IN WHICH WE MEET A WARDEN AND HER CHARGES, AND HEAR TWO OR THREE
STORIES OF STORMY VOYAGES ON LIFE'S WATERS BEFORE HAVEN WAS REACHED
Two pretty maids having arrived, one to take away the tea and the
other to be with the little girls, Mr. Harberton suggested that we
should go and see the Warden. This he said with a slight smile that
made the invitation very pleasant, and I joined Mrs. Harberton with
thoughts of Trollope in my head and visions of the white-haired
president of a college. Judge, then, of my surprise when a little
shy woman met us not far from the gate and we were introduced to Miss
Mitt, the Warden of the Pink Almshouses. Again I anticipated
wrongly, for instead of the rose-tinted building which these words
led me to expect, I found a very beautiful edifice in grey stone with
a long, warmly-tiled roof, the founder of which was a Mrs. Pink, a
friend of Mrs. Harberton.
There are beautiful almshouses all over England, and someone ought to
write a book describing them, especially as almshouse architecture is
almost the best indigenous domestic architecture that we have. Such
temptations as beset modern architects when they build private houses
seem for the most part to be absent when they build almshouses.
Another triumph for humility, perhaps. For the time being even the
most ambitious designer, remembering the purpose of the building, is
forced to be simple.
The most amusing almshouse I know is at Chichester, where, under one
great dark red roof with pretty dormers in it, dwell several old
ladies, each in her own apartments, like an undergraduate or a nun,
with a nurse at one end of the central passage and a chapel at the
other. But I like the more usual plan better--the row of tiny
domiciles like a terrace for fairy godmothers, the little gardens,
the muslin blinds, and all the evidences of security. Such a
building was that which a young architect in a soft flannel collar
(as I guess) had put up for Mrs. Harberton with Mrs. Pink's legacy.
Mrs. Pink's almshouses are all that she would have desired: a long,
low façade with two wings at right angles and a flagged garden in the
intervening space. Quite a suggestion of "The Harbour of Refuge,"
but no harm in that. By using old materials the architect had
prevented any appearance of crudity, and creepers were already high
on the walls. There are thirteen little houses under this long roof,
three in each wing and seven in the main building, of which the
Warden's house is the middle one. The twelve old women have to be
either spinsters or widows and to be fifty-five or over, and it makes
not the faintest difference whether or not they have ever been in
receipt of parish relief. Each has ten shillings a week, light, and
coal. On this allowance they find their own meals and dress; but in
both respects they are often a little helped out by other friends or
their own relations.
That anyone meeting Miss Mitt, in London, say, would guess her to be
the Warden of twelve pernickety old women, is unlikely; and this not
because London seldom or never estimates provincials at their true
worth, but because she was so small and unobtrusive. But in her own
abode of authority there was no doubt, for, though still small and
unobtrusive, she wore there, on her brow, the sign manual of
responsibility and control. I had a long talk with her about her
duties and difficulties.
"I love the work," she said, "but it's not too easy. I'm not
complaining, you know. I don't think things ought to be easy."
"Why ever not?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't know," she said, "but I've always had that feeling ever
since I was a child."
Of course she had, poor little Nonconformist, or, shall I say, poor
little Anglo-Saxon?
"Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomach-ache," I said,
"wouldn't it?"
And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope
so."
What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them.
Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.
"Tell me about the old pests," I said.
"Oh no, Mr. Falconer," she replied, "they're not old pests. They're
dears. Only now and then, as old people will, they have troublesome
ways. I really believe that the worst of all is jealousy. It makes
it so difficult for me to be quite open, and I hate not to be. If I
show a little more attention to one than another I'm sure to hear
about it or notice the effects of it."
"Ah, jealousy!" I said. "That's the real blot on mankind. You know
the origin of it, of course. The good God first made man, and then,
as you remember, He extracted woman from man's side. He was so much
occupied in gazing at this new work of His hand, so suddenly thought
of and created, that He forgot that the aperture was not closed, and
before He could close it a little poisonous reptile had crept in. It
has been there ever since, and no human blood is free from it. Look
how much of it Cain at once inherited!"
"Oh dear, how terrible!" said Miss Mitt. "And is that really true?"
and she clicked her tongue. "Well, there's plenty of it here. I can
do with their ordinary tantrums and their ailments and their
grumblings: but it is so hard to have to keep away from the nicer
ones because the others can't bear it, and to have to do things
surreptitiously."
