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CHAPTER III

§I

(Scene: Trafalgar Square. Dimly visible through the mist, a dozen people, Dorothy among them, are grouped about one of the benches near the north parapet.)

Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary, ’a-il Ma-ary——” (Big Ben strikes ten.)

Snouter (mimicking the noise): “Ding dong, ding dong! Shut your —— noise, can’t you? Seven more hours of it on this —— square before we got the chance of a set-down and a bit of sleep! Cripes!”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Non sum qualis eram boni sub regno Edwardi! In the days of my innocence, before the Devil carried me up into a high place and dropped me into the Sunday newspapers—that is to say when I was Rector of Little Fawley-cum-Dewsbury . . .”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy, with my willy willy——”

Mrs. Wayne: “Ah, dearie, as soon as I set eyes on you I knew as you was a lady born and bred. You and me’ve known what it is to come down in the world, haven’t we, dearie? It ain’t the same for us as what it is for some of these others here.”

Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary, ’a-il Ma-ary, full of grace!”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Calls himself a bloody husband, does he? Four pound a week in Covent Garden and ’is wife doing a starry in the bloody Square! Husband!”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Happy days, happy days! My ivied church under the sheltering hillside—my red-tiled Rectory slumbering among Elizabethan yews! My library, my vinery, my cook, house-parlourmaid and groom-gardener! My cash in the bank, my name in Crockford! My black suit of irreproachable cut, my collar back to front, my watered silk cassock in the church precincts . . .”

Mrs. Wayne: “Of course the one thing I do thank God for, dearie, is that my poor dear mother never lived to see this day. Because if she ever had of lived to see the day when her eldest daughter—as was brought up, mind you, with no expense spared and milk straight from the cow . . .”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Husband!”

Ginger: “Come on, less ’ave a drum of tea while we got the chance. Last we’ll get to-night—coffee shop shuts at ’ar-parse ten.”

The Kike: “Oh Jesus! This bloody cold’s gonna kill me! I ain’t got nothing on under my trousers. Oh Je-e-e-eeze!”

Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary——”

Snouter: “Fourpence! Fourpence for six —— hours on the bum! And that there nosing sod with the wooden leg queering our pitch at every boozer between Aldgate and the Mile End Road. With ’is —— wooden leg and ’is war medals as ’e bought in Lambeth Cut! Bastard!”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy, with my willy willy——”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Well, I told the bastard what I thought of ’im, anyway. ‘Call yourself a man?’ I says. ‘I’ve seen things like you kep’ in a bottle at the ’orspital,’ I says. . . .”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Happy days, happy days! Roast beef and bobbing villagers, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding! Sunday mornings in my oaken stall, cool flower scent and frou-frou of surplices mingling in the sweet corpse-laden air! Summer evenings when the late sun slanted through my study window—I pensive, boozed with tea, in fragrant wreaths of Cavendish, thumbing drowsily some half-calf volume—Poetical Works of William Shenstone, Esq., Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, J. Lempriere, D.D., professor of immoral theology . . .”

Ginger: “Come on, ’oo’s for that drum of riddleme-ree? We got the milk and we got the tea. Question is, ’oo’s got any bleeding sugar?”

Dorothy: “This cold, this cold! It seems to go right through you! Surely it won’t be like this all night?”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Oh, cheese it! I ’ate these snivelling tarts.”

Charlie: “Ain’t it going to be a proper perisher, too? Look at the perishing river mist creeping up that there column. Freeze the fish-hooks off of ole Nelson before morning.”

Mrs. Wayne: “Of course, at the time that I’m speaking of we still had our little tobacco and sweetstuff business on the corner, you’ll understand. . . .”

The Kike: “Oh Je-e-e-eeze! Lend’s that overcoat of yours, Ginger. I’m bloody freezing!”

Snouter: “—— double-crossing bastard! P’raps I won’t bash ’is navel in when I get a ’old of ’im!”

