A Doorstep Party.
London, the "stony-hearted stepmother," as De Quincey called Oxford Street—has many a time given her children stones for bread. Many are the men and women, poets, authors, journalists, actors, who come up to the vast city, attracted by "the deceitful lights of London," to starve in Soho or Bloomsbury garrets (Bloomsbury, to which place, it is said, more MSS. are returned than to any other locality in the British Isles). Too proud to beg, too sensitive to fight, they soon become ousted in the struggle for life, and very often get pushed altogether out of the ranks; or, if they do succeed, are soured by years of trial and suffering. The biographies of successful men sometimes tell of such early struggles: but of the many who are not successful, the submerged ones, you do not hear. Some of the Bloomsbury and Bayswater boarding-houses afford sad evidence of retrenched fortunes and squalid lives. The ragged window blind, the dirty tablecloth, covered always with remains of meals; the sad, lined, discontented faces pressed close to the dingy panes, the eternal smell of onions or fried fish, the general wretchedness and frowsiness of everything—all tell tales of a sadder kind than those of Dickens's Mrs. Tibbs or Mrs. Todgers. And, descending yet lower in the social scale, individual cases become yet sadder. I once lived in a London square, next door to an empty house. For two days a battered corpse lay on the other side of the wall, in the garden, and no one knew of it. It was only the poor caretaker left in the "mansion" who, weary of existence, had herself severed the Gordian knot of life. And, in the immediate neighbourhood of another square of "desirable residences," no less than three murders was considered the usual winter average—murders, too, of the worst and most squalid type. Such, in London, is the close juxtaposition of "velvet and rags," luxury and misery. London is the refuge of blighted lives, of the queer flotsam and jetsam of humanity. Where can they all come from? and what were their beginnings? Among such waifs and strays do I recall one old man—feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty black bag, and stretched it out towards me appealingly. The contents, if any, of the black bag, I never discovered; but I often gave him a penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now, and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams. And the afflicted girl—white-faced and expressionless—who sat for many years close to the "Horse-Shoe" of Tottenham Court Road (indeed, she may sit there still), her face calm as that of a Caryatid, as though oblivious of Time and inured to suffering, through all the noise and tumult of drovers' carts and omnibuses; she has often seemed to me as a type of the eternal, dumb sorrow of humanity.
Yet this isolation of London, terrible as it is for the poor and suffering,—is,—for the well-to-do class at least,—in some ways advantageous. For one thing, it allows more liberty of action;—for another, it prevents any undue personal pride. It is, fortunately, rare indeed for the individual to be as conceited in London as he is in the provinces. True,—London has occasional æsthetic crazes and literary fashions; but, as a rule,—and with the exception of special cliques and coteries such as those of Chelsea and Hampstead,—people are not unduly puffed up in London. The city, with its vast size, acts as an automatic equaliser;—personality becomes lost,—and individuals tend to find their proper level. The Londoner is apt to realise,—that, in the words of Mr. Gilbert's song,—"he never would be missed." Nowhere is there more liberty; no one even notices you as you walk the streets. A man used, some years ago, to walk about the Bloomsbury squares with long hair in be-ribboned pigtails, and in a harlequin dress; the street-boys hardly marked him; even a Chinaman in full costume only attracts a following of a few nursery-maids and perambulators. But in London it really matters very little what you do, or how you dress. Dress here is in fact immaterial, unless you are bent on social successes. Eyes are not for ever scanning you critically, as they do in country villages. And, for ladies who work in slums and "mean streets,"—the safest plan is always to wear dark, shabby, and quiet clothes—clothes that do not "assert themselves." Otherwise, it is likely that she may be accosted as "dear" or "Sally,"—invited to take "a drop o' tea," or otherwise chaffed by rough women standing akimbo at street doors. This practice of standing at doors and gossiping would appear, indeed, to be the main occupation of women of the lower class; but, poor things! they enjoy it; and their life, after all, must contain but few enjoyments. It is perhaps, less certain that their babies enjoy the "cold step," on which they are unceremoniously flopped at all hours of the day. An overdose of "cold step" may, indeed, partially account for the bronchitis which riddles the ranks of the children of the poor. You may see a family of six slum children playing happily in the damp gutter one week; the week following, you may find half of them dead or dying from a visitation of this fell plague. To say that the children of London are decimated by it would be putting the case much too mildly. The mothers, however, take a different view. "She niver looked 'erself agin sence that 'ere crool vaccination,"—a mother will say placidly,—ignoring the cold step and the bronchitis that did the work. "Cold step," indeed, to their minds, acts as a refreshing tonic; they call it "bringin' 'im,—or 'er,—up 'ardy."
