But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to
the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by
a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirts
of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became
aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through
the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railway
stations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to the
covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight,
he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with
astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the small
theatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in that
thoroughfare.
This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
blind to anything but manifest disorder.
Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
twice he says that he was begged from.
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