Читать книгу Magic London - Netta Syrett - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Punctually at three o’clock next day, Godmother’s pretty little car pulled up at the door of Betty’s home in Chelsea, and a few minutes later she was driving away with her.

“Well!” began Godmother, as she observed a curious expression upon the face of her godchild, “did you try explaining to people all you saw yesterday?”

“Why, Godmother, till I caught sight of you just now, I’d forgotten all about it!” exclaimed Betty, breathless with surprise. “I mean I’d forgotten all the magic part about the ring and actually going back to see London as it was when the Romans were here,” she explained. “I kept wondering why I had a picture in my mind of London as it looked then. I simply couldn’t think how it was I knew, and I’ve only just remembered.”

“I told you that it wouldn’t be difficult to keep the secret,” returned Godmother, laughing.

“Oh, it’s a lovely secret!” Betty exclaimed. “Where are we going now?”

“I’m taking you to a Museum. But as you will see, it is, in its own way, a sort of fairy-tale place. A beautiful house, called Lancaster House, close to St. James’s Palace, has been turned into a kind of treasure-palace, containing all sorts of things that have to do with London from the very earliest times up to the present day. It is called The London Museum, and you ought to find it even more fascinating than it appears to most other people.”

“I generally hate Museums,” said Betty frankly. “But then I’ve never been to one with you before.”

“You won’t hate this one,” was Godmother’s reply. They were driving down St. James’s Street now, and in a few moments the car stopped before a stately-looking house quite near to the old Palace of St. James.

“Now,” said Godmother, as they went up the steps, “the way to see Museums is to look at a very little at a time, so, though this place is full of interesting things, I’m only going to show you one or two of them. First of all, we go downstairs into the basement.”

Betty followed her to the left of an entrance hall from which a grand staircase rose, into a corridor whose windows gave her a glimpse of a pretty green garden; then down a flight of steps into a big hall below. The floor of this had been hollowed out to look rather like a swimming-bath, but instead of water, the hollow was filled up by the skeleton of a great wooden boat. It was black with age, broken and battered, but the pieces had been carefully fitted together, so that one might at least guess how it looked more than a thousand years ago, when it was new. “It’s a Roman galley!” cried Betty, who had recently seen one, not ancient and decayed, but actually floating upon the Thames. In her excitement she scarcely knew whether to look first at the ancient boat, or at the picture which filled the end wall just above it, and showed a galley rowed by Roman soldiers.

“I see! I see!” she cried eagerly. “That’s how the man who painted that picture imagined it looked when it was new, ages ago? He hasn’t imagined it badly, has he, Godmother? The boat is just passing the fortress, and it’s very much like the one we really went up, isn’t it? And he’s made the river clear, with grassy banks, just as it was. And the soldiers are quite good too. They did look like that! Oh! Godmother, how did they find this boat?”

“Here’s a notice that will tell you. It was dug up, you see, a few years ago—in 1910, to be precise—when men were at work on a road in Lambeth.”

“Under a road?” echoed Betty. “But how did it get there?”

“Have you forgotten already what you saw yesterday? Don’t you remember that the Thames then spread out all over what is now Lambeth as well as over Westminster on the opposite bank? This boat was found in what then was the bed of the river, and is now land covered with buildings.”

“Yes, I understand. Oh, Godmother, do you think it could be the very galley we saw? Perhaps it is!”

Godmother smiled. “I’m afraid not. It is thought that this galley was sunk a hundred years or so earlier than the one we saw when we stood on the first London Bridge. But it must have been very like it.”

Betty looked up again at the picture. “It shows a piece of the wall that went round London,” she said, gazing at it with interest. “And in the background there is the great forest. Oh, I think the painter has imagined it very well.”

“Considering that he hadn’t our magic advantage I think he has,” agreed Godmother.

Betty was silent a moment, looking down thoughtfully at the remains of the poor battered galley which once sailed so proudly on London’s river, filled with soldiers, their armour and helmets glittering in the sunshine of long ago. There were other things in this basement hall that looked interesting, but Godmother would not let her stay to examine them.

“We will go upstairs now,” she said. So up the narrow staircase they went, into the corridor again, and thence to a room with Roman London painted over the door.

No sooner had Betty entered it than she gave a little cry and stood staring at the end wall, where a sort of picture in mosaic work was hanging, filling up its whole space.

