outward mail sailings were reduced, and the men who landed in the early
days had been unable to get away. So the streets and lodging-houses were
thronged with Arabs, Malays, Hindoos, South Sea Islanders, and East
Africans; and the Asiatics' Home for Destitute Orientals was having the
time of its life. Every cubicle in the hotel was engaged, and many
wanderers were sleeping where they could. Those with money paid for
their accommodation; for the others, a small grant from the India Office
secured them board and bed until such time as proper arrangements could
be made. The kitchens were working overtime, for each race or creed has
its own inexorable laws in the matter of food. Some eat this and some
eat that, and others will eat anything--save pork--provided that prayers
are spoken over it by an appointed priest.
At half-past nine an occasional tipsy Malay might be seen about the
streets, but the old riots and mêlées were things of the past. In the
little public-house at the corner of Pennyfields we found the usual
crowd of Chinks and white girls, and the electric piano was gurgling its
old sorry melodies, and beer and whisky were flowing; but the whole
thing was very decorous and war-timish.
We did, however, find one splash of colour. A new and very gaudy
restaurant had lately been opened in a narrow by-street, and here we
took a meal of noodle, chow-chow and awabi, and some tea that was a
mocking echo of the old suey-sen. The room was crowded with yellow boys
and a few white girls. Suddenly, from a corner table, occupied by two of
the ladies, came a sharp stir. A few heated words rattled on the air,
and then one rose, caught the other a resounding biff in the neck, and
screamed at her:--
"You dare say I'm not respectable! I _am_ respectable. I come from
Manchester."
This evidence the assaulted one refused to regard as final. She rose,
reached over the table, and clawed madly at her opponent's face and
clothes. Then they broke from the table, and fought, and fell, and
screamed, and delivered the hideous animal noises made by those who see
red. At once the place boiled. I've never been in a Chinese rebellion,
but if the clamour and the antics of the twenty or so yellow boys in
that café be taken as a faint record of such an affair, it is a good
thing for the sensitive to be out of. To the corner dashed waiters and
some customers, and there they rolled one another to the floor in their
efforts to separate the girls, while others stood about and screamed
advice in the various dialects of the Celestial Empire. At last the
girls were torn apart, and struggled insanely in half a dozen grips as
they hurled inspired thoughts at one another, or returned to the old
chorus of "Dirty prostitute." "I ain't a prostitute. I come from
Manchester. Lemme gettater."
And with a final wrench the respectable one did get at her. She broke
away, turned to a table, and with three swift gestures flung cup, saucer
and sauce-boat into the face of her traducer. That finished it. The
proprietor had stood aloof while the girls tore each other's faces and
bit at uncovered breasts. But the sight of his broken crockery acted as
a remover of gravity. He dashed down the steps, pushed aside assistants
and advisers, grabbed the nearest girl--the respectable one--round the
waist, wrestled her to the top of the marble stairs that lead from the
door to the upper restaurant, and then, with a sharp knee-kick, sent her
headlong to the bottom, where she lay quiet.
Whereupon her opponent crashed across a table in hysterics, kicking,
moaning, laughing and sobbing: "You've killed 'er--yeh beast. You've
killed 'er. She's my pal. Oo. Oo. Oooooowh!"
This lasted about a minute. Then, suddenly, she arose, pulled herself
together, ran madly down the stairs, picked up her pal, and staggered
with her to the street. At once, without a word of comment, the company
returned placidly to its eating and drinking; and this affair--an event
in the otherwise dull life of Limehouse--was over.
Years ago, such affairs were of daily occurrence, and the West India
Dock Road became a legend to frighten children with at night. But the
times change. Chinatown is a back number, and there now remains no
corner to which one may take the curious visitor thirsting for exotic
excitement--unless it be the wilds of Tottenham.
