Chapter 8. The Bad Boy Writes About The Craze For Gin...

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_ CHAPTER VIII. The Bad Boy Writes About the Craze for Gin in the Whitechapel District--He Gives His Dad a Scare in the Tower of London

London, England.--My Dear Chum: I received your letter yesterday, and it made me homesick. Gee, but if I could be home there with you and go down to the swimming hole and get in all over, and play tag in the sand, and tie some boy's pants and shirt in knots, and yell that the police are coming, and all grab our clothes under our arms and run across lots with no clothes on, and get in a barn and put on our clothes, and dry our hair by pounding it with a stick, so we would not get licked when we got home, life would be worth living, but here all I do is to dodge people on the streets and see them look cross when they step on me.

Say, boy, you will never know your luck in being a citizen of good old America, instead of a subject of Great Britain, because you have got to be rich or be hungry here, and if you are too rich you have got no appetite. You have heard of the roast beef of old England, but nobody eats it but the dukes and bankers. The working men never even saw a picture of a roast beef, and yet we look upon all Englishmen as beef-eaters, but three-fourths of the people in this town look hungry and discouraged, and they never seem to know whether they are going to have any supper.

I went down to a market this morning where the middle class and the very poor people buy their supplies, and it would make you sick to see them. They buy small loaves of bread and a penny's worth of tea, and that is breakfast, and if a man is working he takes some of the bread to work for lunch, and the wife or mother buys a carrot or a quarter of a cabbage, and maybe a bone with a piece of meat about as big as a fish bait, and that makes supper, with a growler of beer.

Say, the chunk of meat with a bone that an American butcher would throw at a dog that he had never been introduced to would be a banquet for a large family over here.

I have been down into the White Chapel district, which is the Five Points of London, and of the thousands of tough people I saw there was not a man but looked as though he would cut your liver out for a shilling, and every woman was drunk on gin. What there is about gin that makes it the national beverage for bad people beats me, for it looks like water, tastes like medicine and smells like cold storage eggs. At home when a person takes a drink of beer or whisky he at least looks happy for a minute, and maybe he laughs, but here nobody laughs unless somebody gets hurt, and that seems to tickle everybody in the White Chapel district.

The people look mad and savage when they are not drinking, as though they were only looking for an opportunity to commit murder, and then when they take a drink of gin, instead of smiling and smacking their lips as though it was good and braced them up, they look as though they had been stabbed with a dirk and they put on a look of revenge, as though they would like to wring a child's neck or cut holes in the people they meet.

Two drinks of gin makes a man or woman look as though they had swallowed a buzz saw. I always thought drinking liquor made people think they were enjoying themselves, or that they took it to drive away care and make them forget their sorrows, but when these people drink gin they seem to do it the way an American drinks carbolic acid, to end the whole business quick.

At home the drinker drinks to make him feel like he was at a picnic. Here every drinker acts like a suicide, who only hopes that he may commit a murder before the gin ends his career. And there are hundreds of thousands of people in this town who have no ambition except to get a bit of bread to sustain them till they can get a drink of gin, and gradually they let up on bread entirely and feed on gin, and look like mad dogs and snarl at everybody they see, as much as to say: "What are you going to do about it?"

A good square American meal would give them a fit, and they would go to a hospital and die if the meal could not be got out of them.

Gosh, but I was glad to get out of the White Chapel district, and I kept looking back for fear one of the men or women would slit me up the back with a butcher knife, and laugh like an insane asylum inmate.

Do you know, those people who drink gin and go hungry are different from our American murderers. Our murderers will assault you with a smile, rob you with a joke on their tongue's end, and give you back car fare when they hold you up, and if they murder you they will do it easy and lay you out with your hands across on your breast and notify the coroner, but your White Chapel murderer wants to disembowel you and cut you up into chunks, and throw your remains head first into something nasty, and if you have money enough on your person to buy a bottle of gin your murderer is as well satisfied as though he got a roll. Some men in our country commit murders in order to get money to lay away so they can live a nice, respectable life and be good ever afterwards, but your slum murderer in London just kills because his stomach craves a drink, and when he gets it he is tame, like a tiger that has eaten a native of India.

You may think this letter is a solemn occasion because I tell you about things that are not funny, but if you ever traveled abroad you will find that there is no fun anywhere except in America unless you make it or buy it.

We are taking in the solemn things first in order to get dad's mind in a condition so he can be cured of things he thinks ail him. I took dad to the Tower of London, and when we got out of it he wanted to have America interfere and have the confounded place burned down and grass sown on the site and a park made of it.

The tower covers 13 acres of ground, and there are more things brought to a visitor's attention that ought to be forgotten than you ever thought about.