I asked her which were the worse, the single or the married women.
She was forced to give the palm to the single. "I suppose," she
said, "it's because the married ones have been married and are
therefore--therefore----" Here she was at a loss.
I helped her out. "--are therefore," I said, "more inured to trouble
and vexations."
"Yes," Miss Mitt agreed, "if you don't mind my thinking so."
"Men are a nuisance, aren't they?" I said.
"Oh dear, I didn't mean exactly that. Not exactly," said the little
Warden. "What I meant was that married women understand
give-and-take better than the others who have lived alone. But you
mustn't think that all the single ones are cross, or all the widows
are always good tempered. It isn't so. This one, for example"--and
she knocked at a door--"is the sweetest spinster you could wish to
meet. Her name is Selina Still. Isn't that pretty?"
Miss Still let us in--a little grey woman. Her room was a marvel of
radiant precision. "Mr. Falconer has come from London all the way in
a motor-car," said Miss Mitt.
"It's very wonderful," said the little grey woman. "But I should be
frightened to go in one;" and indeed, how could a Selina Still be in
a motor-car? It would be a sin against Nature.
The others now joined us, and Farrar laughed at the notion of fear.
"What about flying, then?" he asked.
"Oh," said Miss Still very solemnly, "I think this flying's dreadful,
and I don't believe it's going to last. For I can't help feeling
there's One above Who won't much longer brook those things getting so
near Him."
Miss Still expressed a wish to see London again, but did not expect
to. She was last there in 1860, when she was a lady's maid. Her two
most prized recollections were the Crystal Palace and Spurgeon's
preaching.
Next to Selina Still lived Gipsy Woods, who must in her long-ago
youth have been a beauty. Her mother had named her Gipsy for her
black eyes. She was now nearing eighty, and was very rheumatic. She
had married a gentleman--that is to say, one who would walk about as
if he had money in his pockets and do no work, while she was toiling
day and night bringing up eleven children. For her belief was that
so long as you kept a roof over your head nothing else matters, and
that is what she always told the children. She had twins when she
was fifty-one, and brought them up too! Her husband disappeared, and
most of the children dropped away, and a few years ago she had to go
into hospital because her legs were so bad; and when she came out the
people in the house where she had a room had vanished with all her
few things, and had it not been for these almshouses she would be in
the union.
Quite a typical story, this, not only as illustrating the wife's
dogged courage and the husband's unthrift, but also the uselessness
of so many children. It would seem indeed to be the exception rather
than the rule to find sons and daughters of the poor growing up to
help their parents, poverty being so hard put to it to provide any
spring-board from which to take off for a better position.
Apropos of twins, another of the old ladies who was not otherwise
interesting, a mournful body in black, with pink cotton wool in her
ears which gave her head the appearance, seen hurriedly, of being
hollow, boasted of having had "two couple of twins twice." This
works out, if we are exact in the use of the word twin, to eight at a
birth or sixteen in all. But she meant only that she had had four
altogether. I congratulated her on her achievement, but she was
apathetic about it. "Mrs. Nottidge," she said, "the wife of the
landlord of the 'Jolly Bricklayers,' had triplets and got the Queen's
bounty." The heroine of the twins, the Warden told us, liked to keep
a bottle of gin, which was always referred to tactfully as medicine.
It was supplied to her by a neighbouring lady who once sent a pound
of tea in the same basket, and the gin bottle breaking, the tea was
saturated. An ordinary person would merely have deplored a loss; but
this recipient was more resourceful. She dried the tea in the oven
and found it vastly improved for its drenching. That old women like
a drop of something strong in the teacup, we all know; but here is
possibly an idea for the tea trade which might enormously increase
its profits. When consuming her gin in a more normal manner, Miss
Mitt told us, the old lady always stirred it with a sprig of rue. It
made it "healthier."
