The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the
Whitechapel District--He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower
of London.
London, England.--My Dear Chum: I received your letter yesterday, and it
made me homesick. Gee, but if I could be home there with you and go down
to the swimming hole and get in all over, and play tag in the sand, and
tie some boy's pants and shirt in knots, and yell that the police are
coming, and all grab our clothes under our arms and run across lots with
no clothes on, and get in a barn and put on our clothes, and dry our
hair by pounding it with a stick, so we would not get licked when we got
home, life would be worth living, but here all I do is to dodge people
on the streets and see them look cross when they step on me.
Say, boy, you will never know your luck in being a citizen of good old
America, instead of a subject of Great Britain, because you have got
to be rich or be hungry here, and if you are too rich you have got no
appetite. You have heard of the roast beef of old England, but nobody
eats it but the dukes and bankers. The working men never even saw
a picture of a roast beef, and yet we look upon all Englishmen as
beef-eaters, but three-fourths of the people in this town look hungry
and discouraged, and they never seem to know whether they are going to
have any supper.
I went down to a market this morning where the middle class and the very
poor people buy their supplies, and it would make you sick to see them.
They buy small loaves of bread and a penny's worth of tea, and that is
breakfast, and if a man is working he takes some of the bread to work
for lunch, and the wife or mother buys a carrot or a quarter of a
cabbage, and maybe a bone with a piece of meat about as big as a fish
bait, and that makes supper, with a growler of beer.
Say, the chunk of meat with a bone that an American butcher would throw
at a dog that he had never been introduced to would be a banquet for a
large family over here.
I have been down into the White Chapel district, which is the Five
Points of London, and of the thousands of tough people I saw there
was not a man but looked as though he would cut your liver out for a
shilling, and every woman was drunk on gin. What there is about gin that
makes it the national beverage for bad people beats me, for it looks
like water, tastes like medicine and smells like cold storage eggs. At
home when a person takes a drink of beer or whisky he at least looks
happy for a minute, and maybe he laughs, but here nobody laughs unless
somebody gets hurt, and that seems to tickle everybody in the White
Chapel district.
The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though
they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then
when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their
lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though
they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge,
as though they would like to wring a child's neck or cut holes in the
people they meet.
Two drinks of gin makes a man or woman look as though they had swallowed
a buzz saw. I always thought drinking liquor made people think they were
enjoying themselves, or that they took it to drive away care and make
them forget their sorrows, but when these people drink gin they seem
to do it the way an American drinks carbolic acid, to end the whole
business quick.
At home the drinker drinks to make him feel like he was at a picnic.
Here every drinker acts like a suicide, who only hopes that he may
commit a murder before the gin ends his career. And there are hundreds
of thousands of people in this town who have no ambition except to get
a bit of bread to sustain them till they can get a drink of gin, and
gradually they let up on bread entirely and feed on gin, and look like
mad dogs and snarl at everybody they see, as much as to say: “What are
you going to do about it?”
[Illustration: Snarl at everybody they see 101]
A good square American meal would give them a fit, and they would go to
a hospital and die if the meal could not be got out of them.
Gosh, but I was glad to get out of the White Chapel district, and I kept
looking back for fear one of the men or women would slit me up the back
with a butcher knife, and laugh like an insane asylum inmate.
Do you know, those people who drink gin and go hungry are different from
our American murderers. Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob
you with a joke on their tongue's end, and give you back car fare when
they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay
you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner,
but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up
into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty,
and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your
murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our
country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can
live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum
murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and
when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has eaten a native of
India.
You may think this letter is a solemn occasion because I tell you about
things that are not funny, but if you ever traveled abroad you will find
that there is no fun anywhere except in America unless you make it or
buy it.
We are taking in the solemn things first in order to get dad's mind in a
condition so he can be cured of things he thinks ail him. I took dad to
the Tower of London, and when we got out of it he wanted to have America
interfere and have the confounded place burned down and grass sown on
the site and a park made of it.
The tower covers 13 acres of ground, and there are more things brought
to a visitor's attention that ought to be forgotten than you ever
thought about.
I remember attending the theater at home and seeing Richard the Third
played, and I remember how my sympathies were aroused for the two little
boy princes that were murdered by Richard the Third, but I thought it
was a fake play, and that there was nothing true about it, but, by gosh,
it was right here in the Tower of London that the old hump-backed cuss
murdered those little princes, and dad and I stood right on the spot,
and the beef-eater who showed us around told us all the particulars. Dad
was indignant, and said to the beef-eater:
[Illustration: Stood around and let Richard kill those princes 098]
“Do you mean to tell me you stood around and let Richard kill those
princes without uttering a protest or protecting them or ringing for
the police? By the great hornspoon, you must have been accessory to the
fact, and you ought to be arrested and hung,” and dad pounded his cane
on the stone floor and looked savage.
