She grows old at her trade; it is a healthy one, and she has no home. Some of her fellows are stranger and still more definably homeless. Thus the muffin-man, killed, perhaps, by the war. It is a long time since I heard his bell, and was thereby assured that Sunday was getting on nicely, and would be over by-and-by. There is the travelling accountant, a real wanderer, that one, who, every day and night, goes from little shop to little factory, continually confronted with new names, new deals, and, perhaps, new and complicated methods of dishonesty. There are the queerest and most incomprehensible of all, the guides. I do not know what turns a man into a guide, but if you stand awhile near Charing Cross, and make a noise like a Jugo-Slav, it is likely that a seedily, respectably dressed man, with a badly rolled umbrella, will offer to show you the town. Once it is clear that he does not want to exchange pocket-books with you to show his confidence, he may lead you to Henry V.’s chapel, to Westminster Abbey, to Carlyle’s house, and so on, reciting as he goes, something like this: ‘The painted ’all was originally planned by King John the same who signed that Magna Charta in the year 1215 but the plans being lost in the Wash the project did not come to take form before the year 1533 when King Henry VIII. after his marriage with Anne Boleyn laid the foundations on the plans of Sir ’Erbert ’Opkins who was also the architect of the golden tower of Muswell ’Ill where Nell Gwynn ...’ and so on. That man is a gramophone; I once let him show me Saragossa, but he shall never show me anything more. For one thing, I believe he is respectable at heart, and there is no profit in his company. The only good guide is the amateur guide. I met one in Brussels once, a cab-driver, who stopped before the café where I was having a drink; he so many times cried out to me, ‘Hi, Englishman! you’re a sportsman, come along!’ that I fell a prey to his flattery. (Who told him that every Englishman wants to be thought a sportsman?) He knew his Brussels pretty well, but I will not tell you the rest of the story, for he also knew his Englishman pretty well.
There are many more of these strange people. A strange one was a woman who offered to give me a thousand guesses at her profession; I declined the proposal and found out that she was a pearl-threader. Few of us know that the silken thread, on which collars of pearls are strung, wears out, and that, from time to time, pearls have to be re-strung. All women do not care to send their pearls to the jeweller, for the art of Tecla is profound. Nor do they care to re-thread them themselves, for the holes are so small that the work is infinitely wearisome. So my pearl-threader, who looked like the most respectable type of retired maid, spent her life in Mayfair and Belgravia, where she sat re-threading pearls while the owner read a novel. The pearl-threader smiled as she told this: ‘One of them,’ she said, ‘read a newspaper upside down all the time while I was doing her pearls. And there is another, so unsuspicious; she turns her back on me and smokes a cigarette, and stares into the looking-glass, dreamy-like.’
But that is a high walk of wanderer. There are others more tragic. There used to be a terrible creature, the runner, who followed four-wheelers laden with luggage, and arrived at the end of his long run too blown to be red in the face, but lead white, his right hand gripped to his heart, his left hand spasmodically touching the greasy brim of his cap. I have seen no greater agony than the hungry desire in those filmy eyes, half-obscured by the wet, dust-laden eyelids. I used to stop the runners when I could; often they persisted, their open mouth close to the wheel; they could not see me wave them away, or they could not hear me call out, as if all the energy of their poor senses had passed into those eternally running legs. One of them seized my trunk as we arrived, before I could ransom myself, hating my opulence, full of shame. It is fifteen years ago, but I remember him, a big body, but little flesh; I remember his eyes like glass, and the awful stagger of him as he bent under the weight of the trunk, as he tottered, and as I leaped to seize it when it fell. Then the door opened, and the hotel waiter came out with the air of black hostility which the house dog has for the street dog. The runner looked at us without anger, without misery, though he understood very well that the job was not for him; he was like a Greek peasant patiently encountering fate. But, as he turned away, clasping my shilling in his hand, and I saw the foot in the broken boot fumble for the step, a wave of self-hatred rose in me. I told myself: ‘You have crucified him.’
