Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

by George Augustus Sala

TWO O’CLOCK P.M.: HIGH CHANGE.

Now, whatever can her ladyship, who has been shopping in Regent Street, have ordered the stalwart footman, who shut the carriage door with a resounding bang, to instruct the coachman to drive her to the Bank for? Her ladyship’s own private bank is in a shiningly aristocratic street, by Cavendish Square, embosomed among green trees. She does not want to buy ribbons or lace on Ludgate Hill, artificial flowers in St. Paul’s Churchyard, or fine linen in Cheapside. No; she has a very simple reason for going into the city: Sir John, her liege lord, is on ’Change. He will be there from half-past two to three, at which hour High ’Change, as it may be called, closes, and she intends to call for him, and drive him to the West-end again. By your leave, we will jump up behind the carriage, heedless of the stalwart footman; for we are in the receipt of fern-seed, and invisible.

Going on ’Change seems to be but a mechanical and mercantile occupation, and one that might with safety be entrusted to some confidential clerk; yet it is not so; and the greatest magnates of commerce and finance, the Rothschilds, the Barings, the Huths, the legions of London’s merchant-princes, are to be found chaffering in the quadrangle every day. In the old Exchange, they used to point out the particular column against which the elder Rothschild was wont to lean. They called the old man, too—marvellous diplomatist in financial combinations as he was—the Pillar of the Exchange. You know that the colonnades—whose ceilings are painted in such elaborate encaustic, and with such a signal result in ruin from damp and smoke—are divided into different promenades, variously designated, according to the nations of the merchants who frequent them. Thus—there are the Italian Walk, the Spanish Walk, the Portuguese Walk, the Danish Walk, and—a very notable walk it is too—the Greek Walk. Here you may see, jabbering and gesticulating, the crafty, keen-eyed, sallow-faced Smyrnians, Suliotes, Zantrites, and Fanariotes, individuals much given to speculations in corn, in which, if report does them no injustice, they gamble most egregiously.

Three o’clock strikes—or rather chimes—from the bell-tower of Mr. Tite’s new building. The quadrangle of the Exchange is converted into an accurate model of the Tower of Babel. The mass of black-hatted heads—with here and there a white one, like a fleck of foam on the crest of a wave—eddies with violence to and fro. Men shout, and push, and struggle, and jostle, and shriek bargains into one another’s ears. A stranger might imagine that these money and merchandise dealers had fallen out, and were about to fight; but the beadle of the Exchange looks on calmly; he knows that no breach of the peace will be committed, and that the merchants and financiers are merely singing their ordinary pæan of praise to the great god Mammon. Surely—if there be not high treason in the thought—they ought to pull down Mr. Lough’s statue of Queen Victoria, which stands in the centre of the quadrangle, and replace it by a neat effigy of the Golden Calf.

THREE P.M.—DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS, AND THE PANTHEON BAZAAR.

The travelled reader has visited that astonishing atelier of mosaics and pietra dura in Florence maintained at the charges of the late Grand Duke of Tuscany, (he has been signally kicked off thronedom, since the first writing of these presents), and has watched with admiring amazement the patient ingenuity with which the artisans adjust the tiny little vitreous and metallic fragments, that, firmly imbedded in paste, make the fruits and flowers, the birds and angels of the mosaic. What an impossible task it is, apparently, to form the microscopic bits into comely shapeliness, symmetrical in form and glowing with rich colours! yet how deftly the artists accomplish their task! how the work grows beneath their nimble hands! What astonishing memories these maître mosaicists must have, remembering to a pin’s point where the high lights on the petals of a rose will fall, and storing up in their minds archives of the eyelashes of the Madonna, precedents for every scintillation of the rays in the golden nimbus round His head! The mosaicists of Rome, and Florence, and Venice—though the glorious art has well-nigh died out in the Adriatic city—are the real administrative reformers, after all. The right thing in the right place is their unvarying motto, and they are never found putting the round men in the square holes, or vice versâ.

I have been led into this train of thought by the contemplation of the exigencies of “Twice Round the Clock.” Time, my slave for once, though he has been my stern and cruel master for years and years, and at whom I mean to throw a dart when this series shall be completed—Time, who is my bond servant, to fetch and carry, to hew wood and draw water for yet a span, has culled from the wild garden of Eternity, and thrown at my feet, a heterogeneous mass of hours, minutes, and seconds, and has said with a mocking subserviency—“There, my master, there are the hours of the day and night, and their minutest subdivisions; try and paste them on your printed calendar; try and reconcile your men and women to them; try and apportion in its proper measure of time each grain of sand to the futile rivings and strivings of your conceited humanity. You have stumbled on from hour to hour since the sun was young, telling, with indifferent success, the good and bad deeds that are done in London as the relentless needle pushes round and round the dial. Here, then, is Three o’Clock in the Afternoon. Take it; see what you can make of it, and much good may it do you!” And as Time, or the vagrant thought I have embodied for the nonce, says this, he sticks his tongue into his cheek, as though he thought that three o’clock in the afternoon were rather a poser to me.