OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 


BY


THOMAS BURKE 

























MEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1919 





Copyright, 1Q19 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



1916 

Lady, the world is old, and we are young. 
The world is old to-night and full of tears 

And tumbled dreams, and all its songs dire sung. 
And echoes rise no more from the tombed years. 

Lady, the world is old, but we are young. 

Once only shines the mellow moon so fair; 

One speck of Time is Love's Eternity, 
Once only can the stars so light your hair. 

And the night make your eyes my Psaltery. 
Lady, the world is old. Love still is young. 

Let us take hand ere the svaift moment end. 

My heart is but a lamp to light your way. 
My song your counsellor, my love your friend, 

Your soul the shrine whereat I kneel and pray. 
Lady, the world grows old. Let us be young. 

T.B. 



CbNTENTS 

PA6S 

Round the Town, 191 7 3 

Back to Dockland 30 

Chinatown Revisited 40 

SoHO Carries On 58 

Out of Town 69 

In Search of a Show 82 

Vodka and Vagabonds 89 

The Kids' Man 113 

Crowded Hours 123 

Saturday Night 134 

Rendezvous 140 

Tragedy and Cockneyism 148 

Mine Ease at Mine Inn iss 

Relics 168 

Attaboy! ••••••••.• 176 



OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 



ROUND THE TOWN, 19 17 

It was a lucid, rain-washed morning — one of 
those rare mornings when London seems to laugh 
before you, disclosing her random beauties. In 
every park the trees were hung with adolescent 
tresses, green and white and yellow, and the sky 
was busy with scudding clouds. Even the solenm 
bricks had caught something of the sudden colour 
of the day, and London seemed to toss in its long, 
winter sleep and to take the heavy breaths of the 
awakenmg sluggard. 

I turned from my Fleet Street window to my 
desk, took my pen, found it in good working 
order, and put it down. I was hoping that it 
would be damaged, or that the ink had run out; 
I like to deceive myself with some excuse for not 
working. But on this occasion none presented 
itself save the call of the streets and the happy 
aspect of things, and I made these serve my pur- 
pose. With me it is always thus. Let there come 
the first sharp taste of Spring in the February air 
and I am demoralized. Away with labour. The 

3 



4 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

sun is shining. The sky is bland. There are 
seven hundred square miles of London in which 
Adventure is shyly lurking for those who will 
seek her out. What about it? So I drew five 
pounds from the cash-box, stuffed it into my 
waistcoat-pocket, and let myself loose, feeling, as 
the phrase goes, that I didn't care if it snowed. 
And as I walked, there rose in my heart a silly 
song, with no words and no tune; or, if any 
words, something like — ^how does it go? — ? 

Boys and girls, come out to play — 
Ri-ti-hiddley-hi-ti-hayl 

But the fool is bent upon a twig. I found the 
boys preoccupied and the girls unwearied in war- 
work. One good comrade of the highways and 
byways had married a wife; and therefore he 
could not come. Another had bought a yoke of 
oxen, and must needs go and prove them — as 
though they were a problem of Euclid. Luckily, 
I ran against Caradoc Evans, disguised in a 
false beard, in order to escape the fury of the 
London Welshmen, and looking like the advance 
agent of a hard winter. Seeing my silly, hark- 
halloa face, he inquired what was up. I explained 
that I was out for a day's amusement — ^thc first 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 5 

chance I had had since 19 14. Whereupon, he 
ran me into a litde place round the corner, and 
bought me an illicit drink at an hour when the 
minatory finger of Lord d'Abernon was still wag- 
ging; and informed me with tears in the voice, 
and many a " boy bach," and " old bloke," and 
" indeed," that this was the Year of Grace 19 17, 
and that London was not amusing. 

It was not until the third drink that I discov- 
ered how right he was. As a born Cockney, living 
close to London every minute of my life, I had 
not noticed the slow change in the face and soul 
of London. I had long been superficially aware 
that something was gone from the streets and the 
skies, but the feeling was no more definite than 
that of the gourmet whose palate hints that the 
cook has left something — it cannot say what — 
out of the soup. It was left for the swift percep- 
tion of the immigrant Welshman to apprise me 
fully of the truth. But once it was presented to 
me, I saw it too clearly. My search for amuse- 
ment, I knew then, was at an end, and what had 
promised to be an empurpling of the town seemed 
like to degenerate into a spelling-bee. Of course, 
I might have gone back to my desk ; but the Spring 
had worked too far into my system to allow even 



6 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

a moment's consideration of that alternative. 
There remained nothing to do but to wander, and 
to pray for a glimpse of that tempestuous petti- 
coat of youth that deserted us in 19 14. It was a 
forlorn pursuit: I knew I would never touch its 
hem. 

I never did. I wandered all day with Caradoc 
bach, and we did this and we did that, while I 
strove to shake from my shoulders the bundle of 
dismay that seemed fastened there. The young 
men having gone to war, the streets were filled 
with middle-aged women of thirty, in short skirts, 
trying to attract the aged satyrs, the only men 
that remained, by pretending to be little girls. 
At mid-day, that hour when, throughout London, 
you may hear the symphony of swinging gates and 
creaking bolts, we paid hurried calls at the old 
haunts. They were either empty or filled with 
new faces. Rule's, in Maiden Lane, was de- 
serted. The Bodega had been besieged by, and 
had capitulated to, the Colonial army. Mooney's 
had become the property of the London Irish. 
The vociferous rehearsal crowds had decamped 
from the Bedford Head, and left it to strayed 
and gloomy Service men, who cared nothing for 
its traditions; and Yates's Wine Lodge, the home 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 7 

of the blue-chinned laddies looking for a shop, 
was filled with women war-workers. 

Truly, London was no more herself. The 
word carried no more the magical quality with 
which of old time it was endued. She was no 
more the intellectual centre, or the political centre, 
or the social centre of the world. She was not 
even an English city, like Leeds or Sheffield or 
Birmingham. She was a large city with a popu- 
lation of nondescript millions. 

This I realized more clearly when, a week or 
so after our tour, an American, whom I was con- 
ducting round London, asked me to show him 
something typically English. I couldn't. I tried 
to take him to an English restaurant. There was 
none. Even the old chop-houses, under prevail- 
ing restrictions, were offering manufactured food 
like spaghetti and disguised offal. I turned to 
the programmes of the music-halls. Here again 
England was frozen out. There were come- 
dians from France, jugglers from Japan, con- 
jurers from China, trick-cyclists from Belgium, 
weight-lifters from Australia, buck-dancers from 
America, and . . . England, with all thy faults 
I love thee still; but do take a bit of Interest In 
yourself. A stranger, arriving from overseas, 



8 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

might suppose that the war was over, and that 
London was in the hands of the conquerors. This 
impression he might receive from a single glance 
at our streets. The Strand at the moment of 
writing is blocked for pedestrian traffic by Aus- 
tralians and New Zealanders; Piccadilly Circus 
belongs to the Belgians and the French; and the 
Americans possess Belgravia. Canadian cafe- 
terias are doing good business round West- 
minster; French coffee-bars are thriving in the 
Shaftesbury Avenue district; Belgian restaurants 
occupy the waste corners around Kingsway; and 
two more Chinese restaurants have lately been 
opened in the West End. 

The common Cockney seemed to walk almost 
fearfully about his invaded streets, hardly daring 
to be himself or talk his own language. Apart 
from the foreign tongues, which always did an- 
noy his car, foul language now assailed him from 
every side: "no bon," "napoo," "gadget," 
" camouflaged," " buckshee," " bonza," and so 
on. This is not good slang. Good slang has a 
quality of its own — a bite and spit and fine ex- 
pressiveness which do not belong to dictionary 
words. That is its justification — the supplying 
of a lacking shade of expression, not the sup- 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 9 

planting of adequate forms. The old Cockney 
slang did justify itself, but this modern Army 
rubbish, besides being uncouth, is utterly meaning- 
less, and might have been invented by some idiot 
schoolboy : probably was. ' 

After some search, we found a quiet comer in 
a bar where the perverted stuff was not being 
talked, and there we gave ourselves to recalling 
the little joyous jags that marked the progress 
of other years. I was dipping the other night 
into a favourite bedside book of mine — here Fd 
like to put in a dozen pages on bedside books — 
a Social Calendar for 1909; a rich reliquary for 
the future historian; and was shocked on noting 
the number of simple festivals which are now 
ruled out of our monotonous year. Do you re- 
member them? Chestnut Sunday at Bushey 
Park — City and Suburban — Derby and Oaks — 
Ascot Sunday at Maidenhead — Cup Tie at the 
Crystal Palace — Spring week-ends by the sea — 
evening taxi jaunts to Richmond and Staines — 
gay nights at the Empire and the adjoining bars 
— supper after the theatre — ^moonlight trips in 
the summer season down river to the Nore — ^polo 
at Ranelagh — cricket at Lord's and the Oval — 
the Boat Race — Henley week — Earl's Court and 



10 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

White City Exhibitions, where one could finish 
the evening on the wiggle-woggle, as a final 
flicker. And now they have just delivered the 
most brutal blow of all. Having robbed us of our 
motors and our cheap railways, they have stolen 
away from the working-man his (and my) chief- 
est delight — ^the beanfeast wagonette. (How I 
would have loved to take Henry James on one of 
these jags.) The disappearance of this delight 
of the summer season is, at the moment, so acute 
and so personal a grief, that I cannot trust my- 
self to speak of it. I must withdraw, and leave 
F. W. Thomas (of The Star) to deliver the 
valedictory address: — 

This spells the death of yet another old English institution. 
One cannot go beanfeasting in traps and pony carts. There 
would be no room for the cornet man, and without his dis- 
tended cheeks and dreadful harmony the picture would be 
incomplete. 

That was a great day when we met at the works in the 
morning, all in our best clothes and squeaky boots, all sporting 
large buttonholes and cigars of the rifle-range brand. 

With the yellow stone jars safely stowed under the seat and 
the cornet man perched at the driver's left hand, we started 
off. Usually the route lay through Shoreditch and Hackney 
to Clapton, and so to the green fields of the Lea Bridge Road. 

For the first hour of the journey we were quiet, early- 
morningish, and a little reminiscent, recalling the glories of 
past beanfeasts. The comet man tootled half-heartedly, with 
many rests and much licking of dry lips. Not until the 
^'Greyhound" was passed did he get well under way, and 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 11 

then there was no stopping him. His face got redder and 
redder as he blasted his way through his repertoire; a feast 
of music covering the years between ''Champagne Charlie" 
and Marie Lloyd. 

At the end of the drive the horses were put up and baited, 
and the merry beanfeasters spread themselves and their melody 
through the glades of Loughton or High Beech, with cold 
roast beef and pickles at Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge or 
the " Robin Hood." 

And who does not remember that joyful homeward journey, 
with the cornet man, now ruddier than the cherry, blaring 
"Little Brown Jug" from well-oiled lungs, while behind him 
the revellers sang "As your hair grows whiter," and an 
accordion in the back seats bleated "The Miner's Dream." 

As Herbert Campbell used to sing in the old days: — 

Then up I came with my little lot. 
And the air went blue for miles; 
The trees all shook and the copper took his hook, 
And down came all the tiles. 



That was the real tit-bit of the beanfeast, the rollicking 
homeward drive, with the brake embowered in branches of 
trees raped from the Forest, and lit by swaying Chinese lan- 
terns and great bunches of dahlias bought from the cottagers 
of Loughton, and Chingford. 

One always took home a bunch of flowers from a beanfeast, 
and maybe a pint of shrimps for the missus, and some acorns 
for the youngsters, or a gilded mug. 

The defunct brake had other uses than this. Sometimes it 
took parties of solenm old ladies in beads and black to an 
orgy of tea and cake in the grounds of the "Leg of Mutton" 
at Chadwell Heath. These were prim affairs. Mothers' 
Meeting from the little red church round the corner. They had 
no comet, and the smiling parson rode in the seat assigned to 
Orpheus. 

The youngsters, too, had their days — riotous days shrill with 
•ong and gay with coloured streamers, air-balloons and trum- 



12 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

pets. How merrily they would bellow that they were " all 
a-going to Rye House, so * Ip-ip-ip-ooray ! ' " though their des- 
tination was Burnham Beeches or Brickett Wood. 

Rubber-neck parties of American tourists occasionally saw 
the sights of London from brakes and wagonettes; solenm 
people, who for all the signs of holiday they displayed might 
have been driving to Tyburn Tree. 

But the real reason for the brake was the beanfeast with 
its attendant cornet man and its rubicund driver with his white 
topper and the little boys running behind and stealing rides 
on the back step. Until die war is over Epping will knchv them 
no more, and the nightingales of Fairlop Plain will sing to the 
moon undisturbed. 



We lunched at the " Trocadero,'* where a 
friend on the staff put us in the right place and 
put before us the right food and the right wine. 
The rooms looked like a Service mess-room. 
Every guest looked like every other guest. Men 
and women alike had fallen victims to that devas- 
tating plague of uniforms, and all charm, all 
significance, had been obliterated by this murrain 
of khaki and blue serge. The suave curves of 
feminine dress had been ironed out by the harsh 
hand of the standardizer, and in their place we 
saw only the sullen lines of the Land Girls' rig 
making juts and points with the rigidities of the 
Women's Army Corps and Women's Police garb. 
The Vorticists ought to be thankful for the war. 
It accomplished in one stroke what, in 19 14, they 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 U 

were feverishly attempting: it turned life into a 
wilderness of angles. 

** Clothes," said Carlyle, ** gave us individ- 
uality, distinction, social polity." He ought to 
see us now. Standard Bread, Standard Suits, 
Standard This, and Standard That . . . The 
very word ** standard " must now be so uni- 
versally loathed by men who have managed to 
conceal from the controllers some remnants of 
character, that I wonder the Evening Standard 
manages to retain its popularity without a change 
of title. If standardizing really helped matters, 
nobody could complain; but can Dogberry aver 
that it does ? Does it not, in practice, rather hin- 
der than help ? In railway carriages the bottlefed 
citizen girds against all this aimless interference 
with his daily life; but his protests are no more 
considerable than that of the victim in the melo- 
drama : " Have a care. Sir Aubrey, have a care. 
You have ruined me sister. You have murdered 
me wife. You have cast me aged father into 
prison. You have seduced me son. You have 
sold up me home. But beware, Sir Aubrey, be- 
ware. I am a man of quick temper. DonU go too 
farr 

When we looked round the Trocadero, and we 



14 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

remembered the bright company it once held, and 
then noted the tart aspect of the place under or- 
ganization, we felt a little unwell, and dared to 
wonder why efficiency cannot walk with beauty 
and the zeal for victory go with grace and glad- 
ness. Had the marriage, we wondered, been 
tried by the authorities, and the parties proved to 
be so palpably incompatible ? Or was it that they 
had been for ever sundered by some one who mis- 
takes dullness for earnestness and ugliness for 
strength ? 

However, the rich scents of well-cooked offal, 
mingled with those of wine and Oriental tobacco, 
soothed us a little, and we achieved a brief loosen- 
ing of the prevailing restraint, and allowed our 
thoughts to run without the chain. Our friend had 
dug from the depths of the cellar a fragrant 
Southern wine, true liquid sunshine, tinct with the 
odour of green seas; a rare bottle to which I 
made a chant-royal on the back of the menu, and, 
luckily for you, mislaid the thing, or it would be 
printed here. We talked freely; not brilliantly, 
but with just that touch of piquancy that stimu- 
lants and narcotics, rightly used, bestow upon the 
brain. 

We lounged over coffee and liqueurs, and then 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 iS 

strolled up the Avenue and called at the establish- 
ment of " Mr. Francis Downman," that most dis- 
criminating and charming of wine-merchants— 
discriminating because he has given his life to the 
study of wines; charming because, away from his 
wine-ceUars and in his true name, he is a novelist 
whose books, so lit with sparkle and espieglerie, 
have carried fair breezes into many a dusty heart. 
If you have ever visited that old Queen Anne 
House in Dean Street and glanced at *' Mr. 
Downman's'' Bulletins, you will realize at once 
that here is no ordinary vendor of wines. Wine 
to ** Mr. Downman " is a serious matter. Open- 
ing a bottle is an exquisite ceremony; drinking is 
a sacrament. I once lunched with " Mr. Down- 
man ** in his cool Dutch kitd^ " over the shop," 
and each course was loving cooked and served 
by his own hands, with suitable wines and liqueurs. 
It was a lesson in simple and courtly living. How 
pleasant the homes of England might be if our 
housewives would pay a little attention to correct 
kitchen and table amenities. " Mr. Downman " 
would be a public benefactor if he would open a 
School of Kitchen Wisdom where the little sub- 
urban wife might sit at his feet and learn of him. 
Yes, I know that there are many schools of cook- 



i6 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

ery and housewifery, but these places are managed 
by people who only know how to cook. " Mr. 
Downman " would bring to the task all those little 
elegancies which make a dinner not merely satis- 
factory, but a refinement of joy. Feeding, like all 
functions of the human body, is a vulgar business 
anyway, but here is a man who can raise it to the 
dignity of a rite. 

