IV.
Our Womankind.
“I utterly disapprove of any club that takes girls systematically away from their own homes. It makes them for the present unmaidenly, and in the future bad wives and mothers,” so a very excellent clergyman’s wife said to me at the end of one of my lectures. I tried to suggest to her that this was not quite the standard to which she had brought up her own daughters; but she soon answered that by saying, “Oh, that’s quite different! my girls are ladies.” Thank God I was able to answer her, “My girls are ladies too.” For in the truest and most real sense that is what my sisters, and those who have worked with them, have achieved at Landport—ladies in appearance and manners, in mind and in heart. It has been, of course, a slow and tedious process, some disappointments, but surprisingly few as compared with the work among boys and men. “How have you done it?” people have often said to me, when sitting at one of our dances. My sister answers, “By having ideals for them; they soon live up to them.”
The good seed had been sown before we came, more efficiently amongst them, I think, than in any other parochial work. Dr. Linklater had started a club for girls called “The Social.” Almost all the original members, certainly all who are living in Portsmouth, belong to it still. They alarmed me very much the first time I saw them. I had half expected to be asked to give a short address, but I found them in the middle of a game of dumb-crambo. They very kindly soon put me at my ease by telling me that they did not think my sermons were as good as Dr. Linklater’s, but they did it in such a genuine kind way that I could not be offended. Most of them, I found out, worked at the Stay Factory; some of them were in service, and they all either lived in the parish, or had been prepared for confirmation by one of the clergy. My first great quarrel with them was because I thought them too exclusive; and herein is the chief difference between work amongst girls and amongst boys. At first you must be exclusive; you have almost reached a point of perfection when you can afford not to be so. Quite rightly their parents would have objected, and they themselves would have lost caste in the factory, besides running a real danger themselves. Ah! how often one wishes there was the same public opinion amongst men that there is amongst women, and that the shady man had as much difficulty in getting into good society as the shady woman. And yet I felt how utterly useless our woman’s work would be if it remained at the point of respectability. The very stay factories from which these girls came were, in those days, places of great temptation. Many of the workers were positively bad, and even amongst those who were not leading bad lives there was great vulgarity of speech and manner, a want of all true refinement. All that is changed to-day, and our Portsmouth factory girls are, as a rule, most respectable and well-conducted.
Then the Commercial Road and the Southsea Common were a perpetual menace. Those places, in which the girls delighted to walk, were full not only of rollicking, good-natured, thoughtless soldiers and sailors, but of those most hateful of all living creatures, the older profligate, the zest of whose pleasure is the innocence of his victim. Many of these girls, too, see sin continually in the streets in which they live. They see other girls who have no work to do—would to God they knew more plainly the awfulness of the work they do do!—able to dress well and go to places of amusement continually, while they themselves too often are unable to earn enough to keep themselves in the actual necessaries of life, with a hundred wretched old women ever on the look-out to tell them how easily money can be made. Take a walk any night you like down the Commercial Road, and, however prejudiced you might be against clubs that keep girls away from their own homes, you would be converted. And so our “Social” gradually added to its numbers, became courageous enough to take in one and then another who really wanted a helping hand, and thus led the way for opening two other clubs for younger girls, so that now, I suppose, there are more than a hundred girls attending every week. I can never tell what I owe to my elder girls, many of them Sunday School teachers and temperance workers, all of them communicants, every one helping a circle of younger girls, the truest, purest, most loving friends I have in the world.
Each club has its nominal lady manager. Miss Brown has governed the “Social” now for twelve years. It would be impossible to even measure the love which binds these girls together, love which proves itself in the highest acts of self-denial. I have known, when there was little doing at the factory, a girl lending another her good bonnet and jacket to come to church in on Sunday, she coming in her workday one. I have known, when another girl was sick, three of them arranging to surrender their own night’s rest, that the sick girl might have someone with her at night, though the illness lasted over six weeks. I have known a girl going with Miss Dolling into the worst streets, into the worst houses, looking for one whom we heard had gone astray. This spirit has spread even amongst the younger girls, and with it a spirit of self-respect, which has given them an absence of self-consciousness, and has very largely removed that horrid giggling habit so common amongst them. My sisters and I have taken them to spend the day with friends of our own in the country, as well as with Mrs. Bramston at Winchester—I like to call her Mrs. Trant—who does for the girls and women what Mrs. Richardson does for the boys and men. Wherever we go, their hosts always remark the same things—their naturalness and refinement.
