I ventured as respectfully as I could to protest. I represented that it was hardly just to punish a man for not performing a heavy physical task whilst admitting in the very terms of the sentence that he was unfit to do it. The answer was, "Right about face, march!" I went to cells. I had my hair cut, and I spent thirty-six delirious hours alone. At the end of that time my condition was reported and I was removed; but from that hour I was sullen and rebellious, and whatever spirit of order and discipline might have lived in me until then vanished completely.
Only four years ago, on a very memorable occasion in my life, I sat side by side with one of my old officers. He a.s.sured me, with every appearance of gravity, that if I had stayed much longer I should have disintegrated the regiment. I was sure, on the other hand, that the regiment would have disintegrated me; and though I was smart enough and willing enough to have made a good soldier at the beginning, I was too angry at stupidity and injustice to care to please anybody any longer.
I knew one man who, having been gently nurtured, found himself suddenly thrown upon his own resources. He enlisted with a full determination to rise. When I last heard of him, years ago, he held brevet rank in another regiment; but I know what slights he endured, to what numberless insults he submitted, and how harsh and cruel the pathway to success was made for him at the beginning. They tell me things are better now, and I hope with all my heart they may be. As I knew the ranks they were made well-nigh intolerable for any well-educated youngster who showed a disposition to get on.
V
Thousands of people remember the excitement created five or six years ago by the story of the Missing Journalist. Scores still cherish the memory of poor MacNeill and think of him as amongst the cheeriest, friendliest, and most helpful of men. He was a delightful fellow and a good fellow; but he had a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and blameless life.
He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone.
He was unusually radiant and a.s.sured, and "At last, at last," he said, "I"ve got my foot on the neck of this big London!" The triumphant phrase set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money to back him, and no reputation to begin with.
I came to London just after the opening of the Parliamentary session of 1872, at a time when every nook and corner of the journalistic work-room was filled, and when the doors were besieged, as they always are at such a season, by scores of outsiders eager for a turn at the good things going. I forget now precisely how it came about, but I went to live at a frowsy caravanserai in Bouverie Street, an astonishingly dirty and disreputable hotel called the "Suss.e.x." It is down now, and its site is occupied by the extended offices of the _Daily News_; but in its day it was the home of as much shabby gentility as could be found under any one roof in London. Beds were to be had there at threepence and sixpence.
I remember no arrangement for meals, and certainly never troubled the establishment in that way myself. The linen had a look of having been washed in pea-soup and dried in a chimney, and the whole aspect of the house and its _clientele_ was wo-begone and neglected to the last extreme. Paper and pen and ink are cheap enough, and I used to sit all day long in my bedroom, fireless in the winter weather, wrapped up in an ulster and with a counterpane about my knees, writing for bare life.
I wrote verses grave and gay, special articles, leading articles, and leaderettes. These were delivered at all manner of likely and unlikely places, and came back again, like the curses and the chickens and the bad penny in the proverbs.
I lived for weeks on hard-rinded rolls and thick chocolate, procured at an Italian restaurant on the opposite side of Fleet Street, and found myself admirably healthy on that simple diet. I wrote now and then to friends in the country, disguising my estate, and telling them what I was working at without hinting what became of the work when it was finished. One of my correspondents remonstrated with me for taking up my quarters in a hotel in that part of London, and advised me to try cheaper lodgings. Until I had something regular to rely upon, I was told, it was absurd to launch into an extravagance of that sort. I have often had to think how many hundreds of men, better equipped for the intellectual arena than I was, as plucky, as determined, and as full of hope, have gone down in the lonely and bitter sea of poverty in which I floated in those days. My breakfast expenditure of threepence, with a halfpenny to the waiter, secured me a look at the daily papers, and every morning I went back to that beastly bedroom to write at my dressing-table in denunciation of the Ministry, or to hold up to public contumely some unpaid justice of the peace who had given a hungry labourer six months for stealing twopenny-worth of turnips. I redressed countless wrongs on paper in that draughty garret; but nothing came of it There is no use in being too minute in narrating the history of that time. It was bad enough to begin with, and grew at last to be about as bad as it could be. That obliging uncle, who becomes your aunt when you cross the Channel, was useful for a time. But at last there was nothing more for him to take or for me to offer, and I was alone in London with a vengeance.
