Honor's Kingdom (15 page)

The compartment behind it was empty.

As I had feared.

“Well, there’s a thing, ain’t it?” the watchmaker declared. He gave me a knowing look I did not like. “The perfect hiding place for billy-doo.” He winked. “A gent can’t tell a rascal from a saint by looking, now can he?” He held the watch toward me in three pieces. “I can let you have twelve shillings for the ticker.”

I bid him reassemble the parts, although it made him grumble. He charged me half a crown for his work, though it did not take a tuppence of his time. But that is London, where Mammon is enthroned.

Next, I found a tailor’s shop that offered clothes readymade. The proprietor was a Pole well past his prime, with a hanging mustache and billows of ashen hair. The whole world finds its way to London, see. He kitted me up in a black frock coat that almost fit and did not seem too dear. I matched it with a sober black waistcoat, but picked gray for my trousers, since he let me have them cheaper. Now, the Pole can be a gloomy sort, when not aroused by passions, but this old fellow was positively charming. He agreed to alter the cuffs of the coat and to hem my chosen trousers on the spot. I am strong in the chest and shoulders, see, but my arms and legs have no proportionate length. For I am small, though capable.

The winning grace was that I was an American. From the moment when I told him that, he would have altered the sun and the moon to suit me. He pinched a pair of eyeglasses onto his nose and set to work most fervently.

It come out the fellow was a revolutionist.

“Soon now,” he told me, as he cut and stitched. “Soon now, you will see. Everybody will see. Poland will be free, there will be a free Poland. No Austrians, no Prussians. No black cossacks with the whip. Only Polish peoples. Then we will be free, like the Americans.”

He looked up from his battered sewing table. “Socialism is coming, the revolution. All men . . .” he drew his needle through the cloth, which seemed to sigh, “ . . . all men are brothers. Yes? As in America, I think.” Biting off a thread, he confided, “In Poland, I am professor. In Cracow. In Jagellonian University.” His eyes shone in remembrance. “It is very old, you know. Most old, our university. I am teaching the philosophy. Then comes the ’Forty-eight and the people say, ‘Now we will have freedom.’ But more of the Austrian soldiers come. Bang-bang. I go to Warsawa. To make the fight against the Russians there. But they are too many. So many killings they are making.” The hot light in his eyes might have melted all the ice in all the arctic seas. “In the prison I have been. In Siberia. Very terrible, the things I see. Still, I go back. Poland must be free. No? Is that not true? Must not all men be free?”

I fear I was a disappointment to him. The truth is I know little enough of Poland and am not certain of its state of government, although I believe the Tsar has a heavy hand. Other foreigners were mucking about there, too, to hear that old professor and tailor tell it. But, while I do believe men should be free, I am no friend to uproar and disorder. As Mr. Carlyle has explained, most revolutions finish worse than they started. With dreams cut short, and heads cut off, and soldiers cut down by the thousands.

I began to speak of our own war and of slavery, but that only riled him the worse.

“Yes, yes! The black slave! He will rise up!” The fellow’s mustache trembled with excitement. “And here, here in this England, the working man soon makes the revolution. Here, right here! In Manchester, I think. In such places. To be free of the rich people and the boot of the government. The system of the Capitalism—it all comes down. Very soon, I think. It cannot go on making only the poverty for the people. The worker is the slave of the Capitalism, like the Negro. Perhaps your American war becomes everywhere a war—and then the English worker rises up. Because he is told to fight against
the black man, but he will not do that. Perhaps it starts this way, you see?”

I did not see. And I wanted no part of any bigger war. Our Union had enough to eat without a second helping. Worse, I knew full well what the English working man, given a bayonet, would do to a black or brown hide wherever he found it.

A thing occurred to me that might both please the tailor and aid myself.

“Would you happen to know,” I asked, “one
Herr
Karl Marx, a German revolutionist?”

The tailor made a dismissive face. “I know. Yes. Him I know.” The fellow shook his head. “He makes no revolutions, that man. Once, I think, maybe he does. But he only makes the talk and goes to the library. Every day to the library. To make his foolish writing no one reads.” The tailor paused at his eye-straining labors. “The time of books is gone. Finished. I am professor, I know. Now it is time for the world revolution.”

“Yes, but would you happen to have the fellow’s address?”

He did. All written down in a book, which seemed an incautious practice for a conspirator. Mr. Marx might be found at 9 Grafton Terrace, in Kentish Town, which was just north of London and near the country joys of Hampstead Heath. Firebrand or no, he was not in hiding.

But the revolutionist tailor tried to warn me: “He wastes your time only, this Marx. Always talking. Talking and writing.” He tapped his head. “He is more professor than me. Too much thinking. Now it is time for the war and the Socialist revolution! Here, take this. You try, yes? I think they fit you now, your coat and trousers.”

They sat all proper and I paid the fellow. Although it pinched to count the money out.

Fortunately, I conserved the price of an omnibus, for Baker Street was but a stroll away. Before I went back to the hotel, with my parcel and my fears of what I might find, I bought a meat pie from a vendor and ate it in the street. I was determined to pursue a proper economy, see. All London was a horror of high
prices, and I near expected to be charged a toll for walking and taxed for every breath I took of the air.

The pie made a good repast and was filling enough, although I spit some gristle on the pavings.

