Through a Door Off Oxford-Street

Introduction

Arthur Machen never tired of the spectacle and mystery of his adopted city of London. Throughout his long career, he peopled his stories with strange figures haunting the endless twists and turns of the great metropolis. This was not simply a fictional flourish. In his nonfiction, Machen described beautifully, in symbolic tones, the sincere awe and wonder in which he beheld this city. This is evident in The London Adventure (1924), his finest book of nonfiction. Below, he weaves a short journalistic dispatch on a veritable museum of past glory. Interesting as that would be, Machen frames the experience in his stylistic method: by entering a door off a somber London street, one may be confronted with mystery.

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Through a Door Off Oxford-Street
by
Arthur Machen
May 14, 1919

There is nothing graver in our grave old London than Stratford-place, Oxford-street. The houses in it are large, heavy, massive. They are built of undistinguished bricks, of neutral colour. The only feature about the street is that the two houses facing each other, halfway up, have Ionic pilasters, in plaster, on their fronts. Stratford-place is sombre; it is almost grim.

I have passed it on my journeys along Oxford-street, stony-hearted stepmother, for forty years, and thought only that it was grim and forbidding. But in the Eastern tale the man finds one day a door that he has never seen before in the dull wall of his daily passage, and enters, and sees wonders. And so with me in Stratford-place.

The djinn—I should say the secretary of the Services Club—took me from room to room of the new houses that the club has acquired, and everywhere there were marvels. In this house has lived somebody who made the Grand Tour at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and picked up curious carved work wherever he found it, and set it up in his house in Stratford-place. Here is fifteenth century carved wood of Flanders, scenes of Holy Writ set about a fireplace; here are doors framed in fair, flourished workmanship; here are windows of stained glass, painted with the arms of bishops. Here the wall is covered with panels of figured velvet of Smyrna; here with carved wood from a church in Genoa.

I became confused, as one does in Arabian tales. My guide takes me through arches hewn in thick walls, and I think that it is in another house, formerly in the occupation of Sir Rennell Rodd, our Ambassador at Rome, that we come into the Venetian Room. Here the ceiling is all of squares of mirror, here everywhere are singular gilded ornaments and adornments, like panels of the doors are covered with Renaissance flourishes in dark wood; the great mirrors on the walls are inset with mirrors in gilded, flourished frames, the gilded chairs still wear their rich brocades that were made when Venice was a great Republic, with an embassy in Soho-square, opposite Mrs. Cornely’s Rooms—now the pickle factory.

Again a change: a suite of lofty rooms decorated in the modern Italian fashion, which isn’t modern at all, but a sort of faded recollection in the seventeenth century mode; figures still flourish on the ceiling, but not so confidently as at Hampton Court; there is plenty of gilded ornament about the walls, but the gilt begins to look ghostly, as if someone had been whispering about a thing called the French Revolution, and the end of wigs, and of red morocco shoes. Still, there is a brave show of the old stateliness. This was a bedroom, my guide told me; if I slept in it, I should expect to be wakened in the morning with a discreet murmur of: “Eminence’s chocolate is prepared.” It is, indeed, a bedroom fit for any Cardinal.

And all this, these strange adornments, these curious golden mirrors, these rich, ancient carvings, behind the dull bricks of a grim London street.

Here is another face of the everlasting wonder and enchantment of London. You stray into some new, red, raw suburbs, all plate-glass shops, cheap goods, shiny villas, and the rest of it; and at a corner here is a mansion that deny with one voice that Queen Anne is dead. And here, a pace or two from Oxford-street, is a room in which Casanova might have heard the advice of his patron, the Senator Bragadin; another in which Johnson might have discussed with Boswell the acting of Garrick.

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