IN SEARCH OF VICE
When I first came to London I was twenty years old; I came from Paris,
and, being twenty, felt sure that there remained no sensations for
me to experience, no realms of passion to explore. I felt that I had
lived--well, lived; that I came from Babylon city, and was now entering
a Puritanic world, a place of dignities and parliaments, of clergymen
with white bibs, of ladies with prominent teeth and elastic-sided boots
who said ‘shocking’; I also felt that I was entering the country of
_le sport, le flirt_; I had also been told that the English were a
strange people, adepts in every depravity, of which the secret drinking
of methylated spirits was a minor example. I admired them thoroughly,
as I admired Westminster Abbey. Briefly, a land of virtue. This state
of mind was fairly well kept up for the first year, because it rained
nearly all the time, and there is nothing like a rainy summer to raise
the moral tone of the streets. I was interested by the life I saw round
me, bored by the life I led on thirty-eight shillings a week; I could
afford little in the way of theatres; whisky made me sick; so did Irish
stew and suet pudding; I did not see as much of my fellows as I wanted,
because, in those days, I often had to choose between a clean shirt
in the evening, and a cut from the joint at lunch. Also, my landlady
washed the collie in the bath, which annoyed me.
It is not surprising, then, that I did not at once enter London’s
‘gilded haunts of vice.’ It took me a little time to discover them,
and, to be truthful, I am still looking for them. Indeed, I can say
that I have employed a considerable portion of the last eighteen years
in search of vice, and it may be that I must blame a Parisian education
for my disappointment. I thought I had found vice the first time I saw
a couple publicly embrace, opposite Marble Arch, never having seen
anything so indecent in a Continental city; but this was an illusion,
just like another illusion when, for the first time, I heard a speaker
in the Park state his true opinion of the Royal Family: I thought
this was the beginning of the revolution, and could not understand why
the police looked so bored. I do now, for I suppose that meetings have
been going on for several generations. But when it came to vice, when
I explained to my new and fast English friends that I was looking for
vice, when they took me to the old Empire Promenade, when they bade
me be shocked at the condition of Regent Street, between Vigo Street
and Piccadilly Circus, when they took me to Earl’s Court to ogle and
to drink milk-coffee, when they drew my attention to the chorus girls
performing what they called orgies in the punts near Maidenhead, a
certain melancholy crept over me. English vice was overrated. Indeed,
to this day, I am sure that there is very little vice in England, that
the Londoner, particularly, is a flighty creature, who kills virtue
with his mouth, who tells unpleasant stories about the deeds of other
people, and paints the town red with the assistance of his fancy socks.
They are cowards, really, and most of them, when they slip at all, seem
to slip ignobly into the rare satisfaction of a purely animal instinct;
also, to do this, they need drink. Nero would not have understood them
at all.
Since those days much time has passed, and now and then, here and
there, I have come a little closer to those strange and secret
depravities of which, according to the Continent, London holds the
monopoly. The newspapers are helpful; for they have occasional fits
of virtue and begin to expose something, thus, at last, giving it an
advertisement; or the police intervene and shut up a restaurant, thus
focusing all eyes upon its proprietor and making him so famous that
when he opens another restaurant next door he is assured of custom. And
so I have known dreadful places, manicure shops where hands were held
longer than filing demands, tea shops where the depraved waitresses
call you ‘old dear,’ and demonstrate that in a chair when there is
room for one there is room for two. It is perfectly appalling. I have
been to the old Continental and to the old Globe Restaurant to spend
considerable sums on not very satisfactory meals, to see a number of
ladies manifest a little more clearly than is the custom the liberalism
of their mind. I don’t know why it strikes the Puritan faction as
so terrible that the women whom they call lost should congregate in
a particular place; it cannot be because thus they can be found, for
the Puritans must know that there is no street in central London, no
tube, no omnibus, which does not hold as much temptation and as much
opportunity as a small room in a quiet restaurant. I suppose it is the
openness of the thing shocks them, the fact that they cannot cover it
up and, therefore, pretend it is not there. But if that is vice, if
that is ‘the smirch on our fair escutcheon,’ then, indeed, must English
prudery be easily offended. It must be a sensitive prudery, for it
cried out against night-clubs, against the Cave of the Golden Calf,
where a few people did drink too much, against the excessive dancing at
poor Ciro’s, which for a time fell among Y.M.C.A.’s.