They are not so tragic, all of them, unaccountable people, or even people who have adopted trades one thinks queer because one would not have adopted them oneself. Some are merely disgusting, such as the bus-conductor. I have met a civil bus-conductor; I have even met an optimistic one, but nowadays, especially, he stands exposed by comparison with the girl-conductor. Oh, it is natural enough that the girl should have been friendly, civil, clean, obliging, for to her the job was new, varied, faintly exciting, probably better paid than her previous work. But still, she made the man terrible. He seems to be nearly always a rather grimy, ill-shaven, misanthropic man; something of the watch-dog and of the bureaucrat has crept into his constitution; he cannot gently ask for fares; the demand must come with a snap and a snarl, pitched on a high note that shall reach the recesses of the omnibus and of the traveller’s consciousness. When he yelps: ‘Fares!’ I feel for my ticket as if I were guilty; when he looks at me, his little, hard eye suggests that I am bilking the company, and then I hate him so that, if I can, I do bilk the company, and get off four hundred yards to the good, bursting with an unexpelled shout of ‘Yah!’ I hate him above all because, so often, he companions my journey with a snarly chorus, addressed sometimes to the wretched nearest occupant. One hears him run on: ‘Some people can’t learn where buses stop; seem to think it’s the Lord Mayor’s coach; pulling the string themselves, too; might as well be no conductor.’ Or it is something like this: ‘Chucking their half-crowns about; taking about four hours finding ’em, too; come into the bus and expect to get change as if it was a blooming bank; gave her twenty-four ha’pennies though, that’ll learn her.’ Or, during a shower: ‘Plenty room on top. Drop o’ rain won’t ’urt yer. When it’s fine they all want to get on top.’ And so on, a regular orgy of grace and charm. Growl, grouse, snap, snarl, grumble, yap, and long, dirty moustaches, filthy hands, and if it is not a grudging black hand to help a white sleeve on to the bus, it is a hand that has to restrain itself not to shove the white shoulder off. All that because the poor brute is not happy. I know I ought to be sympathetic, for it must be dreadful to travel all day from Camden Town to Brixton and back, to sell so small a variety of goods, never to feel steady ground under your feet when you look for change, to answer the same idiotic question seventy times a day, to tread on feet, to have your feet trodden on. The bus-conductor is a nasty man because he is an unhappy man, because he has no prospect in life, save that of growing older and, for all I know, retiring without a pension. Those monotonous occupations, such as the hellish one of lift-man, ought not to be human occupations, and they will not be such some day. Meanwhile, they rack by boredom people to whom has not been given the free expanse of the pedlar. What a brute Charon must have become by now!
Those people who range freely street and field are indeed of another kind; there is in them less civilisation and more civility. They are detached from their fellows; they lead lives of their own within the beating life of the world. Many of the newspaper-sellers are pleasant, ironic people, with a capacity for estimating character, with a quick interest in the news they retail. Citizens of the world, they are often so stimulated by their news that, as you buy, they must tell you the contents of the stop-press. It is a hard trade. Before the war they used to pay ninepence for twenty-seven halfpenny papers: fourpence-halfpenny profit for selling twenty-seven papers! Still, there is a nomadic satisfaction in their movable beat. They are not locked up. They are in the midst of life, other people’s life, but yet life.
To quite another class belong the beggars, not the pseudo-beggars who profess to sell laces or matches, or the blind, for these are inanimate beggars and nobody knows what goes on behind their faces, but the adventurous beggars, the old woman who follows you, shrilly asking for the price of a cup of tea, or the well-known teacher of French, who stops you in the street and asks you what chance he has of a professorship at King’s College. Those adventurers are amusing because they are coloured, because, if you stop, they will tell you where they come from, the number and names of their children, the diseases from which they suffer, and, indeed, recite you the shameless novel of their lives.
Of the same kind, but more offensive, is the fern-seller who is nearly always (or was before the war) a particularly burly brute, carrying a couple of potted ferns under each arm. He haunts the quieter streets of the West End, and when a woman alone meets him late at night, she will do well to make for the nearest policeman, the proper method being to ask the fern-seller to carry the ferns home for her: a policeman will doubtless be encountered on the way. I remember a fern-seller, who accosted me once in Portman Square. It was about six o’clock in the evening; I told the man that I wanted no ferns; he followed me, rumbling abuse which I could hardly hear. As it happened, I was looking for lodgings, and stopped at a likely house in Portman Street. As I had been walking rather fast, I thought that I had got rid of him, but, seeing I was going into a house, he ran up behind me, and once more began his pressure. While I was ordering him off the door opened, and a fat little landlord, with a grubby little white beard and choleric little blue eyes in a puffy little pink face, stood staring in the doorway. ‘If you don’t go,’ I said to the man, ‘I’ll give you in charge.’ But the man went on whining and growling and, being very young, I was filled with awful confusion at this brawl on the step. This was increased by the nasty little landlord, who said: ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to see some rooms,’ I replied, and to the fern-seller: ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I’ve got no rooms,’ snapped the landlord, ‘get out of it, both of you.’
‘What the devil do you mean by both of you?’ I said to the landlord, being thoroughly enraged. Then I became paralysed at having to quarrel on two different subjects simultaneously.