentle quality which 
 softens Falstaff and Uncle Toby, Pantagruel and Don Quixote. 
 Men are all queer, but they are all brothers. 
 
 It is this humane magic that makes living caricatures so 
 grotesquely pathetic. These faces that surge round us are the 
 waves of life. As they flow round us we are moved by their 
 strange unconsciousness, their unaware isolation. The un- 
 known sculptor that is carving their fantastic features is also 
 carving ours. He is careless of rank and station. He plies 
 his chisel as cunningly on the face of a wretch who sells penny 
 toys on Ludgate Hill as on the face of a king. If the faces of 
 horses and dogs and cows were as diverse as the faces of men,- 
 the spectacle of life would be intolerable. But the faces of birds 
 and beasts and fishes are restfully monotonous. Stones and 
 flowers and trees and grasses maintain their homely familiarity. 
 It is only the human face that seems strange. Now and then 
 a glimpse of strangeness in animals makes the flesh creep. Now 
 and then one shivers at a tree that comes alive. In silent woods, 
 such as Burnham Beeches or the New Forest, Nature seems to 
 be all eyes, and I have known sensitive minds that have shrunk 
 in horror from such solitudes. It is the old sense of life making 
 itself felt as children feel it. It may invade you as you look at 
 a primrose, or as you meet the gaze of a dog or a cat, or as you 
 regard a questioning star. But it touches you most intimately 
 in the living caricatures that are the faces of those you love. For 
 it is the old familiar faces that are most foreign, and the con- 
 summation of strangeness is the look that is seen only by lovers 
 in the hush and rapture of love.
 
 THE QUEST OF JOY 
 
 THE art of inexpensive joy is not so easily cultivated in Lon- 
 don as it is in Paris. In Paris you can escape from the tedium 
 of life by stepping into the street. The boulevards throb with 
 gaiety. The air is vivacious, and the people are vivid. They 
 do not step along the pavements with the sad reticence of the 
 London pedestrians. 
 
 The secret of the Parisian is freedom from self-consciousness. 
 Rich and poor alike yield to the pressure of the passing mood. 
 They are publicly amused by the trivial nothings of existence. 
 They express their feelings in volatile chatter, in the quick play 
 of feature and gesture. They have the gift of lightness and the 
 genius of transition. They brush sensations in swallow-flights 
 of swift interest. 
 
 The Londoner is slow, ponderous, dignified, and dull. He 
 walks his streets in the full armour of an aggressive pomposity, 
 hardening his heart against any leakage of personal emotion. 
 He thinks only of himself, and of the impression which he is 
 making on those he meets. He seldom smiles or talks. He has 
 no gestures. His eyes are resolutely glazed with reserve. He 
 clothes himself with gloom like a garment. That is why a walk 
 along London streets is like a walk in a living graveyard. 
 
 This frigidity is due to the racial passion for concealing its 
 self-consciousness. Paris is all rarefaction. London is all pet- 
 rifaction. 
 
 Now, stone is a good and desirable thing, but it is possible 
 to have too much of it, and one sometimes grows weary of walking 
 amid millions of stone men and stone women. One feels in 
 one's blood a wild insurrection of defiant joy. I know Irish- 
 women who glory in scandalising the petrified decorum of their 
 English friends. The granite propriety of Englishwomen mad- 
 25 385
 
 386 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 dens the imp in their blood, and tempts them to smash the tables 
 of stone. 
 
 The other night I watched one of these Celtic rebellions. 
 Molly is a wild Irish girl, who spends her life in horrifying the 
 maidens and matrons of the solemn surburb against whose bars 
 she beats her passionate wings. She came to me the other even- 
 ing crying for a respite from " Drearydom. " That is her name 
 for life. 
 
 "Let us have some fun somewhere," she beseeched. 
 
 So I blow two blasts on my cab-whistle, and at once the air 
 is full of jingling bells and thundering hoofs. Two hansoms 
 arrive simultaneously, and the galloping steeds, pulled back 
 upon their haunches, slide on their light shoes for several yards. 
 
 "Hurroo!" cries Molly, "I like this." 
 
 In a trice we are jingling down Regent Street. It is seven 
 o'clock of a summer night, and the shops are shut, the pave- 
 ments are sparsely sprinkled with forlorn pilgrims, and every- 
 where is a vibrating dejection. The only sign of life is in the 
 omnibuses, the hansoms, the broughams, the motors and the 
 taxies which are carrying silent ghosts from dull dinners to dull 
 plays. 
 
 "Stop at the first restaurant," I shout through the trap-door 
 in the roof. The cab stops, I jump out, and passing a liveried 
 janitor of gigantic stature, I spy out the Promised Land. 
 
 The environment is radiant. There is a blaze of light. 
 There is a fragrance of flowers. There is a snow of napery. 
 There is a glitter of glass. There is an army of waiters. There 
 is music. But the diners ... I survey their stolid gravity 
 and fly. 
 
 " Well!" cries MoUy. 
 
 "Glasnevin not in it," I groan. On we go, and in each 
 caravanserai we find the same funereal phantoms in the same 
 atmosphere of false gaiety. 
 
 "My dear Molly," I moan, as I sink back for the fifth time, 
 " it is the people. The restaurants are all right. But a French 
 chef cannot cook guests as well as food." 
 
 "I know," she sighs; "but surely there is some place in all
 
 THE QUEST OF JOY 387 
 
 London where we can be gay. Can't you find a jolly little 
 French cafe something in Soho?" 
 
 Alas! I know those French restaurants. There are two 
 sorts, the dull and dear, and the dull and cheap. The cheap 
 one is a bad burlesque of the Ritz. Ten courses for two shillings. 
 Everything in season salmon, quail, plover, partridge, duck, 
 grouse, pheasant, woodcock, as the case may be but every- 
 thing brandishing the same wishy-washy flavour, from the 
 variegated hors d'oeuvres to the debilitated ices. Still more 
 sad is the solemn swagger of the deluded diners, their dress and 
 their manners a still more horrible hash of imitative snobbery. 
 
 By this time our cabby has come to the conclusion that we 
 are mad. 
 
 "Ain't you 'ungry, guvnor? I know as I've got a thirst!" 
 
 We take the hint, and in desperation we dump ourselves into 
 an old-fashioned restaurant in Leicester Square. It is not gay. 
 Oh, by no means. But it lacks the ghastly artificial glitter of 
 the modish restaurant. It is sober. It is a trifle dingy. The 
 diners are very silent, very subdued, very melancholy. The 
 women are dowdy. The men are obese. Molly looks round the 
 place, and makes a face at me. The waiter smiles. He is an 
 old Frenchman, lean, lantern- jawed, and lame. Yes, he will 
 give us a good dinner, the best in London. 
 
 While we eat we chat with our lame Frenchman. Molly 
 has quickly captivated him. They chatter about Paris. He has 
 been in London for twenty-five years. In this restaurant ? Yes, 
 in this restaurant. He finds London very triste. He could not 
 live without his annual holiday in Paris with his old mother. 
 Molly tells him about our fruitless search for gaiety. He smiles, 
 spreads out his palms, lifts his shoulders. 
 
