Chapter Twenty Three.
A Placard.
Now, you know, it wouldn’t matter a bit if it was only the publicans who gave short measure. Most of us know what their gin-glasses are—regular little humbugs of things—werry broad at the top, and werry solid at the bottom, and holding precious little in ’em; bad as the old-fashioned wine bottles, that have had such a kick as has sent the bottom right up inside ever so far, like a glass mountain, so that when you think the bottle’s half full, it’s three-parts empty. But it isn’t the publican so much as the street-sellers, who one way and the other do drop most terribly on to the poor man in what he buys; and yet that ain’t the worst of it, for there’s someone else as drops on to the poor man worse than anybody; cheats him; gives him short measure; and one way and another knocks twenty-five per cent, off his wages and the good they would do him; and I’m going to show you how; while “Who is it?” says you; “Why, himself!” says I. And now I’m going to prove it.
Now, I don’t know what you are as is reading this; but we’ll say you’re a working man, for once in a way, and say you and I settled down in London. You makes your three-and-thirty shillings a week at your trade! and I, being a bill-sticker, makes what I can—sometimes more, sometimes less—finds my own paste—makes it myself, you know; and though I says it as shouldn’t say it, you never see my bills a-going flip-flap in the wind, like some people’s as I knows, which ain’t neither here nor there, in a manner of speaking; though as regards a wall or hoarding, they are here and there. I allus make good paste, and though sometimes when I has one of them big posters to stick up a letter at a time, I do get a bit bothered with the spelling, it ain’t often. I ain’t ashamed of my faults, and having made myself a scholard off bills on walls, why, ’tain’t surprising as I blunders a bit sometimes, even if one’s reading has been a bit diversified. As I said before, it ain’t surprising, and I ain’t ashamed if, when I stuck them Star bills, I did putt the cart afore the horse, and instead of saying “War Correspondence” put it up as “Raw Correspondence,” which, seeing as it related to cutting up and butchering, warn’t so werry much out of place. But it warn’t me as stuck the Prince o’ Wales’s feathers upside down, and if I do have to put a letter up at a time I always makes them meet at the edges, and don’t put ’em over other folkses.
But this ain’t proving how pore men cheats and measures themselves out short; so, as I said before, we’ll suppose you and me to be working men settled in London. Well, rent we can’t say nothing about; but if we goes on as some people do, living from hand to mouth and back again, why, where are we? Now, this is what I always noticed—the poorer a man is, the dearer he buys his things.
“Get out,” says you; “how can that be?”
“Why, so,” says I, and in imagination, you know, I holds the bill up against the wall with one hand, stirs the brush round in my paste with the other, and then well lathers or lubricates the back of the paper, then turns him, claps him in his place, and touches him over with the brush so as he fits into all the crevices tight. “And now,” says I, “read,” and you read, or is s’posed to read, as follers, though of course it’s me speaking:—
“The poor man allus goes to the cheap shop.”
“Right enough too,” says you.
“Gammon,” says I, for that cheap’s a word as ain’t to be found in reality; it’s a word as my philosophic friend Josef Sprouts would call “a beautiful illoosion.” It’s a ignis something—I don’t quite know what—as cheats men on to follow it, and then bogs them as tight as my brush is bogged in dry weather in the crusty paste. Don’t you never buy nothing cheap. Now, this is the way. You goes and buys cheap butter at fourteen-pence when you might have had it as honest dripping, afore the tater flour and yaller colour was put in, for ninepence. You buys penny candles one at a time, and so gives eight pence a pound when you might have had ’em for seven-pence. You buys: cheap tea at two shillings, when one spoonful of three-shilling goes twice as fur. Working men’s stout bluchers, all brown paper and bosh. Cheap clothes, as falls all to pieces, and shrinks anyhow, till the bottoms of the trousers seem to have made up their minds to be tight knickerbockers. Cheap calico, as is all facing till it’s washed, when it turns out canvas or fine net. Coffee, as is—well, perhaps what I heard about burnt liver ain’t true, after all; but you may depend upon one thing, and that is, that the man as buys the best of everything in a plain way lives the cheapest. Look at flour. Well, say the best is a penny a quartern more—and the wife seems so satisfied because she thinks she is saving. Why, it’s a mistake altogether, and if you feed yourself with so much husk amongst your corn, mustn’t you have more corn to supply the nutriment? Don’t tell me! I haven’t made paste so many years without being a good judge of flour.
