Probation

The merry month of May, in the year of grace 1862, and in that part of her Majesty’s dominions known as the County Palatine of Lancaster, wore a face even less smiling and colder than usual. Despite the gaudy sunshine, despite the unusual chances offered to external nature, of showing herself to the best advantage through the absence of smoke—despite this, all was sad, penitential, silent. One missed the burst of talk and laughter, the chaffing and shouting in the streets when the mills were loosed. One missed the tramp, tramp, of the thousands of clogs over the flags at the appointed times.

Trade had collapsed. King Cotton was discrowned; his subjects had become a nation of paupers; some of whom were begging their bread, all of whom were living chiefly on help from outside. There was a vast organisation kept up, chiefly by unpaid, voluntary toil, for discovering distress, and distributing relief. Thanshope had now added herself to the list of towns which had instituted Relief Committees, and Sebastian’s schools had been merged into the larger ones belonging to the public body. They had served as a sort of model or introduction, and the others were founded upon the same plan. He himself was one of the most powerful and active members of the committee, while Adrienne and Helena, from their previous experience, were in reality the head and front of the ladies’ committee, though duly subordinated in outward order to Mrs. Ponsonby, and one or two other dames of place and importance.

But while the great complicated machine was working with such regularity and smoothness, so that it and its movements were praised by all who beheld them, what were those doing on whose behalf all this mechanism had been set a-going? What was happening in the thousands of homes whose most cherished hopes and traditions had to be given up and forsaken in this terrible emergency? In the one home in which we are interested it was going hardly enough.

It was in the very beginning of the month, a bright, glaring, sunny May morning, to look upon, with a dry pitiless east wind blowing round the corners and sweeping down the shady side of the streets. It was the middle of the forenoon, and the Heywoods’ kitchen did not get the morning sun. There was no fire. Mary and her next-door neighbour, Mrs. Mitchell, took turns at having a fire, for the cooking of both households now was less extensive than it once had been, and each alternately undertook the responsibility of the other’s baking and boiling. This was the day on which Mrs. Mitchell had the fire; consequently Mary’s kitchen was all the colder from its bareness and its spotless neatness. She was sitting in the window, sewing. Myles was at the centre table with some books from the library before him, ostensibly reading—really gazing blankly at the page, and looking, as it is not good that a young man, or any man, should look—looking as men only do look when their affairs are in a very bad way.

His sister stole occasional side-glances at his face, and her heart wept, if her eyes did not. She and Edmund had been living all this time upon the weekly sum allowed by Sebastian Mallory to such of his hands as chose to accept it. They had been aided by Myles from his own store, in order that Edmund might have the things he required; and that store, Mary knew now, was at an end, had come to an end some days ago. She did not quite know how Myles had lived during those few dreadful days. He had accepted nothing from her, because what she offered had been bought with Sebastian Mallory’s money. He had smiled when she had implored him to take something and repay her when times mended, if he would not have it as a gift; smiled in a way that had not encouraged her to repeat the offer. He had made no complaints, had been very quiet, but those days had been the most wretched Mary had ever spent in her life. She knew what her brother had been trying to hold out for, but the hope continued to be deferred; and even if it must now be soon fulfilled, she feared the relief would come too late to save him from what he and she both considered the supreme and ultimate disgrace and shame, of having to apply for relief. Some fortnight ago, the Relief Committee had advertised for two clerks, to relieve their honorary secretaries of the burden of accounts and correspondence, which had grown greater than they could bear. Candidates of the artisan class were invited to apply, and it was intimated that, if competent, they would be preferred rather than others, on the principle of helping them to help themselves. Myles Heywood had been one of the applicants, and the decision would not be known for two days yet. The day before, Mary had met Mr. Mallory, and had hurriedly implored him to use his influence, if he had any, to get her brother in; but never, never to say she had asked him, or she did not know what would happen if Myles ever knew of it. He had promised; but there still remained a dreadful blank two days, and then, even with Sebastian’s efforts, the answer might be that Myles was rejected.

Thus she sat this morning, with a sick heart, furtively watching her brother in an anguish of pity. Would it really come to the worst? Would he actually have to turn his steps—her brother, of whom she was so proud—towards those dreadful doors above which glared, in white letters a foot long, ‘Relief Committee’s Offices’? those doors which, she thanked her God every night, she had not yet been obliged to enter? He had had no breakfast, she knew; she did not know when he had last eaten, or of what the meal had consisted. His face was terribly wasted; so was the muscular, long-fingered hand which lay before him on the table. There was lassitude in his attitude, a drawn look about his lips and his eyes; his eyes haunted her, and made her very heart bleed when she encountered them. What would he do? At eleven the committee began their sitting, and it was ten minutes to eleven now, and the offices were some distance away. If he were going it was time he——

She started violently as he, at this moment, pushed his books away from him with a slow, resolute sweep of his hand, and rose. What a terrible change had taken place in the whole figure and deportment of the man!

Myles took his cap from the nail on which it hung, and turned to her.

‘I’m going out, Molly,’ said he.

