Tales of Mean Streets | Page 2

to much better effect. The note seems likely
to be a permanent one in our fiction. Now and then it appears to die out,
but not for long. A year ago I thought it was doing so--and then came
the 'Limehouse Nights' of Thomas Burke, and James Stephens'

'Hunger.' Both go back to 'Tales of Mean Streets' as plainly as vers
libre goes back to Mother Goose.
H.L. MENCKEN.
Baltimore, 1918.
* * *
Introduction
A STREET
This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of
what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand
of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through
Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will
say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus
of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women
live on penn'orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies
unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs
his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to
the unemployed. And the unemployed is a race whose token is a clay
pipe, and whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to
Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with
disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as a place
whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all
perennially insolvent, and everybody always wants a day in the country.
Many and misty are people's notions of the East End; and each is
commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature. Foul slums
there are in the East End, of course, as there are in the West; want and
misery there are, as wherever a host is gathered together to fight for
food. But they are not often spectacular in kind.
Of this street there are about one hundred and fifty yards--on the same
pattern all. It is not pretty to look at. A dingy little brick house twenty
feet high, with three square holes to carry the windows, and an oblong
hole to carry the door, is not a pleasing object; and each side of this

street is formed by two or three score of such houses in a row, with one
front wall in common. And the effect is as of stables.
Some who inhabit this street are in the docks, some in the gas-works,
some in one or other of the few shipbuilding yards that yet survive on
the Thames. Two families in a house is the general rule, for there are
six rooms behind each set of holes: this, unless 'young men lodgers' are
taken in, or there are grown sons paying for bed and board. As for the
grown daughters they marry as soon as may be. Domestic service is a
social descent, and little under millinery and dressmaking is compatible
with self-respect. The general servant may be caught young among the
turnings at the end where mangling is done; and the factory girls live
still further off, in places skirting slums.
Every morning at half past five there is a curious demonstration. The
street resounds with thunderous knockings, repeated upon door after
door, and acknowledged ever by a muffled shout from within. These
signals are the work of the night-watchman or the early policeman, or
both, and they summon the sleepers to go forth to the docks, the
gas-works, and the ship-yards. To be awakened in this wise costs
fourpence a week, and for this fourpence a fierce rivalry rages between
night-watchmen and policemen. The night-watchman--a sort of
by-blow of the ancient 'Charley,' and himself a fast vanishing
quantity--is the real professional performer; but he goes to the wall,
because a large connection must be worked if the pursuit is to pay at
fourpence a knocker. Now, it is not easy to bang at two knockers three
quarters of a mile apart, and a hundred others lying between, all
punctually at half past five. Wherefore the policeman, to whom the
fourpence is but a perquisite, and who is content with a smaller round,
is rapidly supplanting the night-watchman, whose cry of 'Past nine
o'clock,' as he collects orders in the evening, is now seldom heard.
The knocking and shouting pass, and there comes the noise of opening
and shutting of doors, and a clattering away to the docks, the gas-works
and the ship-yards. Later more door-shutting is heard, and then the
trotting of sorrow-laden little feet along the grim street to the grim
board school three grim streets off. Then silence, save for a subdued

sound of scrubbing here and there, and the