CHAPTER XII--CORONATION DAY
O thou that sea-walls sever
From lands unwalled by seas!
Wilt thou endure forever,
O Milton's England, these?
Thou that wast his Republic,
Wilt thou clasp their knees?
These royalties rust-eaten,
These worm-corroded lies
That keep thy head storm-beaten,
And sun-like strength of eyes
From the open air and heaven
Of intercepted skies!
- SWINBURNE.
Vivat Rex Eduardus! They crowned a king this day, and there has
been great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed
and saddened. I never saw anything to compare with the pageant,
except Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see
anything so hopeless and so tragic.
To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come
straight from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the
Hotel Cecil to a five-guinea seat among the washed. My mistake was
in coming from the unwashed of the East End. There were not many
who came from that quarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in
the East End and got drunk. The Socialists, Democrats, and
Republicans went off to the country for a breath of fresh air, quite
unaffected by the fact that four hundred millions of people were
taking to themselves a crowned and anointed ruler. Six thousand
five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen, princes, and warriors
beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest of us the pageant as
it passed.
I saw it at Trafalgar Square, "the most splendid site in Europe,"
and the very innermost heart of the empire. There were many
thousands of us, all checked and held in order by a superb display
of armed power. The line of march was double-walled with soldiers.
The base of the Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets.
Eastward, at the entrance to the square, stood the Royal Marine
Artillery. In the triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the
statue of George III. was buttressed on either side by the Lancers
and Hussars. To the west were the red-coats of the Royal Marines,
and from the Union Club to the embouchure of Whitehall swept the
glittering, massive curve of the 1st Life Guards--gigantic men
mounted on gigantic chargers, steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted,
steel-caparisoned, a great war-sword of steel ready to the hand of
the powers that be. And further, throughout the crowd, were flung
long lines of the Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were
the reserves--tall, well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles
to wield them in ease of need.
And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole
line of march--force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid
men, the pick of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly
to obey, and blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And
that they should be well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have
ships to hurl them to the ends of the earth, the East End of London,
and the "East End" of all England, toils and rots and dies.
There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another
will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, "The fact that many
men are occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause
of there being many people without clothes." So one explains the
other. We cannot understand the starved and runty {2} toiler of the
East End (living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out
the floor space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers)
till we look at the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and
come to know that the one must feed and clothe and groom the other.
And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto
themselves a king, I, jammed between the Life Guards and
Constabulary of Trafalgar Square, was dwelling upon the time when
the people of Israel first took unto themselves a king. You all
know how it runs. The elders came to the prophet Samuel, and said:
"Make us a king to judge us like all the nations."
And the Lord said unto Samuel: Now therefore hearken unto their
voice; howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that
shall reign over them.
And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked
of him a king, and he said:
This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he
will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots,
and to be his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.
And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and
to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
instruments of his chariots.
And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers.
And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your
oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and
give to his officers, and to his servants.
And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.
And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye
shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.
All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out
to Samuel, saying: "Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God,
that we die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to
ask us a king." And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam,
who "answered the people roughly, saying: My father made your yoke
heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with
whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."
And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-
fifth of England; and they, and the officers and servants under the
King, and those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend
in wasteful luxury $1,850,000,000, or 370,000,000 pounds, which is
thirty-two per cent. of the total wealth produced by all the toilers
of the country.
At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of
trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of
masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the
insignia of his sovereignty. The spurs were placed to his heels by
the Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple
scabbard, was presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with
these words:-
Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
though unworthy.
Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop's
exhortation:-
With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are
restored, punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in
good order.
But hark! There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the
double walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the
King's watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the
world like the van of a circus parade. Then a royal carriage,
filled with ladies and gentlemen of the household, with powdered
footmen and coachmen most gorgeously arrayed. More carriages,
lords, and chamberlains, viscounts, mistresses of the robes--lackeys
all. Then the warriors, a kingly escort, generals, bronzed and
worn, from the ends of the earth come up to London Town, volunteer
officers, officers of the militia and regular forces; Spens and
Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep, Mathias of Dargai,
Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral Seymour of China;
Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all the world--the
fighting men of England, masters of destruction, engineers of death!
Another race of men from those of the shops and slums, a totally
different race of men.
But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and
still they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world
harnessers. Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs,
Equerries to the King and Yeomen of the Guard. And here the
colonials, lithe and hardy men; and here all the breeds of all the
world-soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand; from Bermuda,
Borneo, Fiji, and the Gold Coast; from Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal,
Sierra Leone and Gambia, Nigeria, and Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus,
Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and Wei-Hai-Wei; from Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia,
Singapore, Trinidad. And here the conquered men of Ind, swarthy
horsemen and sword wielders, fiercely barbaric, blazing in crimson
and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs, Burmese, province by province, and
caste by caste.
And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands--"The
King! the King! God save the King!" Everybody has gone mad. The
contagion is sweeping me off my feet--I, too, want to shout, "The
King! God save the King!" Ragged men about me, tears in their
eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, "Bless 'em!
Bless 'em! Bless 'em!" See, there he is, in that wondrous golden
coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white
beside him likewise crowned.
And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it
is all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I
cannot succeed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to
believe that all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo
foolery has come from fairyland, than to believe it the performance
of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter and solved the
secrets of the stars.
Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of
coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors,
and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pagent is over. I drift
with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets,
where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and
children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is
rising the favourite song of the Coronation:-
"Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We'll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
For we'll all be marry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry,
We'll all be merry on Coronation Day."
The rain is pouring down. Up the street come troops of the
auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and
befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain
batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm,
going slish, slish, slish through the pavement mud. The public-
houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by
their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.
"And how did you like the procession, mate?" I asked an old man on a
bench in Green Park.
