Manhood--England: First Period

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_ I

Of late years the printers have given us reams and reams of first impressions of such world centres as London and New York. Not to mention the army of unknown globe-trotters and writers, celebrities of every sort and kind have recorded their impressions. I always smile when my eyes fall upon such writings; and, generally, I recall, momentarily at all events, some aspect of my own arrival in England as purser's clerk on board the Orimba.

When I read, for example, the celebrity's first impressions of New York--a confused blend of bouquets, automobiles, newspaper interviewers, incredibly high buildings, sumptuous luncheons, barbaric lavishness, bad road surfaces, frenetic hospitality, wild expenditure of paper money--I think it would be more interesting perhaps, certainly more instructive, to have the first impressions of the immigrant, who lands with five pounds, and it may be a wife and a child or two. Then there is the immigrant from the same end of the ship who is not allowed to land, who is rejected by the guardians of this Paradise on earth, because he has an insufficient number of shillings, or a weakness in his lungs. The bouquets, automobiles, sumptuous luncheons, and things do not, one may apprehend, figure largely in the first impressions of these last uncelebrated people, though their impressions may embrace quite as much of the reality concerned as do those of the famous; and, it may be, a good deal more.

Broadly speaking, and as far as outlines go, I was in the position of one who sees England for the first time. There were, I know, subtle differences; yet, broadly speaking, that was my position. The native-born Australian, approaching the land of his fathers for the first time, comes to it with a mass of cherished lore and associations at least equal in weight and effect to my childhood's knowledge and experience of England. He very often comes also to relatives. I came, not only having no claim upon any single creature in these islands, but having no faintest knowledge of any one among them. I carried two letters of introduction: one from Mr. Foster to a London newspaper editor whom he knew only by correspondence, and the other from Mr. Rawlence to a painter, who just then (though I knew it not) was in Algiers.

The purser paid me my five pounds before I left the ship, wished me luck, and vowed, as his habit was in saying good-bye to people, that he was very glad he had met me. And then I got into the train with my luggage, and set out for Fenchurch Street and the conquest of London.

The passengers had all disappeared long since. England swallows up shiploads of them almost every hour without winking. My arrival differed in various ways from theirs. For instance, I had had no leisure in which to think about it, to anticipate it, until I was actually seated in the train, bound for Fenchurch Street. They had been arriving, in a sense, ever since we left the Mediterranean; after a passage, by the way, resembling in every particular all other passages from Australia to England in mail steamers.

To be precise, I think the first impression received by me was that the England I had come to was a quite astonishingly dingy land. The people seemed to me to have a dingy pallor, like the table-linen of the cheaper sort of lodging-house. They looked, not so much ill as unwashed, not so much poor as cross, hipped, tired, worried, and annoyed about something. They wore their hats at an angle then unfamiliar to me, with a forward rake. They must laugh or, at any rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where Punch comes from. It is the land of Dickens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily under sunny blue skies upon bright and cheery scenes.

Since then I have again and again encountered the most indomitable cheerfulness in Londoners, in circumstances which would drive any Australian to tears, or blasphemy, or suicide, or to all three. And I know now that many Londoners wash as frequently as Australians, or nearly so. But my first impression of the appearance of those I saw was an impression of sour, cross, unwashed sadness. And, being an impressionable person, I immediately found an explanatory theory. The essential difference between these folk and people following similarly humble avocations in Sydney, I thought, is that these people, even those of them who, personally, were never acquainted with hunger, live in the shadow of actual want; even of actual starvation. In Sydney they do not. That accounts for the don't-care-a-damn light-heartedness seen in Australian faces, and for the dominance of care in these faces.

I still had everything to learn, and have since learned some of it. And I do not think now that my theory was particularly incorrect. The mere physical fact that the working men in Sydney take a bath every day as a matter of course, and that in London they do not all take one every week, trifling as it may seem, is itself accountable for something. But the ever-present knowledge that starvation is a real factor in life, not in Asia, but in the house next door but one, if not in one's own house--that is a great moulder of facial expression. It plays no part whatever in the life of the country from which I had come.

As my train drew to within half a dozen miles of its destination, I became vaguely conscious of the real inner London as distinguished from its extraordinary dockland and water approaches. We passed a huge and grimy dwelling-house, overlooking the railway, a 'model' dwelling-house; and in passing I caught sight of an incredible legend, graven in stone on the side of this building, intimating that here were the homes of more than one thousand families. That rather took my breath away.

