know where it shall go. It drifts, winds, rises, drops, debouches. You
climb its length, and, at the top, you see a wide open space, which is
Mount Pleasant, and you think you have reached its end; but you
haven't. There is much more to come. It doesn't stop until it reaches
Gray's Inn Road, and then it stops sharply, unexpectedly. But the
romance of the place lies not only in its past; there is an immediate
romance, for which you must turn into its byways. Here live all those
bronzed street-merchants who carry delightful things to our
doors--ice-cream, roast chestnuts, roast potatoes, chopped wood, and
salt. In unsuspected warehouses here you may purchase wonderful toys
that you never saw in any other shops. You may buy a barrow and a stove
and a complete apparatus for roasting potatoes and chestnuts, including
a natty little poker for raking out the cinders. You may buy a gaudily
decorated barrow and freezing-plant for the manufacture and sale of
ice-cream. Or--and as soon as I have the money this is what I am going
to buy in Clerkenwell--you may buy a real street organ--a hundred of
them, if you wish. While the main road and the side streets on the south
are given up to the watch and clock-makers, the opposite side-streets
are Italian soil. Here are large warehouses where the poor Italian may
hire an organ for the day, or week, or month. A rehearsal at one of
these show-rooms is a deafening affair; it is just like Naples on a
Sunday morning. As the organs come over from Italy, they are "tried
out," and any flaws are immediately detected by the expert ear. In the
same way, a prospective hirer always tries his instrument before
concluding the deal, running through the tunes to be sure that they are
fairly up-to-date. When you get, say, six clients all rehearsing their
organs at once in a small show-room....
This organ industry, by the way, is a very big thing; and the dealers
make much more by hire than by sale. Sometimes a _padrone_, who has done
very well, will buy an organ; later, he may buy another organ, and
perhaps another. Then, with three organs, he sits down, and sends other
men out with them. Street organs, under our fatherly County Council, are
forbidden on Sundays; nevertheless, Sunday being the only day when
millions of people have any chance of recreation, many organs go out.
Whither do they go? East, my dears. There, in any ramshackle hall, or
fit-up arch-way, or disused stables, the boys and girls, out for fun,
may dance the golden hours away throughout Sunday afternoon and evening.
Often the organs are hired for Eastern weddings and christenings and
other ceremonials, and, by setting the musician to work, say, in the
back parlour, the boys and girls can fling their little feet about the
garden without interference from any one of the hundred authorities who
have us at their mercy.
It is because of the organs, I think, that I chiefly loved Clerkenwell.
Organs have been part of my life ever since I was old enough to sit up
and take notice. Try to think of London without organs. Have they not
added incalculably to the store of human happiness, and helped many
thousands over the waste patches of the week? They have; and I heap
smouldering curses upon the bland imbeciles of Bayswater who, some time
ago, formed themselves into a society for, I think they called it, The
Abatement of Street Noises, and stuck their loathly notices in squares
and public streets forbidding street organs to practise there. Let
house-agents take note that I and a dozen of my friends will never,
never, never take a house in any area where organs or street vendors or
street cries are prohibited. They are part of the very soul of London.
Kill them, and you kill something lovely and desirable, without which
the world will be the sadder. That any one should have the impudence to
ask for money for the carrying out of such a project is merely another
proof of the disease of the age. They might as well form a society and
appeal for funds for suppressing children from laughing or playing in
the streets. They might as well form a society for the strangulation of
all babies. They might as well.... But if I go on like this, I shall get
angry. Thank Heaven, organs are not yet suppressed, though, after the
curtailing of licensed hours, anything is possible. In that event, it
really looks as if America were the only country in which to live,
unless one could find some soft island in the Pacific, where one could
do just as one jolly well pleased.
