Alphonse Daudet, when analysing Tartarin de Tarascon, found in him two Tartarins, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho. Tartarin Quixote liked fighting, adventure, uncertainty, blood, knives, unscalable peaks, tornadoes at sea. Tartarin Sancho liked flannel vests, long drinks of lemonade on a hot day, chocolate in bed in the morning. No doubt, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho live in many of us, and certainly I confess to desperate moods which, on the whole, I restrain, and to self-indulgent moods which, on the whole, I encourage; but when we consider men we know, it is curious how much more strongly Tartarin Sancho or Tartarin Quixote is developed in them. Tartarin Sancho leads the majority of mankind, that majority which is always looking for a good billet, for a pension, for a nice little wife, a cat, and a garden. Some, more ambitious, substitute for the nice little wife a woman of title, for the cat a hunter, for the garden an estate, but their desires, after all, are still those of Sancho, even though they are those of Sancho become Governor of Barataria. Naturally they adopt the wadded life. It is not a crime, and no doubt many of the Tartarin Quixotes, who number among them tight-rope dancers, mining magnates, card-sharpers, and cabinet ministers, often come to regret the bed quilt of a blameless life. Only the bed quilt is not for them. Somehow, I don’t know why, I cannot help feeling that Tartarin Sancho is less normal than Tartarin Quixote. He does such strange things; he enlists in a bank, grinds out his little span of life and dies; or he becomes a barrister, pleads cases he believes in, and also others; or Tartarin Sancho turns into a respectable stockbroker, that is to say, he never speculates, but induces other people to gamble; or he becomes a professional soldier, and passes the first half of his life hoping there will be a war; if there is none, then he passes the other half in the rather more decayed parts of Earl’s Court. These are queer trades, for46 they do not seem to satisfy anything that man needs if he is to feel complete. It is not enough that a man should, by the time he dies, have manufactured, let us say, large quantities of office furniture, have played golf, have gone to Eastbourne or Monte Carlo, have met the one girl whom he wrongly imagined to be the only girl in the world, ignoring the fact that there are thousands like her, have reproduced the species and left them behind to do likewise. ‘Such is life,’ says my old friend the housekeeper of Wellington Buildings, Bethnal Green; she is right, but somehow this explanation does not satisfy me, and I wonder whether all those respectable, clean-living people are not really degenerates, in so far as they have lost the desire for colour in life. It may be that Tartarin Quixote does not desire colour in life, and that he would gladly exchange the pebbly bed of romance for the eiderdown of the regular life; still, what a man does matters, as well as what a man desires. It is all very well praising the mute, inglorious Milton in the factory or the shop, but the Milton who manages to break the silence is also important in the scheme. The idea is greater than the fact, but to deny the fact would be to run Plato too far.
Therein lies the charm of the queer people, in whom London is rich, people who follow unexpected occupations, occupations that nobody would naturally think of following. One can understand how Mrs Smith comes to hear from one of her husband’s friends that they want an apprentice in the printing shop; she sends little Tommy to the printing shop, and he becomes a printer. But how does little Paolo become an ice-cream man? There are lots of ice-cream men, and so we must believe that some impulse directed young Paolo towards ice-cream. How did it happen? Was it a vocation, this selling of ice-cream? Did he discover an ice-cream opening? I don’t know; I once asked an ice-cream merchant why he sold ice-cream. He told me that he did it because his father did it. Then I asked him why his father sold ice-cream. He told me that his father sold ice-cream because his grandfather sold ice-cream. Then I saw that we might go on for a long time like this, and let him alone, for the ice-cream47 merchant was growing suspicious. I am glad that I do not know whether his grandfather sold ice-cream because his great-grandfather sold ice-cream, for this leaves a little to my imagination, and I am able to imagine that in the misty cinquecento, some adventurous Florentine, some relative of Benvenuto Cellini, was impelled to forsake a hospitable guild to push about the European tracks the gay little carriage that to-day bears the Italian flag, diplomatically intertwined with the flag of the country in which the merchant happens to trade, the portrait of King Victor, and, on the other side, some touching scene such as ‘Mother’s Last Kiss.’