Thousands of well-to-do people endure privation and discomfort every year for the pure pleasure of it. In my campaigning days I lived on black bread and onions and dirty water for seven weeks, and topped up that agreeable record with four days" absolute starvation, But I had a pocketful of money, though there was nothing to be bought with it, and I had staunch comrades, and we were marching on with the certainty of plenty before us. It was all endured easily enough, and now and then there were outbursts of rollicking jocundity in spite of it The mere physical suffering of privation is not a thousandth part of its pain.
The sense of loneliness, of defeat, of unmerited neglect; the blind rebellion against the inequality with which the world"s chances are distributed; the impotent sense of power which finds no outlet--these are the things which make poverty bitter. But there was nothing else for it, and I took up _la vie en plein air_.
My favourite chamber in the Hotel of the Beautiful Star during the hours of darkness was the Thames Embankment. I have pa.s.sed many years in London since then, and must have heard the boom of Big Ben and the monotonous musical chime which precedes it many thousands of times. They have rarely greeted a conscious ear without bringing back a memory of the stealing river (all dull shine and deep shadow), the lights on the spanning bridges, the dim murmur of distant traffic, the shot-tower glooming up against the sky, the bude-light flaring from the tower of the Palace of Parliament, the sordid homeless folks huddled together on the benches, the solemn tramp of the peeler, and the flash of the bullseye light that awoke the chilled and stiffened sleepers. There is a certain odour of Thames Embankment which I should recognise anywhere. I have encountered it often, and it brings back the scene as suddenly and as vividly as the chimes themselves.
There is plenty of elbow-room in the Hotel de la Belle Etoile, and there is water enough; but in other respects the provision it offers is scanty and comfortless. I spent four days and nights in it, and was on the borders of despair, when what looked like a mere chance saved me.
Suppose I had not walked down Fleet Street; suppose I had not stopped to look at the little cork b.a.l.l.s in Lips...o...b.."s window, so mournfully emblematic of my own condition; suppose that the unsuspected good-hearted friend had not come by and clapped me on the shoulder, what would have happened? _Quien sabe?_ These are the narrow chances of life which give one pause sometimes. He came, however, the unsuspected helpful friend.
It was John Lovel, then manager of the Press a.s.sociation. I have since had reason to believe that he deliberately deceived me from the first moment of our encounter, and that later in the day he was guilty of a plagiarism. If deceit were always as kindly and guileless, lying would grow to be the chief of human virtues; and if plagiarism always covered a jest so generous, the plagiarist would be amongst the most popular men alive.
Was I busy? he asked. Was I too busy to undertake for him a very pressing piece of work he had on hand? I made an effort not to seem quite overborne, and told him that I was entirely at his service. He said (I suppose it was the first thing he could think of) that to-morrow was the anniversary of the birthday of Christopher Columbus. He wanted an article about that event for a country paper and had no time to write it He wanted no dates, no historic facts, but simply--"a good, rattling, tarry-breeches, sea-salt column." The pay was a couple of guineas; and if I could so far oblige him as to let him have the article that morning, he could make it money down.
I wrote the article in the reporters" room at the P.A. and sent it in to the chief. In return I received a pill-box, on the top of which was written, "The prescription to be taken immediately." I found within the pillbox two sovereigns and two shillings wrapped in cotton-wool, and I went my way to a square meal with the first money I had ever earned in London. I found out afterwards that the date was nowhere near that of Christopher Columbus"s birthday; and, so far as I know, the article I had written was never used. I was telling the story years afterwards, and somebody informed me that the prescription on top of the pill-box was Thackeray"s. I was quite content to discover that, and I don"t think poor Lovel would have minded it either. He paid the debt of nature some time ago, and when he left this world had the memory of more than one good deed to sweeten his parting moments.
