Now I generally found the police helpful in these emergencies, but on this occasion, though their spirit was quite willing, their knowledge was hopelessly out of date.
“There’s a Women’s Lodging House in Drury Lane, Miss,” said the constable on duty. “You’ll find it quite a decent place.”
I went on my voyage of discovery, fired with new hope, and after interminable questioning and considerable doubt and pain, discovered the number he had given me. It did not look at all like a lodging house, and when after repeated pealings at the bell, a man appeared, I learned that it was Baptist Mission.
“It used to be a lodging house twenty years ago,” said the caretaker, mournfully, “but it’s shut up now, and we’re holding service. No, I don’t know anywhere you could get a bed. Sister Etheldreda might tell you, she’s just round the corner.”
But Sister Etheldreda’s domain was bolted and barred, and in despair I held up a woman in the street and asked if she could help me. Time was getting on, and I simply could not face the prospect of a second night in the streets.
“There’s a decent woman who lets lodgings quite close here; you’ll know the house by the green door and the white steps. She doesn’t charge very much and I think you’ll be comfortable.”
As the proud possessor of a few shillings, I wasn’t afraid of the charge, and I walked up, bold as brass, to the green door and gave the regulation two knocks.
By this time it was dark, and in the dimness of the street, broken by one remote lamp, I hoped my shabbiness would pass unnoticed. But from the lynx eyes of the woman in the white starched apron, and immaculate black dress, there was no escape. One look was quite enough. Before I had time to frame my request I was answered.
“I haven’t got a room,” she said. “No, I couldn’t possibly take you.”
She shut the door firmly, with precision, and I knew that I might beat my hands against it—she would not reopen.
I think I went a little mad just then. I felt that London ought to be burned, that fire and brimstone should rain down on a city in which a decent woman could not find a bed. I could not go back to Mare Street, Hackney, it wasn’t fair to impose myself upon the Salvation Army as a destitute when I had money in my pocket. Besides, it seemed incredible that such a state of things could be. I returned doggedly to Bow Street and was told of a lodging house at the bottom of Craven Street leading to the Embankment.
There was no such place. The lodging house resolved itself into one-of the many private hotels whose price would have been beyond my means, and from whose doors my dilapidated appearance would have barred me.
The Church Army I could not try again and the Christian Herald Mission, full the previous night, would obviously still be crowded.
I returned to the charge and interrogated a policeman. He is the one member of the Force who has given me cause for dislike. He is a very superior person, enormously tall, with large and languorous hands that wave imperially towards the traffic at Charing Cross.
“Can you tell me of a place, please, where I can get a decent bed for half-a-crown or three shillings?”
He regarded me as if I were a sort of loathsome microbe, impertinently disturbing his contemplation of the universe.
“Six-and-sixpence is the cheapest you can get a bed in this district,” he said, languidly, in a pronounced Oxford accent.
“I can’t pay as much as that,” I answered.
“If you go across the river you could get it for ninepence.”
“I don’t want that sort of place,” I protested. “I want somewhere respectable.”
“You can’t get respectability for two and sixpence,” he said, as though shocked at the enormity of my demand. “Ninepence, or perhaps fourpence, across the river, or six and sixpence here; there’s no choice between.”
There was nothing more to be gained by talking to this guardian of the public, so I walked off, burning with rage and literally longing for a fight. Here was I, in the possession of money and unable to find a bed within three, four, or even five miles of Charing Cross this side of the river. I rebelled at the thought that I was to be cooped in a doss house and I had no wish to return to the casual ward.
I decided to seek information from my own kind, and it being past ten o’clock, I went to the Adelphi Arches already filling up. It is the fashion, nowadays to state that people do not sleep in the streets of London. The Embankment, we are told, has been swept clean of the homeless, while the destitute who used to congregate in the Adelphi, have now migrated to the office under Hungerford Bridge.
This is but the expression of an airy fancy. There are still destitute men and women on the streets of London and, night after night in the cold weather, the Adelphi Arches are crowded with tired souls. They are very silent as a rule, keeping themselves to themselves for the most part, and rarely exchanging confidences. The men there—fewer in number than the women—keep together, a short distance from the other sex, who huddle close, friend and stranger, for the sake of warmth. There is the same tragic resignation in their faces as you find throughout their world, a blind acceptance of fate that has marked them out, for no direct fault or failing, as wanderers of the
