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 débris 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 his
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.
[3] The San Francisco bricklayer receives twenty shillings per day,
and at present is on strike for twenty-four shillings.
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.