The ice-cream man sets out every day on adventure. He may have a beat, but I prefer to think that he follows in the wake of the sun, always where it is hottest, caring little whether the street be mean or opulent. I like to think of him as at the mercy of a cold snap that ruins him, while it makes the fortune of his fellow merchant, the hot-potato man. (What a beautiful poem Tennyson would have made of that ... the golden wheel turning, and raising high, now the ice-cream, then the hot potato ... and always above a noble voice bidding them hope and pray.) Of course, there are no hot-potato men now. I wonder what happened to them. Indeed, that is what oppresses the curious when he considers the wanderers: what becomes of them when they are no longer strong enough to ply their strange trades and to range the world? Are our workhouses full of crossing-sweepers who sweep no more? Perhaps it is not so tragic, after all, to have been a crossing-sweeper and to end in the workhouse; I cannot imagine a crossing-sweeper murmuring with Mr Kipling: ‘Me that ’ave been what I’ve been!’ for he has never been more than what Mr Tim Healy would call a movable fixture. He has just sat and touched his cap, and been tipped, and has occasionally swept. But he must have meditated. No man can sit for ten hours a day in the same place without meditating; I say this without authority, for I have known only one crossing-sweeper who meditated to any effect; he was a pronounced optimist, and believed that the world was getting better and better, this because,48 for forty years, he had been observing the quality of people’s boots. As he put it, when he started in life some of them wore no boots; later on, they began to wear other people’s cast-off boots; now they were getting on to buy their own boots, and what with that, and what with the skirts getting shorter and shorter, and the stocking getting thinner and thinner, by gum, he was blowed if he knew what was going to happen next.
No, crossing-sweepers are not wanderers. They are limpets. I should not have thought of them if they were not street folk, for it is a distinguishing trait of the wanderer that he is a street creature, something that appears from the stones in the early morning, and at night into the stones seems to vanish. The London wanderer may have a home, but only in the sense of the London sparrow. Can you imagine the flower-girl’s home? If the flower-girl were indeed the sort of flower-girl of whom you see half a hundred portraits every year in the Royal Academy, a sort of pure and peach-blossom girl, she would have a home like Mélisande, very, very small and dainty (you know, the Charbonnel and Walker-Marcus Stone style), with chairs covered in flowered chintzes, and a white cat. At night she would lie in her little white bed, over the head of which would hang a text about the lilies of the field; her fair hair would ripple over the pillow; her rosy lips would open in a sweet smile as she dreamed of the dear little faded flowers which she had stood for the night in her tooth-glass. (Tooth-glass! Nasty realist touch; I shall never do this sort of thing properly.) Ah, if it were only like that! If she were not a big, fine woman of about forty, tied up in three thick shawls, which imperfectly conceal her tidal bodice; if only she did not so much love a quartern of gin. It would be much more romantic, but I should regret her if she were to turn into a picture post card, for she is such a jolly good, saucy sort, as a rule, and I like her thick hand terminated by five sausages, one of these sausages strangulated by a wedding ring, the thickness of which places one beyond all cynicism as to the permanence of the tie. You see her in many places, by the fountain at Piccadilly Circus, until all the nobs have bought a bunch of violets for49 somebody, now that they have given up the habit of buying a flower for themselves; then you see her near restaurant entrances, cleverly shaming men into buying flowers for women who are already wearing some, and who do not know what to do with the offering because it is invariably very wet; later on, outside theatres near the queues; she is all enterprise, and during the war I even saw her trying to sell to an unpromising margarine queue.