I went up the hotel stairs in trepidation. Concerned that I might find the boy’s other hand—or worse—upon my bed. But my room was neat and orderly, though stuffy as the punishment cell in Delhi. Down I went again and asked the porter if I might have a tub of water in my room. Twas queer. The night before, the man had been gay and friendly, at least until he tired of our conversation, but now he was as sullen as a bear. He made it clear he did not want to be bothered, which hardly seemed a proper hospitality. To be fair, he doubtless had been questioned by the police about severed hands and dark-of-the-night intruders. Likely, I was no longer a favored guest.

Finally, he offered a tub of water. “Hardly used,” he said, and left in a room just vacated by a lodger. Now, you may think me particular, but I will not bathe in another’s leavings, except, of course, on bath day with my family. It required the production of some shillings—the city was extortionate to an outrage—to prevail upon him to haul up a tub, though a small one, and a bucket for me to carry my own water.

My bath smelled before I got in it, for London is a city poorly piped. Nonetheless, the experience was salutary. A cold bath always sets a man to rights. I drew on a change of linens and my new clothes, and started on my way to the depths of sin.

SIX

THE CRUSH OUTSIDE THE PENNY GAFF WAS SHAMELESS, with male and female pressed in a pack and hollering loud as recruits on pay-day night. I fear some were intoxicated and, sadly, not only the boys. Oh, colorful they were, that squirming mass of apprentices and laboring lads, of chambermaids off for the night and huckster girls freed of flower carts and fruit trays. Got up bright in cast-off clothes, a benefit of certain domestic employments, the best-appointed females paraded the fashions of seasons past. Some of the boys affected velvet coats, despite the summer’s heat, while others, mannered worst of all, had stripped off their jackets and turned back their sleeves in public, with all the license of secluded artisans. But the herding together it was that struck me deepest, a mixing of the sexes indiscriminate, with bodies pushed up tight to one another, close as soldiers on a freezing night. Those young girls, some of them fair in the common way, did not display the least regard for modesty.

There were fights, of course. For some male hands explored beyond all permissible boundaries in that tangle. But, mostly, there was laughter and good feeling of a depth that proper folk would hardly credit. Twas Saturday night, and even joyless lives seemed full of hope.

“Which ’un was it, Mabel? Tell me, an’ I’ll put ’is teeth out ’is arse.”

“Go on with you. Ain’t you the fresh one, Charlie?”

“I told ’im, I did, ’e could put ’is lips right ’ere, but to leave ’is bloody ’ands off me.”

“Oh, you din’t!”

“I sent Bill off for an ice, so we got two minutes.”

“Joanie? Where are you got to, Joanie-girl?”

“I put an ’alf couter down on the Lion of Lambeth, though I couldn’t get no odds. Knock down Joey Bones, ’e will, so’s the bastard won’t get up.”

“Don’t be afraid to flash it, ladies. That’s what we’re all ’ere for.”

Such was their talk, to the limits of my understanding. For many spoke true cockney, the maddening tongue of those born to the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow. The penny gaff itself appeared no more than a private house, altered to serve an alien purpose. Above that steaming rumpus in front of the doors, a great span of canvas displayed a painted female form, with blond locks and a finger raised to her chin. The lettering read:

Dr. Beezil’s Universal Musical Theater Proudly Presents

For the Amusement of the Discriminating Public

Miss Polly Perkins

The White Lily of Kent

The Toast of Paris!

Newly Returned From Her Grand Tour

And Other Artists of Fame and Reputation

This seemed to me no venue for a Methodist. But let that bide. I had a task before me, and I would do it.

Tired I was, and sweated despite my bath, for I had sat crammed into a succession of omnibuses on my progress across London, confined in the closest quarters with ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances or good sense did not afford them private conveyances or the extravagance of cabs. On Saturday night, all the city seemed abroad, rushing here and there, to sample the world. Then, setting down by Mansion House and all its glittering glories, I had walked the last few streets to save the fare.

And I will tell you: For all the gaiety of those streets, there was plentiful sorrow, too. Public houses blazed with fancy fixtures, their gas jets sparkling on leaded glass and brass, even where the fallen looked weak in the pocket. The welcome-halls of Hell they were, foaming with damnation. The evening had gathered the warmth of the day and, although a clouding, darkening sky promised relief in the night, the city remained an oven to bake its children. It only made those weak souls drink the more, and though the light of day had not yet left us, the gutters counted men among their refuse.

Women of unfortunate profession walked abroad in startling numbers—passing in the omnibus, I had even seen them strutting in front of Newgate—and I could only wonder at the variety of their patronage. How many men must break their sacred vows, or lose their youthful health, to keep so vast an army of sinners marching? To say nothing of the fate of those sad women themselves. I even imagined I saw Mr. Gladstone pleading with one such in a shadowed nook, but doubtless the man I glimpsed bore but a resemblance.

Now I stood by the penny gaff—one of half a hundred in those streets—afraid I would not even get me in. For I did not see how the building before me could hold the swarming crowd.

When at last the chargers opened the doors, you would have thought the weak bound to be crushed. I edged forward, wielding my cane to keep me from unfortunate embarrassments, but could not get me anywhere close to the entrance. When Mr. Carlyle wrote of the Bastille’s storming, his language failed to capture a penny gaff.

Girls squealed, some in delight. Nor were they shy of cursing any boy who stepped on their precious shoes or trailing hems. Their stock of words seemed drawn from docks and barracks.