MISCHIEF BREWING IN NORTH INLET.
Morning, noon and night, whenever the small body of fresh workmen had
to pass to and from the works, they were accompanied by the two
policemen specially engaged to protect them, whilst others hovered
within call. North Inlet, the ill-feeling of its old inhabitants
increasing day by day, had become dangerous. It was not that all the
men would have done violence. Ketler, for instance, and others,
well-disposed men by nature, sensible and quiet, would not have lifted
a hand against those who had, in one sense of the word, displaced
them. But they did this: they stood tamely by, knowing quite well that
some of their comrades only waited their opportunity to kill, or
disable--as might be--Richard North's new followers. North Inlet was
not quite so full as it used to be: for some of the old inhabitants,
weary and out of patience with hope deferred: hope they hardly knew of
what, unless for the good time promised by the Trades' Union: had
departed on the tramp, with their wives and little ones, seeking a
corner of the earth where work sufficient to give them a crust of
bread and a roof, might be found. Others had decamped without their
wives and children: and were in consequence being sought by the
parish. North Inlet, taken on the whole, was in a sore plight. The men
and women, reduced by want and despair to apply for parish relief,
found none accorded them. They had brought themselves to this
condition; had refused work when work was to be had; and to come and
ask to be supported in idleness by the parish was a procedure not to
be tolerated or entertained; as one resolute guardian, sitting at the
head of a table, fiercely told them. Not as much as a loaf of bread
would be given them, added another. If it came to the pass that they
were in danger of dying of hunger--as the applicants urged--why they
must come into the house with their wives and families: and a
humiliating shame that would be for able-bodied men, the guardian
added: but they would receive no relief out-of-doors. So North Inlet,
not choosing to go into that unpopular refuge for the destitute, kept
out of it. And to terrible straits were they reduced!
Looking back upon their past life of plenty, and their present empty
homes and famished faces, little wonder that this misguided body of
men grew to find that something of the old Satan was in them yet. A
great deal of it, too. Perhaps remorse held its full share with them.
They had intended that it should be so entirely for the better when
they threw up work; and it had turned out so surprisingly for the
worse. They had meant to return to work on their own terms; earning
more and toiling less: they had been led to believe that this result
lay in their own hands, and was as safe and certain as that the sun
shone overhead at noonday. Instead of that--here they were, in as
deplorable a condition as human beings could well be; Time had been,
not very long ago either, that the false step might have been
redeemed; Richard North had offered them work again on the old terms.
Ay, and he had once conceded a portion of their demands--as they
remembered well. But that time and that offer had gone by for ever.
Fresh men (few though they were) had taken their places, and they
themselves were starving and helpless.
The feeling against these new men was bitter enough; it was far more
bitter against the small number of old workmen who had gone back
again. We are told that the heart of man is desperately wicked: our
own experience shows us that it is desperately selfish. They saw the
employed men doing the work which once was theirs; they saw them
wearing good coats, eating good food. They themselves had neither one
nor the other; and work they had rejected. It would not have seemed
quite so hard had the work altogether left the place: but to see these
others doing it and living in comfort was more than mortal temper
could brook.
This was not all. The men unreasonably held to it that these others
having taken work again, was the cause why they themselves were kept
out of it. Richard North would ha' come-to, they said, if these curs
hadn't went sneaking back again to lick his hand. If all had held out,
Dick North must ha' given in. And this they repeated so constantly, in
their ire, one to another, that at last they grew to believe it. It
was quite wrong, and they were wholly mistaken: for had Richard North
not begun again cautiously as he did, and on the old terms, he would
not have recommenced at all: but the men refused to see this, and held
to their idea, making it a greater grievance than the want of food. It
is so convenient to have something substantial on which to throw
blame: and unlimited power and permission to punch the obnoxious head
would have afforded intense gratification. Oh, it was very hard to
bear. To see this small knot of men re-established in work, and to
know that it was their own work once, and might have been theirs
still! Peeping through hedges, hiding within doorways, standing
sulkily or derisively in the open ground, they would watch the men
going to and fro, guarded by the two policemen. Many a bitter word,
many a silent threat was levelled at the small band. Murder had been
done from a state of mind not half as bad as they were cherishing.
