‘A young foreign sailor?’
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‘Yes. He’s a Spaniard. You’re a Spaniard, ain’t you, Antonio?’
‘Me Spanish.’
‘And he don’t know a word you say, not he; not if you was to talk
to him till doomsday.’ (Triumphantly, as if it redounded to the
credit of the house.)
‘Will he play something?’
‘Oh, yes, if you like. Play something, Antonio. YOU ain’t ashamed
to play something; are you?’
The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost of a tune, and three
of the women keep time to it with their heads, and the fourth with
the child. If Antonio has brought any money in with him, I am
afraid he will never take it out, and it even strikes me that his
jacket and guitar may be in a bad way. But, the look of the young
man and the tinkling of the instrument so change the place in a
moment to a leaf out of Don Quixote, that I wonder where his mule
is stabled, until he leaves off.
I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather to my uncommercial
confusion), that I occasioned a difficulty in this establishment,
by having taken the child in my arms. For, on my offering to
restore it to a ferocious joker not unstimulated by rum, who
claimed to be its mother, that unnatural parent put her hands
behind her, and declined to accept it; backing into the fireplace,
and very shrilly declaring, regardless of remonstrance from her
friends, that she knowed it to be Law, that whoever took a child
from its mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it. The
uncommercial sense of being in a rather ridiculous position with
the poor little child beginning to be frightened, was relieved by
my worthy friend and fellow-constable, Trampfoot; who, laying hands
on the article as if it were a Bottle, passed it on to the nearest
woman, and bade her ‘take hold of that.’ As we came out the Bottle
was passed to the ferocious joker, and they all sat down as before,
including Antonio and the guitar. It was clear that there was no
such thing as a nightcap to this baby’s head, and that even he
never went to bed, but was always kept up – and would grow up, kept
up – waiting for Jack.
Later still in the night, we came (by the court ‘where the man was
murdered,’ and by the other court across the street, into which his
body was dragged) to another parlour in another Entry, where
several people were sitting round a fire in just the same way. It
was a dirty and offensive place, with some ragged clothes drying in
it; but there was a high shelf over the entrance-door (to be out of
the reach of marauding hands, possibly) with two large white loaves
on it, and a great piece of Cheshire cheese.
‘Well!’ says Mr. Superintendent, with a comprehensive look all
round. ‘How do YOU do?’
‘Not much to boast of, sir.’ From the curtseying woman of the
house. ‘This is my good man, sir.’
‘You are not registered as a common Lodging House?’
‘No, sir.’
Sharpeye (in the Move-on tone) puts in the pertinent inquiry, ‘Then
why ain’t you?’
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‘Ain’t got no one here, Mr. Sharpeye,’ rejoin the woman and my good
man together, ‘but our own family.’
‘How many are you in family?’
The woman takes time to count, under pretence of coughing, and
adds, as one scant of breath, ‘Seven, sir.’
But she has missed one, so Sharpeye, who knows all about it, says:
‘Here’s a young man here makes eight, who ain’t of your family?’
‘No, Mr. Sharpeye, he’s a weekly lodger.’
‘What does he do for a living?’
The young man here, takes the reply upon himself, and shortly
answers, ‘Ain’t got nothing to do.’
The young man here, is modestly brooding behind a damp apron
pendent from a clothes-line. As I glance at him I become – but I
don’t know why – vaguely reminded of Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth,
and Dover. When we get out, my respected fellow-constable