Читать книгу Unchanging Quest - Philip Gibbs - Страница 3

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AM writing this story about a woman I loved because it pleases me to do so in remembrance of her spirit, and because her early days when I first knew her recall many incidents of my own life belonging to a past which seems strangely remote after all that has happened in recent years. Besides, the story of Katherine and Michael is in some ways the history of my generation and has a warning for the next—useless, but interesting.

The beginning of it, as far as my friendship with Katherine is concerned, goes back to the time when I was a boy of eighteen, and to a night when Paul Lambert—three years older than myself, and a medical student with a cheery view of life—took me to Romilly Hall, Whitechapel.

It was raining, and Paul and I had to sit on the top of a horse-omnibus which went from Ludgate Circus. It was the first time I had been to the East End of London—my people living in the well-to-do smugness of Clapham Park when that suburb was still “genteel”—and it filled me with a sense of disgust because of the hideous squalor of its life. It was not the East End of to-day, where one no longer sees such foul aspects of life, though there is misery enough still. Down the Whitechapel Road there was a sort of fair, with naphtha flares blowing wildly in the wet wind above the wooden booths, where bedraggled women with filthy children picked at chunks of offal and rotten fruit among crowds of men in battered bowlers, ragged overcoats, and broken boots. From a gin-palace some coster girls came out, shrieking with laughter and holding their skirts high as they swayed to and fro, with their feathered hats getting rain-sodden. One of them shouted some obscene words at a young lout with a cap pulled over his eyes, leaning against the wall of the “pub.” He took a hand out of his pocket and swiped her across the face with a clenched fist. We heard the girl’s scream of rage, the shrill laughter of her friends, and the blowing of a police-whistle.

“A cat and dog fight,” said Paul, laughing as he looked on over the rail of the ’bus. “Lots of fun on a Saturday night!”

Outside another public-house a mob of young hooligans were jeering at an old woman like Dan Leno as the widow Twankey, shrieking like one possessed of a devil as two policemen tried to strap her down on a stretcher. At the opposite corner a Salvation Army lass shook her tambourine at the passing crowd who were hurrying under broken umbrellas or slouching by with upturned collars, and we heard her crying out something about the Blood of Jesus, joyfully. From side streets young women with painted faces, large picture hats, and long skirts which they held up over high-heeled boots, came to the edge of the wet pavements and hailed the ’buses going West, but already overcrowded.

“Off to Piccadilly,” said Paul. “Boat-race night.... As the Scripture hath it, ‘Beware of women who paint their faces and stand at the corner of the street.’ ”

It was London in 1894.

Romilly Hall was down a narrow passage off the Whitechapel Road. It was an institution founded by Paul’s father, Canon Lambert, as a centre of social science in the London slums. Paul, with the irreverence of youth, called it the House of Humbug. It was a rendezvous of young Oxford men and others, of high ideals and liberal views, who believed that the masses would benefit by their intellectual and moral companionship. The Canon, who had a greater sense of humour, believed that the young Oxford men would get more advantage themselves, morally and intellectually, by contact with dock-labourers, mechanics, sempstresses, and charwomen who faced the insecurities of life in East London with a courage which never ceased to amaze him.

That night, when I went there for the first time, I became fired with enthusiasm for this experiment in social idealism, although Paul thought the whole thing “dashed silly.” But I had sense of humour enough to see that, as a social evening, it was not altogether successful from the point of view of the working-folk who had been induced to attend. The charladies and coster girls had tidied themselves up in a poor way, and sat on stiff-backed chairs, looking uncomfortable and class-conscious. They laughed or squealed at the Canon’s little jokes as he passed down their lines, enquiring after their husbands—so often “in drink” again, or “put away” for three months—with benevolence shining through his pince-nez, his bald head reflecting the luminance of the gas-jets, his fluffy white whiskers framing his lean old face with its thin, delicate, ironical lips.

“Ain’t ’e an ole dear?” whispered one of the women.

Mrs. Lambert, a bustling, organising lady who happened to be the daughter of an obscure peer, though she dressed almost as shabbily as some of the charwomen, did her best in a cheery way to make her guests “mix,” and served out tea and coffee, sandwiches and buns, indefatigably, while she snatched little conversations, on the political situation and the latest measures of social reform, with professors, journalists, and trade-union leaders.

