in that quarter bears for me still the same charm. On a bright Spring
day it might be Paris. There is a sense of space and sparkle about it.
The little milliners' girls, in piquant frocks, evoke memories of
Louise, and the crowding curls on their cheeks waft a perfume of
youth-time lyrics, chiming softly against the more strident and
repulsively military garb of the girl porters and doorkeepers. The
cleaners, bustling about the steps of the music-halls, throw
adumbrations of entertainment on the morning streets. People are
leisurely busy in an agreeable way--not the huckstering E.C. way.
In Piccadilly Circus there is the same sense of light and song among the
crowds emerging from the Tube. The shops are decked in all the colours
of the Maytime, and not one little workgirl but pauses to throw a mute
appeal to the posturing silks and laces and pray that the lily-wristed,
wanton damsel of Fortune will turn a hand in her direction.
But in the City, as I have said, there is little of this delight to be
found, either at morning, noon or night. The typical crowd of this
district may be seen at London Bridge, where, from eight to half-past
ten in the morning and from half-past five to half-past seven in the
evening, the dispirited toilers swarm to or from work. Indeed, it is not
a crowd: it is a _cortège_, marching to the obsequies of hope and fear.
It is a funeral march of marionettes. Here are no gay colours; no
smiles; no persiflage. All is sombre. Even the typists and the little
workgirls make no effort towards bright raiment; all is dingy and
soiled, not with the clean dirt that hangs about the barges and wharves
on the river, but with the mustiness of old ledgers and letter-files.
Listless in the morning and taciturn in the evening are these people;
and to watch them for an hour from the windows of the Bridge House Hotel
is to suffer an attack of spiritual dyspepsia. For, among them, are men
who have crossed that bridge twice daily for thirty years, walking
always on the same side, always at the same pace, and arriving at the
other end at precisely the same minute. There are men who began that
daily journey with bright boyish faces, clean collars, and their first
bowler hats, brave with the importance of working in the City. Their
hearts were fired with dreams and ambition. They had heard tales of
office-boys who, by industry, had been taken eventually into
partnership. They received their first rise. Later, they achieved the
romantic riches of thirty shillings a week. They made the acquaintance
of a girl in their suburban High Street. They married. And now, at
forty-five, all ambition gone, they are working in the same murky corner
of the same office, and maintaining wife and child on three pounds a
week. Their trousers are frayed and bag at the knees. Their coats are
without nap or grace. Two collars a week suffice. Gone are the shining
dreams. They have "settled down," without being conscious of the fact,
and will make that miserable journey, with other sombre and silent
phantoms, until the end. Verily, the London Bridge crowd of respectables
is the most tragic of all London crowds, and the bridge itself a _via
dolorosa_.
I do not know why work in the City should produce a more deadening
effect on the souls of the workers than work in other quarters, but the
fact that it does is recognized by all students of Labour conditions. I
have worked in all quarters, and have noticed a curious change of
outlook when I moved from the City to Fleet Street, or from Fleet
Street to Piccadilly. You shall notice it, too, in the faces of the
lunch-time crowds. East of St. Paul's, the note is apathy. Coming
westward, just to Fleet Street, you perceive a change. Here boys and
girls, men and women, seem to take an interest in things; one
understands that they like their work. They do not regard it as a mere
routine, to be dragged through somehow until the clock releases them.
A similar study in crowd psychology awaits you at the Tube stations in
the early hours of the evening, when the rush is on. With elbows wedged
into your ribs, and strange hot breaths pouring down your neck, you need
all the serenity you have stored against such contingencies; and the
attitude of the other people about you can mitigate your distress or
enhance it. The City and South London crowd is not the kind of crowd
that can bear its own troubles cheerfully, or help others to bear
theirs. I would never wish to go on a day's holiday with any of its
people. Their composite frame of mind is one of weak anger, expressive
of "Why isn't Something Done? What's the use of going on like this?"
More comely is the St. James's Park or Westminster crowd. From five to
half-past six these stations receive a steady stream of sweet and merry
little girls from the mushroom Government Departments that have spawned
all about this quarter. It is girls, girls, girls, all the way, with the
feeble and the aged of the male species toiling behind.
