Sybil - 11

“There is my home,” said Gerard, pointing to a cottage recently built, and in a pleasing style. Its materials were of a fawn-coloured stone, common in the Mowbray quarries. A scarlet creeper clustered round one side of its ample porch; its windows were large, mullioned, and neatly latticed; it stood in the midst of a garden of no mean dimensions but every bed and nook of which teemed with cultivation; flowers and vegetables both abounded, while an orchard rich with promise of many fruits; ripe pears and famous pippins of the north and plums of every shape and hue; screened the dwelling from that wind against which the woods that formed its back-ground were no protection.

“And you are well lodged! Your garden does you honour.”

“I’ll be honest enough to own I have no claim to the credit,” said Gerard. “I am but a lazy chiel.”

They entered the cottage, where a hale old woman greeted them.

“She is too old to be my wife, and too young to be my mother,” said Gerard smiling; “but she is a good creature, and has looked after me many a long day. Come, dame,” he said, “thou’lt bring us a cup of tea; ‘tis a good evening beverage,” he added, turning to Egremont. “and what I ever take at this time. And if you care to light a pipe, you will find a companion.”

“I have renounced tobacco,” said Egremont; “tobacco is the tomb of love,” and they entered a neatly-furnished chamber, that had that habitable look which the best room of a farmhouse too often wants. Instead of the cast-off furniture of other establishments, at the same time dingy and tawdry, mock rosewood chairs and tarnished mahogany tables, there was an oaken table, some cottage chairs made of beech wood, and a Dutch clock. But what surprised Egremont was the appearance of several shelves well lined with volumes. Their contents too on closer inspection were very remarkable. They indicated a student of a high order. Egremont read the titles of works which he only knew by fame, but which treated of the loftiest and most subtle questions of social and political philosophy. As he was throwing his eye over them, his companion said, “Ah! I see you think me as great a scholar as I am a gardener: but with as little justice; these hooks are not mine.”

“To whomsoever they belong,” said Egremont, “if we are to judge from his collection, he has a tolerably strong head.”

“Ay, ay,” said Gerard, “the world will hear of him yet, though he was only a workman, and the son of a workman. He has not been at your schools and your colleges, but he can write his mother tongue, as Shakespeare and Cobbett wrote it; and you must do that, if you wish to influence the people.”

“And might I ask his name,” said Egremont.

“Stephen Morley, my friend.”

“The person I saw with you at Marney Abbey?”

“The same.”

“And he lives with you?”

“Why, we kept house together, if you could call it so. Stephen does not give much trouble in that way. He only drinks water and only eats herbs and fruits. He is the gardener,” added Gerard, smiling. “I don’t know how we shall fare when he leaves me.”

“And is he going to leave you?”

“Why in a manner he has gone. He has taken a cottage about a quarter of a mile up the dale; and only left his books here, because he is going into —shire in a day or two, on some business, that may be will take him a week or so. The books are safer here you see for the present, for Stephen lives alone, and is a good deal away, for he edits a paper at Mowbray, and that must be looked after. He is to be my gardener still. I promised him that. Well done, dame,” said Gerard, as the old woman entered; “I hope for the honour of the house a good brew. Now comrade sit down: it will do you good after your long stroll. You should eat your own trout if you would wait?”

“By no means. You will miss your friend, I should think?”

“We shall see a good deal of him, I doubt not, what with the garden and neighbourhood and so on; besides, in a manner, he is master of his own time. His work is not like ours; and though the pull on the brain is sometimes great, I have often wished I had a talent that way. It’s a drear life to do the same thing every day at the same hour. But I never could express my ideas except with my tongue; and there I feel tolerably at home.”

“It will be a pity to see this room without these books,” said Egremont, encouraging conversation on domestic subjects.

“So it will,” said Gerard. “I have got very few of my own. But my daughter will be able to fill the shelves in time, I warrant.”

“Your daughter—she is coming to live with you?”

“Yes; that is the reason why Stephen quits us. He only remained here until Sybil could keep my house, and that happy day is at hand.”

