§ 10.
But the neighbourhood that immediately environs the Park still remains fairly costly and responsible, and that it seems a little to fall short of absolute impressiveness is doubtless largely due to the overwhelming nature of its accessory. And then, too, it should be remembered, these yellow, uneasy houses came before the bungalow had taught a reasonable compromise between dignity and domesticity. A little further away, up towards Mossley Hill, the success is notably greater. Grave roads, filled with that indescribable hushed exclusiveness which only tall, ripe, sandstone walls and overarching leafage have power to confer, lead up the hill towards the Church. There are deliberate lodges and sudden glimpses of deep-breathing lawn; life grows leisurely and communicative; the silence is full of confessions.
The Church itself, bulking monumentally against the sky, continues the warm, grave intimacy: even the green stillness that encircles it seems fuller of humanity than all the acres, dense with flesh and blood, over at Everton and Anfield. It is always worth while, therefore, to step through to the farther wall. There, in a flash, you find you have come again to the uttermost edge of the town. A great landscape leaps suddenly out from beneath your feet, woods curve distantly about it, sweet airs bring a company of quiet sounds. A chalk line being softly ruled across the green map means that half a hundred people who have just had tea in town will see the buses in the Euston Road before dinner. A vague smear on the far sky stands for Widnes and poison. A fainter smear above the tree-tops to the right reveals the neighbourhood of Garston.
§ 11.
And with Garston we reach the tip of the last of the plumes of our fan. Viewed de profil—as, for instance, from the River—it would appear to be furnished chiefly with gasometers. The concomitants of gasometers are as invariable as those of race-meetings: Garston is grimy. Considered more closely, however, it breaks up a little, and reveals here and there some wholly pleasant incidents. And on its inland side it yields very gracefully to the influence of the shadowed lanes from Allerton.
The rib that joins it to the centre, sweeps, in the first place, through an easy, spacious district of private parks and well-preserved, middle-aged mansions, and, in the last place, through the débris of the southern slums. Its name in this last phase is Park Lane. If, perceiving that, the visitor feel impelled to smile as at an anticlimax, he would perhaps do well to hesitate; for this Park Lane has probably a wider reputation than any other thoroughfare in Europe. In and about this débris stand the sailors’ quarters, the foreign quarters, the Chinese Colony, the emigrants’ lodging-houses, the Sailors’ Home; and the street that threads these things (“Parkee Lanee Street” the coolies call it) is spoken of affectionately in every corner of the Seven Seas. Park Lane probably spells home to half the sailors in the world.
Midway in its course this last rib separates the decaying gentility south of Princes Park from the frankly homespun suburb of the Dingle. But even the Dingle, since it marches cheek by jowl with the River, cannot escape being occasionally infected with romance. There is one little row of apparently quite subdued little tenements, for instance, whose lives must really be one long debauch of raw sensation. I do not insist upon the haunting presence of the Fever Hospital at one end of them; nor upon that of the lean bridge which stalks appallingly across a ramping railway-siding at the other; for these are incidents of a sort that make other neighbourhoods tremendous. But these cottages have perched themselves exactly on the brink of the ragged cliff which surrounds that ultimate dock, the Herculaneum, and beneath them a group of black monsters are always at work plucking trucks of coal bodily from the railway and plunging them into the bowels of chained ships. Further over, there are the peering heads and shoulders of embedded liners; further, again, the wide manuscript of the River, lurid with adventure; and, beyond that, the stony slopes of the Wirral. Nor is this all; for immediately below their doorsteps some thousands of gallons of petroleum are stored in the live rock, and somewhere beneath their kitchen floors the Midland expresses race and hammer all day long.
HERCULANEUM DOCK.
Certainly, if it is roaring melodrama one thirsts for, the Dingle, in spite of its drabness, is clearly the place to dwell.