Nephelo goes into Polite Society, and then into a Dungeon.—His Escape,
Recapture, and his Perilous Ascent into the Sky, surrounded by a
Blaze of Fire.
Nephelo was a light-hearted subject of the Prince of Nimbus. It is he
who often floats, when the whole cloud is dark, as a white vapour on the
surface. For love of Cirrha, he came down behind a team of rain-drops
and leapt into the cistern of a handsome house at the west end of
London.
Nephelo found the water in the cistern greatly vexed at riotous
behaviour on the part of a large number of animalcules. He was told that
Water-Drops had been compelled to come into that place, after undergoing
many hardships, and had unavoidably brought with them germs of these
annoying creatures. Time and place favouring, nothing could hinder them
from coming into life; the cistern was their cradle, although many of
them were already anything but babes. Hereupon, Nephelo himself was
dashed at by an ugly little fellow like a dragon, but an uglier fellow,
who might be a small Saint George, pounced at the dragon, and the heart
of the poor fairy was the scene of contest.
After a while, there was an arrival of fresh water from a pipe, the flow
of which stirred up the anger of some decomposing growth which lined the
sides and bottom of the cistern. So there was a good deal of confusion
caused, and it was some time before all parties settled down into their
proper places.
“The sun is very hot,” said Nephelo. “We all seem to be getting very
warm.” “Yes, indeed,” said a Lady-Drop; “it’s not like the cool
Cloud-Country. I have been poisoned in the Thames, half filtered, and
made frowsy by standing, this July weather, in an open reservoir. I’ve
travelled in pipes laid too near the surface to be cool, and now am
spoiling here. I know if water is not cold it can’t be pleasant.” “Ah,”
said an old Drop, with a small eel in one of his eyes; “I don’t wonder
at hearing tell that men drink wine, and tea, and beer.” “Talking of
beer,” said another, “is it a fact that we’re of no use to the brewers?
Our character’s so bad, they can’t rely on us for cooling the worts, and
so sink wells, in order to brew all the year round with water cold
enough to suit their purposes.” “I know nothing of beer,” said Nephelo;
“but I know that if the gentlemen and ladies in this cistern were as
cold as they could wish to be, there wouldn’t be so much decomposition
going on amongst them.” “Your turn in, Sir,” said a polite Drop, and
Nephelo leapt nimbly through the place of exit into a china jug placed
ready to receive him. He was conveyed across a handsome kitchen by a
cook, who declared her opinion that the morning’s rain had caused the
drains to smell uncommonly. Nephelo then was thrown into a kettle.
Boiling is to an unclean Water-Drop, like scratching to a bear, a
pleasant operation. It gets rid of the little animals by which it had
been bitten, and throws down some of the impurity with which it had been
soiled. So, after boiling, water becomes more pure, but it is, at the
same time, more greedy than ever to absorb extraneous matter. Therefore,
the sons of men who boil their vitiated water ought to keep it covered
afterwards, and if they wish to drink it cold, should lose no time in
doing so. Nephelo and his friends within the kettle danced with delight
under the boiling process. Chattering pleasantly together, they compared
notes of their adventures upon earth, discussed the politics of
Cloud-Land, and although it took them nearly twice as long to boil as it
would have done had there been no carbonate of lime about them, they
were quite sorry when the time was come for them to part. Nephelo then,
with many others, was poured out into an urn. So he was taken to the
drawing-room, a hot iron having, in a friendly manner, been put down his
back, to keep him boiling.
Out of the urn into the tea-pot; out of the tea-pot into the slop-basin;
Nephelo had only time to remark a matron tea-maker, young ladies
knitting, and a good-looking young gentleman upon his legs, laying the
law down with a tea-spoon, before he (the fairy, not the gentleman) was
smothered with a plate of muffins. From so much of the conversation as
Nephelo could catch, filtered through muffin, it appeared that they were
talking about tea.
