Nights in London

Thomas Burke

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• Publié par: choid
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 78
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Nights in London, by Thomas Burke This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Nights in London Author: Thomas Burke Release Date: November 24, 2007 [eBook #23605] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NIGHTS IN LONDON*** E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Martin Pettit, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) NIGHTS IN LONDON [Pg i] BY THOMAS BURKE Author of "Limehouse Nights." NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1918 [Pg ii] First published in 1915 Popular Edition . 1918 [Pg iii] CITY DUSK The day dies in a wrath of cloud, Flecking her roofs with pallid rain, And dies its music, harsh and loud, Struck from the tiresome strings of pain. Her highways leap to festal bloom, And swallow-swift the traffic skims O'er sudden shoals of light and gloom, Made lovelier where the distance dims. Robed by her tiring-maid, the dusk, The town lies in a silvered bower, As, from a miserable husk, The lily robes herself with flower. And all her tangled streets are gay, And all her rudenesses are gone; For, howso pitiless the day, The evening brings delight alone. [Pg iv] BY THE SAME AUTHOR LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS: TALES OF C HINATOWN TWINKLETOES. [Pg v] TO MY MOTHER WHO STILL ENJOYS A NIGHT IN TOWN [Pg vi] NOTE These chapters on London life deal almost exclusively with the period before war, when the citizen was permitted to live in freedom, to develop himself to his finest possibilities, and to pursue happiness as he was meant to do. Since the delights of these happy times have been taken from us, perhaps never to be restored, it is well that they should be recorded before they are forgotten. T. B. CONTENTS CITY DUSK NOTE N OCTURNAL EVENING AN ENTERTAINMENT N IGHT (Round the Halls) MUSIC-HALL BALLET A C HINESE N IGHT (Limehouse) AT LIMEHOUSE A D OMESTIC N IGHT (Clapham Common) THE LAMPLIT HOUR A LONELY N IGHT (Kingsland Road ) A LONELY NIGHT A MUSICAL N IGHT (The Opera, the Promenades) AT THE PIANO [Pg vii] A JEWISH N IGHT (Whitechapel) LONDON ROSES A H APPY N IGHT (Surbiton and Battersea) A SUBURBAN NIGHT A WORKER'S N IGHT (The Isle of Dogs ) THE WORK CHILD A C HARITABLE N IGHT (East, West, North, South) POOR A FRENCH N IGHT (Old Compton Street ) OLD COMPTON STREET AN ITALIAN N IGHT (Clerkenwell) CLERKENWELL A BASHER'S N IGHT (Hoxton) LONDON JUNE A D OWN-STREAM N IGHT (Blackwall) WEST INDIA DOCK ROAD AN ART N IGHT (Chelsea) A LONDON MOMENT A R USSIAN N IGHT (Stepney ) STEPNEY CAUSEWAY A SCANDINAVIAN N IGHT (Shadwell) AT SHADWELL A SUNDAY N IGHT (Anywhere) SUNDAY TEA-TIME AT R ANDOM TWO IN A TAXI [Pg viii] [Pg 9] NOCTURNAL [Pg 10] EVENING From the Circus to The Square There's an avenue of light; Golden lamps are everywhere From the Circus to The Square; And the rose-winged hours there Pass like lovely birds in flight. From The Circus to The Square There's an avenue of light. London yields herself to men With the dying of the day. Let the twilight come, and then London yields herself to men. Lords of wealth or slaves of pen, We, her lovers, all will say: London yields herself to men With the dying of the day. NIGHTS IN LONDON NOCTURNAL For the few who have an eye for the beauty of townscapes, London by night is the loveliest thing in the world. Only in the London night may the connoisseur find so many vistas of sudden beauty, because London was never made: she has "growed." Paris affords no townscapes: everything there is too perfectly arranged; its artificiality is at once apparent. In London alone he finds those [Pg 11] fantastic groupings, those monstrous masses of light and shade and substance. Take London from whatever point you will and she will satisfy. For the rustic the fields of corn, the craggy mountain, the blossomy lane, or the rush of water through the greenwood. But for your good Cockney the shoals of gloom, the dusky tracery of chimney-stack and gaswork, the torn waste of tiles, and the subtle tones of dawn and dark in lurking court and alley. Was there ever a lovelier piece of colour than Cannon Street Station at night? Entering by train, you see it as a huge vault of lilac shadow, pierced by innumerable pallid arclights. The roof flings itself against the sky, a mountain of glass and interlacing girders, and about it play a hundred indefinite and ever-changing tones. Each platform seems a lane through a dim forest, where the trees are of iron and steel and the leaves are sullen windows. Or where shall you find a sweeter pastoral than that field of lights that thrills the midnight sojourner in lower Piccadilly? Or where a more rapturous river-piece than that to be glimpsed from Hungerford footbridge as the Embankment lights and stones [Pg 12] surge east and west towards