Part 1
BROKEN EARTHENWARE
A Footnote in Narrative to Professor William James's Study in Human Nature, 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.'
'I might as well call my book a footnote to his. I am proud of the dedication and of the references, and I wish the book a great success.' Professor William James.
Read a book called "Broken Earthenware." . . . Your sceptical friend has got to answer this.' The Bishop of London.
In "Broken Earthenware" Mr. Harold Begbie has written a wonderful and convincing book. ... It is only religion that is not in despair about this mass of profitless evil dragging at the heels of progress the religion which still believes in miracle that can be of any avail.' Daily Chronicle.
'There is remarkable skill and pathos in Mr. Harold Begbie's stories of reclaimed prodigals. . . . Mr. Begbie draws us pictures of the underworld which may well stir our consciences and make us shudder; but pictures also of the gallantry and saintliness of the devoted men and heroic women who fight the good fight in this stricken field. All this is admirable, and we would gladly see this book in the hands of the indifferent and comfortable rich. The moralists tell us that no one ever suddenly became very base, but Mr. Begbie would have us believe that under the influence of religion a man or woman may suddenly become very good. Well, we hope it, but in some ways it is a rather disturbing doctrine.' The Westminster Gazette.
TO WILLIAM JAMES PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY; WITH ADMIRATION AND RESPECT
'No heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.' Seeley.
CONTENTS
PREFACE I. A PART OF LONDON II. THE PUNCHER III. A TIGHT HANDFUL IV. O. B. D. V. THE CRIMINAL VI. A COPPER BASHER VII. LOWEST OF THE LOW VIII. THE PLUMBER IX. RAGS AND BONES X. APPARENT FAILURE POSTSCRIPT
PREFACE
WHILE I was gathering together the strange and almost inconceivable materials which go to make this book, I was conscious of so many and such diverse emotions that the point of view from which it should be written changed with every fresh turn in my journey of discovery, and perplexed me increasingly with the multitude of its aspects. But now that I sit down actually to write what I have learned, now that I set out to play showman, dramatist, or author to the little group of human beings with whom I have been companioned for the past few weeks, there is in my mind one uppermost feeling, one central and dominating sensation of the emotions, and this is a feeling of astonishment that all the terrible tragedy, all the infinite pathos, all the amazing psychology, all the agony and bitter suffering, all the depth and profundity of spiritual experience with which I have to deal, all of it, was discovered in a single quarter of London.
Here in this little book, which tells the story of a few humble and quite commonplace human beings, is such astonishing psychology as must surely bewilder the metaphysician, the social reformer, the criminologist, the theologian, and the philosopher; and it is unearthed, brought to the surface of observation, this incredible
psychology, from a single quarter of London, from a few shabby streets huddled together on the western edge of the metropolis, forming a locality of their own, calling themselves by a particular name, and living almost as entirely aloof from the rest of London as Cranford from Drumble.
One would say that a man might go here and there in London, picking and choosing among all the city's multifarious districts, and at the end of his researches find half a dozen human beings whose psychological experiences would amaze the general world and prove of considerable, even of lasting interest to metaphysics and philosophy. But who would say that one might find, without difficulty and without selection, in a single negligible fragment of the vast city, men whose feelings, struggles, and experiences in the moral sphere contribute such extraordinary material to psychology as that of which this book is composed? One is startled by the possibility that every single individual among the swarming millions of London, the fermentation of whose brains is the spirit, mystery, and attraction of the great city, has this supreme interest for the rest of us that every single individual maintains a struggle of some kind with the forces of good and evil, and in the silence of his soul holds some secret intercourse with the universe. Is it possible that the vilest, the most degraded, the most abandoned, and even the most stupid of all those massed and congregated millions, hides from the gaze of his fellow-men longings and hungering aspirations which in the eyes of the angels entitle him to his place in the cosmos?
One feels, standing at some central point in London, and studying the incessant multitude of human beings, that personality is blurred into some such sameness as one sees in a flock of sheep, or in a procession of waves, or in an ant-heap. And passing through a dreary street of interminable villas, one feels that a monotony similar to the bricks and slates and window-frames must characterize the lives of their occupiers, that the man who lives in Number 3 can be of no more interest to us than the man who pays the rent of Number 27, and that all the children playing on the pavements or shouting in the road are similar one to the other as the leaves on the stunted limes behind the
garden railings.
But reflection tells us that every human unit in this great mass of mortality has a silence and a solitude proper to himself alone. His thought is separate. Fractional may be his occupation or his idleness, his virtue or his vice, his laughter or his tears; but he himself, he in the silence and solitude of his thought, the quintessence of the man, is integral. One may classify him in a hundred ways, and find that he fits perfectly into our tables of anthropological statistics; but the silence and the solitude in which his thought dwells preserve the ultimate reality of his identity from our research.
Possibly, then, every individual life apparently merged and lost in the thick density of the mass, could we penetrate to this solitude of the soul, would possess interest for the gossip and information for the student of human nature.
More or less interest; more or less information.
Yes; this is probably true. The apprehension that every unit in the multitude has his own individual silence of the soul, his own impenetrable chamber of thought, his own unbroken and incommunicable solitude, brings home to us the knowledge that one's own pressing sense of personal identity is the property of all mankind, that sameness is ultimately impossible, that variation is the law, that the swarm is composed of separate and individual ones.
And yet it still remains remarkable that all the wonderful biography of this book was discovered in a single quarter of the town.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, Professor William James defines religion as 'the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.' This definition must not be restricted to theologians and philosophers. Hamlet's religion is more to humanity than that of Athanasius. The religion of Crainquebille has its profound interest. Every man who thinks at all,
however noisy his public worship of the no-God, does in his solitude feel himself to stand in some relation to the universe. Every man has a religion.
This religion of the ordinary man must possess more interest for the student of human nature than 'the second-hand religious life' of the conventional formalist. It has the attraction of diversity, the sympathy of drama, the force of reality. It is 'the primordial thing.' 'Churches,' says Professor James, 'when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition, but the founders of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case.'
Here, in this book, then, is a record of individual religion manifesting itself in modern London among men with whom a theologian would scarcely pause for a moment's discussion, but who may seem to the reader, nevertheless, of that very order of simple souls chosen by the. Light of the World for the central revolution of human history.
If there is aught in these men to shock our respect for the normal, let it be remembered that profound changes in character are not conventional. You cannot have upheaval with platitude.
