Part 18 (2/2)
And the ”salle-a-manger,” with its old black-panelled walls, was so much prettier as it was!
To be a waiter, however, even an ”oyster-bar” waiter, is a superior position to that of a mere porter; and to be porters, ”boots,” hotel drudges of any and every description, ”just to get a footing,” is the primary aim of these st.u.r.dy aliens. Not only money and future advantage, but also what is known as the ”Wanderl.u.s.t,” is, perhaps, yet another factor in the impulse that drives them from their homes.
However this may be, rarely do they stay in the land of their bondage beyond the allotted time; still more rarely do they ”colonize” in our sense of the word; but have ever before them, through all their struggles and hards.h.i.+ps, the thought of the peaceful mountain home and honest competency that shall be theirs in middle age.... Poor lads!
when I see you, worn and shabby, waiting, perhaps, in that long, pitiful black line of seedy applicants, now hopeful, now despairing of engagement, outside the big London restaurants, I confess to a tightness in my throat, thinking how, like Calverley's little Savoyard of Hatton Garden:
”Far from England, in the sunny South, where Anio leaps in foam, Thou wast bred, till lack of money Drew thee from thy vine-clad home.”
Surely the traveller who returns, yearly, from his pleasant tour in Alpine valleys, might always, here in foggy London, yield to the motive that prompts him, after a well-served dinner, to ”give to the poor devil” an extra sixpence, reflecting, meanwhile, that he is thereby hastening the happy, far-off time when that ”poor devil,”
enriched by years of painful toil and honest endeavour, may return to his valley, his home, his boyhood's love perhaps, and his own little patch of tillage.
The great monument of the ”Fremden-Industrie” in London, as well as the focus and centre of the Swiss-Italian immigrants, is, of course, the establishment known as ”Gatti's.” Everyone knows the ”Adelaide Gallery,” and the palatial, velvet-cus.h.i.+oned restaurant that fronts the Strand. What were the beginnings of this great business? The brothers Agostino and Stefano Gatti, chocolate-makers, ice-cream princes, theatrical managers,--who has not heard of them from time immemorial?--has not their fame, in melodrama no less than in meringues, been almost a household word? In 1868, already they were naturalized as Englishmen; yet Mr. Agostino Gatti, native of Ticino, was none the less elected as a representative to the supreme Swiss Federal a.s.sembly. The two brothers began modestly, in a small way; they managed everything themselves; standing, daily, s.h.i.+rt-sleeved, at their desk at receipt of custom, they were familiar figures of the past. They succeeded on the principle of d.i.c.kens's honest grocer, Mr.
Barton, who made it his boast that ”he was never above his business, and he hoped his business would never be above him!” The ”Maison Gatti,” the brothers' private house, stands in dignified Bedford Square; and the firm of Gatti, the heads of which are still to be seen in their shops, has doubtless ama.s.sed a large fortune. That fortune was well deserved; for the Gattis were among the pioneers in the reforming of restaurants.
”There is no more curious sight in London,” writes the chronicler of the Gattis, ”than the Adelaide Gallery between five and seven o'clock in the evening. From the door which opens into the street which runs by the graveyard of St.
Martin's Church, to the handsome frontage which opens into the Strand, every table is occupied by a remarkable a.s.semblage of men, women, and children. The husband brings his wife, the mother brings her children, the lover brings his sweetheart, and the Church, the stage, the press--each sends its representatives. Tragedies and comedies have been enacted over those marble-topped tables which, if they were related, would make the fortune of a thousand playwrights.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Ice-cream Barrow._]
The ice-cream trade, however, with which the brothers Gatti largely identified themselves, is carried on, on inferior lines, to-day in Hatton Garden, Little Saffron Hill, and Clerkenwell. Here is the poorer Italian colony; organ-grinders, ice-cream-barrow-men, ”hokey-pokey” sellers, and their like. Here, among a population of more or less honest toilers, congregate the waifs and strays of civilisation, people who, owing perhaps to their peripatetic and uncertain trade, could hardly help being loafers, even were they not mainly Neapolitans to boot: a difficult word, which has been corrupted by the low English in the vicinity, into first ”Nappleton” and then simply ”Appleton.” City improvements have, however, ousted the chief Neapolitan colony from Great and Little Saffron Hills; and Eyre Street Hill, with its adjacent slums and alleys, is now their peculiar haunt.
