Chapter IV

The compilation of anything like a detailed record of my first two years in London would be a task to alarm a Zola. I could not possibly face it; and, if I did, no good end could be served by such a harrowing of my own feelings.

Such a compilation would be a veritable monument of squalid details; of details infinitely mean and small, and, for the most part, infinitely, unredeemedly ugly. Heaven knows I have no need to remind myself by the act of writing of all those dismal details. Mere poverty, starvation itself, even, may be lightsome things, by comparison with the fetid misery which surrounded me during the major part of those two years.

People say, with a smile or a sigh, as their mood dictates, that one half the world does not know how the other half lives. So far is that truism from comprehending the tragic reality of what poverty in London means, that I have no hesitation in saying this: there is no wider divergence between the lives of tigers and the lives of men than lies between the lives of English people, whose homes in some quarters I could name are separated by no more than the width of a street, a mews, and, it may be, a walled strip of blackened grass and tree-trunks.

It is not simply that some well-to-do people are ignorant regarding details of the lives of the poor. It is that not a single one among the cultivated and comfortably off people, with whom I came to mix later on, had any conception at all regarding the nature and character of the sort of life I saw all round me during my first two years in London. I consider that London's cab horses were substantially better off than the section of London's poor among whom I lived in places like South Tottenham, the purlieus of that long unlovely highway--the Seven Sisters Road.

Had I been of a more gregarious and social bent, the experience must have broken my heart, or unhinged my mind, I think. But, from the very first day, I began systematically to avoid intercourse with those about me; and in time this became more and more important to me. So much so indeed that, as I remember it, quite a large proportion of my many changes of lodgings were due to some threatened intimacy, some difficulty over avoiding a fellow lodger. Other moves were due to plagues of insects, appalling odours, persistent fighting and screaming in the next room, wife-beating; in one case a murder; in another the fact that a sodden wretch smashed my door in, under the impression that I had hidden his wife, by whose exertions he had lived, and soaked, for years. I must have removed more than a score of times in those two years, and more than once it was to seek a cheaper lodging--cheaper than the previous hell!

No, it would never do for me to attempt a detailed record of this period. Even consideration of it in outline causes the language of melodrama to spring to the pen. Melodrama! What drama ever conceived in the mind of man could plumb the reeking depths of the life of the vicious among London's poor? Things may be a little better nowadays. Beyond all question, the way of the aspirant in Grub Street appears vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they say--schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort and another. But with regard to the life of the very poor, of the submerged, I have seen signs in the twentieth century which to my experienced eye suggested that no fundamental change had taken place since I lived among these cruelly debased people.

One would never dare to say it in print, of course, but I know very well that, while I lived among them, I was perfectly convinced that, for very many--not for all, of course, but for very many--there could be no fundamental improvement this side of the grave. For them the only really suitable and humane institution, I told myself a hundred times, would be a place of compulsory euthanasia--comfortably equipped lethal cubicles. For some there would be little need of the compulsory element. Police court officials (especially the court missionaries, the only philanthropic workers who earned my admiration; and they, of course, belonged to a properly organised corps, working on salary) know something of these people; but the big, bright, busy world of cleanly, educated folk know less of them than they know of prehistoric fauna.

I have lived under the same roof with men who beat their wives every week of their lives, and figured in police courts every month of their lives, when not in prison; with women who, in their lives, had swallowed up a dozen small homes, through the pawn-shops and in the form of gin; with men and women who, so degraded were they, were like as not to kick an infant as they passed if they saw one on the ground; with human beings who had fallen so very low that on my honour I had far liefer share a room with a hog than with one of them. Yes, the close companionship of swine would have been much less distasteful; and, be it noted, less unwholesome. I have written articles about Australian wattle blossom, about the bush and the sea--oh, about a thousand things!--with nothing more than a few inches of filthy lath and plaster between my aching head and such human wrecks as these.