"What be you looking at, with those evil frowns on your faces?"
A group of malcontents, gazing from a corner of North Inlet at the
daily procession, found this question suddenly sounding on their ears.
Mrs. Gass had stepped out of a dwelling close by, and put it to them.
Their eyes were following the escorted men coming home to their
twelve-o'clock dinner, so that they had not observed her.
They turned to her, and dropped their threatening expression. A man
named Poole, not too much respected in the most prosperous times, and
one of the worst of the malcontents, answered boldly too.
"We was taking the measure o' that small lot o' convic's. Wishing we
could brand 'em."
"Ah," said Mrs. Gass. "It strikes me some of you have been wishing it
before to-day. I should like to give you a bit of advice, my men; and
you, especially, Poole. Take care you don't become convicts
yourselves."
"For two pins, I'd do what 'ud make me one," was the rejoinder of
Poole, who was in a more defiant mood than even he often dared
exhibit. He was a large, thick-set man, with shaggy light hair and a
brick-dust complexion. His clothes, originally fustian, had been worn
and torn and patched until they now hardly held together.
"You are a nice jail-bird, Poole! I don't think you ever were much
better than one," added Mrs. Gass. To which candid avowal Poole only
replied by a growl.
"These hard times be enough to make jail-birds of all of us,"
interposed another, Foster; but speaking civilly. "Why don't the
Government come down and interfere, and prevent our work being took
out of our hands by these rascals?"
"You put the work out of your own hands," said Mrs. Gass. "As to
interference, I should have thought you'd had about enough of that, by
this time. If you had not suffered them fine Trades' Unionists to
interfere with you, my men, you'd have been in full work now, happy
and contented as the day's long."
"What we did, we did for the best."
"What you did, you did in defiance of common sense, and of the best
counsels of your best friends," she said. "How many times did your
master show you what the upshot would be if you persisted in throwing
up your work?--how much breath did I waste upon you, as I'm doing now,
asking you all to avoid a strike--and after the strike had come, day
after day begging you to end it?--could any picture be truer than mine
when I said what you'd bring yourselves to?--rags, and famine, and
desolate homes. Could any plight be worse than this that you've
dropped into now?"
"No, it couldn't," answered Foster. "It's so bad that I say Government
ought to interfere for us."
"If I was Government, I should interfere on one point--and that's with
them agitating Unionists," bravely spoke Mrs. Gass. "I should put
_them_ down a bit."
"This is a free country, ma'am," struck in Ketler, who made one of the
group.
"Well, I used to think it was, Ketler," she said; "but old ways
seem to be turned upside down. What sort of freedom do you enjoy just
now?--how much have you had of it since you bound yourselves sworn
members of the Trades' Unions? You have wanted to work and they
haven't let you: you'd like to be clothed and fed as you used to be
and to clothe and feed your folks at home, and they prevent your
exercising the means by which you may do it. What freedom or liberty
is there in that?--Come, Ketler, tell me, as a reasonable man."
"If the Trades' Unions could do as they wish, there'd be work and
comfort for all of us."
"I doubt that, Ketler."
"But they can't do it," added Ketler. "The masters be obstinate and
won't let 'em."
"That's just it," said Mrs. Gass. "If the Trades' Unions held the
world in their hands, and there were no such things as masters and
capital, why then they might have their own way. But the masters have
their own interests to look after, their business and capital to
defend: and the two sides are totally opposed one to the other, and
squabbling is all that comes of it, or that ever will come of it. You
lose your work, the masters lose their trade, the Unionists fight it
out fiercer than ever--and, between it all, the commerce of the
country is coming to an end. Now, my men, that is the bare truth; and
you can't deny it if you talk till midnight."
"'Twouldn't be no longer much of a free country, if the Government put
down the Trades' Unions," spoke a man satirically; one Cattleton.
