and giving a pull at the door to make sure it had not opened. "Dicky,
poor fellow, is half starved; he's not used to it, and feels it keenly:
resents it, I dare say. This morning, when out in the lane, he saw a
tray of halfpenny buns, hot from the oven, put on old Ford's counter.
The sight was too much for him, the temptation too great. Dicky Hoar is
naturally honest; has been, up to now, at all events: but I suppose
hunger was stronger than honesty to-day. He crept into the shop on all
fours, abstracted a bun with his fingers, and was creeping out again,
when Ford pounced upon him, bun in hand. There was a fine outcry. Ford
was harsh, roared out for the policeman, and threatened him with jail,
and in the midst of the commotion Hoar came up. In his mortification at
hearing that a boy of his had been caught pilfering, he seized upon a
thick stick that a bystander happened to have, and laid it unmercifully
upon poor Dick."
"And broke his arm?"
"And broke his arm. And covered him with weals beside. He'll be all
manner of colours to-morrow."
"What a brutal fellow Hoar must be!"
"To beat him like that?--well, yes," assented Miss Timmens, in accents
that bore rather a dubious sound. "Passion must have blinded him and
urged him further than he intended. The man has always been upright;
prided himself on being so, as one may say; and there's no doubt that
to find his child could be a thief shook him cruelly. This strike is
ruining the tempers of the men; it makes them feel at war with
everything and everybody."
When I got home I found them in the thick of the news also, for Cole the
doctor was there telling it all. Mrs. Todhetley, sitting on the sofa
with her bonnet untied and her shawl unpinned, was listening in a kind
of horror.
"But surely the arm cannot be _broken_, Mr. Cole!" she urged.
"Broken just above the wrist, ma'am. I ought to know, for I set it.
Wicked little rascal, to steal the bun! As to Hoar, he is as fierce as a
tiger when really enraged."
"Well, it sounds very shocking."
"So it does," said Cole. "I think perhaps it may be productive of one
good--keep the boy from picking and stealing to the end of his life."
"He was hungry, you say."
"Famished, ma'am. Most of the young ones in Crabb Lane are so just now."
The Squire was walking up and down the room, his hands in his pockets.
He halted, and faced the Doctor.
"Look here, Cole--what has brought this state of things about? A
strike!--and prolonged! Why, I should as soon have expected to hear
the men had thrown up their work to become Merry Andrews! Who is in
fault?--the masters or the men?"
Cole lifted his eyebrows. "The masters lay the blame on the men, the men
lay it on the masters."
"What is it the men are holding out for?"
"To get more wages, and to do less work."
"Oh, come, that's a twofold demand," cried the Pater. "Modest folk
generally ask for one favour at a time. Meanwhile things are all at
sixes-and-sevens, I suppose, in Crabb Lane?"
"Ay," said the Doctor. "At worse than sixes-and-sevens, indoors and out.
There are empty cupboards and empty rooms within; and there's a good
deal of what's bad without. It's the wives and children that suffer,
poor things."
"The men must be senseless to throw themselves out of work!"
"The men only obey orders," cried Mr. Cole. "There's a spirit of
disaffection abroad: certain people have constituted themselves rulers,
and they say to the men, 'You must do this,' and 'You must not do that.'
The men have yielded themselves up to be led, and _do_ do what they are
told, right or wrong."
"I don't say they are wrong to try to get more wages if they can; it
would be odd if we were to be debarred from bettering ourselves," spoke
the Squire. "But to throw up their work whilst they are trying, there's
the folly; there's where the shoe must tighten. Let them keep on their
work whilst they agitate."
"They'd tell you, I expect, that the masters would be less likely to
listen then than they are now."
"Well, they've no right, in common sense, to throw up their wives' and
children's living, if they do their own," concluded the Squire.
Cole nodded. "There's some truth in that," he said as he got up to
leave. "Any way, things are more gloomy with us than you'd believe,
Squire."
* * * * *
You may remember that I told you, when speaking of the Court and my
early home, how, when I was a little child of four years old, Hannah my
nurse, and Eliza one of her fellow-servants, commented freely in my
hearing on my father's second marriage, and shook me well because I was
wise enough to understand them. Eliza was then housemaid at the Court;
and soon after this she had left it to marry Jacob Hoar. She was a nice
sort of young woman (in spite of the shaking), and I kept up a great
acquaintance with her, and was free, so to say, of her house in Crabb
Lane, running in and out of it at will, when we were at Crabb Cot. A
tribe of little Hoars arrived, one after another. Jacky, the eldest,
over ten now, had a place at the works, and earned two shillings a week.