In the worst byways, and after dark, this is said to be a dangerous quarter to visit, Neapolitans being always proverbially ready with the knife.... Nevertheless, on fine spring days, it is not unpicturesque; the gay dresses of the women, the groups of handsome, dark-eyed youths, and the merry, brightly-clad children, lending almost an Italian charm to the scene. And the charming, curly-haired boys--the pretty and pathetic Savoyard, with his beloved monkey in a red coat--who does not know them? The men have other resources, as well as ice-creams and street-organs. Some of them hire themselves out as artists'-models to the big studios, a business which is well paid, and to which the picturesque Italian beauty well lends itself. Some, more skilled, are perhaps modellers of stucco images, which are hawked about the streets by others; some are knife-grinders, who go about with a wheel, and make, it is said, the best earnings of all. In the summer these poor exotics from the land of the sun manage to live, no doubt, pretty tolerably; in the winter, surely not even the chestnut-roasting apparatus that they hawk from street to street can suffice to keep them warm! They generally live in human rabbit warrens, under the patronage of a ”padrone,” a sort of modified and amiable slave-dealer, who imports them from their native land, and pockets, as price, a share of their earnings. They live poorly and frugally: and those of us who know the long street of Portici, will not, in the fouler air of London, expect much from their homes in the way of cleanliness. Yet the Italian women who, with their ”men” and their babies, accompany the street organs, are generally trim and smiling, and, so far as foot-gear and general neatness of appearance is concerned--are immeasurably the superiors of their English slum-sisters.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Organ-grinder._]
The Italian woman seems, indeed,--in London, at any rate,--always vastly superior to the Italian man. She is religious; she goes, as a rule, regularly to her ”Chiesa Cattolica.” She is cleaner, smarter, pleasanter; she does most of the work; she often does the princ.i.p.al part of the organ-pus.h.i.+ng--while her loafing partner slouches along by her side, yearning, doubtless, for his ”polenta” and his midday siesta. She helps--indeed, her entire family, down to the babies, help--in the matutinal manufacture of the mysterious ”hokey-pokey,”
whence, in the early morning hours, her ”court” is a perfect babel of chatter and noise, and Eyre Street Hill becomes a strange sight for the inexperienced Londoner. Not only Neapolitans, but Sicilians, Tuscans, Venetians, are represented; indeed, the dialects and the slang used are so unlike, that the different circles of this Italian colony often themselves fail to understand one another. In the evenings, and generally on their doorsteps, the men play ”mora,” and gamble; while the women, for their part, patch clothes, chatter, and gesticulate in true native fas.h.i.+on. Later, the lord of creation, leaving his lady at home, goes off to the ”Club Vesuvio” or to the ”Club Garibaldi,” where dancing goes on to a tune struck up by a fiddler, and the lowest type of London girls, befeathered, shawled, and dishevelled in true East-End fas.h.i.+on, dance with dirty and brigand-like Italian men. It is a strange life, and stranger still is the manner in which various types and nationalities have thus for generations ”squatted down” in special districts of the metropolis, and filled them with their traditions, their atmosphere, their personality.
Many other colonies are to be seen in London; it is the most polyglot of cities. For those interested in such matters, nothing would give a better idea of the many-sided life of the metropolis than to take a long Sunday walk through its various districts. To quote the words of a recent writer:
”Sunday is, above all days, the day for such excursions, because there are none of the distractions of every-day life, or the bustle of business affairs. It is on Sunday you can see how polyglot London is, how the gregarious foreigners, herding together, occupy whole districts, living their own life, following the manners and customs of their own country, enjoying their own forms of religion, amus.e.m.e.nt, and business.”
The Yiddish colony of Whitechapel, the Jewish Ghetto; the Asiatic colony in Poplar and the Dock neighbourhood generally; these and others display all the picturesqueness, the local colour, the kaleidoscopic life that many travellers go to distant lands to experience. In London, all peoples, and all cla.s.ses, have their traditional strongholds, which are known and labelled. Thus, Bayswater, where the ”high life” among the Asiatic colonists makes its home, is generally spoken of by foreigners as ”Asia Minor.” Here live the rich and cultured Orientals, those who have come over for pleasure, business, trade, or education; as for their poorer brethren, they live out in Poplar, Shadwell, or anywhere in the near vicinity of the East India Docks.
