Part 4

Down in the crypt of St. Martin's Church, the church whose doors never close, I saw a remarkable sight. Broad, white arches spanned a dim gloom. Certain benches were set facing the east, as in the church above, and others were placed round the crypt. Lying, sitting upright, and huddled in every position of which the human body is capable, were men and women, homeless wanderers over the hard face of the earth.

There was no sound in the white crypt but variously keyed snores and the small scratch of a policewoman's pen as she kept a record of Christ's guests, for such they are; and as I looked at them these words sang in my heart: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Sanctuary. That was it. They had the hunted air of having run hard to find this place, and, having found it, had abandoned themselves to safety. There was something else. They reminded me of a picture that used to thrill me when I was a child: troops, rolled in their cloaks beside dead fires, sleeping before a battle. Their battle was To-morrow.

* * *

There was a young girl who could not sleep. She was wrapped tightly in a blue mackintosh. She sat with her eyes wide open, gazing before her. There was a grey-haired woman sleeping upright in a pew, a poor, rakish hat on a pile of prayer-books beside her. Three or four other women slept near together, leaning against each other, as if for warmth.

Most of the men slept. Some had no overcoats, and lay huddled with their tousled heads on hassocks. Others had placed their coats over their heads. One or two wore spats, and appeared from their clothes to be prosperous. Then you looked at their boots, and read a story of tramp, tramp, tramp. One elderly man, awakened suddenly, shot out an arm to look at his wrist-watch. But there was no watch there, and he drew his hand swiftly under his coat again as though it hurt.

* * *

"Some extraordinary dramas have been acted on the steps outside in the small hours," said a young man officially connected with the church. "Once a girl was saved from white-slavers; once I brought in a boy so blue with cold that I had to open the furnace doors without delay, and thaw him. Most of the 'down-and-outs' know this church. Many of them we manage to set up again, some sink back or just disappear. Yet we never lose faith in human nature. A homeless person is allowed to shelter here only three nights in succession. After that we try to find some other abode, so you see our visitors are always changing."

He opened a door, and I found myself in a cellar full of old clothes. Boxes of collars lay on the floor. A knowing looking silk hat crowned a pile of old hats. Women's skirts and men's trousers hung from pegs. Boots and shoes stood neatly dressed by the right.

"This is our wardrobe," he said. "Our first principle is to give a homeless person food and then whatever clothes we can. You can't expect to hear the truth on an empty stomach."

"Are you often deceived by people who drift in here out of the night?"

"Now and then. It's nothing compared with the friends we make, the delightful characters we discover when the ache and pain of hardship have worn off. We divide men into three groups: Those who have been to prison and have a grudge against the world; those who went to the war as boys and came back men with boys' minds; and those who simply will not work and can't run straight. We have heard every fairy tale in the world, and we know a scrounger at sight!"

* * *

I tip-toed back through the white crypt. The pale girl was still awake. The grey-haired woman still slept--old, worn-out, uncared-for, and life gone by. Men slept and stirred uneasily as if afraid of the dawn that was stealing on to draw them again into the battle. How many would rise gloriously; how many fall? We talk of human nature in the rough, heartbeats, life. Here it is in the middle of London every night, each sleeper a real drama of struggle, each man and woman midway in that Valley of the Shadow through which all lives, spiritually or materially, must pass.

"We don't care what they are," said the young man. "If they are in trouble, that is enough."

I hardly heard him, for I was thinking that in this white place is the Spirit of Christ.

A Bit of Bagdad

The only place where you could sell an elephant, a were-wolf, or your second best aunt without attracting the slightest curiosity is Club Row, a Sunday market famous throughout the eastern regions of London. Turn out of Shoreditch along the Bethnal Green Road and presently you see a large cloth-capped crowd. You approach.

A dramatic, sinister man who lost his razor early last year detaches himself and sidles up to you with his right hand suspiciously hidden in the breast of his coat. Is he an anarchist? Just as you expect him to bring out a bomb and cry "Down with Civilization," he quickly produces a six-ounce pom and whispers in a voice like a rusty door hinge: "Come on, half a dollar!" Other dog men approach. They offer handfuls of pups, or they submit dogs of larger growth which sit round in a circle looking up at you questioningly, hopefully. You want to buy the lot. Then an Airedale bites a collie and you find yourself the centre of a splendid battle, from which you escape into the heart of the mob.

