he is seen in a dramatic situation or in some moment of emotional
stress. He does not then cry "Gorblimey" or "Comartovit" or some
current persiflage of the day; or stand reticent and monosyllabic, as
some superior writers depict him; but, from some atavistic cause, harks
back to the speech of forgotten Saxon forefathers.
This trick you will find reflected in the melodrama and the cheap serial
story that are made for his entertainment. It is hostile to superior
opinion, but it is none the less true to say that melodrama does
endeavour to reflect life as it is. When the wronged squire says to his
erring son: "Get you gone; never darken my doors again," he is not
talking a particular language of melodrama. He may be a little out of
his part as a squire; that is not what a father of long social position
and good education would say to a scapegrace son; but it is what an
untaught town labourer would say in such a circumstance; and, as these
plays are written for him, the writers draw their inspiration from his
speech and manners. The programme allure of the Duke of Bentborough,
Lord Ernest Swaddling, Lady Gwendoline Flummery, and so on, is used
simply to bring him to the theatre. The scenes he witnesses, and the
scenes he pays to witness, show himself banishing his son, himself
forgiving his prodigal daughter, with his own attitudes and his own
speech. The illiterate do not quote melodrama; melodrama quotes them.
Again and again this has been proved in London police-courts. When the
emotions are roused, the Cockney does not pick his words and alight
carefully on something he heard at the theatre last week; nor does he
become sullen and abashed. He becomes violently vocal. He speaks out of
himself. Although he seldom enters a church, the grip of the church is
so tightly upon him that you may, as it were, see its knuckles standing
in white relief when he speaks of solemn affairs. If you ask him about
his sick Uncle John, he will not tell you that Uncle John is dead, or
has "pegged out" or "snuffed it"; such phrases he reserves for reporting
the passing of Prime Ministers, Dukes and millionaires. He will tell you
that Uncle John has "passed away" or "gone home"; that it is a "happy
release"; and, between swigs at his beer, he will give you intimate, but
carefully veiled, details of his passing. He will never speak of the
elementary, universal facts of life without the use of euphemism. A
young unmarried mother is always spoken of as having "got into trouble."
It is never said that she is about to have a baby; she is "expecting."
He never reports that an acquaintance has committed suicide; he has
"done away with himself" or "made a hole in the water."
At an inquest on a young girl in the Bermondsey district, the mother was
asked when last she saw her daughter.
"A'Monday. And that was the last time I ever clapped eyes on her, as
Gawd is my witness."
At another inquest on a Hoxton girl, a young railwayman was called as
witness. Having given his evidence, he suddenly rushed to the body, and
bent over it, and cried loudly:--
"Oh, my dove, my dear! My little blossom's been plucked away!"
In a police-court maternity case, I heard the following from the mother
of the deserted girl, who had lost her case; "Ah, God! an' shall this
villain escape from his crime scot-free?" And in the early days of the
war a bereaved woman created a scene at an evening service in a South
London Church with this audible prayer: "Oh, Gawd, take away this Day of
Judgment from the people, fer the sake of Thy Son Jesus. Amen."
Again, at Thames Police Court, during a case of theft against a boy of
seventeen, the father was called, and admitted to turning his son from
home when he was fifteen, because of his criminal ways.
"Yerce, I did send 'im orf. An' never shall 'is foot cross my threshold
until 'e's mended 'is evil ways."
The same reversion to passionate language may be found in many of the
unreported incidents of battle. I have heard of Cockneys, whose pals
were killed at their side, and of their comment on the affair in the
stress of the moment:--
"Old George! I loved old George better'n I loved anything in the world.
I'd 'ave give my 'eart's blood fer George."
And the cry of a mother at the Old Bailey, when her son was sentenced to
death:--
"Oh, take me. Take my old grey 'airs. Let me die in 'is stead."--
And here is the extraordinary statement of a girl of fourteen, who,
tired of factory hours and home, ran away for a few days, and then would
not go back for fear of being whipped by her father. At the end of her
holiday she gave herself up to the police on the other side of London
from her home, and this was her statement to them:--
"Why can't I go where I want to? I don't do anybody any harm. I knew the
world was good. I got tired of all the monotony, an' the same old thing
every day, an' I wanted to get out. I am. Why bother me? I wonder why I
can't go out and do as I like, so long as I don't do no harm. I thought
the world was so big an' good, but in reality living in it is like being
in a cage. You can't do nothing in this world unless somebody else
consents."