The Chinatown of New York, too, has become respectable. The founder of
that colony, Old Nick, died recently, in miserable circumstances, after
having acquired thousands of dollars by his enterprise. From the high
estate of Founder of the Chinatown he dropped to the position of
panhandler, swinging on the ears of his compatriots. About forty years
ago, when Mott Street, Pell Street, and Doyers Street were the territory
of the Whyos, the Bowery boys and the Dead Rabbits, Old Nick crept
stealthily into a small corner. He started a cigar-store in Mott Street,
making his own cigars. He was honest, thrifty, and possessed a lust for
work. The cigar-store prospered, and soon, feeling lonely, as the only
Chink among so many white boys, he passed the word to his countrymen
about the big spenders of the district. On his advice, they closed their
laundries and came to live alongside, to get their pickings from the
dollars that were flying about. Chinatown was started, and rapidly
developed, and its atmosphere was sedulously "arranged" for the benefit
of conducted tourists from uptown, and the tables rattled with the dice
and fluttered with the cards. This success was the beginning of Old
Nick's failure. At the tables he lost all: his capital, his store, his
home, and his proud position. For a time he managed to survive in fair
circumstances; but soon the hatchet men became too numerous, and their
tong feuds too deadly, and their gambling tricks too notorious. Police
raids and the firm hand of the higher Chinese merchants put a stop to
the prosperity of Chinatown, and soon it fell away to nothing, and Old
Nick passed his last days on the sporadic charity of a white woman whom
he had in happier days befriended.
And to-day Pell Street and Mott Street are as quiet and virtuous as
Pennyfields and the Causeway. Coburn and I left the old waterside
streets with feelings of dismay, tasting ashes in the mouth. We tried to
draw from an old storekeeper, a topside good-fella chap, some expression
of his own attitude to present conditions, but with his usual
impassivity he passed it over. How could this utterly debased and
miserable one who dares to stand before noble and refined ones from
Office of Printed Leaves, who have honoured his totally inadequate
establishment with symmetrical presences, presume to offer to exalted
intelligences utterly insignificant thoughts that find lodging in
despicable breast?
Clearly he was handing us the lemon, so we took it, and departed for the
more reckless joys of Hammersmith, where Coburn has his home. On the
journey back I remembered the drabness we had just left, and then I
remembered Limehouse as it was--a pool of Eastern filth and metropolitan
squalor; a place where unhappy Lascars, discharged from ships they were
only too glad to leave, were at once the prey of rascally lodging-house
keepers, mostly English, who fleeced them over the fan-tan tables and
then slung them to the dark alleys of the docks. A wicked place; yes,
but colourful.
Listen to the following: two extracts from an East End paper of thirty
years back:--
THAMES POLICE COURT.
John Lyons, who keeps a common lodging-house, which he has
neglected to register, appeared before Mr. Ingram in answer to a
summons taken out by Inspector Price. J. Kirby, 53A, inspector of
common lodging-houses, stated that on Saturday night last he
visited defendant's house, which was in a most filthy and
dilapidated condition. In the first floor he found a Chinaman
sleeping in a cupboard or small closet, filled with cobwebs. The
wretched creature was without a shirt, and was covered with a few
rags. The Chinaman was apparently in a dying state, and has since
expired. An inquest was held on his remains, and it was proved he
died of fever, and had been most grossly neglected. The room in
which the Chinaman lay was without bedding or furniture. In the
second room he found Aby Callighan, an Irishwoman, who said she
paid 1s. 6d. a week rent. In the third room was Abdallah, a Lascar,
who said he paid 3s. per week, and a Chinaman squatting on a chair
smoking. In the fourth room was Dong Yoke, a Chinaman, who said he
paid 2s. 6d. per week for the privilege of sleeping on the bare
boards; two Lascars on bedsteads smoking opium, and the dead body
of a Lascar lying on the floor, and covered with an old rug. In the
fifth room was an Asiatic seaman, named Peru, who said he paid 3s.
per week, and eleven other Lascars, six of whom were sleeping on
bedsteads, three on the floor, and two on chairs. If the house were
registered, only four persons would be allowed in the room. The
effluvium, caused by smoking opium and the over-crowded state of
the room, was most nauseous and intolerable. In the kitchen, which
was very damp, he found Sedgoo, who said he had to pay 2s. a week,
and eight Chinamen huddled together. The stench here was very bad.
If the house were registered, no one would have been allowed to
inhabit the kitchen at all. He should say the house was quite unfit
for a human habitation. The floors of the rooms, the stairs and
passages were in a filthy and dilapidated condition, covered with
slime, dirt, and all kinds of odious substances.
