WHAT IT ALL CAME TO
FOR two years or thereabouts, M’Kay and myself continued our labours in
the Drury Lane neighbourhood. There is a proverb that it is the first
step which is the most difficult in the achievement of any object, and
the proverb has been altered by ascribing the main part of the difficulty
to the last step. Neither the first nor the last has been the difficult
step with me, but rather what lies between. The first is usually helped
by the excitement and the promise of new beginnings, and the last by the
prospect of triumph; but the intermediate path is unassisted by
enthusiasm, and it is here we are so likely to faint. M’Kay nevertheless
persevered, supporting me, who otherwise might have been tempted to
despair, and at the end of the two years we were still at our posts. We
had, however, learned something. We had learned that we could not make
the slightest impression on Drury Lane proper. Now and then an idler, or
sometimes a dozen, lounged in, but what was said was strange to them;
they were out of their own world as completely as if they were in another
planet, and all our efforts to reach them by simplicity of statement and
by talking about things which we supposed would interest them utterly
failed. I did not know, till I came in actual contact with them, how far
away the classes which lie at the bottom of great cities are from those
above them; how completely they are inaccessible to motives which act
upon ordinary human beings, and how deeply they are sunk beyond ray of
sun or stars, immersed in the selfishness naturally begotten of their
incessant struggle for existence and the incessant warfare with society.
It was an awful thought to me, ever present on those Sundays, and
haunting me at other times, that men, women, and children were living in
such brutish degradation, and that as they died others would take their
place. Our civilisation seemed nothing but a thin film or crust lying
over a volcanic pit, and I often wondered whether some day the pit would
not break up through it and destroy us all. Great towns are answerable
for the creation and maintenance of the masses of dark, impenetrable,
subterranean blackguardism, with which we became acquainted. The filthy
gloom of the sky, the dirt of the street, the absence of fresh air, the
herding of the poor into huge districts which cannot be opened up by
those who would do good, are tremendous agencies of corruption which are
active at such a rate that it is appalling to reflect what our future
will be if the accumulation of population be not checked. To stand face
to face with the insoluble is not pleasant. A man will do anything
rather than confess it is beyond him. He will create pleasant fictions,
and fancy a possible escape here and there, but this problem of Drury
Lane was round and hard like a ball of adamant. The only thing I could
do was faintly, and I was about to say stupidly, hope—for I had no
rational, tangible grounds for hoping—that some force of which we are not
now aware might some day develop itself which will be able to resist and
remove the pressure which sweeps and crushes into a hell, sealed from the
upper air, millions of human souls every year in one quarter of the globe
alone.
M’Kay’s dreams therefore were not realised, and yet it would be a mistake
to say that they ended in nothing. It often happens that a grand
attempt, although it may fail—miserably fail—is fruitful in the end and
leaves a result, not the hoped for result it is true, but one which would
never have been attained without it. A youth strives after the
impossible, and he is apt to break his heart because he has never even
touched it, but nevertheless his whole life is the sweeter for the
striving; and the archer who aims at a mark a hundred yards away will
send his arrow further than he who sets his bow and his arm for fifty
yards. So it was with M’Kay. He did not convert Drury Lane, but he
saved two or three. One man whom we came to know was a labourer in
Somerset House, a kind of coal porter employed in carrying coals into the
offices there from the cellars below, and in other menial duties. He had
about fifteen or sixteen shillings a week, and as the coals must
necessarily be in the different rooms before ten o’clock in the morning,
he began work early, and was obliged to live within an easy distance of
the Strand. This man had originally been a small tradesman in a country
town. He was honest, but he never could or never would push his trade in
any way. He was fond of all kinds of little mechanical contrivings,
disliked his shop, and ought to have been a carpenter or
cabinet-maker—not as a master but as a journeyman, for he had no ability
whatever to control men or direct large operations. He was married, and
a sense of duty to his wife—he fortunately had no children—induced him to
stand or sit behind his counter with regularity, but people would not
come to buy of him, because he never seemed to consider their buying as
any favour conferred on him; and thus he became gradually displaced by
his more energetic or more obsequious rivals. In the end he was obliged
to put up his shutters. Unhappily for him, he had never been a very
ardent attendant at any of the places of religious worship in the town,
and he had therefore no organisation to help him. Not being master of
any craft, he was in a pitiable plight, and was slowly sinking, when he
applied to the solicitor of the political party for which he had always
voted to assist him. The solicitor applied to the member, and the
member, much regretting the difficulty of obtaining places for grown-up
men, and explaining the pressure upon the Treasury, wrote to say that the
only post at his disposal was that of labourer. He would have liked to
offer a messengership, but the Treasury had hundreds of applications from
great people who wished to dispose of favourite footmen whose services
they no longer required. Our friend Taylor had by this time been brought
very low, or he would have held out for something better, but there was
nothing to be done. He was starving, and he therefore accepted; came to
London; got a room, one room only, near Clare Market, and began his new
duties. He was able to pick up a shilling or two more weekly by going on
errands for the clerks during his slack time in the day, so that
altogether on the average he made up about eighteen shillings. Wandering
about the Clare Market region on Sunday he found us out, came in, and
remained constant. Naturally, as we had so few adherents, we gradually
knew these few very intimately, and Taylor would often spend a holiday or
part of the Sunday with us. He was not eminent for anything in
particular, and an educated man, selecting as his friends those only who
stand for something, would not have taken the slightest notice of him.
