AND
 
 I LIBRARY 
 
 V SAHOIHSO J
 
 DA-' 
 
 '
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC
 
 WRITINGS OF W. L. GEORGE 
 NOVELS 
 
 CALIBAN 
 
 BUND ALLEY 
 
 THE STRANGERS' WEDDING 
 
 THE SECOND BLOOMING 
 
 A BED OP ROSES 
 
 CITY OF LIGHT 
 KAUSCH 
 
 (Am firm TilU : UNTIL THB DAT BRRAT) 
 THE MAKING OP AN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 (Amtrirtm TilU: THB Lrrn-B BSLOVKD) 
 OLGA XAZIMOV (SHOW STORIES) 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 WOMAN AND TO-MORROW 
 DRAMATIC ACTUALITIES 
 ANATOLB PRANCE 
 THE INTELLIGENCE OP WOMAN 
 A NOVELIST ON NOVELS 
 
 (Amtrutn TitU: LITBXAKT CBAPTZBS) 
 EDDIES OP THE DAY
 
 1 / I '; ! .' \ l\ l\
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 Text by 
 
 W. L. GEORGE 
 
 Pictures by 
 
 PHILIPPE FORBES-ROBERTSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1921 
 
 Manufactured in Great Britain
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. PRELUDE 
 
 II. PLAYGROUNDS *3 
 
 III. THE FRIENDLY BOWL 35 
 
 IV. WANDERERS 43 
 
 V. SOUPS AND STEWS X 
 
 VI. IN SEARCH OF VICE 75 
 
 VII. THE POOR **5 
 
 VIII. STONES 99 
 
 IX. CAFE* ROYAL IZ 9
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 HYDE PARK 
 
 THE REGENT CANAL AT MAIDA HILL 
 
 CUMBERLAND HAY-MARKET 
 
 THE PUB 
 
 FLOWER-GIRL 
 
 THE HEART OF THE CITY 
 
 SOHO MARKET 
 
 THE SAVOY 
 
 SHOPPING 
 
 THE CHELSEA ARTS BALL 
 
 SHEPHERD'S MARKET 
 
 THE TUBE, 9.30 A.M. 
 
 AN ABSENT DESERT! THE CROMWELL RCAD 
 
 BEASTS AT THE ZOO 
 
 THE CAFf ROYAL 
 
 PRIVATE VIEW: THE A.AJV. 
 
 THE GOOD INTENT, CHELSEA 
 
 Frontispiece 
 Facing page 6 
 
 9 
 
 38 
 48 
 56 
 64 
 68 
 
 72 
 
 84 
 
 92 
 
 103 
 
 109 
 
 "3 
 
 122 
 126
 
 I 
 
 PRELUDE
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 THE first thing that impresses me as I begin this short book on 
 London is the large number of subjects of which I will say nothing. 
 There are many reasons for this. One is that a title such as A 
 London Mosaic is as difficult to compose to as Life or Love. (Two 
 novels are still on sale under these somewhat atlasian titles, but 
 as an author does not wish to be unkind in the first paragraphs 
 of a book, they need not be reviewed.) Another reason is that 
 Mr E. V. Lucas, Mrs E. T. Cook, John o' London, Mr G. R. 
 Sims, have compiled various volumes of passionate Baedeker, 
 and I hesitate to set my feet in their mighty footprints. For so 
 much of this London is unknown to me, and I have learnt little 
 of her, indeed, learned little except to love her. Thus, in this 
 book, you will find no lists of houses where famous people lived. 
 This may seem strange, but it wakes in me no thrill to see a 
 circular plate of debased wedgwood imposed by a maternal L.C.C. 
 upon a wall of innocent stucco coated with eternal dirt. To read 
 that William Hazlitt died here, or lived there, does not add much 
 to the fact that William Hazlitt lived. It may be interesting to know 
 that Hazlitt chose that sort of house, though it is likely that he 
 did not choose it, but accepted it; a house does not define a man 
 of worth, for men of worth are mostly poor, and their houses 
 reflect them not. Many must have hated them. Yet, I happen 
 to know Huxley's house in St John's Wood, and Carlyle's house 
 in Chelsea (there is no getting over that one when friends arrive 
 from America), but it is not exciting knowledge, and I incline to 
 rejoice with Kingsley that it is not the house one lives in matters, 
 but the house opposite. Unfortunately, the house opposite is 
 generally just as bad: the only thing that reconciles one to one's 
 house is that the people opposite see most of it. 
 
 I shall not tell you anything of ' quaint corners,' or ' picturesque 
 bits.' I will not cut up and pickle London. Ever since the days 
 of Dickens (or is it since those of Dr Syntax ?) people have ranged 
 
 3
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 our unfortunate town armed with a butterfly-net: swoop! caught 
 Cloth Fairl Another swoop! Staple Inn lies in the butterfly-net. 
 Quick, into the pickle-jar. Now for the cyanide. Here they are, 
 London butterflies, ready for delineation by Mr Hugh Thompson. 
 No, I will pickle you no living strips of London Town, and I 
 promise that not once will I portray a humorous bus-conductor. 
 One reason is that there are no humorous bus-conductors; there 
 are only raucous brutes, working long hours, and maintained in 
 a state of pessimism because these long hours separate them 
 from the public-house. They do not, however, separate them 
 enough. 
 
 There will be no East in the West, nor West in the East. 
 There will be no list of statues, for nobody ever looks at statues. 
 There is a statue of George Stephenson at Euston, and one of 
 William Pitt in Hanover Square. That is very interesting, isn't 
 it ? It is a terrible commentary upon fame that when you erect 
 a statue to a man he becomes invisible. You pass a statue every 
 day, but you never look at it, you pass it. Nobody cares for 
 statues, except the birds, who make them a venue for love and war. 
 Christopher Wren did say that if you required a monument you 
 should look about you; thus does the London population. Those 
 who have noticed Mr Peabody, miraculously encased in a frock 
 coat several sizes too small, Mr Huskisson stark naked, and one 
 of the Georges on his little horse, trotting to nowhere in particular, 
 as was the way of his dynasty, will agree that it is no wonder 
 statues fail to arouse even merriment. 
 
 No, there are no statues in this book. There are no pictures 
 either. I shall not tell you how to find the Madonna degli Ansidei 
 in the National Gallery, nor direct you to the Flaxmans of 
 University College. The catalogues can do that. That is, if 
 you want to know, and are not one of the ordinary beings who 
 use the museums to get out of the rain or for the innocent purposes 
 of courtship. (I recommend the Geological; chilly, but leads to 
 concentration). Sometimes, in remorseful mood, when the word 
 ' ought,' which as a rule means little to me, suddenly assumes 
 material shape to the extent of a faint mist, I tell myself that I am 
 4
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 very uneducated, and regrettably unrepentant, that I ' ought ' 
 to care that Swift lived in Bury Street and Sir Isaac Newton in 
 Jermyn Street, and that I * ought ' to find desecration in the fact 
 that where the dog Diamond barked, the plates of Jules's Balkan 
 waiters clatter. And I go to Jules's to lunch and to meditate on 
 gravitation. But Jules can cook, and while eating his meats you 
 do not meditate; and he is so popular that as soon as you have 
 finished those meats, you are driven out by the eyes of some young 
 couple, beaming with love and appetite. Nor may you meditate 
 opposite the houses of the great; it annoys the police. So, after 
 this faint attempt, the slender ' ought ' evaporates. Perhaps 
 because of that I have not yet succeeded in visiting the Tower, 
 the Roman Bath, the Foundling, the Soane Museum, the Mint, 
 and many other places which doubtless would improve my 
 mind. 
 
 I am not a student, but a lover of London; it amuses me 
 much more to notice that one man shouts: * Paw Maw! Exper! 
 Paw Maw!' while another does it like this: ' Per Mer! Gatesh- 
 pozervenment! ' than to bask in the knowledge that Johnson 
 lived in Gough Square. This arises, I suppose, from having taken 
 London as I found her, and from not being a Londoner. The 
 first twenty years of my life having been spent in another country, 
 I did not treat London as a relation, but as some one whom I 
 liked. Everything of her was interesting, and there is to-day no 
 mews where I cannot hear the footsteps of her smutty nymphs. 
 The entry into London is such a romantic march; I say march 
 because it is worth doing on foot. But as I speak to Londoners, 
 we had better do it by train, for they would grow tired of her. 
 When Londoners say * London,' they mean Piccadilly, Selfridges, 
 Covent Garden, that sort of thing, and that is not London. London 
 is Tottenham and Chiswick, the * Paragon,' Mile End, Walker's 
 Court and what it sells, and the black doss places under the railway 
 arches. London is Houndsditch, where everybody looks bad, 
 and Cornwall Gardens where everybody looks good. London 
 is a congress-house of emotions. 
 
 When one looks at the map, particularly if it is on a large 
 
 5
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 scale, London looks like a splash, rather longer than it is broad, 
 with railway lines radiating in all directions, rather like a spider's 
 web, the centre being tenanted by whoever you like. And one 
 thinks of Dick Whittington gaily treading in the spider's web. 
 But, in fact, one does not come out of the everywhere into the here 
 of London. One melts into London, and one hardly knows how 
 one comes to abandon the rest of the world. There is a moment 
 when the Essex or Kentish marsh ceases to lap so uniformly 
 against Medway or Thames. One has a sense of population, of 
 rather large houses set rather far apart, but not yet so far apart 
 as in the counties; of grounds less richly endowed with the high 
 walls crowned with broken glass which announce that respectable 
 people live inside. One reads names on the platforms: ' Brent- 
 wood,' or * Mailing,' and there is a sprinkling of villas, with plenty 
 of white paint and concrete, and red roofs and leaded panes. One 
 glimpses cerise curtains, and one knows with painful accuracy 
 where to look for the back of the swing mirror. Then, again, gaps, 
 cows. It must have been a mistake, it is not London after all! 
 But there come more platforms and more villas, then a row of 
 shops, shops not branded with the names one would expect to 
 find, such as ' Boots ' or * Home and Colonial,' but brisk, individual 
 little shops belonging to Smith, and to Jones, yet strangely alike 
 in build, furnished by the same shopfitter, just as the owners will 
 be buried by the same undertaker. (He is quite ready, for he 
 owns one of the shops.) That is individualism, which, like the 
 camomile plant, is ever bruised and ever arises. 
 
 The train rumbles on, and the houses change. They are still 
 detached, but less detached: they are separated by privet hedges 
 over which a man can look, and so they have an air of fellowship. 
 Suddenly, one enters a little colony of houses; one sees a postman 
 on foot instead of on a bicycle, a horse omnibus and no carrier's 
 cart; one sees a policeman too: the world is growing less respect- 
 able; it must be London after all. But again come gaps and cows, 
 except that now the gaps are described as * desirable freehold sites ' 
 with loudly advertised frontages. The earth is already torn up, 
 and excavations are turning into roads; one observes a solitary
 
 r 
 
 H T" 
 
 ~ 
 
 W <! 
 
 w 
 
 H
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 gas-lamp, and on a board the words ' Macedonia Avenue.' No 
 avenue is built yet, but it is foredoomed to Macedonia. 
 
 All that is the overflow of London ; it is the fugitive London 
 which has no love or understanding of the town. The movement 
 of a Londoner who rises in life seems to follow a definite curve; 
 if he begins in Whitechapel the wheel of fortune may take him to 
 Streatham ; after a while he will dream of a place in the country 
 and realise his dream perhaps at Purley Oaks; by the time his son 
 has come back from Oxford, his wife will have been ambitious 
 enough to remove him to South Kensington; thence, the last 
 step, to God's quadrilateral between Oxford Street and Piccadilly, 
 Regent Street, and Park Lane. After the bankruptcy the process 
 is reversed. Outward, then inward, and outward again. It is 
 like the tide. 
 
 But the train goes on, and unexpectedly, we find age after 
 youth, Croydon, Sydenham, Edmonton, places where again the 
 walls are high, the oaks thick, where are deep lawns, heavy stucco 
 fronts, little crowded streets with spreading market places. We 
 breathe the air of genteel sleep. Genteel, perhaps, but restless 
 sleep, for these are old villages made into islands. 
 
 They seem vaguely annoyed among the trams; they blink at 
 the sky-signs and the objurgations of Bovril. But it is too late; 
 round each little group run fifty streets, each one comprising a 
 hundred houses or so, all complete, with Nottingham lace curtain 
 and Virginia creeper. The old house may call itself ' The Lodge,' 
 but ' Chatsworth ' and 4 Greville Towers ' are round the corner. 
 Indeed, we forget them as we go on, for now, as the train roars 
 over railway bridges, through cuttings, we look down on the 
 endless congestion of suburban roofs, each one separated from its 
 neighbour by what the builder regrettably calls a ' worm.' 
 
 And yet it is not London. For London has yet to burst upon 
 our eyes, in the shape of strident Clapham Road, or Brixton 
 Road, true London of the black, greasy pavement and the orange 
 peel of which Private Ortheris babbled in his delirium. We 
 have still to come to the giant warehouses and their ambitious 
 grayness, to the flat mass of gray, yellow, and black, broken only 
 
 7
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 by the washing that hangs to dry, and the narrow gardens where 
 droops the nasturtium. At last here is working London, little, 
 nestling, hard, grimy London, gritty, troglodyte London, London 
 of crowded shop and public-house, of tramway and clotted traffic, 
 and yelping children. That is London of many heads and, to me, 
 all smiling. 
 
 It is only later, when at last we reach the river that is gray as 
 a cygnet, and see London rising in a hundred solemn spires, that 
 we come to understand London, to feel the use of that white, 
 central pomp; as well of that opulence as of the smiling cleanliness 
 of the outer ring, of the blackness of the inner ring. For all that 
 is part of London's world, and it is well that she should, within 
 herself, comprise all ugliness and all beauty. For this makes her 
 worth exploring. 
 
 The secret of a city's exploration does not lie in the dutiful 
 following of itineraries, but rather in a lover-like submission to 
 its moods. One should eat in various places, not only within the 
 stereotyped square mile which, in London, in Paris, or in Petrograd, 
 is loudly labelled as the foreigner's restaurant. One must seek 
 culinary adventure far afield, at Harrow, and at Tulse Hill, in 
 Piccadilly and Norton Folgate; and let me assure you that there 
 exists a subtle difference between the cooking at the Cheapside 
 A.B.C. and its fellow in the Brixton Road. 
 
 Also one should readily cede to the fancy that is bred by a 
 beautiful place name. It is true that, as a rule, the most attractive 
 names lead to the least attractive places, but on the way one touches 
 singularity often, and beauty sometimes. My Baedeker has 
 always been Kelly's Directory; that is one of the books I should 
 like to find in my restricted library if I were wrecked on a desert 
 island. For, sitting under my bread-fruit tree, warm in my 
 garment of yakskin, and smoking an earthen pipe of dried I don't 
 know what leaf, Kelly's Directory would bring up dreams, dreams 
 such as these: Seven Sisters' Road, Satchwell Rents, Beer Lane, 
 and Whetstone Park. All those dreams have come true, and thus 
 a little of my fervour has been abated by their materialisation ; by 
 the discovery of Seven Sisters' Road as gray, refuse-strewn, rich 
 8
 
 W 
 
 * 

 
 PRELUDE 
 
 in Victorian goodness and in modern slum; of Satchwell Rents 
 as a dusty affluent into Bethnal Green Road, shuttered, and locked, 
 and suspicious. Whetstone Park, of course, is not at Whetstone, 
 but just off New Oxford Street, and there is no park there. But 
 still, those names, like Orme Square, that secludes itself from the 
 Bayswater Road behind its column and its defiant eagle, like 
 Cumberland Market, Hanoverian, naked, whose many iron posts 
 await cattle that never come, contain the seed of romance because 
 they induce quest. And so I will not be discouraged yet, but soon 
 must discover what stones have wrought Jedburgh Street and 
 Parsifal Road. 
 
 Yet those streets, and roads, and squares that have their place 
 in Kelly are, after all, only the outer shell which the true lover 
 must break through. If he is a true lover, he will soon understand 
 that London lies behind the streets. He will realise that between 
 two streets there is often more than two rows of houses and of 
 gardens or yards. He will have discovered that in the core of 
 those blocks of masonry lives an inner London. Into that core 
 there is but one way, which I will call the slits. We all know 
 slits, little spaces between houses, that lead inwards, you know not 
 whither. You pass them every day, perhaps, and never turn 
 aside, yet through those slits is the way in. There is one, for 
 instance, near Netting Hill Gate. They call it Bulmer Place, 
 though it is only six feet broad and is buried under an archway. 
 Enter; ten yards lead you to an old cottage settlement, where no 
 house exceeds two floors, where each has its garden, its creeper 
 and its cat, where washing floats undisturbed, and, on fine after- 
 noons, public beanoes take place. This is an old London village, 
 caught between the warehouses and shops, yet maintained by the 
 magic law of ancient lights. 
 
 There is another slit, less well known, quite near Kensington 
 Square. To the ordinary eye, Kensington Square is entirely 
 civilised, and none live there unless they have both money and 
 good taste. In the far south-west corner stands a convent, that 
 stares forth blankly upon this world. But walk south-east and 
 turn to the right, and go on until, past low, white cottages grown 
 
 L M. B 9
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 with sterile vine, you meet a brick wall. On the way, small houses, 
 well locked, that are quiet and green, will have seen you pass 
 without approval. If adventure is not for you, you will turn back 
 on seeing the brick wall; if, however, it is, you will go on, and, 
 on your right, find a slit so small that you may not open your 
 umbrella in it. This they call South End; if you persevere you 
 shall come to rustic cottages of plaster, and at last discover, single- 
 floored against the side of a great block of flats, the cottage and 
 garden where rot two old green, painted figure-heads. There 
 live Prunella, Mityl, Selysette, and their tribe. But go carefully 
 to South End, for the road is fugitive, and I cannot always find 
 it myself. I think I find it only on the days when I am not too 
 impure in heart. 
 
 Wherever flows London stone the slits exist. A deep, dark 
 archway out of Surrey Street dives under the Norfolk Hotel; 
 follow it, go down Surrey Steps, and you shall come to a water- 
 gate, on which you may yet lean and smell the tar of Henry Fitz 
 Alwyn's barge. Another slit, behind the Alexandra Hotel, will 
 lead you through Old Barrack Yard (I do not know what barrack) 
 and past low, industrial cottages, to the petrified splendours of 
 Belgravia. I wish I knew them all, for I discovered yet another 
 last week, after overlooking it for over sixteen years. It is called 
 St James's Market, and leads ofF the Haymarket, towards the 
 neat elegancies of Jermyn Street. That does not sound promising; 
 yet, lost among the backs of warehouses and restaurants, 
 there stands a long, low house coated with green plaster; it 
 is a workshop, but some sense of fitness had bidden the 
 workers relieve its green walls with claret curtains. I 
 choose to be sure that in this house Axford tried to imprison 
 Hannah Lightfoot, until the fair Quakeress fled to her Georgian 
 lover. 
 
 And follow the green spot on the map, on the borough map, 
 that cares so much for the borough, so little for the town. The 
 borough map will lead you to green fields where flourish the 
 sardine tin and the wild hyacinth. It will lead you to a church- 
 yard, itself buried between theatres and shops, behind St Ann's, 
 10
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 Soho, where King Theodore of Corsica has laid his insurgent 
 bones. It will lead you behind the solemnities of South Paddington 
 into the vast churchyard behind the little Chapel of the Ascension. 
 This is open to you all day; there you will find sparse graves, 
 vast lawns and, under the trees, friendly seats where you may 
 dream of death, or, if you prefer, of loves that will companion 
 you to that bourne. 
 
 II
 
 II 
 
 PLAYGROUNDS
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 IT is strange that the theatre should matter in a nation such as 
 ours, which has gained a reputation for liberalism and tolerance, 
 being tolerant because it cared for nothing, and liberal because it 
 understood little. The vogue of the theatre reflects the character 
 of urban England, which is as frivolous as that of urban Italy is 
 dour; because it is the symbol of pleasure, easily attained and 
 still more easily digested, it can always find room in the newspaper, 
 where the affairs of the nation flicker and the claims of art are 
 unmet. For let there be no confusion: art and the theatre are 
 not the same thing; almost one might say that if a play possesses 
 artistic quality it holds a passport to eternity, with this difference, 
 that many things lost in eternity are remembered. A little more 
 may be said of this further on. 
 
 London has always been a city of theatres, perhaps because 
 we have, for many centuries, laboured under the Puritan tradition : 
 its bitterness has attached to the theatre a glamour foreign to it in 
 hotter lands. When you open a book of memoirs by an Italian, 
 a German, or a Russian, you may be sure that it will consist in 
 portraits of politicians, biographies of cocottes, stories of riots 
 and coronations, but if at Hatchards you peer into any volume 
 called My Life, or something like that, you will almost invariably 
 discover that the greater part of the author's life seems to have 
 been employed in meeting Sir Henry Irving, or waiting outside 
 the Adelphi on first nights. The theatre, you see, is wicked and 
 winning; the most august of the augustine, Messrs Coutts and 
 Co., stamp upon their cheques their old sign : ' At the " Three 
 Crowns " in the Strand, next door to the Globe Theatre, A.D. 1692.' 
 I will wager those three crowns that no bank manager would 
 ever think of advertising on his cheques : ' Next door to West- 
 minster Abbey.' Why this should be is not entirely explained 
 by the Puritan tradition, and it is still less explained by the London 
 theatres themselves, nearly all of them, the meanest, dirtiest, 
 
 15
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 dingiest, fustiest, frowstiest edifices in the country. This is true, 
 whether you pass from Drury Lane, that cave of winds, to 
 4 behind,' at the Kingsway, where the oldest rabbit would get 
 lost. Indeed, our theatres must have been influenced by the 
 Puritan tradition, for everything has been done to hide their 
 addresses in the papers, to make their doors invisible, their seating 
 suitable for a Christian martyr. There is not in London a pre- 
 Boer War theatre the pit of which is not summed up by Rutland 
 Harrington's song: * You bark your shins, you bang your head, 
 your knees are up to your nose in bed . . .' and so on. They are 
 so arranged that people delicately place their feet in the small 
 of your back, so that nobody can enter the middle of a row without 
 disturbing it, or leave it without infuriating it; as for the rakes, 
 in spite of the matinee hat, I suspect that they have been planned 
 to encourage expensive transfers. Of course, the worst theatres 
 are those which are known as the ' ood old ' ones. There is no 
 such thing as good old. There is nothing but bad old, and the 
 theatre is an example. It must have been that heathen god, Good 
 Old, invented Covent Garden. Good Old got it up in red and 
 gold (Good Old would) ; Good Old planned the slips, which on one 
 side let you hear all the strings and on the other all the brass. 
 Good Old says it is cheap for half a crown. Good Old planned 
 Drury Lane and laid it down where no buses pass. And, no 
 doubt, Good Old handed over what was then Her Majesty's 
 Theatre to Shakespeare as dramatised by Beerbohm Tree. 
 
 Some of the old London theatres, it is true, are a little less 
 repulsive because they are not quite so large. Thus, the Hay- 
 market, the Royalty, and in a queer, insidious way old Sadler's 
 Wells. Sadler's Wells has gone; there to-day upon the film 
 cowboys race and rescue, and negroid heroines register their 
 emotions, but not long ago it was one of the few pleasant places 
 Good Old had bequeathed us, with its hemicycle of plush-backed 
 stalls, its little boxes lined with an inch of plush and half an inch 
 of dirt, its heavy red hangings, favourable to lovers, its preposterous 
 plays of love, gold, faith, patriotism, and banana falls. You see, 
 at Sadler's Wells, Good Old dated back to about 1780, while at 
 16
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 most of our theatres he has brought himself up to date, say to 1860, 
 and has grown respectable; it has not agreed with him. When 
 we consider the few new theatres that have been built, such as 
 the Scala, the Little Theatre, the Ambassadors, we are sure 
 that the old cannot be brought up to date. Like most old insti- 
 tutions, the English theatre can be reformed only by dynamite. 
 
 As in many human things, architecture is at fault. The 
 playhouse is evolved from the Roman circus. But the circus 
 offered a performance without scenery, which could be seen from 
 all sides. When scenery came, it grew impossible to show the 
 play except from one side, so as not to give away the mystery; 
 thus we obtained the semi-circular auditorium, which would be 
 quite satisfactory if it did not result in a perpetually partial view 
 for one half of the audience. The old play was mainly pantomimic ; 
 when the play grew more articulate it became impossible to hear 
 the words very far, and as the theatre could not spread outwards 
 it spread upwards. Then chaos came, for rakes had to be so 
 arranged as to enable people to see, and yet packed close under 
 another tier. The result is sardines. 
 
 Indeed, when we consider what it labours against, it is remark- 
 able that the theatre should be so healthy. Every year, well over 
 half the plays that are put on enjoy less than six weeks' run, and 
 if it were not notorious that bankruptcy is a profitable trade one 
 would wonder how managers live. The managers seem to have 
 done everything to achieve financial suicide. Especially during 
 the last twenty years ; notably stimulated by Mr Charles Frohman 
 and Mr George Edwardes, they have indulged in an endless 
 competition in expensive staging. It grew quite common for a 
 play to cost 5000 to stage, and much more was spent sometimes. 
 Now, that large sum was risked, not invested, and so the unfortunate 
 manager had to pay his backers a heavy toll. I am sure he was 
 entirely wrong, for audiences prefer plays to scenery, and Mr 
 Cochran, one of the few managers who remembers that once 
 upon a time he was a public, has proved this by staging a successful 
 revue for about 150. Do not believe that I am a highbrow; 
 I do not suggest that A Little Bit of Fluff should be staged without
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 scenery, but with curtains (though there is a lot in curtains, if 
 discreetly drawn), but I do suggest that the more elaborate the 
 scenery, the more the play is overlooked. Perhaps that is what 
 the managers desire, and judging from the condition of modern 
 drama, perhaps they are right. But I attribute to the managers 
 no such prorundities of psychology. Rather would I say that 
 they know what the public wants, and one thing they know well : 
 the public wants certain actors and wants them passionately. 
 
 I shall never forget a certain performance of King Henry V. 
 There entered a man in silver armour, his visor down, and a 
 gasping female by my side said: 'That's Lewis Waller.' And 
 the worst of it is that she was right, and that I knew she was right. 
 Visor or no visor, I too knew it was Lewis Waller; it was Lewis 
 Waller, slamming and banging British drama as none better 
 could than he, by insisting, in his silver armour, on being always 
 Waller, never Henry V. They are all like that: Mr Gerald 
 du Maurier may dress himself up as a policeman, or swathe his 
 neck in a choker, or get into evening clothes and pretend to be a 
 burglar, but thick over those artifices lies always the charming 
 du Maurier trail. He is loved for that, just as Beerbohm Tree 
 was loved for the confectionery of his voice and the circular 
 movement of his hand, as Mr Hawtrey is loved for his sober 
 cynicism, and Miss Doris Keane for ... I don't know exactly 
 what. Whatever actors are loved for, it is always for being them- 
 selves and never for being their parts; whether, like Miss Lilian 
 Braithwaite, they have cast themselves for the lilies and languors 
 of virtue, or, like Miss Dorothy Minto, for the roses and raptures 
 of vice, to those selections they must cleave, or they shall be loved 
 no more. But if they do cleave to these selves of theirs, then shall 
 they attain fame, and the public will not say: ' Have you been to 
 Hamlet ? ' but ' Have you seen Martin Harvey ? ' And this 
 worship shapes yet another stone to hurl at the English theatre, 
 namely, fantastic salaries, varying between 100 and 300 a week. 
 Call me a Bolshevik if you like, but I say no man is worth 300 
 a week; nobody knows this when the man is alive, but everybody 
 does the day after he is dead. This would not matter if it did 
 18
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 not make the theatre so expensive to run, therefore the prices of 
 the seats so high that only those who can afford it sit in them. 
 The richer the staging, the poorer the play; the dearer the seat, 
 the greater its attraction to the people who know ' the price of 
 everything and the value of nothing.' For long purses are made 
 of sows' ears. 
 
