Part 18

A whisky that night with the father! In the course of the whisky you contrive to let him gather that you, too, keep an eye on the share-market, and that you have travelled a great deal. In another twenty-four hours you are perfectly at home in the boarding-house, greeting people all over the place, and even stopping on the stairs to converse. Rather a jolly house! Really, some very decent people here, indeed! Of course there are also some with whom the ice is never broken. To the end you and they glaringly and fiercely pretend to be blind when you meet. You reconcile yourself to this; you harden yourself. As for new-comers, you wish they would not be so stiff and so absurdly aristocratic. You take pity on them, poor things!

But father and daughter remain your chief stand-by. They overstay you (certainly unlimited wealth), and they actually have the delightful idea of seeing you off at the station. You part on terms that are effusive. You feel you have made friends for life--and first-class friends. You are to meet them again; you have sworn it.

By the time you get home you have forgotten all about them.

V--TEN HOURS AT BLACKPOOL

Manchester is a right place to start from. And the vastness of Victoria Station--more like London than any other phenomenon in Manchester--with its score of platforms, and its subways romantically lighted by red lamps and beckoning pale hands, and its crowds eternally surging up and down granitic flights of stairs---the vastness of this roaring spot prepares you better than anything else could for the dimensions and the loudness of your destination. The Blackpool excursionists fill the twelfth platform from end to end, waiting with bags and baskets: a multitude of well-marked types, some of the men rather violently smart as to their socks and neckties, but for the most part showing that defiant disregard of appearances which is perhaps the worst trait of the Midland character. The women seem particularly unattractive in their mack-intoshed blousiness--so much so that the mere continuance of the race is a proof that they must possess secret qualities which render them irresistible; they evidently consult their oculists to the neglect of their dentists: which is singular, and would be dangerous to the social success of any other type of woman.

“I never _did_ see such a coal-cellar, not in all my days!” exclaims one lady, apparently outraged by sights seen in house-hunting.

And a middle-aged tradesman (or possibly he was an insurance agent) remarks: “What I say is--the man who doesn’t appreciate sterling generosity--is no man!”

Such fragments of conversation illustrate the fine out-and-out idiosyncrasy of the Midlands.

The train comes forward like a victim, and in an instant is captured, and in another instant is gone, leaving an empty platform. These people ruthlessly know what they want. And for miles and many miles the train skims over canals, and tram-cars, and yards, and back-streets, and at intervals you glimpse a young woman with her hair in pins kneeling in sack-cloth to wash a grimy doorstep. And you feel convinced that in an hour or two, when she has “done,” that young woman, too, will be in Blackpool; or, if not she, at any rate her sister. *****

The station of arrival is enormous; and it is as though all the passenger rolling-stock of the entire country had had an important rendezvous there. And there are about three cabs. This is not the town of cabs. On every horizon you see floating terrific tramcars which seat ninety people and which ought to be baptised Lusitania and Baltic. You wander with your fellow men down a long street of cookshops with calligraphic and undecipherable menus, and at every shopdoor is a loud-tongued man to persuade you that his is the gate of paradise and the entrance to the finest shilling dinner in Blackpool. But you have not the courage of his convictions; though you would like to partake of the finest shilling dinner, you dare not, with your southern stomach in rebellion against you. You slip miserably into the Hotel Majestic, and glide through many Lincrusta-Walton passages to an immense, empty smoking-room, where there is one barmaid and one waiter. You dare not even face the bar.... In the end the waiter chooses your _apéritif_ for you, and you might be in London. The waiter, agreeably embittered by existence, tells you all about everything.

“This hotel used to be smaller,” he says. “A hundred and twenty. A nice select party, you know. Now it’s all changed. Our better-class clients have taken houses at St. Anne’s.. . . Jews! I should say so! Two hundred and fifty out of three hundred in August. Some of ‘em all right, of course, but they try to own the place. They come in for tea, or it may be a small ginger with plenty of lemon and ice, and when they’ve had that they’ve had their principal drink for the day.. . . The lift is altered from hydraulic to electricity. . . years ago. . .”