Charlie: “Fortunes o’ war, boy, fortunes o’ war. Perishing Square to-night—rumpsteak and kip on feathers to-morrow. What else d’you expect on perishing Thursday?”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Shove up, Daddy, shove up! Think I want your lousy old ’ed on my shoulder—me a married woman?”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “For preaching, chanting and intoning I was unrivalled. My ‘Lift up your Hearts’ was renowned throughout the diocese. All styles I could do you, High Church, Low Church Broad Church and No Church. Throaty Anglo-Cat Warblings, straight from the shoulder muscular Anglican, or the adenoidal Low Church whine in which still lurk the Houyhnhnm-notes of neighing chapel elders. . . .”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy——”

Ginger: “Take your ’ands off that bleeding overcoat, Kikie. You don’t get no clo’es of mine while you got the chats on you.”

Charlie (singing):

“As pants the ’art for cooling streams,

When ’eated in the chase——”

Mrs. McElligot (in her sleep): “Was ’at you, Michael dear?”

Mrs. Bendigo: “It’s my belief as the sneaking bastard ’ad another wife living when ’e married me.”

Mr. Tallboys (from the roof of his mouth, stage curate-wise, reminiscently): “If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony . . .”

The Kike: “A pal! A bloody pal! And won’t lend his bloody overcoat!”

Mrs. Wayne: “Well, now as you’ve mentioned it, I must admit as I never was one to refuse a nice cup of tea. I know that when our poor dear mother was alive, pot after pot we used to . . .”

Nosy Watson (to himself, angrily): “Sod! . . . Gee’d into it and then a stretch all round. . . . Never even done the bloody job. . . . Sod!”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy——”

Mrs. McElligot (half asleep): “Dear Michael. . . . He was real loving, Michael was. Tender an’ true. . . . Never looked at another man since dat evenin’ when I met’m outside Kronk’s slaughter-house an’ he gimme de two pound o’ sausage as he’d bummed off de International Stores for his own supper. . . .”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Well, I suppose we’ll get that bloody tea this time to-morrow.”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting, reminiscently): “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion! . . .”

Dorothy: “Oh, this cold, this cold!”

Snouter: “Well, I don’t do no more —— starries this side of Christmas. I’ll ’ave my kip to-morrow if I ’ave to cut it out of their bowels.”

Nosy Watson: “Detective, is he? Smith of the Flying Squad! Flying Judas more likely! All they can bloody do—copping the old offenders what no beak won’t give a fair chance.”

Ginger: “Well, I’m off for the fiddlede-dee. ’Oo’s got a couple of clods for the water?”

Mrs. McElligot (waking): “Oh dear, oh dear! If my back ain’t fair broke! Oh holy Jesus, if dis bench don’t catch you across de kidneys! An’ dere was me dreamin’ I was warm in kip wid a nice cup a’ tea an’ two o’ buttered toast waitin’ by me bedside. Well, dere goes me last wink o’ sleep till I gets into Lambeth public lib’ry to-morrow.”

Daddy (his head emerging from within his overcoat like a tortoise’s from within its shell): “Wassat you said, boy? Paying money for water! How long’ve you bin on the road, you ignorant young scut? Money for bloody water? Bum it, boy, bum it! Don’t buy what you can bum and don’t bum what you can steal. That’s my word—fifty year on the road, man and boy.” (Retires within his coat.)

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “O all ye works of the Lord——”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy——”

Charlie: “ ’Oo was it copped you, Nosy?”

The Kike: “Oh Je-e-e-eeze!”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Shove up, shove up! Seems to me some folks think they’ve took a mortgage on this bloody seat.”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “O all ye works of the Lord, curse ye the Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!”

Mrs. McElligot: “What I always says is, it’s always us poor bloody Catholics dat’s down in de bloody dumps.”

Nosy Watson: “Smithy. Flying Squad—flying sod! Give us the plans of the house and everything, and then had a van full of coppers waiting and nipped the lot of us. I wrote it up in the Black Maria:

‘Detective Smith knows how to gee;

Tell him he’s a —— from me.’ ”

Snouter: “ ’Ere, what about our —— tea? Go on, Kikie, you’re a young ’un; shut that —— noise and take the drums. Don’t you pay nothing. Worm it out of the old tart. Snivel. Do the doleful.”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “O all ye children of men, curse ye the Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!”

Charlie: “What, is Smithy crooked too?”

Mrs. Bendigo: “I tell you what, girls, I tell you what gets me down, and that’s to think of my bloody husband snoring under four blankets and me freezing in this bloody Square. That’s what I can’t stomach. The unnatural sod!”

