by Ellen Wood
Of course the Hoars had to suffer in common with the rest under the strike. But I did not like to hear of empty cupboards in connection with Eliza; no, nor of her boy’s broken arm; and in the evening I went back to Crabb Lane to see her. They lived next door but one to the house that had been Lease the pointsman’s; but theirs was far better than that tumble-down hut.
Well, it was a change! The pretty parlour looked half dismantled. Its ornaments and best things had gone, as Miss Timmens expressed it, to adorn the pawnshop. The carpet also. Against the wall, on a small mattress brought down for him, lay Dicky and his bruises. Some of the children sat on the floor: Mrs. Hoar was kneeling over Dicky and bathing his cheek, which was big enough for two, for it had caught the stick kindly.
“Well, Eliza!”
She got up, sank into a chair, flung her apron up to her face, and burst into tears. I suppose it was at the sight of me. Not knowing what to say to that, I pulled the little girls’ ears and then sat down on the floor by Dicky. He began to cry.
“Oh come, Dick, don’t; you’ll soon be better. Face smarts, does it?”
“I never thought to meet you like this, Master Johnny,” said Eliza, getting up and speaking through her tears. “’Twas hunger made him do it, sir; nothing else. The poor little things be so famished at times it a’most takes the sense out of ‘em.”
“Yes, I am sure it was nothing else. Look up, Dick. Don’t cry like that.” One would have thought the boy was going into hysterics.
I had an apple in my pocket and gave it to him. He kept it in his hand for some time, and then began to eat it ravenously, sobbing now and then. The left arm, the broken one, lay across him, bound up in splints.
“I didn’t mean to steal the bun,” he whispered, looking up at me through his tears. “I’d ha’ give Mrs. Ford the first ha’penny for it that I’d ever got. I was a-hungered, I was. We be always a-hungered now.”
“It is hard times with you, I am afraid, Eliza,” I said, standing by her.
Opening her mouth to answer, a sob caught her breath, and she put her hand to her side, as if in pain. Her poor face, naturally patient and meek, was worn, and had a bright hectic spot upon it. Eliza used to be very pretty, and was young-looking still, with smooth brown hair, and mild grey eyes: she looked very haggard now and less tidy. But, as to being tidy, how can folk be that, when all their gowns worth a crown are hanging up at the pawnbroker’s?
“It’s dreadful times, Master Johnny. It’s times that frighten me. Worse than all, I can’t see when it is to end, and what the end is to be.”
“Don’t lose heart. The end will be that the men will go to work again: I dare say soon.”
“The Lord send it!” she answered. “That’s the best we can hope for, sir; and that’ll be hard enough. For we shall have to begin life again, as ‘twere; with debts all around us, and our household things and our clothes in pledge.”
“You will get them out again then.”
“Ay, but how long will it take to earn the money to do it? This strike, as I look upon it, has took at the rate of five years of prosperity out of our lives, Master Johnny.”
“The league — or whatever it is — allows you all money to live, does it not?”
“We get some, sir. It’s not a great deal. They tell us that there’s strikes a-going on in many parts just now; these strikes have to be helped as well as the operatives here; and so it makes the allowance small. We have no means of knowing whether that’s true or not, us women, I mean; but I dare say it is.”
“And the allowance is not enough to keep you in food?”
“Master Johnny, there’s so many other things one wants, beside bare food,” she answered, with a sigh. “We must pay our rent, or the landlord would turn us out; we must have a bit o’ coal for firing: we must have soap; clothes must be washed, sir, and we must be washed; we must have a candle these dark evenings; shoes must be mended: and there’s other trifles, too, that I needn’t go into, as well as what Hoar takes for himself — —”
“But does he take much?” I interrupted.
“No, sir, he don’t: nothing to what some of ’em takes: he has always been a good husband and father. The men, you see, sir, must have a few halfpence in their pockets to pay for their smoke and that, at their meetings in the evening. There’s not much left for food when all this comes to be taken out — and we are seven mouths to fill.”
