Chapter 3

For general social intercourse the labouring people do not meet at one another's cottages, going out by invitation, or dropping in to tea in the casual way of friendship; they have to be content with "passing the time of day" when they come together by chance. Thus two families may mingle happily as they stroll homewards after the Saturday night's shopping in the town, or on a fine Sunday evening they may make up little parties to go and inspect one another's gardens.

Until recently--so recently that the slight change may be ignored at least for the present--the prevailing note of this so restricted intercourse was a sort of _bonhomie_, or good temper and good sense. With this for a guide, the people had no need of the etiquette called "good manners," but were at liberty to behave as they liked, and talk as they liked, within the bounds of neighbourliness and civility. This has always been one of the most conspicuous things about the people--this independence of conventions. In few other grades of society could men and women dare to be so outspoken together, so much at ease, as these villagers still often are. Their talk grows Chaucerian at times. Merrily, or seriously, as the case may be, subjects are spoken of which are never alluded to between men and women who respect our ordinary conventions.

Let it be admitted--if anybody wishes to feel superior--that the women must be wanting in "delicacy" to countenance such things. There are other aspects of the matter which are better worth considering. Approaching it, for instance, from an opposite point of view, one perceives that the average country labourer can talk with less restraint because he has really less to conceal than many men who look down upon him. He may use coarse words, but his thoughts are wont to be cleanly, so that there is no suspicion of foulness behind his conversation, rank though it sound. A woman consequently may hear what he says, and not be offended by suggestion of something left unsaid. On these terms the jolly tale is a jolly tale, and ends at that. It does not linger to corrupt the mind with an unsavoury after-flavour.

But more than this is indicated by the want of conventional manners in the village. The main fact is that the two sexes, each engaged daily upon essential duties, stand on a surprising equality the one to the other. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experienced outlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation of ignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at any rate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend that these wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and death for themselves, do not know the things which obviously they cannot help knowing; too absurd to treat them as though they were all innocence, and timidity, and daintiness. No labouring man would esteem a woman for delicacy of that kind, and the women certainly would not like to be esteemed for it. Hence the sexes habitually meet on almost level terms. And the absence of convention extends to a neglect--nay, to a dislike--of ordinary graceful courtesies between them. So far as I have seen they observe no ceremonial. The men are considerate to spare women the more exhausting or arduous kinds of work; but they will let a woman open the door for herself, and will be careless when they are together who stands or who sits, or which of them walks on the inside of the path, or goes first into a gateway. And the women look for nothing different. They expect to be treated as equals. If a cottage woman found that a cottage man was raising his hat to her, she would be aflame with indignation, and would let him know very plainly indeed that she was not that sort of fine lady.

In general, the relations between the sexes are too matter-of-fact to permit of any refinement of feeling about them, and it is not surprising that illegitimacy has been very common in the village. But once a man and a woman are married, they settle down into a sober pair of comrades, and instead of the looseness which might be looked for there is on the whole a remarkable fidelity between the married couples. I have no distinct memory of having heard during twenty years of any certain case of intrigue or conjugal misbehaviour amongst the cottage folk. The people seem to leave that sort of thing to the employing classes. It scandalizes them to hear of it. They despise it. Oddly enough, this may be partly due to the want of a feminine ideal, such as is developed by help of our middle-class arts and recognized in our conventions. True, the business of making both ends meet provides the labourer and his wife with enough to think about, especially when the children begin to come. Then, too, they have no luxuries to pamper their flesh, no lazy hours in which to grow wanton. The severity of the man's daily labour keeps him quiet; the woman, drudge that she is, soon loses the surface charm that would excite admirers. But when all this is said, it remains probable that a lowliness in their ideal preserves the villagers from temptation. They do not put woman on a pedestal to be worshipped; they are unacquainted with the finer, more sensitive, more high-strung possibilities of her nature. People who have been affected by long traditions of chivalry, or by the rich influences of art, are in another case; but here amongst the labouring folk a woman is not seen through the medium of any cherished theories; she is merely an individual woman, a man's comrade and helper, and the mother of his family. It is a fine thing, though, about the unions effected on these unromantic terms, that they usually last long, the man and wife growing more affectionate, more tender, more trustful, as they advance in years.

