definitely, that I loathe it. I hate to say this about any part of
London, but Kingsland Road is Memories ... nothing sentimental, but
Memories of hardship, the bitterest of Memories. It is a bleak patch in
my life; even now the sight of its yellow-starred length, as cruelly
straight as a sword, sends a shudder of chill foreboding down my back.
It is, like Barnsbury, one of the lost places of London, and I have met
many people who do not believe in it. "Oh yes," they say, "I knew that
'buses went there; but I never knew there really was such a place."
Many miles I have tramped and retramped on its pavements, filled with a
brooding bitterness which is no part of seventeen. Those were the days
of my youth, and, looking back, I realize that something, indeed, a
great deal, was missing. Youth, of course, in the abstract, is regarded
as a kingship, a time of dreams, potentialities, with new things waiting
for discovery at every corner. Poets talk of it as some kind of magic,
something that knows no barriers, that whistles through the world's dull
streets a charmed tune that sets lame limbs pulsing afresh. Nothing of
the kind. Its only claim is that it is the starting-point. Only once do
we make a friend--our first. Only once do we succeed--and that is when
we take our first prize at school. All others are but empty echoes of
tunes that only once were played.
There are fatuous folk who, having become successful and lost their
digestions, look back on their far youth, and talk, saying that their
early days, despite miseries and hardships, were really, now they regard
them dispassionately, the happiest of their lives. That is a lie. And
everybody, even he who says it, secretly knows it to be a lie. Youth is
not glorious; it is shamefaced. It is a time of self-searching and
self-exacerbation. It is a horrible experience which everybody is glad
to forget, and which nobody ever wants to repeat. It knows no zest. It
is a time of spiritual unrest, a chafing of the soul. Youth is cruel,
troubled, sensitive to futilities. Only childhood and middle-age can be
light-hearted about life: childhood because it doesn't understand,
middle-age because it does.
And a youth of poverty is, literally, hell. There is a canting phrase in
England to the effect that poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet if
there is one country in the world where poverty is a thing to be
superlatively ashamed of, that country is England. There never was an
Englishman who wasn't ashamed of being poor. I myself had a youth of
hardship and battle: a youth in which I invaded the delectable countries
of Literature and Music, and lived sometimes ecstatically on a plane
many degrees above everyday life, and--was hungry. Now, looking back,
when I have, at any rate, enough to live upon and can procure anything I
want within reason; though I am no longer enthusiastic about Art or
Music or Letters, and have lost the sharp palate I had for these things;
yet, looking back, I know that those were utterly miserable days, and
that right now I am having the happiest time of my life. For, though I
don't very much want books and opera and etchings and wines and
liqueurs--still, if I want them I can have them at any moment. And that
sense of security is worth more than a thousand of the temperamental
ecstasies and agonies that are the appanage of hard-up youth.
At that time, fired by a small journalistic success, I insulted the
senior partner of the City firm which employed me at a wicked wage, and
took my departure. Things went well, for a time, and then went ill.
There were feverish paradings of Fleet Street, when I turned out vivid
paragraphs for the London Letter of a Northern daily, receiving half a
crown apiece. They were wonderful paragraphs. Things seemed to happen in
London every day unknown to other newspapers; and in the service of that
journal I was, by the look of it, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, in five
places at once. But that stopped, and for some time I drifted, in a sort
of mental and physical stupor, all about highways and byways. I saw
naked life in big chunks. I dined in Elagabalian luxury at Lockhart's on
a small ditto and two thick 'uns, and a marine. I took midnight walks
under moons which--pardon the decadent adjectives--were pallid and
passionate. I am sure they were at that time: all moons were. Then, the
lightness of my stomach would rise to the head, so that I walked on air,
and brilliance played from me like sparks from a cat's back. I could
have written wonderful stuff then--had I the mind. I wandered and
wandered; and that is about all I remember. Bits of it come back to me
at times, though....
I remember, finally, sloughing through Bishopsgate into Norton Folgate,
when I was down to fifteen-and-sixpence. In Norton Folgate I found a
timid cocoa-room, and, careless of the future, I entered and gorged.