‘Yes,’ she answered; and something in the muffled toneless accent of her voice made him look at her. She was gazing intently at him, with a fixed, almost staring look—a glance of blank pain and suffering, passive, yet terrible.

‘Mary,’ said he, pausing, ‘you know what it is. It must be. You think it is the worst; but I tell you it is not so. It is not so bad as what you would have me do.’

With that he left the room and the house.

He had a pretty long walk, up and down hill. He felt inexpressibly tired—and worse than tired: his stomach was empty: he had a sick, gnawing sense of hunger—absolute, grinding hunger, such as he had read of others—destitute people—feeling; but such as he had never before felt, till now that he was destitute himself. His head felt weak and dizzy; his mind dull and stupid—he found he could only walk slowly, as he took first this turning and then that, and presently arrived at his destination—the one place in Thanshope where, in these hard times, a flourishing business was being carried on.

About the door was a crowd of people—men and women; young and old. The expressions upon the different faces varied from callousness, through every variety of unwillingness, pain, and shame, up to a careless hardihood that felt no disgrace, and was only wishful to make the most of the opportunity.

Into this crowd stepped the tall figure of the young workman; his face white, half with exhaustion, half with emotion; his lips set, his deep-set eyes glooming beneath the pain-drawn brows. He looked neither to right nor left of him, but leaning against the wall, plunged his hands into his pockets and waited. There was a kind of network of railings before the door, through which the people had to pass in single file, to prevent their all crowding in together, and Myles, like the rest, had to wait his turn.

Most men have to go through one or two mauvais quarts d’heure in the course of their lives, but few can have surpassed in bitterness the minutes which Myles Heywood spent, waiting his turn, before the door of the committee-room. Some one recognised him, spoke to him, and said she had never expected to see him there. He answered mechanically and composedly, but felt his face suddenly grow fierily hot; and then a little push from behind warned him to move on, and he obeyed it.

He entered the large room in company with several other people, and there were more than a dozen gentlemen seated round the table in the middle of the room. But from the moment in which he entered and saw a face raised, a pair of eyes fixed in pitying astonishment upon him, he felt as if he were alone with one man, and that man Sebastian Mallory. Strange to say, he had never remembered, had scarcely been conscious of the fact, that Mallory was one of the most important members of this very committee. He knew it now—realised it with heart and brain and consciousness, as the face of his rival

and for a moment the sense of degradation, of humiliation, burned and scorched him, and he felt almost mad.

Almost—but no; reason was still the stronger. The remembrance of his own utter destitution, the distinct, imperative call of sickness and hunger, the clear knowledge that there was no alternative, prevailed. He did not turn round and walk away. He remained, but how he dragged his feet towards the desk of the man who was asking questions, he knew not. How he answered those questions remained also a mystery to him. The gentlemen heard him, noted his address, and said he would see that the case was inquired into. Myles felt no resentment at the idea of his statements being thought to require investigation: whether because his pride had been once for all laid low, or whether from sheer weakness and dulness of sense, he did not know. He was turning away and wondering when the inquiries would be made, and how much longer he would be able to hold out, when Sebastian Mallory, for the first time removing his attention from the writing in which he had apparently been engrossed, said composedly,

‘There is no need to trouble the visitor to inquire into that case, Mr. Whitaker. I can vouch for the truth of every word of it. I should recommend you to write a ticket and pay the sum required at once.’

Then he turned to his writing again. Mr. Whitaker said, ‘Ah, that is all right, then,’ and immediately took a ticket and began to write.

Myles felt as if everything was reeling around him, and himself with the rest. He caught at the top of a chair by the table and steadied himself, feeling as if he were some one else, some strange, alien, degraded being—one of the beggars of whom he used to read in advanced periodicals, that they ought not to be relieved by private, miscellaneous almsgiving; but should all be ticketed and classified, and strictly watched and overlooked. It was as the bitterness of death, and must be borne unmoved, standing composedly and decently.

All the time he still supported himself by the back of the chair, unable, from very weakness and dizziness, to move. The gentleman who sat in it rose, and looked at him from a pair of keen, stern, steel-gray eyes.

‘You look ill, young man,’ said he. ‘Come with me, and I will show you where to get the money.’

He took the ticket in his hand, and, taking Myles’s arm, led him away through a side-door, into a small sort of anteroom. Here he bade Myles sit down, and he took from a cupboard some wine—red wine, which he poured into a glass and gave to Myles with a piece of bread.

‘Take that,’ said he, ‘and drink the wine, or you will be ill before you get home. You have fasted long. You should have come sooner. How long is it since you had any food?’

‘About thirty-six hours, I think,’ said Myles, looking at him as he took the glass in his hand. It was Canon Ponsonby, ‘the radical parson,’ the man who ought to have been a prime minister, but who, as Rector of Thanshope, earned more love than falls to the lot of most prime ministers, charm they never so wisely.

His stern face softened as he looked upon the figure before him.

‘You have a right spirit,’ said he. ‘I know your name, and who you are. Your sister attends the parish church. You——’

‘Attend no church at all. I’m a free thinker.’

