_Swansea._--_Entered inwards_, _s.s. Benvenuto_. From S.
Africa. P. W. D.
Which cryptic item covers much joy, much money, and an irrepressible
consumption of strong drink. O ye rabid total-abstinence mongers! If I
could only lure you away on a six-thousand-mile voyage, make you work
twelve hours a day, turn you out on the middle watch, feed you on
bully beef and tinned milk! Where would your blue ribbons be then? My
faith, gentlemen, when once you had been paid off at the bottom of
Wind Street, I warrant me we should not see your backs for dust as you
sprinted into the nearest hostelry!
And the joy, moreover, of receiving three months' pay in one lump sum!
Ah! one is rich as he pushes past the green baize swing-door, and
through the crowd of seamen and sharks who cluster like flies round
that same green door. To the married sailor, however, that joy is
chastened by the knowledge that his "judy" has been drawing half-pay
all the time, and to say nothing of the advance note of two-pound-ten
which he drew on joining, to buy clothes. But Jack Tar or Jack Trimmer
knows well how to drown such worries. He possesses an infinite
capacity for taking liquor, which inevitably goes, not to his head,
but to his feet. Six of the _Benvenuto's_ sailor-men, two firemen,
and the carpenter enter our private bar as we sit drinking. An
indescribable uproar invades the room immediately. They are in their
best clothes--decent boots, ready-made blue serge, red tie with green
spots over a six-penny-halfpenny "dickey," and a cap that would make
even Newmarket "stare and gasp." Nothing will pacify them short of
drinks at their expense. A sailor with yellow hair and moustache
curled and oiled insufferably, insists on providing me with a pint of
rum. The carpenter, a radical and Fenian when sober, sports a bowler
with a decided "list." He embraces my yellow-haired benefactor, and
now, to the music of "Remember Me to Mother Dear," rendered by the
electric piano behind the bar, they waltz slowly and solemnly around.
The landlady implores them to stop, and the carpenter bursts into
tears. It really is very much like the "Hunting of the Snark." They
are so unaffectedly wealthy, so ridiculously happy, so unspeakably
vulgar! They batter their silver and gold upon the bar; they command
inoffensive strangers to drink monstrous potations; they ply their
feet in unconscious single-steps; they forget they have not touched
the last glass, and order more; they put cataclysmal questions to the
blushing lassie who serves them; they embrace one another repeatedly
with maudlin affection, and are finally ejected by main force from the
premises. All the world--below Wind Street--knows that the _Benvenuto_
has been paid off.
And we? We drink soberly to England, home, and beauty, bank our
surpluses, and scuttle back to the ship. Past interminable rows of
huge hydraulic cranes, over lock-gates, under gigantic coal-shoots
which hurl twenty tons of coal at once into the gaping holds of filthy
colliers, we stumble and hurry along to where our own steamer is
berthed. That is one of the hardships of our exalted position as
officers. _We_ begin again as soon as we have been paid off; _they_
depart, inebriated and uxorious, to their homes. _They_ enjoy what the
political economists call "the rewards of abstinence"; _we_ put on our
boiler suits and crawl about in noisome bilges, soot-choked
smoke-boxes, and salt-scarred evaporators.
Nevertheless, when five o'clock strikes and work is done for the day,
we put on our "shore clothes" (the inevitable blue serge of the
seamen), light our pipes, and go into the town again. Ah! How good it
is to see people, people, people! To see cars, and shops, and girls
again! How wondrously, how ineffably beautiful a barmaid appears to
us, who have seen no white woman for nearly four months! And
book-shops! Dear God! I was in the High Street for half an hour
to-night, and I have already bagged a genuine "Galignani" Byron, calf
binding, yellow paper, and suppressed poems, all complete, for three
shillings. It will go well in our book-case beside our Guiccioli
Recollections. For myself I have a dear little "Grammont" with notes,
a fine edition of Bandello's "Novelle," and a weird paper-covered copy
of "Joseph Andrews," designed, presumably, to corrupt the youthful
errantry of Swansea, and secreted by the vendor of Welsh devotional
literature at the very bottom of the tuppenny box. In spite of
Borrow's enthusiasm for Ab Gwilym, I have no craving for Welsh
Theology, mostly by Jones and Williams, which is to be had by the
cubic ton. No one buys it, I fear. The little lass who sold me the
Fielding and the "Novelle" looked pale and hungry behind the stacks of
books, and I am shamed, speaking merely as a thorough-paced buyer of
second-hand books, that I paid more for the latter than she would have
asked. But the blue-grey eyes, the nervous poise of the head, the
pride in the sensitive nostrils, reminded me of someone.... A horrible
life for a young girl, my friend, a horrible life.
