expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain-hunter who
starves if he cannot make a successful trade, and yet the final
impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and
sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty, pathetic, nerveless
and workworn, showing white in the uncertain light of the street,
and clutching forward for food which was already unfit to eat.

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human
hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from
savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward. I
have never since been able to see a number of hands held upward,
even when they are moving rhythmically in a calisthenic exercise,
or when they belong to a class of chubby children who wave them
in eager response to a teacher's query, without a certain revival
of this memory, a clutching at the heart reminiscent of the
despair and resentment which seized me then.

For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively,
afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose
again this hideous human need and suffering. I carried with me
for days at a time that curious surprise we experience when we
first come back into the streets after days given over to sorrow
and death; we are bewildered that the world should be going on as
usual and unable to determine which is real, the inner pang or the
outward seeming. In time all huge London came to seem unreal save
the poverty in its East End. During the following two years on
the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer
quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy
nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same
conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this