(To M. G. S.)
TO and fro over the heated surface of Fleet Street passed the red omnibuses, a sickly pale vapour coming from the engines. It was a Saturday afternoon in August, and there were few people about. For myself, I had to toil at my useless and fretting work of getting material for one of the big Sunday newspapers. Saturday was the day when the paper became alive, and the Editor more exacting and more like an Egyptian slave-driver than ever. This was from the point of view of the wretched hack-writers who were privileged to work from ten o’clock in the morning till midnight the same day. Possibly the Editor did not regard himself as one so omnipotent, since he was the target for the deadly arrows of the proprietor’s wrath on Tuesday morning, should any blemish in the make-up of the paper be discovered, or any important item of news be missed. Nevertheless, we loathed the Editor on Saturdays, especially at evening. His face grew whiter, and his despairful leer at our non-success in obtaining some facts from a West End flunkey whose mistress had that morning lost a pearl necklace, or a reputation, was most exasperating for men with tired feet and grit-filled eyes.
That afternoon of August London was more arid than ever. I looked with despair for any sign of beauty, something that could take my mind away from dinginess. My mind was drouthy, and the roots of calm thought were sapped. The blue sky overhead made me miserable: I thought of the waves lapping the sunlit sands of the West Country that I knew so well. There the gray stock-doves flew from the bushes growing on the headland cliff sides, and the lark’s song was ever in the air. Here by the church of Mary-le-Strand all nature was dead. True, there were pigeons, but their wings were tinged with soot, and they were alienated from the wild dove whose nest was among the blackthorns. Even the bark of the plane trees was unrefreshed, and guarded by iron cages; my thought was shut in too. My mind was never in my drudge work, however much I tried to force myself to think in terms of sensation and factory-made phrases. Everything was ugly, the competition, the smoke, the grimy buildings.
And then I saw, floating across the shimmering roadway, a few downy seeds. They came from the direction of the Thames. They swung in the motion of the street-air, and the light glistened on their filaments. One drifted to the pavement at my feet, and released a curved brown seed. By its size I knew it to be that of the Yellow Goatsbeard, or John-go-to-bed-at-noon. Immediately the bus-rattle, the whirr of cab-wheels, and the burnt-oil smell sank away. The seed bloomed in the palm of my hand, and I saw its flowers of pure yellow, and a whitethroat was slipping through the nettles of the ditch. The city was old, but the brown seed was older. Men raised their buildings anew after the great fire, hundreds of years ago; the flower did not change. My mind reached back before the time of the Romans with their tiled baths and chariots; further still, when the first wild settlers made their hut circles by the marge of the wooded river. All the while the dandelion had been blooming so that the seed should be formed. No haste, no strife, no misery: growing in the sunlight. A lovely disk of gold, a summer day, a wandering bee, and the mother-beauty became the child-seed. And this common speck, coming with the moving air to my feet, was as old as the spirit that manifests itself through dull matter in a million million forms and ways.
I dropped the seed and went away, no longer stifled by the weary monotony of my useless work. Then I thought that I would like to keep it, and plant it in some known corner in order to watch its increasing joy as the plant grew in spring, and to take to myself some of its happiness. I searched on the pavement, but it was so small and commonplace I could not see it. A passerby asked if he might help me: had I lost anything and was it of any value—a gold ring, perhaps? I replied in my enthusiasm that it was of more value than a gold ring, hoping (as ever the dreamer has) that he would share my wonder of this seed in London. He was interested and puzzled, so I told him it was the seed of a sort of dandelion that I sought. He stared at me as though I had said that God was in the Strand, and had just spoken to me; and then he turned away with a smile.