"'Twarn't much," said Hoar the father, "but 'twas bringing his hand in."
Dick, the second, he who had just had the beating, was nine; two girls
came next, and there was a young boy of three.
Hoar earned capital wages--to judge by the comfortable way in which they
lived: I should think not less than forty shillings a week. Of course
they spent it all, every fraction; as a rule, families of that class
never put by for a rainy day. They might have done it, I suppose; in
those days provisions were nothing like as dear as they are now; the
cost of living altogether was less.
Of course the Hoars had to suffer in common with the rest under the
strike. But I did not like to hear of empty cupboards in connection with
Eliza; no, nor of her boy's broken arm; and in the evening I went back
to Crabb Lane to see her. They lived next door but one to the house that
had been Lease the pointsman's; but theirs was far better than that
tumble-down hut.
Well, it was a change! The pretty parlour looked half dismantled. Its
ornaments and best things had gone, as Miss Timmens expressed it, to
adorn the pawnshop. The carpet also. Against the wall, on a small
mattress brought down for him, lay Dicky and his bruises. Some of the
children sat on the floor: Mrs. Hoar was kneeling over Dicky and bathing
his cheek, which was big enough for two, for it had caught the stick
kindly.
"Well, Eliza!"
She got up, sank into a chair, flung her apron up to her face, and burst
into tears. I suppose it was at the sight of me. Not knowing what to say
to that, I pulled the little girls' ears and then sat down on the floor
by Dicky. _He_ began to cry.
"Oh come, Dick, don't; you'll soon be better. Face smarts, does it?"
"I never thought to meet you like this, Master Johnny," said Eliza,
getting up and speaking through her tears. "'Twas hunger made him do it,
sir; nothing else. The poor little things be so famished at times it
a'most takes the sense out of 'em."
"Yes, I am sure it was nothing else. Look up, Dick. Don't cry like
that." One would have thought the boy was going into hysterics.
I had an apple in my pocket and gave it to him. He kept it in his hand
for some time, and then began to eat it ravenously, sobbing now and
then. The left arm, the broken one, lay across him, bound up in splints.
"I didn't mean to steal the bun," he whispered, looking up at me through
his tears. "I'd ha' give Mrs. Ford the first ha'penny for it that I'd
ever got. I was a-hungered, I was. We be always a-hungered now."
"It is hard times with you, I am afraid, Eliza," I said, standing by
her.
Opening her mouth to answer, a sob caught her breath, and she put her
hand to her side, as if in pain. Her poor face, naturally patient and
meek, was worn, and had a bright hectic spot upon it. Eliza used to be
very pretty, and was young-looking still, with smooth brown hair, and
mild grey eyes: she looked very haggard now and less tidy. But, as to
being tidy, how can folk be that, when all their gowns worth a crown are
hanging up at the pawnbroker's?
"It's dreadful times, Master Johnny. It's times that frighten me. Worse
than all, I can't see when it is to end, and what the end is to be."
"Don't lose heart. The end will be that the men will go to work again: I
dare say soon."
"The Lord send it!" she answered. "That's the best we can hope for, sir;
and that'll be hard enough. For we shall have to begin life again, as
'twere; with debts all around us, and our household things and our
clothes in pledge."
"You will get them out again then."
"Ay, but how long will it take to earn the money to do it? This strike,
as I look upon it, has took at the rate of five years of prosperity out
of our lives, Master Johnny."
"The league--or whatever it is--allows you all money to live, does it
not?"
"We get some, sir. It's not a great deal. They tell us that there's
strikes a-going on in many parts just now; these strikes have to be
helped as well as the operatives here; and so it makes the allowance
small. We have no means of knowing whether that's true or not, us women,
I mean; but I dare say it is."
"And the allowance is not enough to keep you in food?"
"Master Johnny, there's so many other things one wants, beside bare
food," she answered, with a sigh. "We must pay our rent, or the landlord
would turn us out; we must have a bit o' coal for firing: we must have
soap; clothes must be washed, sir, and we must be washed; we must have a
candle these dark evenings; shoes must be mended: and there's other
trifles, too, that I needn't go into, as well as what Hoar takes for
himself----"
"But does he take much?" I interrupted.
"No, sir, he don't: nothing to what some of 'em takes: he has always
been a good husband and father. The men, you see, sir, must have a few
halfpence in their pockets to pay for their smoke and that, at their
meetings in the evening. There's not much left for food when all this
comes to be taken out--and we are seven mouths to fill."
No wonder they were hungry!
"Some of the people you've known ought to help you, Eliza. Mrs. Sterling
at the old home might: or Mrs. Coney. Do they?"
