Note: Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/outaboutlondon00burk
OUT AND ABOUT LONDON
* * * * * *
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
NIGHTS IN LONDON
"Hundreds of books have been written about London, but few are as well
worth reading as this."--_London Times._
"Thomas Burke writes of London as Kipling wrote of India."--_Baltimore
Sun._
"A real book."--_New York Sun._
4th printing, $1.50
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
* * * * * *
OUT AND ABOUT LONDON
by
THOMAS BURKE
Author of "Limehouse Nights"
and "Nights In London"
[Illustration: Logo]
New York
Henry Holt and Company
1919
Copyright, 1919
by
Henry Holt and Company
1916
_Lady, the world is old, and we are young.
The world is old to-night and full of tears
And tumbled dreams, and all its songs are sung,
And echoes rise no more from the tombed years.
Lady, the world is old, but we are young._
_Once only shines the mellow moon so fair;
One speck of Time is Love's Eternity.
Once only can the stars so light your hair,
And the night make your eyes my psaltery.
Lady, the world is old. Love still is young._
_Let us take hand ere the swift moment end.
My heart is but a lamp to light your way.
My song your counsellor, my love your friend,
Your soul the shrine whereat I kneel and pray.
Lady, the world grows old. Let us be young._
_T. B._
CONTENTS
PAGE
ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 3
BACK TO DOCKLAND 30
CHINATOWN REVISITED 40
SOHO CARRIES ON 58
OUT OF TOWN 69
IN SEARCH OF A SHOW 82
VODKA AND VAGABONDS 89
THE KIDS' MAN 113
CROWDED HOURS 123
SATURDAY NIGHT 134
RENDEZVOUS 140
TRAGEDY AND COCKNEYISM 148
MINE EASE AT MINE INN 155
RELICS 168
ATTABOY! 176
OUT AND ABOUT LONDON
ROUND THE TOWN, 1917
It was a lucid, rain-washed morning--one of those rare mornings when
London seems to laugh before you, disclosing her random beauties. In
every park the trees were hung with adolescent tresses, green and white
and yellow, and the sky was busy with scudding clouds. Even the solemn
bricks had caught something of the sudden colour of the day, and London
seemed to toss in its long, winter sleep and to take the heavy breaths
of the awakening sluggard.
I turned from my Fleet Street window to my desk, took my pen, found it
in good working order, and put it down. I was hoping that it would be
damaged, or that the ink had run out; I like to deceive myself with some
excuse for not working. But on this occasion none presented itself save
the call of the streets and the happy aspect of things, and I made these
serve my purpose. With me it is always thus. Let there come the first
sharp taste of Spring in the February air and I am demoralized. Away
with labour. The sun is shining. The sky is bland. There are seven
hundred square miles of London in which Adventure is shyly lurking for
those who will seek her out. What about it? So I drew five pounds from
the cash-box, stuffed it into my waistcoat-pocket, and let myself loose,
feeling, as the phrase goes, that I didn't care if it snowed. And as I
walked, there rose in my heart a silly song, with no words and no tune;
or, if any words, something like--how does it go?--
Boys and girls, come out to play--
Hi-ti-hiddley-hi-ti-hay!
But the fool is bent upon a twig. I found the boys preoccupied and the
girls unwearied in war-work. One good comrade of the highways and byways
had married a wife; and therefore he could not come. Another had bought
a yoke of oxen, and must needs go and prove them--as though they were a
problem of Euclid. Luckily, I ran against Caradoc Evans, disguised in a
false beard, in order to escape the fury of the London Welshmen, and
looking like the advance agent of a hard winter. Seeing my silly,
hark-halloa face, he inquired what was up. I explained that I was out
for a day's amusement--the first chance I had had since 1914.
Whereupon, he ran me into a little place round the corner, and bought me
an illicit drink at an hour when the minatory finger of Lord d'Abernon
was still wagging; and informed me with tears in the voice, and many a
"boy bach," and "old bloke," and "indeed," that this was the Year of
Grace 1917, and that London was not amusing.
It was not until the third drink that I discovered how right he was. As
a born Cockney, living close to London every minute of my life, I had
not noticed the slow change in the face and soul of London. I had long
been superficially aware that something was gone from the streets and
the skies, but the feeling was no more definite than that of the gourmet
whose palate hints that the cook has left something--it cannot say
what--out of the soup. It was left for the swift perception of the
immigrant Welshman to apprise me fully of the truth. But once it was
presented to me, I saw it too clearly. My search for amusement, I knew
then, was at an end, and what had promised to be an empurpling of the
town seemed like to degenerate into a spelling-bee. Of course, I might
have gone back to my desk; but the Spring had worked too far into my
system to allow even a moment's consideration of that alternative.
There remained nothing to do but to wander, and to pray for a glimpse of
that tempestuous petticoat of youth that deserted us in 1914. It was a
forlorn pursuit: I knew I would never touch its hem.
I never did. I wandered all day with Caradoc bach, and we did this and
we did that, while I strove to shake from my shoulders the bundle of
dismay that seemed fastened there. The young men having gone to war, the
streets were filled with middle-aged women of thirty, in short skirts,
trying to attract the aged satyrs, the only men that remained, by
pretending to be little girls. At mid-day, that hour when, throughout
London, you may hear the symphony of swinging gates and creaking bolts,
we paid hurried calls at the old haunts. They were either empty or
filled with new faces. Rule's, in Maiden Lane, was deserted. The Bodega
had been besieged by, and had capitulated to, the Colonial army.
