<^^nk UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET BEING SOME OF THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE LATE MR. JOHN MASON BY J. H. M. ABBOTT AUTHOR OP 'TOMMY CORNSTALK,' 'AN OUTLANDER IN ENGLAND," ETC. LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1908 TR Gooi f- TO E. C. B. 3 415S86 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET LETTER I DEAR JIMMY, You have never been in Queer Street, so you will hardly know where it is or what it is like ; and, as for conditions of life in the delightful thoroughfare, you will be as ignorant as Paddy's pig. I don't know that such ignor- ance is greatly to be deplored ; but, on the other hand, there is much about the dismal, picturesque slum that has a peculiar interest of its own, and many things having to do with it that are worth knowing, if you can acquire your knowledge at second hand. And, as I live there now, and am likely to live there for the rest of my days, and know pretty well all that is to be known about it, it has occurred to me that, perhaps, you would care to hear a little concerning it and its ways, and of some of the people who live in it, and what the aforesaid conditions of life in it are really like 1 2 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET so I am opening a correspondence with you, in which I propose to tell you something about it. It is true that the correspondence will be wholly one-sided. There is no post office in Queer Street, nor any letter delivery. What letters ever come to it are called for at post offices situate in more respectable localities. Writs, to be sure, and summonses get them- selves delivered with a wonderful precision and pertinacity ; but I verily believe that such literature would find its way to Limbo itself. Many residents in the street profess to be daily expectant of letters, which generally are supposed to be about to produce money orders and cheques frequently oversea drafts but it is a sad fact that such communications never actually arrive. If the people of the street ever obtain them, it is, as I have said, from some other place ; and almost invariably those who receive them depart from our classic neighbourhood, either never to return (which is extremely rare), or merely for a period which is in ratio with the contents of the missives elsewhere obtained. But the G.P.O. ignores Queer Street itself. No double knock of a postman ever resounds along its narrow length, nor does any member of that industrious tribe LETTER I 3 ever collect a Christmas box in it. Many de- partments of Government have to do with it particularly those concerned with the adminis- tration of that strange abstraction, whose effects are material, called the Law but the G.P.O. either professes to be unaware of its existence, or really is, and, in either case, the effect is the same one gets no letters in Queer Street. So, if you are foolish enough to reply to any or every of the series of epistles which I propose to inflict upon you, I shall never get your letters. Therefore, our correspondence must necessarily be one-sided, and you must be content to leave it at that. I have my reasons, old Jimmy, so don't think me unkind if I deliberately cut myself off from you whilst intruding myself upon you. You were always patient with me, always ready to take me as I came, always good enough to refrain from asking questions, and always content to lack the explanation which meaner mortals would have demanded as a right. And so I'm going to tell you some things about myself which I have told to no one else, am going to tell you the truth the whole truth (as well as I can, being out of practice rather) and nothing but the truth ; and you must make your own 12 4 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET explanations to suit yourself. I fancy that, when you have read the last word, they will be obvious enough. At any rate, you will see the reasons why I invite no response to these letters. You will adequately realize that, from the very fitness of things, it would be impossible for me to do so. If I were the best geographer in the world I could not exactly locate Queer Street for you. As a matter of fact, I imagine that, as nearly every town in the British Empire has its Town Hall (or, as in South Africa, its Town House), so also it possesses its Queer Street. In some it is miles long, in some it may only be two houses separated by a right-of-way ; but each city, town, township, village and" dorp has it more or less hidden somewhere. I only write of Queer Street, London. As I have said, it has no postal recognition, but I fancy that if you were to write, say, to ' John Mason, Queer Street, London,' you would be more correct and nearer the mark in putting the symbol d., and include a saveloy. It is an extravagant proposition, and requires careful and deliberate consideration, and I do not yet decide definitely as to whether I shall include the German abomination in the esti- mates or not I shall see. Then, like a giant refreshed, I shall wander into Hyde Park, and listen to the tail-end of the band performance. I shall remain on a seat in the park until mid- night, when it is closed, and, with some amount of luck, may be able to indulge in forty winks. After midnight I shall go to a little cabman's public-house that I wot of off Knightsbridge, and there revive my flagging 144 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET soul with two-pennyworth worth of stout. That will, allowing for the horse-meat, reduce my balance to 2 Jd. I shall walk about for the dark hours anywhere that it occurs to me to go and about the breaking of the dawn I will have a ha'penny mug of coffee at a stall, and one slice of bread. That will leave me Ijd., which will, later on, be devoted to breakfast. After that, well the Lord tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb, considers the sparrows of the air (lucky little devils 1), and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and all that. Here, as I write, the calm, long summer evening is coming on, and the sunlight makes golden slants through the trees, and bands of small boys are beginning to play hid ey- whoop in and out amongst their black trunks. People are flocking along from the direction of the Zoo, and from the big open playground in the middle of the park the cries and yells of the cricketers come clearly and sharply, borne on the evening air. It is very peaceful and beautiful. For an hour or so I am not Johnny Mason, the broken-down chump I am one of the rest of them, one of the decent people who can live their lives openly and decently and happily, and have nothing at all to be sorry LETTER IX 145 for, and can happily be sorry for themselves which 1 cannot afford to be. This is a loose, rambling sort of scrawl, old boy but I only write it to fill in the day. It is something like talking to a friend when I write to you, a little like putting my hand on your shoulder and walking up and down, gabbling any nonsense that comes into my head, and knowing that I am beside some one who really cares a bit about me. So you mustn't mind. It sort of fortifies me against the night to come and I know you are not the sort to grudge helping a lame dog like me. Good evening, old fellow. If I write any more now, I shall become disgustingly maudlin. 10 LETTER X DEAR JIMMY, It is three weeks perhaps a few days more than the twenty-one since I wrote to you last. It has not been a fat and prosperous period for me indeed, it has been so full of emptiness that I have been compelled to devote all the feeble energies in my possession to the mere process of keeping alive, of con- serving enough vitality to make the struggle for existence in any way a possibility, even to refrain from relieving myself of its burden by a summary process of felo-de-se. There has been none left over for correspondence. The wolf which is the bad bogey of Queer Street has not been merely content to snarl and sniff at my door he has actually got inside it, and has chased me round the house with a savage persistency that has not been less terrifying than insulting. The insult lies in the unholy grim humorous appreciation of the joke that bares his gleaming fangs and 146 LETTER X 147 the closer he gets to you the more he seems to grin, and when his grin is at its very worst you know that he is going to bite. If he would only rend and tear your vitals with less amusement, he would not be half the bad beast he is. I have had many pavement bivouacs, my James, since last I wrote to you, many weary night marches, many days of soul-destroying starvation, many black hours of despair. Some- times I have been deeply plunged in an abyss of abject, degraded sorrow for myself ; at others almost dangerously maniacal with a sort of sullen furiousness against I-don't-know-what well-fed people, happy people, innocent people, and even against my own unhappy neighbours in the street. At those times I have been, and have frankly acknowledged it to myself, uncompromisingly homicidal. As I have trudged round and about the hard streets, aching and hungry, I have half amused myself well hardly ' amused,' but diverted myself by vain imaginings as to how I might run amok through London, and by curious specu- lations as to how long a run I would have, and how much damage I could do before I was killed or taken. I have gazed at the Monument, and pictured 102 myself in the cage at the top with a magazine rifle and fifty cartridges. The clearing of those busy city streets would be a matter of minutes. How the shopmen and bank-clerks, and stock- brokers and costermongers, and cabdrivers and women, and louts and loafers would run for cover ! And when the streets and thorough- fares were cleared, so far as they might be within my range, it would be vastly entertain- ing to lob some long shots westward that would drop, as bolts from the blue, in Fleet Street or Lincoln's Inn. With the sight up to 2,000 yards you could make yourself unpleasant to London over a wide area, and annoy it very much. A bullet would suddenly smite a man dead in Holborn, and no one would know for hours how or why he had been smitten, or by whom. Somebody down in the Commercial Road would stagger, and come down on all- fours on the pavement, and cough up blood, and Jew and Gentile would crowd round, and then panic, and then scurry into their holes like rats. The craft in the river could be livened up, and the bargees hustled, and windows of warehouses over on the Surrey shore punctured, and stray shots sent winging into houses more than two miles away. And then how the well-protected Londoners would LETTER X 149 howl for the police, and send those decent fellows clambering up the narrow stairs inside the Monument to take me into custody. What a startling thing it would be for all London, what a heaven-sent sensation for the evening papers, what a sporting chance for the Lord Mayor 1 Would he read the Riot Act all on my behalf, and get out soldiers to capture me, or would he lead a forlorn hope of Common Councillors in the storming of my position ? Of course they wouldn't take long to get hold of one, if they really meant it ; but, upon my soul, I doubt whether many would be found in the city to tackle the hazardous job. They would probably decide to starve the lunatic out. At any rate, I am sure one would last for quite half or three-quarters of an hour. It would be an exciting half-hour in the City of London, a very hell of a time. One could imagine oneself laughing at them, and singing out, ' Dance, you devils ! I've been hungry amongst you, and I hate you, and it's my turn now damn you !' Or one might climb into the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul's, and loose a magazine full down into the cathedral, and pot across at the little entrance door, if anyone came to the attack. Or stand on one of the bridges, and 150 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET clear it. Or take possession of one of the big railway stations. Or go out into a suburb and hold up a County Council tram. There are many, if necessarily short-lived, methods by which one's displeasure with London might be manifest to its people. But London is safe enough. You couldn't get your rifle and your cartridges, and, if you could, the first thing you'd do would be to try and sell them for the price of a feed, and even if you did not do so, your savage, bloodthirsty imaginings are quite another thing to their practice. Hunger makes you savage enough at times, but it cows you too. more than you would think, my James. I have often and often wondered why the hungry English bear their hunger so quietly, so submissively, and with such an heroic forti- tude. But experience has convinced me that it is neither fortitude nor submission, nor is there anything particularly heroic about such endurance. It is simply fear the terrible fear possessing starving human beings who are a contemptible minority amongst a well-fed majority that controls them, and keeps them down, and amenable to law, and slavishly obedient to its administrators. And that fear is not the simple natural manifestation of the LETTER X 151 instinct of self-preservation, such as you and I have often experienced, say, under shell fire. It is not the sub-conscious dread controlled by cerebral or vertebral regions the mere healthy distaste for the unknowability of death, the animal dislike of extinction. It is a dreadful something that comes from a chronically empty stomach, from a semi-permanent feeble- ness of heart-beat, from a weariness of brain and nerve, and from, above all, an innate con- sciousness of the sheer despicableness of the state of starvation. However sullenly angry starvation in the midst of plenty will make a man, however much he may resent his accursed condition, he is, nevertheless, involuntarily conscious of his own inferiority to those about him who are well fed. He may find a thousand excuses for his having come into such a condition ; may adduce ten thousand injustices that have been inflicted upon his life, even from before his birth ; may persuade himself, and often succeed in persuading others, that he is a very ill-used fellow but he knows all the time, more or less distinctly, that the reason why he starves is because he is inferior to those who don't. And it is this sense of fear of the efficients for their qualities of efficiency, rather than for their 152 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET numerical strength that keeps him from active revolt. To put it coarsely, he knows that he ' hasn't the guts ' for it and such a consciousness makes him afraid, cows him, holds him back, and leaves him to 'stew in his own juice.' I think that's about it, Jimmy, and if the stump orators who incite him to the assertion of his ' rights ' could but sufficiently recognize that such is the case, they would easily come to comprehend the futility of their efforts. A man may be a man, but a starved man is only a quarter of a man and he knows it. Another matter, too, has ever filled me with a deep wonderment. The potency of fear may account for the submission of the inefficient to the misery of his lot, but what can explain his personal endurance of its most galling and most utterly hopeless aspects ? Why does he continue to endure it, when it is so easy to remove himself quickly from it ? The very wearying continuance of his privations, the sense that must be his of their inevitable future continuance, the dullness and despair of all his days these things alone must make him look longingly towards the gate that always stands open for him. In Life, as he has come to know it, there are LETTER X 153 hunger and cold, dirt, lousiness, the contempt of his fellow-men, the insolence of authority and riches one long and unvarying succession of hard times, and, always more cruelly in- sistent than anything else, hopelessness. In Death there may be anything, but he does not know in the faintest degree what it is. Your dead-beat has no belief in a Hell upon credit. He has experienced the ready-cash article, and takes that to be the real inferno. So that any consideration of a future period of punishment is eliminated from his contemplation of what lies beyond the wall. What it may be influ- ences him not an atom. It is easy for him to pass through the gate. A quick spring into the river, when the ebb tide swirls down like a mill-race, and the night is black and rainy ; a dash below the wheels of a motor-bus ; contact with the * live ' rail of an electric railway there are a hundred cheap and expeditious, and not very painful, ways of passing into the beyond. He may choose from any of them. But the strange thing is that he does not often find relief in this way. Suicide amongst the very submerged is much rarer than you would suppose. It is a popular notion that Westminster, Waterloo, and Blackfriars 154 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET Bridges are constantly infested by furtive un- fortunates of both sexes seeking to circumvent a vigilant police force, in order to pop over into the river. But it is not so, or at least I came to a conclusion that it was not. Of the hundreds of utterly outcast waifs and strays who infest the Thames Embankment at night, I would dare swear that there is not more than one in each hundred who seriously contem- plates suicide, who even considers, in the light of a remote possibility, such a means of ending his or her sufferings. You can see it for your- self, note it in the conversation of Queer Street, observe it in the actions and lives of the people of the street that self-destruction, as a means of getting beyond the sorrow and the wretch- edness of it, is very little thought of. There are, old James, a great many people who live in Queer Street, but very few leave it that way. Why they don't, I don't know. I only know my own reason for not doing so, one wet and windy night, and I will tell you of it. But even in my own case, I'm not quite sure whether there was a reason. I rather think it was only a fatuous accident. It was during this recent period of acute starvation, and, to be explicit, not more than LETTER X 155 about ten days ago, when a downpour of rain caught me in Hyde Park, not very far from the Serpentine. The only shelter anywhere available was the archway that passes under the bridge across the lake, and leads from the park into Kensington Gardens. I ran for it, but was drenched before I could get there. It was cold rain, too, and I had not had a single bite to eat since the morning of the day before. I stood in the shelter of the arch, through which the wind roared as through a funnel, and shivered for two bitter hours. The rain continued all that time in a kind of stinging fury, and I crouched and chattered with the cold. By the time the downpour had abated, I had come to a very definite conclusion that life was not worth living, and had resolved that I would not go on living it any longer. I was half dead with weakness, sick with hunger, and colder, I think, than I had ever been in my life before. The proximity of the Serpentine suggested drowning ; but I thought that if I went into those still and tideless waters, I might want to swim out again, be caught by a keeper or a policeman, and haled off to a police-station on a charge of attempted suicide. But the Thames, with its strong tide, would be surer 156 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET and more certain. I had been by the river-side about midday, and knew that the ebb must be flowing swiftly by this time. So off I went, sloshing across the wet grass, down through the Green Park and St. James's, until I came into Westminster. It was a queer thing that, crossing Piccadilly, I should have shouted anathema at a cabman who nearly ran me down, but it did not seem absurd to me at the time. The traffic roared and hummed by Palace Yard, and the lights in the wet pavements looked warm and cheerful, and a public-house at the corner glowed and shone with bright radiance. The House of Commons was sitting, and crowds of people were hurrying to and fro in the three great arteries that meet there. People in overcoats who carried umbrellas passed me laughing, and talking, and cheerful. Policemen in the roadway regulated the im- patient traffic pouring in and out across the bridge, and up Parliament Street, and in from Victoria Street. The aspect of them all made me more bitterly resolved upon the execution of my purpose, and I hurried round the corner by St. Stephen's Club, and down the Embank- ment. I did not think very much about anything. LETTER X 157 Neither the retrospect of things seen and done, nor memories of people loved and hated, nor regrets, nor remorse, nor sorrow for myself were in my mind. All the sensation I had was one of numb discontent with my con- dition, a sort of vague exasperation with my present wretchedness, and a cynical careless- ness as to the morality or immorality of what 1 was about to do. I felt that the breaking strain was reached. I was done, beaten, finished. I passed by Scotland Yard, and began to cross the road. It was inches deep in slush, and I went slowly, picking my steps though why I should have been so delicately minded in extremis, I don't know. When I was half- way across, I saw a woman spring from a shadow, run to the parapet, scramble clumsily up, and disappear over into the river. And here, my James, is a curious thing. I ran to the parapet too, and as I came up to it noticed a life-buoy, a yard or two away, and got it, and flung myself over into the river with it, and in the darkness I heard a shriek and some splashing, and then another shriek, and weakly tried to swim to it. And then I heard another horrible piercing scream, just as a boat ran into me, and a boat-hook caught 158 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET my clothing, and I was lifted into the boat. And then I lost consciousness. * # # * * When I came to, I was lying wrapped in blankets before a glowing stove, and there was a pleasant sense of warmth and comfort ; and a big man in a Thames police uniform was standing over me with a tin cup in his hand, and a pleasant smile on his face. * Here,' he said, ' drink this,' and he held the cup to my lips, and I drank deep of hot whisky and water, and closed my eyes and thought. All the impression I had was that I had tried to commit suicide, and had failed, and had only succeeded in making such a fool of myself as would be well advertised in the papers. It was just my way I was destined to fail in every detail of life, even in the ending of it, as I had failed in it as a whole. I opened my eyes again. * Well,' said the big man, ' you're game all right !' ' Game ' I. He was laughing at me. He was rubbing it in. It seemed that no little detail of misery was to be spared me. 1 did not answer. ' We were coining down the river, and saw LETTER X 159 the woman jump in, and you after her with the life-buoy ; and we caught you up first, as we came right atop of you but we lost her. How d'ye feel now ?' * For God's sake give me something to eat!' ' Oh, it's like that, is it ? What, are you down to it too ?' I told him simply how it was with me, for I did not care what happened only I did not tell him that I had come to the river to use it as the woman had used it. He was a kind, good, decent man, that Thames police sergeant. He would have it that I was some sort of a hero. ' Here,' he said, ' you're all right you'll do. Why, man, there's plenty well-fed folk wouldn't have done what you done let alone you being right down to it, and half starved. You'll do.' And he got me bread, and meat, and hot coffee. He told me I could wait until my clothes were dried. Thank God they did riot dry until nearly eight o'clock. Then he took my name, and I told him the Blackfriars Road address, and, as I stood up to go, the good chap gave me four shillings, and said I could come and pay it back when I was able. He 160 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET asked me to say nothing about that, though, and I fancy that he ought really to have detained me. And so I went away and had some breakfast. And that was how I failed to commit suicide. The lucky woman had been more fortunate, in spite of my impudent interference. Well, I don't know, but I don't think I will try again. Just now I am a little better off, and have slept in a bed for five nights. How strange it was, though ! The woman and I were both exceptions to the general rule, but why I should have wished to save her I cannot tell. It was only, I suppose, another instance of the variation of the inexplicable human. Man is a queer animal, my Jimmy a strange beast. LETTER XI DEAR JIMMY, You would often laugh, even if you were very sorry, if you could see in these days the curious expedients to which I resort in order to forget that I am hungry. They are so many and various and yet so exactly similar in intention and effect that I hardly know where to begin in their enumeration. Briefly, they all possess one fundamental principle. They relieve or postpone the pangs of hunger by inducing the mind to disconnect the tele- phone wires which communicate between it and the gastric regions. They lead you, to put it coarsely, to forget that you have a stomach, and that it is insistently shouting to be filled. It is, I suppose, a kind of * faith-healing pro- cess'; but, like all such, it has its limitations. * Little Mary ' possesses a shrill voice and an assertive manner, and may not be put off or hoodwinked for very long ; but it is some- thing if, by any extraneous influence what- 161 11 162 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET soever, one may stifle her clamour even for a little time. What to do is to go and look at something that interests you. And there can be no place in the world where you may find so much of interest given away gratuitously as in London. The number of free ' Feasts of Intellect ' that you may substitute for luncheon is extra- ordinarily large and astonishingly varied. Of course, a great deal depends upon your capacity for being interested. On that score I am lucky, because there is hardly anything in the world that does not interest me deeply, and I can lunch as well off the Elgin Marbles as on the sight of a lot of hairy workmen pulling up a section of