HODGE'S LAST MASTERS. CONCLUSION
After all the ploughing and the sowing, the hoeing and the harvest, comes
the miserable end. Strong as the labourer may be, thick-set and capable of
immense endurance; by slow degrees that strength must wear away. The limbs
totter, the back is bowed, the dimmed sight can no longer guide the plough
in a straight furrow, nor the weak hands wield the reaping-hook, Hodge,
who, Atlas-like, supported upon his shoulders the agricultural world,
comes in his old age under the dominion of his last masters at the
workhouse. There, indeed, he finds almost the whole array of his rulers
assembled. Tenant farmers sit as the guardians of the poor for their
respective parishes; the clergyman and the squire by virtue of their
office as magistrates; and the tradesman as guardian for the market town.
Here are representatives of almost all his masters, and it may seem to him
a little strange that it should require so many to govern such feeble
folk.
The board-room at the workhouse is a large and apparently comfortable
apartment. The fire is piled with glowing coals, the red light from which
gleams on the polished fender. A vast table occupies the centre, and
around it are arranged seats, for each of the guardians. The chairman is,
perhaps, a clergyman (and magistrate), who for years has maintained
something like peace between discordant elements. For the board-room is
often a battle-field where political or sectarian animosities exhibit
themselves in a rugged way. The clergyman, by force of character, has at
all events succeeded in moderating the personal asperity of the contending
parties. Many of the stout, elderly farmers who sit round the table have
been elected year after year, no one disputing with them that tedious and
thankless office. The clerk, always a solicitor, is also present, and his
opinion is continually required. Knotty points of law are for ever arising
over what seems so simple a matter as the grant of a dole of bread.
The business, indeed, of relieving the agricultural poor is no light
one--a dozen or fifteen gentlemen often sit here the whole day. The
routine of examining the relieving officers' books and receiving their
reports takes up at least two hours. Agricultural unions often include a
wide space of country, and getting from one village to another consumes as
much time as would be needed for the actual relief of a much denser
population. As a consequence, more relieving officers are employed than
would seem at first glance necessary. Each of these has his records to
present, and his accounts to be practically audited, a process naturally
interspersed with inquiries respecting cottagers known to the guardians
present.
Personal applications for out-door relief are then heard. A group of
intending applicants has been waiting in the porch for admission for some
time. Women come for their daughters; daughters for their mothers; some
want assistance during an approaching confinement, others ask for a small
loan, to be repaid by instalments, with which to tide over their
difficulties. One cottage woman is occasionally deputed by several of her
neighbours as their representative. The labourer or his wife stands before
the Board and makes a statement, supplemented by explanation from the
relieving officer of the district. Another hour thus passes. Incidentally
there arise cases of 'settlement' in distant parishes, when persons have
become chargeable whose place of residence was recently, perhaps, half
across the country. They have no parochial rights here and must be
returned thither, after due inquiries made by the clerk and the exchange
of considerable correspondence.
The master of the workhouse is now called in and delivers his weekly
report of the conduct of the inmates, and any events that have happened.
One inmate, an ancient labourer, died that morning in the infirmary, not
many hours before the meeting of the Board. The announcement is received
with regretful exclamations, and there is a cessation of business for a
few minutes. Some of the old farmers who knew the deceased recount their
connection with him, how he worked for them, and how his family has lived
in the parish as cottagers from time immemorial. A reminiscence of a grim
joke that fell out forty years before, and of which the deceased was the
butt, causes a grave smile, and then to business again. The master
possibly asks permission to punish a refractory inmate; punishment is now
very sparingly given in the house. A good many cases, however, come up
from the Board to the magisterial Bench--charges of tearing up clothing,
fighting, damaging property, or of neglecting to maintain, or to repay
relief advanced on loan. These cases are, of course, conducted by the
clerk.
