There were about fifty people at work in the room, three-fourths women, seated at desks and tables, and some occupied the dignified position of little glass-partitioned rooms. She had one of these to herself, in which there was also a table for a stenographer. It was a publishing-house; books, illustrations, manuscripts, were in evidence everywhere. Near the door was a sort of railed-in pen where men with bundles of manuscript under their arms were usually to be seen seated, waiting. Some of these were even shown into her office, and left minus their bundles, or more often with them. There was a hum of chattering typewriting machines constantly in the air, like the chirruping of insects heard from tropical trees. Constantly her telephone rang and she had to make excursions to the manager's office, and head printers and printers'-ink-marked men came to her with proof-sheets, and so on, till 12.30, when she went out to lunch at the women's cafe and had lunch not unlike her breakfast.

The room was full of girls similarly employed, ten to thirty cents being the average of their expenditure; all real workers, none of them the fancy stenographers that their employers frequently take out to little lunches at the smarter restaurants at safe distance from their wives up town. They were not a very attractive crowd—thin, flat-chested, and often anaemic, occasionally with pretty faces, hair, or eyes; but work, daily work, had left its impress on them all. Some (their luncheon bills did not exceed ten cents) looked, with their thin fingers and arms, like human attachments to typewriting machines. There was a something not in the least mannish, but still not appealingly womanly, in these self-reliant, quiet business beings. Was it a sort of neuter gender, a sexless being that was there in course of development? Somehow, they did not strike one as beings who would bear and suckle and nurse children. Was this severe struggle and necessity of existence to eliminate the supreme joy of motherhood from their lives?

Back to the office, where they joined their fellow men-workers; they were just fellow-workers, no quarter given or looked for in the failure to do their work. Some of them earned fine salaries, yet there seemed a limit-point—thus far and no farther—men were always in the highest positions. Put it down to tenacity of possession, jealousy, prejudice—anything but want of perseverance, circumspection, industry: the obviousness of the fact remains.

Until half-past five her work goes on just the same as before lunch, and then up town on the elevator. Dry snow is spotting the swirling wind that eddies round the corners; the sidewalks are thick with hurrying people; the elevator is packed to the platforms with men and women tightly crushed together, worse even than coming down. She dines at a little Italian restaurant, where the proprietor, his wife, and children personally attend on their customers; it is known only to a few who mostly know each other—constant habitues—magazine writers and magazine artists, and miscellaneous, but interesting, nondescripts; and her dinner, with Italian wine included, costs forty cents. It is the pleasantest part of the day for her—men and women of that little writing, artistic, thoughtful, and, in a way, thoughtless set she had known for years; men who could never boom themselves or others, or keep up a bluff even enough to advertise themselves; the slow steps of actual merit made their progress seem like marking time. Ruggles, commonly known to his friends as Rembrandt, saw her home—old Ruggles, who painted better pictures than half the foreigners who came to New York, but who would never be a prophet in his own country. Nice old boy, Ruggles; but the fire was burning low in him, its only fuel being the ashes of disappointment.

The sky had cleared, and the moon shone out on the glorious old square, and red lights suggestive of old port and big wood fires streaked the silent snow from the windows. "Bully, isn't it?" And the silent pressure of her arm was affirmative of complete understanding. Her tiny sitting-room was warm; the cheap eastern rugs and dark green background of the walls and some clever original sketches, all were in the harmony of taste that loved restfulness. She lit the gas-stove of imitation logs; Ruggles wheeled a chair in front of it and filled his pipe; from his match she glowed a cigarette, and with a great sigh of relief and tiredness lay back on the sofa.

Then they chatted chum-like of many things. She was doing well—doing a man's work and getting a man's pay, supporting her mother and the two younger girls in the country. It was a strain; but is not successful effort Brian L'Estrange's definition of happiness? So they chatted on until it was time for Ruggles to go.

"Thank you so much for coming, dear old Ruggles; it is so lonely when I come back here by myself."

"Why don't you get married?"

"Ah! I don't know. Perhaps I'm getting old working, and the men I would like to marry don't care for me, and those that would I don't like. I don't think I want really to marry any one, either."

As he shook hands at the door he said, "You ought to get married, girlie. What a good, and true, and beautiful mother you would make for a boy-child!"

The shooting of the door-hasp seemed to let go the flood-gates of her heart. There was the great longing of her heart—to bear a boy-child. "For joy that a man is born into the world" seemed vaguely ringing in her ears. Like a deep-down spring surface-seeking, that old desire welled up, the perfect reward and crown of valiant womanhood—and she felt how good and tender and true a mother she could be; and as the desolation of denial flooded her soul she threw herself on that sofa made of empty cases, held the cushions to her, and cried—cried as if her heart would break.

Being independent and alone in her own room, she could cry out her lone cry without any one interfering with unwelcome comforting. Then, pale-faced and red-eyed, she got up, the sobs still coming in little gasps. She looked in the glass as she pushed the black hair back from her blue-veined forehead. With one of those strange revelations of reality that come to people in life when in solitude they look at their own reflection in a mirror—she thought—spoke. "It is too late—too late—for me to be the mother of a boy-child."

Then she went and set her alarm-clock to a quarter to seven in the morning.



