~ / ^-rf . x I -JTL 1 Ur ^p /""\ Hi \ J T 'O A KJ I, L^-vJ/A LN - P 9 . m I n U m A y r\ \ ./V ?: 1 / -: LIL-5RARY I M I . UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE QUEEN'S POOR NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION Crown %vo. . 6d. THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE BY M. LOANE M AUTHOR OF "THE QUEEN'S POOR' NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W. 1908 {All Rights Reserved] N01TE THE greater part of the chapter entitled "Culture among the Poor " appeared first in the Contemporary Review, and is reprinted by kind permission of the Editor. Thanks are also due to the Editors of Nursing Notes, The British Journal of Nursing, and the NortJiem Newspaper Syndicate. CONTENTS I PACK CULTURE AMONG THE POOR ..... 1 II HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR . . . .42 III ETHICS OP THE POOR .... 72 IV COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE . . . .107 TOWN AND COUNTRY . . . . .123 VI OTHER PEOPLE'S BUSINESS . . . . .142 VII INTERDEPENDENCE ...... 159 VIII HOME INDUSTRIES AND THEIR EFFECT ON THE HOME . 174 IX THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 186 viii CONTENTS x A CASE OP CRUELTY . .204 XI THE STEPMOTHER . . . . .219 XII ONE OF THEMSELVES ..... 235 XIII " AND so WE QO DOWN AND DOWN AND DOWN ! " . . 243 XIV A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN ..... 255 XV THE FIRE-POLICEMAN ..... 268 XVI "Mr TRUSTED SERVANT" . . . . 277 XVII A WAY THEY HAD IN THE NAVY .... 284 XVIII SIMPLE CONVERSION ...... 296 XIX HER REWARD . . 304 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE CULTURE AMONG THE POOR EXCEPT in its literal sense, culture is a word un- known among the poor. Cultivated and uncultivated especially the latter are favourite adjectives, but used with a peculiar implication. " An oncultivated person" is not necessarily ignorant or rough in manner, but is untrustworthy and of low moral tone, while "a great big oncultivated person" is almost past praying for. Culture, as a reality, exists far more generally than novelists and newspaper writers would have us believe, although evidence of it may not be apparent at the first glance. If we inquired closely into the complaints of modern deterioration of manners in the lower classes, we should find that the real sting does not lie in actual rudeness, but in the shock of receiving courtesy when respect was demanded. The complainants feel, in their modest degree, very much like Henry Lix. of Hochneunschlosser-Fichtenwald, when the Amer- 2 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE ican student, on being presented, said genially, " Pleased to make your acquaintance ! " Not long ago I read a book in which a young and beautiful but " earnest " lady propounds the theory that humour can only exist with partial ignorance; nothing is amusing if we probe deeply enough ; to understand is to weep. I was reminded of her views by a recent picture in Punch, headed " A Good Start." A servant, just arrived, is saying to her scandalised mistress, " May I harsk if my young man has called yet ? " It is difficult to grasp how any middle-class mistress could see anything startling in the question ; how could she fail to know that it simply meant, " Has my box come ? " Servants, however extrav- agant in other ways, have a rooted objection to spending a farthing on cab fares or porters, and one of the most generally acknowledged uses of a " young man" is to carry his fianceVs luggage from one situation to another. If the box is too heavy for him he brings a friend who is also in training for matri- mony, or, failing that, an unwilling younger brother, but no paid help must be engaged. Would any of the forty thousand Smiths of Sur- biton have done as much as this to repair an imagined discourtesy ? Happening to be in the near neighbour- hood of a woman who had shown me many small attentions, I called to see her. She was a little slow in answering the door, and when she came, said she was just getting her husband's tea. Knowing that tea really means dinner, and that the comfortless meal a workman calls his dinner is mercifully only his lunch, I declined to go in, and would not allow CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 3 her to stay talking to me. A few evenings later she came to see me, a distance of three miles, accompanied by her husband in his Sunday best. I was rather puzzled by the visit, as they seemed to have nothing special to say, and it must have been quite two years later that I received the explanation. " When you said as you wouldn't keep me, I felt as if I could have cut my tongue out ! I'd only spoke of his tea to account for being so slow coming to the door. My husband was as put out as could be. ' Why did you go for to say that about my tea ? ' he says. ' What did my tea matter whether I had it or no ?' ' Well/ I says, ' if it's my last word, I never said it to hinder her coming in.' And after that nothing would do but we must both take the tram and go and see you, just to show that no harm was meant by neither of us." These people, I must add, were in an entirely independent position, and my only professional con- nection with them was in having helped to nurse the husband's mother, and, being over-pressed with work at the time, I had done remarkably little for her. One sign of culture common among the poor at the present day, and comparatively rare in the upper classes, is love of the natural freshness, simplicity, and innocent credulity of early childhood, coupled with an intense dislike and distrust of precocity in any form. "Mother's fair frightened about baby," reported number one, aged nineteen, of number eight, aged three months. " But what is the matter with baby ? She is a most beautiful child." " It's her knowing- ness, m'm. Mother says none of the rest of us would ha' tlwught of doing the things she does ! " A little 4 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE girl, some weeks short of four years old, the youngest child of a steady-going agricultural labourer, utterly shocked her elders by announcing defiantly, " I dohn' believe Santy Claws puts the things in our stockins, it's just old mother ! " They were ashamed to think they had nourished up such an esprit fort, and greatly relieved a year later when, rationalistic interpreta- tions being temporarily obscured by the miraculous arrival of a baby sister, she was overheard telling her schoolfellows, " Father's brought home some holly boughs to sweep the chimley, so's Santy Claws wohn' dirty hees white whiskahs when he comes down ; " and immensely pleased when, the baby having reached the age of eight weeks, she said pityingly, " Pore baby, it do seem a shame she's never had no birfday yet!" Certainly such mothers are wiser than an acquaint- ance who began teaching her little daughter, aged four, to read French. One day, irritated by the child's incapacity, she said, " Go away, you little stupid ! " " Mother, I'm not stupid," protested the child indignantly, " I'm not of age for such learning." The turn of the phrase suggested that this was a quotation from her nurse, but the aptness and readiness of the retort proved her point. Two or three days after the conclusion of the Boer war, a village blacksmith's eleventh child celebrated his fourth birthday. He found a long-desired toy on his pillow, and rashly told his sister, aged six, that Santa Claus had brought it. " He don't never come, except at Christmas," she said contemptuously. "I daresay he don't, I'd be bound he don't not to CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 5 naughty little girls," he retorted angrily. She knew that her character would not bear looking into, " a terrible one for colly ing her pinnies as ever you see," so she offered a compromise which he reluctantly accepted, " Perhaps it was the Peace Angel." In no point does the difference of feeling between rich and poor come out more strongly than in their respective attitude towards personal deformity. In the upper classes any congenital defect is too bitter a grief to be spoken of, whether by the sufferer or his nearest relatives; while disfigurement or loss of limb, even if the result of a wound received in battle, or in the attempt to save life, is often regarded by the victim as a personal disgrace, and results in a hyper-sensitiveness which makes life one long dis- tress. Among the poor, on the contrary, deformity is a thing to be rather boastful of. Taking everything into consideration, it is difficult to decide whether at the present low stage of civilis- ation the state of feeling which enables a mother to be as proud of an idiot or crippled child as of an intelligent and healthy one, does or does not result in a margin of advantage to the community. Sentiment cannot be left out of the question, and it hopelessly complicates the problem. At present the poor may occasionally ill-treat a deformed child because ex- asperated by the hopeless burden, but no temptation to cruelty arises from a sense of shame. Such a crime as this, for instance, could not have occurred among the working classes, and the particular form that the cruelty took would, of course, have been impracticable: Many years ago a distinguished 6 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE London surgeon told me that from time to time he paid secret visits to a great country mansion, in the topmost attic of which a young daughter of the house had been imprisoned night and day ever since her pretended death in early infancy. The unhappy child was intelligent and pretty, and could walk fairly well: it was simply a very bad case of cur- vature of the spine. Naturally at the age of nine or ten I was too much fascinated by the horror of the tale to press him with any childishly crude questions as to how he found it consistent with his honour to have any part in such a contemptible conspiracy. In strong contrast to this : A friend of mine visiting a house in a very poor neighbourhood found a mother celebrating the birthday of her idiot daughter, a woman of forty who could "sometimes speak quite plain." I know a little dwarf of about the same age, and although the net of compulsory education had many wide meshes in her childhood, her mother always carried her to school twice a day, and to Sunday school in addition. One lasting result of this devotion is that the little creature has no abnormal sensitiveness ; she faces the world bravely, not even shrinking from any public amusements within her reach, and at the present moment she is the chief comfort of a slowly dying woman who sacrificed every hope in life to a paralysed mother. As an instance of how lightly deformity is regard* ! by my patients : A young lad had entered the hospital where I was ward sister to undergo an operation which was slight in itself but which necessitated putting him under ether. The evening CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 7 before the date fixed, the father asked to see me, and begged me to urgently request the surgeon to cut off both the lad's great toes. I asked the reason for this extraordinary suggestion, and was told, " He's got awful long feet, and he's got to kneel a good bit at his work, and his toes gets in the way, like." I tried to explain the service performed by these despised members, but he was so persistent and insistent that I was obliged to promise that the operator should be informed of his fatherly anxiety to remove such stumbling-blocks from his son's path. Great was his anger when he found that his wishes had been disregarded! It was the disobligingness of our conduct that he could not away with ; he could understand reluctance to make " a sep'rit job of it," but, " while we were about it ? " Oh, the weariness of trying to persuade any poor person that one's avowed reason for refusal is the real one ! Mutual credence must have been met with more commonly among those old-fashioned diploma- tists "sent to lie abroad for the good of their country," than between members of distinct classes. In time one becomes used to what is at first an extraordinarily ignominious experience, to state quietly and deliberately some simple fact that is well within one's knowledge and to be openly dis- believed ; but a hard-working person can never get over the loss of time entailed by the necessity of establishing every word in the mouth of two or three witnesses. Here and there one comes across the belief that a lady does not tell falsehoods, but the practical value of this idea is heavily discounted by a convic- 8 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE tion of her extreme credulity. " It's what they've told her, pore dear. She don't know no better." To hear the truth is a favour largely depending upon one's previous conduct ; the obligation to tell the truth is by no means generally recognised. When a poor woman says, " I wouldn't tell you a lie, m'm," the accent lies really on " you," and the speech, much oftener than not, is followed by the truth, or at any rate by the truth as far as the speaker is capable of perceiving it. Philosophers are always warning us not to confuse the conclusions we have drawn with the facts we have observed, and unless we remember how peculiarly liable the uneducated dre to slip into this error, we are likely to accuse them of moral untruthfulness when it is only their intellectual processes that are at fault. A mother will tell you, honestly believing what she says, " Teacher's always on to Dick, just because he isn't as bright as the others," omitting to observe that his dulness chiefly arises from inattention, that he is almost invariably late at school, and noisy and turbulent after he arrives. There is almost entire indifference to the appear- ance of the teeth. The prettiest girl in the gayest hat and the smartest blouse does not fear to smile broadly although her teeth would cause a shudder if one saw them in the mouth of an aged man. And when some dentist's traveller has induced her to have the wrecks replaced by a complete false set, she does not try to keep up even the most transparent pretence that they are her own. I know one graceful young girl who would be most unhappy if her CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 9 glorious yellow hair were not crowned by at least six new hats every year, but who quite unconcernedly walks through the village with or without her teeth as best suits her momentary convenience. Even those of the poor who are in the constant habit of reading good literature never seem to have the dimmest perception of distinctive style. Macaulay might equally well have written Hie Pilgrim's Progress as an essay upon it, and I had considerable difficulty in persuading one of the most intelligent of my patients that Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, and East Lynne were not written by the same person. Another patient always kept a copy of the Inferno close at hand, and I believe derived great satisfaction from reading it, but I am absolutely certain that she would have readily accepted the poems of Adelaide Procter, or Mrs. Hemans, as being the work of Dante. That the same writer should publish both prose and poetry would, however, be inconceivable. This complete insensibility to style is not without practical effect in daily life ; it adds to the ease with which mischief is made, not only between employers and employed, but between one neighbour and another, stories bearing strong internal evidence of entire falsity find instant credence. No one thinks of saying, "Why, that's a word I never heard old Mrs. Brown use in her life, and I've known her thirty years ; " and one but rarely hears the objection, " Well, he may ha' said it, but it don't sound to me like his us'al way o' talkin'." In the upper classes a rudi- mentary perception of style can be detected at a very io THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE early age. Untruthful servants are often taken aback by the unhesitating way in which a child of four or five will reject spurious utterances attributed to parents or older brothers and sisters, while swallowing with facile credulity the most improbable statements about persons of whom she knows very little. This unconsciousness of. the existence of style throws an air of improbability over tales of which the relaters are quite unaware. Asked to account for a furious fight that had taken place on the lower deck, a bluejacket told his captain, " Well, sir, all I says to J im was, 'Thomas, will you kindly get out of my 'ammick ? ' " and after completing the narrative on these lines he was genuinely astonished at the incredulity with which it was received. Books are generally liked in proportion to their " cuttin' " powers. People have found this ludicrous, but why ? Are not a handful of tragedies considered the culminating point of every great literature ? Comedy and farce, however, are by no means dis- relished. I lent a woman who had lived all her life in South London a copy of Erb, and it delighted her more than any books she had ever had except Booker Washington's Autobiography and Adam Bede. "I can see it all," she said enthusiastically, " I can follow him every step of the way. I wanted Alf to read it, but he wouldn't take the trouble. I read him a good bit of it, though, and he seemed to enter into it." For Adam Bede she has such an intense admiration that it is her invariable wedding present to her friends. This woman, by the way, left school at CULTURE AMONG THE POOR n twelve and went to a very hard place. By the time she was old enough to get a better situation, she had almost forgotten how to read. Her young mistress accidentally discovered this, and made her read the whole of The Daisy Chain and The Trial aloud, writing down in an exercise book the mean- ing of all unfamiliar words. It was hard labour for both of them, as the girl bitterly resented it at the time, but it has influenced her whole life and will influence her children's. To have a mother who cannot read is as great a strain on filial piety as an h-less parent would be in the middle classes. A knowledge of writing is not at present indispensable, but it soon will be. Only the other day a long-standing engagement was nearly broken off' because the lover, going to spend his holiday with "particular" friends, most rashly presented his less polished fiancee with a packet of addressed envelopes. " She knows her writing an't up to much juss-as-well's he do," said her sister wrath- f ully, " and if he'd a-leff it to her, I don't doubt but what she'd ha' ast me or Gladys to direct 'em for her ; but he's got no tack. Real coarse, I call him." I once tried to teach a young servant how to address envelopes, as her method was peculiarly unconven- tional. "I don't never put capitals all the way through," she objected. " What use do you make of capitals ? " "I begins every line with one inside my letters." It struck me afterwards that at her school dictation lessons were usually in verse. Mistakes in spelling are very much ridiculed. " There may be many ways of sayin' words, but 12 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE there's only one way of spellin' of 'em," said a girl scornfully when a neighbour tried to palliate her ignorance of the art by pleading that she came from a different county. I have never known any poor person resent the fact that our system of spelling is so imperfectly phonetic. Orthography is like the hills, there before they came. Grammatical con- structions, however unusual, pass unheeded, but a precocious child reciting a " Fifth Standard poem " to me in which the verb "methinks" occurred, broke off to remark impatiently, " Me thinks ! It do sound silly. It had ought to be / think" The poor seldom read aloud in a manner agreeable, or even intelligible, to one another ; and while they are far more interested in the conversation of their own class, and quicker at catching its points, they honestly prefer the reading of a cultivated person and follow it more readily. Unfamiliar words and phrases are yet more incomprehensible when read haltingly and in familiar accents. " Just to hear him read ! " said an old man contemptuously of a fellow- inmate of the workhouse, "he don't take no more notice of a comma than he do of a full stop, and as to a colon " His scorn was so withering that I dared not say how many excellent persons I knew who had never yet found any use for a colon. As a rule they are simply ignored, but one friend stated positively, after hearing all that could be said upon the point in four languages, " Colons are just affectation : either you wish to end a sentence or you don't" The Union grammarian continued with melancholy self-esteem. " And there's more things than stops that I can't get CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 13 none of them to give no heed to. I often set and think of things, though it's little I say, and few I have to say 'em to. There's Vesuvius, now. As far as I understand, ever since seventy-six of the first century it has been at work. What a termenjous great big hole in the earth there must be ! Now, if so be as the sea was to pour down that great big hole, what d'you suppose 'ud happen ? That's one thing I set and think of. And Russia's in a bad way, she is indeed. Milliards of francs the French have lent her, and the Czar has gambled it all away. Mil-yards, mind you, not mil-yons. Well, well, they'll have to settle it between themselves. / shan't go among 'em." I met my friend of the colon as she was driving into town, and asked her if she knew the difference between milliards and millions. " Oh, it's just a way of talking, isn't it ? " she said airily. It is quite incorrect to represent the poor as always making the same errors in speech, to do this would be far more remarkable than to display unvarying grammatical accuracy. The same persons will at different times use as the past tense of "see," see, seen, seed, and saw ; while others will ring the changes on sawed, did see, and saw. They will leave h's out one day, and not another ; they will say alternately he has, he have, and he haves, we have, we has, us has, us haves, and so on. A woman entirely alters her phraseology according to whether she is speaking to a child, to her husband, to a neighbour or an em- ployer, and the difference is still more marked among men. In certain districts when men are speaking to one another even upon such general topics as the 14 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE weather their language is almost unintelligible to a stranger, but they can if they choose make themselves readily understood by him. It is a curious and melancholy fact that many of the poor are still so sadly convinced of the arrogant displeasure felt by the upper classes at any signs of " airs " on their part, that they deliberately speak worse than they need with the idea of gratifying and disarming them. After knowing patients and their friends for a few days I have often found them using a far larger and more refined vocabulary than they did at first. The poor are as a rule strangely incapable of the art of letter-writing. A mother will correspond for years with a son in America, or a married daughter " in the North," and neither will succeed in giving the other more than the haziest and most incorrect ideas of situation and surroundings. The mechanical difficulties of writing and spelling have nothing to do with the matter ; many of the baldest and empti- est epistles look like the original of a lithographed circular, and are faultless in spelling, while by far the best letter I ever saw written by any poor person is the following, sent by the wife of a peasant farmer to a lady whose pet dog she had received as a boarder : " Dear Madam Whith one thing and a nother i do not seem to get much time for writing my husbant told me to write all last Week the days do seem to come and go so quicke i am glad it is a friend i am writing to and I am sure you do not mind me heve- ing keep you waiting so long for a letter and Dear CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 15 old trap as been all right had annything been the mather i should of write at once Dear old trap is quite at home he do not mind I dont know how meny times a day he do want to wash the baby and the gambles he do keep them in thear place my husbant he shant come in the house we have to hold him when he do come from Work but as soon as he do see who he is he do not know how to make enought of him he would not want anny Water to wash in if he would let trap do it for him he has taken so much to evelyn that he will follow her annywhere she do go out to he do play with her the main of his time you should see him sit down between the two When they do have some thing to eat of course he do come in for a big bit some times he do not get any alien inoshley as a bit for him he do take it so gentle from the baby that he do laugh Dear madam i must not for gat to tell you abaut bakeing day last Week of course it was some thing new for trap to see he is so much like a Christian Well he did look at me and like talk to me as much as to say What are you doin then he would stand up on two legs and Walk a round the table as much as to say i never see any thing like that before he do make us all laugh at him he is very good i am sure he is such a good dog i think in your trouble must make you laugh hoping i have not put in to much but i Was bound to tell you abaut trap so i think to close for the present hopeing you are still on the mend not forgating to think you very much for your kinds i do remainn . . . trap is haveing fine sport i have got the same biscuits as you had i sent to C for them." 1 6 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE If by chance the sons enter into detail it is not always understood. A few years ago a somewhat turbulent private wrote to his mother : " I am sorry you had no letter last week, but I am a defaulter and it gives me a heap of extra work." The good woman most excusably took the unknown for the magnifi- cent, and in reply begged him not to be too hard upon the others, but to remember he had been a private himself. I regret to say that he roared with laughter, and read the letter aloud for the benefit of all who shared his room. At the present day it is a sign of impermeable middle-age to mention the words " inherited capacity " ; but how can one help contrasting the emptiness of the letters, whether of business or affection, commonly written by the poor, with the fact that at three or four years of age a professional man's child will ask for a pencil and paper, scrawl industriously for a few minutes, and then volunteer to read a " letter," which generally proves to be a tolerably clear record of all the facts that have specially interested him during the previous forty-eight hours. And at seven or eight, even when much hampered by difficulties of execution, he will produce, without any assistance, a far better composition than the most intelligent servant in the house. But even the smallest power of letter- writing is a wonderful protection from injustice. A large employer of labour once showed me as a curiosity a pencilled note that he had received from a man summarily dismissed by an overseer for some alleged breach of rules. Nearly every word was misspelt, and the words them- CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 17 selves were uncouth, for the final sentence was, " Be I to shape on the screen ? " As the master restored the document to his pocket-book. In' said casually, "It would have taken him an hour to tell me as much as this and then I should not have been able to make head or tail of it. He stammers horribly." A small telegraph boy, much persecuted by his two seniors, one day flew into a violent rage, and fury temporarily supplying the lack of muscle he reduced them to such a condition that they made a formal complaint against him of aggravated and unprovoked assault. Three days later the fiery morsel received a formidable, blue-lined official paper requesting him to "State his reasons in writing for having forced soap and blacking into the eyes of messenger G." Nothing daunted, he asked the most favour- ably disposed of the lady clerks for a new pen, and sent in such a pertinent reply that he was fully exonerated, and his enemies were rather superfluously warned " not to let it occur again." An elementary knowledge of science is spreading' rapidly. One woman seriously complained to me because a nurse had not " filled the glass right up " when disinfecting a thermometer ; and a man patient was most insistent in his desire to know the cubic contents of his room. He would not be contented with a rough calculation ; it had to be worked out to what sailors call an " affygrafiy," a word that I cannot find even in a German dictionary, but which I imagine corresponds to the tenth place of decimals. Luckily he had never heard that it is necessary to subtract the cubic contents of the furniture from the 1 8 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE amount, or I should have been obliged to advertise for a nurse with a knowledge of conic sections. In a North-country town I was once stopped in the street by a chimney-sweep, who told me that he had been asked to clean a flue in a house where there had been a case of fever, and inquired if it would be safe for him to do so. "I suppose the place has been dis- infected ? " " Ay, but Ah doot they've disinfected the chimley." He presently told me that he had not washed for forty years, and having survived that 1 thought he must be strong enough to risk battle with any enfeebled germs lurking behind soot-flakes. The general intelligence of the poor, and their interest in matters which have no visible connection with their daily lives, are far more developed than is commonly believed. A very poor man came to see me one day ; his glance wandered over my writing- table, and there was a sudden gleam in his eye : " Times Literary Supplement ? Ah, there'd be some good readin' in that, I reckon?" Afterwards I regularly passed it on to him. A countryman of eighty-four, to whom many worthy persons would have presented tracts in one syllable and large print, asked me to lend him Green's History of the English People. He returned it two months later with a criticism which would have grieved the author : " I've studied every word, and most interestin' I've found it, but too much about war. It's full of fighting, and all about nothing, as far's I can make out." Standards of propriety, and even morality, vary strangely, but are never entirely absent. "He's droonk, yon mon," said an experienced child of nine CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 19 or ten in a matter-of-fact manner entirely free from any tinge of surprise or blame ; but after a moment's reflection she added in tones of stern condemnation, " and it's not Saturday, nayther ! " " Danny's a bit improved from what he was ; he used to be a nawfil boy," said an elder sister. I dared not ask from what a life of sin satin-cheeked Danny had been rescued, but she gave me an adequate measure of his depths of infamy by adding, " When he come indoors now he do remember to take his hat off!" Offers of marriage may always come from the woman if she possesses property. " Then you married rather late in life ? " said a friend of mine to a retired butler, in whose house she was lodging. ' Yes, ma'am, but," in a husky and triumphant whisper, " Fd had offers I " Repeated visits to the same house are necessary before a fair idea of the condition of the inmates can be arrived at. Without any intentional deception things may at the first or second call look better or worse than they commonly are. You may chance to find the children making a scanty dinner off bread dyed deep with household jam ; you may find one or more of them with tear-stained faces, and hear them loudly objurgated for most trivial offences ; the floor may be dirty and all the crockery unwashed; and yet you may be quite mistaken in thinking that any of these things are characteristic of the house in its normal state. A home may seem the acme of dis- comfort when you visit it at eleven or twelve in the morning, but you would hardly recognise it in the 20 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE evening, floor clean and dry, fire brightly burning, lamp lighted, children munching cake and drinking heavily sweetened tea, or perhaps sharing the father's hot meat and potatoes. On the other hand, what peaceful moments, what breathing-spaces one may enter on even in the stormiest and most wretched of households ! I remember visiting one cottage where, misled chiefly by seeing something of the orderly routine of middle- class families, I thought myself among unusually respectable people. Two days later I discovered that their moral standard was infinitely below that of their rough, unpolished neighbours, who, unacquainted with any of the gentler means of moral suasion, assembled in a crowd round the house to hoot and throw stones; and when the police arrived on the scene it was not to disperse the mob but to arrest the inmates. The line which separates those who "dress for dinner " from those who do not, is an almost invisible crack compared with the yawning gulf that divides those who " dress theirselves of a Sunday " from those who have none but their workaday clothes. " My word ! " exclaimed a scandalised boy of four, catching sight of the eighth above him in seniority, "my word, if that isn't our Tom walkin' in the road fer ev'ryone to see, and not dressed ner nothin' ! " I had often noticed that one highly respectable old agricultural labourer wore very much the same clothes at all times, but unfortunately it was not until after his death that I heard of the tragedy that had darkened all the Sundays of his later life and CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 21 bitterly mortified his wife and daughters. " Thirteen 'ear ago his clo'es was stole by a tramp, and us never had no money for to put 'em back. Us did feel it, goin' to chapel and all. There's a many as would ha' stopped at home, but he wasn't that sort, the old man wasn't. ' It's the garminks of our souls as matters,' he'd say. But fer all that he was ashamed to wear his weekdays ones. He couldn't never get used to it. His proper soot was made by an Irish tailor who come over to these parts in a cattle-boat, and stayed a month or two earnin' what he could all round about. Twenty-nine 'ears they'd lasted 'un, and they'd ha' seen 'un through to the end. Yes, he was always a good dresser, and pretty careful with his things, too. But he was never much of a one for housework. Clumsy like. I often scolded 'un, but it didn't do 'un not a bit o' good." One curious trait of character is that the sting of an accusation does