There is sometimes a report, to be read by one of the doctors who receive
salaries from the Board and attend to the various districts, and
occasionally some nuisance to be considered and order taken for its
compulsory removal on sanitary grounds. The question of sanitation is
becoming rather a difficult one in agricultural unions.
After this the various committees of the Board have to give in the result
of their deliberations, and the representative of the ladies' boarding-out
committee presents a record of the work accomplished. These various
committees at times are burdened with the most onerous labours, for upon
them falls the duty of verifying all the petty details of management.
Every pound of soap, or candles, scrubbing-brushes, and similar domestic
items, pass under their inspection, not only the payments for them, but
the actual articles, or samples of them, being examined. Tenders for
grocery, bread, wines and spirits for cases of illness, meat, coals, and
so forth are opened and compared, vouchers, bills, receipts, invoices, and
so forth checked and audited.
The amount of detail thus attended to is something immense, and the
accuracy required occupies hour after hour. There are whole libraries of
account-books, ledgers, red-bound relief-books, stowed away, pile upon
pile, in the house; archives going back to the opening of the
establishment, and from which any trifling relief given or expenditure
inclined years ago can be extracted. Such another carefully-administered
institution it would be hard to find; nor is any proposed innovation or
change adopted without the fullest discussion--it may be the suggested
erection of additional premises, or the introduction of some fresh feature
of the system, or some novel instructions sent down by the Local
Government Board.
When such matters or principles are to be discussed there is certain to be
a full gathering of the guardians and a trial of strength between the
parties. Those who habitually neglect to attend, leaving the hard labour
of administration to be borne by their colleagues, now appear in numbers,
and the board-room is crowded, many squires otherwise seldom seen coming
in to give their votes. It is as much as the chairman can do to assuage
the storm and to maintain an approach to personal politeness. Quiet as the
country appears to the casual observer, there are, nevertheless, strong
feelings under the surface, and at such gatherings the long-cherished
animosities burst forth.
Nothing at all events is done in a corner; everything is openly discussed
and investigated. Every week the visiting committee go round the house,
and enter every ward and store-room. They taste and test the provisions,
and the least shortcoming is certain to be severely brought home to those
who are fulfilling the contracts. They pass through the dormitories, and
see that everything is clean; woe betide those responsible if a spot of
dirt be visible! There is the further check of casual and unexpected
visits from the guardians or magistrates. It is probable that not one
crumb of bread consumed is otherwise than good, and that not one single
crumb is wasted. The waste is in the system--and a gigantic waste it is,
whether inevitable as some contend, or capable of being superseded by a
different plan.
Of every hundred pounds paid by the ratepayers how much is absorbed in the
maintenance of the institution and its ramifications, and how very little
reaches poor deserving Hodge! The undeserving and mean-spirited, of whom
there are plenty in every village, who endeavour to live upon the parish,
receive relief thrice as long and to thrice the amount as the
hard-working, honest labourer, who keeps out to the very last moment. It
is not the fault of the guardians, but of the rigidity of the law. Surely
a larger amount of discretionary power might be vested in them with
advantage! Some exceptional consideration is the just due of men who have
worked from the morn to the very eve of life.
The labourer whose decease was reported to the Board upon their assembling
was born some seventy-eight or seventy-nine years ago. The exact date is
uncertain; many of the old men can only fix their age by events that
happened when they were growing from boys into manhood. That it must have
been nearer eighty than seventy years since is known, however, to the
elderly farmers, who recollect him as a man with a family when they were
young. The thatched cottage stood beside the road at one end of a long,
narrow garden, enclosed from the highway by a hedge of elder. At the back
there was a ditch and mound with elm-trees, and green meadows beyond. A
few poles used to lean against the thatch, their tops rising above the
ridge, and close by was a stack of thorn faggots. In the garden three or
four aged and mossgrown apple-trees stood among the little plots of
potatoes, and as many plum-trees in the elder hedge. One tall pear-tree
with scored bark grew near the end of the cottage; it bore a large crop of
pears, which were often admired by the people who came along the road, but
were really hard and woody. As a child he played in the ditch and hedge,
or crept through into the meadow and searched in the spring for violets to
offer to the passers-by; or he swung on the gate in the lane and held it
open for the farmers in their gigs, in hope of a halfpenny.
