E. V. Lucas

“ To cross a river is in itself nothing; but to come, from somewhere unknown, to the bank of the river, cross it, and pass on to unknown bournes on the other side—that is an enterprise, and that is what every one but the ferryman is doing. I have written elsewhere—it is a recurring theme of sympathy—of the servants of the traveller who live by helping him on his eventful way but never participate in any wanderings—railway porters, for example—and the ferryman is perhaps chief, because so much of the very matter of romance—a running stream—comes into his daily routine. ”

“ Finding things is at once so rare and pure a joy that to trifle with it is peculiarly heartless. Yet are there people so wantonly in need of sport as to do so. Every one knows of the purse laid on the path or pavement beside a fence, which, as the excited passer-by stoops to pick it up, is twitched through the palings by its adherent string. There is also the coin attached to a thread which can be dropped in the street and instantly pulled up again, setting every eye at a pavement scrutiny. ”

“ To be on one's knees, in evening dress, at twenty past twelve in the day, facing a row of people, across a vast expanse of carpet, similarly kneeling, and being also a little self-conscious and hungry, is not conducive to minute observation; but I was able to notice that our host was alert and bird-like in his movements and had a searching, shrewd, and very rapid and embracive glance. ”

“ Too many real names get into print in these inquisitive days.
It was not however of strange dead names that I was thinking when I took up my pen, but of the epitaphs on the tombstones, sometimes so brief and simple, sometimes so long and pompous, and almost always withholding everything of real importance about the occupants of the narrow cells beneath and almost always affecting to despise the precious gift of life. Why should not some one, greatly daring, go so far as to bid the mason engrave a tribute to the world that is being left behind? ”

“ THE SPARROWS' FRIEND
If you entered the Tuileries any fine morning (and surely the sun always shines in Paris, does it not?) by the gate opposite Frémiet's golden arrogant Joan of Arc, and turned into the gardens opposite the white Gambetta memorial, you were certain to see a little knot of people gathered around an old gentleman in a black slouch hat, with a deeply furrowed melancholy face, a heavy moustache, and the big comfortable slippers of one who (like so many a wise Frenchman) prefers comfort to conventionality or the outraged opinion of others. ”

“ So far am I from withholding possessions from others, that as I walked down Bond Street the other day and paused at this window and that, filled with exquisite jewels and enamelled boxes and other voluptuous trifles, I thought how delightful it would be to be rich enough to buy them all—not to own them, but to give them away. To women for choice; to one woman for choice. ”

“ For human nature's reluctance to change is never more manifest than in the homes of the drama, and the audience in this embryonic playhouse in the London street whose name escapes me and the audience in that crumbling abode of lizards beneath the burning sun of Verona would probably be astonishingly alike. ”

“ And no matter at what hour in the night I wake, or from what disconcerting dream, I am always at once secure in my mind that the old recognisable world is still about me and I have not passed over in my sleep, because the voices and laughter about the coffee-stall fill the air. "Good," I say, "I am still here." Now it would be a pleasant thing, and prove one's life not to have been lived in [Pg 112] vain, to be able to minister in the small hours gaily to so many heroes, and incidentally to impart to wakeful and disquieted neighbours reassurance of stability. ”

“ In the honour of what Saint they burned so gaily, like a little mass meeting of flames, I cannot say, but probably the Gentle Spirit of Padua, who not only befriends all tender young things but, it is notorious, if properly approached, can find again whatever you have lost; and most people have lost something. I remember Ross also because I had Dickens's Letters (that generous feast) with me, and behold! ”

“ The result was that she could not see, and not to be able to see is for any woman a calamity, but for a foreign woman a tragedy: particularly so when she is in her own country a queen, accustomed to every kind of homage and attention. The ballerina was at the height of her despair when one of the policemen on duty took pity on her, and lifting her in his arms held her up long enough to enjoy the principal moments of the pageant. From that day onwards, she said, the London policeman was, for her, the symbol of strength and comfort and power. ”

“ The London plane has a special advantage over other trees in growing where it is most wanted. The maimed elms of Kensington Gardens, for example, grow where already there is a waste of greenery, but the plane trees which I have particularly in my mind at this moment grow among bricks and brush the sides of houses with their branches. From a balloon the leaves of these trees, making—from that altitude, immediately above—verdant pools among the red and grey of the roofs, must strike the eye very soothingly. ”

“ The odd thing is that we not only resent the age of the joke, even though it is in our own repertory, but we resent the laughter of those to whom it is new—perhaps three-quarters of the audience. How dare they also not have heard it before? is our unspoken question. Not long ago, seated in a theatre next a candid and normally benignant and tolerant friend, I found myself laughing at what struck me as a distinctly humorous remark made by one of London's nonsensical funny men. ”

“ No call, as I say, to feel sorry for them; but what of those other Sons of Martha, the railway porters, who while helping us to travel and get away from home never travel or get away from home themselves, and for ever are carrying or wheeling heavy trunks or searching for visionary cabs?
The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing. Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their ravages. Men who take no holidays must not, therefore, necessarily become objects of our pity. ”

“ It is my good or ill fortune to have taken a furnished flat at a dizzy altitude in the neighbourhood of that London terminus which is at once nearest the sea and the Promised Land. Immediately above the flat is a spacious roof, which affords a pleasant retreat in the cool of the evening and commands what the agents call an extensive prospect, and where, at most hours, toy dogs may be met. The flat itself consists of a number of rooms the walls of which are covered with photographs of men, women, and children, almost as thickly as the pages of a schoolboy's album are covered with stamps. ”

