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She goes every night, after the toil of each day, to the door of the theatre, where she waits to conduct her father safely past the gin-palaces, into which, but for her, he would infallibly stray, and she spends all she has in making him comfortable, but I see well enough that this is killing her. She can't stand it long, and I won't stand it at all! I've made up my mind to that.
The Devil shuffles the cards for the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our museums and open our gin-palaces; to neglect the education of the masses; and then prompts us to accuse them with hypocritical respectability of drunkenness and stupidity.
He was not indeed an absolute "Arab," being the son of an honest hardworking mother, but being also the son of a drunken, ill-doing father, he had, in the course of an extensive experience of bringing his paternal parent home from gin-palaces and low theatres, imbibed a good deal of the superficial part of the "waif" character, and, but for the powerful and benign influence of his mother, might have long ago entered the ranks of our criminal population.
To bring things under the light of one's intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court, or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as absurdities that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at present.
"'O Kate, I have found my destiny! These are the people for whose Salvation I have been longing all these years. As I passed by the doors of the flaming gin-palaces to-night I seemed to hear a voice sounding in my ears, "Where can you go and find such heathen as these, and where is there so great a need for your labours?"
There they stretched the same blackened wilderness of roofs sheltering the same horde of drinking, filthy, cursing, parasitical creatures; there flared the gin-palaces, more of them, more brilliantly lit, more gorgeously decorated. Ten years of my life, and what had I done? What could any one do? The truth seemed suddenly written across the sky in letters of fire.
In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
Toddy-shops, easily recognised by the barrels they contain upon tap, and the drinking-vessels placed beside them, seem almost as numerous as the gin-palaces of London, arguing little for the sobriety of the inhabitants of Bombay. In the drive home through the bazaar, it is no very uncommon circumstance to meet a group of respectably-dressed natives all as tipsy as possible.
There at least rise splendid buildings with stuccoed fronts and richly-ornamented balustrades.... These are the gin-palaces." Naturally, among so much poverty gin-palaces and public-houses abounded. It is curious to note how many of Hogarth's pictures of misery and vice were drawn from St. Giles's. "Noon" has St.
Drink alone keeps them alive, stirs their blood now and then so that they can feel their pulses beat, brings them a blessed stupor. And see over there the sun, God's sun, rises every morning, over them and you. Young man! You see those flaming spots of light? They are gin-palaces.
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