There seemed to be no escape, no outlet, no future. Sometimes I
sat in that forlorn little room; sometimes I went to bed; sometimes I
wandered and made queer acquaintance at street corners; sometimes I even
scanned that tragic column of the _Daily Telegraph_--Situations Vacant.
Money went dribbling away. At "Dirty Dick's" you can get a quartern of
port for threepence, and gin is practically given away. Drink is a
curse, I know, but there are innumerable times when it has saved a man
from going under.... I wish temperance fiends would recognize this.

After a time, all effort and anxiety ceased. I became listless. I
neither wondered nor anticipated. I wandered about the Christmas
streets, amid radiant shops. The black slums and passages were little
gorges of flame and warmth, and in Morning Lane, where the stalls roared
with jollity, I could even snatch some of their spirit and feel,
momentarily, one of them. The raucous mile of Cambridge Road I covered
many times, strolling from lit window to lit window, from ragged smears
of lights to ragged chunks of dark. The multitudes of "Useful Presents,"
"Pretty Gifts," "Remarkable Value," "Seasonable Offerings" did not
tantalize me; they simply were part of another world. I saw things as
one from Mars.

That was a ghastly Christmas. Through the whole afternoon I
tramped--from Hackney to Homerton, thence to Clapton, to Stoke
Newington, to Tottenham, and back. Emptiness was everywhere: no people,
little traffic. Roofs and roads were hard with a light frost, and in the
sudden twilight the gleaming windows of a hundred houses shone out
jeeringly. Sounds of festivity disturbed the brooding quiet of the
town. Each side street was a corridor of warm blinds. Harmoniums,
pianos, concertinas, mouth organs, gramophones, tin trumpets, and voices
uncertainly controlled, poured forth their strains, mingling and
clashing. The whole thing seemed got up expressly for my disturbance. In
one street I paused, and looked through an unshaded window into a little
interior. Tea was in progress. Father and Mother were at table, Father
feeding the baby with cake dipped in tea, Mother fussily busy with the
teapot, while two bigger youngsters, with paper headdresses from the
crackers, were sprawling on the rug, engaged in the exciting sport of
toast-making. It made me sick. A little later the snow unexpectedly came
down, and the moon came out and flung long passages of light over the
white world, and for