from themselves, to be somebody else, which is expressed, in the
nursery, by their delight in "dressing up," and, in later life, by their
delight in watching others pretend. But the child is the most happy
actor, for to children acting is as natural as eating, and their stage
work always convinces because they never consciously act--never, that
is, aim at preconceived effects, but merge their personalities wholly in
this or that idea and allow themselves to be driven by it. When to this
common instinct is added an understanding of stage requirements and a
sharp sense of the theatre, the result is pure delight. We live in a
little age, and, in the absence of great figures, we are perhaps prone
to worship little things, and especially to cultivate to excess the
wonder-child and often the pseudo-wonder-child. But the gifted
stage-children have a distinct place, for they give us no striving after
false quantities, no theatricality, and their effects are in proportion
to the strength of their genius. Of course, when they are submitted to
the training of a third-rate manager, they become mere mechanical dolls,
full of shrill speech and distorted posings that never once touch the
audience. You have examples of this in any touring melodrama. These
youngsters are taught to act, to model themselves on this or that adult
member of the company, are made conscious of an audience, and are
carefully prevented from being children. The result is a horror. The
child is only an effective actor so long as it does not "act." As soon
as these youngsters reach the age of fifteen or sixteen the dramatic
faculty is stilled, and lies dormant throughout adolescence. They are
useless on the stage, for, beginning to "find themselves," they become
conscious artists, and, in the theatrical phrase, it doesn't come off.
It is hardly to be expected that it should, for acting, of all the arts,
most demands a knowledge of the human mind which cannot be encompassed
even by genius at seventeen. That is why no child can ever play such a
part as that of the little girl in Hauptmann's "Hannele." Intuition
could never cover it. Nor should children ever be set to play it. The
child of melodrama is an impossibility and an ugliness. Children on the
stage must be childish, and nothing else. They must not be immature men
and women. Superficially, of course, as I have said, every child of
talent becomes world-weary and sophisticated; the bright surface of the
mind is dulled with things half-perceived. But this, the result of
moving in an atmosphere of hectic brilliance, devoid of spiritual
nourishment, is not fundamental: it is but a phase. Old-fashioned as the
idea may be, it is still true that artificial excitement is useful,
indeed necessary, to the artist; and conditions of life that would
spoil or utterly destroy the common person are, to him, entirely
innocuous, since he lives on and by his own self. And, though some stage
children may become prematurely wise, in the depths of their souls, they
must preserve, fresh and lovely, the child-spirit, the secret glory
shared by all children. If they lose that they have justification of any
kind.
There was a little girl on the London stage some few years ago whom I
have always remembered with joy. I first saw her accidentally at a
Lyceum pantomime, into which I strolled after a dull evening in Fleet
Street.
The theatre was drowned in a velvet gloom. Here and there sharp lamps
stung the dusks. There was a babble of voices. The lights of the
orchestra gleamed subtly. The pit was a mist of lilac, which shifted and
ever shifted. A chimera of fetid faces swam above the gallery rail. Wave
after wave of lifeless heads rolled on either side of me.
Then there was a quick bell; the orchestra blared the chord on, and I
sat up. Something seemed about to happen. Back at the bar was a clamour
of glass and popping cork, and bashful cries of "Order, please!" The
curtain rushed back on a dark, blank stage. One perceived, dimly, a high
sombre draping, very far upstage. There was silence. Next moment, from
between the folds, stole a wee slip of a child in white, who stood,
poised like a startled fawn. Three pale spot-limes swam uncertainly from
roof and wings, drifted a moment, then picked her up, focusing her
gleaming hair and alabaster arms. I looked at the programme.
It was Marjorie Carpenter.
The conductor tapped. A tense silence; and then our ears were drenched
in the ballet music of Delibes. Over the footlights it surged, and,
racing down-stage, little Marjorie Carpenter flung herself into it,
caressing and caressed by it, shaking, as it seemed, little showers of
sound from her delighted limbs. On that high, vast stage, amid the
crashing speed of that music and the spattering fire of the side-drums,
she seemed so frail, so lost, so alone that--oh! one almost ached for
her.
But then she danced: and if she were alone at first, she was not now
alone. She seemed at a step to people the stage with little companies of
dream.
I say she danced, and I must leave it at that. She gave us more than
dance; she gave us the spirit of Childhood, bubbling with delight, so
fresh, so contagious that I could have wept for joy of it. It was a
thing of sheer lyrical loveliness, the lovelier, perhaps, because of its
very waywardness and disregard of values. Here was no thing of trick and
limelight. It was Blake's "Infant Joy" materialized. She was a poem.
