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The People of the Abyss

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #1688 · 365,312 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The People of the Abyss

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: March 1, 1999 [eBook #1688]
                Most recently updated: May 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1688

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS ***

[Illustration]




The People of the Abyss

by Jack London


Contents

 PREFACE
 I. THE DESCENT
 II. JOHNNY UPRIGHT
 III. MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS
 IV. A MAN AND THE ABYSS
 V. THOSE ON THE EDGE
 VI. FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO
 VII. A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS
 VIII. THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER
 IX. THE SPIKE
 X. CARRYING THE BANNER
 XI. THE PEG
 XII. CORONATION DAY
 XIII. DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
 XIV. HOPS AND HOPPERS
 XV. THE SEA WIFE
 XVI. PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON
 XVII. INEFFICIENCY
 XVIII. WAGES
 XIX. THE GHETTO
 XX. COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
 XXI. THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF LIFE
 XXII. SUICIDE
 XXIII. THE CHILDREN
 XXIV. A VISION OF THE NIGHT
 XXV. THE HUNGER WAIL
 XXVI. DRINK, TEMPERANCE, AND THRIFT
 XXVII. THE MANAGEMENT


The chief priests and rulers cry:—

“O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,
We build but as our fathers built;
Behold thine images how they stand
Sovereign and sole through all our land.

“Our task is hard—with sword and flame,
To hold thine earth forever the same,
And with sharp crooks of steel to keep,
Still as thou leftest them, thy sheep.”

Then Christ sought out an artisan,
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
And a motherless girl whose fingers thin
Crushed from her faintly want and sin.

These set he in the midst of them,
And as they drew back their garment hem
For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said he,
“The images ye have made of me.”

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.




PREFACE


The experiences related in this volume fell to me in the summer of
1902. I went down into the under-world of London with an attitude of
mind which I may best liken to that of the explorer. I was open to be
convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of
those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone
before. Further, I took with me certain simple criteria with which to
measure the life of the under-world. That which made for more life, for
physical and spiritual health, was good; that which made for less life,
which hurt, and dwarfed, and distorted life, was bad.

It will be readily apparent to the reader that I saw much that was bad.
Yet it must not be forgotten that the time of which I write was
considered “good times” in England. The starvation and lack of shelter
I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never
wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.

Following the summer in question came a hard winter. Great numbers of
the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time,
and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread. Mr.
Justin McCarthy, writing in the month of January 1903, to the New York
_Independent_, briefly epitomises the situation as follows:—

“The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds
who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and
shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in
trying to raise supplies of food for the famishing residents of the
garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys. The quarters of the
Salvation Army in various parts of London are nightly besieged by hosts
of the unemployed and the hungry for whom neither shelter nor the means
of sustenance can be provided.”

It has been urged that the criticism I have passed on things as they
are in England is too pessimistic. I must say, in extenuation, that of
optimists I am the most optimistic. But I measure manhood less by
political aggregations than by individuals. Society grows, while
political machines rack to pieces and become “scrap.” For the English,
so far as manhood and womanhood and health and happiness go, I see a
broad and smiling future. But for a great deal of the political
machinery, which at present mismanages for them, I see nothing else
than the scrap heap.

JACK LONDON.


PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.




CHAPTER I.
THE DESCENT


“But you can’t do it, you know,” friends said, to whom I applied for
assistance in the matter of sinking myself down into the East End of
London. “You had better see the police for a guide,” they added, on
second thought, painfully endeavouring to adjust themselves to the
psychological processes of a madman who had come to them with better
credentials than brains.

“But I don’t want to see the police,” I protested. “What I wish to do
is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to
know how those people are living there, and why they are living there,
and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there
myself.”

“You don’t want to _live_ down there!” everybody said, with
disapprobation writ large upon their faces. “Why, it is said there are
places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence.”

“The very places I wish to see,” I broke in.

“But you can’t, you know,” was the unfailing rejoinder.

“Which is not what I came to see you about,” I answered brusquely,
somewhat nettled by their incomprehension. “I am a stranger here, and I
want you to tell me what you know of the East End, in order that I may
have something to start on.”

“But we know nothing of the East End. It is over there, somewhere.” And
they waved their hands vaguely in the direction where the sun on rare
occasions may be seen to rise.

“Then I shall go to Cook’s,” I announced.

“Oh yes,” they said, with relief. “Cook’s will be sure to know.”

But O Cook, O Thomas Cook & Son, path-finders and trail-clearers,
living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to
bewildered travellers—unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and
celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but
to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate
Circus, you know not the way!

“You can’t do it, you know,” said the human emporium of routes and
fares at Cook’s Cheapside branch. “It is so—hem—so unusual.”

“Consult the police,” he concluded authoritatively, when I had
persisted. “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End;
we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever
about the place at all.”

“Never mind that,” I interposed, to save myself from being swept out of
the office by his flood of negations. “Here’s something you can do for
me. I wish you to understand in advance what I intend doing, so that in
case of trouble you may be able to identify me.”

“Ah, I see! should you be murdered, we would be in position to identify
the corpse.”

He said it so cheerfully and cold-bloodedly that on the instant I saw
my stark and mutilated cadaver stretched upon a slab where cool waters
trickle ceaselessly, and him I saw bending over and sadly and patiently
identifying it as the body of the insane American who _would_ see the
East End.

“No, no,” I answered; “merely to identify me in case I get into a
scrape with the ’bobbies.’” This last I said with a thrill; truly, I
was gripping hold of the vernacular.

“That,” he said, “is a matter for the consideration of the Chief
Office.”

“It is so unprecedented, you know,” he added apologetically.

The man at the Chief Office hemmed and hawed. “We make it a rule,” he
explained, “to give no information concerning our clients.”

“But in this case,” I urged, “it is the client who requests you to give
the information concerning himself.”

Again he hemmed and hawed.

“Of course,” I hastily anticipated, “I know it is unprecedented, but—”

“As I was about to remark,” he went on steadily, “it is unprecedented,
and I don’t think we can do anything for you.”

However, I departed with the address of a detective who lived in the
East End, and took my way to the American consul-general. And here, at
last, I found a man with whom I could “do business.” There was no
hemming and hawing, no lifted brows, open incredulity, or blank
amazement. In one minute I explained myself and my project, which he
accepted as a matter of course. In the second minute he asked my age,
height, and weight, and looked me over. And in the third minute, as we
shook hands at parting, he said: “All right, Jack. I’ll remember you
and keep track.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Having burnt my ships behind me, I was now
free to plunge into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to
know anything. But at once I encountered a new difficulty in the shape
of my cabby, a grey-whiskered and eminently decorous personage who had
imperturbably driven me for several hours about the “City.”

“Drive me down to the East End,” I ordered, taking my seat.

“Where, sir?” he demanded with frank surprise.

“To the East End, anywhere. Go on.”

The hansom pursued an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a
puzzled stop. The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabman
peered down perplexedly at me.

“I say,” he said, “wot plyce yer wanter go?”

“East End,” I repeated. “Nowhere in particular. Just drive me around
anywhere.”

“But wot’s the haddress, sir?”

“See here!” I thundered. “Drive me down to the East End, and at once!”

It was evident that he did not understand, but he withdrew his head,
and grumblingly started his horse.

Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject
poverty, while five minutes’ walk from almost any point will bring one
to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one
unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of
people, short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance. We
rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor, and from each cross
street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery. Here and
there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with
sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and
women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten
potatoes, beans, and vegetables, while little children clustered like
flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the
shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but
partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.

Not a hansom did I meet with in all my drive, while mine was like an
apparition from another and better world, the way the children ran
after it and alongside. And as far as I could see were the solid walls
of brick, the slimy pavements, and the screaming streets; and for the
first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the
fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street,
seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and
threatening to well up and over me.

“Stepney, sir; Stepney Station,” the cabby called down.

I looked about. It was really a railroad station, and he had driven
desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all
that wilderness.

“Well,” I said.

He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very
miserable. “I’m a strynger ’ere,” he managed to articulate. “An’ if yer
don’t want Stepney Station, I’m blessed if I know wotcher do want.”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” I said. “You drive along and keep your eye
out for a shop where old clothes are sold. Now, when you see such a
shop, drive right on till you turn the corner, then stop and let me
out.”

I could see that he was growing dubious of his fare, but not long
afterwards he pulled up to the curb and informed me that an old-clothes
shop was to be found a bit of the way back.

“Won’tcher py me?” he pleaded. “There’s seven an’ six owin’ me.”

“Yes,” I laughed, “and it would be the last I’d see of you.”

“Lord lumme, but it’ll be the last I see of you if yer don’t py me,” he
retorted.

But a crowd of ragged onlookers had already gathered around the cab,
and I laughed again and walked back to the old-clothes shop.

Here the chief difficulty was in making the shopman understand that I
really and truly wanted old clothes. But after fruitless attempts to
press upon me new and impossible coats and trousers, he began to bring
to light heaps of old ones, looking mysterious the while and hinting
darkly. This he did with the palpable intention of letting me know that
he had “piped my lay,” in order to bulldose me, through fear of
exposure, into paying heavily for my purchases. A man in trouble, or a
high-class criminal from across the water, was what he took my measure
for—in either case, a person anxious to avoid the police.

But I disputed with him over the outrageous difference between prices
and values, till I quite disabused him of the notion, and he settled
down to drive a hard bargain with a hard customer. In the end I
selected a pair of stout though well-worn trousers, a frayed jacket
with one remaining button, a pair of brogans which had plainly seen
service where coal was shovelled, a thin leather belt, and a very dirty
cloth cap. My underclothing and socks, however, were new and warm, but
of the sort that any American waif, down in his luck, could acquire in
the ordinary course of events.

“I must sy yer a sharp ’un,” he said, with counterfeit admiration, as I
handed over the ten shillings finally agreed upon for the outfit.
“Blimey, if you ain’t ben up an’ down Petticut Lane afore now. Yer
trouseys is wuth five bob to hany man, an’ a docker ’ud give two an’
six for the shoes, to sy nothin’ of the coat an’ cap an’ new stoker’s
singlet an’ hother things.”

“How much will you give me for them?” I demanded suddenly. “I paid you
ten bob for the lot, and I’ll sell them back to you, right now, for
eight! Come, it’s a go!”

But he grinned and shook his head, and though I had made a good
bargain, I was unpleasantly aware that he had made a better one.

I found the cabby and a policeman with their heads together, but the
latter, after looking me over sharply, and particularly scrutinizing
the bundle under my arm, turned away and left the cabby to wax mutinous
by himself. And not a step would he budge till I paid him the seven
shillings and sixpence owing him. Whereupon he was willing to drive me
to the ends of the earth, apologising profusely for his insistence, and
explaining that one ran across queer customers in London Town.

But he drove me only to Highbury Vale, in North London, where my
luggage was waiting for me. Here, next day, I took off my shoes (not
without regret for their lightness and comfort), and my soft, grey
travelling suit, and, in fact, all my clothing; and proceeded to array
myself in the clothes of the other and unimaginable men, who must have
been indeed unfortunate to have had to part with such rags for the
pitiable sums obtainable from a dealer.

Inside my stoker’s singlet, in the armpit, I sewed a gold sovereign (an
emergency sum certainly of modest proportions); and inside my stoker’s
singlet I put myself. And then I sat down and moralised upon the fair
years and fat, which had made my skin soft and brought the nerves close
to the surface; for the singlet was rough and raspy as a hair shirt,
and I am confident that the most rigorous of ascetics suffer no more
than I did in the ensuing twenty-four hours.

The remainder of my costume was fairly easy to put on, though the
brogans, or brogues, were quite a problem. As stiff and hard as if made
of wood, it was only after a prolonged pounding of the uppers with my
fists that I was able to get my feet into them at all. Then, with a few
shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flake
tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and said
good-bye to my foreboding friends. As I passed out of the door, the
“help,” a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that
twisted her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary
sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises we are wont to designate as
“laughter.”

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the
difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished
from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact.
Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of
them. My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and
advertisement of my class, which was their class. It made me of like
kind, and in place of the fawning and too respectful attention I had
hitherto received, I now shared with them a comradeship. The man in
corduroy and dirty neckerchief no longer addressed me as “sir” or
“governor.” It was “mate” now—and a fine and hearty word, with a tingle
to it, and a warmth and gladness, which the other term does not
possess. Governor! It smacks of mastery, and power, and high
authority—the tribute of the man who is under to the man on top,
delivered in the hope that he will let up a bit and ease his weight,
which is another way of saying that it is an appeal for alms.

This brings me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which
is denied the average American abroad. The European traveller from the
States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a
chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing
robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his
pocket-book in a way that puts compound interest to the blush.

In my rags and tatters I escaped the pestilence of tipping, and
encountered men on a basis of equality. Nay, before the day was out I
turned the tables, and said, most gratefully, “Thank you, sir,” to a
gentleman whose horse I held, and who dropped a penny into my eager
palm.

Other changes I discovered were wrought in my condition by my new garb.
In crossing crowded thoroughfares I found I had to be, if anything,
more lively in avoiding vehicles, and it was strikingly impressed upon
me that my life had cheapened in direct ratio with my clothes. When
before I inquired the way of a policeman, I was usually asked, “Bus or
’ansom, sir?” But now the query became, “Walk or ride?” Also, at the
railway stations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a
matter of course.

But there was compensation for it all. For the first time I met the
English lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they were.
When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-houses,
talked with me, they talked as one man to another, and they talked as
natural men should talk, without the least idea of getting anything out
of me for what they talked or the way they talked.

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that
the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it.
The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped
gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it—with the one
exception of the stoker’s singlet.




CHAPTER II.
JOHNNY UPRIGHT


I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that
he lives in the most respectable street in the East End—a street that
would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the
desert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packed
squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation;
but its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have
no other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are
the people that come and go.

Each house in this street, as in all the streets, is shoulder to
shoulder with its neighbours. To each house there is but one entrance,
the front door; and each house is about eighteen feet wide, with a bit
of a brick-walled yard behind, where, when it is not raining, one may
look at a slate-coloured sky. But it must be understood that this is
East End opulence we are now considering. Some of the people in this
street are even so well-to-do as to keep a “slavey.” Johnny Upright
keeps one, as I well know, she being my first acquaintance in this
particular portion of the world.

To Johnny Upright’s house I came, and to the door came the “slavey.”
Now, mark you, her position in life was pitiable and contemptible, but
it was with pity and contempt that she looked at me. She evinced a
plain desire that our conversation should be short. It was Sunday, and
Johnny Upright was not at home, and that was all there was to it. But I
lingered, discussing whether or not it was all there was to it, till
Mrs. Johnny Upright was attracted to the door, where she scolded the
girl for not having closed it before turning her attention to me.

No, Mr. Johnny Upright was not at home, and further, he saw nobody on
Sunday. It is too bad, said I. Was I looking for work? No, quite the
contrary; in fact, I had come to see Johnny Upright on business which
might be profitable to him.

A change came over the face of things at once. The gentleman in
question was at church, but would be home in an hour or thereabouts,
when no doubt he could be seen.

Would I kindly step in?—no, the lady did not ask me, though I fished
for an invitation by stating that I would go down to the corner and
wait in a public-house. And down to the corner I went, but, it being
church time, the “pub” was closed. A miserable drizzle was falling,
and, in lieu of better, I took a seat on a neighbourly doorstep and
waited.

And here to the doorstep came the “slavey,” very frowzy and very
perplexed, to tell me that the missus would let me come back and wait
in the kitchen.

“So many people come ’ere lookin’ for work,” Mrs. Johnny Upright
apologetically explained. “So I ’ope you won’t feel bad the way I
spoke.”

“Not at all, not at all,” I replied in my grandest manner, for the
nonce investing my rags with dignity. “I quite understand, I assure
you. I suppose people looking for work almost worry you to death?”

“That they do,” she answered, with an eloquent and expressive glance;
and thereupon ushered me into, not the kitchen, but the dining room—a
favour, I took it, in recompense for my grand manner.

This dining-room, on the same floor as the kitchen, was about four feet
below the level of the ground, and so dark (it was midday) that I had
to wait a space for my eyes to adjust themselves to the gloom. Dirty
light filtered in through a window, the top of which was on a level
with a sidewalk, and in this light I found that I was able to read
newspaper print.

And here, while waiting the coming of Johnny Upright, let me explain my
errand. While living, eating, and sleeping with the people of the East
End, it was my intention to have a port of refuge, not too far distant,
into which I could run now and again to assure myself that good clothes
and cleanliness still existed. Also in such port I could receive my
mail, work up my notes, and sally forth occasionally in changed garb to
civilisation.

But this involved a dilemma. A lodging where my property would be safe
implied a landlady apt to be suspicious of a gentleman leading a double
life; while a landlady who would not bother her head over the double
life of her lodgers would imply lodgings where property was unsafe. To
avoid the dilemma was what had brought me to Johnny Upright. A
detective of thirty-odd years’ continuous service in the East End,
known far and wide by a name given him by a convicted felon in the
dock, he was just the man to find me an honest landlady, and make her
rest easy concerning the strange comings and goings of which I might be
guilty.

His two daughters beat him home from church—and pretty girls they were
in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicate
prettiness which characterises the Cockney lasses, a prettiness which
is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade
quickly away like the colour from a sunset sky.