Further, he has shown us, in those " Bulletins,'* 
how to turn advertising into one of the minor 
arts. Perhaps of all the enormities which the 
nineteenth century perpetrated in its efforts to 
make life unbearable, the greatest was the de- 
basing of trade. In the eighteenth century trade 
was a serene occupation, as you may see by 
glancing at the files of the old Gentleman's Maga- 
zine, Mirror, Spectator, where announcements of 
goods and merchandise were made in fine flowing 
English. Advertisement was then a matter of 
grace, of flourish and address; for people had 
leisure in which to receive gradual impressions. 
The merchants of that day did not scream at you ; 
they sat with you over the fire, and held you in 
pleasant converse, sometimes, in their talk, throw- 
ing off some persiflage or apothegm that has be- 
come immortal. There was a Mr. George Farr, 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 i7 

a grocer, circa 1750, who issued some excellent 
trade tickets from the " Beehive and Three 
Sugar Loaves " ; little cards, embellished with 
dainty -woodcuts that bring to mind an Elzevir 
bookplate; the pictures a sheer joy to look upon, 
the prose a delicate pomp of words that delights 
the ear. Then there were the trade cards of the 
Goldsmiths* and Silversmiths' Company of the 
eighteenth century, each one the production of a 
true artist (Hogarth did several), as well as the 
tobacco advertisements of the same period. In 
the latter case, not only were the cards works of 
art, but poetry was wooed and won for the cause. 
Near the old Surrey Theatre lived one John 
Mackey, who sang the praise of his wares in 
rhyme and issued playbills purporting to an- 
nounce new tragedies under such titles as My 
Snuf'Box, The Indian fFeed, The True Friend, 
or Arrivals from Havannah, The Last Pinch, and 
so on. The cabinet-makers of the eighteenth 
century also found time to indite delicious morsels 
of prose and prepare quaint and harmonious 
pictures for the delight of their patrons. Mr. 
Chippendale and Mr. Heppelwhite were most 
industrious in this direction, and the Society of 
Upholsterers and Cabinet Makers issued, in 1765, 



i8 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

a work now very much sought after : The Cabinet 
and Chair Makers* Real Friend and Companion. 
But then, snorting and hustling like a provin- 
dal alderman, in came the nineteenth century, 
with its gospel of Speed-up; and the result was 
that fair fields and stately streets scream harshly 
in your ears at every turn : — 

Drink Bingo. 
It is the Best 

Eat Dinkydux. 
You'll hate it at First. 



This sort of thing continued for many decades, 
when, happily, its potency became attenuated, and 
some genius discovered that people were not al- 
ways responsive to screams ; that, after all, the old 
way was better. 

Thus literature returned and linked arms once 
again with trade. Partly, the circularizing dodge 
was responsible for this, since, in the circular, the 
bald statement was hardly good enough. It was 
found that subtle means must be employed if you 
are striving to catch a man's attention at the break- 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 i9 

f asMable, when sleep still crawls like a slug about 
the brain and temper is uncertain. Nothing is so 
riling to the educated person as to have ungram- 
matical circulars dropped in his letter-box. Their 
eflfect is that he heartily detests the article adver- 
tised, not because he has tried it and found it 
wanting, but because of the split infinitive or the 
infirm phrase. So the whoop and the yell gave 
place to the full-flowered essay sprigged with the 
considered phrase. And to my mind the best of 
all contemporary efforts in this direction are 
"Mr. Downman's" "Bulletins," of which I 
have a complete set. Here a fastidious pen is 
delightfully employed; and not the pen only, but 
the taste of the book-lover. Indeed, they are 
lovable productions, having all the gracious re- 
sponse to the eye and the touch of Mr. Arthur 
Humphreys' anthologies of seventeenth-century 
poetry. Everything — format, type, paper, and 
Elian style — ^breathes an air of serendipity. 

The first part of each " Bulletin " consists of a 
number of essays on questions pertaining to wine 
and wine-drinking; the second half is a catalogue 
of " Mr. Downman's " wines and their current 
prices, with specimen labels, which are such gentle 
harmonies of line and colour that one is tempted 



20 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

to start collecting them. " Mr. Downman " 
opens his addresses in the grand manner: — 



My Lords, Reverend Fathers, Ladies and 

Gentlemen. 

And if you love your Elia, then you must read 
*' Mr. Downman " on Decanters and Decanting, 
On Corkscrews, On How to Drink Wine, On 
Bottling, On Patriotism and Wines, On the Suit- 
ing of Food to Wine, On Wines at Picnics. His 
sharp-flavoured prose, full of sly nuances and co- 
quettish conceits, has all the tone of the best 
claret Hear him on salads : — 



This 18 the time of salads. And a good salad means good 
oil. It alto means good vinegar, or a fresh and juicy lime or 
lemon. Now the Almighty has given us better tools for salad- 
making than any wooden fork or spoon. In conditions of 
homely intimacy, a salad-maker, when all is ready, will wash 
his hands well and long as the moment approaches for serving 
the bowl. He will shun common or perfumed soaps, and will 
use nothing but a soap made from olive oil. Having dried his 
hands perfectly on a warm, clean towel, he will finally whisk 
the cup of dressing into homogeneity, will pour its contents 
over the salad, and will immediately proceed to wring the 
leaves in the liquid as a washerwoman wrings clothes in soapy 
water. (How horrid!) In doing this he will spoil the appear- 
ance of come of the leaves, but he will have a salad fit for the 
gods. 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 ^t 

After sampling a noble Madeira in his cellar 
cool, in William and Mary Yard, we resumed 
our crawl, and in the black evening made a tour 
of other of the old places. At the Cafe de 
TEurope, Mr. Jacobs, leader of the band, played 
for us a few old waltzes and morceaux reeking of 
the spirit of 1912 ; but even he did not handle the 
fiddle, or seem to care to handle it, in his old 
happy manner. Like the rest of us, I suppose, he 
felt that it wasn't worth while; it didn't matter. 
We called at the " Gambrinus," now owned by 
a Belgian ; at the old " Sceptre," for a coupon's 
worth of boiled beef; and so to the Cafe Royal. 

Here we received a touch or two from the old 
times. War has killed many lovely things, but, 
though it maim and break, it cannot wholly kill 
the things of the spirit, and in the " Royal " we 
found that art was still a living thing; ideas were 
still being discussed as though they mattered. 
Epstein and Augustus John, both in uniform, were 
there, and Austin Harrison had his usual group 
of poets. It was reassuring to see the old domino- 
playing Frenchmen, who seem part of the fixtures 
of the place, in their accustomed comer. The 
girls seemed to have packed away their affright- 
ing futurist gowns, and were arrayed more 



52 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON > 

soberly. That night they seemed to be more like^ 
human creatures, and less like deliberate Bo- 
hemians. 

I am not overfond of the Cafe Royal, but it is 
one of the West End shows which visitors feel 
they must see; and when any provincial visitors 
wonder: ** Why is the Cafe Royal? " I have one 
answer for them: " Henri Murger." 

It is certain that, but for Murger, there would 
be no Chelsea and no Cafe Royal. That m^ 
has a lot to answer for. I doubt if any one man 
(I'm not including kings) has wrought so much 
havoc in young lives. He meant to warn youth 
of danger; he actually drove youth towards it. 

Any discussion which seeks to name the most 
dangerous book in the world is certain to bring 
mention of Rousseau's Confessions, of Paine's 
Age of Reason, of ArtzIbashePs Sanine, of Bau- 
delaire's Fleurs de Mai, and other works of sub- 
versive tendency. The one book which has really 
done more harm to young people than any other 
IS seldom remembered in this connection. That 
book is Scenes de la Vie de Bohetne; and it Is dan* 
gerous, not that It contains a line of obscenity or 
blasphemy, not that It teaches evil as higher than 
good, but because It founded a cult and taught 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 23 

young people how to ruin their lives. Bohemian- 
ism has, of course, existed since the world began ; 
rebels have always been; but it remained for 
Murger to find a name for it and make a cult of it. 

The dangers of this cult to young people lay 
not in its being an evil cult, but in its being per- 
haps as fine a cult as any of the world's great 
creeds: the cult of human sjrmpathy and gener- 
osity. The Bohemian makes friends with all 
kinds and all creeds — sinners and saints, rich and 
poor; he cares nothing so long as they be kindly. 
And there lay the danger, for the blood of youth, 
freed from all restraint, was certain to overdo it. 
It became a cult of excess. Murger died, but he 
left behind him a very bitter legacy to the coming 
generation. As that legacy passed through the 
years it gathered various adhesions — such as 
Wilde's " In order to be an artist it is first neces- 
sary to ruin one's health," and Flaubert's ** Noth- 
ing succeeds like excess " ; so that very soon art 
colonies became things discredited, unpleasant to 
the nostrils of the righteous. 

Murger himself saw the life very clearly, for 
he described it as " Vie gai et terrible " ; and he 
takes no pains to present to us only the lighter, 
wanner side of it. He shows us everything; yet, 



24 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

so diabolical is his manner, that, even after pass- 
ing the tragedy of the closing pages, the book 
and the life it pictures call to every one of us 
with song in his blood and the spirit of April in 
his heart. 

It first appeared as a feuilleton in a Paris daily, 
and Murger, with characteristic insouciance, 
wrote his instalments only a few hours before the 
time when they were due fof the printer; and 
when he was stumped for material, he invented 
a little story. Hence that singularly beautiful 
tale, slammed into the middle of the book — the 
Story of Francine's Muff — ^which forms the open- 
ing scene of Puccini's opera founded on the novel. 
The book has neither balance nor cohesion, and 
in this it catches its note from its theme. It is 
a cinematographic) succes^on of scenes, tender 
and passionate and gay; swift and hectic. He 
invented and employed the picture-palace manner 
in literature before the picture-palace was even 
conceived. The very style is feverish, and from 
it one visualizes the desperately merry Bohemian 
slaving with pen and paper in his high garret, 
and whipping his flagging brain with fierce stim- 
ulant, while the printer's boy sits on the door- 
step. 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 25 

It stands alone. There is no book in the liter- 
ature of the world quite like it. It is the chal- 
lenge of youth and beauty to the world; and if 
we — grown wise and weary in the struggle — find 
a note of ferocity and extravagance in the chal- 
lenge, then let us judge with understanding, and 
remember that it is a case of the fine and the 
weak against the brutal and the ignorant. Mur- 
ger's voice is the voice of protesting youth. He 
is illo^cal; so is youth. He is furious; so is 
youth. He is heroic; so is youth. He is half-mad 
with indignation and half-mad with the joy of 
living; so is youth.' It is by its very waywardness 
and disregard of values that the book captures us. 

There is no other book in which the spirit of 
Paris breathes more easily. Here we have the 
essential Paris, just as In Thomas Dekker we 
have the essential London. Poets, novelists and 
essayists have set themselves again and again to 
ensnare the elusive Paris between the covers of a 
book; but Murger alone — ^though he writes of 
Paris in 1830 — ^has succeeded. Those who have 
never been to Paris should first read his book; 
then, when they do go, they will experience the 
sense of coming back to some known place. 

It was this insidious book that first tempted 



26 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

youth to escape from a hidebound world ; showed 
it the way out — a way beset by delightful hazards. 
It offered to all the golden boys and girls a new 
Utopia, and they were fain to visit it. That it 
was a false world troubled them not at all. The 
green glass, the delirious midnight hours, and the 
pale loveliness of Mimi and Musette were, per- 
haps, shackles as binding and as fearful as those 
of Convention. But anything to escape from the 
irk and thrall of their narrow realities; so away 
they went, and the end of the story is written in 
the archives of the Morgue. 

After seventy years, however, the middle way 
has been found. There are few tragedies to-day 
in the Quartier Latin, and very little gaiety or 
kindliness; none of the old adventurous spirit. 
Things are going too well in the studio-world 
these days. Chelsea and Montmartre have been 
invaded by the American dilettanti, whose lives 
are one long struggle to be Bohemians on a 
thousand a year. If, however, there be those 
who regard this state of things as an improve- 
ment on the old, then let it be remembered that 
this way was only found after Murger had 
wrecked his own life and the lives of those who 
followed so gaily the unkind path down which he 



ROUND THE TOWN. 1917 27 

• 

led them. It is a pitiful catalogue; the more 
pitiful since so many of the young dead are 
anonymous — the young men who might, had they 
lived, have given the world so much of beauty, 
but who were unable to pull up short of the prec- 
ipice. Some of them, of course, we know: Gerard 
de Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Ver- 
laine, Ernest Dowson; and their London monu* 
ment is the Cafe Royal. 

a|c a|c a|c a|c a|c 

At half-past nine all fun ceased, but we had 
picked up a bunch from Fleet Street, one of 
whom was taking home two bottles of whisky. 
So we moved to ** another place," and ordered 
black coffees which drank tolerably well— after 
some swift surreptitious business with a cork- 
screw. Later, we strolled across Oxford Street 
to what remained of the German Quarter. We 
visited various coffee-bars, where our genial com- 
rade with the bottles again did his duty; did it 
beautifully, did it splendidly, did it with Vine 
Street at his ear. And in a grey street off Tot- 
tenham Court Road we found a poor man's 
cabaret. In the back room of a coffee-bar an en- 
tertainment was proceeding. Two schonk boys, 
in straw hats, were at a piano, assisted by an 



a8 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

anaemic girl and a real coal-black coon, who gave 
us the essential rag-times of the South. Th^ 
place was packed with the finest collection of cos- 
mopolitan toughs I had ever seen in one room. 
The air, physical and moral, was hardly breath- 
able, and as the boys were spoiling for a row, one 
misinterpreted glance would have brought trou- 
ble — and lots of it. At different tables, voices 
were raised in altercation, when not in lusty song, 
and the general impression the place gave me 
was that it was a squalid, dirty model of the old 
Criterion Long Bar. All the meaner, more des- 
perate citizens of the law-breaking world were 
gathered here ; and, though we had broken a few 
by-laws ourselves that night, we were not anxious 
to be led into any more shattering of the Doraic 
tables. So at midnight we adjourned to " an- 
other place," and drank dry gingers until three 
o'clock in the morning. Then, to a Turkish Bath, 
and so to bed; not very merry, but as cheered in 
the spirit as the humble, useless citizen is allowed 
to be in a miserable, hole-and-corner way in war- 
time. 

It had been a sorry experience, this round of 
visits, in 1917, to quarters last seen in 1914; and 
it made me curious to know how other familiar 



ROUND THE TOWN, 1917 29 

nooks had received the wanton assault of kings. 
In the haphazard sketches that follow I have 
tried to catch the external war-time atmosphere 
of a few of the old haunts, so far as a poor re- 
porter may. Later, perhaps, a better hand than 
mine will discover for us the essential soul of 
London under siege; and these rough notes may 
be of some service, since all remembrance of that 
time was blown away from most minds by the 
maroons of Armistice Day. 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 

From my earliest perceiving moments, docks and 
railway stations have been, for me, the most 
romantic spots of the city in which I was born 
and bred. Quays and wharves, cuts, basins, 
reaches, steel tracks and passenger trains, and all 
that belonged to the life of the waterside and the 
railway, spoke to me of illimitable travel and 
distant, therefore desirable, things. 

This feeling I share, I suppose, with millions 
of other men and children who have been reared 
in coast cities, and whose minds respond to the 
large invitations offered by sooty smoke-stacks or 
the dim outline of a station roof. And if these 
things pierced the complacence of one's days in 
the past, how much deeper and more significant 
their message in those four dreadful years, when 
men fared forth in ships and trains to new perils 
unima^ned in the quieter years. 

That apart, I see docks and railway stations 
not in their economic or historic aspect, but in the 
picturesque light, as, perhaps, the most emphatic 

30 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 31 

glory of London. For London's major archi- 
tectural beauties I care little. Abbeys, cathedrals, 
old churches, museums, leave me cold; the fine 
shudder about the shoulders I suffer most sharply 
before those haphazard wizardries of brick and 
iron flung together by the exigencies of modern 
commerce. Their fortuitous ugliness achieves a 
new beauty. A random eye-full of such town- 
scapes may yield only an impression of squalor, 
but many acres of squalor produce, by their very 
vastness, something of the sublime^ Belching 
chinmeys, flaring furnaces, the solenm smell of 
wet coal mingled with that of tar and bilge-water, 
and the sight of brown sails and surly funnels and 
swinging cranes — in these misshapen masses I find 
that delight that others receive from contempla- 
tion of Salisbury Cathedral or a spire of Wren's. 
The docks of London lie closely in a group — 
Wapping, Shadwell, Rotherhithe, Poplar, Lime- 
house, Isle of Dogs, Blackwall, and North Wool- 
wich, and each possesses its own fine-flavoured 
character. You may know at once, without other 
evidence than that afforded by the sense of smell, 
whether you stand in London Docks, Surrey Com- 
mercial Docks, West India Docks, Millwall 
Docks, or Victoria and Albert Docks. To me, 



32 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

the West and East India Docks are soaked in the 
bright odour and placid clamour of the East, with 
something of feminine allure in the quality of 
their appeal. Victoria and Albert Docks I find 
gaunt and colourless. Surrey Commercial Docks 
remind me of some coarse merchant from the 
Royal Exchange, stupidly vulgar in speech, clothes 
and character. 

