After seventy years, however, the middle way has been found. There are few tragedies to-day in the Quartier Latin, and very little gaiety or kindliness; none of the old adventurous spirit. Things are going too well in the studio-world these days. Chelsea and Montmartre have been invaded by the American dilettanti, whose lives are one long struggle to be Bohemians on a thousand a year. If, however, there be those who regard this state of things as an improvement on the old, then let it be remembered that this way was only found after Murger had wrecked his own life and the lives of those who followed so gaily the unkind path down which he led them. It is a pitiful catalogue; the more pitiful since so many of the young dead are anonymous—the young men who might, had they lived, have given the world so much of beauty, but who were unable to pull up short of the precipice. Some of them, of course, we know: Gerard de Nerval, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Ernest Dowson; and their London monument is the Café Royal.
* * * * *
At half-past nine all fun ceased, but we had picked up a bunch from Fleet Street, one of whom was taking home two bottles of whisky. So we moved to "another place," and ordered black coffees which drank tolerably well—after some swift surreptitious business with a corkscrew. Later, we strolled across Oxford Street to what remained of the German Quarter. We visited various coffee-bars, where our genial comrade with the bottles again did his duty; did it beautifully, did it splendidly, did it with Vine Street at his ear. And in a grey street off Tottenham Court Road we found a poor man's cabaret. In the back room of a coffee-bar an entertainment was proceeding. Two schonk boys, in straw hats, were at a piano, assisted by an anæmic girl and a real coal-black coon, who gave us the essential rag-times of the South. The place was packed with the finest collection of cosmopolitan toughs I had ever seen in one room. The air, physical and moral, was hardly breathable, and as the boys were spoiling for a row, one misinterpreted glance would have brought trouble—and lots of it. At different tables, voices were raised in altercation, when not in lusty song, and the general impression the place gave me was that it was a squalid, dirty model of the old Criterion Long Bar. All the meaner, more desperate citizens of the law-breaking world were gathered here; and, though we had broken a few by-laws ourselves that night, we were not anxious to be led into any more shattering of the Doraic tables. So at midnight we adjourned to "another place," and drank dry gingers until three o'clock in the morning. Then, to a Turkish Bath, and so to bed; not very merry, but as cheered in the spirit as the humble, useless citizen is allowed to be in a miserable, hole-and-corner way in war-time.
It had been a sorry experience, this round of visits, in 1917, to quarters last seen in 1914; and it made me curious to know how other familiar nooks had received the wanton assault of kings. In the haphazard sketches that follow I have tried to catch the external war-time atmosphere of a few of the old haunts, so far as a poor reporter may. Later, perhaps, a better hand than mine will discover for us the essential soul of London under siege; and these rough notes may be of some service, since all remembrance of that time was blown away from most minds by the maroons of Armistice Day.
BACK TO DOCKLAND
From my earliest perceiving moments, docks and railway stations have been, for me, the most romantic spots of the city in which I was born and bred. Quays and wharves, cuts, basins, reaches, steel tracks and passenger trains, and all that belonged to the life of the waterside and the railway, spoke to me of illimitable travel and distant, therefore desirable, things.
This feeling I share, I suppose, with millions of other men and children who have been reared in coast cities, and whose minds respond to the large invitations offered by sooty smoke-stacks or the dim outline of a station roof. And if these things pierced the complacence of one's days in the past, how much deeper and more significant their message in those four dreadful years, when men fared forth in ships and trains to new perils unimagined in the quieter years.
That apart, I see docks and railway stations not in their economic or historic aspect, but in the picturesque light, as, perhaps, the most emphatic glory of London. For London's major architectural beauties I care little. Abbeys, cathedrals, old churches, museums, leave me cold; the fine shudder about the shoulders I suffer most sharply before those haphazard wizardries of brick and iron flung together by the exigencies of modern commerce. Their fortuitous ugliness achieves a new beauty. A random eye-full of such townscapes may yield only an impression of squalor, but many acres of squalor produce, by their very vastness, something of the sublime. Belching chimneys, flaring furnaces, the solemn smell of wet coal mingled with that of tar and bilge-water, and the sight of brown sails and surly funnels and swinging cranes—in these misshapen masses I find that delight that others receive from contemplation of Salisbury Cathedral or a spire of Wren's.