“That is a great compensation for the loss of your friend,” said Egremont.

“And yet she talks of flitting,” said Gerard, in a rather melancholy tone. “She hankers after the cloister. She has passed a still, sweet life in the convent here; the Superior is the sister of my employer and a very saint on earth; and Sybil knows nothing of the real world except its sufferings. No matter,” he added more cheerfully; “I would not have her take the veil rashly, but if I lose her it may be for the best. For the married life of a woman of our class in the present condition of our country is a lease of woe,” he added shaking his head, “slaves, and the slaves of slaves? Even woman’s spirit cannot stand against it; and it can bear against more than we can, master.”

“Your daughter is not made for the common cares of life,” said Egremont.

“We’ll not talk of them,” said Gerard. “Sybil has an English heart, and that’s not easily broken. And you, comrade, you are a traveller in these parts, eh?”

“A kind of traveller; something in the way of your friend Morley—connected with the press.”

“Indeed! a reporter, eh? I thought you had something about you a little more knowing than we provincials.”

“Yes; a reporter; they want information in London as to the real state of the country, and this time of the year, Parliament not sitting—Ah; I understand, a flying commission and a summer tour. Well, I often wish I were a penman; but I never could do it. I’ll read any day as long as you like, but that writing, I could never manage. My friend Morley is a powerful hand at it. His journal circulates a good deal about here; and if as I often tell him he would only sink his high-flying philosophy and stick to old English politics, he might make a property of it. You’ll like to know him?”

“Much.”

“And what first took you to the press, if I may ask!”

“Why—my father was a gentleman—“, said Egremont in a hesitating tone, “and I was a younger son.”

“Ah!” said Gerard, “that is as bad as being a woman.”

“I had no patrimony,” continued Egremont, “and I was obliged to work; I had no head I believe for the law; the church was not exactly in my way; and as for the army, how was I to advance without money or connexions! I had had some education, and so I thought I would turn it to account.”

“Wisely done! you are one of the working classes, and will enlist I hope in the great struggle against the drones. The natural friends of the people are younger sons, though they are generally enlisted against us. The more fools they; to devote their energies to the maintenance of a system which is founded on selfishness and which leads to fraud; and of which they are the first victims. But every man thinks he will be an exception.”

“And yet,” said Egremont, “a great family rooted in the land, has been deemed to be an element of political strength.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Gerard, “there is a great family in this country and rooted in it, of which we have heard much less than they deserved, but of which I suspect we shall hear very soon enough to make us all think a bit.”

“In this county?”

“Ay; in this county and every other one; I mean the PEOPLE.”

“Ah!” said Egremont, “that family has existed for a long time.”

“But it has taken to increase rapidly of late, my friend—how may I call you?”

“They call me, Franklin.”

“A good English name of a good English class that has disappeared. Well, Mr Franklin, be sure of this, that the Population Returns of this country are very instructive reading.”

“I can conceive so.”

“I became a man when the bad times were beginning,” said Gerard; “I have passed through many doleful years. I was a Franklin’s son myself, and we had lived on this island at least no worse for a longer time than I care to recollect as little as what I am now. But that’s nothing; I am not thinking of myself. I am prosperous in a fashion; it is the serfs I live among of whom I am thinking. Well, I have heard, in the course of years, of some specifics for this constant degradation of the people; some thing or some person that was to put all right; and for my part, I was not unready to support any proposal or follow any leader. There was reform, and there was paper money, and no machinery, and a thousand other remedies; and there were demagogues of all kinds, some as had as myself, and some with blood in their veins almost as costly as flows in those of our great neighbour here. Earl de Mowbray, and I have always heard that was very choice: but I will frankly own to you, I never had much faith in any of these proposals or proposers; but they were a change, and that is something. But I have been persuaded of late that there is something going on in this country of more efficacy; a remedial power, as I believe, and irresistible; but whether remedial or not, at any rate a power that will mar all or cure all. You apprehend me? I speak of the annual arrival of more than three hundred thousand strangers in this island. How will you feed them? How will you clothe them? How will you house them? They have given up butcher’s meat; must they give up bread? And as for raiment and shelter, the rags of the kingdom are exhausted and your sinks and cellars already swarm like rabbit warrens.

