The heart of London

Where the Eagles Sleep

One o'clock in the City of London. Crowds overflow the pavement into the narrow, twisting road. Young men in striped trousers, ruled like ledgers, black coats sober as a bill of lading, rush or saunter, according to their natures, towards a quick lunch-bar, where a girl with golden hair will give them beer and mutton. Girls, arm-in-arm, discuss those eternal verities--dress, love, and another woman--as they go primly or coyly, according to their nature, towards two poached eggs and a cup of tea. Here and there a large man in a silk hat, who may be a millionaire or a bankrupt, chases the inevitable chop. And the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders.

But behind a tall hoarding that shouts dogmatically of soap and shirts and pills things are quiet. Out of the chaos a great new bank will rise. Workmen sit around in picturesque groups eating. On their knees are spotted handkerchiefs in which lie gigantic sandwiches cut by wives in the early dawn. They carve them with clasp-knives and carry them to their mouths, the clasp-knives upright in their hands grazing their cheeks. They drink from tin cans, and wonder, in rich monosyllables, "wot" will win the three-thirty.

I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive strata--brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement--lies the clay on which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the spine. I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four feet above the primal mud.

How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian, Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman. There it stops, for there it began. Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay; and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet London?

A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and shouts up to his mate:

"Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!"

And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that look like flat cakes of sealing wax. I pick them up, knock off the caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus. F." Just that.

What does it mean? It means that I have seen the deep roots of London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome. "Fl. Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning "Flavius Germanus made it." What a message to receive in modern London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders!

Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a new bank is built. For we stand on the shoulders of Rome. Men from the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill.

As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius. What do I see? I see the first London and its colonists pegging out their camp. Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin. The second London rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the young men; and round this London they are building a wall.

Gradually, as a vision in a crystal clears and forms out of mist, I see a smaller, colder Rome standing with its marble feet in Thames water. I see rows of wood and red-tile houses running within the walls in straight lines like tents within a castrum; I see the marble capitals under our grey skies, the majestic circular sweep of the theatre, the white gleam of the Forum, the gates with their statues, the baths at the gates, the long straight streets crowded, noisy, varied. I see the shaggy Britons and the Gauls move to a side as the Roman troops come clattering over the stones, their helmets shining, swords at hips; the marvellous short sword that carved out an Empire as a girl might cut a cake.

And the heart of this little English Rome, how did it beat? I imagine that it knew the enterprising business man opening up new markets, the enthusiastic soldier always dreaming of sending the Eagles north, the inevitable Phœnician with his galley at the docks and his shop somewhere in the city, the bad boy sent to colonial London to expiate, and women making the best of it, always three months behind Rome in fashion: wives and sweethearts who had followed their men into barbary. O, the homesickness and heroism of colonization! How many old men must have wept to see their careful vines wilt in the London clay; and I wonder if Londinium Augusta numbered among its inhabitants the optimistic gardener who bored his friends with a vision of olives in a neat Italian row!

There would come a time in this first London when a small boy would say to his mother: "Tell me about Rome!"

And she would sit facing the broad Thames, talking of Italy as a homesick woman in Winnipeg might talk of England:

"Do you see those galleys coming up under the bridge like water beetles? They come from Ostia--from Rome. They bring soldiers and--sometimes people go home in them! Yes, dear, perhaps when you grow up you too will go. The sun always shines there, and it is seldom cold as it is here. When your father was a little boy like you..."

So the tale would go on.

Then I see the market-place, the marvellous mixture of race which Rome drew to her cities: the dark Iberian soldier pressed into service for duty on the Wall, the Gaul, the German, the negro, the merchants with their wares, the amber from the Baltic, the pearls, the perfumes from the East, the brown fingers holding out gold chains as the Roman ladies go by....

What chatter of a six months old scandal as the women walk to the baths; what discussion of Rome's latest coiffure, her newest pin, her smartest sandal! At the docks the creak of timber and the straining of a released rope, the "one, two, three" as the oarsmen dip their great blades in the Thames; and a galley goes home with letters to Cæsar from the Governor of London.