has no business, and why she performs them, Heaven only knows! At
length she is seen plunging within a cable's length of our port
broadside, and is being roared at through our speaking-trumpets to
do this thing, and not to do that, and to stand by the other, as if
she were a very demented tender indeed. Then, we slackening amidst
a deafening roar of steam, this much-abused tender is made fast to
us by hawsers, and the men in readiness carry the bags aboard, and
return for more, bending under their burdens, and looking just like
the pasteboard figures of the miller and his men in the theatre of
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our boyhood, and comporting themselves almost as unsteadily. All
the while the unfortunate tender plunges high and low, and is
roared at. Then the Queenstown passengers are put on board of her,
with infinite plunging and roaring, and the tender gets heaved up
on the sea to that surprising extent that she looks within an ace
of washing aboard of us, high and dry. Roared at with contumely to
the last, this wretched tender is at length let go, with a final
plunge of great ignominy, and falls spinning into our wake.
The voice of conscience resumed its dominion as the day climbed up
the sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port; kept by us as
we passed other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast,
where some of the officers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone
ashore in sailing-ships in fogs (and of which by that token they
seemed to have quite an affectionate remembrance), and past the
Welsh coast, and past the Cheshire coast, and past everything and
everywhere lying between our ship and her own special dock in the
Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of the clock, on a fair
evening early in May, we stopped, and the voice ceased. A very
curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stopped, ensued
upon that silence; and it was with a no less curious sensation that
I went over the side of the good Cunard ship 'Russia' (whom
prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer
hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So,
perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that
held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy derived this
similitude.
CHAPTER XXXII - A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST
I had been looking, yesternight, through the famous 'Dance of
Death,' and to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with the
new significance of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the
original. The weird skeleton rattled along the streets before me,
and struck fiercely; but it was never at the pains of assuming a
disguise. It played on no dulcimer here, was crowned with no
flowers, waved no plume, minced in no flowing robe or train, lifted
no wine-cup, sat at no feast, cast no dice, counted no gold. It
was simply a bare, gaunt, famished skeleton, slaying his way along.
The borders of Ratcliff and Stepney, eastward of London, and giving
on the impure river, were the scene of this uncompromising dance of
death, upon a drizzling November day. A squalid maze of streets,
courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms. A
wilderness of dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, chiefly
inhabited by a tribe from whom employment has departed, or to whom
it comes but fitfully and rarely. They are not skilled mechanics
in any wise. They are but labourers, - dock-labourers, water-side
labourers, coal-porters, ballast-heavers, such-like hewers of wood
and drawers of water. But they have come into existence, and they
propagate their wretched race.
One grisly joke alone, methought, the skeleton seemed to play off
here. It had stuck election-bills on the walls, which the wind and
rain had deteriorated into suitable rags. It had even summed up
the state of the poll, in chalk, on the shutters of one ruined
house. It adjured the free and independent starvers to vote for
Thisman and vote for Thatman; not to plump, as they valued the
state of parties and the national prosperity (both of great
importance to them, I think); but, by returning Thisman and
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Thatman, each naught without the other, to compound a glorious and
immortal whole. Surely the skeleton is nowhere more cruelly
ironical in the original monkish idea!
Pondering in my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and Thatman,
and of the public blessing called Party, for staying the
degeneracy, physical and moral, of many thousands (who shall say
how many?) of the English race; for devising employment useful to
the community for those who want but to work and live; for
equalising rates, cultivating waste lands, facilitating emigration,
and, above all things, saving and utilising the oncoming
generations, and thereby changing ever-growing national weakness
into strength: pondering in my mind, I say, these hopeful
exertions, I turned down a narrow street to look into a house or
two.
It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all the
outer doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry, and
knocked at a parlour-door. Might I come in? I might, if I plased,
sur.
The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips of
wood, about some wharf or barge; and they had just now been thrust
into the otherwise empty grate to make two iron pots boil. There
was some fish in one, and there were some potatoes in the other.
The flare of the burning wood enabled me to see a table, and a
broken chair or so, and some old cheap crockery ornaments about the
chimney-piece. It was not until I had spoken with the woman a few
minutes, that I saw a horrible brown heap on the floor in a corner,
which, but for previous experience in this dismal wise, I might not
have suspected to be 'the bed.' There was something thrown upon
it; and I asked what that was.
''Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur; and 'tis very bad she
is, and 'tis very bad she's been this long time, and 'tis better
she'll never be, and 'tis slape she does all day, and 'tis wake she
does all night, and 'tis the lead, sur.'
'The what?'