Professor James teaches the student of psychology to expect something exceptional and eccentric in men who have suffered a profound spiritual experience. He contrasts such men with the ordinary religious believer 'who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan; his religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.' He declares that it profits us little to study this second-hand religious life, and says, 'We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit,
but as an acute fever rather.' As Seeley says in the phrase which I have taken for the motto of this book, 'No heart is pure that is not passionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.'
Such religion as this book will contain is the strange, individual, and elemental force which one finds in the Book of Job, in the Psalms of David, in the Pilgrim's Progress. It is the struggle of overmastered and defeated souls for liberty, for life, for escape from hell. It reveals in the hearts of men whom science and law would condemn as hopeless of reformation, such possibilities of purity and devotion as La Rochefoucauld would have us believe do not exist even in the hearts of the best. It is religion terribly real in men who have terribly suffered.
From this religion of my book flows everything else.
At the beginning is the revelation that the lost can be saved. One listens too willingly nowadays to the pathologist ready to pronounce physiological judgement upon every soul of man. It is our avoidance of the miracle which disposes us to the conviction that certain people are beyond the reach of regeneration. Our fashionable support of the Salvation Army is inspired largely by the success of what is called its 'Social Work.' We think that a tramp may be lifted from the gutters, stood upon his feet, put to some task, and made a citizen; we think that a family sinking towards destitution may be emigrated to Canada and saved to human society; but, antipathy to the miracle will not let us believe that a dipsomaniac of a sudden can lose all desire for alcohol, that a criminal who has spent the best part of his life in prisons may of a sudden turn from his crime; we are sceptical about these revolutions which pathology is inclined to pronounce impossible, and as for 'conversions' as for the dipsomaniac and the gaol bird becoming savers of other men in the name of religion as for this, we shrug our shoulders and inquire, Is it true? or dismiss it as hysteria.
But to make a tramp a workman is commonplace. Why are we interested in dull things? To convert the worst of men into a saint is a miracle in psychology. Why are we not interested in this great matter?
What is 'conversion '?
According to Professor James, in whose steps we follow with admiration and respect, 'to be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.'
Elsewhere he speaks of 'those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul's is the most eminent, and in which often, amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new.'
These definitions, as all the world knows, are illustrated in Professor James's book by remarkable and well-authenticated histories of personal conversion. The evidence for the reality of these immense changes in character is overwhelming, and the only point where the psychologists find themselves at issue is the means by which they have been accomplished. As to that interesting conflict of opinion the reader is referred to the combatants. The purpose of this book, which I venture to describe as a footnote in narrative to Professor James's famous work, is to bring home to men's minds this fact concerning conversion, that, whatever it may be, conversion is the only means by which a radically bad person can be changed into a radically good person.
Whatever we may think of the phenomenon itself, the fact stands clear and unassailable that by this thing called conversion, men consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy become consciously right, superior, and happy. It produces not a change, but a revolution in character. It does not alter, it creates a new personality. The phrase 'a new birth' is not a rhetorical hyperbole, but a fact of the physical kingdom. Men, who have been irretrievably bad, and under conversion have become ardent savers of the lost, tell us, with all the pathetic emphasis of their
inexpressible and impenetrable discovery, that in the change which overcame them they were conscious of being 'born again.' To them, and we can go to no other authorities, this tremendous revolution in personality signifies a new birth. It transforms Goneril into Cordelia, Caliban into Ariel, Saul of Tarsus into Paul the apostle.
There is no medicine, no Act of Parliament, no moral treatise, and no invention of philanthropy which can transform a man radically bad into a man radically good. If the State, burdened and shackled by its horde of outcasts and sinners, would march freely and efficiently to its goal, it must be at the hands of religion that relief is sought. Only religion can perform the miracle which will convert the burden into assistance. There is nothing else; there can be nothing else. Science despairs of these people and pronounces them 'hopeless' and 'incurable.' Politicians find themselves at the end of their resources. Philanthropy begins to wonder whether its charity could not be turned into a more fertile channel. The law speaks of 'criminal classes.' It is only religion that is not in despair about this mass of profitless evil dragging at the heels of progress the religion which still believes in miracle.
Professor James, you notice, speaks of men consciously unhappy becoming consciously happy. This phrase helps one to understand that particular side of the Salvation Army's methods which offends so many people its band its cheerful singing, and its laughing optimism. You cannot imagine what effect these exhilarating bands, the rejoicing hymns, and these radiant Salvationists produce in streets of infinite squalor and abysmal degradation. Think what it means for a sodden and degraded Miserable; shivering some Sunday morning in his filthy rags on the steps of a common lodging-house, hating himself, hating God, and regarding the whole race of humanity with hostility, to hear suddenly the jocund clash of brass music to catch words that challenge his wretchedness and despair with exhilarating joy, and then to see among those marching down the centre of his dreary street, happy, clear. and rejoicing, the very men who once shared his dog's life of misery and crime.
It is the rejoicing, singing, irrepressible happiness q the Salvationist, which often makes him such a powerful saver of other men. Such a spirit exists in these savers of the lost as moved an American writer, quoted by Professor James, to exclaim: 'I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered together with the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation of the whole material universe! Such a phrase almost disgusts the coldblooded. But at the very heart of this mystery of conversion is a wild joy. A soul consciously unhappy has become consciously happy. A soul bound and in prison has been loosed and is free! Does one expect a man whose entire being has suffered so great, so pervasive, so cataclysmic a change, to wall sedately, to measure his words, to take the temperature of his enthusiasm and feel the pulse of his transport? The enchanted felicity which sends this man singing an| marching into the slums is not only the token of the miracle in himself, but is the magic, as my book shows over and over again, which draws unhappy and dejected souls to make surrender of their sin and wretchedness.
Does not Christ speak of a sinner's repentance actually increasing the joy of Heaven?
I have walked with one of these converted Salvationists an ex-soldier and now a road-labourer through some of the most evil and desperate streets in West London. I observed how his handsome face, with its bronzed colour and its bright eyes, the proud carriage of his vigorous body, and the steadied cheerfulness of his voice, attracted the notice and held the attention of the hundreds of disreputable people swarming in that neighbourhood. I attributed this interest to his good looks and his air of veil-being; for my companion, on these occasions, was not in the uniform of the Salvation Army; fresh from his work, fresh from his tea in a comfortable and happy home, veil dressed, smart, and attractive, he walked as an English workman, consciously right, superior, and happy, through streets filled with people consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy. But I discovered the reason for the attention we attracted. I said that the people seemed to regard him with wonder, and a little envy. 'You should see them,'
he replied, 'when we march down here on Sunday morning in the red jersey; I, Tom This, Joe That, and Will Other-Fellow, all of us at one time the worst men in the whole neighbourhood.'
