I do not suggest that a number of outcasts—using the term in the sense that they are outcast from home and security—are competent cooks. But a certain proportion are skilled, as I have said, in the domestic arts, and if an employer could persuade herself to try them out at a proper wage—none of your ninepence an hour—they would discover unlooked for ability, and at the same time have the satisfaction of feeling that they had offered an opportunity, very rarely to be found.
Clothes are, of course, the great barrier. I have experimented deliberately to test my theory that where a woman is concerned, her social value is estimated on externals. I have gone out of my home in a soiled raincoat and a bedraggled hat, and have immediately been placed in a totally different social strata from that to which I am usually relegated. The same policeman who would touch his hat when I pass him at the comer of the street in my ordinary attire, stares blankly at me when I pet on shabby garments. The porter at a block of flats who knows me very well and is always most polite, has failed to recognise me when I turned up in what my friends call my “Annie Turner” clothes. I do not think this is the case where a destitute man is concerned. People have learned that they must look beneath the habit in the case of masculine appraisement, but women still suffer from the old test. Bedraggled garments not only spell destitution, but incapacity, dishonesty, and a total lack of sex morals.
In my own particular case I discovered a means profitably to exploit such personality as I possess. I developed my latent talent for commerce, and evolved a system of attack which brought me, in gradual stages of increase, enough to live on. When I went back to my home I was making sufficient on the commission I received on the sale of metal cigarette cases, etc., to keep me in meals, find me a bed—when there was one available—and to permit me to have an occasional wash and bath. Had I kept on a little longer, by extending my area of trade and increasing my experience, I should have been able, either to rent a weekly bed at a lodging house, or to have taken one of those top attics, which are to be found in the alleys and byways of Soho.
It would have taken me a long time, however, to have accumulated sufficient to renovate my wardrobe. I might have managed a new pair of shoes, and perhaps, have picked up a hat in one of the cheaper stalls at Berwick Market, the New Cut or Petticoat Lane, but a complete renewal of wardrobe could not have been accomplished without considerable difficulty. Still, I formed the nucleus of a livelihood which in the fullness of time, would, I think, have grown into a moderate but stable income.
When I had reached that point in my commercial career, however, I should have been faced by new difficulties. Directly you grow prosperous in this particular walk of life, the police get wise to you. While you remain furtive, dirty, and obviously destitute, so long as you are civilly spoken and quiet mannered you are allowed to rub along. But appear on your beat with the least appearance of well-doing, and keep up that appearance for a week or ten days and you will be pounced upon. For this reason my friend of the black plush coat clung to her unsavoury habiliments. For this reason—apart from her vagrant instinct and her tendency to drug—she would never sleep two nights running in the same house. Admitted, that her appearance militated against her in the sense that customers were not drawn towards her, still this disability was counterbalanced by her employment of younger and less dilapidated women who, like myself, worked on commission for sales.
I should say this woman has a tidy sum put away somewhere, probably sewn in the innermost recesses of her rags, where even she cannot easily get hold of it. I know of more than one case where women carry a sum about with them that would surprise the casual observer, but it is very rarely that they will break into this store. They know that once this happens they may lack the resolution to stay their hand, and so winter and summer the greasy wad of fingered notes, done up in newspaper, sewn into oilskin and packed away with intimate garments next the skin, travels about with the owner, for in no circumstances would my friend or those like her, put their money into any sort of bank.
These cases are by no means numerous, nor do I for a moment want to suggest that it is common for an outcast to have a secret hoard. But such phenomena do exist, and they are generally recruited from the educated classes. They have not always been homeless, but have become Arabs of the pavement through circumstances allied to an inborn dislike of ordered routine. Very often these people disappear from the homeless world and return to the place from whence they came. But I do not think they permanently stay there. There is an urge about street life difficult to resist, and once you have experienced the stimulus of an almost complete isolation, there is a danger that you may indulge in it too often.
Such people as I have indicated, do not offer the problems which assail the rank and file. Personality, which in its ultimate, means resistance, is difficult to destroy, but given a long monotone of semi-starvation and lack of easy sleep, its fibres disintegrate and gradually weaken. Change of suffering is a stimulus; the sudden alternation of prosperity with penury inspires the imagination and revives the spirit. My friend of the plush coat had known such contrasting periods and by