not lie in its truth. The poor are just as much wounded by being accused of what is so demonstrably false that the accusation is obviously a mere rhetorical ornament as they are by charges that are disputable, or even true. I have seen a woman reduced to floods of tears because a neighbour had said, " The vicar and the schoolmaster, and everyone in the village, knows as yours is the dirtiest and starvedest and worst-beyaved childern in the whole place, and how you're just a mass of paupers living on the rates." In vain I assured her that " everyone " could see for themselves that her seven children were well washed, well clothed and as fat as butter, and received an average of three good-conduct prizes per 22 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE head every year of their lives, and that it would puzzle anyone to prove that she had ever had a penny from the rates. She wept inconsolably, and does to this day if anything brings the insult to her mind. Another woman was even more afflicted because a man, well known to be qualifying for his third visit to the county asylum, had called her husband "a casual labourer picked up on the race- course," whereas he "had a trade" and had only changed employers twice in the whole course of his working life. Fluent conversational powers are highly prized, but sometimes rouse jealousy and suspicion. A country girl, who had recently joined a Mutual Improvement Class at a London suburban chapel, one day " walked out " with the class leader, and on returning told me indignantly that he had talked " about the Wall of China." Finding that she knew the word solely in connection with cups and saucers, and believed the wall to be of the same material, I thought that the young man also must have suffered, and hunted up a tattered copy of Every Boy's Treasury of Knowledge, advising her to read it. A few weeks later she informed me that she had broken off her engagement with her country lover on the grounds that she "had been took religious, and couldn't marry a man what wasn't converted and hadn't no conversation." Extempore prayer is also greatly admired and valued. " My husband he do kneel down in the kitchen every night and pray bewtiful," said an old cottager ; " and so does I," she added with a sudden CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 23 jealousy lest he should monopolise all my admiration. It was said with genuine feeling of a> lady who visited constantly among the labourers on her father's estate, "She do pray that lovely it do make your blood run cold to hear her." Contrary to the professed experience of most writers, I find men more reticent on the subject of the suffering or adventures encountered in war time than on any other. The longest tale of the kind ever related to me was : " How'd we take the forts ? Well, we fired at them, and they fired at us, and it didn't seem to make much cliff'rence, so we got tired of it, and we run in one side and they run out the other. I r'member a fellow next to me picked up a child's toy gun, and he said, ' Can't return this as more'n a six-pounder, I s'pose.'" But to hear that old gentleman relate how he had once run a bristle into a hollow tooth, life was not long enough even in those leisurable days. Fine phrases are much delighted in. My patients are never so happy as when they can turn " nearly fell down an opening ten feet deep" into "was partially precipitated down a precipice," but I am quoting here from a local newspaper, not a patient. A young Frenchman wishing to tell me, in the most elegant language at his command, that a toy terrier had nearly been suffocated in the toe of a bedroom slipper, said, " The anterior of the animal was entirely implicated in the concavity of the sleeper." " So the Ad'mal he put me on his private stawff" was the climax of a very long-winded tale related to me by a police-constable ex-seaman-gunner. I inquired with 24 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE all due delicacy into the precise implication of the words, and' found that the Admiral, having acci- dentally discovered that the man had been fraudu- lently enlisted at the age of twelve, with the connivance of an over-zealous lieutenant, and was detained illegally and strongly against his wish, had put him into the galley to help the cook until the case could be inquired into and his discharge granted. I was once travelling by train from Shrewsbury to Flint, and among my fellow-passengers were an engaged couple, a young mechanic and a bonny, sonsy-looking girl of nineteen or twenty. He held forth at great length on the wonders of the viaduct and the aqueduct, which were both to be seen from a certain point on the line. She listened with one eye on him, and the other ninety-nine or so fixed upon a hat which was not particularly well suited for a third- class railway journey, but had probably been worn because the owner at the last moment had lacked the nerve to shut down the uncompromising lid of her flat tin-box upon its feathered glory. "There they are ! " cried the man at last. She looked up with a smile that I am sure would have persisted even on a washing day when there was " no dry in the air," and asked innocently, " Which is the aqua-ducks and which is the water-ducks ? " A mere man would have been more than satisfied, but this was a Superior Person, and he snubbed her ruthlessly. I hope her husband is a different man, even if he is the same person. Phrases that have slipped down from another rank of society are occasionally brought out with curious CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 25 effect. A very old inmate of the workhouse, formerly a journeyman shoemaker, wishing to compliment me on a basket of flowers that I had sent to the matron, told me, " Mr. Manners and his good lady happened to drive over that day, and he said he'd never seen such beautiful specimens in his life. Man in a very good position, too, v e-ry good." " Who is he ? " I asked, wondering that a county magnate's know- ledge of flowers should be so small, or his regard for truth so slight. " Man in a very good position," he repeated impressively, " he's the master of the tramp ward at M ." But although this style of language may sometimes be irresistibly absurd, the people who use it have generally been among the most estimable of my patients and their friends. I have always thought it wrong to laugh at children for using long words, even if they should be a little shaky as to the spelling, meaning, or pronunciation. The desire to make verbal distinctions, to call different things by different names, shows a real and natural expansion of brain power, and is the beginning of the mental accuracy without which the best-intentioned persons can never attain the highest forms of truthfulness. I felt far more hope of the future usefulness of a child who when told of some great misfortune that had befallen a near relative exclaimed " What a cata-stroff ! " than I did of one who hearing of the fatal results of an accident remarked " What a snub for him \ " The mode of address often affords a district nurse a roughly accurate measure of the society in which she finds herself. "Missus" goes with unpolished but 26 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE fairly respectable surroundings ; " ma'am " is usually a sign that the house-mother has been in regular service, while " mum " marks the charwoman and her belongings ; " miss " is only heard in the upper circles of those whom we visit, while " lady " gives pointed warning that we are among mendicants, actual or possible. Very small differences in the use of words are often puzzling. On examining into the joys of an " alleged school-treat," I was told by a country boy of thirteen, "There was a false woman with pipes," and it was only with an effort that I recognised my old friend Aunt Sally. During the Spanish-American war a village baker protested, " Two thousand years and them Philippines ain't altered, not a mite. You mind what St. Paul said of 'em ? " Greatly exaggerated views are held as to the ignor- ance of cooking commonly found among the working classes. A country doctor once attended the first of a County Council series of lectures on cottage cooking. He had hoped much from this new venture, and listened with deepening disgust as the lecturer lightly dropped references to gas-rings, double saucepans methods of regulating heat of ovens, etc. At the close he asked her if she would go with him and see half a dozen typical cottage grates. She followed him silently in and out of the houses, and in response to his question, " Well, what could you cook there ? " replied frankly, " Nothing ! nothing at all. In the course of time I might boil a kettle." " And yet all these ignorant women cook something that enables their husbands to work and their children to grow. CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 27 What is wanted is that you should teach them how to do this just a little bit better. Their great-grandchildren will be dead of old age before country labourers have twenty-guinea stoves. For nearly fifty years I have seen them obliged to take off the kettle before they can boil the potatoes, and supplied with an oven that will not hold the smallest plate in the house, and all that time people have marvelled that they don't do more cooking ! " Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that, what- ever we may think of it, the cooking of " my missus " generally satisfies " my master," at any rate after he has had her under training for a little time. I was told recently of a factory girl who, the day after the wedding, provided her husband with chops burnt absolutely black. He remonstrated. " Well, I juss put 'em in the pan and they come so. What had I ought to ha' done ? " " You'd ought to ha' put oil in the pan," replied the husband boldly. As soon as she had hurried back with two fresh chops she soused them well in paraffin and recommenced her labours. After a little " language " the husband retreated to the public-house. But that kind of thing is far rarer than we choose to believe, and it is difficult for us to grasp what a genuine difference of taste there is between one class and another. Even the daintiest puddings supplied by the charitable rich are not found palatable without alteration, and sugar or jam must always be added. " In my dear home we never had a pudding without currants," said an anaemic girl, looking at an excellent batter pudding with contempt. The givers are often 28 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE so much offended that I have to remonstrate and ask, " How would you like it if you were expected to eat a few Chinese delicacies, slugs, for example, or eggs black with age ? " Not only is there a genuine difference in taste, but monotony, so far from being regarded as a hardship, is preferred and insisted on, especially by men. When I have suggested this or that cheap and palatable dish to a prudent housewife, she has often shaken her head regretfully. "Yes, I know, m'm. We had it frequent in the kitchen where I was in service, and I'm partial to it myself, and I don't doubt but what the children 'ud take to it, but my husband, he'll eat nothing but boiled bacon, or a chop, or a bit of fat beef baked over pertaters ; and if it won't run to that, 'Gimme a bit o' brenn'-cheese'n I'll know weer I am' he'll say." The working man's wife is constantly reproached (in papers she never reads!) for making "heavy" puddings and pastry. Except from a dyspeptic husband here and there she would receive small thanks for making them light. " Well, what's your idea of properly made duff?" asked an officer of a grumbling sea-lawyer. " Why, sir, if the cook was worth his salt you might throw a plum-duff over the mast-head and it wouldn't never break ! " The cost of fuel, in addition, is too often forgotten by those who think that (instead of its bringing us one stage nearer to periodical famines) every social evil would be cured if only the poor would eat food of a lower quality. " Why go hungry on a piece of dry bread when five children could be well fed on a CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 29 penny-farthing's worth of lentils?" ask ardent vege- tarians, oblivious that the bread is ready to be eaten, while the lentils cooked at an extravagant open stove would need an expenditure of from seven to fourteen pounds of coal before they were sufficiently softened to give the human stomach a fair chance of being paid for its labour. I have never heard any Council School French (" Mrs. Jones has adopted the out-of-door cure"," came from the former pupil of a select school for young ladies), but I came across an amusing specimen of the language one day at the Royal Academy. Two young Cockney clerks had come to a pause before a picture represent- ing an elderly man and a middle-aged woman enjoying a quiet gossip, and referring to the catalogue found that it was named Entre nous. "You're a French scholar, Havant ; what does it mean ? " " Lemme see ; entre, enter, nous, we, Enter we enter we lem- me " " Enter we into conversation ? " " Um well yes that's what it means," with a deep breath, implying that strict scholarship hindered him in the performance of such enviably brilliant feats of con- structive imagination. German is, of course, even less known, and I was certainly baffled for a moment one day when a small farmer's wife read from her newspaper in tones of admiring complacency, " The Crown Prince's Jar filled the edifice " ; no one would be astonished now if his " Jar " shook two continents. I often doubt if the general teaching of languages is much more practical than it was in the days of Ahn and Otto and Ollendorff. "Why don't you 3 o THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE enter at Y.'s studio ? " I asked a young art student who had recently arrived in Paris. " I can't." " Then D.'s, or W.'s ? " "I can't," she replied in still more melancholy tones. " But why not ? There are plenty of English-speaking students at all three, and " " Oh, it's not that ; I was always first in French." [I never knew a High School girl who was not !] " It's because there are no vacancies." I laughed ; in one studio I knew there were acres of dusty floor with no chalk-marks of proprietorship, and the sublime indifference of the owners of the other two as to whether it was even physically possible for a student to set up an easel was notorious. " Well, you can see for yourself," she protested a little huffily. " It's marked on all three prospectuses." I took them from her, but only dared smile inwardly when I read " Pas de vacances." After all, it is a sentence which would be almost equally unintelligible to most English people in whatever language it were written. Another student being told that such and such an hotel would be too expensive for her, as rooms on the Stages supdrieurs were from twelve to fifteen francs a day naively replied, " But the Mages infe'rieurs would do quite well enough for me ! " Tags of Latin are sometimes known by men, but are considered entirely beyond the powers of women. Only a few days ago when I was reading a rather illegible label a shopman kindly told me that facilis was the Latin for easy. I accepted his instruction meekly, but the apprentice blushed hotly; he evi- dently knew that women could scale these heights and live. CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 31 I often wonder what is meant by the expression in such common use among my patients " seein' life." A young maid-servant who had been given a day's holiday to visit a peculiarly sleepy cathedral city said on her return, " While I was gettin' out o' the way o' the tram, a cab nearly rodd over me. Ah, you do see life there ! " and she never again settled down in the village where she had previously seemed perfectly happy. " Well, m'm, / should call the Parish Tea dull, but then I've always bin used to a deal o' life," said the fifteen-years' inmate of an almshouse. Letter-writers in the daily papers this winter have suggested endowing the poor with old tea-leaves, stale bread, and pieces from the children's plates. Why omit sour milk from the cat's saucer, and bones that have ceased to interest the dog ? I should think little of the poor if I did not firmly believe that they would starve rather than eat the scrapings of nursery plates, and what children must be brought up in the houses of people capable of writing such maddening in- sults and calling them charity ? In a suburban kitchen I once accidentally witnessed a scene thoroughly characteristic of the decent poor. A charwoman and a general servant were sitting down to their dinner, a roast joint which the latter had just carried out from the dining-room. The charwoman was about to help herself, using the carving knife that was still on the dish. " Don't use that, it's dirty ! " cried the servant, and produced another. A friend told me that she had once observed her maid, knowingly and quite unnecessarily, drink from a cup that her mistress had used. She said, " I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt 32 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE of being served by a woman who had so far lost all sense of personal dignity. I could never like her afterwards, and I was thankful when she left." An exaggerated sensitiveness, perhaps, but at least a woman like that would not offer me for the use of the poor a feeding- bottle no longer needed by the half-dozen puppy dogs for which it had been bought, one of my very last experiences as a Queen's nurse. The attitude of many parents towards compulsory education is pardonably critical. " School's well enough if they'd teach 'em the right things, but they don't" said the father of a long family. " What d'you s'pose I heerd the master tellin' of 'em the last time I was passing ? the winders was open and you know what size voice he has. 'Ah!' he was a-sayin', ' Ah, and they had to work so hard, so hard that many of 'em died o' work.' Nice thing, that, to tell 'em ! None o' my thirteen won't die o' work." The desire of the Anglo-Saxon parent that his children shall receive a literary education is indeed pale and shadowy when contrasted with that of the poorest and least desired alien. From one house where Russian Jews lived, five and seven and even nine in a single room, the children sallied out two evenings a week for extra lessons, still hungry for instruction after swallowing the entire " Time Table " of the Council School. Instrumental music is very generally taught to artisans' daughters, and whether because there is more natural talent in that class, or because the children do not begin until a reasonable age, they certainly play far better than professional men's daughters did thirty years ago, when music CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 33 was often studied before the alphabet, and was the last lesson to be discontinued. Singing is taught in every school and practised in every chapel, but the quality of voice is so harsh that the results are generally discordant. The idea of singing as a thing to be learnt is comparatively new to the poor. I remember a servant protesting with astonishment when her young mistress had singing lessons, " But I thought people just sang or didn't sing," ciTtuinly a consummation devoutly to be wished ! Intuitive knowledge ranks far higher than the result of study: to have been taught is almost a direct proof of being "more than common" stupid. " ' Well/ " says the doctor to me, ' and whad's the marrer wirree ? ' Pretty thing that to ast, and him a doctor ! " said an old country neighbour scornfully. This explains why quacks are highly valued and highly paid. I have rarely come across any dislike of noise. In a hospital exposed to the full roar of London traffic I cannot remember hearing a complaint, or any desire for silence. Once, however, in a room on the ground- floor of a courtyard, I nursed a woman who said to me : " If I was rich, I would like to build a place where poor sick people could be in the quiet." I saw a letter written by. a patient for whom such a haven had been provided, and after a sad enumeration of the events of the day, she said : " In the evening we have a service. It do put the clock on a bit against we go to bed." I once lived near a railway bridge which crossed a street, and one of the greatest pleasures of the children in the neighbourhood was 3 34 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE to run and stand under it when a train rattled over- head. One day a very fat little boy who had arrived last in the stampede heaved a sigh of satisfaction and said contentedly, " Well, I beared the tail of the wow, anyway!" A young girl sent from the heart of London to a thinly-built suburb was sadly oppressed by the silence : the first time she was seen to smile was when by some chance about fifty people in heavy boots crossed a piece of asphalte. She looked up beamingly at her mistress, " Don't it sound nice, mum ? " The poor, as a whole, are insensitive to the incon- veniences of overcrowding, especially at night. Not only are they ignorant of hygiene, but to a great extent they have become accustomed to bad air, and therefore it has no immediate, unmistakable effect upon their health. Their nerves are, as a rule, far less irritable than those of the more educated classes, and the chief part of their moral training is to endure rather than to ameliorate. Disorder and untidiness do not greatly affect them ; while cleanliness in their opinion is easy or difficult to maintain in proportion to the size of your premises; and overcrowding, in strictly family life, does not even wound their sense of decency. Until these things are changed, over- crowding will continue ; incidentally it may benefit the landlord, but it is the " will of the people." As an example of how purely voluntary it sometimes is, I was told recently of four unmarried policemen allowed to live in lodgings who shared a single room in a house the whole of which was let for 5s. 6d. a week. How they baffled the person whose duty it CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 35 was to see that they engaged proper accommodation, I do not know, but the one drop of bitterness in their lot was the fear of being found out and compelled to live decently. Mere book -learning does not always raise the standard of life in this particular ; if I were to describe some of the homes in which Board School teachers and superior shop assistants have been brought up, and continue to live in, the account would seem incredible. Ability to calculate the spending power of money never goes beyond a very small sum. " Mrs. Jacobs was a widow when she married Mr. Tomlins, and she's his third wife. But he had a lot of money; that's why she done it. He must have had quite a hundred pounds," The speaker was earning sixteen pounds a year " and all found," and I do not think she would have been in the least impressed by the wealth of a man with an income of two pounds a week, but a hundred pounds in the bank was as dazzling and incalculable as a hundred thousand, although she knew that poor old Tomlins could scarcely earn thirty shillings in a month. " Is the little gentleman going to be an officer ? " asked the widow of a sergeant who lived in a three-roomed house on four and six- pence a week. "No," replied the district visitor, looking regretfully at the small nephew who accom- panied her, " no ; we cannot afford to make him a soldier. He must earn his living." "But, ma'am," protested the old woman proudly, " there wasn't an officer in our regiment that had less than seven-and-sixpence a day." Unfortunately the majority of wage-earners are 36 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE also unable to grasp that they are not benefited by the amount of money they receive, but by the money's worth that falls to their share. A lady working in a Midland town where married women's labour in the factories is a customary thing, and their earnings average about ten shillings a week, told me that she had sometimes sat down and talked with mothers of young children and gone thoroughly into the question with them, regarding it simply as a gain or loss of money. She proved to them that by the time they had paid to have their children "minded," paid someone to do the family washing, paid the difference between ready-made clothing for the children and the price of the materials used in them, paid for the extra wear and tear of their own clothing, and paid the differ- ence between the price of tinned food and fresh, the ten shillings were entirely swallowed up ; while if a still more strict and minute reckoning were made, several shillings of their husbands' earnings were gone as well. The usual reply is : " Well, even if I do gain nothing by it, I'd rather go to the mill than stop at home all day." But they do not really believe the calculation: every person in that state of mental development is blinded by the magic of money, unable to conceive that money can pass through her hands without benefiting her, or that she can be benefited unless it does pass through them. I recently read rejoicings in a newspaper because when the miners were out of work in a certain district, which frequently happened, their wives could " keep the home together " by going to factories where they earned eighteen shillings a week. The CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 37 connection between the two facts seemed to me obvious. In another neighbourhood where there is very little paid employment for married women, and miners cannot get work underground throughout the year, I am told that they make a practice of " coming up" at hay harvest and corn harvest, thoroughly enjoying the change, and greatly appreciated by the small farmers who at these seasons often do not know where to look for help, and sometimes engage three or four tramps on the off-chance that even one of them will remain a week with them. Ideas of art are of the crudest : the mission of the artist, as far as the poor understand it, is to produce what is immediately pleasing to untaught perception. A woman after spending a dreary hour at the recently opened National Portrait Gallery, said to me charit- ably, " They an't very good-looking people, but of course just first startin' off no doubt they had to be content with what they could get, like ! " At the same time, no one who remembers the greasy finery, oiled heads, and hats laden with artificial flowers and draggled feathers that filled Sunday- school classes thirty or forty years ago, and compares them with the white embroidered frocks which return to the wash-tub every Monday, the big straw hats trimmed with knots of pale ribbon, and the washed and generally uncurled hair of the present-day pupils, can deny that in one most important and really creative branch of art the poor have made great advance in their perception of the beautiful. The improvement in the dress of girls past the age of childhood is not quite so marked, the hats are often 38 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE gaudy, and far too much is wasted on them, but the skirts are unquestionably better cut, the boots and gloves are neater, and the blouses, although often over elaborate and unsuited for outdoor wear, are pretty enough in themselves. The amount and quality of the underclothing worn has improved to an extraordinary extent during the last twelve or fifteen years. Even the appearance of the busy, over-burdened mother is more cared for than formerly. Daughters are beginning to think it a reflection on themselves if mother "has nothing nice to put on." The last time I was in a ready-made boot shop I heard a girl reproving her mother for wearing fives " when fours was her proper size." The girl was quite right, the fours looked comfortable as well as neat, but even the mother's own choice was a decided step in advance; and I am sure that if the charitable rich had wished to present her with any foot-gear they would have thought that she required sevens at least. This seems to be an ineradicable prejudice; small hands and feet are at least as common among the poor as among the rich, while among the lower middle classes I find them the rule instead of the exception. Often in hospital wards the shoes that the donors told me "might be large enough for children of three or four " were worn by children of ten or eleven, and those intended for the latter were passed on as easy fits for the women patients. The pleasures of a married man among the poor are chiefly connected with his children. When they are too old to interest him much fortunately they CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 39 are never too young ! he falls back on papering, painting, gardening, carpentry, joinery, and wood- carving. I have known articles of furniture made in an open shed at the bottom of a 30 feet by 13 back- Icn which I could not distinguish from those sold in shops. A complete set of bedroom furniture, including a large toilet-glass, is a very common " tribute of affection " from a husband to a wife. I know one man who is making a panelled wardrobe, but as the children are still somewhat absorbing he expects that it will take him two years to complete it. The pleasures for children are certainly sufficient in these days for all those who are possessed of mothers energetic and self-sacrificing enough for the extra washing and dressing entailed. I kept count of the " outings " enjoyed by one little girl between Easter and the August Bank Holiday. She was twelve years old, and the middlemost of seven children of a country labourer. The list comprised two Sunday- school treats (one church, one chapel), one circus, paid for by the father's overtime money ; one fair, paid for by the eldest sister ; one " co-operative tea," the three tickets used being paid for by three Saturdays' work for a neighbour; two picnics, one arranged by her mother, and one by a neighbour with ten young children. In addition, she once walked with her mother to the seaside, five miles off, had tea and returned ; and once did the same thing with her father and sister ; and every third Friday she walked with her mother to the nearest town to help to do the shopping. This last implies wearing Sunday clothes 40 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE and ranks so highly as a treat that all judicious and fair-minded mothers make their elder children take it in regular turns, and if they wish to accuse a woman of gross favouritism, the usual charge brought against her is, " She always take Victor and Evie to town with her ; none of the others don't never have a chance." The treats of a town child of equally respectable parentage would have been still more numerous. Pleasures for the old are scarce, although they need them more than the young and enjoy them quite as much. During all the years I have worked among the poor the only persons I have found devising treats for the aged are the Church Sisters and one wealthy clergyman who in the summer used to send them for drives, and in the winter had them fetched in cabs and entertained them eight or ten at a time in his own dining-room. I have sometimes happened to go in when they were sitting dressed and waiting to be fetched : no child could have been more full of joy, excitement, and self-importance. Only a small proportion of the poor require to be taught the duty of kindness to their children, but such actions as these supply a wholesome and much-needed example of care and respect for the aged. At first sight one is inclined to say that there are no pleasures for poor married women independently of their children, but there is the one great pleasure of " talking by the hour," and an increasing number enjoy reading; and many of them derive such an immense amount of satisfaction from that much ridiculed institution Mothers' Meetings, that I wish CULTURE AMONG THE POOR 41 these despised reunions could be increased in number and size and in the variety of the entertainment oll'rred. A few songs and recitations might well be added to the programme, and tea should be provided at least once a month, even if the women have to pay for it themselves. If a middle-class mother finds pleasure in occasionally eating a meal which she has not ordered, and for which she feels no responsibility, let her imagine the joy that a meal which she has not prepared, and which she will not have to clear away and wash up, is to a really poor woman. I can re- member now in a provincial hospital seeing a con- valescent woman of over seventy dressing herself in time for afternoon chapel, and saying with deep conviction, " Well, if we arn't happy we ought to be. Nothing to do but lie still and be waited on ! " Many of my patients and their friends are civilised enough to exchange calls with a certain amount of regularity and formality, but I have never found calling cards in use. More than twenty years ago, however, a servant I knew very well was going to Liverpool for ten days' holiday, and she said to her mistress's young daughter, " They're sure to ask me if I've brought my card-case ! " " What shall you say ? I can give you some blank ones to write on, if that will do." " Oh no, miss ; they'd have to be printed. I shall just rummage through my box and say I can't find it." Perhaps the most common form of recreation in the homes of the poor is keeping pets. Sad is the fate of some of these animals left to the tender mercies of the ignorant! One man, tired of having fowls, bought 42 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE ducks, and, determined that they should be provided with every luxury, he sunk an old bath-tub and kept it filled to the brim with water. After ascertaining that it contained nothing to eat, the ducks naturally preferred dry land, but they had a benevolent despot to deal with, and he knew what was for their good. A wickerwork cover was made out of a discarded hamper, and the " obstrepalous " birds were held in their proper place. Another man bred black beetles, and spent much of his leisure manufacturing neat cardboard pagodas for them to live in. He worked at an eating-house, and was constantly bringing home unusually fine specimens. " He might do worse," said his wife philosophically, but most of her neighbours agreed that they would rather take their chance of the poker at some unknown date than endure "such ways." They had small pity for her, however, because it is well known that every marriage produces a child, and a woman " with any gumption " grasps that she can fill the post more becomingly than her husband. II HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR FOR many generations an innumerable multitude of charitable people have been deeply concerned in helping the poor: they have attacked the problems relating to them from the religious, the moral, the sentimental, the intellectual, the "practical" stand- points. All alike have failed almost completely either in reducing the number of the abjectly wretched, or in effecting any lasting improvement in their condition. And why? Chiefly, I believe, because they have one and all despised the home life of the poor, held it cheaply, as a thing of no moment. Are there aged and destitute men and women ? Put them in an almshouse, or a Nazareth Home. Are there orphans? Build barracks for them and let their shoestrings be regulated by order of the committee. Children are ill-fed? Provide free meals at school. Do the over- worked teachers rebel at serving tables ? (One of them told me recently, "As it is, I can only afford ten minutes for my dinner.") Send them to a restaurant. Are any ill ? Advertise in every newspaper, and shout in the high- ways and byways until you have multiplied and extended your hospitals and convalescent homes. 