Then we dived into a tunnel, and emerged a few seconds later, screeching hoarsely, right in London. It hit me below the belt. I experienced what they call a 'sinking' feeling in the pit of my stomach. I thought what a fool I was, how puny and insignificant; and, again, what a fool I must be, to come blundering along here into the maw of this vast beast, this London--I and my miserable five-and-twenty pounds! For one wild moment the panic-born thought of hurrying back to my purser and begging re-engagement for the outward trip to Australia scuttled across my mind. And then the train jolted to a standstill, and, with a faint kind of nausea in my throat, I stepped out into London.

I have to admit that it was not at all a glorious or inspiriting home-coming. It was as different from the home-coming of my dreams (when a minor capitalist) as anything well could be. But yet this was indubitably London, my destination; the objective of all my efforts for a long time past. A uniformed boot-black gave me a sudden thought of St. Peter's Orphanage--the connection, if any existed, must have been rather subtle--and that somehow stiffened my spine a little. Here I was, after all, the utterly friendless Orphanage lad who, a dozen thousand miles away, had willed that he should go out into the world, do certain kinds of things, meet certain kinds of people, and journey all across the world to his native England. Well, without much assistance, I had accomplished these things, and was actually there, in London. There was tingling romance in the thought of it, after all. No drizzling rain could alter that. Having successfully adventured so far, surely I was not to be daunted by dingy faces, bricks, and mortar, and houses said to accommodate a thousand families!

And so, with tolerably authoritative words to a porter about luggage, I squared my shoulders in response to life's undeniable appeal to the adventurous.

II

When I had been a dozen years or more in London, a man I knew bewailed to me one night the fact that he had to leave Fenchurch Street Station in the small hours of the next morning, and did not know how on earth he would manage it.

'Why not sleep there to-night?' I suggested carelessly.

'Sleep there!' he repeated with a stare. 'But there are no hotels in that part of the world.'

'Oh, bless you, yes!' said I. 'You try the Blue Boar. You will find it almost as handy as sleeping in the booking-office, without nearly so strong a smell of kippers and dirt.'

I do not think my friend ventured upon the Blue Boar; but I did, a dozen years earlier, and stayed there for two nights. I wonder if any other new arrival from Australia has done that! Hardly, I think. And yet there is something to be said for it. It was quite inexpensive, as London hotels go. (They are all much more expensive than Australian hotels, though the cost of living in England is appreciably lower than it is in the Antipodes.) And putting up there obviates the embarrassing necessity of taking a cab from the station, when you cannot think of a place to which you can tell the man to drive.

I cherish the thought that I have become something of a tradition at the Blue Boar, where I have reason to think I am probably remembered to-day by a now aged Boots and others--many, many others--as 'The genelmun as orduder bawth.'

On rising after my first insomnious night there, I went prowling all about the house in search of the bathroom. Finally, I was routed back to my room by a newly-wakened maid (in curl-pins), who told me rather crossly that I could not have a 'bawth' unless I ordered it 'before'and.' She did not say how long beforehand. But I was in a hurry to get out of doors, so I did without my bath, and promised myself I would see to it later in the day.

That afternoon, footsore, tired, and feeling inexpressibly grimy, I interviewed the lady again, and begged permission to have a bath. She was then in a much brighter humour, and in curls in place of pins. She promised to arrange the matter shortly, and send some accredited representative to warn me when the psychological moment arrived. Where could I be found?

'Oh, I'll go and undress at once,' I said.

'No, don't do that, sir; I cawn't get a bawth all in a minute,' she told me. 'Perhaps you'd like to wite in the smokin'-room.'

Grateful for the absence of the morning's crossness I agreed at once, and retired to the fly-blown smoking-room, where there was ample choice of distraction for a writing man between a moth-eaten volume called King's Concordance and a South-Eastern Railway time-table cover, very solidly fashioned, with lots of crimson and gold, but no inside. Here I smoked half a pipe, and would have rested, but that I felt too dirty. Presently Boots came in, elderly and sad but furtively bird-like, both in the way he held his head on one side and in the jerky quickness of his movements:

'You the genelmun as orduder bawth?' he asked anxiously. I admitted it, and he gave a long sigh of relief.

