bed.
'Is he out of work?'
'Oh, yes, sir! and work's at all times very, very scanty with him;
and now he's laid up.'
'It's my legs,' said the man upon the bed. 'I'll unroll 'em.' And
immediately began.
'Have you any older children?'
'I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son that
does what he can. She's at her work now, and he's trying for
work.'
'Do they live here?'
'They sleep here. They can't afford to pay more rent, and so they
come here at night. The rent is very hard upon us. It's rose upon
us too, now, - sixpence a week, - on account of these new changes
in the law, about the rates. We are a week behind; the landlord's
been shaking and rattling at that door frightfully; he says he'll
turn us out. I don't know what's to come of it.'
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The man upon the bed ruefully interposed, 'Here's my legs. The
skin's broke, besides the swelling. I have had a many kicks,
working, one way and another.'
He looked at his legs (which were much discoloured and misshapen)
for a while, and then appearing to remember that they were not
popular with his family, rolled them up again, as if they were
something in the nature of maps or plans that were not wanted to be
referred to, lay hopelessly down on his back once more with his
fantail hat over his face, and stirred not.
'Do your eldest son and daughter sleep in that cupboard?'
'Yes,' replied the woman.
'With the children?'
'Yes. We have to get together for warmth. We have little to cover
us.'
'Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see
there?'
'Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, with
water. I don't know what's to come of it.'
'Have you no prospect of improvement?'
'If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he'll bring it home. Then
we shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to do
something towards the rent. If not, I don't know what's to come of
it.'
'This is a sad state of things.'
'Yes, sir; it's a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you
go, sir, - they're broken, - and good day, sir!'
These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and
received no out-of-door relief.
In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent
woman with five children, - the last a baby, and she herself a
patient of the parish doctor, - to whom, her husband being in the
hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family,
four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman,
M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the Public-blessing Party, lay their
heads together in course of time, and come to an equalization of
rating, she may go down to the dance of death to the tune of
sixpence more.
I could enter no other houses for that one while, for I could not
bear the contemplation of the children. Such heart as I had
summoned to sustain me against the miseries of the adults failed me
when I looked at the children. I saw how young they were, how
hungry, how serious and still. I thought of them, sick and dying
in those lairs. I think of them dead without anguish; but to think
of them so suffering and so dying quite unmanned me.
Down by the river's bank in Ratcliff, I was turning upward by a
side-street, therefore, to regain the railway, when my eyes rested
on the inscription across the road, 'East London Children's
Hospital.' I could scarcely have seen an inscription better suited
to my frame of mind; and I went across and went straight in.
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I found the children's hospital established in an old sail-loft or
storehouse, of the roughest nature, and on the simplest means.
There were trap-doors in the floors, where goods had been hoisted
up and down; heavy feet and heavy weights had started every knot in
the well-trodden planking: inconvenient bulks and beams and
awkward staircases perplexed my passage through the wards. But I
found it airy, sweet, and clean. In its seven and thirty beds I
saw but little beauty; for starvation in the second or third
generation takes a pinched look: but I saw the sufferings both of
infancy and childhood tenderly assuaged; I heard the little
patients answering to pet playful names, the light touch of a
delicate lady laid bare the wasted sticks of arms for me to pity;
and the claw-like little hands, as she did so, twined themselves
lovingly around her wedding-ring.
One baby mite there was as pretty as any of Raphael's angels. The
tiny head was bandaged for water on the brain; and it was suffering
with acute bronchitis too, and made from time to time a plaintive,
though not impatient or complaining, little sound. The smooth
curve of the cheeks and of the chin was faultless in its
condensation of infantine beauty, and the large bright eyes were
most lovely. It happened as I stopped at the foot of the bed, that
these eyes rested upon mine with that wistful expression of
wondering thoughtfulness which we all know sometimes in very little
children. They remained fixed on mine, and never turned from me
while I stood there. When the utterance of that plaintive sound
shook the little form, the gaze still remained unchanged. I felt
as though the child implored me to tell the story of the little
hospital in which it was sheltered to any gentle heart I could
address. Laying my world-worn hand upon the little unmarked
clasped hand at the chin, I gave it a silent promise that I would
do so.
