A VISION OF THE NIGHT
All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable of
being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.—CARLYLE.
Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to
Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled
with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter
with the East End as a living place for men and women.
It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is
untenable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the “nightly horror” of
Piccadilly and the Strand. It _was_ a menagerie of garmented bipeds
that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete
the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they
snarled too fiercely.
I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my “seafaring”
clothes, and I was what is called a “mark” for the creatures of prey
that prowled up and down. At times, between keepers, these males looked
at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves that they were, and I was afraid
of their hands, of their naked hands, as one may be afraid of the paws
of a gorilla. They reminded me of gorillas. Their bodies were small,
ill-shaped, and squat. There were no swelling muscles, no abundant
thews and wide-spreading shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an
elemental economy of nature, such as the cave-men must have exhibited.
But there was strength in those meagre bodies, the ferocious,
primordial strength to clutch and gripe and tear and rend. When they
spring upon their human prey they are known even to bend the victim
backward and double its body till the back is broken. They possess
neither conscience nor sentiment, and they will kill for a
half-sovereign, without fear or favour, if they are given but half a
chance. They are a new species, a breed of city savages. The streets
and houses, alleys and courts, are their hunting grounds. As valley and
mountain are to the natural savage, street and building are valley and
mountain to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in
the jungle.
The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of the
West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But
they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day,
when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men
are on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their
dens and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the
dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another,
“Whence came they?” “Are they men?”
But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They were
only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like grey
shadows along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins they
spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones
begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing
ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering and
gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in
debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive,
fearful to look upon.
And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types of
sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating carcasses,
the living deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame
brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags,
wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their
faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling
like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew.
And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies
and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the
bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. And I remember a lad of
fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless,
the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a
railing and watched it all.
The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them. There
are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The dockers
crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the foreman
does not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay six
shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing to do;
514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the employment
of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare, are found to
toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of fourteen hours.
Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he loses his job. Ellen
Hughes Hunt prefers Regent’s Canal to Islington Workhouse. Frank
Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and children because he cannot
find work enough to give them food and shelter.
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and forgotten,
dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution—of the
prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and
sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is
the best that civilisation can do for the human, then give us howling
and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and
desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the
machine and the Abyss.