The Lure of Old London Part 6

Crosby Hall, that fragment of antiquity, is within a stone's throw of the church, and to anyone not knowing the story of its presence there, it must appear a strange erection standing in the centre of a piece of waste ground surrounded by a h.o.a.rding. It was a daring and ingenious idea to uproot it from its native soil in Bishopsgate Street, and if the horrid crime had to be done, no better spot than Chelsea, on the site of Sir Thomas More's garden, could be found for its transplanting.

We walked all round the h.o.a.rding seeking entrance, and at last found a hitherto unnoticed door. The caretaker said the Hall was not open to visitors, except by appointment, but that if we liked we could go in. We went and found the place like a huge, cold barn, its fine oak flooring chalked out for Badminton, whilst into the cavernous old fireplace, decorated with Sir John Crosby's crest--a ram, armed and hoofed--had been put a hideous iron stove. The magnificent timber roof, forty feet above, looked down on these innovations sadly, and the glorious oriel window, with the old gla.s.s emblazoned with coats of arms, was eloquent of the times when Richard, Duke of Gloucester, entertained there in 1470, and of such occasions as the visit of Princess Katherine of Aragon to Sir Bartholomew Bird, or the masque performed by the students of Gray's Inn before Queen Elizabeth. What changes of fortune have visited it since! amongst which it has figured in turn as a Presbyterian Chapel and a restaurant! The caretaker's voice echoed hollow in that husk of a building from which the kernel is gone. It had borne its transplanting ill, and even the ghosts, I felt, had deserted it.

Outside, we found the world transfigured by the setting sun, and I left Crosby Hall behind with a sensation of relief. For once in my delvings into the past I had missed the thrill, but the blood-red sun over the river provided a compensation, and I thought of the little house where J. M. W. Turner died close at hand. If ever he haunts the spot it would be at such an hour, when the wizardry of the sinking sun casts its spell of romance and mystery over the most commonplace objects. All too short are such moments, but Turner, that mad genius who lived with his visions of splendour in the midst of dirt and squalor, "the wizened, meagre old man," has s.n.a.t.c.hed and imprisoned for those who come after him the fleeting miracle.

Mrs. Darling, who is tolerant of what she considers my "balmy"

propensity for "staring at nothink," occupied herself with watching the craft on the river whilst I meditated before the little green-shuttered house. It lies below the level of the footpath and behind the frontage line of its neighbours, seeking, it seems, as would the man who lived, worked and died there, to evade notice. J. M. W. Turner's action in suddenly and secretly leaving his "den" in Queen Anne's Street to take refuge in Cheyne Walk was dictated by a mad impulse to go into hiding, and one pictures the flight of the strange old man who wanted only to be left alone with his tyrannical mistress, Art. The house is described as being "next door to a ginger-beer shop close to Cremorne Pier". There is no ginger-beer shop now, only "The Aquatic Stores," and Cremorne has long disappeared.

I looked up at the windows and wondered from which one it was that the dying painter watched the gates of heaven open to let out the mystic flood of colour and take in the departing sun. There was the iron balcony on the roof, erected by Turner himself, so that he should not fall off when busy there at his easel. How well he must have known the limitless moods of the river! The silence of its inexorable tides, its liquid fire under the flaming sun, its pale shiver under the silver moon, and its black despair on a winter's night.

Mrs. Darling interrupted my meditations to inform me that a policeman was observing me with suspicion, and that she thought it would be advisable to move on. She said she had noticed on former occasions that my "ixcentrik 'abits" had attracted unwelcome notice, but that she hadn't liked to mention the matter for fear of making me nervous. Pure imagination on the old lady's part, of course, but she finds a certain pleasurable excitement in such fancies, and so I humoured her by walking on with an air of a.s.sumed indifference calculated to allay the apprehensions of any "nosey" member of the force.

_4th December._

It was too late when we left Cheyne Walk to go to Carlyle's house, and we have paid another visit to Chelsea to-day. The weather which, so far, has been kind to our wanderings, turned the disagreeable side of its face to us this afternoon. The wind was blowing a gale from the north-east, and pieces of paper and dead leaves flew as high as the topmost branches of the plane trees along the Embankment. Mrs. Darling was quite cheerful. She said the cold weather "agreed" with her feet, but, for myself, old age slapped me insultingly in the face with every spiteful gust of the biting blast.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GREAT CHEYNE ROW AND CARLYLE'S HOUSE.]