The joy of the converted Salvationist, so attractive and startling to miserable and abandoned wretches, is an essential feature of reform by conversion. It is almost the central force of the whole movement. But it, in its turn, effects conversion by love of the highest order love which seeks out the lost and shows infinite tenderness to the worst. Professor James has not missed this feature of work by conversion.' General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army,' he says, 'considers that the first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in the question whether they are to rise or sink.' The amazing work accomplished by the Salvation Army a work which I think is only now in its infancy, and which will probably be subjected to endless evolutionary changes without losing its essential character is a work of Love fired and inspired by Joy.
If psychologists would know the secret of this miracle, working now in almost every country under the sun, they will find that it lies in using men once consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, using them to seek and to save, with a contagious joy and a vital affection, those of their own condition in life who are still consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy, and who are thus in despair about themselves only because they believe that no one on earth or in heaven cares whether they rise or sink.
The social work of the Salvation Army is as nothing to its spiritual work, and that social work itself could not exist without the miracle of conversion.
This psychological mystery of conversion deserves the practical attention of the social reformer.
In this book it will be seen that all the punishments invented by law for the protection of property and the reformation of the criminal, fail
absolutely of their purpose in certain cases, and only render more hard and more rebellious the lawless mind; whereas that lawless mind, apparently so brutal, terrible and hopeless, responds with extraordinary sensitiveness to love and pity, and under the influence of religion becomes perfected in all that makes for the highest citizenship.
It would be a simple reform, and yet one of the most humane and useful, if the State did away with the formality of prison chaplains, men who too often perform their perfunctory duties with little enthusiasm and with little hope of achieving anything, and admitted, under proper authority, some such organization as the Salvation Army, which has in its ranks many men who have themselves suffered in prison, who know the criminal mind, and who would approach the most deplorable and hopeless case with the certain knowledge that conversion is possible.
Few people, I think, after reading this book, will be able to enunciate the prayer, 'That it may please Thee to have pity upon all prisoners and captives,' without feeling that divine pity will only manifest itself when human pity has learned to make use of common sense in the matter of its State prisons.
The strange revelations which this book makes concerning our prisons and our police, while they must shock and surprise the reader, will lead, I hope, to some change in administration which will prevent the manufacture of a criminal class one of the achievements of the present system.
The police have many virtues, the prison system has of late years been greatly improved, but, as this book will show, for certain men, forming what is called the criminal class, police and prison join forces to build a barrier against their improvement. It is appalling to think that men who once got into the black books of the police of their neighbourhood, were marked down by them for such cruel harassing, such fiendish persecution, and such cowardly bullying as hardly disgraced a man-o'-war In the worst days of the press-gang.
However this particular attitude of the police towards their enemies may have changed of late, for masses of people in London, the police still exist, not as the guardians of public order, but as agents of the rich and enemies of the poor.
Until one penetrates into the vast areas of destitution which crowd on every side the little centre of London's wealth and prosperity, it is impossible to realize how largely this barbarous notion of the police rules the minds of the multitude. Few things so sharply challenge our civilization deeply reflected on as this attitude of the poor towards the guardians of public order.
While it is impossible for one to say, after reading the strange histories recorded in this volume, that any man is hopelessly lost to religion virtue and self-respect, the ancient conviction remains a form of the adage which says, Prevention is better than Cure that the business of all reformation begins with the child.
In the first pages of this book I shall attempt to sketch the neighbourhood in which I made the acquaintance of my broken earthenware. London is made up of such localities, few, perhaps, worse, many as bad, but all marked by the one great damning shame of child waste. Wherever you go in London you will find children living under the horrible influence of parents who deny, with every commandment in the decalogue, the authority of the moral sense and the commonest laws of sanitation. To leave these children under the domination of such parents is to imperil their physical and moral wellbeing, is to bring up a posterity unworthy of a proud and high-spirited nation, is to lay upon our children an increase of that burden which is already causing us to stumble in our march.
'One million people are living on the ratepayers,' says a newspaper.' Twenty-six millions of money are raised in one way or another to support this host of paupers.' The Salvation Army speaks of 'the vast army numbering tens of thousands of tramps who prey on the public charity to the estimated extent of three millions a year, who do no
work, and who cost the community an immense sum in Poor Law relief.'
Is the burden being lightened or increased? Is it likely to lighten or decrease while the children of the slums are left with their abominable parents?
There is another aspect. Is it humane, has it the sanction of the religious conscience of the nation, that children should be left to live with parents Infinitely below the moral standard which exists among the negroes of Africa?
We have ceased to be sentimental. Such a ballad as The Cry of the Children would fail to move the contemporary world. But we are practical, we are anxious to do well. Some appeal addressed to the religious conscience of the nation in the name of this great army of soiled innocence and poisoned childhood if it showed a practical way out would surely meet with a response. The Churches, who have divine reasons for conserving the purity of the child, and politicians, whose responsibility to posterity is the child, must feel if they give attention to this subject that the necessity for immediate and drastic action is at our doors.
In the meantime there is appalling waste, hideous ruin, and unthinkable pain. One reads, for instance: 'Turn to any town, and you find the officials saying, "There are scores of little children in this town nay (where the town is a large one) hundreds living under circumstances of the most shocking depravity: living in conditions from which, under existing Acts of Parliament, they ought to be rescued, living in surroundings in which it is impossible for them to grow up other than a burden and a danger to the State: living in a manner which makes them a source of moral defilement to all other children with whom they come in contact, whether at school or elsewhere: living in what are nothing else than human middens." '
At a low estimate the children of the worst tramps number five thousand, a fragment of the army of childhood doomed to
unspeakable suffering and corruption from their infancy; in Great Britain there are thirty thousand children 'doomed to be criminals, doomed to be outcasts, to be even worse than that.'
Beyond seeking to interest the reader in the psychological mystery of conversion, and beyond seeking to bring home to practical men the immense value of personal religion in the work of social regeneration, that is to say, in the work of developing national character, this book endeavours to create sympathy for two rational and economic reforms: a reform of our prison system, especially in its educative and saving functions; and a reform of our administration as touching the children of iniquitous parents.
The note of the book is not one of despair; it is distinctly one of hope. That is why action is so reasonable and so compelling.
A PART OF LONDON
A TURNING from one of the great main roads on the western side of London brings you into a district which is chiefly famous for containing some of the worst streets, and some of the lowest characters, known to the police. The residents of this neighbourhood will point out to you, with local pride, the public-house frequented by Milsom and Fowler before their terrible murder in Muswell Hill.
