Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon

“Hour after hour went by, and still we worked on; while as every big rafter or beam was lifted and dragged away, I was obliged to turn my head, for I felt sick, and the place seemed to swim, for I expected to see Patty’s little bright curls torn out and hanging to the jagged wood, and that underneath there would be something horrible and crushed.

“I know it wasn’t manly; but what can I say, when there was a little bright, blue-eyed child in the case – one of those little things whose look will make your great rough hand fall to your side when raised in anger, while the tiny thing can lead you about and do what she likes with you? P’r’aps I ain’t manly; but somehow, children always seems to get the upper hand of me.

“And so on we worked, hour after hour; men getting tired and dropping off, but always plenty more ready to take their places; while I – I never thought of it, and kept on tearing away till my hands bled, and the sweat ran down my face; but I turned away every time there was something large lifted, for I said to myself ‘She must be under that!’ And then again and again, in my mind, I seemed to see the torn and crushed face of my darling, and her long curls dabbled in blood.

“In the midst of the piled-up, blackened ruins – bricks, mortar, tiles, lead, and ragged and split beams, huge pieces of wood snapped and torn like matches – we toiled on hour after hour till the dark night came, when the gas pipes that had been laid bare and plugged were unstopped, and the gas lit, so that it flared and blazed and cast a strange wild light over the ruined place. There had been flames burst forth two or three times from parts of the ruins, but a few sprinklings from the fire engine in attendance had put them out; and as we worked on the rubbish grew cooler and cooler.

“Some said that the child could not have been there, but the sight of her mother tearing out was sufficient, when once she got away from the kind people who had her in their house – a house where but part of the windows had been broken by the explosion – and came running to where I was at work, snatching at the bricks and wood, till I got two or three to take her back for I couldn’t have left where I was to have saved my life. But I remember so well asking myself why it was that women will let down their back hair when they’re in a state of excitement, and make ’emselves look so wild.

“By-and-by someone came to say how bad my wife was, and that she wanted to see me; but I felt that I couldn’t go, and kept on in a fevered sort of way, work, work; and I’ve thought since that if she had been dying it would have been all the same. However, I heard soon after that she seemed a little better; and I found out afterwards that a doctor there had given the poor thing something that seemed to calm her and she went to sleep.

“It would have been a strong dose, though, that would have sent me off to sleep, as still on, hour after hour, I worked there, never tiring, but lifting beams that two or three men would have gone at, and tossing the rubbish away like so much straw.

“The owners were kind enough, and did all they could to encourage the men, sending out beer and other refreshments; but the heap of stuff to move was something frightful, and more than once I felt quite in despair, and ready to sit down and weakly cry. But I was at it again the next moment, and working with the best of them.

“‘Hadn’t you better leave now?’ said one of my masters; ‘I’ll see that everything is done.’

“I gave him one look, and he laid his hand kindly on my shoulder, and said no more to me about going; and I heard him say, ‘Poor fellow!’ to some one by him, as he turned away.

“We came upon the biler quite half-a-dozen yards out of its place, ripped right across where the rivers went; while as for the engine, it was one curious bit of iron tangle – rode, and bars, and pieces of iron and brass, twisted and turned and bent about, like so much string; and the great flywheel was broken in half-a-dozen places.

“This showed us now where the great cellar-like place – the stoke-hole – was; and we worked down now towards that; but still clearing the way, for how could I tell where the child might be? But it was weary, slow work; every now and then rigging up shears, and fastening ropes and pulley and sheaf, to haul up some great piece of iron or a beam; and willing as every one was, we made very little progress in the dark night.

“Once we had to stop and batter away a wall with a scaffold pole; for the police declared it to be unsafe, and the sergeant would not let us work near it till it was down; and all the while I was raging like a madman at the check. But it was of no use, and the man was right. He was doing his duty, and not like me, searching for the little crushed form of my darling in the cruel ruins. The people made me worse, for they would talk and say what they thought, so that I could hear. One would say she might still be alive, another would shake his head, and so on; when I kept stopping, in spite of all I tried not, listening to what they said, and it all seemed so much lost time.

