Women of the Country Part 8

"I just heard of it the other day," replied Mrs Hankworth, letting the b.u.t.ter-prints sink on her lap. "I don't know how it was I came to know of it so late. I'd no idea till the other day that she'd ever gone to live with that Burton. I wonder how she got acquainted with him. There's no men goes about their house. What's she doing now?"

"She's in the Union," said Anne, "and she sits there without speaking, staring into the fire. n.o.body can rouse her. She seems to have no life left in her. It's pitiful to see her, and to think of what's coming to her."

"She's been foolish," said Mrs Hankworth, "and I expect she'll find plenty to make her pay for her foolishness. But I see no reason why she shouldn't do all the better for a lesson. She'll have to work though.

There'll be no sitting round in silk blouses doing fancy-work. You needn't be troubled about her moping when she's got the baby. They don't leave you much time for that," she added with a laugh of retrospection.

"But your first baby's as much trouble as ten. If she can earn a living when she comes out she'll be better without that Burton. He's no better than a child's balloon. He's up, and you p.r.i.c.k him with a pin and he's down! She's provided in the Union, I suppose?"

"I think so, since they never asked anything about it," said Anne.

"What sort of a place is it, Miss Hilton?" asked Mrs Hankworth in the tone of one who might be enquiring after a prison or worse.

"They'd a nice big fire," said Anne, "and until you came to look at the people, it looked quite comfortable. But when you came to look at those poor things, and thought that that was all they had to expect, it made your heart ache."

"She's a good matron I've heard," said Mrs Hankworth.

"She's a kind woman," returned Anne, heartily, "and I suppose it's a good thing they've got such a place to shelter them. But it seems a poor end somehow, and not a place for young people. There seems to be no hope in it, and yet it's clean, and they've got good food."

"Other people's bread doesn't taste like your own to them that's been used to having any," returned Mrs Hankworth. "I expect, if you've never had any of your own, you're glad to get anything. I suppose Burton's out of the country."

"n.o.body seems to know rightly," said Anne. "Jane says not a word. I don't suppose she really knows anything."

"She'll come to see that she's better without him," said Mrs Hankworth, taking up the prints and working the b.u.t.ter emphatically. "But she must work like the rest of us. It's generally the long clothes that gets left over," she added, "the short ones get worn out by some of them, but I'll look and see what I can find. It'll be rather nice to be looking out baby-things again. There's nothing you miss more than a baby, when you've had one or other about for a good many years. But she'd never do any good with that Burton about."

It seemed not so much the fact that a girl would give up her reputation for a man, that impressed Mrs Hankworth unpleasantly, but that she would give it into the keeping of _such_ a man. She did not expect impossible things of anybody. No one belonging to her had ever made a slip, and such a happening seemed to be so remote a possibility for anyone "connected," that she could spare great charity for the rest of the world. Nor did she believe in "driving people." If a girl had made a mistake, that was no reason why everyone else should make another, and her good sense revolted against a perpetually drawn-out punishment for any fault. Her disgust at this fault, not very deep, being submerged almost as it arose, by the immediate necessity for doing something, and a reminiscent understanding of the timidity and dread with which the first child-bearing might be regarded by an ignorant and forsaken girl.

Her position as the reputable and capable mother of a family being una.s.sailable, no one could consider that kindness to the girl implied any countenancing of her offence. Anne, puzzled and baffled by the things which she had seen, felt herself in a larger sphere which could consider the fact of birth as a small matter for everyday occurrence and preparation, happen however it might.

"You can't do anything by worrying, Miss Hilton, you know," said Mrs Hankworth. "You've got to wait. There's nothing _anybody_ can do but wait. There's our John. I think he gets more nervous every child we have. I always say to him that he can't help anything by worrying, and in any case _I'm_ the person who's got to go through it; but it makes no difference. He can't be satisfied till he sees me walking about again.

The girl'll be quite right when she's got the baby to work for. She's nothing to do now but wait and think about it and herself. You'll see when she's up and about again she'll be another thing. I hope the baby's a boy. It'll be sooner forgotten about if he is."

"I'm afraid," said Anne, growing expansive beneath the good sense which attacked every practical side of the matter, and dissolved difficulties as soon as they arose, "that she'll get little work to do when she comes out. People talk unkindly, and say that you must make a difference between her and other girls."

"Oh! there'll always be some clever folk like that," said Mrs Hankworth, drily. "The difference that anyone can see if they use their eyes is, that _she'll_ have a child to keep and _they_ won't. She's no idea where she'll go, I suppose?"

"She doesn't seem to know where she is now," replied Anne. "It's terrible to see anybody drinking such bitter waters as that poor girl.

She thinks we're all against her, and I'm a religious old maid. So she shuts herself up, and doesn't say a word."

"Don't you worry, Miss Hilton," said Mrs Hankworth; "she'll look for friends when the baby comes. She'll stir herself for his sake, if she won't for her own. We're going to have Mr Charter to stop to-morrow night. You'll be going to the Home Missions, won't you?" she said, as if all had been said that could be.

"It'll be a great treat to hear Mr Charter," said Anne. "He's such a kind way of talking about everybody. It's a season of grace and sweet delight when he comes."

