THE CARES OF WEALTH.
It is, perhaps, a survival of feudal customs that in English minds a
kind of proprietorship is assumed over one's dependents, those who labor
for a man and are paid by him. It was this feeling of responsibility
which had entered into the mind of Angela, and was now firmly fixed
there. All these men, this army of seven hundred brewers, drivers,
clerks, accountants, and the rest, seemed to belong to her. Not only did
she pay them the wages and salaries which gave them their daily bread,
but they lived in her own houses among the streets which lie to the
right and to the left of the Mile End Road. The very chapels where they
worshipped, being mostly of some Nonconformist sect, stood on her own
ground--everything was hers.
The richest heiress in England! She repeated this to herself over and
over again, in order to accustom herself to the responsibilities of her
position, not to the pride of it. If she dwelt too long upon the subject
her brain reeled. What was she to do with all her money? A man--like her
grandfather--often feels joy in the mere amassing of wealth; to see it
grow is enough pleasure; other men in their old age sigh over bygone
years, which seem to have failed in labor or effort. Then men sigh over
bygone days in which more might have been saved. But girls cannot be
expected to reach these heights. Angela only weakly thought what an
immense sum of money she had, and asked herself what she could do, and
how she should spend her wealth to the best advantage.
The most pitiable circumstance attending the possession of wealth is
that no one sympathizes with the possessor. Yet his or her sufferings
are sometimes very great. They begin at school, where a boy or girl, who
is going to be very rich, feels already set apart. He loses the greatest
spur to action. It is when they grow up, however, that the real trouble
begins. For a girl with large possessions is always suspicious lest a
man should pretend to love her for the sake of her money; she has to
suspect all kinds of people who want her to give, lend, advance, or
promise them money; she is the mere butt of every society, hospital, and
institution; her table is crowded every morning with letters from
decayed gentlewomen and necessitous clergymen, and recommenders of
"cases;" she longs to do good to her generation, but does not know how;
she is expected to buy quantities of things which she does not want, and
to pay exorbitant prices for everything; she has to be a patron of art:
she is invited to supply every woman throughout the country who wants a
mangle, with that useful article; she is told that it is her duty to
build new churches over the length and breadth of the land: she is
earnestly urged to endow new Colonial bishoprics over all the surface of
the habitable globe. Then she has to live in a great house and have
troops of idle servants. And, whether she likes it or not, she has to go
a great deal in society.
All this, without the least sympathy or pity from those who ought to
feel for her, who are in the happy position of having no money. Nobody
pities an heiress; to express pity would seem like an exaggerated
affectation of virtue, the merest pedantry of superiority; it would not
be believed. Therefore, while all the world is agreed in envying her,
she is bemoaning her sad fate. Fortunately, she is rare.
As yet, Angela was only just at the commencement of her troubles. The
girls at Newnham had not spoiled her by flattery or envy; some of them
even pitied her sad burden of money; she had as yet only realized part
of the terrible isolation of wealth; she had not grown jealous, or
suspicious, or arrogant, as in advancing years often happens with the
very rich; she had not yet learned to regard the whole world as composed
entirely of money-grabbers. All she had felt hitherto was that she went
in constant danger from interested wooers, and that youth, combined with
money-bags, is an irresistible attraction to men of all ages. Now,
however, for the first time she understood the magnitude of her
possessions, and felt the real weight of her responsibilities. She saw,
for the first time, the hundreds of men working for her; she saw the
houses whose tenants paid rent to her; she visited her great brewery,
and she asked herself the question, which Dives no doubt frequently
asked--What she had done to be specially set apart and selected from
humanity as an exception to the rule of labor? Even Bunker's complaint
about the difficulty of putting by a little, and his indignation because
she herself could put by so much, seemed pathetic.
