BENEVOLENCE."

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 108, 8 May 1909, Page 10

BENEVOLENCE."

He was not very pleasant to look at. Some strips of leather covered, sandalwise, his bare feet. Once they had been boots— good boots which a charitable person had given away, and which the fortunate possessor had pawned and which now were decaying strips of leather. A ragged pair of trousers and filthy ragged coat clutched round a bare, shivering chest satisfied, not extiavagantly, the requirements of common' decency. A grea&y torn cap, pushed over matted hair, completed the picture, and shaded a shrunken unpleasing face. The man was a beggar, an unemployable— a useless piece of the lumber of broken humanity. Of course he had come "down" to this; no one is born so wholly without hope or value. Perhaps drink had pushed him down, or perhaps inherited ei'iminality, or perhaps the weak wilfulness growing, like a weed, on the sort of soil^that comes of wastrel parentage and a reckless peopling of the world. Often he had addressed the seemingly benevolent, and assured them that he had been "a gentleman once" — as if, forsooth, that were a trade that could be abandoned or resumed at will. A curious air of some half-smothered distinction about the man had made this patter useful to him. But the air was quite accidental — like the social status which birth confers. There had never been the makings* of a gentleman in this decrepit parasite. Cunning theiv was, and the smatterings of a sort of education picked vp — who knows where and how ? Of the finer instincts and feelings there was, however, no trace. Morally and physically he was as valueless as by the slouching hang-dog air of starved despair he seemed to be. Yet the man — still he was a man of flesh and blood and bone — was very hungry and very cold. Fourteen — fifteen — sixteen — he had lost count — hours ago he had got some food. Its effect had long been lost in the dull ache of hunger and the numb wretchedness of cold. A fog wrapped London at six o'clock on a December evening in her veil of mysterious bea-uty. To the man it was no more than an evil vapour which drove the cold more narrowly through his degraded coverings, and which made him cough as even an excess of gin had no power to do. So far as he understood anything at all, Hell itself could offer no worse torture than the continued absence of the price of a warming drink. To-morrow he might be dead — though h;> could recognise the unlikelihood of death being offered freely to hands which had not the courage to grasp it. But his thoughts stopped far short of to-morrow. They were centred on the moment and the moment's need of gin. A degraded creature this, of no use to friend of foe, one of those shattered fragments which no social evolution can mend, which no millennium on earth can make an end of. The lowest type of wretchedness, this beggar, worthless, inconsiderable, useless — and yet a man, God's creature also. With power, limited power, to feel and reason. Here in the Embankment fog these powers took curious and spasmodic spurts of activity. The lights of a big hotel winked a half-cheerful way through the thick fog ; a window, opened for a moment, let out a sudden clink and clatter of opulent enjoyment. The man turned and slowly spat at the hotel. Figures buttoned up in heavy coats loomed out of the fog and passed him hurriedly. The fog stood cold and clammy on the moustache of the welldressed man, it ate deep into the bones of the bedraggled wretch. Once or twice he shuffled for a few steps Deside these figures, mumbling the beggar's whine which he had so well by heart. But he was the scarecrow and the skeleton of a man. Even in the fog his footsteps and his whine held no menace and had no appeal. He was an inconsiderable atom of degradation. Never having known a finer feeling, rebuff was to him no more than the postponement of desire. No feeling of loneliness, no acute distress of the misery of neglect and contempt could usually find a way to what was in his heart. But somehow to-night cold, hunger, and the fog had sharpened the shadows of susceptibility into clearer outline. A new feeling of self-pity overtook him. For the first time he realisod loneliness and contempt — not as another might have realised it with a poignant stab, but with a dull pain whifh confused itself with the normal aches and pains of wastreldom. For a time he drew bacii and leaned himself against the railing with a new and rather incomprehensible stricture of the soul. Again the clattei of a kitchen came faintly through the fog. He lifted a blue haggard face towards the sound, and said, "My God !" Then there passed on his way Benevolence the benevolence that knows no reason, that does so much harm, thit means so well, and Benevolence touched him on the .shoulder, shoved a coin into his hand, and passed hurriedly on. Ho looked stupidly at the coin. He turned it over in his hand. By a gaslamp ha saw that it was gold. And again he said, "My God !" — much as Benevolence himself might have said, "Indeed?" And when, three hours later, he was thrown out of the publichouse into the gutter, purple where he had been blue, bloated where he had been gaunt, more wretched and more useless if that were possible, yet having secured some moments of that very precious oblivion for which lethal chambers are designed, there was nothing left of tho half-sovereign which Benevolence had — wasted. There is no moral to this little story. —Guy Pollock in St. James's Budget.