In Darkest London · Chapter 6 (2/2)

Apart from the flower-seller and a consumptive-looking girl who worked in a slop shop, i.e., a cheap tailor’s, my fellow lodgers were seasoned veterans. A few took off their hats, if you can so describe the battered objects perched on their matted hair, the rest retained them closely, fearful, I suppose, of losing a vital part of their possessions. Their faces were not clean, though I am sure before their mode of life shifted their perspective, they would have welcomed a wash.

There was very little chatter. Mostly they sat quiet, in an apathy of rest. Not that their faces expressed vacancy, but their minds were elsewhere. As I discovered, the eternal walking about erects a barrier between you and material things, and it is only the sharper and more primal needs of the body which arouse the active consciousness. My friend of the plush coat had disappeared, and presently I felt I would like to follow her. The lack of air, the smouldering smell of stale humanity affected me with a physical nausea, the like of which I had not before known.

I found the decrepit female in the passage outside⁠—I could write a whole chapter on the psychology of these aged doorkeepers⁠—and asked her for a bed. She pointed up a rickety flight of stairs lit by a faint gas-burner. The walls, originally painted brown, were black with age; the window on the landing, draped with torn curtains of Nottingham lace, had not been cleaned for generations. Up yet another flight, across a creaking landing, and into a large room filled with truckle beds.

The air was impossible. I tried the next room on the same floor. It was smaller, and the window was open at the top. There was a vacant bed just underneath it, and, thankful at the chance of better atmosphere, I decided it should be mine.

I did not dare to look at the sheets, I felt somehow they were alive; indeed, it needed a very definite act of will before I could induce myself to take off my raincoat and my costume. I put on my nightdress over the rest of my clothes, hoping they would serve as protection against the invading army of insects which I was sure lurked in the sodden palliasses and unsavoury blankets. This, however, was an affliction from which I was spared. Generally speaking, your lodging house and doss house is free from lice. The lodgers, many of them, are fruitfully verminous, but the strays, which they leave behind them, are dealt according to those preparations discovered during the war, so that though the shakedowns in Waterloo Bridge Road are horribly dirty, they are free from vermin, being daily sprayed with strong chemicals.

This I did not know until the next morning, and apprehension of crawlers and an uncanny sense of spiritual discomfort kept me awake. Now the senses of the outcast, as I discovered, grow preternaturally acute, and though I had been on the streets only a few days, I had already learned to feel not only the approach of physical danger, but the proximity of evil. I felt evil was near me, moving towards me from the nearest bed. There was no light in the room, only the pale sinister grey of the South London sky, which seemed to distort the features of the face on the flock pillow next to mine into something almost inhuman.

I did not feel drowsy, but if slumber had approached me I must have fought it off. I had put my bag with my day’s things under the pillow, and I clasped it quickly as I lay, uncomfortable in mind, body and estate. Bad nights, however, were telling on me, and towards dawn I suppose I must have dropped off. I do not think I can have slept more than a few minutes, for I awoke with a start, my heart thumping, as it always does in moments of stress. The bed next to me was empty, and⁠—I knew it⁠—I felt it⁠—my bag had gone⁠ ⁠…

Now an unfamiliar sensation, something you have never quite experienced before is a psychological landmark. When I sat up and realized that the whole of my day’s takings, the money that I had so proudly earned by the sale of matches, plus the development of a special technique, had left me, I was gripped by actual terror. Not physical terror, which we must all of us have known, but a terror of the future, the material future that never before had touched me. I suppose the life I had been leading, one of hand-to-mouth destitution, had tangibly affected me, for I forget that behind all the hunger and anxiety my own home was waiting for me, and remembered only that I had to begin that day without a penny, and that before nightfall I must get a bed or walk the streets.

The terror slipped like a shadow when I got out of bed, and I became very angry. I could have forgiven the woman if she had taken half or nearly all the money; she might have left me the price of a cup of tea⁠—and she should not have taken my bag. I dressed myself with furious haste, and went in search of my friend of the night before. Emotion always changes one’s perspective, and whereas the previous evening I shrank from inspecting the large room next to where I had passed the night, that morning I marched in, indifferent to the smells, the suffocating reek which met me, and peered at every truckle bed in turn, until I found my lady embedded in her black plush coat.

She was past all rousing. Heavily drugged, she had gone over the border line to the world of the imagination, and the house might have been a fire, or murder committed straight in front of her, and she would not have known. I left her, and made my way back through the room, across the landing, down the flight of rickety stairs, and so out into the alley.

Some of the lodgers were already astir, searching among strange and unsavoury bundles in the dim light. Unlike Kennedy Court, most of the sojourners brought their bundles, which seemed to consist very largely of horrid looking skins⁠—“mog,” I suppose, in process of transfiguration to a higher plane. The skins of rabbit, cat and even dog, looked creepy, and I suspected insects and hurried past, with fearful feet.

