Part 6
These casualties are happening constantly--they are so common they are scarcely reported, even in local papers; but what becomes of the widows and orphans?
A man's wages on the trawlers are 14s. a week, _when his boat is at sea_.
"They ought to be included in the Compensation Act," I suggested to a boatman.
"Who is to pay the compensation?" he asked.
I suggested the smack owners.
"Oh, they couldn't afford it"; they couldn't afford more wages; couldn't afford anything. They also were to be numbered amongst those deserving unfortunate classes of disinterested British capitalists who are living on their losses. Yet one doesn't hear of _their_ starving in the winter, of _their_ being drowned in quest of a precarious livelihood, of _their_ widows and orphans being gathered into the workhouse. Nor the boatbuilders, nor the sailmakers, nor the Billingsgate "wholesalers," nor any of the men connected with the trade, except those who do the actual work of catching the fish.
Their poverty is apparent to all the world; the difficulty of getting even a bare living by the fisheries is bringing competition for employment even into the lifeboat. Lifeboatmen may earn 30s. in a winter's night by going out to a wreck, and may get as much as £10 per man in one haul if they recover salvage. That is "big money" to fishermen; so it comes to pass that even that business is tarnished with a sordid taint.
"The coastguard had no business to fire their rocket-line," said a fisherman to me, speaking of the wreck above described; "we was in the water first and was entitled to the pay. Besides," he continued, following up a train of thought which is horrible to pursue, "they needn't be in such a hurry to take the bread from us lifeboatmen: _it's only half a crown each they'd get for firing the rocket_."
I heard ugly hints of vessels purposely cast away to recover insurance; and I heard a well-dressed townsman, who spoke with considerable warmth, and evidently with knowledge, utter bitter sneers at the rapacity of certain boatmen who had "made salvage a business," and who "always won their actions-at-law against the owners because counsel artfully worked on the jurymen's feelings by glowing accounts of the men's pluck and perils."
"And do you deny the peril of the work?" I asked.
"No," he admitted, "it's risky enough, but it pays better than fishing, and that's about as risky."
"You would not care to do it yourself, I presume?"
"Not me!" he answered, with a chuckle; "I should hope I'd got a better mark on. But to make a ten-pound note, those beggars, why, they'd face hell!"
* * * * *
If there be a devil his name is Money.
Fresh from the hands of the gods, we are the exquisite instruments upon which they play divine music. But comes Money to play upon us, and the strings become jangled, harsh, and out of tune. If there were no money--if none were tempted for lack of it to sell themselves, if none were driven by excess of it to wallow in porcine gutters--how brave, noble, and lovable were Man!
The stock question that Yorkshire weavers ask of one another on meeting, is one we might fitly ask of our Civilisation, "What soorts are yo' makin' now?"
The nearer the knuckle of civilisation we seek, the less shall we find of the cool, fearless, manly air of my Gorleston lifeboatman.
Civilisation is not making those "soorts," Nature preserves the monopoly of manufacture; civilisation succeeds only in spoiling them.
LONDON PRIDE AND COCKNEY CLAY
From drinking fiery poison in a den Crowded with tawdry girls and squalid men, Who hoarsely laugh and curse and brawl and fight: I wake from day dreams to this real night.
JAMES THOMSON.
Since I met the Lancashire excursionist at Lowestoft I have been wondering what is the essential distinction between the Cockney-tripper and the holiday-maker one meets at New Brighton, Douglas, or Blackpool.
We were tightly packed in the shelter on the promenade waiting the end of the thunderstorm. There were two native boys singing a temperance song to the tune of "There's nae luck aboot the hoose," translated to a dirge with a drawling refrain of "No d-r-r-rink! no d-r-r-rink for me!"
This they would whisperingly sing, with stealthy inquiring glances at the people who pressed about them, and then hysterically giggle. But the stolid, respectable crowd of "visitors" from London, stiff with the recent dignity of seeing their names printed in the visitors' list (with "Esquire" at the end!) would not stoop to notice these frivolous ebullitions. They stolidly glowered with heavy impassive glare, oblivious, it seemed, not only of the boys, but also of each other.