Ginger (singing): “ ‘There they go—in their joy——’ Don’t take that there drum with the cold sausage in it, Kikie.”

Nosy Watson: “Crooked? Crooked? Why, a corkscrew ’ud look like a bloody bradawl beside of him! There isn’t one of them double —— sons of whores in the Flying Squad but ’ud sell his grandmother to the knackers for two pound ten and then sit on her gravestone eating potato crisps. The geeing, narking toerag!”

Charlie: “Perishing tough. ’Ow many convictions you got?”

Ginger (singing):

“There they go—in their joy—

’Appy girl—lucky boy——”

Nosy Watson: “Fourteen. You don’t stand no chance with that lot against you.”

Mrs. Wayne: “What, don’t he keep you, then?”

Mrs. Bendigo: “No, I’m married to this one, sod ’im!”

Charlie: “I got perishing nine myself.”

Mr. Tallboys (chanting): “O Ananias, Azarias and Misael, curse ye the Lord, curse Him and vilify Him for ever!”

Ginger (singing):

“There they go—in their joy—

’Appy girl—lucky boy—

But ’ere am I-I-I—

Broken—’a-a-aarted!

God, I ain’t ’ad a dig in the grave for three days. ’Ow long since you washed your face, Snouter?”

Mrs. McElligot: “Oh dear, oh dear! If dat boy don’t come soon wid de tea me insides’ll dry up like a bloody kippered herring.”

Charlie: “You can’t sing, none of you. Ought to ’ear Snouter and me ’long towards Christmas time when we pipe up ‘Good King Wenceslas’ outside the boozers. ’Ymns, too. Blokes in the bar weep their perishing eyes out to ’ear us. ’Member when we tapped twice at the same ’ouse by mistake, Snouter? Old tart fair tore the innards out of us.”

Mr. Tallboys (marching up and down behind an imaginary drum and singing):

“All things vile and damnable,

All creatures great and small——”

(Big Ben strikes half-past ten.)

Snouter (mimicking the clock): “Ding dong, ding dong! Six and a —— half hours of it! Cripes!”

Ginger: “Kikie and me knocked off four of them safety-razor blades in Woolworths’s afternoon. I’ll ’ave a dig in the bleeding fountains to-morrow if I can bum a bit of soap.”

Deafie: “When I was a stooard in the P. and O., we used to meet them black Indians two days out at sea, in them there great canoes as they call catamarans, catching sea-turtles the size of dinner tables.”

Mrs. Wayne: “Did you used to be a clergyman, then, sir?”

Mr. Tallboys (halting): “After the order of Melchizedec. There is no question of ’used to be,’ Madam. Once a priest always a priest. Hoc est corpus hocus pocus. Even though unfrocked—un-Crocked, we call it—and dog-collar publicly torn off by the bishop of the diocese.”

Ginger (singing): “ ‘There they go—in their joy——’ Thank Christ! ’Ere comes Kikie. Now for the consultation-free!”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Not before it’s bloody needed.”

Charlie: “ ’Ow come they give you the sack, mate? Usual story? Choirgirls in the family way?”

Mrs. McElligot: “You’ve took your time, ain’t you, young man? But come on, let’s have a sup of it before me tongue falls out o’ me bloody mouth.”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Shove up, Daddy! You’re sitting on my packet of bloody sugar.”

Mr. Tallboys: “Girls is a euphemism. Only the usual flannel-bloomered hunters of the unmarried clergy. Church hens—altar-dressers and brass-polishers—spinsters growing bony and desperate. There is a demon that enters into them at thirty-five.”

The Kike: “The old bitch wouldn’t give me the hot water. Had to tap a toff in the street and pay a penny for it.”

Snouter: “—— likely story! Bin swigging it on the way more likely.”

Daddy (emerging from his overcoat): “Drum o’ tea, eh? I could sup a drum o’ tea.” (Belches slightly.)

Charlie: “When their bubs get like perishing razor strops? I know.”

Nosy Watson: “Tea—bloody catlap. Better’n that cocoa in the stir, though. Lend’s your cup, matie.”

