Nights in London. Thomas Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ revolving world. There were nights, festive with hoof and harness bell. There were cheery nights of homeward walks from the City office at six o'clock, under those sudden Octobral dusks, when, almost at a wink, London is transformed into one long lake of light. There were nights of elusive fog and bashful lamp when one made casual acquaintance on the way home with some darling little work-girl, Ethel, or Katie, or Mabel, brown-haired or golden, and walked with her and perhaps were allowed to kiss her Good-night at this or that crossing.

      What romantic charm those little London work-girls have, with their short, tossing frocks and tumbling hair! There are no other work-girls in the world to compare with them for sheer witchery of face and character. The New York work-girl is a holy terror. The Parisian grisette has a trim figure and a doughy face. The Berlin work-girl knows more about viciousness, and looks more like a suet dumpling than any one else. But, though her figure may not be perfect, the London work-girl takes the palm by winsomeness and grace. At seven o'clock every evening you may meet her in thousands in Oxford Street, Villiers Street, Tottenham Court Road, or London Bridge, where the pavements lisp in reply to the chatter of her little light feet. The factory girl of twenty years ago has, I am glad to say, entirely disappeared. She was not a success. She screwed her hair into sausages and rolled them around her ears. She wore a straw hat tilted at an absurd angle over her nose. She snarled. Her skin was coarse, her hands brutal, and she took no care with herself. But the younger generation came along, the flapper—and behold, a change! The factory girl or work-girl of fourteen or fifteen would surprise the ladies of the old school. She is neat. She knows enough about things to take care of herself, without being coarsened by the knowledge. And she has a zest for life and a respect for her dear little person which give her undisputed title to all that I have claimed for her. Long may she reign as one of London's beauties!

      Then there were other nights of maddening pace, when music and wine, voice and laughter harnessed themselves to the chariot of youth and dashed us hither and thither. There were nights of melancholy, of anguish even, nights of failure and solitariness, when the last word seemed to be spoken, and the leaves and the lamps and all the little dear things seemed emptied of their glory. There were the nights of labour: dull nights of stress and struggle, under the hard white lights, the crashing of the presses, and the infuriating buzz of the tape machine. There were nights of. …

      It is these nights that I pretend to show you in this book, in a little series of cinematographic pictures. If you will come with me, we will slip through the foreign quarters. We will have a bloodthirsty night in the athletic saloons of Bethnal Green. We will have a bitter night in the dock-side saloons. We will have a sickening night in sinister places of no name and no locality, where the proper people do not venture. We will have a glittering night in the Hoxton bars. We will have, too, a night among the sweet lights of the Cockney home, and among pleasant working-class interiors. And we will——

      But let us get started.

AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT

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ROUND THE HALLS

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       MUSIC-HALL BALLET

      Through the sad billowing base of grey and rose,

      Stung with sharp lamps in its most velvet gloom;

      Drowsy with smoke, and loud with voice and glass,

      Where wine-whipped animations pass and pass—

      Beauty breaks sudden blossoms all around

      In happy riot of rhythm, colour, and pose.

      The radiant hands, the swift, delighted limbs

      Move as in pools of dream the dancer swims,

      Holding our bruted sense to fragrance bound.

      Lily and clover and the white May-flowers,

      And lucid lane afire with honeyed blooms,

      And songs that time nor tears can ever fade,

      Hold not the grace for which my heart has prayed.

      But in this garden of gilt loveliness,

      Lapped by the muffled pulse of hectic hours,

      Something in me awoke to happiness;

      And through the streets of plunging hoof and horn,

      I walked with Beauty to the dim-starred morn.

AN ENTERTAINMENT NIGHT

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ROUND THE HALLS

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      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. I have assisted at carnivals and feasts in various foreign parts—carnivals of students and also of the theatrically desperate apaches in the crawling underworlds. But, oh, what bilious affairs! You simply flogged yourself into it. You said, as it were: "I am in Vienna, or Berlin, or Paris, or Brussels, or Marseilles, or Trieste; therefore, I am gay. Of course I am gay." But you were not. You were only bored, and the show only became endurable after you had swallowed various absinthes, vermuths, and other rot-gut.

      All the time you were—or I was—aching for Camden Town High Street, and a good old London music-hall. I cannot understand those folk who sniff at the English music-hall and belaud the Parisian shows. These latter are to me the most dismal, lifeless form of entertainment that a public ever suffered. Give me the Oxford, the Pavilion, or the Alhambra, or even a suburban Palace of Varieties. Ever since the age of eight the music-hall has been a kind of background for me. Long before that age I can remember being rushed through strange streets and tossed, breathless, into an overheated theatre roaring with colour. The show was then either the Moore and Burgess Minstrels or the Egyptian Hall, followed by that chief of all child-life entertainments—tea at a tea-shop. But at eight I was initiated into the mysteries of the Halls, for a gracious chef d'orchestre permitted me to sit in the orchestra of an outlying hall, by the side of a cousin who sawed the double bass.

      I have loved the music-hall ever since, and I still worship that chef d'orchestre, and if I met him now I am sure I should bow, though I know that he was nothing but a pillow stuffed with pose. But in those days, what a man! Or no—not a man—what a demi-god! You should have seen him enter the orchestra on the call: "Mr. Francioli, please!" Your ordinary music-hall conductor ducks from below, slips into his chair, and his tap has turned on the flow of his twenty instruments before you realize that he is up. But not so Francioli. СКАЧАТЬ