Meanwhile a client who obviously knows his way about has taken possession of the bar and the barmaid.

“I’ve changed my frock, you see,” says she.

“Changed it down here?” he demands.

“Yes. Well, I’ve been ironing. . . Oh! You monkey!”

In a mirror you catch her delicately chucking him under the chin. And, feeling that this kind of thing is not special to Blackpool, that it in fact might happen anywhere, you decide that it is time to lunch and leave the oasis of the Majestic and confront Blackpool once more.

*****

The Fair Ground is several miles off, and on the way are three piers, loaded with toothless young women flirting, and with middle-aged women diligently crocheting or knitting. Millions of stitches must be accomplished to every waltz that the bands play; and perhaps every second a sock is finished. But you may not linger on any pier. There is the longest sea-promenade in Europe to be stepped. As you leave the shopping quarter and undertake the vista of ten thousand boarding-house windows (in each of which is a white table full of knives and forks and sauce-bottles) you are enheartened by a banneret curving in the breeze with these words: “Flor de Higginbotham. The cigar that you come back for. 2d.” You know that you will, indeed, come back for it.. . . At last, footsore, amid a maze of gliding trams, your vision dizzy with the passing and re-passing of trams, you arrive at the Fair Ground. And the first thing you see is a woman knitting on a campstool as she guards the booth of a spiritualistic medium. The next is a procession of people each carrying a doormat and climbing up the central staircase of a huge lighthouse, and another procession of people, each sitting on a doormat and sliding down a corkscrew shoot that encircles the lighthouse. Why a lighthouse? A gigantic simulation of a bottle of Bass would have been better.

The scenic railway and the switchback surpass all previous dimensions in their kind. Some other method of locomotion is described as “half a mile of jolly fun.” And the bowl-slide is “a riot of joy.”

“Joy” is the key-word of the Fair Ground. You travel on planks over loose, unkempt sand, and under tethered circling Maxim aeroplanes, from one joy to the next. In the House of Nonsense, “joy reigns supreme.” Giggling also reigns supreme. The “human spider,” with a young woman’s face, is a source of joy, and guaranteed by a stentorian sailor to be alive. Another genuine source of joy is “‘Dante’s Inferno’ up to date.” Another enormous booth, made mysterious, is announced as “the home of superior enjoyments.” Near by is the abode of the two-headed giant, as to whom it is shouted upon oath that “he had a brother which lived to the height of twelve foot seven.” Then you come to the destructive section, offering joy still more vivid. Here by kicking a football you may destroy images of your fellow men. Or--exquisitely democratic invention--you can throw deadly missiles at life-sized dolls that fly round and round in life-sized motor-cars: genius is, in fact, abroad on the Fair Ground.

All this is nothing compared to the joy-wheel, certainly the sublimest device for getting money and giving value for it that a student of human nature ever hit upon. You pay threepence for admittance into the booth of the joy-wheel, and upon entering you are specially informed that you need not practise the joy-wheel unless you like; it is your privilege to sit and watch. Having sat down, there is no reason why you should ever get up again, so diverting is the spectacle of a crowd of young men and boys clinging to each other on a large revolving floor and endeavouring to defy the centrifugal force. Every time a youth is flung against the cushions at the side you grin, and if a thousand youths were thrown off, your thousandth grin would be as hearty as the first. The secret thought of every spectator is that a mixture of men and maidens would be even more amusing. A bell rings, and the floor is cleared, and you anticipate hopefully, but the word is for children only, and you are somewhat dashed, though still inordinately amused. Then another bell, and you hope again, and the word is for ladies only. The ladies rush on to the floor with a fearful alacrity, and are flung rudely off it by an unrespecting centrifugal force (which alone the attendant, acrobatic and stately, can dominate); they slide away in all postures, head over heels, shrieking, but the angel of decency seems to watch over their skirts.. . . And at length the word is for ladies and gentlemen together, and the onslaught is frantic. The ladies and gentlemen, to the number of a score or so, clutch at each other, making a bouquet of trousers and petticoats in the centre of the floor. The revolutions commence, and gain in rapidity, and couple after couple is shot off, yelling, to the periphery. They enjoy it. Oh! They enjoy it! The ladies, abandoning themselves to dynamic law, slither away with closed eyes and muscles relaxed in a voluptuous languor. And then the attendant, braving the peril of the wheel, leaps to the middle, and taking a lady in his arms, exhibits to the swains how it is possible to keep oneself in the centre and keep one’s damsel there too. And then, with a bow, he hands the lady back to her lawful possessor. Nothing could be more English, or more agreeable, than the curious contradiction of frank abandonment and chaste simplicity which characterises this extraordinary exhibition. It is a perfect revelation of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, and would absolutely baffle any one of Latin race.. . . You leave here because you must; you tear yourself away and return to the limitless beach, where the sea is going nonchalantly about its business just as if human progress had not got as far as the joy-wheel.