The men had been hung up with weights tied to their feet; flogged
with a rope; pork, the horror of the Mohammedan, served out to them
to eat, and the insult carried further by violently ramming the
tail of a pig into their mouths and twisting the entrails of the
pig round their necks; they were forced up aloft at the point of
the bayonet, and a shirt all gory with Lascar blood was exhibited
on the trial, and all this proved in evidence. One man leaped
overboard to escape his tormentor; a boat was about to be lowered
to save the drowning man, but it was prohibited, and he was left to
perish. The captain escaped out of the country, forfeiting his bail
and abandoning his ship, leaving his chief officer to be brought
to trial and to undergo punishment for his share of this cruel
transaction.
In those days you might stand in West India Dock Road, on a June
evening, in a dusk of blue and silver, the air heavy with the reek of
betel nut, chandu and fried fish; the cottages stewing themselves in
their viscid heat. Against the skyline rose Limehouse Church, one of the
architectural beauties of London. Yellow men and brown ambled about you,
and a melancholy guitar tinkled a melody of lost years. Then, were
colour and movement; the whisper of slippered feet; the adventurous
uncertainty of shadow; heavy mist, which never lifts from Poplar and
Limehouse; strange voices creeping from nowhere; and occasionally the
rasp of a gramophone delivering records of interminable Chinese dramas.
The soul of the Orient wove its spell about you, until, into this
evanescent atmosphere, came a Salvation Army chorus bawling a lot of
emphatic stuff about glory and blood, or an organ with "It ain't all
lavender!" and at once the clamour and reek of the place caught you.
Thirty years ago--that was its time of roses. Then, indeed, things did
happen: things so strong that the perfume of them lingers to this day,
and one can, remembering them, sometimes sympathize with those who say
"LIMEHOUSE" in tones of terror. One of my earliest memories is of the
West India Dock Road on a wet November afternoon. A fight was on between
a Chink and a Malay. The Chink used a knife in an upward direction,
forcefully. The Malay got the Chink down, and jumped with heavy boots on
the bleeding yellow face.
Some time ago, when my ways were cast in that district, the boys would
loaf at a kind of semi-private music-hall, attached to a public-house,
where one of the Westernized Chinks, a San Sam Phung, led the band, and
freely admitted all friends who bought him drinks. Every night he
climbed to his chair, and his yellow face rose like a November sun over
the orchestra-rail. When the conductor's tap turned on the flow of the
dozen instruments, which blared rag-tag music, we shifted to the
babbling bar and tried to be amused by the show. It was the dustiest
thing in entertainment that you can imagine. To this day the hall stinks
of snarling song. Dusty jokes we had, dusty music, dusty dresses, dusty
girls to wear them, or take them off; and only the flogging of cheap
whisky to carry us through the evening. Solemn smokes of cut plug and
indifferent cigar swirled in a haze of lilac, and over the opiate air
San's fiddle would wail, surging up to the balcony's rim and the cloud
of corpse faces that swam above it. More and more mephitic the air would
grow, and noisier would become voice and foot and glass; until, with a
burst of lights, and the roar of the chord-off from the band, the end
would come, and we would tumble out into the great road where were the
winking river, and keen air and sanity.
Later, the boys would shuffle along with San Sam Phung to his lodging
over a waterside wine-shop, crossing the crazy bridge into the Isle of
Dogs. Often, passing at midnight, you might have heard his heart-song
trickling from an open window. He cared only for the modern, Italianate
stuff, and would play it for hours at a time. Seated in the orchestra,
in his second-hand dress-suit and well-oiled hair, he looked about as
picturesque as a Bayswater boarding-house. But you should have seen him
afterwards, during the day, in his one-room establishment, radiant in
spangled dressing-gown and tempestuous hair, a cigarette at his lips,
his fiddle at his chin. It was worth sitting up late for. Then his face
would shine, if ever a Chink's can, and his bow would tear the soul
from the fiddle in a fury of lyricism.
