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1905
THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS
by Jack London

AUTHOR'S 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. To such an
extent did the suffering and positive starvation increase that society
was unable to cope with it. 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 epitomizes 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 ONE.
The Descent.

Christ look upon us in this city,
And keep our sympathy and pity
Fresh, and our faces heavenward,
Lest we grow hard.
-THOMAS ASHE.

'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 endeavoring 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
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, pathfinders 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- ahem- so unusual.'
'Consult the police,' he concluded authoritatively, when I
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 built 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 gray-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
afterward 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 bulldoze 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, apologizing 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, gray
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
moralized 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 did I 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-by to my foreboding friends. As I passed out 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 demeanor 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 pocketbook 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, 'Buss or 'ansom, sir?' But now the query became, 'Walk or
ride?' Also, at the railway stations it was the rule to be asked,
'First or second, sir?' Now I was asked nothing, a third-class
ticket being 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, on 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 TWO.
Johnny Upright.

The people live in squalid dens, where there can be no
health and no hope, but dogged discontent at their own
lot, and futile discontent at the wealth which they see
possessed by others.
-THOROLD ROGERS.

I SHALL NOT GIVE YOU the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice
that he lives on 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 on this street, as on all the streets, is shoulder to
shoulder with its neighbors. 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-colored sky. But it must be
understood that this is East End opulence we are now considering. Some
of the people on 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 to
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 neighborly
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 favor, 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 the 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 civilization.
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 characterizes 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 color 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, on his own respectable
and opulent street, in a house as like to his own as a pea to its
mate.
CHAPTER THREE.
My Lodging and Some Others.

The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand,
Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand,
Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore;
They sigh a monstrous, foul-air sigh
For the outside leagues of liberty,
Where art, sweet lark, translates the sky
Into a heavenly melody.
-SIDNEY LANIER.

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 75 cents to $1.50 per week,
it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain
floor space for, say from 15 to 25 cents. 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. Besides,
so beautiful is the adjustment of all things in this world, here in
East London it rains nearly every day, and, willy-nilly, our baths
would be on tap upon the street.
True, the sanitation of the places I visited was wretched. From
the imperfect sewage and drainage, defective traps, poor
ventilation, dampness, and general foulness, I might expect my wife
and babies speedily to be attacked by diphtheria, croup, typhoid,
erysipelas, blood poisoning, bronchitis, pneumonia, consumption, and
various kindred disorders. Certainly the death-rate would be
exceedingly high. But observe again the beauty of the adjustment.
The most rational act for a poor man in East London with a large
family is to get rid of it; the conditions in East London are such
that they will get rid of the large family for him. Of course, there
is the chance that he may perish in the process. Adjustment is not
so apparent in this event; but it is there, somewhere, I am sure.
And when discovered it will prove to be a very beautiful and subtle
adjustment, or else the whole scheme goes awry and something is wrong.
However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own in Johnny
Upright's street. What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and
the various cubbyholes 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 on 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 neighborhood 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 neighborhood 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 neighborhood by neighborhood, 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 realizes 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
semidetached villas, with bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and
breathing space. They inflate themselves with pride and throw 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 FOUR.
A Man and the Abyss.

After a momentary silence spake
Some vessel of a more ungainly make;
They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the hand then of the Potter shake?
-OMAR KHAYYAM.

'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 'ave 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 bin 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. 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, gray
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 'is 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 labor 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 around from the babies when they go
to bed, and the kettle singing and the long talk afterward 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-cryin' 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 fer 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 humor 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 pound 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 grandparents 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 7 and 1/2 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 35 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 so often degraded in
intellect as to be incapable of distinguishing their right from
their left hand, or of recognizing 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 FIVE.
Those on the Edge.

I assure you I found nothing worse, nothing more
degrading, nothing so hopeless, nothing nearly so
intolerably dull and miserable as the life I left
behind me in the East End of London.
-HUXLEY.

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 labor 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 Thistleton-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 crystallized 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 3,000 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 and with two flounces,
for seven shillings a dozen! This is equal to $1.75 per dozen, or 14
3/4 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 1/2 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 had 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 clamor.
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.
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 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 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 SIX.
Frying-pan Alley and a Glimpse of Inferno.

The beasts they hunger, and eat, and die,
And so do we, and the world's a sty.
'Swinehood hath no remedy,'
Say many men, and hasten by.
-SIDNEY LANIER.

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 a 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 one hundred and forty pounds!'
I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy, so
I contented myself with taking his measure. Poor misshapen little man!
His skin an unhealthy color, 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 in supplying 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 this eight-by-seven room. In winter a lamp burned nearly all
the day and added its fumes to the overloaded 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 neighboring buildings. But there were no back yards,
or, rather, they were covered with one-story 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 stories. 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 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 was arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight
of which would have impelled Dore 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 afterward 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 SEVEN.
A Winner of the Victoria Cross.

From out of the populous city men groan, and the soul
of the wounded crieth out.
-JOB.

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 casual 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 woful picture, men and women waiting in the cold
gray 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-by 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. Woful 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 afterthought, 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 in 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, if 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 memorized 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 EIGHT.
The Carter and the Carpenter.

It is not to die, nor even to die of hunger, that makes
a man wretched. Many men have died; all men must die. But
it is to live miserable, we know not why; to work sore, and
yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated,
unrelated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire.
-CARLYLE.

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 gray and ragged overcoat flapping mournfully in the
breeze, swung on in a long and tireless stride which reminded me
strongly of the plains 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 sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel,
apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pips of
green gage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels
inside. They picked up stray crumbs 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 far 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
morning' 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,
Spitalfields, 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-colored 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 honor do gray 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 thirty to forty dollars, 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 and 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 for the coming of the porter.
He came. He barely looked at us. 'Full up,' he said, and sh