Book: The Foolish Lovers

S >> St. John G. Ervine >> The Foolish Lovers




"Good-morning," John said to the driver as he rose from his seat.

"Goo'-mornin'!" said the driver. He paused while John got out of the
seat into the gangway. "You know," he went on, "you wown't git so
excited abaht things after you bin 'ere a bit. You'll tyke things more
calm. Like me. I down't go an' lose my 'ead abaht Shykespeare!..."

"Good-morning," said John.

"Ow, goo'-mornin'!" said the driver.

The conductor was standing on the pavement when John descended.

"You'll get a 'bus owver there at the Mansion 'Ouse," he said, "thet'll
tyke you right into Fleet Street. Or you can walk it easy from 'ere.
'Long Cheapside, just rahnd the corner!..."

"Cheapside!" John said with interest. Uncle Matthew had told him that
Herrick, the poet, was born in Cheapside, and that Richard Whittington,
resting in Highgate Woods, had heard Bow Bells pealing from a Cheapside
steeple, bidding him return to be Lord Mayor of London and marry the
mercer's daughter.

"Yus, Cheapside!" the conductor dully repeated. "Go 'long Cheapside,
turn to the left pas' St. Paul's, and you'll be in Ludgate 'ill. After
thet, follow your nowse! See?"

"Thank you!" said John.

The throng of traffic seemed to be greater here than it had been at
Elephant and Castle, and John, confused by it, stood looking about him.
"Thet's the Benk of England, thet!" the conductor hurriedly continued,
pointing across the street to the low, squat, dirty-looking building
which occupied the whole of one side of the street. "An' thet's the
Royal Exchynge owver there, an' this 'ere is the Mansion 'Ouse where
the Lord Mayor lives. I can't stop to tell you no more. Ayngel, Ayngel,
Ayngel! Any more for the Ayngel?..."

Several persons climbed on to the 'bus, and then, after attempting to
persuade people, anxious to go to Charing Cross, to go to the Angel at
Islington instead, the conductor rang his bell. He waved his hand in
farewell to John, who smiled at him. The 'bus lumbered off, John
watched it roll out of sight and, when it had gone, turned to find
Cheapside. There was an immense pressure of people in the streets, and
for a few moments he imagined that he had wandered into the middle of a
procession.

"Is there anything up?" he said to a lounger.

"Up?" the man repeated in a puzzled tone.

"Yes. All these people!..."

"Oh, no," the man said, "It's always like this!"

_Always like this!_...

He had never seen so many people or so much traffic before. The crowd
of workmen pouring out of the shipyards in Belfast was more impressive
than this London crowd, but not so perturbing, for that was a definite
crowd, having a beginning and an end and a meaning: it was composed
entirely of men engaged in a common enterprise; but this crowd had no
beginning and no end and no meaning: there was no common enterprise. It
was an amorphous herd, and almost it frightened him. If that herd were
to become excited ... to lose its head!... Hardly had the thought come
into his mind when an accident happened. A four-wheeler cab, trundling
across Mansion House Place towards Liverpool Street, overbalanced and
fell on its side. The driver was thrown into the road, and John,
imagining that he must be killed by a passing vehicle, shut his eyes so
that he might not see the horrible thing happen.... When he opened his
eyes again, the driver was on his feet and, assisted by policemen and
some passers-by, was freeing his horse from its harness, while two
other policemen dragged an old lady through the window of the cab and
placed her on the pavement.

"Really, driver!" she said, "you ought to be mere careful. I shall lose
my train!"

"You'd think I'd done it a-purpose to 'ear 'er," the driver mumbled.

And the traffic swept by on either side of the overturned cab, and
there was no confusion, no excitement, no disaster. The careless,
traffic of the streets which seemed so likely to end in disorder never
ended otherwise than satisfactorily. There was control over it, but the
control was not obtrusive.