Of course, the marriages are not invariably comfortable or even tolerable. One hears sometimes of men callously disappearing--deserting their wives for a period, and going off, as if for peace, to distant parts wherever there is work to be picked up. One man, I remember, was reported to have said, when he ultimately reappeared, that he had gone away because "he thought it would do his wife good." Another, who had openly quarrelled with his wife and departed, was discovered months afterwards working in a Sussex harvest-field. He came back by-and-by, and now for years the couple have been living together, not without occasional brawls, it's true, but in the main good comrades, certainly helpful to one another, and very fond of their two or three children. A bad case was that of a bullying railway navvy, who, having knocked his wife about and upset his old father, went off ostensibly to work. In reality he made his way by train to a town some ten miles distant, and from there, in a drunken frolic, sent a telegram home to his wife announcing that he was dead. He had given no particulars: a long search for him followed, and he was found some days later in a public-house of that town vaingloriously drinking. I remember that Bettesworth, who told me this tale, was full of indignation. "Shouldn't you think he could be punished for that?" he asked. "There, if I had my way he should have twelve months reg'lar _hard labour_, and see if that wouldn't dummer a little sense into 'n." There was no suggestion, however, of "a woman in the case," to explain this man's ill-treatment of his wife; it appears to have been simply a piece of freakish brutality.

When disagreements occur, it is likely that the men are oftener to blame than their wives. Too often I have seen some woman or other of the village getting her drunken and abusive husband home, and never once have I seen it the other way about. Nevertheless, in some luckless households the faults are on the woman's side, and it is the man who has the heartache. I knew one man--a most steady and industrious fellow, in constant work which kept him from home all day--whose wife became a sort of parasite on him in the interest of her own thriftless relatives. In his absence her brothers and sisters were at his table eating at his expense; food and coals bought with his earnings found their way to her mother's cottage; in short, he had "married the family," as they say. He knew it, too. In its trumpery way the affair was an open scandal, and the neighbours dearly wished to see him put a stop to it. Yet, though he would have had public opinion to support him in taking strong measures, his own good nature deterred him from doing so. Probably, too, his own course was the happier one. Thrive he never could, and gloomy enough and dispirited enough he used to look at times; yet to see him with his children on Sundays--two or three squalid, laughing urchins--was to see a very acceptable sight.

Returning to the main point, if anyone has a taste for ugly behaviour, and thinks nothing "real" but what is uncomfortable too, he may find plenty of subjects for study in the married life of this parish; but he will be ridiculously mistaken if he supposes the ugliness to be normal. A kind of dogged comradeship--I can find no better word for it--is what commonly unites the labouring man and his wife; they are partners and equals running their impecunious affairs by mutual help. I was lately able to observe a man and woman after a removal settling down into their new quarters. It was the most ordinary, matter-of-fact affair in the world. The man, uncouth and strong, like a big dog or an amiable big boy, moved about willingly under his wife's direction, doing the various jobs that required strength. One evening, in rain, his wife stood watching while he chopped away the wet summer grass that had grown tall under the garden hedge; then she pointed out four or five spots against the hedge, where he proceeded to put in wooden posts. Early the next morning there was a clothes-line between the posts, and the household washing was hanging from it. Nothing could have been more commonplace than the whole incident, but the commonness was the beauty of it. And it was done somehow in a way that warmed one to a feeling of great liking for those two people.

Very often it seems to be the woman who supplies the brains, and does the scheming, for the partnership. When old Bettesworth was on his last legs, as many as half a dozen different men applied to me for his job, of whom one, I very well remember, apologized for troubling me, but said his "missus" told him to come. Poor chap! it was his idea of courtesy to offer an apology, and it was the Old Adam in him that laid the blame on his wife, for really he desired very much to escape from his arduous night-work on the railway. At the same time there is not the least doubt that what he said was true; that he and his wife had talked the matter over, and that, when he proved timid of interviewing me, she forced him to come. Again, two or three winters ago, a man despairing of work in England got in touch with some agency to assist him in emigrating to Canada. It was his wife then who went round the parish trying to raise the few extra pounds that he was to contribute. That was a case to fill comfortable people with uncomfortable shame. The woman, not more than five-and-twenty, would have been strikingly handsome if she had ever in her life had a fair chance; but as it was she looked half-starved, and she had a cough which made it doubtful if she would ever live to follow her husband to Canada. Still, she was playing her part as the man's comrade. As soon as he could save enough money he was to send for her and her baby, she said; in the meantime she would have to earn her own living by going out to day-work.

During the South African War there was many a woman in the village keeping things together at home while the men were at the front. They had to work and earn money just as they do when their men are beaten down at home. There was one woman who received from her husband a copy of verses composed by him and his companions during their occupation of a block-house on the veldt. Very proud of him, she took the verses to a printer, had them printed--just one single copy--and then had the printed copy framed to hang on the bedroom wall in her cottage. Her husband showed it to me there one day, mightily pleased with it and her.