Mooney's had become the property of the London Irish. The vociferous
rehearsal crowds had decamped from the Bedford Head, and left it to
strayed and gloomy Service men, who cared nothing for its traditions;
and Yates's Wine Lodge, the home of the blue-chinned laddies looking
for a shop, was filled with women war-workers.
Truly, London was no more herself. The word carried no more the magical
quality with which of old time it was endued. She was no more the
intellectual centre, or the political centre, or the social centre of
the world. She was not even an English city, like Leeds or Sheffield or
Birmingham. She was a large city with a population of nondescript
millions.
This I realized more clearly when, a week or so after our tour, an
American, whom I was conducting round London, asked me to show him
something typically English. I couldn't. I tried to take him to an
English restaurant. There was none. Even the old chop-houses, under
prevailing restrictions, were offering manufactured food like spaghetti
and disguised offal. I turned to the programmes of the music-halls. Here
again England was frozen out. There were comedians from France, jugglers
from Japan, conjurers from China, trick-cyclists from Belgium,
weight-lifters from Australia, buck-dancers from America, and ...
England, with all thy faults I love thee still; but do take a bit of
interest in yourself. A stranger, arriving from overseas, might suppose
that the war was over, and that London was in the hands of the
conquerors. This impression he might receive from a single glance at our
streets. The Strand at the moment of writing is blocked for pedestrian
traffic by Australians and New Zealanders; Piccadilly Circus belongs to
the Belgians and the French; and the Americans possess Belgravia.
Canadian cafeterias are doing good business round Westminster; French
coffee-bars are thriving in the Shaftesbury Avenue district; Belgian
restaurants occupy the waste corners around Kingsway; and two more
Chinese restaurants have lately been opened in the West End.
The common Cockney seemed to walk almost fearfully about his invaded
streets, hardly daring to be himself or talk his own language. Apart
from the foreign tongues, which always did annoy his ear, foul language
now assailed him from every side: "no bon," "napoo," "gadget,"
"camouflaged," "buckshee," "bonza," and so on. This is not good slang.
Good slang has a quality of its own--a bite and spit and fine
expressiveness which do not belong to dictionary words. That is its
justification--the supplying of a lacking shade of expression, not the
supplanting of adequate forms. The old Cockney slang did justify
itself, but this modern Army rubbish, besides being uncouth, is utterly
meaningless, and might have been invented by some idiot schoolboy:
probably was.
After some search, we found a quiet corner in a bar where the perverted
stuff was not being talked, and there we gave ourselves to recalling the
little joyous jags that marked the progress of other years. I was
dipping the other night into a favourite bedside book of mine--here I'd
like to put in a dozen pages on bedside books--a Social Calendar for
1909; a rich reliquary for the future historian; and was shocked on
noting the number of simple festivals which are now ruled out of our
monotonous year. Do you remember them? Chestnut Sunday at Bushey
Park--City and Suburban--Derby and Oaks--Ascot Sunday at Maidenhead--Cup
Tie at the Crystal Palace--Spring week-ends by the sea--evening taxi
jaunts to Richmond and Staines--gay nights at the Empire and the
adjoining bars--supper after the theatre--moonlight trips in the summer
season down river to the Nore--polo at Ranelagh--cricket at Lord's and
the Oval--the Boat Race--Henley week--Earl's Court and White City
Exhibitions, where one could finish the evening on the wiggle-woggle, as
a final flicker. And now they have just delivered the most brutal blow
of all. Having robbed us of our motors and our cheap railways, they have
stolen away from the working-man his (and my) chiefest delight--the
beanfeast wagonette. (How I would have loved to take Henry James on one
of these jags.) The disappearance of this delight of the summer season
is, at the moment, so acute and so personal a grief, that I cannot trust
myself to speak of it. I must withdraw, and leave F. W. Thomas (of _The
Star_) to deliver the valedictory address:--
This spells the death of yet another old English institution. One
cannot go beanfeasting in traps and pony carts. There would be no
room for the cornet man, and without his distended cheeks and
dreadful harmony the picture would be incomplete.
That was a great day when we met at the works in the morning, all
in our best clothes and squeaky boots, all sporting large
buttonholes and cigars of the rifle-range brand.
With the yellow stone jars safely stowed under the seat and the
cornet man perched at the driver's left hand, we started off.
Usually the route lay through Shoreditch and Hackney to Clapton,
and so to the green fields of the Lea Bridge Road.
For the first hour of the journey we were quiet, early-morningish,
and a little reminiscent, recalling the glories of past beanfeasts.
The cornet man tootled half-heartedly, with many rests and much
licking of dry lips. Not until the "Greyhound" was passed did he
get well under way, and then there was no stopping him. His face
got redder and redder as he blasted his way through his repertoire;
a feast of music covering the years between "Champagne Charlie" and
Marie Lloyd.
At the end of the drive the horses were put up and baited, and the
merry beanfeasters spread themselves and their melody through the
glades of Loughton or High Beech, with cold roast beef and pickles
at Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge or the "Robin Hood."