The beef-eater got red in the face and said: “Begging your pardon, don't
you know, but h'l was not 'ere at the time. This 'istory was made six
'undred years ago.”
Dad begged the man's pardon and told him he supposed the boys were
murdered a year or two ago, and he gave the beef-eater a dollar, and he
was so gratified I think he would have had a murder committed for dad
right there and then if dad had insisted on it.
You feel in going through the tower like you was in an American
slaughter house, for it was here that kings and queens were beheaded
by the dozen. They showed us axes that were used to behead people, and
blocks that the heads of the victims were laid on, and the places where
the heads fell on the floor. It seemed that in olden times when a king
or a queen got too gay, the anti-kings or queens would go to the palace
and catch the king or queen in the act, and take them by the neck and
hustle them to the tower, and when a king or queen got in the tower they
went out on the installment plan, and after being thrown in the gutter
for the mob to recognize, and walk on the bodies, they would bring
them back in the tower, and seal them up in a pigeon hole for future
generations to cry over.
All my life I have had in our house to look at a picture of beautiful
Anne Boleyn, and here I stood right where her head was cut off, and I
couldn't help thinking of how we in America got our civilization from
the descendants of the English people who cut her head off.
By ginger, old chum, it made me hot. I didn't care to look at the old
armor, or the crown jewels, which make you think of a cut glass factory,
but I reveled in the scenes of the beheading. I never was stuck much
on kings and queens, but it seems to me if they had to murder them they
ought to have given 'em a show, and let them fight for their lives,
instead of getting into a trap, like you would entice a rat with cheese,
and then cut their heads off.
I suppose it is right here that we inherited the desire to lynch and
burn at the stake the negroes that commit crime and won't confess at
home. When anything is born in the blood you can't get rid of it without
taking a dose of patriotism and purifying the blood, and I advise you
never to visit the Tower of London, unless you want to feel like going
out and killing some one that is tied up with a rope.
Hearing of these murders and seeing the place where they were committed
does not give you an idea of fair play and you don't feel like taking
some one of your size when you fight, but you get to thinking that if
you could catch a cripple who couldn't defend himself you would like to
take a baseball club and maul the stuffing out of him. You become imbued
with the idea that if you went to war you would not want to stand up
and fight fair, but that you would like to get your enemy in a bunch
and drop dynamite down on him from a balloon, and kill all in sight, and
sail away with an insane laugh.
Gee, but another day in this tower, and I would want to go home and
murder ma, or the neighbors.
The only thing we have got in America that compares with the Tower of
London and its associates is the Leutgert sausage factory in Chicago,
where Leutgert got his wife into the factory, murdered her, and is
alleged to have cut her up in pieces and made sausage of the meat, given
the pieces with gristle in to his dogs, boiled the bones until they
would run into the sewer, dissolved the remnants in concentrated lye,
and sold the sausage to the lumber Jacks in the pine woods.
I expect Chicago will buy that sausage factory and make a show of it, as
London does the tower, and you can go and see it, and feel that you are
as full of modern history as I am of ancient history, here in London.
I could see that dad was getting nervous every time a new beheading
was described to us, and I thought it was time to wake him up. In going
through the room where the old armor was displayed the beef eater told
us who wore the different pieces of armor, and he said at times the
spirit of the dead came back to the tower and occupied the armor, and
I noticed that dad shied at some of the pieces of armor, so when we got
right into the midst of it, and there was armor on every side, and dad
and the beef eater were ahead of me, and dad was walking fast in order
to get out quick, I pushed over one of the pieces, and it went crashing
to the floor and the noise was like a boiler factory exploding, and the
dust of centuries rose up, and the noise echoed down the halls.
Well, you'd a died to see dad and the beef eater. Dad turned pale and
got down on his knees, and I think he began to pray, if he knows how,
and he trembled like a leaf, and the beef eater got behind a set of
armor that Cromwell or some old duck used to wear, and said, “Wot in
the bloody 'ell is the matter with the h'armor?” and then a lot of other
beef eaters came, and they thought dad was the spirit of King John, and
they stampeded, and finally I got dad to stop praying, or whatever it
was that he was doing, and I led him out, and when he got into the open
air he recovered and said. “'Ennery, 'hi have got to get out of Lunnon,
don't you know, because me 'eart is palpitating,” and we went back to
the 'otel, to see if our invitation to visit King Hedward had arrived.
[Illustration: Beefeater's stampede 107]
Say, we are getting so we talk just like English coachmen, and you won't
hundredstand us when we get 'ome. Yours, with a haccent.
'Ennery.