§ 2.

It is by the presence of these wires, then, that you may recognize the great suburb-reaching thoroughfares, the raying bones of our all but unfurled fan, and by taking up a position at one of the central junctions—that river-side terrace would be an excellent place—you may traverse them all in turn, and examine almost all the details of the residential plume, with no more trouble than is caused by stepping from pavement to car-platform, from car-platform back again to pavement. Seaforth tips the first bone; Litherland the second; Walton, Aintree and Fazakerley, Everton and Anfield, Cabbage Hall, Tuebrook and West Derby, variously feather the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth; whilst Fairfield, Old Swan and Knotty Ash, Edge Hill and Wavertree, Sefton Park and Mossley Hill, Dingle, Aigburth and Garston, fledge the remaining branches in the east and south.

Great Howard Street, Derby Road, and Rimrose Road, the three nominal sections of the first of these plangent ways, are tipped, as I say, by Seaforth, and to reach Seaforth they have to bore their way through the dense landscape of warehouses and timber-yards that lies behind the northern docks. But out beyond Seaforth, through Waterloo, Blundellsands, Altcar (its rifle-ranges crackling like a coffee-mill), Formby, Freshfield, and Birkdale, that other humming river of electricity, the most western arm of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, whose course the road from the first pretty closely follows, drains (or, rather, feeds) a constantly spreading, bungalow-saturated district of bonne bourgeoisie. It is all very prosperous, this new rubicund neighbourhood: sand-hills and wide shore spread between it and the sea; half a dozen golf-links accompany its brisk march by the railway-side; and that march can really scarcely be regarded as completed until the railway terminates, and plutocracy flames up in a last supreme outburst, twenty miles away from Liverpool, among the bathing-vans and pierrots of Southport: for Southport, too, in spite of plutocratic hauteur, is being rapidly induced by locomotion to play the part of Liverpool’s accessory. And Southport presents, anyhow, a series of little paradoxes in appearance upon which one could desire to linger. It is, for instance, at once the chosen home of countless millionaires, and the chosen resort of countless cheap day-trippers. (Although that, indeed, if all local tales be true, is less fundamental a paradox than might perhaps be supposed.) Antitheses—at any rate superficial antitheses—are in consequence engagingly plentiful, and at night the place crowns this distracting effect by assuming all the airs and graces of the Continent. Lights thickly sown among the prolonged verdure of its central boulevard, a red-coated band and endless promenaders, little tables beneath the trees—yes, it is all, to the eye, very perfectly arranged.... And then, suddenly, disastrously, there emerges the slow accent, the toilsome facetiousness, of Chowbent.... But it is still very charming to have so many of the materials of illusion so ingeniously provided; and one looks back at evenings spent there, discreetly companioned, with a very quick tinge of pleasure.

As for Seaforth itself, the first link in this chain of seaside settlements—well, it, naturally, is the least personable of them all. “The slums of the future,” say the pessimists sententiously; and already a notable greyness begins to creep over its tightly packed workmen’s cottages. It seems especially deplorable, for the shore of the place (unbelievably peppered in the summer heats with naked pinkish youngsters) is clean and fair enough, New Brighton glitters pleasantly across the estuary, the Welsh hills heave up in the distance, and the great ships of the world promenade before its parlour windows. A little further along the coast, towards Waterloo, the Marconi station leans upon its tall central mast like a sentry on his spear, and listens to the cries of other great ships fighting in the clutch of some blind Atlantic storm.