And yet even with all this one felt that there was something wanting. There is a perfect naturalness and fitness in humanity, the want of recognition of which is oftentimes the overthrow of religious work. It is natural and proper for boys and girls to court, for men and women to marry. We had failed altogether with regard to this. We had excellent clubs for boys, excellent clubs for girls, and then just when you thought you had got hold of them your influence weakened. Soon they disappeared, and the reason was perfectly natural; they had begun to “walk out.” Then one discovered that the one great difficulty in all this was, that it was literally walking out, they had no place where courtship could be carried out. Two dangers in this will suggest themselves to any thinking person. First, the whole thing, as a rule, was done in secret; secondly, there was no outward moral restraint. To people without deep moral sense of right these two dangers would be very great, and they are the cause of most grievous consequences to large numbers of young people. You would naturally say, “Why cannot they use their own homes?” But if you lived with your father and mother, and many brothers and sisters, in one common feeding room, perhaps you would not be bold enough to present your fiancée. I have often known a marriage take place, and the parents on both sides have never been introduced to their new relative. I have more often known marriages take place because of necessity, when the religious ceremony was looked upon as a kind of whitewash. Naturally one talked a great deal both to boys and girls on the subject of courtship, and they soon showed what was one’s duty. We were bound to supply that which the circumstances of their life prevented, an opportunity of meeting and knowing each other. Then came the real difficulty. Where were they to meet, and what were they to do? The gymnasium was the natural meeting place, and so we tried a kind of social evening. But they proved anything but social—the young men on one side of the room, the young ladies on the other. If any male was bold enough to cross over, he was received with giggling, and as conversation was not our strong point—for we had never been taught, so to speak, to talk—he soon subsided, red-faced, amongst his fellows. Then we tried games, but they always ended in horrid romps. All games seemed to end in kissing, and forfeits brought forth witticisms which were not always conducive to propriety. At last my sister was bold enough to suggest, what had been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, why should they not dance? The girls had already learned in their own clubs. But excellent and good-natured as our girls are, we feared it would be putting their kindness to a hard test to ask them to become instructors, especially as all our men could not bring dancing pumps; and though a hob-nailed boot is very useful for most men’s daily work, it was not a pleasant reminder to a partner that she was good-natured enough to be dancing for the purpose of teaching someone else to dance. So I cleared out my dining-room one or two nights a week, and we taught the men as my sisters had taught the girls, and now for the last five years our dancing-class has been one of the most valuable parish institutions. Mr. Whittick, our blind organist, presides at the piano. Nearly all the members are communicants. I had to make this rule, because I must be able to stand over the character of every member. Everyone pays twopence, and we dance from 8 till 10.30 p.m.
It is extraordinary, the difference which this has effected in the manners of our people. The dancing is, perhaps, a little more serious than at a ball in Belgravia, for squares are danced with a due attention to the figures. It has given one the most happy opportunity of enabling our boys and girls to meet naturally together, and I am more and more convinced by experience that one of the greatest causes of sin, in places like ours, is this want. Many of our boys and girls have got engaged to be married through this chance, and if any of them get engaged to a girl outside the parish, the dance gives then an excellent excuse to introduce her to us. It would be very difficult to say, “You must come and see my parson.” It is very easy to say, “You must come and see my dancing-class.” In the last six years I do not think we have had one marriage amongst our people for which we have had cause to feel shame. In the last four years I do not think any of our people have been married without receiving the Holy Communion on the Sunday before, or on the morning of their marriage. Why cannot we talk far more plainly on these subjects to our people? This hideous demand for facilities for divorce, the extraordinary attitude of almost the whole episcopate to it, could never have arisen if we had taught plainly that marriage is a Sacrament, in which God gives grace enabling people to live in holy love together, and therefore demanding from people a preparation as rigid, I need not say more rigid, perhaps, than the preparations needed for the reception of other Sacraments. Think of the hideous vulgarity of modern marriages, the whole talk about clothes and feasting. Think of the behaviour in church. Amongst fashionable people the ceremony is as interesting as a Drawing-room. Amongst my class of people the ceremony is disfigured by ribald jests, oftentimes by the rudest horse-play. Our Lord not only consecrated by His own presence, but brought His Blessed Mother to Cana of Galilee as well. Oh, inestimable value of any saintly woman, who can show the girl why there need not be any amazement in the commencement of a new life, in which, unless she is prepared, there must be a strange and awful awakening.
