filthier than any I have heard from a bookmaker. She lisped, and there
was a suggestion in her accent of East Prussia or Western Russia. Her
face was permanently reddened by alcohol. The skin was coarse, almost
scaly, and her whole person sagged abominably. She wore no corsets, but
her green frock was of an artful shade to match her brassy hair. Her hat
was new and jaunty and challenging.
"Tell you what," she said, turning from me, and seeming to wake up;
"tell you what I'd like to do to that old counsel. I'd like to----" And
here she poured forth a string of suggestions so disgusting that I
cannot even convey them by euphemism. Her mouth was a sewer. The air
about us stunk with her talk. When she had finished, my mate again
leaned across me, and asked in a hollow whisper, like the friction of
sand-paper--
"'Ere--Luba--tell us. Why d'you go back on Billie, eh?"
Luba made an expressive gesture with her fingers in his face, and that
was the only answer he received; for she suddenly noticed me again, and,
without another word, she dipped her hand to her bosom and pulled out a
naked knife of the bowie pattern and twisted it under my nose. With the
nervous instinct of the moment, I dodged back; but it followed me.
"No monkey-tricks with me, dear! See? Else you'll know what. See?"
I was turning to my friend, in an appeal for intervention, when, quite
as suddenly as the knife was drawn, it disappeared, for Luba
overbalanced because of the gin that was in her, and slipped from the
form. Between us, we picked her up, replaced her, and tucked the knife
into its sheath. Whereupon she at once got up, and said she was off. For
some reason she went through an obscure ritual of solemnly pulling my
ear and slapping my face. Then she slithered across the room, fell up
the stair into the passage, and disappeared into the caverns of gloom
beyond the door. When she had gone, some one said, "Daddy--Luba's gone!"
Daddy leaped from the form, snarled something inarticulate, fell up the
same stair, and went babbling and yelling after Luba. Some one came and
shoved a fuzzy head through the door, asking lazily, "Whassup?" "Luba's
gone." "Oh!"
I wondered vaguely if it was a nightmare; if I had gone mad; or if other
people had gone mad. I don't know now what it all meant. I only know
that the girl was the Crown's principal witness in a now notorious
murder case. My ear still burns.
A CHARITABLE NIGHT
EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH
_POOR_
_From jail he sought her, and he found
A darkened house, a darkened street,
A shrilly sky that screamed of sleet,
And from The Lane quick gusts of sound._
_He mocked at life that men call sweet.
He went and wiped it out in beer--
"Well, dammit, why should I stick here,
By a dark house in a dark street?"_
_For he and his but serve defeat;
For kings they gather gems and gold,
And life for them, when all is told,
Is a dark house in a dark street._
A CHARITABLE NIGHT
EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH
Charity ... the most nauseous of the virtues, the practice of which
degrades both giver and receiver. The practice of Charity brings you
into the limelight; it elevates you to friendship with the Almighty; you
feel that you are a colleague of the Saviour. It springs from Pity, the
most unclean of all human emotions. It is not akin to love; it is akin
to contempt. To be pitied is to be in the last stages of spiritual
degradation. You cannot pity anything on your own level, for Pity
implies an assumption of superiority. You cannot be pitied by your
friends and equals, only by your self-elected superiors. Let us see Pity
at work in London....
As I lounged some miles east of Aldgate Pump, an old song of love and
lovers and human kindliness was softly ringing in my head, and it still
haunted me as I slid like a phantom into that low-lit causeway that
slinks from a crashing road to the dark wastes of waters beyond. At the
far end a brutal black building broke the sky-line. A few windows were
thinly lit by gas. I climbed the stone steps, hollowed by many feet, and
stood in the entrance-hall.
