She welcomes us to the "Hotel de Fourpence," and says, though it isn't exactly the Carlton, it is quite comfortable when you get used to it. She interlards her bantering remarks with French words, and we come to the conclusion that she is a governess who has drifted down.
It is no uncommon thing to find men and women of education in the lowest lodging-houses of London. I have found a clergyman in one of the worst dens of Flower and Dean Street. In one of the Dale lodging-houses there is a woman whose father had his town house and his country house and his villa in the South of France.
This woman in the astrachan hat is a striking contrast to her surroundings. Most of the other inmates are of the usual type—women who have drifted down from honest industry to vagabondage, or have been born to it.
Returning through the Golden Gates into the sunshine, we make our way to Jetsam Street. That is not its real name, but the one I have given it. This is a street of black and battered doors, of damaged railings, and of broken windows. On the doorsteps here and there stand groups of slatternly, unkempt women. From the windows above a tousled head occasionally appears. Many of the houses here are common lodging-houses; but some of them are in the hands of the house-farmers, who let them out in furnished rooms at a shilling a day. We enter a room which is unoccupied and take stock of the furniture. It consists of a bed, two chairs, and the wreckage of a dirty deal table.
In this room a man and his wife and children are accommodated at night, but the shilling paid only entitles the family to remain there until ten in the morning.
At that hour they are turned out and their tenancy ceases. If they wish to renew it they can do so in the evening, but not before.
These people, who are paying six shillings a week, or seven shillings where Sunday is not a free day, for a single room, have to spend the day in the streets. Many of them make their way to the public parks and sleep on the seats or on the grass. Some of them beg, some of them hawk trumpery articles. They are probably paying eighteen pounds a year for a wretched room, and yet in the house-farmer's hands they are homeless every day in the week.
Jetsam Street is flooded with golden sunshine as we pass through it, but the sunshine has not made the inhabitants light-hearted. Half-way down the street a man and a woman are fighting. The man is delivering a series of kicks in the style of La Savate at the woman, who is defiant and nimble and defends herself with her jacket, which she has taken off and uses both as a guard and as a weapon.
"ONE OR TWO WOMEN STANDING ON THE DOORSTEPS WATCH THE PROCEEDINGS."