On the Bakerloo you find a crowd that is--well, "rorty" is the only
word. The people here are mostly southbound for the Elephant and Castle;
and you know the Elephant and Castle and its warm, impetuous life. There
are bold youths who have not fallen, like their fathers, to the cajolery
of a collar-and-cuff job in the City, but have taken up the work that
offers the best pecuniary reward. Grimy youths they are, but full of
vitality, and they pour down the staircase in a Niagara of humanity.
An excellent centre for observing the varying moods of the evening crowd
is Villiers Street, that gentle slope from which you may reach Charing
Cross Station, the Hampstead Tube, the District Railway, or the
Embankment trams. It is a finely mixed company, for, as any Londoner
will tell you, the residents of the hundred suburbs differ from one
another in manner, accent and appearance, even as the natives of
different continents. Those who are using the Hampstead Tube are
sharply marked from those who are taking the Embankment car to Clapham
Junction; while those who are journeying on the South-Eastern to Croydon
have probably never heard of Upton Park, whither the District will carry
others. There are well-dressed people and ill-dressed people; some who
are going home to soup, fish, a _soufflé_ and coffee, with wine and
liqueurs; and some who are going home to "tea," at about eight
o'clock--bread-and-margarine and bloater paste, with a pint of tea, or,
occasionally, a bit of tripe and onions. There are people in a mad
hurry, and others who move in aloof idleness. And above them all stand
the stalwart Colonials, waiting until 6.30, when the bars shall open,
airily inspecting the troops of girls and comparing notes.
"Say now, jes' watch here. Here comes a real Fanny."
"Ah, gwan. I ain' got no time for Fannies. I finished wid 'em. Gimme
beer, every time."
I have often wanted to make a song of Villiers Street, but I have never
been able to catch just the essence of its atmosphere. I am sure,
though, that the modern orchestra offers opportunities for one of our
new composers to embrace it in an overture. No effort has been made, so
far as I know, to interpret in music the noisy soul of the London
crowds. Elgar's "Cockaigne" overture and Percy Grainger's "Handel in the
Strand" were both retrospective in spirit, and the real thing yet
remains to be done. It has been done on the Continent by Suppé
("Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna"), by Sibelius in his "Finlandia,"
by Massenet in his "Southern Town," and by Dvorák in "Carneval Roman." I
await with eagerness a "Morning, Noon and Night at Charing Cross,"
scored by a born Cockney.
SATURDAY NIGHT
The origins of Saturday night, as a social institution, are obscure. No
doubt a little research would discover them to the earnest seeker, but I
am temperamentally averse from anything like research. It is tedious in
process and disappointing in result. Successful research means grasping
at the reality and dropping the romance.
The outstanding fact about Saturday night is that it is an exclusively
British institution. Neither America nor the Continent knows its
precious joys. It is one of the few British institutions that reconcile
me to being an islander. It is a festival that is observed with the same
casual ritual in the London slums and in Northumberland mining villages;
in Scottish hills and in the byways of the Black Country; in Camden Town
High Street and in the hamlets of the Welsh marches. Certainly, so long
as my aged elders can carry their memories, and the memories of their
fathers before them, Saturday night has been a festival recognized in
all homely homes. Strange that it has only once been celebrated in
literature.
It is, as it were, a short grace before the meal of leisure offered by
the Sabbath; a side-dish before the ample banquet; a trifling with the
olives of sweet idleness. On Saturday night the cares of the week are,
for a space, laid aside, and men and women gather with their kind for
amiable chatter and such mild conviviality as the times may afford. Then
the bonds of preoccupation are loosed, and men escape for dalliance with
the lighter things of life. Then the good gossips in town and country
take their sober indulgence in the social amenities. In village street,
or raucous town highway, they will pause between shops to greet this or
that neighbour and discuss affairs of mutual concern.
