A superior place—Class distinctions—The men who have fallen—The family outcast—The shabby minister—A strange disappearance—The common kitchen

IT is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and the church bells have just ceased ringing. Along the broad thoroughfare which is one of the main arteries of London a few belated worshippers are wending their way, prayer-book in hand. But from the side streets come the roar and clamour of a busy market at its height. The hoarse shrieks of the hawkers and the cheap Jacks rise above the murmur of the mob, which elbows its way, a black stream of humanity, between two banks of barrows and open shops.

At the corner of one of the side streets—the corner at which the clamour of the market ends and the quiet of the English Sabbath begins—there is a huge, well-ordered, common lodging-house.

The whole neighbourhood is Jewish, the area is given up now almost entirely to the alien immigrant; but in this vast lodging-house the guests are not Jews but Gentiles.

In the entrance hall there is a case in which the letters awaiting the arrival of guests are exposed. There are letters from abroad, letters with American and colonial stamps on them; envelopes directed in a clerkly hand, envelopes directed in handwriting which tells of culture and refinement, and there are envelopes with a scrawled, ill-spelt address upon them.

For this Hotel of the Poor, where the prices range from five-pence to sixpence a night, has a reputation for comfort, good order, and good management, and attracts a superior order of men to that found in the fourpenny lodging-houses in the locality which are largely patronized by the criminal and the vagabond class.

On Sunday morning the clients of the doss-house lie later. It is a privilege accorded by custom. On ordinary days the guests are expected to be out of bed and downstairs by ten at the latest, but on Sunday, if you go over the dormitories and cubicles, even as late as twelve o'clock, you will find plenty of beds still occupied by slumbering—sometimes by snoring—citizens.

But by noon the majority of the patrons of the Poor Man's Hotel have "descended." Some are lounging against the wall in the street, taking the air. Many are in the vast underground apartment which serves the purpose of a common kitchen, and breakfast is in the course of preparation or consumption. Hard by this apartment is another, which is fitted up with every arrangement for as much ablution as the client of the house may care to indulge in. He can have a bath, or he can wash his face and hands. He can, if he is so minded, brush his hat, and there is a bit of looking-glass, in front of which he can arrange his collar—if he has one—and his necktie.

Fivepence carries you considerably further on the road to comfort here than fourpence does in most of the smaller establishments.

I know the doss-houses of most parts of London. I have spent mornings and evenings round the coke fire of the common kitchen with all sorts and conditions of male and female dossers, and I have always been struck by the note of classification which distinguishes them. Even the poorest of the poor have their sympathies, and, if I may use the word, their "aloofnesses."

The thieves do not care to mix with the honest folks; the tramps and vagabonds look down upon the workers, and the men of the working-class look askance at the wreckage of the black coat brigade. So each class has its own particular doss-houses. Even the begging-letter writers have their favourite haunts; in one house the clients are nearly all begging-letter writers, and sometimes pool the receipts.

The "screever," who is practically a public writer at the service of anyone willing to pay for a well-concocted story and a touching appeal, is not so particular. He puts up at any house where he is likely to find clients.

The lodging-house we are visiting this Sunday morning is so huge, and its accommodation is so vast, that it is patronized by the poor of every class. The poor working man is there, and the poor clerk; the wreckage of the superior class is there also, but there are no professional tramps. The professional tramp would find the society slow, and there would be no one with whom he could compare notes and yarn about the bad times that had come to the road. He prefers the more genial and instructive society of the street beggar, the itinerant musicians, and the "dodgers."

You will rarely see any work being done in a tramps' lodging-house.

The nearest approach to it is when one or two of the company patch their rags or take a needle and thread and collect their rents—those in their garments.

But in the lodging-house we are visiting you will find a number of the occupants hard at work, even on Sunday morning.

Beyond the common kitchen is a room with a long, wide table. Every seat at this table is occupied by men who are writing as diligently as if they were in an office.

Most of the men are of the broken-down clerk class. Many are young; only one or two are middle-aged. But all are lean and dilapidated and hungry-looking.

These poor fellows are addressing envelopes at so much a thousand, or filling in circulars, or doing copying work. On the table is a Post Office Directory for the use of the envelope-directors, and there is a good supply of inkstands.

Some of the men have been at work since nine, and, with a short interval, will work away till late in the afternoon, perhaps till the evening. They are earning the price of the next night's bed.

These men belong to the shabby-genteel brigade of the common lodging-house. Many of them have still the traces of refinement on their features, though their clothes are threadbare and their bowler hats weather-beaten and greasy-brimmed.

Who are they? What stroke of evil fortune brought them to this last ditch in the fight with Fate?

