“I’d go back there tonight, if I only had the fare,” said she.
“Maybe you’ll get enough to go up for the Grand National,” said the cheery little lady still drying her underwear before the fire. “I wonder now, if I was to meet the Prince of Wales, do you think he’d give me a pound if he wanted me?”
One of the elderly women—an office cleaner as I afterwards learned—answered the naive query.
“He couldn’t give you a pound, my dear, however much he wanted to. The Royal family never have no money of their own; they pay everything through their secretaries. You’d just have to send in the bill.”
“Not half,” said the cheery girl. “I wouldn’t give him away to Queen Mary.”
It was at this moment that the emotional tornado broke upon the kitchen. These atmospheric disturbances are not uncommon among the homeless. Circumstances force them to lead highly concentrated lives in that they must seize on the moment when they find it—the moment which gives them the shelter of a roof, however pitifully impermanent.
The door was flung wide open, and a good-looking young woman in a dilapidated fur coat and battered feathered hat burst in. She flung a brown paper parcel on the floor with a gesture of tragedy.
“There it is,” she cried, “my old man’s washing—I tell you he won’t want it again for sixteen months.”
She was all strung up as she spoke, and then, suddenly, she collapsed, and crouching down on the bench beside the parcel began to cry. I have never seen a woman cry as she did. The most emotional outburst of the women of the middle class is reticent, almost austere, by contrast. It seemed an intrusion somehow, to witness such devastating grief. Her body shook with big sobs, interspersed with coughs, sneezings and other primitive methods of expression. All conventional barriers were down—the woman was raw, bleeding, utterly unable to hold herself in.
I cannot repeat her language. It is not printable, but as I listened it did not shock me. I understood the violence of the feeling that moved her. I understood also why she had to cry out then and there without leaving one method of relief sealed up. Tomorrow she might be homeless. There might be no place in which to weep, vituperate or despair. It is the tragedy of the destitute that when there is a roof above their heads they must seize the chance to give voice to their emotions—emotions that we can take our time to think about, nicely to express and delicately to restrain. For consider—can you cry out in the street, shriek your agony to the pavements, raise your streaming eyes to the sky? Such demonstration comes within the definition of “a disturbance,” and she who shows her heart rent and bleeding, runs the risk of arrest—not to mention gaol. I am not here pleading that women should be allowed violently to weep in public places; I only say that emotional intemperance is inevitable if a woman has no home.
Presently she began to tell her story.
“The devils from Scotland Yard have got my Arthur for sixteen months. They came into court this morning and told—bloody lies.”
“Lies, is it,” said the Irishwoman. “Sure God Almighty’s truth ’ud choke ’em, the—bastards.”
“He’ll be six months in Wandsworth and nine in the Isle of Wight,” moaned the wife.
“But he knows the ropes; he’s done a stretch before, remember,” said a friend. “Besides, it’s not as if you didn’t know what it was like; you’ve done your bit, too, my girl.”
“That’s so, and everybody likes my Arthur, but—but I want him—oh, I want him!”
She hugged the spoiled packet of washing in her arms, and then threw it across the room. “Take it, Sally,” she said to a pretty girl. “I can’t bear to touch it now he’s gone from me.”
She sobbed on and on, and no one ventured near her. It is not manners to interfere. Some of the women continued their conversation in undertones, others waited, listening sympathetically, and then at last the Irishwoman chipped in.
“It’s not my business, I know, dear, and I’ve no call to speak to you, but I wouldn’t cry if I was you, it’ll hurt your stomach something cruel.”
The woman stared with streaming eyes, the racking sobs continued. At this moment the aged crone by the fireside felt it time to sound the official note.
“You haven’t paid for your bed,” she said.
A look of furtive distress crossed the woman’s face—I suppose she felt the street was very near.
“I haven’t paid yet, Ida,” she said, “but I’ve got the money—only do let me have my cry out, or it won’t come.”
Gradually she grew quieter; suddenly she started to her feet, began to laugh at the top of her bent, and, producing a parcel from under her coat, handed round a selection of pigs’ trotters.
Evanescent feeling? Easy tears? Hysterical outburst? Not a bit of it. Wait until you have no home to cry in, and then you will understand. Wait until you have walked about the streets, cut off from your kind as completely as though you were in a desert. Wait until, by a rare piece of luck, you get the money to pay for a bed, and can claim something of that community of interest and affection which goes by the name of home. Then, no sooner is your foot beyond the threshold, be it the kitchen of Kennedy Court, a doss house in the Waterloo Bridge Road, or any of the public lodging places, you will