Sausages ... mashed ... bread ... tomatoes ... pints of hot tea.... Too,
I found sage wisdom in the counter-boy. He had been through it. We put
the matter into committee, and it was discussed from every possible
point of view. I learnt that I could get a room for next to nothing
round about there, and that there was nothing like studying the "Sits.
Vacant" in the papers at the Library; or, if there was anything like it,
it was trusting to your luck. No sense in getting the bleeding pip. As
he was eighteen and I was seventeen, I took his counsel to heart, and,
fired with a repletion of sausage and potato, I stalked lodgings through
the forests of Kingsland Road and Cambridge Road. In the greasy, strewn
highway, where once the Autonomie Club had its home, I struck Cudgett
Street--a narrow, pale cul-de-sac, containing fifty dilapidated
cottages; and in the window of the first a soiled card: "One Room to
Let."
The doorstep, flush with the pavement, was crumbling. The door had
narrowly escaped annihilation by fire; but the curtains in the
front-room window were nearly white. Two bare-armed ladies, with skirts
hiked up most indelicately behind them, were sloshing down their
respective doorsteps, and each wall was ragged with five or six frayed
heads thrust from upper windows for the silken dalliance of
conversation. However, it was sanctuary. It looked cheap. I knocked.
A lady in frayed alpaca, carrying a house-flannel, came to hearken. "Oh,
yerss. Come in. Half a jiff till I finished this bottom stair. Now
then--whoa!--don't touch that banister; it's a bit loose. Ver narsely
furnished you'll find it is. There. Half-a-crown a week. Dirt cheap,
too. Why, Mrs. Over-the-Road charges four for hers. But I can't. I ain't
got the cheek."
I tripped over the cocoanut mat. The dulled windows were draped with a
strip of gauze. The "narse furnicher" wasn't there. There was a chest of
drawers whose previous owner had apparently been in the habit of
tumbling into bed by candle-light and leaving it to splutter its decline
and shed its pale blood where it would. The ceiling was picked out with
fly-spots. It smelt--how shall I give it to you? The outgoing tenant had
obviously used the hearth as a spittoon. He had obviously supped nightly
on stout and fish-and-chips. He had obviously smoked the local
Cavendish. He had obviously had an acute objection to draughts of any
kind. The landlady had obviously "done up" the room once a week.... Now
perhaps you get that odour.
But the lady at my side, seeing hesitation, began a kind of paean on the
room. She sang it in its complete beauty. She dissected it, and made a
panegyric on the furniture in comparison with that of Mrs.
Over-the-Road. She struck the lyre and awoke a louder and loftier strain
on the splendour of its proportions and symmetry--"heaps of room here to
swing a cat"--and her rapture and inspiration swelled as she turned
herself to the smattering price charged for it. On this theme she
chanted long and lovingly and a hundred coloured, senescent imageries
leaped from the song.
Of course, I had to take it. And towards late afternoon, when the grey
cloak of twilight was beginning to be torn by the gas lamps, I had
pulled the whole place to pieces and found out what made it work. I had
stood it on its head. I had reversed it, and armlocked it, and committed
all manner of assaults on it. I had found twenty old cigarette ends
under the carpet, and entomological wonders in the woodwork of the
window. Fired by my example, the good lady came up to help, and when I
returned from a stroll she had garnished it. Two chairs, on which in my
innocence I sat, were draped with antimacassars. Some portraits of drab
people, stiffly posing, had been placed on the mantelshelf, and some
dusty wool mats, set off with wax flowers, were lighting the chest of
drawers to sudden beauty. In my then mood the false luxury touched me
curiously.
There I was and there I stayed in slow, mortifying idleness. _You_ get
stranded in Kingsland Road for a fortnight ... I wish you would. It
would teach you so many things. For it is a district of cold, muddy
squalor that it is ashamed to own itself. It is a place of narrow
streets, dwarfed houses, backed by chimneys that growl their way to the
free sky, and day and night belch forth surly smoke and stink of hops.
