The Uncommercial Traveller

by Dickens, Charles

  has no business, and why she performs them, Heaven only knows! At

  length she is seen plunging within a cable's length of our port

  broadside, and is being roared at through our speaking-trumpets to

  do this thing, and not to do that, and to stand by the other, as if

  she were a very demented tender indeed. Then, we slackening amidst

  a deafening roar of steam, this much-abused tender is made fast to

  us by hawsers, and the men in readiness carry the bags aboard, and

  return for more, bending under their burdens, and looking just like

  the pasteboard figures of the miller and his men in the theatre of

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  our boyhood, and comporting themselves almost as unsteadily. All

  the while the unfortunate tender plunges high and low, and is

  roared at. Then the Queenstown passengers are put on board of her,

  with infinite plunging and roaring, and the tender gets heaved up

  on the sea to that surprising extent that she looks within an ace

  of washing aboard of us, high and dry. Roared at with contumely to

  the last, this wretched tender is at length let go, with a final

  plunge of great ignominy, and falls spinning into our wake.

  The voice of conscience resumed its dominion as the day climbed up

  the sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port; kept by us as

  we passed other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast,

  where some of the officers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone

  ashore in sailing-ships in fogs (and of which by that token they

  seemed to have quite an affectionate remembrance), and past the

  Welsh coast, and past the Cheshire coast, and past everything and

  everywhere lying between our ship and her own special dock in the

  Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of the clock, on a fair

  evening early in May, we stopped, and the voice ceased. A very

  curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stopped, ensued

  upon that silence; and it was with a no less curious sensation that

  I went over the side of the good Cunard ship 'Russia' (whom

  prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer

  hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So,

  perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that

  held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy derived this

  similitude.

  CHAPTER XXXII - A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST

  I had been looking, yesternight, through the famous 'Dance of

  Death,' and to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with the

  new significance of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the

  original. The weird skeleton rattled along the streets before me,

  and struck fiercely; but it was never at the pains of assuming a

  disguise. It played on no dulcimer here, was crowned with no

  flowers, waved no plume, minced in no flowing robe or train, lifted

  no wine-cup, sat at no feast, cast no dice, counted no gold. It

  was simply a bare, gaunt, famished skeleton, slaying his way along.

  The borders of Ratcliff and Stepney, eastward of London, and giving

  on the impure river, were the scene of this uncompromising dance of

  death, upon a drizzling November day. A squalid maze of streets,

  courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms. A

  wilderness of dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, chiefly

  inhabited by a tribe from whom employment has departed, or to whom

  it comes but fitfully and rarely. They are not skilled mechanics

  in any wise. They are but labourers, - dock-labourers, water-side

  labourers, coal-porters, ballast-heavers, such-like hewers of wood

  and drawers of water. But they have come into existence, and they

  propagate their wretched race.

  One grisly joke alone, methought, the skeleton seemed to play off

  here. It had stuck election-bills on the walls, which the wind and

  rain had deteriorated into suitable rags. It had even summed up

  the state of the poll, in chalk, on the shutters of one ruined

  house. It adjured the free and independent starvers to vote for

  Thisman and vote for Thatman; not to plump, as they valued the

  state of parties and the national prosperity (both of great

  importance to them, I think); but, by returning Thisman and

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  Thatman, each naught without the other, to compound a glorious and

  immortal whole. Surely the skeleton is nowhere more cruelly

  ironical in the original monkish idea!

  Pondering in my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and Thatman,

  and of the public blessing called Party, for staying the

  degeneracy, physical and moral, of many thousands (who shall say

  how many?) of the English race; for devising employment useful to

  the community for those who want but to work and live; for

  equalising rates, cultivating waste lands, facilitating emigration,

  and, above all things, saving and utilising the oncoming

  generations, and thereby changing ever-growing national weakness

  into strength: pondering in my mind, I say, these hopeful

  exertions, I turned down a narrow street to look into a house or

  two.

  It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all the

  outer doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry, and

  knocked at a parlour-door. Might I come in? I might, if I plased,

  sur.

  The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips of

  wood, about some wharf or barge; and they had just now been thrust

  into the otherwise empty grate to make two iron pots boil. There

  was some fish in one, and there were some potatoes in the other.

  The flare of the burning wood enabled me to see a table, and a

  broken chair or so, and some old cheap crockery ornaments about the

  chimney-piece. It was not until I had spoken with the woman a few

  minutes, that I saw a horrible brown heap on the floor in a corner,

  which, but for previous experience in this dismal wise, I might not

  have suspected to be 'the bed.' There was something thrown upon

  it; and I asked what that was.

  ''Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur; and 'tis very bad she

  is, and 'tis very bad she's been this long time, and 'tis better

  she'll never be, and 'tis slape she does all day, and 'tis wake she

  does all night, and 'tis the lead, sur.'

  'The what?'

  'The lead, sur. Sure 'tis the lead-mills, where the women gets

  took on at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application

  early enough, and is lucky and wanted; and 'tis lead-pisoned she

  is, sur, and some of them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them

  gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many, niver; and 'tis

  all according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is

  strong, and some is weak; and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned,

  bad as can be, sur; and her brain is coming out at her ear, and it

  hurts her dreadful; and that's what it is, and niver no more, and

  niver no less, sur.'