As a lad he went forth with his father to work in the fields, and came
home to the cabbage boiled for the evening meal. It was not a very roomy
or commodious home to return to after so many hours in the field, exposed
to rain and wind, to snow, or summer sun. The stones of the floor were
uneven, and did not fit at the edges. There was a beam across the low
ceiling, to avoid which, as he grew older, he had to bow his head when
crossing the apartment. A wooden ladder, or steps, not a staircase proper,
behind the whitewashed partition, led to the bedroom. The steps were
worm-eaten and worn. In the sitting-room the narrow panes of the small
window were so overgrown with woodbine as to admit but little light. But
in summer the door was wide open, and the light and the soft air came in.
The thick walls and thatch kept it warm and cosy in winter, when they
gathered round the fire. Every day in his manhood he went out to the
field; every item, as it were, of life centred in that little cottage. In
time he came to occupy it with his own wife, and his children in their
turn crept through the hedge, or swung upon the gate. They grew up, and
one by one went away, till at last he was left alone.
He had not taken much conscious note of the changing aspect of the scene
around him. The violets flowered year after year; still he went to plough.
The May bloomed and scented the hedges; still he went to his work. The
green summer foliage became brown and the acorns fell from the oaks; still
he laboured on, and saw the ice and snow, and heard the wind roar in the
old familiar trees without much thought of it. But those old familiar
trees, the particular hedges he had worked among so many years, the very
turf of the meadows over which he had walked so many times, the view down
the road from the garden gate, the distant sign-post and the red-bricked
farmhouse--all these things had become part of his life. There was no hope
nor joy left to him, but he wanted to stay on among them to the end. He
liked to ridge up his little plot of potatoes; he liked to creep up his
ladder and mend the thatch of his cottage; he liked to cut himself a
cabbage, and to gather the one small basketful of apples. There was a kind
of dull pleasure in cropping the elder hedge, and even in collecting the
dead branches scattered under the trees. To be about the hedges, in the
meadows, and along the brooks was necessary to him, and he liked to be at
work.
Three score and ten did not seem the limit of his working days; he still
could and would hoe--a bowed back is no impediment, but perhaps rather an
advantage, at that occupation. He could use a prong in the haymaking; he
could reap a little, and do good service tying up the cut corn. There were
many little jobs on the farm that required experience, combined with the
plodding patience of age, and these he could do better than a stronger
man. The years went round again, and yet he worked. Indeed, the farther
back a man's birth dates in the beginning of the present century the more
he seems determined to labour. He worked on till every member of his
family had gone, most to their last home, and still went out at times when
the weather was not too severe. He worked on, and pottered round the
garden, and watched the young green plums swelling on his trees, and did a
bit of gleaning, and thought the wheat would weigh bad when it was
threshed out.
Presently people began to bestir themselves, and to ask whether there was
no one to take care of the old man, who might die from age and none near.
Where were his own friends and relations? One strong son had enlisted and
gone to India, and though his time had expired long ago, nothing had ever
been heard of him. Another son had emigrated to Australia, and once sent
back a present of money, and a message, written for him by a friend, that
he was doing well. But of late, he, too, had dropped out of sight. Of
three daughters who grew up, two were known to be dead, and the third was
believed to be in New Zealand. The old man was quite alone. He had no hope
and no joy, yet he was almost happy in a slow unfeeling way wandering
about the garden and the cottage. But in the winter his half-frozen blood
refused to circulate, his sinews would not move his willing limbs, and he
could not work.