I remember attending the theater at home and seeing Richard the Third played, and I remember how my sympathies were aroused for the two little boy princes that were murdered by Richard the Third, but I thought it was a fake play, and that there was nothing true about it, but, by gosh, it was right here in the Tower of London that the old hump-backed cuss murdered those little princes, and dad and I stood right on the spot, and the beef-eater who showed us around told us all the particulars. Dad was indignant, and said to the beef-eater:

"Do you mean to tell me you stood around and let Richard kill those princes without uttering a protest or protecting them or ringing for the police? By the great hornspoon, you must have been accessory to the fact, and you ought to be arrested and hung," and dad pounded his cane on the stone floor and looked savage.

The beef-eater got red in the face and said: "Begging your pardon, don't you know, but h'l was not 'ere at the time. This 'istory was made six 'undred years ago."

Dad begged the man's pardon and told him he supposed the boys were murdered a year or two ago, and he gave the beef-eater a dollar, and he was so gratified I think he would have had a murder committed for dad right there and then if dad had insisted on it.

You feel in going through the tower like you was in an American slaughter house, for it was here that kings and queens were beheaded by the dozen. They showed us axes that were used to behead people, and blocks that the heads of the victims were laid on, and the places where the heads fell on the floor. It seemed that in olden times when a king or a queen got too gay, the anti-kings or queens would go to the palace and catch the king or queen in the act, and take them by the neck and hustle them to the tower, and when a king or queen got in the tower they went out on the installment plan, and after being thrown in the gutter for the mob to recognize, and walk on the bodies, they would bring them back in the tower, and seal them up in a pigeon hole for future generations to cry over.

All my life I have had in our house to look at a picture of beautiful Anne Boleyn, and here I stood right where her head was cut off, and I couldn't help thinking of how we in America got our civilization from the descendants of the English people who cut her head off.

By ginger, old chum, it made me hot. I didn't care to look at the old armor, or the crown jewels, which make you think of a cut glass factory, but I reveled in the scenes of the beheading. I never was stuck much on kings and queens, but it seems to me if they had to murder them they ought to have given 'em a show, and let them fight for their lives, instead of getting into a trap, like you would entice a rat with cheese, and then cut their heads off.

I suppose it is right here that we inherited the desire to lynch and burn at the stake the negroes that commit crime and won't confess at home. When anything is born in the blood you can't get rid of it without taking a dose of patriotism and purifying the blood, and I advise you never to visit the Tower of London, unless you want to feel like going out and killing some one that is tied up with a rope.

Hearing of these murders and seeing the place where they were committed does not give you an idea of fair play and you don't feel like taking some one of your size when you fight, but you get to thinking that if you could catch a cripple who couldn't defend himself you would like to take a baseball club and maul the stuffing out of him. You become imbued with the idea that if you went to war you would not want to stand up and fight fair, but that you would like to get your enemy in a bunch and drop dynamite down on him from a balloon, and kill all in sight, and sail away with an insane laugh.

Gee, but another day in this tower, and I would want to go home and murder ma, or the neighbors.

The only thing we have got in America that compares with the Tower of London and its associates is the Leutgert sausage factory in Chicago, where Leutgert got his wife into the factory, murdered her, and is alleged to have cut her up in pieces and made sausage of the meat, given the pieces with gristle in to his dogs, boiled the bones until they would run into the sewer, dissolved the remnants in concentrated lye, and sold the sausage to the lumber Jacks in the pine woods.

I expect Chicago will buy that sausage factory and make a show of it, as London does the tower, and you can go and see it, and feel that you are as full of modern history as I am of ancient history, here in London.

I could see that dad was getting nervous every time a new beheading was described to us, and I thought it was time to wake him up. In going through the room where the old armor was displayed the beef eater told us who wore the different pieces of armor, and he said at times the spirit of the dead came back to the tower and occupied the armor, and I noticed that dad shied at some of the pieces of armor, so when we got right into the midst of it, and there was armor on every side, and dad and the beef eater were ahead of me, and dad was walking fast in order to get out quick, I pushed over one of the pieces, and it went crashing to the floor and the noise was like a boiler factory exploding, and the dust of centuries rose up, and the noise echoed down the halls.

Well, you'd a died to see dad and the beef eater. Dad turned pale and got down on his knees, and I think he began to pray, if he knows how, and he trembled like a leaf, and the beef eater got behind a set of armor that Cromwell or some old duck used to wear, and said, "Wot in the bloody 'ell is the matter with the h'armor?" and then a lot of other beef eaters came, and they thought dad was the spirit of King John, and they stampeded, and finally I got dad to stop praying, or whatever it was that he was doing, and I led him out, and when he got into the open air he recovered and said. "'Ennery, 'hi have got to get out of Lunnon, don't you know, because me 'eart is palpitating," and we went back to the 'otel, to see if our invitation to visit King Hedward had arrived.

Say, we are getting so we talk just like English coachmen, and you won't hundredstand us when we get 'ome. Yours, with a haccent.

'Ennery. _

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