On Saturday night is kept the festival of the String Bag, one of those
many rigid feasts of the people that find no place in the Kalendar of
the Prayer Book. Go where you will about the country on this night, and
you will witness the celebration of this good domestic saint by the
cheerful and fully choral service of Shopping. Go to East Street
(Walworth Road); to St. John's Road (Battersea); to Putney High Street;
to Stratford Broadway; to Newington Butts; to Caledonian Road; to Upper
Street (Islington); to Norton-Folgate; to Kingsland Road; to Salmon
Lane (Limehouse); to Mare Street (Hackney); to the Electric Avenue
(Brixton); to Powis Street (Woolwich); to the great shopping centres of
provincial cities or to the easier market-places of the rural district,
and you will find this service lustily in progress; the shops lit with a
fresh glamour for this their special occasion. You will taste a
something in the air--a sense of well-being, almost of carnival--that
marks this night from other nights of the week. You will see Mother
hovering about the shops and stalls, her eye peeled for the elusive
bargain, while Father, or one of the children, stands away off with the
bag; and when the goodwife has achieved all that she set out to do, and
the string bag is distended like an overfed baby, then comes the
crowning joy of the feast, when the shoppers slip together into the
private bar of the "Green Dragon" or the "White Horse," and compare
notes with other Saturday-nighters and condemn the beer.
Saturday night is also, in millions of homes, Bath Night; another of the
pious functions of this festival; and for this ceremony the attendance
of the heads of the household is compulsory. Then the youngsters,
according to their natures, howl with delight or alarm as their turn
for the tub approaches. They will be scrubbed by Mother and dried by
Father; and when the whole brood is well and truly bathed and packed off
to bed, the elders will depart with the string bag, and perchance, if
shopping be expeditiously accomplished, take it, well-filled, to the
second house of the local Empire or Palace.
Do you not remember--unless you were so unfortunate as to be brought up
in what are called well-to-do surroundings--do you not remember the
tingling delight that was yours when, to ensure correct behaviour during
the week, the prospect was dangled before you of going shopping on
Saturday night? Many Saturday nights do I recall, chiefly by association
with these shopping expeditions, when I was permitted to carry the
string bag; and the shopping expeditions again are recalled through the
agency of smell. Never does my memory work so swiftly as when assisted
by the nose; I am a bit of a dog in that way. When I catch the hearty
smell of a provision shop, I leap back twenty-five years and I see the
tempestuous Saturday-evening lights of Lavender Hill from the altitude
of three-foot-six; and I remember how I would catalogue shop smells in
my mind. There were the solemn smell of the furniture shop; the
wholesome smell of the oilshop; the pungent smell of the chemist's; the
potent smell of the "Dog and Duck", where I received my weekly
heart-cake; the stiff smell of the linen-drapers'; the overpowering
odour of the boot-shop, and the aromatic perfume of the grocer's; all of
which, in one grand combination, present the smell of Saturday night: a
smell as sharp and individual as the smell of Sunday morning or the
smell of early-closing afternoon in the suburbs. If Rip van Winkle were
to awake in any town or village on Saturday night, he would need no
calendar to name for him the day of the week: the smell, the aspect, and
the temper of the streets would surely inform him.
But lately Saturday night has come under control, and the severe hand of
authority has wrenched away the most of its delight. Not now may the
String Baggers express their individuality in shopping. Having
registered for necessary comestibles at a given shop, they enjoy no more
the sport of bargain-hunting, or of setting rival tradesmen in cheerful
competition. Not now may the villagers crowd the wayside station for
their single weekly railway trip to the neighbouring town, where was
larger scope for the perfect shopper than the native village could
afford. No more may the earnest London Saturday-nighter journey by tram
or bus to outlying markets because the quality of the meat was better in
that district than in his own, or the price of eggs a penny
lower--though, if the truth be known, these facts were mostly proffered
as excuse for the excursion. No more do residents of Brixton travel to
Clapham Junction for their Sunday stores, or the elegant ones of
Streatham slink guiltily to Walworth Road. No more is Hampstead seen
chaffering at the stalls of Camden Town, or Bayswater struggling
gallantly about the shops of the Edgware Road and Kilburn.
The main function of Saturday night has died a dismal death. Still, the
social side remains. Shopping of a sort still has to be done. One may
still meet one's cronies in the market streets, and compare the bulk and
quality of one's ration of this and that, and take a draught of insipid
ale at the "Blue Pigeon", and talk of the untowardness of the times. But
half of the savour is gone out of the week's event; and it is well that
the Scots peasant made his song about it before it was controlled.
