When I first came to London I was twenty years old; I came from Paris, and, being twenty, felt sure that there remained no sensations for me to experience, no realms of passion to explore. I felt that I had lived—well, lived; that I came from Babylon city, and was now entering a Puritanic world, a place of dignities and parliaments, of clergymen with white bibs, of ladies with prominent teeth and elastic-sided boots who said ‘shocking’; I also felt that I was entering the country of le sport, le flirt; I had also been told that the English were a strange people, adepts in every depravity, of which the secret drinking of methylated spirits was a minor example. I admired them thoroughly, as I admired Westminster Abbey. Briefly, a land of virtue. This state of mind was fairly well kept up for the first year, because it rained nearly all the time, and there is nothing like a rainy summer to raise the moral tone of the streets. I was interested by the life I saw round me, bored by the life I led on thirty-eight shillings a week; I could afford little in the way of theatres; whisky made me sick; so did Irish stew and suet pudding; I did not see as much of my fellows as I wanted, because, in those days, I often had to choose between a clean shirt in the evening, and a cut from the joint at lunch. Also, my landlady washed the collie in the bath, which annoyed me. It is not surprising, then, that I did not at once enter London’s ‘gilded haunts of vice.’ It took me a little time to discover them, and, to be truthful, I am still looking for them. Indeed, I can say that I have employed a considerable portion of the last eighteen years in search of vice, and it may be that I must blame a Parisian education for my disappointment. I thought I had found vice the first time I saw a couple publicly embrace, opposite Marble Arch, never having seen anything so indecent in a Continental city; but this was an illusion, just like another illusion when, for the first time, I heard a speaker in the Park state his true opinion78 of the Royal Family: I thought this was the beginning of the revolution, and could not understand why the police looked so bored. I do now, for I suppose that meetings have been going on for several generations. But when it came to vice, when I explained to my new and fast English friends that I was looking for vice, when they took me to the old Empire Promenade, when they bade me be shocked at the condition of Regent Street, between Vigo Street and Piccadilly Circus, when they took me to Earl’s Court to ogle and to drink milk-coffee, when they drew my attention to the chorus girls performing what they called orgies in the punts near Maidenhead, a certain melancholy crept over me. English vice was overrated. Indeed, to this day, I am sure that there is very little vice in England, that the Londoner, particularly, is a flighty creature, who kills virtue with his mouth, who tells unpleasant stories about the deeds of other people, and paints the town red with the assistance of his fancy socks. They are cowards, really, and most of them, when they slip at all, seem to slip ignobly into the rare satisfaction of a purely animal instinct; also, to do this, they need drink. Nero would not have understood them at all.
Since those days much time has passed, and now and then, here and there, I have come a little closer to those strange and secret depravities of which, according to the Continent, London holds the monopoly. The newspapers are helpful; for they have occasional fits of virtue and begin to expose something, thus, at last, giving it an advertisement; or the police intervene and shut up a restaurant, thus focusing all eyes upon its proprietor and making him so famous that when he opens another restaurant next door he is assured of custom. And so I have known dreadful places, manicure shops where hands were held longer than filing demands, tea shops where the depraved waitresses call you ‘old dear,’ and demonstrate that in a chair when there is room for one there is room for two. It is perfectly appalling. I have been to the old Continental and to the old Globe Restaurant to spend considerable sums on not very satisfactory meals, to see a number of ladies manifest a little more clearly than is the custom the liberalism of their mind. I don’t know why it strikes the79 Puritan faction as so terrible that the women whom they call lost should congregate in a particular place; it cannot be because thus they can be found, for the Puritans must know that there is no street in central London, no tube, no omnibus, which does not hold as much temptation and as much opportunity as a small room in a quiet restaurant. I suppose it is the openness of the thing shocks them, the fact that they cannot cover it up and, therefore, pretend it is not there. But if that is vice, if that is ‘the smirch on our fair escutcheon,’ then, indeed, must English prudery be easily offended. It must be a sensitive prudery, for it cried out against night-clubs, against the Cave of the Golden Calf, where a few people did drink too much, against the excessive dancing at poor Ciro’s, which for a time fell among Y.M.C.A.’s.
