When I came into the palace, out of the streets where black human
silhouettes moved on seemingly mysterious errands in the haze of
high-hung electric globes, I was met at the inner portal by the word
“Welcome” in large gold letters. This greeting, I saw, was part of the
elaborate mechanics of the place. It reiterated its message monotonously
to perhaps fifteen thousand visitors a week; nevertheless, it had a
certain effectiveness, since it showed that the Hanbridge Theatres
Company Limited was striving after the right attitude towards the weekly
fifteen thousand. At some pit doors the seekers after pleasure are
received and herded as if they were criminals, or beggars. I entered
with curiosity, for, though it is the business of my life to keep an eye
on the enthralling social phenomena of Hanbridge, I had never been in
its Empire. When I formed part of Hanbridge there was no Empire; nothing
but sing-songs conducted by convivial chairmen with rapping hammers
in public-houses whose blinds were drawn and whose posters were in
manuscript. Not that I have ever assisted at one of those extinct
sing-songs. They were as forbidden to me as a High Church service. The
only convivial rapping chairman I ever beheld was at Gatti’s, under
Charing Cross Station, twenty-two years ago.
Now I saw an immense carved and gilded interior, not as large as the
Paris Opéra, but assuredly capable of seating as many persons. My
first thought was: “Why, it’s just like a real music-hall!” I was so
accustomed to regard Hanbridge as a place where the great visible people
went in to work at seven a.m. and emerged out of public-houses at eleven
P.M., or stood movelessly mournful in packed tramcars, or bitterly
partisan on chill football grounds, that I could scarcely credit their
presence here, lolling on velvet amid gold Cupids and Hercules, and
smoking at ease, with plentiful ash-trays to encourage them. I glanced
round to find acquaintances, and the first I saw was the human being who
from nine to seven was my tailor’s assistant; not now an automaton wound
up with deferential replies to any conceivable question that a dandy
could put, but a living soul with a calabash between his teeth, as fine
as anybody. Indeed, finer than most! He, like me, reclined aristocratic
in the grand circle (a bob). He, like me, was offered chocolates and
what not at reasonable prices by a boy whose dress indicated that his
education was proceeding at Eton. I was glad to see him. I should have
gone and spoken to him, only I feared that by so doing I might balefully
kill a man and create a deferential automaton. And I was glad to see
the vast gallery with human twopences. In nearly all public places of
pleasure, the pleasure is poisoned for me by the obsession that I owe
it, at last, to the underpaid labour of people who aren’t there and
can’t be there; by the growing, deepening obsession that the whole
structure of what a respectable person means, when he says with
patriotic warmth “England,” is reared on a stupendous and shocking
injustice. I did not feel this at the Hanbridge Empire. Even the
newspaper-lad and the match-girl might go to the Hanbridge Empire and,
sitting together, drink the milk of paradise. Wonderful discoverers,
these new music-hall directors all up and down the United Kingdom! They
have discovered the folk.
*****
The performance was timed as carefully as a prize-fight. Ting! and the
curtain went unfailingly up. Ting! and it came unfailingly down. Ting!
and something started. Ting! and it stopped. Everybody concerned in
the show knew what he and everybody else had to do. The illuminated
number-signs on either side of the proscenium changed themselves with
the implacable accuracy of astronomical phenomena. It was as though some
deity of ten thousand syndicated halls was controlling the show from
some throne studded with electric switches in Shaftesbury Avenue. Only
the uniformed shepherd of the twopences aloft seemed free to use his
own discretion. His “Now then, order, _please_,” a masterly union of
entreaty and intimidation, was the sole feature of the entertainment not
regulated to the fifth of a second by that recurrent ting.
But what the entertainment gained in efficient exactitude by this
ruthless ordering, it seemed to lose in zest, in capriciousness, in rude
joy. It was watched almost dully, and certainly there was nothing in it
that could rouse the wayward animal that is in all of us. It was marked
by an impeccable propriety. In the classic halls of London you can still
hear skittish grandmothers, stars of a past age unreformed, prattling
(with an amazing imitation of youthfulness) of champagne suppers. But
not in the Hanbridge Empire. At the Hanbridge Empire the curtain never
rises on any disclosure of the carnal core of things. Even when a young
woman in a short skirt chanted of being clasped in his arms again, the
tepid primness of her manner indicated that the embrace would be that
of a tailor’s dummy and a pretty head-and-shoulders in a hairdresser’s
window. The pulse never asserted itself. Only in the unconscious but
overpowering temperament of a couple of acrobatic mulatto women was
there the least trace of bodily fever. Male acrobats of the highest
class, whose feats were a continual creation of sheer animal beauty,
roused no adequate enthusiasm.
