CHAPTER XIV.

THE CADGERS OF LONDON BRIDGE.

AFTER leaving the Old Jewry Lane and passing up Cheapside, we came into the Poultry just as the rain had ceased, and as great rifts in the masses of fog were breaking through the opaque atmosphere. The Poultry is a short street which runs up to the Mansion House, and during the noon of the day is nearly impassable from the amount of traffic done there. Now the shops were all closed, and the bell of St. Paul's rang out for midnight, the echoes stealing over the city and the river in a ghostly way that thrilled through the hearts of the pedestrians who were darkness-bound in the streets. We passed through the Poultry into King William street, and on past Cannon street, with its warehouses and retail stores, by East Cheap, until we could see London Bridge, in all its vastness, looming up like a sleeping giant, the dark arches girding the river in seemingly everlasting bands.

The detective said: "Let's go down the stairs of the bridge and see some of the characters that find board and lodging down the steps. They're a hawful set, some on 'em."

The Thames lay at our feet, spread out like a map. The sky was clearing, and the river was very quiet. Now and then the sullen waters, driven in an eddy against the huge piers, could be heard plashing in a secret, stealthy manner, and anon they would recede and come back again, plash! plash! plash! All about us was so still; not a sound to be heard as we leaned over one of the alcoves in the bridge. Below us, to the left, the Catharine Docks, full of shipping; the London Docks, full of shipping; Shadwell lined with lighter craft--all so still, and the million of masts looking ghostly in the holy light of the midnight. Over on the right, Bermondsey-way, more shipping--countless spars pointing up to the midnight skies; the Pool choked with shipping--coal barges, eel-boats, East India vessels, brigs and schooners, barks and black-hulled packets, lying high in the water; flat-bottomed barges for carrying sand and for dredging; the gray coping stones of the Tower hanging over the water, and the stillness of death on noisy Rotherhithe, and a pall over the immense West India docks.

This great river, this river of all the nations of the world, with their tributes laid at her docks and their gifts on her broad bosom--how quiet it is just now. A matchless stream for its congregated wealth. Miles of warehouses, miles of stone docks, miles of shipping, and thousands of seamen. And yet a dirty and turbid and ungrateful river at times, when it overflows the fish-stalls, when it overflows the high street in Wapping and drowns myriads of rats in Upper and Lower Thames street.

[Sidenote: VAGRANCY AND PAUPERISM.]

We went down the "London Stairs." Every bridge that spans the Thames has four stairs or flights of stone-steps running down to the water's edge. These stone stairs are generally twenty or twenty-five feet wide, and they run down, for a hundred broad, massive and capacious steps, to where the tide comes in. There are turns in the stairs, and stone platforms--where the magnificent stone embankment has not been completed, as it is at Westminster Bridge down the river--under whose vast arches hundreds of human beings find shelter from the inclemency of the weather. I may say here that there is not such a city in the world as London for vagrancy and vagabondism of the worst kind despite the fact that there are 7,000 police in the metropolitan district; and besides this force for prevention, the work-houses in the West District, composing Kensington, Fulham, Paddington, Chelsea, St. George's, Hanover Square, St. Margaret, and St. John, and Westminster, furnish in and out door relief to 18,000 persons. Marylebone, Hampstead, St. Pancras, Islington, and Hackney, in the North District, provide for 24,820 persons. St. Giles, St. George, Bloomsbury, the Strand, Holborn, and City of London, in the Central District, provide for 19,127 persons. Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George in the East, Stepney, Mile End Town, and Poplar, provide for 28,713 persons, in the East District. In the Southern District, St. Saviour, Southwark, Rotherhithe, and Bermondsey; in St. Olave's, Lambeth, Wandsworth, and Clapham, Camberwell, Greenwich, Woolwich, and Lewisham, there is provision for 38,487 persons. Here we have a total of 128,880 men, women, and children, occupants of the union work-houses of the metropolis of London, with a population of less than three and a half millions. Besides this number, there are thousands of casuals who receive lodgings in the work-houses; and outside this fearful aggregate there are roaming in and about London at least 15,000 vagrants--or, as they would be called in America, "bummers"--who do not frequent the work-houses from various reasons, and consequently have to "bunk out," as we would call it in New York.