RENDEZVOUS
Although London possesses a thousand central points suitable for a
street rendezvous, Londoners seem to have decided by tacit agreement to
use only five of these for their outdoor appointments. They are: Charing
Cross Post Office, Leicester Square Tube, Piccadilly Tube, under the
Clock at Victoria, and Oxford Circus Tube; and I have never known my
friends telephone me for a meeting and fix a rendezvous outside this
list. Indeed, I can now, by long experience, place the habits and
character of casual acquaintances who wish to meet me, from their choice
among these places.
Thus, a Charing Cross Post Office appointment means a pleasure
appointment. Here, at one o'clock on Saturday afternoon, wait the bright
girls and golden boys, their faces, like living lamps, shining through
the cloud of pedestrians as a signal for that one for whom they wait.
And, though you be late in keeping the appointment, you may be certain
that the waiting party will be in placid mood. There is so much to
distract and delight you on this small corner. There are the bustle of
the Strand and the stopping buses; the busy sweep of Trafalgar Square,
so spacious that its swift stream of traffic suggests leisure; the hot
smell of savouries rising from the kitchens of Morley's Hotel; and the
cynical amusement to be drawn from a study of the meetings and
encounters of other waiting folk. Hundreds of appointments have I kept
at Charing Cross Post Office. I have met soldier-friends there, after an
absence of three years. I have met cousins and sisters and aunts, and
damsels who stood not in any of these relations. And I have met the Only
One there, many, many times; often happily; often in trepidation; and
sometimes in lyrical ecstasy, as when a quarrel and a long parting have
received the benison of reconciliation. Now, I can never pass the Post
Office without a tremor, for its swart, squat exterior is, for me,
bowered with delicious thrills.
Never keep an appointment under the Clock at Victoria. A meeting here is
fatal to the sweetness of the intercourse that is to follow. Always he
or she who arrives first will be peevish or irate by the time the second
party turns up; for Victoria Station, with its lowering roof, affects
you with a frightful sense of being shut in and smothered. Turn how you
will, sharply or gently, and you cannon with some petulant human, and,
retiring apologetically from him, you impale your kidney region on some
fool's walking-stick or umbrella. That fool asks you to look where
you're going, and then he gets his from a truck-load of luggage. You
laugh--bitterly. After three minutes of waiting in that violet-tinted
beehive, you loathe your fellow-man; you loathe the entire animal
kingdom. You "come over in one of them prickly 'eats." Your nerves flap
about you like bits of bunting, and the new spring suit that set in such
fine lines seems fit only for scaring birds. Then your friend arrives,
and God help him if he's late!
I have watched these Victoria appointments many times while waiting for
my train. The first party to the contract arrives, glances at the clock,
and strolls to the bookstall, cheerfully swinging stick or umbrella. He
strolls back to the clock, glances, compares it with his watch. Hums a
bar or two. Coughs. A flicker of dismay shades his face. Then a
handicapped runner for the 6.15 crashes violently against him in
avoiding a platoon of soldiers, and knocks his hat over his eyes and
his stick ten yards away. When the great big world ceases turning and he
finds a voice, the offender has gone. The next glance he shoots at the
clock is choleric. A slight prod from an old lady who wishes to find the
main booking-office produces a spout of fury; and the comedy ends with a
gestic departure, in the course of which he gets a little of his own
back on other of his species. His final glance at the clock is charged
with the pure essence of malevolence.
How much more gracious is an appointment in the great resounding hall of
Euston, though this is mainly a travellers' rendezvous and is seldom
used for general appointments. Here, cloistered from the rush and roar
of the station proper, yet always with a cheerful sense of loud
neighbourhood, the cathedral mood is induced. You become benign, Gothic.
There are pleasant straw seats. There are writing-tables with real ink.
There are noble photographs of English beauty-spots, and--oh, heaps of
dinky little models of railway trains and Irish Channel steamers which
light up when you drop pennies in the slots. Vast, serene and episcopal
is this rendezvous--it always reminds me of the Athenæum Club; and,
however protracted your vigil, it showers upon you something of its
quality; so that, though your friend be twenty minutes late, you still
receive him affably, and talk in conversational tones of this and of
that, instead of roaring the obvious like a baseball fan, as Victoria's
hall demands. You may even make subtle epigrams at Euston, and your
friend will take their point. I'd like to hear someone try to convey a
fine shade of meaning in Victoria.
