OVER BEMERTON'S

CHAPTER I

ONE TRAVELLER RETURNS AND FINDS
A HOME IN WESTMINSTER

"Mr. Falconer," said Naomi to Mrs. Duckie, "wants quiet, clean rooms and the simplest cooking. Rarely anything but breakfast, and that very light. It must be in this neighbourhood, so as to be near Queen Anne's Gate."

Mrs. Duckie said that hers were the quietest rooms in London and almost the nearest to Queen Anne's Gate: certainly the nearest quiet rooms. As for her cooking, although she had of course in her time served up for dinner parties of ten or a dozen, when she was with Canon Lyme, she was famous for her small happetising meals too. If Mr. Dabney was only up and dressed we might ask him.

Mr. Dabney had the rooms above mine—or, I should say, above those which (as I could see) Naomi intended should be mine in about five minutes—but being a gentleman on the press who kept very late hours, he did not appear till nearly lunch time;—all gentlemen who use their heads, said Mrs. Duckie, needing their full eight hours, if not nine. As for herself, she could do with six or seven; but Duckie wanted his full eight, and had them too, coming as he did from a sleepy stock. She had known him of a Saturday night when he had slep' for a good ten.

"I also like to get up late," I said, "but that is owing to my misfortune in being unable to sleep well. I suffer very badly from insomnia."

"Yes," said Naomi, "and that is one reason why I brought you first to these rooms, because of the advantage of living over a second-hand bookseller's shop. Don't you see that there will always be something to read? When you can't sleep," she hurried on, "and you are tired of all your own books, as one then is, you have only to get up, light a candle, slip on your dressing-gown" (Naomi's mind is all hopefulness and practical method), "and go down to the shop for as many others as you want. Because of course you will become friends with the bookseller directly. You always do."

"All very well; but how if the bookseller only rents the ground floor and basement and lives four miles away in Harringay with the key under his pillow? which as a matter of fact he does, for Mrs.—er—Mrs.—told me so while you were looking at the bathroom. What then, Naomi?"

"Oh, I don't think anything of that," she said: "why, he'll give you a duplicate key within a week. And look," she went on, "what splendid cupboards those are, and it's a Lambert grate too, and it's known that they throw the heat right out into the room" (Naomi has no scepticism in her, and she remembers so many advertisements), "and it is so convenient to have the bedroom and the bathroom leading out of each other. It is a good bath, too: the hot water comes at once."

"How long does it run hot?" I asked.

"Dear Kent," she cried, now as completely on the side of the landlady as if they were in partnership, "you are so suspicious. It keeps hot all the time. I tried it."

Mrs. Duckie corroborated. "There isn't another house within a mile," she said, "which lets rooms that has a bathroom like ours. It was put in by the landlord when he thought of living here himself, and then of course he had his accident and married the nurse and settled down at Hendon for life. And though I wish him nothing but happiness, it's an accident that I've found it in my heart to be very thankful for, laying in that beautiful bath of a Saturday night."

"After the books and the bathroom," Naomi broke in, "the best thing is the corner position. The windows look right along two streets. Think how interesting that will be sometimes. Because I shall put your table in the corner, so that you can look up from your reading and see out of both equally well."

I mentioned something about draughts.

"Oh no," said Naomi; "there will be india-rubber piping put all round, and sandbags over the cracks."

"They are such a violent red," I said.

"Yes, of course, when you buy them," said Naomi, who thinks ahead by instinct, "but I shall cover them for you. I saw some stuff at Libnett's the other day. I think purple is the colour for this room, and blue for the bedroom. Yes, purple and blue. I will send for a book of patterns at once, and we can choose them to-morrow morning when the light is good."

"But the 'Goat and Compasses' opposite," I said, determined to be as difficult as I could, "isn't that rather near?"

"Not a better conducted house in London," Mrs. Duckie at once broke in. "The landlord and the landlady are as nice a couple as God Almighty ever set behind a bar. He was butler to Lord Latimer, and she was the cook, and his Lordship left them each five hundred pounds. They've only been there eight months, and already the place is so changed you wouldn't know it. The difference between it now and what it used to be!" Mrs. Duckie raised her hands. "I assure you, miss," she said, "that if you had brought your—your——"

"Grandfather," I suggested.

"Oh no, sir!" said Mrs. Duckie. "What a thing to say! Grandfather indeed! Why, you're in your prime."

"Of course," said Naomi, "what rubbish you talk!"

"As I was saying," Mrs. Duckie continued, "if you had brought him to these rooms a year ago, and implored me on your bended knees to let him take them at twice the rent, I should have said no. My conscience wouldn't have permitted me to let them to a refined gentleman with insomnia and scholarly ways of life and relations in Queen Anne's Gate. I should have said no. But now—why, I might be living in the Little Cloisters at the Abbey again, it's so respectable and quiet."

"The sign of the 'Goat and Compasses,'" I remarked, "is said to be derived from the words, 'God encompasseth us."

"I shouldn't be surprised," said Mrs. Duckie, who at that moment was called away.

"Then you insist on my taking these rooms," I said to Naomi.

"No, Kent, not insist," she answered. "But they're really nice rooms. And central too. You've only got to cross the bridge and you're all among your Clubs and everything else, and such a nice walk to lunch through the park among the ducks and cormorants. I should be miserable if you were in Jermyn Street with no compulsory nice walk at all. And you're close to us and the Stores."

"Yes," I said, "and if ever I choose to go into Parliament, which any one may do to-day, how convenient! And how easy to become a Roman Catholic, with the new Cathedral so handy! And I might buy one of the Thames steamboats, which I am told are going very cheap, and keep it at Westminster Bridge."

Naomi laughed. She laughs at me now and then, not because she thinks I am particularly funny, but because she knows it makes me happier to think that I am thought funny. For Naomi takes things as they come, and, like most women, has no need of jokes. Brightness and sense appeal to her more than all fantasy, wit, or cleverness. People who think ahead are bound to be rather automatically receptive, and as a matter of fact her mind was already turning over the patterns; but the undercurrent of sweetness always running in her nature prompted her little kindly laugh. Deceptive, no doubt, but innocently so. A gentle hypocrisy is not only the basis but the salt of civilised life.

"The only objection left," I said, "is the name of the landlady. Do I really understand you to say that it is Duckie?"

Naomi laughed outright. This struck her as being really funny. "But, my dear Kent," she said, "you would not refuse good rooms because of the landlady's name?"