The poverty of Poplar is abject, and, to that extent, picturesque in its
frankness; there is no painful note of uncomely misery about it. But the
poverty of Kingsland is the diseased poverty of bead flowers in the
front room and sticky furniture on the hire system.
My first night was the same as every other. My window looked out on a
church tower which still further preyed on the wan light of the street,
and, as I lay in bed, its swart height, pierced by the lit clock face,
gloated stiffly over me. From back of beyond a furry voice came
dolefully--
Goo bay to sum-_mer_, goo bay, goo baaaaay!
That song has thrilled and chilled me ever since. Next door an Easy
Payments piano was being tortured by wicked fingers that sought after
the wild grace of Weber's "Invitation to the Valse." From the street the
usual London night sounds floated up until well after midnight. There
was the dull, pessimistic tramp of the constable, and the long rumble of
the Southwark-bound omnibus. Sometimes a stray motor-car would hoot and
jangle in the distance, swelling to a clatter as it passed, and falling
away in a pathetic _diminuendo_. A traction-engine grumbled its way
along, shaking foundations and setting bed and ornaments a-trembling.
Then came the blustering excitement of chucking-out at the "Galloping
Horses." Half a dozen wanted to fight; half a dozen others wanted to
kiss; everybody wanted to live in amity and be jollyolpal. A woman's
voice cried for her husband, and abused a certain Long Charlie; and Long
Charlie demanded with piteous reiteration: "Why don't I wanter fight?
Eh? Tell me that. Why don't I wanter fight? Did you 'ear what he called
me? Did you 'ear? He called me a--a--what was it he called me?"
Then came police, disbandment, and dark peace, as the strayed revellers
melted into the night. Sometimes there would sound the faint tinkle of a
belated hansom, chiming solitarily, as though weary of frivolity. And
then a final stillness of which the constable's step seemed but a part.
It was a period of chill poverty that shamed to recognize itself. I was
miserably, unutterably lonely. I developed a temper of acid. I looked
on the world, and saw all things bitter and wicked. The passing of a
rich carriage exasperated me to fury: I understood in those moments the
spirit that impels men to throw bombs at millionaires and royalties.
Among the furious wilds of Kingsland, Hackney, and Homerton I spent my
rage. There seemed to be no escape, no outlet, no future. Sometimes I
sat in that forlorn little room; sometimes I went to bed; sometimes I
wandered and made queer acquaintance at street corners; sometimes I even
scanned that tragic column of the _Daily Telegraph_--Situations Vacant.
Money went dribbling away. At "Dirty Dick's" you can get a quartern of
port for threepence, and gin is practically given away. Drink is a
curse, I know, but there are innumerable times when it has saved a man
from going under.... I wish temperance fiends would recognize this.
After a time, all effort and anxiety ceased. I became listless. I
neither wondered nor anticipated. I wandered about the Christmas
streets, amid radiant shops. The black slums and passages were little
gorges of flame and warmth, and in Morning Lane, where the stalls roared
with jollity, I could even snatch some of their spirit and feel,
momentarily, one of them. The raucous mile of Cambridge Road I covered
many times, strolling from lit window to lit window, from ragged smears
of lights to ragged chunks of dark. The multitudes of "Useful Presents,"
"Pretty Gifts," "Remarkable Value," "Seasonable Offerings" did not
tantalize me; they simply were part of another world. I saw things as
one from Mars.
That was a ghastly Christmas. Through the whole afternoon I
tramped--from Hackney to Homerton, thence to Clapton, to Stoke
Newington, to Tottenham, and back. Emptiness was everywhere: no people,
little traffic. Roofs and roads were hard with a light frost, and in the
sudden twilight the gleaming windows of a hundred houses shone out
jeeringly. Sounds of festivity disturbed the brooding quiet of the
town. Each side street was a corridor of warm blinds. Harmoniums,
pianos, concertinas, mouth organs, gramophones, tin trumpets, and voices
uncertainly controlled, poured forth their strains, mingling and
clashing. The whole thing seemed got up expressly for my disturbance. In
one street I paused, and looked through an unshaded window into a little
interior. Tea was in progress. Father and Mother were at table, Father
feeding the baby with cake dipped in tea, Mother fussily busy with the
teapot, while two bigger youngsters, with paper headdresses from the
crackers, were sprawling on the rug, engaged in the exciting sport of
toast-making. It made me sick. A little later the snow unexpectedly came
down, and the moon came out and flung long passages of light over the
white world, and forced me home to my room.
