The Foolish Lovers Part 31

"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 pa.s.sing between two lorries, he found himself in front of a coffee-house, and again aware of his hunger, he entered it. He pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter!"

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 b.u.t.ter 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 warehous.e.m.e.n. A narrow pa.s.sage, congested by carts, separated the eastern end of the cathedral from ugly buildings; a narrower pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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' h.o.a.rdings. 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 pa.s.sage, "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 coa.r.s.e 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 pa.s.sed 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....

He looked at the names of the barristers painted on the doorways of the houses, and wondered which of them were judges. He wished he could see a judge in his crimson robes and his long, curly wig, coming out of the chambers, and while he wished for this splendid spectacle, he saw a barrister in his black gown and horse-hair wig, come down a narrow pa.s.sage from the Strand and enter the doorway of one of the houses. He walked on into Pump Court and watched the sparrows washing themselves in the fountain where Tom Pinch met Ruth ... and while he watched them, his sense of loneliness returned to him. His head still ached and now his heart ached, too. Disappointment had come to him all day. He was alone in a city full of people who knew nothing of him and cared nothing for him. And his heart was aching. The peace of Pump Court only served to make him more aware of the ache in his head. As he dipped his hand in the water of the fountain, he wished that he could go round a corner and meet Uncle William or Mr. Cairnduff or the minister or even Aggie Logan ... meet someone whom he knew!...

"I'd give the world for a cup of tea," he said to himself suddenly, and then, "I wonder could I find that place where I saw the girl. Mebbe she'd be there again!..."

He looked about him in an indeterminate way. Then he moved from the fountain in the direction of the Strand. "I can try anyway!" he said.

VIII

The girl was sitting at a large table in a corner of the restaurant, and he saw with joy that there was a vacant seat immediately opposite to her. He looked at her as he sat down, but she gave no sign of recognition. He had hoped that their encounter earlier in the day would have ent.i.tled him to a smile from her, but her features remained unrelaxed, although he knew that she was aware of him and remembered him. Her eyes and his had met, and he had been ready to answer her smile with another smile, but she averted her eyes from his stare and looked down at her plate. What eyes she had ... grey at one moment and blue at another as her face turned in the light! When she looked downwards, he could see long lashes fringing her eyelids, and when she looked up, the changing colour of her irises and the blue tinge that suffused the cornea, caused him to think of her eyes as pools of light.

Her face was pale, and in repose it had an appearance of puzzled pathos that made him feel that he must instantly offer comfort to her, and he would have done so had not her nervous reticence prevented him. What would she do if he were to speak to her? There was an ill.u.s.trated paper lying close to her plate. He leant across the table and, pointing to the paper, said, "Are you using that?"