resome songs which so satisfy the
musical taste of Bayswater--baritone songs about the Army and the Navy
and their rollicking ways, and about old English country life; tenor
songs about Grey Eyes and Roses and Waiting and Parting and Coming Back;
soprano songs about Calling and Wondering and Last Night's Dance and
Remembering and Forgetting--foolish words, foolish melodies, and clumsy
orchestration. But they seem to please the well-dressed crowd that
comes to listen to them, so I suppose it is justified. I suppose it
really interprets their attitude toward human passion. I don't know....
Anyway, it is sorry stuff.

If you don't go to these shows, then there is nothing to do but walk
about. I think the most pathetic sight to be seen in London is the
Strand on a Sunday night. The whole place is shut up, almost one might
say, hermetically sealed, except that Mooney's and Ward's and Romano's
are open. Along its splendid length parade crowds and crowds of Jew
couples and other wanderers from the far regions. They look lost. They
look like a Cup Tie crowd from the North. They don't walk; they drift.
They look helpless; they have an air expressive of: "Well, what the
devil shall we do _now_?" I have a grim notion that members of the
London County Council, observing them--if, that is, members of the
London County Council ever do penance by walking down the Strand on
Sunday--take to themselves unction. "Ah!" they gurgle in their hearts,
"ah!--beautiful. Nice, orderly crowd; all walking about nice and
orderly; enjoying themselves in the right way. Ah! Yes. We _like_ to see
the people enjoy themselves."

And, in their Christian way, they pat themselves on the back (if not too
stout) and go home to their cigars and liqueurs and whatever else they
may want in the way of worldly indulgence. It is Sunday.

Some years ago there was a delightful song that devastated New York. It
was a patriotic song, and it was called: "The sun is always shining on
Broadway." At the time, I translated this into English, for rendering at
a private show, the refrain being that the sun is always shining in the
Strand. So it is. Dull as the day may be elsewhere, there is always
light of some kind in the Strand. It is the gayest, most Londonish
street in London. It is jammed with Life, for it is the High Street of
the world. Men of every country and clime have walked down the Strand.
Whatever is to be found in other streets in other parts of the world is