Читать книгу This England - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5
ОглавлениеReproduced from The Evening Post (New Zealand), February 5, 1927
HE isn't a tramp. He very seldom leaves the West End and never goes out of London. He is very unwashed and wears two overcoats, and I have never seen him begging. Shuffling along by the edge of the pavement, his downcast eyes seeking a cigarette-end, he would be an object of pity, if compassion could overcome nausea.
The women of his species you can find any afternoon or evening, sleeping in the doorway recesses of West End theatres. Why she chooses theatres nobody knows, unless they are the only public, buildings about the doorways of which it is permissible to loiter without incurring the censure of the police. She is terribly grimy and carries a market bag in which she stores the treasures she finds in her waking hours.
Everybody associated with charitable work has tried to help them both— the Impossible Man and the Impossible Woman. They have been prayed over and bathed and given good food and good advice and money and clothes and disinfectants; but they have gone back to The Life and the two overcoats and the gallery entrance of St. Martin's Lane.
A lady friend of mine who had incited her husband to kill a former lover, and was tremendously well known in consequence, once told me that the spectacle of the Impossible People was a shame and a disgrace to England.
"We wouldn't stand for it in New York," she said.
So you see how badly we compare with New York, and even Chicago, which has two murders a day, but no Impossible People. Because they wouldn't stand for it.
In warmish weather, when charitable well-to-do folks, their hearts glowing with loving kindness and wine, dash down to the Embankment and distribute largesse to the submerged, the Impossible People gravitate towards the Embankment. They occupy most of the available seats and huddle themselves up in odd corners, looking oh, so wretched, and they take their share of what is coming.
In the winter they keep to the brighter, warmer spots, knowing that loving kindness doesn't often square with cold feet, and that slumming comes more natural on a warm, moonlit night in June than in the icy blasts of December, when a north-easter is blowing and horribly cold rain is liable to trickle down the necks of vicarious philanthropists.
I dislike the Impossible People because they are like the small boys who are always getting in the way of the photographer who is snapping the genuine article.
There is one called Old Frank, whom I have known for years. This frowsy man was old and dirty in 1910. He has slept out of doors ever since (except for a month he spent in Pentonville), and soap advertisements are meaningless to him There he is—a shuffling old body with his three waistcoats and cardigan jacket, alive and fit. There has been a war. Thousands of men have passed in their prime. Millionaires and princes, with all the resources of medicine and surgery at their command, have been gathered to their fathers. Old Frank, who sleeps in the oddest corners, and garners his meals in unbelievable places, is prime and hearty.
I have only given him one penny in my life. He remembers the circumstance vividly. He also remembers all the air raids.
"Frank, there is only one remedy for you,—and that is a lethal chamber," I told him when I met him a few nights ago.
He was not offended.
"There ain't many of us left now," he said, regretfully. It was as though he were speaking of a decaying industry—you might have imagined that he was a flint-knapper or something of the sort.
He named about thirty impossible people, all males, and could, with an effort, have named a hundred.
He was once a soldier, and got a wandering fit on him when quite a young man. He became a tramp in the more noble sense, but the country was too lonely, and farmers kept dogs and rural policemen were entirely unsympathetic In the country the Vagrancy Act is a real, vital thing. In London it is a curiosity. He "did" three weeks in Exeter Prison and three weeks in Gloucester, and so he came back to London, where the police are kind. He was not sorry for himself, but regretted the passing of two old friends of his, one of whom had been knocked down by a motor-omnibus a few months before.
"These motors oughtn't to be allowed," he considered.
Unlike his kind, who take an intensive interest in themselves, are casually concerned about their fellow-unfortunates, and are wholly oblivious of the phenomena of life that appear daily before their eyes, Old Prank is sensitive to economic conditions.
"There's less regulars on the pavement," he said, "but there's more outsiders than any time I can remember. They come and go and don't stay long. Young fellers, some of 'em, out of work and not used to the road. Gentle chaps, clurks, and what not. Some of 'em had good positions, too—orficers in the army. They drift in an' drift, out."
You can watch the drift if you spend a night at the "Morning Post" home— a place where wretchedness loses for a while some of its depressive quality. Here come the pieces that refuse to fit into the jigsaw puzzle called Economic Life. Some have lost all shape and belong to the waste section that go into the rag-bag. Some are only momentarily lost to place. Youngish men, rather bewildered, rather ashamed, by this glaring emphasis of their inadequacy.
They don't exactly know how they got here It is easy to explain, but difficult to convince them that such an explanation is a true one.
I wonder how many people realise the number of wrecks there are that are traceable to the coal strike of three years ago? Immediately after that strike I edited a hard-luck page for a weekly newspaper, and at least thirty per cent, of the men who confessed their ruin traced it directly to that strike. Small shopkeepers, like master men, found them.selves one day (figuratively) snug and comfortable; the next day they were waiting in a queue for admission to a Church Army institute or begging admission to the "Morning Post" home.
Now you find plenty of small tradesmen; you find, too, officers and soldiers with a bitter recollection of gratuities ill-spent. Not squandered— just badly spent. They invested their all in business, which they knew nothing whatever about. Poultry farms and garages and things that seem easy.
Chess figures carved from bones, as big as a man's fist, and said to date back to the tenth century, are now on show in the British Museum.