In the heated theatre, where the opiate air rolled like a fog, we sat
entranced before her--the child, elfish and gay and hungry for the
beauty of life; the child, lit by a glamorous light. Far below the
surface this light burns, and seldom is its presence revealed, save by
those children who live very close to Nature: gipsy and forest children.
But every child possesses it, whether bred in the whispering wood or
among sweetstuff shops and the Highbury 'buses; and I, for one,
recognized it immediately this lovely child carried it over the
footlights of the Lyceum Theatre.
Hither and thither she drifted like a white snowflake, but all the time
... dancing; and one had a sense of dumb amazement that so frail a
child, her fair arms and legs as slender as a flower-stem, should so
fill that stage and hold the rapt attention of a theatreful of people.
Here was evidence of something stronger than mere mastery of ballet
technique. Perfect her dancing was. There was no touch of that automatic
movement so noticeable in most child dancers. When she went thus or so,
or flitted from side to side of the stage, she clearly knew just why she
did it, why she went up-stage instead of down. But she had more than
mere technical perfection: she had personality, that strange,
intangible something so rare in the danseuse, that wanders over the
footlights. The turn of a foot, the swift side look, the awakening
smile, the nice lifting of an eyebrow--these things were spontaneous. No
amount of rehearsal or managerial thought could have produced effects so
brilliantly true to the moment.
I am not exaggerating. I am speaking quite literally when I say that,
for me, at that time, Marjorie Carpenter and her dancing were the
loveliest things in London. She danced as no child has ever danced
before or since, though, of course, it would never do to say so. It was
the most fragile, most evanescent genius that London had seen; and
nobody cared, nobody recognized it. It attracted no more attention that
the work of any other child-actress. Yet you never saw such gazelle-like
swiftness and grace.
When she had completed one dance, a new back-cloth fell, and she danced
again and yet again. I forget what she danced, but it spoke to me of a
thousand forgotten things of childhood. I know that I touched
finger-tips with something more generously pure and happy than I had met
for years. Through the hush of lights the sylvan music stole, and
Marjorie Carpenter stole with it, and every step of her whispered of
April and May.
The curtain fell. I was jerked back to common things. But I was in no
mood for them. The house applauded. It thought it was applauding
Marjorie Carpenter for her skill as a dancer. It was really worshipping
something greater--that elusive quality which she had momentarily
snatched from nothing and presented to them: the eternal charm and
mystery of Childhood.
A CHINESE NIGHT
LIMEHOUSE
_AT LIMEHOUSE_
_Yellow man, yellow man, where have you been?
Down the Pacific, where wonders are seen.
Up the Pacific, so glamorous and gay,
Where night is of blue, and of silver the day._
_Yellow man, yellow man, what did you there?
I loved twenty maids who were loving and fair.
Their cheeks were of velvet, their kisses were fire,
I looked at them boldly and had my desire._
_Yellow man, yellow man, what do you know?
That living is lovely wherever I go;
And lovelier, I say, since when soft winds have passed
The tides will race over my bosom at last._
_Yellow man, yellow man, why do you sigh?
For flowers that are sweet, and for flowers that die.
For days in fair waters and nights in strange lands.
For faces forgotten and little lost hands._
A CHINESE NIGHT
LIMEHOUSE
It was eight o'clock. We had dined in Soho, and conversed amiably with
Italian waiters and French wine-men. There were now many slack hours
before us, and nothing wherewith to tighten them. We stood in the
low-lit gaiety of Old Compton Street, and wondered. We were tired of
halls and revues; the theatres had started work; there was nothing left
but to sit in beer-cellars and listen to dreary bands playing ragtimes
and bilious waltzes.
Now it is a good tip when tired of the West, and, as the phrase goes, at
a loose end, to go East, young man, go East. You will spot a winner
every time, if it is entertainment you seek, by mounting the first
East-bound omnibus that passes. For the East is eternally fresh, because
it is alive. The West, like all things of fashion, is but a corpse
electrified. They are so tired, these lily-clad ladies and white-fronted
gentlemen, of their bloodless, wine-whipped frivolities. They want to
enjoy themselves very badly, but they do not know how to do it. They
know that enjoyment only means eating the same dinner at a different
restaurant, and afterwards meeting the same tired people, or seeing the
same show, the same songs, jests, dances at different houses. But
Eastward ... there, large and full, blossoms Life--a rather repellent
Life, perhaps, for Life is always that. Hatred, filth, love, battle, and
death--all elemental things are here, undisguised; and if elemental
things repel you, my lamb, then you have no business to be on this
planet. Night, in the particular spots of the East to which these pages
take you, shows you Life in the raw, stripped of its silken wrappings;
and it is of passionate interest to those for whom humanity is the only
Book. In the West pleasure is a business; in the East it is recreation.
