THE TRINITY ALMSHOUSE.
From Stepney Green to the Trinity Almshouse is not a long way; you have,
in fact, little more than to pass through a short street and to cross
the road. But the road itself is noteworthy; for, of all the roads which
lead into London or out of it, this of Whitechapel is the broadest and
the noblest by nature. Man, it is true, has done little to embellish it.
There are no avenues of green and spreading lime and plane trees, as,
one day, there shall be; there are no stately buildings, towers, spires,
miracles of architecture--but only houses and shops, which, whether
small or big, are all alike mean, unlovely, and depressing. Yet, in
spite of all, a noble road.
This road, which is the promenade, breathing-place, place of resort,
place of gossip, place of amusement, and place of business for the
greater part of East London, stretches all the way from Aldgate to
Stratford, being called first Whitechapel Road, and then the Mile End
Road, and then the Stratford Road. Under the first name the road has
acquired a reputation of the class called, by moralists, unenviable. The
history of police courts records, under the general heading of
Whitechapel Road, shows so many free fights, brave robberies, gallant
murders, dauntless kickings, cudgellings, pummellings, pocket-pickings,
shop-liftings, watch-snatchings, and assaults on constables, with such a
brave display of disorderly drunks, that the road has come to be
regarded with admiration as one of those Alsatian retreats, growing
every day rarer, which are beyond and above the law. It is thought to be
a place where manhood and personal bravery reign supreme. Yet the road
is not worthy this reputation; it has of late years become orderly; its
present condition is dull and law-abiding, brilliant as the past has
been, and whatever greatness may be in store for the future. Once out
of Whitechapel, and within the respectable regions of Mile End, the road
has always been eminently respectable; and as regards dangers, quite
safe, ever since they built the bridge over the river Lea, which used
now and again to have freshets, and at such times tried to drown
harmless people in its ford. Since that bridge was built, in the time of
Edward I., it matters not for the freshets. There is not much in the Bow
Road when the stranger gets there, in his journey along this great
thoroughfare, for him to visit, except its almshouses, which are many;
and the beautiful old church of Bow, standing in the middle of the road,
crumbling slowly away in the East End fog, with its narrow strips of
crowded church-yard. One hopes that before it has quite crumbled away
some one will go and make a picture of it--an etching would be the best.
At Stratford the road divides, so that you may turn to the right and get
to Barking, or to the left and get to Epping Forest. And all the way,
for four miles, a broad and noble road, which must have been carved
originally out of No Man's Land, in so generous a spirit is it laid out.
Angela is now planting it with trees; beneath the trees she will set
seats for those who wish to rest. Here and there she will erect
drinking-fountains. Whitechapel Road, since her improvements begun, has
been transformed; even the bacon shops are beginning to look a little
less rusty; and the grocers are trying to live up to the green avenues.
Angela's imagination was fired by this road from the very first, when
the idle apprentice took her into it as into a new and strange country.
Here, for the first times she realized the meaning of the universal
curse, from which only herself and a few others are unnaturally
exempted; and this only under heavy penalties and the necessity of
finding out their own work for themselves, or it will be the worse for
them. People think it better to choose their own work. That is a great
mistake. You might just as well want to choose your own disease. In the
West End, a good many folk do work--and work pretty hard, some of
them--who need not, unless they please; and a good many others work who
must, whether they please or no: but somehow the forced labor is pushed
into the background. We do not perceive its presence: people drive about
in carriages, as if there were nothing to do; people lounge; people have
leisure; people do not look pressed or in a hurry, or task-mastered, or
told to make bricks without straw.
Here, in the East End, on the other hand, there are no strollers. All
day long the place is full of passengers, hasting to and fro, pushing
each other aside, with set and anxious faces, each driven by the
invisible scourge of necessity which makes slaves of all mankind. Do you
know that famous picture of the Israelites in Egypt? Upon the great
block of stone, which the poor wretches are painfully dragging, while
the cruel lash goads the weak and terrifies the strong, there sits one
in authority. He regards the herd of slaves with eyes terrible from
their stony gaze. What is it to him whether the feeble suffer and
perish, so that the Pharaoh's will be done? The people of the East
reminded Angela, who was an on-looker, and had no work to do, of these
builders of pyramids: they worked under a taskmaster as relentless as
that stony-hearted captain or foreman of works. If the Israelites
desisted, they were flogged back to work with cats of many tails; if our
workmen desist, they are flogged back by starvation.