You would never suspect, while you pass down the main road, the existence of so deplorable a quarter. On either side of you are some of the finest private houses in London; the traffic of carriages and automobiles is incessant; the pavements are vivid and animated with a ceaseless procession of humanity; and everywhere one sees that flagrant exhibition of great wealth which almost frightens those who know the destitution of the poor. Presently the private houses end, and shops begin. In the midst of these shops, which are not of the first-class, stands a station of the Underground Railway. Here there is noise, smell, and shabbiness. Motor omnibuses, panting and vibrating, are drawn up at the kerb; dirty and ragged newspaper lads toss for pennies and discuss horse-races; flower-girls, with the leather straps of their baskets depressing their shoulders, exhibit bright flowers, whose contrast to their human ugliness is complete; under the glass porch of the railway station there is always a crowd of people waiting for an omnibus or a friend; and the traffic just here is heavy, noisy, and continuous, for this point is the junction of several roads.
The pavement is strewn with dust, dirt, and refuse. You tread upon a carpet of omnibus tickets, scraps of newspaper, cigarette ends, matches, tissue paper from oranges, hairpins, and that inevitable chaff of the London streets, composed of broken straw, hay, and dust, which the lightest wind can lift and blow into the eyes of pedestrians.
Disagreeable as this busy corner is, and that in many ways, one still sees on every side women extravagantly dressed, men of fashion, and a tide of pleasure traffic which suggests nothing but wealth, ease, and festivity.
But with one step you are out of this cheerful vulgar world.
The quarter of London which we are about to penetrate is approached from the thronging pavements of the main thoroughfare by a road even more densely packed. It is the market street of the Miserables. The shops are faced by an unbroken line of stalls at the kerb's edge. Between the darkened windows of the shops and the brilliant stalls of the gutter, passes a swarm of very dirty and brutal-looking people, mostly women, the coppers of whose greasy purses, acquired by sin and crime, are eagerly sought by the hoarse-voiced stall-holders.
Apparently the tradesmen who pay rent and rates have nothing to do but stand desolately at their shop-doors, and watch the thriving business of their more than opposite neighbours. Among these stalls, where you can buy the best strawberries for three-halfpence a pound, meat and fish for a few pence, corsets, caps, and shoes for next to nothing, one observes with some astonishment cut flowers and flowers in pots, pictures, and books. Is it not wonderful that the very poor buy flowers, and books, and pictures? It is also interesting to notice that while the customer stands in front of the fruit and vegetable, or fish and meat stall, making a bargain, the wholesale merchant, in his smart pony and trap, is at the back waiting to do business with the retailer. The commerce of the great city, flowing in from all the seas of the world, has these strange and numerous backwaters.
At the end of this busy road, terminated by several public-houses, one comes into the private quarter of the neighbourhood. Here you find almost every kind of house except the best, you find the large and comfortable villa, once resplendent with the new paint and flowerboxes dear to the prosperous citizen, and the straight line of neat, low, one-storied houses dear to the working man. All are now shabby, all are now stricken with misery. The large villa is occupied by some more or less respectable workman, who lives in the basement and lets off the other floors. The front garden is uncultivated. The pavements and roadway are filled with shouting children, who chalk wickets on garden walls, and lines for hop-scotch on the pavement. Many of these
children, the great majority, are wonderfully well clothed, beautifully clean, and appear far more happy and vigorous than their anaemic contemporaries of Kensington Gardens. At one of these houses, rented and occupied in the basement by a Salvationist, as many as seventy beggars have called from the neighbouring street in a single week.
One turns out of these respectable streets, where the children are playing cricket, cherry-bobs, hop-scotch, hoops, and cards, and suddenly finds oneself in streets miserable and evil beyond description.
These are streets of once decent two-storied villas, now lodginghouses. The very atmosphere is different. One is conscious first of dejection, then of some hideous and abysmal degradation. It is not only the people who make this impression on one's mind, but the houses themselves. Dear God, the very houses seem accursed! The fancies are crusted, and in a dull fashion shiny with grime; the doors, window-frames, and railings are dark with dirt only disturbed by fresh accretions; the flights of steps leading up to the front doors, under their foul porches, are worn, broken, and greasy; the doors and windows in the reeking basements have been smashed up in nearly every case for firewood again and again one sees the window-space rough boarded by some landlord anxious to preserve his property from the rain. Here and there a rod is missing from the iron railings it has been twisted out and used as a weapon.
In these streets, on a summer evening, you find the flights of steps occupied by the lodgers, and the pavements and roadways swarming with their children. The men are thieves, begging-letter writers, pickpockets, bookmaker's touts, totters (rag and bone men), and trouncers (men paid by costermongers to shout their wares), and bullies. The women add to their common degradation which may be imagined the arts of the pickpocket, the beggar, the shoplifter, and the bully.
A drunken man, who wakes up to find himself in one of these houses, is given a few old rags wherein to make his return home, but his purse,
his watch, his pocket-book, and his papers are not more tenaciously claimed by his terrible host than every shred of his clothing.
Sunday morning witnesses the strangest sight in these streets. The lodgers hold a bazaar. From end to end the railings are hung with fusty and almost moving rags, the refuse of the week's picking and stealing, which no pawnbroker can be brought to buy. Neighbours, barely dressed, many of them with black eyes, bandaged heads, and broken mouths, turn out to inspect this frightful collection of rags. There is bargaining, buying, and exchanging. Practically naked children look on, and learn the tricks of the trade.
If you could see these bareheaded women, with their hanging hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths; if you could see them there, half-dressed, and that in a draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and if you could hear the appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature, in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes, had never, could never, have been like this; that these people are moving on in a line of their own, that they have produced something definitely nonhuman, which is as distinct from humanity as the anthropoid ape. Ruth, or even Mary of Magdala, at the beginning of the line; two thousand years of progress; and then these corrupt and mangy things at the end! This is not to be believed. No; they do not belong to the advancing line, they have never been human. For the honour of humanity, one rejects them.
Concerning the men, one thing only need be said. Every woman the oldest hag amongst them challenged me with a hating stare, the boldness and effrontery of which struck me more than the enmity; every man seemed to be ashamed. There was cunning in their faces, there was every expression of stealth and underhand craft, but they looked and lowered their eyes. I was more impressed by this apparent shamefacedness of the men than by the murderous hostility of the women. They seemed to me 'consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy.'