The East and West India Docks I have treated 
elsewhere. Of the others, the most exciting are 
Millwall and London Docks — though of the lat- 
ter I fear one must now speak in the past tense. 
Shadwell High Street and St. George's, which 
border the London Docks, are no longer them- 
selves. All is now charged with gloom, broken 
only by the anaemic lights of a few miserable mis- 
sion-halls and coffee-bars for the use of Scan- 
dinavian seamen. Awhile back, before this 
monstrous jest of war, there was a certain raw 
gaiety about the place brought thither by these 
same blond vikings; but, since the frenetic agita- 
tions of certain timorous people against " all 
aliens'' — as though none but an alien can be a 
spy — ^these men are not now allowed to land from 
their boats, and Shadwell is the poorer of a touch 
of colour. One might often meet them and 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 33 

fraternize with them in the coffee-bars and beer- 
shops (there are few ** public-houses " in these 
streets) , and hear their view of things. Bearded 
giants they were, absurdly out of the picture in 
these tiny, sawdusted rooms, against the hideous 
bedizenment of the London house of refreshment 
They would engage in rich, confused, interminable 
conversations, using a language which, to the 
stranger, sounded like a medley of hiccoughs and 
snorts; and there would be vehement arguments 
and a large fanning of the breeze. In the upper 
rooms, on Saturday evenings, one might have 
singing and dancing to a cracked piano and a 
superannuated banjo, and there the girls of the 
quarter would appear, and would do themselves 
well orf seafarers' hospitality. 
^ But the free-and-easy atmosphere is gone. You 
enter any bar and are at once under a doud. 
Suspicion has been bred in all these docks men 
by the cheap Press. The patriotic stevedores re- 
gard you as a disguised alien. The landlord won- 
ders whether you are one of those blasted 
newspaper men or are from the Yard. The visi- 
tors to the bars are in every case insipid; none 
of the ripe character that once lit such places to 
sudden life. Abrupt acquaintance and casual con- 



34 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

versation are not to be had. The beer is filthy. 
The good Burton is gone, and in its place you 
have a foul concoction which has not the mellow- 
ing effect of honest British beer or the ex- 
hilarating effect of the light continental brews. 
Shadwell High Street is now a dirty lane of poor 
lodging-houses, foul courts, waste tracts of land, 
nfilssion halls exuding a stale air of diseased hos- 
pitality, and those nondescript establishments, 
ships' chandlers, with their miscellanies of appar- 
ently useless lumber, stored in such a heap that 
it would seem impossible to find any article im- 
mediately required. In short, social life here is 
as it should be, according to the unwearied in 
war-work. 

Still, there are some adorable morsels of 
domestic architecture to be found up narrow 
alleys: old cottages and tumbling buildings, mel- 
lowed by centuries of association with many 
weathers and with men and ships from the green 
and golden seas that lie beyond the muddy waters 
of London River; and these supply one touch of 
animation to the prevailing moribundity. 

Very different are the Millwall Docks. Little 
material beauty here, but something much better 
— good company, and plenty of it. The docks He 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 35 

at the south of the Isle of Dogs, amid a flat 
stretch of dreary warehouses and factories, and 
you approach them by a long curving street of 
poor cottages and " general " shops. The island 
is a place of harsh discords, for Cubitt's works 
are established here, and the ring of hammers 
rises above the roar of furnaces, and the vocifer- 
ous life of the canals above the scream of the 
siren and the moan of the hooter, and the con- 
certed voices of the island seem to cry the ac- 
cumulated agony of the East End. Great arc 
lights, suspended from above, when cargoes are 
being unloaded by night, fling into sudden il- 
lumination or shadow the faces and figures of the 
groups of workers as they stagger up the gang- 
ways with their loads, and lend to the whole scene 
an air of theatrical illusion. In the bars you find 
sweaty engineers and grimy stokers. Here is a 
prolific field of character; mostly British, though 
a few Lascars may be found, drinking solitary 
drinks or parading the streets with their cus- 
tomary air of bewilderment. Here are nut-brown 
toilers of the sea, whose complexions suggest that 
they have been trapped by that advertiser in the 
popular Press who offers his toilet wares with the 
oracular pronouncement that " Handsome Men 



36 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

Are Slightly Sunburnt." Here are men who 
have circled the seven seas. Here, calm and taci- 
turn, is a man who knows Pitcairn Islanders to 
speak to ; who produces from one pocket a carved 
ivory god, presented to him by some native of 
Java, and from the other Old Timothy's One- 
Horse Snip for the Big Race. 

Under the meagre daylight and the opulent 
shadows of these docks you may drink beer and 
listen to casual chit-chat that carries you round 
the world and into magical hidden places, and 
brings you back with a jerk to the Isle of Dogs. 

" Yerce. Two bob a pound the 'Ome an' 
Colonial was arstin' the missus for the stuff« I 
soon went round an* told 'em where they could 
put it. Well, 'si was sayin', after we left Ran- 
goon, we " 

The land in this district consists, for the most 
part, of oozing marsh, so that, when a gale sweeps 
from the mouth of the river, it reaches the island 
with unexpended force. Then the sky seems to 
scream in harmony with the rattling windows. 
Saloon signs swing grotesquely. The river as- 
sumes a steely hue, heaving and rushing, sucking 
against staples, wharves and barges, and rising in 
ineffectual splashes against the gates of the docks. 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 37 

until you seek the public bar of the " Dog and 
Thunderstorm " as a sanctuary. There, amid the 
babble of pewter and glass and the punctuation 
of the cash register, you forget any London gale 
in listening to stories of typhoons, cyclones, and 
other freaks of the elements common to the 
Pacific and the meeting of the waters round the 
Horn. 

Many hours have I squandered on the ridicu- 
lous bridge of the Isle of Dogs, in sunlight or twi- 
light, grey mist or velvet darkness, building my 
dreams about the boats as they dropped down- 
stream to the oceans of the world and their ports 
with honey-syllabled names— Swatow, Rangoon, 
Manila, Mozambique, Amoy — returning in nor- 
mal times, with fantastic cargoes of cornelian 
and jade, malachite and onyx, fine shapes of ivory 
and coral, sharp spices of betel-nut and bhang, 
and a secret tin or two of li-un — ^perhaps not re- 
turning at all. There I would stand, pving to 
each ship some name and destination born of my 
own fancy, and endowing it with a marvellous 
meed of adventure. 

It is an exciting experience for the landsman 
Cockney, strolling the streets about the docks, to 
rub shoulders with other little Cockneys, in blue 



38 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

serge and cotton scarves, who have accepted the 
non-committal invitation offered by the funnel 
and the rigging over the walls of Limehouse 
Basin. One remembers the story of the pale 
curate at the church concert, at which one of the 
entertainers had sung a setting of Kipling's 
" Rolling Down to Rio." " Ah, Godl " he said, 
wringing his thin hands, " that's what I often feel 
like. . . . Rolling down to Rio." And in these 
streets one meets insignificant little men who have 
done it ; who have rolled down to Rio and gone 
back to Mandalay, and seen the dawn come up 
like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay 

And I am proud to have nodding acquaintance 
with them. I am glad they have drunk beer with 
me. I am glad I have clicked the chopsticks in 
Limehouse Causeway with the yellow boys who 
can talk of Canton and Siam and North Borneo 
and San Francisco. I am glad I have salaamed 
noble men of India at the Asiatics' Home, and 
heard their stories of odourous villages in the hills 
and of the seas about India, and of strange islands 
which mere Cockneys pick out on the map with an 
uncertain forefinger — ^Andamans, Nicobars, Solo- 
mons, and so forth. I am glad from having met 
m^n who know Java as I know London; who 



BACK TO DOCKLAND 39 

know the best places in Tokio for tea and the 
most picturesque spots in Formosa; who can 
direct me to a good hotel in Singapore, should I 
ever go there, and who know where Irish whisky 
can be bought in Sarawak. Why study guide- 
books, or consult with the omniscient Mr. Cook, 
when you may find about the great ornamental 
gates of the docks of London natives of all 
corners of the world who can provide you with 
a hundred exclusive tips which will make smooth 
the traveller's way over every obstacle or un- 
toward incident? Indeed, why travel at all, 
when you may travel by proxy ; when, by hanging 
round the docks of London, you may travel, on 
the lips of these men, through jungle, ocean, 
white town, palm grove, desert island, and suf- 
fer all the sharp sensations of standing silent 
upon a peak in Darien, the while you are taking 
heartening draughts of mild and bitter in the 
saloon bar of the " Star of the East " ? 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 

" Chinatown, my Chinatown, where the lights 
are low" — -a fragment of a music-hall song in 
praise of Chinatown which sticks ironically in my 
memory. The fact that the lights are low applies 
at the time of writing to the whole of London; 
and as for the word " Chinatown," which once 
carried a perfume of delight, it is now empty of 
meaning save as indicating a district of London 
where Chinamen live. To-day Limehouse is 
without salt or savour; flat and unprofitable; and 
of all that it once held of colour and mystery and 
the macabre, one must write in the past tense. 
The missionaries and the Defence of the Realm 
Act have together stripped it of all that furtive 
adventure that formerly held such lure for the 
Westerner. 

It was in 19 17 that I returned to it, after an 
absence of some years. In that year I received an 
invitation that is rightly accepted as a compli- 
ment: I was asked by Alvin Langdon Coburn to 
meet him at his studio, and let him make from 

40 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 41 

my face one of those ecstatic muddles of grey and 
brown that have won for him the world's acknowl- 
edgment as the first artist of the camera. Our 
meeting discovered a mutual enthusiasm for 
Limehouse, and we arranged an excursion. 
There, we said to ourselves, we shall find yet a 
taste of the pleasant things that the world has 
forgotten: soft movement, solitude, little cour- 
tesies, as well as wonderful things to buy. There 
we shall find sharp-flavoured things to eat and 
drink, and josses and chaste carvings, and sharp 
knives. Oh, and the tea, too — ^the little two- 
ounce packets of suey-sen at sevenpence, that 
clothe the hour of five o'clock with delicate scents 
and dreams. 

But the suey-sen was gone, done to death by 
the tea-rationing order. Gone, too, was the bland 
iniquity of the place. Our saunter through Penny- 
fields and the Causeway was a succession of dis- 
illusions. The spirit of the commercial and 
controlled West breathed on us from every side. 
AH the dusky delicacies were suppressed. Dora 
had stepped in and khyboshed the little haunts 
that once invited to curious amusement. Opium, 
li-un, and other essences of the white poppy, se- 
cretly hoarded, were fetching £30 per pound. 



42 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

The hop-hoads had got it in the neck, and the 
odour of gin-seng floated seldom upon the air. 
The old tong feuds had been suppressed by stem 
policing, and Thames Police Court had become 
almost as suave and seemly as Rumpelmayer's. 
Even that joyous festival, the Feast of the 
Lanterns, kept at the Chinese New Year, had 
fallen out of the calendar. The Asiatic seamen 
had been made good by an Order in Council. All 
for the best, no doubt; yet how one missed the 
bizarre flame and salt of the old Quarter. 

We found Pennyfields and the Causeway un- 
comfortably crowded, for the outward mail sail- 
ings were reduced, and the men who landed in 
the early days had been unable to get away. So 
the streets and lodging-houses were thronged 
with Arabs, Malays, Hindoos, South Sea Island- 
ers, a;id East Africans; and the Asiatics' Home 
for Destitute Orientals was having the time of 
its life. Every cubicle in the hotel was engaged, 
and many wanderers were sleeping where they 
could. Those with money paid for their accom- 
modation; for the others, a small grant from the 
India Oflice secured them board and bed until 
such time as proper arrangements could be made. 
The kitchens were working overtime, for each 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 43 

race or creed has its own inexorable laws in the 
matter of food. Some eat this and some eat that, 
and others will eat anything — save pork — ^pro- 
vided that prayers are spoken over it by an ap- 
pointed priest. 

At half-past nine an occasional tipsy Malay 
might be seen about the streets, but the old riots 
and melees were things of the past. In the little 
public-house at the corner of Pennyfields we found 
the usual crowd of Chinks and white girls, and the 
electric piano was gurgling its old sorry melodies, 
and beer and whisky were flowing; but the whole 
thing was very decorous and war-timish. 

We did, however, find one splash of colour. A 
new and very gaudy restaurant had lately been 
opened in a narrow by-street, and here we took a 
meal of noodle, chow-chow and awabi, and some 
tea that was a mocking echo of the old suey-sen. 
The room was crowded with yellow boys and a 
few white girls. Suddenly, from a corner table, 
occupied by two of the ladies, came a sharp stir. 
A few heated words rattled on the air, and then 
one rose, caught the other a resounding biff in the 
neck, and screamed at her: — 

" You dare say I'm not respectable I I am 
respectable. I come from Manchester." 



/ 



44 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

This evidence the assaulted one refused to re- 
gard as final. She rose, reached over the table, 
and clawed madly at her opponent's face and 
clothes. Then they broke from the table, and 
fought, and fell, and screamed, and delivered the 
hideous animal noises made by those who see red. 
At once the place boiled. I've never been in a 
Chinese rebellion, but if the clamour and the 
antics of the twenty or so yellow boys in that cafe 
be taken as a faint record of such an affair, it 
is a good thing for the sensitive to be out of. 
To the corner dashed waiters and some* custom- 
ers, and there they rolled one another to the floor 
in their efforts to separate the girls, while others 
stood about and screamed advice in the various 
dialects of the Celestial Empire. At last the 
girls were torn apart, and struggled insanely in 
half a^ dozen grips as they hurled inspired 
thoughts at one another, or returned to the old 
chorus of " Dirty prostitute." " I ain't a prosti- 
tute. I come from Manchester. Lemme 
gettater." 

And with a final wrench the respectable one 
did get at her. She broke away, turned to a 
table, and with three swift gestures flung cup, 
saucer and sauce-boat into the face of her tra- 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 45 

ducer. That finished it. The proprietor had 
stood aloof while the giris tore each other's faces 
and bit at uncovered breasts. But the sight of his 
broken crockery acted as a remover of gravity. 
He dashed down the steps, pushed aside assist- 
ants and advisers, grabbed the nearest girl — the 
respectable one — round the waist, wrestled her to 
the top of the marble stairs that lead from the 
door to the upper restaurant, and then, with a 
sharp knee-kick, sent her headlong to the bottom, 
where she lay quiet. 

Whereupon her opponent crashed across a 
table in hysterics, kicking, moaning, laughing and 
sobbing: "You've killed 'er — ^yeh beast. You've 
killed 'er. She's my pal. Oo. Oo. Oooooowh 1 " 

This lasted about a minute. Then, suddenly, 
she arose, pulled herself together, ran madly 
down the stairs, picked up her pal, and staggered 
with her to the street. At once, without a word 
of comment, the company returned placidly to 
its eating and drinking; and this affair — an event 
in the otherwise dull life of Limehouse — ^was 
over. 

Years ago, such affairs were of daily occur* 
rence, and the West India Dock Road became 
a legend to frighten children with at night. But 



46 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

the times change. Chinatown is a back number, 
and there now remains no corner to which one 
may take the curious visitor thirsting for exotic 
excitement — ^unless it be the wilds of Tottenham. 
The Chinatown of New York, too, has become 
respectable. The founder of that colony, Old 
Nick, died recently, in miserable circumstances, 
after having acquired thousands of dollars by his 
enterprise. From the high estate of Founder of 
the Chinatown he dropped to the position of pan- 
handler, swinging on the ears of his compatriots. 
About forty years ago, when Mott Street, Pell 
Street, and Doyers Street were the territory of 
the Whyos, the Bowery boys and the Dead Rab- 
bits, Old Nick crept stealthily into a small corner. 
He started a cigar-store in Mott Street, making 
his own cigars. He was honest, thrifty, and pos- 
sessed a lust for work. The cigar-store pros- 
pered, and soon, feeling lonely, as the only Chink 
among so many white boys, he passed the word 
to his countrjonen about the big spenders of the 
district. On his advice, they closed their laun- 
dries and came to live alongside, to get their pick- 
ings from the dollars that were flying about. 
Chinatown was started, and rapidly developed, 
and its atmosphere was sedulously " arranged " 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 47 

for the benefit of conducted tourists from up- 
town, and the tables rattled with the dice and 
fluttered with the cards. This success was the 
beginning of Old Nick's failure. At the tables he 
lost all: his capital, his store, his home, and his 
proud position. For a time he managed to sur- 
vive in fair circumstances; but soon the hatchet 
men became too numerous, and their tong feuds 
too deadly, and their gambling tricks too notori- 
ous. Police raids and the firm hand of the higher 
Chinese merchants put a stop to the prosperity of 
Chinatown, and soon it fell away to nothing, and 
Old Nick passed his last days on the sporadic 
charity of a white woman whom he had in hap- 
pier days befriended. 

And to-day Pell Street and Mott Street are as 
quiet and virtuous as Pennyfields and the Cause- 
way. Coburn and I left the old waterside streets 
with feelings of dismay, tasting ashes in the 
mouth. We tried to draw from an old store- 
keeper, a topside good-fella chap, some expres- 
sion of his own attitude to present conditions, but 
with his usual impassivity he passed it over. How 
could this utterly debased and miserable one who 
dares to stand before noble and refined ones from 
Office of Printed Leaves, who have honoured his 



48 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

totally inadequate establishment with symmetrical 
presences, presume to offer to exaltecj intelligences 
utterly insignificant thoughts that find lodging in 
despicable breast? 