"Let us hope," said Harry, to whom Angela imparted a portion of the
above reflection and comparison--"let us hope the Pharaoh himself means
well and is pitiful." He spoke without his usual flippancy, so that
perhaps his remark had some meaning for himself.
All day long and all the year round there is a constant fair going on in
Whitechapel Road. It is held upon the broad pavement, which was
benevolently intended, no doubt, for this purpose. Here are displayed
all kinds of things: bits of second-hand furniture, such as the head of
a wooden bed, whose griminess is perhaps exaggerated, in order that a
purchaser may expect something extraordinarily cheap. Here are lids of
pots and saucepans laid out, to show that in the warehouse, of which
these things are specimens, will be found the principal parts of the
utensils for sale; here are unexpected things, such as rows of skates,
sold cheap in summer; light clothing in winter; workmen's tools of
every kind, including, perhaps, the burglarious jimmy; second-hand
books--a miscellaneous collection, establishing the fact that the
readers of books in Whitechapel--a feeble and scanty folk--read nothing
at all except sermons and meditations among the tombs; second-hand boots
and shoes; cutlery; hats and caps; rat-traps and mouse-traps and
bird-cages; flowers and seeds; skittles; and frames for photographs.
Cheap-jacks have their carts beside the pavement, and with strident
voice proclaim the goodness of their wares, which include in this
district bloaters and dried haddocks, as well as crockery. And one is
amazed, seeing how the open-air fair goes on, why the shops are kept
open at all.
And always the same. It saddens one, I know not why, to sit beside a
river and see the water flowing down with never a pause. It saddens one
still more to watch the current of human life in this great thoroughfare
and feel that, as it is now, so it was a generation ago, and so it will
be a generation hence. The bees in the hive die, and are replaced by
others exactly like them, and the honey-making goes on merrily still.
So, in a great street, the wagons always go up and down; the passengers
never cease; the shopboy is always behind the counter; the work-girl is
always sewing; the workman is always carrying his tools as he goes to
his work; there are always those who stay for half a pint, and always
those who hurry on. In this endless drama, which repeats itself like a
musical box, the _jeune premier_ of to-day becomes to-morrow the lean
and slippered pantaloon. The day after to-morrow he will have
disappeared, gone to join the silent ones in the grim, unlovely cemetery
belonging to the Tower Hamlets, which lies beyond Stepney, and is the
reason why on Sundays the "frequent funeral blackens all the road.
"One can moralize," said Harry one day, after they had been exchanging
sentiments of enjoyable sadness, "at this rate forever. But it has all
been done before."
"Everything, I suppose," replied Angela, "has been done before. If it
has not been done by me, it is new--to me. It does not make it any
better for a man who has to work all the days of his life, and gets no
enjoyment out of it, and lives ignobly and dies obscurely, that the
same thing happens to most people."
"We cannot help ourselves." This time it was the cabinet-maker who spoke
to the dressmaker. "We belong to the crowd, and we must live with the
crowd. You can't make much glory out of a mercenary lathe nor out of a
dressmaker's shop, can you, Miss Kennedy?"
It was by such reminders, one to the other, that conversations of the
most delightful kind, full of speculations and comparisons, were
generally brought up short. When Angela remembered that she was talking
to an artisan, she froze. When Harry reflected that it was a dressmaker
to whom he was communicating bits of his inner soul, he checked himself.
When, which happened every day, they forgot their disguises for a while,
they talked quite freely, and very prettily communicated all sorts of
thoughts, fancies, and opinions to each other; insomuch that once or
twice a disagreeable feeling would cross the girl's mind that they were
perhaps getting too near the line at which "keeping company" begins; but
he was a young workman of good taste, and he never presumed.
She was walking beside her guide, Mr. Bunker, and pondering over these
things as she gazed down the broad road, and recollected the talk she
had held in it; and now her heart was warm within her, because of the
things she thought and had tried to say.