“That was in the villa that belonged to Lucius!” she exclaimed. “I remember it quite well. It was the pavement of one of the rooms. There’s the lady riding on that funny animal’s back with the border round her, just as I saw it. Oh, Godmother! Just fancy its being here after all these years and years.”

“It is wonderful,” said Godmother. “How many of the thousands of people who every day hurry along the streets near London Bridge either know or remember that deep down under their feet lies a buried Roman city? Every now and then a fragment of it, like this one, is dug up. But there must be much, much more hidden far beneath houses and shops and roads where trams and omnibuses roll and rattle. By the way,” she added, “if you want to see the actual piece of pavement that was in the villa ‘that belonged to Lucius’ we shall have to go to the British Museum. This one is only a copy of it.”

“I shall go one day,” Betty answered. “I should like to see the very pavement I walked on. I’m luckier than any of the children in London,” she added with a little chuckle of delight.

“Now look at some of the things in these cases,” advised Godmother. “You will find them just as interesting.”

Betty obediently examined the contents of one of the glass boxes the room contained, and soon found occasion for a fresh excitement. On a label beside a collection of battered coins, she read: Found in the river bed near the present London Bridge. Instantly a scene rose in her mind of a little fair-haired girl crying and looking down through the chinks of a wooden bridge into the shining water.

“Oh, Godmother, perhaps one of them is the very coin that poor little girl dropped when her mother was so angry with her?” she cried.

“Perhaps,” said Godmother. “She dropped it one thousand five hundred years ago, and that’s about the date of this group of coins.”

“How do people know that?”

“By the inscriptions on them, we discover which emperor was ruling in Rome, and in that way we are often able to fix the date at which the money was in use.”

In another moment Betty had discovered other things in the cases which took her thoughts back to the “magic” experience. These were ornamental pins for the hair, combs, and other toilet articles which must once have been pretty and shining, but were dull and rusty now from long burial in the earth. She thought of the glimpse she had had of a bedroom (perhaps belonging to the mother of Lucius), in which such things as these were lying on a marble table. In fact, everything she saw in the cases reminded her of Roman London, with its beautiful villas and gardens, now buried and almost as forgotten as though they had never existed. And she sighed.

“It’s very sad to think of,” she said.

“Yes,” answered Godmother in an understanding voice. “But the life of London still goes on, even though it’s a different life, and Roman London is forgotten.” They were standing by the window of the room, and beyond the garden upon which it looked, in the road outside St. James’s Park, people were walking, children running, and taxicabs and motor-cars swept past in a constant stream.

“When the Romans lived here, all this”—she waved her hand towards the Park and the busy road—“was a dreary swamp, impossible for human existence. Now you see it the home and pleasure-ground of thousands of people whose turn it is to enjoy the sunshine, the blue sky, and all the pleasant things the Romans and the British who lived side by side in this London of ours, enjoyed long ago.”

“This may be a Museum, but it’s an awfully nice one,” declared Betty, as she and Godmother walked back towards the corridor. “It wouldn’t be dull, even without the magic. But that makes it a hundred times more fascinating, of course. Can’t we look at some other things?”

“The only other thing I’m going to show you to-day, is a certain picture,” returned Godmother. “But before we look at it, I must explain a little, or you won’t understand it.”

They found a seat in the corridor, and she began at once.

“You will remember that when we saw London yesterday, on our magic journey into the Past, I told you we were very near the end of the Romans’ stay in Britain. Soon afterwards they had to go back to fight against enemies in their own land, and you know what happened when the British were left unprotected?”

“Enemies came to fight against them.”

“And who were those enemies?”

“The Jutes and the Angles and the Saxons,” replied Betty, who was quite good at history.

“Yes, those names are all right; but the chief thing to remember about them is that they were our forefathers, and that before long they were known as the English people. This island, once called Britain, became England, and the original inhabitants—those British among whom the Romans lived—though they were not entirely driven out of the country, were hunted as far west as they could go, and received a different name.”

“I remember!” cried Betty, nodding. “They are called the Welsh now, and they live in Wales.”

“Well, for the future, in thinking about London, let us leave them there, remembering that though nowadays we scarcely know Welsh from our own countrymen, they are not our countrymen. They are of a different race, the descendants of the British, and though nearly all of them now talk in English, their native language is quite different from ours. It is really the old British language. Now, for goodness’ sake, get that clearly into your mind, and never let me hear you muddle up the British with the English, in the annoying way of most children!” concluded Godmother in her sharpest voice.