 "No," he says meditatively, "there is no place in London 
 where you can be gay. " The proprietor had given him a sover- 
 eign the other night and told him to go out and amuse himself. 
 Like us, he had tried to find gaiety in London. 
 
 "It is not possible, sir," he said quietly. 
 
 Well, we enjoyed our dinner and our gossip with the old 
 lame French waiter, and, filled with fresh hope, we went to a
 
 388 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 music hall, but after half an hour we fled. Then we walked 
 round Piccadilly Circus, killing time, or being killed by it. 
 'Tired of loitering, we dived into a German beer hall, and drank 
 amber pillars of lager beer to stupefy our ennui. But the 
 Teutonic melancholy and the Teutonic tobacco smoke soon 
 proved insupportable, and again we found ourselves in the sad, 
 discomfortable street. 
 
 "Molly," said I, "we may give it up. There is no gaiety 
 in London." 
 
 "What time is it?" said Molly. 
 
 "Ten o'clock." 
 
 " Take me home, " she cried. " I 'm tired of trying to be gay." 
 
 What is the cure for this climatic desolation? I see that 
 some syndicate is trying to grow a little Paris in London. They 
 might as well try to grow shamrock. The spirit of London is 
 sadness. If Paris were peopled with Londoners, it would be 
 London. The Londoner cannot live in the street like the Paris- 
 ian. That is why there are no rows of tables and chairs on the 
 London pavements in front of the London taverns. With us 
 gaiety is like guilt, a thing to hide behind closed doors, to lock 
 up like a skeleton in a cupboard. 
 
 Some philosophers ascribe the ennui of the English to Puri- 
 tanism. That is absurd, for even our impropriety is dreary, 
 and our sins are dull.
 
 THE PLEASURES OF INSANITY 
 
 IT is delightful to be mad for an hour or two, but it is not 
 easy to find a place where you can go mad with absolute comfort. 
 Therefore the Mammoth Fun City in Olympia supplies a great 
 moral and intellectual need. It is the metropolis of innocent 
 lunacy and harmless idiocy. No longer must the desperate 
 searcher after silliness go to Hanwell or Colney Hatch.' In the 
 Fun City you can be moderately silly for sixpence, and uproari- 
 ously imbecile for half a crown. For half a sovereign you can 
 taste the most refined delights of Bedlam. The charm of the 
 Fun City is the cheapness of its nonsense. There is none of 
 its follies which costs more than threepence, and most of them 
 can be purchased for twopence. The mad King of Bavaria 
 spent thousands on the cultivation of lunacy. He hired Wagner 
 to invent many expensive varieties of noise. What a time King 
 Ludwig would have had in the Fun City! Wagner imagined 
 that he had said the last word in noise. He did not foresee Fun- 
 opolis. I prescribe it as a cure for neuropaths who are worried 
 by street cries and street music. After an evening in the Fun 
 City they will realize that London is a city of dead silence. 
 
 I took my young friend Bimbo there the other afternoon. 
 He had arrived from a drowsy country school. He was hungry 
 for theatres and pantomimes. The Fun City sated even his 
 appetite for strenuous amusement. After four hours of it he 
 was pale with laughter, limp with enjoyment. First of all, we 
 went down in the submarine, 20,000 miles under the sea. Ah, 
 it was awful, that dire plunge into the ocean. We shuddered 
 as we saw the water bubbling outside the dim deadlights, and the 
 fish swimming between the legs of the diver. We trembled as 
 the submarine rolled and pitched. Then, leaving the bed of the 
 ocean, we bravely walked into the winding corridors of Katzen- 
 
 389
 
 390 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 jammer Castle. It is dark as Erebus, baleful as Gehenna. 
 Through the midnight gloom we stumbled, and at every step we 
 groaned with laughter and terror. It is a haunted castle. The 
 ground is insane. It wriggles under your feet. It bites you. 
 It sinks from under you. It dances. It jumps. It gets glori- 
 ously drunk. As you stagger on you hear demons howling and 
 chuckling, shrieking and laughing. If your sweetheart is with 
 you, it is necessary to put your arm round her. Nay, you may 
 find that nothing but a kiss will allay her fears. When you come 
 out you are laughing. You can 't help it. Stand for a moment 
 outside, and watch the people coming out. It will do you good 
 to see how many kinds of laugh the human face is capable of. 
 
 But the crowning idiocy of the Fun City is the bewildering 
 variety of insane movement in it. There are all sorts of dia- 
 bolical machines which whirl you and toss you and jerk you and 
 shake you round and round, to and fro, up and down, backward, 
 forward, and sideways. You are whisked like an egg and sizzled 
 like a cocktail. You are churned like butter and pulled like 
 toffee. There is a staircase which makes you dance the cake- 
 walk. There is a huge roulette wheel, which dips as it spins 
 you round. There are wigglers which wiggle you horribly. 
 There are motor-cars which duck and dive in a blaze of light and 
 a blare of sound. There are galloping ostriches which buck -and 
 peck as they gyrate. There is also the aeroflyte, which sends 
 you flying on a wire across the hall over the heads of the lunatics 
 below. There are haunted swings, and heaven only knows 
 what else. After a full course of these engines of insanity you 
 feel as if you had been turned upside down and inside out. 
 There is no physical dignity left in you. The consequence is 
 that you are perfectly happy in the certitude that you are a fool. 
 You grasp the great truth that your residence in a thing so absurd 
 as your body is the master-joke of the universe. You see the 
 comic side of your nobility. You perceive that your great soul 
 is at the mercy of your grotesque body, and that your grotesque 
 body is at the mercy of the stars. If the dance of the earth were 
 a cake-walk instead of a waltz, all your glory would be gone. 
 The splendour of your pride is based upon the sober behaviour
 
 THE PLEASURES OF INSANITY 391 
 
 of a million constellations. You can get drunk without dislo- 
 cating the universe, but the universe cannot get drunk without 
 dislocating you. 
 
 It is possible that these profound thoughts do not cheer the 
 Fun citizens. It is even possible that they do not think at all 
 as they shy at the hairy cocoanut or strike the patient striker. 
 Bimbo certainly is not moth-eaten with introspection. He ap- 
 proves of the Bactrian camel which stands as still as stone at the 
 gates of the Morocco village, its great eyes staring scornfully 
 at the gaping crowd. He also approves of the Touaregs, Chaam- 
 bas and Meharis, with their melancholy dances, their deafening 
 drums, and their screaming pipes. We ask Korah, a swarthy 
 lady in gaudy raiment, to bring us coffee. Two other -dusky 
 damsels sit down at our table. They chatter to us in French. 
 They beg for a cigar. We are desolated because we have no 
 cigars. We offer cigarettes. They condescend to take them, 
 explaining at the same time that they prefer cigars. They smile 
 on us out of vast mouths filled with glittering teeth. They flirt 
 with us. We tear ourselves away, and go round the tents. We 
 find more Moorish beauties, some with string-coloured skin and 
 delicate features. We discover a solemn Moorish schoolmaster, 
 sitting cross-legged among his scholars, who are writing Arabic 
 pothooks on a wooden tablet. 
 