"Here we are, miss," said Mr. Bunker, stopping. "Here's the Trinity
Almshouse."
She awoke from her dream. It is very odd to consider the strange
thoughts which flash upon one in walking. Angela suddenly discovered
that Mr. Bunker possessed a remarkable resemblance to a bear. His walk
was something like one, with a swing of the shoulders, and his hands
were big and his expression was hungry. Yes, he was exactly like a bear.
She observed that she was standing at a wicket-gate, and that over the
gate was the effigy of a ship in full sail done in stone. Mr. Bunker
opened the door, and led the way to the court within.
Then a great stillness fell upon the girl's spirit.
Outside the wagons, carts, and omnibuses thundered and rolled. You could
hear them plainly enough; you could hear the tramp of a thousand feet.
But the noise outside was only a contrast to the quiet within. A wall of
brick with iron railings separated the tumult from the calm. It seemed
as if, within that court, there was no noise at all, so sharp and sudden
was the contrast.
She stood in an oblong court, separated from the road by the wall above
named. On either hand was a row of small houses containing, apparently,
four rooms each. They were built of red brick, and were bright and
clean. Every house had an iron tank in front for water; there was a
pavement of flags along this row, and a grass lawn occupied the middle
of the court. Upon the grass stood the statue of a benefactor, and at
the end of the court was a chapel. It was a very little chapel, but was
approached by a most enormous and disproportionate flight of stone
steps, which might have been originally cut for a portal of St. Paul's
Cathedral. The steps were surmounted by a great doorway, which occupied
the whole west front of the chapel. No one was moving about the place
except an old lady, who was drawing water from her tank.
"Pretty place, ain't it?" asked Mr. Bunker.
"It seems peaceful and quiet," said the girl.
"Place where you'd expect pride, ain't it?" he went on scornfully. "Oh
yes! Paupers and pride go together, as is well known. Lowliness is for
them who've got a bank and money in it. Oh, yes, of course. Gar! The
pride of an inmate!"
He led the way, making a most impertinent echo with the heels of his
boots. Angela observed, immediately, that there was another court beyond
the first. In fact, it was larger: the houses were of stone, and of
greater size; and it was if anything more solemnly quiet. It was
possessed of silence.
Here there is another statue erected to the memory of the founder, who,
it is stated on the pedestal, died, being then "Comander of a Shipp" in
the East Indies, in the year 1686. The gallant captain is represented in
the costume of the period. He wears a coat of many buttons, large cuffs,
and full skirts; the coat is buttoned a good way below the waist,
showing the fair doublet within, also provided with many buttons. He
wears shoes with buckles, has a soft silk wrapper round his neck, and a
sash to carry his sword. On his head there is an enormous wig, well
adapted to serve the purpose for which solar toupées were afterward
invented. In his right hand he carries a sextant, many sizes bigger than
those in modern use, and at his feet dolphins sport. A grass lawn covers
this court, as well as the other, and no voice or sound ever comes from
any of the houses, whose occupants might well be all dead.
Mr. Bunker turned to the right, and presently rapped with his knuckles
at a door. Then, without waiting for a reply, he turned the handle, and
with a nod invited his companion to follow him.
It was a small but well-proportioned room with low ceiling, furnished
sufficiently. There were clean white curtains with rose-colored ribbons.
The window was open, and in it stood a pot of mignonette, now at its
best. At the window sat, on one side, an old gentleman with silvery
white hair and spectacles, who was reading, and on the other side a girl
with work on her lap, sewing.
"Now, Cap'n Sorensen," said Mr. Bunker, without the formality of
greeting, "I've got you another chance. Take it or leave it, since you
can afford to be particular. I can't; I'm not rich enough. Ha!" He
snorted and looked about him with the contempt which a man who has a
banker naturally feels for one who hasn't, and lives in an almshouse.
"What is the chance?" asked the inmate meekly, looking up. When he saw
Angela in the doorway he rose and bowed, offering her a chair. Angela
observed that he was a very tall old man, and that he had blue eyes and
a rosy face--quite a young face it looked--and was gentle of speech and
courteous in demeanor.
"Is the chance connected with this young lady, Mr. Bunker?"
