If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall's Dictionary, Mrs. Beeton's House Book, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through Dolly Gray, The Honeysuckle and the Bee, and Everybody's Loved by Some One; and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we had better have supper and get off to bed.
This kind of thing is going on right down both sides of Sandringham Road—at Holmwood, at Hazledene, at The Pines, and at Sutherland House, as well as at The Laurels—every week-day evening between the hours of eight and midnight. In point of fact, it is going on all over Tooting. It is the suburban notion of an 'appy evening at home; and, hallowed as it is by wont and custom, everybody in Tooting takes it to be the best that life can offer after business hours. Perhaps it is. Just before supper, or haply a little afterwards, however, Spriggs says that he believes he will take a little stroll "round the houses." He puts on a straw hat in summer and a tweed cap in winter, and proceeds gravely down the Sandringham Road until he reaches a break in the long array of villas, and is aware of a rather flaring public-house. Into the saloon bar of this hostelry he walks staidly, nods to the company, and asks the barmaid for a drop of the usual. "Let me see," says that sweet lady; "Johnny Walker, is n't it?" "Well, you know it is," says Spriggs, as he hands over threepence. With the glass of whisky in his hand he retires to the nearest red plush settee, and looks listlessly at the illustrated papers on the little table in front of him, drinks somewhat slowly, smokes a pipe, exchanges a word about the weather with the landlord of the establishment, says there's time for another before closing time, has another, and at twelve-thirty trots off home.
The seven or eight other men in the saloon bar being respectively the occupiers of Holmwood, Hazledene, The Pines, Sutherland House, etc., have done almost exactly as Spriggs has done in the way of drinks and nods and illustrated papers and having a final at twenty minutes past twelve. But during the whole evening they have not exchanged a rational word with one another. They have nothing to talk about; therefore they have not talked. They are neighbours, and they know it; but they all hold themselves to be so much superior to one another that they have scorned to speak to each other, except in the most cursory and casual way. Next morning, at a few minutes to nine o'clock, they will all be scooting anxiously along the Sandringham Road with set faces, damp brows, and a fear at their hearts that they are going to miss their train. They will travel in packed carriages, half of them standing up, while the other half growls, to Ludgate Hill or Moorgate Street, as the case may be, and then rush off again to their respective offices, in fear and trembling this time lest they should be three minutes late and the "governor" might notice it.
This is the life of the males in the Sandringham Road year in and year out. Through living in the same houses, in the midst of the same furniture, listening to the same pianos, drinking at the same public-houses, going to business in the same trains, they become as like one another as peas. They are all anxious, all dull, all short of sleep, all short of money. In brief, they have become suburbanized. The monotony and snobbery and listlessness of their home life are reflected in their conduct of the working-day's affairs. There is not a man amongst them who has a soul above his job. Each of them sticks at business, not because he loves it or likes it, but simply because he knows that, if he were discovered in a remissness, he would get what he calls "the sack." Each of them "lunches"—oh, this English lunch!—at the bar of a public-house on a glass of bitter beer and a penny Welsh rare-bit. Each of them feels a bit chippy and not a little sleepy of an afternoon, and each of them races for his train in the evening, chock-full of worry and bad-temper. You must live in the suburbs if you are to live in London at all, and there is no escape from it.
The lines of the female suburbians are cast in more or less pleasant places. They do not need to go to town every day. There are shops galore, filled with just the goods they want, round the corner; and there is always the next female on both sides to gossip with. For, unlike the male suburbian, the female suburbian will talk to her neighbours. Her conversation is of babes, and butchers' meat, and the piece at the theatre, and the bargains at the stores in the High Road, and "him." He, or "him," means the good lady's husband. She never by any chance refers to him either by his Christian name, or his surname, or as "my husband." It is always, "He said to me this morning," or, "As I was saying to him before he went to business,"—which, I take it, is a peculiarly English habit. The female suburbian goes out to tea sometimes, usually at the house of some suburban relative. Her dress is a curious blend of ostentation and economy. She will be in the fashion; and, being an Englishwoman, "expense is no object," providing she can get the money. She has no notion of thrift; she is perennially in arrears with the milk and the insurance man; and when money gets very tight indeed, she lectures her husband on his wicked inability to make more than he is getting. The whole life, whether for male or female, is dreary, harried, unrelieved, and destructive of everything that tends to make life affable and tolerable.
In view of the obvious evils suburbanism has brought about in the English metropolis, it might have been expected that the English provincial cities would have done their best to avoid similar troubles in their own areas. So far from this being the case, however, the craze for suburbanism is making itself apparent wherever one turns. City and borough councils lead the way by erecting, at the public expense, artisans' and clerks' dwellings well out of the town. They hold that fresh air, the open country, and cheap railway fares are all that is wanted to make the English citizen's life a perennial joy to him. Yet the dwellings they erect are of the shoddiest and least homelike kind, the fresh-air which is to do the worker and the children so much good is a doubtful quantity, and the cheap railway fares are bragged about without regard to the time taken up in travelling and the hurry and anxiety to catch trains. Suburbanism as a stereotyped and soul-deadening institution is of purely English origin. In no other country in the world do convention and what other people will say so rule the lives of men as they do in England. Suburbanism is in many ways the most obvious of the many products of English convention. It is at once an indication of brainlessness, want of intelligence, and incipient decay. Apparently there is to be no limit to it. Outside London new suburbs spring up almost weekly. But their newness brings no changes in its train. Each new suburb is mapped out and built exactly on the lines of the old ones; each is destined for the reception of exactly the same kind of stupid people; each will be the living-ground of generations of people still more stupid.
THE MAN-ABOUT-TOWN