Part 7
What does the Cockney's mind first register when, far from home, he visualizes the London that he loves with the casual devotion of his type? To the serious tourist London is the shrine of England's history; to the ordinary artist, who sees life in line and colour, it is a city of noble or delicate "bits"; to the provincial it is a playground; to the business man a market; but to the Cockney it is one big club, odourous of the goodly fellowship that blossoms from contact with human-kind.
"Far from the madding crowd" may express the longings of the modern Simeon Stylites, but your Cockney is no Simeon. He doesn't pray to be put upon an island where the crowds are few. The thicker the crowd, the more elbows that delve into his ribs, the hotter the steam of human-kind, the happier he is. Far from the madding crowd be blowed! Man's place, he holds, is among his fellows; and he sniffs with contempt at this widespread desire to escape from other people. To him it is a sign of an unhealthy mind, if not pure blasphemy.
So, when he thinks of London, he does not think of a city of palaces, or serene architectural triumphs; of a huckster's mart or a playground. At the word "London" he sees people: the crowds in the Strand, in Walworth Road, Lavender Hill, Whitechapel Road, Camden Town High Street.
Your moods may be various, and London will respond. You may work, you may idly dream away the hours, or you may actively enjoy yourself in play; but if you wish that supreme enjoyment--the enjoyment of other people--then London affords opportunities in larger measure than any city that I know.
I discovered the magic and allure of crowds when I was fourteen years old and worked as office-boy in those filthy alleys marked in the Postal Directory as "E.C." Streets and crowds became my refreshment and entertainment then, and my palate is not yet blunted to their savour. I do not want the flowery mead or the tree-covered lane or the insect-ridden glade--at least, not for long; and I hate that dreadful hollow behind the little wood. Give me six o'clock in the evening and a walk from the City to Oxford Circus, through the soft Spring or the darkling Autumn, with festive feet whispering all around you, and your heart filled with that grey-green romance which is London.
Once out of Newgate Street and across Holborn Viaduct I was happy, for I was, so to speak, in a foreign country; so wholly different were the people of Holborn from the people of Cheapside. The crowds of the City had always to me, a mean, craven air about them. They walked homeward with lagging steps and worn faces. They seemed always preoccupied with paltry problems. They carried the stamp of their environment: a dusty market-place, in which things made by more adept hands and brains are passed from wholesale place to wholesale place with sorry bargaining on the odd halfpenny.
But West and West Central were a pleasuance of the finer essences, and involuntarily body and soul assumed there a transient felicity of gait. One walked and thought suavely. There were noble shops, brilliant theatres, dainty restaurants, highways whose sole business was pleasure, rent with gay lights and oh! so many delightful people. At restaurant and theatre doors one might pause pensively and touch finger-tips, as it were, with rose-leaf grace and beauty and fine comradeship; a refreshing exercise after encounters with the sordid and the uncouth in Gracechurch Street. Then, when the hoofs clattered and the motors hooted and the whistles blew, and streets were drenched with festal light and festal folk, I was, I felt, abroad. Figure to yourself that you are walking through the streets of Teheran, or Stamboul, or Moscow, surrounded by strange bazaars and people who seem to have stepped from some book of magic so far removed are they from your daily interests. So did I feel as I walked down Piccadilly. It was suffocating to think that there were so many streets to explore, so many types to meet and to know. I wanted then to make heaps and heaps of friends--not, I must confess, for friendship--but just for the sake of meeting people who did interesting and gracious things, and for the sake of knowing that I _had_ a host of friends. The plashing of the fountains in Trafalgar Square, the lights of the Alhambra and Empire seen through the green trees of Leicester Square, the procession of 'buses along Holborn and Oxford Streets, the alluring teashops of Piccadilly and the scornful opulence of the hotels--these things sank into me and became part of me.
My way to the City lay through Leicester Square, and the morning crowd in that quarter bears for me still the same charm. On a bright Spring day it might be Paris. There is a sense of space and sparkle about it. The little milliners' girls, in piquant frocks, evoke memories of Louise, and the crowding curls on their cheeks waft a perfume of youth-time lyrics, chiming softly against the more strident and repulsively military garb of the girl porters and doorkeepers. The cleaners, bustling about the steps of the music-halls, throw adumbrations of entertainment on the morning streets. People are leisurely busy in an agreeable way--not the huckstering E.C. way.
In Piccadilly Circus there is the same sense of light and song among the crowds emerging from the Tube. The shops are decked in all the colours of the Maytime, and not one little workgirl but pauses to throw a mute appeal to the posturing silks and laces and pray that the lily-wristed, wanton damsel of Fortune will turn a hand in her direction.