Then, as it seemed from far away, I heard an insistent murmur, like the
breaking of distant surf. I gazed around and speculated. In the bare
brick wall was a narrow, high door. With the instinct of the journalist,
I opened it. The puzzle was explained. It was the Dining Hall of the
Metropolitan Orphanage, and the children were at their seven o'clock
supper. From the cathedral-like calm of the vestibule, I passed into an
atmosphere billowing with the flutter of some five hundred small
tongues. Under the pendant circles of gas-jets were ranged twelve long,
narrow tables packed with children talking and eating with no sense of
any speed-limit. On the one side were boys in cruelly ugly brown suits,
and on the other side, little girls from seven to fifteen in frocks of
some dark material with a thin froth of lace at neck and wrists and
coarse, clean pinafores. Each table was attended by a matron, who served
out the dry bread and hot milk to the prefects, who carried the basins
up and down the tables as deftly as Mr. Paul Cinquevalli. Everywhere was
a prospect of raw faces and figures, which Charity had deliberately made
as uncomely as possible by clownish garb and simple toilet. The children
ate hungrily, and the place was full of the spirit of childhood, an
adulterated spirit. The noise leaped and swelled on all sides in an
exultant joy of itself, but if here and there a jet of jolly laughter
shot from the stream, there were glances from the matrons.
The hall was one of wide spaces, pierced at intervals by the mouths of
bleak, stark corridors. The air of it was limp and heavy with the smell
of food. Polished beams ran below the roof, pretending to uphold it, and
massive columns of painted stone flung themselves aggressively here and
there, and thought they were supporting a small gallery. Outside a full
moon shone, but it filtered through the cheap, half-toned glass of the
windows with a quality of pale lilac. Here and there a window of stained
glass stabbed the brick wall with passionate colour. The moral
atmosphere suggested nut-foods and proteid values.
At half-past seven a sharp bell rang, and with much rumbling and
manoeuvring of forms, the children stood stiffly up, faced round, and,
as a shabby piano tinkled a melody, they sang grace, somewhat in this
fashion:--
To Go doo give sus dailyb read
Dour thankful song we raise-se,
Sand prayth at he who send susf ood,
Dwillf ill lour reart swithp raise, _Zaaaamen_.
Then a wave of young faces rolled upward to the balcony, where stood a
grey-headed, grey-bearded, spectacled figure. It was one of the honorary
managers. The children stood to attention like birds before a snake. One
almost expected to hear them sing "God bless the squire and his
relations...." The Gentleman was well-tailored, and apart from his
habiliments there was, in every line of his figure, that which suggested
solidity, responsibility, and the substantial virtues. I have seen him
at Committee meetings of various charitable enterprises; himself,
duplicated again and again. One charitable worker is always exactly like
the other, allowing for differences of sex. They are of one type, with
one manner, and--I feel sure--with one idea. I am certain that were you
to ask twenty members of a Charity committee for opinions on aviation,
Swedenborgism, the Royal Academy, and Little Tich, each would express
the same views in the same words and with the same gestures.
This gentleman was of the City class; he carried an air of sleekness.
Clearly he was a worthy citizen, a man who had Got On, and had now
abandoned himself to this most odious of vices. And there he stood, in a
lilac light, splashed with voluptuous crimsons and purples, dispensing
Charity to the little ones before him whose souls were of hills and the
sea. He began to address them. It appeared that the Orphanage had
received, that very morning, forty more children; and he wished to
observe how unnecessary it was for him to say with what pleasure this
had been done. Many thousands of children now holding exalted positions
in banks and the Civil Service could look to him as to their father, in
the eighty or more years of the School's life, and he was proud to feel
that his efforts were producing such Fine Healthy Young Citizens. The
children knew--did they not?--that they had a Good Home, with loving
guardians who would give them the most careful training suited to their
position in life. They were clothed, maintained, and drilled, as
concerned their bodies; and, as concerned their souls, they had the
habits of Industry and Frugality inculcated into them, and they were
guided in the paths of Religion and Virtue. They had good plain food,
suited to their position in life, and healthy exercise in the way of
Manly Sports and Ladylike Recreations. He quoted texts from the
Scriptures, about the sight of the Widow touching those chords which
vibrate sympathetically in all of us, and a lot of stuff about a Cup of
Cold Water and These Little Ones. He exuded self-content.