Not far away, and even more conspicuous, a high, livid convent, many-windowed and forbidding, rises up out of the sand; and on its flat roof, remote against the sky, you may sometimes see the good nuns pacing to and fro together, or leaning solitarily against the wind. They must survey a bold and various prospect. On the one hand the level floor of the sea, here dusked, there silvered, marbled by voyaging clouds, runs out until it meets a wide pure sky. Poised at the western extreme of the long horizon blade, Anglesey rests like a sapphire, and the hem of all the air that sweeps away to the south is braided thereafter by the woven hills of Wales. From them the eye stoops successively to the shimmering aura of the Dee, to the embossed interspace of the Wirral, to the bright-mailed river down below, and so to the louring masses of the City, ranging darkly out towards the east, a creation more terribly unhuman than even the mountains or the sea. Lastly, there is the scaly back of the suburb lying beneath, and, beyond it, unfolding between that spreading blackness in the south and a rim of purple woodland in the north, a fair carpet of meadowland and cornfield runs clear and away. A rare white farm or so, set in that green tranquillity, invest it with a kind of homely joy. And the tender outlines of a sister convent near at hand, rising gravely among the serene devices of its trees, touch that joy with a patience as of evening.

§ 3.

But although it thus provides a very gracious incident in the landscape, that sister convent, the Convent of Our Good Shepherd down at Ford, plays no small part in increasing the dolour of the second of our great northward-driving roadways. For its annexe, hidden among those trees, is one of the chief of Liverpool’s Catholic cemeteries, and since this second “bone” (Scotland Road, Stanley Road, Linacre Road, are its successive names) passes through the very heart of the Irish quarter of Liverpool, it follows that a grim pageant of rococo hearses, plumes, and jaded mourners passes constantly along this thoroughfare every Sunday in the year. It certainly stands in no need of these aids to sobriety. Quite on its own merits it succeeds in being the most profoundly depressing highway in all Liverpool. It plunges, the moment it leaves the City, into the tawdry litter of shops that edge the northern slum, and it is defamed, all thereabout, by the sour sights and sounds and smells (the sights and sounds and smells which we are to investigate in the next chapter) which the northern slum exudes. It runs, after that, along the ragged fringe of the grey curtain of shoddy streets that droops drearily down from the stooping shoulder of Everton. And it winds up, at Linacre, with an altogether abominable jangle of raw street-ends, waste lands, gasometers, and factories. Its solitary moment of even comparative cheerfulness, indeed, is to be set down to the credit of Bootle. At Bootle you catch a glimpse of a couple of parks; a broad avenue—trim, well-treed, and topped by an elegant spire—sweeps proudly across your track; and signs of free-stone and prosperity are not wanting. Lacking that respite, this arrow-straight four-mile stretch from the Old Haymarket to the terminus at Linacre Road would infallibly induce neurasthenia.

Not that Bootle ever receives the slightest acknowledgment for this fine alleviating effort. It is a curious thing, but no Liverpolitan to whom you may ever speak will permit himself to refer to Bootle except in tones of an amused contempt. In part, no doubt, this is a result of Bootle’s obstinate, exotic retention of her independence. In spite of the identity of interests, in spite of the physical absorption which long ago took place, Bootle still clings vehemently to her separate Boroughship; and not all the engines of suasion or attack (and both sorts have been energetically applied) that Liverpool can level against her seem able to encompass the surrender. Vividly exceptional, breaking up, at any rate theoretically, the co-ordination that would else be almost universal, she still adheres to all the formulÆ of a separate social and municipal existence: appointing her own Mayor, lodging him in an impressive Town Hall, making him the hub of a brightly revolving wheel of emphatically local sociabilities. And Liverpool, incensed, no doubt, by this gross transgression of the physical and sentimental laws that rule her life, responds with a dole of contempt.

It is terribly unfair, of course; for Bootle, in spite of the fact that its dockside quarters are not places of an overwhelming lucency and charm, really does possess many gentle and engaging attributes, not least among them being the spasmodic presence in its midst (even yet in larger numbers than elsewhere) of the most delightful broad Scotch seagoing engineers—sitters (when in port) in stifling back sitting-rooms—smokers of incomparable cigars (on which duty may or may not have been paid)—possessors of a very precise knowledge of the healing virtues of strong waters.... And yet, in spite of the unfairness of that contempt, one can’t help feeling that perhaps, after all—independence or no independence—something of the sort was inevitable. Frankly, what is to be expected by a place so unhappily named? Its absurdity is crushing. Bootle, tootle, footle—and not another rhyme-sound in the language. Buckingham Palace, Bootle; White Nights, Bootle: clearly, note-paper could affect no address, from the most stately to the most charming, that it would not instantly convert to screaming farce. And to protest that the name is of the most honourable antiquity is by no means to avoid the consequences. It simply invests the whole business with an extra tinge of tragedy.