 
FLOWER-GIRL
She grows old at her trade; it is a healthy one, and she has no home. Some of her fellows are stranger and still more definably homeless. Thus the muffin-man, killed, perhaps, by the war. It is a long time since I heard his bell, and was thereby assured that Sunday was getting on nicely, and would be over by-and-by. There is the travelling accountant, a real wanderer, that one, who, every day and night, goes from little shop to little factory, continually confronted with new names, new deals, and, perhaps, new and complicated methods of dishonesty. There are the queerest and most incomprehensible of all, the guides. I do not know what turns a man into a guide, but if you stand awhile near Charing Cross, and make a noise like a Jugo-Slav, it is likely that a seedily, respectably dressed man, with a badly rolled umbrella, will offer to show you the town. Once it is clear that he does not want to exchange pocket-books with you to show his confidence, he may lead you to Henry V.’s chapel, to Westminster Abbey, to Carlyle’s house, and so on, reciting as he goes, something like this: ‘The painted ’all was originally planned by King John the same who signed that Magna Charta in the year 1215 but the plans being lost in the Wash the project did not come to take form before the year 1533 when King Henry VIII. after his marriage with Anne Boleyn laid the foundations on the plans of Sir ’Erbert ’Opkins who was also the architect of the golden tower of Muswell ’Ill where Nell Gwynn ...’ and so on. That man is a gramophone; I once let him show me Saragossa, but he shall never show me anything more. For one thing, I believe he is respectable at heart, and there is no profit in his company. The only good guide is the amateur guide. I met one in Brussels once, a cab-driver, who stopped before the café where I was50 having a drink; he so many times cried out to me, ‘Hi, Englishman! you’re a sportsman, come along!’ that I fell a prey to his flattery. (Who told him that every Englishman wants to be thought a sportsman?) He knew his Brussels pretty well, but I will not tell you the rest of the story, for he also knew his Englishman pretty well.
There are many more of these strange people. A strange one was a woman who offered to give me a thousand guesses at her profession; I declined the proposal and found out that she was a pearl-threader. Few of us know that the silken thread, on which collars of pearls are strung, wears out, and that, from time to time, pearls have to be re-strung. All women do not care to send their pearls to the jeweller, for the art of Tecla is profound. Nor do they care to re-thread them themselves, for the holes are so small that the work is infinitely wearisome. So my pearl-threader, who looked like the most respectable type of retired maid, spent her life in Mayfair and Belgravia, where she sat re-threading pearls while the owner read a novel. The pearl-threader smiled as she told this: ‘One of them,’ she said, ‘read a newspaper upside down all the time while I was doing her pearls. And there is another, so unsuspicious; she turns her back on me and smokes a cigarette, and stares into the looking-glass, dreamy-like.’
But that is a high walk of wanderer. There are others more tragic. There used to be a terrible creature, the runner, who followed four-wheelers laden with luggage, and arrived at the end of his long run too blown to be red in the face, but lead white, his right hand gripped to his heart, his left hand spasmodically touching the greasy brim of his cap. I have seen no greater agony than the hungry desire in those filmy eyes, half-obscured by the wet, dust-laden eyelids. I used to stop the runners when I could; often they persisted, their open mouth close to the wheel; they could not see me wave them away, or they could not hear me call out, as if all the energy of their poor senses had passed into those eternally running legs. One of them seized my trunk as we arrived, before I could ransom myself, hating51 my opulence, full of shame. It is fifteen years ago, but I remember him, a big body, but little flesh; I remember his eyes like glass, and the awful stagger of him as he bent under the weight of the trunk, as he tottered, and as I leaped to seize it when it fell. Then the door opened, and the hotel waiter came out with the air of black hostility which the house dog has for the street dog. The runner looked at us without anger, without misery, though he understood very well that the job was not for him; he was like a Greek peasant patiently encountering fate. But, as he turned away, clasping my shilling in his hand, and I saw the foot in the broken boot fumble for the step, a wave of self-hatred rose in me. I told myself: ‘You have crucified him.’