Oxford Street, or a crowd round a broken-down motor-car. Take, for instance, the British Museum. It caters for an extraordinary variety of tastes and appetites. Often, feeling pretty sick of everything, and when wholly of opinion that being alive is no use at all, and that being hungry and homeless in London matters a great deal, I go into the Egyptian rooms, and browse on the mummies. This may seem to your material mind rather a coarsely gruesome statement, my James, but it does not mean that I abstract bits of spiced Egyptian from LETTER XI 163 the cases, with a ghoulish view towards their consumption. It is quite a different matter to that. I go there and prowl round amongst the dead Kings and Queens, priests and priestesses, cats and crocodiles, and say to them and to myself: 'Well, I am hungry, and I am dirty, and the soles of my boots let in the wet, right enough ; but, my ancient corpses, I'm alive, and you've been dead thousands of years. And even as you are so shall I be, and my present discomforts will matter as little to me then as any you might have endured in your time do to you now.' And it is wonderful what an amount of satisfaction is derivable from the contemplation of those ancient Have Beens. There is one old Stone Age Johnny, who has been shifted to Bloomsbury from a shallow grave in the sandstone along the Nile, and lies in a model of it, crouched up amongst his earthen pots and his flint knives and he has been dead somewhere about 6,000 years. (He is a well-preserved lad for his age, and you can even see some of his original carroty hair stick- ing to his leather scalp.) It does me all the good in the world to stand and gaze at that prehistoric waif. He has been lying in that same attitude for all those ages while the 164 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET Pharaohs ran their dynasties, while Greece was great, while the Old Testament was getting made, while Rome waxed and waned, while Christianity was born, through all the makings of the modern world, he has slept quietly on his stomach, with his legs drawn up, and his head pillowed on his crooked arm until he could serve the useful purpose of making Johnny Mason reconciled to the fact, even forgetful of the fact, that he had had no mid- day meal. It is sad to think that he could never have realized his ultimate usefulness when he was a wild man bushranging in the desert. There is a sort of * Alas, poor Yorick !' about the contemplation of this particular human relic that out-Hamlets Hamlet. It was pathetic enough, and gloomily philosophic enough, no doubt, to contemplate the pos- sibility of Csesar's clay coming to stuff up a cranny ; but just think of this fellow coming to lie in Bloomsbury, after 6,000 odd years, for the purpose of being called a duck of a mummy ' by American girls with Baedekers, and taking the place of two sandwiches and a glass of ale to such a one as I ! But the Egyptian room is what you might call a kind of Lord Mayor's banquet it fills you up to repletion, and is heavily indigestible. LETTER XI 165 And so are the Assyrian rooms, and, in a lesser degree, the Grecian. If you feel that you can subsist upon something lighter, try the pottery galleries, or the print rooms, or the illuminated manuscripts, or the place where they keep medieval clocks and watches. My favourite restaurant, indeed, is the Ethnological Gallery. There you can choose of the places and the people that you know Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa. I have often done well on the contemplation of Solomon Island canoes, New Hebridean head-dresses, Santa Cruz bows and arrows. Kaffir gourds, assegais, and knob- kerries have frequently stayed my cravings. And the boomerangs, nulla-nullas, waddies and spears of my own enlightened country have more than once helped me to forget that I was starving. After a time, you become quite a gourmand. You feel, as you pass between the great columns of the Museum's front, what you will be best able to digest just as when you go into, say, Gatti's, you make up your mind that an under- done steak, a sole, or perhaps oysters, will best satisfy your appetite. You march in through the glass doors, and go straight to your luncheon- table. People whom you pass on the stairways, or in the galleries, cruising about aimlessly, as 166 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET if they did not know what to look at next, have your sympathy. They remind you of greedy little boys in the supper-room at a children's party intensely appreciative of the Whole spread, knowing that they have only room for some portion of it, but woefully uncertain as to where they will begin. They stray amongst sarcophagi, stare sadly at old porce- lain, gape at tessellated pavements, lurk dis- contentedly past Aztec treasures, and come out entirely unsatisfied. It is not, of course, that many of those have come to the Museum to feed. For the lack of that reason for their presence they are to be congratulated but they mostly go away without having really seen anything at all. It would take years to see and know the contents of the vast treasure- house intimately and affectionately, but one thing you may be sure of. If you wish to see them well, you must go and see them instead of having a meal. When they take the place of meat and drink, they are far more thoroughly assimilated than when they are simply objects of inadequate inspection. Whenever I went into the Museum about the hour of noon, there was always one corner to which I turned first, and, as I came out, I never failed to go and pause there again in LETTER XI 167 loving contemplation of the bust which it con- tains. As you pass into the entrance-hall, turn sharply to the left into a long gallery that contains a row of Roman portrait busts along the right, and, on the left, altars and inscrip- tions that have been unearthed in England. Just inside the door, and facing up the gallery, you will find the dear woman. It is a little white marble head, and the tip of the nose is broken off, and on the pediment there is a tentative statement to the effect that it is supposed to be a portrait of a lady named Julia, wife of the Emperor Elagabalus. Well, Elagabalus was a lucky man, and the long- forgotten artist who preserved the features of his Empress a cunning ajid deft chiseller. There is the quietest, demurest, most gently ironical smile lingering about her sweet face- just the kind of smile that some flattering speech might have called into play, or perhaps the cruel little smile that the contemplation of some love-sick admirer, whom she had en- couraged to his undoing, might have given birth to. It is suggestive of the eternally in- scrutable mask of femininity, of the veil which clever women use to mislead the cleverest of men a beautiful woman's most powerful weapon and her greatest charm. It seems to 168 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET dare you, and to defy you, and to flout you and yet there is something of gentle kindness in it. One day you think Julia was a dainty little flirt, and on another that she was a brave-souled woman whose clear eyes must have been lights of truth and honour, and all gentle charity and goodness. But before all else, you recognize that she was a clever woman, and a brave woman. I have never come away from the contemplation of her portrait, made so long ago and made so deftly, without a stronger feeling of respect for womankind. I hardly know whether to feel more grateful to Julia for having lived these many centuries ago, or to the sculptor who has made her live to-day in Bloomsbury. Other restaurants and cafes available for those to whom material and solid food-stuffs are denied exist in great number in London. Picture galleries, natural history museums, collections, are abundantly available. But I can't go into detail about all of them. You are never likely, old Jamesey, to make use of them in the way I have outlined above, so there is hardly a necessity for elaborating their ' points.' A very brief description of how I found them may suffice. There is the National Gallery. I must con- LETTER XI 169 fess that much of the fare provided there I have found eminently indigestible. It is true that I could make a very satisfying meal of the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Rubens, and Velasquez, and a few others (even in- cluding Turner), I have browsed upon very comfortably. Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Romney I have done well on. And there are some others. But the chefs whose soups and entries have lacked nourishment are the Old Masters. It has always seemed wonderful to me that Christianity has survived their efforts in de- picting Christ and His Mother. I have never been able to make out why the greatest Man of all the world should have been represented by these gentlemen as an unhealthy fat baby, and a more unhealthy thin man. As to the Virgin Mary, she is usually portrayed as one of the most insipid and colourless women it would be possible to imagine. I have been told that the colours are the thing. Nobody can produce them nowadays. Well, if that is so, I am prepared to concede it as a good point. And to come to the martyrs and the saints the generally anaemic-looking people who are painted as they undergo various tortures at the hands of those who saw no reason for 170 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET changing what religion they may have had, or for adopting one if they had it not it has always seemed to me that if they looked as the Old Masters have made them look, they richly deserved all they got, and a bit more beside. Take St. Sebastian up a lopped tree (I forget who perpetrated that), getting shot full of arrows. The sinners who are busy below, taking aim and loading up their crossbows, are mostly quite decent-looking chaps, but the saint himself is a sheer libel on mankind. Such a man could never have had the qualities requisite to the making of a saint. The saints, one imagines, were really rather fine fellows who had, at any rate, the courage of their con- victions ; but poor Sebastian is made out to be the most awful-looking worm in the world. I don't blame the heathen for lynching him. Just as we say to-day of the typical Bill Sikes, ' his face would hang him,' so, I should think, did the outsiders of Sebastian's day very properly feel that a man who looked like that deserved speedy and painful extinction. And there is one strange point about this particular picture the martyr has been shot clean through some of his bones with an arrow. I knew a man in South Africa who got drilled through LETTER XI 171 the collar-bone without its being broken ; but there is considerable difference between the penetrative effect of a Mauser bullet fired at close quarters, with a muzzle velocity of I-don't- know- how-many thousand feet per second, and a shaft of wood propelled from a bow. It is true that the natives of Santa Cruz in the South Pacific can fire an arrow half-way through the stem of a cocoanut-tree, but I doubt very much whether their missiles could stick through a man's bones without fracturing them and St. Sebastian's bones are pretty obviously not fractured. No, Jimmy, I've never been able to get the value of a scone and a cup of cocoa out of the Old Masters. The Tate Gallery I found pretty satisfying. Barring Burne-Jones, and one or two others, it is possible to lunch on its contents without experiencing subsequent dyspeptic symptoms. G. F. Watts was to my mind a particularly good cook, and so are most of the other modern British painters. I like the Tate. (Once I went to see a collection of Whistler's works in Piccadilly, but that was before there was famine in Egypt, and I wish that in these sad times those same pictures were available to me.) I know I am what has been called a Philistine, my James and indeed I am one, 172 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET morally, socially, and intellectually but, as I have remarked before, we are as God has made us, and if it's altogether my fault that I can see no particular beauty in such as Sebastian, medieval Madonnas and Christs, and the blood- less, unhealthy women of Burne-Jones and Rossetti well, perhaps that is one reason why I am in Queer Street. I like looking at the models of prehistoric beasts in the South Kensington Museum. They appeal to me (selfish egoist) in much the same way as the bitumen-coated early Egyptian in the British Museum appeals. It is cheering to think that such as they, in certain species, probably roamed over London as I roam in these evil days, and that in a geological to-morrow there won't be any London, as was the case then. It reminds me that, after all with all the terrible im- mediate burden of his privations and his vicissitudes Johnny Mason is only a louse and a parasite crawling over the earth's crust for his brief second of eternity, and that all the other happier and more fortunate, even less happy and less fortunate, lice about him are really in the same case. Where were they when the Megatherium was ? where will they be on the cold, frozen, lifeless earth when it LETTER XI 173 is appreciably nearer to the constellation to- wards which it rushes to-day at the rate of eighteen miles per second ? It makes me feel that Johnny Mason does not matter that nothing matters very much. Of the National Portrait Gallery (dreary place) I won't say much, except that it is of no use whatever in staving off hungry longings. The Wallace Collection is all right. So is Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. So are many other places, but, after all, some of the best restaurants are in the open air the parks, the River, the docks, and even the streets. The docks have always moved me tremen- dously. Any wharfside is wonderful enough when you come to think of it, or any beach where boats land, or any little creek in whose mud shallow craft lie at low tide but the Port of London is unique ; and the longshore- men of London River are also unique. Some- times I travel eastward across the city, past Whitechapel, down the Commercial Road, through that great refuge of all Europe, and land of many nations, lying between the road and the river and make my way to the West India Docks. There I loaf round, and talk to other idle men, scan the ships, and fill my 174 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET ears with the music of the sea trades rattling of donkey engines, full-bodied curses of those in authority, the creak of block and tackle, the clatter of cans in ships' galleys. It is all pleasant music to me, and all of interest, and nearly always makes me forget that I am hungry but it is sad music, too, and each time I go there I come away saying that it shall be the last. For when I am there by the water-side, the fact is brought home to me more vividly and seriously than at any other time that I am 'on the beach.' And it is one thing to be on the beach in the South Seas, and quite another to be on London beach. Why it comes home to me more at the docks that I am 'done finish' is because there the track starts for home. The muddy waters in the basin meet and mingle with the river when the great gates are opened, the river runs to the sea, the sea goes south, ' an' dat's whar I would be ' and never will be again, my Jimmy, never again. It's a narrow little world, isn't it ? One day when I was down there leaning against a post, and watching a big four-masted ship being emptied, a fellow came swinging past whom I had last seen most villainously drunk and delirious at Vila in the New Hebrides a big LETTER XI 175 Chilian fellow, who was called out there Lopez, and who had been working with some trader on Malekula when I saw him. He did not know me, and I did not speak to him, but it was funny seeing him walk past in that casual way, just as if he had strolled up from the beach at Vila. He looked pretty pros- perous, and, as he made his way aboard a ship with an air of ownership and importance, I rather guessed him to be the mate of her. He looked better than when I had seen him last, being held down by six niggers on the broad of his back, mad with the horrors, and screaming Spanish swear words. And another day I stood and watched a steamer I had once travelled in being tied up in her berth. On the bridge was the same skipper whom I had known, still smoking the same kind of black cigar that never seemed to leave his lips when I was a passenger five years ago. He was a little stouter, perhaps, and there were some grey streaks in his beard, but he was the same otherwise, and it was all I could do to refrain from hailing him from the dock-side. Of course, he had forgotten me, and I didn't quite feel up to re-introducing myself, though I was fairly clean and neat in my dress. (I never did become actually 176 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET very shabby at least to outward appearances, so long as my boots did not receive attention.) He and I had been rather good pals, and I used to spend hours on the bridge, and smoking with him in his cabin but I wasn't quite such an outcast then. When you have about three- pence in the world, you are not eager to claim old acquaintances. The walk back westwards in the evening through the deserted city was generally rather a melancholy one. It seemed like having stood on the bank of a river which separated one from one's own well-loved country, and having been compelled to turn away sorrow- fully because there was no bridge, or no boat to take one across. My bridges and my boats have long been burned, and though it gives me some amount of morbid satisfaction to prowl round the West India Docks, and watch the ships loading up for 'down under,' I know quite well that none of them will ever load me up. Still, one doesn't pull long faces any more than one can help. The parks, regarded in the light of imaginary food-supply, may, perhaps, best be described as Sunday dinners. On weekdays they are more useful as resting-places than as anything else, but on Sundays the meetings in them, LETTER XI 177 and the evening music in summer, take the place of luncheons and of suppers. You can get a variety of courses just inside the Marble Arch, and may enjoy a repast that ranges from Atheism to the Licensing Laws. I have listened in one afternoon to an atheist, a temperance reformer, one who would abolish marriage, a lady desirous of the franchise, an anarchist, the Church Army, and a Japanese Christian. For many months, while I have been in Queer Street, I suppose I have hardly missed a Sunday afternoon there, unless it rained. I would be sorry to see the meetings abolished. Their absence from the park would mean to at least one unimportant individual a greatly enhanced comprehension of the reality of hunger, and the hardship of short commons. Well, old boy, I must stop. I could better imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury taking to being a Murrumhidgee Whaler than you ever coming to live in Queer Street ; but if, in the strange changes and chances of this extremely rum life, you should ever do so, I think you will find the Museum and the Docks about as useful places for forgetting your woes in as any you might come across in London. And, personally, of the two, I pin my faith to the Museum. 12 LETTER XII DEAR JIMMY, I am afraid that latterly that is to say, during the course of the last two or three letters I have written to you, and as far as I remember them I have been giving you rather an account of my impressions than of my more material adventures. Well, I don't apologize for it. Every one in Queer Street must inevitably have pretty much the same kind of personal experiences as every one else, but they can hardly have a single impression between them that is common and identical. What I mean is this let me illustrate it. If you and I try and imagine it, old prince of the matter of fact stood together on London Bridge at sunrise upon a clear summer morning, after we had tramped about all night, and were to have no breakfast (so far as we could prophesy), we should both see the sun coming up out of the haze, and the dull copper gleam on the waters, and the 178 LETTER XII 179 purple-blue shadows amongst the houses and the shipping. The same scene and the same colours would strike upon our eyes, and we should hear the same sounds, smell the same smells of the muddy river and the ships, and the hay in the barges but to each of us the view would be most utterly different. It would be to me a picture before which in con- templation I could forget our circumstances and condition. I would carry away a recol- lection of a scene of sordid beauty. You would remember a tableau of two damned fools on a stone bridge, wondering where and how their appetites were to be satisfied. You won't be offended but that would be the difference between us and there would be a difference, but not the same difference in the different respective impressions of every pair of spectators of that sunrise. So you are getting in these letters just the impressions of the worthless John Mason in Queer Street. But you can believe that the impressions of every other man or woman in the multitude who populate the street vary from his and each other's just as their thumb impressions vary. Their lives are much the same. Cold, hunger, homelessness are material experiences that they share but each who 180 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET tells his tale must tell it differently, and after such a fashion as he is shaped to tell it. No one can say : ' This is how it gets us.' He must say : ' This is how it gets me' The impressions are the thing, not the common record. It is true that I have given you some of the adventures too. I have had to, in order to certify my fitness, or to demonstrate my un- fitness, to criticize Queer Street. You have had latitude, and longitude, and landmarks but if you were reading a book of voyages you would want to know these things before you considered the opinions of the voyager con- cerning what he saw, wouldn't you ? He must tell you where he is before he describes it. And in this particular voyage that I am taking my last, I think the dreary detail of the course would have little personal interest for you if the navigator, or rather the derelict castaway, did not inflict his opinions upon you. So that is why, old Jimmy. And now we come to what I want to be at in this letter the business of telling you that, though I amas poor as Lazarus, as destitute as a starving black fellow, and often as miser- able as the proverbial bandicoot on the burnt ridge, yet have I one thing that I can never LETTER XII 181 lose, that may never be taken from me by man, and in whose inalienable possession I glory and rejoice, as the only thing I have left to rejoice and glory in. If I would, I could not sell it. Nor can any man sell his try as he may, and bargain with the devil as he may, or with God. It must remain with him till he dies, and it does even when he may think it does not. And this last asset, this inalienable possession, is that strange, indefinable part of him which is his soul, his ego, his individuality, his liberty of thought. It may be of the greatest value, mediocre, or the meanest. It may be a bless- ing and a consolation, or a curse and a reproach. But he has got to hang on to it. He cannot pawn it ; he cannot give it away. Nothing but death can take it. When death takes it no man knows what becomes of it. When what we call insanity besets it well, it is only changed in some subtle and mysterious fashion. It is death alone that has the power of con- fiscation. I am pleased with my possession, Jimmy though you, or anyone else, might not envy me it. I have one suit of clothes, and its pockets are empty. I am never sure where I am to pass the night, nor do I know for certain 182 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET how I will be fed to-morrow. But my soul is my own, and even in my worst, and unhappiest, and most friendless times I have that know- ledge, and it cheers me cheers me more than I know how to write. It is not that 1 crack my soul up as one who should say of it ' Look here, this is my soul a turbine-engined, smooth-running paragon of a soul, warranted to do more good and effective souling than any other in the market this is the kind of soul to have !' I don't. In many respects I regard it as a hell of a soul. It is unreliable, variable, capricious, more often inclined to evil than good ; a little worn now, and the worse for wear. It is a confirmed liar ; it delights in subterfuge and deceit ; it bullies me, and blackguards me, and gets me into trouble. It is a very rip of a soul. For the few good traits it possesses it has many bad ones. For one comfort it brings me, it is responsible for ten discomforts. It is a poor enough thing but, my Jimmy, it is * mine own.' Such as it is, I'm glad it's mine. And I wouldn't resign it or sell it if I could. Now here is a little story of a soul not mine, but some one else's and it isn't a very long little story, so I'll tell it to you. One morning and it was a fairly prosperous LETTER XII 183 morning, for I had had a bed, and a breakfast of sorts I wandered into Battersea Park, having come across the river from West- minster, and up through Lambeth. It was a fine morning, warm and bright, and the sky was pretty blue for London. I had tobacco, and I had a newspaper, and I sought a seat upon the river-side of the park one of those long, comfortable garden benches which are the armchairs of the outcast. There were children playing in the open spaces beyond the trees behind me I could hear their shouts and laughter the children of the poor, who seem to be the only London children who really do play and enjoy life while they have the capacity for doing so. The tide flowed up, and laden barges drifted with it, and tugs towed empty strings of coal flats down against it. A white motor-launch flitted past. Little flotillas of sea-gulls floated on the broad waters. Everything was placid and quiet, and Chelsea across the river looked nice and clean, and artistically respectable. For these times, I felt pretty good and content. It was not on every morning of the week that I could sit, fed and satisfied, with the morning paper and a penny one at that and smoke