No wonder they were hungry!
“Some of the people you’ve known ought to help you, Eliza. Mrs. Sterling at the old home might: or Mrs. Coney. Do they?”
Eliza Hoar shook her head. “The gentlemen be all again us, sir, and so the ladies dare not do anything. As to Mrs. Sterling — I don’t know that she has so much as heard of the strike — all them miles off.”
“You mean the gentlemen are against the strike!”
“Yes, sir; dead again it. They say strikes is the worst kind of evil that can set in, both for us and for the country; that it will increase the poor-rates to a height to be afraid of, and in the end drive the work away from the land. Sitting here with my poor children around me at dusk to save candle, I get thinking sometimes that the gentlemen may not be far wrong, Master Johnny.”
Seeing the poor quiet faces lifted to me, from which every bit of spirit seemed to have gone, I wished I had my pockets full of buns for them. But buns were not likely to be there; and of money I had none: buying one of the best editions of Shakespeare had just cleared me out.
“Where’s Hoar?” I asked, in leaving.
A hot flush overspread her face. “He has not shown himself here, Master Johnny, since what he did to him,” was her resentful answer, pointing to Dick. “Afraid to face me, he is.”
“I’d not say too much to him, Eliza. It could not undo what’s done, and might only make matters worse. I dare say Hoar is just as much vexed about it as you are.”
“It’s to be hoped he is! Why did he go and set upon the child in that cruel way? It’s the men that goes in for the strike; ’tisn’t us: and when the worry of it makes ’em so low they hardly know where to turn, they must vent it upon us. Master Johnny, there are minutes now when I could wish myself dead but for the children.”
I went home with my head full of a scheme — getting Mrs. Todhetley and perhaps the Coneys to do something for poor Eliza Hoar. But I soon found I might as well have pleaded the cause of the public hangman.
Who should come into our house that evening but old Coney himself. As if the strike were burning a hole in his tongue, he began upon it before he was well seated, and gave the Squire his version of it: that is, his opinion. It did not differ in substance from what had been hinted at by Eliza Hoar. Mr. Coney did not speak for the men or against them; he did not speak for or against the masters; that question of conflicting interests he said he was content to leave: but what he did urge, and very strongly, was, that strikes in themselves must be productive of an incalculable amount of harm; they brought misery on the workmen, pecuniary embarrassment on the masters, and they most inevitably would, if persisted in, eventually ruin the trade of the kingdom; therefore they should, by every possible means, be discouraged. The Squire, in his hot fashion, took up these opinions for his own and enlarged upon them.
When old Coney was gone and we had our slippers on, I told them of my visit to Eliza, and asked them to help her just a little.
“Not by a crust of bread, Johnny,” said the Squire, more firmly and quietly than he usually spoke. “Once begin to assist the wives and children, and the men would have so much the less need to bring the present state of things to an end.”
“I am so sorry for Eliza, sir.”
“So am I, Johnny. But the proper person to be sorry for her is her husband: her weal and woe can lie only with him.”
“If we could help her ever so little!”
The Squire looked at me for a full minute. “Attend to me, Johnny Ludlow. Once for all, NO! The strike, as Coney says, must be discouraged by every means in our power. Dis
couraged, Johnny. Otherwise these strikes may come into fashion, and grow to an extent of which no man can foresee the end. They will bring the workmen to one of two things — starvation, or the workhouse. That result seems to me inevitable.”
“I’m sure it makes me feel very uncomfortable,” said the Mater. “One can hardly see where one’s duty lies.”
“Our poor-rates are getting higher every day; what do you suppose they’ll come to if this is to go on?” continued the Squire. “I’d be glad for the men to get better pay if they are underpaid now: whether they are or not, I cannot tell; but rely upon it, striking is not the way to attain to it. It’s a way that has ruined many a hopeful workman, who otherwise would have gone on contentedly to the end of his days; ay, and has finally killed him. It will ruin many another. Various interests are at stake in this; you must perceive it for yourself, Johnny lad, if you have any brains; but none so great as that of the workmen themselves. With all my heart I wish, for their own sakes, they had not taken this extreme step.”
