As Jane Glyne said, just four miles away from The Dingle was a low, long
range of hovels, roughly built in the coarsest manner, and so covered in
that but for a stuffing of straw here and there, the bleak winds and
rain that come even in summer could beat through with all their force.
The hovels were built on the unity principle--one room--one door--one
chimney--one window, and they stood in a row close by the bank of a
canal which formed the great highway to and from the dirty Goshen of
these modern children of Israel.
But they were not Jews, any more than they were Christians: they were
simply work-people--the slaves who make bricks without straw, and not
for the use of a king of Egypt, but for modern Babylon. The canal was
the great highway to this settlement, which stood in an earth-gnawed
desert of its own; but all the same there was a rugged pathway which led
towards the pretty stream on whose bank stood Mrs Riversley's cottage,
passable in fine weather, a slough in wet; and there was a roadway for
carts, a horribly churned up mingling of mud and water, along which
chariot wheels drave heavily to work woe upon that patient martyr of
ours--the horse.
It was not a pleasant spot that brickfield, and seemed to have been
thrust out far from the habitations of ordinary men. It was not
salubrious, but then its subsoil was of the stiffest clay. Here the
brickmakers lived gregariously, each hovel containing as many as it
would hold. Here four or five men `pigged' together. It was their own
term, and most appropriate. In another hovel, a young couple would have
three young men lodgers, while the occupants of other dens would have
done the same, only that their swarming children did not give room for
lodgers to lie down, the superficies of the floors being small.
A desolate-looking spot on a flat expanse, through which the canal, erst
a river, ran. It was once a series of pleasant meadows, but Babylon
swallows many bricks. Hence the tract had been delved all over into a
chaos of clay, where long rows of bricks stood drying, while others were
being made. Stagnant water covered with green scum lay in the holes
whence clay had been dug, while other holes were full of liquid mud.
Dirt-pie-making by horse-power seemed to be going on all day long, and
soft mud mixtures were formed, water being run into banked-up lakes by
means of wooden troughs, while every here and there wretched horses,
blindfolded so that they should not resent their task, seemed to be
turning torture machines to break up so much obstinate clay upon the
wheel.
The breeze there was not a balmy wind, laden with sweet floral odours,
but a solid gritty breeze, being the musty, ill-savoured, sifted ashes
of the great city, brought in processions of barges to mix with the
clay, to be burned and go back as so much brick.
"Bring that bairn here," cried a shrill voice, proceeding from a being,
who, but for the shaping of the scanty garment she had on, might have
been taken for a clay-daubed man. Her long cotton dress clung close to
her figure, for it was soaked with water, and on "that bairn," a tiny
little morsel whose experience of the world was not many hours old,
being brought to her by a half-naked girl of ten with something cotton
upon her, but more clay, the infant was tended in a maternal way for
some little time, during which the woman, as she rocked herself to and
fro, made use of an unoccupied hand to draw a piece of rag from her
pocket, and then, much to the discomfort of the infant, she tied up in
the corners and middle of the rag, with as many knots, five new, bright
sovereigns.
"Look out, mother," cried the girl, but her warning came too late: a
heavy-looking man in half a shirt, and a pair of trousers held up by a
strap, and who seemed to go by machinery, for he emitted puffs of smoke
from a short black pipe as he moved, made a snatch at the rag, and
thrust it into his pocket.
"I'll take care o' that 'ere," he growled; and, as the woman uttered a
resentful cry, he "made an offer" at her with the back of his hand, and
then began puffing smoke once more, and moved away. The woman cowered
down to avoid the expected blow, muttered viciously to herself, and at
last rose, and tucked the babe into an improvised bed of rags in the
shelter of a shed. This, by the way, was only a sloping roof of boards
some six feet by five, covering the rough bench upon which a brickmaker
works, and being unoccupied just then, came in handy for the purpose to
which it was put.
"I'll have that back agen, old man," the woman muttered to herself.
"Just wait till you're asleep. Now then," she cried aloud to sundry
clayey imps who were at work fetching and carrying the plastic mass with
which they were daubed, "keep a hye on this bairn, all on yer. If Bill
Jones's dawg comes anigh, let go at him."
Saying this, she joined "father," who under the next shed was puffing
away as he worked, a puff being emitted as each brick was made in its
mould, and turned out upon a board.
"When's she comin' agen about that there kid?" growled father.
"Wait and see," said the woman surlily, as she attacked a mass of clay,
as if it were so much dough pinched off pieces, and roughly shaped them
into loaves a little larger than a brick ready for the man to mould.
Then there was a pause, during which the puffs of smoke came with
beautiful regularity from the brickmaker's mouth, and as a boy
approached, it almost seemed as if he were going to stoke father, and
put on some more coals; but he only dabbed down a mass of clay which he
had carried upon his head, whose shape was printed in the lump which
left a portion amongst the boy's hair.