Clearly he was handing us the lemon, so we 
took it, and departed for the more reckless joys 
of Hammersmith, where Cobum has his home. 
On the journey back I remembered the drahness 
we had just left, and then I remembered Lime- 
house as it was- — a pool of Eastern filth and 
metropolitan squalor; a place where unhappy 
Lascars, discharged from ships they were only 
too glad to leave, were at once the prey of ras- 
cally lodging-house keepers, mostly English, who 
fleeced them over the fan-tan tables and then 
slung them to the dark alleys of the docks. A 
wicked place; yes, but colourful. 

Listen to the following: two extracts from an 
East End paper of thirty years back : — 

Thames Police Court. 

John Lyons, who keeps a common lodging-house, which he 
has neglected to register, appeared before Mr. Ingram in 
answer to a summons taken out by Inspector Price. J. Kirby, 
53 A, inspector of common lodging-houses, stated that on Satur- 
day night last he visited defendant's house, which was in a 
most filthy and dilapidated condition. In the first floor he 
found a Chinaman sleeping in a cupboard or small closet, filled 
with cobwebs. The wretched creature was without a shirt, and 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 49 

was covered with a few rags. The Chinaman was appar- 
ently in a dying state, and has since expired. An inquest was 
held on his remains, and it was proved he died of fever, and 
had been most grossly neglected. The room in which the 
Chinaman lay was without bedding or furniture. In the second 
room he found Aby Callighan, an Irishwoman, who said she 
paid IS. 6d. a week rent. In the third room was Abdallah, 
a Lascar, who said he paid 3s. per week, and a Chinaman 
squatting; on a chair smoking. In the fourth room was Dong 
Yoke, a Chinaman, who said he paid 2s. 6d. per week for the 
privilege of sleeping on the bare boards; two Lascars on bed- 
steads smoking opium, and the dead body of a Lascar lying on 
the floor, and covered with an old rug. In the fifth room was 
an Asiatic seaman, named Peru, who said he paid 3s. per week, 
and eleven other Lascars, six of whom were sleeping on bed- 
steads, three on the floor, and two on chairs. If the house were 
registered, only four persons would be allowed in the room. 
The eflluvium, caused by smoking opium and the over-crowded 
state of the room, was most nauseous and intolerable. In the 
kitchen, which was very damp, he found Sedgoo, who said he 
had to pay 2S. a week, and eight Chinamen huddled together. 
The stench here was very bad. If the house were registered, 
no one would have been allowed to inhabit the kitchen at all. 
He should say the house was quite unfit for a human habitation. 
The floors of the rooms, the stairs and passages were in a filthy 
and dilapidated condition, covered with slime, dirt, and all 
kinds of odious substances. 

The men had been hung up with weights tied to their feet; 
flogged with a rope; pork, the horror of the Mohanmiedan, 
served out to them to eat, and the insult carried further by 
violently ramming the tail of a pig into their mouths and 
twisting the entrails of the pig round their necks; they were 
forced up aloft at the point of the bayonet, and a shirt all 
gory with Lascar blood was exhibited on the trial, and all this 
proved in evidence. One man leaped overboard to escape his 
tormentor; a boat was about to be lowered to save the drown- 
ing man, but it was prohibited, and he was left to perish. The 
captain escaped out of the country, forfeiting his bail and 



50 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

abandoning his ship, leaving his chief officer to be brought to 
trial and to undergo punishment for his share of this cruel 
transaction. 

In those days you might stand in West India 
Dock Road, on a June evening, in a dusk of blue 
and silver, the air heavy with the reek of betel 
nut, chandu and fried fish; the cottages stewing 
themselves in their viscid heat. Against the sky- 
line rose Limehouse Church, one of the architec- 
tural beauties of London. Yellow men and brown 
ambled about you, and a melancholy guitar tinkled 
a melody of lost years. Then, were colour and 
movement; the whisper of slippered feet; the 
adventurous uncertainty of shadow; heavy mist, 
which never lifts from Poplar and Limehouse; 
strange voices creeping from nowhere; and occa- 
sionally the rasp of a gramophone delivering rec- 
ords of interminable Chinese dramas. The soul 
of the Orient wove its spell about you, until, into 
this evanescent atmosphere, came a Salvation 
Army chorus bawling a lot of emphatic stuff about 
glory and blood, or an organ with " It ain't all 
lavender I " and at once the clamour and reek of 
the place caught you. 

Thirty years ago — ^that was its time of roses. 
Then, indeed, things did happen : things so strong 
that the perfume of them lingers to this day, and 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 51 

one can, remembering them, sometimes sym- 
pathize with those who say " Lime house " in 
tones of terror. One of my earliest memories is 
of the West India Dock Road on a wet November 
afternoon. A fight was on between a Chink and 
a Malay. The Chink used a knife in an upward 
direction, forcefully. The Malay got the Chink 
down, and jumped with heavy boots on the bleed- 
ing yellow face. 

Some time ago, when my ways were cast in 
diat district, the boys would loaf at a kind of 
semi-private music-hall, attached to a public-house, 
where one of the Westernized Chinks, a San Sam 
Phung, led the band, and freely admitted all 
friends who bought him drinks. Every night he 
climbed to his chair, and his yellow face rose like 
a November sun over the orchestra-rail. When 
the conductor's tap turned on the flow of the 
dozen instruments, which blared rag-tag music, 
we shifted to the babbling bar and tried to be 
amused by the show. It was the dustiest thing 
in entertainment that you can imagine. To this 
day the hall stinks of snarling song. Dusty jokes 
we had, dusty music, dusty dresses, dusty girls to 
wear them, or take them off ; and only the flogging 
of cheap whisky to carry us through the evening. 



52 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

Solemn smokes of cut plug and indifferent cigar 
swirled in a haze of lilac, and over the opiate air 
San's fiddle would wail, surging up to the balcony's 
rim and the cloud of corpse faces that swam above 
it. More and more mephitic the air would grow, 
and noisier would become voice and foot and 
glass; until, with a burst of lights, and the roar 
of the chord-off from the band, the end would 
come, and we- would tumble out into the great 
road where were the winking river, and keen air 
and sanity. 

Later, the boys would shuffle along with San 
Sam Phung to his lodging over a waterside wine- 
shop, crossing the crazy bridge into the Isle of 
Dogs. Often, passing at midnight, you might 
have heard his heart-song trickling from an open 
window. He cared only for the modern, Italianate 
stuff, and would play it for hours at a time. 
Seated in the orchestra, in his second-hand dress- 
suit and well-oiled hair, he looked about as pic- 
turesque as a Bayswater boarding-house. But you 
should have seen him afterwards, during the day, 
in his one-room establishment, radiant in spangled 
dressing-gown and tempestuous hair, a cigarette 
at his lips, his fiddle at his chin. It was worth 
sittmg up late for. Then his face would shine. 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 53 

if ever a Chink's can, and his bow would tear the 
soul from the fiddle in a fury of lyricism. 

Half his room was filled with a stove, which 
thrust a long neck of piping ten feet in the wrong 
direction, and then swerved impulsively to the 
window. In the corner was a joss. The rest of 
the room was littered with fiddles and music. Over 
the stove hung a gaudy view of Amoy. He never 
tired of talking of Amoy, his home. He longed 
to get b^ck to it — to flowers, blue waters, white 
towns. He lived only for the moment when he 
might tuck his fiddle-case under his arm and return 
to Amoy, home and beauty. Once started on the 
tawdry ribaldry which he had to play at the hall, 
his arm and fingers following mechanically the 
sheet before him, he would set his fancies free, 
and, like a flock of rose-winged birds, they took 
flight to Amoy. Music, for him, was just melody 
— ^the graceful surface of things ; in a word Amoy. 
Often he confessed to a terrible fear that he 
would grow old and die among our swart streets 
ere he could save enough to return. And he did. 
Full of the poppy one dark night, he stepped over 
the edge of a wharf at Millwall. Then, at the 
inquiry, it was discovered that his nostalgia for 
Amoy was pure fake. He had never been tb' 



54 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

He was born on a boat that crawled up-river one * 
foggy morning, and had never for a day gone 
out of London. 

There were many other delightful creatures of 
Limehouse whose names lie persistently on the 
memory. There was Afong, a chimpanzee who 
ran a pen-yen joint. There was Chinese Emma, 
in whose establishment one could go '^ sleigh- 
riding." There was Shaik Boxhoo, a gentleman 
who did unpleasant things, and finally got religion 
and other advantages over his less wily brothers, 
who got only the jug. Faults they had in plenty, 
these throwbacks, but their faults were original. 
Every one of them was a bit of sharp-flavoured 
character, individual and distinct. 

In those days there was a waste patch of wan 
grass, called The Gardens, near the Quarter, and 
something like a band performed there once a 
week. O Carnival, Carnival! There the local 
crowd would go, and there, to the music of dear 
Verdi, light feet would clatter about the asphalt 
walk, and there would happen what happens every 
Sunday night in those parts of London where are 
parks, promenades, bandstands and monkeys' pa- 
rades. In the hot spangled dusk, the groups of 
girls, brave with best frocks and daring ribbons, 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 55 

would fling their love and their laughter to all 
who would have them. Through the plaintive 
music — poor Verdi 1 how like a wheezy music-box 
his crinoline melodies sounded, even then I — 
would swim little, ripples of laughter when the 
girls were caressing or being caressed; and 
always the lisp of feet and the whisk of darling 
frocks kissing little black shoes. 

Near by was the old " Royal Sovereign," which 
had a skittle-alley. There would gather the lousy 
Lascars, and there they would roll, bowl or pitch. 
Thenthey would swill. Later, they would roll, bowl 
or pitch, with a skinful of gin, through the reel- 
ing streets to whichever boat might claim them. 

The black Lascars, unlike their yellow mates, 
arc mostly disagreeable people. There was, in 
those days, but one of them who even approached 
affability. He was something of a Limehouse 
Wonder, for, in a sudden fight over spilt beer, he 
showed amazing aptitude not only with his fists, 
but also in ringcraft. Chuck Lightfoot, a local 
sport, happened to see him, and took him in hand, 
and for some years he stayed in Shadwell, putting 
one after another of the local lads to sleep. He 
finished his ring career in a dockside saloon by 
knocking out an offending white man who had 



56 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

chipped him about his colour. It was a foul blow, 
and the man died. Pennyfields Polly got twelve 
months, and when he came out he started on the 
poppy and the snow, for he was not allowed to 
fight again, and life held nothing else for him. His 
friends tried to dissuade him, on the ground that 
he was ruining his health — a sensible argument to 
put to a man who had no interest in life; they 
might as well have told an Arctic explorer, who 
had lost the trail, that his tie was creeping up the 
back of his .neck. 

It is curious how the boys cling to you after 
a brief interchange of hospitalities. You drop 
into a beer-shack one evening, and you are sure 
to find a friend. One makes so easily in these 
parts a connection, salutations, fugitive intimacy. 
You are suddenly saluted, it may be by that good 
old friend, Mr. Lo, the poor Indian, or John Sam 
Ling Lee. Vaguely you recall the name. Yes; 
you stood him a drink, some ten years ago. Where 
has he been? Oh, he found a boat . . . went 
round the Horn . . . stranded at Lima . . . 
been in Cuba some time . . . got to Swatow later 
. . . might stay in London . . . might get a 
boat on Saturday. 

But these casual encounters are now hardly 



CHINATOWN REVISITED 57 

to be had. So many boys, so many places have 
disappeared. Blue Gate Fields, scene of many 
an Asiatic demonism, is gone.* The " Royal Sov- 
ereign " — the old " Royal Sovereign " — is gone, 
and the Home for Asiatics reigns in its stead. 
The hop-shacks about the Poplar arches and the 
closed courtyards and their one-story cottages are 
no more. To-day — as I have said three times 
already; stop me if I say it again — the glamor- 
ous shame of Chinatown has departed. Nothing 
remains save tradition, which now and then is 
fanned into life by such a case as that of the 
drugged actress. Yet you may still find people 
who journey fearfully to Limehouse, and spend 
money in its shops and restaurants, and suffer 
their self-manufactured excitements while sojourn- 
ing in its somnolent streets among the respectable 
sons of Canton. The boys will not thank me for 
robbing them of the soft marks who pay twenty 
shillings for a jade bangle, of the kind sold in a 
sixpenny-halfpenny bazaar; so, anticipating their 
celestial disapproval, this miserable prostrates 
himself and remains bowed for their gracious 
pardon, and begs to be permitted to say that the 
entirely inadequate benedictions of this one will 
be upon them until the waning of the last moon. 



SOHO CARRIES ON 

SoHO 1 Soho 1 

Joyous syllables, in early times expressive of the 
delights of the chase, and even to-day carrying an 
echo of nights of festivity, though an echo only. 
How many thousand of provincials, seeing Lon- 
don, have been drawn to those odourous byways 
that thrust themselves so briskly through the 
staid pleasure-land of the West End — Greek 
Street, Frith Street, Dean Street, Old Compton 
Street: a series of interjections breaking a dull 
paragraph — ^where they might catch the true 
Latin temper and bear away to the smoking- 
rooms of country Conservative clubs fulsome tales 
that have made Soho already a legend. Indeed, 
I know one cautious lad from Yorkshire, whose 
creed is that You Never Know and You Can't Be 
Too Careful, who always furnishes himself with 
a loaded revolver when dining with a town friend 
in Soho. I am not one to look sourly upon the 
simple pleasures of the poor; I do not begrudge 
him his concocted dish of thrills. I only mention 

68 



SOHO CARRIES ON 59 

this trick of his because it proves again the 
strange resurrective powers of an dft-buried lie. 
You may sweep, you may garnish Soho if you will ; 
but the scent of adventure will hang round it still. 
But to-day the scent is very faint. The streets 
that once rang with laughter and prodigal talk 
are in a.d. 19 17 charged with gloom; their gentle 
noise is pitched in the minor key. These morsels 
of the South, shovelled into the swart melanchol- 
ies of central London, have lost their happy 
summer tone. Charing Cross Road was always 
a streak of misery, but, on the most leaden day, 
its side streets gave an impression of light. Lord 
knows whence came the light. Not from the 
skies. Perhaps from the indolently vivacious 
loungers; perhaps from the flower-boxes on the 
window-sills, or the variegated shops bowered 
with pendant polonies, in rainbow wrappings of 
tinfoil, and flasks of Chianti. One always walked 
down Old Compton Street with a lilt, as to some 
carnival tune. Nothing mattered. There were 
macaroni and spaghetti to eat, and Chianti to 
drink; dishes of ravioli; cigars at a halfpenny a 
time and cigarettes at six a penny; copies of friv- 
olous comic-papers; and delicate glasses of lire, 
a liqueur that carried you at the first sip to the 



6o OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

green-hued Mediterranean. The very smell of 
the place was the smell of those lovable little 
towns of the Midi. 

But all is now changed. Gone are the shilling 
tables-d'hote and their ravishing dishes. Gone 
is the pint of vin ordinaire at tenpence. Will they 
ever come again, those gigantic, lamp-lit evenings, 
those Homeric bob's-worths of hors-d'oeuvre, 
soup, omelette, chicken, cheese and coffee ? Shall 
we ever again cross Oxford Street to the old Ger- 
man Quarter and drink their excellent Pilsener 
and Munchner, in heartening steins, and eat their 
leber-wurst sandwiches, and smoke their long, thin 
cigars? Or seat ourselves in the Schweitzerhof, 
where four wonderful dishes were placed before 
you at a cost of tenpence by some dastard spy, in 
the pay of that invisible-cloak artist, the English 
Bolo ? — ^who doubtless reported to Berlin our con- 
versation about Phyllis Monkman's hair and Billy 
Merson's technique. Nay, I think not. The blight 
of civilization is upon Soho. Many once cosy and 
memorable cafes are closed. Other places have 
altered their note and become uncomfortably Eng- 
lish ; while those that retain their atmosphere and 
their customers have considerably changed their 
menu and cuisine. One-and-ninepence is the low- 



SOHO CARRIES ON 6i 

est charge for a table-d'hote — and pretty poor 
hunting at that. The old elaborate half-crown 
dinners are now less elaborate and cost four shill- 
ings. And the wine-lists — ^well, wouldn't they 
knock poor Omar off his perch? I don't know 
who bought Omar's drinks, or whether he paid 
for his own, but if he lived in Soho to-day he'd 
have a pretty thin time either way — ^unless the 
factory price for tents had increased in propor- 
tion with other things. 

Gone, too, is the delicious atmosphere of 
laisser-faire that made Soho a refreshment of the 
soul for the visitors from Streatham and Ealing. 
Soho's patrons to-day have a furtive, guilty look 
about them. You see, they are trying to be happy 
in war-time. No more do you see in the cafes the 
cold-eyed anarchists and the petty bourgeois and 
artisans from the foreign warehouses of the local- 
ity. In their place are heavy-eyed women, placid 
and monosyllabic, and much khaki and horizon 
blue. Many of the British soldiers, officers and 
privates, are men who have not yet been out, and 
are experimenting with their French among the 
French girls who have taken the places of the 
swift-footed, gestic Luigi, Frangois or Alphonse; 
others have come from France, where they have 



62 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

discovered the piquancy of French cooking, and 
desire no more the solidities of the " old English " 
chop-house. 

