CHAPTER XVIII
SMOKY ENGLAND (continued)
AT Middleton the mills are majestically large and the cottages relatively minute. There is a famous old inn here, very picturesque to look upon, and Somebody of Something’s comfortable manor, but they were not the point for me. In one of its old streets, in the dark doorway of an old house, I encountered an old woman, very heavy, very pale, very weary, who stood leaning against the door post.
“What do you burn here, gas or oil?” I asked, interested to obtain information on almost any topic and seeking a pretext for talking to her.
“Hey?” she replied, looking at me wearily, but making no other move.
“What do you burn?” I asked. “What do you use for light, gas or oil?”
“Ile,” she replied heavily. “You’ll have to talk very loud. I’m gettin’ old and I’m goin’ to die pretty soon.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “you’re not old enough for that. You’re going to live a long time yet.”
“Hey?” she asked.
I repeated what I had said.
“No,” she mumbled, and now I saw she had no teeth. “I’m gettin’ old. I’m eighty-two and I’m goin’ to die. I been workin’ in the mills all my life.”
“Have you ever been out of Middleton?” I asked.
“Hey?” she replied.
I repeated.
“Yes, to Manchester, Saturdays. Not of late, though. Not in years and years. I’m very sick, though, now. I’m goin’ to die.”
I could see from her look that what she said was true. Only her exceeding weariness employed her mind. I learned that water came from a hydrant in the yard, that the kitchen floor was of earth. Then I left, noticing as I went that she wore wooden-soled shoes.
In the public square at Boulton, gathered about the city-hall, where one would suppose for the sake of civic dignity no unseemly spectacle would be permitted, was gathered all the paraphernalia of a shabby, eighth-rate circus—red wagons, wild animal and domestic horse tents, the moderate-sized main tent, the side show, the fat woman’s private wagon, a cage and the like. I never saw so queer a scene. The whole square was crowded with tents, great and small; but there was little going on, for a drizzling rain was in progress. Can human dullness sink lower? I asked myself, feeling that the civic heart of things was being profaned. Could utmost drabbiness out-drab this? I doubted it. Why should the aldermen permit it? Yet I have no doubt this situation appealed exactly to the imagination of the working population. I can conceive that it would be about the only thing that would. It was just raw and cheap and homely enough to do it. I left with pleasure.
When I came into Oldham on a tram-car from Rochdale, it was with my head swimming from the number of mills I had seen. I have described the kind—all new. But I did not lose them here.
It was the luncheon hour and I was beginning to grow hungry. As I walked along dull streets I noticed several small eating-places labeled “fish, chip, and pea restaurant” and “tripe, trotters, and cow-heels restaurant,” which astonished me greatly—really astonished me. I had seen only one such before in my life and that was this same morning in Middleton—a “fish, chip, and pea restaurant”; but I did not get the point sufficiently clearly to make a note of it. The one that I encountered this afternoon had a sign in the window which stated that unquestionably its chips were the best to be procured anywhere and very nourishing. A plate of them standing close by made it perfectly plain that potato chips were meant. No recommendation was given to either the fish or the peas. I pondered over this, thinking that such restaurants must be due to the poverty of the people and that meat being very dear, these three articles of diet were substituted. Here in Oldham, however, I saw that several of these restaurants stood in very central places where the rents should be reasonably high and the traffic brisk. It looked as though they were popular for some other reason. I asked a policeman.
“What is a ‘fish, chip, and pea’ restaurant?” I asked.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said, “it’s a place where a man who’s getting over a spree goes to eat. Those things are good for the stomach.”
I pondered over this curiously. There were four such restaurants in the immediate vicinity, to say nothing of the one labeled “tripe, trotters, and cow-heels,” which astonished me even more.
“And what’s that for?” I asked of the same officer.
“The same thing. A man who’s been drinking eats those things.”
I had to laugh, and yet this indicated another characteristic of a wet, rainy climate, namely considerable drinking. At the next corner a man, a woman, and a child conferring slightly confirmed my suspicion.
“Come on,” said the man to the woman, all at once, “let’s go to the pub. A beer’ll do you good.”
The three started off together, the child hanging by the woman’s hand. I followed them with my eyes, for I could not imagine quite such a scene in America—not done just in this way. Women—a certain type—go to the back rooms of saloons well enough; children are sent with pails for beer; but just this particular combination of husband, wife, and child is rare, I am sure.
And such public houses! To satisfy myself of their character I went to three in three different neighborhoods. Like those I saw in London and elsewhere around it, they were pleasant enough in their arrangement, but gloomy. The light from the outside was meager, darkened as it was by smoke and rain. If you went on back into the general lounging-room, lights were immediately turned on, for otherwise it was not bright enough to see. If you stayed in the front at the bar proper it was still dark, and one light—a mantled gas-jet—was kept burning. I asked the second barmaid with whom I conferred about this:
“You don’t always have to keep a light burning here, do you?”
“Always, except two or three months in summer,” she replied. “Sometimes in July and August we don’t need it. As a rule we do.”
“Surely, it isn’t always dark and smoky like this?”
“You should see it sometimes, if you call this bad,” she replied contemptuously. “It’s black.”
“I should say it’s very near that now,” I commented.
