A Bit of Bagdad
The only place where you could sell an elephant, a were-wolf, or your second best aunt without attracting the slightest curiosity is Club Row, a Sunday market famous throughout the eastern regions of London. Turn out of Shoreditch along the Bethnal Green Road and presently you see a large cloth-capped crowd. You approach.
A dramatic, sinister man who lost his razor early last year detaches himself and sidles up to you with his right hand suspiciously hidden in the breast of his coat. Is he an anarchist? Just as you expect him to bring out a bomb and cry "Down with Civilization," he quickly produces a six-ounce pom and whispers in a voice like a rusty door hinge: "Come on, half a dollar!" Other dog men approach. They offer handfuls of pups, or they submit dogs of larger growth which sit round in a circle looking up at you questioningly, hopefully. You want to buy the lot. Then an Airedale bites a collie and you find yourself the centre of a splendid battle, from which you escape into the heart of the mob.
Here life is magnificent. Thousands of things are happening at once in Oriental variety. This is what Bagdad was like in the days of the Caliph. This is what the Mouski in Cairo is like to-day. As you stand wedged between people who hold sacks that writhe and cluck, a man waves a couple of buff Orpingtons in your face and pushes past to stand himself a glass of jellied eels. An elderly parrot-like old lady is marooned helplessly, with a green aloof-looking parrot, exactly like herself, perched on her hand. Pigeons coo, hens cackle, cockerels crow, dogs bark, canaries sing, and you gain the impression that anything—anything—is yours for "half a dollar."
I was interested in the little groups round contortionists, catch-penny men, and herb doctors. We have driven these mediæval characters from more polite places, and it is almost with a thrill that east of Aldgate Pump you find yourself in the hearty atmosphere of a fair as old as England. One man, who said that his face was as well known as the dome of St. Paul's, walked rapidly up and down with a mysterious paper packet over which he held a pair of dental forceps. Every one wanted to see what marvellous thing he would pick out of the packet at the psychological moment. All the time as he walked backwards and forwards he talked, of indigestion and other things with Elizabethan frankness. He discussed food as if it were a revolver.
"If the steak repeats, if the onions repeat, if the pudding repeats, if cheese repeats...."
Then, working up to his climax, he dived the forceps into the packet and produced a beautiful heliotrope-coloured pill!
Did he sell any? He did!
Under a railway arch a young man with a faint Scottish accent had been handcuffed and chained. Round his neck he wore a steel collar; on his head a steel cap which, he said, was "an exact replica of the cap used for capital punishment throughout the United States of America." (Thrill in the audience!)
"And now," he remarked (with a touch of his Scottish accent), "before I release myself, my partner will take the liberty of passing the hat round!"
The fringes of the crowd melted away. After a prolonged struggle, interrupted by a donkey and cart bursting violently into the arena, the young man unshackled himself, dived for the hat, looked at the pennies, and remarked, "Well, now; if any sportsman would care...."
But the crowd had stampeded.
How delightfully childish it all is. In order to sell chocolate one man had taken off his coat and had put on his head an irresponsible looking opera hat!
In side streets I came on a bicycle market. I wondered how many were doped like racehorses. A stray bicycle found carelessly outside a house becomes something quite different with the aid of a paint pot! How many old crocks had been dressed up with new lamps and saddles I would not care to say! Here trade was booming. I saw a man who had bought a dog, a birdcage, and a pair of pink braces, treat himself to a pair of handle-bars. It must be wonderful to wander through Bagdad like this, meeting things on the way, living an hour full of infinite possibilities, not knowing whether you will arrive home with a bullfinch or a bicycle! After watching this market closely I realize this: people do not go there to buy things, but to have things sold to them!
* * *
On the way out I saw something worth while. A melancholy bull pup sitting in the road with all the world's troubles in his eyes was picked up by a little girl.
"I want him because he looks so unhappy."
A chauffeur in a green coat paid out five shillings.
"Darling ... darling," said the girl, holding the squat little body.
They took him to a motor-car that had been left round the corner. So he left a street corner in Bagdad to be a prince among pups.
Kismet!