In the East it may be a thinner, poorer body, but it is alive. The
people are sick, perhaps, with toil; but below that sickness there is a
lust for enjoyment that lights up every little moment of their evening,
as I shall show you later, when we come to Bethnal Green, Hoxton, and
the athletic saloons. You may listen to Glazounoff's "L'Automne
Bacchanale" at the Palace Theatre, danced by Pavlova, but I should not
look in Shaftesbury Avenue or Piccadilly for its true spirit. Rather, I
should go to Kingsland Road, Tunnel Gardens, Jamaica Road; to the
trafficked highways, rent with naphthas, that rush about East India
Dock. There, when the lamps are lighted, and bead the night with tears,
and the sweet girls go by, and throw their little laughter to the
boys--there you have your true Bacchanales.
So, leaving the fixed grin of decay in Coventry Street, we mounted a
motor-'bus, and dashed gaily through streets of rose and silver--it was
October--and dropped off by the Poplar Hippodrome, whose harsh signs lit
the night to sudden beauty.
To turn from East India Dock Road to West India Dock Road is to turn,
contradictorily, from West to East, from a fury of lights and noise and
faces into a stillness almost chaste. At least, chaste is the first word
you think of. In a few seconds you feel that it is the wrong epithet.
Something ... something there is in this dusky, throttled byway that
seems to be crawling into your blood. The road seems to slink before
you; and you know that, once in, you can only get out by retracing your
steps or crossing into the lost Isle of Dogs. Against the wrath of
October cloud, little low shops peer at you. In the sharp shadows their
lights fall like swords across your path. The shuttered gloom of the
eastern side shows strangely menacing. Each whispering house seems an
abode of dread things. Each window seems filled with frightful eyes.
Each corner, half-lit by a timid gas-jet, seems to harbour unholy
features. A black man, with Oriental features, brushes against you. You
collide with a creeping yellow man. He says something--it might be
Chinese or Japanese or Philippinese jargon. A huge Hindoo shuffles,
cat-like, against the shops. A fried-fish bar, its windows covered with
Scandinavian phrases, flings a burst of melodious light for which you
are grateful.
No; chaste was certainly not the right word. Say, rather, furtive,
sinister. You are in Limehouse. The peacefulness seems to be that
attendant upon underhand designs, and the twilight is that of people who
love it because their deeds are evil.
But now we come to Pennyfields, to the thunderous shadows of the great
Dock, and to that low-lit Causeway that carries such subtle tales of
flowered islands, white towns, green bays, and sunlight like wine. At
the mouth of Pennyfields is a cluster of Chinks. You may see at once
that they dislike you.
But my friend Sam Tai Ling will give us better welcome, I think; so we
slip into the Causeway, with its lousy shop-fronts decorated with
Chinese signs, among them the Sign of the Foreign Drug Open Lamp. At
every doorway stand groups of the gallant fellows, eyeing appreciatively
such white girls as pass that way. You taste the curious flavour of the
place--its mixture of camaraderie and brutality, of cruelty and pity and
tears; of precocious children and wrecked men--and you smell its
perfume, the week before last. But here is the home of Tai Ling, one of
the most genial souls to be met in a world of cynicism and dyspepsia: a
lovable character, radiating sweetness and a tolerably naughty goodness
in this narrow street. Not immoral, for to be immoral you must first
subscribe to some conventional morality. Tai Ling does not. You cannot
do wrong until you have first done right. Tai Ling has not. He is just
non-moral; and right and wrong are words he does not understand. He is
in love with life and song and wine and the beauty of women. The world
to him is a pause on a journey, where one may take one's idle pleasure
while others strew the path with mirth and roses. He knows only two
divisions of people: the gay and the stupid. He never turns aside from
pleasure, or resists an invitation to the feast. In fact, by our
standards a complete rogue, yet the most joyous I have known. Were you
to visit him and make his acquaintance, you would thank me for the
introduction to so charming a character. I never knew a man with so
seductive a smile. Many a time it has driven the virtuously indignant
heart out of me. An Oriental smile, you know, is not an affair of a
swift moment. It has a birth and a beginning. It awakens, hesitates,
grows, and at last from the sad chrysalis emerges the butterfly. A
Chinese smile at the full is one of the subtlest expressions of which
the human face is capable.
