You see just as the flunkey flunked on the chestnut burr, the fire cracker went off, and the man jumped up and said “’Ells-fire, h’am blowed,” and he had his hands on his pants, and the air was full of smoke, and dad got on his knees and said, “Now I lay me,” and Mr. Astor fainted all over a rocking chair and tipped beer bottles on the veranda and more than forty servants came, and I told dad to come on, and we got outside the gate, ahead of the police, and got a cab and drove quicker than scat to the hotel, and I ast dad what he thought it was that went off, and he said “You can search me,” but he said he had got enough of trying to reform escaped Americans, and we got in the hotel and laid low, and the newspapers told about a dynamite outrage, and laid it to anarchists. Well I must close, cause we are going to see the American minister and get a date to meet King’ Edward. We won’t do a thing to Edward.
Yours,
Hennery.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the Whitechapel District—He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower of London.
London, England.—
My Dear Chum: I received your letter yesterday, and it made me homesick. Gee, but if I could be home there with you and go down to the swimming hole and get in all over, and play tag in the sand, and tie some boy’s pants and shirt in knots, and yell that the police are coming, and all grab our clothes under our arms and run across lots with no clothes on, and get in a barn and put on our clothes, and dry our hair by pounding it with a stick, so we would not get licked when we got home, life would be worth living, but here all I do is to dodge people on the streets and see them look cross when they step on me.
Say, boy, you will never know your luck in being a citizen of good old America, instead of a subject of Great Britain, because you have got to be rich or be hungry here, and if you are too rich you have got no appetite. You have heard of the roast beef of old England, but nobody eats it but the dukes and bankers. The working men never even saw a picture of a roast beef, and yet we look upon all Englishmen as beef-eaters, but three-fourths of the people in this town look hungry and discouraged, and they never seem to know whether they are going to have any supper.
I went down to a market this morning where the middle class and the very poor people buy their supplies, and it would make you sick to see them. They buy small loaves of bread and a penny’s worth of tea, and that is breakfast, and if a man is working he takes some of the bread to work for lunch, and the wife or mother buys a carrot or a quarter of a cabbage, and maybe a bone with a piece of meat about as big as a fish bait, and that makes supper, with a growler of beer.
Say, the chunk of meat with a bone that an American butcher would throw at a dog that he had never been introduced to would be a banquet for a large family over here.
I have been down into the White Chapel district, which is the Five Points of London, and of the thousands of tough people I saw there was not a man but looked as though he would cut your liver out for a shilling, and every woman was drunk on gin. What there is about gin that makes it the national beverage for bad people beats me, for it looks like water, tastes like medicine and smells like cold storage eggs. At home when a person takes a drink of beer or whisky he at least looks happy for a minute, and maybe he laughs, but here nobody laughs unless somebody gets hurt, and that seems to tickle everybody in the White Chapel district.
The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge, as though they would like to wring a child’s neck or cut holes in the people they meet.
Two drinks of gin makes a man or woman look as though they had swallowed a buzz saw. I always thought drinking liquor made people think they were enjoying themselves, or that they took it to drive away care and make them forget their sorrows, but when these people drink gin they seem to do it the way an American drinks carbolic acid, to end the whole business quick.
At home the drinker drinks to make him feel like he was at a picnic. Here every drinker acts like a suicide, who only hopes that he may commit a murder before the gin ends his career. And there are hundreds of thousands of people in this town who have no ambition except to get a bit of bread to sustain them till they can get a drink of gin, and gradually they let up on bread entirely and feed on gin, and look like mad dogs and snarl at everybody they see, as much as to say: “What are you going to do about it?”
A good square American meal would give them a fit, and they would go to a hospital and die if the meal could not be got out of them.
Gosh, but I was glad to get out of the White Chapel district, and I kept looking back for fear one of the men or women would slit me up the back with a butcher knife, and laugh like an insane asylum inmate.
Do you know, those people who drink gin and go hungry are different from our American murderers. Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob you with a joke on their tongue’s end, and give you back car fare when they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner, but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty, and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has eaten a native of India.
You may think this letter is a solemn occasion because I tell you about things that are not funny, but if you ever traveled abroad you will find that there is no fun anywhere except in America unless you make it or buy it.
We are taking in the solemn things first in order to get dad’s mind in a condition so he can be cured of things he thinks ail him. I took dad to the Tower of London, and when we got out of it he wanted to have America interfere and have the confounded place burned down and grass sown on the site and a park made of it.
The tower covers 13 acres of ground, and there are more things brought to a visitor’s attention that ought to be forgotten than you ever thought about.