They looked me over with frank curiosity, as though I were some sort of
a strange animal, and then ignored me utterly for the rest of my wait.
Then Johnny Upright himself arrived, and I was summoned upstairs to
confer with him.

“Speak loud,” he interrupted my opening words. “I’ve got a bad cold,
and I can’t hear well.”

Shades of Old Sleuth and Sherlock Holmes! I wondered as to where the
assistant was located whose duty it was to take down whatever
information I might loudly vouchsafe. And to this day, much as I have
seen of Johnny Upright and much as I have puzzled over the incident, I
have never been quite able to make up my mind as to whether or not he
had a cold, or had an assistant planted in the other room. But of one
thing I am sure: though I gave Johnny Upright the facts concerning
myself and project, he withheld judgment till next day, when I dodged
into his street conventionally garbed and in a hansom. Then his
greeting was cordial enough, and I went down into the dining-room to
join the family at tea.

“We are humble here,” he said, “not given to the flesh, and you must
take us for what we are, in our humble way.”

The girls were flushed and embarrassed at greeting me, while he did not
make it any the easier for them.

“Ha! ha!” he roared heartily, slapping the table with his open hand
till the dishes rang. “The girls thought yesterday you had come to ask
for a piece of bread! Ha! ha! ho! ho! ho!”

This they indignantly denied, with snapping eyes and guilty red cheeks,
as though it were an essential of true refinement to be able to discern
under his rags a man who had no need to go ragged.

And then, while I ate bread and marmalade, proceeded a play at cross
purposes, the daughters deeming it an insult to me that I should have
been mistaken for a beggar, and the father considering it as the
highest compliment to my cleverness to succeed in being so mistaken.
All of which I enjoyed, and the bread, the marmalade, and the tea, till
the time came for Johnny Upright to find me a lodging, which he did,
not half-a-dozen doors away, in his own respectable and opulent street,
in a house as like to his own as a pea to its mate.




CHAPTER III.
MY LODGING AND SOME OTHERS


From an East London standpoint, the room I rented for six shillings, or
a dollar and a half, per week, was a most comfortable affair. From the
American standpoint, on the other hand, it was rudely furnished,
uncomfortable, and small. By the time I had added an ordinary
typewriter table to its scanty furnishing, I was hard put to turn
around; at the best, I managed to navigate it by a sort of vermicular
progression requiring great dexterity and presence of mind.

Having settled myself, or my property rather, I put on my knockabout
clothes and went out for a walk. Lodgings being fresh in my mind, I
began to look them up, bearing in mind the hypothesis that I was a poor
young man with a wife and large family.

My first discovery was that empty houses were few and far between—so
far between, in fact, that though I walked miles in irregular circles
over a large area, I still remained between. Not one empty house could
I find—a conclusive proof that the district was “saturated.”

It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no
houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms,
unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and
chattels. There were not many, but I found them, usually in the
singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man’s
family in which to cook and eat and sleep. When I asked for two rooms,
the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I imagine, that a
certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he asked for more.

Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family,
but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much
space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. When such
rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a
fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space
for, say, from eightpence to a shilling. He may even be able to board
with the sublettees for a few shillings more. This, however, I failed
to inquire into—a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I
was working on the basis of a hypothetical family.

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned
that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen.
Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of
lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a
bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking. But, it
seems, the compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all’s
well, and God’s still in heaven.

However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright’s
street. What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various
cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind’s eye had become
narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at
once. The immensity of it was awe-inspiring. Could this be the room I
had rented for six shillings a week? Impossible! But my landlady,
knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my
doubts.

“Oh yes, sir,” she said, in reply to a question. “This street is the
very last. All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago,
and all the people were very respectable. But the others have driven
our kind out. Those in this street are the only ones left. It’s
shocking, sir!”

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental
value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.

“You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others
do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class
people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only
get one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It
_is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be.”

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
that be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel,
and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and
degrading neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of
workers before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging
them down, if not in the first generation, surely in the second and
third.

It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright’s street must go.
He realises it himself.

“In a couple of years,” he says, “my lease expires. My landlord is one
of our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and
this has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he may
die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house is
bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of
ground at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents
it a room to a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright’s gone!”

And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters,
and frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the
gloom, the monster city roaring at their heels.

But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting. Far, far out, on the
fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and
successful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas,
with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They
inflate themselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they
contemplate the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God
that they are not as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny
Upright and the monster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like
magic, gardens are built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into
many dwellings, and the black night of London settles down in a greasy
pall.




CHAPTER IV.
A MAN AND THE ABYSS


“I say, can you let a lodging?”

These words I discharged carelessly over my shoulder at a stout and
elderly woman, of whose fare I was partaking in a greasy coffee-house
down near the Pool and not very far from Limehouse.

“Oh yus,” she answered shortly, my appearance possibly not
approximating the standard of affluence required by her house.

I said no more, consuming my rasher of bacon and pint of sickly tea in
silence. Nor did she take further interest in me till I came to pay my
reckoning (fourpence), when I pulled all of ten shillings out of my
pocket. The expected result was produced.

“Yus, sir,” she at once volunteered; “I ’ave nice lodgin’s you’d likely
tyke a fancy to. Back from a voyage, sir?”

“How much for a room?” I inquired, ignoring her curiosity.

She looked me up and down with frank surprise. “I don’t let rooms, not
to my reg’lar lodgers, much less casuals.”

“Then I’ll have to look along a bit,” I said, with marked
disappointment.

But the sight of my ten shillings had made her keen. “I can let you
have a nice bed in with two hother men,” she urged. “Good, respectable
men, an’ steady.”

“But I don’t want to sleep with two other men,” I objected.

“You don’t ’ave to. There’s three beds in the room, an’ hit’s not a
very small room.”

“How much?” I demanded.

“’Arf a crown a week, two an’ six, to a regular lodger. You’ll fancy
the men, I’m sure. One works in the ware’ouse, an’ ’e’s been with me
two years now. An’ the hother’s bin with me six—six years, sir, an’ two
months comin’ nex’ Saturday. ’E’s a scene-shifter,” she went on. “A
steady, respectable man, never missin’ a night’s work in the time ’e’s
bin with me. An’ ’e likes the ’ouse; ’e says as it’s the best ’e can do
in the w’y of lodgin’s. I board ’im, an’ the hother lodgers too.”

“I suppose he’s saving money right along,” I insinuated innocently.

“Bless you, no! Nor can ’e do as well helsewhere with ’is money.”

And I thought of my own spacious West, with room under its sky and
unlimited air for a thousand Londons; and here was this man, a steady
and reliable man, never missing a night’s work, frugal and honest,
lodging in one room with two other men, paying two dollars and a half
per month for it, and out of his experience adjudging it to be the best
he could do! And here was I, on the strength of the ten shillings in my
pocket, able to enter in with my rags and take up my bed with him. The
human soul is a lonely thing, but it must be very lonely sometimes when
there are three beds to a room, and casuals with ten shillings are
admitted.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Thirteen years, sir; an’ don’t you think you’ll fancy the lodgin’?”

The while she talked she was shuffling ponderously about the small
kitchen in which she cooked the food for her lodgers who were also
boarders. When I first entered, she had been hard at work, nor had she
let up once throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busy
woman. “Up at half-past five,” “to bed the last thing at night,”
“workin’ fit ter drop,” thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey
hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending
toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet
between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and
sickening, to say the least.

“You’ll be hin hagain to ’ave a look?” she questioned wistfully, as I
went out of the door.

And as I turned and looked at her, I realized to the full the deeper
truth underlying that very wise old maxim: “Virtue is its own reward.”

I went back to her. “Have you ever taken a vacation?” I asked.

“Vycytion!”

“A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off, you
know, a rest.”

“Lor’ lumme!” she laughed, for the first time stopping from her work.
“A vycytion, eh? for the likes o’ me? Just fancy, now!—Mind yer
feet!”—this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the rotten
threshold.

Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring
disconsolately at the muddy water. A fireman’s cap was pulled down
across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered
unmistakably of the sea.

“Hello, mate,” I greeted him, sparring for a beginning. “Can you tell
me the way to Wapping?”

“Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?” he countered, fixing my
nationality on the instant.

And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a
public-house and a couple of pints of “arf an’ arf.” This led to closer
intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling’s worth of
coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a bed, and
sixpence for more arf an’ arf, he generously proposed that we drink up
the whole shilling.

“My mate, ’e cut up rough las’ night,” he explained. “An’ the bobbies
got ’m, so you can bunk in wi’ me. Wotcher say?”

I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole
shilling’s worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in a
miserable den, I knew him pretty fairly for what he was. And that in
one respect he was representative of a large body of the lower-class
London workman, my later experience substantiates.

He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him. As a
child, his home was the streets and the docks. He had never learned to
read, and had never felt the need for it—a vain and useless
accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life.

He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, all
crammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular
food than he could ordinarily rustle for himself. In fact, he never
went home except at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his
own food. Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks, a
trip or two to sea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer, and
then a full-fledged fireman, he had reached the top of his life.

And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of
life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical and
sensible one from his point of view. When I asked him what he lived
for, he immediately answered, “Booze.” A voyage to sea (for a man must
live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big
drunk at the end. After that, haphazard little drunks, sponged in the
“pubs” from mates with a few coppers left, like myself, and when
sponging was played out another trip to sea and a repetition of the
beastly cycle.

“But women,” I suggested, when he had finished proclaiming booze the
sole end of existence.

“Wimmen!” He thumped his pot upon the bar and orated eloquently.
“Wimmen is a thing my edication ’as learnt me t’ let alone. It don’t
pay, matey; it don’t pay. Wot’s a man like me want o’ wimmen, eh? jest
you tell me. There was my mar, she was enough, a-bangin’ the kids about
an’ makin’ the ole man mis’rable when ’e come ’ome, w’ich was seldom, I
grant. An’ fer w’y? Becos o’ mar! She didn’t make ’is ’ome ’appy, that
was w’y. Then, there’s the other wimmen, ’ow do they treat a pore
stoker with a few shillin’s in ’is trouseys? A good drunk is wot ’e’s
got in ’is pockits, a good long drunk, an’ the wimmen skin ’im out of
his money so quick ’e ain’t ’ad ’ardly a glass. I know. I’ve ’ad my
fling, an’ I know wot’s wot. An’ I tell you, where’s wimmen is
trouble—screechin’ an’ carryin’ on, fightin’, cuttin’, bobbies,
magistrates, an’ a month’s ’ard labour back of it all, an’ no pay-day
when you come out.”

“But a wife and children,” I insisted. “A home of your own, and all
that. Think of it, back from a voyage, little children climbing on your
knee, and the wife happy and smiling, and a kiss for you when she lays
the table, and a kiss all round from the babies when they go to bed,
and the kettle singing and the long talk afterwards of where you’ve
been and what you’ve seen, and of her and all the little happenings at
home while you’ve been away, and—”

“Garn!” he cried, with a playful shove of his fist on my shoulder.
“Wot’s yer game, eh? A missus kissin’ an’ kids clim’in’, an’ kettle
singin’, all on four poun’ ten a month w’en you ’ave a ship, an’ four
nothin’ w’en you ’aven’t. I’ll tell you wot I’d get on four poun’ ten—a
missus rowin’, kids squallin’, no coal t’ make the kettle sing, an’ the
kettle up the spout, that’s wot I’d get. Enough t’ make a bloke
bloomin’ well glad to be back t’ sea. A missus! Wot for? T’ make you
mis’rable? Kids? Jest take my counsel, matey, an’ don’t ’ave ’em. Look
at me! I can ’ave my beer w’en I like, an’ no blessed missus an’ kids
a-crying for bread. I’m ’appy, I am, with my beer an’ mates like you,
an’ a good ship comin’, an’ another trip to sea. So I say, let’s ’ave
another pint. Arf an’ arf’s good enough for me.”

Without going further with the speech of this young fellow of
two-and-twenty, I think I have sufficiently indicated his philosophy of
life and the underlying economic reason for it. Home life he had never
known. The word “home” aroused nothing but unpleasant associations. In
the low wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life,
he found sufficient reason for branding wife and children as
encumbrances and causes of masculine misery. An unconscious hedonist,
utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought the greatest possible
happiness for himself, and found it in drink.

A young sot; a premature wreck; physical inability to do a stoker’s
work; the gutter or the workhouse; and the end—he saw it all as clearly
as I, but it held no terrors for him. From the moment of his birth, all
the forces of his environment had tended to harden him, and he viewed
his wretched, inevitable future with a callousness and unconcern I
could not shake.

And yet he was not a bad man. He was not inherently vicious and brutal.
He had normal mentality, and a more than average physique. His eyes
were blue and round, shaded by long lashes, and wide apart. And there
was a laugh in them, and a fund of humour behind. The brow and general
features were good, the mouth and lips sweet, though already developing
a harsh twist. The chin was weak, but not too weak; I have seen men
sitting in the high places with weaker.

His head was shapely, and so gracefully was it poised upon a perfect
neck that I was not surprised by his body that night when he stripped
for bed. I have seen many men strip, in gymnasium and training
quarters, men of good blood and upbringing, but I have never seen one
who stripped to better advantage than this young sot of two-and-twenty,
this young god doomed to rack and ruin in four or five short years, and
to pass hence without posterity to receive the splendid heritage it was
his to bequeath.

It seemed sacrilege to waste such life, and yet I was forced to confess
that he was right in not marrying on four pounds ten in London Town.
Just as the scene-shifter was happier in making both ends meet in a
room shared with two other men, than he would have been had he packed a
feeble family along with a couple of men into a cheaper room, and
failed in making both ends meet.

And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is
criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. They are the stones by
the builder rejected. There is no place for them, in the social fabric,
while all the forces of society drive them downward till they perish.
At the bottom of the Abyss they are feeble, besotted, and imbecile. If
they reproduce, the life is so cheap that perforce it perishes of
itself. The work of the world goes on above them, and they do not care
to take part in it, nor are they able. Moreover, the work of the world
does not need them. There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to
the steep slope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more.

In short, the London Abyss is a vast shambles. Year by year, and decade
after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life,
that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the third
generation. Competent authorities aver that the London workman whose
parents and grand-parents were born in London is so remarkable a
specimen that he is rarely found.

Mr. A. C. Pigou has said that the aged poor, and the residuum which
compose the “submerged tenth,” constitute 71 per cent, of the
population of London. Which is to say that last year, and yesterday,
and to-day, at this very moment, 450,000 of these creatures are dying
miserably at the bottom of the social pit called “London.” As to how
they die, I shall take an instance from this morning’s paper.

SELF-NEGLECT


Yesterday Dr. Wynn Westcott held an inquest at Shoreditch, respecting
the death of Elizabeth Crews, aged 77 years, of 32 East Street,
Holborn, who died on Wednesday last. Alice Mathieson stated that she
was landlady of the house where deceased lived. Witness last saw her
alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch,
relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had
occupied the room in question for thirty-five years. When witness was
called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and the
ambulance and coachman had to be disinfected after the removal. Dr.
Chase Fennell said death was due to blood-poisoning from bed-sores, due
to self-neglect and filthy surroundings, and the jury returned a
verdict to that effect.


The most startling thing about this little incident of a woman’s death
is the smug complacency with which the officials looked upon it and
rendered judgment. That an old woman of seventy-seven years of age
should die of SELF-NEGLECT is the most optimistic way possible of
looking at it. It was the old dead woman’s fault that she died, and
having located the responsibility, society goes contentedly on about
its own affairs.

Of the “submerged tenth” Mr. Pigou has said: “Either through lack of
bodily strength, or of intelligence, or of fibre, or of all three, they
are inefficient or unwilling workers, and consequently unable to
support themselves . . . They are often so degraded in intellect as to
be incapable of distinguishing their right from their left hand, or of
recognising the numbers of their own houses; their bodies are feeble
and without stamina, their affections are warped, and they scarcely
know what family life means.”

Four hundred and fifty thousand is a whole lot of people. The young
fireman was only one, and it took him some time to say his little say.
I should not like to hear them all talk at once. I wonder if God hears
them?




CHAPTER V.
THOSE ON THE EDGE


My first impression of East London was naturally a general one. Later
the details began to appear, and here and there in the chaos of misery
I found little spots where a fair measure of happiness
reigned—sometimes whole rows of houses in little out-of-the-way
streets, where artisans dwell and where a rude sort of family life
obtains. In the evenings the men can be seen at the doors, pipes in
their mouths and children on their knees, wives gossiping, and laughter
and fun going on. The content of these people is manifestly great, for,
relative to the wretchedness that encompasses them, they are well off.

But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the
full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are
stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a
stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens
them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror
nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the
evening pipe, with their regular “arf an’ arf,” is all they demand, or
dream of demanding, from existence.

This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all. The
satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that
precedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not to
progress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they
may only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their
children and their children’s children. Man always gets less than he
demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the less than
little they get cannot save them.

At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city
life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or
workwoman cannot stand it. Mind and body are sapped by the undermining
influences ceaselessly at work. Moral and physical stamina are broken,
and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city
generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of
push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform
the labour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the
bottom of the Abyss.

If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes,
is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes
unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening
on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.