But in the City, as I have said, there is little of this delight to be found, either at morning, noon or night. The typical crowd of this district may be seen at London Bridge, where, from eight to half-past ten in the morning and from half-past five to half-past seven in the evening, the dispirited toilers swarm to or from work. Indeed, it is not a crowd: it is a _cortège_, marching to the obsequies of hope and fear. It is a funeral march of marionettes. Here are no gay colours; no smiles; no persiflage. All is sombre. Even the typists and the little workgirls make no effort towards bright raiment; all is dingy and soiled, not with the clean dirt that hangs about the barges and wharves on the river, but with the mustiness of old ledgers and letter-files. Listless in the morning and taciturn in the evening are these people; and to watch them for an hour from the windows of the Bridge House Hotel is to suffer an attack of spiritual dyspepsia. For, among them, are men who have crossed that bridge twice daily for thirty years, walking always on the same side, always at the same pace, and arriving at the other end at precisely the same minute. There are men who began that daily journey with bright boyish faces, clean collars, and their first bowler hats, brave with the importance of working in the City. Their hearts were fired with dreams and ambition. They had heard tales of office-boys who, by industry, had been taken eventually into partnership. They received their first rise. Later, they achieved the romantic riches of thirty shillings a week. They made the acquaintance of a girl in their suburban High Street. They married. And now, at forty-five, all ambition gone, they are working in the same murky corner of the same office, and maintaining wife and child on three pounds a week. Their trousers are frayed and bag at the knees. Their coats are without nap or grace. Two collars a week suffice. Gone are the shining dreams. They have "settled down," without being conscious of the fact, and will make that miserable journey, with other sombre and silent phantoms, until the end. Verily, the London Bridge crowd of respectables is the most tragic of all London crowds, and the bridge itself a _via dolorosa_.
I do not know why work in the City should produce a more deadening effect on the souls of the workers than work in other quarters, but the fact that it does is recognized by all students of Labour conditions. I have worked in all quarters, and have noticed a curious change of outlook when I moved from the City to Fleet Street, or from Fleet Street to Piccadilly. You shall notice it, too, in the faces of the lunch-time crowds. East of St. Paul's, the note is apathy. Coming westward, just to Fleet Street, you perceive a change. Here boys and girls, men and women, seem to take an interest in things; one understands that they like their work. They do not regard it as a mere routine, to be dragged through somehow until the clock releases them.
A similar study in crowd psychology awaits you at the Tube stations in the early hours of the evening, when the rush is on. With elbows wedged into your ribs, and strange hot breaths pouring down your neck, you need all the serenity you have stored against such contingencies; and the attitude of the other people about you can mitigate your distress or enhance it. The City and South London crowd is not the kind of crowd that can bear its own troubles cheerfully, or help others to bear theirs. I would never wish to go on a day's holiday with any of its people. Their composite frame of mind is one of weak anger, expressive of "Why isn't Something Done? What's the use of going on like this?"
More comely is the St. James's Park or Westminster crowd. From five to half-past six these stations receive a steady stream of sweet and merry little girls from the mushroom Government Departments that have spawned all about this quarter. It is girls, girls, girls, all the way, with the feeble and the aged of the male species toiling behind.
On the Bakerloo you find a crowd that is--well, "rorty" is the only word. The people here are mostly southbound for the Elephant and Castle; and you know the Elephant and Castle and its warm, impetuous life. There are bold youths who have not fallen, like their fathers, to the cajolery of a collar-and-cuff job in the City, but have taken up the work that offers the best pecuniary reward. Grimy youths they are, but full of vitality, and they pour down the staircase in a Niagara of humanity.
An excellent centre for observing the varying moods of the evening crowd is Villiers Street, that gentle slope from which you may reach Charing Cross Station, the Hampstead Tube, the District Railway, or the Embankment trams. It is a finely mixed company, for, as any Londoner will tell you, the residents of the hundred suburbs differ from one another in manner, accent and appearance, even as the natives of different continents. Those who are using the Hampstead Tube are sharply marked from those who are taking the Embankment car to Clapham Junction; while those who are journeying on the South-Eastern to Croydon have probably never heard of Upton Park, whither the District will carry others. There are well-dressed people and ill-dressed people; some who are going home to soup, fish, a _soufflé_ and coffee, with wine and liqueurs; and some who are going home to "tea," at about eight o'clock--bread-and-margarine and bloater paste, with a pint of tea, or, occasionally, a bit of tripe and onions. There are people in a mad hurry, and others who move in aloof idleness. And above them all stand the stalwart Colonials, waiting until 6.30, when the bars shall open, airily inspecting the troops of girls and comparing notes.
"Say now, jes' watch here. Here comes a real Fanny."
"Ah, gwan. I ain' got no time for Fannies. I finished wid 'em. Gimme beer, every time."
