CHAPTER TWENTY. The people of the abyss, | ||
20. CHAPTER TWENTY.
Coffee-houses and Doss-houses.
Why should we be packed, head and tail, like canned sardines?-ROBERT BLATCHFORD.
ANOTHER PHRASE GONE GLIMMERING, shorn of romance and tradition and all that goes to make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth, 'coffee-house' will possess anything but an agreeable connotation. Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians of Grub Street.
But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
is a misnomer. Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee. Not at
all. You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or money. True,
you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you something in
a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it and be
disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.
And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house. Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in a man or put self-respect into him. Tablecloths and napkins are unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor. In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the muck and mess that covered the floor and I have managed to eat because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.
This seems to be the normal condition of the
A pint of tea, kipper (or bloater), and 'two slices' (bread and butter) are a very good breakfast for a London workman. I have looked in vain for him to order a five-penny or six-penny steak (the cheapest to be had); while, when I ordered one for myself, I have usually had to wait till the proprietor could send out to the nearest butchershop and buy one.
As a vagrant in the 'Hobo' of a California jail, I have been served better food and drink than the London workman receives in his coffee-houses; while as an American laborer I have eaten a breakfast for twelvepence such as the British
There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and American merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub, good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working populations of both countries. The ocean greyhounds have to pay for speed and steam, and so does the workman. But if the workman is not able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America. He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San Francisco.[n1] His standard of living has been rising all the time.
Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
way to work, many women sit on the sidewalk with sacks of bread beside
them. No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they walk
along. They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea to be
obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses. It is incontestable that
a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a meal like that; and it
is equally incontestable that the loss will fall upon his employer and
upon the nation. For some time, now, statesmen have been crying, 'Wake
up, England!' It would show more hard-headed
Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have
stood outside a butchershop and watched a horde of speculative
housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
and mutton- dog-meat in the States. I would not vouch for the clean
fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
about in their anxiety to get
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
'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
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
'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,' I said.
'I'll see you in 'ell first,' came the retort
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
The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated
horrors. I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
confine myself to the bigger and better ones. Not far from Middlesex
Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house,
One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough wooden table, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not over-clean table constituted his butter. Into it he dipped his bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big mug. A piece of fish completed his bill of fare. He ate silently, looking neither to right nor left nor across at me. Here and there, at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently. In the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation. A feeling of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place. Many of them sat and brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be punished so.
From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured in to the range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me into the street for fresh air.
On my return I paid fivepence for a 'cabin,' took my receipt for the same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the smoking-room. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several
But no more than the two cellar rooms, did this room convey the remotest suggestion of home. Certainly there could be nothing homelike about it to you and me, who know what home really is. On the walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put out, and nothing remained but bed. This was gained by descending again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper regions. I went to the top of the building and down again, passing several floors filled with sleeping men. The 'cabins' were the best accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room alongside of it in which to undress. The bedding was clean, and with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault. But there was no privacy about it, no being alone.
To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of a large, barnlike room, and there you have it. There are no ceilings to the
Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should have, is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up pictures of his mother, sister, sweetheart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listeth- in short, one place of his own on the earth of which he can say: 'This is mine, my castle; the world stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master.' He will be a better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.
I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened. I went from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers. They were young men, from twenty to forty, most of them. Old men cannot afford the working-man's home. They go to the workhouse. But I looked at the young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows. Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's arms. They were lovable, as men are lovable. They were capable of love. A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and harsher. And I wondered where these women were, and heard a 'harlot's ginny laugh.' Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly, The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.
CHAPTER TWENTY. The people of the abyss, | ||