'Oo! All right,' he said, almost gladly. 'I'll letcher know when it's ready.'

And he hopped out. I finished my pipe, yawned, opened the Concordance, and shut it again hastily, by reason of the extraordinarily pungent mustiness its pages emitted. Then I went prospecting into the passage between the stairs and the private bar. Here I passed a sort of ticket-office window, at which a middle-aged Hebrew lady sat, eating winkles from a plate with the aid of a hairpin. Her face lit up with sudden interest as she saw me:

'Oo!' she cried with spirit, 'er you the genelmun has orduder bawth?' Again I pleaded guilty, and with a broad, reassuring smile, as of one who should say: 'Bless you, we've had visitors just as mad as you before this, and never attempted to lasso or otherwise constrain them. There's no limit to our indulgence toward gentlemen afflicted as you are,' she nodded her ringleted head, and said: 'Right you are, sir. I'll send Boots to letcher know when it's ready.'

Apart from consideration of her occupation, which seemed to me to demand privacy, I could not stand gazing at this lady, though I was momentarily inclined to ask if the Lord Mayor and his Aldermen had been invited to attend my bathing; so I passed on to the only refuge from the Concordance room--the private bar. There was a really splendid young lady in attendance here, who smiled upon me so sweetly that I felt constrained to order something to drink. Also, I was greatly athirst. But the trouble was it happened I had never tasted beer, and could think of nothing else suitable that was likely to be available. While I pondered, one hand on the counter, the still smiling barmaid opened conversation brightly:

'Er you the genelmun what's orduder bawth?' she asked engagingly.

I began to feel that there must be some kind of a special London joke about this formula. Perhaps it is a phrase in the current comic opera, I thought. A pity that ignorance should prevent my capping it! At all events I was saved for the moment from choosing a drink, for three hilarious city gentlemen entered from the street just then, and demanded instant attention. As I hung indeterminately, waiting, I heard a voice in the passage outside, and recognised it as belonging to that elderly bird, the Boots.

'No, I ain't awastin' uv me time,' it said. 'I'm alookin' fer somebody. I serpose you ain't seed the genelmun as orduder bawth anywhere abart, 'ave yer?'

Fearful lest further delay should lead to the bricking up of the bathroom, or to a crier being sent round the town for 'the genelmun,' etc., I hastened out almost into the arms of the retainer, and forcibly checked him, as he began on an interrogative note to cheep out: 'You the genelmun as orduder----'

Coming from a country where, even in the poorest workman's house, the bathroom at all events is always in commission, I was greatly struck by this incident; more especially when, an hour later, I heard the chambermaid cry out over the banisters:

'Mibel! The genelmun as orduder bawth sez 'e'll 'ave a chop wiv 'is tea!'

III

It was at the beginning of the second day at the Blue Boar that I counted over my money, and was rather startled to discover that expenditure in pennies can mount up quite rapidly.

In those days pennies were comparatively infrequent, almost negligible, in Australia; the threepenny-bit representing for most purposes the lowest price asked for anything. (It still is a coin more generally used in Australia than anywhere else, I think.) Now, during my first day or so in London I was so struck by the number of things one could do and get for a penny, that it seemed I was really spending hardly anything. I covered enormous distances on the tops of omnibuses, and talked a great deal with their purple-faced drivers, most of whom wore tall hats, and carried nosegays in their coats. When beggars and crossing-sweepers asked, I gave, unhesitatingly, in the Australian fashion, as one gives matches when asked for them. I gave only pennies; and now was startled to find what a comparatively large sum can be disbursed in a day or so, in single pennies, upon 'bus fares, newspapers, charity, and the like.

The two men to whom my only letters of introduction were addressed were both out of town: one in Algiers, the other, I gathered, on the Riviera. I suppose most people in London have never reflected on the oddity of the position of that person in their midst who does not know one solitary soul in the entire vast city. And yet, there must always be hundreds in that position. There was a time when I had serious thoughts of asking a policeman to recommend to me the cheapest quarter in which one might obtain a lodging, for I had already conceived a great admiration for the uniformed wardens of London's streets.

I studied the newspaper advertisements under the heading 'Apartments.' But some instinct told me these did not refer to London's cheapest lodgings, and I felt a most urgent need for economy in the handling of my small hoard. These few pounds must support me, I thought, until I could cut out a niche for myself, here where there seemed hardly room for the feet of the existing inhabitants. Already in quite a vague way I had become conscious of the shadow of that dread presence whose existence colours the outlook of millions in England. I wonder if the consciousness had begun to affect my expression!