XVII

THE HOU-MEN OF THE DINGY CITY

How they call with different voices, these cities of men—from the Maxim-gun-like rattle of New York, with its chorus of strenuous steamers calling from the water, on over the gamut of different capitals to Tokio, where the city voice is the tinkling of stilted wooden shoes; not "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," but "Tinkle, tinkle, little feet," go the small wooden shoes on the wide firmament of pavement.

Most strident are the American cities; the most sweet-sounding are those of Japan, except in those few streets raided by tram-cars.

What is the voice of London? Is it not the plod, plod, dumping plod of the horses' hoofs and the jangling rattle of harness and bells, which last we hardly hear, so close is the sound to our ears, like things we cannot see because they are so close to our eyes? As it is a murmurous and noisy city in comparison with those of Japan, so it is peaceful and quiet in comparison with Chicago or New York. A friend of mine from that City of Unrest says that the sound of the London streets has a soothing, lulling effect on him, and makes him sleepy, like the sound of falling water.

As I went up to Euston to-day to meet an Oriental visitor, I fell to speculating how the city might look to him. A very cultured, intellectual fellow he is, who looks into the backs of the eyes of things. A Chinaman born, he had been through college in America, and knew American cities; he had also been studying in Paris, but this was his first visit to London. A wet, drizzling day was not the most propitious for his first impressions. Slopping along in a cab through the muddy streets, as I went under the portico of Euston Station I was forcefully reminded of one of the big gates of Pekin. There is a suggestion of the same massiveness; but the massiveness is only make-face, like the painted cannon on a Chinese city gate. It was an imposing portico to a shamble of sheds.

The railway terminus is the real gate of the modern city.

Yet what absurdly incongruous things these London city gates are—a salad jumble of architecture and machinery with a mayonnaise of train-oil and soot!

As I waited for my friend long trains came rumbling in under a canopy of smoke that hung about the grim iron rafters of this labyrinth. Fifteen minutes ago these trains had been spinning along through the green fields and across the shady lanes of what looked like "Merrie England," although now shaved down and trimmed to intense respectability of cultivation. The heavens darkened and the air thickened as they came close to their journey's end, until they slow down as if gropingly finding their way into the cavernous gateway of the great dingy city.

What a strange conglomeration of people was waiting on each platform! There was a train leaving to catch the steamer for New York, there was a line of people waiting to take tickets for a close-by station, there was a line of soldiers waiting to be entrained; an American girl was standing on an automatic machine, and getting the railway porter to translate from stones into pounds how much she weighed after her visit to Europe. A couple of Oriental servants seemed to have lost themselves in the labyrinthine station, and were wandering round with Oriental indifference. Porters, with hands and faces and uniforms toned down to the universal greyness of things, trundled their hand-lorries to the monotonous calling of "B' your leave, b' your leave"; and variegated specimens of humanity were looking around after their luggage as one might imagine disembodied souls looking for their bodies in the Valley of Jehoshaphat on the Last Day. There were not a few touches of cosmopolitanism suggestive of that gathering.

My Oriental alighted from the train. As his Japanese servant was quite capable of looking after his luggage and bringing it to his hotel, his master was left free to come right on with me and exercise his industrious curiosity—a curiosity that seemed never to be surprised at anything he saw, but took everything as a matter of course. He was a man of the world in his own estimation. Nevertheless, what an important part of it he had not yet seen! Was it not a great epoch in his life, this arrival of his in London?

"This is our North Gate."

"Ah, yes, Hou-Men," he said. "A very dark day, is it not?"

We drove away in a cab under that sepulchral prison-like portico; we had the glass down, it was raining so hard, and even he, whose Westernisation was principally confined to New York, noticed the absurdly asphyxiating arrangement of the London cab, which hermetically seals its frame-bound occupants. The New Yorkers got their idea of the cab from us, but they have improved upon the window by having it slanting outwards, so that, while protecting people from the rain, it admits air. For Londoners there is no alternative between spatteration and suffocation. In the New York cabs they can have shelter and fresh air.

It was not an inspiriting entrance through these first streets outside Euston into London. The pavement of Melton Street was little better than that of Pekin, and from each side those dreary-looking small hotels blinked out of their closed windows on the muddy street as if wondering when a God-forsaken guest would come and occupy them. And then on through grimy Gower Street, looking like the empty bottom of a drained canal.

It's not very inspiriting, this entrance into London from this North Gate of ours.

The people we passed there were not an interesting lot; they seemed all to belong to the two-storeyed houses. They were two-storeyed people, apparently keeping themselves moderately busy making a moderate amount of money, but hampered in the money-making by the mud and rain. We passed a little square carpeted with fresh grass, but the trees on the other side were vague in mist, and the square and its vegetation gave the suggestion of a tank with seaweeds in it. It was a day for studying men and women by their umbrellas and boots. Boots tell confessions for the most Low Church Protestants, and the umbrellas above them generally corroborate the sins of the boots.

My Oriental friend was gazing out gravely.

It was on a warm evening in a tea-garden that he had talked about his coming visit to London. I recollect his enthusing over the phrase

"Beneath the rule of men supremely great The pen is mightier than the sword."

A great motto for a great country, he then said it was. He professed an anxiety to see or meet some of the great English writers, our literati, as he called them. He liked the honesty of Englishmen in business, and wanted to see them at work. He had helped to show me something of the life of the East—that part of the life most difficult to see, the life of the home—and in return I promised to show him something of the life of the West, how and where people work and play, and pray—when they do so.