That "pity for a horse o'erdriven" that often catches you by the throat in London streets,—is yet almost cast into the shade by the far sadder lot of helpless humanity. 'Bus horses, at any rate, are well fed,—to say nothing of their being worn out, and released from their sufferings after an average period of four years; besides, you can always comfort yourself by refusing to travel by 'bus (I have a friend, indeed, who always vows that he will NOT on any consideration make one of twenty-eight people for two horses to pull);—but it is little or nothing you can do for the alleviation of the lot of the slum babies. Sad indeed is the case of some of these. For, in some dingy and romantically-named "Rose Lane,"—or "Marigold-Avenue,"—(the filthier the London lanes, the more poetic their names),—baby-farms flourish and spread. Once, I remember coming home sick at heart, from a visitation of one such slummy "lane." In a dirty "two-pair back" I found an old woman of witch-like aspect and doubtful sobriety, three mangy cats, and two miserable "farmed" babies,—one an infant, wretched, scrofulous, and covered with sores, lying on a dirty flock bed, its eyes half-closed, in the last stage of exhaustion;—the other a girl of two, wasted and cadaverous, sitting on the usual "cold step," and gazing with pathetic and suffering eyes over to the cabbage-laden and redolent gutter that, filthier far than any in Italian town or foreign Ghetto, apparently did duty, in the middle of the paved alley, as a common dustbin. (Truly, it well becomes us to decry,—in this matter of cleanliness, our neighbours of Central Europe!) I went away sadly; yet what could I have done? I could not take the poor neglected babies home; even though they probably belonged to girls who were not too regular in paying for their weekly maintenance. Nothing short of bringing in the Law would have been of any use, and I was not sure enough of my facts to do this. Yet that elder child's pathetic and mournfully patient eyes still afflict my memory.
Poor, little, neglected slum children! Miss Dorothy Tennant (Lady Stanley), has by her unique art surrounded these waifs with all that glamour of poetry and sentiment that had, by a foolish custom, been hitherto exclusively reserved for the children of the rich. Even Du Maurier always made his slum children ugly and repulsive. Nature, however, knows no such differences. And,—apart from Miss Dorothy Tennant's charming ragamuffins,—who has not stopped to admire, in some back street, the graceful dancing of some half-dozen of small ragged girls? girls in shocking shoes,—but who, nevertheless, hop so delightfully, and with such sense of time and rhythm, to the wheezy old organ, the wheeziest of its tribe, that they have inveigled into their custom. Indeed, I have sometimes doubted whether the organ-man does not himself engage the small girls to dance, as a catch-penny ruse. They do difficult, intricate, ever-changing steps:
"advance, evade,
Unite, dispart, and dally,
Re-set, coquet, and gallopade,"
as Mr. Austin Dobson hath it.
It is not, indeed, only in hospital wards that the children of the great city are pathetic. I have been moved (like Mrs. Meagles), almost to tears, at the sight of a big Ragged School of small boys marching, ten abreast, in perfect drill, in a large phalanx, numbering about five hundred. Five hundred unwanted little human souls! each child, of infant years, with no mother to love it; more destitute in a way than even the slum baby, regarded as a cipher merely; it is surely a sight pitiful enough to make the angels weep!