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.
VII
Knocking at the Gate
It is confidently assumed that the doss house is extinct. The Public Lodging House for women, licensed by the London County Council, is supposed to have taken its place. This is not so. There are doss houses in all the poorer quarters of London, though they are more numerous on the south side of the river and in the East End than in other districts. The class of lodger who uses this kind of place for a night’s shelter is lower in the social scale than the women who frequent the lodging houses. There is, of course, the great economic difference between those who can pay one shilling and twopence, and those who can only rise to fourpence and, in some cases, threepence. As I explained, my first experience only cost me twopence, owing to the intervention of the lady in the plush coat. The general tariff is fourpence, and the accommodation is not so vastly inferior to those places which are supposed to be inspected by the L.C.C. and are permitted—so far as the beds are concerned—to flourish in undiminished dirt.
The doss houses are owned by individual proprietors, though I gather that there has arisen in this, as in other industries, a syndicate. The manageress, if she may be so called, is an employee at a small salary, and in certain instances, receives a commission on the takings. There is also frequently, a man on the premises in case of a disturbance. Usually, the outcasts who frequent the doss house are not quarrelsome—they have not the energy; but cases have been known of a free fight, invariably terminated by the arrival of the man in charge who bundles the combatants out of the house. The floors are dirty, the bed clothes are of that uniform drab-grey which harbours dirt without exposing it. It is a dreadful colour, and always you feel that underneath the surface there must lurk thousands of germs, noxious bacilli and, very often, lice and bugs.
Bugs I met with, lice I did not encounter, generally speaking. This is, I think, a very definite alteration in the underworld of London. Not so many years ago, lice were rampant in many quarters, but, as I have said, the use of chemicals keeps them down, for which relief I give much thanks.
The people who use this kind of shelter are personally very dirty. They rarely have any opportunity of changing their clothes. They have lost that zest for personal daintiness so conspicuous at Kennedy Court, where the poorest little prostitute will wash her rags at every opportunity. Clean hands are not the rule in these particular sections, and many of the women are perennially verminous, so far as their hair is concerned. The strange thing is that, no matter how infected, they will not have it cut. It is not a question of shame; it is not a desire to escape criticism, for they could quite easily cut their hair themselves, nor is there any occasion to seek an official. But cut their hair they will not and masses of unkempt locks are wound round the head, literally alive with insects.
It is, I think, a feeling that long hair is the last touch of feminine attraction that life has left them. Possibly they feel that a cropped head would unsex them. They never express irritation at their uncomfortable condition—they regard it, very largely, as an act of God, and day after day carry their load of dirt and misery without the faintest hope of any relief.
So keen is