Leaving out the disease germs that fill the air of the East End,
consider but the one item of smoke. Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, curator
of Kew Gardens, has been studying smoke deposits on vegetation, and,
according to his calculations, no less than six tons of solid matter,
consisting of soot and tarry hydrocarbons, are deposited every week on
every quarter of a square mile in and about London. This is equivalent
to twenty-four tons per week to the square mile, or 1248 tons per year
to the square mile. From the cornice below the dome of St. Paul’s
Cathedral was recently taken a solid deposit of crystallised sulphate
of lime. This deposit had been formed by the action of the sulphuric
acid in the atmosphere upon the carbonate of lime in the stone. And
this sulphuric acid in the atmosphere is constantly being breathed by
the London workmen through all the days and nights of their lives.

It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults,
without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless
breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life
with the invading hordes from the country. The railway men, carriers,
omnibus drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require
physical stamina, are largely drawn from the country; while in the
Metropolitan Police there are, roughly, 12,000 country-born as against
3000 London-born.

So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge
man-killing machine, and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way
streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a
greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless wretches
dying at the bottom of the pit. They, at least, are dying, that is the
point; while these have yet to go through the slow and preliminary
pangs extending through two and even three generations.

And yet the quality of the life is good. All human potentialities are
in it. Given proper conditions, it could live through the centuries,
and great men, heroes and masters, spring from it and make the world
better by having lived.

I talked with a woman who was representative of that type which has
been jerked out of its little out-of-the-way streets and has started on
the fatal fall to the bottom. Her husband was a fitter and a member of
the Engineers’ Union. That he was a poor engineer was evidenced by his
inability to get regular employment. He did not have the energy and
enterprise necessary to obtain or hold a steady position.

The pair had two daughters, and the four of them lived in a couple of
holes, called “rooms” by courtesy, for which they paid seven shillings
per week. They possessed no stove, managing their cooking on a single
gas-ring in the fireplace. Not being persons of property, they were
unable to obtain an unlimited supply of gas; but a clever machine had
been installed for their benefit. By dropping a penny in the slot, the
gas was forthcoming, and when a penny’s worth had forthcome the supply
was automatically shut off. “A penny gawn in no time,” she explained,
“an’ the cookin’ not arf done!”

Incipient starvation had been their portion for years. Month in and
month out, they had arisen from the table able and willing to eat more.
And when once on the downward slope, chronic innutrition is an
important factor in sapping vitality and hastening the descent.

Yet this woman was a hard worker. From 4.30 in the morning till the
last light at night, she said, she had toiled at making cloth
dress-skirts, lined up and with two flounces, for seven shillings a
dozen. Cloth dress-skirts, mark you, lined up with two flounces, for
seven shillings a dozen! This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14.75
cents per skirt.

The husband, in order to obtain employment, had to belong to the union,
which collected one shilling and sixpence from him each week. Also,
when strikes were afoot and he chanced to be working, he had at times
been compelled to pay as high as seventeen shillings into the union’s
coffers for the relief fund.

One daughter, the elder, had worked as green hand for a dressmaker, for
one shilling and sixpence per week—37.5 cents per week, or a fraction
over 5 cents per day. However, when the slack season came she was
discharged, though she had been taken on at such low pay with the
understanding that she was to learn the trade and work up. After that
she had been employed in a bicycle store for three years, for which she
received five shillings per week, walking two miles to her work, and
two back, and being fined for tardiness.

As far as the man and woman were concerned, the game was played. They
had lost handhold and foothold, and were falling into the pit. But what
of the daughters? Living like swine, enfeebled by chronic innutrition,
being sapped mentally, morally, and physically, what chance have they
to crawl up and out of the Abyss into which they were born falling?

As I write this, and for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by
a free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is
back to back with my yard. When the first sounds reached me I took it
for the barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to
convince me that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a
fearful clamour.

Drunken women fighting! It is not nice to think of; it is far worse to
listen to. Something like this it runs—

Incoherent babble, shrieked at the top of the lungs of several women; a
lull, in which is heard a child crying and a young girl’s voice
pleading tearfully; a woman’s voice rises, harsh and grating, “You ’it
me! Jest you ’it me!” then, swat! challenge accepted and fight rages
afresh.

The back windows of the houses commanding the scene are lined with
enthusiastic spectators, and the sound of blows, and of oaths that make
one’s blood run cold, are borne to my ears. Happily, I cannot see the
combatants.

A lull; “You let that child alone!” child, evidently of few years,
screaming in downright terror. “Awright,” repeated insistently and at
top pitch twenty times straight running; “you’ll git this rock on the
’ead!” and then rock evidently on the head from the shriek that goes
up.

A lull; apparently one combatant temporarily disabled and being
resuscitated; child’s voice audible again, but now sunk to a lower note
of terror and growing exhaustion.

Voices begin to go up the scale, something like this:—

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

Sufficient affirmation on both sides, conflict again precipitated. One
combatant gets overwhelming advantage, and follows it up from the way
the other combatant screams bloody murder. Bloody murder gurgles and
dies out, undoubtedly throttled by a strangle hold.

Entrance of new voices; a flank attack; strangle hold suddenly broken
from the way bloody murder goes up half an octave higher than before;
general hullaballoo, everybody fighting.

Lull; new voice, young girl’s, “I’m goin’ ter tyke my mother’s part;”
dialogue, repeated about five times, “I’ll do as I like, blankety,
blank, blank!” “I’d like ter see yer, blankety, blank, blank!” renewed
conflict, mothers, daughters, everybody, during which my landlady calls
her young daughter in from the back steps, while I wonder what will be
the effect of all that she has heard upon her moral fibre.




CHAPTER VI.
FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO


Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero. He was a
slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Fra
Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over. He
was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and
ripe for martyrdom. As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an
active and dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer
meetings which have vexed the serenity of Merry England these several
years back. Little items he had been imparting to me as he walked
along; of being mobbed in parks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the
platform to lead the forlorn hope, when brother speaker after brother
speaker had been dragged down by the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of
a siege in a church, where he and three others had taken sanctuary, and
where, amid flying missiles and the crashing of stained glass, they had
fought off the mob till rescued by platoons of constables; of pitched
and giddy battles on stairways, galleries, and balconies; of smashed
windows, collapsed stairways, wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads
and bones—and then, with a regretful sigh, he looked at me and said:
“How I envy you big, strong men! I’m such a little mite I can’t do much
when it comes to fighting.”

And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions, remembered
my own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn,
to envy there. Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart
of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears
barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.

But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out a
precarious existence in a sweating den.

“I’m a ’earty man, I am,” he announced. “Not like the other chaps at my
shop, I ain’t. They consider me a fine specimen of manhood. W’y, d’ ye
know, I weigh ten stone!”

I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy
pounds, or over twelve stone, so I contented myself with taking his
measure. Poor, misshapen little man! His skin an unhealthy colour, body
gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders
bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily
forward and out of place! A “’earty man,’ ’e was!”

“How tall are you?”

“Five foot two,” he answered proudly; “an’ the chaps at the shop . . .
”

“Let me see that shop,” I said.

The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it. Passing
Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into
Frying-pan Alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for
all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry
pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her,
sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and
libelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow
hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an
even narrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights, each
landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.

There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house. In six of
the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both sexes and all ages, cooked, ate,
slept, and worked. In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or
possibly nine. The seventh room we entered. It was the den in which
five men “sweated.” It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table
at which the work was performed took up the major portion of the space.
On this table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to
stand to their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with
cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous
assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of shoes to their
soles.

In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children. In another vile
hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of
consumption. The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and
more often failed than not to supply her son with the three quarts of
milk he daily required. Further, this son, weak and dying, did not
taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this
meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human
swine eat.

“The w’y ’e coughs is somethin’ terrible,” volunteered my sweated
friend, referring to the dying boy. “We ’ear ’im ’ere, w’ile we’re
workin’, an’ it’s terrible, I say, terrible!”

And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace
added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.

My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men
in his eight-by-seven room. In the winter a lamp burned nearly all the
day and added its fumes to the over-loaded air, which was breathed, and
breathed, and breathed again.

In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he
could earn as high as “thirty bob a week.”—Thirty shillings! Seven
dollars and a half!

“But it’s only the best of us can do it,” he qualified. “An’ then we
work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we
can. An’ you should see us sweat! Just running from us! If you could
see us, it’d dazzle your eyes—tacks flyin’ out of mouth like from a
machine. Look at my mouth.”

I looked. The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the
metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.

“I clean my teeth,” he added, “else they’d be worse.”

After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools,
brads, “grindery,” cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain
that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.

“But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high
wage of thirty bob?” I asked.

“Four months,” was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he
informed me, they average from “half a quid” to a “quid” a week, which
is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars. The
present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.
And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the better
grades of sweating.

I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards
of the neighbouring buildings. But there were no back yards, or,
rather, they were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which
people lived. The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of
filth, in some places a couple of feet deep—the contributions from the
back windows of the second and third storeys. I could make out fish and
meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware,
and all the general refuse of a human sty.

“This is the last year of this trade; they’re getting machines to do
away with us,” said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the
woman with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap
young life.

We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County
Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison’s “Child
of the Jago.” While the buildings housed more people than before, it
was much healthier. But the dwellings were inhabited by the
better-class workmen and artisans. The slum people had simply drifted
on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.

“An’ now,” said the sweated one, the ’earty man who worked so fast as
to dazzle one’s eyes, “I’ll show you one of London’s lungs. This is
Spitalfields Garden.” And he mouthed the word “garden” with scorn.

The shadow of Christ’s Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in
the shadow of Christ’s Church, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I saw
a sight I never wish to see again. There are no flowers in this garden,
which is smaller than my own rose garden at home. Grass only grows
here, and it is surrounded by a sharp-spiked iron fencing, as are all
the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come
in at night and sleep upon it.

As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed
us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two
bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her. She
was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her
failing carcass through the workhouse door. Like the snail, she carried
her home with her. In the two sacking-covered bundles were her
household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and dear feminine possessions.

We went up the narrow gravelled walk. On the benches on either side
arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which
would have impelled Doré to more diabolical flights of fancy than he
ever succeeded in achieving. It was a welter of rags and filth, of all
manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness,
indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces. A chill, raw wind
was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping
for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging
in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine
months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor
covering, nor with any one looking after it. Next half-a-dozen men,
sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In
one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms,
and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On
another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a
knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.
Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a
man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap
of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.

It was this sleeping that puzzled me. Why were nine out of ten of them
asleep or trying to sleep? But it was not till afterwards that I
learned. _It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not
sleep by night_. On the pavement, by the portico of Christ’s Church,
where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were
whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in
torpor to rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.

“A lung of London,” I said; “nay, an abscess, a great putrescent sore.”

“Oh, why did you bring me here?” demanded the burning young socialist,
his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.

“Those women there,” said our guide, “will sell themselves for
thru’pence, or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread.”

He said it with a cheerful sneer.

But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried,
“For heaven’s sake let us get out of this.”




CHAPTER VII.
A WINNER OF THE VICTORIA CROSS


I have found that it is not easy to get into the casual ward of the
workhouse. I have made two attempts now, and I shall shortly make a
third. The first time I started out at seven o’clock in the evening
with four shillings in my pocket. Herein I committed two errors. In the
first place, the applicant for admission to the casual ward must be
destitute, and as he is subjected to a rigorous search, he must really
be destitute; and fourpence, much less four shillings, is sufficient
affluence to disqualify him. In the second place, I made the mistake of
tardiness. Seven o’clock in the evening is too late in the day for a
pauper to get a pauper’s bed.

For the benefit of gently nurtured and innocent folk, let me explain
what a ward is. It is a building where the homeless, bedless, penniless
man, if he be lucky, may _casually_ rest his weary bones, and then work
like a navvy next day to pay for it.

My second attempt to break into the casual ward began more
auspiciously. I started in the middle of the afternoon, accompanied by
the burning young socialist and another friend, and all I had in my
pocket was thru’pence. They piloted me to the Whitechapel Workhouse, at
which I peered from around a friendly corner. It was a few minutes past
five in the afternoon but already a long and melancholy line was
formed, which strung out around the corner of the building and out of
sight.

It was a most woeful picture, men and women waiting in the cold grey
end of the day for a pauper’s shelter from the night, and I confess it
almost unnerved me. Like the boy before the dentist’s door, I suddenly
discovered a multitude of reasons for being elsewhere. Some hints of
the struggle going on within must have shown in my face, for one of my
companions said, “Don’t funk; you can do it.”

Of course I could do it, but I became aware that even thru’pence in my
pocket was too lordly a treasure for such a throng; and, in order that
all invidious distinctions might be removed, I emptied out the coppers.
Then I bade good-bye to my friends, and with my heart going pit-a-pat,
slouched down the street and took my place at the end of the line.
Woeful it looked, this line of poor folk tottering on the steep pitch
to death; how woeful it was I did not dream.

Next to me stood a short, stout man. Hale and hearty, though aged,
strong-featured, with the tough and leathery skin produced by long
years of sunbeat and weatherbeat, his was the unmistakable sea face and
eyes; and at once there came to me a bit of Kipling’s “Galley Slave”:—

“By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel;
By the welt the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal;
By eyes grown old with staring through the sun-wash on the brine,
I am paid in full for service . . . ”


How correct I was in my surmise, and how peculiarly appropriate the
verse was, you shall learn.

“I won’t stand it much longer, I won’t,” he was complaining to the man
on the other side of him. “I’ll smash a windy, a big ’un, an’ get run
in for fourteen days. Then I’ll have a good place to sleep, never fear,
an’ better grub than you get here. Though I’d miss my bit of
baccy”—this as an after-thought, and said regretfully and resignedly.

“I’ve been out two nights now,” he went on; “wet to the skin night
before last, an’ I can’t stand it much longer. I’m gettin’ old, an’
some mornin’ they’ll pick me up dead.”

He whirled with fierce passion on me: “Don’t you ever let yourself grow
old, lad. Die when you’re young, or you’ll come to this. I’m tellin’
you sure. Seven an’ eighty years am I, an’ served my country like a
man. Three good-conduct stripes and the Victoria Cross, an’ this is
what I get for it. I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead. Can’t come any
too quick for me, I tell you.”

The moisture rushed into his eyes, but, before the other man could
comfort him, he began to hum a lilting sea song as though there was no
such thing as heartbreak in the world.

Given encouragement, this is the story he told while waiting in line at
the workhouse after two nights of exposure in the streets.

As a boy he had enlisted in the British navy, and for two score years
and more served faithfully and well. Names, dates, commanders, ports,
ships, engagements, and battles, rolled from his lips in a steady
stream, but it is beyond me to remember them all, for it is not quite
in keeping to take notes at the poorhouse door. He had been through the
“First War in China,” as he termed it; had enlisted with the East India
Company and served ten years in India; was back in India again, in the
English navy, at the time of the Mutiny; had served in the Burmese War
and in the Crimea; and all this in addition to having fought and toiled
for the English flag pretty well over the rest of the globe.

Then the thing happened. A little thing, it could only be traced back
to first causes: perhaps the lieutenant’s breakfast had not agreed with
him; or he had been up late the night before; or his debts were
pressing; or the commander had spoken brusquely to him. The point is,
that on this particular day the lieutenant was irritable. The sailor,
with others, was “setting up” the fore rigging.

Now, mark you, the sailor had been over forty years in the navy, had
three good-conduct stripes, and possessed the Victoria Cross for
distinguished service in battle; so he could not have been such an
altogether bad sort of a sailorman. The lieutenant was irritable; the
lieutenant called him a name—well, not a nice sort of name. It referred
to his mother. When I was a boy it was our boys’ code to fight like
little demons should such an insult be given our mothers; and many men
have died in my part of the world for calling other men this name.

However, the lieutenant called the sailor this name. At that moment it
chanced the sailor had an iron lever or bar in his hands. He promptly
struck the lieutenant over the head with it, knocking him out of the
rigging and overboard.

And then, in the man’s own words: “I saw what I had done. I knew the
Regulations, and I said to myself, ‘It’s all up with you, Jack, my boy;
so here goes.’ An’ I jumped over after him, my mind made up to drown us
both. An’ I’d ha’ done it, too, only the pinnace from the flagship was
just comin’ alongside. Up we came to the top, me a hold of him an’
punchin’ him. This was what settled for me. If I hadn’t ben strikin’
him, I could have claimed that, seein’ what I had done, I jumped over
to save him.”

Then came the court-martial, or whatever name a sea trial goes by. He
recited his sentence, word for word, as though memorised and gone over
in bitterness many times. And here it is, for the sake of discipline
and respect to officers not always gentlemen, the punishment of a man
who was guilty of manhood. To be reduced to the rank of ordinary
seaman; to be debarred all prize-money due him; to forfeit all rights
to pension; to resign the Victoria Cross; to be discharged from the
navy with a good character (this being his first offence); to receive
fifty lashes; and to serve two years in prison.

“I wish I had drowned that day, I wish to God I had,” he concluded, as
the line moved up and we passed around the corner.

At last the door came in sight, through which the paupers were being
admitted in bunches. And here I learned a surprising thing: _this being
Wednesday, none of us would be released till Friday morning_.
Furthermore, and oh, you tobacco users, take heed: _we would not be
permitted to take in any tobacco_. This we would have to surrender as
we entered. Sometimes, I was told, it was returned on leaving and
sometimes it was destroyed.