 Then there are the lions, and the untamable Nubian lion- 
 ess, Spitfire. There is the Hunger House in which Sacco 
 starves for his daily bread. There are giants and midgets. 
 There is our old and tried friend, the sacred bull from Benares. 
 There are holy baboons from the Ganges. There is, above all, u 
 real Russian Circus, with real clowns and a real ring-master, 
 Monsieur Emilio Gautier, who is doubtless descended from the 
 great The'ophile. I like circuses, and this circus makes me 
 quite happy; I lose my heart to Mile. Helen Girard, of the 
 diabolo waist, the sparkling eyes, the bewitching smile, and the 
 bewildering hat. How daintily she makes her palfrey dance 
 the cakewalk! How well his hoofs keep time with the band, or 
 vice versa! How daring are the Four Lepicqs in their marvel- 
 lous aerial act! I fancy I am in the' vanished Aquarium, and un-
 
 392 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 consciously I look round for Papa Ritchie's flowing locks and 
 paternal smile. Alas ! Papa is no more ! But, thank goodness ! 
 I am still young enough to love a circus, and as I look slyly at 
 Bimbo's enraptured face, alight with ecstasy, I remember my 
 first circus. It was Ginnett's. It was in Ireland, an immense 
 building packed to the roof. Ah, the clown there was a clown 
 of clowns. How he sang "Killaloe," and how we all roared the 
 chorus! And how I adored the dazzling divinity in lampshade 
 skirts and pale blue tights who pirouetted so airily on the flat 
 back of the old white horse! Are you an old fogey? Well, if 
 you want to feel young again, go to the Mammoth Fun City with 
 a soaring human boy.
 
 A COMEDY OF FRIENDSHIP 
 
 POMPEY CRAWLE is the wittiest man in London. His novels 
 are coruscations of irony. He is feared by his friends, for he 
 crucifies them on a phrase. He has perfected the art of oblique 
 derision. His touch is so delicate that only the victim is sure 
 that he is the victim. He never descends to coarse satire. His 
 sneer is like the forked tongue of a serpent. It flickers lightly 
 in the air, and vanishes. His pen is a butterfly with a sting. 
 
 His acidulated miniatures are not portraits. They are 
 veiled insolences. He hates his fellow creatures with a bland 
 and tolerant venom that rankles in their vanity. His patronage 
 is so suave that it is more cruel than his contempt. He tinges 
 his praise with an almost invisible scorn, and his fleers with an 
 imperceptible condescension. There are men who writhe under 
 his benevolence. His blessing is a kind of gangrene. "It festers 
 in the soul. 
 
 The artful mistiness of his insults deprives their target of 
 its glory. For the only consolation of a target is the certainty 
 that it is being aimed at. Pompey always denies his prey that 
 certainty. He invests his sport with an intolerable aspect of 
 chance. His bow is always drawn at a venture. His poisoned 
 rain falls, or seems to fall, on the just and the unjust. I think 
 that is what makes him universally hated. His caps always 
 fit more than one head. It is very perilous to assume that he 
 means what he says. The duplicity of his hate is equalled only 
 by the duplicity of his love. 
 
 There is a well-known story which illustrates his agility of 
 contumely. An irascible man of genius walked up to Pompey 
 one afternoon as he sat reading in the smoking room of his Club. 
 He flourished Pompey 's latest novel. Many of us thought he 
 
 393
 
 394 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 was going to hurl it at Pompey's sleek head. Pompey looked 
 over his pink sheet at the purple fury of the great face. 
 
 " How d 'ye do, Flobber ? " he drawled. " What have you got 
 there?" 
 
 "You know what I've got, hang you, sir!" roared our great 
 man. 
 
 "Some masterpiece, I suppose," he cooed, polishing his eye- 
 glass indolently. 
 
 " It 's your masterpiece, sir ! " Flobber bellowed. " A master- 
 piece of impudence!" 
 
 "Really," smiled Pompey. "I've forgotten it. You see it 
 has been out so long. " 
 
 "But it's only a week old!" 
 
 "Hopelessly antiquated, my dear fellow! What's the 
 title?" 
 
 " Confound you, sir ! Do you mean to say you have forgotten 
 your own novel in a week ? " 
 
 "Well," said Pompey, "my memory is not so good as yours. 
 Memory is vulgar. " 
 
 "Vulgar!" howled the eminent one. "Do you call me vul- 
 gar?"' 
 
 "Not exactly, my dear boy, but you know you are er by 
 way of being popular." 
 
 "It's more than you are, sir." 
 
 "Ah, one can't have everything in this world." 
 
 "Well, I mean to have one thing. " 
 
 "And what is that one thing?" murmured Pompey, screwing 
 his monocle into his right eye. 
 
 "An apology!" 
 
 "My dear fellow, if you want me to apologise for you, I'll 
 do my best. What 's your offence ?" 
 
 "My offence! Confound you, sir, it's your offence. What 
 do you mean by putting me into your wretched novel?" 
 
 "Dear me! Did I put you into it? How careless of me!" 
 
 " Am I not Doodle ? Isn 't Doodle a gross caricature of my 
 manner, my habits, my ?" 
 
 " My dear Flobber, calm yourself. I never thought of you.
 
 A COMEDY OF FRIENDSHIP 395 
 
 I make a point of never thinking of you, except as a friend, and 
 a very amusing friend, too." 
 
 "Look here," said Flobber, "if Doodle is not meant for me 
 who on-earth is he meant for?" 
 
 "It's hardly a fair question, my dear Flobber. The fact is 
 it's a secret. Still, I don't mind telling you in strict confidence. 
 Promise never to divulge it." 
 
 "Of course, of course," said Flobber eagerly. 
 
 "Well," said Pompey, in a stage whisper, "I am Doodle." 
 
 "You!" cried Flobber. "But that necktie, that hat, that 
 gesture! They are mine, not yours." 
 
 "Tricks, Flobber, only tricks. It would never do to give 
 myself away -too flagrantly." 
 
 " But it is not placing the game. How will the public know ? " 
 
 " My dear chap, the public never know. " 
 
 "All the same, it's deuced hard on me. Everybody is saying 
 that Doodle is Flobber. " 
 
 "Well, if you like, you can say that I authorised you to 
 contradict it." 
 
 "Oh, they wouldn't believe it. Look here, will you write 
 me a letter that I can publish?" 
 
 "With pleasure, my dear Flobber. Anything to oblige!" 
 