'The lead, sur. Sure 'tis the lead-mills, where the women gets
took on at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application
early enough, and is lucky and wanted; and 'tis lead-pisoned she
is, sur, and some of them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them
gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many, niver; and 'tis
all according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is
strong, and some is weak; and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned,
bad as can be, sur; and her brain is coming out at her ear, and it
hurts her dreadful; and that's what it is, and niver no more, and
niver no less, sur.'
The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took
a bandage from her head, and threw open a ba
ck door to let in the
daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I
ever saw.
'That's what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned; and it cooms
from her night and day, the poor, sick craythur; and the pain of it
is dreadful; and God he knows that my husband has walked the
sthreets these four days, being a labourer, and is walking them
now, and is ready to work, and no work for him, and no fire and no
food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shillings in a
fortnight; God be good to us! and it is poor we are, and dark it is
and could it is indeed.'
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Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my selfdenial,
if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in
the course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may
state at once that my closest observation could not detect any
indication whatever of an expectation that I would give money:
they were grateful to be talked to about their miserable affairs,
and sympathy was plainly a comfort to them; but they neither asked
for money in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or
disappointment or resentment at my giving none.
The woman's married daughter had by this time come down from her
room on the floor above, to join in the conversation. She herself
had been to the lead-mills very early that morning to be 'took on,'
but had not succeeded. She had four children; and her husband,
also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no
better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, and
by nature, of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress
and in her mother's there was an effort to keep up some appearance
of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the unfortunate
invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms
came on, and how they grew, - having often seen them. The very
smell when you stood inside the door of the works was enough to
knock you down, she said: yet she was going back again to get
'took on.' What could she do? Better be ulcerated and paralysed
for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the children
starve.
A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door
and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleepingplace
of the sick young woman. But the nights being now wintry,
and the blankets and coverlets 'gone to the leaving shop,' she lay
all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The woman of
the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and two others,
lay on the one brown heap together for warmth.
'God bless you, sir, and thank you!' were the parting words from
these people, - gratefully spoken too, - with which I left this
place.
Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another
ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four
children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their
dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty
cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent
bedstead in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man
did not rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly
inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my
inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said,
'Certainly.' There being a window at each end of this room, back
and front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight,
to keep the cold out, and was very sickening.
The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her
husband's elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon
appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of
about thirty.
'What was he by trade?'
'Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?'
'I am a boilermaker;' looking about him with an exceedingly
perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.
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'He ain't a mechanic, you understand, sir,' the wife put in: 'he's
only a labourer.'
'Are you in work?'
He looked up at his wife again. 'Gentleman says are you in work,
John?'
'In work!' cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his
wife, and then working his vision's way very slowly round to me:
'Lord, no!'
'Ah, he ain't indeed!' said the poor woman, shaking her head, as
she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.
'Work!' said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler,
first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features
of his second son at his knee: 'I wish I WAS in work! I haven't
had more than a day's work to do this three weeks.'
'How have you lived?'
A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be
boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his threadbare
canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, 'On the work of
the wife.'
I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it
had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head,
coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming
The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did
slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in
hand, and spread it out upon the bed, - the only piece of furniture
in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she
made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine.
According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her
trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence halfpenny,
and she could make one in something less than two days.
But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it
didn't come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come
through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand
took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money
enough to pay the security deposit, - call it two pound, - she
could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not
have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second
hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to
tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great
intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or
murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband's side
at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as
the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups,
and what not other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was in
dress, and toning done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of
nutriment and washing, - there was positively a dignity in her, as
the family anchor just holding the poor ship-wrecked boilermaker's
bark. When I left the room, the boiler-maker
's eyes were slowly
turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that
vanished boiler lay in her direction.
These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that
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was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.
Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor.
The woman apologised for its being in 'an untidy mess.' The day
was Saturday, and she was boiling the children's clothes in a
saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she
could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or
bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken
bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. The last
small scraping of coals left was raked together in a corner of the
floor. There were some rags in an open cupboard, also on the
floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old French bed-stead,
with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot jacket, and
rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black. It was
difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured
black, the walls were so begrimed.
As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children's clothes, - she
had not even a piece of soap to wash them with, - and apologising
for her occupation, I could take in all these things without
appearing to notice them, and could even correct my inventory. I
had missed, at the first glance, some half a pound of bread in the
otherwise empty safe, an old red ragged crinoline hanging on the
handle of the door by which I had entered, and certain fragments of
rusty iron scattered on the floor, which looked like broken tools
and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood looking on. On the box
nearest to the fire sat two younger children; one a delicate and
pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed.
This woman, like the last, was wofully shabby, and was degenerating
to the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the ghost of a
certain vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple in her
cheek, carried my memory strangely back to the old days of the
Adelphi Theatre, London, when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend of
Victorine.
'May I ask you what your husband is?'
'He's a coal-porter, sir,' - with a glance and a sigh towards the