Part 19 (2/2)
b.l.o.o.d.y good company!”_
_He loved all creatures--black, brown, white, Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare-o!
And never a word he'd speak in spite, Tan-ta-ta-ran-tan-tare!
He knew that we were mortal men Who sinned and laughed and sinned again; And never a cruel thing he'd do At Millwall Docks or Pi-chi-lu; If you were down he'd make you gay: He'd spit his juice ten yards away, And roundly he'd declare--oh!
”It isn't so much that I want yer beer As yer b.l.o.o.d.y good company, Whow!
b.l.o.o.d.y good company!”_
A SCANDINAVIAN NIGHT
SHADWELL
One night, when I was ten years old, I was taken by a boy who was old enough to have known better into the ashy darkness of Shadwell and St.
George's. Along that perilous mile we slipped, with drumming hearts.
Then a warm window greeted us ... voices ... gruff feet ... bits of strange song ... and then an open door and a sharp slab of mellow light.
With a sense of high adventure we peeped in. Some one beckoned. We entered. The room was sawdusted as to the floor, littered with wooden tables and benches. All was sloppy with rings and pools of spent cocoa.
The air was a conflict: the frivolous odour of fried sausage coyly flirted with the solemn smell of dead smoke, and between them they bore a b.a.s.t.a.r.d perfume of stale grease. Coffee-urns screamed and belched.
Cakes made the counter gay.
We stood for a moment, gazing, wondering. Then the blond-bearded giant who had beckoned repeated his invitation; indeed, he reached a huge arm, seized me, and set me on his knee. I lost all sense of owners.h.i.+p of my face in the tangles of his beard. He hiccuped. He coughed. He rattled.
He sneezed. His forearms and fingers flew, as though repelling mult.i.tudinous attacks. His face curled, and crinkled, and slipped, and jumped suddenly straight again, and then vanished in infinite corrugations. He seemed to be in the agony of a lost soul which seeks to cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff.... Arms and lips lashed the air about them, and at last the very lines of his body seemed expressive of the state of a man who has explained himself forty-five times, and is then politely asked to explain himself. For half an hour, I suppose, I sat on his knee while he sneezed and roared and played games with his vocal cords.
It was not until next morning that I learnt that he had been speaking Norwegian and trying to ask me to have a cake. When I knew that I had been in the lair of the Scandinavian seamen, I thrilled. When I learnt that I had lost a cake, I felt sad.
It is a curious quarter, this Shadwell and St. George's: a street of mission-halls for foreign sailors and of temperance restaurants, such as that described, mostly for the Scandinavians, though there are many shops catering for them still farther East. Sometimes you may hear a long, savage roar, but there is no cause for alarm. It is only that the great Mr. Jamrach, London's leading dealer in wild animals, has his menagerie in this street.
The shop-fronts are lettered in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Strange provisions are found in the ”general” shops, and quaintly carved goods and long wooden pipes in other windows. Marine stores jostle one another, shoulder to shoulder, and there is a rich smell of tar, bilge-water, and the hold of a cargo tramp. Almost you expect to hear the rattle of the windla.s.s, as you stand in the badly lighted establishment of Johann Dvensk, surrounded by ropes, old s.h.i.+p's iron, bloodthirsty blades, canvas, blocks, and pulleys. Something in this narrow s.p.a.ce seizes you, and you feel that you must ”Luff her!” or ”Starrrrrb'd yer h.e.l.llllllm!” or ”Ease 'er!” or ”Man the tops'l!” or whatever they do and say on Scandinavian boats. You may see these boats in the Pool any night; timber boats they are, for the most part; squat, low-lying affairs, but curiously picturesque when ma.s.sed close with other s.h.i.+pping, steam or sail. One of our London songsters has recorded that ”there's always something doing by the seaside”; and that is equally true of down Thames-side. London River is always alive with beauty, splendid with stress and the sweat of human hands. There is something infinitely saddening in watching the casual, business-like departure of one of these big boats. As she swings away and drops downstream, her crew, idling, lean over the side, and spit, smoking their long Swedish pipes, and looking curiously unearthly as the dock lights fall, now on one, now on the other. I always want to plunge into the water and follow them through that infinitude of travel which is suggested by the dim outline of Greenwich.
