Thomas Burke

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 suffer 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"? ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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 usefully 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. ”

“ Who could possibly desire to exchange fatigued inanities with the vacuous vulgarities who administer the ordinary London bar; who seem, like telephone girls, to have taken lessons from some insane teacher of elocution, with their "Nooh riarly?" expressive 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. ”

“ Rubber-neck parties of American tourists occasionally saw the sights of London from brakes and wagonettes; solemn 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 the war is over Epping will know them no more, and the nightingales of Fairlop Plain will sing to the moon undisturbed. ”

“ A similar study in crowd psychology awaits you at the Tube stations in the early hours of the evening, when the rush is on. With elbows wedged into your ribs, and strange hot breaths pouring down your neck, you need all the serenity you have stored against such contingencies; and the attitude of the other people about you can mitigate your distress or enhance it. The City and South London crowd is not the kind of crowd that can bear its own troubles cheerfully, or help others to bear theirs. I would never wish to go on a day's holiday with any of its people. ”

“ If you appear interested in the piano, whose voice Lolotte 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. Leaning, 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 ”

“ Indeed, it is not a crowd: it is a cortège, marching to the obsequies of hope and fear. It is a funeral march of marionettes. Here are no gay colours; no smiles; no persiflage. All is sombre. Even the typists and the little workgirls make no effort towards bright raiment; all is dingy and soiled, not with the clean dirt that hangs about the barges and wharves on the river, but with the mustiness of old ledgers and letter-files. Listless in the morning and taciturn in the evening are these people ”

“ On a bright Spring day it might be Paris. There is a sense of space and sparkle about it. The little milliners' girls, in piquant frocks, evoke memories of Louise, and the crowding curls on their cheeks waft a perfume of youth-time lyrics, chiming softly against the more strident and repulsively military garb of the girl porters and doorkeepers. The cleaners, bustling about the steps of the music-halls, throw adumbrations of entertainment on the morning streets. People are leisurely busy in an agreeable way—not the huckstering E.C. way. ”

“ Against the skyline rose Limehouse Church, one of the architectural 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 occasionally the rasp of a gramophone delivering records of interminable Chinese dramas. ”

“ Murger's voice is the voice of protesting youth. He is illogical; 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. ”

“ The illiterate do not quote melodrama; melodrama quotes them.
Again and again this has been proved in London police-courts. When the emotions are roused, the Cockney does not pick his words and alight carefully on something he heard at the theatre last week; nor does he become sullen and abashed. He becomes violently vocal. He speaks out of himself. Although he seldom enters a church, the grip of the church is so tightly upon him that you may, as it were, see its knuckles standing in white relief when he speaks of solemn affairs. ”

“ 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 1917 do you see Old Compton Street as a line of warm and fragrant café-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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are bold youths who have not fallen, like their fathers, to the cajolery of a collar-and-cuff job in the City, but have taken up the work that offers the best pecuniary reward. Grimy youths they are, but full of vitality, and they pour down the staircase in a Niagara of humanity.
An excellent centre for observing the varying moods of the evening crowd is Villiers Street, that gentle slope from which you may reach Charing Cross Station, the Hampstead Tube, the District Railway, or the Embankment trams. ”

“ You will see Mother hovering about the shops and stalls, her eye peeled for the elusive bargain, while Father, or one of the children, stands away off with the bag; and when the goodwife has achieved all that she set out to do, and the string bag is distended like an overfed baby, then comes the crowning joy of the feast, when the shoppers slip together into the private bar of the "Green Dragon" or the "White Horse," and compare notes with other Saturday-nighters and condemn the beer. ”

“ 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 [Pg 26] youth to escape from a hidebound world; showed it the way out—a way beset by delightful hazards. ”

“ Wherefore, it is a relief to possess one place—and that an inn—where one may be sure of finding company that will join with relish in serious talk and put their whole lives in a jest. Such delight and refreshment do I find at this inn, that scarcely a Saturday passes but I board the car and glide to "The Chequers" in—well, just beyond the London Postal District. ”

“ 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 glamorous 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 sojourning in its somnolent streets among the respectable sons of Canton. ”

“ I had not known it, but all my childish dreams must have had for their background 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 blue 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 waiting dames carry those dinky little brown-paper bags, stamped with the name of some Oxford Street draper, at whose contents the idler may amuse himself by guessing—a ribbon, a camisole, a flower-spray for a hat, gloves, or those odd lengths of cloth and linen which women will buy—though Lord knows to what esoteric use they put them. Hither come, too, those lonely people who, through the medium of "Companionship" columns or Correspondence Circles, have found a congenial soul. ”

“ I do not begrudge him his concocted dish of thrills. I only mention [Pg 59] this trick of his because it proves again the strange resurrective powers of an oft-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. 1917 charged with gloom; their gentle noise is pitched in the minor key. These morsels of the South, shovelled into the swart melancholies of central London, have lost their happy summer tone. ”

“ In these troubled days there is little room for the exercise of the graces of life. Our ears are deaf to the gentle voice of urbanity. The delicacies of intercourse have been trodden underfoot, and lie withered and broken. Even the quality of mercy has been standardized and put into uniform. Throughout the world to-day, everything is organized, and to organize a beautiful movement or emotion is to brutalize it: while lubricating its mechanism you ossify its soul. ”

“ There is no man who, amid this welter of blood and hate, has performed 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. ”