When we got to the fields beyond, the great city played with us and led us a comic dance along the paths of the Green Park. Westminster Cathedral was in view. There was a large balloon overhead in the murk of the London sky, and many people were looking up at it. Our steps took us along various grand crescents of pathway, and the intention of the city with regard to our ultimate destination began to seem very obscure. There were several knotty points as to which was a turning and which was not, and when I made an artful decision the companion of my way said to me, “You want to shape things to your own ends.”
“No,” said I. “I want to be faithful and just.”
A stiff discussion set in and we could not get the matter straight. However, we eventually found ourselves in St. James’ Park, and there was an issue for us into Birdcage Walk where, in the barracks beyond, we saw the soldiers at drill, though little did I think at the time that I was destined to drill there, and be on sentry there myself in time to come.
So the walk went on, and we passed the London Soldiers’ Home near Buckingham Gate, made our last purchase at a little shop in Wilfred Street, passed Westminster City School, and entered Victoria Street by Palace Street and took an omnibus home.
Thus ended the first lap of our zigzag walk through London, and we promised ourselves to return to the point where we had left off and continue this way of chance as soon as a convenient moment came.
Therefore, one Sunday afternoon, and not long after, we took the omnibus back to the corner of Palace Street and resumed. Fate allowed us to miss Victoria Station, and its many lines of rail, and we entered Flatdom and Belgravia, not the best part of Belgravia, but the sadder and more faded streets, the streets where the lamps of joy had died down and guttered out. Then we passed by Moreton Terrace to Lupus Street (“What a name for a London street!” says G. A. B. Dewar, in his sad tale of Letty—“Is not all London wolfish street for our Lettys?”), Colchester Street, Chichester Street, Claverton Street, streets of faded grandeur, the Embankment. Then over the river we go by Chelsea Bridge and find ourselves in a district hitherto unvisited by us.
We entered Battersea Park and had such a time in its mazes of paths that we were obliged to make a second rule for our walks, and that was that henceforward we should enter no parks. A friend to whom we had communicated the secret of our street adventure had warned us that if in the near future we should disappear from London life he would come in search of us to the Maze at Hampton Court, from which, he was afraid, once entered, we should never extricate ourselves. So we made a rule: No parks, no mazes. Incidentally, however, we spent a remarkable and amusing hour in that artificial wilderness of Battersea. If zigzagging should ever become fashionable I am afraid that most people will consider it de rigueur to follow out the mazes and labyrinths to the last intricacy and the correct issue, and that they will not have the courage to cut the Gordian knot as we did. And starting pedantically they will finish pedantically—in the literal sense, for is not pes, pedis, a foot. There were many Gordian knots which our footsteps made in the ins and outs of London.
Having given Battersea Park the go-by, we threaded many typically poor streets, not slum, just better than that. How deplorable a sight! Very poor and dirty houses which you feel moving to be worse, with broken windows here and there, and derelict barrows in the roadway. We passed under gloomy railway arches, so gloomy, as if crimes had been committed there, arches where at night spooning couples lurk or solitary bodies furtively eat fish and chips. So we came to a little house which, in the course of time, we ought to have visited, but probably would not, and there we called in our unexpected way—a call not without its sequence in our after-life. This was all in the realm of Lavender Walk and Battersea Rise. In one of the streets we came on two demure villas called Alpha and Omega, and very fitly passed from Battersea to Wandsworth.
Another day, in full fresh air, we walked along Bolingbroke Grove and the fringe of the Common and Nightingale Lane, through very respectable Suburbia, where the houses are just so, and there are plaster angels in the cemeteries. That day we went home from Earlsfield Station. Next time we passed St. Barnabas’ Church with the niches left in the bricks for saints. We made our exit from real London, watching from a railway arch the mad red caterpillars of tube trains going to and fro. The houses grew higher and the roads more spacious, and great elm trees were in the front gardens. With wild wind and rolling sky, ’twixt Putney Heath and the golf links of Wimbledon, we finished up one jolly afternoon by coming unexpectedly to tea at the house of another friend to which without jiggery-pokery the zigzag way had led us.
The next afternoon on which we ventured forth we wandered to sad Merton and the fringe of outer Suburbia. There were fields, but they had Destiny’s mark upon them; they were doomed to be imprisoned with brick by the London which was encroaching, encroaching.