Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

I have never understood why Bacon was left out. Only the pedant would disown so desirable a tenant for the poor reason that the house has been rebuilt since his day. As it is, Pepys heads the list, and we do not pretend to claim that the house is exactly as it was when he lived in it. He never saw our Adam ceilings and fireplaces, we never saw his row of gables along the River front except in Canaletto's drawing of the old Watergate which our windows still overlook. However, except for the loss of the gables, the outside has changed little, and if the inside has been remodelled beyond recognition, we make all we can of the Sixteenth-Century drain-pipe discovered when the London County Council, in the early throes of reform, ordered our plumbing to be overhauled. Their certified plumber made so much of it, feeling obliged to celebrate his discovery with beer and in his hurry forgetting to blow out the bit of candle he left amid the laths and plaster, that if J. had not arrived just in time there would be no house now for the plaque to decorate. Pepys, I regret to say, waited to move in until after the Diary ended, so that we do not figure in its pages. Nor, during his tenancy, does he figure anywhere except in the parish accounts, which is more to his credit than our entertainment.

Etty was considerate and left a record of his "peace and happiness" in our chambers, but I have no proof that he appreciated their beauty. If he liked to walk on our leads in the evening and watch the sun set behind Westminster, he turned his back on the River at the loveliest hour of all. It was his habit as Academician to work like a student at night in the Royal Academy Schools, then in Trafalgar Square,—an admirable habit, but one that took him away just when he should have stayed. For when evening transformed the Thames and its banks into Whistler's "Fairyland" he, like Paul Revere, hung out a lantern from his studio window as a signal for the porter, with a big stick, to come and fetch him and protect him from the robbers of the Quarter, which had not then the best of reputations. Three generations of artists climbed our stairs to drink tea and eat muffins with Etty, but they showed the same ignorance of the Thames, all except Turner, who thought there was no finer scenery on any river in Italy, and who wanted to capture our windows from Etty and make them his own, but who, possibly because he could not get them, never painted the Thames as it was and is. One other painter did actually capture the windows on the first floor, and, in the chambers that are now the Professor's, Stanfield manufactured his marines, and there too, they say, Humphry Davy made his safety lamp.

We do not depend solely upon the past for our famous tenants. Some of the names which in my time have been gorgeously gilded inside our vestibule, later generations may find in the list we make a parade of on our outer wall. For a while, in the chambers just below ours, we had the pleasure of knowing that Mr. Edmund Gosse was carrying on for us the traditions of Bacon and Pepys. Then we have had a Novelist or two, whose greatness I shrink from putting to the test by reading their novels, and also one or more Actors, but fame fades from the mummer on the wrong side of the footlights. We still have the Architect who, if the tenants were taken at his valuation, would, I fancy, head our new list.

He is not only an architect but, like Etty,—like J. for that matter,—an Academician. He carries off the dignity with great stateliness, conscious of the vast gulf fixed between him and tenants with no initials after their name. Moreover, he belongs to that extraordinary generation of now elderly Academicians who were apparently chosen for their good looks, as Frederick's soldiers were for their size. The stoop that has come to his shoulder with years but adds to the impressiveness of his carriage. His air of superiority is a continual reminder of his condescension in having his office under our modest roof. His "Aoh, good-mornin'," as he passes, is a kindness, a few words from him a favour rarely granted, and there is no insolent familiar in the house who would dare approach him. Royalty, Archbishops, University dignitaries are his clients, and it would seem presumption for the mere untitled to approach him with a commission. His office is run on dignified lines in keeping with the exalted sphere in which he practises. A parson of the Church of England is his chief assistant. A notice on his front door warns the unwary that "No Commercial Travellers need Apply," and implies that others had better not.

William Penn is probably the only creature in the house who ever had the courage to enter the Academic precincts unbidden. William was a cat of infinite humour, and one of his favourite jests was to dash out of our chambers and down the stairs whenever he had a chance; not because he wanted to escape,—he did not, for he loved his family as he should,—but because he knew that one or all of us would dash after him. If he was not caught in time he added to the jest by pushing through the Academician's open door and hiding somewhere under the Academic nose, and I am certain that nobody had a keener sense of the audacity of it than William himself. More than once a young assistant, trying to repress a grin and to look as serious as if he were handing us a design for a Deanery, restored William to his family; and once, on a famous occasion when, already late, we were starting for the Law Courts and the Witness-box, the Architect relaxed so far as to pull William out from among the Academic drawing-boards and to smile as he presented him to J. who was following in pursuit. Even Jove sometimes unbends, but when Jove is a near neighbour it is wiser not to presume upon his unbending, and we have never given the Architect reason to regret his moment of weakness.

Whatever the Architect thinks of himself, the other tenants think more of Mr. Square, whose front door faces ours on the Third Floor. Mr. Square is under no necessity of assuming an air of superiority, so patent to everybody in the house is his right to it. If anything, he shrinks from asserting himself. He had been in his chambers a year, coming a few months "after the fire," before I knew him by sight, though by reputation he is known to everybody from one end of the country to the other. Not only is there excitement in our house when the police officer appears on our staircase with a warrant for his arrest for murder, but the United Kingdom thrills and waits with us for the afternoon's Police Report. In the neighbourhood I am treated with almost as much respect as when I played a leading part in the Law Courts myself. The milkman and the postman stop me in the street, the little fruiterer round the corner and the young ladies at the Temple of Pomona in the Strand detain me in giving me my change as if I were an accessory to the crime. What if the murder is only technical, Mr. Square's arrest a matter of form, his discharge immediate? The glory is in his position which makes the technical murder an achievement to be envied by every true-born Briton. For he is Referee at the Imperial Boxing Club, and therefore the most important person in the Empire, except, perhaps, the winning jockey at the Derby or the Captain of the winning Football Team. The Prime Minister, Royalty itself, would not shed a brighter lustre on our ancient house, and there could be no event of greater interest than the fatal "accident" in the ring for which Mr. Square has been so many times held technically responsible.

In his private capacity Mr. Square strikes me as in no way remarkable. He is a medium-sized man with sandy hair and moustache, as like as two peas to the other men of medium height with sandy hair and moustache who are met by the thousand in the Strand. He shares his chambers with Mr. Savage, who is something in the Bankruptcy Court. Both are retiring and modest, they never obtrude themselves, and either their domestic life is quiet beyond reproach, or else the old builders had the secret of soundless walls, for no sound from their chambers disturbs us. With them we have not so much as the undesirable intimacy that comes from mutual complaint, and such is their amiability that William, in his most outrageous intrusions, never roused from them a remonstrance.

I am forced to admit that William was at times ill-advised in the hours and places he chose for his adventures. He often beguiled me at midnight upon the leads that he might enjoy my vain endeavours to entice him home with the furry monkey tied to the end of a string, which during the day never failed to bring him captive to my feet. By his mysterious disappearances he often drove J., whose heart is tender and who adored him, out of his bed at unseemly hours and down into the street where, in pyjamas and slippers, and the door banged to behind him, he became an object of suspicion. On one of these occasions, a policeman materializing suddenly from nowhere and turning a bull's-eye on him,—

"Have you seen a cat about?" J. asked.

"Seen a cat? Oi've seen millions on 'em," said the policeman. "Wot sort o' cat?" he added.