"He's got such a way with children and young people," said Mrs Hankworth, steering away from "experiences." "There's my big lad William! He'll follow him round from place to place till he's out of walking distance. 'What do you do it for, William?' I says to him, and he stands on one leg and then on the other, and says 'I don't know,' he says. 'I like hearing him,' he says. He's a great attraction for him."

"I hope there'll be a good meeting," said Anne, rising to go. "Don't you get up. It's been a great relief to me to have a chat with you."

"I'll go down myself and have a look at Jane," said Mrs Hankworth.

"Perhaps in a week or so she'll have got a bit used to her position, and see that she can't go on like that long."

"It'll be a real work of charity," said Anne earnestly. "Young people think a lot of married women. She thinks, you know, that I'm an old maid and don't know anything about it."

"Well, I'll go," said Mrs Hankworth, gratified. "Good morning, then. We shall see you at the meeting."

"G.o.d willing," replied Anne, and turned to go, comforted by the confidence and ample views of this well-to-do woman.

CHAPTER XVI

The little grey chapel at the corner of two roads was lighted and already hot with steam on the windows. The wooden pews, set on steps which rose evenly to the window-sill at the back of the tiny building, seemed to precipitate themselves upon the mean wooden pulpit. Three benches set endwise to the platform served for the choir, and there was a small harmonium. The girl (a daughter of a prosperous farmer) who played it was already in her place, and a group of children had taken possession of the front pew. These were playing under the book-rest and frequent giggles burst from their number. At last one of them threw a hat so much too high that it dropped into the next pew, and a preter-natural silence fell upon the group, who all wriggled themselves erect on their seats and looked apprehensively round. The girl at the harmonium bent back to look at the clock and then pulled out her stops and began to play. The door clicked, and burst open to admit a cold breeze and a big farm boy in his Sunday clothes, whose head and shoulders came in before the rest of him was ready to follow, and who held on to the door as he entered as if for protection. Every child turned its head and watched him while he ducked his head on to the book-board for a second, and then sat upright, adjusting his neck into his collar. The farmer, whose daughter played the organ, came next with his wife, who made her way with an air of owners.h.i.+p to her seat, and having covered her face with her hand for a moment, untied her bonnet-strings and fanned her hot face. Every other moment now the door burst open, and admitted someone from the dark blue outside--a group of clumsy youths who flung themselves upon the pew doors as if they had formed the deliberate purpose of keeping them out, some girls in their finery nodding to acquaintances as they entered, some labourers in unaccustomed clothes, and last Mary Colton who walked with her calculating step to the nearest choir bench. Then a larger group hesitated at the door and the evangelist entered, mounting the pulpit with a confident tread, the minister taking a seat in the choir benches and the stewards sitting behind him. There was some whispering between the evangelist and the minister, then the evangelist remained seated and the minister rose and gave out a hymn--

"Rescue the peris.h.i.+ng, care for the dying."

Those who did not know the words knew and shouted the chorus. It was a rousing beginning. As the hymn came to a final shout, Anne Hilton in a black bonnet and old-fas.h.i.+oned mantle with a bead fringe at the shoulders, with one black cotton glove half on and the other wholly off, entered the chapel and sat just within the door.

The evangelist glanced round his congregation and found himself able to believe the report that the country districts were apathetic. He was an ugly little man with straggling brown whiskers and unruly hair, and had no great appearance of illumination, yet he was a true evangelist, labouring hard to pull souls from the pit of social and moral corruption. That was why he had been sent to the task of addressing the country congregations. He was not working with an eye to romance, nor for the glory which comes to those who work in the slums. He thought with the thoughts of those among whom he worked. He had known what it was to be hungry. He had known the crucifixion of standing idle when every limb ached to be working. He knew that pregnant women are sometimes beaten and kicked by the clogs of their husbands. He knew what little children felt like when they cried from cold. His heart was incessantly burning, but he had worked now for fifteen years and it was no longer burning with indignation. He had found others, not Christians, as he thought, who would be indignant, who would plan with pity and sympathy and with more efficiency and foresight that he could ever control, build up and organise ways of escape for much that he saw. He could meet them too. But his work was to understand, and from his understanding to attract and heal. The others had nothing to say to a woman whose husband died, or whose son became crippled at work, to a man who lost his right hand, or a girl whose sweetheart was drowned two days before the wedding, and these things were always happening.

He looked round. He thought of his various speeches. It was no use telling these people how many more women were arrested for drunkenness in the streets this year than last, nor how many families lived in cellars, nor how many men were without work. Their imaginations, never straying into large numbers, would be blank. He would tell them stories of men and women like themselves, and of how _they_ managed when calamity came. He had sheaves of such stories and a ready tongue. He might strike a spark of understanding. His voice, as he began to speak, belied his appearance. It was sonorous and beautiful and it immediately controlled his audience.

