Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (646 page)

It is very much the same in cement or kindred works. A hand must commence by being a good and an industrious workman, but he must also, if he is to rise, give the impression of being very much alive and very much interested in his work. I am thinking of a case in point in some rather small works of the sort. Here there is a managing foreman whom I will call Stanley. He is perhaps twenty-nine. These works were started to work a new process about twelve years ago, and Stanley, at the time a boy, helped in making the bed of the first engine. He was particularly alert, and entered into the spirit of the thing. This at the time was not very obvious, the engine being set down on the slope of a green hill into which it has since tunnelled and cut until an arena of sand, of rubble and of chalk, opens an immense face to the lower Thames. It shelters alike on its flat surface a huge cement factory, sand works, and a large brickfield. Immense chimney shafts like thin pencils pierce up into the lower clouds; the ground is sticky and white under foot, channelled with open conduits of hot water, a maze of small lines on which run tiny locomotives, a maze of the little black shelters that cover drying bricks.

In the midst of these gray and monstrous apparitions, in the faint and sickly odour of steam, under the drops that condense and fall from the eaves of engine sheds, clambering through small holes, dressed in dull clothes, clean shaven and with sparkling eyes, Stanley moves like a spirit of romance. If he chances upon a visitor he becomes almost a spirit in ecstasy. He slaps the bed of the engine that he helped to set there, he bids workmen run the wet sand through trap doors, he explains how these three industries, set there together in that hollow, work one into another so that nothing is lost. The hot water from the boilers of the cement works runs in those open conduits to separate in the sand works the sand from the loam; the separated loam makes the bricks in the brick works. He waves his hands and shouts in the immense roar of pebble-crushing machines to explain how what appears to be a lot of old ploughshares tied together with rope is really a nice device of his own for regulating the pressure on the crushing rollers. These things are the great, the romantic facts of his world. Because they are so, his managing director has advanced him very quickly from being a shovel boy, paddling in the warm and sandy water, to be superintendent of the whole works.

But it is almost more important that the hands all like him. His director can go home and sleep, or leave the place for days on end, confident that Stanley has the knack of infusing into his men some of his own interest in the work itself, and that he will not by petty tyrannies bring on a strike. That particular human quality, the particular sort of artistic delight in his work which brings to birth an
esprit de corps,
is almost the most precious quality that a man can offer in these days of organisation. Without at least a share of it Stanley could never have risen from the ranks; with as much as he has there is no limit to his possibilities.

At the same time, as a defect of this particular quality of work in London, the making of Stanley has meant throwing out of work of a whole small industry. It has caused to disappear almost the last of the old small flotillas of barges that used to dredge sand by hand from the bottom of the river. (Thames sand is indispensable in the London building trade; it is stipulated for in all the contracts for honest mortar.)

Travelling through all that eastern London of toil, no thought is more oppressive than that: a little way away or at a great distance people are unceasingly working to mature new processes that will ruin any one of the works that the eye rests on. Nothing can well be more tragic than such an announcement as this, which one may read any day in a trade paper:

“Owing to the competition of the new D — process of Messrs. W — , the D — Co of Plumstead have been forced to close that branch of their works. Two thousand workmen have been discharged this week. Messrs. T — , of Erith, have notified their ability to take over fifty mechanics at once and fifty-nine more later on. If other firms requiring men will communicate with the secretary of the D — workers’ Union they will assist in mitigating the local distress.”

I must confess to finding that thought the most exciting and the most sinister that can come into one’s head in those parts of the vast city. They are grim, they are overhung with perpetual miasma, they lie low in damp marshes. Square and stumpy chimneys rise everywhere in clusters like the columns of ruined temples overhung with smirchings of vapour. Great fields are covered with scraps of rusty iron and heaps of fluttering rags; dismal pools of water reflect on black waste grounds the dim skies. But all these things, if one is in the mood, one may find stimulating, because they tell of human toil, of human endeavour towards some end with some ideal at that end. But the other thing is sinister, since the other influences are working invisible, like malign and conscious fates, below the horizon.

To assist at the obsequies of one of these great works is more suggestive than to have seen the corpses in the snow of the retreat from Moscow. It is more horrible because the sufferers have fought in a fight much more blind and suffer inarticulately in the midst of their suffering children and in the face of their desolate homes. They suffer for no apparent principle, for no faith, for no fame, for no nation, for no glory; they suffer the shame of poverty without the compensating glory of defeat. They have not ever seen their Napoleon ride slowly along their cheering lines.

For London, if it attracts men from a distance with a glamour like that of a great and green gaming table, shows, when they are close to it, the indecipherable face of a desperate battle field, without ranks, without order, without pity and with very little of discoverable purpose. Yet those that it has attracted it holds for ever, because in its want of logic it is so very human.

