CHAPTER IX--THE SPIKE
First of all, I must beg forgiveness of my body for the vileness
through which I have dragged it, and forgiveness of my stomach for
the vileness which I have thrust into it. I have been to the spike,
and slept in the spike, and eaten in the spike; also, I have run
away from the spike.
After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the Whitechapel
casual ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before
three o'clock in the afternoon. They did not "let in" till six, but
at that early hour I was number twenty, while the news had gone
forth that only twenty-two were to be admitted. By four o'clock
there were thirty-four in line, the last ten hanging on in the
slender hope of getting in by some kind of a miracle. Many more
came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the bitter fact
that the spike would be "full up."
Conversation was slack at first, standing there, till the man on one
side of me and the man on the other side of me discovered that they
had been in the smallpox hospital at the same time, though a full
house of sixteen hundred patients had prevented their becoming
acquainted. But they made up for it, discussing and comparing the
more loathsome features of their disease in the most cold-blooded,
matter-of-fact way. I learned that the average mortality was one in
six, that one of them had been in three months and the other three
months and a half, and that they had been "rotten wi' it." Whereat
my flesh began to creep and crawl, and I asked them how long they
had been out. One had been out two weeks, and the other three
weeks. Their faces were badly pitted (though each assured the other
that this was not so), and further, they showed me in their hands
and under the nails the smallpox "seeds" still working out. Nay,
one of them worked a seed out for my edification, and pop it went,
right out of his flesh into the air. I tried to shrink up smaller
inside my clothes, and I registered a fervent though silent hope
that it had not popped on me.
In both instances, I found that the smallpox was the cause of their
being "on the doss," which means on the tramp. Both had been
working when smitten by the disease, and both had emerged from the
hospital "broke," with the gloomy task before them of hunting for
work. So far, they had not found any, and they had come to the
spike for a "rest up" after three days and nights on the street.
It seems that not only the man who becomes old is punished for his
involuntary misfortune, but likewise the man who is struck by
disease or accident. Later on, I talked with another man--"Ginger"
we called him--who stood at the head of the line--a sure indication
that he had been waiting since one o'clock. A year before, one day,
while in the employ of a fish dealer, he was carrying a heavy box of
fish which was too much for him. Result: "something broke," and
there was the box on the ground, and he on the ground beside it.
At the first hospital, whither he was immediately carried, they said
it was a rupture, reduced the swelling, gave him some vaseline to
rub on it, kept him four hours, and told him to get along. But he
was not on the streets more than two or three hours when he was down
on his back again. This time he went to another hospital and was
patched up. But the point is, the employer did nothing, positively
nothing, for the man injured in his employment, and even refused him
"a light job now and again," when he came out. As far as Ginger is
concerned, he is a broken man. His only chance to earn a living was
by heavy work. He is now incapable of performing heavy work, and
from now until he dies, the spike, the peg, and the streets are all
he can look forward to in the way of food and shelter. The thing
happened--that is all. He put his back under too great a load of
fish, and his chance for happiness in life was crossed off the
books.
Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were
wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves
for their folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to
them, a prison from which there was no hope of escape. It was
impossible for them to get away. They could neither scrape together
the passage money, nor get a chance to work their passage. The
country was too overrun by poor devils on that "lay."
I was on the seafaring-man-who-had-lost-his-clothes-and-money tack,
and they all condoled with me and gave me much sound advice. To sum
it up, the advice was something like this: To keep out of all
places like the spike. There was nothing good in it for me. To
head for the coast and bend every effort to get away on a ship. To
go to work, if possible, and scrape together a pound or so, with
which I might bribe some steward or underling to give me chance to
work my passage. They envied me my youth and strength, which would
sooner or later get me out of the country. These they no longer
possessed. Age and English hardship had broken them, and for them
the game was played and up.
There was one, however, who was still young, and who, I am sure,
will in the end make it out. He had gone to the United States as a
young fellow, and in fourteen years' residence the longest period he
had been out of work was twelve hours. He had saved his money,
grown too prosperous, and returned to the mother-country. Now he
was standing in line at the spike.
For the past two years, he told me, he had been working as a cook.
His hours had been from 7 a.m to 10.30 p.m., and on Saturday to
12.30 p.m.--ninety-five hours per week, for which he had received
twenty shillings, or five dollars.
"But the work and the long hours was killing me," he said, "and I
had to chuck the job. I had a little money saved, but I spent it
living and looking for another place."
This was his first night in the spike, and he had come in only to
get rested. As soon as he emerged, he intended to start for
Bristol, a one-hundred-and-ten-mile walk, where he thought he would
eventually get a ship for the States.
But the men in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were
poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of
that, in many ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently
returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so
that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb in.
