LITTLE BITS OF LONDON.
The Houses of Parliament.
The guide-books have a good deal to say about the Houses of Parliament, but the people who write guide-books never go to the really amusing places and never know the really interesting things. For instance they have never yet explained what it is that the House of Commons smells of. I do not refer to the actual Chamber, which merely smells like the Tube, but the lofty passages and lobbies where the statues are. The smell, I think, is a mixture of cathedrals and soap. It is a baffling but rather seductive smell, and they tell me that the policemen miss it when they are transferred to point-duty. Possibly it is this smell which makes ex-Premiers want to go back there.
But let us have no cheap mockery of the Houses of Parliament, because there is a lot to be said for them. They are much the best houses for hide-and-seek I know. The parts which are dear to the public, the cathedral parts, are no good for that, but behind them and under them and all round them there are miles and miles of superb secret passages and back staircases, the very place for a wet afternoon. They are decorated like second-class waiting-rooms and lead to a lot of rooms like third-class waiting-rooms; and at every corner there is a policeman; but this only adds to the excitement. Besides, at any moment you may blunder into some very secret waiting-room labelled "Serjeant-at-Arms."
If you are seen by the Serjeant-at-Arms you have lost the game, and if you are seen by a Lord of the Treasury I gather from the policemen that you would be put in the Tower. Or you may start light-heartedly from the Refreshment Department of the House of Commons and find yourself suddenly in the bowels of the House of Lords, probably in the very passage to the Lord Chancellor's Secretary's Room.
Still, there is no other way for Private Secretaries to take exercise and at the same time avoid their Members without actually leaving the building, so risks of that sort have to be faced.
While the Private Secretary is playing hide-and-seek in the passages and purlieus his Member waits for him in the Secretaries' Room. The Secretaries' Room is the real seat of legislation in this country, and it is surprising that Mr. Bagehot gave it no place in his account of the Constitution. It is also surprising, in view of its importance, that it should be such a dismal, ill-furnished and thoroughly mouldy room. It is a rotten room. Mr. Asquith, when a Private Secretary, is reported to have said of it, "In the whole course of my political career I can recall no case of administrative myopia at all parallel to the folly or ineptitude which has condemned the authors of legislation in His Majesty's Parliament to discharge their functions in this grotesque travesty of a legislative chamber, this sombre and obscure repository of mouldering archives and forgotten records, where the constructive statesmen of to-morrow are expected to shape their Utopias in an atmosphere of disillusion and decay, in surroundings appointed to be the shameful sepulchre of the nostrums of the past." If that is what Mr. Asquith said, I agree with him; if he didn't say it, I wish he had.
The room is pitch-dark always, and it is full of tables and tomes. The tables are waiting-room tables and the tomes are as Mr. Asquith has described them. It is divided into two by a swing-door. One part is the female Private Secretary part, the other is the male Private Secretary part, and it is lamentable to record that no romance has ever occurred between a male Private Secretary and a female one.
The room is plentifully supplied with House of Commons' stationery, which disappears at an astonishing rate. This is because the Members come in and remove it by the gross, knowing full well that the Serjeant-at-Arms will suspect the Private Secretaries. It is a hard world.