Buried Alive | Page 8

cab tinkled through canyons of familiar stucco, he looked
further at the Telegraph. He was rather surprised to find more than a
column of enticing palaces, each in the finest position in London;
London, in fact, seemed to be one unique, glorious position. And it was
so welcome, so receptive, so wishful to make a speciality of your
comfort, your food, your bath, your sanitation! He remembered the old
boarding-houses of the eighties. Now all was changed, for the better.
The Telegraph was full of the better, crammed and packed with tight
columns of it. The better burst aspiringly from the tops of columns on
the first page and outsoared the very title of the paper. He saw there, for
instance, to the left of the title, a new, refined tea-house in Piccadilly
Circus, owned and managed by gentlewomen, where you had real tea
and real bread-and butter and real cakes in a real drawing-room. It was
astounding.
The cab stopped.
"Is this it?" he asked the driver.
"This is 250, sir."

And it was. But it did not resemble even a private hotel. It exactly
resembled a private house, narrow and tall and squeezed in between its
sister and its brother. Priam Farll was puzzled, till the solution occurred
to him. "Of course," he said to himself. "This is the quietude, the
discretion. I shall like this." He jumped down.
"I'll keep you," he threw to the cabman, in the proper phrase (which he
was proud to recall from his youth), as though the cabman had been
something which he had ordered on approval.
There were two bell-knobs. He pulled one, and waited for the portals to
open on discreet vistas of luxurious furniture. No response! Just as he
was consulting the Telegraph to make sure of the number, the door
silently swung back, and disclosed the figure of a middle-aged woman
in black silk, who regarded him with a stern astonishment.
"Is this----?" he began, nervous and abashed by her formidable stare.
"Were you wanting rooms?" she asked.
"Yes," said he. "I was. If I could just see----"
"Will you come in?" she said. And her morose face, under stringent
commands from her brain, began an imitation of a smile which, as an
imitation, was wonderful. It made you wonder how she had ever taught
her face to do it.
Priam Farll found himself blushing on a Turkey carpet, and a sort of
cathedral gloom around him. He was disconcerted, but the Turkey
carpet assured him somewhat. As his eyes grew habituated to the light
he saw that the cathedral was very narrow, and that instead of the choir
was a staircase, also clothed in Turkey carpet. On the lowest step
reposed an object whose nature he could not at first determine.
"Would it be for long?" the lips opposite him muttered cautiously.
His reply--the reply of an impulsive, shy nature--was to rush out of the
palace. He had identified the object on the stairs. It was a slop-pail with

a wrung cloth on its head.
He felt profoundly discouraged and pessimistic. All his energy had left
him. London had become hard, hostile, cruel, impossible. He longed
for Leek with a great longing.
Tea
An hour later, having at the kind suggestion of the cabman deposited
Leek's goods at the cloak-room of South Kensington Station, he was
wandering on foot out of old London into the central ring of new
London, where people never do anything except take the air in parks,
lounge in club-windows, roll to and fro in peculiar vehicles that have
ventured out without horses and are making the best of it, buy flowers
and Egyptian cigarettes, look at pictures, and eat and drink. Nearly all
the buildings were higher than they used to be, and the street wider; and
at intervals of a hundred yards or so cranes that rent the clouds and
defied the law of gravity were continually swinging bricks and marble
into the upper layers of the air. Violets were on sale at every corner,
and the atmosphere was impregnated with an intoxicating perfume of
methylated spirits. Presently he arrived at an immense arched façade
bearing principally the legend 'Tea,' and he saw within hundreds of
persons sipping tea; and next to that was another arched façade bearing
principally the word 'Tea,' and he saw within more hundreds sipping tea;
and then another; and then another; and then suddenly he came to an
open circular place that seemed vaguely familiar.
"By Jove!" he said. "This is Piccadilly Circus!"
And just at that moment, over a narrow doorway, he perceived the
image of a green tree, and the words, 'The Elm Tree.' It was the
entrance to the Elm Tree Tea Rooms, so well spoken of in the
Telegraph. In certain ways he was