And who does not remember that joyful homeward journey, with the
cornet man, now ruddier than the cherry, blaring "Little Brown Jug"
from well-oiled lungs, while behind him the revellers sang "As your
hair grows whiter," and an accordion in the back seats bleated "The
Miner's Dream."
As Herbert Campbell used to sing in the old days:--
Then up I came with my little lot,
And the air went blue for miles;
The trees all shook and the copper took his hook,
And down came all the tiles.
That was the real tit-bit of the beanfeast, the rollicking homeward
drive, with the brake embowered in branches of trees raped from the
Forest, and lit by swaying Chinese lanterns and great bunches of
dahlias bought from the cottagers of Loughton, and Chingford.
One always took home a bunch of flowers from a beanfeast, and maybe
a pint of shrimps for the missus, and some acorns for the
youngsters, or a gilded mug.
The defunct brake had other uses than this. Sometimes it took
parties of solemn old ladies in beads and black to an orgy of tea
and cake in the grounds of the "Leg of Mutton" at Chadwell Heath.
These were prim affairs. Mothers' Meeting from the little red
church round the corner. They had no cornet, and the smiling parson
rode in the seat assigned to Orpheus.
The youngsters, too, had their days--riotous days shrill with song
and gay with coloured streamers, air-balloons and trumpets. How
merrily they would bellow that they were "all a-going to Rye House,
so 'Ip-ip-ip-ooray!'" though their destination was Burnham Beeches
or Brickett Wood.
Rubber-neck parties of American tourists occasionally saw the
sights of London from brakes and wagonettes; solemn people, who for
all the signs of holiday they displayed might have been driving to
Tyburn Tree.
But the real reason for the brake was the beanfeast with its
attendant cornet man and its rubicund driver with his white topper
and the little boys running behind and stealing rides on the back
step. Until the war is over Epping will know them no more, and the
nightingales of Fairlop Plain will sing to the moon undisturbed.
We lunched at the "Trocadero," where a friend on the staff put us in the
right place and put before us the right food and the right wine. The
rooms looked like a Service mess-room. Every guest looked like every
other guest. Men and women alike had fallen victims to that devastating
plague of uniforms, and all charm, all significance, had been
obliterated by this murrain of khaki and blue serge. The suave curves of
feminine dress had been ironed out by the harsh hand of the
standardizer, and in their place we saw only the sullen lines of the
Land Girls' rig making juts and points with the rigidities of the
Women's Army Corps and Women's Police garb. The Vorticists ought to be
thankful for the war. It accomplished in one stroke what, in 1914, they
were feverishly attempting: it turned life into a wilderness of angles.
"Clothes," said Carlyle, "gave us individuality, distinction, social
polity." He ought to see us now. Standard Bread, Standard Suits,
Standard This, and Standard That.... The very word "standard" must now
be so universally loathed by men who have managed to conceal from the
controllers some remnants of character, that I wonder the _Evening
Standard_ manages to retain its popularity without a change of title. If
standardizing really helped matters, nobody could complain; but can
Dogberry aver that it does? Does it not, in practice, rather hinder than
help? In railway carriages the bottlefed citizen girds against all this
aimless interference with his daily life; but his protests are no more
considerable than that of the victim in the melodrama: "Have a care, Sir
Aubrey, have a care. You have ruined me sister. You have murdered me
wife. You have cast me aged father into prison. You have seduced me son.
You have sold up me home. But beware, Sir Aubrey, beware. I am a man of
quick temper. _Don't go too far._"
When we looked round the Trocadero, and we remembered the bright
company it once held, and then noted the tart aspect of the place under
organization, we felt a little unwell, and dared to wonder why
efficiency cannot walk with beauty and the zeal for victory go with
grace and gladness. Had the marriage, we wondered, been tried by the
authorities, and the parties proved to be so palpably incompatible? Or
was it that they had been for ever sundered by some one who mistakes
dullness for earnestness and ugliness for strength?
However, the rich scents of well-cooked offal, mingled with those of
wine and Oriental tobacco, soothed us a little, and we achieved a brief
loosening of the prevailing restraint, and allowed our thoughts to run
without the chain. Our friend had dug from the depths of the cellar a
fragrant Southern wine, true liquid sunshine, tinct with the odour of
green seas; a rare bottle to which I made a chant-royal on the back of
the menu, and, luckily for you, mislaid the thing, or it would be
printed here. We talked freely; not brilliantly, but with just that
touch of piquancy that stimulants and narcotics, rightly used, bestow
upon the brain.
We lounged over coffee and liqueurs, and then strolled up the Avenue
and called at the establishment of "Mr. Francis Downman," that most
discriminating and charming of wine-merchants--discriminating because he
has given his life to the study of wines; charming because, away from
his wine-cellars and in his true name, he is a novelist whose books, so
lit with sparkle and espièglerie, have carried fair breezes into many a
dusty heart. If you have ever visited that old Queen Anne House in Dean
Street and glanced at "Mr. Downman's" Bulletins, you will realize at
once that here is no ordinary vendor of wines. Wine to "Mr. Downman" is
a serious matter. Opening a bottle is an exquisite ceremony; drinking is
a sacrament. I once lunched with "Mr. Downman" in his cool Dutch kitchen
"over the shop," and each course was lovingly cooked and served by his
own hands, with suitable wines and liqueurs. It was a lesson in simple
and courtly living. How pleasant the homes of England might be if our
housewives would pay a little attention to correct kitchen and table
amenities. "Mr. Downman" would be a public benefactor if he would open a
School of Kitchen Wisdom where the little suburban wife might sit at his
feet and learn of him. Yes, I know that there are many schools of
cookery and housewifery, but these places are managed by people who
only know how to cook. "Mr. Downman" would bring to the task all those
little elegancies which make a dinner not merely satisfactory, but a
refinement of joy. Feeding, like all functions of the human body, is a
vulgar business anyway, but here is a man who can raise it to the
dignity of a rite.