Next day, I had no food at all, and in the evening I sprawled on the
bed. Then things happened.
The opposite room on the same landing had been let to a girl who worked,
so I understood from my hostess, at the cork factory close at hand. She
came home every evening at about six, and the little wretch invariably
had a hot meal with her tea. It was carried up from below. It was
carried past my door. I could not object to this, but I could and did
object to the odour remaining with me. Have you ever smelt Irish stew
after being sixteen hours without food? I say I objected. What I said
was: "Can't you keep that damn stink out of my room?" Landlady said she
was sorry; didn't know it annoyed me; but you couldn't keep food from
smelling, could you?
So I slammed the door. A little later came a timid tap. I was still
lying on the bed, picturing for myself an end in the manner of a youth
named Chatterton, but I slithered off to answer the knock. Before I
could do so, the door was pushed softly open, and Miss Cork Factory
pushed a soft head through it.
"Say, don't mind me, do you? But here, I know all about you. I been
watching you, and the old girl's told me, too. She given you notice?
Listen. I got a good old stew going in here. More'n enough for two. Come
on!"
What would you have done? I was seventeen; and she, I imagine, was about
twenty. But a girl of twenty is three times older than a boy of
seventeen. She commanded. She mothered. I felt infinitely childlike and
absurd. I thought of refusing; but that seemed an idiotic attempt at
dignity which would only amuse this very mature young person. To accept
seemed to throw away entirely one's masculinity. Somehow, I.... But she
stepped right into the room then, instinctively patting her hair and
smoothing herself, and she took me by the arm.
"Look here, now. Don't you go on this silly way; else you'll be a case
for the morchery. Noner your nonsense, now. You come right along in."
She flitted back, pulling me with her, to the lit doorway of her room, a
yellow oblong of warmth and fragrance. "Niff it?" she jerked in allusion
to the stew. I nodded; and then I was inside and the door shut.
She chucked me into a rickety chair by the dancing fire, and chattered
cheerily while she played hostess, and I sat pale and tried to recover
dignity in sulky silence.
She played for a moment or so over a large vegetable dish which stood in
the fender, and then uprose, with flaming face and straying hair, and
set a large plate of real hot stuff before me on the small table.
"_There_ you are, me old University chum!" served as her invitation to
the feast. She shot knife, fork, and spoon across the table with a neat
shove-ha'p'ny stroke. Bread followed with the same polite service, and
then she settled herself, squarely but very prettily, before her own
plate, mocking me with twinkling eyes over her raised spoon.
Her grace was terse but adequate: "Well--here's may God help us as we
deserve!" I dipped my spoon, lifted it with shaking hand, my heart
bursting to tell the little dear girl what I thought about her, my lips
refusing to do anything of the sort; refusing, indeed, to do anything at
all; for having got the spoon that far, I tried to swallow the good
stuff that was in it, and--well ... I ... I burst into tears. Yes, I
did.
"What the devil----" she jerked. "Now what the devil's the matter
with---- Oh, I know. I see."
"I can't help it," I hiccuped. "It's the st-st-st-stew! It's so
goo-goo-good!"
"There, that's all right, kid. I know. I been like that. You have a
stretch of rotten luck, and you don't get nothing for perhaps a day, and
you feel fit to faint, and then at last you get it, and when you got it,
can't touch it. Feel all choky, like, don't you? I know. You'll be all
right in a minute. Get some more into you!"