Eliza Hoar shook her head. "The gentlemen be all again us, sir, and so
the ladies dare not do anything. As to Mrs. Sterling--I don't know that
she has so much as heard of the strike--all them miles off."
"You mean the gentlemen are against the strike!"
"Yes, sir; dead again it. They say strikes is the worst kind of evil
that can set in, both for us and for the country; that it will increase
the poor-rates to a height to be afraid of, and in the end drive the
work away from the land. Sitting here with my poor children around me at
dusk to save candle, I get thinking sometimes that the gentlemen may not
be far wrong, Master Johnny."
Seeing the poor quiet faces lifted to me, from which every bit of spirit
seemed to have gone, I wished I had my pockets full of buns for them.
But buns were not likely to be there; and of money I had none: buying
one of the best editions of Shakespeare had just cleared me out.
"Where's Hoar?" I asked, in leaving.
A hot flush overspread her face. "He has not shown himself here, Master
Johnny, since what he did to _him_," was her resentful answer, pointing
to Dick. "Afraid to face me, he is."
"I'd not say too much to him, Eliza. It could not undo what's done, and
might only make matters worse. I dare say Hoar is just as much vexed
about it as you are."
"It's to be hoped he is! Why did he go and set upon the child in that
cruel way? It's the men that goes in for the strike; 'tisn't us: and
when the worry of it makes 'em so low they hardly know where to turn,
they must vent it upon us. Master Johnny, there are minutes now when I
could wish myself dead but for the children."
I went home with my head full of a scheme--getting Mrs. Todhetley and
perhaps the Coneys to do something for poor Eliza Hoar. But I soon found
I might as well have pleaded the cause of the public hangman.
Who should come into our house that evening but old Coney himself. As if
the strike were burning a hole in his tongue, he began upon it before he
was well seated, and gave the Squire his version of it: that is, his
opinion. It did not differ in substance from what had been hinted at by
Eliza Hoar. Mr. Coney did not speak _for_ the men or _against_ them; he
did not speak for or against the masters; that question of conflicting
interests he said he was content to leave: but what he did urge, and
very strongly, was, that strikes in themselves must be productive of
an incalculable amount of harm; they brought misery on the workmen,
pecuniary embarrassment on the masters, and they most inevitably would,
if persisted in, eventually ruin the trade of the kingdom; therefore
they should, by every possible means, be discouraged. The Squire, in his
hot fashion, took up these opinions for his own and enlarged upon them.
When old Coney was gone and we had our slippers on, I told them of my
visit to Eliza, and asked them to help her just a little.
"Not by a crust of bread, Johnny," said the Squire, more firmly and
quietly than he usually spoke. "Once begin to assist the wives and
children, and the men would have so much the less need to bring the
present state of things to an end."
"I am so sorry for Eliza, sir."
"So am I, Johnny. But the proper person to be sorry for her is her
husband: her weal and woe can lie only with him."
"If we could help her ever so little!"
The Squire looked at me for a full minute. "Attend to me, Johnny Ludlow.
Once for all, NO! The strike, as Coney says, must be discouraged by
every means in our power. _Discouraged_, Johnny. Otherwise these strikes
may come into fashion, and grow to an extent of which no man can foresee
the end. They will bring the workmen to one of two things--starvation,
or the workhouse. That result seems to me inevitable."
"I'm sure it makes me feel very uncomfortable," said the Mater. "One can
hardly see where one's duty lies."
"Our poor-rates are getting higher every day; what do you suppose
they'll come to if this is to go on?" continued the Squire. "I'd be glad
for the men to get better pay if they are underpaid now: whether they
are or not, I cannot tell; but rely upon it, striking is not the way to
attain to it. It's a way that has ruined many a hopeful workman, who
otherwise would have gone on contentedly to the end of his days; ay, and
has finally killed him. It will ruin many another. Various interests are
at stake in this; you must perceive it for yourself, Johnny lad, if you
have any brains; but none so great as that of the workmen themselves.
With all my heart I wish, for their own sakes, they had not taken this
extreme step."
"And if the poor children starve, sir?" I ventured to say.
"Fiddlestick to starving! They need not starve while there's a workhouse
to go to. And _won't_; that's more. _Can't_ you see how all this acts,
Mr. Johnny? The men throw themselves out of work; and when matters
come to an extremity the parish must feed the children, and we, the
rate-payers, must pay. A pleasant prospect! How many scores of children
are there in Crabb Lane alone?"
"A few dozens, I should say, sir."