Further, he has shown us, in those "Bulletins," how to turn advertising
into one of the minor arts. Perhaps of all the enormities which the
nineteenth century perpetrated in its efforts to make life unbearable,
the greatest was the debasing of trade. In the eighteenth century trade
was a serene occupation, as you may see by glancing at the files of the
old _Gentleman's Magazine_, _Mirror_, _Spectator_, where announcements
of goods and merchandise were made in fine flowing English.
Advertisement was then a matter of grace, of flourish and address; for
people had leisure in which to receive gradual impressions. The
merchants of that day did not scream at you; they sat with you over the
fire, and held you in pleasant converse, sometimes, in their talk,
throwing off some persiflage or apothegm that has become immortal. There
was a Mr. George Farr, a grocer, _circa_ 1750, who issued some
excellent trade tickets from the "Beehive and Three Sugar Loaves";
little cards, embellished with dainty woodcuts that bring to mind an
Elzevir bookplate; the pictures a sheer joy to look upon, the prose a
delicate pomp of words that delights the ear. Then there were the trade
cards of the Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' Company of the eighteenth
century, each one the production of a true artist (Hogarth did several),
as well as the tobacco advertisements of the same period. In the latter
case, not only were the cards works of art, but poetry was wooed and won
for the cause. Near the old Surrey Theatre lived one John Mackey, who
sang the praise of his wares in rhyme and issued playbills purporting to
announce new tragedies under such titles as _My Snuff-Box_, _The Indian
Weed_, _The True Friend, or Arrivals from Havannah_, _The Last Pinch_,
and so on. The cabinet-makers of the eighteenth century also found time
to indite delicious morsels of prose and prepare quaint and harmonious
pictures for the delight of their patrons. Mr. Chippendale and Mr.
Heppelwhite were most industrious in this direction, and the Society of
Upholsterers and Cabinet Makers issued, in 1765, a work now very much
sought after: _The Cabinet and Chair Makers' Real Friend and Companion_.
But then, snorting and hustling like a provincial alderman, in came the
nineteenth century, with its gospel of Speed-up; and the result was that
fair fields and stately streets scream harshly in your ears at every
turn:--
DRINK BINGO.
It is the Best.
EAT DINKYDUX.
You'll hate it at First.
This sort of thing continued for many decades, when, happily, its
potency became attenuated, and some genius discovered that people were
not always responsive to screams; that, after all, the old way was
better.
Thus literature returned and linked arms once again with trade. Partly,
the circularizing dodge was responsible for this, since, in the
circular, the bald statement was hardly good enough. It was found that
subtle means must be employed if you are striving to catch a man's
attention at the breakfast-table, when sleep still crawls like a slug
about the brain and temper is uncertain. Nothing is so riling to the
educated person as to have ungrammatical circulars dropped in his
letter-box. Their effect is that he heartily detests the article
advertised, not because he has tried it and found it wanting, but
because of the split infinitive or the infirm phrase. So the whoop and
the yell gave place to the full-flowered essay sprigged with the
considered phrase. And to my mind the best of all contemporary efforts
in this direction are "Mr. Downman's" "Bulletins," of which I have a
complete set. Here a fastidious pen is delightfully employed; and not
the pen only, but the taste of the book-lover. Indeed, they are lovable
productions, having all the gracious response to the eye and the touch
of Mr. Arthur Humphreys' anthologies of seventeenth-century poetry.
Everything--format, type, paper, and Elian style--breathes an air of
serendipity.
The first part of each "Bulletin" consists of a number of essays on
questions pertaining to wine and wine-drinking; the second half is a
catalogue of "Mr. Downman's" wines and their current prices, with
specimen labels, which are such gentle harmonies of line and colour that
one is tempted to start collecting them. "Mr. Downman" opens his
addresses in the grand manner:--
_My Lords, Reverend Fathers, Ladies and Gentlemen._
And if you love your Elia, then you must read "Mr. Downman" on Decanters
and Decanting, On Corkscrews, On How to Drink Wine, On Bottling, On
Patriotism and Wines, On the Suiting of Food to Wine, On Wines at
Picnics. His sharp-flavoured prose, full of sly nuances and coquettish
conceits, has all the tone of the best claret. Hear him on salads:--
This is the time of salads. And a good salad means good oil. It
also means good vinegar, or a fresh and juicy lime or lemon. Now
the Almighty has given us better tools for salad-making than any
wooden fork or spoon. In conditions of homely intimacy, a
salad-maker, when all is ready, will wash his hands well and long
as the moment approaches for serving the bowl. He will shun common
or perfumed soaps, and will use nothing but a soap made from olive
oil. Having dried his hands perfectly on a warm, clean towel, he
will finally whisk the cup of dressing into homogeneity, will pour
its contents over the salad, and will immediately proceed to wring
the leaves in the liquid as a washerwoman wrings clothes in soapy
water. (How horrid!) In doing this he will spoil the appearance of
come of the leaves, but he will have a salad fit for the gods.
