Читать книгу Loitering in Pleasant Paths - Marion Harland - Страница 5

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IN one week we had been twice to Westminster Abbey, once to the Tower; had seen St. Paul’s, Hyde Park, Tussaud’s Wax Works, Mr. Spurgeon, the New Houses of Parliament, Billingsgate, the Monument, Hyde Park, the British Museum, and more palaces than I can or care to remember. In all this time we had not a ray of sunshine, but neither had a drop of rain fallen. We began to leave umbrellas at home, and to be less susceptible in spirits to the glooming of the dusky canopy upborne by the chimneys. That one clear—for London—Sunday had made the curtain so nearly translucent as to assure us that behind the clouds the sun was still shining, and we took heart of grace for sight-seeing.

But in the course of seven smoky-days we became slightly surfeited with “lions.” Weary, to employ a culinary figure, of heavy roast and boiled, we longed for the variety of spicy entrées—savory “little dishes” not to be found on the carte, and which were not served to the conventional sight-seer. One morning, when the children had gone to “the Zoo” with papa and The Invaluable, Prima—the sharer with me of the aforesaid whim—and myself left the hotel at ten o’clock to carry into effect a carefully-prepared programme. We had made a list of places where “everybody” did not go; which “Golden Guides” and “Weeks in London” omitted entirely, or slurred over with slighting mention; which local ciceroni knew not of, and couriers disdained, but each of which had for us peculiar association and attraction.

Four-wheelers were respectable for unattended women, and cheaper than hansoms. But there was a tincture of adventure in making our tour in one of the latter, not taking into account the advantages of being able to see all in front of us, and the less “stuffy” odor of the interior. Sallying forth, with a pricking, yet delicious sense of questionableness that recalled our school-day pranks, we sought the nearest cab-stand and selected a clean-looking vehicle, drawn by a strong horse with promise of speed in body and legs. The driver was an elderly man in decent garb. The entire establishment seemed safe and reputable so far as the nature of our enterprise could partake of these characteristics. When seated, we gave an order with inward glee, but perfect gravity of demeanor.

“Newgate Prison!”

We had judged shrewdly respecting the qualities of our horse. It was exhilarating, even in the dull, dead atmosphere we could not breathe freely while on foot, to be whirled through the unknown streets, past delightless parks and dolefuller mansions in the West End, in and out of disjointed lanes that ran madly up to one turn and down to another, as if seeking a way out of the mesh of “squares” and “roads” and “rows,”—perceiving satisfiedly, as we did all the time, that we were leaving aristocratic and even respectable purlieus behind as speedily as if our desires, and not the invisible “cabby,” shaped our flight. We brought up with a jerk. Cabs—in the guidance of old or young men—have one manner of stopping; as if the “concern,” driver, horse and hansom, had meant to go on for ever, like Tennyson’s brook, and reversed the design suddenly upon reaching the address given them, perhaps, an hour ago. We jerked up now, in a narrow street shut in on both sides by black walls. The trap above our heads opened.

“Newgate on the right, mem! Old Bailey on the left!”

The little door shut with a snap. We leaned forward for a sight of the prison on the right. Contemptible in dimensions by comparison with the spacious edifice of our imaginations, it was in darksomeness and relentless expression, a stony melancholy that left hope out of the question, just what it should—and must—have been. The pall enwrapping the city was thickest just here, resting, like wide, evil wings upon the clustered roofs we could see over the high wall. The air was lifeless; the street strangely quiet. Besides ourselves we did not see a human being within the abhorrent precincts. The prison-front, facing the smaller “Old Bailey,” is three hundred feet long. In architecture it is English—bald and ugly as brick, mortar, and iron can make it. In three minutes we loathed the place.

“You can go on!” I called to the pilot, pushing up the flap in the roof. “Drive to the church in which the condemned prisoners used to hear their last sermon.”

“Yes, mem!” Now we detected a rich, full-bodied Scotch brogue in his speech. “Pairhaps ye wouldna’ moind knawing that by that gett—where ye’ll see the bairs—the puir wretches went on the verra same mornin’. Wha passed by that gett never cam’ back.”

It was a dour-looking passage to a disgraceful death; a small door crossed by iron bars, and fastened with a rusty chain. It made us sick to think who had dragged their feet across the dirt-crusted threshold, and when.

