“They want peace,” said Bertram, “and enough to eat, decent house-room, and a little pocket-money for the fun of things.”
It was Bill Huggett who had given him that view of the situation. He used Huggett as a guide to the mind of the London crowds, the average mind of the dreary processions of men, marching with trained step through London with banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and the point of view of the seedy-looking groups lounging about the Labour Exchanges, and of other assemblies of men listening on Sunday afternoons to political orators in Hyde Park. Bill Huggett was his interpreter.
The man had succeeded in getting back some of his work as “French polisher.” He was earning about two pounds ten a week, out of which he paid eighteen shillings for two miserable rooms in the slums of Walworth. With the rest he could manage to get food for himself and his four children, in spite of high prices. Getting back to work had changed his whole aspect. He was more alert, and less inclined to “grouse,” and he’d regained some of the old Cockney humour which had made him popular as a company sergeant in France and Flanders.
Bertram spent half an hour with him, now and again, in his lodgings, or in a public-house round the corner, and Hugget, though always embarrassed by this comradeship of his former officer, and somewhat suspicious of its motives, was not ungrateful or unfriendly.
It amazed him that Bertram seemed pleased to sit in his dirty little room for a few minutes, not bothering when the youngest “brat” began a howl in the next room, and dozens of other children, sickly, ailing, underfed some of them, joined in a chorus of wailing in this block of “workmen’s dwellings.”
Women railed through open or broken windows, looking into a courtyard filled with “washing”—and threatened to break the jaws of small children, if they didn’t “be’ave,” or insulted each other for certain grievances connected with the water supply on the common stairways. Doors banged, cheap gramophones blared out jazz tunes. Somewhere a violin was being scraped like the crying of a soul in agony, by a diligent practiser of finger-exercises. Shrill laughter of coarse-voiced girls rang out in the passages. Oaths floated up from the courtyard. The noise of distant domestic quarrels came vaguely into Huggett’s room, where he sat in his shirtsleeves, smoking Woodbine cigarettes and answering Bertram’s questions with a queer, nervous grin.
“ ’Omes for ’Eroes!” he remarked once when the strange medley of noises in the Workmen’s Dwellings became more than usually discordant.
The “silver slipper” story upon which Bertram questioned him, excited his sense of humour.
“Silver my foot!” he said; “white metal at sixpence the gross! A Bolshevist emblem? Well, if that ain’t the funniest yarn! Strikes me there’s no more sense in some of them so-called Toffs than in the long ears of a coster’s moke.”
He had a realistic mind, and was something of a philosopher, like others Bertram knew, who had risked their lives in the war, and escaped by a hairsbreadth chance of luck. In their billets behind the line, in dug-outs, in shell-holes where they had lain wounded, these men, or some of them, had thought starkly of the meaning of things, had talked with each other in a kind of short-cut language, incoherent, yet understanding. Now they thought of the Peace they’d helped to make, and the life they’d come back to find.