Ginger: “Jest wait’ll I knock a ’ole in this tin of milk. Shy us a money or your life, someone.”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Easy with that bloody sugar! ’Oo paid for it, I sh’d like to know?”

Mr. Tallboys: “When their bubs get like razor strops. I thank thee for that humour. Pippin’s Weekly made quite a feature of the case. ‘Missing Canon’s Sub Rosa Romance. Intimate Revelations.’ And also an Open Letter in John Bull: ‘To a Skunk in Shepherd’s Clothing.’ A pity—I was marked out for preferment. (To Dorothy) Gaiters in the family, if you understand me. You would not think, would you, that the time has been when this unworthy backside dented the plush cushions of a cathedral stall?”

Charlie: “ ’Ere comes Florry. Thought she’d be along soon as we got the tea going. Got a nose like a perishing vulture for tea, that girl ’as.”

Snouter: “Ay, always on the tap. (Singing):

‘Tap, tap, tappety tap,

I’m a perfec’ devil at that——’ ”

Mrs. McElligot: “De poor kid, she ain’t got no sense. Why don’t she go up to Piccadilly Circus where she’d get her five bob reg’lar? She won’t do herself no good bummin’ round de Square wid a set of miserable ole Tobies.”

Dorothy: “Is that milk all right?”

Ginger: “All right?” (Applies his mouth to one of the holes in the tin and blows. A sticky greyish stream dribbles from the other.)

Charlie: “What luck, Florry? ’Ow ’bout that perishing toff as I see you get off with just now?”

Dorothy: “It’s got ‘Not fit for babies’ on it.”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Well, you ain’t a bloody baby, are you? You can drop your Buckingham Palace manners, ’ere, dearie.”

Florry: “Stood me a coffee and a fag—mingy bastard! That tea you got there, Ginger? You always was my favourite, Ginger dear.”

Mrs. Wayne: “There’s jest thirteen of us.”

Mr. Tallboys: “As we are not going to have any dinner you need not disturb yourself.”

Ginger: “What-o, ladies and gents! Tea is served. Cups forward, please!”

The Kike: “Oh Jeez! You ain’t filled my bloody cup half full!”

Mrs. McElligot: “Well, here’s luck to us all, an’ a better bloody kip to-morrow. I’d ha’ took shelter in one o’ dem dere churches meself, only de b ——s won’t let you in if so be as dey t’ink you got de chats on you.” (Drinks.)

Mrs. Wayne: “Well, I can’t say as this is exactly the way as I’ve been accustomed to drinking a cup of tea—but still——” (Drinks.)

Charlie: “Perishing good cup of tea.” (Drinks.)

Deafie: “And there was flocks of them there green parakeets in the coco-nut palms, too.” (Drinks.)

Mr. Tallboys:

“What potions have I drunk of siren tears,

Distilled from limbecs foul as Hell within!”

(Drinks.)

Snouter: “Last we’ll get till five in the —— morning.” (Drinks.)

(Florry produces a broken shop-made cigarette from her stocking, and cadges a match. The men, except Daddy, Deafie and Mr. Tallboys, roll cigarettes from picked-up fag-ends. The red ends glow through the misty twilight, like a crooked constellation, as the smokers sprawl on the bench, the ground or the slope of the parapet.)

Mrs. Wayne: “Well, there now! A nice cup of tea do seem to warm you up, don’t it, now? Not but what I don’t feel it a bit different, as you might say, not having no nice clean table-cloth like I’ve been accustomed to, and the beautiful china tea service as our mother used to have; and always, of course, the very best tea as money could buy—real Pekoe Points at two and nine a pound. . . .”

Ginger (singing):

“There they go—in their joy—

’Appy girl—lucky boy——”

Mr. Tallboys (singing, to the tune of “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles”): “Keep the aspidistra flying——”

Charlie: “ ’Ow long you two kids been in Smoke?”

Snouter: “I’m going to give them boozers such a doing to-morrow as they won’t know if they’re on their ’eads or their —— ’eels. I’ll ’ave my ’alf dollar if I ’ave to ’old them upside down and —— shake ’em.”

Ginger: “Three days. We come down from York—skippering ’alf the way. God, wasn’t it jest about bleeding nine carat gold, too!”

