Thomas Burke

“ An Upright Man
Breaking-Point
An English Gentleman
Buying and Selling
Throughout the day I sit behind the counter of my shop
And the odours of my country are all about me—
Areca nut, and betel leaf, and manioc,
Lychee and suey sen,
Li-un and dried seaweed,
Tchah and sam-shu;
And these carry my mind to half-forgotten days
When tales were plentiful and care was hard to hold.
All day I sell for trifling sums the wares of my own land,
And buy for many cash such things as people wish to sell,
That I may sell them again to others,
With some profit to myself. ”

“ London is not one place, but many places; she has not one soul, but many souls. The people of Brondesbury are of markedly different character and clime from those of Hammersmith. They of Balham know naught of those of Walthamstow, and Bayswater is oblivious to Barking. The smell, the sound, and the dress of Finsbury Park are as different from the smell, the sound, and the dress of Wandsworth Common as though one were England and the other Nicaragua. London is all things to all men. Day by day she changes, not only in external beauty, but in temperament. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of course, every night spent in London is an entertainment night, for London has more blood and pace and devil than any city I know. Thick as the physical atmosphere is with smoke and fog, its moral atmosphere is yet charged with a sparkle as of light wine. It is more effervescent than any continental city. It is the city of cities for learning, art, wit, and—Carnival. Go where you please at nightfall and Carnival slips into the blood, lighting even Bond Street—the dreariest street in town—with a little flame of gaiety. ”

“ Here, within a brief tram-ride of London, so close to the centre of things that you may see the mantle of metropolitan smoke draping the spires and steeples, is a place as rich in the historic thrill as any of these show-places.
But its main charm for me is the goodly fellowship and comfortable talk to be had in the little smoking-room, decorated with original sketches by famous black-and-white men who make it their week-end rendezvous. You may be a newcomer at "The Chequers," but you will not long be lonely unless your manner cries a desire for solitude. ”

“ The practice of Charity brings you into the limelight; it elevates you to friendship with the Almighty; you feel that you are a colleague of the Saviour. It springs from Pity, the most unclean of all human emotions. It is not akin to love; it is akin to contempt. To be pitied is to be in the last stages of spiritual degradation. You cannot pity anything on your own level, for Pity implies an assumption of superiority. You cannot be pitied by your friends and equals, only by your self-elected superiors. Let us see Pity at work in London.... ”

“ There were the solemn smell of the furniture shop; the wholesome smell of the oilshop; the pungent smell of the chemist's; the potent smell of the "Dog and Duck", where I received my weekly heart-cake; the stiff smell of the linen-drapers'; the overpowering odour of the boot-shop, and the aromatic perfume of the grocer's; all of which, in one grand combination, present the smell of Saturday night: a smell as sharp and individual as the smell of Sunday morning or the smell of early-closing afternoon in the suburbs. ”

“ Have you ever, when walking home very late at night, looked down the grey suburban streets, with their hundred monotonous-faced houses, and thought that there sleep men, women, and children, free for a few hours from lust and hate and fear, all of them romantic, all of them striving, in their separate ways, to be happy, all of them passionate for their little span of life; and then thought that that street is but one of thousands and thousands which radiate to every point, and that all the night air of one city is holding the passions of those millions of creatures? ”

“ 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 sustenance 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 offal that may renew thy energies for further war-work; but, if there be any grace of God still left in thee, if there be any virtue, any charity—leave, for those who are shielding thy senescent body, the flower-girls about Piccadilly Circus on a May morning. ”

“ They love colour; and ribbons of many hues are lavished on the frocks and tunics. One of my London moments was when I first saw, in Whitechapel High Street, a little Jewess, with masses of jet-black hair, dressed in vermilion and white. I wonder, by the way, why it is that the children of the genteel quarters of London, such as Kensington Gardens, have no hair, or at any rate, only skimpy little twigs of it, while the children of the East are loaded with curls and tresses of an almost tropical luxuriance, and are many times more beautiful. ”