After sampling a noble Madeira in his cellar cool, in William and Mary
Yard, we resumed our crawl, and in the black evening made a tour of
other of the old places. At the Café de l'Europe, Mr. Jacobs, leader of
the band, played for us a few old waltzes and morceaux reeking of the
spirit of 1912; but even he did not handle the fiddle, or seem to care
to handle it, in his old happy manner. Like the rest of us, I suppose,
he felt that it wasn't worth while; it didn't matter. We called at the
"Gambrinus," now owned by a Belgian; at the old "Sceptre," for a
coupon's worth of boiled beef; and so to the Café Royal.
Here we received a touch or two from the old times. War has killed many
lovely things, but, though it maim and break, it cannot wholly kill the
things of the spirit, and in the "Royal" we found that art was still a
living thing; ideas were still being discussed as though they mattered.
Epstein and Augustus John, both in uniform, were there, and Austin
Harrison had his usual group of poets. It was reassuring to see the old
domino-playing Frenchmen, who seem part of the fixtures of the place, in
their accustomed corner. The girls seemed to have packed away their
affrighting futurist gowns, and were arrayed more soberly. That night
they seemed to be more like human creatures, and less like deliberate
Bohemians.
I am not overfond of the Café Royal, but it is one of the West End shows
which visitors feel they must see; and when any provincial visitors
wonder: "Why is the Café Royal?" I have one answer for them: "Henri
Murger."
It is certain that, but for Murger, there would be no Chelsea and no
Café Royal. That man has a lot to answer for. I doubt if any one man
(I'm not including kings) has wrought so much havoc in young lives. He
meant to warn youth of danger; he actually drove youth towards it.
Any discussion which seeks to name the most dangerous book in the world
is certain to bring mention of Rousseau's _Confessions_, of Paine's _Age
of Reason_, of Artzibashef's _Sanine_, of Baudelaire's _Fleurs du Mal_,
and other works of subversive tendency. The one book which has really
done more harm to young people than any other is seldom remembered in
this connection. That book is _Scènes de la Vie de Bohême_; and it is
dangerous, not that it contains a line of obscenity or blasphemy, not
that it teaches evil as higher than good, but because it founded a cult
and taught young people how to ruin their lives. Bohemianism has, of
course, existed since the world began; rebels have always been; but it
remained for Murger to find a name for it and make a cult of it.
The dangers of this cult to young people lay not in its being an evil
cult, but in its being perhaps as fine a cult as any of the world's
great creeds: the cult of human sympathy and generosity. The Bohemian
makes friends with all kinds and all creeds--sinners and saints, rich
and poor; he cares nothing so long as they be kindly. And there lay the
danger, for the blood of youth, freed from all restraint, was certain to
overdo it. It became a cult of excess. Murger died, but he left behind
him a very bitter legacy to the coming generation. As that legacy passed
through the years it gathered various adhesions--such as Wilde's "In
order to be an artist it is first necessary to ruin one's health," and
Flaubert's "Nothing succeeds like excess"; so that very soon art
colonies became things discredited, unpleasant to the nostrils of the
righteous.
Murger himself saw the life very clearly, for he described it as "Vie
gai et terrible"; and he takes no pains to present to us only the
lighter, warmer side of it. He shows us everything; yet, so diabolical
is his manner, that, even after passing the tragedy of the closing
pages, the book and the life it pictures call to every one of us with
song in his blood and the spirit of April in his heart.
It first appeared as a feuilleton in a Paris daily, and Murger, with
characteristic insouciance, wrote his instalments only a few hours
before the time when they were due for the printer; and when he was
stumped for material, he invented a little story. Hence that singularly
beautiful tale, slammed into the middle of the book--the Story of
Francine's Muff--which forms the opening scene of Puccini's opera
founded on the novel. The book has neither balance nor cohesion, and in
this it catches its note from its theme. It is a cinematographic
succession of scenes, tender and passionate and gay; swift and hectic.
He invented and employed the picture-palace manner in literature before
the picture-palace was even conceived. The very style is feverish, and
from it one visualizes the desperately merry Bohemian slaving with pen
and paper in his high garret, and whipping his flagging brain with
fierce stimulant, while the printer's boy sits on the doorstep.
It stands alone. There is no book in the literature of the world quite
like it. It is the challenge of youth and beauty to the world; and if
we--grown wise and weary in the struggle--find a note of ferocity and
extravagance in the challenge, then let us judge with understanding, and
remember that it is a case of the fine and the weak against the brutal
and the ignorant. Murger's voice is the voice of protesting youth. He is
illogical; so is youth. He is furious; so is youth. He is heroic; so is
youth. He is half-mad with indignation and half-mad with the joy of
living; so is youth. It is by its very waywardness and disregard of
values that the book captures us.
There is no other book in which the spirit of Paris breathes more
easily. Here we have the essential Paris, just as in Thomas Dekker we
have the essential London. Poets, novelists and essayists have set
themselves again and again to ensnare the elusive Paris between the
covers of a book; but Murger alone--though he writes of Paris in
1830--has succeeded. Those who have never been to Paris should first
read his book; then, when they do go, they will experience the sense of
coming back to some known place.