"'Ow did I like it? A bloomin' good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
sleep, wi' all the coppers aw'y, so I turned into the corner there,
along wi' fifty others. But I couldn't sleep, a-lyin' there an'
thinkin' 'ow I'd worked all the years o' my life an' now 'ad no
plyce to rest my 'ead; an' the music comin' to me, an' the cheers
an' cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an' wanted to blow out
the brains o' the Lord Chamberlain."
Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he,
but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and them was no
more discussion.
As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light. Splashes of
colour, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and
"E. R.," in great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was
everywhere. The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of
thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking,
drunkenness and rough play abounded. The tired workers seemed to
have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged
and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with
linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be crazy, but I love
you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the Bee"--the last
rendered something like this:-
"Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."
I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the
illuminated water. It was approaching midnight, and before me
poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous
streets and returning home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged
creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat
with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body
in constant play--now dropping forward till it seemed its balance
would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining
to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man's shoulder;
and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it
awoke her and she sat bolt upright. Whereupon the dropping forward
would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by
the strain and stretch.
Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go
behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This
always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at
sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with
laughter as it flooded past.
This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness
exhibited on every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the
benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.
Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon
it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the
King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say
to the woman: "Here's sixpence; go and get a bed." But the women,
especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman
nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.
To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism
was more appropriate--it was "fierce." I confess I began to grow
incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of
satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one
in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in
the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.
I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.
He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for
labour, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times
were slack. He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the
Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might
possibly get in a few days' work and have a bed in some doss-house.
He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in
1878, he saw foreign service in India.
Of course he would eat; so would the girl. Days like this were
uncommon hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor
folk could get in more sleep. I awoke the girl, or woman, rather,
for she was "Eyght an' twenty, sir," and we started for a coffee-
house.
"Wot a lot o' work puttin' up the lights," said the man at sight of
some building superbly illuminated. This was the keynote of his
being. All his fife he had worked, and the whole objective
universe, as well as his own soul, he could express in terms only of
work. "Coronations is some good," he went on. "They give work to
men."
"But your belly is empty," I said.
"Yes," he answered. "I tried, but there wasn't any chawnce. My age
is against me. Wot do you work at? Seafarin' chap, eh? I knew it
from yer clothes."
"I know wot you are," said the girl, "an Eyetalian."
"No 'e ayn't," the man cried heatedly. "'E's a Yank, that's wot 'e
is. I know."
"Lord lumne, look a' that," she exclaimed, as we debauched upon the
Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:-
"Oh! on Coronation D'y, on Coronation D'y,
We'll 'ave a spree, a jubilee, an' shout 'Ip, 'ip, 'ooray;
For we'll all be merry, drinkin' whisky, wine, and sherry,
We'll all be merry on Coronation D'y."
"'Ow dirty I am, bein' around the w'y I 'ave," the woman said, as
she sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the
corners of her eyes. "An' the sights I 'ave seen this d'y, an' I
enjoyed it, though it was lonesome by myself. An' the duchesses an'
the lydies 'ad sich gran' w'ite dresses. They was jest bu'ful,
bu'ful."
"I'm Irish," she said, in answer to a question. "My nyme's
Eyethorne."
"What?" I asked.
"Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne."
"Spell it."
"H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.'
"Oh," I said, "Irish Cockney."
"Yes, sir, London-born."
She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
accident, when she had found herself on the world. One brother was
in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and
eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment,
could do nothing for her. She had been out of London once in her
life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked
fruit for three weeks: "An' I was as brown as a berry w'en I come
back. You won't b'lieve it, but I was."
The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours
from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she
had received five shillings a week and her food. Then she had
fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to
find anything to do. She wasn't feeling up to much, and the last
two nights had been spent in the street.
Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man
and woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated
their original orders that they showed signs of easing down.
Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt,
and remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore. My rags good
clothes! It put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more
closely and on examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I
began to feel quite well dressed and respectable.
"What do you expect to do in the end?" I asked them. "You know
you're growing older every day."
"Work'ouse," said he.
"Gawd blimey if I do," said she. "There's no 'ope for me, I know,
but I'll die on the streets. No work'ouse for me, thank you. No,
indeed," she sniffed in the silence that fell.
"After you have been out all night in the streets," I asked, "what
do you do in the morning for something to eat?"
"Try to get a penny, if you 'aven't one saved over," the man
explained. "Then go to a coffee-'ouse an' get a mug o' tea."
"But I don't see how that is to feed you," I objected.
The pair smiled knowingly.
"You drink your tea in little sips," he went on, "making it last its
longest. An' you look sharp, an' there's some as leaves a bit
be'ind 'em."
"It's s'prisin', the food wot some people leaves," the woman broke
in.
"The thing," said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me,
"is to get 'old o' the penny."
As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of
crusts from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into
her rags.
"Cawn't wyste 'em, you know," said she; to which the docker nodded,
tucking away a couple of crusts himself.
At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. It was a gala
night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each
bench was jammed with sleeping occupants. There were as many women
as men, and the great majority of them, male and female, were old.
Occasionally a boy was to be seen. On one bench I noticed a family,
a man sitting upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife
asleep, her head on his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a
sleeping youngster. The man's eyes were wide open. He was staring
out over the water and thinking, which is not a good thing for a
shelterless man with a family to do. It would not be a pleasant
thing to speculate upon his thoughts; but this I know, and all
London knows, that the cases of out-of-works killing their wives and
babies is not an uncommon happening.
One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra's Needle, to
Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
twenty centuries old, recited by the author of "Job":-
There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
and feed them.
They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox
for a pledge.
They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.
Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
their children.
They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
the wicked.
They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in
the cold.
They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
for want of a shelter.
There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a
pledge of the poor.
So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.
Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and
apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian
civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king.
