to find shorter hours, lighter jobs, better pay, and the chance to save a bit—to find, in fact, these streets paved with gold.
"Mart's well be back there," he said, with a humorous smile, as if the idea were absurd. For London, if its work, even from the outside, have the mysterious and magnetic attraction of an immense gambling table, may, and inevitably does, rob those it attracts of that tremulous and romantic idea. The gambling becomes a hard and almost unceasing struggle, with the pay proportionately worse, with the hours really longer because the work is so much more strenuous. But London itself and for itself takes a hold of the hearts of men; along with disillusionments grows up a hunger, like a new sense, for London only. These men in the mass never go back. When I offered to this particular man to write to a farmer who I knew was in want of a hand he looked at me as if I must be joking. He groped in his mind for a reason. "The missis would never hear of it," he said. "Besides—" His power of invention seemed to break down till he got out: "Oh, London's the place!" His eyes roved along the sides of a cab that was passing and up the front of an establishment called, I think, the West London Stores. "London's the place," he repeated. I objected that he could not see much of London inside a soap factory. He considered for a moment and said: "No, but it's the Saturday afternoons and Sundays." He paused. "It's when ye have your leisure." He continued with the air of one trying to explain something difficult to a
109