 I wonder if something could be done for the theatre. 
 Supposing it were built like the Scala, so that nobody sat at 
 the sides, so that everybody might see the play instead of 
 hats, so that one might have a fit in the stalls and be removed 
 without causing too much trouble (you see, I think of everything), 
 so that the people at the top were not seated so high as to observe 
 mainly the actors' upper skulls. Supposing a theatre like the 
 Munich Kammerspiele, which holds five hundred, were to be 
 built. Supposing, like that one, it had but one balcony; supposing 
 it were cheap to light; supposing, too, that it had no programme 
 sellers, but delivered programmes at the doors from a penny-in- 
 the-slot machine; supposing it had no cloak-room attendants, 
 but hooks with a number and a padlock; supposing it had no ... 
 I forget the name of the attendant, something like pew-opener, 
 and that the seats were not numbered from A. 2 6 to M-34 in the 
 stalls, not numbered at all in the pit, and re-numbered again in 
 the upper circle; supposing the seats were just numbered I, 2, 
 3, so that one could find them; supposing we paid actors for 
 rehearsals and engaged them for a certain term; supposing all 
 this, would the public be pleased ? I wonder! I wonder whether 
 the public would like paying less for its seats. If stalls did not 
 cost IDS. 6d., would it trust the play ? It certainly does not trust 
 the doctor who charges less than los. 6d. And yet, once upon 
 a time, the theatre was cheap. When, sixty years ago, Ben 
 Webster was producing at the Adelphi, a stall cost 55., and Mr 
 Webster offered amphitheatre stalls * with elbows and cushions, 
 secured the whole evening ' for is. 
 
 Yes, a good deal might be done like this. A good deal might 
 be done by the Lord Chamberlain and the London County Council, 
 if only they would cease to devote all their thoughts to exits from 
 
 19
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 the theatre. (On consideration, this may be well advised.) They 
 might allow smoking, and best of all, they might allow everything, 
 suspend all censorship, and be assured that the plays which are 
 called objectionable would not be staged. I do not mean that 
 there is no demand for objectionable plays; there is; indeed, we 
 nearly all of us like objectionable plays, but the Puritans can trust 
 our Puritan feeling, which makes it impossible for us to enjoy 
 objectionable plays because we dare not be seen enjoying them 
 by other people who are also enjoying them. Ahl if you could 
 go to the play masked it would be different. 
 
 What is wrong with the drama is that it does not hold an 
 idea to the square act; is it worth saving ? For it may truly be 
 said that the only fault the public finds in a stupid play is that it 
 1 is not stupid enough. You do not believe me. Let us look at 
 the list of plays in to-day's paper. To-day there are open thirty- 
 six metropolitan theatres, including some we can leave out, 
 Maskelyne's, Drury Lane (Opera), the Philharmonic. Of the 
 remaining thirty-three, musical comedy occupies six stages. Say 
 no more about that. If it were not for the lips that sing, our 
 attention would be concentrated on English music. Revue rages 
 at five theatres. This leaves twenty-two plays running. Among 
 them are two spy plays, two comic war plays, a mystical melodrama, 
 four farces; the rest consists in plays made by hands unassisted 
 by heads, plays that the next generation may make by machinery. 
 The groans of old age are heard as Sir Arthur Pinero rigs The 
 Freaks upon their legs, as Mr Somerset Maughan presents Love 
 in a Cottage. And Dear Brutus is the twinkling star that makes 
 darker the Thalian night. 
 
 In hardly one of these plays is there a single moment of 
 intellectual distinction. I do not mean that I ask those twenty- 
 two stages to make up the night's programme of King Lear, 
 Ghosts, Les Trots Filles de Monsieur Dupont, the Sunken Bell, The 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, but I do think that their coalition 
 might give us more than Dear Brutus. There should be plenty 
 of room for true comedy of the type of The Admirable Crichton, 
 Mrs Gorringe's Necklace, John Bull's Other Island, The Cassilis 
 
 20
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 Engagement, Chains, comedy with ideas. There should be room 
 for The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnett, The Playboy of the Western 
 World and other solid plays. But one condition is that we should 
 pay for plays, not players. We do not. If you want evidence 
 consider the following advertisement of When Knights were Bold 
 (a really amusing play): 
 
 WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD. 
 
 BROMLEY 
 CHALLENOR 
 
 MARJORIE 
 BELLAIRS 
 
 * Bromley Challenor has a personality and 
 
 fun of his own.' Times. 
 'An individual style of his own/ Daily 
 
 Telegraph. 
 ' A manner quite his own.' The Queen. 
 
 * Nothing funnier than the second act.' 
 
 Daily Telegraph. 
 
 * His fun is infectious/ Daily Graphic. 
 
 * Keeps his audience in convulsions/ Star. 
 ' Had a triumphant reception/ Daily 
 
 Chronicle. 
 
 ' Bromley Challenor extracts every spark of 
 fun/ J. T. GREIN, Sunday Times. 
 
 * The play went more gloriously than ever/ 
 
 Referee. 
 
 ' Miss Marjorie Bellairs is a charming actress 
 with a singularly sweet voice/ Era. 
 
 Ten press quotations. Two refer to the play; one may refer to 
 play or to actor; seven refer to the actor only. (The playwright 
 is not mentioned, but never mind). This does not mean that the 
 newspapers confined their notices to Mr Bromley Challenor, but 
 it does mean that the management selected for quotation only 
 the phrases which refer to the actor, because that is what the 
 public wants, and what it gets for the hastening of its mental 
 decay. 
 
 What is wrong with the theatre is, to a certain extent, right 
 
 21
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 with the music-hall, and this for two reasons: we have to deal 
 with a different kind of playgoer, and the excessive valuation of the 
 actor is sharply limited by the worth of his songs. I have seen 
 Ernie Mayne, Ella Shields, and others rouse the house with one 
 song and half-fail with another. The theatre-goer, who, on the 
 whole, is not a music-hall-goer, is usually either in a smug condition, 
 or over-conscious of his digestive process. Nearly all the pit 
 and upper circle, and the bulk of the dress circle, feel that they 
 are indulging in a respectable spree. Leaving aside the one who, 
 in the newspapers, signs his letters as * Old Playgoer ' (generally 
 an old fool), or ' Old Firstnighter,' probably an old lunatic (because 
 the first night is the worst night), the cheaper seats in a theatre 
 are tenanted mainly by people in a stupefied state of admiration. 
 They have escaped for a few hours from the dug-outs of respect- 
 ability; their families have not long emerged from the tradition 
 that the theatre is a place of evil repute; some even believe that 
 they are improving their minds, which is touching, whatever the 
 condition of their minds. They file their programmes. They 
 loudly proclaim to their friends that they ' ought ' to go and see 
 such and such a play. Perhaps they go because they ought to. 
 Perhaps they go to dream dreams; no doubt nightmares do not 
 disappoint them. The stalls are not in search of virtue tempered 
 with a little vice; most of their patrons are confessedly in search 
 of vice neat. They never get it. And if this vice, invisible to 
 anybody who is not a bishop or the editor of a Sunday paper, is 
 necessary to their health, it is because they visit the theatre in a 
 state of advanced repletion, because they are people who manage 
 to be replete in the middle of a European war; such is their 
 nature. No wonder, then, that the cold suet of the drama should 
 have so securely become wrapped in the wet dish-cloth of the 
 playgoer. Thus, it may be true to say that the playgoer gets the 
 plays he deserves. The music-hall-goer is different. 
 
 If it is true that many go to the theatre when they have eaten 
 too much, it is, to a certain extent, true that many go to the music- 
 hall when they have drunk too much, which, if I must choose, 
 is less repulsive. They are frankly out for a rag; they want to 
 22
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 laugh, and I had rather they guffawed than drowsed. You can't 
 drowse in a music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, 
 in his elaborately luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, 
 addresses his first and infinitely disabused bow to the audience, 
 to the time when he calls upon the band to produce the smallest 
 possible scrap of * God Save the King,' and hurries out loyalty 
 on the wings of ragtime, there is no flagging. It is not only that 
 red-nosed comedian and eccentric comedienne, American dancer, 
 or sketch got up regardless, tread upon each other's heels; the 
 main thing is the band, the harsh, rapid band, that never stops, 
 that plays anything, providing it is the thing of the day, with all 
 the regularity and indifference of the typewriter. From it gush 
 patriotism, comedy or sentiment, and all three burst forth with 
 their full headline value. There is no tickling of big drums; 
 when the drum is banged you know it; nor is there measure in 
 the sigh of the oboe, for the music-hall paints not in wash- 
 greens and grays; scarlet, black, white, and electric-blue are 
 its gamut. 
 
 Nothing else would satisfy the audience that every music- 1 
 hall comedian must encounter every night. It is a mixed audience. 
 There are old stagers who sit in the same seat every Saturday 
 night, without looking at the programme, and this differentiates 
 them from the playgoer : they are bound for a playground. There 
 are the discriminating who follow the star, so long as the star's 
 songs refrain from appealing to what is described as their better 
 feelings; there are the very young in search of excitement, and 
 determined to get it; there are the slightly older, who come in 
 pairs, and do nothing to conceal the fact. (Of late years, many 
 of these have been lost to the music-halls and have taken to the 
 cinemas because they are darker.) But one thing unites them 
 all: they have come here to be amused, amused at once, amused 
 all the time; they are not ready to make allowances; if an old 
 song is a good song, it is a good song, but if it is not a good song 
 the seasoned music-hall-goer will know it at once. I have heard 
 him turn to his neighbour and say: * It's all up. She won't get 
 across.' Getting across the footlights is not, in a music-hall, the 
 
 23
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 same thing as getting across in a theatre. The music-hall per- 
 former has no scenery to help him, in this sense, that the properties 
 are well known to the audience. I have seen at least twenty turns 
 at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in front of a drop-curtain which 
 I swear is Croydon High Street. The words of the song are, as 
 a rule, difficult to sing. Often, as in the case of George Robey, 
 the costume is stereotyped and never varies. Thus the music- 
 hall performer, having not the scenery of Harry Hope, or the 
 knee-breeches of Malvolio, can rely on nothing but himself. He 
 comes naked into an entirely cold world. His situation is ideally 
 expressed by the old cartoon of the impresario, his foot bound up 
 to show that he has gout. Before him stands the dingy figure of 
 a little performer. This is their dialogue : 
 
 Impresario : ' What's your line ? ' 
 
 Performer: 'Comedian.' 
 
 Impresario: 'Well! get on with it! Make me laugh.' 
 
 If within one minute of his appearance the performer has not 
 got his laugh he will probably not get it at all. If he is famous, 
 and if his turn is not too bad, nothing worse will happen than the 
 administration of the frozen lemon. It is rather tragic, feeling 
 the lemon come. You feel the audience leap up towards the 
 performer, for it is always ready to give him his chance, even if 
 he is unknown; then, in a minute or so, you feel the audience 
 drop away from him; you are aware that he is not being listened 
 to, for people begin to talk, to flutter with their programmes, and 
 perhaps some one may hum an irrelevant air. The wretched 
 performer knows it. If you are sitting in the first row of the 
 stalls you see anxiety come over his face. He begins to shout or 
 to dance rather wildly; he knows that he is not getting across; 
 he tries to attract attention as a cockatoo if he cannot do so as an 
 eagle. Then some one laughs derisively, and there is something 
 hideous in that laughter; it makes one think of the thumb-down 
 attitude in the Roman circus. The curtain drops in the middle 
 of something that is half hum and half silence. That is the lemon. 
 24
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 It is only in extreme cases that the audience manifests dis- 
 approval. Indeed, it is an audience full of good-natured contempt, 
 and if the lemon is taken it willingly passes on to the next turn ; 
 as a rule, the lemon is taken by the management, who ring down 
 the curtain on the first song and do not let the performer come 
 on again. But if the performer does come on again, and strives 
 to recapture lost ground, the audience will give him thirty seconds 
 to do it; if he fails, the hum grows angry as that of a swarm of 
 bees. There is more derisive laughter; a few yells come from 
 the gallery; a general uproar develops from the hum. You 
 discern cries : * I want to go 'ome ' . . . ' Take me back to mother.' 
 . . . Opponents reply as loudly: 'Shut up! chuck him out!' 
 But the voices resume in more and more sepulchral tones: ' I 
 want to go 'ome,' while others join the rag for the rag's sake, and 
 some stentor high above roars: ' Shut yer face, dear, I see yer 
 Christmas dinner.' And then everybody cries: * Chuck him out! 
 while the performer sings louder and louder, and the band makes 
 still more desperate efforts to drown his song. Then a large portion 
 of the audience rise to their feet and bellow enmity until the 
 curtain goes down. That is the scarlet bird, and I have not often 
 seen it on the wing. 
 
 No, there is no mercy in the music-hall audience. For it is an 
 honest audience, and is, therefore, capable of every brutality. 
 Also, everybody has paid for his seat. Nobody there can afford 
 to waste that small payment. They must get their money's 
 worth. They know exactly what they want; they have 
 been wanting it ever since the Middle Ages, and, on the whole, 
 have been getting it. They want rough and obvious jokes told 
 in a subtle and intelligent way; they want to see the performer 
 break plates or sit on the butter, but he must do it in a debonair 
 style; they want songs of which they know the tune by the time 
 the second couplet is reached, favourite songs of which they can 
 bellow the choruses while the triumphant performer whispers it; 
 above all, they want their traditional jokes. Cheese, lodgers, 
 mothers-in-law, twins, meeting the missus at 3 a.m., alcoholic 
 excess, one or more of these must be introduced to make a 
 
 L.M. C 25
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 successful song. It does not matter who you are, whether the great 
 McDermott, Dan Leno, or R. G. Knowles, you must tie your 
 little bark to the great ship of the English music-hall tradition. 
 No famous song has become famous unless a portion of it at 
 least dealt with one of these subjects: ' Champagne Charlie/ 
 * I'm following in father's footsteps,' ' The Girl, the Woman, and 
 the Widow,' are clear evidences of this. Perhaps that is why 
 some delicate artists, such as Maidie Scott and Wish Wynne, 
 have never quite * got there.' Maidie Scott is the most finished 
 product on the music-halls of to-day. As soon as she comes on, 
 her quick, schoolgirl walk, her red hair, her distrait eyes, and the 
 voice which she knows so amazingly how to keep down to a minor 
 key, cut her right out of the stage. When Maidie Scott sings 
 ' Amen,' or ' Father's got the sack from the water- works ' (all 
 along of his cherry briar pipe, because they were afraid he'd set 
 the water- works on fire), and still more when she sings, ' I'm 
 glad I took my mother's advice,' one has a sense of extraordinary 
 detachment. She is aloof, alone. She is so entirely under restraint; 
 knows so well how, at last, to let her voice swell and underline 
 her point; she knows so well how not to waste during a song the 
 power of her splendid blue eyes, but to reserve them for that final 
 point. Thus she should wield astonishing power, yet does not 
 quite; she lacks grossness; like Wish Wynne, her art is a little 
 too delicate to get across. The audience like her, they like Wish 
 Wynne singing * Oo! er! ' and miserably dragging her little 
 tin trunk, but never for either do they rise and roar as they do for 
 Marie Lloyd. 
 
 It is true that Marie Lloyd takes us into another world, that of 
 the comfortable public-house, with plenty of lights and red plush; 
 to the publican's dog-cart off to the Derby; to the large birthday 
 party, enlivened by plenty of sherry wine. In Marie Lloyd's 
 world everything is fat, healthy, round, jolly, bouncing; when 
 she keeps the old man's trousers to remember him by after he's 
 gone, she defines the human quality of her sentiment: she can 
 do nothing false and artificial, such as pressing his nuptial button- 
 hole. Marie Lloyd is a woman before she is an actress, and in 
 26
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 this lies her strength. When she advises the audience to ' 'Ave 
 a little bit of what yer fancy (if you fancy it, if you fancy it), 'Ave a 
 little bit of what yer fancy, I say it does yer good/ Marie Lloyd 
 is expressing the eternal claim of the flesh against the spirit, which 
 has been rediscovered a great many times since Epicurus. She 
 survives a great generation; there is nobody to-day fit to wear 
 her pleasantly-little shoes. 
 
 There is nobody, because the spirit of the music-hall is 
 changing, and women, who are more adaptable than men, are 
 feeling it first. An awful thing is happening to most of the young 
 women on the halls; they are becoming refined. Louie and 
 Toots Pounds, Ella Retford, Clarice Mayne, Ella Shields, have 
 nothing of the Marie Lloyd tradition; they are almost creatures 
 of the drawing-room. Even Beattie and Babs, though Babs 
 does what she can with stockings that nothing will ever keep up, 
 never seem to experience the thick joy of being alive that Marie 
 Lloyd conveys in one slow, sidelong raising of her immortal 
 eyelid. There is, perhaps, a white hope, Daisy Wood, but one 
 cannot be sure. They sing well, these young women, they dance 
 well ; they do it too well ; women of the older tradition, such as 
 Victoria Monks and Nellie Wallace are still themselves: they 
 do not do it so well, but they do it. These are not trained, like 
 the young women, but they have grown up and discovered them- 
 selves; they do not act joy or distress: they cut joy or distress 
 out of common life and lay it down on the bare planks. All that 
 is going, for the music-hall is growing refined. 
 
 Let me dispel a possible misunderstanding. When I say 
 music-hall I do not mean those sinks of virtue, the Coliseum, or 
 the Palladium, the Palace, and the Hippodrome. Those are royal 
 theatres of varieties, eminently suited for long skirts and acrobats, 
 and large enough for elephants. Two of them can safely be 
 handed over to revue, and the rest is silence. I have seen Mr 
 George Robey, I forget whether it was at the Palladium or the 
 Coliseum, and the place was so broad, and so deep, and so high, 
 that his eyebrows looked normal : can I add anything to the horror 
 of this picture ? The only comedian who ever seemed to me a 
 
 27
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 success in those barns was Little Tich, as little Miss Turpentine, 
 because they made him still smaller, which heightened his effect. 
 But those halls pay large salaries, and I suppose they will go on. 
 Indeed, I fear that they are gaining ground because we are daily 
 sinking deeper in the Joseph Lyons civilisation, where everything 
 must be cheap, gilt, and enormous. The old halls, the Holborn, 
 the Metropolitan, the Bedford, Collins's, will not last long; 
 already many halls have been seized, the Tivoli and the Canterbury 
 by cinemas, the Shepherd's Bush, I think the Paragon, Mile End, and 
 certainly the Shoreditch Empire by Sir Oswald Stoll. We have to 
 count with Sir Oswald Stoll. Together with Sir Joseph Lyons, he has 
 done more to drive out Merrie England than the dourest champion 
 of methodism. You can go to his music-halls, or to the 
 Palladium, which is not a Stoll hall, but a stollomorphe, and nothing 
 will offend your good taste. During the last dozen years Sir Oswald 
 Stoll has been engaged in a continuous and painfully successful 
 campaign to raise the English music-hall; he has almost succeeded 
 in elevating it. True, in his halls appear all those men who carry 
 on the old tradition and glorify the flesh: George Robey, Sam 
 Stern, Ernie Mayne, Sam Mayo, who sing the crude joy of 
 poor life, which is found in drunken sprees and conjugal mis- 
 understandings, but which yet is true life. Little by little their 
 songs grow less broad. Sam Mayo would not, at a Stoll hall, 
 sing the ditty which used to delight the old Middlesex: ' Ching 
 chang, wing wang, bing, bang, boo,' nor would Dutch Daly 
 sing about the larks in May. Our old comedians are limiting 
 their humours, discolouring their noses, rolling their umbrellas. 
 The young ladies in the audience, and their young gentlemen, 
 modern forms of the donah and her bloke, would feel uncomfort- 
 able if too crudely reminded that love is something more than 
 kisses on Brighton Pier under a pale pink sunshade. The old 
 comedians are not yet dead, and Ernie Mayne can still sing : 
 
 4 Last night I wandered thro' the park, 
 I met a female after dark ; 
 And, feeling faint for want of food, 
 28
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 I fell into her arms how rude! 
 
 Just then she murmured " Kiss me, 
 
 George! " her face I chanced to see, 
 
 The girl was black, with nigger lips; 
 
 I shouted, " Not for me! " 
 
 It's my meatless day, my meatless day, 
 
 I'm not going to eat any sort of meat. 
 
 Meat, meat, meat, meat, 
 
 I'm thin and pale, all I've put away 
 
 Is two roly-polies, never left a crumb, 
 
 Three currant puddings and a little bit of plum, 
 
 And five apple-dumplings are rolling round my turn, 
 
 'Cos it's my meatless day.' 
 
 Yes, Ernie Mayne may still sing his songs of Araby, but 
 little by little he is being borne down by the American raconteur, 
 whose impropriety is always in the best of taste, by the ragtime 
 dancer, by the wandering Italian fiddler, by the respectable 
 eccentric at the piano, by the juggler, by the refined soprano, 
 who sings * God send you back to me, over the mighty sea,' or, 
 ' There's a little mother always yearning for the ones that long 
 to roam.' It's all getting so clean, so precious pure. The old 
 comedian will not last long. He that was once a bull in a china- 
 shop will soon become a Stolled ox. 
 
 But the worst may yet have to come. A new demon is arising 
 in the shape of the cinema. It is as if Merrie England, that once 
 lived at the Surrey Theatre and the Globe, and was driven out 
 when the middle class began to frequent the theatre about 1870 
 and took refuge in the caves of harmony, then doubled back into 
 the Tivoli and the Oxford (fortunately to provide what the late 
 W. T. Stead called * drivel for the dregs '), were being pursued. 
 Wherever Merrie England goes, it seems that, as Mark Sheridan 
 used to put it, ' the villain thtill purthued her, purthued her, 
 purthued her.' When the music-hall has been completely improved 
 I wonder whether he will be glad to have ' purthued her ' to such 
 good purpose. Certainly, in the cinemas, little is left of the old 
 
 29
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 spirit that arose as one drank one's beer in the stalls at the old 
 Mogul, for the cinema, let police magistrates say what they like, 
 bears deep upon its brow the brand of Abel. 
 
 The cinema, like most new and virile things, has split opinion, 
 and has collected round itself more unwise friends and unthinking 
 enemies than any other form of entertainment. Few people like 
 cinemas; they either love them or loathe them, while a few, I 
 suppose, fall into my section of feeling and hate them for not 
 being better than they are. For I believe in the cinema; I do not 
 think that the cinema will do away with the theatre and the novel, 
 but I do believe that it is destined to play a still larger part in the 
 amusement of the people. Also, I believe that it is destined to 
 play a cleaner, that is, a more artistic part. How far it can be 
 brought, I do not know, because I do not suppose that I am the 
 one chosen by nature to raise it high; but if we consider films 
 such as The Birth of a Nation, or Intolerance, where Mr D. W. 
 Griffith, a man of some slight culture, is not entirely devoid of 
 taste, and certainly bold in his conceptions, audacious in his 
 execution, we cannot wave the cinema away with a sneer at cowboy 
 drama. 
 
 The cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on 
 horseback, by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, 
 for the first time, movement could be reproduced. The repro- 
 duction of movement was a new pleasure, and so the mob 
 clamoured for it. Carry yourself back to your first film and, be 
 you as highbrowed as you like, you will not deny that you enjoyed 
 those febrile races, those people falling out of windows, crashing 
 through ceilings, the violent opening and shutting of doors, the 
 rush of flying crockery. Then you grew tired of it and began to 
 think it silly. Well, it was silly, and it is silly, but we should 
 remember that the pioneers of the cinema were Americans of the 
 travelling-showman type, men whose fathers had exhibited the 
 camera obscura loved of our fathers; they had passed through 
 dissolving views, and that type of man could not be expected 
 to like, and therefore to put forward, a dramatic version of Paradise 
 Lost. Briefly, the cinema was put forward by the vulgar, for the 
 30
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 vulgar, but by degrees, as the mob grew weary of movement for 
 movement's sake, as the profits increased, new men such as Pathe", 
 Urban, Gaumont, came in. They were commercial men, but 
 not vulgar men, men who realised that if there was a public for 
 the novels of Mr E. F. Benson and the plays of Mr Alfred Sutro, 
 there must be a cinema public for something less lurid than the 
 early films. By degrees, the cinema improved; it improved in 
 conceptions when subjects such as Quo Vadis ?, The Walls of 
 Jericho, Bella Donna, appeared on the film; yet more ambitious 
 things were done in the shape of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Justice, 
 Intolerance, and many more. 
 
 The film improved, too, in its actual execution. The earliest 
 type of film actor was scraped up from the East Side gutters of 
 New York and the graving-docks of Naples. For that early 
 cinema you needed creatures immensely unrestrained, yelling, 
 dancing, dirty creatures, not at all the people who could have 
 impersonated what the old lady in the pit called the ' married life 
 of the dear Queen.' And as the subjects changed the actors 
 changed; many were taken from the stage; some, to this day, 
 preserve certain characteristics of the ordinary human being. 
 It is not quite their fault if they do not preserve them all; the 
 cinema has had time to make a tradition of its own, which is still 
 represented by the American posters we see upon the walls, 
 where the heroines have enormous eyes and more teeth than Lulu 
 Dentifrice; where the young men have straight backs to their 
 heads, half a pound of white meat on each cheek, a rugged brow, 
 or an emetic grin, briefly, the most brutal type of Chicago com- 
 mercial rigged out in the dress clothes of a suicide; where ladies 
 whose clothing is too low for blouses and too high for evening 
 frocks, whose jewels flash beyond the dreams of Gophir, quaff 
 the sparkling champagne wine. Where the illustrator manages 
 to make Miss Irene Vanbrugh look vulgar. Where American 
 policemen (or admirals, you never know) arrest crooks in mid-air; 
 where all is six-shooters, bowie-knives, cinches, and snarks. Like 
 poster like player, is, to a certain extent, true, for the producer is 
 still a cross between Pimple and the sort of stockbroker whose silk 
 
 31
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 hat glitters in eight places. (Observe the band on his cigar.) 
 But that producer, like that poster, is the old tradition, and is 
 giving way before the ordinary business man who does not see 
 the world in terms of banana falls. That new man is not pressing 
 his actors as the old producer did. He still makes them register, 
 but less intensely. Register means to mark the emotions. When 
 the hero is being filmed, and the heroine enters, he smiles; if he 
 does not smile beatifically enough the producer will cry to him: 
 * Register delight! ' You have all seen the result. In the old days 
 they were registering all the time; you could see the heroine 
 registering terror, while the hero registered nobility, and the 
 villain registered hate; meanwhile, the old mother dropped a 
 stitch and registered benevolence with extreme pertinacity, and, 
 all the time, servants in the background were registering national 
 pride and rectitude. One still has to do these things on the cinema 
 because, after all, the cinema picture has to be photographable. 
 It has to be seen rather plainly, but the cinema producer has 
 begun to understand that, to be effective, facial expression need 
 not be recognisable a mile away. 
 