I went back to that gruesome hostelry and wrote an article on "Impecunious Life in London." It appeared in the _Gentleman"s Magazine_, then published by Messrs. Grant & Co. and under the editorship of my old friend Richard Gowing. The article was not far from being autobiographical. I think--but I am not quite sure--that I got sixteen guineas for it. I know that it set me on my feet, and that since then any acquaintance I may have had with the Thames Embankment has been purely voluntary.
Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows; and I made one or two queer acquaintances on the Thames Embankment and acquired a taste for vagabondising about among the poor which lasted a year or two and has proved to be of no small service since. Slumming had not become a fashion at that time of day; but I have never aimed at being in the fashion, and I did a good deal of it. Through Archibald Forbes"s kind offices, I found an introduction to the _World_ journal, and, at Edmund Yates"s instigation, wrote a series of articles therein under the t.i.tle of "Our Civilisation," picking up all the quaint and picturesque odds and ends of humanity I could find in London.
I met many people whom it was very difficult to describe and impossible to caricature. Amongst them was a street artist who lived in Gee"s Court, off Oxford Street--a worthless, drunken, and pretentious scoundrel, who seriously believed himself to be the most neglected man of genius in London. I employed him to repeat what he called his _chief de hover_ on cardboard, and paid him half a crown for it. He called this work "The Guard Ship Attacked." It represented a Dead Sea of Reckitt"s Blue with two impossible ships wedged tightly into it, each broadside on to the spectator. From the port-holes of each issued little streaks of vermilion, and puffs of smoke like pills. The artist gloated over this work, and was ready to resent criticism of it like another Pietro Vanucci. He told me he was unappreciated; that he was a man of the supremest talent, and was kept out of the great theatres, where he could have shone as a scene-painter, by nothing but the pettiest and shabbiest jealousies. I don"t know where he had picked up the phrase, but he had something to say about the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, and he returned to it fondly as long as I would allow him to talk to me. His artistic labours and his art invention were dissipating the grey matter of _his_ brain. All he asked for was a fair field and no favour.
If I would give him three pound ten he could buy an easel, a canvas, and a set of painting tools, and would at once proceed to show the Royal Academy what was what I was well to do by this time, but yet not quite wealthy enough to venture on such an experiment. The most amusing thing this vagabond said was when he found in my room the painting materials and sketches of an artistic friend of mine with whom I was chumming at the time. His nose wrinkled with an infinite disdain as he turned the sketches over, and he said, with a delightful air of patronage, "I see, I see. A brother of the brush." He brought with him on his journey from Gee"s Court to the north of London an incredible ghoul of a man, a creature whose face was m.u.f.fled in a huge beard alive with vermin. He, it seemed, was another neglected man of genius; but I declined to be introduced to him. I looked up the artist"s address, however, and got to know his neighbourhood pretty well. Boulter"s Rents, in my first novel, "A Life"s Atonement," were drawn from Gee"s Court.
I thought the picture rather like at the time, within limits; but I never had the heart--or the stomach--to be a realist. Feebly as I dared to paint it, I had to re-form it in fancy before the book was finished.
The original horror stands there, pretty much unreformed; though I dare say its walls get a coat or two more whitewash than they did when I was intimate with them.
I have kept for this place in a rambling record a story which might have been told in my last paper. When I left the barracks of Ballincollig and said good-bye to her Majesty"s service, I had an encounter with one of my non-commissioned enemies. I had my leave of absence in my pocket, and my discharge was to follow me by post I was in civilian dress and was smoking a cigar at the barrack gates. My enemy saluted before he had had time to recognise me, and then, seeing to whom he had done this homage, stood abashed at himself for a minute and then exploded. He could think of nothing better to say than to order me to put out my cigar. I refused to obey, for I was yards beyond the magazine limit, within which it was, of course, forbidden to smoke, and I gave that sergeant a piece of my mind. One is a good deal more vehement at nineteen than one grows to be when creeping on towards the fifties, and I made my sergeant a dreadful promise. I told him that he had acted like an unmitigated brute to me, and I undertook, if ever I should meet him in civil life, to inflict upon him a chastis.e.m.e.nt which should repay us both amply. I never met him again for thirteen years, and I was slumming when I ran against him.
