The Message

by A. J. Dawson

I remember that I talked, even to the poor, overworked servant at my lodging, rather of the prospects of her class and order than of anything more intimate or within her narrow scope. Poor Bessie! She was of the callously named tribe of lodging-house "slaveys"; and what gave me some interest in her personality, apart from the type she represented, was the fact that she had come from the Vale of Blackmore, a part of Dorset which I knew very well. I even remembered, for its exceptional picturesqueness and beauty of situation, the cottage in which Bessie had passed her life until one year before my arrival at the fourth-rate Bloomsbury "apartments" house in which she now toiled for a living. There was little enough of the sap of her native valley left in Bessie's cheeks now. She had acquired the London muddiness of complexion quickly, poor child, in the semi-subterranean life she led.

I was moved to inquire as to what had led her to come to London, and gathered that she had been anxious to "see a bit o' life." Certainly she saw life, of a kind, when she entered her horrible underground kitchen of a morning, for, as a chance errand once showed me, its floor was a moving carpet of black-beetles until after the gas was lighted. In Bloomsbury, Bessie's daily work began about six o'clock—there were four stories in the house, and coals and food and water required upon every floor—and ended some seventeen hours later. Occasionally, an exacting lodger would make it eighteen hours—the number of Bessie's years in the world—but seventeen was the normal.

The trains which every day came rushing in from the country to the various railway termini of London were almost past counting. The "rural exodus," as it was called, was a sadly real movement then. Every one of them brought at least one Bessie, and one of her male counterparts, with ruddy cheeks, a tin box, and bright eyes straining to "see life." Insatiable London drew them all into its maw, and, while sapping the roses from their cheeks, enslaved many of them under one of the greatest curses of that day: the fascination of the streets.

So terrible a power was exercised by this unwholesome passion that men and women became paralyzed by it, and incapable of plucking up courage enough to enable them to leave the streets. I talked with men—poor, sodden creatures, whose greasy black coats were buttoned to their stubbly chins to hide the absence of collar and waistcoat—who supported a wretched existence in the streets, between begging, stealing, opening cab-doors, and the like, in constant dread of police attention. Among these I found many who had refused again and again offers of help to lead an honest, self-dependent life, for the sole reason that these offers involved quitting the streets.

The same creeping paralysis of the streets kept men from emigration to parts of the Empire in which independent prosperity was assured for the willing worker. They would not leave the hiving streets, with their chances, their flaunting vice, their incessant bustle, and their innumerable drinking bars.

The disease did not stop at endowing the streets with fascination for these poor, undisciplined, unmanned creatures; it implanted in them a lively fear, hard to comprehend, but very real to them, of all places outside the streets, with their familiar, pent noises and enclosed strife.

I met one old gentleman, the head of an important firm of printers, who, being impressed with the squalid wretchedness of the surroundings in which his work-people lived, decided to shift his works into the country. He chose the outskirts of a charmingly situated garden city, then in course of formation. He gave his people a holiday and entertained them at a picnic party upon the site of his proposed new works. He set before them plans and details of pleasant cottages he meant to build for them, with good gardens, and scores of conveniences which they could never know in the dingy, grimy tenements for which they paid extortionate rents in London.

There were four hundred and thirty-eight of these work-people. Twenty-seven of them, with some hesitation, expressed their willingness to enter into the new scheme for their benefit. The remaining four hundred and eleven refused positively to leave their warrens in London for this garden city, situated within an hour's run of the metropolis.

Figure to yourself the attitude of such people, where the great open uplands of the Empire were concerned: the prairie, the veld, the bush. Consider their relation to the elements, or to things elemental. We went farther than "Little Englandism" in those days; we produced little street and alley men by the hundred thousand; and then we bade them exercise their rights, their imperial heritage, and rule an Empire. As for me, I was busy in my newspaper work trying to secure more rights for them; for men whose present freedom from all discipline and control was their curse.

The reporters' room at the office of the Daily Gazette was the working headquarters of five other men besides myself. One was a Cambridge man, one had been at Oxford, one came from Cork, and the other two were products of Scotch schools. Two of the five would have been called gentlemen; four of them were good fellows; the fifth had his good points, but perhaps he had been soured by a hard upbringing. One felt that the desire for money—advancement, success, or whatever you chose to call it; it all meant the one thing to Dunbar—mastered every feeling, every instinct even, in this young man, and made him about as safe and agreeable a neighbour as a wolf might be for a kennel of dogs.