Oxford Circus Tube I register as the meeting-ground of the suburban
flapper and the suburban shopping mamma. Its note is little swinging
skirts, and artful silk stockings, and shining curls, that dance to the
sober music of the matron's rustling satin. The waiting dames carry
those dinky little brown-paper bags, stamped with the name of some
Oxford Street draper, at whose contents the idler may amuse himself by
guessing--a ribbon, a camisole, a flower-spray for a hat, gloves, or
those odd lengths of cloth and linen which women will buy--though Lord
knows to what esoteric use they put them. Hither come, too, those lonely
people who, through the medium of "Companionship" columns or
Correspondence Circles, have found a congenial soul. Why they choose
Oxford Circus I don't know, but they are always to be seen there. You
may recognize the type at first glance. They peer and scan closely every
arrival, for, though correspondence has introduced them to the other
soul, they have not yet seen the body, and they are searching for
someone to fit the description that has been supplied; as thus: "I am of
medium height and shall be wearing a black hat, trimmed with Michaelmas
daisies, and a fawn macintosh," or "I am tall, and shall be wearing a
grey suit and black soft hat and spectacles, and will carry a copy of
the _Buff Review_ in my hand." One is pleased to speculate on the result
of the meeting. Is it horrible disillusion, or does the flint find its
fellow-flint and produce the true spark? Do they thereafter look happily
upon Oxford Circus Tube, or pass it with a shudder?
The crowd that hovers about the Leicester Square Tube entrances affords
little matter for reflection. It is so obvious. It is so Leicester
Square. It alternately snarls and leers. It never truly smiles; it is so
tired of the smiling business. The loud garb of the women tells its own
tale. For the rest, there are bejewelled black men, a few Australian and
Belgian soldiers, and a few disgruntled and "shopless" actors. I never
accept an appointment at Leicester Square Tube. It puts me off the lunch
or dinner or whatever business is the object of the meeting. It is
ignoble, squalid, with an air of sickly decency about it.
A few yards further Westward, at Piccadilly Tube, the atmosphere
changes. One tastes the ampler ether and diviner air. It does not, like
Charing Cross Post Office, sing April and May, but rather the mellowness
of August and September. Good solid people meet here; people
"comfortably off," as the phrase goes; people who have lived largely,
but have not lost their capacity for deliberate enjoyment. At meal-times
they gather thickly; quiet, dainty women; obese majors; Government
officials; and that nondescript type that wears shabby, well-cut clothes
with an air of prosperity and breeding. You may almost name the first
words that will be spoken when a couple meet: "Well, where shall we go?
Trocadero, Criterion--or Soho?" There is little hilarity; people don't
"let themselves go" at this rendezvous. They are out for entertainment,
but it is mild, well-ordered entertainment. The note of the crowd is,
"If a thing is worth doing at all, it's worth doing well," even if the
thing is only a hurried lunch or a curfew-rationed theatre.
Classifying London's meeting-places by their moral atmospheres, I would
mark Charing Cross Post Office as juvenile; Oxford Circus Tube as youth;
Leicester Square Tube as senility; Piccadilly Tube as middle-age; the
Great Hall at Euston as reverend seniority; and Victoria Station--well,
Victoria Station should get a total-rejection certificate.
TRAGEDY AND COCKNEYISM
The Cockney is popularly supposed to stand for the fixed type of the
blasphemous and the cynical in his speech and attitude to life. He is
supposed to jump with hobnailed boots on all things and institutions
that are, to others, sacred. He is supposed to admit no solemnities, no
traditional rites or services, to the big moments of life.
This is wrong. The Cockney's attitude to life is perhaps more solemn
than that of any other social type, save when he is one of a crowd of
his fellows; and then arises some primitive desire to mock and destroy.
He will say "sir" to people who maintain their carriages or cars in his
own district; but on Bank Holidays, when he visits territories remote
from his home, he will roar and chi-ike at the pompous and the rich
wherever he sees it.