Berkeley Square

“ Few streets in the West End have escaped being modernised, and façades of every period and style may now be seen side by side with such old Georgian mansions as still remain. On the whole, however, Berkeley Square has survived pretty well, and still retains a good deal of its old appearance.
The streets leading out of it, though in many cases some of the houses have been altered, also keep that air of quiet repose which makes this part of London so pleasant to live in. ”

“ Parbold had not an intimate acquaintance with the squares of Mayfair but he knew Berkeley Square when he saw it. The car had pulled up before a very large, ancient house, a palace of a house, the sort of house wherein great men must have died and gracious women lived. ”

“ The owners of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Square [125] and Portman Square and Cavendish Square and Berkeley Square—the Squares, par excellence, of fashionable London—have kept their seigniorial rights untouched. Pascal told us of some very human but very unregenerate children who said "This dog belongs to me," and "That place in the sun is Mine," and Pascal's comment was, "Behold, the beginning and the image of all usurpation upon earth!" ”

“ Sir, you may be a prophet. You may have prophesied correctly in the Berkeley Square. But if you are, and if you have, remember this—that you have proved the self-sacrifice, the privation, the denial, the subterfuge, the mask, and the position of Sagittarius Lodge in its own grounds beside the River Mouse at Crampton St. Peter, N.—N., I said, sir—totally and entirely unnecessary. I will go further, sir, and I will say more. You have not only done that. You have also proved the sacred instinct of a woman, a respectable married woman—such as we must all reverence—false and deceived. ”

“ Shirley was a darling, and Hugo had no money above that which he earned, which was nothing; wherefore they lived in a garage in the Mews behind Berkeley Square, had breakfast late, went out for dinner and on to supper. The garage, however, was delightful. Shirley herself had supervised the builders, decorators and plumbers; and by the time rooms had been added, kitchens hollowed out, bathrooms punched in—by the time, in fact, the garage had been converted into a house, it had cost Hugo more borrow2d money than the lease of a mansion in Berkeley Square. Poor Hugo! ”

“ Suddenly he began to grow excited.
“And now,” he cried, “after all these years of secrecy, after all these years of avoiding the central districts—in which Madame longs to live—after all these years of seclusion beyond the beat even of the buses, do you come here to me, and search yourself and say upon your oath that a prophet can live and be a prophet in the Berkeley Square, that he can read the stars with Gunter’s just opposite, ay, and bring out an almanac if he likes within a shilling fare of the Circus? ”

“ Sagittarius.
“I can only adhere to what I have said,” answered the Prophet. “My grandmother has never been removed from the bottle, has never worn a short coat, has never put her hair up and has never had an epidemic in Berkeley Square.”
“Then all I can say is that she’s an unnatural old lady,” cried Madame, with obvious temper, tossing her head and kicking out the kid boots, as if seized with the sudden desire to use them upon a human football. “And there’s not many like her.”
“There is no one like her, no one at all,” said the Prophet with fervour. ”

“ Mary-le-bone was almost a mile distant from any part of London; the nearest street being Old Bond Street, which scarcely extended to the present Clifford Street. Soon after the accession of George the First, New Bond Street arose, with others in the immediate neighbourhood, and the houses in Berkeley Square and its vicinity. Hanover Square and Cavendish Square were open fields in the year 1716. They were built about the beginning of the reign of George the Second, at which time the houses arose on the north side of Oxford Street, which then first took the name. ”

“ He has retired from business and put down his telescope once and for all, recognising that prophecy is a dangerous employment, and one likely to bring about the very evils it foreshadows. Calmly he dwells with his beloved grandmother in the Berkeley Square, which has received them once more into its former favour. Sometimes, at night, when the sky is clear, and the bright stars, the guardian stars, keep watch over his aristocratic neighbourhood, he draws aside the curtain from the drawing-room window and glances forth at Mercury and Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus. ”

“ The taxi, arrested and reversed on its way to Piccadilly Circus, was soon speeding Westwards. It whirred up Berkeley Street, traversed Berkeley Square, and turned into a short street ending in railings, enclosing grass wonderfully green for August, clipped bushes of evergreens, and some autumn-foliaged planes.
"We'll keep the man. ”

