CHAPTER VI

IN SEARCH OF VICE

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 opinion 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 the 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; 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 watch 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 in 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