Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (643 page)

Bill Johnston of the “stumpy” called “Britisher” had in his childhood sailed from that port aboard a coaling schooner. Afterwards he had “been South,” he had been in the Cape Mounted Police, then he had returned to London. He had saved a little money and bought a share in his “stumpy,” which is a barge without a topsail: he had carried freight unceasingly from Rotherhithe into the Pool or into the canals; his employers had advanced him money to buy the barge outright; he had carried freights until he had paid them back. “And now,” his eulogiser comments, “he sails that there river, Bill Johnston, with his missis for mate and his kid for apprentice; he’s in his own home with a cooking range in the cabin and a joint hanging in the hatchway for a larder. He’s his own master; he comes when he will and he goes; he draws a steady three quid a week, and he’s buying up other barges gradual.”

The young fishermen standing round dive their hands deeper into their russet breeches pockets and gaze out over the rubble of old boats, cork floats, harbour mud and piles. The old man sucks at his pipe, spits, waves a grimy hand wanting a thumb, and says, “Just such a lad as you be Bill Johnston were,” and a boy moves his hands in his pockets sighing “Ah!”

You will see scenes just the same besides the Bay of Naples and,
mutatis mutandis,
in Ukrainia and the Levant. For London calls out across the lands to the spirit of Romance, to the spirit of youth and the spirit of adventure — to the Finer Spirits.

There are such glorious plums. And the thought of them eventually fills alike those City Meccas and the square, blackened brick, balconied dock-dwellings; it fills the bare rooms in Whitechapel, where dark and hook-nosed men sit amid the stench of humanity, their mouths filled with small brass nails, silent amid the rattling clatter of hammers on boot soles. It fills, too, the behind-counters of large drapers, the very sewers with large neutral-coloured scavengers, and the great Offices in Whitehall. In the whitewashed and grimy courts of Saffron Hill splendid-limbed, half-nude children tumble, dark eyed, like the cherubs of Cinquecento pictures, round the feet of dark men puffing cigarette smoke, and fair Venetian girls lean back, smiling and chattering, in bright head-cloths, bright neck-cloths, bright bodices and bright petticoats against brilliant barrows. Hook-nosed, saturnine and imperturbable old men mix, with the air of sorcerers, flour, vanilla, cochineal, and condensed milk in pewter freezing pots like infernal machines. The Finer Spirit... because, to-day as always and for ever, the streets of London are paved with gold.

I remember reading somewhere a long time ago an ingenious article pronouncing boldly that this splendid figure of speech, this myth shining down the ages, was literally true. I remember the bare existence of the article, but I cannot remember its arguments. It was, perhaps, because the ground in front of the Mansion House is worth its area in sovereigns set on edge. Or it may have been that, according to the writer, the mud trodden underfoot was, for some profound chemical reason, worth its weight in gold. In either case a favoured few do undoubtedly possess the secret of alchemy, in that everything they touch — mud, too, no doubt — turns to gold. And the number of that favoured few is very great, because in London there are so many things to touch. Hence the immensity of London’s silent appeal. She calls to all the world.

“In the old days,” there were, say, The Holy Land, the “Wars” where thousands of mercenaries cut by turns the throats of Ferrarese, of Bolognese, of French, of Burgundians, of Kaiserliks and of each other. There were afterwards the Indies, Peru, Mexico, the Spanish Main; then more Wars of Seven, of Thirty years’ duration — then the opening up of the silent East, then goldfields. These things called to the adventurous of succeeding generations for ten centuries. But these appeals were limited. They called only to those who felt able to handle a sword, fire a thatch, cut the rings off a woman’s hand, set a sail, shoot in a wood, march a thousand miles or come out of a death of thirst. They were for the valorous alone who could work with their hands.

The appeal of London is far wider. She has seemed for the last century or so to stand on high, offering, like the figure on the Duke of York’s column, laurel wreaths to all the world. She seems to hold them for bank clerks and for bargees, for charlatans and the Founders of Faiths, to poets and to privates in the Foot Guards, to actors as to all sorts of robbers with violence. But the appeal is on the whole a modern one: it was not until the wider world of woods and seas was nearly all exploited that the Occidental peoples “discovered” London. To enter minutely into this movement would be impracticable. It would take one very deep into that odd psychology of statistics that is called Political Economy.

But it had its rise, this modern appeal of London, at about the time of the triumphing principle of Free Trade;1 it had its beginning at about the time when the world evolved the equally triumphant principles of Limited Liability, Specialism in Labour and the freedom of knowledge.

(1 I have, however, just read the book of a well received Political Economist who asserts that it did not. The modern spirit is by him attributed to the “consistent, unrelenting, true-sighted policy of five centuries of English Governmental action to a protective system which, in fact, was only relaxed when the supremacy had been reached.” It isn’t, of course, my business to assert the one or the other dogma. The supremacy of London’s particular attraction came at about the time of Free Trade. But Free Trade itself may have come because just then London had become supreme owing to five centuries of Protection. Or the reverse may have been the case.

