go--you first?"
"Whaffor?" asked the boys.
"'Cos I say so."
"No, but----"
Again there came a stealthy tap at the door, again the whispering of
slippered feet. More words were exchanged. Then Sanya grabbed the boys
by arms, and they and the girls disappeared.
I was alone.
I got up, and moved to the door. I heard nothing. I stood by the window,
my thoughts dancing a ragtime. I wondered what to do, and how, and
whether. I wondered what was up exactly. I wondered ... well, I just
wondered. My thoughts got into a tangle, sank, and swam, and sank again.
Then there was a sudden struggle and spurt from the lamp, and it went
black out. From a room across the landing a clock ticked menacingly. I
saw, by the thin light from the window, the smoke of a discarded
cigarette curling up and up to the ceiling like a snake.
I went again to the door, peered down the steep stair and over the crazy
balustrade. Nobody was about; no voices. I slipped swiftly down the five
flights, met nobody. I stood in the slobbered vestibule. From afar I
heard the sluck of the waters against the staples of the wharves, and
the wicked hoot of the tugs.
It was then that a sudden nameless fear seized me; it was that simple
terror that comes from nothing but ourselves. I am not usually afraid of
any man or thing. I am normally nervous, and there are three or four
things that have the power to terrify me. But I am not, I think, afraid.
At that moment, however, I was afraid of everything: of the room I had
left, of the house, of the people, of the inviting lights of the
warehouses and the threatening shoals of the alleys.
I stood a moment longer. Then I raced into Brick Lane, and out into the
brilliance of Commercial Street.
A SCANDINAVIAN NIGHT
SHADWELL
_AT SHADWELL_
_He was a bad, glad sailor-man,
Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare-o!
You never could find a haler man,
Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare!
All human wickedness he knew.
From Millwall Docks to Pi-chi-lu;
He loved all things that make us gay,
He'd spit his juice ten yards away,
And roundly he'd declare--oh!
"It isn't so much that I want the beer
As the bloody good company,
Whow!
Bloody good company!"_
_He loved all creatures--black, brown, white,
Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare-o!
And never a word he'd speak in spite,
Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare!
He knew that we were mortal men
Who sinned and laughed and sinned again;
And never a cruel thing he'd do
At Millwall Docks or Pi-chi-lu;
If you were down he'd make you gay:
He'd spit his juice ten yards away,
And roundly he'd declare--oh!
"It isn't so much that I want yer beer
As yer bloody good company,
Whow!
Bloody good company!"_
A SCANDINAVIAN NIGHT
SHADWELL
One night, when I was ten years old, I was taken by a boy who was old
enough to have known better into the ashy darkness of Shadwell and St.
George's. Along that perilous mile we slipped, with drumming hearts.
Then a warm window greeted us ... voices ... gruff feet ... bits of
strange song ... and then an open door and a sharp slab of mellow light.
With a sense of high adventure we peeped in. Some one beckoned. We
entered. The room was sawdusted as to the floor, littered with wooden
tables and benches. All was sloppy with rings and pools of spent cocoa.
The air was a conflict: the frivolous odour of fried sausage coyly
flirted with the solemn smell of dead smoke, and between them they bore
a bastard perfume of stale grease. Coffee-urns screamed and belched.
Cakes made the counter gay.
We stood for a moment, gazing, wondering. Then the blond-bearded giant
who had beckoned repeated his invitation; indeed, he reached a huge arm,
seized me, and set me on his knee. I lost all sense of ownership of my
face in the tangles of his beard. He hiccuped. He coughed. He rattled.
He sneezed. His forearms and fingers flew, as though repelling
multitudinous attacks. His face curled, and crinkled, and slipped, and
jumped suddenly straight again, and then vanished in infinite
corrugations. He seemed to be in the agony of a lost soul which seeks to
cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff.... Arms and lips
lashed the air about them, and at last the very lines of his body seemed
expressive of the state of a man who has explained himself forty-five
times, and is then politely asked to explain himself. For half an hour,
I suppose, I sat on his knee while he sneezed and roared and played
games with his vocal cords.