At the bottom of some of the bridges there are heaps of rubbish and old rotting planking, some of which rubbish is carried off when the tide leaves the stones of the bridges. Then there are old boat-houses, and rows of long, stout-built boats for hire; but at night there are no persons to watch these boats, and they are used as berths to sleep in by the vagrant vagabonds who haunt the recesses of the bridges. When the tide recedes in the Thames, it generally leaves a space of twenty to two hundred feet of the inshore bottom of the river bare on the Surrey side, and this is generally a soft, drab-looking mud, with a treacherous look, where man or beast might be swallowed up without any warning. When the detective and I went down into the dark recesses of London Bridge, that night, the river was at the flood, and the rubbish was being carried away by the incoming tide. This was on the Surrey side of the river. There were about a dozen persons beneath the first archway, making, in fact, a perfect gypsy encampment. Eight of these persons were of the male sex, and beside these there were two old haggard-looking women and a grown girl of twenty years or thereabouts, and a child of ten years, in all the glory of rags and destitution. The oldest man in the party might have been fifty years of age, and the others were younger, one of them being a stout, able-bodied young fellow of eighteen or nineteen. Some of the party were asleep, and were snoring most comfortably, as the rain did not penetrate to their place of sleeping; but every few minutes a gust of wind came howling down the river and burst through the arches with a mad fury, making the sleepers turn uneasily on the stone steps.

The old fellow, who seemed to be a confirmed vagrant, from his slouchy look and greasy, unpatched clothes, had built a small fire of the refuse which abounded in the arches, and he was drying pieces of driftwood that had floated from the scaffolding on the new Blackfriar's Bridge down the river. He was warming his hands and slapping them, and the little girl of ten years was stooped over the fire, toasting an enormous potato on the end of a splinter of wood.

[Sidenote: THE LOST GIRL.]

"What are you herding here for, Prindle," said the detective to the old fellow, who looked up in a morose way and muttered something under his teeth which sounded like "D----n the bobbies."

"I'm a trying to get somethink to heat. Vy vill yer foller a cove everywheres as wants to get a mouthful to heat. I haint done nothink as should bring you here arter me. I'm not hon the pad now hany more."

"I don't want yer pertikler, I don't; but stop yer jaw and keep a civil tongue in yer head, will ye," said the sergeant. "Whose gal is that ere a toasting the taty with the skiver?"

"I'm blessed hif I knows whose gal it his. Ye don't suppose that I'm the man as makes the Post-hoffice Di-rek-te-ree. She haint mine, I know, cos I'm not a fool, nor never vos, to have any children. I must say she is werry 'andy at the taties when a feller wants to get some winks. But, I say, you got nothink aginst me from the Beak, 'ave you?"

"No, I have nothing against you just at this partickler moment, but I dunno how soon I'll have," said the sergeant. "But I have brought a gentleman here who wants to get some information about this 'ere precious family of yours, and how you contrive to live, and I want you to answer him civilly, or I may find something against you that would hurt your tender feelings, you know."

"He wants some hinformation habout me and my family, does he? That's a precious lark, that is. Why doesn't he stay in his bleeding bed and cover his nose hup in the sheets. I never asked 'im about his familee, as I knows on. Wot a werry pecoolier taste he has, to be sure. Maybe he's one of them rummaging Paper chaps as is halways a torkin about the rights and dooties of the vorkin' classes, and is a-ruinin' of the country's blessed prosperity?"

"Father, answer the man civilly, will ye. Yer halways a-making trouble for yourself by yer bad tongue, and it does other people harm as well as yourself. Tell him wot you have got to tell, and he'll go away."

This was said by the young girl, who now came forward and stood looking at the old man eagerly. She was robed in an old calico gown, rather tattered at the bottom, and quite besmirched with the washings of the Thames mud which had clung to the stone stairs of the bridge. The girl was well formed and tall, and her dress hung from a good figure. Her eyes were black and glittering, and her bold, coarse, handsome face was seared with the traces of evil passions, hardship, and reckless despair. The girl's face told her story before she had spoken. Childhood and girlhood reeking with the foulness of the gutters, and then the matured woman a castaway in the deadly miasma of the London slums.

"There, aint that a precious daughter for a loving father like me. Oh, she's a comfort to me in me hold hage, so she is. And she talks of wirtue and gets on the 'igh 'orse with her poor old father sometimes, and makes him veep. Oh, vot an ungrateful family I've got, to be sure. She's no better than she ought to be, anyhow."

"Oh, stop that bloody talk, old man," said the stout, able-bodied young fellow, who seemed to be a person of influence in the out-door establishment. "W'ats the use of throwin' sich things in the gal's face. Molly's a gal jest like any one else's gal when she can't get anything to eat. I don't blame her a bit."

[Sidenote: THE YOUNG CADGER'S STORY.]