No. 28 Cheyne Row, built in 1708, has a modest exterior which somewhat belies its interior. I rang the bell, the sound prolonging itself in a tinkle that seemed to take a journey to some remote corner of the house, and almost before its warning voice had ceased the door was opened by a girl whose glance set at rest my fears of intrusion. She ushered us into a dim, drab room wainscotted from floor to ceiling, but before I go any further, Agatha, I have a confession to make. It was not Carlyle whom I had chiefly come to see. If the maid had answered my ring and said, "Mr. Carlyle is out, but Mrs. Carlyle is at home," I should certainly not have turned away; indeed, I'm afraid it would have been difficult to disguise my satisfaction at the prospect of a _tete-a-tete_ with Jane Welsh--Jane, who never sunk her individuality to the extent of becoming "the wife of Thomas Carlyle". Jane, who has always been, and always will be, "Jane Welsh" and not "Jane Carlyle" to her admirers.

It was Jane who had lured me to the old house on this bleak afternoon when I should have been sitting over the fire, forgetting my sixty-five years in a novel of youth. Jane, who in her cheery way describes the house as "an excellent lodgement, and most antique physiognomy, quite to our humour; roomy, substantial, commodious, with closets to satisfy any Bluebeard, ..." and who, in an earlier letter on the same subject, says, "I have a great liking to the ma.s.sive old concern with the broad staircase and abundant accommodation for crockery. But is it not too near the river? And another idea presents itself along with that wainscot--if bugs have been in the house! Must they not have found there as well as the inmates room without end?" I hope, by the way, that the dear lady's fears were unfounded, but judging from her later letters, I have my doubts.

How shall I describe to you the effect of that chill, prim room, seen in the light of the bleak winter afternoon! One thing of living beauty alone made a link with the present--a great bunch of tawny yellow and white chrysanthemums which a worshipper had brought to the shrine on this, the birthday, of the great man. We had chosen an auspicious date for our visit, and inspired by the coincidence, I sought to animate the dry bones with life. Over the fireplace hangs a picture in which Jane is represented sitting by the fire in this very apartment, whilst her spouse, attired in a plaid dressing-gown, stands with his back against the mantel. Here is the identical room, the identical tables and chairs, the horsehair sofa and pictures, but the room no more resembles the home-like one in the picture than do dried rose leaves placed between the leaves of a book resemble the scented freshness of freshly plucked velvety petals. Ah, well! the dead cannot live again in _this_ world, and those of us who visit ghosts' houses must leave our more material selves on the doorstep.

Everywhere are portraits of the sad, brooding face of Thomas Carlyle.

Mrs. D. said the late Mr. D. used to look like that "when 'e'd lost a bit on a 'orse," and I was moved to explain that identical results may be obtained by widely different causes. Who would choose to be a genius if he realised that loneliness was the price? Loneliness, with Jane by the fireside! Strange problem! I looked at her portrait in youth, the heart-shaped face with the parted lips and frank eyes, the dark curls and beautiful throat, and as I looked sentences in her letters came to mind. Referring to her choice of a husband, she says, "Indeed, I continue quite content with my bargain; I could wish him a little _less yellow_ and a little more _peaceable_, but that is all." And again, when writing to him, she says, "Try all that ever you can to be patient and good-natured with your povera piccola Gooda, and then she loves you, and is ready to do anything on earth that you wish.... But when the signor della casa has neither kind look nor word for me, what can I do but grow desperate and fret myself to fiddlestrings."

Referring to a birthday present from him, she says, "Only think of my husband, too, having given me a little present! He who never attends to such nonsense as birthdays, and who dislikes nothing in the world so much as going into a shop to buy anything.... Well, he actually risked himself in a jeweller's shop and bought me a very nice smelling bottle!"

Poor little wife! Poor husband, too, when after her death he has so often to say, "Ah me! too late, too late". Yet they loved each other well, and when Thomas Carlyle wrote on her tombstone, "For forty years she was the true and ever-loving helpmate of her husband," and added that she was "suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out," no one doubts that the words came from the deepest depths of his heart.

In the china closet a gla.s.s case contains some pathetic mementoes--a yellowed old lace cap worn by Mrs. Carlyle, a brooch with the portrait of her dog Nero, given by the mistress to "little Charlotte," a sock of Carlyle's with his initials neatly marked in red thread, and two small cardboard boxes, each containing locks of the hair of Thomas Carlyle and his wife. Trivial things, which yet in their haunting intimacy are too sacred, it seems, to be stared at by the curious sightseers.

In a corner hangs an etching that deserves a more prominent place, the desolate picture of a funereal _cortege_ wending its slow way against a bleak background of snow and leaden sky.... Thomas Carlyle is being carried to his last rest, and surely the Great Scene Shifter had well chosen the setting. The simple dignity of the procession approaching over the white countryside, the little group of humble folk awaiting its arrival at the gate of the churchyard, the frozen silence of the dead day--what could be more touching or impressive!

