The House by the RiverHerbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
General
The House by the River
Herbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
London (England) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Poets -- Fiction
Mr. Dimple, who had been got at by the church, strongly advocated the
claims of the Montobel Day Nursery; Stephen, he said, had had two
children himself, and if he had been able to give an opinion, would
almost certainly have elected to be commemorated by a gift to the little
ones of the neighbourhood.
No one thought much of any of these suggestions; and after a great deal
of bland and sugary argument the field of alternatives was thinned down
for practical purposes to two--Mr. Stimpson's plan and Mr. Meredith's
plan. Mr. Meredith was the Home Office man. He had vacillated for a
while between a Stephen Byrne monolith at Hammersmith Broadway and a
Stephen Byrne Scholarship at London University, the balance of the fund
to be devoted to the provision of a mural tablet in Hammerton church,
setting out the principal works of Stephen Byrne, a kind of monumental
bibliography. Finally, however, he decided in favour of the Hammersmith
Broadway scheme. At that time there was much excitement in the Press
over the conduct of foot passengers in the London streets, who were said
to show an extraordinary carelessness of life in the face of the rapid
increase of motor transport. For example, they took no notice of
"refuges"; they crossed the street at any old point. And Meredith's
theory--which was also apparently the official theory of the Home
Secretary, if not actually of the Home Secretary's private
secretary--was that people neglected the refuges because they were such
dull places. An unbeautiful lamp-post, he said, sprouting unnaturally
from a small island of pavement, held out no inducement to pedestrians.
It simply did not attract their attention, so they did not go there.
Now, if they were made _attractive_, if every refuge at the principal
crossings and danger-points were made into a thing of intrinsic beauty
or interest, the people would crowd to them, to look at the statue, or
read the inscription, or drink at the fountain, or whatever it was. And
he proposed that the first experiment should be made with a Stephen
Byrne memorial at Hammersmith Broadway, which was very dangerous and had
nothing striking in the centre of it. He said it was a curious thing
that, if you counted the people who used the Piccadilly Circus refuge or
the King Charles refuge in one day, you would find the number was "out
of all proportion" to the number of people who used an ordinary refuge
where there was no fountain and no flower-girls and no statue of King
Charles. Nobody could remember doing this, and very few of the Committee
were prepared to take his word for it. In fact, Stimpson said that what
Meredith said was not borne out by his own experience (and this was as
near as the Committee ever approached to open incredulity or
contradiction); he also said that you do not _want_ crowds gathering
round refuges and gaping at pieces of sculpture; but then Stimpson was
prejudiced, for Stimpson had his own plan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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