They are not so tragic, all of them, unaccountable people, or even people who have adopted trades one thinks queer because one would not have adopted them oneself. Some are merely disgusting, such as the bus-conductor. I have met a civil bus-conductor; I have even met an optimistic one, but nowadays, especially, he stands exposed by comparison with the girl-conductor. Oh, it is natural enough that the girl should have been friendly, civil, clean, obliging, for to her the job was new, varied, faintly exciting, probably better paid than her previous work. But still, she made the man terrible. He seems to be nearly always a rather grimy, ill-shaven, misanthropic man; something of the watch-dog and of the bureaucrat has crept into his constitution; he cannot gently ask for fares; the demand must come with a snap and a snarl, pitched on a high note that shall reach the recesses of the omnibus and of the traveller’s consciousness. When he yelps: ‘Fares!’ I feel for my ticket as if I were guilty; when he looks at me, his little, hard eye suggests that I am bilking the company, and then I hate him so that, if I can, I do bilk the company, and get off four hundred yards to the good, bursting with an unexpelled shout of ‘Yah!’ I hate him above all because, so often, he companions my journey with a snarly chorus, addressed sometimes to the wretched nearest occupant. One hears him run on: ‘Some people can’t learn where buses stop; seem to think it’s the Lord Mayor’s coach; pulling the string themselves, too;52 might as well be no conductor.’ Or it is something like this: ‘Chucking their half-crowns about; taking about four hours finding ’em, too; come into the bus and expect to get change as if it was a blooming bank; gave her twenty-four ha’pennies though, that’ll learn her.’ Or, during a shower: ‘Plenty room on top. drop o’ rain won’t ’urt yer. When it’s fine they all want to get on top.’ And so on, a regular orgy of grace and charm. Growl, grouse, snap, snarl, grumble, yap, and long, dirty moustaches, filthy hands, and if it is not a grudging black hand to help a white sleeve on to the bus, it is a hand that has to restrain itself not to shove the white shoulder off. All that because the poor brute is not happy. I know I ought to be sympathetic, for it must be dreadful to travel all day from Camden Town to Brixton and back, to sell so small a variety of goods, never to feel steady ground under your feet when you look for change, to answer the same idiotic question seventy times a day, to tread on feet, to have your feet trodden on. The bus-conductor is a nasty man because he is an unhappy man, because he has no prospect in life, save that of growing older and, for all I know, retiring without a pension. Those monotonous occupations, such as the hellish one of lift-man, ought not to be human occupations, and they will not be such some day. Meanwhile, they rack by boredom people to whom has not been given the free expanse of the pedlar. What a brute Charon must have become by now!
Those people who range freely street and field are indeed of another kind; there is in them less civilisation and more civility. They are detached from their fellows; they lead lives of their own within the beating life of the world. Many of the newspaper-sellers are pleasant, ironic people, with a capacity for estimating character, with a quick interest in the news they retail. Citizens of the world, they are often so stimulated by their news that, as you buy, they must tell you the contents of the stop-press. It is a hard trade. Before the war they used to pay ninepence for twenty-seven halfpenny papers: fourpence-halfpenny profit for selling twenty-seven papers! Still, there is a nomadic satisfaction53 in their movable beat. They are not locked up. They are in the midst of life, other people’s life, but yet life.
To quite another class belong the beggars, not the pseudo-beggars who profess to sell laces or matches, or the blind, for these are inanimate beggars and nobody knows what goes on behind their faces, but the adventurous beggars, the old woman who follows you, shrilly asking for the price of a cup of tea, or the well-known teacher of French, who stops you in the street and asks you what chance he has of a professorship at King’s College. Those adventurers are amusing because they are coloured, because, if you stop, they will tell you where they come from, the number and names of their children, the diseases from which they suffer, and, indeed, recite you the shameless novel of their lives.