"Show me the house of one of your literati if we pass one," he said. "Is that one, there?" pointing to a gorgeous public-house, as we passed a street corner.

I saw the probable toppling of an ideal. We passed a couple of quick-driving vans with a green placard of an evening paper, and I explained to him what a reading public we were, and how many editions of the papers were quickly distributed during the afternoon, how the appetite for them had grown, like the craving for cheap cigarettes, as a relief from being obliged to inhale pure literary air. The newspaper habit and the cigarette habit are about on a par after all.



We passed a church with closed doors, and he seemed surprised. I explained to him that the churches were open on Sunday, on which day the more numerous temples of Bacchus were closed for a while.

We reached the Strand, where he was greatly interested in a line of 'buses. "Have you no street cars like in New York?" I submitted that these were kept on chiefly in order to have a supply of artillery horses in times of war.

"And have you no high buildings either?"

The explanation of ancient lights and the overhead space wasted in London was too much to go into. His attention was diverted by a newspaper placard.

"Ah," said he, "another earthquake, is it not?"

"Collapse of Australia" stared from that vermilion placard. It began to dawn on me that I had undertaken rather a large order in showing this Oriental London life.

"And you have not shown me any of your literati yet, or any of their houses."

We were stopped in a block of omnibuses and cabs. A line of sandwich-men were straggling along between vehicles and the curb. One of them stopped just by our cab; the rain was trickling down his nose; he looked as dismal as the weather. I could not resist the temptation of explaining that these were some of our literati undergoing punishment for some of the books or plays they had written. In China the crime is set forth on a board hung on the neck of the criminal, called the cangue. It was only a very mild surprise he showed when I gave him the names of the line of sandwich-men. "How like the head of your Shakespeare!" he said of one.

We were received at the hotel door by a brass-bound German in the undress uniform of a British admiral, who pays the hotel L500 for receiving tips. The rooms and corridors of the big building did not look hospitably cheering. There were no fires in the grates, because, being June, the weather ought to have been warm; and the electric lights were not turned on, because, being daytime, there ought to have been light. He liked the smoking-room. "It is more like one of our big tea-houses," he said. "Men do business here," pointing to a man with a sheaf of papers talking earnestly to another beside him.

"Yes, that is a company promoter."

"What is a company promoter?"

The nearest definition that occurred was, "A man who sells something he hasn't got to another who does not want to buy it."

"I think London is a very interesting city," he said.



XVIII

TIRED

It was the fag end of the week in the Dingy City. A heavy weight of dusty grey cloud lay oppressively inert, vaguely resting on the house and tree tops, and underneath the cloud the air seemed stagnantly confined; in its lowest strata people had been breathing it all day—all the week, in fact—in and out of their lungs, so that it was no wonder it felt tired and second-hand and used up.

The air-thirst of their lungs had impelled those who were energetic to go away to where fresh air was to be breathed; but the very tired, and those who lacked the energy for initial impetus, remained. The shops had been closed, and the sunlight beat upon the shuttered eyelids of their windows on the Phryne side of Piccadilly. By that hour on Saturday afternoon Regent Street and Piccadilly were wearing almost a Sunday appearance; Ranelagh and Hurlingham and the new club at Roehampton were crowded with smart people, and for hours past trains from Paddington and Waterloo had been carrying thousands of Panama-hatted, white-trousered men and summer-clad women riverwards. Though the shops were closed, some belated workers, in ones or twos or threes, continued to dribble out from their doors.

Going westward, along Piccadilly, a slight, dark-haired young girl stepped out from one. She was dressed in a thin white blouse that showed the outline of her arms and shoulders; she did not join the crowd of others who were scaling the 'buses on the opposite side of the street, but turned to walk along the pavement parkwards. One fell to speculating as to why she walked. There was no spring or elasticity in her step as if she were doing so for the enjoyment of the exercise. Her feet, in boots with heels slightly rounded on the outside, seemed to drag on that hot pavement. Possibly the 'bus fare was an item of consideration, even though she looked as if she had spent all the morning on her feet in the shop. With thick, dark hair and good eyes, it would have taken very little aid in the way of dress to make her appear quite good-looking. As it was, men turned to look at her as she passed, and one even came across the street, followed, and leered at her as he came abreast; she held on the even tenor of her way, taking no notice of them. On, past the clubs, through the street vocal with the clanking stamp of the horses' hoofs—horses with shining flanks, who cocked their ears, and tossed their foam-dripping mouths as they passed the water-trough.

Wooden stands here and there still disfigured some of the house fronts, and here and there a red pole, looking like a sugar-stick that a child had been sucking, stood as a memento of one of the most hideous schemes of tawdry decoration that a civilised city has ever shown.

At Hyde Park corner she turned in towards the trees, following the stream-crowd direction of other pedestrians. She stopped near the railings, watching the procession of carriages going by. A girl, so like herself that they might almost have been sisters, passed in a high C-springed carriage. Looking from one to the other, the great difference made by little things was apparent. An application of powder-puff to the moist face of the girl at the railings would have worked improvement; her cotton gloves hung down flaccidly from the bare hand which held up her skirt; perhaps some such thought as that of the unfair distribution of C-spring carriages in this world crossed her mind, as she turned away and languidly continued her journey westward under the trees.

