John stood for a moment, looking at her, and then, remembering his manners, went back to his seat and began to eat his meal of tea and bread and butter and sausages.
"Eleanor Moore!" he murmured to himself as he cut off a large piece of sausage and put it into his mouth. "That's a very nice name!" He munched the sausage. "A very nice name," he thought again. "Much nicer than Maggie Carmichael."
VI
He left the restaurant and, having enquired the way, proceeded along Cheapside towards Fleet Street. There was nothing of interest to him in Cheapside, and so, in spite of its memories of Richard Whittington and Robert Herrick, he hurried out of it. He turned into St. Paul's Churchyard, eager to see the Cathedral, but as he did so, his heart fell. The Eastern end of the Cathedral does not impress the beholder. John ought to have seen St. Paul's first from Ludgate Hill, but, coming on it from Cheapside, he could not get a proper view of it. He had expected to turn a corner and see before him, immense and wonderful, the great church, rich in tradition and dignity, rearing itself high above the houses like a strong man rising up from the midst of pigmies ... and he had turned a corner and seen only a grimy, blackened thing, huddled into a corner ... jostled almost ... by greedy shopkeepers and warehousemen. A narrow passage, congested by carts, separated the eastern end of the cathedral from ugly buildings; a narrower passage separated the railings of the churchyard from shops where men sold baby linen and women's blouses and kitchen ranges and buns and milk....
His Uncle Matthew had told him that the dome of St. Paul's could be seen from every part of London. "If ever you lose yourself in London," he had said, "search the sky 'til you see the dome of St. Paul's and then work your way towards it!" And here, in the very churchyard of the Cathedral, the dome was not visible because the shop-keepers had not left enough of room for a man to stand back and view it properly. John wondered whether the whole of London would disappoint him so much as St. Paul's had done. The English seemed to have very little regard for their cathedrals, for they put them into cramped areas and allowed merchants to encircle them with ugly shops and offices. In Southwark, he had seen the church where Shakespeare prayed, hidden behind a hideous railway bridge, with its pavement fouled by rotting cabbage leaves and the stinking debris of a vegetable market. And here, now, was St. Paul's surrounded by dingy, desolating houses, as if an effort were being made to conceal the church from view.
He hurried through the churchyard until he reached the western end of the Cathedral, where some of his disappointment dropped out of his mind. The great front of the church, with its wide, deep steps and its great, strong pillars, black and grey from the smoke and fog of London, filled him with a sense of imperturbable dignity. Men might build their dingy, little shops and their graceless, scrambling warehouses, and try to crowd the Cathedral into a corner, but the great church would still retain its dignity and strength however much they might succeed in obscuring it. He walked across the pavement, scattering the pigeons as he did so, undecided whether to enter the Cathedral or not, until he reached the flagstone on which is chiselled the statement that "Here Queen Victoria Returned Thanks to Almighty God for the Sixtieth Anniversary of Her Accession. June 22, 1897." As he contemplated the flagstone, he forgot about the Cathedral, and remembered only his Uncle Matthew. On this spot, a little, old woman had said her thankful prayers, the little, old woman for whom his Uncle, who had never seen her, had cracked a haberdasher's window and suffered disgrace; and she and he were dead, and the little, old lady was of no more account than the simple-minded man who had nearly been sent to gaol because of his devotion to her memory. Many times in his life, had John heard people speak of "the Queen" almost in an awe-stricken fashion, until, now and then, she seemed to him to be a legendary woman, a great creature in a heroic story, someone of whom he might dream, but of whom he might never hope to catch a glimpse. It startled him to think that she had human qualities, that she ate and drank and slept and suffered pain and laughed and cried like other people. She was "the Queen": she owned the British Empire and all that it contained. She owned white men and black men and yellow men and red men; she owned islands and continents and deserts and seas; a great tract of the world belonged to her ... and here he was standing on the very spot where she had sat in her carriage, offering thanks in old quavering accents to the Almighty God for allowing her to reign for sixty years. The fact that he was able to stand on that very spot seemed comical to him. There ought to have been a burning bush on the place where "the Queen" had said her prayers. Uncle Matthew would have expected something of that sort ... but there was nothing more dramatic than this plainly-chiselled inscription. And the little, old woman was as dusty in her grave as Uncle Matthew was in his....