She walked about the sad and monotonous streets of East London,
reflecting upon these subjects. She did not know where she was, nor the
name of any street; in a general way she knew that most of the street
probably belonged to herself, and that it was an inexpressibly dreary
street. When she was tired she asked her way back again. No one insulted
her; no one troubled her; no one turned aside to look at her. When she
went home she sat silently, for the most part, in the common
sitting-room. The boarding-house was inexpressibly stupid except when
the sprightly young mechanic was present, and she was even angry with
herself for finding his society pleasant. What could there be, she
asked, in common between herself and this workman? Then she wondered,
remembering that so far she had found nothing in her own mind that was
not also in his. Could it be that two years of Newnham had elevated her
mentally no higher than the level of a cabinet-maker?
Her meditation brought her, in the course of a few days, to the point of
action. She would do something. She therefore wrote a letter instructing
her solicitors to get her, immediately, two reports, carefully drawn up.
First, she would have a report on the brewery, its average profits for
the last ten years, with a list of all the employees, the number of
years' service, the pay they received, and, as regards the juniors, the
characters they bore.
Next she wanted a report on her property at the East End, with a list of
her tenants, their occupations and trades, and a map showing the
position of her houses.
When she had got these reports she would be, she felt, in a position to
work upon them.
Meantime, Mr. Bunker not having yet succeeded in finding a house
suitable for her dressmaking business, she had nothing to do but to go
on walking about and to make herself acquainted with the place. Once or
twice she was joined by the idle apprentice, who, to do him justice, was
always ready to devote his unprofitable time to these excursions, which
his sprightliness enlivened.
There is a good deal to see in and about Stepney, though it can hardly
be called a beautiful suburb. Formerly it was a very big place, so big
that, though Bethnal Green was once chopped off at one end and Limehouse
at the other, not to speak of Shadwell, Wapping, Stratford, and other
great cantles, there still remains a parish as big as St. Pancras. Yet,
though it is big, it is not proud. Great men have not been born there or
lived there; there are no associations. Stepney Green has not even got
its Polly, like Paddington Green and Wapping Old Stairs; the streets are
all mean, and the people for the most part stand upon that level where
respectability--beautiful quality!--begins.
"Do you know the West End?" Angela asked her companion when they were
gazing together upon an unlovely avenue of small houses which formed a
street. She was thinking how monotonous must be the daily life in these
dreary streets.
"Yes, I know the West End. What is it you regret in your comparison?"
Angela hesitated.
"There are no carriages here," said the workman; "no footmen in powder
or coachmen in wigs; there are no ladies on horseback, no great squares
with big houses, no clubs, no opera-houses, no picture-galleries. All
the rest of life is here."
"But these things make life," said the heiress. "Without society and
art, what is life?"
"Perhaps these people find other pleasures; perhaps the monotony gets
relieved by hope and anxiety, and love, and death, and such things." The
young man forgot how the weight of this monotony had fallen upon his own
brain; he remembered, now, that his companion would probably have to
face this dreariness all her life, and he tried in a kindly spirit to
divert her mind from the thought of it. "You forget that each life is
individual, and has its own separate interests; and these are apart
from the conditions which surround it. Do you know my cousin, Tom
Coppin?"
"No: what is he?"
"He is a printer by trade. Of late years he has been engaged in setting
up atheistic publications. Of course, this occupation has had the effect
of making him an earnest Christian. Now he is a captain of the Salvation
Army."
"But I thought----"
"Don't think, Miss Kennedy; look about and see for yourself. He lives on
five-and-twenty shillings a week, in one room, in just such a street as
this. I laughed at him at first; now I laugh no longer. You can't laugh
at a man who spends his whole life preaching and singing hymns among the
Whitechapel roughs, taking as a part of the day's work all the rotten
eggs, brickbats, and kicks that come in his way. Do you think his life
would be less monotonous if he lived in Belgrave Square?"
"But all are not preachers and captains in the Salvation Army."
"No: there is my cousin Dick. We are, very properly, Tom, Dick, and
Harry. Dick is, like myself, a cabinet-maker. He is also a politician,
and you may hear him at his club denouncing the House of Lords, and the
Church, and monarchical institutions, and hereditary everything, till
you wonder the people do not rise and tear all down. They don't, you
see, because they are quite accustomed to big talk, and it never means
anything, and they are not really touched by the dreadful wickedness of
the peers."