43 44 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Are they " uninteresting cases " ? Enlarge the work- house infirmaries. Are there hopeless sufferers? Build Homes for the Dying. Do married women mothers of young children, go out to work ? Whether it be from custom, choice, or necessity, furnish numberless creches and bribe them to bring you their wailing incumbrances. Do mothers decline to suckle their own infants ? Provide sterilised milk in sterilised bottles, and lest the unsterilised mother's tender care too oft forget the child she bare, do not trouble her to call for the basket, but deliver it by a sterilised errand-boy ; and by no means ask her to give the bottles even a per- functory rinse out before she returns them I mean before a second and less expensively sterilised urchin fetches them away. Is the bedding insufficient ? Do not be content with such half-hearted and hard- hearted measures as blanket clubs, but lend freely to every applicant. To satisfy the scruples of some pragmatic old maid, you can make a rule that the blankets are to be returned, and returned clean, but you will not dream of enforcing it. It will be a charity within a charity to let "poor Mrs. Smith, whose husband has been so long out of work " have the washing of them, and if she grumbles at their blackness, and dramatically begs you " only to take a look at them," she will be easily soothed with an extra twopence per pair. As to collecting such as have not disappeared without leaving any address, it will be a nice little job for Mrs. Smith's husband ; and if he sublets the work and furtively repairs to the public-house with the discount, Mrs. Smith is far HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 45 too tactful to force the matter upon your attention. Are the school - children ill-clothed ? Supply all deficiencies at once, and be sure (it is so " elevating ") that the garments are far better in cut and quality than those purchased by hard-working, self-sacrificing fathers and mothers. Are the children unwashed? Provide every facility at the Council Schools, and lay yet another burden upon the teachers. Is there no room for boys and girls to play indoors ? Arrange " Happy Evenings " ; not once a month or so, as middle-class children might go to a party, but every night; and for the older boys and girls open clubs where expensive games and amusements can be enjoyed that do not fall to the lot of professional men's children, nor to the sons and daughters of the moderately prosperous shopkeeper. And yet, in spite of all disintegrating influences, there can be no doubt that the conception and the actuality of family life have vastly improved among the decent poor during the last fifty years ; parental affection bears almost every strain that can be laid upon it, and filial affection is slowly but unmistakably developing. The conception of family life and ties is widening as well as deepening : ask the first little girl of ten whom you meet, and you will find that she can give you a complete list of her uncles and aunts (distinguishing the mother's brothers and sisters very clearly from the father's), and that she can tell you the names and ages of all her first cousins, and most probably knows the names of some of her mother's cousins and of her own elder cousins' children, besides those of several persons who, she is 4 6 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE quite sure, "are something to mother n father." Even thirty years ago this would not have been; absent relatives were soon lost sight of, and a generation was long enough to obscure the relation- ships of those living in different parts of the same parish. The keeping of anniversaries becomes more and more common among the poor. Children's birthdays have long been observed, and now the mother's birthday is commonly, and the father's occasionally, recognised. Silver weddings are frequently cele- brated, the children usually combining to make a substantial present to the parents. In one case where the gifts were bought separately, a daughter in service puzzled her parents (the mother had been a factory girl) by sending them an electro-plated pair of knife-rests. They could not imagine what their use could be, nor yet rest satisfied that they were intended purely for ornament, and they would not ask any of their neighbours for fear of exposing themselves to ridicule. The love of childhood's home often intensifies as the years go by. A lady writing from the country to a poor old friend living in "the heart of a great town, and finding it difficult to think of anything to interest her, half filled her letter with an account of the difficulties of the water supply, the rain-water tanks, the water fetched from the spring half a mile away, and despatched it, thinking that the full sheet would at any rate testify to her goodwill. She was very much touched by the reply: "My dear, it did refresh my spirit to hear about the Water. It's just HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 47 what we done in Jersey when I was a girl, and it did bring it all back to my mind so clear." I have always found this family feeling of great lance in district nursing, especial ly in conjunction with the mixture of classes, which is far more frequent than most people imagine. One hears of labourers, of artisans, of shopkeepers, etc., as if they formed distinct castes. In the country, and in small towns, I have sometimes traced out the ramifications of families and found that (among living members) they have included agricultural labourers, superior gardeners, skilled artisans, tradesmen, farmers, builders, nurserymen, and solicitors. In one instance the granddaughter of an exceedingly poor old couple was ill, and I noticed a motor-car standing at the door. I thought that a second doctor had been called in, but afterwards learnt that it belonged to people closely connected with them by marriage. Even if there is no marked difference in wealth, relatives can often help one another ; for one member may be in steady work and another is unemployed ; one may be childless while another has an unusually large family ; and no encouragement should be given to the idea that charity, like independence, is a privilege of the rich, and that those who cannot give largely need give nothing at all. In the rare cases where the relatives refuse to help, the refusal generally arises from well-grounded fear that their hard-earned money will be wasted on superfluities instead of supplying the invalid's real wants. One objection to the thrift of prudent people is the extent to which their fore- sight benefits the thriftless. I have often seen 48 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE families where one member consumed the savings of all the rest, and it makes one inclined to wish that until the poor have more idea of justice to themselves and others their savings might chiefly take the form of sick pay and deferred annuities. The persons w r ho most need protection from rapacious claims are domestic servants ; even if they have the strength of mind to refuse money to undeserving relatives, it is too often robbed from them wholesale by pretended lovers. I should like to see some scheme elaborated of deferred annuities for women - servants, more especially as even if they marry prudently a man's pension, club allowance, etc., dies with him, and in no way benefits his widow. The most ordinary home is as preferable to the best-managed institution as the natural aliment of babies is to patent foods. A friend of mine once asked the matron of a large orphanage why as soon as her well-disciplined girls entered service they suddenly became obstinate and unmanageable. She said with a sigh, "It is because all their lives they have only yielded to compulsion: they have never known what it is to yield to love and persuasion." In a very poor and declining district of Essex some friends who had lived there for over forty years told me : " When the girls go to service the mothers' almost invariable farewell is, ' If you're not happy, mind you come back home at once. There'll always be a welcome for you.'" They found an exceptionally good place for one girl, eldest of a large family, and the mother on parting told her that if she lost it her parents ' would not speak to her for a twelvemont." How- HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 49 ever, at the first word of complaint an aunt was sent twrhv miles to inquire into a microscopic grievance, and at the second the mother walked six miles through August dust to send a telegram giving the girl per- mission to return home immediately, which she did, without an instant's delay, in the absence of her mistress, and o\vin<^ her two pounds which had been ad vanced towards her outfit in consideration of the extreme poverty of her parents. Curiously enough, the home of the widow is the only one that benevolent persons seem anxious to protect. The philanthropic convention that all widows are desirable persons, and that any amount of useful legislation may be blocked in their supposed interest, is to me one of the strangest phenomena in the history of charity. It is (in most cases) a great misfortune to be a widow, especially if one has sons, but I fail to see how or why widows are more meritorious than the women whose husbands survive their cooking for the normal period ; and not being better in themselves, what is there in the position to improve them ? For the first few weeks there is idleness, abundant sympathy, unusual command of money ; then, hardly obtained, hardly kept, scantily paid work ; then, grinding poverty and temptation. In a world where it is not always easy for an unmarried woman to earn an honest living, and where not every wife is flawless, how did the boundless belief in widows arise ? In my experience all young and middle-aged widows have either had some trade which placed them above the temptations of hunger, or they were sycophants and weaklings propped up by charity, or 50 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE they fell into vicious courses, or they married the first decent man who offered them a home. In one small village I knew six women who were widowed in early middle age. One was a vigorous, sensible person whose two daughters were soon old enough to help her, and the three together earn a comfortable liveli- hood; one is helped largely by charity, in addition to what she gets from the rates, and is nevertheless leading a scandalous life; the third has been im- prisoned for leading her own young daughter into sin ; the fourth, fifth, and sixth married after a brief interval, one of them for the third time. In a large town, although work would have been ill paid it would have been easier to obtain, and probably only the third (disreputable even in the lifetime of her husband) would have fallen into vicious habits. Widows, like all poor and ill-fed persons, are especially open to the temptation of drink. Home industries are notoriously ill-paid, and yet the practice of any other must lead to the physical and moral neglect of the children, and in most cases the sons are difficult to manage. A lad old enough when his father dies to feel some sense of responsibility is often a good son to a widowed mother, but the boy accustomed from earliest childhood to see his mother a bread-winner almost invariably grows up what the neighbours call " a poor tool " ; and many a woman lives to regret that she has spared her sons the possibly rough but not always unwholesome discipline of a stepfather. In brief, it is altogether so difficult for an ordinary widow with her small earnings to bring up her family in health and decency that her HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 51 home should be the last to receive protection and encouragement, not the first. The incorruptible independence of the majority of the poor strikes me as simply marvellous. Would the middle classes stand out for ever against the insidiousness of such attacks as this? A. was married and had ten young children, one of whom was supported by the grandparents. His weekly wages were only twenty-three shillings, but that was at least five shillings above the village average, while many labourers had families even larger and younger. A. fell eight pounds behind with his rent. The squire, a very poor man, forgave the debt and allowed him to start fresh. A.'s house was scantily furnished, his children plump but dirty and ragged ; his wife cracked nuts and scrunched sweets on Saturdays and Sundays, and was a notorious novel-reader at all times. The cottage garden was small, but the grandfather, who lived quite close, had nearly an acre of good ground, three-quarters of which was always left uncultivated. In the course of the following three years A. paid fifteen shillings rent. By this time two of his children were old enough to work. The squire grew impatient and uttered his ultimatum : pay ten pounds back rent or leave the cottage. A.'s wife's sister was servant at the vicarage, and although the children went to chapel and the wife went nowhere, A. was prudent enough to put in an occasional attendance at church. A subscription list was at once started, headed by a sovereign from the vicar (whose living was under 200), and was voluntarily carried round by a man who had brought up nine 52 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE children respectably, who lived in one of the largest and best kept cottages in the place, and whose wages had only recently exceeded a guinea. One of the heaviest subscribers was a widower with twelve children, and a widower among the poor is poor indeed. This man, by the way, ungrudgingly paid fifteen shillings a week to have his three youngest children taken care of, and had to work nearly sixteen hours a day to raise this amount and to support himself and two more children entirely dependent on him and three partially dependent. The sums collected soon reached seven pounds, and then subscriptions slackened because it came to light that A. had had money enough to attend a ball, wearing new kid gloves and tan shoes, and the worthy dupes were exasperated by being told that he was "a lovely singer and dancer." The vicar, more obstinately duped than the rest, made up the balance. Why did not every mother in the village refuse to pay rent and give up her days to novel-reading and begging ? It is not by the wisdom of the charitable that we are saved from entire destruction of the stability of working-class homes. "So long's the Salvation Army likes to feed my children, / shan't do it!" shouted the next-door neighbour of one of my patients truculently. " And why should she, neither?" asked my informant. "Not as I'd be beholden to 'em meself." Here is another instance: A few weeks since a woman was convicted of inciting one of her children to steal. It was her third serious offence, and she HOMK I.IFK AMONG THE POOR 53 was s.-iitt'iir.'d to a ti-riM of imprisonment. Tin- youngest child could not be separated from lu-r, Imt tlu' n -maining six, dirty, ragged, and ill-tVd, \\cre sent to tin 1 workhouse. The father stated in court that his wages were from thirty-two to thirty - li\v shillings, and his rent four shillings, and his employer said that he "could earn more when lie phase." Some days later the man received a notice from the Poor Law Guardians, and being unable to read carried it to the wife of a labourer who sup- ported five children decently on a pound a week. (These children's cast-off clothes had often been worn by the skilled artisan's neglected little girls.) The letter was a formal demand for ten shillings a week for taking entire charge of his family. She read it without comment, but later on her astonishment and indignation broke all bounds. " That makes eight of 'em off his hands for ten shillings, and not a clean rag nor a decent pair o' boots among the lot ! The very least should ha' bin fifteen shillings, and tltat wouldn't allow a halfpenny of wages for them as has to do the work for 'em." Can those who know any- thing of human nature be surprised that the next news received of this man was, " He's giving hisself a fine holiday. He don't go to work more'n two- three days a week " ? But of all attacks upon the home life of the poor the indiscriminate provision of free meals would be the most destructive and deadly. What logic, or common-sense, or knowledge of human nature, or of past history, is there in the proposition ? A varying proportion of children go ill-fed to school 54 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE therefore all elementary school-children must be fed without cost to the parents. The rational course would be to find out why they are ill-fed, and attack the roots of the evil, not symptoms which may have half a dozen different causes. If the children who obligingly hold up their hands in answer to the question " Which of you have had no breakfast this morning ? " were asked individually and privately " Why did you have none ? " a considerable percentage of the replies would be, " Because I didn't want none," or, among the smaller scholars, " 'Cause mother couldn't make me eat none." No mother has ever yet asked me how she could obtain breakfast for her children, but I have often been cross-questioned as to the best means of making them eat it, and the rival systems of " smackin' 'em until they do " and " lettin' 'em alone until they feels the want of it" are lengthily explained to me, generally with the confession that these are mere counsels of perfection, and that they themselves have resorted to the weak-minded, intermediate course of threats modified by the provision of lunch. A few weeks ago an elder sister asked me, " D'you happen to know, mum, if cheese is bad for children ? There's Elsie [aged five] has took it into her head like a doornail that she won't eat nothing else for her breakfass, and mother don't like to give it to her and she don't like not to, for she says it ain't right for her to go to school on a nempty stummick. She always used to take a good cup of milk and a fair- sized piece of bread-and-butter, or treacle, or dripping, just as it might be. I can't think what's come to her. HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 55 Two-three times mother's give her some pretty good hnnl smacks over it, but it don't make a bit o' difFrence." I knew well enough why the child's appetite failed, but was utterly unable to remedy the matter : a new baby had arrived, and Elsie had been ousted from the cot in her parents' room, where there was a large open chimney, and put to sleep with five older children in a room with no fireplace at all, and measuring 13 feet by 10 feet by 7 feet 4 inches. Another point must be remembered in connection with these breakfastless children : breakfast, even among the aristocracy of the poor, seldom bears the same relative importance to other meals that it does in the middle and upper classes. In well-to-do house- holds the last meal of children between the ages of four and twelve is their tea, a meal consisting of bread-and-butter and jam or cake, and rarely eaten later than five-thirty. After a long night's rest in a well- ventilated room, they are bathed and dressed and play about for half an hour or so, and then sit down to breakfast with a sharper appetite than they are likely to feel again during the day. Poor men's children, on the contrary, eat their last meal at hours varying from six-thirty to nine, and it is often the heaviest and most indigestible meal of the day. They commonly sleep in a crowded, stuffy room, and remain in bed until breakfast is actually ready, when they scramble on their clothes and go to it unwashed, half dressed, "with what appetite you may." Washing is postponed until the last moment before they start for school. A child brought up 56 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE on the first system would be sick with hunger by eleven o'clock if deprived of its breakfast, while many of those brought up on the second system would feel positively ill if compelled to eat a hearty meal early in the morning. In addition, is it wise to reject the testimony of a great Society which solemnly assures us that it has dealt with scores of thousands of children (and reasonably suspects the existence of very many more) deprived of necessary food not by their parents' poverty but by their ill-will ? It has often occurred to me that the average lodge at the rich man's gate is a bitterly ironic commentary upon the reality of the wish to improve the housing of the poor. Neither "Supply and Demand" nor any other perversion of economic doctrine can account for the inadequacy of these dwellings to meet the requirements of decent family life; there is usually but one lodge, rarely more than three, and they are usually intended for persons slightly above the ordinary run of villagers. Surely these houses could, at no ruinous cost, be made model cottages, an ex- ample of decency and comfort, places where home life could be honoured with no maimed rites ? What do we find ? Lodges are usually in better external repair than other cottages, but with few exceptions smaller and more inconvenient. It is impossible to look at them without a sense of shame, especially when, as is often the case, they are occupied by large families of children. Lack of competition, agricultural depression, and a host of other things " without bodies to be kicked or souls to be damned" may account for the crazy HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 57 and comfortless cottars in the village at, lar^c, hut what plausible explanation is there for the rahhit- hutch lodge ? In many cases it is even divided into two, and stands on either side of the gate like a -short, stout pillar. I have never been able to decide the least inconvenient way of using the rooms, but apparently the lower ones are intended for kitchen and parlour, the upper for bedrooms. Let any careful mother imagine herself in such a position, and consider how she would like having to go downstairs in the night, crass the drive, and then walk upstairs again every time she thought she heard one of the children cry ! Overcrowding in the country often exceeds any- thing I have ever seen in towns, for not only do larger numbers commonly sleep in one room, but the rooms are much smaller. The " boarding-out " of workhouse children in rural districts such as I have known always seems to me an impossibility, and I would far rather see them placed among the childless or middle-aged house-owners in the suburbs of some of our large towns. These are a few instances all observed within a thinly populated district of three square miles: (1) Twelve in family, one bedroom and one landing. (2) Thirteen in family, four grown- up, four more above the age of twelve, three bedrooms, two of which are extremely small and without chimneys. (3) Twelve in family, often for weeks at a stretch fifteen; eight grown-up. Two small bedrooms and a loft where one lad sleeps. (4) Four adults and a baby. A two-roomed house, each 9 feet by 8. (5) Nine persons in two bedrooms 58 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE (originally one room, and by no means a large one then). All these people were closely related, but there were other houses in which strangers were living under very slightly better conditions. In all respectable homes women and girls take the lead to a much greater degree than is generally believed. Amused to find that a maid-servant of less than twenty buttered the bread and carved the meat and cut the cake and apportioned the jam of a groom nearly double her age, I asked a married woman belonging to a large and unusually hospitable family, and acquainted with what she called the " in- sides" of a great number of houses, if men were allowed to help themselves at table. Her reply simply bristled with negatives: "Why, no, miss; you couldn't stand letting them help theirselves, the money wouldn't never go round. Men and boys would just wolf the things down. Will don't much like being helped, so I only put as much on the table as I don't mind being ate. Father's never allowed to put a knife into the butter. All the forty years he's been married mother has spread every slice of bread he has had. And that's the way it is in every house I know." The speaker had no children, and consequently Will was less well disciplined than his father-in-law. I have come across several instances of great devotion shown by unmarried brothers to unmarried sisters. In one case a girl of seventeen and a lad of twenty were the last survivors of a large family swept off by consumption. The girl was attacked by the same disease, and in its worst and most HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 59 lingering form. The lad earned only a labourer's wages, and that with difficulty, as although healthy he was not robust, and if he had allowed her to go to the workhouse infirmary few could have blamed him. Instead of this he engaged two furnished rooms where the landlady was willing to wait on her while he was at work, and when the over-burdened club- doctor turned his back on the hopeless sufferer, he came to our Association and begged us to visit her, which we did until her death nearly two years later. All that time his zeal never slackened ; every penny that he could spare was spent on fruit and cream to tempt her failing appetite, and a piece of needlework that she began for him and left unfinished is still his most valued possession. Precautions that were rare among the professional classes thirty years ago are common among the poor at the present day. In the early part of the winter I heard that the two-year-old daughter of a former servant had been ordered to bed by the doctor, but was continually hopping out directly her mother left the room. I dropped a word of warning as to the danger of bare feet, and felt slightly crushed on being told that the child was always buttoned into the latest fashion in flannels, "bananas," which encased her from her toes to her neck. Another woman com- plained to me that when her second child was born she had allowed a neighbour to take charge of the elder one, aged two and a half, that the child " had been fear- fully neglected, and it had taken her weeks and months to get over it." Having seen a few really bad homes here and there I was prepared for almost any atrocity, 60 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE and found it difficult to maintain a sufficiently sympa- thetic expression when she went into details : " I always changes her shoes d'reckly minute she comes indoors, and they never thought of doing such a thing. And as to her eating ! Her father only lets her have two ounces of meat every other day, chopped up so fine as you can't hardly see it, and the other days it must be potatoes and gravy, or a fresh egg. He wouldn't let her have meat two days following not even if she cried for it ! They just let her eat any- thing. One day the milk would be boiled and another it would be raw." "Your husband will find it hard to be so careful when you have a larger family." " He says that twenty is welcome to come, miss, as long as he has his health to work for 'em. One of his uncles had fifteen, and his top wages was thirty- two and six, and when someone ast how him and his wife had managed to rear 'em all, he said, ' By lovin' all of 'em, but always lovin' the youngest best.' " A poor mother's first care when there is a new arrival is to reconcile the ousted baby. When the forlorn little creature is brought to her (generally on the second or third day, but often earlier) she " makes much of it," and then affects to pity the small and helpless rival, asking, " Will you let it stay, or shall I send it away ? " The child usually begs the mother to keep the apparently harmless intruder, and any jealousy that may be shown later on is cheeked by saying, "Well, you told me baby could stay, and I can't send her away now. What would become of her if I did, all out in the cold by herself with no HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 61 one to give her any food?" Tin -re is generally great affection among the children; the elder ones rarely speak of "my brothers and sisters," almost always saying " our children " with an air of pro- prietorship. Poor mothers do occasionally meet with languid approbation from their " richers," but if fathers among the lower classes were what many people affect to believe, the population would die out with extreme rapidity. Hardly anyone seems able to con- ceive that the ordinary working man is a faithful and friendly husband, an indulgent father to young children and girls, and at least a tolerant one to growing lads. The following scene might be paralleled in every street and every village : I went one Sunday morning to a house in the lowest part of an old sea- port town. The mother of the family was seriously ill, and there were ten children almost as young as they could be, with the fortunate exception of the baby, which had reached the comparatively tough age of thirteen months. Needless to say the father was not at church, but neither was he engaged in what so many of our pastors and would-be masters seem to think the only possible alternative, " sleeping off the Saturday night's debauch." He was sitting by the fire in the easy deshabille of trousers, unlaced boots, and a collarless shirt, with a short pipe (empty and upside down) between his teeth, patiently boiling water for the ten baths by which the day must be honoured. "But why not have done this on the previous evening ? " asks the unmoved Sabbatarian. " My eldest " was a thin-armed child of twelve, and 62 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE from two-thirty p.m. until he went to bed, tired out, the man had been scrubbing floors, polishing grates, and cleaning boots. Until the upper classes believe that the poor really love and cherish their children, they will not under- stand their nature well enough to help them. A lady was telling me of a large school-treat in which she had personally assisted. The children had been taken about twenty miles out of London, and when they returned at nine-thirty and were met by a great crowd of parents, it was discovered that three little girls were missing, "and the mothers were quite disagreeable about it." " Quite disagreeable " because at the very best their children were crying themselves to sleep at a police-station, while the worst could scarcely be spoken of ! A country labourer had seven daughters; they were handsome, intelligent children, and he was duly proud of them, but no reigning duke ever longed more intensely for a son. After a pause of five years another child was born. When I heard that it was again a girl, I dared not ask what reception it had met with, but two or three months later No. 4 made bitter complaints of her father's conduct: "He do spoil baby somethin' shockin'. The moment he comes from work he'll take her out of her cradle and go dancing about with her in his arms. She mustn't cry, not half a minute ! Mother has never held with nursing the baby for three parts of the day as if no one else wasn't any account at all. She was a good baby to start with, but she's a terror now. Father don't never think what me and mother has to HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 63 put up with all through her being learnt such ways." The tie between a mother and her eldest daughter is often peculiarly close and tender. From her earliest years the girl has been her mother's confidante, champion, and nurse, and is regarded with an affec- tion mixed with gratitude and compunction. " I often think I let her begin work too early," the mother will say. " I haven't let none of the others begin so soon. But there ! what should I ha' done without her, or if she'd a-bin like some, great long mawthers that eat without any thought ? " " My Emma must always be sought," said the proud mother of a singularly plain and unattractive girl. But this was insight, not blindness : " My Emma " was sought by a steady young working farmer, and married him at an age when some of the prettiest girls in the place were " walking out " with lads who could not earn a man's wages. A poor woman's strongest but not her most long- lived affection is for her children; a poor man's strongest as well as his most enduring love is for his wife, and therefore it is often from late middle-age " till death do them part " that the union of thought and feeling is most complete. Nowhere does Swift show the purblindness of cynicism more plainly than in the passage where he says that the Struldbrugs on reaching the age of eighty were released from the ties of matrimony, as it was felt to be intolerable that they should have the burden of an old wife as well as that of earthly immortality. If a Struldbrug existed, every hour of his wife's life would have a 64 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE distinct value to him. I can see now the alacrity with which a married daughter left her aged mother to my possibly untender mercies and disappeared, while the faithful old husband could scarcely be induced to leave me alone with her, and when he at last consented to go out for half an hour, he sat in the bedroom lacing up his boots as slowly and reluctantly as a sulky child. What working women suffer from husbands who are merely selfish, not actively unkind, can never be told. Even a district nurse cannot estimate it accur- ately, but I fear that the following account, given to me by an old servant who had been to see a friend the second day after her sixth child was born, may be taken as characteristic of a large number of homes. The friend, I must explain, had been a parlour-maid in one family for seven or eight years, and the husband was a policeman ; so that, compared with most of my patients, they were well-to-do and well educated. The woman told me : " Porter and the children were having tea when I passed through the kitchen, and the things were so strewed about that I think they were nearly finished. I found Mrs. Porter looking flushed and tired. Dicky, the eldest boy, and as nice a child as you'd find in a day's walk, was sitting with her. I didn't like to ask her how long it was since she'd had anything to eat, but I said, ' Wouldn't you like a cup o' tea if Dicky was to bring it up ? ' She said she felt sinking for want of it, so I said to the boy, ' Go and ask Dad to give you a nice cup o' tea for your Mammy.' In a minute or two he come stumbling up the stairs in his thick boots, holding a HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 65 cup by the handle, and slopping the tea all over the sides. When I took it from him I saw it was cold and bitter, and had hardly a drop of milk in it. I said, ' Go and tell Dad as Mammy mustn't drink this. She ought to have some nice and fresh, and lots of milk in it.' He came back, 'Dad says there ain't no more.' I wanted to throw it away, but she was so eager for it, such as it was, that I had to let her have it, but I sent the boy down again for a piece of thin bread-and-butter to eat with it. The child brought back a tough, dry old piece on the flat of his hand, which was as black as soot, for the poor little soul had done all the work as had been done for them two days. I couldn't get her a decent cup myself, because neither of them didn't ask me, and I knew if I offended him, it 'ud be the last of the little or much that I could do for her and the children." After all, it is not only the poor who have a low standard of attendance on the sick. I have seen a probationer, a member of a well-known county family, feed a wizened twelve-months old child with a tablespoon, quite as indifferent as the baby itself to the thin streams trickling each side of its mouth and saturating its little cotton shirt. I have seen an officer's wife I was told by her mother that she was a born nurse hand a jagged tin of beef essence, together with a teaspoon hot from her grasp, to an elderly and disgusted invalid, saying cheerfully, " There ! you can dig it out for yourself with that!" There is complete religious freedom in the homes of the very poor. From an absurdly early age the 5 66 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE child chooses its own Sunday school, and frequently attends two of opposite views. The desire- that Sunday should be kept is generally very strong. " Does Jenny never go to church or chapel ? " I asked, speaking of a skilled artisan's shabby, neglected little daughter to her neighbour, a girl of seventeen. " Last Sunday I ast her to go, and she said she'd like to, but she hadn't no hat. She hasn't had but one ever since I knowed her, and Willy threw it in the rainwater tub, and all the straw come unripped. Well, mother didn't like to lend her one of our childern's, because they could never ha' wore it again if she had, but she said it was a shame the child should be kept away from church when she was willing to go, so she found an old black shape of her own, and she trimmed it with a bit of ribbon and some vi'lets, although it was Sunday. But she only pinned 'em," she added, fearing that the mother's case was not sufficiently strong. It is strange that while the upper classes are often extremely bitter against the poor for their supposed ill-treatment of their children, the personal advice they offer them generally takes the form of, " Why don't you make them eat what you give them ? Why do you spend so much on their clothes ? You ought to give them a good whipping for making so much noise. Why do you let them play about the streets ? They ought to be sitting down sewing." There is scarcely ever any plea for greater indulgence, or any sympathy with the mother in her desire to see them well dressed and happy, any realisation of the fact that the woman with a guinea a week and half a HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 67 ;i children has prcc'iM-ly tin' same maternal ambitions as the mother with four or six or eight hundivd a year, while slic lias been called on to make, and generally has made, infinitely greater sacrifices on their behalf. It is impossible to show too much respect to a poor woman who has managed to rear her children, fed and clothed them, inspired them with the elements of morality and self-respect, and taught them to love one another and spare a thought for their neighbours. To see such women treated with brusque discourtesy, or condescending patronage, is simply intolerable. People never weary of telling you how the children of the poor are fed on red herrings and gin : but are the only ignorant and foolish mothers to be found among wage-earners ? I have occasionally been able to make some slight impression upon women whose dearest boast is that they "have buried five a'ready, and not one of them two years old." I have never yet been able to get any hold upon the mother who in exquisitely refined accents tells me how "painfully delicate" all her children are, and incidentally lets me know that her unguided offspring frequently make their dinner at eight or eight-thirty off savouries fiery with cayenne pepper and rich plum-pudding thickly spread with cream, that they " never will " retire much before midnight, and prefer breakfasting in bed. How can one bring any pressure to bear on her ? Her neighbours are so far off, and as polished as herself; she has little fear of the family physician, and none at all of the police. OF THE " UNIVERSITY 68 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Again, do not the upper classes complain how soon the children of the poor shake off parental control ? But what do these critics do to help maintain it? Is not almost every mistress, young or old, married or single, rich or poor, in the habit of speaking to her servants as if she considered herself better fitted to give advice to them on every imaginable point than their own mothers? If a lady enters the homes of the poor, she often does not hesitate to criticise the parents' methods in the hearing of the children. An intelligent little girl , ninth out of twelve healthy and well-brought-up children, said to me, "D'you know what the district visitor told me ? She said I had ought to ha' bin scrubbin' the house long ago. I told her as mother wouldn't let me do it, not yet, 'cos I'd get myself all wet, but I do look to see how 'Lizabeth doos it when she cleans the house." This child was small for her age, and her age was barely nine ! The remark had been rankling in her little mind for more than a month, and had doubtless been repeated to that unworthy and inexperienced person, her mother. The children of the poor are in one sense more natural than those of the upper classes, because (unless it should be for begging purposes) they have seldom received any teaching as to what they ought to like, and will generally reply with some frankness when asked what they really like. "Would you rather have a halfpenny to-day [Wednesday] or three- pence on Saturday ? " I asked a village child of seven. Unhesitatingly came the reply, " A yapenny to-day" " What is your uncle ? " I asked the same child. " He HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 69 used to be a soldier." " And what is he now ? " " He's only a man now," she replied regretfully. It cannot be said that the poor love animals, but, like the French, they are extremely fond of cats and dogs, and firm believers in their extraordinary sagacity. "Tibby feels hisself bigger nor what he is" said a fond owner in explanation of the battered condition of her wiry and fiery little cat. One day I found an unmarried woman crying bitterly over a poisoned dog. " She's nothin' else to care for," said a neighbour contemptuously. A little farther down the hill a woman's eyes were red with tears over the loss of her cat which had met with the same fate. She possessed a husband and twelve bonny, well- cared-for children, " But I can't tell you how I misses that cat. So gentle as he always was with the little ones ! Even when they would hold him in their arms when they was in their bath, he'd never put out a claw. Nothin' don't seem right without him." Very much more could be effected, in proportion to the efforts made, if charitable persons realised what sharply divided classes there are among the poor, and what widely differing ideals and standards of life. I remember some question arising at a suburban working-party as to who could be employed to wash up the tea-things. A lady who knew the district well said, " There is no one within half a mile who would accept work of that kind." " Oh," objected the vicar's wealthy wife, "there must be heaps of people in those poky little houses in the M road who would be glad of a couple of hours' work." 70 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE In the road in question the cheapest house was rated at 24, there were only two in which no servant was kept, and none that was inhabited by more than one family. A dear old friend once told me : " I think these ladies' Sewing Guilds are such excellent things, they teach the ladies needlework." When I have seen aged and bedridden patients holding up the shape- less products of the " Sewin' Gull," screaming with laughter, or their mouths pulled awry with scorn, and assuring me, " every blessed stitch must be ripped and the pattern cut diffrent afore I'd be seen in it," I have felt that even her temperate estimate was far too sanguine, and that workers for the poor should be reminded that while the use of ready-made clothing may have accustomed their clients to flimsy materials, it has enormously raised their standard of cut and workmanship. When trying to benefit my patients I often think of a German novel in which a charitable countess goes to visit a country cottage, and is distressed by finding that there is no chimney in the one living- room and a large pool of water in front of the door. She ordered her agent to build a chimney and supply a flat stone for a doorstep. Some weeks later she went again, and was annoyed to find the pool still unbridged and the room filled with smoke as before. She demanded an explanation. " Gracious lady, the chimney made the room so cold ! We laid the door- step on top of it; and now, gracious lady, we are (juite as comfortable as we were before." And yet that countess had the real root of the matter, she HOME LIFE AMONG THE POOR 71 wished to improve and develop the home life of the poor, not to undermine and abolish it; she knew that guilds and classes and clubs are mere dust in the balance compared with the moral effect of a decent house to live in. Ill ETHICS OF THE POOR IT has often struck me that it might be an assistance to those who are trying to improve the condition of the poor, and who have realised that, to be success- ful, they must not ignore the beliefs and prejudices of their clients, if notes of the ethical views prevalent among them were furnished by district nurses and other persons intimately acquainted with their home life. On certain points morality varies with the district. A lady who has worked for years in a great Midland manufacturing town heard me speak of the large proportion of second and third marriages among my patients, and asked with surprise, and even admira- tion, " Do your widows and widowers go through a second ceremony ? Ours commonly do not ; they seem to think that one marriage consecrates all subsequent connections, at any rate that it entitles them to be considered ' respectable/ They do not think there is anything wrong in these unions. They tell me, without hestitation, ' We haven't been to church/ as if it were some petty formality that experienced persons are excused from observing. It is necessary, however, that both the parties should have been 75 ETHICS OF THE POOR 73 married before. Connections of this kind would not be formed between people of the same general decency if one of them were a spinster or a bachelor." This threw some light upon a case which had greatly troubled me, a widow nearly fifty years of age, and apparently possessed of almost every virtue, living happily under these conditions in spite of poverty and mortal illness. It was not until I heard a clergy- man vainly endeavouring to rouse a sense of sin in her entirely cheerful and self-contented mind that I had the faintest idea of any irregularity in the union. I had noticed the entire alienation of her former husband's children, but was too much accustomed to ingratitude in that direction to suspect that their conduct had any valid excuse. Later on I was contrasting the standard of sexual morality in two towns well known to me, and saying that in one I could almost count the illegitimate offspring among my patients, while in the other I had scarcely entered a house where there was not some unaccounted for child ; and the same worker then told me that in one large district eighty per cent, of the first confinements happened within six months of marriage, and that a considerable proportion of these occurred during the first four weeks. If the marriage took place only a single day before, the situation was saved and public opinion satisfied. One moral characteristic above all others dis- tinguishes the poor, the general forgivingness of their disposition. Wives will with incredible toil nurse and cherish husbands from whom they have received little but neglect, insult, and cruelty, and to whom 74 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE they have not even owed their scanty portion of daily bread. Husbands will ungrudgingly work for wives who have failed in almost every duty towards them. Children are forgiven over and over again every injury that it is in their power to inflict, and in many instances the same inexhaustible charity is shown by children to parents. In no class is the trait more marked than among seamen ; as a whole they are singularly untroubled by any thirst for retributive justice. An officer of much experience told me : " No matter what a blue- jacket had done, even if he had robbed his messmates, or wronged them in the meanest ways imaginable, none of his shipmates would have any satisfaction in seeing him punished. If it depended on them, every offender would be let off." As an example of this : The canteen on board a cruiser had fallen into an unsatisfactory state, and the captain requested one of the lieutenants to take temporary charge of the whole concern. This officer began by careful stock-taking, which brought to light gross carelessness in the management, and strongly pointed towards dishonesty. At the end of four or five months he had not only wiped out the deficit, but had a surplus of two or three pounds in hand. He called the men together and explained what he had done, and the lines on which affairs must be managed in order that they should be served as cheaply as possible, and yet keep the canteen on a sound business footing. He then suggested that half of the surplus should be given to a certain naval charity, and asked what they wished to do with the remainder. With one accord ETHICS OF THE POOR 75 they requested him to give it to the man formerly in cl large, conclusively proved to have robbed tik'iu : The i-xclusive rights of property are certainly more dimly recognised in the country than in the town. " I hi'ard someone working in the garden very early this muniing; it must have been soon after four," I said to my landlady's daughter when she brought in my breakfast. She smiled in the tolerant, in- scrutable, maternal fashion that one sometimes observes even in quite young girls. " That would be Tim. He's a railway porter who's got married again, and has a fresh lot of children ; and at a little station like this there's almost nothing to be picked up in the way of tips. We employ him for a couple of hours in the garden sometimes, and he thinks he has a right to what he wants. He doesn't take the peas or tomatoes, but just potatoes and onions, and so on. Of course mother would let him have them if he asked her, but he is too proud to do that." I told this story t" a young French journalist, and he seemed scarcely able to believe that such easy-going ways could exist in a rural district. " Well, what would French people have done ? " " They could have shot him for a few francs. There was a case in our neighbourhood not long ago. The plums were just ripe, and a tramp was seen hanging about. Three or four farmers took their guns, hunted him down, and killed him. They all got off with a fine of forty francs. I don't think you have any conception of the rights of property in England. Only peasant farmers can develop the full ferocity of the idea," In the abstract stealing is ;6 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE always held to be wrong, but there are certain things in the country that do not count, and curiously enough coal is among the number. I have been shown cottages where coal fires were always burning, and yet none of it had been bought and only a few hundredweight had been given. The tenants were well known to help themselves from their neighbours' open sheds, but no serious attempt was made to check the practice. Neither in town nor country does the conception of honesty commonly rise above the obligation not to take literal possession of tangible property. To borrow a thing for one purpose and use it for another, or even to obtain the loan of it upon entirely false pretences, to use another person's property wastef ully, or to destroy half its value by reckless handling, none of these actions are considered to be dishonest. " I've always taught my boys not to take the value of a pin," the mother says proudly, and listens with withers unwrung when told that No. 1 has broken his master's grass-cutter by neglecting to sweep the lawn, smashed the American tree-pruner by using it for dead wood, and left half his tools out in the rain for two days. The same remark is offered for the complete satisfaction of the exasperated butcher when he tells her that No. 2 has spoilt two fine joints of meat by leaving the basket in the sun while he sat down in the road for an hour and waited for another boy to come and share the tedium of his walk ; and she repeats it again when told that No. 3 has been dismissed for " giving rides " when sent out to exercise a horse. Definite, practical moral teaching is greatly ETHICS OF THE POOR 77 needed, especially by boys. Domestic instruction is left almost exclusively to the mother, and she tolerates conduct in her sons that she would never endure from her daughters. This does not arise from stronger affection for the sons, but from the low opinion that working women have of men. It is a contemptuous tolerance founded on the pessimistic principle, " What can you expect from a pig but a grunt ? " I often wonder how it is that while there is such an immeasurable distance between the ordinary boy and the ordinary girl, the moral inferiority of husbands as compared with wives should be so much less marked. In the words of a child's poet, " Little boys are all born bad," that is to say with certain fierce instincts which are feebler, or even entirely lacking, in girls. The following instances of what must be considered as conduct "natural" to very small boys all became known to me within three days. A father suffering from heart disease was lying asleep in bed, and his son, aged one year and eight months, struck him such a heavy blow on the fore- head with a piece of metal that a doctor had to be called in. No. 2 was a year and ten months old. He was in the garden with his mother and his sister, aged four. The little girl asked, " Mother, what shall we do with Brownie's chickens ? " and the woman, to tease her, replied, " I think we'll cut their heads off and boil them in a pot." The girl, half believing that she meant it, protested vehemently that it must not be done ; the boy, entirely believing it, said nothing, but 78 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE ran into the kitchen and fetched a sharp knife, and hurried back joyfully to witness the execution. Unluckily he stumbled and fell, driving the knife into his own cheek and disfiguring himself for life. In the third case the boy was four years old. His mother, busy in another part of the house, left him in the kitchen, alone except for the lodger's three pet kittens which were sleeping on a chair. There was a large saucepan on the fire, and in about an hour's time the woman came to see if it was boiling. The boy, rubbing his hands gleefully, exclaimed, " They'll soon be done, mother, they'll soon be done ! " " What'll be done, Jimmy ? " " You lift up the lid and see ! " She did so, and dropped it with a scream of horror as she saw the limp bodies of the hapless kittens. Two of these children lived in country villages and the third in London. Their parents were in every way normal, and it is doubtful if the little fellows had ever witnessed an act of violence, cruelty, or even harshness. Less extreme instances have been related to me in a very large number of homes, and a boy's instincts with regard to animals are nearly always of tyranny ; babies unable to walk alone will clutch up sticks and stones and try to use them against perfectly unoffending dogs and cats. At a corresponding age their little sisters are either terrified of animals or passionately fond of them, and blindly confident that their goodwill is understood and returned. Tolerance is almost universal among the poor ; not only religious tolerance, but moral. The sinner and the criminal rarely meet with harsh judgment. Cruelty to young children is perhaps the only sin ETHICS OF THE POOR 79 uncompromisingly condemned, and even (lion, except in very gross cases, the usual vmliot is, "She can't be right in her head. No one in tlu-ir snisrs would go for to do such a thing." The one groat clu-ck on all action acknowledged to be wrong is the intense fear that the poor have of suffering from remorse " if we don't act up to our lights," and the perfect confidence that they will enjoy unchequered satisfaction in the ceaseless contemplation and enumeration of their good deeds. Their spirit, in this respect, is more of the " antique Roman " than the Christian; there is not the faintest perception of imperfectness in their work, no shadow of the haunting fear that, having done all, they are still unprofitable servants. The usual phrase runs: "I done my duty by him well. Five years I nursed him, and he never wanted for nothing, night or day." Clergymen visiting in poor districts often and I think on the whole mistakenly try to sow seeds of introspection and self-distrust which would indeed easily silence these innocent self-glorifications, but would also weaken the springs of noble action and noble patience. A minority of the upper strata of society " acquires merit " by reproaching the majority for class feeling and class prejudice, without any realisation of the fact that class barriers are firmly erected and closely guarded by the poor. Any working man's wife would more readily confide her private affairs to the neighbour with whom she has had bitter, year-long quarrels, than she would to the kindest and most discreet of nurses or district visitors. 8o THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE It is a well-known fact that it is dangerous to interfere in the disputes of husband and wife, but in a lesser degree this holds good of all quarrels among the poor. No quarrel is ever final and irrevocable, and would-be peacemakers are often left outside with a damaged reputation while the belligerents fra- ternise warmly. The rules of quarrelling are like the inhumanly complicated grammar of the Basques, utterly impossible to acquire except in early childhood. Two neighbours had been wrangling steadily for five years. In point of " langwidge," honours were easy, but the material injuries had all been inflicted by Mrs. B.,and Mr. A., without consulting his wife, finally sent for the police and charged Mrs. B. with theft of money. A week later the whole party (including two infants in arms) had a long dusty walk into the little county town, where the case was considered so serious that it was adjourned until a fuller bench of magistrates should be present. They toiled home in the dust, the two women " longing for their tea." Mrs. B.'s caddy was empty, so was her purse, but without an instant's hesitation, or a trace of shame- facedness, she took it in to the prosecutrix, and blandly asked her to be kind enough to lend her a few spoonfuls, a favour which was promptly granted. The following week Mrs. B. was consigned to the county gaol, and when the Inspector went to convey her six children to the workhouse, he found Mrs. A., her eyes red with tears, engaged in preparing dinner for the whole party, heroically indifferent as to whether her hard-hearted husband " went short " that day or not. After Mrs. B.'s discharge I made frequent ETHICS OF THE POOR Si inquiries as to tlio terms on which the lu-i li\ve measured. Until we frankly abandon all hope of family life and accept the baldest communism, children must be allowed to spend some part of their waking hours with their parents, and if their homes are too small to permit of their doing this, it is the homes that we must improve and not the school. VIII HOME INDUSTRIES AND THEIR EFFECT ON THE HOME THE ultimate results of home industries upon the general wage market may be difficult to calculate, but the proximate and immediate results of home industries as carried on by married women, and observed by district nurses whose duties call them daily to the same house for periods frequently as long as three years, and occasionally far longer, are scarcely open to dispute. In my experience they are disastrous from every point of view and to every member of the household. Let us consider the baby first : the mother, anxious above all things not to be interrupted, is constantly tempted to give soothing syrups, and if she refrains from doing that, she nevertheless is so thankful if the child " will only be good and lie quiet," that she avoids all the mild excitement and exercise of mind and body necessary to the child's development, and I have known many instances where children of a naturally passive disposition have been seriously injured by lack of this stimulus, and several where paralysis or permanent stiffness of joints has resulted If, on the other hand, the baby is endowed with the 174 HOME INDUSTRIES 175 \\ill to live, cries, struggles, and attempts to crawl about, it is promptly hum led over to the oldest child available, sister, cousin, small sister-in-law, or who- ever it may be, and that child, regardless of the weather, or of her own or the infant's risk or dis- comfort, is compelled to remain out of doors hour after hour, finding what shelter and amusement she can. As soon as the infant reaches the age of three it is packed off to school twice a day to get rid of it, although if a child has a tolerable home, or a reasonable amount of care, it is better for it in every way to postpone attendance until the last day of the legal limit. What becomes of the older children ? If noisy, clumsy, and troublesome, they are driven into the streets. If docile and neat-handed, they are soon pressed in to do the simpler parts of the paid work, or else compelled to perform the roughest household duties. I have often known children between seven and ten, an age when they might reasonably have been expected to wash up tea-things or peel potatoes, set to scrub floors and clean grates. The mother has no time for family sewing, and the children alternately wear smart ready-made clothes and garments held together with string and pins, the rags not resulting from long wear, but from entire lack of mending. What is the effect on the woman herself ? She grudges every moment spent in resting, or attending to her own toilet, or taking a breath of fresh air; she even gives up doing the weekly shopping. Her health deteriorates, her tongue sharpens. At heart every woman believes that a man, " if he is a man," 1 76 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE can earn, not the " living " of the family, for she knows that must be greatly her work, but all the money wages required. If he cannot do this, there is always the seed of discontent in her mind, and it brings forth fruit of bitterness and contempt and even hatred. I know one woman whose husband lost his situation owing to the closing of a rope factory thirty years ago. She at once took his burden upon her, and he has never done a day's work since. "If I'd my time to go over again," she told me, " I'd just sit down and cry. It would have been better for him and the whole lot of us if I had." As even thirty years of idleness have not turned him into a drunkard or a wife-beater, her self-reproach is probably just. Most working-men have the same instinct, and the wife who is a wage-earner subtly degrades them in their own eyes, while at the same time she weakens their motives for exertion. They gradually earn less and spend more. Men with homes of this kind will buy themselves lamb chops, or rumpsteak, and cook the meat on a shovel over a wayside fire, while their companions are eating a savoury home- baked pie, or contentedly munching bread-and- cheese in the confident expectation that the " missus " will have something hot for their supper. What effects have the home industry on the home itself ? I do not say that the dwelling becomes dirty or neglected in the extremest sense of the words, for work of any delicacy could not be carried on in very grimy surroundings, but cleaning of all kinds is cut down to the minimum, and done at any HOME INDUSTRIES 177 hour of night or day without the faintest regard for family comfort. Cooking is as far as possible avoided ; the worker does not wish to soil her hands, nor to disarrange the sewing spread out upon what is probably the only table. She and the children live chiefly on tea and bread-and-jam, and the husband is encouraged to get his meals elsewhere. The neglect suffered by the sick in almost all cases where home industries are carried on is painful to witness. Home industries, especially if of a skilled kind, may be a blessing to the widow working for her children, to daughters supporting aged or invalid parents, to unmarried women not strong enough for factory labour or domestic service, but they are the destruction of normal family life. Compared with the factory work of married women, which of course results in far more complete neglect of home and children, and far greater domestic extravagance of every kind, home industries may seem a small social evil, but it must be remembered what a much larger number of households they affect. The wife who would utterly decline to lock her children in the street while she went to a factory, and would " make shift " on their father's wages in preference, eagerly accepts work that can be done at home. The husband who would emphatically refuse to let his wife go out to work does not always recog- nise the more insidious evil of home industries; in many cases, indeed, they are sedulously kept out of his sight as far as possible, and he does not even know how much or little his wife earns by them. In one instance a wife told me: "I didn't dare let 12 1 78 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Tom know how little I earned last month. He was put out enough about the place being all messed up, and never a table clear, nor a chair he could sit on without moving something, and me screaming out ' Don't ; you'll spoil it.' Even if I could get some- thing worth having, he wouldn't really like it. He can't say I've ever neglected the house, and he has his dinner where he works, but he says I don't take baby out nearly enough. He wants me to be half the day in the park with her, three or four times a week, but I do like to earn a bit when I can." These conflicting ideals led to over-strain and a long illness, but the ultimate result was fortunately a complete victory for the husband. Lately I have come across two examples of what can be done on very moderate wages earned entirely by the husband. In the first case the wages were twenty -three shillings a week. There had been seven children in the family, but the two eldest had died of scarlatina. The remaining five were sturdy, well- grown, and always neatly clothed but (in their earlier days at any rate) with a plainness that some- times made them remarkable among the other small villagers. The eldest son, after working three years as gardener's boy and stable helper, was apprenticed to an engineer. The second son worked four years for a farmer, and then entered the railway company's service. The third son is to be apprenticed when ho is sixteen, and in the meantime is earning what he can. When the youngest child was a few months old the parents bought the cottage in which they lived and about a third of an acre of garden : when HOME INDUSTRIES 179 she was seven, and her brothers were growing into big lads, but still earning very little, two rooms and a greenhouse were added, and the garden consider- ably increased. When these ambitions were satisfied, the little girls were at last allowed embroidery on their pinafores and hats from the nearest town. Until the boys were fourteen, not even their Sunday suits were bought ready made. Even in the most sparing days, however, the mother was always well enough dressed to do her own shopping, to go to church, and to attend any lectures or concerts that might be given in the village. In the second case the man earns twenty-seven shillings a week, and has only two children, neither of whom are yet set out in the world, but as the doctor who attends the family told me, " What they have spent and lost through illness during the ten years that I have known them would have supported three or four more small children comfortably." The man, although only thirty-six, has bought himself a piece of land and has had built on it a cottage containing six rooms and a bathroom, and it is neatly furnished throughout. I do not know what he paid for the land, but probably not less than 30, and the house, although he did the papering, painting, glazing, and much of the carpentering himself, cost 150, every penny of which is paid. Both of these wives had been in service, and neither of them earned any money from the day they married, but they were intelligent and well educated for their position; they could read and write fluently and add up accounts, understood gardening, cooking and i8o THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE nursing, and every kind of housework, and entirely gave themselves