"It is," said the great man. "Miss Kennedy, this is the young woman I
told you of. This young lady"--he indicated Angela--"is setting herself
up, in a genteel way, in the dressmaking line. She's taken one of my
houses on the Green, and she wants hands to begin with. She comes here,
Cap'n Sorensen, on my recommendation."
"We are obliged to you, Mr. Bunker."
The girl was standing, her work in her hands, looking at Angela, and a
little terrified by the sight of so grand a person. The dressmakers of
her experience were not young and beautiful; mostly they were pinched
with years, troubles, and anxieties. When Angela began to notice her,
she saw that the young work-girl, who seemed about nineteen years of
age, was tall, rather too thin, and pretty. She did not look strong, but
her cheeks were flushed with a delicate bloom; her eyes, like her
father's, were blue; her hair was light and feathery, though she brushed
it as straight as it would go. She was dressed, like most girls of her
class, in a frock of sober black.
Angela took her by the hand. "I am sure," she said kindly, "that we
shall be friends."
"Friends!" cried Mr. Bunker, aghast. "Why, she's to be one of your
girls! You _can't_ be friends with your own girls."
"Perhaps," said the girl, blushing and abashed, "you would like to see
some of my work." She spread out her work on the table.
"Fine weather here, cap'n," Mr. Bunker went on, striking an attitude of
patronage, as if the sun was good indeed to shine on an almshouse. "Fine
weather should make grateful hearts, especially in them as is provided
for--having been improvident in their youth--with comfortable roofs to
shelter them."
"Grateful hearts, indeed, Mr. Bunker," said the captain quietly.
"Mr. Bunker"--Angela turned upon him with an air of command, and pointed
to the door--"you may go now. You have done all I wanted."
Mr. Bunker turned very red. "He could go!" Was he to be ordered about by
every little dressmaker? "He could go!"
"If the lady engages my daughter, Mr. Bunker," said Captain Sorensen, "I
will try to find the five shillings next week."
"Five shillings!" cried Angela. "Why, I have just given him five
shillings for his recommendation."
Mr. Bunker did not explain that his practice was to get five shillings
from both sides, but he retreated with as much dignity as could be
expected.
He asked, outside, with shame, how it was that he allowed himself thus
to be sat upon and ordered out of the house by a mere girl. Why had he
not stood upon his dignity? To be told he might go, and before an
inmate--a common pauper!
There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest
among us poor worms of earth. We are gifted with imaginations; we can
make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind
make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore, when we are
down-trodden, we may proceed, without the trouble and danger of turning
(which has been known to bring total extinction upon a worm), to take
revenge upon our enemy in imagination. Mr. Bunker, who was at this
moment uncertain whether he hated Miss Kennedy more than he hated his
nephew, went home glowing with the thought that but a few short months
would elapse before he should be able to set his foot upon the former
and crush her. Because, at the rate she was going on, she would not last
more than that time. Then would he send in his bills, sue her, sell her
up, and drive her out of the place stripped of the last farthing. "He
might go!" He, Bunker, was told that he might go! And in the presence of
an inmate. Then he thought of his nephew, and while he smote the
pavement with the iron end of his umbrella, a cold dew appeared upon his
nose, the place where inward agitation is frequently betrayed in this
way, and he shivered, looking about him suddenly as if he was
frightened. Yet what harm was Harry Goslett likely to do him?
"What is your name, my dear?" asked Angela softly, and without any
inspection of the work on the table. She was wondering how this pretty,
fragile flower should be found in Whitechapel. O ignorance of Newnham!
For she might have reflected that the rarest and most beautiful plants
are found in the most savage places--there is beautiful botanizing, one
is told, in the Ural Mountains; and that the sun shines everywhere,
even, as Mr. Bunker remarked, in an almshouse; and that she herself had
gathered in the ugliest ditches round Cambridge the sweetest flowering
mosses, the tenderest campion, the lowliest little herb-robert.
"My name is Ellen," replied the girl.
"I call her Nelly," her father answered, "and she is a good girl. Will
you sit down, Miss Kennedy?"
