But I know Esther very well indeed, and I protest that she is not in the least preposterous, that she is not, essentially, anything but particularly normal. I am convinced, indeed, as Grant Allen was of Hedda Gabler, that “I take her in to dinner twice a week.” She has all the essential, the root qualities: she is just, she is generous, she is sociable. She loves cleanliness and good colours. She has a fine appetite for pleasure, and the right, needful touch of diablerie. All that she lacks is an adequate mode of expression, the flexile, elaborate technique which would enable her to grant these things a gracious and orderly embodiment.... If you could invest her with certain possibilities of dress (the dress that Mr. Charles Ricketts designed the other day for Miss McCarthy would suit her admirably), could get her hair heaped up and back, and so round across her forehead in the curve that would rhyme with the feat curve of her chin, she would present, if not a figure of intolerable beauty, at least one of very singular vividness and charm.... Well, just in the same way with that essential bundle of root qualities which she possesses: grant them a similar appropriate equipment, and you would get an equally delightful result. But as it is, hammered out on the patched and tuneless instrument she has been provided with, all the fine human music of which she is so full sounds fearfully like so much deliberate discordancy. Her sociability, for instance: she is compelled to express that by sitting on a sour doorstep in the midst of a raucous group of messy neighbours. Her affection, again: she can only display that by lovingly cursing her mother, and by swinking all day on her behalf instead of getting married—as she so easily might do. She is just; but perhaps the only dignified example of her justness that I can produce is her remark (remember, she is one of the devoutest of Catholics) that probably the folks who insist upon leaving tracts for her really mean very well at bottom. She is fond of cleanliness; and the proof of that is to be found in the fact that she spends vastly more pains upon her toilet than many even second-rate actresses. It is not her fault that the results are incommensurate with her efforts. When one has to get all the water one uses from a little dribbling pump in the middle of a filthy court; when one has to carry it in a leaky meat-tin up a slimy stairway to a fœtid room; when one has to wash (without soap) in the same meat-tin, and do one’s fringe without a looking-glass; when one has to do all this on a diet of bread and tea, and under a constant hail of reproaches from a rheumaticky old gargoyle, then it becomes distinctly easy to expend an enormous amount of energy without obtaining any very ravishing result. The result in Esther’s case is that you get an apparition so preposterous and streaky that well-meaning old ladies in the public streets are often moved to remonstrate with it on the subject of untidiness. I have heard them. I have also heard Esther’s replies.... She has, as I say, the needful touch of diablerie.
§ 5.
As with Esther, so with the majority of those about her. They are not plaster saints, and they are not morlocks: they are simply a community of amiably-intentioned life and laughter loving men and women and children, with the average amount of pluck and the average amount of cowardice, all exceedingly human and sinful and lovable and amorous and faithful and absurd and vain, and all compelled, by some strange swirl of outer circumstance, to spend their strength in a warfare waged on prehistoric lines. Here and there, of course, the skin self-protectingly toughens, malformities creep in, the Beast gets its appalling opportunities. Those levers at the Docks produce some sickening results.... But I do not want to heap up horrors. That, indeed, would be an easy thing to do. But it is even easier to misunderstand those exterior horrors which constantly do present themselves. That dirt, as we have seen, does not mean a love of dirt or a lack of energy; it simply stands for lack of proper tools.
Those clustered slatterns on the doorsteps do not really symbolize degeneracy; they merely emblematize that delicate and wholesome spirit which finds its projection elsewhere in the pleasant devices of our drawing-rooms. That ghastly uproar in a place of stench and wailing children simply means that the spleen which you and I, armed with a host of ingenious little instruments, twist and contrive into this and that elaborate code of moods and attitudes, is there being published abroad in the only fashion available. And it is not the fault of these people, nor in the least their essential desire, it is wholly the fault of the uncouth apparatus at their disposal, that their embodiment of that other wholesome and delicate human instinct—the instinct for Pleasure—should have taken the form of the crude lights and shocks of a corner tavern.
No, down here in the blackness and the slime, it is not, for the most part, any strange, incalculable brood that has its spawning-place; and I would like these two regions to remain in your imagination rather as a couple of far, unwholesome islands, primitive with jungle and morass, on which some thousands of twentieth century civilians, bankrupt of even the necessities, have been planked astonishingly down.
§ 6.
Now, it is obviously not in the nature of things that Liverpool should permit all the resultant discordancies and malformities—the constant waste of effort, the constant and preposterous clothing of civil bodies in a barbarous dress—without making some very notable efforts to provision and equip those islands. Much of this black disorder forms, as I have said, a large part of the price she pays for her efficiency—these people have been marooned here by the necessities of her own prosperous voyages—and although her passion for efficiency will never permit her to reduce the blackness by decreasing the efficiency, that very passion has always made her supremely anxious to beat down the price as far as possible. In no other city in the country, certainly, have the questions of feeding the poor, of housing them, nursing them, washing them, received more earnest and controlled attention; and upon the shores of these strange islands far-sounding official tides are constantly flinging this and that of necessity, of comfort, of direction. Into the details of all these efforts I have now no space to enter; nor, indeed, would such entry fall within the scope of this book. But you get their presence visualized, you get the vital sense of the activity of all these forces, when you turn some drab corner among the hovels and the rank disorder and come suddenly in sight of one of the clean, decisive blocks of Corporation dwellings: leash, personable structures, balconied and symmetrical, made up of course upon course of fit and habitable flats, and glittering at night with an unexpected blithesomeness and order. You get the same assurance, again, in the public wash-houses planted here and there—the first of their kind in the kingdom; and again in the occurrence of those neat-handed depots for distributing sterilized milk which dot a white pattern all about the blackness.
And always about these coasts, augmenting the gifts of the controlled official tides, there constantly wheels and dips an active fleet of friendly privateers. It is to them, indeed, that one’s natural inclination is always to look most hopefully: they are obviously human, they bring camaraderie and affection—needful things that the milk depots are not compelled to supply. You get all that side of the thing admirably symbolized by those open-air concerts (also, I fancy, the first of their sort in the kingdom) organized by one of the most successful of these free-lance expeditions, which fill the darkest of the courts, night after night, with actual, colourful music.... So that all these islanders, Esther and the rest, are not to be pictured as living in absolute isolation. Through the chaotic crowd of them there constantly move, very vitally and wonderfully, certain reassuring visitants—some shrewd, some benignant, some sentimental, but all enormously in earnest; and for my own part I never recall the dull bleared speech that prevails there without hearing, too, the dainty broken English, the daintier laughter, of a certain Swiss worker who chaffs them and mothers them and bullies them, and whom they love exceedingly, or without seeing the spare figure of that fine Founder of a noble secular order whom seven thousand children know by name, and who can pass anywhere among these morasses, at any hour of the day or night, and receive nothing but a welcome of elemental friendliness.