The seats were full of a heterogeneous collection of people, all more or less under the drowsy influence of that stagnant air. Here and there men were to be seen asleep in the chairs. Heads in tall hats nodded, debarred the luxury enjoyed by those tramps who lay at full length under the trees on the grass behind. Between those luxuriating on the grass, men lying in their shirt-sleeves, with heads a-resting in the laps of tired-faced women, whose children played or cried noisily around, and those who passed in the procession of carriages, was the intervening line of people from which all sorts of specimens could be taken of the great mediocracy of England—those who could no more afford a carriage than they could afford to lie on the grass. The men's heads were branded with tall hats, remnants and summer sales were suggested in the costumes of many of the women; an occasional glimpse of shoes or hosiery explained why the graceful holding up of the skirts should be unstudied or unknown on this side of the Channel. And their gloves were of the same character as the hose.

Curious specimens were to be found amongst that crowd. A man passed whom I recollect seeing there as long as I can recollect going to the park. Go round the world and back, and here one was certain to find him. I know his income—it is just three hundred a year; except that his whiskers had got a little whiter, he looked just the same as usual. The frock-coat he wore I have a sort of suspicion was the same as I saw on him two years ago. I could swear to the umbrella—at least the handle, because possibly it had been recovered. The frock-coat would obviously not see another season—not that it was showing any tinge of green about the shoulders, far from it. But perhaps it was a feeling of doubtfulness about the coat, which prompted a startling departure in his costume. He had gone in for a pair of those yellow, chamois-coloured gloves which have made their appearance this season. He sauntered along leisurely, watching the people and the carriages with apparently the same degree of interest as he had done for the past ten years. I have heard that long ago he had a good tenor voice, and he used to speak authoritatively of great singers, when they really were great singers, not such as now.... I've never seen him talking to anybody in the park, and I've never seen him smoke; yet his lips are seldom at rest. They have now got a motion something between that of a nervous American with a cigar and a cow chewing the cud. This is the result of the movableness of his artificial teeth. Perhaps an extra visit to his dentist was an item of expenditure not to be lightly incurred.

What appeared to be corresponding feminine types were to be seen in profusion. Women with incomes of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred a year, women who had passed the age either of matrimony or naughtiness. What thousands of friendless and lonely people there must be in this great Dingy City! The class that lies on the grass is more sociable; they are free from a thousand tyrannies that oppress the mediocracy.

The face of a woman dressed in black, seated between two children, seemed familiar; not until she bowed did I recognise her as the wife of an old friend who had been killed in Ladysmith. She used to be the prettiest officer's wife of his smart regiment; and from her account it would have been better if she had not been so pretty, or the regiment so smart. She was now left with barely his pension for herself and the two children to live on.... Yet very bravely, apparently, she had faced the change!

"Oh, I have tried various things for the last couple of years," she said, "but I am afraid there is nothing I can do. I even tried the stage for a time." She used to have a good voice. "But the managers were horrid, and the pay was very small. Then I tried to give music lessons; but what I got was hardly worth the distances I had to go; so now I have to settle down to working out daily problems in domestic economy."

"And all your friends?"

"Oh, they all were very nice and kind; but one cannot go about without being properly dressed, and when one keeps refusing invitations, one gradually becomes forgotten in time. I felt rather lonely just now when I saw the people driving down to Hurlingham. Come along, chicks, we must be going now. You see," she said, "it is a long 'bus ride to our little flat."

At the end of the long free seat, beyond where they had been sitting, was a strange, haggard-looking woman; a pair of cheap cotton gloves showed her thin white wrists, and her black dress looked dusty and draggled. She had a strange haunted look on her face, as if she had left some tragedy behind her at home. Every time a carriage with scarlet-liveried coachmen passed, she got up and stood on the seat. Perhaps she had journeyed there to see the Queen. She looked cross and disappointed each time she stepped down again. On the other side a couple of girls were discussing those that passed in the carriages, and speculating as to who they might be. It was interesting to follow their surmises.

"I think that's Lady X.," one of them said, as a lady, driving a pair of high-steppers, passed.

But it wasn't. The little fellow sitting beside her glowed with the importance of proprietorship; but, smart little chap that he was in Throgmorton Street, he had no idea how many understudies there were to his part, and did not realise that there are syndicates outside those of the City.

"What an awfully common-looking woman!" the other said, as an old lady passed in her carriage behind a sleepy pair of horses, sleepily driven, the fat pug dog at her feet suffering eclipse by the jelly-shaking arc of her redundant figure. She happened not to be common by any means, but one of the brightest and most good-natured members of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in England.

"My goodness, isn't that Lord Roberts?" said the other, as a pair of chestnuts passed, with a rigid and angular lady in the carriage sitting beside a red-faced, white-moustached little man with his nose in the air.

It was not Lord Roberts. He really looked much too important for "Bobs," although he was a military man in a sense, being colonel of a Volunteer regiment.

And how nasally obviously numerous in the procession was the proportion of Jews, and the Jewesses whose plumpness seemed the retribution inflicted by prosperity.