'Quite brutal!' one has heard some ignorant innocent exclaim, when accident gave him a fleeting glimpse of a denizen of the under world. Brutal! I know something of brutes, and something of London's under world, and I am well assured no brute known to zoology ever reaches the loathsome depths touched by humanity's lowest dregs. It would sicken me to recall instances in proof of this; but I have known scores of them. The beast brutes have no alcohol. That makes a world of difference. They are actuated mainly by such cleanly motives as healthy hunger. They have no nameless vices; and they live in surroundings which make dirt, as dirt exists among humanity's under world, impossible. In changing my lodging I have fled from neighbours who, at times, sheltered acquaintances of whom it might literally be said that you could not walk upon pavement they had trodden without risk of physical contamination.

Drink! A man occupied a room next to mine, at one time, of which his mother was the tenant. Somewhere, I was told, he had at least one wife, upon whom he sponged, and children. (His kind invariably beget children, many children.) This man was in middle life, and his mother, a frail creature, was old. She had some small store of money; enough, I was told, for the few more months she was likely to live, and to save her from a pauper funeral. She had some lingering internal complaint. When the man had finished drinking his mother's little hoard away, he drove her out of doors--not merely with shameful words, but with blows--to get work, and earn liquor for him. Incredible as it seems she did get work, and he did take her earnings, and drink them, for a number of weeks. Then came the morning when she could not leave her bed. That week the rest of her furniture was sold, and the son drank it. On Saturday night he threw his mother from her bed to the floor, removed the bed and bedding, and drank them. She was dead when he returned, and on Sunday morning he took from his murdered mother's body the wedding ring which she, miraculously, had preserved to the end, and drank that. No one slew him. There was no lethal chamber for him. He did not even figure in a police court for this particular murder.

People think _L'Assommoir_ dreadful, horrible. I cannot imagine what stayed Zola's hand; I am at a loss to account for his astonishing reticence, if he really knew anything of the worst degradation for which drink is accountable. In two short years I must have come upon a score of instances in every respect as horrible as that I have mentioned. And some that were worse; yes, more vile; too vile to recall even in thought. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons-- Oh! shame and degradation unspeakable! I do not know if any section of the community is to blame. I do know that the glory and brightness of life, the romance and the splendour of life--beauty, chivalry, loyalty, pomp, grandeur, nobility--all have been for ever robbed of some of their refulgence for me, as the result of two years in the under world of London. Life could never be quite the same again.

I stood at the base of a statue and watched the stately passage among her cheering subjects of the most venerable lady in Christendom. My very soul thrilled loyalty to Queen Victoria, loyalty that was proud and glad. And on the instant it was stabbed by the thought of another widowed mother, flung from the death-bed her worn fingers had toiled to save, and flung to die on the floor, by her son. The shame of it, in Christian London!

Were the poor always with us? Probably. But the awful human vermin that I knew, were they always with us? I doubt it; nay, I do not believe it. I believe they are part of England's sin, of England's modern wickedness. I believe they are the maggots bred out of the sore upon which our modern industrialism is based. When I looked upon the vilest of this city spawn, if my rising gorge permitted thought at all, I always had visions of little shrinking children whipped to work in English factories and mines and potteries; of souls ground out of anaemic bodies that Manchester might fatten. Free trade--licensed slaughter! The rights of the individual--the sacred liberty of the subject! Oh, I know it made England the emporium of the world, and built up some splendid fortunes, and--well, I believe it gave us the human vermin of our cities.

There is no cure for them in this world. Nor yet for their damned and doomed offspring--while the individual liberty shibboleths endure, while mere numbers rule, or while our degenerate fear of every form of compulsion lasts. And the present tendency is, not merely to stipulate for complete freedom of action for the poor wretches, but to invite them to govern, by count of heads. So marvellously enlightened are we becoming!