These Asiatics of the East End are a strange and motley crew; brought in by every steamer, every heavily-cargoed s.h.i.+p from the East, every trader ”dropping down with costly bales.” On the largest s.h.i.+ps, say those of the P. and O. Company, vessels of some 7,000 tons, there will be perhaps some 120 Orientals on board, and, with such contingents continually arriving, there is, naturally, in the East End, a large foreign, though ever-s.h.i.+fting, population. Curious are the corruptions of Indian words one hears, and strange indeed are the sights and sounds among Malays, Chinese, and Indians. The famous opium dens of the East End, turned to such dramatic account not only in d.i.c.kens's _Edwin Drood_, but also, at a later day, in the _Sherlock Holmes_ sequence of stories, are now much restricted in their horrors by police supervision. They used to be devils' haunts, famed for robbery and vice--traps set to catch the unwary Asiatic; but missionary work, combined with the clearances made by the East London Railway, has effected great improvement in the opium den of to-day. In the words of the writer before-mentioned:
”It looks like a private house, and no noise is permitted, for it is necessary to keep it as private as possible to prevent police interference. For they are invariably gambling dens also, and the Asiatic who goes to gamble still burns his joss-stick before the idol set up inside, in order to propitiate his deity and get good luck. Though repellant in appearance, there is a certain picturesqueness about the interior of these places. The shrine stands just inside the door, and there is a pungent odour from the ever-burning incense, while vases of artificial flowers, mingling among such queer votive offerings as biscuits and cups of tea, give it a strange appearance. The Canton matting, which is largely used in the rooms, gives a little local colour, and the _personnel_ of the place is of a decided polyglot order.
You may possibly see one or two men lying about sleeping off the results of their opium debauch: but gambling seems to be the main feature.”
Nevertheless, even in these ”reformed” dens, the home-coming sailor, or the imprudent Lascar, may find himself tempted to his undoing and ”cleaned out” of all his hard-won earnings. Or he may possibly be ”knifed,” and, if the criminal escape, in this region of obscure and unknown ”byways,” even the experienced police may be hard set to find him. It is, indeed, a true ”Vanity Fair,” this East End of London, for poor Christian and Faithful, fresh from the sea and all its dangers.
The Yiddish colony is also a city by itself. The Jews who foregather in Whitechapel are mostly of Polish, Russian, or German extraction, and their talk, to unused ears, sounds like a strange German lingo, unpleasantly whined through the nose. Indeed, it closely resembles German; the word ”Yiddish” itself being but a corruption of the German ”Judisch,” or Jewish. These people, whose ”interpreters” figure largely at nearly every police-court brawl in Whitechapel, Sh.o.r.editch, and Spitalfields, may be said to be a law and a dispensation to themselves. They crowd, in their numbers, into dirty tenement houses, in yet dirtier streets; streets in which they barter, buy and sell with all the instinct and all the indomitable energy of their race.
Here are the tailors' sweating dens, so often deplored by philanthropic ”commissions”; here human toil is reduced, for the benefit of the ”middleman,” to its lowest possible price. The so-called ”Jewish slave-market,” to the existence of which attention has been called in the Press, is a strange and unpleasing custom. Here the Jewish ”slave-owner” is, more or less, in the place of the Italian ”padrone” already referred to, in that he imports human material, and ”farms out” human labour:
”Any one who devotes a Sunday or two to visiting the open-air markets in the Jewish quarter, will have noticed on the fringe of the markets groups of men, sometimes with women and children. If you are under the convoy of a Jewish acquaintance who 'knows the ropes,' he will tell you that it is a 'hiring fair.' But it has a suspiciously close approximation to a slave market.”
Leases of human labour, sold, at starvation wages for the victims, to the highest bidder, are not unnatural to a slum Yiddish population whose whole life is spent in barter. The Jewish colony in the East End now numbers some 35,000 souls:
”Only recently Lord Rothschild described it as a 'new Poland,' and said that it was the business of the nation 'first to humanise it and then Anglicise it.' It certainly wants humanising.”
The cosmopolitanism of London tends to draw to it the sweepings, as well as the choice spirits,--the worst, as well as the best,--of all other nations and climes. ”h.e.l.l is a city much like London,” said the poet Sh.e.l.ley; and he spoke truth. Views, religious and otherwise, differ largely as to what h.e.l.l may be; one opinion, however, may be safely hazarded; that it will at any rate be cosmopolitan.
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