“You should see Piccadilly around one o’clock in the morning,” my guide had said to me a little while before, and now I understood. They were all forced out into Piccadilly from everywhere.
It was rather a dismal thing sitting here, I must confess. The room was lively enough, but this type of life is so vacant of soul. It is precisely as though one stirred in straw and sawdust, expecting it to be vigorous with the feel of growing life and freshness, such as one finds in a stalk or tree. It is a world of dead ideals I should say—or, better yet, a world in which ideals never had a chance to grow. The women were the veriest birds of prey, cold, weary, disillusioned, angry, dull, sad, perhaps; the men were victims of carnal desire without the ability to understand how weary and disgusted the women were who sought to satisfy them. No clear understanding of life on either side; no suggestion of delicacy or romance. No subtlety of lure or parade. Rather, coarse, hard bargaining in which robbery and abuse and bitter recrimination play a sodden part. I know of nothing so ghastly, so suggestive of a totally dead spirit, so bitter a comment on life and love and youth and hope as a street girl’s weary, speculative, commercial cry of—“Hello, sweetheart!”
From this first place we went to others—not so good, Lilly told me.
It is a poor world. I do not attempt to explain it. The man or woman of bridled passion is much better off. As for those others, how much are they themselves to blame? Circumstances have so large a part in it. I think, all in all, it is a deadly hell-hole; and yet I know that talking is not going to reform it. Life, in my judgment, does not reform. The world is old. Passion in all classes is about the same. We think this shabby world is worst because it is shabby. But is it? Isn’t it merely that we are different—used to different things? I think so.
After buying her a large box of candy I hailed a taxi and took my little girl home to her shabby room and left her. She was very gay. She had been made quite a little of since we started from the region of rented rooms. Her purse was now the richer by three pounds. Her opinion had been asked, her advice taken, she had been allowed to order. I had tried to make her feel that I admired her a little and that I was sorry for her a little. At her door, in the rain, I told her I might use some of this experience in a book sometime. She said, “Send me a copy of your book. Will I be in it?”
“Yes.”
“Send it to me, will you?”
“If you’re here.”
“Oh, I’ll be here. I don’t move often.”
Poor little Welsh waif! I thought, how long, how long, will she be “here” before she goes down before the grim shapes that lurk in her dreary path—disease, despair, death?