The lamps in Shadwell High Street and what was once Ratcliff Highway are few and very pale; and each one, welcome as it is, flings shapes of fear across your path as you leave its radius and step into darkness more utter. The quality of the darkness is nasty. That is the only word for it. It is indefinite, leering. It says nothing to you. It is reticent with the reticence of Evil. It is not black and frightful, like the darkness of Hoxton or Spitalfields. It is not pleasant, like the darkness of Chinatown. It is not matey, like the darkness of Hackney Marshes. It is ... nasty. At every ten paces there is the black mouth of an alley with just s.p.a.ce enough for the pa.s.sage of one person. Within the jaws of each alley is a lounging figure--man, woman, or child, Londoner or foreigner, you cannot discern. But it is there, silent, watchful, expectant. And if you choose to venture, you may examine more closely. You may note that the faces that peer at you are faces such as one only sees elsewhere in the picture of Felicien Rops. Sometimes it is a curl-sweet little girl who greets you with a smile strangely cold.
Sometimes the mouth of the alley will appear to open and will spit at you, apparently by chance. If it hits you, the alley swears at you: a deep, frightfully foreign oath. Sudden doors flap, and gusts of brutal jollity sweep up the street.
In the old days, Shadwell embraced the Oriental quarter, and times, in the 'seventies, long before I was thought of, seem to have been really frolicsome, or so I gather from James Greenwood. The chief inhabitants of to-day are those little girls just mentioned. Walk here at any time of the day or night, and you will find in every doorway and at those corners which are illuminated, cl.u.s.ters of little girls, all of the same age, all of the same height, their glances knowing so much more than their little fresh lips imply. They seem all to be born at that age, and they never grow up. For every boy and woman that you pa.s.s in that dusty mile you will find dozens of pale little girls. There is a reason for this local product, about which I have written more seriously elsewhere, and if you saunter here, beware of sympathy with crying children. I could tell things; curious things. But if I did you would not believe them, and if you believed them you would be sick.
I have mentioned the peculiar darkness. It is provocative and insistent.
It possesses you. For you know that in this street, or rather, back of it, there are the homes of the worst vices of the seagoing foreigner. It is the haunt of the dissolute and the indigent; not only of the normal brute, but also of the satyr. You know that behind those heights of houses, stretching over the street with dumb, blank faces, there are strangely lighted rooms, where unpleasant rites are celebrated.
I can never understand why artists and moralists paint Temptation invariably in gaudy scarlet and jewels, tinted cheeks, and laughing hair. If she were always like that, morality would be gloriously triumphant; for she would attract n.o.body. The true Temptation of this world and flesh wears grey rags, dishevelled hair, and an ashen cheek.
Any expert will prove that. I can never believe that any one would be lured to destruction by those birds of paradise whom one has met in the stuffy, over-gilded, and, happily, abortive night-clubs and cabarets. If a consensus were taken, I think it would be found that wickedness gaily apparelled is seldom successful. It is the subtle and the sinister, the dark and half-known, that make the big appeal. Lace and scent and champagne and the shaded glamour of Western establishments leave most men cold, I know. But dirt and gloom and secrecy.... We needs must love the lowest when we see it.
As far back as I can remember the Eastern parishes have been, to me, the home of Romance. My romance was not in the things of glitter and chocolate-box gaiety, but rather in the dolours and silences of the East. Long before I had adventured there, its very street names--Whitechapel High Street, Ratcliff Highway, Folly Wall, Stepney Causeway, Pennyfields--had thrilled me as I believe other children thrill to the names of The Arabian Nights.
That is why I come sometimes to Shadwell, and sit in its tiny beershops, and listen to the roaring of Jamrach's lions, and talk with the blond fellows whose conversation is mostly limited to the universalities of intercourse. I was there on one occasion, in one of the houses which are, in the majority of cases, only licensed for beer, and I made the acquaintance of a quite excellent fellow, and spent the whole evening with him. He talked Swedish, I talked English; and we understood one another perfectly. We did a ”pub-crawl” in Commercial Road and East India Dock Road, and finished up at the Queen's Theatre in Poplar High Street. A jolly evening ended, much too early for me, at one o'clock in the morning, when he insisted on entering a lodging-house in Gill Street because he was sure that it was his. I tried to make him understand, by diagrams on the pavement, that he was some half-mile from St. George's.
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