I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the bodies of other men. My equanimity was not restored by seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory scratching.
A shirt was handed me-which I could not help but wonder how many other men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off to the sleeping apartment. This was a long, narrow room, traversed by two low iron rails. Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks, but pieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide. These were the beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches above the floor. The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than the feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down. Being slung to the same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest were set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle back to the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.
Many hours passed before I won to sleep. It was only seven in the evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in the street, continued till nearly midnight. The smell was frightful and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and crawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us. Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast. In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead. At any rate, I woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.
But morning came, with a six o’clock breakfast of bread and skilly, which I gave away; and we were told off to our various tasks. Some were set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary, where we were set at scavenger work. This was the method by which we paid for our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many times over.
Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was considered the best, and the other men deemed themselves lucky in being chosen to perform it.
‘Don’t touch it, mate, the nurse sez it’s deadly,’ warned my working partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage can.
It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me. Nevertheless, I had to carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong disinfectant.
Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this. These men of the spike, the peg, and the street, are encumbrances. They are of no good or use to any one, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with their presence, and are better out of the way. Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, as they are likewise the quickest to die.
They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them out of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead wagon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the ‘white potion’ and ‘black jack,’ and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was ‘polished off.’ That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a dose of ‘black jack’ or the ‘white potion,’ and sent over the divide. It does not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not. The point is, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created the language with which to express that feeling- ‘black jack,’ ‘white potion,’ ‘polishing off.’
At eight o’clock we went down into a cellar under the Infirmary, where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess-pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for. It wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have done worse. But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.
‘Once, w’en I was ‘ere before, wot did I find out there but a ‘ole lot of pork-ribs,’ said Ginger to me. By ‘out there’ he meant the place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant. ‘They was a prime lot, no end o’ meat on ‘em, an’ I ‘ad ‘em into my arms an’ was out the gate an’ down the street, a-lookin’ for some ‘un to gi’ ‘em to. Couldn’t see a soul, an’ I was runnin’ ‘round clean crazy, the bloke runnin’ after me an’ thinkin’ I was ‘slingin’ my ‘ook’ [running away]. But jest before ‘e got me, I got a ole woman an’ poked ‘em into ‘er apron.’
O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson from Ginger. At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruistic act as was ever performed outside the Abyss. It was fine of Ginger, and if the old woman caught some contagion from the ‘no end o’ meat’ on the pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine. But the most salient thing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, ‘clean crazy’ at sight of so much food going to waste.
It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay two nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had paid for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.
‘Come on, let’s sling it,’ I said to one of my mates, pointing toward the open gate through which the dead wagon had come.
‘An’ get fourteen days?’
‘No; get away.’
‘Aw, I come ‘ere for a rest,’ he said complacently. ‘An’ another night’s kip won’t ‘urt me none.’
They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to ‘sling it’ alone.
‘You cawn’t ever come back ‘ere again for a doss,’ they warned me.
‘No bloody fear,’ said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend; and, dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.
Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that I could stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than two hundred and twenty.
CHAPTER TEN.
Carrying the Banner.
I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the
result. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to
my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great
class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and
better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of
his superiority to his work.
-EMERSON.
‘TO CARRY THE BANNER’ means to walk the streets all night; and I, with the figurative emblem hoisted, went out to see what I could see. Men and women walk the streets at night all over this great city, but I selected the West End, making Leicester Square my base, and scouting about from the Thames Embankment to Hyde Park.
The rain was falling heavily when the theatres let out, and the brilliant throng which poured from the places of amusement was hard put to find cabs. The streets were so many wild rivers of cabs, most of which were engaged, however; and here I saw the desperate attempts of ragged men and boys to get a shelter from the night by procuring cabs for the cabless ladies and gentlemen. I use the word ‘desperate’ advisedly; for these wretched homeless ones were gambling a soaking against a bed; and most of them, I took notice, got the soaking and missed the bed. Now, to go through a stormy night with wet clothes, and, in addition, to be ill-nourished and not to have tasted meat for a week or a month, is about as severe a hardship as a man can undergo. Well-fed and well-clad, I have travelled all day with the spirit thermometer down to seventy-four degrees below zero; and though I suffered, it was a mere nothing compared with carrying the banner for a night, ill-fed, ill-clad, and soaking wet.