The old man-of-war’s man gave me a lesson. Opening his pouch, he
emptied the tobacco (a pitiful quantity) into a piece of paper. This,
snugly and flatly wrapped, went down his sock inside his shoe. Down
went my piece of tobacco inside my sock, for forty hours without
tobacco is a hardship all tobacco users will understand.

Again and again the line moved up, and we were slowly but surely
approaching the wicket. At the moment we happened to be standing on an
iron grating, and a man appearing underneath, the old sailor called
down to him,—

“How many more do they want?”

“Twenty-four,” came the answer.

We looked ahead anxiously and counted. Thirty-four were ahead of us.
Disappointment and consternation dawned upon the faces about me. It is
not a nice thing, hungry and penniless, to face a sleepless night in
the streets. But we hoped against hope, till, when ten stood outside
the wicket, the porter turned us away.

“Full up,” was what he said, as he banged the door.

Like a flash, for all his eighty-seven years, the old sailor was
speeding away on the desperate chance of finding shelter elsewhere. I
stood and debated with two other men, wise in the knowledge of casual
wards, as to where we should go. They decided on the Poplar Workhouse,
three miles away, and we started off.

As we rounded the corner, one of them said, “I could a’ got in ’ere
to-day. I come by at one o’clock, an’ the line was beginnin’ to form
then—pets, that’s what they are. They let ’m in, the same ones, night
upon night.”




CHAPTER VIII.
THE CARTER AND THE CARPENTER


The Carter, with his clean-cut face, chin beard, and shaved upper lip,
I should have taken in the United States for anything from a master
workman to a well-to-do farmer. The Carpenter—well, I should have taken
him for a carpenter. He looked it, lean and wiry, with shrewd,
observant eyes, and hands that had grown twisted to the handles of
tools through forty-seven years’ work at the trade. The chief
difficulty with these men was that they were old, and that their
children, instead of growing up to take care of them, had died. Their
years had told on them, and they had been forced out of the whirl of
industry by the younger and stronger competitors who had taken their
places.

These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel
Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse. Not much of a show,
they thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us. It was
Poplar, or the streets and night. Both men were anxious for a bed, for
they were “about gone,” as they phrased it. The Carter, fifty-eight
years of age, had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep,
while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and
airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is
to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s
streets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and
gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were
ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would
marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a
bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would
rouse you and gruffly order you to “move on.” You may rest upon the
bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on
you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets.
Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark
passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out
just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the
powers that be that you shall be routed out.

But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to
refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your
adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty
story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a
Homer.

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me.
And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London
Town this night. Please don’t remember it as you go to bed; if you are
as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for
old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor
blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in
mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them
again, and to do this five nights and days—O dear, soft people, full of
meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter. Mile
End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and
there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so
that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next
paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and
cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would
curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead
them to believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they took me for
a “seafaring man,” who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his
clothes (no unusual occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was
temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This accounted for my
ignorance of English ways in general and casual wards in particular,
and my curiosity concerning the same.

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at which we walked (he told me
that he had eaten nothing that day), but the Carpenter, lean and
hungry, his grey and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the breeze,
swung on in a long and tireless stride which reminded me strongly of
the plains wolf or coyote. Both kept their eyes upon the pavement as
they walked and talked, and every now and then one or the other would
stoop and pick something up, never missing the stride the while. I
thought it was cigar and cigarette stumps they were collecting, and for
some time took no notice. Then I did notice.

_From the slimy, spittle-drenched, sidewalk, they were picking up bits
of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and, they were eating
them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for
the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of
peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be
apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and
chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven
o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the
heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world
has ever seen_.

These two men talked. They were not fools, they were merely old. And,
naturally, their guts a-reek with pavement offal, they talked of bloody
revolution. They talked as anarchists, fanatics, and madmen would talk.
And who shall blame them? In spite of my three good meals that day, and
the snug bed I could occupy if I wished, and my social philosophy, and
my evolutionary belief in the slow development and metamorphosis of
things—in spite of all this, I say, I felt impelled to talk rot with
them or hold my tongue. Poor fools! Not of their sort are revolutions
bred. And when they are dead and dust, which will be shortly, other
fools will talk bloody revolution as they gather offal from the
spittle-drenched sidewalk along Mile End Road to Poplar Workhouse.

Being a foreigner, and a young man, the Carter and the Carpenter
explained things to me and advised me. Their advice, by the way, was
brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country. “As fast as
God’ll let me,” I assured them; “I’ll hit only the high places, till
you won’t be able to see my trail for smoke.” They felt the force of my
figures, rather than understood them, and they nodded their heads
approvingly.

“Actually make a man a criminal against ’is will,” said the Carpenter.
“’Ere I am, old, younger men takin’ my place, my clothes gettin’
shabbier an’ shabbier, an’ makin’ it ’arder every day to get a job. I
go to the casual ward for a bed. Must be there by two or three in the
afternoon or I won’t get in. You saw what happened to-day. What chance
does that give me to look for work? S’pose I do get into the casual
ward? Keep me in all day to-morrow, let me out mornin’ o’ next day.
What then? The law sez I can’t get in another casual ward that night
less’n ten miles distant. Have to hurry an’ walk to be there in time
that day. What chance does that give me to look for a job? S’pose I
don’t walk. S’pose I look for a job? In no time there’s night come, an’
no bed. No sleep all night, nothin’ to eat, what shape am I in in the
mornin’ to look for work? Got to make up my sleep in the park somehow”
(the vision of Christ’s Church, Spitalfield, was strong on me) “an’ get
something to eat. An’ there I am! Old, down, an’ no chance to get up.”

“Used to be a toll-gate ’ere,” said the Carter. “Many’s the time I’ve
paid my toll ’ere in my cartin’ days.”

“I’ve ’ad three ’a’penny rolls in two days,” the Carpenter announced,
after a long pause in the conversation. “Two of them I ate yesterday,
an’ the third to-day,” he concluded, after another long pause.

“I ain’t ’ad anything to-day,” said the Carter. “An’ I’m fagged out. My
legs is hurtin’ me something fearful.”

“The roll you get in the ‘spike’ is that ’ard you can’t eat it nicely
with less’n a pint of water,” said the Carpenter, for my benefit. And,
on asking him what the “spike” was, he answered, “The casual ward. It’s
a cant word, you know.”

But what surprised me was that he should have the word “cant” in his
vocabulary, a vocabulary that I found was no mean one before we parted.

I asked them what I might expect in the way of treatment, if we
succeeded in getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I was
supplied with much information. Having taken a cold bath on entering, I
would be given for supper six ounces of bread and “three parts of
skilly.” “Three parts” means three-quarters of a pint, and “skilly” is
a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three
buckets and a half of hot water.

“Milk and sugar, I suppose, and a silver spoon?” I queried.

“No fear. Salt’s what you’ll get, an’ I’ve seen some places where you’d
not get any spoon. ’Old ’er up an’ let ’er run down, that’s ’ow they do
it.”

“You do get good skilly at ’Ackney,” said the Carter.

“Oh, wonderful skilly, that,” praised the Carpenter, and each looked
eloquently at the other.

“Flour an’ water at St. George’s in the East,” said the Carter.

The Carpenter nodded. He had tried them all.

“Then what?” I demanded

And I was informed that I was sent directly to bed. “Call you at half
after five in the mornin’, an’ you get up an’ take a ‘sluice’—if
there’s any soap. Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o’ skilly
an’ a six-ounce loaf.”

“’Tisn’t always six ounces,” corrected the Carter.

“’Tisn’t, no; an’ often that sour you can ’ardly eat it. When first I
started I couldn’t eat the skilly nor the bread, but now I can eat my
own an’ another man’s portion.”

“I could eat three other men’s portions,” said the Carter. “I ’aven’t
’ad a bit this blessed day.”

“Then what?”

“Then you’ve got to do your task, pick four pounds of oakum, or clean
an’ scrub, or break ten to eleven hundredweight o’ stones. I don’t ’ave
to break stones; I’m past sixty, you see. They’ll make you do it,
though. You’re young an’ strong.”

“What I don’t like,” grumbled the Carter, “is to be locked up in a cell
to pick oakum. It’s too much like prison.”

“But suppose, after you’ve had your night’s sleep, you refuse to pick
oakum, or break stones, or do any work at all?” I asked.

“No fear you’ll refuse the second time; they’ll run you in,” answered
the Carpenter. “Wouldn’t advise you to try it on, my lad.”

“Then comes dinner,” he went on. “Eight ounces of bread, one and a arf
ounces of cheese, an’ cold water. Then you finish your task an’ ’ave
supper, same as before, three parts o’ skilly an’ six ounces o’ bread.
Then to bed, six o’clock, an’ next mornin’ you’re turned loose,
provided you’ve finished your task.”

We had long since left Mile End Road, and after traversing a gloomy
maze of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse. On a low
stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief
put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the “bit o’
baccy” down his sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the
drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with
our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a forlorn group at the
workhouse door.

Three working girls came along, and one looked pityingly at me; as she
passed I followed her with my eyes, and she still looked pityingly back
at me. The old men she did not notice. Dear Christ, she pitied me,
young and vigorous and strong, but she had no pity for the two old men
who stood by my side! She was a young woman, and I was a young man, and
what vague sex promptings impelled her to pity me put her sentiment on
the lowest plane. Pity for old men is an altruistic feeling, and
besides, the workhouse door is the accustomed place for old men. So she
showed no pity for them, only for me, who deserved it least or not at
all. Not in honour do grey hairs go down to the grave in London Town.

On one side the door was a bell handle, on the other side a press
button.

“Ring the bell,” said the Carter to me.

And just as I ordinarily would at anybody’s door, I pulled out the
handle and rang a peal.

“Oh! Oh!” they cried in one terrified voice. “Not so ’ard!”

I let go, and they looked reproachfully at me, as though I had
imperilled their chance for a bed and three parts of skilly. Nobody
came. Luckily it was the wrong bell, and I felt better.

“Press the button,” I said to the Carpenter.

“No, no, wait a bit,” the Carter hurriedly interposed.

From all of which I drew the conclusion that a poorhouse porter, who
commonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a very
finicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too fastidiously
by—paupers.

So we waited, ten times a decent interval, when the Carter stealthily
advanced a timid forefinger to the button, and gave it the faintest,
shortest possible push. I have looked at waiting men where life or
death was in the issue; but anxious suspense showed less plainly on
their faces than it showed on the faces of these two men as they waited
on the coming of the porter.

He came. He barely looked at us. “Full up,” he said and shut the door.

“Another night of it,” groaned the Carpenter. In the dim light the
Carter looked wan and grey.

Indiscriminate charity is vicious, say the professional
philanthropists. Well, I resolved to be vicious.

“Come on; get your knife out and come here,” I said to the Carter,
drawing him into a dark alley.

He glared at me in a frightened manner, and tried to draw back.
Possibly he took me for a latter-day Jack-the-Ripper, with a penchant
for elderly male paupers. Or he may have thought I was inveigling him
into the commission of some desperate crime. Anyway, he was frightened.

It will be remembered, at the outset, that I sewed a pound inside my
stoker’s singlet under the armpit. This was my emergency fund, and I
was now called upon to use it for the first time.

Not until I had gone through the acts of a contortionist, and shown the
round coin sewed in, did I succeed in getting the Carter’s help. Even
then his hand was trembling so that I was afraid he would cut me
instead of the stitches, and I was forced to take the knife away and do
it myself. Out rolled the gold piece, a fortune in their hungry eyes;
and away we stampeded for the nearest coffee-house.

Of course I had to explain to them that I was merely an investigator, a
social student, seeking to find out how the other half lived. And at
once they shut up like clams. I was not of their kind; my speech had
changed, the tones of my voice were different, in short, I was a
superior, and they were superbly class conscious.

“What will you have?” I asked, as the waiter came for the order.

“Two slices an’ a cup of tea,” meekly said the Carter.

“Two slices an’ a cup of tea,” meekly said the Carpenter.

Stop a moment, and consider the situation. Here were two men, invited
by me into the coffee-house. They had seen my gold piece, and they
could understand that I was no pauper. One had eaten a ha’penny roll
that day, the other had eaten nothing. And they called for “two slices
an’ a cup of tea!” Each man had given a tu’penny order. “Two slices,”
by the way, means two slices of bread and butter.

This was the same degraded humility that had characterised their
attitude toward the poorhouse porter. But I wouldn’t have it. Step by
step I increased their order—eggs, rashers of bacon, more eggs, more
bacon, more tea, more slices and so forth—they denying wistfully all
the while that they cared for anything more, and devouring it
ravenously as fast as it arrived.

“First cup o’ tea I’ve ’ad in a fortnight,” said the Carter.

“Wonderful tea, that,” said the Carpenter.

They each drank two pints of it, and I assure you that it was slops. It
resembled tea less than lager beer resembles champagne. Nay, it was
“water-bewitched,” and did not resemble tea at all.

It was curious, after the first shock, to notice the effect the food
had on them. At first they were melancholy, and talked of the divers
times they had contemplated suicide. The Carter, not a week before, had
stood on the bridge and looked at the water, and pondered the question.
Water, the Carpenter insisted with heat, was a bad route. He, for one,
he knew, would struggle. A bullet was “’andier,” but how under the sun
was he to get hold of a revolver? That was the rub.

They grew more cheerful as the hot “tea” soaked in, and talked more
about themselves. The Carter had buried his wife and children, with the
exception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his little
business. Then the thing happened. The son, a man of thirty-one, died
of the smallpox. No sooner was this over than the father came down with
fever and went to the hospital for three months. Then he was done for.
He came out weak, debilitated, no strong young son to stand by him, his
little business gone glimmering, and not a farthing. The thing had
happened, and the game was up. No chance for an old man to start again.
Friends all poor and unable to help. He had tried for work when they
were putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade. “An’ I got
fair sick of the answer: ‘No! no! no!’ It rang in my ears at night when
I tried to sleep, always the same, ‘No! no! no!’” Only the past week he
had answered an advertisement in Hackney, and on giving his age was
told, “Oh, too old, too old by far.”

The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served
twenty-two years. Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the army;
one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in India after
the Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in the East, had
been lost in Egypt. The Carpenter had not gone into the army, so here
he was, still on the planet.

“But ’ere, give me your ’and,” he said, ripping open his ragged shirt.
“I’m fit for the anatomist, that’s all. I’m wastin’ away, sir, actually
wastin’ away for want of food. Feel my ribs an’ you’ll see.”

I put my hand under his shirt and felt. The skin was stretched like
parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the
world like running one’s hand over a washboard.

“Seven years o’ bliss I ’ad,” he said. “A good missus and three bonnie
lassies. But they all died. Scarlet fever took the girls inside a
fortnight.”

“After this, sir,” said the Carter, indicating the spread, and desiring
to turn the conversation into more cheerful channels; “after this, I
wouldn’t be able to eat a workhouse breakfast in the morning.”

“Nor I,” agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly
delights and the fine dishes their respective wives had cooked in the
old days.

“I’ve gone three days and never broke my fast,” said the Carter.

“And I, five,” his companion added, turning gloomy with the memory of
it. “Five days once, with nothing on my stomach but a bit of orange
peel, an’ outraged nature wouldn’t stand it, sir, an’ I near died.
Sometimes, walkin’ the streets at night, I’ve ben that desperate I’ve
made up my mind to win the horse or lose the saddle. You know what I
mean, sir—to commit some big robbery. But when mornin’ come, there was
I, too weak from ’unger an’ cold to ’arm a mouse.”

As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and wax
boastful, and to talk politics. I can only say that they talked
politics as well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal
better than some of the middle-class men I have heard. What surprised
me was the hold they had on the world, its geography and peoples, and
on recent and contemporaneous history. As I say, they were not fools,
these two men. They were merely old, and their children had undutifully
failed to grow up and give them a place by the fire.

One last incident, as I bade them good-bye on the corner, happy with a
couple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a bed
for the night. Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away the
burning match when the Carter reached for it. I proffered him the box,
but he said, “Never mind, won’t waste it, sir.” And while he lighted
the cigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with the filling
of his pipe in order to have a go at the same match.

“It’s wrong to waste,” said he.

“Yes,” I said, but I was thinking of the wash-board ribs over which I
had run my hand.




CHAPTER IX.
THE SPIKE


First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness
through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for the
vileness which I have thrust into it. I have been to the spike, and
slept in the spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run away from
the spike.

After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel casual
ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three
o’clock in the afternoon. They did not “let in” till six, but at that
early hour I was number twenty, while the news had gone forth that only
twenty-two were to be admitted. By four o’clock there were thirty-four
in line, the last ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by
some kind of a miracle. Many more came, looked at the line, and went
away, wise to the bitter fact that the spike would be “full up.”

Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one
side of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they had
been in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full house of
sixteen hundred patients had prevented their becoming acquainted. But
they made up for it, discussing and comparing the more loathsome
features of their disease in the most cold-blooded, matter-of-fact way.
I learned that the average mortality was one in six, that one of them
had been in three months and the other three months and a half, and
that they had been “rotten wi’ it.” Whereat my flesh began to creep and
crawl, and I asked them how long they had been out. One had been out
two weeks, and the other three weeks. Their faces were badly pitted
(though each assured the other that this was not so), and further, they
showed me in their hands and under the nails the smallpox “seeds” still
working out. Nay, one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and
pop it went, right out of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up
smaller inside my clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent
hope that it had not popped on me.