Cheap things is nasty. At least that’s wrong, for cheap things is good, and the real cheap things is the best of everything; and what you’ve got to do is this—have a little, but have it good. I’ve watched the dodges long enough to know; I’ve stuck up the cheap advertising bills, and then looked into it, and blowed the missus up for being so took in: cheap soap as is kept wet and runs all to a mosh in the water; cheap rice full of grit; cheap bacon as shrinks in the pot; cheap currants with plenty of stones; cheap meat—there, if there is a cruel thing perpetrated on the poor people of London streets, it’s that sending up diseased beasts, sheep, and pigs, to be sold cheap; and if I were the Lord Mayor of London, or either of the other magistrates (which ain’t likely to be the case this year, because the election’s over, and there ain’t a bench at liberty) I’d just tar the gentlemen as sells the stuff with their own brush, I’d—I would, and no mistake—I’d feed ’em with their own meat—now then!
I’ve stuck so much poetry about cheap clothes for the tailors, and strong tea for the groshers, that I’m sick of it; but I know one piece right off by heart, and at the end of a verse it says:—
“Oh, God, that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!”
You know! “Song of the shirt.” Cheap shirts for cheap people, who make fortunes out of the poor.
“Oh,” you’ll say, “that was only a made-up thing.”
What! here, save up your pence and go down Bethnal Green, or amongst the tottering old houses in Spitalfields, places where I can find heaps of spots for sticking bills, and you can hunt ’em out for yourself; women sewing their shrouds, hard at work at ’em, doing a little bit every day till they get ’em done, and then the parish sends a cheap coffin, supplied by the lowest bidder, the undertaker as does these things by contract on the cheap fetches the rough black case; and then “rattle his bones over the stones,” and off to the cemetery; and you and I will buy the cheap shirt, and find as the calico’s thin, and the buttons come off, and the stitches fall out almost from our bargain.
“Just come here, will you?” says a p’leeceman to me one day as I was a-sticking an “Alarming Sacrifice” against the wall, and a thinking to myself it was like the way we used to gammon the old hens at home, shamming to throw down barley, so that they’d come running and clucking like fun to find nought; while here was these rogues a-using me to scatter their barley about to bring all the old London hens a-clucking over their bargains in calicoes and dresses, bought at unheard-of prices, “in bankruptcy.” “Just come in here a minute,” says the policeman, and I leaves off at “Alarming Sac—;” and I daresay there was an alarming sack made out of the noodles, for that bill never got finished, but stopped there till another sticker went and stuck the “Christy’s” over it. I follows my chap in, carrying my bills and crutches and paste, on account of the boys, and follows him right upstairs—up stairs as wern’t safe—to a miserable attic, where there was a poor thing lying on a bed—at least on a few rags, and she dressed in rags herself. There was the rain pelting against the broken windows and making a puddle on the floor; the wind whistling down the chimney, where there was no grate, only a few bits or iron hoop resting on some bricks, but no fire; whilst the rest of the furniture, after the ricketty bedstead, was a little table, and a chair with the bottom sticking down like part of a fish basket.
“Stop with her while I goes for help,” says the p’leeceman, and I nodded, staring all the while at the poor thing on the bed; and as soon as he had gone, I goes a tiptoe to the winder, pulls a little bill out of my bag, lays on the paste, and pops it over one of the broken panes; and then does the same by two more, which was some improvement, you know, only when I looks on the first, if it wasn’t in big letters, “Coffin!” for the “Dr” was tucked round outer sight one side, and the “s” and the “Pills” the other.
“That won’t do,” I says, and I fetches out another bill from another parcel. Nice thing that for a sick woman to see as a transparency—“Coffin!” so I pastes the other bill and sets up, but snatches it down again directly, for it was “The Dead Letter,” and there was only “The Dead” to be seen. But the next one did service, for it was “Good Words.”
