Thus far I have spoken chiefly of the setting of this central stage, its scenery and back-cloths. Let me now attempt to indicate, as uninvidiously as may be, one or two of the more prominent actors: themselves, of course, equally symptomatic, equally the choice and the mouthpiece of that Rodinesque deus ex machina couched invisibly behind.
ST. NICHOLAS CHURCH AND THE LAST OF TOWER BUILDINGS.
Place aux dames, by all means.... Of the maturer actresses, however, I confess I speak with a certain degree of diffidence. It is always dangerous to generalize on such a topic, and when the generalization inclines to be not wholly laudatory, to the danger of being guilty of inaccuracy is added that of floundering into blank discourtesy. But I will have, at least, the courage of my impressions. Sifting them, I incline to suggest that the more mature of the women-folk whom one discerns here, among the central shops—driving, walking, shopping—seem somehow not wholly to succeed. The efforts of an earlier day seem to have left their marks—sometimes in a certain exiguity, more often in a certain inexiguity; and, facially, one rather deplores the absence of anything in the nature of that enduring patrician basis which sometimes makes (as one seems to remember) the inevitable touches of attrition touches almost to be welcomed—touches that refine, clarify, take distinction a delicate step further. Here and there, in a Bold Street carriage, or in some one of the more guarded roadways of the south-eastern suburbs, a silvery face will flash out with a cameo-like precision; but their incidence is rare—quite rare enough, it seems to me, to be accepted as significant. The general note wavers instead between something almost touchingly fade and something too tenacious of qualities which, however charming in themselves, have rather lost their personal propriety.... So one hesitatingly generalizes. For the rest, there is an infinitude of kindliness; and one suspects that it would sometimes much prefer to break away, more often than it has the right to do, into frankest homeliness. One is never tempted to deplore a too vulgar display of mere culture.
But of the younger of the female players I speak with a notable access of assurance. There, beyond question, do I seem to detect the presence of a very distinct type, and (still more reassuring) of a type that is vastly pleasant. More, I have, for the first part at least of this judgment, the confirmation of a friend in whose flair for social qualities I repose, for the best of reasons, the most absolute confidence. “I can tell them anywhere, anywhere,” she assures me: in Paris, at Nice, in Scotland, it seems, the Liverpool jeune fille stands apart. To the latter part of my judgment, it is true, she subscribes only an assent that is dimmed by a vague qualification or so, perhaps not wholly inexplicable. She hints, for one thing, at a kind of gaucherie; but that, I am convinced, is unfair. One may suggest, indeed, not without justice, a certain lack of finesse, but that is by no means the same thing. Gaucherie implies a kind of inefficiency, an inadequacy that trends towards clumsiness, and anything short of an absolute efficiency is flatly uncharacteristic of the sort of girl I mean. Whether she speaks or walks, buys a hat or wears one, plays golf or the piano, it is always the consummate apportionment of means to end that most impresses one; and if one rarely finds her indulging in the frailer, more elusive, artifices of femininity—in those so alluringly deliquescent touches of speech, voice, emotion, gesture, and so forth—in all the subtle craft of implication, for instance—it is by no means because her methods stumble before they reach her ideals, but simply because her ideals include none of those fine, diaphanous practices. Her vision of the world is as distinct and sharp as Mr. Bernard Shaw’s (Mr. Shaw, indeed, would unreservedly admire her); her emotions are robustious and definite; and she makes all this instantly quite clear, even to the outsider, in her manner of speaking to her coachman as she steps into her brougham, or in the strong delicacy of the colours with which she so charmingly and undisguisedly emphasizes the clear colour of her eyes.
I grow intimate, it will be perceived, and, in order to grow more intimate still, let me appoint a flesh-and-blood heroine. She is a woman who always seems to me perfectly to achieve exactly what her sister-players, one in this way, one in that, succeed in attaining only approximately. She certainly, at any rate, perfects and epitomizes, in the most delightful fashion, what one singles out as their main tendencies—their main physical tendencies, that is, and therefore, no doubt, their main sub-physical tendencies as well. She is tall and large-limbed, more Hebe than Diana, with the grace of swiftness rather than of languor, and a mode of gowning that deals directly with the body’s needs, and so, the body being so admirably fashioned, immensely rejoices the eye. Bronze and rose (here one inevitably tends toward dithyramb; but these Liverpool complexions, too good to be untrue, are really quite memorable) meet distractingly in her face’s colouring, and I will not deny an occasional freckle or so. She speaks an English that is clean and well picked in a voice that is so satisfied that it needs all its firmness to keep it from complacency, and she has no discoverable accent. She lives at Sefton Park in one of the rather ineffective houses we will criticize in the next chapter, and, as often as not, comes to town by electric car. (London, I hear, still looks askance at its County Council cars, but in Liverpool they are, and always have been, quite the thing.) She is most herself when she walks. Her stride is not evasive. Golf has helped to solidify it. She writes a most excellent letter, reads a good deal, cares nothing for Mr. Yeats, a great deal for Tolstoi, is (rather unexpectedly) a devotee of Bach, and can play the Chaconne very vividly. She is at once shrewd and tender, cool-headed and warm-hearted. And although she protests that she has “a soul above self-coloured papers,” her regard for sacred things, on the one hand, is as free from sickliness as her regard for secular things, on the other, is free from crudity and ill-taste.
SAINT PETER’S CHURCH.
She stands, then, that highly satisfactory young animal, for all that, in their several ways, the majority of the younger women-folk tend to rival; not only those who pass from brougham to shop in the clear morning brightness of Church Street and Bold Street, but also those others, even more truly native to these central quarters, whom one observes hurrying here a few hours earlier, and leaving, with something more of leisureliness, in the neighbourhood of six and seven: the less fortunate, but scarcely less reassuring sisterhood whose business it is to wait at the thither end of that passage from brougham to shop, and produce such hats, ribbons, laces, flowers, as our heroine may desire. Physically, indeed, these shop-girls of Liverpool have a charm that rather astonishes the stranger; and they, too, are remarkably efficient self-gowners. To pass down Lord Street and Church Street on some spring evening, with the ebbing daylight tactfully erasing any of the lines the stress of the long, close hours may have left on the young faces, and the flowering lights of the City flinging little splashes of piquancy among them, is to be charmed into accepting the physical beauty of women as one of the especial attributes of these rapid commercial streets.