Let's all go down Eyre Street Hill, for there, you know, organs are
still gurgling, and there are lazy laughter and spaghetti and _dolce far
niente_, and cigarettes are six a penny. There are little restaurants
here hardly bigger than a couple of telephone boxes. They contain but
two tables, and some wooden benches, but about a dozen gloriously savage
boys from Palermo and Naples are noisily supping after their day's tramp
round London with whatever industry they affect. They have olive skins,
black curly hair, flashing eyes, and fingers that dance with gemmy
rings. A new-comer arrives, unhooking from his shoulders the wooden tray
which holds the group of statuettes that he has been hawking round
Streatham and Norwood. He salutes them in mellifluous tones, and sits
down. He orders nothing; but a heaped-up dish of macaroni is put before
him, and he attacks it with fork and finger. There are few women to be
seen, but those few are gaudily arrayed in coloured handkerchiefs, their
mournful eyes and purring voices touching the stern night to beauty. Of
children there are dozens: furious boys and chattering girls. All the
little girls, from four to fourteen, wear socks, and the narrow roadway
flashes with the whirling of little white legs, so that the pedestrian
must dodge his way along as one dancing a _schottische_. A few
public-houses shed their dusty radiance, but these, too, are little
better than dolls' houses. I have never seen village beer-shops so
small. They are really about the size of the front room of a labourer's
cottage, divided into two--Public Bar and Private Bar.
Such is the High Street of Italy, where one feeds. Most of the Italians,
however, live in one of those huge blocks of tenements of which there
are, I should think, a dozen in Clerkenwell. They seem to centre about
the sounding viaducts that leap over Rosebery Avenue. Upon a time the
place had a reputation for lawlessness, but that is now gone, with most
of the colour of things. Occasionally there is an affray with knives,
but it is always among themselves: a sort of vendetta; and nobody
interferes so long as they refrain from bloodshed or from annoying
peaceable people. The services in the Italian Church are very
picturesque, and so, too, are their ceremonies at Christmas-time; while
the procession of the children at First Communion is a thing of beauty.
The little girls and boys walk together, the boys in black, the girls in
white, with white wreaths gleaming in their dark curls. At
Christmas-time there are great feasts, and every Italian baker and
restaurant-keeper stocks his trays with Panetonnes, a kind of small loaf
or bun, covered with sugar, which are distributed among the little ones
of the Church.
An old friend of mine, named Luigi, who once kept a tiny wine-shop,
lives in a little dirty room in Rosoman Street, and I sometimes spend an
evening with him. But not in summer. I adjure you--do not visit an
impoverished Italian who lives in one room in Clerkenwell, in the
summer; unless, of course, you are a sanitary inspector. He is an
entertaining old fellow, and speaks a delicious Italian-Cocknese, which
no amount of trickery could render on the printed page. When I go, I
usually take him a flask of Chianti and some Italian cigars, for which
he very nearly kisses me.
But Luigi has a story. You will see that at once if you scan his face.
There is something behind him--something he would like to forget. It
happened about ten years ago, and I witnessed it. Ten years ago, Luigi
did something--an act at once heroic, tragic, and idiotic. This was the
way of it.
It was an April night, and we were lounging at that corner which was
once called Poverty Point; the corner where Leather Lane crashes into
Clerkenwell Road, and where, of a summer night, gather the splendid
sons of Italy to discuss, to grin, to fight, and to invent new oaths. On
this corner, moreover, they pivot in times of danger, and, once they can
make the mazy circle of which it is the edge, safety from the pursuer is
theirs. The place was alive with evening gladness. In the half-darkness,
indolent groups lounged or strolled, filling their lungs with the
heavily garlicked air of the place.
Then an organ pulled up at the public-house which smiles goldenly upon
Mount Pleasant, and music broke upon us. Instantly, with the precision
of a harlequinade, a stream of giggling girls poured from Eyre Street
Hill and Back Hill. With the commencement of a rag-tag dance, the Point
was whipped to frivolous life. The loungers grunted, and moved up to
see. Clusters of children, little angels with dark eyes and language
sufficiently seasoned to melt a glacier, slipped up from nowhere, and,
one by one, the girls among them slid into the dance. One of them had a
beribboned tambourine. Two others wanted it, and would snatch it away.
Its owner said they were--something they could not possibly have been.
Stabs of light from the tenements pierced the dusk high and low. The
night shone with recent rain, and in a shifting haze of grey and rose
the dancers sank and glided, until the public-house lamp was turned on
and a cornet joined the organ. In the warm yellow light, the revels
broke bounds, and, to the hysterical appeal of "Hiawatha," the Point
became a Babel.... When most of the dancers had danced themselves to
exhaustion, two of the smaller maidens stood out and essayed a kind of
can-can.