In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their
being “on the doss,” which means on the tramp. Both had been working
when smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the hospital
“broke,” with the gloomy task before them of hunting for work. So far,
they had not found any, and they had come to the spike for a “rest up”
after three days and nights on the street.

It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by disease
or accident. Later on, I talked with another man—“Ginger” we called
him—who stood at the head of the line—a sure indication that he had
been waiting since one o’clock. A year before, one day, while in the
employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of fish which was
too much for him. Result: “something broke,” and there was the box on
the ground, and he on the ground beside it.

At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said it
was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to rub on
it, kept him four hours, and told him to get along. But he was not on
the streets more than two or three hours when he was down on his back
again. This time he went to another hospital and was patched up. But
the point is, the employer did nothing, positively nothing, for the man
injured in his employment, and even refused him “a light job now and
again,” when he came out. As far as Ginger is concerned, he is a broken
man. His only chance to earn a living was by heavy work. He is now
incapable of performing heavy work, and from now until he dies, the
spike, the peg, and the streets are all he can look forward to in the
way of food and shelter. The thing happened—that is all. He put his
back under too great a load of fish, and his chance for happiness in
life was crossed off the books.

Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were
wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves for
their folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to them, a
prison from which there was no hope of escape. It was impossible for
them to get away. They could neither scrape together the passage money,
nor get a chance to work their passage. The country was too overrun by
poor devils on that “lay.”

I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack, and
they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice. To sum it up,
the advice was something like this: To keep out of all places like the
spike. There was nothing good in it for me. To head for the coast and
bend every effort to get away on a ship. To go to work, if possible,
and scrape together a pound or so, with which I might bribe some
steward or underling to give me chance to work my passage. They envied
me my youth and strength, which would sooner or later get me out of the
country. These they no longer possessed. Age and English hardship had
broken them, and for them the game was played and up.

There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure, will
in the end make it out. He had gone to the United States as a young
fellow, and in fourteen years’ residence the longest period he had been
out of work was twelve hours. He had saved his money, grown too
prosperous, and returned to the mother-country. Now he was standing in
line at the spike.

For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook. His
hours had been from 7 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to 12.30
p.m.—ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received twenty
shillings, or five dollars.

“But the work and the long hours was killing me,” he said, “and I had
to chuck the job. I had a little money saved, but I spent it living and
looking for another place.”

This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to get
rested. As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for Bristol, a
one-hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would eventually get
a ship for the States.

But the men in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were poor,
wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many
ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after
the day’s work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful,
who had run to meet him, could climb in. But the cart was big, the
young hopeful little, and he failed in his several attempts to swarm
up. Whereupon one of the most degraded-looking men stepped out of the
line and hoisted him in. Now the virtue and the joy of this act lies in
that it was service of love, not hire. The carter was poor, and the man
knew it; and the man was standing in the spike line, and the carter
knew it; and the man had done the little act, and the carter had
thanked him, even as you and I would have done and thanked.

Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the “Hopper” and his “ole
woman.” He had been in line about half-an-hour when the “ole woman”
(his mate) came up to him. She was fairly clad, for her class, with a
weather-worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-covered bundle in
her arms. As she talked to him, he reached forward, caught the one
stray wisp of the white hair that was flying wild, deftly twirled it
between his fingers, and tucked it back properly behind her ear. From
all of which one may conclude many things. He certainly liked her well
enough to wish her to be neat and tidy. He was proud of her, standing
there in the spike line, and it was his desire that she should look
well in the eyes of the other unfortunates who stood in the spike line.
But last and best, and underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy
affection he bore her; for man is not prone to bother his head over
neatness and tidiness in a woman for whom he does not care, nor is he
likely to be proud of such a woman.

And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard workers
I knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper lodging. He had
pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself. When I asked him
what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to earn at “hopping,” he
sized me up, and said that it all depended. Plenty of people were too
slow to pick hops and made a failure of it. A man, to succeed, must use
his head and be quick with his fingers, must be exceeding quick with
his fingers. Now he and his old woman could do very well at it, working
the one bin between them and not going to sleep over it; but then, they
had been at it for years.

“I ’ad a mate as went down last year,” spoke up a man. “It was ’is fust
time, but ’e come back wi’ two poun’ ten in ’is pockit, an’ ’e was only
gone a month.”

“There you are,” said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his voice.
“’E was quick. ’E was jest nat’rally born to it, ’e was.”

Two pound ten—twelve dollars and a half—for a month’s work when one is
“jest nat’rally born to it!” And in addition, sleeping out without
blankets and living the Lord knows how. There are moments when I am
thankful that I was not “jest nat’rally born” a genius for anything,
not even hop-picking,

In the matter of getting an outfit for “the hops,” the Hopper gave me
some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and tender
people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.

“If you ain’t got tins an’ cookin’ things, all as you can get’ll be
bread and cheese. No bloomin’ good that! You must ’ave ’ot tea, an’
wegetables, an’ a bit o’ meat, now an’ again, if you’re goin’ to do
work as is work. Cawn’t do it on cold wittles. Tell you wot you do,
lad. Run around in the mornin’ an’ look in the dust pans. You’ll find
plenty o’ tins to cook in. Fine tins, wonderful good some o’ them. Me
an’ the ole woman got ours that way.” (He pointed at the bundle she
held, while she nodded proudly, beaming on me with good-nature and
consciousness of success and prosperity.) “This overcoat is as good as
a blanket,” he went on, advancing the skirt of it that I might feel its
thickness. “An’ ’oo knows, I may find a blanket before long.”

Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead
certainty that he _would_ find a blanket before long.

“I call it a ’oliday, ’oppin’,” he concluded rapturously. “A tidy way
o’ gettin’ two or three pounds together an’ fixin’ up for winter. The
only thing I don’t like”—and here was the rift within the lute—“is
paddin’ the ’oof down there.”

It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and while
they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, “paddin’ the ’oof,” which
is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them. And I looked at
their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten years, and wondered how
it would be with them.

I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them
past fifty. The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into the
spike; but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was turned
away to tramp the streets all night.

The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty feet
wide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence street. At
least workmen and their families existed in some sort of fashion in the
houses across from us. And each day and every day, from one in the
afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the principal feature of
the view commanded by their front doors and windows. One workman sat in
his door directly opposite us, taking his rest and a breath of air
after the toil of the day. His wife came to chat with him. The doorway
was too small for two, so she stood up. Their babes sprawled before
them. And here was the spike line, less than a score of feet
away—neither privacy for the workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About
our feet played the children of the neighbourhood. To them our presence
was nothing unusual. We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and
ordinary as the brick walls and stone curbs of their environment. They
had been born to the sight of the spike line, and all their brief days
they had seen it.

At six o’clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of destitution,
and the previous night’s “doss,” were taken with lightning-like
rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was startled by a
man’s thrusting into my hand something that felt like a brick, and
shouting into my ear, “any knives, matches, or tobacco?” “No, sir,” I
lied, as lied every man who entered. As I passed downstairs to the
cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand, and saw that by doing
violence to the language it might be called “bread.” By its weight and
hardness it certainly must have been unleavened.

The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled on
to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men. The
place smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of voices
from out of the obscurity, made it seem more like some anteroom to the
infernal regions.

Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced the
meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with which
their feet were wrapped. This added to the general noisomeness, while
it took away from my appetite.

In fact, I found that I had made a mistake. I had eaten a hearty dinner
five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare before me I
should have fasted for a couple of days. The pannikin contained skilly,
three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water. The
men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt scattered over the
dirty tables. I attempted the same, but the bread seemed to stick in my
mouth, and I remembered the words of the Carpenter, “You need a pint of
water to eat the bread nicely.”

I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going and
found the water. Then I returned and attacked the skilly. It was coarse
of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter. This bitterness which
lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly had passed on, I
found especially repulsive. I struggled manfully, but was mastered by
my qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly and bread was the
measure of my success. The man beside me ate his own share, and mine to
boot, scraped the pannikins, and looked hungrily for more.

“I met a ‘towny,’ and he stood me too good a dinner,” I explained.

“An’ I ’aven’t ’ad a bite since yesterday mornin’,” he replied.

“How about tobacco?” I asked. “Will the bloke bother with a fellow
now?”

“Oh no,” he answered me. “No bloomin’ fear. This is the easiest spike
goin’. Y’oughto see some of them. Search you to the skin.”

The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. “This
super’tendent ’ere is always writin’ to the papers ’bout us mugs,” said
the man on the other side of me.

“What does he say?” I asked.

“Oh, ’e sez we’re no good, a lot o’ blackguards an’ scoundrels as won’t
work. Tells all the ole tricks I’ve bin ’earin’ for twenty years an’
w’ich I never seen a mug ever do. Las’ thing of ’is I see, ’e was
tellin’ ’ow a mug gets out o’ the spike, wi’ a crust in ’is pockit. An’
w’en ’e sees a nice ole gentleman comin’ along the street ’e chucks the
crust into the drain, an’ borrows the old gent’s stick to poke it out.
An’ then the ole gent gi’es ’im a tanner.”

A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from somewhere
over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating angrily:

“Talk o’ the country bein’ good for tommy [food]; I’d like to see it. I
jest came up from Dover, an’ blessed little tommy I got. They won’t gi’
ye a drink o’ water, they won’t, much less tommy.”

“There’s mugs never go out of Kent,” spoke a second voice, “they live
bloomin’ fat all along.”

“I come through Kent,” went on the first voice, still more angrily,
“an’ Gawd blimey if I see any tommy. An’ I always notices as the blokes
as talks about ’ow much they can get, w’en they’re in the spike can eat
my share o’ skilly as well as their bleedin’ own.”

“There’s chaps in London,” said a man across the table from me, “that
get all the tommy they want, an’ they never think o’ goin’ to the
country. Stay in London the year ’round. Nor do they think of lookin’
for a kip [place to sleep], till nine or ten o’clock at night.”

A general chorus verified this statement.

“But they’re bloomin’ clever, them chaps,” said an admiring voice.

“Course they are,” said another voice. “But it’s not the likes of me
an’ you can do it. You got to be born to it, I say. Them chaps ’ave ben
openin’ cabs an’ sellin’ papers since the day they was born, an’ their
fathers an’ mothers before ’em. It’s all in the trainin’, I say, an’
the likes of me an’ you ’ud starve at it.”

This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the
statement that there were “mugs as lives the twelvemonth ’round in the
spike an’ never get a blessed bit o’ tommy other than spike skilly an’
bread.”

“I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike,” said a new voice.
Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
“There was three of us breakin’ stones. Winter-time, an’ the cold was
cruel. T’other two said they’d be blessed if they do it, an’ they
didn’t; but I kept wearin’ into mine to warm up, you know. An’ then the
guardians come, an’ t’other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an’ the
guardians, w’en they see wot I’d been doin’, gives me a tanner each,
five o’ them, an’ turns me up.”

The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the
spike, and only come to it when driven in. After the “rest up” they are
good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are
driven in again for another rest. Of course, this continuous hardship
quickly breaks their constitutions, and they realise it, though only in
a vague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do
not worry about it.

“On the doss,” they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to “on the
road” in the United States. The agreement is that kipping, or dossing,
or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even than
that of food. The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainly
responsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their
homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian
Jews, who take their places at lower wages and establish the sweating
system.

By seven o’clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed. We
stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our
belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the
floor—a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin. Then, two by two, we
entered the bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know:
the two men preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same
water, and it was not changed for the two men that followed us. This I
know; but I am also certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the
same water.

I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid
at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the
bodies of other men. My equanimity was not restored by seeing the back
of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and
retaliatory scratching.

A shirt was handed me—which I could not help but wonder how many other
men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off
to the sleeping apartment. This was a long, narrow room, traversed by
two low iron rails. Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks,
but pieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide. These
were the beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches
above the floor. The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat
higher than the feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down.
Being slung to the same rails, when one man moved, no matter how
slightly, the rest were set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was
sure to struggle back to the position from which he had slipped, and
arouse me again.

Many hours passed before I won to sleep. It was only seven in the
evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in the
street, continued till nearly midnight. The smell was frightful and
sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and
crawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and snoring
arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times,
afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells,
aroused the lot of us. Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some
similar animal on my breast. In the quick transition from sleep to
waking, before I was completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the
dead. At any rate, I woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my
lack of manners.

But morning came, with a six o’clock breakfast of bread and skilly,
which I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks. Some were
set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us
were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary where we
were set at scavenger work. This was the method by which we paid for
our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many
times over.

Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in being
chosen to perform it.

“Don’t touch it, mate, the nurse sez it’s deadly,” warned my working
partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage
can.

It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to
touch it, nor to allow it to touch me. Nevertheless, I had to carry the
sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a
receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong
disinfectant.

Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this. These men of the spike, the
peg, and the street, are encumbrances. They are of no good or use to
any one, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with their presence,
and are better out of the way. Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse
nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, as
they are likewise the quickest to die.

They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them out
of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the
dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The
conversation turned to the “white potion” and “black jack,” and I found
they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the
Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was “polished
off.” That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a
dose of “black jack” or the “white potion,” and sent over the divide.
It does not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not. The
point is, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created
the language with which to express that feeling—“black jack,” “white
potion,” “polishing off.”

At eight o’clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary, where
tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were heaped high
on a huge platter in an indescribable mess—pieces of bread, chunks of
grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints,
bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the
sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases. Into this mess the men
plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining,
rejecting, and scrambling for. It wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have
done worse. But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of
the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left
into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.

“Once, w’en I was ’ere before, wot did I find out there but a ’ole lot
of pork-ribs,” said Ginger to me. By “out there” he meant the place
where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant.
“They was a prime lot, no end o’ meat on ’em, an’ I ’ad ’em into my
arms an’ was out the gate an’ down the street, a-lookin’ for some ’un
to gi’ ’em to. Couldn’t see a soul, an’ I was runnin’ ’round clean
crazy, the bloke runnin’ after me an’ thinkin’ I was ‘slingin’ my ’ook’
[running away]. But jest before ’e got me, I got a ole woman an’ poked
’em into ’er apron.”

O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson from
Ginger. At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruistic
act as was ever performed outside the Abyss. It was fine of Ginger, and
if the old woman caught some contagion from the “no end o’ meat” on the
pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine. But the most salient
thing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, “clean crazy”
at sight of so much food going to waste.

It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay two
nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had paid
for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.

“Come on, let’s sling it,” I said to one of my mates, pointing toward
the open gate through which the dead waggon had come.

“An’ get fourteen days?”

“No; get away.”

“Aw, I come ’ere for a rest,” he said complacently. “An’ another
night’s kip won’t ’urt me none.”

They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to “sling it” alone.

“You cawn’t ever come back ’ere again for a doss,” they warned me.

“No fear,” said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend; and,
dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.

Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an
hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever
germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that I
could stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than two
hundred and twenty.




CHAPTER X.
CARRYING THE BANNER


“To carry the banner” means to walk the streets all night; and I, with
the figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could see. Men
and women walk the streets at night all over this great city, but I
selected the West End, making Leicester Square my base, and scouting
about from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park.

The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the
brilliant throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard put
to find cabs. The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs, most of
which were engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate attempts of
ragged men and boys to get a shelter from the night by procuring cabs
for the cabless ladies and gentlemen. I use the word “desperate”
advisedly, for these wretched, homeless ones were gambling a soaking
against a bed; and most of them, I took notice, got the soaking and
missed the bed. Now, to go through a stormy night with wet clothes,
and, in addition, to be ill nourished and not to have tasted meat for a
week or a month, is about as severe a hardship as a man can undergo.
Well fed and well clad, I have travelled all day with the spirit
thermometer down to seventy-four degrees below zero—one hundred and six
degrees of frost[1]; and though I suffered, it was a mere nothing
compared with carrying the banner for a night, ill fed, ill clad, and
soaking wet.

 [1] This in the Klondike.—J. L.


The streets grew very quiet and lonely after the theatre crowd had gone
home. Only were to be seen the ubiquitous policemen, flashing their
dark lanterns into doorways and alleys, and men and women and boys
taking shelter in the lee of buildings from the wind and rain.
Piccadilly, however, was not quite so deserted. Its pavements were
brightened by well-dressed women without escort, and there was more
life and action there than elsewhere, due to the process of finding
escort. But by three o’clock the last of them had vanished, and it was
then indeed lonely.

At half-past one the steady downpour ceased, and only showers fell
thereafter. The homeless folk came away from the protection of the
buildings, and slouched up and down and everywhere, in order to rush up
the circulation and keep warm.

One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed
earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester
Square. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get
out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got
the chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life was young and
blood was warm. But she did not get the chance often. She was moved on
by every policeman, and it required an average of six moves to send her
doddering off one man’s beat and on to another’s. By three o’clock, she
had progressed as far as St. James Street, and as the clocks were
striking four I saw her sleeping soundly against the iron railings of
Green Park. A brisk shower was falling at the time, and she must have
been drenched to the skin.

Now, said I, at one o’clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor
young man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must look
for work. It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep in order
that you may have strength to look for work and to do work in case you
find it.

