AROUND LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 6, 6 July 1929, Page 29

AROUND LONDON

CANTERBURY PILGRIM

ODDMENTS & MARIONETTES

THE PUPPET SHOW

(Written for "The Post.") (By Ngaio Marsh.) A few weeks ago I worked for two days in a London shop as a mannequin. It was one of those small, exclusive shops just off Bond street, where there is no window, no display inside, but many extremely expensive wares shut up in chests of drawers and boxes. This particular little shop is owned and managed by a Russian lady, an exile since the revolution, who, like many of her compatriots, came to England completely destitute of money, and dependent on nothing but her courage and initiative. She is one of the few who have succeeded, and now. in a little room behind her shop, she has a dozen girls weaving jumper suits with hand embroideries to the tune of twelve guineas apiece. It was in this little back room that I found myself with five other mannequins. Two of them were professionals, one a Russian girl whom I know by the name of Maleta, and one a friend of "Tamara," the lady who owns the shop. We were waited upon, dressed, and tidied up by some halfdozen nondescripts, poorly, dressed Cockneys who looked odd amongst the rest of us —richly turned-out automatons that we were. The dresses hung in rows, and lay in piles on long tables, the air smelt stale—too much humanity and too little ventilation, and the women, with a kind of listless precision, made up their faces and carefully arranged their dresses. We hurried into the models, fell into line, and, one by one, filed out of the door into the showroom, where we dropped into that curiously inhuman walk that for some reason is considered necessary under these circumstances. The guests faced us, sitting in rows, smoking and drinking tea. Among them twere a good many actresses looking rather like mannequins themselves. In the front row was Mlle. Alice Delysia, the famous French comedienne. She took a gloomy fancy to some of the dresses I wore, and called me back once or twice to look again at them. I noticed that the grandest of the professional mannequins occasionally gave tongue to a remark: "It's a sweet little hat, isn't it?" and so on. Sho had a very high voice and sounded like a mechanical doll. Her head vas a mass of soft yellow curls, and her face very babyish and sweet, but her language in the- dressing-room fairly congealed on the face of the mirrors. As soon as wo had undulated backwards and forwards two or three times, stood in half a dozen modern attitudes, and strolled nonchalantly out of the door, the attendant nymphs fell upon us like automatic furies, switched dresses off, and slipped others on, and back we went Into the queue again all silks and smiles. This went on from 2.30 until 5. I suppose I must have worn three hundred pounds in the course ofthe afternoon. None of my models wore less than £15, and many were £30—not exponsive for this sort of shop. At half-past five we put ou our own clothes, and said good-night. As I went ont, I turned to look once more behind the scenes, where the six Cockneys in their two guinea, three-year-old jumper suits, were wearily folding up the-wares. "Such is life," as the clown used to say in the circus. POINT-TO-POINT. On Easter Saturday we went to the Point-to-point Meeting at Sonning. It was a fine spring morning, and after an hour's run by way of Maidenhead, we came out into the pleasantest sort of upland country, and into a wide field overlooking a typical sporting print landscape—hedges and fields and broken groups of trees. We lunched on the green grass—a vivid plant-like green it is in the early spring—among plus fours, berets, vivid scarves, and the sort of back-chat that one reads of in fashionable novels. Beneath us, not far away, were the bookmakers, each with his unbelievably typical name written up large behind him, yelling the odds in the immemorial voice of his kind. Behind this row of little jerking figures stretched the fields and hedges, and from time to time a line of tiny strenuous horses with brilliant riders began moving across it, looking for all the world like the pieces in a racing game. They seemed to pour across the country, gliding over the fences with no effort, so that when one of the little dolls suddenly toppled off his toy mount there appeared to be no reason for his doing so. When the lunch baskets had ,boen packed away in the cars we walked down hill and the ing bookmakers were large purple-faced toys became real. The little gesticulate human beings, the toy horses, sweating strenuous beasts with shining muscles and the riders mud-bespattered, earnest creatures who gripped the sides of their mounts with thighs that seemed to be made of steel and rubber. We stood by the first jump and watched them come over, then hurried to another point while they ranged away, doubled back again and came in by twos and threes, going heavily up the straight to the winning post. There was a ladies' race in which a field of hard-riding, well-mounted, English women, rode to a good finish. One of them, took a toss under our very noses, coming down in tho soft, churn-ed-up mud after the flurry of the first jump. She tucked her head in and lay still, while tho rest of the field went over her, then picked herself up aud stood comically rubbing her head, and staring after the others, a pretty fairheaded girl, slim and gallant looking in spite of her muddied habit. We turned homewards late in the afternoon, when the long rays of sunlight turn gold and almost tangible. No more appropriate line has ever been written about any country than Blake's persistently recurrent, "England's green and pleasant land." It jumps to the mind, in every English lane and on every sunny day, more especially now, in April, when all the trees are bursting with soft young leaves, the fields are shrill with keen blades, and a new enervating sweetnesss turns the air into wine. We are in the very dawn of spring, the time of year when England seems to hold hor breath and hug to herself the promise of coming warmth. In a few days the bluebells will be out in the woods: "The cuckoo then 'On every tree Mocks married men For thus sings he Cuckoo Oh word of fear Unpleasing to the married ear." DEAD PUPPETS AND AN IMMORTAL WARRIOR. Westminster Abbey is one of those official "sights" of which one has seen so many pictures and photographs that it is difficult to believe one is at last looking at the reality. A great virtue of the mistiness of London is its knack of simplifying everything. The Abbey, as I saw it at 10 o'clock on a spring morning, was wearing this added dignity so that it seemed to have risen up in a single gesture and then frozen into immobility. The utterly single-minded eloquence of great buildings is a perpetual source of wonder to the writer who knows less than nothing of the technique of architecture. What a blow it is then, after that first magnificent

