Now, Adams was naturally a kind and timid woman. When in the cells she was quiet, when before the magistrate respectful, when in prison well-behaved; but the devils of sensuality, drink, and despair had made their abode within her, and they led her whereso’er they would. The years went on and she still kept it up; bronchitis seemed to get fast hold upon her, and it was wonderful to me how she lived. Probably it was the frequent detentions in prison that kept her alive, for her name became notorious, and her record was next only to that of Cakebread. Again Lady Henry Somerset wrote me, ‘Bring her down to Duxhurst.’ Many might have considered that the residue of her days were not worth saving; yet I took her, and though Lady Henry knew that to receive her was to receive a broken, almost dying, piece of humanity, she received her. Two years she stayed there, and they were two years of peace. She proved docile, obedient, kind, and trustworthy. But again Nature had its own. She manifested symptoms of a disease that could only be treated in a London hospital, and she was sent for treatment. It did not succeed, and she soon passed away.
In one of the rooms at Duxhurst is a tablet kindly placed there to her memory, and it tells of her goodness whilst an inmate of that institution. Somewhere in one of our great London cemeteries, deep down she lies—I know not where. Somewhere out in the world is her child, now a man. He knows the life of shame and notoriety his mother lived. For years, her hope was to see him, and to her doom she went with that hope unfulfilled. If he is ‘respectable,’ I at least hope he is not hard or bitter, and that he lets the knowledge that she had a passionate love for him draw a thick veil over the main part of her sad life.
But it is not only for their own flesh and blood that these poor outcasts care. ‘Unfortunates’ as they are, a divine pity for those who are more unfortunate still is ever one of their distinguishing traits, though it may be a comparative stranger that calls it into play. They have their own way of doing things; to better people it may not seem a nice way, it may not even be a good way, but nevertheless they do ‘good things.’ I have known very much better people do much worse things than some of these outcasts do. On one of the bitterest winter days I remember a number of women sat in the female prisoners’ waiting-room in one of our police courts. It was a makeshift sort of a place, and only intended for temporary use. There sat two of these women, who were by no means strangers to the place. Fairly well dressed, but coarse and repulsive in appearance, they were equally ready to drink, fight, or steal, while to decent ears their language was not nice. Beside them sat a young woman of very different stamp, but of the same occupation. Her eyes were closed, her head was leaning against the wall, and it was patent to anyone that the hand of Death was upon her. She was nicely dressed and of refined appearance, evidently not a slum girl. Opposite to them sat a fearsome thing that had been a woman, now a piece of humanity—all disease and dirt—whose only joy was to absorb alcohol. She had been found dead-drunk in the streets, and taken on an ambulance to the police station. The other three had been found drunk and disorderly at 1 a.m.
‘Look at that, lassies!’ I said to the strong girls. They looked and shuddered as I pointed to the ‘ghoul.’ ‘Look at this!’ and I pointed to their dying companion. ‘Which will you be?’ They looked uncomfortable, but did not answer. ‘Come!’ said I, ‘let me send you away from London, and you shall begin a new life.’ ‘And what is to become of her?’ I was asked. ‘I will take her to the infirmary.’ ‘No, thank you. We can look after her ourselves.’
I could not persuade them, and one by one, before the magistrate, they were fined ten shillings or seven days. The two coarse girls paid their fines and went into the wintry streets, but the ‘ghoul’ and the delicate one had no money, and were placed in a cell. Now, this particular wooden cell had a charm for me that the rest of the cells lacked. A street artist, who had been one of its occupants but a short time before, had whiled away some of his time with the help of his crayons, and had placed on the whitened boards the good old motto Nil desperandum. There, in good-sized Old English capitals and startling colours, it smiled upon everyone that entered. When I went to the cell to speak to the sick woman I found underneath the motto two words freshly written—Deus misereatur. They were written in a woman’s hand, with pencil, so I knew who had written them. ‘Tell me where your friends live, and I will go and see them,’ I said. ‘It is no use your going, sir. I know I am very ill, and I saw my mother last week, but she won’t have me home again.’ But while I was speaking to her the gaoler came for her; her fine had been paid. There in the gaoler’s office stood the two coarse girls. Cold as it was, they were without their jackets, for they had left them at the nearest pawnshop to raise their friend’s fine. I took them into a refreshment-house, gave them a warm breakfast, and told them that they had done a deed of heavenly charity and made the angels smile. I earnestly renewed my attempt to care for the sickly one, and send them away; but no, they meant to see the last of her. I watched them in the street that cold wintry morning as the snow fell about them, two jacketless girls, one on each side of a dying one, supporting her. I saw them pass into a haunt of vice, and I knew they would be faithful unto death. In less than a month’s time there was a funeral from that house, and though it was not the time of flowers, there was a good display; and in a cab behind the hearse rode the two girls, each holding a wreath, and each newly dressed in mourning. How had they got their new clothing? Five shillings down and half a crown a week to a ‘tallyman.’ How had they paid for the funeral, kept their friend, and paid the doctor? By selling themselves, by hunting drunken men and possibly by robbing them, by the help of other ‘unfortunates,’ and by getting into debt. And I had no word of condemnation as I saw them pass along, not though the girls courted public attention; nay, I had a lump in my throat, a dimness in my eyes, and a thankfulness in my heart. For I had visited at a house of refinement, I had seen a well-dressed, respectable mother, I had pleaded for an erring but dying girl; but respectability said, ‘I must consider her sisters,’ and that was the only reply I got. True, money was offered for the girl’s needs, but as motherly love and sisterly sympathy were denied, I declined it, and left it to the outcasts to tend the dying and bury the dead.