So I sat down on the stone steps of a building. Five minutes later a
policeman was looking at me. My eyes were wide open, so he only grunted
and passed on. Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I was dozing,
and the same policeman was saying gruffly, “’Ere, you, get outa that!”

I got. And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time I
dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again. Not long after,
when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner (who had
been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them again), when I
noticed an open passage leading under a building and disappearing in
darkness. A low iron gate barred the entrance.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s climb over and get a good sleep.”

“Wot?” he answered, recoiling from me. “An’ get run in fer three
months! Blimey if I do!”

Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or
fifteen, a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and sick.

“Let’s go over the fence,” I proposed, “and crawl into the shrubbery
for a sleep. The bobbies couldn’t find us there.”

“No fear,” he answered. “There’s the park guardians, and they’d run you
in for six months.”

Times have changed, alas! When I was a youngster I used to read of
homeless boys sleeping in doorways. Already the thing has become a
tradition. As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in literature
for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased to be. Here are
the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy conjunctions are no
longer effected. The doorways remain empty, and the boys keep awake and
carry the banner.

“I was down under the arches,” grumbled another young fellow. By
“arches” he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span
the Thames. “I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its ’ardest,
an’ a bobby comes in an’ chyses me out. But I come back, an’ ’e come
too. ‘’Ere,’ sez ’e, ‘wot you doin’ ’ere?’ An’ out I goes, but I sez,
‘Think I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin’ bridge?’”

Among those who carry the banner, Green Park has the reputation of
opening its gates earlier than the other parks, and at quarter-past
four in the morning, I, and many more, entered Green Park. It was
raining again, but they were worn out with the night’s walking, and
they were down on the benches and asleep at once. Many of the men
stretched out full length on the dripping wet grass, and, with the rain
falling steadily upon them, were sleeping the sleep of exhaustion.

And now I wish to criticise the powers that be. They _are_ the powers,
therefore they may decree whatever they please; so I make bold only to
criticise the ridiculousness of their decrees. All night long they make
the homeless ones walk up and down. They drive them out of doors and
passages, and lock them out of the parks. The evident intention of all
this is to deprive them of sleep. Well and good, the powers have the
power to deprive them of sleep, or of anything else for that matter;
but why under the sun do they open the gates of the parks at five
o’clock in the morning and let the homeless ones go inside and sleep?
If it is their intention to deprive them of sleep, why do they let them
sleep after five in the morning? And if it is not their intention to
deprive them of sleep, why don’t they let them sleep earlier in the
night?

In this connection, I will say that I came by Green Park that same day,
at one in the afternoon, and that I counted scores of the ragged
wretches asleep in the grass. It was Sunday afternoon, the sun was
fitfully appearing, and the well-dressed West Enders, with their wives
and progeny, were out by thousands, taking the air. It was not a
pleasant sight for them, those horrible, unkempt, sleeping vagabonds;
while the vagabonds themselves, I know, would rather have done their
sleeping the night before.

And so, dear soft people, should you ever visit London Town, and see
these men asleep on the benches and in the grass, please do not think
they are lazy creatures, preferring sleep to work. Know that the powers
that be have kept them walking all the night long, and that in the day
they have nowhere else to sleep.




CHAPTER XI.
THE PEG


But, after carrying the banner all night, I did not sleep in Green Park
when morning dawned. I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I had had
no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a penniless
man looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a breakfast,
and next for the work.

During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of the
Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away a
breakfast to the unwashed. (And, by the way, the men who carry the
banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining they do
not have much show for a wash, either.) This, thought I, is the very
thing—breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in which to look
for work.

It was a weary walk. Down St. James Street I dragged my tired legs,
along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand. I crossed the
Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars Road,
coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the Salvation Army
barracks before seven o’clock. This was “the peg.” And by “the peg,” in
the argot, is meant the place where a free meal may be obtained.

Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the night
in the rain. Such prodigious misery! and so much of it! Old men, young
men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner of boys. Some
were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were stretched out on
the stone steps in most painful postures, all of them sound asleep, the
skin of their bodies showing red through the holes, and rents in their
rags. And up and down the street and across the street for a block
either way, each doorstep had from two to three occupants, all asleep,
their heads bent forward on their knees. And, it must be remembered,
these are not hard times in England. Things are going on very much as
they ordinarily do, and times are neither hard nor easy.

And then came the policeman. “Get outa that, you bloomin’ swine! Eigh!
eigh! Get out now!” And like swine he drove them from the doorways and
scattered them to the four winds of Surrey. But when he encountered the
crowd asleep on the steps he was astounded. “Shocking!” he exclaimed.
“Shocking! And of a Sunday morning! A pretty sight! Eigh! eigh! Get
outa that, you bleeding nuisances!”

Of course it was a shocking sight, I was shocked myself. And I should
not care to have my own daughter pollute her eyes with such a sight, or
come within half a mile of it; but—and there we were, and there you
are, and “but” is all that can be said.

The policeman passed on, and back we clustered, like flies around a
honey jar. For was there not that wonderful thing, a breakfast,
awaiting us? We could not have clustered more persistently and
desperately had they been giving away million-dollar bank-notes. Some
were already off to sleep, when back came the policeman and away we
scattered only to return again as soon as the coast was clear.

At half-past seven a little door opened, and a Salvation Army soldier
stuck out his head. “Ayn’t no sense blockin’ the wy up that wy,” he
said. “Those as ’as tickets cawn come hin now, an’ those as ’asn’t
cawn’t come hin till nine.”

Oh, that breakfast! Nine o’clock! An hour and a half longer! The men
who held tickets were greatly envied. They were permitted to go inside,
have a wash, and sit down and rest until breakfast, while we waited for
the same breakfast on the street. The tickets had been distributed the
previous night on the streets and along the Embankment, and the
possession of them was not a matter of merit, but of chance.

At eight-thirty, more men with tickets were admitted, and by nine the
little gate was opened to us. We crushed through somehow, and found
ourselves packed in a courtyard like sardines. On more occasions than
one, as a Yankee tramp in Yankeeland, I have had to work for my
breakfast; but for no breakfast did I ever work so hard as for this
one. For over two hours I had waited outside, and for over another hour
I waited in this packed courtyard. I had had nothing to eat all night,
and I was weak and faint, while the smell of the soiled clothes and
unwashed bodies, steaming from pent animal heat, and blocked solidly
about me, nearly turned my stomach. So tightly were we packed, that a
number of the men took advantage of the opportunity and went soundly
asleep standing up.

Now, about the Salvation Army in general I know nothing, and whatever
criticism I shall make here is of that particular portion of the
Salvation Army which does business on Blackfriars Road near the Surrey
Theatre. In the first place, this forcing of men who have been up all
night to stand on their feet for hours longer, is as cruel as it is
needless. We were weak, famished, and exhausted from our night’s
hardship and lack of sleep, and yet there we stood, and stood, and
stood, without rhyme or reason.

Sailors were very plentiful in this crowd. It seemed to me that one man
in four was looking for a ship, and I found at least a dozen of them to
be American sailors. In accounting for their being “on the beach,” I
received the same story from each and all, and from my knowledge of sea
affairs this story rang true. English ships sign their sailors for the
voyage, which means the round trip, sometimes lasting as long as three
years; and they cannot sign off and receive their discharges until they
reach the home port, which is England. Their wages are low, their food
is bad, and their treatment worse. Very often they are really forced by
their captains to desert in the New World or the colonies, leaving a
handsome sum of wages behind them—a distinct gain, either to the
captain or the owners, or to both. But whether for this reason alone or
not, it is a fact that large numbers of them desert. Then, for the home
voyage, the ship engages whatever sailors it can find on the beach.
These men are engaged at the somewhat higher wages that obtain in other
portions of the world, under the agreement that they shall sign off on
reaching England. The reason for this is obvious; for it would be poor
business policy to sign them for any longer time, since seamen’s wages
are low in England, and England is always crowded with sailormen on the
beach. So this fully accounted for the American seamen at the Salvation
Army barracks. To get off the beach in other outlandish places they had
come to England, and gone on the beach in the most outlandish place of
all.

There were fully a score of Americans in the crowd, the non-sailors
being “tramps royal,” the men whose “mate is the wind that tramps the
world.” They were all cheerful, facing things with the pluck which is
their chief characteristic and which seems never to desert them, withal
they were cursing the country with lurid metaphors quite refreshing
after a month of unimaginative, monotonous Cockney swearing. The
Cockney has one oath, and one oath only, the most indecent in the
language, which he uses on any and every occasion. Far different is the
luminous and varied Western swearing, which runs to blasphemy rather
than indecency. And after all, since men will swear, I think I prefer
blasphemy to indecency; there is an audacity about it, an
adventurousness and defiance that is better than sheer filthiness.

There was one American tramp royal whom I found particularly enjoyable.
I first noticed him on the street, asleep in a doorway, his head on his
knees, but a hat on his head that one does not meet this side of the
Western Ocean. When the policeman routed him out, he got up slowly and
deliberately, looked at the policeman, yawned and stretched himself,
looked at the policeman again as much as to say he didn’t know whether
he would or wouldn’t, and then sauntered leisurely down the sidewalk.
At the outset I was sure of the hat, but this made me sure of the
wearer of the hat.

In the jam inside I found myself alongside of him, and we had quite a
chat. He had been through Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and France, and
had accomplished the practically impossible feat of beating his way
three hundred miles on a French railway without being caught at the
finish. Where was I hanging out? he asked. And how did I manage for
“kipping”?—which means sleeping. Did I know the rounds yet? He was
getting on, though the country was “horstyl” and the cities were “bum.”
Fierce, wasn’t it? Couldn’t “batter” (beg) anywhere without being
“pinched.” But he wasn’t going to quit it. Buffalo Bill’s Show was
coming over soon, and a man who could drive eight horses was sure of a
job any time. These mugs over here didn’t know beans about driving
anything more than a span. What was the matter with me hanging on and
waiting for Buffalo Bill? He was sure I could ring in somehow.

And so, after all, blood is thicker than water. We were
fellow-countrymen and strangers in a strange land. I had warmed to his
battered old hat at sight of it, and he was as solicitous for my
welfare as if we were blood brothers. We swapped all manner of useful
information concerning the country and the ways of its people, methods
by which to obtain food and shelter and what not, and we parted
genuinely sorry at having to say good-bye.

One thing particularly conspicuous in this crowd was the shortness of
stature. I, who am but of medium height, looked over the heads of nine
out of ten. The natives were all short, as were the foreign sailors.
There were only five or six in the crowd who could be called fairly
tall, and they were Scandinavians and Americans. The tallest man there,
however, was an exception. He was an Englishman, though not a Londoner.
“Candidate for the Life Guards,” I remarked to him. “You’ve hit it,
mate,” was his reply; “I’ve served my bit in that same, and the way
things are I’ll be back at it before long.”

For an hour we stood quietly in this packed courtyard. Then the men
began to grow restless. There was pushing and shoving forward, and a
mild hubbub of voices. Nothing rough, however, nor violent; merely the
restlessness of weary and hungry men. At this juncture forth came the
adjutant. I did not like him. His eyes were not good. There was nothing
of the lowly Galilean about him, but a great deal of the centurion who
said: “For I am a man in authority, having soldiers under me; and I say
to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and
to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.”

Well, he looked at us in just that way, and those nearest to him
quailed. Then he lifted his voice.

“Stop this ’ere, now, or I’ll turn you the other wy an’ march you out,
an’ you’ll get no breakfast.”

I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he said
this. He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in authority, able
to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, “you may eat or go hungry,
as I elect.”

To deny us our breakfast after standing for hours! It was an awful
threat, and the pitiful, abject silence which instantly fell attested
its awfulness. And it was a cowardly threat. We could not strike back,
for we were starving; and it is the way of the world that when one man
feeds another he is that man’s master. But the centurion—I mean the
adjutant—was not satisfied. In the dead silence he raised his voice
again, and repeated the threat, and amplified it.

At last we were permitted to enter the feasting hall, where we found
the “ticket men” washed but unfed. All told, there must have been
nearly seven hundred of us who sat down—not to meat or bread, but to
speech, song, and prayer. From all of which I am convinced that
Tantalus suffers in many guises this side of the infernal regions. The
adjutant made the prayer, but I did not take note of it, being too
engrossed with the massed picture of misery before me. But the speech
ran something like this: “You will feast in Paradise. No matter how you
starve and suffer here, you will feast in Paradise, that is, if you
will follow the directions.” And so forth and so forth. A clever bit of
propaganda, I took it, but rendered of no avail for two reasons. First,
the men who received it were unimaginative and materialistic, unaware
of the existence of any Unseen, and too inured to hell on earth to be
frightened by hell to come. And second, weary and exhausted from the
night’s sleeplessness and hardship, suffering from the long wait upon
their feet, and faint from hunger, they were yearning, not for
salvation, but for grub. The “soul-snatchers” (as these men call all
religious propagandists), should study the physiological basis of
psychology a little, if they wish to make their efforts more effective.

All in good time, about eleven o’clock, breakfast arrived. It arrived,
not on plates, but in paper parcels. I did not have all I wanted, and I
am sure that no man there had all he wanted, or half of what he wanted
or needed. I gave part of my bread to the tramp royal who was waiting
for Buffalo Bill, and he was as ravenous at the end as he was in the
beginning. This is the breakfast: two slices of bread, one small piece
of bread with raisins in it and called “cake,” a wafer of cheese, and a
mug of “water bewitched.” Numbers of the men had been waiting since
five o’clock for it, while all of us had waited at least four hours;
and in addition, we had been herded like swine, packed like sardines,
and treated like curs, and been preached at, and sung to, and prayed
for. Nor was that all.

No sooner was breakfast over (and it was over almost as quickly as it
takes to tell), than the tired heads began to nod and droop, and in
five minutes half of us were sound asleep. There were no signs of our
being dismissed, while there were unmistakable signs of preparation for
a meeting. I looked at a small clock hanging on the wall. It indicated
twenty-five minutes to twelve. Heigh-ho, thought I, time is flying, and
I have yet to look for work.

“I want to go,” I said to a couple of waking men near me.

“Got ter sty fer the service,” was the answer.

“Do you want to stay?” I asked.

They shook their heads.

“Then let us go and tell them we want to get out,” I continued. “Come
on.”

But the poor creatures were aghast. So I left them to their fate, and
went up to the nearest Salvation Army man.

“I want to go,” I said. “I came here for breakfast in order that I
might be in shape to look for work. I didn’t think it would take so
long to get breakfast. I think I have a chance for work in Stepney, and
the sooner I start, the better chance I’ll have of getting it.”

He was really a good fellow, though he was startled by my request.
“Wy,” he said, “we’re goin’ to ’old services, and you’d better sty.”

“But that will spoil my chances for work,” I urged. “And work is the
most important thing for me just now.”

As he was only a private, he referred me to the adjutant, and to the
adjutant I repeated my reasons for wishing to go, and politely
requested that he let me go.

“But it cawn’t be done,” he said, waxing virtuously indignant at such
ingratitude. “The idea!” he snorted. “The idea!”

“Do you mean to say that I can’t get out of here?” I demanded. “That
you will keep me here against my will?”

“Yes,” he snorted.

I do not know what might have happened, for I was waxing indignant
myself; but the “congregation” had “piped” the situation, and he drew
me over to a corner of the room, and then into another room. Here he
again demanded my reasons for wishing to go.

“I want to go,” I said, “because I wish to look for work over in
Stepney, and every hour lessens my chance of finding work. It is now
twenty-five minutes to twelve. I did not think when I came in that it
would take so long to get a breakfast.”

“You ’ave business, eh?” he sneered. “A man of business you are, eh?
Then wot did you come ’ere for?”

“I was out all night, and I needed a breakfast in order to strengthen
me to find work. That is why I came here.”

“A nice thing to do,” he went on in the same sneering manner. “A man
with business shouldn’t come ’ere. You’ve tyken some poor man’s
breakfast ’ere this morning, that’s wot you’ve done.”

Which was a lie, for every mother’s son of us had come in.

Now I submit, was this Christian-like, or even honest?—after I had
plainly stated that I was homeless and hungry, and that I wished to
look for work, for him to call my looking for work “business,” to call
me therefore a business man, and to draw the corollary that a man of
business, and well off, did not require a charity breakfast, and that
by taking a charity breakfast I had robbed some hungry waif who was not
a man of business.

I kept my temper, but I went over the facts again, and clearly and
concisely demonstrated to him how unjust he was and how he had
perverted the facts. As I manifested no signs of backing down (and I am
sure my eyes were beginning to snap), he led me to the rear of the
building where, in an open court, stood a tent. In the same sneering
tone he informed a couple of privates standing there that “’ere is a
fellow that ’as business an’ ’e wants to go before services.”

They were duly shocked, of course, and they looked unutterable horror
while he went into the tent and brought out the major. Still in the
same sneering manner, laying particular stress on the “business,” he
brought my case before the commanding officer. The major was of a
different stamp of man. I liked him as soon as I saw him, and to him I
stated my case in the same fashion as before.

“Didn’t you know you had to stay for services?” he asked.

“Certainly not,” I answered, “or I should have gone without my
breakfast. You have no placards posted to that effect, nor was I so
informed when I entered the place.”

He meditated a moment. “You can go,” he said.

