The Life Of Thomas Wanless, Peasant Part 2

"We ain't Englishmen, we labourers, except when we list and let ourselves be shot by the thousand when some big chap with a handle to his name says, March! An' even then the big chaps get all the rewards, and such o' the common lot as escape hardly get leave to beg. No, no, sir; we ain't Englishmen, we are only Englishmen's slaves."

"Drop that, Tom Wanless," interrupted Hawthorn; "drop it. Good Lord, man, do you suppose I came here to listen to a speech from you, when I kept well without earshot of the parsons. And, Gad, that reminds me--Where are the parsons? Francis! Francis!"

"Yes sir, yes sir," answered that staid person, hurriedly coming forward.

"Humph, making love to the wenches at my very elbow, you graceless dog.

Go and tell the vicar with my compliments, that I want to speak to him out here in this old waggon with the bottom half out. Gad, I'll be through it, I do believe, before you get back. Could that shouting fellow have stamped holes in it," he added to himself, as Francis disappeared. "Shouldn't wonder," and chuckling again at the idea, he sat down on the side of the waggon, quite oblivious of the expectant crowd around him. An impatient hum soon broke on his ear, and he lifted his head and called out, "Go home to bed, you mutinous pack; you'll be defrauding your masters of an hour's work to-morrow morning."

"No fear of that, sir; and we want to hear what you have got to say to us."

"Say to you! Ah, yes, to be sure I have something to say; but we must wait for the parson, boys."

"Here he comes! Here he comes!" shouted voices from the edge of the crowd, and after a little bustling the ruddy face of Codling, and the grey head of his friend gleamed over the side of the waggon in the dim candle-light.

"Glad to see you, sir, I'm sure," said Hawthorn to the vicar graciously; "and you, too, sir," turning to Mr. Slocome. "Sorry I didn't hear your speech; Gad, you have put new life into the boys; they've smashed the farmers. 'Pon my soul, sir, I didn't think they had it in them. You must be a powerful orator, and I wish I had been here sooner."

"Pardon me, sir, I have not the advantage," stammered Slocome. "I did not cause the fight, G.o.d forbid. I did all I could to stop it; my mission is not to stir up sedition, sir, but to preach peace." This last remark in a tone of high offence.

"He, he, he!" laughed the cynical squire. "Well, well, we shan't dispute the point. The boys did fight, and well, too, as you must allow. Licked the farmers, by Jove; and I tell you what, Mr. Vicar," turning again to Codling, "I mean to show my appreciation of their pluck by doing something for them. What do you propose it should be?"

"I'm afraid, sir," answered the vicar, pompously, "I can't abet you in your design, or lend it my countenance. I am deeply grieved that my humbler parishioners should have so far forgotten themselves as to create a disturbance in the village to-night. It has been my wish to do them good, and for that end I held this meeting, and brought my esteemed brother here to imbue their minds with the principles of forethought and thrift. But they interrupted his address with an unseemly riot, led, I am sorry to say, by a young man of whom I had hoped better things.

Bitterness between man and man, cla.s.s and cla.s.s, has been created by the conduct of which you have been guilty to-night, my friends, and you may be sure, though I wish you well, it will be long before I again make the mistake of seeking to increase your material comforts." Turning again to Hawthorn, he added, "I must beg you to excuse me, sir, but I cannot remain here to behold a landed proprietor of this parish, the landlord, in fact, of these villagers, acting as an inflamer of sedition," and with lofty bow, and a wave of his hand, dimly visible to his listeners, Codling turned to go.

"Stay a moment," roared Hawthorn, reaching forth his stick as if to catch the vicar by the collar of his coat. "Stop, sir; don't let him go, boys, I also have something to say." The vicar stood still, looking rather foolish, and Hawthorn continued--"You have made an accusation against my tenants, and I, as their representative and spokesman, must ask you to substantiate those charges. I don't care a curse what you say about myself, but I'm not going to stand by and see these men slandered.

Tell me, sir, who began the disturbance?"