I have often wanted to make a song of Villiers Street, but I have never been able to catch just the essence of its atmosphere. I am sure, though, that the modern orchestra offers opportunities for one of our new composers to embrace it in an overture. No effort has been made, so far as I know, to interpret in music the noisy soul of the London crowds. Elgar's "Cockaigne" overture and Percy Grainger's "Handel in the Strand" were both retrospective in spirit, and the real thing yet remains to be done. It has been done on the Continent by Suppé ("Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna"), by Sibelius in his "Finlandia," by Massenet in his "Southern Town," and by Dvorák in "Carneval Roman." I await with eagerness a "Morning, Noon and Night at Charing Cross," scored by a born Cockney.
SATURDAY NIGHT
The origins of Saturday night, as a social institution, are obscure. No doubt a little research would discover them to the earnest seeker, but I am temperamentally averse from anything like research. It is tedious in process and disappointing in result. Successful research means grasping at the reality and dropping the romance.
The outstanding fact about Saturday night is that it is an exclusively British institution. Neither America nor the Continent knows its precious joys. It is one of the few British institutions that reconcile me to being an islander. It is a festival that is observed with the same casual ritual in the London slums and in Northumberland mining villages; in Scottish hills and in the byways of the Black Country; in Camden Town High Street and in the hamlets of the Welsh marches. Certainly, so long as my aged elders can carry their memories, and the memories of their fathers before them, Saturday night has been a festival recognized in all homely homes. Strange that it has only once been celebrated in literature.
It is, as it were, a short grace before the meal of leisure offered by the Sabbath; a side-dish before the ample banquet; a trifling with the olives of sweet idleness. On Saturday night the cares of the week are, for a space, laid aside, and men and women gather with their kind for amiable chatter and such mild conviviality as the times may afford. Then the bonds of preoccupation are loosed, and men escape for dalliance with the lighter things of life. Then the good gossips in town and country take their sober indulgence in the social amenities. In village street, or raucous town highway, they will pause between shops to greet this or that neighbour and discuss affairs of mutual concern.
On Saturday night is kept the festival of the String Bag, one of those many rigid feasts of the people that find no place in the Kalendar of the Prayer Book. Go where you will about the country on this night, and you will witness the celebration of this good domestic saint by the cheerful and fully choral service of Shopping. Go to East Street (Walworth Road); to St. John's Road (Battersea); to Putney High Street; to Stratford Broadway; to Newington Butts; to Caledonian Road; to Upper Street (Islington); to Norton-Folgate; to Kingsland Road; to Salmon Lane (Limehouse); to Mare Street (Hackney); to the Electric Avenue (Brixton); to Powis Street (Woolwich); to the great shopping centres of provincial cities or to the easier market-places of the rural district, and you will find this service lustily in progress; the shops lit with a fresh glamour for this their special occasion. You will taste a something in the air--a sense of well-being, almost of carnival--that marks this night from other nights of the week. You will see Mother hovering about the shops and stalls, her eye peeled for the elusive bargain, while Father, or one of the children, stands away off with the bag; and when the goodwife has achieved all that she set out to do, and the string bag is distended like an overfed baby, then comes the crowning joy of the feast, when the shoppers slip together into the private bar of the "Green Dragon" or the "White Horse," and compare notes with other Saturday-nighters and condemn the beer.
Saturday night is also, in millions of homes, Bath Night; another of the pious functions of this festival; and for this ceremony the attendance of the heads of the household is compulsory. Then the youngsters, according to their natures, howl with delight or alarm as their turn for the tub approaches. They will be scrubbed by Mother and dried by Father; and when the whole brood is well and truly bathed and packed off to bed, the elders will depart with the string bag, and perchance, if shopping be expeditiously accomplished, take it, well-filled, to the second house of the local Empire or Palace.
Do you not remember--unless you were so unfortunate as to be brought up in what are called well-to-do surroundings--do you not remember the tingling delight that was yours when, to ensure correct behaviour during the week, the prospect was dangled before you of going shopping on Saturday night? Many Saturday nights do I recall, chiefly by association with these shopping expeditions, when I was permitted to carry the string bag; and the shopping expeditions again are recalled through the agency of smell. Never does my memory work so swiftly as when assisted by the nose; I am a bit of a dog in that way. When I catch the hearty smell of a provision shop, I leap back twenty-five years and I see the tempestuous Saturday-evening lights of Lavender Hill from the altitude of three-foot-six; and I remember how I would catalogue shop smells in my mind. There were the solemn smell of the furniture shop; the wholesome smell of the oilshop; the pungent smell of the chemist's; the potent smell of the "Dog and Duck", where I received my weekly heart-cake; the stiff smell of the linen-drapers'; the overpowering odour of the boot-shop, and the aromatic perfume of the grocer's; all of which, in one grand combination, present the smell of Saturday night: a smell as sharp and individual as the smell of Sunday morning or the smell of early-closing afternoon in the suburbs. If Rip van Winkle were to awake in any town or village on Saturday night, he would need no calendar to name for him the day of the week: the smell, the aspect, and the temper of the streets would surely inform him.
