CHAPTER LXXXVII
Which has to do with the Binding of Books in Half-calf and the Whimsies of Calf Love
When Noll had left his baggage in a quiet hotel by the Strand, and had refreshed his body with much splashing of himself in water and a change of clothes, he sallied out into the streets of London in a vague wonder and surprise as to how to begin the search for Betty, yet firmly determined to start straightway in his quest—the Baddlesmere jaw set firm.
The summer afternoon was closing in, and the Strand was gay with people cheerily making their way homewards from work or amusement. But homewards Noll did not take his steps; he felt a certain sense of shame about going to his own people without Betty at his side—and this, too, not on his own account, but that it seemed disloyal to Betty and likely to make her future entrance into the family circle an embarrassment to her—so sudden was the suddenness with which he had stepped into the realm of his manhood!
The young fellow had been too restless to stay in the dingy mute rooms of the hotel; he could think it out better in the open—striding to his thinking. It was in the blood—he smiled at the restless walk of Lord Wyntwarde up and down that library, of the strange trick that came out in his mother at times....
Ah, London, thou queen of cities, that filchest for ever the hearts of them that dare to love thee! Radiant in thy sunshine, fantastic in thy murk, it is when thou puttest on the habit of thy lilac twilight that thou showest all thy majesty—thy tiring maids, the handsomest women of the world, helping thee to thy wondrous mantle of many hues—pale whitenesses and opal greys, beribboned with purple and ultramarine and the sooty tinge of dusky shadows, adorned with diamonds of a hundred flames and wrought through and through with gold and silvery strands, and thus and so, with smoky art, spinning thyself a mystic robe that it is full fit only the Queen of all cities shall wear.
And what a splendid stage, thy realm, to strut it in! Thy large drama knows no curtain, thy magnificence no boundary but man’s narrow sight. Thy whisper and the song of thee, and thy strange melodies, no strings of violins nor the resounding hollows of deep orchestral ’cellos can yield. From the music of thy ways, where goes thy multitudinous traffic with roll of many wheels, and lurches the gaudy omnibus with reeking horses twain, and lumbers the thundering dray, and winds in and out the teeming welter the quick black hansom seeking the hackney fare, with jigging of horse-bells that sound a catchy measure to the shuffle of many feet, from out thy swarming hive there comes the breath of vigorous life and thinkingness and the atmosphere of quick wits and alert wills that have the habit of decisive action and of dogged enthusiasms.
And the faces that pass, with lingering glance out of the dusk, the pale sweet faces of thy beautiful women and the handsome figures of a vigorous race, how much larger vastnesses are in the communion of these eyes than in wide empty spaces of unthinking continents!
The mystic dusk turns thy many habitations to a thousand shadowy palaces, thy very vulgarities to dulcet musicalities. What comedies are in the making in thy wide hospitable lap to-night! what tragedies! what heroic strivings! what bemeaning indecencies! what crimes!
Thy very mud holds something of dark mysterious lustre—being that which is trod out of thy pageant and thy history.