"Oh yes, I would," I replied. "That's exactly what I would do."

"Not when all you have to do," said Naomi, "is to call her something else? One of our parlourmaids was named Victoria, but we called her Jane. You could call Mrs. Duckie Landlady or Housekeeper."

At this moment Mrs. Duckie returned, and I took the rooms without another word.

"Mr. Bemerton will be very pleased," she said. "Mr. Bemerton has the book shop downstairs. He asks me every day if I have a tenant yet, and he has been hoping it would be some one who is fond of reading."

As a matter of fact (although I did not tell Naomi so, wishing her to think that it was all her doing), as a matter of fact, I had made up my mind directly I saw the book shop underneath, that unless there were very imposing obstacles I should make these rooms my home. My feet have always led me naturally to second-hand booksellers' shops, and after thirty years of exile in such a bookless city as Buenos Ayres, the idea of being so close to one of these little terrestrial heavens was too much for me. Besides, think of the name—Bemerton—with the suggestion of holy Mr. Herbert in it.

That was my fate, I knew swiftly (as one does know his fate at fifty-five). I was to live over Bemerton's.

Having arranged to send in some paperhangers and painters at once, we bade Mrs. Duckie farewell and descended the stairs to the street; but I would not depart until I had bought a book for luck. Being a profound believer in the humour if not the reason of chance, I told Naomi that from the first shelf on the left hand that came as high as my heart I would buy two books: for her, the twenty-ninth book from the doorway (her age is twenty-nine); for me, the fifty-fifth;—no matter what the subject and no matter what the price.

And what do you think they were? Naomi's by curious and very pleasant fortune was Walton's Lives (with holy Mr. Herbert of Bemerton shedding a gentle light over all); and mine was a fat volume in a yellow paper cover, lying on its side, for which I had to pay two solid English pounds.

Naomi's face was a picture of disapproval as I produced the money; for she is no believer in fate and no supporter of supine acquiescence, wise receptivity, and all the rest of it: Naomi believes in self-help and courage and in getting one's books from the London Library. But when she saw the title her expression changed from disapproval to positive grief, for it ran thus: A Chinese Biographical Dictionary, by Herbert A. Giles, London and Shanghai, 1898.

"My dear Kent," she cried, "how very wrong of you to do these silly superstitious things! Whatever can you find to interest you in Chinese biography?"

"My dear young lady," said the bookseller, "you make a great mistake. The gentleman has bought what is at once one of the best and the least known books in this shop. If he looks at it to-night, however casually, and does not agree with me, I will cheerfully give him two pounds again for it to-morrow morning."

Directly Naomi heard this she brightened again—for was there not a bargain in the air?—and off we trotted to Queen Anne's Gate in very good humour, talking furniture and decoration all the way, with a word as to the promising and unusual business habits of Mr. Bemerton, and a few remarks from me on the favourite topic of the kindness of chance when one really gives her her head and refrains from even the shadow of authority.

To this Naomi replied that she thought, all things considered, that I had better get most of the things at the Stores rather than go all the way to Tottenham Court Road.

CHAPTER II

INTRODUCING THE READER TO MR. AND MRS. WYNNE, A COUNTY CRICKETER, A SUFFRAGETTE, AN HEIR OF THE AGES, AND AN ANGEL

Queen Anne's Gate, where my stepsister and her family live, is, I think, save for the lack of sun, the most attractive street in London. My stepsister's house backing on the Park, the windows on that side pick up some kindly oblique rays in the afternoon, but in the morning they are sunless. My stepsister, who is an optimist, says, however, that she would as soon see from her rooms London lit by the sun as have the sun herself.

Certainly she has made her own especial sanctuary very charming, and the view over the Park and the water to the cool line of Carlton House Terrace and the grey mist above is very soothing. To the right is the half smoked, half gleaming stone-work of the Government offices.

It is a quiet spot, undisturbed by shattering traffic. One sits here within sound of the greater music of the city, but so far removed from it that the cries of the water-fowl and the cooing of outrageously fat pigeons come soothingly to the ear. Now and then a bugle sounds in the neighbouring barracks. Big Ben booms the hours. In the room at the top of the house which I occupied on my return from abroad while Naomi was scouring the neighbourhood for a lodging for me, I used, as I lay awake at night, to hear the water-fowl so clearly that at first it seemed like old days in Norfolk. Now, it is a circumstance worth recording that after Norfolk there is no place where one can so certainly count upon watching the sure strong flight of wild-duck as St. James's Park.

It is very interesting, after an intercourse with a family which for some years has been carried on wholly by letter, with perhaps an occasional interchange of photographs, to be set down suddenly in its midst and become one of it. My stepsister of course came more or less naturally enough to me, for we had been friends when we were young, before I went abroad. Moreover, she requires no learning: she is always complete and the same. But her husband I had never seen, and as for the children (as I thought of them), they were just names and anecdotes and faded cartes de visite to me. I, however, thanks to their mother's loyalty, was more to them, for they had been told much about my young days, and I have no doubt that portions at least of my infrequent letters were read aloud as they arrived.

The initial difficulty—by no means a small one—of what I was to be called having been slowly overcome (myself objecting as strongly to the Uncle Kent which they seemed to favour as they did to the Kent pure and simple which I wanted), all went very smoothly, and the family quickly dropped company manners and showed me what it really was. Not that the difference was very marked, but a difference of course there always is—company manners being for the most part a kind of sandpaper that removes the asperities (and occasionally the attractions) of personality.

They are all very affectionate, but at the same time they all have their idiosyncrasies and cherish them.

There are (as one says) two boys and two girls; but the boys are twenty-seven and twenty-five, and the girls twenty-nine and twenty-one. Naomi, the eldest, is the quiet head of the house, for my stepsister has poor health and takes things easily, and it is understood that she must be saved from anxieties and trials. Naomi therefore is the buffer state not only between her mother and the kitchen but between her mother and the world.

Brasilia when I first arrived was a Slade student, a suffragette, and beyond correction or even instruction on any point under the sun. She wore a badge bearing the words "Defiance, not Defence." Drusilla is very pretty, but Naomi, I think, is beautiful. It is, however, Drusilla who wins notice. Naomi's beauty is for a riper judgment, since the better you know her the more beautiful she is. I thought of Ceres directly I saw her, and the impression grows. If I were an artist I would paint her so. She has the steady level gaze that I think of as that goddess's: she loves all little helpless things, and all little helpless things love her; she leaves nothing quite where it is, but stimulates and nourishes it. And yet to compare Naomi with Ceres is not doing her full justice, for it takes no count of her sympathetic imagination or her readiness for fun. Ceres the goddess, I take it, might have been the dullest woman in real life.