up to making the most of their husbands' earnings. Trades unions may in many cases prevent a low rate of wages, but they cannot prevent " half time," and wherever married women are wage-earners one of these two things will happen. No scheme of life that leaves out of account the facts that most men are lazy and most women are short- sighted can lead to anything but increased distress. I know one instance where the husband of a money- earning wife works hard, harder than the proverbial galley slave. At five- thirty, summer and winter, a neighbour rouses him by heavy thumps on the front door, and stands leaning up against it until he is ready to start, a period rarely exceeding three minutes, and then they trudge to their work two and a half miles away. The man's weekly earnings vary (according to the weather) from fourteen to forty shillings, but certainly average at least twenty-five. At six-thirty lie is at home again, but two or three times a week his eldest child meets him at the village two miles off with a large empty basket, and he arrives laden with bread, paraffin oil, groceries, and pork. He has a comfortless meal among the wash-clothes, and then goes down to the brook to " haul water " for his wife. He has not even a yoke, but staggers along with the buckets in his hands. Other villagers go on alternate evenings, missing Sunday, and a single journey suffices, but this man must go every evening, and in dry weather three or four times. In the early part of the week he fetches heavy baskets of linen, most of it from a school at the top of a steep hill a mile HOME INDUSTRIES 181 away, and in the latter part he carries it home, seldom going to bed before ten-thirty or eleven. On Saturday afternoons he does a few hours' rough gardening if any- one will employ him (his own garden is a wilderness of trampled weeds); if not, he gathers wood. The last is a village custom, but his wife wants four tim< -s as much as anyone else's. On Sunday mornings he chops the wood, and in the evening he fetches a double supply of water in preparation for Monday. In the afternoon without dressing he takes his three little girls for a walk. This may count as recreation, but as the youngest generally falls asleep, and has to be carried all the way back, it is not of a restful nature. The wife spends Sunday "soaking in " the family wash and any clothes collected on the previous day. They never enter a place of worship, although the average attendance of the adult villagers at church or chapel is at least once a month, and theirs are almost the only children who do not attend Sunday school. Both the parents are teetotallers.. This family is surrounded by neighbours living almost exclusively on husbands' earnings ranging from sixteen to twenty-five shillings a week, and in incomparably greater comfort and decency. " What do they get for it all ? " ask some of the shrewder women. " The money is just muddled away. Why, even the children are no better dressed than ours, and to see how sickly they are ! One gone already, and another looks fit to follow before the year is out." The majority believe that it is because of the Sunday labour that the work does not prosper. A widow and two daughters living in the same village support them- 182 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE pelves entirely by laundry work,but they keep Saturday for house- cleaning and needlework, pay a neighbour to collect and deliver the baskets, and tell you that they " would die sooner than work of a Sunday." On that day two out of the three attend morning service and are among the most becomingly dressed persons there, and the elder daughter, although she is twenty- three, has only just given up Sunday school in order to " walk out " with a young man, who accompanies her to church in the evening. As an example of the chivalry to be found among the poor, in summer weather this man often spends the whole of his Saturday afternoon " hauling water " for her use on Monday. The home industry that I have seen most of is laundry work, and for several reasons it is the worst. In the first place, because it is the one which most readily enables an untrained woman to support the whole family, and it supplies the husband with half a day's work once or twice a week to keep up appear- ances. " Uncle earns good wages," a girl told me, " but he don't need to." " Why not ? " " His wife Ins a laundry." The second reason for objecting is that it is extremely hard and exhausting labour, and if carried on in their own ill-adapted kitchens by married women, it generally leads to permanent ill-health. If mangling alone is undertaken, internal injuries often result to the operator owing to the cumbrous nature of the machine used, and the large amount of material forced through together to save time. A third objection is, that more than any other kind of work it interferes with the health and comfort HOME INDUSTRIES 183 of tin- whole house. Imagine what it is like in wet or wintry weather to have the narrow passage filled with a double line of wet clothes, and the one living- room completely blocked up with them. In a suburban district where a huge amount of laundry work is done, it lias become the established custom that the husbands only pay the rent and the baker's bill and buy the boots. " What do they do with the rest ? " I inquired. " There isn't much rest. The men are only earning about twenty-two shillings a week, and as no cooking is ever done except on Sunday, the bread bill for a very ordinary - 1 family amounts to ten shillings. The women live almost exclusively on bread and tea." The girls in this neighbourhood are so anaemic that even if they wish to go to service they cannot stand the strain. Formerly the whole family lived on the father's wages, and on what they could get from gardens which are now trampled almost as hard as the roads. Wages were lower, but so w r as rent ; they lived in thatched cottages instead of box-villas, but such as the space was they had it to themselves. As for food, they had plenty of pork and peasoup, home- made bread and vegetables : they would sicken at the sight of such things now. It is not generally recognised, but there is a heavy strain in domestic service, and it can only be borne easily and advantageously by those accustomed to eat and sleep in proportion. Women who would break down after a month as housemaid or " general " can stand year after year of the lighter kinds of factory work, and those who are too weak for this can put in 1 84 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE an indefinite number of hours daily at certain " home industries." One of the worst parts of factory and home work is not only that they tend to produce a low level of health, but they reconcile women to this unnecessary affliction. Country districts where there are no factories, and where the women have previously been accustomed to live on their husbands' wages, doing every stitch of the family sewing and the lighter parts of the gardening, are now often the most affected by home industries. A doctor who had worked in rural districts for over forty years told me, " These parcels of tailoring are an unmitigated curse as far as the women's health is concerned. They shut their door and sew from morning till night. They had far better be standing, arms akimbo, gossiping over the fence. Much of the field-work they used to do was far preferable. Our village women are suffering from too little air, day and night. I used to look to the three weeks' gleaning to set the women up for the whole winter. They are beginning to suffer as much from dyspepsia, anaemia, insomnia, and nerves as the typical fine lady of fiction." It is as difficult for district nurses to rejoice over the establishment of great sanatoria for the cure (?) of consumption, while many of its sources are left totally unchecked, as it would be to exult in the building of acre-wide reformatories while every fiftieth house was more or less openly a school for thieves. Of all agencies for the production and dis- semination of consumption, home industries are the worst, and the second of these facts seems calculated HOME INDUSTRIES 185 to move even the most selfish and inert portion of the public. I have seen the bedrooms, the very beds, of consumptive patients strewn with work ; and work that has slipped from their dying fingers has been finished by the side of the corpse, and then sent out to wreak vengeance and destruction among all classes of the community. A great part of the industries that I have seen was Govern- ment work, and must have done not a little to spread consumption among men too well fed, clothed, and housed to have developed the disease owing to any other circumstances of their lives. In one tiny cottage, with its four rooms all on the ground floor and communicating directly with one another, a child was slowly dying of one of the most terrible forms of consumption, a form which is a more cruel scourge than cancer itself. Although the husband was a steady man in regular work, the wife took in the entire washing of a large girls' boarding-school. During a considerable part of the year the washing was dried indoors, and was always mangled and ironed in the living- room, and the garden was so small that even in the most favourable weather it can never have been out of reach of infection. Two of the children contracted scarlatina; the doctor at once interfered, the patients were sent to hospital, the house was disinfected, and no washing was sent for some weeks. In the case of the consumptive girl he was powerless to do anything, although he knew the whole of the circumstances, and that it was the second fatal case in the family within three years. IX THEIR MOTHERS' SONS FELICIA and I had taken a house in the country ; we had a pony and a dog and a maid, each nearly as good as they were beautiful, and all that we needed in addition was a lad big enough to clean the carriage and keep down the weeds. Much advice was offered to us, and finally Felicia told me that she had engaged Robert Crump, whose mother's garden almost touched the end of our own. " Everyone says it is best to take a boy directly he leaves school. Robert is only just thirteen, but he has a labour certificate, and he is an old-fashioned kind of boy. I mean he has big hands and feet, and he pulls the dog-cart in and out of the coach- house easily. His mother is an excellent gardener, and she says he understands a great deal about vegetables." All might have gone well, but Robert's mother was of sterner stuff than most of the village matrons, and, after summing up the amount of work lie did for us, told him contemptuously that it was "mere play," and insisted on his making himself useful to her in the evening. This may have kept him out of mischief, but considering ISO THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 187 that h, 1 was only thirteen, that his hours with us were t'r.>m seven a.m. to six p.m., and that he earned -hillings a week, it seemed to me that she was rather hard on him. The results were soon shown in the boy's temper, and we all suffered in our ili-Ljree: Jenny C^IS-M! to come when he called her, and had to be '"ticed" with carrots and apples; while at the mere suggestion of "going for a run with Robert" Peterkin retired to bed and nursed a pre-historic injury to a hind leg, frequently changing his mind as to which of the two needed treatment, but otherwise sticking to his point. One day a labourer's wife asked to see me privately, and poured out a long tale of Robert's notorious cruelties to Jenny. I "wasn't to think as she had anybody she wanted the place for, she'd only a little girl not five years old, but she couldn't bear to think of a poor dumb animal being tormented." Perhaps the woman protested too much; at any rate we took no notice of the complaint until Felicia caught Robert in the act of kicking Jenny violently in the stomach. She presented him with a week's wages, and strongly advised his mother to apprentice him to a trade. We applied to the Discharged Soldiers' Aid Society for a groom-gardener at a pound a week, but had not a single applicant for the post, and Felicia was suddenly seized with the idea that our most immediate duty to our country was to employ a certain back-to-the-lander. He was a civil, pleasant young fellow of five or six and twenty, very slow and deliberate in all his ways, had once had a 1 88 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE share of a back-yard, and considered that he had "a great notion of gardening." Moreover, he had had three lessons in grooming and harnessing a horse from a drunken cabman who was his cousin by marriage, and the same worthy had given him a recipe for "blackin' 'orses' 'oofs." Jenny's feet certainly looked very smart, and, after noticing the way in which they shook off the dust, more than one country groom flattered him by asking how the mixture was prepared. He had been with us for about three weeks, and Felicia had ceased asking the country-bred Edith to take a surreptitious look at the harness before we started for a drive. We had been to pay a call about five miles off, and were on our way home, when the ostler dashed out of a wayside inn and arrested us with a loud cry of warning. "Beg pardon, m'm, but I've been watching for you this half - hour. The yard boy saw you'd got your harness all wrong when you passed, and I've been fit to wring his head off for not telling you. It don't matter much going up hill, but you'd be likely to have a terrible smash-up going down that steep pitch near your place." - While speaking he rapidly unbuckled and re- buckled traces and girths, and slapped Jenny encouragingly, and we set off, not much inclined to speak of back-to-the-landism. We stopped at the village blacksmith's to pay a small bill, and Felicia's attention was momentarily withdrawn from Jenny, whose hair and cars suddenly stood on end as she gazed horror-stricken at a large THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 189 white sheep-dog with an accidental tail of yellow bracken. Nearer and nearer came the monster, and she whisked round frantically to avoid the intolerable sight. I just had time to reflect " the road is white and dusty and hard," when I was lying full length on it, verifying my conjectures, and watching Felicia float over me in an easy curve and land safely on a grassy bank. Doubtless the reason we fell as we did was a very simple problem in ballistics, but Felicia thought there was merit as well as good fortune in reaching the bank, and she continues to be of opinion that unless I had fallen out first she would have been able to keep her seat altogether. Jenny made a bolt for her stable, but a gentleman and his groom, who had also been interviewing the blacksmith, sprang at her head, and she yielded like a lamb. Like the lamb of literature, I mean, not the kind known to farmers. " Blazes ! " said the groom, " her bit's in upside down. Been ten miles with her like that? You couldn't have held her ten seconds unless she'd chose to ha' let you. Ladies ought to drive with a curb, especially with a strong young creature like this, standing over fourteen hands. Fourteen two ? I thought so, and I shouldn't wonder if she'd grown since you bought her. She's under five years old now, whatever they told you." It was a fortnight before I could walk, and then I left the village for some months. When I returned I found that Felicia had put the pony out for the winter, owing to a severe shock to its nerves received i go THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE whilst in charge of the back-to-the-lander, and that that estimable person was giving his attention to the carriage drive. The drive was about 320 feet in length, and I calculated that he would finish it in half a year. Felicia had begun keeping fowls animals that we simply loathe to fill up his time. He was not conscious of any vacancy that needed filling, and it was we who had to look after them. When Felicia reminded him, he carried half a bucket of water for the pony, who, her long reddish-brown coat tipped with frost, wandered dejectedly about the paddock, or whinnied appealingly with her head dropped over the railings. With the thermometer below zero, he thought nothing of letting her wait until ten o'clock for her breakfast. I hope we benefited our country: I am sure that many have died for it and suffered far less. In the spring an irascible old gentleman had need of an honest, phlegmatic young man, who could read and write and do simple accounts, and make himself happy for eleven hours a day in a room heated by gas and secluded by a black wire-blind. We joyfully presented him with our back-to-the-lander, and advertised for a groom who could do a little gardening. There was only one reply, but on writing to the address furnished we received an excellent character from the applicant's previous employer, and engaged him with as little delay as possible. We were not altogether pleased with his manner, and he certainly looked five or six years more than his professed age of twenty-two, but Felicia declared that the age of every groom is a mystery, and Jenny gladly came at TIJKIR MOTHERS' SONS 191 his first whistle, and allowed herself to be clipped and trimmed. Steevens took her out twice alone, and pronounced her the quit-test pony "both in and out of the stable " that he had ever seen. On the second occasion he brought her back very hot and exhausted, but he accounted plausibly for her condition, and we knew that she suffered from the itUefixe that any stranger who drove her was trying to steal her, and always galloped home at a rate of speed very different from the sober jog-trot that she kept for our personal service. The following day Steevens drove us to pay a call at the vicarage, and finding that we were expected to play croquet we sent the pony home, and did not see her again until the next morning, when Felicia had arranged that I was to go to the top of the highest hill in the neighbourhood, from which she had discovered that a distant view of the sea could be obtained. Jenny seemed out of spirits, and showed none of her usual zeal in climbing, and we were absent from the house for quite three hours. As we came through the village I caught sight of Felicia restlessly walking up and down the little terrace outside the drawing-room. " At any rate you are safe, and I suppose nothing else matters much," she said enigmatically ; and then turning to the groom, added incisively, " Steevens, you can go to the coach-house and collect your things, and then come to the side door and I will give you a wink's wages in lieu of notice. Do not touch the pony again. / will unharness her." Steevens pushed his hat back on his head, stared 1 92 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE hard at her for a few seconds, and then turned away without uttering a word. Felicia, with Edith's assistance, unharnessed Jenny, and came to me with one of the traces in her hands. It had come from the saddler scarcely a week before, but it was broken through close to the buckle, and only held by four or five rough stitches. " Just look at this ! The Warners have been here this afternoon, and they tell me that Steevens, instead of coming back to the house yesterday, took three other men for a drive, and he beat the pony so cruelly that at last she reared up, got her leg over the shaft and broke the trace. I suppose he meant to get it mended on Saturday, or else to let the pony 'break' it while out with us. And you remember the state Jenny came home in on Thursday ? I find that he drove all the way to Headingly, and took a man, two women, and a boy. He was out rather less than two hours, so you can imagine the rate at which he drove." An hour later Steevens came to the kitchen door with a civil request for permission to go to the harness room to fetch his clippers, which he had forgotten to take away. Edith offered to fetch them, but he said he had better go himself as he was not quite sure where they were, and had barely time to catch his train. Knowing that Jenny was safe in the paddock, and not thinking of any mischief he could do, she consented. In about ten minutes he passed through the courtyard, saying that he could not find the clippers and must after all have left them at his lodgings. THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 193 News travels quickly in a village, and the same evening a pleasant, comely-looking matron asked to see us, and suggested that as we were left without anyone at all, and as her boy Hubert had ten days' holiday from school, we might like to take him until we were suited. " How old is he ? fourteen ? Do you think he is strong enough for the work ? " " He's very strong, ma'am, never had a day's illness in his life. He's had four years' attendance at school without a single break. It's only because he's such a pretty boy that people think he's delicate." She spoke decidedly, but her eyes pleaded for confirmation, and Felicia hastened to assure her that she had only asked on general principles; she had never been near enough to the boys to distinguish him from Herbert, who was twelve and a half, and Humbert, who was fifteen. Hubert came early the next morning to take up his duties, and one could only echo his mother's words, " Such a pretty boy." Tall, slender, and grace- ful, with small, well-shaped hands and feet, yellow hair and a radiant smile, he looked more fit for the part of a page in a cloak-and-sword drama than as under-study for an odd-job man. However, Jenny mumbled his shoulder affectionately ; Peterkin could scarcely be convinced that he had not been engaged solely as a playfellow for him ; and the angel Edith called him Hughie, and volunteered to " lend a hand ;> with the carriage or wherever else it might be wanted. 13 194 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Hubert really knew a great deal about gardening, having learnt both at school and at home. We engaged an old man at threepence an hour to do the digging, and the boy planned out the kitchen garden with solemn satisfaction. The vacant end of the dinner - hour was devoted to Peterkin's instruction, and he told me gravely, "I've learnt many dogs, but I never knowed one that knowed so few words as Perky does ; at least, not a dog that has lived with the same fam'ly so long." He pro- ceeded on the most approved kindergarten principles : first the dog was implored to sit up and listen, then he was repeatedly asked if he would like a bone, then the bone was produced, and after being named many times it was presented to him and he ate it. Nevertheless, the word bone remained as unmeaning a sound in his ears as chips or sawdust. The first time Hubert was ordered to get the carriage ready, he came to Felicia with a puzzled air, holding Jenny's bit in his hand. " Please to look at this, ma'am. There's something quite wrong with it." " I will come round presently and show you how to put it in. I expect you are not used to that kind of bit." " No, I'm not, ma'am. Uncle's Dick is drove on a snaffle. But I'm sure this can't be right. It doesn't go level. I put it in her mouth and it pinches one corner a lot more than it does the other. If she had it in for more than five minutes she'd be like a mad cow." The bit was sent to the saddler, and the next time THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 195 we passed his shop he came out and told us significantly, " It couldn't have been an accident. Whoever did it must have used pretty considerable force to wrench it like that." We then made a few inquiries as to our late groom, and discovered that the testimonial was genuine and the man was entitled to the name he used, but it was a case of false personation. The man with whom we had been in correspondence, after accepting the situation, had found another that he liked better, and had not taken the trouble to let us know. A cousin six years his senior had come to us in his stead, but whether with or without the connivance of the first Steevens we never knew. Jenny's confidence in Hubert increased every day, and he was plainly unwilling to be parted from her, for he told Felicia very shyly that he was some weeks past his fourteenth birthday and could leave school "whenever mother chose." Our offer to keep the boy permanently was listened to with evident gratification by his mother, but was firmly declined. "Hubert isn't a clever boy, at least he isn't sharp. None of my children are, so I keep every one of them at school, girls and boys alike, until they are turned fifteen." Having known people in every class of life who thought it reasonable to keep clever children at school longer and take dull ones away earlier, we could only admire her wisdom and submit, promising Hubert that he should return to us the following spring. Long before the year was out, six feet of earth lay heavily on the bright hair and smiling mouth, and 196 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE the mother with a troop of sons and daughters round her felt desolate as the childless. She loved them all, but Hubert had loved her, and his death chill had been caught in performing a task that an older and stronger brother had sullenly refused. " People say Herbert is the image of him," sighed the poor woman, " but " Even Peterkin knows better than that. I have often seen him pelt down the hill to catch up a slight figure and a yellow head, gaze reproachfully in Herbert's face, and turn back sadly, deaf to his endearments. We advertised for a lad between fifteen and eighteen, and before noon the next day a thin, dark, eager woman of about forty arrived, carrying a fat, fair baby of the terrible age and cunning that only walks when especially wished not to do so. She had trudged five miles and come seven by train in order to secure the place for her third son Bennet, aged sixteen. She told us that he was taller than herself (a good height for a country lad of that age), that he was accustomed to animals, as she had live acres of land of her own, two cows, a donkey, and twenty-three pigs, and, moreover, he was one of the pleasantest and willingest boys you would meet in a day's walk. For two years he had been employed by a butcher, but "they were beginning to put on him " and the work was too hard. He was a little bit frightened at the prospect of working for a lady, but had told her, "After all she can't be worse than the butcher's mother." He was too young to go into lodgings, and he was a very hearty eater, and if only he might "live in" she cared very little what his THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 197 11101103- wages AVCIV. lie had a good stock of clothes, and his socks and shirts was all ne\v. Felicia agreed to take him on trial, and promised that he should have the room at the top of the kitchen stairs, moving Edith to one on our own landing. She suggested his coming the next day, but finding the mother, thought it absolutely indispensable that she should bring him herself, she postponed the date to give the poor woman time to rest between two such fatiguing journeys. Like the Irishman, we expected to be disappointed, but it was rather a blow to find that the boy was half a head shorter than his mother and had the sulkiest face imaginable. However, he was strongly built and well clothed, and we hoped that the pro- found gloom might be due to shyness, or to some chance resemblance on our part to the butcher's mother. It was quite four hours before the woman was rested and sufficiently at ease in her mind to leave her treasure and return home. Felicia sent the boy to the station, with strict orders that he was to carry his massive young sister, but they had scarcely reached the garden gate before she was in her mother's arms, and the boy was two yards in front listening with complete indifference to expressions of the tenderest anxiety. " I wish we could have a son-of-his-father for a change," I remarked. " Are there none in that class of life ? " Felicia reflected for a moment: "There was one about a mile off, but he is only nine, and an awful 1 98 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE little villain. The father has been sent to prison for maltreating him, the boy is to go to an Industrial School, and the mother has gone into the work- house." " The story indirectly proves that fathers are of some use: I should never have gathered the idea from any of these mothers and sons." Bennet proved capable of doing all that we required, but carried with him an atmosphere of impenetrable gloom and dissatisfaction. Three weeks after his arrival we had another visit from his mother, her face drawn with pain and fatigue, but her spirit indomitable, and every fibre in her body braced for a fight. She wished to speak about her boy ; he had been brought up to work as all her children were, but we were not to imagine that he had been brought up like hungry, common children, and he was used to a fire in his room, and couldn't do without it weather like this. Felicia looked at her in growing astonishment, her great dark eyes opening wider and wider. " But really, Mrs. Cummins, I never dream of having bed- room fires unless a room is damp, or in case of illness. Edith slept in that very room for two years, and I am sure that she had not a fire more than three times. How could I think of giving a healthy boy a luxury which I do not allow to a girl, nor to myself ? " More volubility and mystification. After an hour's patient unravelling of the tale, we discovered that on the previous Thursday, Edith's " evening out," Bennet had neglected to put any coal on the kitchen fire, THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 199 and in the course of her four hours' absence it naturally sank into a few handfuls of dead cinders. When Edith returned at nine o'clock, she had declined to relight it, and had boiled all the water that was needed on the oil-stove. And to remedy this cruel hardship, a woman who did not look fit to stand for ten minutes had come a distance of twelve miles, nearly half of it on foot, carrying a baby of twenty months old and a heavy parcel. We made her rest for some hours, and then Edith carried the baby to the railway station. The husband met her at the other end, but by the time she reached home she was so ill that she had to go to bed and stay there. " I would not mind so much," said Felicia, " if only people would not try to tear my heart asunder with their descriptions of the children of the poor. Just look at these paragraphs in the Banner and the Daily Styptic and the Abyss. Listen to this : ' None of the children are above ten years of age, and few are more than seven, but none of them miss their mothers. The children of the poor are independent from the age of five.' Why, only the other day a man told me in the most matter-of-course, what-else-can-you- expect way, that his youngest daughter, who is nearly eleven, had been unable to attend Sunday school lately because her mother is too ill to wash and dress her. Poor mothers who neglect their children are quite as exceptional persons as rich mothers who hand theirs over entirely to servants." Twice again Mrs. Cummins toiled over to see her boy, and then, partly because her health failed more 200 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE and more, and partly because she had begun to put some confidence in Felicia, her visits ceased. Bennet had been with us about four months, when we received a pitiful letter from her, enclosing one for her boy which she begged us to read before giving it to him. She said that her health had broken down entirely, and that she would have to leave home and undergo a dangerous operation ; the other two lads were getting on well, and her sister would come and mind the little ones ; only Bennet was on her mind. She knew that the boy was discontented and was not doing his best, but she implored Felicia to try and keep him for two months longer, by which time, God willing, she would be about again and able to look for a place that suited him better. We would gladly have been rid of the boy, but we could not refuse the appeal, and Felicia promised that as far as it depended on us he should remain until his mother had made a complete recovery. Bennet received his mother's letter, and a very kind and manly one from the local minister, with absolute indifference, and spoke of her with brutal ingratitude. " She dohn' do nothin' fer me. I dohn' owe her nothin'. I earns all I gets," and so forth. The hospital doctor decided that Mrs. Cummins was too weak to give her a fair chance of rallying after the operation, and postponed it for six weeks, recommending good food and rest of mind and body. About a fortnight later Edith came to us with a face of alarm : " I ranjr the bell four times for Bennet THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 201 to come to dinner, and then I went to the stable and couldn't see him, and then I went to his room, and all his clothes are gone, even his Sunday suit and thin boots." We spent the rest of the day trying to trace the boy, but entirely failed. Felicia could not take the r ^ponsibility of concealing the news from his mother, but we begged her to remember that he was old enough and strong enough to take care of himself, that he had a big bundle of serviceable clothes, and several shillings in his pocket, and that a little hardship would be a wholesome experience. She arrived a few hours after receiving the letter, again bringing the baby, which was heavier than ever and able to walk perhaps fifty paces in each mile. She left the child with us and wandered distractedly about, but could learn nothing. Knowing the power of repetition, we repeated our advice over and over again ; she owned that it was what his father had said before she started, and we finally induced her to return home Ultimately we found the boy working at an upland farm and sleeping in a barn. By that time the mother was too ill to interfere with him, and before she had sufficiently recovered to go and see him, he had packed up his much diminished bundle and disappeared once more. She cherishes the hope that he will " come to hisself one of these days," but I fear that he is himself. There is not the faintest doubt in her mind as to whether she may possibly have made some mistake in his upbringing. "Many old maids imagine that they could bring boys up 202 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE properly," said Felicia, " but these women think that they have done it. In face of the facts, it is certainly a stronger delusion." Our next boy was a handsome, well-grown lad of nearly eighteen. He also was brought by his mother. She told us that she never allowed her sons to go into a public-house, that she never allowed them to be beat, nor to fight, and that if anyone laid so much as a finger on them they were to go to a lawyer at once ; finally, they were not allowed to " walk out " before they were one-and-twenty. She then proceeded to instruct Felicia and myself as to the general care and treatment required by her son. Not content with this, she adjured Edith always to see that he wore a muffler when he crossed the road after supper to go to his lodgings. The boy was so intolerably lazy that we struck at the end of a fortnight ; his mother found three more situations for him, all of which he lost for the same reason. There was nothing really bad in the boy, and none of Bennet's leaning towards vagabondage, and when his father finally rebelled in the interest of the younger children and turned him out of doors, he very quickly found a place and kept it. Shapton, his successor, was nineteen, but small for his age. He was chosen chiefly because he came a distance of seven miles unaccompanied by his mother, and after a few weeks' experience Felicia formed a high opinion of him. "When all is said and done, there are only two kinds of servants : those that one can put up with, and those that one can't. This boy is bad-tempered and lazy and untidy and untruthful, THEIR MOTHERS' SONS 203 and I am not at all sure that he is honest, but I can endure him." The next day she came to me, three lines of dis- traction between her eyes : " Edith has borne with all the others, but she says she would rather leave than put up with Shapton any longer." A CASE OF CRUELTY EVELYN MARY KNAPP, as she stood by my side in the light of the great window that filled one side of my drawing-room, was as fair a specimen of well-cared- for childhood as one could hope to see, although she was one of a family of thirteen, more than half of whom were still entirely dependent upon their parents. She had a sturdy, upright figure; her eyes, a little small in her round, full face, were of a deep violet ; her golden-brown curls were tied with white ribbon and her elaborately frilled pinafore was worn over a pale blue cotton dress made short enough to display her tan-coloured stockings and shoes. It was Evelyn's ninth birthday, and she had long looked forward to the honour and pleasure of spend- ing part of it with me. The pleasure had somehow evaporated, and Evelyn was sadly bored, but the honour remained ; she had been invited to stay until seven, and not one minute sooner would she gather up her little presents and bid me good-bye. I had started fifty subjects of conversation, but after a feeble spurt they had all flickered and died down in the chilling reception accorded to them. The child suffered from excessive self-esteem, but as I 201 A CASE OK CRUELTY 205 looked at her dejected face I felt convinced that a homoeopathic dose of flattery would not be unwhole- some, and I started again with fresh energy : " You are much braver than the little girl I invited to come and play with you. She promised to come, but you see she has not had the courage to do so." Who is she?" I hardly liked to own how small my knowledge was of the absent guest ; I suddenly recollected how dirty and untidy she was, and how thin and pale. It was by her quick intelligence and gay temper that I had been attracted ; I was a stranger in the place, and perhaps in asking the two children at the same time I had sinned against village etiquette. " Her name is Ethel Blanche Adlams. She lives in that cottage close to the dried-up pond." " Oh, that would be Winifred Emily Adlams," said Evelyn, recovering her usual funny little air of superiority. " I certainly understood that her name " " They don't none of them rightly know their names 'xcept the eldest boy, William Reginald his name is. He's the only one that's been christ-tened. Their mother keeps changing their names about. She calls them one week one thing and one another, like we does with the puppies till father sells 'em. Winny is what they calls her at school, and I suppose that's what'll grow to her." "Well, whatever her name is, she was afraid to come." " There isn't much that Winny is afraid of. She's always getting into rows at school." 