“The engine-room was now cleared, and in spite of my trembling and horror, as every big piece was disturbed, nothing had been found; but all at once, as we were trying to clear behind the biler, and get down to the stoke-hole, one of the men gate a cry. I caught at the man nearest to me, and then lights, rubbish, the strange wild scene, all seemed to run round me, and I should have fallen only the man held me up, and some one brought me some brandy.

“I was myself again directly, and stumbling over the bricks to where a knot of men had collected, and a policeman had his bull’s-eye lantern open, and they were stooping to look at something that lay just under a beam they had raised – to the left of where I expected she would be found.

“‘Smashed,’ I heard some one, with his back to me, say; and then some one else, ‘Poor little thing, she must have run past here!’

“Then, with my throat dry and my eyes staring, I crept up and thrust two men aside, right and left, when the others made way for me without speaking, and, when I got close up, I covered my face with my hands, and softly knelt down.

“The policeman said something, and some one else spoke cheerily; but I couldn’t hear what they said, for my every thought was upon what I was going to see. And now, for the first time, the great, blinding tears came gushing from my eyes, so that when I slowly took down first one hand and then another, I was blinded, and could not see for a few moments; till, stooping a little lower, there, smashed and flattened, covered with mortar and dust, was my old red cotton handkercher tied round the basin and plate that held my dinner, dropped here by my little darling girl.

“For a few moments I was, as it were, struck dumb – it was so different a sight to what I had expected to see; and then I leaped up and laughed, and shouted, and danced – the relief was so great.

“‘Come on!’ I cried again; and then, for an hour or more, we were at it, working away till the light began to come in the east, and tell us that it was daybreak.

“Late as it was, plenty of people had stopped all the time; for, somehow or another, hundreds had got to know the little bright, golden-haired thing that trotted backwards and forwards every day with my dinner basin. She was too little to do it, but then, bless you, that was our pride; for the wife combed and brushed and dressed her up on purpose. And fine and proud we used to be of the little thing, going and coming – so old-fashioned. Why, lots of heads used to be thrust out to watch her; and seeing how pretty, and artless, and young she was, we used to feel that every one would try and protect her; and it was so. Time after time, that night, I saw motherly-looking women, that I did not know, with their aprons to their eyes, sobbing and crying; and though I didn’t notice it then, I remembered it well enough afterwards – ah! and always shall; while the way in which some of the men worked – well-to-do men, who would have thought themselves insulted if you’d offered ’em five shillings for their night’s job – showed how my poor little darling had won the hearts of all around. Often and often since, too, I could have stopped this one, and shook hands with that one for their kindness; only there’s always that shut-upness about an Englishman that seems to make him all heart at a time of sorrow, and a piece of solid bluntness at every other time.

“Well, it was now just upon morning, and we were all worked up to a pitch of excitement that nothing could be like. We had been expecting to come upon the poor child all the afternoon and night, but now there could be no doubt of it. She must be here; for we were now down in the stoke-hole, working again with more vigour than had been shown for hours. Men’s faces were flushed, and their teeth set. They didn’t talk, only in Whispers; and the stuff went flying out as fast as others could take it away.

“‘Easy, easy,’ the sergeant of police kept saying, as he and two of his men kept us well lit with the strong light of their lanterns.

“But the men tore on, till at last the place was about cleared out, and we had got to a mass of brick wall sloping against one side, and a little woodwork on the other side, along with some rubbish.

“And now was the exciting time, as we went, four of us, at the brick wall, and dragged at it, when some women up above shrieked out, and we stood trembling, for it had crumbled down and lay all of a heap where we had raised it from.

“‘Quick!’ I shouted, huskily. And we tore the bricks away till there was hardly a scrap left, and we stood staring at one another.

“‘Why, she ain’t here, arter all!’ says a policeman.

“‘I’m blest,’ says another.

“But I couldn’t speak, for I did not know what to do; but stood staring about as if I expected next to see the little darling come running up again unhurt.

“‘Try there,’ says the sergeant.

“Then he turned on his light in a dark corner, where the bits of wood lay, and I darted across and threw back two or three pieces, when I gave a cry, and fell on my knees again. For there was no mistake this time: I had uncovered a little foot, and there was the white sock all blood-stained; and I felt a great sob rise from my breast as I stooped down and kissed the little red spot.