The crowd swooped in. It crowded with appreciation as they introduced
all the piquant possibilities of the dance. It babbled its merriment at
seeing little faces, which should show only the revel of April, bearing
all the ravage of Autumn.
Comments and exhortations, spiced to taste, flew about the Point,
ricochetted, and returned in boomerang fashion to their authors, who
repolished them and shot them forth again. Heads bobbed back, forth, and
up in the effort to see. In a prestissimo fire of joy, the novel
exercise reached its finale, when ...
"Hi-hi! _He._ _Eeeee!_" As though by signal, the whole Point was
suddenly aspurt with spears of flame, leaping, meeting, and crossing. We
looked round. The dance stopped, the organ gurgled away to rubbish, the
crowd took open order, and stared at the narrow alley of Back Hill.
Blankets of smoke moved from its mouth, pushing their suffocating way up
the street. Twenty people hurt themselves in shrieking orders. Women
screamed and ran. From an open window a tongue of flame was thrust
derisively; it tickled a man's neck, and he swore. Then a lone woman had
the sense to scream something intelligible.
We all ran. English, Italian, and profane clashed together. Three small
boys strangled each other in a race for the fire-bell. In Back Hill,
men, women, and children were hustling themselves through the
ground-floor window of the doomed house. Thick, languid flames blocked
the doorway, swaying idly, ready to fasten their fangs in anything that
approached. Furniture crashed and bounded to the pavement. Mattresses
were flung out to receive the indecent figures of their owners. The
crowd swelled feverishly. Women screamed.
Gradually the crackle of burning wood and the ripple of falling glass
gained voice above the outcry of the crowd. A shout of fear and
admiration surged up, as a spout of flame darted through the roof, and
quivered proudly to the sky. Luigi threw back his sweeping felt hat,
loosened his yellow neckcloth, tightened his scarlet waistband. "It is
bad," he said. "It is a fire."
I said "Yes," having nothing else to say. A few Cockneys inquired
resentfully why somebody didn't do something. Then the word went round
that all were out but one. A woman was left at the top. A sick hush
fell. Away in the upper regions a voice was wailing. The women turned
pale, and one or two edged away. The men whistled silently, and looked
serious. They had the air of waiting for something. It came. Luigi moved
swiftly away from me, fought a way through the crowd, and stood by the
door, his melodious head lashed by the fringe of the flames.
"I go up," he said operatically.
A dozen men dashed from him, crying things. "Wet blanket, there. Quick!
Here's a bloke going up. Italiano's going up!"
At the back of the crowd, where I stood, a few fools cheered. They were
English. "'Ray! 'Ray! 'Ray! Good iron! 'E's gotter nerve, 'e 'as.
Wouldn't athought it o' them Italians."
The Italians were silent. From the house came long screams, terrible to
hear in the London twilight. A Sicilian said something in his own
language which cannot be set down; the proprietor of the Ristorante del
Commercio also grew profane. The children stared and giggled,
wonderingly. Blankets and buckets of water were conjured from some
obscure place of succour. In half a minute the blankets were soaked, and
Luigi was ready.
A wispy man in a dented bowler danced with excitement. "Oh, he's gotter
nerve, if yeh like. Going to risk his life, he is. Going to risk his
blasted life." Fresh and keener screams went down the golden stairway.
Luigi flung the wet folds about him, vaulted the low sill, and then the
wild light danced evilly about him. Outside, we watched and waited. A
lurid silence settled, and the far cries of one of the late dancers who
was receiving correction for dancing indecent dances seemed entirely to
fill space. The atmosphere was, as it were, about to crack and buckle,
and I was feeling that Luigi was a heroic fool, when a passing navvy,
not susceptible to influences, saved the situation by bursting into
song:--
"You're here and I'm here,
So what do we care?"
The wispy man looked round, reprovingly. "Easy on, there!" he implored.
"Whaffor?"
"Well ... chep's risking his life."
"Well ... 'at don't make no difference. Be 'appy while yeh can, I say."
"No, but ... chep's risking his life."
"Yew maide me love yew,
I didn't wanter do it!"
"Risking his life, and all!"
