William Sharp

The Hotel of the Beautiful Star

In Papers Critical and Reminiscent. William Heinemann, 1912.

On a hot night in July, when travelling thunders have been loosening long sudden avalanches of wind through a barren desert, I have lain below a hawthorn-bush in Regent's Park, and dreamed I was far from London. For, harsh in the silence, came the same restless cry of cranes I had heard in the shallow Moorish waters beyond Tunis; then, bewilderingly, the screams of the great-skua and the cormorant, recalling twilit shores in the wave-washed north; then, savagely, the aow-aow-aow of a wolf, the sullen, snarling howl of the jungle tiger, or abruptly, the sickeningly near roar of a hunger or heat-maddened lion. But I was in London, after all; and the finch sitting in the hawthorn over her second brood did not stir, nor did the little cluster of sheep, like gray boulders cropping above the grass, edge further from the elm shadows into moonlit safety. I had forgotten where I was within a few yards of the enclosed trees of the Zoological Gardens...

The author was a friend of the Rossetti family and familiar with all the literary figures of the period. Although he wrote and edited almost forty books under his own name he is best known now for novels such as The Sin Eater that were written under the pseudonym of Fiona MacLeod.

One mild March some years ago...I was on Primrose Hill about midnight...I was given to mounting its grassy slope occasionally o' nights, partly for the sake of the scintillating view on fine evenings and the sealike mass of the foliage of Regent's Park, and the Zoological Gardens, and partly for the free play of air at that relatively high and uncontaminated spot of smoky London. It used to be a favourite resort on warm June and July nights for those who preferred a couch on the soft grass to a weary tramp of the pavements or the hard mercies of a stone seat or iron-clamped wooden bench. I have seen more than a score of sleepers, apart from the many couples who lingered long and late on that rather bare and prosaic Mons Amoris

Stumbling over a recumbent figure in the darkness, he makes the acquaintance of a young self-proclaimed genius and subsequently invites him home for the night.