The fugue gave place to a quaint old dance, and Spring, which was paying a premature visit to the Soho streets outside, stole with the sunshine through the windows into the church. With it came a dream, and as I listened to the music, ladies in silk petticoats, with patches and powder, and gentlemen in wigs and knee breeches paced gravely through a minuet in the aisle. It was irreverent, but John Sebastian was to blame, and somehow the dancers seemed no more out of place than did the sunbeams which found entrance through the dusty windows.
Mrs. Darling had gone to read the "Roll of Honour" in a corner of the church decorated by flags. She has sounded depths in life which are outside my experience, and I do not like to obtrude my presence at such moments. I could see her from where I sat wiping her eyes, yet I knew that presently she would come back with a cheerful face and some soul-destroying remark which would knock the bottom out of my dreams. There is no pose with Mrs. Darling.
It was as I expected. She wanted to know if the man was tuning the organ? Oh, Mrs. D.! What is the tie which binds me to your prosaic, plush-jacketed person? Why do I court your unappreciative companionship, and sacrifice you to my mania for imparting information?
Perhaps the answer was supplied by the old lady herself when we issued from the church. "I 'spose you'd 'ave stopped in that old church all the afternoon if I 'adn't tipped you the wink to git out, sir," she said. "No one could accuse you er bein' a rollin' stone. If it wasn't for me you'd be choked up with moss."
When I leave Shaftesbury Avenue for Berwick Market I always think of Hogarth, which, by the way, reminds me that I saw a bronze bust of him at the Portrait Gallery. A keen, small-featured, refined face, with a penetrating, bad-tempered expression about the eyes—not the face one would picture of the creator of "The Rake's Progress" or "Marriage à la Mode". But when is the occasion on which one does not have to readjust one's mental attitude towards the artist (known only through his works) on first making acquaintance with his face and features?
BERWICK MARKET.
Berwick Market, with a Spring sky above the costers' barrows of fruit and flowers making splashes of colour amidst the motley crowd peopling its narrow confines, might have stepped straight out of an Italian canvas on this delectable afternoon. Busy sellers and loitering buyers seemed to be making a pleasant pastime of it all. The stall-keepers, with an artless intimacy and a reckless confidence in the weather, had hung out on lines silk stockings, articles of lingerie, yards of ribbon and laces. Everything here is open to the world, even the little shops on either side of the gutter are windowless. What happens in Berwick Market on wet days, I don't know. I always choose the time of my visits, carefully avoiding it when there's a blizzard or a downpour. I want to keep the memory of its cheeriness intact, undimmed. When I pine for a continental trip, which my purse will not allow, I go to Berwick Market and stare at the long French loaves in the bakers' shops, at the weird, dirty-looking sausages enclosed in a network of string, the ropes of garlic, the spaghetti and salad dressings in the Italian provision dealers, listening meanwhile to the chatter of foreign tongues all round. Berwick Market lives out of doors and it doesn't wear hats. It takes the stranger into its confidence and is never dull. It thrusts fur coats, frocks, and blouses under your nose as you walk. It will supply you with butcher's meat, cabbages and potatoes, flowers and fruit, ironware, books, music, toys, jewellery, leather goods and trinkets, all within the space of a few hundred yards, and if you buy any of these things you will go away under the pleasant but false impression that you have taken advantage of an ingenuous huckster who didn't know the value of his goods.
Mrs. D. bought a flat-iron, two saucepan lids, and a hat shape. In view of these articles having to accompany us on the remainder of our journey, they seemed to me an unwise purchase, especially as it was problematical whether the lids would fit the saucepans for which they were intended. She was, however, so convinced that never again would the opportunity occur for securing ironware at so low a price, or a hat of such a becoming shape, that I shouldered my share of the burden (the flat-iron and saucepan lids) and refrained from putting a damper on her satisfaction.
At the top of Greek Street is the house where De Quincey lived, and it is always of De Quincey and poor Ann that I think when meditating in Soho Square. The story of that poor child of the streets, who, out of her penury, befriended her companion in misfortune and afterwards disappeared so mysteriously, is one of undying interest and pathos. "For weeks," says De Quincey, "I had walked with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or rested with her on steps under the shelter of porticoes...." What a picture of the misery of these two children the words call up! Speaking of that night in Soho Square when he fainted in her arms, and she rose and fetched the glass of hot spiced wine which he was convinced saved his life, he continues, "We sat down on the steps of a house, which, to this hour, I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble action which she there performed".