 
 
 Pompey rose, sat down at the desk, and wrote a letter in his 
 delicate Italian calligraphy* Flobber bore it off triumphantly. 
 Next day in all the papers appeared a letter from Flobber, in 
 which he set forth Pompey 's certificate of indemnity as follows: 
 
 MY DEAR FLOBBER: I authorize you to contradict the idle rumour that 
 you are the Doodle in my novel, "The Gasometer." I am at a loss to imagine 
 how the rumour originated, and I take this opportunity of assuring you that 
 my admiration of your gifts remains, as ever, undiminished. 
 
 Believe me, sincerely yours, 
 
 POMPEY CRAWLE. 
 
 Some malignant commentators pointed out that the epistle 
 was tinted with Pompeian ambiguity, and called attention to the 
 ironic flavour of the word "undiminished." Flobber, however,
 
 396 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 was satisfied, and the episode served to cement the friendship 
 between him and Pompey. He sent Pompey a complete set of 
 his works, with an autograph inscription upon the title-page of 
 each magnum opus. His next novel was dedicated, "To my 
 dear friend, Pompey Crawle, an earnest of gratitude and regard. " 
 Not to be outdone, Pompey dedicated his new novel to Mr. 
 Flobber in these touching words: "To my very dear friend, 
 Flavian Flobber, as an humble oblation on the altar of our friend- 
 ship." Mr. Crawle 's novel bore the somewhat sentimental 
 title, "Friendship's Guerdon." It was a study of literary com- 
 radeship. It chronicled the mutual esteem of two novelists, 
 one supremely great, the other supremely small. Flobber 
 instantly recognised himself in the former and Pompey in the 
 latter. He met Pompey one morning in Piccadilly, and shaking 
 hands ''with him heartily, he cried: 
 
 "There can be no mistake this time, old boy!" 
 "No," said Pompey, "there can be no mistake."
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES 
 
 THE London season has begun, and town is full of the old 
 familiar faces. We are all talking about the new portraits in 
 the Royal Academy and the new caricatures at the Carfax. 
 Academy portraits are even more amusing than Carfax carica- 
 tures, because unconscious humour is always more amusing than 
 conscious humour. A caricature by Max is a delicate jest, but a 
 portrait of an eminent person by an eminent painter is an in- 
 delicate jest. You can repudiate a portrait, but you cannot 
 repudiate a caricature. You can say that your portrait flatters 
 you, but you cannot say that a caricature libels you : for a por- 
 trait is a representation of your face, a thing which can be veri- 
 fied by reference; but a caricature is a representation of your 
 soul, a thing which cannot be verified by any reference. There 
 is no doubt that caricature is cruel, for it emphasises a man's 
 weakness and suppresses a man 's strength. It is strange that 
 there is no such thing as benevolent caricature. Perhaps some 
 day a great artist will invent a new kind of caricature which will 
 exaggerate virtues instead of defects. A comically enlarged 
 virtue would be as amusing as a comically enlarged vice. 
 
 Is your face a failure ? I insist upon a plain answer to this 
 plain question. You must make your mind up once and for 
 all without any further vacillation. I know that the matter 
 has caused you many years of anxious thought. It is perhaps 
 well that your mirror cannot write the story of your silent com- 
 munings with its crystal soul. What a procession of baffled 
 yearnings and passionate regrets has marched across its surface 
 without leaving a footprint! Perhaps it has watched you weep- 
 ing because you were not born as beautiful as a romantic hero or 
 a romantic heroine. Perhaps it has gravely regarded you while 
 you made a mountain out of a mole and elephant's tracks out 
 
 397
 
 398 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 of crow 's feet. Perhaps it has seen your raven hair yielding to 
 the touch of time and gradually growing golden. Yes, my friend, 
 a great part of your life is spent upon the contemplation of your 
 face. Is your face a failure ? Do not prevaricate or equivocate. 
 Do not evade the issue. 
 
 Let me help you to answer this important question. In the 
 first place let me tell you that, if you are the unhappy possessor 
 of a perfect face, I have nothing but pity for you. A perfectly 
 beautiful face is an inhuman thing. Its proprietor is seldom 
 popular and never beloved. Moreover, a perfectly beautiful 
 face is insipidly regular. What we call regular features are 
 really the most extreme form of ugliness. The nearer the 
 human face approaches towards the human ideal of beauty 
 the more hideous it is. Man has an insane desire to standardise 
 everything, and if he had his way, he would manufacture human 
 beings like bricks. Let us be thankful that Providence is not 
 a manufacturer and that life is not a factory. We are all born 
 beautiful because we are all born different. 
 
 In order to decide whether your face is a failure, it is not 
 necessary to look in the kind of mirror which is made by hands. 
 You must look in another mirror. It is a mirror which is not 
 made by hands. It is the most marvellous mirror in the uni- 
 verse. Monsieur Lemoine says he can make diamonds, but 
 neither Monsieur Lemoine nor any other inventor can make this 
 wonderful mirror. I suppose you are eager to know where it is 
 to be found. Well, it is not in any strong room or in any in- 
 accessible place. It is the commonest thing in the world, for 
 everybody possesses two of these mirrors. If you desire to know 
 whether your face is a failure you must look into the eyes of 
 those around you. 
 
 No face is a failure which is loved by even the meanest 
 thing alive. You may be lonely and desolate, but if your face 
 is loved by your dog it is a magnificently triumphant success. 
 If your face is loved by one human being, then its success is 
 more dazzling than that of a hated emperor or a loveless mil- 
 lionaire. The shape of your face has absolutely nothing to do 
 with the question in point. You may be worse than ugly, that
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES 399 
 
 is to say, you may be plain, but if your features are dear to one 
 or two human beings, then your features are in the highest sense 
 of the word beautiful. 
 
 That is why we ought never to sit in judgment upon each 
 other's faces. A face which may seem to you dull and dreary 
 may be radiantly lovely when it is mirrored in the eyes of one 
 who loves it. I think this is the reason why caricatures nearly 
 always wound the friends of the victim more cruelly than the 
 victim himself. The face which is caricatured means something 
 to a friend which it does not mean to a stranger. The image in 
 the mirror of the eye is richer than the image in the mirror of 
 glass. There are wistful memories in it and ancient tenderness 
 and imperishable tears. For those who know and love a face it 
 is more than a face, it is a spiritual history. 
 
 Consider for a moment the image of a mother's face in the 
 eyes of her child. It is no exaggeration to say that this image 
 is always beautiful. There are no ugly mothers. The reason 
 why there are no ugly mothers is simply this a mother is lovely 
 because she loves, and because her love is the purest and the 
 most selfless kind of love in the world. I think motherhood in 
 these days has lost something of its noble simplicity and sub- 
 limity. The modern painter does not paint madonnas. You 
 seek in vain on the walls of the Academy for modern versions 
 of the Holy Family. Our urban life tends to destroy the home. 
 A mother is out of place in the modern flat. Indeed, she is 
 nearly as incongruous as a bookshelf. 
 
