THE SEA WIFE
You might not expect to find the Sea Wife in the heart of Kent, but
that is where I found her, in a mean street, in the poor quarter of
Maidstone. In her window she had no sign of lodgings to let, and
persuasion was necessary before she could bring herself to let me sleep
in her front room. In the evening I descended to the semi-subterranean
kitchen, and talked with her and her old man, Thomas Mugridge by name.
And as I talked to them, all the subtleties and complexities of this
tremendous machine civilisation vanished away. It seemed that I went
down through the skin and the flesh to the naked soul of it, and in
Thomas Mugridge and his old woman gripped hold of the essence of this
remarkable English breed. I found there the spirit of the wanderlust
which has lured Albion’s sons across the zones; and I found there the
colossal unreckoning which has tricked the English into foolish
squabblings and preposterous fights, and the doggedness and
stubbornness which have brought them blindly through to empire and
greatness; and likewise I found that vast, incomprehensible patience
which has enabled the home population to endure under the burden of it
all, to toil without complaint through the weary years, and docilely to
yield the best of its sons to fight and colonise to the ends of the
earth.
Thomas Mugridge was seventy-one years old and a little man. It was
because he was little that he had not gone for a soldier. He had
remained at home and worked. His first recollections were connected
with work. He knew nothing else but work. He had worked all his days,
and at seventy-one he still worked. Each morning saw him up with the
lark and afield, a day labourer, for as such he had been born. Mrs.
Mugridge was seventy-three. From seven years of age she had worked in
the fields, doing a boy’s work at first, and later a man’s. She still
worked, keeping the house shining, washing, boiling, and baking, and,
with my advent, cooking for me and shaming me by making my bed. At the
end of threescore years and more of work they possessed nothing, had
nothing to look forward to save more work. And they were contented.
They expected nothing else, desired nothing else.
They lived simply. Their wants were few—a pint of beer at the end of
the day, sipped in the semi-subterranean kitchen, a weekly paper to
pore over for seven nights hand-running, and conversation as meditative
and vacant as the chewing of a heifer’s cud. From a wood engraving on
the wall a slender, angelic girl looked down upon them, and underneath
was the legend: “Our Future Queen.” And from a highly coloured
lithograph alongside looked down a stout and elderly lady, with
underneath: “Our Queen—Diamond Jubilee.”
“What you earn is sweetest,” quoth Mrs. Mugridge, when I suggested that
it was about time they took a rest.
“No, an’ we don’t want help,” said Thomas Mugridge, in reply to my
question as to whether the children lent them a hand.
“We’ll work till we dry up and blow away, mother an’ me,” he added; and
Mrs. Mugridge nodded her head in vigorous indorsement.
Fifteen children she had borne, and all were away and gone, or dead.
The “baby,” however, lived in Maidstone, and she was twenty-seven. When
the children married they had their hands full with their own families
and troubles, like their fathers and mothers before them.
Where were the children? Ah, where were they not? Lizzie was in
Australia; Mary was in Buenos Ayres; Poll was in New York; Joe had died
in India—and so they called them up, the living and the dead, soldier
and sailor, and colonist’s wife, for the traveller’s sake who sat in
their kitchen.
They passed me a photograph. A trim young fellow, in soldier’s garb
looked out at me.
“And which son is this?” I asked.
They laughed a hearty chorus. Son! Nay, grandson, just back from Indian
service and a soldier-trumpeter to the King. His brother was in the
same regiment with him. And so it ran, sons and daughters, and grand
sons and daughters, world-wanderers and empire-builders, all of them,
while the old folks stayed at home and worked at building empire too.
“There dwells a wife by the Northern Gate,
And a wealthy wife is she;
She breeds a breed o’ rovin’ men
And casts them over sea.
“And some are drowned in deep water,
And some in sight of shore;
And word goes back to the weary wife,
And ever she sends more.”
But the Sea Wife’s child-bearing is about done. The stock is running
out, and the planet is filling up. The wives of her sons may carry on
the breed, but her work is past. The erstwhile men of England are now
the men of Australia, of Africa, of America. England has sent forth
“the best she breeds” for so long, and has destroyed those that
remained so fiercely, that little remains for her to do but to sit down
through the long nights and gaze at royalty on the wall.
The true British merchant seaman has passed away. The merchant service
is no longer a recruiting ground for such sea dogs as fought with
Nelson at Trafalgar and the Nile. Foreigners largely man the merchant
ships, though Englishmen still continue to officer them and to prefer
foreigners for’ard. In South Africa the colonial teaches the islander
how to shoot, and the officers muddle and blunder; while at home the
street people play hysterically at mafficking, and the War Office
lowers the stature for enlistment.
It could not be otherwise. The most complacent Britisher cannot hope to
draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever. The
average Mrs. Thomas Mugridge has been driven into the city, and she is
not breeding very much of anything save an anæmic and sickly progeny
which cannot find enough to eat. The strength of the English-speaking
race to-day is not in the tight little island, but in the New World
overseas, where are the sons and daughters of Mrs. Thomas Mugridge. The
Sea Wife by the Northern Gate has just about done her work in the
world, though she does not realize it. She must sit down and rest her
tired loins for a space; and if the casual ward and the workhouse do
not await her, it is because of the sons and daughters she has reared
up against the day of her feebleness and decay.