"But it ought to put down their arbitrary way of preventing others
working that want to work," maintained Mrs. Gass. "The Unionists be
your worst enemies. I'm speaking, as you know I have been all along,
of the heads among 'em who make laws for the rest; not of poor sheep
like yourselves who have joined the society in innocence. If the heads
like to live without work themselves, and can point out a way by which
others can live without it, well and good; there's no law against
that, nor oughtn't to be; but what I say Government ought to put down
is this--their forcing you men to reject work when it's offered you.
It's a sin and a shame that, through them, the country should be
brought to imbecility, and you, its once free and brave workmen, to
beggary."
"The thought has come over me at times that under the new state of
things we are no better than slaves," confessed Ketler, his eyes
wearing an excited look.
"Now you've just said it, Ketler," cried Mrs. Gass, triumphantly.
"Slaves. That's exactly what you are; and I wish to my heart all the
workmen in England could open their eyes to the truth of it. You took
a vow to obey the dictates of the Trades' Union; it has bound you hand
and foot, body and soul. If a job of work lay to your hand, you dare
not take it up; no, not though you saw your little ones dying of
famine before your eyes. It's the worst kind of slavery that ever fell
on the land. Press-gangs used to be bad enough, but this beats 'em
hollow."
There was no reply from any of the men. Mrs. Gass had been a good
friend to their families even recently; and the old habits of respect
to her, their mistress, still held sway. Perhaps some of them, too,
silently assented to her reasoning.
"It's that that I'd have put down," she resumed. "Let every workman be
free to act on his own judgment, to take work or to leave it. Not but
what it's too late to say so: as far as I believe, the mischief has
gone too far to be remedied."
"It be mighty fine for the masters to cry out and say the Trades'
Unions is our enemies! Suppose we choose to call 'em our friends?"
spoke Poole.
"Put it so, Poole, if you like," said Mrs. Gass equably. "The
society's your friend, let's say. How has it showed its friendship?
what has it done for you?"
Mr. Poole did not condescend to say.
"It's not hard to answer, Poole. The proofs, lie on the surface; not
one of you but may read 'em off-hand. It threw you all out of good
work that you had held for years under a good master, that you might
probably have held, to the last day of your lives. It dismantled your
homes and sent your things to the pawnshop. It has reduced you to a
crust of bread, where you used to have good joints of beef; it has
taken your warm shoes and coats, and sent you abroad half naked. Your
children are starving, some of them are dead; your wives are worn out
with trouble and discontent. And this not for a time, but for good:
for, there's no prospect open to you. No prospect, that I can see, as
I am a living woman. That's what your friends, as you call 'em, have
done for you; and for thousands and thousands beside you. I don't care
what they meant: let it be that they meant well by you, and that you
meant well--as I'm sure you did--in listening to 'em: the result is as
I've said. And you are standing here this day, ruined men."
Mr. Poole looked fierce.
"What is to become of you, and of others ruined like you, the Lord in
heaven only knows. It's a solemn question. When the best trade of the
country's driven from it, there's no longer any place for workmen.
Emigration, suggest some of the newspapers. Others say emigration's
overdone for the present. We don't know what to believe. Any way, it's
a hard thing that a good workman should find no employment in his
native land, but must be packed off, very much as if he was
transported, to be an exile for ever."
Poole, not liking the picture, broke into an oath or two. The other
men looked sad enough.
"You have been drinking, Poole," said Mrs. Gass with dignity, "Keep a
civil tongue in your head before me if, you please."
"I've not had no more than half-a-pint," growled Poole.
"And that was half-a-pint too much," said Mrs. Gass. "When people's
insides are reduced by famine, half-a-pint is enough to upset their
brains in a morning."
"What business have Richard North to go and engage them frogs o'
Frenchmen?" demanded Poole who had in truth taken too much for his
good. "What business have them other fellows, as ought to have stuck
by us, to go back to him? It's Richard North as wants to be
transported."
"Richard North was a good master to you. The world never saw a
better."
"He's a rank bad man now."
"No, no--hold th' tongue!" put in Ketler. "No good to abuse _him_."
"If you men had had a spark of gratitude, you'd have listened to Mr.
Richard North, when he prayed you to go back to him," said Mrs. Gass.
