The road comes straight from London, which is but a very short distance
off, within a walk, yet the village it passes is thoroughly a village,
and not suburban, not in the least like Sydenham, or Croydon, or
Balham, or Norwood, as perfect a village in every sense as if it stood
fifty miles in the country. There is one long street, just as would be
found in the far west, with fields at each end. But through this long
street, and on and out into the open, is continually pouring the human
living undergrowth of that vast forest of life, London. The nondescript
inhabitants of the thousand and one nameless streets of the unknown
east are great travellers, and come forth into the country by this main
desert route. For what end? Why this tramping and ceaseless movement?
what do they buy, what do they sell, how do they live? They pass
through the village street and out into the country in an endless
stream on the shutter on wheels. This is the true London vehicle, the
characteristic conveyance, as characteristic as the Russian droshky,
the gondola at Venice, or the caique at Stamboul. It is the camel of
the London desert routes; routes which run right through civilisation,
but of which daily paper civilisation is ignorant. People who can pay
for a daily paper are so far above it; a daily paper is the mark of the
man who is in civilisation.
Take an old-fashioned shutter and balance it on the axle of a pair of
low wheels, and you have the London camel in principle. To complete it
add shafts in front, and at the rear run a low free-board, as a sailor
would say, along the edge, that the cargo may not be shaken off. All
the skill of the fashionable brougham-builders in Long Acre could not
contrive a vehicle which would meet the requirements of the case so
well as this. On the desert routes of Palestine a donkey becomes
romantic; in a coster-monger's barrow he is only an ass; the donkey
himself doesn't see the distinction. He draws a good deal of human
nature about in these barrows, and perhaps finds it very much the same
in Surrey and Syria. For if any one thinks the familiar barrow is
merely a truck for the conveyance of cabbages and carrots, and for the
exposure of the same to the choice of housewives in Bermondsey, he is
mistaken. Far beyond that, it is the symbol, the solid expression, of
life itself to the owner, his family, and circle of connections, more
so than even the ship to the sailor, as the sailor, no matter how he
may love his ship, longs for port, and the joys of the shore, but the
barrow folk are always at sea on land, Such care has to be taken of the
miserable pony or the shamefaced jackass; he has to be groomed, and
fed, and looked to in his shed, and this occupies three or four of the
family at least, lads and strapping young girls, night and morning.
Besides which, the circle of connections look in to see how he is going
on, and to hear the story of the day's adventures, and what is proposed
for to-morrow. Perhaps one is invited to join the next excursion, and
thinks as much of it as others might do of an invitation for a cruise
in the Mediterranean. Any one who watches the succession of barrows
driving along through the village out into the fields of Kent can
easily see how they bear upon their wheels the fortunes of whole
families and of their hangers-on. Sometimes there is a load of pathos,
of which the race of the ass has carried a good deal in all ages. More
often it is a heavy lump of dull, evil, and exceedingly stupid cunning.
The wild evil of the Spanish contrabandistas seems atoned by that
wildness; but this dull wickedness has no flush of colour, no poppy on
its dirt heaps.
Over one barrow the sailors had fixed up a tent--canvas stretched from
corner poles, two fellows sat almost on the shafts outside; they were
well. Under the canvas there lay a young fellow white and emaciated,
whose face was drawn down with severe suffering of some kind, and his
dark eyes, enlarged and accentuated, looked as if touched with
belladonna. The family council at home in the close and fetid court had
resolved themselves into a medical board and ordered him to the sunny
Riviera. The ship having been fitted up for the invalid, away they
sailed for the south, out from the ends of the earth of London into the
ocean of green fields and trees, thence past many an island village,
and so to the shores where the Kentish hops were yellowing fast for the
pickers. There, in the vintage days, doubtless he found solace, and
possibly recovery. To catch a glimpse of that dark and cavernous eye
under the shade of the travelling tent reminded me of the eyes of the
wounded in the ambulance-waggons that came pouring into Brussels after
Sedan. In the dusk of the lovely September evenings--it was a beautiful
September, the lime-leaves were just tinted with orange--the waggons
came in a long string, the wounded and maimed lying in them, packed
carefully, and rolled round, as it were, with wadding to save them from
the jolts of the ruts and stones. It is fifteen years ago, and yet I
can still distinctly see the eyes of one soldier looking at me from his
berth in the waggon. The glow of intense pain--the glow of
long-continued agony--lit them up as coals that smouldering are
suddenly fanned. Pain brightens the eyes as much as joy, there is a
fire in the brain behind it; it is the flame in the mind you see, and
not the eyeball. A thought that might easily be rendered romantic, but
consider how these poor fellows appeared afterwards. Bevies of them
hopped about Brussels in their red-and-blue uniforms, some on crutches,
some with two sticks, some with sleeves pinned to their breasts,
looking exactly like a company of dolls a cruel child had mutilated,
snapping a foot off here, tearing out a leg here, and battering the
face of a third. Little men most of them--the bowl of a German pipe
inverted would have covered them all, within which, like bees in a
hive, they might hum "Te Deum Bismarckum Laudamus." But the romantic
flame in the eye is not always so beautiful to feel as to read about.
