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The battle of the Somme had begun about nine weeks before when this particular train, carrying the daily instalment of men on leave from it, began to wind its way in past the endless back-gardens and yellow brick houses, every one the replica of the next, and the numberless villa chimneys and chimney-pots which fence the southern approaches of the great capital.
'I gazed at the squalid outskirts of London as they flew by. I doubted, as I listened to my fellow-passengers, whether I should be able to shine at Keeb. I rather wished I were going to spend the week-end at one of those little houses with back-gardens beneath the railway-line. I was filled with fears. 'For shame! thought I. Was I nobody? Was the author of "Ariel in Mayfair" nobody?
Slums, the dead uniformity of long rows of houses, sordid back-gardens, bourgeois public statues all these eyesores are mercifully hidden by the roofed surface. The very factory chimneys have a certain air of impressiveness, in common with church towers and the higher buildings.
A friend of mine one of those people who talk about money with an air of familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef in their back-gardens said to me the other day that I ought to buy a fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined coat or a sealskin jacket, said he.
That the Classical Renaissance was essentially an intellectual movement is proved, I think, by the fact that it left the uneducated classes untouched almost. They suffered from its consequences; it gave them nothing. A wave of emotion floods the back-gardens; an intellectual stream is kept within the irrigation channels.
Quinn maintaining that greed was the principal characteristic of a peasant nation, inherent in it, inseparable from it. "Look at the French," he had said on one occasion. "By God, they buried their food in their back-gardens rather than let their hungry soldiers have it in the Franco-German War! Would an aristocrat have done that, John Marsh?
The trees of its orchard are still discoverable in the back-gardens of Hobart Place and Wilton Street, and I am looking out upon them as I write this page. Stories of highwaymen are excellent Links with the Past, and here is one.
The palace to be visited lay half a mile beyond the king's, but the highroad to it was forbidden me, as it is considered uncourteous to pass the king's gate without going in. So after winding through back-gardens, the slums of Bandowaroga, I struck upon the highroad close to her majesty's, where everything looked like the royal palace on a miniature scale.
"From the railway only," admitted the Rector; "and chiefly its back-gardens. It left an impression of washing on my mind." "It left an impression of not washing on mine," said the Squire, and leant back in his chair to laugh heartily at his witticism. The Rector also did justice to it, perhaps more than justice, with a kind smile.
Across the sun-flooded back of the house were Alice's little bedroom, nunlike in its rigid austerity, her nurse's room adjoining, and a square sun-room, giving glimpses of roofs and trim back-gardens, full of flowers, with a little fountain and goldfish, a floor of dull pink tiling, and plants in great jars of Chinese enamel.
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