It seemed to me, a shy but observant boy, that the guests didn’t “mix” as well as might have been hoped. A few “horny-handed sons of toil” stood awkwardly around in clean collars and respectable clothes, rather like the models of famous criminals in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s—before the fire. They looked as though they wanted to spit somewhere, but found themselves inhibited, as we should say now, by the polished boards. Here and there a man in a dog’s-ear collar and red tie argued aggressively about social economics with the young Oxford or Cambridge men, who were hopelessly self-conscious and affected a smiling deference to half-baked ideas. Their high-toned voices clashed with the pure Cockney of the earnest young men from Limehouse, Bermondsey, and West Ham.

That night there was an address by a distinguished professor, whose name I forget, on the social history of Europe, followed by a discussion, when some of the young men in the red ties became hopelessly involved in the intricacies of English grammar, lost their notes, spluttered convulsively, or sat down abruptly and sullenly after agonised endeavours to express their belief in the utter wrongness of everything. Some of them are now ex-Cabinet Ministers, with great gifts of speech. Paul annoyed his father considerably by guffawing loudly when one of them quoted a Latin tag with a false quantity, but I was not so hypercritical.

It was after the debate that evening that I first saw Katherine. Like the young lady in The Sorrows of Werther, she was helping her mother with the tea and coffee and handing round bread and butter.

She was twenty then, and a tall, slim girl, with coiled, brown hair. She had shy, grey eyes and irregular features which, for some reason, were wonderfully attractive, and a lurking humour about her lips. It was no wonder that the young University men seemed to forget their mission to elevate the working classes, or to revolutionise the social conditions of England, and edged round with obsequious offers to help in regard to coffee cups and buns. Being barely eighteen, and painfully self-conscious, I was completely tongue-tied at first when Paul pushed me forward among this group and introduced me to his sister.

“Here’s a lad I want you to know, Kitty. A new idealist for you, and a lily-white soul.”

Katherine laughed as she gave me her hand, and her candid glance seemed to test what quality I had.

“We’ve lots of idealists here,” she said. “It’s a home for them. But they don’t do Paul any good. He’s a dreadful materialist.”

Paul grinned, and seemed to take this as a compliment.

“I try to restore the mental balance of the family.”

He explained to me that Katherine spent most of her time nursing dirty little babies, visiting their filthy homes, and trying to reform their disreputable parents. He didn’t approve of it.

“Why can’t you leave these poor devils alone?” he asked. “Honest working men don’t want to be poked up by social inquisitors when they’re comfortably drunk in their back parlours after beating their objectionable wives. And why shouldn’t they get drunk? It gives them their only escape from ‘demnition’ drudgery. It’s a biological necessity, as a reaction against their devitalising environment.”

“Yes, but we ought to alter their environment,” I said, finding my tongue for the first time in the presence of Paul’s sister. I had recently become a convert to the gospel of the Fabian Society, which at that time, under the leadership of youngish Mr. H. G. Wells, and early-middle-aged Mr. Bernard Shaw, was devising a new Utopia, in which poverty, disease, and unpleasant work should be abolished for ever.

“That’s father’s idea,” said Katherine generously. “You ought to have a talk with him. Paul’s a heretic on these subjects.”

She smiled at her brother as though his heresy didn’t distress her, and he proclaimed his faith as a free thinker, specialising in bacteriology, which he called “bugs”—more honest, he thought, than his father’s religious compromises and his power of believing what he knew to be untrue.

“The intellectual arrogance of youth!” said Katherine, as though she were a hundred years old herself. She went out of the way that evening to talk to me, though so many good-looking men were anxious for her conversation, and she seemed to take an interest in my literary ambitions and ideas, which I blurted out to her in an eager, boyish way, talkative like all shy people when they find themselves in sympathetic company and forget their self-consciousness.

That night I went home in love with her, and Whitechapel became my Paradise. My father and mother wondered a little anxiously what took me so often to the East End at night and brought me back home by the last omnibus, with a strange luminance in my eyes. My father, with his Tory views—he regarded Gladstone as a wicked old traitor—did not approve much of Romilly Hall, which he thought was “a hot-bed of Socialism,” and he called Canon Lambert a silly old humbug who was doing a lot of harm to the country by putting false ideas into the people’s heads. My mother—who had no politics, and an anxious love for me, her sensitive plant—came into my room one night after one of my trips to Whitechapel, and put her hand on my shoulder.

“I believe you’re in love!” she said. “My foolish darling! Tell me all about her.”