It was this insidious book that first tempted youth to escape from a
hidebound world; showed it the way out--a way beset by delightful
hazards. It offered to all the golden boys and girls a new Utopia, and
they were fain to visit it. That it was a false world troubled them not
at all. The green glass, the delirious midnight hours, and the pale
loveliness of Mimi and Musette were, perhaps, shackles as binding and as
fearful as those of Convention. But anything to escape from the irk and
thrall of their narrow realities; so away they went, and the end of the
story is written in the archives of the Morgue.
After seventy years, however, the middle way has been found. There are
few tragedies to-day in the Quartier Latin, and very little gaiety or
kindliness; none of the old adventurous spirit. Things are going too
well in the studio-world these days. Chelsea and Montmartre have been
invaded by the American dilettanti, whose lives are one long struggle to
be Bohemians on a thousand a year. If, however, there be those who
regard this state of things as an improvement on the old, then let it be
remembered that this way was only found after Murger had wrecked his own
life and the lives of those who followed so gaily the unkind path down
which he led them. It is a pitiful catalogue; the more pitiful since so
many of the young dead are anonymous--the young men who might, had they
lived, have given the world so much of beauty, but who were unable to
pull up short of the precipice. Some of them, of course, we know: Gerard
de Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Ernest Dowson; and
their London monument is the Café Royal.
* * * * *
At half-past nine all fun ceased, but we had picked up a bunch from
Fleet Street, one of whom was taking home two bottles of whisky. So we
moved to "another place," and ordered black coffees which drank
tolerably well--after some swift surreptitious business with a
corkscrew. Later, we strolled across Oxford Street to what remained of
the German Quarter. We visited various coffee-bars, where our genial
comrade with the bottles again did his duty; did it beautifully, did it
splendidly, did it with Vine Street at his ear. And in a grey street off
Tottenham Court Road we found a poor man's cabaret. In the back room of
a coffee-bar an entertainment was proceeding. Two schonk boys, in straw
hats, were at a piano, assisted by an anæmic girl and a real coal-black
coon, who gave us the essential rag-times of the South. The place was
packed with the finest collection of cosmopolitan toughs I had ever seen
in one room. The air, physical and moral, was hardly breathable, and as
the boys were spoiling for a row, one misinterpreted glance would have
brought trouble--and lots of it. At different tables, voices were raised
in altercation, when not in lusty song, and the general impression the
place gave me was that it was a squalid, dirty model of the old
Criterion Long Bar. All the meaner, more desperate citizens of the
law-breaking world were gathered here; and, though we had broken a few
by-laws ourselves that night, we were not anxious to be led into any
more shattering of the Doraic tables. So at midnight we adjourned to
"another place," and drank dry gingers until three o'clock in the
morning. Then, to a Turkish Bath, and so to bed; not very merry, but as
cheered in the spirit as the humble, useless citizen is allowed to be in
a miserable, hole-and-corner way in war-time.
It had been a sorry experience, this round of visits, in 1917, to
quarters last seen in 1914; and it made me curious to know how other
familiar nooks had received the wanton assault of kings. In the
haphazard sketches that follow I have tried to catch the external
war-time atmosphere of a few of the old haunts, so far as a poor
reporter may. Later, perhaps, a better hand than mine will discover for
us the essential soul of London under siege; and these rough notes may
be of some service, since all remembrance of that time was blown away
from most minds by the maroons of Armistice Day.
BACK TO DOCKLAND
From my earliest perceiving moments, docks and railway stations have
been, for me, the most romantic spots of the city in which I was born
and bred. Quays and wharves, cuts, basins, reaches, steel tracks and
passenger trains, and all that belonged to the life of the waterside and
the railway, spoke to me of illimitable travel and distant, therefore
desirable, things.
This feeling I share, I suppose, with millions of other men and children
who have been reared in coast cities, and whose minds respond to the
large invitations offered by sooty smoke-stacks or the dim outline of a
station roof. And if these things pierced the complacence of one's days
in the past, how much deeper and more significant their message in those
four dreadful years, when men fared forth in ships and trains to new
perils unimagined in the quieter years.
That apart, I see docks and railway stations not in their economic or
historic aspect, but in the picturesque light, as, perhaps, the most
emphatic glory of London. For London's major architectural beauties I
care little. Abbeys, cathedrals, old churches, museums, leave me cold;
the fine shudder about the shoulders I suffer most sharply before those
haphazard wizardries of brick and iron flung together by the exigencies
of modern commerce. Their fortuitous ugliness achieves a new beauty. A
random eye-full of such townscapes may yield only an impression of
squalor, but many acres of squalor produce, by their very vastness,
something of the sublime. Belching chimneys, flaring furnaces, the
solemn smell of wet coal mingled with that of tar and bilge-water, and
the sight of brown sails and surly funnels and swinging cranes--in these
misshapen masses I find that delight that others receive from
contemplation of Salisbury Cathedral or a spire of Wren's.
