"What I describe," I replied, "is what I have seen. Nothing more horrible can be met in the Vision of Hell. This city of shame and sin is full of little hells, and if there is any truth in pulpit sermons and religious ministrations, in every little hell souls are daily being damned."
He threw a searching glance upon me. "I like that. Don't forget the metaphor; use it in one of the early articles. Some writers keep their big plums till the last; it is a mistake. Fairy tales can be written on a Swiss mountain or an Italian lake, but to do justice to such a subject as yours you must dig into Babylon's crust; you need the pest-houses of civilization, the hog-like natures of men and women familiar with crime and poverty."
"The evil is not confined to hovels," I remarked, "nor to the criminal classes. Mansions of the well-to-do supply fruitful material."
"Well, do your best," he said. "We shall create a sensation."
We did. My articles were quoted far and near. Writing under a burning sense of wrong I was not sparing of epithet and denunciation. I worked at fever heat, and was often appalled at what I wrote, but it went into print with scarcely the alteration of a word. Had I written under my own name I might have become a celebrity.
In one of my articles I touched upon the marriage tie in relation to the evil. I described a home--a type of many--in which the wife was a confirmed dipsomaniac; another, in which the husband was drunk every day of his life. They were cases which came under my own eye in the localities where I pursued my investigations. From the lips of the sufferers themselves I received the terrible details of the gradual sinking into the slough of despair. Here was the wretched husband, once a bright mechanic earning a fair wage, whose wife's filthy habits had brought ruin upon him--hopeless, irremediable ruin. Vainly had he striven to reform her, vainly had he pointed out to her the sure consequences of her dissipation. Coming home at night from his work he found his rooms in darkness, his hungry children lying almost naked on the bare boards, and his wife drunk in the nearest gin palace. It had become a common occurrence. She pawned the beds, the furniture, the children's clothes and his own, again and yet again, and when he dragged her from the public-house she lay through the night, gibbering at the awful sights her diseased imagination conjured up. He replaced the furniture, he bought new beds and clothing, he gave his children food, and when his wife was able to crawl out again, off she crept to the pawnbroker to repeat her evil work. The children had grown stunted and deformed, their rags hung loosely on their shrunken limbs, like starving dogs they nosed the gutters for offal. "My God, my God!" he cried, the tears streaming down his face. "What shall I do? How shall I save my children? How shall I save myself?" His voice sank to a whisper. "One night I shall kill her, and there will be murder on my soul!"