As the smart carriages passed and the high-stepping horses, which were indeed the exception, for the majority ambled along half somnolent from careless coachmanship, one sought in vain for some idea of what they were doing it all for. They did not seem to enjoy it. If they did not enjoy it, why did they do it? The expression that was common and universal to almost all was their seriousness. The Volunteer colonel took himself seriously, as did the fair frailty behind the high-steppers, no less than the best ladies of the land who seemed to be doing it as a traditional duty; but each and every one looked so serious.

How was it that no one seemed to be laughing and enjoying himself out of all the crowd? The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne seemed to belong to another planet. The listless languor of these girls did not at least obviously claim Transatlantic cousinship; the gaiety of a Japanese street seemed so remote as to belong to a planet of another system; and the seriousness seemed reflected in the faces of the great mediocracy sauntering along inside the railings or solemnly seated in the chairs with their faces turned carriagewards.

Here it did not seem the Dingy City; there was colour enough—bright splashes of colour, both colour in movement and colour from the rhododendron bushes, backgrounded with the fresh grass, that an artist was making a picture of over the way; it was not the Dingy City here. At least this was an oasis in it. But here, in this oasis, playground or pleasure-ground, the People of the Serious City was what was writ on their faces.

Five hours later the park was almost deserted, and the gleam of white shirt-front or tulle-foam was caught as a closed carriage passed.

The old bachelor was asleep in his chair at an open window looking across the narrow street at the familiar sooty face of the house opposite.

"Good-night, Tom; I do hope it will be fine for to-morrow," the black-haired girl was saying at her door, holding in her hand the new hat she had been trimming.

The Volunteer colonel was discussing Buller and port across the glittering dinner-field.

The little fair-haired boy had climbed softly out of his cot, and, going over to his mother's bed, whispered coaxingly, "Will 'oo let me sleep with 'oo, mummy?" and when he had nestled his head on her arm, "Now tell me the story how daddy died," and was asleep before the familiar story was finished.



XIX

THE CITY OF DUMB DISTANCES

I am sure there must be many to whom the idea occurs at such times of the year as this, at the end of the season, when people are scattering out of London, that friends are leaving whom we would like to have had the time to have seen before they went. How often, looking over the pages of one's address book, one says, "I wonder how it is I have not seen So-and-so for an age," and one feels that people we used to enjoy meeting, if they do not happen to move in the same orbit of metropolitan existence, are vanishing from our ken. They are being lost in the Limbo of long distances. An hour of Underground in very hot weather may give the remoteness of Styx-ferryage.

It would be nice even to be able to speak to one's friends who are not conveniently visitable. In other cities this is possible, but not here. The telephone service of an American town or a Norwegian village is a thing of which London has never got even sufficient sample-taste to realise what she is deprived of, or what she ought very reasonably to demand. There is no reason why London should remain telephonically deaf and dumb. There is nothing which strikes the visitor more forcibly, however, than the long-suffering patience of the Londoner. The exasperatingly slow, inefficient apology for a telephone service that would not be tolerated anywhere else is good enough for London. It is no excuse to plead in apology the great size of the City, when there is the example of New York before one, where there are more telephones, where they are cheaper, and where the average time to get into communication with another subscriber appears to be a third or a fourth of the time taken in London. It is only when one has had actual experience of a thoroughly telephoned town that one appreciates the convenience of it. Look what it means for saving time in shopping, doing business, making appointments, and speaking to one's friends. "I got a telephone put right into my room the day I arrived," said an American friend, "but the people I want to speak to most often don't seem to use them, and it is so darned slow getting on to those that do that now I am keeping a cab by the day; it is quicker in the end, and makes me swear less."

It will only be a matter of time, and that not so very far off, when wireless telegraphy will replace the telephone. The principle of sending messages in a multiplicity of keys, so that a message sent will only be received on the instrument keyed for it, has been established, and only requires practical working out. Until that time London will probably have to remain as deaf and dumb as it is.

As regards getting from one part to another, it is not a cheerful thing to contemplate that what should be the most agreeable way of traversing London—I mean the pathway of the river—should just now be closed, and while Mr. Yerkes looks out on it from his offices in the Hotel Cecil, Londoners have to look to him to see if he or Pierpont Morgan will not open it to them again. What a pleasant alternative from the asphyxiating Underground or the tortoise-moving omnibus would not a fast, comfortably fitted line of river steamers be! It seems inconceivable that, with such a waterway and such primitive and inadequate alternative means of travel, the people should stand its being closed. What a great, stimulating, suggestive pathway it is through the Dingy City! Coming from a dance early the other morning I walked along the Embankment, to see a carpet of blue and silver being laid along the river as if by the angels of the dawn; and at evening in ever-varying schemes of sometimes gorgeous colour a richer carpet is laid sunsetwards, while the smoke and dust exhalation of the City is glorified to an incense offering by the stained rose window to the west. At such times the Dingy City looks great, robed in vague organ-tones of colour. But you must no longer walk on that carpet, even though the angels have laid it for you; you must no longer see your city from that pathway; you must burrow homewards from your work in a sewer-pipe of stink, and deeper rabbit-warrens of burrowing are being prepared for you, and you have no Declaration of Independence that secures to you the undeniable right to breathe fresh air. Long-suffering, patient Londoner! To whom does the City belong, and the river? If you reward with honours the men who make beer or whisky for you, or supply you with cheap tea, or signalise themselves by successfully struggling against disease, there ought to be the inducement of honours and reward waiting for the man or men that would help the millions in their daily struggle with this plague of long distances. Is there no knight to champion the cause of the toilers of London and in earnest tackle this dragon problem of distances? That is left to enterprising Americans who come over from pure philanthropy (?) to help you. Three years of his life are spent by the average-lived Londoner in the Underground, who has to take a daily half-hour's journey in it to get to his business. A man with an office in the neighbourhood of the Stock Exchange and a dwelling-house in South Kensington will spend about four or five years of his life going to and fro. To an extent it is a necessary evil. We cannot transport ourselves by telegraph, but there are things that the people of the largest city in the world might reasonably expect. They might expect to have as good facilities for getting about as the people of the most progressive cities in the world; they might expect to have the power to speak when they will with the same quickness, cheapness, and facility as people of other cities. But there is a dull feeling of resigned apathy about them. They will not insist on making any one "get a move on" them to get these things done; will no more think of hustling themselves than a cab-horse in a growler hired by the hour.

