Part 18

A CHARITABLE NIGHT

EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH

Charity ... the most nauseous of the virtues, the practice of which degrades both giver and receiver. The practice of Charity brings you into the limelight; it elevates you to friendship with the Almighty; you feel that you are a colleague of the Saviour. It springs from Pity, the most unclean of all human emotions. It is not akin to love; it is akin to contempt. To be pitied is to be in the last stages of spiritual degradation. You cannot pity anything on your own level, for Pity implies an assumption of superiority. You cannot be pitied by your friends and equals, only by your self-elected superiors. Let us see Pity at work in London....

As I lounged some miles east of Aldgate Pump, an old song of love and lovers and human kindliness was softly ringing in my head, and it still haunted me as I slid like a phantom into that low-lit causeway that slinks from a crashing road to the dark wastes of waters beyond. At the far end a brutal black building broke the sky-line. A few windows were thinly lit by gas. I climbed the stone steps, hollowed by many feet, and stood in the entrance-hall.

Then, as it seemed from far away, I heard an insistent murmur, like the breaking of distant surf. I gazed around and speculated. In the bare brick wall was a narrow, high door. With the instinct of the journalist, I opened it. The puzzle was explained. It was the Dining Hall of the Metropolitan Orphanage, and the children were at their seven o'clock supper. From the cathedral-like calm of the vestibule, I passed into an atmosphere billowing with the flutter of some five hundred small tongues. Under the pendant circles of gas-jets were ranged twelve long, narrow tables packed with children talking and eating with no sense of any speed-limit. On the one side were boys in cruelly ugly brown suits, and on the other side, little girls from seven to fifteen in frocks of some dark material with a thin froth of lace at neck and wrists and coarse, clean pinafores. Each table was attended by a matron, who served out the dry bread and hot milk to the prefects, who carried the basins up and down the tables as deftly as Mr. Paul Cinquevalli. Everywhere was a prospect of raw faces and figures, which Charity had deliberately made as uncomely as possible by clownish garb and simple toilet. The children ate hungrily, and the place was full of the spirit of childhood, an adulterated spirit. The noise leaped and swelled on all sides in an exultant joy of itself, but if here and there a jet of jolly laughter shot from the stream, there were glances from the matrons.

The hall was one of wide spaces, pierced at intervals by the mouths of bleak, stark corridors. The air of it was limp and heavy with the smell of food. Polished beams ran below the roof, pretending to uphold it, and massive columns of painted stone flung themselves aggressively here and there, and thought they were supporting a small gallery. Outside a full moon shone, but it filtered through the cheap, half-toned glass of the windows with a quality of pale lilac. Here and there a window of stained glass stabbed the brick wall with passionate colour. The moral atmosphere suggested nut-foods and proteid values.

At half-past seven a sharp bell rang, and with much rumbling and manoeuvring of forms, the children stood stiffly up, faced round, and, as a shabby piano tinkled a melody, they sang grace, somewhat in this fashion:--

To Go doo give sus dailyb read Dour thankful song we raise-se, Sand prayth at he who send susf ood, Dwillf ill lour reart swithp raise, Zaaaamen.

Then a wave of young faces rolled upward to the balcony, where stood a grey-headed, grey-bearded, spectacled figure. It was one of the honorary managers. The children stood to attention like birds before a snake. One almost expected to hear them sing "God bless the squire and his relations...." The Gentleman was well-tailored, and apart from his habiliments there was, in every line of his figure, that which suggested solidity, responsibility, and the substantial virtues. I have seen him at Committee meetings of various charitable enterprises; himself, duplicated again and again. One charitable worker is always exactly like the other, allowing for differences of sex. They are of one type, with one manner, and--I feel sure--with one idea. I am certain that were you to ask twenty members of a Charity committee for opinions on aviation, Swedenborgism, the Royal Academy, and Little Tich, each would express the same views in the same words and with the same gestures.

This gentleman was of the City class; he carried an air of sleekness. Clearly he was a worthy citizen, a man who had Got On, and had now abandoned himself to this most odious of vices. And there he stood, in a lilac light, splashed with voluptuous crimsons and purples, dispensing Charity to the little ones before him whose souls were of hills and the sea. He began to address them. It appeared that the Orphanage had received, that very morning, forty more children; and he wished to observe how unnecessary it was for him to say with what pleasure this had been done. Many thousands of children now holding exalted positions in banks and the Civil Service could look to him as to their father, in the eighty or more years of the School's life, and he was proud to feel that his efforts were producing such Fine Healthy Young Citizens. The children knew--did they not?--that they had a Good Home, with loving guardians who would give them the most careful training suited to their position in life. They were clothed, maintained, and drilled, as concerned their bodies; and, as concerned their souls, they had the habits of Industry and Frugality inculcated into them, and they were guided in the paths of Religion and Virtue. They had good plain food, suited to their position in life, and healthy exercise in the way of Manly Sports and Ladylike Recreations. He quoted texts from the Scriptures, about the sight of the Widow touching those chords which vibrate sympathetically in all of us, and a lot of stuff about a Cup of Cold Water and These Little Ones. He exuded self-content.