The two are older and coarser. They are often before the court, when the police tell of their bad language and worse conduct, and sometimes they go to prison. Their mourning has long since been worn out or been torn to shreds, but the tallyman has been paid in full, and the doctor was not defrauded. Deus misereatur. No, the devil does not have it all his own way even with these women, not till the evening of their lives, not till they have become ghouls, not till they are left with but one passion to satisfy, not till King Alcohol has claimed them for his own—not till then does all goodness die within them. Deus misereatur, for it is a frightful power that impels these women to the streets of London.
Drunkenness with them is but the symptom of a deeper cause, and this cause is not alone the possession of the poor; women of middle age, wives of well-to-do and cultured husbands, mothers of many children, leave those homes, husbands, and children to roll in the sensual sties of London. ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. It is my eldest son’s twenty-first birthday, and I am two hundred miles away. I must come back, if only to look once more through the window.’ So wrote the mother of eight children to me. She had left them and her beautiful home for the wild and gross degradation of the streets; she had become one of the most notorious of our police-court habitués; she revelled in impurity, and down to the lowest depths she sank. So I sent her away, not hoping to reform her, but hoping that she might, at any rate, live a less scandalous life. To look once more through the windows of her once happy home she came back to London, came back to die in one of our workhouses. Their punishment is greater than they can bear, and the punishment that the law inflicts is but a small portion of it.
‘Take away the drink, and they will be all right.’ I yield to no man in my detestation of drink. I know its power and effects as but very few can; but with the great majority of these women it is not a question of drink at all. Mentally diseased, or sensually possessed, they present a hopeless problem, and unless science, in conjunction with human sympathy, can find some method of treating them as patients as well as sinners, the problem will go unsolved.
Such are the women who come within the provisions of the Habitual Inebriates Act of 1898. These are the women who come before our magistrates four times in one year. These are the women of whom the State says to philanthropic societies of private individuals: ‘Take them off our hands. Cure them of inebriety. Keep them for one, two, or three years, and you shall have ten and sixpence per week for each of them.’ And local bodies say: ‘Take them, treat them for the drink craze, and we will supplement the State payments by six and sixpence per week for each.’ Seventeen shillings per week paid by the community, plus the labour of the individual, for sensually possessed or demented women to be cured of drunkenness! To such wisdom have we attained! Deliberately and emphatically I say, and I say it with some knowledge and great experience of these women, that drink is not the root cause of their condition. They drink because they must drink; their hunting-ground is the public-house, their prey the drink-excited male.
A friend of mine took a young woman of this class, who had been to prison a hundred times, into his service. There, with good wages and a comfortable home, shielded from the temptation to drink, with no possibility of indulging grosser passions, she tried to hang herself and was taken to an asylum. After three months’ detention I brought her away and cared for her. She stayed with us a few days and left us suddenly, not to drink, but to revel in impurity. Sadly but earnestly I say that philanthropic societies cannot restrain, discipline, and control these women. The State, and the State alone, can deal with them with any hope of success, and medical men who have made a study of sensuality and dementia should have charge of them in institutions where they can be properly classified, studied, and treated, for the hopeless scandal of their present lives ought not to continue. But to commit such women to ‘inebriate reformatories’ for one year or two, and then send them back to their old haunts and old vices, is not only supremely ridiculous but stupidly cruel—ridiculous, because the community has to pay about fifty pounds for a penniless and homeless woman to be conveyed to and kept at a reformatory for one year where her condition is not diagnosed; cruel, because these women come back to the same old conditions from which they were taken away. The Act is but eighteen months old, and they are coming back, back to their sensuality, back to the wild and fierce grossness of the street, back to the police courts and to prison—for this has been the case with several. Can it be right? Is it just to the community or to the individual directly concerned that a woman should be taken from her horrible life for a year, and at the end of that year be again launched into the abyss of uncleanness? The community, having borne the cost, has a right to demand, and I hope it will demand, that before any woman is discharged from any inebriate reformatory some provision is made for her, and that at least a chance of living a clean life is presented to her. If she accepts the opportunity, well; if not, the State ought to know how to deal with her.