Also, during the war, a great fuss was raised in the newspapers over
the flappers in the Strand. I do not think anybody would have bothered
much about the flappers if, at that time, we had not had among us a
number of Anzacs who, as everybody knows, are the gentlest and most
guileless of men. These unfortunate young soldiers, finding themselves
lonely in a town such as ours, where no man needs go lonely along a
street if he has a little determination, lacking all the home comforts
which are implied in the possession of aunts, made their acquaintances
where they could. The flappers in the Strand who, to my knowledge,
have always been in the Strand, particularly on Saturday afternoon
and on Saturday night, when they descend upon Villiers Street and
the bandstand, coming from Aldgate and alighting at Charing Cross,
naturally welcomed them. Now, in the old days the flappers attached
themselves to any young man they met; sometimes he was a soldier in
a red coat, sometimes just a civilian, and nobody bothered, because
in those days it was not evident that anything unusual existed in the
association. Common sense revealed to all of us that these friendships
had been formed round the bandstand, but nobody was compelled to know
that they did not arise out of engagements of five years’ standing. On
the other hand, the Anzacs, with their beautiful bodies, their bronzed
faces and their squash hats, were noticeable; a Puritan, after having,
in the course of Saturday afternoon, seen several hundred Anzacs
accompanied by pretty girls, was compelled to realise that there could
not be so many Anzacs united by engagements of five years’ standing,
to the flappers in the Strand. The Puritan hates realising, because
when he realises he has to do something energetic, write to a paper, or
form a committee, or something. He does not mind writing to a paper or
forming a committee, but the whole thing upsets him; he cannot cover it
up, and he runs about with wild eyes, terrified because the thing which
is generally covered up has got loose.
It was that gave rise to the trouble, and the Puritans, determined that
the flappers should flap no more, had to manufacture a theoretical
Anzac, a young man from Melbourne (but born in the Bush, where no woman
had ever been before), a young man extraordinarily pure in spirit,
but liable to fall into temptation even if he had to cross the road
to do so, a young man imbued by his past education with a profound
reverence for womankind, whose feelings of reverence were daily being
outraged by shameless exhibitions into which he was reluctantly drawn.
It’s queer; this flapper question occupied the Press for months; now
and then the controversy died down, and then a Bishop or a special
article writer brought it up again; agents-general were called upon
to proclaim that our soldiers feared no foe in shining armour because
their heart was pure, while, in the same column, presidents of watch
committees gloomily acknowledged that something seemed to have happened
to the purity of those hearts. But all agreed that that purity must
at once be restored, that the Anzacs, which includes the Canadians,
the South Africans, and other moral weaklings, must be protected. To
this day we are protecting men of thirty against girls of fifteen: I
never heard anybody talk of protecting the flappers, for it was assumed
that, by the time they were fifteen, they had sunk too deep in iniquity
to deserve better protection than four walls in Holloway. And no one
seems to have asked himself whether these young men, cut away from old
habits, from their friends and their work, did not desperately want
feminine companionship; the members of watch committees did not ask
Colonials to stay with them for the weekend; for a long time they did
not even provide them with sufficient sleeping places, but seemed to
expect them to make merry all night in the ribald waiting-rooms of
Waterloo. Briefly, their virtue was to be its own reward, and certainly
we could not take from Nietzsche the aphorism that man is for war,
woman for the recreation of the warrior. Above all, we could not let
them alone.
Owing to this, my moral sense being aroused by an article in a Sunday
paper, I devoted a Saturday to a search for vice. Of course, I began
in the Strand, where I was told vice reigns. I saw a great number of
soldiers, doubtless viciously employed, but conducting their debauches
with singular restraint and dignity. Outside the Corner House stood
a number of boudoir ladies from the Government offices, who were
deplorably waiting for omnibuses; many of them may have been viciously
employed, but as their company was mostly confined to their own sex,
they were not sliding very fast down the butter-slide of perdition;
mostly, they were eating chocolates, and the fact that chocolates then
cost four shillings a pound may be sufficient evidence of undesirable
conduct, but this seems to me hardly enough to hang even a girl on.
I proceeded up the Strand where the East End was slowly beginning to
arrive, mostly in twos and threes. Often, indeed, I met the regrettable
flapper; certainly she was powdered and lip-salved, and I do not know
that this is exceptional, but right up to Temple Bar not a single
flapper made an effort to draw me from the straight path. (It is all
very well saying that I may not be the sort of person whom the flapper
would want to draw from the straight path, but surely vice has no
pride, and stoops to all men.) The most vicious thing I saw was two
soldiers and two girls walking rudely arm in arm.
I did my best. Indeed, I think I became a regular _agent provocateur_,
but I did not seem able to provoke anybody. So, desperately, I turned
back and crossed the river towards Waterloo Road. The reputation of
this gray and green commercial track was made by the street arab in
_Captain Brassbound’s Conversion_, who declared that if he did in
Morocco the things he did in Waterloo Road he would be hanged. But
nothing was happening in Waterloo Road; many people were drinking in
many public-houses; I entered a few public-houses, and though I tried
as hard as the two houses of convocation put together, I found nothing.
