IT was the first October frost. Outside a half-built house, before a board on which was written, “Jolly Bros., Builders,” I saw a man, whose eyes seemed saying: “In the winter building will stop; if I am homeless and workless now, what shall I be in two months’ time?” Turning to me he said: “Can you give me a job, sir? I don’t mind what I do.”
His face was in mourning for a shave, his clothes were very ragged, and he was so thin that there seemed hardly any man behind those ragged clothes. He smelt, not indeed of whiskey, but as though bereaved of it; and his blue and watery eyes were like those of a lost dog.
We looked at each other, and this conversation passed between our eyes:
“What are you? Where did you work last? How did you get into this condition? Are you married? How many children? Why don’t you apply to the proper authorities? I have money, and you have none; it is my right to ask these questions.”
“I am a lost dog.”
“But I have no work for you; if you are really hungry I can give you sixpence; I can also refer you to a Society who will examine your affairs, but if they find you a man for whom life has been too much, they will tell me so, and warn me not to help you. Is that what you want?”
“I am a lost dog.”
“I dare say; but what can I do? I can’t make work! I know nothing about you, I daren’t recommend you to my friends. No man gets into the condition you are in without the aid of his own folly. You say you fell ill; yes, but you all say that. Why couldn’t you look ahead and save some money? You see now that you ought to have? And yet you come to me! I have a great many calls—societies, old people, and the sick; the rates are very high—you know that—partly on your account!”
“I am a lost dog.”
“Ah! but I am told daily by the just, the orderly, the practical, who have never been lost or hungry, that I must not give to casuals. You know yourself it would be pure sentiment; you know yourself it would be mere luxury. I wonder you can ask me!”
“I am a lost dog.”
“You have said that before. It’s not as if I didn’t know you! I have seen and talked with you—with dozens of you. I have found you asleep on the Thames Embankment. I have given you sixpence when you were shambling empty away after running a mile behind a cab. One night, don’t you remember, in the Cromwell Road—well, not you, but your twin brother—we talked together in the rain, and the wind blew your story against the shuttered windows of the tall, closed houses. Once you were with me quite six weeks, cutting up a dead tree in my garden. Day after day you sat there, working very slowly to keep the tree from coming to an end, and showing me in gratitude each morning your waistbelt filling out. With the saw in your hand and your weak smile you would look at me, and your eyes would say, ‘You don’t know what a rest it is for me to come here and cut up wood all day.’ At all events, you must remember how you kept yourself from whiskey until I went away, and how you excused yourself when I returned and found you speaking thickly in the morning: ‘I can’t help rememberin’ things!’ It was not you, you say? No; it was your double.”
“I am a lost dog.”
“Yes, yes, yes! You are one of those men that our customs breed. You had no business to be born—or at any rate you should have seen to it that you were born in the upper classes. What right had you to imagine you could ever tackle the working-man’s existence—up to the mark all day and every day? You, a man with a soft spot? You knew, or your parents ought to have known, that you couldn’t stand more than a certain pressure from life. You are diseased, if not physically, then in your disposition. Am I to excuse you because of that? Most probably I should be the same if life pressed hard enough. Am I to excuse myself because of that? Never—until it happens! Being what you are you chose deliberately—or was it chosen for you—to run the risks of being born; and now you complain of the consequences, and come to me for help? To me—who may myself at some time be in need, if not of physical, of moral bread? Is it right, or reasonable?”
“I am a lost dog.”
“You are getting on my nerves! Your chin is weak—I can see that through your beard; your eyes are wistful, not like the professional beggar’s pebbly eyes; you have a shuffling walk, due perhaps a little to the nature of your boots; yes, there are all the marks of amiability about you. Can you look me in the face and say it would be the slightest use to put you on your legs and thrust you again, equipped, into the ranks of battle? Can you now? Ah! if you could only get some food in you, and some clothes on you, and some work to do! But don’t you know that, three weeks hence, that work would be lost, those clothes in pawn, and you be on the drink? Why should I waste my charity on you—‘the deserving’ are so many! There’s ‘something against you’ too? Oh! nothing much—you’re not the sort that makes a criminal; if you were you would not be in such a state. You would be glad enough to do your fellows a good turn if ever you could do a good turn to yourself; and you are not ungrateful, you would attach yourself to any one who showed you kindness. But you are hopeless, hopeless, hopeless—aren’t you now?”
“I am a lost dog.”
“You know our methods with lost dogs? Have you never heard of the lethal chamber? A real tramp, living from hand to mouth in sun and rain and dirt and rags, enjoys his life. But you don’t enjoy the state you’re in. You’re afraid of the days when you’ve nothing to eat, afraid of the nights when you’ve nowhere to sleep, afraid of crime, afraid even of this begging; twice since we’ve been standing here I’ve seen you looking round. If you knew you’d be afraid like this, what made you first desert ‘the narrow path’? Something came over you? How could you let it come like that? It still comes over you? You were tired, you wanted something new—something a little new. We all want that something, friend, and get it if we can; but we can’t recognise that your sort of human creature is entitled, for you see what’s come of it?”
“I am a lost dog.”
“You say that as if you thought there was one law for the rich and another for the poor. You are making a mistake. If I am had up for begging as well as you, we shall both of us go to prison. The fact that I have no need to steal or beg, can pay for getting drunk and taking holidays, is hardly to the point—you must see that! Do not be led away by sentimental talk; if we appear before a judge, we both must suffer punishment. I am not so likely to appear as you perhaps, but that’s an accident. No, please don’t say that dreadful thing again! I wish to help you. There is Canada, but they don’t want you. I would send you anywhere to stop your eyes from haunting me, but they don’t want you. Where do they want you? Tell me, and you shall go.”
“I am a lost dog.”
“You remind me of that white shadow with little liver spots that my spaniel dog and I picked up one night when we were going home.
“‘Master,’ he said, ‘there’s such an amusing cur out there in the middle of the road.’
“‘Behave yourself! Don’t pick up with anything you come across like this!’
“‘Master, I know it is a thin and dirty cur, but the creature follows me.’
“‘Keep to heel! The poor dog will get lost if you entice him far from home.’
“‘Oh, master! that’s just what’s so amusing. He hasn’t any.’
“And like a little ghost the white dog crept along behind. We looked to read his collar; it was gone. We took him home—and how he ate, and how he drank! But my spaniel said to me:
“‘Master, what is the use of bringing in a dog like this? Can’t you see what he is like? He has eaten all my meat, drunk my bowl dry, and he is now sleeping in my bed.’
“I said to him: ‘My dear, you ought to like to give this up to this poor dog.’
“And he said to me: ‘Master, I don’t! He is no good, this dog; I am cleaner and fatter than he. And don’t you know there’s a place on the other side of the water for all this class of dog? When are we going to take him there?’
“And I said to him: ‘My dear, don’t ask me; I don’t know.’
“And you are like that dog, standing there with those eyes of yours and that weak chin and those weak knees, before this half-built house with the winter coming on. And I am like my spaniel, who knows there is a proper place for all your kind of creature. Man! what shall I do with you?”