Tales of Mean Streets | Page 9

petticoat and said: 'Where's my dinner?'
'I dunno,' Lizer responded, hazily. 'Wot's the time?'

'Time? Don't try to kid me. You git up; go on. I want my dinner!'
'Mother's gittin' it, I think,' said Lizer. 'Doctor had to slap 'im like
anythink 'fore `e'd cry. 'E don't cry now much. 'E--'
'Go on; out ye git. I do' want no more damn jaw. Git my dinner!'
'I'm a-gittin' of it, Billy,' his mother said, at the door. She had begun
when he first entered. 'It won't be a minute.'
'You come 'ere; y'aint alwis s' ready to do 'er work, are ye? She ain't no
call to stop there no longer, an' I owe 'er one for this mornin'. Will ye
git out, or shall I kick ye?'
'She can't, Billy,' his mother said. And Lizer sniveled and said: 'You're
a damn brute. Y'ought to be bleedin' well booted!'
But Billy had her by the shoulder and began to haul; and again his
mother besought him to remember what he might bring upon himself.
At this moment the doctor's dispenser, a fourth-year London Hospital
student of many inches, who had been washing his hands in the kitchen,
came in. For a moment he failed to comprehend the scene. Then he
took Billy Chope by the collar, hauled him pell-mell along the passage,
kicked him (hard) into the gutter, and shut the door.
When he returned to the room, Lizer, sitting up and holding on by the
bed-frame, gasped hysterically: 'Ye bleedin' makeshift, I'd 'ave yer liver
out if I could reach ye! You touch my 'usband, ye long pisenin' 'ound
you! Ow!' And,infirm of aim, she flung a cracked teacup at his head.
Billy's mother said: 'Y'ought to be ashamed of yourself, you low
blaggard. If 'is father was alive `e'd knock yer 'ead auf. Call yourself a
doctor--a passel o' boys! Git out! Go out o' my 'ouse, or I'll give y'in
charge!'
'But--why, hang it, he'd have killed her.' Then to Lizer. 'Lie down.'
'Sha'n't lay down. Keep auf; if you come near me I'll corpse ye. You go
while ye're safe!'

The dispenser appealed to Billy's mother. 'For God's sake, make her lie
down. She'll kill herself. I'll go. Perhaps the doctor had better Come.'
And he went: leaving the coast clear for Billy Chope to return and
avenge his kicking.

III.
Lizer was some months short of twenty-one when her third child was
born. The pickle factory had discarded her some time before, and since
that her trade had consisted in odd jobs of charing. Odd jobs of charing
have a shade the better of a pickle factory in the matter of respectability,
but they are precarious, and they are worse paid at that. In the East End
they are sporadic and few. More over, it is in the household where paid
help is a rarity that the bitterness of servitude is felt. Also, the
uncertainty and irregularity of the returns were a trouble to Billy Chope.
He was never sure of having got them all. It might be ninepence, or a
shilling, or eighteenpence. Once or twice, to his knowledge, it had been
half a crown, from a chance job at a doctor's or a parson's, and once it
was three shillings. That it might be half a crown or three shilling again,
and that some of it was being kept back, was ever the suspicion evoked
by Lizer's evening homing. Plainly, with these fluctuating and
uncertain revenues, more bashing than ever was needed to insure the
extraction of the last copper; empty-handedness called for bashing on
its own account; so that it was often Lizer's hap to be refused a job
because of a black eye.
Lizer's self was scarcely what it had been. The red of her cheeks, once
bounded only by the eyes and the mouth, had shrunk to a spot in the
depth of each hollow; gaps had been driven in her big white teeth; even
the snub nose had run to a point, and the fringe hung dry and ragged,
while the bodily outline was as a sack's. At home, the children lay in
her arms or tumbled at her heels, pulling and foul. Whenever she was
near it, there was the mangle to be turned; for lately Billy's mother had
exhibited a strange weakness, sometimes collapsing with a gasp in the
act of brisk or prolonged exertion, and often leaning on whatever stood
hard by, and grasping at her side. This ailment she treated, when she

had twopence, in such terms as made her smell of gin and peppermint;
and more than once this circumstance had inflamed the breast of Billy
her son, who was morally angered by this boozing away of money that
was really his.
Lizer's youngest, being