I will not weary you with details; it is enough to say that, still
guided by my Sunday newspaper, I proceeded on my footsore search. By
evening, I was lurking round Victoria, watching from the corner of my
eyes for the harpies who drug veteran members of the Band of Hope, and
after I had loafed about for a while, no doubt I must have conveyed a
harpy-like suggestion; I was seen in a picture palace, peering into
the dimness of the curtained boxes, which was easy, as they were not
dim. That night I was seen in many places, searching the blackness
of railway arches, furtively peering down the staircases of tubes,
hoping to discover the worst; I appeared in the deserted City; the back
streets of Theobald’s Road, the confidences of a hall porter in Gerrard
Street (expensive and uneventful), a long inspection of the first
floor fronts of Vauxhall Bridge Road, seen from the top of a tram,
all these grew familiar to me; and still nothing. As time went on, my
legs grew more and more woolly; my mind so obsessed and incoherent,
that I realised time would soon fit me for membership of the National
Vigilance Society. I even entered the Leicester Lounge, where there was
hardly anybody, as it was not Boat Race night; then I wondered whether
a visit to North Bank, St John’s Wood ... and awoke from my trance,
remembering that this would be thirty years late. There is no vice in
London; at least, there is nothing deliberate and artistic, just as
there is very little in Paris or Vienna that would justify a Welsh
elder in taking so long a journey. It is a pity that so fair a bubble
should be pricked.
This does not mean that London is a magnified Exeter Hall. There are,
in this town, about half a million bachelors, and that is enough to
lower the moral status of any city. There are also rather more married
men, which does not mend matters. Observe the bias of my mind: I have
forgotten to tell you the number, frequently quoted by indignant letter
writers to the Press, of women who hold forth temptation. For it may
be true that supply assists demand, but it is much more certain that
demand makes supply. During the war, for instance, there was great
agitation in the Upper House of Convocation, where the Bishop of London
revealed that in Cayeux and Havre undesirable houses were frequented
by British troops. Canon Burroughs went on to ask for purity patrols,
while the Bishop of Oxford presented a resolution designed to protect
our troops from molestation in London. This is all very well, and
deserves all sympathy, but the Bishop of London unfortunately read out
a protest addressed to the Mayor of the French town by its inhabitants,
and this protest referred to ‘crowds of English soldiers waiting
outside the houses.’ Does one, then, wait for temptation? Does not
temptation steal upon one as a thief in the night, or as a raging lion,
seeking whom it may devour? It is a picturesque idea this, of crowds
of innocent victims impatiently waiting for an opportunity to degrade
their eternal spirit.
Temptation is nonsense. I have spoken to many men about temptation;
they are seldom tempted, and this for very good reasons: men do not
fall, they dive. The women who ‘prey on them,’ fulfil a function
which will be necessary so long as society is as vilely constituted
as it is, so long as life is hard and insecure, so long as social
relations are false, so long as marriage is expensive and difficult of
dissolution, and, especially, so long as the hearts of men are brutish
and the hearts of women soft. The class which for centuries has been
hunted, has for centuries been maintained by the hunter, just as the
fox is bred and protected for the pleasure of the chase. Those women
do not seem to me to lead as easy lives as the men who profit by their
weakness; they look rather less well-fed, less well-clad; they wear
gold of a lesser carat; when they die their names do not appear in the
newspapers under the final advertisement: ‘To-day’s wills.’ Truly, the
wages of sin are low. Should we not conclude that if bread is so dear,
and flesh and blood cheap, there is no great inducement for the sale of
flesh and blood, except the cost of bread? Perhaps it is the easiest
way, but only for those to whom all ways would be easy.
There is no remedy for what the social campaigners call the condition
of our streets, except an alteration in the mind of the men who walk
in them; Christianity cannot help, for Christianity attempts to solve
this problem by purging sin, instead of realising misfortune. Thus too
many Christians justify Tacitus: ‘After the burning of Rome, suspicion
fell on the Emperor. In order to allay them, the Emperor embarked on
a series of persecutions; among those he persecuted was a sect that
called themselves Christians, who had incurred the animosity of the
populace owing to their sullen hatred of mankind.’
Tacitus was wrong, but then he was judging the Christians of his day
as agitators. The streets will alter when the houses along the streets
alter, when mankind has found love in the mind, when it is no longer
content with the love of the body. The majority of men seem to approach
life as pigs do the trough. Visit a West End restaurant, and you will
be sure. In that trough are not only curds and whey, and truffles, and
other suitable dainties; but excessive clothes and jewellery, honours,
false social values, irrelevant powers; so long as the Gadarene crowd
nuzzle and fight about that trough, so long will many of those, who are
not Gadarene in the spirit, be infected with envy and desire, so long
will they be driven to shrillness and self-advertisement, so long drawn
by popularity and repelled by fame. Meanwhile, it naturally follows
that what many call vice should endure, for vice is the satisfaction
that dulls the flesh when the spirit aches. Happy men have no vices;
it is only the unhappy, the hungry, fly to them. For my part, if I had
to make laws for a new society, I would make few. I should say rather
that we will build our new society so that all may be assured security
and justice, but no more. If we were to establish justice, we should
automatically do away with the curse of the world, which is wealth. It
might be a pity. It may be that Anatole France is right when he says:
‘The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil,
will vanish with him. Maybe that we shall not again see the flowers
that intoxicate, and the eyes that slay.’ Still, one would like to see
it tried.
[Illustration:
THE CHELSEA ARTS BALL]
VII
THE POOR