II
A DOOR-PLATE
But for having lived in London long enough to know the rules, or, in other words, to be aware that nothing is out of place there, I might have thought of the door-plate which, in Fetter Lane, suddenly caught my eye as an incongruity. But no; I am inured, and therefore I merely looked at it twice instead of only once, and passed on with a head full of mental and intensely uncivic pictures of undauntable men, identical in patience and hopefulness, standing hour after hour at the ends of piers all round ours coasts, watching their lines. For the words on the door-plate were these: "British Sea Anglers' Society."
I shall continue to deny that the notice was out of place, but a certain oddity (not uncommon in London) may be conceded, for Fetter Lane otherwise has less marine association than any street that one could name; and angling is too placid, too philosophic, too reclusive a sport to be represented by an office absolutely on the fringe of that half-square mile of the largest city in the world given over to fierce, feverish activity; where printing presses are at their thickest, busy and clattering, day and night, in the task of providing Britons with all—and a little more—of the news, and a fresh sensation for every breakfast table. Except that upon the breakfast table is often to be found the herring in one or other of its posthumous metamorphoses, there is no connecting link whatever. And why one has to belong to a society with a door-plate in Fetter Lane before drawing mackerel from Pevensey Bay, or whiting from the Solent, is a question to answer which is beside the mark; although that fish can be caught from the sea without membership of this fraternity I myself can testify—for was I not once in the English Channel in a small boat in the company of two conger eels and a dogfish, whose noisy and acrobatic reluctance to die turned what ought to have been a party of pleasure into misery and shame; and shall I ever forget the look of dismay (a little touched by triumph) on the face of a humane English girl visiting Ireland, when, after she had pulled in an unresisting pollock at the end of a trawl line and the boatman had taken it from the hook and beaten it sickeningly to death with an iron thole pin, she heard him say, as later, he handed the fish to a colleague on the landing-stage, "The young lady killed it"?
But this is not London—far, indeed, from it!—although an excellent example of London's peculiar and precious gift of starting the mind on extra-mural adventures. The sea, however, is, in reality too, very near the city, and the closeness of London's relations with it can be tested in many delightful ways. Although, for example, the natural meeting-place of those two old cronies, Father Thames and Neptune, is somewhere about Gravesend, Neptune, as a matter of fact, comes for a friendly glass with Gog (I almost wrote Grog) and Magog right up to town. If you lean over the eastern parapet of London Bridge, just under the clock which has letters instead of numerals, you will see the stevedores unloading all kinds of wonderful sea-borne exotic merchandise. The other morning I was the guest of a skipper of one of these vessels, and sat in his cabin (which smelt, authentically, of tobacco smoke as only a cabin can,) with his first engineer, and ate ship's biscuits and heard first-hand stories of the sinking of the Titanic, together with details of a romance in the European quarter of a certain African port all ready to the magic hand of Mr. Conrad. Twelve minutes later I was in a club in Pall Mall!
But there is no need to enter a cabin, although that is, of course, the pleasantest way, for if you wander down to the Tower you can sit on an old cannon on the quay and have the music of cordage in your ears, and if you climb to the top of the Tower Bridge the scene below you has the elements of a thousand yarns. And there are streets near the docks which might have been cut out of Plymouth or Bristol. Now and then, indeed, London may be said to be actually on the sea.
Such excursions are for the hours of light. In the hours of darkness I used to have, years ago, a favourite river-side refuge. In those days, when cabmen asked for custom instead of repulsing it, and public-houses remained open until half-past 12 a. m., I had for fine summer nights, after a dull play or dinner, a diversion that never failed; and this was to make my way—if possible with a stranger to such sights and scenes, and an impressionable one—to the Angel at Rotherhithe and watch the shipping for an hour. The Angel is difficult of access, but once there you might be at Valparaiso. It is a quarter of a mile below the Tower Bridge on the south bank, with a wooden balcony overhanging the water, and a mass of dark creaking barges moored below. Here on the balcony we used to sit, while the great ships stole by at quarter speed, groping for their moorings, and strange lights appeared and disappeared, and voices hailed each other and were answered, and little sinister rowing boats moved here and there on unknown missions, and perhaps an excursion steamer, back very late from Margate, with its saloon all lighted and a banjo bravely making merry to the bitter end, would glide past towards London Bridge; and such is the enchantment of ships and shipping that not even she could break the spell.
May the Angel survive the deluge! If not, I must carry out the dream of my life, and make friends with the captain of a Thames tug.