Change in the Village Part 2

"She was with its father. He'd fainted. So we went in. We thought p'raps we could run for the doctor. But she went herself, jest as she was,"

carrying the child down to the town.

As for the girl's sister, who had behaved with some aplomb, "It made her feel rather bad afterwards. She felt sick. All the floor was covered with blood." The little maidservant had a curious look, half horror, half importance, as she said this. She herself was not more than fifteen at the time.

But sickness is commoner by far than accident, and owing to the necessity the cottagers are under of doing everything for themselves they often get into dire straits. Of some of the things that go on one cannot hear with equanimity. The people are English; bone of our bone.

But we shut our eyes. I have heard of well-to-do folk in the parish who, giving of their abundance to foreign missions, deny that there is distress here at home. The most charitable explanation of that falsehood is to suppose that across their secluded gardens and into their luxurious rooms, or even to their back-doors, an average English cottager is too proud to go. Yet it is hard to understand how all signs of what is so constantly happening can be shut out. For myself, I have never gone out of my way to look for what I see. I have never invited confidences. The facts that come to my knowledge seem to be merely the commonplaces of the village life. If examples of the people's troubles were wanted, they could be provided almost endlessly, and in almost endless diversity. But there is one feature that never varies. Year after year it is still the same tale; all the extra toil, all the discomfort, or horror, or difficulty, of dealing with sickness falls immediately on the persons of the family where the sickness occurs; and it sets its cruel mark upon them, so that the signs can be seen as one goes about, in the faces of people one does not know. And the women suffer most.

One winter evening a woman came to my door to see if she could borrow a bed-rest. Her sister, she said, had been ill with pleurisy and bronchitis for a week or more, and for the last two days had been spitting a great deal of blood. The woman looked very poor; she might have been judged needlessly shabby. A needle and thread would so soon have remedied sundry defects in her jacket, which was gaping open at the seams. But her face suggested that there were excuses for her.

I have never forgotten her face, as it showed that evening, although I have since seen it looking happier. It was dull of colour--the face of an overworked and over-burdened soul; and it had a sullen expression of helplessness and resentment. The eyes were weary and pale--I fancied that trouble had faded the colour out of them. But with all this I got an impression of something dogged and unbeaten in the woman's temper.

She went away with the bed-rest, apologizing for coming to borrow it.

"'Tis so bad"--those were her words--"'tis so bad to see 'em layin'

there like that, sufferin' so much pain."

I had never seen her before--for it was years ago; and, knowing no better then, I supposed her to be between forty and fifty years old. In reality, she can hardly have been thirty. It was the stress of personal service that had marred her so young. Did her jacket need mending? As I have since learnt, at that period the youngest of her family was unborn, and the oldest cannot have been more than eight or nine. Besides nursing her sister, therefore, she had several children to wait upon, as well as her husband--a man often ailing in health. For all I know she was even then, as certainly she has been since, obliged to go out working for money, so as to keep the family going; and, seeing that she was a mother, it is probable that she herself had already known the extremity of hards.h.i.+p.

Because, as scarcely needs saying, the principle of self-help is strained to the uttermost at time of child-birth. Then, the other members of the family have to s.h.i.+ft for themselves as best they can, with what little aid neighbours can find time to give; and where there are young children in the cottage, it is much if they are sufficiently fed and washed. But it is the situation of the mother herself that most needs to be considered. Let me give an ill.u.s.tration of how she fares.

Several years ago there was a birth in a cottage very near to me. Only a few hours before it happened the woman had walked into the town to do her shopping for herself and carry home her purchases. As soon as the birth was known, a younger sister, out at service, got a week's holiday, so that she might be at hand to help, though there was no spare room in the cottage where she could sleep. During that week, also, the parish nurse came in daily, until more urgent cases occupied all her time.

After that the young mother was left to her own resources. According to someone I know, who looked in from time to time, she lay in bed with her new-born baby, utterly alone in the cottage, her husband being away at work all day for twelve hours, while the elder children were at school.

