第55章

The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and sleeping room for the night.There it is exposed to the sickness and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.

The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good wholesome meat or fruit- in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at all;while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of what he eats.Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa taste like.The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea and coffee.

A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.

'Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi don't mind.Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an Hi'm that fynt...'

She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she held a penny.The one she had addressed as 'daughter' was a care-worn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.

I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the appeal would be received.It was four in the afternoon, and she looked faint and sick.The woman hesitated an instant, then brought a large plate of 'stewed lamb and young peas.' I was eating a plate of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth that the poor are the most charitable.

The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other side of the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.

We ate steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly, explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me:

'Hi sold a box o' matches!'

'Yus,' she confirmed, if anything with greater and more explosive glee.'Hi sold a box o' matches! That's 'ow Hi got the penny.'

'You must be getting along in years,' I suggested.

'Seventy-four yesterday,' she replied, and returned with gusto to her plate.

'Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would, but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy,' the young fellow alongside volunteered to me.'An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many pots.'

'No work at my own tryde for six weeks,' he said further, in reply to my questions; 'nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between.'

One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-houses, and I shall not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square, to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score.(By the way, one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats.)The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.

'Where'd you find it?' she at length demanded.

'Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you think?' I retorted.

'Wot's yer gyme?' she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.

'I makes 'em,' quoth I.

She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver, and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.

'I'll give you ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea,' Isaid.

'I'll see you in 'ell first,' came the retort courteous.Also, she amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.

I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.

While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as living in common lodging-houses- known in the vernacular as 'doss-houses.' There are many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent and blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know nothing about them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness.By this I do not mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that life in them is degrading and unwholesome.

'The poor man's hotel,' they are often called, but the phrase is caricature.Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that of hotel life.

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes.Far from it.They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should be who does his work in the world.