Treasure Trove
Some things, such as umbrellas, suitcases, trousers, boots, bedsteads, and hats, both male and female, can become so old that it would be a decency could they disintegrate and vanish into thin air. Nothing can be quite so old and dissipated as an umbrella. But, no; the effortless Nirvana which these things have earned is denied them; they are spread out on the cobbles of the Caledonian Market (North London) every Friday, in the hope that their pitiful pilgrimage may continue.
When I walked into this remarkable once-a-week junk-fair I was deeply touched to think that any living person could need many of the things displayed for sale. For all round me, lying on sacking, were the driftwood and wreckage of a thousand lives: door knobs, perambulators in extremis, bicycle wheels, bell wire, bed knobs, old clothes, awful pictures, broken mirrors, unromantic china goods, gaping false teeth, screws, nuts, bolts, and vague pieces of rusty iron, whose mission in life, or whose part and portion of a whole, Time had obliterated.
It seemed that all the queer things in all the little shops in London's by-streets had been poured out in a last desperate effort of salesmanship, while on every hand, above the Oriental clamour of stall-holders and the negative remarks of the public, rose the all-prevailing cry:
"Come on, ma, take it for sixpence ... four-pence? ... twopence? All right, then I'll give it you...."
I must say, however, that I never observed this threat carried into execution.
As I walked between the aisles of junk I remembered the story of a friend who went to this market out of curiosity, and came away unexpectedly in a taxicab with a priestess. He had bought a mummy for ten shillings. And well can I believe it. I longed for something like this to happen to me, for that is how life should go. When you look forward to a thing, or search for it and find it, you are invariably disappointed because your mind has had time to experience it and possess it and tire of it long before it comes. But the joy of sudden, unexpected things seldom fails. I have always envied J., not his priestess, because she smelt like a French third-class carriage and had to be buried at night, but his meeting with her. That must have been wonderful. He was walking along thinking about door knobs or bell wire when he saw her: "My God, a mummy! Man or woman? Woman! How romantic! Probably she was beautiful and young! She used to shake a sistrum at Karnak beside the Nile and wear a lovely pleated skirt and nothing underneath...."
For a second, perhaps two—anyhow just long enough to hand over a ten-shilling note—I think he loved her as much as you can love a mummy, and although his affection waned in Bloomsbury when he had to help her out of the taxi, it must have been worth it just for the sharp delirium of that meeting—he ardent, romantic; she a bit glazed and fish-like in more ways than one, but eternally feminine, though, as it were, canned.
I walked on trying not to expect that anything so wonderful would come my way. Near the entrance a man offered me someone's skeleton for seven-and-sixpence, and when I said "No" he put down the box in which it is kept and remarked to his wife: "Now, don't put your foot through the skull, Emma." At the next stall a young mother was buying a cradle festooned in dusty black lace.