Independence of another sort, as yet untouched by tragedy, and awakening in the soul of the Liverpolitan something more like envy than contempt, is to be found at Litherland, which lies just beyond that raucous Linacre terminus, a few steps nearer to the cemetery at Ford. They are steps that provide an effective study in contrasts. They carry one across a frail little swing-bridge; and whilst one end of the bridge is immersed in that bad-tempered outburst of industrialism, the other shares an atmosphere of positively Quakerish demureness. Mild old Georgian residences, placidly sunning themselves among their groves and lawns, are respectfully waited upon by an irresistible village street of shops and inns and a post office. In the mildest and sunniest residence of all the Urban District Council has comfortably established itself; the village fire-escape sits contentedly upon the lawn; and the orchard at the rear has been contrived into an alley echoing with bird-song, where councillors and counselled may foregather with their evening pipes.... It is that highly prosaic thing, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, that has apparently served to keep this idyll unspotted by the world. It curves like a defensive moat between the bird-song and the harsh imbroglio a biscuit’s-throw beyond, and upon the frail structure that crosses it not the most reckless electric car in the world would ever dream of venturing. It is the weakness of that bridge that has proved the place’s strength.

It was in the very shadow of that enviable fire-escape, by the way, that I heard of another and a subtler way in which the electric car carries on its business of subversion. My informant was an Urban District retainer, whom I found, the other afternoon, bedding out the Urban District geraniums. I spoke to him regarding the pleasantness of the neighbourhood, praised its quiet, its salubrity, and so forth. He merely subscribed a perfunctory assent. Judging that my pÆan was considered to lack the appropriate degree of fervour, I redoubled my efforts. I waxed really eloquent. Superlatives abounded. But my strophe aroused no antistrophe. The more loudly did I extol, indeed, the gloomier and more perfunctory became his replies. At last I touched on rates, and that proved the last straw. “They’re only two shillings and ninepence,” he burst out wrathfully—I think it was two shillings and ninepence; anyhow, something quite preposterously minute—“and over in Liverpool folks is paying eight or nine shillin’.” It certainly seemed an extraordinary sort of grievance.... And then “They use our cars,” he went on savagely—“they use our cars an’ libries an’ baths. Why shouldn’t they help to pay for ’em?... But they can’t ’old out for ever; Liverpool will nab the place some o’ these fine days.” And he glanced at the genteel old stucco with an air of malevolent triumph.

The man, it will be seen, was himself a Liverpolitan, and I dare say he voiced very fairly the general Liverpolitan sentiment in these matters. “You use our cars; clearly, then, you must be one of us; so quit this foolish pose of independence.” And one day, no doubt, it will quit the pose perforce. Liverpool will “nab” it, the moat will be stoutly bridged, a troop of electric cars will storm across, and the quiet little gathering among the trees will be rudely broken up and submerged.

§ 4.

To witness the actual consummation of such a ravagement, it is only necessary to follow the next “bone” as far as Walton-on-the-Hill. Walton, to my mind, stands as a perfect embodiment of all the mingled tragedy and triumph of this great process of suburb overthrow. For centuries her Church was the proud hub of the parish in which Liverpool was but an inconsiderable hamlet; and even so late as the last year of the seventeenth century she compelled Liverpool to regard her as its parochial superior, and to tramp every Sunday three miles out to her and three miles back. There is little pride left to the old Church now. It stands, bleak and friendless, in the midst of a dull pool of gravestones; smoke from a railway siding blackens its walls; the cars roar triumphantly past its very gates; it has been compelled to guard its dead with rows of iron railings. In the lanes that cower behind it, too, defeat is equally apparent: scraps of villagedom hunted down by a rabble of red-faced tenements; a mass of garish brick squatting blatantly in the ruins of a cornfield; jerry-builders evicting old residents from the cottages they have lived in for half a century; the old Hall, in its nest of trees, lying fouled and rifled. In the shadow of the Church there is a little cottage that has the reputation, significantly enough, of being the only thatched cottage in Liverpool. It is delicately complexioned, daintily windowed, and altogether very fragrant and delightful. But the poor soul, one fancies, is not long for this world. A frenzied hoarding, horrent and gibbering, raves above it on one side; on the other some kind of corrugated iron affair screws its blunt shoulder into the frail old bones.... One seems to catch a gleam of piteous supplication behind the leaded panes.

