Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (648 page)

So, having scored his “marks,” our friend would go slowly and soberly home; set another pailful of treacle beer to brew against next Sunday morning, and put himself quietly to bed.

Thus his life was perfectly regular and calm; hard muscular work giving place to sober amusement, dashed once a week with that intense leisure of lying still, looking at the ceiling and thinking nothing. On off days, bank holidays and the like, he would take his cages, wrapped up, under his arm, out into Epping Forest. For these chaffinch fanciers have a notion — no doubt it is a true one — that unless their captive birds refresh their memory of the wild song by chanting against free chaffinches in the woods or parks, they will lose the brilliance of their note, and finally mope and die. There are in London many thousands of men like this.

Chaffinches, bullfinches, prize bantams, prize rabbits, whippets, bull terriers, canaries, and even pigs occupy their leisure moments, and are regarded with pride by their wives, and awe by their young children. These breeders and fanciers are mostly country born, deliberate, gentle, sober, with a pipe generally in the corner of the mouth, from which come rare jets of smoke accompanying words as rare and as slow. And their “fancies” provide them with that companionship of animals that is such a necessity to the country-bred Englishman. It gives them a chance to get rid of some of the stores of tenderness towards small living things which, for lack of words, they cannot so well lavish on their wives and children. I have known a carter who did not apparently trouble himself in the least about illnesses in his own house, driven to a state of distraction because one of his old companions, a draught-horse, was on the point of death.

They give him, too, these “fancyings,” not only the chance to gaze ineffably, like the agricultural labourer, at the motions of animals, but the chance of emulation, the chance, if you will, of sharing in a sport. That, as it were, is what London supplies, and what makes London in a way both attractive and salutary. For we may say that the man who ceases to compete ceases to be a perfect man, and, in the actual stages of heavy manual work there is no room for emulation. It is true that in the country you have ploughing matches, but they touch only the very few; you have cottage garden prizes, but those are artificially fostered “from above,” and, indeed, they call for efforts too like those of the everyday work to afford much of an occupation for a man’s leisure. — So that, as a rule, these prizes flourish most in the neighbourhood of the small towns, and fall to railway signalmen, cobblers and the non-agricultural. Starling and sparrow shoots are, of course, mere bank holiday carouses, not the hobbies that are necessary for the everyday life of a man. Thus the country districts are depleted.

And, inasmuch as the arts are matters of association, we, loving a picture, a melody, a verse, because for obscure reasons it calls up in us forgotten memories of times when we were young, in love or happy, so these “fancies” which are Arts, call up in the hearts of these countrymen become town-labourers, moods like those they felt in forgotten green fields. I know a man who breeds pheasants in the green enclosure of a City church-yard, and when, towards October in the early black mornings of that tiny and shut-in square, roofed in from the sky by plane leaves high up near the steeple, overlooked by the gleaming plate-glass windows of merchants’ offices, these noble birds utter their shrill, prolonged and wild crockettings, like peals of defiant laughter, their owner says rhapsodically: “Doesn’t it make you think of Norfolk?” It makes me think of covert rides in Kent, dripping with dew, and of the clack of the beaters’ sticks and their shrill cries; but all the same it makes that City caretaker have all the sensuous delight of the green fields of his youth.

Nevertheless, he comments; “It’s better here nor there. — Down there it meant forty shillings if the keeper caught you so much as smelling a pheasant’s neck feather.” — Here he needed no gun license, and they paid him ten times over for their keep, and kept his hands nicely full.

So the birds with their delicate gait, high and dainty spurred steps, and peering, brilliant necks, seek unceasingly for issues from the closed railings of the churchyard, and contribute all that, in London, is needed to keep their owner there for ever. I knew a Rye fisherman, a lazy, humorous scoundrel, who never went to sea when he had the price of a pint in his pocket. He grew tired of that life and became a doorkeeper in some Southwark chemical works. He spends his leisure time with his hands in his pockets, leaning over the river wall, spitting into the eddies of the water and commenting on the ineptitude of the men on the dumb barges. Their sweeps dip up and down, to all appearances senselessly and futilely, and H — comments that ne’er a one of them ever seems to know that twenty yards in shore there’s a current that would take them down three miles an hour faster. H — will scull you down to Greenwich for a pipe of tobacco just for the fun of the thing; whereas five shillings, in the old days, would not have induced him to scull you down from Rye to the harbour mouth, a matter of two miles. Sails, he used to say, were his business, oars being against nature. — But London has changed that, making of former toils present leisure.

Your London ‘bus-driver takes his days off sitting on the front seat of an omnibus with his head close to that of the driver at work, just as the sailor lounges round harbours, glances along ropes with quietened but still professional eyes. — He gets in this way the feeling of leisure “rubbed in” and, without anxieties, his mind is kept employed by the things he best understands. And it is because in London there are so many things to see, so many anecdotes to be retailed, such a constant passing of material and human objects, that London holds us.

I do not know that it really sharpens our wits: I fancy that it merely gives us more accidental matters on which to display them, more occurrences to which to attach morals that have been for years crystallised in our minds. — I was listening to the observations of two such ‘bus drivers. They were like this: of a red-nosed four wheel driver: “Now then old danger signal!” To a driver of a very magnificent state carriage: “Where are you going with that glass hearse?” Of a very small man conducting a very tall lady across the road: “I reckon he wants a step ladder when he kisses her goodnight!”