Over all is an atmosphere of restraint. Gone 
are the furious argument and the preposterous 
accord. Gone are the colour and the loud lights 
and the evening noise. Soho is marking time, 
until the good days return — if ever. Not in 19 17 
do you see Old Compton Street as a line of warm 
and fragrant cafe-windows; instead, you stumble 
drunkenly through a dim, murky lane, and take 
your chance by pushing the first black door that 
exudes a smell of food. Gone, too, are those 
exotic foods that brought such zest to the jaded 
palate. The macaroni and spaghetti now being 
manufactured in London are poor substitutes for 
the real thing, being served in long, flat strips 
instead of in the graceful pipe form of other days. 
Camembert, Brie, Roquefort, Gruyere, Port Salut, 
Strachini and other enchanting cheeses are unob- 
tainable ; and you may cry in vain for edible snails 
and the savoury stew of frogs' legs. True, the 
Chinese cafe in Regent Street can furnish for the 
adventurous stomach such trifles as black eggs 
(guaranteed thirty years old), sharks' fins at 
seven shillings a portion, stewed seaweed, bamboo 



SOHO CARRIES ON 65 

shoots, and sweet birds'-nests ; but Regent Street 
is beyond the bounds of Soho. 

Nevertheless, if you attend carefully, and if 
you are lucky, you may still catch in Old Compton 
Street a faint echo of its graces and picturesque 
melancholy. You may still see and hear the som- 
bre Yid, the furious Italian, the yodelling Swiss, 
and the deprecating French, hanging about the 
dozen or so coffee-bars that have appeared since 
I9i4« A few of these places existed in certain 
corners of London long before that date, but 
it is only lately that the Londoner has discovered 
them and called for more. The Londoner — I 
offer this fact to all students of national traits — 
must always lean when taking his refreshment. 
Certain gay and festive gentlemen, who constitute 
an instrument of order called the Central Control 
Board, forbid him to lean in those places where, 
of old, he was accustomed to lean; at any rate, he 
is only allowed to lean during certain defined 
hoursw You might think that he would have 
gladly availed himself of this opportunity for 
resting awhile by sitting at a marble-topped table 
and drinking coffee or tea, or — horrid thought 1 — 
cocoa. But no; he isn't happy unless he leans 
over his refreshment; and the cafe-bar has sup- 



64 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

plied his demands. There is something in lean- 
ing against a bar which entirely changes one^s 
outlook. You may sit at a table and drink whisky- 
and-soda, and yet not achieve a tithe of the ex- 
pansiveness that is yours when you are leaning 
against a bar and drinking dispiriting stuff like 
coffee or sirop. Maybe the physical attitude re- 
acts on the mind, and tightens up certain cords or 
sinews, or eases the blood-pressure; anyway, fears, 
doubts, and cautions seem to vanish in these little 
corners of France, and momentarily the old ani- 
mation of Soho returns. 

In these places you may perchance yet cap- 
ture for a fleeting space the will-o'-the-wisperie of 
other days: movement and festal colour; laughter 
and quick tears; the warm jest and the darkling 
mystery that epitomize the city of all cities; and 
the wanton, rose-winged graces that flutter about 
the fair head of M'selle Lolotte, as she hands you 
your cafe nature and an April smile for sweeten- 
ing, carry to you a breath of the glitter and spa- 
ciousness of old time. You do not know Lolotte, 
perhaps ! Thousand commiserations, M'sieu ! 
What damage! Is Lolotte lovely and delicate? 
But of a loveliness of the most ravishing! The 
shining hair and the eyes of the most disturbing ! 



SOHO CARRIES ON 65 

Lolotte is in direct descent from Mimi Pinson, 
half angel and half puss. 

Soldiers of all the Allied armies gather about 
her crescent-shaped bar after half-past nine of an 
evening. The floor is sawdusted. The counter is 
sloppy with overflows of coffee. Lips and nose 
receive from the air that bitter tang derived only 
from the smoke of Maryland tobacco. The varied 
uniforms of the patrons make a harmony of 
debonair gaiety with the many-coloured bottles 
of cordials and sirops. 

" Pardon, m^sieul ^' cries the poilu, as he acci- 
dentally jogs the arm by which Sergeant Michael 
Cassidy is raising his coffee-cup. 

*^ Oh, sarner fairy hang, mossool Moselle, 
donnay mwaw urn Granny Dean.** 
M*5teu parte frangais, alorsf* 
Ah, ouL Jer parte urn purr.*' 

And another supporting column is added to the 
structure of the Entente. 

Over in the corner stands a little fat fellow. 
That comer belongs to him by right of three 
years' occupation. He is 'Ockington from a near- 
by printing works. Ask 'Ockington what he thinks 
about these 'ere coffee-bars. 

" Ah," he'll say, " I like these Frenchified caf- 



it 



66 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

fies. Grand idea, if you ask me. Makes yeh feel 
as though you was abroad-like. Gives yeh that 
Lazy-Fare feelin*. I bin abroad, y'know. Dessay 
you *ave, too, shouldn't wonder. I don't blame 
yeh. See what yeh can while yeh can, 'ats what I 
say. My young Sid went over to Paris one Bang 
Koliday, 'fore the war, an' he come back as 
different again. Yerce, I'm all fer the French 
caffies, I am. Nicely got up,. I think. Good 
meoggerny counter; and this floor and the walls — 
all done in that what-d'ye call it — mosey-ac. What 
I alwis say is this: the French is a gay nation. 
Gay. And you feel it 'ere, doncher? Sort of 
cheers you up, like, if yer know what I mean, to 
drop in 'ere for a minute or two. . . . Year or 
two ago, now, after a rush job at the Works, I 
used to stop at a coSee-stall on me way 'ome late 
at night, an' 'ave a penny cup o' swipes — ^yerce, 
an' glad of it. But the difference in the stuff 
they give yer 'ere — don't it drink lovely and 
smooth ? " 

Then his monologue is interrupted by the elec- 
tric piano, which some one has fed with pennies ; 
and your ear is charmed or tortured by the latest 
revue music or old favourites from Paris and 
Naples^ — ** Marguerite," " Sous les ponts de 



SOHO CARRIES ON 67 

Paris," " Monaco," the Tripoli March. If you 
appear interested in the piano, whose voice Lo- 
lotte loves, she will offer to toss you for the next 
penn'orth. Never does she lose. She wins by the 
simple trick of snatching your penny away the 
moment you lift your hand from it, and gurgling 
delightedly at your discomfiture. 

No wonder the coffee-bar has become such a 
feature of London life in this time of war. Lean- 
ing, in Lolotte's bar, is a real and not a forced 
pleasure. In the old days one could lean and 
absorb the drink of one's choice; but amid what 
company and with what service 1 Who could 
possibly desire to exchange fatigued inanities with 
the vacuous vulgarities who administer the ordi- 
nary London bar; who seem, like telephone girls, 
to have taken lessons from some insane teacher 
of elocution, with their " Nooh riarly? " expres- 
sive of incredulity; and their ** Is yewers a 
Scartch, Mr. Iggulden?" But in Lolotte's bar, 
talk is bright, sometimes distinctly clever, and one 
lingers over one's coffee, chaffering with her for 
— ^well, ask 'Ockington how long he stays. 

But Lolotte is not always gay. Sometimes she 
will tell you stories of Paris. There is a terrible 
story which she tells when she is feeling triste. 



68 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

It is the story of a girl friend of hers with whom 
she worked in Paris. The girl grew ill; lost her 
work; and earned her living by the only possible 
means, until she grew too ill for that. One night 
Lolotte met her wearily walking the streets. She 
had been without food for two days, and had that 
morning been turned from her lodging. Sud- 
denly, as they passed a florist's, she darted through 
its doors and inquired the price of some opulent 
blooms at the further end of the shop. The shop- 
man turned towards them, and, as he turned, she 
dexterously snatched a bunch of white violets 
from a vase on the counter. The price of the 
orchids, she decided, was too high, and she came 
out. 

Lolotte, who had seen the trick from the door- 
way, inquired the reason for the theft. And the 



answer was : 



Eh, hien; il faut avoir quelquechose quand on 
va rencontrer le bon Dieu/' 

Two days later her body, with a bunch of white 
violets fastened at the neck, was recovered from 
the Seine. 



OUT OF TOWN 

It was an empty day, in the early part of the 
year, and I was its very idle singer; so idle that 
I was beginning to wonder whether there would 
be any Sunday dinner for me. I took stock of 
my possessions in coin, and found one-and-ten- 
pence-halfpenny. Was I downhearted? Yes. 
But I didn't worry, for when things are at their 
worst, my habit is always to fold my hands and 
trust. Something always happens. 

Something happened on this occasion : a double 
knock at the door and a telegram. It was from 
the most enlightened London publisher, whose 
firm has done so much in the way of encouraging 
young writers, and it asked me to call at once. I 
did so. 

" Like to go to Monte Carlo? " he asked. 

When I had recovered from the swoon, I beg- 
ged him to ask another. 

''Here's an American millionaire," he said, 

69 



70 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

" writing from Monte Carlo. He wants to write 
a book, and he wants some assistance. How 
would it suit you ? " 

I said it would suit me like a Savile Row out- 
fit of clothes. 

" When can you go ? " 

" Any old time." 

" Right. You'd better wire him, and tell him 
I told you to. Don't let yourself go cheap. 
Good-bye." 

I didn't fall on his neck in an outburst of grati- 
tude: he wouldn't have liked it. But I yodelled 
and chirruped all the way to the nearest post- 
office, having touched a friend for ten shillings on 
the strength of the stunt. All that day and the 
next, telegrams passed between Monte Carlo and 
Balham. I asked a noble salary and expenses, 
and a wire came back: "Start at once." I re- 
plied : ** No money." Ten pounds were delivered 
at my doorstep next morning, with the repeated 
message " Start at once." 

But starting at once, in war-time, was not so 
easily done. There was a passport to get. That 
meant three days' lounging in a little wooden 
hut in the yard of the Foreign Office. Having 
got the passport, I spent four hours in a gueu^ 



OUT OF TOWN 71 

outside the French Consulate before I could get 
it vise. Six days after the first telegram, I stood 
shivering on Victoria Station at seven o'clock of 
a cadaverous January morning. Having been 
well and truly searched in another little hut, and 
having kissed the book, and sworn full-flavoured 
oaths about correspondence, and thought of a 
number, and added four to it, I was allowed to 
board the train. 

Half the British Army was on that train, and 
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome and myself were the only 
civilians in our carriage. You will rightly guess 
that it was a lively journey. I had always won- 
dered, in peace-time, why the jew's-harp was in- 
vented. I understand now. In the histories of 
this war, the jew's-harp will take as romantic a 
place as the pipes of Lucknow or the drums of 
Oude in the histories of other wars. 

At Folkestone there were more searchings, 
more stamping of passports, more papers and 
" permissions " to bulk one's pocket and perplex 
one's mind. On the boat, standing-room only, 
and when a gestic stewardess sought seats for a 
fond mother and five little ones in the ladies' 
saloon, she found all places occupied by khaki 
figures stretched at full length. 



tt 



72 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

'' Seulement les dames I *' she cried, pointing to 
a notice over the door. 

Aha, madamel '' said a stalwart Australian, 
mats c'est la guerre! " In other words " Au- 
brey Llewellyn Coventry Fell to you 1 " 

Yes, it was war ; and it was tactfully suggested 
to us by the crew, for, when we were clear of 
Folkestone harbour, all boats were slung out, 
and lifeboats were placed in tragic heaps on 
either side. It was a cold, angry sea, and stew- 
ards and stewardesses became aggressively pro- 
phetic about the fine crossing that we were to 
have. Germany had a few days before declared 
her first blockade of the English coast, and every 
speck on the sea became dreadfully portentous. 
At mid-Channel a destroyer stood in to us and 
ran up a stream of signals. 

" This is it," chortled a Cockney, between vio- 
lent trips to the side; " this is it! Now we're 
for it!" 

Next moment I got a push in the back, and I 
thought it had come. But it was the elbow of one 
of the crew who had rushed forward, and was 
sorting bits of bunting from an impossibly tan- 
gled heap at my side. It} about two seconds, he 
found what he wanted and hauled at a rope. Up 



OUT OF TOWN 73 

went what looked like a patchwork counterpane, 
until the breeze caught it, when it became a string 
of shapes and colours, straining deliriously against 
its fastenings. Then down it came ; then up again ; 
then down; then up; then down; and that was 
the end of that conversation. I don't know what 
it signified, but half an hour later we were in 
Boulogne harbour. 

More comic business with papers; then to the 
train. Yes, it was war. The bridge over the 
Oise had not then been repaired; so we crawled 
to Paris by an absurdly crab-like route. We left 
Boulogne just after twelve. We reached Paris 
at ten o'clock at night. There was no food on 
the train, and from sbc o'clock that morning, 
when I had had a swift cup of tea, until nearly 
midnight I got nothing in the way of refresh- 
ment. But who cared? I was going South to 
meet ah American millionaire, and I had money 
in my pocket. 

I arrived at Paris too late to connect with that 
night's P.L.M. express, so I had twenty-four 
hours to kill. I strolled idly about, and found 
Paris very little changed. There was an air 
about the people of irritation, of questioning, of 
petulant suffering; they had a manner expressive 



74 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

of "A quoi bonf'^ Somebody in high quarters 
had brought this thing upon them. Somebody in 
high quarters might rescue them from its evils — 
or might not They moved like stricken animals, 
their habitual melancholy, which is often un- 
noticed because it is overlaid with vivacity, now 
permanently in possession. 

I caught the night express to Mdnte Carlo. 
Our carriage contained eight sombre people, and 
the corridors were strewn with sleep-stupid sol- 
diers. I was one sardine among many, and, with 
a twenty-seven-hour journey before me in this 
overheated, hermetically sealed sardine-tin, I 
began to think what a fool I had been to make 
this absurd journey to a place that was strange to 
me; to meet a millionaire about whom I knew 
nothing, and who might have changed his mind, 
millionaire-fashion, and left Monte Carlo by the 
time I got there; and to undertake a job which 
I might find, on examination, was beyond me. 

Then, with a French girl's head on one shoul- 
der, and my other twisted at an impossible angle 
into the window-frame, I went to sleep and awoke 
at Lyons, with a horrible headache and an un- 
bearable mouth, the result of the boiling and over- 
spiced soup I had swallowed the night before. I 



OUT OF TOWN 75 

think we all hated each other. It was impossible 
to wash or arrange oneself decently, and again 
there was no food on the train. But, as only the 
Latin mind can, we made the best of it and pre- 
tended that it was funny. Girls and men, com- 
plete strangers, drooped in abandonment against 
one another, or reclined on unknown necks. A 
young married couple behaved in a way that at 
other times would have meant a divorce. The 
husband rested his sagging head on the bosom 
of a stout matron, and a poilu stretched a rug 
across his knees and made a comfortable pillow 
for the little wife. N^importe. Cetait la guerre. 

On the platform at Lyons were groups of 
French Red Cross girls with wagons of coffee. 
This coffee was for the soldiers, but they handed 
it round impartially to civilians and soldiers 
* alike, and those who cared could drop a few sous 
into the collecting basin. That coffee was the 
sweetest draught I had ever swallowed. 

At Marseilles it was bright morning, and I was 
lucky enough to get a pannier, at a trifling cost 
of seven francs. These panniers are no meal 
for a hungry man. They contain a bone of 
chicken, a scrap of ham, a corner of Gruyere, a 
stick of bread (that surely was made by the firm 



76 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

that put the sand In sandwich), a half-bottle of 
sour white wine, a bottle of the eternal Vichy, 
Old Uncle Tom Cobleig^ and all. 

I had just finished it when we rolled into Tou- 
lon, and there I got my first glimpse of the true, 
warm South. I suffered a curious sense of 
" coming home." I had not known it, but all my 
childish dreams must have had for their back- 
ground this coloured South, for, the moment it 
spread itself before me, bits of Verdi melodies 
ran through my heart and brain and I danced a 
double-shuffle. Since I was old enough to handle 
a fiddle, all music has interpreted itself to me in 
a visualization of bllie seas, white coasts, green 
palms with lemon and nectarine dancing through 
them, and noisy, sun-bright towns, and swart 
faces and languorous and joyfully dirty people. 
The keenest sense of being at home came later, 
when, at Monte Carlo, I met Giacomo Puccini, 
the hero of my young days, whose music had il- 
lumined so many dark moments of my City slav- 
ery; who is in the direct line of succession from 
Venli. 

This first visit to Monte Carlo showed me 
Monte Carlo as she never was before. Half the 
hotels were closed or turned into hospitals^ since 



OUT OP TOWN 77 

all the German hotel-staSs had been packed home. 
In other times it would have been " the season," 
but now there was everywhere a sense of empti- 
ness. Wounded British and French ofEcers 
paraded the Terrace; disabled blacks from Al- 
geria were on every hotel verandah or wandering 
aimlessly about the hilly streets with a sad air of 
being lost. The Casino was open, but it closed 
at eleven, and all the cafes closed with it; the 
former happy night-life had been nipped off 
short. At midnight the place was dead. 

