Ragged Trousered Philanthropists/Chapter 24
CHAPTER XXIV
The Veteran
Old Jack Linden had tried hard to get work—work of any kind—but nobody wanted him; and to make things worse his eyesight, which had been failing for a long time, became very bad. Once he was given a job by a big provision firm to carry an advertisement board about the streets, its previous bearer, an old soldier, having been sacked the day before for getting drunk on duty. The advertisement was not an ordinary pair of sandwich boards, but a sort of box without any bottom or lid: a wooden frame, four sides covered with canvas, on which were pasted printed bills advertising margarine.
Old Linden had to get inside this thing and carry it about the streets. It swayed about a good deal as he walked along, especially when the wind caught it, but there were two handles inside to steady it by. The pay was eighteen pence a day, and he was obliged to travel a certain route, up and down the busiest streets.
At first the frame did not feel very heavy, but the weight seemed to increase as the time went on, and the straps hurt his shoulders. He felt very much ashamed, also, whenever he encountered any of his old mates, some of whom laughed at him.
What with the frame requiring so much attention to keep it steady, and his sight being so bad, the old man several times narrowly escaped being run over. Another thing that added to his embarrassment was the jeering of the other sandwich men, the loafers outside the public houses, and the boys, who shouted 'old Jack-in-the-box!' after him. Sometimes the boys threw refuse at the frame, and once a decayed orange thrown by one of them knocked his hat off.
By the time evening fell he was scarcely able to stand for weariness. His shoulders, legs and feet ached terribly, and as he was taking the thing back to the shop he was accosted by a ragged, dirty-looking, beer-sodden old man whose face was inflamed with drink and fury. This was the old soldier who had been discharged the previous day. He cursed and swore, and accused Linden of 'taking the bread out of his mouth'; and, shaking his fist fiercely at him, shouted that he had a good mind to knock his face through his head and out at the back of his neck. He might possibly have tried to put this threat into practice but for the timely appearance of a policeman, when he calmed down at once and took himself off.
Jack did not go back the next day; he felt that he would rather starve than have any more of the advertisement frame, and from this time forth he seemed to abandon all hope of earning money: wherever he went it was the same, no one wanted him. So he just wandered about the streets aimlessly, now and then meeting an old workmate who asked him to have a drink; but this was not often, for nearly all of them were out of work and penniless.
During most of this time Mary Linden, his daughter-in-law, however, had 'plenty of work,' making blouses and pinafores for Sweater and Company. At first they had employed her exclusively on the cheapest kind of blouses, those paid for at the rate of two shillings a dozen, but latterly, as she did the work very neatly, they kept her busy on the better qualities, which did not pay her so well, because, although she was paid more per dozen, there was a great deal more work in them than in the cheaper kinds. Once she had a very special one to make, for which she was paid six shillings; but it took her four and a half days, working early and late, to do it. The lady who bought this blouse was told that it came from Paris and paid three guineas for it. But of course young Mrs Linden knew nothing of that, and even if she had known, it would have made no difference.
Most of the money she earned went to pay the rent, and sometimes there were only two or three shillings left to buy food for all of them, sometimes not even so much, because although she had Plenty of Work she was not always able to do it. There were times when the strain of working the machine was unendurable; her shoulders ached, her arms became cramped, and her eyes became so painful it was impossible to go on.
When they owed four weeks' rent and the threats of the agent, who acted for Mr Sweater, their landlord, terrified them with the thought of being sold up and turned out of the house, she decided to sell the round mahogany table and other things out of the sitting-room. Nearly all the furniture that was left in the house now belonged to her, and had formed her home before her husband died at the war.
Mr Didlum, the furniture dealer, called to see the various articles, and looked at them with open contempt. Five shillings was the very most he could think of giving for the table, and even then he doubted whether he would ever get his money back. Eventually he gave her thirty shillings for the table, the overmantel, the easy-chair, three other chairs and the two best pictures, one a large steel engraving of 'The Good Samaritan,' and the other 'Christ Blessing Little Children.'
He paid the money at once. Half-an-hour afterwards the van came to take the things away, and when they were gone Mary Linden sank down on the hearthrug in the wrecked room and sobbed as if her heart would break.
This was the first of several similar transactions. Slowly, piece by piece, in order to buy food and to pay the rent, the furniture was sold. Every time Didlum came he affected to be doing them a very great favour by buying the things at all. He did not want them; business was so bad it might be years before he could sell them again; and so on. Once or twice he asked Mary if she did not want to sell the clock—the one that her late husband had made for his mother; but Mary shrank from the thought of selling this, until at last there was nothing else left that Didlum would buy, and one week, when she was too ill to do her needlework, it had to go. Didlum gave them ten shillings for it.
Mary had expected the old woman to be heartbroken at parting with this clock, but she was surprised to see her almost indifferent. The truth was that lately both the old people seemed stunned and incapable of taking an intelligent interest in what was happening around them.
From time to time nearly all their other possessions, things of inferior value that Didlum would not look at, were sold at small second-hand shops in back streets or pledged at the pawnbroker's. The feather pillows, sheets and blankets, bits of carpet or oilcloth, and as much of their clothing as was saleable or pawnable.
They felt the loss of the bedclothes more than anything else, for although all the clothes they wore during the day and all the old clothes and dresses in the house and even an old coloured table-cloth were put on the beds at night, they did not compensate for the blankets, and they were often unable to sleep on account of the intense cold.
A lady district visitor who called occasionally sometimes gave an order for a hundredweight of coal or a shilling's worth of groceries, or a ticket for a quart of soup which Elsie fetched in the evening from the Soup Kitchen. But this was not very often, because, as the lady said, there were so many cases similar to theirs that it was impossible to do more than a very little for any one of them.