Here life is magnificent. Thousands of things are happening at once in Oriental variety. This is what Bagdad was like in the days of the Caliph. This is what the Mouski in Cairo is like to-day. As you stand wedged between people who hold sacks that writhe and cluck, a man waves a couple of buff Orpingtons in your face and pushes past to stand himself a glass of jellied eels. An elderly parrot-like old lady is marooned helplessly, with a green aloof-looking parrot, exactly like herself, perched on her hand. Pigeons coo, hens cackle, cockerels crow, dogs bark, canaries sing, and you gain the impression that anything--anything--is yours for "half a dollar."

I was interested in the little groups round contortionists, catch-penny men, and herb doctors. We have driven these mediæval characters from more polite places, and it is almost with a thrill that east of Aldgate Pump you find yourself in the hearty atmosphere of a fair as old as England. One man, who said that his face was as well known as the dome of St. Paul's, walked rapidly up and down with a mysterious paper packet over which he held a pair of dental forceps. Every one wanted to see what marvellous thing he would pick out of the packet at the psychological moment. All the time as he walked backwards and forwards he talked, of indigestion and other things with Elizabethan frankness. He discussed food as if it were a revolver.

"If the steak repeats, if the onions repeat, if the pudding repeats, if cheese repeats...."

Then, working up to his climax, he dived the forceps into the packet and produced a beautiful heliotrope-coloured pill!

Did he sell any? He did!

Under a railway arch a young man with a faint Scottish accent had been handcuffed and chained. Round his neck he wore a steel collar; on his head a steel cap which, he said, was "an exact replica of the cap used for capital punishment throughout the United States of America." (Thrill in the audience!)

"And now," he remarked (with a touch of his Scottish accent), "before I release myself, my partner will take the liberty of passing the hat round!"

The fringes of the crowd melted away. After a prolonged struggle, interrupted by a donkey and cart bursting violently into the arena, the young man unshackled himself, dived for the hat, looked at the pennies, and remarked, "Well, now; if any sportsman would care...."

But the crowd had stampeded.

How delightfully childish it all is. In order to sell chocolate one man had taken off his coat and had put on his head an irresponsible looking opera hat!

In side streets I came on a bicycle market. I wondered how many were doped like racehorses. A stray bicycle found carelessly outside a house becomes something quite different with the aid of a paint pot! How many old crocks had been dressed up with new lamps and saddles I would not care to say! Here trade was booming. I saw a man who had bought a dog, a birdcage, and a pair of pink braces, treat himself to a pair of handle-bars. It must be wonderful to wander through Bagdad like this, meeting things on the way, living an hour full of infinite possibilities, not knowing whether you will arrive home with a bullfinch or a bicycle! After watching this market closely I realize this: people do not go there to buy things, but to have things sold to them!

* * *

On the way out I saw something worth while. A melancholy bull pup sitting in the road with all the world's troubles in his eyes was picked up by a little girl.

"I want him because he looks so unhappy."

A chauffeur in a green coat paid out five shillings.

"Darling ... darling," said the girl, holding the squat little body.

They took him to a motor-car that had been left round the corner. So he left a street corner in Bagdad to be a prince among pups.

Kismet!

"Prisoners Only"

"Prisoners Only."

A door in Bow Street Police Station opens on a small tiled room in which each morning all the prisoners on their way to the celebrated dock gather to await the call.

It is an exclusive apartment. Visitors are not allowed. Unless you break a shop window, punch a policeman in the stomach, or become publicly full of spirit you will never see it. It was due only to the courtesy of Bow Street that I was allowed in for a moment yesterday like an ordinary prisoner. Here I found a strange assortment of human beings gathered together by Fate--or should I say alcohol?--for Monday morning's crime originates in a bottle!

The room is tiled and looks like an ordinary waiting-room till a policeman opens the door that leads out to a courtyard and then you see a second door composed of stout iron bars. About twenty or thirty men were sitting round the room talking to the policemen who had arrested them. Most of them were weary, some of those who had been let out on bail looked smart, a few still retained traces of their fateful debauch, and all had lost the divine afflatus which had flung them into a pair of blue arms. The atmosphere was rather like that of a headmaster's study in which is gathered a group of bad boys waiting for the cane.

A stoical old man dozed peacefully in a corner. So might dear old Falstaff have bared his grey hairs in a moment of regrettable trial. A navvy with the head of a Roman emperor sat huddled in his clay-soiled clothes, silent, grim. He reminded me of Trajan's bust in the British Museum. He should have been dressed in a toga instead of sitting in Bow Street with a fine of five shillings hanging over him! A young man with a mild face sat near him, the kind of young man who keeps rabbits in a back yard. I wondered what odd circumstance had brought him in conflict with law and order. Among a group of seedy and tattered people I noticed a smart man wearing spats and holding a neat umbrella.

