CHAPTER XX--COFFEE-HOUSES AND DOSS-HOUSES
Another phrase gone glimmering, shorn of romance and tradition and
all that goes to make phrases worth keeping! For me, henceforth,
"coffee-house" will possess anything but an agreeable connotation.
Over on the other side of the world, the mere mention of the word
was sufficient to conjure up whole crowds of its historic
frequenters, and to send trooping through my imagination endless
groups of wits and dandies, pamphleteers and bravos, and bohemians
of Grub Street.
But here, on this side of the world, alas and alack, the very name
is a misnomer. Coffee-house: a place where people drink coffee.
Not at all. You cannot obtain coffee in such a place for love or
money. True, you may call for coffee, and you will have brought you
something in a cup purporting to be coffee, and you will taste it
and be disillusioned, for coffee it certainly is not.
And what is true of the coffee is true of the coffee-house.
Working-men, in the main, frequent these places, and greasy, dirty
places they are, without one thing about them to cherish decency in
a man or put self-respect into him. Table-cloths and napkins are
unknown. A man eats in the midst of the debris left by his
predecessor, and dribbles his own scraps about him and on the floor.
In rush times, in such places, I have positively waded through the
muck and mess that covered the floor, and I have managed to eat
because I was abominably hungry and capable of eating anything.
This seems to be the normal condition of the working-man, from the
zest with which he addresses himself to the board. Eating is a
necessity, and there are no frills about it. He brings in with him
a primitive voraciousness, and, I am confident, carries away with
him a fairly healthy appetite. When you see such a man, on his way
to work in the morning, order a pint of tea, which is no more tea
than it is ambrosia, pull a hunk of dry bread from his pocket, and
wash the one down with the other, depend upon it, that man has not
the right sort of stuff in his belly, nor enough of the wrong sort
of stuff, to fit him for big day's work. And further, depend upon
it, he and a thousand of his kind will not turn out the quantity or
quality of work that a thousand men will who have eaten heartily of
meat and potatoes, and drunk coffee that is coffee.
As a vagrant in the "Hobo" of a California jail, I have been served
better food and drink than the London workman receives in his
coffee-houses; while as an American labourer I have eaten a
breakfast for twelvepence such as the British labourer would not
dream of eating. Of course, he will pay only three or four pence
for his; which is, however, as much as I paid, for I would be
earning six shillings to his two or two and a half. On the other
hand, though, and in return, I would turn out an amount of work in
the course of the day that would put to shame the amount he turned
out. So there are two sides to it. The man with the high standard
of living will always do more work and better than the man with the
low standard of living.
There is a comparison which sailormen make between the English and
American merchant services. In an English ship, they say, it is
poor grub, poor pay, and easy work; in an American ship, good grub,
good pay, and hard work. And this is applicable to the working
populations of both countries. The ocean greyhounds have to pay for
speed and steam, and so does the workman. But if the workman is not
able to pay for it, he will not have the speed and steam, that is
all. The proof of it is when the English workman comes to America.
He will lay more bricks in New York than he will in London, still
more bricks in St. Louis, and still more bricks when he gets to San
Francisco. {3} His standard of living has been rising all the time.
Early in the morning, along the streets frequented by workmen on the
way to work, many women sit on the side-walk with sacks of bread
beside them. No end of workmen purchase these, and eat them as they
walk along. They do not even wash the dry bread down with the tea
to be obtained for a penny in the coffee-houses. It is
incontestable that a man is not fit to begin his day's work on a
meal like that; and it is equally incontestable that the loss will
fall upon his employer and upon the nation. For some time, now,
statesmen have been crying, "Wake up, England!" It would show more
hard-headed common sense if they changed the tune to "Feed up,
England!"
Not only is the worker poorly fed, but he is filthily fed. I have
stood outside a butcher-shop and watched a horde of speculative
housewives turning over the trimmings and scraps and shreds of beef
and mutton--dog-meat in the States. I would not vouch for the clean
fingers of these housewives, no more than I would vouch for the
cleanliness of the single rooms in which many of them and their
families lived; yet they raked, and pawed, and scraped the mess
about in their anxiety to get the worth of their coppers. I kept my
eye on one particularly offensive-looking bit of meat, and followed
it through the clutches of over twenty women, till it fell to the
lot of a timid-appearing little woman whom the butcher bluffed into
taking it. All day long this heap of scraps was added to and taken
away from, the dust and dirt of the street falling upon it, flies
settling on it, and the dirty fingers turning it over and over.
The costers wheel loads of specked and decaying fruit around in the
barrows all day, and very often store it in their one living and
sleeping room for the night. There it is exposed to the sickness
and disease, the effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and
rotten life, and next day it is carted about again to be sold.