“‘Steady,’ said the sergeant; and then quickly, as I knelt there, they reached over me, and lifted piece after piece away, till there, in the grey light of the morning, I was looking upon the little motionless figure, lying there with her golden hair, as I had fancied, dabbled in blood from a cut in her little white forehead, where the blood had run, but now lay hard and dry. Covered with blood and scraps of mortar, she lay stretched out there, and I felt as if my heart would break to see the little, peaceful face almost with a smile upon it; while, as if out of respect to my feelings, the men all drew back, till I knelt there alone.

“And now far up in the sky the warm light of the rising sun shone, and it was reflected down upon that tiny face, and as I knelt there in the still silence of that early morn I could hear again and again a half-stifled sob from those looking on.

“With trembling hands I leaned forward and gently raised her head; then, passing one beneath her, I rose on my knee to bear her out, when I stopped as if turned to stone, then left go, and clasped both my raw and bleeding hands to my blackened forehead, as shrieking out – ‘My God, she’s alive!’ I fell back insensible; for those little blue eyes had opened at my touch, and a voice, whispered the one word —

“‘Father!’

“That’s her, sir. Fine girl she’s grown, ain’t she? but she was beautiful as a child. Hair ever so many shades lighter; and, unless you went close up, you couldn’t see the mark of that cut, though it was some time before the scar gave over looking red.

“But really, you know, sir, there ought to be something done about these bilers; for the rate at which they’re a-bustin’s fearful.”

Chapter Twelve.

My Patient the Captain

Captain Greening as he was called was a curious old patient of mine whom I had to attend pretty regularly when I lived at Basingstoke. His title of captain was derived from the fact that he had in his younger days been captain of a barge plying along the canal. His was a chronic case that was incurable, so I rarely called upon him at a busy time, for nothing pleased the old fellow better than buttonholing me for a long talk.

“Look ye here, doctor,” he’d say, “I like you, and it’s a pleasure to be ill that it is, so as to have you to talk to.”

I believe that any good return would have done as well but I did not say so, and we remained the best of friends.

I called upon him one day at his cottage where he very comfortably enjoyed the snug winter of his days, and found him so excited over a newspaper that he forgot all about his asthma, and could only answer my questions with others.

“Have you seen about this Regent’s Park accident?” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” I replied, “I read it all yesterday morning. Terrible affair.”

“Awful, only it might have been so much worse. There sit down, doctor. You know I used to have a canal boat – monkey boat we called ’em, because they are so long and thin.”

“Yes, I know it,” I said.

“Ah, and I’ve had a load of powder scores o’ times both in monkey boats and lighters on the Thames. You ain’t in a hurry to-day, doctor?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“That’s good,” said the old fellow. “Asthma’s better. Look here, doctor, I might have been blown up just as those poor chaps was at any time, and I nearly was once.”

“What, blown up by powder!”

“To be sure I was. Look here, I take my long clay pipe off the table – so; I pulls the lead tobacco box towards me – so; I fills my pipe-bowl – so; and then I pulls open this neat little box, made like somebody’s first idea of a chest of drawers, takes out one of these little splints of wood, rubs it on the table, no good – on the floor, no good – on the sole of my boot, no good; but when I gives it a snap on the side of a box – fizz, there’s a bright little light, the wood burns, and I am holding it to the bowl of my pipe, drawing in the smoke and puffing it out again, looking at you pleasantly through the thin blue cloud, and – how are you?

“Times is altered since I was a lad, I can tell you. Why, as you know, that there match wouldn’t light not nowhere but on the box, so as to be safe and keep children from playing with ’em and burning themselves, or people treading on ’em and setting fire to places; and what I’ve got to say is this, that it’s a precious great convenience – so long as you’ve got the box with you – and a strange sight different to what it was when I was a boy.

“Now I’ll just tell you how it was then, whether you know or whether you don’t know. Lor’ bless you, I’ve seen my old aunt do it lots o’ times. There used to be a round, flat tin box, not quite so big as the top of your hat; and the lid on it used to be made into a candlestick, with a socket to hold a dip. Then into this box they used to stuff a lot of old cotton rag, and set light to it – burn it till it was all black, and the little sparkles was all a-running about in it, same as you’ve seen ’em chasing one another in a bit o’ burnt paper. Down upon it would come a piece o’ flat tin and smother all the sparkles out, ’cos no air could get to ’em; and then they’d put on the lid, and there was your tinder-box full o’ tinder.