As we mounted the stairs on our way to the upper rooms, Mrs. D., who had said nothing for quite five minutes, remarked that, for _her_ part, she couldn't see why people weren't allowed to rest in their graves. Even Mrs. D.'s scepticism and want of imagination was not proof against those little mementoes in the gla.s.s case, and I think she resented her inability on this occasion to take refuge behind the usual, "'Ow d'yer know it's all true?" The old lady was visibly depressed, and, to cheer her up, I asked her if she had ever worn a "bustle," quoting a letter of Jane Welsh's, in which she wrote, "The diameter of the fashionable ladies at present is about three yards; their bustles (false bottoms) are the size of an ordinary sheep's fleece. Eliza Miles told me a maid of theirs went out one Sunday with three kitchen dusters pinned-on as a subst.i.tute."

Whereupon Mrs. D., between laughter and breathlessness, had to pause on the top stair whilst she adjusted her hat at a still more rakish angle, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "Oh, saucy!"

It is well nigh impossible, in the later portraits of Mrs. Carlyle, to recognise the girl in the miniature. The dark brooding face is almost forbidding, and one is forced to the conclusion that the portraits have little real likeness to the original. Jane, with a vitality that upheld her through years of bodily and mental suffering, with a gaiety and wit which won her the admiration and homage of those celebrated men who went to see her husband, and stayed to make friends with her, Jane could never have looked _like that_! No doubt the coal-scuttle bonnet and severe style of hair dressing had a great deal to do with it. The fashions in those days were not kind to the middle-aged woman. All the same, when I looked at a portrait of Lady Ashburton, Carlyle's friend and patron, I found there a woman whose beauty could triumph over such handicaps. Jane thought Lady Ashburton a "cat," and the insolent eyes and disdainful curve of "Harriet's" mouth incline me to think Jane was right. Comparisons are unkind, but one is forced to the conclusion that whilst Lady Ashburton's face might well be her fortune, Jane Welsh would have to draw on her wit and intellect.

The cold wind outside roared round the cold house, and a piano-organ in the street ground out a hymn. Down below the bell tinkled. More visitors were arriving, and wishing to keep in advance of them, we left the drawing-room for Mrs. Carlyle's bedroom.

"Red bed," says Carlyle in a letter to his wife, "will stand behind the drawing-room"--and here it is! A four-poster with bare laths hung with faded red curtains and flounce. There is nothing more intimate than a bed, but this bed, standing so many years unwarmed by human contact, has outlived all such a.s.sociations. It was not always a kind bed, either, judging from the tragic account in her letters of Jane's sleepless nights. "Oh!" she writes, "if there was any sleep to be got in that bed wherever it stands!" (alluding to a change in the position of her bed at Chelsea). "But it looks to my excited imagination, that bed I was born in, like a sort of instrument of red-hot torture; after all those nights I lay meditating on self-destruction as my only escape from insanity." A woman who could express her sufferings in such vivid language would be spared no iota of misery. Pin-p.r.i.c.ks, which a stupid person might ignore, would to Jane be sword-thrusts.

As one thinks of her one remembers those words written by her husband: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" and there, on the wall close at hand, hangs the photograph of her grave in Haddington Church.

But, dear me, Agatha, this won't do! I don't want (to quote my pal, Mrs.

D.) to give you the "bloomin' 'ump". One must remember that Jane was not always ill or unhappy. Jane had her bright days and her friends, "dandering individuals dropping in," Charles d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson. Note this little vignette of the latter: "Pa.s.sing through a long, dim pa.s.sage" (she was at the theatre) "I came on a tall man leant to the wall, with his head touching the ceiling like a caryatid, to all appearances asleep, or resolutely trying it under most unfavourable circ.u.mstances. 'Alfred Tennyson,' I exclaimed in joyful surprise.

'Well,' said he, taking the hand I held out to him and forgetting to let it go again, 'I should like to know who you are. I know that I know you, but I cannot tell your name.'"

Then, too, there was Macready, D'Orsay, Lord Houghton, and Mazzini. Of the latter she says, "He told me there was nothing worth recording except that he had received the other day a declaration of love. Of course, I asked the particulars. Why not?--and I got them fully." And again, "He had had two other declarations of love! 'What, more of them?'

'Ah, yes!--unhappily! They begin to rain on me like _sauterelles_!'"

Mrs. Darling said there was "nothink in _that_!" _Her_ old man had had six proposals before _she_ herself annexed him. I inquired how she had succeeded in capturing such a shy bird, and she said it only needed a bit of confidence and a lot of soft soap. _Any_ woman could marry _any_ man if she properly set her mind to it. The news was rather disquieting; also, it was not exactly flattering to one's vanity to reflect that, apparently, no woman had been anxious enough to marry me to set her mind properly to the task.