Florry: “Got any more tea there, Ginger dear? Well, so long, folks. See you all at Wilkins’s to-morrow morning.”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Thieving little tart! Swallers ’er tea and then jacks off without so much as a thank you. Can’t waste a bloody moment.”

Mrs. McElligot: “Cold? Ay, I b’lieve you. Skipperin’ in de long grass wid no blanket an’ de bloody dew fit to drown you, an’ den can’t get your bloody fire goin’ in de mornin’, an’ got to tap de milkman ’fore you can make yourself a drum o’ tea. I’ve had some’v it when me and Michael was on de toby.”

Mrs. Bendigo: “Even go with blackies and Chinamen she will, the dirty little cow.”

Dorothy: “How much does she get each time?”

Snouter: “Tanner.”

Dorothy: “Sixpence?”

Charlie: “Bet your life. Do it for a perishing fag along towards morning.”

Mrs. McElligot: “I never took less’n a shilling, never.”

Ginger: “Kikie and me skippered in a boneyard one night. Woke up in the morning and found I was lying on a bleeding gravestone.”

The Kike: “She ain’t half got the crabs on her, too.”

Mrs. McElligot: “Michael an’ me skippered in a pigsty once. We was just a-creepin’ in, when, ‘Holy Mary!’ says Michael, ‘dere’s a pig in here!’ ‘Pig be ——!’ I says, ‘he’ll keep us warm anyway.’ So in we goes, an’ dere was an old sow lay on her side snorin’ like a traction engine. I creeps up agen her an’ puts me arms round her, an’ begod she kept me warm all night. I’ve skippered worse.”

Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy——”

Charlie: “Don’t ole Deafie keep it up? Sets up a kind of a ’umming inside of ’im, ’e says.”

Daddy: “When I was a boy we didn’t live on this ’ere bread and marg. and tea and suchlike trash. Good solid tommy we ’ad in them days. Beef stoo. Black pudden. Bacon dumpling. Pig’s ’ead. Fed like a fighting-cock on a tanner a day. And now fifty year I’ve ’ad of it on the toby. Spud-grabbing, pea-picking, lambing, turnip-topping—everythink. And sleeping in wet straw and not once in a year you don’t fill your guts right full. Well——!” (Retires within his coat.)

Mrs. McElligot: “But he was real bold, Michael was. He’d go in anywhere. Many’s de time we’ve broke into an empty house an’ kipped in de best bed. ‘Other people got homes,’ he’d say. ‘Why shouldn’t we have’m too?’ ”

Ginger (singing): “But I’m dan-cing with tears—in my eyes——”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Absurnet haeres Caecuba dignior! To think that there were twenty-one bottles of Clos St. Jacques 1911 in my cellar still, that night when the baby was born and I left for London on the milk train! . . .”

Mrs. Wayne: “And as for the wreaths we ’ad sent us when our mother died—well, you wouldn’t believe! ’Uge, they was. . . .”

Mrs. Bendigo: “If I ’ad my time over again I’d marry for bloody money.”

Ginger (singing):

“But I’m dan-cing with tears—in my eyes——

Cos the girl—in my arms—isn’t you-o-ou!”

Nosy Watson: “Some of you lot think you got a bloody lot to howl about, don’t you? What about a poor sod like me? You wasn’t narked into the stir when you was eighteen year old, was you?”

The Kike: “Oh Je-e-eeeze!”

Charlie: “Ginger, you can’t sing no more’n a perishing tomcat with the guts-ache. Just you listen to me. I’ll give y’a treat. (Singing): Jesu, lover of my soul——”

Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Et ego in Crockford. . . . With Bishops and Archbishops and with all the Company of Heaven. . . .”

Nosy Watson: “D’you know how I got in the stir the first time? Narked by my own sister—yes, my own bloody sister! My sister’s a cow if ever there was one. She got married to a religious maniac—he’s so bloody religious that she’s got fifteen kids now—well, it was him put her up to narking me. But I got back on ’em, I can tell you. First thing I done when I come out of the stir, I buys a hammer and goes round to my sister’s house, and smashed her piano to bloody matchwood. ‘There!’ I says, ‘that’s what you get for narking me! You nosing mare!’ I says.”

Dorothy: “This cold, this cold! I don’t know whether my feet are there or not.”