"It was--I believe--I--fancy--some people on the outskirts of the meeting--people from Warwick I should imagine."

"Bah! can't you speak out like a man, instead of beating about the bush like a fool? Who began the disturbance?" The old Captain was clearly getting excited.

"The--the farmers and--but--" blurted out Codling.

"Ah! the farmers was it?" interrupted Hawthorn, "and would you have had these lads stand still like a.s.ses to be thwacked? Do you mean to come out here and deliberately blame my tenants for having spirit enough left to resent insult and abuse? A nice parson you are--a fine preacher of peace. Suppose it had been the other way, and the farmers had been taunted and stoned by the labourers until they turned and thrashed them.

What would you have said then? No doubt that these wretches deserved their fate. I hate all this snivelling cant about the obligation of the poor to submit to whatever is put upon them."

Hawthorn spoke fast and bitterly, and, as he ended, his audience broke into ringing cheers much prolonged.

Codling stood dumb, and looked so cowed and sheepish that Slocome tried a diversion.

"Captain Hawthorn--I believe--and good people," he began, but his voice was drowned amid cries of "Silence--hold your tongue; we want to hear the Captain."

"I have a little more to say, my boys," Hawthorn answered. "My chief object in coming here, and in asking the Vicar to come here, was to tell you that I have decided to a.s.sign to you, the men of my own village, the twenty acre field just by on Warwick road, to be made into allotment gardens. I admire"--but he got no further. Shout upon shout, the men cheered, and the women wept and laughed by turns, as if the speaker had promised them all fortunes. The announcement was so unexpected, and the way it was made went so about the hearts of these poor villagers, that they could have hugged the old Captain to death for joy had he let himself within their reach. As it was, they crowded round the waggon to shake hands with him, hustling the Vicar and his friend out of the way, and it was fully five minutes before order could be restored. During the hubbub the Vicar and Mr. Slocome managed to slink away. What Codling may have thought about his own conduct on that evening no one can say, but he evidently resented Hawthorn's freedom of speech most bitterly. He was disgusted also that the people should have got their allotments so obviously without his help, and from this time forth he may be said to have abjured philanthropy. Henceforth he found it safer and much more pleasant to confine his attention to Church ritual and the worship of feudalism.

The labourers never missed the Vicar in their delight over Hawthorn's announcement. They wanted to escort him home in a body, but he would not hear of it. He peremptorily ordered them to go home to bed, and departed with his servant and his dog. A few of the younger men followed him to the end of the village, then sending a parting cheer after him quickly dispersed. Thus ended the great Ashbrook allotment meeting. It was a nine days' wonder in the neighbourhood, and the oddities of Hawthorn were held to be dangerous by the squires, while farmers cursed him for his liberality. But these things did not prevent the labourers from obtaining their allotments, and they were thereby rendered perhaps a degree less hungry for a time.

CHAPTER IV.

DISCLOSES AN EXCELLENT, INFALLIBLE AND ARISTOCRATIC PLAN FOR MANUFACTURING CRIMINALS.

Nothing serious came directly of the Ashbrook fight. There was a talk of bringing certain labourers before the justices, and the Pembertons in particular uttered loud threats against Tom Wanless, young Satchwell, the blacksmith, and one or two others; but old Hawthorn let it be widely known that if any steps were taken to prosecute the labourers, he would not only provide means for their defence, but enable them also to raise counter actions, in support of which he would compel the Vicar to enter the witness-box. That did not suit the farmers or their abettors, still less Codling, so after a little noisy squabbling the matter dropped.

