VII
THE POOR
CHAPTER VII
THE POOR
Not much more than a dozen years ago, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman startled England by stating that thirteen million of our people stood, at all times, on the edge of starvation. He took as a basis the study of the condition of the poor, made by Mr Charles Booth in a great number of volumes, containing a great number of columns of figures, and was alluding in general to the large class that existed on a family income of twenty-three shillings a week. There was something terrible about those figures, so terrible that even the press was shocked. But there was something uninspired and inhuman about Mr Booth’s columns of figures; it is all very well telling us that so many thousands of people live five in a room, and so many thousands six in a room, and so on, but it does not mean anything. The ordinary man finds it almost as difficult to imagine that kind of life as to visualise a million; he can see six people in a room, but his mind does not bring up the idea of those six people in material attitudes, sleeping, eating, courting, making merry; figures create no microcosm. I suspect that to understand the poor, a little, you need to know very well the places where the poor live. The house is a fairly clear indication of the inhabitant; it is the house he chose, or the house to which he submitted. Then who is this poor man? this poor man round whom so many essays have been written? by the Fabian Society, judicial; by the Charity Organisation Society, severe; by Mr John Galsworthy, understanding and tender? The poor man is of the same genus as the rich man, but of a different species. (I mean the born poor man as opposed to the born rich man.) The rich man is no better than the poor man; the poor man is no better than the rich man; they are different creatures, made such by different conditions, just as a Spaniard and a Lancastrian are made different by their various lives. Only, and there’s the political rub, Englishmen have not to administer the affairs of Spaniards, while they do have to administer the affairs of their own poor; thus it is important that they should not blunder, because the poor are not good at improving conditions; their attitude is to grin and bear, and then, one day, to cease to bear.
To understand them at all one must take an imaginative leap; if you find this difficult, Mr John Galsworthy has taken it admirably in The Freelands. Listen to his description of a labourer’s life:—
‘He gets up summer and winter ... out of a bed that he cannot afford time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably has not a large enough window; into clothes stiff with work, and boots stiff with clay; makes something hot for himself, very likely brings some of it to his wife and children; goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and without comfort; works with his hands and feet from half-past six or seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat, if he could have had his will. He goes home to a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and “baccy.” And so, dead tired, but not from directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his doubtful bed.’
One should read, as a contrast, Mr Galsworthy’s description of the rich man he calls Malloring:—
‘Your Malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven o’clock, out of a nice, clean, warm bed; he gets into a bath that has been got ready for him; into clothes and boots that have been brushed for him; and goes down to a room where there’s a fire burning already if it’s a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, before eating a breakfast of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared for him, and reading the newspaper that best comforts his soul; when he has eaten and read, he lights his cigar or his pipe, and attends to his digestion in the most sanitary and comfortable fashion; then in his study he sits down to the steady direction of other people, either by interview or by writing letters, or what not. In this way, between directing people and eating what he likes, he passes the whole day, except that for two or three hours, sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends to his physique by riding, motoring, playing a game, or indulging in a sport that he has chosen for himself. And, at the end of all that, he probably has another bath that has been made ready for him, puts on clean clothes that have been put out for him, goes down to a good dinner that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns, and inwardly digests, or else plays cards, billiards, and acts host until he is sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean, warm bed, in a clean, fresh room.’
I challenge you to say that this is exaggerated. If you like, say you don’t care; but don’t say it isn’t true. And I will not preach at you, but suggest, to such as detect in me sentimentality, that if we belong to a refined and gifted class into whose hands the world has been given, if, indeed, we are refined and gifted people, a condition such as that of the poor man should offend our æsthetic sense. I have known a rather larger number of poor men than is usual in my class; I have not known them very well, because the worst of the difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor cannot trust the rich; they know them too well. The poor know that the rich conduct against them the class-war, and so they are defensive, inclined either to say the thing that will procure a tip, or a post as office-boy for little Tommy, or they will turn savagely on you to show you they are as good as you, and tell you that though margarine is good enough for you, their inborn good taste makes it impossible for them to consume anything but the best butter. One does not get together, any more than that Spaniard and that Lancastrian would get together, after five years of Ollendorff. Still, if one passionately wants to understand, one sometimes, for a moment, perceives the shadow of a hint of what another creature is. I remember perceiving it, for the first time, in the midst of an alien family in Widegate Street, just off Petticoat Lane; I had been sent by the firm who employed me to make searching inquiries and to dispense small bounties. My aliens were, I think, German Jews, who called themselves Russian refugees because it sounded more appealing; they were not a pleasant crowd; the man was a great, big, heavy, fat fellow, with greasy, black hair, a rather surly brigand; there was a woman, too, lying in a corner, dirtier than the man, presumably because she had been lying there for some time; there were four little children, exceedingly fat and well kept, the usual mystery of Jewish poverty; there was an extraordinarily old woman who sat next to the woman on the floor, and from the beginning to the end of the interview said not a word and moved not a feature. But the horror of it came from the woman on the floor, who also said not a word: there was no furniture in the room, not a table, not a chair, not even a bed; the woman lay on a few crumpled newspapers ... and had, the night before, given birth to a child, who lay naked between her indescribably filthy bodice and her breast. They were there, all together, in the midst of life, left and abandoned, hungrily desirous of the moment when the great industrial machine of London would be ready to consume them. Impostors, perhaps, but if so, hard is the way of imposture and slender the wages thereof.
I remember thinking, after that, as I went along Petticoat Lane, that is become Middlesex Street, how much the district resembled the people. There is no Petticoat Lane now; Middlesex Street holds nothing picturesque or national; even its open-air market on Sunday morning can be paralleled by any Saturday afternoon scene in the little streets of Edgware Road, or in Walker’s Court, Soho. It is a street mainly of warehouses; Widegate Street and Sandys Row exhibit the oddity of narrow crookedness and no more. Petticoat Lane, where the shops are paltry, and the folk divide into too fat and too lean, is not even a mean street. Its one charm is the prevalent, handsome young Jewess, aged about fourteen, with high tasselled boots, and plenty of silk stocking, containing plenty of leg. She is a fine girl; she haunts you all along Whitechapel Road, and so to Mile End, with her rude air of wealth and wealth-consciousness. I don’t know how she does it; with very little money, some crude colour and some light furs, she suggests opulence. There is something matronly about her, too; she looks so marriageable ... and when one looks into the humid softness of her brown eyes, one finds a limitless rectitude of morals, which may arise from a limitless power to resist temptation.