She made no complaint, however, of being lonely; she thought the solitude good for her. But she was worried by thinking of the fire in the next room--the living-room, which had the only fireplace in the house, there being none in her bedroom--lest it should set fire to the cottage while she lay helpless. It seems that the hearth was so narrow and the grate so high that coals were a little apt to fall out on to the floor. Once, she said, there had almost been "a flare-up." It was when she was still getting about, and she had gone no farther away than into her garden to feed the fowls; but in that interval a coal fell beyond the fender, and she, returning, found the place full of smoke and the old hearthrug afire. The dread that this might happen again distressed her now as she lay alone, unable to move.

I could furnish more pitiful tales than this, if need were--tales of women in child-bed tormented with anxiety because their husbands are out of work, and there is no money in the cottage, and no prospect of any; or hara.s.sed by the distress of little children who miss the help which the mother cannot give, and so on. But this case ill.u.s.trates the normal situation. Here there was no actual dest.i.tution, nor any fear of it, and the other children were being cared for. The husband was earning a pound a week at constant work, and the circ.u.mstances of the family were on the whole quite prosperous. But one of the conditions of prosperity was that the father of the family should be away all day, leaving the mother and infant unattended.

From whatever sickness the woman suffers, there is always the same piteous story to be told--she is dest.i.tute of help. The household drudge herself, she has no drudges to wait upon her. The other day I was told of a woman suffering from pleurisy. Her husband had left home at six o'clock for his work; a neighbour-woman came in to put on a poultice and make things comfortable; then she, too, had to go to her work. In the afternoon a visitor, looking in by chance, found that the sick woman had been alone for five hours; she was parched with thirst, and her poultice had gone cold. For yet one more example. I mentioned just now a man who was killed on the railway. His widow, quite a young woman then, reared her three or four children, earning some eight or nine s.h.i.+llings a week at charing or was.h.i.+ng for people in the town; and still she keeps herself, pluckily industrious. There is one son living with her--an errand-boy--and there are two daughters both in service at a large new house in the village. During last spring the woman had influenza, and had to take to her bed, her girls being permitted to take turns in coming home to care for her. Just as she, fortunately, began to recover, this permission was withdrawn: both girls were wanted in "their place,"

because a young lady there had taken influenza. So they had to forsake their mother. But by-and-by one of these girls took the infection. Her "place," then, was thought to be--at home. She was sent back promptly to her mother, and it was not long before the mother herself broke down again, not being yet strong enough to do sick-nursing in addition to her daily work.

It must be borne in mind that these acute and definite troubles spring up from the surface of an ill-defined but chronic anxiety, from which very few of the cottagers are free for any length of time. For though there is not much extreme dest.i.tution, a large number of the villagers live always on the brink of it; they have the fear of it always in sight. In a later chapter I shall give some particulars as to their ways and means; in this, I only wish it to be remembered that the question of ways and means is a life-and-death one for the labourer and his wife, and leaves them little peace and little hope of it. During the trade depression which culminated in 1908-09 I was frequently made aware of the disquiet of their minds by the sc.r.a.ps of talk which reached me as I pa.s.sed along the road, and were not meant for my hearing. From women who were comparing notes with one another, this was the sort of thing one would hear: "'En't had nothin' to do this six weeks; and don't sim no likelihoods of it." "I s'pose we shall get through, somehow." "I'm sure I dunno what 'tis a-comin' to." "'Tis bad 'nough now, in the summer; what it'll be like in the winter, Gawd only knows." Again and again I heard talk like this.

And all this was only an accentuation or a slight increase in volume of a note of apprehension which in better times still runs less audibly as a kind of undertone to the people's thought. I had stopped one day to say good-morning to an old widow-woman outside her cottage. She was the mother of that young man whose funeral was mentioned two chapters back; but this was before his death, and while, in fact, he was still doing a little occasional work. She spoke cheerfully, smiled even, until some chance word of mine (I have forgotten what it was) went through the armour of her fort.i.tude, and she began to cry. Then she told me of the position she was in, and the hopelessness of it, and her determination to hold out. Some charitable lady had called upon her. "Mrs. Curtis,"

the lady had said, "if ever you are ill, I hope you'll be sure and send to _me_." And Mrs. Curtis had replied: "Well, ma'am, if ever I sends, you may be sure I _am_ ill." "But," she added, "they don't understand.