My choice of a locality was made eventually upon ridiculously inadequate grounds. In a newspaper article dealing with charitable work, I came upon some such words as these: 'Life is supported upon an astoundingly small outlay of money among the poor householders, and even poorer lodgers, in these streets opening out of the Seven Sisters Road in the district lying between Stoke Newington and South Tottenham. Here are families whose weekly rental is far less than many a man spends on his solitary dinner in club or restaurant,' etc.

'This appears to be the sort of place for me,' I told myself. Remembering certain green omnibuses that bore the name of Stoke Newington, I descended from one of them an hour later outside a hostelry called the Weavers' Arms. (Transatlantic slang has dubbed these places 'gin-mills'; a telling name, I think.)

One of my difficulties was that I had no clear idea what amount would be considered cheap in London, by way of rent for a single room. The one thing clear in my mind was that I must, if possible, find the cheapest. I had already gathered from chance talk, on board the Orimba and elsewhere, that the Australian 'board and lodging' system was not much used in London, save in strata which would be above my means. The cheaper way, I gathered, was to pay so much for a room and 'attendance,' which should include the preparation of one's own food. The cheapest method of all, I had heard, and the method I meant to adopt, was to rent a furnished room, but without 'attendance,' and to provide meals for myself in the room or outside.

By this time the thing most desirable in my eyes was the possession of a room of my own. I wanted badly to be able to shut myself in with my luggage; to secure privacy, and be able to think, without the distracting consciousness of my small capital melting away from me at an unnecessary and alarmingly rapid pace. Anything equivalent to the comparative refinement, quietness, cleanliness, and spacious outlook of my North Shore quarters was evidently quite out of the question; and would have been, as a matter of fact, even at double their cost in Sydney.

Late that afternoon a cab conveyed me with my baggage to No. 27 Mellor Street, a small thoroughfare leading out of the Seven Sisters Road. Here I had secured a barely furnished top-floor room, with a tiny oil-stove in it, for 4s. 6d. per week. I paid a week's rent in advance, and, having deposited my bags there, I sallied forth into the Seven Sisters Road, with the room key in my pocket, to make domestic purchases. Billy cans were not available, but I bought a tin kettle for my oil-stove, some tea, a very little simple crockery and cutlery, some wholemeal brown bread (which I had heard was the most nutritious variety), butter, and cheese. Also some lamp oil, for the simple furniture of my room included, in addition to its oil-stove, a blue china lamp with pink and silver flowers upon its sides. Most of these things I ordered in one shop, and then, carrying one or two other purchases, hurried back to my room to be ready for the shop-boy who was to deliver the remainder.

Over the little meal that I presently prepared, with the aid of the oil-stove, my spirits, which had fallen steadily during the hunt for a room, brightened considerably. Pipe in mouth I made some alterations in the disposition of my furniture, placing the little table nearer to the window, and shifting the bed to give me a glimpse of sky when I should be occupying it. The oil-stove made a regrettable stench I found, and the lamp appeared to suffer from some nervous affection which made its flame jump spasmodically at intervals. The mattress on my bed was extraordinarily diversified in contour by little mountain ranges, kopjes which could not be induced to amalgamate with its general plan. Also, I was not so much alone in my sanctum as I had hoped to be. There were other forms of life, whose company I do not think I ever entirely evaded during my whole period as a lodger of the poorest grade in London.

But for the time these trifles did not greatly trouble me. Drunken brawls which occurred later in the evening, immediately under my window, were a nuisance. But it was all new; my health of mind and body was sound and unstrained; and I presently went to bed rather well pleased with myself, after an hour spent in considering and adding to sundry notes I had accumulated, for articles and sketches presently to be written.

My hope was to be able to win a place in London journalism without having any sort of an appointment. The very phrase 'free-lance' appealed to my sense of the romantic. 'All the clever fellows are free-lances, you know, in the Old Country.' I recalled many such statements made to me in Sydney. Prudence might have led me to offer myself for a post of some kind, if the editor to whom my letter of introduction was addressed had been visible. But he was not in London; and, in my heart, I was rather glad. It should be as a free agent, an unknown adventurer in Grub Street, that I would win my journalistic and literary spurs in the Old World. Other men had succeeded....

