Suddenly Harry felt himself dug in the ribs by the man on his right; he turned to see a stranger.
“Are you two from Lumbs?” demanded this man. Harry and the other agreed that they were, and, so irrational is hope, it sprang up at once in Harry’s breast. (Was there some news? Was Arnold Lumb finding work impossible without them? Was he relenting?) “Because I wish you’d stayed there,” went on the other man aggressively. “I’m sick o’ paying extra to th’ union every week, to keep you Valley Mill chaps.”
“We’ve paid often enough for other chaps,” protested Harry’s friend hotly.
“Aye, I daresay,” agreed the other. “But not in t’ same conditions. Not for them as could have full union time rates for the asking. Strike pay!” he snorted, and his voice rose with his grievance. “If I’d been at Lumb’s, nobody’d have had to pay me strike pay, I can tell you.”
Luckily just then the band struck up again, playing “1812” with such gusto that conversation was no longer possible. It was Harry’s favourite piece, but he heard not a note of it. He was struck to the heart by this view of the Valley Mill situation as it appeared to a fellow trade-unionist who was subject to a weekly levy for the maintenance of the strikers. His face burnt with shame and anger, and he could see that the other Lumb’s employee shared his feeling. On a natural impulse, all four members of the Schofield’s party sat very close together throughout the item, and the moment it was over the two couples rose, and parted with a flat farewell in marked contrast to the exuberance of their greeting.
“We’ve often paid for other chaps,” argued Harry to his wife, with indignation, as by tacit consent they turned their footsteps homeward.
“Of course you have,” agreed Jessie consolingly. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t yon.”
They repeated this to each other with variations till they reached Thwaite Street, and later when they were alone in their bedroom. But the next morning Harry did not attend the picket at his allotted hour. When Milner attacked him on the subject he said nothing in excuse or explanation, and, indeed, hardly knew himself why he felt he should picket no more. In reality, his faith in the rightness of the men’s action, and the rightness of his own vote, had been roughly shaken; and to be thus set apart from his fellows, thus criticised, thus considered in the wrong, was a situation he had never previously experienced and did not know how to endure. Until the incident of the park, he had taken Milner’s view of the strike as a strike; but since all the men would be disqualified for unemployment benefit and require strike pay, for as long as the dispute continued, if it were regarded as a dispute, he now began secretly to long for the affair to be regarded as one of unemployment only—as though Arnold Lumb had simply given certain individuals notice, and they had accepted it. And the more fools they, said his heart; but he fought the feeling down, for he must be loyal to his union, to his class. But, then, that man in the park seemed to think…. Oh, well! It was all so mixed up; he could make no sense of it, thought Harry disgustedly. He began to shirk the subject of the dispute; to move uneasily in his chair when it was mentioned. It was the first knotting of a neurosis in his straightforward mind.
The Umpire’s decision, when it came at last, upheld that of the Court of Referees. When the six weeks’ disallowance prescribed was over, to Milner’s bitter disappointment, and in spite of his angry protests, the “dispute” side of the position was allowed to lapse by everyone concerned. The Schofields, with the rest of the Lumbs’ “striking” employees, put in their claims for unemployment benefit, fulfilled the necessary formalities, and at last drew benefit one Friday morning. Henceforward there was nothing extraordinary in the Schofields’ situation; they were just two unemployed men among the country’s millions. The excitement was over; routine began.