'Tis when you're on yer feet that help's wanted--not wait till 'tis too late." With regard to her present circ.u.mstances--she "didn't mind saying it to me--sometimes she didn't hardly know how they was goin' on," for she hadn't a penny except what her son could earn. And "people seemed to think it didn't matter for a single chap to be out o' work. They didn't think he might have a mother to keep, or, if he was in lodgin's, he couldn't live there for nothin'.... Sometimes we seems to be gettin' on a little, and then you has bad luck, and there you are again where you was before. It's like gettin' part way up a hill and fallin' down to the bottom again, and you got it all to begin over again."

I said something--some plat.i.tude--turning to go away. Then she managed to smile--a s.h.i.+ning-eyed smile--saying: "Well, 'tis only for life. If 'twas for longer than that I don't know if we should hardly be able to bear it."

This was but one old woman. Yet, if you have an ear for a folk-saying, you will recognize one there in that "only for life" of hers. Be sure that a by-word so compact as that was not one old woman's invention. To acquire such brevity and smoothness, it must have been wandering about the parish for years; and when it reached me at last it had been polished by the despair of hundreds of other people, as a coin is polished by pa.s.sing through hundreds of hands.

V

DRINK

It will be understood, from what was said on the subject in the first chapter, that the village population has its rough element, and that drunkenness, or at any rate excessive drinking, is very common. It is true that there are very few habitual drunkards in the parish--there are not even many men, perhaps, who frequently take too much; but, on the other hand, the majority are beer-drinkers, and every now and then one or another of them, normally sober, oversteps the limit. Thus, possibly every other family has had its pa.s.sing experience of what drunkenness means in the temporary lapse of father, or son, or brother. A rainy Bank Holiday invariably leads to much mischief in this way, and so does a sudden coming of hot weather in the summer. The men have too much to do to spare time for the public-house in the ordinary weekdays, but on Sat.u.r.day and Sunday nights, when the strain is relaxed, they are apt to give way too far.

The evils of drunkenness, however, are well enough known, and I do not propose to dwell on that side of the matter. But there is another aspect of it which must be considered, if only because it is so thoroughly characteristic of the old village outlook. Incidentally, this other aspect may be worth a little attention from temperance reformers.

For the truth is that the average villager's att.i.tude towards drink and temperance is not that of an unrepentant or rebellious sinner; rather, it is the att.i.tude of a man who has sound reasons for adhering to his own point of view. If he grows restive under the admonitions of the pharisaical, if he meets them defiantly, or if he merely laughs, as often as not it is because he feels that his mentors do not understand the situation so well as he does. How should they, who see it wholly from the outside--they who never go near the public-house; they who have no experience either of poverty or of hard work--how should they, who speak from prejudice, be ent.i.tled to dictate to him, who has knowledge?

He resents the interference, considers it insulting, and goes his own way, supported by a village opinion which is entirely on his side, and certainly has its claims to respect. It is this village opinion which I wish to examine now.

In the eyes of the older villagers or of the more old-fas.h.i.+oned ones mere occasional drunkenness is a very venial fault. The people make a distinction between the habitual drunkard and him who occasionally drinks too much, and they are without compa.s.sion for the former. He is a "low blackguard"; they look reproachfully if you talk of trying to help him by giving him a job of work, or at any rate they pity your wasted efforts. But for the occasional defaulter they have a friendly feeling, unless, of course, he turns savage in his cups. As long as he is cheerful he is rather a figure of fun to them than anything, or he is an object of wondering interest. On a certain August Bank Holiday I saw one of our villagers staggering up the hill--a middle-aged man, far gone in drink, so that all the road was none too wide for him. Other wayfarers accompanied and observed him with a philosophically detached air, and between whiles a woman grabbed at his coat between the shoulders, trying to steady him. But by and by, lurching free, he wobbled across the road to within an inch of a perambulator with two children which another man was pus.h.i.+ng. The drunken man leant over it, poised like an impending fate, and so hung for a few seconds before he staggered away, and it might be supposed that at least the man with the perambulator would be indignant. But not he. He merely remarked wonderingly: "You wouldn't ha'

thought it possible he could ha' done it, would ye?" The other wayfarers laughed lightly, amongst them a young married woman with a refined face.

While the comic side of a man in drink makes its strong appeal to the village folk, they are ready to see excuses for him, too. Anybody, they argue, is liable to be overtaken before he knows, and where is the great disgrace in an accident that may befall themselves, or me, or you?