Also, during the war, a great fuss was raised in the newspapers over the flappers in the Strand. I do not think anybody would have bothered much about the flappers if, at that time, we had not had among us a number of Anzacs who, as everybody knows, are the gentlest and most guileless of men. These unfortunate young soldiers, finding themselves lonely in a town such as ours, where no man needs go lonely along a street if he has a little determination, lacking all the home comforts which are implied in the possession of aunts, made their acquaintances where they could. The flappers in the Strand who, to my knowledge, have always been in the Strand, particularly on Saturday afternoon and on Saturday night, when they descend upon Villiers Street and the bandstand, coming from Aldgate and alighting at Charing Cross, naturally welcomed them. Now, in the old days the flappers attached themselves to any young man they met; sometimes he was a soldier in a red coat, sometimes just a civilian, and nobody bothered, because in those days it was not evident that anything unusual existed in the association. Common sense revealed to all of us that these friendships had been formed round the bandstand, but nobody was compelled to know that they did not arise out of engagements of five years’ standing. On the other hand, the Anzacs, with their beautiful bodies, their bronzed faces and their squash hats, were noticeable;80 a Puritan, after having, in the course of Saturday afternoon, seen several hundred Anzacs accompanied by pretty girls, was compelled to realise that there could not be so many Anzacs united by engagements of five years’ standing, to the flappers in the Strand. The Puritan hates realising, because when he realises he has to do something energetic, write to a paper, or form a committee, or something. He does not mind writing to a paper or forming a committee, but the whole thing upsets him; he cannot cover it up, and he runs about with wild eyes, terrified because the thing which is generally covered up has got loose.
It was that gave rise to the trouble, and the Puritans, determined that the flappers should flap no more, had to manufacture a theoretical Anzac, a young man from Melbourne (but born in the Bush, where no woman had ever been before), a young man extraordinarily pure in spirit, but liable to fall into temptation even if he had to cross the road to do so, a young man imbued by his past education with a profound reverence for womankind, whose feelings of reverence were daily being outraged by shameless exhibitions into which he was reluctantly drawn. It’s queer; this flapper question occupied the Press for months; now and then the controversy died down, and then a Bishop or a special article writer brought it up again; agents-general were called upon to proclaim that our soldiers feared no foe in shining armour because their heart was pure, while, in the same column, presidents of watch committees gloomily acknowledged that something seemed to have happened to the purity of those hearts. But all agreed that that purity must at once be restored, that the Anzacs, which includes the Canadians, the South Africans, and other moral weaklings, must be protected. To this day we are protecting men of thirty against girls of fifteen: I never heard anybody talk of protecting the flappers, for it was assumed that, by the time they were fifteen, they had sunk too deep in iniquity to deserve better protection than four walls in Holloway. And no one seems to have asked himself whether these young men, cut away from old habits, from their friends and their work, did not desperately want feminine companionship; the members of watch81 committees did not ask Colonials to stay with them for the weekend; for a long time they did not even provide them with sufficient sleeping places, but seemed to expect them to make merry all night in the ribald waiting-rooms of Waterloo. Briefly, their virtue was to be its own reward, and certainly we could not take from Nietzsche the aphorism that man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior. Above all, we could not let them alone.
Owing to this, my moral sense being aroused by an article in a Sunday paper, I devoted a Saturday to a search for vice. Of course, I began in the Strand, where I was told vice reigns. I saw a great number of soldiers, doubtless viciously employed, but conducting their debauches with singular restraint and dignity. Outside the Corner House stood a number of boudoir ladies from the Government offices, who were deplorably waiting for omnibuses; many of them may have been viciously employed, but as their company was mostly confined to their own sex, they were not sliding very fast down the butter-slide of perdition; mostly, they were eating chocolates, and the fact that chocolates then cost four shillings a pound may be sufficient evidence of undesirable conduct, but this seems to me hardly enough to hang even a girl on. I proceeded up the Strand where the East End was slowly beginning to arrive, mostly in twos and threes. Often, indeed, I met the regrettable flapper; certainly she was powdered and lip-salved, and I do not know that this is exceptional, but right up to Temple Bar not a single flapper made an effort to draw me from the straight path. (It is all very well saying that I may not be the sort of person whom the flapper would want to draw from the straight path, but surely vice has no pride, and stoops to all men.) The most vicious thing I saw was two soldiers and two girls walking rudely arm in arm.
I did my best. Indeed, I think I became a regular agent provocateur, but I did not seem able to provoke anybody. So, desperately, I turned back and crossed the river towards Waterloo Road. The reputation of this gray and green commercial track was made by the street arab in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, who declared that if he did in Morocco the things he did in82 Waterloo Road he would be hanged. But nothing was happening in Waterloo Road; many people were drinking in many public-houses; I entered a few public-houses, and though I tried as hard as the two houses of convocation put together, I found nothing. I will not weary you with details; it is enough to say that, still guided by my Sunday newspaper, I proceeded on my footsore search. By evening, I was lurking round Victoria, watching from the corner of my eyes for the harpies who drug veteran members of the Band of Hope, and after I had loafed about for a while, no doubt I must have conveyed a harpy-like suggestion; I was seen in a picture palace, peering into the dimness of the curtained boxes, which was easy, as they were not dim. That night I was seen in many places, searching the blackness of railway arches, furtively peering down the staircases of tubes, hoping to discover the worst; I appeared in the deserted City; the back streets of Theobald’s Road, the confidences of a hall porter in Gerrard Street (expensive and uneventful), a long inspection of the first floor fronts of Vauxhall Bridge Road, seen from the top of a tram, all these grew familiar to me; and still nothing. As time went on, my legs grew more and more woolly; my mind so obsessed and incoherent, that I realised time would soon fit me for membership of the National Vigilance Society. I even entered the Leicester Lounge, where there was hardly anybody, as it was not Boat Race night; then I wondered whether a visit to North Bank, St John’s Wood ... and awoke from my trance, remembering that this would be thirty years late. There is no vice in London; at least, there is nothing deliberate and artistic, just as there is very little in Paris or Vienna that would justify a Welsh elder in taking so long a journey. It is a pity that so fair a bubble should be pricked.
