At the door of one a middle-aged woman sat on an empty packing-case tying up bundles of grass, which had been previously dyed a startling colour. She had no children, and said her husband had died a year ago. They had lived in that tent together, and had two children; but both of them died. ‘I suppose you will be married again soon?’ I said, looking at her. She said she thought not, for she did not have a very good time with the first.

I thought it time to go, so I took a walk to the ‘dust-shoot.’ Year after year the ashes and refuse from the dust-bins of Hackney had been shot here—mountains of it. Here were boys and girls with sacks picking up bits of coal, cinders, or coke to take home, and young fellows collecting all the meat tins, salmon and lobster tins, etc. I watched the latter for a time, and saw they were placing the tins on coke fires, which were burning in several places. At one of these fires I saw the fellow with the upright hair, the man I was in search of, so I drew near and watched him awhile. He recognised me, but did not say anything. I soon saw why the tins were collected and put on the fire, for as soon as they became thoroughly red-hot he lifted them off, threw them away, and replaced them by others, a heap of which had been collected, his object being to melt the solder and tin, which ran quickly to the bottom of the fire, where a hole was made in the ground to receive it. ‘I suppose you get a tidy lot of metal in this way?’ I said to him. ‘Pretty well,’ he said. ‘The sardine-boxes are the best.’ ‘Let me look at some of your metal.’ He disappeared for a minute, and then brought me some rough-shaped pieces to look at. They were full of bits of cinder, etc., and not very saleable, even to marine-store dealers. I said, ‘You have got good metal, but it is very dirty. Have you got an old saucepan about here?’ He brought one, and I melted the metal over again, this time in the saucepan, and with the aid of a bit of wood skimmed off all the dross. ‘Now for some clay.’ He found some. We tempered it and flattened it as level as possible on the ground. A piece of cane about a foot long was found, a number of impressions of half the cane lengthways were made. Into these I poured his metal, and soon a number of sticks of solder, white, clear, and shining, were in his possession. ‘Now you have got something worth having,’ I said. ‘You can get a good price for it. Now I have shown you how to do this, won’t you give that little fellow his nine and sixpence back?’ ‘You must think I’m a mug. Why, I never had it.’ ‘Come,’ I said, ‘you must think me a mug if you ask me to believe that. You know you had it. Hand it over, and I will take it to him. One good turn deserves another.’ ‘What do you think!’ he said. I could get nothing from him, and I did not want to offend him, for I wanted to learn something from him. Presently I asked him how long he had lived in the ‘dust-shoot.’ He said five weeks, but I am inclined to believe he had been there much longer. After some persuasion he took me to his cave, which was on the other side of the ‘shoot.’ Here he had, in the side of the ‘shoot,’ excavated a short tunnel, at the end of which was his cave, not very commodious or comfortable; quite dark, except for his candle. Here he had his store of metal and anything else he picked up that was of any value. Here he had lived among all the festering rottenness for at least five weeks. On my asking him how many more lived in the ‘shoot,’ he said: ‘Only five or six.’ ‘Any women here?’ ‘No fear!’ I was told by another ‘Gubbin’ afterwards that at least twelve had caves, and that a woman came sometimes to one of them.

My method of dealing with the sardine boxes and other tins seems to have created quite an industry, but led two ‘Gubbins’ into trouble, for, quite three months after my visit to the shoot, two young fellows were charged with the unlawful possession of a number of ‘sticks of solder.’ A detective had followed them into a marine-store dealer’s, where they offered the metal for sale. In vain they said that they had obtained it at the shoot; the detective’s experience told him that the metal was not found there, so they were charged. I happened to be in court when they were before the magistrate. The youths told the magistrate how they had obtained it, and said that the missionary from the court had shown them how to do it. When the magistrate looked inquiringly at me, I had to own up, and the youths were discharged. Their metal was, of course, given back to them, so, while they were signing the ‘Prisoners’ Property Book,’ and acknowledging receipt of their knives, etc., I examined the metal, and also came to the conclusion that it had not been procured from the ‘shoot,’ and that in all probability it had been stolen. I did not tell the police, but I took the young fellows aside, and asked them what they knew about me, and they said: ‘Didn’t you come on to the shoot and show us how to do it?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I did not, for I have never seen you in my life before.’ ‘Well, we saw you.’ ‘No lies!’ I said. ‘This metal has never been on the shoot. You vagabonds have stolen it, and then tell this tale, and it’s pretty clever of you, for it has got you off.’ I found on further inquiry that they had lived for a time in the shoot, and knew about my visit there, but they had never obtained any metal from the old tins.

I paid no further visits to the ‘Gubbins’; they knew too much for me, and my last visit has been paid to Arcadia, for Hackney Wick knows it no more. I saw the last of it, and a sad and singular sight it was. The inhabitants were being ‘moved off.’ For months they had lived in their unclean simplicity, with no sanitary arrangements, and cut off from clean water. It was one dull day at the latter end of April; the rain fell gently all the day long, and the atmosphere was of a leaden hue. They had struck their tents, and were packing up when I got there, so I waited to see the last of them. My friends the midgets had packed their few boards, some sacking, an old kettle and saucepan, etc., on the barrow, and the little man pushing it, with his sister carrying her two babes—for the younger one had kept her word, and, with her bit of humanity, had gone into the workhouse—moved off in the dull mist, but where I never knew, for they would give me no information on the subject. The three young women had already gone. The poor fellow and his wife had their belongings on a wheelbarrow, and were ‘moving off.’ The caravans, with their ancient horses and numerous children, ‘moved off.’ Tent after tent was struck; in different directions the occupants ‘moved off,’ and Arcadia was no more.