He was acting as commissionaire at a big manufacturing place in the East End, and when I accosted him he had no idea of my ident.i.ty. I wore a beard and had taken to wearing spectacles, and, if ever I had looked warlike, had lost that aspect long ago. I asked him if he were Sergeant ----. He admitted that at once. He had served in the Fourth Royal Irish?
"Seventeen years, sir; but I don"t remember you."
He had been quartered at Cahir, I reminded him, in the year "65, and in "66 at Ballincollig. He admitted that quite willingly and seemed interested. Did he remember a recruit who was nicknamed "Oxford?" He thought he remembered that recruit, and paled visibly. He was not the stalwart fellow he had been, but looked bowed down as if by a premature old age. I asked him why he had left his regiment.
"Hernia, sir; hernia and pulmonary consumption,"
I had promised this man a hiding thirteen years ago, and thirteen years ago I am persuaded he had richly merited it, and am quite sure it would have done him good. It is very likely that at that time I might have been unable to give it him; but now, between a florid manhood on my side and hernia and pulmonary consumption on his, the task should have been easy. But the events of "65-66 looked a long way off in "78; and somehow it seemed hardly worth while to reveal one"s ident.i.ty. So the sergeant got half a crown and was left with a bit of a puzzle to occupy his leisure moments.
VI
I have seen a good deal of the working of the English Poor-law, and have learned to have some decisive opinions about it It has always seemed to me, since I had any acquaintance with it at all, that it might have been constructed on purpose to restrict the free action of honest labour and to set a premium on idle vagabondage. I determined, fourteen or fifteen years ago, to put the system to a test in my own person, and for my own sake to start with the odds in favour of the inst.i.tution. My belief was, and is, that no law-abiding man could travel in search of work through England under the provisions of the Poor-law without danger to health and even life, whilst any worthless and shiftless idler can by its provisions eke out a tolerably comfortable subsistence.
I got me a shabby suit of clothes, sent a portmanteau to the place where I intended to end my journey, and, posting a ten-pound note in advance, carried a money order for that sum in the lining of my hat. Thus provisioned, and with a shilling in my pocket, I started to walk towards the money. I was David Vane, compositor, and it was my object to see if David, with the best will in the world, could live under Poor-law provisions without bringing himself into the mesh of the policeman"s net I gave him seven weeks of it, and walked over half the south, midland, and western counties; giving him an occasional rest in a cheap lodging-house when workhouse fare had come to be too much for him.
When; I came to a town where my money lay at a post-office, I drew a shilling or two and sent the bulk on further; but during the whole seven weeks I only trespa.s.sed on my h.o.a.rd to the extent of fifty shillings.
Without that h.o.a.rd, or without a breach of the law, my imaginary compositor would surely have died. I see now and again in the newspapers a sporadic correspondence about the treatment of men on tramp, about the food supplied them, the hours of their imprisonment, and the amount of labour they are compelled to perform. I notice that chairmen of boards of guardians are quite satisfied with the existing condition of things.
I encounter, in the newspapers, gentlemen who have tasted workhouse skilly and soup, and who like it, and consider it well made and nourishing. I meet others who account the sleeping accommodation good, the bread excellent, and the labour demanded no more than reasonably adequate. I should ask nothing better than to see these easily contented gentlemen each enjoying a seventh part of my personal experience.
I may say at once that my notes of this journey were destroyed years ago, and that I cannot tell with absolute certainty in what places certain things happened. My experiences were challenged at the time, and the challengers got little good by their denial of my statements. I had hoped that my Quixotic enterprise might have some good result, but the absurd old system has undergone no alteration.