Probably the people behind the counters at the provision shops in the town could tell many interesting things about the relations between married people of this class, for it is quite the common thing in the villages for a man and wife to lock up their cottage on a Saturday evening, and go off with the children to do the week's shopping together. On a nice night the town becomes thronged with them, and so do the shops, outside which, now and then, a passer-by may notice little consultations going on, and husband or wife--sometimes one, sometimes the other--handing over precious money to the other to be spent. And if it is rather painful to see the faces grow so strained and anxious over such trifling sums, on the other hand the signs of mutual confidence and support are comforting. Besides, anxiety is not the commonest note. The majority of the people make a little weekly festivity of this Saturday night's outing; they meet their friends in the street, have a chat, wind up with a visit to the public-house, and so homewards at any time between seven and ten o'clock, trooping up the hill happily enough as a rule. Now and then one comes across solitary couples making one another miserable. Thus one night I heard a woman's voice in the dark, very tired and faint, say, "It's a long hill!" to which the surly tones of a man replied: "'Ten't no longer than 'twas, is it?" Brutishness like this, however, is quite the exception.

As a sample of what is normal, take the following scraps of talk overheard one summer night some years ago. The people were late that night, and indeed, it was pleasant to be out. Not as yet were there any of those street lamps along the road which now make all nights alike dingy; but one felt as if walking into the unspoiled country. For though it was after ten, and the sky overcast, still one could see very clearly the glimmering road and the hedgerows in the soft midsummer twilight. Enjoying this tranquillity, I passed by a man and woman with two children, and heard the man say invitingly: "Shall I carry the basket?" The wife answered: "'E en't 'eavy, Bill, thanks.... Only I got this 'ere little Rosy to git along."

Her voice sounded gentle and cheerful, and I tried to hear more, checking my pace. But the children were walking too slowly. I was getting out of earshot, missing the drift of the peaceful-sounding chatter, when presently the woman, as if turning to the other child, said more loudly: "Come along, Sonny!" The man added: "Hullo, old man! Come along! You'll be left behind!"

The children began prattling; their father and mother laughed; but I was leaving them farther and farther behind. Then, however, some other homeward-goer overtook the little family. For the talk grew suddenly louder, the woman beginning cheerily: "Hullo, Mr. Weatherall! 'Ow's your poor wife?... I didn't see as 'twas you, 'till this here little Rosy said...."

What Rosy had said I failed to catch. I missed also what followed, leading up to the woman's endearing remark: "This 'ere little Rosy, she's a reg'lar gal for cherries!" The neighbour seemed to say something; then the husband; then the neighbour again. And at that there came a burst of laughter, loudest from the woman, and Mr. Weatherall asked: "Didn't you never hear that afore?"

The woman, laughing still, was emphatic: "No; I'll take my oath as I never knowed that."

"Well, you knows it now, don't ye?"

"I ain't sure yet. I ain't had time to consider."

After that the subject changed. I heard the woman say: "I've had six gals an' only one boy--one out o' seven. Alice is out courtin'"; and then they seemed to get on to the question of ways and means. The last words that reached me were "Fivepence ... tuppence-ha'penny;" but still, when I could no longer catch any details at all, the voices continued to sound pleasantly good-tempered.

IV

MANIFOLD TROUBLES

Besides the unrelieved hardness of daily life--the need, which never lifts from them, of making shift and doing all things for themselves--there has always been another influence at work upon my neighbours, leaving its indelible mark on them. Almost from infancy onwards, in a most personal and intimate way, they are familiar with harrowing experiences of calamity such as people who employ them are largely able to escape. The little children are not exempt. There being no nursemaids to take care of the children while fathers and mothers are busy, the tiniest are often entrusted to the perilous charge of others not quite so tiny, and occasionally they come to grief. Then too often the older children, who are themselves more secure for a few years, are eyewitnesses of occurrences such as more fortunate boys and girls are hardly allowed even to hear of. Nor is it only with the gory or horrible disaster that the people thus become too early acquainted. The nauseating details of sickness are better known and more openly discussed in the cottage than in comfortable middle-class homes. For it is all such a crowded business--that of living in these cramped dwellings. Besides, the injured and the sick, absorbed in the interest of their ailments, are amiably willing to give others an opportunity of sharing it. The disorder or the disablement is thus almost a family possession. An elderly man, who had offered to show me a terrible ulcer on his leg, smiled at my squeamishness, as if he pitied me, when I declined the privilege. "Why, the little un," he said, pointing to a four-year-old girl on the floor, "the little un rolls the bandage for me every evening, because I dresses'n here before the fire." That is the way in the labourer's cottage. Even where privacy is attempted for the sufferer's sake there is no refuge for the family from the evidence of suffering. The young people in one room may hardly avoid knowing and hearing where a man is dying, or a woman giving birth to a child, just the other side of a latched deal door.