Blackfriars and Chelsea? Or where a panorama like those that sweep before you from Highgate Archway or the Islington Angel? But your good Cockney finds his joy not merely in the opulent masses of gloom and glare. For him London holds infinite delicacies. There is a short street in Walworth Road—East Street—which is as perfect as any nightscape ever conceived by any artist. At day or dark it is incomparably subtle. By day it is a lane of crazy meat and vegetable stalls and tumbling houses, whose colours chime softly with their background. By night it is a dainty riot of flame and tousled stone, the gentle dusk of the near distance deepening imperceptibly to purple, and finally to haunting chaos. And—it is a beautiful thought—there are thousands and thousands of streets in London where similar ecstasy awaits the evening wanderer. There is Edgware Road, with its clamorous by-streets, alluring at all times, but strangely so at twilight. To dash down the great road on a motor-'bus is to take a joy-ride through a fairyland of common things newly revealed, and to look back from Dollis Hill is to look back, not on Kilburn or Paddington or Marylebone, but on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Moreover, London wears always new beauties for the faithful—new aspects, sudden revelations. What was beautiful yesterday is gone, and a new splendour is presented. Building operations are begun here, house-breaking is in progress there, the gaunt scaffolding making its own beauty against the night sky. Always, throughout the seasons, her townscapes are there to cheer, to entrance, to satisfy. At dawn or noon or dusk she stands superb; but perhaps most superb when the day is done, and her lights, the amazing whites and yellows and golds, blossom on every hand in their tangled garden and her lovers cluster thicker and thicker to worship at her shrine and spend a night in town. Nights in town! If you are a good Cockney that phrase will sting your blood and [Pg 13] set your heart racing back to—well, to those nights in town, gay or sad, glorious or desperate, but ever sweet to linger upon. There is no night in all the world so rich in delicate delights as the London night. You cannot have a bad night in London unless you are a bad Cockney—or a tourist; for the difference between the London night and the continental night is just the difference between making a cult of pleasure and a passion of it. The Paris night, the Berlin night, the Viennese night—how dreary and clangy and obvious! But the London night is spontaneous, always expressive of your mood. Your gaieties, your little escapades are never ready-made here. You must go out for them and stumble upon them, wondrously, in dark places, being sure that whatever you may want London will give you. She asks nothing; she gives everything. You need bring nothing but love. Only to very few of us is she the stony-hearted stepmother. We, who are all her lovers, active or passive, know that she loves each one of us. The passive lover loves her as he loves his mother, not knowing his love, not knowing if she be beautiful, not caring, but knowing that she is there, has always been there, to listen, to help, to solace. But the others who love her consciously, love her as mistress or wife. For them she is more perfect than perfection, adorable in every mood, season, or attire. They love her in velvet, they love her in silk; she is marvellous in broadcloth, shoddy, or corduroy. But, like a woman, her deepest beauty she holds for the soft hours when the brute day is ended and all mankind sighs for rest and warmth. Then she is her very self. Beauty she has by day, but it is the cold, incomplete beauty of a woman before she has given herself. With the lyric evening she surrenders all the wealth and wonder of her person to her lover: beauty in full flower. As a born Londoner, I cannot remember a time when London was not part of me and I part of London. Things that happen to London happen to me. [Pg 14] Changes in London are changes in me, and changes in my affairs and circumstances have again and again changed the entire face of London. Whatever the mood or the occasion, London is behind it. I can never say that I am happy or downcast. London and I are happy, London and I are having a good time, or are lost in the deeps. Always she has fallen to my mood, caught the temper of the hour; always is waiting, the fond mother or the gracious mistress, with stretched hand, to succour and sympathize in sorrow, to rejoice in good fortune. And always it is London by lamplight which I vision when I think of her, for it was the London of lamplight that first called to me, as a child. She hardly exists for me in any other mood or dress. It was London by night that awoke me to a sense of that terrible spirit which we call Beauty, to be possessed by which is as unsettling and as sweetly frightful as to be possessed by Love. London, of course, is always calling us, if we have ears