“‘Tis an awful consideration,” said Egremont musing.

“Awful,” said Gerard; “‘tis the most solemn thing since the deluge. What kingdom can stand against it? Why go to your history—you’re a scholar,—and see the fall of the great Roman empire—what was that? Every now and then, there came two or three hundred thousand strangers out of the forests and crossed the mountains and rivers. They come to us every year and in greater numbers. What are your invasions of the barbarous nations, your Goths and Visigoths, your Lombards and Huns, to our Population Returns!”

END OF THE SECOND BOOK






BOOK III






Book 3 Chapter 1

The last rays of the sun, contending with clouds of smoke that drifted across the country, partially illumined a peculiar landscape. Far as the eye could reach, and the region was level, except where a range of limestone hills formed its distant limit, a wilderness of cottages or tenements that were hardly entitled to a higher name, were scattered for many miles over the land; some detached, some connected in little rows, some clustering in groups, yet rarely forming continuous streets, but interspersed with blazing furnaces, heaps of burning coal, and piles of smouldering ironstone; while forges and engine chimneys roared and puffed in all directions, and indicated the frequent presence of the mouth of the mine and the bank of the coal-pit. Notwithstanding the whole country might be compared to a vast rabbit warren, it was nevertheless intersected with canals crossing each other at various levels, and though the subterranean operations were prosecuted with so much avidity that it was not uncommon to observe whole rows of houses awry, from the shifting and hollow nature of the land, still, intermingled with heaps of mineral refuse or of metallic dross, patches of the surface might here and there be recognised, covered, as if in mockery, with grass and corn, looking very much like those gentlemen’s sons that we used to read of in our youth, stolen by the chimneysweeps and giving some intimations of their breeding beneath their grimy livery. But a tree or a shrub—such an existence was unknown in this dingy rather than dreary region.

It was the twilight hour; the hour at which in southern climes the peasant kneels before the sunset image of the blessed Hebrew maiden; when caravans halt in their long course over vast deserts, and the turbaned traveller bending in the sand, pays his homage to the sacred stone and the sacred city; the hour, not less holy, that announces the cessation of English toil, and sends forth the miner and the collier to breathe the air of earth, and gaze on the light of heaven.

They come forth: the mine delivers its gang and the pit its bondsmen; the forge is silent and the engine is still. The plain is covered with the swarming multitude: bands of stalwart men, broad-chested and muscular, wet with toil, and black as the children of the tropics; troops of youth—alas! of both sexes,—though neither their raiment nor their language indicates the difference; all are clad in male attire; and oaths that men might shudder at, issue from lips born to breathe words of sweetness. Yet these are to be—some are—the mothers of England! But can we wonder at the hideous coarseness of their language when we remember the savage rudeness of their lives? Naked to the waist, an iron chain fastened to a belt of leather runs between their legs clad in canvas trousers, while on hands and feet an English girl, for twelve, sometimes for sixteen hours a-day, hauls and hurries tubs of coals up subterranean roads, dark, precipitous, and plashy: circumstances that seem to have escaped the notice of the Society for the Abolition of Negro Slavery. Those worthy gentlemen too appear to have been singularly unconscious of the sufferings of the little Trappers, which was remarkable, as many of them were in their own employ.

See too these emerge from the bowels of the earth! Infants of four and five years of age, many of them girls, pretty and still soft and timid; entrusted with the fulfilment of most responsible duties, and the nature of which entails on them the necessity of being the earliest to enter the mine and the latest to leave it. Their labour indeed is not severe, for that would be impossible, but it is passed in darkness and in solitude. They endure that punishment which philosophical philanthropy has invented for the direst criminals, and which those criminals deem more terrible than the death for which it is substituted. Hour after hour elapses, and all that reminds the infant Trappers of the world they have quitted and that which they have joined, is the passage of the coal-waggons for which they open the air-doors of the galleries, and on keeping which doors constantly closed, except at this moment of passage, the safety of the mine and the lives of the persons employed in it entirely depend.