Now this starchiness would not have been remarkable in Southport or Folkestone, where one meets so many pompous, old, superior persons, puffed up with the importance of their little pension, annuity, or snug, retiring hoard; nor in Scarborough, where many visitors are genuine "toffs," and naturally privileged to look down upon the common herd.
But this crowd at Lowestoft consisted unmistakably of the genteel working class--the clerks at £150 to £300 a year, the small shopkeepers, the--in short, the genteel working class.
In Lancashire this class, though disposed to a sort of blunt arrogance at home, become humanised when holiday-making. They will condescend to fuse with their "inferiors," and when united, as in this case, by common misfortune, they will even condescend to be affable.
Not so the genteel workman of Cockaigne.
That he is a workman he never remembers; that he is genteel he never forgets.
Even when he has divested himself of his customary frock-coat and tall silk hat, he remains still clothed with his cumbrous and sombre gentility. It is to him as valour was to his forebears. It serves him in lieu of honour or religion. His gentility is of his possessions the most sacred: rather than that, he would lose his honesty, his manliness, and his humanity.
The silence was broken by the irruption of a bustling newcomer, who, as he shook his dripping cap, cheerily cried, "Good Laur! it does come down!"
He looked round for acknowledgment, but the genteel gentlemen from London stonily stared into vacancy.
Undiscouraged, the newcomer took off his mackintosh, offered a jest about the weather, beamed cordially upon the crowd, and playfully cuffed the ears of the boy who demanded, "No d-r-r-rink, no d-r-r-rink for me."
"All right," he said, "if you don't want any drink, you needn't cry about it. I'll take your share when the whisky comes."
Again he glanced round with an inviting smile, but the petrified images looked remote, unfriendly, melancholy, slow.
But this chilliness troubled him no more than a frosty morning troubles the jovial sun. He beamed and glowed and laughed and talked, and, despite themselves, the genteel glaciers thawed.
"That man," I said to myself, "comes from the North."
His next speech told of storms he had seen--at Blackpool! of seas washing over the promenade wetting him "three streets back."
One of the gentlemen from London cast a look of curiosity.
The man from the North went on to tell how he had taken a day's sail from Blackpool, and, being unable to land there at night, had been carried to Fleetwood, and thence back by rail after midnight.
"How was that?" asked the gentleman who had looked interested; "haven't they a pier at Blackpool?"
Fancy that to a Blackpoolite! It was as if one had asked a sailor whether he had ever seen the sea, a Scotch reporter whether he had tasted whisky, a French soldier whether he had ever heard the "Marseillaise," or a Southport man whether he knew what sand was.
It did my heart good in that strange land upon that cheerless day to hear the man from the North pour out his volcanic eloquence in Blackpool's praise.
I grieve to be compelled to admit that some of his statements struck me as inaccurate. For instance, I thought he was wrong in describing the promenade as ten miles long, and I think he was not justified in stretching the Tower to double the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
I cast a glance of mild rebuke upon him when he added that the Winter Gardens were "something like the Crystal Palace, and Earl's Court put together," and I gasped when he represented Uncle Tom's Cabin as "a sort of shandygaff of Buckingham Palace and Olympia!".
I felt that if I didn't check him the man would rupture himself.
I touched him on the shoulder. "I have lived at Blackpool myself," I said.
"There you are," he continued, without turning a hair; "this gentleman will confirm what I'm telling you. Aren't all these South of England watering-places slow as compared with Blackpool?"
"Well," I said, "none of them have such variety of amusements."
"If you want amusement," said the Cockney gentleman who had offered the cue about the pier, "if you want amusement, you should try Yarmouth."
"Yarmouth!" cried the North of England man, with an expression of superb disdain. "Bah! Yarmouth is vulgar!"