But the cart was big, the young hopeful little, and he failed in his
several attempts to swarm up. Whereupon one of the most degraded-
looking men stepped out of the line and hoisted him in. Now the
virtue and the joy of this act lies in that it was service of love,
not hire. The carter was poor, and the man knew it; and the man was
standing in the spike line, and the carter knew it; and the man had
done the little act, and the carter had thanked him, even as you and
I would have done and thanked.
Another beautiful touch was that displayed by the "Hopper" and his
"ole woman." He had been in line about half-an-hour when the "ole
woman" (his mate) came up to him. She was fairly clad, for her
class, with a weather-worn bonnet on her grey head and a sacking-
covered bundle in her arms. As she talked to him, he reached
forward, caught the one stray wisp of the white hair that was flying
wild, deftly twirled it between his fingers, and tucked it back
properly behind her ear. From all of which one may conclude many
things. He certainly liked her well enough to wish her to be neat
and tidy. He was proud of her, standing there in the spike line,
and it was his desire that she should look well in the eyes of the
other unfortunates who stood in the spike line. But last and best,
and underlying all these motives, it was a sturdy affection he bore
her; for man is not prone to bother his head over neatness and
tidiness in a woman for whom he does not care, nor is he likely to
be proud of such a woman.
And I found myself questioning why this man and his mate, hard
workers I knew from their talk, should have to seek a pauper
lodging. He had pride, pride in his old woman and pride in himself.
When I asked him what he thought I, a greenhorn, might expect to
earn at "hopping," he sized me up, and said that it all depended.
Plenty of people were too slow to pick hops and made a failure of
it. A man, to succeed, must use his head and be quick with his
fingers, must be exceeding quick with his fingers. Now he and his
old woman could do very well at it, working the one bin between them
and not going to sleep over it; but then, they had been at it for
years.
"I 'ad a mate as went down last year," spoke up a man. "It was 'is
fust time, but 'e come back wi' two poun' ten in 'is pockit, an' 'e
was only gone a month."
"There you are," said the Hopper, a wealth of admiration in his
voice. "'E was quick. 'E was jest nat'rally born to it, 'e was."
Two pound ten--twelve dollars and a half--for a month's work when
one is "jest nat'rally born to it!" And in addition, sleeping out
without blankets and living the Lord knows how. There are moments
when I am thankful that I was not "jest nat'rally born" a genius for
anything, not even hop-picking,
In the matter of getting an outfit for "the hops," the Hopper gave
me some sterling advice, to which same give heed, you soft and
tender people, in case you should ever be stranded in London Town.
"If you ain't got tins an' cookin' things, all as you can get'll be
bread and cheese. No bloomin' good that! You must 'ave 'ot tea,
an' wegetables, an' a bit o' meat, now an' again, if you're goin' to
do work as is work. Cawn't do it on cold wittles. Tell you wot you
do, lad. Run around in the mornin' an' look in the dust pans.
You'll find plenty o' tins to cook in. Fine tins, wonderful good
some o' them. Me an' the ole woman got ours that way." (He pointed
at the bundle she held, while she nodded proudly, beaming on me with
good-nature and consciousness of success and prosperity.) "This
overcoat is as good as a blanket," he went on, advancing the skirt
of it that I might feel its thickness. "An' 'oo knows, I may find a
blanket before long."
Again the old woman nodded and beamed, this time with the dead
certainty that he WOULD find a blanket before long.
"I call it a 'oliday, 'oppin'," he concluded rapturously. "A tidy
way o' gettin' two or three pounds together an' fixin' up for
winter. The only thing I don't like"--and here was the rift within
the lute--"is paddin' the 'oof down there."
It was plain the years were telling on this energetic pair, and
while they enjoyed the quick work with the fingers, "paddin' the
'oof," which is walking, was beginning to bear heavily upon them.
And I looked at their grey hairs, and ahead into the future ten
years, and wondered how it would be with them.
I noticed another man and his old woman join the line, both of them
past fifty. The woman, because she was a woman, was admitted into
the spike; but he was too late, and, separated from his mate, was
turned away to tramp the streets all night.
The street on which we stood, from wall to wall, was barely twenty
feet wide. The sidewalks were three feet wide. It was a residence
street. At least workmen and their families existed in some sort of
fashion in the houses across from us. And each day and every day,
from one in the afternoon till six, our ragged spike line is the
principal feature of the view commanded by their front doors and
windows. One workman sat in his door directly opposite us, taking
his rest and a breath of air after the toil of the day. His wife
came to chat with him. The doorway was too small for two, so she
stood up. Their babes sprawled before them. And here was the spike
line, less than a score of feet away--neither privacy for the
workman, nor privacy for the pauper. About our feet played the
children of the neighbourhood. To them our presence was nothing
unusual. We were not an intrusion. We were as natural and ordinary
as the brick walls and stone curbs of their environment. They had
been born to the sight of the spike line, and all their brief days
they had seen it.