CHAPTER XII
HOW THE POOR LIVE—AND DIE

One hot afternoon in July, in the hottest year of recent times, a man of about thirty-five years of age sat on a chair outside a very poor house in a very mean street of Hackney Wick. There was not a breath of air stirring, and, though the sun shone brilliantly, and the street was redolent with unsavoury smells, the poor fellow found the rays of the sun and the smells of the street preferable to the insufferably close atmosphere of the very little room—first floor back—in which he had lived for the last eighteen months. I had just come from a room where misery, poverty, and marvellous heroism had been strikingly illustrated. I neither saw the man nor smelt the unsavoury odours, for I was thinking of what I had seen, when I heard a faint but choking cough—one that told its story. I looked and stopped, and found myself face to face with the man on the chair.

His high cheek-bones, his hollow cheeks, and emaciated body and limbs told me that not much longer would he gasp for air in that unclean street, or lie waiting for death in his very, very small room. ‘You are very ill,’ I said, and he nodded his head. ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Consumption, but it is nearly all over.’ ‘Would you not be more comfortable in a hospital?’ ‘I have been in the Chest Hospital, but there is no hope.’ On further inquiry, I found that he was a single man, had no relations who knew or cared about him, and that he had come from the hospital to live with strangers, hoping that his time would be short. ‘But how do you manage to live?’ I asked. ‘Ah, sir,’ he said, ‘it is a race, and I don’t know which will be gone first—my money or my life. I knew years ago what was the matter with me, and I have been very careful and saving, and I did hope that I should leave enough to pay for my funeral.’ I got him some cooling drink, and told him that I would call and see him the following Tuesday, when I should again be in his neighbourhood.

I called on the appointed day, but his chair was not at the door, for he lay in his little room. When I went in he gave me his poor thin hand, saying: ‘I am glad you have come.’ I told him that if it gave him the least pleasure I would call every Tuesday afternoon. He looked at me and said: ‘I am glad, because you have kept your word.’ There was sad suggestiveness and deep pathos in his words and look. I had no need to inquire what he meant, for they told of promises lightly made and wickedly forgotten, of hopes raised never to be realized. After sponging his forehead with a little toilet vinegar, and putting a handful of flowers where he could fondle them, and a little fruit where he could reach it, I left him. Week by week I called upon him as he lay there waiting for the end in his stuffy little room. All the night long he lay alone, a very small, evil-smelling lamp for his companion; but night brought no relief, no welcome coolness, and all the night long, he told me, he lay and wished to God it were morning. But the morning and the brightness of the sun brought no welcome change, so during the day he lay and wished for the cool of the evening, for to sleep he had become a stranger. One day I called, and he was in great pain; he could not keep still, yet he had not strength to move. I wanted to soothe him, but I did not know how, so I said to him: ‘How can I help you?’ With his burning eyes he looked at me and said: ‘Ask God to let me sleep—if I could, I might be easier—or die.’ I knelt down by his bedside, and taking his poor hands into mine, I prayed that sleep might come upon him; and then, silent and still, I knelt there hand in hand with him for some minutes, and lo! ‘He gave His beloved sleep.’ Quietly withdrawing my hands, I left him peacefully sleeping, and took my last look at him, for I never saw him again.

It was now well into August, and I had to leave London for a few weeks. The first day of my return I went to see him, but his final sleep had come, for he was dead and buried. On inquiry, the landlady told me that he had given her, just before he died, enough money to pay for his funeral; so the race had been run and the pauper’s funeral had been avoided. She gave me a scrap of paper with some writing on it in pencil—I have it by me now. I never knew his name, he never knew mine—what did they matter? But this is what the paper says: ‘Tell the kind gentleman I am not ungrateful; I hope he will forgive me, for I think God will. I cannot bear it any longer and am going to end it. He will not see me again.’ I was told that after my last visit he again became sleepless, and that one day he got up and put on his clothes and wandered tremblingly into the street, making, as it seemed, for a canal close by. He told no one his errand; slowly, step by step, he went, till his weakened limbs could carry him no farther, for he fell exhausted close to the canal, but closer still to death; for he was carried to his little room, and God had mercy upon him. He left no debts unpaid; the rent of his little room had been discharged, all his landlady’s claims had been satisfied, and his account balanced—no assets, no liabilities.

And the simple annals of the poor in the sordid misery and dirt of our slums furnish many an instance of stern independence and unfailing industry. But heroes are of no sex, and so I want to tell the story of the poor widow who lived but six doors from my unnamed friend. I had been visiting her when I came in contact with him. I met her at the police court; she had been dragged from the Lea and charged with attempted suicide. Her garments, few and old, clung to her like cerements. Her hollow cough told its tale, and her face spoke of a pathetic hopelessness. She was a match-box maker, and, as I said, a widow. Her husband had been a wood-carver and a worker in the Ragged School. It was the fourth anniversary of his death. ‘Promise me, Mary,’ he had said, just before his death, ‘that you will not let the children go into the workhouse.’ She had willingly promised, and to her that promise was sacred. But it cost something to keep it.