It was not until next morning that I learnt that he had been speaking
Norwegian and trying to ask me to have a cake. When I knew that I had
been in the lair of the Scandinavian seamen, I thrilled. When I learnt
that I had lost a cake, I felt sad.
It is a curious quarter, this Shadwell and St. George's: a street of
mission-halls for foreign sailors and of temperance restaurants, such as
that described, mostly for the Scandinavians, though there are many
shops catering for them still farther East. Sometimes you may hear a
long, savage roar, but there is no cause for alarm. It is only that the
great Mr. Jamrach, London's leading dealer in wild animals, has his
menagerie in this street.
The shop-fronts are lettered in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Strange
provisions are found in the "general" shops, and quaintly carved goods
and long wooden pipes in other windows. Marine stores jostle one
another, shoulder to shoulder, and there is a rich smell of tar,
bilge-water, and the hold of a cargo tramp. Almost you expect to hear
the rattle of the windlass, as you stand in the badly lighted
establishment of Johann Dvensk, surrounded by ropes, old ship's iron,
bloodthirsty blades, canvas, blocks, and pulleys. Something in this
narrow space seizes you, and you feel that you must "Luff her!" or
"Starrrrrb'd yer Helllllllm!" or "Ease 'er!" or "Man the tops'l!" or
whatever they do and say on Scandinavian boats. You may see these boats
in the Pool any night; timber boats they are, for the most part; squat,
low-lying affairs, but curiously picturesque when massed close with
other shipping, steam or sail. One of our London songsters has recorded
that "there's always something doing by the seaside"; and that is
equally true of down Thames-side. London River is always alive with
beauty, splendid with stress and the sweat of human hands. There is
something infinitely saddening in watching the casual, business-like
departure of one of these big boats. As she swings away and drops
downstream, her crew, idling, lean over the side, and spit, smoking
their long Swedish pipes, and looking curiously unearthly as the dock
lights fall, now on one, now on the other. I always want to plunge into
the water and follow them through that infinitude of travel which is
suggested by the dim outline of Greenwich.
The lamps in Shadwell High Street and what was once Ratcliff Highway are
few and very pale; and each one, welcome as it is, flings shapes of fear
across your path as you leave its radius and step into darkness more
utter. The quality of the darkness is nasty. That is the only word for
it. It is indefinite, leering. It says nothing to you. It is reticent
with the reticence of Evil. It is not black and frightful, like the
darkness of Hoxton or Spitalfields. It is not pleasant, like the
darkness of Chinatown. It is not matey, like the darkness of Hackney
Marshes. It is ... nasty. At every ten paces there is the black mouth of
an alley with just space enough for the passage of one person. Within
the jaws of each alley is a lounging figure--man, woman, or child,
Londoner or foreigner, you cannot discern. But it is there, silent,
watchful, expectant. And if you choose to venture, you may examine more
closely. You may note that the faces that peer at you are faces such as
one only sees elsewhere in the picture of Felicien Rops. Sometimes it is
a curl-sweet little girl who greets you with a smile strangely cold.
Sometimes the mouth of the alley will appear to open and will spit at
you, apparently by chance. If it hits you, the alley swears at you: a
deep, frightfully foreign oath. Sudden doors flap, and gusts of brutal
jollity sweep up the street.
In the old days, Shadwell embraced the Oriental quarter, and times, in
the 'seventies, long before I was thought of, seem to have been really
frolicsome, or so I gather from James Greenwood. The chief inhabitants
of to-day are those little girls just mentioned. Walk here at any time
of the day or night, and you will find in every doorway and at those
corners which are illuminated, clusters of little girls, all of the same
age, all of the same height, their glances knowing so much more than
their little fresh lips imply. They seem all to be born at that age, and
they never grow up. For every boy and woman that you pass in that dusty
mile you will find dozens of pale little girls. There is a reason for
this local product, about which I have written more seriously elsewhere,
and if you saunter here, beware of sympathy with crying children. I
could tell things; curious things. But if I did you would not believe
them, and if you believed them you would be sick.
I have mentioned the peculiar darkness. It is provocative and insistent.