CHAPTER I
V

LONDON AT LEISURE

I WAS talking some time ago to a timekeeper in one of the ‘bus yards in the west of London. In a sort of very clean square of stables horses stood patiently in couples with their traces hooked over their backs, the chains jingling a little, and yardmen with their braces about their loins bent over pails of water into which they stirred a powder of coarse oatmeal. A big man in painfully clean-washed corduroys came furtively and hesitatingly under the square entrance arch. His eyes wandered round, resting with a look of acquaintance and friendship upon the small litters of straw that lay outside each of the house doors. He began fumbling in an inner pocket painfully for his testimonials, his “character.” The timekeeper said, “No, mate, no job here,” and the man, after staring again at the straw, turned away without a word spoken, painfully shy, tired, and mutely disappointed, slowly as if he had all the time of the world upon his hands. They had had five men like him already in the yard that same morning.

This particular man appealed to me — and upon the whole you cannot hope to find in London anything much more pathetic, in a small way, than the peculiar “action” of a genuine labourer seeking work, his slow and heavy movements, his vacant and undecided air, his evident not knowing what to do with his hands, and all the signs that go to tell of a hungry and undesired leisure, and the fact that, as a rule, you cannot do anything in the world really to help him. This man was one of a great many employees in a soap factory that the vagaries of one of our Napoleons of Finance had lately caused to “shut down.” It was a hopeless bankruptcy at a time when trade was too slow to make it feasible for the debenture-holders to carry on the work. All the hands had been thrown as if out of a barrow to find other holes somewhere in London. This man had been for a fortnight without a job, and he said it seemed precious likely he wouldn’t get one for a good bit.

He had walked that morning from East Ham way right across to Hammersmith but his case was not a particularly poignant one. He had a missis but no kids, and his missis did a bit of charing for a Mrs. North and a Mrs. Williamson. He had been, as a boy, a wagoner’s mate — one of those boys who walk with a brass-bound whip beside a team either in the cart or in the plough — in Lincolnshire. But things had seemed a bit slow down there and he had come up to London to find shorter hours, lighter jobs, better pay, and the chance to save a bit — to find, in fact, these streets paved with gold.

“Mart’s well be back there,” he said, with a humorous smile, as if the idea were absurd. For London, if its work, even from the outside, have the mysterious and magnetic attraction of an immense gambling table, may, and inevitably does, rob those it attracts of that tremulous and romantic idea. The gambling becomes a hard and almost unceasing struggle, with the pay proportionately worse, with the hours really longer because the work is so much more strenuous. But London itself and for itself takes a hold of the hearts of men; along with disillusionments grows up a hunger, like a new sense, for London only. These men in the mass never go back. When I offered to this particular man to write to a farmer who I knew was in want of a hand he looked at me as if I must be joking. He groped in his mind for a reason. “The missis would never
hear of
it,” he said. “Besides—” His power of invention seemed to break down till he got out: “Oh, London’s the place!” His eyes roved along the sides of a cab that was passing and up the front of an establishment called, I think, the West London Stores. “London’s the place,” he repeated. I objected that he could not see much of London inside a soap factory. He considered for a moment and said: “No, but it’s the Saturday afternoons and Sundays.” He paused. “It’s when ye have your leisure.” He continued with the air of one trying to explain something difficult to a stupid person or a child: “It’s the dinner hour with your mates and the snacks of talk between whiles loading barrows. Don’t you see?” He paused again for a long time and then added: “London’s the place.” He could not think of going back.

Thus what London attracts with the mirage of its work shining across the counties and the countries, London holds with the glamour of its leisure. We never go back, never really and absolutely: London for those who have once, for however short a space, been Londoners, is always on the cards, is always just beyond the horizon. We may “go back” to the country for our health’s sake, for our children’s health’s sake, if we can. We may “go back” in a sense to the Colonies because we are not fitted for life or for work in London. But all the time London is calling; it calls in the middle of our work, it calls at odd moments like the fever of spring that stirs each year in the blood. It seems to offer romantically, not streets paved with gold but streets filled with leisure, streets where we shall saunter, things for the eye to rest on in a gray and glamorous light, books to read, men to be idle with, women to love.

If the idea of the “working classes” seems to call up a picture of the black plains of the East End, the picture when the “leisured classes” are in consideration is that of a circumscribed parallelogram of rows of tall buildings. It is a square block like a fortress that we all, more or less, are besieging — the little plot of ground bounded on the south by Piccadilly, on the west by the railings of Hyde Park, on the north by Oxford Street and on the east by Bond Street. It stands fairly well for where we should all live if we were “really rich,” it represents, as far as London is concerned, our castles in the air whether we should be contented with a small, bright house in one of the angles of Mayfair, with a suite of rooms in the P — that overlooks the Green Park, or whether we should be contented with nothing less than one of the palaces in Park Lane.

These streets are quiet, for London, and bright and well swept and almost joyous. From their exclusiveness one steps out so easily into Rotten Row, which stands for the high-water mark of out-of-doors laziness in the modern world; and, if the clubs from which, as from an opera-box, one looks out across the parks towards Buckingham Palace — if those clubs are not, for social traditions, for standing, for gravity, or for place, “in it” with the older clubs near Pall Mall or about Whitehall, they are at least more pagan in the sense of being more humanly enjoyable to the uninitiated. A man can, in these places, lounge so utterly and entirely.