But more than by anything concerning the men and women of this neighbourhood, one is impressed by the swarm of dreggy children playing their poor little pavement games in the shadow of these lodging-houses. Some - can it be believed? are decently clothed and look as if they are sometimes washed; degraded mothers, sitting on the doorsteps, may be seen proudly exhibiting a baby to their friends, cooing over it, brushing its poor little pale cheek with a black finger, suddenly stooping their foul faces to cover the little mouth with gay and laughing kisses; one of my first experiences in these streets was to hear the sudden opening of a top-story window, to see a frightful woman thrust herself half out, and to hear her shout to a toddling child to come out of the road and on to the pavement although not a cart of any kind was in view; but this sentimental affection of the mother does not last very far beyond the period of helpless infancy. The mass of these children above five or six years of age are terribly neglected. I have never seen children more dirty, more foully clothed, more dejected-looking. In all cases, to use a phrase which I am told is common in the district, these poor children are 'lousy as a cuckoo.' I saw many children with sores and boils; I also saw some children whose eyes looked out at me from a face that was nothing but a scab.
A mortuary chapel has had to be built for this neighbourhood. The rooms of the houses are so crowded that directly a person dies the body must be moved.
Can the boys of these dreadful streets grow into anything but hooligans, or the girls do anything but earn money in their mothers' fashion?
Let me put the common question, but with real emphasis: Would we allow a dog to live in these streets?
Well, into these streets come day after day, and every Sunday, the little vigorous corps of the Salvation Army stationed in this quarter of London. The adjutant of this corps some years ago was a beautiful and delicate girl. She prayed at the bedside of dying men and women in these lodging-houses; she taught children to pray; she went into
public-houses and persuaded the violent blackguards of the town to come away; she pleaded with the most desperate women at street corners; she preached in the open streets on Sundays; she stood guard over the doors of men mad for drink and refused to let them out. It is to the work of this wonderful woman so gracious, so modest, and so sweet that one may trace the miracles whose histories are contained in the following pages. The energy, resolution, and splendid cheerfulness of the present corps some of them her own personal converts may likewise be traced to her influence. She has left in these foul streets the fragrance of her personality, a fragrance of the lilies of a pure soul.
'Ah!' exclaimed an old gaol-bird, showing me the photograph of this woman; 'if anybody goes to heaven, it'll be that there little angel of God.'
They call her the angel-adjutant.
On one occasion this little woman was walking home through evil streets after midnight, when a drunken man asked her if he might travel by her side. After going some way the man said: 'No, you aren't afraid'; and then he mumbled to himself 'Never insults the likes of you, because you care for the likes of us.'
THE PUNCHER
WHAT strikes one most in the appearance of this short, broadshouldered, red-haired prize-fighter is the extreme refinement of his features. His face is pale, with that almost transparent pallor of the red-haired; the expression is weary, heavy, and careworn; the features are small, delicate, and regular; one cannot believe that the lightcoloured eyes have been hammered, and the small, almost girlish mouth rattled with blows; he might be a poet, the last role one would ascribe to him is that of the ring.
Of all the men in this little group of the 'saved,' he is the saddest, quietest, and most restrained. He is the least communicative, too; one has to get his history more from others than from himself. He speaks slowly, unwillingly, in a voice so low that one must stretch the ear to hear him; he regards one with the look of a soul that does not expect to be understood; one feels that he is carrying a burden; at times one is tempted to wonder whether he really does feel himself to be consciously right, superior, and happy.
I account for this sorrowfulness of manner, first, by the natural inexcitability of a prize-fighter's temperament, and secondly, by the profound depths of his spiritual nature, which keeps him dissatisfied with the results of his work for others.
This man, whose fame as a prize-fighter still renders him a hero of the first magnitude among his neighbours, has been the means of saving some of the worst men in the place. Unpaid by the Salvation Army, and devoting every hour of his spare time to its work, the Puncher hungers to save by the score and by the hundred. I discovered in his nature a mothering and compassionate yearning for the souls of unhappy men, the souls of men estranging themselves from God. One perceives that every man so conscious of a mission for saving, and so conscious of the appalling misery of London, must be quiet, and silent, and sorrowful. He is the son of fairly respectable people who came gradually down and down, till their home was a loft in some mews patronized by
cabmen. It was here that the consciousness of the Puncher received its first stimulus of ambition. There was in the yard, working among the cabs and horses, a young man pointed out by the denizens of that dirty place as a wonderful hero. He had fought someone in a great fight on Wormwood Scrubs, and had beaten him to bits.
'I remember distinctly, just as if it was yesterday,' said the reflective Puncher, speaking in his low voice and looking sadly away from me; 'I remember distinctly the feeling that used to come over me whenever I looked at that man. I don't remember life before that. It seems to me that I only began to live then. And this was the feeling, I wanted to be like that man. I wanted to fight. I wanted people to point at me, and say: "There's a fighting man!" I never thought I should be as big a man as the cock of our yard; I only wanted to be something like him; something as near to him as strength and pluck could carry me. But the day came 'he added, with a touch of pride I when I stood up to that very man, a bit of a boy, I was, too and I smothered him, Yes; I smothered him. Ay, and afterwards many a man bigger than him; a lot bigger.'
While he was a boy, still stirred by these heroic longings, he started out on a career of wildness and daring. He had all those virile, headstrong, and daring qualities which in such a country as Canada or South Africa would have made him a useful member of society, but which in London drove him into crime. His first escapade was stealing a duck from Regent's Park, for which offence he made his appearance before a magistrate. Then one day he stole several bundles of cloth from a shop, sold them to the keeper of a marine store, and once more, this time with the storekeeper at his side, stood in the dock of a police court. The storekeeper went to prison, the boy was fined.
His animal spirits got him into trouble at school. There was no master able to influence his character. He was pronounced utterly unmanageable; his temper was said to be ungovernable; the authorities said that he endangered the lives of other boys by flinging slates about as if he wanted to kill someone. He was turned out of nearly every school in Marylebone.
He was still a boy when he stole a bottle of rum from a grocer's barrow, shared it with some of his mates, and made himself so hopelessly drunk that he fell into Regent's Canal. At the age of seventeen he was put to work. Work, it was thought, might tame his wild spirits. Moreover, it was necessary for him to earn bread. He became a porter at Smithfield Meat Market.
It was at this time that he began seriously to discipline his fighting qualities. He trained under a man whom middle-aged sportsmen will remember, the redoubtable Nobby Thorpe. In a few months he was a hero, and a man of substance.
He fought sixteen famous fights at Wormwood Scrubs, and won them all. Then came a challenge to meet Eycott at the Horse and Groom Tavern in Long Acre. In those days certain of the public-houses patronized by sporting noblemen had covered yards at the back of their premises for the purpose of prize-fights. It was in one of these places that the young porter from Smithfield Market met Eycott, a rare champion. The fight went through fourteen rounds, and the Puncher was declared victor. Eycott objected to this decision. The Puncher was game, and they fought again. In three rounds he had won easily.