A gentleman and lady, a young husband and wife, have bought and
fitted up this building for its present noble use, and have quietly
settled themselves in it as its medical officers and directors.
Both have had considerable practical experience of medicine and
surgery; he as house-surgeon of a great London hospital; she as a
very earnest student, tested by severe examination, and also as a
nurse of the sick poor during the prevalence of cholera.
With every qualification to lure them away, with youth and
accomplishments and tastes and habits that can have no response in
any breast near them, close begirt by every repulsive circumstance
inseparable from such a neighbourhood, there they dwell. They live
in the hospital itself, and their rooms are on its first floor.
Sitting at their dinner-table, they could hear the cry of one of
the children in pain. The lady's piano, drawing-materials, books,
and other such evidences of refinement are as much a part of the
rough place as the iron bedsteads of the little patients. They are
put to shifts for room, like passengers on board ship. The
dispenser of medicines (attracted to them not by self-interest, but
by their own magnetism and that of their cause) sleeps in a recess
in the dining-room, and has his washing
apparatus in the sideboard.
Their contented manner of making the best of the things around
them, I found so pleasantly inseparable from their usefulness!
Their pride in this partition that we put up ourselves, or in that
partition that we took down, or in that other partition that we
moved, or in the stove that was given us for the waiting-room, or
in our nightly conversion of the little consulting-room into a
smoking-room! Their admiration of the situation, if we could only
get rid of its one objectionable incident, the coal-yard at the
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back! 'Our hospital carriage, presented by a friend, and very
useful.' That was my presentation to a perambulator, for which a
coach-house had been discovered in a corner down-stairs, just large
enough to hold it. Coloured prints, in all stages of preparation
for being added to those already decorating the wards, were
plentiful; a charming wooden phenomenon of a bird, with an
impossible top-knot, who ducked his head when you set a counter
weight going, had been inaugurated as a public statue that very
morning; and trotting about among the beds, on familiar terms with
all the patients, was a comical mongrel dog, called Poodles. This
comical dog (quite a tonic in himself) was found characteristically
starving at the door of the institution, and was taken in and fed,
and has lived here ever since. An admirer of his mental endowments
has presented him with a collar bearing the legend, 'Judge not
Poodles by external appearances.' He was merrily wagging his tail
on a boy's pillow when he made this modest appeal to me.
When this hospital was first opened, in January of the present
year, the people could not possibly conceive but that somebody paid
for the services rendered there; and were disposed to claim them as
a right, and to find fault if out of temper. They soon came to
understand the case better, and have much increased in gratitude.
The mothers of the patients avail themselves very freely of the
visiting rules; the fathers often on Sundays. There is an
unreasonable (but still, I think, touching and intelligible)
tendency in the parents to take a child away to its wretched home,
if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus carried off on
a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation, and who had
been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with exceeding
difficulty; but he was a jolly boy, with a specially strong
interest in his dinner, when I saw him.
Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of
disease among these small patients. So nourishment, cleanliness,
and ventilation are the main remedies. Discharged patients are
looked after, and invited to come and dine now and then; so are
certain famishing creatures who were never patients. Both the lady
and the gentleman are well acquainted, not only with the histories
of the patients and their families, but with the characters and
circumstances of great numbers of their neighbours - of these they
keep a register. It is their common experience, that people,
sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper poverty, will conceal
it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last extremity.
The nurses of this hospital are all young, - ranging, say, from
nineteen to four and twenty. They have even within these narrow
limits, what many well-endowed hospitals would not give them, a
comfortable room of their own in which to take their meals. It is
a beautiful truth, that interest in the children and sympathy with
their sorrows bind these young women to their places far more
strongly than any other consideration could. The best skilled of
the nurses came originally from a kindred neighbourhood, almost as
poor; and she knew how much the work was needed. She is a fair
dressmaker. The hospital cannot pay her as many pounds in the year
as there are months in it; and one day the lady regarded it as a
duty to speak to her about her improving her prospects and
following her trade. 'No,' she said: she could never be so useful
or so happy elsewhere any more; she must stay among the children.