"And a few to that. No, Johnny; let the men look to their families'
needs. For their own sakes; I repeat it; for their own best interests,
I'll have them left alone. They have entered on this state of things of
their own free will, and they must themselves fight it out.--And now get
you off to bed, boys."
"The Pater's right, Johnny," cried Tod, stepping into my room as we
went up, his candle flaring in the draught from the open staircase
window; "right as right can be on principle; but it _is_ hard for the
women and children----"
"It is hard for themselves, too, Tod: only they have the unbending
spirit of Britons, to hold out to the death and make no bones over it."
"I wish you'd not interrupt a fellow," growled Tod. "Look here; I've got
four-and-sixpence, every farthing I can count just now. You take it and
give it to Eliza. The Pater need know nothing."
He emptied his trousers pocket of the silver, and went off with his
candle. I'm not sure but that he and I both enjoyed the state of
affairs as something new. Had any one told us a year ago that our quiet
neighbourhood could be disturbed by a public ferment such as this, we
should never have believed it.
The next morning I went over to South Crabb with the four-and-sixpence.
Perhaps it was not quite fair to give it, after what the Squire had
said--but there's many a worse thing than that done daily in the world.
Eliza caught her breath when I gave it to her, and thanked me with her
eyes as well as her lips. She had on a frightfully old green gown--green
once--shabby and darned and patched, and no cap; and she was on her
knees wiping up some spilt water on the floor.
"Mind, Eliza, you must not say a word to any one. I should get into no
end of a row."
"You were always generous, Master Johnny. Even when a baby----"
"Never mind that. It is not I who am generous now. The silver was given
me for you by some one else; I am cleared out, myself. Where's Dicky?"
"He's upstairs in his bed, sir: too stiff to move. Mr. Cole, too, said
he might as well lie there to-day. Would you like to go up and see him?"
As I ran up the staircase, open from the room, a vision of her wan face
followed me--of the catching sob again--of the smooth brown hair which
she was pressing from her temples. We have heard of a peck of troubles:
she seemed to have a bushel of them.
Dicky was a sight, as far as variety of colours went. There was no
mistake about his stiffness.
"It won't last long, Dick; and then you'll be as well as ever."
Dick's grey eyes--they were just like his mother's--looked up at mine. I
thought he was going to cry.
"There. You will never take anything again, will you?"
Dick shook his head as emphatically as his starched condition allowed.
"Father says as he'd kill me the next time if I did."
"When did he say that?"
"This morning; afore he went out."
Dicky's room had a lean-to roof, and was about the size of our jam
closet at Crabb Cot. Not an earthly article was in it but the mattress
he was lying on.
"Who sleeps here besides you, Dicky?"
"Jacky and little Sam. 'Liza and Jessy sleeps by father and mother."
"Well, good day, Dicky."
Whom should I come upon at the end of Crabb Lane, but the Squire and
Hoar. The Squire had his gun in his hand and was talking his face red:
Hoar leaned against the wooden palings that skirted old Massock's
garden, and looked as sullen as he had looked yesterday. I thought the
Pater had been blowing him up for beating the boy; but it seemed that he
was blowing him up for the strike. Cole, the surgeon, hurrying along on
his rounds, stopped just as I did.
"Not your fault, Hoar!" cried the Squire. "Of course I know it's not
your fault alone, but you are as bad as the rest. Come; tell me what
good the strike has done for you."
"Not much as yet," readily acknowledged Hoar, in a tone of incipient
defiance.
"To me it seems nothing less than a crime to throw yourself out of work.
There's the work ready to your hands, _spoiling_ for want of being
done--and yet you won't do it!"
"I do but obey orders," said Hoar: who seemed to be miserable enough, in
spite of the incipient defiance.
"But is there any sense in it?" reasoned the Squire. "If you men could
drop the work and still keep up your homes and, their bread-and-cheese,
and their other comforts, I'd say nothing. But look at your poor
suffering wives and children. I should be _ashamed_ to be idle, when my
idleness bore such consequences."
The man answered nothing. Cole put in his word.
"There are times when I feel _I_ should like to run away from my work,
and go in for a few weeks' or months' idleness, Jacob Hoar; and drink my
two or three glasses of port wine after dinner of a day, like a lord;
and be altogether independent of my station and my patients, and of
every other obligation under the sun. But I can't. I know what it would
do for _me_--bring me to the parish."
"D'ye think we throw up the work for the sake o' being idle?" returned
Hoar. "D'ye suppose, sirs,"--with a burst of a sigh--"that this state o'
things is a _pleasure_ to us? We are doing it for future benefit. We are
told by them who act for us, and who must know, that great benefit will
come of it if we be only firm; that our rights be in our own hands if we
only persevere long enough in standing out for 'em. Us men has our
rights, I suppose, as well as other folks."
