Benjamin Farjeon - Toilers of Babylon - A Novel

"The three books you sell for waste-paper will bring in something; perhaps they're big ones."

"Perhaps they're little ones. We won't reckon them. Anything else?"

"You bought twenty-eight books, sir; you only gave me twenty-seven to figure out. One short, sir."

"That was stolen, Timothy."

"Where from, sir?"

"From the stall outside."

"It couldn't have been, sir, if you had a sharp boy to attend to it for you."

"Ah! The question is, where to find that particularly sharp boy?"

"He's handy, sir, almost at your elbow." Now, although these words betokened a certain confidence and were spoken with a certain boldness, it is a fact that there was a tremor in Timothy's voice as he uttered them. The conversation between him and Mr. Loveday had been strangely in accordance with his earnest desire to be taken into Mr. Loveday's service. He had been upheld by this hope as he tramped from Essex after the schoolhouse had been burned down, and he had hurried back to London more swiftly than he would have done without it.

Mr. Loveday ruminated; Timothy Chance waited anxiously.

"I'm rather a peculiar fellow, Timothy," said Mr. Loveday, presently; "not at all unpleasant out of business, unless you quarrel with my social crotchets, and you're not old enough to do that yet, Timothy, but very strict in business matters, however trifling. That fowl of yours is beginning to crow, Timothy."

"It's all right, sir," said Timothy, in a tone of wistful expectation, "please finish."

"This strictness of mine in business matters may make me a hard master; I haven't tried my hand in that line much, as I've always attended to my shop myself, but I will not deny that I'm half inclined to engage a lad."

"Make it a whole mind, sir, and engage me."

Timothy's occasionally apt replies tickled and pleased Mr. Loveday; they betokened a kind of cleverness which he appreciated.

"As we stand now," continued Mr. Loveday, "man and boy, not master and servant, we have a mutual respect for each other."

"Thank you, sir."

"It would be a pity to weaken this feeling."

"It might be made stronger, sir."

"There are numberless things to consider. If I say, 'Up at six every morning,' up at six it would have to be."

"And should be, sir."

"If I say, 'Every day's work completely done, every day's accounts satisfactorily made up, before the next day commences,' it would have to be. That fowl of yours is crowing louder, Timothy. No shirking of work by the excuse that it doesn't belong to the duties I engage a lad for. You understand all this?"

"I understand it, sir."

"On the other hand, satisfaction given, the cart would run along smoothly. There might be a little time in the evening for study and reading; there might be sundry pleasant interludes which one can't think of right off. Eh, Timothy?"

"Yes, sir."

"You had it in your mind?"

"I did, sir."

"But," said Mr. Loveday, glancing at the lad, "there is one most important question-the question of respectability."

"There's nothing against me, sir. You may inquire of everybody I've worked for."

"I mean the question of a respectable appearance. Now, Timothy, you will not have the assurance to assert that you present a respectable appearance?"

"Cluck! cluck! cluck?" went the fowl in the basket.

Timothy's eyes wandered dolefully over his ragged garments.

"If my new suit of clothes hadn't been burnt," he murmured-

"But they are burnt. Spilled milk, you know. The long and the short of it is, if you can obtain a decent suit of clothes, I'll give you a trial, Timothy."

"Cluck! cluck! cluck! Cluck! cluck! cluck!" from the basket. A jubilant, noisy, triumphant flourish of trumpets, to force upon the world the knowledge of a great event. Timothy knelt down, put his hand in the basket, and drew forth a new-laid egg.

"The world's mine oyster, which I with knife will ope." But surely that knife never presented itself, as it did at the present moment, in the form of a new laid-egg.

Church Alley, in which Mr. Loveday's second-hand bookshop was situated, was not in the most squalid part of the East, wherein may be found horrible patches, in comparison with which the haunts of heathens in savage lands are a veritable paradise. It was, indeed, in close contiguity to the most respectable part of it, lying to the eastward of the famous butchers' mart, which, in the present day, is shorn of its doubtful glories. The alley was a slit in the main thoroughfare, running parallel with it, about sixty yards in length, and containing thirty-four tenements, sixteen of which were private dwellings and eighteen places of business. In the flourishing West it would have been converted into an arcade, and dignified with an imposing name drawn from royal or martial records; in the toiling East it was simply what it professed to be-an alley, very narrow, very shabby, and generally very dark. When winter fogs lay thick upon the mighty city they reached perfection by the time they floated to Church Alley and settled there. Then was the darkness truly Egyptian, and there the gloom remained, as if in proud assertion of the fitness of things, long after surrounding thoroughfares were bright. The sun rose later there and set earlier, and in freezing time it was a very heaven of slides days after surrounding space was thawing. The explanation of these unusual phenomena may be found in the circumstance that when "weather" got into Church Alley it could not easily get out. There was no roadway for horses and carts; between the rows of houses ran a footpath ten feet in width. The enterprising builder who purchased the land and designed the estate had husbanded his inches with a shrewd eye to the greatest possible number of rents to be squeezed out of them, and it must be confessed that his efforts were crowned with complete success.

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," and this applies to weeds as well as flowers. Persons not acquainted with the intricacies of the neighborhood would have passed Church Alley without noticing it, even without being aware that there was such a thoroughfare within hail; it seemed, as it were, to shrink from notice, and to have been formed with a view to the enjoyment of the pleasures of obscurity, notwithstanding that it had at one end a public-house and a pawnbroker's shop, and at the other end a pawnbroker's shop and a public-house. These four establishments may be said to have been the archways to the paradise of Church Alley, and from the commencement to the end of the year, in rain or shine, in winter or summer, lost and wretched Peris could always be seen there, lingering at the gates. Public-houses and pawnbroker's shops are as the very breath of life in the East of London, and are important and degrading elements in the education of the dwellers therein. Children from their earliest days are familiar with them, and grow into the knowledge (which fair minds cannot dispute) that these institutions are planted there especially for their behoof. Brewers and distillers grow fat upon vice, and go smilingly through the world, conveniently blind to the fact that the richer they grow the more crowded become the ranks of those wretched ones from whose midst our prisons are filled, and whose lives are a standing reproach to humanity and civilization. It is not the fair use, but the gross abuse, of a system which is here deplored. The axe should be laid to it, despite the Moloch called vested interests, which is set up at the least remonstrance to frighten the timid. Let there be beer-shops and public-houses within limits, but it is infamous legislation which sanctions and encourages (as is to be verified to-day in slices of the East) every fifth or sixth tenement to be either one or the other. To contend, in respect of these hot-beds of vice, that the law of supply follows the law of demand, is an unblushing falsehood; they are distinctly forced upon the people by the very men who fatten upon the degradation, and who are often to be seen upon public platforms deploring the evils of which they are the creators. The sermons these moralists preach-to win votes, or to prove themselves qualified for public office, or to air their spurious philanthropy-are the bitterest of mockeries.