power on excited brains, this crash grew more and more discordant. Nice
lads, with smooth, pleasant faces, grew flushed and excited, and I am
afraid that I occupied myself in marking out possible careers for a good
many of them as I studied their faces. There was not much fun of the
healthy kind; fat, comfortable, middle-aged men laughed so heartily at
the faintest indecent allusion that the singers grew broader and
broader, and the hateful music-hall songs grew more and more risky as
the night grew onward. By the way, can anything be more loathsomely
idiotic than the average music-hall ditty, with its refrain and its
quaint stringing together of casual filthiness? If I had not wanted to
fix a new picture on my mind I should have liked better to be in a
tap-room among honestly brutal costers and scavengers than with that
sniggering, winking gang. The drink got hold, glasses began to be broken
here and there, the time was beaten with glass crushers, spoons, pipes,
and walking-sticks; and then the bolder spirits felt that the time for
good, rank, unblushing blackguardism had come. A being stepped up and
faced a roaring audience of enthusiasts who knew the quality of his
dirtiness; he launched out into an unclean stave, and he reduced his
admirers to mere convulsions. He was encored, and he went a trifle
further, until he reached a depth of bestiality below which a gaff in
Shoreditch could net descend. Ah! Those bonny lads, how they roared with
laughter, and how they exchanged winks with grinning elders! Not a
single obscure allusion to filth was lost upon them, and they took more
and more drink under pressure of the secret excitement until many of
them were unsteady and incoherent. I think I should shoot a boy of mine
if I found him enjoying such a foul entertainment. It was léze-Humanity.
The orgie rattled on, to the joy of all the steaming, soddened company,
and I am not able to guess where some of the songs and recitations came
from. There are deeps below deeps, and I suppose that there are skilled
literary workmen who have sunk so far that they are ready to supply the