Big race-meetings don’t vary very much; and Grand National Day at Aintree presents much the same features as one finds elsewhere. There are the same great stands, looking, from a proletarian distance, like boxes crammed with flowers; the same sliding bourdon from the betting-rings; the same sudden drift of music that means that Majesty has arrived, that Majesty is mounting the Stand, that Majesty’s binoculars are even now compressing the whole astonishing landscape into one bright little picture for Majesty’s eyes. Follows, as always, the remote, wavering crescent at the starting-point; the delicate stream of coloured scraps, blowing as before a wind, rising and falling here and there in easy, soundless undulations; the faint, raw crash of sound as the stream flutters beneath the quivering sparkle of the Stands. And afterwards, the usual black flood of people pouring across the plain, the usual sententious groups about the jumps, the usual rancid litter, the inevitable dizzy smell of trodden turf.
Only, right at the end, there is one amendment to note. The traditional hotchpotch of home-returning vehicles has been replaced by something else. Away in the centre of the City some one in a little office signs an order; and when the mob pours out, it discovers long glittering files of electric cars awaiting it at the entrance. So, independently propelled no longer, but packed sociably together, they sweep back to the heart of the City, past the sad walls of Walton Church, a magnificent official cavalcade.
§ 6.
Walton’s drab neighbours on the other side, too, have also their sporting associations, and, in consequence, some measure of independent fame. Each Saturday afternoon throughout the winter grey clouds of sound drift over all this northern district and out into the country beyond: rivalling for a time the brazen rumours from the River which are always visiting these airs. They rise from the great football-grounds at Everton and Anfield, where some tens of thousands of enthusiasts, incredibly packed together (any number of the worst-paid of L——’s understudies among them), indulge, week after week, a passion for vicarious athletics.
There is always something rather heartsome about the sound of distant cheering, and in this case one welcomes these tumults with an especial enthusiasm. It would probably be unjust to suggest that they stand for the most positive moment in the lives of the cheerers, but it is certainly true that they provide the most positive note in the whole of the dull regions that surround them. Towards Stanley Park, indeed, in Anfield, there is a momentary touch of something that is almost sprightliness; and over in Everton, near the hill from which De Quincey admired the view of distant Liverpool, there is a flavour of dignified decay. But, for the rest, there are only labyrinthine miles of gardenless, spiritless streets, neither new nor old, neither vicious nor respectable—always tragically null and inchoate. They involve Kirkdale; they trail out towards Cabbage Hall; they trudge past Newsham Park, and so away towards the south. The main ribs strike across them here and there, distributing a little colour—paper-shops, tobacconists’, sweet-shops, the rich phials of a drug-store, butchers’ slabs covered with intricate runes of red and yellow; but these respites are desperately restricted. The gleam dies away as quickly as the sound of the car-gongs; the web slinks back into its old monotony, into that grey neutrality which seems, somehow, to be far baser and more vitiating than the brute positive blackness of the slums.
To explain these regions, to see them (as we ought to see them) as something more than a dull and featureless enigma, it is needful to regard them in relation to the City, to see them as one of the essential whorls in the great hieroglyph which is Liverpool. Looked at in this way, they do begin to reveal a kind of meaning, even to assume a kind of magnificence. They mean that Liverpool demands, for the prosecution of her so colourful adventures, the services of so many thousands of grey lives, the efforts of a great brotherhood content to labour all day long on her behalf in exchange for permission to return at nightfall just here, to make themselves a home in just this stretch of barren twilight. She cannot let them go further afield; she cannot grant them space enough for brightness. This much she can afford them, and no more.
So regarded, all this drabness becomes something much more terrible and magnificent than a mere neutral foil to the City’s beauty, a mere grey passage which throws the purple into relief. It becomes one of the sources of that beauty, one of the processes by which that beauty was attained—a grey and dreadful ritual observed by the City in the hope of being granted strange powers. These dull houses are so much squeezed dye-wood. Their colour, their brightness, have gone to stain the rich fabric of the City’s enterprise, to paint the romantic emblem by which she is known in dim corners of the earth, to illuminate the saga of her career. And, remembering this, it becomes almost possible to regard the dwellers in these regions less as prisoners in a dull and sorrowful gaol than as priests in the recesses of some twilit temple, gravely and honourably fulfilling sacred offices.
§ 7.
At the same time, it is, no doubt, only too easy to overestimate the heaviness of the twilight. Here is human nature packed thick and thick, and where there is human nature, there romance is also. Theoretically, therefore, the whole place is seething with adventure, and each one of these drab doorways is an entrance to a palpitating epic. Theoretically, all this monotony is but a mask, and beneath it there are warm human features, quick and variable with terror and pity and passion and quiet joy. It may be so; but those doors remain implacably closed, the mask is never dropped; all this great romance is writ in cipher. Here and there a phrase emerges: a couple of youths whispering at a corner; a woman wrapped in a shawl singing drearily in an empty street; an old man solemnly tapping at a door; a child running screaming from a curtainless house; and one fingers them for a little, and pores over them, but in the end is always forced to push them despairingly aside. The key is lacking; they remain enigmatic; and one might wander these grey sad streets for ever and learn nothing of their secrets. Every house is inarticulate; a menacing dumbness broods over the whole region.