I remember attending the theater at home and seeing Richard the Third played, and I remember how my sympathies were aroused for the two little boy princes that were murdered by Richard the Third, but I thought it was a fake play, and that there was nothing true about it, but, by gosh, it was right here in the Tower of London that the old hump-backed cuss murdered those little princes, and dad and I stood right on the spot, and the beef-eater who showed us around told us all the particulars. Dad was indignant, and said to the beef-eater:
“Do you mean to tell me you stood around and let Richard kill those princes without uttering a protest or protecting them or ringing for the police? By the great hornspoon, you must have been accessory to the fact, and you ought to be arrested and hung,” and dad pounded his cane on the stone floor and looked savage.
The beef-eater got red in the face and said: “Begging your pardon, don’t you know, but h’l was not ‘ere at the time. This ‘istory was made six ‘undred years ago.”
Dad begged the man’s pardon and told him he supposed the boys were murdered a year or two ago, and he gave the beef-eater a dollar, and he was so gratified I think he would have had a murder committed for dad right there and then if dad had insisted on it.
You feel in going through the tower like you was in an American slaughter house, for it was here that kings and queens were beheaded by the dozen. They showed us axes that were used to behead people, and blocks that the heads of the victims were laid on, and the places where the heads fell on the floor. It seemed that in olden times when a king or
a queen got too gay, the anti-kings or queens would go to the palace and catch the king or queen in the act, and take them by the neck and hustle them to the tower, and when a king or queen got in the tower they went out on the installment plan, and after being thrown in the gutter for the mob to recognize, and walk on the bodies, they would bring them back in the tower, and seal them up in a pigeon hole for future generations to cry over.
All my life I have had in our house to look at a picture of beautiful Anne Boleyn, and here I stood right where her head was cut off, and I couldn’t help thinking of how we in America got our civilization from the descendants of the English people who cut her head off.
By ginger, old chum, it made me hot. I didn’t care to look at the old armor, or the crown jewels, which make you think of a cut glass factory, but I reveled in the scenes of the beheading. I never was stuck much on kings and queens, but it seems to me if they had to murder them they ought to have given ’em a show, and let them fight for their lives, instead of getting into a trap, like you would entice a rat with cheese, and then cut their heads off.
I suppose it is right here that we inherited the desire to lynch and burn at the stake the negroes that commit crime and won’t confess at home. When anything is born in the blood you can’t get rid of it without taking a dose of patriotism and purifying the blood, and I advise you never to visit the Tower of London, unless you want to feel like going out and killing some one that is tied up with a rope.
Hearing of these murders and seeing the place where they were committed does not give you an idea of fair play and you don’t feel like taking some one of your size when you fight, but you get to thinking that if you could catch a cripple who couldn’t defend himself you would like to take a baseball club and maul the stuffing out of him. You become imbued with the idea that if you went to war you would not want to stand up and fight fair, but that you would like to get your enemy in a bunch and drop dynamite down on him from a balloon, and kill all in sight, and sail away with an insane laugh.
Gee, but another day in this tower, and I would want to go home and murder ma, or the neighbors.
The only thing we have got in America that compares with the Tower of London and its associates is the Leutgert sausage factory in Chicago, where Leutgert got his wife into the factory, murdered her, and is alleged to have cut her up in pieces and made sausage of the meat, given the pieces with gristle in to his dogs, boiled the bones until they would run into the sewer, dissolved the remnants in concentrated lye, and sold the sausage to the lumber Jacks in the pine woods.
I expect Chicago will buy that sausage factory and make a show of it, as London does the tower, and you can go and see it, and feel that you are as full of modern history as I am of ancient history, here in London.
I could see that dad was getting nervous every time a new beheading was described to us, and I thought it was time to wake him up. In going through the room where the old armor was displayed the beef eater told us who wore the different pieces of armor, and he said at times the spirit of the dead came back to the tower and occupied the armor, and I noticed that dad shied at some of the pieces of armor, so when we got right into the midst of it, and there was armor on every side, and dad and the beef eater were ahead of me, and dad was walking fast in order to get out quick, I pushed over one of the pieces, and it went crashing to the floor and the noise was like a boiler factory exploding, and the dust of centuries rose up, and the noise echoed down the halls.
Well, you’d a died to see dad and the beef eater. Dad turned pale and got down on his knees, and I think he began to pray, if he knows how, and he trembled like a leaf, and the beef eater got behind a set of armor that Cromwell or some old duck used to wear, and said, “Wot in the bloody ‘ell is the matter with the h’armor?” and then a lot of other beef eaters came, and they thought dad was the spirit of King John, and they stampeded, and finally I got dad to stop praying, or whatever it was that he was doing, and I led him out, and when he got into the open air he recovered and said. “’Ennery, ‘hi have got to get out of Lunnon, don’t you know, because me ‘eart is palpitating,” and we went back to the ‘otel, to see if our invitation to visit King Hedward had arrived.
