The Lure of Old London Part 5

The portraits, too, were eloquent. Boswell of the long ears, who did for Johnson what Pepys did for himself. "Bozzy," who saw with the terrible eyes of a child, and who, without any apparent realisation that each word was a stroke of the chisel, patiently hewed his living portrait of Dr. Johnson for posterity. I do not agree with the implications of toadyism against "Bozzy". There was real humility in his att.i.tude towards the great man, and real love for the object of his hero worship.

To myself, the history of "Bozzy's" patience under rebuff, his elation at small victories, his hopes and fears, and the minuteness with which he chronicles every detail of his intercourse with the object of his adoration, is more thrilling than many a romance of the love of man for woman.

There was Garrick, too, of whom Goldsmith wrote, "He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back". Johnson, speaking of the actor's great wealth and popularity, said, "If all this had happened to me I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way.... Yet Garrick speaks to _us_.... A liberal man. He has given away more money than any man in England." To which Boswell replies, "Yet Foote used to say of him that he walked out with an intention to do a generous action, but, turning the corner of a street, he met the ghost of a halfpenny, which frightened him". I've been reading "Bozzy," you will see, and having my faith in the colossal inconsistency of human nature strongly confirmed.

The vivacious Mrs. Thrale, whom Macaulay describes as "one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who are perpetually saying or doing something that is not exactly right; but who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable," wears a hat which lends her an appearance of false solemnity. She has, though, an air of elegance which makes it easy to believe that she was the lady "for whom"

the Doctor "bought silver buckles and new wigs, and by a.s.sociating with whom, his external appearance was much improved".

There also was Goldsmith, with his ugly, bulging forehead, his protruding, obstinate mouth and apprehensive eyes, the eyes of a man who antic.i.p.ates adverse criticism. To _him_ the Doctor accorded a protective tenderness the more notable that, whilst recognising the genius of his protege, Johnson could have but ill understood poor Goldy's self-consciousness and foolish little weaknesses.

The poet himself had a lively appreciation of this trait of chivalry in the Doctor. Witness his words when speaking of a ne'er-do-well of his acquaintance: "He is now become miserable," says Goldsmith, "and that insures the protection of Johnson".

Mrs. Darling was curious to know whether the Doctor had a wife, and I told her the strange story of his wooing and winning a lady twice his age--not a beauty, according to Garrick, who described her as "very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour". Boswell's remark apropos of the situation is very nave. Says "Bozzy" in his most pompous style, referring to the Doctor and his wife, "He had a high opinion of her understanding, and the impressions which her beauty, real or imaginary, had originally made upon his fancy, being continued by habit, had not been effaced, though she herself was doubtless much altered for the worse". What a touching view this gives of the learned Doctor's simplicity of heart! Mrs. Darling, on whom even such an ancient piece of gossip as this had a cheering effect, remarked that the Doctor wasn't everybody's money. For her part she wouldn't have taken him "if 'is 'air 'ad 'ung with dimonds". Not that she doubted the excellence of his character, but, well--and really, Agatha, you must forgive me if I appear vain in repeating the incident. "Give me a man," said Mrs.

Darling solemnly, with an unmistakable glance of admiration in _my_ direction--"Give me a man that keeps 'imself _clean_ and 'olds 'imself stright, even if 'e does put a bit of gla.s.s in 'is eye and pretend 'e can see through it." Mrs. Darling, by the way, never misses an occasion for airing her disapproval of my monocle.

We climbed the winding staircase and stood in the garret where the dictionary had been written, a long, low-ceiled room with small curtained windows, one end of which was chill with the approach of dusk, whilst the other was warmed by slant beams of a red sun shining amongst the crowding chimney-pots and telephone wires. I pictured on some such afternoon Johnson's six amanuenses busy at their part in the great work, and wondered whether they knocked off at dusk.

The Doctor, in his rusty brown suit and his "little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up and his unbuckled shoes," would probably be busy with them. Perhaps he would be, as Boswell once found him, "covered with dust and buffeting his books,"

whilst Mrs. Hannah Williams in the room downstairs waited at the tea table. Presently the Doctor would go down and they would drink tea by the light of the fire. What would they talk about? Boswell describes the blind lady as "a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature,"

and the two might have discussed some contribution Johnson had in his mind for "The Literary Magazine"--"A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," perhaps, or his "Essay on Tea".

"I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson," says Boswell, and as Mrs. Darling shares with myself the Doctor's weakness, I proposed an adjournment to Temple Tea Rooms--if we could extricate ourselves from the maze surrounding Gough Square.

And so we left the tall, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century house as the lights were coming out in the offices all round. At the printers'

windows compositors were busy setting up type, and the printing machines had no peace from their treadmill labour. But no sound issued from Number 17, and no face appeared at any one of the long narrow windows.