"No, you wouldn't; and what has it done for him? Why, just ruined him,
my men: almost as bare as you are ruined. It has took his hopes from
him; wasted what little money he had; played the very dickens with his
prospects. The business he once had never will and never can come
back. If once you break a mirror to pieces, you can't put it together
again. Mr. Richard has a life of work to look forward to; he may earn
a living, but he won't do much more. You men have at least the
satisfaction of knowing that whilst you ruined your own prosperity,
you also ruined his."
They had talked so long--for all that passed cannot be recorded--that
it was close upon one o'clock, and the small band of workmen and the
two policemen were seen coming back again towards the works. The
malignant look rose again on Poole's face: and he gave forth a savage
growl.
"There'll be mischief yet," thought Mrs. Gass, as she turned away.
Sounds of a woman's sobbing were proceeding from an open door as she
went down North Inlet, and Mrs. Gass stepped in to see what might be
the matter. They came from Dawson's wife. Dawson had been beating her.
The unhappy state to which they were reduced tried the tempers of the
men--of the women also, for that matter--rendering some of them little
better than ferocious beasts. In the old days, when Dawson could keep
himself and his family in comfort, never a cross word had been heard
from him: but all that was changed; and under the new order of things,
it often came to blows. The wife had now been struck in the eye.
Smarting under ills of body and ills of mind, the woman enlarged on
her wrongs to Mrs. Gass, and displayed the mark; all of which at
another time she would certainly have concealed. The home was
miserably bare; the children, wan and thin, were in tatters like their
mother; it was a comprehensive picture of wretchedness.
"And all through those idiots having thrown up their work at the
dictates of the Trades' Union!" was the wrathful comment of Mrs. Gass,
as she departed. "They've done for themselves in this world: and, to
judge by the unchristian lives they are living, seem to be in a fair
way of doing for themselves in the next."
As she reached her own house, the smart housemaid was showing Miss
Dallory out of it. That young lady, making a call on Mrs. Gass, had
waited for her a short time, and was departing. They now went in
together. Mrs. Gass, entering her handsome drawing-room, began
recounting the events of the morning; what she had heard and seen.
"There'll be mischief, as sure as a gun," she concluded. "My belief
is, that some of them would kill Mr. Richard if they had only got the
chance."
Mary Dallory looked startled. "Kill _him!_" she cried. "Why, he has
always been their friend. He would have been so still, had they only
been willing."
"He's a better friend to them still than they are aware of," said Mrs.
Gass, nodding her head wisely. "Miss Mary, if ever there was a
Christian man on earth, it is Richard North. His whole life has been
one long thought for others. Who else has kept up Dallory Hall? Who
would have worked and slaved on, and on, not for himself, but to
maintain his father's home, finding money for madam's wicked
extravagance, to save his poor father pain, knowing that the old man
had already more than he could bear. At Mr. Richard's age, he ought,
before this, to have been making a home and marrying: he would have
done so under happier circumstances: but he has had to sacrifice
himself to others. He has done more for the men than they think for;
ay, even at the time that they were bringing ruin upon him--as they
have done--and ever since. Richard North is worth his weight in gold.
Heaven, that sees all, knows that he is; and he will sometime surely
be rewarded for it. It may not be in this world, my dear; for a great
many of God's own best people go down to their very graves in nothing
but disappointment and sorrow: but he'll find it in the next."
Miss Dallory made no reply. All she said was, that she must go. And
Mrs. Gass escorted her to the front-door. They had almost reached it,
when Miss Dallory stopped to ask a question, lowering her voice as she
did so.
"Have you heard any rumour about Dr. Rane?"
Mrs. Gass knew what must be meant as certainly as though it had been
spoken. She turned cold, and hot, and cold again. For once language
failed her.
"It is something very dreadful," continued Miss Dallory. "I do not
like to give utterance to it. It--it has frightened me."
"Law, my dear, don't pay no attention to such rubbish as rumours,"
returned Mrs. Gass, heartily. "_I_ don't. Folk say all sorts of things
of me, I make little doubt; just as they are ready to do of other
people. Let 'em! We shan't sleep none the worse for it. Goodbye. I
wish you'd have stayed and taken some dinner with me--as lovely a
turkey-poult as ever you saw, and a jam dumpling."