Musing in this hopeful vein I fell asleep, with never a hint of a presentiment of what did actually lie before me. I suppose the chiefest boon that mortals enjoy is just that negative blessing: their total inability to see even so far into the future as to-morrow morning.

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.

V

Looking back across the long succession of crowded years upon the period of my struggle to obtain a foothold in the London world of journalism and literature, I see a certain amount of pathos, some bathos, and something too in the way of steadfast, unmercenary endurance, which is not altogether unworthy of respect.

In my humble opinion a foothold in that world was at least rather better worth having in those days than it is to-day for a thinking man of literary instincts. It was certainly vastly harder to obtain, in the absence of any influence or assistance from established friends.

Of late years I have met representatives of a type of young journalist which had not yet come into existence when I arrived in London. In those days (when the published price of novels was still 31s. 6d., and halfpenny dailies were unknown) there were three kinds of newspaper men. There were the hacks, very able fellows, some of them, but mostly given to bar and taproom life; there were thoroughly well qualified, widely informed, sober pressmen of the middle sort, who often spent their whole lives in one employ; and there were literary men, frequently of high scholarly attainments, who wrote for newspapers. To-day, there are not very many representatives of these three divisions. The modern host of journeymen, with their captains, keen men of business, may represent a great advance upon their predecessors. Since I am told we live in an age of wonderfully rapid progress, I suppose they must. They certainly are different. To realise this fully one has only to come in contact, once, with one of the few surviving practitioners of the earlier type. They stand out like trees in--shall I say?--a flower-bed.

Ignorance of journalistic conditions and requirements, combined with a foolish sort of personal sensitiveness or vanity, had more to do with my early hardships and difficulties than anything in the quality of my work. In the light of practical knowledge acquired later I see that I might with ease have earned at least five times the amount of money I did earn in those first years by doing about half the amount of work I did, and--knowing how to dispose of it. I concentrated my entire stock of youthful energy upon writing and reading, and really worked very hard indeed. That, I thought, was my business. Some vague, benevolent power, 'the World,' I suppose, was to see to it that I got my reward. My part was to do the work. Good work might be trusted to bring its own reward. And, in any case, I asked no more than that I should be able to live with decency and go on with my work. I no longer had the faintest sort of interest in the idea of saving money. That ambition died with the end of my saving days in Sydney. I never thought about it at all. It simply had ceased to exist.

Well, my work, as a matter of fact, was not at all bad, and it was amazingly abundant. I would wager I wrote not less than three hundred articles, sketches, and stories during my first year, probably more, and always in the most hostile and unsuitable sort of environments. And my reward in that first year was slightly less than twenty pounds sterling, something well below an average of two guineas each month. I suppose I might have starved in that first year if I had not had some twenty pounds in hand at the beginning of it. I had not twenty shillings in hand at the end of it, and yet I had already learned what hunger meant; not the bracing sensation of being sharp set and enjoying one's meal, but the dull, deadening, sickly sensation which comes of sustained work during weeks of bread and butter (or dripping) diet, and none too much of that.

The devilish thing about an insufficient dietary is that it saps one's manhood. Few people whose circumstances have been uniformly comfortable realise that the stomach is the real seat of self-respect, courage, dignity, good manners, and the higher sort of honour, not to mention the spirits and emotions. Most would scoff at the suggestion, of course, feeling that it showed the low nature of the suggester. And the thing of it is they cannot possibly test the truth of it. For, given an average share of self-control and will-power, any educated person can starve him or herself for a week or more, deliberately and of set purpose, without much inconvenience, with no difficulty, and no loss of self-respect.

It is starvation, or semi-starvation from necessity, combined with a hard-working routine of life, and without the soul-supporting knowledge that one can stop and order a good meal whenever one chooses; it is continuous and enforced lack of proper nutriment, endured throughout sustained and unsuccessful efforts to overcome the poverty that enforces it, that tells upon one's humanity and coarsens the fibre of one's personality. There is a certain sustaining exhilaration about voluntary abstinence from food, due to the contemplation of one's mind's mastery. The reverse is true of the hunger due to the unsuccess of one's efforts to obtain the wherewithal to get better food and more of it.