Naomi, although she could not be called clever and certainly is not witty, is so full of what, to save much language, one might call womanliness, and the best womanliness, as to suggest profound sanity. If I had to describe this gift in a single word, I should say acceptivity. Those of us who are born critical and exacting approach nothing quite simply: we disapprove or we approve, and in so doing lose not only time but equanimity. But to Naomi's serene, sane mind the world has to be accepted as it is, and therefore she is always the same. Not that she considers everything perfect, but she has an instinctive realisation of the inevitability of imperfection which keeps her contented—or at any rate prevents querulous discontent.

Naomi's sweet and candid mind, without poring over the matter at all, has, one feels, submitted life and all its phenomena to a reasonable evaluation. She understands: in a word, accepts. It is indeed a special prerogative of even stupid women to do this simply. The last thing that men learn about women is how transparent and natural they really are in all the essentials, our delay being due largely to our own want of imagination and not a little to the circumstance that we are brought up to expect freakishness, insincerity, and mischief. Proverbial lore, the testimony of so much literature, and the whole tendency of national facetiousness run that way. And yet few intelligent men individually would support it from their own knowledge, and most would say that among their least admirable and most ridiculous moments were those which they had once spent in protecting their wives or sweethearts (to use a better word than fiancées) from possibilities of offence in public places. Women are far nearer nature than men: so near, indeed, that one suspects that the inventor of most of the superficial proprieties was not Mrs. Grundy but her husband.

Naomi has no vocation. The eight years intervening between her birth and that of Drusilla made all the difference, and it is as natural for the elder sister never to have learned, say, typewriting, as it is for the younger to learn painting in Gower Street. But Naomi is by far the busier. She is, indeed, always employed, either indoors or out. She does the shopping, decides the menu, writes most of the letters, engages servants, and pays the calls.

Those are her family duties. Her own tastes run in the direction of what is called charity, but to them she herself would never give that word. The number of her pensioners (and I might say subjects or worshippers) no one probably will ever know. They are not by any means all in want of material help, the only benefaction she offers beneath many roofs being the bounty of her smile and cheerfulness. She makes a point, for example, of retaining knowledge of the Queen Anne's Gate servants after they leave, which they do only to be married and have fat and happy babies with punctuality and dispatch for Miss Naomi to play with and befriend. There are three such servants at this moment in various parts of London whose babies are visited regularly; but Frank's twins naturally come first. Then there is a hospital at which Naomi attends, and a girls' club of which she is the treasurer; and of course she has a retinue of "chars" and sewing women.

The boys are Frank and Lionel. Frank is the only one that is married, and he lives in a tiny house in Barton Street with his wife and his twins. He is at present a journalist, but all kinds of books are to come from him. Lionel is at the Bar, but not yet has he pleaded a cause, largely, I fancy, on account of the British solicitor's unwillingness to believe in the zeal or capacity of a Middlesex fast scorer (for Lionel plays for that county), and partly because his grandmother's generosity has made it so absurdly possible for Lionel to neglect his duties.

Frank I like immensely, for he is quiet and kind and humorous, but Lionel is more caustic and impatient than one wants, and he is also a shade too voluble upon games. He may be said to live for them; and, as with most men who do so, his yawns come with the dusk. Cricket I too adore, and we have this passion in common; but Lionel is not interested in the past, and that, of course, is where all my cricket lies. He is, however, going to take me to see him play, and I dare say I shall soon learn enough about the new men not to bore him. Into golf I cannot follow him; partly because I have never played, and partly because I like socialism in games, and the idea of employing a caddie will always be unpleasant to me. Lionel naturally cannot accept this point of view, and so few other golfers that I know are able to do so that I have come to the conclusion that the golfing temperament is essentially aristocratic—a feudal inheritance—the property exclusively of those who can see nothing absurd or even degrading in the spectacle of powerful frivolous men being followed by boys of burden.

With my stepsister I was of course quickly at home; but with her husband, Alderley Wynne, K.C., I shall never really be comfortable. Beside his clear, comprehensive, legal, synthetic mind, accustomed to see the end at the same moment that it sees the beginning, generalising swiftly and usually accurately, my intellectual edges appear so very ragged and indistinct, and my hesitancies with regard to right and wrong so cowardly and anarchical. Moreover, he does not understand how any man can voluntarily expatriate himself except for gain, and I have come back so little better off than I left. Alderley likes a man to make either money or reputation; he is impatient of all who stand still. Stuff must in due course be succeeded by silk in life as well as at the Bar, he holds. I figure as a stationary man, which is only one degree less reprehensible than a retrograde man. None the less, since he is devoted to his wife in a very beautiful, attentive way, and she is fond of me, and I stand for her relation (although I am, of course, no kin to her really), even although his critical judgment tells him that I have failed, his heart and house are open to me.

It is amusing to watch him with his daughters, for although he disapproves of almost every word that Drusilla says, yet his passion for intellectual activity makes him secretly far prouder of her than of Naomi, whom he loves truly enough, but is inclined rather to group with mere creatures of instinct.

Naomi threw out signals of understanding at once and took me under her charge, as I have already shown. You leave it to me, she seemed to say, evidently looking upon me as a foreigner in need of help and instruction at every turn. Unmarried girls of twenty-nine, if they have not grown embittered (as they are too apt to do), can be very administrative and protective. The maternal feeling, I suppose.

With Drusilla, whose blood circulates more in the brain, I have not hit it off so well, although we are quite friendly. She so clearly looks upon me pityingly as a trifler and in a sense an ignoramus (for I had never even heard of John), and she is not yet old enough to see that England and its needs can perhaps be as well, if not better, studied from abroad than when one is in the midst. The difference between Naomi and Drusilla is that Drusilla asks, Naomi gives. Not the least remarkable thing in this wonderful world in which we grope and have our being, is the amazing differences that can exist in the children of the same parents.