I did. And I was all right. I sat by her fire for the rest of the
evening, and smoked her cigarettes--twelve for a penny. And we talked;
rather good talk, I fancy. As the food warmed me, so I came out of my
shell. And gradually the superior motherliness of my hostess
disappeared; I was no longer abject under her gaze; I no longer felt
like a sheepish schoolboy. I saw her as what she really was--a pale,
rather fragile, very girlish girl. We talked torrentially. We broke into
one another's sentences without apology. We talked simultaneously. We
hurled autobiography at each other....
That was my last week in Kingsland Road; for luck turned, and I found
work--of a sort. I left on the Saturday. I parted from her at Cudgett
Street corner. I never asked her name; she never asked mine. She just
shook hands, and remarked, airily, "Well, so long, kid. Good luck."
A MUSICAL NIGHT
THE OPERA, THE PROMENADES
_AT THE PIANO_
_Cane chairs, a sleek piano, table and bed in a room
Lifted happily high from the loud street's fermentation;
Tobacco and chime of voices wreathing out of the gloom,
Out of the lilied dusk at the firelight's invitation.
Then, in the muffled hour, one, strange and gracious and sad,
Moves from the phantom hearth, and, with infinite delicacies,
Looses his lissome hands along the murmurous keys._
_Valse, mazurka, and nocturne, prelude and polonaise
Clamour and wander and wail on the opiate air,
Piercing our hearts with echo of passionate days,
Peopling a top front lodging with shapes of care.
And as our souls, uncovered, would shamefully hide away,
The radiant hands light up the enchanted gloom
With the pure flame of life from the shadowless tomb._
A MUSICAL NIGHT
THE OPERA, THE PROMENADES
For a few months of the year London is the richest of all cities in the
matter of music; but it is only for a few months. From the end of August
to the end of October we have Sir Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts. From
the end of May to mid-July we have the Grand Season at Covent Garden.
Interspersed between these, at intervals all too rare, we have
individual concerts at the Queen's, Steinway, and AEolian Halls;
sometimes an Autumn Season of opera or Russian ballet; and the Saturday
and Sunday concerts, the former at the Albert and Queen's Halls, and the
latter, under the auspices of the Sunday League, at pretty well every
theatre and music-hall in London and the suburbs.
There are, however, long spells of emptiness when nothing or little is
doing in musical London, and that little hardly ever at night, though
Sir Thomas Beecham, the greatest philanthropist of his time, is doing
splendid work in feeding the hungry music-lover.
I should like, just here, to enter a protest against the practice
prevalent among our best soloists of giving their concerts in the
afternoons. Does it not occur to MM. Pachmann, Paderewski, Backhaus,
Mischa Elman, Hambourg, and others that there are thousands of
music-lovers in London who are never free at afternoons, and cannot turn
their little world upside down in order to snatch an afternoon even for
something so compelling as their recitals? Continually London gives you
these empty evenings. You do not want theatre or vaudeville; you want
music. And it is not to be had at any price; though when it is to be had
it is very well worth having.
No artist of any kind in music--singer, pianist, violinist,
conductor--considers himself as established until he has appeared in
London and received its award of merit; and whatever good things may be
going in other continental cities we know that, with the least possible
waste of time, those good things will be submitted to us for our sealing
judgment. There is only one other city in the world which has so firm a
grip on the music of the hour, and that is Buenos Ayres.
Let the superior persons, like Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who says that
London is not musical, because it sniffs at Schonberg, and doesn't get
excited over the dead meat of Rossini, Auber, and Bellini, pay a visit
any night to Queen's Hall during the Promenade Season. Where are the
empty seats? In the five-shilling tier. Where is the hall packed to
suffocation? In the shilling promenade. In the promenade there are seats
for about one hundred, and room for about seven hundred. That means that
six hundred Londoners stand, close-packed, with hardly room for a change
of posture and in an atmosphere overcharged with heat and sound, for two
hours and a half, listening, not to the inanities of Sullivan or
Offenbach or Arditi, but to Weber, Palestrina, Debussy, Tchaikowsky,
Wieniawski, Chopin, Mozart, Handel, and even the starch-stiff Bach.