CHAPTER XXIV--A VISION OF THE NIGHT
All these were years ago little red-coloured, pulpy infants, capable
of being kneaded, baked, into any social form you chose.--CARLYLE.
Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields
to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the
docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which,
filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing
the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.
It is rather hard to tell a tithe of what I saw. Much of it is
untenable. But in a general way I may say that I saw a nightmare, a
fearful slime that quickened the pavement with life, a mess of
unmentionable obscenity that put into eclipse the "nightly horror"
of Piccadilly and the Strand. It WAS a menagerie of garmented
bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and
to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among
them when they snarled too fiercely.
I was glad the keepers were there, for I did not have on my
"seafaring" clothes, and I was what is called a "mark" for the
creatures of prey that prowled up and down. At times, between
keepers, these males looked at me sharply, hungrily, gutter-wolves
that they were, and I was afraid of their hands, of their naked
hands, as one may be afraid of the paws of a gorilla. They reminded
me of gorillas. Their bodies were small, ill-shaped, and squat.
There were no swelling muscles, no abundant thews and wide-spreading
shoulders. They exhibited, rather, an elemental economy of nature,
such as the cave-men must have exhibited. But there was strength in
those meagre bodies, the ferocious, primordial strength to clutch
and gripe and tear and rend. When they spring upon their human prey
they are known even to bend the victim backward and double its body
till the back is broken. They possess neither conscience nor
sentiment, and they will kill for a half-sovereign, without fear or
favour, if they are given but half a chance. They are a new
species, a breed of city savages. The streets and houses, alleys
and courts, are their hunting grounds. As valley and mountain are
to the natural savage, street and building are valley and mountain
to them. The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the
jungle.
The dear soft people of the golden theatres and wonder-mansions of
the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they
exist. But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle.
And woe the day, when England is fighting in her last trench, and
her able-bodied men are on the firing line! For on that day they
will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West
End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw
them and asked one another, "Whence came they?" "Are they men?"
But they were not the only beasts that ranged the menagerie. They
were only here and there, lurking in dark courts and passing like
grey shadows along the walls; but the women from whose rotten loins
they spring were everywhere. They whined insolently, and in maudlin
tones begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every
boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, and towsled, leering
and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone
in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably
repulsive, fearful to look upon.
And there were others, strange, weird faces and forms and twisted
monstrosities that shouldered me on every side, inconceivable types
of sodden ugliness, the wrecks of society, the perambulating
carcasses, the living deaths--women, blasted by disease and drink
till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in
fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all
semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain,
grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step
they took and each breath they drew. And there were young girls, of
eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with
twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in
one swift fall. And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or
seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat
upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it
all.
The unfit and the unneeded! Industry does not clamour for them.
There are no jobs going begging through lack of men and women. The
dockers crowd at the entrance gate, and curse and turn away when the
foreman does not give them a call. The engineers who have work pay
six shillings a week to their brother engineers who can find nothing
to do; 514,000 textile workers oppose a resolution condemning the
employment of children under fifteen. Women, and plenty to spare,
are found to toil under the sweat-shop masters for tenpence a day of
fourteen hours. Alfred Freeman crawls to muddy death because he
loses his job. Ellen Hughes Hunt prefers Regent's Canal to
Islington Workhouse. Frank Cavilla cuts the throats of his wife and
children because he cannot find work enough to give them food and
shelter.
The unfit and the unneeded! The miserable and despised and
forgotten, dying in the social shambles. The progeny of
prostitution--of the prostitution of men and women and children, of
flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit; in brief, the prostitution
of labour. If this is the best that civilisation can do for the
human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a
people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-
place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss.