I was accommodated at an Italian pension in 
Beausoleil, which, in peace-times, was patronized 
by music-hall artists working the Beausoleil cas- 
ino. The Casino had been turned into a barracks, 
but one or two Italian danseuses from the cabarets 
of San Remo were taking a brief rest, so that the 
days were less tiresome than they might have 
been. My millionaire was a charming man, who 
used my services but a few hours each day. Then 
I could dally with the sunshine and the Chianti 
and the breaking seas about the Condamine. 

When I next want a cheap holiday I shan't go 
to Brighton, or Eastbourne, or Cromer; I shall 
go to Monte Carlo. The dear Italian Mama 
who kept the pension treated me like a prince for 



jS OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 1 

thirty-five francs a week. I had a large bedroom, 
with four windows looking to the Alpes Mari- 
times, and a huge, downy French bed; I had 
coffee and rol! in the morning; a four-course 
lunch of Italian dishes, with a bottle of Chianti 
or Barolo; and a five-course dinner, again with 
a bottle. Those meals were the most delightful 
I have ever taken. The windows of the dining- 
room were flung wide to the Mediterranean, and 
between courses we could bask on the verandah 
while one of the girls would touch the guitar, the 
mandolin, or the accordion (sometimes we had 
all three going at once), in effervescent Neapoli- 
tan melody. My contribution to these meal-time 
entertainments was an English song of which they 
never tired: "The Man that Broke the Bank at 
Monte Carr-rr-IoI " Sometimes it was demanded 
five or six times in an evening. Immediately I 
arrived I was properly embraced and kissed by 
Mama and the three girls, and these rapturous 
kisses seemed to be part of the etiquette of the 
establishment, for they happened every morning 
and after all meals. M'selle Lola was allotted 
to rae; a blonde Italian, afire with mischief and 
loving-kindness and little delicacies of affection. 
On the third day of my visit I met a kindred— 



OUT OF TOWN 79 

soul, the wireless operator from the Prince of 
Monaco's yacht, VHirondelle, which was lying 
in the harbour on loan to the French Govern- 
ment. He was a bright youth; had been many 
rimes on long cruises with the yacht, and spoke 
English which was as good as my French was bad. 
We had some delightful " noces " together, and 
it was iti his company that I met and had talks with 
Caruso at the Cafe de Paris. An opera season 
was running at the Casino, and on opera nights 
the cafe remained open until a little past mid- 
night. After the evening's work Caruso would 
drop into the cafe and talk with everybody. His 
naive gratification when I told him how I had 
saved money for weeks, and had waited hours at 
the gallery door of Covent Garden to hear him 
sing, was delightful to witness. Prince George 
of Serbia was also there, recuperating; but though 
the Terrace at mid-day was crowded and pleas- 
antly bright, I was told that against the Terrace 
in the old seasons it was miserably dull. 

On ordinary nights, when we felt still fresh at 

eleven o'clock, we would take a car to Mentone, 

Lcross the frontier into Italy {which was not then 

ut war) , and spend a few cheery hours at Bordig- 

Ihera or San Remo, which were nightless. Then 



8o OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

back to Monte Carlo at about five, to bed, and up 
ag^in at nine, with no feeling of fatigue. It was 
curious to note how, under that sharp sunshine 
and keen night sky, all moral values were 
changed, or wholly obliterated. The first breath 
of the youthful company at the pension blew all 
London cobwebs away. It was all so abandoned, 
yet so sweet and wholesome ; and, by contrast, the 
English seaside resort, where the girls play at 
" letting themselves go," was a crude and shame- 
ful farce. Whatever happened at Monaco 
seemed to be right; nothing was wrong except 
frigidity and unkindness. 

My dear Italian Mama said to me one evening 
at dinner, when I had (in the English sense) 
disgraced myself by a remark straight from the 
heart : — 

*' M'sieu Thomas, on m'a dit que les anglais 
ont froid. C'est pas vrail " 

No, dear Mamina; but it was true before I 
stayed at the Pension Poggio at Beausoleil. 

My work with the millionaire spread itself 
over two months ; then, with a fat wad, I was free 
to return. It was not until I went to the Con- 
sulate to get my passport vise that I discovered 
how many war-time laws of France I had broken. 



OUT OF TOWN 8i 

I had not re^stered myself on arrival ; I had not 
reported myself periodically; and I had not ob- 
tained a permis de sejour. The Consul informed 
me cheerfully that heaps of trouble would be 
waiting for me when I went to the Mairie to get 
my laisseZ'passer, without which I could not buy 
a railway ticket. However, after being stood in 
a corner for two hours until all other travellers 
had received attention, a laissez-passer was 
thrown at me on my undertaldng to leave Monte 
Carlo that night. A gendarme accompanied me 
to the station to see that I did so. 

At Paris, a few hours spent with the police, 
the military, H6tel-de-Ville, and the British Con- 
sulate resulted in permission to kick my heels 
there for a day or so. 

A few mornings later arrived the millionaire's 
precious MS., which I had left behind so that 
he might revise it, with a message to hustle. I 
hustled. I reached London the same night. Next 
morning I negotiated with a publisher. In two 
days it was in the printer's hands and in a fort- 
night it was in the bookshops; and I was again 
out of a job. 



IN SEARCH OF A SHOW 

I HAVE been looking for a needle in a haystack, 
and I have not found it. I have been looking for 
an hour's true entertainment in London's theatres 
and music-halls during this spring season of 
1918. 

The tag of Mr. Gus Elcn's old song, '* 'E 
dunno where 'e are," very aptly describes the con- 
dition of the regular theatre-goer to-day. What 
would the old laddies of the Bodega-cheese days 
have thought, had any prophesied that at one 
swift step the Oxford and the Pavilion would 
simultaneously move into the ranks of the " legit- 
imate;" that His Majesty's Theatre would be 
running a pantomime; that smoking would be al- 
lowed in the Lyceum, the Comedy, the Vaude- 
ville, and the Garrick? Many people have lost 
their individuality by being merged into one or 
other war-movement since 19 14; many streets 
have entirely lost those distinctive features which 
enable us to recognize them at one glance or by 

8a 



IN SEARCH OF A SHOW 83 

sound or smell; but nowhere has the war more 
completely smashed personality than in theatre- 
land. 

In the old days (one must use that pathetic 
phrase in speaking of ante-1914), the visitor to 
London knew precisely the type of entertainment 
and the type of audience he would find at any 
given establishment To-day, one figures his be- 
wilderment — ^verily, 'e dunno where 'e are. 
Formerly, he could be sure that at the Garrick 
he would find Mr. Bourchier playing a Bourchi- 
eresque part. At His Majesty's he would find 
just what he wanted — or would want what he 
found — for going to His Majesty's was not a 
matter of dropping in: it was a pious function. 
At the Alhambra or the Empire he would be sure 
of finding excellent ballet at about ten o'clock, 
when he could sip his drink, stroll round the 
promenade, and leave when he felt like it. At 
the time I write he finds Mr. Bourchier playing 
low comedy at a transformed music-hall, and at 
the Alhambra or the Empire he finds a suburban 
crowd, neatly seated in rows — father, mother and 
flappers — ^watching a quite innocuous entertain- 
ment. 

Managers were long wont to classify in their 



84 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

minds the " Garrick " audience, the *' Daly " au- 
dience, the "Adelphi" audience, the "Hay- 
market*' audience; and plays would be refused 
by a manager on the ground that " our audience 
wouldn't stand it; try the Lyric." To-day they 
are all in the melting-pot, and the poor habitue 
of the So-and-so Theatre has to take what is 
given him, and be mighty thankful for it. 

At one time I loved a show, however cheap its 
kind; but in these days, after visiting a war-time 
show and suffering the feeling of assisting at some 
forbidden rite, I always wish I had wasted the 
evening in some other manner. Since 19 14 the 
theatres have not produced one show that any 
sober man would pay two pence to see. The 
stuff that has been produced has paid its way be- 
cause the bulk of the public is drunk — ^with war 
or overwork. The story of the stage since 19 14 
may be given in one word — " Punk." Knowing 
that we are all too preoccupied with solemn af- 
fairs to examine very closely our money's-worth, 
and knowing that the boys on leave are not likely 
to be too hypercritical, the theatrical money-lords 
— ^with one noble exception — have taken advan- 
tage of the situation to fub us off with any old 
store-room rubbish. We have dozens of genuine 



IN SEARCH OF A SHOW 85 

music-hall comedians on the stage to-day^ but they 
are all slacking. Some of them get absorbed by 
West End shows, and at once, when they appear 
on the gigantic American stages of some of our 
modern theatres, surrounded by crowds of ele- 
phantine women, they lose whatever character 
and spontaneity they had. Others give the bulk 
of their time and brains to earning cheap noto- 
riety by raising funds for charities or cultivating 
allotments — ^both commendable activities, but not 
compatible with the serious business of cheering 
the public. Gradually, the individual is being 
frozen out, and the stages are loaded with crowda 
of horsey, child-aping women, called by courtesy 
a beauty chorus; the show being called, also by 
courtesy, a revue. These shows resemble a revue 
as much as the short stories of popular magazines 
resemble a conte. They dazzle the eye and blast 
the ear, and, instead of entertaining, exhaust. 

The artists have, allowing for human nature, 
done their best under trying circumstances; but 
playing to an audience of overseas khaki and tired 
working-people, who applaud their most mala- 
droit japes, has had the effect of wearing them 
down. They no longer work. They take the 
easiest way, knowing that any remark about the 



86 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

Kaiser, Old Bill, meat-cards, or the Better 'Ole 
is sure of a laugh. 

One solitary example of money's-worth in war- 
time I found — ^but that is outside the lists of 
vaudeville or drama. I mean Sir Thomas Beech- 
am's operative enterprise. Beginning, in 19 15, 
to develop his previous tentative experiments — 
fighting against indifference, prejudice, often 
against active opposition — he went steadily on; 
and it is he whom our men must thank if, on re- 
turning, they find in England something besides 
factories and barracks. There is no man who, 
amid this welter of blood and hate, has per- 
formed work of higher national importance. 
While every effort was made to stifle or stultify 
every movement that made towards sanity and 
vision, he went doggedly forward, striving to save 
from the wreckage some trifle of sweetness and 
loveliness for those who have ears to hear. Had 
certain good people had their way, he, his ideals, 
his singers, his orchestra and his band instruments 
would have been flung into the general cesspool, 
to lie there and rot. But he won through; and 
I think only that enemy of civilization, the 
screaming, flag-wagging patriot, will disagree 
with a famous Major-General who, in full war- 



IN SEARCH OF A SHOW 87 

paint, stood at my side in the theatre bar between 
the acts of Tristan, and, turning upon a querulous 
civilian who had snorted against Wagner, cried 
angrily : — 

" Nonsense, sir, nonsense. War is war. And 



music is music." 



After years of struggling, Beecham has made 
it possible for an English singer to sing to Eng- 
lish audiences under his English name, and has 
proved what theatrical and music-hall managers 
never attempt to prove : that England can produce 
her own native talent in music and drama, with- 
out taking the fourth-rate and fifth-rate, as well 
as the first-rate, material of America and the 
Continent. He has shown himself at once a phil- 
anthropist and a patriot. In none of his produc- 
tions do we find signs of that cheap philosophy 
that ** anything will do for war-time." Before the 
arrival of his company, opera in London was a 
mere social function which (except from the point 
of view of the galleryite) had little to do with 
music. People went to Covent Garden not to 
listen to music, but to be seen; just as they went 
to the Savoy or to the Carlton to be seen, not to 
procure nourishment. The Beecham opera is first 
and last a matter of music 



88 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

So, Sir Thomas, a few thousand of us take off 
our hats to you. I think we should all like to 
send you every morning a little bunch of violets, 
or something equally valueless, but symbolic of 
the fine things you have given us, of the silver 
lining you have disclosed to us in these •over- 
clouded days« 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 

Last year London lost two of its quaintest char- 
acters — Robertson, of Australia, that pathetic 
old man who haunted the Strand and carried in 
his hat a clumsily scrawled card announcing that 
he was seairching for his errant daughter, and 
" Please Do Not Give Me Money " ; and " Spring 
Onions," the Thames Police Court poet 

Now the race of London freaks seems ended. 
Craig, the poet of the Oval Cricket ground; Spiv 
Bagster; the Chiswick miser; Onions and Robert- 
son; all are gone. Hunnable is confined; and G. 
N. Curzon isn't looking any too well. Even that 
prolific poet, Rowbotham, self-styled " the mod- 
ern Homer," has been keeping quiet lately. It 
took a universal war, though, to make him nod. 

I met " Spring " (privately, Mr. W. G. 
Waters) once or twice at Stepney. He was a 
vagrant minstrel of the long line of Villon and 
Cyrano de Bergerac. His anniversary odes were 
known to thousands of newspaper readers. He 
yns the self-appointed Laureate of the nation. 

«9 



90 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

He celebrated not only himself, his struggles and 
successes, but the pettier happenings of the day, 
such as the death of a king, the accession of a 
king, or the marriage of some royal couple. You 
remember his lines on the Coronation of Edward 
VII:— 

The King, His Majesty, and may him Heaven bless, 

He don't put no side on in his dress. 

For, though he owns castles and palaces and houses. 

He wears, just like you and me, coats and waistcoats and trousis. 

The character of the genial Edward in four lines. 
Could it have been better said? 

Not to know Spring argues yourself unknown. 
He might have stepped from the covers of Dek- 
ker's GulFs Hornbook. He was a child of na- 
ture. I can't bring myself to believe that he was 
bom of woman. I believe the fairies must have 
left him under the gooseberry — ^no, under the 
laurel bush, for he wore the laurel, the myrtle, 
and the bay as one born to them. He also, on oc- 
casion, wore the vine-leaf; and surely that is now 
an honour as high as the laurel, since all good 
fellowship and kindliness and conviviality have 
been sponged from our social life. We have been 
made dull and hang-dog by law. I wonder what 
Spring would have said about that law in his 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 91 

unrcgenerate days — Spring, who was " in " thirty- 
nine times for " D. and D." He would have 
written a poem about it, I know: a poem that 
would have rung through the land, and have 
brought to camp the numerous army of Boltists, 
Thresholdists, and Snortists. 

OK, Spring has been one of the boys in his 
time^ believe me. But in his latter years he was 
dull and virtuous ; he kept the pledge of teetotal- 
ism for sixteen years, teetotalism meaning absten- 
tion from alcoholic liquors. This doesn't mean 
that he wasn't like all other teetotalers, some- 
times drunk. The pious sages who make our by- 
laws seem to forget that it is as easy to get drunk 
on tea and coffee as on beer; the only difference 
being that beer makes you pleasantly drunk, and 
tea and coffee make you miserably drunk. 

If you knew Spring in the old days, you 
wouldn't have known him towards the end — and 
I don't suppose he would have known you. For 
in his old age he was a Person. He was odd mes- 
senger at Thames Police Court. In November, 
1898 Spring, who was then the local reprobate, 
took to heart the kindly abmonitions of Sir John 
Dickinson, then magistrate at Thames, and 
signed the pledge of total abstinence. Ever after- 



V 



92 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

wards, on the anniversary of that great day, 
Spring would hand to the magistrate a poem in 
celebration of the fact that he had " kept off it " 
for another year. 

I visited Spring just before his death in his 
lodging — ^lodging stranger than that of any 
Montmartre poet. 

The Thames Police Court is in Arbour Square, 
Stepney, and Spring lived near his work. 
Through many mean streets I tracked his dwel- 
ling, and at last I found it. I climbed flights of 
broken stairs in a high forbidding hous6. I stum- 
bled over steps and unexpected turns, and at last 
I stood with a puffy, red-faced, grey-whiskers, 
stocky old fellow, in a candle-lit garret whose one 
window looked over a furtively noisy court. 

It was probably his family name of Waters 
that drove him to drink in his youth, since when, 
he has been known as the man who put the tea in 
" teetotal." In his room I noticed a bed of non- 
descript colour and make-up, a rickety chest of 
drawers, (in which he kept his treasures), two 
doubtful chairs, a table, a basin, and bits of food 
strewn impartially everywhere. A thick, limp 
smell hung over all, and the place seemed set 
a-jigging by the flickering light of the candle. 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 93 

There I heard his tale. He sat on the safe chair 
while I flirted with the other. 

It was on the fortieth occasion that he yielded 
to Sir John Dickinson's remonstrances and signed 
the pledge, and earned the respect of all con- 
nected with that court where he had made so 
many appearances. All through that Christmas 
and New Year he had, of course, a thin time; it 
was suffocating to have to refuse the invitation: 
" Come on, Spring — let's drink your health ! " 
But what did Spring do ? Did he yield ? Never. 
V7hen he found he was thirsty, he sat down and 
wrote a poem, and by the time he had found a 
rhyme for Burton, the thirst had passed. Then, 
too, everybody took an interest in him and gave 
him work and clothes, and so on. Oh, yes, it's a 
profitable job being a reformed vagabond in Step- 
ney. 

He was employed on odd messages and er- 
rands for the staff at Thames Police Court, and 
visited the police-stations round about to do simi- 
lar errands, such as buying breakfast for the un- 
fortunates who have been locked up all night 
and are about to face the magistrate. Whatever 
an overnight prisoner wants in the way of food 
he may have (intoxicants barred), if he cares to 



94 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

pay for it, and Spring was the agile fellow who 
fetched it for him; and many stray coppers 
(money, not policemen) came his way. 

