to hear the splash.’
According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a
General Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which
modest character I remarked:
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‘They are often taken out, are they, and restored?’
‘I dunno about restored,’ said the apparition, who, for some occult
reason, very much objected to that word; ‘they’re carried into the
werkiss and put into a ‘ot bath, and brought round. But I dunno
about restored,’ said the apparition; ‘blow THAT!’ – and vanished.
As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to
find myself alone, especially as the ‘werkiss’ it had indicated
with a twist of its matted head, was close at hand. So I left Mr.
Baker’s terrible trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy
rinsing of sooty chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse
gate, where I was wholly unexpected and quite unknown.
A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in her
hand, responded to my request to see the House. I began to doubt
whether the police magistrate was quite right in his facts, when I
noticed her quick, active little figure and her intelligent eyes.
The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first.
He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all
was.
This was the only preparation for our entering ‘the Foul wards.’
They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved
yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of
the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the
time – a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient
and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and only
accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted
for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.
A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a
change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage
of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively
observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of
expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity
of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up
and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for
ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow,
looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a
little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and
indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every
pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a
word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came
into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world.
No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who
could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done
there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their
suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The
wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such
rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if
they were ill-kept.
I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into
a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. There
was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards
had been like sides of school-boys’ bird-cages. There was a strong
grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either
side of the hearth, separated by the breadth of this grating, were
two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was surely
the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency to be found
in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently jealous of
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each other, and passed their whole time (as some people do, whose
fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, and
contemptuously watching their neighbours. One of these parodies on