Then the climax was reached. A scream sounded from above, then silence,
then a confused rush of feet. The figure of Luigi filled the opening of
the low window, and those nearest surged in to help and see. He was
dragged through, head first, and set on his feet. The fire-engine raved
and jangled in Clerkenwell Road, but there was no way for it. The
firemen tried to clear the crowd, but it would not be denied its sight
of the hero. It struggled in to admire. It roared and yelled in one and
a hundred voices. The cafe proprietor gestured magnificently. Regard the
hero! How he was brave! The wispy man nearly had a fit. He skipped.
Risked his life, and all. For a blasted stranger.
Luigi dropped the bundle gently from his arms, and stood over it, a
little bewildered at his reception. The firemen fought furiously, and at
last they cleared a passage for their plant. Then, as they cleared, the
wispy man danced again, and seemed likely to die. He sprang forward and
capered before Luigi. I tried to get through to help Luigi out, but I
was wedged like a fishbone in the throat of the gang.
It was then that horrid screams came again from the house, winding off
in ragged ends. The wispy, man spluttered.
"Yeh damn fool! Look what yeh brought down. Look at it. Yeh damn fool!"
Luigi looked still bewildered, and now I fought with sharp elbows, and
managed to get to the front rank. The man's shaking finger pointed at
Luigi's feet. "D'you know what you done, Italiano? You made a mistake. A
blasted mistake. Aw ... yeh damn fool!"
I looked too. There was no woman at Luigi's feet. There was a bundle of
sheets, blanket, and carpet. A scream came from the house. Every window
filled with flame. The roof fell inwards with a crash and a rain of
sparks.
Clerkenwell has never forgiven Luigi. Luigi has never forgiven himself.
A BASHER'S NIGHT
HOXTON
_LONDON JUNE_
_Rank odours ride on every breeze;
Skyward a hundred towers loom;
And factories throb and workshops wheeze,
And children pine in secret gloom.
To squabbling birds the roofs declaim
Their little tale of misery;
And, smiling over murk and shame,
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._
_Where every traffic-thridden street
Is ribboned o'er with shade and shine,
And webbed with wire and choked with heat;
Where smokes with fouler smokes entwine;
And where, at evening, darkling lanes
Fume with a sickly ribaldry--
Above the squalors and the pains,
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._
_Somewhere beneath a nest of tiles
My little garret window squats,
Staring across the cruel miles,
And wondering of kindlier spots.
An organ, just across the way,
Sobs out its ragtime melody;
But in my heart it seems to play:
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey!_
_And dreams of happy morning hills
And woodlands laced with greenest boughs
Are mine to-day amid the ills
Of Tooley Street and wharfside sloughs,
Though Cherry Gardens reek and roar,
And engines gasp their horrid glee;
I mark their ugliness no more:
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._
A BASHER'S NIGHT
HOXTON
Hoxton is not merely virile; it is virulent. Life here hammers in the
blood with something of the insistence of ragtime. The people--men,
women, and children--are alive, spitefully alive. You feel that they are
ready to do you damage, with or without reason. Here are antagonism and
desire, stripped for battle. Little children, of three years old, have
the spirit in them; for they lean from tenement landings that jut over
the street, and, with becoming seriousness, spit upon the passing
pedestrians, every hit scoring two to the marksman.
The colour of Hoxton Street is a tremendous purple. It springs upon you,
as you turn from Old Street, and envelops you. There are high, black
tenement houses. There are low cottages and fumbling passages. There are
mellow fried-fish shops at every few yards. There are dirty beer-houses
and a few public-houses. There are numerous cast-off clothing _salons_.
And there are screeching Cockney women, raw and raffish, brutalized
children, and men who would survive in the fiercest jungle. Also there
is the Britannia Theatre and Hotel. The old Brit.! It stands, with
Sadler's Wells and the Surrey, as one of the oldest homes of fustian
drama. Sadler's Wells is now a picture palace, and the Surrey is a
two-house Variety show. The old Brit. held out longest, but even that is
going now. Its annual pantomime was one of the events of the London
Season for the good Bohemian. Then all the Gallery First Nighters boys
and girls would go down on the last night, which was Benefit Night for
Mrs. Sara Lane, the proprietress. Not only were bouquets handed up, but
the audience showered upon her tributes in more homely and substantial
form. Here was a fine outlet for the originality of the crowd, and among
the things that were passed over the orchestra-rails or lowered from
boxes and circles were chests of drawers, pairs of corsets, stockings,
pillow-cases, washhand jugs and basins, hip-baths, old boots,
mince-pies, Christmas puddings, bottles of beer, and various items of
lumber and rubbish which aroused healthy and Homeric laughter at the
moment, but which, set down in print at a time when Falstaffian humour
has departed from us, may arouse nothing but a curled lip and a rebuke.
