Our House and London out of Our Windows

by Elizabeth Robins Pennell

"Well, and have you ever seen one come down again?" And if you will believe it, I never have.

A door or so from the Dramatist, but on the opposite side of the street, the Socialist's windows face mine. I cannot, with any respect for truth, call him unassuming; modesty is not his vice. It is not his ambition to hide his light under a bushel,—or rather a hogshead; on the contrary, as he would be the first to admit, it could not flare on too many housetops to please him. When I first met him, years before we again met in the Quarter, the world had not heard of him, but he was quite frank in his determination that it should, though to make it hear, he would have to play a continuous solo on his own cornet, until he impressed somebody else with the necessity of blowing it for him. Besides, he has probably never found other people as entertaining as himself, which is an excellent reason why he should not keep himself out of his talk and his writing,—and he is talking and writing all the time. His is a familiar voice among the Fabians, on public platforms, and at private meetings, and for a very little while it was listened to by bewildered Borough Councillors. He has as many plays to his credit as the British Dramatist, as many books as the Novelist, and I recall no other writer who can equal him in the number and length of his letters to the press. As he courts, rather than evades, notice, I doubt if he would be embarrassed to learn how repeatedly I see him doing his hair and beard in the morning and putting out his lights at night, or how entirely I am in his confidence as to the frequency of his luncheon parties and the number of his guests. Were I not the soul of discretion I could publish his daily menu to the world, for his kitchen opens itself so aggressively to my view that I see into it as often as into my own.

For that matter, I have under my inspection half the kitchens in the Quarter, and the things I witness in them might surprise or horrify more than one woman who imagines herself mistress in her own house. I have assisted at the reception of guests she never invited; I understand, if she does not, why her gas and electric-light bills reach such fabulous figures; I could tell her what happens when her motor-car disappears round the corner,—for, seedy and down-at-heel as the Quarter may appear, the private motor is by no means the exception among the natives. Only the other day, when the literary family, who are as unsuspicious as they are fond of speed, started in their motor for the week-end, they could have got no further than the suburbs before the cloth was laid in their dining-room, their best china, silver, and glass brought out, flowers, bottles, and siphons in place, and their cook at the head of their table "entertaining her friends to luncheon." The party were lingering over the fruit when suddenly a motor-horn was heard in the street. There was a look of horror on all their faces, one short second of hesitation, and then a wild leap from the table, and, in a flash, flowers, bottles, and siphons, china, glass, and silver were spirited away, the cloth whisked off, chairs set against the wall. As the dining-room door closed on the flying skirt of the last guest, the cook looked out of the window, the horn sounded again, and the motor was round the corner in the next street, for it was somebody else's, and the literary family did not return until Monday.

The Socialist, who deals in paradox and the inconsequent, also has his own car. Now that Socialism is knocking at our doors, the car tooting at his, come to fetch him from his town house to his country house or off to the uttermost ends of the earth, toots reassurance into our hearts. Under such conditions we should not mind being Socialists ourselves. However, he does make one protest against Individualism in which I should not care to join him, for he goes shares in his personality and has perpetrated a double in the Quarter,—a long lean man, with grizzled red hair and beard, who is clothed in brown Jaegers, whose face has the pallor of the vegetarian, and who warns us of the manner of equality we may expect under the Socialist's régime. I dread to think of the complications there might be were the double not so considerate as to carry a black bag and wear knee-breeches. A glance at hands and legs enables us to distinguish one from the other and to spare both the inconvenience of a mistaken identity. The double, like the old men opposite, remains one of the mysteries of the Quarter. Nobody can explain his presence in our midst, nobody has ever spoken to him, nobody can say where he comes from with his black bag in the morning, where he goes with it in the evening, or even where he stops in the Quarter. I doubt if the Socialist has yet, like the lovers in Rossetti's picture, met himself, for surely no amount of Socialism could bear the shock of the revelation that must come with the meeting.