* * * * *
It was lovely! After his praise of Blackpool it was sublime. I saluted him respectfully and departed with a soul full of awe.
For I had not then seen Yarmouth. On the next day I did.
Then my wonder vanished.
I had seen something of the Yarmouth yahoos at Gorleston.
For the democratic price of twopence, steamers bring them up the river, past the teeming wharves and shipbuilding yards of the Yare, and belch them forth to stare upon Gorleston's "slowness."
Our placid Gorleston sun smiled on their hurry and pain with its customary calm complacency. Our lazy Gorleston sea rocked itself benignly with its usual hushing swish. Our deliberate Gorleston sea-gulls indolently flapped their wings.
And the Yarmouth yahoos yawned and hastened away in disgust.
* * * * *
But at Yarmouth, their feet are, as it were, upon their own wicket; their deportment was to the manner born.
See them shying at skittles or cocoanuts, gorging on stout and shellfish, bustling, breathless but roaring, from "entertainment" to "entertainment." How hot they look! how they perspire! and how they shout! Do they really amuse themselves? I wonder.
They all seek happiness, these good brothers and sisters of ours; but surely they run away from it that so distress themselves in its pursuit. To "get on," to "do" the utmost possible in the shortest possible time, to eclipse their fellows, to make haste and yet more haste, and ever more haste--that, in pleasure as in toil, is ever their aim.
For a right-down, regular, blaring, flaring, glaring, tearing, staring, devil-may-caring hullabaloo, Blackpool on August Bank Holiday is peculiar.
But between the Lancashire and the Cockney-tripper there is an essential difference which is not in the Southerner's favour.
The Northern tripper may be rowdy, but there is a redeeming quality of broad joviality, good-tempered companionship in his razzling, that mellows and softens its asperity. But the Cockney-tripper, from his exasperating accent to his infuriating concertina, is aggressively, blatantly, harshly coarse. There is a self-sufficient "cockiness" about him that soars above all compromise and defers to nothing and to nobody. His profanity is more raucous and vicious than the Northerner's, his ebriety more ribald, brutal, and swinish. Armed with his customary concertina, or his still more harrowing occasional cornet, 'Arry is a terror to shudder at.
His 'Arriet, too, is infinitely coarser than the worst specimen of the Lancashire mill-girl.
The shrieking sisterhood of the flaunting feathers and marvellously beaded and bugled tippets, swagger along in serried bands, five and six feet deep. Arm in arm they come, lifting their skirts high in impudent dance as they lurch to and fro, giggling hysterically, and shouting vocal inanities with shrill and piercing insistence.
There is nothing more distressing in all England than the spectacle of these unfortunate persons in their hours of mirth. In all England there is no poverty more pitiful than the conspicuous poverty of their resources of pleasure.
To raise as much noise as they can, to make themselves as offensive as possible to the quietly disposed, to spoil natural beauties and break things,--these seem to be the aims of their enjoyment.
If they find a pleasant stretch of clean sand, where barefooted children happily disport themselves, they will fill the place with lurid profanity, and departing leave behind them a Tom Tiddler's heap of broken bottles, threatening the security and comfort of every playing baby in the neighbourhood. If they find a pretty flower-garden, where they are politely requested to "keep off the grass," they will deliberately and purposely trample on the sequestered patch, to prove their insolent superiority over regulations framed for their and the general public's profit and advantage.
Oh, but it is sad to see! There is nothing more depressing, more crushing to one's aspirations for the people's greater and truer liberty.
The usurer's greed, the tyranny of upstart wealth, labour's subjection and dependence, poverty's hunger--all these may be cured; but what shall be done with yahoos whose chief delight lies in spoiling the enjoyment of others?
Ah, me! I wish I had not been to Yarmouth.
MY INTRODUCTION TO RESPECTABILITY
It was a Sunday in London--gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look to them out of windows in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the plague were in the city, and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people.
CHARLES DICKENS.
