Part 7

And yet the sublime institution of the club is not a bit anæmic. Within a quarter of a mile is the monumental proof that the institution has been rejuvenated and ensanguined and empowered. Colossal, victorious, expensive, counting its adherents in thousands upon thousands, this monument scorns even the pretence of any ancient ideal, and adopts no new one. The aim of the club used ostensibly to be peace, idealism, a retreat, a refuge. The new aim is pandemonium, and it is achieved. The new aim is to let in the world, and it is achieved. The new aim is muscular, and it is achieved. Arms, natation, racquets--anything to subdue the soul and stifle thought! And in the reading-room, dummy hooks and dummy book-cases! And a dining-room full of bright women; and such a mad competition for meals that glasses and carafes will scarce go round, and strangers must sit together at the same small table without protest! And, to crown the hullaballoo, an orchestra of red-coated Tziganes swaying and yearning and ogling in order to soothe your digestion and to prevent you from meditating.

This club marks the point to which the evolution of the sublime institution has attained. It has come from the shore of Lake Michigan; it is the club of the future, and the forerunner of its kind. Stand on its pavement, and watch ‘its entering heterogeneous crowds, and then throw the glance no more than the length of a cricket-pitch, and watch the brilliantly surviving representatives of feudalism itself ascending and descending the steps of the most exclusive club in England; and you will comprehend that even when the House of Lords goes, something will go--something unconsciously cocksure, and perfectly creased, and urbane, and dazzlingly stupid--that was valuable and beautiful. And you will comprehend politics better, and the profound truth that it takes all sorts to make a world.

IV--THE CIRCUS

The flowers heaped about the bronze fountain are for them. And so that they may have flowers all day long, older and fatter and shabbier women make their home round the fountain (modelled by a genius to the memory of one whose dream was to abolish the hardships of poverty), with a sugar-box for a drawing-room suite and a sack for a curtain; these needy ones live there, to the noise of water, with a secret society of newspaper-sellers, knowing intimately all the capacities of the sugar-box and sack; and on hot days they revolve round the fountain with the sun, for their only sunshade is the shadow of the dolphins. On every side of their habituated tranquillity the odours of petrol swirl. The great gaudy-coloured autobuses, brilliant as the flowers, swing and swerve and grind and sink and recover, and in the forehead of each is a blackened demon, tremendously preoccupied, and so small and withdrawn as to be often unnoticed; and this demon rushes forward all day with his life in his hand and scores of other lives in his hand, for two pounds a week. When he stops by the fountain, he glances at the flowers unseeing, out of the depths of his absorption. He is piloting cargoes of the bright beings for whom the flowers are heaped.

Stand on the steps of the fountain, and look between the autobuses and over the roofs of taxis and the shoulders of policemen, and you will see at every hand a proof that the whole glowing place, with its flags gaily waving and its hubbub of rich hues, exists first and last for those same bright beings. If there is a cigar shop, if there is a necktie shop like Joseph’s coat, it is to enable the male to cut a dash with those beings. And the life insurance office--would it continue if there were no bright beings to be provided for? And the restaurants I And the I chemists! And the music-hall! The sandwich-men are walking round and round with the names of the most beauteous lifted high on their shoulders. The leather shop is crammed with dressing-cases and hat-boxes for them. The jeweller is offering solid gold slave-bangles (because they like the feel of the shackle) at six pound ten.

And above all there is the great establishment on the corner! An establishment raised by tradition and advertisement and sheer skill to the rank of a national institution, famous from Calgary to the Himalayas, far more famous and beloved than even the greatest poets and philanthropists. An institution established on one of the seven supreme sites of the world! And it is all theirs, all for them! Coloured shoes, coloured frocks, coloured necklaces, coloured parasols, coloured stockings, jabots, scents, hats, and all manner of flimsy stuffs whose names--such as Shantung--summon up in an instant the deep orientalism of the Occident: the innumerable windows are a perfect riot of these delicious affairs! Who could pass them by? This is a wondrous institution. Of a morning, before the heat of the day, you can see coming out of its private half-hidden portals (not the ceremonious glazed doors) black-robed young girls, with their hair down their backs, and the free gestures learnt at school and not yet forgotten, skipping off on I know, not what important errands, earning part of a livelihood already in the service of those others. And at its upper windows appear at times more black-robed girls, and disappear, like charming prisoners in a castle.