Of the same kind, but more offensive, is the fern-seller who is nearly always (or was before the war) a particularly burly brute, carrying a couple of potted ferns under each arm. He haunts the quieter streets of the West End, and when a woman alone meets him late at night, she will do well to make for the nearest policeman, the proper method being to ask the fern-seller to carry the ferns home for her: a policeman will doubtless be encountered on the way. I remember a fern-seller, who accosted me once in Portman Square. It was about six o’clock in the evening; I told the man that I wanted no ferns; he followed me, rumbling abuse which I could hardly hear. As it happened, I was looking for lodgings, and stopped at a likely house in Portman Street. As I had been walking rather fast, I thought that I had got rid of him, but, seeing I was going into a house, he ran up behind me, and once more began his pressure. While I was ordering him off the door opened, and a fat little landlord, with a grubby little white beard and choleric little blue eyes in a puffy little pink face, stood staring in the doorway. ‘If you don’t go,’ I said to the man, ‘I’ll give you in charge.’ But the man went on whining and growling and, being very young, I was filled with awful confusion at this brawl on the step. This was increased by the nasty little landlord, who said: ‘What do you want?’
54 ‘I want to see some rooms,’ I replied, and to the fern-seller: ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I’ve got no rooms,’ snapped the landlord, ‘get out of it, both of you.’
‘What the devil do you mean by both of you?’ I said to the landlord, being thoroughly enraged. Then I became paralysed at having to quarrel on two different subjects simultaneously.
‘Mean by it!’ shouted the little landlord. ‘What do you mean by creating a disturbance on my doorstep? Let rooms to the likes of you! You’re drunk!’
At that moment the fern-seller was breathing on me, and I saw that the landlord’s words were well-founded, though ill-directed. Before I could think of a reply, the little landlord slammed his door so as to make the whole of Portman Street shake. And I remained alone with the fern-seller, who still painstakingly and threateningly attempted to make me buy ferns. He was the sort of man who speaks from under his under lip. I was so ashamed that I did not say one word, but ran. Oh! how good and free Oxford Street felt.
I have not been much annoyed or interested by the more desperate wanderers one comes across. Only once did anything perilous come my way, and that I will call ‘The Row in Homer Row.’ It was many years ago. I had, one evening, made an acquaintanceship with the light fallibility that will, I hope, always characterise youth. It did not at once have results; some other business intervened, but I remember quite well that I returned at nine o’clock to a little block of flats, that were not exactly flats, but superior model dwellings. I remember the hard, stone stairs and the iron banisters, you will soon see why. As I left, later in the evening, I shut the door of the flat behind me, and stood for a second in the entire blackness of the landing. Then I felt a foot against my left ankle, and a hand grip my left arm. It was the darkness saved me, for it is not easy accurately to seize an arm in the dark, and the notorious ‘pull-over’ is not suited for cellar blackness. I remember that I did not think, that I did not have time to be afraid. I remember only the vast55 unchaining of a self-protective instinct, that swung my right hand across to the left. I swear I did not will it. And I still have unforgettably in my knuckles the sensation of crash and give, in my ears the curious, fat sound, something like ‘kroch,’ that was made by some teeth giving way under the blow. And then there was an immensely long pause, during which I had time to think; it may have lasted a tenth of a second. There was a dull, muffled sound, that of a head striking the iron banisters. That is all, except that I remember the clatter of my feet on the stone stairs.
But to the man who wanders in London streets at night, and I am one of these, stranger things happen. One of those cases was ‘The Poisoned Girl of Grosvenor Square.’ It was about twelve o’clock at night. As I turned out of Brook Street into the Square, I saw on my right two people by the railings of an area. One was a woman dressed in black, kneeling down and holding on to the railings by one hand. The other was a man, who stood a few yards off, with statue-like immobility. I remember thinking: ‘This is awkward. He has been knocking her about, and I suppose I shall have to say something, and if he attacks me in front no doubt she’ll attack me from behind.’ But still, there was nothing to do but to say something. So I went up to them, and suddenly realised that the two people had nothing to do with each other. She was kneeling in that frozen attitude, and he was looking on. The girl was young, very white, with masses of fair hair. She was neatly dressed in black, and looked like a parlourmaid. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed hardly to breathe. Two or three times I asked her what was the matter, but she did not reply. Then only did I look at the man, who was evidently of another class. A rather large, square man, the sort of man whom you know to be bald, though he has his hat on, with a moustache that was too thick, and cheeks that were too healthy, a phlegmatic, staring man.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said the man.