Many of them are mysteries. They do not, like the tramps and the vagabonds, wear their heart upon their sleeve. There is no confidence between them and the other occupants of the "writing-room" in the poor man's hotel.

Some of them have held good positions in mercantile offices and lost them. One or two are lawyers' clerks with whom the world has gone wrong. A fair percentage have come to envelope-directing in a common lodging-house through drink, others through an act that has caused them to forfeit the character essential for a re-engagement. Some of them owe their downfall to the turf. One or two have a conviction standing against them, and that is the sort of thing that stands against you till the last. All have wandered or stumbled into the slough from which few ever emerge to gain a foothold again upon firm ground.

In this room, in which a score of well-educated men are writing hard all Sunday long to get a few coppers, the stragglers of a doomed legion are really making the last stand. They may fight desperately, and hold their ground for a time, but they will yield eventually, and the hospital or the workhouse will claim them.

Yet some of them have homes they have forfeited, wives and children from whom by their own act they have separated themselves for ever.

Among the men I have met in a common lodging-house is one who, every now and then, is interviewed in the common kitchen by his family solicitor. He is a trustee to a marriage settlement, and his signature is occasionally necessary to deeds and transfers. A little while back he had to put his signature to a cheque for £72,000. Why, under these circumstances, is there no home for him—no position open to him in which at least he could earn the rent of a private lodging?

That is a mystery the solution of which is known only to himself, his relatives, and the family solicitor. He has a wife and sons and daughters, and they live in a pretty villa and keep servants, entertain, and visit their neighbours.

But many a night since the thing happened that made it impossible for him ever again to be seen with his own people he has been too poor even to afford the few pence for a doss-house bed, and has had to seek shelter in one of the night refuges for the utterly destitute or sleep under a railway arch.

If we were to stand at the entrance of a lodging-house such as this for a night and watch the guests as they come in—some of them so late that on the outside lamp is the reassuring notice, "A Night Porter kept"—we should see a strange procession of human documents.

If we knew the story of each we should have the details of life romances far more dramatic and haunting than those which are the stock-in-trade of fictionists who sit at home at ease and imagine things.

Look at this man, for instance, who is limping in and cringing to the deputy. If you are in the kitchen to-morrow morning you will see him do the same to a sturdy fellow who enters jauntily. You will see him take a teapot from the hob, where he has been keeping it hot, and put it on the table before the new arrival. The one man is the valet of the other. For a copper or two a week he cleans the other man's boots and gets his breakfast ready.

The man who employs a valet is a professional beggar. He can pitch a good tale, and his features suggest better days, and so he does exceedingly well in certain neighbourhoods. The valet is a mystery. No one knows how he earns his living. Occasionally he leaves the lodging-house for some weeks, saying that he has come into a little money. But he drifts back again, and is generally—if possible—more dilapidated than when he left.

If we were to go to one of the fashionable churches of London to listen to a preacher whose name is a household word, we should be struck with the likeness of that distinguished divine to the lodging-house valet. The likeness is accounted for by the fact that they are brothers. Both were at Harrow, both were at Oxford. But one this Sunday morning is preaching to a wealthy West End congregation, and is on the straight road to a bishopric, while the other is "valeting" a beggar in a common lodging-house.

Clergymen themselves come here sometimes. There is one who comes constantly—generally late at night. He has a cubicle, for which he pays sixpence. However late he may come in, he generally leaves early, before most of the lodgers are about.

He never enters the common kitchen. Sometimes he is shabby and down at heel. Sometimes he appears to have had a little luck, and his appearance is neater. Why a clergyman reduced to using a common lodging-house should retain the distinguished marks of clerical attire it is difficult to say. The deputy is the only person who has had an opportunity of studying him closely. The deputy, who is an excellent judge of character, thinks that the clerical get-up is a dodge; that the man is an impostor. But the proprietor, who, on two occasions, has spoken with his guest, is certain that there is no imposture—that the man is a Clerk in Holy Orders who has come upon evil times. He has been using the lodging-house off and on for the past five years.

Once in the rack at the door there was a letter for him. The envelope had a black border, and was addressed simply "Mr. William Venn."

Letters at the lodging-house are not given to the first person who claims them. Unless a guest is thoroughly well known he is expected to give some proof that he is the person named on the envelope.

In this instance Mr. Venn produced a couple of letters from his pocket. Both were addressed to the Rev. William Venn—I am not giving the correct name—at the General Post Office, "to be called for."

When he came to the lodging-house again there was a black band round the dilapidated high hat he always wore.

He only came back once after he was in mourning. No one at the lodging-house saw him again for some time. Shortly afterwards a solicitor's clerk came to make inquiries. His firm were particularly anxious to find the Rev. William Venn, who was entitled to a considerable sum of money by the death of a relative. The last known address of the reverend gentleman was this lodging-house, to which a relative had sent him the news of his wife's death in a lunatic asylum.