It was in a green lane in Oxfordshire that I came across my first travelling companion. He was a man of about sixty, a decent-looking old fellow, and, as I found out when I got into talk with him, by trade a tailor. He had stopped to bathe his feet in a little brook spanned by a single arch of mossy brickwork, and whilst he cooled his feet in the stream he rubbed his cotton socks with a bit of yellow soap the size of half a crown. He was civil and ready to talk; but he was very downhearted, He showed me his fingers, the tips of which were raw and smeared with tar.
"That"s this mornings work," he said. He named the workhouse he had stayed in. "That"s put me off earning a living for a good week to come.
A man can"t sew whilst his fingers is in this state. Stone breaking"s bad enough; but when it comes to oak.u.m-picking it"s all up with work for one while. There was another chap there last night," he went on, as I should take to be worse off than me. He"s a watchmaker. Dressed very nice and tidy he was, and got a job to go to in the town this morning.
He begged hard to be let off, and offered to pay for his night"s lodgings if they"d let him. They kep" him to it, hows"ever, and he did his work, "wouldn"t ha" done it," he concluded. "I"d ha" gone afore the Bench first; though that ain"t mostly any good in these "ere country places."
This disclosure interested me, for I myself belonged provisionally to one of the light-fingered professions. It would be about as easy for a compositor to earn a living fresh from oak.u.m-picking as for a tailor or a watchmaker; and I determined, if that task were set before me, to plead my trade and see what came of it I had no longer to wait than next morning; but when the work was given out it looked to my ignorant eye so inconsiderable that I forbore to make any complaint about it. A piece of old tarred rope, six or seven inches long and an inch and a half in diameter, had to be picked into fine oak.u.m between seven o"clock in the morning and eleven. The business looked anything but formidable, and I began upon it with a light heart.
The accustomed men began by hammering the ends of their strands upon the stone floor, and I followed their example, and, having secured a hold for the finger-tips, went ahead with the work. I may say that until a man of delicate fingers has tried this occupation he can have no idea of the long-drawn and exasperating misery of it. It is no use to be impatient, for in attempting to go too fast you succeed only in skinning your thumb and fingers. The only chance is patience, and that is not an easy thing. The old stagers, who had had years of it, got along quite comfortably, and were thankful that they were not stone-breaking. The new men swore and grumbled and flayed their fingers. The result of my own experience was that David Vane, compositor, was put beyond the chance of earning a living at his legitimate trade for a good fortnight The accommodation paid for by the labour consisted, all told, in one hunk of dry bread--weight, I should say, about four ounces; one pint of stirabout made of Indian meal and flavoured with soot; and a particularly dirty and uninviting bed. Having bestowed these benefactions on the harmless workman, the British Poor-law in return insists that he shall become a hopeless pauper by stealing from him his handicraft.
I tried stone-breaking pretty often later in the course of my tramp, and found it a much less painful occupation. The handling of cricket-bat and sculls hardens the palm of the hand whilst it leaves the tips of the fingers unprotected. But though at the time of my excursion I was fresh from life on the river, it took me some time to get inured to this new occupation, and stone-breaking alone would, of course, unfit for his work any man who needed lightness and steadiness of hand. Work and accommodation varied very widely. In one or two places we got good bread at night, good broth in the morning, and a bed to sleep in which, as I suppose, the average tramp would find almost luxurious. The bedclothes were coa.r.s.e, as they had a perfect right to be, but they were clean; and the food, though scanty and of the plainest, was wholesome and nourishing. In one place, I remember, the bread actually stank, and the hungriest of the hungry crowd left it uneaten. The broth served out next morning was nothing more or less than the water in which bacon had been boiled. The beds were kennels. A long wooden bench was divided into compartments by upright boards; a quant.i.ty of dirty straw which might, by the look of it, have served already in a stable was spread in each recess, and was covered with foul sacks which bore the name of a local miller. Several of these sacks, cut open and st.i.tched together, served for a counterpane.
"I"d "eard about this place," said my neighbour when the able-bodied pauper who superintended us had trooped us into this abominable chamber, "and I"d a dam good mind to smash a lamp or summat and get run in instead o" comin" here. If I"d ha" knowed the truth about it, I"d ha"
done it."