 The tragedy of London life is the lonely face which is lonely 
 because it is greedily addicted to lonely pleasure. This type 
 of face is very common. You meet it in the street, in the 
 theatre, and in the restaurant. Sometimes it belongs to a man, 
 sometimes it belongs to a woman. It is the weary face of the 
 pleasure-seeker who has never found time to allow any kind of 
 love to illumine the gloom of gaiety and the darkness of amuse- 
 ment. These melancholy beings are the husks that once were 
 human beings. They have contracted themselves out of human 
 sympathy and human tenderness and human compassion. 
 They are without hope in the world because they are without
 
 400 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 
 
 memories. They have no future because they have no past. 
 They cannot comfort themselves with the remembrance of a 
 vanished hand or the sound of a voice that is still. They do not 
 know that loves pay higher interest than selfishness. They 
 cannot say: 
 
 What is to come we know not. But we know 
 That what has been was good was good to show 
 Better to hide and best of all to bear. 
 We are the masters of the days that were. 
 We have lived. We have loved: 
 We have suffered. Even so. 
 Shall we not take the ebb, who had the flow? 
 Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe 
 Dear, though it spoil and break us need we care 
 What is to come? 
 
 If I were to name the most heart-breaking poem in the 
 English language I should without hesitation choose Charles 
 Lamb's lines, "The Old Familiar Faces": 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days, 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies, 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I loved a love once, fairest among women; 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man; 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly; 
 Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 
 
 Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood, 
 Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
 Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces 
 
 How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some are taken from me; all are departed; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 It is said that Lamb wrote this poem in a fit of remorse after 
 a fit of resentment against his friend Charles Lloyd. Writing
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES 401 
 
 to Coleridge at the time, Lamb tells of the estrangement, adding: 
 "But he has forgiven me." Whatever may have been its in- 
 spiration, the poem expresses the hungry longing of a lonely 
 heart for faces that exist only in the memory. It is a sad poem, 
 but there is a kind of sacred joy in it. Desolate indeed is the 
 man who has survived those who had loved him and whom he 
 had loved, and whose feet must go down to the grave along an 
 avenue of tombs. But his desolation is a wilderness that blos- 
 soms with the roses of remembrance. He has a stake in death. 
 The only really desolate man is the man who has never lost 
 anybody because he has never loved anybody. For him mem- 
 ory is an abiding horror from which he must ever fly, and the 
 past is a black abyss from which he must always avert his gaze. 
 Your face is not a failure if after you are dead it will live like a 
 beautiful agony in the memory of some one who loved you. The 
 time will come when you too will be numbered among " the old 
 familiar faces." Others will think the thoughts that you have 
 thought, sigh the sighs that you have sighed, and shed the tears 
 that you have shed. For their sake as well as for your own 
 you ought to endeavour to earn the right of admission to the 
 Valhalla of Memory. 
 
 I know a man who sacrificed love to ambition. He has 
 gained the whole world, but he has lost his own soul. When he 
 was young he resolved to emulate the pitiless selfhood of Na- 
 poleon. He made himself superhuman. In the jargon of Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw, he became a Superman. He hardened his 
 heart against the still small voice of sympathy and the little 
 whimperings of fellowship. He turned his heart into an anvil 
 and he beat out worldly glory upon it with remorseless blows. 
 He boasted of his splendid isolation. He exulted in his self- 
 sufficiency. His wife died of spiritual famine, for he could not 
 spare her even the crumbs of affection and the broken fragments 
 of comradeship. He used her dead heart as a stepping-stone 
 to fame. He climbed over her tombstone into the glare of 
 eminence. Now that he has got the desire of his heartless heart, 
 he is of all men the most miserable. His face is a failure, for 
 nobody loves it. His greatness is only an intense solitude, 
 26
 
 402 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 and although he is envied by his fellows, he is devoured by the 
 furies of regret. He has not only killed love in others; he has 
 killed love in himself. He has discovered too late that nothing 
 is worth winning which you win for yourself alone. His glory 
 is Dead Sea fruit, for he is condemned to eat it in exile the 
 exile of the soul. He has banished himself from humanity.
 
 YOM KIPPUR 
 
 THE adventure of adventures! I have seen Israel. I have 
 heard the tide of the past roaring in her synagogues. I have 
 seen the ghosts of her prophets rising from the tomb of time. 
 All day long my ears have been filled with the music of Hebrew 
 syllables that were shaped by the lips of Ezekiel and Isaiah. 
 I have heard that majestic poetry rolling over our Babel of 
 tongues and submerging our confusion of creeds, until our 
 civilisation seemed a vapour vanishing like its predecessors, 
 our iron order of empires, our brazen glory of kingdoms, our 
 golden pomp of nations shrivelling into a shadow. Two thou- 
 sand years ago we were not, but Israel was. Let us not be duped 
 by the pinchbeck centuries and the brittle chronologies. Issuing 
 out of the opening doors of the Ark the very wind of eternity 
 rushes over the torn leaves of history into fathomless futurity. 
 
 In the Great Synagogue the venerable presence of Lord 
 Rothschild touches the scene with the romance of a secret dynasty. 
 Around him is the flower of English Jewry: leaders in finance, 
 in scholarship, and in the liberal arts. This is the higher Ghetto. 
 There is no vestige of oppression here. These finely moulded 
 faces are calm with conquest, serene with wealth and power. 
 Here is the supple imagination which has emerged from the 
 vicissitudes of hate to endure the subtler perils of tolerance. 
 Pride of race ennobles the ugliness of top-hats, black skull-caps, 
 striped praying-shawls, frock coats and swallow-tails, starched 
 collars and cuffs, trousers, patent boots and felt slippers. There 
 is a throb of exultation in the clear, metallic cry of the choir chant- 
 ing the ancient songs, and the mournful voice of the white- 
 haired Cantor rings pure in the immemorial cadences. The same 
 spirals of sound are curling at this moment from innumerable 
 
 403
 
 404 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 throats In every clime. The same sad moans and the same 
 ecstatic wails carve the London silence to-day as they carved 
 the Egyptian silence yesterday. Although in these cultured 
 visages the passion of Israel is veiled, behind their polished 
 immobility glows ' a hard, gem-like flame' which fuses even mer- 
 ciless men of the world into a mystic unity. As I listen to the 
 perpetual murmur of the Hebrew vocables, the grave faces 
 flow into gigantic lineaments inscribed with the triumphs and 
 tribulations of an unconquerable race. The mysterious sculp- 
 tures of Isis and Osiris, whose vague regard chills the corri- 
 dors of the British Museum, are not more awful than this 
 living effigy of the living Israel. In the presence of the hoary 
 theogony out of whose loins came our whimpering Christianity 
 I bow my head, humbled by the antiquity which stamps our 
 oldest creeds as novelties and our greyest philosophies as new- 
 fangled toys. 
 