From the material point of view the Schofields were better equipped to face unemployment than many of their fellows, for they had no debts, enjoyed good health, and were not paying any instalments on the hire-purchase system, of which Mrs. Schofield did not approve. But the very solidity of their financial position, the very integrity of their past lives, made the change to poverty and insecurity all the more difficult to bear. They were not used to shifts and evasions; they were not used to dreading the sound of the rent-collector’s step. There had always been plenty of things they wanted and couldn’t have, of course; but it was new for Jessie to have to be miserly with the children’s milk, it was new for Dorothy—and it greatly dismayed her—to have to attend the Infants’ School with holes in her little boots. In the past, the Schofields had had a sturdy Yorkshire pride in paying their way, and having a bit left over to help other less lucky members of the family; they were skilled workmen, earning good wages, living in a good house. They thought themselves as good as the next man, or perhaps a bit better, and were apt to consider families who got into debt as poor things, lacking in back-bone, in proper Yorkshire spirit. And now all this was gone, and they had to come down to the level of unlucky folk. Friends and neighbours, on hearing that the two Schofield lads were now “on the Labour” did not insult them by offering sympathy, of course; they merely nodded their heads slowly, and said “Ah see!” But even that was terribly galling to their pride—especially to Harry’s. Milner had other things to be proud of. He was proud of being a casualty in the industrial fight, proud of the energy with which he had sustained the Valley Mill pickets, proud of the reputation he had gained for being a fiery speaker, a selfless enthusiast, an indomitable leader, a man whom all employers would be chary of employing and very ready to “victimise.” He was, in fact, honestly and nobly proud of suffering for the working class cause, and no word of complaint as to the inevitable privations ever passed his lips. But Harry did not have those feelings with the same intensity. He was interested primarily in his own family and his own affairs; movements and causes seemed vague and far away to him. Milner was neither husband nor father; and though he sympathised deeply with Jessie, and Dorothy and Baby Hal, he did not feel their privations in every fibre of his body, as a reproach to his manhood, as Harry did. Then, too, Harry was not a great reader, as Milner was; he liked the pictures and a football match and a smoke and perhaps a bit on a horse to occupy his leisure, and was now more or less cut off from these things; whereas give Milner some great learned tome from the free library, and he was perfectly happy, and could do without his supper without much noticing it.
At first the Schofields got along pretty well, though Harry’s twenty-seven and threepence and Milner’s fifteen and threepence seemed lamentably meagre after two union wages every week. It was summer, so coal was not the problem it would become later, and the family’s clothes were all in good repair. All idea of a holiday at the Wakes had to be given up, naturally, but they did very well with country walks; and then the weather was bad, so that they were able to congratulate themselves on not being away in lodgings, while the absence of their friends and neighbours threw them on to themselves, and did not show up their situation in contrast with that of luckier people. Moreover, work was slack everywhere, as town after town in the West Riding took its local holiday, its week of “feast” or “tide” or “wakes.” But presently the holidays were over, and Hudley began to settle down for the winter’s work. Other men got up early, went off to work in overalls, and returned at night tired and dirty, having honestly earned a day’s wages, while Harry lay abed, “signed on” at the Employment Exchange, and messed about the house doing odd jobs for his wife. Every night he was so glad that the long dreary day was over that he fell asleep almost at once in Jessie’s arms, but after an hour or so of this first delicious slumber he started uneasily awake, and lay thus for hours, worrying about the family’s future. In these wretched wakeful hours, too, he gradually began to feel an increasing bitterness against Milner. He argued this bitterness down, told himself that the lad meant well, and was right clever, everybody said so; kind-hearted, too—“he’d do anything for t’ childer,” Harry found himself saying reprovingly to
some imaginary antagonist. But Harry, though not quick at book-learning, was shrewd enough; he remembered the details of the meeting of the Lumbs’ employees, where Arnold’s last proposals were refused and his warning disregarded, and turning the whole thing slowly over in his mind, came to the conclusion that Milner had had a good deal to do with the adverse vote. Of course the lad was right; Arnold Lumb’s proposals were wrong, an attack on their standard of living, just as he said; the men had been right to refuse them. Still…. “Some chaps get a bit above theirsen when they hear their own voice,” reflected Harry shrewdly, “and I reckon our Milner’s one on ’em.” After a few hours of such thoughts, mingled with meditations on Dorothy’s boots, the price of coal, the rent, Jessie’s condition—she was pregnant with her third child—the steady increase in unemployment figures all over the country, the approach of rate-day, and his own utter helplessness in the face of all these things—“If only I could do summat about it,” thought Harry despairingly: “It’s not being able to do owt that makes it so bad”—after a few hours of such thoughts, sleep when it came at last was such a blessed relief that when he woke in the morning, for the first moment he recalled only that relief, and felt quite happy. But then he remembered that he had no work to go to, and all his problems fell on him at once with crushing force. Jessie was usually already up—she left him to sleep as long as he could, poor lad—getting Dorothy’s breakfast and packing her off to school. There were one or two busy cross-roads between Thwaite Street and Prince’s Road Infants’, and in his new leisure Harry escorted his daughter, and with her several other “infants” from the neighbourhood who gladly sought his protection, thither once or twice. But soon he gave it up; even to get out of the house, out of the women’s way, he could not do it; it was too humiliating, too degrading—“a grown man, a man who had addled good brass for more nor twelve years,” thought Harry, “to be dragging about wi’ a parcel o’ childer!” No, he could not do it, so he lay abed as long as he could without missing his signing-on time at the Employment Exchange, and each day found it more difficult to come downstairs and face his difficulties—and especially his mother.