Say, we are getting so we talk just like English coachmen, and you won’t hundredstand us when we get ‘ome. Yours, with a haccent.
’Ennery.
CHAPTER IX.
The Bad Boy and His Dad Call on King Edward and Almost Settle the Irish Question.
London, England.—
Dear Uncle Ezra: The worst is over, and dad and I have both touched a king. Not the way you think, touching a king for a hand-out, or borrowing his loose change, the way you used to touch dad when you had to pay for your goods, but just taking hold of his hand and shaking it in good old United States fashion.
The American minister arranged it for us. He told somebody that Peck’s Bad Boy and his dad were in town, and just wanted to size up a king and see how he averaged up with United States politicians, and the king set an hour for us to call.
Well, you’d a dide to see dad fix up. Everybody said, when we showed our card at the hotel, notifying us that we were expected at Marlboro House at such a time, that we would be expected to put on plenty of dog. That is what an American from Kalamazoo, who sells breakfast food, said, and the hotel people said we would be obliged to wear knee breeches and dancing pumps and silk socks, and all that kind of rot, and men’s furnishers began to call upon us to take our measure for clothes, but when they told us how much it would cost, dad kicked. He said he had a golf suit he had made in Oshkosh at the time of the tournament, that every one in Oshkosh said was out of sight, and was good enough for any king, and so he rigged up in it, and I hired a suit at a masquerade place, and dad hired a coat, kind of red, to go with his golf pants and socks, and he wore canvas tennis shoes.
I looked like a picture out of a fourteenth century book, but dad looked like a clown in a circus. One of dad’s calves made him look as though he had a milk leg, cause the padding would not stay around where the calf ought to be, but worked around towards his shin. We went to Marlboro House in a hansom cab, and all the way there the driver kept looking down from the hurricane deck, through the scuttle hole, to see if we were there yet, and he must have talked with other cab drivers in sign language about us, for every driver kept along with us, looked at us and laughed, as though we were a wild west show.
On the way to the king’s residence it was all I could do to keep dad braced up to go through the ordeal. He was brave enough before we got the invitation, and told what he was going to say to the king, and you would think he wasn’t afraid of anybody, but when we got nearer to the house and dad thought of going up to the throne and seeing a king in all his glory, surrounded by his hundreds of lords and dukes and things, a crown on his head, and an ermine cloak trimmed with red velvet, and a six-quart milk pan full of diamonds, some of them as big as a chunk of alum, dad weakened, and wanted to give the whole thing up and go to a matinee, but I wouldn’t have it, and told him if he didn’t get into the king row now that I would shake him right there in London and start in business as a Claude Duval highwayman and hold up stage coaches, and be hung on Tyburn Tree, as I used to read about in my history of Sixteen-String Jack and other English highwaymen. Dad didn’t want to see the family disgraced, so he let the cabman drive on, but he said if we got out of this visit to royalty alive, it was the last tommyrot he would indulge in.
Well, old man, it is like having an operation for appendicitis, you feel better when you come out from under the influence of the chloroform and the doctor shows you what they took out of you, and you feel that you are going to live, unless you grow another vermiform appendix. We were driven into a sort of Central park, and up to a building that was big as a lot of exposition buildings, and the servants took us in charge and walked us through long rooms covered with pictures as big as side show pictures at a circus, but instead of snake charmers and snakes and wild men of Borneo and sword swall
owers, the king’s pictures were about war, and women without much clothes on from the belt up. Gosh, but some of those pictures made you think you could hear the roar of battle and smell gun powder, and dad acted as though he wanted to git right down on the marble floor and dig a rifle pit big enough to git into.
They walked us around like they do when you are being initiated into a secret society, only they didn’t sing, “Here comes the Lobster,” and hit you with a dried bladder. The servants that were conducting us laffed. I had never seen an Englishman laff before, and it was the most interesting thing I saw in London. Most Englishmen look sorry about something, as though some dear friend died every day, and their faces seem to have grown that way. So when they laff it seems as though the wrinkles would stay there, unless they treated their faces with massage. They were laughing at dad’s dislocated calf, and his scared appearance, as though he was going to receive the thirty-second degree, and didn’t know whether they were going to throw him over a precipice or pull him up to the roof by the hind legs. We passed a big hall clock, and it struck just when we were near it, and of all the “Hark, from the tombs” sounds I ever heard, that clock took the cake. Dad thought it sounded like a death knell, and he would have welcomed the turning in of a fire alarm as a sound that meant life everlasting, beside that doleful sound.
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