There is at least no superiority in their outlook, no pharisaism.

Listen, for proof of it, to a talk of Bettesworth's about a neighbour who had been working with the "ballast-train" on the railway all night.

"You," he began--and this first word showed how innocent he was of shame in his own att.i.tude, since he supposed that I must share his amus.e.m.e.nt--"you'd ha' laughed if you'd ha' sin Isaac yest'day. He was got fair boozed; an' comin' up the gully, thinkin' he was goin' straight for 'ome, he run his head right into they bushes down by ol' Dame Smith's. Then he got up the slope about a dozen yards, an' begun to go back'ards 'till he come to Dame Smith's wall, and that turn'd 'n, and he begun to go back'ards again down the gully. I did laugh. He bin at work all night on the ballast-train, an' come back reg'lar f.a.gged out, an'

hadn't had no vittles--an' a feller _wants_ something--and then the fust gla.s.s he has do's for 'n. He bin workin' every night for a week, an'

Sundays, too. And Alice" ("Alice" is Isaac's wife) "is away hop-tyin'

all day, so, of course, Isaac didn't care 'bout goin' 'ome to lop about there by hisself.... I've seed a many go like that. They works all night, an' gets reg'lar f.a.gged out, an' then the fust drop does 'em.

When Alice come 'ome, she looked at least to find the kettle boilin'.

'Stead o' that, she couldn't git in. At least, she had to fetch the key from where she put 'n when she went away in the mornin'. I laughed at her when I went down 'ome. 'Where is he now?' I says. 'Ah, you may laugh,' she says, 'but I got to rouse 'n up about ten o'clock an' git 'n a cup o' tea. He got to be at work again at eleven.' That's how they do's. Begins about ten or eleven o'clock, and don't leave off again afore six or seven, or p'raps nine or ten, next mornin'. Makes days an'

quarters for three an' ninepence. I've knowed a many like that come 'ome an' git boozed fust gla.s.s, like old Isaac. I did laugh, though, and so did Dame Smith when she was a-tellin' of me."

Inheriting from their forefathers such an unimaginative point of view, most of the cottage folk have been, until quite lately, far from regarding the public-house as a public nuisance. It had a distinct value in their scheme of living. That fact was demonstrated plainly in an outburst of popular feeling some years ago. The licensing magistrates of the neighbourhood had taken the extreme, and at that time unprecedented, course of refusing to renew the licenses of several houses in the town.

But while the example they had thus set was winning them applause all up and down England, they were the objects, in this and the adjacent villages, of all sorts of vituperation on account of what the cottagers considered a wanton insult to their cla.s.s. It must be admitted that the action of the justices had some appearance of being directed against the poor. n.o.body could deny, for instance, that the houses frequented by middle-cla.s.s clients, and responsible for a good deal of middle-cla.s.s drinking, were all pa.s.sed over, and that those singled out for extinction served only the humblest and least influential. My neighbours entertained no doubts upon the matter. They were not personally concerned--at any rate, the public-houses in this village were left open for them to go to--but the appearance of favouritism offended them. They were as sure as if it had been officially proclaimed that the intention was to impose respectability upon them against their will; their pleasures were to be curtailed to please fanatics who understood nothing and cared less about the circ.u.mstances of cottage folk. So, during some weeks the angry talk went round the village; it was not difficult to know what the people were thinking. They picked to pieces the character of the individual magistrates, planning ineffective revenge. "That old So-and-So" (Chairman of the Urban Council)--"they'd bin to his shop all their lives, but he'd find he'd took his last s.h.i.+llin' from 'em now! And that What's-his-Name--the workin' cla.s.ses had voted for 'n at last County Council election, and this was how he served 'em! He needn't trouble to put up again, when his turn was up!" Then they commiserated the suffering publicans. "Look at poor old Mrs. ----, what kept the house down Which Street--always a most well-conducted house. n.o.body couldn't find no fault with it, and 'twas her livin'! Why should she have her livin' took away like that, poor old gal?... They sims to think n.o.body en't right 'xcep' jest theirselves--as if we poor people could live an'

go on same as they do. They can 'ave their drink at 'ome, and their music, but where be we to go to if they shuts up the 'ouses?" Such were the remarks I heard over and over again. It seemed to the poor that there were to be no more cakes and ale, because Malvolio was virtuous, or because their own manners were not refined enough.