The cab jerked up again in half a minute, although we had rushed off at a smart trot that engaged to land us at least a mile off.

“St. Sephulchre’s, mem!”

I have alluded to the difficulty of determining the age of London buildings from the outward appearance. A year in the sooty moisture that bathes them for seven or eight months out of twelve, destroys all fairness of coloring, leaving them without other beauty than such as depends upon symmetrical proportions, graceful outlines and carving. The humidity eats into the pores of the stone as cosmetics impair the texture of a woman’s skin. But St. Sepulchre has a right to be blasé. It antedated the Great Fire of 1666, the noble porch escaping ruin from the flames as by a miracle. It is black, like everything else in the neighborhood, and, to our apprehension, not comely beyond the portico. The interior is as cheerless as the outside, cold and musty. Throughout, the church has the air of a battered crone with the sins of a fast youth upon her conscience. There are vaults beneath the floor, lettered memorial-stones in the aisle, tarnished brasses on the walls. Clammy sweats break out upon floor, walls, pews and altar in damp weather, and this day of our visit had begun to be damp. It was an unwholesome place even to be buried in. What we wanted to see was a flat stone on the southern side of the choir, reached in bright weather by such daring sunbeams as could make their way through a window, the glass of which was both painted and dirty. A brownish-gray stone, rough-grained, and so much defaced that imagination comes to the help of the eyes that strive to read it: “Captain John Smith—Sometime Governour of Virginia and Admirall of New-England.” He died in 1631, aged fifty-two. The Three Turks’ Heads are still discernible upon the escutcheon above the inscription. The rhyming epitaph begins with—

“Here lyes One conquer^d that Hath conquer^d Kings.”

We knew that much and failed to decipher the rest.

Family traditions, tenderly transmitted through eight generations, touching the unwritten life of the famous soldier of fortune, of the brother who was his heir-at-law, and bequeathed the coat-of-arms to American descendants, were our nursery tales. For him whose love of sea and wildwood was a passion captivity nor courts could tame, his burial-place is a sorry one, although esteemed honorable. I think he would have chosen rather an unknown grave upon the border of the Chickahominy or James, the stars, that had guided him through swamp and desert, for tapers, instead of organ-thrill and incense, the song of mockingbirds and scent of pine woods. The more one knows and thinks and sees of St. Sepulchre’s the less tolerant is he of it as a spot of sepulture for this gallant and true knight. They interred him there because it was his parish church. But they—the English—are not backward in removing other people’s bones when it suits their pride or convenience to do so. In the square tower, lately restored, hangs the bell that has tolled for two hundred years when the condemned passed out of the little iron gate we had just seen. They used to hang them at Tyburn, afterward in the street before the prison. Now, executions take place privately within the Newgate walls. In the brave old times, when refinement of torture was appreciated more highly than now as a means of grace and a Christian art, the criminal had the privilege of hearing his own funeral sermon—which was rarely, we may infer, a panegyric—seated upon his coffin in the broad aisle of St. Sepulchre’s. There was a plat of flowers then in the tiny yard where the grass cannot sprout now for the coal-dust, and as the poor creature took his place—the service done—upon the coffin in the cart that was to take him to the gallows, a child was put forward to present him with a bouquet of blossoms grown under the droppings of the sanctuary. What manner of herbs could they have been? Rue, rosemary, life-everlasting? Yet they may have had their message to the dim eyes that looked down upon them—for the quailing human heart—of the Father’s love for the lowest and vilest of His created things.

“Temple Bar!” was our next order.

Before we reached it our driver checked his horse of his own accord, got down from his perch at the back, and presented his weather-beaten face at my side.

“I’ve thocht”—respectfully, and with unction learned in the “kirk”—“that it might eenterest the leddies to know that this is the square where mony hundreds of men, wimmen, and, one may say, eenfants, were burrned alive for the sake of the Faith.”

And in saying it, he lifted his hat quite from his head in reverence, we were touched to note, was not meant for us, but as a tribute to those of whom the world was not worthy.

“Smithfield!” we cried in a breath. “Oh! let us get out!”

