Only a few of these abodes of wretchedness remained unvisited, when I inquired after the poor woman I was seeking of a somewhat decently clothed woman, who rented one of them.
She was the weekly tenant of one of these houses, and told me that on the preceding night a poor woman, with a child wrapped up in a miserably torn shawl, had applied for a lodging at about eleven o’clock. It was raining hard, and the poor woman possessed only twopence, and the price of a bed in the cellar was at this house threepence. The poor woman went away, remarking that she must then go and pawn the remnant of the shawl that covered her infant. She went, but returned no more.
The ancient weekly tenant then thought it necessary to defend, or rather to explain, her own apparently cruel conduct. I told her that it was unnecessary, and that even in my inmost thoughts I had not cast a reproach upon her. I told her that, from my knowledge of the misery suffered by poor people, I could readily imagine circumstances which might fully explain her conduct.
Her heart, however, was too full, so I sat down and listened to her tale. She was a widow advanced in years, having no relatives, or even friends, to assist her in her old age. She was the weekly tenant of a small house in that villanous street, and was entirely supported by letting out every foot of floor which could be made available for a human being to {246} sleep upon. But the stern necessity which hung over her with its iron hand was this:—
Her weekly rent became due on each Monday, and if not paid on that night, the next morning would see her inexorably turned out of her only home, and deprived of her only means of sustaining life.
〈A STARVING MAN IN HER KITCHEN.〉
She was pleased at my attention to her sad tale, and, with a little encouragement, mentioned some of the experience she had had in her painful vocation.
“At this moment,” she said, “there is lying on a rug in the back kitchen a young man, who has tasted nothing during the last two days but water from the pump on the opposite side of the street. He appears,” she said, “to have been in better circumstances in other times.”
It was now two o’clock in the morning, in the midst of a dense fog. I inquired whether it would be possible at this hour to get some soup or meat, or anything to sustain life. I went down into the close unventilated room, and beheld, stretched on a kind of thing like a couple of sacks, a pale, emaciated man, apparently about two or three and thirty years of age. I desired him to call on me the next morning; and, leaving my address with his landlady, left also a small sum of money to procure for him, if possible, present necessaries.
The next morning this half-starved man called at my house, in garments scarcely covering him. I inquired into his history, and he told me one probably as fabulous as that with which he afterwards deluded me, during my own short acquaintance with him.