shock of wonderment, to walk in at a lovely doorway and find yourself once again in a puppet show. This time they are not moving dolls or racing toys, but dead puppets; huddled together in the half light, lolling on stone couches, turning blank pupil-less eyes piously upwards. Here are countless images of Georgian gentlemen, all of them so very plain, poor darlings, wearing full bottomed wigs, bare stomachs, and Lord knows why, Roman togas. Irritable-looking cherubim support them in their stony grandeur, and pompous Latin inscriptions bear witness to their undying nonentity. This was my first view of the inside of the Abbey. It took a few minutes to realise that above all this cumbersome jumble, the roof soared up like trumpet calls into spearshaped perfections; that the mess of effigies was no more than a smudge on the floor of the Abbey, and that from tho loftiest of thoso spear-points the largest tourist would look rather like an incapacitated flea. Tho aisles wero thronged with people, moving softly about with black gowned guides. I edged my way cautiously among them, through narrow stone alleys, lined and paved with more and still more tablets and inscriptions. Then suddenly, all this poky antiquity came to an end. As if by magic I had come out into a great lofty place with a roof as high as the clouds and a floor as wide as a-great field. It was filled with a soft light full of colour, such as I have always imagined comes down through the sea to tho floor of the ocean. At the far end of this great place, under a very high window, a little group of people stood, all with their heads bent down. I watched them for some time, not liking to go nearer for fear they were a private or official party of some sort. Then I noticed that tho little group was always changing—melting away a little and renewing itself. So I walked down the long, long payed floor to see what they were all looking at so gravely, and found that it was the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. It is impossible for me to describe the sharpness of the emotional appeal of that moment. The grave of the warrior is the very consummation of the Cenotaph in Whitehall. They both have the same excellent simplicity, the same sombre thoughtfulness, the same almost unendurable sincerity. It is as if, after all the wretchedness, muddle, and pain of war, one national impulse had risen, one ideal, triumphant over a world of pain—the ideal of absolute selflessness. If those Georgian gentlemen are perfect effigies to futile nonentity, surely the grave of the Unknown Warrior is a symbol of nonentity when it is more glorious than fame itself. BANNERS, AND THE PUPPET SHOW PAR EXCELLENCE. Surely the most exciting chapel in tho whole world is the one where the banners of the peers of England hang. The colours of heraldry blazing in the dim light of the King's chapels and those old scarlets, greens, and azures hanging from the exquisite roof seem to shout joyfully of an anoient pageantry that shall not die out for ever. Undor the banners are the carved chairs where the peers of the realm sit in conclave, and above each chair are the arms and mottoes of their houses. The whole thing seems to be a perfect expression of the temper of the English people, and rings extraordinarily true. History seems to sit there brooding, an actual personality in the heart of her ancient capital. I saw the tombs of the kings, and was surprised to learn that James had clapped Elizabeth and Mary under one stone slab, hoping, I suppose, that they would got long better in death than they did in life. In Elizabeth's half is enshrined that ring which she gave to Essex, and which Mr. Str.achey says was never mislaid at all. We stood in a shadowy cavern chapel round Edward the Confessor's chair. I longed to know who had dared to carve these letters, long worn away, at the edges; apparently larrikinism flourished in ancient times as well as today. Then we walked up twisty stairs and came to the puppet show par-ex-cellence. Here in a tiny room are the effigies of past Kings and Queens of England,

wearing their own clothes and jewels and staring with rather dreadful eyes at the subjects of King George V. There is Elizabeth, an actual death mask of her still wearing the contortions which during the last hours distorted that already rather terrible old head; and there are swarthy Charles and fat Anne (who is dead), all bedecked and bedizened—terrific personages—glaring and glaring through their glass doors on which some other longdead sightseer has scratched unseemly letters with a diamond ring.