Angela sat down and proceeded to business. She said, addressing the old
man, but looking at the child, that she was setting up a dressmaker's
shop; that she had hopes of support, even from the West End, where she
had friends; that she was prepared to pay the proper wages, with certain
other advantages, of which more would be said later on; and that, if
Captain Sorensen approved, she would engage his daughter from that day.
"I have only been out as an improver as yet," said Nelly. "But if you
will really try me as a dressmaker--O father, it is sixteen shillings a
week!"
Angela's heart smote her. A poor sixteen shillings a week! And this girl
was delighted at the chance of getting so much.
"What do you say, Captain Sorensen? Do you want references, as Mr.
Bunker did? I am the granddaughter of a man who was born here and
made--a little--money here, which he left to me. Will you let her come
to me?"
"You are the first person," said Captain Sorensen, "who ever, in this
place, where work is not so plentiful as hands, offered work as if
taking it was a favor to you."
"I want good girls--and nice girls," said Angela. "I want a house where
we shall all be friends."
The old sailor shook his head.
"There is no such house here," he said sadly. "It is 'take it or leave
it'--if you won't take it, others will. Make the poor girls your
friends, Miss Kennedy? You look and talk like a lady born and bred, and
I fear you will be put upon. Make friends of your servants? Why, Mr.
Bunker will tell you that Whitechapel does not carry on business that
way. But it is good of you to try, and I am sure you will not scold and
drive like the rest."
"You offended Mr. Bunker, I learn, by refusing a place which he
offered," said Angela.
"Yes: God knows if I did right. We are desperately poor, else we should
not be here. That you may see for yourself. Yet my blood boiled when I
heard the character of the man whom my Nelly was to serve. I could not
let her go. She is all I have, Miss Kennedy"--the old man drew the girl
toward him and held her, his arm round her waist. "If you will take her
and treat her kindly, you will have--it isn't worth anything,
perhaps--the gratitude of one old man in this world--soon in the next."
"Trust your daughter with me, Captain Sorensen," Angela replied, with
tears in her eyes.
"Everybody round here is poor," he went on. "That makes people
hard-hearted; there are too many people in trade, and that makes them
mean; they are all trying to undersell each other, and that makes them
full of tricks and cheating. They treat the work-girls worst because
they cannot stand up for themselves. The long hours, and the bad food,
and the poisonous air--think a little of your girls, Miss Kennedy. But
you will--you will."
"I will, Captain Sorensen."
"It seems worse to us old sailors," he went on. "We have had a hardish
life, but it has been in open air. Old sailors haven't had to cheat and
lie for a living. And we haven't been brought up to think of girls
turning night into day, and working sixteen hours on end at twopence an
hour. It is hard to think of my poor girl----" He stopped and clinched
his fist. "Better to starve than to drive such a mill!" He was thinking
of the place which he had refused.
"Let us try each other, Nelly," she said, kissing her on the forehead.
The captain took his hat to escort her as far as the gate.
"A quiet place," he said, looking round the little court, "and a happy
place for the last days of improvident old men like me. Yet some of us
grumble. Forgive my plain speech about the work."
"There is nothing to forgive, indeed, Captain Sorensen. Will you let me
call upon you sometimes?"
She gave him her hand. He bowed over it with the courtesy of a captain
on his own quarter-deck. When she turned away she saw that a tear was
standing in his eyes.
"Father!" cried Nelly, rushing into his arms, "did you ever see anybody
like her? Oh! oh! do you think I really shall do for her?"
"You will do your best, my dear. It is a long time, I think, since I
have seen and spoken with any one like that. In the old days I have had
passengers to Calcutta like her; but none more so, Nelly--no, never one
more so."
"You couldn't, father." His daughter wanted no explanation of this
mysterious qualification. "You couldn't. She is a lady, father;" she
looked up and laughed.
"It's a funny thing for a real lady to open a dressmaker's shop on
Stepney Green, isn't it?"
Remark, if you please, that this girl had never once before, in all her
life, conversed with a lady; using the word in the prejudiced and narrow
sense peculiar to the West End. Yet she discovered instantly the truth.
Whence this instinct? It is a world full of strange and wonderful
things; the more questions we ask, the more we may; and the more things
we consider, the more incomprehensible does the sum of things appear.
Inquiring reader, I do not know how Nelly divined that her visitor was a
lady.