Part 20 (1/2)
But no; he loomed above me, in his blond strength, and when he tried to follow the diagram, he toppled over. I spent five minutes in lifting six foot three and about twelve stone of Swedish manhood to its feet.
He looked solemn, and insisted: ”I ban gude Swede.”
I told him again that he must not enter the lodging-house, but must let me see him safe to his right quarters. But he thrust me aside: ”I ban gude Swede!” he said, resentfully this time, with hauteur. I pulled his coat-tails, and tried to lead him back to Shadwell; but it was useless.
”I ban gude Swede!”
There I left him, trying to climb the six steps leading to the lodging-house entrance. I looked back at the corner. He turned, to wave his hand in valediction, and, floating across the night, came a proud declaration--
”I ban gude Swede!”
This is one of the few occasions when I have been gay in Shadwell.
Mostly you cannot be gay; the place simply won't let you be gay. You cannot laugh there spontaneously. You may hear bursts of filthy laughter from this or that low-lit window; but it is not spontaneous. You only laugh like that when you have nine or ten inside you. The spirit of the place does not, in the ordinary way, move you to cheer. Its mist, and its dust-heaps, and its coal-wharves, and the reek of the river sink into you, and disturb your peace of mind.
Most holy night descends never upon Shadwell. The night life of any dockside is as vociferant as the day. They slumber not, nor sleep in this region. They bathe not, neither do they swim; and Cerberus in all his hideousness was not arrayed like some of these. If you want to make your child good by terror, show him a picture of a Swede or a Malay, pickled in brown sweat after a stoking-up job.
Of course, the seamen of St. George's do not view it from this angle.
Shadwell is only fearful and gloomy to those who have fearful and gloomy minds. Seamen haven't. They have only fearful and gloomy habits.
Probably, when the evening has lit the world to slow beauty, and a quart or so has stung your skin to a galloping sense of life, Shadwell High Street and its grey girls are a garden of pure pleasure. I shouldn't wonder.
There are those among them who love Shadwell. A hefty seafaring Dane whom I once met told me he loved the times when his boat brought him to London--by which, of course, he meant Shadwell. He liked the life and the people and the beer. And, indeed, for those who do love any part of London, it is all-sufficient. I suppose there are a few people living here who long to escape from it when the calendar calls Spring; to kiss their faces to the gra.s.s; to lose their tired souls in tangles of green shade. But they are hardly to be met with. Those rather futile fields and songs of birds and bud-spangled trees are all very well, if you have the narrow mind of the Nature-lover; but how much sweeter are the things of the hands, the darling friendliness of the streets! The maidenly month of April makes little difference to us here. We know, by the calendar and by our physical selves, that it is the season of song and quickening blood. Beyond London, amid the spray of orchard foam, bird and bee may make their carnival; l.u.s.ty spring may rustle in the hedgerows; golden-ta.s.selled summer may move along the shadow-fretted meadows; but what does it say to us? Nothing.... Here we still gamble, and wors.h.i.+p the robustious things that come our way, and wait to find a boat. We have no seasons. We have no means of marking the delicate pomp of the year's procession. We have not even the divisions of day and night, for, as I have said, boats must sail at all hours of the day and night, and their swarthy crews are ever about. In Shadwell we have only more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness and Winter a time of fog. Season of flower and awakening be blowed! I'll have the same again!
This is a book of adventures in and about London: not a sociological pamphlet; but I do seriously feel that if I am writing on the subject at all, I may as well write the complete truth. I have heard, often, in this macabre street, the most piercing of all sounds that the London night can hold: a child's scream. The sound of a voice in pain or terror is horrible enough anywhere at night; it is twenty times worse in this district, when the voice is a child's. I want, very badly, to tell the story I refrained from telling. I want to tell it because it is true, because it ought to be told, and because it might shake you into some kind of action, which newspaper reports would never do. Yet I know perfectly well that if I did tell it, this book would be condemned as unclean, and I as a p.o.r.nographist, if not something worse. So let our fatuous charity-mongers continue to supply Flannel Underclothing for the Daughters of Christian Stevedores; let them continue to provide Good Wholesome Meals for the Wifes of G.o.d-Fearing Draymen, and let them connive by silence at those other unspeakable things.