At six o'clock the line moved up, and we were admitted in groups of
three. Name, age, occupation, place of birth, condition of
destitution, and the previous night's "doss," were taken with
lightning-like rapidity by the superintendent; and as I turned I was
startled by a man's thrusting into my hand something that felt like
a brick, and shouting into my ear, "any knives, matches, or
tobacco?" "No, sir," I lied, as lied every man who entered. As I
passed downstairs to the cellar, I looked at the brick in my hand,
and saw that by doing violence to the language it might be called
"bread." By its weight and hardness it certainly must have been
unleavened.
The light was very dim down in the cellar, and before I knew it some
other man had thrust a pannikin into my other hand. Then I stumbled
on to a still darker room, where were benches and tables and men.
The place smelled vilely, and the sombre gloom, and the mumble of
voices from out of the obscurity, made it seem more like some
anteroom to the infernal regions.
Most of the men were suffering from tired feet, and they prefaced
the meal by removing their shoes and unbinding the filthy rags with
which their feet were wrapped. This added to the general
noisomeness, while it took away from my appetite.
In fact, I found that I had made a mistake. I had eaten a hearty
dinner five hours before, and to have done justice to the fare
before me I should have fasted for a couple of days. The pannikin
contained skilly, three-quarters of a pint, a mixture of Indian corn
and hot water. The men were dipping their bread into heaps of salt
scattered over the dirty tables. I attempted the same, but the
bread seemed to stick in my mouth, and I remembered the words of the
Carpenter, "You need a pint of water to eat the bread nicely."
I went over into a dark corner where I had observed other men going
and found the water. Then I returned and attacked the skilly. It
was coarse of texture, unseasoned, gross, and bitter. This
bitterness which lingered persistently in the mouth after the skilly
had passed on, I found especially repulsive. I struggled manfully,
but was mastered by my qualms, and half-a-dozen mouthfuls of skilly
and bread was the measure of my success. The man beside me ate his
own share, and mine to boot, scraped the pannikins, and looked
hungrily for more.
"I met a 'towny,' and he stood me too good a dinner," I explained.
"An' I 'aven't 'ad a bite since yesterday mornin'," he replied.
"How about tobacco?" I asked. "Will the bloke bother with a fellow
now?"
"Oh no," he answered me. "No bloomin' fear. This is the easiest
spike goin'. Y'oughto see some of them. Search you to the skin."
The pannikins scraped clean, conversation began to spring up. "This
super'tendent 'ere is always writin' to the papers 'bout us mugs,"
said the man on the other side of me.
"What does he say?" I asked.
"Oh, 'e sez we're no good, a lot o' blackguards an' scoundrels as
won't work. Tells all the ole tricks I've bin 'earin' for twenty
years an' w'ich I never seen a mug ever do. Las' thing of 'is I
see, 'e was tellin' 'ow a mug gets out o' the spike, wi' a crust in
'is pockit. An' w'en 'e sees a nice ole gentleman comin' along the
street 'e chucks the crust into the drain, an' borrows the old
gent's stick to poke it out. An' then the ole gent gi'es 'im a
tanner."
A roar of applause greeted the time-honoured yarn, and from
somewhere over in the deeper darkness came another voice, orating
angrily:
"Talk o' the country bein' good for tommy [food]; I'd like to see
it. I jest came up from Dover, an' blessed little tommy I got.
They won't gi' ye a drink o' water, they won't, much less tommy."
"There's mugs never go out of Kent," spoke a second voice, "they
live bloomin' fat all along."
"I come through Kent," went on the first voice, still more angrily,
"an' Gawd blimey if I see any tommy. An' I always notices as the
blokes as talks about 'ow much they can get, w'en they're in the
spike can eat my share o' skilly as well as their bleedin' own."
"There's chaps in London," said a man across the table from me,
"that get all the tommy they want, an' they never think o' goin' to
the country. Stay in London the year 'round. Nor do they think of
lookin' for a kip [place to sleep], till nine or ten o'clock at
night."
A general chorus verified this statement
"But they're bloomin' clever, them chaps," said an admiring voice.
"Course they are," said another voice. "But it's not the likes of
me an' you can do it. You got to be born to it, I say. Them chaps
'ave ben openin' cabs an' sellin' papers since the day they was
born, an' their fathers an' mothers before 'em. It's all in the
trainin', I say, an' the likes of me an' you 'ud starve at it."