"My dear friends! Just round the corner from the house where I live, there's a street called 'Paradise Street,' but I can tell you as I came along here this morning in the lanes by the chapel, it seemed to me a good deal more like Paradise than that street. It was a treat to smell hawthorn hedges again, and to see some clear sky again, after the foundries of stone-work, and I don't know what it is that makes people give names like Angel Meadow, Paradise Row, Greenfield Street to the dirtiest and smelliest streets in all the town. But I've got some very good friends in this particular Paradise Street I was talking of, and if they don't get an abundant entrance into the Paradise of our Saviour when their time comes, I've mistaken His loving-kindness very sadly.

"Now, you'd hardly think that an old woman could be very happy living in a cellar, without even a proper window to put a plant in, and six steps to come up and down every time she went out and in, and drunken men cursing and blaspheming up above in the street! Well! I'm going to tell you a tale of one of the happiest old women I know, but I'm afraid it's got to be about a day on which she wasn't happy at all.

"Her name's Jane Clark, and she lives in that cellar I'm speaking of on 2s. 6d. a week she has from the parish. She's a widow, and some of you women know what that means. She pays 1s. 3d. for her share of the cellar, for you know in towns such as I come from, we're building so many factories, and railway sheds, and what not, that we've no room left to live in, so Mrs Clark had to share even her cellar. Many a time when I pa.s.sed down that dreadful street and hadn't time to go in, I'd just shout down the cellar and she'd have an answer back in no time. I used to go down for a few minutes, just to cheer myself up a bit, for there's a lot of discouraging things happen in our sort of work, and she always made me ashamed. She was so content, never wanting more and always thankful for what she had.

"Well! one day I was in Paradise Street. It was wet and cold, and the beer-shops were full of drunken men and women, and even the children were shouting foul language.

"'O G.o.d,' I said, ready to cry out in the street, 'How long will the power of the devil last in this town?' However, I thought of Mrs Clark down there, and how she had to live in it all, so I went down the steps, and there she was, but I could see that even she had been crying.

"'Now, Mrs Clark!' I said, 'you don't mean to tell me that it's your turn to be cheered up?'

"'No!' she said, 'not now! I've got it done already!'

"'Well, now!' I said, 'it's so unusual to see you with those red eyes that you make me quite curious. That is, if it's nothing that'll hurt you to tell,' I said.

"'No!' she said, 'it'll not hurt me. I'm a silly old woman,' she said.

She didn't speak for a minute, and then she went on:

"'You know it's my birthday to-day, Mr Charter. I'm sixty this very Friday. Well, you know, I always say to myself, "Short commons on Friday," I says, "because 1s. 6d. won't last for ever." But somehow, with its being my birthday I suppose, and me being sixty, I got it into my head that the Lord would perhaps remember me. I've gone on loving Him for over forty years, and it did seem hard that on my birthday and me sixty, He should have left me with only a crust of bread to my tea.

However, I sat down to eat my crust, but when I began to say a blessing over it, I just began to cry like a silly child. Well, what do you think! I'd just taken the first bite, when a child, whose mother I know, came running in and put a little newspaper parcel on the table. "Mrs Clark," she says, "my mother was out working to-day, and the lady gave her a big pot of dripping, so she sent a bit round for your tea!" She run straight away, and when that child had gone, I cried a good bit more, and then I laughed and laughed, and says over and over again to myself, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."'"

The evangelist looked at his watch, and took a drink of water. One or two men s.h.i.+fted their att.i.tude from one side to the other, and all waited as children do for an absorbing story. A momentary look of satisfaction came over the face of the evangelist, and he began again with zest.

"I'm afraid the next tale I've got to tell you will take a good deal of time." ("We're here to listen," interrupted the minister.)

"Thank you! but you don't know me when I begin to talk! I can hardly tell this tale in a public meeting, it comes so near home. It's about a friend of mine, we'll call him Joe, and whenever I think about him there always comes into my mind the verse we put up over him, 'Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me,' for Joe hadn't an easy lot. I'll tell you what his trade was, though it may make you laugh to hear he was a sweep! Now, I don't know what there is about a sweep that makes little rascals of boys throw stones at him, and call names after him, but that's the curious fact. As soon as ever a sweep begins to call out in the street, there's a crowd of little rascals round him at once. I've seen Joe sometimes, a little crooked man with a lame leg and a black face, and a tail of little ragam.u.f.fins shouting ''Weep, 'weep!' behind him, going about his earthly business in the dirty streets round about where he lived. 'Eh! never mind 'em, Mr Charter,' he used to say. 'It pleases the children, and it doesn't hurt me.' That was the sort of man he was, you see, humble and content.

"He was married, was Joe, to a good, hard-working little wife, and they'd had one daughter. She married a young plumber who got work at Peterhead, and she had three little boys that their grandfather had never seen. He had a photograph of them on the mantleshelf with their mother, that she'd sent him one Christmas. Now one day, an idea came into his head, that if he put by threepence a week, after a good long time, he and his wife could go by a cheap excursion to see those little grandchildren and their mother, just once before they died. He prayed about it, and then week by week, they began saving up, and the nearer they came to having 3, the more real those little grandchildren of theirs became. The daughter, you see, wasn't to be told till all was ready, and then there was going to be a grand surprise. Well, you know, I got as interested in that saving-up as though it was me that was going the excursion!