VII
He passed down Ludgate Hill, across Ludgate Circus, into Fleet Street, turning for a few moments to look back at the Cathedral. Again, he had a sense of anger against the English people who could allow a railway company to fling an ugly bridge across the foot of Ludgate Hill and destroy the view of St. Paul's from the Circus; but he had had too many shocks that morning to feel a deep anger then, and so, turning his back on the Cathedral, he walked up Fleet Street. He stared about him with interest, gazing up at the names of the newspapers that were exhibited in large letters on the fronts of the houses. The street seemed to be shouting at him, yelling out names as if it were afraid to be silent. It was a disorderly street. It seemed to straggle up the hill to the Strand, as if it had not had time to put its clothes on properly. All along its length, he could see, at intervals, scaffold-poles and builders' hoardings. Houses and offices were being altered or repaired or rebuilt. He felt that the street had been constructed for a great game of hide-and-seek, for the flow of the buildings was irregular: here, a house stood forward; there, a house stood back. In one of these bays, a player might hide from a seeker!... Somewhere in this street, John remembered, Dr. Johnson had lived, and he tried to imagine the scene that took place on the night of misery when Oliver Goldsmith went to the Doctor and wept over the failure of The Good Natured Man, and was called a ninny for his pains. But he could not make the scene come alive because of the noise and confusion in the street. The air of immediacy which enveloped him made quiet imagination impossible. His head began to ache with the sounds that filled his ears, and he wished that he could escape from the shouting herd into some little soundless place where his mind could become easy again and free from pain. He stared around him, glancing at the big-lettered signs over the newspaper offices, at the omnibuses, at the crowds of men and women, and once his heart leaped into his throat as he saw a boy on a bicycle, carrying a bag stuffed with newspapers on his back, ride rapidly out of a side street into the middle of the congested traffic as if there were nothing substantial to hinder his progress ... and as he stared about him, it seemed to him that Fleet Street was on the verge of a nervous breakdown....
"I must get out of this," he said to himself, turning aimlessly out of the street.
He found himself presently in a narrow lane, and, looking up at the sign, saw that it was called "Hanging Sword Alley." He looked at the bye-way, a mere gutter of a street, and wondered what sort of a man had given it that romantic name; and while he wondered, it seemed to him that his mind had suddenly become illuminated. His Uncle Matthew had had romantic imaginings all his life about everything except the things that were under his nose. He had never seen Queen Victoria, but he had suffered for her sake. He had never seen London, but he had declared it to be a city of romance and colour and vivid happenings. Perhaps Uncle Matthew was like the man who had named this dull, grimy, narrow passage, "Hanging Sword Alley"! Perhaps Queen Victoria was not quite ... not quite all that Uncle Matthew had imagined her to be. The thought staggered him, and he felt as if he had filled his mind with treason and sedition!... He could not say what Queen Victoria was, but with his own eyes he had seen London, and London had as little of romance in it as Hanging Sword Alley had. There were noise and scuffle and dingy distraction and mobs of little white-faced, nervous men and women, and a drab content with blotched beauty ... but none of these things had romance in them. He had been told that London flower-girls were pretty ... and he had seen only coarse and unclean women, with towsled hair. He had been told that London 'busdrivers were cheerful, witty men ... but the driver to whom he had spoken had been surly at the beginning and witless to the end. If Uncle Matthew had come into this dirty bye-way, he would have seen only the name of Hanging Sword Alley, but John had seen more than the name: he had seen the inadequacy of the bye-way to the name it bore.