Poverty is a teacher, a most powerful schoolmaster, I freely grant. But the most of the lessons it teaches are lessons I had liefer not learn. As a teacher its one vehicle of instruction is the cane. First, it weakens and humiliates the pupil; and then, at every turn, it beats him, teaching him to walk with cowering shoulders, furtive eyes, a sour and suspicious mind. I have no good word to say for poverty; and I believe an insufficient dietary to be infernally bad for any one--worse, upon the whole, than an over-abundant one--and especially so for young men or women who are striving to produce original work.

I have heard veterans criticise their sleek juniors, with a round assertion that if these youngsters had had to fight their way on a crust, as the veteran said he did, they would be vastly better men for it. I do not believe it. Hard work, and even disappointment and loss, are doubtless rich in educational and disciplinary values; but not that wolfish, soul-crushing fight for insufficient food, not mere poverty. I have tried them, and I know.

Every day a procession of more or less battered veterans in life's fight straggles across the floors of the police courts, from waiting-room to dock and dock to cells. 'How extraordinarily vicious the poor are!' says some shallow observer. In reality, a very large proportion of these battered ones are there as drinkers. And, in any case, the whole of them put together (including the many who require not penal but medical treatment), supposing they were all viciously criminal--all violent thieves, say--what a tiny handful they represent of the poor of London!

The enormous majority of the poor never set foot in a police court. And yet, for one who knows anything of the conditions in which they live, how marvellous that is! Most educated people, after all, go through life, from cradle to grave, without once experiencing any really strong temptation to break the law of the land. The very poor are hardly ever free from such temptation; hardly ever free from it. I know. I, with all the advantages behind me of traditions, associations, memories, hopes, knowledge, and tastes, to which most very poor people are strangers, I have felt my fingers itch, my stomach crave woundily, as I passed along a mean street in which food-stuffs were exposed outside shop windows; a practice which, upon a variety of counts, ought long since to have been abolished by law.

Oh, the decency, the restraint, and the enduring law-abidingness of London's poor, in the face of continuously flaunting plenty, of gross ostentation! It is the greatest miracle of our time. The comparative absence of either religion or philosophy among them to-day makes the spectacle of their docility, to me, far more remarkable than anything in the history of mediaeval martyrdom. When I come to consider also the prodigiously irritant influences of modern life in its legislation, journalism, amusements, swift locomotion, and, not least, its education for the masses, then I see wireless telegraphy and such things as trifles, and the abiding self-restraint of the very poor as our greatest marvel.

VI

After my second year in London I became approximately wealthy. Early in the third year, at all events, I earned as much as five guineas in a single month, and ate meat almost every day; in other words I began to earn pretty nearly one-third as much as I had earned some years previously in Sydney. I now bought books, and no longer always, as before, at the cost of a meal or so. Holywell Street was a great delight to me, and I never quite comprehended how Londoners could bring themselves to let it go. I doubt if Fleet Street raised a single protest, and yet-- Well, it was surprising.

I wrote rather less in this period, and used more method in my attacks upon the editors. I even succeeded in actually interviewing one or two of them, including the gentleman to whom I carried a note of introduction from a colleague he had never met. But I do not think I gained anything by these interviews. I might possibly have done so had they come earlier, while yet the freedom of easier days and of sunshine was in my veins. But my mean street period had affected me materially. It had made me morbidly self-conscious, and suspiciously alive to the least hint of patronage or brusqueness.

It is true I gave hours to the penetration of editorial sanctums; but in nearly every case my one desire, when I reached them, was to escape from them quickly without humiliation. In a busy man's very natural dislike of interruption, or anxious glance toward his clock, I saw contempt for my obscurity and suspicion of my poverty. And, after all, I had nothing to say to these gentlemen, save to beg them to read the effusions I pressed upon them; an appeal they would far rather receive on half a sheet of notepaper. As to impressing my personality upon them in any way, as I say, my uneasy thoughts in their presence were usually confined to the problem of how best I might escape without actual discredit.

Once, I remember, in a very lean month, I chanced to see one of the Olympians passing with god-like nonchalance into the restaurant of a well-known hotel. On the instant, and without giving myself time for reflection, I followed him down the glittering vestibule, and into a palatial dining-hall. The hour was something between one and two o'clock, and a minute before I had been thoughtfully weighing the relative merits of an immediate allowance of sausages and mashed potatoes for fivepence, or a couple of stale buns for one penny, to be followed at nightfall by a real banquet--seven-pennyworth of honest beef and vegetables. Now, with a trifle over four shillings in my pocket, I was, to outward seeming, carelessly scanning a menu, in which no single dish, not even the soup, seemed to cost less than about three times the price of one of my best dinners.