 Escaping from this surcharged symbolism into the secular 
 din of Aldgate, we are piloted by a Jewish novelist through 
 the broad boulevards and clean byways of the East End. The 
 pavements are crowded with Jewesses, garbed in flaming colours 
 and insolently beautiful. There is not room for a tithe of these 
 girls in the grilled seraglios of the synagogues. In any case, 
 the Jewish woman is a religious cipher. The Jew is an Oriental 
 when he enters Shool. "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, 
 who hast not made me a woman, " says the Jew. But the Jewess 
 cries: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, who hast made me 
 according to Thy will." 
 
 To-day the Pavilion Theatre in the spacious Whitechapel 
 Road is transformed into a synagogue. At the edge of the pro- 
 scenium the Ark is rigged up crazily, with a bowler hat cast on its 
 roof to fix the incongruity. In the centre of the stage are the 
 Readers. The house is packed with foreign Jews, hatted, capped, 
 shrouded, shawled; their bizarre voices bubbling and muttering 
 the fantastic liturgy. The Reader is a Russian virtuoso, and I 
 hear eager debates about the quality of his voice. With dramatic 
 gesticulations he chants in sonorous tenor tones, using many 
 modulations, now in a galloping murmur, now in a slow, long-
 
 YOM KIPPUR 405 
 
 drawn rising rhythm. As he reaches the solemn passage recalling 
 how the High Priest pronounced of old the glorious and awful 
 Name of Jahveh, and how "he in awe prolonged the Name," 
 the Reader prostrates himself on the ground, and a ragged si- 
 lence steals through the congregation. As we tiptoe into the 
 street, hot-coloured theatrical posters drag us back from Sinai 
 and Jerusalem into the gutter of life. To-night "The Traitor," 
 a bellowing melodrama, will purge the boards of Israel's historic 
 wraith. It is the insanity of Paradox. 
 
 But the Jew is pure paradox. He moves in everlasting in- 
 congruity. The spirit of place is his vassal. His bush burns 
 and his Shekinah shines in the darkest squalor and the vilest 
 vulgarity. We find his mystery even in prosaic "Wonderland." 
 Here, a few days ago, a Jew fought with a Gentile for a purse of 
 gold. Now the Cohanim are fighting on the floor for pardon. 
 The den of pugilists is a house of prayer. The latest aliens and 
 exiles are here, eager to climb the social pyramid whose apex 
 we saw in Aldgate. It is polyglot Jewry in valiant beggary, 
 hungry pathos and haggard zeal. 
 
 From "Wonderland" to Beaumont Hall, with anti-alien 
 posters plastered ironically on its portals. It is a free service 
 for men, mostly Russian, Polish, and Galician refugees. What 
 a tumult of features! What a riot of Rembrandts and Holbeins! 
 Here are no masking languors, but yearning faces and eyes 
 bright with bitter tears. A group of shrouded mystics, their 
 heads covered with shawls, range themselves in a row. The 
 congregation turns its back upon the hooded figures. They are 
 Cohanim, descendants of the priests, hallowed with the holi- 
 ness of Aaron. As these shapeless ghosts sway to and fro, their 
 hands outstretched in a supernatural gesture, crying a desolate 
 cry, a faint shudder of awe shakes the averted worshippers, and 
 even I, a Gentile, thrill with communicated dread. 
 
 With large grandeur the pattern of the ancient ritual is un- 
 rolled. These passionate exiles groan forth the dark catalogue 
 of all imaginable transgressions, beating their breasts with simul- 
 taneous blows of remorse. The sense of sin is graven on their 
 wan countenances, worn with fasting, scored and scarred with
 
 406 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 the fierce vigil of penitence and prayer. Isolated, alien, in- 
 trusive, I shrink from this terrible agony of the Semitic con- 
 science. I feel its pity and its terror. I divine the secret of 
 that moral miracle, the Jew. 
 
 In the vast spaces of the Jewish Free School I find a vapour- 
 bath of flesh. There is barely room for my nose, but it recoils 
 from the foul odour of steaming thousands. After one glimpse 
 of Rabbinical ancientry we hasten to the Spitalfields Synagogue, 
 a fine old Huguenot chapel which is now a school. It is crowded 
 with shawled devotees and groaning patriarchs. Stifled with 
 their stench, we take flight again. In Bevis Marks we find 
 richly dressed women chattering on the threshold of the Spanish 
 and Portuguese Synagogue. The warm southern beauty of 
 these laughing brunettes bewilders the eye accustomed to the 
 colder northern charms. The interior of the synagogue is an 
 exotic calm made of sombre, mellow tones, the light of many- 
 candled brass candelabra sinking richly into the slumbering 
 gloom of the oaken walls. The congregation is like a collection 
 of old masters. One of the cantors is an august hidalgo, his 
 Castilian features finely sculptured, his eyes calm wells of scorn, 
 his pose haughtily fluent, a living Velasquez, in whom I see a 
 gesture of Israel, a carven symbol of the Jew. 
 
 From Bevis Marks we hurry to the marble opulence of the 
 Bayswater Synagogue. Long lines of broughams are waiting at 
 the doors. The interior vaguely resembles the House of Com- 
 mons, but the top-hatted members are frozen into a congested im- 
 mobility, and the galleries are gay with ladies. The Ark replaces 
 the Speaker's chair, and white-robed celebrants stand on a tribune 
 in the centre of the floor. Two men slowly advance like tellers 
 to the Ark. One solemnly divests the other of his talith, and 
 drapes its folds over his top-hat. He then performs a like office 
 for himself. The act is solemnly absurd, but as the grotesque 
 figures close the great doors and draw the mystic veil, our ir- 
 reverence is quelled by awe. The white-robed Baal Tokeiah, 
 the Master of the Sounding, sets the ram's horn to his lips and 
 blows a long, melancholy blast. Instantly the anguish of the 
 long White Fast is ended, the taliths are folded up, the doors
 
 YOM KIPPUR 407 
 
 are flung open, and the famished congregation disperses in a 
 burst of laughter and joy. As I go home the quavering desola- 
 tion of the blown shofar is sounding through the night, and 
 the magic and mystery of the Hebrew seers is beating in 
 my blood. 
 
 Yes, it is the adventure of adventures. I have seen Israel.
 
 HELIOTROPE AND ROSES 
 
 IT is easy to take a cheerful view of life if you choose to be 
 cheerful, for cheerfulness is largely a caprice. You can make 
 up your mind to be miserable and you can make up your mind 
 to be gay. As a rule, you have no sound reason for sadness, and 
 no sound reason for gladness. Life is neither very bright nor 
 very dark. It is usually a serviceable grey. Well, unless you 
 are going to be hanged after breakfast, there is no reason why 
 you should not decide to make a happy day for yourself. You 
 may not be rich, and you may not be poor, but whether you are 
 rich are poor or merely comfortable, your blessedness depends 
 upon your own self-made mood. 
 