If London may be considered the head—the brain of the Empire—the blood-circulation of that brain is surely of vital importance. When keen competitors seize every time-saving, labour-saving weapon as it is offered to help them in the conquest of trade, can we afford to do without them? The business methods of twenty years ago will not do for to-day, still less will they do for twenty years to come. The methods which our competitors are practising are what will tell, and they cannot be imitated and acquired in a hurry when their importance will become suddenly alarmingly apparent. I think the position is far more serious than the stay-at-home Englishman realises. Perhaps from these passing years the future historian will get material for the opening chapters of his work on "British Trade: its Decline and Fall."



XX

THE LAND OF THE EVENING CALM

It is difficult to think this morning that it was only last evening I left London. Lying on one's back on a soft carpet of pine spirules on the slope of the hill, the deep green of the water in the harbour shows through the pine branches. There is a plumage of bracken around wonderful green feathers, that are rising on their slender stems from the thick brown carpet of nature's plush, which hushes one's footsteps through the wood and makes them noiseless, except when one treads on a crisp tory top. There is a delightful hush under this cool roof pillared by the brown tree-trunks, but it is not silence. There is a soft hum that comes ceaselessly to one's ear, sometimes anear, sometimes afar, from one knows not where, from bees, perhaps, busy amongst the hurts or honeysuckle just below. Up above a wood-pigeon keeps cooing that ceaseless question, or is it a question, or the plaint call of his pigeon heart for love? or has he lost his love, and croons a mourning for her? Distinct from and louder than the murmur of the bees is a rustling of the water from below where the outgoing tide from the river meets the water of the harbour; and mingled with that, one can just faintly catch the hushed sound of an occasional wave on the rocks. It is a holiday with the breakers, and the sea moves its fringe as gently as if fanning itself to sleep. The river winds around below, and down to its edge the hills are tree-covered—not there altogether with pines, but with rounded luxurious clumps of dark trees, recalling Dore's idea of a forest—they are exactly Dore's trees. It does not look from here as if the river went up farther, but around that bend is the deep green water called Drake's Pool. It was there that Admiral Drake, outnumbered and chased along the Irish coast by the Spanish fleet, hid from them. The Spaniards came into the harbour and searched around, but never thought there was an opening through the trees. And there Drake waited with his high-pooped ships until they went away. Close to the trees that grow around the steep margin of the pool and always darken the green water, even in daytime, fishermen who go there at night to fish for conger tell that when the moon has been clouded at midnight they have seen the shapes of queer-looking ships, and on their high sterns the forms of men in outlandish costumes, sitting around drinking.

Right on the summit of this hill which commands the harbour is the Giant's Grave; and a propos of commanding the harbour, Napoleon I. knew of it, and had a plan for the invasion of Ireland, in which was included the idea of occupying this hill, from which he could command from the rear the forts at the harbour's mouth. He would have planted his guns on the Giant's Grave. We know little of the history of that giant, except that he carried off the wife of another giant who lived on the Great Island opposite, and held her here in his fastness amid the pine trees against all efforts to wrest her from him. A huge rock that he hurled back in one of these fights is still to be seen on the shore of Spike Island.

A twittering flutter of white and grey below me a few yards away. It is a rabbit—and now another. Their ears are cocked, but they do not appear to notice me in the least. They hop about quite noiselessly on the brown carpet. The crowing of a cock in the distance seems almost musical, and there is some insect in the tree above me that appears to be trying to give an imitation of a telegraph instrument. I wonder what these rabbits are saying to each other. They seem very alert and interested. Now a third appears on the scene. Two of them are beginning to play, at least I thought so at first—and I feel in this peaceful wood I should have left it at that, but having to recollect the heading of these chapters I have to record the fact that they are fighting. I never saw rabbits fight before, but they are fighting like mad. I now see, in fact, the origin of the expression making "the fur fly." The third is just skipping around watching intently with big round eyes and its ears erect—perhaps the third is timekeeper, or perhaps it is the story of the giants over again. The new-comer was getting the best of it. I am sorry now that I could not resist the temptation of taking a shot at them with my fountain pen. They fled instantly. Perhaps the little rabbit lady is glad—she may be licking the wounds of her Lancelot in their burrow a few yards away while he is telling her that he would have beaten the other fellow all right in the end if that darned fool hadn't thrown his fountain pen, while she agrees, as she works her little rabbit tongue soothingly, although privately she has her "doots."