This victory meant not only money, but fame and the patronage of powerful men. The porter from Smithfield became the flash fightingman, a terrible type of humanity. He swaggered with lords and shook his fist in the face of the world. He met his trainer at the 'Horse and Groom,' and smothered him in eight rounds. Then came fights with Shields, of Marylebone; Darkie Barton, of Battersea; Tom Woolley, of Walsall; and Bill Baxter, of Shoreditch. At some of these fights at the back of London taverns, there were as many as sixteen members of the House of Lords, in addition to many of the most famous men on the turf. When the National Sporting Club was organized, the Puncher was chosen to open it in a great fight, still remembered, with Stanton Abbott. One of his most famous encounters was with Bill Bell, of Hoxton; they fought with bare fists, on Lord de Clifford's estate in Devonshire. The record of the Puncher is, that never once was he beaten by his own weight.
In what state was he at this period of his life? Many times he entered the ring so drunk that the referees objected. He was one of those extraordinary men who can saturate their bodies with alcohol and perform in a condition of complete drunkenness physical feats requiring the coolest brain and the deadliest cunning. It was the very obstinacy of his body to break down under this terrible strain which ultimately plunged him into ruin.
With his pockets full of money he married, bought a laundry business, took a comfortable house, kept servants, a carriage, and a pair of horses, went to race meetings, associated as a hero with the rich and powerful, and lived a life of racket and debauchery. His body held out. He was perfectly strong, perfectly fit. The truth is his whole system was singing with the joy of success. His brain was on fire. He felt himself capable of enormous things. He was drunk nearly every day of his life. Nothing mattered.
When he began to feel the days of his fighting drawing to a close, he looked about him for another means of earning money quickly and easily. He had not far to look. He started a racing business.
His name, so famous to the sporting world, was advertised as 'A guarantee of Good Faith.' Under the cloak of this name he tricked and cheated in a hundred cunning and disgraceful ways. He became the member of a gang. A tip was given, and with an air of mystery was worked for all it was worth by the touts and the prophets; the horse tipped was a certain loser. The men who gave the tip profited by the wagers made confidently by their friends and patrons. The gang did well, and prospered. The Puncher's guarantee of good faith sold many a sportsman what is called 'a pup.'
But suddenly some of these schemes, advancing in boldness, attracted the attention of the police. The Puncher lost at a stroke his fame, his popularity, his good name. He was designated a low blackguard, and fell from wealth to poverty. His wife and her relations, who had sunned themselves in his wealth, became scornful and antagonistic. The Puncher felt this treatment, and it made him worse Again and
again he went to prison; each time he came out t was to find his wife and children sinking deeper into poverty, and showing him a colder and a deadlier hatred. The old glory of an establishment and horses had quite departed. His experience of Dives' splendour was shortlived Destiny prepared for him a longer experience in the role of Lazarus.
In one single year, from October, 1904, to October, 1905, he was seventeen times convicted, chiefly for drunkenness. His wife now left him for the third time, determined that this should be the last. She had done with the wretch. He was alone in poverty with his madness, an insatiable passion for drink.
He told me something of the way in which he obtained drink during this destitute period of his life. He used to intimidate those of his old racing companions whom it was perfectly safe to blackmail; he would waylay the rich and powerful, and what is called 'pitch a tale'; when absolutely penniless and mad for drink, he would march into any crowded public-houses where he was known, and demand it. He was never refused.
These fighting-men, when they come down to poverty, however weak and broken they may be, can live in a certain fashion on the terror of their past strength. They do not cadge; they demand. There are plenty of publicans who themselves give drink to these terrible men making them first promise that they will go away in order to prevent a disturbance, possibly a fight.
The Puncher lived in this way. Food had no attraction for him, indeed, he had a feeling of repulsion for anything in the nature of solid nourishment; everything was in drink. He was a blazing mass of alcoholic energy. The state into which he had sunk can only be understood by a medical man. His body was supported by alcohol and nothing else. Try and imagine the condition of his brain.
He lived now in the common lodging-houses of which I have written lodging-houses occupied by the lowest, most desperate, and infinitely
the most loathsome creatures on the face of the earth. He found no horror in these places. He was their king. No one dared to interfere with him. He was more terrible in his rags and madness than in the days of his splendour. Murder shone in his eyes; it was a word often on his lips. If he hit a man, that man fell like a stone. The Puncher, fed by alcohol, was something that spread terror through the district. As a prize-fighter he had been an object of awe; now he was an object of fear. Then he had been a man; now he was a devil.
His brain was active and cunning in one direction the obtaining of money for drink. He devised a hundred ways for raising the wind. This outcast in his rags was not an ordinary cadging beggar; he was a man who had known wealth and comfort; a pot or two of four-ale could not satisfy the fiery longings of his body. He wanted drink always and for ever. He wanted to sit at his ease, and call for drink after drink, till he slept satisfied for a little; then to wake and find more drink waiting for him. One of his tricks brought him into collision with his wife's family. He managed to obtain a few pawn-tickets for forfeited jewellery, which was to be sold by auction. Many of the publicans in low houses deal in these tickets. The Puncher bethought him of a young relative of his wife's, who had a good situation in an office. Thither he went, and showed his tickets. He asked for a loan of seven shillings and sixpence on one of these tickets. He said that he knew a good thing for Epsom on the following day; meant to walk there that night and back the horse if he found that his information still held good.
The money was given.
It was a great sum to him in those days, but no sooner was he out of the office than it maddened him by its meanness. He contrasted his miserable present with his glorious past. He cursed fate, he cursed himself. What a fool he had been to ask so little! He would go back and get more.
But first he must drink.
When the silver had gone, he went back and got gold.
He was what is called 'drunk to the world' when this relation of his wife who believed him at Epsom came upon him unexpectedly.
The news reached his wife and children that he had begun to prey upon decent members of the family. The news of what his wife was saying of him reached the Puncher. It sank deeply into his mind, and with it he himself sank deeper into the mud.
One day the Puncher's eldest son sought him out in his low haunts. The prize-fighter loved this boy above everything on earth, except drink. He looked up and saw his son standing before him in the uniform of the Salvation Army.
'What God's foolery is this?' he demanded, and laughed.
The boy pleaded with his father. He spoke of getting back from misery to comfort, of a return from wretchedness and destitution to happiness and home-love. With all the earnestness he could command, with all the anxiety of a son to save his father, the lad pleaded with the Puncher.
