Paris Nights, and Other Impressions of Places and People by Arnold Bennett

Author:Arnold Bennett [Bennett, Arnold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Personal Memoirs, Essays & Travelogues, Europe, Nonfiction, History, Biography & Autobiography, Biography & Memoir, France
ISBN: 9781528787734
Google: P5q2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2019-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

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“What we try to do,” he said, “is to bridge the gulf—to bridge the gulf between the East End and the West End. We don’t want your money, we want your help, we want each of you to take up one person and look after him. That is the only way to bridge the gulf.” He kept on emphasising the phrase “bridge the gulf”; and to illustrate it, he mentioned a Christmas pudding that was sent from a Royal palace to his “Pudding Sunday” orgy labelled for “the poorest and loneliest widow.”

“We soon found her,” he said. “She worked from 8.30 A.M. to 6:30 p.m. and again two hours at night, sewing buttons, and in a good week she earned six shillings. Her right hand was all distorted by rheumatism, so that to sew gave her great pain. We found her, and we pushed her upstairs, with great difficulty—because she was so bad with bronchitis—and she had her pudding. Someone insisted on giving her 1s. a week for life, and someone else insisted on giving her 2s. a week for life, so now she’s a blooming millionaire. Give us money, if you like, but please don’t give us any more money for her....”

“There’s another class of women,” continued the Prebendary, “the drunkards. Drunkenness is growing among women owing to the evil of grocers’ licences. We should like some of you to take up a drunken woman apiece and look after her. We can easily find you a nice, gentle creature, to whom getting drunk is no more than getting cross is to us. Very nice women are drunkards, and they can be reclaimed by bridging the gulf. Then there’s the hooligans—you have them on the Riviera, too. I’ve had a good deal of experience of them myself. I was once picked up for dead near the Army and Navy Stores after meeting a hooligan. Only the other day a man put his fist in my face and said: ‘You’ve ruined our trade.’ ‘What trade? The begging trade?’ I said, ‘I wish I had.’ And then the discharged prisoners. We offer five months’ work to any discharged prisoner who cares to take it; there are 200,000 every year. I was talking to a prison official the other day, who told me that 90 per cent, of his ‘cases’ he sent to us. We reclaim about half of these. The other half break our hearts. One broke all our windows not long since. ..”

And the Prebendary said also: “My greatest pleasure is a day, a whole day, in a thoroughly bad slum. I went down to Wigan for such a day, and at a meeting, when I asked whether anyone would come forward and speak up for beer, not for Christ, a man came along and threw three pence at my feet—remains of pawning his waistcoat—and then fell down dead drunk. We picked him up, and I charged a helper with 6d., so that he could be filled up with tea or coffee beyond his capacity to drink any more beer at all.

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