and read and rest. There was even prospect 184 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET of some meals ahead, and of a bed that night. So you will see that I was entirely in an amiable frame of mind, and, as is my wont when not hungry, had almost become quite pleasantly unmindful of the very existence of Queer Street. I would read the news in the paper, and then the leading articles, and finally all the advertisements, and I would smoke all the time. And at mid-day I would feed some- where modestly, it is true, but, nevertheless, I would feed and then come back again. And so the day would pass. To-morrow might not pass so well, but then, to-morrow is to-morrow. I had sat for about an hour, and had almost reached the advertisements, when I became aware that some one else shared my seat, and was in occupation of its other end. I looked up, and saw that it was a tall, thin old woman a very old woman. I glanced at her at first without noticing her very much, and then resumed my reading. It was an interesting editorial article upon the subject of some correspondence which had careered through the silly season in the columns of the paper I had bought. That particular paper has a genius for propounding the idiotic LETTER XII 185 sociological, dietetical, or religious questions that appeal to the (no excuse for saying it to you) idiotic English Middle Classes with so much force, and evoke from them so much ' copy ' during a time of year which, in Europe, is singularly unproductive of interesting news. The questions are of such a kind as might be put in the same class as * Do we cross the street gracefully ?' ' Should we eat more grass ?' or * How did St. Paul dress for Damascus ?' And it is most wonderful nay, most awe-inspiring to note the enthusiasm and verbosity with which citizens, doctor-men, parsons, and pifflers harangue one another, and the general public, in print upon subjects of such a kind. The leader I was reading was a triumph of leader- writing, and it masterfully demonstrated that, although black was black, it was quite permissible to suppose, with equal reason, that white was white. It was not until 1 had read right through this positive achievement in prose that I could find leisure to turn and look at my neighbour. It was not in her carriage that one found indication of her great age. She sat up, straight and rigid, on the seat, and stared out across the Thames as if she could see beyond Chelsea to some far-off place that was 186 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET invisible to me. Her gaze was so fixed and steady that I stared too. To me, there was nothing but the green trees along the opposite embankment and the houses. To her, there might have been open plains, with waving grass, and dim blue mountains in the distance. Her face was very beautiful, in that fashion of beauty that often comes to old women who may not even have been pretty in their girlhood. It was in profile to me, and the features were perfect. I once saw an aged ex-empress for a brief moment at a London railway station, and her type was the type of my old lady a type that seems to embody both infinite goodness and infinite sorrow. One hardly knows how to describe it but you knew a face, Jimmy, that was very dear to me a brave, splendid old face, full of love, and kindness, and nobility and it was something like hers, or, rather, it had that in it that was in hers. And because of her memory, the old lady somehow, unconsciously, became a friend to me. I fell in love with her. Her clothes were black, but faded almost into the green of shabbiness but the way the little bonnet set on her silver hair made you think of an old queen with a crown on her head. I couldn't help it I spoke to her LETTER XII 187 a foolish remark about the fineness of the morning. She turned towards me, and seemed to look through me with that strangely fixed gaze that had pierced Chelsea, and said gently, in a low, soft tone : * Ah yes, indeed. I can feel that it is so.' And it was not until then that my density permitted me to observe that she was blind. Her large eyes were of a faded kind of blue, but they were sightless. * We blind people,' she continued, ' really get almost as much out of the weather as you who can see. We can feel a blue sky.' She smiled in a way that lit up all her face. * Oh I'm sorry,' I said. ' I had not noticed when I spoke. You find your way about wonderfully.' ' Yes but if I did not, I should be obliged to stay at home always. And besides, twenty years is quite a fair length of time in which to learn to do so. One really ought to learn a few new things in such a long time as that.' We talked for nearly an hour. She asked me if I had not a newspaper, and if there were any news from India this morning. Some disturbance there interested her, and when I had read all there was about it, she sighed, 'Ahrne!' 188 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET ' I do pray,' she said, ' that '57 may not come again. I was there then. I do pray that that awful time may not repeat itself.' She laughed gently as I made some exclama- tion. ' Oh yes it's quite true. I was in Lucknow. You see, I'm quite an ancient person, am I not ?' She told me that she was eighty-one, and spoke long and cheerily about the Mutiny. Her husband had been a surgeon, and she had shared with him all the terrors of the famous seige. And now, here in Battersea, she lived with her son, who had been crippled in the legs as a child during the bombardment of the Residency. All her people were dead. She had a little pension, and astounding thing- she gave lessons in French to a small private class ! It was holiday time now, so she came each day to the park, by way of taking hers, and sat upon a bench. She was extraordinarily well informed. Her son read the paper to her in the evenings, and she followed every event of the day with keen interest. Her knowledge of the world, as it wags to-day, was wonderfully lucid and exact. Politics, science, literature we discussed every- thing she knew much more of them than I did. Her memory was a marvel. Dates and LETTER XII 189 periods were never wrong or confused. In- cidents that have long been forgotten history were fresh and clear to her, and she had a way of telling them that made them fresh and clear to me, too much more so than if I had read them, or even witnessed them, for myself. At last she rose to go, and, feeling that it was the least I could do, I offered to walk with her to her house. She laughed merrily. ' Oh it's very good of you. Indeed, it is. I should be delighted to have your escort but please don't think that I need any guidance. I can find my way quite easily. You know, we people of the dark have a sixth sense if not a dozen extra ones given to us as com- pensation. But if you are doing nothing, I shall be very glad of your company.' So I walked with her, she directing me as to our course. We went through many streets, and finally came into one of small detached brick cottages, in which she asked me to look out for No. 67. I found it, and she found a latch-key, and in some marvellous manner the keyhole, and entered, and said, ' Please do come in.' So in we went. On a sofa in the front room lay a man with a grey beard, and he was reading a volume of Guy de Maupassant. 190 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET ' Hullo, mammie, back again ?' he called out cheerily. ' Thought you were never coming. But I see you have an escort to-day. Good morning, sir.' He stretched out a thin hand to me, and smiled just as his mother had smiled, and then they both talked. I stayed an hour with them, and never saw such happiness, such fine content, such cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. His was rather a weak face, and it was easy to see that the wonderful old lady was the sustaining in- fluence. In all her blindness, she treated him as if he were the one of the two who needed most consideration, and tenderness, and care. He was still the little boy with the mangled legs in Lucknow. He had never grown a day older in spite of his taste for French novels. She stood behind him, and stroked his white hair, and told me of all their quiet, poverty- stricken, happy life until I felt ashamed of my own useless^ unhappy one. It was a perfect picture of resignation, and peace, and pluck. And presently I went away feeling mean and poor poorer than I have ever been in Queer Street. I have never seen them since. But the soul of that dear old lady has always remained as LETTER XII 191 a beautiful memory to me. In all her sorrows after a long life of poverty and distress, and the endless care of her helpless son she has preserved her cheerful faith in life, her courage, her belief in, the goodness of things as they are ordained. She had no complaint, no lingering doubt that anything was in her life that called for complaint. She had had little fyut sorrow and trouble all her days, and yet she was neither troubled nor sorrowful. I tell you, Jimmy, she made me blush for myself. It was better worth having as a priceless posses- sion than mine, but her soul was her own too. I am in a Rowton House to-night. I don't like them much. They are too big, and* too full of Queer Street people. Though who am I that I should be fastidious ? LETTER XIII DEAR JIMMY, To-day my address is Hyde Park no less. That is where my home is. It is not a bad address by any means ; in fact, it is rather a coveted one, for if you go up the Edgeware Road, quite half a mile up and more, you will find a whole neighbourhood whose inhabitants describe themselves as being of Suchandsuch Street, or Whatyoucallem Terrace, ' Hyde Park, W.' And do not those whom the King delighteth to honour get houses assigned to them in Kensington Gardens, which are right alongside ? I have no need at all to be ashamed of the eligible locality in which I am living until midnight ; but, for ' private reasons,' I would willingly exchange it for a room in Brixton, or Islington, even Stepney or West Ham. And I'd exchange my immortal soul for a pound of steak, and a quart of coffee, and a hunk of the stodgiest bread that was ever made. Oh Lord, Jimmy, I am hungry ! 192 LETTER XIII 193 But, n import e I've got to put up with being hungry, and I'll have to put up with being so all day long, and all the night, too. And I'll have to walk about from midnight until daylight ; but joy cometh in the morning, my James, and joy this time takes the form of one half-sovereign or, to spread it out into as great a sum as it will look, ten silver shillings. I wish I could draw it as one-hundred-and- twenty coppers, or better still, as two-hundred- and-forty ha'pennies. I'm sure it would last longer and go further than will the small gold coin that will be paid me over the counter to-morrow at the office of Chippy Cuts in Fetter Lane. For you must know that I have become a literary man I am in it now with De Quincey, Chatterton, Noll Goldsmith, and one or two other experts of the pen and the pawnshop. Were this the eighteenth, instead of the twentieth century, I almost fancy that the good Mr. Richardson who wrote ' Pamela ' would reward my genius by hiring me to dust the shelves in his shop. (No fear, Jimmy I'd be in the Fleet Prison.) To be brief, I have succeeded in winning one of a number of ten shilling prizes, offered by the proprietary of Chippy Cuts to the reader 194 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET who succeeded in guessing exactly the number of letters in the last word of the last column of the back page of a forthcoming number of that great educational organ. I guessed six, and six it was, and I made it so because, turn- ing over the copy in which I read the announce- ment, I perceived that the very last thing in that particular column was the name and address of the publisher, according to law, and the address was 'Fleet Street, E.G.' So I took a sporting chance, and it turned out that the editor was just the wag I had assumed him to be. The morning after I saw the award, I went to collect it, but was informed that it was not payable for fourteen days ! You will under- stand the things I said. But the fourteen days expire at midnight, and at nine o'clock sharp I'll be up to the Chippy Cuts cashier, and at 10 a.m. I'll be well into a very sub- stantial and nutritious breakfast. It is high noon, James, and the Serpentine looks very pretty. The sun is shining brightly ; all the trees have had their leaves dusted by the slight shower of rain that damped my raiment in the night. The park looks at its best and that is not saying a little. I am sitting about half way down from the bridge, LETTER XIII 195 on the Knightsbridge side. Behind me the generally execrable horsemen and horsewomen who exhibit their poor equestrian attainments in Rotten Row are prancing up and down. In front a small boy with a toy-boat is holding vigorous argument with his nurse, who evidently wants to cause him to abandon a cruise upon which his soul is set, and accompany her home to lunch. Otherwise, the foreshore is deserted, except by divers waterfowl who paddle up and down, or lie hove-to in the sunlight, wobbling on the little ripple- waves that run up the lake before the soft breeze. The vehicles that have been driving to and fro along the carriage way across the water are getting fewer and fewer, as the people in them begin to feel that feeding time approaches, and tell John to tell Thomas to turn the horses' heads for home. Occasional dead beats and loafers amble wearily past, dejected, tired, unhappy. As I write this, one has sat himself down upon the other end of the bench I am on, and, with his legs thrust straight out in front of him, and hands plunged deep in his trouser pockets, is gloomily contemplating the sky, the Serpen- tine, and the trees across its surface. He is a young man as we mostly are, we loafers but well set up. He has a clean-shaven, 132 196 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET sharp face, and every now and then, as I write, I can feel, rather than see, that he is darting quick covert glances at me, as if he wondered what I were at. His clothes are fairly good. With the eye of an expert I can see that his collar is doing double duty, having been turned inside out as lately as this morning. He wears a cloth cap, and his hair is very short. His tweed suit looks fairly well. Only one who has become accustomed to the close contem- plation of things second-hand would notice that it is old and worn, and has seen much service under trying circumstances. ***** I have made use of these asterisks to signalize the fact that this veracious chronicle has been interrupted for a' space of time somewhere about two hours in duration. The gentle- man whose arrival I have recorded above has engaged me in conversation for the greater part of this interval or rather he has engaged me as a listener, while he himself did most of the conversing. I have found him interesting in the extreme, but I am afraid he has found me sadly unresponsive and unimpressionable. He began by asking me whether I had a match, and when I produced one from a waistcoat pocket, he found that he had lost LETTER XIII 197 his tobacco. So I bestowed upon him a pipe- ful of shag. He then stated gloomily that it was a fine day. I agreed, and he plunged immediately into a recital of his grievances, and his personal contempt for London and its inhabitants. * Here,' he said, ' look at me ! I'm an old soldier, I am I've fought for the bloomin' countiy, an' this is how it treats me. I ain't had a bite all day, an' I've walked about for four solid nights four nights out in the street, mister. Were'd I fight ? In South Africa, o' course. Colenso that's w'ere I was yes, I was there with Gen'ral French. In the Guards, I was. Grenadier Guards. Yes, we seen some pretty 'ard fightin' in South Africa. An' this is what they does for yer afterwards. Sickenin', I call it. Nice way to treat us blokes.' I felt constrained to point out that General French was not present at Colenso, being on the other side of South Africa at the time, and that the Grenadier Guards, if I was not mistaken, were equally absent from Natal during the period in question. He looked at me in a sickly way, half suspiciously and half respectfully. 4 Here,' he queried, * what's your game ?' 198 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET I laughed, and said I imagined that it was pretty much the same as his resting in the park, and trying to forget that I was hungry. ' Ho !' he said interestedly, ' Ho you're on th' rocks too, are yer ? Well, wot are you doin' writin' there ? Beggin' letters ?' 'What?' I said, not properly grasping his meaning. * Doing what ?' ' You know writin' to people parsons. an' such like about your starvin' fam'ly. Pitchin' 'em a tale askin' 'em to send you a dollar or so for Gawd's sake.' ' Oh !' I gasped ; ' no, not quite that. I'm writing to a friend, but I'm not asking him for anything.' He was visibly disappointed in me, and looked a little scornful. ' I suppose you're like me,' he said sadly, 'wore 'em all out. I done pretty well that way for a w'ile, but it don't last long. At first I used to do pretty well at it with old ladies, but one of 'em see me shickered one afternoon w'en I should have been buryin' me dead .baby, an' she put th' coppers on to me next time I wrote, an' I got pinched, an' got a month in quod. So that finished it for me. But' he leant over towards me, and looked LETTER XIII 199 eagerly wolfish * you're all right, ain't you ? Or 'ave they got you marked too ?' * How do you mean marked ?' I asked him, becoming interested in this new aspect of the Life of Leisure. He spat contemptu- ously on the gravel. ' 'Ow do I mean marked ! W'y, if the police 'ave got you set like they've got me. Are they lookin' after you all the time, an' blockin' whatever you do to make a livin' ? Bust 'em they don't give me arf a charnce. But you're all right, aren't you ?' ' Oh yes ; they don't interfere with me.' ' Well w'y don't you ?' He had become greatly excited, and glared at me eagerly. ' W'y don't you ?' he repeated. ' You do th' writin', an' I'll put you on to the right marks, an' we'll 'alve wot comes out of it. It's a dead cert, I tell you. Can't go wrong. Nobody knows you. I'd do it on me own, on'y, as I says, they've got me set, an' I daren't look sideways at a parson or an old lady. They don't give me any sort of a show at all. But you're all right. You can write a good 'and, can't you ? No ! Well, then, you can spell all right, I expect ? You'll do. Now, listen 'ere.' With great vehemence, and no little 200 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET enthusiasm, for the space of one hour my new acquaintance lectured to me eloquently upon the complete Art of Writing Begging Letters, of which he was a professor of extra- ordinary attainments and not a little celebrity. Unfortunately, as he put it, his celebrity extended to the ranks of the police, and his fame resounded within the walls of New Scotland Yard, so that, though his skill and resourcefulness of invention remained unim- paired, his field of operation had become so restricted as to render the practice of his alluring profession almost impossible. There are, it appears, enormous possibilities about begging letters. As a field for the employment of skill, subtlety, knowledge of mankind, imagination, and daring, the art of writing them is unrivalled. To practise it successfully, however, and with hope of making it a remunerative branch of literature, you must, as is the case in all the arts, devote much time to the serious and laborious study of your subject, and must ever bring to bear upon it an unwavering degree of intelligence, and an assiduous earnestness. He who trifles with it, and does not regard it with a certain respect and reverence, will inevitably fail. Witness the case of my instructor ! The LETTER XIII 201 lamentable indiscretion of getting drunk in West Kensington, where was the home of his benefactress, had resulted in closing its pursuit to him for all time in London, if not in the whole of England. He should, of course, have gone to Kennington, or Mile End, or High- gate, or any other place far removed from Kensington and the haunts of the old lady, before indulging in the pastime of intoxication. It was just such carelessness of detail that was most harmful and ruinous to a successful practice, and he had no one to thank but him- self for his present situation. He spoke in an injured way, just as if he might have been a solicitor who had been struck off the rolls for the trifling indiscretion of confusing trust -moneys with his own private banking account. Broadly speaking, I learned, the raison d'etre of the begging letter is the universal one for all villainy and swindling that at least every second person in the world is an incurable fool, with a perfectly appalling capacity for being taken in and cheated. And here, at the beginning, was to be noted the one great primary law. You must be quite certain and sure that you are dealing with a fool, or, as my teacher put it, a ' mug,' before you begin 202 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET operations. There are many ways of assuring yourself upon this point so many that I cannot undertake to make out a complete list of those enumerated to me here this afternoon. If your chosen patron is a clergyman, it will be wise to attend his church on one or two occasions before you bring yourself under his notice, just to gauge his capacity for the reception of lies. If an old lady maiden ladies are the best it is worth while watching her for a little while before beginning opera- tions, in order to learn what particular follies of charity may be hers. If, for instance, you discover that she subscribes to, say, a home for friendless cats, you at once become possessed of the means of securing a footing in her sympathetic regard. It is not a difficult matter to pick up a half -starved and mangy kitten, and you may approach your dear old lady through its troubles. You call upon her, and say you have heard of her kindness to dumb creatures, and how you hope she may be induced to interest herself in the case of your little pet. Its miserable appearance is to be accounted for by the fact of your own poverty. Some little time after, you write to ask after its health. If your letter be skilfully composed, it is rather more than likely that LETTER XIII 203 her reply to it will contain a remittance for yourself. He gave me many instances of the correct way in which to reconnoitre the ground in the beginning, and illuminated his discourse with several others showing the wrong and amateurish methods of procedure. It is never to be forgotten that success is very largely dependent upon the care and exactitude with which this portion of your operations is carried out. Next to these essentials comes the indis- pensable one of a good memory. You must be extremely careful never by any chance to contradict yourself. The sad story of Mr. William Durkin well illustrates the importance of this golden rule. Bill, as my informant referred to him with a kind of regretful affec- tion, had been a very prince of impostors. He had possessed a genius for writing begging letters such as had never been approached before or since his career had come to an abrupt termination. Faculty of invention, fluency of diction, insight, judgment of character, the power of correctly recognizing the psychological moment for an appeal had all been attributes of Bill's that rendered him a very Napoleon of the Importunate Pen. So 204- LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET successful had he been, in his widespread scheme of operations, that he was able to occupy a small villa at Brixton, and to support the wife of a gentleman who was resident in Dartmoor Prison for a term of years. He even found it necessary to employ, as a sort of secretary, a clerk who was 'wanted' by the police on a warrant charging him with embezzlement. He enjoyed all those luxuries and comforts which rightly belong to the man of achieve- ment in any walk of life. For no less than six years he had had what might be termed, with no exaggeration whatever, a most flourish- ing and affluent career. And his downfall from his high estate had been brought about by just one of those simple slips of memory which it was so necessary in his profession to be ever on guard against. Briefly, it happened in this way. Bill had applied to a well-known philanthropist in Brighton whom, under different names and alleged circumstances, he had several times successfully exploited before for a trifle of pecuniary assistance towards an operation upon the eyes of his little daughter, who was a phenomenally clever child of seven, doomed, unless the operation were available, to the loss of her eyesight. He had received, in reply, a LETTER XIII 205 sympathetic communication enclosing a cheque for five guineas. Just about then, Bill became greatly worried by the undutiful behaviour of his family that is to say, by the lady whose husband was a guest of His Majesty's at Dartmoor. She took somewhat aggressively to drink, and Bill's usually careful exactitude was upset by such harassing affairs as having to become bail for her at Vine Street Police Station, and atten- dance at Marlborough Street Police Court one morning, in order to pay a fine which the lady had rendered herself liable to by reason of drunken and disorderly performances in Picca- dilly. When she had returned to the little home in Brixton, Bill had naturally been com- pelled to inflict corporal punishment upon her as any gentleman would have been compelled. A letter had just arrived from Brighton, en- closing another guinea for the benefit of the juvenile ophthalmic sufferer. In the agitation engendered by his ruffling domestic cares, Bill had written back his thanks, together with a statement that his dear little son was getting on very nicely. It was, perhaps, nothing more than a slip of the pen, brought about by a slip of memory but that trifling inexactitude resulted in the destruction of Bill's flourishing 206 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET business, the breaking up of his home, and his own ultimate retirement from the Old Bailey into durance vile for a term of no less