Chapter Nine: MR. SMEETH IS WORRIED (continued 2)

“’Aving a look at the good old graves, mister?” said a voice. It belonged to an elderly and shabby idler, one of those dreamy and dilapidated men who seem to haunt all such places in London, and who will offer to guide you, if you are obviously a stranger and well-to-do, but are quite prepared to pour out information for nothing to a fellow-citizen.

“Yes, just having a look,” said Mr. Smeeth.

“Ar, there’s some pretty work ’ere, if yer know where to look for it, mister. I know the Fields well, I do. Some big men’s buried ’ere. An’ I’ll tell yer one of ’em. Daniel Defow’s buried in ’ere, boy, and I could take yer straight to the plice. Yers, the grite Daniel Defow.”

“Is that so? Now, let me see, who was he exactly?”

“Oo was ’e? Daniel Defow! Yer know Rawbinson Crusoe, doncher? Rawbinson Crusoe on the island and Man Friday an’ all that? Thet’s ’im. Defow—’e wrote that. Cor!—think ’e did! Known all over the world, that piece, all over the wide world. Well, ’e’s in ’ere, Daniel Defow, and I could take yer straight to the plice. Yers, that’s right. Monument, too—ee-rected by the boys and girls of England to Daniel Defow ’cos ’e wrote Rawbinson Crusoe—in ’ere. I tell yer, boy, there’s some big men in there—what’s left of ’em.”

Mr. Smeeth nodded and continued to stare idly through the railings of Bunhill Fields, where the old Nonconformists are buried in mouldering eighteenth century elegance, to which they had at least conformed in death if not in life; and where, among the divines and elders, not only Defoe, but also Bunyan and Blake, the two God-haunted men, lie in the sooty earth, while their dreams and ecstasies still light the world. As Mr. Smeeth stared, something floated down, touched the crumbled corner of the nearest headstone, and perished there. A moment later, on the curved top of the little wall beside him was a fading white crystal. He looked up and saw against the brassy sky a number of moving dark spots. He looked down and saw the white flakes floating towards the black pavement. In all his life, he had never been so surprised by the appearance of snow, and for one absurd moment he found himself wondering who had made it and who was responsible for tumbling it into the City. He hurried away now, and as he went the snow came faster and shook down larger and larger flakes upon the town. Before he had reached Angel Pavement, not only had it whitened every cranny, but it had stolen away, behind its soft curtains, half the noises of the City, which only roared and hooted now through the white magic as if in an uneasy dream. It was so thick that Mr. Smeeth was no longer one of ten thousand hurrying little figures, but a man alone with the whirling flakes. The snow was storming the City and all London. In Twigg & Dersingham’s, they had turned on the lights, but they could still see a queer dim scurrying through the windows. Mrs. Smeeth, in her little dining-room up at Stoke Newlington, watched it with delight and remembered her childhood, when they had cried, “Snow, snow faster, White alabaster.” Mrs. Dersingham, who had been shopping in Kensington High Street, had to shelter from it in a doorway, and was wondering if it had caught the children. The Pearsons, secure in their warm maisonette in Barkfield Gardens, stood at the window for quarter of an hour, calling one another’s attention to the size of the flakes, for there had never been anything like this in Singapore. Miss Verever, who had missed her usual visit to the Italian Riviera, wrote another angry little note to her solicitor, because it was he who had insisted upon her staying in London. Lena Golspie, in Maida Vale, watched it for a minute or two, then switched on one of the big shaded lights and curled among the cushions, with a magazine, voluptuously, like a sleek blonde cat. Mr. Pelumpton was just prevented in time from making a bid of twelve and six for a marble clock (out of order), and stayed at home, in Mrs. Pelumpton’s way. Benenden, having dozed off, never knew it was there. For an hour it was unceasing, and all the open spaces on the hills, from Hampstead Heath on one side to Wimbledon Common on the other, were thickly carpeted, and everything in the city, except the busier roadways and the gutters, was magically muffled and whitened and plumed with winter, just as if it had been some old town in a fairy-tale.