The People of the Abyss eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 229 pages of information about The People of the Abyss.

The People of the Abyss eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 229 pages of information about The People of the Abyss.

“First cup o’ tea I’ve ’ad in a fortnight,” said the Carter.

“Wonderful tea, that,” said the Carpenter.

They each drank two pints of it, and I assure you that it was slops.  It resembled tea less than lager beer resembles champagne.  Nay, it was “water-bewitched,” and did not resemble tea at all.

It was curious, after the first shock, to notice the effect the food had on them.  At first they were melancholy, and talked of the divers times they had contemplated suicide.  The Carter, not a week before, had stood on the bridge and looked at the water, and pondered the question.  Water, the Carpenter insisted with heat, was a bad route.  He, for one, he knew, would struggle.  A bullet was “’andier,” but how under the sun was he to get hold of a revolver?  That was the rub.

They grew more cheerful as the hot “tea” soaked in, and talked more about themselves.  The Carter had buried his wife and children, with the exception of one son, who grew to manhood and helped him in his little business.  Then the thing happened.  The son, a man of thirty-one, died of the smallpox.  No sooner was this over than the father came down with fever and went to the hospital for three months.  Then he was done for.  He came out weak, debilitated, no strong young son to stand by him, his little business gone glimmering, and not a farthing.  The thing had happened, and the game was up.  No chance for an old man to start again.  Friends all poor and unable to help.  He had tried for work when they were putting up the stands for the first Coronation parade.  “An’ I got fair sick of the answer:  ‘No! no! no!’ It rang in my ears at night when I tried to sleep, always the same, ‘No! no! no!’” Only the past week he had answered an advertisement in Hackney, and on giving his age was told, “Oh, too old, too old by far.”

The Carpenter had been born in the army, where his father had served twenty-two years.  Likewise, his two brothers had gone into the army; one, troop sergeant-major of the Seventh Hussars, dying in India after the Mutiny; the other, after nine years under Roberts in the East, had been lost in Egypt.  The Carpenter had not gone into the army, so here he was, still on the planet.

“But ’ere, give me your ’and,” he said, ripping open his ragged shirt.  “I’m fit for the anatomist, that’s all.  I’m wastin’ away, sir, actually wastin’ away for want of food.  Feel my ribs an’ you’ll see.”

I put my hand under his shirt and felt.  The skin was stretched like parchment over the bones, and the sensation produced was for all the world like running one’s hand over a washboard.

“Seven years o’ bliss I ’ad,” he said.  “A good missus and three bonnie lassies.  But they all died.  Scarlet fever took the girls inside a fortnight.”

“After this, sir,” said the Carter, indicating the spread, and desiring to turn the conversation into more cheerful channels; “after this, I wouldn’t be able to eat a workhouse breakfast in the morning.”

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Project Gutenberg
The People of the Abyss from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.