Angel Pavement

She came gliding along London’s broadest street, and then halted, swaying gently. She was a steamship of some 3,500 tons, flying the flag of one of the new Baltic states. The Tower Bridge cleared itself of midgets and toy vehicles and raised its two arms, and then she passed underneath, accompanied by cheerfully impudent tugs, and after some manœuvring and hooting and shouting, finally came to rest alongside Hay’s Wharf. The fine autumn afternoon was losing its bright gold and turning into smoke and distant fading flame, so that it seemed for a moment as if all London bridges were burning down. Then the flare of the day died out, leaving behind a quiet light, untroubled as yet by the dusk. On the wharf, men in caps lent a hand with ropes and a gangway, contrived to spit ironically, as if they knew what all this fuss was worth, and then retired to group themselves in the background, like a shabby and faintly derisive chorus; and men in bowler hats arrived from nowhere, carrying dispatch cases, notebooks, bundles of papers, to exchange mysterious jokes with the ship’s officers above; and two men in blue helmets, large and solid men, took their stand in the very middle of the scene and appeared to tell the ship, with a glance or two, that she could stay where she was for the time being because nothing against her was known so far to the police. The ship, for her part, began to think about discharging her mixed cargo.

This cargo was so mixed that it included the man who now emerged from the saloon, came yawning on to the deck, and looked down upon Hay’s Wharf. This solitary passenger was a man of medium height but of a massive build, square and bulky about the shoulders, and thick-chested. He might have been forty-five; he might have been nearly fifty; it was difficult to tell his exact age. His face was somewhat unusual, if only because it began by being almost bald at the top, then threw out two very bushy eyebrows, and finally achieved a tremendous moustache, drooping a little by reason of its very length and thickness; a moustache in a thousand, with something rhetorical, even theatrical, about it. He wore, carelessly, a suit of excellent grey cloth but of a foreign cut and none too well-fitting. This passenger had come with the ship from the Baltic state that owned her, but there was something about his appearance, in spite of his clothes, his moustache, that suggested he was really a native of this island. But that is perhaps all it did suggest. He was one of those men who are difficult to place. The sight of him did not call up any particular background, and you could not easily imagine him either at work or at home. He had come from the Baltic to the Thames, but it might just as well have been from any place to any other place. As he stood there, straddling at ease, a thick figure of a man but not slow and heavy, with his gleaming bald front and giant moustache, looking down at the wharf quite incuriously, he seemed a man who was neither coming home nor leaving it, and yet not a simple traveller, and this gave him a faint piratical air.

“Lon-don, eh?” cried a voice at his elbow. It came from the second mate, a small natty youngster not unlike a pale and well-brushed monkey. “Vairy nice, eh?”

“All right.”

“You com’ ’ere, Misdair Colsbee? You stay ’ere?” The second mate liked to air his English and had not had much opportunity of doing so during the voyage.

“Yes, I stay here,” replied Mr. Golspie, for that was the name the second officer was trying to pronounce. “That is,” he boomed, as an afterthought, “if there’s anything doing.”

“You leef ’ere, in Lon-don?” pursued the other, who had missed the force of the last remark.

“No, I don’t. I don’t live anywhere. That’s me.” And Mr. Golspie said this with a kind of grim relish, as if to suggest that he might pop up anywhere, and that when he did, something or somebody had better look out. He might have been one of the quieter buccaneers sailing into harbour.

Then, nodding amiably, he stepped forward, looked up and down the wharf again, and returned to the saloon, where he took a cigar from the box the captain had bought at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, and helped himself to a drink from one of the many bottles that overflowed from the sideboard to the table. It had been a convivial voyage. Mr. Golspie and the captain were old acquaintances who had been able to do one another various good turns. The captain had promised to make Mr. Golspie very comfortable, and one way of making Mr. Golspie very comfortable was to lay in and then promptly bring out a sound stock of whisky, cognac, vodka, and other liquors. There had been nothing one-sided about this arrangement, for the captain had been able to keep pace with his guest, even though his progress had not had the same steady dignity. The captain, who had once served in the Russian Imperial Navy and had only resigned from it by escaping in his shirt and trousers over the side one night, was apt to turn fantastic in his drink. On two nights out of the three, during the voyage, he had insisted upon declaiming a long speech from Goethe’s Faust in four different languages, to show that he was a man of culture. And on the night before they had entered the Thames Estuary, the previous night, in fact, he had gone further than that, for he had laughed a great deal, sung four songs that Mr. Golspie could not understand at all, told a long story apparently in Russian, cried a little, and shaken Mr. Golspie’s hand so hard and so often that as he thought about it all now, over his cigar in the saloon that seemed so strangely still, Mr. Golspie could almost feel the ache again in his hand. Mr. Golspie himself did not perform any of these antics; he merely mellowed as the evening waned and the bottles were emptied; and he was mellowing now, early though it was, for he and the captain had sat a long time over lunch. Apparently, however, Mr. Golspie did not consider that he was sufficiently mellow, for he now helped himself to another drink.

