The Down and Out King - 6

WILLIAM

Whomade such laws of for English hearts? - who tread on freemen now?

Doesnot the warm blood beat the same through every English brow?

Why part the mother from her child, in spite of burning tears;

O why divide the wedded ones, who lived through grief and years?

Sam and I are still busy doing our writing - he more than I. I like the stories he tells that he hears from the other inmates. This is the gist of what he told me recently.

“Taking the indoor paupers of this house I question if five in a hundred will ever be found to owe their degradation to anything save their own misdeeds.”

I told him that I thought that was a bit harsh. Surely the widows who had no means of support were not to blame for their husband's early demise.”

He ignored my point and continued.

“The truth is, the general run of indoor paupers richly deserve their fate, and a great many seem to like it better than any other. There are dozens of men under my view at this very moment who have been removed from the house and been given opportunities of making themselves comfortably independent out of doers - many of them several times over. Yet here they are again as hopeless and helpless as ever.”

Here he was talking about those he calls the In and Outs. People who choose to leave to get jobs, but somehow always find their way back when the life outside does not meet up with their expectations.

“The number who blame the guardians as the main cause of their lot is astonishing. These people ignore the fact that the guardians did not bring them here in the first instance. All they think fit to remember is that, at one time or another after becoming indoor paupers, it occurred to them that, if they could but make a decent appearance outside, they would have a chance of employment. Accordingly they applied to the board for a suitable outfit, and received the answer generally given under the circumstances, viz., 'We will do what we can in a fair way to help you. Prove to us that you can secure employment, and you shall have all the outfit you require.'

“As the grumblers, however, could not satisfy the condition imposed - and very properly - by the guardians, the outfit was denied.

“And for this reason, and no other, they credit the guardians with their ruin, and cherish undying animosity against them as the sole cause of it. It is curious that, while thus estimating and resenting the refusal, these gentry pronounce invariably that fellow-applicants who met with the like need were rightly served. Thus they condemn themselves very completely, though they cannot see it.

“A still greater number credit runaway wives with their introduction to the house; and these also condemn themselves without perceiving it. So long as the much-maligned partners clung to them, their homes were kept together, and husbands and children preserved from pauperism.
But when the woman disappeared, it took but a short time - merely a few weeks - to break up the home and send the man and his children into the house.

“Looking at this fact, one cannot help asking one's self, Are the absconding women so very much to blame? Shiftless and weak as such husbands are - often utterly worthless into the bargain - what woman of strong feelings would continue to love and cherish and waste her prime on one of them? Is there any of them worth such a sacrifice? ”

I expect he is thinking about Henry when he tells the following story. A few feet from us sleeps a man once well-to-do as a shopkeeper. He is barely forty, but already a pauper who is not likely to be
anything else. He ruined himself by incorrigible vices. He was a betting man and a profligate in every sense. Moreover, nobody living could place the slightest trust in anything he ever said, or rely
upon him in any way. His wife put up with him for years upon years. At last, the workhouse, with its miserable prison life, being full in view, this woman, several years her husband's junior - fine-looking
too, full of vigorous life and womanly feelings, and exasperated by a long course of something worse than neglect - gave way to the solicitations of an old sweetheart who had remained single for her
sake; and, taking the youngest and most helpless of her children, emigrated with this old lover. The husband straight away broke up house and became an indoor pauper. The fact that he had held a
respectable position, and that his nearest relatives still filled respectable positions, disposed the guardians to befriend this man.

“Another specimen of the wife-deserted indoor pauper is a fine powerful fellow, in the prime of life, with plenty of ability and education to back it. He is an artisan, and a skilful one, in most branches of iron-work. Boiler-making, iron-shipbuilding, fitting, etc., are occupations in which he has no superior. He can turn his hand to anything almost in an iron factory, be it rough or smooth.
Consequently, he is precisely the man who should never be out of employment for even an hour.

“His temper is a happy one, full of fun and joke, and he has many fine and taking qualities. A lie he never utters; his courage is sure, and he may be relied on to back his friends in trouble to the last. Generous and sympathetic, too, as well as handsome, frank, and fearless, he is just the man one would think to fasten upon himself the life-long affections of a wife; yet he has done precisely the reverse.

“For a couple of years past he has been and In and Out. He cannot resist the attractions offered by a jovial group in the tap-room; still less can he resist the blandishments of a new and buxom female
acquaintance. And in order to enjoy the society of the one and the other, he allows himself to be tempted at times into forgetting that there is any distinction between meum and tuum: more is the pity.

“He is adroit and wide-awake, and withal makes free with his neighbours' property in a conscientious sort of way. He will not possess himself of what is indispensable to a man, nor of anything the loss of which would produce serious, not to say irreparable, injury; and he would not perform even his little bits of filching, if it were possible without them to enjoy his pet amusements.

