A Poor Man's House Part 24

I follow you into your kitchen, with its faint odour of burnt grease (your carelessness) and of c.o.c.kroaches, and its whiffs from the scullery sink, and a love-story that scents your life, hidden away in a drawer. I hear your mistress's bell jingle under the stairs. You must go to bed, and sleep, and be up early, before it is either light or warm, to work for her; you must be kept in good condition like a cart horse or a donkey; you must earn, earn well, your so many silver pounds a year.

In mind, I follow you also into your little bedroom under the roof, with its cracked water-jug that matches neither the basin or the soap-dish, and its boards with a ragged sc.r.a.p of carpet on them, and your tin box in the corner; and the light of the moon or street lamp coming in at the window and casting shadows on the sloping whitewashed ceiling; and your guttered candle. What will you try on to-night? A hat, or a dress, or the two-and-eleven-three-farthing blouse? Shift the candle. Show yourself to the looking-gla.s.s. A poke here and a pull there--and now put everything away carefully in the box under the bed, and go to sleep.

Though I say that I follow you up to your attic, and watch you and see you go to sleep, you need not blush or giggle or snap. I would not do you any harm; your eyes would plague me. And besides, I do not entirely fancy you. You are not fresh. You are boxed up too much. But I trust that some l.u.s.ty careless fellow, regardless of consequences, looking not too far ahead, and following the will of his race--I trust that he will get hold of you and whirl you heavenwards, and will fill your being full to the brim; and will kiss you and surround you with himself, and will make you forget yourself and your mistress and all the world, the leaves and birds of the Lover's Lane, the shadowy cattle munching in the field and the footsteps approaching.

I wish you luck--that your young man may stick to you. It is after all a glimpse of G.o.d I wish you, perhaps your only one.

You've got a longish time before you.

11

[Sidenote: _MRS YARTY_]

Mrs Yarty, up Back Lane, is reduced to that last extremity of poor women: she is cleaning her cottage and preparing as well as she can 'to go up over' on credit, without either doctor or midwife--unless she becomes so ill that someone sends for the parish doctor. She will not wish that done, and probably when her time comes, some neighbour will look in to see if she is going on as well as can be expected. Were Yarty and his wife sufficiently servile to attend church or chapel, prayer-meetings or revivals, all sorts of amateur parsons, male and female, would flock round; but in any case, Mrs Yarty has no time for such goings-on, and if Yarty found anyone sniffing about his house, he would certainly tell them that it _was_ his house.

A while ago one of the 'district ladies' came here, to Tony's. We were a little short with her, and as a last resource, she remarked superciliously, in a tone of pleasant surprise: "You are really _very_ clean here." 'Twas an untruth. We are not _very_ clean: we are as cleanly as is practicable. I should have liked to show her the door.

"'Tis only the way of 'em!" said Mrs Widger. "They'm stupid, but they means all right."

[Sidenote: _THE YARTY CHILDREN_]

Mrs Yarty is not low-spirited at all, and though her voice sounds rather hysterical, it is merely her manner of speaking, slightly accentuated perhaps by more trouble than usual. She is fairly well used to such events by now. Yarty himself is angry. His ordinary habits are bound to be upset for a few days; for ever, if Mrs Yarty dies. He is what successful and conceited people call a waster. "There ain't no harm in him," Tony says. "He wuden't hurt a fly. The only thing is, 'er don't du much." I have never seen him actually drunk. He keeps very nearly all his irregular earnings for his own use in a strong locked box upstairs. His house is a sort of hotel to him, where he expects to find a bed and food, and it is apparently not his business to inquire how the food is obtained. If there is none, he makes a fuss, and will not take for an answer that he has failed to bring the money. Bobby Yarty, thin, pale, big-eyed, the eldest son but one--a nice intelligent boy though he swears badly at his mother--is ill of a disease which only plenty of good food can cure. If, however, food is scarce, it is first Mrs Yarty who goes short, then the children. Whether they do, or don't, have as much as a couple of chunks each of bread and dripping, Yarty must have his stew or fry. The wage-earner has first claim on the food, and even when the wage-earner does not earn, the custom is still kept up. It is possible also that Mrs Yarty has still an underlying affection for her man, a real desire, become instinctive, to feed him.

She does not say so. Far from it. She says that she is sorry she ever left a good place to marry Yarty. She would, she declares, go back into service but for her children. Washing-day, she swears, is her jolliest time, and she boasts, with what pride is left her, of there being places at twelve or fourteen shillings a week still open to her. She did take a place once--was allowed to take her baby with her--but at the end of a fortnight she arrived home to find that her husband, impatient for his tea, had thrown all the crockery on the floor. She saw then that she must be content with things as they are.

Her present worry is, what will become of the children while she is up over, and who will feed them? Mam Widger will do her share, I don't doubt. Very often now she puts aside something for them. There is a sort of pleasantness in watching them take it: they run off with the dish or baking tin like very polite and very hungry dogs, and bring it back faithfully with exceeding great respectfulness towards a household where there is food to spare.