“It’s all very well for you to say, mother, that you’re confident you
make tea very good, but I ask—no, there I see you put six spoonfuls in
for five of us. Mother, if this were not hard water—(here there was a
noise as of a spoon hammering upon the iron)—two spoonsful less would
make tea of a better flavour and of equal strength. Now, there are three
hundred and sixty-five times and a quarter tea-times in the year——”
“And how many spoonfuls, brother, to the quarter of a tea-time?”
“Maria, you’ve no head for figures. I say nothing of the tea consumed at
breakfast. Multiply——”
“My dear boy, you have left school; no one asks you to multiply. Hand me
the muffin.”
Nephelo, released, was unable to look about him, owing to the high walls
of the slop-basin which surrounded him on every side. The room was
filled with pleasant sunset light, but Nephelo soon saw the coming
shadow of the muffin-plate, and all was dark directly afterwards.
“Take cooking, mother. M. Soyer[5] says you can’t boil many vegetables
properly in London water. Greens won’t be green; French beans are tinged
with yellow, and peas shrivel. It don’t open the pores of meat, and make
it succulent, as softer water does. M. Soyer believes that the true
flavour of meat cannot be extracted with hard water. Bread does not rise
so well when made with it. Horses——”
Footnote 5:
Evidence before the Board of Health.
“My dear boy, M. Soyer don’t cook horses.”
“Horses, Dr. Playfair tells us, sheep, and pigeons will refuse hard
water if they can get it soft, though from the muddiest pool.
Racehorses, when carried to a place where the water is notoriously hard,
have a supply of softer water carried with them to preserve their good
condition. Not to speak of gripes, hard water will assuredly produce
what people call a staring coat.”
“Ah, no doubt, then, it was London water that created Mr. Blossomley’s
blue swallowtail.”
“Maria, you make nonsense out of everything. When you are Mrs.
Blossomley——”
“Now pass my cup.”
There was a pause and a clatter. Presently the muffin-plate was lifted,
and four times in succession there were black dregs thrown into the face
of Nephelo. After the perpetration of these insults he was once again
condemned to darkness.
“When you are Mrs. Blossomley, Maria,” so the voice went on, “when you
are Mrs. Blossomley, you will appreciate what I am now going to tell you
about washerwomen.”
“Couldn’t you postpone it, dear, until I am able to appreciate it. You
promised to take us to Rachel to-night.”
“Ah!” said another girlish voice, “you’ll not escape. We dress at seven.
Until then—for the next twelve minutes you may speak. Bore on, we will
endure.”
“As for you, Catherine, Maria teaches you, I see, to chatter. But if
Mrs. B. would object to the reception of a patent mangle as a wedding
present from her brother, she had better hear him now. Washerwoman’s
work is not a thing to overlook, I tell you. Before a shirt is worn out,
there will have been spent upon it five times its intrinsic value in the
washing-tub. The washing of clothes costs more, by a great deal, than
the clothes themselves. The yearly cost of washing to a household of the
middle class amounts, on the average, to about a third part of the
rental, or a twelfth part of the total income. Among the poor, the
average expense of washing will more probably be half the rental if they
wash at home, but not more than a fourth of it if they employ the Model
Wash-houses. The weekly cost of washing to a poor man averages certainly
not less than fourpence halfpenny. Small tradesmen, driven to economise
in linen, spend perhaps not more than ninepence; in the middle and the
upper classes, the cost weekly varies from a shilling to five shillings
for each person, and amounts very often to a larger sum. On these
grounds Mr. Bullar, Honorary Secretary to the Association for Promoting
Baths and Wash-houses, estimates the washing expenditure of London at a
shilling a week for each inhabitant, or, for the whole, five millions of
pounds yearly. Professor Clark—”
“My dear Professor Tom, you have consumed four of your twelve minutes.”
“Professor Clark judges from such estimates as can be furnished by the
trade, that the consumption of soap in London is fifteen pounds to each
person per annum—twice as much as is employed in other parts of England.
That quantity of soap costs six-and-eightpence; water, per head, costs
half as much, or three-and-fourpence; or each man’s soap and water
costs, throughout London, on an average, ten shillings for twelve
months. If the hardness of the water be diminished, there is a
diminution in the want of soap. For every grain of carbonate of lime
dissolved in each gallon of any water, Mr. Donaldson declares, two
ounces of soap more for a hundred gallons of that water are required.
