Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains—very dingy—at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor and blue plates hung by wire along the walls.
He was a languid, artistic chap—played the violin, hung about old bookstalls and bric-à-brac shops in the lanes off Holborn.
He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand, half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental bowls—“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully—he gave you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally.
He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square. Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs. Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.
You don’t know the oppressively respectable side of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is altering fast. The change pains me. I wish some fellow who could write would immortalize the old place before it disappears. Every time I go outside the gates of the Inn some change hits me in the face. I see hoardings with up-to-date posters and the addresses of house-breakers in places where once there was a familiar, flat-faced house, with wide-framed windows. The old shops are going, little fusty shops—eating houses, furniture stores, undertakers. I saw the last typical eating house this morning. There was nothing in the window but a big blue dish—Kinsman would have admired it—and a row of pressed beef tins, with a haddock hanging flabbily over each tin.
Bloomsbury is forever in the violent stage—always going up or down. Directly they took away our exclusive gates and let the cabs run straight through to Kings Cross and Euston, there was an epidemic of boarding houses. I believe that every house in Woburn Place takes lodgers—more or less genteelly. An old fellow who had the first floor set at 3 when I came to the Inn remembered the days when only carriage folk lived in Great James Street. The first professional brass plate on a door ruffled the inhabitants considerably.
Great James Street, Doughty Street, and a few more belong to the Tichborne family. I remember a charwoman who used to say viciously—at times when she considered herself imposed upon by those she worked for:
“Ah! Wait till Sir Roger comes out o’ quod, and then they’ll see.”
Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a story to others, made gardens of the mews—and ruined the place for all sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in Mrs. Conifer’s time.
She was on the respectable side, of course: where people subscribe to Mudie’s and make the changing of books the great business of the day, where the men come home punctually to dinner at seven and the women stroll down Oxford Street regularly on fine afternoons. You may still see them swarming out of Hanway Street, very well dressed as a rule, and very often Jewesses.