r at the beck and call of
landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children; seventeen hours at least out
of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen, running up stairs
with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water; down on your knees before
a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands--can I call them hands?
The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognised
that you were akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a dog.
And I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions, I was curious to know
the depth of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you had
never been raised. And you generally answered innocently and naively
enough. But sometimes my words were too crude, and they struck through the
thick hide into the quick, into the human, and you winced a little; but
this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal: your
temperament and intelligence was just that of a dog that has picked up a
master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at
any moment. Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I
merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation. You looked--well,
to be candid,--you looked neither young nor old; hard work had obliterated
the delicate markings of the years, and left you in round numbers something
over thirty. Your hair was reddish brown, and your face wore that plain
honest look that is so essentially English. The rest of you was a mass of
stuffy clothes, and when you rushed up stairs I saw something that did not
look like legs; a horrible rush that was of yours, a sort of cart-horse
like bound. I have spoken angrily to you; I have heard others speak angrily
to you, but never did that sweet face of yours, for it was a sweet
face--that sweet, natural goodness that is so sublime--lose its expression
of perfect and unfailing kindness. Words convey little sense of the real
horrors of the reality. Life in your case meant this: to be born in a slum,
and to leave it to work seventeen hours a day in a lodging-house; to be a
Londoner, but to know only the slum in which you were born and the few
shops in the Strand at which the landlady dealt. To know nothing of London
meant in your case not to know that it was not England; England and London!
you could not distinguish between them. Was England an island or a
mountain? you had no notion. I remember when you heard that Miss L---- was
going to Ameri