“Next, you know, you used to have a piece o’ soft iron, curled round at each end, so as you took hold on it, and held it like a knuckle-duster; and also you had a bit o’ common flint, such as you might pick up in any road as wasn’t paved with granite; and, lastly, you had a bundle – not a box, mind, but a bundle – of matches, and them was thin splints o’ wood, like pipe lights, pointed at the ends same’s wood palings, and dipped in brimstone. Them’s what the poor people used to sell about the streets, you know – a dozen of ’em spread out and tied like a lady’s fan – in them days, and made ’em theirselves, they did. A piece o’ even splitting wood and a penn’orth o’ brimstone was a stock in trade then, on which many a poor creetur lived – helped by a bit o’ begging.

“Say, then, you wanted a light – mind, you know, those was the days when the sojers used to carry the musket they called Brown Bess, as went off with a flint and steel, long before the percushin cap times – well, say you wanted a light, you laid your match ready, took your tinder-box off the chimneypiece, opened it, took the bit o’ flint in one hand and the steel or iron in the other, and at it you went – nick, nick, nick, nick, nick, with the sparks flying like fun, till one of ’em dropped on your black tinder, and seemed to lie there like a tiny star. You were in luck’s way if you did that at the end of five minutes; and then you made yourself into a pair o’ human bellows, and blew away at that spark, till it began to glow and get bigger, when you held to it one of the brimstone matches, and that began to melt and burn blue, and flamed up; when the chances was as the stifling stuff got up your nose, and down your throat, and you choked, and sneezed, and puffed the match out, and had to begin all over again.

“Well, that’s a long rigmarole about old ways of getting a light; but I mention it because we’d got one o’ them set-outs on board, and that’s the way we used to work. You know, after that came little bottles in which you dipped a match, and lit it that way – in fosseros, I think you call it. Next came what was a reg’lar wonder to people then – lucifers, which in them days was flat-headed matches, which you put between a piece of doubled-up stuff, like a little book cover, and pulled ’em out smart. Soon after, some one brought out them as you rubbed on the bottoms of the box on sand-paper, and they called them congreves; but by degrees that name dropped out, and we got back to lucifers for name, and now folks never says nothing but matches.

“In the days I’m telling you about, I was capen of a lighter – a big, broad, flat barge, working on the Thames; not one of your narrow monkey boats as run on the canals, though it was the blowing up of the Tilbury the other day as put me in mind of what I’m going to tell you in my long-winded, roundabout fashion. But I s’pose you ain’t in no hurry, so let me go on in my own way.

“You see, your genuine lighterman ain’t a lively sort of a chap, the natur’ of his profession won’t lot him be; for he’s always doing things in a quiet, slow, easy-going fashion. Say he’s in the river: well, he tides up and he tides down, going as slow as you like, and only giving a sweep now and then with a long oar, to keep the barge’s head right, and stay her from coming broadside on to the piers o’ the bridges.

“Well, that’s slow work, says you; and so it is. And it ain’t no better when your bargeman gets into a canal, for then he’s only towed by a horse as ain’t picked out acause he’s a lovely Arab as gallops fifty mile an hour – one and a half or two’s about his cut, and that ain’t lively. As for your new-fangled doing with your steam tugs, a-puffing, and a-blowing, and as smoking, like foul chimneys on a foggy day, what I got to say about them is as it’s disgustin’, and didn’t ought to be allowed. Just look at ’em on the river now, a-drawing half-a-dozen barges full o’ coal at once, and stirring up the river right to the bottom! Ah! there warn’t not no such doings when I was young, and a good job too.

“Well, as I was going to tell you, I was capen of the Betsy– as fine a lighter as you’d ha’ found on the river in them days, and I’d got two hands aboard with me. There was Billy Jinks – Gimlet we used to call him, because he squinted so. I never did see a fellow as could squint like Billy could. He’d got a werry good pair o’ eyes, on’y they was odd uns and didn’t fit. They didn’t belong to him, you know, and was evidently put in his head in a hurry when he were made, and he couldn’t do nothing with ’em. Them eyes of his used to do just whatever they liked, and rolled and twissened about in a way as you never did see; and I’ve often thought since as it was them eyes o’ Billy’s as made him take to drink – and drink he could, like a fish.

