Frying-pan Alley and a Glimpse of Inferno.
The beasts they hunger, and eat, and die, And so do we, and the world's a sty.
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Say many men, and hasten by.
-SIDNEY LANIER.
THREE OF US WALKED down Mile End Road, and one was a hero.He was a slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Fra Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over.
He was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and ripe for martyrdom.As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an active and dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer meetings which have vexed the serenity of Merry England these several years back.Little items he had been imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in parks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn hope, when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he and three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying missiles and the crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the mob till rescued by platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy battles on stairways, galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows, collapsed stairways, wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and bones- and then, with a regretful sigh, he looked at me and said: 'How I envy you big, strong men! I'm such a little mite I can't do much when it comes to fighting.'
And I, walking a head and shoulders above my two companions, remembered my own husky West and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn, to envy there.Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.
But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight who eked out a precarious existence in a sweating den.
'I'm a 'earty man, I am,' he announced.'Not like the other chaps at my shop, I ain't.They consider me a fine specimen of manhood.W'y, d'
ye know, I weigh one hundred and forty pounds!'
I was ashamed to tell him that I weighed one hundred and seventy, so I contented myself with taking his measure.Poor misshapen little man!
His skin an unhealthy color, body gnarled and twisted out of all decency, contracted chest, shoulders bent prodigiously from long hours of toil, and head hanging heavily forward and out of place! A''earty man,' 'e was!
'How tall are you?'
'Five foot two,' he answered proudly; 'an' the chaps at the shop...'
'Let me see that shop,' I said.
The shop was idle just then, but I still desired to see it.
Passing Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into Frying-pan Alley.A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond.In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe nursing at breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood.In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler stairway.Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth and refuse.
There were seven rooms in this abomination called a house.In six of the rooms, twenty-odd people, of both ***es and all ages, cooked, ate, slept, and worked.In size the rooms averaged eight feet by eight, or possibly nine.The seventh room we entered.It was the den in which five men 'sweated.' It was seven feet wide by eight long, and the table at which the work was performed took up the major portion of the space.On this table were five lasts, and there was barely room for the men to stand to their work, for the rest of the space was heaped with cardboard, leather, bundles of shoe uppers, and a miscellaneous assortment of materials used in attaching the uppers of shoes to their soles.
In the adjoining room lived a woman and six children.In another vile hole lived a widow, with an only son of sixteen who was dying of consumption.The woman hawked sweetmeats on the street, I was told, and more often failed than not in supplying her son with the three quarts of milk he daily required.Further, this son, weak and dying, did not taste meat oftener than once a week; and the kind and quality of this meat cannot possibly be imagined by people who have never watched human swine eat.
'The w'y 'e coughs is somethin' terrible,' volunteered my sweated friend, referring to the dying boy.'We 'ear 'im 'ere, w'ile we're workin', an' it's terrible, I say, terrible!'
And, what of the coughing and the sweetmeats, I found another menace added to the hostile environment of the children of the slum.
My sweated friend, when work was to be had, toiled with four other men in this eight-by-seven room.In winter a lamp burned nearly all the day and added its fumes to the overloaded air, which was breathed, and breathed, and breathed again.
In good times, when there was a rush of work, this man told me that he could earn as high as 'thirty bob a week.'- Thirty shillings! Seven dollars and a half!