At No. 8 was Martha Drax. Mrs. Drax was now nearing seventy, and all
the time that she could spare from her household duties she devoted
to meditating upon a letter to the King. Not that she was exactly
mad--although this occupation might suggest it--but a little
enfeebled in intellect, as indeed all poor old women have every right
to be, considering what most of them go through in their long lives
of penury and struggle; but in her case there was more than enough
reason. Martha's story was this:
As a girl in service she had become engaged to the son of the local
baker. All had gone well until they took a day's holiday to visit a
seaside resort, where he became wholly and dangerously intoxicated,
and so terrified her that she broke off the match. He did all he
could to win her again, but in vain; and after some years he married
another girl from the same place, a big, strong creature who was cook
to the doctor. They lived in the village, where the man worked as a
gardener and attended the same chapel as Martha, who also had
remained there, although only too eager to get away, tethered to it
by an epileptic brother and bedridden mother, on whom she had to
wait. At last the dislike of seeing the man and his wife together so
told upon her that she left chapel and began to go to church; the man
himself she avoided, exchanging the time of day with him when they
met, but no more, and though not jealous of his wife, she intensely
resented her.
So things went on for sixteen years, when she was at last able to
leave the village and take service in a neighbouring town, and cease
to be reminded of the man's existence.
One evening, two years after, there was a knock at the back door, and
when she went to it there he was. His wife had been dead six months;
he was very lonely and unhappy; he had never really loved anyone but
Martha, and would she marry him now? Partly from the suddenness of
the shock; partly from a feeling that here was the finger of Fate;
not a little from pleasurable excitement and pride to think of the
power she exerted; and partly, in her own words, because "it seemed
more natural like to die a married woman," she consented. "The
thought," to quote her again, "of his coming back after all those
years and saying he had never wanted anybody else took my breath
away, and made it impossible to say no."
Anyway, they were married, only for her at once to discover that her
husband was a secret drinker of the worst kind, and had been so for
years. He made no disguise of it to her, and even told her that his
first wife had helped to keep it dark by locking him in the house
till the orgy was over and then thrashing him with his own leather
belt--a feat to which Martha refers in envious admiration, for she is
a little meek woman. She had no power to cope with the situation,
and her husband became worse. The secret was a secret no longer; he
lost his work, and, during a period of distress, died of pneumonia
three years after his second marriage.
Martha, who was now a woman of over fifty, went back to service and
became housekeeper to a country clergyman, an old bachelor, where for
two weeks she was in transports of delight, only to be plunged in
misery and anxiety by the discovery that her new master also was a
drunkard, and that the real reason of her engagement to him was to
assist in keeping this fact from the parish. This, with the
assistance of a curate, she did her best to accomplish; the poor old
gentleman during his periodical outbreaks was confined as much as
possible to one room. Again and again she made up her mind to run
away, but she was restrained, partly by pity for her employer, who,
when not in his cups, was the sweetest of characters, and partly from
the knowledge that her age was a bad one for re-engagement. The
clergyman, who knew all about his unfortunate malady, further
enlisted her sympathies by telling her that it was after his wife's
death that he had begun to give way.
For seven years the deception was maintained, when one day the
scandal could be hidden no longer; the parish rose, the Bishop
interfered, and the unhappy invalid was removed to closer restraint.
Martha for a while lived on her savings, such as they were, and
assistance from the clergyman's friends, who knew how hard she had
toiled to preserve his good name, and then Mrs. Pink's almshouses
being set up in her neighbourhood, she entered that haven, and is now
in security for the rest of her days.
She is perfectly sane except for the obsession that it is her duty to
write to the King, calling upon him to prohibit the sale of alcohol
anywhere in England, and so save millions of homes. But although she
is convinced that a letter sent to the King always gets to him and
cannot fail of its purpose, the missive has never gone, for the
simple reason that she cannot compose it to her satisfaction, being
too little of a scholar, and she will not allow anyone else to write
it for her. It is because of vicarious assistance in such matters
that similar letters have not had the desired effect, and she will
not prejudice her case in that way. Such is the life story of Martha
Drax at No. 8.
I came away, again wondering what Spanton would say of all this
serenity and comfort. Foolish sentimentalism, probably. Wanton and
anti-social waste of money to cosset these old, unproductive women.
Let the back-numbers either perish or look after themselves. And so
on. But to talk like that is to disregard human nature and the
kindlier feelings. A state that deliberately refused the
responsibilities of protecting and caring for its old might achieve
miracles of scientific housing, profit-sharing, and so forth; but it
would be fossilized at the core. Sentiment and emotion cannot be
left out.