"You have come, Miss Marriott," he said, "now to the home of the utterly degraded and the utterly lost. Nothing I or anybody else can say or do is possible to redeem this generation. Their brains have almost gone, through filth and starvation. They live more terribly than any animal lives. Their lives are too feeble and too awful, either for description or for betterment. It is, indeed, difficult for one who, as myself, believes most thoroughly in the fact that each one of us has an immortal soul, that each one of us in the next world will start again, according to what we have done in this, to realise that the poor creatures whom you have seen now are human. Come!"
It was almost with the slowness and solemnity of a funeral procession that the party passed up the broken steps of one of the houses and entered what had once, in happier bygone days, been the hall of a mansion of some substance and fair-seeming.
The broken stairs stretched up above. The banisters which guarded them had long since been broken and pulled away. The doors all round were almost falling from their hinges.
"Come in here, gentlemen," said the sanitary inspector of the London County Council, pushing a door open with his foot as he did so.
They all followed into a large front room.
A slight fire was burning in a broken grate, and by it, upon a stool, sat an immensely fat woman of middle-age. Her hair was extremely scanty and caught up at the back of her head in a knot hardly bigger than a Tangerine orange. Through the thin dust-coloured threads the dirty pink scalp showed in patches. The face was inordinately large, bloated, and of a waxen yellow. The eyes were little gimlet holes. The mouth, with its thick lips of pale purple, smiled a horrid toothless smile as they came in.
All round the walls of the room were things which had once been mattresses, but from which damp straw was bursting in every direction. These mattresses were black, sodden, and filthy, and upon them—covered, or hardly covered as the case might be, with scraps of old quilt or discarded clothing—lay young children of from one year to eighteen months old. These little mites were almost motionless. Their heads seemed to be extraordinarily large, their unknowing, unseeing eyes blazed in their faces.
The fat woman, suffering from dropsy, rose from her seat and curtsied as she saw the sanitary inspector and his colleagues.
"It is all right, gentlemen," she said in a wee, fawning voice. "There's food on the fire for the little dearies, and they're going to have their meal, bless 'em, as soon as it's boiled up."
She pointed to an iron pot full of something that looked like oatmeal which was simmering upon the few coals.