And she stays. One of the nurses, as I passed her, was washing a
baby-boy. Liking her pleasant face, I stopped to speak to her
charge, - a common, bullet-headed, frowning charge enough, laying
hold of his own nose with a slippery grasp, and staring very
solemnly out of a blanket. The melting of the pleasant face into
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delighted smiles, as this young gentleman gave an unexpected kick,
and laughed at me, was almost worth my previous pain.
An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called 'The
Children's Doctor.' As I parted from my children's doctor, now in
question, I saw in his easy black necktie, in his loose buttoned
black frock-coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark
hair, in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the
exact realisation of the Paris artist's ideal as it was presented
on the stage. But no romancer that I know of has had the boldness
to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and young wife
in the Children's Hospital in the east of London.
I came away from Ratcliff by the Stepney railway station to the
terminus at Fenchurch Street. Any one who will reverse that route
may retrace my steps.
CHAPTER XXXIII - A LITTLE DINNER IN AN HOUR
It fell out on a day in this last autumn, that I had to go down
from London to a place of seaside resort, on an hour's business,
accompanied by my esteemed friend Bullfinch. Let the place of
seaside resort be, for the nonce, called Namelesston.
I had been loitering about Paris in very hot weather, pleasantly
breakfasting in the open air in the garden of the Palais Royal or
the Tuileries, pleasantly dining in the open air in the Elysian
Fields, pleasantly taking my cigar and lemonade in the open air on
the Italian Boulevard towards the small hours after midnight.
Bullfinch - an excellent man of business - has summoned me back
across the Channel, to transact this said hour's business at
Namelesston; and thus it fell out that Bullfinch and I were in a
railway carriage together on our way to Namelesston, each with his
return-ticket in his waistcoat-pocket.
Says Bullfinch, 'I have a proposal to make. Let us dine at the
Temeraire.'
I asked Bullfinch, did he recommend the Temeraire? inasmuch as I
had not been rated on the books of the Temeraire for many years.
Bullfinch declined to accept the responsibility of recommending the
Temeraire, but on the whole was rather sanguine about it. He
'seemed to remember,' Bullfinch said, that he had dined well there.
A plain dinner, but good. Certainly not like a Parisian dinner
(here Bullfinch obviously became the prey of want of confidence),
but of its kind very fair.
I appeal to Bullfinch's intimate knowledge of my wants and ways to
decide whether I was usually ready to be pleased with any dinner,
or - for the matter of that - with anything that was fair of its
kind and really what it claimed to be. Bullfinch doing me the
honour to respond in the affirmative, I agreed to ship myself as an
able trencherman on board the Temeraire.
'Now, our plan shall be this,' says Bullfinch, with his forefinger
at his nose. 'As soon as we get to Namelesston, we'll drive
straight to the Temeraire, and order a little dinner in an hour.
And as we shall not have more than enough time in which to dispose
of it comfortably, what do you say to giving the house the best
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opportunities of serving it hot and quickly by dining in the
coffee-room?'
What I had to say was, Certainly. Bullfinch (who is by nature of a
hopeful constitution) then began to babble of green geese. But I
checked him in that Falstaffian vein, urging considerations of time
and cookery.
In due sequence of events we drove up to the Temeraire, and
alighted. A youth in livery received us on the door-step. 'Looks
well,' said Bullfinch confidentially. And then aloud, 'Coffeeroom!'
The youth in livery (now perceived to be mouldy) conducted us to
the desired haven, and was enjoined by Bullfinch to send the waiter
at once, as we wished to order a little dinner in an hour. Then
Bullfinch and I waited for the waiter, until, the waiter continuing
to wait in some unknown and invisible sphere of action, we rang for
the waiter; which ring produced the waiter, who announced himself
as not the waiter who ought to wait upon us, and who didn't wait a
moment longer.
So Bullfinch approached the coffee-room door, and melodiously
pitching his voice into a bar where two young ladies were keeping
the books of the Temeraire, apologetically explained that we wished
to order a little dinner in an hour, and that we were debarred from
the execution of our inoffensive purpose by consignment to
solitude.
Hereupon one of the young ladies ran a bell, which reproduced - at
the bar this time - the waiter who was not the waiter who ought to
wait upon us; that extraordinary man, whose life seemed consumed in
waiting upon people to say that he wouldn't wait upon them,
repeated his former protest with great indignation, and retired.