For Mrs. Schofield did her best to make her sons’ lives hell, from the first day of their unemployment. She thought it her duty to do so. Men were naturally lazy and employment scarce, in Mrs. Schofield’s creed; and unless you nagged them, “went on” at them, they never exerted themselves properly to look for work. So she nagged and “went on”; it was the technique of her generation. When Milner talked to her of world forces, currency problems, overproduction, and the like, Mrs. Schofield simply snorted contemptuously; for her—or, at any rate, so she pretended—the problem was simply one of human weakness. The “strike” theory of the trouble at Messrs. Lumb’s she always scornfully repudiated, except when it suited her book to use it in an attack on Milner. Moreover, she was intensely indignant at her own situation; that she, the mother of nine healthy children, whom all her life she had regarded as an insurance against her old age, should now have no man left to earn for her!
In vain did Harry point out that she had her pension, her other sons were making weekly contributions to her keep, and she had really nothing to grumble at; the failure of three of her children—for the eldest Schofield was still out of work—to be an insurance for her old age was her constant theme.
Her immense experience of life, combined with the rough sardonic humour of her race, made her shafts terrifically effective. In the morning when Harry sheepishly descended, she would observe: “Eh, you’ve left your bed, then?” The words were simple, but the tone annihilated.
If he asked for water for a shave, she embarked on a tirade which began: “I never could abide men what hang round th’house of a morning. They want watter here, and boots cleaning there, and they can’t lift a hand to help theirsens, not they! Just like a pack o’ childer….” If, on the contrary, abashed by the previous morning’s scolding, he neither washed nor shaved, she rebuked him for “sitting about in his muck.” “Nobody’d ever tak you on again, Harry Schofield, if they saw you now,” she would remark with bitter zest: “You look that gaumless. Eh, I don’t know what I’ve done, I’m sure, to be blessed wi’ a pair o’ lads like you and Milner, what can’t stay in a good job when they’ve getten one. Your father were forty year wi’ Lumbs, but you two can’t stay ten. Not fine enough for you, I reckon. Well, you mun do as you’ve a mind, I suppose; but them as can’t addle for their childer shouldn’t bring ’em into t’world, that’s what I say.”
The inconsistency between this remark, so bitter to Harry and Jessie, and her usual lament about the inadequacy of her nine children in supporting her one day provoked Milner into comment, but he might as well have spared his breath.
“I want no back-answers from you, Milner Schofield,” said his mother on a loud, hostile note—her grating tones were indeed becoming an irritation almost beyond bearing to her sons. “If you’re non married, it’s because no lass’d look at you, you great sheep’s head, messing about wi’ all those books and fuddling yourself wi’ their silly nonsense. From all I hear, this business is mostly your doing.”
“It is, and I’m proud on it,” said Milner fiercely, very pale about the mouth.
The old woman was so taken aback that for the nonce she desisted. But not for long. Few were the opportunities she let slip of reminding her sons of their workless condition.
If a hawker came to the door, she told him: “We can’t do owt for thee here, lad, our men’s out o’ work.” If a neighbour had an errand to be done, Mrs. Schofield offered to send one of her sons. “I’ll ask our Harry to run up for you,” she would say sardonically, “He’s nowt else to do.”