In this connection it should be remembered how much more than their share of the afflictions of the community falls to the labouring people. The men's work naturally takes them where accidents happen, where disease is contracted. And then, from ignorance or the want of conveniences, from the need to continue wage-earning as long as endurance will hold out, and also from the sheer carelessness which is a part of their necessary habit, both the men and the women not seldom allow themselves to fall into sickness which a little self-indulgence, if only they dared yield to it, would enable them to avoid. I should not know how to begin counting the numbers I have personally known enfeebled for life in this way. Things are better now than they were twenty years ago; there are many more opportunities than there used to be of obtaining rest or nursing, but still the evil is widespread. Without going out of my way at all, during the last fortnight I have heard of--have almost stumbled across--three cases of the sort. The first was that of a woman who had been taking in washing during her husband's long illness. Meeting the man, who was beginning to creep about again, I happened to ask how his wife was; and he said that she was just able to keep going, but hardly knew how to stand because of varicose veins in both legs. The second case, too, was a woman's. She met me on the road, and on the off chance asked if I could give her a letter of admission to the County Hospital, and so save her the pain of going down to the Vicarage to beg for a letter there. What was the matter? "I give birth to twins five months ago," she said, "and since then dropsy have set in. I gets heavier every day. The doctor wants me to go to the hospital, and I was goin' to the Vicar to ask for a letter, but I dreads comin' back up that hill." As it was she had already walked half a mile. In the third case a man's indifference to his own suffering was to blame for the plight in which he found himself. Driving a van, he had barked his shin against the iron step on the front of the van. Just as the skin had begun to heal over he knocked it again, severely, in exactly the same way, and he described to me the immense size of the aggravated wound. But, as he said, he had supposed it would get well, and, beyond tying his leg up with a rag, he took no further trouble about it, until it grew so bad that he was obliged to see a doctor. His account of the interview went in this way: "'How long since you done this?' the doctor says. 'A month,' I says. 'Then you must be a damn fool not to 'ave come to me afore,' the doctor says." The man, indeed, looked just as likely as not to be laid up for six months, if not permanently crippled, as a result of his carelessness.

Yet, common as such cases are now, they were commoner when I first knew the village--when there was no cottage hospital, no proper accommodation at the workhouse infirmary, no parish nurse, and when the parish contained few people of means to help those who were in distress. I remember once looking round in that early period, and noting how there was hardly a cottage to be seen which had not, to my own knowledge, been recently visited by trouble of some sort or another. True, the troubles were not all of them of a kind that could be avoided by any precaution, for some of them arose from the death of old people. Yet in a little cottage held on a weekly tenancy death often involves the survivors of the family in more disturbance, more privation too, than it does elsewhere. Putting these cases aside, however, I could still see where, within two hundred yards of me, there had been four other deaths--one being that of an infant, and one that of a woman in child-birth. In the other two cases the victims were strong men--one, a railway worker, who was killed on the line; the other a carter, who died of injuries received in an accident with his horse. The list of lesser misfortunes included the illness of a man who broke down while at work, with haemorrhage of the stomach, and the bad case of a bricklayer's labourer, who lay for days raving from the effects of a sunstroke. In pre-Christian times it might have been argued that the gods were offended with the people, so thickly did disasters fall upon them, but my neighbours seemed unaware of anything abnormal in the circumstances. By lifelong experience they had learned to take calamity almost as a matter of course.

For, as I said, the experience begins early. The children, the young girls, have their share of it. During those earlier years I am recalling, a little girl of the village, who was just beginning domestic service in my household, was, within the space of six months, personally concerned in two accidents to little children. She came from one of half-a-dozen families whose cottages, for a wonder in this village, stood in a row; and amongst scraps of her talk which were repeated to me I heard how her little brother--only five years old, but strong at throwing stones--threw at a girl playmate and knocked out one of her eyes. That happened in the springtime. In the autumn of the same year a mishap, if possible more shocking at the moment, befell another child in that row of cottages. A man there one evening was trimming a low hedge. His tool was a fag-hook--well sharpened, for he was one of the ablest men in the village. And near by where he worked his children were at play, the youngest of them being between three and four years old.

As he reached over the hedge, to chop downwards at the farther side, this little one suddenly came running dangerously near. "Take care, ducky!" he cried. "Don't come so close, 'r else perhaps father'll cut ye."