206 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE " Then why did she not come ? " Evelyn made no answer, and remained silent for so long that I feared that this subject also failed to interest her, and, little guessing how much hung upon the child's answer, I was rising to look for a box of Chinese puzzles I hoped would amuse her, when she suddenly began to speak, and I saw to my surprise that the priggish, self-sufficient child was very strongly moved; with hands clenched and eyes fixed on the carpet, she poured out a rapid stream of words "She said she'd come, but she must have known she couldn't. She wouldn't never tell you why, she darsn't ; but 7'11 tell you ! It's because she's got a cruel, wicked mother, and she won't let her go no- where for fear people would find it out. Her mother beats her and starves her, and under her pinafore there's nothing but rags, and her pinafores is just mangled, she never had a ironed one in her life, and she's only got one with a scrap of trimming on it, and the boys at school say it was stole off a hedge. And her mother makes her do all the hard, nasty work. My mother only gives me the nice work, and that's what Id do if I had a little girl. She has to scrub the floor and clean the grates, and she won't be as old as me till the week after next. When she goes to school of a morning her hand shakes so's she can't hardly write." " Is Mrs. Adlams unkind to them all ? " " It's only William and Winny that have to work so hard, but she's often cruel to Georgy, that's Cisslc they call him at school. And mother says she don't A CASE OF CRUELTY 207 believe none of them ever sec a bath from year's end to year's end, and once for three whole months there \v;iMi't even a rag hung out in her garden to dry. And they're just starved. They only get a piece of dry bread for their breakfast, and eat it in their hands as they go, and often it's bread again at dinner. In the evening they get tea and some jam or butter because their father's at home, and they get meat and vegetables on Sunday. But Winny is funny; her father never hits her, and she doesn't care for him at all, and she says she loves her mother, and I believe it's true. William and Winny are late at school nearly every morning. They darsn't start till they've finished their work, and their mother gives them so much to do they can't get it done in time, and if they do it badly they have to do it over again. Once after W'illy had blacked the grate she threw a bucket of water over it, and he was soused through. He came to school with his jacket so as you could have wrung it. And the schoolmaster used to cane them every time, and at last they told him it was their mother's doing, and not theirs, and she heard it, and she dressed herself until you wouldn't know it was the same woman, and she spoke so gentle and quiet, and she come to the school and told him they was wicked little story-tellers, and Georgy too, and she'd be very much obliged if he'd beat them well every time they come late, as she always took petickler pains to start 'em off punctual. " I told mother about it, and she said she'd go off to the schoolmaster and tell him a, thing or two, but father said she wasn't to be mixing herself up in 208 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE other people's business. And then Mrs. Rivetts heard about it. She isn't married now, her husband is dead, so the next morning she watched out of her parlour window what time the children was let go to school, and then she put on her bonnet and got to the school just as the three eldest ones was going to get the cane, and the master said he wouldn't do it any more. Mrs. Rivetts wanted him to go and see Mrs. Adlams and give her a good talking to, but he said it wasn't any use. The next day Winny had a cut on her head and a bruise right up her arm. Mother wanted father to write to the Sussiety, but he said he wanted to live at peace with his neighbours, and mother couldn't write herself because " Evelyn's ears grew a little pink " when she was young there wasn't schools like there is now, and she can't write so's everybody could read it, but she told Mrs. Pratt about the Sussiety. Mrs. Pratt lives next door to Mrs. Adlams, and she pretty well frightened her, and she said, ' I s'pose you don't never beat your children ? What was that smacking and dancing I heard this very morning ? ' And Mrs. Pratt said, ' I smack them when they deserve it, and I daresay I'll smack them again before the year's out, but they don't deserve copper sticks and flat irons and boots at their heads, and neither does your children, though you're turning them into little villains as fast as you can.' Mother says it's the drink that does it ; she'll do anything for drink. Wherever her husband hides away his money she finds it. She sets all the children to search. Willy steals anything he can lay hands on. Winny doesn't, but mother says that hunger and bad A CASE OF CRUELTY 209 comp'ny will soon learn her. Their grandmother li\vs not far off. She feeds the children sometime , but she don't say nothing. Mother says she don't dare to." " There is Winny," I interrupted, " coming in at the drive gate." " And she's got little Frankie with her. Have you ever seen him ? He's such a pretty boy. They're all pretty to start with, but Mrs. Pratt says they get to look as old and ugly as if they was a travelling tinker's children instead of a decent workman's. Mr. Adlams don't get drunk, not often.'' Evelyn's know- ledge of life was evidently not as circumscribed as would have been suggested by her white ribbons and ruffled pinafore. Winny came to the open window, leading her little brother, a thin-legged, round-faced child with brown curls and a heavy sweep of dark eyelashes which he was too shy to raise except for furtive peeps at his unusual surroundings. He wore a stained tartan frock, very short in the waist and gaping at the back, and a velvet jockey-cap with the peak hanging by a thread. Winny looked dirtier than I had ever seen her, and an indescribably nauseous odour arose from them both. " I couldn't come before," Winny explained glibly, " because mother wouldn't believe you had asked me, she said it was all lies ; and then your Kath'rine passed by, and she asked mother why I hadn't come up to play with Evelyn, and then mother said I might come, and I brought Frankie." I fed the children, who ate as fast as dogs, and sent 14 2io THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE them home. When " my Kath'rine " returned, I asked her if she had seen any of the Adlams that evening. " No, m'm ; I didn't go that way. I've been in the town doing the week's shopping for mother. Her leg is bad again. I always speak to the children when I see them, they're such affeck'shunate little things you can't help liking 'em, but mother doesn't like me to speak to Mrs. Adlams. I have'nt said more than ' good evening ' to her for the last three years. It's shameful how she brings them poor children up. The lies just drop out of their mouths every time they open them. What can you expec' ? They never goes to church, nor chapel, nor Sunday school, nor Bible class, nor nothing, and they're kep' away from school as much as their mother dare. Why, our Alice, though she was ill four months on end, put in a better attendance last year than any one of them. She ought to be summonsed, but she's so plausible she gets round the attendance officer just like she does the gentry. Mrs. Filliter-Morison said she had the best manners of any woman in the village, just because she'll curtsey. Our children have picked it up from seeing her do it. It makes mother die with laughin' to see them do it, but she don't say nothin'. It's only a joke to them, and the vicar and the ladies at the Manor is as pleased as can be." Following up the information I had received from Evelyn, I made numerous inquiries in the village, and by dint of professing to know everything already, learnt enough to justify me in writing to the " Sussiety." Three days later an Inspector called on me, a short, strongly-made man, whose appearance and A CASE OF CRUELTY 2 . i manner reminded me simultaneously of a soldier, a sailor, a policeman, a home missioner, a father of a luriv young family, and an Irishman with a genuine love of "a bit of a shindy." He told me what his morning's work had been. "I went first to Mrs. Knapp and Mrs. Rivetts; they both want to back out, and have watered down their evidence till it isn't worth a straw. Then I went to the schoolmaster. He owned he had often seen ugly bruises on the children, and that they are so 111 thy that only yesterday he sent them home at ten o'clock in the morning with a message to their mother to clean them before they came again ; but he didn't want to appear in a police-court, said I didn't seem to realise his position. I told him he didn't realise theirs, and that if he called himself a man he ought to be glad to go into court five times a week if he could do anything to help such miserable little wretches. I took all four children away with me, and left them outside while I went in to see the vicar. All I could get out of him was, ' It's a dee-fficult case. A ve-ry dee-fficult case.' I told him we lived to deal with difficult cases, easy ones could look after themselves. Then I took the children home and made their mother undress them. They're badly nourished and horribly dirty, and there were several nasty bruises and old scars, and of course a tale to account for every one of them. There has been gross neglect and occasional violence, but not what you could call systematic ill-usage; it's just drink and degradation. Then I went to see Mrs. Pratt. She's the only man among them. I'll get a doctor to see 212 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE the children to-day, and with his evidence, and hers, and what I've seen for myself, we ought to get the woman three months' imprisonment. It won't do her any good, poor soul, but it will clear decks for action. I want you to write a letter to headquarters to-night and explain the whole business, and ask them if they can't take Winny and the eldest boy, the father of course paying towards their maintenance. We don't break up families if we can help it ; we often leave children in considerable danger of occasional ill-treatment, but these are being perverted into the bargain. They are thieves and liars already, and the mother's moral character is bad. The father's steady enough, but seems to have no idea of his duty towards his children, thinks it's all the wife's business. 'Stonish- ing how many men there are like him ! I went to a house last week, out in the country like this, man getting twenty-eight shillings a week (of course you know that Adlams earns close on two pounds ?), wife in poor health for three months, whole place like a pigstye, the children perfect gutter-snipes. I found out where the man was working, and I said to him, ' I can see well enough that your wife can't do it, but why don c yo u turn to and scrub the place down ? And if you were to carry the water up from the brook, she'd wash the children fast enough.' ' How can I/ he says, ' when I don't never get back from my work till ten at night ? ' That sounded pretty reasonable, but I'm an old bird, so I asked, ' And what time do you go to it ? ' After a lot of shilly-shally he owned that he scarcely ever had to go before A CASE OF CRUELTY 213 twelve o'clock. ' Well,' I said, ' ray work begins at ten, when it doesn't begin sooner, and I'm often at it till midnight, but all this winter my wife's been ailing, and I've done two hours work for her every day before I began my own. Look here/ I said, ' wo don't want to be hard on you; get the house cleani-d down and the children washed, and the next time I come I'll get my wife to give me some bits of things for them. I don't expect you to be able to sew: I'm not much of a hand at it myself.' So we parted, but I fear we shall have trouble with him yet Sixteen years ago we were fighting against active cruelty, horrible, devilish cruelty; we don't get much of that now, only a case now and again, but the dirt and neglect seem to me pretty nearly as bad as ever, and it's a cowardly way of doing the business." The next week the Inspector called again : " The people at headquarters don't see why they should have anything to do with the case. Of course it doesn't sound as bad as a great many, but it means seven ordinary children being turned into criminals. How the woman manages it I don't know, but I doubt if there's another mother in the place who has as much influence over her children as she has. I wonder if we could get the Guardians to adopt the elder ones and make the parents pay ? The woman has never been violent to the babies, and if she had to do the housework herself, and had less money in her pocket, less time and money would be spent on drinking. Some of the magistrates are Guardians, aren't they ? Do you know any of them ? 2i 4 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE It's against the rules for me to approach them. The case is to be tried on Tuesday." On Tuesday I stood outside the dingy police- court waiting for the doors to be opened. There was a miscellaneous crowd, composed of prisoners and prosecutors, witnesses, loafers, complainants, defendants, persons accused of betting, bad language, and fighting, conscientious objectors to vaccination, a landlord with plans for cottages to be erected, and a very small and slender fox-terrier charged with violent conduct. Farthest from the entrance were the Adlams family ; the mother curtseyed and addressed me with great suavity and condescension. She seemed rather pleased with her position than otherwise. They had arrived early, she told me, but needed biscuits for the little ones, and of course such out-of-the-way commodities could only be obtained at a publykouse. The terrier scented refreshments, and divided his time between begging from the children, who gave with the generosity of those who know what it is to suffer hunger, and stretching himself to an extraordinary length in order to lick one of the unvaccinated babies, whose parents were rather too openly indignant at being "jostled in along o' them Adlams." '! When I delivered the summons on that there dog," remarked a young constable, " his owner said he'd been brought up in a nursh'ry, and I must say it looks pretty much as if he had," he added judicially. The heat in the court was suffocating; one of the children began to cry and was shaken into silence; the terrier took a chair in ^thc front A CASE OF CRUELTY 215 rank facing the seven magistrates, and panted aggressively. " What is that dog doing in court ? " demanded the chairman. " It's the fee-roshus one, sir," explained the constable, lifting him by his fore-paws and placing him on the window-sill behind him to get air. The Adlams had engaged a solicitor to defend them, but as he had not yet arrived all the other cases were taken first; the babies were exempted from vaccination, the terrier was unanimously acquitted, but everyone else was convicted, and the well-meaning landlord, when his plans were con- tumeliously rejected, looked the most abashed person in the court. At last the solicitor appeared, and not seeing much else that he could do, he harassed the witnesses, notably Mrs. Pratt, but she more than justified the Inspector's praise, and remained cool under a purposely insulting cross-examination. The would-be landlord, who had stayed behind hoping for an interview with the chairman, half forgot his grievance in watching her. The hearing lasted about an hour; Mrs. Adlams was found guilty of cruelty and gross neglect, and the sentence, as the Inspector foretold, was three months' imprisonment. The next day the whole village was talking of the " darin' " of Winny and her two eldest brothers. It appeared that they had walked home from the court by themselves, and crossing a field found a neighbour lying in a drunken sleep and had stolen his watch and chain and several shillings 216 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE in money. Just as they were escaping with their booty the man woke, missed his watch, and sobered by the shock had recognised the children and followed them home. At first they denied all knowledge of the matter, but finally led him to a hole in the hedge where they had hidden the watch and chain. No money could be found. I wrote to the Inspector that night, and once more he bicycled over to see what could be done, and made his report : " I've seen the man, and I tried to get him to prosecute, for the best thing that could happen to the poor little creatures, now that things have gone so far, is that they should be committed to a reformatory, but he will do nothing. He pretends it's kindness of heart, but that's all bunkum; he's ashamed to own in court that he was drunk in broad daylight. All I can do now is to insist on the grandmother or aunt or some- one coming to look after them. We're baffled this time. I couldn't get the magistrates even to order the children to the workhouse temporarily. If it hadn't been for the chairman I believe that son of a sea-cook would have got her off with a caution. It happened in a far worse case last quarter; the child was whisked off no one knew where the next day, and it cost the Society no end to trace her and prosecute the parents in another town. I can tell you there was reason for it by the time we found her ! Ten cases before a stipendi- ary don't give us as much trouble as two before a bench of country magistrates; it's all wheels within wheels, We can do the cautioning part well enough A CASE OF CRUELTY 217 ourselves : when we take a case to court it's because cautioning would be sheer fool's play. Well, we'll keep as good a look-out on the woman as we : she may take a turn. We must hope for the best." Mrs. Adlams reappeared very thin and pale, but publicly as bland and self-satisfied as ever: the governor and everyone in the place, she reported, had been so kind to her that " it was quite like going away to stay for your health"; she had had roast beef every day, and had slep' in a room with a carpet and a looking-glass. Her husband had repeatedly sworn that she should never enter his house again, but he met her at the prison gates, and they carried the baby home between them. The poor woman greeted her children rapturously, and they received her with a strange absence of fear. For a week or two all went well, and then the sordid story began again from the beginning. " The chairman's dead," said the Inspector, " and it's no use to press for a heavy sentence. I shall use all my cunning to get the whole of the children sent to the workhouse. Once there, I am sure we can induce the Guardians to adopt them, and make the father pay for their maintenance." This was finally done, and the Inspector drove the whole party off to a range of large cottages called the Orphanage. "The kitchen alone was enough to convict both the parents," he declared. "I found them starving hungry. There was a loaf in the house, but I suppose they were afraid to 2i8 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE touch it. I tried to cut it up for them, but the only knife had no handle and was like a bit of hoop iron, and the eldest boy made some tea in a jug. He boiled the water in a saucepan with no lid to it. There wasn't a teapot or a kettle in the house, nor a wash-tub, nor even a basin. And yet that woman looks so decent, and can talk as plausible as any lady in the land." Once a month Mrs. Adlams walks seven miles there and back to see her children, takes them cake and sweets; and if anyone inquires for them, genteelly criticises the management of the workhouse as if it were a boarding-school chiefly dependent upon her patronage. XI THE STEPMOTHER " NEW-LAID eggs, miss ? You're sure to be able to get them at the bailiffs at High Trees. Straight up and turn to the left. It's the only house there, so you can't mistake it." I had lived in a part of the country where farm bailiffs were persons of substance, very far removed in social consideration from the men whose labours they directed, and I was surprised to find that after subtracting the barns and cattle-sheds which straggled away on three sides of it, High Trees was little larger than an ordinary agricultural labourer's cottage. I knocked several times at the door facing the lane, but with no result, and then picked my way through the yard with its chicken, ducks, pigs, and boarded-out foxhound puppies. In the shadow of the gaudily-painted Dutch barn some little girls were playing, sturdy sunburnt twins of about three years old, and a younger child, a delicate little creature just able to toddle, and with many smears of earth on her unhealthily white skin. One of the twins was firmly clutching a tailless kitten which squeaked feebly. m 220 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE " Don't be unkind to the poor little thing. See, it has no tail." She slightly relaxed her grasp and examined the kitten severel} 7 . "It's dot four leds," she replied, summarily dis- missing my plea for pity. " What is your name ? " I asked. " I be Yolive." She did not introduce her sisters, but I learned afterwards that her twin's name was Myrtle, and the white-faced baby with a tinge of green was Ivy. " Where is your mother ? " She nodded her head in the direction of the back door. I knocked per- se veringly, and the door was ultimately opened by a short, roundabout woman whose walk told of incessant fatigue. She could not have been much over forty, but her first smile (and it was a pleasant one notwithstanding) revealed a discoloured fang which was the only tooth left in her head. She sent an older girl, a thin, plain little creature of eleven or twelve, to look for the eggs, and I sat down on a bench to wait, stared at by several boys who were cleaning their Sunday boots. " You have a large family ? " " Yes, m'm. My eldest daughter's bin married three years, and I've two more daughters in service, and two sons at work, and four children at school, and three more that have to go into a tub every night of their lives. And then there's the chicken and ducks and pigs to see to, not to mention the puppies and my husband." THE STEPMOTHER 221 " Well, you have plenty of room for them all to run about." " Yes, and we've more room inside than most of the houses hereabout. But the bedrooms is cruel hot. I'm forced to make the beds the instant the children is out of them at this time of the year. The heat would strike me down if I waited even till nine." " Have you a good water supply up here ? " " Pretty fair. There's so much out-buildings, and we have any number of tubs. We catch a lot of rain-water, except where it runs to waste through the gutterings being broke. We don't have to haul water not above three months in the year. Come, Sarah, my dear, what a time you've bin ! " After a prolonged hunt a paper-bag was found, and I took my leave. I frequently returned to the house for eggs, but I never saw the mother again ; all my communications were with the small and severe Sarah, who interested me strangely, though she treated me with great asperity, and had neither the sturdy good looks of the twins nor the pathetic, appealing beauty of the languid little Ivy. Fifteen months later I heard news which sent me up the steep path, although it was August, a time when only " box-eggs " can be obtained. The twins were playing in the straw ; there was certainly more than twelve hours' grime on their faces and arms, and their pinafores were the colour of the ground. Ivy looked cleaner, but one of her little canvas shoes had disappeared, and she was using the other as a ball ; her socks had rolled down over her ankles, and were damp and gritty. 222 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE "There's a new little baby come to our house," cried Olive, always the spokeswoman. "It's a boy. It doesn't like bein' yere at all. It cries like anyfin" " Like ev'ryfin" corrected Myrtle. Ivy tossed her shoe over her head. The direction suggested the possibility of finding the missing one, and presently I buttoned them on and pulled up her socks. " Is mother better to-day ? " The question was too difficult, and they made no reply. "No, she isn't" said a fierce little voice at my elbow. "She's " Sarah disappeared suddenly as if in answer to a call, but she had only gone round to the other side of the barn, and was stifling her sobs in the hay. Two days after the " new little baby " went away again, taking with him the only thing that he had seen reason to value during his brief and unwilling residence at High Trees. From the shopkeepers in the little town, from the farmers' wives for three miles around, from the doctor's sister and the vicar's wife, and from cottagers who had formerly been her neighbours, I heard nothing but good of the deceased woman. Perhaps the testimony of one of the latter was the most toucliing : " She was always working for her children, always. Why, I've known her get up early of a morning and pick a couple of quarts of gooseberries, or whatever it might be, and go off to the town and sell them, and buy a bit of calico or a bit of print, and come home and make it up for one of the little ones, and they'd be wearing it before night." THE STEPMOTHER 223 The first time I met the widower, a keen-eyed man with prematurely grey hair, I offered my condolences on his great loss. " She had her faults," he said drily. The tide of my sympathy retreated, bringing with it a sudden recollection of hints I had heard as to the " life " he had led his wife during the first ten or twelve years after their marriage. I did not care to make any inquiries from him as to his plans, but a distant relative who had come from the next county for the funeral told me that the eldest married daughter had no children of her own, and was to take charge of Ivy and the twins ; a recently married daughter lived a mile off, and would come in on Saturdays and clean down the house; the washing was to be put out, and Sarah must manage the rest of the work. " I suppose she can leave school ? " The woman shook her head : " She'll have to stay more'n another year. She might ha' got her labour suttiffcate next month, she's as sharp as a needle, but for the last half year or more her attendance has been onreglar. It wasn't her mother's doin'. Sarah would stop at home, and if she hadn't it's my belief the poor dear wouldn't have lasted as long as she did, not by a great many weeks." "But High Trees is more than a mile from the school. That means at least five miles a day for Sarah, and of course she will have to go into the town sometimes to do the shopping. How many will there still be in the house for her to cook and wash up for ? " " Five, beside herself and her father. I've told him 224 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE plain, and I can't tell him no plainer, that the two biggest lads had ought to leave home and batch for themselves. But there, he's like a plum-pudding with the stones left in it, lots of good materials, bub you're always running up against a hard spot in him. The best thing to look for is that he should marry again as fast as he can get a decent woman to take him." I could but agree with her ; the childless sister would probably keep the frail little Ivy whether paid for doing it or not ; Myrtle and Olive were, as myfemme de menage used to say, " d'une ttoffe fort re'sistante," and the boys would be better for a tight hand. Only Sarah blocked the way. Even in her mother's life- time she had not been a gay, or pretty, or amiable child, and day by day the marks of the hopeless drudge would be stamped upon her. Could any woman be found who would resist the shameless partiality of nature and take pity on her youth ? The first candidate suggested in my hearing was a general servant, a girl not yet twenty. Her mistress was so much horrified at the idea, that she insisted on her going to the dentist and having a row of black stumps which greatly aged her appearance removed and replaced ; and adorned with " store teeth " which she valued far more highly than her heavy golden fleece and her graceful figure, the girl developed a becoming amount of self-esteem, and soon relieved her mistress's anxiety by acknowledging her engagement to a reputable young bachelor. The second name mentioned was that of a brisk and stirring widow, mother of ten sons and daughters, THE STEPMOTHER 225 whose ages roughly corresponded with those of the bailiffs children. She was six or eight years older than the deceased wife, but one of the strongest women in the neighbourhood. I had often been told the tale how, five months before her last boy was born, her pony had been frightened by a motor-car as she was driving into market. The pony reared up on its hind legs, the traces broke, and she was thrown into the road with all her baskets of eggs and fruit. She picked herself up instantly, chased and caught the pony, collected all her property, and returned home. She sorted and washed the eggs, and sold as many as she could to her neighbours, and with the cracked ones she made a large supply of cakes. The damaged fruit was picked over, one of the boys was sent for a stone of preserving sugar, and before she went to bed that night a row of neatly covered jam-pots stood in her larder. An excellent woman, no doubt, to bring bailiff and boys to their bearings, and to wash and tend the little ones, but probably the last person in the world to make life any easier for over-burdened Sarah. Five children at the very least she would bring with her, and I shuddered at the thought of Friday's market- ing and Saturday's baths, and Monday's line of wash clothes, and all these were not equal to my horror of Sunday's dinner. Once when a very small child I was taken to dine at an old-fashioned London restaurant. It was a stifling hot day, and even strawberries and cream soon ceased to interest me. While my elders lingered over them I slipped from my seat to satisfy my curiosity as to what might be 226 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE behind a great screen from which a subdued but never- ceasing clatter of crockery proceeded. I saw a girl, even to me she seemed a mere child, drab-coloured from head to foot, washing a pile of plates nearly as high as herself at a sink ; other piles stood near her, and every few minutes the waiters brought a fresh supply and fetched away those she had washed. I returned to my seat and told no one what I had seen, but from that moment I knew what was meant by drudgery, and that hopeless, drab-coloured toiler always rises before my eyes as its mental symbol. Happily for Sarah, this