The Blower of Bubbles Part 27

"Pippa," he said, "you are as old as Cleopatra."

"Cleo-patra. How many years has she?"

"Oh, about two thousand."

She pretended to be offended, and ended by looking such a thoroughly engaging little figure, with her dark hair and innocently intriguing eyes, that the airman resumed his study of architecture from sheer self-defense, and the Australian contemplated the odds against his knocking the student of cathedrals on the head, and, _a la_ caveman of old, eloping forcibly with the damsel.

Chimney-pots! Hundreds of them--thousands of them.

Chimney-pots! Standing like regiments in stiff and orderly array, waiting for a review that never took place.

Chimney-pots! Short ones, stout ones, crumbling ones; gray, blue, and indigo ones; pots of no color at all, and just as little character.

Chimney-pots! Racing by, mile after mile; industrious fellows, some of them, puffing out black smoke as though the mist over London were their private and personal concern.

Chimney-pots!

"Waterloo!" yelled a dozen voices, and the bewildered Pippa heard a stamping of feet, a rattling of trucks, the din of two porters in a semi-religious discussion concerning the right of way, the din being aided and abetted by a young gentleman possessed of a voice which had recently broken, who howled, alternately in a deep ba.s.s and a shrill treble (giving the general effect of a Swiss yodeler running amok), that, in exchange for coin of the realm, he was willing to barter light refreshment--very light refreshment indeed--in the shape of small biscuits or popular magazines. A slim girl porter, far too weak for her task, dragged a trunk from the van for a vigorous indispensable, who stood by with sixpence in his hand. A sailor kissed a rosy-cheeked woman with moist heartiness.... A taxi-driver, outside the station, took a sudden and violent dislike to a horse-cabby, casting loud aspersions on the latter's respectability, and hinting at a doubtful pedigree; to which the other replied simultaneously, his remarks being quite unintelligible, but apparently giving himself the greatest personal satisfaction. Down the road a street-piano burst forth into "The Lost Chord."

"Pippa," said the airman, opening the door, "we have arrived. The Prince with the Golden Key welcomes you to London."

"_Mon Dieu_," said that young person, "what a noise!"

IX

It was nearing the middle of the afternoon when the airman succeeded, after some difficulty, in piloting his little companion across Piccadilly Circus to Regent Street. It is something to be noticed in that most cosmopolitan of districts, but more than one turned to watch the solemn officer of the formidable stride and the French girl whose wealth of hair and length of dress (barely revealing her ankles) made her seem a vignette from some past century novel.

It had been, for her, a day of wonders.

From her lonely little world, peopled with make-believe inhabitants, she had been transported through the air to the center of reality.

London, the "Bagdad of the West," huge, monotonous, garish, beautiful--what term is there in language that could not be applied to that great gathering of human souls?--London sprawled before her gaze in a yellow sunlight which played such tricks with its tired buildings that age-old stone looked bright and cheerful, and the very dust seemed like the coating of frost when a thaw succeeds a freezing night.

Before her eyes the pageant of pa.s.sions pa.s.sed in endless array.

Poverty and hypocrisy rubbed shoulders with ostentation, greed, and l.u.s.t. Streets, crowded with a suffocating similarity of stodgy dwelling-places, gave way to parks, fragrant with the atmosphere of romance. Vice stalked unashamed through the thronged streets, and dull, tired faces, leaving monotony in their trail, pa.s.sed their next of kin without a glance, those to whom discouragement had come as some incurable disease. Sinister, sensuous eyes looked into hers, and children pure in mind as snowflakes laughed as they walked beside their nurses.

For the sun was in the heavens--and the same warmth that brings the beauty of a narcissus into being gives life to the noisome, crawling things that feed on decay.

London's costume drama was at its height; uniformed men and girls paraded in their thousands. There were loose-limbed Colonials, slouchily-smart British Tommies, amazingly serious Americans; bus-girls, land-girls, girls on motor-cycles, and girls driving ambulances; graceful French officers, swarthy Italians, impa.s.sive j.a.panese, and ruddy-faced British sailors seeking a day's diversion from the sentry-go of the sea.