Strange wisdom from a child of fourteen, spoken in moments of terror
before uniformed policemen in that last fear of the respectable--the
police-station. But it is in such official places that the Cockney loses
the part he is for ever playing--though, like most of us, he is playing
it unconsciously--and becomes something strangely lifted from the airy,
confident materialist of his common moments. The educated man, on the
other hand, brought into court or into other dramatic surroundings,
ceases to be himself and begins to act. The Cockney, normally without
dignity, achieves it in dramatic moments, where the man of position and
dignity usually crumbles away to rubbish or ineptitude.
Hence, only the wide-eyed writers of melodrama have successfully
produced the Cockney on the stage. True, they dress him in evening
clothes, and surround him with impossible butlers and footmen, but if
you want to probe the Cockney's soul, and cannot probe it at first-hand,
it is to melodrama and the cheap serial that you must turn; not to the
slum stories of novelists who live in Kensington or to the "low-life"
plays of condescending dramatists.
MINE EASE AT MINE INN
When everything in your little world goes wrong; when you can do nothing
right; when you have cut yourself while shaving, and it has rained all
day, and the taxis have splashed your collar with mud, and you receive
an Army notice, post-marked on the outer covering _Buy National War
Bonds Now_--in short, when you are fed up, what do you do?
To each man his own remedy. I know one man who, in such circumstances,
goes to bed and reads Ecclesiastes; another who goes on an evening jag;
another who goes for a ten-mile walk in desolate country; another who
digs up his garden; another who reads school stories. But my own cure is
to board a London tram-car bound for the outer suburbs, and take mine
ease at a storied sixteenth-century inn.
Where is this harbour of refuge? No, thank you; I am not giving it away.
I am too fearful that it may become popular and thereby spoiled. I will
only tell you that its sign is "The Chequers"; that it is a
low-pitched, rambling post-house, with cobbled coach-yard, and
ridiculous staircases that twist and wind in all directions, and rooms
where apparently no rooms could be; that it was for a while the G.H.Q.
of Charles the First; and that it is soaked in that ripe, substantial
atmosphere that belongs to places where companies of men have for
centuries eaten and drunken and quarrelled and loved and rejoiced.
You talk of your galleried inns of Chester and Shrewsbury and Ludlow and
Salisbury, and your thousand belauded old-world villages of the West....
Here, within a brief tram-ride of London, so close to the centre of
things that you may see the mantle of metropolitan smoke draping the
spires and steeples, is a place as rich in the historic thrill as any of
these show-places.
But its main charm for me is the goodly fellowship and comfortable talk
to be had in the little smoking-room, decorated with original sketches
by famous black-and-white men who make it their week-end rendezvous. You
may be a newcomer at "The Chequers," but you will not long be lonely
unless your manner cries a desire for solitude. Its rooms are aglow with
all those little delights of the true inn that are now almost
legendary. One reads in old fiction and drama of noble inns and
prodigally hospitable landlords; but I have always found it difficult to
accept these pictures as truth. I have sojourned in so many old inns
about the country, and found little welcome, unless I arrived in a car
and ordered expensive accommodation. It was not until I spent a night at
"The Chequers" that I discovered an inn that might have been invented by
Fielding, and a landlord who is and who looks the true Boniface.
I had missed the last car and the last train back to town. I wandered
down the not very tidy High Street, and called at one or two of the
hundred taverns that jostle one another in the street's brief length.
The external appearance of "The Chequers" promised at least a
comfortable bed, and I booked a room, and then wandered to the bar. I
felt dispirited, as I always do in inns and hotels; as though I were an
intruder with no friend in the world. I ordered a drink and looked round
the little bar. My company were a police-sergeant in uniform, a
horsey-looking man in brown gaiters, an elderly, saturnine fellow in
easy tweeds, a young fellow in blue overall--obviously an electrician's
mechanic--and a little, merry-faced chap with a long flowing moustache.
I scrutinized faces, and sniffed the spiritual atmosphere of each man.
It was the usual suburban bar crowd, and I assumed that I was in for a
dull time. The talk was all saloon-bar platitudes--_This was a Terrible
War. The rain was coming down, wasn't it? Yes, but the farmers could do
with it. Yes, but you could have too much of a good thing, couldn't you?