“When do the Yorkshire Songsters come on?” I asked an attendant at the
interval. In the bar, a handful of pleasure-seekers were dispassionately
drinking, without a rollicking word to mar the flow of their secret
reflections.
“Second item in the second part,” said the attendant, and added
heartily: “And very good they are, too, sir!”
He meant it. He would not have said as much of a man whom in the lounge
of a London hotel I saw playing the fiddle and the piano simultaneously.
He was an attendant of mature and difficult judgment, not to be carried
away by clowning or grotesquerie. With him good meant good. And they
were very good. And they were what they pretended to be. There were
about twenty of them; the women were dressed in white, and the men wore
scarlet hunting coats. The conductor, a little shrewd man, was disguised
in a sort of _levée_ dress, with knee-breeches and silk stockings. But
he could not disguise himself from me. I had seen him, and hundreds of
him, in the streets of Halifax, Wakefield, and Batley. I had seen him
all over Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Staffordshire. He was a Midland
type: infernally well satisfied with himself under a crust of quiet
modesty; a nice man to chat with on the way to Blackpool, a man who
could take a pot of beer respectably and then stop, who could argue
ingeniously without heat, and who would stick a shaft into you as he
left you, just to let you know that he was not quite so ordinary as he
made out to be. They were all like that, in a less degree; women too;
those women could cook a Welsh rarebit with any woman, and they wouldn’t
say all they thought all at once, either.
And there they were ranged in a flattened semicircle on a music-hall
stage. Perhaps they appeared on forty music-hall stages in a year. It
had come to that: another case of specialisation. Doubtless they had
begun in small choirs, or in the parlours of home, singing for the
pleasure of singing, and then acquiring some local renown; and then
the little shrewd conductor had had the grand idea of organised
professionalism. God bless my soul! The thing was an epic, or ought to
be! They really could sing. They really had voices. And they would
not “demean” themselves to cheapness. All their eyes said: “This is
no music-hall foolery. This is uncompromisingly high-class, and if
you don’t like it you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” They sang
part-song music, from “Sweet and Low” to a “Lohengrin” chorus. And with
a will, with finesse, with a pianissimo over which the endless drone
of the electric fan could be clearly distinguished, and a fine, free
fortissimo that would have enchanted Wagner! They brought the house down
every time. They might have rendered encores till midnight, but for my
deity in Shaftesbury Avenue. It was the “folk” themselves giving back to
the folk in the form of art the very life of the folk.
*****
[Illustration: 0377]
But the most touching instances of this giving-back was furnished by the
lady clog-dancer. Hanridge used to be the centre of a land of clogs.
Hundreds of times I have wakened in winter darkness to the sound of
clogs on slushy pavements. And when I think of clogs I think of the
knocker-up, and hurried fire-lighting, and tea and thick bread, and the
icy draught from the opened front door, and the factory gates, and the
terrible timekeeper therein, and his clock: all the military harshness
of industrialism grimly accepted. Few are the clogs now in Hanbridge.
The girls wear paper boots, for their health’s sake, and I don’t know
what the men wear. Clogs have nearly gone out of life. But at the
Hanbridge Empire they had reappeared in an art highly conventionalised.
The old clog-dancing, begun in public-houses, was realistic, and was done
by people who the next morning would clatter to work in clogs. But this
pretty, simpering girl had never worn a clog seriously. She had never
regarded a clog as a cheap and lasting protection against wind and rain,
but as a contrivance that you had to dance in. I daresay she rose at
eleven a.m. She had a Cockney accent. She would not let her clogs make
a noise. She minced in clogs. It was no part of her scheme to lose her
breath. And yet I doubt not that she constituted a romantic ideal for
the young male twopences, with her clogs that had reached her natty feet
from the original hack streets of, say, Stockport. As I lumbered home in
the electric car, besieged by printed requests from the tram company
not on any account to spit, I could not help thinking and thinking, in a
very trite way, that art is a wonderful thing.