The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at
all; while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of
what he eats. Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair
criterion, they never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or
cocoa tastes like. The slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-
houses, varying only in sloppiness and witchery, never even
approximate or suggest what you and I are accustomed to drink as tea
and coffee.
A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far
from Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.
"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi
don't mind. Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that
fynt . . . "
She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she
held a penny. The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a
careworn woman of forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.
I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the
appeal would be received. It was four in the afternoon, and she
looked faint and sick. The woman hesitated an instant, then brought
a large plate of "stewed lamb and young peas." I was eating a plate
of it myself, and it is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and
that the peas might have been younger without being youthful.
However, the point is, the dish was sold at sixpence, and the
proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew the old truth
that the poor are the most charitable.
The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other
side of the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew.
We ate steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly,
explosively and most gleefully, she cried out to me, -
"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus," she confirmed, if anything with
greater and more explosive glee. "Hi sold a box o' matches! That's
'ow Hi got the penny."
"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.
"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to
her plate.
"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would,
but this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside
volunteered to me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make
an odd shilling washin' out, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many
pots."
"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply
to my questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."
One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall
not soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square,
to whom I tendered a sovereign when paying my score. (By the way,
one is supposed to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly
dressed he is compelled to pay before he eats).
The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the
counter, and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.
"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.
"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you
think?" I retorted.
"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.
"I makes 'em," quoth I.
She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver,
and I had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.
"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I
said.
"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous. Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.
I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what
little I had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she
gloated after me even as I passed out to the street.
While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and
900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are
registered as living in common lodging-houses--known in the
vernacular as "doss-houses." There are many kinds of doss-houses,
but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to
the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by
smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that
one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not mean that
the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that
life in them is degrading and unwholesome.
"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
caricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes
to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing
in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and
never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite
different from that of hotel life.
This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big
private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men's homes. Far
from it. They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon
the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more
for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make
them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should
be who does his work in the world.
The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.
I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and
confine myself to the bigger and better ones. Not far from
Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place
inhabited almost entirely by working men. The entrance was by way
of a flight of steps descending from the side-walk to what was
properly the cellar of the building. Here were two large and
gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate. I had intended
to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my
appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with
watching other men cook and eat.
One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough
wooden table, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not
over-clean table constituted his butter. Into it he dipped his
bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big
mug. A piece of fish completed his bill of fare. He ate silently,
looking neither to right nor left nor across at me. Here and there,
at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently. In
the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation. A feeling
of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place. Many of them sat and
brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as
Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be
punished so.
From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured
into the range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had
noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me
into the street for fresh air.
On my return I paid fivepence for a "cabin," took my receipt for the
same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the
smoking-room. Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several
checkerboards were being used by young working-men, who waited in
relays for their turn at the games, while many men were sitting
around, smoking, reading, and mending their clothes. The young men
were hilarious, the old men were gloomy. In fact, there were two
types of men, the cheerful and the sodden or blue, and age seemed to
determine the classification.
But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the
remotest suggestion of home. Certainly there could be nothing home-
like about it to you and me, who know what home really is. On the
walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating
the conduct of the guests, and at ten o'clock the lights were put
out, and nothing remained but bed. This was gained by descending
again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly
doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper
regions. I went to the top of the building and down again, passing
several floors filled with sleeping men. The "cabins" were the best
accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room
alongside of it in which to undress. The bedding was clean, and
with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault. But there was no
privacy about it, no being alone.
To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have
merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-
crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise
properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of
a large, barnlike room, and there you have it. There are no
ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores
from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer
neighbours come plainly to your ears. And this cabin is yours only
for a little while. In the morning out you go. You cannot put your
trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind
you, or anything of the sort. In fact, there is no door at all,
only a doorway. If you care to remain a guest in this poor man's
hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations
which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little
soul of your own and less to say about it.
Now I contend that the least a man who does his day's work should
have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in
his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look
out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can
accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries
about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up
pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or
bulldogs, as his heart listeth--in short, one place of his own on
the earth of which he can say: "This is mine, my castle; the world
stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master." He will be a
better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day's work.
I stood on one floor of the poor man's hotel and listened. I went
from bed to bed and looked at the sleepers. They were young men,
from twenty to forty, most of them. Old men cannot afford the
working-man's home. They go to the workhouse. But I looked at the
young men, scores of them, and they were not bad-looking fellows.
Their faces were made for women's kisses, their necks for women's
arms. They were lovable, as men are lovable. They were capable of
love. A woman's touch redeems and softens, and they needed such
redemption and softening instead of each day growing harsh and
harsher. And I wondered where these women were, and heard a
"harlot's ginny laugh." Leman Street, Waterloo Road, Piccadilly,
The Strand, answered me, and I knew where they were.