“ I was charmed by the air of intimacy that belongs to that bar, deriving, I think, from the sweet nature of the host. You may stay at popular inns or resplendent hotels, and make casual acquaintance in the lounges, and exchange talk; but it is impossible, in the huge cubic space of such establishments, to come near to other spirits. You do not meet a man in town and say: "What? You've stayed at the 'Royal York'? I've stayed there too," and straightway develop a friendship. But you can meet a stranger, and say: "What? You know 'The Chequers?' D'you know Jimmy?" ”

“ He discovers that there is a life of ideas, that principles and ideals are something more than mere fooling for dry-minded people, that thoughts are as important as things. In a word, he has heard the Call of Beauty. Just as a man may live in the same house with a girl for years, and then one day will discover that she is beautiful, that she is adorable, that he cannot lose her from his life, so we live surrounded by unregarded beauty, until we awake. So for seven years I was surrounded by the glory of London before I knew that I loved her.... ”

“ From that day London has been my mistress. I knew this a few days later, when, as a birthday treat, I was taken to see the illuminations in our district—we were living near the Langham Hotel then—for the marriage of some princess or the birth of some royal baby. Whenever I am away from London—never more than ten days at a time—and think of her, she comes to me as I saw her then from a height of three-foot-five: huge black streets rent with loud traffic and ablaze with light from roof to pavement; shop-fronts full of magical things, drowned in the lemon light which served the town at that time ”

“ There never were such warmth and profusion and display. Not only is it a voice of incomparable magnificence: it has that intangible quality that smites you with its own mood: just the something that marks the difference between an artist and a genius. There are those who sniff at him. "No artist," they say; "look what he sings." They would like him better if he were not popular; if he concerned himself, not with Puccini and Leoncavallo, but with those pretentiously subtle triflers, Debussy and his followers. Some people can never accept beauty unless it be remote. ”

“ Now it is a regiment of soft lights, each carrying its message of cheer and promises of tea, armchair, and slippered ease. The fragrance of the meal is already on the air, and through the darling twilight comes the muffin-man and the cheery tinkle of his bell—one of the last of a once great army of itinerant feeders of London. Gaslight and firelight leap on the spread table, glinting against cups and saucers and spoons, and lighting, with sudden spurts, the outer gloom. A sweet warmth fills the room—the restful homeliness imparted by a careful, but not too careful, woman. ”

“ It is that there is nothing else to do. That is the tragedy of the London Sunday; there is nothing else to do. Why does the submerged man get drunk on Sunday? There is nothing else to do. Why does the horse-faced lady, with nice clothes, go to church on Sunday? There is nothing else to do. Why do people overeat themselves on Sunday? There is nothing else to do. Why do parents make themselves stiff and uncomfortable in new clothes, and why do they get irritable and smack their children if they rouse them from their after-dinner sleep? ”

“ The pet of the crowd behind the scenes, the pet of the house in front, she is accustomed, every night, to salvoes of applause, to flowers left at the stage-door, and to boxes of chocolates handed over the footlights. Night after night, in dance or make-believe of life, she spends herself to exhaustion for the pleasure of the multitude; night after night, in a tinsel-world of limelight and grease-paint, she plays at being herself. ”

“ You may believe that, if you choose; it is simply a tale for the soft-minded with a turn for the melodramatic. There is no such thing as a dangerous street in London. I have loafed and wandered in every part of London, slums, foreign quarters, underground, and docksides, and if you must have adventure in London, then you will have to make your own. The two fiercest streets of the metropolis—Dorset Street and Hoxton Street—are as safe for the wayfarer as Oxford Street; for women, safer. And the manners of Limehouse are certainly a lesson to Streatham Hill.
But we are talking of opium. ”

“ There are few women to be seen, but those few are gaudily arrayed in coloured handkerchiefs, their mournful eyes and purring voices touching the stern night to beauty. Of children there are dozens: furious boys and chattering girls. All the little girls, from four to fourteen, wear socks, and the narrow roadway flashes with the whirling of little white legs, so that the pedestrian must dodge his way along as one dancing a schottische. A few public-houses shed their dusty radiance, but these, too, are little better than dolls' houses. I have never seen village beer-shops so small. ”