Then the influence we gained amongst the girls reacted very much on their own homes. I had been very anxious about the elder women, for though, when I came, I found three mothers’ meetings, they were badly attended, and I was told that different streets would not amalgamate, for, in our little parish, there is just as much difference between one street and another as there is between Earl’s Court and West Kensington. I felt that this unchristian state of things must, at all hazards, be broken down, and that the best method was to try and make the meeting as much like a party as possible. And so the first use we made of the schoolroom attached to the gymnasium was to open it once a week, and, as numbers increased, twice a week, for a kind of At Home. At first it was difficult to make them understand that they need not bring a piece of work if they did not like. They might talk to each other, indeed gossip, and move about the room when there was no singing or reading going on, and there always was a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter. I heard a lady once, when I was lecturing, saying aside to a friend, as I spoke about this, “Fancy, encouraging them in their gossiping habits. Of course they will come if he gives them tea.” When the lecture was over I happened to stand behind her for a minute or two in the crush, and I can vouch for two cups of tea, several cakes, and a story to her neighbour, which I should call gossip. Do you suppose that there would be any afternoon visiting if there was no gossip and no afternoon tea? I should admire the courage of the lady who cared to make the attempt.
Of course our influence over these women was slow. On our first summer outing, seventy of us went to the Isle of Wight. It happened to be a very wet day, perhaps that was the excuse, but I noticed in many of their pockets, when coming home, the outline of a little bottle, the contents of which one could easily guess at by the ardour with which these old ladies skipped, for one had supplied a skipping rope, and by the character of the songs they sang. Luckily for us this was an impediment to quick disembarking, and so my sisters and I were glad to get off the boat, before we could be recognised as the guardians of the party. But soon all that passed away. Letting them talk gave us an opportunity of showing them what conversation might be made, above all showing them that vulgarity is seldom witty and never convenient. In 1894 they willingly gave up their summer outing, their one yearly enjoyment, to add to a fund which we were raising for the sufferers from the Victoria disaster. Women are far more stay-at-home, and get far fewer treats than men, and therefore it was a great self-denial.
The girls, as I have said, soon induced their mothers to come, and thus we got an influence in the family. The vast majority of our mothers are regular communicants now, influencing their husbands and sons, giving me immediate warning when any spot in the parish is getting bad, with their Coal Club, their Blanket Club, their Penny Bank, carrying into every street in the parish the power of a homely religious influence, and paying back to me and mine tenderness, sympathy, and love, which people could only do who have become in the truest sense religious and refined. Remember how almost impossible it is to conquer old habits long indulged, how cursing, and swearing, and drinking, and bad talk take even deeper root in women’s hearts than in men’s, and just because their lives are far more commonplace, these are the harder to eradicate. I wish I dare tell you of how bravely month after month some have fought against some special besetting sin, coming to me regularly before Communion Sunday to report progress, so humbly, so trustfully. As I write these words, a letter comes from Portsmouth, “I hope you will be able to save many poor souls, as you have saved me. My husband says he hopes I will not break the pledge now you are gone, as he has had four years of comfort. But I will pray for the help of God to keep me up. I was at church this morning at eight, a very few. We are going to have service on Wednesday at a quarter to six, so that will give us all a chance to go. I remain your affectionate child in Christ.” (She is more than sixty.) This is only one out of a hundred miracles that the Blessed Sacrament has wrought among us. For years that woman had fought against Confirmation. It was the Blessed Sacrament that broke down the stubbornness of her heart.
I can hardly bear to think of them now, for I know how especially desolate they are. And yet I know that their lessons have not been learned in vain, and that as long as they have the Blessed Sacrament, the supernatural graces which have refined them will still support and strengthen them. Many of them are very old, all of them are very ignorant, very poor. I wish you could see them at their day’s outing at Winchester, enjoying the rest and the beauty, so grateful for every attention, so careful not to appear greedy, and yet to do, as one said, “graceful justice” to the splendid food provided; or, better still, if you could see them at their own special service in church, in the truest sense at home in their Father’s house, their house, too, because it is His, and because some act of self-denial on their part has helped to build it; their dear old cracked voices singing all out of tune, their little sighing “Amens” and “Halleluias” in the middle of the prayer, their rapt attention during the sermon, the tear or the smile as the case might be, with sometimes a comment thrown in; a little impatience on the part of the younger, when the clock is reaching four, because the children will be home; a long lingering, sometimes for hours, on the part of those who live alone.