Workhouse Characters Part 10

The big gates were locked, but farther down, hidden in the ivy of the wall, was a small door which yielded to his push, and then, by the favour of the angels, he stood free, and ran for his life up the white road which led to London. At the top of the hill he paused and panted for breath. The windows of the great school-house glared at him like the eyes of some evil beast, and, small as he was, he was painfully conscious of his conspicuousness on the white highway. A farmer's cart pa.s.sed him, and the man turned round and gazed after him curiously. A motor-bus thundered past in a cloud of white, and again it seemed as if every head turned to watch him.

Hot and faint and thirsty, he still plodded on. London, with its beloved chimneys and friendly crowds, would soon burst into view, and his mother, with her cheery "What-ho, Percy!" would be welcoming him. The new shoes of the school were pinching badly. He longed to take them off, but funked the knots, which some female person had tied that morning with d.a.m.nable efficiency. The sun had suddenly tumbled into a dangerous-looking pool of red fire, and the shadows which ran beside him had grown so gigantic he felt alarmed. Such terrifying phenomena were unknown in the blessed streets of London. The queer night noises of the countryside had begun around him: strange chirrups and cries from unseen beasts, which seemed to follow and run beside him; and every now and then a horned monster stuck its head over the gate and roared hungrily for its prey.

At length, wearied and hungry, and terrified by the sinister darkness stealing over the landscape, he threw himself down by the wayside. He heard the sound of footsteps behind, and braced himself to meet the knife of the murderer, when a cheerful voice greeted him: "What-ho, sonnie! You are out late. Time for little boys to be in bed."

"Please, sir," said the child, "I am going home to mother."

"Where does your mother live?"

"In London."

"London, eh! But you've a long way to go."

A sob rose and tore at his throat. Still a long way to go, and darkness was coming on--black, inky darkness, uncut by familiar street-lamps.

"Come home with me, Tommy, and my missis will sleep you for the night."

With a feeling of perfect confidence, the child slipped his small fingers into the h.o.r.n.y hand of the farm labourer, and half an hour later, washed and fed, he was sleeping in a big bed amongst a heterogeneous collection of curly heads.

"Look 'ere, Bill," said the labourer's wife as she folded up the neat little garments provided by unwilling ratepayers, "'e's runned away from that there barrack school."

"I knowed that," said Bill, knocking the ashes out from his clay pipe.

"It ain't the first time as I've met youngsters on the road, and, mebbe, it won't be the last, as folks in the village have been before the beak for harbouring them, poor little devils!"

"A GIRL! G.o.d HELP HER!"

The Lady Catherine Castleton lay dying in the stately bed-chamber of Castleton Hall. Night and day they had sought for my lord in clubs and gambling dens and well-known haunts of vice and pleasure, but they did not know of the rose-grown cottage on the Thames which he had taken for his latest inamorata.

When they told my lady the child was a girl she had given a low cry, "G.o.d help her!" and had turned her face to the wall. Great obstetricians summoned by telephone had sped in flying motors from town, but they stood baffled and helpless by the bedside of the young woman, who lay so still and indifferent, making no effort to live.

In the library the family lawyer and the white-haired admiral, her father, sat signing cheques for the great specialists, who had done so little and charged so much.

When they had gone the admiral, who loved his daughter, swore long and vigorously with the gorgeous powers of the seafaring man, and the lawyer listened with fascinated approval.

"I told her what her life would be with a loose-living scoundrel like Castleton, but she would not listen--madly in love with him and his handsome face, and now he has killed her at twenty-two!"

"I had a very distressing interview with Lady Catherine a few weeks ago.

She went away in disgust and despair when I had to tell her that I did not think she had sufficient evidence for a divorce, and that she must prove cruelty or desertion as well as adultery."

"D---d shameful law, sir; can't think how the country puts up with it.

But she shall be safe from him if she lives, my poor little girl!"

Then they were silent, for the shadow of death crept nearer.

Outside the park gates at the end of the village, in Castleton Union, another girl lay dying. The local pract.i.tioner had been called in on his way back from consultation with the great gynaecologists, and as at the hall, so in the workhouse, he found his patient sinking. "She came in late last night, sir," said the nurse, "and the child was born almost immediately. Her pulse is very weak, and I can't rouse her; she won't even look at the child."

"I hear it is Jennie Appleton, the carpenter's daughter at Kingsford--very respectable people. How did she get here?"

"Usual thing. Got into trouble at her situation in London; the man promised to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and then one day he disappeared, and wrote to her from Glasgow saying that he was a married man. She came back home, but her father drove her out with blows and curses, and she walked here from Kingsford--goodness knows how. It is a sad case, and the relieving officer tells me she will probably not be able to get any affiliation order enforced, as the man has evaded liability by going to Scotland."

"Abominable!" said the doctor; then he went towards the bedside of his patient, felt her pulse, glanced at the temperature chart, and his face grew grave.

Taking the babe from the cradle, he laid it beside the mother: "You have a pretty little girl."

The eyelids flickered, and, as the Countess had spoken, so spoke the pauper: "G.o.d help her!"

"He will," said the doctor, who was a religious man.

"He didn't help me. He let me come to this, and I was born respectable.

She is only a little come-by-chance maid."

"Cheer up, my la.s.s! My wife will help you: she knows it has not been your fault."

The doctor gave a few directions, and then left, looking puzzled and worried. He was a good _accoucheur_, and hated to lose a case. What was the matter with the women that they seemed to have lost the will to live?

Three days later, in the glory of the May sunshine, there was a double funeral in Castleton churchyard.

ON THE PERMANENT LIST

(1905)

Now also when I am old and grey-headed, O G.o.d, forsake me not.

"Spend but a few days in the police-court," says Juvenal, "and then call yourself an unhappy man if you dare." Had he sat on a Board of Guardians, he would doubtless have included that also as a school of personal contentment.

All sorts of griefs and tragedies are brought up before us, some of them abnormal and Theban in horror, some of them so common that we seem to hear them unmoved: an honest man who cannot find employment, women with unborn babes kicked, starved, and deserted, children neglected or tortured, poor human beings marred in the making, the crippled, the diseased, the defective physically and mentally, too often the pitiful scapegoats for the sins of the race.

All these things seem too terrible for words or tears; it is the cheeriness and humour of the poor, their pluck and endurance, their kindness and generosity one to another, that bring a lump to the throat and a dimness to the eyes.

We are a very careful Board, and pride ourselves on the strict way in which we administer our small amount of out-relief; to get it at all one must be, as an applicant observed, "a little 'igher than an angel,"

and so it is the very aristocracy of labour that files past us this morning, men and women against whom even the Charity Organization Society could find no fault, a brave old army, seventy and eighty odd years of age, some of them bent and crippled with rheumatism and weight of years, short of breath, asthmatic, hard of hearing, dim in vision, but plucky to the last, always in terror of looking too ill or too old, and being forced into the workhouse.

A few, like Moses, do not suffer the usual stigmata of age. "Their eye is not dim, nor their natural force abated."

"How do you keep so young?" said our chairman, half-enviously, to an applicant eighty years of age, but upright still, with hair thick and untinged with grey.