With the exception of Frank, the family seems to be incorrigibly celibate. But of course at every moment lifelong decisions to be single are being overturned, and one never knows. Drusilla now, I feel, might easily follow some such remark as "Please pass the salt" with the statement, made equally coolly, that she was engaged. If so, it would probably be to a Fabian with long hair, a blue flannel collar, and a red tie, or some youthful artist whose genius carries with it a perpetual dispensation from soap and razor. All her friends seem to be young men of these two brands, who like drawing to be ugly and poetry to be Irish. I meet her now and then in St. James's Park with a retinue of them, and we stand on the bridge and exchange views of life for a few moments or draw each other's attention to the light over Whitehall and the colour of London. Then they move off, a little as if they were guests for the Last Supper, with their brown beards and blue collars, and Drusilla and I walk to Queen Anne's Gate together.

They are all simple good fellows, in spite of their very patent atheisms and nihilisms and solemn vows to be married either without a ceremony at all or in a registry office; but I don't think our little Drusilla is for any of them. For this new comradeship between young men and young women is not making for marriage, especially among the bisexual, as to a certain extent most artists and revolutionaries are.

One other member the family may be said to have: Mr. Adolphus—or Dollie—Heathcote, an articled pupil of Alderley's who is continually dropping in in the evening and is on the best terms with himself and every one: a very agreeable ornamental person. When it was the fashion to present me with contributions of furniture or knick-knacks for my rooms, Dollie, who seems to have an infallible scent for everything that is, in his own phrase, dodgy, and who lights his cigarettes with a pocket spirit-lamp that would not be out of place in the Arabian Nights, gave me a clock on a new design which dispenses with a dial but records the hours and minutes on little numbered labels. These labels are flipped away by an invisible agency one by one as they expire, and are for one's comfort almost too much like performers in a sombre moral drama illustrating the flight of time and the approach of annihilation. Dollie, however, I am sure has no such thoughts. "A top-hole idea," he called it.

CHAPTER III

THE HAUNTS OF MEN REVISITED AND
THE FIRST BEMERTONIAN NUGGET

My first few days over Bemerton's were a dream of joy and liberty. I am happy enough still (my nature is happy), but in those first few days I was realising the desire of half a lifetime—I was in the dovecote, so to speak, that all my thoughts had been homing to, day and night, for years and years.

How often had I awakened and lain awake for hours, powerless to sleep again with all London in my head—not only its sights and sounds but the scents of it. Latterly, when the date of my release was fixed and grew nearer, this small-hour excitement had so intensified that I began to fear brain-fever, and indeed at the end nothing but drugs had saved me; but the voyage put things right: once again the sea washed away—as who says? is it not Lucretius?—the ills of man.

At my stepsister's I was in a kind of trance. It was all so strange and unreal, and also there, even if subconsciously, I played the voluptuary, the epicure, and postponed the true rapture to the last, thinking that I would not begin to realise all the best anticipations until my rooms were my own—until once again I was my own master, as one never is in any one else's house. Dreams of London liberty that were dreamed alone should be realised alone; and so, although Naomi and I went everywhere, and I tasted many of the pleasures I had meditated upon, there was, as it were, a veil between them and my sensorium, not to be lifted until I was free once more and the obligations of a grateful guest were removed. Dear Naomi, I think, understood, and hastened accordingly in her search for rooms.

At first this perfect irresponsibility in my city of delight was almost too much: I was in danger of another breakdown. Sleep I could not. I roamed London from west to east, from south to north. I drifted wherever the impulse took me. I was intoxicated with humanity—bemused by people. I stood for hours on the bridges watching the tugs and the barges. I stood for hours in Farringdon Street at this barrow and that.

I had no method: I boarded buses for the docks, and never got beyond the stalls of Butchers' Row. I set out in the morning for Highgate, and by evening was still in the Charing Cross Road. I accepted invitations to dinner, and what time the entrée was being served I might be seen through the steam of sausage and mashed dining in a small eating-house. I started to pay calls on old friends, and wandered to the National Gallery. I read the advertisements of the best plays, and found myself in the Middlesex. I meditated Hampstead Heath, and instead inhaled invigorating draughts of naphtha in the New Cut. I bought a ticket for Queen's Hall, and allowed a melodrama in the Mile End Road to play fast and loose with my emotions.

But I had my disappointments too. It was too often not the London of my dreams. My dreams had taken no account of change. The Piccadilly I had visualised so long and so longingly was the Piccadilly of 1875—now different from this! My Strand was a Strand on which no County Council had wreaked its zeal. One of my favourite haunts as a youth had been Clare Market—that Hogarthian oasis—and Clare Market has passed for ever; and who can lay his hand upon his heart and say that the Charing Cross Road is any real substitute for the street of Holy Well? That that area was insanitary and is better away has nothing to do with it. The true Londoner cares no straw for sanitation. He thrives on ill conditions.

I swear to you that through my heaven blow pungent clouds of sulphurous metropolitan smoke—such as we breathed in perfection years ago between Portland Road and King's Cross and between Blackfriars and Charing Cross. Where are they now? The higher slopes of Snowdon are hardly more free from grime than the ladylike highway into which electricity has converted the underground.

London's other new means of rapid transit were a disappointment too. We have motor cars in Buenos Ayres, but I was not prepared for such a capture of the streets as I found. For how many nights before I came away did coloured omnibuses in full sail fill my dreams in irresistible onset! That was London. The motor bus has its onset too, but it has none of the old rollick. It comes rigidly towards you, immense and terrifying. It does not sway nor roll. It wears the inflexible, pitiless air of progress. It is Juggernaut. How human and genial was the bus!

But among all the London phantasmagoria that had flickered before my sleeping and waking and dozing eyes the hansom cab was, I think, the most constant. I used to hear the horse's bell.... I had never forgotten my first hansom ride. Does any one forget it? My next—my second first hansom ride, so to say—was to be as memorable. I thought about it absurdly. I remembered the sense of comfort with which one settled down into the seat and closed the flaps and then composed oneself to watch London unfold.... But I found the motor cab the master of the streets. The hansom was still there, but not the hansom that I had known. The dashing driver was gone, the knowing fellow with a straw in his mouth, and a coat with large buttons, and a raffish tall hat on the side of his head. The hansom driver to-day is more like the growler driver of the past: a beaten man. I am sorry for him, and so long as I am not in a hurry I will climb into his vehicle as of old—that is, until it disappears, as I suppose it must. And what then? In my youth old hansoms when they died went to Oxford. Where will they go to-day?