*****

After you have gone back for the cigar, and faced the question of the man on the kerb, “Who says Blackpool rock?” and eaten high tea in a restaurant more gilded than the Trocadero, and visited the menagerie, and ascended to the top of the Tower in order to be badgered by rather nice girl-touts with a living to make and a powerful determination to make it, and seen the blue turn to deep purple over the sea, you reach at length the dancing-halls, which are the justification of Blackpool’s existence. Blackpool is an ugly town, mean in its vastness, but its dancing-halls present a beautiful spectacle. You push your way up crowded stairs into crowded galleries, where the attendants are persuasive as with children--“_Please_ don’t smoke here”--and you see the throng from Victoria Station and a thousand other stations in its evening glory of drooping millinery and fragile blouses, though toothless as ever. You see it in a palatial and enormous setting of crystal and gold under a ceiling like the firmament. And you struggle to the edge and look over, and see, beneath, the glittering floor covered with couples in a strange array of straw hats and caps, and knickers, and tennis shoes, and scarcely a glove among the five hundred of them. Only the serio-comic M.C., with a delicately waved wand, conforms to the fashion of London. He has his hands full, has that M.C., as he trips to and fro, calling, with a curious stress and pause: “One--more couple please! One--more couple please!” And then the music pulsates--does really pulsate--and releases the multitude.. . . It is a sight to stir emotion. The waltz is even better. And then beings perched in the loftiest corners of the roof shoot coloured rays upon the floor, and paper snow begins to fall, and confetti to fly about, and eyes to soften and allure.. . .

And all around are subsidiary halls, equally resplendent, where people are drinking, or lounging, or flirting, or gloating over acrobats, monkeys and ballerinas. The tiger roars, the fountain tinkles, the corks go pop, the air is alive with music and giggling, the photographer cries his invitation, and everywhere there is the patter of animated feet and the contagion of a barbaric and honest gaiety.

Brains and imagination are behind this colossal phenomenon. For sixpence you can form part of it; for sixpence you can have delight, if you are young and simple and lusty enough. This is the huge flower that springs from the horrid bed of the factory system. Human creatures are half-timers for this; they are knocked up at 5.30 a.m. in winter for this; they go on strike for this; they endure for eleven months and three weeks for this. They all earn their living by hard and repulsive work, and here they are in splendour! They will work hard at joy till they drop from exhaustion. You can see men and women fast asleep on the plush, supporting each other’s heads in the attitudes of affection. The railway stations and the night-trains are waiting for these.

THE BRITISH HOME--1908

I--AN EVENING AT THE SMITHS’

Mr. Smith returns to his home of an evening at 6:30. Mr. Smith’s home is in a fairly long street, containing some dozens of homes exactly like Mr. Smith’s. It has a drawing-room and a dining-room, two or three bedrooms, and one or two attics, also a narrow hall (with stained glass in the front door), a kitchen, a bathroom, a front garden, and a back garden. It has a service of gas and of water, and excellent drains. The kitchen range incidentally heats the water for the bathroom, so that the bath water is hottest at about noon on Sundays, when nobody, wants it, and coldest first thing in the morning, and last thing at night, when everybody wants it. (This is a detail. The fact remains that when hot water is really required it can always be had by cooking a joint of beef.)