If many books are written in the Quarter, more are published from it, and the number increases at a rate that is fast turning it into a new Paternoster Row. I am surrounded by publishers: publishers who are unknown outside our precincts, and publishers who are unknown in them save for the names on their signs; publishers who issue limited editions for the few, and publishers who apparently publish for nobody but themselves; and, just where I can keep an eye on his front door, the Publisher, my friend, who makes the Quarter a centre of travel and a household word wherever books are read, and uses his house as a training-school for young genius. More than one lion now roaring in London served an apprenticeship there; even Mr. Chatteron passed through it; and I am always encountering minor poets or budding philosophers going in or coming out, ostensibly on the Publisher's affairs, but really busy carrying on the Quarter's traditions and preparing more memorial tablets for its overladen walls. The Publisher and his wife live a few doors away, where they are generously accumulating fresh associations and memories for our successors in the Quarter. To keep open house for the literary men and women of the time is a fashion among publishers that did not go out with the Dillys and the Dodsleys, and an occasional Boswell would find a note-book handy behind the windows that open upon the river from the Publisher's chambers.

Associations are being accumulated also by the New York Publisher, who, accompanied by his son, the Young Publisher, and by his birds, arrives every year with the first breath of spring. It is chiefly to artists that his house is open, though he gives the literary hallmark to the legacy of memories he will leave to the Quarter. I cannot understand why the artist, to whom our streets and our houses make a more eloquent appeal than to the author, has seldom been attracted to them since the days when Barry designed his decorations in the "grand manner" for our oldest Society's lecture-hall, and Angelica Kauffmann painted the ceiling in Peter the Great's house, or since the later days when Etty and Stanfield lived in our house. Now and then I come across somebody sketching our old Watergate or our shabby little shops and corners, but only the youth in the attic below has followed the example given by J., whose studio continues the exception in the Quarter: the show-place it ought to be for the beauty of river and sky framed in by the windows.

But to make up for this neglect, as long a succession of artists as used to climb to Etty's chambers visit the New York Publisher in the quiet rooms with the prints on the walls and the windows that, for greater quiet, look away from our quiet streets and out upon our quieter backs and gables. Much good talk is heard there, and many good stories, and by no means the least good from the New York Publisher himself. It is strange that, loving quiet as he does, he should, after the British Dramatist, have contributed more to my disquiet than anybody in the Quarter: a confession for which I know he will think I merit his scorn. But the birds it is his fancy to travel with are monsters compared to the sparrows and pigeons who build their nests in the peaceful trees of the Quarter, and I am never at ease in their company. I still tremble when I recall the cold critical eye and threatening beak of his favourite magpie, nor can I think calmly of his raven whom, in an access of mistaken hospitality, I once invited to call with him upon William Penn. William had never seen a live bird so near him in his all too short life, and what with his surprise and curiosity, his terror and sporting instincts, he was so wrought up and his nerves in such a state that, although the raven was shut up safe in a cage, I was half afraid he would not survive the visit. I have heard the New York Publisher say of William, in his less nervous and more normal moments, that he was not a cat but a demon; the raven, in my opinion, was not exactly an angel. But thanks to the quality of our friendship, it also survived the visit and, in spite of monstrous birds, strengthens with the years.

It is not solely from my windows that I have got to know the Quarter. Into my Camelot I can not only look, but come down, without webs flying out and mirrors cracking, and better still, I might never stir beyond its limits, and my daily life and domestic arrangements would suffer no inconvenience. The Quarter is as "self-contained" as the flats advertised by our zealous Agent who manages it. Every necessity and many luxuries into the bargain are to be had within its boundaries. It may resemble the Inns of Court in other ways, but it does not, as they do, encourage snobbishness by placing a taboo upon the tradesman. We have our own dairy, our own green-grocer, our own butcher, though out of sympathy with Augustine I do my marketing in Soho. At one corner our tobacconist keeps his shop, at another our tailor. If my drains go wrong I call in the local plumber; when I want a shelf put up or something mended I send for the local carpenter; I could summon the local builder were I inclined to make a present of alterations or additions to the local landlord. I but step across the street if I am in need of a Commissioner of Oaths. I go no further to get my type-writing done. Were my daily paper to fail me, the local gossip of the Quarter would allow me no excuse to complain of dearth of news; the benevolent would exult in the opportunity provided for benevolence by our slums where the flower-girls live; the energetic could walk off their energy in our garden where the County Council's band plays on summer evenings. There is a public for our loungers, and for our friends a hotel,—the house below the hill with the dingy yellow walls that are so shiny-white as I see them by night, kept from time immemorial by Miss Brown, where the lodger still lights himself to bed by a candle and still eats his meals in a Coffee Room, and where Labour Members of Parliament, and South Kensington officials, and people never to be suspected of having discovered the Quarter, are the most frequent guests.