He felt reassured in a measure, but a sense of loneliness filled
him. He stood with his back, against the wall of a large building
and regarded the scene. Wherever he looked there were masses of people
and vehicles and tall buildings. Crowds and crowds of people with
no common, interest save that of speedily reaching a destination.
He might stand there for hours, with his back to this wall, and not
see the end of that crowd. In Belfast, at twelve o'clock on Saturday
morning, the workmen would hurry over the bridge to their homes:
a thick, black, unyielding mass of men; but at thirty minutes after
twelve, that thick, black, seemingly solid mass would be dissolved
into the ordinary groupings of a provincial city and there would
be no sign of it. This London crowd would never dissolve. The man
had told him that "it's always like this"!... There were nearly seven
millions of men and women and children in London, but he did not
know one of them. He had seen George Hinde for a few moments, and
he had spoken to Miss Squibb, and to Lizzie ... but he did not know
anyone. He was alone in this seven-million-fold herd, without a relative
or an intimate friend. He might stand at this corner for days, for weeks,
on end, viewing the passersby until his eyes were sore with the sight
of them, and never see one person whom he knew even slightly. In
Ballyards, he could not walk a dozen yards without encountering an
acquaintance. In Belfast, he was certain to see someone whom he knew
in the course of a day. But in this place!... He became horrified at
the thought that if he were suddenly to drop dead at that moment,
none of the persons who would gather round his body could say who
he was. He would be carried off to a morgue and laid on a marble
slab in the hope that someone would turn up and identify him ... and
he might never be identified; he might be buried as "a person unknown."
He determined to keep a note of his name and address in his breast-pocket,
together with a note of his mother's name and address.

"I'm not going to run the risk of them burying me without knowing who I
am." he murmured to himself.

Someone jostled him roughly, and mumbling "Sorry!" hurried on. In
Ireland, John thought to himself, had a man jostled a stranger so
rudely, he would have stopped and apologised to him and would have
asked for assurance that he had not hurt him. "I beg your pardon, sir,"
he would have said. "I'm very sorry. I hope I haven't hurt you!" But
this stranger who had roughly shoved against him, had not paused in his
rude progress. He had shouted "Sorry!" at him, but he had barely turned
his head to do it.

"Of course, I ought not to be standing here, blocking the way!" John
admitted to himself. "I wonder is London always like this, rough and in
a hurry!"

He crossed the street, not without alarm, and stood by the entrance to
the Central London Railway. There were some flower-sellers sitting by
the railings, but they had no resemblance to the flower-girls of whom
Uncle Matthew had often told him. He glanced at them with distaste.
"It's queer," he thought, "how disappointed I am with everything!" and
then, as if he would account for his disappointment, he added, "I'm
bitter. That's what's wrong with me! I'm bitter about Maggie
Carmichael!"

He turned to a man who was leaning against the iron railings. "What's
down there?" he asked, pointing to the stairs leading to the Central
London Railway.

"The Toob," said the man.

"The what?"

"The Toob. The Tuppeny Toob. Undergrahnd Rylewy!"

"Oh, is that what you call the Tuppeny Tube?" John exclaimed, as
comprehension came to him. He had read of the Underground Railway built
in the shape of two long tubes stretching from the centre of the City
to Shepherd's Bush, but he had imagined a much more dramatic entrance
to it than this dull flight of steps.

"But you _walk_ into it," he exclaimed to his informant.

"There's lifts down below," the man replied unemotionally.

"I thought it would be different," John continued.

"Different? 'Ow ... different?"

"Well ... different!"

The man spat. "I down't see wot more you could expect," he said. "It's
there, ain't it? Wot more du want?"

"Oh, it's there, of course ... only!..."

The man interrupted him. "Wot's a toob for?" he said. He answered his
own question. "To travel by. Well, you can travel by it. Wot more du
want?"

"But I thought it would be exciting!..."

"An' 'oo the 'ell wants excitement in a toob!" the man answered.

John considered the matter for a moment or two. "I expect you're
right," he said, and then, more briskly, added, "Yes, of course. Of
course, you're right. Travelling in a train would not be pleasant if it
were exciting."

"It would not," the man answered.

"But it sounded such an extraordinary thing, a Tube, when I read about
it that I expected to see something different," John continued.

"Well, it is an extraordinary thing," the man said. "You walk down them
steps there, an' get into a lift, an' wot'll 'appen to you? You'll be
dropped 'undreds of feet into the earth, an' when you get ta the
bottom, you'll find trains runnin' by electricity. I call that
extraordinary, if you down't ... only I down't want to myke a song
abaht it!"

John felt that he had been rebuked for an excess of enthusiasm. The
Englishman was right about the Tube. It was a wonderful thing, more
wonderful, perhaps, because of the quietness of its approach: it would
not be any more wonderful if people were to go about the town uttering
shouts of astonishment over it, nor was it any less wonderful because
the English people treated it as if it were an ordinary affair.