“I won’t. I promise,” Betty said, laughing, for she was getting quite used to Godmother, and was no longer afraid of her.

“Very well, then. Now you’re ready to look at the picture. Come along.”

Betty followed her down a corridor till she stopped before one of several pictures hung in a line. It represented a group of wild-looking men standing beneath the walls of a city which Betty at once saw was meant to represent the London or Londinium of the Romans.

“You must imagine that the scene shown by this picture, is about a hundred years after the Romans had gone,” said Godmother. “Those great strong men looking up at London Wall are our forefathers, the English. Awful things have been happening for the past hundred years; terrible fighting between these invaders and the British, who by now are being everywhere defeated and driven farther and farther west. The Englishmen in the picture, have come suddenly into sight of a walled city that looks dangerous to approach. They are hesitating. One of them is blowing his horn to see whether any defenders will appear upon the battlements. No answer comes to the loud blast, and the warriors will presently rush at that gate, batter it down and enter. To their amazement they will find within, beautiful houses such as they have never seen or imagined. But all of them are empty and dropping into decay. They will see the ruined gardens and orchards of buildings the use of which they can’t even guess. For many, many years London has lain deserted, because on account of the fighting in the country all round, no food could reach it, and all its people have fled. Wondering and afraid, believing, no doubt, all these decaying remains of luxury to be some magic device of demons, those rough warriors will hurry away from the silent city, leaving it to fall into still deeper ruin.”

“Poor London!” said Betty. “But how did it ever wake up again?”

“It had to wait till the worst of the fighting was over before it was occupied again—this time by a different race—the English race. Then London once more came to life. But by this time probably nearly the whole of the Roman buildings had disappeared, and become buried under the first rough English houses where the new race of men lived who once more made the city into a thriving port.”

“And these English people forgot all about the Romans, I suppose?”

“They never knew them, you see. Even the few British who were left (the descendants of those who had lived under Roman rule), only had legends about them. They used the great roads the Romans had made, but they called them by new names—English names. Watling Street, for instance, was the name they gave to the great Roman road that led northwards out of London. It is now partly Oxford Street and partly Edgware Road. Roman London disappeared as though it had never been, till bits of it, ages later, were, and are, being dug up.”

“Then didn’t the Romans ever have anything to do with the English at all?”

“They had a great deal to do with them—later on. For one thing, as you ought to remember, they converted them to Christianity.”

“Oh yes, of course. St. Augustine came from Rome, didn’t he, and taught the English to be Christians? But that was a long time afterwards.”

“When we see London again, it will be a Christian city once more, just as it was when you and I looked down upon it from the Roman fortress.”

“Only the people in it will be English—instead of British and Roman,” said Betty. “Oh, Godmother, when shall we see it the ‘magic’ way again?”

“All in good time,” was Godmother’s reply, as she looked at her watch. “I shall just have time to show you one little bit of Roman London which remains to this day just where the Romans left it,” she added.

“Not in a museum then?”

“No. It’s in the very midst of London, at the back of a modern hotel. You shall see it first, and I’ll tell you what I can about it, afterwards.”

“Stop at Strand Lane, close to Aldwych Tube Station in the Strand,” was Godmother’s direction to the chauffeur.

They were soon there, and Betty wonderingly followed the old lady down a winding, narrow road between houses, till she stopped before an ordinary-looking back-door, near which a board hung, with the words Roman Bath upon it. In another moment Betty was in a vaulted room, gazing down at what seemed to be a little swimming-bath. It was paved and lined with marble slabs, but these did not reach quite to the top, and a rim of ancient bricks was visible.

“Once upon a time, two thousand years ago, perhaps,” said Godmother, “there was a Roman villa on this spot, and here is the very bath belonging to it! Under those steps that go down into the bath, there is a spring of water, constantly bubbling up—the same spring that filled it in Roman days.”

“And Roman people bathed here ages ago!” exclaimed Betty.

“It seems wonderful, doesn’t it? But there is the bath that they built nearly two thousand years ago. The water that fills it, comes from a stream forming a well, which in the Middle Ages was called Holy Well. Only a very few years ago there was a street over there, on the other side of the Strand, called Holywell Street, because it was built over the old well.”