Henceforth, however, the feud, if such it may be called, between the Pembertons and Wanless was renewed, and became on their part a sleepless desire for petty vengeances. They never missed the smallest opportunity of making him feel their ill-will. Thomas had in other ways enough to bear with in those days, helped though he was by his freehold cottage and allotment. His intelligence told against him with most of the farmers, making them regard him with hatred and suspicion. So he got no opportunity of bettering himself, was, indeed, hardly able to keep his head above water by the severest labour. Many a time did he see other and less skilled workmen preferred before him, and often in harvest had he to work as one of a gang of reapers under another contractor, instead of himself taking the lead. This, by and by, caused him to try and find work at greater distances from home, and he was occasionally away for months at a time wood-cutting, ditch-cutting, toiling early and late for what pittance he could pick up, while his wife struggled at home to make ends meet in spite of her increasing family. By the time Thomas was 35 years old, she had borne him eight children, of whom seven were alive, and it was almost more than mortal could do to bring these up decently on 9s. or 10s. a-week. How his neighbours, who had rent to pay, managed, was more than Thomas could divine, unless they quietly stole what was not given them; as, indeed, most of them did. Many also were so demoralised as to look upon poor relief as a perquisite which they thought it no shame to accept, and even demand, on all occasions. Nearly all poached game, when they had a chance, and boasted of it to each other. In regard to game there was, in fact, no consciousness of wrong-doing in the mind of any labourer, and Thomas himself thought nothing of killing a rabbit or leveret when he had the chance; the only anxiety was not to be caught doing it. There was a clear distinction in his mind between slaying wild animals protected by selfish and abominable laws, and stealing vegetables, fowls, stray eggs, or fruit, which many of his comrades made a practice of doing, pleading in their defence that man must live.

Thomas Wanless had a soul above petty thieving of this kind. Not only was he naturally high-spirited and jealous of a good conscience, but his mind had become considerably expanded by diligent cultivation. He did not again forget his reading, and though his books were few, he still contrived to read enough on odd Sundays in summer, and in the winter evenings, to stimulate his naturally strong thinking powers. His friends, the blacksmith and the parish clerk, were also often in his company, and the three discussed matters of Church and State in the freest possible style over their jugs of thin ale. Poor Brown, the parish clerk and schoolmaster, had not improved his prospects by settling in Ashbrook, for the vicar had long ceased to interest himself in the education of the poor, and the school emoluments had become meagre enough. But Brown had married, and so was, in a measure, rooted to the spot, not knowing where to better himself.

He eked out his parish clerkship with odd accountant jobs for surrounding farmers, and occasionally picked up a crown or two by acting as clerk at country auctions, and his greatest earthly blessing was a contested parliamentary election. Yet life was hard for him withal, and his Radicalism naturally was bitter, for adversity is the best nursery of democratic ideas. It is only the n.o.blest natures that can enjoy prosperity, and yet be just and considerate towards all men. Too often the man who when poor was a blatant Radical becomes a hollow tin kettle sort of creature when he has struggled up from the earth where his Radicalism took birth. I say not that Brown was of this sort, but undeniably poverty and disappointment put an edge on his wit when he dealt with the inequalities of life, and under his leadership Thomas Wanless stood in no danger of becoming an unquestioning pauper. The three friends solved social problems in a style that would have amazed their superiors had they known; nay, that they would have even startled some of the limp and dilettante friends of the people who, in these days, haunt London clubs, and dilate with wondrous volubility on social reform. Thomas's Radicalism, however, never interfered with his work, for his family was more to him than the ills of the State. He viewed these wrongs, perhaps, from too narrow a standpoint for him to be a great social reformer. He felt for his little ones, and for his once blooming, patient wife--now grown brown, gaunt, and hollow-eyed from incessant care, toil, and privation--and the disjointed order of society was to him a personal wrong. His life was, indeed, cheerless; and after his father died and his brother had been killed by a fall from a rick, he often felt lonely and sullen at the heart, working against his fate as a prisoner might in chains. For him this life had no hope, no prospect of rest but the grave.

Struggling bravely, though bitter at the heart, Thomas dragged his family through the terrible years that followed the pa.s.sing of the Reform Bill--years during which his wife and children were almost as familiar with want as with the light of the sun. How they survived he could hardly tell. "My remembrance of that time," he one day said to me, "is but a kind of confused dream. I ceased to think or feel. I just worked where and when I could; and I swallowed my crust like a dumb beast. But now I thank G.o.d that I had health, though then to commit murder would at times to me have seemed as nothing."