"I should like to know your cousins."
"You shall. They don't like me, because I have been brought up in a
somewhat different school. But that does not greatly matter."
"Will they like me?" It was a very innocent question, put in perfect
innocence, and yet the young man blushed.
"Everybody," he said, "is bound to like you."
She changed color and became silent, for a while.
He went on presently.
"We are all as happy as we deserve to be, I suppose. If these people
knew what to do in order to make themselves happier, they would go and
do that thing. Meantime, there is always love for everybody, and
success, and presently the end--is not life everywhere monotonous?"
"No," she replied stoutly; "mine is not."
He was thinking at the moment that of all lives a dressmaker's must be
one of the most monotonous. She remembered that she was a dressmaker,
and explained:
"There are the changes of fashion, you see."
"Yes, but you are young," he replied, from his vantage-ground of
twenty-three years, being two years her superior. "Mine is monotonous
when I come to think of it. Only, you see, one does not think of it
oftener than one can help. Besides, as far as I have got I like the
monotony."
"Do you like work?"
"Not much, I own. Do you?"
"No."
"Yet you are going to settle down at Stepney."
"And you, too?"
"As for me, I don't know." The young man colored slightly. "I may go
away again soon and find work elsewhere."
"I was walking yesterday," she went on, "in the great, great church-yard
of Stepney Church. Do you know it?"
"Yes--that is, I have not been inside the walls. I am not fond of
church-yards."
"There they lie--acres of graves. Thousands upon thousands of dead
people, and not one of the whole host remembered. All have lived,
worked, hoped much, got a little, I suppose, and died. And the world
none the better."
"Nay, that you cannot tell."
"Not one of all remembered," she repeated. "There is an epitaph in the
church-yard which might do for every one:
"'Here lies the body of Daniel Saul--
Spitalfields weaver; and that is all.'
That is all."
"What more did the fellow deserve?" asked her companion. "No doubt he
was a very good weaver. Why, he has got a great posthumous reputation.
You have quoted him."
He did not quite follow her line of thought. She was thinking in some
vague way of the waste of material.
"They had very little power of raising the world, to be sure. They were
quite poor, ill-educated, and without resource."
"It seems to me," replied her companion, "that nobody has any power of
raising the world. Look at the preachers and the writers and the
teachers. By their united efforts they contrive to shore up the world
and keep it from falling lower. Every now and then down we go, flop--a
foot or two of civilization lost. Then we lose a hundred years or so
until we can get shoved up again."
"Should not rich men try to shove up, as you call it?"
"Some of them do try, I believe," he replied; "I don't know how they
succeed."
"Suppose, for instance, this young lady, this Miss Messenger, who owns
all this property, were to use it for the benefit of the people, how
would she begin, do you suppose?"
"Most likely she would bestow a quantity of money to a hospital, which
would pauperize the doctors, or she would give away quantities of
blankets, bread, and beef in the winter, which would pauperize the
people."
Angela sighed.
"That is not very encouraging."
"What you could do by yourself, if you pleased, among the working-girls
of the place, would be, I suppose, worth ten times what she could do
with all her giving. I'm not much in the charity line myself, Miss
Kennedy, but I should say, from three weeks' observation of the place
and conversation with the respectable Bunker, that Miss Messenger's
money is best kept out of the parish, which gets on very well without
it."
"Her money! Yes, I see. Yet she herself----" She paused.
"We working men and women----"
"You are not a working-man, Mr. Goslett." She faced him with her steady,
honest eyes, as if she would read the truth in his. "Whatever else you
are, you are not a working-man."
He replied without the least change of color:
"Indeed, I am the son of Sergeant Goslett, of the --th Regiment, who
fell in the Indian Mutiny. I am the nephew of good old Benjamin Bunker,
the virtuous and the disinterested. I was educated in rather a better
way than most of my class, that is all."
"Is it true that you have lived in America?"
"Quite true." He did not say how long he had lived there.
Angela, with her own guilty secret, was suspicious that perhaps this
young man might also have his.