“It needs hardly be said that he has not been 'copped' - as these people term arrest, conviction, and punishment - above twice in a long career, and that then he managed to escape the worst stigma and punishment under the guise of illegal possession or pawning. In fact, the gaol knows him rather as a misdemeanant than a criminal. He has never fallen into the hands of the police, except under circumstances such as to give his misdeeds a seeming of thoughtlessness and semi-accident, if I may be allowed to use such a term, and to take away the greater part of their criminality in the eyes of most people - his own eyes, of course, included.

“Meanwhile, the house was kept together somehow by the exertions of the wife. She worked early and late - washing, sewing, mending - often far on into the night, never sparing herself in the least, and still idolizing the ne'er-do-well husband who, as she delighted to hope, would 'pull himself together one of these days,' and turn out quite a model husband and father. However, his ceaseless infidelities shook even her faith in him at last, and she lost heart. Then a hurt received from an irate husband laid the man up, and there was nothing for the family except to place the furniture for care with trusty friends and go into the house.

“As an indoor pauper, Sid Hopkins wins everybody - paupers, master, and guardians. His lot was made an easy one, to begin with. Then, when his health was restored, a former employer took pity on him, and Sid was put in the way of becoming a useful member of society.

“Perhaps he might have done so, had Polly Hopkins remained as she had been. But the spell in the workhouse caught her in a critical state of mind and heart, and exposed her to a species of evil influence, to be described hereafter, precisely when she was in the mood to feel it most. She issued from the house with her principles as well as her affections sapped, with a feeling of degradation and shame, and of indignation also at the author of her temporary pauperism.

“Polly learned to nag indoors, and being a very handsome woman, as suited the wife of such a man, to listen to compliment and solicitation from the young men about. Sid therefore relapsed all the more readily into his former habits. At this period took place one of his few 'coppings' - the imprisonment lasting but a few weeks. It was long enough, however, to send the family into the house for the second time, after disposing of the furniture as before.

“In the old place, Sid played the old part, with the old effect on everybody - irate guardians included. Not so Polly. A few weeks more of indoor pauperism completely perverted her, and she made up her
mind to waste no more of her days on such a husband. Inventing a plausible excuse, she went straight to the master, and begged a few hours' leave of absence. He, never dreaming of what was in her mind - how could he, all things considered, and with such a handsome husband and such fine children? - gave the requisite permission, and Polly hastened away without asking leave of husband or bidding 'good-bye' to the little ones.

“Out of doors, she went directly to a furniture-broker with a second plausible tale, and in his company visited, one after another, the various houses in which the furniture of her old home was stored. Here the parties, never doubting that she was acting under the ordersof Sid, gave up the furniture at her request, and she sold every article to the broker for ready money. The cash in her pocket, she disappeared, and the detested workhouse saw her no more.

“The act just mentioned put the finishing touch to the husband's demoralization and ruin. Wife and furniture lost, his difficulties became far too much for him, or, rather, he ceased to wrestle with
them. Two of his children, being over fourteen, were soon disposed of - the boy to sea and the girl to service. Another boy, a child of eight or nine, remains; and whenever Sid feels in want of a few days
in his accustomed haunts he discharges himself and boy; in any case, the house is sure to see him back again ere half a week goes by. Thus he has been going on for a couple of years - ten days in the house and three to four out - with remarkable regularity.

“As to the wife, she passed through the hands of a series of paramours in rapid succession, until she descended into the streets. Nor was she interfered with in the least by the parochial authorities; for though a runaway husband who leaves wife and children on their hands is hunted down with untiring pertinacity, a runaway wife may do as she pleases, so long as her husband remains alive.

“A very different set of men, however, are the few husbands who are here through the death of cherished consorts. He is the most pitiable object of some three hundred male inmates. (I have to admit that some of what he has said for this category of pauper applies to me.) but the lonely hearth tries them too severely. They fly from it, indeed, into the workhouse, where they allow their thoughts to eat away their hearts in silence, moping about like senseless stocks, perfectly apathetic as respects their surroundings, utterly careless of the present, and living only in the past and the future - on the memory of lost happiness - on the hope of meeting those who have gone before into a better world.

Here is one. A few days will complete his seventieth year. He is short, but exceedingly broad, and must have been a powerful man in his time. With a fine, good-tempered-looking face and the most perfect simplicity of thought and manners - perhaps a little touched with servility - he wins one at once. Born of a peasant family in Worcestershire, he was bred a farrier, but left home and sweetheart for labour in London at an early age - as soon as he was out of his time, indeed - nor did he ever see her or any relative again. London drove them out of his thoughts. They ceased to write, and he never married; so when infirmities drove him into the house, he was entirely alone. Only the other day, a yearning of heart compelled him to write to one whom he had known forty-nine years earlier, but had never seen since, and never even heard of for almost the same period.
The letter was returned, and the old man wept as he received it.”

I do enjoy hearing these stories about our inmates. I can never get much of a story from any of them, but Sam has a way of making them talk and they tell him their deepest secrets. I expect they are quite pleased with the idea that he is writing a book and that their lives will feature in it. Anyway, that is all I have time to write this week.