But, when all is said, the London that one most desired in such an exile as mine was the London of winter. London on a fine November evening at, say, six o'clock, after Christmas has been signalled, when there is an edge on the air and an indigo mist in the streets and the shops are all lighted. The return home to a bright fire under these conditions, with the evening paper or a new book or magazine! It was a simple ideal, but it carried extraordinary comfort and satisfaction with it.

Slippers ...

I used to meditate on it for hours.

What a deal of pleasant undress repose must be missed by the fashionable! How poor an exchange are dress boots for soft slippers, a stall for an arm-chair, and (I myself would add) a play for a book!

That reminds me that I must tell you about my first Bemerton purchase, the Chinese Biographical Dictionary. Mr. Bemerton was right: it is a treasure. I only nibbled at it at first, opening at random and reading a life here and there—there are 2,579 lives in it altogether—and I was never disappointed. And then I began to take it seriously, and now I know something of its merits and for awhile am measuring mankind by a Chinese standard.

It is the model of biographical dictionaries. I have long possessed our own Dictionary of National Biography, in how many weighty volumes? Sixty-two, including the Errata; but after the dry, epigrammatic conciseness of Dr. Giles it is unreadable. To this sage appraiser of Chinese genius and address all meritorious men come alike—whether statesmen, cynics, sorcerers, or saints. He never questions: he merely puts on record in brief credulous sentences their characters and deeds. When all is said, it is, I suppose, their imperturbability and saturnine humour that are the most engaging qualities of the Chinese. They could not have found a better celebrant, or one more in tune with themselves, than Dr. Giles. He sets down everything gravely, and is as kind to the supernatural as to the natural. The sole qualification for admission into the Gilesian Valhalla is merit.

The book's brevity is its great charm. It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page. Nor does anything strike one as wanting. One could do with more, of course, and yet who would have the olive larger? There is no blemish on this work save its prohibitive weight as a bed book, and that I have overcome by cutting it into four pamphlets.

I find a disdain for worldly advantage among these pagan Celestial philosophers that makes a more reasonable ideal for some of our Western plutocrats to-day than many that are placed before them in the professional pulpit. A few Englishmen have had a similar whimsical unworldliness, but they are few and far between. I imagine that J. K. Stephen had, for one, and the Shelley that emerges from certain of Hogg's pages. A glittering example of the humorous romantic detachment and carelessness of public opinion that I mean is Chang Chih-ho, of the eighth century A.D., who spent his time in angling, but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish. When Lu asked him why he roamed about, Chang's answer was instant: "With the Empyrean as my home, the bright moon my constant companion, and the four seas my inseparable friends—what mean you by roaming?" and when a friend offered him a comfortable home instead of his poor boat, he replied, "I prefer to follow the gulls into cloud-land rather than bury my ethereal self beneath the dust of the world." Isn't that fine?

There should certainly be a Chang Chih-ho Society. The spread of such roseate impracticableness would do no harm at all. Indeed, the crying need for the moment in this country, as in America, is a gospel of poverty to cope with the gospel of riches that is vitiating society. Sufficient exemplars for preachers of this new evangel could probably be found in Dr. Giles's pages alone, but if others were needed there is always the wise and silent India in reserve. Yang Ksiung, a poet of the first century B.C. (note the period), would be one high among them. On the completion of Yang's most famous work, "a wealthy merchant of the province was so struck by its excellence that he offered to give 100,000 cash if his name should merely be mentioned in it. But Yang answered with scorn that a stag in a pen or an ox in a cage would not be more out of place than the name of a man with nothing but money to recommend him in the sacred pages of a book."

Another recluse, Cháo Fu, who flourished B.C. 2,357, took to the branches of the trees to be removed as far as possible from contact with the world. "Yao offered him the throne, but he declined and immediately went and washed his ears to free them from the defilement of such worldly contamination," nor would he let his calves drink of the water.

Not the least interesting and instructive thing about this work is its record of virtue, genius, and fortitude of not only a non-Christian people but to a large extent, as we understand it, a non-civilised people.

Another eminent pagan was Chang Chēn-chou, of the seventh century A.D., who, on being appointed Governor of Shu-chou, "proceeded to his old home and spent ten days in feasting his relatives and friends. Then calling them together, he gave to each a present of money and silk, and took leave of them with tears in his eyes, saying, 'We have had this pleasant time together as old friends. To-morrow I take up my appointment as Governor; after that we can meet no more.' The result was an impartial and successful administration."

Of Chēn Shih, A.D. 104-187, who was also famous for his probity, a pleasant story is told. On one occasion "when a thief had hidden himself among the roof-beams, he quietly called together his sons and grandsons, and after a short moral lecture pointed up at the thief, saying, 'Do not imitate this gentleman on the beam.' The latter was so touched that he came down and asked forgiveness, promising to lead an honest life for the future, and departing joyfully with a present of money."

Another sage was Sun Fang, of the twelfth century A.D., an Imperial physician, who called himself the Hermit of the Four Stops. He explained this to mean that when he had taken his fill of plain food, he stopped; when he had put on enough plain clothes to keep himself warm, he stopped; when he had realised a fair proportion of his wishes, he stopped; and finally, after growing old, free from covetousness or envy, he would also be prepared to stop.

With him may be coupled Ping Chi, who died B.C. 55, at the time that our tight little island was being invaded by the Romans. "In 63 he was ennobled as Marquis, and in 59 became Minister of State. The following story is told of his acumen. One spring day he came upon a crowd of brawlers, among whom were several killed and wounded; but he took no notice of them and passed on. Soon afterwards he saw an ox panting violently, and at once showed the greatest concern. 'For,' as he explained, 'the brawlers can be left to those whose business it is to deal with such matters; whereas an ox panting in spring means that heat has come before its time, and that the seasons are out of joint, thus opening a question of the deepest national interest.'"

Among the philosophers I like Yin Hao, who, when he failed to grapple with the rebellion of Yao Hsiang, was impeached for incompetence and cashiered. "He took his punishment without complaint, except that he spent his days in writing with his finger in the air the four words 'Oh! oh! strange business!'" Sang Wei-han had philosophy of another kind: "He was short of stature, with a long beard; but used to stand before a mirror and say, 'One foot of face is worth seven of body.' At the same time, he was so hideously ugly that the very sight of him made people sweat, even in mid-winter."