He looked across the road at the Bank of England, devoid equally of
dignity and sensation, and then turned and looked at the Royal
Exchange. A pigeon flew up from the ground and perched among the
figures carved over the portico, and as he watched it, he read the
inscription beneath the figure of Justice: _The Earth is the Lord's
and the Fullness Thereof_.

"Dear me!" he said, turning away again.

He began to feel hungry, and he moved away to search for a place in
which to find a meal.

"Good-morning," he said to the man who had instructed him concerning
the Tube.

"Oh. goo'-mornin'!"



V

He walked along Queen Victoria Street and, without considering what he
was doing, turned into a narrow street that ran off it at an angle of
seventy-five degrees. It was a perilous street to traverse for every
building in it seemed to have a crane near its roof, and every crane
seemed to have a heavy bale dangling from it in mid-air; and from the
narrow pavement cellar flaps were raised so that an unwary person might
suddenly find himself descending into deep, dark holes in the ground.
The roadway was occupied by lorries, and John had to turn and cross,
and cross and turn many times before he could extricate himself from
the labyrinth into which he had so carelessly intruded. While he was
crossing the street at one point, and passing between two lorries, he
found himself in front of a coffee-house, and again aware of his
hunger, he entered it. He passed to the back of the L-shaped shop, and
sat down at a small marble-topped table and waited for a waitress to
come and take his order. There was a girl sitting on the other side of
the table, but he did not observe her particularly, for her head was
bent over a letter which she was reading. He looked about him. The room
was full of men and young women, all eating or waiting to eat, and from
a corner of the room came a babble of conversation carried on by a
group of young clerks, and while John looked at them, a waitress came
to him, and said, "Yes, sir?"

He looked up at her hurriedly. "Oh, I want something to eat!" he said.
She waited for him to proceed. "What have you?" he asked. She handed a
bill of fare to him, and he glanced through it, feeling incapable of
choice.

"The sausages are very nice," the waitress suggested.

"I'll have sausages," he replied, thankful for the suggestion.

"Two?"

He nodded his head.

"Tea or coffee?"

"Tea, please. And a roll and butter!"

The waitress left him, and he sat back in his chair, and now he
regarded the bent head of the girl sitting opposite to him, and as he
did so, she looked up and their eyes met. She looked away.

"What lovely eyes she has," John said to himself.

She stood up as he thought this, and prepared to leave the restaurant,
and he saw again that her eyes were very beautiful: blue eyes that had
a dark look in them; and he said to himself that a woman who had
beautiful eyes had everything. He wished that he had come earlier to
the restaurant or that she had come later, so that they might have sat
opposite to each other for a longer time. He listened while she asked
the waitress for her bill. The softness of her voice was like gentle
music. He thought of the tiny noise of a small stream, of the song of a
bird heard at a distance, of leaves slightly stirring in a quiet wind,
and told himself that the sound of her voice had the quality of all
these. He wondered what it was that brought her to the City of London.
Perhaps she was employed in an office. Perhaps she had come up to do
some shopping.... She moved away, and as she did so, he saw that she
had left her letter lying on the table. He leant over and picked it up,
reading the name written on the envelope: _Miss Eleanor Moore_. He
got up and hurried after her.

The restaurant was a narrow cramped one, and it was not easy for him to
make his way through the people who were entering or leaving it, and he
feared that he would not be able to catch up with her before she had
reached the street. Customers in that restaurant, however, had to stop
at the counter to pay their bills, and so he reached her in time.

"Excuse me," he said. "I think you left this letter behind you."

She looked up in a startled manner, and then, seeing the letter which
he held out to her, smiled and said, "Oh, thank you! Thank you very
much. I left it on the table!"

She took it from him, and put it in a pocket of her coat.

"Thank you very much," she said again, and turned to take her change
from the man behind the counter.

John stood for a moment, looking at her, and then, remembering his
manners, went back to his seat and began to eat his meal of tea and
bread and butter and sausages.

"Eleanor Moore!" he murmured to himself as he cut off a large piece of
sausage and put it into his mouth. "That's a very nice name!" He
munched the sausage. "A very nice name," he thought again. "Much nicer
than Maggie Carmichael."