But at the next table sat a London editor. I was free to contemplate him. Was not that feast enough for such as I? Evidently I thought it was, for I told the waiter with an elaborate assumption of boredom that I did not feel like eating much, but would see what I could make of a little of the soup St. Germain. I wondered often if the man noticed the remarkable manner in which the crisp French rolls on that table disappeared, while I toyed languidly with my soup. I did not dare to ask for more rolls when I had made an end of the four or five that were on the table; but I could have eaten a dozen of them without much difficulty.

'No, thank you, I think I shall be better without anything to-day,' I said to the waiter who drew my attention to a sumptuous volume which I had already discovered to be the wine-list. There was a delicate suggestion in my tone (I hoped) that occasional abstinence from wine, say, at luncheon had been found beneficial for my gout. Certainly, if he counted his rolls, the man could hardly have suspected me of a diabetic tendency.

All this time I studied the profile of the editor, while he leisurely discussed, perhaps, half a sovereign's worth of luncheon. I hoped--and again feared--he might presently recognise me; but he only looked blandly through me once or twice to more important objects beyond. And just as I had concluded that it was not humanly possible to spend any longer over one spoonful of practically cold soup, he rose, gracefully disguised a yawn, and strolled away to an Elysian hall in which, no doubt, liqueurs, coffee, and cigars of great price were dispensed. This was not for me, of course.

They managed somehow to make my bill half a crown, and, as a trifling mark of my esteem, I gave the waiter the price of two of my ordinary dinners, for himself. I badly wanted to give him sixpence, but lacked the requisite moral courage, though I do not suppose he would have wasted a thought upon it either way, and if he had--but, as I say, I gave him a shilling. After all I do not suppose the poor fellow earned much more in a day than I earned in a week. And then (still with prudent thought for my gouty tendency, no doubt) I loftily waved aside all suggestions of coffee in the lounge, and made my way to the street, with the air of one who found luncheon a rather annoying interruption in his management of great affairs.

'Now if you had as much enterprise and resourcefulness as--as a bandicoot,' I told myself, passing down the Thames Embankment, 'you would have entered into conversation with A----, and by this time he would be pressing you to write articles for him. Instead of that, you'll have to content yourself with dry bread to-night and to-morrow, my friend.'

But I did not altogether regret that bread and soup luncheon, after all. It was an adventure of sorts, and quite a streak of colour in its way, across the drab background of South Tottenham days.

There were times when the spirit of revolt filled my very soul, and all life seemed black or red in my eyes. But I do not recall any day of panic or suggested surrender. On one day of revolt, when I told myself that this slum life in London was too horrible for a self-respecting dingo, let alone a man, I buttoned up my coat and walked with angry haste all the way to Epping Forest. In that noble breathing-place I raged to and fro under trees and through scrub, delighting in the prickly caress of brambles, and pausing in breathless ecstasy to watch rabbits at play in a dim, leafy glade. Fully twelve miles I must have walked, and then, healed and tamed, but somewhat faint from unwonted exercise and wonted lack of good food, I sat down in a little arbour and wolfishly devoured just as much as I could get in the form of a ninepenny tea. I fear there can have been no margin of profit for the good woman who served me.

At that period my digestive faculties still were holding up miraculously, or my sufferings on the homeward tramp would have been acute. As a fact I reached home in rare spirits, and almost--so cheery was I--cancelled the notice I had given that morning of my intention to vacate the current garret. But the smell of the house smiting my forest freshness as I stepped over the boards, jammed in its threshold to keep crawling children in, saved me from that indiscretion. There were fewer drunkards, less fighting, and not many more insects in that house than in most of my places of residence; but the smell of it I shall never, never forget. In that respect it was the vilest in a vile series of slum dwellings, and many and many a time had caused me to revile my naturally keen olfactory organs. I had endured it for almost a month, and would suffer its unmanning horrors no more. Indeed, I would suffer nothing like it again. Why should I? My earnings were increasing. I would escape from the whole district, its miseries, its smells, its infamies, and its thousand dehumanising degradations. I would emigrate.

