his hand.
"Want a kip? That'll be a 'og, guv'nor."
I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety
unlighted staircase to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek of
paregoric and foul linen; the windows seemed to be tight
shut, and the air was almost suffocating at first. There
was a candle burning, and I saw that the room measured
fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it.
Already six lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with
all their own clothes, even their boots, piled on top of
them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome manner in
one corner.
When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a
board, and as for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder
like a block of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on
a table, because the bed was not six feet long, and very
narrow, and the mattress was convex, so that one had to
hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly
of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose. Also,
the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a cotton
counterpane, so that though stuffy it was none too warm.
Several noises recurred throughout the night. About once
in an hour the man on my left a sailor, I think-woke up,
swore vilely, and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim
of a bladder disease, got up and noisily used his chamber-pot
half a dozen times during the night. The man in the corner
had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly
that one came to listen for it as one listens for the next
yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably
repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the
man's bowels were being churned up within him. Once when he
struck a match I saw that he was a very old man, with a grey,
sunken face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing his
trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing
which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every
time he coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice
from one of the other beds cried out:
"Shut up! Oh, for Christ's ------
sake shut up!"
I had about an hour's sleep in all. In the morning I was
woken by a dim impression of some large brown thing
coming towards me. I opened my eyes and saw that it was
one of the sailor's feet, sticking out of bed close to my
face. It was dark brown, quite dark brown like an Indian's,
with dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three
weeks from the wash, were almost raw umber colour. I got
up, dressed and went downstairs. In the cellar were a row
of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a piece of
soap in my pocket, and I was going to wash, when I
noticed that every basin was streaked with grime-solid,
sticky filth as black as boot-blacking. I went out
unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house had not come up
to its description as cheap and clean. It was however, as I
found later, a fairly representative lodging-house.
I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward,
finally going into a coffeeshop on Tower Hill. Anfinally
going into a coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An
ordinary London coffee-shop, like a thousand others, it
seemed queer and foreign after Paris. It was a little stuffy
room with the high-backed pews that were fashionable in
the 'forties, the day's menu written on a mirror with a
piece of soap, and a girl of fourteen handling the dishes.
Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and
drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china tumblers.
In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate,
was guiltily wolfing bacon.
"Could I have some tea and bread and butter?" I said to
the girl.
She stared. "No butter, only marg," she said, surprised.
And she repeated the order in the phrase that is to London
what the eternal
coup de rouge is to Paris: "Large tea and
two slices!"
On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying
"Pocketing the sugar not allowed," and beneath it some
poetic customer had written:
He that takes away the sugar,
Shall be called a dirty---
but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last
word. This was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost
threepence halfpenny, leaving me with eight and
twopence.
XXV
THE eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After
my bad experience in the Waterloo Road'. I moved
eastward, and spent the next night in a lodginghouse in
Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores
of others in London. It had accommo-
1 It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much commoner in
south than north London. For some reason they have not yet crossed the
river in any great numbers
.
dation for between fifty and a hundred men, and was
managed by a "deputy"-a deputy for the owner, that is, for
these lodging-houses are profitable concerns and are
owned by rich men. We slept fifteen or twenty in a
dormitory; the beds were again cold and hard, but the
sheets were not more than a week from the wash, which
was an improvement. The charge was ninepence or a
shilling (in the shilling dormitory the beds were six feet
apart instead of four) and the terms were cash down by
seven in the evening or out you went.
Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers,
with free firing and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-basins,
and toasting-forks. There were two great, clinker fires,
which were kept burning day and night the year through.
The work of tending the fires, sweeping the kitchen and
making the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One
senior lodger, a fine Norman-looking stevedore named
Steve, was known as "head of the house," and was arbiter
of disputes and unpaid chuckerout.
I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep
underground, very hot and drowsy with coke fumes, and