By this time the thing most desirable in my eyes was the possession of a room of my own. I wanted badly to be able to shut myself in with my luggage; to secure privacy, and be able to think, without the distracting consciousness of my small capital melting away from me at an unnecessary and alarmingly rapid pace. Anything equivalent to the comparative refinement, quietness, cleanliness, and spacious outlook of my North Shore quarters was evidently quite out of the question; and would have been, as a matter of fact, even at double their cost in Sydney.
Late that afternoon a cab conveyed me with my baggage to No. 27 Mellor Street, a small thoroughfare leading out of the Seven Sisters Road. Here I had secured a barely furnished top-floor room, with a tiny oil-stove in it, for 4s. 6d. per week. I paid a week's rent in advance, and, having deposited my bags there, I sallied forth into the Seven Sisters Road, with the room key in my pocket, to make domestic purchases. Billy cans were not available, but I bought a tin kettle for my oil-stove, some tea, a very little simple crockery and cutlery, some wholemeal brown bread (which I had heard was the most nutritious variety), butter, and cheese. Also some lamp oil, for the simple furniture of my room included, in addition to its oil-stove, a blue china lamp with pink and silver flowers upon its sides. Most of these things I ordered in one shop, and then, carrying one or two other purchases, hurried back to my room to be ready for the shop-boy who was to deliver the remainder.
Over the little meal that I presently prepared, with the aid of the oil-stove, my spirits, which had fallen steadily during the hunt for a room, brightened considerably. Pipe in mouth I made some alterations in the disposition of my furniture, placing the little table nearer to the window, and shifting the bed to give me a glimpse of sky when I should be occupying it. The oil-stove made a regrettable stench I found, and the lamp appeared to suffer from some nervous affection which made its flame jump spasmodically at intervals. The mattress on my bed was extraordinarily diversified in contour by little mountain ranges, kopjes which could not be induced to amalgamate with its general plan. Also, I was not so much alone in my sanctum as I had hoped to be. There were other forms of life, whose company I do not think I ever entirely evaded during my whole period as a lodger of the poorest grade in London.
But for the time these trifles did not greatly trouble me. Drunken brawls which occurred later in the evening, immediately under my window, were a nuisance. But it was all new; my health of mind and body was sound and unstrained; and I presently went to bed rather well pleased with myself, after an hour spent in considering and adding to sundry notes I had accumulated, for articles and sketches presently to be written.
My hope was to be able to win a place in London journalism without having any sort of an appointment. The very phrase 'free-lance' appealed to my sense of the romantic. 'All the clever fellows are free-lances, you know, in the Old Country.' I recalled many such statements made to me in Sydney. Prudence might have led me to offer myself for a post of some kind, if the editor to whom my letter of introduction was addressed had been visible. But he was not in London; and, in my heart, I was rather glad. It should be as a free agent, an unknown adventurer in Grub Street, that I would win my journalistic and literary spurs in the Old World. Other men had succeeded....
Musing in this hopeful vein I fell asleep, with never a hint of a presentiment of what did actually lie before me. I suppose the chiefest boon that mortals enjoy is just that negative blessing: their total inability to see even so far into the future as to-morrow morning.
IV
The compilation of anything like a detailed record of my first two years in London would be a task to alarm a Zola. I could not possibly face it; and, if I did, no good end could be served by such a harrowing of my own feelings.
Such a compilation would be a veritable monument of squalid details; of details infinitely mean and small, and, for the most part, infinitely, unredeemedly ugly. Heaven knows I have no need to remind myself by the act of writing of all those dismal details. Mere poverty, starvation itself, even, may be lightsome things, by comparison with the fetid misery which surrounded me during the major part of those two years.
People say, with a smile or a sigh, as their mood dictates, that one half the world does not know how the other half lives. So far is that truism from comprehending the tragic reality of what poverty in London means, that I have no hesitation in saying this: there is no wider divergence between the lives of tigers and the lives of men than lies between the lives of English people, whose homes in some quarters I could name are separated by no more than the width of a street, a mews, and, it may be, a walled strip of blackened grass and tree-trunks.