Act II

ACT II

The yard of the West Ham shelter of the Salvation Army is a cold
place on a January morning. The building itself, an old
warehouse, is newly whitewashed. Its gabled end projects into the
yard in the middle, with a door on the ground floor, and another
in the loft above it without any balcony or ladder, but with a
pulley rigged over it for hoisting sacks. Those who come from
this central gable end into the yard have the gateway leading to
the street on their left, with a stone horse-trough just beyond
it, and, on the right, a penthouse shielding a table from the
weather. There are forms at the table; and on them are seated a
man and a woman, both much down on their luck, finishing a meal
of bread [one thick slice each, with margarine and golden syrup]
and diluted milk.

The man, a workman out of employment, is young, agile, a talker,
a poser, sharp enough to be capable of anything in reason except
honesty or altruistic considerations of any kind. The woman is a
commonplace old bundle of poverty and hard-worn humanity. She
looks sixty and probably is forty-five. If they were rich people,
gloved and muffed and well wrapped up in furs and overcoats, they
would be numbed and miserable; for it is a grindingly cold, raw,
January day; and a glance at the background of grimy warehouses
and leaden sky visible over the whitewashed walls of the yard
would drive any idle rich person straight to the Mediterranean.
But these two, being no more troubled with visions of the
Mediterranean than of the moon, and being compelled to keep more
of their clothes in the pawnshop, and less on their persons, in
winter than in summer, are not depressed by the cold: rather are
they stung into vivacity, to which their meal has just now given
an almost jolly turn. The man takes a pull at his mug, and then
gets up and moves about the yard with his hands deep in his
pockets, occasionally breaking into a stepdance.

THE WOMAN. Feel better otter your meal, sir?

THE MAN. No. Call that a meal! Good enough for you, props; but
wot is it to me, an intelligent workin man.

THE WOMAN. Workin man! Wot are you?

THE MAN. Painter.

THE WOMAN [sceptically] Yus, I dessay.

THE MAN. Yus, you dessay! I know. Every loafer that can't do
nothink calls isself a painter. Well, I'm a real painter:
grainer, finisher, thirty-eight bob a week when I can get it.

THE WOMAN. Then why don't you go and get it?

THE MAN. I'll tell you why. Fust: I'm intelligent--fffff! it's
rotten cold here [he dances a step or two]--yes: intelligent
beyond the station o life into which it has pleased the
capitalists to call me; and they don't like a man that sees
through em. Second, an intelligent bein