Sir Joshua, a man of genius and a courtly artist, struck by the seraphic countenance of Lady Alice Gordon, when a child of very tender years, painted the celestial visage in various attitudes on the same canvass, and styled the group of heavenly faces—guardian angels!

We would say to some great master of the pencil, Mr Landseer or Mr Etty, go thou to the little trappers and do likewise!

A small party of miners approached a house of more pretension than the generality of the dwellings, and announcing its character by a very flagrant sign of the Rising Sun. They entered it as men accustomed, and were greeted with smiles and many civil words from the lady at the bar, who inquired very cheerfully what the gentlemen would have. They soon found themselves seated in the tap, and, though it was not entirely unoccupied, in their accustomed places, for there seemed a general understanding that they enjoyed a prescriptive right.

With hunches of white bread in their black hands, and grinning with their sable countenances and ivory teeth, they really looked like a gang of negroes at a revel.

The cups of ale circulated, the pipes were lighted, the preliminary puffs achieved. There was at length silence, when he who seemed their leader and who filled a sort of president’s seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and then uttering the first complete sentence that had yet been expressed aloud, thus delivered himself.

“The fact is we are tommied to death.”

“You never spoke a truer word, Master Nixon,” said one of his companions.

“It’s gospel, every word of it,” said another.

“And the point is,” continued Master Nixon, “what are we for to do?”

“Ay, surely,” said a collier; “that’s the marrow.”

“Ay, ay,” agreed several; “there it is.”

“The question is,” said Nixon, looking round with a magisterial air, “what is wages? I say, tayn’t sugar, tayn’t tea, tayn’t bacon. I don’t think it’s candles; but of this I be sure, tayn’t waistcoats.”

Here there was a general groan.

“Comrades,” continued Nixon, “you know what has happened; you know as how Juggins applied for his balance after his tommy-book was paid up, and that incarnate nigger Diggs has made him take two waistcoats. Now the question rises, what is a collier to do with waistcoats? Pawn ‘em I s’pose to Diggs’ son-in-law, next door to his father’s shop, and sell the ticket for sixpence. Now there’s the question; keep to the question; the question is waistcoats and tommy; first waistcoats and then tommy.”

“I have been making a pound a-week these two months past,” said another, “but as I’m a sinner saved, I have never seen the young queen’s picture yet.”

“And I have been obliged to pay the doctor for my poor wife in tommy,” said another. “‘Doctor,’ I said, says I, ‘I blush to do it, but all I have got is tommy, and what shall it be, bacon or cheese?’ ‘Cheese at tenpence a pound,’ says he, ‘which I buy for my servants at sixpence. Never mind,’ says he, for he is a thorough Christian, ‘I’ll take the tommy as I find it.’”

“Juggins has got his rent to pay and is afeard of the bums,” said Nixon; “and he has got two waistcoats!”

“Besides,” said another, “Diggs’ tommy is only open once a-week, and if you’re not there in time, you go over for another seven days. And it’s such a distance, and he keeps a body there such a time—it’s always a day’s work for my poor woman; she can’t do nothing after it, what with the waiting and the standing and the cussing of Master Joseph Diggs,—for he do swear at the women, when they rush in for the first turn, most fearful.”

“They do say he’s a shocking little dog.”

“Master Joseph is wery wiolent, but there is no one like old Diggs for grabbing a bit of one’s wages. He do so love it! And then he says you never need be at no loss for nothing; you can find everything under my roof. I should like to know who is to mend our shoes. Has Gaffer Diggs a cobbler’s stall?”

“Or sell us a penn-orth of potatoes,” said another. “Or a ha’porth of milk.”

“No; and so to get them one is obliged to go and sell some tommy, and much one gets for it. Bacon at ninepence a-pound at Diggs’, which you may get at a huckster’s for sixpence, and therefore the huckster can’t be expected to give you more than fourpence halfpenny, by which token the tommy in our field just cuts our wages atween the navel.”

