Books: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

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As soon as she decided to sell the things, Mary went to Didlum's
second-hand furniture store, and the manager said he would ask Mr
Didlum to call and see the table and other articles. She waited
anxiously all the morning, but he did not appear, so she went once
more to the shop to remind him. When he did come at last he was very
contemptuous of the table and of everything else she offered to sell.
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 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. Almost an act of charity.
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 Mary was too ill to do any needlework - it had to go.
He gave them ten shillings for it.

Mary had expected the old woman to be heartbroken at having to part
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, and Mary had to attend to everything.

From time to time nearly all their other possessions - things of
inferior value that Didlum would not look at, she carried out and sold
at small second-hand shops in back streets or pledged at the
pawn-broker'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
tablecloth, 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 Mary an
order for a hundredweight of coal or a shillingsworth 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, and positively could not do any work at all. Then she used to
lie down on the bed in her room and cry.

Whenever she became like this, Elsie and Charley used to do the
housework when they came home from school, and make tea and toast for
her, and bring it to the bedside on a chair so that she could eat
lying down. When there was no margarine or dripping to put on the
toast, they made it very thin and crisp and pretended it was biscuit.

The children rather enjoyed these times; the quiet and leisure was 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 with the cat beside her listening to the conversation
and purring or mewing whenever they stroked it or spoke to it. They
talked principally of 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 one has a grocer's shop, there is
always plenty to eat; 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 - and
one was almost certain to have some money every day, because it wasn't
likely that a whole day would go by without someone or other coming
into the shop to buy something. When delivering the groceries with
the horse and cart, he would give rides to all the boys he knew, and
in the summertime, 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 - used to
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 Organized
Benevolence Society for assistance. It was about eleven o'clock in
the morning when he turned the corner of the street where the office
of the society was situated and saw a crowd of about thirty men
waiting for the doors to be opened in order to apply for soup tickets.
Some of these men 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 inquire into the case and lay his
application before the committee at the next meeting, which was to be
held on the following Thursday - it was then Monday.

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, but she had
not done anything for nearly a fortnight now, because the firm she
worked for had not had any work for her to do. 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 inquire into the case and bring it before
the committee.

As Jack was returning home he passed the Soup Kitchen, where he saw
the same lot of men who had been to the office of the Organized
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. They owed five
weeks' rent, and to crown their misfortune his eyesight had become so
bad that even if there had been any prospect of obtaining work it was
very doubtful if he could have managed to do it. So Linden, feeling
utterly crushed and degraded, swallowed all that remained of his pride
and went like a beaten dog to see the relieving officer, who took him
before the Board, who did not think it a suitable case for out-relief,
and after some preliminaries it was 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.
As for Linden's sons, the Guardians intimated their Intention of
compelling them to contribute towards the cost of their parents'
maintenance.

Mary accompanied the old people to the gates of their future
dwelling-place, and when she returned home she found there 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 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 five weeks that were
still owing - or perhaps 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.

It was about half past three o'clock in the afternoon when she
returned home and found this letter on the floor in the front passage.
She was faint with fatigue and hunger, for she had had nothing but a
cup of tea and a slice of bread that day, and her fare had not been
much better 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 teaspoons, 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, one with the top
cross-piece gone from the back, and the other with no back to the seat
at all. The bareness of the walls was relieved only by a coloured
almanac and some paper pictures which the children had tacked upon
them, and by the side of the fireplace 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 she 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 heterogeneous 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 so on. Through the other door was visible the
dilapidated bedstead that had been used by the old people, with a
similar lot of bedclothes to those on her own bed, and the torn,
ragged covering of the mattress through the side of which the flock
was protruding and falling in particles on to the floor.

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.

Chapter 34

The Beginning of the End

During the months of January and February, Owen, Crass, Slyme and
Sawkins continued to work at irregular intervals for Rushton & Co.,
although - even when there was anything to do - they now put in only
six hours a day, commencing in the morning and leaving off at four,
with an hour's interval for dinner between twelve and one. They
finished the `plant' and painted the front of Rushton's shop. When
all this was completed, as no other work came in, they all had to
`stand off' with the exception of Sawkins, who was kept on because he
was cheap and able to do all sorts of odd jobs, such as unstopping
drains, repairing leaky roofs, rough painting or lime-washing, and he
was also useful as a labourer for the plumbers, of whom there were now
three employed at Rushton's, the severe weather which had come in with
January having made a lot of work in that trade. With the exception
of this one branch, practically all work was at a standstill.

