“Thank ye, mister; not for me. I'm making my five-pound note a week, I am, and each cove that dies off makes the survivors one richer, so to speak—survival of the fittest, they call it. So we don't talk much, and just pockets the pay.”
“Ah, that is the arrangement, is it?” said Cornish, indifferently. “Yes. We've got a clever financier, as they call it, I can tell yer. We're a good-goin' concern, we are. Some of us are goin' pretty quick, too.”
“Are there many deaths, then?”
“Ah! there you're asking a question,” returned the man, who came of a class which has no false shame in refusing a reply.
Cornish looked at the man beneath the dim light of the unsuccessful lamp—a piteous specimen of humanity, depraved, besotted, without outward sign of a redeeming virtue, although a certain courage must have been there—this and such as this stood between him and Dorothy Roden. Uncle Ben had known starvation at one time, for starvation writes certain lines which even turtle soup may never wipe out—lines which any may read and none may forget. Tony Cornish had seen them before—on the face of an old dandy coming down the steps of a St. James's Street club. The malgamiter had likewise known drink long and intimately, and it is no exaggeration to say that he had stood cheek by jowl with death nearly all his life.
Such a man was plainly not to be drawn away from five pounds a week.
Cornish turned to the Frenchman—a little, cunning, bullet-headed Lyonnais, who would not speak of his craft at all, though he expressed every desire to be agreeable to monsieur.
“When one is en fête,” he cried, “it is good to drink one's glass or two and think no more of work.”
“I knew one or two of your men once,” said Cornish, returning to the genial Uncle Ben. “William Martins, I remember, was a decent fellow, and had seen a bit of the world. I will come to the works and look him up some day.”
“You can look him up, mister, but you won't find him.”