 It is the excessive vigour of the cinema has endeared it to 
 Londoners; most of them are a rather lymphatic crowd, because 
 they live in too large a city, surrounded by too many interesting 
 things, because they eat rather bad food and not enough of it, 
 and also because most of them work in stuffy offices and factories. 
 Thus they need strong stimuli if they are to react, and no 
 doubt that is why cinemas are being established one by the side 
 of the other, and run for ten hours a day. Like the sensational 
 stories in the magazines, like the newspapers which consist in 
 much headline and little text, they spur this tired creature. The 
 more he is spurred, the more tired he grows. The more tired he 
 grows, the more he needs spurring. So the cinema must prosper. 
 But I think it will prosper in a more moderate way; it will continue 
 to grow, to absorb theatres and music-halls; it has already 
 absorbed the Coronet, the Canterbury, Sadler's Wells, the Tivoli, 
 the Scala, the London Opera House, and others; but I think it 
 will more and more tend to produce the historical film, films based
 
 PLAYGROUNDS 
 
 on novels and plays of some slight merit; that it will increasingly 
 provide bearable music. For a while it may not originate much, 
 and therefore it will not easily become a form of art. I am not 
 sure that it can become a form of art, though I do not know why : 
 the ballet is a form of art, and people like Nijinsky, Pavlova, 
 Madame Rambert (let alone TagHoni and Gene) have made a 
 great deal of it. I do not say that it is impossible for the cinema 
 to produce a work of art, but this must be within the limits of 
 pantomime, which are close and narrow limits. Subtle emotions 
 it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ' she thought 
 this, because she thought that he thought that.' (If a cinema 
 company will film The Golden Bowl, I will burn seven candles as an 
 offering to the Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave 
 to the play and the novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience 
 by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre 
 can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the 
 cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to 
 reproduce flying feet. Because it cannot speak, it must move, 
 and so it is a different kind of thing. 
 
 That does not mean that it need always be the rather crude 
 thing it is to-day. As people of better taste come into the business, 
 we are likely to do away with a few of the continual changes of 
 scene; we shall reduce repetitions, such as the woman who end- 
 lessly rocks the baby's cradle between every tragic scene in 
 Intolerance. Repetition is the way in which a crude taste rams its 
 point home; a fine taste will select its points better, need to make 
 them less obvious, know how to vary them. The selective art of 
 the novelist can thus be applied. Also, the finer taste will not 
 corrupt the actor as hitherto he has been corrupted, by leading 
 him into a wilderness of monkeys. The cinema will learn restraint, 
 that first need of all art. Some of the actors, such as Norma 
 Talmadge, Pauline Frederick, Mary Pickford, and especially 
 Charlie Chaplin, have already evolved a new form of acting, and 
 not a mean one. When Charlie Chaplin runs along a road, in 
 that queer, lolloping way which starts from the shoulders and 
 animates his fingers and his elbows, chasing a Rolls-Royce that is 
 
 33
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 obviously travelling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, 
 when thereupon he falls into a ditch, and extricates himself with 
 an air of incredulity, when he then appears to realise, with a 
 detachment that none but Plato could have equalled, that he is 
 not likely to catch that car, and decides to go home, Charlie Chaplin 
 does a wonderful thing: he turns his back on the audience, and 
 you know, from a little ripple in his back that he is considering 
 the situation. Then the head gives a jerk, one of the shoulders 
 goes up, the fingers give a twist, and long before Charlie Chaplin 
 turns round to face the audience, with his soft eyes laughing, 
 his animate body has told you what he meant: * It's gone. Oh, 
 well, I don't care.' The popularity of others may wane, but 
 Charlie Chaplin is a monument. As in the case of the music- 
 halls, a merciless audience has formed, and its love has readily 
 been given to the best. 
 
 34
 
 Ill 
 
 THE FRIENDLY BOWL
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE FRIENDLY BOWL 
 
 HARD things are said of the London public-house. It is dirty; 
 it is dingy; there is nothing to sit on; there is nothing to read; 
 it possesses neither intellect nor domino set; it is not a place 
 where a man can take his wife and family; it should be improved, 
 it should be suppressed (subtle distinction), and so on. The 
 curious side of these assaults is that the people who rave at the 
 public-house are not the people one sees in it, and one wonders 
 whether they passionately desire public-houses after their own 
 heart, and, presumably, for their own use. I have visions of the 
 public-house of their dreams, aesthetic and antiseptic, furnished, 
 according to persuasion, with Fabian tracts, or tracts of greater 
 orthodoxy. I imagine a staid crowd in that reformed public- 
 house, let us say, the Reverend Dr Horton and party, quaffing 
 the foaming cider-cup and discussing the principles of recon- 
 struction; Mr Sidney Webb and Mr Bernard Shaw passionately 
 engaged at spillikins . . . and the working man in the modest 
 background. 
 
 The idea has little attraction, because, frankly, I like the 
 London public-house, just as I like the Paris cafe and the German 
 beer-hall. I do not see why we should make our public-houses 
 into Parisian cafes, for our needs differ from those of Parisians, 
 and we do not, among other things, visit public-houses to play 
 dominoes or to read The Spectator. Men go to public-houses to 
 drink, either because they are thirsty, or because they like drink. 
 Notably, the working man goes there to be rid of that wife and 
 family of which he sees quite enough. I know it is difficult for 
 the well-to-do man, whose house contains ten rooms, who has 
 a private room at his office, and a sulking chair at his club, to 
 understand that the working man, who generally lives in two 
 rooms with several children and the scented memory of many 
 meals, should want to escape this felicitous atmosphere. It may 
 also strike him as strange that the working man should not, after 
 
 37
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 a ten-hour day, relish ' a good, brisk walk.' Also, he does not 
 realise that ours is not yet a kid-glove civilisation, and that most 
 of our working people like the sensual life. Being Anglo-Saxons, 
 they are largely impervious to art, and rather crude in love; so 
 their sensuality finds an outlet in drink. You may deplore this 
 sensuality, but it is no use trying to stem it by making distasteful 
 the conditions under which it is indulged; the way to stem it is 
 to make a change in the creature, by treating it as a man, by 
 paying it as a citizen, and by granting it justice instead of favour, 
 education instead of teaching. 
 
 A new English people will make a new public-house; to-day, 
 they have the public-house they deserve, and it is not such an 
 evil place as some like to make out. Pellucid reader, have you 
 ever visited The Green Man ? The Red Lion ? or The Bedford 
 Head ? Do you know the brew of The Warrington and The 
 Horseshoe's chop ? I like their busy bars, so cunningly 
 stratified into public bar, private bar, and saloon. They are a 
 microcosm of English society, where everybody keeps himself to 
 himself, where every class is defiled by every other class because 
 the one beneath is ' low,' and the one above ' stuck up.' In 
 England, classes barely establish internal toleration. There are 
 few equals inside classes. One either looks up or looks down, 
 and one never looks at. But in public-houses a rude toleration 
 does exist. They are not unattractive, for rough friendship is 
 included by every barmaid in the ' gin and peach.' One talks to 
 people one does not know. If one stays, one may hear the history 
 of their life. Nor are all public-houses ugly; there is a Dickensian, 
 a Jacobean charm in the dazzle of their many glasses, in their 
 piling bottles, their ash-trays presented by the brewer, their 
 match-stands, a gift from the distiller, in the portraits of 
 horses and dogs that proclaim the virtues of Johnny Walker, 
 and Black and White. Aesthetically speaking, these articles 
 are ugly, but they have a certain joviality which is not dis- 
 agreeable. 
 
 It is a mistake to think that public-houses are all alike. No 
 two places are alike; not even Lyons's depots are all alike, for 
 38
 
 THE PUB 
 
 To face paee 3?
 
 THE FRIENDLY BOWL 
 
 the personality of the manageress reveals itself, say in strange 
 arrangements of salt-cellars. The casual visitor may not find 
 much difference between The Red Lion in the Harrow Road, 
 The Hero of Maida, Bricklayers' Arms, or The Archway, and I 
 will not stress it. But it would need a more than casual observer 
 to overlook the spacious cleanliness of The Warrington, and its 
 rather Victorian air of solid comfort; should he go to Rule's, or 
 The Cheshire Cheese, he will be obsessed by the domestic fusti- 
 ness of places that have escaped renovation for a century. Those 
 old taverns reveal a London little older than fifty years, when no 
 Ritz-Carltons were open, when the young man could join no 
 club until he was a middle-aged one, and when he ate his meals 
 in his rooms in Bury Street off soiled mahogany. These old 
 places are traditional, and their ale is traditional. I suspect that 
 it is a secret blend of old ale and new ale, the new being poured 
 into the old casks, thus ever inheriting and ever bequeathing the 
 virtues of the family. 
 
 And other inns have their temperament, which is that of 
 their customers. Thus, at the public houses of London 
 Wall, as also at Coates's Wine Bar, you never get away from the 
 sense of business. These places are friendly, but wary. Likewise, 
 at The Cock, in Fleet Street, there is more noise and less wariness, 
 because here is an exchange for news, and occasionally for facts; 
 farther on, at ShirrefFs, the attraction is sound wine under sound 
 arches. ShirrefFs clientele numbers rather obese people who 
 know how to treat a glass of port. Thus should you treat a glass 
 of port : let the glass be not quite full, so that the holy wine may 
 have space in which to unwind its lovely surface; raise the glass, 
 holding its stem so that the fingers may not break the amber oval 
 of its form ; then raise it to the level of the eyes, so that the pale light 
 of the city may stream through that rich amber, and emerge 
 transfigured; draw closer; respectfully breathe in the soft, 
 insidious scent that rises to your nostrils like a prayer. Then 
 only, when the golden ghost has spoken to all senses save that of 
 taste, drink, and drink slowly, without haste, with respect, not as 
 a vulgar man, thirsty, but as a man without thirst, and risen over 
 
 39
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 such necessity. Thus only shall you be companions of Amarante, 
 Miranda, and Sabor. 
 
 If all drank with such elegance we might hear less of public- 
 house reform. Of late years, attempts have been made to humanise 
 the public-house; the first result has been to make it inhuman. 
 I lead no attack upon the Public-House Trust and the People's 
 Refreshment House Association. They are excellent bodies, and 
 once upon a time I supported them, but as I grow older, I think 
 I grow more depraved. I know it is not pleasant to see people 
 drunk, though some are still more unpleasant when they are 
 sober; I do not support the public-house in selling last week's 
 sandwiches and last year's cheddar, but still ... ale that hath 
 no sting . . . and leadless glaze ! Instinct wars with my reason; I 
 see the public-houses grow more civilised, and a faint regret 
 creeps over me that good intentions should get into beer. 
 
 It is true that at the other end of the scale luxury fights with 
 good intentions and produces, well, not the abomination of 
 desolation, but the greater abomination of delectation in the 
 shape of the American bar. Already a young civilisation has 
 produced its first-fruits, such as broncho busting, college yells, 
 and cinema rides; already poets quaff from the foaming soda- 
 fountain in Hippocrene City, Pa. (or possibly Minn.), and in the 
 friendly bowl mix the cocktail. Magic word, eloquent in form! 
 I cannot express what I owe to the cocktail: it provides half of 
 what a dinner party needs, for it stimulates conversation. The 
 other half is provided by bridge, for it stops this conversation. 
 The power of the cocktail is not that of the pure in heart; it is a 
 complex, a modern; it is a congress of alcohols; nothing is alien 
 to it; nothing can hallow it; nothing can resist its repeated 
 assaults. With all drinks it has affinity. It carries the bar sinister 
 of all liqueurs. Bitters and Curasao, whisky and maraschino, 
 brandy, vermouth and cassis, Fernet Branca, gentle raspberry, 
 all of these; and creme de menthe, and gin, and absinthe, and 
 apple-jack, these, too, are of its fiery soul, and apricot brandy 
 that is like a blush, sherry like a burnt topaz, paprika to make 
 you leap, and sly benedictine, dancing anisette, and port like a 
 40
 
 THE FRIENDLY BOWL 
 
 minor canon, gins from Plymouth, and Schiedam, virginal 
 grenadine, all can join with all the fruits the world has ever known, 
 cherry, lemon, tangerine, olive, spray of tarragon too. And thus one 
 begins a cocktail. Let your basis be gin ; enlist vermouth; let 
 bitter and maraschino creep in: behold Martini! But expel the 
 vermouth to substitute apricot brandy: then you have Hungarian. 
 But if for you gin has no fire, then let your mainstay be rye whisky : 
 its allies, bitter and vermouth, and Manhattan for you appears. 
 And others for you shall rise, soda cocktail and love tree, or silver 
 fizz, or blagden punch ... or hot apple toddy. Treat not the 
 cocktail rudely. Let all coalitions be gradual, and temper their 
 fire with ground ice; then cast the whole in the silver mixer and 
 shake, shake, shake. While you shake, meditate. 
 
 In English bars they neither shake nor meditate; they drink 
 too uncritically the expression of the brewer's artistic temperament, 
 and give forth too little of their own. But, still, they are pleasant 
 enough, these bars, whether British, as the gloomily popular 
 Leicester Lounge, or foreign as the Monico. They have 
 all the well-bred indifference of the Englishman who asks 
 you no questions because he seeks no answers, who makes 
 no comments because he has nothing to say. You need, you pay, 
 you are satisfied, you go. There is no revelry. For true revelry, 
 the glass that sparkles and the jug that foams, you must go to 
 some club at least a hundred years old, and in St James's Street or 
 Pall Mall, where ' old man ' and ' old thing ' know each other's 
 record and capacity, where, under an ancient roof, the prairie 
 oyster revives the spirits that flagged in the Row. Watch the 
 bow windows of some ancient club, and, while still holding that 
 good wine needs no bush, confess that good wine gets it. 
 
 L.M. D 41
 
 IV 
 WANDERERS
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 ALPHONSE DAUDET, when analysing Tartarin de Tarascon, found 
 in him two Tartarins, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho. 
 Tartarin Quixote liked fighting, adventure, uncertainty, blood, 
 knives, unscalable peaks, tornadoes at sea. Tartarin Sancho 
 liked flannel vests, long drinks of lemonade on a hot day, chocolate 
 in bed in the morning. No doubt, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin 
 Sancho live in many of us, and certainly I confess to desperate 
 moods which, on the whole, I restrain, and to self-indulgent 
 moods which, on the whole, I encourage; but when we consider 
 men we know, it is curious how much more strongly Tartarin 
 Sancho or Tartarin Quixote is developed in them. Tartarin 
 Sancho leads the majority of mankind, that majority which is 
 always looking for a good billet, for a pension, for a nice little 
 wife, a cat, and a garden. Some, more ambitious, substitute for 
 the nice little wife a woman of title, for the cat a hunter, for the 
 garden an estate, but their desires, after all, are still those of 
 Sancho, even though they are those of Sancho become Governor 
 of Barataria. Naturally they adopt the wadded life. It is not a 
 crime, and no doubt many of the Tartarin Quixotes, who number 
 among them tight-rope dancers, mining magnates, card-sharpers, 
 and cabinet ministers, often come to regret the bed quilt of a 
 blameless life. Only the bed quilt is not for them. 
 
 Somehow, I don't know why, I cannot help feeling that 
 Tartarin Sancho is less normal than Tartarin Quixote. He does 
 such strange things; he enlists in a bank, grinds out his little 
 span of life and dies; or he becomes a barrister, pleads cases he 
 believes in, and also others; or Tartarin Sancho turns into a 
 respectable stockbroker, that is to say, he never speculates, but 
 induces other people to gamble; or he becomes a professional 
 soldier, and passes the first half of his life hoping there will be 
 a war; if there is none, then he passes the other half in the rather 
 more decayed parts of Earl's Court. These are queer trades, for 
 
 45
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 they do not seem to satisfy anything that man needs if he is to 
 feel complete. It is not enough that a man should, by the time he 
 dies, have manufactured, let us say, large quantities of office 
 furniture, have played golf, have gone to Eastbourne or Monte 
 Carlo, have met the one girl whom he wrongly imagined to be 
 the only girl in the world, ignoring the fact that there are thousands 
 like her, have reproduced the species and left them behind to do 
 likewise. 4 Such is life,' says my old friend the housekeeper of 
 Wellington Buildings, Bethnal Green; she is right, but somehow 
 this explanation does not satisfy me, and I wonder whether all 
 those respectable, clean-living people are not really degenerates, 
 in so far as they have lost the desire for colour in life. It may be 
 that Tartarin Quixote does not desire colour in life, and that 
 he would gladly exchange the pebbly bed of romance for the 
 eiderdown of the regular life; still, what a man does matters, as 
 well as what a man desires. It is all very well praising the mute, 
 inglorious Milton in the factory or the shop, but the Milton who 
 manages to break the silence is also important in the scheme. 
 The idea is greater than the fact, but to deny the fact would be to 
 run Plato too far. 
 
 Therein lies the charm of the queer people, in whom London 
 is rich, people who follow unexpected occupations, occupations 
 that nobody would naturally think of following. One can under- 
 stand how Mrs Smith comes to hear from one of her husband's 
 friends that they want an apprentice in the printing shop; she 
 sends little Tommy to the printing shop, and he becomes a printer. 
 But how does little Paolo become an ice-cream man ? There are 
 lots of ice-cream men, and so we must believe that some impulse 
 directed young Paolo towards ice-cream. How did it happen ? 
 Was it a vocation, this selling of ice-cream ? Did he discover an 
 ice-cream opening ? I don't know; I once asked an ice-cream 
 merchant why he sold ice-cream. He told me that he did it 
 because his father did it. Then I asked him why his father sold 
 ice-cream. He told me that his father sold ice-cream because his 
 grandfather sold ice-cream. Then I saw that we might go on 
 for a long time like this, and let him alone, for the ice-cream 
 46
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 merchant was growing suspicious. I am glad that I do not 
 know whether his grandfather sold ice-cream because his great- 
 grandfather sold ice-cream, for this leaves a little to my imagination, 
 and I am able to imagine that in the misty cinquecento, some 
 adventurous Florentine, some relative of Benvenuto Cellini, was 
 impelled to forsake a hospitable guild to push about the European 
 tracks the gay little carriage that to-day bears the Italian flag, 
 diplomatically intertwined with the flag of the country in which 
 the merchant happens to trade, the portrait of King Victor, and, 
 on the other side, some touching scene such as ' Mother's Last 
 Kiss.' 
 
 The ice-cream man sets out every day on adventure. He 
 may have a beat, but I prefer to think that he follows in the wake 
 of the sun, always where it is hottest, caring little whether the 
 street be mean or opulent. I like to think of him as at the mercy 
 of a cold snap that ruins him, while it makes the fortune of his 
 fellow merchant, the hot-potato man. (What a beautiful poem 
 Tennyson would have made of that . . . the golden wheel turning, 
 and raising high, now the ice-cream, then the hot potato . . . and 
 always above a noble voice bidding them hope and pray.) Of 
 course, there are no hot-potato men now. I wonder what happened 
 to them. Indeed, that is what oppresses the curious when he 
 considers the wanderers: what becomes of them when they are 
 no longer strong enough to ply their strange trades and to range 
 the world ? Are our workhouses full of crossing-sweepers who 
 sweep no more ? Perhaps it is not so tragic, after all, to have been 
 a crossing-sweeper and to end in the workhouse; I cannot imagine 
 a crossing-sweeper murmuring with Mr Kipling: * Me that 'ave 
 been what I've been! ' for he has never been more than what 
 Mr Tim Healy would call a movable fixture. He has just sat 
 and touched his cap, and been tipped, and has occasionally swept. 
 But he must have meditated. No man can sit for ten hours a 
 day in the same place without meditating; I say this without 
 authority, for I have known only one crossing-sweeper who 
 meditated to any effect; he was a pronounced optimist, and 
 believed that the world was getting better and better, this because, 
 
 47
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 for forty years, he had been observing the quality of people's 
 boots. As he put it, when he started in life some of them wore 
 no boots; later on, they began to wear other people's cast-off 
 boots; now they were getting on to buy their own boots, and 
 what with that, and what with the skirts getting shorter and 
 shorter, and the stocking getting thinner and thinner, by gum, 
 he was blowed if he knew what was going to happen next. 
 
 No, crossing-sweepers are not wanderers. They are limpets. 
 I should not have thought of them if they were not street folk, 
 for it is a distinguishing trait of the wanderer that he is a street 
 creature, something that appears from the stones in the early 
 morning, and at night into the stones seems to vanish. The 
 London wanderer may have a home, but only in the sense of the 
 London sparrow. Can you imagine the flower-girl's home ? 
 If the flower-girl were indeed the sort of flower-girl of whom you 
 see half a hundred portraits every year in the Royal Academy, 
 a sort of pure and peach-blossom girl, she would have a home 
 like Me'lisande, very, very small and dainty (you know, the 
 Charbonnel and Walker- Marcus Stone style), with chairs covered 
 in flowered chintzes, and a white cat. At night she would lie in 
 her little white bed, over the head of which would hang a text 
 about the lilies of the field; her fair hair would ripple over the 
 pillow; her rosy lips would open in a sweet smile as she dreamed 
 of the dear little faded flowers which she had stood for the night 
 in her tooth-glass. (Tooth-glass! Nasty realist touch; I shall 
 never do this sort of thing properly.) Ah, if it were only like that ! 
 If she were not a big, fine woman of about forty, tied up in three 
 thick shawls, which imperfectly conceal her tidal bodice; if only 
 she did not so much love a quartern of gin. It would be much 
 more romantic, but I should regret her if she were to turn into a 
 picture post card, for she is such a jolly good, saucy sort, as a rule, 
 and I like her thick hand terminated by five sausages, one of 
 these sausages strangulated by a wedding ring, the thick- 
 ness of which places one beyond all cynicism as to the permanence 
 of the tie. You see her in many places, by the fountain at Piccadilly 
 Circus, until all the nobs have bought a bunch of violets for 
 48
 
 To face page 4$ 
 
 FLOWER GIRL
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 somebody, now that they have given up the habit of buying a 
 flower for themselves; then you see her near restaurant entrances, 
 cleverly shaming men into buying flowers for women who are 
 already wearing some, and who do not know what to do with the 
 offering because it is invariably very wet; later on, outside theatres 
 near the queues; she is all enterprise, and during the war I even 
 saw her trying to sell to an unpromising margarine queue. 
 
 She grows old at her trade; it is a healthy one, and she has 
 no home. Some of her fellows are stranger and still more definably 
 homeless. Thus the muffin-man, killed, perhaps, by the war. 
 It is a long time since I heard his bell, and was thereby assured 
 that Sunday was getting on nicely, and would be over by-and-by. 
 There is the travelling accountant, a real wanderer, that one, 
 who, every day and night, goes from little shop to little factory, 
 continually confronted with new names, new deals, and, perhaps, 
 new and complicated methods of dishonesty. There are the 
 queerest and most incomprehensible of all, the guides. I do not 
 know what turns a man into a guide, but if you stand awhile near 
 Charing Cross, and make a noise like a Jugo-Slav, it is likely that 
 a seedily, respectably dressed man, with a badly rolled umbrella, 
 will offer to show you the town. Once it is clear that he does not 
 want to exchange pocket-books with you to show his confidence, 
 he may lead you to Henry V.'s chapel, to Westminster Abbey, 
 to Carlyle's house, and so on, reciting as he goes, something like 
 this : ' The painted .'all was originally planned by King John the 
 same who signed that Magna Charta in the year 1215 but the 
 plans being lost in the Wash the project did not come to take 
 form before the year 1533 when King Henry VIII after his 
 marriage with Anne Boleyn laid the foundations on the plans of 
 Sir 'Erbert 'Opkins who was also the architect of the golden 
 tower of Muswell '111 where Nell Gwynn . . .' and so on. That 
 man is a gramophone; I once let him show me Saragossa, but he 
 shall never show me anything more. For one thing, I believe he 
 is respectable at heart, and there is no profit in his company. The 
 only good guide is the amateur guide. I met one in Brussels 
 once, a cab-driver, who stopped before the cafe where I was 
 
 49
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 having a drink; he so many times cried out to me, ' Hi, English- 
 man! you're a sportsman, come along! ' that I fell a prey to his 
 flattery. (Who told him that every Englishman wants to be 
 thought a sportsman ?) He knew his Brussels pretty well, but I 
 will not tell you the rest of the story, for he also knew his 
 Englishman pretty well. 
 
 There are many more of these strange people. A strange one 
 was a woman who offered to give me a thousand guesses at her 
 profession; I declined the proposal and found out that she was 
 a pearl threader. Few of us know that the silken thread, on which 
 collars of pearls are strung, wears out, and that, from time to 
 time, pearls have to be re-strung. All women do not care to 
 send their pearls to the jeweller, for the art of Tecla is profound. 
 Nor do they care to re-thread them themselves, for the holes are 
 so small that the work is infinitely wearisome. So my pearl- 
 threader, who looked like the most respectable type of retired 
 maid, spent her life in Mayfair and Belgravia, where she sat 
 re-threading pearls while the owner read a novel. The pearl- 
 threader smiled as she told this: ' One of them,' she said, ' read 
 a newspaper upside down all the time while I was doing her pearls. 
 And there is another, so unsuspicious; she turns her back on 
 me and smokes a cigarette, and stares into the looking-glass, 
 dreamy-like.' 
 
 But that is a high walk of wanderer. There are others more 
 tragic. There used to be a terrible creature, the runner, who 
 followed four-wheelers laden with luggage, and arrived at the end 
 of his long run too blown to be red in the face, but lead white, 
 his right hand gripped to his heart, his left hand spasmodically 
 touching the greasy brim of his cap. I have seen no greater 
 agony than the hungry desire in those filmy eyes, half-obscured 
 by the wet, dust-laden eyelids. I used to stop the runners when 
 I could; often they persisted, their open mouth close to the 
 wheel; they could not see me wave them away, or they could not 
 hear me call out, as if all the energy of their poor senses had 
 passed into those eternally running legs. One of them seized 
 my trunk as we arrived, before I could ransom myself, hating 
 50
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 my opulence, full of shame. It is fifteen years ago, but I remember 
 him, a big body, but little flesh; I remember his eyes like glass, 
 and the awful stagger of him as he bent under the weight of the 
 trunk, as he tottered, and as I leaped to seize it when it fell. Then 
 the door opened, and the hotel waiter came out with the air of 
 black hostility which the house dog has for the street dog. The 
 runner looked at us without anger, without misery, though he 
 understood very well that the job was not for him; he was like 
 a Greek peasant patiently encountering fate. But, as he turned 
 away, clasping my shilling in his hand, and I saw the foot in the 
 broken boot fumble for the step, a wave of self-hatred rose in me. 
 I told myself: * You have crucified him.' 
 