The Puncher laughed.
He had one form of expression for an answer. In his rags, shame, and frightful beastliness, he looked proudly at his son, and exclaimed, 'Me! a Salvationist!' The contempt was complete.
That phrase haunted him and delighted him, long after the son had retired discomfited. 'Me! a Salvationist!' he kept on repeating, and every time he laughed with a rich delight. It was the first joke he had enjoyed for a year.
He got profoundly drunk, out of sheer joy, and was in trouble with the police. That night he slept in a cell at the police-court.
The next day was Sunday.
He was in his cell, tortured by thirst, mad with the rage of a caged beast, cursing God for this long Sunday of solitude and imprisonment, when suddenly he heard the noise of a band through the little grating at the top of his cell.
He considered, and knew it to be the band of the Salvation Army.
He thought of his son.
As he sat there, dwelling on all the memories evoked by the thought of his boy, he compared his wretchedness and despair with the lad's brightness and goodness, and suddenly melting into tears, vowed that he would at least make an effort to live a decent life.
He spent that Sunday striving to prepare himself for the great struggle. He endeavoured to see clearly what it would mean. The temptation to drink, he knew well, would continually assail him. The distaste for steady work, which had always characterized him, would take long to overcome. It would be a hard fight, the hardest he had ever put up, but it was worth it. Instead of the lodging house, a home; instead of the lowest companionship, the love of wife and children; instead of the prison, security and peace! Surely, this was worth a big fight.
On the following morning he stood in the dock. There were plenty of officials to tell the magistrate the past record of this prisoner. Unfortunately there was no one to tell him what thoughts had been working in his brain all that long Sunday in the terrible solitude of the cell. The sentence was a month's hard labour. No doubt many people who read the case in the newspaper said that the punishment was inadequate, and called the Puncher hard names. One can only judge men by written statements: the admission of anything else is impossible. The Puncher deserved his month.
What did that month's imprisonment do for him in his new state of mind? It had a curious effect upon him. It roused him into a new form of mental energy. Braced, vigorous, and restored to something of his old glowing joy in his strength, he looked with an equal loathing both on his life of horror and on his intention to reform it.
His soul was filled with a vague consciousness of some unattainable superiority which he had missed by his past life, and which he would have even further degraded by his notion of a reformation. Only in the deplorable condition to which drink had reduced him, could he have entertained the base notion of creeping back to his wife with a plea for pity and forgiveness. He revolted from himself. How low must he have fallen to contemplate the cowardice of repentance in God in Heaven, to what further depths of infamous disgust might he descend, if it were possible for him a few hours ago to think of religion!
Do you understand this condition of his mind?
He was conscious of some unattainable superiority. He felt himself infinitely above his degradation, and infinitely above his pious son in the red jersey. He was conscious of a great manhood, of powers capable of inexpressible achievement, of some immense superiority just beyond his reach, and of which the world God curse it! had cheated him.
No; not unattainable. It flashed upon him that it was attainable. He could attain it by Death.
This man, whose pale and refined face tells of a profound spiritual warfare, felt himself grow to the fulness of his stature in the realization that death would save him from himself.
When he left the prison his mind was made up. He would murder his wife, and end his life by dying gamely on the scaffold.
This intention was perfectly clear and definite in his mind. It was a fixed idea. So powerful was it, of such extraordinary power, that it utterly destroyed his mania for drink. Psychologists, interested to observe how a religious idea will suddenly uproot a long-established habit, will be equally interested to find how an idea of hate destroyed the appetite for alcohol in the body of a man literally saturated with the poison. The old-established madness was exorcised by a single idea formed in the mind during a period of enforced deprivation. One devil went out, another entered.
The Puncher went straight from the prison to some of his old sporting acquaintances. He borrowed a sovereign. He drank with his friends till he was drunk, because they pressed him, but he did not break the sovereign for drink. With this money he purchased a butcher's knife and a hamper of food. He concealed the knife on his person, and carried the provisions to his wife.
The woman, who had suffered terribly at his hands, but who had never helped him, received his advances chillingly. He proposed a reconciliation, presenting the food as his peace-offering. Then he suggested a visit to the local music-hall. Apparently out of fear of his fists, she accepted his proposal. She accepted the proposal of a man with murder in his heart, the means of murder on his person, and a man who was drunk.
They went out from the house.
As they passed down the street, a door opened, and a Salvationist, who knew the Puncher and knew his son, came out and joined them. He asked if husband and wife were corning to the meeting. The Puncher said, No. The Salvationist himself a converted drunkard and wife-beater turned and looked the prize-fighter in the face. He told him simply and straightly, looking at him as they went down the street, that he could never be happy until his soul was at peace. He said this with emphatic meaning. Then he said, 'God has got a better life for you, and you know it.' The Puncher struck across the road and entered a public-house. His wife waited at the door for her murderer.
This was the vision. With it he saw the world pointing at his son, and saying, 'That's young, whose father was hanged for murdering his mother.'
A wave of shame swept over him; he came out of his vision with this sense of horror and shame drenching his thought. For the first time in all his life he was stunned by realization of his degradation and infamy. He knew himself.
He says that it is impossible to describe his sensations. The past dropped clear away from him. An immense weight lifted from his brain. He felt light as air. He felt clean. He felt happy. All the ancient words used to symbolize the spiritual experience of instant and complete regeneration may be employed to describe his feelings, but they all fail to convey with satisfaction to himself the immediate and delicious joy which ravished his consciousness. He cannot say what it was. All he knows is that there, at the penitent form, he was dismantled of old horror and clothed afresh in newness and joy.
Whatever the effect upon himself, the effect of this conversion on the neighbourhood was amazing. The news of it spread to every foul court and alley, to every beerhouse and gin-palace, to every coster's barrow and street corner, to every common lodging-house and cellar in all that quarter of the town. There is no hero to these people like a prizefighter; let him come down, as the Puncher had come down, to rags, prison, and the lodging-house still, trailing clouds of glory does he come, and the rest worship their idol even when he lies in the gutter.
When the Sunday came and this great hero marched out of barracks with the band and the banners and the lasses, there were thousands to witness the sight a dense mass of poverty-stricken London, dazed into wonderment by a prize-fighter's soul. 'The Puncher's got religion!' was the whispered amazement, and some wondered whether he had got it bad enough to last, or whether he would soon get over it and be himself again. Little boys swelled the multitude, gazing at the prize-fighter who had got religion.
He had got it badly.