He went on to remark that the hazardous occupations of Modern Industry
had, by their many mischances, stripped innumerable families of their
heads, and reduced them to a condition of the most deplorable. He
desired to remind them that the class to which they belonged was not the
Very Poor of the gutters, but the Respectable Poor who would not stoop
to receive the aid doled out by the State. No; they were not Gutter
Children, but, at the same time, the training they received was not such
as to create any distaste among them for the humblest employments of
Honest Industry, suitable to their position in life. He redeemed the
objects interested in his exertions from the immoralities of the Very
Poor, while teaching them to respect their virtues, and to do their duty
in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call them.
(The little objects seemed to appreciate this, for they applauded with
some spirit, on prompting from the matrons.)
He went on to suggest, with stodgy jocularity, that among them was
possibly a Prime Minister of 1955--think of Pitt--and perhaps a Lord
Kitchener. He spoke in terms of the richest enthusiasm of the fostering
of the Manly Qualities and the military drill--such a Fine Thing for the
Lads; and he urged them to figure to themselves that, even if they did
not rise to great heights, they might still achieve greatness by doing
their duty at office desk, or in factory, loom, or farmyard, and so
adding to the lustre of their Native Land--a land, he would say, in
which they had so great a part.
(Here the children cheered, seemingly with no intent of irony.) He added
that, in his opinion, kind hearts were, if he might so put it, more than
coronets.
The Gentleman smiled amiably. He nourished no tiny doubt that he was
doing the right thing. He believed that Christ would be pleased with him
for turning out boys and girls of fourteen, half-educated, mentally and
socially, to spend their lives in dingy offices in dingy alleys of the
City. There was no humbug here; impossible for a moment to doubt his
sincerity. He had a childlike faith in his Great Work. He was, as he
annually insisted, with painful poverty of epithet, engaged in
Philanthropic Work, alleviating the Distresses of the Respectable Poor
and ameliorating Social Conditions Generally. So he trained his children
until he trained them into desk or farm machines; trained them so that
their souls were starved, driven in on themselves, and there stifled,
and at last eaten away by the canker of their murky routine.
I looked at those children as they stood before me. I looked at their
bright, clear faces, their eyes wonder-wide, their clean brows alert for
knowledge, hungry for life and its beauty. Despite their hideous
clothes, they were the poetry of the world: all that is young and fresh
and lovely. Then I thought of them five years hence, their minds larded
with a Sound Commercial Education, tramping the streets of the City from
nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening, living in
an atmosphere of intellectual vacuity, their ardent temperaments fled,
their souls no longer desiring beauty. I felt a little sick.
But The Gentleman.... The Gentleman stood there in a lilac light, and
took unction unto himself. He smiled benignly, a smile of sincere
pleasure. Then he called the children to attention while he read to
them a prayer of St. Chrysostom, which he thought most suitable to
their position in life. A ring of gas-jets above his head hovered like
an aureole.
* * * * *
I do wish that something could somehow be done to restrain the
Benevolent. We are so fond, as a nation, of patronizing that if we have
nothing immediately at hand to patronize, we must needs go out into the
highways and hedges and bring in anything we can find, any old thing, so
long as we can patronize it. I have often thought of starting a League
(I believe it would be immensely popular) for The Suppression of Social
Service. The fussy, incompetent men and women who thrust themselves
forward for that work are usually the last people who should rightly
meddle with it. They either perform it from a sense of duty, or what
they themselves call The Social Conscience (the most nauseous kind of
benevolence), or they play with it because it is Something To Do. Always
their work is discounted by personal vanity. I like the Fabians: they
are funny without being vulgar. But these Social Servants and their
Crusades for Pure and Holy Living Among Work-Girls are merely fatuous
and vulgar when they are not deliberately insulting. Can you conceive a
more bitter mind than that which calls a girl of the streets a Fallen
Sister? Yet that is what these people have done; they have labelled a
house with the device of The Midnight Crusade for the Reclamation of our
Fallen Sisters; and they expect self-respecting girls of that profession
to enter it....
