”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.