The house and its two gardens are absolutely private. The front garden is made private by iron rails; its sole purposes are to withdraw the house a little from the road and to enable the servant to fill up her spare time by washing tiles. The back garden is made private by match-boarding. The house itself is made private by a mysterious substance unsurpassed as a conductor of sound.

Mr. Smith’s home is adequately furnished. There may be two beds in a room, but each person has a bed. Carpets are everywhere; easy chairs and a sofa do not lack; linen is sufficient; crockery is plenteous. As for cutlery, Mr. Smith belongs to the only race in the world which allows itself a fresh knife and fork to each course of a meal. The drawing-room is the best apartment and the least used. It has a piano, but, as the drawingroom fire is not a constant phenomenon, pianists can only practise with regularity and comfort during four months of the year--hence, perhaps, a certain mediocrity of performance.

Mr. Smith sits down to tea in the dining-room. According to fashionable newspapers, tea as a square meal has quite expired in England. On six days a week, however, tea still constitutes the chief repast in about 99 per cent, of English homes. At the table are Mrs. Smith and three children--John, aged 25; Mary, aged 22; and Harry, aged 15. For I must inform you that Mr. Smith is 50, and his wife is very near 50. Mr. Smith gazes round at his home, his wife, and his children. He has been at work in the world for 34 years, and this spectacle is what he has to show for his labour. It is his reward. It is the supreme result. He hurries through his breakfast, and spends seven industrious hours at the works in order that he may have tea nicely with his own family in his own home of a night.

Well, the food is wholesome and sufficient, and they are all neat and honest, and healthy--except Mrs. Smith, whose health is not what it ought to be. Mr. Smith conceals his pride in his children, but the pride is there. Impossible that he should not be proud! He has the right to be proud. John is a personable young man, earning more and more every year. Mary is charming in her pleasant blouse, and Harry is getting enormous, and will soon be leaving school.

*****

This tea, which is the daily blossoming-time of the home that Mr. Smith and his wife have constructed with 26 years’ continual effort, ought to be a very agreeable affair. Surely the materials for pleasure are present! But it does not seem to be a very agreeable meal. There is no regular conversation. Everybody has the air of being preoccupied with his own affairs. A long stretch of silence; then some chaffing or sardonic remark by one child to another; then another silence; then a monosyllable from Mr. Smith; then another silence.

No subject of wide interest is ever seriously argued at that table. No discussion is ever undertaken for the sake of discussion. It has never occurred to anyone named Smith that conversation in general is an art and may be a diverting pastime, and that conversation at table is a duty. Besides, conversation is nourished on books, and books are rarer than teaspoons in that home. Further, at back of the excellent, honest, and clean mind of every Smith is the notion that politeness is something that one owes only to strangers.

When tea is over--and it is soon over--young John Smith silently departs to another home, very like his own, in the next street but one. In that other home is a girl whom John sincerely considers to be the pearl of womanhood. In a few months John, inspired and aided by this pearl, will embark in business for himself as constructor of a home.

Mary Smith wanders silently and inconspicuously into the drawing-room (it being, as you know summer) and caresses the piano in an expectant manner. John’s views as to the identity of the pearl of womanhood are not shared by another young man who lives not very far off. This other young man has no doubt whatever that the pearl of womanhood is precisely Mary Smith (an idea which had never entered John’s head); and he comes to see Mary every night, with the permission of her parents. The pair are, in fact, engaged. Probably Mary opens the door for him, in which case they go straight to the drawing-room. (One is glad to think that, after all, the drawingroom is turning out useful.) Young Henry has disappeared from human ken.

