I journeyed forth once more, interested by the fact that, according to Baedeker, from one point somewhere, on a clear day, whenever that might be, six hundred stacks might be seen. In this fog I soon found that it was useless to look for them. Instead I contented myself with noting how, in so many cases, the end of a street, or the sheer dismal length of an unbroken row of houses, all alike, was honored, made picturesque, made grand even, by the presence of the mills, these gloomy monuments of labor.
There is an architecture of manufacture, dreary and shabby as its setting almost invariably is, which in its solemnity, strangeness of outline, pathos and dignity, quite rivals, if it does not surpass, the more heralded forms of the world—its cathedrals, parthenons, Moorish temples and the like. I have seen it often in America and elsewhere where a group of factory buildings, unplanned as to arrangement and undignified as to substance, would yet take on an exquisite harmony of line and order after which a much more pretentious institution might well have been modeled. At Stockport, near Manchester, for instance, on the Mersey, which here is little more than a rivulet, but picturesque and lovely, I saw grouped a half-dozen immense mills with towering chimneys which, for architectural composition from the vantage point of the stream, could not have been surpassed. They had the dignity of vast temples, housing a world of under-paid life which was nevertheless rich in color and enthusiasm. Sometimes I fancy the modern world has produced nothing more significant architecturally speaking, than the vast manufactory. Here in Oldham they were gathered in notable clusters, towering over the business heart and the various resident sections so that the whole scene might well be said to have been dominated by it. They bespeak a world of thought and feeling which we of more intellectual fields are inclined at times to look on as dull and low, but are they? I confess that for myself they move me at times as nothing else does. They have vast dignity—the throb and sob of the immense. And what is more dignified than toiling humanity, anyhow—its vague, formless, illusioned hopes and fears? I wandered about the dull rain-sodden thoroughfares, looking in at the store windows. In one I found a pair of gold and a pair of silver slippers offered for sale—for what feet in Oldham? They were not high in price, but this sudden suggestion of romance in a dark workaday world took my fancy.
At four o’clock, after several hours of such wandering, I returned to the main thoroughfare—the market-place—in order to see what it was the hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants found to entertain them. I looked for theaters and found two, one of them a large moving-picture show. Of a sudden, walking in a certain direction my ears were greeted by a most euphonious clatter—so interwoven and blended were the particular sounds which I recognized at once as coming from the feet of a multitude, shod with wooden-soled clogs. Where were they coming from? I saw no crowd. Suddenly, up a side street, coming toward me down a slope I detected a vast throng. The immense moving-picture theater had closed for the afternoon and its entire audience, perhaps two thousand in all, was descending toward the main street. In connection with this crowd, as with the other at Boulton, I noted the phenomenon of the black or white straw hat, the black or brown shawl, the shapeless skirts and wooden-soled clogs of the women; the dull, commonplace suit and wooden clogs of the men. Where were they going now? Home, of course. These must be a portion of the strikers. They looked to me like typical mill-workers out on a holiday and their faces had a waxy pallor. I liked the sound of their shoes, though, as they came along. It was like the rattle of many drums. They might have been waltzing on a wooden floor. The thing had a swing and a rhythm of its own. “What if a marching army were shod with wooden shoes!” I thought; and then, “What if a mob with guns and swords came clattering so!”
A crowd like this is like a flood of water pouring downhill. They came into the dark main street and it was quite brisk for a time with their presence. Then they melted away into the totality of the stream, as rivers do into the sea, and things were as they had been before.
If there were any restaurants other than the “Kafe” Monico, I did not find them. For entertainment I suppose those who are not religiously minded do as they do in Fall River and elsewhere—walk up and down past the bright shop windows or sit and drink in the public houses, which are unquestionably far more cheerful by night than by day.
The vast majority who live here must fall back for diversion on other things, their work, their church, their family duties, or their vices. I am satisfied that under such conditions sex plays a far more vital part in cities of this description than almost anywhere else. For, although the streets be dull and the duties of life commonplace, sex and the mysteries of temperament weave their spells quite as effectively here as elsewhere, if not more so. In fact, denied the more varied outlets of a more interesting world, humanity falls back almost exclusively on sex. Women and men, or rather boys and girls (for most of the grown women and men had a drudgy, disillusioned, wearied look), went by each other glancing and smiling. They were alert to be entertained by each other, and while I saw little that I would call beauty in the women, or charm and smartness in the men, nevertheless I could understand how the standards of New York and Paris might not necessarily prevail here. Clothes may not fit, fashion may find no suggestion of its dictates, but after all, underneath, the lure of temperament and of beauty is the same. And so these same murky streets may burn with a rich passional life of their own. I left Oldham finally in the dark and in a driving rain, but not without a sense of the sturdy vigor of the place, keen if drab.
CHAPTER XIX
CANTERBURY
It was not so long after this that I journeyed southward. My plan was to leave London two days ahead of Barfleur, visit Canterbury and Dover, and meet with him there to travel to Paris together, and the Riviera. From the Riviera I was to go on to Rome and he was to return to England.
Among other pleasant social duties I paid a farewell visit to Sir Scorp, who shall appear often hereafter in these pages. During the Christmas holidays at Barfleur’s I had become well acquainted with this Irish knight and famed connoisseur of art, and while in London I had seen much of him. Here in his lovely mansion in Cheyne Walk I found him surrounded by what one might really call the grandeur of his pictures. His house contained distinguished examples of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Van Dyck, Paul Potter, Velasquez, Mancini and others, and as I contemplated him on this occasion he looked not unlike one of the lymphatic cavaliers of Van Dyck’s canvases. A pale gentleman, this—very remote in his spirit, very far removed from the common run of life, concerned only with the ultimately artistic, and wishing to be free of everything save the leisure to attend to this. He was not going to leave London, he thought, at this time, except possibly for a short visit to Paris. He was greatly concerned with the problem of finding a dilapidated “cahstle” which he could restore, live in, fill with his pictures and eventually sell, or dedicate to his beloved England as a memorial of himself. It must be a perfect example of Tudor architecture—that he invariably repeated. I gained the impression that he might fill it with interesting examples of some given school or artist and leave it as a public monument.