The proprietor took the address of the solicitors, and promised to communicate with them should the clergyman come again.

A year afterwards the clergyman did come—more wretched-looking, more woe-begone than ever.

When he applied for a bed, the deputy at once communicated the good news to him. "There's been somebody here asking for you," he said; "some solicitors. We were to communicate with them if we saw you again. They want you for——"

Before the deputy could finish the sentence the clergyman had fled.

The proprietor of the lodging-house, interested in the case, made several inquiries of the solicitors; but from that night the Rev. William Venn was never seen again.

There is a street in the East End which, owing to the character of its fourpenny lodging-houses, has become notorious. You may see standing at the doors of these houses men and women whose appearance, even in the broad daylight, would make a stranger doubtful as to the advisability of passing near them.

Night after night these houses are crowded with vagabonds, male and female, of the most dangerous type. In one of these, three murders took place in one year.

Nearly every woman who comes out of them has a black eye or some facial disfigurement due to male violence. The younger men have "ruffian" writ large upon their features, while the older men are of the ragged, weather-beaten tramp order.

To spend an evening in the common kitchens is to get an idea of humanity which revolts rather than saddens. Horrifying as the ordinary language of the company is, their callous viciousness and criminality are more horrifying still. There are men here who have taken human life—taken it brutally on dark nights in country lanes and by the waterside, sometimes to rob their victim, sometimes to get rid of a man or woman who knows too much or who wants too much.

Some of the men and women sitting together and indulging in drunken chaff or maudlin reminiscences are old acquaintances. They have met in more than one lodging-house in London, and have tramped together to fairs and race-meetings. And the mildest form of "ragging" among them is to remind each other of the robbery or the outrage, it may be the murder, with which the gossip of the doss-houses credits them.

The one offence which among these people is considered discreditable, and which makes them unfit for the society of their fellows, is to give information to the police, or to give evidence which assists the police in obtaining a conviction.

The man who is suspected of having murdered his wife or his companion is rather looked up to. But the man who has assisted in bringing a murderer to justice is despised, and if he were to return to one of these doss-houses at a time that anyone was present who knew of his conduct, he would have a poor chance of getting out again with a whole skin.

But these people, ragged, dirty, wretched as their appearance generally is, are not always without means. I have been in one of the lowest of these houses on a Sunday morning, when the place was packed, and seen the tramps and beggars enjoying a breakfast that seldom falls to the lot of a poor working family.

Look in at one of the kitchens to-day. Tea with bread and butter, bacon, haddocks, bloaters, and cold fried fish are among the breakfast "relishes" on the table, and in a frying-pan on the fire one stalwart tramp is cooking himself a pork chop.

The man's wallet stowed away on a shelf in the kitchen contains nothing but a few old rags and bits of rubbish picked up by the wayside. But he makes enough somehow to pay for his night's lodging and a good meat breakfast, and you will see him, as soon as the public-house at the corner opens, investing more money in the purchase of a stimulant to assist the digestion of the pork chop. There is always a public-house near a doss-house, and it is liberally patronized by the lodgers.

With all their apparent poverty they find money to visit the gin-palace two or three times in the course of as many hours.

I have seen the same group of women from a notorious doss-house go into a public-house four times in an hour. Two of them were miserably clad, and limped painfully in boots that scarcely held together.

If it is astonishing that men and women who have so much money to spend in drink can put up with the shelter of the lowest of the common lodging-houses in London, it is still more astonishing that men, and sometimes women, of wealth should habitually resort to them.

Yet in a doss-house in Bangor Street, Notting Dale, a woman lodged regularly, who, at the time of her death, had standing to her credit at a local bank several hundred pounds, In a fourpenny lodging-house in Great Peter Street, Westminster, a man who was taken ill and removed to a hospital was found to have upon him a money-belt which contained bank-notes to the value of sixty pounds. In a lodging-house in the Mint—one of a better kind, run in connection with a temperance mission, the lodging-house, in fact, in the kitchen of which the first free meals provided by the "Referee" Children's Dinner Fund were prepared—a man died who was supposed to be almost destitute; so poor and miserable was he, that his bed was paid for every week by a kindly clergyman interested in the mission.

This old fellow used to go to Covent Garden in the morning, pick up vegetable refuse, and bring it back with him and make soup of it. He picked up something one day that made him seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital, and died there, and in the battered old box which he left behind him at the lodging-house were discovered securities for a very large sum of money, and a banker's pass-book with all the entries on the credit side, and not a single one on the debit side.

The mysteries of the common lodging-houses of London are not always the mysteries of Poverty and Crime.