How interesting it would be to be able to study the lives of all these little people in this wood! There are terrible weasels here who wage a sanguinary warfare against the rabbits—a guerilla war that no war correspondent I know of has yet got his pass for. The seagulls are beginning to talk now in a New York pitch of voice, and one can get an occasional gleam of their wings through the blue-green pine branches. I think it is their dinner-time when the tide goes out and spreads a table-strip of slob for them on the shore.

How thankful we ought to be to have such dear stupid neighbours as the English, who don't come in hordes of tourists to desecrate this delightful land! Those who love it with intimacy of knowledge—this wild coast with its rock fingers stretching into the Atlantic and harbours around which the trees nestle for shelter from the winter storms—the ruined castles with empty "magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn"—own it still for their pleasure, moss-grown with history as vivid as the lichens on its rocks or ruins.

Perhaps from a sense of justice, our neighbours think the invasion of Cromwell's army was enough, and that we ought to be spared from something worse, so that the hordes rush off perspiring over the Continent and elsewhere, and just a few nice people come and come again to the South of Ireland, and say they like that cordial greeting that always is waiting for the Englishman personally, who only in the abstract is disliked. Then the Irish railways and hotel-keepers act in a very nice and gentlemanly fashion; the former do not force on the notice of the tourist hordes that a train leaves Euston or Paddington every evening which would land them here at 10.30 in the morning for a few shillings. The latter are quite content with the knowledge they have themselves that they possess now as comfortable and well-fitted-up hotels as any in the world.

A little old Irish lady was reduced to selling apples in the street. "Fresh apples, fresh apples!" she would call out; then, to herself, "I hope no one will hear me."

I do not know, indeed, whether we have to thank most our kind neighbours or the railway and hotel people for the blessing we enjoy in this Land of the Evening Calm that still keeps

"A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

One fills one's lungs with the delicious air, aromatic with pine perfume, to send it out in a sigh of infinite content.

From across the water comes a sound of music; it is some one playing a cornet. The air the unseen musician is playing sounds familiar. He is only practising—learning—— Ye gods! Is there no place where one can get away from that air? But yet, does not it speak volumes for the remoteness of this harbourage of repose to realise that the unseen musician is only now learning "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"?



XXI

WITH SOME TOILERS OF THE SEA

"Stop makin' a noise wid your face, man, and cook the spuds; 'tis time for dinner." Thus Tim to Mike, who had been expounding a theory of his on the wayward habits of mackerel. Tim occasionally comes out with quaint phrases worthy a wider audience. "Mr. Speaker, the right hon. member who has just been making a noise with his face on this amendment"—how would that sound?

There are three men in the boat, not including the writer—Tim, Mike, and Dennis—engaged in lobster-fishing. They have lived in her now six weeks from the time they left Baltimore; "doin' purty well, thank God," they admit. The fishing and the weather and the price all "purty fair." They get ten shillings a dozen for the lobsters, small or large, from the cutters that sail along the coast to collect them and take them to England, and they consider a couple of dozen lobsters a very good day's fishing. They don't get as good a price in the middle of the summer, however. They are going to stop the lobstering just now for the autumn mackerel-fishing, which they hope will be as good as the mackerel-fishing of last spring, which was the best for the past four years. The open boat, which they own in partnership, is a strongly built one about twenty-two feet long, with a lug and foresail of brown canvas and great flat stones for ballast. The whole outfit, including the lobster-pots, cost them twenty-five pounds. The pots have been set and baited with gurnet; during the two hours' interval we are anchored. A curious thing about the craft is the galley. On a spar which stretches from the bow to about four feet up the mast is stretched a piece of brown canvas just forward of the mast, on a flat stone some lumps of turf are burning, and under this canvas is spread the straw on which my friends sleep. Mike is now washing a prodigious quantity of potatoes in a large iron pot, "a grate crop of praties this year, but the salt water plays the divil with the keeping av them, like that," and he holds up one with a red mark on it in his gigantic paw. I kept wondering if they were really going to eat all these potatoes at one meal. They did, however, washed down with milk from a big tin jug which they passed around. They make their own bread or griddle-cake, but that was to be taken with their tea for breakfast or supper. Tim is a teetotaler, and his two partners have a limit of three pints (of porter) when they are ashore. They always go ashore on Sundays, when two of them go to Mass, while the other minds the boat and the lobsters. Three great, simple, almost child-like giants they are, yet not without a certain natural courtesy—a core of genuine politeness within a rough rind.