His home became comfortable and happy. He appeared at all the meetings. No desire for tobacco or drink disturbed his peace or threatened his holiness. The neighbourhood saw this great fighter going every night to the Army Hall, and marching every Sunday to the meetings in the open air.
Then they saw something else.
The wonder of the Puncher is what Salvationists call his 'love for souls.' This is a phrase which means the intense and concentrated compassion for the unhappiness of others which visits a man who has discovered the only means of obtaining happiness. The Puncher was not content with the joy of having his own soul saved; he wanted to save others. He did not move away from the neighbourhood which had witnessed his shame, but lived there the life of a missionary. Every hour of his spare time, every shilling he could spare from his home, was given to saving men with whom he had companied in every conceivable baseness and misery. This man, as other narratives will show, has been the means of saving men apparently the most hopeless. To this day, working hard for his living, and with tragedy deepening in his life, he is still to be found in that bad quarter of London, spending his time and his money in this work of rescuing the lost. I never met a quieter soul so set upon this bitter and despairing task of rescue.
And hear something of what he has gone through.
After his conversion, and when it seemed quite certain that he would never revert, a lady set up the Puncher and two other men with a pony and cart, that they might become travelling greengrocers. The business prospered. The prize-fighter and ex-dandy was quite happy in his work. Money came sufficiently for the needs of his home. The work was hard and incessant, but it was interesting.
Then his wife gradually cooled towards the Army. It was not respectable enough for her relations. She did not gird at her husband, but she withheld sympathy. Probably she wished him to remain a Salvationist, if that meant her own immunity from his chastisement; but she would have been better pleased, from a social point of view, if the Puncher had kept his morality and sloughed his religion.
Almost more difficult to bear, the son whom he loved so greatly the boy who had done so much to save him resigned from the Army and gave his thoughts to other things. He did not become bad or vicious, or even indifferent to religion, but the old enthusiasm, the old energy which alone can keep a mind to this exacting form of service, vanished. The Puncher was the only Salvationist left in his home.
One bitter winter's day he was on his rounds with the pony-cart in North London. The third partner in the venture had gone out of the business. The Puncher was on this round with the other man, his only partner. 'Puncher' said this man, pulling up at a public-house, 'I'm going to have a nip of whisky; it's perishing cold. You come in too, and have a glass of port port's teetotaller's drink.'
The Puncher said, No. The partner wheedled and coaxed. It was cold.
'Port's teetotaller's drink,' said the partner. 'One glass can't hurt a man like you; come on. I'll stand it.'
The Puncher fell. He was miserable, lonely, and unhappy in his home. It was cold. His partner stood in the tavern, calling him in. The Puncher followed him. He thinks that the wine was drugged. He dropped like a shot man on the floor of the public-house, and when they picked him up, and got him round, his partner had disappeared with the pony and trap. Such is one aspect of the life of London. In the City the same kind of cleverness is practised in other ways. The Puncher was still drunk when he arrived back in his own neighbourhood.
People seeing him stagger through the streets did not laugh nor mock; they were genuinely sorry even the worst of them to see this greathearted man fallen back into ruin. A kind of silence held the crowded streets as the Puncher with sunk head and giving legs shambled to his home, a terrible look in his eyes and jaws.
Then the tongues wagged. In a few minutes all the neighbourhood knew that the Puncher's conversion had not lasted. People talked of nothing else. They wondered if he had already wrecked his home and smashed his wife. Some of them slouched round to his street and hung about in front of his house. A crowd assembled.
The door opened. The Puncher came out. He had taken off his coat, and had put on the red jersey. He walked straight to the Army Hall, went to the penitent form, and prayed.
That was a brave thing to do. But the Puncher does not see the courage of it. One thought stuck in his mind when he came to himself, drunk, ruined, and alone in that public-house in the North of London: the thought that he would be safe if he could get into his uniform. It was not the honour of the regiment he thought about, but the covering protection of the Flag. He went to his uniform for protection. This is a true story, and it seems to me there is nothing more remarkable in the narrative than the poor beaten fellow's fixed idea that if only he could get into his jersey he would be safe.
From that day he has never fallen. The shadows have deepened for him. His wife's lack of sympathy is an increasing distress and discomfort in the home. The solitude of his soul there is complete. His children do not care about their father's religion. He has to earn his living among men who are not Salvationists, and who do not show him sympathy. But in spite of this the Puncher remains in the neighbourhood of which I am writing, and he is there perhaps the greatest force for personal religion among the sad, the sorrowful, the broken, and the 'lost' who cram its shabby streets.
'The Puncher,' someone said to me, 'has spent hours and pounds trying to reach his old companions. He is chiefly unhappy because he has not saved more than he has. He seems to think of nothing else. He's always talking about it, in his quiet, low voice, and with that queer straining look of longing in his sad eyes.'
He receives no pay from the Army. He is not an officer, he is a soldier a volunteer. The time he gives to the work is the time left over from an arduous day of earning daily bread.
When I suggested to the adjutant mentioned in the preface, that it might be well for the Army to deliver this remarkable man from the task of earning his living, and set him free to 'testify' all over the kingdom, she replied:
He testifies every now and then at great meetings, and wherever his name appears we get vast audiences, for he is known all over England, especially in places where there are race-courses. But the Army does not encourage this idea, because a man who continually narrates the story of his evil deeds is apt to glory in them; that is a great danger, and it is not conversion. You see, we do not stop at converting people from crime and wickedness, we endeavour to lead them on to the heights of character. This man is quite lovely in his mind. His wistfulness for the souls of others is almost feminine; it is an intense yearning. And the discipline of earning his daily bread is far better for him than the excitement of continually narrating the story of the past, from which he is spiritually moving every day of his brave life. I think we are wise in this. To be converted is only a new beginning of something greater.'
Does not this remark of the little adjutant give one fresh ideas of the Salvation Army as a spiritual force?
A TIGHT HANDFUL
"HOW does science account for this man? A His father was the best type of English soldier, a man with discipline in the blood, full of selfrespect, proud of obedience, brave, upright, and orderly.
He had soldiered in the 13th Light Dragoons, now the i3th Hussars, and rode with his regiment on the right of the line at Balaclava. He was one of the six hundred who charged the Russian guns with sabres; he was one of the remnant that rode back out of the jaws of death, out of the mouth of hell. Steadier and better trooper of horse never served his country. The man was clothed with some mysterious dignity; an aloofness of self-respect which was pride in its highest manifestation showed in his manner, his appearance, and his speech. He held himself proudly, was inexorable in his duty, and only forsook taciturnity in unwilling monosyllables. He was what Carlyle would have called a great, silent, inarticulate soul.