"Men of your class," she said, "do not as a rule talk like you."
"Matter of education--that is all."
"And you are really a cabinet-maker?"
"If you will look into my room and see my lathe, I will show you
specimens of my work, O thou unbeliever! Did you think that I might have
'done something,' and so be fain to hide my head?"
It was a cruel thing to suspect him in this way, yet the thought had
crossed her mind that he might be a fugitive from the law and society,
protected for some reason by Bunker.
Harry returned to the subject of the place.
"What we want here," he said, "as it seems to me, is a little more of
the pleasure and graces of life. To begin with, we are not poor and in
misery, but for the most part fairly well off. We have great works
here--half a dozen breweries, though none so big as Messenger's;
chemical works, sugar refineries, though these are a little depressed at
present, I believe; here are all the docks; then we have silk-weavers,
rope-makers, sail-makers, match-makers, cigar-makers; we build ships; we
tackle jute, though what jute is, and what to do with it, I know not; we
cut corks; we make soap, and we make fireworks; we build boats. When all
our works are in full blast, we make quantities of money. See us on
Sundays, we are not a bad-looking lot; healthy, well-dressed, and
tolerably rosy. But we have no pleasures."
"There must be some."
"A theatre and a music-hall in Whitechapel Road. That has to serve for
two millions of people. Now, if this young heiress wanted to do any
good, she should build a Palace of Pleasure here."
"A Palace of Pleasure!" she repeated. "It sounds well. Should it be a
kind of a Crystal Palace?"
"Well!" It was quite a new idea, but he replied as if he had been
considering the subject for years. "Not quite--with modifications."
"Let us talk over your Palace of Pleasure," she said, "at another time.
It sounds well. What else should she do?"
"That is such a gigantic thing that it seems enough for one person to
attempt. However, we can find something else for her--why, take schools.
There is not a public school for the whole two millions of East London.
Not one place in which boys--to say nothing of girls, can be brought up
in generous ideas. She must establish at least half a dozen public
schools for boys and as many for girls."
"That is a very good idea. Will you write and tell her so?"
"Then there are libraries, reading-rooms, clubs, but all these would
form part of the Palace of Pleasure."
"Of course. I would rather call it a Palace of Delight. Pleasure seems
to touch a lower note. We could have music-rooms for concerts as well."
"And a school for music." The young man became animated as the scheme
unfolded itself.
"And a school for dancing."
"Miss Kennedy," he said with enthusiasm, "you _ought_ to have the
spending of all this money! And--why, you would hardly believe it--but
there is not in the whole of this parish of Stepney a single dance given
in the year. Think of that! But perhaps----" He stopped again.
"You mean that dressmakers do not, as a rule, dance? However, I do, and
so there must be a school for dancing. There must be a great college to
teach all these accomplishments."
"Happy Stepney!" cried the young man, carried out of himself. "Thrice
happy Stepney! Glorified Whitechapel! Beautiful Bow! What things await
ye in the fortunate future!"
He left her at the door of Bormalack's, and went off on some voyage of
discovery of his own.
The girl retreated to her own room. She had now hired a sitting-room all
to herself, and paid three months in advance, and sat down to think.
Then she took paper and pen and began to write.
She was writing down, while it was hot in her head, the three-fold
scheme which this remarkable young workman had put into her head.
"We women are weak creatures," she said with a sigh. "We long to be up
and doing, but we cannot carve out our work for ourselves. A man must be
with us to suggest or direct it. The College of Art--yes, we will call
it the College of Art; the Palace of Delight; the public schools. I
should think that between the three a good deal of money might be got
through. And oh! to think of converting this dismal suburb into a home
for refined and cultivated people!"
In blissful revery she saw already the mean houses turned into red brick
Queen Anne terraces and villas; the dingy streets were planted with
avenues of trees; art flourished in the house as well as out of it; life
was rendered gracious, sweet, and lovely.
And to think that this result was due to the suggestion of a common
working-man!
But then, he had lived in the States. Doubtless in the States all the
working-men---- But was that possible?