"Those who, as you term it, act for you, may be mistaken, Hoar," said
the Squire. "I'll leave that point: and go on to a different question.
Do you think that the future benefit (whatever that may be: it's vague
enough now) _is worth the cost you are paying for it_?"
No reply. A look crossed Hoar's face that made me think he sometimes
asked the same question of himself.
"It does appear to be a very _senseless_ quarrel, Hoar," went on the
Squire. Cole had walked on. "One-sided too. There's an old saying,
'Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face,' and your strike seems just
an illustration of it. You see, it is only _you men_ that suffer. The
rulers you speak of don't suffer: while they are laying down rules for
you, they are flourishing on the meat and corn of the land; the masters,
in one sense, do not suffer, for they are not reduced to any extremity
of any kind. But you, my poor fellows, _you_ bear the brunt of it all.
Look at your homes, how they are bared; look at your hungry children.
What but hunger drove little Dick to crib that bun yesterday?"
Hoar took off his hat and passed his hand over his brow and his black
hair. It seemed to be a favourite action of his when in any worry of
thought.
"It is just ruin, Jacob Hoar. If some great shock--say a mountain of
snow, or a thunderbolt--descended suddenly from the skies and destroyed
everything there was in your home, leaving but the bare walls standing,
what a dreadful calamity you would think it. How bitterly you'd bemoan
it!--perhaps almost feel inclined, if you only dared, to reproach Heaven
for its cruelty! But you--you bring on this calamity yourself, of your
own free and deliberate will. You have dismantled your home with your
own fingers; you have taken out your goods and sold or pledged them, to
buy food. I hear you have parted with all."
"A'most," assented Hoar readily; as if it quite pleased him the Squire
should show up the case at its worst.
"Put it that you resume work to-morrow, you don't resume it as a free
man. You'll have a load of debt and embarrassment on your shoulders.
You will have your household goods to redeem--if they are then still
redeemable: you will have your clothes and shoes to buy, to replace
present rags: while on your mind will lie the weight of all this past
time of trouble, cropping up every half-hour like a nightmare. Now--is
the future benefit you hint at worth all this?"
Hoar twitched a thorny spray off the hedge behind the pales, and twirled
it about between his teeth.
"Any way," he said, the look of perplexity clearing somewhat on his
face, "I be but doing as my mates do; and we are a-doing for the best.
So far as we are told and believe, it'll be all for the best."
"Then _do_ it," returned the Squire in a passion; and went stamping away
with his gun.
"Johnny, they are all pig-headed together," he presently said, as we
crossed the stile into the field of stubble whence the corn had been
reaped. "One can't help being sorry for them: they are blinded by
specious arguments that will turn out, I fear, to be all moonshine. Hold
my gun, lad. Where's that dog, now? Here, Dash, Dash, Dash!"
Dash came running up; and Tod with him.
* * * * *
In a fortnight's time, Crabb Cot was deserted again. Tod and I returned
to our studies, the Squire and the rest to Dyke Manor. As the weeks
went on, scraps of news would reach us about the strike. There were
meetings of the masters alone: meetings of the men and what they called
delegates; meetings of masters and men combined. It all came to nothing.
The masters at length offered to concede a little: the men (inwardly
wearied out, sick to death of the untoward state of things) would have
accepted the slight concession and returned to work with willing feet;
but their rulers--the delegates, or whatever they were--said no. And so
the idleness and the pinching distress continued: the men got more
morose, and the children more ragged. After that (things remaining in a
chronic state of misery, I suppose) we heard nothing.
* * * * *
"Another lot of faggots, Thomas; and heap up the coal. This is weather!
Goodness, man! Don't put the coal on gingerly, as if you were afraid of
it. Molly's a fool."
We were in the cozy sitting-room again at Crabb Cot. The Squire was
right: it _was_ weather: the coldest I have ever felt in December. Old
Thomas's hands were frozen with the drive from the station. Molly, who
had come on the day before, had put about a handful of fire in the grate
to greet us with. Naturally it put the Squire's temper up.
"That there strike's a-going on still, sir," began Thomas, as he waited
to watch his wood blaze up.
"No!" cried the Squire. For we had naturally supposed it to be at an
end.
"It is, though, sir. Ford the driver telled me, coming along, that Crabb
Lane was in a fine state for distress."
"Oh dear! I wish I knew whose fault it is!" bewailed Mrs. Todhetley.
"What more did the driver say, Thomas?"