第26章

'Don't touch it, mate, the nurse sez it's deadly,' warned my working partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage can.

It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me.Nevertheless, Ihad to carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong disinfectant.

Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this.These men of the spike, the peg, and the street, are encumbrances.They are of no good or use to any one, nor to themselves.They clutter the earth with their presence, and are better out of the way.Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, as they are likewise the quickest to die.

They feel, themselves, that the forces of society tend to hurl them out of existence.We were sprinkling disinfectant by the mortuary, when the dead wagon drove up and five bodies were packed into it.The conversation turned to the 'white potion' and 'black jack,' and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the Infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was 'polished off.' That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a dose of 'black jack' or the 'white potion,' and sent over the divide.It does not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not.The point is, they have the feeling that it is so, and they have created the language with which to express that feeling- 'black jack,' 'white potion,' 'polishing off.'

At eight o'clock we went down into a cellar under the Infirmary, where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps.These were heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess- pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases.Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for.It wasn't pretty.Pigs couldn't have done worse.But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.

'Once, w'en I was 'ere before, wot did I find out there but a 'ole lot of pork-ribs,' said Ginger to me.By 'out there' he meant the place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant.'They was a prime lot, no end o' meat on 'em, an' I'ad 'em into my arms an' was out the gate an' down the street, a-lookin' for some 'un to gi' 'em to.Couldn't see a soul, an' I was runnin' 'round clean crazy, the bloke runnin' after me an' thinkin'

I was 'slingin' my 'ook' [running away].But jest before 'e got me, I got a ole woman an' poked 'em into 'er apron.'

O Charity, O Philanthropy, descend to the spike and take a lesson from Ginger.At the bottom of the Abyss he performed as purely an altruistic act as was ever performed outside the Abyss.It was fine of Ginger, and if the old woman caught some contagion from the 'no end o'

meat' on the pork-ribs, it was still fine, though not so fine.But the most salient thing in this incident, it seems to me, is poor Ginger, 'clean crazy' at sight of so much food going to waste.

It is the rule of the casual ward that a man who enters must stay two nights and a day; but I had seen sufficient for my purpose, had paid for my skilly and canvas, and was preparing to run for it.

'Come on, let's sling it,' I said to one of my mates, pointing toward the open gate through which the dead wagon had come.

'An' get fourteen days?'

'No; get away.'

'Aw, I come 'ere for a rest,' he said complacently.'An' another night's kip won't 'urt me none.'

They were all of this opinion, so I was forced to 'sling it' alone.

'You cawn't ever come back 'ere again for a doss,' they warned me.

'No bloody fear,' said I, with an enthusiasm they could not comprehend; and, dodging out the gate, I sped down the street.

Straight to my room I hurried, changed my clothes, and less than an hour from my escape, in a Turkish bath, I was sweating out whatever germs and other things had penetrated my epidermis, and wishing that Icould stand a temperature of three hundred and twenty rather than two hundred and twenty.