“T’other chap was Bob Solly – Toeboy they used to call him on the river, acause of his lame foot and the thick sole he used to wear to make one leg same length as t’other; and perhaps, after all, it was Bob’s toe as made him such a drinking chap, and not the example as Gimlet set him. Anyhow, that there don’t matter; only when I’m a-telling a thing I likes to be exact, as one used to be with the inwoices o’ the goods one had to deliver up or down the river.

“Well, I was going up and down the river with all sorts o’ goods, from ships, and wharves, and places – sundry things, you know, for I never had no dealings with coals – and one day, down the river, we loaded up with barrels off a wharf down by Tilbury – not the Tilbury as was blowed up the other day, ’cause that was only a monkey boat, but Tilbury down the river, you know; where there’s the fort, and soldiers, and magazines, and all them sort o’ things.

“Loaded up we were, and the little barrels all lying snug, and covered up with tarpaulins, and us a-waiting for the tide to come – for we was going up to Dumphie’s Wharf, up there at Isleworth – when Bob Solly comes up to me, and he says, says he —

“‘Guv’nor,’ he says, ‘we ain’t got no taties.’

“‘Well, Bob,’ I says, ‘then hadn’t you better get some?’

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I will.’

“And then Gimlet, who had been standing by, he says —

“‘And we ain’t got no herrins.’

“The long and the short on it was that them two chaps goes ashore to buy some herrins and some taties, so as we could cook ’em aboard in the cabin, where we bargees reg’lar kind o’ lived, you know.

“I ought to ha’ knowed better; but I’d got an old Weekly Dispatch, as was the big paper in them days, and I was a-spelling it over about the corrynation o’ King George the Fourth, and the jolly row there’d been up by Westminster Abbey when Queen Carryline went up to the doors and said as she wanted to be crowned too. I might ha’ knowed what ud follow, but I was so wrapped up in that there old noosepaper, not being a fast reader, that I never thought about it; and consequently, when it was about low tide, and time for us to go, them two chaps was nowhere.

“‘Seen anything o’ my mates?’ I hollers to a chap ashore, for I was now out in the stream.

“‘They’re up at the Blue Posties,’ he says. ‘Shall I fetch ’em?’

“‘Yes, and be hanged to ’em!’ I says; and I goes down to the cabin, vexed like, gets hold o’ the flint and steel and my pipe, and was going to fill it, when I remembered what we took aboard, and I put ’em all back in the cupboard.

“Quarter of an hour arter, just as the tide was beginning to turn, them two chaps comes aboard, reg’lar tossicated, not to say drunk, and werry wild I was, and made ’em go down into the cabin, thinking as they’d sleep it off; and then, casting loose, I put out one of the sweeps, and we began to float gently up the river.

“I got on very comfortably that afternoon, never fouling any of the ships lying in the Pool, getting well under London Bridge, and old Blackfriars with its covered-in seats like small domes of St. Paul’s cut in half, and so on and under Westminster Bridge, which was very much like the one at Blackfriars, and on and on, till the tide was at its height, when I let go the anchors and went to look at them two chaps; when, instead of being all fight, I found as the money as ought to have bought herrins and taties had gone in a bottle of stuff which one of ’em had smuggled in under his jacket, and they was wuss than ever.

“Of course I was precious wild; but as it’s waste o’ words to talk to men in that state, I saved it up for them, went forward, and rolled myself up in my jacket, pulled a bit o’ tarpaulin over me, wished for a pipe, and then began to think.

“Now, I suppose that I got thinking too hard, as I sat there looking at the lights, blinking here and there ashore, as the tide ran hissing down by the sides of the barge; for after a time I got too tired to think, and I must have gone off fast asleep, for I got dreaming of all sorts of horrible things through being in an uncomfortable position, and among others – I suppose all on account of twenty ton of gunpowder I had on board – I dreamed as it had blown up, and I was in our little boat, rowing about on the river amongst burnt wood and bits of barge and powder barrels, picking up the pieces of myself.