Chinese thoroughness is also worth some attention in the West. Look at Chi Cháng. Chi Cháng was an archer who arrived at proficiency by painful measures. "He began by lying for three years under his wife's loom, in order to learn not to blush. He then hung up a louse, and gazed at it for three years, until at length it appeared to him as big as a cart-wheel. After this, he is said to have been able to pierce through the heart with an arrow." Another conscientious model was Liu Hsün, who died A.D. 521, and "who read all night, having a lighted twist of hemp arranged in such a way as to burn his hair if he began to nod from drowsiness."

Chang I, who died B.C. 310, a political adventurer, and eventually Prime Minister, had a certain dry humour. "It is recorded that in his early life, after a banquet at the house of a Minister of Ch'u, at which he had been present, he was wrongly accused of stealing some valuable gem, and was very severely beaten. On his return home, he said to his wife, 'Look and see if they have left me my tongue.' And when his wife declared that it was safe and sound, he cried out, 'If I still have my tongue, that is all I want.'"

Here is humour again: Tung-fang So, a censor in the first century B.C., "on one occasion drank off some elixir of immortality which belonged to the Emperor, and the latter in a rage ordered him to be put to death. But Tung-fang So smiled and said, 'If the elixir was genuine, your Majesty can do me no harm; if it was not, what harm have I done?'"

Of Chao Kao, who died B.C. 207, a famous rebel, we have this sinister variant of Andersen's story of the Emperor's new clothes: "Tradition says that on one occasion, in order to discover which of the officials at the Court of Hu Hai, the Second Emperor, would be likely to defy him, he presented the Emperor with a stag, saying that it was a horse. His Majesty, bewildered by the absurdity of the statement, appealed to his surrounding courtiers. Those who were bold enough to say that it was a stag were marked down by Chao Kao for destruction."

Are they not an interesting company? Let me end this taste by the celebration of one of the most attractive of all—Ch'ĕn Tsun. Ch'ĕn Tsun, who died A.D. 25, was distinguished as a letter-writer, but still more famous for his love of good company. That, however, is nothing: the characteristic that fills me with pleasure is the following: "He used to keep his guests with him, even against their will, by throwing the linch-pins of their carriages into a well." What a delightful trait—or, rather, habit!

CHAPTER IV

DESCRIBING MR. AND MRS. DUCKIE,
ALF PINTO, BEATRICE, AND ERN

Mrs. Duckie has only one fault. Her virtues are many, chief among them an almost fervid cleanliness, displaying itself in the spotlessness of the rooms and an affection for fresh towels that is Continental—certainly very un-English. She believes, too, in open windows, to a point inconceivable in a retired cook.

But she has a fault, and that is talkativeness—more than talkativeness, for she spins a kind of gummy web of words from which the listener, unless he is more ruthless than I can be, has the greatest difficulty in disentangling himself. The law of association governing her mind, as it does that of so many feminine talkers, one thing leads to another. To me, who have nothing to do—who am out, so to speak, for no other purpose than to occupy a stall in the theatre of life and watch the play—this does not matter very much, and I have already learned the trick of listening with one ear only, and making by a natural reflex action the expected sounds due from common politeness; but I can imagine it driving another and busier man mad, and I wonder what Mr. Dabney's short way with her is.

Mrs. Duckie's family consists of three children and a husband. They are quite prosperous, for two of the children, now grown up, keep themselves, and Mr. Duckie does well enough as head waiter in a Fleet Street chop house of the old type. The eldest son indeed more than keeps himself, for he has latterly become a celebrity and earns the income of at least an Under Secretary—almost that of the President of the Local Government Board, to whom I have no doubt he has in his time made many successful sarcastic allusions. For Herbert Duckie (to give him his baptismal name) is a music-hall singer.

The mild syllables uttered over the child by the curate at the font some five-and-twenty years ago are, however, unknown to London, on whose placards Herbert Duckie figures more provocatively as Alf Pinto. Of this pseudonym his mother is rightly proud, for there is more in it than meets the casual eye. Much thought went to its architecture, Alf standing not only for an abbreviation of Alfred, but signifying also a moiety, and Pinto being pronounced humorously by the initiate with the "i" long—thus convivially suggesting a measure of the national beverage. The joke is not original, I fear, for I remember it in a delightful travesty of poor Ouida; but it seems to have been genuinely evolved afresh by young Duckie and his friends.

His father and mother are naturally proud of him, for in addition to his fame and his considerable salary, he has the kindly filial habit of driving up to the house on fine Sunday afternoons in a dogcart and taking some of the family noticeably in it to Epping, or the Welsh Harp, or Richmond.

Mrs. Duckie's attitude to her gifted son is reverential and wondering. She is proud of his shining gifts and success, and perplexed at his possession of them; although, as she says, it comes from her side, grandfather being that musical, and her Uncle Will a terrible one to notice and make jokes.

How true it is that honour can come from our friends quite as much as from our personal attainments—often, perhaps, more. Dollie Heathcote, I feel sure, has hitherto looked upon me as a harmless old buffer, hopelessly out of date, but amiable enough, and possibly a person to be conciliated in view of my kinship with his chosen family. But when one evening at dinner I asked him casually if he knew Alf Pinto, respect for me began to grow, and when I went on to say that I had met Alf Pinto and conversed with him, he was at my feet.

"Not the Alf Pinto?" he said. "Not the man who sings 'He isn't so pleased as he was'?"

"The same," I said.

He asked me feverishly how I knew him, but I am not quite so green as that. If I told Dollie that Alf Pinto was my landlady's son, all, or nearly all, the gilt would be off the gingerbread. So I made a mystery of it, and the young gentleman went off to a dance baffled but still reverent.

He did not, however, go before we had arranged an evening together at the Frivoli to hear Alf and other stars; and also not before I was able to enlighten him as to the true esoteric pronunciation of Alf's name.

"I notice," I said, "that you call him Alf Pinto. Isn't that rather a confession of weakness on your part? I thought you were in the very innermost and most knowledgable know."

Dollie looked—for him—abashed. "Why, what do you mean?" he asked.

I then explained the mystery.

"By Jove!" said Dollie, "that's clever! It's one of the dodgiest things I ever heard. 'Alf Pinto'! Ripping!"

He went away in a taxi, rolling the morsel of wit on his appreciative tongue.