*****

The beings for whom the place exists come down all the curved vistas towards it, on foot or on wheel, all day in radiant droves. They are obliged at any rate to pass through it, for the Circus is their Clap-ham Junction, and the very gate of finery. Impossible to miss it! It leads to all coquetry, and all delights and dangers. And not only down the vistas are they coming, but they are shot along subterranean tubes, and hurried through endless passages, and flung up at last by lifts from the depths into the open air. And when you look at them you are completely baffled. Because they are English, and the most mysterious women on earth, save the Scandinavians. You cannot get at their secret; it consists in an impenetrable ideal. With the Latin you do come in the end to the solid marble of Latin practicalness; the Latin is perfectly unromantic. But the romanticism of these English is something so recondite that no research and no analysis can approach it. Ibsen could never have made a play out of a Latin woman; but I tell you that, for me, every woman stepping off an autobus and exposing her ankles and her character as she dodges across the Circus, has the look in her face of an Ibsen heroine; she emanates romance and enigma; she is the potential mainspring of a late-Ibsen drama, the kind whose import no critic is ever quite sure of. This it is to be Anglo-Saxon, and herein is one of the grand major qualities of the streets of London.

They are in this matter, I do believe, all alike, these creatures. You may encounter one so ugly and mannish and grotesque that none but an Englishman could take her to his arms, and even she has the ineffable romantic gaze. All the countless middle-aged women who support circulating libraries have it; the hair of a woman of fifty blows about her face romantically. All the nice, youngish married women have it, those who think they know a thing or two. And as for the girls, the young girls, they show a romantic naïveté which transcends belief; they are so fresh and so virginal and so loose-limbed and so obsessed by a mysterious ideal, that really (you think) the street is too perilous a place for them. And yet they go confidently about, either alone or in couples, or with young men at bottom as simple as themselves, and naught happens to them; they must be protected by their idealism. And now and then you will see a woman who is strictly and truly _chic_, in the extreme French sense--an amazing spectacle in our city of sloppy women who, while dreaming of dress for ten hours a day, cannot even make their blouses fasten decently--and this _chic_ Parisianised creature herself will have kept her idealistic gaze! They all keep it. They die with it at seventy-five. Whatever adventure occurs to an Englishwoman, she remains spiritually innocent and naïve. The Circus is bathed in the mood of these qualities.

*****

Towards dark it alters and is still the same. See it after the performances on a matinée day, surging with heroines. See it at eight o’clock at night, a packed mass of taxis and automobiles, each the casket of a romantic creature, hurrying in pursuit of that ideal without a name. Later, the place is becalmed, and scarcely an Englishwoman is to be seen in it until after the theatres, when once again it is nationalised and feminised to an intense degree. The shops are black, and the flower-sellers are gone; but the electric sky-signs are in violent activity, and there is light enough to see those baffling faces as they flash or wander by. And the trains are now bearing the creatures away in the deep-laid tubes.

And then there comes an hour when the hidden trains have ceased, and the autobuses have nearly ceased, and the bright beings have withdrawn themselves until the morrow; and now, on all the footpaths of the Circus, move crowded processions of men young and old, slowly, as though in the performance of a rite. It leads to nothing, this tramping; it serves no end; it is merely idiotic, in a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon way. But only heavy rain can interfere with it. It persists obstinately. And the reason of it is that the Circus is the Circus. And after all, though idiotic, it has the merit and significance of being instinctive. The Circus symbolises the secret force which drives forward the social organism through succeeding stages of evolution. The origin of every effort can be seen at some time of day emerging from a crimson autobus in the Circus, or speeding across the Circus in a green taxi. The answer to the singular conundrum of the City is to be found early or late in the Circus. The imponderable spirit of the basic fact of society broods in the Circus forever. Despite all changes, there is no change. I say no change. You may gaze into the jeweller’s shop at the gold slave-bangles, which cannot be dear at six pound ten, since they express the secret attitude of an entire sex. And then you may turn and gaze at the face of a Suffragette, with her poster and her armful of papers, and her quiet voice and her mien of pride. And you may think you see a change fundamental and terrific. Look again.

V--THE BANQUET

In every large London restaurant, and in many small ones, there is a spacious hall (or several) curtained away from the public, in which every night strange secret things go on. Few suspect, and still fewer realise, the strangeness of these secret things.