"Even if you 'adn't told me, sir, I should 'ave known that wos a empty house," announced Mrs. Darling, as she stared meditatively at the Queen Anne front, and the roof line against the reddening sky.

"Why?" I enquired.

"Oh, I dunno 'ow I know, but I _do_ know." Mrs. Darling begins, you will see, to display signs of imagination. It would not surprise me to learn that she belongs to the cla.s.s of "mute inglorious" Miltons. Hers may be:--

"Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre."

I shared her feeling about the place, and as we stood taking a final look it occurred to me that such houses are pathetic attempts to a.s.suage a wistful craving for things that have pa.s.sed. Perhaps, though, it is in their very failure that they score. If one could put back the centuries and meet the real selves of all those people about whom one had been dreaming one might lose something for which nothing gained could compensate.

No. 17 Gough Square, however, isn't _always_ forlorn. There are afternoons when merry tea parties of twentieth-century men and women gather in the garret, or in the "Pink" room sacred to those long ago tea parties when Hannah Williams entertained the Doctor's friends. There are, too, evenings when members of the Johnsonian Club, literary folk, or societies given over to the study of London lore, meet for discussion or conviviality. I hope the Doctor doesn't resent the intrusion: I don't think he does, for hospitality was one of his distinguishing traits.

Mrs. Darling suggested we should go back by the way we came. She feared the magnetic power of The Red Lion, coupled with my propensity for rotating. And so we turned to the right and followed our noses until they brought us out into the bustle of Fleet Street and the sight of the dark archway leading to Middle Temple Lane under the jutting windows of Prince Henry's room.

At the risk of inducing in Mrs. Darling a mood which she describes as the "bloomin' 'ump," I suggested over the tea-cups that, being on the spot, it would only be seemly to visit poor "Goldy's" grave in the Temple.

She said she was in "good sperets" this afternoon and thought she could bear it. Poor Goldy! it seems from the accounts one reads of his end that it was his humble friends who grieved most for him. Neither Johnson nor Reynolds nor Burke nor Garrick followed him to the grave, and Boswell, writing to Johnson on June 24th (Goldsmith died on April 4th), says, "You have said nothing to me about poor Goldsmith," to which Johnson replied, "Of poor dear Dr. Goldsmith there is little to be told, more than the papers have made public. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted."

Darkness had fallen when we left the tearooms, and people were hurrying through the Temple on their way home from work. The gas lamps shone on the windows of the circular end of the Temple Church, giving them a frosty sort of glitter, and no one but ourselves heeded the turning which leads to the poet's tomb. The little corner where he lies was deserted and silent, and the inscription on the tombstone could be deciphered easily by the light of the gas lamp near. There is so little of it to read:--

"Here lies Oliver Goldsmith. Born November 10th, 1728, died April 4th, 1774."

As I read it I thought of his own words: "Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom."

"This dream of life." Is he _awake_ now? An idea occurs to me, Agatha: the idea that these ghosts enjoy a visit to their old haunts in the same fashion that we enjoy trying to reconstruct their past, but they are only allowed to return during those moments when someone in this life thinks of them. If this is so, _I_ must be much sought after on the other side, and my obsession with the past is accounted for.

I showed Mrs. Darling the chambers in Brick Court where Goldsmith died, and we looked in through the open door at the crooked, narrow staircase where those poor creatures he had befriended wept for his loss on the morning after his death. No doubt he had given them sympathy as well as alms. _He_ knew the meaning of poverty from the day when, as a humble physician, he hid the holes in the front of his coat with his hat when paying visits, to the hour when, dying a debtor to the extent of two thousand pounds, he earned Johnson's exclamation, "Was ever poet so trusted before!"

Returning to Temple Bar, we exchanged confidences about our early recollections of the old gate, and I wondered at the barbarity of those times, not much more than a hundred and fifty years ago, when the heads of traitors were spiked over the gate and allowed to rot under the eyes of those who pa.s.sed to and fro beneath. There's a lot of "frightfulness"

in old London. It reads at times very much like a penny dreadful. The kings and queens, saints and warriors, the men of letters and gentle poets are limned against a tenebrous background of narrow ill-lit streets, of plague and fire, persecution and deeds of violence. There is something of the crudeness of cheap melodrama about it all, but at the same time a virility which satisfies.

But it grows late as I write this, and to quote Goldsmith once more, "Let me no longer waste the night over the page of antiquity ... the dying lamp emits a yellow gleam; no sound is heard but of the chiming clock...."

Meanwhile, dear Agatha,

I am, yours as ever, GEORGE.