It was great to see how they made that heavy boat move with their long oars, coming out of the harbour this morning; and yet they hardly ever eat any meat. Potatoes and milk are their chief diet; fish sometimes—"an' thin we has to sample the lobsters sometimes; it wouldn't do not to sample what we are daling in." They cooked one in honour of their visitor, who never tasted a better. Then they lit the pipe, which they smoked in turn, and soon it was time to pick up the pots. Three lobsters and a crawfish were the haul. What magnificent colour in the strong yet delicate armour of their shells! Deep blue shaded into brown, mottled in yellow spots, with deep red at the joints. They were put into the big basket, which already contained over three dozen. What a terrible time the poor brutes must have there! Two or three weeks in this boat, probably the same time in the tank of the cutter, and a week or two more in another ashore before they are eaten. I asked if they ever gave them any food, but found they never did. "One av them dies off an' on, and thin the others ate him, an' they are always atin' the small claws off each other." Talk of the lobster blushing because it saw the salad dressing; but ought it not to make a member of the S.P.C.A. blush to eat lobster mayonnaise? We set the brown sails to lay the pots again further along the coast. It is a glorious day, the wavelets dancing on the surface of the long Atlantic swell that heaves ponderously; for, as Tim remarked, "the adjacent parish wesht is Ameriky." A glorious translucent green under the shadow of the leaning sails, and beyond, under our lee, the line of breakers on the rocks, tapestried in the rich brown of autumnal seaweed, and above them, in more broken billows, fields that make the island called "Emerald."

While waiting after laying the pots again, the wind kept freshening, and heavier clouds in big battalions kept hurrying up from windward. The trio seem unanimous that we are in for a bit of a blow. Tim says 'tis going to be a nasty night, and we must go in somewhere, although night is the best time for their fishing. Only one jack-lobster out of all the pots this time. It was now blowing hard and beginning to rain, so, with one reef in, we started again. It was a ripping breeze; I knew of old how quickly the wind can rise along that coast. The last time I was in Baltimore—picturesque old place, with its ruined abbey and the memory of the sacking of it by Moorish pirates, and the carrying-off of the women from only the eighteenth century back—was when I sailed round in a half-decked 16-footer, designed by Watson. She was a great little boat, with a ton of lead on her keel. As I was nearing the harbour just such a breeze sprang up, and, being single-handed, I could not take in a reef, so had to carry on; right outside the harbour my foresail carried away, but I got in all right under the mainsail, and anchored alongside the Baroness Burdett-Coutts's yacht that was there at the time. I asked Tim about the money she had lent to the men there for buying fishing-boats. "Ah, thin, she's a good woman, God bless her; there's many rich or well-to-do men in Baltimore to-day through the means of her, an' ivery penny paid back—divil a penny av a bad debt."



The smaller the boat the greater the delight of sailing; you get closer to things than in big boats. It is part of yourself, half in the sea and half in the air, and with the sea and breezes you play or fight. White sails standing patiently upright, waiting, and adown from over the hills comes along the breath of the wind, breathing across the mirror; gently, ripplingly, comes the wind to play, and would try to pass, but you catch it in your white wings—catch it and hold it, leaning over to its fleeing passage, and press the trembling tiller-pulse, now throbbing with life, and luff as the boat darts forward in joy of possession of the wind, but she passes, gently, gently up again with the tiller till she leaves the sails with the lingerage of a caress.

But more fun is the fight and tussle in that wonderful surface fighting-line between sea and wind, which laugh as they fight, blowing and buffeting, with you between and the little boat-part of you, now intensely alive and glad like you to be alive, to sing back to the wind any old song as she passes her fingers through your hair.

One unique sensation of the almost uncanny mingling of the two elements I can never forget, when once, at daybreak, I went down into the Cave of the Winds under Niagara Falls; on along the slippery path, the spray streaming down the oilskins; within a few feet that shimmering, glistening wall of falling water, the sense of hearing gone in intoxication, of most musically thunderous noise. One seemed breathing water, so finely spray-saturated was the air. One seemed to have passed the portals into a strange, eerie, watery world.

Every moment the wind came up, piping louder and louder, scudding across the now darkening water. The entrance to Oyster Haven was only half a mile on. It was too far to go to Kinsale. The Old Head was invisible in blue-grey mist.

How things find voice in music! I recollect in the climax of the fight at Elandslaagte, when the uproar of various sounds was simply terrific, from the shrill treble of the whimpering bullets to the trumpet-like whoop of the shells as they arched overhead, to alight with a drum-boom and burst with a cymbal crash; the whole orchestra of battle was playing—it seemed that everyone must recognise the air—"The Ride of the Valkyrie;" and now the driving rain and the salt spindrift, the flapping of the leech of our brown sail, every note of accompaniment is being given to that great air that runs through Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, which the wind is singing louder and louder. Tim sits up well to windward, the tiller quivering in his hand, the rain beating on one side of his face, his beard blowing out from the other. Tim doesn't think what a good model for a Viking he makes just now. The real actual Viking must have been very little different in appearance from Tim.

We were not long in making that last half-mile, and dropped anchor close inshore. At once on doing so the many advantages of the canvas cabin were apparent. The boat, riding head to wind, made the bow under the canvas quite snug. Mike blew the bellows on the smouldering sods of turf which had never quite gone out; it is true the eddying smoke resulting therefrom was smarting to the eyes, but the resulting hot tea was compensation. It was useless for me to try to explain that it would be a real pleasure for me to sleep outside in my waterproof—that it would make me dream of being outside Santiago in the trenches, or on the veldt. It was only a matter of which of the three—who all wanted to—should give up his berth on the straw. Dennis succeeded eventually. It was a bad night. It was snug and "comfy" inside on the straw as the boat cradled on the broken aftermath of swell. The rain played in sheets of notes on the flapping canvas, and from its edge wraiths of smoke shuddered off into the darkness; and, dropping off to sleep, I listened to the Storm moaning the air of the Waldstein to the ear of Beethoven.



THE END

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