More of the real emotion of distance, of destinies astonishingly contravened, belongs to the instant of the steamer’s arrival. The naked fact of the departure is always somewhat misted, and the last severance gradually prepared for, by the way the process extends: the steamer protects the Stage for an hour or so, the nerves are habituated. But the incoming of the liner is a different matter. It is a smear in the sky, it is a neatly pencilled apparition, it is a towering event in the River, it is a vast door barring out the west, all in the briefest space of time: from start to climax the event leaps up through a swift crescendo of incident, and the little figures trooping an instant later over the high gangways that are really bridges from New York to London have a fine aura of adventure. To see all this accomplished in some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale flowers on the far-drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the world’s possibilities of beauty and romance.
CHAPTER III
THE CITY
§ 1.
How to set about conveying the sense of this great mass of minutely reticulated architecture without instantly growing too pedantic on the one hand or too vaguely general on the other—that is the problem—always, in this business of civic portraiture, a very present one—that now begins to grow especially insistent. For the Docks, after all, in spite of their unhuman magnitude, do resolve themselves, as we have seen, into a fairly compact cycle of recurrences; and the Suburbs, again, unfolding themselves in their order, do provide a clear and vital method of attack; and the Slums, unhappily, cling loyally throughout to one dolorous code. But here, in this imposing van of the civic army, there is neither loyalty to sole effect nor specific rotation of several effects. Each building is more or less deeply individualized; every street has its especial quality; and about the bases of all these fretted cliffs, down all these changeful ravines, the mutable tides of the traffic charge and ebb unceasingly.... How is the sense of all these innumerable aspects going to be squeezed into a pitiful couple of thousand words?...
One would like, for example, to distinguish street from street: to speak of Lord Street, say, with its inevitable air of well-groomed alertness, brisk and personable even under gloom, its rather superficial architecture pleasantly asnap, its traffic and its shops equally avoiding the dully commercial, equally achieving a confident glitter that only just falls short of a swagger. One would like to contrast it with one of the ways that branch out from it—with North John Street, for instance, bleak-faced and sombre, constantly resonant with heavy traffic from the Docks, but made suddenly magnificent by the rocketting cream and gold of the foreshortened Royal Insurance building at its head; or with Whitechapel, again—a street, for all its proximity, of so profoundly different a quality: a street that seems always to be attempting to override, by dint of cheap cafés, clothiers, boot-shops, and the like, the coarse utilitarian note that insists on lumbrously emerging from Crosshall Street, from Stanley Street, from the neighbouring clangorous Goods depots: a country tripper of a street, shamefacedly endeavouring to conceal the presence of its obviously autochthonous companions.
And one would like, again, to speak of Stanley Street itself, chief of those autochthonous companions, a narrow and difficult ravine, mostly sunless, always noisy, whose bed is encumbered from end to end with floats and lorries and waiting carters, and whose walls are provision offices, provision warehouses, and the sheer grey flanks of the G.P.O. From a gash in those grey flanks a blood-red stream of post-office vans and motors is jerked out intermittently. The air is thick with swinging boxes and heavy or keen with the most astounding range of odours: with slab cheesy odours and searching fruity ones; with exotic odours that one sniffs uncertainly, for which one can find no closer definition than nice or nasty; and, supereminently, running through them all, the wild decivilizing smell of wet deal cases—a smell that always arouses a certain unemotional cotton-broker of one’s acquaintance to an inconvenient but rather touching hunger for some particular place of dim forest silences.
BOLD STREET.