Ah, you could never rely on the English climate.... Three shillings a
pound they were. Scandalous. Robbery. Somebody was making some money out
of this war. Ah, there was a lot going on in Whitehall that the public
never heard about...._ So, clutching at a straw, I opened the local
paper, and read about A Pretty Wedding at St. Matthew's, and a
Presentation to Mr. Gubbins, and a Runaway Horse in the High Street, and
a----
Then came the felicitous shock. From the horsey man came words that
rattled on my ears like the welcome hoofs of a relief-party.
"No, it wasn't Euripides, I keep telling you. It was Sophocles," he
insisted. "I know it was Sophocles. I got the book at home--in a
translation. And I see it played some time ago in town. Ask Mr.
Connaught here if I'm not right." He grew flushed as he argued his
rightness. I followed the direction of his nod. Mr. Connaught was the
disgruntled-looking man in tweeds. And Mr. Connaught set down his
whisky, fished in a huge well of a side-pocket, and produced--_OEdipus
Rex_ in the original Greek, and began to talk of it.
I sank back, abashed at my too previous judgment. Here was a man who,
during the half-hour that I had been sitting there, had talked like a
grocer or a solicitor's clerk--of the obvious and in the obvious way. It
was he who had made the illuminating remarks that there was a lot going
on in Whitehall that we didn't know anything about, and that you could
never rely on the English climate. And now he was raving about
Sophocles, and chanting fragments to the assembled whisky-drinkers.
Tiring of Sophocles, he dived again into the pocket and produced
Aristophanes.
The talk then became general. The constable, apparently annoyed at so
much Latin and Greek, thrust into the chatter a loud contention that
when a man had finished with English authors, then was time enough to go
to the classics. Give him Boswell's _Johnson_ and _Pepys' Diary_ and a
set of Dickens written in the language of his fathers, to keep on the
dressing-table, within easy reach of the bed, like. The electrician's
mechanic couldn't bother with novels; he was up to the neck just now in
Spencer and Häckel and Bergson, and if we hadn't read Bergson, then we
ought to: we were missing something. Then somehow the talk switched to
music, and there followed a dissertation by the police-sergeant on
ancient church music and the futility of grand opera, and names like
Palestrina and Purcell and Corelli were thrown about, with a cross-fire
of "Bitter, please, Miss Fortescue"--"Martell, please; just a splash of
soda--don't drown it"--"Have you tried the beer at the
'Hole-in-the-Wall?'--horrible muck"--"Come on--drink up, there, Fred;
you're very slow to-night."
"D'you know this little thing by Sibelius?" asked the merry fellow; and
hummed a few bars from the _Thousand Seas_.
"Ah, get away with yer moderns!" snapped the police-sergeant. "This
Debussy, Scriabine, Schonberg and that gang. Keep to the simplicities, I
say--Handel, Bach, Haydn and Gluck. Listen to this;" and he suddenly
drew back from the bar, lifted a mellow voice at full strength, and
delivered "Che Faro" from _Orfeo_; and then took a mighty swig at a pint
tankard and said that it had just that bite that you only get when it's
drawn from the wood.
It took me some time to pull myself together and sort things out. I
wondered what I had stumbled upon: whether other pubs in this suburb
offered similar intellectual refreshment; whether all the local
tradesmen were bookmen and music-lovers; and how to reconcile the dreary
talk that I had first heard with the enthusiastic and individual
discourse that was now proceeding. I wondered whether it were a dream,
and how soon I should wake up. If it were real, I wondered if people
would believe me if I told them of it.
But soon I dismissed all speculation, for by a happy chance I was drawn
into the circle. Some discussion having arisen on beer and its varying
quality, a member of the company produced a once-popular American
pamphlet, entitled _Ten Nights in a Bar-Room_; whereupon I handed round
a little brochure of my own, compiled, for private circulation, from
contributions by members of that London rambling Club, "The Blueskin
Gang," and entitled _Ten Bar-Rooms in a Night_. This pleased the
company, and I at once became popular and had to take my part in the
gigantic beer-drinking. Then the merry-faced little fellow slipped away,
and quickly returned to counter my move with an old calf-bound
seventeenth-century book, _The Malt-Worm's Guide_: a description of the
principal London taverns of the period, with notes as to the
representative patrons and the quality of the entertainment, material
and moral, offered by each establishment; every page adorned with
preposterous but captivating woodcuts.