“ It is beyond Oxford Street northward that the difference is striking. This district was only just being built upon, and the well-laid-out streets soon run off into open country. "Marybone" Gardens, a favourite tea-garden, and the church, and a few houses, form a little hamlet just connected with the other part of London by a single street, and further westward, north of Berkeley Square, are fields. ”

“ When speaking of them, in the highest terms, he never differentiated them by the adjectives great, or great-great. They were all kind and condescending enough to be his grandmothers. For a man of his sensitive, delicate and grateful disposition this was enough. He thought them all quite perfect, and took them all under the protection of his soft and beaming eyes.
Of Mrs. Merillia, the live grandmother with whom he had the great felicity to dwell in Berkeley Square, he seldom said anything in public praise. The incense he offered at her shrine rose, most sweetly perfumed, from his daily life. ”

“ Berkeley Square, to which he had moved in October 1779 from Arlington Street. He left the sisters each 4,000l. for their lives, together with Little Strawberry and its furniture. Strawberry Hill itself passed to Mrs. ”

“ Beside the parks and gardens, London has an infinity of squares, commons, and crescents, which are surrounded by private residences and inclosed by railings and walls—such as Trafalgar Square (public) , Bedford, Cavendish, St. George's, Grosvenor, Leicester, Soho, Belgrave, Euston, Finsbury, Fitzroy, Portman, Russell, Wellclose, Hanover, Brunswick, Eaton, Berkeley, Golden, Mecklenburg, Red Lion, Tavistock, and a great number of other squares which I do not now call to mind. ”

“ Who are you that thinks those glittering monsters have nothing to do but to inform your pigmy brain of snowfalls, street accidents, and love-affairs prematurely, so that you may flaunt about your pocket-handkerchief of a square pluming your dwarfship that you are a prophet? ”

“ Merillia appeared in the aperture, clad in a most charming night bonnet, and robed in a dressing-gown of white watered silk.
“The ratcatcher!” she cried. “The ratcatcher!”
Malkiel turned and darted down the stairs, while Mrs. Merillia, in the extreme of terror, shut her door, locked it as many times as she could, and then hastened trembling to the bell which communicated with the faithful Mrs. Fancy, rang it, and dropped half fainting into a chair. Mrs. Fancy woke from her second dream just as Malkiel, closely followed by the now shattered Gustavus, reached the hall. ”

“ Ferdinand’s trousers with both hands, hurried onward through the mire, whither he knew not. His only thought was that all was now discovered and that his life was in danger. A woman’s vanity had wrecked his future. He must hide somewhere for the night, and get away in the morning, perhaps on board some tramp steamer bound for Buenos Ayres, or on a junk weighing anchor for Hayti or Java, or some other distant place. Vague memories of books he had read when a boy came back to him as he ran through the unkempt wilds of the Regent’s Park. ”

“ Bridgeman was forced—from lack of room—to forego her society start, though she was still able to indulge in her society smile, as she bowed, with almost swooning graciousness, to a short, perspiring, bald and side-whiskered man in greasy broadcloth, who looked as if he would have been quite at home upon the box of a four-wheeled cab, as indeed he would, seeing that he had driven a growler for five-and-twenty years before discovering that he was the great and only Towle, medium, seer, and worker-of-miracles-in-chief to the large and increasing crowd that lives the silly life. ”

“ The Prophet started and looked eagerly at the newcomer. His eyes rested upon an individual whose face was comic in outline with a serious expression, and whose form suggested tragic farce dressed to represent commonplace, as seen at Margate and elsewhere. A top hat, a spotted collar, a pink shirt, a white satin tie, a chocolate brown frock coat, brown trousers and boots, and a black overcoat thrown open from top to bottom—these appurtenances, clerkly in their adherence to a certain convention, could not wholly disguise the emotional expression that seems sometimes to lurk in shape. ”

“ Do you study the noble and beautiful stars for their own sakes to find out what they are, and what they are doing, what is their nature and what their place in the great scheme, or do you peek and pry at them through the keyhole of a contemptible curiosity in order to discover what you think they can do for you, to set you on high, to puff you out into a personage and cause you to be noticed of the foolish ones of this world? ”

