“Because I’ve nowhere to go to.”
“There’s plenty o’ common lodgin’-’ouses, ain’t there?”
“Yes, but I haven’t got a single rap.”
“Well, then, ain’t there the casual ward? Why don’t you go there? You’ll git bed and board for nothin’ there.”
Having put this question, and received no answer, Ned turned away without further remark.
Hardened though Ned was to suffering, there was something in the fallen boy’s face that had touched this fallen man. He turned back with a sort of remonstrative growl, and re-entered the back lane, but Signor Twittorini was gone. He had heard the manager’s voice, and fled.
A policeman directed him to the nearest casual ward, where the lowest stratum of abject poverty finds its nightly level.
Here he knocked with trembling hand. He was received; he was put in a lukewarm bath and washed; he was fed on gruel and a bit of bread—quite sufficient to allay the cravings of hunger; he was shown to a room in which appeared to be a row of corpses—so dead was the silence—each rolled in a covering of some dark brown substance, and stretched out stiff on a trestle with a canvas bottom. One of the trestles was empty. He was told he might appropriate it.
“Are they dead?” he asked, looking round with a shudder.
“Not quite,” replied his jailer, with a short laugh, “but dead-beat most of ’em—tired out, I should say, and disinclined to move.”