Liverpool was a quaint city. I liked its weathered brick houses, and the evenness and settled feeling, as though the people in them planned to remain where they were for time everlasting. The women of the poor were unconcernedly wearing on the streets dresses originally made for bustles, hats with feathers, caricatures which should have been stuffed away in attics forty years before.
Bertha Watson had a letter to the local Fabian Society, and at six I went to the Clarion Café, where it foregathered each Friday. I presented her letter, was welcomed heartily, and invited to the discussion. I found the English then and later polite in speech and action, tolerant in listening. One of the members helped me to locate temporary rooms while I waited for the arrival of letters and messages from the United States. These lodgings were in the home of gentle, middle-class people to whom I paid thirty shillings a week, including breakfast and dinner.
I shall always be glad I went to that meeting, because there I met Lorenzo Portet, once companion of Francisco Ferrer and now heir to his educational work, which both believed was the key to Spanish emancipation.
After the attempted assassination of Alfonso XIII and Victoria of England, the Government had arrested twenty-five hundred Spaniards having republican ideas, among them Ferrer. His school had been closed and he had been jailed. When he had been eventually released, he had still been determined to educate for universal peace by means of economic justice. Accordingly, as Portet stated it, he had reopened a school for all Spain by publishing labor texts at Barcelona. This again had earned him no reward from a grateful Government. In 1909 he had been arrested in a purge of republicans, stood up against a wall and shot, and his body thrown into a ditch.
Ferrer had left his money to Portet, who was now fulfilling his trust by feeding the country with modern scientific translations from Italy, France, and England. He was a man of middle height and weight whose alert glance summed you up with an accuracy occasionally disturbing. After our initial encounter he called on me with punctiliousness and formality, and produced an article from a New York magazine which carried the story of the indictment of Margaret Sanger. “This is you?” he questioned with the jumping of all fact which is termed intuition.
Portet, a born teacher, was then instructing youth at the University of Liverpool in Spanish. No human being I ever knew could explain with such infinite pains the details of a subject. He placed your own opposition before you, marshaled it in all its strength, and then annihilated every point, one by one. His humorous cynicism was most baffling to those who were merely emotional converts to better worlds. “Civilization?” he might say, “Mainly a question of good roads.”
Sometimes in the midst of those long, drab, November weeks I escaped to Wales, where there were endless lanes, winding and hard, with very few carts, and all very quiet. Even here were Carnegie libraries, one of them turned into a restaurant. I went into the houses of the smelting workers at Green Brombo, Wexham, all lovely, minute, stone cottages of two or three rooms, huddled closely together, charming with their walks and walls and flower gardens. The folk were slow, deliberate, simple.
Liverpool was only a junction; London was my terminus. There I could study at the British Museum, and meet the Neo-Malthusians. Towards the end of the month I rolled up to London through miles of chimney-potted suburbs; it continued rainy and foggy, but still there was a friendly atmosphere in the air. I seemed to be coming to a second home.
My first quarters were on the top floor of a “bed and breakfast” on Torrington Square, just back of the British Museum. I looked out on little rows of trees, iron fences, steps going up to all the houses. There was but one bathroom and to use it cost extra. Every morning about seven came a knock, and when I opened the door I discovered a midget jug of hot water outside. I was supposed to break the ice on my large pitcher, mix the two, and pour all into my tin tub, the back of which rose behind me like a throne. After this winter I realized how the British had acquired their well-known moral courage.
I had no fireplace, but two floors below was an empty room with a grate. Occasionally I indulged myself in the luxury of renting it for the evening, and of buying wood to keep myself warm while I worked. I made up for it by not having the slatternly Cockney maid bring up tea, and also went each morning to the basement dining room for my breakfast, thereby saving a shilling a week. It was not long before I was stricken by the first digestive upset I had ever had, and was obliged to call in an American doctor. He looked me over casually and then, without further examination, asked, “Have you been drinking English coffee?”