It was the strangest roomful you can imagine.

* * *

How wonderfully British! I do not imagine that the police and prisoners of any other nation meet together as captor and captive in the same cheery, almost social atmosphere.

In Berlin I imagine it must be exceedingly unpleasant to be a prisoner, and in Paris, also, it cannot be exactly jolly. In Cologne I once saw a German policeman draw his sword and charge a little boy who had left a banana skin on a patch of neat, cultured turf; and in Paris once I saw a gendarme do unnecessarily unfriendly things to his captive. But our Roberts are not like this, and when they are face to face with their prey in the station they seem almost apologetic about it:

"You broke the law and I did my duty, and that's that. Let's forget it!"

That is the atmosphere in the "Prisoners Only" room. Thumbs in belts, the policemen talked with their prisoners about racing, the weather, and, as far as I could gather, anything but drink and brawls. What instinctive good breeding! Here and there a prisoner who took his captivity lightly laughed and joked with the man who brought him there.

"What'll I get?" one prisoner asked.

"Oh, about twenty years without option!" replied the constable. Then a man with a notebook became busy with the day's evil-doers, a name was called, and as the first prisoner pulled himself together and strode out dockwards, a flutter of interest went round the waiting-room, and the old man awakened with a start and asked where he was.

* * *

Under the Royal Arms sat Sir Chartres Biron, white-haired and exceedingly wise to human nature. He was dealing with a pathetic collection of women prisoners who had been waiting in a "Prisoners Only" room of their own. Constable after constable described scenes of revelry in which it was alleged that certain inadequate Bacchantes in black bonnets had been urged to deeds of violence.

Some women pleaded guilty and got it all over quickly. Others clasped and unclasped their hands--appealing, thin, worn hands grimed with work--and tried to impress Sir Chartres that "two glasses of port" had been the cause of all their trouble. They were fined and went their way, some with an assumption of belated dignity, others jauntily. One old lady was so pleased with her sentence that she danced down the corridor between two lines of policemen promising never to look upon the wine again.

* * *

Then one by one my friends of the waiting-room came up for justice: drunk and disorderly, drunk in charge of a motor-car, creating a disturbance, using insulting language. They all looked sorry for themselves and exceedingly foolish. Five deaf and dumb youths had, it appeared, pushed a policeman off the pavement. The mother of one of them interpreted the case, talked to them in baby language, asked them if they had really "banged" the policeman. They nodded their heads and tried to speak, but only vague, tortured sounds, heart-rending to hear, came from their mouths. They filed out, bound over.

Then Cæsar strode into the dock, said he had been drunk, accepted his fine without a trace of emotion, and walked from the dock with an invisible cohort before him and--a visible bottle sticking out of his coat-tails!

* * *

When he has done his day's work does Sir Chartres Biron feel more like laughing or crying, I wonder?

Boys on the Bridge

Boys are always leaning over London Bridge, as right-minded boys have been leaning these five hundred years and more. Beneath them the Thames, that loved river of ours, swirls and eddies round the piers, sucking at the weathered stone as it runs seawards, out and away.

When I joined them the other day I noticed with an authentic thrill that against the grim wharves men were doing interesting things in ships. No matter how trivial the act--the hauling of a rope, the turning of a winch, the painting of a hull--it becomes somehow vital and significant to anyone on dry land. To a London office boy who has been told not to linger by the wayside--ah! how exquisite, how irresistible!

Sometimes little important jets of steam rose from a cargo boat, marvellously suggesting departure and the imminence of great adventure; enviable free men whose boots had never trod an office stair popped their heads out of hatchways and lumbered up on deck; a string of linked barges, dingy, low in the water, went by behind an impertinent tug, which nosed the tide sideways, pulling and puffing. On the hindmost barge a man was frying bacon in a jet-black pan. O, exquisite! O, irresistible! Was this not life? Was this not romance?