Whereupon the driver who hadn’t made the remark muttered: “Just what I was going to say, Bill. You took the very words out of my mouth.” — Thus these famous witticisms of the London streets are largely traditional and common property. No doubt London breeds a certain cast of mind by applying men’s thoughts to a similar class of occurrences, but the actual comments float in the air in class and class. In the classes that are as a rule recruited from the country, the type of mind is slower, more given to generalisation, less topical, more idealising. It is broader, in fact, because it has two experiences of life, and depends less upon the daily papers.

The children of these countrymen are quite different. The power of generalisation has left them altogether, with their town breeding; their conversation is a collection of town topics, their allusions are gathered from the interests of daily papers, they have international nicknames for the food in cheap eating houses and for common objects. — Thus whiskers become “Krugers”; slices of German sausage are “Kaiser’s telegrams”; macaroni is called “A. J. B.” out of a fancied resemblance to the entwined legs of the Prime Minister of a certain epoch. Thus for the Londoner the “facts” of the daily and weekly press take the place of any broad generalisations upon life.

It takes, too, for at least the poorer classes, the place of animal “fancies”; it dictates, the daily and weekly press, their very hobbies. For to a man with an individuality — and the countryman has a strong and knotted one as a rule — his hobby is his mental anodyne. To the real Londoner the press is that. You get the distinction strongly in this way. My Lincolnshire waggoner become a soapmaker’s hand, has his bit of cold steak wrapped up in a fragment of newspaper six weeks old. At lunch time he spells out from this, laboriously, a report of the trial of a solicitor for embezzling,£40,000. He says slowly: “Well, well: why do the Law always breed rogues and ruin fools?”

 
— a general speculation. He reads the report of a wife unfaithful to her husband who has been fighting in South Africa, and he says: “You can’t trust a woman out of your sight.... Reckon he didn’t beat her oft enow.... A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, the ofter you beat ‘em the faithfuller they be” — and many more speculations of a general kind.

But his son, an office boy, his overseer, a smart London born workman, the clerks in his office, his general manager, the directors of the Company he serves; these sit morning after morning in their city-going trains, with the sheets held up before them, swallowing “news” as they swallow quick lunches later on. These things pass through their quiescent minds as under the eyes of the clubman that string of vehicles: “The Play that Failed; A Chat with the Manager”—”Varieties in Weather”—”Scorned Woman’s Vengeance”—”’Objected to Fireguards’”—” Comedy in the County Court”—”Slavery to Drugs; Alarming Growth of the Opium Habit”—” Country’s Loneliness; Mental Isolation of the Cultured”—” Infant Motorists; The Automobile as an Adjunct to the Nursery”—”Home Rule for Egypt; Khedive’s interest in an Organised Agitation”—”Married to a Scoundrel”—”Batch of Stabbing Cases.” All these things flicker through the dazed and quiescent minds without leaving a trace, forgotten as soon as the first step is made upon the platform at Mark Lane or the Mansion House Stations — as much forgotten as any telegraph pole that flickered past the train window out towards the suburbs. Very salient and very characteristic figures may make a certain mark upon the mind — the German Emperor is, for some reason or another, particularly impressive to the lower order of Londoner—” Kaiser’s telegrams” is an evidence of it. He will evoke some such comment as “Willie’s a bit dotty,” but practically never such trite general reflections as that immense power, immense isolation, or immense conspicuousness, will drive a man to eccentricities of speech and action. And indeed, anyone who made such an observation aloud, would run the risk of being silenced with: “Oh, don’t talk like a book here.” Or: “When we want to hear a preacher, we go to the City Temple.” In a country cottage, on the other hand, the remark would be considered, accepted, and even commented on. This dislike for generalisations is as a rule set down as an English trait. An English trait it is not: but
the
London habit of mind it is. Probably, too, it is what has made conversation in London a lost art. It gives one something of a shock to read in Emerson: “English stories,
bon-mots
, and table talk are as good as the best of the French. In America we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained to the same perfection: for the range of nations from which London draws, and the steep contrasts of conditions create the picturesque in society, as a broken country makes picturesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because dressing for dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage every thing good.
Much attrition has worn every sentence to a bullet
An American writing that passage to-day would be accused of irony, since we no longer utter sentences at dinners. Yet when we consider the ages of Johnson, of the Prince Regent, even when we think of the Table Talk of Shirley, we must remember — and we must wonder what has become of that mighty stream. And we must wonder why we will no longer listen to talkers: why a talker is something we resent; why, in fact, a conversational artist strikes us nowadays as” a bounder.”

The really good raconteurs of the Brummel type did survive in London, as very old men, into the late ‘eighties: the mild, splendid, whiskered creatures of the Crimea still talked; the mild, splendid and bearded creatures of the ‘seventies still told anecdotes “à
propos
of” some general idea or other; nowadays we tell a “good story” with diffidence, being afraid of being taken for a sort of Theodore Hook or professional diner out. But, as a general rule, London limits itself to: “Did you see that extraordinary case in the So-and-so to-day?...” or “Have you read Such-and-such a novel? Seen such a play? Or such a picture show?” and it comments: “Rotten, I think,” without reason given for the condemnation.

Partly, no doubt, it is because we have become so “democratic,” as Emerson puts it, that society resents any monopolist of talk. Perhaps, too, the Englishman never did really enjoy being talked to or “entertained.”

(Indeed an American hostess has put it on record that an English guest commented to her the other day, “But, we don’t
want
to be entertained.”) But, undoubtedly, conversation began to go out of fashion when the phrase: “He speaks like a book” was first used invidiously. It marked the bifurcation of the English language: the distinction between our spoken and our written tongue. For this the periodical press must be held responsible.