XI
THE FLOWER BEAUTIFUL

Limehouse, Plaistow, and the East India Docks—these are places in the world to wonder about. Yet even there beauty manages to creep in and grow in a soil where there would seem to be nothing but decay.

There are societies, I believe, which exist in those quarters, whose endeavour it is to lift the mind of the East End inhabitant to an appreciation of what the West End knows to be Art. I am sure that all their intentions are the sincerest in the world. But what is the good of Art to a dock labourer and his wife?

We have only arrived at Art ourselves after generations and generations of a knowledge of what is beautiful. So absolutely have we arrived, moreover, that we care no longer for what is beautiful; we only care for Art.

That, however, is another question too long to enter into here. But to teach Art to the East India dock labourer when he knows so little of beauty, that is a process of putting carts before horses—a reduction to absurdity which can be seen at once.

Now when I was a journalist—that is to say, when I wrote lines of words for a paper which paid me so much per line for the number of lines which the chief sub-editor was good enough to use—I was one day despatched to the East End to see if there were any stuff—I speak colloquially—in a poor people’s flower show.

“It may be funny,” said the editor.

“It might be,” said I.

“Well, make it funny,” said he, for I think he caught the note in my voice.

I pocketed my notebook and set off for the East End. Oh, there were all sorts of flowers and doubtless it looked the funniest of flower shows you would ever have seen. For example, the qualification necessary for exhibition was that your plant had been grown in a pot and on a window sill. It was a qualification not difficult to fulfil. In all my wanderings there to find the place, no plot of ground did I see, save a graveyard around a church. But the only things that grew there were the stones in memory of the dead; and they, begrimed with soot and dirt, were sorry flowers to grace a tomb.

You can imagine the pitiful, shrivelled little things that had struggled to maintain life on the window sills of the houses in those dingy courts and darksome alleys. Never did I see such an array in all my life. They would almost, when you thought of country gardens where the daffodils stand up and brave the April winds, they would almost have brought the tears to your eyes.

Little geraniums there were, blinking their poor, tired eyes at the light. One woman brought a plant of sweet pea, which was climbing so wearily, yet so anxiously out of its little pot of red up a wee thin stake of wood. You knew it would never reach the light of the heaven it so yearned to see. The two faint blossoms that it bore were pale, like fragile slum children. What would I not have given then to wrench it out of its poor bed and give it to the great generous sweep of an open field, with a hedge of hawthorn perhaps on which to lean its tired arms.

The woman saw my eyes in its direction and she beamed with conscious pride.

“It doesn’t look very healthy,” said I.

She gazed at it and then at me with open wonder in her eyes.

“Not ’ealthy?” she said—“why, I’ve never seen none looking better. Look at that pansy over there—it can’t ’old its ’ead up.”

“But why compare it with the worst one in the show?” I asked—“I didn’t mean it as a personal criticism when I said it wasn’t healthy. I’m sure you’ve taken a tremendous amount of care over it.”

“Care!” she exclaimed—“I should just think I ’ave. It’s ’ad all the scrapin’s off the road in front of our ’ouse.”

I passed on, for the judges were coming round and the young curate just down from the university has not a proper respect for the Press. He has probably written for it. Now the young curate of the parish was the principal judge.

I did not hear what he said about the sweet pea. I had gone further on to where a woman was standing with her hand affectionately round a pot from which rose a fine, healthy plant, with rich, deep purple flowers nestling in the leaves that grew to the very pinnacle of the stem. There I waited. I wanted to hear what the judges were going to say about this one. I wanted to hear very much indeed.

This woman, too, seeing my interest in her exhibit, smiled with generous satisfaction.

“Think I’ve got a chanst, sir?”

“I don’t know,” said I—“it’s fine and strong.”

“And look at all the blossoms,” said she with enthusiasm—“you wouldn’t believe it, but my son brought that from the country last year when ’e went for the houtin’. ’E brought it back, dragged up almost to the roots it was—an’ it was in flower then. ‘Put it in a vawse,’ I says, but my ole man, ’e says—‘Shove it in a bloomin’ pot,’ ’e says, ‘that’ll grow,’ ’e says—‘it’s got roots to it.’ So we puts it in a pot and sticks it out on a window sill, and there it is. It died down to nothin’ last winter, but my ole man, ’e wouldn’t let me throw the pot away. ‘Give it a chanst of the spring,’ ’e says—‘give it a chanst of the spring.’ And bless my soul, if we didn’t see little bits of green sticking up through the mould before the beginning of last March.”

“It’s been a constant interest since then?” said I.

“Hinterest! Why my ole man said as I was killin’ it, the way I watered it and looked after it.”

“And what do you call it?” I asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Nobody seems to know. We call it—William.”

I laughed. “There is a flower called Sweet William,” said I.

“Perhaps that’s it,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But it don’t smell—leastways, I’ve never smelt nothin’ from it.”

I stood aside as the judges came up. When he saw the plant, standing so bravely and so healthily, and so beautifully in its bright red pot, the curate laughed out loud.

“Look here,” said he to one of the other judges, who came up and laughed as well.

“Do you know what you’ve got here, my good woman?” asked the curate.

She shook her head.

“Well, we can’t give you anything for this—it’s only a common nettle—a red dead nettle.”

“But it’s a beautiful colour—ain’t it?” said she, with a flame of red in her face.

“Oh—it’s a beautiful colour, no doubt,” replied the curate easily—“so, I hope, is every plant that grows in the highways and the byways.”

“Well, then, why shouldn’t it get a prize?” she demanded.

“Because it’s only a common dead nettle,” said the curate, very softly, turning away wrath.

“But it’s ’ealthier and stronger and finer than any o’ them other flowers,” said she.

“Quite so—no doubt—you might expect that. These others are cultivated flowers, you see. This is only a common dead nettle.”

I saw the editor when I returned.

“No stuff worth having,” said I—disconsolately, for I was thinking of my few short lines.

“Nothing funny at all?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said I, and I told him about the red dead nettle.

“But I think that’s dammed funny,” he said.

“Do you?” I said.