He went on to remark that the hazardous occupations of Modern Industry had, by their many mischances, stripped innumerable families of their heads, and reduced them to a condition of the most deplorable. He desired to remind them that the class to which they belonged was not the Very Poor of the gutters, but the Respectable Poor who would not stoop to receive the aid doled out by the State. No; they were not Gutter Children, but, at the same time, the training they received was not such as to create any distaste among them for the humblest employments of Honest Industry, suitable to their position in life. He redeemed the objects interested in his exertions from the immoralities of the Very Poor, while teaching them to respect their virtues, and to do their duty in that station of life to which it had pleased God to call them.

(The little objects seemed to appreciate this, for they applauded with some spirit, on prompting from the matrons.)

He went on to suggest, with stodgy jocularity, that among them was possibly a Prime Minister of 1955--think of Pitt--and perhaps a Lord Kitchener. He spoke in terms of the richest enthusiasm of the fostering of the Manly Qualities and the military drill--such a Fine Thing for the Lads; and he urged them to figure to themselves that, even if they did not rise to great heights, they might still achieve greatness by doing their duty at office desk, or in factory, loom, or farmyard, and so adding to the lustre of their Native Land--a land, he would say, in which they had so great a part.

(Here the children cheered, seemingly with no intent of irony.) He added that, in his opinion, kind hearts were, if he might so put it, more than coronets.

The Gentleman smiled amiably. He nourished no tiny doubt that he was doing the right thing. He believed that Christ would be pleased with him for turning out boys and girls of fourteen, half-educated, mentally and socially, to spend their lives in dingy offices in dingy alleys of the City. There was no humbug here; impossible for a moment to doubt his sincerity. He had a childlike faith in his Great Work. He was, as he annually insisted, with painful poverty of epithet, engaged in Philanthropic Work, alleviating the Distresses of the Respectable Poor and ameliorating Social Conditions Generally. So he trained his children until he trained them into desk or farm machines; trained them so that their souls were starved, driven in on themselves, and there stifled, and at last eaten away by the canker of their murky routine.

I looked at those children as they stood before me. I looked at their bright, clear faces, their eyes wonder-wide, their clean brows alert for knowledge, hungry for life and its beauty. Despite their hideous clothes, they were the poetry of the world: all that is young and fresh and lovely. Then I thought of them five years hence, their minds larded with a Sound Commercial Education, tramping the streets of the City from nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock in the evening, living in an atmosphere of intellectual vacuity, their ardent temperaments fled, their souls no longer desiring beauty. I felt a little sick.

But The Gentleman.... The Gentleman stood there in a lilac light, and took unction unto himself. He smiled benignly, a smile of sincere pleasure. Then he called the children to attention while he read to them a prayer of St. Chrysostom, which he thought most suitable to their position in life. A ring of gas-jets above his head hovered like an aureole.

* * * * *

I do wish that something could somehow be done to restrain the Benevolent. We are so fond, as a nation, of patronizing that if we have nothing immediately at hand to patronize, we must needs go out into the highways and hedges and bring in anything we can find, any old thing, so long as we can patronize it. I have often thought of starting a League (I believe it would be immensely popular) for The Suppression of Social Service. The fussy, incompetent men and women who thrust themselves forward for that work are usually the last people who should rightly meddle with it. They either perform it from a sense of duty, or what they themselves call The Social Conscience (the most nauseous kind of benevolence), or they play with it because it is Something To Do. Always their work is discounted by personal vanity. I like the Fabians: they are funny without being vulgar. But these Social Servants and their Crusades for Pure and Holy Living Among Work-Girls are merely fatuous and vulgar when they are not deliberately insulting. Can you conceive a more bitter mind than that which calls a girl of the streets a Fallen Sister? Yet that is what these people have done; they have labelled a house with the device of The Midnight Crusade for the Reclamation of our Fallen Sisters; and they expect self-respecting girls of that profession to enter it....

I once attended one of these shows in a North London slum. The people responsible for it have the impudence to send women-scouts to the West End thoroughfares at eleven o'clock every night, there to interfere with these girls, to thrust their attentions upon them, and, if possible, lure them away to a service of song--Brief, Bright, and Brotherly. It was a bitter place in a narrow street. The street was gay and loud with humanity, only at its centre was a dark and forbidding door, reticent and inhuman. There was no sign of good-fellowship here; no warm touch of the flesh. It was as brutal as justice; it seemed to have builded itself on that most horrible of all texts: "Be just before you are generous."

