Adventures and Enthusiasms

by E. V. Lucas

It was thus on the present occasion.

On passing the vans I was suddenly aware that the curtain had risen; for on the south pavement were some fifteen or twenty people watching two women at the house opposite, one of whom, a young one in a long brown overcoat, was trying to get past the half-opened door, while the other, an older one, in black, repulsed her from within. Just as I arrived the policeman darted from between the vans, seized the young woman's arm, and said, "That's enough of that. You come along with me." Her reluctance was intense, but she did not resist; in fact, she had about her a suggestion of having expected it.

One of the spectators remarked, "Quite time, too"; another added, "She was arstin' for it." The other woman disappeared into the house, and we all began to move in a westward direction.

Had this young woman, the nature of whose offence I did not learn, been a malefactor of any importance she would have been hustled into a cab and lost to sight. Happily, however, she was only a common brawler or disturber of the peace, and therefore there was no cab. I say happily, because it is rarely that one sees people so cheered up on a dull cold day as every one seemed to be who caught sight of her between Gerrard Street, where the policeman put that deadly grip upon her, and Vine Street, where she vanished into the station. Watching the effect of her impact on the street, "Captured to make a London holiday" is the form of words that ran through my mind.

When we turned from Gerrard Street into Wardour Street we were about thirty strong. When we turned from Wardour Street into Shaftesbury Avenue we were forty-five strong, for as the glad news spread we increased amazingly. It is a point of honour with Londoners to accompany the fallen on their way. Not to jeer at them, although our absence would be kinder, nor to sympathize with them; merely to be in whatever is going on. If our prevalent expression is one of amusement, that is because we are being entertained, and entertained free. No malice.

And so we proceeded. Every now and then the young woman, who had one of those thin white faces that often mark the excitable and even the not quite sane, and who, I fancy, had been drinking, would have stopped, to enlarge upon her grievance; but the policeman urged her ever onward, always with those terrible official fingers encircling her arm.

The retinue became alarming, like a food queue on the march. Little boys who a moment ago had no hopes of any such luck screamed the tidings to other little boys in the by-ways and these, in their turn, shrieked out to others, so that reinforcements scampered down Rupert Street and Great Windmill Street to swell the concourse. In one little boy I watched horror struggle with joy. "They've pinched a lady!" he exclaimed in shocked tones, and then hurried to the head of the line to miss nothing of the outrage. The people on the tops of motor-buses stood up. At Piccadilly Circus the traffic was suspended.

A pathetic young woman in a long brown overcoat having tried for just a few moments too long to enter a house in Gerrard Street (to which, for all I know, she had a perfect right), all London was disorganised!

And so she crossed Regent Street, passed the Piccadilly Hotel, and at the alley leading to Vine Street was swallowed up. The most eager of the adults and all the small boys penetrated the alley too, but the rest, with one last longing look, melted away and resumed the ordinary tedium of life. The thrill was over....

But the squalor of that march! What she had done I have no notion, but she was well punished for it long before Vine Street was reached. I hope that magistrates sometimes take these distances into consideration.