than seven years. No, you could not be too careful in correctly memorizing all the points of an appeal. The pathetic tragedy of Bill Durkin's downfall proved this, just as my instructor's own carelessness in getting drunk in West Kensing- ton pointed a moral in another direction. He told me much more, with careful elabora- tion of detail, and ended up by proposing a working arrangement between us. He was to be a sort of sleeping partner, who would be behind the scenes, and who would scout, and investigate, and prepare the ground for the eloquent appeals which I should indite to the ever charitable and eternally credulous middle classes. As a guarantee that he had no designs towards using me as a catspaw, or of keeping me in reserve as a scapegoat should our under- takings by any chance go wrong he offered to draw up an agreement, or statement, which would incriminate him equally with myself, in the event of detection, and allow me to retain possession of the document. He admitted that he had taken quite a liking to me, and painted in glowing terms the life of ease, luxury, and refinement which might be expected to lie LETTER XIII 207 before us were we to join forces. We would, he said, ' live like gentlemen, and cany on like proper toffs.' He had become, as it were, ' intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity,' and when I bade him quietly to * Go to hell,' he did not at first realize that my attitude was not one of playfulness. But when I further requested him to shift himself from the seat, adding that I would seek to assist him to do so, he grasped the fact that, for reasons of my own, I did not receive his proposition with favour, and he stood up and cursed me in a comprehensive, complete, and eminently obscene fashion. When I put away this note-book in my pocket, buttoned up my coat, and reared myself upon my hind-legs with an obvious inclination to make a demon- stration in force, he departed. But, as he went, he continued to fling back remarks of an insulting and contemptuous character at me, and, as he faded away through the trees behind, the last expression of opinion which I caught correctly was one to the effect that, in his estimation, I was merely a ' Something Nark.' A 'Nark,' my James, is one who cultivates the acquaintance of policemen and detectives with a view towards informing them 208 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET of various and sundry misdeeds of his fellows, and in the state of life to which it hath pleased God to call me, the term is not unnaturally one of considerable opprobrium. My Jimmy, my good Jimmy, I am simply famishing. The day is yet young hardly six o'clock in the evening and I have some sixteen weary hours to put in before I can hope to satisfy my importunate appetite, and during which I must ever vividly contemplate in my mind the kind of feed I could do with, and the sort of repast I would like to set before me. I have no doubt that fasting, as practised by ascetics, is eminently conducive to the clearer contemplation of the ethics of existence, but to a coarse and material scoundrel of my description it is conducive to little but bitterness, profanity, and discon- tent. And yet, my good old James, the one thing that I have left to pride myself upon, the peg upon which I can hang the merest rag of a garment of self-respect (a thing which I have never really had), is that none of my experiences in Queer Street have really resulted in making me bitter with the world. It is a good world, Jimmy, a good and gracious world, and, as Mr. Browning, I think, has it, ' God's in His heaven.' LETTER XIV DEAR JIMMY, Since I wrote to you last somewhere about ten days ago I have been ' on the wallaby track.' You will know what that means. I cannot say that I have been ' humping bluey,' because I have had no bluey to hump ; and even if I had had one I hardly suppose that in this free and enlightened land I should have been per- mitted to hump it. To make myself clear, old James, I have for a very short period been a 'sundowner' I have been 'up country.' My brief experience has taught me one very plain lesson. So far as London is concerned, it has long been obvious to me that it is more or less of a crime to be ' hard up,' or, perhaps. I should say, to appear to be hard up. In the World's Shop there is no room for anyone to whom the shopkeepers cannot sell something, or their attendants extract some commission from, or their door-keepers some gratuity. 209 14 210 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET There is just about room for anyone as to whom there may be a shadow of a doubt. If it seem at all possible that he may be a buyer he is grudgingly tolerated. But if it is quite unambiguously certain that there can be no chance of making the very slightest profit out of him, he is a pariah, an outcast, and very nearly an outlaw. It is not permissible to murder him, but it is obligatory to ' give him Hell.' And he gets Hell. He is hustled from pillar to post ; he must have no rest for his weary bones ; he must be ' taught his place.' And he is taught his place with a thorough- ness and directness that it is almost possible to admire. But I did not know that it was so in all England. London has always seemed to me to be a place apart from the rest of the world, a separate province of England, peopled by a race that is somehow different from any other tribe on earth. It is true that I have never quite been taken at my real value. Some inherited instinct for keeping clean, some almost unconscious habit of holding myself up, and looking better than I felt, or really was, has been a kind of sustaining power to me, has kept me from becoming quite utterly submerged in the depths,^and from LETTER XIV 211 being hounded and howled at in the streets. But I've been in the midst of the hordes who are so treated, have realized that wretchedness, hunger, and poverty are unforgivable offences, and have long ago seen with unclouded eyes the whole prospect surrounding me. And now I have learned not with bitterness, but with resignation that what I have seen of London is true of England. There is no room for the man whose feet have touched bottom. He has been classified with those who cannot keep in the swim. And once, in this land of class distinction, he has been written down under any distinct heading, it will be a miracle and a marvel if ever he gets himself entered under any other, unless it be one of a lower grade. He is booked as some- thing definite, and it is everybody's business to see that he keeps to the order of his booking. The gradual wear and tear of the life that I have led during the past six months has a little shaken my nerve. Hardly knowing that it was so, I have slowly been losing courage ; getting a little more depressed in mind as I weakened in body ; acquiring, by infinitely slow degrees, a faculty of feeling . sorry for myself ; appreciating less of the humour of my situation and more of the miserable helpless- 14 2 212 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET ness of it ; and becoming less capable of seeing, and sympathizing with, the distresses and un- happiness of my neighbours in Queer Street. It had been some strange consolation, in times of the severest stress, when I looked around me and saw that, if I were in a bad way, there were others in a worse way. After a day of starvation, when I walked dejectedly in the streets, having nowhere to go to, it seemed to make my lot less burdensome if I saw some poor creature overwhelmed in a mire of distress deeper and blacker than mine own. Not that I had any devilish satisfaction in noting any- thing of the kind but the realization of it had a salutary effect, made me ashamed of my own poor spirit, caused me to say to myself something like this 'Well, now what are you whimpering for ?' Look there ! you're not coughing up bits of your lungs, are you ? Keep quiet, you fool, and don't cry out until you are hurt.' But now I began to be less pained at my inability to assist such as were worse off than myself, to feel less shame at grumbling to myself concerning my own misfortunes, to realize more dread of the possibilities of evil as they concerned myself. I began to fear Queer Street rather than to wonder at it to LETTER XIV 213 dread the grim cruelty of London rather than to observe it as something of interest worthy of observation. Terrors began to lurk round corners where I had before only expected to meet with interesting unknown phases of the lower life. An active pessimism took posses- sion of me. I would sit for hours in the parks, overwhelmed with a wretched melancholy that I could not shake off. When I had a bed and shelter for the night, I would lie awake and toss about, and think too many of those tor- turing ' might-have-been ' thoughts. When I had money to pay for a breakfast, I would often be too sick with melancholia to eat any. I had a dread that I would go mad. The roar of the streets, the ceaseless rush of hurry- ing people, the eternal grind, grind, grind of the mill of London terrified me. If I saw a policeman I would cross the street, from some vague fear that he would see that there was something (I knew not what) the matter. If a foot-passenger on the pavement jostled me rudely in his hurry, I would think that he could see too plainly that I was to be easily despised and shoved aside. My nerve was going. London was too cruelly, too pitilessly strong for me. And so one afternoon I fled from London, determined to escape, if I could, 214 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET from the maddening noise and noisomeness of it to the more peaceful poverty of country lanes and open fields. It was quite immaterial to me where I went, but, as I was lying on the grass in Hyde Park when I made my sudden resolution of flight, and Paddington was about the nearest of the railway termini, I decided to escape by way of Paddington. I was rolling in wealth, for I had eight and ninepence, and the prospect of getting out of Hell quickly, and in the suddenest way available to me, made a railway fare to some place in the country look like money well invested. I was so keen on following up my sudden resolve that, instead of walking, I took a bus from the Marble Arch to Praed Street. I could not go very far as a matter of fact I had literally no notion as to where I did want to go to. The insistent idea that drove me was that I must by some means get out of London. For a reason which I do not recall I took a ticket to Maidenhead. In more pros- perous days I had often been there, and perhaps that was why I went there now, and chose the Thames Valley as a refuge. I might just as well have chosen any other part of England, the reaching of which lay within my means, LETTER XIV 215 but, in an indistinct way, I remembered that Maidenhead was a place you went to from Paddington, and as it was about the only name of a destination I could recall when I found myself at the booking-office window, I suppose that that is why I went there. When I reached Maidenhead it was dark at least, it was dark so far as the cessation of daylight went. But it was a clear evening, and there was a fragmentary new moon, and I could see the road-way so, not knowing whither I went, and because Maidenhead had people in it, and lights and some shops, and I could hear laughter from within the houses, and talk that suggested happiness, and a piano, I fled from it, as I had fled from London. All people who were happy were hateful ; any light that shone through an open window mocked me ; every voice that did not complain jeered at me. I longed for some great solitude where I could feel that I really was alone, where a knowledge that there was no human being within a score of miles would give me the rest of mind and nerve that I so much needed. I thought of the salt-bush plains at home and the remembrance of little solitary camp-fires in the pine-scrub, of hobbled horses, of a saddle 216 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET hanging on a limb, of myself lying on my unrolled blankets, smoking, and gazing up at the clear stars, made me homesick and weary of England. I wasn't homesick for my people I had long cut loose from them but for that dear land of great distances, and spacious life, and clear air, and great familiar solitudes. God's own country, my Jimmy God's own country. At a little wayside inn with red, illuminated blinds, that was full of loudly argumentative yokels who played shove-ha'penny (an edifying sport) and talked unlimited rot, and argued illogically about unimportant things they did not understand, I had some bread and cheese and ale, and bought some shag tobacco and rested for a while. But the blether of the dull dogs who filled the tap-room sickened me, and I fled again into the night. For a long time I walked not knowing, and not caring, whither along a broad road at first, and then through a network of narrow hedge-bound lanes. Sometimes, through gaps in the hedges, shone the lights of houses ; sometimes the lanes were sunk deep in the earth, and it was as if one explored the bottom of a dry ditch. But there was some tonic in the air that soothed me, and took the jagged- LETTER XIV 217 ness from my nerves the smell of the grass, perhaps, and the faint whiff of leaves, that seemed so strangely pure and refreshing after the manifold blended stinks of London. It was quiet, too. There was no endless roar to signify the existence of life. It was indi- cated in a hundred gentle ways. Some subtle influence began to make me cheerful again. I was glad that I had broken out of London. The cool night air freshened and revived me, and gave me back some of the courage I had lost, and in a little time I felt myself striding along almost lightheartedly, and just as if I had had some destination in view, or was going to pass the night some- where, and not merely wandering through it like a lost soul let out of hell, all unfamiliar with the world of men. Where the way went, I went. The thin light of the young moon showed me tall trees hi the fields elms and beeches and sometimes a hayrick loomed up over the hedges, or the top of a house, or a barn. Occasionally chained dogs barked at me, and once I nearly tripped over a pair of lovers in a darker nook than usual. The man swore, and the girl giggled, and I went on. The quiet of the restful night seemed to have taken possession of me, so that 218 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET even the giggle of the girl seemed to desecrate something that was sacred. I wandered into another village, and out of it again, and was in a broad road. A motor- car buzzed past me, its great head-lights dazzling my eyes, and the dust in its wake half choking me. It was one of the hated things from the world I had left behind, and, to escape from others of its kind, I turned again into a narrow lane, imprisoning myself between tall hedges, and went on walking. The lane led me up to a hill-top by winding ways, and was very long and steep, so that when I came to the summit I stopped, and rested, and sat down to smoke. There was a gap in the hedge, and I sat in it on the earthen bank, and gazed out over a scene of fairyland. Dimly, faintly visible, a long landscape stretched away before me towards distant hills and woods. In deeper hollows of the valley silvery mist lay in long sheets that shone and gleamed in the thin rays of the declining moon. Faint, far-off noises were wafted up to me from a cluster of twinkling lights that marked some village the shouts of children, the barking of dogs. Once, across a section of the scene, sped a railway train like a long glow-worm, and the sound of its rush and rumble came faintly LETTER XIV 219 to me after it had disappeared. For a long time I sat there gazing over that peaceful valley until the lights had gone, one by one, and the children's voices were hushed, and only now and again came the barking of a dog. The crescent moon grew yellow and more yellow as it came down the sky, and presently its light was put out, too, behind the distant skyline. So I scrambled to my feet, and walked on still, caring little where I went or how I passed the night. It was enough for me that this was not London. I must have wandered miles about the country, and towards all points of the compass, before I began to realize that I was tired and needed sleep. But the night was warm, and I had become enchanted by the sense of freedom, so I deter- mined to look for no shelter, but to sleep under the stars, as I had so often done before in other lands. So I made my way through the first gap in the hedge that I found, and lay down inside a field, and presently was fast asleep and dreaming, my head pillowed upon the bank of a ditch. Pleasant, clean dreams I dreamed all night dreams of free, wide, open life. The plains and the veldt were inextricably mixed in them as things do get mixed in dreams but every 220 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET incident was happy, and every scene bright and fresh and clear. Sometimes I woke for a moment and opened my eyes to the clear stars above me, and my lungs to the clean air, and turned over happily, and went to sleep and dreamed again. This was good ; this was being alive again. London was forgotten. The sun was shining when I woke up the sun was shining brightly and some one was hitting me with a stick about the shoulders, and a mongrel dog was snapping and yelping within a foot or two of me. I sprang up, not quite awake, and instantly the dog had me by the ankle, and I could fee] his teeth through the leather of my boot. I kicked him clear, and kicked him again as he returned to the attack, hoisting him up in the air, and he fled, 4iowling and yelping. And then I became aware of an infuriated man, who was coming at me with an uplifted stick. I dodged the stick and jumped at the man, and caught him fairly on the nose, so that he went over back- wards, and then I knelt upon his chest, and got the stick from his hand, and threw it away over my shoulder. A strange awakening, wasn't it ? I was as angry as anybody could be who had been bitten by a dog and assaulted by LETTER XIV a furious red-faced man, by way of a morning greeting. And I did not know what it was all about, or what I had done to deserve such treatment. Two or three hundred yards away stood a farmhouse that had been hidden in the darkness when I lay down to rest. Towards this the man, having scrambled to his feet, began to walk rapidly, mopping his bleeding nose with his handkerchief. ' I say, you dam fool !' I shouted after him * hold on. What's the matter ?' I caught him, and laid my hand upon his shoulder. He turned as if to strike me, but I tripped him up, and he sprawled upon the ground again. He got up slowly. This time he stood and swore. ' Matter,' he spluttered ' what be the matter ? You'll know quick enough, ye vaga- bond. What are ye sleeping on my land for ? I'll have ye gaoled for it. Y' domned savage t' come at me loike that there !' * Steady, old boy,' I said to him. ' You came and hit me when I was asleep, and your dog bit me. It seems to me that the boot's on the other foot. What harm have I done by sleeping on your land ?' ' Harm how, what ? Don't I pay rates, and ain't there a workus paid for out of 'em 222 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET for lazy rascals like you to live in ? Ha' we got t' have ye roostin' in our fields, so well as if they belonged to you layin' down th' grass an' spoilin' it for sheep feed ? You wait till I get my boy up, an' I'll send him for the police- man. I'll show you whether you can come and lay about my fields. I'll show you.' He was a miserable devil, with a miserable, skinflint face. But the face looked so funny with the blood about it, and his rage was so comically ineffective, and he was so clearly satisfied with what he had had, that I could not help laughing at him. This enraged him very much. ' See here,' he spluttered ' y're trespassing. Get off my land.' ' I'll go when I've admired your pretty face a little longer,' I jeered at him. He turned hastily, and ran towards the house. I watched him running, and then walked out of his field again, through the gap in the hedge by which I had entered it, and along the lane down the hill towards the valley I had gazed over the night before. The churl ! And this was free England. A man must no more be poor in the country than in London, then. I was so sick of it that I determined to go back to London as quickly LETTER XIV as I could, and strode down the hill towards the railway station in the village, which was only about a mile away, as quickly as I could. There I found that there would be a train in an hour, so I took a ticket, and spent the time having some breakfast at the village inn. And so I'm back in London, and I suppose I'll be there always. Poverty is a poor busi- ness in England. You must not sleep out, under pain and penalties of the law. I sup- pose if I had lit a fire I should have been liable to hanging. If I had asked for ' tucker ' I'd have been imprisoned. Truly, it is a crime to be hard up in England. Well, good night, old boy I'm pretty sick with everything just now. LETTER XV DEAR JIMMY, It may be that what I am about to say will seem to you a vain thing the mere im- pudent assertion of a ridiculous untruth but it is not so. It is quite strictly and unam- biguously correct. There may, of course, be a possibility that I am mistaken. I may be wrong in asserting that the grass in Regent's Park is green, or the clear sky overhead blue, or this paper, on which I scribble to you, white for we can be quite positive about nothing. But within the limits of human fallibility, my dear James, I honestly believe I have only lost my temper three times in my life. There it is, and it seems a preposterous thing to say, but all the same I am very sure that I am justified in saying it. Why I introduce such an irrelevant subject into this letter is simply because the third and latest occasion of my losing my temper was so recently as last night, and I 224 LETTER XV have been thinking about it ever since, and wondering why and how I came to lose it. I suppose every single individual may dif- ferently define the act of losing temper. There is such an infinite variety of it distributed amongst mankind that to attempt to delineate a type would be as futile as to describe a par- ticular face or figure as the example of the human form and aspect. Just as every man's thumb impression varies, so does every man's temperament differ in a small or great degree from every other man's. But there is a common acceptance of the meaning of the form of words that holds good everywhere. When a man ' loses his temper ' he departs or varies from his normal outlook upon life. Whether, like the old Norseman, he becomes * berserk,' like the Malay, runs amok, or, like some people, shuts up and gets sulky, and broods over the upsetting cause he becomes a different man to what he usually is. If we take it that his most usual condition is, for him, his 'sane' condition then when he loses his temper, he becomes a little insane. Some people become insane several times a day, others once a week, or once a month, or once a year ; others only a few times in their whole lives. Of this latter design, I think, the Architect fashioned me. 15 226 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET Whenever circumstance has caused me to become very much annoyed, or even enraged and murderous, I have nearly always been able to control myself, even to retain or assume some appearance of not being very much put out or upset. It is no virtue that I claim; I only note the fact. But for the fact I have always congratulated myself, always considered that I was a very fortunate being. And yet so strangely is each one of us fashioned and built and worked on each of the three occa- sions when 1 can recall becoming a little mad, a little chaotic and incoherent to myself, a little temporarily insane, it was about an absurd trifle that could not possibly matter, and was of no serious import whatever. So it was last night, and so it was on the two other occasions when such madness has overcome me. I will tell you. About ten years ago I was riding in from Western New South Wales to the coast. My caravan consisted of two horses, one carrying myself and the other the packsaddle with my blankets, saddle-bags, and general kit. I had left Condobolin, and was making as straight a line as I could for Goulburn, on the eastern side of the Dividing Ranges. My way led more or less up the Lachlan River, and my LETTER XV 227 first port, so to speak, was the town of Forbes. Forbes is a good sort of place, a cut above the average Western township, so I stabled the horses there for a day while I had one of them shod, and prepared myself for the track across the intervening plains and mountains. I was allowing myself four days for the ride, or, may be, five. At any rate, I purchased at a baker's shop four loaves of bread to last me until I should strike civilization, in the shape of Goulburn, once more. I also laid in some American tinned meat. We had not at that time realized that fingers and trouser buttons were to be found in the tins, and regarded them as containing very nutritious food packed in a convenient form. ' The Jungle ' has since enlightened the world, of course, but I must say that I have often staved off starvation on far more unsavoury rations than the products of Chicago. Now, some little time previously I had been sick run down, sleepless, a trifle melancholic, and generally ' off colour.' So a medicine man had prescribed for me a tonic, and this tonic seemed to be compounded very largely of ' the waters of bitterness.' It was the bitterest and sourest medicine that I had ever come across there was about it a lingering acidity 152 and disagreeableness that required the con- sumption of at least two pipefuls of tobacco to remove after taking one dose. I imagine that strychnine entered very largely into its composition, but there were other and fouler things beside, and it was one of those chemical preparations which, by its very unpleasantness, seemed to urge upon the patient who took it the imperative desirability of making strenuous efforts towards a very speedy and complete recovery, which