Half his room was filled with a stove, which thrust a long neck of
piping ten feet in the wrong direction, and then swerved impulsively to
the window. In the corner was a joss. The rest of the room was littered
with fiddles and music. Over the stove hung a gaudy view of Amoy. He
never tired of talking of Amoy, his home. He longed to get back to
it--to flowers, blue waters, white towns. He lived only for the moment
when he might tuck his fiddle-case under his arm and return to Amoy,
home and beauty. Once started on the tawdry ribaldry which he had to
play at the hall, his arm and fingers following mechanically the sheet
before him, he would set his fancies free, and, like a flock of
rose-winged birds, they took flight to Amoy. Music, for him, was just
melody--the graceful surface of things; in a word Amoy. Often he
confessed to a terrible fear that he would grow old and die among our
swart streets ere he could save enough to return. And he did. Full of
the poppy one dark night, he stepped over the edge of a wharf at
Millwall. Then, at the inquiry, it was discovered that his nostalgia for
Amoy was pure fake. He had never been there. He was born on a boat that
crawled up-river one foggy morning, and had never for a day gone out of
London.
There were many other delightful creatures of Limehouse whose names lie
persistently on the memory. There was Afong, a chimpanzee who ran a
pen-yen joint. There was Chinese Emma, in whose establishment one could
go "sleigh-riding." There was Shaik Boxhoo, a gentleman who did
unpleasant things, and finally got religion and other advantages over
his less wily brothers, who got only the jug. Faults they had in plenty,
these throwbacks, but their faults were original. Every one of them was
a bit of sharp-flavoured character, individual and distinct.
In those days there was a waste patch of wan grass, called The Gardens,
near the Quarter, and something like a band performed there once a week.
O Carnival, Carnival! There the local crowd would go, and there, to the
music of dear Verdi, light feet would clatter about the asphalt walk,
and there would happen what happens every Sunday night in those parts of
London where are parks, promenades, bandstands and monkeys' parades. In
the hot spangled dusk, the groups of girls, brave with best frocks and
daring ribbons, would fling their love and their laughter to all who
would have them. Through the plaintive music--poor Verdi! how like a
wheezy music-box his crinoline melodies sounded, even then!--would swim
little ripples of laughter when the girls were caressing or being
caressed; and always the lisp of feet and the whisk of darling frocks
kissing little black shoes.
Near by was the old "Royal Sovereign," which had a skittle-alley. There
would gather the lousy Lascars, and there they would roll, bowl or
pitch. Then they would swill. Later, they would roll, bowl or pitch,
with a skinful of gin, through the reeling streets to whichever boat
might claim them.
The black Lascars, unlike their yellow mates, are mostly disagreeable
people. There was, in those days, but one of them who even approached
affability. He was something of a Limehouse Wonder, for, in a sudden
fight over spilt beer, he showed amazing aptitude not only with his
fists, but also in ringcraft. Chuck Lightfoot, a local sport, happened
to see him, and took him in hand, and for some years he stayed in
Shadwell, putting one after another of the local lads to sleep. He
finished his ring career in a dockside saloon by knocking out an
offending white man who had chipped him about his colour. It was a foul
blow, and the man died. Pennyfields Polly got twelve months, and when he
came out he started on the poppy and the snow, for he was not allowed to
fight again, and life held nothing else for him. His friends tried to
dissuade him, on the ground that he was ruining his health--a sensible
argument to put to a man who had no interest in life; they might as well
have told an Arctic explorer, who had lost the trail, that his tie was
creeping up the back of his neck.
It is curious how the boys cling to you after a brief interchange of
hospitalities. You drop into a beer-shack one evening, and you are sure
to find a friend. One makes so easily in these parts a connection,
salutations, fugitive intimacy. You are suddenly saluted, it may be by
that good old friend, Mr. Lo, the poor Indian, or John Sam Ling Lee.
Vaguely you recall the name. Yes; you stood him a drink, some ten years
ago. Where has he been? Oh, he found a boat ... went round the Horn ...
stranded at Lima ... been in Cuba some time ... got to Swatow later ...
might stay in London ... might get a boat on Saturday.