Another shutter on wheels went by one day with one little pony in the
shafts, and a second harnessed in some way at the side, so as to assist
in pulling, but without bearing any share of the load. On this shutter
eight men and boys balanced themselves; enough for the Olympian height
of a four-in-hand. Eight fellows perched round the edge like
shipwrecked mariners, clinging to one plank. They were so balanced as
to weigh chiefly on the axle, yet in front of such a mountain of men,
such a vast bundle of ragged clothes, the ponies appeared like rats.
On a Sunday morning two fellows came along on their shutter: they
overtook a girl who was walking on the pavement, and one of them, more
sallow and cheeky than his companion, began to talk to her. "That's a
nice nosegay, now--give us a rose. Come and ride--there's plenty of
room. Won't speak? Now, you'll tell us if this is the road to London
Bridge." She nodded. She was dressed in full satin for Sunday; her
class think much of satin. She was leading two children, one in each
hand, clean and well-dressed. She walked more lightly than a servant
does, and evidently lived at home; she did not go to service. Tossing
her head, she looked the other way, for you see the fellow on the
shutter was dirty, not "dressed" at all, though it was Sunday, poor
folks' ball-day; a dirty, rough fellow, with a short clay pipe in his
mouth, a chalky-white face--apparently from low dissipation--a
disreputable rascal, a monstrously impudent "chap," a true London
mongrel. He "cheeked" her; she tossed her head, and looked the other
way. But by-and-by she could not help a sly glance at him, not an angry
glance--a look as much as to say, "You're a man, anyway, and you've the
good taste to admire me, and the courage to speak to me; you're dirty,
but you're a man. If you were well-dressed, or if it wasn't Sunday, or
if it was dark, or nobody about, I wouldn't mind; I'd let you 'cheek'
me, though I have got satin on." The fellow "cheeked" her again, told
her she had a pretty face, "cheeked" her right and left. She looked
away, but half smiled; she had to keep up her dignity, she did not feel
it. She would have liked to have joined company with him. His leer grew
leerier--the low, cunning leer, so peculiar to the London mongrel, that
seems to say, "I am so intensely knowing; I am so very much all there;"
and yet the leerer always remains in a dirty dress, always smokes the
coarsest tobacco in the nastiest of pipes, and rides on a barrow to the
end of his life. For his leery cunning is so intensely stupid that, in
fact, he is as "green" as grass; his leer and his foul mouth keep him
in the gutter to his very last day. How much more successful plain,
simple straightforwardness would be! The pony went on a little, but
they drew rein, and waited for the girl again; and again he "cheeked"
her. Still, she looked away, but she did not make any attempt to escape
by the side-path, nor show resentment. No; her face began to glow, and
once or twice she answered him, but still she would not quite join
company. If only it had not been Sunday--if it had been a lonely road,
and not so near the village, if she had not had the two tell-tale
children with her--she would have been very good friends with the
dirty, chalky, ill-favoured, and ill-savoured wretch. At the parting of
the roads each went different ways, but she could not help looking back.
He was a thorough specimen of the leery London mongrel. That hideous
leer is so repulsive--one cannot endure it--but it is so common; you
see it on the faces of four-fifths of the ceaseless stream that runs
out from the ends of the earth of London into the green sea of the
country. It disfigures the faces of the carters who go with the waggons
and other vehicles--not nomads, but men in steady employ; it
defaces--absolutely defaces--the workmen who go forth with vans, with
timber, with carpenters' work, and the policeman standing at the
corners, in London itself particularly. The London leer hangs on their
faces. The Mosaic account of the Creation is discredited in these days,
the last revelation took place at Beckenham; the Beckenham revelation
is superior to Mount Sinai, yet the consideration of that leer might
suggest the idea of a fall of man even to an Amoebist. The horribleness
of it is in this way, it hints--it does more than hint, it conveys the
leerer's decided opinion--that you, whether you may be man or woman,
must necessarily be as coarse as himself. Especially he wants to
impress that view upon every woman who chances to cross his glance. The
fist of Hercules is needed to dash it out of his face.