The University men and the excellent virgins who carry out this kind of patronage might do well to drop it for a while, and tell the plain truth about the things which they must see in the course of their labours. If you stand in Leicester Square, in the gayest quarter of the gayest city in the world, after nightfall, indeed, long after theatres, bars, and music-halls are closed, and their saucy lights extinguished, you will see, on the south side, a single lamp glowing through the green of the branches. That lamp is s.h.i.+ning the whole night through. The door that it lights is never closed day or night; it dare not close. Through the leafy gloom of the Square it s.h.i.+nes--a watchful eye regarding the foulest blot on the civilization of England. It is the lamp of the office of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. This Society keeps five hundred workers incessantly busy, day and night, preventing cruelty to little English children. Go in, and listen to some of the stories that the inspectors can tell you. They can tell you of appalling sufferings inflicted on children, of bruised bodies and lacerated limbs and poisoned minds, not only in the submerged quarters but in comfortable houses by English people of education and position. Buy a few numbers of the Society's official organ, _The Child's Guardian_, and read of the hundreds of cases which they attack every month, and of the b.e.s.t.i.a.lities to which children are submitted, and you will then see that light as the beacon-light of England's disgrace. I once showed it to a Spanish friend, and he looked at me with polite disgust. ”And your countrymen, my friend,” he said, ”speak of the Spaniards as cruel. Your countrymen, who gather themselves in dozens, protected by horses and dogs, to hunt a timid fox, call us cruel because we fight the bull--because our toreadors risk their lives every moment that they are in the ring, fighting a savage, maddened animal five times larger and stronger than themselves. You call us cruel--you, who have to found a Society in order to stop cruelty to your little children. My friend, there is no society like that in Spain, for no society like that is necessary. The most depraved Spaniard, town or countryman, would never dream of raising his hand against a child. And your countrymen, in face of that building, which is open day and night, and supports a staff of five hundred, call the Spaniards cruel! My friend, yours surely must be the cruellest people on earth.”
And I had no answer for him, because I knew. I knew what Mr. Robert Parr had told me: and I knew why little girls of twelve and thirteen are about the dripping mouths of the Shadwell alleys at all queer hours. You will understand why some men, fathers of little girls, suddenly have money for beer when a foreign boat is berthed. You will appreciate what it is that twists its atmosphere into something anomalous. You remember the gracious or jolly fellows you have met, the sweet, rich sea-chanties you have heard; and then you remember other things, and the people suddenly seem monstrous, the spirit of the place bites deep, and the dreadful laughter of it shocks.
A SUNDAY NIGHT
ANYWHERE
_SUNDAY TEA-TIME_
_There is a noise of winkles on the air, m.u.f.fins and winkles rattle down the road, The sluggish road, whose hundred houses stare One on another in after-dinner gloom._ ”Peace, perfect Peace!” _wails an accordion,_ ”Ginger, you're barmy!” _snarls a gramophone._
_A most unhappy place, this leafless Grove In the near suburbs; not a place for tears Nor for light laughter, for all life is chilled With the unpurposed toil of many years.
But once--ah, once!--the accordion's wheezy strains Led my poor heart to April-smelling lanes._
A SUNDAY NIGHT
ANYWHERE
There is something almost freakish in the thoughtful calm of the London Sunday. During the night the town seems to have cleaned and preened itself, and the creamy, shadow-fretted streets of the Sabbath belong more to some Southern region than to Battersea or Barnsbury. The very houses have a detached, folded manner, like volumes of abstruse theological tracts. From every church tower sparks of sound leap out on the expectant air, mingling and clas.h.i.+ng with a thousand others; and the purple spires fling themselves to heaven with the joy of a perfect thought. In the streets there is an atmosphere of best clothes and best manners. There is a flutter of bright frocks. Father, in his black coat and silk hat, walks seriously, as befits one with responsibilities, what time mother at home is preparing the feast. The children, poor darlings, do not skip or jump or laugh. They walk sedately, in their starchy attire, holding father's arm and trying to realize that it really is Sunday, and therefore very sinful to fling oneself about. The people taking their appet.i.te stroll before midday dinner look all so sleek and complacent that one would like to borrow money from them. The 'buses rumble with a cheeriness that belongs not to weekdays; their handrails gleam with a new brightness, and the High Street, with shops shuttered and barred, bears not the faintest resemblance to the High Street you know so well, even as policemen, with helmets and tunics, look surprisingly unlike human beings. The water-carts seem to work with cleaner, lighter water, and as the sun catches the sprayed stream it whips it into a thousand drops of white fire. It is Sunday. The roads are blazing with white ribbons under the noon sun. A stillness broods over all, a stillness only accentuated by the brazen voice of the Salvation Army band and the miserable music of winkles rattling on dinner-plates. The colours of the little girls' dresses slash the grey backgrounds of the pavement with rich streaks. Spears of suns.h.i.+ne, darting through the spa.r.s.e plane-trees, play all about them, and ring them with radiance; and they look so fresh and happy that you want to kiss them. It is Sunday.
Yes, it is Sunday, and you will realize that as the day wears on. These pleasant people are walking about the streets for a very definite reason. What is that? It is that there is nothing else to do. That is the tragedy of the London Sunday; there is nothing else to do. Why does the submerged man get drunk on Sunday? There is nothing else to do. Why does the horse-faced lady, with nice clothes, go to church on Sunday?
There is nothing else to do. Why do people overeat themselves on Sunday?