Every such grain is called a degree of hardness. Water of five degrees
of hardness requires, for example, two ounces of soap; water of eight
degrees of hardness then will need fifteen; and water of sixteen degrees
will demand thirty-two. Sixteen degrees, Maria, is the hardness of
Thames Water—of the water, mother, which has poached upon your
tea-caddy. You see, then, that when we pay for the soap we use at the
rate of six-and-eightpence each, since the unusual hardness of our water
causes us to use a double quantity, every man in London pays at an
average rate of three-and-fourpence a year his tax for a hard water,
through the cost of soap alone.”
“Now you must finish in five minutes, brother Tom.”
“But soap is not the only matter that concerns the washerwoman and her
customers. There is labour also, and the wear and tear; there is a
double amount of destruction to our linen, involved in the double time
of rubbing and the double soaping, which hard water compels washerwomen
to employ. So that, when all things have been duly reckoned up in our
account, we find that the outlay caused by the necessities for washing
linen in a town supplied like London with exceedingly hard water, is
four times greater than it would be if soft water were employed. The
cost of washing, as I told you, has been estimated at five millions a
year. So that, if these calculations be correct, more than three
millions of money, nearly four millions, is the amount filched yearly
from the Londoners by their hard water through the wash-tub only. To
that sum, Mrs. Blossomley, being of a respectable family and very
partial to clean linen, will contribute of course much more than her
average proportion.”
“Well, Mr. Orator, I was not listening to all you said, but what I heard
I do think much exaggerated.”
“I take it, sister, from the Government Report; oblige me by believing
half of it, and still the case is strong. It is quite time for people to
be stirring.”
“So it is, I declare. Your twelve minutes are spent, and we will always
be ready for the play. If you talk there of water, I will shriek.”
Here there arose a chatter which Nephelo found to be about matters that,
unlike the water topic, did not at all interest himself. There was a
rustle and a movement; and a creaking noise approached the drawing-room,
which Nephelo discovered presently to be caused by Papa’s boots as he
marched upstairs after his post-prandial slumberings. There was more
talk uninteresting to the fairy; Nephelo, therefore, became drowsy; his
drowsiness might at the Same time have been aggravated by the close
confinement he experienced in an unwholesome atmosphere beneath the
muffin-plate. He was aroused by a great clattering; this the maid caused
who was carrying him down stairs upon a tray with all the other
tea-things.
From a sweet dream of nuptials with Cirrha, Nephelo was awakened to the
painful consciousness that he had not yet succeeded in effecting any
great good for the human race; he had but rinsed a tea-pot. With a faint
impulse of hope the desponding fairy noticed that the slop-basin in
which he sate was lifted from the tray, in a few minutes after the tray
had been deposited upon the kitchen-dresser. Pity poor Nephelo! By a
remorseless scullery-maid he was dashed rudely from the basin into a
trough of stone, from which he tumbled through a hole placed there on
purpose to engulf him,—tumbled through into a horrible abyss.
This abyss was a long dungeon running from back to front beneath the
house, built of bricks—rotten now, and saturated with moisture. Some of
the bricks had fallen in, or crumbled into nothingness; and Nephelo saw
that the soil without the dungeon was quite wet. The dungeon-floor was
coated with pollutions, travelled over by a sluggish shallow stream,
with which the fairy floated. The whole dungeon’s atmosphere was foul
and poisonous. Nephelo found now what those exhalations were which rose
through every opening in the house, through vent-holes and the
burrowings of rats; for rats and other vermin tenanted this noisome den.
This was the pestilential gallery called by the good people of the
house, their drain. A trap-door at one end confined the fairy in this
place with other Water-Drops, until there should be collected a
sufficient body of them to negotiate successfully for egress.
