You can't. But the rank and file of The Salvation Army, with its almost uncanny knowledge of men, has found a better, happier way. I have spent many nights in various of their Shelters, and I should like to put on record the fine spirit which I have found prevailing there. It is a spirit of camaraderie. In other charitable institutions you will find timidity, the cowed manner, sometimes symptoms of actual fear. But never at the Salvation Army. There every new-comer is a pal, until he is proved to be unworthy of that name. There is no suspicion, no underhanded questioning, no brow-beating: things which I have never found absent from any other organized charity.
The Salvation Army method is food, warmth, mateyness; and their answer to their critics, and their reward, is the sturdy, respectable artisan who comes along a few months later to shake hands with them and give his own services in helping them in their work.
Far away West, through the exultant glamour of theatre and restaurant London, through the solid, melancholic greys of Bayswater, you find a little warm corner called Shepherd's Bush. You find also Notting Dale, where the bad burglars live, but we will talk of that in another chapter. Back of Shepherd's Bush is a glorious slum, madly lit, uncouth, and entirely wonderful.
To Shepherd's Bush I went one evening. I went to fairyland. I went to tell stories and to lead music-hall choruses. No; not at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, but at a dirty little corrugated hall in a locked byway. Some time ago, the usual charitably minded person, finding time hang heavy on her hands, or having some private grief which she desired to forget in bustle and activity, started a movement for giving children happy evenings. I have not been to one of the centres, and I am sure I should not like to go. I dislike seeing children disciplined in their play. Children do not need to be taught to play. Games which are not spontaneous are as much a task as enforced lessons. I have been a child myself. The people who run charities, I think, never have been.... However....
This Shepherd's Bush enterprise was an entirely private affair. The idea was based on the original inception, and much improved. At these organized meetings the children are forced to go through antics which, three hundred years ago, were a perfectly natural expression of the joy of life. These antics were called morris dances; they were mad, vulgar, joyous abandonment to the mood of the moment; just as the dances performed by little gutter-arabs and factory-girls around street organs are an abandonment to the mood of to-day's moment. But the elderly spinsters have found that what was vulgar three hundred years ago is artistic to-day; or if it isn't they will make it so. Why on earth a child should have to dance round a maypole just because children danced round a maypole centuries ago, I cannot understand. To-day, the morris dance is completely self-conscious, stiff, and ugly. The self-developed dance of the little girl at the organ is a thing of beauty, because it is a quite definite expression of something which the child feels; it follows no convention, it changes measure at fancy, it regards nothing but its own rapture.... The morris dance isn't.
So, at the hall to which I went, the children were allowed to play exactly as and when they liked. Any child could come from anywhere, and bring other children. There was a piano, and some one was always in attendance to play whatever might be required by the children. If they wanted "The Cubanola Glide," or "Down in Jungle-Town," or "In the Shadows," they got it, or anything else they might choose. Toys of all kinds were on hand—dolls, engines, railways, dolls'-houses, little cooking-stoves, brick puzzles, regiments of soldiers, picture-books, and, indeed, everything that a child could think of.
When I arrived I tripped over the threshold of the narrow entrance, and fell into a warmly lighted room, where the meetings of some local Committee were usually held. All chairs had been cleared to the wall, and the large central space was littered with troops of glad girls and toddlers from the stark streets around. Instead of teaching the children to play, the management here set the children to play by themselves and set elder children to attend them. Great was the fun. Great was the noise. On a little dais at the end, coffee and sweet cakes were going, but there was no rush. When the kiddies wanted a cake they went up and asked for it; but for the most part they were immersed in that subdued, serious excitement which means that games are really being enjoyed. All of the attendants were girls of 12 or 13, of that sweet age between childhood and flapperhood, when girls are at their loveliest, with short frocks that dance at every delicate step, and with unconcealed glories of hair golden or dusky; all morning light and melody and fearlessness, not yet realizing that they are women. Many of them, shabby and underfed as they were, were really lovely girls, their beauty shining through their rags with an almost religious radiance, as to move you to prayer and tears. Their gentle ways with the baby-children were a joy to watch. One group was working a model railway. In another a little twelve-year-old girl was nursing two tinies, and had a cluster of others at her feet while she read "Jack and the Beanstalk" from a luridly illustrated rag-book. Another little girl was figuring certain steps of a dance of her own invention, each step being gravely followed by two youngsters who could scarcely walk.
Then the wonderful woman—a local woman, she bought a small shop years ago, and now owns a blazing rank of Stores—who financed the play-room went to the piano, crashed a few chords, and instantly every head, golden or brown or dark, was lifted to us. My hostess said something—a word of invitation—and, as though it were a signal, the crowd leaped up, and rushed, tumbled, or toddled toward us.
"What about a song?" cried the lady.