In that time Thomas became a strong Chartist, and was a leader among his fellows; and, feeling as he did, it says much for his force of character that there were no outbreaks by the Ashbrook villagers such as occurred in many parts of Warwickshire at that time. His opinions, however, were well known, and he was called a rogue freely enough by his enemies the farmers. More than once he might have suffered unjust imprisonment for his freedom of speech at village gatherings and elsewhere, had not old Squire Hawthorn stood his friend. Ever since Ashbrook fight, that strange old man had taken a special interest in Thomas. It only extended, however, to occasional efforts to keep him out of the grip of the justices, and could hardly perhaps have gone further, for Thomas was proud; and, besides, he was a labourer, and in that lowly lot he was predestined by the laws of the landed oligarchy to remain. Over the great gulf fixed by that mighty trades union of the Take-alls he could never pa.s.s.

So pa.s.sed the years of my friend's early manhood. He was familiar with care; poverty was his abiding portion. A young family gathered round his knee; which he tried to bring up in less ignorance than had been his early lot, but whom he could not always keep less hungry. Thomas had many times difficulty in providing his household with a sufficiency of coa.r.s.e dry bread. Insufficiently nourished his children were weakly and stunted; little able to wrestle with disease. His two eldest boys were sent to work for good at the age of ten; and the younger of the two died through exposure and hunger before he was twelve. The girls were kept longer at home, hard though the fight for life was; but the third boy (Thomas) was taken on at Squire Hawthorn's own farm, at 2s. per week, when he was little over nine. That same year, Thomas himself had had a fine spell of harvesting; and his wife, having no new baby to provide for, had saved a few shillings by selling vegetables from the allotment garden, to people in Warwick town, so that the winter was faced by the couple in better heart than they had known almost since the day they were married. A pound or two in hand after meeting the bills that the harvest money had to pay! Surely greater bliss no man could know. The thought of such riches made Thomas declare that he might yet escape the workhouse, as, thank G.o.d, his father had done. Already, though not forty years old, the shadow of that accursed refuge of the English poor had begun to loom over Thomas's future, grim and horrible as the gate of h.e.l.l. As he thought, in his hours of bitterness, of whither his endless toil was carrying him, of the sole "good" that the Take-alls left to him and such as him, he set his teeth and cursed his country. Nor would he believe that for this he had been born. His soul was bitter within him, and, young as he yet was, hard work and harder fare were telling on his stalwart frame.

But this autumn had brought him a gleam of hope; and the stirring events of the time helped to strengthen that hope. All things were changing.

The great towns had been roused into political activity by the Reform Bill, and railways were fast revolutionising the habits of the people the land through, as well as opening up new fields of labour. At last, then, and even in sleepy, wealth worshipping, hide-bound England, democracy might be considered born. Thomas was sanguine that in the coming struggles the people would win, and, like all sanguine believers in the future good, his belief expected instant fulfilment. The apostles themselves lived in the belief that the end of the world was at hand.

Might not the way-worn and heart-weary agricultural labourer therefore hope? Thomas Wanless, at least, did so. The world was changing for others; for him and his also better times might be at hand. Hitherto, alas, the changes had been mostly to his hurt. Railway-making itself had done his cla.s.s harm rather than good, for the new iron roads linked the country more and more closely to the great centres of industry. Prices of all kinds of agricultural produce went higher and higher, but without bringing a corresponding increase in the labourer's pay. The landowner grabbed all he could of the augmented gains, and what he left the farmer took. For the hind was there not still the workhouse? Yet the demand for labour was increasing fast, and not all the hungry kerns of Ireland seemed able to meet that demand. For once Thomas and his wife had enjoyed a good year. Was not Leamington Priors growing a big town moreover, and going to have a college of its own to outshine Rugby itself? Surely Ashbrook would benefit from the nearness of so much wealth as this implied. The grounds for this hope were many and obvious.