But just beside the Church one gets the modern touch that seems to make amends. It is from here that the great new road—wide, much-foliaged, grass-platted—begins the journey which is to result in a curving band of ordered white and green being drawn right through the mass of eastern suburbs: a noble avenue which posterity will pace delightedly, thinking kind thoughts of 1907. It is an admirable project, and a fine salve for outraged sentiment. It sets the seal on Walton’s defeat: more even than the red-faced streets does it signalize her absorption in the mass; but it is none the less a thing one welcomes with enthusiasm. Thatch, after all, is not the final excellence of life.

§ 5.

And, in any case, if Walton still thirsts for redress, she can surely regard herself as amply revenged by her sister suburb, Aintree. For Aintree, to no inconsiderable proportion of the inhabitants of the British Isles, is a vastly more important place than Liverpool—Liverpool, indeed, for them, deriving its sole significance from the fact that it is a well-trained and useful attendant at Aintree’s door. The secret, of course, is the Grand National—most searching of all the national rhapsodies we strum on horse-flesh—which is performed here every spring.

Big race-meetings don’t vary very much; and Grand National Day at Aintree presents much the same features as one finds elsewhere. There are the same great stands, looking, from a proletarian distance, like boxes crammed with flowers; the same sliding bourdon from the betting-rings; the same sudden drift of music that means that Majesty has arrived, that Majesty is mounting the Stand, that Majesty’s binoculars are even now compressing the whole astonishing landscape into one bright little picture for Majesty’s eyes. Follows, as always, the remote, wavering crescent at the starting-point; the delicate stream of coloured scraps, blowing as before a wind, rising and falling here and there in easy, soundless undulations; the faint, raw crash of sound as the stream flutters beneath the quivering sparkle of the Stands. And afterwards, the usual black flood of people pouring across the plain, the usual sententious groups about the jumps, the usual rancid litter, the inevitable dizzy smell of trodden turf.

Only, right at the end, there is one amendment to note. The traditional hotchpotch of home-returning vehicles has been replaced by something else. Away in the centre of the City some one in a little office signs an order; and when the mob pours out, it discovers long glittering files of electric cars awaiting it at the entrance. So, independently propelled no longer, but packed sociably together, they sweep back to the heart of the City, past the sad walls of Walton Church, a magnificent official cavalcade.

§ 6.

Walton’s drab neighbours on the other side, too, have also their sporting associations, and, in consequence, some measure of independent fame. Each Saturday afternoon throughout the winter grey clouds of sound drift over all this northern district and out into the country beyond: rivalling for a time the brazen rumours from the River which are always visiting these airs. They rise from the great football-grounds at Everton and Anfield, where some tens of thousands of enthusiasts, incredibly packed together (any number of the worst-paid of L——’s understudies among them), indulge, week after week, a passion for vicarious athletics.

There is always something rather heartsome about the sound of distant cheering, and in this case one welcomes these tumults with an especial enthusiasm. It would probably be unjust to suggest that they stand for the most positive moment in the lives of the cheerers, but it is certainly true that they provide the most positive note in the whole of the dull regions that surround them. Towards Stanley Park, indeed, in Anfield, there is a momentary touch of something that is almost sprightliness; and over in Everton, near the hill from which De Quincey admired the view of distant Liverpool, there is a flavour of dignified decay. But, for the rest, there are only labyrinthine miles of gardenless, spiritless streets, neither new nor old, neither vicious nor respectable—always tragically null and inchoate. They involve Kirkdale; they trail out towards Cabbage Hall; they trudge past Newsham Park, and so away towards the south. The main ribs strike across them here and there, distributing a little colour—paper-shops, tobacconists’, sweet-shops, the rich phials of a drug-store, butchers’ slabs covered with intricate runes of red and yellow; but these respites are desperately restricted. The gleam dies away as quickly as the sound of the car-gongs; the web slinks back into its old monotony, into that grey neutrality which seems, somehow, to be far baser and more vitiating than the brute positive blackness of the slums.

