CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A ZIGZAG WALK
I HAVE mentioned the “zigzag” walk. Did you ever make one? Probably not, for it is my secret. I invented it. A frequent wish of the traveler and wanderer is to obtain genuinely chance impressions of cities and countries. He would trust neither his own choice of road, nor the guide’s choice, nor the map. But if he goes forth aimlessly he inevitably finds himself either making for the gayer and better-lighted places, or returning to his own door. The problem is to let chance and the town take charge of you, for the world we travel in is more wonderful than human plan or idle hearts desire.
One day in New York, wishing to explore that great city in a truly haphazard way I hit on the following device—a zigzag walk. The first turning to the left is the way of the heart. Take it at random and you are sure to find something pleasant and diverting. Take the left again and the piquancy may be repeated. But reason must come to the rescue, and you must turn to the right in order to save yourself from a mere uninteresting circle. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left again, and so on.
I had a wonderful night’s walking thus in New York, taking cross sections of that marvelous cosmopolitan city. And many were the surprises and delights and curiosities that the city unfolded to me in its purlieus and alleys and highways and quays. That was several years ago. After New York I saw Paris for the first time, and wandered that way there. Curiously enough, I started from the conventional and tourist-stricken Avenue de l’Opéra, and the zigzag plan led me across the Seine to the Quartier Latin and Bohemian Montparnasse. I saw more of Paris in a night than many may do in a month. After Paris I tried the experiment in Cologne. That was after I had marched in with my regiment from the wilds of the Ardennes and southern Germany. I explored the city in that way. How unusual and real and satisfactory were the impressions obtained by going—not the crowd’s way, but the way of the zigzag, the diagonal between heart and reason.
However, the most charming and delightful associations of my zigzag walk are not those of the great foreign cities which I have known, but of our mysterious and crooked-streeted capital, London herself.
It was Christmas time and I said to my wife: “Let us do our shopping on the zigzag way.” We had not gone forth on such an adventure before, and were full of excitement, wondering where we should be led. What exactly we bought on the way I do not wholly remember, but London was generous to us in its cross section of houses and shops. On this occasion we started on the road of reason, since we had a definite purpose in view, and we took the first on the right, and the first on the left, instead of the first on the left, and the first on the right. It may be thought that made no difference. Believe me, all the difference in the world!
The first street we knew quite well, the second was an asphalt alley, where scores of children were playing hop-o’-my-thumb on the white-scrawled flagstones. The third street was one of the great film streets of London, with cinema stores from end to end and shop windows lurid with horror posters. The fourth turning brought us to the famous market of Pulteney, where all the surplus fruit and job lots of vegetables from Covent Garden are exhibited on donkey barrows, and cried by vociferous hawkers. Here we could buy two grapefruit on occasion for a penny, and the “rare and refreshing fruit” which the wizard from Wales once offered to the poor as a result of legislation could here be obtained by chance and in abundance. From the market we went by a crooked road from Rupert Street to Callard’s cake shop in Regent Street.
Happy forethought of London! We had coffee and mustard-and-cress sandwiches in this jolly shop, and bought a cake. Then we crossed Regent Street, bought two chickens at Louis Gautier’s in Swallow Street, and plunged for Piccadilly. We came out at St. James’ Church, and fortune was kind enough to make it possible to visit Hatchards. We went in and “browsed around” for a while and ordered a copy of The Sweet-scented Name. Our way was then by Duke Street, Jermyn Street and some others to St. James’ Street with its clubs, and we turned up St. James’ Place. As we passed Number Five, rat-a-tat-tat, from a little window; rattling and jumping like the sound of an old-fashioned motor, went the typing machine of the secretary of the world’s greatest newspaper chief. We thought we had arrived at a cul-de-sac and that we should have to retrace our footsteps—one of the natural rules of the walk—but we found an eye of a needle through which the rich men have to pass to get to the Paradise of the Green Park. It is always explained to the rich that the eye of the needle in the Gospel is only a figure of speech, and that there was a needle gate through which a camel, without too great a hump, could pass, and the alley from St. James’ Place will just admit the not too stout.