VI

He left the restaurant and, having enquired the way, proceeded along
Cheapside towards Fleet Street. There was nothing of interest to him in
Cheapside, and so, in spite of its memories of Richard Whittington and
Robert Herrick, he hurried out of it. He turned into St. Paul's
Churchyard, eager to see the Cathedral, but as he did so, his heart
fell. The Eastern end of the Cathedral does not impress the beholder.
John ought to have seen St. Paul's first from Ludgate Hill, but, coming
on it from Cheapside, he could not get a proper view of it. He had
expected to turn a corner and see before him, immense and wonderful,
the great church, rich in tradition and dignity, rearing itself high
above the houses like a strong man rising up from the midst of
pigmies ... and he had turned a corner and seen only a grimy, blackened
thing, huddled into a corner ... jostled almost ... by greedy shopkeepers
and warehousemen. A narrow passage, congested by carts, separated the
eastern end of the cathedral from ugly buildings; a narrower passage
separated the railings of the churchyard from shops where men sold baby
linen and women's blouses and kitchen ranges and buns and milk....

His Uncle Matthew had told him that the dome of St. Paul's could be
seen from every part of London. "If ever you lose yourself in London,"
he had said, "search the sky 'til you see the dome of St. Paul's and
then work your way towards it!" And here, in the very churchyard of the
Cathedral, the dome was not visible because the shop-keepers had not
left enough of room for a man to stand back and view it properly. John
wondered whether the whole of London would disappoint him so much as
St. Paul's had done. The English seemed to have very little regard for
their cathedrals, for they put them into cramped areas and allowed
merchants to encircle them with ugly shops and offices. In Southwark,
he had seen the church where Shakespeare prayed, hidden behind a
hideous railway bridge, with its pavement fouled by rotting cabbage
leaves and the stinking debris of a vegetable market. And here, now,
was St. Paul's surrounded by dingy, desolating houses, as if an effort
were being made to conceal the church from view.

He hurried through the churchyard until he reached the western end of
the Cathedral, where some of his disappointment dropped out of his
mind. The great front of the church, with its wide, deep steps and its
great, strong pillars, black and grey from the smoke and fog of London,
filled him with a sense of imperturbable dignity. Men might build their
dingy, little shops and their graceless, scrambling warehouses, and try
to crowd the Cathedral into a corner, but the great church would still
retain its dignity and strength however much they might succeed in
obscuring it. He walked across the pavement, scattering the pigeons as
he did so, undecided whether to enter the Cathedral or not, until he
reached the flagstone on which is chiselled the statement that "Here
Queen Victoria Returned Thanks to Almighty God for the Sixtieth
Anniversary of Her Accession. June 22, 1897." As he contemplated the
flagstone, he forgot about the Cathedral, and remembered only his Uncle
Matthew. On this spot, a little, old woman had said her thankful
prayers, the little, old woman for whom his Uncle, who had never seen
her, had cracked a haberdasher's window and suffered disgrace; and she
and he were dead, and the little, old lady was of no more account than
the simple-minded man who had nearly been sent to gaol because of his
devotion to her memory. Many times in his life, had John heard people
speak of "the Queen" almost in an awe-stricken fashion, until, now and
then, she seemed to him to be a legendary woman, a great creature in a
heroic story, someone of whom he might dream, but of whom he might
never hope to catch a glimpse. It startled him to think that she had
human qualities, that she ate and drank and slept and suffered pain and
laughed and cried like other people. She was "the Queen": she owned the
British Empire and all that it contained. She owned white men and black
men and yellow men and red men; she owned islands and continents and
deserts and seas; a great tract of the world belonged to her ... and
here he was standing on the very spot where she had sat in her
carriage, offering thanks in old quavering accents to the Almighty God
for allowing her to reign for sixty years. The fact that he was able to
stand on that very spot seemed comical to him. There ought to have been
a burning bush on the place where "the Queen" had said her prayers.
Uncle Matthew would have expected something of that sort ... but there
was nothing more dramatic than this plainly-chiselled inscription. And
the little, old woman was as dusty in her grave as Uncle Matthew was in
his....