In the richly decorated interior (sometimes marked with mystic signs), at a table which in space reaches from everlasting to everlasting, and has the form of a grill or a currycomb or the end of a rake--at such a table sit fifty or five hundred males. They are all dressed exactly alike, in black and white; but occasionally they display a coloured flower, and each man bears exactly the same species and tint and size of flower, so that you think of regiments of flowers trained throughout their lives in barracks to the end of shining for a night in unison on the black and white bosoms of these males. Although there is not even a buffet in the great room, and no sign of the apparatus of a restaurant, all these males are eating a dinner, and it is the same dinner. They do not wish to choose; they accept, reading the menu like a decree of fate. They do not inquire upon the machinery; a slave, unglanced at, places a certain quantity of a dish in front of them--and lo! the same quantity of the same dish is in front of all of them; they do not ask whence nor how it came; they eat, with industry, knowing that at a given moment, whether they have finished or not, a hand will steal round from behind them, and the plate will vanish into limbo. Thus the repast continues, ruthlessly, under the aquiline gaze of a slave who is also a commander-in-chief, manoeuvring his men silently, manoeuvring them with naught but a glance. With one glance he causes to disappear five hundred salad-plates, and with another he conjures from behind a screen five hundred ices, each duly below zero, and each calculated to impede the digesting of a salad. The service of the dinner is a miracle, but the diners, absorbed in the expectancy of rites to come, reck not; they assume the service as they assume the rising of the sun. Only a few remember the old, old days, in the ’eighties (before a cabal of international Jews had put their heads together and inaugurated a new age of miracles), when these solemn repasts were a scramble and a guerilla, after which one half of the combatants went home starving, and the other half went home glutted and drenched. Nowadays these repasts are the most perfectly democratic in England; and anybody who has ever assisted at one knows by a morsel of experience what life would be if the imaginative Tory’s nightmare of Socialism were to become a reality. But each person has enough, and has it promptly.

*****

The ceremonial begins with a meal, because it would be impossible on an empty stomach. Its object is ostensibly either to celebrate the memory of some deed or some dead man, or to signalise the triumph of some living contemporary. Clubs and societies exist throughout London in hundreds expressly for the execution of these purposes, and each! of them is a remunerative client of a large restaurant. Societies even exist solely in order to watch for the triumphs of contemporaries, and to gather in the triumphant to a repast and inform them positively that they are great. So much so that it is difficult to accomplish anything unusual, such as the discovery of one pole or another, or the successful defence of a libel action, without submitting to the ordeal of these societies one after the other in a chain, and emerging therefrom with modesty ruined and the brazen conceit of a star actor. But the ostensible object is merely a cover for the real object, the unadmitted and often unsuspected object: which is, to indulge in a debauch of universal mutual admiration. When the physical appetite is assuaged, then the appetite for praise and sentimentality is whetted, and the design of the mighty institution of the banquet is to minister, in a manner majestic and unexceptionable, to this base appetite, whose one excuse is its _naïveté_.

A pleasurable and even voluptuous thrill of anticipation runs through the assemblage when the chairman rises to open the orgy. Everybody screws himself up, as a fiddler screwing the pegs of a fiddle, to what he deems the correct pitch of appreciativeness; and almost the breath is held. And the chairman says: “Whatever differences may divide us upon other subjects, I am absolutely convinced, and I do not hesitate to state my conviction in the clearest possible way, that we are enthusiastically and completely agreed upon one point,” the point being that such and such a person or such and such a work is the greatest person or the greatest work of the kind in the whole history of the human race. And although the point is one utterly inadmissible upon an empty stomach, although it is indeed a glaring falsity, everybody at once feverishly endorses it, either with shrill articulate cries, or with deep inarticulate booming, or with noises produced by the shock of flesh on flesh, or ivory on wood, or steel on crystal. The uproar is enormous. The chairman grows into a sacramental priest, or a philosopher of amazing insight and courage. And everybody says to himself: “I had not screwed myself up quite high enough,” and proceeds to a further screwing. And in every heart is the thought: “This is grand! This is worth living for! This alone is the true reward of endeavour!” And the corporate soul muses ecstatically: “This work, or this man, is ours, by reason of our appreciation and our enthusiasm. And he, or it, is ours exclusively.” And, since the soul and the body are locked together in the closest sympathetic intimacy, all those cautious dyspeptic ones who have hitherto shirked danger, immediately put on courage like a splendid garment, and order the strongest drinks and the longest cigars that the establishment can offer. The real world fades into unreality; the morrow is lost in eternity; the moment and the illusion alone are real.