“Oh, no, most of the mills are not running. You should see it when it’s foggy and the mills are running.”
She seemed to take a sort of pride in the matter and I sympathized with her. It is rather distinguished to live in an extreme of any kind, even if it is only that of a smoky wetness of climate. I went out, making my way to the “Kafe” Monico, as the policeman who recommended the place pronounced it. Here I enjoyed such a meal as only a third-rate restaurant which is considered first by the local inhabitants would supply.
I journeyed forth once more, interested by the fact that, according to Baedeker, from one point somewhere, on a clear day, whenever that might be, six hundred stacks might be seen. In this fog I soon found that it was useless to look for them. Instead I contented myself with noting how, in so many cases, the end of a street, or the sheer dismal length of an unbroken row of houses, all alike, was honored, made picturesque, made grand even, by the presence of the mills, these gloomy monuments of labor.
There is an architecture of manufacture, dreary and shabby as its setting almost invariably is, which in its solemnity, strangeness of outline, pathos and dignity, quite rivals, if it does not surpass, the more heralded forms of the world—its cathedrals, parthenons, Moorish temples and the like. I have seen it often in America and elsewhere where a group of factory buildings, unplanned as to arrangement and undignified as to substance, would yet take on an exquisite harmony of line and order after which a much more pretentious institution might well have been modeled. At Stockport, near Manchester, for instance, on the Mersey, which here is little more than a rivulet, but picturesque and lovely, I saw grouped a half-dozen immense mills with towering chimneys which, for architectural composition from the vantage point of the stream, could not have been surpassed. They had the dignity of vast temples, housing a world of under-paid life which was nevertheless rich in color and enthusiasm. Sometimes I fancy the modern world has produced nothing more significant architecturally speaking, than the vast manufactory. Here in Oldham they were gathered in notable clusters, towering over the business heart and the various resident sections so that the whole scene might well be said to have been dominated by it. They bespeak a world of thought and feeling which we of more intellectual fields are inclined at times to look on as dull and low, but are they? I confess that for myself they move me at times as nothing else does. They have vast dignity—the throb and sob of the immense. And what is more dignified than toiling humanity, anyhow—its vague, formless, illusioned hopes and fears? I wandered about the dull rain-sodden thoroughfares, looking in at the store windows. In one I found a pair of gold and a pair of silver slippers offered for sale—for what feet in Oldham? They were not high in price, but this sudden suggestion of romance in a dark workaday world took my fancy.
At four o’clock, after several hours of such wandering, I returned to the main thoroughfare—the market-place—in order to see what it was the hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants found to entertain them. I looked for theaters and found two, one of them a large moving-picture show. Of a sudden, walking in a certain direction my ears were greeted by a most euphonious clatter—so interwoven and blended were the particular sounds which I recognized at once as coming from the feet of a multitude, shod with wooden-soled clogs. Where were they coming from? I saw no crowd. Suddenly, up a side street, coming toward me down a slope I detected a vast throng. The immense moving-picture theater had closed for the afternoon and its entire audience, perhaps two thousand in all, was descending toward the main street. In connection with this crowd, as with the other at Boulton, I noted the phenomenon of the black or white straw hat, the black or brown shawl, the shapeless skirts and wooden-soled clogs of the women; the dull, commonplace suit and wooden clogs of the men. Where were they going now? Home, of course. These must be a portion of the strikers. They looked to me like typical mill-workers out on a holiday and their faces had a waxy pallor. I liked the sound of their shoes, though, as they came along. It was like the rattle of many drums. They might have been waltzing on a wooden floor. The thing had a swing and a rhythm of its own. “What if a marching army were shod with wooden shoes!” I thought; and then, “What if a mob with guns and swords came clattering so!”
A crowd like this is like a flood of water pouring downhill. They came into the dark main street and it was quite brisk for a time with their presence. Then they melted away into the totality of the stream, as rivers do into the sea, and things were as they had been before.
If there were any restaurants other than the “Kafe” Monico, I did not find them. For entertainment I suppose those who are not religiously minded do as they do in Fall River and elsewhere—walk up and down past the bright shop windows or sit and drink in the public houses, which are unquestionably far more cheerful by night than by day.
The vast majority who live here must fall back for diversion on other things, their work, their church, their family duties, or their vices. I am satisfied that under such conditions sex plays a far more vital part in cities of this description than almost anywhere else. For, although the streets be dull and the duties of life commonplace, sex and the mysteries of temperament weave their spells quite as effectively here as elsewhere, if not more so. In fact, denied the more varied outlets of a more interesting world, humanity falls back almost exclusively on sex. Women and men, or rather boys and girls (for most of the grown women and men had a drudgy, disillusioned, wearied look), went by each other glancing and smiling. They were alert to be entertained by each other, and while I saw little that I would call beauty in the women, or charm and smartness in the men, nevertheless I could understand how the standards of New York and Paris might not necessarily prevail here. Clothes may not fit, fashion may find no suggestion of its dictates, but after all, underneath, the lure of temperament and of beauty is the same. And so these same murky streets may burn with a rich passional life of their own. I left Oldham finally in the dark and in a driving rain, but not without a sense of the sturdy vigor of the place, keen if drab.