It is a hollow square, a small, railed-in garden and fountain in the middle; around these extends on three sides an immense market, the pride of modern London, a structure of much pretension, with four towers and a roof, like that of a conservatory, of glass and iron, supported by iron pillars. A very Babel of buying and selling, of hawkers’ and carters’ yells, at that early hour of the day. The stake was near the fine old church of St. Bartholomew, which faces the open space. Excepting the ancient temple, founded in 1102, there is no vestige of the Smithfield (Smooth-field) where Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305; where the “Gentle Mortimer” of a royal paramour was beheaded in 1330, and, in the reign of Mary I., the “Good Catholic,” three hundred of her subjects, John Rogers and Bradford among them, were burned with as little scruple as the white-aproned butcher in the market-stall near by slices off a prime steak for a customer. The church has been several times restored, but the Norman tower bears the date 1628. It, too, felt the Great Fire, and the heat and smoke of crueller flames, in the midst of which One like unto the Son of Man walked with His children. Against the walls was built the stage for the accommodation of the Lord Mayor of London, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Bedford, that they might, at their ease, behold Anne Askew burn. They were in too prudent dread of the explosion of the powder-bag tied about her waist to sit near enough to hear her say to the sheriff’s offer of pardon if she would recant—“I came not hither to deny my Lord!”

St. Bartholomew the Great stands yet in Smithfield. Above it bow the heavens that opened to receive the souls born into immortality through the travail of that bloody reign. Forty years ago, they were digging in the ground in front of the church to lay pavements, or gas-pipes, or water-mains, or some other nineteenth-century device, and the picks struck into a mass of charred human bones.

“Unknown!” Stephen Gardiner and his helpers had a brisk run of business between St. Andrew’s Day, 1554, and November 17, 1558. There was no time to gather up the fragments. Ah, well! God and His angels knew where was buried the precious seed of the Church.

How the cockles of our canny Scot’s heart warmed toward us when he perceived that he and we were of one mind anent Smithfield! that we took in, without cavil, the breadth and depth of his words—“The Faith!” During that busy four years tender women, girls and babes in age proved, with strong men, what it meant to “earnestly contend for” it.

In a gush of confidence induced by the kinship of sentiment upon this point, we told our friend what we wanted to see in the city, that day, and why, and found him wonderfully versed in other matters besides martyrology. He named a dozen places of interest not upon our schedule, and volunteered to call out the names of noted localities through the loop-hole overhead, as we passed them. This arrangement insured the success of our escapade, for his judicious selection of routes, so as to waste no time in barren neighborhoods, was only surpassed by the quality of the pellets of information dropped into our ears.

St. John’s gate was, in aspect, the most venerable relic we saw in London. They told us in the office at the gateway that it and the Priory—now destroyed—were built in 1111; but recollecting that the Pope’s confirmation of the first constitution of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem bore date of 1113, we nursed some unspoken doubts. The prior who finished the building in 1504 modestly left his family coat-of-arms upon the wall of the small entrance-room, now used as an office. This black and bruised arch marks what was the rallying-point of British chivalry and piety during three crusades. Out of this gate the Hospitaliers drew forth in mingled martial and ecclesiastical array—white gown with the red cross on shoulder, over hauberk and greaves—at each departure for the Holy Land. Godfrey de Bouillon was an influential member and patron of the Order. Henry VIII. scattered the brethren and pocketed their revenues. His daughter Mary reinstated them in their home and privileges. Her sister Elizabeth would none of them, and that was an end of the controversy, for she lived long enough to enforce her decree.

Cave’s “Gentleman’s Magazine” was published here when gentlemen ceased to ride, booted, spurred, and illiterate, upon the crusades against the Saracen. Johnson, a slovenly provincial usher, having failed as translator and schoolmaster to make a living, applied for, and received from this periodical literary employment—the first paying engagement of his life. For more than a dozen years he was a contributor to the Magazine, and the office above the gate was his favorite lounging-place. As a proof of this they show a chair, ungainly and unclean enough to have been used by him throughout the period of his contributorship.

East of St. John’s Gate we passed a disused intramural cemetery, begloomed on all sides by rows of dingy houses. The rain of “blacks” incessantly descending upon the metropolis collects here in unstirred, sable sheets. Such a pall enfolds the graves of Isaac Watts and Daniel Defoe, whose “Diary of the Great Plague” is a work of more dramatic power than his Robinson Crusoe. A stone’s throw apart from hymnster and romancist, lies a greater than either—the prince of dreamers, John Bunyan.