It possesses you. For you know that in this street, or rather, back of
it, there are the homes of the worst vices of the seagoing foreigner. It
is the haunt of the dissolute and the indigent; not only of the normal
brute, but also of the satyr. You know that behind those heights of
houses, stretching over the street with dumb, blank faces, there are
strangely lighted rooms, where unpleasant rites are celebrated.
I can never understand why artists and moralists paint Temptation
invariably in gaudy scarlet and jewels, tinted cheeks, and laughing
hair. If she were always like that, morality would be gloriously
triumphant; for she would attract nobody. The true Temptation of this
world and flesh wears grey rags, dishevelled hair, and an ashen cheek.
Any expert will prove that. I can never believe that any one would be
lured to destruction by those birds of paradise whom one has met in the
stuffy, over-gilded, and, happily, abortive night-clubs and cabarets. If
a consensus were taken, I think it would be found that wickedness gaily
apparelled is seldom successful. It is the subtle and the sinister, the
dark and half-known, that make the big appeal. Lace and scent and
champagne and the shaded glamour of Western establishments leave most
men cold, I know. But dirt and gloom and secrecy.... We needs must love
the lowest when we see it.
As far back as I can remember the Eastern parishes have been, to me, the
home of Romance. My romance was not in the things of glitter and
chocolate-box gaiety, but rather in the dolours and silences of the
East. Long before I had adventured there, its very street
names--Whitechapel High Street, Ratcliff Highway, Folly Wall, Stepney
Causeway, Pennyfields--had thrilled me as I believe other children
thrill to the names of The Arabian Nights.
That is why I come sometimes to Shadwell, and sit in its tiny beershops,
and listen to the roaring of Jamrach's lions, and talk with the blond
fellows whose conversation is mostly limited to the universalities of
intercourse. I was there on one occasion, in one of the houses which
are, in the majority of cases, only licensed for beer, and I made the
acquaintance of a quite excellent fellow, and spent the whole evening
with him. He talked Swedish, I talked English; and we understood one
another perfectly. We did a "pub-crawl" in Commercial Road and East
India Dock Road, and finished up at the Queen's Theatre in Poplar High
Street. A jolly evening ended, much too early for me, at one o'clock in
the morning, when he insisted on entering a lodging-house in Gill Street
because he was sure that it was his. I tried to make him understand, by
diagrams on the pavement, that he was some half-mile from St. George's.
But no; he loomed above me, in his blond strength, and when he tried to
follow the diagram, he toppled over. I spent five minutes in lifting six
foot three and about twelve stone of Swedish manhood to its feet.
He looked solemn, and insisted: "I ban gude Swede."
I told him again that he must not enter the lodging-house, but must let
me see him safe to his right quarters. But he thrust me aside: "I ban
gude Swede!" he said, resentfully this time, with hauteur. I pulled his
coat-tails, and tried to lead him back to Shadwell; but it was useless.
"I ban gude Swede!"
There I left him, trying to climb the six steps leading to the
lodging-house entrance. I looked back at the corner. He turned, to wave
his hand in valediction, and, floating across the night, came a proud
declaration--
"I ban gude Swede!"
This is one of the few occasions when I have been gay in Shadwell.
Mostly you cannot be gay; the place simply won't let you be gay. You
cannot laugh there spontaneously. You may hear bursts of filthy laughter
from this or that low-lit window; but it is not spontaneous. You only
laugh like that when you have nine or ten inside you. The spirit of the
place does not, in the ordinary way, move you to cheer. Its mist, and
its dust-heaps, and its coal-wharves, and the reek of the river sink
into you, and disturb your peace of mind.
Most holy night descends never upon Shadwell. The night life of any
dockside is as vociferant as the day. They slumber not, nor sleep in
this region. They bathe not, neither do they swim; and Cerberus in all
his hideousness was not arrayed like some of these. If you want to make
your child good by terror, show him a picture of a Swede or a Malay,
pickled in brown sweat after a stoking-up job.
Of course, the seamen of St. George's do not view it from this angle.
Shadwell is only fearful and gloomy to those who have fearful and gloomy
minds. Seamen haven't. They have only fearful and gloomy habits.
