第15章

'But it's only the best of us can do it,' he qualified.'An' then we work twelve, thirteen, and fourteen hours a day, just as fast as we can.An' you should see us sweat! Just running from us! If you could see us, it'd dazzle your eyes- tacks flyin' out of mouth like from a machine.Look at my mouth.'

I looked.The teeth were worn down by the constant friction of the metallic brads, while they were coal-black and rotten.

'I clean my teeth,' he added, 'else they'd be worse.'

After he had told me that the workers had to furnish their own tools, brads, 'grindery,' cardboard, rent, light, and what not, it was plain that his thirty bob was a diminishing quantity.

'But how long does the rush season last, in which you receive this high wage of thirty bob?' I asked.

'Four months,' was the answer; and for the rest of the year, he informed me, they average from 'half a quid' to a 'quid' a week, which is equivalent to from two dollars and a half to five dollars.The present week was half gone, and he had earned four bob, or one dollar.

And yet I was given to understand that this was one of the better grades of sweating.

I looked out of the window, which should have commanded the back yards of the neighboring buildings.But there were no back yards, or, rather, they were covered with one-story hovels, cowsheds, in which people lived.The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep- the contributions from the back windows of the second and third stories.Icould make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a human sty.

'This is the last year of this trade; they're getting machines to do away with us,' said the sweated one mournfully, as we stepped over the woman with the breasts grossly naked and waded anew through the cheap young life.

We next visited the municipal dwellings erected by the London County Council on the site of the slums where lived Arthur Morrison's 'Child of the Jago.' While the buildings housed more people than before, it was much healthier.But the dwellings were inhabited by the better-class workmen and artisans.The slum people had simply drifted on to crowd other slums or to form new slums.

'An' now,' said the sweated one, the 'earty man who worked so fast as to dazzle one's eyes, 'I'll show you one of London's lungs.This is Spitalfields Garden.' And he mouthed the word 'garden' with scorn.

The shadow of Christ's Church falls across Spitalfields Garden, and in the shadow of Christ's Church, at three o'clock in the afternoon, I saw a sight I never wish to see again.There are no flowers in this garden, which is smaller than my own rose garden at home.Grass only grows here, and it is surrounded by sharp-spiked iron fencing, as are all the parks of London Town, so that homeless men and women may not come in at night and sleep upon it.

As we entered the garden, an old woman, between fifty and sixty, passed us, striding with sturdy intention if somewhat rickety action, with two bulky bundles, covered with sacking, slung fore and aft upon her.She was a woman tramp, a houseless soul, too independent to drag her failing carcass through the workhouse door.Like the snail, she carried her home with her.In the two sacking-covered bundles were her household goods, her wardrobe, linen, and dear feminine possessions.

We went up the narrow gravelled walk.On the benches on either side was arrayed a mass of miserable and distorted humanity, the sight of which would have impelled Dore to more diabolical flights of fancy than he ever succeeded in achieving.It was a welter of rags and filth, of all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness, indecency, leering monstrosities, and bestial faces.A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep.

Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy.Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with any one looking after it.Next, half a dozen men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep.In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother's arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe.On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents.Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms.Farther on, a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep with head in the lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.

It was this sleeping that puzzled me.Why were nine out of ten of them asleep or trying to sleep' But it was not till afterward that Ilearned.It is a law of the powers that be that the homeless shall not sleep by night.On the pavement, by the portico of Christ's Church, where the stone pillars rise toward the sky in a stately row, were whole rows of men lying asleep or drowsing, and all too deep sunk in torpor to rouse or be made curious by our intrusion.

'A lung of London,' I said; 'nay, an abscess, a great putrescent sore.'

'Oh, why did you bring me here?' demanded the burning young socialist, his delicate face white with sickness of soul and stomach sickness.

'Those women there,' said our guide, 'will sell themselves for thru'pence, or tu'pence, or a loaf of stale bread.'

He said it with a cheerful sneer.

But what more he might have said I do not know, for the sick man cried, 'For heaven's sake, let us get out of this.'