 They are not so tragic, all of them, unaccountable people, 
 or even people who have adopted trades one thinks queer because 
 one would not have adopted them oneself. Some are merely 
 disgusting, such as the bus-conductor. I have met a civil bus- 
 conductor; I have even met an optimistic one, but nowadays, 
 especially, he stands exposed by comparison with the girl-con- 
 ductor. Oh, it is natural enough that the girl should have been 
 friendly, civil, clean, obliging, for to her the job was new, varied, 
 faintly exciting, probably better paid than her previous work. But 
 still, she made the man terrible. He seems to be nearly always 
 a rather grimy, ill-shaven, misanthropic man; something of the 
 watch-dog and of the bureaucrat has crept into his constitution; 
 he cannot gently ask for fares; the demand must come with a 
 snap and a snarl, pitched on a high note that shall reach the 
 recesses of the omnibus and of the traveller's consciousness. 
 When he yelps: ' Fares! ' I feel for my ticket as if I were guilty; 
 when he looks at me, his little, hard eye suggests that I am bilking 
 the company, and then I hate him so that, if I can, I do bilk the 
 company, and get off four hundred yards to the good, bursting 
 with an unexpelled shout of ' Yah ! ' I hate him above all because, 
 so often, he companions my journey with a snarly chorus, addressed 
 sometimes to the wretched nearest occupant. One hears him run 
 on: * Some people can't learn where buses stop; seem to think 
 it's the Lord Mayor's coach; pulling the string themselves, too; 
 
 5 1
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 might as well be no conductor.' Or it is something like this: 
 ' Chucking their half-crowns about; taking about four hours 
 finding 'em, too; come into the bus and expect to get change 
 as if it was a blooming bank; gave her twenty-four ha'pennies 
 though, that'll learn her.' Or, during a shower: ' Plenty 
 room on top. Drop o' rain won't 'urt yer. When it's fine they 
 all want to get on top.' And so on, a regular orgy of grace and 
 charm. Growl, grouse, snap, snarl, grumble, yap, and long, 
 dirty moustaches, filthy hands, and if it is not a grudging black 
 hand to help a white sleeve on to the bus, it is a hand that has to 
 restrain itself not to shove the white shoulder off. All that because 
 the poor brute is not happy. I know I ought to be sympathetic, 
 for it must be dreadful to travel all day from Camden Town to 
 Brixton and back, to sell so small a variety of goods, never to feel 
 steady ground under your feet when you look for change, to 
 answer the same idiotic question seventy times a day, to tread on 
 feet, to have your feet trodden on. The bus-conductor is a nasty 
 man because he is an unhappy man, because he has no prospect 
 in life, save that of growing older and, for all I know, retiring 
 without a pension. Those monotonous occupations, such as the 
 hellish one of lift-man, ought not to be human occupations, and 
 they will not be such some day. Meanwhile, they rack by 
 boredom people to whom has not been given the free expanse 
 of the pedlar. What a brute Charon must have become by 
 now! 
 
 Those people who range freely street and field are indeed 
 of another kind ; there is in them less civilisation and more civility. 
 They are detached from their fellows; they lead lives of their own 
 within the beating life of the world. Many of the newspaper- 
 sellers are pleasant, ironic people, with a capacity for estimating 
 character, with a quick interest in the news they retail. Citizens 
 of the world, they are often so stimulated by their news that, as 
 you buy, they must tell you the contents of the stop-press. It is 
 a hard trade. Before the war they used to pay ninepence for 
 twenty-seven halfpenny papers: fourpence-halfpenny profit for 
 selling twenty-seven papers! Still, there is a nomadic satisfaction 
 
 5*
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 in their movable beat. They are not locked up. They are in the 
 midst of life, other people's life, but yet life. 
 
 To quite another class belong the beggars, not the pseudo- 
 beggars who profess to sell laces or matches, or the blind, for 
 these are inanimate beggars and nobody knows what goes on 
 behind their faces, but the adventurous beggars, the old woman 
 who follows you, shrilly asking for the price of a cup of tea, or the 
 well-known teacher of French, who stops you in the street and 
 asks you what chance he has of a professorship at King's College. 
 Those adventurers are amusing because they are coloured, 
 because, if you stop, they will tell you where they come from, the 
 number and names of their children, the diseases from which 
 they suffer, and, indeed, recite you the shameless novel of their lives. 
 
 Of the same kind, but more offensive, is the fern-seller who 
 is nearly always (or was before the war) a particularly burly brute, 
 carrying a couple of potted ferns under each arm. He haunts 
 the quieter streets of the West End, and when a woman alone 
 meets him late at night, she will do well to make for the nearest 
 policeman, the proper method being to ask the fern-seller to 
 carry the ferns home for her: a policeman will doubtless be 
 encountered on the way. I remember a fern-seller, who accosted 
 me once in Portman Square. It was about six o'clock in the 
 evening; I told the man that I wanted no ferns; he followed 
 me, rumbling abuse which I could hardly hear. As it happened, 
 I was looking for lodgings, and stopped at a likely house in 
 Portman Street. As I had been walking rather fast, I thought 
 that I had got rid of him, but, seeing I was going into a house, 
 he ran up behind me, and once more began his pressure. While 
 I was ordering him off the door opened, and a fat little landlord, 
 with a grubby little white beard and choleric little blue eyes in a 
 puffy little pink face, stood staring in the doorway. * If you don't 
 go,' I said to the man, ' I'll give you in charge.' But the man 
 went on whining and growling and, being very young, I was 
 rilled with awful confusion at this brawl on the step. This was 
 increased by the nasty little landlord, who said : ' What do you 
 want ? ' 
 
 53
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 ' I want to see some rooms,' I replied, and to the fern-seller: 
 4 Did you hear what I said ? ' 
 
 4 I've got no rooms,' snapped the landlord, ' get out of it, 
 both of you.' 
 
 * What the devil do you mean by both of you ? ' I said to the 
 landlord, being thoroughly enraged. Then I became paralysed 
 at having to quarrel on two different subjects simultaneously. 
 
 4 Mean by it! ' shouted the little landlord. ' What do you 
 mean by creating a disturbance on my doorstep ? Let rooms to 
 the likes of you ! You're drunk ! ' 
 
 At that moment the fern-seller was breathing on me, and I 
 saw that the landlord's words were well-founded, though ill- 
 directed. Before I could think of a reply, the little landlord 
 slammed his door so as to make the whole of Portman Street 
 shake. And I remained alone with the fern-seller, who still 
 painstakingly and threateningly attempted to make me buy 
 ferns. He was the sort of man who speaks from under his under 
 lip. I was so ashamed that I did not say one word, but ran. Oh! 
 how good and free Oxford Street felt. 
 
 I have not been much annoyed or interested by the more 
 desperate wanderers one comes across. Only once did anything 
 perilous come my way, and that I will call ' The Row in Homer 
 Row.' It was many years ago. I had, one evening, made an 
 acquaintanceship with the light fallibility that will, I hope, 
 always characterise youth. It did not at once have results ; some 
 other business intervened, but I remember quite well that I 
 returned at nine o'clock to a little block of flats, that were not 
 exactly flats, but superior model dwellings. I remember the 
 hard, stone stairs and the iron banisters, you will soon see why. 
 As I left, later in the evening, I shut the door of the flat behind 
 me, and stood for a second in the entire blackness of the landing. 
 Then I felt a foot against my left ankle, and a hand grip my left 
 arm. It was the darkness saved me, for it is not easy accurately 
 to seize an arm in the dark, and the notorious ' pull-over ' is not 
 suited for cellar blackness. I remember that I did not think, 
 that I did not have time to be afraid. I remember only the vast 
 54
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 unchaining of a self-protective instinct, that swung my right 
 hand across to the left. I swear I did not will it. And I still 
 have unforgettably in my knuckles the sensation of crash and 
 give, in my ears the curious, fat sound, something like ' kroch,' 
 that was made by some teeth giving way under the blow. And 
 then there was an immensely long pause, during which I had 
 time to think; it may have lasted a tenth of a second. There 
 was a dull, muffled sound, that of a head striking the iron banisters. 
 That is all, except that I remember the clatter of my feet on the 
 stone stairs. 
 
 But to the man who wanders in London streets at night, and 
 I am one of these, stranger things happen. One of those cases 
 was ' The Poisoned Girl of Grosvenor Square.' It was about 
 twelve o'clock at night. As I turned out of Brook Street into the 
 Square, I saw on my right two people by the railings of an area. 
 One was a woman dressed in black, kneeling down and holding 
 on to the railings by one hand. The other was a man, who stood 
 a few yards off, with statue-like immobility. I remember thinking : 
 1 This is awkward. He has been knocking her about, and I 
 suppose I shall have to say something, and if he attacks me in 
 front no doubt she'll attack me from behind.' But still, there was 
 nothing to do but to say something. So I went up to them, and 
 suddenly realised that the two people had nothing to do with 
 each other. She was kneeling in that frozen attitude, and he was 
 looking on. The girl was young, very white, with masses of 
 fair hair. She was neatly dressed in black, and looked like a 
 parlourmaid. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed hardly to 
 breathe. Two or three times I asked her what was the matter, 
 but she did not reply. Then only did I look at the man, who 
 was evidently of another class. A rather large, square man, the 
 sort of man whom you know to be bald, though he has his hat 
 on, with a moustache that was too thick, and cheeks that were 
 too healthy, a phlegmatic, staring man. 
 
 ' What's the matter with her ? ' I asked. 
 
 ' I don't know,' said the man. 
 
 As it was clear that he was the sort of man who wouldn't 
 
 55
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 know, I turned to the girl and, taking her by the shoulder, tried 
 to make her stand up. I was surprised to find her limp instead of 
 stiff, and she fell back against my shoulder with a little groan. 
 
 ' Let me alone,' she murmured. 
 
 4 What's the matter ? ' I asked again. ' Are you in any 
 trouble ? ' 
 
 ' Let me alone,' she said again. 
 
 I felt irritated because she did not realise that I couldn't let 
 her alone, that man's code compelled me to torture her, and that 
 nothing in the world could allow me to let her alone. 
 
 4 Let me help you,' I said, feeling that I behaved like a con- 
 siderable idiot. ' What is it ? ' 
 
 She opened her eyes a little, and murmured: 4 I've taken 
 something.' 
 
 4 Taken something ? ' I repeated, vaguely thinking of theft. 
 4 What do you mean ? Taken something.' 
 
 4 Poison,' she said. Then again : ' Let me alone.' 
 
 I hear the shrillness of my voice as I cried out : 4 Poison ! ' ; 
 then I found myself hurrying her along the pavement. * What is 
 it ? ' I said to her, as we went. 4 Is it laudanum ? You've got to 
 walk, you know,' and to the man : * Hurry up. Get a cab.' There 
 was no cab to be seen. 4 Come along! ' I shouted. ' Run ahead 
 and get a cab.' After a moment's hesitation he waddled away, 
 not much faster than we. And now the girl was almost weeping, 
 while I tortured her with questions, tried to make her run, this 
 one idea of laudanum in my mind. At last she answered : 4 Spirits 
 of salt.' 
 
 It took us very long, I think, to get up North Audley Street, 
 and I felt rent by her youth and her prettiness, for the fair hair 
 was coming unbound on my shoulder. There was a tenderness 
 in me as I lifted her at last into the cab. I remember saying to 
 the man, 4 You've been pretty slow about it. I hope you haven't 
 killed her. What were you doing staring at her instead of doing 
 something ? ' 
 
 Then he said: 4 Oh, well, one doesn't want to be mixed up.' 
 
 There is no end to this story. I took her to the Middlesex, 
 56
 
 H 
 
 O
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 and they saved her by means of the stomach pump : to this day 
 I cannot help wishing that her salvation might have had a more 
 romantic name. But much more impressive is the man's remark. 
 I should not wonder if most people go through life with a single 
 end in view: not to be mixed up. And one might as well be 
 dead as not be mixed up. I have been much more mixed up than 
 I dare tell in this respectable volume. I stole a baby once. 
 
 That is the story of * The Stolen Baby of Pimlico.' I was 
 waiting for an omnibus one night at the Chippenham. A young, 
 dark girl was also waiting for the omnibus, but as she was showing 
 more signs of impatience than are usual, namely, stamping, I 
 could not help being interested. At last, as she passed me and 
 flung me a look of intense malevolence, which I felt was rather 
 unfair, I could not help smiling and saying: * I wonder whether 
 there are any more buses/ (Now I come to think of it, I might 
 have said something more soothing.) This had the unexpected 
 result of arousing confidence. * There's got to be another bus,' 
 she said. * I've got to fetch my sister's baby.* 
 
 ' Oh! ' I remarked. 
 
 We said no more for some time, and still no omnibus came. 
 Then a taxi crawled up to us, and I said : * Well, if there are no 
 more buses we had better take this taxi.' The dark girl, who was 
 young and very pretty, put on an expression of increased malevo- 
 lence, but as I stopped the taxi, she said : * Oh, all right then, but 
 I give the cabman the address, and not you.' As we sat down, 
 I gathered from this that my wanderer was no fledgling. But, 
 after a few minutes, as she discovered that I made no attempt to 
 kiss her, she became confidential. She had run away from an 
 evil stepmother. She had 2 IDS. She had just taken a furnished 
 flat at 3 i os. a week. She was nineteen. She was going on the 
 stage. Also, she wouldn't have gone away if it hadn't been for 
 her father. (Rather mixed, this.) As we drew nearer to Pimlico 
 I became more and more confused, for the baby was turning 
 into her sister-in-law's baby, and I swear that he became a she. 
 We stopped in a little black street in Pimlico, in front of an 
 enormous Victorian house which was still blacker than the street. 
 L.M. E 57
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 * I must ring,* said the girl, and promptly took from her little bag 
 a key. Therefore she did not ring, but disappeared into the 
 house, the inside of which was blacker than the outside, leaving 
 the door wide open. After I had waited for a moment she came 
 out again: ' I say,' she said, * I can't carry him down; he's too 
 heavy.' 
 
 ' Oh,' I thought, * now I'm in for it. But they can't have 
 laid much of a trap for a young man picked up outside the 
 Chippenham.' So, true to my principles, I went in. The house 
 stank of solitude. It was the sort of house that does not even 
 creak. I felt my way up to the first floor, and in a back room 
 where there was very little besides a bed and a couple of chairs, 
 I found asleep a pretty boy aged about five. ' Pick him up,' 
 murmured the girl, ' and don't make a noise, I don't want to 
 wake the woman so late.' Obediently I picked him up, and 
 carried him down into the taxi. Just as the girl was about to 
 follow me in, she said: 'Now I'd better pay the woman. Lend 
 me two shillings.' In a few moments she came back, and some 
 time later made me pull up the taxi at the corner of a side street, 
 off Elgin Avenue. 
 
 Only later did all these confusions, this mixture of sexes and 
 relationships, the silence in the silent house, lead me to theories. 
 Little by little they crystallised into this: I seem to have stolen a 
 baby I don't know, belonging to somebody I don't know, and 
 taken it I don't know where, in the charge of I don't know whom. 
 It preyed on me rather. I even worked up an alibi. Now I 
 suppose it does not matter, as the child may be a house- 
 holder. 
 
 There are many other stories I should like to tell, that of 
 4 The Watchmaker and the Four Pounds of Black-Lead,' though, 
 really, the adventure of * The Two Girls from County Cork and 
 the Lost Camisole,' is much more remarkable, but these and 
 others must appear in another volume. There are many of these 
 people, and one never discovers them before ten o'clock or so. 
 They live in the streets, where they have their loves and their 
 tragedies, and mainly in those places where there is not too much 
 58
 
 WANDERERS 
 
 light. They like the darkness because the light of human under- 
 standing is not good for their peculiar affairs. We do not think 
 enough of the influence of light. When we stand on Primrose 
 Hill and, as Karl Baedeker would put it, behold before us the 
 rich expanse of a great and sleeping city, we do not individualise 
 the lights enough. When we look down upon Piccadilly 
 Circus flaring from every veranda, and, like the laburnum, 
 dropping wells of fire, when in these days we stand at the corner 
 of Tottenham Court Road and watch the electric signs: 
 ' Player's Navy Mixture,' ' Meux's London Original Stout,' 
 * Y.M.C.A.,' and * Tube,' when we walk in all that brightness, 
 we do not realise that this is the spirit of our city, the rather 
 crude, commercial, and friendly spirit of London. Nor, in other 
 cities at night, say in Birmingham, where through the dirty glass 
 falls dirty yellow light, do we perceive in man unambitiousness. 
 For mankind must have light. Light alone opens the windows 
 on life, and makes night Arabian. 
 
 Only one creature likes the dark, and that is a wanderer, the 
 cat. Have you watched cats at night ? If you try in the street 
 to stroke cats when the mood of night is on them, when they 
 crouch under a bush, rolled up into tight balls, their sharp heads 
 sunk into the woolly folds of their shoulders, when some are 
 shadows in the shadow, spotted with two points of fire, they 
 will not shrink from you, nor approach you, but so remain in 
 static life. Or they will swiftly pass you, at that queer, soft trot, 
 making towards a secret direction with entire intentness. Or, 
 one upon the steps of a house, the other on a balustrade, they 
 will face each other with swishing tails, and so remain in immense 
 motion within the same spot, an infinity of provocation in every 
 shiver of their sleek flanks; you, human, shall not know whether 
 they are minded to love or war. If you interfere, you break the 
 spell of their communication, but there is no room for you in 
 their compact. You are the spectre of the commander, and they 
 flee. But you shall feel the hostility they have left behind them; 
 it flows from the immense cruelty of their cold eyes, that are lovely 
 as emerald and topaz, that can harbour no love, but only 
 
 59
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 voluptuousness, calm, deep eyes that calculate and fix only upon that 
 which can serve them, eyes that glimpse only things they fear 
 and things they desire, not things for which they may suffer. You 
 shall stay awhile in that hostile ambiance, while they have fled 
 into the night, to adventures more secret and profound than any 
 that may be yours, even though you, too, be one of Diana's foresters, 
 a gentleman of the shade, a minion of the moon. 
 
 60
 
 V 
 SOUPS AND STEWS
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 IN another chapter of this book the change that has come over 
 London feeding has already been indicated. The times when 
 respectability edicted that one should eat only within the family 
 circle, when all that could be obtained abroad was a stodgy meal 
 of bread and cheese at a coffee-house, or the lightest refreshment 
 at Vauxhall or Cremorne, are long gone by; to-day, almost as 
 many meals are consumed at restaurants as under homely roofs. 
 It was a long battle the restaurants waged under the early banners 
 of Hatchett's or the Cafe Royal and, strange to say, the Grand 
 Hotel. Yes, once upon a time the Grand Hotel, that ancestor, 
 was the latest thing; in the eighties it was ' the thing ' to lunch 
 or stay at the Grand Hotel. But, in those days, ' the thing ' was 
 rather a scandalous thing, and if one lunched or dined away from 
 home one felt dissipated; one had to choose one's company when 
 taking a meal thus, for the worst was easily thought of one in 1880, 
 while to-day, the best is hoped for. (There is, perhaps, no great 
 difference between the two attitudes.) 
 
 In those days the home was a British institution; it figured 
 in the solemn list which numbered suet pudding, the royal family, 
 bustles, Tennyson, the evangelical attitude, and chenille decoration 
 of mantelpieces. The home had its rights; indeed, it had all 
 rights; it was the place where you ought to want to be, and far 
 from which you would naturally feel remorse; it was the thing 
 you had to * keep together,' the thing you had to * make,' to 
 ' save '; your self-abnegation should have told you that you had 
 no rights except to add the pillar of your person to those of the 
 porch. It has gone, this Victorian rectitude; it has gone the way 
 of Dundreary whiskers and of weepers round the hat; I suspect 
 that the restaurant habit, as it is called, has turned some of the 
 sods for its grave. There is something relaxing in a restaurant, 
 at least to a people such as ours, afflicted with a considerable 
 sense of private licence and of public dignity. Restaurant dining 
 
 63
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 outrages in us a sort of modesty, and, like most Puritans, we 
 rather enjoy having our modesty outraged; it is the revenge of 
 the flesh, and it pleases us godly men to discover in ourselves a 
 streak of the devil. We feel this rather more in the foreign 
 restaurants than in the British; in the British eating-houses, 
 where there is no menu, but only a bill of fare, where understand- 
 able things, such as mock-turtle soup, boiled mutton with caper 
 sauce, and roly-poly are offered us, we know too well where we 
 are; we eat, instead of giving way to greediness; by avoiding 
 that temptation we avoid one of the cardinal sins, and more's the 
 pity. In foreign restaurants, however, where neither the name 
 of the dish nor the form it assumes is understandable, we can 
 develop a sense of sin ; we can do this because our feet are set on 
 foreign ways, all of which lead to Babylon. Foreign waiters 
 address us, and there is no virtue in their eyes; they look like 
 assassins, and it is thrilling to think that they may be assassins, 
 or nihilists, or grand-dukes. Foreigners dine at the tables; their 
 women are too smart to be good; the yellow-backed novels they 
 bring in must surely be undesirable; they are poorly clad, which 
 proves that they lead sinful lives; they are richly dressed, which 
 points to evil courses. They are foreign. Is not the Drury Lane 
 villain foreign ? 
 
 From this sense of sin arose in the beginning the popularity 
 of the Soho restaurants. I do not know when they began to be 
 popular. Some, such as the Restaurant d'ltalie, the Monico, 
 the Villa Villa, are old stagers, but when I first came to town 
 their customers were mostly men ; if couples came they generally 
 included a man who did not care to take his womenkind to such 
 places, but did not mind taking other people's womenkind. 
 (Thus it worked out just the same in the end.) The growth of 
 London, which compelled men to live farther and farther out, 
 favoured the restaurants, for distant dormitories drive men to 
 proximate refectories. The Soho restaurant grew in numbers, 
 together with the Cabins, the Lyons's, the J.P.'s, and others, but 
 at the same time, because they provided pleasant fare at low prices, 
 they gained advertisement from the men who first frequented 
 64
 
 X
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 them. Thus the women heard of them, and they liked them 
 immensely, for the Soho restaurant provides exactly the sort of 
 meal that many women want: next to nothing, pleasantly served. 
 So, in the last dozen years, they have prospered enormously; 
 the early ones, such as Brice's, Le Diner Fran^ais, Au Petit Riche, 
 found many rivals such as the Moulin d'Or, the Mont Blanc, 
 Chantecler, Maxim's, the Rendezvous, etc. Their career has 
 been curiously uniform. Nearly all have been started by a chef, 
 a waiter who had saved up a small working capital or married 
 well. Being foreigners, the proprietors liked good cooking, and 
 in the beginning every Soho restaurant offered a good meal. 
 To-day there are still a few where the proprietor circulates among 
 the tables, asking you whether you are satisfied, and naively begs 
 congratulation, but that state of mind is rare. So long as the 
 customers were mainly foreign, the standard was kept up: small, 
 important, subtle things were done, such as steaming vegetables 
 instead of boiling them, such as putting in salt while the meat 
 cooked. But the Englishmen who came to lunch, having adver- 
 tised their wonderful find, grew very proud of it, began to bring 
 their friends, their sisters, and, nowadays, even their aunts. They 
 came in increasing numbers, and the proprietors discovered 
 three things: that there were in London more Londoners than 
 foreigners; that the Londoners were willing to pay more than 
 the foreigners; that they either didn't know what they ate, or 
 that they didn't care. As very few of the proprietors were in 
 business as artists; as, moreover, they grew discouraged when 
 they went round the tables and asked people whether they had 
 enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms and were asked: ' Were they 
 stuffed ? ' they ceased to take pains. They found out what the 
 English customer wanted: paper flowers on the tables, Japanese 
 fans, and dishes with incomprehensible names. So, one after 
 the other, they began to cater for a purely English clientele; a good 
 many have discovered that the English customers expect made- 
 up meats instead of, say, roast beef, and are willing to take those 
 meats on trust; so the wise proprietor, in many cases, makes up 
 his menu from the dishes left over from the night before at the 
 
 65
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 Carlton or the Ritz. After all, he gives them what they want: 
 a dissipated atmosphere. Not long ago, I watched four school 
 mistresses in a state of considerable dissipation. They sat in the 
 little restaurant, laughing rather more shrilly than they would 
 have at Simpson's, as if excited by the rather excessive effect of 
 prettiness, the mauve walls, the blue and yellow curtains, the 
 pretty fringed shades. Oh, how one understood Sally Bishop! 
 How the mellow spirit of Mr Temple Thurston brooded with 
 folded wings over the little place! The school mistresses listened 
 hungrily for French, which was being spoken by the attendants, 
 and they kept a wary eye upon their fellow lunchers : sober couples 
 drinking claret; young men and women, the latter unpowdered, 
 the former oppressed by sartorial self-righteousness. There 
 was nothing against the lunch; it was a nice, ordinary little lunch; 
 the sort of well-cooked little lunch that could be turned out by 
 the gross, out of a machine, all the year round, every little lunch 
 alike, for ever and ever. But my school mistresses were tasting 
 dissipation while avoiding vice. 
 
 In true cooking one does not avoid vice. One courts vice. 
 One says: * Eating is a sensuality, and we shall satisfy our senses 
 as much as we can. We shall sing hymns to it; people have sung 
 hymns to drinking, why not to eating ? We are not ashamed of 
 " feasting " our eyes and our ears; why not our palates ? ' Some 
 people understand this. Mr Anatole France sums it up well 
 when analysing a Castelnaudary stew: 
 
 ' The Castelnaudary stew contains the preserved thighs of 
 geese, whitened beans, bacon, and a little sausage. To be good 
 it must have been cooked lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence's 
 stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the stew 
 sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is 
 always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient 
 and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the 
 picture of old Venetian masters you find in the women's amber 
 flesh.' 
 
 If you are a proper person you will call this disgusting; you 
 will feel that this is an indecent subject, and that an author who 
 66
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 dares to head his chapter * Soups and Stews ' ought in another 
 world to be chained for a thousand years to the ghost of Colonel 
 Newnham Davis. That is a legacy of the past; not more than 
 twenty years ago it was indeed indecent to discuss food, and if a 
 vulgarian did so, the only thing the lady of the house could reply 
 was: ' Oh, really! ' The war has altered that, and I am inclined 
 to hope that people who endlessly discussed the difference between 
 butter and margarine, the advantages to be found in neck of 
 mutton, will maintain these not ignoble preoccupations. I believe 
 they will, for they were moving that way; they had already left 
 far behind the Victorian lady with a wasp waist who * daintily 
 pecked at her dinner like a little bird.' They may one day adopt 
 Brillat-Savarin's dictum : * Let me cook your ministers' dishes, 
 and they will give you good laws.' 
 
 But, leaving aside Soho, which is, after all, only the culinary 
 frontier, we find that the restaurant has spread over the whole of 
 London, carrying everywhere its gospel of satisfaction. This 
 gospel takes various forms, for restaurants fall into different 
 classes according to their locality and their prices. There are the 
 pompous, like the Carlton, the Savoy, the Popular Cafe; there 
 are the distinguished, such as Claridge's, Jules's, Dieudonne*'s ; 
 there are the fanciful, such as Pagani, Verrey's, old Gambrinus, 
 Bellomo's, Gustave, the Savoyard, the Chinese, the Japanese, 
 the Greek; there is the slab-of-meat class, such as Gatti's, 
 Simpson's, to say nothing of the Shepherd's Bush Restaurant, 
 and the Tulse Hill Hotel ; above all there is the restaurant of the 
 Joseph Lyons civilisation, the Strand Palace Hotel, the Regent 
 Palace, the Strand Corner House. 
 
