“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s haunted,” he said. “You may laugh—so did I years ago, afore I took to this sort of thing. But sleeping out-of-doors all night has taught me more than any politicians, bishops, or schoolmasters know; or any of those fine ladies that swell about in their carriages know; I’ve seen sights that would make an hangel afraid; I’ve seen ghosts of all sorts. They’re not all like us, neither. Some of them ain’t human at all, they’re devils. You may laugh when you read about them in them library books, but it’s no laughing matter when you see them, as I’ve seen them, all alone and cold, in some wayside ditch. This tree, I tell yer, is ’aunted—and it’s a devil that ’aunts it. Ask my mates, any of them that you’ll find sleeping in the parks. There’s many of them that ’ave experienced it. They’ve seen something hiding in the branches, and when they’ve seen it, they’ve felt they must either kill themselves or someone else. There’s a devil in the tree that tempts one to do all kind of wicked things, and if you take my advice, young man, you’ll sit somewhere else.”
“I think I will,” I said; “and here’s something for your warning.” I gave him threepence, the only coins I had on me just then, and, overwhelming me with thanks, he shuffled away.
Since that night I have often thought that the poor—the very poor—know far more of the other world or worlds than do the rich, and that they know more—far more—on other points than the rich. The statesman talks of the people and the people’s needs, but what does he know of the people and their needs? He rarely, if ever, goes amongst them. Except in electioneering times, I doubt if any Member of Parliament ever goes into the more squalid of our London districts. I have seen one Member of the House of Lords eating whelks in a tavern in the Limehouse Causeway, but he is an exception. Journalists go there—but the leisured folk—never.
It bores them; and yet how much they might learn, how much not only of urgent human needs, but of coming storms. They might learn that the East End brews whilst the West End sleeps, and that as surely as the long-talked-of German war cloud—that war cloud they affected to ridicule—has at last burst, so undoubtedly will the war cloud of revolution; revolution hatched by malcontents of all nationalities in East End doss houses and crowded coffee taverns.
This is no empty prophecy. The cinders of the volcano have been hot for some time—they are now burning hot—and the hour is fast approaching when they will arise mightily in a red conflagration. Are we prepared for it? It takes a very sound constitution to face a revolution with perfect confidence. Are we sound? Can any constitution be sound when the rich daily grow richer, and the poor, poorer. Where Art—all that cries out for beauty, real beauty, beauty as it is seen and worshipped by souls uninspired by lucre—is starved to death and crushed, limp and lifeless, by the thumbscrews of a vain, shallow, mercenary mushroom aristocracy on the one hand, and an equally selfish, crude, ignorant, money-grabbing working class on the other. But let me say again it is the East End, the ever watchful, never slumbering East End, that is the thermometer of future events. And why? Because it is here that the lean, hungry men of letters, who seldom, if ever, get their thoughts transferred to print, are even now threshing out the nation’s destiny. Threshing it out, consolidating it, whilst the monied men and women, the present all-powerful nouveau riche—the beer, whiskey and tobacco, peers and peeresses—the lords of the Stock Exchange, Banks and Divorce Courts—those who have made their money out of the sins and follies of the world, or by sweating and usury, are lolling in their soft, upholstered chairs, smoking luxurious cigars and quaffing liqueurs.
The war has done much: it has aroused patriotism, it has given rise to self-sacrifice, but it has not touched the root of the gangrene, it has not lessened our worship of the dollar. Individualism, as we know it to-day, must collapse, and some better and purer system—a system that does not encourage selfishness—must prevail. The people are dying for change—for some great change that will give them fair play. This is the people’s need—the need that you may hear voiced throughout the length and breadth of the squalid East End. “We want a Government that remembers its primary duties,” they cry. “A Government that is father to its children, that loves, fosters and protects them. We have never had one yet, but the hour may not be far distant when we shall demand one.” This is what the people of leisure might learn, if they visited the haunts I visit; and they might learn more beside. They might learn of another world, a spirit world, such as is never alluded to in the pulpits, with which people in the poorest parts—people who are too poor to pay for beds—are forced to live in contact. Nights in the parks and commons have taught these vagrants more, a thousand times more, than they ever learned in Sunday or County Council Schools. They have seen sights—spirits in the form of man and of beast, of both and of neither—that have revealed to them how closely the other world borders on this, and to what close supervision the inhabitants of the other world subject some of us. They have learned, I say, what no priest or preacher would, or could, teach them, namely, that the hell of spirit-land lies on this earth, and that the worst of all punishments is that of the poor phantasms of the dead, that glides in and out the trees nocturnally, never meeting those it knew and loved, but ever encountering the most terrifying of the spirits that are hostile to man.
“What gives me the worst fright is a tree....”