The enormous majority of the poor never set foot in a police court. And yet, for one who knows anything of the conditions in which they live, how marvellous that is! Most educated people, after all, go through life, from cradle to grave, without once experiencing any really strong temptation to break the law of the land. The very poor are hardly ever free from such temptation; hardly ever free from it. I know. I, with all the advantages behind me of traditions, associations, memories, hopes, knowledge, and tastes, to which most very poor people are strangers, I have felt my fingers itch, my stomach crave woundily, as I passed along a mean street in which food-stuffs were exposed outside shop windows; a practice which, upon a variety of counts, ought long since to have been abolished by law.
Oh, the decency, the restraint, and the enduring law-abidingness of London's poor, in the face of continuously flaunting plenty, of gross ostentation! It is the greatest miracle of our time. The comparative absence of either religion or philosophy among them to-day makes the spectacle of their docility, to me, far more remarkable than anything in the history of mediaeval martyrdom. When I come to consider also the prodigiously irritant influences of modern life in its legislation, journalism, amusements, swift locomotion, and, not least, its education for the masses, then I see wireless telegraphy and such things as trifles, and the abiding self-restraint of the very poor as our greatest marvel.
VI
After my second year in London I became approximately wealthy. Early in the third year, at all events, I earned as much as five guineas in a single month, and ate meat almost every day; in other words I began to earn pretty nearly one-third as much as I had earned some years previously in Sydney. I now bought books, and no longer always, as before, at the cost of a meal or so. Holywell Street was a great delight to me, and I never quite comprehended how Londoners could bring themselves to let it go. I doubt if Fleet Street raised a single protest, and yet-- Well, it was surprising.
I wrote rather less in this period, and used more method in my attacks upon the editors. I even succeeded in actually interviewing one or two of them, including the gentleman to whom I carried a note of introduction from a colleague he had never met. But I do not think I gained anything by these interviews. I might possibly have done so had they come earlier, while yet the freedom of easier days and of sunshine was in my veins. But my mean street period had affected me materially. It had made me morbidly self-conscious, and suspiciously alive to the least hint of patronage or brusqueness.
It is true I gave hours to the penetration of editorial sanctums; but in nearly every case my one desire, when I reached them, was to escape from them quickly without humiliation. In a busy man's very natural dislike of interruption, or anxious glance toward his clock, I saw contempt for my obscurity and suspicion of my poverty. And, after all, I had nothing to say to these gentlemen, save to beg them to read the effusions I pressed upon them; an appeal they would far rather receive on half a sheet of notepaper. As to impressing my personality upon them in any way, as I say, my uneasy thoughts in their presence were usually confined to the problem of how best I might escape without actual discredit.
Once, I remember, in a very lean month, I chanced to see one of the Olympians passing with god-like nonchalance into the restaurant of a well-known hotel. On the instant, and without giving myself time for reflection, I followed him down the glittering vestibule, and into a palatial dining-hall. The hour was something between one and two o'clock, and a minute before I had been thoughtfully weighing the relative merits of an immediate allowance of sausages and mashed potatoes for fivepence, or a couple of stale buns for one penny, to be followed at nightfall by a real banquet--seven-pennyworth of honest beef and vegetables. Now, with a trifle over four shillings in my pocket, I was, to outward seeming, carelessly scanning a menu, in which no single dish, not even the soup, seemed to cost less than about three times the price of one of my best dinners.
But at the next table sat a London editor. I was free to contemplate him. Was not that feast enough for such as I? Evidently I thought it was, for I told the waiter with an elaborate assumption of boredom that I did not feel like eating much, but would see what I could make of a little of the soup St. Germain. I wondered often if the man noticed the remarkable manner in which the crisp French rolls on that table disappeared, while I toyed languidly with my soup. I did not dare to ask for more rolls when I had made an end of the four or five that were on the table; but I could have eaten a dozen of them without much difficulty.
'No, thank you, I think I shall be better without anything to-day,' I said to the waiter who drew my attention to a sumptuous volume which I had already discovered to be the wine-list. There was a delicate suggestion in my tone (I hoped) that occasional abstinence from wine, say, at luncheon had been found beneficial for my gout. Certainly, if he counted his rolls, the man could hardly have suspected me of a diabetic tendency.
All this time I studied the profile of the editor, while he leisurely discussed, perhaps, half a sovereign's worth of luncheon. I hoped--and again feared--he might presently recognise me; but he only looked blandly through me once or twice to more important objects beyond. And just as I had concluded that it was not humanly possible to spend any longer over one spoonful of practically cold soup, he rose, gracefully disguised a yawn, and strolled away to an Elysian hall in which, no doubt, liqueurs, coffee, and cigars of great price were dispensed. This was not for me, of course.