The Royal Hotel, San Remo, has the reputation of being the best hotel,
and the most expensive, on the Italian Riviera. It is the abode of
correctness and wealth, and if a stray novelist or so is discovered
there, that is only an accident. It provides distractions of all kinds
for its guests: bands of music, conjuring shows, dances; and that week
it provided quite a new thing in the way of distraction, namely, an
address from Prebendary Carlile, head of the Church Army, which was
quite truthfully described as a “national antidote to indiscriminate
charity.” We looked forward to that address; it was a novelty. And if we
of the Royal Hotel had a fault, our fault was a tendency, after we had
paid our hotel bills, to indiscriminate charity. Indiscriminate charity
salves the conscience just as well as the other kind, and though it
costs as much in money, it costs less in trouble. However, we liked to
be castigated for our sins, and, in the absence of Father Vaughan, we
anticipated with pleasure Mr. Carlile. We did not all go. None of
the representatives of ten different Continental aristocracies and
plutocracies went. Nor did any young and beautiful persons of any nation
go. As a fact, it was a lovely afternoon.
To atone for these defections, the solid respectability of all San Remo
swarmed into the hotel. (A notice had been posted that it might order
its carriages for 3.30.) We made an unprepossessing assemblage. I am far
removed from the first blush of youth; but I believe I was almost the
youngest person present, save a boy who had been meanly “pressed” by
his white-haired father. We were chiefly old, stout, plain, and of
dissatisfied visage. Many of us had never been married, and never would
be. We were prepared to be very grave. But the mischief was that Mr.
Carlile would not be grave.
Mr. Carlile looked like a retired colonel who had dressed by mistake in
clerical raiment. His hue was ruddy, his eye clear, and his moustache
martial. He is of a naturally cheerful disposition. It is impossible
not to like him, not to admire him, not to respect him. It really
requires considerable selfrestraint, after he has been speaking for a
few minutes, not to pelt him with sovereigns for the prosecution of his
work. Still, appreciation of humour was scarcely our strong point. We
could not laugh without severe effort. We were unaccustomed to laugh.
It is no use pretending that we were not a serious conclave (we were not
basking in the sun, nor dashing across the country in our Fiat cars; we
had the interests of the Empire at heart). Therefore, though we took the
Prebendary’s humorous denunciation of our indiscriminate charity with
fairly good grace, we should have preferred it with a little less
facetiousness. People burdened as we were with the responsibilities of
Empire ought not to be expected to laugh. As protectionists, we were
not, if the truth is to be told, in a mood for gaiety. Hence we did not
laugh; we hardly smiled. We just listened soberly to the Prebendary,
who, after he had told us what we ought not to do, told us what we ought
to do.
*****
“What we try to do,” he said, “is to bridge the gulf--to bridge the gulf
between the East End and the West End. We don’t want your money, we want
your help, we want each of you to take up one person and look after him.
_That_ is the only way to bridge the gulf.” He kept on emphasising the
phrase “bridge the gulf”; and to illustrate it, he mentioned a Christmas
pudding that was sent from a Royal palace to his “Pudding Sunday” orgy
labelled for “the poorest and loneliest widow.”
“We soon found her,” he said. “She worked from 8.30 A.M. to 6:30 p.m.
and again two hours at night, sewing buttons, and in a good week she
earned six shillings. Her right hand was all distorted by rheumatism,
so that to sew gave her great pain. We found her, and we pushed
her upstairs, with great difficulty--because she was so bad with
bronchitis--and she had her pudding. Someone insisted on giving her 1s.
a week for life, and someone else insisted on giving her 2s. a week for
life, so now she’s a blooming millionaire. Give us money, if you like,
but please don’t give us any more money for her....”
“There’s another class of women,” continued the Prebendary, “the
drunkards. Drunkenness is growing among women owing to the evil of
grocers’ licences. We should like some of you to take up a drunken woman
apiece and look after her. We can easily find you a nice, gentle
creature, to whom getting drunk is no more than getting cross is to us.
Very nice women are drunkards, and they can be reclaimed by bridging the
gulf. Then there’s the hooligans--you have them on the Riviera, too.
I’ve had a good deal of experience of them myself. I was once picked up
for dead near the Army and Navy Stores after meeting a hooligan. Only
the other day a man put his fist in my face and said: ‘You’ve ruined our
trade.’ ‘What trade? The begging trade?’ I said, ‘I wish I had.’ And
then the discharged prisoners. We offer five months’ work to any
discharged prisoner who cares to take it; there are 200,000 every year.
I was talking to a prison official the other day, who told me that 90
per cent, of his ‘cases’ he sent to us. We reclaim about half of these.
The other half break our hearts. One broke all our windows not long
since. ..”
And the Prebendary said also: “My greatest pleasure is a day, a whole
day, in a thoroughly bad slum. I went down to Wigan for such a day, and
at a meeting, when I asked whether anyone would come forward and speak
up for beer, not for Christ, a man came along and threw three pence
at my feet--remains of pawning his waistcoat--and then fell down dead
drunk. We picked him up, and I charged a helper with 6d., so that he
could be filled up with tea or coffee beyond his capacity to drink any
more beer at all. I don’t know whether it was the beer or the tea, but
he joined us. All due to emotion, or excitement, perhaps! Yes, but
the next morning I was going out to the 7.30 prayer-meeting and I came
across a Wigan collier dead drunk in the road. I tried to pick
_him_, up. I had my surplice on: I always wear my surplice, for the
advertisement, and because people like to see it. And I couldn’t pick
him up. I was carrying my trombone in one hand. Then another man came
along, and we couldn’t get that drunkard up between us. And then who
should come along but my reclaimed drunkard of the night before! He
managed it.”
And the Prebendary further said: “Come some day and have lunch with me.
It will take you two hours. You ought to chop ten bundles of firewood,
but I’ll let you off that. Or come and have tea. That will take four
hours. There’s a Starvation Supper to end it at 8.30, and something
going on all the time. We have a brass band, thirty players, all very
bad. I’m the worst, with my trombone. We also have a women’s concertina
band. It’s terrible. But it goes down. As one man said, ‘It mykes me
’ead ache, but it do do me ’eart good.’”
*****
Then Lord Dundonald proposed a vote of thanks to everybody who deserved
to be thanked. He indicated that we ought to help Mr. Carlile, just
to show our repentance for having allowed the people free access
to public-houses for several centuries. (Faint applause.) Unless we
prevented the people from getting at beer and unless we prevented aliens
from entering England--(Loud applause)--Mr. Carlile’s efforts would
not succeed. If we stopped the supply of beer and of aliens then the
principal steps [towards Utopia?] would have been accomplished. This
simple and comprehensible method of straightening out the social system
appealed to us very strongly. I think we preferred it to “bridging
the gulf.” At the back of our minds was the idea that if we lent
our motor-cars or our husbands’ or brothers’ motor-cars to the right
candidates at election time we should be doing all that was necessary to
ensure the millennium. Upon this we departed. In the glow of the meeting
the scheme of attaching ourselves each to a nice, gentle drunken woman
seemed attractive; but really, on reflection...! There was a plate at
the door. However, Mr. Carlile had himself said, “I don’t depend much on
the plate at the door.”