The streets can hardly accommodate the dense, seething crowd. The mob has not enough room on the pavements and swamps the whole street. All this mass of humanity craves for booty and hurls itself at the first comer with shameless cynicism. Glistening, expensive clothes and semi-rags and sharp differences in age – they are all there. A drunken tramp shuffling along in this terrible crowd is jostled by the rich and titled. You hear curses, quarrels, solicitations and the quiet, whispered invitation of some still bashful beauty. And how beautiful they are sometimes with their keepsake faces!
I remember once I went into a “casino”. The music was blaring, people were dancing, a huge crowd was milling around. The place was magnificently decorated. But gloom never forsakes the English even in the midst of gaiety; even when they dance they look serious, not to say sullen, making hardly any steps and then only as if in execution of some duty. Upstairs in the gallery I saw a girl and stopped in amazement. She was sitting at a little table together with an apparently rich and respectable young man who, by all the signs, was an unaccustomed visitor to the casino. Perhaps he had been looking for her and they had at last found each other and arranged to meet there. He spoke to her little and only in short, jerky phrases, as if he was not talking about what really interested him.
Their conversation was punctuated by long and frequent silences. She too looked sad. Her face was delicate and fine, and there was something deep-hidden and sad, something thoughtful and melancholy in the proud expression of her eyes. I should say she had consumption. Mentally and morally she was, she could not fail to be, above the whole crowd of those wretched women; otherwise, what meaning would there be in a human face? All the same, however, she was then and there drinking gin, paid for by the young man. At last he got up, shook hands with her and went away. He left the casino, while she, her pale cheeks now flushed deep with drink, was soon lost in the crowd of women trading their bodies.
In the Haymarket I noticed mothers who brought their little daughters to make them ply that same trade. Little girls, aged about twelve, seize you by the arm and beg you to come with them. I remember once amidst the crowd of people in the street I saw a little girl, not older than six, all in rags, dirty, barefoot and hollow-cheeked; she had been severely beaten, and her body, which showed through the rags, was covered with bruises. She was walking along, as if oblivious of everybody and everything, in no hurry to get anywhere, and Heaven knows why loafing about in that crowd; perhaps she was hungry. Nobody was paying any attention to her.
But what struck me most was the look of such distress, such hopeless despair on her face, that to see that tiny bit of humanity already bearing the imprint of all that evil and despair was somehow unnatural and terribly painful. She kept on shaking her tousled head as if arguing about something, gesticulated and spread her little hands and then suddenly clasped them together and pressed them to her little bare breast. I went back and gave her sixpence. She took the small silver coin, gave me a wild look full of frightened surprise, and suddenly ran off as fast as her legs would carry her, as if afraid that I should take the money away from her. Jolly scenes, altogether…
And then one night in the midst of a crowd of loose women and debauchees I was stopped by a woman making her way hurriedly through it. She was dressed all in black and her hat almost concealed her face; in fact I had hardly time to make it out, I only remember the steady gaze of her eyes. She said something in broken French which I failed to understand, thrust a piece of paper into my hand and hurried on. I examined the paper at the light of a café window: it was a small square slip. One side bore the words “Crois-tu cela?”* printed on it. The other, also in French: “I am the Resurrection and the Life”…* etc. – the well-known text.
This too, you must admit, is rather bizarre. It was explained to me afterwards that that was Catholic propaganda ferreting around everywhere, persistent and tireless. Sometimes they distribute these bits of paper in the streets, sometimes booklets containing extracts from the New Testament and the Bible. They distribute them free, thrust them into people’s hands, press them on people. It is ingenious and cunning propaganda.
A Catholic priest would search out and insinuate himself into a poor workman’s family. He would find, for example, a sick man lying in his rags on a damp floor, surrounded by children crazy from cold and hunger, with a wife famished and often drunk.
He would feed them all, provide clothes and warmth for them, give treatment to the sick man, buy medicine for him, become the friend of the family and finally convert them all to the Catholic faith. Sometimes, however, after the sick man has been restored to health, the priest is driven out with curses and kicks. He does not despair and goes off to someone else. He is chucked out again, but puts up with everything, and catches someone in the end.
But an Anglican minister would never visit a poor man. The poor are not even allowed inside a church, because they have not the money to pay for a seat. More often than not, working-class men and women, and the poor generally, live together in illegitimate union, as marriages are expensive. Many husbands, by the way, beat their wives horribly and disfigure them to the point of death – mostly with the aid of pokers used to break up coal in open grates. They seem to regard them specifically as instruments for beating purposes. At least, in describing family quarrels, injuries and murders, newspapers always mention pokers. The children of the poor, while still very young, often go out into the streets, merge with the crowd and in the end fail to return to their parents.
Anglican ministers and bishops are proud and rich, live in wealthy parishes and dioceses and wax fat with an entirely untroubled conscience. They are great pedants, are highly educated, and pompously and seriously believe in their own solidly moral virtues and in their right to preach a staid and complacent morality, to grow fat and to live here for the sake of the rich. It is a religion of the rich, and undisguised at that.
At least, this is rational and no one is being deceived. These professors of religion, who carry their convictions to the point of obtuseness, have one amusement, if such can be called: it is missionary work. They travel all over the earth, penetrate into darkest Africa to convert one savage, and forget the million savages in London, because these have nothing to pay them with. But wealthy Englishmen and in fact all the golden calves* in that country are extremely religious, gloomily, sullenly and peculiarly so. English poets have, from time immemorial, been fond of celebrating the beauty of provincial vicarages, standing in the shade of ancient oaks and elms, their virtuous wives and ideally beautiful, blonde and blue-eyed daughters.
But when night is over and day begins, the same proud and gloomy spirit once again spreads its lordly wings over the gigantic town. It is not worried by what happened during the night, neither is it worried by what it sees all around itself by day. Baal reigns and does not even demand obedience, because he is certain of it. He has a boundless faith in himself; contemptuously and calmly and only so as to be left alone, he organizes alms-giving and his self-confidence is not to be shaken. Baal does not close his eyes, as they do in Paris for instance, to certain savage suspicions and alarming facts of life.
The poverty, suffering, complaints and torpor of the masses do not worry him in the slightest. Contemptuously he allows all these suspicions and ominous facts to jostle his own life, to sit on his own doorstep for everyone to see. Unlike a Parisian, he does not make strenuous if cowardly attempts to convince himself of the falsity of facts, boost his own morale and report to himself that all is quiet and fine. He does not hide his poor, as is done in Paris, lest they disturb and needlessly trouble his sleep.
The Parisian likes sticking his head in the sand like an ostrich, so as not to see his pursuers catching
