The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens [most important books to read TXT] 📗

lead-mills very early that morning to be 'took on,' but had not succeeded. She had four children; and her husband, also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, and by nature, of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress and in her mother's there was an effort to keep up some appearance of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the unfortunate invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms came on, and how they grew,--having often seen them. The very smell when you stood inside the door of the works was enough to knock you down, she said: yet she was going back again to get 'took on.' What could she do? Better be ulcerated and paralysed for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the children starve.

A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleeping- place of the sick young woman. But the nights being now wintry, and the blankets and coverlets 'gone to the leaving shop,' she lay all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The woman of the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and two others, lay on the one brown heap together for warmth.

'God bless you, sir, and thank you!' were the parting words from these people,--gratefully spoken too,--with which I left this place.

Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent bedstead in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man did not rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said, 'Certainly.' There being a window at each end of this room, back and front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight, to keep the cold out, and was very sickening.

The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her husband's elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of about thirty.

'What was he by trade?'

'Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?'

'I am a boilermaker;' looking about him with an exceedingly perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.

'He ain't a mechanic, you understand, sir,' the wife put in: 'he's only a labourer.'

'Are you in work?'

He looked up at his wife again. 'Gentleman says are you in work, John?'

'In work!' cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his wife, and then working his vision's way very slowly round to me: 'Lord, no!'

'Ah, he ain't indeed!' said the poor woman, shaking her head, as she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.

'Work!' said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler, first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features of his second son at his knee: 'I wish I WAS in work! I haven't had more than a day's work to do this three weeks.'

'How have you lived?'

A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his thread- bare canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, 'On the work of the wife.'

I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head, coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming back.

The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in hand, and spread it out upon the bed,--the only piece of furniture in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine. According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence half- penny, and she could make one in something less than two days.

But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it didn't come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money enough to pay the security deposit,--call it two pound,--she could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband's side at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups, and what not other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was in dress, and toning done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of nutriment and washing,--there was positively a dignity in her, as the family anchor just holding the poor ship-wrecked boilermaker's bark. When I left the room, the boiler-maker's eyes were slowly turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that vanished boiler lay in her direction.

These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.

Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor. The woman apologised for its being in 'an untidy mess.' The day was Saturday, and she was boiling the children's clothes in a saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. The last small scraping of coals left was raked together in a corner of the floor. There were some rags in an open cupboard, also on the floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old French bed-stead, with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot jacket, and rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black. It was difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured black, the walls were so begrimed.

As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children's clothes,--she had not even a piece of soap to wash them with,--and apologising for her occupation, I could take in all these things without appearing to notice them, and could even correct my inventory. I had missed, at the first glance, some half a pound of bread in the otherwise empty safe, an old red ragged crinoline hanging on the handle of the door by which I had entered, and certain fragments of rusty iron scattered on the floor, which looked like broken tools and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood looking on. On the box nearest to the fire sat two younger children; one a delicate and pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed.

This woman, like the last, was wofully shabby, and was degenerating to the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the ghost of a certain vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple in her cheek, carried my memory strangely back to the old days of the Adelphi Theatre, London, when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend of Victorine.

'May I ask you what your husband is?'

'He's a coal-porter, sir,'--with a glance and a sigh towards the bed.

'Is he out of work?'

'Oh, yes, sir! and work's at all times very, very scanty with him; and now he's laid up.'

'It's my legs,' said the man upon the bed. 'I'll unroll 'em.' And immediately began.

'Have you any older children?'

'I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son that does what he can. She's at her work now, and he's trying for work.'

'Do they live here?'

'They sleep here. They can't afford to pay more rent, and so they come here at night. The rent is very hard upon us. It's rose upon us too, now,--sixpence a week,--on account of these new changes in the law, about the rates. We are a week behind; the landlord's been shaking and rattling at that door frightfully; he says he'll turn us out. I don't know what's to come of it.'

The man upon the bed ruefully interposed, 'Here's my legs. The skin's broke, besides the swelling. I have had a many kicks, working, one way and another.'

He looked at his legs (which were much discoloured and misshapen) for a while, and then appearing to remember that they were not popular with his family, rolled them up again, as if they were something in the nature of maps or plans that were not wanted to be referred to, lay hopelessly down on his back once more with his fantail hat over his face, and stirred not.

'Do your eldest son and daughter sleep in that cupboard?'

'Yes,' replied the woman.

'With the children?'

'Yes. We have to get together for warmth. We have little to cover us.'

'Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see there?'

'Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, with water. I don't know what's to come of it.'

'Have you no prospect of improvement?'

'If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he'll bring it home. Then we shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to do something towards the rent. If not, I don't know what's to come of it.'

'This is a sad state of things.'

'Yes, sir; it's a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you go, sir,--they're broken,--and good day, sir!'

These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and received no out-of-door relief.

In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent woman with five children,--the last a baby, and she herself a patient of the parish doctor,--to whom, her husband being in the hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family, four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the Public-blessing Party, lay their heads together in course of time, and come to an equalization of rating, she may go down to the dance of death to the tune of sixpence more.

I could enter no other