The docks of London lie closely in a group--Wapping, Shadwell,
Rotherhithe, Poplar, Limehouse, Isle of Dogs, Blackwall, and North
Woolwich, and each possesses its own fine-flavoured character. You may
know at once, without other evidence than that afforded by the sense of
smell, whether you stand in London Docks, Surrey Commercial Docks, West
India Docks, Millwall Docks, or Victoria and Albert Docks. To me, the
West and East India Docks are soaked in the bright odour and placid
clamour of the East, with something of feminine allure in the quality of
their appeal. Victoria and Albert Docks I find gaunt and colourless.
Surrey Commercial Docks remind me of some coarse merchant from the Royal
Exchange, stupidly vulgar in speech, clothes and character.
The East and West India Docks I have treated elsewhere. Of the others,
the most exciting are Millwall and London Docks--though of the latter I
fear one must now speak in the past tense. Shadwell High Street and St.
George's, which border the London Docks, are no longer themselves. All
is now charged with gloom, broken only by the anæmic lights of a few
miserable mission-halls and coffee-bars for the use of Scandinavian
seamen. Awhile back, before this monstrous jest of war, there was a
certain raw gaiety about the place brought thither by these same blond
vikings; but, since the frenetic agitations of certain timorous people
against "all aliens"--as though none but an alien can be a spy--these
men are not now allowed to land from their boats, and Shadwell is the
poorer of a touch of colour. One might often meet them and fraternize
with them in the coffee-bars and beer-shops (there are few
"public-houses" in these streets), and hear their view of things.
Bearded giants they were, absurdly out of the picture in these tiny,
sawdusted rooms, against the hideous bedizenment of the London house of
refreshment. They would engage in rich, confused, interminable
conversations, using a language which, to the stranger, sounded like a
medley of hiccoughs and snorts; and there would be vehement arguments
and a large fanning of the breeze. In the upper rooms, on Saturday
evenings, one might have singing and dancing to a cracked piano and a
superannuated banjo, and there the girls of the quarter would appear,
and would do themselves well on seafarers' hospitality.
But the free-and-easy atmosphere is gone. You enter any bar and are at
once under a cloud. Suspicion has been bred in all these docks men by
the cheap Press. The patriotic stevedores regard you as a disguised
alien. The landlord wonders whether you are one of those blasted
newspaper men or are from the Yard. The visitors to the bars are in
every case insipid; none of the ripe character that once lit such places
to sudden life. Abrupt acquaintance and casual conversation are not to
be had. The beer is filthy. The good Burton is gone, and in its place
you have a foul concoction which has not the mellowing effect of honest
British beer or the exhilarating effect of the light continental brews.
Shadwell High Street is now a dirty lane of poor lodging-houses, foul
courts, waste tracts of land, mission halls exuding a stale air of
diseased hospitality, and those nondescript establishments, ships'
chandlers, with their miscellanies of apparently useless lumber, stored
in such a heap that it would seem impossible to find any article
immediately required. In short, social life here is as it should be,
according to the unwearied in war-work.
Still, there are some adorable morsels of domestic architecture to be
found up narrow alleys: old cottages and tumbling buildings, mellowed by
centuries of association with many weathers and with men and ships from
the green and golden seas that lie beyond the muddy waters of London
River; and these supply one touch of animation to the prevailing
moribundity.
Very different are the Millwall Docks. Little material beauty here, but
something much better--good company, and plenty of it. The docks lie at
the south of the Isle of Dogs, amid a flat stretch of dreary warehouses
and factories, and you approach them by a long curving street of poor
cottages and "general" shops. The island is a place of harsh discords,
for Cubitt's works are established here, and the ring of hammers rises
above the roar of furnaces, and the vociferous life of the canals above
the scream of the siren and the moan of the hooter, and the concerted
voices of the island seem to cry the accumulated agony of the East End.
Great arc lights, suspended from above, when cargoes are being unloaded
by night, fling into sudden illumination or shadow the faces and figures
of the groups of workers as they stagger up the gangways with their
loads, and lend to the whole scene an air of theatrical illusion. In the
bars you find sweaty engineers and grimy stokers. Here is a prolific
field of character; mostly British, though a few Lascars may be found,
drinking solitary drinks or parading the streets with their customary
air of bewilderment. Here are nut-brown toilers of the sea, whose
complexions suggest that they have been trapped by that advertiser in
the popular Press who offers his toilet wares with the oracular
pronouncement that "Handsome Men Are Slightly Sunburnt." Here are men
who have circled the seven seas. Here, calm and taciturn, is a man who
knows Pitcairn Islanders to speak to; who produces from one pocket a
carved ivory god, presented to him by some native of Java, and from the
other Old Timothy's One-Horse Snip for the Big Race.
Under the meagre daylight and the opulent shadows of these docks you may
drink beer and listen to casual chit-chat that carries you round the
world and into magical hidden places, and brings you back with a jerk to
the Isle of Dogs.
"Yerce. Two bob a pound the 'Ome an' Colonial was arstin' the missus for
the stuff. I soon went round an' told 'em where they could put it. Well,
'sI was sayin', after we left Rangoon, we----"
The land in this district consists, for the most part, of oozing marsh,
so that, when a gale sweeps from the mouth of the river, it reaches the
island with unexpended force. Then the sky seems to scream in harmony
with the rattling windows. Saloon signs swing grotesquely. The river
assumes a steely hue, heaving and rushing, sucking against staples,
wharves and barges, and rising in ineffectual splashes against the gates
of the docks, until you seek the public bar of the "Dog and
Thunderstorm" as a sanctuary. There, amid the babble of pewter and glass
and the punctuation of the cash register, you forget any London gale in
listening to stories of typhoons, cyclones, and other freaks of the
elements common to the Pacific and the meeting of the waters round the
Horn.