 They all deserve their little word, and it is difficult to say of 
 each of them just what should be said, because they have so much 
 in common, yet are so far apart, like brothers and sisters. There 
 is a flavour of Joseph Lyons at the Savoy, while Gatti has Reggiori 
 for a little relative. Yet, when one comes to know them well, 
 they are all so different. No one, for instance, could mistake the 
 Carlton for the Savoy; both have a broad spaciousness born of 
 their size, of the comparative expensiveness of their meats; 
 
 67
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 both arc lofty and white and clean; their glass is pretty good, 
 and their plate so-so. But while the Carlton maintains a certain 
 air of having selected from among the not very select, the Savoy 
 shows little sign of having tried that much. To lunch at the 
 Savoy makes one feel not so much that one is among the rich as 
 among the well-to-do on short leave. The Savoy is sober; its 
 luxury is quieter than that of the Joseph Lyons restaurant; in a 
 way, with its top lights, its flowers, it recalls the Joseph Lyons 
 civilisation; the flowers are real, but not much more so; the 
 band is more discreet, but it plays the same tunes. Its population, 
 too, is different; at the Savoy, you do not see the young clerk, 
 but you do see what some of the young clerks will become if they 
 are lucky; many foreigners in a state of gormandise and bejewel- 
 ment; rather dowdy people, too, the well-off dowdy, whose 
 sideboards must be taken to pieces before they can be got into 
 country cottages. The business element is strong. Somehow, 
 one tells a business man fairly easily; he wears good clothes that 
 nearly fit him; his hair is well cut, his cheek is well shaved, but 
 a consciousness of the barber's art hangs about his head; his 
 elegance is not a natural product, it is one of the goods which he 
 produces; he misses ' the line ' which some sediment of aristocracy 
 or musical-comedy upstart achieves better than will ever the 
 business man's solidities. There is too much meat upon his 
 cheeks; you feel that he is a little too rich, just as his eyes are a 
 little too bright; he is like a very new knife that has not yet learned 
 to cut. 
 
 Others, too, Americans, who are happier in those big hotels 
 than any of the English, because hotel-life is, in many of them, 
 an acquired characteristic. They are interesting, those Savoy 
 Americans, abundant women, exquisite girls made of beautifully 
 tinted steel-plate, those men with the square shoulders, square 
 chins, square heads, cubic cheeks; you know, without being 
 told, that they are connected with the cinema trade, or that they 
 are producing a play by Mr Montague Glass or Mr Bayard Veiller, 
 or that they are selling many motor-cars, or something like that. 
 (The American who comes to Europe for the purpose of exporting 
 68
 
 Si
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 art to Pittsburg is not found at the Savoy; he goes to Chelsea 
 and Fitzroy Square.) And yet it is not a disagreeable place; its 
 breadth, the airy width of plate-glass that looks out upon the 
 Thames, the cheapness and the adequacy of its food, all these 
 are part of the new restaurant of the new civilisation, which has 
 replaced the little taverns in the little corners of the town. It is 
 no use being sentimental over the little restaurant, or, indeed, 
 over anything little: there are too many of us for anything little 
 to be much more than a survival. If restaurants did not feed us 
 a thousand at a time, they would never manage to feed us all. 
 
 One thinks of that in the small restaurants that have survived, 
 such as Verrey's. To many people it seems a queer thing to 
 lunch at Verrey's ; it seems rather out of date, and, indeed, when 
 one approaches that frontage, painted a sort of faded 1850 blue 
 and provided with coloured glass, one has a sense of antiquity. 
 Inside antiquity is still more striking, for the big, square room 
 under the skylight manages at the same time to be drab in colour 
 and Moorish Gothic in architecture. It still has the many mirrors 
 of the 'fifties, an air of being comfortably off enough to afford to 
 be dowdy. Rakish and dowdy! Can anything better translate 
 the amusements of two generations ago ? To-day, Verrey's gives 
 you a fair lunch, and at its caf tables, which are somehow more 
 substantial than the cafe tables of Paris, you understand what 
 England thought the Continent must be like in the days of the 
 Grand Tour. 
 
 There are other places, fanciful as Verrey's. There is Bellomo's, 
 in Jermyn Street, a modest, pleasant little place, a long, narrow 
 back room filled with agreeable young couples. Bellomo's is 
 rather like a young-old man, with its panelled wainscoting, its 
 wallpaper of faded gold, and its moulded, early Victorian frieze. 
 There is something solid about its dumb waiters; Bellomo's is 
 somehow benevolent. 
 
 But then Verrey's and Bellomo's are within limited flights of 
 fancy. The curious gastronome will, in London, easily find queerer 
 places and foods. At Pagani's he can come to understand that 
 risotto may well be eaten in Valhalla; at Gambrinus's, the Regent 
 
 69
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 Street one, of course, he could, before the war, when it was German, 
 find unexpected delight in liver-sausage sandwiches, with perfectly 
 sour gherkins, and, heaven of heavens, really cold beer. In those 
 days it was decorated with antlers, enormous fanciful jugs, out 
 of which you enormously drank the frozen gold of that beer. 
 I think it has become Belgian since the war; I am not quite sure, 
 for I went there only once after the transfer. 
 
 But the truly curious go not to foreigners like Pagani or 
 Gambrinus, or even to Gustave, where the foods are truly French, 
 or to the Savoyard, where they are French and eatable under the 
 eye of strange pictures ; the truly curious go not to the foreigner, 
 but to the professional foreigner, to restaurants such as the Greek, 
 the Chinese, or the Japanese. Of these the Chinese is the most 
 attractive. I mean the Cathay, next door to the Monico, not the 
 Chinese restaurants in Limehouse, where nothing is eatable, and 
 nothing is tragic, and nothing is coloured, let Mr Thomas Burke 
 say what he likes. A lunch at the Chinese restaurant is really an 
 adventure, for nearly all the dishes are made of the same things, 
 and yet they all taste different. There is an admirable dish, 
 hang-yang-kai-ting, made of fried chicken with almonds and 
 bamboo shoots. That is a simple one, and the curious will find 
 more profit in a dish the name of which I have forgotten, which 
 contains fried sliced pork, celery, beans, sprouts, mushrooms, 
 bamboo shoots, and green chutney. Eat that, and it is a very 
 large, overflowing, savoury portion; flavour it well with chop- 
 suey (which you can call liquid salt if you are a foreign devil). 
 Eat it immediately after chicken liver soup, and if you do not 
 forget before swallowing the bamboo shoots to chew, and chew, 
 and chew, then a true mellowness will be known to you. Also, 
 do not forget the great bowl of boiled rice, pure, white rice, 
 perfectly dried, not sticky rice a la A.B.C. y but rice where every 
 grain remembers that it has a personality. Don't ask for chop- 
 sticks: the best people in China do not use chopsticks; they use 
 forks. (There used to be a Chinese restaurant where they provided 
 chopsticks for the English; it was great fun watching them pour 
 their food down their sleeves with that conscious air of duty that 
 70
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 seems to overwhelm the Englishman experiencing pleasure.) And 
 don't forget dessert, ginger in syrup, fire in the midst of sweet- 
 ness, like a red-haired girl; and ly-chee, large, sweet, white nuts 
 in an opalescent syrup, extraordinarily good. 
 
 But, in a way, all those places, the very rich and the very odd, 
 are running on tifieir own ticket, and do not express the times in 
 which we live. Our modern times are the Strand Corner House. 
 I should not wonder if many of my readers had never been into 
 the Strand Corner House; that is, if they are incurious of life. 
 If they repent their acceptance of things as they are, they will find 
 an unexpectedly large building decorated with heavily flowered 
 stucco mouldings, with plate-glass, with stained glass, with panels 
 of crimson satin. They will find light, co-operative luxury; 
 superposed tiers, bearing crowds of people lunching on the top 
 of one another's heads, and at the bottom of a deep well, a band 
 that can be heard above the clatter of twelve hundred pairs of 
 jaws. A thousand people at a time really eat all together 
 at the Strand Corner House, and, in a way, no wonder. 
 The place is quite clean, not offensive in its appurtenances, and 
 can supply three courses for less than two shillings; the music 
 is the ordinary dance or sentimental music, the sort that makes 
 you feel friendly or affectionate as required. The public of the 
 Strand Corner House is, therefore, the world. Its variety is 
 much greater than that of any other place. One might think that 
 this public would consist exclusively of flappers and their escorts, 
 and, indeed, the flapper is prevalent, though she comes in threes 
 and fours quite as much as more ostentatiously with a ' boy.' 
 Also the suburbs, middle-aged couples, when the wife has been 
 shopping in St Paul's Churchyard and has strayed down the 
 Strand; unexpectedly you see people with an air of modish vanity, 
 dashing people who smoke cigarettes and drink claret, damning 
 both the expense and the consequences. Though very few of 
 the frequenters could be mistaken for members of the classes, 
 none are members of the masses; they seem to be in a state of 
 social suspension ; they are, especially the girls, of a rather crystal- 
 line type. I mean that you realise their good looks at once instead 
 
 71
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 of by degrees. If you look about you, you will not fail to find 
 half a dozen faces that can give you the knock . . . only, if you 
 look round the other way, you will probably see another half a 
 dozen faces that can give you exactly the same knock, and when 
 one is an old Londoner and has been getting the knock all one's 
 life, well, one unfortunately comes to stand it rather well. 
 
 These great crowds of young people with a little money in 
 their pocket and much zest in their hearts tend to fall into uniform 
 types. The men nearly all buy their collars at the Regent Street 
 branches of city hosiers; the girls seem to skim the lighter froth 
 of the big West End stores, except that Marshall's knows them 
 not. This produces a uniform quality: they have to overtake 
 the fashions, and so become a little outrees. 
 
 Women, more readily than men, respond to the stratifications 
 of restaurants, because they are more adaptable. Their very 
 clothes show it; women are like cats, they have no bones, and 
 easily suit themselves to bell-mouthed skirt or hobble. The 
 female form is infinitely squashable and extensible; any fashion 
 can transform it, and if a woman has the wit to shun the becoming, 
 she can always be in the fashion if she dares. If she fails, it is 
 because she does not dare to underline her deficiency. If I were 
 a woman and extraordinarily tall, I should dress myself in vertical 
 stripes; if I were very short and very stout, I should insert the 
 hoops of barrels under my skirt; I should be hideous, but I should 
 be It, for the essence of true fashion is extremism. I said fashion, 
 not elegance; that is quite another story, but then, to be elegant 
 you must be born as the greyhound, and if you strive to elegance 
 you are more likely to resemble the mouse. Fashion is much 
 easier. 
 
 Not only in her clothes, but in herself, does the metropolitan 
 girl define her city. She is always the creature of the day, who 
 heavily overlays the creature of all time. In soups and stews she 
 has little part, for a woman is a poor partner at the table. She 
 eats and drinks, as a rule, without much science or much intent- 
 ness; she eats too little, she bolts; she does not realise that she is 
 doing something important and artistic. Oh, it is not that she 
 72
 
 SHOPPING 
 
 To face page 75
 
 SOUPS AND STEWS 
 
 is lifted high above material desires, for, indeed, certain articles 
 of food, such as chocolates, certain drinks, such as liqueurs, make 
 her accept the society of the dullest and the most dreary, but 
 such trifles are merely the preludes and the coronals of the true 
 soup and the true stew. Still, she is the decoration and the charm 
 of the table; when Mr Lauzerte said that where there are no 
 women there is no true elegance, he was speaking the truth. In 
 matters of food they care very little what it is and very much what 
 it looks. Also, because few of them neglect an advantage and 
 prove the old adage that what woman most desires is mastery 
 over man, they never ignore what they look upon as a gross means 
 of seduction. It was a woman, I think, who told another to * feed 
 the brute.' What an illusion! If you have to deal with a brute, 
 indeed, you can keep him quiet by feeding him, just as you mollify 
 Cerberus with a sop, but to keep a man quiet . . . how un- 
 necessary in the early days of marriage! and how disastrous after! 
 It is unconsciously, I think, that women strive to please the palate 
 of men, that is they are unconscious of the effects of such a course. 
 Unless they are very unhappy they do not want to soothe the 
 sullen creature; they wish to produce in him a light and airy 
 grace, a not very promising ambition. For some men, who are 
 in possession of all their senses, will feel true gratitude, which 
 is akin to love, to the one who knows how so to flatter them. One 
 of them said to me not long ago : ' It makes the day easier to feel 
 that I shall go back to-night to a perfectly cooked meal, and a 
 perfectly dressed wife.' I am not quite sure whether he said that, 
 or whether it was ' a perfectly dressed wife, and a perfectly cooked 
 meal,' but anyhow, it does not matter, for in that man's mind the 
 two delights had grown mixed. That is what every woman knows, 
 and perhaps she is wise as well as humble in hoping to mingle 
 with the Dotage veloute some of the old philtres of love. 
 
 L.M. F 73
 
 VI 
 IN SEARCH OF VICE
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 IN SEARCH OF VICE 
 
 WHEN I first came to London I was twenty years old; I came 
 from Paris, and, being twenty, felt sure that there remained no 
 sensations for me to experience, no realms of passion to explore. 
 I felt that I had lived well, lived; that I came from Babylon 
 city, and was now entering a Puritanic world, a place of dignities 
 and parliaments, of clergymen with white bibs, of ladies with 
 prominent teeth and elastic-sided boots who said * shocking ' ; 
 I also felt that I was entering the country of le sport, le flirt\ I 
 had also been told that the English were a strange people, adepts 
 in every depravity, of which the secret drinking of methylated 
 spirits was a minor example. I admired them thoroughly, as I 
 admired Westminster Abbey. Briefly, a land of virtue. This 
 state of mind was fairly well kept up for the first year, because it 
 rained nearly all the time, and there is nothing like a rainy summer 
 to raise the moral tone of the streets. I was interested by the 
 life I saw round me, bored by the life I led on thirty-eight shillings 
 a week ; I could afford little in the way of theatres ; whisky made 
 me sick; so did Irish stew and suet pudding; I did not see as 
 much of my fellows as I wanted, because, in those days, I often had 
 to choose between a clean shirt in the evening, and a cut from 
 the joint at lunch. Also, my landlady washed the collie in the 
 bath, which annoyed me. 
 
 It is not surprising, then, that I did not at once enter London's 
 ' gilded haunts of vice.' It took me a little time to discover them, 
 and, to |pe truthful, I am still looking for them. Indeed, I can 
 say that I have employed a considerable portion of the last eighteen 
 years in search of vice, and it may be that I must blame a Parisian 
 education for my disappointment. I thought I had found vice 
 the first time I saw a couple publicly embrace, opposite Marble 
 Arch, never having seen anything so indecent in a Continental 
 city; but this was an illusion, just like another illusion when, for 
 the first time, I heard a speaker in the Park state his true opinion 
 
 77
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 of the Royal Family: I thought this was the beginning of the 
 revolution, and could not understand why the police looked so 
 bored. I do now, for I suppose that meetings have been going 
 on for several generations. But when it came to vice, when I 
 explained to my new and fast English friends that I was looking 
 for vice, when they took me to the old Empire Promenade, when 
 they bade me be shocked at the condition of Regent Street, between 
 Vigo Street and Piccadilly Circus, when they took me to Earl's 
 Court to ogle and to drink milk-coffee, when they drew my 
 attention to the chorus girls performing what they called orgies 
 in the punts near Maidenhead, a certain melancholy crept over 
 me. English vice was overrated. Indeed, to this day, I am sure 
 that there is very little vice in England, that the Londoner, parti- 
 cularly, is a flighty creature, who kills virtue with his mouth, who tells 
 unpleasant stories about the deeds of other people, and paints the 
 town red with the assistance of his fancy socks. They are cowards, 
 really, and most of them, when they slip at all, seem to slip ignobly 
 into the rare satisfaction of a purely animal instinct; also, to do this, 
 they need drink. Nero would not have understood them at all. 
 
 Since those days much time has passed, and now and then, 
 here and there, I have come a little closer to those strange and 
 secret depravities of which, according to the Continent, London 
 holds the monopoly. The newspapers are helpful; for they 
 have occasional fits of virtue and begin to expose something, 
 thus, at last, giving it an advertisement; or the police intervene 
 and shut up a restaurant, thus focusing all eyes upon its pro- 
 prietor and making him so famous that when he opens another 
 restaurant next door he is assured of custom. And so I have 
 known dreadful places, manicure shops where hands were held 
 longer than filing demands, tea shops where the depraved waitresses 
 call you * old dear,' and demonstrate that in a chair when there is 
 room for one there is room for two. It is perfectly appalling. 
 I have been to the old Continental and to the old Globe Restaurant 
 to spend considerable sums on not very satisfactory meals, to see 
 a number of ladies manifest a little more clearly than is the custom 
 the liberalism of their mind. I don't know why it strikes the 
 78
 
 IN SEARCH OF VICE 
 
 Puritan faction as so terrible that the women whom they call lost 
 should congregate in a particular place; it cannot be because 
 thus they can be found, for the Puritans must know that there is 
 no street in central London, no tube, no omnibus, which does 
 not hold as much temptation and as much opportunity as a small 
 room in a quiet restaurant. I suppose it is the openness of the 
 thing shocks them, the fact that they cannot cover it up and, 
 therefore, pretend it is not there. But if that is vice, if that is 
 * the smirch on our fair escutcheon,' then, indeed, must English 
 prudery be easily offended. It must be a sensitive prudery, for 
 it cried out against night-clubs, against the Cave of the Golden 
 Calf, where a few people did drink too much, against the excessive 
 dancing at poor Giro's, which for a time fell among Y.M.C.A.'s. 
 
 Also, during the war, a great fuss was raised in the newspapers 
 over the flappers in the Strand. I do not think anybody would 
 have bothered much about the flappers if, at that time, we had 
 not had among us a number of Anzacs who, as everybody knows, 
 are the gentlest and most guileless of men. These unfortunate 
 young soldiers, finding themselves lonely in a town such as ours, 
 where no man needs go lonely along a street if he has a little 
 determination, lacking all the home comforts which are implied 
 in the possession of aunts, made their acquaintances where they 
 could. The flappers in the Strand who, to my knowledge, have 
 always been in the Strand, particularly on Saturday afternoon 
 and on Saturday night, when they descend upon Villiers Street 
 and the bandstand, coming from Aldgate and alighting at 
 Charing Cross, naturally welcomed them. Now, in the old 
 days the flappers attached themselves to any young man 
 they met; sometimes he was a soldier in a red coat, sometimes 
 just a civilian, and nobody bothered, because in those days it 
 was not evident that anything unusual existed in the association. 
 Common sense revealed to all of us that these friendships had 
 been formed round the bandstand, but nobody was compelled 
 to know that they did not arise out of engagements of five years' 
 standing. On the other hand, the Anzacs, with their beautiful 
 bodies, their bronzed faces and their squash hats, were noticeable; 
 
 79
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 a Puritan, after having, in the course of Saturday afternoon, seen 
 several hundred Anzacs accompanied by pretty girls, was com- 
 pelled to realise that there could not be so many Anzacs united 
 by engagements of five years' standing, to the flappers in the 
 Strand. The Puritan hates realising, because when he realises 
 he has to do something energetic, write to a paper, or form a 
 committee, or something. He does not mind writing to a paper 
 or forming a committee, but the whole thing upsets him; he 
 cannot cover it up, and he runs about with wild eyes, terrified 
 because the thing which is generally covered up has got loose. 
 
 It was that gave rise to the trouble, and the Puritans, deter- 
 mined that the flappers should flap no more, had to manufacture 
 a theoretical Anzac, a young man from Melbourne (but born in 
 the Bush, where no woman had ever been before), a young man 
 extraordinarily pure in spirit, but liable to fall into temptation 
 even if he had to cross the road to do so, a young man imbued 
 by his past education with a profound reverence for womankind, 
 whose feelings of reverence were daily being outraged by shameless 
 exhibitions into which he was reluctantly drawn. It's queer; 
 this flapper question occupied the Press for months; now and 
 then the controversy died down, and then a Bishop or a special 
 article writer brought it up again; agents-general were called 
 upon to proclaim that our soldiers feared no foe in shining armour 
 because their heart was pure, while, in the same column, presidents 
 of watch committees gloomily acknowledged that something 
 seemed to have happened to the purity of those hearts. But all 
 agreed that that purity must at once be restored, that the Anzacs, 
 which includes the Canadians, the South Africans, and other 
 moral weaklings, must be protected. To this day we are protecting 
 men of thirty against girls of fifteen : I never heard anybody talk 
 of protecting the flappers, for it was assumed that, by the time 
 they were fifteen, they had sunk too deep in iniquity to deserve 
 better protection than four walls in Holloway. And no one 
 seems to have asked himself whether these young men, cut away 
 from old habits, from their friends and their work, did not des- 
 perately want feminine companionship; the members of watch 
 80
 
 IN SEARCH OF VICE 
 
 committees did not ask Colonials to stay with them for the week- 
 end; for a long time they did not even provide them with sufficient 
 sleeping places, but seemed to expect them to make merry all 
 night in the ribald waiting-rooms of Waterloo. Briefly, their 
 virtue was to be its own reward, and certainly we could not take 
 from Nietzsche the aphorism that man is for war, woman for the 
 recreation of the warrior. Above all, we could not let them alone. 
 
 Owing to this, my moral sense being aroused by an article 
 in a Sunday paper, I devoted a Saturday to a search for vice. Of 
 course, I began in the Strand, where I was told vice reigns. I saw 
 a great number of soldiers, doubtless viciously employed, but 
 conducting their debauches with singular restraint and dignity. 
 Outside the Corner House stood a number of boudoir ladies 
 from the Government offices, who were deplorably waiting for 
 omnibuses; many of them may have been viciously employed, 
 but as their company was mostly confined to their own sex, they 
 were not sliding very fast down the butter-slide of perdition; 
 mostly, they were eating chocolates, and the fact that chocolates 
 then cost four shillings a pound may be sufficient evidence of 
 undesirable conduct, but this seems to me hardly enough to 
 hang even a girl on. I proceeded up the Strand where the East 
 End was slowly beginning to arrive, mostly in twos and threes. 
 Often, indeed, I met the regrettable flapper; certainly she was 
 powdered and lip-salved, and I do not know that this is exceptional, 
 but right up to Temple Bar not a single flapper made an effort 
 to draw me from the straight path. (It is all very well saying 
 that I may not be the sort of person whom the flapper would 
 want to draw from the straight path, but surely vice has no pride, 
 and stoops to all men.) The most vicious thing I saw was two 
 soldiers and two girls walking rudely arm in arm. 
 
 I did my best. Indeed, I think I became a regular agent 
 provocateur, but I did not seem able to provoke anybody. So, 
 desperately, I turned back and crossed the river towards Waterloo 
 Road. The reputation of this gray and green commercial track 
 was made by the street arab in Captain Brassbound"s Conversion^ 
 who declared that if he did in Morocco the things he did in 
 
 8 1
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 Waterloo Road he would be hanged. But nothing was happening 
 in Waterloo Road; many people were drinking in many public- 
 houses; I entered a few public-houses, and though I tried as 
 hard as the two houses of convocation put together, I found 
 nothing. I will not weary you with details; it is enough to say 
 that, still guided by my Sunday newspaper, I proceeded on my 
 footsore search. By evening, I was lurking round Victoria, 
 watching from the corner of my eyes for the harpies who drug 
 veteran members of the Band of Hope, and after I had loafed about 
 for a while, no doubt I must have conveyed a harpy-like suggestion ; 
 I was seen in a picture palace, peering into the dimness of the 
 curtained boxes, which was easy, as they were not dim. That 
 night I was seen in many places, searching the blackness of railway 
 arches, furtively peering down the staircases of tubes, hoping to 
 discover the worst; I appeared in the deserted City; the back 
 streets of Theobald's Road, the confidences of a hall porter in 
 Gerrard Street (expensive and uneventful), a long inspection of 
 the first floor fronts of Vauxhall Bridge Road, seen from the toj 
 of a tram, all these grew familiar to me; and still nothing. As 
 time went on, my legs grew more and more woolly; my mind so 
 obsessed and incoherent, that I realised time would soon fit me 
 for membership of the National Vigilance Society. I even entered 
 the Leicester Lounge, where there was hardly anybody, as it 
 was not Boat Race night; then I wondered whether a visit to 
 North Bank, St John's Wood . . . and awoke from my trance, 
 remembering that this would be thirty years late. There is no 
 vice in London; at least, there is nothing deliberate and artistic, 
 just as there is very little in Paris or Vienna that would justify a 
 Welsh elder in taking so long a journey. It is a pity that so fair 
 a bubble should be pricked. 
 
 This does not mean that London is a magnified Exeter Hall. 
 There are, in this town, about half a million bachelors, and that 
 is enough to lower the moral status of any city. There are also 
 rather more married men, which does not mend matters. Observe 
 the bias of my mind: I have forgotten to tell you the number, 
 frequently quoted by indignant letter writers to the Press, of 
 82
 
 IN SEARCH OF VICE 
 
 women who hold forth temptation. For it may be true that supply 
 assists demand, but it is much more certain that demand makes 
 supply. During the war, for instance, there was great agitation in the 
 Upper House of Convocation, where the Bishop of London 
 revealed that in Cayeux and Havre undesirable houses were fre- 
 quented by British troops. Canon Burroughs went on to ask for 
 purity patrols, while the Bishop of Oxford presented a resolution 
 designed to protect our troops from molestation in London. 
 This is all very well, and deserves all sympathy, but the Bishop 
 of London unfortunately read out a protest addressed to the 
 Mayor of the French town by its inhabitants, and this protest 
 referred to * crowds of English soldiers waiting outside the houses.' 
 Does one, then, wait for temptation ? Does not temptation steal 
 upon one as a thief in the night, or as a raging lion, seeking whom 
 it may devour ? It is a picturesque idea this, of crowds of innocent 
 victims impatiently waiting for an opportunity to degrade their 
 eternal spirit. 
 
 Temptation is nonsense. I have spoken to many men about 
 temptation; they are seldom tempted, and this for very good 
 reasons : men do not fall, they dive. The women who ' prey on 
 them,' fulfil a function which will be necessary so long as society 
 is as vilely constituted as it is, so long as life is hard and insecure, 
 so long as social relations are false, so long as marriage is expensive 
 and difficult of dissolution, and, especially, so long as the hearts of 
 men are brutish and the hearts of women soft. The class which 
 for centuries has been hunted, has for centuries been maintained 
 by the hunter, just as the fox is bred and protected for the pleasure 
 of the chase. Those women do not seem to me to lead as easy 
 lives as the men who profit by their weakness; they look rather 
 less well-fed, less well-clad; they wear gold of a lesser carat; 
 when they die their names do not appear in the newspapers under 
 the final advertisement: 'To-day's wills.' Truly, the wages of 
 sin are low. Should we not conclude that if bread is so dear, and 
 flesh and blood cheap, there is no great inducement for the sale 
 of flesh and blood, except the cost of bread? Perhaps it is the 
 easiest way, but only for those to whom all ways would be easy. 
 