“And that’s as true as if you heard it in church, Master Waghorn.”

“This Diggs seems to be an oppressor of the people,” said a voice from a distant corner of the room.

Master Nixon looked around, smoked, puffed, and then said, “I should think he wor; as bloody-a-hearted butty as ever jingled.”

“But what business has a butty to keep a shop?” inquired the stranger. “The law touches him.”

“I should like to know who would touch the law,” said Nixon; “not I for one. Them tommy shops is very delicate things; they won’t stand no handling, I can tell you that.”

“But he cannot force you to take goods,” said the stranger; “he must pay you in current coin of the realm, if you demand it.”

“They only pay us once in five weeks,” said a collier; “and how is a man to live meanwhile. And suppose we were to make shift for a month or five weeks, and have all our money coming, and have no tommy out of the shop, what would the butty say to me? He would say, ‘do you want e’er a note this time’ and if I was to say ‘no,’ then he would say, ‘you’ve no call to go down to work any more here.’ And that’s what I call forsation.”

“Ay, ay,” said another collier; “ask for the young queen’s picture, and you would soon have to put your shirt on, and go up the shaft.”

“It’s them long reckonings that force us to the tommy shops,” said another collier; “and if a butty turns you away because you won’t take no tommy, you’re a marked man in every field about.” * *A Butty in the mining districts is a middleman: a Doggy is his manager. The Butty generally keeps a Tommy or Truck shop and pays the wages of his labourers in goods. When miners and colliers strike they term it, “going to play.”

“There’s wus things as tommy,” said a collier who had hitherto been silent, “and that’s these here butties. What’s going on in the pit is known only to God Almighty and the colliers. I have been a consistent methodist for many years, strived to do well, and all the harm I have ever done to the butties was to tell them that their deeds would not stand on the day of judgment.

“They are deeds of darkness surely; for many’s the morn we work for nothing, by one excuse or another, and many’s the good stint that they undermeasure. And many’s the cup of their ale that you must drink before they will give you any work. If the queen would do something for us poor men, it would be a blessed job.”

“There ayn’t no black tyrant on this earth like a butty, surely,” said a collier; “and there’s no redress for poor men.”

“But why do not you state your grievances to the landlords and lessees,” said the stranger.

“I take it you be a stranger in these parts, sir,” said Master Nixon, following up this remark by a most enormous puff. He was the oracle of his circle, and there was silence whenever he was inclined to address them, which was not too often, though when he spoke, his words, as his followers often observed, were a regular ten-yard coal.

“I take it you be a stranger in these parts, sir, or else you would know that it’s as easy for a miner to speak to a mainmaster, as it is for me to pick coal with this here clay. Sir, there’s a gulf atween ‘em. I went into the pit when I was five year old, and I count forty year in the service come Martinmas, and a very good age, sir, for a man what does his work, and I knows what I’m speaking about. In forty year, sir, a man sees a pretty deal, ‘specially when he don’t move out of the same spot and keeps his ‘tention. I’ve been at play, sir, several times in forty year, and have seen as great stick-outs as ever happened in this country. I’ve seen the people at play for weeks together, and so clammed that I never tasted nothing but a potatoe and a little salt for more than a fortnight. Talk of tommy, that was hard fare, but we were holding out for our rights, and that’s sauce for any gander. And I’ll tell you what, sir, that I never knew the people play yet, but if a word had passed atween them and the main-masters aforehand, it might not have been settled; but you can’t get at them any way. Atween the poor man and the gentleman there never was no connection, and that’s the wital mischief of this country.

“It’s a very true word, Master Nixon, and by this token that when we went to play in —28, and the masters said they would meet us; what did they do but walk about the ground and speak to the butties. The butties has their ear.”

“We never want no soldiers here if the masters would speak with the men; but the sight of a pitman is pison to a gentleman, and if we go up to speak with ‘em, they always run away.”

“It’s the butties,” said Nixon; “they’re wusser nor tommy.”

