The World Set Free

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent from this ecstatic vision of reality.

’Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a little hungry.’

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon the Thames Embankment.  He made his way through the galleries of the booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the hotel colonnade to the Embankment.  He had long known of these admirable offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would, as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a night’s lodgings and some indication of possible employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by a large and rather unruly crowd.  He hovered for a time on the outskirts of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railway stations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to the covered ways of the Strand.  And here, in the open glare of midnight, he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the small theatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in that thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing.  There had been no begging in London streets for a quarter of a century.  But that night the police were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were invading those well-kept quarters of the town.  They had become stonily blind to anything but manifest disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for twice he says that he was begged from.  Near the Trafalgar Square gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.

‘I’m starving,’ he said to her abruptly.

‘Oh! poor dear!’ she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand….

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet within reach of the prison lash.  But he took it, he confesses, and thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get food.