On my suggesting that "The Blueskin Gang" might compile a similar guide
on the London bars of to-day, each member of the company burst in with
material for such a work. We decided that it would be impossible to
follow the model of _The Malt-Worm's Guide_ for such a work, since the
London taverns of to-day are fast shedding their individual character.
Formerly, one might know certain houses as a printers' bar, a
journalists' bar, a lawyers', and so on. The "Cock," in Fleet Street,
remains a rendezvous for legal gentry, and the taverns between
Piccadilly and Curzon Street are still "used" by grooms and butlers; and
two Oxford Street bars are the unregistered headquarters of the
furniture trade. And do you know the "Steam Engine" in Bermondsey, the
haunt of the South-Eastern Railway men, where gather engine-drivers,
firemen, guards and other mighty travellers? A pleasant house, with just
that touch of uncleanliness that goes with what some people call low
company, and produces a harmony of rough living that is so attractive to
matey men. And the Burton they used to sell in old times--oh, boy--as my
American friends say--even to think of it gives you that gr-rand and
gl-lor-ious feelin'.
But these places make the full list. The war has largely obliterated
fine distinctions. The taverns of the Strand and its side streets, once
the clubs of the lower Thespians, have become the rendezvous of Colonial
soldiers. The jewellers who once foregathered at the Monico, have been
driven out by French and Belgian military; and Hummum's, in Covent
Garden, into which you hardly dared enter unless you were a market-man,
has become anybody's property.
While I named the taverns of central London and their pre-war character,
others of the company threw in details of obscure but highly-flavoured
houses in outlying quarters of the city to which their business had at
times occasioned them, with much inside information as to the special
drinks of each establishment and its regular frequenters. I saw at once
that such a work, if produced, would exceed the bulk of Kelly's Post
Office Directory, but the discussion, though of no practical value, gave
me a closer view of the idiosyncrasies of the company. The lover of
Sophocles liked loud, jostling bars, reeking with the odour of crowded
and violent humanity, where you truly fought for your drink; where no
voice could be heard unless your ear were close upon it, and where you
had barely room to crook your elbow: such bars as you find in the poorer
quarters, as seem, at first acquaintance, to be under the management of
the Sicilian Players. The electrician preferred a nice quiet house where
he could sit down--no doubt to think about Bergsonism. The musical
police-sergeant had no preferences in the matter of company or
surroundings; the quality of the beer was all his concern. The
horsey-looking man liked those large, well-kept, isolated suburban bars
where you might find but two or three customers with whom you could have
what he called a Good Old Talk About Things.
At closing time I discovered that the little merry-faced fellow was the
host; indeed, I had placed him in some such capacity, for his face might
have been preserved on canvas as the universal type of the jovial
landlord.
"You're staying here, aren't you? Come through to my room for a bit.
Unless you want to get off to bye-bye."
I didn't want to get off to bye-bye. I wanted to know more of this
comic-opera inn. So I followed him to his private room, and I found it
walled with books--real books, such as were loved by Lamb--_The Anatomy
of Melancholy_, Walker's _Original_, _The Compleat Angler,_ an
Elizabethan Song-book, Descartes, Leopardi, Montaigne, and so on. The
piano in the corner bore an open volume of Mozart's Sonatas; and this
extraordinary Boniface, having "put the bar up," seated himself and
played Mozart and Beethoven and Schumann and Isolde's "Liebestod," and
morsels of Grieg, until three o'clock in the morning, when I climbed to
my room.
On the way he showed me the King Charles room and the delightful
eighteenth-century mezzotints on the stair-case walls, and the secret
way from the first floor to the yard. From that night our friendship
began. I stayed there the following day and for two days more, and
pulled his books about, and roamed over the many rooms, and met the
company of my first night in the bar.
I was charmed by the air of intimacy that belongs to that bar, deriving,
I think, from the sweet nature of the host. You may stay at popular inns
or resplendent hotels, and make casual acquaintance in the lounges, and
exchange talk; but it is impossible, in the huge cubic space of such
establishments, to come near to other spirits. You do not meet a man in
town and say: "What? You've stayed at the 'Royal York'? I've stayed
there too," and straightway develop a friendship. But you can meet a
stranger, and say: "What? You know 'The Chequers?' D'you know Jimmy?"
and you fall at once to discussing old Jimmy, the landlord, and you
admit the stranger to the secrets of your heart.