 83
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 There is no remedy for what the social campaigners call the 
 condition of our streets, except an alteration in the mind of the 
 men who walk in them; Christianity cannot help, for Christianity 
 attempts to solve this problem by purging sin, instead of realising 
 misfortune. Thus too many Christians justify Tacitus : ' After 
 the burning of Rome, suspicion fell on the Emperor. In order 
 to allay them, the Emperor embarked on a series of persecutions; 
 among those he persecuted was a sect that called themselves 
 Christians, who had incurred the animosity of the populace owing 
 to their sullen hatred of mankind.' 
 
 Tacitus was wrong, but then he was judging the Christians 
 of his day as agitators. The streets will alter when the houses 
 along the streets alter, when mankind has found love in the mind, 
 when it is no longer content with the love of the body. The 
 majority of men seem to approach life as pigs do the trough. 
 Visit a West End restaurant, and you will be sure. In that trough 
 are not only curds and whey, and truffles, and other suitable 
 dainties; but excessive clothes and jewellery, honours, false social 
 values, irrelevant powers; so long as the Gadarene crowd 
 nuzzle and fight about that trough, so long will many of those, 
 who are not Gadarene in the spirit, be infected with envy and 
 desire, so long will they be driven to shrillness and self-advertise- 
 ment, so long drawn by popularity and repelled by fame. Mean- 
 while, it naturally follows that what many call vice should endure, 
 for vice is the satisfaction that dulls the flesh when the spirit 
 aches. Happy men have no vices; it is only the unhappy, the 
 hungry, fly to them. For my part, if I had to make laws for a 
 new society, I would make few. I should say rather that we 
 will build our new society so that all may be assured security and 
 justice, but no more. If we were to establish justice, we should 
 automatically do away with the curse of the world, which is wealth. 
 It might be a pity. It may be that Anatole France is right when 
 he says: 'The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this 
 ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe that we shall not 
 again see the flowers that intoxicate, and the eyes that slay.' Still, 
 one would like to see it tried. 
 84
 
 
 u
 
 VII 
 THE POOR
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE POOR 
 
 NOT much more than a dozen years ago, Sir Henry Campbell- 
 Bannerman startled England by stating that thirteen million of 
 our people stood, at all times, on the edge of starvation. He took 
 as a basis the study of the condition of the poor, made by Mr 
 Charles Booth in a great number of volumes, containing a great 
 number of columns of figures, and was alluding in general to the 
 large class that existed on a family income of twenty-three shillings 
 a week. There was something terrible about those figures, so 
 terrible that even the press was shocked. But there was something 
 uninspired and inhuman about Mr Booth's columns of figures; 
 it is all very well telling us that so many thousands of people live 
 five in a room, and so many thousands six in a room, and so on, 
 but it does not mean anything. The ordinary man finds it almost 
 as difficult to imagine that kind of life as to visualise a million; 
 he can see six people in a room, but his mind does not bring up 
 the idea of those six people in material attitudes, sleeping, eating, 
 courting, making merry; figures create no microcosm. I suspect 
 that to understand the poor, a little, you need to know very well 
 the places where the poor live. The house is a fairly clear indica- 
 tion of the inhabitant; it is the house he chose, or the house to 
 which he submitted. Then who is this poor man ? this poor man 
 round whom so many essays have been written ? by the Fabian 
 Society, judicial; by the Charity Organisation Society, severe; 
 by Mr John Galsworthy, understanding and tender ? The poor man 
 is of the same genus as the rich man, but of a different species. 
 (I mean the born poor man as opposed to the born rich man.) 
 The rich man is no better than the poor man ; the poor man is no 
 better than the rich man; they are different creatures, made such 
 by different conditions, just as a Spaniard and a Lancastrian are 
 made different by their various lives. Only, and there's the 
 political rub, Englishmen have not to administer the affairs of 
 Spaniards, while they do have to administer the affairs of their 
 
 87
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 own poor; thus it is important that they should not blunder, 
 because the poor are not good at improving conditions; their 
 attitude is to grin and bear, and then, one day, to cease to bear. 
 
 To understand them at all one must take an imaginative leap; 
 if you find this difficult, Mr John Galsworthy has taken it admir- 
 ably in The Freelands. Listen to his description of a labourer's 
 life: 
 
 ' He gets up summer and winter . . . out of a bed that he 
 cannot afford time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small 
 room that probably has not a large enough window; into clothes 
 stiff with work, and boots stiff with clay; makes something hot 
 for himself, very likely brings some of it to his wife and children ; 
 goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and without comfort; 
 works with his hands and feet from half-past six or seven in the 
 morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an 
 hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether 
 have chosen to eat, if he could have had his will. He goes home to 
 a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without 
 assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two 
 days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his 
 vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of 
 beer and " baccy." And so, dead tired, but not from directing 
 other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his doubtful 
 bed/ 
 
 One should read, as a contrast, Mr Galsworthy's description 
 of the rich man he calls Malloring: 
 
 ' Your Malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven 
 o'clock, out of a nice, clean, warm bed ; he gets into a bath that 
 has been got ready for him; into clothes and boots that have 
 been brushed for him; and goes down to a room where there's a 
 fire burning already if it's a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, 
 before eating a breakfast of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared 
 for him, and reading the newspaper that best comforts his soul; 
 when he has eaten and read, he lights his cigar or his pipe, and 
 attends to his digestion in the most sanitary and comfortable 
 fashion; then in his study he sits down to the steady direction of 
 88
 
 THE POOR 
 
 other people, either by interview or by writing letters, or what 
 not. In this way, between directing people and eating what he 
 likes, he passes the whole day, except that for two or three hours, 
 sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends to his physique 
 by riding, motoring, playing a game, or indulging in a sport that 
 he has chosen for himself. And, at the end of all that, he probably 
 has another bath that has been made ready for him, puts on clean 
 clothes that have been put out for him, goes down to a good dinner 
 that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns, and inwardly 
 digests, or else plays cards, billiards, and acts host until he is 
 sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean, warm bed, in a clean, fresh 
 room.' 
 
 I challenge you to say that this is exaggerated. If you like, 
 say you don't care; but don't say it isn't true. And I will not 
 preach at you, but suggest, to such as detect in me sentimentality, 
 that if we belong to a refined and gifted class into whose hands 
 the world has been given, if, indeed, we are refined and gifted 
 people, a condition such as that of the poor man should offend 
 our aesthetic sense. I have known a rather larger number of 
 poor men than is usual in my class; I have not known them very 
 well, because the worst of the difference between the rich and the 
 poor is that the poor cannot trust the rich; they know them too 
 well. The poor know that the rich conduct against them the 
 class-war, and so they are defensive, inclined either to say the 
 thing that will procure a tip, or a post as ofHce-boy for little Tommy, 
 or they will turn savagely pn you to show you they are as good as 
 you, and tell you that though margarine is good enough for you, 
 their inborn good taste makes it impossible for them to consume 
 anything but the best butter. One does not get together, any 
 more than that Spaniard and that Lancastrian would get together, 
 after five years of Ollendorff. Still, if one passionately wants to 
 understand, one sometimes, for a moment, perceives the shadow 
 of a hint of what another creature is. I remember perceiving it, 
 for the first time, in the midst of an alien family in Widegate Street, 
 just off Petticoat Lane; I had been sent by the firm who employed 
 me to make searching inquiries and to dispense small bounties. 
 L.M. G 89
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 My aliens were, I think, German Jews, who called themselves 
 Russian refugees because it sounded more appealing; they were 
 not a pleasant crowd; the man was a great, big, heavy, fat fellow, 
 with greasy, black hair, a rather surly brigand ; there was a woman, 
 too, lying in a corner, dirtier than the man, presumably because 
 she had been lying there for some time; there were four little 
 children, exceedingly fat and well kept, the usual mystery of 
 Jewish poverty; there was an extraordinarily old woman who 
 sat next to the woman on the floor, and from the beginning to 
 the end of the interview said not a word and moved not a feature. 
 But the horror of it came from the woman on the floor, who also 
 said not a word: there was no furniture in the room, not a table, 
 not a chair, not even a bed; the woman lay on a few crumpled 
 newspapers . . . and had, the night before, given birth to a 
 child, who lay naked between her indescribably filthy bodice and 
 her breast. They were there, all together, in the midst of life, 
 left and abandoned, hungrily desirous of the moment when the 
 great industrial machine of London would be ready to consume 
 them. Impostors, perhaps, but if so, hard is the way of imposture 
 and slender the wages thereof. 
 
 I remember thinking, after that, as I went along Petticoat 
 Lane, that is become Middlesex Street, how much the district 
 resembled the people. There is no Petticoat Lane now; Middlesex 
 Street holds nothing picturesque or national; even its open-air 
 market on Sunday morning can be paralleled by any Saturday 
 afternoon scene in the little streets off Edgware Road, or in 
 Walker's Court, Soho. It is a street mainly of warehouses; 
 Widegate Street and Sandys Row exhibit the oddity of narrow 
 crookedness and no more. Petticoat Lane, where the shops are 
 paltry, and the folk divide into too fat and too lean, is not even a 
 mean street. Its one charm is the prevalent, handsome young 
 Jewess, aged about fourteen, with high tasselled boots, and plenty 
 of silk stocking, containing plenty of leg. She is a fine girl; she 
 haunts you all along Whitechapel Road, and so to Mile End, with 
 her rude air of wealth and wealth-consciousness. I don't know 
 how she does it; with very little money, some crude colour and 
 90
 
 THE POOR 
 
 some light furs, she suggests opulence. There is something 
 matronly about her, too; she looks so marriageable . . . and 
 when one looks into the humid softness of her brown eyes, one 
 finds a limitless rectitude of morals, which may arise from a limitless 
 power to resist temptation. 
 
 Her thick mouth is tight closed; her stays are tight; her 
 mind is tight. She is fair and square, and will give her husband 
 value for his money, but somehow one feels it a pity that all she 
 will give him is value. 
 
 Those girls are part of a certain reckless gaiety that pervades 
 Whitechapel. I like Whitechapel Road; the streets that run 
 off it are indeed tragic with dirt and desolation, but the road 
 itself, which is the pleasure-house of the inhabitants, is full of 
 vitality. At all times it is thickly peopled, mostly with foreign 
 Jews of all types, many of them scrubby little men with beards, 
 who gesticulate in groups at street corners, and argue with their 
 co-religionists. Some are in a state of offensive prosperity. 
 Those Jewish crowds are more alive than the average 
 London crowd; their eyes shine more, as if they were 
 more capable of conceiving desire. They are at their most intense 
 before the many open-air stalls, where you may buy boots and 
 clothing, flowers, toys, and books, and music, and furniture, and 
 every food you know, and some you do not; and teasers for ladies, 
 and surprises for gents, and penny boxes of tricks that will make 
 you popular at a social evening, and collections of jokes of ancient 
 lineage. It is a wonderful show; it is, in many ways, more 
 wonderful than Williamson's Bonanza in the Brixton Road, 
 because it is cheaper, because a penny goes farther, and thus the 
 penn'orth is more hotly desired. All that points to another side 
 of the poor, the side Mr Galsworthy never sees : their joys. 
 
 It is true that the joyous side of poverty is much less evident 
 than the unhappy side; this because the pleasures of the poor 
 are either localised within their own homes (instead of outcropping 
 in restaurants), or because they are confined every year to a limited 
 number of delirious days. Also, the places in which they live are 
 mostly so abominable that it is difficult for men of our sort to 
 
 91
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 understand that delight may dwell in a slum a little more easily, 
 and a little longer than love in a cottage. 
 
 The slums are so evident to our eyes; they are everywhere. 
 For instance, there is an unexpected little slum in the middle of 
 Mayfair, round Shepherd Market and Shepherd Street. I believe 
 the whole place is insanitary and should be pulled down (I have 
 no love for the picturesque). It is surprising to think that the 
 inhabitants of Mayfair must now and then go through the little, 
 cramped market with the small, dirty houses, yet fail to discover 
 that here, between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, stands a knot of 
 public-houses at one of which, perhaps, Sam Weller was asked to 
 take part in a swarry of boiled mutton ; the hypothetical investigator 
 from Grosvenor Square would be surprised to find out that here 
 one can buy a shirt for 35. 6d., sweets by the ounce, underclothes 
 for 2s. I id., and that for 2d. a hungry man can purchase a meat 
 pie. It is like that all over London, in Belgravia, in Marylebone, 
 just as in St Giles's. They have not quite slain St Giles's, the 
 street-improvers, and there still is charm in Seven Dials, where 
 once seven little public-houses stood at seven little corners, and 
 each public-house had a dial. You told the time by tossing up or 
 averaging. And now there is but one dial left, and it has lost its 
 hands. (Hush, my soul 1 Do not let the spirit of Mr E. V. Lucas 
 invade thee.) 
 
 There is more truth in the frank slums over the river. I once 
 enjoyed the services of a supernumerary postman, who frequently 
 came to my house to make experiments on the garden, to put up 
 shelves, to interfere with the gas, or to drown kittens. In the 
 end he went too far, for he attempted to cure the ball-cock of some 
 obscure disease, and it responded to his treatment by flooding 
 the kitchen three feet deep. But before that tragic day (you 
 should have seen my cat swim), I visited him in Rotherhithe, 
 because, among his many supernumerary trades, he numbered that 
 of vine grower. Against the back of his house in West Lane he 
 had, indeed, managed to grow a splendid, muscular-looking vine, 
 which produced great quantities of grapes; these grapes, when 
 eaten, reproduced what is probably the flavour of vitriol, but he 
 92
 
 THE MAY FAIR 
 
 DIRECT 
 
 SHEPHERD'S MARKET 
 
 To face page 92
 
 THE POOR 
 
 was very proud of them, and ate them, and he kept his vine in 
 condition by occasionally watering its roots with a bucket of 
 bullock's blood. He received this free, because he kept the 
 slaughterer's books in his spare time. But all this is by the way, 
 and there are many respectable old gentlemen who do all these 
 things and are thought none the worse of; as everybody knows, 
 lunacy in the poor is originality in the rich. What was interesting 
 about the supernumerary's home was the breadth of West Lane, 
 that is really a dingy square of bare earth planted with trees whose 
 every sooty leaf whispers : ' Oh ! had I the wings of a dove ! ' It is 
 a square of crumbling Georgian frontages not devoid of a certain 
 splendour. That discovery is one of the keys to the condition of 
 the poor. You find this not only in Rotherhithe, but in Clapham, 
 in Brixton, in the New Kent Road; here and there, behind the 
 board of a photographer, where are exposed pictures of young 
 men with all their hair brushed off their foreheads, and of young 
 girls with all their hair brushed into their eyes, you see a beautiful 
 old house with a porch of the Adams type. Many of these streets, 
 such as Old Kent Road, such as Tooley Street, have become 
 wholly commercial, have turned into long lines of gray warehouses 
 and decaying side streets, haunted by many children; some, 
 like Jamaica Road, and most of Bermondsey, have entirely fallen 
 into the hands of the grayest commerce, but here and there you 
 are bound to find a still splendid Georgian house, looking rather 
 like a distressed Irish lady, who does her best to keep her trans- 
 formation combed, and to maintain the traditions of the Ballymullins 
 of County Mayo. These houses are in the hands of the poor, 
 which means that, originally intended for prosperous people 
 with several servants, they have been cut up into tenements ; this 
 also means that the stairs have not been mended since the days of 
 W T illiam IV. ; that Queen Victoria came to the throne, and married 
 and mourned, that Disraeli passed reform bills while no bath- 
 rooms were put in; that the tap went on running in the back- 
 yard, where Georgian wealth used to fill the jugs; it means that 
 the old house has lost most of its glass, and is running with mice 
 and stinking with beetles; that the drains have been left by the 
 
 93
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 local to a higher authority. Part of the tragedy of the poor is 
 that few houses have been built for them, and that they have to 
 adapt themselves to houses discarded by the rich, which are not 
 meant for them, which are not usable by them. The rooms are so 
 large that the poor cannot afford them unless they over- 
 crowd them; or they have tiny windows because they were 
 limited by the old window tax. There is only one thing to 
 do for them, as is the case with most institutions: blow them 
 up. 
 
 Will the superman be bred by the L.C.C. ? I do not know, 
 but I am sure that the superman will not be bred in any numbers 
 in the middle of the stench of the past. Evil and old are almost 
 synonyms, and I confess that I like better the vulgarity of the 
 suburban street, with its concrete that pretends to be stone, and 
 its plaster beams that pretend to be wood, its wooden pillars 
 that pretend to be marble. I like it better, with its bay windows, 
 so built that no article of furniture will fit it, with its awful ingle 
 nooks, its sham gables and its sham dormer windows, than the 
 awful old Georgian houses near Lamb's Conduit Street, where, 
 crowded together under a ceiling still flecked with gold, on which 
 naked cherubs sprawl, a dozen Russian furriers sit and scratch. 
 For the hideous modern house can at least be clean; it is small; 
 it is washable; a through draught can be arranged; a very little 
 it opens the window on life. 
 
 In the sense of housing we have never housed our poor; 
 hardly anywhere, up to 1900 or so, have we done anything but 
 run up rude brick boxes as shelters, or adapt the dwellings of 
 the rich. Hence, I believe, a stricken, scrofulous generation. 
 Yes, I know there is a charm about all this black filth, as if, indeed, 
 flowers did sprout from dunghills. It is the charm of contrast, 
 it is singularity. You feel it in every poor region. You feel it at 
 the Elephant and Castle, for instance, though why the Elephant 
 should alone be famous, while at the two opposite corners sit the 
 Rockingham and Alfred's Head, equally great public-houses, 
 I do not know; you feel it in the rowdiness of London Road, 
 and in a sort of * none-of-your-lip ' air that hangs over Newington 
 94
 
 THE POOR 
 
 Causeway. You feel it still more in Deptford; indeed, Deptford 
 is a pitiful place, all gray stone and gray slate, but the smell of the 
 sea hangs about it, and as it lies along the docks, often above these 
 slate roofs, above the timber stacks of strange wood, you see the 
 tangled masts and cranes cut out against the sky, patterns evidently 
 designed by Nevinson. I remember once seeing on the shoulder 
 of an old woman who kept a stationer's shop, a gorgeous parrot. 
 It had a yellow and blue body, scarlet feathers in its tail, a bill of 
 ebony, and eyes like molten gold. It sat on her shoulder, thinking 
 of things old as the willow pattern. The parrot looked out upon 
 Deptford High Street, through the flaming topaz of its eyes at 
 the young men who passed now and then, sun-burnt starvelings 
 of the merchant service, in blue jerseys; the sailors rolled and 
 the parrot thought, and in the heat the East breathed from the 
 logs of mahogany and sandalwood. But under all that, under all 
 that theatrical charm was buried the same old thing, the bad old 
 house made to fit the bad new time. 
 
 Yet, the poor are not as unhappy as they look. They do not, 
 in the accepted sense, live a life of pleasure, but to say that they 
 have no pleasures, or can have none because they are poor, is a 
 mistake. The poor have cheap pleasures, pleasures which many 
 of us do not care for, and they take no part in what we choose to 
 call pleasures. If I were compelled to say something sweeping, 
 I should say that the rich have less pleasures than the poor; they 
 are free from more pains, but that is not the same thing. The 
 pleasures of the poor reside much more than do ours in animal 
 comforts; whereas the rich take a good dinner and its wines as 
 a matter of course, the poor make a feast of a joint or a gallon of 
 beer. Things such as these, food, drink, warmth, second-class 
 travelling, arm-chairs, extra blankets, translate themselves, not 
 into the mere satisfaction of needs, but into recognisable pleasures. 
 It is so in the whole field of their amusements, the cinema, the 
 music-hall, the football and cricket fields, where many watch 
 matches, and a few play them; it is so in regard to bank holidays, 
 to journeys to Southend or Margate, to bathing, to visiting the 
 Chamber of Horrors, to being photographed. All these things 
 
 95
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 matter more to the poor than they do to the rich, and you will 
 realise that this is true, if you recall that you have never met an 
 underpaid clerk or a working girl who did not passionately look 
 forward to holidays. On the other hand, you are all familiar 
 with the state of mind of a well-to-do family, who solemnly discuss 
 one May evening, * Where shall we go in August ? ' When the 
 poor discuss where they shall go to in August, and most of them 
 mean on August Bank Holiday, they do not come together in the 
 spirit of profound misery and grim hostility that characterises 
 the respectable classes. They do not go away because they must 
 go away in August, nor must they go away in August because 
 everybody goes away in August: it costs them something to go 
 away. The holiday is a treat, and is not a part of the household 
 budget estimated for in every income. I need not stress this, 
 but we all know that when estimates are prepared one must put 
 in rent, rates, taxes, doctor, dentist, chemist . . . holidays. 
 That is not pleasure. But it is pleasure when Alf tells Ethel that 
 he has had a rise, and that they can this year rise to Cromer instead 
 of Ramsgate. The difference is still more remarkable if we recall 
 the * thank-God-that's-over ' attitude of the rich when, at last, their 
 holiday is done, and the beneficent train pants into Paddington or 
 Victoria. I have known many poor young men and women, and 
 never met one who had not enjoyed a perfect holiday. I have met 
 some who had passed seven days in a mackintosh, and even then 
 had enjoyed a perfect holiday. 
 
 The poor have pleasures, because they draw more than we 
 can from pleasures; they anticipate more, because they are less 
 spoilt by the experience of pleasures, and have not yet found out 
 that these have mutable faces. To make their good fortune more 
 complete, they are even capable of anticipating pleasure without 
 being disappointed when they attain it. Their pleasures are 
 keen, because they are rare. They are keen, because they obtain 
 very little pleasure without paying for it, and as they have little 
 money they must scheme, plan, save; so pleasure becomes a 
 thing to strive for, a true reward; they have to climb the fig tree 
 to secure the figs; they are not cursed with the ownership of the 
 96
 
 THE POOR 
 
 fig tree, cannot lie under its boughs until a ripe fig drops into 
 their mouth. 
 
 We must not forget, too, that poverty has psychological 
 reactions. Mr Bernard Shaw says that poverty is a disgusting 
 disease, and, on the whole, he is right, but the sufferer has mar- 
 vellous moments of recovery. In those moments the poor man 
 does what the rich man, by long education, has been taught not 
 to do : he lets himself go. He can hold arms with half a dozen 
 companions and proceed uproariously along a pier, singing 
 abominably an excellent music-hall tune, to the inefficient accom- 
 paniment of a concertina or mouth-organ; he can reel out of 
 public-houses in a state of complete indifference to public opinion, 
 instead of being secreted by the club waiter and paternally controlled 
 by a taxi-driver; indeed, the poor man can derive much vanity 
 from his condition, and rise in the esteem of his fellows next day, 
 because he took part in such a spree. (In this country, if you 
 can't be great, be drunk.) Above all, he can make love in public. 
 He can, unashamedly, sit upon a bench in the park, complicatedly 
 intertwined with his beloved, sometimes with two beloveds; 
 nobody minds, and the little god of love will, for a moment, blind 
 the policeman's bull's eye. He needs no Sussex down, nor footmen, 
 nor thermos flasks, to make a picnic; with the Daily Mirror beneath 
 the bough, a flask of ginger beer, and her beside him singing, 
 * Who were you with Last Night ? ' Battersea Park is Paradise 
 enow. 
 
 Their social functions, too, are more social, and less functional. 
 They do not, in our sense, entertain, that is to say they do not, at 
 given intervals, go through their address book and say: ' We 
 can't ask Lady So-and-So, because she has refused our last two 
 invitations, and I suppose we must ask the Fitz-Thompsons. 
 Or do you think we could get out of it ? * No, they don't entertain ; 
 they prefer to be entertained, and so, on strictly scheduled occasions, 
 namely, Christmas, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and engage- 
 ments, and on no others, the whole family and a few very old friends 
 are asked to a spread. And it is a spread. It is not compulsory 
 jellies from Gunter's, or game pie from the Cafe Royal, or, still 
 
 97
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 worse, a dinner no better than every day's dinner, but merely a 
 little longer; it is a real spread comprising three times the food 
 that is normally eaten, choice food, such as tinned salmon, lobster, 
 trifle with real brandy, stuffed loin of pork, likely to be remembered. 
 If there is wine it is port wine, the real article. The real article 
 and not the rotten routine. So the people they bring together 
 are not the frigid crowd we call acquaintances, whom most of us 
 ask because they have asked us, or because they threaten to do so, 
 people whom we do not know very well and whom we don't want 
 to know very well, people, therefore, on whom our display cannot 
 make a great impression. The poor ask the people they know well, 
 people who know their exact income. Thus they attain a great 
 human pleasure: ostentation. The life of the poor is harsh, but 
 their joys are keen. I used to know a woman who called them the 
 poor poor. What a fool she was 1
 
 VIII 
 STONES
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 STONES 
 
 A CRITICAL foreigner, whose impressions of London I collected, 
 (a thing one does to foreigners because that at least is common 
 ground), gave words to the usual complaint of the Continental: 
 London was a mean-looking city; its bricks were dirty; it used 
 so little stone; lacked we stone ? And the buildings were low. 
 And some stuck out beyond the common frontage, while some 
 set back. And so on, the whole served with the usual sauce made 
 up mainly of respect for our practical spirit and our commercial 
 success, the things we are not proud of because, indeed, they are 
 ours. 
 
 Almost every foreigner has that impression of London, and 
 he mistakes the spirit of our city so much that, to restore him, 
 one has to show him typical American architecture such as 
 Selfridge's, Kingsway, or older buildings of greater majesty, 
 such as the Quadrant or the terraces round Regent's Park. Failing 
 stone, we exhibit stucco, and the intelligent foreigner discerns no 
 irony in the epigram on Nash : 
 
 * Augustus, at Rome, was for building renowned, 
 And of marble he left what of brick he had found; 
 But is not our Nash, too, a very great master ? 
 He finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster.' 
 
 Now stucco is an unfairly scorned material; it produces a 
 pleasantly smooth surface, which weathers to creamy-olive, and, 
 indeed, its only crime is that it conceals brick. Brick and tile are 
 two of our most delightful materials; people do wrong to sneer at 
 them just because poor cottages are so built. Red brick, when 
 not too large, such as the delightful little Tudor brick, is smiling 
 and domestic. The progress of building has, in this case, proved 
 a retrogress for art. Nowadays, the big red bricks are so angular, 
 so perfectly cemented that most blocks of flats approximate to 
 
 101
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 workhouses, while the yellow brick now current should be reserved 
 for public buildings of special distinction, such as national 
 memorials and academies of painting. But the little red brick 
 that you could hold in your hand, the irregular lines of which 
 bespoke a temperament, which fitted tenderly into patchy cement, 
 as an almond of alabaster into the green velvet of its sheath, was 
 quite another kind of stone. Still, we must take our stones as 
 we find them, and I do not agree with the intelligent foreigner 
 who thinks London a mean city. Many of us find the fine 
 Continental cities, such as new Paris, new Barcelona, and new 
 Frankfurt, as painful to live in as might be the Agricultural Hall. 
 The houses are too high, their flanks too white, their alignment 
 dull as a righteous life. When one considers towns like New York, 
 one wonders how the inhabitant finds his way home. By scent, 
 I suppose, for little can his eyes help him among those vast 
 buildings, all alike. 
 