This does not mean that London is a magnified Exeter Hall. There are, in this town, about half a million bachelors, and that is enough to lower the moral status of any city. There are also rather more married men, which does not mend matters. Observe the bias of my mind: I have forgotten to tell you the number, frequently quoted by indignant letter writers to the Press, of83 women who hold forth temptation. For it may be true that supply assists demand, but it is much more certain that demand makes supply. During the war, for instance, there was great agitation in the Upper House of Convocation, where the Bishop of London revealed that in Cayeux and Havre undesirable houses were frequented by British troops. Canon Burroughs went on to ask for purity patrols, while the Bishop of Oxford presented a resolution designed to protect our troops from molestation in London. This is all very well, and deserves all sympathy, but the Bishop of London unfortunately read out a protest addressed to the Mayor of the French town by its inhabitants, and this protest referred to ‘crowds of English soldiers waiting outside the houses.’ Does one, then, wait for temptation? Does not temptation steal upon one as a thief in the night, or as a raging lion, seeking whom it may devour? It is a picturesque idea this, of crowds of innocent victims impatiently waiting for an opportunity to degrade their eternal spirit.
Temptation is nonsense. I have spoken to many men about temptation; they are seldom tempted, and this for very good reasons: men do not fall, they dive. The women who ‘prey on them,’ fulfil a function which will be necessary so long as society is as vilely constituted as it is, so long as life is hard and insecure, so long as social relations are false, so long as marriage is expensive and difficult of dissolution, and, especially, so long as the hearts of men are brutish and the hearts of women soft. The class which for centuries has been hunted, has for centuries been maintained by the hunter, just as the fox is bred and protected for the pleasure of the chase. Those women do not seem to me to lead as easy lives as the men who profit by their weakness; they look rather less well-fed, less well-clad; they wear gold of a lesser carat; when they die their names do not appear in the newspapers under the final advertisement: ‘To-day’s wills.’ Truly, the wages of sin are low. Should we not conclude that if bread is so dear, and flesh and blood cheap, there is no great inducement for the sale of flesh and blood, except the cost of bread? Perhaps it is the easiest way, but only for those to whom all ways would be easy.
84 There is no remedy for what the social campaigners call the condition of our streets, except an alteration in the mind of the men who walk in them; Christianity cannot help, for Christianity attempts to solve this problem by purging sin, instead of realising misfortune. Thus too many Christians justify Tacitus: ‘After the burning of Rome, suspicion fell on the Emperor. In order to allay them, the Emperor embarked on a series of persecutions; among those he persecuted was a sect that called themselves Christians, who had incurred the animosity of the populace owing to their sullen hatred of mankind.’
Tacitus was wrong, but then he was judging the Christians of his day as agitators. The streets will alter when the houses along the streets alter, when mankind has found love in the mind, when it is no longer content with the love of the body. The majority of men seem to approach life as pigs do the trough. Visit a West End restaurant, and you will be sure. In that trough are not only curds and whey, and truffles, and other suitable dainties; but excessive clothes and jewellery, honours, false social values, irrelevant powers; so long as the Gadarene crowd nuzzle and fight about that trough, so long will many of those, who are not Gadarene in the spirit, be infected with envy and desire, so long will they be driven to shrillness and self-advertisement, so long drawn by popularity and repelled by fame. Meanwhile, it naturally follows that what many call vice should endure, for vice is the satisfaction that dulls the flesh when the spirit aches. Happy men have no vices; it is only the unhappy, the hungry, fly to them. For my part, if I had to make laws for a new society, I would make few. I should say rather that we will build our new society so that all may be assured security and justice, but no more. If we were to establish justice, we should automatically do away with the curse of the world, which is wealth. It might be a pity. It may be that Anatole France is right when he says: ‘The devil dead, good-bye sin. Maybe beauty, this ally of the devil, will vanish with him. Maybe that we shall not again see the flowers that intoxicate, and the eyes that slay.’ Still, one would like to see it tried.