Many hours have I squandered on the ridiculous bridge of the Isle of
Dogs, in sunlight or twilight, grey mist or velvet darkness, building my
dreams about the boats as they dropped downstream to the oceans of the
world and their ports with honey-syllabled names--Swatow, Rangoon,
Manila, Mozambique, Amoy--returning in normal times, with fantastic
cargoes of cornelian and jade, malachite and onyx, fine shapes of ivory
and coral, sharp spices of betel-nut and bhang, and a secret tin or two
of li-un--perhaps not returning at all. There I would stand, giving to
each ship some name and destination born of my own fancy, and endowing
it with a marvellous meed of adventure.
It is an exciting experience for the landsman Cockney, strolling the
streets about the docks, to rub shoulders with other little Cockneys, in
blue serge and cotton scarves, who have accepted the non-committal
invitation offered by the funnel and the rigging over the walls of
Limehouse Basin. One remembers the story of the pale curate at the
church concert, at which one of the entertainers had sung a setting of
Kipling's "Rolling Down to Rio." "Ah, God!" he said, wringing his thin
hands, "that's what I often feel like.... Rolling down to Rio." And in
these streets one meets insignificant little men who have done it; who
have rolled down to Rio and gone back to Mandalay, and seen the dawn
come up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay.
And I am proud to have nodding acquaintance with them. I am glad they
have drunk beer with me. I am glad I have clicked the chopsticks in
Limehouse Causeway with the yellow boys who can talk of Canton and Siam
and North Borneo and San Francisco. I am glad I have salaamed noble men
of India at the Asiatics' Home, and heard their stories of odourous
villages in the hills and of the seas about India, and of strange
islands which mere Cockneys pick out on the map with an uncertain
forefinger--Andamans, Nicobars, Solomons, and so forth. I am glad from
having met men who know Java as I know London; who know the best places
in Tokio for tea and the most picturesque spots in Formosa; who can
direct me to a good hotel in Singapore, should I ever go there, and who
know where Irish whisky can be bought in Sarawak. Why study guidebooks,
or consult with the omniscient Mr. Cook, when you may find about the
great ornamental gates of the docks of London natives of all corners of
the world who can provide you with a hundred exclusive tips which will
make smooth the traveller's way over every obstacle or untoward
incident? Indeed, why travel at all, when you may travel by proxy; when,
by hanging round the docks of London, you may travel, on the lips of
these men, through jungle, ocean, white town, palm grove, desert island,
and suffer all the sharp sensations of standing silent upon a peak in
Darien, the while you are taking heartening draughts of mild and bitter
in the saloon bar of the "Star of the East"?
CHINATOWN REVISITED
"Chinatown, my Chinatown, where the lights are low"--a fragment of a
music-hall song in praise of Chinatown which sticks ironically in my
memory. The fact that the lights are low applies at the time of writing
to the whole of London; and as for the word "Chinatown," which once
carried a perfume of delight, it is now empty of meaning save as
indicating a district of London where Chinamen live. To-day Limehouse is
without salt or savour; flat and unprofitable; and of all that it once
held of colour and mystery and the macabre, one must write in the past
tense. The missionaries and the Defence of the Realm Act have together
stripped it of all that furtive adventure that formerly held such lure
for the Westerner.
It was in 1917 that I returned to it, after an absence of some years. In
that year I received an invitation that is rightly accepted as a
compliment: I was asked by Alvin Langdon Coburn to meet him at his
studio, and let him make from my face one of those ecstatic muddles of
grey and brown that have won for him the world's acknowledgment as the
first artist of the camera. Our meeting discovered a mutual enthusiasm
for Limehouse, and we arranged an excursion. There, we said to
ourselves, we shall find yet a taste of the pleasant things that the
world has forgotten: soft movement, solitude, little courtesies, as well
as wonderful things to buy. There we shall find sharp-flavoured things
to eat and drink, and josses and chaste carvings, and sharp knives. Oh,
and the tea, too--the little two-ounce packets of suey-sen at
sevenpence, that clothe the hour of five o'clock with delicate scents
and dreams.
But the suey-sen was gone, done to death by the tea-rationing order.
Gone, too, was the bland iniquity of the place. Our saunter through
Pennyfields and the Causeway was a succession of disillusions. The
spirit of the commercial and controlled West breathed on us from every
side. All the dusky delicacies were suppressed. Dora had stepped in and
khyboshed the little haunts that once invited to curious amusement.
Opium, li-un, and other essences of the white poppy, secretly hoarded,
were fetching £30 per pound. The hop-hoads had got it in the neck, and
the odour of gin-seng floated seldom upon the air. The old tong feuds
had been suppressed by stern policing, and Thames Police Court had
become almost as suave and seemly as Rumpelmayer's. Even that joyous
festival, the Feast of the Lanterns, kept at the Chinese New Year, had
fallen out of the calendar. The Asiatic seamen had been made good by an
Order in Council. All for the best, no doubt; yet how one missed the
bizarre flame and salt of the old Quarter.