As it was clear that he was the sort of man who wouldn’t56 know, I turned to the girl and, taking her by the shoulder, tried to make her stand up. I was surprised to find her limp instead of stiff, and she fell back against my shoulder with a little groan.
‘Let me alone,’ she murmured.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked again. ‘Are you in any trouble?’
‘Let me alone,’ she said again.
I felt irritated because she did not realise that I couldn’t let her alone, that man’s code compelled me to torture her, and that nothing in the world could allow me to let her alone.
‘Let me help you,’ I said, feeling that I behaved like a considerable idiot. ‘What is it?’
She opened her eyes a little, and murmured: ‘I’ve taken something.’
‘Taken something?’ I repeated, vaguely thinking of theft. ‘What do you mean? Taken something.’
‘Poison,’ she said. Then again: ‘Let me alone.’
I hear the shrillness of my voice as I cried out: ‘Poison!’; then I found myself hurrying her along the pavement; ‘What is it?’ I said to her, as we went. ‘Is it laudanum? You’ve got to walk, you know,’ and to the man: ‘Hurry up. Get a cab.’ There was no cab to be seen. ‘Come along!’ I shouted. ‘Run ahead and get a cab.’ After a moment’s hesitation he waddled away, not much faster than we. And now the girl was almost weeping, while I tortured her with questions, tried to make her run, this one idea of laudanum in my mind. At last she answered: ‘Spirits of salt.’
It took us very long, I think, to get up North Audley Street, and I felt rent by her youth and her prettiness, for the fair hair was coming unbound on my shoulder. There was a tenderness in me as I lifted her at last into the cab. I remember saying to the man, ‘You’ve been pretty slow about it. I hope you haven’t killed her. What were you doing staring at her instead of doing something?’
Then he said: ‘Oh, well, one doesn’t want to be mixed up.’
 
THE HEART OF THE CITY
There is no end to this story. I took her to the Middlesex,57 and they saved her by means of the stomach pump: to this day I cannot help wishing that her salvation might have had a more romantic name. But much more impressive is the man’s remark. I should not wonder if most people go through life with a single end in view: not to be mixed up. And one might as well be dead as not be mixed up. I have been much more mixed up than I dare tell in this respectable volume. I stole a baby once.
That is the story of ‘The Stolen Baby of Pimlico.’ I was waiting for an omnibus one night at the Chippenham. A young, dark girl was also waiting for the omnibus, but as she was showing more signs of impatience than are usual, namely, stamping, I could not help being interested. At last, as she passed me and flung me a look of intense malevolence, which I felt was rather unfair, I could not help smiling and saying: ‘I wonder whether there are any more buses.’ (Now I come to think of it, I might have said something more soothing.) This had the unexpected result of arousing confidence. ‘There’s got to be another bus,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to fetch my sister’s baby.’
‘Oh!’ I remarked.
We said no more for some time, and still no omnibus came. Then a taxi crawled up to us, and I said: ‘Well, if there are no more buses we had better take this taxi.’ The dark girl, who was young and very pretty, put on an expression of increased malevolence, but as I stopped the taxi, she said: ‘Oh, all right then, but I give the cabman the address, and not you.’ As we sat down, I gathered from this that my wanderer was no fledgling. But, after a few minutes, as she discovered that I made no attempt to kiss her, she became confidential. She had run away from an evil stepmother. She had ￡2 10s. She had just taken a furnished flat at ￡3 10s. a week. She was nineteen. She was going on the stage. Also, she wouldn’t have gone away if it hadn’t been for her father. (Rather mixed, this.) As we drew nearer to Pimlico I became more and more confused, for the baby was turning into her sister-in-law’s baby, and I swear that he became a she. We stopped in a little black street in Pimlico, in front of an enormous Victorian house which was still blacker than the street.58 ‘I must ring,’ said the girl, and promptly took from her little bag a key. Therefore she did not ring, but disappeared into the house, the inside of which was blacker than the outside, leaving the door wide open. After I had waited for a moment she came out again: ‘I say,’ she said, ‘I can’t carry him down; he’s too heavy.’
