they were talking about old days and old ways and all the changes that have come on london in the last weary years; a little party of three of them, gathered for a rare meeting in perrott’s rooms.
one man, the youngest of the three, a lad of fifty-five or so, had begun to say:
“i know every inch of that neighbourhood, and i tell you there’s no such place.”
his name was harliss; and he was supposed to have something to do with chemicals and carboys and crystals.
they had been recalling many london vicissitudes, these three; and it must be noted that the boy of the party, harliss, could remember very well the strand as it used to be, before they spoilt it all. indeed, if he could not have gone as far back as the years of those doings, it is doubtful whether perrott would have let him into the meeting in mitre place, an alley which was an entrance of the inn by day, but was blind after nine o’clock at night, when the iron gates were shut, and the pavement grew silent. the rooms were on the second floor, and from the front windows could be seen the elms in the inn garden, where the rooks used to build before the war. within, the large, low room was softly, deeply carpeted from wall to wall; the winter night, with a bitter dry wind rising, and moaning even in the heart of london, was shut out by thick crimson curtains, and the three then sat about a blazing fire in an old fireplace, a fireplace that stood high from the hearth, with hobs on each side of it, and a big kettle beginning to murmur on one of them. the armchairs on which the three sat were of the sort that mr. pickwick sits on for ever in his frontispiece. the round table of dark mahogany stood on one leg, very deeply and profusely carved, and perrott said it was a george iv table, though the third friend, arnold, held that william iv, or even very early victoria, would have been nearer the mark. on the dark red wall-paper there were eighteenth-century engravings of durham cathedral and peterborough cathedral, which showed that, in spite of horace walpole and his friend mr. gray, the eighteenth century couldn’t draw a gothic building when its towers and traceries were before its eyes: “because they couldn’t see it,” arnold had insisted, late one night, when the gliding signs were far on in their course, and the punch in the jar had begun to thicken a little on its spices. there were other engravings of a later date about the walls, things of the thirties and forties by forgotten artists, known well enough in their day; landscapes of the valley of the usk, and the holy mountain, and llanthony: all with a certain enchantment and vision about them, as if their domed hills and solemn woods were more of grace than of nature. over the hearth was bolton abbey in the olden time.
perrott would apologize for it.
“i know,” he would say. “i know all about it. it is a pig, and a goat, and a dog, and a damned nonsense”—he was quoting a welsh story—“but it used to hang over the fire in the dining-room at home. and i often wish i had brought along te deum laudamus as well.”
“what’s that?” harliss asked.
“ah, you’re too young to have lived with it. it depicts three choir-boys in surplices; one singing for his life, and the other two looking about them—just like choir-boys. and we were always told that the busy boy was hanged at last. the companion picture showed three charity girls, also singing. this was called te dominum confitemur. i never heard their story.”
“i know.” harliss brightened. “i came upon them both in lodgings near the station at brighton, in mafeking year. and, a year or two later, i saw sherry, sir in an hotel at tenby.”
“the finest wax fruit i ever saw,” arnold joined in, “was in a window in the king’s cross road.”
so they would maunder along, about the old-fashioned rather than the old. and so on this winter night of the cold wind they lingered about the london streets of forty, forty-five, fifty-five years ago.
one of them dilated on bloomsbury, in the days when the bars were up, and the duke’s porters had boxes beside the gates, and all was peace, not to say profound dullness, within those solemn boundaries. here was the high vaulted church of a strange sect, where, they said, while the smoke of incense fumed about a solemn rite, a wailing voice would suddenly rise up with the sound of an incantation in magic. here, another church, where christina rossetti bowed her head; all about, dim squares where no one walked, and the leaves of the trees were dark with smoke and soot.
“i remember one spring,” said arnold, “when they were the brightest green i ever saw. in bloomsbury square. long ago.”
“that wonderful little lion stood on the iron posts in the pavement in front of the british museum,” perrott put in. “i believe they have kept a few and hidden them in museums. that’s one of the reasons why the streets grow duller and duller. if there is anything curious, anything beautiful in a street, they take it away and stick it in a museum. i wonder what has become of that odd little figure, i think it was in a cocked hat, that stood by the bar-parlour door in the courtyard of the bell in holborn.”
they worked their way down by fetter lane, and lamented dryden’s house—“i think it was in 87 that they pulled it down”—and lingered on the site of clifford’s inn—“you could walk into the seventeenth century”—and so at last into the strand.
“someone said it was the finest street in europe.”
“yes, no doubt—in a sense. not at all in the obvious sense; it wasn’t belle architecture de ville. it was of all ages and all sizes and heights and styles: a unique enchantment of a street; an incantation, full of words that meant nothing to the uninitiated.”
a sort of litany followed.
“the shop of the pale puddings, where little david copperfield might have bought his dinner.”
“that was close to bookseller’s row—sixteenth-century houses.”
“and ‘chocolate as in spain’; opposite charing cross.”
“the globe office, where one sent one’s early turnovers.”
“the narrow alleys with steps going down to the river.”
“the smell of making soap from the scent shop.”
“nutt’s bookshop, near the welsh mutton butcher’s, where the street was narrow.”
“the family herald office; with a picture in the window of an early type-setting machine, showing the operator working a contraption with long arms, that hovered over the case.”
“and garden house in the middle of a lawn, in clement’s inn.”
“and the flicker of those old yellow gas-lamps, when the wind blew up the street, and the people were packing into that passage that led to the lyceum pit.”
one of them, his ear caught by a phrase that another had used, began to murmur verses from “oh, plump head waiter at the cock.”
“what chops they were!” sighed perrott. and he began to make the punch, grating first of all the lumps of sugar against the lemons; drawing forth thereby the delicate, aromatic oils from the rind of the mediterranean fruit. matters were brought forth from cupboards at the dark end of the room: rum from the jamaica coffee house in the city, spices in blue china boxes, one or two old bottles containing secret essences. the kettle boiled, the ingredients were dusted in and poured into the red-brown jar, which was then muffled and set to digest on the hearth, in the heat of the fire.
“misce, fiat mistura,” said harliss.
“very well,” answered arnold. “but remember that all the true matters of the work are invisible.”
nobody minded him or his alchemy; and after a due interval, the glasses were held over the fragrant steam of the jar, and then filled. the three sat round the fire, drinking and sipping with grateful hearts.