When, as a boy of ten (driven from Paris by General Trochu's proclamation before the siege as a _bouche inutile_), I first set my eyes on the world's metropolis, my impressions were not favourable. Ugh! that first Sunday in London! It was like a day of death, a day among the tombs.
What a change from the Paris of the Third Empire!
I had been suddenly translated from an airy, flower-festooned apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens, to a dirty brick lodging-house in the Pentonville Road, with a soot-garden in front and a dingy penitentiary across the way.
Never before had I seen a brick house, soot-garden, or penitentiary; and novelty for once failed to lure my youthful eye.
It was then that the purple-faced landlady in the rusty black gown assured my father that the place was "exceedingly respectable."
"What is that?" asked my elder brother John in French--"_c'est tres quoi?_"
"Respectable," repeated my father.
"Respectable," quoth John. "What we call _triste, hein_?"
And my father, who was ever grave as a tetrarch, smiled.
I knew only two or three English phrases then, such as "I am pretty and vell; how vos you?" "If you please," "menny of zem," etc. etc.
Never till then had I heard the British national word; and when my father explained that "respectability" meant "_une nature honorable_," we boys looked out at the soot-garden and penitentiary, and marvelled why honour in London looked so dirty.
The next day was Sunday, and our landlady furnished us with the name of a "most respectable" church near Clerkenwell Prison.
But John expressed a suspiciously fervent and pious desire to attend service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and when my mother looked hard at him he blushed. That settled it. I was ordered to put on my new Sunday boots, and go with him.
When we got outside, John took the precaution, by way of a start, to box my ears for being an artful little _mouchard_, and then set off as fast as he could go, with a view to leaving me behind.
His legs were long, mine were short, and I wore my Sunday boots. Besides, I was hindered by rude insular boys, who stood in my way pointing to my Parisian headgear, and shouting barbarian phrases which I have since recognised as "Who's your 'atter?"
We ran, as I have since ascertained, through Euston Square, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury Square, Bedford Square, twice round Russell Square, and then somehow got back to Euston. Then John stopped. The fact was he was lost. But he put a bold front on the matter, and said we would go and dance with the London 'prentice lads and fair-haired Saxon maids, first at Westminster and then at Tower Green. He told me he had seen pictures in which the youth of Britain, in gaily-coloured attire, were shown dancing round garlanded and festooned poles. He fancied the sports were held at Westminster. But was sure some were held on Tower Hill. Was I brave enough to join the venture and risk the after-part?
I was a nice, well-meaning boy, but before his dazzling array of temptations I fell at once.
John knew a little English--learnt at the Lycée St. Louis--but, as he confided to me after several interviews with the ignorant Londoners, these persons did not understand their own tongue; and it seemed to take a long time to teach it them.
So we trudged again through the dreadful, dreary, desolate squares, with their carefully railed regulation patches of soot-gardens, and indefinable, uniform air of hypochondriacal blight.
I believe we should have walked round and round those grim and forbidding dwelling-boxes all day, had we not, after many attempts, discovered a man who knew a little French, and who offered to take us down to Westminster.
John asked him about the Squares. "Are they barracks?" he said, "or workmen's dwellings?"
"_Mais, non_," answered our guide, looking shocked, "they are the dwellings of the most respectable people."
Again that mystic word "respectable." Again the atmosphere of dignified dumps and dingy sulkiness. And father had told us that "respectability" was "an honourable nature." London honour seemed a sad thing.
The story of that day's spree ought to be published as a Sunday-school tract. It was the most chastening experience I ever underwent.
A few months later we were in the midst of barricades and street massacres in Paris; but even that weird experience has left no such impression of blank and heavy gloom upon my memory as the dismal reconnaissance into the London Sabbath and British respectability whereof this is the true account.
Those miles of deserted and colourless streets under the narrow glimpses of leaden sky, with the solitary heavy figure of the large British policeman everlastingly in the foreground--_mon Dieu!_ in what clammy, icy bands of unrelieved wretchedness they strangled the exuberance of our boyish hearts upon that dull September Sunday!