From the great, throbbing city a babel of voices rose, like the sound from a gigantic mart; hurrying, restless vehicles worried their way through the maze of traffic; Youth with its carelessness of years elbowed Age, waiting with weakening tread the call of the Reaper to whom all men's lives are but sands that run their little course. Over the whole city brooded the Past.

Take all the comedies of the centuries; gather the tragedies of history; piece them together with the fancies of a madman's brain--and what could they offer in the play of human emotions that would compare with one hour of London's life?

They had gone a little way down Regent Street when an exclamation of delight escaped from the girl.

"_Tiens!_" She caught the airman by the arm. "Papa Joffre!"

A one-legged man with outstretched cap was seated on the pavement, and beside him were five colored drawings vaguely suggesting men of the times.

"But he is wonderful," cried the girl. "See--it is Papa Joffre himself!

Monsieur, you will give him a little present?"

The airman presented the art-exhibitor with half-a-crown, receiving a gin-and-watery blessing in return, as they strolled on their way.

"She's the fust one," muttered the cripple, preparing to close business for the day, "as 'as recognoized that there dial of Juff's this last four month. It were a rotten drawink and no mistike. Blime! I'll give that cove this 'arf-crown to draw me a picter of this 'ere General Fush as what is getting hisself talked abaht."

He saw a shadow on the pavement and held out his cap. A Jewish rabbi, with sallow brow and spiritual face, pa.s.sed without a glance, his flowing robes oddly reminiscent of the Levite in that Past to which the age of London is mere immaturity.

The wanderers turned into Pall Mall, and, traversing it, reached the Strand, where the meeting of human currents forms a whirlpool.

Threading their way with difficulty, he felt the restraining hand on his arm, as he had done two hundred times that day. The girl had stopped opposite a hollow-eyed old woman offering violets, from her seat on a box, to the thousands who cared as little for her flowers as for her.

Once more he produced the inevitable coin, and again received a blessing, as trembling, unlovely fingers clutched it. He was about to turn away, when something almost attractive in the wrinkled face held his attention. The woman had looked searchingly at the girl, then into his eyes, and, touched by sudden sympathy, there was a faded echo of comeliness in her features that came and went, like a glow caused by a breath of air on ashes that seemed dead.

"What is it, mother?" he asked, holding the girl's arm. "Business bad?"

"Yes--yes," answered the woman in a low, weak voice; "but it's her I'm thinking of. Take care of her, laddie, won't you?"

The girl, unable to understand them, leaned over and smiled into the wrinkled face. With a little air of embarra.s.sment Pippa picked half-a-dozen violets from her cl.u.s.ter, holding them out to the woman, who took them with strangely twitching features, just as an encircling current of the Strand caught them in its grip and carried them away.

Although they had rested at noon in a quiet hostelry in Oxford Street, after visiting Kensington Gardens where the delightful statue of Peter Pan pleads for belief in fairies, it was obvious that the strain of countless impressions was beginning to bring fatigue to his charge.

Accordingly the airman paused in the doorway of a theater and drew her away from the traffic's turmoil.

"It is three-thirty," he said, "and there is a performance inside."

Her eyes, which still held their tenderness for the woman of the flowers, sparkled happily.

"That is delightful monsieur. Is it a play as I read in my books?"

"Alas, Pippa! there are no more plays--only revues."

"But there is music?"

"There is an orchestra."

"It will be droll, monsieur?"

"I doubt it, little one; but we shall see."

Purchasing tickets from a lordly being in a cage, they entered the theater, where a huge audience was rocking with laughter at the three hundred and sixteenth performance of _Oh Aunt!_ They took their seats just in time to hear the best of a scene between two comedians who, lest the subtlety of their wit be lost, were talking at the top of their lung-power, pulling chairs from underneath one another, colliding frequently, and every now and then, to emphasize some point, kicking each other.

Several minutes pa.s.sed, and wonderingly the French girl gazed at the pair, while the melancholy of her escort's face reached an intensity that threatened tears.

"Monsieur."

He inclined his face towards hers.

"Monsieur--they are----?" She did not complete the sentence, but her shoulders conveyed her meaning.