“The people will never have their rights,” said the stranger, “until they learn their power. Suppose instead of sticking out and playing, fifty of your families were to live under one roof. You would live better than you live now; you would feed more fully, and he lodged and clothed more comfortably, and you might save half the amount of your wages; you would become capitalists; you might yourselves hire your mines and pits from the owners, and pay them a better rent than they now obtain, and yet yourselves gain more and work less.”

“Sir,” said Mr Nixon, taking his pipe from his mouth, and sending forth a volume of smoke, “you speak like a book.”

“It is the principle of association,” said the stranger; “the want of the age.”

“Sir,” said Mr Nixon, “this here age wants a great deal, but what it principally wants is to have its wages paid in the current coin of the realm.”

Soon after this there were symptoms of empty mugs and exhausted pipes, and the party began to stir. The stranger addressing Nixon, enquired of him what was their present distance from Wodgate.

“Wodgate!” exclaimed Mr Nixon with an unconscious air.

“The gentleman means Hell-house Yard,” said one of his companions.

“I’m at home,” said Mr Nixon, “but ‘tis the first time I ever heard Hell-house Yard called Wodgate.”

“It’s called so in joggraphy,” said Juggins.

“But you hay’nt going to Hell-house Yard this time of night!” said Mr Nixon. “I’d as soon think of going down the pit with the windlass turned by lushy Bob.”

“Tayn’t a journey for Christians,” said Juggins.

“They’re a very queer lot even in sunshine,” said another.

“And how far is it?” asked the stranger.

“I walked there once in three hours,” said a collier, “but that was to the wake. If you want to see divils carnal, there’s your time of day. They’re no less than heathens, I be sure. I’d be sorry to see even our butty among them, for he is a sort of a Christian when he has taken a glass of ale.”






Book 3 Chapter 2

Two days after the visit of Egremont to the cottage of Walter Gerard, the visit of the Marney family to Mowbray terminated, and they returned to the Abbey.

There is something mournful in the breaking up of an agreeable party, and few are the roofs in which one has sojourned, which are quitted without some feeling of depression. The sudden cessation of all those sources of excitement which pervade a gay and well arranged mansion in the country, unstrings the nervous system. For a week or so, we have done nothing which was not agreeable, and heard nothing which was not pleasant. Our self-love has been respected; there has been a total cessation of petty cares; all the enjoyment of an establisnment without any of its solicitude. We have beheld civilization only in its favoured aspect, and tasted only the sunny side of the fruit. Sometimes there are associations with our visit of a still sweeter and softer character, but on these we need not dwell: glances that cannot be forgotten, and tones that linger in the ear; sentiment that subdues the soul, and flirtation that agitates the fancy. No matter, whatever may be the cause, one too often drives away from a country-house, rather hipped. The specific would be immediately to drive to another, and it is a favourite remedy. But sometimes it is not in our power; sometimes for instance we must return to our household gods in the shape of a nursery; and though this was not the form assumed by the penates of Lord Marney, his presence, the presence of an individual so important and so indefatigable, was still required. His Lordship had passed his time at Mowbray to his satisfaction. He had had his own way in everything. His selfishness had not received a single shock. He had lain down the law and it had not been questioned. He had dogmatised and impugned, and his assertions had passed current, and his doctrines been accepted as orthodox. Lord Mowbray suited him; he liked the consideration of so great a personage. Lord Marney also really liked pomp; a curious table and a luxurious life; but he liked them under any roof rather than his own. Not that he was what is commonly called a Screw; that is to say he was not a mere screw; but he was acute and malicious; saw everybody’s worth and position at a glance; could not bear to expend his choice wines and costly viands on hangers-on and toad-eaters, though at the same time no man encouraged and required hangers-on and toad-eaters more. Lord Marney had all the petty social vices, and none of those petty social weaknesses which soften their harshness or their hideousness. To receive a prince of the blood or a great peer he would spare nothing. Had he to fulfil any of the public duties of his station, his performance would baffle criticism. But he enjoyed making the Vicar of Marney or Captain Grouse drink some claret that was on the wane, or praise a bottle of Burgundy that he knew was pricked.