London Impressions Part 3

THE SMOULDERING CITY

Because the town covers her fires, sits darkling in her daily and nightly burning, and sequesters flame from flame in a thousand thousand little chambers of their own, there is but small show of the perpetual devouring whereby fire abides among men as a long companion. Ariel of a hotter name and of a wilder element, willing and brief, delicate and eager, quick to finish and be gone, a hasty servant, is fire the mere visitant, unused to these long hours. But fire in London never escapes. It is bound in perpetual business, and if it flashes away for a moment it is recaptured in another flash, and if it slips away under cover of ashes it is overtaken and bound to the task again. Man, then, willingly pays the wages of such a wildness in servitude, and spends mines and forests to keep the mobile creature close within his gates.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Rain, Smoke and Traffic._]

If there is little show of that mult.i.tudinous presence, there is a broadcast sign of it. 'No smoke without a fire'; and the sky of London continually betrays her house-mate. It is the flag signalling the presence of the unseen creature; not by colour and brilliance like its own, but by a folding and unfolding of banners of darkness. The quicker and hotter the enclosed fire, the duller is the sign. It is a sign that denies and confesses at once. Not a curl of flame, not a glow of furnace is visible under the hurrying blackness of river-side smoke that hangs house and wall with the grey tokens of invisible and splendid flame. Fire is the blush, and when London shows colour it is the cool red, not the hot.

Such colour has been all alight on many midsummer evenings. Hardly a town away from these dark lat.i.tudes could show a fresher or fuller flash of dyes. A coloured sky, a coloured sun, coloured cloud, the red of brick softly empurpled, or made rosy, or turned a frolic scarlet, and the green of trees, yet undarkened by the later days of summer--all this stirs and lightens under the soft hurry of a west wind, so that a drive between seven and eight o'clock is a surprise of red and blue. White is wanting--the white surface that would look beautiful in western suns.h.i.+ne.

All the white is bad and unfortunate, whether it is the paint of Regent Street or the stucco of suburbs; and where there is no beauty of white there must be much lacking. It is grotesque to find the silly oil-paint gloss of the Quadrant glazing back the tender sun, where one looked for white made luminous. Seldom does the country landscape fail--especially where it is gently populous--to hold up some tempered white to the rosy sun; where there is no chalk or white quarry, or cliff, or white hawthorn-tree or white cherry, there is the welcome whitewash of a cottage wall. London, undecked with its white, and wearing little or no yellow, has nevertheless a choice of these kindling reds of her various bricks; and so decked with the colours of fire she is at her freshest. It is as when you touch the red of a deep cheek and find it cool.

The general fire has no part in the coloured evening; that sunny wind blows the sign of flame away. In the thicket of fire there is no red brick or green tree, or rosy cloud, or any light blue sky. Those who find something to complain of in the rebuilding of the west of London in brick, because the architecture is not everywhere what it should be, are hardly thankful enough for the colour. The builder may build amiss, but he builds with a colour that becomes all our skies, whether grey or bright. One day he will, perhaps, begin a fas.h.i.+on of using much more white, in brick and tile, and the fiery town will look relieved from her suggestion of fever.

Ruddy roofs abound in the poorer town, where red walls are absent; they are built up with grey and black, needless to say, in such a manner that their old gables are hidden in square frontages and straight cornices, and their colours made invisible except to a view from above. It is from a high railway that you may see the darkened but still soft and charming colour spreading from roof to roof of the cottage-streets of older London, until it looks--fading eastwards--as though it were itself some effect of a London sunset. That flush almost reaches the regions of the red-hot eastern furnaces hidden coldly under black and grey.

The waters of the Thames could hardly quench so great a mult.i.tude of imprisoned flames. Fire is the secret of the Thames itself, lurking as it does in the s.h.i.+ps and boats; the black barges are charged to feed it, and the airs that wander with the river fan it to its perpetual work. It is trained within its little shrines, and leaps in chains and captivity, and runs in narrow courses. With its cold ashes and its cold grime, with the burden of its chill refuse, all the remote roads and byways of the town seem to be utterly choked and filled.

When the Great Fire of London came out of its hiding-places and took life in the air of day, it made ashes of more evident and conspicuous things, but it can hardly have made more ashes and cinders than it makes daily under cover. London is not destroyed again, but it has become the place of immeasurable destruction. Moreover, since the smouldering city is a city of men, the life of men, so multiplied, makes London a very centre of fires insatiable. That life burns within five millions of furnaces. Life feeds itself by fire, but out of London we are accustomed to see it at its consuming work side by side with the signs of unceasing re-creation. Man, woman, and child, sprinkled over the labouring land, are separate flames far apart like the marsh flames of wildfire. Between them graze the sheep, the wheat turns brown, or the apple reddens, and the husbandman's life itself is immediately paid again in labour to the soil. Whereas London visibly works at nothing but transformation.

The delicate fire, that plays and vanishes elsewhere, but cannot vanish in London, has nowhere else so gross and dead a following. Even in the north, where the factory makes a denser cloud, you find the blue close by, and the horizon cleaner, or so it seems. Little distant things on the verge, the lashes of the eyes of earth and sky, are more perceptible than they are in London, even with a west wind. Here the fiery Ariel has no delicate companions.h.i.+p, no one near but Caliban.

[Ill.u.s.tration]