Probably, when the evening has lit the world to slow beauty, and a quart
or so has stung your skin to a galloping sense of life, Shadwell High
Street and its grey girls are a garden of pure pleasure. I shouldn't
wonder.
There are those among them who love Shadwell. A hefty seafaring Dane
whom I once met told me he loved the times when his boat brought him to
London--by which, of course, he meant Shadwell. He liked the life and
the people and the beer. And, indeed, for those who do love any part of
London, it is all-sufficient. I suppose there are a few people living
here who long to escape from it when the calendar calls Spring; to kiss
their faces to the grass; to lose their tired souls in tangles of green
shade. But they are hardly to be met with. Those rather futile fields
and songs of birds and bud-spangled trees are all very well, if you have
the narrow mind of the Nature-lover; but how much sweeter are the things
of the hands, the darling friendliness of the streets! The maidenly
month of April makes little difference to us here. We know, by the
calendar and by our physical selves, that it is the season of song and
quickening blood. Beyond London, amid the spray of orchard foam, bird
and bee may make their carnival; lusty spring may rustle in the
hedgerows; golden-tasselled summer may move along the shadow-fretted
meadows; but what does it say to us? Nothing.... Here we still gamble,
and worship the robustious things that come our way, and wait to find a
boat. We have no seasons. We have no means of marking the delicate pomp
of the year's procession. We have not even the divisions of day and
night, for, as I have said, boats must sail at all hours of the day and
night, and their swarthy crews are ever about. In Shadwell we have only
more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness and Winter a
time of fog. Season of flower and awakening be blowed! I'll have the
same again!
This is a book of adventures in and about London: not a sociological
pamphlet; but I do seriously feel that if I am writing on the subject at
all, I may as well write the complete truth. I have heard, often, in
this macabre street, the most piercing of all sounds that the London
night can hold: a child's scream. The sound of a voice in pain or terror
is horrible enough anywhere at night; it is twenty times worse in this
district, when the voice is a child's. I want, very badly, to tell the
story I refrained from telling. I want to tell it because it is true,
because it ought to be told, and because it might shake you into some
kind of action, which newspaper reports would never do. Yet I know
perfectly well that if I did tell it, this book would be condemned as
unclean, and I as a pornographist, if not something worse. So let our
fatuous charity-mongers continue to supply Flannel Underclothing for the
Daughters of Christian Stevedores; let them continue to provide Good
Wholesome Meals for the Wifes of God-Fearing Draymen, and let them
connive by silence at those other unspeakable things.
The University men and the excellent virgins who carry out this kind of
patronage might do well to drop it for a while, and tell the plain truth
about the things which they must see in the course of their labours. If
you stand in Leicester Square, in the gayest quarter of the gayest city
in the world, after nightfall, indeed, long after theatres, bars, and
music-halls are closed, and their saucy lights extinguished, you will
see, on the south side, a single lamp glowing through the green of the
branches. That lamp is shining the whole night through. The door that it
lights is never closed day or night; it dare not close. Through the
leafy gloom of the Square it shines--a watchful eye regarding the
foulest blot on the civilization of England. It is the lamp of the
office of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children. This Society keeps five hundred workers incessantly busy, day
and night, preventing cruelty to little English children. Go in, and
listen to some of the stories that the inspectors can tell you. They can
tell you of appalling sufferings inflicted on children, of bruised
bodies and lacerated limbs and poisoned minds, not only in the submerged
quarters but in comfortable houses by English people of education and
position. Buy a few numbers of the Society's official organ, _The
Child's Guardian_, and read of the hundreds of cases which they attack
every month, and of the bestialities to which children are submitted,
and you will then see that light as the beacon-light of England's
disgrace. I once showed it to a Spanish friend, and he looked at me with
polite disgust. "And your countrymen, my friend," he said, "speak of the
Spaniards as cruel. Your countrymen, who gather themselves in dozens,
protected by horses and dogs, to hunt a timid fox, call us cruel because
we fight the bull--because our toreadors risk their lives every moment
that they are in the ring, fighting a savage, maddened animal five times
larger and stronger than themselves. You call us cruel--you, who have to
found a Society in order to stop cruelty to your little children. My
friend, there is no society like that in Spain, for no society like that
is necessary. The most depraved Spaniard, town or countryman, would
never dream of raising his hand against a child. And your countrymen, in
face of that building, which is open day and night, and supports a staff
of five hundred, call the Spaniards cruel! My friend, yours surely must
be the cruellest people on earth."