 In London, few streets and not many squares are alike. The 
 detestable institution of the leasehold has had this good result, that 
 few ground landlords in central London have built the houses 
 they own. They have merely imposed upon the leaseholder the 
 obligation to build a good house worth so much. As a result, 
 the leaseholder has built what he fancied, and, therefore, London 
 is not the result of the schemes of some horrid central office, but 
 of the oddities and taste of thousands of men. That is why 
 our sky-line is so broken, why, in Berkeley Square, we find 
 two charming little, narrow houses close to a tall block of flats; 
 that is why, in Oxford Street, tottering little shops, built under 
 William IV., hug the Tube Station and its monster hotel. 
 Variety is the salt of London life. 
 
 Where London has, to a certain extent, abandoned variety, 
 and that to good purpose, is in the squares. London, more than 
 any in the world, is a city of squares ; a feudal remnant has there 
 set most of the important houses, while those of the vassals were 
 placed in the side streets, and those of the churls in the mews. 
 The squares imply social classifications, and though many of 
 them, such as Golden Square, Soho Square, Regent Square, have 
 
 102
 
 iJ
 
 STONES 
 
 fallen into the hands of the poor or of commerce, they all began 
 by being centres of polite society. To this day there is something 
 in a square that no other thoroughfare has; a sort of measured 
 enclosedness, a finished privacy. The garden in the middle that 
 none enter save lovers and cats, a garden sometimes sooty, some- 
 times kept trim by a gardener born old, is cut off from the rough 
 movement of the city. Those who have been interested enough 
 to penetrate into the green part of Cavendish Square or Craven 
 Hill Gardens, will know that there one is as truly lost as in any 
 lane of West Anglia. Those green spots are almost untrodden, 
 and, to all visitors, are virginal. The impression of privacy 
 extends also to the houses; though these may differ they do not 
 vastly do so. The contrasts between them are those which appear 
 among the members of a family. All are, to a certain extent, 
 traditional, and it is mainly in the squares that you find remnants 
 of Georgian London. 
 
 Most of Georgian London has fallen into the hands of the 
 tenement maker, because the people of the Georgian period built 
 in districts now populous, such as Clapham, Highbury, Soho, 
 Chalk Farm, because the leases were long and the houses good 
 enough to make it unbusinesslike to pull them down. Still, some 
 Georgian London, and especially some London of William IV., 
 has preserved its old, flat face, sober and dignified, yet has been 
 modernised, internally, by anachronistic organs such as the bath- 
 room, the telephone, electric light. Those houses are delightful, 
 for the adventure of the present has purged them of the sins of the 
 past. Such houses as the one now tenanted by Messrs Thornton 
 Smith, in Soho Square, the small houses with the Adams doorways 
 that make up the Adelphi, the slim exquisiteness of Westminster 
 in Barton Street or North Street, all these, by their very form, 
 suggest that inside all is order and courtesy. Those houses were 
 built when land was cheap, when we did not need to pile Smith 
 upon Jones and call the result Cornucopia Court, or what not; 
 in those days they did not need to store coal in the pantry, and, 
 for historic reasons, they did not combine the bathroom with the 
 kitchens. Still, these are only survivals, and though the late 
 
 103
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 William Willett did what he could near Avenue Road to restore 
 the Georges under an Edward, the Georgian house is dead. It 
 is too large; it leaves aside the servant problem; its rooms are 
 too square, difficult to light, difficult to furnish in a period when 
 furniture is small and tortured in design. It is almost as dead 
 as the Elizabethan house, which is only a curiosity. 
 
 People still talk of Cloth Fair, but if you go to Smithfield you 
 will find no Cloth Fair now, only a dirty little back street, not at 
 all the scenery which Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree would have 
 thought suitable for the entry of Bolingbroke into London. If 
 you are wise, you will at once step back farther into the past and 
 enter St Bartholomew's, where arches and pillars, broad and solid 
 as those of hell, will make you understand the Mosaic quality of 
 the Christian faith. In St Bartholomew's, that is black and 
 dispassionate, dwells no gentle Redeemer, but the spirit of the 
 Lord of Hosts. 
 
 True, there is Crosby Hall, though it is hard to shake off the 
 connection between Crosby Hall and chops, for I knew it best in 
 the days when, there, one ate chops (and sirloin, yes, sirloin). In 
 those days, in the City, Crosby Hall was really an Elizabethan 
 place, a mullioned old house, with sunken beams. For most of 
 the day it held people who ate a great deal, drank a great deal, 
 and bellowed, and played billiards, and flirted with the waitresses, 
 and made bets, and told undesirable stories. Yes, it was real 
 Shakespeare, all the time. But one day they pulled down Crosby 
 Hall and re-erected it in Chelsea, near the end of Oakley Street; 
 the last time I went in they were holding an exhibition of arts and 
 crafts, which proved that leather might be compelled to assume 
 many forms it didn't like. I never saw it again. Then there is 
 St Ethelburga, the little wooden church in Bishopsgate, which 
 takes, I believe, a special interest in seamen. A pleasant little 
 church, for there is something very human and pre-Fire in its 
 having let off its frontage to an optician. (I wonder whether the 
 optician and the incumbent both labour under the motto of 
 Usebius.) 
 
 But if Georgian London has left so little, and Elizabethan 
 104
 
 STONES 
 
 London hardly anything, it is not so of the Victorian period, which 
 still hangs over most of the city like the shadow of a great tree 
 which will not let the flowers grow. Nearly all the houses in 
 central London are Victorian; most are early Victorian, because 
 the building rush in the 'eighties and 'nineties affected mainly 
 the suburbs, where a ribald sestheticism combined with the 
 discovery of the quaint by Charles Dickens. Now the Victorian 
 period was neither picturesque nor quaint; it looked upon that 
 sort of thing as indecent. It liked a plain house for a plain man, 
 and the Victorian man got his house. In another fifty years or 
 so, when time has done with the houses of the 'sixties, on their 
 tombstone shall be inscribed: ' Eight steps and a brass knocker, 
 such are the wages of virtue.' Some think that too much evil is 
 spoken of the Victorian period, and that much that was solid, 
 sound, truly English came to fruition in those days. For my 
 part, I think that the Victorian period was nothing but a bad 
 dream, that the English are essentially the people who drank 
 sack, and danced round the maypole, just as now they drink beer 
 and go to the cinema. The English are a pleasure-loving people, 
 an emotional, perhaps a hysterical people; they are gay, improvi- 
 dent, thriftless, adventurous, reckless people; there is little to 
 pick between them and the Neapolitans. Yes, there has been a 
 lot of respectability and talk of carriage folk, and heavy sideboards, 
 and being shocked, and all that sort of thing; but I submit that 
 English history extends farther back than 1830, that there were 
 happy days before the English grew oppressed with their new 
 respectability, which arose slowly out of the sudden growth of 
 wealth among numbers of ill-educated people. Before the 'thirties 
 there were only two kinds of people : those who did what they were 
 told, and those who did what they liked. The factory had begun 
 to take shape in 1770; towards 1830 occurred the rise, all over 
 the Midlands and North, of small workshops that became mills. 
 This turned some members of the working class into capitalists. 
 As the workshops grew, the working class population grew 
 round them and formed towns. To serve the needs of these 
 towns shops arose; these became prosperous, and produced 
 
 L.M. H 105
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 another fairly rich class, the shopkeeping class. From the 'sixties 
 onwards, the workshops, warehouses, and shops grew so much 
 that those who, once upon a time, were scriveners, became managers 
 and agents. This produced a third class of ill-educated people 
 endowed with some money. 
 
 The result was soon felt: we had created the middle class, 
 and as, in those days, the middle class was still conscious of the 
 upper class, realised itself as lowly bred, it concluded that the 
 only way of living up to its new money was to be more moral and 
 especially more refined than either the upper class or the lower 
 class. That is the origin of the red damask curtains, of the English 
 Sunday (which once upon a time was debauched and delicious), 
 of wax fruit, tall hats, black silk, jet, and such like horrors. 
 
 But is that the end? No. Round about 1890, the middle 
 class having made still more money, having split itself up into 
 upper middle class and lower middle class, having sent its sons 
 to the public schools and universities, its daughters to Brussels 
 or Dresden, began swiftly to slough off the old 'virtues which it no 
 longer needed. The daughters went to dances under slender 
 chaperonage; some of them became Fabians; red paper was 
 scraped off and replaced by brown ; Jacobean furniture came in ; 
 respectable people began to dine at hotels and, what was much 
 more fatal, to lunch at restaurants. Bridge came in ... cigarettes 
 crept in. I do not say the middle class is dead, but when you are 
 tempted to think that the Victorian period represented, in English 
 history, anything but an accident, anything but the formulation 
 of a class, then consider most of your young acquaintances, and 
 ask yourself, honestly, whether those very people, fifty years ago, 
 would not have gone to funerals with weepers tied round their 
 hats. To-day, there is a continuous impulse in the middle class 
 to grow smart, fast, intellectual, all that. Call this progress or call 
 it decay, never mind; I submit that it exhibits Victorian respect- 
 ability as merely a stage in the development of English people, 
 and that we are tending towards a time when the jolly 1780*5 will 
 live again with something hectic and abandoned thrown in. The 
 English people are a light people, a gay people, and the famous 
 1 06
 
 STONES 
 
 period 183 o- 1880 was, after all, a short period in the eight hundred 
 years odd which separate us from the Conqueror. It was a period 
 of reconstruction, and the English emerged from it as new English, 
 not very different from the old English. We have digested our 
 money; of course, England was sleepy while she did that; those 
 who believe that that sleep was natural to her suffer from illusion. 
 Now she has begun to spend the resultant energy. Bustles, 
 daguerreotypes, Sunday rest, and whiskers, Pecksniff will find 
 all that in another region. 
 
 Pecksniff will also, at least I hope so, if he is to be happy, 
 find the Victorian house. It was not a bad house inside, in spite 
 of its vast, incoherent basement, the ell at the back of the drawing- 
 room, and the shameful servants' bedrooms; it was a roomy 
 house, but there was too much in it for the cockroach and the 
 mouse. Most of Bayswater, Paddington, Kensington, and 
 Marylebone, are Victorian; all depend upon slave labour. Few 
 of those houses can be managed properly on less than three servants; 
 some are still run by one servant assisted by the young ladies, who 
 do the dusting, but the importance of the point lies in this: with 
 one servant they are dirtily run ; with two servants they are barely 
 run. They are full of corners, corridors, cupboards; they collect 
 dust, and eat up light. In days when flesh and blood was cheap, 
 when you could easily get young girls to wear the skin off their 
 knees on the steps, the edifice stood up pretty well. But those 
 days are gone; the servant problem is partly due to the Victorian 
 house, which became almost too much to bear when the servants 
 developed enough to understand that there were things they need 
 not bear. What will replace it, we do not yet know. It is too 
 early to talk of a revolutionary change into blocks of flats with 
 common kitchens, common dining-rooms, and common nurseries; 
 all that will come, has come, is extending, but it is not yet general. 
 The first step is the break-up of the Victorian house into maison- 
 ettes. You can see this going on all over central London, where 
 two families now share a house built for one. Others are being 
 absorbed by the boarding-house. Briefly, we are packing closer 
 into the old spaciousness, partly because we do not need 
 
 107
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 it for the purposes of ostentation, partly because we cannot 
 afford it. 
 
 Still, there is much left of old, bleak London, Highbury 
 Crescent, Warwick Street (Pimlico), Mornington Crescent, and 
 many others. There is, about those places, what there is more 
 proximately about Bayswater, a sense of past comfort, dating 
 back to the days when comfort meant red paper in the hall, brown 
 paint, thick stuff curtains, polished boards, large and straight 
 chairs with hard seats for the young, stuffed seats for the old. 
 Those houses were comfortable in a frowzy way; they were 
 houses in which one ate a great deal, slept a great deal, drank a 
 great deal, and thought within the limits of genteel taste. Little 
 by little people began to stay up later, so had less time to sleep; 
 then, their fathers having drunk too much, they found that their 
 inherited constitutions did not allow of similar excess, while the 
 intrusive foreigner brought in his curious dishes which taught us 
 to eat less, if more peculiarly. Picture galleries were opened on 
 Sunday, concerts were held upon that day; matinees, cinemas, 
 other pleasures, all these things making a continual call upon 
 time and purse, have stolen some of its privileges from the old 
 home, until it ceased to be home in the sacramental sense, a 
 pleasure in itself, and turned into a dormitory. The bleak old 
 nouses of London have responded to this movement, by breaking 
 up into maisonettes, converting themselves into boarding-houses 
 and lodgings; there are now few claimants to their five floors; 
 indeed, the five floors grow more and more disliked. To-day, 
 when you walk along a street such as Mornington Crescent, 
 whose gray face wears the inscription : ' Joy forbidden,* you are 
 to a certain extent, labouring under an illusion, for the life behind 
 those gray fronts is not gray. It is, more and more, the life of 
 people who have no roots, who have settled for a short time in 
 rooms, whose employment is precarious, whose fortunes are 
 small, people who live on small weekly wages, or even on social 
 piracy, whose presence must cause uneasiness among the portly 
 Victorian ghosts. Inside those houses live few families, because 
 no families of wealth care to live in such districts, while poor 
 108

 
 STONES 
 
 families cannot afford the servants to keep such houses clean. 
 So their dwellers are, many of them, adventurers, semi-respectable 
 people who have something to do with the stage, or who are in a 
 sort of way in the city. They never want the windows cleaned, and 
 when they sit down at the Victorian writing-desk with the waggly 
 legs, they care little if it is not dusted : they blow. That is the 
 end of those old houses ; to-day, most of them are spinning out 
 the last of their long leases in a truly Victorian way : keeping up 
 appearances, and pretending to be as respectable as ever. 
 
 In South Kensington and Bayswater, the bleakness is less 
 complete, because those districts are dimly in the West End, 
 with a little too much End about it. They are ' possible ' districts, 
 as the phrase goes among some of us; a ' possible ' district is one 
 the name of which can be stamped upon one's note-paper. The 
 tenants of Bayswater and South Kensington number many of the 
 old-fashioned people who like quiet places, comfortable homes, 
 in some cases gardens, but many more are making of those places 
 a jumping-off ground. They pass through Bayswater or South 
 Kensington on the way to Mayfair, Belgravia, and Marylebone ; 
 they are already well-to-do, and intend to be better-to-do; in 
 those places they associate with the people who, once upon a time, 
 were very well-to-do and are now less so; those districts are social 
 junctions. But everywhere the boarding-house is gaining ground, 
 and nowhere does one see this so well as in Cromwell Road. 
 Cromwell Road is a remarkable street; its length has, on a warm 
 and hazy day, a quality of eternity. It seems to have no beginning, 
 no end; one might walk for ever along its broad stretch, between 
 those high walls; a prison yard must be like that. This does not 
 mean that I dislike Cromwell Road; far from it; I visit it at least 
 once a week, for purposes of meditation. One can meditate in 
 Cromwell Road, because nothing ever seems to have happened 
 there; it certainly looks as if nothing could happen. It holds 
 no tragedy, no comedy. You pass along the endless series of 
 houses, all of which have four and a half or five and a half floors, 
 the half being accounted for by the servants' rooms, to which the 
 Victorian builder never accorded a complete floor; they are nearly 
 
 109
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 all alike, having five to nine steps, a porch on pillars, and a flat 
 face; the only difference between one house and another is the 
 age of their lease, the age being revealed by the condition of the 
 paint: some were repainted three years ago, some two years, 
 some recently. White, gray, black, such is their symphony. If 
 you look in at the windows of the dining-room you will generally 
 see a large mahogany table: in the middle of this stands a heavy 
 brass pot; in the brass pot grows a big green fern. Behind the 
 green fern, and always facing the window, stands a colossal side- 
 board, surmounted by a mirror against which is outlined a 
 tantalus and sometimes, which is very regrettable, a cruet. (You 
 do not see a bottle of salad-dressing in Cromwell Road, but a little 
 farther west you do.) Near the tantalus sometimes dwell a silver 
 cup or two. On one side of the room you discern a mantelpiece, 
 decorated with coloured pots, a large, black marble clock, suitably 
 representing a tomb. There may also be some brass ash-trays 
 and bowls of obviously Indian pattern. The carpet one cannot 
 see, but I feel sure that it is generally a red and blue Turkey. 
 That is old Cromwell Road, grandpapa's old Cromwell Road, 
 comfortable in its stifled sort of way. Rail as I may at the Victorian 
 period, I have a vague liking for those old solidities, that mean 
 pleasant, saddleback chairs, pipes (not cigarettes), the Spectator, 
 port, and evenings devoted to the reading of travel books 
 and memoirs (not novels). Dull, but solid, and in Cromwell 
 Road one is aware of a certain merit in solidity because it finds 
 itself at the point of flux between the old civilisation and the 
 new. 
 
 The new civilisation has already set its teeth into Cromwell 
 Road. The houses are unchanged, but a great many have been 
 bought up and joined together, decorated with stained glass, 
 re-named as hotels. These have fancy pots instead of brass pots, 
 ferns from strange bournes; curtains of lesser conventionality; 
 looking out from a window you no longer see Mary Jane in a pink 
 dress, but a sombre face, which may be that of a musician or a 
 poet; or of a Balkanic waiter stained with political conspiracy. 
 The inhabitants of those hotels are Americans, provincials, people 
 no
 
 STONES 
 
 who have grown tired of housekeeping and like to buy it ready- 
 made; they number many widows who behave as if they were 
 conscious of a transitory condition, actors, unattached people of 
 all kinds. These are not the old Cromwell Road people; they 
 are a new type, which you might call the Cromwell light-Roadster, 
 people who drive up in taxis at all times, and even after eleven 
 o'clock. Kensington means nothing to them; not one of them 
 will ever be an alderman. They are breaking up the Cromwell 
 Road, and many of those who read these lines will see Cromwell 
 Road without a private dwelling-house, except that here and 
 there a pair of very old maids, accompanied by some very fat dogs, 
 will stick to the old house. They will groan at the taxis which 
 stop at the Grand Imperial next door, send out an old retainer to 
 warn off the street band, and grumble at the electric underground, 
 just as they grumbled at the smoky steam underground. Then 
 they will die, and the Grand Imperial will extend its 
 possessions. 
 
 The Grand Imperial is extending all over London. Not 
 only have hotels, undreamt of twenty years ago, sprung up at 
 unexpected corners near the Strand and over the tube stations, 
 not only have they taken over anything between two and six 
 private houses at a time, but they are buying up site after site: a 
 big one in Piccadilly near Down Street, also the St George's 
 Hospital site, perhaps. They are extending everywhere, com- 
 munising life. It is ail very well saying that the hotel is a sign of 
 the decadent luxury of the day, but that is not true. In the first 
 place there is in hotels no such thing as decadent luxury; all that 
 the best offer are things such as plenty of light, air, space to move 
 in, electric light when you want it, hot water day and night, a 
 telephone by your bedside, a comfortable common room to write 
 in, a band to amuse you while you have your meals; such like 
 simple, obvious things which make up the ordinary comfort of 
 life. The old-fashioned people look upon this as luxury, but I 
 submit that the facility of having a hot bath when you want it is 
 a natural thing, and one of the first things that a developing 
 civilisation should give us all. Some people seem to think it 
 
 in
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 morally wrong to be comfortable, and it shocks one to think that 
 so many of our best minds should, for so long, have been working 
 out ideas for pleasant and harmonious heating, lighting, cooking, 
 only to be told that they are pampering us. The whole object of 
 civilisation is to pamper us, to get rid of nature. Nature 
 is all very well in the summer numbers of the magazines; 
 it looks very pink and scented with hay, but real nature is rather 
 cold, damp, earwiggy, dark, always ill-drained, and much less 
 healthy than London. The object of civilisation is to reduce the 
 struggle for life, and to make the material side of it pleasant enough 
 to be forgotten. If that is not true, then let us back to the cave- 
 man forthwith. 
 
 The truth is that hotels are not luxurious and not dear. It 
 sounds dear to pay a pound a day for a bedroom and your board, 
 which is what one paid before the war, but if one reflects that for 
 that pound one also has the use of excellent common rooms, that 
 one pays nothing whatever for all sorts of racking things such as 
 gas, electric light, water rate, borough rate, inhabited house duty, 
 house repairs, that one owes nothing to the sweep, no tips to 
 tradesmen, it is not dear. One has the space one needs to live in, 
 and that is the essence of the old-fashioned opposition to hotel life : 
 it does away with the large number of rooms that people used to 
 think they needed, rooms in which they shut themselves up 
 behind closed windows and drawn blinds. The old-fashioned 
 hate the simplification of life; they do not like to think 
 that people need no longer tie themselves down, define and 
 label themselves: hotels are meant for those who do not go to 
 the Zoo. 
 
 Indeed, the Zoo is a tragic hint of the period we have just 
 left behind. It was founded in 1826, its object being, of course, 
 * to further the study of animal life,' but it did not very long retain 
 that character. The only character it retained was a sort of brutal 
 insensibility, a capacity for not understanding what it means to 
 animals, accustomed to run forty miles a day, or to fly out of sight, 
 to find themselves boxed up in small cages. The treatment of 
 animals in the Victorian period was very like the treatment of 
 
 112

 
 o 
 
 N
 
 STONES 
 
 children; people meant well by their children, which did not 
 prevent their constraining them to immobility on Sundays, forcing 
 them into careers they disliked, or into marriages with people they 
 detested. They were a sentimental and brutal generation, mainly 
 because they were stupid. So the Zoo, which is now a vulgar 
 gapery, remains as one of the ugly blots inherited by our people; 
 I hope to live long enough to see Parliament pass an act for 
 its suppression. It seems to me indecent that people who do not 
 know the difference between a leopard and a yak should, any 
 afternoon, for sixpence or a shilling, or on Sundays if they are 
 the friends or the servants of a Fellow, line up in hundreds outside 
 cages anything between six feet and thirty feet long, to see wretched 
 animals pace up and down, up and down eternally, or tragic birds 
 hop from an upper stick to a lower stick and then back again, not 
 one of them with the space for a full spring or a flight, sentenced 
 to penal servitude for life, a sentence which we inflict on no man 
 except for murder. I agree with Mr Galsworthy that the Zoo 
 is one of the saddest and most disgusting sights in the world. 
 At least, I know that I never leave the Zoo, which I seldom visit, 
 because it hurts me, without feeling a partner in a national crime. 
 You can defend vivisection by saying that it has valuable medical 
 results. I know nothing about that, but you cannot defend the 
 Zoo by saying that you give some snivelling boy an opportunity 
 to know what the mandril looks like. What is the use (I put it on 
 the lowest ground, that of use) of knowing what a mandril looks 
 like ? And if it is of any use, is that use not counterbalanced by 
 the poison poured into that boy, which is that he shall consent to 
 the life-long imprisonment of a helpless creature ? 
 
 This Zoo question was discussed in the Weekly Dispatch some 
 years ago; I think that one of the points, in defence, was that most 
 of the animals were born in the Zoo, and, knowing not liberty, 
 could not be unhappy. That may be, even if nothing in you 
 answers when you look into the eyes of the animals in those empty 
 cages where there is nothing to do, when all their nature, thousands 
 of generations of it, is calling in their blood to hunt and to fly. 
 Is not the test this: would you be satisfied if at birth your son
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 were placed in a room eight feet by four, and told to grow up in it ? 
 Do you really believe that he would be content when he reached 
 manhood ? even if he had never known freedom. The truth is 
 represented by opinions such as that of the secretary of the Zoo, 
 Doctor Chalmers Mitchell, who summed up Mr Galsworthy's attack 
 on the Zoo by saying: * Mr Galsworthy knows nothing about 
 the subject. His attack is rubbish, pure rubbish.' It may be that, 
 on second thoughts, Doctor Chalmers Mitchell might find one or 
 two more arguments to put up against Mr Galsworthy, but this 
 one, while not lacking in force, somehow fails to convince. One 
 is more impressed by the argument of Mr J. D. Hamlyn, an 
 animal trainer, who said: 'After the war, the business of importing 
 animals will go on exactly as it did before. In the first place, too 
 much capital is at stake, too much money has been expended to 
 give up the trade altogether.' The only comment I have 
 to make on this is that this argument was continually used, 
 first in the West Indies, and later in the southern states of 
 America, when it was suggested that we should do away with 
 slavery. 
 
 Yes, the Zoo carries on to-day the old tradition of Victorian 
 brutality. But enough of the Zoo, and of its visitors, so like the 
 yokels at a fair, that guffaw with their heads through horse collars. 
 I would rather think that in a few of those Victorian places, sweet 
 old ladies in mauve silk and lace serve tea in Rockingham cups, 
 which they dust themselves for fear of Sarah Jane. One such 
 place is Crescent Grove. That is the sort of place one would 
 like to live in, when one feels rather older. It is near Clapham 
 Common, and, of course, it is a blind alley, so that no rude traffic 
 may pass up and down when the milkman has finished his melodious 
 round. The houses are clean, stuccoed, comfortable. The 
 knockers are cleaned every day. The glass is cleaned often, the 
 curtains are changed, and I am sure that when they go up, a whiff 
 of lavender spreads. Crescent Grove is, perhaps, a little too 
 clean; in those rooms where everything has its place, just as in 
 the past every one had his place, there must be so much order and 
 regularity of life that, as Mirbeau said : 'On doit rudement s'embeter 
 114
 
 STONES 
 
 la-dedans.' Still, at the very end of Crescent Grove, there is one 
 house that should be preserved as a monument of its period. Of 
 course, it is double-fronted; in front are planted evergreens, and 
 there is a drive. By the side runs a large garden beyond a wall; 
 on the other side of the wall one hears children at play. That is 
 the house to which father came back round about 1860, with his 
 top hat and his mutton-chop whiskers. If this description does 
 not convince you, let me give you the clinching fact : it is a private 
 road. Yet Crescent Grove stands very near to the suburbs. Not 
 far are Streatham, Tooting, the new streets of Clapham and 
 Brixton. Imbedded among the new streets are old houses with 
 columns, plaster fronts, stucco mouldings, squares surrounding 
 a single column that bears a moulting golden eagle, but the 
 suburbs are overwhelming them. These are not the inner suburbs, 
 such as Brixton, where the feeling is, on the whole, one of poverty 
 and dirt. Those inner suburbs have a certain vigour of coarse 
 life; thus, the Brixton Road is a place of immense activity, 
 notably round the great, open-air ironmonger, Williamson's 
 Bonanza; there are shops and shops, nearly all of the multiple 
 type, Salmon and Gluckstein, Maypole Dairies, Home and Colonials, 
 the shops that Private Ortheris must have raved of in his Indian 
 delirium. Likewise, in Kilburn, where the Kilburn Bon Marche 
 and B. B. Evans struggle in zealous commercialism. Those inner 
 suburbs are hardly suburbs now, for the trams run through them 
 and bleed them of their population ; tubes tap them ; everywhere 
 the motor-buses stop. The true suburbs lie farther out. You 
 have to go well beyond the Brixton Bon Marche before you can 
 find such a place as Streatham, with its endless, well-kept, villa 
 streets of red brick houses, nearly all alike, creeper and grass plot 
 complete. Those suburbs outline a new social order; with a 
 little experience you can easily tell the thirty-five-pounds-a-year 
 street from the fifty-two-pounds-a-year street; you come with a 
 feeling of familiarity upon the corner house, where lives the doctor 
 or the surgeon. It is a new order, for all those houses are small, 
 manageable, clean, modern, in every way satisfactory, except that 
 they are all alike, made for people who may not be all alike, but 
 
 "5
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 tend so to become. For if one buys one's food, one's clothes, one's 
 furniture at the same big, local store, and if one takes one's literature 
 from the same bookstall, one attains to a sort of nationality. But 
 it is not the nationality of the village, where local effort can develop 
 into art, because it develops slowly and creeps back upon itself. 
 In the suburbs everything is supplied on the model of central 
 London, and is turned out in hundreds of thousands by machines. 
 Perhaps the houses are made by machines. Maybe, one day the 
 people will be made by machines. Near those streets, all alike, 
 generally survives an older quarter of poor streets where live the 
 ' little women,' the sweep, the turncock, the dependents of the 
 semi-poor; there, also, small shopkeepers live by undercutting 
 the big stores. They do this by selling the vegetables that are 
 too stale for the stores, by washing the linen which cannot be sent 
 to the steam laundry because it would fall to pieces, and especially 
 by lowering their own standard of living to the lowest possible 
 level. They are the last ramparts of suburban individualism, 
 and they will not last long. As time goes on, the bigger villa 
 streets, many of whose houses have pretensions, exemplified by 
 their architecture of concrete and tile, by their barbarous 
 roofs which make evil, dusty corners in the rooms, by the 
 select flowers in their front gardens, will turn away from 
 those little shops and, more and more, deal with Whiteley's 
 and Harrod's. 
 