Thomas might yet rent his own little farm, and be independent. His ambition ran no higher, yet the indulgence of it proved him to be a short-sighted fool.

At this time Thomas was an odd or day labourer, taking contract jobs on his own account when he could get them, and working for a daily wage when these failed. This winter found him at work grubbing up old hedges, and helping to lay out anew some land on a farm of Lord Duckford's beyond Radbury. He had to walk about four miles each way daily to and from his work, but as the days were short he lost no time, and the company of a fellow villager engaged with him at the same job made the trudge lighter. And the hopes that lay around his heart helped him more than aught else, as they always help us poor will-o'-the-wisp-led mortals in this dark world.

Alas for these hopes! Thomas Wanless had not been a month at his new work when an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out at Ashbrook, and amongst the first to catch the disease was his youngest child, a girl of two years. Ere ten days had elapsed five out of his seven surviving children were down with the treacherous disease. His eldest boy and girl had had it years before, but the boy was sent home from the farm where he worked for fear of spreading contagion, and the girl was little more than nine years old, so that she could not do much to help the overworked mother.

Crowded together in the long low-roofed attic of the cottage, three of the five lay helpless and wailing for many days. After the first week the other two whose attack had been slight got out of bed, but were kept in the same room to avoid cold. The food of all was poor, the medical attendance miserable and infrequent. Thomas's heart was nearly broken.

All his hopes vanished, and the old bitterness settled down on his spirit. The rage of helplessness often swept over him as he looked at his tired and hara.s.sed wife, or thought of her left alone, day in and out, with those sick children. The little savings would mostly be needed for the doctor's bill; there was only the 10s. a-week that Thomas happily still earned to stand between the whole family and want. Can anyone wonder that Thomas grew moody, and glowered at the world to which he owed so little?

One evening, in the middle of the third week of their affliction, as he and neighbour Robins were trudging home together through the perplexing obscurity of a grey November fog, the latter said--

"Couldn't we get a rabbit or two, Tummas? They'd make a nice pot for the young ones, poor things; better nor barley gruel, any way."

"I don't mind," said Thomas, in an indifferent tone. "But where can we come at 'em?"

"Oh, there's a warren up in Squire Greenaway's fir coppice to the left here, just off the Banbury road. We can beat it in five minutes. Come on," he added, seizing Thomas's arm.

"All right, let's have some o' the wermin," his friend answered, and presently they turned off the road, making for the coppice.

"You keep up by the fence here, and you'll strike the edge of the wood in no time," said Robins. "The burrows lie mostly along to the right.

Crouch down by the holes and be ready. I'll walk round the field and drive the bunnies in. There's sure to be lots feedin' to-night in old Claypole's turmuts."

Thomas obeyed, and the two at once lost sight of each other. Robins, it is to be feared, had often helped himself to a rabbit before now, here and elsewhere, but by some chance Thomas had never yet been a regular poacher. He could not say why, for certainly he had no respect for the game laws. Such, however, was the fact, and he said a queer kind of feeling came over him when he found himself alone, and realised the errand he was upon. But his mind was in tone to be tempted now, and he never thought of turning back. There was, indeed, little time to think of it, for he was among the rabbit-holes in a minute, and choosing a handy bush where the holes were thick he knelt down, grasped his stick and waited. Presently he heard a low whistle from the field below, but quite near, and almost as it reached his ears rabbits by the dozen came hopping up cautiously, and with frequent pauses of watchfulness. The foremost caught sight of Thomas and scudded to the left, whither the whole troop might have followed had not Robins at that instant rushed up and sent a batch of the scared creatures right amongst Thomas's feet.

Ere they could get under ground he managed to knock over three, and Robins himself maimed but did not succeed in catching a fourth. Two of the three knocked over were not quite dead, but Robins at once finished them, and as he did so, said:--

"Look here Tummas, you takes the two big uns. You're more in need o' 'em than me," and as he would take no denial the spoil was so divided.

Thomas thanked his friend, and stowing the rabbits inside their coats as best they could, the two carefully made their way out of the coppice, and again took the road for home.