But lately Saturday night has come under control, and the severe hand of authority has wrenched away the most of its delight. Not now may the String Baggers express their individuality in shopping. Having registered for necessary comestibles at a given shop, they enjoy no more the sport of bargain-hunting, or of setting rival tradesmen in cheerful competition. Not now may the villagers crowd the wayside station for their single weekly railway trip to the neighbouring town, where was larger scope for the perfect shopper than the native village could afford. No more may the earnest London Saturday-nighter journey by tram or bus to outlying markets because the quality of the meat was better in that district than in his own, or the price of eggs a penny lower--though, if the truth be known, these facts were mostly proffered as excuse for the excursion. No more do residents of Brixton travel to Clapham Junction for their Sunday stores, or the elegant ones of Streatham slink guiltily to Walworth Road. No more is Hampstead seen chaffering at the stalls of Camden Town, or Bayswater struggling gallantly about the shops of the Edgware Road and Kilburn.
The main function of Saturday night has died a dismal death. Still, the social side remains. Shopping of a sort still has to be done. One may still meet one's cronies in the market streets, and compare the bulk and quality of one's ration of this and that, and take a draught of insipid ale at the "Blue Pigeon", and talk of the untowardness of the times. But half of the savour is gone out of the week's event; and it is well that the Scots peasant made his song about it before it was controlled.
RENDEZVOUS
Although London possesses a thousand central points suitable for a street rendezvous, Londoners seem to have decided by tacit agreement to use only five of these for their outdoor appointments. They are: Charing Cross Post Office, Leicester Square Tube, Piccadilly Tube, under the Clock at Victoria, and Oxford Circus Tube; and I have never known my friends telephone me for a meeting and fix a rendezvous outside this list. Indeed, I can now, by long experience, place the habits and character of casual acquaintances who wish to meet me, from their choice among these places.
Thus, a Charing Cross Post Office appointment means a pleasure appointment. Here, at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon, wait the bright girls and golden boys, their faces, like living lamps, shining through the cloud of pedestrians as a signal for that one for whom they wait. And, though you be late in keeping the appointment, you may be certain that the waiting party will be in placid mood. There is so much to distract and delight you on this small corner. There are the bustle of the Strand and the stopping buses; the busy sweep of Trafalgar Square, so spacious that its swift stream of traffic suggests leisure; the hot smell of savouries rising from the kitchens of Morley's Hotel; and the cynical amusement to be drawn from a study of the meetings and encounters of other waiting folk. Hundreds of appointments have I kept at Charing Cross Post Office. I have met soldier-friends there, after an absence of three years. I have met cousins and sisters and aunts, and damsels who stood not in any of these relations. And I have met the Only One there, many, many times; often happily; often in trepidation; and sometimes in lyrical ecstasy, as when a quarrel and a long parting have received the benison of reconciliation. Now, I can never pass the Post Office without a tremor, for its swart, squat exterior is, for me, bowered with delicious thrills.
Never keep an appointment under the Clock at Victoria. A meeting here is fatal to the sweetness of the intercourse that is to follow. Always he or she who arrives first will be peevish or irate by the time the second party turns up; for Victoria Station, with its lowering roof, affects you with a frightful sense of being shut in and smothered. Turn how you will, sharply or gently, and you cannon with some petulant human, and, retiring apologetically from him, you impale your kidney region on some fool's walking-stick or umbrella. That fool asks you to look where you're going, and then he gets his from a truck-load of luggage. You laugh--bitterly. After three minutes of waiting in that violet-tinted beehive, you loathe your fellow-man; you loathe the entire animal kingdom. You "come over in one of them prickly 'eats." Your nerves flap about you like bits of bunting, and the new spring suit that set in such fine lines seems fit only for scaring birds. Then your friend arrives, and God help him if he's late!
I have watched these Victoria appointments many times while waiting for my train. The first party to the contract arrives, glances at the clock, and strolls to the bookstall, cheerfully swinging stick or umbrella. He strolls back to the clock, glances, compares it with his watch. Hums a bar or two. Coughs. A flicker of dismay shades his face. Then a handicapped runner for the 6.15 crashes violently against him in avoiding a platoon of soldiers, and knocks his hat over his eyes and his stick ten yards away. When the great big world ceases turning and he finds a voice, the offender has gone. The next glance he shoots at the clock is choleric. A slight prod from an old lady who wishes to find the main booking-office produces a spout of fury; and the comedy ends with a gestic departure, in the course of which he gets a little of his own back on other of his species. His final glance at the clock is charged with the pure essence of malevolence.