When we mounted the last flight of stairs and entered the attic study we seemed to leave Jane behind. Carlyle himself met us on the threshold of this refuge, fondly planned with dreams of quiet in which he could work unmolested. As a matter of fact, it did not repay him for the discomforts endured whilst it was being built. "My room," he writes, "is irremediably somewhat of a failure, and 'quiet' is far off me yet."

The afternoon was beginning to draw in and a little fire glowed in the old-fashioned grate. Perhaps that was why the attic study seemed the most cheerful room in the house. It might not be "sound"-proof, but, at least, the wail of the north-east wind, as it careered round the old walls, was lost here, and through the ground gla.s.s window came a warm light which suggested a fragment of sunset somewhere out in the stormdriven sky. The apartment had a hermit-like atmosphere, although there could have been but little peace for the man who travailed as Carlyle did over his gigantic tasks. One recalls to mind such words as "I was in the throes of the French Revolution at this time, heavy laden in many ways and gloomy of mind...." "I, in dismal continual wrestle with 'Friedrich,' the inexcusable book, the second of my twelve years 'wrestle' in that element." ... "Hades was not more laborious than that book, too, now was to me."

What must it have been to one, who so travailed in the birth of those children of his brain, to lose as he did, through the "miserablest accident" of his whole life, the first volume of the French Revolution?

And surely never man behaved so chivalrously to the friend who was the innocent cause of the disaster as did Carlyle to the unfortunate Mill.

Poor John Stuart Mill! One imagines with a shudder his feelings when, with the black consciousness of the awful news he had to impart, he stood on the doorstep of No. 5 Cheyne Row waiting admittance! A visit to the dentist would, in contrast, have been an occasion of happiness. The thought of what that wretched man must have suffered diverts my mind from the contemplation of the cruel blow to the victim. The picture of Mill as, after having made his terrible disclosure, "he sat three hours trying to talk of other subjects," pa.s.ses the bounds of tragedy and almost verges on the ludicrous. How he must have longed to go! and how Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle must have ached to see the back of him!

Dusk was gathering on the stairs and in the grey empty rooms as we left the attic, and we had to go carefully round the corners. Was it the whisper of a silken gown, or the swish of the wind through the branches of the bare trees in the little garden which accompanied us? Who can tell? Who _wants_ to tell? Leave us some room for speculation--some peg on which to hang our hopes of things beyond which we can see and handle.

We walked down the little street at the end of which is the Embankment gardens, and there, in the blue twilight amidst the purple branches of the bare trees, is a seated figure. A figure of which even the distant view conveys a suggestion of profound and brooding melancholy. There sits Carlyle, watching for ever the silent pa.s.sing of the river. Silver lights dotted the wharves opposite, and in the west, behind the four tall chimneys of the power station, there was yet a smouldering red amidst the almost extinct fires of sunset.

Perhaps if the mute lips could speak they would echo the once written words, "Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far, _shall_ be permitted to go farther: hope, despair not".

And on that note I close this long epistle.

Ever your friend, GEORGE.

CHAPTER VIII

CARRINGTON MEWS, SHEPHERD MARKET, _6th December._

Dear Agatha,--Mrs. Darling has announced that she doesn't want to go to any more dead people's houses. She says they give her a "nasty, sleepy feelin'". She is, moreover, of the opinion that, in these days, when living people can't get homes, it's downright wicked to waste bricks and mortar on ghosts.

She said she wanted to go to St. Paul's Churchyard to see the shops, and in a moment of weak amiability I consented to accompany her. If my good nature had stopped at that point all would have been well, but putting on the brakes halfway down hill is a thing I've never been able to accomplish, and I was lured into a draper's to help the old lady choose a blouse for Christmas.

I had never in my most imaginative moments thought of Mrs. D. as a vain woman, but her conduct over the purchase of that blouse was a revelation! If she looked at one she looked at twenty; moreover, she insisted on trying some of them on with disastrous results. Blouses that looked quite attractive off, a.s.sumed a curious appearance of bodginess when on. The little minx who served us could, I suspect, have explained the reason. _I_ could only grope for it whilst I watched Mrs. D., with the help of the little minx, push a fat arm clothed in a cloth sleeve into another sleeve composed of gossamer fabric which the a.s.sistant called "_Georgette_"!

"It's too tight," said Mrs. D. "'Tisn't my colour neither. 'Aven't you got somethink in a red silk, with a bit er lace on it?"

At this moment I became conscious of a perfume with familiar a.s.sociations, and some one put a hand on my sleeve from behind.

"George!" Then a laugh--you know Katherine's laugh. It used to be one of her a.s.sets, but there's a thin note in it now which betrays her age.

"You look so absurd," said she. "What _are_ you doing?"

"Helping Mrs. Darling to choose a blouse," said I, with a nod in the direction of Mrs. D., who at that moment was entangled in the georgette creation which the little minx was removing from above.