CHAPTER VII

CARRINGTON MEWS, SHEPHERD MARKET, _November 25th._

Dear Agatha,--I antic.i.p.ated your wish that I should make Chelsea the object of my next pilgrimage. Mrs. D. and I went there yesterday.

The gulls were very busy about nothing over the river, and they harmonised with the colour scheme of the afternoon. Pale sunshine, a sky of washed-out blue, a silver river, wharves, and leafless trees in Battersea Park veiled by a curtain which was part autumn mist and part smoke from the factory chimneys on the south side.

The square brick tower of the old parish church makes a landmark to the barges and steamboats on their silent pa.s.sing, and at night its clock shines out like a full moon above the plane trees which line the Embankment.

A quaint old place it is inside, with a great west gallery that encroaches almost to the chancel. Where the pews leave off the crowding large tombs begin, and where the tombs end the discoloured walls are covered with coats of arms. All this, seen by the homely light of day, which falls through the windows of plain gla.s.s, has an intimate and pleasant appearance. Even the ancient tombs in their proximity to the worshippers seem friendly.

In Sir Thomas More's chapel a certain Arthur Georges, who died in 1660, lies under the feet of the person who happens to occupy the chair which partly hides the inscription on his tomb:--

"Here lies interred the body of that generous and worthy Gent, Arthur Georges, Esq. Here sleepes and feeles noe pressure of ye stone. He that had all the Georges Soules in One. Here the ingenious Arthur lies to be bewailed by marble and our eyes...."

"The ingenious Arthur!" One pictures him. A man who had "a way with women". Apt to get into sc.r.a.pes, irresponsible, but with a knack of getting out of a tight corner. Kind-hearted, given to take what life offers in the way of pleasure, and always ready to pa.s.s on good things, and do a good turn to the under-dog. The inscription goes on to say, "When all the Georges rise he'll rise again," which pious belief set me speculating as to whether I might some day meet the "ingenious Arthur".

I'm sure I should like him.

Mrs. Darling was visibly impressed when I told her that the body of Sir Thomas More (whose head had been thrown from London Bridge into his daughter's arms below) was in all probability buried under the church.

His tomb in the chancel consists of a ledge and a tablet of black marble surmounted by a flat Gothic arch. On the ledge was a bunch of tawny chrysanthemums and a cross of scarlet immortelles, so the old man who went to the scaffold rather than be a party to the chicanery and concupiscence of Henry VIII is not yet forgotten. Sir Thomas More, it has always seemed to me, carried his asceticism to extreme limits in the matter of his marriage. "Having determined," so says the historian, "by the advice of his ghostly father to be a married man, he was offered the choice of the two daughters of a friend, and although his affection most served him to the second, for that he thought her the fairest and best favoured, yet when he thought within himself that it would be a grief and some blemish to the eldest to have the youngest sister preferred before her, he, out of a kind of compa.s.sion, settled his fancy on the eldest, and soon afterwards married her."

More's first marriage, curiously arranged as it was, seemed to have proved happier than his second, and one is driven to the conclusion that the great man lacked discrimination in affairs of the heart. Hear his second wife's tirade when visiting in the Tower. "I marvel," says she, "that you, who have been hitherto always taken for a wise man, will now so play the fool as to lie here in this close-fitting prison, and be content to be shut up thus with mice, and rats, when you might be abroad at your liberty, with the favour and goodwill of the King and his council, if you would but do as the bishops and best learned of his realm have done."

Mrs. Darling said that was what _she_ called "a sensible woman," but when I explained the marital complications of Henry VIII, and the particular offence with which the Lord Chancellor was charged, the old lady changed her front, saying she was glad some one had had the "s.p.u.n.k to stand up to that ole rapscallion in the 'tammy'!" Mrs. D. is evidently familiar with pictures of the amorous monarch.

We found our way to that corner of the church where are the chained books. Mrs. D., whose knowledge of literature included, by hearsay, "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," accorded a glance of fearful curiosity at the brown back of the dread old volume. The books, the verger told us, were taken out of the case and dusted once a month, and I envied the person to whom the task was allotted.

I think, though, I'd choose a bright early morning when morbid fancies do not find easy foothold. "Foxe's Book of Martyrs," in the old church at dusk, might raise ugly phantoms which no bell or candle could lay.

In these ancient buildings, which are so jealous of the admission of light, the sunbeams play impish pranks once they gain entrance. They are as elusive as ghosts, and as nimble as fairies. They throw ruddy gleams on discoloured walls, setting old bra.s.ses afire, and giving a semblance of warmth to the sculptured features of the dead. The venerable walls are the target for their elfish tricks and wanton caresses, their fugitive withdrawals and stealthy returns. The soundless game was in progress as we left the church, and I shall always picture the quaint homely old building touched to beauty by the tender flitting of these noiseless visitors.