The old-age pensioner
: "Jest you try it on, you--!
I'm thirty year older'n you, but it wouldn't take much to
make me give you one as'd knock you into a bucketful of
piss!"
The stevedore
: « Ah, an' then p'raps I wouldn't smash
you up after, you ole---!"
Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy,
trying to disregard the quarrel. The stevedore looked
sullen, but the old man was growing more and
more furious. He kept making little rushes at the other,
sticking out his face and screaming from a few inches
distant like a cat on a wall, and spitting. He was trying to
nerve himself to strike a blow, and not quite suc
ceeding. Finally he burst out:
"A--, that's what you are, a---! Take that
in your dirty gob and suck it, you--! By--, I'll
smash you afore I've done with you. A---, that's
what you are, a son of a --- whore. Lick that, you---!
That's what I think of you, you---, you---, you---
you BLACK BASTARD!"
Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his
face in his hands, and began crying. The other man seeing
that public feeling was against him, went out.
Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the
quarrel. It appeared that it was all about a shilling's worth
of food. In some way the old man had lost his store of
bread and margarine, and so would have nothing to eat
for the next three days, except what the others gave him
in charity. The stevedore, who was in work and well fed,
had taunted him; hence the quarrel.
When my money was down to one and fourpence I went
for a night to a lodging house in Bow, where the charge
was only eightpence. One went down an area and through
an alley-way into a deep, stifling cellar, ten feet square.
Ten men, navvies mostly, were sitting in the fierce glare
of the fire. It was midnight, but the deputy's son, a pale,
sticky child of five, was there playing on the navvies'
knees. An old Irishman was whistling to a blind bullfinch
in a tiny cage. There were other songbirds there-tiny,
faded things, that had lived all their lives underground.
The lodgers habitually made water in the fire, to save
going across a yard to the lavatory. As I sat at the table I
felt something stir near my feet, and, looking down, saw a
wave of black things moving slowly across the floor; they
were blackbeetles.
There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets,
marked in huge letters "Stolen from No.--- Road," smelt
loathsome. In the next bed to me lay a very old man, a
pavement artist, with some extraordinary curvature of the
spine that made him stick right out of bed, with his back a
foot or two from my face. It was bare, and marked with
curious swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. During the
night a man came in drunk and was sick on the floor,
close to my bed. There were bugs too-not so bad as in
Paris, but enough to keep one awake. It was a filthy place.
Yet the deputy and his wife were friendly people, and
ready to make one a cup of tea at any hour of the day or
night.
XXVI
IN the morning after paying for the usual tea-andtwo-
slices and buying half an ounce of tobacco, I had a
halfpenny left. I did not care to ask B. for more money
yet, so there was nothing for it but to go to a casual
ward. I had very little idea how to set about this, but I
knew that there was a casual ward at Romton, so I
walked out there, arriving at three or four in the after-
noon. Leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-
place was a wizened old Irishman, obviously a tramp. I
went and leaned beside him, and presently offered him
my tobacco-box. He opened the box and looked at the
tobacco in astonishment:
"By God," he said, "dere's sixpennorth o' good baccy
here! Where de hell d'you get hold o' dat? You ain't
been on de road long."
"What, don't you have tobacco on the road?" I said.
"Oh, we
has it. Look."
He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo
Cubes. In it were twenty or thirty cigarette ends, picked
up from the pavement. The Irishman said that he rarely
got any other tobacco; he added that, with care, one
could collect two ounces of tobacco a day on the
London pavements.
"D'you come out o' one o' de London spikes [casual
wards], eh?" he asked me.
I said yes, thinking this would make him accept me as a
fellow tramp, and asked him what the spike at Romton
was like. He said:
"Well, 'tis a cocoa spike. Dere's tay spikes, and cocoa
spikes, and skilly spikes. Dey don't give you skilly in
Romton, t'ank God-leastways, dey didn't de last time I
was here. I been up to York and round Wales since."
"What is skilly?" I said.
"Skilly? A can o' hot water wid some bloody oatmeal
at de bottom; dat's skilly. De skilly spikes is always de
worst."
We stayed talking for an hour or two. The Irishman was a
friendly old man, but he smelt very unpleasant, which was
not surprising when one learned how many diseases he
suffered from. It appeared (he described his symptoms
fully) that taking him from top to bottom he had the
following things wrong with him: on his crown, which
was bald, he had eczema; he was shortsighted, and had no
glasses; he had chronic bronchitis; he had some
undiagnosed pain in the back; he had dyspepsia; he had
urethritis; he had varicose veins, bunions and flat feet.
With this assemblage of diseases he had tramped the
roads for fifteen years.
At about five the Irishmen said, "Could you do wid e
cup o' tay? De spike don't open till six."
"I should think I could."
"Well, dere's a place here where dey gives you a free