第21章

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.'

'Nor I,' agreed the Carpenter, and they fell to discussing belly delights and the fine dishes their respective wives had cooked in the old days.

'I've gone three days and never broke my fast,' said the Carter.

'And I, five,' his companion added, turning gloomy with the memory of it.'Five days once, with nothing on my stomach but a bit of orange peel, an' outraged nature wouldn't stand it, sir, an' I near died.

Sometimes, walkin' the streets at night, I've ben that desperate I've made up my mind to win the horse or lose the saddle.You know what I mean, sir- to commit some big robbery.But when mornin' come, there was I, too weak from 'unger an' cold to 'arm a mouse.'

As their poor vitals warmed to the food, they began to expand and wax boastful, and to talk politics.I can only say that they talkedpolitics as well as the average middle-class man, and a great deal better than some of the middle-class men I have heard.What surprised me was the hold they had on the world, its geography and peoples, and on recent and contemporaneous history.As I say, they were not fools, these two men.They were merely old, and their children had undutifully failed to grow up and give them a place by the fire.

One last incident, as I bade them good-by on the corner, happy with a couple of shillings in their pockets and the certain prospect of a bed for the night.Lighting a cigarette, I was about to throw away the burning match when the Carter reached for it.I proffered him the box, but he said, 'Never mind, won't waste it, sir.' And while he lighted the cigarette I had given him, the Carpenter hurried with the filling of his pipe in order to have a go at the same match.

'It's wrong to waste,' said he.

'Yes,' I said, but I was thinking of the washboard ribs over which Ihad run my hand.