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘now I’m in for it. But they can’t have laid much of a trap for a young man picked up outside the Chippenham.’ So, true to my principles, I went in. The house stank of solitude. It was the sort of house that does not even creak. I felt my way up to the first floor, and in a back room where there was very little besides a bed and a couple of chairs, I found asleep a pretty boy aged about five. ‘Pick him up,’ murmured the girl, ‘and don’t make a noise, I don’t want to wake the woman so late.’ Obediently I picked him up, and carried him down into the taxi. Just as the girl was about to follow me in, she said: ‘Now I’d better pay the woman. Lend me two shillings.’ In a few moments she came back, and some time later made me pull up the taxi at the corner of a side street, off Elgin Avenue.
Only later did all these confusions, this mixture of sexes and relationships, the silence in the silent house, lead me to theories. Little by little they crystallised into this: I seem to have stolen a baby I don’t know, belonging to somebody I don’t know, and taken it I don’t know where, in the charge of I don’t know whom. It preyed on me rather. I even worked up an alibi. Now I suppose it does not matter, as the child may be a householder.
There are many other stories I should like to tell, that of ‘The Watchmaker and the Four Pounds of Black-Lead,’ though, really, the adventure of ‘The Two Girls from County Cork and the Lost Camisole,’ is much more remarkable, but these and others must appear in another volume. There are many of these people, and one never discovers them before ten o’clock or so. They live in the streets, where they have their loves and their tragedies, and mainly in those places where there is not too much59 light. They like the darkness because the light of human understanding is not good for their peculiar affairs. We do not think enough of the influence of light. When we stand on Primrose Hill and, as Karl Baedeker would put it, behold before us the rich expanse of a great and sleeping city, we do not individualise the lights enough. When we look down upon Piccadilly Circus flaring from every veranda, and, like the laburnum, dropping wells of fire, when in these days we stand at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and watch the electric signs: ‘Player’s Navy Mixture,’ ‘Meux’s London Original Stout,’ ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ and ‘Tube,’ when we walk in all that brightness, we do not realise that this is the spirit of our city, the rather crude, commercial, and friendly spirit of London. Nor, in other cities at night, say in Birmingham, where through the dirty glass falls dirty yellow light, do we perceive in man unambitiousness. For mankind must have light. Light alone opens the windows on life, and makes night Arabian.
Only one creature likes the dark, and that is a wanderer, the cat. Have you watched cats at night? If you try in the street to stroke cats when the mood of night is on them, when they crouch under a bush, rolled up into tight balls, their sharp heads sunk into the woolly folds of their shoulders, when some are shadows in the shadow, spotted with two points of fire, they will not shrink from you, nor approach you, but so remain in static life. Or they will swiftly pass you, at that queer, soft trot, making towards a secret direction with entire intentness. Or, one upon the steps of a house, the other on a balustrade, they will face each other with swishing tails, and so remain in immense motion within the same spot, an infinity of provocation in every shiver of their sleek flanks; you, human, shall not know whether they are minded to love or war. If you interfere, you break the spell of their communication, but there is no room for you in their compact. You are the spectre of the commander, and they flee. But you shall feel the hostility they have left behind them; it flows from the immense cruelty of their cold eyes, that are lovely as emerald and topaz, that can harbour no love, but only60 voluptuousness, calm, deep eyes that calculate and fix only upon that which can serve them, eyes that glimpse only things they fear and things they desire, not things for which they may suffer. You shall stay awhile in that hostile ambiance, while they have fled into the night, to adventures more secret and profound than any that may be yours, even though you, too, be one of Diana’s foresters, a gentleman of the shade, a minion of the moon.