Jimmy--I hope he won't mind my writing him down as Jimmy; you have only
to look at him to know that he cannot be James or Jim--Jimmy radiates
cheer; whether in his own inn or in other people's. Among his
well-smoked furniture and walls men talk freely and listen keenly. There
is no obscene reticence, no cunning reserve. Unpleasant men would be
miserable at "The Chequers"; they would seek some other biding-place
where self-revelation is kept within diplomatic bounds.
Believe me, "The Mermaid" was not the end of the great taverns. What
things have we seen done and heard said at the bar of "The Chequers."
What famous company has gathered there on Sunday evenings, artists,
literary men, musicians, philosophers, entering into fierce argument and
vociferous agreement with the local stalwarts. In these troubled times
people are mentally slack. They readily accept mob opinion, to save
themselves the added strain of thinking; and eagerly adopt the attitude
that it is idle to concern oneself with intellectual affairs in these
days; so that there is now no sensible talk to be had in bar or club.
Wherefore, it is a relief to possess one place--and that an inn--where
one may be sure of finding company that will join with relish in serious
talk and put their whole lives in a jest. Such delight and refreshment
do I find at this inn, that scarcely a Saturday passes but I board the
car and glide to "The Chequers" in--well, just beyond the London Postal
District.
RELICS
The turning-out of the crowded drawers of an old bureau or cabinet is
universally known as the prime pastime of the faded spinster; a pastime
in which the starved spirit may exercise itself among delicious
melancholies and wraiths of spent joys. Well, I am not yet faded, and I
am not a spinster; but I have fallen to the lure of "turning out." I
have lately "turned out"--not the musty souvenirs of fifty years ago,
love, fifty years ago, but the still warm fragments of A.D. 1912.
The other day, while searching irately in my fumed-oak rolltop desk for
a publisher's royalty statement which he had not sent me, I opened at
random a little devil of a drawer who conceals his being in the
right-hand lower corner. And lo! out stepped, airily, that well-polished
gentleman, Mr. Nineteen-Twelve. My anger over the missing accounts was
at once soothed. In certain chapters of this book I have harked back to
the years before 1914, and it may be that you conceive me as a doddering
old bore: a praiser of times past. But what would you have? You have
not surely the face to ask me to praise times present?
So I took a long look at Mr. Nineteen-Twelve, and went thoroughly
through him. My first discovery was an old menu. My second discovery was
a bunch of menus. You won't get exasperated--will you?--if I print here
the menu of a one-and-sixpenny dinner, eaten on a hot June night in
Greek Street:--
Hors-d'oeuvre varié.
Consommé Henri IV.
Crème Parmentier.
Saumon bouillé.
Concombre.
Filet mignon.
Pommes sautés.
Haricots verts.
Poulet en casserole.
Salade saison.
Fraises aux liqueurs.
Glace vanille.
Fromages.
Dessert.
Café.
I dug my hand deeper into the pockets of Mr. Nineteen-Twelve, and menu
after menu and relic after relic came forth. There was a menu of a Lotus
Club supper. I'm hanged if I can remember the Lotus Club, or its idea,
or even its situation. There were old hotel bills, which, thrown
together in groups, might suggest itineraries for some very good walking
tours; for there were bills from Stratford-on-Avon and Goring-on-Thames
and High Wycombe and Oxford and Banbury; there were bills from Bognor
and Arundel and Chichester and the Isle of Wight; there were bills from
Tintern and Chepstow and Dean Forest and Monmouth; there were bills from
Kendal and Appleby and Windermere and Grasmere. Another clutching hand
gave up old menus from the Great Western, the North-Western, and the
Great Northern dining-cars. In a corner I found an assortment of fancy
cigarette tins and boxes, specially designed and engraved for various
restaurants and hotels. Now the cigarette tins are no more, and the
boxes are made from flimsy card and are none too well printed, and many
of the restaurants from which they came have disappeared, these
elaborate productions are treasurable, not only as echoes of the good
days, but as _objets d'art_.