I went in at an early hour, about half-past ten, and only two victims had been secured. The place stunk of The Church Times and practical Christianity. In the main room was a thin fire, as skimpy as though it had been lit by a spinster, as, I suppose, it had. There was a bare deal table. The seating accommodation was cane chairs, which I hate; they always remind me of the Band of Hope classes I was compelled to attend as a child. They suggest something stale and cheesy, something as squalid as the charity they serve. On a corner table was a battered urn and a number of earthenware cups, with many plates of thick, greasy bread-and-butter; just the right fare to offer a girl who has put away several benedictines and brandies. The room chilled me. Place, people, appointments, even the name--Midnight Crusade for the Reclamation of our Fallen Sisters--smacked of everything that is most ugly. Smugness and super-piety were in the place. The women--I mean, ladies--who manage the place, were the kind of women I have seen at the Palace when Gaby is on. (For you will note that Gaby does not attract the men; it is not they who pack the Palace nightly to see her powder her legs and bosom. They may be there, but most of them are at the bar. If you look at the circle and stalls, they are full of elderly, hard women, with dominant eyebrows, leering through the undressing process, and moistening their lips as Gaby appears in her semi-nakedness.)

The walls of the big bedroom were adorned with florid texts, tastefully framed. It was a room of many beds, each enclosed in a cubicle. The beds were hard, covered with coarse sheets. If I were a Fallen Brother, I hardly think they would have tempted me from a life of ease. And there were RULES.... Oh, how I loathe RULES! I loathed them as a child at school. I loathed drill, and I loathed compulsory games, and I loathed all laws that were made without purpose. There were long printed lists of Rules in this place, framed, and hung in each room. You can never believe how many things a Fallen Sister may not do. Certain rules are, of course, essential; but the pedagogic mind, once started on law-making, can never stop; and it is usually the pedagogic type of mind, with the lust for correction, that goes in for Charity. Why may not the girls talk in certain rooms? Why may they not read anything but the books provided? Why may they not talk in bed? Why must they fold their bed-clothes in such-and-such an exact way? Why must they not descend from the bed-room as and when they are dressed? Why must they let the Superior read their letters? And why, oh, why are these places run by white-faced men and elderly, hard women?

I have written, I fear, rather flippantly on this topic; but that is only because I dare not trust myself to be serious. I realize as much as any one that the life is a shameful life, and all that sort of thing; but I boil with indignation at the hundred shamefulnesses which these charity-mongers heap upon defenceless girls who, in a weak moment, have sought their protection. If you know anything about the matter, you will know that these girls have in their little souls an almost savage flame of self-respect which burns with splendour before the bleak, miserable flame of Organized Charity. If I spoke my mind on the subject, this page would blaze with fury ... and you would smile.

* * * * *

But amid all this welter of misdirected endeavour, there is just one organized charity for which I should like to say a word; and that is The Salvation Army. I do not refer to its religious activities so much as to its social work as represented in the excellent Shelters which have been opened in various districts. There is one in Whitechapel Road, which is the identical building where General Booth first started a small weekly mission service which was afterwards known all over the world as The Salvation Army. There is one in Hoxton. There is one--a large one--in Blackfriars Road. And there are others wherever they may be most needed.

The doors open at five o'clock every evening. The Shelter, mark you, is not precisely a Charity. The men have to pay. Here is shown the excellent understanding of the psychology of the people which the University Socialist misses. You cannot get hold of people by offering them something for nothing; but you can get hold of them by tens of thousands by offering them something good at a low price. For a halfpenny the Salvation Army offers them tea, coffee, cocoa, or soup, with bread-and-butter, cake, or pudding. All this food is cooked and prepared at the Islington headquarters, and the great furnaces in the kitchens of the Shelters are roaring night and day for the purpose of warming-up the food, heating the Shelter, and serving the drying-rooms, where the men can hang their wet clothes.

A spotlessly clean bed is offered for threepence a night, which includes use of bathroom, lavatory, and washhouse. The washhouse is in very great demand on wet nights by those who have been working out of doors, and by those who wish to wash their underclothes, etc.

In addition to this, the men have the service of the Army orderlies, in attention at table and in "calling" in the morning. The staff is at work all night, either attending new-comers or going round with the various "calls," which, as some of the guests are market porters, are for unearthly hours, such as half-past three or four o'clock. The Shelters are patronized by many "regulars"--flower-sellers, pedlars, Covent Garden or Billingsgate odd men, etc.--who lodge with them by the week, sometimes by the year. Lights are officially out at half-past nine, but of course the orderly is on duty at the door until eight o'clock the following morning, and no stranger who wants food and bed is refused. He is asked for the threepence and for the halfpenny for his food, but if he cannot produce these he has but to ask for the Brigadier, and, if he is a genuine case, he is at once taken in.