But it really was funny to see the stage littered with these tributes,
which, as I say, included objects which are never exhibited in the light
of day to a mixed company.
But the cream of Hoxton is its yobs. It is the toughest street in
London. I don't mean that it is dangerous. But if you want danger, you
have only to ask for it, and it is yours. It will not be offered you
anywhere in London, but if you do ask for it, Hoxton is the one place
where there is "no waiting," as the barbers say. The old Shoreditch Nile
is near at hand, and you know what that was in the old days. Well,
Hoxton to-day does its best to maintain the tradition of "The Nile."
Now once upon a time there was a baby-journalist named Simple Simon. He
went down to Hoxton one evening, after dinner. It had been the good old
English dinner of Simpson's, preceded by two vermuths, accompanied by a
pint of claret, and covered in the retreat by four maraschinos. It was a
picturesque night. A clammy fog blanketed the whole world. It swirled
and swirled. Hoxton Street was a glorious dream, as enticingly
indefinite as an opium-sleep. Simple Simon had an appointment here. The
boys were to be out that night. Jimmie Flanagan, their leader, had
passed the word to Simon that something would be doing, something worth
being in. For that night was to witness the complete and enthusiastic
bashing of Henry Wiggin, the copper's nark, the most loathed and
spurned of all creeping things that creep upon the earth.
Simon walked like a lamb into the arms of trouble. He strolled along the
main street, peering every yard of his way through the writhing gloom.
Nobody was about. He reached Bell Yard, and turned into it. Then he
heard something. Something that brought him to a sharp halt. Before he
saw or heard anything more definite, he felt that he was surrounded. To
place direction of sound was impossible. He heard, from every side, like
the whisper of a load of dead leaves, the rush of rubber shoes. With
some agility he leaped to what he thought was the clear side, only to
take a tight arm like a rope across his chest and another about his
knees.
"There's one fer yew, 'Enry!" cried a spirited voice as a spirited palm
smote him on the nose.
"Hi! Hi! Easy!" Simon appealed. "I ain't 'Enry, dammit! You're bashing
me--me--Simon!" He swore rather finely; but the fog, the general
confusion, and, above all, the enthusiasm of bashing rendered
identification by voice impracticable. Indeed, if any heard it, it had
no effect; for, so they had some one to bash, they would bash. It didn't
matter to them, just so it was a bash. Flanagan heard it quite clearly,
but he knew the madness of attempting to stop eleven burly Hoxton yobs
once they were well in....
"I'm not 'Enry. I ain't the nark!" But he was turned face downward, and
his mouth was over a gully-hole, so that his protests scared only the
rats in the sewer. He set his teeth, and writhed and jerked and swung,
and for some seconds no bashing could proceed, for he was of the stuff
of which swordsmen are made--small, lithe, and light: useless in a
stand-up fight with fists, but good for anything in a scrum. When,
however, as at present, eleven happy lads were seeking each a grip on
his person, it became difficult to defeat their purpose. But at last, as
he was about to make a final wrench at the expense of his coat, the
metal tips on his boots undid him. He dug his heels backward to get a
purchase, he struck the slippery surface of the kerb instead of the
yielding wood of the roadway, and in a moment he was down beyond all
struggle. A foot landed feelingly against his ribs, another took him on
the face; and for all that they were rubbered they stung horribly. Then,
with two pairs of feet on his stomach, and two on his legs, he heard
that wild whisper that may unnerve the stoutest--
"Orf wi' yer belts, boys!"
The bashing of the nark was about to begin. There was a quick jingle as
many leather belts were loosed, followed by a whistle, and--_zpt_! he
received the accolade of narkhood. Again and again they came, and they
stung and bit, and he could not move. They spat all about him. He swore
crudely but sincerely, and if oaths have any potency his tormentors
should have withered where they stood. Two and three at a time they
came, for there were eleven of them--Flanagan having discreetly
retired--and all were anxious to christen their nice new belts on the
body of the hated nark; and they did so zealously, while Simon could
only lie still and swear and pray for a happy moment that should free
one of his hands....