IV
WANDERERS
CHAPTER IV
WANDERERS
Alphonse Daudet, when analysing Tartarin de Tarascon, found in him two Tartarins, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho. Tartarin Quixote liked fighting, adventure, uncertainty, blood, knives, unscalable peaks, tornadoes at sea. Tartarin Sancho liked flannel vests, long drinks of lemonade on a hot day, chocolate in bed in the morning. No doubt, Tartarin Quixote and Tartarin Sancho live in many of us, and certainly I confess to desperate moods which, on the whole, I restrain, and to self-indulgent moods which, on the whole, I encourage; but when we consider men we know, it is curious how much more strongly Tartarin Sancho or Tartarin Quixote is developed in them. Tartarin Sancho leads the majority of mankind, that majority which is always looking for a good billet, for a pension, for a nice little wife, a cat, and a garden. Some, more ambitious, substitute for the nice little wife a woman of title, for the cat a hunter, for the garden an estate, but their desires, after all, are still those of Sancho, even though they are those of Sancho become Governor of Barataria. Naturally they adopt the wadded life. It is not a crime, and no doubt many of the Tartarin Quixotes, who number among them tight-rope dancers, mining magnates, card-sharpers, and cabinet ministers, often come to regret the bed quilt of a blameless life. Only the bed quilt is not for them.
Somehow, I don’t know why, I cannot help feeling that Tartarin Sancho is less normal than Tartarin Quixote. He does such strange things; he enlists in a bank, grinds out his little span of life and dies; or he becomes a barrister, pleads cases he believes in, and also others; or Tartarin Sancho turns into a respectable stockbroker, that is to say, he never speculates, but induces other people to gamble; or he becomes a professional soldier, and passes the first half of his life hoping there will be a war; if there is none, then he passes the other half in the rather more decayed parts of Earl’s Court. These are queer trades, for they do not seem to satisfy anything that man needs if he is to feel complete. It is not enough that a man should, by the time he dies, have manufactured, let us say, large quantities of office furniture, have played golf, have gone to Eastbourne or Monte Carlo, have met the one girl whom he wrongly imagined to be the only girl in the world, ignoring the fact that there are thousands like her, have reproduced the species and left them behind to do likewise. ‘Such is life,’ says my old friend the housekeeper of Wellington Buildings, Bethnal Green; she is right, but somehow this explanation does not satisfy me, and I wonder whether all those respectable, clean-living people are not really degenerates, in so far as they have lost the desire for colour in life. It may be that Tartarin Quixote does not desire colour in life, and that he would gladly exchange the pebbly bed of romance for the eiderdown of the regular life; still, what a man does matters, as well as what a man desires. It is all very well praising the mute, inglorious Milton in the factory or the shop, but the Milton who manages to break the silence is also important in the scheme. The idea is greater than the fact, but to deny the fact would be to run Plato too far.
Therein lies the charm of the queer people, in whom London is rich, people who follow unexpected occupations, occupations that nobody would naturally think of following. One can understand how Mrs Smith comes to hear from one of her husband’s friends that they want an apprentice in the printing shop; she sends little Tommy to the printing shop, and he becomes a printer. But how does little Paolo become an ice-cream man? There are lots of ice-cream men, and so we must believe that some impulse directed young Paolo towards ice-cream. How did it happen? Was it a vocation, this selling of ice-cream? Did he discover an ice-cream opening? I don’t know; I once asked an ice-cream merchant why he sold ice-cream. He told me that he did it because his father did it. Then I asked him why his father sold ice-cream. He told me that his father sold ice-cream because his grandfather sold ice-cream. Then I saw that we might go on for a long time like this, and let him alone, for the ice-cream merchant was growing suspicious. I am glad that I do not know whether his grandfather sold ice-cream because his great-grandfather sold ice-cream, for this leaves a little to my imagination, and I am able to imagine that in the misty cinquecento, some adventurous Florentine, some relative of Benvenuto Cellini, was impelled to forsake a hospitable guild to push about the European tracks the gay little carriage that to-day bears the Italian flag, diplomatically intertwined with the flag of the country in which the merchant happens to trade, the portrait of King Victor, and, on the other side, some touching scene such as ‘Mother’s Last Kiss.’
The ice-cream man sets out every day on adventure. He may have a beat, but I prefer to think that he follows in the wake of the sun, always where it is hottest, caring little whether the street be mean or opulent. I like to think of him as at the mercy of a cold snap that ruins him, while it makes the fortune of his fellow merchant, the hot-potato man. (What a beautiful poem Tennyson would have made of that ... the golden wheel turning, and raising high, now the ice-cream, then the hot potato ... and always above a noble voice bidding them hope and pray.) Of course, there are no hot-potato men now. I wonder what happened to them. Indeed, that is what oppresses the curious when he considers the wanderers: what becomes of them when they are no longer strong enough to ply their strange trades and to range the world? Are our workhouses full of crossing-sweepers who sweep no more? Perhaps it is not so tragic, after all, to have been a crossing-sweeper and to end in the workhouse; I cannot imagine a crossing-sweeper murmuring with Mr Kipling: ‘Me that ’ave been what I’ve been!’ for he has never been more than what Mr Tim Healy would call a movable fixture. He has just sat and touched his cap, and been tipped, and has occasionally swept. But he must have meditated. No man can sit for ten hours a day in the same place without meditating; I say this without authority, for I have known only one crossing-sweeper who meditated to any effect; he was a pronounced optimist, and believed that the world was getting better and better, this because, for forty years, he had been observing the quality of people’s boots. As he put it, when he started in life some of them wore no boots; later on, they began to wear other people’s cast-off boots; now they were getting on to buy their own boots, and what with that, and what with the skirts getting shorter and shorter, and the stocking getting thinner and thinner, by gum, he was blowed if he knew what was going to happen next.
No, crossing-sweepers are not wanderers. They are limpets. I should not have thought of them if they were not street folk, for it is a distinguishing trait of the wanderer that he is a street creature, something that appears from the stones in the early morning, and at night into the stones seems to vanish. The London wanderer may have a home, but only in the sense of the London sparrow. Can you imagine the flower-girl’s home? If the flower-girl were indeed the sort of flower-girl of whom you see half a hundred portraits every year in the Royal Academy, a sort of pure and peach-blossom girl, she would have a home like Mélisande, very, very small and dainty (you know, the Charbonnel and Walker-Marcus Stone style), with chairs covered in flowered chintzes, and a white cat. At night she would lie in her little white bed, over the head of which would hang a text about the lilies of the field; her fair hair would ripple over the pillow; her rosy lips would open in a sweet smile as she dreamed of the dear little faded flowers which she had stood for the night in her tooth-glass. (Tooth-glass! Nasty realist touch; I shall never do this sort of thing properly.) Ah, if it were only like that! If she were not a big, fine woman of about forty, tied up in three thick shawls, which imperfectly conceal her tidal bodice; if only she did not so much love a quartern of gin. It would be much more romantic, but I should regret her if she were to turn into a picture post card, for she is such a jolly good, saucy sort, as a rule, and I like her thick hand terminated by five sausages, one of these sausages strangulated by a wedding ring, the thickness of which places one beyond all cynicism as to the permanence of the tie. You see her in many places, by the fountain at Piccadilly Circus, until all the nobs have bought a bunch of violets for somebody, now that they have given up the habit of buying a flower for themselves; then you see her near restaurant entrances, cleverly shaming men into buying flowers for women who are already wearing some, and who do not know what to do with the offering because it is invariably very wet; later on, outside theatres near the queues; she is all enterprise, and during the war I even saw her trying to sell to an unpromising margarine queue.
FLOWER-GIRL