“ He was a neatly-made little man of fashionable, even of modish, cut, spare, smart and whimsical, with a clean-shaved, small-featured face, large, shining brown eyes, abundant and slightly-waving brown hair, that could only be parted, with the sweetest sorrow, in the centre of his well-shaped, almost philosophical head, and movements light and temperate as those of a meditative squirrel. ”

“ The Prophet felt bound to accept it.
“Sir Tiglath is really, as an old man, what everybody thinks I am, as a young woman. D’you see?”
“You mean?”
“The opposite of me. And in this way too. While I hide my silliness under my eyebrows, and hair, and smile, and manner, he hides his sensibleness under his. When people meet me they always think—what a common-sense young woman! When they meet him they always think—what a preposterous old man!”
“Well, but then,” cried the Prophet, struck by a sudden idea, “if that is so, how can you live a double life as Miss Minerva Partridge? ”

“ As there is a fascination of the earth, so is there a fascination of the heavens. Along the dim, empurpled highways that lead from star to star, from meteorite to comet, the imagination travels wakefully by night, and the heart leaps as it draws near to the silver bosses of the moon. Mrs. Merillia was soon obliged to permit the intrusion of a gigantic telescope into her pretty drawing-room, and found herself expected to converse at the dinner-table on the eight moons of Saturn, the belts of Jupiter, the asteroids of Mars and the phases of Venus. ”

“ Sagittarius. “The nose-reader from the Butts!”
“Verano!” screamed the footman, triumphantly submerging the flute and the twenty guitars. “Verano!”
“The South American Irish palmist from the Downs! My love,” said Mr. Sagittarius, in a cracking voice, “we are in it to-night, we are indeed; we are fairly and squarely in it.”
Madame began to bridle and to look as ostentatious as a leviathan.
“And if we are, Jupiter!” she said in a voice that rivalled the footman’s—“if we are, we are merely in our element. They needn’t think to come over me!” ”

“ Just as the Prophet was beginning to feel obstinate and to steel himself to resistance, he remembered the fierce and horrible threats of Malkiel the Second. If he should cease to concern himself with the stars, if he should cease to prophesy, not alone should he restore peace to his beloved grandmother, and pay the tribute of respect to Sir Tiglath, but he should do more. He should preserve his quick from being searched and his core from being probed. ”

“ The Prophet expected to find himself ushered into a gigantic chamber, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves that groaned beneath their burden of the literature of genius. Indeed he had, in fancy, beheld even the chairs and couches covered with stacks of volumes, the very floor littered with the choicest productions of the brains of the dead and living. His surprise was, therefore, very great when, on passing through the door, he beheld Madame Sagittarius reposing at full length upon a maroon sofa in a small apartment, whose bare walls, were entirely innocent of book-shelves. ”

“ Merillia and Lady Julia looked at each other in elegant amazement.
“What do you mean, sir?” exclaimed Sir Tiglath. “And why do you insult the sacred heavens, you an astronomer!”
“I am not an astronomer,” cried Mr. Sagittarius, cringing in the voluminous waistcoat of Mr. Ferdinand. “I am an outside broker. I swear it. My dress, my manner proclaim the fact. Sophronia, tell the gentleman that I am an outside broker and that all Margate has recognised me as such.” ”

“ Ferdinand!”
“Sir?”
“The ice to Madame Sagittarius instantly!”
Mr. Ferdinand, who was trembling in every limb at having to assist at such a scene in his dining-room, which had hitherto been the very temple of soft conversation and the most exquisite decorum, advanced towards Madame, clattering the flat silver dish, and causing the frozen delicacy that the cook had elegantly posed upon it to run first this way and then that as if in imitative agitation.
“I cannot,” sobbed Madame, beginning once more to catch her breath. “At such a moment food becomes repulsive!” ”

“ The Prophet made no answer.
“Hennessey,” cried his grandmother, with tender pertinacity, “promise me! Sir Tiglath, join your voice to mine!”
Sir Tiglath had become really grave, not theatrically serious.
“Young man,” he said, “your revered granddam asks of you a righteous thing. Who are you to trifle with those shining worlds that make a beauty of the night and that stir eternity in the soul of man? Who are you to glue your pinpoint of a human eye to yonder machine and play with the stupendous Jupiter and Saturn as a child plays with marbles or with peg-tops? ”