I once attended one of these shows in a North London slum. The people
responsible for it have the impudence to send women-scouts to the West
End thoroughfares at eleven o'clock every night, there to interfere with
these girls, to thrust their attentions upon them, and, if possible,
lure them away to a service of song--Brief, Bright, and Brotherly. It
was a bitter place in a narrow street. The street was gay and loud with
humanity, only at its centre was a dark and forbidding door, reticent
and inhuman. There was no sign of good-fellowship here; no warm touch of
the flesh. It was as brutal as justice; it seemed to have builded itself
on that most horrible of all texts: "_Be just before you are generous._"
I went in at an early hour, about half-past ten, and only two victims
had been secured. The place stunk of _The Church Times_ and practical
Christianity. In the main room was a thin fire, as skimpy as though it
had been lit by a spinster, as, I suppose, it had. There was a bare deal
table. The seating accommodation was cane chairs, which I hate; they
always remind me of the Band of Hope classes I was compelled to attend
as a child. They suggest something stale and cheesy, something as
squalid as the charity they serve. On a corner table was a battered urn
and a number of earthenware cups, with many plates of thick, greasy
bread-and-butter; just the right fare to offer a girl who has put away
several benedictines and brandies. The room chilled me. Place, people,
appointments, even the name--Midnight Crusade for the Reclamation of our
Fallen Sisters--smacked of everything that is most ugly. Smugness and
super-piety were in the place. The women--I mean, ladies--who manage the
place, were the kind of women I have seen at the Palace when Gaby is on.
(For you will note that Gaby does not attract the men; it is not they
who pack the Palace nightly to see her powder her legs and bosom. They
may be there, but most of them are at the bar. If you look at the circle
and stalls, they are full of elderly, hard women, with dominant
eyebrows, leering through the undressing process, and moistening their
lips as Gaby appears in her semi-nakedness.)
The walls of the big bedroom were adorned with florid texts, tastefully
framed. It was a room of many beds, each enclosed in a cubicle. The beds
were hard, covered with coarse sheets. If I were a Fallen Brother, I
hardly think they would have tempted me from a life of ease. And there
were RULES.... Oh, how I loathe RULES! I loathed them as a child at
school. I loathed drill, and I loathed compulsory games, and I loathed
all laws that were made without purpose. There were long printed lists
of Rules in this place, framed, and hung in each room. You can never
believe how many things a Fallen Sister may not do. Certain rules are,
of course, essential; but the pedagogic mind, once started on
law-making, can never stop; and it is usually the pedagogic type of
mind, with the lust for correction, that goes in for Charity. Why may
not the girls talk in certain rooms? Why may they not read anything but
the books provided? Why may they not talk in bed? Why must they fold
their bed-clothes in such-and-such an exact way? Why must they not
descend from the bed-room as and when they are dressed? Why must they
let the Superior read their letters? And why, oh, why are these places
run by white-faced men and elderly, hard women?
I have written, I fear, rather flippantly on this topic; but that is
only because I dare not trust myself to be serious. I realize as much as
any one that the life is a shameful life, and all that sort of thing;
but I boil with indignation at the hundred shamefulnesses which these
charity-mongers heap upon defenceless girls who, in a weak moment, have
sought their protection. If you know anything about the matter, you will
know that these girls have in their little souls an almost savage flame
of self-respect which burns with splendour before the bleak, miserable
flame of Organized Charity. If I spoke my mind on the subject, this page
would blaze with fury ... and you would smile.
* * * * *
But amid all this welter of misdirected endeavour, there is just one
organized charity for which I should like to say a word; and that is The
Salvation Army. I do not refer to its religious activities so much as to
its social work as represented in the excellent Shelters which have
been opened in various districts. There is one in Whitechapel Road,
which is the identical building where General Booth first started a
small weekly mission service which was afterwards known all over the
world as The Salvation Army. There is one in Hoxton. There is one--a
large one--in Blackfriars Road. And there are others wherever they may
be most needed.
