LONDON IN DECEMBER.
WHEN Dr. Johnson was giving Boswell one of his. lectures on the delights of living in London, he would probably have been greatly surprised if he had been asked at which season of the year he liked London best. "Sir," he would perhaps have replied, "there are no seasons of the year in London. A man is either indoors or out of doors." Country-loving people like Mr. Thrale might "go to Brighthelmstone about Michaelmas, to be jolly and ride a-bunting," but for Dr. Johnson there was only one place in the world in which a sensible man could be happy, and probably in that place one season of the year seemed to him very like another. To a later generation, accustomed to live half in and half out of town and country, there are two or three seasons of the year with which London associates itself with peculiar distinction. London has become, indeed, two or three different places. There is the London of March, when the year has turned and the East wind has been blowing a week. Under
a sky of that deep clear blue which comes only with easterly winds the chimney-pots and paint take on an aspect of a most delicate cleanliness ; the wind has dried the rain from the red buds of the elms ; the parks are purple and white and yellow with crocuses, and turning the corner of the street, you are suddenly struck with a note of new colour,—the daffodils and wallflowers have come back into the flower-girls' baskets. There is a sense of light and life in the wide spaces of the streets; it is as though the blinds of a great room had been suddenly drawn up and the windows thrown open. That is the first 'of the two or three Londons ; and if it is distinct chiefly because of its clean sunlight, there is another London, the London of June, which marks itself in the memory foremost as a city of men and women ; of parasols and laces and polo-ponies ; of streets blocked with hansoms and victorias, and vistasOf
buildings flying bunting over white sun-blinds and window- boxes pink with geraniums and daisies. But if a Londoner
had to choose between them, would he take March or June as revealing the real meaning of London, the true spirit of the great town ? He would choose neither; he would choose the London of December.
If London in March is a city of spring sunlight, and in June a city of men and women, in December it is a city of twilight. The spirit and the meaning of that vast congeries of streets and squares, towers and steeples, of crowded bridges and roaring highways, are best interpreted in the half-lights of a late winter afternoon. To the Londoner exiled, what would be the insistent memory, the "extreme impression," of the city- left behind him ? His thought would take him first, surely; to one of the great bridges over the river between Chelsea and the Tower. "It was all Australia to me," singe Mr. Kipling's trooper of the smell of the wattle round Lichtenburg, when he is "riding in, in the rain " ; and what would "all London" be to the exiled Londoner? , Would it be, perhaps, the sudden breath of the river breeze that catches the wayfarer on Waterloo Bridge,—a breeze that has come up with the tide from Tilbruy, wet with the fog above the Goodwins, brackish with the salt the open sea beyond the Nore, heavy with the vapour of , brewery malt, of churned mud and steaming horses, but blowing dank and wet and welcome as no other, cleaner wind , blows on the hills or the sea ? Or would it be the sudden sight of the long lines of grey buildings beyond the river, with the December sun buried behind a bank of mist in the West ; with the towers of Westminster standing grey and mauve against a frosty glow of ochre and orange; and all along the curve of the river the dotted sequence of street lamps, large and bright in contrast with the thousands of tiny candles and gas-jets gleaming through the windows of the great business houses and hotels ? Or would he follow the swaying traffic over the bridge, and find the "extreme impression" in one of the broad, wood-paved thoroughfares, with its unceasing • drum-roll of hoofs and wheels, and with the flare of gas-jets a hundred yards away stretching glittering pathways down the wet pavement, like ship-lights along the level ripple of a wide waterway ? Or would he stand on the bridge itself, and watch the red lamp of some small steamer ride up on the yellow-grey tide below him, with its long string of barges swinging after it, borne under the arch of the bridge by the huge weight of water heaving up from the sea ? If that long line of jostling, blunt-bowed barges looks at first' to be travelling slowly towards the bridge, see with what incredible swiftness it has swung away into the darkness, and then watch the water swirling round the piers, lifted above its level at the check of the smooth stone, and falling away again with , a rushing gurgle to the sides. Winter in London has changed, in some ways rather strangely, from the winter of twenty or thirty years ago. It was only eleven years ago, in 1895, during the long frost which began in January and only broke up in March, that the gulls first came to London. That was a frost which probably burst more water-pipes than any English frost on record,—if any one with an enthusiasm for weather records should be , inclined to doubt it, let him reflect that in any frost before 1895 there were not so many water-pipes to burst. The river was not frozen over below London Bridge; but if the people ,of London did not bold a fair on the Thames, as they did in the ,year before Waterloo, the gulls did; and have come back to hold their fair every winter since. The Embankment is a sunnTand spacious highway in spring and summer, but one of its chief and most charming characteristics in the winter months is the troop of tlack-headed gulls in their winter suits of pearl-grey and snowy white, soaring and wheeling high over the bridges, or floating like the trail scattered in a paperchase down the stream, or dipping and crying round the figure of some way.
fever at the parapet, who knows that he can come down to the river to feed the gulls with just as much confidence as the nurses who take bread in the perambulator for the children to
feed the ducks on the Serpentine. Gulls, too, are much more amusing to feed than ducks. You can stand in one of the stone bays off the pavement of the Embankment and throw pieces of bread out over the river, and if you have succeeded in getting a good number of guests to lunch, no piece of bread will ever get wet before it is swallowed. It looks an 'astonishing feat, the ease with which the bird swoops at the falling bread, and has it in his beak before it touches the water; but no one who has seen a number of gulls chasing the glittering fry of mackerel flying before a shoal of bass will underestimate a gull's power of swift and certain choosing of his victim. It is, perhaps, from the Embankment that you can get the best idea of the actual numbers of the gulls which range up stream in December. But it is from the bridges that you can measure best the beauty of their flight as they sail up out of the 'mist and stay poised above you, looking curiously this way and that, or wing their high and quiet journey across the fading sky,—strangely slow in contrast to the sharp, curved flight of the pigeons darting backwards and forwards between the bridges.
Perhaps not all the changes which time has brought about have been quite as welcome as the yearly return of the gulls. Nothing, of all that means London in December, has changed more than the flower-shops and the greengrocers'. It was not so many years ago that the proper dessert, and indeed the only dessert to be had, on Christmas Day was oranges and raisins. To-day, when more is known about growing and storing late kinds of fruit, and when Covent Garden can draw on the climate of almost any country in the world within two or three weeks, it is difficult to think of fruits which it is impossible to put on the table after the plum-pudding. As for flowers, the poet who at Christmas did not desire a rose would have to look the other way in passing any London flower-shop in December. He would try to find something better fitting the grey and umber distances of the streets and squares, and the early lit gas-lamps flaring yellow through the fog, in the merry December market the business and chatter of which you can hear in Fleet Street from Ludgate Hill. The penny-toy sellers, lining Ludgate Hill from the Circus to St Paul's, came to London, it is true, before the gulls. But it is only during the last few years, since the police first decided 'that they should not be allowed there, and then decided that they should, that they have nearly equalled the gulls in numbers. They can be inconvenient on occasion. But their note of cheery trade has at least something more opportune in it, in December weather, than the florist's • crimson roses.
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