And I had no answer for him, because I knew. I knew what Mr. Robert Parr
had told me: and I knew why little girls of twelve and thirteen are
about the dripping mouths of the Shadwell alleys at all queer hours. You
will understand why some men, fathers of little girls, suddenly have
money for beer when a foreign boat is berthed. You will appreciate what
it is that twists its atmosphere into something anomalous. You remember
the gracious or jolly fellows you have met, the sweet, rich sea-chanties
you have heard; and then you remember other things, and the people
suddenly seem monstrous, the spirit of the place bites deep, and the
dreadful laughter of it shocks.
A SUNDAY NIGHT
ANYWHERE
_SUNDAY TEA-TIME_
_There is a noise of winkles on the air,
Muffins and winkles rattle down the road,
The sluggish road, whose hundred houses stare
One on another in after-dinner gloom._
"Peace, perfect Peace!" _wails an accordion,_
"Ginger, you're barmy!" _snarls a gramophone._
_A most unhappy place, this leafless Grove
In the near suburbs; not a place for tears
Nor for light laughter, for all life is chilled
With the unpurposed toil of many years.
But once--ah, once!--the accordion's wheezy strains
Led my poor heart to April-smelling lanes._
A SUNDAY NIGHT
ANYWHERE
There is something almost freakish in the thoughtful calm of the London
Sunday. During the night the town seems to have cleaned and preened
itself, and the creamy, shadow-fretted streets of the Sabbath belong
more to some Southern region than to Battersea or Barnsbury. The very
houses have a detached, folded manner, like volumes of abstruse
theological tracts. From every church tower sparks of sound leap out on
the expectant air, mingling and clashing with a thousand others; and the
purple spires fling themselves to heaven with the joy of a perfect
thought. In the streets there is an atmosphere of best clothes and best
manners. There is a flutter of bright frocks. Father, in his black coat
and silk hat, walks seriously, as befits one with responsibilities, what
time mother at home is preparing the feast. The children, poor darlings,
do not skip or jump or laugh. They walk sedately, in their starchy
attire, holding father's arm and trying to realize that it really is
Sunday, and therefore very sinful to fling oneself about. The people
taking their appetite stroll before midday dinner look all so sleek and
complacent that one would like to borrow money from them. The 'buses
rumble with a cheeriness that belongs not to weekdays; their handrails
gleam with a new brightness, and the High Street, with shops shuttered
and barred, bears not the faintest resemblance to the High Street you
know so well, even as policemen, with helmets and tunics, look
surprisingly unlike human beings. The water-carts seem to work with
cleaner, lighter water, and as the sun catches the sprayed stream it
whips it into a thousand drops of white fire. It is Sunday. The roads
are blazing with white ribbons under the noon sun. A stillness broods
over all, a stillness only accentuated by the brazen voice of the
Salvation Army band and the miserable music of winkles rattling on
dinner-plates. The colours of the little girls' dresses slash the grey
backgrounds of the pavement with rich streaks. Spears of sunshine,
darting through the sparse plane-trees, play all about them, and ring
them with radiance; and they look so fresh and happy that you want to
kiss them. It is Sunday.
Yes, it is Sunday, and you will realize that as the day wears on. These
pleasant people are walking about the streets for a very definite
reason. What is that? It is that there is nothing else to do. That is
the tragedy of the London Sunday; there is nothing else to do. Why does
the submerged man get drunk on Sunday? There is nothing else to do. Why
does the horse-faced lady, with nice clothes, go to church on Sunday?
There is nothing else to do. Why do people overeat themselves on Sunday?
There is nothing else to do. Why do parents make themselves stiff and
uncomfortable in new clothes, and why do they get irritable and smack
their children if they rouse them from their after-dinner sleep? Because
there is nothing else to do. Why does the young clerk hang around the
West End bars, and get into trouble with doubtful ladies? Because there
is nothing else to do.