"Think it were Bill Jones's dawg as took Lamby's kid, mother?" growled
father at last.
"Think? I'm sure on it," said mother. "It were there one minute, and
it were gone the next. Where could it ha' gone if he hadn't took it."
The machinery stopped, for father took his pipe out of his mouth, wiped
his lips with the back of his clayey hand, which was all the cleaner
afterwards, father's lips having the character of a short stubbly
bristled brush. Then he thought for a minute; the machinery began to go
once more, a puff of smoke was emitted from his lips and he replied:
"Dunno!"
"I think Lamby's gal, July, dropped it in the canal, and was 'fraid to
tell," said the girl in the clay robe shrilly.
"You hold your noise, and look alive wi' them lumps," growled father,
who made as if to strike the girl, whereupon she ducked down to avoid
the expected blow, dodged away to a safe distance, put out her tongue,
and said, "Yah!" and the other children--four--all engaged in carrying
clay, laughed and ran to avoid blows.
They varied in age from five to fourteen, and were all richly clothed in
clay, which coated them from their hair--tangled and hardened with the
worked-up adhesive soil--to their very toes, which printed their shapes
in the moist ground they trod.
Father seeming disposed to "hull" one of the moulds at them, they all
hastened away to the clay mill--a machine like a great churn bound with
many strong iron hoops and with a thumper or plunger therein, to which a
long wooden bar was attached, harnessed to one end of which was another
blindfolded skeleton of a horse, which still retained its skin and
vitality, and went round and round despondently, as if under the
impression that it was going straight forward; but a sharp jerk of the
head seemed to say from time to time: "It doesn't matter; it will not be
for long."
At the bottom of the great mill, in a gloomy hole, was a clayey man in a
kind of rough apron, and armed with a piece of wire two feet long, whose
ends were twisted round a couple of pieces of wood to form handles.
As the mill turned, the well-mixed clay was forced through the bottom in
a mass some ten inches in diameter, which from time to time the man
dexterously cut through with his wire, and passed the pieces to the
children who came for fresh supplies.
One took the heavy fat lump, and hugged it to its breast, making a mould
in the top for its little chin.
Another had it dabbed upon its curly head; another bore it upon the
shoulder, leaving therein the print of the ear; but the favourite way
seemed to be to hug it to the breast back to the shed, where mother
seized it and went on making her brown loaves.
Father, whose external machinery consisted of some water, some dry,
sandy earth, and a little oblong box the shape of the brick, seized the
brown loaves his wife passed to him, gave them a dexterous dab which
forced them into the mould, scraped off the top level with the sides,
pushed it along on a board, raised the mould, and left there a soft clay
brick.
Then with regular puffs the process was repeated again and again, while
a man with a strange-shaped barrow removed the new soft bricks and bore
them away.
At the first sight it seemed as if the babe Jane Glyne had brought had
fallen amongst savages, but they were English fellow-creatures, living--
existing rather--not so very far from the centre of civilisation, and
bricks are in great demand.
As the work went on in its muddy monotony, an evil-looking, long-jawed
dog, the very opposite of the hound in the legend who slew the wolf to
save his master's child, came slinking and sniffing about the sheds. He
was a lean, starving, wolfish, mangy cur, with reddish glaring eyes,
always on the watch for kicks and blows. He would have been a big dog
had he been fed, but want of food appeared to have produced a bad crop
of hair upon his skin, and given him a thin shadowy look even to his
head, which seemed to have been starved into a snarl and a set of teeth.
The dog slunk here and slunk there for a time, till his keen senses led
him towards where, some fifty yards away, one of the brickmakers'
dinners lay within his reach. Giving a sharp glance round, he had
already opened his sharp jaws to snatch up the knotted handkerchief
which held a basin, when a well-aimed, half-dried brick struck him in
the ribs, which emitted a cavernous drummy sound, and with a sharp yelp
the brute bounded off.
But he was too hungry to be driven right away, and before long he
stopped short, screwed himself round, and soothed the injured spot with
half a dozen licks. Then, wild of eye and wolfish of aspect, he turned
once more towards the sheds to seek for food.
He whined a little, either from pain or from an injured feeling--his
_amour propre_ telling him that dogs must live as well as the savages
round whose camp he prowled. Then, forgetting one pain external in a
greater one within, he set off once more, but this time displaying a
caution worthy of a wolf as he neared the shed where father, mother, and
the clayey children were all so busily at work making their summer
harvest--too busy to mind the wretched foster-child, which, after feebly
appealing against the neglect, and turning its little face to and fro in
search of something warm, had gone off fast asleep.
Prologue--Chapter IV.