To explain these regions, to see them (as we ought to see them) as something more than a dull and featureless enigma, it is needful to regard them in relation to the City, to see them as one of the essential whorls in the great hieroglyph which is Liverpool. Looked at in this way, they do begin to reveal a kind of meaning, even to assume a kind of magnificence. They mean that Liverpool demands, for the prosecution of her so colourful adventures, the services of so many thousands of grey lives, the efforts of a great brotherhood content to labour all day long on her behalf in exchange for permission to return at nightfall just here, to make themselves a home in just this stretch of barren twilight. She cannot let them go further afield; she cannot grant them space enough for brightness. This much she can afford them, and no more.

So regarded, all this drabness becomes something much more terrible and magnificent than a mere neutral foil to the City’s beauty, a mere grey passage which throws the purple into relief. It becomes one of the sources of that beauty, one of the processes by which that beauty was attained—a grey and dreadful ritual observed by the City in the hope of being granted strange powers. These dull houses are so much squeezed dye-wood. Their colour, their brightness, have gone to stain the rich fabric of the City’s enterprise, to paint the romantic emblem by which she is known in dim corners of the earth, to illuminate the saga of her career. And, remembering this, it becomes almost possible to regard the dwellers in these regions less as prisoners in a dull and sorrowful gaol than as priests in the recesses of some twilit temple, gravely and honourably fulfilling sacred offices.

§ 7.

At the same time, it is, no doubt, only too easy to overestimate the heaviness of the twilight. Here is human nature packed thick and thick, and where there is human nature, there romance is also. Theoretically, therefore, the whole place is seething with adventure, and each one of these drab doorways is an entrance to a palpitating epic. Theoretically, all this monotony is but a mask, and beneath it there are warm human features, quick and variable with terror and pity and passion and quiet joy. It may be so; but those doors remain implacably closed, the mask is never dropped; all this great romance is writ in cipher. Here and there a phrase emerges: a couple of youths whispering at a corner; a woman wrapped in a shawl singing drearily in an empty street; an old man solemnly tapping at a door; a child running screaming from a curtainless house; and one fingers them for a little, and pores over them, but in the end is always forced to push them despairingly aside. The key is lacking; they remain enigmatic; and one might wander these grey sad streets for ever and learn nothing of their secrets. Every house is inarticulate; a menacing dumbness broods over the whole region.

And it is by personal associations alone that those secrets can be surprised. Directories carry us a little way: they tell us that two cabmen, a draper’s assistant, a cotton-porter, a stoker, a bricklayer, and a carter, live in that half-dozen liver-coloured brick boxes; and the knowledge certainly invests the place (it is a street in Anfield) with a tinge of actuality. But there are so many other things we require to know about that bricklayer—the colour of his wife’s eyes, for instance; whether he prefers hot-pot or Irish-stew; whether his youngest has yet had the measles. At Sefton Park, at Blundellsands, qualities analogous to these are easily discoverable, even by the outsider; but here they are hidden away beneath an unfathomable monotony. To discover the romance, to taste the secret drama that makes Anfield and Everton and Cabbage Hall habitable, it would be necessary to live in each of them in turn, to have an initiating friend in every road.... Thus, in a little street behind Netherfield Road there live a couple of dear old maiden ladies, whom the progress of education has prevented from teaching and taught to starve, and whose training has made them determined to starve respectably, in private; and knowledge of them and of their drama has made, for me, that street a shade less cryptic. And then, again, over in Edge Hill there is a little bed-sitting-room overlooking a stale back-yard where I used to go once a week to hear the Kosmos put in order by a poet who wrote bad verses, but quoted good ones. To the outsider Edge Hill must seem as inscrutably monotonous as its neighbours. But I know better. It revealed itself to me, in those days, as a wonderful avenue to all manner of tender and high-hearted possibilities; and I still recall evenings spent in the Botanic Gardens over there, with my poet mouthing some splendid scarlet thing from Whitman or Shelley in the afterglow, when the place seemed positively surcharged with vital and dramatic loveliness.