And that, in essentials, is the charm of social life in London. There are not any really rigid barriers; one has so immense a choice within the limits of any purse. There are in London institutions that are rigidly exclusive, but these are so rare as to be merely the spice of the large dish. This, of course, is only the case comparatively with the other capitals of the world.

It is, for instance, impossible for a French outsider to “get into” the real society of the Faubourg St. Germain; a relatively great number of quarterings are needed, a certain tradition, a certain habit of mind, a certain, let us say, inanity. It is also relatively impossible in Berlin to
“
get into” the military, or the blood aristocracies. Money cannot do it, or personal charm, or immense talents. It is absolutely impossible in Vienna where society is ruled by a Court, and that Court absolutely insists on quarterings as a social qualification. It is, I should say, with certain modifications the same in St. Petersburg and in Rome. It is almost more markedly so in Madrid and Lisbon. In all these places a man is
“
placed”; he knows his place and it is known for him.

But in London, comparatively speaking, a man stands pretty well by what he is or by what he has. He cannot, of course, occupy the throne but, given the temperament or the wealth he can sit in almost any other chair. Essentially, the other capitals ask a man to be something; London society asks him to give something — whether dinners or personal charm, whether financial tips or a soothing personal effacement.

It is probably this last characteristic that is the most essential, or, at least, the most attainable. It is that that, as it were, gives every man his chance. Paradoxically enough the reason for it is that London society is made up of such intensely individual types that the comparatively characterless man is absolutely essential. He fills up holes, he tones down dinner parties, he may be relied on not to jar, not to shine — not to worry one’s nerves. In a society which is made up very much of strong individualities more or less constantly at war, self-effacement has a charm; the listener grows very precious.

And, upon the whole, in the other capitals of the world the thing is very exactly the other way round. In societies where the essential quality is birth, individuals are rare. In those closed ranks men are very much alike, and women — in character, in point of view, in gesture, in speech. In consequence an individuality tells. It is not, as in London, questioned, doubted and mistrusted; it is, if the individual belongs to the society, welcomed as a rather pleasant relief from the dead level.

The fascination of life in London is essentially its freedom. In society of the one type you may do very much what you like short of eating peas with a knife, wearing a felt hat with a frock coat, or a coloured tie with evening dress. You may, in the realm of ideas, be as heterodox as you please; you may “pass” being a Roman Catholic, a Buddhist, even a Jew or Mohammedan. (Obviously it is not good form to intrude your personal views in mixed company, but you are allowed your freedom of private thought.) But in, say, Catholic circles In France, entry is barred to a man suspected of being a Protestant or a Republican.

But if, on the one hand, private freedom of views is permissible in London, the rule that you must not express in Society any views at all is so rigid, that any infringement of it causes a shudder. It is a want of tact. Examined into minutely, you will find again, as the basis of this characteristic, the individual unit. There is not any London type. London is a meeting place of all sorts of incongruous types, and, if you must not utter your views, it is simply because you run so sure a risk of hurting the feelings of every individual near you. In Catholic circles abroad you may talk freely of the Deity, the Virgin, the Saviour, or the Saints, because what is thought about these divinities is rigidly defined. In London society you may be — it is considered commendable to
be
— devout in private, but it is a shuddering offence to mention the Deity in company. Similarly all metaphysical topics, all political matters going below the surface or likely to cause heat, the consideration of sexual questions, the mention of the poor or the suffering, are avoided. This is, in origin, because your neighbour at dinner has his or her private views, and has a right to them. You do not enquire into them, you do not know them, and you cannot air your own views because they will probably give offence.

The net result is to make London conversations singularly colourless; but they become singularly unexhausting. No call is made upon your brain or your individuality; it is precisely not “good form” to make any kind of display. You may be yourself as much as you please, but it must be yourself in a state of quiescence. No strain at all is put upon you, because it is the height of good manners to have no manners at all.

This of course is most noticeable abroad, where the Londoner is celebrated for his atrociously bad manners. He does not bow over his hat on entering a room; he sits down on any chair, he has no gesticulations of pleasure, he stops short at being well groomed and undemonstrative. There is not, in fact, any etiquette in London, there is only a general rule against obtruding your personality — a general rule against animation in society. “Dieverstaendigste und geistreichste aller europaeischen Nationen hat sogar die Regel, ‘never interrupt,’ das elfte Gebot genannt,” says Schopenhauer.
 
But obviously if you never interrupt you must have schooled yourself to care little for the discussion you have in hand, or you must avoid the discussion of subjects you care for.

(
 
“The most understanding and most spiritual of all the European nations (the English) has named the rule ‘never interrupt,’ theeleventhcommandment.” — Parergaund Paralipomena. “Über Larm und Gerausch,” p. 679.)

Essentially we may say that the other great societies of Europe prescribe rigid codes of manners, and a member of society attains to self-respect by his knowledge of these codes. He tries in fact to do something. London society has no code, it prescribes an attitude of mind. You do not enter a London drawing-room with one, three or six bows; you do not kiss your hostess’s hand. But you lounge in and get through that ceremonial contact as best suits you. You try to show no impressment at all. For it may be said that, in London, the mark of the leisured class is to be without restraint. One may go even further: to be conscious of any restraint is to be guilty of bad manners.