All these things he told me as I sat in his me- 
phitic lod^ng. Spring, like his brother Villon, was 
a man of all trades ; no job was too " odd " for 
him to take on. Holding horses, taking messages 
from court to station, writing odes on this and 
that, opening and shutting doors, and dashing 
about in his eightieth year just like a newsboy — 
Spring was certainly a credit to Stepney. On my 
mentioning that I myself made songs at times, he 
dashed oif the following impromptu, as I was fall- 
mg down his crazy stairs at midnight : — 

Oh, how happy we all should be, 
If none of us ever drank anything stronger than tea. 
For how can a man hope to write a beautiful song 
When he is hanging round the public-houses all day long? 

" Spring Onions " apart. Stepney is a home for 
all manner of queer characters, full of fire and 
salt; from Peter the Painter, of inmiortal mem- 
ory, to those odd-job men who live well by being 
Jacks of all trades, and masters of them, too. 

There are my good friends, Johnny, the scav- 
enger, Mr. 'Opkinson, the cat's-meat man, 'Erb, 
the boney, Fat Fred, who keeps the baked-potata 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 95 

can, and that lovable personality " My tJncle 
Toby," gate-man at one of the docks. 

There's 'Grace, too, the minder. Ever met 
him? Ever employed him? Probably not, but 
if you live near any poor market-place, and ever 
have occasion for his services, I cordially recom- 
mend him. 

'Orace is the best minder cast of the Pump. 
What does he mind? Your business, not his. 
Haven't you ever seen him at it in the more 
homely quarters? At a penny a time, it's good 
hunting; and 'Grace is the only man I know who 
blesses certain recent legislation. 

His profession sprang from the Children Act, 
which debarred parents from taking children into 
public-houses. Now, there are thousands of re- 
spectable couples who like to have a quiet— or 
even a noisy — drink on market-night; and the ef- 
fect of the Act was that they had to go in singly, 
one taking a drink while the other stood outside 
and held the baby. 

There was 'Grace's opportunity, and he took 
it. Why not let father and mother take their 
drink together, while 'Grace sang lullabies to his 
Majesty? 

Admirable idea. It caught on, for 'Grace has a 



96 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

way with babies. He can talk baby guff by the 
hour, and in the whole of his professional career 
he has never had to mind a baby that did not 
" take " to him on sight. 

The fee is frequently more than a penny. If 
the eld dad wants to stay for a bit, he will stand 
'Orace a drink (under the rose) and a pipe of 
'baccy. Sundays and holidays are his best days. 
He selects his public-house, on the main road 
always, and works it all day. Often he 'has five 
or sue kiddies at a time to protect; and he gave 
me a private tip towards success as a " minder " : 
always carry a number of bright things in your 
pockets — ^nails, pearl buttons, bits of coloured 
chalk, or, best of all, a piece of putty. 

Outside his regular pitch, the public-house owns 
a horse-trough, but as no horses now draw up, 
the trough is dry, and in this he places his half- 
dozen or so proteges, out of danger and as happy 
as you please. 

Then there's Artie, the copper's nark. What 
shall be said of Artie ? Shall I compare him to a 
sunmier's day? No, I think not; rather to a cob- 
webbed Stepney twilight. I don't commend Artie. 
Indeed, I have as little regard for him as I have 
for those poisonous weeds that float on the 




» 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS g?" 

Thames near Greenwich at flood. He Is a thor- 
oughly disagreeable person, with none of the acid 
qualities of the really bad man or the firelight 
glow of commonplace sinners like ourselves. He 
is incapable of following any other calling. He 
has been, from boyhood, mixed up with criminal 
gangs, but he has not the backbone necessary for 
following them on their enterprises. Always he 
has wanted to feel safe; so he cringes at the feet 
of officialism. He is hated by all — by the boys 
whose games he springs and by the unscrupulous 
pohce who employ him. His rewards are small: 
a few pence now and then, an occasional drink, 
and a tolerant eye towards his own little misbe- 
havings. 

Often the police are puzzled as to how Artie 
gets his information. If you were to ask him, he 
would become Orientally impassive. 

"Ah, you'd like to know, wouldn't yer?" 
But the truth is that he does not himself know. 
In a poor district — Walworth, Hoxton, or Net- 
ting Dale — everybody talks; and it is in these dis- 
tricts that Artie works. He is useless in big crim- 
Iinal affairs; he can only gather and report Infor- 
mation on the petty doings of his associates. The 
moment any small burglary is planned, two 



I 



mfor- 

. The , 

wo or ^^H 



98 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

three people know about it, for the small burglar 
is always maladroit and ill-instructed in his 
methods, and is bound to confide in some one. 
Artie is always about like a pedatory bird to 
snatch up crumbs of other people's business. 

Are you married, and were you married at a 
Registry Office? If so, it's certain that youVe 
met my dear old friend. Stepney Syd, the Con- 
gratulator, one of our most earnest war-workers ; 
as " unwearied " as Lady Dardy Dinkum. 

Congratulations, spoken at the right moment, 
in the right way, to the right people, are a paying 
proposition. The war has made no difference in 
the value of those mellifluous syllables, unless it 
be in an upward direction. It's a soft job, too. 
Syd never works after three in the afternoon. 
He cannot, because his work is the concluding 
touch to the marriage service. It consists in 
hanging about repstry-offices — that in Covent 
Garden is very popular with young people in a 
hurry — and waiting until a cab arrives with pros- 
pective bride and bridegroom. When they leave, 
Syd is there to open the door for them, and re- 
spectfully offer felicitations; and so fatuous and 
helpless is man when he has taken a woman for 
life that he dare not ignore this happy omen. 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 99 

Thus, Syd comes home every time on a good 
thing, and, by careful watching of the weekly 
papers in the Free Library, and putting two and 
two together, he contrives, like some of our politi- 
cians, to anticipate events, and to be where the 
good things are. 

Strolling round Montagu Street the other 
night, I met, in one of the little Russian cafes, a 
man who pitched me a tale of woe — a lean, fer- 
rety little man, with ferrety eyes and fingers that 
urged me to button my overcoat and secure all 
pockets. 

But I was shocked to discover that he was an 
honest man. Diamonds and honesty seldom walk 
hand-in-hand, and precious stones and virtue do 
not yet publicly kiss each other ; and he talked so 
much of diamonds that my first apprehensions 
were perhaps justified. I learnt, however, that 
his was a sad case. He was a diamond-cutter by 
trade, and in those war days one might as use- 
fully have diamonds in Amsterdam (as Maudi 
Darrell's song went) as have them in London. 

I had not before met a man who so casually 
juggled with the symbols of revue-girlhood, so 
I bought him some more vodka and tea-and* 
lemon, and led him on to talk. Stones to the 



loo OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

value of £20,000 passed through his hands every 
day, but none of them stuck. This fact greatly 
refreshed my dimming faith in human nature, 
until he qualified it by adding that it wasn't worth 
a cutter's while to steal. Every worker in the 
trade is known to every branch, and he would 
have no second chance. 

Apprenticeship to the trade of diamond-cutting 
costs £200: and, once out of his indentures, the 
apprentice must join the Union, for it would be 
useless for him, however proficient in his business, 
to attempt to obtain a post without his Union 
ticket. 

The diamond-mechanic earns anything from 
£3 to £8 per week. The work calls for a very 
considerable knowledge of the characters of 
stones, for very deft fingers, and for exception- 
ally shrewd judgment; since every diamond or 
brilliant, however minute, has sixty-four facets, 
each of which has to be made and polished on a 
lathe. 

The stones are handed out in the workshop 
practically haphazard, and in .the event of the 
loss of a stone, no disturbance is caused. The 
staff simply look for it; the floor of the shop is 
swept up with a fine broom, and the dust sifted 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS loi 

until it is found. The explanation of this laxity 
is the International Diamond Cutters' Union. 

In the process of diamond-cutting, of course, 
the stone loses about 60 per cent, of its weight; 
and the cutter told me that the fillings that come 
from the stone, mixed with the oil of the lathe, 
make the finest lubricant for a razor-strop. The 
making of his smooth cheeks was the perfect 
razor sharpened with diaitiond filings! 

Before we parted, he showed me casually a 
green diamond. This is the most rare form of 
stone, and there are only six known examples in 
the world. No, he didn't steal it. It had just 
been handed to hini for setting, and he was carry- 
ing it in his waistcoat-pocket in the careless man- 
ner of all stone-dealers. 

After he and a sure thousand pounds had van- 
ished into the night, I sat for awhile in the cafe 
listening to the chatter of the cigarette-girls of 
the quarter. 

It was all of war. Of Stefan, who had been re- 
patriated; of Abramovitch, who had evaded ser- 
vice by bolting to Ireland with a false green form 
for which he had paid £100; of Sergius, who had 
been hiding in a cellar. 

When one thinks of cigarette-girls one thinks at 



/ 



I02 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

once of Marion Crawford's Cigarette-makei^ s 
Romance and of Martin Harvey's super-senti- 
mental performance in that play, so dear to the 
Streatham flapper. But Sonia Karavitch, though 
soaked in the qualities of her race — dark beauty, 
luxurious curls, brooding temper, and spiritual 
melancholy — would, I fear, repel those who only 
know her under the extravagantly refining rays of 
the limelight. But those who love humanity in 
the raw will love her. 

Sonia Karavitch is seventeen. She wears a 
black frock, with many sprigs of red ribbon at 
her neck and in her raven hair. Her fingers are 
stained brown with tobacco; but, though she has 
heavy eyes and lounges languorously, like a 
drowsy cat in the sunshine, she works harder than 
most other factory-girls. 

From six o'clock in the morning until eight 
o'clock at night she is at her table, rolling by the 
thousand those hand-made cigarettes which com- 
mand big prices in Piccadilly. When she speaks 
she has a lazy voice with a curious lisp, and it is 
full of sadness. 

Yet she is not sad. She has a pleasant little 
home in one of the big tenements, where she lives 
with her mother and little brother, and, in her 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 103 

own demonstrative way, is happy. The harder 
she works, the more money there is for luxuries 
for the little brother. Often of an evening her 
friends come home, with her, and drink tea-and- 
lemon with her, and make music. 

Sonia Karavitch is very shy, and never mixes 
with the folk who are not of her own colony. 
She was born in Stepney of Russian parents, and 
she never goes out of Stepney. And why should 
she? For in the half-dozen streets where she 
lives her daily life she can speak the language 
of her parents, can buy clothes such as her mother 
wore in Odessa, and can find all those little 
touches that mean home to the homeless or the 
exiled. 

Every morning she goes straight to the factory ; 
at noon she goes home to dinner ; and in the eve- 
ning she goes straight home again. Sometimes on 
Saturday afternoons — which is her Sunday, for 
Sonia is of Jewish faith — she takes a walk in 
Whitechapel High Street, because, you see, there 
is much life in Whitechapel High Street; there are 
her compatriots, and there are street-organs, and 
violets are a penny a bunch. 

When she has had a good week she sometimes 
takes her mother and brother for kvass to one of 



104 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

the many Russian restaurants in Osborn Street 
and Little Montagu Street. 

Sometimes you see Sonia Karavitch at a table, 
sipping her tea, and listening to the talk, and you 
may wonder why that sad, far-away look in her 
eyes. She is not in Stepney. Her soul has flown 
to her native land — ^to the steppes, to the cold airs 
of Russia, whither a certain Russian lad, who used 
to work by her side in the cigarette factory in 
Osborn Street, was dispatched by a repatriation 
order. 

But then she remembers mother, and little 
brother, and stops her dreamings, and hurries on 
to work. 

Many wild folk have sat in these cafes and 
discoursed on the injustices of civilization ; and at 
one time private presses in the neighbourhood gave 
forth inflammatory sheets bearing messages from 
international warriors in the cause of freedom. 

If ever you are tired of the solemn round of 
existence, don't take a holiday at the seaside, 
don't go to the war. Edit an anarchist news-sheet, 
and your life will be full of quick perils and 
alarms. 

Another of my Stepney friends is Jane, the 
flower-girl, who tramps every day from Stepney 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 103 

to Covent Garden, and sells her stock from a 
pitch near Leicester Square. Here's another 
ardent war-worker. 

Some worthy people may not think that the 
selling of violets comes properly under the fine 
exclusive label of War Work.; but these are the 
neurotics whose only idea of doing their bit is that 
of twisting their soiling fingers about anything 
that carries a message of grace; who fume at a 
young man because he isn't in khaki, and, when 
he is in uniform, kill him with a look because he 
isn't in hospital blue, and, when he is in hospital, 
regard him askance because he isn't eager to go 
back. 

" Flowers I " they snort or wheeze. " Fiddling 
with flowers in war-time I It ought to be stopped. 
Look at the waste of labour. Look at the press 
on transport. Will the people never realize," 
etc 

Yet, good troglodytes, because the world is at 
war, shall we then wipe from the earth everyt 
thing that links us, however lightly, to God — and 
save Germany the trouble? Must everything be 
lead and steel? Old Man — dost thou think, be- 
cause thou art old, that glory and loveliness have 
passed away with the corroding of thy bones? 



io6 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

Nay, youth shall still take or make its pleasure; 
fair girls shall still adorn their limbs with silks, 
and flowers shall still be sweet to the nose. 

Old Man — on many occasions when I could get 
no food — ^not even war-bread — ^the sight and 
smell of bunches of violets have furnished suste- 
nance for mind and body. So fill thy belly, if 
thou wilt, with the waxy potato; put the Army 
cheese where the soldier puts the pudding; shovel 
into thy mouth the frozen beef and off^l that may 
renew thy enerpes for further war-work; but, if 
there be any grace of God still left in thee, if 
there be any virtue, any charity- — Cleave, for 
those who are shielding thy senescent body, the 
flower-girls about Piccadilly Circus on a May 
morning. 

"Vi'lerts! Swee' Vi'lerts ! Pennyer bunch P' 

Good morning, Jane! How sweet you and 
your violets look in the tangle of trafiic that laces 
and interlaces itself about Alfred Gilbert's 
Mercury. . 

Morning by morning, fair or foggy, she stands 
by the fountain; and if you give her more than a 
passing glance you will note that her tumbled hair 
is of just the right shade of red, and in her eyes 
arc the very violets that she holds to your indiffer- 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 107 

ent nose, and under her lucent skin beat the im- 
perious pulses of youth. 

Jane is fourteen, and Jane is always smiling; not 
because she is fourteen, but because it's ^such fun 
to be alive and to be selling flowers. Indeed, she 
looks herself like a little posy, sweet and demure. 
Times may be bad, but they are not reflected in 
Jane's appearance. 

Of education she has only what the Council 
School gave her in the odd hours when she choose 
to attend; of religion she has none, but she has a 
philosophy of her own, which, in a sentence, is 
To Get All The Fun You Can Out of Things. 

That's why Jane's smile is a smile that certain 
people look for every morning as they alight from 
their bus in the Circus. But you must not imagine 
that Jane is good in the respectable sense of the 
word. Let anyone annoy her, or try to " dish " 
her of one of her customers. Then, when it comes 
to back-chat, Jane can more than hold her own 
in the matter of language; and once I saw an 
artillery officer's face turn livid during a discus- 
sion between her and a rival flower-prl. 

The war has hit Jane very badly. The young 
bloods who frequented her stall in the old days, 
and bought the most expensive buttonholes every 



io8 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

morning, are now in khaki, and a thoughtless 
Army Order forbids an officer to decorate his 
tunic with a spray of carnations or a moss-rose. 

There are only the old bounders remaining, 
and their custom depends so much on such a num- 
ber of things — the morning's news, the fact that 
they are not ten years younger, the weather, and 
the state of their digestions. 

Jane always reads the paper before she starts 
work, because, as she says, then you know what to 
expect. She doesn't believe in meeting trouble 
halfway, but she believes in being prepared for it. 
When there's good news, stout old gentlemen will 
buy a bunch of violets for themselves, and per- 
haps a cluster of blossoms for the typist. But 
when the news is bad, nobody is in the mood for 
flowers. They want to band themselves together 
and tell one another how awful it is; which, as 
Jane says, is all wrong. 

** If they'd only buy a bunch of violets and stick 
it in their coats, other people would feel better 
by looking at them, and they'd forget the bad news 
in the jolly old smell in their buttonhole." 

Yes, Jane's fourteen years have given her much 
wisdom, and she is doing as fine war-work as any 
admiral or iield-marshaL 



I 

I 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS 109 

While in Stepney we mustn't forget good Mrs. 
Joplin. Mrs. Joplin lives up a narrow court of 
menacing aspect, and in her window is a printed 
card, bearing the cryptic legend — " Mangling 
Done Here " — which, to an American friend of 
mine, suggested that atrocities of a German kind 
were going on downstairs. But I calmed his fears 
by assuring him that Mrs. Joplin's business card 
was a simple indication of her willingness to re- 
ceive from her neighbours bundles of newly- 
washed clothes, and put them through a machine 
called a mangle, from which they were discharged 
neatly pressed and folded. The remuneration for 
tliis service is usually but a few coppers — ^beer- 
money, nothing more; so to procure the decencies 
of existence Mrs. Joplin lets her basement rooms 
for — What's that? Yes, I daresay you've had a 
few pewter half-crowns and florins passed on you 
lately, but what's that to do with me — or Mrs. 
Joplin? Do you want me to suggest that good 
Mrs. Joplin is a twister; a snide-merchant? Never 
let it be said. Good Mrs. Joplin, unlike so many 
of her neighbours, has never seen the inside of a 
police-court, much less a prison. 