The object of this door was to prevent the ingress of much more foul
matter from without; and its misfortune was, that in so doing it
necessarily pent up a concentrated putrid gas within. At length Nephelo
escaped; but alas! it was from a Newgate to a Bastille—from the drain
into the sewer. This was a long vaulted prison running near the surface
underneath the street. Shaken by the passage overhead of carriages, not
a few bricks had fallen in; and Nephelo hurrying forward, wholly
possessed by the one thought—could he escape?—fell presently into a
trap. An oyster-shell had fixed itself upright between two bricks
unevenly jointed together; much solid filth had grown around it; and in
this Nephelo was caught. Here he remained for a whole month, during
which time he saw many floods of water pass him, leaving himself with a
vast quantity of obstinate encrusted filth unmoved. At the month’s end
there came some men to scrape, and sweep, and cleanse; then with a
sudden flow of water, Nephelo was forced along, and presently, with a
large number of emancipated foulnesses, received his discharge from
prison, and was let loose upon the River Thames.
Nephelo struck against a very dirty Drop. “Keep off, will you?” the Drop
exclaimed. “You are not fit to touch a person, sewer-bird.”
“Why, where are you from, my sweet gentleman?”
“Oh! I? I’ve had a turn through some Model Drains. Tubular drains, they
call ’em. Look at me; isn’t that clear?”
“There’s nothing clear about you,” replied Nephelo. “What do you mean by
Model Drains?”
“I mean I’ve come from Upper George Street through a twelve-inch pipe
four or five times faster than one travels over an old sewer-bed;
travelled express, no stoppage.”
“Indeed!”
“Yes. Impermeable, earthenware, tubular pipes, accurately dove-tailed. I
come from an experimental district. When it’s all settled, there’s to be
water on at high pressure everywhere, and an earthenware drain pipe
under every tap, a tube of no more than the necessary size. Then these
little pipes are to run down the earth; and there’s not to be a great
brick drain running underneath each house into the street; the pipes run
into a larger tube of earthenware that is to be laid at the backs of all
the houses; these tubes run into larger ones, but none of them very
monstrous; and so that there is a constant flow, like circulation of the
blood; and all the pipes are to run at last into one large conduit,
which is to run out of town with all the sewage matter and discharge so
far down the Thames, that no return tide ever can bring it back to
London. Some is to go branching off into the fields to be manure.”
“Humph!” said Nephelo. “You profess to be very clever. How do you know
all this?”
“Know? Bless you, I’m a regular old Thames Drop I’ve been in the
cisterns, in the tumblers, down the sewers, in the river, up the pipes,
in the reservoirs, in the cisterns, in the teapots, down the sewers, in
the river, up the pipes, in the reservoirs, in the cisterns, in the
saucepans, down the sewers, in the Thames—”
“Hold! Stop there now!” said Nephelo. “Well, so you have heard a great
deal in your lifetime. You’ve had some adventures, doubtless?”
“I believe you,” said the Cockney-Drop. “The worst was when I was pumped
once as fresh water into Rotherhithe. That place is below high-water
mark; so are Bermondsey and St. George’s, Southwark. Newington, St.
Olave’s, Westminster, and Lambeth, are but little better. Well, you
know, drains of the old sort always leak, and there’s a great deal more
water poured into London than the Londoners have stowage room for, so
the water in low districts can’t pass off at high water, and there ’s a
precious flood. We sopped the ground at Rotherhithe, but I thought I
never should escape again.”
“Will the new pipes make any difference to that?”
“Yes; so I am led to understand. They are to be laid with a regular
fall, to pass the water off, which, being constant, will be never in
excess. The fall will be to a point of course below the water level, and
at a convenient place the contents of these drains are to be pumped up
into the main sewer. Horrible deal of death caused, Sir, by the damp in
those low districts. One man in thirty-seven died of cholera in
Rotherhithe last year, when in Clerkenwell, at sixty-three feet above
high water, there died but one in five hundred and thirty. The
proportion held throughout.”
“Ah, by the bye, you have heard, of course, complainings of the quality
of water. Will the Londoners sink wells for themselves?”
“Wells! What a child you are! Just from the clouds, I see. Wells in a
large town get horribly polluted. They propose to consolidate and
improve two of the best Thames Water Companies, the Grand Junction and
Vauxhall, for the supply of London, until their great scheme can be
introduced; and to maintain them afterwards as a reserve guard in case
their great scheme shouldn’t prove so triumphant as they think it will
be.”