Sometimes Mary became so weak and exhausted through overwork, worry and lack of proper food that she broke down altogether for the time being. Then she used to lie down on the bed in her room and cry.
On these occasions Elsie and Charley did the housework when they came home from school, made tea and toast for her, and brought it to her bedside.
The children rather enjoyed these times; the quiet and leisure were so different from other days when their mother was so busy she had no time to speak to them. They would sit on the side of the bed, the old grandmother in her chair opposite, and talk together about the future. Elsie said she was going to be a teacher and earn a lot of money to bring home to her mother to buy things with. Charley was thinking of opening a grocer's shop and having a horse and cart. When you have a grocer's shop, he said, there is always plenty to eat, for even if you have no money, you can take as much as you like out of your shop, good stuff too, tins of salmon, jam, sardines, eggs, cakes, biscuits and all those sorts of things. When delivering the groceries with the horse and cart, he went on, he would give rides to all the boys he knew; and in the summer-time, after the work was done and the shop shut up, Mother and Elsie and Granny could also come for long rides into the country.
The old grandmother, who had latterly become quite childish, would sit and listen to all this talk with a superior air. Sometimes she argued with the children about their plans, and ridiculed them. She used to say with a chuckle that she had heard people talk like that before, lots of times, but it never came to nothing in the end.
One week about the middle of February, when they were in very sore straits indeed, old Jack applied to the secretary of the Organised Benevolence Society for assistance. It was about eleven o'clock in the morning when he turned the corner of the street where the office was situated and he saw a crowd of about thirty men waiting for the doors to be opened in order to apply for soup tickets. Some of them were of the tramp or the drunken loafer class; some were old broken down workmen like himself; and others were labourers wearing corduroy or moleskin trousers with straps round their legs under their knees.
Linden waited at a distance until all these were gone before he went in. The secretary received him sympathetically and gave him a big form to fill up, but as Linden's eyes were so bad and his hand so unsteady the secretary very obligingly wrote in the answers himself, and informed him that he would enquire into the case and lay the application before the committee at the next meeting, which was to be held on the following Thursday.
Linden explained to him that they were actually starving. He had been out of work for sixteen weeks, and during all that time they had lived for the most part on the earnings of his daughter-in-law. There was no food in the house and the children were crying for something to eat. All last week they had been going to school hungry, for they had had nothing but dry bread and tea every day; but this week, as far as he could see, they would not get even that. After some further talk the secretary gave him two soup tickets and an order for a loaf of bread, and repeated his promise to enquire into the case and bring it before the committee.
As Jack was returning home he passed by the Soup Kitchen, where he saw the same lot of men who had been to the office of the Organised Benevolence Society for the soup tickets. They were waiting in a long line to be admitted; the premises being so small, the proprietor served them in batches of ten at a time.
On Wednesday the secretary called at the house, and on Friday Jack received a letter from him to the effect that the case had been duly considered by the committee who had come to the conclusion that as it was a 'chronic' case they were unable to deal with it, and advised him to apply to the Board of Guardians. This was what Linden had hitherto shrunk from doing, but the situation was desperate, and feeling utterly crushed and degraded, he swallowed all that remained of his pride and went like a beaten dog to see the relieving officer. He was taken before the Board, with the result that his case was not considered suitable for out-relief; and after some preliminaries it was finally arranged that Linden and his wife were to go into the workhouse, and Mary was to be allowed three shillings a week to help her to support herself and the two children.
Mary accompanied the old people to the gates of their future dwelling place, and on her return home found a letter addressed to J. Linden. It was from the house agent, and contained a notice to leave the house before the end of the ensuing week. Nothing was said about the five weeks' rent that was due. Perhaps Mr Sweater thought that as he had already received nearly six hundred pounds in rent from Linden he could afford to be generous about the amount that was still owing, or he thought there was no possibility of getting the money. However that may have been, there was no reference to it in the letter; it was simply a notice to clear out, addressed to Linden, but meant for Mary.
She was faint with fatigue and hunger, for she had had nothing but a cup of tea and a slice of bread that day, her usual fare for many weeks past. The children were at school, and the house, now almost destitute of furniture and without carpets or oilcloth on the floors, was deserted and cold and silent as a tomb. On the kitchen table were a few cracked cups and saucers, a broken knife, some lead tea spoons, a part of a loaf, a small basin containing some dripping, and a brown earthenware teapot with a broken spout. Near the table were two broken kitchen chairs. The bareness of the walls was relieved only by a coloured almanac and some paper pictures which the children had tacked upon them, and there by the side of the fire-place was the empty wicker chair where the old woman used to sit. There was no fire in the grate, and the cold hearth was untidy with an accumulation of ashes, for during the trouble of these last few days Mary had not had time or heart to do any housework. The floor was unswept and littered with scraps of paper and dust. In one corner was a heap of twigs and small branches of trees that Charley had found somewhere and brought home for the fire.
The same disorder prevailed all through the house. All the doors were open, and from where she stood in the kitchen she could see the bed she shared with Elsie, with its wretched heap of coverings. The sitting room contained nothing but a collection of odds and ends of rubbish which belonged to Charley, his 'things' as he called them: bits of wood, string and rope; one wheel of a perambulator, a top, an iron hoop, and other treasures. Through the other door she could see the dilapidated bedstead that had been used by the old people, the flock protruding through the ragged covering of the mattress.
As she stood there with the letter in her hand, faint and weary in the midst of all this desolation, it seemed to her as if the whole world were falling to pieces and crumbling away all around her. She sank down on a chair by the table and her head fell limply forward on her arms.