No one with any sense will, of course, try to sell matches or beg coppers from the Sunday crowd in the park. I very much wanted to see what would happen if I asked one of the beautifully gowned women on church parade for the price of a bed, but I felt it was too risky. It was ninety to one that I should have been run in, and that was an experience which during this adventure, at least, I did not want to try.
I did not get much pleasure from watching the people in the park. Generally speaking, I take a vivid interest in clothes, and am always ready to discuss the latest cut or fashion. But this is one of the relaxations that do not appeal to the homeless. I found the joy of smart hats and dainty gowns had left me, with the keen interest in the newspapers which belonged to my other life. Again, flowers, when you are very tired, do not soothe you. You remember dully how much care is bestowed upon them, and in a dumb, unconscious way, resent it. Usually it is not until dusk that the destitute go to the parks in the West End. They prefer the commonwealth of the streets where, every now and then, you may meet an answering eye, and exchange an eloquent glance.
I found that Sunday very dull. Such museums and public galleries as are open do not appeal to the dispossessed. There again you meet the sharp contrast which is unbearable in moments of comparative leisure. For it is in those moments when, for the time being, the fight for bed and board is of necessity suspended, that you touch the bottom of rejection. It is then that woman, no matter what she be, craves for that thing which is called a home.
I tramped about the streets, sat for a while in Trafalgar Square, and had a rasher of bacon and a cup of coffee in an eating house. At the end of the afternoon I roused myself to begin business, and by a stroke of luck I met my friend of the plush coat in one of her favourite bars.
We did some business together. I made a shilling or two, and then my friend suggested we should go to a cinema, she standing treat. Now I have never been keen on films, except when Charlie Chaplin is on the screen, and I felt quite indifferent at the prospect of such enjoyment. She took two of the cheaper seats in a house near Shaftesbury Avenue, and I waited for the show to begin, quite incurious and even depressed. It was a story of the conventional type, in which a poor girl becomes a leader of society, following a round of luxurious enjoyment, but I found myself suddenly watching the pictures with eagerness, positive pleasure! I dwelt with rapture on her dinner with the hero in an expensive restaurant. I noted with extraordinary precision everything she ate. I enjoyed with her the roses he bought, and thrilled to the music the orchestra was playing. I would not have missed an inch of film. I would not have forfeited any one of the thousand mechanical sensations she enjoyed. It was not until it was all over that I asked myself why this change had come about, why it was that I, and the people in the cheap seats around me, had been wrought up to such excitement, almost ecstasy.
And then the solution came. When you are hungry and cold, without a home and without hope, the “Pictures” warm your imagination, heat your blood and somehow vitalise your body. The blank shutters that hem you in from enjoyment are suddenly down, and you look into a world of light and colour, expectancy and romance—that eternal longing for romance which dies so hardly. This is one of the things that I discovered in my experience. For the same reason this is, I think, why the inhabitants of drab homes in mean streets flock to the cinema. I do not think it has any educational value, nor does it generally stimulate the imagination. But it supplies a lack, and to those whose horizon is bounded by the four walls of a room, badly distempered, or hideously papered, the contemplation of the garish hotel, the spacious restaurant, or impossible heroines of the screen is compensation. This also accounts, I suppose, for the unending supply of this kind of picture. Commerce always caters for a steady public, and while the taste of the artistic is soon surfeited, the intelligence of the thinking easily annoyed, the vast residuum of the patient poor, who unendingly bear the burden of monotony, is a sure and certain market in a world of shifting values.
I parted with my friend outside the cinema. She suggested I should go with her to some doss house in the Borough, but I felt I could not endure a second dose of that kind of thing. I had been out for thirty-six hours, and the desire for bed was getting clamorous. I set my teeth and vowed that, whatever happened, I would sleep under a roof that night.
I did not want to return to Kennedy Court. Experience, however, had already shown me how difficult it was to get a bed over the weekend, so I determined to pay my one and twopence, secure my lodging and then try my luck elsewhere, so that if no fresher accommodation were forthcoming I could be certain of a comparatively decent rest.
But Kennedy Court was full. The weekend, it seems, fills up every available corner in the world that lies beyond the ken of the well-fed. I wasn’t cast down, however, but took a tram to Camden