It was twelve o’clock when I gained the street, and I couldn’t quite
make up my mind whether I had been in the army or in prison. The day
was half gone, and it was a far fetch to Stepney. And besides, it was
Sunday, and why should even a starving man look for work on Sunday?
Furthermore, it was my judgment that I had done a hard night’s work
walking the streets, and a hard day’s work getting my breakfast; so I
disconnected myself from my working hypothesis of a starving young man
in search of employment, hailed a bus, and climbed aboard.

After a shave and a bath, with my clothes all off, I got in between
clean white sheets and went to sleep. It was six in the evening when I
closed my eyes. When they opened again, the clocks were striking nine
next morning. I had slept fifteen straight hours. And as I lay there
drowsily, my mind went back to the seven hundred unfortunates I had
left waiting for services. No bath, no shave for them, no clean white
sheets and all clothes off, and fifteen hours’ straight sleep. Services
over, it was the weary streets again, the problem of a crust of bread
ere night, and the long sleepless night in the streets, and the
pondering of the problem of how to obtain a crust at dawn.




CHAPTER XII.
CORONATION DAY


O thou that sea-walls sever
From lands unwalled by seas!
Wilt thou endure forever,
O Milton’s England, these?
Thou that wast his Republic,
Wilt thou clasp their knees?
These royalties rust-eaten,
These worm-corroded lies
That keep thy head storm-beaten,
And sun-like strength of eyes
From the open air and heaven
Of intercepted skies!


SWINBURNE.


Vivat Rex Eduardus! They crowned a king this day, and there has been
great rejoicing and elaborate tomfoolery, and I am perplexed and
saddened. I never saw anything to compare with the pageant, except
Yankee circuses and Alhambra ballets; nor did I ever see anything so
hopeless and so tragic.

To have enjoyed the Coronation procession, I should have come straight
from America to the Hotel Cecil, and straight from the Hotel Cecil to a
five-guinea seat among the washed. My mistake was in coming from the
unwashed of the East End. There were not many who came from that
quarter. The East End, as a whole, remained in the East End and got
drunk. The Socialists, Democrats, and Republicans went off to the
country for a breath of fresh air, quite unaffected by the fact that
four hundred millions of people were taking to themselves a crowned and
anointed ruler. Six thousand five hundred prelates, priests, statesmen,
princes, and warriors beheld the crowning and anointing, and the rest
of us the pageant as it passed.

I saw it at Trafalgar Square, “the most splendid site in Europe,” and
the very innermost heart of the empire. There were many thousands of
us, all checked and held in order by a superb display of armed power.
The line of march was double-walled with soldiers. The base of the
Nelson Column was triple-fringed with bluejackets. Eastward, at the
entrance to the square, stood the Royal Marine Artillery. In the
triangle of Pall Mall and Cockspur Street, the statue of George III.
was buttressed on either side by the Lancers and Hussars. To the west
were the red-coats of the Royal Marines, and from the Union Club to the
embouchure of Whitehall swept the glittering, massive curve of the 1st
Life Guards—gigantic men mounted on gigantic chargers,
steel-breastplated, steel-helmeted, steel-caparisoned, a great
war-sword of steel ready to the hand of the powers that be. And
further, throughout the crowd, were flung long lines of the
Metropolitan Constabulary, while in the rear were the reserves—tall,
well-fed men, with weapons to wield and muscles to wield them in ease
of need.

And as it was thus at Trafalgar Square, so was it along the whole line
of march—force, overpowering force; myriads of men, splendid men, the
pick of the people, whose sole function in life is blindly to obey, and
blindly to kill and destroy and stamp out life. And that they should be
well fed, well clothed, and well armed, and have ships to hurl them to
the ends of the earth, the East End of London, and the “East End” of
all England, toils and rots and dies.

There is a Chinese proverb that if one man lives in laziness another
will die of hunger; and Montesquieu has said, “The fact that many men
are occupied in making clothes for one individual is the cause of there
being many people without clothes.” So one explains the other. We
cannot understand the starved and runty[2] toiler of the East End
(living with his family in a one-room den, and letting out the floor
space for lodgings to other starved and runty toilers) till we look at
the strapping Life Guardsmen of the West End, and come to know that the
one must feed and clothe and groom the other.

 [2] “Runt” in America is the equivalent of the English “crowl,” the
 dwarf of a litter.


And while in Westminster Abbey the people were taking unto themselves a
king, I, jammed between the Life Guards and Constabulary of Trafalgar
Square, was dwelling upon the time when the people of Israel first took
unto themselves a king. You all know how it runs. The elders came to
the prophet Samuel, and said: “Make us a king to judge us like all the
nations.”


And the Lord said unto Samuel: Now therefore hearken unto their voice;
howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the king that shall reign
over them.

And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of
him a king, and he said:

This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you; he will
take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be
his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, and
captains of fifties; and he will set some to plough his ground, and to
reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the
instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks,
and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields and your vineyards, and your oliveyards,
even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take a tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give
to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your
goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take a tenth of your flocks; and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall call out in that day because of your king which ye shall
have chosen you; and the Lord will not answer you in that day.


All of which came to pass in that ancient day, and they did cry out to
Samuel, saying: “Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God, that we
die not; for we have added unto all our sins this evil, to ask us a
king.” And after Saul, David, and Solomon, came Rehoboam, who “answered
the people roughly, saying: My father made your yoke heavy, but I will
add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will
chastise you with scorpions.”

And in these latter days, five hundred hereditary peers own one-fifth
of England; and they, and the officers and servants under the King, and
those who go to compose the powers that be, yearly spend in wasteful
luxury $1,850,000,000, or £370,000,000, which is thirty-two per cent.
of the total wealth produced by all the toilers of the country.

At the Abbey, clad in wonderful golden raiment, amid fanfare of
trumpets and throbbing of music, surrounded by a brilliant throng of
masters, lords, and rulers, the King was being invested with the
insignia of his sovereignty. The spurs were placed to his heels by the
Lord Great Chamberlain, and a sword of state, in purple scabbard, was
presented him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with these words:—

Receive this kingly sword brought now from the altar of God, and
delivered to you by the hands of the bishops and servants of God,
though unworthy.


Whereupon, being girded, he gave heed to the Archbishop’s exhortation:—

With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the
Holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the
things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored,
punish and reform what is amiss, and confirm what is in good order.


But hark! There is cheering down Whitehall; the crowd sways, the double
walls of soldiers come to attention, and into view swing the King’s
watermen, in fantastic mediaeval garbs of red, for all the world like
the van of a circus parade. Then a royal carriage, filled with ladies
and gentlemen of the household, with powdered footmen and coachmen most
gorgeously arrayed. More carriages, lords, and chamberlains, viscounts,
mistresses of the robes—lackeys all. Then the warriors, a kingly
escort, generals, bronzed and worn, from the ends of the earth come up
to London Town, volunteer officers, officers of the militia and regular
forces; Spens and Plumer, Broadwood and Cooper who relieved Ookiep,
Mathias of Dargai, Dixon of Vlakfontein; General Gaselee and Admiral
Seymour of China; Kitchener of Khartoum; Lord Roberts of India and all
the world—the fighting men of England, masters of destruction,
engineers of death! Another race of men from those of the shops and
slums, a totally different race of men.

But here they come, in all the pomp and certitude of power, and still
they come, these men of steel, these war lords and world harnessers.
Pell-mell, peers and commoners, princes and maharajahs, Equerries to
the King and Yeomen of the Guard. And here the colonials, lithe and
hardy men; and here all the breeds of all the world-soldiers from
Canada, Australia, New Zealand; from Bermuda, Borneo, Fiji, and the
Gold Coast; from Rhodesia, Cape Colony, Natal, Sierra Leone and Gambia,
Nigeria, and Uganda; from Ceylon, Cyprus, Hong-Kong, Jamaica, and
Wei-Hai-Wei; from Lagos, Malta, St. Lucia, Singapore, Trinidad. And
here the conquered men of Ind, swarthy horsemen and sword wielders,
fiercely barbaric, blazing in crimson and scarlet, Sikhs, Rajputs,
Burmese, province by province, and caste by caste.

And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a
golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands—“The King!
the King! God save the King!” Everybody has gone mad. The contagion is
sweeping me off my feet—I, too, want to shout, “The King! God save the
King!” Ragged men about me, tears in their eyes, are tossing up their
hats and crying ecstatically, “Bless ’em! Bless ’em! Bless ’em!” See,
there he is, in that wondrous golden coach, the great crown flashing on
his head, the woman in white beside him likewise crowned.

And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it is
all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I cannot
succeed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to believe that
all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo foolery has come
from fairyland, than to believe it the performance of sane and sensible
people who have mastered matter and solved the secrets of the stars.

Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coroneted
folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys,
and conquered peoples, and the pageant is over. I drift with the crowd
out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the
public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children
mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the
favourite song of the Coronation:—

“Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
For we’ll all be merry, drinking whisky, wine, and sherry,
We’ll all be merry on Coronation Day.”


The rain is pouring down. Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries,
black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and befezed, and coolies
swinging along with machine guns and mountain batteries on their heads,
and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm, going _slish, slish, slish_
through the pavement mud. The public-houses empty by magic, and the
swarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return at
once to the carouse.

“And how did you like the procession, mate?” I asked an old man on a
bench in Green Park.

“’Ow did I like it? A bloomin’ good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a
sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there,
along wi’ fifty others. But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there an’
thinkin’ ’ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ’ad no plyce
to rest my ’ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon,
till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the
Lord Chamberlain.”

Why the Lord Chamberlain I could not precisely see, nor could he, but
that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and there was no more
discussion.

As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light. Splashes of colour,
green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and “E. R.,” in
great crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere. The
crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though
the police sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play
abounded. The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation
and excitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and
women, old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, “I
may be crazy, but I love you,” “Dolly Gray,” and “The Honeysuckle and
the Bee”—the last rendered something like this:—

“Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi’d like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see.”


I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the
illuminated water. It was approaching midnight, and before me poured
the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and
returning home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man
and a woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat with her arms clasped
across the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play—now
dropping forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she
would fall to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till
her head rested on the man’s shoulder; and now to the right, stretched
and strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright.
Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its
cycle till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.

Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind
the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always
jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the
startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it
flooded past.

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited
on every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the
poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless. Fifty thousand
people must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on
such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his
heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman:
“Here’s sixpence; go and get a bed.” But the women, especially the
young women, made witty remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably
set their companions laughing.

To use a Briticism, it was “cruel”; the corresponding Americanism was
more appropriate—it was “fierce.” I confess I began to grow incensed at
this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction
from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four
adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse,
the infirmary, or the asylum.

I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker. He
could only find odd work when there was a large demand for labour, for
the younger and stronger men were preferred when times were slack. He
had spent a week, now, on the benches of the Embankment; but things
looked brighter for next week, and he might possibly get in a few days’
work and have a bed in some doss-house. He had lived all his life in
London, save for five years, when, in 1878, he saw foreign service in
India.

Of course he would eat; so would the girl. Days like this were uncommon
hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor folk could
get in more sleep. I awoke the girl, or woman, rather, for she was
“Eyght an’ twenty, sir,” and we started for a coffee-house.

“Wot a lot o’ work puttin’ up the lights,” said the man at sight of
some building superbly illuminated. This was the keynote of his being.
All his life he had worked, and the whole objective universe, as well
as his own soul, he could express in terms only of work. “Coronations
is some good,” he went on. “They give work to men.”

“But your belly is empty,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered. “I tried, but there wasn’t any chawnce. My age is
against me. Wot do you work at? Seafarin’ chap, eh? I knew it from yer
clothes.”

“I know wot you are,” said the girl, “an Eyetalian.”

“No ’e ayn’t,” the man cried heatedly. “’E’s a Yank, that’s wot ’e is.
I know.”

“Lord lumme, look a’ that,” she exclaimed, as we debouched upon the
Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men
bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:—

“Oh! on Coronation D’y, on Coronation D’y,
We’ll ’ave a spree, a jubilee, an’ shout ’Ip, ’ip, ’ooray;
For we’ll all be merry, drinkin’ whisky, wine, and sherry,
We’ll all be merry on Coronation D’y.”


“’Ow dirty I am, bein’ around the w’y I ’ave,” the woman said, as she
sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the corners
of her eyes. “An’ the sights I ’ave seen this d’y, an’ I enjoyed it,
though it was lonesome by myself. An’ the duchesses an’ the lydies ’ad
sich gran’ w’ite dresses. They was jest bu’ful, bu’ful.”

“I’m Irish,” she said, in answer to a question. “My nyme’s Eyethorne.”

“What?” I asked.

“Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne.”

“Spell it.”

“H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.’

“Oh,” I said, “Irish Cockney.”

“Yes, sir, London-born.”

She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an
accident, when she had found herself on the world. One brother was in
the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and eight
children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment, could do
nothing for her. She had been out of London once in her life, to a
place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked fruit for three
weeks: “An’ I was as brown as a berry w’en I come back. You won’t
b’lieve it, but I was.”

The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours from
seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she had
received five shillings a week and her food. Then she had fallen sick,
and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to find anything
to do. She wasn’t feeling up to much, and the last two nights had been
spent in the street.

Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man and
woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated their
original orders that they showed signs of easing down.

Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt, and
remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore. My rags good clothes! It
put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more closely and on
examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I began to feel quite
well dressed and respectable.

“What do you expect to do in the end?” I asked them. “You know you’re
growing older every day.”

“Work’ouse,” said he.

“Gawd blimey if I do,” said she. “There’s no ’ope for me, I know, but
I’ll die on the streets. No work’ouse for me, thank you. No, indeed,”
she sniffed in the silence that fell.

“After you have been out all night in the streets,” I asked, “what do
you do in the morning for something to eat?”

“Try to get a penny, if you ’aven’t one saved over,” the man explained.
“Then go to a coffee-’ouse an’ get a mug o’ tea.”

“But I don’t see how that is to feed you,” I objected.

The pair smiled knowingly.

“You drink your tea in little sips,” he went on, “making it last its
longest. An’ you look sharp, an’ there’s some as leaves a bit be’ind
’em.”

“It’s s’prisin’, the food wot some people leaves,” the woman broke in.

“The thing,” said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me, “is
to get ’old o’ the penny.”

As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of crusts
from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into her rags.

“Cawn’t wyste ’em, you know,” said she; to which the docker nodded,
tucking away a couple of crusts himself.

At three in the morning I strolled up the Embankment. It was a gala
night for the homeless, for the police were elsewhere; and each bench
was jammed with sleeping occupants. There were as many women as men,
and the great majority of them, male and female, were old. Occasionally
a boy was to be seen. On one bench I noticed a family, a man sitting
upright with a sleeping babe in his arms, his wife asleep, her head on
his shoulder, and in her lap the head of a sleeping youngster. The
man’s eyes were wide open. He was staring out over the water and
thinking, which is not a good thing for a shelterless man with a family
to do. It would not be a pleasant thing to speculate upon his thoughts;
but this I know, and all London knows, that the cases of out-of-works
killing their wives and babies is not an uncommon happening.

One cannot walk along the Thames Embankment, in the small hours of
morning, from the Houses of Parliament, past Cleopatra’s Needle, to
Waterloo Bridge, without being reminded of the sufferings, seven and
twenty centuries old, recited by the author of “Job”:—


There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away flocks
and feed them.

They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow’s ox for
a pledge.

They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.

Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work,
seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for
their children.

They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of
the wicked.

They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in the
cold.

They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
for want of a shelter.

There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge
of the poor.

So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
they carry the sheaves.—Job xxiv. 2-10.


Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite
to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilisation whereof
Edward VII. is king.




CHAPTER XIII.
DAN CULLEN, DOCKER


I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the “Municipal Dwellings,” not
far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw that I
would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go
down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short.

It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to
be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It
was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the
ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a
British soldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets,
occupied nearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple
of boxes left little space in which to turn around. Five dollars would
have purchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while the walls
and ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each
mark represented a violent death—of an insect, for the place swarmed
with vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.

The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying
in hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable
surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man he
was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns,
and other labour leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant’s
novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and had read history,
sociology, and economics. And he was self-educated.

On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on
which was scrawled: _Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug and
corkscrew I lent you_—articles loaned, during the first stages of his
sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in anticipation of
his death. A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to a
creature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace. To
the last, Dan Cullen’s soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of
which it strove vainly to rise.

It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is much
to read between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and land where
the lines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he toiled hard with
his body; and because he had opened the books, and been caught up by
the fires of the spirit, and could “write a letter like a lawyer,” he
had been selected by his fellows to toil hard for them with his brain.
He became a leader of the fruit-porters, represented the dockers on the
London Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the labour
journals.

He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his economic
masters, and controlled the means whereby he lived, and he spoke his
mind freely, and fought the good fight. In the “Great Dock Strike” he
was guilty of taking a leading part. And that was the end of Dan
Cullen. From that day he was a marked man, and every day, for ten years
and more, he was “paid off” for what he had done.

A docker is a casual labourer. Work ebbs and flows, and he works or
does not work according to the amount of goods on hand to be moved. Dan
Cullen was discriminated against. While he was not absolutely turned
away (which would have caused trouble, and which would certainly have
been more merciful), he was called in by the foreman to do not more
than two or three days’ work per week. This is what is called being
“disciplined,” or “drilled.” It means being starved. There is no
politer word. Ten years of it broke his heart, and broken-hearted men
cannot live.

