THE CITY OF SOOT.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1675, 15 February 1913, Page 6

THE CITY OF SOOT.

ITS WIDE BACK DOOR. A CHRISTMAS'IMPRESSION, (By 8. V. Bkachee.) " "Only ninepenco the dozen 1" I hesitated, for I did not happen to want any London picture postcards. "Well, make it sixpence. Christinas to-rnorrowi -Ton ray soul, ifsjiko begging, but a fellow's got to do it." It was at the base of Cleopatra's Needle, on the Thames Embankment. The' postcard vendor, an elderly man with blue lips, stubbly chin, and a long overcoat, whoso colour owed less to the original dye than to the storms of many winters,

hail set out his stock between the feet of one of tho plump and blandly-smiling brazen sphinxes that look up at the obelisk.' ... ~ , • '•■ ■ .''■■

I bought the dozen. One of them informed mo that the obelisk was "probably designed by- Cleopatra." This I took leave to doubt, preferring tho legend on one of the great brass panels of tho base. "Erected at Heliopolis," so the lettering ran, "by the l'haraoh Thothmes 111, probably about 1500 B.C. Lateral inscriptions were added nearly two centuries later by Rameses tho Great. . . . Removed during the Greek Dynasty to Alexandria, the Royal City of Cleopatra, and there erected in the ISth year of Augustus Caesar, B.C. 12."

•There was no Christmas in those days. And now, on the eve of the world's nihe-teen-hundred-and-twelfth Christmas, a blue-lipped man stands beside tho monument of the Pharaohs and says, " 'Pon my soul, it's like begging, but a fellow's got to do it." Would he have been any worse off in the Royal City of Cleopatra, finder the world-decree 3 pf Augustus, or even in Heliopolis, when tho Great Rameses made his wars, or when Thothmes piled his splendours in that City of the Sun?.

From Rose-Red to Soot-Black I do not know. He might, at least, have breathed a.purer air. I glanced again at the postpaid. "Of rose-red granite, from the quarries of Syene." And to-day the thing is black as night—covered with London soot. Surely, if tho monolith had feelings—and if to any stone, surely to this; with its long: memories running back to Thothmes, might so much of sentience be ascribed—it would ' wish that it still lay, a3- the inscription says it did for centuries, "prostrate on the sanda of Alexandria." It has a grievance, this storied'stone, against tho ages and the Empires. Three thousand four hundred years ago it glowed and sparkled in the City- of the Sun. To-day it glooms in tho City of Soot. . ~.,.-. On Waterloo Bridge. I go to Waterloo Bridge, where the grey granite hewn in the nineteenth century is almost as thickly . shrouded in black as the rose-red granite of Thothmes. '■?, sky-and all the city 'aro blurred with chilly fog. Up-river, the groat towers of ,the Houses of Parliament are a ■ grey silhouette against the- paler mist be,hmd them.- The towers 'of Westminster' Abbey aro faintly visible in the pallor, and lost again. Nearer, tho Hotel Cecil, in its somewhat begrimed red and white, and the biscuit-coloured Savoy beside it, •neither of them bright enough for cheerfulness. look merely impertinent. The dirty confusion of' the wharves' and factories on tho opposite shore is more accordant with tlie general gloom on this morning before Christmas. - JJut a little flock of seagull's wheols about the black parapets of the bridge' and over tho drab, waters below. They are as fair of hue'and freo of wing as any that follow tho-liners at sea, or nest upon the cliffs of New Zealand. ■So far as .appearances go, they might be the very same birds one moy see any day on the reclamation at Wellington. Surely they,.so, clean-rand I had almost said so nomeiiko—must x be-exilcshere. '

A Way Out , - ; And so back to the noisier, and even thicker,.air of the streets. The Christmas shops, ,of course, are gay. and some of them splendid, but I. shall remember longer the toy-sellers on the kerb in Holborn Men and women, elderly and young-thero they had placed themselves in an almost continuous line, ,so Ion" that I wondered when-1 should come to the end of it. In voices rough, or crack,ed, or. shrill, they cried up the marvellous qualities of their, penny toys. They made their boxers box and their aeroplanes fly on strings,' and behind tho ridiculous animation of tho mechanical tovs and the absurd brightness of their malfdrmed birds and trumpery jewellery, their dull, half-desperate faces showed all' the sadder. A little light makes darkness visible. '

For these .there may be no way out of it all. Happier surely are these others, crowding into the "boat special'? at Fenchurch Street Station. The Ajana, with 500 emigrants, leaves the Thames this d «T for Fremantlo. Let us sco them off.' The' London, Tilbury, and' Southend Railway seems to have been specially designed for destroying the last regrets of the departing. It shoots them out, as it were, through the rubbish of the backyard. To look from the train as if goes through the East End is to gaze upon miles of mean streets and 9raa]l squalid backyards, all dirty, dark, and miserable. Here and there a' bird in a cage, a clean window curtain and a flower behind it, or an attempt to make a garden in a backyard, offer their pathetic assurance that even here the desire to enjoy life is not extinguished. At length the train gets free of the slums and factories, and comes out—yes, really—into green fields. But the fields are flat and water-loggedj turgid ditches traverse them, and the fog lies heavy upon them. They are soon past,-and the train entangles itself among the minor squalors of Tilbury. There it stops, and discharges its passengers into tho great waiting-shed on the riverbank.

With the Emigrants. After a long and dreary wait, we are allowed to file on board the tender, and, after still further waiting, we steam out to the big 1 ship. The expanse of ruffled, mud-coloured water, tho flat shores, tho huddled houses of Greenwich on the one side and Tilbury on the other, the giant chimneys ponring their smoke into the already too much burdened air, these things aro the, Inst the emigrants will see of England. They do not seem very sorry. Thiy are a quiet crowd, consisting mostly of wives and children going out to join t'lo breadwinners who have mado home 3 f< r them in the new land.

For-a minute or two, during the hours of weary waiting (the • embarkation ia tedious \o tho point of exasperation) a ray of sunshine struggles through the fop, ■ to iches tho masts and ropes of tho Ajana, and makes tho sullon wavelets almost glimmer. All is over at last. The liner and tho tender are both moving. The actual momsnt of separation hn3 come. When tho little 'crowd on the tender stands again on the landing stage, the Ajana' is alroady fading into the mists. lato the mists—but through and bevond them she goes to tho Australian sunshine. Our City of Soot, however it may. rob the roses of their glow, has a wide backdoor that leads to tho Continent of tho Sin. And I, Englishman as I am, back again in my nativo land after years of absence, lean back in the.train and shut my oyes upon the darkening fields and sqnalid streets, for instead of the roar of loiirlon, I hear singing in my mind a verso of New Zealand song:— 'But o'er the edges of my town, Swept in a tide that ne er abates, The riotous breezes tumble down; Sly heart looks home, looks home, where. Tho Windy City of the Straits!"