Besides, I wore my Sunday boots.
The man who spoke French, or who, at least, understood some of John's English, left us at Charing Cross, and we went on alone to the joyous dance and revels of Westminster.
John had mentioned them to the man, so far as his resources would allow; but the man only shook his head and muttered something about Cremorne, which John explained to me, must be the name of the queen of the revels.
And when we got there--oh dear! oh dear!--frosty-faced, dun-coloured, British matrons and virgins with ivory-backed prayer-books were streaming out of the Abbey, and a drizzling chilly rain and mist had begun to fall over the scene, when John, distracted and discomfited, stumbled over the boots of the customary policeman.
"_Milles pardons!_" said John, lifting his hat, "but ve seek vere ze girls and boys dance ze Sunday."
"Daunce!" replied the heavy policeman, "daunce a' Sundays? Nice, respectable little boys you must be, I down't think!"
We didn't understand all he said, but we heard the chilly word "respectable," and didn't get warm again till we had run to the City.
To tell all the adventures of that terrible day would be to repeat, with variations, the tale I've told so far. The City finished our spirits. Even liquorice-water would not raise one's courage in these "catacombs with the roof off," as John aptly described the tomb-like streets.
And the Tower, which John had represented to me as a sort of Versailles or Fontainebleau, with fountains, flower-beds, and avenues on the exterior, and British lions, crowns, and a plentiful supply of beheaded traitors constantly on view inside, was the last straw.
It was, as the usual policeman told John, "closed on Sundays."
Then I fell upon a seat, repentant, and vowed I'd tell my mother.
Finally, we compromised, on my brother's promising to pay the omnibus fare home, for the which I was to declare that we had lost our way, and to deny that we had been upon the spree.
I felt that I could do this without injury to my conscience, and when we returned to the soot-garden I did it.
John got a hiding all the same, and I didn't offer myself as a substitute; for my feet were very sore, and I felt that he was a wicked boy who deserved all the chastisement he could get.
In the days which followed, my understanding of "respectability" was much ripened.
There was another family in the house.
Its head was a fat old lady with corkscrew ringlets (I'd never seen corkscrew ringlets before), who sat everlastingly in front of the fire, like Patience in a hair-seated rocking-chair (I'd never seen a hair-seated chair before), toasting endless slices of bread (I'd never seen toast before). There were her two thin, middle-aged, maiden daughters, who were perfect types of the British old maid (and I'd never seen an old maid before). There was also a son, who washed up the pots, and occasionally went out into the garden to feed the hens, dressed in a pair of shabby gaiters, a rusty tall hat, and a cane.
The landlady informed us that they were a family of the highest respectability. They never paid any rent, and owed money to all the tradesmen in the neighbourhood; but they always went to church on Sundays and were most respectable people.
My mother asked why the son didn't go to work.
"Work?" said the landlady, with a pitying smile. "None of the Ropers were ever known to work. The family is too respectable."
There was another thing I saw for the first time in that house, and that was a drunken woman.
The landlady, robbed of rent and food by the Ropers, who were too respectable to be turned out, had grown poor and dismal, and had taken to pawn her belongings for gin. I had never heard of gin before, nor ever seen a gin-palace. It was our landlady who bribed me for the first time to enter a London public-house--a flaring, reeking, typical London gin-palace. The sight and smell of the place filled me with a loathing which I have never forgotten.
But "here's a penny for yourself," said she, "and it's a most respectable house."
And that was my first introduction to English respectability.
No wonder that I preferred Parisian wickedness!
PARIS REVISITED
Other days come back on me With recollected music, though the tone Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan Of dying thunder on the distant wind.
BYRON.
The stock-in-trade of the ten-a-penny poets includes a serviceable allusion to the pleasure derivable from a re-visit, after a prolonged absence to a familiar scene of earlier years.