To me a fat white woman was singularly significant. She appeared from the bowels of a barge and, moving slowly to starboard with a nautical roll, hung an intimate item of her laundry right in the eye of London Bridge. Then she looked round her with that composed placidity which sustains the suburbs (just as if she were in Brixton and not on the high seas), and after giving one of her sleeves a roll to keep it above her fat elbow, she went below with the important air of the busy female who believes that her industry is the hinge on which life turns smoothly. No cut-throats on that barge, no swashbuckling, no silly ideas about the Spanish Main there, but everything nice and tidy, and wipe your boots on the mat and mind you don't stay out too long after closing time! Wonderful how a woman--any woman--softens a masculine scene and awakens the boy in man to a swift respect--as if the matron had appeared suddenly on the scene of a scrum on a dormitory landing! The wild places of the earth do not care much about a man. He can't do much! When the woman appears the aspens shiver and the tamarisks tremble and even the oak is fearful, for a lone man is transitory and woman is permanent: she means a home and a whole lot more men; she is the beginning of civilization.

So the fat woman made her barge most interesting to me: she brought it right into society, she humanized the wild old Thames. All this was high above the office boys who pressed their stomachs to the stone and clambered for a foothold in the balustrading so that they might take a better view of all this glamour....

Thames, you muddy strip of magic, how many London heads have you turned; how many sirens come in from sea on every tide to sing those wicked songs against which we poor chained creatures sometimes wax our ears in vain?

* * *

I looked at the faces of the spellbound office boys. They gazed like gargoyles from the parapet. Most of them were dull and stolid; but you never can tell! Their cheeks bulged with sweets and their eyes regarded the river with the same intent vacancy that they would have given to a spectacular road repair.

One face only seemed to me to hold the hunger that burns. It belonged to a thin, pale lad who possessed no physical strength, the type that would rather have been Hercules than Homer; the frail type that dreams of swords and ambuscades and blood. He looked out over the water towards Tower Bridge with eyes that were wide--whether with imagination or indigestion I cannot say! I can only tell you this: he was the kind of pale, useless mass of parental despair that through history has met the turning point of existence in an idle hour, when imagination, blazing suddenly like fired straw, illuminates a dream on which to build a life.

What was he thinking, I wondered. Had I asked him he would have said sullenly, "Nothing," and have slouched away, ashamed.

I wondered if he was seeing in Thames water those things that thousands of London boys have seen--argosies and ventures and foreign places, the drive of water past a vessel's bows, leaning sails, and small white towns whose palm trees stand with their feet in calm lagoons.

Who knows? This is the dream of London Bridge. This is the challenge that the Thames flings down to London every day and every night, crying it aloud to the huddled streets and to the crowded places, calling it softly in the marketplace. This is the old magic. It has given to London merchants, adventurers, sailors, poets, and millions of poor, discontented men who must need take their burning hearts to Balham and shut their ears.

* * *

Slowly conscience dawned in the minds of the boys. One by one they went away, their places immediately filled by others.

Away they went into the traffic, to become lost in the ant-hills of commerce, carrying who knows what high resolve from that stolen moment beside the river.

* * *

More barges came downstream slowly. High and shrill sounded the hoarse protest of a siren, imperative and wild, and I seemed to feel, right in the heart of London, where all things are so ordered and inevitable, the ancient call to the open places that comes with the smell of tar and the sight of thin masts rising to the sky.

Night Birds

It is three o'clock in the morning. Piccadilly Circus is empty of life and movement--save for a prowling policeman trying shop doors, and a group of men directing water from a giant hose over the gleaming, empty road.

A taxicab is an event, and a stray person walking quietly into the Circus holds dramatic possibilities. The mind fastens on him. Who is he? He may be a great criminal, or a great lover walking home after a dance with his head full of glorious dreams, or he may be a burglar, or a young man who has just inherited a million, or a young man without a place to rest his head. The emptiness of Piccadilly at three a.m. is awful, unnatural, death-like....

Yet London is not asleep. Hundreds of people in London never seem to sleep. Come into one of the all-night cafés which have sprung up within the last year or so. It is full. It hums with talk and laughter. Waiters move about between the crowded tables. There is a constant clatter of cups and saucers, and the air is blue with smoke. In contrast with the desolation of the empty streets outside, it is an astonishing place. At first you think there is nothing to distinguish the café from the same place at normal hours. You look again and realize the difference. The people are different. The woman with three or four brown paper parcels--the shopping woman--is absent. There are no children. Few elderly people.

Those present are mostly young people distinguished either by an air of lassitude or an unnatural hectic gaiety.

At the next table a girl is eating lobster salad. Lobster at three a.m.!

* * *

Who are these people? You begin to wonder about them. Some are obvious--extremely obvious--some are mysteries.