Opium-Eating in London.

Cromwell Argus, Volume II, Issue 99, 3 October 1871, Page 7

Opium-Eating in London.

[From Good Word*. ]

Her Majesty has given her name to a good many streets ; but dirty, narrow, squalid Vic-toria-street, Biuegate Fields, is, we think, the one she would feel least proud of, if she could see it. Oif this dismal Victoria-street there ia a double row of miserable little two-floored houses, called Victoria-court, and two of these are houses of call for Chinamen and Lascar opium-smokers. “Close up, gentlemen, don’t lose sight of me,” our dragoman, as we sidle in single rile a fog-choked little covered passage. Presently we reach Victoria-court, and stop outside Eliza’s door. (Eliza is the original of the woman opium-smoker in Edwin Vruud. ) Our dragoman calls up the pitch-dark staircase, “ You at home, Eliza ? ” Being answered in the affirmative, he leads the way up the narrow, corkscrew-like little staircase—or rather, we have to stumble up it the best way we can. In a dirty little room there is a dirty bedstead, outside the dirty clothes on which a blackmoustached, swarthy Lascar, who passes for Eliza’s husband, lies rolled up in a rug. He pretends to be asleep, but now and then gives a grunt of inquiry, and Eliza answers him n his own tongue. She is a sallow-faced, care-lessly-dressed woman, reclining on the other end f the bed, with her opium-pipe, lamp, &0., ready to her hand, Some wet clothes are hung up to dry before the little fire. She is asked whether she is getting ready to go to church or chapel next day. “Ah, no,” she answers in a canting whine, “ that’s what I can’t do, but it’s where I should like to go if 1 was prepared. ” When asked how she came to take to opium-smoking, she says that she can speak Hindi and Hindustani, and used to be with those that spoke them, and one would say to her, “ Have a whiff,” and another would say to her, “ Have a whiff,” and she knew no better, and so she got into the habit, and now she cannot leave it olf.

In intervals between her talk she scoops out prepared opium from a little gallipot, sticks it on the needle that crosses the broad shallow bowl of her ruler-like pipe, turns the bowl to the orifice in the glass cover of her lamp, humours the pill with the spatula end of another needle to get it to kindle, and then takes a long pull—sometimes sending back the smoke through her nostrils and ears.

“ It’s very healthy, gentlemen,” she says, when wo remark upon its not unpleasant odour. “ When the cholera was about, nobody took it that lived in a house where they smoked opium.” There used to be half-a-dozen and more of these houses in the East-end, but the two in Bluegate Fields are the only ones now known to the police. The Strangers 7 Home officials exerted themselves a good deal to put the others down ; but lodgers in the Strangers 7 Home are still, during the day, pretty frequent custoiue s at the two houses in Viotoria-street.

“Craving for drink, gentlemen 1” Eliza presently exclaims ; “ wanting to have a smoke, and not to be able to get opium, is a hundred times worse than that. I used to drink about as free as any—didn’t 1, sir,’’ appealing, almost proudly, to our dragoman for corroboration of her statement. “But I’ve broke myself of that. But if you can’t get a pipe when you want it, it’s like as if you was having electric shocks one after another, or as if you were having a knife scraped along your bare bones. ” A drachm of opium is the largest amount which Eliza owns to having smoked in a day. Across the court and up another dark little staircase into Johnson’s dirty bedroom. Johnson is a Chinaman, but has an English “ wife,” who sits before the fire grumbling because they have to pay four shillings a week for a house that lets in the rain. There are a few dirty prints on the walls, and a little oblong chimney glass, with the backing almost worn off. On the dirty bed reclines Johnson, a corpse-corn-plexioned, sapless-looking individual, whose face twitches as if he had the tic-doloreaux until he succeeds in lighting his charge of opium. When asked why he smokes opium, be answers that he could not “ go to sillip ” (sleep) if he did not smoke it; and when an inquiry is made as to the number of pipes he could smoke in a day, he says five hundred dozen, if he could get them. A Chinese lodger in Chinese costume (a slender, tapcr-fingcred, black-moustached, almost obse-quiously-polite young fellow, who is sitting at a table reading a Chinese history of the Tae-ping rebellion) bares his v, bite, gleaming teeth in a broad smile when he hears his landlord give this hyperbolical estimate of his powers. The two Chinamen cannot talk to each other in Chinese, as they come from different pi evinces. From "'hat they say to each other and ourselves in f""“pigeon English,’’ we gather that the lodger came over to England as a ship’s cook, and is now staying to see a little of the country, supporting himself by selling penny packets of scent in the streets. At Johnson’s hint, he brings out

the box in which ho keeps his stock, and soon disposes of sundry little white and pink parcels of some atrociously sickly scented stuff. Johnson next shows us the modicum of opium, which he sells his customers for fid, Bd, Is fid, and so

on ; and then taking a stiekless gas candle, he shambles off the bed and down his narrow stair

case, to light us out. As ho stands at his doorway, and looks out, into the fog, he holds the candle above his head. When the light falls on

hia fllmy-oyod, twitching, sieKiy-yoilow face, it looks riot unlike that of a grilvanisei corpse. Oil another night, Johnson is in his ground - door room, and ho calls out cheerily, “Come in,” aa soon as ha hairs us at the door. He is lolling on a bedtick divan, made oat of a greasy bed and mattrass, placed on cho floor and against the wall. Ka is in high good humour, almost constantly joking and laughing. Now he takes a pull at the opium pipe, and then ho puts it into the month of a drowsy Lascar, who begins to smoke with hia head on the logs of another Lascar who is lying aa motionless as a log. Johnson manages the Lmp for his lazy customers, and meanwhile smokes & cheroot. A slight Chinese sailor, who has had his dose, stands up in the middle of the room chuckling at anything and nothing. A more powerful fellow, of a negrolike complexion and cut of countenance, but who says that he comes from Singapore, has also had his dose. He sits musing by the divan for a minute, and then gets up and seats himself before the fire, where he begins a song of the kind the tom-tom players sing. Johnson says, approvingly, “ Nice-very good cantic,” and then he and the two Lascars and the Chinaman biust out laughing, in that dingy little hole, as if caie, for them, w or; banished from the world.