A similar study in crowd psychology awaits you at the Tube stations in the early hours of the evening, when the rush is on. With elbows wedged into your ribs, and strange hot breaths pouring down your neck, you need all the serenity you have stored against such contingencies; and the attitude of the other people about you can mitigate your distress or enhance it. The City and South London crowd is not the kind of crowd that can bear its own troubles cheerfully, or help others to bear theirs. I would never wish to go on a day's holiday with any of its people. Their composite frame of mind is one of weak anger, expressive of "Why isn't Something Done? What's the use of going on like this?"
More comely is the St. James's Park or Westminster crowd. From five to half-past six these stations receive a steady stream of sweet and merry little girls from the mushroom Government Departments that have spawned all about this quarter. It is girls, girls, girls, all the way, with the feeble and the aged of the male species toiling behind.
On the Bakerloo you find a crowd that is—well, "rorty" is the only word. The people here are mostly southbound for the Elephant and Castle; and you know the Elephant and Castle and its warm, impetuous life. There are bold youths who have not fallen, like their fathers, to the cajolery of a collar-and-cuff job in the City, but have taken up the work that offers the best pecuniary reward. Grimy youths they are, but full of vitality, and they pour down the staircase in a Niagara of humanity.
An excellent centre for observing the varying moods of the evening crowd is Villiers Street, that gentle slope from which you may reach Charing Cross Station, the Hampstead Tube, the District Railway, or the Embankment trams. It is a finely mixed company, for, as any Londoner will tell you, the residents of the hundred suburbs differ from one another in manner, accent and appearance, even as the natives of different continents. Those who are using the Hampstead Tube are sharply marked from those who are taking the Embankment car to Clapham Junction; while those who are journeying on the South-Eastern to Croydon have probably never heard of Upton Park, whither the District will carry others. There are well-dressed people and ill-dressed people; some who are going home to soup, fish, a soufflé and coffee, with wine and liqueurs; and some who are going home to "tea," at about eight o'clock—bread-and-margarine and bloater paste, with a pint of tea, or, occasionally, a bit of tripe and onions. There are people in a mad hurry, and others who move in aloof idleness. And above them all stand the stalwart Colonials, waiting until 6.30, when the bars shall open, airily inspecting the troops of girls and comparing notes.
"Say now, jes' watch here. Here comes a real Fanny."
"Ah, gwan. I ain' got no time for Fannies. I finished wid 'em. Gimme beer, every time."
I have often wanted to make a song of Villiers Street, but I have never been able to catch just the essence of its atmosphere. I am sure, though, that the modern orchestra offers opportunities for one of our new composers to embrace it in an overture. No effort has been made, so far as I know, to interpret in music the noisy soul of the London crowds. Elgar's "Cockaigne" overture and Percy Grainger's "Handel in the Strand" were both retrospective in spirit, and the real thing yet remains to be done. It has been done on the Continent by Suppé ("Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna"), by Sibelius in his "Finlandia," by Massenet in his "Southern Town," and by Dvorák in "Carneval Roman." I await with eagerness a "Morning, Noon and Night at Charing Cross," scored by a born Cockney.