  The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took

  a bandage from her head, and threw open a ba
ck door to let in the

  daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I

  ever saw.

  'That's what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned; and it cooms

  from her night and day, the poor, sick craythur; and the pain of it

  is dreadful; and God he knows that my husband has walked the

  sthreets these four days, being a labourer, and is walking them

  now, and is ready to work, and no work for him, and no fire and no

  food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shillings in a

  fortnight; God be good to us! and it is poor we are, and dark it is

  and could it is indeed.'

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  Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my selfdenial,

  if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in

  the course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may

  state at once that my closest observation could not detect any

  indication whatever of an expectation that I would give money:

  they were grateful to be talked to about their miserable affairs,

  and sympathy was plainly a comfort to them; but they neither asked

  for money in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or

  disappointment or resentment at my giving none.

  The woman's married daughter had by this time come down from her

  room on the floor above, to join in the conversation. She herself

  had been to the lead-mills very early that morning to be 'took on,'

  but had not succeeded. She had four children; and her husband,

  also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no

  better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, and

  by nature, of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress

  and in her mother's there was an effort to keep up some appearance

  of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the unfortunate

  invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms

  came on, and how they grew, - having often seen them. The very

  smell when you stood inside the door of the works was enough to

  knock you down, she said: yet she was going back again to get

  'took on.' What could she do? Better be ulcerated and paralysed

  for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the children

  starve.

  A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door

  and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleepingplace

  of the sick young woman. But the nights being now wintry,

  and the blankets and coverlets 'gone to the leaving shop,' she lay

  all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The woman of

  the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and two others,

  lay on the one brown heap together for warmth.

  'God bless you, sir, and thank you!' were the parting words from

  these people, - gratefully spoken too, - with which I left this

  place.

  Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another

  ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four

  children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their

  dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty

  cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent

  bedstead in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man

  did not rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly

  inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my

  inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said,

  'Certainly.' There being a window at each end of this room, back

  and front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight,

  to keep the cold out, and was very sickening.

  The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her

  husband's elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon

  appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of

  about thirty.

  'What was he by trade?'

  'Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?'

  'I am a boilermaker;' looking about him with an exceedingly

  perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.

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  'He ain't a mechanic, you understand, sir,' the wife put in: 'he's

  only a labourer.'

  'Are you in work?'

  He looked up at his wife again. 'Gentleman says are you in work,

  John?'

  'In work!' cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his

  wife, and then working his vision's way very slowly round to me:

  'Lord, no!'

  'Ah, he ain't indeed!' said the poor woman, shaking her head, as

  she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.

  'Work!' said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler,

  first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features

  of his second son at his knee: 'I wish I WAS in work! I haven't

  had more than a day's work to do this three weeks.'

  'How have you lived?'

  A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be

  boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his threadbare

  canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, 'On the work of

  the wife.'

  I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it

  had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head,

  coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming

  back.

  The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did

  slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in

  hand, and spread it out upon the bed, - the only piece of furniture

  in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she

  made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine.

  According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her

  trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence halfpenny,

  and she could make one in something less than two days.

  But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it

  didn't come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come

  through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand

  took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money

  enough to pay the security deposit, - call it two pound, - she

  could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not

  have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second

  hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to

  tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great

  intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or

  murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband's side

  at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as

  the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups,

  and what not other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was in

  dress, and toning done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of

  nutriment and washing, - there was positively a dignity in her, as

  the family anchor just holding the poor ship-wrecked boilermaker's

  bark. When I left the room, the boiler-maker
's eyes were slowly

  turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that

  vanished boiler lay in her direction.

  These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that

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  was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.

  Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor.

  The woman apologised for its being in 'an untidy mess.' The day

  was Saturday, and she was boiling the children's clothes in a

  saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she

  could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or

  bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken

  bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. The last

  small scraping of coals left was raked together in a corner of the

  floor. There were some rags in an open cupboard, also on the

  floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old French bed-stead,

  with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot jacket, and

  rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black. It was

  difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured

  black, the walls were so begrimed.

  As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children's clothes, - she

  had not even a piece of soap to wash them with, - and apologising

  for her occupation, I could take in all these things without

  appearing to notice them, and could even correct my inventory. I

  had missed, at the first glance, some half a pound of bread in the

  otherwise empty safe, an old red ragged crinoline hanging on the

  handle of the door by which I had entered, and certain fragments of

  rusty iron scattered on the floor, which looked like broken tools

  and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood looking on. On the box

  nearest to the fire sat two younger children; one a delicate and

  pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed.

  This woman, like the last, was wofully shabby, and was degenerating

  to the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the ghost of a

  certain vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple in her

  cheek, carried my memory strangely back to the old days of the

  Adelphi Theatre, London, when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend of

  Victorine.

  'May I ask you what your husband is?'

  'He's a coal-porter, sir,' - with a glance and a sigh towards the