Speaking of prisons, it was in Stepney that I 
was told how to carry myself if ever I came within 



4 




I lo OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

the grip of the law on frequent occasions. The 
English prison is not an establishment to which 
one turns with anticipation of happiness ; but there 
is one prison which is as good as a home of rest 
for those suffering from the pain of the world. 
There is but one condition of eligibility : you must 
be a habitual criminal. 

If you fulfilled that condition, you were dis- 
patched to the Camp Hill Detention Prison in the 
Isle of Wight. 

A most comfortable affair, this Camp Hill. It 
stands in pleasant grounds, near Newport; and 
the walls are not the grey, scowling things that 
enclose HoUoway, or Reading, or Wandsworth, 
but walls of warm brown stone, such as any good 
fellow of reputable fame might build about his 
mansion. Close-shaven lawns and flower-beds 
delight the eye, and the cells are roomy apart- 
ments with real windows. The guests do not dine 
in solitude; they are marched together to the 
dining-hall, and there nourished, not with skilly 
or stew, with its hunk of bread and a pewter plat- 
ter, but with meat and plum-duff, sometimes fish, 
greenstuffs, and cocoa. This, of course, in peace- 
time ; the menu has no doubt suffered variations in 
these latter days. The tables are covered. After 



VODKA AND VAGABONDS in 

the meal the good fellows may sit for a few 
minutes and enjoy a pipe of tobacco, even as the 
respectable citizen. A fair number of marks for 
good behaviour carries with it the privilege of 
smoking after the night meal as well, and one of 
the most severe punishments is the docking of 
this smoking privilege. 

Also, a canteen is provided. Not only do they 
wallow in luxury; they are paid for it. Two- 
pence a day is given to each prisoner for excep- 
tional conduct, and one penny of this may be spent 
at the canteen. This is by way of payment for 
work done — the work being of a much lighter 
kind than that given to ordinary " second divi- 
sion " prisoners. In cases where conduct fulfils 
every expectation of the authorities, the good lad 
is rewarded, every six months, with a stripe. Six 
stripes entitle the holder to a cash reward, half of 
which he may spend, the other half being banked. 
The canteen sells sweets, mineral waters, ciga- 
rettes, apples, oranges, nuts etc. Those inclined 
to the higher forms of nourishment may use the 
library. There are current magazines, novels of 
popular "healthy" writers (it would be unfair 
to give their names; they might not appreciate the 
epithet), and — ^uplifting thought — the works of 



112 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

Spencer, Huxley, Darwin, and some French high- 
brows. 

On special occasions bioscope shows of an edu- 
cative kind are given. Oh, I do love my virtue, 
but I wish I were a habitual criminal. Why 
wasn't I bom in Stepney, and born a vagabond ? 

Whether the prison is still running on the old 
lines I know not. Most likely the British habitual 
convicts have been served with ejectment notices 
to make room for German prisoners. I wouldn't 
wonder. 



THE KIDS' MAN 

" Tll learn ych, y' litde wretch 1 '' 

"Oowh! Don't— don't!" 

The lady, savagely wielding a decayed carpet- 
beater, bent over the shrinking form of the child 
— ^a little storm of short skirts and black hair. 
Her arm ached and her face steamied, but she 
continued to shower blows wherever she could get 
them in, until suddenly the storm limply subsided 
into a small figure which doubled up and fell. 

A step sounded in the doorway, and the lady 
looked up, frayed at the edges and panting. A 
small, slight man, in semi-ofEcial dress, stood just 
inside the room, which gave directly on to a bjrway 
of Homerton. 

" Na then. Feet — ^mind yer dirty boots on my 
carpet, cancher? What's the " 

" N.S.P.C.C," replied Feet. He stooped over 
the child, lifted her, and set her on a slippery 
sofa. "Had my eye on you for some time. 
Thought there were something dicky with this 
chUd." 

IIS. 



114 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 



C( 9 



Ere, look 'ere — I mean, can't 'er muvver 'it 



'er " 



\ 



" Steady, please. Let me warn you " 

The lady threatened with glances, but Kids' 
Man met them. 

She fumed. "Owl You waltz in, do yeh? 
Well, strikes me yeh'U waltz out quicker'n yeh 
came in. 'Ere — ^Arfer 1 " Her raucous voice 
scraped up the narrow stairway leading from the 
room, and in answer came a misty voice, suggest- 
ing revelries by night. The lady roared again: 
" Ar-ferr 1 Get up an' come daown. 'Ere's a 
little swab insultin' yer wife! Kids' Man in- 
sultin' yer wife 1 " 

Kids' Man made no move, but stood over the 
sofa with sober face, ministering to the heavily 
breathing bundle. Overhead came bumps and a 
prayer for delivery from women. 

Then on the lower step of the stairway ap- 
peared a symbol of Aurora in velveteen breeches 
and a shirt of indeterminate colour. His braces 
hung dolefully at the rear as he bleared on the 
situation. His furry head moved from side to 
side. " Wodyeh want me t'do?" 

" Cosh 'im ! Insultin' yer wife I " 



THE KIDS' MAN lis 

He stared. Then his lip moved and he grinned. 
He hitched up his trousers, belted them with 
braces, and expectorated on both hands with gusto. 
" Git aout, else I'll split yer f aice ! " 

No answer. " Righto I " He descended from 
the stair, and, hands down, fists closed, chin pro- 
truded, advanced on the bending Inspector with 
that slow, insidious movement proper to street- 
fighters. "Won't pt aout, woncher? Grrr — 
yehl" 

Kids' Man looked up and met him with a steady 
stare. But the stare annoyed him, so he lifted 
up his fist and smote Kids' Man between the eyes. 
Then things happened. He towered over the In- 
spector. " Want another? " The Inspector lifted 
a short and apparently muscleless arm. 

Bk! Aurora reeled as the fist met his jaw, 
and was followed by a swift one under the ear. 
For a moment astonishment seemed to hold him as 
he bleared at the slight figure; then he seemed 
about to burst with wrath ; then he became a cold 
sportsman. The wife screamed for aid. 

" Aoutside — come on I " He shoved Kids' 
Man before him into the walk, which, torpid a 
moment ago, now flashed with life and movement. 



ii8 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

would get torn. It was just a hair's-brcadth 
question between lynching and triumphal chair- 
ing. The sporting spirit prevailed, and: " Raaay ! 
Good on yeh, mate I Well done th' Society I " 
The lads swung in and gathered admiringly 
around the victor, who tenderly caressed a dam- 
aged beetroot of a face, while half a dozen help- 
ers impeded each other's efforts to render first 
aid to the prostrate Arfer. 

" Where's the blankey twicer? Lemme git 'old 
of 'im. Lemme git 'old of 'im ! " implored the 
lady. But she was no longer popular, and they 
hustled her aside, so that in impotent rage she 
smote her prostrate husband with her foot for 
failing to uphold her honour before a measly little 
Kids' Man what she could have torn in two wiv 
one hand. 

"Well, 'e's gotter nerve, ain't 'e?" 

" Firs' chap ever I knew stand up t'old Arfer. 
Fac' 1 " 

" Yerce — 'e's — e's gotter nerve ! " 

" Tell yeh what I say, boys — three cheers for 
th' Kids' Man I " 

And as the bruised and discoloured Kids' Man 
gripped the hand of Orphan Dora and led her, 
brave with new importance, from the Walk to 



THE KIDS* MAN 119 

neadquarters, a round of beery cheering made 
sweet music in their rear. 

" Well, fancy a little chap like that. . . .Well, 
*e's getter blasted nerve 1 " 

:|c :|c :|c :|c 4c 

The Kids' Man. That is his title — ^used some- 
times affectionately and sometimes bitterly. He 
is the children's champion, and often he is met 
with curses, and that plea of parenthood which 
is supposed to justify all manner of gross and 
unnameable abominations : " Can't a f arver do 
what he likes wiv his own child?" 

The Society employs two hundred and fifty 
Inspectors, whose work is to watch over tly wel- 
fare of the children in their allotted district. But, 
since most ill-treatment takes place behind closed 
doors, it is difficult for an outsider to obtain direct 
evidence, and neighbours, even when they know 
that children are being starved and daily tortured, 
are shy of lodging information, lest it may lead to 
the publicity of the police-court and the news- 
papers, and subsequently to open permanent en- 
mity from the people next whom they have to 
live. 

The Kids' Man is usually an old Army or 
Navy man, accustomed to making himself heard. 



120 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

and able to hold his own. The chief qualities for 
such a post are: a real love of children; tact and 
knowledge of men ; and ability to deal with a hos- 
tile reception. It is by no means pleasant, as you 
have seen, to pay a warning visit to a house up a 
narrow alley, whose inhabitants form something . 
of a clan or freemasonry lodge. 

The motto of the Society, however, is persua- 
sion. Prosecutions are extremely distasteful, and 
are only used when all other means have failed. 
In any case that comes to the Inspector's knowl- 
edge, his first thought is the children's well-being. 
If they are being starved, he provides them with 
food, clothes, bedding and baths, or sees that the 
parish does so without any of the delays incident 
to parish charity. Then he has a quiet talk with 
the parents, and gives a warning. Usually this is 
enough. In cases where the neglect is due to lack 
of work, he is sometimes an employment agency, 
and finds work for the father. But, if necessary, 
there are more warnings, and then, with great 
reluctance, an appearance in court is called for. 

Cruelty is of two kinds — active and passive. 
The passive cruelty is the cruelty of neglect — 
lack of proper food, clothing, sanitation, etc. The 
Other kind — the active cruelty of a diabolical na- 



THE KIDS' MAN 121 

ture — comes curiously enough, not so much from 
the lower, but from the upper classes. It is sel- 
dom that the rough navvy is deliberately cruel to 
his children; but Inspectors can tell you some 
appalling stories of torture inflicted on children by 
leisured people of means and breeding. Among 
their convictions are doctors, lawyers, clergymen, 
and many women of position. 

There was one terrible case of a woman in 
county society — ^you will remember her Cornish 
name — ^who had been guilty of atrocious cruelty 
to a little girl of twelve. The Kids' Man called. 
The woman maintained that a mother had a per- 
fect right to correct her own child. She called 
the child and fondled it to prove that rumour of 
tortures was wrong. But the Kids' Man knows 
children ; and the look in the child's eyes told him 
of terrorizing. He demanded a medical exami- 
nation. 

The case was proved in court. A verdict of 
" Guilty " was given. And the punishment for 
this fair degenerate — ^£50 fine 1 The punishment 
for the Kids' Man was a kind of social ostracism. 
There lies the difficulty of the work. The 
woman's position had saved her. 

The Kids' Man needs to have his eyes open 



122 OUT AND ABOUT LONDON 

everywhere and at every time for signs of suffer- 
ing among the little ones. And often, where a 
father won't listen to advice from him, he is 
found amenable to suggestions from Mrs. In- 
spector. 

In every big town in this country you will find 
the N.S.P.C.C. bureau, but, in spite of their 
efforts, too much cruelty is going on that might 
be stopped if the British people, as a race, were 
not too fond of " minding their own business " 
and shutting their eyes to everyday evils. 

If you still think England a Christian and en- 
lightened country, you had better accompany an 
N.S.P.C.C. man on his daily round. Before you 
do so, inspect the record at their offices. Read the 
verbatim reports of some of their cases. Look at 
their " museum " which Mr. Parr, the secretary, 
will show you ; a museum more hideous than any 
collection of inquisition relics or than anything in 
the Tower. You will then know something of the 
hideous conditions of child-life in " this England 
of ours," and you will be prepared for what you 
shall see on your tour with the Kids' Man. 



CROWDED HOURS 

What does the Cockney's mind fifst register 
when, far from home, he visualizes the London 
that he loves with the casual devotion of his type ? 
To the serious tourist London is the shrine of 
England's history; to the ordinary artist, who 
sees life in line and colour, it is a city of noble or 
delicate "bits"; to the provincial it is a play- 
ground; to the business man a market; but to the 
Cockney it is one big club, odourous of the goodly 
fellowship that blossoms from contact with 
human-kind. 

" Far from the madding crowd " may express 
the longings of the modern Simeon Stylites, but 
your Cockney is no Simeon. He doesn't pray to 
be put upon an island where the crowds are few. 
The thicker the crowd, the more elbows that delve 
into his ribs, the hotter the steam of human-kind» 
the happier he is. Far from the madding crowd 
be blowed ! Man's place, he holds, is among his 
fellows ; and he sniffs with contempt at this ^ 

h]r8ical. Whoever or whatever she 
is, she meets the test that human beings meet." — Fiancis Hacxktt 
in The New Republic. 

'* A mind, whosoever it may be, that has retained abnndant vigor, 
distinction and individual savor." — Lawibmcb Gilmam in The North 
American Review. 

BOOKS BY PATIENCE WORTH 
Edited by Caspar S. Yost 

THE SORRY TALE 
A Story of the Time of Christ 644 pages. $1.90 net 

A story filled with action. It brings into close view the 
historical characters of Tiberius, the Herods, Pilate, Peter, 
and particularly and dominantly, Jesus Christ. 

"This second book increases the marvel of the first A wonderful, 
a beautiful and a noble book."— ^rar York Times Book Review. 

HOPE TRUEBLOOD 
A novel of Mid-Victorian England. $1.50 net 

'^A work approximating absolute genius." — New York Tribune, 



HENRY POLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHEBS NEW YOKK 



t 



WRITERS OF THE DAY 

Critical estimates of the works of famous authors and 
accounts of their lives, written while they are yet alive, and 
done, not by literary hacks, but by fellow-craftsmen of a 
younger generation distinguished for imaginative work. , 

Each volume with portrait and bibliography, 7S cents neL 

** There it nothing perfunctory about these little volumes. . • • All 
are terse, breety, oomprebenstve^ authoritatiTe."-— i\^#w York Time* 
Review, 

ANATOLE FRANCE 

tj W. L. GEORGE 

H. G. WELLS 

9f J. D. BERESFORD 

ARNOLD BENNETT 

Br F. J. H. DARTON 

RUDYARD KIPUNG 

By JOHN PALMER 

HENRY JAMES 

Bjr REBECCA WEST 

JOSEPH CONRAD 

Bjr HUGH WALPOLE 

THOMAS HARDY 

Bjr HUGH CHILD 

JOHN GALSWORTHY 

Bjr SHEILA KAYE-SMITH 

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD^ 

Bjr STEPHEN GWYNN 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
PuMjMuu Nnr Yokk 



BY CLAYTON HAMILTON 

Each book fully indexed. 12aio. $1.60 net 

PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT 

Building a Play Backward; Surprise in the Drama; The 
Troublesome Last Act; High Comedy in America; The George 
M. Cohan School of Playrights; Middle Class Opinion; Criti- 
cism and Creation in the Drama; Dramatic Talent and Theat- 
rical Talent; The Plays of Lord Dunsany; Romance and 
Realism in the Drama; Scenic Settings in America;. The New 
Stagecraft; The Non-Commercial Drama; A Democratic Insur- 
rection in the Theatre ; A Scheme for a Stock Company ; What's 
Woiig ^'ith the American Drama, etc., etc. ^ 

Prof, Brander Matthews, in the Bockwum: . . .I£r. Hamilton and 
Mr. Archer — like Lessing and like Sarcey — ha.ve a broad background of 
culture. . . . They never stray into the dusty paths of pedantry. . . . 
Consistently interesting because it has the Support of knowledge and 
the savour of individuality.*' 

STUDIES IN STAGECRAFT 

The New Art of Making Plays, The Pictorial Stage, The 
Modem Art of Stage Direction, A Plea for a New Type of 
Play, The Undramatic Drama, The Supernatural Drama, The^ 
Iririi National Theatre, Where to Begin a Play, A New Defense 
of Melodrama, The Art of the Movine-Picture Play, The One- 
Act Play in America, Organizing an Audience, etc, etc. 

Nation: "Information, alertness, coolness, sanity and the command 
of a forceful and pointed English. ... A good book, in spite of 
all deductions." 

Prof. Archibald Henderson, in The Drama: •'University excellent in 
quality. . . . Continually interesting in presentation . . • uniform for 
high excellence and elevated standards. ..." 

THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE 

What is a Play?— The Psychology of Theatre Audiences.— 
The Actor and the Dramatist — Stage Conventions in Modem 
Times. — ^The Four Leading Types of Drama. — ^The Modern 
Social Drama, and Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism. — 
The Public and the Dramatist — Dramatic Art and the Theatre 
Business. — Dramatic Literature and Theatric Journalism. — 
Pleasant and Unpleasant Plays.— Themes in the Theatre.— The 
Function of Imagination, etc., etc. 

Bookman: "Presents coherently a more ' substantial body of idea on 
the subject than perhaps elsewhere accessible. 

Boston Transcript: "At every moment of his discussion he has a 
ftrm grasp upon every phase of the subject" 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHEKS NEW YOKK 



\ 



Oolandaboul Lomlon 

liipiu 

3 6105 041 396 628 



S{