The men in bowler hats were by this time on board. Some of them were interviewing the captain. Others were interested in Mr. Golspie, for they had to decide whether he was fit to land in the island of his birth. His relations with these officials were quite amiable, but they did not prevent him from expressing his views.

“Regulations! Of course they’re regulations!” he boomed through the great moustache, mellow but pugnacious. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not a lot o’ damned nonsense. There’s more palaver getting into England now than there was getting into Russia and Turkey before the blasted war. And we used to laugh at ’em. Backward countries we used to call ’em. Passports!” Here he laughed, then tapped the young man on the lapel of his blue serge coat. “Never kept a rogue out yet, never. Only wants a bit of cleverness. All they do is to make trouble for honest men--fellows like me, wanting to do a bit of good to trade. Isn’t that right? You bet it is.”

He then saw the customs officers, who dipped a hand here and there in his two steamer trunks and three battered suitcases.

“I expect you’d like to get away,” said one of them, beginning to chalk up his approval of the luggage.

Mr. Golspie watched him with idle benevolence, looking quite unlike a man who has two hundred and fifty cigars cunningly stowed away in a steamer trunk. “Not this time. No hurry, for once. I’m staying aboard to pick a bit of dinner with the skipper here.” He waved a hand, presumably to indicate the city that lay all round them. “It can wait.”

“What can?” And the young man gave a final flourish of chalk.

“London can,” replied Mr. Golspie. “All of it.”

The young man laughed, not because he thought this last remark very witty, but because this passenger suddenly reminded him of a comedian he had once seen at the Finsbury Park Empire. “Well, I dare say it can. It’s been waiting a long time.”

Left to himself, with his cigars all safe, Mr. Golspie ruminated for a minute or two, then climbed to the upper deck, perhaps to decide what it was that had been waiting so long.

He found himself staring at the immense panorama of the Pool. Dusk was falling; the river rippled darkly; and the fleet of barges across the way was almost shapeless. There was, however, enough daylight lingering on the north bank, where the black piles and the whitewashed wharf edge above them still stood out sharply, to give shape and character to the waterfront. Over on the right, the grey stones of the Tower were faintly luminous, as if they had contrived to store away a little of their centuries of sunlight. The white pillars of the Custom House were as plain as peeled wands. Nearer still, two church spires thrust themselves above the blur of stone and smoke and vague flickering lights: one was as blanched and graceful as if it had been made of twisted paper, a salute to Heaven from the City; the other was abrupt and dark, a despairing appeal, the finger of a hand flung out to the sky. Mr. Golspie, after a brief glance, ignored the pair of them. They in their turn, however, were dominated by the severely rectangular building to the left, boldly fronting the river and looking over London Bridge with a hundred eyes, a grim Assyrian bulk of stone. It challenged Mr. Golspie’s memory, so that he regarded it intently. It was there when he was last in London, but was new then. Adelaide House, that was it. But he still continued to look at it, and with respect, for the challenge remained, though not to the memory. Both the blind eyes and the lighted eyes of its innumerable windows seemed to answer his stare and to tell him that he did not amount to very much, not here in London. Then his gaze swept over the bridge to what could be seen beyond. The Cold Storage place, and then, cavernous, immense, the great black arch of Cannon Street Station, and high above, far beyond, not in the city but in the sky and still softly shining in the darkening air, a ball and a cross. It was the very top of St. Paul’s, seen above the roof of Cannon Street Station. Mr. Golspie recognised it with pleasure, and even half sung, half hummed, the line of a song that came back to him, something about “St. Paul’s with its grand old Dome.” Good luck to St. Paul’s! It did not challenge him: it was simply there, keeping an eye on everything but interfering with nobody. And somehow this glimpse of St. Paul’s suddenly made him realise that this was the genuine old monster, London. He felt the whole mass of it, spouting and fuming and roaring away. He realised something else too, namely, the fact that he was still wearing his old brown slippers, the ones that Hortensia had given him. He had arrived, had crept right into the very heart of London, wearing his old brown slippers. He had slipped two hundred and fifty cigars past their noses, and had not even changed into his shoes. James Golspie was surveying London in his slippers, and London was not knowing, not caring--just yet. These thoughts gave him enormous pleasure, bringing with them a fine feeling of cunning and strength: he could have shaken hands with himself; if there had been a mirror handy he would probably have exchanged a wink with his reflection.