He had read nothing particular, and thought nothing particular—he was
indeed one of the masses—but in this respect different, that he had not
the tendency to association, aggregation, or clanship which belong to the
masses generally. He was different, of course, in all his ways from his
neighbours born and bred to Clare Market and its alleys. Although
commonplace, he had demands made upon him for an endurance by no means
commonplace, and he had sorrows which were as exquisite as those of his
betters. He did not much resent his poverty. To that I think he would
have submitted, and in fact he did submit to it cheerfully. What rankled
in him was the brutal disregard of him at the office. He was a servant
of servants. The messengers, who themselves were exposed to all the
petty tyrannies of the clerks, and dared not reply, were Taylor’s
masters, and sought a compensation for their own serfdom by making his
ten times worse. The head messenger, who had been a butler, swore at
him, and if Taylor had “answered” he would have been reported. He had
never been a person of much importance, but at least he had been
independent, and it was a new experience for him to feel that he was a
thing fit for nothing but to be cuffed and cursed. Upon this point he
used to get eloquent—as eloquent as he could be, for he had small power
of expression, and he would describe to me the despair which came over
him down in those dark vaults at the prospect of life continuing after
this fashion, and with not the minutest gleam of light even at the very
end. Nobody ever cared to know the most ordinary facts about him.
Nobody inquired whether he was married or single; nobody troubled himself
when he was ill. If he was away, his pay was stopped; and when he
returned to work nobody asked if he was better. Who can wonder that at
first, when he was an utter stranger in a strange land, he was overcome
by the situation, and that the world was to him a dungeon worse than that
of Chillon? Who can wonder that he was becoming reckless? A little more
of such a life would have transformed him into a brute. He had not the
ability to become revolutionary, or it would have made him a conspirator.
Suffering of any kind is hard to bear, but the suffering which especially
damages character is that which is caused by the neglect or oppression of
man. At any rate it was so in Taylor’s case. I believe that he would
have been patient under any inevitable ordinance of nature, but he could
not lie still under contempt, the knowledge that to those about him he
was of less consequence than the mud under their feet. He was timid and,
after his failure as a shopkeeper, and the near approach to the
workhouse, he dreaded above everything being again cast adrift. Strange
conflict arose in him, for the insults to which he was exposed drove him
almost to madness; and yet the dread of dismissal in a moment checked him
when he was about to “fire up,” as he called it, and reduced him to a
silence which was torture. Once he was ordered to bring some coals for
the messenger’s lobby. The man who gave him the order, finding that he
was a long time bringing them, went to the top of the stairs, and bawled
after him with an oath to make haste. The reason of the delay was that
Taylor had two loads to bring up—one for somebody else. When he got to
the top of the steps, the messenger with another oath took the coals, and
saying that he “would teach him to skulk there again,” kicked the other
coal-scuttle down to the bottom. Taylor himself told me this; and yet,
although he would have rejoiced if the man had dropped down dead, and
would willingly have shot him, he was dumb. The check operated in an
instant. He saw himself without a penny, and in the streets. He went
down into the cellar, and raged and wept for an hour. Had he been a
workman, he would probably have throttled his enemy, or tried to do it,
or what is more likely, his enemy would not have dared to treat him in
such fashion, but he was powerless, and once losing his situation he
would have sunk down into the gutter, whence he would have been swept by
the parish into the indiscriminate heap of London pauperism, and carted
away to the Union, a conclusion which was worse to him than being hung.
Another of our friends was a waiter in one of the public-houses and
chop-houses combined, of which there are so many in the Strand. He lived
in a wretched alley which ran from St. Clement’s Church to Boswell
Court—I have forgotten its name—a dark crowded passage. He was a man of
about sixty—invariably called John, without the addition of any surname.