would render its further absorption unnecessary. Well, here in Forbes, I found that I had run out of the beastly stuff, so I took the prescription to a chemist, and got him to make up for me two large bottles, which would last me during the ride across country. I started early in the morning from Forbes, and, when I was saddling up, packed my bags, as usual, with my worldly belongings and my ' tucker.' In each bag I placed, besides other evenly distributed portions of the load, two loaves of bread, and one bottle of the filthy medicine. I was riding Terence you re- member him and leading Tess, who carried the packsaddle. Well, when I had hitched up the big surcingle over the pack and lit my pipe, I sallied forth once more 'on the LETTER XV 229 wallaby track.' In my pocket I carried a few sandwiches for a mid-day meal, so that there would be no necessity to disturb the carefully arranged cargo which Tess transported. It was a hot day. The sun blazed down on me all the forenoon, and the flies were very plentiful, and the faint following breeze carried the little cloud of dust which the horses kicked up along the dry and droughty track just to keep pace with us. When we halted at noon it was for a rest that seemed at least well and toilsomely earned. We had a dinner interval of about three-quarters of an hour, while the horses fed on maize, and I boiled my quart pot (good old ' Jack Shae '), and ate the sand- wiches. Then we resumed our march, and jogged along all through the hot and thirsty afternoon. Sunset came, and still we plodded wearily up the Lachlan. I was looking for a river bend with some grass in it for the horses, wherein to camp for the night. But the big drought was on, and it was after dark before I found a suitable camping place, and I was hungry and thirsty and tired. I had been cheered for miles by the thought of a pot of tea and a feed of bread and meat and a pipe on the broad of my back beneath the clear 230 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET stars, and it was a heavenly sensation when at last I could slip down from the saddle, clear the horses' backs, rub them down with a handful of dry grass, and hobble them in an ideal little grassy bend of the river. And when I had done all that, and lit a fire, and put the pot on to boil, and pulled off my hot top-boots, I turned to one of the saddle-bags in order to fetch out material for a meal which, I felt, was well and honestly earned. I unstrapped it, and thrust in one of my hands to pull out one of the loaves, and im- mediately cut my fingers on broken glass, and became aware of two very moist and spongy loaves of bread. I looked closer, and found that the medicine bottle had broken, and that the bread had, like blotting-paper, soaked up all its horrible contents until they were sodden with them. I swore a little, and turned to the other bag and found that exactly the same thing had happened. Then, Jimmy, I lost my temper. I kicked, bootless, those bags all about the river bend. I kicked the quart pot off the fire. I threw sticks at the horses. I cast my hat on the ground, and danced upon it. I raved, I blasphemed, I used the obscenest and foulest language at my command. I scattered LETTER XV 231 the embers of the fire. If I had had a beard I would have torn it. In short, for the space of five minutes I went quite mad became a gibbering maniac, a howling idiot, a raving lunatic. I believe to this day that if there had been any one there to say, ' I told you so,' I should have slain him incontinently. For hah an hour I walked up and down on the grass in my stockinged feet and swore, and swore, and swore. So mad was I that I ate nothing, and lay down in my blankets, and went to sleep hungrily. Next morning I laughed, and I ate some of the medicated bread, but that night any doctor in the world would have certified me insane. I had to live on that nauseous bread for the rest of the journey, but all the time after it only seemed funny. Just for the moment the realization of my fate was more than I could bear, and it put me temporarily over the border-line. Up to then, Jimmy, I had never really known what it was to go through the phase of insanity which most people dignify by describing as ' a loss of temper.' The next time was in South Africa at the fight at Karee Siding. You weren't with the squadron that day, you old skrimshanker I think you were in the Bloemfontein Raadzaal 232 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET with enteric coming on. As you must often have heard, though, a division of infantry under the command of a certain gallant general who can swear anyone in the British army out of countenance attacked the Boers in front, while Johnny French, with two mounted bri- gades, rode round to take 'em in flank. Now, by that time, as you are aware, brother Boer had got into the habit of always expecting French and Co. to turn up somewhere near his rear, and, accordingly, he was prepared for us with four guns and a pom-pom, and he had the ranges marked. He was so much prepared for us that he let us come riding gaily up in close order to within less than one thousand yards of his position. It was a beautiful afternoon bright and clear, and bracing as only South African after- noons can be. We had started from the Glen station on the Modder River before dawn, and had made a wide detour all the morning, halted at mid-day, and then headed in at right angles to our former line of march. About three o'clock we realized suddenly and start- lingly that we had arrived. I had a box of matches common wooden matches that were made in Cape Town, and half the time only sputtered on the box, and, LETTER XV if they did light, seemed only to do so at their own sweet will. But they were very precious. I had paid one-and-ninepence for them to a brute of a Polish Jew who kept a little shop off Maitland Street, and had been glad to get the box at the price. I was the only man in the squadron who had any at all, and was con- sequently a very popular arid much-sought- after fellow. When the other chaps saw me about to light up they used to come crowding round with their little strings of cordite you remember how we used to pull the bullets out of the cartridges, and use the cordite for kind- ling purposes and beg a light. They knew it was hopeless to beg a match. Well, as we came riding up, like little inno- cents at play, to where the Boers meant us to come I think it was the astute Louis Botha who arranged the picnic I had just filled my pipe, and just pulled out my precious box of matches in order to light it. As usual, sundry of the other fellows sang out, ' Here, let's have a light, Johnny !' ' Give us a dip in, Corporal !' and so on, and were just gathering round, when plunk ! bang ! the first of the Boer shells burst in the leading troop, just in front of us, knocked half a dozen men and horses over like nine-pins that was where young 234 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET Billy Bonsor got killed and set all the rest of the horses in the squadron on their haunches, and every man Jack of us into confusion. My horse reared nearly on the top of me, and I dropped the precious, priceless box of matches in the long grass. Then the other guns whanged in shells through us, until the air seemed to fairly buzz with them. The pom-pom continuously sent strings of his little cracking missiles through our ranks, and a Maxim played over our heads like a hose. It was so sudden and unexpected that, for a few minutes, no one seemed to know where to go, what to do, or how to do it. There was not a panic it was just a sheer, startling surprise. The shell fire was terrific. And the way it got me, Jimmy, was just as the medicine-soaked bread on the Lachlan had done. I went mad. The artillery fire was forgotten. I just cursed and raved over that lost box of matches. I jumped off, and searched for them fruitlessly in the grass. I got knocked over by a riderless horse. My own horse, alarmed by another bursting projectile, reared back, and pulled me to my feet. I beat him with my fists about the head. 1 used all the bad language I knew of, and it was not until I saw poor old Alf Ackworth, who was after- LETTER XV 235 wards killed at Bronkhorst Spruit, and who was our troop leader, come galloping along with his sword drawn, and yelling for us to ' come on,' that I regained my senses and mounted, and rode with the others to the little rise, where we dismounted and went into the firing line with our carbines. It was not until I had dropped a Boer on a grey pony at seven hundred yards that I regained my temper. The shells didn't matter, the noise and confu- sion, and hot rifle-fire didn't matter. What mattered, and what sent me mad again, was the loss of that box of very inferior wooden ' tandstickors.' And now, last night, I lost my reason again, and for two blood-red minutes was once more a raving maniac. Thus it happened : I found myself in the evening wandering about the streets, luncheonless and supperless, with just one halfpenny in my left-hand trouser pocket. I was dreadfully tired and weary so weary that I could scarcely drag one aching leg after the other. My hip sockets seemed to be endowed with every extremity of pain, my knees were stiff, and my ankles ached, ached, ached until I could hardly bear to put my feet to the ground. God how they ached ! 236 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET About midnight, I was walking down the Strand hardly walking, indeed rather shuffling, dragging, sliding along the hard pavements, which seemed almost to radiate pain, to be red-hot with the torments of fatigue, and cruelly persecuting in their insistent and remorseless rockiness. Every curbstone that I bumped my toes into seemed to have assaulted me maliciously, every cab that nearly ran over me at the street crossings seemed to persecute me. I was dead beat, knocked out, done up and I only had a ha'penny. I passed by a little food shop nearly opposite to St. Clement's Danes. You would not know about these places nobody does, except by sight and hearsay, until he comes down to the stratum of society in which I find myself, for my sins. They are all over London, and they are a blessing to London. The food in them is good, and wholesome, and ridiculously cheap. (It is true that, when you only have a ha'penny, it seems ridiculously dear but that doesn't matter.) I knew that my limited resources would provide me with a small cup of coffee, and by Jove, I needed it. So I went in, obtained my coffee at the counter, and pro- ceeded to walk up the room with it. LETTER XV 237 The room has a row of little tables, with benches to match, down each side, and on this night, as is generally the case at the hour in question, it was filled with all sorts and con- ditions of men. Some of them were cabmen, some of them touts, some loafers, some fellows like myself who have ' seen better days,' some thieves, and some of that nondescript class too timid for actual crime, and too furtive to be honest, who ever infest the purlieus of Queer Street. As I stumbled down the room, worn out, and too weary to watch where I trod, my foot slipped, and I stumbled forward, with a fatal effect on the cup of coffee I carried. Nearly all of it was spilled. Instantly went up a roar of laughter from all who sat by. That, my James, sent me mad too. I drank up what was left of the coffee, put the cup down, and stood up in that synod of ragamuffins and cursed them until I could speak no longer. I gave them the lingual result of every experience I have had and you know that I have been vouchsafed opportunities of learning the intricacies of verbal expression. I think I excelled myself. The most prominent of the company I singled out for vituperative remark, and did them both justice and injustice. They seemed to 238 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET me to sit aghast at the flow of language I favoured them with. No one retorted. They all stared at me as if I had been a revivalist, or an ultra-fervent Salvation Army preacher, and made no answer. It was not until I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder, and heard excited threats of ejectment in my ear, that I ceased. ' 'Ere,' said the little man who served behind the counter a little stout chap with a bristling red moustache ' 'Ere get hout. I won't 'ave talk like that. Get out or I'll send the boy for a copper.' So I got out. Just outside I stumbled into a man I knew a journalist of Fleet Street and he ' lent ' me two shillings, and I got a bed ; and now I'm here in Regent's Park, chronicling for you, old James, the three occasions upon which I think I have really lost my temper. Forgive me for all this discursiveness. What made me do it was last night's episode, and the way it reminded me of the two other episodes that have been parallel to it in my life. Temper is a queer thing, and there is no accounting for it. It is nothing but lunacy. For my part there have been infinitely more trying experiences in my life than any of these three, which I have just laughed over. And LETTER XV 239 my point is this we none of us know what will ' take us on the raw,' how, when, or where we will be so taken, or just how much we contain a capacity for going mad, and running amok through all our philosophies and habits. Good night, old boy. LETTER XVI DEAR JIMMY, Yesterday morning, as the sun rose, I sat and shivered in the Green Park, underneath the front garden walls of that row of stately houses at the St. James's end. I had wandered in the streets all night between the City and Hyde Park had slouched wearily from mid- night to dawn through miles of silent thorough- fares, past leagues of sleeping domiciles, over infinite spaces of hard and jarring pavement, until my feet were shod with red-hot iron, and my knees were stiff from overwork, and I could almost have sworn that I heard my hip- sockets creak like rusty hinges, as I dragged one painful limb after the other. My body ached between the shoulders ; each swing of an arm seemed to rend and tear my dorsal muscles, and in the small of my back some malicious demon was boring with an auger. I was very hungry not with the first pangs of keen and healthy appetite, but with that 240 LETTER XVI 241 direful famishing sensation of weakness that comes from long fasting under overmuch exertion. And I was so tired and sleepy that, as I shuffled slowly along, sometimes my eyes involuntarily closed themselves, and I believe that I slept mechanically, as I walked, for spaces of a few seconds at a time. I came to the gates at the lower end of Piccadilly, just as a fresh-looking park-keeper was opening them. On his blue-coated chest were the two South African ribbons, and the sight of them though mine are in a pawnshop in Pimlico straightened me up a little after a painful fashion, and I endeavoured to look as if I were just out for an early morning walk, without succeeding very well, as I marched past him into the park. I don't suppose he was very much imposed upon by the tired loafer who was his first visitor yesterday morn- ing. Afterwards, indeed, I realized that he was not. I wandered out on to the grass aimlessly, found that it was drenched with dew that had the suspicion of autumn frost about it, and then turned back into the straight gravel path that leads from the gate I had entered by into the Mall, opposite Buckingham Palace. Two- thirds of the way down it I dropped into a 16 242 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET seat, thankfully and blasphemously. The curved backs of those deep-seated benches are delightfully luxurious when you have been afoot in London for six or seven hours. They are more comfortable and sumptuous than the deepest -seated leather arm-chair that ever graced a club smoking-room. But it was bitterly cold, and I shook and trembled with it as I rested. Only that abso- lute physical weariness overshadows all other bodily evils, I must have risen up and stamped to make some effort towards keeping warm. But I was too weary. Had it been that I had come to rest just then in a freezing chamber, I think I should have remained seated while I turned into a block of icy humanity. There is a degree of tiredness which no effort of will can lessen, and I had reached it. So I sat, with my legs stretched out, gazing across the green levels of the park towards Constitution Hill, wondering vaguely what was to happen. And a most extraordinary thing did happen. Nothing like it has ever happened to me before or since during my sojourn in Queer Street. It was a little miracle. My boots were leaking badly at this time LETTER XVI 243 not merely admitting the wet and the mud, but even giving hospitality to small pieces of gravel and grit which worked in through their well-ventilated soles, and afforded me laming tortures at intervals. For two hours past a small boulder had been boring into the ball of my left foot, and the last mile of my pilgrimage had been a pilgrimage of mediaeval penance. Because my socks were all in holes I had not, for some reason of improper pride, cared to pull my boot off in the street and exhibit the fact to the world that I was really ' down on my uppers.' For at most times I managed to preserve externally some semblance of respecta- bility, such as a fairly decent suit, and a collar not more than three days worn, could lend to my outward appearance. The flannel shirt of three weeks' service, or the tattered undervest of five, were not in evidence, and sometimes I managed to get my boots cleaned so that, on the whole, I was usually able to delude myself into a belief that people regarded me as one who sauntered about all day, and half the night, rather from choice than of necessity. But now, here in the park, was afforded me a quiet and almost private opportunity of relieving myself of a minor agony that had at the last developed into an overwhelming 162 244 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET misery. So, having rested deliciously for about ten God-sent minutes, I painfully called my aching muscles once more into action and sat up, lifting my left leg across my right, and with frozen fingers began to unlace my boot. To the sole of it was stuck a piece of paper. It had been pierced by a loose nail-head, where part of the sole was worn out. I pulled it off and was about to throw it away, when some- thing in the 'feel' of it arrested me. There was a certain peculiarity about its texture that had an air of aforetime familiarity, something that made me hold my breath as I unfolded it, and wonder fearfully if the suspicion I enter- tained as to its nature could really be well founded, or whether I had gone to sleep on the seat and was dreaming. I opened it, and saw at a glance that it was a 5 Bank of England note ! Suppose, Jimmy if it is possible to suppose such a thing yourself in my place. Imagine, if you can, that you are a homeless blackguard who, supperless, has walked about hard streets all through a chilly night in October the English October, I mean and at last, worn out, half frozen, hungry, hopeless, and dejected, that you have stumbled on the equivalent of LETTER XVI 245 five golden sovereigns, which, in their turn, are the equivalent for a time at any rate of food and clean linen, clean raiment and rest. What would you do, my James ? Well, as you can't reply to my question, I'll tell you. You'd begin by saying to yourself, ' This isn't mine.' And then you'd wonder what you'd do about it. And finally you'd take it to a police-station, or trudge wearily to the Bank of England with it, and put it in the way of reaching its proper owner. That's what you'd do you epitome of honesty and rectitude and straight dealing. And that's just what I didn't do, just what I never had the slightest intention of doing, or even the smallest inclina- tion to do, or suspicion that I might do. No, I smoothed it out, held it up to the light to see if it were genuine (not that I could very well tell), hastily folded it up, and stowed it away in an inside pocket, never once having the slightest idea of seeking out its owner and restoring it to him or her. I regarded its advent purely as a manifestation of redeeming grace upon the part of a Providence which had lately been peculiarly graceless in its dealings with Mr. John Mason. And I was quite sure that if Providence, through, perhaps, some temporary aberration, saw fit to make 246 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET me a present of a fiver, I was not going to make question of my title to it. Years and years ago, when I was a solemn and rather good little boy, I can remember seeing a shilling lying under the seat in one of those old steam trams that used to run in Sydney. It was in Elizabeth Street, just opposite to the corner of the park. There was no one else in the compartment, and my first instinct was to possess myself of the coin, and I reached out to get it. But just then my nobility of character whispered to my conscience, ' No, Johnny ; it is not yours. It is a sin to steal a pin. You will go to Hell and be burned up for ever and ever, amen, if you take that shilling.' So I didn't take it, and at the next stopping-place a Chinaman got in, and swooped on it, and put it in his pocket. And I remember quite well thinking how lucky it was to be a heathen, so that you could do anything wicked and sinful without its mattering, simply because you were a heathen, and had to go to Hell in any case. And now, how tolerant I had become in twenty-four years ! I really felt, as I pocketed the note, that I had at least profited by the broadening influences of life as it is lived. But, in a little time, Conscience did begin LETTER XVI 247 to trouble me. I reflected that there was a chance of my breaking the Eleventh Com- mandment. If the loser of the note had kept its number, and had sent it to the bank, I might be seriously undone. But then I reflected that he must have lost it here last night, or it would have been found before ; that people possessing fivers who sat in the park at night were probably there for no good purpose, and very possibly were intoxicated. And in view of the situation, the very desperate situation in which I found myself, I deter- mined to chance whether the loser had the number, and whether I were charged with having stolen it, or not. Against ' It is a sin to steal a pin,' I set another proverb which would have appealed to unregenerate con- temporaries of my extreme youth in the matter of the shilling in the tramcar * Findin's keeps.' Loose morality, dear Jimmy ; but the waistband of my trousers, and my waistcoat, were loose and slack. And I know of few besides yourself who would not be influenced by such circumstances. So, with an easy mind and an empty stomach, I fell asleep. I don't know whether you dream much, Jimmy I rather suspect not but I always 248 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET do, and as a general thing my dreams are pleasant ones, no matter what has come before or is to come after them. If I were going to be hanged in the morning I believe I would dream happy things during my last slumbers. I don't know that it is much of a privilege to spend visionary happy hours in the last few seconds before one awakens to the realization that one is not really happy ; but, next to the genuine article of happiness being vouchsafed to one, I think that the unreality of dreams does much to compensate for the unhappiness of life. Yesterday morning, all in twenty minutes, I lay in my frost-covered blanket on the High Veldt, smoking Boer tobacco, ere the time came for ' boot and saddle,' watching the clear stars paling in the coming dawn, listening to the horses shuffling and stamping at their pickets, seeing the dim shapes of them looming up all about in the half-darkness, wondering vaguely what of riding and shooting the day was to bring forth, infinitely happy and content, as we used to be in those stirring days in Africa. It was the morning of the second day's fighting at Klip River's Berg. All the recollection of the yesterday was clear and vivid in my mind the hard pounding LETTER XVI 249 their big guns had given us, the strenuous hanging on to the line of kopjes that had been our portion of the battle, the rip-rip and rattle of the rifle-fire, the glorious blue sky and bright sunshine. I lay and smoked and wondered why the sergeant - major was so slow about turning us out of our blankets. It seemed that I had lain about an hour, when I felt his familiar toe kicking at my feet. I turned over, and heard him say, ' Now then, wake up !' And I looked, expecting to see his honest ginger face, and saw instead the scowling visage of the park-keeper who had opened the gates by which I entered. He was stirring me with the toe of his boot. ' 'Ere,' he was saying, * you carn't sleep 'ere. D'ye think these parks is run for you blokes to kip in ?' I felt weak and humble, and was about to move abjectly away, when suddenly I remem- bered that 1 was the possessor of five pounds. It is wonderful how a knowledge of the posses- sion of wealth heartens one up. I immediately became fired with righteous indignation, ' told him off' for his impudence in such a fashion as made him gasp with astonishment, and wound up with a threat of reporting him to the authorities for his gross insolence. He 250 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET was quite polite when I had finished with him, and even touched his cap, and said : ' Beg pardon, sir.' Then I strolled off, swinging my stick in as jaunty a fashion as was consistent with the aches and pains that racked my tired carcass. But I was something like the man with the million -pound note. My bit of paper was about as useless to me in the immediate present as if it had been a crossed cheque. Twelve coppers would have been of infinitely greater value just then. How I was to change it I did not know. It was certain that I could not do so in the Green Park. So I wandered down into the Mall and along to the Horse Guards' Parade and round into Westminster, and stood staring at the Abbey for full five minutes before inspiration came to me. Then I made straight for Waterloo Station across the river, hurried to the booking-office, asked for a first-class ticket to Portsmouth, and, to my great amazement, received change