maitresse femme spoke disrespectfully of conversion, and announced in the bailiffs hearing that not only had she never ex- perienced that inward grace, but could not imagine what outward form it would take if she did ; she had no " ways " to give up ! Then for the first time the only spinster in the village was suggested, a woman of about forty-five. She seemed to me rather a promising candidate, for she was strong enough to keep the boys in order, and old enough to give her heart to the children, and she had always shown a decided partiality for Sarah. Unfortunately she also failed to pass the religious test : she had been a good daughter and a self-sacrificing sister, she was industrious, a clever manager, and a kind and helpful neighbour. " But what is all that ? " demanded the bailiff with tragic force. Meanwhile Sarah grew thinner and paler, and seemed to lose at least two inches in height; she stooped, and one shoulder was always higher than the other. In her mother's lifetime the boys had fed the THE STEPMOTHER 227 fowls and cleaned out their houses, and twice a week went into town with great baskets and carried home the flour and meat and groceries. Now they declined to do any work at all, and tlu-ir father used no com- pulsion. He went himself every Friday evening, and bought till he thought would be wanted, but in the irregularly managed, many-mastered household things were always running short, and Sarah had to toil into the town for to fetch them, while the boys played cricket or loafed idly at the cross-roads. I longed for a little Old-Testament discipline, more than a little ! Only one negative relief fell to Sarah's share : the schoolmaster, I was told, "has given up caning her for being late; it isn't any use." And he was a persevering man, too. Early in the following spring the news spread that Mrs. Jones, the widowed postmistress, had been chosen by the bailiff. I heard the report with satisfac- tion, only moderated by the recollection of Rosetta : how would sJie like it ? Rosetta was Mrs. Jones' niece and adopted daughter, a handsome, well-grown girl of thirteen, with all the faults, failings, and virtues of a child who nearly all her life has been the one object of a loving and unselfish woman. Rosetta petted Ivy and dressed dolls for her, alternately patronised and persecuted the twins, and treated Sarah (who secretly adored her) with chilling indifference. Rosetta's aunt offered to make a new dress for Sarah if the bailiff would buy the material, and on two successive Sundays she tried hard to curl her hair ; but as it remained absolutely straight for five inches from 228 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE the tips, the result was as invraisemblable as it was unbecoming. As to the dress, the bailiff promised to buy the material " if she was a good girl." Remember- ing what he had said of his wife while she still lay on her deathbed with her thirteenth child in her arms, I did not discuss Sarah's obvious merits, but ventured to suggest that Sunday frocks, like sunshine and rain, were the portion alike of the just and the unjust. He shook his head with tightened lips and unfathom- able depth of meaning, and subsequently classified me with those who darken counsel, or with those who counselled dark ways. No two hearers agreed as to his exact words, or felt any doubt as to his meanin'. The marriage was regarded as a settled thing by the village gossips, an approximate date was fixed for the ceremony, and the hour of eight-thirty p.m. was generally approved "as most becomin' in the circumstances," when the spirit of mischief inter- vened. The bailiff's fourth or fifth son, intolerably irritated by the " airs " Rosetta was giving herself as she walked to school in a dress which only a fortnight before had been her Sunday best, flung a stone at her. The missile was carefully chosen and carefully aimed, and no damage resulted except a patch of mud on her shoulder, which she scrupulously avoided brushing off until it had been seen by half the village. Naturally her devoted aunt made a complaint to the bailiff, and he promised to "rebuke" the boy severely. He disapproved of corporal punishment: I have noticed that men generally do when possessed of THE STEPMOTHER 229 hard -working daughters and lazy sons. A few days later another stone was thrown at Rosetta, and with more malice, for it grazed the pretty little chin always held an inch too high, and loosened the very last of her milk teeth. The schoolmaster chanced to witness the incident from an upper window, and, having his own ideas of discipline, " rebuked " the aggressor severely with a tough cane, and when the boy whimperingly promised not to do it again, grimly replied that it would be worse for him if he did. The bailiff, with a logic supposed to be exclusively maternal, protested that it was all Rosetta's fault. Why did she make herself ridiculous by carrying a parasol ? Her aunt retorted that it was no more ridiculous to carry a parasol on weekdays than on Sundays, when nearly all the girls who " had anyone to care how they looked " used them unremarked ; besides, it wasn't a parasol, it was an en-tout-cas. The bailiff hated strange words in anyone's mouth but his own, and the " untookah " settled the matter. The gossips unanimously decided that the marriage was " off," and talked of something else. Some time between Easter and Whitsun I was told definitely that the bailiff was going to marry " the other Mrs. Jones." " I never heard of her before. Who is she ? " " It's Mrs. Jones's stepmother's sister - in - law. She teaches in the chapel Sunday school, and she's always made a lot of the three little ones." " How old is she ? " The worthy gossip could not tell me, and indeed could give very little in- 230 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE formation at all. I met the vicar in the afternoon, and after a prolonged calculation, which dragged in the names of at least twenty parishioners, he told me that she must be about fifty-five, and that she had a nice house of her own, three or four acres of pasture-land and a large orchard. " One thing," he added, with a gleam of un- sanctified amusement in his eyes, "the bailiff won't have the pull of her anywhere. She was converted when he was a little rascal stealing her mother's apples, she taught in the Sunday school at thirteen, and was a 'joined member ' all through the years when like you and me he was wallow- ing in outer darkness." " From what was she converted ? " " From nothing worse than church - going, and not entirely converted from that. She often turns up with her mother's old prayer-book in her hand when there's no service at the chapel, and I hear that she encourages her elder scholars to do the same. Seriously, she is an excellent person. I have never heard anything but good of her. Her mother, a dear old woman who died only a year or two ago, even tried to make me believe that she had been a good baby, but I drew the line at that. I've had seven, and if the fear of my wife were not before my eyes I should earn an honest penny by publishing a tract on the 'Total Depravity of Infants under Two Years of Age/ I've plenty of notes for it, I can assure you." In a few days everyone was talking of the matter, and I learnt that the two eldest sons were THE STEPMOTHER 231 to "batch for themselves," the third hod been iijod by a farmer some miles off, and was to live in : the fowls and puppies were to be given up, and only one pig was to be kept; Ivy was to remain with her sister; a donkey-cart was to be bought, and the bailiff was to move into the bride's house, which was larger and more conveniently arranged than his own, and scarcely two minutes' walk from the school. This was a masterly reduction of work, but I was still doubtful how the marriage would affect Sarah. Not for long, however. Seven or eight weeks after the wedding she was just in front of me coming out of church one Sunday morning, and I scarcely recognised her, for the stoop had disappeared, and she walked with a quick, eager step. No attempt had been made to curl her silky, mouse-coloured hair, but it had been washed and plaited loosely, and tied with an ample bow of white ribbon ; a large white hat shaded the peaked little face, in which there was a tinge of pink amidst the yellow, and her blue cashmere dress had a deep yoke of white satin and lace. She was walking with Rosetta, and seemed to be taking a full share of the conversation, and when they parted at the corner there was a decided suggestion of patronage in her manner as she said, "Don't be late this aft'noon. It takes the donkey a full forty minutes." " Where are you and Sarah going ? " I asked Rosetta, overtaking her. "To the church Sunday school at Treckham. 232 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Her stepmother said they couldn't do justice to us in a little place like this, and she says it's too far for Sally to walk both ways, and so she drives us there in the donkey-cart, and takes Ivy too, just for the airing. Ivy always comes home of a Sunday. Her stepmother says she shall come altogether when Sally leaves school, but she says Sally must stop at school until she's past fifteen because she's lost such a lot of time." " And do you think that Sarah is happier now ? " Rosetta stared at me, unable to decide if I could be as dull as I appeared. " Didn't you see her new frock ? And she's got a parasol to match," she added conclusively. Last week the bailiff uttered a belated panegyric on his first wife, and the three eldest sons have been heard to say feelingly that there's no one like a mother. I know only too well what a different fate my poor little Sarah might have met with. One day not long ago I was visiting a very respectable old woman who lived in two rooms with her grand- daughter, a rosy-cheeked girl of ten or eleven. The child remained quietly beside us, and had every appearance of listening to our conversation, but on glancing at her intelligent little face I saw that she had not been able to follow it. Slightly puzzled, I asked her some trifling question, and was still further surprised by receiving no answer. "She can't hear you, m'm," said the grandmother apologetically ; " if her back were turned you'd have THE STEPMOTHER 233 to speak three times as loud as that before she'd even know you was saying anything." " Scarlet fever, I suppose ? " " No, m'm ; just knocking about, nothing but that. Ah, you wouldn't never guess what that poor child has been through ! My son's first wife was as nice a woman as ever you see; and the two children, Tilly and her brother, was the picture of health, and the sweetest little souls ! When they was eight and nine she died rather sudden, and my son married again. The woman treated 'em shameful, worse than I could tell you. And my son, him as had been showed twice over what a mother ought to be, what do you suppose he done ? Did he pick the children up and say : There's my mother ten miles off who'll look after them if you won't, and you can go to the devil where you b'longs ? Not he ! He shut his eyes and he shut his ears, and when he couldn't shut 'em no longer he ran away ; put his children in hell and left 'em there ! Not a word did I know of it until the Cruelty man had got hold of them, and they'd been in the workhouse three weeks or more. I couldn't afford to take the both of them : I grieved for the boy, but I remembered his father and his grandfather and I took Tilly, and a good child she is. ' Well,' says the nurse when I fetched her away, ' you're lucky to be three weeks behindhand. We've saved you such work as you never had in all your born days.' Ah, she was a bad 'un and no mistake, but my son was worse, for they was his. I've been a wife and a mother, m'm, and I tell you men's cowards, cowards the whole lot of 'em." 234 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE This, by the way, is one of the many points upon which it is difficult for a spinster to make up her mind, for married men say nothing, and the evidence of married women and unmarried men is flatly contradictory. XII ONE OF THEMSELVES " THIRTY-SEVEN thousand in the parish, all about as poor and rough and ignorant as they well can be, and only one church! Yes, a heart-breaking place, heart-breaking," said the vicar unctuously ; but he did not break his heart then, or ever. No one could possibly do all the work, so he contentedly did nothing, or almost nothing. There was a small Sunday school, a still smaller day school, and there were a few old women who received doles. As to other organisations, there were chapels here and there, but poor and uninfluential, and there were several unwholesome buildings where for twopence or three- pence a week the barest rudiments of education could be obtained. It was the year 1847, and in one of the smallest houses in on3 of the meanest streets of this parish Edmund Butler was born. In the same year, and in the very next street, Catherine Cawsley also was born, but although this proved to be one of the most important events of his life, it was twenty-seven years before he heard of it. Both streets led straight to the sea, but the sea shorn of its glory by the grimy hideousness of the beach on which was flung 235 236 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE all the decaying refuse of the district. Edmund was the only child of a seaman in the Royal Navy, and went to school long enough to learn reading and writing and the first rules of arithmetic, and although he received no religious instruction whatever, his upbringing was more decent and regular than that of his companions. When he was ten years old his father contrived to have him put on a ship's books as a private boy. The vessel voyaged leisureably to the Cape of Good Hope, and by the time she arrived there Edmund was nearly eleven. He was a tall, strong, well-grown boy, and was then formally entered into Her Majesty's service as " Edmtfad Butler, an alien, aged fourteen." He had never had the smallest wish to be a sailor, and he was desperately anxious not to remain one, but he was no more consulted in the matter than if he had been a monkey or a slave. The ship pursued her way to China, where at the mature age of fourteen (officially sixteen) he found himself possessed of a medal with four clasps. Two years later, being transferred to a ship where medals were almost unknown, he hid it away, thinking it might be worth "more kicks than halfpence," and not long afterwards pawned it in order to settle a debt with a man who had got most of the youngsters on board into his clutches by keeping a private stock of jam and sweet-stuff, almost irresistible to growing lads who for weeks at a time had nothing more tooth- some than biscuit and pork. One day the news was received that the ship was to be inspected by a distinguished Admiral, and all ONE OF THEMSELVES 237 the usual arrangements were hastily made : the ward- room pets, including a dog, a meerkat, and a very young hyaena, were to be sent off in a boat, with orders to remain below the horizon until the in- spection was over; two men were " told off" to carry the rubbish basket that no ship can exist without, and that no admiral can tolerate, up one ladder and down another as often as might be necessary, and everyone proceeded to instruct everyone else in his duties, while the midshipmen disputed as to whether the great man did or did not insist upon the use of his courtesy title, until an experienced sub-lieutenant crushed them all equally by saying that he had never known an inspecting officer speak to anyone but the captain, unless to complain of the relative length of a man's beard, whiskers, and moustache, a thing which could not happen to them. The master-at-arms, a recent arrival on board, looked up the books to see who was entitled to wear medals, and on the principle that even one was better than none, told Edmund to put on his, an order which the lad received with a feeling little short of terror. He had regarded the medal entirely as his private property, and had parted from it with- out the faintest qualm of doubt, and now perhaps the action would turn out to be a military crime of the deadliest nature. Discipline was a rough-and-ready thing in those days, but, owing to his fine physique and cheerful, willing temper, he had never once been in trouble, and he was far more alarmed at the prospect than the blackest character on the list would have been. After enduring some hours of 238 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE mental torture, he confessed to the master-at-arms that he was unable to obey the order, and was taken before the Commander, who was so much amused by the low value that their only hero had set on the decoration, that he advanced him the money to take it out of pawn and ordered him to wear it every Sunday. One medal among a whole ship's company is not easily overlooked, especially by a man who wears the exact counterpart of it himself, and the Admiral stopped short in front of Edmund. " So you were in China too ? I suppose you saw me there ? You were young for that sort of business ! What was your age ? " " Thirteen, sir." " Then what do [you call yourself now ? " Edmund hesitated, his face turned crimson, and then he made a bold stroke for freedom. " Sixteen, sir." " Sixteen ! But you are a first-class ordinary sea- man. How can that be ? " " He means eighteen, sir," put in the Commander. " He was rated at least seven months ago. I looked his record up a few days since when there was some question about his medal." " He is old enough to answer a plain question." " I doubt if twenty per cent, of the men could tell you their age straight off, sir. They don't know the year they were born in, and they lose count." Edmund had never thought of himself as having been born in any particular year, but he had time to calculate, and in response to the Admiral's next question replied promptly ONE OF THEMSELVES 239 "The 5th of June 1847, sir." " This must be inquired into," said the Admiral, passing on ; " in the meantime he is transferred to the flag-ship." The case was contested with far more zeal and obstinacy than if Edmund's fraudulently obtained services had been worth a million pounds, and it was not until six years later that the Admiral had the pleasure of presenting him with his freedom, which he disposed of as soon as possible by becoming a metropolitan policeman. He had been in the force for some years, when a nervous, middle-aged lady living in the West End had him called in three nights in one week to search for an imaginary burglar, in which search he was assisted by her cook, Catherine Cawsley. The work was perfunctory, especially on the second and third occasions ; they " changed eyes " and exchanged family histories, arid when the lady suggested that it would be an excellent thing to have a married policeman always on the premises, neither of them saw reason to oppose the suggestion. But what Butler accounts the third and greatest turning-point of his life took place the following winter. At a large house in Belgravia two drawing- room meetings for policemen were to be held, one at three, the other at five, and a fellow-constable begged him to attend. He protested that he hated praying and psalm-singing, but ultimately promised to go. At three he approached the house, then suddenly turned away and paced the streets for two hours, struggling between his unwillingness to go and his unwillingness to break his promise. At five he 240 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE returned, and took a seat just inside the door. A solo was sung, " Take me as I am " ; what followed he never knew. For three weeks his mind was filled with tumult and unrest, and then one night he said to his wife, " Katie, I think I'll pray." He knelt by the bedside ; no words came to him, but he seemed to enter a Presence. That night he slept peacefully, and when he awoke his heart was filled with a joy that he says has never left him since. Almost immediately he formed a resolve in which his wife took her full share : he determined to save all the money that he could, and devote it, and the remainder of his life when he retired, to the spiritual and bodily service of the people in the streets where they had been born. In the meantime all his leisure was given to mission work, rescue work, Bible classes, and street- preaching ; all hers to the study of nursing : but he looked on this merely as training for the duty that appealed most to his heart. At the age of fifty Butler retired with a comfort- able pension, and savings amounting to 500, and returned to his native parish. He found that the population had increased to 40,000, and was in charge of a vicar who was the spiritual descendant of the one who had held the living in his boyhood ; there was one district visitor, broken down from over- work, and the chapels had grown little either in number or influence. The streets were cleaner and better kept, and compulsory education had done much to improve the manners and appearance of the children, but the older boys and girls seemed to him almost as rough and neglected as he remembered them nearly ONE OF THEMSELVES 241 fatty years be f 01 v. Ht> hiivd a five-roomed house in the street he was born in, and furnished it neatly, adding a tiny greenhouse, which was to be his wife's one indulgence. He bought a piece of waste ground adjoining his garden, and built a plain brick hall about 50 feet by 20, and fitted it with comfortable seats and everything needed for a mission-room and general class-room. " There is no penny of debt on it," he said when he showed it to me. " How could I offer to God a thing that I should be ashamed to give my brother ? " On the door there is a letter-box, where anyone who wishes to see him may slip in their address. " I go where a clergyman would be no use, even if they would let him in. You see, I am a native, I know the language. Not that I use any but the best words I know, or that I wouldn't expect a lady to understand ; it isn't that, I have heard parsons say ' cove ' and ' bloke,' and talk about ' kidding ' and all that kind of thing, and think they were 'getting at the people.' Of course folks will listen when they do it, it amuses some of them, just as it amuses people who are not very nice in their minds to hear children talk of things they don't understand, but it goes against the grain with most of them, grates on their feelings. One of that kind was talking to a woman here not long ago. She is a roughish person to look at, but my wife knew her when she was in good service, and if you heard her talking to a sick neighbour, or a child, you would soon find out that she has two different sets of words in her head. Well, he thought he was making a great impression on her, bringing 16 OF THE " "WERSITY 242 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE things down to her level, and after he was gone she said, ' I likes a Salvationer to be a Salvationer, and a clergyman to be a gentleman.' And it isn't only by pitying the poor that you ' get at them ' ; however wretched the life looks, that's only one part of it. People may pity the boys here, running barefoot on a filthy beach and throwing stones at dead dogs, but will that teach them to understand what the thought of this place was to me, even when I had all the world before me, and not a scrap of religion in my mind or heart ! Why, if I had met anyone who even knew the name of this street, I should have looked on him as a friend ; and it's the same with my wife. The people here listen to me, and I can help them because I know the life, good and bad alike. I'm one of themselves." XIII "AND SO WE GO DOWN AND DOWN AND DOWN ! " " 'N so we go down 'n down 'n down, 'n then we come oop 'n oop 'n oop." The rider was a fat little girl of three, the horse was thin with the thinness of a boy who is fated to grow tall, and who for the last year or so has never had quite enough to eat. He rocked away gallantly, but the "oop" was a terrible effort: well might his mother say so often, " It's easy enough to go down ! " " Why d'you say oop 'stead of up ? " inquired a sister of five who was impatiently waiting for her turn. Hermann laughed good-humouredly " If Minnie had lived as long as I did with grand- mother, she would say funnier things than that! Was it one week, or two, that we had been in this street when you told Aunt Caroline 'Father's hout, and mother's not hup, and Kerry isn't bin/ and she scolded mother for letting you talk so vulgar ? " Minnie dismissed this as irrelevant " Did they say oop in German Street ? " " No," said Hermann reluctantly ; he knew that he was giving the argument away entirely, but he was not casuist enough to feel justified in saying 244 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE Yes. He generally spoke the truth at home, although abroad he said whatever he thought likely to pro- mote the safety, honour, and welfare of his family. "Aunt Carryliiie lets me speak to her in the street," drawled Edith, with such provocative effect on her elder sister that Hermann hastily reminded her that her turn was finished, and took Minnie on his knee, and trying to gratify her desire for "a fast ride" they both over-balanced and fell on the floor. Minnie wasted no time in tears, but picked herself up and attacked her brother furiously, biting him on his long lean wrists when he seized her hands. A heavy step at the door and an angry exclamation made her beat a hasty retreat. "That's what you get by playing with scratch- cats ! They're as like their mother as two peas. Why aren't you out with the rest of the boys ? She's always wanting to tie you to her apron-strings. Where is she ? " " Mother's upstairs resting." " Hasn't she got the night to rest in same as other people ? " " Your dinner's all ready, father, and the Zeitung's come, and I'm going to read it to you." Hermann picked up a ragged cloth and opened the oven door, and quickly placed two dishes and a hot plate on the table. The contents to purely English eyes and nostrils might not have been attractive, but more than half the man's scowl vanished, and he sat down and ate while Hermann spread out the newspaper and read it with an effortless fluency very different from his laborious English. SO WE GO DOWN AND DOWN " 245 Twelve years before, Johann Mllller, recently natur- al isod and a police constable of some months' standing, had married Marian Gcddcs, the eldest daughter of a police sergeant who had retired on a pension and had laid out his savings to great advantage in cottage property. Marian, the child of less pros- perous days, had gone to service at fourteen, and even before her marriage had been little thought of by Louisa, who had married the managing fore- man of a grocer's widow, and Caroline who was a clerk in the Prudential. At the idea of "a plain pleeceman" the ex-sergeant's family felt the same inexplicable shock that seizes the canon when his daughter chooses a curate, or an admiral when his sees charms in a young lieutenant. Marian was not disrespectful enough to retort that her father had been a policeman himself, and that if he had had half Johann's education he would have become an Inspector : her argument was that he had not been entered for an ordinary constable's work, and would only perform it for a time. He was the son of a baker in Alsace, he had served his time in the army, and spoke French and German as well as he did English, and before long his duties would be pretty well divided between watching anarchists and raiding gambling clubs. Johann proved selfish and overbearing as a husband, but he almost idolised the two children. He paid five shillings a week for a little house with a small yard, and on eighteen shillings Marian had to keep house and dress herself and the children, providing her husband with four hot meals a day. Small 246 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE wonder that she grew thin and shabby, and from pride on one side and vanity on the other the inter- course with her old home almost entirely ceased. Nevertheless Marian's first serious difference of opinion with her husband was in regard to the children. Johann was ambitious and believed in early education, while Marian had been a children's nurse and was anxious to have them out of doors as much as possible, and keep them away from all risk of infection until the age of five was safely The mother was forced to yield, and at three and four she led them twice a day through the crowded streets and delivered them up at the great noisy building. During their first month at school Hermann and Christina both caught diphtheria. Johann never left them night or day : the boy slowly struggled back to life and health, but the grip on his little sister's throat was too fierce a one to be loosed. The father was mad with grief; on the day of the funeral the coffin had to be taken forcibly from his arms. " There is no God ! " he shrieked. "If there were a God He would have heard me." His imprecations terrified Marian; the child born a few days later only survived its birth for an hour. The wife's illness revived a little tenderness in Johann, but her long incapacity for work was too great a strain on him, and he suddenly announced his determination to send her for six months to his mother in Alsace. " She'll feed you up," he said roughly, " and teach you to feed me a little better than you do." SO WE GO DOWN AND DOWN " 247 When at the end of four or five months Marian wrote to her husband to tell him that she was as strong as ever, and longing to return home, and added, " Granny wants to keep Herry altogether, says she'll live long enough to make a baker of him and let him keep on the business," she merely thought it a gratifying proof of her little son's " pretty ways," and was utterly confounded when Johann replied direct to his mother, thanking her for the offer, and declaring that it would be less pain to him to see no child at all in the house than to see Hermann alone. Marian returned to a desolate home, and the birth of Minnie and Edith did little to console her. They were their father's children through and through, and although he rarely took any notice of them, and although she constantly reproached herself for in- sufficient tenderness and indulgence, the neighbours generally spoke of them as " those spoiled little things," while the idolised Hermann and Tina had been at home in half the houses in the street. Marian knew the regulations with regard to the police force fairly well, and it puzzled her that as time went on her husband's pay did not seem to increase. She had no idea that during her absence he had been fined three shillings a week for a serious breach of duty, and soon after her return was mulcted five shillings for six months. As he had not ventured to reduce the eighteen shillings that he gave her, the second fine had been a wholesome check on a growing habit, and if it had not been for the continual temptations to which his special duties exposed 248 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE him, he might yet have recovered his good name in the force. When Hermann was ten years old his grandmother died, and his father went to Alsace to fetch him and to wind up the business. The profits had steadily dwindled away during the proprietress's long illness, and he returned with a very few pounds in his pocket instead of the handsome sum that he had promised himself. Marian did not altogether regret this, and hoped that he would now give all his thoughts to his work, especially as his old affection for the boy had returned and even increased. Hermann had never completely forgotten his mother, and although on zealously friendly terms with Johann, the whole treasure of the child's inmost affection was poured out upon her and his little sisters. " What are you going to do ? " asked Johann with jealous suspicion when Hermann laid the paper down and stirred the fire. " Mother would like some tea when she comes down." The man swore under his breath : " Then let her get it ! Are you and me to be her servants ? " "Well, we would all like some, father, and the kettle's boiling." " Get me the whisky." Hermann fetched a bottle and measured out half the contents: "You will want the rest when you come home," he said, and replaced the cork, thumping it in vigorously with his little fist. It was more than Marian would have ventured to say or do. Johann SO WE GO DOWN AND DOWN " 249 took the bottle, but with no sign of ill-humour, and emptied it into his glass. Hermann added water to it as a matter of form, but there was very little room ; he knew that it was a stiff dose even for his father, and felt guilty and uneasy. There were signs of movement overhead, Johann quickly gulped down the spirit, and Hermann hid away the empty bottle and rinsed the tumbler. Marian came into the room with her three-weeks- old baby in her arms, she smiled pleasantly when she saw the preparations for tea, and tried to reply lightly to her husband's jeering remarks on the number of men-servants that she needed. He presently dropped into a heavy sleep; she checked the boy's zeal when he would have cleared away and washed up, and they sat quietly for nearly an hour, when he woke with a start. " Get me a light, Hermann. I must go and dress. There's to be a raid on the Bounder Club to-night, and I have to be there an hour or two beforehand." " Father's going to dress up ! " whispered Minnie excitedly ; the children were accustomed to laugh and dance round him on these occasions, the only time when they dared make a noise in his presence. Hermann, too, seemed elated, and bustled upstairs and down, getting all that was wanted, and presently, with a burst of boyish laughter, introduced his father in a light tweed suit and pointed shoes, his black moustache waxed, turned up and spread butterfly fashion on his cheeks, and a foreign, bluish shade rubbed over his chin and throat. As he bent towards his wife to have his necktie arranged, she noticed the 250 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE heavy odour of his breath and turned paler than before. " I think I shall go and see how Mr. Schwartz is getting on," said Hermann after his father had started. " Why d'you always want to be with him ? " asked his mother half jealously ; " are you hankering to be a baker?" " I'd rather be a baker than go into the force, or have father there either." " But just look at your grandfather. If you were as steady as he is, and had some of your father's book learning, you'd be safe to be an Inspector." When Hermann returned it was nine o'clock, but it was nearly an hour later before the children went to bed. This was always the custom " the nights father dressed up," and even the boy did not guess that it was because their mother wished them to be