“What is this great scheme, I should like to know?”
“Why, they talk of fetching rain-water from a tract of heath between
Bagshot and Farnham. The rain there soaks through a thin crust of
growing herbage, which is the only perfect filter, chemical as well as
mechanical—the living rootlets extract more than we can, where impurity
exists. Then, Sir, the rain runs into a large bed of siliceous sand,
placed over marl; below the marl there is siliceous sand again—Ah, I
perceive you are not geological.”
“Go on.”
“The sand, washed by the rains of ages, holds the water without soiling
it more than a glass tumbler would, and the Londoners say that in this
way, by making artificial channels and a big reservoir, they can collect
twenty-eight thousand gallons a day of water nearly pure. They require
forty thousand gallons, and propose to get the rest in the same
neighbourhood from tributaries of the River Wey, not quite so pure, but
only half as hard, as Thames water, and unpolluted.”
“How is it to get to London?”
“Through a covered aqueduct. Covered for coolness’ sake, and
cleanliness. Then it is to be distributed through earthenware pipes,
laid rather deep, again for coolness’ sake in the first instance, but
for cleanliness as well. The water is to come in at high pressure, and
run in iron or lead pipes up every house, scale every wall. There is to
be a tap in every room, and under every tap there is to be the entrance
to a drain pipe. Where water supply ends, drainage begins. They are to
be the two halves of a single system. Furthermore, there are to be
numbers of plugs opening in every street, and streets and courts are to
be washed out every morning, or every other morning, as the traffic may
require, with hose and jet. The Great Metropolis mustn’t be dirty, or be
content with rubbing a finger here and there over its dirt. It is to
have its face washed every morning, just before the hours of business.
The water at high pressure is to set people’s invention at work upon the
introduction of hydraulic apparatus for cranes, et cætera, which now
cause much hand labour and are scarcely worth steam-power.
Furthermore——”
“My dear friend,” cried Nephelo, “you are too clever. More than half of
what you say is unintelligible to me,”
“But the grand point,” continued the garrulous Thames drop, “is the
expense. The saving of cisterns, ball-cocks, plumbers’ bills, expansive
sewer-works, constant repairs, hand labour, street sweeping, soap, tea,
linen, fuel, steam-boilers now damaged by incrustation, boards,
salaries, doctors’ bills, time, parish rates——”
The catalogue was never ended, for the busy Drop was suddenly entangled
among hair upon the corpse of a dead cat, which fate also the fairy
narrowly escaped, to be in the next minute sucked up as Nubis had been
sucked, through pipes into a reservoir. Weary with the incessant
chattering of his conceited friend, whose pride he trusted that a night
with puss might humble, Nephelo now lurked silent in a corner. In a
dreamy state he floated with the current underground, and was half
sleeping in a pipe under some London street, when a great noise of
trampling overhead, mingled with cries, awakened him.
“What is the matter now?” the fairy cried.
“A fire, no doubt, to judge by the noise,” said a neighbour quietly.
Nephelo panted now with triumph. Cirrha was before his eyes. Now he
could benefit the race of man.
“Let us get out,” cried Nephelo; “let us assist in running to the
rescue.”
“Don’t be impatient,” said a drowsy Drop. “We can’t get out of here till
they have found the Company’s turncock, and then he must go to this plug
and that plug in one street, and another, before we are turned off.”
“In the meantime the fire——”
“Will burn the house down. Help in five minutes would save a house. Now
the luckiest man will seldom have his premises attended to in less than
twenty.”
Nephelo thought here was another topic for his gossip in the Thames. The
plugs talked of with a constant water supply would take the sting out of
the Fire-Fiend.
Presently, among confused movements, confused sounds, amid a rush of
water, Nephelo burst into the light—into the vivid light of a great fire
that leapt and roared as Nephelo was dashed against it! Through the red
flames and the black smoke in a burst of steam, the fairy reascended
hopeless to the clouds.