DIRT
I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest
people on the earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude and gross affair,
Irish dirt has still a pathetic and almost tender grace about it. “Dear,
dirty Dublin” sigh the emotional in such matters—though you never catch
anybody shedding a tear for remembrance of dear, filthy Glasgow. Dublin
is indubitably a dirty city, just as Ireland is a dirty country, and for
Irishmen, at any rate, the Government is a dirty Government. And it is
not because Dublin or Ireland is dirty of necessity, or in the way that
the Black Country or the East End of London are dirty. Not a bit of it:
Dublin and Ireland are dirty simply and solely because the Dublin and
Irish people steadfastly refuse to keep them clean. To all intents and
purposes the Irish people have lost, if indeed they ever possessed, that
gift of punctilious domesticity, which insists first and last and always
on cleanliness. In Dublin you will come upon more dirty hotels and more
dirty houses than in pretty well any other city of its size in Europe.
True, the dirt has the merit of not being too obvious, and falling short
of the scandalous; but it is still there, and you cannot get away from
it. Properly looked into, it recommends itself to you as the dirt of a
happy-go-lucky, neglectful, behind-hand and poverty-stricken people,
rather than of a people who are flagrantly given over to dirt for its
own sake. It is the dirt of the slattern who is forever dusting things
with her apron, rather than of the stout idleback for whom dust and grime
and sloppiness have no terrors, and no reproach. It is a dirt which is
the direct consequence of bad seasons, the decay of trade, monetary
stringency, and public and private listlessness and apathy. It is the
kind of dirt which one associates with the boarding-houses of elderly
ladies who have seen “better days.” Ireland’s better days have been few
and far between, and they would seem to be all past. Hence, no doubt, the
dustiness and dinginess and shabby gentility of her parlors. In an Irish
hotel dirt and its common concomitant, tumbledownness, are ever before
you. The floors clamor to be swept, the furniture would give a day of its
life for a polishing, the wall papers are faded and fly-blown, there are
cobwebs in the top corners and dust in the bottom corners, the windows
are rickety and perfunctorily cleaned, the carpets infirm and old, the
linen worn and yellow with age, the crockery cracked and chipped, the
cutlery dull and greasy, and the general air of the place shabby and
forlorn. I do not say that there are no cleanly and spick-and-span hotels
in Dublin; for there is at least one such establishment. But, in the
main, what one may term the semi-clean, semi-dirty, used-to-be kind of
hotel prevails. Even the waiters, though their hair be greased and their
faces shine by virtue of vigorous applications of soap, wear frayed and
threadbare swallow-tails and a sort of perennial yesterday’s shirt-front.
And what is true of the hotels is true of the houses. There is a district
between Sackville Street and the ⸺ Railway Station which contains a very
large number of the somberest, most forbidding, and dirtiest-looking
domiciles it has ever been my lot to come across. Formerly these houses
were the homes of the easy and the well-to-do; now they are let off in
tenements to the poorest of the poor. Black and grinding poverty peeps
out of the cracked and paper-patched windows of them; groups of grubby,
bare-legged, blue-cold children huddle round their decrepit doors, or
scamper up and down the filthy pavements in front of them. The places
may be sanitary enough within the meaning of the Acts, but that they
are filthy and foul, to a nauseating degree, no person can doubt. Such
rookeries would be clean swept away by the authorities in any English
city. In Dublin nobody seems to trouble about them, or to be in the
smallest sense disturbed by them. They are a part and parcel of dear,
dirty Dublin, and haply Dublin would not be Dublin without them.
In the other Irish cities and towns the same tendency to squalor and
grime and filth is painfully noticeable. Even in a center like Portadown,
which, be it noted, is Protestant and to a great extent new, the same
undesirable traits assail you pretty well wherever you go. In a city set
on a hill, without a factory to its name, I found a blackness and a grime
which reminded me of nothing so much as Gravesend or Stockport. The hotel
in that same city was as crazy as it was chilly and comfortless—poky
rooms and dark little passages, meager and dubious furnishings, and dirt,
dirt, dirt, from basement to attic. Yet the place seemed populous with
cleaner wenches, floor-scrubbers, and clout-women. There was a boy in a
green apron, who appeared to do nothing all day but dust the banisters,
and the waiters were eternally flicking the dust off things with their
napkins. And such waiters: wall-eyed, heated, fumbling, grumpy, and
incompetent. They insisted on getting in one another’s way, and they
had a gift of dilatoriness that amounted to genius. In this place, let
me set down a small fact about the Irish waiter which may, perhaps,
save future travelers in Ireland some trouble. If you ask an English
waiter for a time-table he will bring it to you, and leave you to your
own devices. If you ask an Irish waiter, he will say “Time-table, yes,
sir. Where will you be afther goin’, sir?” You are taken unawares, and
quite foolishly tell him the name of the next town on your itinerary.
Forthwith he informs you that there is a very good hotel there “be the
name of the Jukes Head,” and that the next train “convanient” goes at
“wan-thirty.” Is it a quick train? “Oh, yes.” Will he see that your
baggage Is taken to the station in time to catch it? Certainly he will.
You keep your mind easy and turn up at the station at “wan-thirty.” There
is a train at one-thirty, it is true, but, unluckily for you, it does not
go within a hundred miles of your place of destination. The train you
ought to have caught went at ten-thirty, and there is not another one
till late at night, while, if it be Saturday, you must wait till Monday
morning, because there are practically no Sunday trains in Ireland. Do
not imagine for a moment that your Irish waiter has misinformed you with
malice aforethought, or out of a desire to lengthen your sojourn in his
employer’s hotel; because this is not the case. He is merely an Irishman,
and therefore a born blunderer; and he does his best to blunder every
time.