This was the worst, and by far the worst, of the places I encountered.
Indeed, I met nothing else comparable to it. I made a trifling error in my description of it at the time. By a slip of the pen I represented the shed in which the casual paupers were accommodated as being a lean-to against the body of the workhouse, whereas it was in fact a lean-to against the outer wall of the workhouse grounds. This was enough in the minds of the guardians to justify them in denouncing me, through their chairman, as a liar, and was held to be triumphant proof that I had never been there, though I proved "David Vane, compositor," upon their books and upon those of the two neighbouring workhouses.
In some country places we went straight to the relieving officer, who gave us our tickets for the night. In other places of more considerable population we were allowed to lounge about the outside of the police station until the hour appointed for distribution. Once inside the workhouse, we were prisoners until at least eleven o"clock next morning whether the tale of stones were broken or no, or the strands of rope were or were not reduced to oak.u.m. In default, men were occasionally detained to be taken before the Bench; but what became of them I never had an opportunity of learning apart from the experiences of my travelling companions, who estimated the punishment at seven or fourteen days. A good many of these had gaol experiences, and I am forced to admit that the decent folk on tramp were few in number. But the occasional honest mechanic or skilled workman in search of employment was hard bestead.
I met two journeymen printers, one of whom, having threepence for a bed outside the workhouse, was able to find employment in the town of Gloucester; whilst the other, being unable to get away from durance before eleven, was left out in the cold. I met other men who, in order to escape this absurd imprisonment, slept in the fields, and so risked liberty on the other side rather than miss the early labour market; for to sleep in the fields is a misdemeanour punishable at law: though why it should be so, if nothing else be provable against a man, Heaven only knows. In the language of the road, to sleep in the open is to "skipper"
and to sleep in the workhouse is to go "on the spike." It was a common question in fine weather, "Skipper or spike to-night?" The habitual loafer invariably chose the spike. The man who had business and wanted to get along elected to skipper, though he lost two meals thereby.
The law, which ruins the hands of the skilled workman, and detains skilled and unskilled alike until the labour market is closed to them, supplies a dietary which would kill anybody but a professional fasting-man in a month, and keeps a keen eye on mendicancy. It is like the sun, with a difference: it looks alike on the just and the unjust The mischief is, it is made for the comfort of the worthless and is the plague of the deserving. There are easy-going boards of guardians, easy-going workhouse masters and labour masters, who do not insist upon the tale of work which is demanded by others. The old stagers know the easy places and give them a natural preference.
The one place of terror on the line I took was Gloucester. The guardians of the Gloucester Union had made up their minds to put down the casual pauper, and, as the means readiest to hand, they determined to make the work too hard for him. I was so persistently warned against Gloucester that I went there to see for myself what it was like. The house itself was orderly and clean, and the discipline as complete as in a gaol. The only thing which distinguished it from other places of its kind was the severity of the labour imposed.
The limits of labour are fixed by law. There is such and such a weight of oak.u.m to be picked, or such a weight of stone to be broken; but the good guardians of Gloucester, without in the least infringing the provisions of the Poor Law Board, made the work twice as severe as it was in other houses than their own. Before every casual pauper was placed the regulation quant.i.ty of stone--it was the hardest I tackled on my pilgrimage--and beyond the morning"s stint was set a screen through which every atom of the stone had to be pa.s.sed before the job was finished and the wanderer was allowed out upon his way again. It was no business of mine to be refractory, and I hammered away with such zeal as I could command; but it took me six hours to get through the tale of work. When I had earned my own discharge I left a handful of unfortunates behind me who had theirs yet to finish. They were all unaccustomed and inexperienced, or they would not have been at Gloucester. Whether that charming western city keeps up its reputation until now I do not know; but the guardians found their system succeed so well that they have probably adhered to it I had forgotten to mention one fact which is common to all workhouses. The casual tramp breakfasts when he has done his work, but not before.