The doors open at five o'clock every evening. The Shelter, mark you, is
not precisely a Charity. The men have to pay. Here is shown the
excellent understanding of the psychology of the people which the
University Socialist misses. You cannot get hold of people by offering
them something for nothing; but you can get hold of them by tens of
thousands by offering them something good at a low price. For a
halfpenny the Salvation Army offers them tea, coffee, cocoa, or soup,
with bread-and-butter, cake, or pudding. All this food is cooked and
prepared at the Islington headquarters, and the great furnaces in the
kitchens of the Shelters are roaring night and day for the purpose of
warming-up the food, heating the Shelter, and serving the drying-rooms,
where the men can hang their wet clothes.
A spotlessly clean bed is offered for threepence a night, which includes
use of bathroom, lavatory, and washhouse. The washhouse is in very great
demand on wet nights by those who have been working out of doors, and by
those who wish to wash their underclothes, etc.
In addition to this, the men have the service of the Army orderlies, in
attention at table and in "calling" in the morning. The staff is at work
all night, either attending new-comers or going round with the various
"calls," which, as some of the guests are market porters, are for
unearthly hours, such as half-past three or four o'clock. The Shelters
are patronized by many "regulars"--flower-sellers, pedlars, Covent
Garden or Billingsgate odd men, etc.--who lodge with them by the week,
sometimes by the year. Lights are officially out at half-past nine, but
of course the orderly is on duty at the door until eight o'clock the
following morning, and no stranger who wants food and bed is refused. He
is asked for the threepence and for the halfpenny for his food, but if
he cannot produce these he has but to ask for the Brigadier, and, if he
is a genuine case, he is at once taken in.
Every Saturday night at half-past eleven certain of the orderlies,
supplied with tickets, go out, and to any hungry, homeless wanderer they
give a ticket with directions to the Shelter. These Saturday night
tickets entitle him, if he chooses to accept them, to bath, breakfast,
bed, and the Sunday service.
Further, the Shelter acts as employment agency, and, once having found
their man, the first step towards helping him is to awaken in him the
latent sense of responsibility. The quickest way is to find him work,
and this they do; and once their efforts show results, they never lose
sight of him.
Many heartbreaking cases go by the orderly's box at the door, and I
would like to set some of those young Oxford philanthropists who write
pamphlets or articles in _The New Age_ on social subjects by the door
for a night. I think they would learn a lot of things they never knew
before. Often, at two or three o'clock in the morning, the scouts will
bring in a bundle of rain-sodden rags that hardly looks as if it could
ever have been a man. How can you deal scientifically or religiously
with that?
You can't. But the rank and file of The Salvation Army, with its almost
uncanny knowledge of men, has found a better, happier way. I have spent
many nights in various of their Shelters, and I should like to put on
record the fine spirit which I have found prevailing there. It is a
spirit of camaraderie. In other charitable institutions you will find
timidity, the cowed manner, sometimes symptoms of actual fear. But never
at the Salvation Army. There every new-comer is a pal, until he is
proved to be unworthy of that name. There is no suspicion, no
underhanded questioning, no brow-beating: things which I have never
found absent from any other organized charity.
The Salvation Army method is food, warmth, mateyness; and their answer
to their critics, and their reward, is the sturdy, respectable artisan
who comes along a few months later to shake hands with them and give his
own services in helping them in their work.
* * * * *
Far away West, through the exultant glamour of theatre and restaurant
London, through the solid, melancholic greys of Bayswater, you find a
little warm corner called Shepherd's Bush. You find also Notting Dale,
where the bad burglars live, but we will talk of that in another
chapter. Back of Shepherd's Bush is a glorious slum, madly lit, uncouth,
and entirely wonderful.
To Shepherd's Bush I went one evening. I went to fairyland. I went to
tell stories and to lead music-hall choruses. No; not at the Shepherd's
Bush Empire, but at a dirty little corrugated hall in a locked byway.
Some time ago, the usual charitably minded person, finding time hang
heavy on her hands, or having some private grief which she desired to
forget in bustle and activity, started a movement for giving children
happy evenings. I have not been to one of the centres, and I am sure I
should not like to go. I dislike seeing children disciplined in their
play. Children do not need to be taught to play. Games which are not
spontaneous are as much a task as enforced lessons. I have been a child
myself. The people who run charities, I think, never have been....
However....