In the light of subsequent political events I am prepared to believe that some of this popular indignation was engineered from the public-houses. But I do not think it required much engineering. It sounded spontaneous at the time, and considering how the villagers are placed, their resentment was not unnatural. As I have said, the public-house has its value in their scheme of living. They have no means of enjoying themselves at home, no room in their cottages for entertaining friends, and they may well ask what they are to do if the public-houses are closed to them.

One thing, at least, is sure. If the ordinary village inn were nothing but the foul drink-shop which its enemies allege, if all that it provided was an irresistible temptation to depravity, the majority of the people who resort to it now would very soon leave it alone. And the same is true of the little lowly places in the town. In the third chapter I mentioned how the village women, with their men-folk and their children, too--until the recent Act of Parliament shut the children out--would make a Sat.u.r.day-night call at some public-house before going home from the weekly shopping expedition. But these are the reverse of bad women. They are honest and self-respecting mothers of families; women obviously innocent of anything approaching intemperance.

I have seen them chatting outside a public-house door, and then smilingly pus.h.i.+ng it open and going in, as happily unconscious of evil as if they were going to a mothers' meeting. They see no harm in it.

They are away from home, they have far to go, and they want refreshment.

But it is perfectly certain that most of them would rather drop than enter such places--for they are not afraid of fatigue--if there were risk of anything really wrong within. The labouring-cla.s.s woman, as already explained, takes no hurt from a frank style of talk. She is not squeamish, but she has a very strong sense of her own honour; and if you remember how keen is the village appet.i.te for scandal, you will perceive that there can be no fear of scandal attaching to her because of a visit to a public-house, or she would not go there. It should be noted, as evidence of a strict public opinion regulating the custom, that these same women seldom enter the public-houses in the village, and never any others save on this one occasion. They require the justification of their weekly outing, when supper is delayed, and the burden of living can be forgotten amongst friends for an hour. At other times they would consider the indulgence disgraceful; and though they enjoy it just at these times, I do not remember that I have ever seen one of them showing the least sign of having carried her enjoyment too far.

The men certainly are governed by no such severe public opinion, but are free to "get a drink" at any time without being thought the worse of by their neighbours; yet they, too, for the most part, are of good and sober character enough to prove that the village public-house cannot be so utterly given up to evil as might be supposed from the horrified talk of refined people. Not many men in this parish would tolerate a place in which they could do nothing but get drunk. It is for something else that they go to the Fox or the Happy Home. The drinking is but a pleasant incident. They despise the fellow who merely goes in to have his unsociable gla.s.s and be off again, as heartily as they dislike the habitual soaker who brings their entertainment into disfavour; and they themselves keep a rough sort of order--or they increase disorder in trying to quell it--rather than that the landlord should interfere. That loud harsh talk which one hears as one pa.s.ses the public-house of an evening is not what the hyper-sensitive suppose. It does not betoken drunkenness so much as uncouth manners--the manners of neglected men who spend their lives at severe physical labour, and want a little relaxation in the evening. So far as I have seen, the usual conversation in the taproom of a country public-house is a lazy and innocent interchange of remarks, which wander aimlessly from one subject to another, because n.o.body wants to bother his head with thinking; or else it is a vehement discussion, in which dogmatic a.s.sertion does duty for argument and loudness for force. In either case it rests and stimulates the tired men, while the drink refreshes their throats, and it has no more necessary impropriety than the drawing-room talk of the well-to-do.

In this intercourse men who do not read the papers get an inkling of the news of the day, those who have no books come into contact with other minds, opinions are aired, the human craving for fun gets a little exercise; and for topics of talk, instead of those which occupy moneyed people, who know about the theatre or the Church, or foreign travel, or golf, or the state of the poor, or the depreciation of Consols, the labourers have their gardens, and the harvest, and the horses they drive. They talk about their employers, and their work, and their wages; they dispute about county cricket or exchange notes about blight, or new buildings, or the latest public sensation; and all this in endless detail, endlessly interesting to them. So, utterly unaided by arts or any contrivances for amus.e.m.e.nt, they make entertainment for themselves.

