The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 21

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 h.o.a.rd 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 Sat.u.r.day 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'a.s.sommoir_ 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, n.o.bility--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 pa.s.sage 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 sp.a.w.n, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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-cla.s.s, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt now.

This remarkable old woman quite civilly declined the gift, and explained how well she could manage without a.s.sistance; 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 sp.a.w.n 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sistance 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 pract.i.tioners 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 b.u.t.ter (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 circ.u.mstances 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 coa.r.s.ens 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 a.s.sertion 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, a.s.sociations, 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 pa.s.sed 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, amus.e.m.e.nts, swift locomotion, and, not least, its education for the ma.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sing with G.o.d-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 a.s.sumption 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, pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.toned up my coat and walked with angry haste all the way to Epping Forest. In that n.o.ble breathing-place I raged to and fro under trees and through scrub, delighting in the p.r.i.c.kly 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--b.u.t.ter 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.