Part 15 (1/2)
As they came into the square Mary shrank back with a little cry; her foot had almost trodden upon a litter of one-day old kittens which had been drowned and flung there.
The houses all round this sinister spot had apparently at one time, though many years ago, been buildings of some substance and importance.
Now they wore an indescribable aspect of blindness and misery. There was hardly a whole window in any of the houses. The broken panes were stopped with dirty rags or plastered with newspaper. The doors of the houses stood open, and upon the steps swarms of children--dirty, pale, pallid, and hopeless--squirmed like larvae. A drunken old woman, her small and ape-like face caked and encrusted with dirt, was reeling from one side of the square to another, singing a hideous song in a cracked gin-ridden voice, which s.h.i.+vered up into the cold, dank air in a forlorn and b.e.s.t.i.a.l mockery of music.
”What is this?” Mary said, turning round to the police inspector by her side.
”This, miss,” said the bearded man grimly, ”is called Taverner's Rents.
Every room in these houses is occupied by a family; some rooms are occupied by two families. The people that live here are the poorest of the poor. The boys that sell newspapers, the little shoeless boys and girls who hawk the cheaper kinds of flowers about the streets, the cab-runners, the people who come out at night and pick over the dust-bins for food, those are the people that live here, miss. And there's a fairly active criminal population as well.”
Mary shuddered. The inspector noticed her involuntary shrinking.
”Miss,” he said, ”you have only seen a little of it yet. Wait until I take you inside some of these places, then you will see what life in London can be like.”
The clergyman, Mr. Conrad, broke in.
”You have come, Miss Marriott,” he said, ”now to the home of the utterly degraded and the utterly lost. Nothing I or anybody else can say or do is possible to redeem this generation. Their brains have almost gone, through filth and starvation. They live more terribly than any animal lives. Their lives are too feeble and too awful, either for description or for betterment. It is, indeed, difficult for one who, as myself, believes most thoroughly in the fact that each one of us has an immortal soul, that each one of us in the next world will start again, according to what we have done in this, to realise that the poor creatures whom you have seen now are human. Come!”
It was almost with the slowness and solemnity of a funeral procession that the party pa.s.sed up the broken steps of one of the houses and entered what had once, in happier bygone days, been the hall of a mansion of some substance and fair-seeming.
The broken stairs stretched up above. The banisters which guarded them had long since been broken and pulled away. The doors all round were almost falling from their hinges.
”Come in here, gentlemen,” said the sanitary inspector of the London County Council, pus.h.i.+ng a door open with his foot as he did so.
They all followed into a large front room.
A slight fire was burning in a broken grate, and by it, upon a stool, sat an immensely fat woman of middle-age. Her hair was extremely scanty and caught up at the back of her head in a knot hardly bigger than a Tangerine orange. Through the thin dust-coloured threads the dirty pink scalp showed in patches. The face was inordinately large, bloated, and of a waxen yellow. The eyes were little gimlet holes. The mouth, with its thick lips of pale purple, smiled a horrid toothless smile as they came in.
All round the walls of the room were things which had once been mattresses, but from which damp straw was bursting in every direction.
These mattresses were black, sodden, and filthy, and upon them--covered, or hardly covered as the case might be, with sc.r.a.ps of old quilt or discarded clothing--lay young children of from one year to eighteen months old. These little mites were almost motionless. Their heads seemed to be extraordinarily large, their unknowing, unseeing eyes blazed in their faces.
The fat woman, suffering from dropsy, rose from her seat and curtsied as she saw the sanitary inspector and his colleagues.
”It is all right, gentlemen,” she said in a wee, fawning voice. ”There's food on the fire for the little dearies, and they're going to have their meal, bless 'em, as soon as it's boiled up.”
She pointed to an iron pot full of something that looked like oatmeal which was simmering upon the few coals.
”That's all right, Mary,” the County Council inspector said in a rough but genial voice. ”We haven't come to make any trouble to-day. We know you do your best. It is not your fault.”
”Thank you, sir,” the woman answered, subsiding heavily once more upon her stool. ”I have never done away with any children yet, and I am glad you know it. I've never been up before any beak yet, and I does my best.
They comes to me when they've got the insurances on the kids, and I ses, 'No,' I ses, 'you take 'em where you know wot you wants will be done.
You won't have far to go,' I ses, and so they takes 'em away. 'My bizness,' I ses, 'is open and aboveboard.' I looks arter the kids for a penny a day, and I gives 'm back to their mothers when they comes 'ome, feeding them meanwhile as well as I can.”
Mary was standing horror-struck in the middle of the room. She turned to Inspector Brown.
”Oh,” she said, ”how awful! How terrible! How utterly awful!”
The inspector looked down at her with grave face.
”You may well say so, miss,” he answered. ”I am a married man myself, and it goes to my heart. But you must know that all this woman says is absolutely true. She is dying of dropsy, and she looks after these children for their mothers while they are at the match factories in Bethnal Green or making s.h.i.+rts in some Jew sweater's den. She is not what you may call a 'baby-farmer.' She is not one of those women who make a profession of killing children by starvation and cold in order that their parents may get the insurance money. As she goes, this woman is honest.”