‘I would never go to bed if I lived there. Never, at least, till——?’
‘A week or two later Swart told me that his place was ready, and that I might call. He had been saving slowly for his furnishing, for, as he observed, what can you do on 1s. 3d. a day? He merely “had his eye” on a table. I let him keep his eye on it. The experiment was too interesting to be spoiled by help from me.
‘His place was in White Horse Yard. White Horse Yard, you must know, Victoria, is a London slum, one of hundreds as clearly marked on the map, and as well known, as Buckingham Palace or Grosvenor Square. The description would interest you, as a semi-savage, but to us worn children of civilisation it is too trite for pleasure or profit. Every social reformer begins by describing White Horse Yard: it is the sign of the “’prentice hand.” Swart’s place was reached by a narrow causeway, reeking with every kind of abomination, and by a staircase, dark and rotten, and swarming with vermin, as I had afterwards good reason to know. Here, at the summit, was his back garret, with his bed of shavings, and his table, made of a packing-case turned upside down. His neighbours worked at many trades, including that most ancient one of private plunder. The front garret was the home, as distinct from the place of business, of “one of them gals.” Swart could never be induced to be more explicit. On the floor below, they made lawn-tennis aprons at threepence a dozen, and army coats. They did something with rabbit-skins in the back drawing-room, for, one day, when Swart opened his window for air, we were nearly choked with a furry adulteration of the precious fluid that came in with the fog. A housebreaker who had been out of work for six months or more, owing to an injury received in a scuffle with a policeman, occupied the front kitchen, and, by general consent, he was the quietest man in the house. The back kitchen—but no, nothing of these premises below the ground level, if you please; nothing, even in distant allusion, in veiled hint; nothing about the back yard either, or about the water-butt therein! If you are going to be foolish, Victoria, I shall just leave off.’
‘I am not foolish.’
‘What are you crying about?’
‘If we let people live so, we should be afraid of God; I think we should be afraid of every thunderstorm.’
‘The lightning is very tender with us—a chimney-stack now and then; seldom the steeple of a church.’
‘It is not true. You are just saying things to me. There are missions in all the cities to look after the poor people. I have read books.’
‘Of course. There were four missions in this very circumscription of Swart’s, and one Inspector of Public Health.
‘The chief thing the missionaries preached was the sanctity of submission, or that sanctity of property which had made this dismal hole what it was. They preached it in a pair of parlours, only less dismal than Swart’s garret. Their object was to effect a change of heart as a condition precedent to the change of linen—the cart before the horse. Of the night of material ugliness around that was, on one side, the parent of all this spiritual ugliness, they seemed to have no idea. On Sunday, some of the poor people in the yard went to the preaching, dubiously, yet still hoping there might be something in it, their dim intuitions of logic being hardly strong enough to expose the mockery of its gospel of love. Others went to the drink-shops, and they were the wiser, for they found a little brightness there. There was one drink-shop to every two hundred inhabitants; and the missionaries, who were quite as dull as their hearers, never understood the reason why.