 I think it is very easy to make happy moods at all times of 
 the year, but it is especially easy if you are in London in June. 
 The London summer offers bliss for nothing at all. The man 
 who cannot then be joyous in Kensington Gardens and Hyde 
 Park is an incurable pessimist. He is not fit to look at the green 
 leaves and the blue sky. The wisest folk in London are the 
 children. Go and sit at their feet and let them teach you how 
 to be happy. They at any rate are happy. The Round Pond 
 is more helpful than any philosophy. The great circle of green 
 trees which stood round it last summer is there still, and the 
 same children are sailing the same toy fleets from shore to 
 shore. The same ducks promenade on the water with the same 
 ducklings. The aspect of life is as delightfully idle and inno- 
 cent as ever, and the pale blue of the sky rests as airily as of 
 old on the spire of St. Mary Abbot's and the cross of the Albert 
 Memorial. These things all take life lightly. Why can't you 
 take it lightly too? I see no earthly reason. If there is dis- 
 content in what you call your soul, turn it out on the grass among 
 the busy birds and the yelping dogs and the nibbling sheep. 
 
 408 '
 
 HELIOTROPE AND ROSES 409 
 
 When you are tired of watching the solemn frivolity of the tiny 
 mariners, take a lazy stroll through the green glades under the 
 shady branches. Refresh your eyes with the delicate coolness 
 of the lime trees, and see how cleverly they are fabricating their 
 honey-sweet blossoms for the cockney bees. Amble lazily down 
 to the playing fountains by the Serpentine and stare awhile at 
 the peacocks, whose miraculously blue throats are glowing and 
 glittering in the sun. Then lean on the bridge by the Magazine 
 and enjoy the free pleasure of looking at the sparkling water 
 with its perspective of noble trees and dim towers. After you 
 have done that, go over the bridge to the barracks and listen for 
 half an hour to the band of the Guards playing the best music 
 in the world. You will find there hundreds of happy people 
 with happy faces. When the band has played "God Save the 
 King, " stroll along the Row under the trees, and cast sidelong 
 glances at the dancing water with its green island and its water- 
 fowl. Do not forget to lean on the railings for five minutes and 
 survey the little green hollow where rabbits are grazing and the 
 blackbirds and thrushes and starlings are hunting for belated 
 worms. 
 
 Then go and absorb the loveliness of the flowers that fill 
 all the green, smooth-shaven spaces with colour and fragrance. 
 There are all sorts of flowers, from the pompous rhododendron to 
 the pert pansy. But be sure to lose your heart to the roses and 
 the heliotrope. It is a very wonderful thing to see the languish- 
 ing languor of the roses, those queens of beauty, who offer 
 their boon of voluptuous charm to the passer-by. It is very 
 wonderful that they can bloom in security here in the heart of 
 the crowded city. They have no guardians to guard their 
 fragile petals. They are protected by public spirit. Nobody 
 dreams of violating their silent grace. They are in sanctuary. 
 From morning till night they breathe their sweetness on the 
 populous air, and not a hand is raised to steal from everybody 
 what everybody owns. The marvel of their safety makes one 
 proud of human nature. Civic sacrilege would be easy, but 
 the saddest tramp and the sourest loafer cannot stoop so low. 
 The roses give their beauty and their odour freely to everybody,
 
 410 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 and everybody is content. It is very jolly to smell the perfume 
 of the roses and the heliotrope as they shed it recklessly upon 
 the sun-saturated air. How on earth can you refuse to be as 
 radiant as the roses and as happy as the heliotrope ? 
 
 If you seek for something more cheerful than heliotrope 
 and roses, go and look at that old gentleman who is feeding the 
 sparrows. The sparrows know him. They perch on his 
 shoulder and on the brim of his top-hat. They peck crumbs 
 daintily out of his fingers. When he throws a crumb in the air 
 they snatch it on the wing. They squabble prettily for morsels 
 on the grass, fluttering and twittering in their excitable fashion. 
 You see it does not take much to make a sparrow happy. He 
 is an optimist on crumbs. Why can't you rival him, O feeble 
 pessimist! Life will throw crumbs to you if you will allow it 
 to do so. Why demand point steaks and chump chops? Be- 
 lieve me, there is a lot of bliss in crumbs. The pigeons are also 
 very helpful to the cheerful eye. They are deliciously plump 
 and prosperous. Their breasts are beautifully burnished. 
 They are obviously contented with their mild destiny. They 
 are the bourgeoisie of birdland. 
 
 "Ah," you growl, "if I were a sparrow or a pigeon I might 
 be happy, but I am a creature with desires which are harder to 
 appease than theirs. " Well, leave the pigeons and sparrows and 
 saunter on the green lawns where all the world and his wife are 
 parading in what they are pleased to call Church Parade. The 
 sight will cure your moral jaundice. These people are as happy 
 as the sparrows and the pigeons. They have smiles in their eyes 
 and there is laughter on their lips. They are picking up their 
 crumbs with resolute gaiety. They have desires, like you, and 
 you may be sure that not one of them has got everything he or 
 she desires. But they are rubbing along on the crumbs they 
 manage to pick up. Some of them are old, but they are trying 
 to make the best of old age. There are old ladies with young 
 hats and youthful figures and rejuvenated hair. There are old 
 boys with merry neckties. Many of these faces are wrinkled 
 and crinkled with trouble and tribulation, but they are fill- 
 ing their ancient furrows with smiles. There is joy in their
 
 HELIOTROPE AND ROSES 411 
 
 crow's feet. There are crumbs for everybody who chooses to 
 take them. 
 
 Above all, look at the young English girls. They will help 
 you to give life the benefit of the doubt. Their complexions 
 will reassure you as to the youthfulness of youth. Their bright 
 eyes will make you ashamed of your experienced cowardice. 
 They are not afraid to be alive in the sunlight. Some of them 
 are with their lovers, and it is good to see their radiant faces 
 and to hear their happy voices chattering adorable nonsense. 
 The old trees over their heads are wiser than you, O philosophic 
 grumbler! They know that youth is as young as the young 
 leaves they wave on their smoky old branches. They know 
 that happiness comes every year with its spring magic and its 
 summer mystery. They do not worry over the winters that were 
 or the winters that will be. They know that life is a game of 
 chance in which you can always call for a fresh deal. It is easy 
 to call for it, and you may be sure that the dealer will not refuse 
 to cut a new pack so long as the sun shines and the scent of 
 roses and heliotrope is in the air.
 
 INDIGNANT SPRING 
 
 OUR London spring is no longer what she used to be. She 
 is a hoyden and a hussy. She has lost all her old respect for 
 the almanac, and all her old reverence for the calendar. She 
 comes when she pleases, breaking all the rules of rotation, and 
 flinging her flowers about our grey streets as recklessly as any 
 milliner in the Rue de la Paix. 
 
 Every morning she shocks us with some freshly cut impro- 
 priety, some bright premature blossom, some impudently early 
 bloom. You can hear her giggling as you stand in astonishment 
 before the florist's window, staring and gasping at her dear 
 impossibilities. 
 