 Thus, when one passes through London, from old Victorian 
 street to inner suburb, then to outer suburb, until one comes to 
 the spreading country of Tooting Bee Common, when one has 
 seen the homes of the rich, their marble solemnity, when one has 
 seen those of the poor in the grimy suburbs that cluster, and 
 emerges at last into those clean suburban streets, where in almost 
 every window an aspidistra wilts in its pot, one may grow a little 
 doubtful of the social revolution. We educate the poor, and 
 sometimes we give them their chance: the next step is the 
 aspidistra. The aspidistra goes to the grammar school; clever 
 aspidistra wins a scholarship and goes to Oxford. Then a 
 house is taken, let us say, in Barkston Gardens; instead of the 
 116
 
 STONES 
 
 aspidistra it is marguerites in the window boxes. The marguerite 
 goes to Oxford as a matter of course, and may give place to 
 a lily in a green art-pot. By that time it understands nothing. 
 If it retains its money, the marguerite goes on having marguerites 
 potted in the window-boxes by the nurseryman; if it loses its 
 money, it goes back to the aspidistra. Upon this gloomy botanical 
 note I close this chapter. 
 
 117
 
 IX 
 CAFE ROYAL
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 WHY did they call it Cafe Royal ? It has nothing of the opulent 
 white and gold quality which naturally would go with such a 
 name, nothing expensive or elaborate. Here and there, in the 
 only room I know, namely, the cafe itself, is an escutcheon im- 
 pressed with the letter N. It makes one think of Napoleon, and the 
 name Cafe Royal clashes still more. But, after all, that matters very 
 little, for who cares what the Cafe Royal was ? or under whose 
 auspices it was founded. I suppose that for antiquity it treads upon 
 the heels of Verrey's; it has a flavour of 1870 rather than 1860; 
 what matters much more is that the Cafe Royal always savours 
 of the day, that it concentrates within itself more of the feeling of 
 the day, as exemplified by current art, than any other spot in this 
 country. Thus, when calling this chapter Cafe Royal, I do not 
 mean to devote it to an anecdotic study of the famous tavern, but 
 rather to those things which it represents and contains, to some 
 slight impression of the arts as they develop, flourish, and wilt in 
 this city. The Cafe itself should never have been called Royal, 
 for an eternal opposition exists between the pomp of such a name 
 and the rebellious young arts; in no essential do they oppose the 
 royal suggestion, but they are remote therefrom, live in a world 
 where the values are different, not related to class or fortune, 
 artificial, perhaps, but created in virtue of a private political 
 economy. Thus, the Cafe Royal should have been called some- 
 thing dashing and picturesque, such as 'Cafe des Mille Colonnes,' 
 or ' Cafe de la Pomme Vermeille.' How well it would have 
 looked, sparsely decorated with rubicund apples painted by 
 Cezanne ! As it is, the Cafe Royal is a very large room in Regent 
 Street. Its ceiling, a mass of gold scrollings that embrace frescoes 
 darkened by smoke and time into the colour of old masters, is 
 sustained by many columns with a golden base and a green stem. 
 Round that stem intertwine golden leaves from which hang 
 golden grapes. The effect of the Cafe is one of rather excessive 
 
 L.M. I 121
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 gilding: the walls are crowded with gilt figures and baskets of 
 flowers that leave space only for many mirrors; as if the wall 
 had been hidden away at the behest of some obscure modesty. 
 Yet the effect is pleasant, for this gold is old and tarnished. It 
 has nothing blatant, and the whole effect is one of comfortable 
 decency, as if this excessive room had been built by a parvenu, 
 but had been lived in so long by his successors as to lose the 
 parvenu spirit. The furnishing, plain tables with marble tops, 
 long seats with red plush backs, also resolve themselves into 
 good-humoured comfort, while, at the end, a prince of bars with 
 something like ten score bottles, each one filled with something 
 individual, produces an impression of eclectic welcome. 
 
 The Cafe Royal may have been built to astound, but nowadays 
 it is just the comfortable background of people who like to drink 
 a little, to pay moderately, and to talk enormously. The conver- 
 sations at the Cafe Royal are not, probably, such as would make 
 a good book of memoirs, but its mixed public has, at one time or 
 another, numbered everybody who did something (whatever 
 that may mean), so that many good things and many spiteful 
 ones are spoken every day under its golden roof. Before the war, 
 the violent young men and the much more violent young women 
 seemed to meet there every night, with an almost sacramental air, 
 to discuss, that is to scarify, reputations. That was good, for 
 Renan was right when he said that if a young man, aged twenty, 
 had not always ready a mouthful of insults for. his predecessors, 
 he would pronounce no judgments fit to be heard when he attained 
 the age of forty. 
 
 This does not mean that the Cafe Royal is a literary cafe, or an 
 artistic cafe. The literary, dramatic, and pictorial elements are 
 certainly stronger there than in any other London resort, but at 
 any time you may see there the strangest assembly: foreigners, 
 a great many; smart people who are seeing life; and very dull, 
 ordinary, fat men who stop on their way from business or shop 
 to have a drink before dinner. At dinner time the room is not 
 itself, for half of it sees its marble tables covered with cloths, 
 which means that eating proceeds, and eating does not, so well as 
 
 122
 
 THE CAFF: ROYAL 
 
 To face pagt 122
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 drinking, favour turbulent debate. It is just before dinner, and 
 especially after dinner, that the Cafe" Royal enters upon its true 
 function: to provide a pleasant, cheap place, fairly noisy, fairly 
 smoky, and fairly comfortable, where the young arts may meet 
 and joust. During the war it did not quite do this, for many 
 of the young men had joined the army, and it was strange suddenly 
 to recognise over a tunic, in a well-kept, well-brushed head, the 
 outlines of somebody whom once one knew with endless locks, 
 whiskers, or a beard. Even in khaki they did what they could. 
 Military discipline did not completely dominate those rebellious 
 beings ; their moustaches were either a little more luxuriant or very 
 much more hogged than usual. The Cafe Royal platoon was still 
 faintly noticeable. 
 
 Some, however, were not in khaki, for theirs was not a very fit 
 generation, and even now many a table throws back a memory 
 to 1914. In those days the frequent visitor to the Cafe Royal 
 soon knew many people by sight, and if he was of that world, or 
 had somebody to guide him, he soon could pick out those who 
 were celebrated and those who were notorious; with time, he 
 even came to recognise those who were extremely well known. 
 I do not know if, nowadays, one often sees at the Cafe" Royal, 
 Mr Jacob Epstein, but once it was difficult to detach one's eyes 
 from the sleepy strength of his heavy profile. One wanted to 
 look into those eyes with the thick lids, in which strangely mingled 
 so much detachment and so much kinetic energy. He was seldom 
 alone; there was always a little Epstein group about his table. 
 Indeed, it is a characteristic of the Cafe Royal that few people sit 
 alone. They form groups. One I remember well. It always 
 contained a tall young man with very long, thin features, and 
 hair grown low about the cheek; he had a fancy for clothes faintly 
 1860 in feeling, notably, for stocks. There was an extremely 
 beautiful girl, thin, dark, and languid as some warm Italian grey- 
 hound. There was a young man who wore a velvet coat, whose 
 fair hair fell in long wisps upon his collar, a strange young man, 
 with a peculiar grayish skin and an air of nervous excitement. 
 Round these moved other figures less definite, but all of them 
 
 123
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 young: square men in knickerbockers, with short pipes stuck 
 precisely in the middle of their faces; girls, outrageously florid 
 or eloquently simple, round whose long necks hung the flowered 
 yokes of Chelsea, on whose hands clustered many rings of turquoise 
 and aquamarine, or whose hands were virgin of all decoration 
 save that of black finger-nails. The smart people used to watch 
 them steadily and feel that, at last, they were really seeing life. 
 
 Sometimes they saw people whose names could serve as 
 conversation at the morrow's lunch party. Sometimes they caught 
 sight of Mr C. R. W. Nevinson, and could describe his square 
 figure, his rather blunt, pleasant face with the bright, live, brown 
 eyes. It does one good to look at Mr Nevinson, though, nowadays, 
 something oppressed has crept into his expression; there is, in 
 those rather thick features, a sense of life and desire. With him 
 sometimes goes his wife, slight, white and rose, and bending a 
 little under the heavy sunshine of her hair. 
 
 Until recently the Cafe Royal also often contained Mr Augustus 
 John, and one could sit for a long time, wondering what it was 
 gave his features that air of tautness. There is always about 
 Mr John a feeling that he is imprisoned within himself. . . . 
 Equally with Mr Epstein he had his court, young men in a state 
 of extreme reverence, and other men who preached to him in 
 attitudes of hostility tinged with nervousness, which is the ordinary 
 approach to the successful painter of those who are less successful. 
 I think that, now and then, Mr Arthur Symons used to draw 
 them away, so as to procure for Mr John a greater peace. It was 
 as if he were trying to create about him an atmosphere of hush. 
 At the Caff Royal this is not easily done. Notably, it was difficult 
 to create hush among the reverential young men, for I suspect 
 that they all wanted to know what Mr John thought of their 
 work, that is meant to tell him what he ought to think. The 
 young women were more easily managed, and it is interesting to 
 note that they tended to approximate in appearance to the John 
 type. Nearly all were what the vulgar call plain, in some cases 
 because they were perfectly beautiful: that which is perfectly 
 beautiful is severe and separate; it does not arouse desire, it 
 124
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 arouses respect, and this most of humanity cannot forgive. Those 
 strange young women, apparently long-legged and long-armed, 
 in their simply-cut high frocks that hung straight from shoulder 
 to ankle, young women with hair plainly banded, rather long 
 noses, strong chins, thick, dark mouths, like open fruits. They 
 seemed to come straight out of some sketch in Donegal. 
 
 There were many others, too. Now and then one caught 
 sight of Mr Wyndham Lewis who, nowadays, is plump, but 
 in those was tall and white and rather slim, often silent and 
 generally weary; it was an education in negligence to watch the 
 depressed droop of the cigarette stump which generally hung 
 from his underlip. There were others, too, a woman with small, 
 humorous eyes and a pleasant coppery complexion, who wore 
 turbans of purple silk and gold, who never thought or spoke an 
 evil thing of any creature alive. One saw Mr Gertler, very young 
 and seductive, perhaps a little conscious of it; Mr Gilbert Cannan, 
 oozing defiance from every sharp angle and confining his con- 
 versation to this process. The other young writers came now and 
 then: Mr Swinnerton before he grew his beard, Mr Hugh 
 Walpole, who always seemed slightly out of place in so ill-regulated 
 a spot. People less definable float through my mind: a young 
 girl who had been told that she looked like a Russian, and thence- 
 forth appeared attired in a red sarafan; a young man with black 
 locks massed upon his eyebrows, locks he often tossed back to 
 show the running water of his pale eyes. There was a young 
 woman who believed in asceticism; as she looked rather like a 
 brick, I was told that her beliefs had never been put to a rude test. 
 There was another young woman, too, who seriously informed 
 any marble table that she believed in reincarnation, and that 
 within her breathed the soul of Shelley. Nearly everybody 
 painted, some wrote verse, a few ventured on prose; the talk 
 was of art and of sinners against art. Swiftly they passed from 
 studio scandal to the declarations, manifestoes, proclamations 
 which made the arts sound foolish in 1914, but actually were 
 evidences of their vigour. Indeed, the modern forms of art tend 
 to shock the Philistine: I am not with him; I like my paint wet. 
 
 125
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 The old arts are unkind to the young arts. Struck by a certain 
 wilful outrageous ness which often overlays talent and in the 
 beginning always heralds it, the old arts make as much fun of the 
 new arts, as the old arts made of the older when they were young. 
 Some of my readers may remember Mr Epstein's rather theoretical 
 Venus, at whose feet reposed a wheel. It was an abstract piece of 
 sculpture, but, however abstract, I think it was a little harsh of 
 Mrs Aria to describe it as a sick penguin sitting on a broken 
 bicycle. The truth is that the modern forms of art are not as 
 wilful or as intentionally shocking as their adepts choose to make 
 out. It may be true that most schools, from the impressionists 
 onwards, have formed round one man who had something original 
 to say in an original way, and that most of the pupils, having 
 nothing original to say, found it necessary to say it in a violently 
 original way. That is true to a certain extent; truer, perhaps, 
 is it to say that * genius creates the taste with which it is enjoyed.' 
 Thus, I think it quite as likely that people like Manet created the 
 taste for impressionism, just as Wagner created a taste for music 
 in reaction against, let us say, Rossini. Nature, after all, is only 
 a thing which one conceives, and not a thing which really exists; 
 it varies with the eye that beholds it, and if a man sincerely and 
 violently feels that trees are pink, then to him they are pink, and 
 if he has art enough to translate his temperament into those pink 
 trees, then the people who can understand him will learn to see 
 trees like him, that is, pink. We need not stress this, because it 
 is an extreme case, but I submit that the modern forms of art, 
 during the last dozen years, have all of them tended to express 
 nature on the lines of certain conventions, and that instead of 
 taking up an attitude of contempt, it was easy to understand 
 these conventions, therefore, to understand the artist, therefore, 
 to collect from the canvas the impression he painted there. Here, 
 I will be told by the Philistine: ' Why should I see that a face 
 looks like a cube ? ' Well, nobody wants to force him to see a 
 face as a cube if he doesn't want to, but one is entitled to point out 
 to him that he has already accepted many conventions. He is 
 quite willing to look at Gainsborough's ' Blue Boy,' and to see it 
 126
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 as a human figure, though it has only surface and not volume. 
 He is quite willing to look at Venus of Milo and to accept it as a 
 reproduction of a beautiful woman, though it has no colour. He 
 is quite willing to go to a play the action of which extends 
 over five years, and to see this action condensed into two 
 and a half hours. The public, has to accept the arts con- 
 ventionally, because the arts do not reproduce nature, they 
 interpret it. 
 
 It may, therefore, be suggested that our young post-im- 
 pressionists, futurists, and cubists were badly treated by the public, 
 for the public never tried to understand the new conventions on 
 which they worked. With all the power of my sincerity, and in 
 the name of such honesty as may be in me, I assure my readers 
 that if they will take the trouble to master the conventions 
 the work can be interpreted. I possess an excellent non- 
 representational picture, by Mr Wadsworth, inspired by the 
 roofs of a Yorkshire village; it is entirely composed of black and 
 white planes. When, lately, this was shown to a friend, she 
 asked why she should be told to admire a set of decayed dominoes. 
 But the picture is not made up of decayed dominoes ; it is a highly 
 simplified impression of walls and roofs, and when you have 
 sympathetically sought for what we may call the key plane, the 
 picture becomes absolutely obvious. 
 
 But what if it were not obvious ? Many of the modern men, 
 such as Mr Wadsworth, Mr McKnight KaufFer, Mr Wyndham 
 Lewis, do not aspire to represent anything at all. What they 
 want to do is to sketch or paint an interesting pattern. Mr Ezra 
 Pound has put the attitude clearly in his book, Gaudier Brzeska, 
 where he says, more or less : ' When you hear a sonata played, 
 you do not say, " Oh, what an eloquent reproduction of the waves 
 upon the shore! " or, " This is where the sheep begin to baa." 
 What you do is to ask yourself whether this combination of sounds 
 is pleasant or moving. That is the freedom we wish to find in 
 painting or sculpture. We are not interested in painting the 
 Mayor of Leeds in such a way as to make it clear that he is a 
 mayor, possibly of Leeds, but we are interested in setting together 
 
 127
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 lines and coloured surfaces, irrespective of any meaning, and to 
 be judged on that, according to whether these lines and colours 
 produce a pleasant sensation.' 
 
 This position appears to me above attack. The technical 
 improvements in painting, which began in the seventeenth century, 
 producing Rembrandt, Raphael, Velasquez, and, in due course, 
 Sir Edward Poynter, seem to have set a heavy yoke upon the 
 painter's neck, for the painter grew enthralled by technique, 
 became more and more inclined to represent a baby so life-like 
 that everybody expected it to howl; he grew liable to lose sight 
 of the one thing that matters, namely, that to represent a baby is 
 nothing, and to represent the artist through the baby, everything. 
 (If I am wrong, consider a picture by Mr Clausen and a photograph 
 by Mr Park; Mr Clausen knows how to paint, but Mr Park 
 will far more exactly reproduce the sitter, do it quicker, and much 
 more cheaply.) The thesis of the modern artist, of which I am 
 trying to give an impression, therefore involves that while we 
 bow to the undeniable greatness of men such as Rembrandt, 
 Botticelli, Leonardo, we wonder whether a greater emancipation 
 from their technique might not have allowed them to soar higher 
 into the abstract region where none save an artist can breathe. 
 The plea is that in a more abstract field they might have been 
 still greater. 
 
 Undeniably, the modern forms of art have emancipated 
 themselves too much from technical restrictions. It is dangerous 
 to have too much technique; it is dangerous to have too little, 
 and I could not say who suavely broods in the golden mean. Still, 
 when we consider what a dead and damnable thing technique 
 alone can be, when we consider the annual mortuary at Burlington 
 House, when we stand awhile before a work of Mr Frank Dicksee, 
 and stare incredulously at Sir Luke Fildes's ' The Doctor,' or 
 attempt to solve the Hon. John Collier's psycho-pictorial mysteries, 
 we are indeed assured that though technique may exclude a man 
 both from heaven and from hell, it shall, for certain, land him in 
 purgatory. 
 
 I remember very well the first ' advanced ' pictures I ever 
 128
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 saw. They were twelve impressions of a bridge over a brook by 
 Claude Monet. That must have been nearly twenty years ago, 
 and I thought them very beautiful. It is strange that nowadays 
 they seem so tame. But it does not matter to me that I thought 
 them beautiful then, just as when I first saw a Matisse I thought 
 it interesting, that my first Gauguin, with its queer brown 
 figures stirred me; it matters to me that when the futurists came 
 to town, Mr Marinetti did not strike me as a marionette, and that 
 later all the others, cubists, boulists, imagists, vorticists, were 
 taken by me as honest men. You may call me a fool; you may 
 even think worse of me and say that I was so anxious to be in the 
 movement that I liked every movement; I prefer to say that I 
 was always ready to try to understand a new pictorial convention. 
 When I cease to be able to do that, when I cease to see in painting 
 that Mr Wadsworth is deeply interesting, in literature, that Mr 
 James Joyce is strikingly individual, when I am Philistine enough 
 to hang a painter because I won't hang his picture, then, indeed, 
 shall I be middle-aged and take to meals. 
 
 The years between 1908 or so and 1914 were some of the 
 most important English art has passed through. In those six or 
 seven years, for the first time, London saw the post-impressionists, 
 not only Matisse, but also Cezanne and Picasso; she saw the 
 futurists, the singular pictures of views from a moving train 
 which, faulty as they were, were well worth painting, because 
 from a moving train one does see things, therefore material for 
 art. She saw Severini's * Pan-Pan Dance,' where colour and 
 surface dance rather than men and women; she saw the coming 
 of Mr Epstein, first in the statues outside the British Medical 
 Association, which were said to be indecent and became famous; 
 she also saw reproductions of Mr Epstein's Oscar Wilde 
 monument, which went to Paris and was said to be indecent and 
 became kilted. The cubists came in the train of Mr Metzinger. 
 The non-representational movement extended, radiating round 
 Mr Wyndham Lewis, impressing many men and women, among 
 whom, in those days, was found true ability. It was 
 a breathless and beautiful period, where everybody was under 
 
 129
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 thirty and many were under twenty, when people painted not 
 for art's sake, but consciously for the expression of self. When 
 that self was feeble, the painting was feeble. But it was not always 
 so. Many ridiculous things were done; many ridiculous things 
 were said in the Cafe" Royal and out of it, but, as Miss May Sinclair 
 puts it very well, these young men had not come to destroy the 
 pictorial glories of the past; they had come to destroy their 
 imitators. Conscious of their period, they wanted to 
 express it. 
 
 Some have suggested that the modern forms of painting were 
 merely outbreaks of youth, that these movements had severed the 
 continuity which should exist between one period and another. 
 Now the modern young man is generally arrogant, and if you talked 
 to him of continuity would say, perhaps: * I don't want any 
 ancestors; I am an ancestor.' But he would be wrong. From 
 Monet to Matisse, from Matisse to the early Nevinson, from the 
 early Nevinson to the modern Wyndham Lewis, the link is close. 
 No doubt a pen better versed than mine could link Monet with 
 Giotto. I cannot; for I find it difficult to think back further than 
 fifty years. 
 
 There have been reactions. One of the most notable is that 
 of Mr Nevinson, who is to-day the most popular of the young 
 men, the one who has been most completely recognised by a 
 broad public. Certainly he has become more recognisable, 
 though I am not of those who think that his work has thereby 
 lost. A man may be great and esoteric, or he may be great and 
 lucid. It all depends on the way in which the dice fall. The 
 several exhibitions of Mr Nevinson's work, during the war, have 
 shown him more and more gaining independence. He began 
 by adopting one of the cubist conventions; he is still able to do 
 so when he wishes, but he is also able to use other conventions, 
 even the most stereotyped, when his subject seems to demand it. 
 He paints pattern, or subject, or idea, but an interesting sidelight 
 on his attitude is hatred of all cliques. In the preface of his last 
 exhibition, he bitterly assails the people who seek ' pure form 
 through nothing but still life, endless green apples, saucepans, 
 130
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 and oranges, picasized and cezanned with a ponderous and self- 
 conscious sub-consciousness.' He hates what he calls the 
 child-like antics and the gambolling of the elect of Bloomsbury. 
 He may not be quite fair, but when I remember the various 
 cliques to which I had occasional access, the Rhythm clique, for 
 whom nobody existed except Anne Estelle Rice, j. D. Fergusson, 
 Jessie Dismorr, and George Banks . . . until the review changed 
 its name, when most of these people ceased to exist and nobody 
 but Mr Albert Rutherston was granted physical likelihood, 
 when I reflect how Mr Nevinson used to cluster with many others 
 in a cosy cube, only to be driven out at last at the point of a cone, 
 when I reflect upon the sombre mystery that surrounds the adepts 
 of Mr Roger Fry (a mystery recently grown less sombre with 
 success), I am assured that cliques are the necessary breeding- 
 ground of talent because they fortify its members against the 
 cackling Philistine. But they are also the thing which keeps 
 talent small and parochial once they have helped it to grow. 
 The clique is the nursery, and the test of a man is 
 whether he knows when he is grown up. The art clique 
 is like journalism, which can lead you anywhere provided you 
 forsake it. 
 
 Most of the cliques have their being in Chelsea, though 
 Fitzroy Square and the Garden City occasionally put forward 
 claims, and Bedford Park asserts itself. I suspect that the move- 
 ment is nowadays away from Chelsea. King's Road grows every 
 day more mercantile; nothing in it recalls the arts except a slight 
 excess of shops which sell artists' materials. One does meet 
 the Chelsea girl, no longer in a jibbah, but more likely in an 
 eloquent sweater, with her hair cut short and her feet brogued, 
 but then the Chelsea style has crept into many circles. You can 
 go into the Chenil Gallery, where you will always find works by 
 Mr Augustus John and Mr Gill; you can even go and have 
 lunch at the Good Intent, but somehow Chelsea will not seem to 
 you very Chelsea-ish. Indeed, there are rows and rows of studios 
 near Glebe Place, Church Street, Redcliffe Square, in all sorts of 
 odd back-yards and shanties, but the whole thing does not hold
 
 A LONDON MOSAIC 
 
 together. At the Good Intent, for instance, you will find a small, 
 quiet restaurant, decorated with old furniture, pictures that may 
 have been advanced once upon a time, a jolly old pug, very fat 
 and wheezing, its portraits on the wall, grossly flattered, with a 
 mauve ribbon round its neck; you will see at the tables mainly 
 women who live at local diggings, rather tired and lonely looking, 
 as women grow when they live in diggings and toast muffins on 
 the gas stove. 
 
 No, Chelsea is nowadays too successful to be a locality for 
 artists. Cheyne Walk has become too famous and too rich, for 
 artists cannot live together, unless it is in a sort of Alsatia where 
 you must pay your footing in such coin as the keeper thinks fit. 
 Nowadays, the arts tend to scatter. They can be found in Chalk 
 Farm, even in Paddington, some say in Bayswater, though this is 
 not likely. They tend to live more privately than they do in Paris, 
 where half the day seems to be spent at the Lilas. (Oh, how I 
 hate the Lilas ! The last time I went there, there was an enormous 
 crowd; a hairy Russian philosopher stood on my right foot while 
 he read bad French translations from the Sanskrit; meanwhile, 
 two young people stood on my left foot and made love.) In 
 London the arts meet at their communal places, in certain 
 restaurants which they discover and then forsake, at the Coq d'Or, 
 at little dancing clubs. If only the Philistine hated them more, 
 they might cling closer. 
 
 Still, the arts are not, in London, as absent and ignored as the 
 foreigner likes to think. It is true, as Mr Nevinson says, that 
 owing chiefly to our Press, to our loathsome, tradition-loving 
 public schools and our antiquity-stinking universities, the average 
 Englishman is not merely suspicious of the new in all intellectual 
 and artistic experiment, but he is mentally trained to be so un- 
 sportsmanlike as to try to kill every new endeavour in embryo. 
 It is true, but it does not matter. The arts are vigorous, and in the 
 end, those who came to kill stay to buy. That will be seen as 
 time goes on. 
 
 Is it, I wonder, a symptom of the English attitude to the arts, 
 that the chapter which concerns them should, in the words of 
 132
 
 h-i rT I
 
 CAFE ROYAL 
 
 Mr Henry James, drag far in the dusty rear of this book ? Perhaps, 
 though London of to-day is so vivid and so eloquent, so full of 
 sharp colour and true line that, when I consider her music, I am 
 inclined to think that she would not have attained her crisp and 
 harmonious form if some creative instinct within her humorous, 
 pessimistic, and languid people had not presided over her birth, 
 and favoured her composite life. 
 
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