This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the
statement that there were "mugs as lives the twelvemonth 'round in
the spike an' never get a blessed bit o' tommy other than spike
skilly an' bread."
"I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike," said a new voice.
Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.
"There was three of us breakin' stones. Winter-time, an' the cold
was cruel. T'other two said they'd be blessed if they do it, an'
they didn't; but I kept wearin' into mine to warm up, you know. An'
then the guardians come, an' t'other chaps got run in for fourteen
days, an' the guardians, w'en they see wot I'd been doin', gives me
a tanner each, five o' them, an' turns me up."
The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like
the spike, and only come to it when driven in. After the "rest up"
they are good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when
they are driven in again for another rest. Of course, this
continuous hardship quickly breaks their constitutions, and they
realise it, though only in a vague way; while it is so much the
common run of things that they do not worry about it.
"On the doss," they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to "on
the road" in the United States. The agreement is that kipping, or
dossing, or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face,
harder even than that of food. The inclement weather and the harsh
laws are mainly responsible for this, while the men themselves
ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of
Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and
establish the sweating system.
By seven o'clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed. We
stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our
belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the
floor--a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin. Then, two by
two, we entered the bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and
this I know: the two men preceding had washed in that water, we
washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men
that followed us. This I know; but I am also certain that the
twenty-two of us washed in the same water.
I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious
liquid at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet
from the bodies of other men. My equanimity was not restored by
seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of
vermin and retaliatory scratching.
A shirt was handed me--which I could not help but wonder how many
other men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I
trudged off to the sleeping apartment. This was a long, narrow
room, traversed by two low iron rails. Between these rails were
stretched, not hammocks, but pieces of canvas, six feet long and
less than two feet wide. These were the beds, and they were six
inches apart and about eight inches above the floor. The chief
difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than the feet,
which caused the body constantly to slip down. Being slung to the
same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest
were set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle
back to the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.
Many hours passed before I won to sleep. It was only seven in the
evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in
the street, continued till nearly midnight. The smell was frightful
and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept
and crawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and
snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and
several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his
shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us. Toward morning I was
awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast. In the quick
transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I
raised a shout to wake the dead. At any rate, I woke the living,
and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.
But morning came, with a six o'clock breakfast of bread and skilly,
which I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks. Some
were set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and
eight of us were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel
Infirmary where we were set at scavenger work. This was the method
by which we paid for our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know
that I paid in full many times over.
Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was
considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in
being chosen to perform it.
"Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly," warned my working
partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage
can.
It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither
to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me. Nevertheless, I had to
carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and
empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily
sprinkled with strong disinfectant.
Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this. These men of the spike,
the peg, and the street, are encumbrances. They are of no good or
use to any one, nor to themselves. They clutter the earth with
their presence, and are better out of the way. Broken by hardship,
ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck
down by disease, as they are likewise the quickest to die.
They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them
out of existence. We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary,
when the dead waggon drove up and five bodies were packed into it.
The conversation turned to the "white potion" and "black jack," and
I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who
in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was
"polished off." That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous
were given a dose of "black jack" or the "white potion," and sent
over the divide. It does not matter in the least whether this be
actually so or not. The point is, they have the feeling that it is
so, and they have created the language with which to express that
feeling--"black jack" "white potion," "polishing off."
At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary,
where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were
heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess--pieces of
bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the
outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from
the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of
diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging,
pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for. It
wasn't pretty. Pigs couldn't have done worse. But the poor devils
were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they
could eat no more they bundled what was left into their
handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.
"Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole
lot of pork-ribs," said Ginger to me. By "out there" he meant the
place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong
disinfectant. "They was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I
'ad 'em into my arms an' was out the gate an' down the street, a-
lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em to. Couldn't see a soul, an' I was
runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke runnin' after me an' thinkin'
I was 'slingin' my 'ook' [running away]. But jest before 'e got me,
I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er apron."
O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson
from Ginger. At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an
altruistic act as was ever performed outside the Abyss. It was fine
of Ginger, and if the old woman caught some contagion from the "no
end o' meat" on the pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so
fine. But the most salient thing in this incident, it seems to me,
is poor Ginger, "clean crazy" at sight of so much food going to
waste.
It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay
two nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had
paid for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.
"Come on, let's sling it," I said to one of my mates, pointing
toward the open gate through which the dead waggon had come.
"An' get fourteen days?"
"No; get away."
"Aw, I come 'ere for a rest," he said complacently. "An' another
night's kip won't 'urt me none."
They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to "sling it" alone.
"You cawn't ever come back 'ere again for a doss," they warned me.
"No fear," said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend;
and, dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.
Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an
hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever
germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that
I could stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than
two hundred and twenty.