§ 8.

But revealing experiences of this sort are inevitably limited, and, lacking any great store of them, one is content to fall back on broad summaries, to say that this crepuscular region stretches from Anfield and Everton in the north, below Newsham Park, through Edge Hill, and so towards Wavertree in the south. It has its degrees of neutrality, of course—amenities creep occasionally in—but for the most part it remains a region whose intimate meanings are concealed by its monotony, but whose monotony gives it in the mass a deep and terrible significance.

And below this tract, gravely introducing its later passages to the City, there marches a dull, highly respectable quarter of streets and squares (rare episodes, these latter, in Liverpool), of which, again, one can only protest that it is really much more impressive than it seems. There is Abercromby Square, where the Bishop lives; there is Oxford Street, upon which the shade of Aubrey Beardsley is reported to make an occasional shrinking descent; there are Catherine Street, Bedford Street, Chatham Street, all earnestly pleading for geranium boxes; and Rodney Street, where many doctors and one small green slab combine to surround Gladstone’s birthplace with an appropriate atmosphere of dignity. And so at length to the verge of the hill that cups the City, with the Philharmonic Hall making one part of it a place, on winter nights, of ringing hoofs and thronging audiences, and the University, in another, looking gravely down upon the rooftops of the tense and vivid City which it is its duty by scholarship to serve.

And on the other side of that dumb territory there always sweep the suburbs that have the green fields for their neighbours: the suburbs that here delicately woo the country and there vulgarly accost it, and now stop short at the sight of it with a gorgeous affectation of surprise, and now stealthily seduce it into all manner of morbid episodes; but whose essential business is always, by this device or by that, to lure the fields into the state of urbanity, to establish fresh colonies and receptacles for the constantly swelling mass that seethes behind. Cabbage Hall, the northernmost, plays the part of stealthy seducer, dribbling out among the fields in colourless disorder, entrapping them in the dreariest fashion, without a hint of glamour. Next comes West Derby, a group of clean-faced cottages standing about its car-terminus like smocked village children gaping prettily at a lurid visitor, its neatly dignified church and deer-scattered park reflecting the outburst of ripe, authentic aristocracy that makes the country-side beyond so unexpectedly, so exotically, old English. And after West Derby come Knotty Ash and Old Swan: the first, in one’s pocket vision of it, a jolly stage-setting of taverns with farm-carts before them, of tiny, twinkling pinafores pouring out of a village school, of a neat spire (a property it doesn’t, however, do to investigate too closely) rising above a grove of realistic trees; the second—suffering in places from a bad attack of the scarlet-fever which is now ravaging domestic architecture—leading to a long surge of ambiguous ways and broken ends that spills out finally among the fields near Wavertree. The country on which it breaks has qualities of richness; little coils of woodland lie pleasantly among leaning meadows; and right in the midst of it, like a fleck of pure foam far cast by the muddy wave of the town, lie the lawns and gardens of Calderstone, the latest of Liverpool’s parks.

§ 9.