“And if the poor children starve, sir?” I ventured to say.
“Fiddlestick to starving! They need not starve while there’s a workhouse to go to. And won’t; that’s more. Can’t you see how all this acts, Mr. Johnny? The men throw themselves out of work; and when matters come to an extremity the parish must feed the children, and we, the rate-payers, must pay. A pleasant prospect! How many scores of children are there in Crabb Lane alone?”
“A few dozens, I should say, sir.”
“And a few to that. No, Johnny; let the men look to their families’ needs. For their own sakes; I repeat it; for their own best interests, I’ll have them left alone. They have entered on this state of things of their own free will, and they must themselves fight it out. — And now get you off to bed, boys.”
“The Pater’s right, Johnny,” cried Tod, stepping into my room as we went up, his candle flaring in the draught from the open staircase window; “right as right can be on principle; but it is hard for the women and children — —”
“It is hard for themselves, too, Tod: only they have the unbending spirit of Britons, to hold out to the death and make no bones over it.”
“I wish you’d not interrupt a fellow,” growled Tod. “Look here; I’ve got four-and-sixpence, every farthing I can count just now. You take it and give it to Eliza. The Pater need know nothing.”
He emptied his trousers pocket of the silver, and went off with his candle. I’m not sure but that he and I both enjoyed the state of affairs as something new. Had any one told us a year ago that our quiet neighbourhood could be disturbed by a public ferment such as this, we should never have believed it.
The next morning I went over to South Crabb with the four-and-sixpence. Perhaps it was not quite fair to give it, after what the Squire had said — but there’s many a worse thing than that done daily in the world. Eliza caught her breath when I gave it to her, and thanked me with her eyes as well as her lips. She had on a frightfully old green gown — green once — shabby and darned and patched, and no cap; and she was on her knees wiping up some spilt water on the floor.
“Mind, Eliza, you must not say a word to any one. I should get into no end of a row.”
“You were always generous, Master Johnny. Even when a baby — —”
“Never mind that. It is not I who am generous now. The silver was given me for you by some one else; I am cleared out, myself. Where’s Dicky?”
“He’s upstairs in his bed, sir: too stiff to move. Mr. Cole, too, said he might as well lie there to-day. Would you like to go up and see him?”
As I ran up the staircase, open from the room, a vision of her wan face followed me — of the catching sob again — of the smooth brown hair which she was pressing from her temples. We have heard of a peck of troubles: she seemed to have a bushel of them.
Dicky was a sight, as far as variety of colours went. There was no mistake about his stiffness.
“It won’t last long, Dick; and then you’ll be as well as ever.”
Dick’s grey eyes — they were just like his mother’s — looked up at mine. I thought he was going to cry.
“There. You will never take anything again, will you?”
Dick shook his head as emphatically as his starched condition allowed. “Father says as he’d kill me the next time if I did.”
“When did he say that?”
“This morning; afore he went out.”
Dicky’s room had a lean-to roof, and was about the size of our jam closet at Crabb Cot. Not an earthly article was in it but the mattress he was lying on.
“Who sleeps here besides you, Dicky?”
“Jacky and little Sam. ‘Liza and Jessy sleeps by father and mother.”
“Well, good day, Dicky.”
Whom should I come upon at the end of Crabb Lane, but the Squire and Hoar. The Squire had his gun in his hand and was talking his face red: Hoar leaned against the wooden palings that skirted old Massock’s garden, and looked as sullen as he had looked yesterday. I thought the Pater had been blowing him up for beating the boy; but it seemed that he was blowing him up for the strike. Cole, the surgeon, hurrying along on his rounds, stopped just as I did.
“Not your fault, Hoar!” cried the Squire. “Of course I know it’s not your fault alone, but you are as bad as the rest. Come; tell me what good the strike has done for you.”
“Not much as yet,” readily acknowledged Hoar, in a tone of incipient defiance.
