The City of Beautiful Nonsense

by E. Temple Thurston

EASTER SUNDAY

One Easter Sunday, soon after his first clandestine meeting with Jill, John was seated alone in his room in Fetter Lane. The family of Morrell and the family of Brown--the plumber and the theatre cleaner--had united in a party and gone off to the country--what was the country to them. He had heard them discussing it as they descended the flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs and passed outside his door.

"As long as we get back to the Bull and Bush by five," Mr. Morrell had said emphatically, and Mr. Brown had said, "Make it half-past four." Then Mrs. Morrell had caught up the snatch of a song:

"I've a tickly feelin' in the bottom of me 'eart

For you--for you,"

and Mrs. Brown has echoed it with her uncertain notes. Finally the door into the street had opened--had banged--their voices had faded away into the distance, and John had been left alone listening to the amorous frolics on the stairs of the sandy cat which belonged to Mrs. Morrell, and the tortoise-shell, the property of Mrs. Brown.

Unless it be that you are an ardent churchman, and of that persuasion which calls you to the kirk three times within the twenty-four hours, Easter Sunday, for all its traditions, is a gladless day in London. There is positively nothing to do. Even Mass, if you attend it, is over at a quarter to one, and then the rest of the hours stretch monotonously before you. The oppressive knowledge that the Bank Holiday follows so closely on its heels, overburdens you with the sense of desolation. There will be no cheerful shops open on the morrow, no busy hurrying to and fro. The streets of the great city will be the streets of a city of the dead and, as you contemplate all this, the bells of your neighbourhood peal out in strains that are meant to be cheerful, yet really are inexpressibly doleful and sad. You know very well, when you come to think about it, why they are so importunate and so loud. They are only ringing so persistently, tumbling sounds one upon another, in order to draw people to the fulfilment of a duty that many would shirk if they dared.

The bells of a city church have need to be loud, they have to rise above the greater distractions of life. Listen to the bells of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. The bell-ringers there know only too well the sounds they have to drown before they can induce a wandering pedestrian within. It was just the same in Fetter Lane. John listened to them clanging and jangling--each bell so intent and eager in its effort to make itself heard.

He thought of the country to which the families upstairs had departed; but in the country it is different. In the country, you would go to church were there no bell at all, and that gentle, sonorous note that does ring across the fields and down the river becomes one of the most soothing sounds in the world. You have only to hear it to see the old lych-gate swinging to and fro as the folk make their way up the gravel path to the church door. You have only to listen to it stealing through the meadows where the browsing cattle are steeping their noses in the dew, to see with the eye of your mind that pale, faint flicker of candle-light that creeps through the stained glass windows out into the heavy-laden air of a summer evening. A church bell is very different in the country. There is an unsophisticated note about it, a sound so far removed from the egotistical hawker crying the virtue of his wares as to make the one incomparable with the other. John envied Mrs. Brown and Mr. Morrell from the bottom of his heart--envied them at least till half-past four.

For an hour, after breakfast was finished, he sat staring into the fire he had lighted, too lonely even to work. That heartless jade, depression, one can not call her company.

Then came Mrs. Rowse to clear away the breakfast things and make his bed. He looked up with a smile as she entered.