*****

Mr. Smith and wife remain in the dining-room, separated from each other by a newspaper, which Mr. Smith is ostensibly reading. I say “ostensibly,” for what Mr. Smith is really reading on the page of the newspaper is this: “I shall have to give something to John, something pretty handsome. Of course, there’s no question of a dowry with Mary, but I shall have to give something handsome to her, too. And weddings cost money. And I have no savings, except my insurance.” He keeps on reading this in every column. It is true. He is still worried about money, as he was 26 years ago. He has lived hard and honourably, ever at strain, and never had a moment’s true peace of mind: once it was the fear of losing his situation; now it is the fear of his business going wrong; always it has been the tendency of expenditure to increase. The fruit of his ancient immense desire to have Mrs. Smith is now ripe for falling. The home which he and she have built is finished now, and is to be disintegrated. And John and Mary are about to begin again what their parents once began. I can almost hear Mr. Smith plaintively asking the newspaper, as he thinks over the achieved enterprise of his home: Has it been a success? Is it a success?

II--THE GREAT MANNERS QUESTION

Let us forget that it is a home. Let us conceive it as a small collection of people living in the same house. They are together by accident rather than by design, and they remain together rather by inertia than by the fitness of things. Supposing that the adult occupants of the average house had to begin domestic life again (I do not speak of husbands and wives), and were effective^ free to choose their companions, it is highly improbable that they would choose the particular crew of; which they form part; it is practically certain that they would not choose it in its entirety. However, there they are, together, every day, every night, on a space of ground not perhaps more than twenty feet by twenty feet--often less. To find room to separate a little they live in layers, and it is the servant who is nearest heaven. That is how you must look at them.

Now it is, broadly speaking, a universal characteristic of this strange community that the members of it can depend upon each other in a crisis. They are what is called “loyal” to an extraordinary degree. Let one of them fall ill, and he can absolutely rely on tireless nursing.

Again, let one of them get into trouble, and his companions will stand by him, and if they cannot, or will not, help him materially, they will, at any rate, make sympathetic excuses for not doing so. Or let one of them sutler a loss, and he will instantly be surrounded by all the consolations that kindness can invent. Or let one of them be ill-spoken of, and every individual of the community will defend him, usually with heat, always with conviction.

*****

But I have drawn only the foul-weather picture. We come to the fine-weather picture. Imagine a stranger from the moon, to whom I had quite truthfully described the great qualities of this strange community presided over by Mr. Smith--imagine him invisibly introduced into the said community!

You can fancy the lunatic’s astonishment! Instead of heaven he would decidedly consider that he had strayed into an armed camp, or into a cage of porcupines. He would conclude, being a lunatic, that the members of the community either hated each other, or at best suffered the sight of each other only as a supreme act of toleration. He would hear surly voices, curt demands, impolite answers; and if he did not hear amazing silences it would be because you cannot physically hear a silence.

He would no doubt think that the truth was not in me. He would remonstrate: “But you told me--”

Then I should justify myself: “In a crisis,’ I said, my dear gentleman from the moon. I said nothing about ordinary daily life. Now you see this well-favoured girl who has been nagging at her brother all through tea because of some omission or commission--I can assure you that if, for instance, her brother had typhoid fever that girl would nurse him with the devotion of a saint. Similarly, if she lost her sweetheart by death or breach of promise, he would envelope her in brotherly affection.”

“How often does he have typhoid fever?” the lunatic might ask. “Once a month?”

“Well,” I should answer, “he hasn’t had it yet. But if he had it--you see!”

“And does she frequently get thrown over?”

“Oh, no! Her young man worships her. She is to be married next spring. But if--”

“And so, while waiting for crises and disasters, they go on--like this?”

“Yes,” I should defend my fellow-terrestrials. “But you must not jump to the conclusion that they are always like this. They can be just as nice as anybody. They are perfectly charming, really.”

“Well, then,” he might inquire, “how do they justify this behaviour to one another?”