“To me it seems nothing less than a crime to throw yourself out of work. There’s the work ready to your hands, spoiling for want of being done — and yet you won’t do it!”
“I do but obey orders,” said Hoar: who seemed to be miserable enough, in spite of the incipient defiance.
“But is there any sense in it?” reasoned the Squire. “If you men could drop the work and still keep up your homes and, their bread-and-cheese, and their other comforts, I’d say nothing. But look at your poor suffering wives and children. I should be ashamed to be idle, when my idleness bore such consequences.”
The man answered nothing. Cole put in his word.
“There are times when I feel I should like to run away from my work, and go in for a few weeks’ or months’ idleness, Jacob Hoar; and drink my two or three glasses of port wine after dinner of a day, like a lord; and be altogether independent of my station and my patients, and of every other obligation under the sun. But I can’t. I know what it would do for me — bring me to the parish.”
“D’ye think we throw up the work for the sake o’ being idle?” returned Hoar. “D’ye suppose, sirs,” — with a burst of a sigh— “that this state o’ things is a pleasure to us? We are doing it for future benefit. We are told by them who act for us, and who must know, that great benefit will come of it if we be only firm; that our rights be in our own hands if we only persevere long enough in standing out for ‘em. Us men has our rights, I suppose, as well as other folks.”
“Those who, as you term it, act for you, may be mistaken, Hoar,” said the Squire. “I’ll leave that point: and go on to a different question. Do you think that the future benefit (whatever that may be: it’s vague enough now) is worth the cost you are paying for it?”
No reply. A look crossed Hoar’s face that made me think he sometimes asked the same question of himself.
“It does appear to be a very senseless quarrel, Hoar,” went on the Squire. Cole had walked on. “One-sided too. There’s an old saying, ‘Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,’ and your strike seems just an illustration of it. You see, it is only you men that suffer. The rulers you speak of don’t suffer: while they are laying down rules for you, they are flourishing on the meat and corn of the land; the masters, in one sense, do not suffer, for they are not reduced to any extremity of any kind. But you, my poor fellows, you bear the brunt of it all. Look at your homes, how they are bared; look at your hungry children. What but hunger drove little Dick to crib that bun yesterday?”
Hoar
took off his hat and passed his hand over his brow and his black hair. It seemed to be a favourite action of his when in any worry of thought.
“It is just ruin, Jacob Hoar. If some great shock — say a mountain of snow, or a thunderbolt — descended suddenly from the skies and destroyed everything there was in your home, leaving but the bare walls standing, what a dreadful calamity you would think it. How bitterly you’d bemoan it! — perhaps almost feel inclined, if you only dared, to reproach Heaven for its cruelty! But you — you bring on this calamity yourself, of your own free and deliberate will. You have dismantled your home with your own fingers; you have taken out your goods and sold or pledged them, to buy food. I hear you have parted with all.”
“A’most,” assented Hoar readily; as if it quite pleased him the Squire should show up the case at its worst.
“Put it that you resume work to-morrow, you don’t resume it as a free man. You’ll have a load of debt and embarrassment on your shoulders. You will have your household goods to redeem — if they are then still redeemable: you will have your clothes and shoes to buy, to replace present rags: while on your mind will lie the weight of all this past time of trouble, cropping up every half-hour like a nightmare. Now — is the future benefit you hint at worth all this?”
Hoar twitched a thorny spray off the hedge behind the pales, and twirled it about between his teeth.
“Any way,” he said, the look of perplexity clearing somewhat on his face, “I be but doing as my mates do; and we are a-doing for the best. So far as we are told and believe, it’ll be all for the best.”
“Then do it,” returned the Squire in a passion; and went stamping away with his gun.
“Johnny, they are all pig-headed together,” he presently said, as we crossed the stile into the field of stubble whence the corn had been reaped. “One can’t help being sorry for them: they are blinded by specious arguments that will turn out, I fear, to be all moonshine. Hold my gun, lad. Where’s that dog, now? Here, Dash, Dash, Dash!”
