Although London possesses a thousand central points suitable for a street rendezvous, Londoners seem to have decided by tacit agreement to use only five of these for their outdoor appointments. They are: Charing Cross Post Office, Leicester Square Tube, Piccadilly Tube, under the Clock at Victoria, and Oxford Circus Tube; and I have never known my friends telephone me for a meeting and fix a rendezvous outside this list. Indeed, I can now, by long experience, place the habits and character of casual acquaintances who wish to meet me, from their choice among these places.

Thus, a Charing Cross Post Office appointment means a pleasure appointment. Here, at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon, wait the bright girls and golden boys, their faces, like living lamps, shining through the cloud of pedestrians as a signal for that one for whom they wait. And, though you be late in keeping the appointment, you may be certain that the waiting party will be[Pg 141] in placid mood. There is so much to distract and delight you on this small corner. There are the bustle of the Strand and the stopping buses; the busy sweep of Trafalgar Square, so spacious that its swift stream of traffic suggests leisure; the hot smell of savouries rising from the kitchens of Morley's Hotel; and the cynical amusement to be drawn from a study of the meetings and encounters of other waiting folk. Hundreds of appointments have I kept at Charing Cross Post Office. I have met soldier-friends there, after an absence of three years. I have met cousins and sisters and aunts, and damsels who stood not in any of these relations. And I have met the Only One there, many, many times; often happily; often in trepidation; and sometimes in lyrical ecstasy, as when a quarrel and a long parting have received the benison of reconciliation. Now, I can never pass the Post Office without a tremor, for its swart, squat exterior is, for me, bowered with delicious thrills.

Never keep an appointment under the Clock at Victoria. A meeting here is fatal to the sweetness of the intercourse that is to follow. Always he or she who arrives first will be peevish or irate by the time the second party turns up; for [Pg 142]Victoria Station, with its lowering roof, affects you with a frightful sense of being shut in and smothered. Turn how you will, sharply or gently, and you cannon with some petulant human, and, retiring apologetically from him, you impale your kidney region on some fool's walking-stick or umbrella. That fool asks you to look where you're going, and then he gets his from a truck-load of luggage. You laugh—bitterly. After three minutes of waiting in that violet-tinted beehive, you loathe your fellow-man; you loathe the entire animal kingdom. You "come over in one of them prickly 'eats." Your nerves flap about you like bits of bunting, and the new spring suit that set in such fine lines seems fit only for scaring birds. Then your friend arrives, and God help him if he's late!

I have watched these Victoria appointments many times while waiting for my train. The first party to the contract arrives, glances at the clock, and strolls to the bookstall, cheerfully swinging stick or umbrella. He strolls back to the clock, glances, compares it with his watch. Hums a bar or two. Coughs. A flicker of dismay shades his face. Then a handicapped runner for the 6.15 crashes violently against him in avoiding a [Pg 143]platoon of soldiers, and knocks his hat over his eyes and his stick ten yards away. When the great big world ceases turning and he finds a voice, the offender has gone. The next glance he shoots at the clock is choleric. A slight prod from an old lady who wishes to find the main booking-office produces a spout of fury; and the comedy ends with a gestic departure, in the course of which he gets a little of his own back on other of his species. His final glance at the clock is charged with the pure essence of malevolence.

How much more gracious is an appointment in the great resounding hall of Euston, though this is mainly a travellers' rendezvous and is seldom used for general appointments. Here, cloistered from the rush and roar of the station proper, yet always with a cheerful sense of loud neighbourhood, the cathedral mood is induced. You become benign, Gothic. There are pleasant straw seats. There are writing-tables with real ink. There are noble photographs of English beauty-spots, and—............