During this time Rushton & Co. had had several `boxing-up' jobs to do,
and Crass always did the polishing of the coffins on these occasions,
besides assisting to take the `box' home when finished and to `lift
in' the corpse, and afterwards he always acted as one of the bearers
at the funerals. For an ordinary class funeral he usually put in
about three hours for the polishing; that came to one and nine.
Taking home the coffin and lifting in the corpse, one shilling -
usually there were two men to do this besides Hunter, who always
accompanied them to superintend the work - attending the funeral and
acting as bearer, four shillings: so that altogether Crass made six
shillings and ninepence out of each funeral, and sometimes a little
more. For instance, when there was an unusually good-class corpse
they had a double coffin and then of course there were two `lifts in',
for the shell was taken home first and the outer coffin perhaps a day
or two later: this made another shilling. No matter how expensive the
funeral was, the bearers never got any more money. Sometimes the
carpenter and Crass were able to charge an hour or two more on the
making and polishing of a coffin for a good job, but that was all.
Sometimes, when there was a very cheap job, they were paid only three
shillings for attending as bearers, but this was not often: as a rule
they got the same amount whether it was a cheap funeral or an
expensive one. Slyme earned only five shillings out of each funeral,
and Owen only one and six - for writing the coffin plate.

Sometimes there were three or four funerals in a week, and then Crass
did very well indeed. He still had the two young men lodgers at his
house, and although one of them was out of work he was still able to
pay his way because he had some money in the bank.

One of the funeral jobs led to a terrible row between Crass and
Sawkins. The corpse was that of a well-to-do woman who had been ill
for a long time with cancer of the stomach, and after the funeral
Rushton & Co. had to clean and repaint and paper the room she had
occupied during her illness. Although cancer is not supposed to be an
infectious disease, they had orders to take all the bedding away and
have it burnt. Sawkins was instructed to take a truck to the house
and get the bedding and take it to the town Refuse Destructor to be
destroyed. There were two feather beds, a bolster and two pillows:
they were such good things that Sawkins secretly resolved that instead
of taking them to the Destructor he would take them to a second-hand
dealer and sell them.

As he was coming away from the house with the things he met Hunter,
who told him that he wanted him for some other work; so he was to take
the truck to the yard and leave it there for the present; he could
take the bedding to the Destructor later on in the day. Sawkins did
as Hunter ordered, and in the meantime Crass, who happened to be
working at the yard painting some venetian blinds, saw the things on
the truck, and, hearing what was to be done with them, he also thought
it was a pity that such good things should be destroyed: so when
Sawkins came in the afternoon to take them away Crass told him he need
not trouble; `I'm goin' to 'ave that lot, he said; `they're too good
to chuck away; there's nothing wrong with 'em.'

This did not suit Sawkins at all. He said he had been told to take
them to the Destructor, and he was going to do so. He was dragging
the cart out of the yard when Crass rushed up and lifted the bundle
off and carried it into the paint-shop. Sawkins ran after him and
they began to curse and swear at each other; Crass accusing Sawkins of
intending to take the things to the marine stores and sell them.
Sawkins seized hold of the bundle with the object of replacing it on
the cart, but Crass got hold of it as well and they had a tussle for
it - a kind of tug of war - reeling and struggling all over the shop.
cursing and swearing horribly all the time. Finally, Sawkins - being
the better man of the two - succeeded in wrenching the bundle away and
put it on the cart again, and then Crass hurriedly put on his coat and
said he was going to the office to ask Mr Rushton if he might have the
things. Upon hearing this, Sawkins became so infuriated that he
lifted the bundle off the cart and, throwing it upon the muddy ground,
right into a pool of dirty water, trampled it underfoot; and then,
taking out his clasp knife, began savagely hacking and ripping the
ticking so that the feathers all came falling out. In a few minutes
he had damaged the things beyond hope of repair, while Crass stood by,
white and trembling, watching the proceedings but lacking the courage
to interfere.

`Now go to the office and ask Rushton for 'em, if you like!' shouted
Sawkins. `You can 'ave 'em now, if you want 'em.'

Crass made no answer and, after a moment's hesitation, went back to
his work, and Sawkins piled the things on the cart once more and took
them away to the Destructor. He would not be able to sell them now,
but at any rate he had stopped that dirty swine Crass from getting
them.

When Crass went back to the paint-shop he found there one of the
pillows which had fallen out of the bundle during the struggle. He
took it home with him that evening and slept upon it. It was a fine
pillow, much fuller and softer and more cosy than the one he had been
accustomed to.

A few days afterwards when he was working at the room where the woman
died, they gave him some other things that had belonged to her to do
away with, and amongst them was a kind of wrap of grey knitted wool.
Crass kept this for himself: it was just the thing to wrap round one's
neck when going to work on a cold morning, and he used it for that
purpose all through the winter. In addition to the funerals, there
was a little other work: sometimes a room or two to be painted and
papered and ceilings whitened, and once they had the outside of two
small cottages to paint - doors and windows - two coats. All four of
them worked at this job and it was finished in two days. And so they
went on.

Some weeks Crass earned a pound or eighteen shillings; sometimes a
little more, generally less and occasionally nothing at all.