It was a relief to be back in the open air once more, though the alley was by no means fragrant, forlorn and dilapidated dustbins obtruded their unseemly presence on the path side. I walked off my anger along the Waterloo Bridge Road, and so over the bridge and along the Strand. By this time the business of the day was astir, and over the bridges were coming those fragile, pretty creatures that London breeds by hundreds, nay, thousands; delicate daughters of the suburbs on the way to those offices where, victims of a white slave traffic in the commercial sense, they tap typewriters for seven or eight hours a day.

I walked leisurely up to Holborn, and then, suddenly, just after nine o’clock, a rage of hunger fell upon me. I was gripped by the desire for food so fiercely that I felt I must scream in anger that I was baulked of a meal. Then I understood how it happened that starving women and men should suddenly break windows and throw stones. It is the result of an extreme want of nourishment, an active and impelling craving for hot drink, fresh bread and, if you are driven to the last ditch, roast meat. Think of the whole universe resolving itself into an anguished frenzy for a mutton chop, friend bacon and a poached egg! Think of wanting to eat so much that you could almost barter your most cherished recollections; your love of literature, the swing of those stately phrases which march through the mind like a triumphant army⁠—for food!

A curious state⁠—when the sheer force of an ill-fed body masters the mind and, like a savage, makes you run amuck. But it is something to have experienced such a moment. It is something to know why it is that women suddenly destroy the nearest thing to hand. I ask you to leave your comfortable beds, your well-spread tables, and live among the destitute, and you also will feel an overwhelming impulse to break windows or beat your hands against the stones.

I did not do either of these things, though I wanted to. But I determined, however I got it, I would have breakfast. I stood at the top of Southampton Row, and eyed the men on their way to their business. And then I selected a well-dressed individual about forty, with shrewd eyes and a certain humorous twist of the mouth. He wasn’t a literary man, I knew that, nor was he in commerce. I judged him to be a barrister, and I went straight up and opened my case.

“You’ve got a lot of money,” I said, brightly.

He stopped, as I knew he would stop, curious to see what would happen.

“Well,” he said, “what about it, if I have?”

“I want some breakfast,” I said calmly.

“Tell me why I should buy you any?”

“Because I have brains,” I said, desperately. The imaginary odour of frizzled bacon fired my will.

“If you have brains,” he answered, “use them to get some breakfast with.”

“I have,” I retorted, quickly. “I have chosen you.”

And at that he smiled, and then began to laugh, and I knew the day was won. For a man may resist tears, harden his heart to importunity, turn aside invective, but there is no son of Adam, who, can deny a woman when she makes him laugh.

He surrendered at discretion, took me to the nearest tea shop and ordered bacon, eggs, toast and hot coffee. We talked over the meal, and I told him how hard I found it to get regular employment without a reference. He brushed that aside, but was quite interested when I explained the psychology of selling matches. He gave me a shilling as we parted, and I somehow felt it due to him that I should make another attempt to get engaged as a cook. I went to the Holborn Public Library and studied the advertisement column, and found that a cook, “good plain,” was wanted in Kensington. I spent some of my few pence on the fare, and called at a house near the High Street. There was nothing doing. The fatal lack of character stood like a flaming sword between me and security. I fought pretty hard, and offered to come for a day on trial, but the suggestion was received coldly. I had wanted to prove that a woman without a reference cannot get employment in a recognised vocation; and prove it I did. I went from that house resolved to waste no more time or effort in chasing a job, but to concentrate on the sale of cigarette cases, etc., on commission.

I felt obliged to treat myself to a wash, and by the time I had walked back to town it was just on the hour when I was to meet the lady of the black plush coat. Alas! she was not at the appointed place. I stood outside the friendly public house and waited for her wistfully. I opened the door and gazed hungrily inside. She was not there, and by closing time I had given up all hope of seeing her again. I spent my remaining coppers in matches, keeping a penny in reserve, but I had no luck. The afternoon is always bad for the match trade; it is the time when women do their shopping, and as I have said they are not profitable customers to street sellers. Moreover, I felt depressed, and despondency minimises your chances of a sale, so I did the only possible thing, I went and sat in the Park.

I did not often go to the Park in those hours when I had come to the end of my tether. You feel so acutely conscious of the gulf that cuts you off from social intercourse. I preferred to go to the British Museum and gaze at Rameses. The contemplation of that immeasurable aloofness has always given me rest and comfort. I have visited Rameses in many moments of poignant distress, and so it seemed natural to go to him when for the first time in my life I wanted food.

The material needs of life were becoming very much of an obsession. I realized with a start that I was no longer eager for the newspapers; I did not even trouble to look at the placards. Your vitality, unreplenished by comfortable food and sleep, instinctively fastens on those things that are essential to the maintenance of life. This is why your outcasts often appear stupid, stolid, almost mentally deficient. They know nothing of the affairs of the political or the literary world, they are unthrilled by the falling of dynasties, or the discovery of a planet. The avenues of interest open to the well-fed are closed to them, they are haunted always by the spectres, hunger and sleeplessness. For them so cruelly often there is only the street for a bed.