for the note, and knew that the day was won. There was a refreshment-room open, and I fed. It would be nearer the truth to say that I guzzled coffee and rolls almost to bursting- point. A girl who had tousled hair and was only half awake served me. She was wholly LETTER XVI 251 awake with astonishment at the size of my repast before I left that room which was not for about an hour and stood and watched me drink my fifth cup of coffee as if I were some strange wild beast. I did not go to Portsmouth. I went to an hotel near the station that is much patronized by junior naval officers and marine subalterns, hired a room, turned in all standing, and slept like a log until three o'clock in the afternoon. And now, Jimmy, with but eleven shillings of that excellent Bank of England note remain- ing in my pocket, do I solemnly or perhaps flippantly recount to you a piece of folly on my part which, even to me, seems to be about as amazing a piece of folly as I have ever indulged in. To you it will savour rather of sheer insanity than of ordinary folly, and with me, also for a time, there has rested a suspicion that privation and cynical despair had a little turned my head. But, reflecting upon it now, I can see that my performance of last evening was quite normal quite thoroughly in keeping with the consistent foolishness that has almost wholly characterized my career. You are doubtless cognizant of the rather coarse and vulgar simile which likens a man returning to abandoned uncleanness to a dog returning to 252 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET his well, I won't complete it, but in the present case it seems to me a peculiarly apt simile. Having some four pounds and odd shillings, I returned, as it were by instinct, to those unhappy and unclean things with which I had become unduly familiar during the time when I was approaching the wider end of Queer Street. For such things I have always been conscious of a distinct and definite loath- ing, and yet, for some strange reason which is not plear to me, I have always somehow drifted into them when worried, remorseful, or hag- ridden with anxiety. Heaven knows why if Heaven takes notice of such affairs I don't. It may be I know that in my own case it is so that the indulgence in wild, mad out- breaks of alcoholic dissipation, unholy orgies, wretched shameless shamefulnesses, has some- thing in it of the nature of a drug. Perhaps it makes one forget wretchedness and unhappi- ness, as opium is said to make one forget the real existence of such conditions of life. Perhaps it takes the place of physical action as a relief from the intolerable monotony of mental misery. Maybe it is just the outcome of pure, unadulterated ' cussedness,' but I don't necessarily think it is so. There must surely be a physiological reason for it, if not a psycho- LETTER XVI 253 logical. We are as God has made us. Some men find a solace in prayer, others in hard work, others in drugs, others in alcohol alone- some, like myself, in the reckless perpetration of follies that are concretely inexcusable. For my own species I make no apology. I merely record a strange fact one of the strangest and most incomprehensible in the whole strange incomprehensibility of human existence. I am not going into details as to that un- hallowed evening. They are, regarded by myself afterwards, too sordid and distasteful to set down in writing. It is merely with a wish to emphasize for your edification, old James, the fact that, of all the damned fools (in the fullest sense of the words) whom John Mason has ever come across, John Mason is the very damnedest, that I make mention of it to you here. When people tell you in the aftertime that your friend Johnny was a fool, you can be quite safe in assuring them that Johnny was perfectly well aware in his lifetime that such was an incontrovertible fact. The only thing he would really feel hurt at being represented as is a hypocrite. And I don't know why even that should hurt him. I went and bought a clean flannel shirt of a dark colour, two collars, two handkerchiefs, 254 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET and a pair of socks. I meant also to purchase boots, but left that until I should have an intact pair of socks to expose to the bootmaker. Then I found some municipal baths, boiled myself, put on the greater part of my new wardrobe, made a parcel of my discarded raiment, carefully forgot it in the baths, and strode forth into the world once more. I had no intention, no cold-blooded inten- tion, of perpetrating the follies which I subse- quently did perpetrate. They seemed to get themselves perpetrated automatically. But I had nowhere to go to in particular, and walked aimlessly across the river by way of Waterloo Bridge, back into the whirlpool of London. And there it commenced. After three or four drinks, 1 became Mr. Mason again. After seven or eight I had no cares, no anxieties, no debts, no existence in Queer Street no anything but a profound joyousness in existence, an exhilarating con- tempt for past privations, a great and lofty appreciation of the magnificent way in which 1 had overcome all difficulties and disadvan- tages, and a very fine and noble opinion of myself altogether. I forgot about the boots, even though I had the dilapidated pair cleaned that I was wearing. I forgot everything but LETTER XVI 255 the fact that I, who had been poor and starving, was now affluent and well fed. I bought a halfpenny paper for sixpence, and gave two shillings to a sad-looking woman who vended matches. I was, in short, a very generous, kindly, and benevolent millionaire. Some time in the evening I dined at a good restaurant, and washed my dinner down with a bottle of good burgundy. I had some liqueurs after that, and then I remember going out into the street, and very indistinctly that I had some more drinks. And then, I sup- pose, a great many things happened ; but I have no first-hand recollection of them, and a blank a hiatus comes into my life until about five o'clock on the following morning, when I awakened hi strange surroundings, with a confused impression that I was dead. But I will write the rest of it to-morrow. The day's events have been trying and wear- ing, and I must go to bed. I am in the Blackfriars Road again, and not a little thank- ful that I am there and nowhere else. LETTER XVII DEAR JIMMY, I feel better this morning less ashamed of myself, and more amused with the recollection of my peculiar adventure than I did last night. You will get these two letters pretty close together in fact, by the same mail but be pleased to consider that they represent two entirely different frames of mind. Last night I was rather unhappy, my head still ached, I blush to say that I felt somewhat repentant. This morning I am as graceless and unregenerate as ever so much so that I hardly even regret the fact that but eight-and-sixpence remains to me out of the Divine gift of which I was the recipient the day before yesterday. I have come to look at the incident and its sequel in an entirely philosophic fashion. If 1 had sat down in the Green Park on the seat to right or left of the one where I found the note, well, I wouldn't have had it, and I wouldn't be worth even eight-and-sixpence at the present 256 LETTER XVII 257 moment, and I would have missed a peculiarly interesting experience. The latter I will relate to you, and you shall judge whether or no it was worth such a fortune as I squandered in the getting of it. But before I proceed to a recital of the facts of this singular adventure of mine, before you become fully possessed of the natural horror and disgust which a knowledge of it must inevitably, in the first instance, instil into your mind, let me, my sad old James, point out one or two matters in connexion with it that may possibly help to alleviate your distress. Not that I could suppose you would ever be likely to regard the episode with any other feeling than that which influences me in subsequent contemplation of it one of regretful distaste for such a thing but I may be able to induce you to believe, for your own comfort, that it is neither a very rare nor unusual experience in London. What I mean is that there are scores and hundreds of men who would be very much put out if they were not taken for gentlemen whom you would have no hesita- tion in entertaining at your club, or inviting to your house, who have undergone that self- same experience. I do not think, myself, that anyone who was really a gentleman, in the 17 258 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET right and proper sense of the word, could by any possibility come into such a situation as would render the undergoing of it necessary ; but then, Jimmy, a gentleman is a great rarity. I have met in my life about half a dozen. There may have been more, but I could not recognize them. You are one, I think. I never was, nor could I ever be. Well, as I told you in what I wrote last night, I awoke yesterday morning amid strange and unfamiliar surroundings, with an aching head, and a confused impression that I was dead. Why the latter, I do not know, unless it was because I found myself lying in a vault- like place that was faintly illuminated by dim twilight, was very silent, and unconscionably cold. It was a long, narrow, high, sepulchral place, and I rested upon a kind of bench or shelf that stretched along one side, raised about two feet from the ground. Facing me, high up in the wall, and near the ceiling, was a little glazed window, through which the new daylight struggled for entry, with but partial success. The atmosphere was laden with the reek of disinfectants. I got to my feet, rather shakily, and walked the length of the tomb. The walls were tiled, or lined, with some sort of glazed brick. The LETTER XVII 259 end near which I had lain on the bench had a door in it, a plain rectangle of stout build painted a dark brown or chocolate colour, and near the top of it was a square aperture that looked out on to some sort of passage or cor- ridor, in which shone a light. I went up to the door, and pushed it with my hand. It did not yield. I looked for a door-handle, but there was none, nor was there any sign of an inner lock or fastening. I was dazed, puzzled, astonished. I had never been in a place like this before. For quite two minutes I stood staring at the fast-closed door, seeking vainly to recollect how I had come here. Then, in a sudden flash of understanding, the mysterious apartment explained itself to me. * My God I'm in a cell !' Figure to yourself, my brave James as the French would say my feeling of horror at this so alarming situation. I sat down heavily in the middle of the bench, and there was a lump in my throat, and a sensation of nausea below my waistcoat, and my lips became dry, and I could almost imagine that I felt myself turning pale, and my hair standing on end. Heavens 1 What could I have done ? Perhaps I had killed some one ! God knew. I had no recollection of anything whatsoever, 172 260 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET beyond the misty one that I had had some drinks somewhere, after a vague and imperfectly remembered dinner. My mind was a complete blank as to all that had transpired between those dim and far-off drinks, and my awakening a few minutes before. I was stunned, stupefied, incapable of either amazement or any other deep feeling. My mouth was parched as from the effect of some terrible fear. I could hardly think of or realize anything. Good God ! In a cell! And what on earth could this place be ? Where was it ? Was it a jail, or a police- station, or what ? There was silence every- where, now and again broken by some distant footsteps echoing on stone floors. Why did not some one come and tell me what it all meant ? Perhaps I had lost my memory for months, and had been tried and sentenced and found guilty of some bad kind of crime, without being conscious of what was going on. I had read of such things. The thought scared me almost to death. I sweated with the agony of the apprehension of the unknown. I got up and paced nervously up and down, and other and more dreadful ideas chased one another through my seething brain. For ten minutes I must have tramped slowly LETTER XVII 261 up and down that narrow dungeon, afraid, tremulous, bewildered. Quite suddenly I noticed an electric bell button on the wall beside the door. Almost literally I flung myself at it, and pressed until my forefinger was numb and cramped. No answering buzzing ring came from anywhere, near or distant. I panted, and tried again, pressing for a longer time, and still with no result. ' It must be broken,' I thought miserably. And so I sat down disheartened. But the silence and suspense became intoler- able. I could not bear it. So I got up and kicked persistently at the bottom of the door. After a long series of kicks I paused to listen. No sound came, no footsteps approached. I was desperate now, and had no scruples as to whether I might be aggravating my original offence or not, so I began again, and for a good five minutes made the cell, and, I hoped, the world without, echo with the noise I made. But it did not seem to have any effect, and at last I desisted and sat down, burying my head in my hands, and more than ever a prey to all unhappiness. Suddenly a harsh voice startled me. ' Now then, now then ! What are you making that damned row for ?' 262 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET I looked up, and saw framed in tl^e opening in the door a fierce red face ornamented with a bristling red moustache, and two steely grey eyes that glared angrily at me. ' If you get kickin' the door any more, I'll come an' take your boots away,' announced the ruddy visage. I jumped up, and went to the door. * I say,' I asked excitedly and imploringly, 4 1 say what's this place ? How did I come here ? What's it all mean ? Oh I say don't go away. Just half a minute, please f ' Was that all you wanted ?' and the grey eyes radiated anger. ' Well, you keep quiet, and you'll find out all about it. Now mind what I'm tellin' you. Keep quiet.' The face withdrew, and I was abandoned to my pleasant reflections once more. Momen- tarily, I had an idea of again assailing the door, and demanding some explanation of my position. Wasn't there a thing called a ' Habeas Corpus ' Act ? and wouldn't some one have to give a reason for that infernal door being closed upon me ? But when I thought of those fierce eyes in that red, resolute face my courage oozed, and I could only groan, and realize that I was in a pretty awful situa- tion, and commiserate myself. LETTER XVII 265 It may seem to you, Jimmy, that it was not such a desperate and fearful situation after all that I was making a great moan over what in itself was nothing so very bad. But there is this about it. It is a most awful and dreadful thing to realize that you are confined, that you are limited and barred and restrained, that you may not open your door and go out. I have always hated to see a bird in a cage, a dog on a chain, or an animal behind bars. I have always felt that if I were to be so restrained myself I should go mad in a day and die in a week. The mere sense of restriction is the thing the knowledge that the whole world is not wide and free to you, that you must breathe air that has filtered through stone walls, and see by light that is second-hand. And more than that that men fashioned like yourself, having in greater or less degree all your emotions and your sensibilities, little better and little worse than yourself, are keeping you from your God-given heritage of light and air and liberty. That is where the saddle galls, my Jimmy. I remember once being taken over the Con- vict Prison on He Nou, in the harbour of Noumea, in New Caledonia, the French penal settlement in the South Pacific. It was the 264 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET place where they kept the more desperate of the prisoners the wild beasts who were danger- ous to their [keepers, their fellow -prisoners, and themselves. We were shown some dark cells which were used for the taming of the more refractory cases. It certainly tamed them, we were told. They used to get sen- tences of five years in the dark. Up to that time there had only been one survivor of the whole awful term, and of course he was a raving maniac when he came out. The others generally died in a couple of years. Now I felt almost as bad yesterday morning as if I had been in a black cell on He Nou. I felt that a day would drive me mad. It may be a thing that one can get used to, but I think I would prefer to die than to spend a year in prison. And yesterday morning I did not know that I had not done some awful thing that might mean my spending an even longer period under restraint. So don't wonder, my James, whether I was a little bit unhappy. I was. I heard footsteps coming down the corridor again, and went to the little window in the door and looked out. It was not my last acquaintance, but a great bulky man with a broad, good-humoured face, who was coatless LETTER XVII 265 and collarless. Taking heart of grace from his benevolent aspect, I hailed him. ' I say !' I called with a note of entreaty in my voice. He had gone a little way past me, but stopped and turned back, and came up to the door grinning cheerfully. 1 Hullo, phwat's your throuble, thin ?' he asked good-naturedly. ' Oh, bedad, you're th' lad that was kickin', aren't ye ? Now phwat made ye make all that row ?' * Oh, I say, look here ; where am I ? What have I done ? Do tell me !' ' Gammon ye don't know where ye are ! Sure ye've bin here many's th' toime before now haven't ye ?' ' No, I'm blest if I have. Don't even know what the dashed place is, or where it is. Where is it ?' ' Why, it's Vine Street, me bhoy.' ' What Vine Street Police-station ?' ' That's it, sonny. That's jist where ye're fixed up this minit, as snug as a bug in a rug.' ' Good Lord !' I ejaculated, and the giant laughed. ' What on earth for ?' ' Well, I think ye was afther buyin' up Pic- cadilly last night too big in th' head t' go home, like a wise man. An' av coorse, whin a gintleman ab-so-lutely rayfuses to go home 266 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET why, he puts up as a gin'ral thing at this here hotel of ours. Now, how d'ye loike th' bidroom accommodation ? Wur th' sheets aired, now ? Mebbe th' dure's a bit stiff in th' openin' but they're noice rooms, ain't they ?' I couldn't help laughing. The man was so good-humoured and cheerful. I asked him what was going to happen to me. * Well,' he replied slowly, ' ye '11 go before the mag'strite at ten o'clock an' ye may be hanged, but I fancy yell get off wid a loife sintence.' Some one called up the corridor. * Comin', sorr. Aw yell be all right. Cheer up. A few shillin's av a foine if y've never rayly been here before. Keep a bould face, me son.' And he departed hurriedly. So that was it ! I was run in. At any rate, though it wasn't a pleasant realization, I had realized the worst. I had not, at least, as- saulted anybody, or killed a man, or stolen anything. History was made quickly after that. My Irish friend brought me a basin of water to wash in, and then a mug of tea. He offered to get me some breakfast for a shilling, but though I had about fifteen shillings, I found I had no appetite, and accordingly refused his kindly offer. About nine o'clock my door LETTER XVII 267 was opened, and I was ordered to ' come this way,' and was conducted into a courtyard where stood that gloomy two-horsed vehicle known as ' Black Maria,' and I was driven in it to a police-court, and there fined five shillings, with the alternative of one day's imprison- ment. I elected not to take the imprisonment, paid five shillings to a sergeant who lived in a little office at the back of the court, and stepped out into the world again a sadder, a wiser, and a very surprised man. As you will notice, I hurry over this part of the episode. It was the least amusing, but the most interesting. I had never seen a police-court before in England, and do not wish to do so again ; but even apart from my own personal interest in it, I was pretty deeply impressed. I do not think my trial and conviction could have lasted more than two minutes. In a conversation with the policeman who had arrested me held in a passage filled with other criminals, policemen, ladies of the town, and detectives I had been advised to plead guilty, say I was sorry ' An' maybe he won't do nothink to you.' He was a very decent chap, that bobby. There was no spite about him, though he told me that I had given him 268 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET a good deal of the rough side of my tongue, besides having been particularly insistent that he should join me in combat. It appears that he did this latter by putting into practice upon me a ju-jitsu hold which must have been particularly effective. I expressed my regrets to him that I had no recollection of his prowess. Afterwards, when he was giving evidence, he was asked whether I had made use of any bad language, and perjured himself readily on my behalf. He said that I merely made use of the expression ' damn,' whereas I am certain that if I swore at all I said many worse things than a mere ' damn.' If you had been in London during the last few years you could not have failed to become familiar with the name of a certain magistrate who is constantly quoted and reported in the newspapers, and who is the possessor of a very pretty judicial wit. He has, moreover, written an excellent book of reminiscences. It would be to belittle his kindly humour to call him the * funny man ' of the metropolitan bench, but he is certainly the jester of it. In the newspaper reports, when one reads ' laughter ' after the quoted remarks of a judge, an official, or a magistrate, one naturally thinks of a class of little boys laughing at the heavy waggish- LETTER XVII 269 ness of a schoolmaster. But this particular magistrate is usually gracefully and genuinely witty. When I heard in the passage, where I waited my turn, that he was the presiding deity in this court I was a little alarmed, lest he should see subject for mirth in my- self, and, on the other hand, a little pleased with the opportunity of observing him at work. But I did not see much. My policeman suddenly said, ' Come along.' I went through a door, and came into a large and evil-smelling room, full of people. At one end of it sat the magistrate. He was writing when I came in and took up a position behind a little railing (the dock, I presume). Then blue funk, stage fright, an attack of nerves took posses- sion of me, so that I saw nothing much of anything for a few seconds. I heard my name called loudly, together with an announcement that I was charged with being 'drunk and disorderly,' and a request to know whether I pleaded ' guilty ' or ' not guilty.' 