I knew him long before we opened our room, for I was in the habit of
frequently visiting the chop-house in which he served. His hours were
incredible. He began at nine o’clock in the morning with sweeping the
dining-room, cleaning the tables and the gas globes, and at twelve
business commenced with early luncheons. Not till three-quarters of an
hour after midnight could he leave, for the house was much used by
persons who supped there after the theatres. During almost the whole of
this time he was on his legs, and very often he was unable to find two
minutes in the day in which to get his dinner. Sundays, however, were
free. John was not a head waiter, but merely a subordinate, and I never
knew why at his time of life he had not risen to a better position. He
used to say that “things had been against him,” and I had no right to
seek for further explanations. He was married, and had had three
children, of whom one only was living—a boy of ten years old, whom he
hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning. Like
Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely—crushed him out
of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was
almost impossible to tell. There was no particular character left in
him. He may once have been this or that, but every angle now was knocked
off, as it is knocked off from the rounded pebbles which for ages have
been dragged up and down the beach by the waves. For a lifetime he had
been exposed to all sorts of whims and caprices, generally speaking of
the most unreasonable kind, and he had become so trained to take
everything without remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life
came to him as a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done
to a cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could
not accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His
wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst
consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk. The
neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man when he
was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner when his
mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when he returned
to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and many a time he got
up at night as late as twelve o’clock, crawled downstairs, and went off
to his father to tell him that “she was very bad, and he could not go to
sleep.” The father, then, had to keep his son in the Strand till it was
time to close, take him back, and manage in the best way he could. Over
and over again was he obliged to sit by this wretched woman’s bedside
till breakfast time, and then had to go to work as usual. Let anybody
who has seen a case of this kind say whether the State ought not to
provide for the relief of such men as John, and whether he ought not to
have been able to send his wife away to some institution where she might
have been tended and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but
her husband and her child. John hardly bore up under this sorrow. A man
may endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when
his day’s toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he
falls. Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which not
a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear that while
he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days, whose close
nevertheless he dreaded! Beaten down, baffled, disappointed, if we are
in tolerable health we can contrive to live on some almost impossible
chance, some most distant flicker of hope. It is astonishing how minute
a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will relieve us; but when with all our
searching we can see nothing, then at last we sink. Such was John’s case
when I first came to know him. He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he
confided his story to me. He found out that I might be trusted, and that
I could sympathise, and he told me what he had never told to anybody
before. I was curious to discover whether religion had done anything for
him, and I put the question to him in an indirect way. His answer was
that “some on ’em say there’s a better world where everything will be put
right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true.” That was his reason
for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him. He found
out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.
Another friend was of a totally different type. His name was Cardinal.
He was a Yorkshireman, broad-shouldered, ruddy in the face, short-necked,
inclined apparently to apoplexy, and certainly to passion. He was a
commercial traveller in the cloth trade, and as he had the southern
counties for his district, London was his home when he was not upon his
journeys. His wife was a curious contrast to him. She was dark-haired,
pinched-up, thin-lipped, and always seemed as if she suffered from some
chronic pain or gnawing—not sufficient to make her ill, but sufficient to
make her miserable. They had no children. Cardinal in early life had
been a member of an orthodox Dissenting congregation, but he had fallen
away. He had nobody to guide him, and the position into which he fell
was peculiar. He never busied himself about religion or philosophy;
indeed he had had no training which would have led him to take an
interest in abstract questions, but he read all kinds of romances and
poetry without any order and upon no system. He had no discriminating
faculty, and mixed up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery
novels, French translations, and the best English authors, provided only
they were unworldly or sentimental. Neither did he know how far to take
what he read and use it in his daily life. He often selected some
fantastical motive which he had found set forth as operative in one of
his heroes, and he brought it into his business, much to the astonishment
of his masters and customers. For this reason he was not stable. He
changed employers two or three times; and, so far as I could make out,
his ground of objection to each of the firms whom he left might have been
a ground of dislike in a girl to a suitor, but certainly nothing more.
During the intervals of his engagements, unless he was pressed for money,
he did nothing—not from laziness, but because he had got a notion in his
head that his mind wanted rest and reinvigoration. His habit then was to
consume the whole day—day after day—in reading or in walking out by
himself. It may easily be supposed that with a temperament like his, and
with nobody near him to take him by the hand, he made great mistakes.
His wife and he cared nothing for one another, but she was jealous to the
last degree. I never saw such jealousy. It was strange that, although
she almost hated him, she watched him with feline sharpness and patience,
and would even have killed any woman whom she knew had won his affection.