Mrs Yarty is one of those people who work better for others than for themselves. She is no manager. "They says," she remarked the other day, "as He do take care of the sparrows." She is a sparrow herself; she grubs up sustenance, rubs along without getting any forwarder, where others would go under altogether. Years ago she must have been good-looking. Her patchily grey hair is crisp; she still has a few pretty gestures. But trouble and too much child-bearing have done next to their worst with her. Sensible when she grasps a thing, she is often a bit mazed. She has the figure of an old woman--bent, screwed--and the toughness of a young one. Her words, spoken pell-mell in a high strained voice which oscillates between laughter and tears, seem to be tumbling down a hill one after another. Spite of all her household difficulties, she retains the usual table of ornaments just inside the front door. Last summer she reclaimed from the roadway a tiny triangular garden, about five inches long in the sides, by wedging a piece of slate between the doorstep and the wall. There she kept three stunted little wall-flowers--no room for more--which she attended to every morning after breakfast. Cats destroyed them in the end. She laughed, as it were gleefully. Her laugh is her own; derisive, open-mouthed, shapeless, hardly sane--but she has a smile--a smile at nothing in particular, at her own thoughts--which is singularly sweet and pathetic. I cannot but think that the spirit which enables her to live on without despair, to love her little garden and to smile so sweetly, is better worth than much material comfort. Hers, after all, is a life that has its fragrance.

12

[Sidenote: _TONY AS NURSEMAID_]

Mrs Widger went off after tea to look at Rosie's grave. She likes to go alone, without the children, and she also likes to stop and have a chat with someone she knows up on land. In consequence, Tony, taking his Sunday evening promenade, found the children on the Front just in that state when they want, and do not wish, to go to bed. They followed him in.

"Wer's thic Mam 'Idger?"

"Don' know!"

"Her's gone to cementry."

"Didn' ought to leave 'ee like thees yer."

"Her's gone to see Rosie."

Tony felt himself rather helpless. "Now then," he cried with a vain nourish, "off to bed wi' 'ee!"

"No!--No!--Shan't!--Us an't had no supper."

"Wer is yer supper? What be going to hae?"

"Don' know.--Mam! Mam 'Idger!"

One started crying, then the other.

"Casn' thee put 'em to bed thyself?" I asked.

"I don' know! Better wait.... Her's biding away a long time. I'll hae to talk to she."

Tony sat down in the courting chair. The two boys climbed one on each of his knees. They wriggled themselves comfortable, and fell asleep. He woke them. "Won' 'ee go to bed now? I wants to go out."

"No! No!" they cried peevishly. "Wer's thiccy Mam?"

Their white heads, turned downwards in sleep on either side of Tony's red weathered face, looked very patient and bud-like. Tony's eyes twinkled over them with a humorous helplessness, crossed occasionally by a shade of impatience. So the three of them waited for the household's source of energy to return. Tony had been wanting a gla.s.s of beer. He nearly slept too.

Mam Widger said, when she did come, that they were 'all so big a fule as one another.' "Casn' thee even get thy children off to bed?" she asked.

"I can't help o'it," was Tony's reply.

[Sidenote: _LOSS OF TEMPER_]

She has taken the household affairs so completely on her shoulders that he is almost helpless without her. In many ways, and in the better, the biblical, sense of the word, he is still so childlike that he often gets done for him what it would be useless for other people who have little of the child in them, to expect. For the same reason, bullies choose him out for attack. If I should happen to lose my temper with him, it is a fault on my part, quickly repented of and quicker forgiven, but a fault nevertheless. If he, on the other hand, loses his temper with me, he merely says afterwards: "Ah! I be al'ays like that--irritable like; I al'ays was an' I al'ays shall be to the end o'

the chapter." He a.s.sumes that there was no fault on his part, that his loss of temper was simply the outcome of the nature of things and of himself, and consequently that there was nothing to call for forgiveness. The curious thing is that one feels his view to be right.

One does not _forgive_ children; nor the childlike spirit either.

Returning from sea one evening, more lazy than tired, he said: "You wash me face, Mam, an' I'll wash me hands myself." His face was washed amid shouts of laughter, and I tugged off his boots. We were all quite pleased. Happy is the man for whom one can do that sort of thing!

Mrs Widger explained the other day at dinner that for a time after they were married, Tony used to help a great deal with the housework, until once, when he was doing something clumsily, she said: "Git 'long out wi' 'ee, I can du that!"

"Iss," added Tony, "I used to scrub, and help her wi' the washing (an'

kiss her tu), but I ain't done nort to it since her spoke to me rough, like that, an' now I be got out the way o'it, an' that's the reason o'it--thic Mam 'Idger there!"

"G'out! 'tis thy...."

"Oh well, I du cuddle 'ee sometimes, when yu'm willing!"

13

Against the beach the listless sea made a sound like a rattle, very gently and continuously shaken by a very tired baby. Nothing was doing.

The air was a little too chilly for pleasure boating. Tony had gone to 'put away up over' the after-dinner hour. I lay down to read, and fell asleep to the meg-meg of Mam Widger's voice chatting in a neighbour's doorway.

Two or three small pebbles jumped through the open window. Uncle Jake was below. When he says, on the Front, that he is going somewhere, he may set off this week, next week, or never; but when he wakes one up.... I hastened down.

[Sidenote: _PRAWNING WITH BOAT-NETS_]

"Going shrimpin' wi' the boat-nets," he said, flavouring, as it were, a t.i.t-bit in his mouth. "Must try and earn summut if I bean't going to feel the pinch o' _thees_ winter." Then he added as if it were an afterthought: "Be 'ee coming?"