A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a
butcher's shop on an upturned crate. Her fingers are covered in
rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing
her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing
throughout the history of the Orient.
She is beautiful after her kind. In five more years, however, she
will look like a side-show. Her lithe grace, her round face, her
firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue. The eye
passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her
recent beauty. She will be like a thin girl who somehow has been
merged with a fat woman. She will be "herself with yesterday's ten
thousand years,"--and yesterday winning all along the line. That is
the burden of the Jewess.
However, at the moment she is ripe as a peach is ripe before it falls
naturally into the hand. Were I a Sultan, swaying above the street
in a litter, I would roll a lazy eye in her direction, make a minute
movement of a jewelled finger, and, later at the palace, I would
address her:
"Moon of Great Beauty and Considerable Possibility," I would say,
"whither comest them, O Radiance, and who is thy father?"
Whereupon she would spit at me with her eyes and reply:
"Cancher see I'm respectable ... cancher? You're a nice chep, you
are, sitting up there dressed like a dorg's dinner and talkin' like
thet ... lemme go..."
For though her eyes are the eyes of Ruth among the alien corn, her
larynx is that of Bill Sykes. The street in which she sits, shedding
this varied atmosphere, is lined on either side by a row of rough
booths. It is a mere track between two bright hedges of merchandise.
Here the fruit-sellers expose their pyramids of red-gold oranges,
their African plums, their pineapples; there the sellers of shoes
wait patiently beneath their pendulous racks. The sellers of cloth
walk up and down with bright, stabbing colours, daringly mixed, slung
across their shoulders, and the drink merchants, with their cooling
brews--never absent from an Oriental market--stand beside their ample
golden globes.
Through this lane of bright colour moves the crowd--the women young,
straight, and mostly beautiful in a dark, passionate way; the old
women fat and round; the men sallow, bearded, and incredibly
wrinkled. Among them crowd the abject creatures so well known in the
East, who clutch a handful of vegetables or three inferior lemons
with which they try to undersell the regular merchants.
Where is it? It might be Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Tunis, or
Tangier, but, as a matter of fact, it is Petticoat Lane in
Whitechapel--a penny ride from Ludgate Hill!
As I walked through Petticoat Lane I thought that if we had a sunny
climate this part of Whitechapel would become one of the famous
show-places of the world. Here you have the East without its lepers,
without small-pox, without the flies, without the impertinent stinks.
This is the scene of rich and amusing variety which, were it only a
few thousand expensive miles from London, under a blue sky, would
attract the attention of the artist and the traveller.
The attitude towards commerce is as old as barter. I saw a neatly
bearded woman, whose brown coat looked as though it was draped over a
barrel, go up to a fishmonger, standing beside two gigantic codfish
and a number of smaller fish.
"How much?" asked the woman, indicating a nice group of still life.
"Six shillings," replied the fishmonger, with a keen glance from
small, black eyes.
"One and ten," remarked the woman, reflectively turning a plaice
upside down and prodding it with a fat finger.
Whereupon a singular change took place in the fishmonger's aloof
attitude. He was insulted, outraged. Suddenly, picking up a plaice
by the tail, he said with a threatening gesture:
"I'll wipe it acrost yeh face!"
The customer was not outraged as a woman would have been in Oxford
Street; she just shrugged her fat shoulders, as she would have done
in Damascus, and moved away, knowing full well that before she had
retreated very far she would be recalled--as she was. After a brisk
argument she bought the fish for two and fourpence and they parted
friends!