The other Duckie children are Beatrice and Ern. Beatrice is twenty-two; Ern is thirteen. Beatrice is also connected with the footlights, being dresser to Miss Azure Verity, the actress who is just now drawing all London (as we say) to the Princess's to see her in the part of Selma Origen in Mr. Operin's new play.

I sometimes wonder what Mrs. Duckie would make of Browning's lines—

"Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please? You whisper 'Beatrice'"—

for to her proud maternal tongue this beautiful name is a dissyllable—Be-trice; and of Be-trice's intimacy with Miss Verity I hear much every morning, together with quotations from that lady's conversation, and tales of her successes with society.

Be-trice also, I find, has abandoned her patronymic. In the profession to which she belongs so completely as to feel entitled to refer to our leading actresses by their last names only—on the first occasion on which we met, she spoke casually of Terry, thereby meaning, to my horror and shame, the incomparable Ellen—in that profession Be-trice is not known as Miss Duckie but as Miss Lestrange.

As for Ern, he is a healthy young London boy, with all its scepticism and slang at his fingers' ends. Mrs. Duckie wants him to be a civil engineer: Mr. Duckie believes in trade, and fancies among trades none so much as that of the butcher. "An engineer," says Mrs. Duckie, "is more gentlemanly." "But," says Mr. Duckie, speaking with experience, "whatever happens, people must eat; the last thing they give up is their victuals. No doubt," he says, "engineering is useful; but look at the money it costs to learn it, and look at the competition afterwards. Whereas I can get the boy into a first-class butcher's to-morrow, and what's more, I can be of use to him myself. How could I help him in his engineering? But though I say it as shouldn't, there isn't a better judge of a steak, point or rump, or a chop, mutton or pork, than me in London."

Ern himself, I need hardly say, is opposed to both callings. At present he has but one ambition, and that is to be a shover. His only real employment so far has been parcel-packing for Mr. Bemerton on the few days each month following the publication of his catalogue. Great days downstairs, I can tell you, and sometimes twenty telegrams in a morning.

I have now described all the fauna of Bemerton's except one—the waterman—who, however, does not come indoors but lends redolence to the exterior. The waterman tends the cab rank and incidentally runs errands for the neighbourhood. London is rich in such wastrels, whose career is all behind them. They have no doubt begun reputably enough in this or that trade, drifted into the drink habit, and steadily filed through one employ after another until they have nothing left but the street corner when they are out of pence, and the public bar when pence come their way.

This man alternately drinks and shivers. His clothes are thin useless things in which he wraps himself. He stands at the corner and beats his arms; looks up each street; walks a few steps; exchanges the time of day with a cabman; and disappears into the "Goat and Compasses" again.

One of the enduring problems to the social observer is, Where do poor men find so much money for beer? When it comes to that, I suppose that the basic question of civilised life is, How on earth can the Blanks afford to live as they do? But the riches of the poor are only a little less astonishing than the riches of one's neighbours. This man seems to be dependent for his earnings on the good-nature of a few cabmen and very infrequent employment by the residents of the neighbourhood. I, for example, have given him odd tips for fetching me taximeter cabs. And yet he seems rarely to want the means to realise his one remaining and—considering how little he can have to remember with joy, I must confess—exceedingly reasonable ambition, which is to keep fuddled. When all is said against alcohol, there remains the unassailable fact that it is the poor man's best accessible anodyne. The poet's line—

"Let us be drunk and for a while forget,"

contains the whole philosophy of intoxication.

Possibly the landlord of the "God encompasseth" is lenient with him in the matter of payment, for the waterman is certainly the cause of much forgetting in others. For with all his ruined air and deplorable condition he seems to be a companionable man. He has popularity in his way. Men at work he watches with extraordinary intelligence and camaraderie: no robin by a woodshed does it better. And he seems to know what to say to them. When the road was up for new electric wires, he was the life and soul of the party. I should not be surprised if he was the best after-breakfast talker in London.

He is always cold and manifestly a sick man; but he has that wonderful gift of the London idler of never being so ill that it is necessary to stay at home. Home, do I say? It is a word which, we are too often told, the English have and the French, to their eternal loss, have not; but I should not like to see the inside of the waterman's sanctuary. It is perhaps wiser to be careful how we pity the French. I have seen his wife: for she brings him dinner in a bowl—a dispirited, broken woman. But his children? It is too horrible a thought.

CHAPTER V

MR. DABNEY OF THE BALANCE LETS
HIMSELF GO

I had not long been over Bemerton's when Mrs. Duckie knocked at the door to ask if Mr. Dabney, the gentleman upstairs, the gentleman on the press, might have a few words with me.

Of course I said yes, and in a minute or so he came in—a man of the ordinary age in London just now, clean shaved, with prematurely grey hair, a slightly discontented expression, and a sensitive, critical mouth.

He made the usual apologies that a well-bred man makes to a stranger with whom he intends to be friendly, and attributed his visit to a remark of Mrs. Duckie's to the effect that I had been living in Buenos Ayres since 1875 and had only just returned. "It seemed to me," he added, "that to an observant man London and the English generally must after so long an exile present many changes, and I thought you would perhaps allow me to ask you a few questions about your impressions for an article in my paper."

I said that provided my name was not mentioned I had no objection whatever, although I doubted, &c. &c.; but I might, as it happened, have spared myself that excursion into conventional false modesty, for I soon found that Mr. Dabney had no real intention of interviewing me at all, but only wanted the stimulus of my experience, or the excuse of my mere existence, to interview himself. As he talked on I wondered if that is the way that all interviews by the more capable and thoughtful journalists are done. May be.

His paper, it seems, is The Balance, a weekly critical review which he runs almost single-handed ("Everything that means anything," he says, "is done by one man"), the financial backing coming from a source which he said he was not in a position to reveal, to me or indeed to any one. The Balance has a circulation of less than two thousand; but, as Mr. Dabney says, every one who counts has to read it. Its aim is to be sane, impartial, and fearless (the aim of all of us), and Mr. Dabney really believes that it achieves this end; but his mind, I should say, with all its vigour and acumen, though naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics.

None the less, Mr. Dabney's paper, which I have since studied carefully, makes the right effort, and it comes as a corrective to the party organs that can see no good in any Bill brought forward by the other side at any time, and particularly so when it chances to be a measure promised vaguely by their own.