1 murmured ' guilty.' The policeman recounted his adven- ture with me. Then the magistrate looked at me in a kindly way and asked if I had any- thing to say. Having a curious obstacle in my throat that prevented articulation, I shook 270 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET my head. ' Been here before ?' queried the magistrate of a sergeant who stood beside me. ' No, y'r wushup,' was the reply. * Five shillings, or one day,' said the Bench. ' Come along !' said the sergeant, and I came along, paid the five shillings, and, as I have said, left that accursed building, somewhat sad, very much surprised, and on the whole rather dazed by the rapidity with which the ordeal was carried through. Well now, Jimmy, don't you think that Johnny Mason legitimately appropriates the cake for being a prize idiot ? Isn't he just about the last thing in hopeless asses ? Doesn't he deserve the proverbial leather medal with a hole in it, for being a very worthy, wholesale, and uncompromising fool ? John Mason thinks so, anyhow. I have always had an idea that everything was worth seeing once, at least, and that any experience was worth undergoing, provided that one came out of it safely, and with not too serious consequences. I have learned a great deal, in one way or another, as to various aspects of the many variations of life. ' Battle, murder, and sudden death ' I have been privileged to study at first hand, and to draw lessons from them which have never profited LETTER XVII 271 me very much. But I am quite sure that I found little that was romantic, edifying, or interesting about this last of my experi- ences. There is only this much that I can recognize as being gleaned from it on my part an intense admiration for the patience and forbearance of the paid magistracy of London. If you had seen the scum of the earth who awaited trial at that police-court, breathed the poisonous atmosphere of the place for even the three-quarters of an hour that covered my sojourn in its precincts, had your mind filled with the sordidness and beastliness of it all, you would quite readily agree with me that, to dispense the even-handed justice that those magistrates do dispense, bespeaks on their behalf the possession of almost heroic personal qualities. Were I a magistrate, the very stink of the place, moral as well as physical, would turn me into a raging tyrant, desirous of hanging, burning, or crucifying all who came before me, and, failing that, of giving them the very stiffest and most merciless sentences that lay within my power to give. How the particular magistrate whose acquaintance I made can find it in him to be humorous, I don't know. 272 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET But perhaps he recognizes that if he were not so it would be impossible for him to exist in such an atmosphere. Well good-bye for the present, old James Don't be too shocked. LETTER XVIII DEAB JIMMY, A merry Christmas to you ! Quite how long it is since I wrote to you last I can hardly say. But the untoward incident of the police-court occurred some time in late October, and as this is Christmas Eve, that makes it about two months ago for I cannot remember having written to you since just after the sorry event I mention. You must forgive me, old boy. I've had the father and the mother of all bad times in the interval two solid, mournful months of it and I've not till to-night had the chance of sitting down for any length of time, or the peace, or the leisure, or the pen, ink, and paper necessary to the making of a letter. I am in Blackfriars Road again now but it is long since I could afford such extravagant luxury. My home has been where I passed the night, and much more often in the streets than out of them. In fact, I may say that, 273 18 274 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET like the snail, I have earned my house upon my back. My only roof has been the crown of my hat at least, the only roof I could ever rely upon having over me from one day to another. It blew away once, too down by Tower Bridge but a kind-hearted waterman rescued it for me, and restored it. Otherwise I should have had to go unprotected from the weather, and although hatlessness may be a guarantee against baldness, it is not a condition that I should much recommend in conjunction with homelessness, hunger, and a London winter. To be quite plain, Jimmy, I think I have come * right down to it.' At first in Queer Street, and for a long time, I managed to keep myself, so far as an exterior presentment was concerned, fairly decent. To any but a close inspection my collar was not too obviously overworked, my clothes were neat, and not ragged, and my boots, if not watertight, were, at any rate, not disreputably eloquent as to my condition. Policemen and park-keepers used to reply with a ' sir ' when I made inquiry of them a thing I often did, simply to test my apparent status in their regard. But now I do not wear collars, my clothes are greasy and worn out, and my boots cry my dishonour to LETTER XVIII 275 a callous world. It is long since they were cleaned, and, indeed, I fear that the friction of a pair of blacking-brushes would hasten their dissolution even more rapidly than the constant work they get. I have no overcoat, and if I had, and any pawnbroker would give me any- thing for it, I would convert it into food. I have got used to the cold, but I cannot pull myself into becoming altogether a fasting man. I can cough and shiver, and yet keep alive but I must eat sometimes. The fact that I sit not far from a bright fire, and am sheltered from the cold weather that prevails just now, is owing to a singular encounter, and one which I had tried with all my might to avoid, that I had a few days since. There was a fog on a black, opaque density of fog such as you only get in London. At noon it was darker than during any ordinary night so dark and thick that the street lamps were hidden overhead, lighted shop windows were almost invisible from the outer edge of the pavement, and all the traffic of the Strand, where I found myself, was held up from the Law Courts to Trafalgar Square. Nothing could move that had wheels, and people crawled and groped their ways along, dived at crossings 182 in a spirit of reckless adventure, and collided with one another, and lamp-posts, alternately. But for the rawness and discomfort of it the fog made little material difference to me, for I had nowhere to go and nothing at all to do except to hang on to the shreds of life that were left to me. And why I wanted to do that I have no idea. So I just cruised slowly along, apathetically indifferent to it all, and wearily careless as to where I went or what might happen. I had spent the night before in a Salvation Army shelter, and had had a little food before leaving it in the morning, so that I was not quite in the very feeblest con- dition I might have been. Somehow I reached Trafalgar Square. Here there was chaos. Great ruddy, flaming * flares ' were alight at the corners, but even they were hardly visible until you came quite close to them. Yells and shouts resounded on all sides. Every now and then fog-signals exploded on the railway-bridge at Charing Cross, and sounded like distant cannon. Some- times a policeman loomed up out of obscurity, called out something, and was swallowed up again in the gloom. For want of anything better to do I went into the road, and presently found myself groping about the base of the LETTER XVIII 277 Nelson column. Coming round one corner of it, I ran into a little fat man wearing a fur overcoat and a silk hat, and he was actually crying. He carried a small leather bag in one hand, and when I collided with him he dropped it, and screamed in the most curiously comical terrified way. ' Oh, my tear man tond't rop me, I peg you kive me dot pag. Dere is nodings in id!' I knew the brute by his voice, and was minded to run, for it was a little beast of a Jew money-lender, whose spider's parlour was in Regent Street, and he had been my largest and most merciless creditor, and I hadn't had the least desire to see him for some time past. I kicked his bag towards him, and turned to go into the fog, and out of his sight, but he clutched me by the arm. ' Helbp me !' he whimpered ; ' I must get to Goutts' Bank. Here, I gif you a sovereign now, and anoder if you get me dere.' He was in a perfect frenzy of terror, but he slipped a sovereign into my hand, and so I led him back across the road with difficulty, and into the Strand. He whimpered and cowered all the way, and clung to me tightly with one hand, while he grasped the bag with the other. By going cautiously I found Coutts', and did 278 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET not overshoot it, and as soon as the little swine recognized the door he dived into it, and left me on the pavement. I laughed, for I knew Mr. Coltstein well, and was quite aware that the other sovereign was not likely to be forth- coming. So I groped away in case he should come out and accuse me of robbing him of the one I had had. I suppose the little tinker had a horde of his ill-gotten gains in the bag, and I felt sorry that I had not taken it from him and thrown it in the river. But still I had succeeded in negotiating another ' loan ' from him, and that was a very wonderful miracle. It is through the generosity of Mr. David Coltstein, therefore, my Jimmy, that I am at present sheltered and fed and warm and writing to you. But, my James, it has been a time a very terror of a time and I think that it has done for me. My papers have been sent for during these two months, looked over, and my term of further life decided upon. That is about it. This is the last festive season I shall rejoice in, so I must make the most of it. I am very weak, and, I think, very ill. But there is no use in pulling a long face, and whether I'm to go under in the street, or here, or in a hospital, or wherever it is to be well, I won't grumble LETTER XVIII 279 very much, or be too plaintively sorry for myself, or feel that I could do with a much longer share of life. I think I'll be content enough to go when the time comes. The very toughest of all the experiences of Queer Street that I've had have fallen to my lot in these two months. What went before doesn't seem to count now. It was trivial in its hardship almost without hardship com- pared to this period. For it was summer then, and now it's winter, and has been more or less winter since I wrote before. And what winter means to us poor devils who are in the narrow and dilapidated end of the street, you'd almost need to see for yourself before you could under- stand. For when hunger and weariness ally them- selves with cold you get a combination that takes some beating. In the summer months a night on the streets was bad enough. The aching fatigue that besets one, the weary despair that drives one through the friendless, silent thoroughfares, the gnawing hunger all these are spirit-breaking experiences. But add cold to them frosts that numb your feet ; chill winds that whistle round corners and lash you about the ribs ; sleet that drives into your face until it aches with 280 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET pain ; rain that drenches your thin clothes ; slushy snow in the roadway that soddens your inadequate footwear and then you have a condition of Hell, my James, that out-hells the worst of Infernos. And remember that those who endure this Hell endure it in the richest and most luxurious city in the world. Remember that these poor lost souls are surrounded on every side by evidences of warmth, and comfort, and good cheer. They pass through worlds of happi- ness, and ease, and superfluous luxury, which are as far removed from them as if, instead of round London, they tramped their weary marches round the North Pole. Every lighted window is a taunt to them, every flaming tavern doorway a provocation, every well- clad man and woman a bitter enemy. I have had a night in the snow. I have had many nights in the rain. And all this time I have been cold, cold, cold. What it is to be always cold I can hardly explain. You must go through it to realize it. The astonishing thing about it is that any human being can endure it I mean that his physical constitu- tion can stand it. Before I had been through it myself, I would not have believed that I could outlast it. But we are tougher than we LETTER XVIII 281 know, and take a good deal more killing than we think we can put up with. All the day before my 'white night' the rain had pelted down. I had sheltered most of the time under a railway arch in a narrow passage that runs up from Farringdon Road to the Old Bailey. It is a dark, squalid thoroughfare, and draughty enough, but it was some kind of shelter, and I managed to keep dry. The few pence I had I was saving for some sort of housing in the night. In the morning I had had a breakfast which cost one penny a small mug of coffee, and a slice of bread and by nightfall I was famishing for food. I think I had sevenpence. Towards dark the wind changed, and the rain ceased, but the sky was cloudy and wild- looking when I left my lair, and the wind cut like a knife. I wandered up into Smithfield, and there, passing by a coffee-shop, I could stand it no longer, and I went in and squan- dered fourpence in bread and coffee. It was ruinous extravagance, and meant that I must go unhoused through the night, but I could not help it. I sat there for nearly two hours over the consumption of two mugs of coffee, and about half a loaf of bread, and when I came out it was into a driving snowstorm. 282 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET Of the horrors of that night, even now, I hate to think, and I dread that I may have to go through them again. I used to fancy that London never looked so beautiful as when roofs, and hedges, and parks, and open spaces had been clad in a white mantle that it was the only time when the dingy place looked beautiful at all. And I do still but I know better now what a snowstorm means for the thousands who do not look at it through windows, nor turn from a contemplation of the eddying flakes to the cheerful glow of a bright fire. . All night I walked about not so much in the hope of keeping warm by means of exer- cise, as in an involuntary struggle to remain awake and alive. I trudged for hours through Fleet Street, up the Strand, by Westminster, through Chelsea, right out to Hammersmith. And then I trudged back again. Three times in the night I drank hot coffee at stalls and I think those drinks must have saved my life. Once, in a dark back street, I stumbled over a prostrate body half buried in the snow, and did not even stop to see whether there was life in it or not. I was too weary to feel pity or sympathy for anyone, too badly used myself to care what usage Fate had meted out to any v .LETTER XVIII 283 others. All my movements were automatic. I did not think. I merely felt two things the bitter cold and the necessity of walking. And I walked, and walked, and walked through an eternity of snow, until daylight came half insensible, dazed, numbed in mind and body. Somebody stopped me after daylight for the life of me I could not tell you whether it was a man or a woman, or where it happened and gave me some money. I don't even know whether I thanked the donor. All T remember of those dim hours is the sight of snow everywhere. I must have gone a little off my head, for I had a vague notion that I was an Arctic ex- plorer, and that if I went on, and on, and on, I should find something that I was looking for. And so I just went on, and on, and on. The first distinct thing I recollect is the inside of a coffee-shop in Whitefriars Street, where I drank some hot coffee, and ate more bread, and coughed and shivered all the time. It was a dreadful night, Jimmy a dreadful night, and, as I have said, I think that night has killed me. Christmas Eve 1 A merry Christmas again to you, old boy. I don't suppose T shall ever see you again 284 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET I know I shan't but that doesn't make my wish less real and earnest. Many of them, too ! I'll not have another, and I'm thankful for it. Heaven knows whether I'll ever write to you again. I have paid for my bed for a week out of Mr. Coltstein's sovereign, and I have nine shillings left. So I shall have five nights of shelter, anyhow, and can reckon on living for that time at least. After that perhaps another night in the snow. Maybe some one will trip over my body in a side street, and grumble at having to step over me. I don't know, and I care very little. All I know is this I am tired, tired, tired. Good night, old boy. LETTER XIX DEAR JIMMY, Again, it is ages since I wrote to you centuries almost and again I have the same excuse as before. The world has been very hard with me harder than ever and yet, in the end, it has been very good, and I have less reason to grumble than to be thankful. This is my last night in Blackfriars Road. I shall never come here again with a shilling, in pence and halfpennies, and the sad know- ledge that if I would rest I must not sup, and that if I would sup I must not rest. All that is over. I am to leave Queer Street. No more starvation in the midst of plenty, my James. No more weary tramping of the streets through the night. No more semi-conscious wanderings in the dawn. No more cold and wet. No more dirtiness, and unshavenness, and squalor. I am to begin a new life to come up out of Hell, to live amongst men and women again, to be some 285 kind of a man myself but, above all, to live. You can't know what it means to me. No one can who has not been in Queer Street in the kind of living death that passes for life at its narrow end. Hardly anyone ever escapes, but I am going to, old boy, I am going to be the one in the thousand who does. And I'll see you again, and some day laugh over the strange experiences of the last twelve months, and tell you much more about them than I've been able to tell you in these scrubby letters, and every now and again you and I will go and pull some poor devil out of the street just as I have been myself pulled out. How strange and wonderful it is ! A week ago there was no hope for me, seemingly not the very faintest chance that I would ever leave the street and live in the world again. And now there is the certainty of it. There will be blue skies again, sunlight, laughter all the common good things of the world that you never know the value of until you have lost them. I am ten years younger than I was last week, and, although I am very ill, as light-hearted as a schoolboy looking forward to his holidays. Hooray old Jimmy hooray ! And now I'll tell you why. It is a strange thing how, during my year in LETTER XIX 287 Queer Street, some chance circumstance has always saved me in the eleventh hour, and fifty-ninth minute, from going right under. I have told you in my letters of a few of them, but there have been many that I have not mentioned, either because I forgot to do so, or because, as a rule, it would have been simply repetition. But I told you of how some one else saved me from suicide by doing it for me, and landed me in the role of an heroic would- be rescuer instead of in that of an unknown 'found drowned.' And of how I found the five-pound note in the Green Park (and the great advantage the find was to me). And how some one, whom I could hardly see, be- stowed life in the shape of a handful of coppers upon me after that dreadful night in the snow. Always there has been some, as it were, special interposition of Fate on my behalf. But the latest is the most curious and singular of them all. After that night in the snow I began to feel very ill not merely weak from hunger and exposure, as I have so often been, but sick and helpless, as I had never been before. Some- times, after a long fast, and when I had the means of breaking it, I could not eat. Twice in Hyde Park I fainted ; but, being alone in 288 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET a quiet corner, nobody noticed it, and I came to of my own accord. I was here for four or five days after I wrote you last, but at length the contribution of Mr. Coltstein came to an end, and I had to go out again into the streets, and take up any quarters as before in the Wide World Hotel. I had two bitter nights in the open, and then, somehow, I raised the wind, and crawled back here for three or four days, more dead than alive. Then again I was homeless, and, after a weary day, was faced with another night in the open. I was so weak and ill that, as the day ended and night came on, I felt quite certain and convinced that I would not see another morning, but would die somewhere in the darkness on a seat upon the Embankment, or in a doorway, or in some narrow back lane, where no one came at night. I was too ill to care too miserable and dazed to realize how bad I was. As in the snow, my very move- ments became automatic, and I walked about not knowing where I meant to go, and hardly knowing, as I went, where I might be. Strange fancies took possession of me as I stumbled along. The lights and noises of the streets converted themselves into a hundred things that were not. Sometimes I would LETTER XIX 289 gaze along a stretch of roadway brilliantly illuminated, and imagine that I was watching a bush fire ; sometimes the humming roar of a motor-bus turned into the sound of a water- fall ; sometimes all the blended din of the traffic became the noise of great waves breaking upon a beach. Occasionally I came to myself, and noted where I was, and wondered how I got there. I must have wandered through long miles of streets, quite unconscious of all that went on about me. Hour after hour must have gone by unnoticed ; place after place that I knew well been passed unseen ; street after street, whose every paving-stone and lamp-post were familiar landmarks, have been traversed un- knowingly. I was as a man in a trance, or a sleep-walker indeed, almost as some dis- embodied spirit prowling about invisibly. I don't think anyone took any notice of me. Perhaps I walked without staggering, and did not look any different to the hundreds of out- casts who nightly wander in the West End. Perhaps I did not talk aloud to myself, as I have heard so many of them doing, or indulge in violent gesticulation, or shouts, or yells. At any rate, no one interfered with me. I was conscious of perpetually passing policemen 19 290 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET whose height my sick fancy exaggerated enor- mously, so that they looked like giants who strode amongst crowds of pigmy people. I was afraid of them sometimes, and sometimes they seemed to me to be the only friends I had in the world. Sometimes the crowd looked to me like a mob of devils who swayed about me with the intention of tearing me to pieces ; a moment or two after they became trans- figured into throngs of benevolent and gracious souls who were urging their help upon me. Now and again I lost all consciousness of their very existence, and was alone in great spaces with no company but my own thoughts, and no impression of the present at all, and was living in the past. Once 1 saw the unhappy face of Doris you remember that girl whom I sent home to Devonshire and she passed me by in the dark, and did not seem to see me. It is likely enough that I really did see her, but I don't know. I must have been quietly delirious that night. The last thing I remember of it all is seeing two great flaring lights that shone in my face and blinded me. I seemed to be looking at them for years and years, and speculating idly for half a lifetime as to what they might be, and why they kept getting larger and larger, LETTER XIX 291 and their glare more blinding and dazzling. And then, suddenly, they went out, and I felt some kind of a blow, and went quietly to sleep, and when I woke up I was lying on a sofa in a room, and standing by me was the six feet of Jan Potgieter. You remember him the big Boer you shot in the leg at Maas Drift, when he and three others chased us from the water-side? You remember how we tied up his wound, and stood by him when those Kaffirs came and wanted to cut his throat? Well, there he was, trying to pour brandy down my throat, and rubbing my hands, and looking as con- cerned and unhappy about me as if I was really worth being unhappy and concerned about. It seems that, when crossing Piccadilly Circus, Jan was just in time to pull me from the front of a motor-car, at the lights of which I stood staring stupidly. He did not know me at first, but as I lay on the ground he recognized me, and hastily calling a cab, drove me to his rooms in Jermyn Street. He knew me because I had a beard, as I had in Africa when we met before, and when I lay still on the ground he very naturally concluded that I was drunk, and, like the good Samaritan he 192 292 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET was, brought me home to Jermyn Street to save me from the police. It was only when he got me there that he saw how thin and starved and sick I was. It did not seem anything miraculous to me that I should have been rescued by a Dutch- man whom I had not seen or heard of for more than five years, or strange that he should step out of the Transvaal across all that time lust to save me from a motor-car in Piccadilly. I was still so weak and dazed that I left all the talking to my host, accepted the situation as it stood, and took everything for granted. He told me all about himself how he had made money since the war, more money than he knew what to do with, and was now a very rich man. I gathered, vaguely, that he had made it in some mining speculations, but how I was too bewildered to understand. When I tried to get to my feet, in order to go, he pushed me gently back on to the sofa. 