Mr. Sam Tai Ling keeps a restaurant, and, some years ago, when my ways
were cast about West India Dock Road, I knew him well. He was an old man
then; he is an old man now: the same age, I fancy. Supper with him is
something to remember--I use the phrase carefully. You will find, after
supper, that soda-mints and potass-water are more than grateful and
comforting.
When we entered he came forward at once, and such was his Celestial
courtesy that, although we had recently dined, to refuse supper was
impossible. He supped with us himself in the little upper room, lit by
gas, and decorated with bead curtains and English Christmas-number
supplements. A few oily seamen were manipulating the chop-sticks and
thrusting food to their mouths with a noise that, on a clear night, I
should think, could be heard as far as Shadwell. When honourable guests
were seated, honourable guests were served by Mr. Tai Ling. There were
noodle, shark's fins, chop suey, and very much fish and duck, and
lychee fruits. The first dish consisted of something that resembled a
Cornish pasty--chopped fish and onion and strange meats mixed together
and heavily spiced, encased in a light flour-paste. Then followed a
plate of noodle, some bitter lemon, and finally a pot of China tea
prepared on the table: real China tea, remember, all-same Shan-tung; not
the backwash of the name which is served in Piccadilly tea-shops. The
tea is carefully prepared by one who evidently loves his work, and is
served in little cups, without milk or sugar, but flavoured with
chrysanthemum buds.
As our meal progressed, the cafe began to fill; and the air bubbled with
the rush of labial talk from the Celestial company. We were the only
white things there. All the company was yellow, with one or two
tan-skinned girls.
But we were out for amusement, so, after the table hospitality, Sam took
us into the Causeway. Out of the coloured darkness of Pennyfields came
the muffled wail of reed instruments, the heart-cry of the Orient; noise
of traffic; bits of honeyed talk. On every side were following feet: the
firm, clear step of the sailor; the loud, bullying boots of the tough;
the joyful steps that trickle from "The Green Man"; and, through all
this chorus, most insistently, the stealthy, stuttering steps of the
satyr. For your Chink takes his pleasure where he finds it; not,
perhaps, the pleasure that you would approve, for probably you are not
of that gracious temperament that accords pity and the soft hand to the
habits of your fellows. Yet so many are the victims of the flesh, and
for so little while are we here, that one can but smile and be kind.
Besides, these yellow birds come from an Eastern country, where they do
not read English law or bother about such trifles as the age of consent.
Every window, as always, was closely shuttered, but between the joints
shot jets of slim light, and sometimes you could catch the chanting of
a little sweet song last sung in Rangoon or Swatow. One of these songs
was once translated for me. I should take great delight in printing it
here, but, alas! this, too, comes from a land where purity crusades are
unknown. I dare not conjecture what Bayswater would do to me if I
reproduced it.
We passed through Pennyfields, through clusters of gladly coloured men.
Vaguely we remembered leaving Henrietta Street, London, and dining in
Old Compton Street, Paris, a few hours ago. And now--was this Paris or
London or Tuan-tsen or Taiping? Pin-points of light pricked the mist in
every direction. A tom-tom moaned somewhere in the far-away.
It was now half-past ten. The public-house at the extreme end was
becoming more obvious and raucous. But, at a sudden black door, Sam
stopped. Like a figure of a shadowgraph he slid through its opening, and
we followed. Stairs led straight from the street to a basement
chamber--candle-lit, with two exits. I had been there before, but to my
companions it was new. We were in luck. A Dai Nippon had berthed a few
hours previously, and here was its crew, flinging their wages fast over
the fan-tan tables, or letting it go at Chausa-Bazee or Pachassee.
It was a well-kept establishment where agreeable fellows might play a
game or so, take a shot of opium, or find other varieties of Oriental
delight. The far glooms were struck by low-toned lanterns. Couches lay
about the walls; strange men decorated them and three young girls in
socks, idiotically drunk. Small tables were everywhere, each table
obscured in a fog of yellow faces and greasy hair. The huge scorbutic
proprietor, Ho Ling, swam noiselessly from table to table. A lank figure
in brown shirting, its fingers curled about the stem of a spent pipe,
sprawled in another corner. The atmosphere churned. The dirt of years,
tobacco of many growings, opium, betel-nut, bhang, and moist flesh
allied themselves in one grand assault on the nostrils. Perhaps you
wonder how they manage to keep these places clean. That may be answered
in two words: they don't.