It is one of the least satisfactory thoughts that come to a reader of the papers that so many men with the gift of expressing themselves well and seeing fairly clearly into things should be so willing to adapt their intellects to the party machine. We are all, of course, born, as the poet says, Liberal or Conservative; but from journalists one expects a rather more complex psychology. We look to journalists to see a little farther not only into the future but also into the past than ordinary persons. Unhappily in England just now, as I remarked to Mr. Dabney, thus incurring his most vitriolic agreement, the type of journalist who seems to have most readers is permitted to be the least sagacious and the least independent.

Mr. Dabney is by nature a pessimist—so much so that one wonders what he would do if any of the reforms he desires were to come into force. He is one of those eloquent and clear-sighted men who must be in revolt to be articulate and well-directed. He was for a long time leader-writer on a daily paper, but gradually found himself more and more irked by the necessity of expressing not his own views but his editor's. At last, unable to bear it any longer, he retired. The circumstance was recorded in the press in a paragraph in the ordinary way, and the very next day Mr. Dabney received a letter from a stranger asking him to prepare an estimate of the cost of a weekly journal that should represent his own views and contain also a sufficiency of acceptable various matter. He did so, on the most disadvantageous scale that even his pessimism could devise, and the next day he received a cheque for the first year's expenses and instructions to begin at once. Under such unworldly conditions was The Balance born.

"You say you left England in 1875," Mr. Dabney began. "Then you are now in a position to observe some very curious developments, for the changes in London alone since that date have been extraordinary. Our whole character seems to have undergone a revolution. We used to be economical, home-keeping: we have become gad-abouts, pleasure-hunters. We pour our money into the hands of entertainers and restaurateurs. Remember, I speak of London. To what extent England resembles London I am not in a position to say. But London becomes daily more hedonistic, more atheistic. Plain living and high thinking are discredited. High living and low thinking have it all to themselves."

Mr. Dabney spoke with concentrated fury, through his teeth, as if I were the primary cause of this calamity. I believe that of all uncomfortable conversationalists (and the world is full of them) the most uncomfortable are those who would convert you to your own way of thinking. This is Mr. Dabney's weakness: he conceives of all his interlocutors as heretics and antagonists.

"But to what," I asked him, "do you attribute this effect?"

"To too long a period of prosperity; to peace; and"—he almost spat the words from him—"to the modern press. The new journalism may not have produced it, but it has fostered it. Since you left England there has sprung up a totally new press—a press that does not dictate but flatters; that finds out what the mob wants and gives it them. A press without any mind—nothing but an infernal instinct for success. A press in the hands of young men in a hurry, without knowledge, experience, or conviction. Opportunists, improvisers, cynics."

"But surely there are good papers too?"

"One or two. But it is those others that have the public ear. They are the true organs of the democracy."

"And yet," I said, "at the last General Election did not these popular papers lose almost every seat?"

"Ah!" he said, "that is so. But that is not, I fear, any proof of their want of influence generally. Political changes are deeper than that. The mob is moved politically never by opinions but always by personality. We don't in England vote for Liberals or Conservatives: we vote for men. Sentiment controls us. We vote for one man because we are sorry for him; for another, because we once met him somewhere and he was very pleasant; for another, because his father's horse won the Derby; for another, because his opponent is So-and-so whom we detest. In England we never accept any one as a simple fellow-creature: we must always fix not only an adjective upon him but some personal feeling. That is why papers lose their influence when elections are on. But at other times they can be steadily operative for good or bad; they can vulgarise all they touch or dignify it. The new press vulgarises. Its gods are false. It knows no shame. When found out, it slavers. When chastised, it says, How charmingly you use the whip."

Mr. Dabney was now happy. His face shone—it might have been with the reflected glow of his molten words. He was the Savonarola of Fleet Street.

"Cynicism," he went on, "is not the only fault. A gross sensuality has also come upon us. A journalist should be something of an ascetic, a recluse: an observer from without. He should not be in the social machine; he should not know every one. How can you keep your hands clean if you know every one? His dress suit should be rusty; one cannot dine out without consuming salt, and by salt are we captured. Journalists now eat too much and too well. It was a bad day for England when a journalist first ate a plover's egg."

"Journalists, in short," I said, "should live over Bemerton's."

He grunted a short acknowledgment of my mild humour, and continued: "Every nation, according to Arnold, has the papers it deserves. That is true. The greater part of this nation, suffering just now from swelled head and swelled stomach and swelled pockets, has the paper it deserves. Cynicism and self-esteem run through everything. Christian of course we never were, and never shall be, not even in adversity; but we are no longer in the least afraid of God. We are getting nasty, too. We buy messy little indecent novels by the thousand, as far removed from honest British coarseness as the poles are asunder. We have given up respecting the Bible.

"I will give you an instance of our new cynicism, our carelessness. The other day, at one of the large music halls, a dancer appeared nightly in nothing whatever but a skirt of beads, and capered as provocatively as she was able round a waxen head. The dancer affected to be Salome, the daughter of Herodias, while the waxen head was intended for that of the decapitated John the Baptist, the forerunner, if I remember aright, of our Lord. This in a London music hall! The exhibition rapidly became the rage, and several other halls, in the usual slavish imitative way, had their Salomes too. Every one went to see and applaud the principal one, including the Prime Minister, who subsequently, to mark his especial approval, entertained the lady at 10 Downing Street. So far as I could discover, I, who am a professed sceptic, was practically the only person in London whose feelings were outraged. I call the incident deplorably significant.

"It seemed to me," Mr. Dabney continued, "sufficiently offensive that a sacred figure such as John the Baptist—a figure of peculiar sanctity to Christians—should be subjected to the indignity of taking part in a music-hall performance at all, amid knockabouts and comic singers and all the other seaminesses of those places; but it was far worse that English people of high position should flock to see it. For any head, you must see, would have done as well. The girl had to dance more or less naked to some waxwork property: that we will take for granted. Then why not the head, say, of Holofernes, who is only in the Apocrypha? The spectacle might then have drawn merely the Leader of the Opposition, but it should have served."

Mr. Dabney smiled a ghastly smile as he made his final joke and paused for breath.

"Were there no protests at all?" I asked.

"There may have been a few," he said: "I was exaggerating a little; but very few. Where were they to appear? A press that lives largely by advertisements does not lightly advise people to stay away from places of entertainment. Do you know," he added, "that my paper is the only paper in London that does not take advertisements. So long as there are advertisements there cannot be absolutely free speech. It is not humanly possible.