For parkland proper, however, it is needful to return to the smoke. Wavertree lies at the end of the Smithdown Road bone of the fan. The next bone pierces that Bloomsbury-like district of highly respectable squares, and so comes out upon the tail of a long regiment of trees making a fine effort to live up to their reputation of being a boulevard. This is Princes Avenue, and Princes Avenue (familiarity breeding uncontempt) is sometimes spoken of in the same breath as Berlin’s Unter den Linden. But although the conjunction is scarcely wise, this broad way of trees and churches makes a wholly pleasant approach to the suavest of Liverpool’s inner suburbs; and it leads, too, to a deftly-handled space of open air, where it is certainly possible to think of the Champs ElysÉes without a blush. Sefton Park, although it may not serve so deeply human a purpose as, say, Stanley Park in the north, is certainly quite the most perfectly fashioned of Liverpool’s open spaces; and although it is the largest, it never commits the mistake that large parks sometimes make of endeavouring to appear like a piece of virginal country. It is always mannered, self-conscious, full of effects that are in the right sense “picturesque”; and the sheep that feed in one part of it do not seem much less deliberately decorative in intention than the peacocks that everywhere admirably strut and flower. To find one of these peacocks (the white one preferably) self-consciously posing on a meadow of rhythmical daffodils is to discover the true spirit of park artistry symbolized with absolute perfection.

Eminently Parisian in the morning, when the nurse-girls bring their charges here, and gossip and read and scold and perfunctorily play ball precisely as the bonnes do in the Champs ElysÉes, Sefton Park grows unmistakably British in the sacred hour that lapses between tea and dinner. For then young athletes like L——, and Hebes like our heroine, fill all its tennis-courts with a white-limbed energy.... It is not exactly a white-limbed energy that one observes in the adjoining bowling-green; and its laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures may conceivably be regarded as striking rather a dissonant note amongst the clean-cut decorative activities which surround it. But none the less the sociologist in one eagerly welcomes and commemorates them. For their apparition is another evidence of that coalescence of strata with strata which is one of the features of suburb life just now. They mean that laborious, stooping, shirt-sleeved figures can live nowadays in the once exclusive neighbourhood hereabout; can demand, for their own especial pleasures, some share of the glittering accessory with which this suave neighbourhood once rather royally provided itself.

§ 10.

But the neighbourhood that immediately environs the Park still remains fairly costly and responsible, and that it seems a little to fall short of absolute impressiveness is doubtless largely due to the overwhelming nature of its accessory. And then, too, it should be remembered, these yellow, uneasy houses came before the bungalow had taught a reasonable compromise between dignity and domesticity. A little further away, up towards Mossley Hill, the success is notably greater. Grave roads, filled with that indescribable hushed exclusiveness which only tall, ripe, sandstone walls and overarching leafage have power to confer, lead up the hill towards the Church. There are deliberate lodges and sudden glimpses of deep-breathing lawn; life grows leisurely and communicative; the silence is full of confessions.

The Church itself, bulking monumentally against the sky, continues the warm, grave intimacy: even the green stillness that encircles it seems fuller of humanity than all the acres, dense with flesh and blood, over at Everton and Anfield. It is always worth while, therefore, to step through to the farther wall. There, in a flash, you find you have come again to the uttermost edge of the town. A great landscape leaps suddenly out from beneath your feet, woods curve distantly about it, sweet airs bring a company of quiet sounds. A chalk line being softly ruled across the green map means that half a hundred people who have just had tea in town will see the buses in the Euston Road before dinner. A vague smear on the far sky stands for Widnes and poison. A fainter smear above the tree-tops to the right reveals the neighbourhood of Garston.

§ 11.

And with Garston we reach the tip of the last of the plumes of our fan. Viewed de profil—as, for instance, from the River—it would appear to be furnished chiefly with gasometers. The concomitants of gasometers are as invariable as those of race-meetings: Garston is grimy. Considered more closely, however, it breaks up a little, and reveals here and there some wholly pleasant incidents. And on its inland side it yields very gracefully to the influence of the shadowed lanes from Allerton.

The rib that joins it to the centre, sweeps, in the first place, through an easy, spacious district of private parks and well-preserved, middle-aged mansions, and, in the last place, through the dÉbris of the southern slums. Its name in this last phase is Park Lane. If, perceiving that, the visitor feel impelled to smile as at an anticlimax, he would perhaps do well to hesitate; for this Park Lane has probably a wider reputation than any other thoroughfare in Europe. In and about this dÉbris stand the sailors’ quarters, the foreign quarters, the Chinese Colony, the emigrants’ lodging-houses, the Sailors’ Home; and the street that threads these things (“Parkee Lanee Street” the coolies call it) is spoken of affectionately in every corner of the Seven Seas. Park Lane probably spells home to half the sailors in the world.

