CHAPTER VII JERMYN STREET N this June morning - and there can be on says: "Yes, I am sorry; I have treated you rather badly all winter, but now for a sample of what I can do to make it up to you". this June morning, then, Jermyn Street was seen at its best-one of the few picturesque mid-city streets really left in London. Its narrowness helped and so did the burst of green from out St. James's Yard which hung over the asphalt, and so did the quiet corner of the old church itself - one of Christopher Wren's. - And yet the street had its drawbacks. One of them and this to me was most humiliating was the discovery that while I had been treated with becoming respect in most of my wanderings over London, that here, in the once most famous quarter of the town the resort of the best bred, most courteous and most illustrious men of England - I was received with marked distrust because of my trade. A man --- who sits in a taxi, with an easel on the front seat, and his fingers black as a chimney sweep's, is really no better than a patent-medicine vendor who cries out the virtues of his nostrums from the top of a soap box, or the fakir who sells tooth wash, patent stovelid lifters, or china-mending cement from behind a push-cart. To-day and I blush to tell it - I was ordered off Jermyn Street. Told to "move on" to evaporate into thin air. Not by a minion of the law, which would have been bearable, but by a plain, well-to-do, matter-offact citizen who said that it was his busy day and that my taxi and I were in the way of numbers of carriage customers who bought their hats and caps in his shop, and that he would call the police - or words to that effect if I delayed my activities an instant. He had come into view by this time could see him below my canvas, as he stood gesticulating on the sidewalk. A large, florid person, in white spats, checked trousers, doublebreasted waistcoat, and spectacles. He was also bald, and had muttonchop side-whiskers. And he was very positive. I I began at his spats, and, in conciliatory terms, addressed him, all the way up his fat body, until I reached his irate face, and then, as was my custom with obdurate and not-to-be pacified persons, turned him over to Evins, and resumed my work: A line of beautiful carts, loaded with enchanting bricks, hauled by adorable horses dragging great bunches of hair tied to their fetlocks, had stopped for a moment in my righthand foreground, the whole accentuating a necessary high light, and there was no time to be lost. Evins advanced under heavy fire, deployed. to the left, and opened within a few inches of the enemy. There came a rattling fire of expletives, the bursting of an oath charged with dynamite (hats and caps set it off) a closer knitting of the crowd, and I was about to waive my paint rag in surrender, when a fat man in a white apron forced his way to my side. "This 'ere carriage comp'ny be blowed!" he cried. "He don't hev none and won't today cause it's Saturday. If ye want to move yer taxi in front of my door, Guvnor, ye can and welcome. I keep this public," and he pointed to a barroom ten feet farther along the sidewalk, "and if ye say what'll ye hev, I'll bring it out to ye. Both sides ceased firing. Evins stepped up and saluted. |