“Stop where you are,” she said. “Don’t come down here.”
As she spoke I felt that I was destitute in every sense of the word.
“Good evening,” I said, politely. “May I have a bed?”
“Stay where you are,” she repeated, and I went back to the little pen at the top of the stairs, surprised and hurt. I realised for the first time since I began my journey, how demoralising it is to be sized up on your external appearance, and the tears were very near my eyes when I asked again for a bed, and announced that I could pay for it.
The statement did not impress the Sister, and under her eyes my shabbiness increased. Draggled coat and sodden hat grew visibly more and more demoralised.
“Please stay there.” The frying fork marked out the frontier. Then there followed a searching cross-examination, which I bore patiently and politely, under the belief that when the interrogatory was finished I should be allowed a bed. As I discovered later, however, my impression was wrong.
“What is your name and occupation?”
“I am out of work,” I said.
“When were you in a regular job?”
“Some time since,” I answered, and felt almost criminal.
“Your address?”
“I haven’t one.”
“No permanent address?”
In face of what I had told her the question seemed irrelevant.
“Well then,” she faced me with frank hostility, “where did you spend last night?”
I had to tell her the truth. I could not frame a suitable lie, besides this was a case when, it seemed to me, fiction would not help matters. The Church Army Shelter existed, I had been told, to supply beds at tenpence a night for destitute women. Why, then, should I shirk the admission of a palpable fact? And yet I felt somehow that my answer would do me out of the comfortable bed I needed so badly.
She seemed shocked at the mention of the casual ward, and positively bristled when I confessed to a common lodging house.
“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give you a bed,” and I knew that the words were the spontaneous expression of her feeling. She did not want me and my bedraggled clothes in her bright, clean kitchen. She had no use for a woman who quite recently had lodged in Kennedy Court, and she hurled at me the condemnation of a whole world when she turned me down.
I have been assured that the Church Army affords help to many destitute women. Facts and figures have been poured upon me. Statistics have set forth how many hundreds and thousands of homeless creatures have been fed and housed. This may be so, but there is an interior sympathy which expresses itself not only in statistics, and when I went to Great Peter Street that night I felt that spirit was not there.
And here I must say a word as to the moral effect of this particular treatment. I discovered that since I had left my home I had acquired a new psychology. I not only looked, but I felt destitute, and the Sister’s refusal struck me like a blow in the face. Why should she turn me down? I was clean, I was honest, I had the money to pay—and I needed a comfortable bed.
I suddenly comprehended with a dreadful clearness what destitution does to the soul. It destroys the sense of human dignity, and as your rags are, so you become. I was bedraggled, I looked miserable and I had not slept—anywhere, and the Sister in the pretty kitchen cooking supper did not want anything like me among the clean, white paint and shining brass fittings.
I once heard a prosperous-looking man say something that expressed what the Sister at that moment must have felt. Someone was speaking with anger as to the terrible condition of the slums which breed deterioration of mind and body.
“That’s all very well,” said the prosperous one, “but after all they are dogs—let them live in their kennels!”
Well, I hadn’t got even a kennel, though at that moment I wanted to slink off and find one. But I wasn’t through yet. I did not want unjustly to condemn the Sister, and it was necessary that I should discover the type of lodger that was acceptable.
I lurked in the passage near the entrance—lurking is one of the fine arts I learned in my wanderings—and watched the door to the kitchen like a lynx. Presently a nice-looking young woman carrying a despatch case walked briskly up the street and into the house. I judged her to be a shop assistant, who wanted to get away from living-in for a night. I watched her enter the little lobby and descend the stairs—no frying fork barred her way, and I listened to her conversation with the Sister.
She answered all enquiries satisfactorily and was fixed up for the night.
I left that house with a burning sense of injury.
It was not that I was penniless. I had been through that stage and had not scrupled to ask for help. When I was hungry I had begged. But now it seemed to me I was in an even more desperate condition. I had the money for a decent bed and I could not get one!
Had the Sister merely told me at the first that she had no accommodation I should not have been so hurt. But it seemed to me deliberate cruelty to interrogate me and then to tum me down. The fact that she did this effectively disposes of any suggestion that she knew from the first that there was no bed available, and that this was not so I subsequently learned.
By this time it was close on ten, and I did not relish the walk back to Holborn. Besides, I could not accept the possibility that only in Kennedy Court could I be taken in. Surely there was some other shelter?
The stars were cruelly bright that evening, and the glory of the sky made my