Temple Bar is—or was, for it has been pulled down since we were there—an arch of Portland stone, and is attributed, I hope, erroneously, to Christopher Wren. Without this information I should have said that it was a wooden structure, badly hacked, gnawed, and besmirched by time, with dirty plaster statues of the two Charleses niched upon one side, and, upon the other, corresponding figures of James I. and Elizabeth. It was much lower than we had supposed, and than it is represented in pictures, and just wide enough to allow two coaches to pass abreast without collision. The roaring tide overflowing the Strand and Fleet Street appeared to squeeze through with difficulty. Above the gate was a row of one-story offices—mere boxes—such as are occupied in our country by newspaper-venders. Within the memory of living men the top of the gate was a thick-set hedge of spikes, reckoned, not very many years back, as one of the bulwarks of English liberties. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century, law-abiding cockneys, on their peregrinations to and from the city, were strengthened in loyalty and veneration for established customs, by the spectacle of rotting and desiccated heads of traitors exposed here. They were tardy in the abolition of object-teaching in Christian England. There were solid oaken gates with real hinges and bars at Temple Gate. When the sovereign paid a visit to the city she was reminded of some agreeable passages between one of her predecessors and the London lords of trade, by finding these closed. Her pursuivant blew a trumpet; there was an exchange of question and reply; the oaken leaves swung back; the Lord Mayor presented his sword to our gracious and sovereign lady, the queen, who returned it to him with an affable smile, and the royal coach was suffered to pass under the Bar. More object-teaching!

From Temple Gate to Temple Gardens was a natural transition. These famous grounds formerly sloped down to the Thames, and were an airy, spacious promenade. Now, one smiles in reading that Suffolk found it a “more convenient” place for private converse than the “Temple Hall.” A talk between four gentlemen of the rank of Plantagenet, Suffolk, Somerset and Warwick, in the pretty plat of grass and flowers, fenced in by iron rails, would have eavesdroppers by the score, and the incident of plucking the roses be overlooked by the gossips of fifty tenement-houses. But the area, sadly circumscribed by the encroachments of business, is a sightly bit of green, intersected by gravel walks, and in the season enlivened by the flaming geraniums that not even London “blacks” can put out of countenance. We really saw rose-trees there in flower, the following August.

In one particular, and one only, the knowledge and zeal of our Scotchman were at fault in the course of our Bohemian expedition. I have said that Baedeker’s excellent “Hand-book for London” was in the printer’s hands just when we needed it most. Therefore we searched vainly in St. Paul’s Churchyard for Dr. Johnson’s Coffee-house, where Boswell hung upon his lumbering periods, as bees upon honeysuckle; for the site of the Queen’s Arms Tavern, also a resort of the literati in the time of the great Lexicographer. We were mortified at our ill-success, chiefly because we ascribed it to the very lame and imperfect descriptions of these places which were all we could offer the Average Britons of whom we made inquiry. We were in no such uncertainty as to the Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row; Mrs. Gaskell had been there before us and left so broad a “blaze” we could hardly miss seeing it.

“Half-way up (the Row), on the left hand side, is the Chapter Coffee-house. It is two hundred years old, or so. … The ceilings of the small rooms were low, and had heavy beams running across them; the walls were wainscoted breast-high; the staircase was shallow, broad, and dark, taking up much space in the centre of the house. This, then, was the Chapter Coffee-house, which, a century ago, was the resort of all the booksellers and publishers; and where the literary hacks, the critics, and even the wits, used to go in search of ideas, or employment. This was the place about which Chatterton wrote, in those delusive letters he sent to his mother at Bristol, while he was starving in London. ‘I am quite familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there.’ Here he heard of chances of employment; here his letters were to be left.”

Here the Brontë sisters, visiting London upon business connected with “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” stayed for two days, resisting the invitation of their publisher to come to his house.