Midway in its course this last rib separates the decaying gentility south of Princes Park from the frankly homespun suburb of the Dingle. But even the Dingle, since it marches cheek by jowl with the River, cannot escape being occasionally infected with romance. There is one little row of apparently quite subdued little tenements, for instance, whose lives must really be one long debauch of raw sensation. I do not insist upon the haunting presence of the Fever Hospital at one end of them; nor upon that of the lean bridge which stalks appallingly across a ramping railway-siding at the other; for these are incidents of a sort that make other neighbourhoods tremendous. But these cottages have perched themselves exactly on the brink of the ragged cliff which surrounds that ultimate dock, the Herculaneum, and beneath them a group of black monsters are always at work plucking trucks of coal bodily from the railway and plunging them into the bowels of chained ships. Further over, there are the peering heads and shoulders of embedded liners; further, again, the wide manuscript of the River, lurid with adventure; and, beyond that, the stony slopes of the Wirral. Nor is this all; for immediately below their doorsteps some thousands of gallons of petroleum are stored in the live rock, and somewhere beneath their kitchen floors the Midland expresses race and hammer all day long.

Certainly, if it is roaring melodrama one thirsts for, the Dingle, in spite of its drabness, is clearly the place to dwell.

§ 12.

I have just spoken of the stony slopes of the Wirral. The stones, of course, are houses, and the houses form themselves into suburbs, and those suburbs troop all about the coast, and pour inland, and tend to fill all the green peninsula with pleasant cubicles. But of those suburbs and all the tranquil spaces they lead to and enclose I must not now attempt to speak. Their qualities are many: river and sea, heather, champaign, woven coppice, and swart fir-wood grant them a procession of aspects no mere generalization could include. Port Sunlight set out as though for an old English festival; Eastham with its woods and booths; New Ferry and Rock Ferry, the stony slopes that lead at length to Birkenhead; Birkenhead itself, a march played like a dirge; Seacombe, Egremont, New Brighton, promenade-linked, wide-shored, flickering out into all manner of watering-place delights; Leasowe, whose sea-beaten coppices are wonderful in spring with ranks of praying white and hymning purple; Hoylake, with its famous links and golfing fishermen; Thurstaston, with its legendary hills and dear memories; Heswall, sunset-saturated among its heaths; Prenton, with its pine-woods and its water-tower; Oxton, mellow and meticulous upon its height: so do I content myself with naming them, and, so naming them, add one word of admiration for the dainty fashion in which, in her green chamber, Wirral makes the beds for so many of the workers in the streets across the way.

But there is one place in the Wirral about which I must inevitably add another word. Both practically and sentimentally, indeed, Bidston Hill belongs to Liverpool: practically because it is the property of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, and because its Pharos plays so large a part in directing the courses of the fleets; sentimentally—well, sentimentally for a dozen excellent good reasons. It would be from here, no doubt, in the old days, that the traveller from the south would catch his first glimpse of the River and the hamlet; it is from here that generation after generation of townsfolk have come to see their City in its bulk; it is here still that they bring the good stranger, hoping secretly that he will find their Liverpool a rather wonderful and alluring sort of place. And certainly it is from here, among this almond-scented gorse, that Liverpool builds up most perfectly into a visible entity. The City and its outposts draw easily together; the Dock Board Building makes an ivory nucleus; and Walton Church on the left, and Mossley Hill Church on the right, seem, in actuality, as they are in essence, but two organic incidents in the great design of which it forms the centre. The bird-song and the dumbness, the green spaces and the grey, the hid tragedies, the fair buildings, the lavish, roaring ways, are now merged wonderfully together, and, in their fusion, form one supreme attribute, nameless because it is unhuman. Smoke-scarves of her own weaving and vapours of the air binding her and her children together, Liverpool broods there in the sunshine, sole and indivisible, a splendid seaward-facing Presence. And the River flames at her feet.