His case came before the Board of Guardians. Those who knew all about him
wished to give him substantial relief in his own cottage, and to appoint
some aged woman as nurse--a thing that is occasionally done, and most
humanely. But there were technical difficulties in the way; the cottage
was either his own or partly his own, and relief could not be given to any
one possessed of 'property' Just then, too, there was a great movement
against, out-door relief; official circulars came round warning Boards to
curtail it, and much fuss was made. In the result the old man was driven
into the workhouse; muttering and grumbling, he had to be bodily carried
to the trap, and thus by physical force was dragged from his home. In the
workhouse there is of necessity a dead level of monotony--there are many
persons but no individuals. The dining-hall is crossed with forms and
narrow tables, somewhat resembling those formerly used in schools. On
these at dinner-time are placed a tin mug and a tin soup-plate for each
person; every mug and every plate exactly alike. When the unfortunates
have taken their places, the master pronounces grace from an elevated desk
at the end of the hall.
Plain as is the fare, it was better than the old man had existed on for
years; but though better it was not his dinner. He was not sitting in his
old chair, at his own old table, round which his children had once
gathered. He had not planted the cabbage, and tended it while it grew, and
cut it himself. So it was, all through the workhouse life. The dormitories
were clean, but the ward was not his old bedroom up the worm-eaten steps,
with the slanting ceiling, where as he woke in the morning he could hear
the sparrows chirping, the chaffinch calling, and the lark singing aloft.
There was a garden attached to the workhouse, where he could do a little
if he liked, but it was not his garden. He missed his plum-trees and
apples, and the tall pear, and the lowly elder hedge. He looked round
raising his head with difficulty, and he could not see the sign-post, nor
the familiar red-bricked farmhouse. He knew all the rain that had fallen
must have come through the thatch of the old cottage in at least one
place, and he would have liked to have gone and rethatched it with
trembling hand. At home he could lift the latch of the garden gate and go
down the road when he wished. Here he could not go outside the
boundary--it was against the regulations. Everything to appearance had
been monotonous in the cottage--but there he did not feel it monotonous.
At the workhouse the monotony weighed upon him. He used to think as he lay
awake in bed that when the spring came nothing should keep him in this
place. He would take his discharge and go out, and borrow a hoe from
somebody, and go and do a bit of work again, and be about in the fields.
That was his one hope all through his first winter. Nothing else enlivened
it, except an occasional little present of tobacco from the guardians who
knew him. The spring came, but the rain was ceaseless. No work of the kind
he could do was possible in such weather. Still there was the summer, but
the summer was no improvement; in the autumn he felt weak, and was not
able to walk far. The chance for which he had waited had gone. Again the
winter came, and he now rapidly grew more feeble.
When once an aged man gives up, it seems strange at first that he should
be so utterly helpless. In the infirmary the real benefit of the workhouse
reached him. The food, the little luxuries, the attention were far
superior to anything he could possibly have had at home. But still it was
not home. The windows did not permit him from his bed to see the leafless
trees or the dark woods and distant hills. Left to himself, it is certain
that of choice he would have crawled under a rick, or into a hedge, if he
could not have reached his cottage.
The end came very slowly; he ceased to exist by imperceptible degrees,
like an oak-tree. He remained for days in a semi-unconscious state,
neither moving nor speaking. It happened at last. In the grey of the
winter dawn, as the stars paled and the whitened grass was stiff with hoar
frost, and the rime coated every branch of the tall elms, as the milker
came from the pen and the young ploughboy whistled down the road to his
work, the spirit of the aged man departed.
What amount of production did that old man's life of labour represent?
What value must be put upon the service of the son that fought in India;
of the son that worked in Australia; of the daughter in New Zealand, whose
children will help to build up a new nation? These things surely have
their value. Hodge died, and the very grave-digger grumbled as he delved
through the earth hard-bound in the iron frost, for it jarred his hand and
might break his spade. The low mound will soon be level, and the place of
his burial shall not be known.