VII

He passed down Ludgate Hill, across Ludgate Circus, into Fleet Street,
turning for a few moments to look back at the Cathedral. Again, he had
a sense of anger against the English people who could allow a railway
company to fling an ugly bridge across the foot of Ludgate Hill and
destroy the view of St. Paul's from the Circus; but he had had too many
shocks that morning to feel a deep anger then, and so, turning his back
on the Cathedral, he walked up Fleet Street. He stared about him with
interest, gazing up at the names of the newspapers that were exhibited
in large letters on the fronts of the houses. The street seemed to be
shouting at him, yelling out names as if it were afraid to be silent.
It was a disorderly street. It seemed to straggle up the hill to the
Strand, as if it had not had time to put its clothes on properly. All
along its length, he could see, at intervals, scaffold-poles and
builders' hoardings. Houses and offices were being altered or repaired
or rebuilt. He felt that the street had been constructed for a great
game of hide-and-seek, for the flow of the buildings was irregular:
here, a house stood forward; there, a house stood back. In one of these
bays, a player might hide from a seeker!... Somewhere in this street,
John remembered, Dr. Johnson had lived, and he tried to imagine the
scene that took place on the night of misery when Oliver Goldsmith went
to the Doctor and wept over the failure of _The Good Natured Man_,
and was called a ninny for his pains. But he could not make the scene
come alive because of the noise and confusion in the street. The air of
immediacy which enveloped him made quiet imagination impossible. His
head began to ache with the sounds that filled his ears, and he wished
that he could escape from the shouting herd into some little soundless
place where his mind could become easy again and free from pain. He
stared around him, glancing at the big-lettered signs over the
newspaper offices, at the omnibuses, at the crowds of men and women,
and once his heart leaped into his throat as he saw a boy on a bicycle,
carrying a bag stuffed with newspapers on his back, ride rapidly out of
a side street into the middle of the congested traffic as if there were
nothing substantial to hinder his progress ... and as he stared about
him, it seemed to him that Fleet Street was on the verge of a nervous
breakdown....

"I must get out of this," he said to himself, turning aimlessly out of
the street.

He found himself presently in a narrow lane, and, looking up at the
sign, saw that it was called "Hanging Sword Alley." He looked at the
bye-way, a mere gutter of a street, and wondered what sort of a man had
given it that romantic name; and while he wondered, it seemed to him
that his mind had suddenly become illuminated. His Uncle Matthew had
had romantic imaginings all his life about everything except the things
that were under his nose. He had never seen Queen Victoria, but he had
suffered for her sake. He had never seen London, but he had declared it
to be a city of romance and colour and vivid happenings. Perhaps Uncle
Matthew was like the man who had named this dull, grimy, narrow
passage, "Hanging Sword Alley"! Perhaps Queen Victoria was not
quite ... not quite all that Uncle Matthew had imagined her to be. The
thought staggered him, and he felt as if he had filled his mind with
treason and sedition!... He could not say what Queen Victoria was, but
with his own eyes he had seen London, and London had as little of
romance in it as Hanging Sword Alley had. There were noise and scuffle
and dingy distraction and mobs of little white-faced, nervous men and
women, and a drab content with blotched beauty ... but none of these
things had romance in them. He had been told that London flower-girls
were pretty ... and he had seen only coarse and unclean women, with
towsled hair. He had been told that London 'busdrivers were cheerful,
witty men ... but the driver to whom he had spoken had been surly at
the beginning and witless to the end. If Uncle Matthew had come into
this dirty bye-way, he would have seen only the name of Hanging Sword
Alley, but John had seen more than the name: he had seen the inadequacy
of the bye-way to the name it bore.

"Perhaps," he said to himself, "I can't see the romance in things.
Mebbe, Uncle Matthew could see more than I can!..."

His head ached more severely now, and he wandered into Tudor Street. A
great rurr-rurr came from the cellars of the houses, and glancing into
them, he could see big machines working, and he guessed that these were
the engines that printed the newspapers. The thump of the presses, as
they turned great rolls of white paper into printed sheets, seemed to
beat inside his head, causing him pain with every stroke. He pressed
his fingers, against his temples in an effort to relieve the ache, but
it would not be relieved. "Oh!" he exclaimed aloud after one very sharp
twinge, and then, as he spoke, he found himself before a gate and,
heedless of what he was doing, he passed through it ... and found
himself in an oasis in a desert of noise. The harsh sounds died down,
the _rurr-rurr-rurr_ of the machines ceased to trouble him, the
scuffle and haste no longer offended his sense of decency. He was in a
place of cool cloisters and wide green lawns. He could see young men in
white flannels playing tennis ... in Ballyards it was called "bat and
ball" ... and beyond the tennis-courts, he saw the shining river.

"What place is this?" he said to a man who went by.

"Temple Gardens!" the man replied.

He walked about the Gardens, delighting in the quiet and the coolness.
Pigeons flew down from the roof of a house and began to pick bread-crumbs
almost at his feet. There was a sweet noise of birds....

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