Both are possible enough, because in the arena of Triumphant Principle pendulums swing backwards and forwards: the undisputed right of to-day becoming the open question of to-morrow, and the unquestioned wrong of the immediate future. That is a platitude because it is one of the indisputable verities. In the country they say that large clocks when they tick solemnly and slowly, thud out the words: “Alive — Dead; Alive — Dead” — because in this world at every second a child is born, a man dies. But, in London, a listener to the larger clock which ticks off the spirits of successive ages, seems to hear above the roar of the traffic, the slow reverberation: “Never — Again; Never — Again,” as principles rise and die, and rise and die again. For in London that fact forces itself upon the ear and upon the eye; it is a part of the very dust. It is, perhaps, the final lesson of the great, human place. Arts rise and die again, systems rise and die again, faiths are born only to die and to rise once more; the only thing constant and undying is the human crowd.)

It was probably foreshadowed in the opening years of last century by the triumphant figure of Napoleon I. He more than anyone stands for that other triumphant principle: What man has done man can do. He raised the standard of the adventurer not only towards respectability but towards apotheosis.

Before his day the great London adventurers were, actively, the Drakes and the Raleighs; passively, Casanovas and Cagliostros. Roderick Random’s idea of “making a career” after the Wars had failed him, was to pretend in London to be a man of fashion, to victimise an heiress, or in some miraculous way to pick up a “patron” with influence. There was not in those days any other career in the Town. Macshanes, O’Creegans, an occasional Colonel Evans, perhaps a French barber spying in the service of the Pretender, a few poets like Thomson of the “Seasons” and a few bastards like Tom Jones — all these people were obsessed by these two ideas. They sat in their best clothes toying with their snuff-boxes or ostentatiously winding up jewelled watches in boxes at the Opera; they panted to attract the attention of an heiress or they wrote dedications and fee’d the footmen of peers.

It would be fanciful to make Buonaparte too responsible for the Modern Type; but he, upon the whole, was the discoverer of the principle: apply yourself to gain the affection of the immense crowd. After his day the mere heiress and the patron as ends of a career vanish. They remain merely as stepping stones.

But the immense crowd is still the indubitable end. If hardly any of us aspire to its suffrage in its entirety, we have, in London at least, discovered the possibilities of capturing its custom in its smallest trifles. To make a corner in collar studs would be rather American: the method in London is to invent, or to buy up the invention of, a collar stud that will appeal straight to the heart of the million, a collar stud that will be not only in all the street vendors’ trays, but in all the barbers’, all the hosiers’, all the drapers’ windows. It ought to be very cheap, very picturesquely “put on the market,” and just perishable enough to make a constant supply desirable. The man who did put it on the market would immediately become the Napoleon of the Collar Stud.

There are already so many of these: there is at least one, I am not sure that there are not several, of the Press; Napoleons of the Lower Finance find their Waterloos every few years. There is a Napoleon of Pharmacy, one of the Tea Trade, one of Grocery, one of Underclothing. This is not a mere figure of speech on my part: the words are used month by month by each of these Trade Journals. There is very obviously one of politics, but that “career,” as things are in London of to-day, has become comparatively decorative — a hobby for Napoleons in retirement. What one would sigh for is no longer the making of a people’s laws or of a people’s songs, but of a people’s socks. With that behind one, one may die Chancellor of the Exchequer and a peer of the realm.

This obviously is desirable enough; we sigh very reasonably for business men in our cabinets. It is picturesque too, and inspiring, it brings about kaleidoscopic changes, and the wildest of contrasts. It makes life more worth living, because it makes life more interesting, and more amusing. The trouble, the defect of this particular Quality, is that the work suffers. The workers and their immediate dependants suffer perhaps still more.

The two clerks in that City Mecca — I happened to be watching them — saw that particular millionaire cross through the cigarette smoke and disappear. He, too, was a Napoleon of a particular financial order, and those two young men, when they rose from their dominos, pulled together their coats, shook their umbrellas a very little, and set their hats on at a particular angle. They were imitating almost gesture for gesture their hero.

I have no means of knowing how much further in the real mysteries of his craft they imitated him. I do not know whether they possessed his tremendous energy, his industry, his nerve, his knowledge of the market — whether they possessed even a shade of his temperament. It is obvious, however, that the great majority do not, that the chance against any average young man is a “thousand to one.” I used to know rather intimately a talented and in that sense romantic young man, whom I will call X. X. had several irons in the fire: that meant that he had several Napoleons he could imitate. He had a very reasonable competence: he invested it in a certain wholesale business, of which he knew little more than that fortunes were rapidly made in it. He occupied certain offices which looked down on Aldgate Pump.

The rooms appealed to his romanticism: he found it extremely picturesque to see women, actually with pails, in London, in the twentieth century, really fetching water. It was interesting, too, to look at the Trade Papers, and his office had lockers all round it. They were meant to contain samples of the raw material he traded in. I happened once to open one; it revealed rather astonishingly the tinfoil necks of champagne bottles.

X. sanguinely and amiably explained. Strauss, an awfully sharp man, the Napoleon of the... Trade, had his lockered office just round the corner: he always offered his clients — perhaps “suitors” would be the right word — that particular brand of wine. He kept it in just such a receptacle.

That part of the business X. attended to with amiability and success: he had also an idea that the Banks were advancing his partner money on some sort of “cover system”; the crop somewhere in the East was going to fail: his partner — X. financed this partner — had taken care to be early in the market: as soon as the season commenced they would be making a profit of
£90
a week, and with a few more such lucky specs, X. would be able to clear out with £50,000.

He attended at his office thus amiably, he wrote an occasional letter on his typewriter, which was rather fun, he looked out of window at the Pump, he countersigned cheques, and genially acknowledged that the... Trade was full of rogues, from ten until four.