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VICTORIA TOWER, WESTMINSTER.
THE SMOULDERING CITY
Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the mobile creature close within his gates.
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Rain, Smoke and Traffic.
If there is little show of that multitudinous presence, there is a broadcast sign of it. ‘No smoke without a fire’; and the sky of London continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by a folding and unfolding of banners of darkness. The quicker and hotter the enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush, and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.
Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town away from these dark latitudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer—all this stirs and lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between seven and eight o’clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is wanting—the white surface that would look beautiful in western sunshine. All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail—especially where it is gently populous—to hold up some tempered white to the rosy sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow, has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks; and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.