The Observations of Henry | Page 2

an egg," he suggested, the moment the rashers had disappeared.
"One of these eggs will just about finish yer."
"I don't really think as I can," says she, after considering like.

"Well, you know your own strength," he answers. "Perhaps you're best
without it. Speshully if yer not used to 'igh living."
I was glad to see them finish, 'cause I was beginning to get a bit
nervous about the coin, but he paid up right enough, and giv me a
ha'penny for myself.
That was the first time I ever waited upon those two, but it wasn't to be
the last by many a long chalk, as you'll see. He often used to bring her
in after that. Who she was and what she was he didn't know, and she
didn't know, so there was a pair of them. She'd run away from an old
woman down Limehouse way, who used to beat her. That was all she
could tell him. He got her a lodging with an old woman, who had an
attic in the same house where he slept--when it would run to
that--taught her to yell "Speshul!" and found a corner for her. There
ain't room for boys and girls in the Mile-End Road. They're either kids
down there or they're grown-ups. "Kipper" and "Carrots"--as we named
her--looked upon themselves as sweethearts, though he couldn't have
been more than fifteen, and she barely twelve; and that he was regular
gone on her anyone could see with half an eye. Not that he was soft
about it--that wasn't his style. He kept her in order, and she had just to
mind, which I guess was a good thing for her, and when she wanted it
he'd use his hand on her, and make no bones about it. That's the way
among that class. They up and give the old woman a friendly clump,
just as you or me would swear at the missus, or fling a boot-jack at her.
They don't mean anything more.
I left the coffee shop later on for a place in the city, and saw nothing
more of them for five years. When I did it was at a restaurant in Oxford
Street--one of those amatoor shows run by a lot of women, who know
nothing about the business, and spend the whole day gossiping and
flirting--"love-shops," I call 'em. There was a yellow-haired lady
manageress who never heard you when you spoke to her, 'cause she
was always trying to hear what some seedy old fool would be
whispering to her across the counter. Then there were waitresses, and
their notion of waiting was to spend an hour talking to a twopenny cup
of coffee, and to look haughty and insulted whenever anybody as really

wanted something ventured to ask for it. A frizzle-haired cashier used
to make love all day out of her pigeon-hole with the two box-office
boys from the Oxford Music Hall, who took it turn and turn about.
Sometimes she'd leave off to take a customer's money, and sometimes
she wouldn't. I've been to some rummy places in my time; and a waiter
ain't the blind owl as he's supposed to be. But never in my life have I
seen so much love-making, not all at once, as used to go on in that
place. It was a dismal, gloomy sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed
to scent it out by instinct, and would spend hours there over a pot of tea
and assorted pastry. "Idyllic," some folks would have thought it: I used
to get the fair dismals watching it. There was one girl--a weird-looking
creature, with red eyes and long thin hands, that gave you the creeps to
look at. She'd come in regular with her young man, a pale-faced
nervous sort of chap, at three o'clock every afternoon. Theirs was the
funniest love-making I ever saw. She'd pinch him under the table, and
run pins into him, and he'd sit with his eyes glued on her as if she'd
been a steaming dish of steak and onions and he a starving beggar the
other side of the window. A strange story that was--as I came to learn it
later on. I'll tell you that, one day.
I'd been engaged for the "heavy work," but as the heaviest order I ever
heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip
out for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from
an ornamental point of view.
I'd been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when
in walked young "Kipper." I didn't know him at first, he'd changed so.
He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that
was fashionable just then,