The Quarter has also its own population, so distinct from other Londoners that I am struck by the difference no further away than the other side of the Strand. Our housekeepers are a species apart, so are our milkmen behind their little carts. Our types are a local growth. Nowhere else in London could I meet anybody in the slightest like the pink-eyed, white-haired, dried-up little old man, with a jug in his hand, whom I see daily on his way to or from our public-house; or like the middle-aged dandy who stares me out of countenance as he saunters homeward in the afternoon, a lily or chrysanthemum, according to the season, in one hand and a brown paper bag of buns in the other; or like the splendid old man of military bearing, with well-waxed moustache and well-pointed beard, whose Panama hat in summer and fur-lined cloak in winter have become as much fixtures in the Quarter as our Adam houses or our view of the river, and who spends his days patrolling the Terrace in front of our frivolous club or going into it with members he happens to overtake at the front door,—where his nights are spent no native of the Quarter can say. Nor is any other crowd like our crowd that collects every Sunday evening as St. Martin's bells begin to ring for evening service, that grows larger and larger until streets usually empty are packed solid, and that melts away again before ten. It is made up mostly of youths to whom the cap is as indispensable a symbol of class as the silk hat further west, and young girls who run to elaborate hair and feathers. They have their conventions, which are strictly observed. One is to walk with arms linked; a second, to fill the roadway as well as the pavement, to the despair of taxicabs and cycles endeavouring to toot and ring a passage through; a third, to follow the streets that bound the Quarter on three sides and never to trespass into others. How the custom originated, I leave it to the historian to decide. It may go back to the Britons who painted themselves blue, it may be no older than the Romans. All I know with certainty is that the Sunday evening walk is a ceremony of no less obligation for the Quarter than the Sunday morning parade in the Row is for Mayfair.

We are of accord in the Quarter on the subject of its charm and the advantage of preserving it,—though on all others we may and do disagree absolutely and continually fight. I have heard even our postman brag of the beauty of its architecture and the fame of the architects who built it more than a century and a half ago, and I do not believe as a rule that London postmen could say who built the houses where they deliver their letters, or that it would occur to them to pose as judges of architecture. Because we love the Quarter we watch over it with unceasing vigilance. We are always on the look-out for nuisances and alert to suppress them. In fact, if not in name, we constitute a sort of League for the Prevention of Dirt and Disorder in the Quarter. There is a distinct understanding that, in an emergency, we may rely upon one another for mutual support, which is the easier as we all have the same Landlord and can make the same Agent's life a martyrdom until the evil is remedied. The one thing we guard most zealously is the quiet, the calm, conducive to work. We wage war to the death against street noises of every kind. No "German Band" would invade our silent precincts. The hurdy-gurdy is anathema,—I have always thought the Suffragettes' attempt to play it through our streets their bravest deed. If we endure the bell of the muffin man on Sunday and the song of the man who wants us to buy his blooming lavender, it is because both have the sanction of age. We make no other concession, and our severity extends to the native no less than to the alien. When, in the strip of green and gravel below my windows, the members of our frivolous Club took to shooting themselves with blank cartridges in the intervals of fencing, though the noise was on the miniature scale of their pistols, we overwhelmed the unfortunate Agent with letters until a stop was put to it. When our Territorials, in their first ardour, chose our catacombs for their evening bugle-practice, we rose as one against them. Beggars, unless they ring boldly at our front doors and pretend to be something else, must give up hope when they enter the Quarter. For if the philosopher thinks angels and men are in no danger from charity, we do not, and least of all the lady opposite, to whom alms-giving in our street is as intolerable as donkeys on the green were to Betsy Trotwood. One of my friends has never dared to come to see me, except by stealth, since the day she pounced upon him to ask him what he meant by such an exhibition of immorality, when all he had done was to drop a penny into the hand of a small boy at his cab-door, and all he had meant was a kindly fellow feeling, having once been a small boy himself.