VI

A JOURNALIST'S SURROUNDINGS

"Religion crowns the statesman and the man,
Sole source of public and of private peace."

YOUNG.

I am bound to suppose that I must have been a tolerably tiring person to
have to do with during my first year in London. The reason of this was
that I could never concentrate my thoughts upon intimate, personal
interests, either my own or those of the people I met. My thoughts were
never of persons, but always of the people; never of affairs, but always
of tendencies, movements, issues, ultimate ends. Probably my crude
unrest would have made me tiresome to any people. It must have been
peculiarly irritating to my contemporaries at that period, who, whatever
they may have lacked, assuredly possessed in a remarkable degree the
faculty of concentration upon their own individual affairs, their
personal part in the race for personal gain.

I remember that I talked, even to the poor, overworked servant at my
lodging, rather of the prospects of her class and order than of anything
more intimate or within her narrow scope. Poor Bessie! She was of the
callously named tribe of lodging-house "slaveys"; and what gave me some
interest in her personality, apart from the type she represented, was
the fact that she had come from the Vale of Blackmore, a part of Dorset
which I knew very well. I even remembered, for its exceptional
picturesqueness and beauty of situation, the cottage in which Bessie had
passed her life until one year before my arrival at the fourth-rate
Bloomsbury "apartments" house in which she now toiled for a living.
There was little enough of the sap of her native valley left in Bessie's
cheeks now. She had acquired the London muddiness of complexion quickly,
poor child, in the semi-subterranean life she led.

I was moved to inquire as to what had led her to come to London, and
gathered that she had been anxious to "see a bit o' life." Certainly she
saw life, of a kind, when she entered her horrible underground kitchen
of a morning, for, as a chance errand once showed me, its floor was a
moving carpet of black-beetles until after the gas was lighted. In
Bloomsbury, Bessie's daily work began about six o'clock--there were four
stories in the house, and coals and food and water required upon every
floor--and ended some seventeen hours later. Occasionally, an exacting
lodger would make it eighteen hours--the number of Bessie's yea