I took my treasures along the brilliantly lighted streets. I walked on
air, happy with a mysterious happiness. I looked at myself as I passed
a shop mirror, and saw a face with a cold, cynical expression, the
soul intrenched behind inscrutable, searching eyes. "You do not look
happy," I said to myself as I passed on, and I smiled. I thought again
of those gaudily dressed sailors; I thought of their inane felicity,
and smiled again. "_De chacun selon que son habillete, a chacun selon
que ses besoins_," I muttered as I turned into an iridescent
music-hall.
And now I reached the summit of experience. All the morning I was
toiling in the engine-room as we ploughed across the Channel, past
Lundy, and up to the Mumbles Head. I had played my part in that
strange comedy of "paying off." I had toiled again in the afternoon
in a dry-docked steamer, making all safe after shutting down. I had
scoured the shelves of a tiny shop for books. And now I sat in the
fauteuils of a modern music-hall, beholding the amazing drama of "The
Road to Ruin."
Verily, as Sainte-Beuve says, "_Au theatre on exagere toujours._" Not
that I would accuse the constructors of the piece of any lack of
skill. Indeed, Scribe himself never displayed more consummate
stage-craft or a greater sense of "situation," than they. As one gazes
upon the spectacle of the impossible undergraduate's downfall, he
loses all confidence in the impossibility; he believes that here
indeed lies the road to ruin; he feels inexpressibly relieved when the
young man thanks Heaven for his terrible dream of the future, and sits
down to Conic Sections, his head between his hands. You notice this
latter touch. The playwright knows his audience. He knows they think
that an influx of Conic Sections strains the cerebral centres, and
that study is always carried on with the head compressed between the
hands. Thus the sermon reaches the hearts of those who still have
occasional nightmares of the time when they conned "Parallel lines are
those which, if produced ever so far both ways, will not meet." Alas!
I fear our conceptions of art are in the same predicament.
Is it not strange, though, how customs vary? In the Middle Ages one
went to church to see the mystery play; now one goes to the music-hall
to hear a sermon. "Pronounced by clergymen and others to be the most
powerful sermon ever preached from the stage," etc. I wonder, as
I scan my programme, whether the monastic playwrights of old
ever published encomiums on their weird productions by prominent
highwaymen. I say highwaymen because I can think of none who had a
better right to criticise dramatic performances from the practical and
moral standpoints. But the noise of the undergraduate as he goes
crashing through his ruinous nightmare recalls me. I proceed to
examine my companions in distress. All are engaged in the Road to
Ruin. I think they like stage ruin--it is so thrilling. Moreover,
it leaves out all that is at all middle class. Even our wicked
undergraduate never falls as low as the middle class. He starts as
a university man, and ends in a slum, but he is saved from the
second-class season ticket. I am still puzzling with this question of
the middle class as I quit the theatre and make my way down to the
docks. There is a mild, misty rain falling, and I turn into my
favourite tavern in Wind Street for a glass of ale. The Middle Class!
Why, I ask myself, are they so strange in their intellectual tastes?
The wealthy I understand; the workmen I understand; but O this
terrible Middle Class! I sit musing, and four men come in upon my
solitude. Obviously they are actors, rushing in for a "smile" between
the acts. Obviously, I say, for their easy manners, _savoir faire_,
and good breeding stamp them men of the world, and their evening dress
does the rest.
"Ah, you read the _Clarion_?" observes one. I start guiltily. Yes, I
had bought a copy, and I have unconsciously spread it on the table by
my side. "Will you drink with us, sir?" adds another. He is not of the
Middle Class.
"Thank you, I will," I answer, and my first interlocutor glances over
the paper.
"Are you a Socialist?" he inquires. "Yes," I reply. "So am I." I rise,
and we shake hands. This, my friend, was beyond all my imagining. It
is, moreover, _not_ middle class. I have ridden in a suburban train
day after day for years, with people who lived in the same street,
without exchanging a word. Here, in this tavern, convention dares not
to show her head. And I am warmed as with the cheerful sun.
"Have you been in?" asks the man who hands me my beer, and he flings
his head back to indicate the theatre.
"Not yet," I answer. "What have you on this week?"
"_A Sister's Sin_. You should see it. Come to-morrow."
* * * * *
"_A Sister's Sin_!"
I shall not go to see it. I dare not. I had intended to ask my
Socialist whether he could solve the problem of the Middle Class for
me, but he has done it. "_Au theatre on exagere toujours._" I hardly
know which are the more baffling--the Middle Ages or the Middle
Classes.