_Beyond Good and Evil._
Dostoievsky"s _The Possessed._
Marie Bashkirtseff"s _Journal._
I have found time to read only the first chapter of this last and am almost afraid to go on. It would be so humiliating to find I was only her duplicate.
On my mantelpiece stands a photograph of Huxley--the hero of my youth--which old B---- has always taken to be that of my grandpapa! A plaster-cast mask of Voltaire when first hung up made him chuckle with indecent laughter. "A regular all-nighter. Who is it?" he said.
_December_ 15.
_Petticoat Lane_
This morning, being Sunday, went to Petticoat Lane and enjoyed myself.
On turning the corner to go into Middles.e.x Street, as it it now called, the first thing I saw was a little girl--a Jewess--being tackled for selling Belgian b.u.t.ton-hole flags by two policemen who ultimately marched her off to the police station.
In the Lane, first of all, was a "Royal Ascot Jockey Scales" made of bra.s.s and upholstered in gaudy red velvet--a penny a time. A very fat man was being weighed and looked a little distressed on being given his ticket.
"Another stone," he told the crowd mournfully.
"You"ll have to eat less pork," some one volunteered and we all laughed.
Next door to the Scales was a man selling gyroscopes. "Something scientific, amusing as well as instructive, ill.u.s.trating the principles of gravity and stability. What I show you is what I sell--price one shilling. Who?"
I stopped next at a stall containing nothing but caps,--"any size, any colour, any pattern, a shilling apiece--now then!" This show was being run by two men--a Jew in a fur cap on one side of the stall and a very powerful-looking sort of Captain Cuttle on the other--a seafaring man, almost as broad as he was long, with a game leg and the voice of a skipper in a hurricane. Both these men were selling caps at a prodigious pace, and with the insouciance of tradesmen sure of their custom. The skipper would seize a cap, chuck it across to a timid prospective purchaser, and, if he dropped it, chuck him over another, crying, with a "yo-heave-ho" boisterousness, "Oh! what a game, what a bees" nest."
Upon the small head of another customer, he would squash down his largest sized cap saying at once,--
"There, you look the finest gentleman--oh! ah! a little too large."
At which we all laughed, the customer looked silly, but took no offence.
"Try this," yells the skipper above the storm, and takes off his own cap. "Oh! ye needn"t be afraid--I washed my hair last--year."
(Laughter.)
Then to his partner, the Jew on the other side of the stall, "Oh! what a face you"ve got. Here! 6d. for any one who can tell me what it is. Why not take it to the trenches and get it smashed in?"
The Jew wore spectacles and had a soft ingratiating voice and brown doe-like eyes--a Jew in every respect. "Oh!" says he, in the oleaginous Semitic way, and accurately taking up his cue (for all this was rehea.r.s.ed patter), "my wife says "my face is my fortune.""
"No wonder you"re so hard up and "ave got to take in lodgers. What"s yer name?"
"John Jones," in a demure wheedling voice.
"Hoo--that"s not your name in your own b.l.o.o.d.y country--I expect it"s Hullabullinsky."
"Do you know what my name really is?"
"No."
"It"s a.s.senheimopoplocatdwizlinsky Kovorod." (Loud laughter.)
"I shall call you "a.s.s" for short."
I was laughing loudly at these two clowns and the skipper observing as much, shouted out to me,--
"Parlez-vous Francois, M"sieur?"
"Oui, oui," said I.
"Ah! lah, you"re one of us--oh! what a game! what a bees" nest," and all the time he went on selling caps and chucking them at the purchasers.
Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things I saw was a stream of young men who, one after another, came up to a stall, paid a penny and swallowed a gla.s.s of "nerve tonic"--a green liquid syphoned out of a large jar--warranted a safe cure for
"Inward weakness, slightest flurry or body oppressed."
Another man was pulling teeth and selling tooth powder. Some of the little urchins" teeth, after he had cleaned them as a demonstration, were much whiter than their faces or his. This was "the original Chas.
a.s.senheim."
Mrs. Meyers, "not connected with any one else of the same name in the Lane" was selling eels at 2d., 3d. and 6d. and doing a brisk trade too.
But I should go on for hours if I were to tell everything seen in this remarkable lane during an hour an a half on a Sunday morning. Each stall-holder sells only one kind of article--caps or clocks or songs, braces, shawls, indecent literature, concertinas, gramophones, coats, pants, reach-me-downs, epergnes. The thoroughfare was crowded with people (I saw two Lascars in red fez caps) inspecting the goods displayed and attentively observed by numerous policemen. The alarm clocks were all going off, each gramophone was working a record (a different one!) and every tradesman shouting his wares--a perfect pandemonium.
_December_ 31.
_A Conversation_
"There is that easily calculable element in your nature, dear boy," I said, "by which you forego the dignity of a free-willed human being and come under an inflexible natural law. I can antic.i.p.ate your movements, intentions, and opinions long beforehand. For example, I know quite well that every Sat.u.r.day morning will see you with _The New Statesman_ under your arm; I know that the words "Wagner" or "Shaw" uttered slowly and deliberately in your ear will produce a perfectly definite reaction."
"I bet you can"t predict what I am going to buy now,"
R---- replied gaily, advancing to the newspaper stall.
He bought the _Pink "Un_ and I laughed....
"And so you read _Pragmatism_," he mused, "while the fate of the Empire stands in the balance."
"Yes," said I, "and the Paris Academy of Sciences were discussing the functions of _?_ and the Polymorphism of Antarctic diatoms last September when the Germans stood almost at the gates of Paris."
This was a lucky stroke for me, for he knew he was rubbing me on the raw. We are, of course, great friends, but sometimes we get on one another"s nerves.
"I am polychromatic," I declaimed, "rhetorical, ba.s.s. You--besides being a bally fool--are of a pretty gray colour, a baritone and you paint in water-colours."
"Whereas you, of course, would paint in blood?" he answered facetiously.
His Oxford education has a firm hold on him. He says for example, "e converso" instead of "on the other hand" and "entre nous" for "between ourselves." He labels his paragraphs _a, , ?_, instead of a, b, c, and quotes Juvenal, knows Paris and Naples, visits the Alps for the winter sports, all in the approved manner of dons.
Not infrequently he visits the East End to Study "how the poor live," he lectures at Toynbee Hall, and calls the proletariat "the prolly." In fact, he does everything according to the regulations, being a socialist and an agnostic, a follower of Shaw and a devotee of Bunyan. "Erotic" he is careful to p.r.o.nounce _ertic_ to show he knows Greek, and the "Duma,"
the _Duma_, tho" he doesn"t know Russian. Like any don, he is always ready to discuss and give an opinion on any sub- supra- or circ.u.m-lunary subject from bimetallism to the Symphony as an art-form.