*****

The key of the mood is to be sought less in the speeches as they succeed each other than in the applause. For the applauders are not influenced by a sense of responsibility, or made self-conscious by publicity. They can be natural, and they are. What fear can prevent them from translating instantly their emotions into sound? By the applause, if you are a slave and non-participator, you may correct your too kindly estimate of men in the mass. Note how the most outrageous exaggeration, the grossest flattery, the most banal platitude, the most fatuous optimism, gain the loudest approval. Note how any reservation produces a fall of temperature. Note how the smallest jokes are seized on ravenously, as a worm by a young bird. And note always the girlish sentimentality, ever gushing forth, of these strong, hard-headed males whose habit is to proverbialise the sentimentality of women.

The emotional crisis arrives. Feeling transcends the vehicle of speech, and escapes in song. And one guest, honoured either; for some special deed of his own or because his name has been “coupled” with some historic deed or movement, remains sitting, in the most exquisite self-consciousness that human ingenuity ever brought about, while all the rest fling hoarsely at him the fifteen sacred words of a refrain which in its incredible vulgarity surpasses even the National Anthem.

The reaction is now not far off. But owing to several reasons it is postponed yet awhile. The honoured guest’s response is one of the chief attractions of the night. Very many diners have been drawn to the banquet by the desire to inspect the honoured guest at their leisure, to see his antics, to divine his human weaknesses and his ridiculous side. And, moreover, the honoured guest must give praise for praise, and lie for lie. He is bound by the strictest conventions of social intercourse to say in so many words: “Gentlemen, you are the most enlightened body of men that I ever had the good fortune to meet; and your hospitality is the greatest compliment that I have ever had, or ever shall have, or could conceive. Each of you is a prince of the earth. And I am a worm.” And then there are the minor speeches, finishing off in detail the vast embroidery of laudation which was begun by the Chairman. Everybody is more or less enfolded in that immense mantle. And everybody is satisfied and sated, save those who have sat through the night awaiting the sweet mention of their own names, and who have been disappointed. At every banquet there are such. And it is they who, by their impatience, definitely cause the reaction at last. The speakers who terminate the affair fight against the reaction in vain. The applause at the close is perfunctory--how different from the fever of the commencement and the hysteria of the middle! The illusion is over. The emotional debauch is finished. The adult and bearded boys have played the delicious make-believe of being truly great, and the game is at an end; and each boy, looking within, perceives without too much surprise that he is after all only himself. A cohort “of the best,” foregathered in the cloakroom, say to each other, “Delightful evening! Splendid! Ripping!” And then one says, ironically leering, in a low voice, and a tone heavy with realistic disesteem: “Well, what do you think of--?” Naming the lion of the night.

VI--ONE OF THE CROWD

He comes out of the office, which is a pretty large one, with a series of nods--condescending, curt, indifferent, friendly, and deferential. He has detestations and preferences, even cronies; and if he has superiors, he has also inferiors. But whereas his fate depends on the esteem of a superior, the fate of no inferior depends on his esteem. When he nods deferentially he is bowing to an august power before which all others are in essence equal; the least of his inferiors knows that. And the least of his inferiors will light, on the stairs, a cigarette with the same gesture, and of perhaps the same brand, as his own--to signalise the moment of freedom, of emergence from the machine into human citizenship. Presently he is walking down the crammed street with one or two preferences or indifferences, and they are communicating with each other in slang, across the shoulders of jostling interrupters, and amid the shouts of newsboys and the immense roaring of the roadway. And at the back of his mind, while he talks and smiles, or frowns, is a clear vision of a terminus and a clock and a train. Just as the water-side man, wherever he may be, is aware, night and day, of the exact state of the tide, so this man carries in his brain a time-table of a particular series of trains, and subconsciously he is always aware whether he can catch a particular train, and if so, whether he must hurry or may loiter. His case, is not peculiar. He is just an indistinguishable man on the crowded footpaths, and all the men on the footpaths, like him, are secretly obsessed by the vision of a train just moving out of a station.