Charlotte’s biographer had gone on to draw for us with graphic pen a scene of later date:

“The high, narrow windows looked into the gloomy Row. The sisters, clinging together on the most remote window-seat, could see nothing of motion or of change in the grim, dark houses opposite, so near and close although the whole breadth of the Row was between. The mighty roar of London was round them, like the sound of an unseen ocean, yet every foot-fall on the pavement below might be heard distinctly in that unfrequented street.”

When we made known our purpose to the guide, who, by this time, had taken upon him the character of protector, likewise, he was puzzled but obedient. He got down at the mouth of the crooked Row and begged permission to do our errand.

“The horse is pairfectly quiet, and there’s quite a dreezle comin’ on.”

This was true. The fog that had seemed dry so long, was falling. The uneven, round stones were very wet. But why not drive down the street until we found the house we were looking for?

He rubbed his grizzled, sandy hair into a mop of perplexity.

“The way is but strait at the best, as ye may pairceive, leddies, and it wad be unco’ nosty to meet a cab, or, mayhap, a four-wheeler in some pairts.”

We primed him with minute directions and let him depart upon the voyage of discovery, while we leaned back under the projecting hood of the carriage, sheltered by it and the queer, wooden folding-doors above our knees, from the “dreezle,” and speculated why “Paternoster” Row should be near to and in a line with “Amen” and “Ave Maria” corners. What august processional had passed that way, and pausing at given stations to say an “Ave,” a “Paternoster,” a united “Amen,” left behind it names that would be repeated as long and ignorantly as the Cross of “Notre Chère Reine” and “La Route du Roi” are murdered into cockney English? That led to the telling of a dispute Caput had had one day with a cabman, who, by the way, had jumped from his box on the road to Hyde Park corner to say: “No, sir, we’re not at H’Apsley ’Ouse yet, sir! But I fancied it might h’interest the lady to know that the pavement we are a-drivin’ over at this h’identical minute, sir, h’is composed h’entirely of wood!”

“We have hundreds of miles of it in America, and wish you had it all!” retorted Caput, amused, but impatient. “Go on!”

Having seen Apsley and Stafford Houses, we bade the fellow take us to a certain number on Oxford Street. He declared there was no such street in the city, and jumped down from his seat to confirm his assertion out of the mouths of three or four other “cabbies” at a hackstand. A brisk altercation ensued, ended by Caput’s exhibition of an open guide-book and pointing to the name.

“Ho! hit’s Hugsfoot Street you mean!” cried the disgusted cockney.

As I finished the anecdote our Scot returned, crestfallen. He did not say we had sent him on a fool’s errand, but we began to suspect it ourselves when we undertook the quest in person. We were wrapped in waterproofs and did not mind the fine, soaking mist, except as it made the strip of flagging next the shops slippery, as with coal-oil. Paternoster Row retains its bookish character. Every second shop was a publisher’s, printer’s, or stationer’s. Everybody was civil. N. B.—Civility is a part of a salesman’s trade in England. But everybody stared blankly at our questions relative to the Chapter Coffee-house, although the very name fixed it in this locality. One and all said, first or last—“I really carn’t say!” and several observed politely that “it was an uncommon nasty day.” One added, “But h’indeed, at this season, we may look for nasty weather.”

One word about this pet adjective of the noble Briton of both sexes. It is quite another thing from the American word, spelled but not pronounced in the same way, and which, with us, seldom passes the lips of well-bred people. An English lady once told me that a hotel she had patronized was “very clean—neat as wax, in fact, and handsomely furnished, but a very-very nasty house!”

She meant, it presently transpired, that the fare was scant in quantity, and the landlord surly. Whatever is disagreeable, mean, unsatisfactory, from any cause whatsoever, is “nasty.” When they would intensify the expression they say “beastly,” and fold over the leaf upon the list of expletives.

We did not find our coffee-house, nor anybody who looked or spoke as if he ever heard of the burly Lichfield bear or his parasite, of Chatterton or Horace Walpole, much less of the Rowley MSS. or the sisters Brontë! Nor were we solaced for the disappointment by driving three miles through the mist to see The Tyburn Tree, to behold an upright slab, like a mile-stone, set upon the inner edge of the sidewalk at the western verge of Hyde Park. A very disconsolate slab, slinking against the fence as if ashamed of itself in so genteel a neighborhood, and of the notorious name cut into its face.