still in their first heavy sleep at one or two in the morning. He was excited by his long talk with the baker, a childless, ailing man who had laid by a little money and was yearning to spend the remnant of his life in his native canton in Italian Switzerland, and he had scarcely fallen asleep when he was roused by a loud thumping at the front door and a drunken outcry Only half awake, frightened, but full of valour, he went to the window and shouted, " Go 'way ! My father's a policeman and he'll soon be after you ! " His own door was quickly opened, and his mother stood there with a candle in her hand. Without a word she put the sleeping baby into his arms, and locked the door on the outside. Mercifully the baby SO WE GO DOWN AND DOWN" 251 woke, and thin and small as its waitings were they were so close to his ear that they deadened the sound of stumbling, oaths, and blows in the little passage below. When Hermann roused himself the next morning, his mother was lying asleep on the counterpane beside him ; there were marks on her face such as he had sometimes seen when she had been cleaning the kitchen grate, and chocolate-coloured smears on her thin fair hair. He crept noiselessly downstairs, listening for a moment to his father's heavy breathing as he passed, and set about lighting the fire and hurriedly clearing up the kitchen. It was past eight o'clock, and he dared not stay away from school, as his attendance had been noticeably irregular during the last month, but he need not wait for Minnie, to whom, as an infant, more license was allowed. He was just going to wash and finish dressing when there was a quiet but imperative knock at the door. He hurried to open it, and his heart flew into his mouth when he recognised the man in plain clothes who asked to see his father immediately. Hoping to gain time, he pretended not to understand English, but the Inspector repeated the demand in German, and finally pushed the child on one side and walked in, and having extorted the facts that Miiller was upstairs and alone, went straight to his room. He returned in two minutes' time, looked at his watch, and made a note in his pocket-book which seemed to give him satisfaction until his eyes met Hermann's, and then he hastily left the house. About ten o'clock Johann dressed himself carefully 252 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE and went out: his wife never saw him in uniform again. Was he suspended, and for how long ? She dared not ask, and she silenced all Hermann's wonder- ment and conjecture. She felt certain that he was not on duty of any kind, though he remained out for hours and returned dog-tired, and often with his face so white and drawn that her heart ached with a pity stronger even than her anxiety. A fortnight passed, and then one evening Johann abruptly asked his wife how much money she had. She told him fifteen shillings and three pounds in the bank, this last sum being the remains of the nest- egg that he had proudly refused to let her spend when they were married. " Well, you'd best take care of it. I don't know when you'll get any more." " Have they stopped all your pay ? " " And all my work," he said grimly. " I've got the sack. It was the third time." Marian's pale face flamed ; for the moment she thought only of the disgrace in her father's eyes, then of possible want and hunger, but before she could speak her eyes fell on her husband's worn and dusty boots, and pity revived the old love in her heart. "They've used you, and spoilt you, and twisted you from what you were, and now they throw you away ! " she cried bitterly. " Who was steadier than you until they gave you their spying, dirty work ? " She laid her hand on his shoulder, and touched his grizzled hair with her lips. " Father," said Hermann, " we will be bakers, you "SO WE GO; DOWN AND DOWN" 253 and I. I know much, and you will remember; you \\vre eighteen, grandmother said, and you made the birthday cake for the colonel's daughter that was so beautiful that she cried when they cut it, although eleven candles were round the dish. We will h;i\< Mr. Schwartz's shop, and pay him money every month ; and I will be errand-boy, and mother shall serve the ladies, and we will have a dienstmddckcn to scrub and clean." " If we had but a ten-pound note to start with ! " groaned his father. "For a whole month we pay nothing, and Mr. Schwartz will leave us a fortnight's flour, and many other things. Besides, the journeyman will eat with us and his wages will be small. Ah, Minnie and Edith shall go also to the little school like Aunt Louisa's children, and in the afternoon they shall walk with the dienstmddchen, and Aunt Carry- line " " No ; they shall go to the Kindergarten at the High School," said his father. Marian raised her head ; it was not only the revival of ambition, but the first sign of interest that he had ever shown in his little daughters. " Go thou, father, and talk to Herr Schwartz," said Hermann, dropping into his most persuasive German, and Johann went. " And so we'll go oop 'n oop 'n oop ! " " If your father would but take the pledge ! " said Marian wistfully. But Hermann shook his head with masculine tolerance and breadth of vision 254 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE " No, mother ; he shall drink beer, much beer, but thin. And he shall eat, ah, terribly I So will it go best." That was six years ago, and now, even on week- days, the children, unreproved, may claim Aunt Carry line's acquaintance. It is their patent of respectability, and they do not dream of resenting her former exclusiveness. XIV A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN HELENA AUGUSTA was a remarkably pretty child of four and a half. She called herself Dleena, and we would have called her anything that would have prevented her from coming. No English boarding- house keeper, however poor and struggling, would have tolerated her for a day ; and if she had done so, her rooms would have been empty in a week. Dleena had wisely planted herself in an entirely French pension of a decidedly expensive type; one where elderly ladies with a suite of rooms and a maid " descended " twice a day, and where old gentlemen came in to breakfast and dinner and grumbled over the strangely varied and abundant meals. Dleena and her mother were the only Americans, my sister and I the only English, and there was a solitary neuralgic Russian often driven from the table by the child's piercing and incessant chatter. Dleena usually spoke French, but had cunning enough to clothe all the remarks intended to be dis- paraging in the broadest American. One sign of the French atmosphere of the house was the extreme unpunctuality. Dinner was nominally at seven-thirty, it was often an hour late, and I have seen the child 256 256 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE led in pale and sleepy, and after being revived with hot wine and water eat her way steadily through eight courses. One day even the wine could not restore her good-humour; she looked down the table and remarked with vicious emphasis, " Mahma, I don't like a derned thing here ! " Madame V., in happy ignorance of the language, smiled sweetly from the end of the table, " Cette ehere petite, how delightful it is to hear her talk ! " An opinion which certainly was not shared by Madame's eighteen-year-old son. Dleena frequently brought a tailor's fashion-book to table with her, and in the lengthy pauses between the courses, and in her shrillest tones, would choose " a trousseau pour Monsieur Adolphe " which invariably included " un pantalon rose tout court." " And your little daughter hails from Boston?" asked my sister the first time the garment was named. " Oh, she thinks it is quite different in French." Apparently she was more than uncertain on the point, for, hearing her mother say that she had been busy all the afternoon making "jupons" for a doll, she inquired piercingly, " Mahma, is it bad to say pantalon ? They wurm't patty cwoats." One day Dleena had been worse than usual; she had flicked her napkin ring across the table at an old monsieur, causing him to drop his spoon into his soup with a splash, and then (a solecism which really scandalised her mother) had exclaimed as he mopped up his shirt front, " Tu n'as pas bien fait ! " She had slapped the oldest lady, and told her that she detested her as much as she did Monsieur Adolphe, A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 257 in fact " ils sont de la meme famille" ; she had driven the uncomplaining Russian from the table, and a white-haired Countess in her exquisitely clear and precise French described to me a little English boy who had once visited the house, and the extraordinary " correctness " of his behaviour. " Oh," interposed Dleena's mother vehemently, " I just hate to see severely brought up children, I like mine to be happy." " Madame, I do not speak of severely brought up children. The little boy was absolutely happy, and he permitted others to be so when they regarded him. Never once did I hear his parents reprove him. C'e*tait un enfant bien elevd." All this was a bad introduction for an announce- ment that fell on us like a thunderbolt : Dleena's mother had two boys at school in Paris, they were a "terruble handful," and they were to spend their holidays at the pension. I looked round the table; there was gloom and dismay, but no rebellion. Even the Countess had apparently fired the only shot in her locker, for when Dleena, smarting over the tale of the " well-elevated " one, muttered that she detested her also, she smiled indulgently, and said, "II lui faut une bete noire. To-morrow it will be the turn of someone else." The advent of two boys pronounced unbearable by such a doting mother was not cheering; but to sacrifice a week's board in lieu of notice was a serious matter, and in addition we had just paid the monthly pourboires which we had been warned were "dues aux domestiques," and as there were six of them it 258 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE was no trifle. Besides, the patient endurance all around us was not without its effect. At dinner the next day the boys appeared, Hubert aged eleven, dark and slender, Jack two years younger, plump, rosy, blue-eyed and snub-nosed, both dressed in a close-fitting uniform of dark blue cloth with a few touches of gold. Their mother introduced them to us, and they looked up eagerly, but the smile died off their faces at the first sound of our voices. " I thought they might be Amurricans," said Jack in an audible whisper. " I begin to think there aren't any Amurricans." "Mahma won't have any around where she is," replied Hubert. " Perhaps they'll have been to Amurrica ? " sug- gested his brother hopefully. " Well, anyway we won't have to speak French to them. Mother wants us to speak it even to Dleena, and it will just mix her up. I can't remember not to thee-and-thou her. It's ridic'lous to say 'vous/ but mother always does for fear she'll say 'tu' to the wrong people." "Your sons are looking well," said the Countess, who had previously told me that the boys were " tres bien," and specially admired Jack's " yeux clairs," " I hope they are happy at school ? " Jack looked appealingly at his mother, and there was a faint suggestion of a grimace on Hubert's well-bred features. " Mais oui, Madame ! And they are getting on so well ! Jacky is in the same class as his brother, and lie is nearly two years younger." A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 259 " Excuse me, nmhma," said Hubert in a small, dry ', " Jacky is just where he ought to be, and I'm two years behind. If I was in Amurrica I could do the work two classes ahead of where I am now. It t;ikes me so long to learn the things in French." "You boys talk until no one at table can hear themselves apeak !" Jack seized his mother's hand. " Mahma, we'd be quiet all the time, there's nothing I wouldn't do for you if only you loved me as you do Dleena." Her face flushed, and she drew her hand away without making any reply. Jack was the first to recover himself, and when Hubert suddenly asked Dleena whether it was right to say le pain or la-pin, he joined gaily in the conversation, producing fresh puzzles for the wonderfully keen little person to solve. I never but once knew her confuse the two, or rather three, languages that she spoke: she re- ferred to a ring her mother was wearing as a "sack," sac being bag, and bag in her American pronunciation was indistinguishable from bag-ue. The conversation, although it sufficed to amuse Dleena, was carried on at a much lower pitch than usual; the Russian for once reached the last course in peace, and the Countess smiled approvingly. " They are very kind indeed to the little one. It is a pleasure to see them." "Jack is such a baby," said his mother dis- paragingly. " Really if you saw the two playing together sometimes you would not think there was a year between them." The Countess glanced at the two boys, one mortified, 26o THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE the other indignant, and her delicately pale face coloured slightly as she replied in a tone of re- monstrance, " Mais, madame, il joue pour faire jouer sa petite soeur." A few days later I was on my way upstairs, intending to pass the miserably wet afternoon in letter writing, but outside my door, gazing forlornly from an open window down into the courtyard, were the two boys. " Isn't it beastly ? " demanded Hubert. " I thought you were Americans ? " "Is that English? I do believe we're beginning to forget Amurrican. But there isn't any Amurrican for it!" " For what ? " " For everything in the whole blessed country. We just loathe it. Holidays are nearly as bad as school. Sometimes I think they're worse." I sat down on the ottoman between them. " Tell me what you would do if you were in America." "We should be in the woods camping out, just a lot of boys together, and shooting things and cooking them. You make an oven in the earth and heat it on top, and rake the ashes off the stone when the bird is done." " How do you know when it is ready ? " " I usen't to know : the other boys did. And even when it's school, there are heaps of things you can do." "But surely French boys know how to enjoy themselves too ? " " The ninnies ! Boys ever so much bigger than I am play with a top, and I've seen boys of sixteen A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 261 skip! Parisian boys, not provincials. Provincials are quite manly fellows ; but mother doesn't want us to know them because they don't speak good French. But the Parisians won't know them, and they won't know us, and surely a provincial must speak better French than me and Jack y ! " Why will not the Parisian boys know you ? " "Because they say we're English, and when we say we're Amurrican, they say, ' Then why do you speak English ? ' Six months ago we couldn't speak French at all. We'd learnt it in Amurrica for a long time, but it was all different, The pronunciation, I mean. There's cafi, now. Well, we called that ecu/." " And it's just as bad with the punishments," struck in his younger brother. "I've seen them put boys years older than us in the corner ! If they tried it on us, we'd well, we'd do enough to make them glad to expel us." " What are the usual punishments ? " "They give you lines to write. Hundreds and thousands, but we usually get off pretty easy. I'll tell you how. There's a fellow in our class who can write as fast as any man you ever saw. I don't think anyone would like to read it, but it looks as neat as new pins. Well, if any of us get an imposi- tion we don't rest till he has one too. Of course he gets through before most of us are a quarter done, and then the master lets us all go, because he says he only wants to punish us equally. Did you ever hear of a barring out ? " " Oh yes ; I used to read all my brothers' books." 262 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE " When they feel like that in France, what d'you guess they do? They just walk round and round the COUT against the sun instead of with it. And then the directeur and the r&gisseur say it is * bien se'rieux ' and call out the military." "Has it ever happened since you have been in Paris?" " Well, no ; things gen'ly happen before you come. I've noticed that even in Amurrica." "Mademoiselle, would you like to see me stand outside the window without holding on ? " cried Jack, suddenly springing on the ottoman. "When first I came I could not even look down a courtyard as deep as this, but now " Hubert seized him round the body and dragged him to the floor, from whence, after much pummelling and struggling, they made a not wholly involuntary descent down the thickly carpeted flight of stairs. Forgetting the subject of dispute, they joined hands and tried to scramble back four steps at a time. I had shut and fastened the window, and suggested that they should sit on my balcony and look at some magazines and newspapers which had just arrived. They gladly accepted the invitation, Jacky adding frankly "Our room leads into mahma's, and if we make a sound it keeps Dleena awake. Dinner is so late that she has to sleep in the afternoon." The rain still fell heavily, but the cornice almost completely sheltered the two boys while they scrunched petits fours and chocolate, and looked out on the world with a slightly less critical gaze. A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 263 " What are you going to do to-morrow if it is fine?" " We generally go to the Champs Elyse"es. Dleena cannot walk very far." " But surely you boys can go out alone ? " Hubert sniffed scornfully. "Boys don't in Paris. Have you ever seen any? I mean boys like us," glancing at his uniform. I was obliged to own that I had not. " Sometimes mother takes us to the Jardin des Plantes. But it doesn't matter which. We hate everything in Paris." " Perhaps as soon as you can speak French really well you will go home." " We'd sit up at night to speak French if we believed that. No ; when we're through here mother wants to take us to Hanover to learn German. But it's a mistake. I keep telling her it's a mistake. Spanish is the only language that's any good to an Amurrican. And German schools are worse than French ones. I know a boy who went to one. While his mother was there they called him ' der yunge Herr,' and as soon as she was gone they called him 'unerzogener Bursche,' and rattled him round till his brains might have been in his heels for any good they did him. Now the French aren't like that. If twenty mothers were there, they wouldn't care a hang. They'd live on their own soup rather than change a hair of their plans to please your parents. Did you see Dleena playing shop with Jack yesterday ? He found fault with what she showed him, and said he must go some- 264 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE where else, and she folded her arms and said, ' Cela m'est e'gal. C'est tout comme vous voulez, monsieur. II n'y a pas de meilleur magazin dans tout Paris que le mien/ and she only had two nibbled biscuits and a smashed chocolate-cream. That's just like all French people." "Do you know what my sister and I are going to do to-morrow ? We are going up the river early in the morning as far as the steam-boat will take us, and then walk out into the country until we are tired, have lunch out of doors, and get back in time for dinner. Would you like to go with us ? Very well; shall I ask your mother if you may do so, or will you ? " Hubert said that he would do it ; Jack was about to explain the reasons for this course, but was hastily silenced. Both boys brightened up so much at the prospect that I resolved they should not be deprived of the pleasure, even if I had to burn incense at Dleena's shrine. "We're never really out of doors," said Hubert. "The best we get is houses on two sides instead of three, or three instead of four. The cour is only about six times as big as the one here, and we never get away from it except Thursdays and Sundays, when we go for a walk three in a row." " Why three ? " "So's we shan't be so dreadful long-tailed. No; I don't think it's that. Catholic schools always do it. We're Catholics, but I think they'd rather we wurrrit. They don't seem to think we're the real thing. I fasted this Lent. Jacky hasn't begun A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 265 I got on better than I expected, but when Easter came, my word ! I felt as if I could eat everything I saw. I think mother goes a lot further than the people here. That beautiful old lady who likes Jack always eats meat on Fridays. She told mother she was a good Catholic, but le bon Dieu did not concern Himself with what she ate. Last Friday the old gentleman who sits next the Russian was awfully angry because the dejeuner was so plain, and he sulked until Madame V. promised him something very nice for dinner ! I'm afraid these long dinners, and being so hungry beforehand, make you fond of eating. In Amurrica I only wanted to get through with my dinner and do something else." I never gathered any clear ideas as to the exiles' father. At first I naturally thought he was dead, but later on I learnt that he had paid a hurried visit to the school while the boys were " at recreation." "Did you tell him how much you wished to go back to America ? " I asked. " No ; we thought he'd see for himself how beastly it was. But he was in such a hurry. He was awful mad about the sabots, though. He told mother we walked like convicts, but she only laughed. She says we're her children. I'll have half of my children, anyway ! " " Which half ? " asked Jack eagerly. " Well, it seems kind of mean not to take the girls," drawled Hubert thoughtfully, " but you see mothers can't be fond of girls and yet give them hell, but they can boys. So I guess I'll take that half. I beg your pardon ; it makes a fellow feel like swearing." 266 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE " But what about the sabots ? Surely you don't wear them ? " " Haven't you noticed the way we walk ? We said we'd never wear the blessed things, but we had to. Wet days that is to say, three parts of the winter there's inches of water in the cour. Getting your feet wet is one thing, and living with them wet is another. You see, we are only allowed to get at our clothes once in twenty-four hours, and if you get soaked up to your knees at twelve o'clock, you have to wait until eleven o'clock the next day before you can get dry socks and trousers. Of course you could wring them out at night and hang them up, but it often froze in the dormitory, so that didn't make much difference. At last Jacky got an awful cough, and I gave in, and said I'd wear sabots if he did. Sometimes even the Frencli parents complain, but the masters say, ' They will all have to be soldiers; if we pamper them now, what will happen then?' But it's all just laziness. French people are so frightfully patient. That's what's wrong with 'em." Poor little exiles, robbed of home and country and friends to gratify their mother's idea of culture by learning languages which, at nine and eleven, they had sense enough to know were needless for an American. As the holidays drew to an end they became more desperate, and during the last excursion that we made together Hubert broke out suddenly " I tell you what ! I wish there'd be a thunder- ing big w.-ir." A RICH MAN'S CHILDREN 267 "Where?" " Any where, so long's they'd have to send us home." I am spiritually a member of every Peace League that ever was formed, but in the intensity of my svmp.ithv I four that I replied "I wish there could be!" XV THE FIRE-POLICEMAN " How does she get on ? " asked my married aunt. "Splendidly; a perfect treasure," said my un- married aunt with enthusiasm. " Oh, a new broom, I suppose ! " I gathered that Ursula was the new broom, and that disparagement was intended, and I went to find her ; she had been in the house for some days, but I had sedulously avoided her, having a most unchildlike dread of new servants. I stood at the head of the stairs as she came up, dust-pan and brush in her hand, and for the first time I really looked at her, and then I stretched my arms across the passage as far as they would go. Ursula went down on her knees to reach me more easily, and very tenderly paid the ransom thus silently demanded, and from that moment we were friends. For a long, long time, it seems half a century or so, I had no rival in her affection, and she spent many hours telling me of the life she had lived as a child. She was the daughter of an agricultural labourer, one of the middle ones of a very large family, and as his wages were too low to supply them with even the coarsest food, the mother went out to work whenever THE FIRE-POLICEMAN 269 work could be found. During her absence, whatever the state of the weather, the children were locked out of doors. In the summer they were happy enough, but in the winter often so cold and hungry that their little bit of dinner was eaten by ten o'clock. When the eldest sister grew big enough to be trusted, they were sometimes left at home, but she was of such a tyrannical disposition that they were thankful when, at the advanced age of twelve, she went to service in a neighbouring town. School was never mentioned in these tales, and I have no idea how Ursula acquired her very uncertain know- ledge of reading and writing. Food was nearly always scarce, and once when she was left alone in the house she stole some split peas from the cupboard and ate them raw, for which offence her mother beat her severely with a broom-handle, and kept her fasting in bed for thirty-six hours. " I've for- given her," Ursula used to say, "but I've never forgot it." Naturally I had no conception of the spasmodic harshness and cruelty that poverty and over- strain will produce in even the tenderest mother, and I was strangely perplexed that this same person, a few years later, when well over fifty, had learnt to write in order to lessen the pangs of separation from Ursula. Ursula never did any field work : her mother was determined that none of her daughters ever should, but at seven or eight she was sent to learn how to make fishing-nets. She told me that for a long time after she began she was so small that she had to stand from morning till night instead of sitting on a bench as the others did. Her lingers 270 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE cruelly cut by the cold, wiry string, but she retained grateful recollections of certain women who used to tie up the wounds and comfort her when she cried with pain and fatigue, and sometimes shortened the endless hours by telling her a story, or broke the monotony by sending her on an errand, rewarding her with rows of netting that it would have taken her half the day to produce. Then the summer came, and I went into the country on a three months' visit. I counted up the days and gave Ursula a kiss for each, paid in advance, and placed my chief treasures in her charge, a kitten, a single French bean about an inch above the ground, twelve blades of corn and a white lily just budding. On my return Ursula received me with the same placid, ever-ready affection; the kitten had "grown out of all knowledge " (of me), the bean had produced thirty stringy pods, the sailor gardener had rooted up the blades of corn mistaking them for grass, the lily had flowered and withered and left a most pleasing legend of its extreme loveliness; more momentous still, the Fire-policeman had come on the scene, and I was no longer without a rival. Ursula did not tell me how she had made his acquaintance; looking back, I recognise that lur ideas of" fit" conversation for little girls were rigid, but from someone else I learnt that the preliminaries had been simple and straightforward. The Fire- policeman had looked into her homely face, even to the uncritical eyes of a child who loved her sli<> was not beautiful, and had promptly asked, "Will you take a walk with me, miss ? " and before the THE FIRE-POLICEMAN 271 week was over "keeping comp'ny" was over, and they were formally engaged. Very soon it was borne in upon me that on one point Ursula and the Fire-policeman \\crc not agronl : he had no liking for " little Missy," and as far as a disciplined man thirty years of age could show his feelings to a scrap of a child, he certainly did. I found his attitude unreasonable. It was true that I did not wish Ursula to marry him, but I had never said so; I accepted the engagement as inevitable, like winter, or Sunday, or the eccentricities of weights and measures. I did not like him to wear only a moustache when other policemen were bearded, still less did it please me that he should call Ursula "Sally," but all these things were buried in my heart as deeply as only a child could bury them, so why should he be resentful ? I could make what seemed to me sufficient allowances: I had known other policemen, and knew that they are not as much alike as Punch to this day supposes them to be. There was the didactic policeman who had asked me if I knew what "metropolis" meant, and challenged me to spell "metropolitan," and had taught me to perceive the social gap between himself and a mere local constable; there was the policeman with strict ideas of what was " proper for little girls," implying a vast amount of licence for little boys which aroused some jealousy, but on which my small brothers and cousins found it wiser not to rely ; there was the policeman who explained his grievances to me, private and departmental, while I tried on a life-belt and looked intelligent; all 272 THE NEXT STREET BUT ONE these, and many more, had been my friends. I had even known convict guards and Inspectors, why, then, was I scorned by the Fire-policeman ? Early the following autumn Ursula was married. My aunt wished me to be bridesmaid, and had chosen a brown velvet dress for the occasion, but the bridegroom disrespectfully declined the honour of Missy's presence at the ceremony. None of the relatives on either side attended the wedding; our man-of-all-work gave away the bride, and the breakfast was at his house. I think he must have understood my feelings, for although immensely proud of his cooking he refrained from telling me any of the details. A fortnight after the wedding I went to see Ursula in the married quarters ; she had a large sitting-room looking on the street, a bedroom and a kitchen behind, the fifth share of a boiler, access to the railed-in roof, and to a kind of barrack -yard where the clothes were dried. There was not a scrap of garden, but Ursula had a single pot of musk and was content. She looked just the same as ever, and even wore her white aprons " because it was a pity to waste them," and it was a great delight to me to find her unchanged. My aunt said I must not go too often to see her, because "familiarity breeds contempt." I did not think it possible for the Fire-policeman to despise me more than he did already, but I promised her to limit my visits to one a week, and promised myself that Ursula should always be alone when I went. I spent many afternoons in the quarters that winter, chattering while Ursula sewed or ironed, and THE F1RE-POLICEMAN 273 turning over and over the only three books she possessed, a picture Bible with the Apocrypha, a volume of the fotflirt Hour dating from its earliest antatorg ano Snouetrtal Hppltcatlonslof tbc {Timbers of Commerce. By G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S., A.S.I., PROFESSOR or BOTANY AND LECTURER ON FORESTRY IN THE CITY or LONDON COLLEGE, AND rORMERLY IN THE ROYAL AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. New Edition, Revised and Enlarged and profusely Illustrated. Demy Svo. 125. 6d. net. Of the many thousand different kinds of wood, the author deals with some 750 of those which are practically known in general commerce. The book is divided into two sections. The first de- scribes the structure and development of trees, followed by chapters on the recognition and classification of woods, selecting, seasoning, storing, defects, methods of testing, etc. The second section, com- prising more than half the book, gives condensed accounts, with physical constants, when these are known, of the different woods of commerce, and will prove most valuable for purposes of referen ce. In an appendix will be found nearly fifty full-page illustrations of magnified sections of all the principal woods of commerce. ORGANIC CHEMISTRY FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS. By JULIUS B. COHEN, PH.D., B.Sc., PRorESSOR OF ORGANIC CHEMISTRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, AND ASSOCIATE OF OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER. Demy Svo. 2 is. net. The book is written for students who have already completed an elementary course of Organic Chemistry, and is intended largely to take the place of the advanced text-book. For it has long been the opinion of the author that, when the principles of classification and synthesis and the properties of fundamental groups have been acquired, the object of the teacher should be, not to multiply facts of a similar kind, but rather to present to the student a broad and general outline of the more important branches of the subject. This method of treatment, whilst it avoids the dictionary arrangement which the text-book requires, leaves the writer the free disposal of his materials, so that he can bring together related substances, irrespective of their nature, and deal thoroughly with important theoretical questions which are often inadequately treated in the text-book. 14 Mr. Edward Arnold's List of New Books A HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY. By DR. HUGO BAUER, ROYAL TECHNICAL INSTITUTE, STUTTGART. Translated by R. V. STANFORD, B.Sc. LOND., PRIESTLEY RESEARCH SCHOLAR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM. Crown Svo. 35. 6d. net. In the course of the historical development of chemistry there have occurred definite periods completely dominated by some one leading idea, and, as will be seen from the contents, it is upon these periods that the arrangement of this book is based. CONTENTS. PART I. I. The Chemistry of the Ancients (to the fourth century, A.D.); II. The Period of Alchemy (from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries) ; III. The Period of latrochemistry (sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies) ; IV. The Period of Phlogistic Chemistry (1700 to 1774). PART II. I. The Period of Lavoisier; II. The Period of the Development of Organic Chemistry ; III. The Chemistry of the Present Day. Index. BOOKS RECENTLY PUBLISHED. A STAFF OFFICER'S SCRAP-BOOK During tbe *Ru0so*3apane0e ^ar. By LIEUT.-GENERAL SIR IAN HAMILTON, K.C.B. Two Volumes, Demy Svo. With Illustrations, Maps, and Plans. 1 8s. net each. 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