'No, no,' he cried, 'you must stay here to-night. It is my turn now. You have been good to me once, you and your friend now I am to be good to you.' I gave in. He pressed me into telling him about myself, and at last I did so. I told him the whole story, leaving out nothing begin- LETTER XIX 293 ning with ' X,' and recounting all the adven- tures of Queer Street. He listened with a sympathy that was infinitely kind, and when I had finished the miserable yarn, he grasped my hand, and said : * It is all right now, my poor John Mason. It is all right now. Come, you shall have my bed to-night, and to-morrow we shall see what is to be done.' So he gave me his bed, whilst he slept himself on the hearthrug in the sitting- room. When to-morrow came he told me that he had to go to Paris that day on some important business, but he would be back in a week. He insisted upon my taking 10 ' as a loan,' he said to see me over until he came back. And he begged me to see a doctor as soon as I could. I am to see one to-morrow, and so I'll finish this letter with what he says. Jan Potgieter wants me to stay with him in the Transvaal, and I said I would, and that is how I am to escape from Queer Street. Even now, to me, the whole thing seems more like a fairy-tale than real life. I did not think that any kindness could have been left in the world, and, if there were any, that some of it should ever have come my way, or ever have been 294 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET likely to come my way again, seemed as im- possible a thing as I could well conceive. But I will finish this in a few days, and tell you what the doctor has said, and what is to happen. Even now I can hardly believe it all myself. So unreal does it seem, that I have come back to this place in order, I think, that the change of circumstances may not seem too sudden. It is three days since I wrote that, and I am writing now from Jan Potgieter's rooms in Jermyn Street. Well, old boy, I don't think I am to leave Queer Street after all. I went to see a doctor a pretty heavy gun of a doctor in Harley Street, and during three successive visits he examined me, and finally he brought in a verdict of ' Guilty'; and, although he did not say it in so many words, I am pretty sure that he sentenced me to death. It seems that I have some tubercular affection which is one of those things that kills nine times and spares once. If I had any constitution left, there might be the one chance for me, but it seems that I have nothing to draw on. Jan Potgieter was back in London when I 295 went last to see the medical man, and he came with me. Afterwards they consulted together, and now Jan tells me I am to go into a Nursing Home, and that he will be responsible for the expense of it, and that when I am better I am to go out to South Africa, and be his secretary. I laughed when he said this, and asked him, 'Didn't the doctor tell him definitely that I was done for?' He made no reply, but his brown eyes were moist when he looked at me, and I knew well enough how things stood ; but still he persisted in the fiction that I would be better one day, and that he could stop the expense of all this out of my salary when I had been some time with him in Africa, and lied away, in his kindness and goodness, just to cheer me up. The doctor recommended a home, and I am to go there to-morrow even- ing, because Jan has to sail for South Africa to-morrow, and I am to see him off at Waterloo in the middle of the day. So that is how it is, Jimmy. I'm too tired to tell you much more. Jan begs me to give you his regards, and to tell you that it will be all right with me, and that 'all shall come right' you remember the old Boer proverb. He is always applying it to me. I am too weary and weak to think much 296 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET over this strange turn my fortunes have taken I am just going to accept it as it has come. If I get better and I hardly believe that I shall perhaps I'll be able to make the good Jan some return. If I don't, I don't think he is the kind to grumble. In fact, he told me as much. For some absurd reason, he is most tremendously grateful to you and me for not abandoning him that morning at Maas Drift. I have argued with him about it, but he still maintains that it was quite a noble thing to stick to him, especially after his little lot had tried to wipe us out, and would have done so if those Kaffirs had not turned up. That we did not leave him to be dealt with by the Kaffirs he considered something most extra- ordinary. He says he thinks he would have left us. But I have my doubts over that. It may be some time before I write to you again. I am really very ill much more so than I like to admit, even to myself. I am keeping up so as to say good-bye to Jan. On the evening of the day he has sailed from Southampton that is to-morrow evening I am to go to the Nursing Home, and to bed. I look forward to it. Just think of weeks of rest and quietness after the kind of life I have had during the last year ! Even if I am not LETTER XIX 297 to leave there again, I don't mind very much. I want rest, peace, quietness, and am not very particular whether it lasts for two months or for eternity. Good night, old man. I am too tired to write any more. Good night. LETTER XX DEAR JIMMY, So this is the last of my long-winded epistles to you the very last you'll have to read of the lot. Maybe that will cheer you up a bit, and maybe it won't. To me, indeed, the fact brings something of relief, though I've derived a queer sort of satisfaction from telling you things that I've told to no one else. What you will do with the edifying series I don't know, and I don't care. Only that you never were the sort of chap who would say, ' I told you so,' I might suggest that they would serve in the light of an awful example. They would hardly, to be sure, do for shaving papers, being written upon slips too small for the purpose. If matches were not so cheap it would have been worth while to twist them up into spills for pipe-lighting. Otherwise I can think of their serving no useful purpose. But isn't it strange, Jimmy the way one's habits stick, even to the end ? / know, per- 298 LETTER XX 299 fectly well, and you know too, that my ghost would be damnably disappointed were you not to print them, and serve them out to a long- suffering public in some form or other after their writer has gone out. It is just the old vanity the queer contrariness that has always been mine, of wanting to seem as if I did not care about things as to which I really care very much indeed. It is all humbug. If you don't publish them some time, I'll haunt you only, for God's sake, old man, don't make them into a rotten novel, and me into a hero, or a villain, or anything of that sort. They are true the only outward truth in the whole of my deceptive existence, and perhaps, just to oblige me, dear old slab-sides, you'll not monkey with them too much. Put in the stops when they're wanted, and tone down the bad language a bit, and use the blue pencil at your discretion but don't apologize, or ex- tenuate, or preface them with your own kindly, well-intentioned excuses for me ; and again, above all, don't make them into a novel. For it would necessarily be a Novel with a Purpose the noble purpose of dissuading other duffers from going the way this duffer has gone. After all, I bear the Way no ill-will, and why should I selfishly seek to be the means of 300 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET discouraging others from going to the dogs ? The dogs, themselves, may be fearsome bow- wows enough but the Way is not so bad not so very bad after all. At any rate, even in its muddiest or its rockiest stretches I've found something in it to amuse me. It has been hard travelling, sometimes, but the scenery has always been good like the Razor-back track down from the summit of the Square Mountain at home on Mullala, where the broken basalt rips the shoes from your horse, and there is a precipice upon either side but the wide world, and its goodness, to North of you and to South of you. And I've never really had a purpose in my life, have I ? So don't inconsistently endow me with one when I am dead. For that's it, Jimmy I'm going to be dead soon. I'm going to * croak,' to 'peg out,' to * shuffle off this mortal coil,' 'hand in my checks,' have ' lilies on my chest ' (but I doubt if it will be such expensive post-mortem adorn- ment here), ' kick the bucket,' ' shove up daisies ' and all that, and all that. I'm going to be dead, and then I'm going to decompose. And that, Jimmy, is all I know about it, and pretty well all that you, or anyone else, knows about it either. LETTER XX 301 The doctor who looks after me here is a youngish man and a good sort. His manner is a little nervous and deferential, as if he only propounded his medical opinions and tendered his advice with the very greatest respect for your own vast and unlimited knowledge of his science ; but he is a man, and a ginger-haired Scot to boot. I like him. He came in last night, and sat on the foot of the bed, and looked at me for a while without speaking. He had told me yesterday that his bull-terrier bitch had had pups, so I asked him how many he had kept. His face lighted up at once. ' Just two,' he said, ' only two. She's young for more. But, man, they're two beauties a dog and a bitch. Ye should see the dog he'll be a prize-winner, as sure as God made little apples. At least, I'm thinking he will. Black patch over the eye just like the mother. The other one's all right too, but I like yon dog best' So I told him a story of a dog I once owned, which, as it is not a true story, I will not set down here, and he became vastly interested, being a very doggy man. So I told him another which was even more untrue than the first, and he laughed until the tears ran down ; and just then the nurse looked in 302 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET the door and said, * Good evening, doctor,' and he became professionally grave and solemn, and again looked at me queerly, as he had done at first. * Mason,' he said slowly, ' you are going to die.' ' Am I ?' I said, pretending not to be inter- ested. When ?' ' Man, it's a hard thing to say to you, but ye can't live a fortnight. Ye might go to-night ye might go to-morrow, but go ye must, and that soon. I had to tell you, Mason I had to tell you. No use beating about, Mason, old chap I had to tell you. Can I do any- thing ?' No, there was nothing to be done. He stayed and talked a little longer, and then said good night. As he turned to say it, with his hand on the door-knob, it occurred to me that I could make him one request, at least, which would be dear to his heart, and the fulfilment of which might perpetuate my memory in some small degree. I knew it would please him. So I called him back, and, as he leaned over the bed, I whispered to him, 'Doctor, you might name the dog pup after me.' He beamed, and I think his eyes glistened a LETTER XX 303 little. He is not a man of many words, and he promised and went, and I had leisure to turn round and look at Death. There he was, right enough the Grey Man. You and I have often looked at him together, old Sobriety, haven't we ? And you have seen him all by yourself, and so have I, and I don't think either of us have been very much in awe of him after the first couple of meetings. We have certainly both discovered that he is by no means the bogey-man of the popular idea. Once or twice I have almost gone to look him up myself. He is a dear fellow in most respects. Do you remember the first occasion when we both attended one of his * At Homes' one of his larger garden-parties, so to speak ? (He had, of course, called upon us individually before, but that was the first time we had been to one of his ' crushes.') Can't you just see it now ? That staff-officer with the red face was merely a footman who pronounced our names as we passed through the door. We, as it were, were chaperoned by the battery of Horse Artillery we escorted when we made our debut. What a fine morning it was as we trotted down that slope 1 How blue the sky as we came into Death's garden ! How gentle 304 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET the soft breeze that swayed all those miles of gleaming yellow grass in the plain ! How strange to see the ground in front being kicked up everywhere in little splashes, and to hear those whispering voices flitting and sighing by one's ears ! And how queer to see the Grey Man going about amongst his guests playfully digging one in the ribs, patting another on the head, doubling up a third, in his boisterous mirth. I, for one, have always owned that I was a little embarrassed that morning. Our host was so ubiquitous, so overwhelmingly energetic. I think that we all stood a little in awe of him then. We had not got to know him properly ; his quips and his jests were not quite understandable ; his merry conceits not so obvious as they became afterwards. We met him with ' company manners.' But how we rose to his humour when he entertained us afterwards, what a good old sport we discovered him to be ! How gorgeous it was to win the odd trick from him, when he held a no-trump hand with a long suit in spades and the four aces ! And how willing he always was to play. Good old Grey Man 1 But last night, when I turned to nod good evening to him, there was a difference. He was courteous, but not merry. His manner LETTER XX 305 was not cold, but neither was it effusively warm. I asked him whether he wished to play. ' No,' he said kindly, ' there is no more play. This is the end of the game, and I've won ; and it's for keeps.' And I knew it was for ' keeps,' and that I was * mucked,' and so I turned over and went to sleep. * * * * * It is three days since I wrote that, and here I am still. The Old Boy sits silently by my bed. He is disinclined for conversation, so I lie and think. Aye Jimmy, you old son of a gun think, think, think ! Ever tried it ? No I didn't mean that. I know you do always for others, though, and not like we reckless egoists whose most altruistic cogita- tions invariably involve ourselves. I dare swear you'll do a lot of thinking for me when you've read the last of these slips a devil of a lot and I know that if the missus, even, comes along as you finish them off you won't be able to speak for a moment or two, and you'll blow your nose noisily, and your eyes will look rather as if you had been on the jag all night. I know you you soft old con- tradiction with your leg-of-mutton fist, your bull's voice, and your heart of a little child, 20 306 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET and it comforts me, Jimmy, it comforts me comforts me as if I were a woman. And so does the recollection of Jan Potgieter's goodness. I have always morally ' cracked hardy. Now, ' cracking hardy ' is a fine thing some times. To weak natures the mere exertion, the mere sense of seeking to demonstrate to one's fellow-creatures that one doesn't care twopence, is stimulating. Of itself, it bucks one up. When one is caned as a little boy it takes the smart out of the cuts if one can successfully maintain the fiction that they didn't hurt. When one has been badly done, later in life, it is by way of encouraging one to a continuance of existence if there be a con- sciousness that the world is unable to say, ' See how sorry he is for himself !' The cuts hurt without doubt, and the 'doing' hurts. One is under no delusion as to those facts. But both would hurt twenty-five per cent, more if one knew that one had asked for pity. Pity and Mercy are beautiful, but horribly galling to their victims. But, for myself, however hardy I may crack, I am always conscious that I could not crack at all if I did not know there was some one human being at least who would be sorry for LETTER XX 307 me, some one who would care if he (there used to be ' shes,' too) knew, and that, whether the blame was mine or not mine. And, thank God, I do know that, old Jimmy-boy, and, as I said before, it comforts me. As I write you don't know, but as you have read you do. And so, though the nurses and the carroty doctor admire my philosophical way of meet- ing the Grey Man, they don't understand that, if it were not for the mere fact of the existence of one beefy, stolid, sterling, sound man, I would probably be lamenting my misspent life, invoking the moral support of a clergy- man, and getting ready for the going-out pro- cess with not a little fear, and with a great amount of trembling. You see, old boy, though you won't have realized it at the time, you will really be holding my hand, and saying * Take care of yourself,' when I go out with Death and it comforts me, Jimmy, it com- forts me. But about this business of dying. It may cheer you to know that I shall have 'passed away painlessly ' that is, of course, provided that my friend Ginger knows what he is talking about. The only unfortunate thing is that I don't know when the Grey Man will stand up and beckon it may be before I finish this slip. 202 308 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET It will certainly be within the fourteen days the doctor has given me. So much as that, I think, may be relied upon. As to aught else, I dunno. It's like this with me now. I sit, half propped up in bed, with a little table thing across my knees, and the open window facing me. The room is bare of everything barring me, and the bed, and a bedside table, and one or two pieces of more or less indispensable sick-room furniture. Outside the window is the top of a tree, freshly green in its spring clothing. Beyond that a high wall, blank and windowless, and crowned by a low-pitched roof of slate. I know how many slates there are in that portion of it which is framed by the window one thousand and forty-four, or it may be fifty-four. (It was a laborious job counting them, but it had to be done, James. ) Over the roof there is sometimes a strip of blue sky. More often it is grey the London colour-note, as one may have remarked before in the course of these epistles. From some invisible chimney on the other side of the roof thin smoke curls up all day long. When the sky is blue, the smoke generally goes straight up. When there are grey days, it mushrooms, and eddies, and drifts along the ridge of the roof. LETTER XX 309 In the mornings I read the Daily Wail. I like the Wail. It is vital and mendacious. I am not vital, and now I am not mendacious, though I have seen the time, Jimmy, I have seen the time when I read nothing else. My tenure of life is too uncertain to begin a novel. There are many novels, of course, from which death would be a welcome relief, but I have never read more than a dozen pages of any book that did not interest me from the start, and I should hate to get fairly going in one that did interest me, and then have to knock off because the Grey Man had made up his mind it was time for us to be off. So, when I feel up to it, as just now, I write to you, and when I don't feel up to it, I just think, think, think. There is a dreadful lot of thinking to be done when the time for it is limited. And the * thinks ' usually have to do with things that have happened hardly at all are they concerned with the inscrutable future. It is a strange thing that of all I have seen in a somewhat varied career, about to end at the age of thirty-five those events and scenes having to do with its first fifteen years are more real and vivid to me now than any of those of the last twenty. Pictures of little things that happened when I was a boy, bits 310 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET of scenery, chance words and phrases of people who are dead, sounds, smells, and dreams all the sensual and spiritual impressions of those years crowd in upon me in these last days. They come back with startling realness. It is as if subconsciousness had opened by chance a lost dispatch-box, in which were stored away documents, plans, and photographs concerning affairs and people long since almost forgotten. For it is startling when a lost hour suddenly resurrects itself without any reason. This morning, I was riding across the Big Hill Flat with George Dawson, who carried that old twelve-shot Winchester which you will remember my father gave me on my twelfth birthday. What a noble weapon it was when it was new 1 The Big Hills on the left were glowing with sunshine. On the right the Cow Hill towered up, and away down to our right rear, beyond the nestling Green Hills, stretched the three long indigo humps of the Lagoon Mountain. There was a blue sky, and it was very hot. An eagle hawk swooped and circled overhead, and the impetuous George let fly a bullet at her. His chestnut pony * Tommy ' immediately threw up his head and bolted, and when I caught them up at the Cow Paddock gate, George LETTER XX 311 was kicking him in the ribs, and swearing in that peculiar Scotch fashion which rendered him famous. You remember the remarkable formula he made use of when he deemed it expedient to consign any person or object to eternal torment ? Since he died, I have never heard it, yet I could this morning, as distinctly as I had let me see twenty-two years ago at the gate ; could see George's face all wrinkled about the mouth under his sandy moustache ; could see Tommy backing, and rearing, and snorting ; could hear the little gum saplings that grow by the gate rustling in the warm breeze ; could feel my sides aching with laughter ; could smile at George's own good laugh as the outburst ended. There was another bit of that country the most beautiful country in the world that has haunted me, too. You remember the track into the homestead by way of the Gap and Bossley's Gully ? Well, if you are riding home in the evening, you remember the last flat- topped hill-crest before you come down towards Bately's hut old Bately and all his wives who haunted him and the place and the view of the valley you get from it? The picture has obsessed me at intervals all day. The wide valley, dim in the short twilight ; the long, 312 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET deep blue ranges on the other side ; the line of yellow sandstone cliffs that limits the valley ; the blaze of red and orange, fading into yellow, and then into the greenish-blue of the night that creeps up from eastward to the deep, cold zenith ; the hundred voices of the Bush at eventide ; the cool breeze that sighs up from the lowlands ; the blue curl from your pipe in the clear air ; the glad sense of health, and strength, and hope that is yours as you ride down the hill-side. Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy I'd like to ride there just once, just once again before I book my berth in the Styx Navigation Company's boat ; but it's ' Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntur anni, nee pietas moram Rugis et instanti senectce Ajferet indomitceque morti.' I'm afraid, though, that there isn't much * pietas ' to make claim for even one extra hour for me. (Forgive that bit of pedantry- it isn't reaUy such, for Mr. Q. H. Flaccus and I have always been pals, through both good and evil report. There's a sigh about that Ode that fits me just now.) Once I had a dream that impressed me deeply. It was at the old place, just after the LETTER XX 313 war, and not long after my father had died. It repeated itself last night, I think or, maybe, I remembered it as I lay half asleep. I had come suddenly from I don't know where into a large kind of dining-room, where was a long wood table, and, seated at it, all the people I had ever known intimately who were dead. Seeing them again gave me a great amount of pleasure, and I was in no way troubled as to how they came there. There was my mother, whom I only remember, as a very little boy, for a gentle, sweet-faced, woman ; there was my father and my grandmother, old George Dawson, Rupert, Uncle Peter in all his grandeur, little Billy Noggs, who died at school of pneumonia ; Reg Fox, who died on the troopship during the voyage to the Cape ; many who had been killed in South Africa they were all there : all the people * gone over the border ' whom I had ever been personally interested in. I was tremendously pleased and happy but somehow they didn't seem to be so enthusiastic about seeing me. They had an air of giving me the cold shoulder. Evidently they had been talking before I came in, but now they all seemed to be silently waiting until I should go out before they should speak again. It puzzled me and hurt 314 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET me. I went to her who was dearest to me of them all, and spoke, but she made no answer : only her dear old face softened, and those splendid, wise, brave old eyes filled as she looked. I went to Rupert can't you see the way he used to stand, looking like a young Knight of the Round Table ? I said some- thing to him, but he only looked at me in the same strange way, and made no answer. My mother, my father none of them would speak a word to me. I stood and wondered for a while, and then, full of sorrowful bitter- ness, turned to go. At the door I stopped and looked at them again. They were all smiling after me not laughing at me, but smiling their friendship and love and good- will ; and then, in a flash, it came to me the reason why they could not speak to me. They were of the dead, and I of the living, and between the two no speech can ever be. So I went away, glad and happy, at any rate, for having seen them all again. And then I woke up. I wonder will there be a place for me at that long table ? God knows. I wish I could believe it, as some people believe in a heaven and a hell. It would do me all the good in the world to believe something of the kind but I can't, and there's an end of it. I always LETTER XX 315 have had a constitutional difficulty in per- suading myself with regard to such matters. Otherwise I'd have had a religion, and a proper sort of death-bed ; and, maybe, I wouldn't have been such a vagabonding blackguard all my days, or have done such shabby things, as I have sometimes done. For I believe in religion, Jimmy. It may seem queer to you my saying this, since you know how little I've ever had of it, and have often heard me laugh at it, and sometimes sneer but, all the same, I do ' I do so,' as Johnny Watts used to say. I don't think the world would be anywhere without it. It is my own misfortune perhaps the greatest of many that I could never find anything in it for myself. All the best people I have ever known have been religious. I don't mean ' pi,' you know, but rather that they have been successful in convincing themselves of the absolute truth of their tenets, and have lived up to the principles of their schools of thought, and with the greatest comfort and satisfaction to themselves. Now, here am I dying, without a single definite belief in any- thing, except the fact that I know nothing ; with nothing at all to sustain me, except a sense of humour ; with no hope of an eternal 316 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET li fe, except that which may be derived from a knowledge of the physical law that matter is indestructible. I have no idea of meeting all those dear people at the long table after I am dead. Perhaps I shall, perhaps I shan't I dunno. But, take it from me, Jimmy, old lad I'd give everything (if I had anything to give) to believe as certainly and surely as my grandmother, my mother, my father, Rupert, believed in a real and definite after-life. But I can't, and that's all there is about it. 1 must just take what comes, and make no complaint. There is only one thing that pleases me in this connexion at the eleventh hour I am not a beastly Atheist. * * * * * After I wrote that yesterday, Jimmy, I fainted. I don't know whether such a tremendous avowal was too much for my system, but anyway, I've come to again much to my surprise, for I really thought I was 'deaded.' But I'm terribly weak now, and the end can't be far off. It is all I can do to scribble this it will probably be more than you can do to read it. The doc. says I mustn't write ; but what's an hour or two when one's got all Eternity before one ? Will do as I dam' well please, just to show my LETTER XX 317 robust independence. But I don't think Carrots minds very much. I have already written a brief good-bye to Jan Potgieter. What I want to jot down now is just my last wish. Of course I don't ask you to see that it's carried out ; but if you did, it might give you some amount of satisfaction after- wards. It won't, of course, make the slightest difference to me, really. I won't know or at least I don't know whether I'll know if you do it or not. In due course I'll be laid out straight, washed, and stuck into a coffin. Then they'll plant me in some suburban cemetery near London. I'll rot. Most of my chemical constituents will have been added to the soil of England by the time you would be able to do what I ask ; but, nevertheless, there would be some of me left, if only bones. Now, I would like you, old boy, to have my bones dug up and planted 'on the other side.' I want, if I can, to do a little * daisy growing ' in my own country. Pack my skeleton in a gin-case if you like, and chuck it down an empty mine-shaft ; but, if you can, do see to it that I may decompose ultimately into Australian soil. 318 LETTERS FROM QUEER STREET I am very tired now, Jimmy boy, and feeling a little weary about things. Can't be much longer. Can't see very clearly. No pain. Time to be off. Grey Man walking up and down. Four-wheeler at the door. Tickets all taken. Charing Cross to Hades. Wonder if Cook's coupons hold good ? Buck up, old stick-in-the-mud. There is something else I want to tell you, Ji . . . [John Mason was found leaning over the last unfinished sheet oj this letter. He lies in Waver ley Cemetery, Sydney. ED.~] THE END BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, OUILDFORD UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below Form L-9 25m -2, '43 (5205) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY PR 6001 A15 1 Abbott - Letters from street 000 493 072 3 PR 6001 A13 1