But these casual encounters are now hardly to be had. So many boys, so
many places have disappeared. Blue Gate Fields, scene of many an Asiatic
demonism, is gone. The "Royal Sovereign"--the _old_ "Royal
Sovereign"--is gone, and the Home for Asiatics reigns in its stead. The
hop-shacks about the Poplar arches and the closed courtyards and their
one-story cottages are no more. To-day--as I have said three times
already; stop me if I say it again--the glamorous shame of Chinatown has
departed. Nothing remains save tradition, which now and then is fanned
into life by such a case as that of the drugged actress. Yet you may
still find people who journey fearfully to Limehouse, and spend money in
its shops and restaurants, and suffer their self-manufactured
excitements while sojourning in its somnolent streets among the
respectable sons of Canton. The boys will not thank me for robbing them
of the soft marks who pay twenty shillings for a jade bangle, of the
kind sold in a sixpenny-halfpenny bazaar; so, anticipating their
celestial disapproval, this miserable prostrates himself and remains
bowed for their gracious pardon, and begs to be permitted to say that
the entirely inadequate benedictions of this one will be upon them until
the waning of the last moon.
SOHO CARRIES ON
Soho! Soho!
Joyous syllables, in early times expressive of the delights of the
chase, and even to-day carrying an echo of nights of festivity, though
an echo only. How many thousand of provincials, seeing London, have been
drawn to those odourous byways that thrust themselves so briskly through
the staid pleasure-land of the West End--Greek Street, Frith Street,
Dean Street, Old Compton Street: a series of interjections breaking a
dull paragraph--where they might catch the true Latin temper and bear
away to the smoking-rooms of country Conservative clubs fulsome tales
that have made Soho already a legend. Indeed, I know one cautious lad
from Yorkshire, whose creed is that You Never Know and You Can't Be Too
Careful, who always furnishes himself with a loaded revolver when dining
with a town friend in Soho. I am not one to look sourly upon the simple
pleasures of the poor; I do not begrudge him his concocted dish of
thrills. I only mention this trick of his because it proves again the
strange resurrective powers of an oft-buried lie. You may sweep, you may
garnish Soho if you will; but the scent of adventure will hang round it
still.
But to-day the scent is very faint. The streets that once rang with
laughter and prodigal talk are in A.D. 1917 charged with gloom; their
gentle noise is pitched in the minor key. These morsels of the South,
shovelled into the swart melancholies of central London, have lost their
happy summer tone. Charing Cross Road was always a streak of misery,
but, on the most leaden day, its side streets gave an impression of
light. Lord knows whence came the light. Not from the skies. Perhaps
from the indolently vivacious loungers; perhaps from the flower-boxes on
the window-sills, or the variegated shops bowered with pendant polonies,
in rainbow wrappings of tinfoil, and flasks of Chianti. One always
walked down Old Compton Street with a lilt, as to some carnival tune.
Nothing mattered. There were macaroni and spaghetti to eat, and Chianti
to drink; dishes of ravioli; cigars at a halfpenny a time and cigarettes
at six a penny; copies of frivolous comic-papers; and delicate glasses
of lire, a liqueur that carried you at the first sip to the green-hued
Mediterranean. The very smell of the place was the smell of those
lovable little towns of the Midi.
But all is now changed. Gone are the shilling tables-d'hôte and their
ravishing dishes. Gone is the pint of vin ordinaire at tenpence. Will
they ever come again, those gigantic, lamp-lit evenings, those Homeric
bob's-worths of hors-d'oeuvre, soup, omelette, chicken, cheese and
coffee? Shall we ever again cross Oxford Street to the old German
Quarter and drink their excellent Pilsener and Munchner, in heartening
steins, and eat their leber-wurst sandwiches, and smoke their long, thin
cigars? Or seat ourselves in the Schweitzerhof, where four wonderful
dishes were placed before you at a cost of tenpence by some dastard spy,
in the pay of that invisible-cloak artist, the English Bolo?--who
doubtless reported to Berlin our conversation about Phyllis Monkman's
hair and Billy Merson's technique. Nay, I think not. The blight of
civilization is upon Soho. Many once cosy and memorable cafés are
closed. Other places have altered their note and become uncomfortably
English; while those that retain their atmosphere and their customers
have considerably changed their menu and cuisine. One-and-ninepence is
the lowest charge for a table-d'hôte--and pretty poor hunting at that.
The old elaborate half-crown dinners are now less elaborate and cost
four shillings. And the wine-lists--well, wouldn't they knock poor Omar
off his perch? I don't know who bought Omar's drinks, or whether he paid
for his own, but if he lived in Soho to-day he'd have a pretty thin time
either way--unless the factory price for tents had increased in
proportion with other things.