Dicky grew slighter and lanker, dark about the eyes, and weaker. He was
growing longitudinally, and that made his lateral wasting the quicker
and the more apparent. A furtive frighted look hung ever in his face, a
fugitive air about his whole person. His mother's long face was longer
than ever, and blacker under the eyes than Dicky's own, and her weak
open mouth hung at the corners as that of a woman faint with weeping.
Little Em's knees and elbows were knobs in the midst of limbs of
unnatural length. Rarely could a meal be seen ahead; and when it came,
it made Dicky doubtful whether or not hunger were really caused by
eating. But his chief distress was to see that little Em cried not like
a child, but silently, as she strove to thread needles or to smear
matchbox labels. And when good fortune brought match-boxes, there was an
undue loss on the twopence farthing in the matter of paste. The stuff
was a foul mess, sour and faint, and it was kept in a broken tea-cup,
near which Dicky had detected his sister sucking her fingers; for in
truth little Em stole the paste.
On and off, by one way and another, Mrs Perrott made enough to keep the
rent paid with indifferent regularity, and sometimes there was a copper
or so left over. She did fairly well, too, at the churches and
prayer-meetings; people saw her condition, and now and again would give
her something beyond the common dole; so that she learned the trick of
looking more miserable than usual at such places.
The roof provided, Dicky felt that his was the task to find food. Alone,
he might have rubbed along clear of starvation, but there were his
mother and his sister. Lack of victuals shook his nerve and made him
timid. Moreover, his terror grew greater than ever at the prospect of
being caught in a theft. He lay awake at night and sweated to think of
it. Who would bring in things from the outer world for mother and Em
then? And the danger was worse than ever. He had felt the police-court
birch, and it was bad, very bad. But he would take it every day and take
it almost without a tear, rather than the chance of a reformatory.
Magistrates were unwilling to send boys to reformatories while both
father and mother were at hand to control them, for that were relieving
the parents of their natural responsibility; but in a case like Dicky's,
a 'schooling' was a very likely thing. So that Dicky, as he prowled, was
torn between implacable need and the fear of being cut off from all
chance of supplying it.
It was his rule never to come home without bringing something, were it
no more than a mildewed crust. It was a resolve impossible to keep at
times, but at those times it was two in the morning ere he would drag
himself, pallid and faint, into the dark room where the others might
be--probably were--lying awake and unfed. Rather than face such a
homecoming he had sometimes ventured on a more difficult feat than
stealing in the outer world: he had stolen in the Jago. Sam Cash, for
instance, had lost a bloater.
Dicky never ate at Weech's now. Rarely, indeed, would he take payment in
kind, unless it were for something of smaller value than the average of
his poor pilferings; and then he carried the food home. But cheaper
things could be bought elsewhere, so that more usually he insisted on
money payments: to the grief of Mr Weech, who set forth the odiousness
of ingratitude at length; though his homilies had no sort of effect on
Dicky's morals.
Father Sturt saw that Hannah Perrott gained no ground in her struggle,
and urged her to apply for outdoor parish relief, promising to second
her request with the guardians. But with an odd throwback to the
respectability of her boiler-making ancestry, she disliked the notion of
help from the parish, and preferred to remain as she was; for there at
least her ingrained inertness seemed to side with some phantom of
self-respect. To her present position she had subsided by almost
imperceptible degrees, and she was scarce conscious of a change. But to
parish relief there was a distinct and palpable step: a step that, on
the whole, it seemed easier not to take. But it was with eagerness that
she took a Maternity Society's letter, wherewith the vicar had provided
himself on her behalf. For her time was drawing near.