There was a lot of jealousy and ill-feeling amongst them about the
work. Slyme and Crass were both aggrieved about Sawkins whenever they
were idle, especially if the latter were painting or whitewashing, and
their indignation was shared by all the others who were `off'. Harlow
swore horribly about it, and they all agreed that it was disgraceful
that a bloody labourer should be employed doing what ought to be
skilled work for fivepence an hour, while properly qualified men were
`walking about'. These other men were also incensed against Slyme and
Crass because the latter were given the preference whenever there was
a little job to do, and it was darkly insinuated that in order to
secure this preference these two were working for sixpence an hour.
There was no love lost between Crass and Slyme either: Crass was
furious whenever it happened that Slyme had a few hours' work to do if
he himself were idle, and if ever Crass was working while Slyme was
`standing still' the latter went about amongst the other unemployed
men saying ugly things about Crass, whom he accused of being a
`crawler'. Owen also came in for his share of abuse and blame: most
of them said that a man like him should stick out for higher wages
whether employed on special work or not, and then he would not get any
preference. But all the same, whatever they said about each other
behind each other's backs, they were all most friendly to each other
when they met face to face.

Once or twice Owen did some work - such as graining a door or writing
a sign - for one or other of his fellow workmen who had managed to
secure a little job `on his own', but putting it all together, the
coffin-plates and other work at Rushton's and all, his earnings had
not averaged ten shillings a week for the last six weeks. Often they
had no coal and sometimes not even a penny to put into the gas meter,
and then, having nothing left good enough to pawn, he sometimes
obtained a few pence by selling some of his books to second-hand book
dealers. However, bad as their condition was, Owen knew that they
were better off than the majority of the others, for whenever he went
out he was certain to meet numbers of men whom he had worked with at
different times, who said - some of them - that they had been idle for
ten, twelve, fifteen and in some cases for twenty weeks without having
earned a shilling.

Owen used to wonder how they managed to continue to exist. Most of
them were wearing other people's cast-off clothes, hats, and boots,
which had in some instances been given to their wives by `visiting
ladies', or by the people at whose houses their wives went to work,
charing. As for food, most of them lived on such credit as they could
get, and on the scraps of broken victuals and meat that their wives
brought home from the places they worked at. Some of them had
grown-up sons and daughters who still lived with them and whose
earnings kept their homes together, and the wives of some of them eked
out a miserable existence by letting lodgings.

The week before old Linden went into the workhouse Owen earned
nothing, and to make matters worse the grocer from whom they usually
bought their things suddenly refused to let them have any more credit.
Owen went to see him, and the man said he was very sorry, but he could
not let them have anything more without the money; he did not mind
waiting a few weeks for what was already owing, but he could not let
the amount get any higher; his books were full of bad debts already.
In conclusion, he said that he hoped Owen would not do as so many
others had done and take his ready money elsewhere. People came and
got credit from him when they were hard up, and afterwards spent their
ready money at the Monopole Company's stores on the other side of the
street, because their goods were a trifle cheaper, and it was not
fair. Owen admitted that it was not fair, but reminded him that they
always bought their things at his shop. The grocer, however, was
inexorable; he repeated several times that his books were full of bad
debts and his own creditors were pressing him. During their
conversation the shopkeeper's eyes wandered continually to the big
store on the other side of the street; the huge, gilded letters of the
name `Monopole Stores' seemed to have an irresistible attraction for
him. Once he interrupted himself in the middle of a sentence to point
out to Owen a little girl who was just coming out of the Stores with a
small parcel in her hand.

`Her father owes me nearly thirty shillings,' he said, `but they spend
their ready money there.'

The front of the grocer's shop badly needed repainting, and the name
on the fascia, `A. Smallman', was so faded as to be almost
indecipherable. It had been Owen's intention to offer to do this work -
the cost to go against his account - but the man appeared to be so
harassed that Owen refrained from making the suggestion.

They still had credit at the baker's, but they did not take much
bread: when one has had scarcely anything else but bread to eat for
nearly a month one finds it difficult to eat at all. That same day,
when he returned home after his interview with the grocer, they had a
loaf of beautiful fresh bread, but none of them could eat it, although
they were hungry: it seemed to stick in their throats, and they could
not swallow it even with the help of a drink of tea. But they drank
the tea, which was the one thing that enabled them to go on living.

The next week Owen earned eight shillings altogether: a few hours he
put in assisting Crass to wash off and whiten a ceiling and paint a
room, and there was one coffin-plate. He wrote the latter at home,
and while he was doing it he heard Frankie - who was out in the
scullery with Nora - say to her:

`Mother, how many more days to you think we'll have to have only dry
bread and tea?'

Owen's heart seemed to stop as he heard the child's question and
listened for Nora's answer, but the question was not to be answered at
all just then, for at that moment they heard someone running up the
stairs and presently the door was unceremoniously thrown open and
Charley Linden rushed into the house, out of breath, hatless, and
crying piteously. His clothes were old and ragged; they had been
patched at the knees and elbows, but the patches were tearing away
from the rotting fabric into which they had been sewn. He had on a
pair of black stockings full of holes through which the skin was
showing. The soles of his boots were worn through at one side right
to the uppers, and as he walked the sides of his bare heels came into
contact with the floor, the front part of the sole of one boot was
separated from the upper, and his bare toes, red with cold and covered
with mud, protruded through the gap. Some sharp substance - a nail or
a piece of glass or flint - had evidently lacerated his right foot,
for blood was oozing from the broken heel of his boot on to the floor.