"If I am bad, Jem," burst out the girl, raging with passion, and her eyes filled with tears, "who made me so? Who kept chiming into my ears that I had a pretty face and that I ought to sell it? Who, I say? Who was it," continued the girl, clenching her hands, and her face blazing with excitement, "that struck me last Christmas night, come two years, and pitched me out of the hole that we lived in on Saffron Hill? And then I had to seek a livin' in the streets, and when I was hungry I took money and sold myself to perdition; and then I had a father who used to steal it from me when I'd come home to sleep, and he'd take the few shillings that I earned by my shame, to go and drink it, and none of ye were ashamed to live on the money that lost my poor soul. Not one of ye." Here the girl, utterly exhausted, sat down on the stones and wept as if her heart was going to break, while the ragged child, who had by this time succeeded in burning her fingers a number of times, looked on in wonder at the sudden turmoil of vagabondism. The son, a powerfully built fellow, looked up and said:

"Molly, I wish your devilish trap ud shut. Wot good does this do any of ye, I'd like to know. Here I've been hon the aggrawatin' tramp for two weeks, and I hexpected to see yes all comfortable like, when I kum home, in Saffron Hill, down St. Giles way, and here I finds yes hall a-living hunder London Bridge by night, and a-beggin, or doin' wuss, in the day time. Hits enuff to make a saint swear at his blessed liver."

"Wuss luck, Jem; wuss luck, Jem; I halways knew as how it would come to this, a-sooner or a-later," said an old crone in the corner of the archway, who was smoking a pipe and whom I believed to be fast asleep.

"Well, sir, if ye'v got no hobjection," said the stout young man, "I'll tell you our story. It isn't much of a story to tell, after all. The old man there went to be a navvy and got two shillings a day until he took to drink; when he had work on the Great Western. They used to swindle him in the Tommy shops. Them's the shops, you see, where a contractor who 'as the job to bulk it, keeps the groceries and grub for the navvies. They skin the navvies so terribly, do these Tommy shops, and when his week is up, a man has nothing left out of his vages, cos', you see, they halways manages to run up the bill as high as the week's vages. Oh! they are precious scoundrels!"

"Don't call them scoundrels, Jem. Hit's too good a name for them haltogether," said the old man, who was beginning to doze.

"Will you shut up?" savagely said the hopeful son; and then he continued, when he had taken a whiff at the pipe: "Well, by and by the old man got to drinking so much beer that the whole of the wages was drawn for lush, and he had nothing to eat during the week excepting what the other men gave him for charity."

"Hevery word of that's a lie, Jem. Wot a precious talent you have, to be sure, for habusin of your poor old fayther."

"Will you shut up, d----n you?" said the dutiful son, who was fast losing his temper at being interrupted so often by his fond parent. "I wos away at sea down on a Cardiff coaster, when the old man came home, and the gal, there, Molly, was a lace-maker, and wos making eight shillings a week, and the old woman used to make penny baskets to carry fish home from the markets, and she got, I suppose, as much as--how much did you make on them ere baskets, mother?"

"Two and sevenpence ha'penny a week, Jem, and some of the stuff wos rotten has an egg, Jem, and I halways had bad hies, Jem--you know I had--a-crying for you when you wos a blessed baby."

"There, stop that bell-clapper of yours, will ye? Yez are all crazy, I think. Well, the short and the long of it wos, that the old man came home and began to drink everything that he could put his hands on, and Molly lost her place because the old un _would_ come haround her place of business, in Tottenham Court road, and her hemployer as was said as 'ow he's blessed if he'd stand hit hany longer, 'aving such a drunken old bloke a-comin around his shop; and then the gal took to the street, and she got two months in the Bridewell for wagrancy, and when she came hout she was wuss nor ever, and then the family got put hout cos' they could not pay the rent in Saffron Hill, four bob and a tanner a week; and it all comes of that hold man a-drinking like a swine that we are here to-night hunder London Bridge."

"How _can_ you tell sich voppers, Jem, about yer poor old fayther? Ven you was about two hinches 'igh I used to dandle ye hon me knee, and now look at yer hingratitude to the hauthor of your beink."

[Sidenote: TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED CADGERS.]

"Guv us a taty, Jenny," said the son to the little girl, who was now engaged in pulling three or four from the dying embers of the fire; and he snatched one and tore a piece out of it eagerly, hot ashes and all. Just then a low steamer went past, with her red signal light shining like a huge glow-worm out upon the surface of the dark river, and as she went under the bridge her whistle shrieked out on the night air like a demon, and at the same moment the bell of St. Saviour's in Southwark, on the Surrey side of the river, tolled in a brazen tone the hour of one o'clock, and Sergeant Scott suggested to me that we might as well go about our business and leave the Cadgers to themselves. "Cadger" is a Cockney term for people who will not work and have no habitation, but go from one place to another, roaming loosely, picking up anything they can get, honestly if they can get it that way, and if not they will not hesitate to steal for a living, or beg when they find people charitable enough and willing to commiserate their supposed sufferings.

There are about 2,500 of this class in and around London, continually changing their places of residence, and to this class the hopeful family under London Bridge belonged.