He, on the other hand, openly avowed that marriage without love was
nothing, and flaunted without the least modification the most ideal
theories as to the relation between man and woman. Not that he ever went
actually wrong. His boyish education, his natural purity, and a fear
never wholly suppressed, restrained him. He exasperated people by his
impracticability, and it must be acknowledged that it is very irritating
in a difficult complexity demanding the gravest consideration—the
balancing of this against that—to hear a man suddenly propose some naked
principle with which everybody is acquainted, and decide by it solely. I
came to know him through M’Kay, who had known him for years; but M’Kay at
last broke out against him, and called him a stupid fool when he threw up
a handsome salary and refused to serve any longer under a house which had
always treated him well, because they, moving with the times, had
determined to offer their customers a cheaper description of goods, which
Cardinal thought was dishonest. M’Kay said, and said truly, that many
poor persons would buy these goods who could buy nothing else, and that
Cardinal, before yielding to such scruples, ought to satisfy himself
that, by yielding, he would not become a burden upon others less
fanciful. This was just what happened. Cardinal could get no work again
for a long time, and had to borrow money. I was sorry; but for my part,
this and other eccentricities did not disturb my confidence in him. He
was an honest, affectionate soul, and his peculiarities were a necessary
result of the total chaos of a time without any moral guidance. With no
church, no philosophy, no religion, the wonder is that anybody on whom
use and wont relax their hold should ever do anything more than blindly
rove hither and thither, arriving at nothing. Cardinal was adrift, like
thousands and hundreds of thousands of others, and amidst the storm and
pitchy darkness of the night, thousands and hundreds of thousands of
voices offer us pilotage. It spoke well for him that he did nothing
worse than take a few useless phantoms on board which did him no harm,
and that he held fast to his own instinct for truth and goodness. I
never let myself be annoyed by what he produced to me from his books.
All that I discarded. Underneath all that was a solid worth which I
loved, and which was mostly not vocal. What was vocal in him was, I am
bound to say, not of much value.
About the time when our room opened, Mrs. Cardinal had become almost
insupportable to her husband. Poor woman; I always pitied her; she was
alone sometimes for a fortnight at a stretch; she read nothing; there was
no child to occupy her thoughts; she knew that her husband lived in a
world into which she never entered, and she had nothing to do but to
brood over imaginary infidelities. She was literally possessed, and who
shall be hard upon her? Nobody cared for her; everybody with whom her
husband associated disliked her, and she knew perfectly well they never
asked her to their houses except for his sake. Cardinal vowed at last he
would endure her no longer, and that they must separate. He was induced
one Sunday morning, when his resolution was strong within him, and he was
just about to give effect to it, to come with us. The quiet seemed to
soothe him, and he went home with me afterwards. He was not slow to
disclose to me his miserable condition, and his resolve to change it. I
do not know now what I said, but it appeared to me that he ought not to
change it, and that change would be for him most perilous. I thought
that with a little care life might become at least bearable with his
wife; that by treating her not so much as if she were criminal, but as if
she were diseased, hatred might pass into pity, and pity into merciful
tenderness to her, and that they might dwell together upon terms not
harder than those upon which many persons who have made mistakes in youth
agree to remain with each other; terms which, after much consideration,
they adjudge it better to accept than to break loose, and bring upon
themselves and those connected with them all that open rupture involves.
The difficulty was to get Cardinal to give up his theory of what two
abstract human beings should do between whom no love exists. It seemed
to him something like atheism to forsake his clearly-discerned, simple
rule for a course which was dictated by no easily-grasped higher law, and
it was very difficult to persuade him that there is anything of equal
authority in a law less rigid in its outline. However, he went home. I
called on him some time afterwards, and saw that a peace, or at any rate
a truce, was proclaimed, which lasted up to the day of his death. M’Kay
and I agreed to make as much of Mrs. Cardinal as we could, and yielding
to urgent invitation, she came to the room. This wonderfully helped to
heal her. She began to feel that she was not overlooked, put on one
side, or despised, and the bonds which bound her constricted lips into
bitterness were loosened.