“ He is also the first droll to conquer the whole world. I suppose that it is no exaggeration to say that at any moment of the day and night—allowing for divergences of time—it would be safe to maintain that ten million people are laughing at the Chaplin antics somewhere or other on this planet of ours. For wherever there is a township of more than two thousand inhabitants, there, I imagine, is a cinema; and wherever there is a cinema there is Charlie; not always quite up to date, of course, for managers are wily birds, but in some film, even though an ancient one. ”

“ Polly is a roan pony; very round in the barrel, and particularly so of late, when there has been no food but meadow-grass. She had been with us (this is my neighbour's story, as told to me during the War: a very charming neighbour who keeps her temper at croquet) —Polly had been with us so long as to become, as ponies peculiarly can, a member of the family, so that to part with her savoured of treachery. Necessity, however, knows no law and sanctifies no memory, and the distasteful preparations were therefore begun. ”

“ The great charm of Nevill's Court is that it has, right in the midst of the printing world, gardens; within sound of countless printing presses, the Nevill Courtiers can grow their own vegetables. Each house has its garden, while the centre house, a stately double-fronted Jacobean mansion, has quite a big one. The Court has also a fruiterer's shop, presided over by one of the most genial and corpulent fruiterers—I almost wrote the fruitiest fruiterers—in the world (what a wonderful word "fruiterer" is!) ”

“ That is to say, he knew that he had an audience: no small incentive. The result is that "Pictures of Life and Character" is the completest survey of the social England of his times that any artist has ever made or is likely to make.
To-day this inexhaustible work in three immense volumes is out of print, but there never was a book that better deserved continuous accessibility. It is Leech's monument, and he has no other. One learns from it, while laughing the honestest of laughter, how inveterate a plagiarist from herself is Dame Fashion. ”

“ But in real life the police are serious creatures, while during the first three days of Armistice week, when they had to stand by and watch all kinds of goings-on for which no one was to be whopped, they were pathetic, too. Seldom can they have been so unhappy as when the bonfire was burning in the middle of Cockspur Street, and nothing could be done, or was permitted to be done.
London, I maintain, has few sublimer sights than a policeman doing his duty. ”

“ I must control my feelings. No, five pounds is absurd. A douceur of one pound will meet the case. It will be nothing to me—or, at any rate, nothing serious—but a gift of quail and manna from a clear sky to the dealer, without, however, doing him any harm. A pound will be ample, accompanied by a brief note.
The note was to the effect that I had sold the drawing at a profit which enabled me to make him a present, because it was an old, and perhaps odd, belief of mine that one should do this kind of thing; good luck should be shared. ”

“ Sir Gilbert Scott, the designer of the Albert Memorial, knowing, either consciously or subconsciously—but the result is the same—that the principal frequenters of Kensington Gardens are children, behaved accordingly.
Those coloured pinnacles, those queens and angels high up in the sky under the golden cross, those gay mosaics against the blue, fill children with wondering delight. The emblematical groups of statuary—America with its buffalo and Red Indian, Asia with its elephant, Africa with its giant negro—must be thrilling, too ”

“ But the cream of the story is that during the year no fewer than three unoffending and genuine old ladies, as female as God created them, were, on different occasions, more than astonished to be accosted by the maître d'hôtel in the midst of their meals with a triumphant and not too refined catch-phrase, and to be asked for a tenner.
People look now so little at the clothes of others that disguise must have become easier than it was. The War brought so many strange costumes into being that we stare hardly at all, and at uniforms never. ”

“ Practical jokers wishing to collect a crowd—and this has always been one of their choicest efforts—stand still and intent, gazing upwards. Even before the aeroplane was invented no lure was so powerful as this. In a few minutes hundreds of people will assemble, all looking up, while the humorist melts away. Probably were London a city of the blind there would be no concourses at all, for it is to see that brings us together. Crowds are always looking. ”

“ Indeed, he was normal enough to like to be liked by every one, and most of the unhappiness of which he was capable—even to a kind of self-torture—proceeded from the suspicion that he was unwelcome here and there. For in spite of his hard experience of the world, he continued a child to the end; a spoilt child, indeed, more than not, as men of genius often can be. ”

“ There is a wealth of reasons for this lack of mirth. To begin with, a boat on a river is normally a vehicle of pleasure; but the ferryman's boat is a drudge. Then, the ordinary course of a boat on a river is up or down, between banks that can provide excitement, and around bends, each one of which may reveal adventure; but the ferryman's boat must constantly cross from side to side, always from the same spot to the same spot and back again, which is subversive of joy. ”

“ Looking the other day into Grimm, I came upon the story called "Hans in Luck," in which a foolish fellow, having his life's savings in a bag, gives them away for an old horse, and the old horse for a cow, and the cow for a pig, and so on, until at last he has only a heavy stone to his name, and, getting rid of that burden, thinks himself the most fortunate of men—Hans in luck. ”

“ During its many years of activity, the Kyrle Society has done much to realise the idealism of its founders—for with Miranda Hill was associated her sister, the late Octavia Hill, that indomitable fighter for all that is good and ameliorative in life, whom, in her serene old age, a symphony in grey and silver, I used often to see walking on that height above Crockham Hill which her energies acquired for the nation as an open space for ever. ”

“ But if Pump Court is more than lit by two plane trees, Cheapside in the summer takes heart from one only—that famous tree which springs from a tiny courtyard at the corner of Wood Street, and, although lopped back almost to a sign-post some few years ago, is again a brave portent of the open world to all the merchants of Chepe and their customers. ”