On a table beneath one of the lanterns squatted a musician with a reed,
blinking upon the company like a sly cat, and making his melody of six
repeated notes.
Suddenly, at one of the tables was a slight commotion. A wee slip of a
fellow had apparently done well at fan-tan, for he slid from his corner,
and essayed a song--I fancy it was meant to be "Robert E. Lee"--in his
seaman's pidgin. At least, his gestures were those of a ragtime
comedian, and the tune bore some faint resemblance. Or is it that the
ragtime kings have gone to the antiquities of the Orient for their
melodies? But he had not gone far before Ho Ling, with the dignity of a
mandarin, removed him. And the smell being a little too strong for us,
we followed, and strolled to the Asiatics' Home.
The smell--yes. There is nothing in the world like the smell of a
Chinatown in a Western city. It is a grand battle between a variety of
odours, but opium prevails. The mouth of West India Dock Road is foul
with it. For you might as well take away a navvy's half-pint of beer as
deprive a Chink of his shot of dope and his gambling-table. Opium is
forbidden under the L.C.C. regulations, and therefore the Chink sleeps
at a licensed lodging-house and goes elsewhere for his fun. Every other
house in this quarter is a seamen's lodging-house. These hotels have no
lifts, and no electric light, and no wine-lists. You pay threepence a
night, and you get the accommodation you pay for. But then, they are not
for silk-clad ossifications such as you and me. They are for the lusty
coloured lads who work the world with steam and sail: men whose lives
lie literally in their great hands, who go down to the sea in ships and
sometimes have questionable business in great waters.
These India Docks are like no other docks in the world. About their
gates you find the scum of the world's worst countries; all the peoples
of the delirious Pacific of whom you have read and dreamed--Arab,
Hindoo, Malayan, Chink, Jap, South Sea Islander--a mere catalogue of the
names is a romance. Here are pace and high adventure; the tang of the
East; fusion of blood and race and creed. A degenerate dross it is, but,
do you know, I cannot say that I don't prefer it to the well-spun gold
that is flung from the Empire on boat-race nights. Place these fellows
against our blunt backgrounds, under the awful mystery of the City's
night, and they present the finest spectacle that London affords.
You may see them in their glory at the Asiatics' Home, to which we now
came. A delightful place, this home for destitute Orientals; for it has
a veranda and a compound, stone beds and caged cubicles, no baths and a
billiard-table; and extraordinary precautions are taken against
indulgence of the wicked tastes of its guests. Grouped about the giant
stove are Asiatics of every country in wonderful toilet creations. A
mild-eyed Hindoo, lacking a turban, has appropriated a bath-towel. A
Malay appears in white cotton trousers, frock-coat, brown boots, and
straw hat; and a stranded Burmese cuts no end of a figure in under-vest,
steward's jacket, yellow trousers and squash hat. All carry a knife or a
krees, and all are quite pleasant people, who will accept your Salaam
and your cigarette. Rules and regulations for impossibly good conduct
hang on the walls in Hindustani, Japanese, Swahili, Urdu, and Malayan.
All food is prepared and cooked by themselves, and the slaughter of an
animal for the table must be witnessed and prayed upon by those of their
own faith. Out in the compound is a skittle-alley, where the boys stroll
and play; and costumes, people, and setting have all the appearance of
the _ensemble_ of a cheap revue.
I suppose one dare not write on Limehouse without mentioning
opium-rooms. Well, if one must, one must, though I have nothing of the
expected to tell you. I have known Limehouse for many years, and have
smiled many times at the articles that appear perennially on the
wickedness of the place. Its name evokes evil tradition in the public
mind. There are ingenuous people who regard it as dangerous. I have
already mentioned its sinister atmosphere; but there is an end of it.
There is nothing substantial. These are the people who will tell you of
the lurking perils of certain quarters of London--how that there are
streets down which, even in broad daylight, the very police do not
venture unaccompanied. You may believe that, if you choose; it is simply
a tale for the soft-minded with a turn for the melodramatic. There is no
such thing as a dangerous street in London. I have loafed and wandered
in every part of London, slums, foreign quarters, underground, and
docksides, and if you must have adventure in London, then you will have
to make your own. The two fiercest streets of the metropolis--Dorset
Street and Hoxton Street--are as safe for the wayfarer as Oxford Street;
for women, safer. And the manners of Limehouse are certainly a lesson to
Streatham Hill.