Yes, that tramp in Epping Forest was quite epoch-making. It came after more than two years of struggle in London. I had made fully five pounds in the past month. I had actually laid aside a couple of sovereigns, and doubtless that salient fact emboldened me. Also, I had had a number of quite meaty meals of late. But the wild stamping to and fro under trees, the sight of the bonny, white-sterned rabbits at play, the copious tea in a pleached arbour, the clean forest air--these I am sure had been as a fiery stimulant to my drooping manhood. I went to bed full of the most reckless resolves, and astonishingly light-hearted.

In the morning, having feasted (as well as the prevailing smell permitted) upon an apple, brown bread, and tea--butter was 'off' that day, I remember--I set forth upon a prospecting tour, working westward from my north-easterly abode, through Holloway, Finsbury, the Camden Road, and such places, into the neighbourhood of Regent's Park. The park, which was strange to me, pleased me greatly; as did also certain minor streets in its neighbourhood, a mews which I found quaint and quite rural in its suggestions, and sundry white houses with green shutters which, for some reason, I remember I called 'discreet.' There was nothing here that looked poor enough for me, but none the less I inquired at one or two of the smaller houses whose windows held cards indicating that rooms were to let in them.

At length, in a quiet and decent thoroughfare called Howard Street, I happened upon Mrs. Pelly's house--No. 37. The girl who answered my knock had a pleasant little face, and a soft, kindly tone in speaking. I supposed she was not more than one-and-twenty, perhaps less. Her mother was out, she said, but she would show me the only vacant room they had. Indeed--with a little smile--she really did more for the lodgers than her mother did.

The room was at the back of the house on the first floor, and there was but one other floor above it. It had a French window, with a tiny iron balcony, three feet by eighteen inches. The furnishings were greatly superior to any I had had in London. There was actually a little writing-table with drawers, and from the window one could see distinctly the waving green tops of trees in the park. The rent was eleven shillings. Whereat I sighed heavily. But the writing-table, and, above all, the actual view of tree-tops in the distance! I sighed again, and explained regretfully that I feared my limit was eight shillings. Then the young woman sighed too, and mentioned, with apparent irrelevance, that her mother might be in any moment now.

I had earned five pounds in the previous month. With reasonable care my food need not cost more than seven to ten shillings a week. Of course I had managed on considerably less. I knew very well that that sort of semi-starvation was in every way bad; but, when I thought of that quiet back room, the distant tree-tops, the absence of smells, the fact that I had seen no filthy or drunken people in the neighbourhood, the soft-spoken girl at my side--'By heavens! It's worth it,' I said to myself.

And just then--we were in the narrow ground floor passage--the mother arrived, bringing with her an unmistakable whiff of a public-house bar. This stiffened my relaxing prudence considerably. I had no kindly feeling left for taverns, especially where women were concerned. But, by an odd chance, it happened that Mrs. Pelly was not only in a talkative mood, but also in higher spirits than I ever saw her afterwards. She insisted on reinspection of the room, a sufficiently dangerous thing in itself for me. And then, standing beside its open window, with arms folded over the place in which her waist once had been, she avowed that she thought the room would suit me, and that I should suit the room.

'There's a writing-table in it, an' all, ye see,' she said, having received a hint as to my working habits.

There was indeed. I was little likely to forget it. It now seemed the charge for the room was eleven shillings weekly, without 'attendance.' But Mrs. Pelly had never been a woman to stick out over trifles, that she hadn't; and, right or wrong, though she hoped she might never live to rue the day, she would let the gentleman this room for nine shillings a week, and include 'attendance' in that merely nominal rate--'So there, Miss!' This, to her daughter Fanny, and in apparent forgetfulness of my presence.

It was a thrilling moment for me, standing there with one hand on the writing-table, my gaze fixed over the scantily covered top of Mrs. Pelly's head--she wore no hat--upon the trees in the distance. Prudence gabbled at me: 'You can't afford it. You must eat. You'll be sold up, and serve you right.' But, of course, the table and the window won. After all, had I not earned five pounds in the past month? And, excepting boots, my outfit was still pretty good!

I could not wait for Monday. The window and the table pulled too hard. So I installed myself at No. 37 on the Saturday afternoon, and thanked God sincerely that I was no longer in a slum. _

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