That they must make it in kindly temper, too, is obvious; for who would take part in it to be usually annoyed? And it may well be conceived that in an existence so empty of other pleasures, the pleasures to be derived from company are held precious. The scheme of living would be very desolate without that consolation, would grow very illiberal and sombre.

But the public-houses at least do something to prevent this, and in clinging to them the villagers have clung to something which they need and cannot get elsewhere. It is idle to pretend that the "Inst.i.tute"

which was started a few years ago provides a satisfactory alternative.

Controlled by people of another cla.s.s, whose "respectability" is irksome, and open only to members and never to women, the Inst.i.tute does not lend itself to the easy intercourse which tired men enjoy at the public-house. Its billiard-table is not for their heavy hands, used to the pick-axe and shovel; its card games interrupt their talk; its newspapers remind them that they cannot read very well, and suggest a mode of life which they are unable to share.

These reasons, I believe, prevail to keep the labouring men from patronizing the Inst.i.tute more even than does its strictly teetotal policy. Or perhaps I should say, rather, that while they dislike going without their beer, they object more strongly still to the principle on which it is forbidden in the Inst.i.tute. For that principle is nothing more or less than a tacit arraignment of their own point of view. It imputes evil propensities to them; it directly challenges the truth of an idea which not only have they never doubted, but which their own experience seems to them to confirm. The day-labourer really knows nothing to take the place of beer. A man who has been shovelling in a gravel-pit, or carrying bricks up a ladder, or hoeing in the fields, or carting coal, for ten hours in the day, and has, perhaps, walked six or seven miles to do it, acquires a form of thirst which no other drink he can buy will touch so coolly. Of alternatives, milk fails utterly; "minerals" are worse than unsatisfactory; tea, to serve the purpose at all, must be taken very hot, and then it produces uncomfortable sweat, besides involving the expense of a fire for its preparation. There remains cold water. But cold water in copious draughts has its drawbacks, even if it can be obtained, and that is a.s.suming too much. In this parish, at any rate, good water was, until quite lately, a scarce commodity, and n.o.body cared to drink the stagnant stuff out of the tanks or water-b.u.t.ts which supplied most of the cottages. In short, prudence itself has seemed to recommend beer as the one drink for tired men. In their view it is the safest, and the most easily obtained, and, when obtained, it affords the most refreshment. Thus much their own experience has taught the villagers.

And they have the tradition of long generations to support them in their taste. As far back as they can remember, the strongest and ablest men, whose virtues they still recall and admire, renewed their strength with beer daily. Not labourers alone, but farmers and other employers too, whose health and prosperity were a sufficient justification of their habits, were wont to begin their morning with a gla.s.s of beer, which they took, not as a stimulant, but as a food; and the belief in it as a food was so convinced that a man denied his beer by doctor's orders was hardly to be persuaded that he was not being starved of due nourishment.

Such was the esteem in which beer was held twenty years ago, nor has the belief been uprooted yet. Indeed, an opinion so sanctioned to a man, by the approval of his own father and grandfather and all the worthies he can remember, does not immediately become false to him just because it is condemned by strangers who do not know him, and who, with all their temperance, seem to him a delicate and feeble folk. He prefers his own standard of good and evil, and in sitting down to his gla.s.s he has no doubt that he is following a sensible old fas.h.i.+on, modestly trying to be, not a fine gentleman, but a st.u.r.dy Englishman.

On much the same principle the public-house as a place of resort is justified to the villager. I have already shown how it serves him for entertainment instead of newspaper, or book, or theatre; and here, again, he has a long-standing country tradition to support him. In spite of reformers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency of "the trade," which is spoiling the public-house as a place of comfortable rest by frowning upon customers who stay too long and drink too little--in spite of these discouragements, the villagers still cannot believe that what was good enough for their fathers is not good enough for themselves. It might not be equally good if they wished to be "superior persons," but for the modest needs of people like themselves they think it should serve. So they go to the public-house just as their fathers did, content to miss the approval of the cultured, so long as they can do as well as those worthies. Of course, if they ever a.n.a.lyzed their impressions, they must often go home discerning that they had been disappointed; that the company had been dull and the comfort small; that they had got less conviviality than they wanted, and more of the drink that should have been only its excuse; but as they are never introspective, so the disappointment goes unnoticed, and leads to no disillusionment.

VI

WAYS AND MEANS