BOXING-DAY ON THE STREETS.
Boxing-day in the London streets, and especially a wet Boxing-day, can
scarcely fail to afford us some tableaux vivants illustrative of English
metropolitan life. In a metaphorical and technical sense, Boxing-day is
always more or less "wet"--generally more, and not less; but this year
the expression is used climatically, and in its first intention.
Christmas-eve of the year about which I write was bright and springlike;
Christmas-day dismal, dark, and un-Christmas-like; but Boxing-day that
year was essentially muggy, sloppy, drizzly, and nasty. A day to avoid
the London streets if you want to take a romantic Rosa-Matilda view of
London life; but the very day of all others, if you wish to see real
London as it is. Boxing-day will inevitably be "wetter" in every sense
than usual this year, internally and externally. So let us commence our
series of living pictures at ten o'clock in the morning. Suppose we
begin with something that shall bear reference to the past festival--the
eve and the day of the Great Birth, recollect. See, here is Grotto
Passage, Marylebone, and at its extremity Paradise Street--the names
sound promising, but alas for the reality! We are going to turn for a
moment into the Marylebone Police Court, where Mr. D'Eyncourt is
dispensing summary justice to the accumulations of the last two days.
These are the people who have been spending Christmas-eve,
Christmas-day, and some portion of Boxing-day already in the
police-cells. Let us take one as a typical case. Let that poor little
eight-year-old Arab step down from the dock and go off with his mother,
who, we hope, will take the magistrate's excellent advice, and keep the
child from begging--that is why he has spent Christmas in the
cells--lest he be sent to a school for eight years, and she have to pay
for him--God help her! she does not look as though she could afford very
high terms. A bruised and bleeding woman, not young or good-looking,
enters the box with her head bound up. Her lord and master confronts her
in the dock. It is the "old, old story." A drop of drink yesterday--the
day of the Great Nativity, never forget--series of "drops of drink" all
day long; and, at five o'clock, just when gentility was beginning to
think of dinner, the kitchen poker was used with frightful effect. A
triangular cut over the right eye, and another in the dangerous
neighbourhood of the left ear, administered with that symbol of domestic
bliss, the kitchen poker, sends the wife doubled up into a corner, with
an infant of two years old in her arms. The head of the family goes out
for a walk after his exertions. The woman lies there bleeding until the
neighbours hear her "mourning," as she terms it--the result being that
the lord and master's "constitutional" is cut short by a policeman, and
the happy pair are this morning separated for six months, at the
expiration of which period Paterfamilias is to find surety for another
six months' good behaviour. Such, starred round with endless episodes of
"drunk and disorderly," "foul language," and so on, is our first tableau
this Boxing-day. It is not a pleasant one. Let us pass on.
Along Oxford Street, despite the Bank Holidays Act, many shops are open,
chiefly those devoted to the sale of articles eatable, drinkable, and
avoidable; these last being in the shape of chemists' shops, and shops
for Christmas presents--to be shunned by miserly old bachelors. Let us
turn into the British Museum and see sensible, decorous Boxing-day
there. At the corner of Museum Street there is a lively itinerant
musician, evidently French, who plays the fiddle until his bow tumbles
all to pieces, but he goes on playing with the stick as though nothing
had happened. When his instrument has come entirely to grief he turns to
a clarionet, which he carries under his arm, and plays "Mourir pour la
Patrie" with extraordinary vocal effect and irreverent gestures.
Punch-and-Judy is largely attended at the other end; Punch is
kitchen-pokering his wife, too, like the gentleman we have just left;
but we pass in with the crowds to the Museum itself. Halting a moment
in the reading-room, to jot down there a few notes, one is struck with
the scanty show of students. _They_ are spending Boxing-day somewhere
else. Passing through the little knot of people who are permitted by
special order to come as far as the door of the reading-room, and who
evidently regard the readers as some curious sort of animal exhibited
for their special delectation--perhaps the book-"worm" of which they
have heard so much--we go up the stairs, now thronged with crowds in
unwonted broadcloth and fragrant with the odour of the inevitable
orange. Next to the drinking fountain, which is decidedly the chief
attraction, comes the gorilla, and then the extinct animals. One stout
old lady, contemplating the megatherium and mastodon, inquires in what
parts "them creeturs" are to be found, and seems considerably damped by
being informed that Nature has been "out" of such articles for several
æons. The mummies, with the bones of their toes sticking out, also come
in for a large share of admiration. There is a good deal of rough
flirtation going on; but, on the whole, the pleasure is rather of a
placid order, though still contrasting favourably with the settled gloom
visible on the faces of the attendants in the various galleries. How
well we can understand such gloom! How utterly hateful must that giant
elk and overgrown extinct armadillo be to a man condemned to spend a
lifetime in their close contemplation!
But let us pass on to the artistic Boxing-day keepers at the National
Gallery. The walk will take us through the Seven Dials, and can scarcely
fail to be suggestive. It is now one o'clock, the traditional hour of
dinner; and in Broad Street, St. Giles's, I see, for the first time
to-day, the human barometer evidently standing at "much wet." A
gentleman in a grey coat and red comforter, who bears palpable signs of
having been more than once on his back, has just reached that perplexing
point of inebriety when he can walk quickly or run, but cannot stand
still or walk steadily. He is pursued by small children, mostly girls,
after whom, every now and then, he runs hopelessly, to their intense
gratification. The poultry and bird shops in the Seven Dials are objects
of some attraction, though they savour too much of "business" to be in
very great force. The National Gallery is crowded with unaccustomed art
students. There is about the visitors a quiet air of doing their duty,
and being determined to go through with it at any price. One
brazen-faced quean speculates audibly--in fact, very audibly--as to
which "picter" she should choose if she had her "pick," and decent
matrons pass the particularly High Art of the old masters with
half-averted gaze, as though they were not quite sure of doing right in
countenancing such exhibitions. Hogarth's evergreen "Marriage à la
Mode" is a great centre of attraction, and the youngsters never tire of
listening, as "with weeping and with laughter still is the story told"
over and over again by their elders. Gainsborough's likeness of Mrs.
Siddons is also a great favourite; but perhaps the picture that attracts
most attention is Van Eyck's "John Arnolfini, of Lucca, and his Wife."
The gentleman wears a portentous hat, which tickled the fancy of the
Boxing-day people immensely. There were great speculations too among
them as to whether the curious Tuscan pictures at the top of the stairs
were "needlework" or not. Still, who shall say that these visitors were
not the better for their visit, surrounded as they were by forms of
beauty on every side, even if they did not examine them with the eyes of
connoisseurs?
Boxing-day on the river: The silent street is almost deserted. There is
no rush for the Express boat to-day. It is literally the
streets--muddier and sloppier than the Thames itself--that are the
attraction. Some little boys are making the trip from Westminster to
London Bridge as a treat; and it is an intense joke with them to pretend
to be dreadfully seasick. Boxing-day in the City is synonymous with
stagnation. It is a howling wilderness, with nobody to howl. On the
Metropolitan Railway I verily believe travellers were tripping it like
the little boys on board the penny boat. And so theatre time draws on,
and the interest of Boxing-day grows to a climax. Soon after five
o'clock groups furtively collect outside the playhouses, half-ashamed of
being so early, but gathering courage from numbers to form the
disorderly queue, so unlike that of a Parisian theatre. Boxing-night in
the theatres others will describe. It is too much to expect of one whose
mission has been the whole day long on the streets.