Royal Satin
When the Queen was married she wore a dress which I find it rather difficult to describe, because there is a special dressmakers' language for this sort of thing.
It was low in the neck, the lowness draped with white lace. The tiny inch-long sleeves were caught up at the shoulder with little bunches of orange blossom. The corsage curved inwards to a tight waist ending in a point, and the dress, cut away over a fine white underskirt, fell in a graceful, generous sweep to the floor. Over the front were draped trailing sprays of orange blossom. The going-away dress is a bit easier to describe. It covered the Queen from neck to feet. The collar was high, and braided like that of a mess uniform or a commissionaire's tunic. The sleeves, tight at the wrist and braided, rose at the shoulder, sharply and alarmingly, in a queer shape, known, I believe, as "leg of mutton." It is very stately and ornate, and, in the light of modern fashion, exceedingly stiff and strange.
Men in the early 'thirties can just remember their mothers in a dress like this, sitting calm and lovely in a victoria with a parasol in their white-gloved hands, and a perky little hat like a vegetarian restaurant poised on their puffed-up hair. So you can't help loving the Queen's going-away dress....
* * *
Where can you see it? Do you know? It is on view with hundreds of other royal satins in that beautiful and comparatively unknown museum within a stone's throw of the Prince of Wales's house in St. James' Palace—the London Museum. This is a woman's museum. I cannot imagine a woman who would not be thrilled by it. In the first place, it is the most beautifully housed museum in the world. Lancaster House, which used to be the town house of the Dukes of Sutherland, is one of the finest houses in London. It makes you feel good all over simply to walk up the wide, dignified staircase that leads from the great marble entrance hall. In the second place, the London Museum contains rooms filled entirely with royal treasures: dolls dressed by Queen Victoria, a tiny suit worn by King Edward, the cradle in which the present Royal Family were rocked to sleep, the coronation robes, intimate family relics that recall Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort, and King Edward. There are also beautiful, slightly-faded dresses which Queen Alexandra wore when she came over the sea many years ago to be the Princess of Wales.
* * *
Every day a few women can be found in a state of ecstasy before these cases. Sometimes the keeper, frock-coated and white-spatted and gardeniaed, can be seen conducting a tall, stately woman through the high magnificence of the halls a woman who looks with a smile at many a relic of childhood; and people whisper "The Queen!"
To the Londoner this place holds more of interest than any other museum, not excepting the unfortunately entombed Guildhall Museum.
The whole history of London, dug up out of London clay and peat, is here for inspection. The finest collection of Roman pottery, found among the roofs of London, is on view. There is a pot which dates from perhaps A.D. 200, on which a Londoner of seventeen hundred years ago has written: "Londini ad fanum Isidis" ("London, next door to the Temple of Isis"). Think of it! In Tudor Street seventeen hundred years ago men worshipped the Egyptian goddess Isis, the goddess with the moon on her head, the sister-wife of Osiris, who travelled from the Nile to the Tiber, where she joined the impartial Pantheon of Rome! There is the skeleton of a Roman galley found in the bed of the Thames: a great ship in which men came to build the first London. There is the skeleton of one of the first Londoners, lying stretched under glass as he was found, with a bronze pin under his chin and a bronze dagger at his breast bone.
Down below in the basement is a Chamber of Horrors few people know. Here are the great iron gates of Newgate Prison. Here in a frightening gloom are two prison cells. A wax figure, who looks as if the execution morning has dawned, writhes on his hard bed, his hands chained to the walls. Here are the manacles that held Jack Sheppard.
In another room are a series of lifelike models of old London which every Londoner should see and admire. Old London Bridge, with its rows of traitors' heads set on staves, is lifelike; old St. Paul's during the Fire of London is wonderful. A mechanical contrivance gives the illusion that smoke is rolling up from the blazing church over the startled city, the windows of houses show blood-red lights, and, as you stand looking at the model, your imagination is stirred so that you can hear the cries and the shouting, see the confused rushes as citizens tried to save their treasures when liquid lead was falling in a hissing stream on the red-hot pavements round St. Paul's.
* * *
One wonders what Lancaster House will be like in fifty years' time if it keeps pace with London! Already a hansom cab is parked in the garden! Some day a motor-omnibus and perhaps a tramcar will arrive. There are crowded days ahead!