"Among her branches, in and out,
The city breezes play;
The dun fog wraps her round about;
Above, the smoke curls grey.
"Others the country take for choice,
And hold the town in scorn;
But she has listened to the voice
Of city breezes borne."
The purple clematis jackmanii, which flowers so well in the Regent's Park terraces and in Kensington, flowers also yearly on a certain sunny balcony in Tavistock Square; the iris hangs out its brilliant flags every summer in St. Pancras Churchyard—close under those smoke-begrimed Caryatids whose sad eyes gaze ever, not on to the Peiraeus and to the Aegean Sea, but towards the dreary and everlastingly murky Euston Road.
Even grass will grow in shut-in, walled Bloomsbury gardens; it may, indeed, sometimes require treating as an "annual"; but what of that? If the difficulties of the London garden are great, why, so are its joys.
Cats are, of course, the primal difficulty. We know how lately the "Carlyle House" in Chelsea was cursed with them; it is said, also, that a certain eccentric lady once lived with a family of some eighty-six cats, in a house in Southampton Row. The descendants of these cats must, one thinks, still haunt the neighbourhood, to judge from the number that prowl in it. Cats, in London, often become wild animals, and lose all their domestic charm. "Cats," as the little Board School essayist naïvely wrote: "has nine liveses, which is seldom required in this country 'cos of yumanity." The "yumanity" in question seems, however, to be rather at a discount in London. For cats' owners have a distracting habit of going away for the summer and leaving the poor beasts, so to speak, "on the parish." Five such cats, starving and sick, have I, to my own knowledge, gently released from a cruel world at a neighbouring chemist's. A little boy—one "of the streets streety," once held poor pussy while the quietus—of prussic acid—was administered: "Won't I jest?" he said with glee when asked to officiate. "Won'erful stuff, that 'ere, Miss!" he remarked at the close of the sad ceremony; adding, admiringly, "w'y, that ket did'nt mow once!" "What are you going to do with her?" I inquired of the youth, who now carried the corpse dangling by one leg. "Throw 'er over the fust garding wall I come to," he replied, grinning. Thus, I reflected, the poor London garden is still the victim!
A dead cat may be an awkward visitor, but the surviving cats are the bane of London gardens. Their courtships—on the garden-wall—are long and musical, causing even the merciful to yearn for a syringe at all costs. The sparrows are a far lesser evil. They, indeed, eat the garden seeds; nothing on earth is sacred to a London sparrow or robin. It is impossible, by any system, however well-devised, to outwit them. They are afraid of nothing. Set up an elaborate scarecrow in the garden; for the space, perhaps, of one hour it will puzzle them; but in a day or two they will hop and twitter familiarly about it, even to the extent of pecking bits of thread from it for their impertinent nests. Get a toy cat and place it on the flower-bed; in twenty-four hours they will have discovered that the thing is a hollow sham, and will sit comfortably in the warmth of its artificial fur. But one forgives them; for the birds, after all, are the chief joy of London gardens. Their twitter is sweet on spring mornings; in winter, the robins and sparrows may be tamed by feeding, almost to the extent of coming into the house itself for crumbs; and, in the summer, if you set them a shallow bath every day for their disporting, they will rejoice your heart by their watery antics. Robins and sparrows are alike charming; the robins are the stronger; a single robin, pecking about on the garden step for his breakfast, will scatter a host of sparrows; but it is the sparrows, after all, that form the real bird population of London. Though they appreciate a quiet back garden, they seem also to delight in the noise, traffic, and bustle of the streets. Their cleverness, and their strength too, surpass belief; they even seem to have æsthetic tastes (did I not see, last month, a sparrow decorate its nest with an overhanging sprig of laburnum, or "golden chain?"); and they are, besides, as irrepressible as the London street arabs, with whom they have much in common; for they are the "gamins" of the bird world. For their parental instinct, on the other hand, there is, in London at least, not much to be said; their way of dealing with their recalcitrant offspring would seem to be a trifle overbearing, for in early spring small, half-fledged corpses are often to be found, dropped unkindly from nests into back-gardens. But, perhaps, as the small boy said of King Solomon, "havin' so many, they can afford to be wasteful of 'em." There are, indeed, many. On the statue of Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, in Russell Square,—a figure, rising erect, in the curious taste of the time, from a nest of cupids and clouds,—sparrows have built many nests. The chinks in the giant's robe are black, in spring, with their tiny heads; the curly hair of the cupids is fluffed with their downy feathers.
I have elsewhere touched on the great picturesqueness of London views—a picturesqueness always more or less coloured and influenced by romance and by history: the past and the present, the natural and the artificial—all blended into one glory:—
"glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
... the glory of going on, and still to be."
Especially beautiful are the effects of light that are obtainable on early summer mornings, or on lurid, stormy, autumn evenings—evenings when the sun sinks with such splendour of attendant fires as is rarely seen away from the great city. The vivid effects are largely increased by the smoky atmosphere. What more mysteriously fine, for instance, than the view of St. Paul's, looking up Ludgate Hill, with, in the foreground, the railway bridge, emitting smoke, raised high above the narrow street: and the black, thin spirelet of St. Martin's, as the attendant "aiguille" leading the eye up to the colossal dome of grey St. Paul's?—
"Here, like a bishop, upon dainties fed,
St. Paul lifts up his sacerdotal head;
While his lean curates, slim and lank to view,
Around them point their steeples to the blue."