All this the old woman did with the deliberate intention of wounding her sons, meaning to be cruel in order to be kind; for, like Harry, she lay awake for long hours in the night in an agony of fear, wondering what would happen to them all—and especially to little Dorothy, who was her favourite grandchild—if one of the men did not soon get work. “And another babby coming,” she mused, staring up through the darkness, recalling the bad times she had had in her youth and deciding, in spite of her scornfulness to Milner about his “world forces,” that these bad times to-day seemed almost worse than any she had known: “Another babby coming. It’s a poor look out for them; it is that.”
Next morning she attacked Harry more furiously than ever, humiliating his pride so that he winced, and felt what a poor thing he had become to cower beneath a woman’s tongue. Thus day by day the interplay of Mrs. Schofield’s fears and Harry’s slowly broke her son’s nerve.
Harry had at first after the Valley Mill disaster visited the Employment Exchange every day to see if there was any chance of work for him, but now he began to pay only the single weekly visit necessary to keep his registration “live,” and sometimes he omitted even that—lying about it to his wife and mother, if the subject came up. It was too humiliating, it required a strength of will, a courage, which he hadn’t now got, to enter that room, approach the counter, with the sure knowledge that there would be nothing for him, that he would not be wanted. Sweat broke out on his forehead now as soon as he pushed back the door—the room was always rather empty, and the space to be crossed between door and counter prolonged the agony beyond bearing point. Instead he spent his days at street corners with groups of unemployed; and presently a fearful lassitude began to fill his veins.
As he lounged, silent and motionless, in the signing-on queue at the Exchange, or at the street corner, gazing ahead with vague eyes at the grey abyss which was his future, he seemed to himself to think of nothing; but after each day spent thus, when he returned home to Thwaite Street, he felt less like the Harry—the sturdy, honest, jolly Harry—whom Jessie and Dorothy and Hal used to know. He grew thin, nervous, irritable, moody. At last one day he spoke so roughly to Dorothy for some childish importunity that her solid little face puckered in horrified astonishment, and she wept; whereupon Jessie too—the placid Jessie who never cr
ied—burst into tears, and cried roundly: “Nay, Harry, don’t you start!”
This reference to her own nagging might have been expected to bring down Mrs. Schofield’s thunders upon her daughter-in-law, but the old woman was nothing if not unexpected—it was part of her strength—and instead, she shouted at her son that he ought to be ashamed of himself for talking so to a woman in Jessie’s condition; and she continued on this theme so long that Harry, who was already ashamed enough of having made Jessie cry, felt that the house was simply intolerable. He snatched up his cap, called Nance, and went out—to stand again in silent misery at the street corner.
Nance was both a boon and a bane to Harry just now. One of Mrs. Schofield’s favourite methods of wounding her son was to refer indirectly to his extravagance in keeping a dog. When Jessie put its meagre plate of scraps down on the rug, for example, Mrs. Schofield would address Nance in ironical approval: “You won’t clem, lass, whatever onybody else does.” And she would sometimes deny Dorothy a second piece of bread unnecessarily, in order to remark brutally when the child whimpered: “Don’t cry, love; dog mun be fed, you know. If one on you’s to lack, it mun be you; dog mun have its meat, choose how.”
Harry foresaw that when the time came to renew Nance’s license, he would have to part with her; even if he could find the money—which he certainly couldn’t—his mother’s opposition would be too overwhelming to resist. He grieved at the thought, for he loved Nance; she was a great solace to him now, accompanied him wherever he went and seemed glad of his society, sat beside him in the group at the street corner, and provided a theme for long hours of slow talk by her unusual breed. Indeed, as the days went on and the situation did not change and his mother continued to nag and Jessie’s good-humour, under the strain of the family dissensions and her condition, grew increasingly uncertain, Harry felt so sunk, so disheartened, that he was thankful even for the affection of a little black bitch; her dark eyes always gazed up at him lovingly; they never reproached, they did not weep.
A Modern Tragedy Page 25