 There was a time when the daffodils came before the swal- 
 lows dared, and took the winds of March with beauty. She has 
 changed all that. The daffodils come now before the snowdrops, 
 and we are weary of their golden rain long ere Easter spears us 
 with pneumonia. Our new-fangled spring anticipates every 
 flower that blows. I fear she is a hustler. 
 
 Each day during the past few weeks she has brought a new 
 blossom out of her bosom. She has kept it up like a smart 
 American girl, who would die rather than be caught twice in the 
 same hat. Where she finds all her flowers is a mystery to me, 
 but there they are in the streets and in the windows, mocking 
 our dull, dank air with their sunny gaiety. 
 
 She began the game with viokts, "fast-fading violets, cov- 
 ered up in leaves." Violets in winter, however, are tolerable. 
 They are not more dreadful than snow in June an English 
 June. It was pleasant to look at the huge bunches of Parma 
 violets in the windows. They made one think of the morning 
 flower market in Cannes, and long for a background of violet 
 sky and violet sea to match their scentless splendour. It was 
 
 412
 
 INDIGNANT SPRING 413 
 
 good, too, to gaze at the rich gold of the mimosa, scattering its 
 perishable yellow dust. 
 
 But Parma violets and flaming mimosa from the C6te d'Azur 
 did not arouse our resentment, for we knew them for alien im- 
 migrants. It was the roses that broke our hearts. Spring ought 
 really to be ashamed of her venal treachery. She has been 
 mimicking the whole pageantry of summer while our teeth 
 chattered and our- noses turned a bluer blue. 
 
 It is a crime to flaunt roses in our faces before the year is 
 aired and before the sun is visible. And such roses! Great, 
 lazy, luxurious, voluptuous, crimson blooms, swooning with pout- 
 ing petals and drunken with secret perfume. Where did spring 
 purloin these sirens of the summer? It is larceny, fragrant 
 larceny. 
 
 Sad were the shy, pale, trembling pink roses, blushing faintly 
 at their own untimely falsehood, sad were the delicate white 
 roses, stricken with shame and remorse, but more and more sad 
 were the Marechal Niels, hanging their sensuous heads in an 
 ecstasy of guilt. I think I pitied their wistful, yellow sorrow 
 more deeply than any hue of grief in Bond Street or any tint of 
 woe in Regent Street. They drooped in an exquisite languor, 
 and I watched them with tears in my eyes as they hung dying on 
 their pallid thorns. 
 
 "Spring," I cried, "you are a murderess! Fie upon you!" 
 
 She laughed heartlessly under the enormous brim of her 
 gigantic hat, as she threw a bunch of wallflowers in my face. 
 That finished me. I could bear no more. I could endure roses 
 and azaleas, cyclamens and carnations, lilies and violets, but 
 what has spring to do with wallflowers? No wallflower ought 
 to be born until the sun has made the sun-dial too hot to touch, 
 yet our cruel spring drags them into the shivering town, and 
 forces them to parody thefr natural glow. "How much?" said 
 I. "Twopence," said Spring. I paid her, picked up the wall- 
 flowers, and buried my bleak nose in their golden-brown. Alas! 
 they had been bereaved of their homely smell. I threw them 
 away, for a wallflower without scent is a queen without a crown. 
 
 Next morning I saw pansies. It was the ultimate insult.
 
 414 ADVENTURES IN LONDON 
 
 Pansies do not go well with furs and fires, chest-protectors and 
 overcoats. At last I realized that something was amiss, and a 
 hideous suspicion stabbed me. " Perhaps," said I, " this London 
 spring is a snare and a delusion. Perhaps she is impersonating 
 the real witch, the true enchantress." With that I resolved 
 to expose the insolent minx, and I hastened with a thirst for 
 vengeance in my heart into the real country where the real flowers 
 grow out of the real earth. 
 
 It was a brave wintry morning as I tramped through Princes 
 Risborough, with its sleepy thatched houses and its drowsy 
 market-place. There are no warmer thatchers in all England 
 than the thatchers of Princes Risborough. They know how to 
 pull the cosy thatch of three generations well down over the 
 cosy leaded windows, like a Dickens muffler twisted round a 
 Dickens throat. As I stepped blithely along the white road to 
 Great Kimble I saw many traces of the old-fashioned spring. I 
 met one furtive daisy, five audacious hedgerow buds, two almond 
 trees in full blush, and three splashes of barberry. In the old 
 garden of the Bear and Cross daffodil and primrose and poly- 
 anthus were flirting with each other behind the jolly, old, fat 
 box hedge. But there were no roses and no pansies. 
 
 In a farmyard twelve woolly lambs were frisking round a 
 haystack. In an odorous pigstye an innocent young porker was 
 curling his tender tail beside his mother. I fell in love with 
 the chubby little cherub, and if I had been wealthy I swear I 
 should have bought him and taken him home under my arm for 
 dinner. I know he would have melted in my mouth. 
 
 Harbouring these inhuman thoughts, I walked down the hill 
 to Little Kimble, and tumbled straight into the young arms of 
 the antique spring. She was dozing dreamily on a bank among 
 a silent congregation of surprised primroses. Her slender 
 fingers chilled mine as we shook hands, and she spoke with a 
 cold in her red nose. I told her plainly what I thought of her 
 dilatory indolence, and asked her what she had to say for herself. 
 She was very indignant, and at first she refused to believe my tale. 
 
 "Roses!" she screamed. "Pansies! It is against nature. 
 It is impossible."
 
 INDIGNANT SPRING 415 
 
 " Come with me, my dear, and you shall see for yourself. " 
 
 I took a third-class ticket for her. She asked me to turn on 
 the steam-heating regulator, and to shut the windows, remarking 
 that the weather was seasonable for the time of year. We spent 
 two hours in town, doing the florists, and I vow I never saw an 
 angrier woman in my life. 
 
 "You see," said I, "you are shockingly old-fashioned. I 
 think you had better retire from the business, unless you can 
 hustle and jolly your flowers along." 
 
 "I do my best," she sobbed. "I know I am late this year, 
 but what with the cold rains and the cold winds ..." 
 
 Thereupon she burst into tears. 
 
 "Spring," said I sternly, "you are out-of-date. You must 
 brisk up. We cannot put up with your dawdling and dilly-dally- 
 ing. This is not the age of Wordsworth. It is the age of " 
 
 "I know," she blubbered, "I know, but I won't be hustled. 
 Your town spring is a blackleg. Her flowers are foreigners. I 
 hate her and her hot-houses. She is a market-gardener's mer- 
 cenary. I don't want your money. Let her keep it. I grow 
 my flowers for the wayfaring man, for the fool, and for the chil- 
 dren. Take me back, for I cannot breathe your sickly air. I 
 will go home to Little Kimble. If you can do without me, I can 
 do without you." 
 
 "Spring," said I, as I saw her off, "I am with you. When 
 we are tired of our town spring, we'll come to see you at Little 
 Kimble." 
 
 "Ah," cried the baggage, as she smiled through her tears, 
 "you shall smell my wallflowers!" 
 
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