It is the same with the other shops—greengrocery, fish, and fruit. All is, so far as possible, cleared out before closing time, and only enough is held in reserve to supply that large army of Sunday morning shoppers who are unable to shop on Saturday night owing to Bill's festivities.
That is one worker's night. But there are others. There are those workers whose nights are not domestic, and who live in the common lodging-houses and shelters which are to be found in every district in London. There are two off Mayfair. There are any number round Belgravia. Seven Dials, of course, is full of them, for there lodge the Covent Garden porters and other early birds. In these houses you will find members of all-night trades that you have probably never thought of before. I met in a Blackwall Salvation Army Shelter a man who looks out from a high tower, somewhere down the Thames, all night. He starts at ten o'clock at night, and comes off at six, when he goes home to his lodging-house to bed. I have never yet been able to glean from him whose tower it is he looks out from, or what he looks out for. Then there are those exciting people, the scavengers, who clean our streets while we sleep, with hose-pipe and cart-brush; the printers, who run off our newspapers; the sewer-men, who do dirty work underground; railwaymen, night-porters, and gentlemen whose occupation is not mentioned among the discreet.
The Salvation Army Shelters are very popular among the lodging-house patrons, for you get good value there for very little money, and, by paying weekly, instead of nightly, you get reductions and a better-appointed dormitory. I know many street hawkers who have lived for years at one Shelter, and would not think of using a common lodging-house. The most popular quarter for this latter class of house is Duval Street, Spitalfields. At one time the reputation of this street was most noisome; indeed, it was officially known as the worst street in London. It holds a record for suicides, and, I imagine, for murders. It was associated in some way with that elusive personality, Jack the Ripper; and the shadow of that association has hung over it for ever, blighting it in every possible way. To-day it is but a very narrow, dirty, ill-lit street of common lodging-houses within the meaning of the Act, and, though it is by no means so gay and devilish as it is supposed to have been of old, they do say that the police still descend first on Duval Street in cases of local murder where the culprit has, as the newspapers say, made good his escape. I do not recommend it as a pleasure-jaunt for ladies or for the funny and fastidious folk of Bayswater. They would suffer terribly, I fear. The talk of the people would lash them like whips; the laughter would sear like hot irons. The noises bursting through the gratings from the underground cellars would be like a chastisement on the naked flesh, and shame and smarting and fear would grip them. The glances of the men would sting like scorpions. The glances of the women would bite like fangs. For these reasons, while I do not recommend it, I think a visit would do them good; it would purify their spotty little minds with pity and terror. For I think Duval Street stands easily first as one of the affrighting streets of London. There is not the least danger or disorder; but the tradition has given it an atmosphere of these things. Here are gathered all the most unhappy wrecks of London—victims and apostles of vice and crime. The tramps doss here: men who have walked from the marches of Wales or from the Tweed border, begging their food by the way. Their clothes hang from them. Their flesh is often caked with dirt. They do not smell sweet. Their manners are crude: I think they must all have studied Guides to Good Society. They spit when and where they will. Some of them writhe in a manner so suggestive as to give you the itch. This writhe is known as the Spitalfields Crawl. There is a story of a constable who was on night duty near the doors of one of the doss establishments, when a local doctor passed him. "Say," said the doctor, with a chuckle, "you're standing rather close, aren't you? Want to take something away with you?" "Not exactly that, sir; but it's lonely round here for the night stretch, and, somehow, it's kind of company if I can feel the little beggars dropping on my helmet."
In this street you are on the very edge of the civilized world. All are outcasts, even among their own kind. All are ready to die, and too sick even to go to the trouble of doing it. They have no hope, and, therefore, they have no fear. They are just down and out. All the ugly misery of all the ages is collected here in essence, and from it the atmosphere is charged; an atmosphere more horrible than any that I know: worse than that of Chinatown, worse than that of Shadwell. These are merely insidious and menacing, but Duval Street is painful.
It was here that I had the nearest approach to an adventure that I have ever had in London. I was sitting in the common kitchen of one of the houses which was conspicuously labelled on its outer white-washed lamp—
GOOD BEDS
For Men Only
Fourpence
The notice, however, was but the usual farcical compliance with the law which nobody regards and which nobody executes. Women were there in plenty—mostly old, unkempt women, wearing but a bodice and skirt and boots. The kitchen was a bare, blue-washed apartment, the floor sanded, with a long wooden table and two or three wooden forms. A generous fire roared up a wide chimney. The air was thick with fumes of pipes that had been replenished with "old soldiers" from West End gutters. Suddenly a girl came in with an old man. I looked at her with some interest because she was young, with copper-coloured hair that strayed about her face with all the profusion of an autumn sunset. She was the only youthful thing in the place, bar myself. I looked at her with rather excited interest because she was very drunk. She called the old man Dad. A few of the men greeted him. One or two nodded to the girl. "'Lo, Luba. Bin on the randy?" The women looked at her, not curiously, or with compassion or disgust, but cursorily. I fancied, from certain incipient movements, that she was about to be violently bilious; but she wasn't. We were sitting in silence when she came in. The silence continued. Nobody moved, nobody offered to make way. Dad swore at a huge scrofulous tramp, and kneed him a little aside from the fire. The tramp slipped from the edge of the form, but made no rebuke. Dad sat down and left Luba to herself. She swayed perilously for a moment, and then flopped weakly to the form on which I sat. The man I was with leaned across me.
"'Ad a rough time in the box, Luba?"