He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible with
his helplessness. He was without kith or kin, a lonely old man,
embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and looking at
Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from the
blood-bespattered walls. No one came to see him in that crowded
municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he was
left to rot.

But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son,
his sole friends. They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from
home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with dirt.
And they brought to him one of the Queen’s Bounty nurses from Aldgate.

She washed his face, shook up his couch, and talked with him. It was
interesting to talk with him—until he learned her name. Oh, yes, Blank
was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George Blank was her
brother. Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan Cullen on his
death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at Cardiff, who,
more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers’ Union of Cardiff,
and was knighted? And she was his sister? Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up
on his crazy couch and pronounced anathema upon her and all her breed;
and she fled, to return no more, strongly impressed with the
ungratefulness of the poor.

Dan Cullen’s feet became swollen with dropsy. He sat up all day on the
side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on the
floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his
shoulders. A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth
fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so
for the good of Dan Cullen’s soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort of man
that wanted his soul left alone. He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or
Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers, tampering with it. He
asked the missionary kindly to open the window, so that he might toss
the slippers out. And the missionary went away, to return no more,
likewise impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unannaled and unsung,
went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan
Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their system
was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands. The
cobbler told them the man’s desperate plight, old, broken, dying,
without help or money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty
years, and asked them to do something for him.

“Oh,” said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer
to the books, “you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we
can do nothing.”

Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan
Cullen’s admission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into a
hospital in London Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at
least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were so
many on the books ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into the
Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he found
that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being
hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way. A fair and logical
conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who
has been resolutely “disciplined” and “drilled” for ten years. When
they sweated him for Bright’s disease to remove the fat from the
kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was hastening his
death; while Bright’s disease, being a wasting away of the kidneys,
there was therefore no fat to remove, and the doctor’s excuse was a
palpable lie. Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and did not come near
him for nine days.

Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated. At
once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the
thing was done in order to run the water down into his body from his
legs and kill him more quickly. He demanded his discharge, though they
told him he would die on the stairs, and dragged himself, more dead
than alive, to the cobbler’s shop. At the moment of writing this, he is
dying at the Temperance Hospital, into which place his staunch friend,
the cobbler, moved heaven and earth to have him admitted.

Poor Dan Cullen! A Jude the Obscure, who reached out after knowledge;
who toiled with his body in the day and studied in the watches of the
night; who dreamed his dream and struck valiantly for the Cause; a
patriot, a lover of human freedom, and a fighter unafraid; and in the
end, not gigantic enough to beat down the conditions which baffled and
stifled him, a cynic and a pessimist, gasping his final agony on a
pauper’s couch in a charity ward,—“For a man to die who might have been
wise and was not, this I call a tragedy.”




CHAPTER XIV.
HOPS AND HOPPERS


So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded, that
the farming districts, the civilised world over, are dependent upon the
cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when the land is
spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been
driven away from the soil, are called back to it again. But in England
they return, not as prodigals, but as outcasts still, as vagrants and
pariahs, to be doubted and flouted by their country brethren, to sleep
in jails and casual wards, or under the hedges, and to live the Lord
knows how.

It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street
people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which
is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of
adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth,
and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished.
Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country
does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat,
misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile
spawn from underground. Their very presence, the fact of their
existence, is an outrage to the fresh, bright sun and the green and
growing things. The clean, upstanding trees cry shame upon them and
their withered crookedness, and their rottenness is a slimy desecration
of the sweetness and purity of nature.

Is the picture overdrawn? It all depends. For one who sees and thinks
life in terms of shares and coupons, it is certainly overdrawn. But for
one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it
cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and
inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who
lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of
London’s golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and
is knighted by the king. Wins his spurs—God forbid! In old time the
great blonde beasts rode in the battle’s van and won their spurs by
cleaving men from pate to chine. And, after all, it is finer to kill a
strong man with a clean-slicing blow of singing steel than to make a
beast of him, and of his seed through the generations, by the artful
and spidery manipulation of industry and politics.

But to return to the hops. Here the divorcement from the soil is as
apparent as in every other agricultural line in England. While the
manufacture of beer steadily increases, the growth of hops steadily
decreases. In 1835 the acreage under hops was 71,327. To-day it stands
at 48,024, a decrease of 3103 from the acreage of last year.

Small as the acreage is this year, a poor summer and terrible storms
reduced the yield. This misfortune is divided between the people who
own hops and the people who pick hops. The owners perforce must put up
with less of the nicer things of life, the pickers with less grub, of
which, in the best of times, they never get enough. For weary weeks
headlines like the following have appeared in the London papers.—

TRAMPS PLENTIFUL, BUT THE HOPS ARE FEW AND NOT YET READY.


Then there have been numberless paragraphs like this:—

From the neighbourhood of the hop fields comes news of a distressing
nature. The bright outburst of the last two days has sent many hundreds
of hoppers into Kent, who will have to wait till the fields are ready
for them. At Dover the number of vagrants in the workhouse is treble
the number there last year at this time, and in other towns the
lateness of the season is responsible for a large increase in the
number of casuals.


To cap their wretchedness, when at last the picking had begun, hops and
hoppers were well-nigh swept away by a frightful storm of wind, rain,
and hail. The hops were stripped clean from the poles and pounded into
the earth, while the hoppers, seeking shelter from the stinging hail,
were close to drowning in their huts and camps on the low-lying ground.
Their condition after the storm was pitiable, their state of vagrancy
more pronounced than ever; for, poor crop that it was, its destruction
had taken away the chance of earning a few pennies, and nothing
remained for thousands of them but to “pad the hoof” back to London.

“We ayn’t crossin’-sweepers,” they said, turning away from the ground,
carpeted ankle-deep with hops.

Those that remained grumbled savagely among the half-stripped poles at
the seven bushels for a shilling—a rate paid in good seasons when the
hops are in prime condition, and a rate likewise paid in bad seasons by
the growers because they cannot afford more.

I passed through Teston and East and West Farleigh shortly after the
storm, and listened to the grumbling of the hoppers and saw the hops
rotting on the ground. At the hothouses of Barham Court, thirty
thousand panes of glass had been broken by the hail, while peaches,
plums, pears, apples, rhubarb, cabbages, mangolds, everything, had been
pounded to pieces and torn to shreds.

All of which was too bad for the owners, certainly; but at the worst,
not one of them, for one meal, would have to go short of food or drink.
Yet it was to them that the newspapers devoted columns of sympathy,
their pecuniary losses being detailed at harrowing length. “Mr. Herbert
L--- calculates his loss at £8000;” “Mr. F---, of brewery fame, who
rents all the land in this parish, loses £10,000;” and “Mr. L---, the
Wateringbury brewer, brother to Mr. Herbert L---, is another heavy
loser.” As for the hoppers, they did not count. Yet I venture to assert
that the several almost-square meals lost by underfed William Buggles,
and underfed Mrs. Buggles, and the underfed Buggles kiddies, was a
greater tragedy than the £10,000 lost by Mr. F---. And in addition,
underfed William Buggles’ tragedy might be multiplied by thousands
where Mr. F---’s could not be multiplied by five.

To see how William Buggles and his kind fared, I donned my seafaring
togs and started out to get a job. With me was a young East London
cobbler, Bert, who had yielded to the lure of adventure and joined me
for the trip. Acting on my advice, he had brought his “worst rags,” and
as we hiked up the London road out of Maidstone he was worrying greatly
for fear we had come too ill-dressed for the business.

Nor was he to be blamed. When we stopped in a tavern the publican eyed
us gingerly, nor did his demeanour brighten till we showed him the
colour of our cash. The natives along the coast were all dubious; and
“bean-feasters” from London, dashing past in coaches, cheered and
jeered and shouted insulting things after us. But before we were done
with the Maidstone district my friend found that we were as well clad,
if not better, than the average hopper. Some of the bunches of rags we
chanced upon were marvellous.

“The tide is out,” called a gypsy-looking woman to her mates, as we
came up a long row of bins into which the pickers were stripping the
hops.

“Do you twig?” Bert whispered. “She’s on to you.”

I twigged. And it must be confessed the figure was an apt one. When the
tide is out boats are left on the beach and do not sail, and a sailor,
when the tide is out, does not sail either. My seafaring togs and my
presence in the hop field proclaimed that I was a seaman without a
ship, a man on the beach, and very like a craft at low water.

“Can yer give us a job, governor?” Bert asked the bailiff, a kindly
faced and elderly man who was very busy.

His “No” was decisively uttered; but Bert clung on and followed him
about, and I followed after, pretty well all over the field. Whether
our persistency struck the bailiff as anxiety to work, or whether he
was affected by our hard-luck appearance and tale, neither Bert nor I
succeeded in making out; but in the end he softened his heart and found
us the one unoccupied bin in the place—a bin deserted by two other men,
from what I could learn, because of inability to make living wages.

“No bad conduct, mind ye,” warned the bailiff, as he left us at work in
the midst of the women.

It was Saturday afternoon, and we knew quitting time would come early;
so we applied ourselves earnestly to the task, desiring to learn if we
could at least make our salt. It was simple work, woman’s work, in
fact, and not man’s. We sat on the edge of the bin, between the
standing hops, while a pole-puller supplied us with great fragrant
branches. In an hour’s time we became as expert as it is possible to
become. As soon as the fingers became accustomed automatically to
differentiate between hops and leaves and to strip half-a-dozen
blossoms at a time there was no more to learn.

We worked nimbly, and as fast as the women themselves, though their
bins filled more rapidly because of their swarming children, each of
which picked with two hands almost as fast as we picked.

“Don’tcher pick too clean, it’s against the rules,” one of the women
informed us; and we took the tip and were grateful.

As the afternoon wore along, we realised that living wages could not be
made—by men. Women could pick as much as men, and children could do
almost as well as women; so it was impossible for a man to compete with
a woman and half-a-dozen children. For it is the woman and the
half-dozen children who count as a unit, and by their combined capacity
determine the unit’s pay.

“I say, matey, I’m beastly hungry,” said I to Bert. We had not had any
dinner.

“Blimey, but I could eat the ’ops,” he replied.

Whereupon we both lamented our negligence in not rearing up a numerous
progeny to help us in this day of need. And in such fashion we whiled
away the time and talked for the edification of our neighbours. We
quite won the sympathy of the pole-puller, a young country yokel, who
now and again emptied a few picked blossoms into our bin, it being part
of his business to gather up the stray clusters torn off in the process
of pulling.

With him we discussed how much we could “sub,” and were informed that
while we were being paid a shilling for seven bushels, we could only
“sub,” or have advanced to us, a shilling for every twelve bushels.
Which is to say that the pay for five out of every twelve bushels was
withheld—a method of the grower to hold the hopper to his work whether
the crop runs good or bad, and especially if it runs bad.

After all, it was pleasant sitting there in the bright sunshine, the
golden pollen showering from our hands, the pungent aromatic odour of
the hops biting our nostrils, and the while remembering dimly the
sounding cities whence these people came. Poor street people! Poor
gutter folk! Even they grow earth-hungry, and yearn vaguely for the
soil from which they have been driven, and for the free life in the
open, and the wind and rain and sun all undefiled by city smirches. As
the sea calls to the sailor, so calls the land to them; and, deep down
in their aborted and decaying carcasses, they are stirred strangely by
the peasant memories of their forbears who lived before cities were.
And in incomprehensible ways they are made glad by the earth smells and
sights and sounds which their blood has not forgotten though
unremembered by them.

“No more ’ops, matey,” Bert complained.

It was five o’clock, and the pole-pullers had knocked off, so that
everything could be cleaned up, there being no work on Sunday. For an
hour we were forced idly to wait the coming of the measurers, our feet
tingling with the frost which came on the heels of the setting sun. In
the adjoining bin, two women and half-a-dozen children had picked nine
bushels: so that the five bushels the measurers found in our bin
demonstrated that we had done equally well, for the half-dozen children
had ranged from nine to fourteen years of age.

Five bushels! We worked it out to eight-pence ha’penny, or seventeen
cents, for two men working three hours and a half. Fourpence farthing
apiece! a little over a penny an hour! But we were allowed only to
“sub” fivepence of the total sum, though the tally-keeper, short of
change, gave us sixpence. Entreaty was in vain. A hard-luck story could
not move him. He proclaimed loudly that we had received a penny more
than our due, and went his way.

Granting, for the sake of the argument, that we were what we
represented ourselves to be—namely, poor men and broke—then here was
our position: night was coming on; we had had no supper, much less
dinner; and we possessed sixpence between us. I was hungry enough to
eat three sixpenn’orths of food, and so was Bert. One thing was patent.
By doing 16.3 per cent. justice to our stomachs, we would expend the
sixpence, and our stomachs would still be gnawing under 83.3 per cent.
injustice. Being broke again, we could sleep under a hedge, which was
not so bad, though the cold would sap an undue portion of what we had
eaten. But the morrow was Sunday, on which we could do no work, though
our silly stomachs would not knock off on that account. Here, then, was
the problem: how to get three meals on Sunday, and two on Monday (for
we could not make another “sub” till Monday evening).

We knew that the casual wards were overcrowded; also, that if we begged
from farmer or villager, there was a large likelihood of our going to
jail for fourteen days. What was to be done? We looked at each other in
despair—

—Not a bit of it. We joyfully thanked God that we were not as other
men, especially hoppers, and went down the road to Maidstone, jingling
in our pockets the half-crowns and florins we had brought from London.




CHAPTER XV.
THE SEA WIFE


You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but
that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of
Maidstone. In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and
persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep
in her front room. In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean
kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name.

And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
tremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I went
down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in
Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this
remarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the wanderlust
which has lured Albion’s sons across the zones; and I found there the
colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish
squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and
stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire and
greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience
which has enabled the home population to endure under the burden of it
all, to toil without complaint through the weary years, and docilely to
yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to the ends of the
earth.

Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man. It was
because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier. He had
remained at home and worked. His first recollections were connected
with work. He knew nothing else but work. He had worked all his days,
and at seventy-one he still worked. Each morning saw him up with the
lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born. Mrs.
Mugridge was seventy-three. From seven years of age she had worked in
the fields, doing a boy’s work at first, and later a man’s. She still
worked, keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and,
with my advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed. At the
end of threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had
nothing to look forward to save more work. And they were contented.
They expected nothing else, desired nothing else.

They lived simply. Their wants were few—a pint of beer at the end of
the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to
pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative
and vacant as the chewing of a heifer’s cud. From a wood engraving on
the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath
was the legend: “Our Future Queen.” And from a highly coloured
lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with
underneath: “Our Queen—Diamond Jubilee.”

“What you earn is sweetest,” quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested that
it was about time they took a rest.

“No, an’ we don’t want help,” said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
question as to whether the children lent them a hand.

“We’ll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an’ me,” he added; and
Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.

Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.
The “baby,” however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven. When
the children married they had their hands full with their own families
and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.

Where were the children? Ah, where were they not? Lizzie was in
Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had died
in India—and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier
and sailor, and colonist’s wife, for the traveller’s sake who sat in
their kitchen.

They passed me a photograph. A trim young fellow, in soldier’s garb
looked out at me.

“And which son is this?” I asked.

They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from Indian
service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King. His brother was in the
same regiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand
sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them,
while the old folks stayed at home and worked at building empire too.

“There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
    And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o’ rovin’ men
    And casts them over sea.

“And some are drowned in deep water,
    And some in sight of shore;
And word goes back to the weary wife,
    And ever she sends more.”


But the Sea Wife’s child-bearing is about done. The stock is running
out, and the planet is filling up. The wives of her sons may carry on
the breed, but her work is past. The erstwhile men of England are now
the men of Australia, of Africa, of America. England has sent forth
“the best she breeds” for so long, and has destroyed those that
remained so fiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down
through the long nights and gaze at royalty on the wall.

The true British merchant seaman has passed away. The merchant service
is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought with
Nelson at Trafalgar and the Nile. Foreigners largely man the merchant
ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and to prefer
foreigners for’ard. In South Africa the colonial teaches the islander
how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder; while at home the
street people play hysterically at mafficking, and the War Office
lowers the stature for enlistment.

It could not be otherwise. The most complacent Britisher cannot hope to
draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever. The
average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she is
not breeding very much of anything save an anæmic and sickly progeny
which cannot find enough to eat. The strength of the English-speaking
race to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New World
overseas, where are the sons and daughters of Mrs. Thomas Mugridge. The
Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just about done her work in the
world, though she does not realize it. She must sit down and rest her
tired loins for a space; and if the casual ward and the workhouse do
not await her, it is because of the sons and daughters she has reared
up against the day of her feebleness and decay.




CHAPTER XVI.
PROPERTY VERSUS PERSON


In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not
soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, that
crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than
crimes against the person. To pound one’s wife to a jelly and break a
few of her ribs is a trivial offence compared with sleeping out under
the naked stars because one has not the price of a doss. The lad who
steals a few pears from a wealthy railway corporation is a greater
menace to society than the young brute who commits an unprovoked
assault upon an old man over seventy years of age. While the young girl
who takes a lodging under the pretence that she has work commits so
dangerous an offence, that, were she not severely punished, she and her
kind might bring the whole fabric of property clattering 

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