‘Are you? I don’t think you will ever solve your riddle by free-thinking. But shake hands. I wish you were one of my flock.’

‘If anything could make me one of a flock, it would be that you are the shepherd, sir,’ said Myles, finishing his bread and wine, and feeling a warmed life in his veins and at his heart.

‘See!’ said Canon Ponsonby, ‘here is the weekly allowance to which your ticket entitles you. Do not trouble to call at the office. Good morning.’ He took the young man’s hand. ‘I have long known of you. I am glad to have seen you. God have you in His keeping!’

Strangely moved and grateful, Myles silently clasped the noble old man’s hand. He could not speak. Canon Ponsonby showed him out by a side-door, so that he avoided that dreadful crowd round the entrance. He was in the street again, with the white ticket, and some money in his hand. After what Canon Ponsonby had said to him, he had ceased to feel that dreadful agony of shame, but he felt utterly crushed, and reduced to the most perfect insignificance.

Dreamily pursuing his homeward way, he turned over the money in his hand, and remembered that he must buy some food with it! Food! for himself? When he had gone through that age of anguish, as it had seemed to him, he should take the coins which had been so hardly earned, and buy bread with them, and eat them? It struck him as being absurd—as if one had used a steam-hammer to crush a midge withal.

Nevertheless, he went into a shop, and bought some bread and cheese, and was carrying it home, still with the same sense of incongruity between the means and the end. But, as he passed a doorstep, at the end of a street, he beheld a little girl sitting on it, and crying bitterly.

‘Little one, what’s the matter?’ he asked, stopping, and looking down at her.

‘I’m—so—hungry!’ said the child, with a sob between each word, as she looked piteously up into his face, and held a thin little pinafore, soaked with tears, in two small, tremulous hands.

‘So hungry!’ he said, stooping over her, with the sense that perhaps, after all, he had not gone through the furnace to find nothing at the other side. ‘Hast had no breakfast?’

‘Nay, none at o’.’

‘How’s that?’

Here a thin, clean-looking, poorly clad woman, with a baby in her arms, came to the door.

‘Come in, Sarah Emily,’ said she. ‘For shame o’ thisel, to sit bawlin’ on th’ dur-step. Thi’ feyther’s gone to see about summat to ayt. Coom in, and hold thi’ din.’

‘I’m—so—hungry!’ was the only answer.

‘Ne’er heed her, lad!’ said the woman to Myles. ‘My measter’s going to th’ committee to-day. We’ve had to come to that, and we’ll likely get summat to ayt afore neet.’

‘Nay, but it’s very hard for such a bit of a lass to wait so long,’ said Myles. ‘If you’ll trust her to me, I’ll give her some breakfast. I’m just going to get my own.’

‘Eh, thank you, you’re very kind,’ said the woman, her voice suddenly breaking, as she looked at him, and then turned aside again.

‘Come, my lass!’ said Myles gently, and he took the open-mouthed Sarah Emily in his arms, and carried her to his home.

In the kitchen, he seated her in Mary’s rocking-chair, explaining briefly to his sister that the child was clemming, and must be fed, and then he cut her some bread and cheese, and watched her with an intense and altogether unaccountable interest while she ate it. He felt almost light-hearted. If he had not, so to speak, walked up to the cannon’s mouth this morning, little Sarah Emily might have been sickening with hunger until eventide.

‘Good! good!’ she cried, when she had eaten as much as she could.

And she laughed at him, while he slowly ate something himself.

‘Look here!’ he suggested; ‘do you think you could find your way from your home to this another day?’

‘Eh, ay! It’s none so far,’ said Sarah Emily.

‘Then, if you come every morning—every morning, mind—I’ll give you something to eat always, eh?’ he suggested.

‘But I can ayt such a lot, when I’m hungry,’ said Sarah Emily bashfully, putting her forefinger into her mouth.

‘Never mind! There’ll always be something. Wilt come?’

‘Eh, I will so!’ said the child, clapping her hands, jumping upon his knee, and kissing him.

Thus was the bargain struck.

There is this day, in Thanshope, a dark-eyed young woman, of some twenty-four years, who has a husband, and some young children. When the little ones clamour for breakfast or dinner, she is in the habit of reproving them, by telling them that they don’t know what real hunger is; and, as an instance in point, she is given to relating the story how she sat on the doorstep one day in the ‘panic’ crying with hunger, and how the tall, pale-faced young man with the kind eyes picked her up, and carried her home, and gave her food; and how either he or his sister welcomed their hungry little visitor daily for——

‘How long, mother?’

‘Three months, child; every day—eh, they were kind; they were so.’

‘Is he alive now, mother?’

‘Ay, for sure he is, and——’

But the dark-eyed young woman always makes rather a long story of it, and freely intersperses remarks and comments, which, though doubtless interesting to her family, might not be considered of value by the public in general.

Two days later, the postman brought Myles a summons to attend at the Central Offices of the Relief Committee that day, as he was one of the successful candidates for the clerkship, and the announcement that his salary would be twenty shillings a week.

Thus the worst, materially, was tided over; but the bitterness of the cup he had drunk that terrible morning did not lightly pass away.