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 sidewalk 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 sidewalk 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.