“Ah!” I says, she wants some bad enough, and then I spoke and said something or another, but there was no answer; so thinking it best, I waited quietly till the p’leeceman came back, when he whispered to me as they were going to take her in a cab to the House.
“House? What house?” somebody cries all at once in a horrid cracked, hoarse voice, “No—no—no—no!” And there, sitting up in the bed, with her blue bony fingers stretched out, and her dull eyes straining, the poor thing kept motioning the p’leeceman away, and no one tried to touch her.
“Little bread—little water—that’s all;” she says again so pitifully; “Let me stay here till I’m gone, and I shan’t be long now;” and then sinking back on the bed, she closed her eyes and lay muttering, with her poor thin, bony arms stretched across her breast.
I looked at the p’leecemen, and they looked at me, and not being men much given to softness, they were about to lift the poor thing up and carry her down, only I stopped ’em, for there was something about the poor soul then as made me hold up my hand; and when they saw what I did, one of them went down to send away the cab and fetch a doctor, while me and t’other stood looking on to see the look of horror and fear go off her face, while the hands kept their place across her poor breast—to see her eyes stopping shut, then open widely for a minute, and then close again, as she lay quiet and still—gone to sleep to wake elsewhere.
P’leeceman went out werry quietly and stopped at the door, beckoning me to come, but I couldn’t see him, for I was seeing that poor woman sitting on that broken chair, close to the broken window, in the early morning, and through the long day, and right into the night, by the light of a cheap candle, stitching away at tailor’s slopwork hour after hour, to make at first 7 shillings 6 pence a week, then, as her eyes grew feebler, and the stitches less regular, six shillings—five shillings—four shillings—two shillings—nothing! for flesh and blood is cheap in London, and when one bone and gristle machine wears out, there are plenty more to take its place. Sitting there in the bitter cold wet autumn of this year, sick at heart, sick in body, weak, old, and helpless—too feeble to work, too proud to tell of her sufferings; and with the horror of the poor against the tender mercies of the parish, where the feeble sink amidst the horrors of the infirmary. Working on till she could work no more, and then, with bloodless limbs and pallid face, when work and food were given, and she took both, the strength failed, and the stomach unused to sustenance could not bear it—the lamp was going out, the flame trembling, and the oil for which it was sinking drowned out the last flickering ray.
No fiction—no tale of imagination—but true! true! true! Not in the past times, before there were visitations, and poor-law boards, and plenty of missionary enterprise, but now—now, within the past few days—in Christian England, whose wealth makes the fabled greatness of the East turn pale and shine with diminished lustre. Here—at home—in our great city—lying down to die, listening to the hurrying tramp of thousands; with help ready to come when it was too late; with coroner and jury ready to sit, and wag their sapient heads, and the twelve to smoke it in their pipes in the evening, saying, “How dreadful!” The coroner saying, too, that such things came before him weekly. And what is done to amend the misery? Where is the plaister for this hideous boil? There was no canting whine here for aid, but the act of the stricken one who knew full well that she would be told to go to the House,—than enter which she would sooner die.
“I’d have taken her a drop of brandy if I’d known how bad she was; but, poor soul, she always kep herself to herself.” God bless you for it, woman! You told me with an earnestness and truthful air that none could doubt: it was the fruition of that loving sympathy that prompts the poor to give of their little to aid distress. Where does the beggar make his harvest? Where do the canting hypocrites who trade upon sympathy fatten? Amidst the thronging streets of East and South London, finding the heart that has felt the pinchings of poverty ever ready to open in their favour. But such sad tales need veiling, ’neath the medium of fiction, and one seeks again to soften the tale.
I see it all, as I said, and at last, seeing it less and less plain for something as came in my eyes, I picked up my paste-tin and my brush, and then made towards the door; but I was obliged to go back and have another look, for the thought come as it might have been a sister, or a mother, or—or—or—I broke down there; for I said to myself as it might have been a widder, and that widder might have been mine. But the thoughts of that made me start again and hurry out of the place, with a will and a spirit in me to have posted up all London, if I could have got the job; and short work I made of what else I had to do. But there in my pipe that night was that worn-out seamstress, whose calm, sleeping face cried out so appealingly—crying in a way that should make all London shudder:
“Brother, I was starved to death!”