Those nightmarish two years seem a long way off. I must be careful not to mislead myself regarding them. I have used such phrases as 'The poor of London.' I think I would delete those phrases if I were writing for other than my own eyes. I would not pretend that I like the poor of London, as companions. But they have, as a class, notable and admirable qualities. And many of the very poorest of them have more of courage, and more I think of honesty, than the average member of the class I came to know better later on: the big division which includes all the professional people. The human wrecks are of the poor, of course. But the really typical poor people are workers; the wrecks, their parasites.

Nothing in life is much more remarkable to me than an old man or an old woman of the poorer working-class, say, in South Tottenham, who, at the end of a long, struggling life remains decent, honest, cleanly, upright, and self-respecting. That I think truly marvellous. I am moved to uncover my head before such an one. The innate decency of such people thrills me to pride of race, where a naval review or a procession of royalties would leave me cold. I know something of the environment in which those English men and women have lived out their arduous lives. Among them I have seen evidences of a bravery which I deliberately believe to be greater than any that has won the Victoria Cross.

I once had a room--which I had to leave because of its closeness to a noisy street--immediately over a basement in which one old bed-ridden man and two women lived. The man had been bed-ridden for more than thirty years, and still was alive; for more than thirty years! His wife and daughter supported him and themselves. The daughter made match-boxes, and was paid 2 1/4d. for each gross; but out of that generous remuneration she had to buy her own paste and thread. The mother lived over a wash-tub. They all worked, slept, and ate, in the one room, of course, and the man was never outside it for a moment.

At the time of my arrival in that house, the daughter had recently taken to her bed. She was a middle-aged woman, far gone in consumption. It happened that a notorious inebriate, a woman, during one of her periodical visits to the local police court, told a missionary about my neighbours. He visited them, and was impressed, though accustomed to such sights. But he could do nothing to help, it seemed. They were very proud, and the mother washed very well; so well that she had work enough to keep her going day and night; and, working day and night, was able to earn an average of close upon eleven shillings weekly, of which only four shillings had to be paid in rent, and a trifle in medicine, soap, fuel, etc., leaving from five to six shillings a week for the two invalids and herself to live upon. So there was nothing to worry about, she said. She had stood at the tub for thirty years, and ...

Well, the missionary spoke to other folk, and other folk were touched, and finally a lady and a gentleman came, with an ambulance and a carriage, and twenty golden sovereigns. The old woman's liberty was not to be interfered with. She herself was to have the spending of the money. She was to take her patients to the seaside, and rest for a few weeks, after her thirty years at the tub. I find a difficulty in setting the thing down, for I can smell the steamy odours of that basement now.

This remarkable old woman quite civilly declined the gift, and explained how well she could manage without assistance; proudly adding that she had no fear of failing in her weekly subscription to the funeral club, so that her husband was happy in the knowledge that no pauper funeral awaited him. She was barely sixty-two herself, and had managed very well these thirty years and more, and trusted, with thanks, that she would manage to the end without charity.

Argument was futile. So the lady and gentleman drove away with their bright sovereigns; and when my next removal came the old woman was still at her tub, the other two helpless ones still on their beds, and living yet. One need not consider the wild unwisdom of it; but in the astounding courage and endurance of it, I hold there is lesson and ensample for the bravest man in British history. And among the working poor such incidents cannot be very rare, because I knew of quite a number in my very brief experience.

That the England from whose loins such master men and women have sprung should have bred also the festering spawn of human vermin that litters many of the mean streets of London, aye, and the seats in its parks and gardens, is a tragic humiliation; an indictment, too, as I see it. Charity may cover a multitude of sins. It can never cover this running sore; or, if it should ever cover it completely, so much the worse; for I swear it can never heal, cleanse, or remove it. Nothing sentimental, personal, and voluntary, nothing sporadic and spasmodic can ever accomplish that. And to approach it with bleatings about the will of the people, universal suffrage, old age, or any other kind of pension, dole, or the like, is to be guilty of a cruel and contemptible kind of mockery.