Another friend, and the last whom I shall name, was a young man named
Clark. He was lame, and had been so from childhood. His father was a
tradesman, working hard from early morning till late at night, and
burdened with a number of children. The boy Richard, shut out from the
companionship of his fellows, had a great love of books. When he left
school his father did not know what to do with him—in fact there was only
one occupation open to him, and that was clerical work of one kind or
another. At last he got a place in a house in Fleet Street, which did a
large business in those days in sending newspapers into the country. His
whole occupation all day long was to write addresses, and for this he
received twenty-five shillings a week, his hours being from nine o’clock
till seven. The office in which he sat was crowded, and in order to
squeeze the staff into the smallest space, rent being dear, a gallery had
been run round the wall about four feet from the ceiling. This was
provided with desks and gas lamps, and up there Clark sat, artificial
light being necessary four days out of five. He came straight from the
town in which his father lived to Fleet Street, and once settled in it
there seemed no chance of change for the better. He knew what his
father’s struggles were; he could not go back to him, and he had not the
energy to attempt to lift himself. It is very doubtful too whether he
could have succeeded in achieving any improvement, whatever his energy
might have been. He had got lodgings in Newcastle Street, and to these
he returned in the evening, remaining there alone with his little
library, and seldom moving out of doors. He was unhealthy
constitutionally, and his habits contributed to make him more so.
Everything which he saw which was good seemed only to sharpen the
contrast between himself and his lot, and his reading was a curse to him
rather than a blessing. I sometimes wished that he had never inherited
any love whatever for what is usually considered to be the Best, and that
he had been endowed with an organisation coarse and commonplace, like
that of his colleagues. If he went into company which suited him, or
read anything which interested him, it seemed as if the ten hours of the
gallery in Fleet Street had been made thereby only the more
insupportable, and his habitual mood was one of despondency, so that his
fellow clerks who knew his tastes not unnaturally asked what was the use
of them if they only made him wretched; and they were more than ever
convinced that in their amusements lay true happiness. Habit, which is
the saviour of most of us, the opiate which dulls the otherwise
unbearable miseries of life, only served to make Clark more sensitive.
The monotony of that perpetual address-copying was terrible. He has told
me with a kind of shame what an effect it had upon him—that sometimes for
days he would feed upon the prospect of the most childish trifle because
it would break in some slight degree the uniformity of his toil. For
example, he would sometimes change from quill to steel pens and back
again, and he found himself actually looking forward with a kind of
joy—merely because of the variation—to the day on which he had fixed to
go back to the quill after using steel. He would determine, two or three
days beforehand, to get up earlier, and to walk to Fleet Street by way of
Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and upon this he would
subsist till the day came. He could make no longer excursions because of
his lameness. All this may sound very much like simple silliness to most
people, but those who have not been bound to a wheel do not know what
thoughts come into the head of the strongest man who is extended on it.
Clark sat side by side in his gallery with other young men of rather a
degraded type, and the confinement bred in them a filthy grossness with
which they tormented him. They excited in him loathsome images, from
which he could not free himself either by day or night. He was
peculiarly weak in his inability to cast off impressions, or to get rid
of mental pictures when once formed, and his distress at being haunted by
these hateful, disgusting thoughts was pitiable. They were in fact
almost more than thoughts, they were transportations out of himself—real
visions. It would have been his salvation if he could have been a
carpenter or a bricklayer, in country air, but this could not be.
Clark had no power to think connectedly to a conclusion. When an idea
came into his head, he dwelt upon it incessantly, and no correction of
the false path upon which it set him was possible, because he avoided
society. Work over, he was so sick of people that he went back to
himself. So it came to pass that when brought into company, what he
believed and cherished was frequently found to be open to obvious
objection, and was often nothing better than nonsense which was rudely,
and as he himself was forced to admit, justly overthrown. He ought to
have been surrounded with intelligent friends, who would have enabled him
to see continually the other side, and who would have prevented his long
and useless wanderings. Like many other persons, too, whom I have
known—just in proportion to his lack of penetrative power was his
tendency to occupy himself with difficult questions. By a cruel destiny
he was impelled to dabble in matters for which he was totally unfitted.
He never could go beyond his author a single step, and he lost himself in
endless mazes. If he could but have been persuaded to content himself
with sweet presentations of wholesome happy existence, with stories and
with history, how much better it would have been for him! He had had no
proper training whatever for anything more, he was ignorant of the exact
meaning of the proper terminology of science, and an unlucky day it was
for him when he picked up on a bookstall some very early translation of
some German book on philosophy. One reason, as may be conjectured, for
his mistakes was his education in dissenting Calvinism, a religion which
is entirely metaphysical, and encourages, unhappily, in everybody a taste
for tremendous problems. So long as Calvinism is unshaken, the mischief
is often not obvious, because a ready solution taken on trust is
provided; but when doubts arise, the evil results become apparent, and
the poor helpless victim, totally at a loss, is torn first in this
direction and then in the other, and cannot let these questions alone.
He has been taught to believe they are connected with salvation, and he
is compelled still to busy himself with them, rather than with simple
external piety.