Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine does.

Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who do not know the way. Only two streets lead directly into it from anywhere, and they lead directly nowhere out of it again; nor do the crowds in the near Strand as much as see the dirty courts and dark alleys which are my short cuts, much less the underground passages which serve the same purpose,—the mysterious labyrinth of carpenters-shops and warehouses and vast wine-cellars, grim and fantastic and unbelievable as Ali Baba and the whole Arabian Nights, burrowed under the Quarter and approached by tunnels, so picturesque that Géricault made a lithograph of one when he was in London, so murderous that to this day they are infested with police who turn a flashing bull's-eye upon you as you pass. Altogether, the Quarter is a "shy place" full of traps for the unwary. I have had friends, coming to see me for the first time, lose themselves in our underground maze; I have known the crowd, pouring from the Strand on Lord Mayor's Day, get hopelessly entangled in our network; as a rule, nobody penetrates into it except on business or by chance.

But for all that, there is a good deal to see, and the Quarter, quiet though it may be, is never dull as I watch it from my high windows. To the front I look out on the Thames: down to St. Paul's, up to Westminster, opposite to Surrey, and, on a clear day as far as the hills. Trains rumble across the bridges, trams screech and clang along the Embankment, tugs, pulling their line of black barges, whistle and snort on the river. The tide brings with it the smell of the sea and, in winter, the great white flights of gulls. At night myriads of lights come out, and always, at all hours and all seasons, there is movement and life,—always I seem to feel the pulse of London even as I have its roar in my ears.

To the east I look down to streets of houses black with London grime, still stately in their old-fashioned shabbiness, as old as the Eighteenth Century, which I have read somewhere means the beginning of the world for an American like myself.

To the west I tower over a wilderness of chimney-pots, for our house is built on the edge of a hill, not very high though the London horse mistakes it for an Alpine pass, but high enough to lift our walls, on this side sheer and cliff-like, above an amazing collection of tumbled, weather-worn, red-tiled roofs, and crooked gables sticking out at unexpected angles, that date back I am not to be bullied by facts into saying how far, and that stretch away, range upon range, to loftier houses beyond, they in their turn over-shadowed by the hotels and clubs on the horizon, and in among them, an open space with the spire of St. Martin-in-the-Fields springing up out of it, dark by day, a white shadow by night,—our ghost, we call it.

And most wonderful of all is the expanse of sky above and around us, instead of the tiny strip framed in by the narrow street which is the usual share of the Londoner. We could see the sun rise every morning behind St. Paul's, if we were up in time, and of course if there was a sun every morning in London to rise. Over the river, when fog and mist do not envelop it as in a shroud, the clouds—the big, low, heavy English clouds—float and drift and scurry and whirl and pile themselves into mountains with a splendour that might have inspired Ruskin to I do not know how many more chapters in "Modern Painters" had he lived in the Quarter. Behind our collection of tumbled roofs and gables awry, the sun—always provided there is a sun—sets with a dramatic gorgeousness that, if it were only in any remote part of the world, the Londoner would spare himself no time nor trouble to see, but that, because it is in London, remains a spectacle for us to enjoy by ourselves. And the wonder grows with the night,—the river, with its vague distances and romantic glooms and starlike lights, losing itself in mystery, and mystery lurking in the little old streets with their dark spectral mass of houses, broken by one or two spaces of flat white wall, and always in the distance the clubs and hotels, now castles and cathedrals, and the white tapering ghost pointing heavenward. With so stupendous a spectacle arranged for my benefit, is it any marvel that much of my time is spent at my windows? And how can I help it if, when I am there, I see many things besides the beauty that lured us to the Quarter and keeps us in it?

Hundreds of windows look over into mine: some so far off that they are mere glittering spots on a rampart of high walls in the day-light, mere dots of light at dusk; some as carefully curtained as if the "Drawn Blinds" or "Green Shutters" of romance had not stranger things to hide from the curious. But others are too near and too unveiled for what goes on behind them to escape the most discreet. In what does go on there is infinite variety, for the Quarter, like the Inns of Court, is let out in offices and chambers, and the house that shelters but one tenant is the exception, if indeed it exists.

All these windows and the people I see through them have become as much a part of my view as the trains and the trams, the taxis and the tugs. I should think the last days of the Quarter were at hand if, the first thing in the morning, I did not find the printer hard at work at his window under one of the little gables below; or if, the last thing at night, I missed from the attic next door to him the lamp of the artist, who never gets up until everybody else is going to bed; or if, at any hour I looked over, people were not playing cards in the first-floor windows of the house painted white, or frowzy women were not leaning out of the little garret windows above, or the type-writer was not clicking hard in the window with the white muslin curtains and the pot of flowers, or the manicurist not receiving her clients behind the window with the staring, new yellow blinds. I should regret even the fiery, hot-tempered, little woman who jumps up out of the attic window immediately below us, like a Jack-in-the-box, and shakes her fist at us every time Augustine shakes those unfortunate rugs which are perpetually getting us into trouble with our neighbours. I should think the picture incomplete if, of an evening, the diners out were to disappear from behind the windows of the big hotel, though nothing makes me more uncomfortably conscious of the "strangely mingled monster" that London is, than the contrast between them lingering over the day's fourth banquet, and the long black "hunger line" forming of a winter morning just beside Cleopatra's Needle and waiting in dreary patience for the daily dole of bread and soup.

I cannot imagine the Quarter without actors and actresses in possession of dozens of its windows, the attraction to them less the associations with Garrick than the convenient proximity to the principal theatres; or without the Societies, Institutes, Leagues, Bureaus, Companies, Associations, and I know not what else, that undertake the charge of everything under the sun, from ancient buildings to women's freedom; or without the clubs, where long-haired men and Liberty-gowned women meet to drink tea and dabble in anarchy; where more serious citizens propose to refashion the world and mankind, and, incidentally, British politics; where, in a word, philanthropists of every pattern fill the very air of the Quarter with reform, until my escape from degenerating into a reformer despite myself seems a daily miracle, and the sham Bohemianism of the one club willing to let the rest of the world take care of itself becomes almost a virtue.

It is probably the seclusion, the cloistral repose, of the Quarter that attracts the student and the scholar. Up at my windows, the busy bee would be given points in the art of improving each shining hour. In every direction I turn I am so edified by the example of hard work that I long for the luxury of being shocked by idleness.