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Read Ebook: Workhouse Characters and other sketches of the life of the poor. by Nevinson Margaret Wynne
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Ebook has 428 lines and 60603 words, and 9 pages
PAGE EUNICE SMITH--DRUNK 13
A WELSH SAILOR 27
THE VOW 33
BLIND AND DEAF 39
"AND, BEHOLD, THE BABE WEPT" 47
"MARY, MARY, PITY WOMEN!" 53
THE SUICIDE 61
PUBLICANS AND HARLOTS 68
OLD INKY 75
A DAUGHTER OF THE STATE 80
IN THE PHTHISIS WARD 85
AN IRISH CATHOLIC 91
AN OBSCURE CONVERSATIONIST 97
MOTHERS 104
"YOUR SON'S YOUR SON" 110
"TOO OLD AT FORTY" 115
IN THE LUNATIC ASYLUM 118
THE SWEEP'S LEGACY 126
AN ALIEN 130
"WIDOWS INDEED!" 134
THE RUNAWAY 138
"A GIRL! GOD HELP HER!" 145
ON THE PERMANENT LIST 148
THE PAUPER AND THE OLD-AGE PENSION 153
THE EVACUATION OF THE WORKHOUSE 157
WORKHOUSE CHARACTERS
EUNICE SMITH--DRUNK
"Eunice Smith, drunk, brought by the police."
The quaint Scriptural name, not heard for years, woke me up from the dull apathy to which even the most energetic Guardian is reduced at the end of a long Board meeting, and I listened intently as the Master of the workhouse went on to explain that the name Smith had been given by the woman, but her clothes and a small book, which the doctor said was Homer, in Greek, were marked Eunice Romaine.
Eunice Romaine--the name took me back down long vistas of years to a convent school at Oxford, to the clanging bells of Tom Tower, to the vibrant note of boys' voices in college chapels, to the scent of flowers and incense at early celebrations, to the high devotions and ideals of youth, to its passionate griefs and joys. Eunice Romaine had been the genius of our school--one of those gifted students in whom knowledge seems innate; her name headed every examination list, and every prize in the form fell to her; other poor plodders had no chance where she was. From school she had gone with many a scholarship and exhibition to Cambridge, where she had taken a high place in the Classical Tripos; later I heard she had gone as Classical Mistress to one of the London High Schools, then our paths had separated, and I heard no more.
I went down to the Observation Ward after the meeting, where between a maniacal case lying in a strait-waistcoat, alternately singing hymns and blaspheming, and a tearful melancholic who begged me to dig up her husband's body in the north-east corner of the garden, I saw my old friend and classmate.
She was lying very quiet with closed eyes; her hair had gone grey before her time, and her face was pinched and scored with the deep perpendicular lines of grief and disappointment; but I recognized the school-girl Eunice by the broad, intellectual brow and by the delicate, high-bred hands.
"She is rather better," said the nurse in answer to my question, "but she has had a very bad night, screaming the whole time at the rats and mice she thought she saw, and the doctor fears collapse, as her heart is weak; but if she can get some sleep she may recover."
Sleep in the crowded Mental Ward, with maniacs shrieking and shouting around! But exhausted Nature can do a great deal, and when I called some days later I found my old friend discharged to the General Sick Ward, a placard above her head setting forth her complaint as "chronic alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, and cardiac disease."
She recognized me at once, but with the apathy of weakness she expressed neither surprise nor interest at our meeting, and only after some weeks had passed I found her one evening brighter and better, and anxious to go out. Over an impromptu banquet of grapes and cakes we fell into one of those intimate conversations that come so spontaneously but are so impossible to force, and I heard the short history of a soul's tragedy.
"After that I went back to work; mountains and sea had no message for me. I was better sitting at my desk in the class-room, trying to drill Latin and Greek into the unresponsive brains of girls.
"I got through the days, but the nights were terrible; all the great army of forsaken lovers know that the nights are the worst. I used to lie awake hour after hour, sobbing and crying for mercy and strength to endure, and I used to batter my head against the floor, not knowing any one could hear. One night a fellow-lodger, who slept in the next room, came in and begged me to be quiet; she had her work to do, and night after night I kept her awake with my sobbing. 'I suppose it is all about some wretched man,' she observed coolly; 'but, believe me, they are not worth the love we give them. I left my husband some years ago, finding that he had been carrying on with a woman who called herself my friend. At first I cried and sobbed just as you do now; but I felt such a fool making such a fuss about a man who had played it down so low, that I made up my mind I would forget him; and in time you will get over this, and give thanks that you have been delivered from a liar and a traitor.'
"She gave me a glass of strong brandy and water; it was the first I had ever tasted, and I remember how it ran warm through my veins, and how I slept as I had not slept for months.
"My fellow-lodger and I became great friends; she was quite an uneducated woman, the matron of a laundry, but she braced me up like a tonic with her keen humour and experience of life.
"But by strange irony of fate the very day I escaped from the toils of love I fell under another tyranny--that of alcohol. Now, Peg"--I started at the unfamiliar old nickname of my school days--"I believe you are crying. Having shed more than my own share of tears, nothing irritates me so much as to see other women cry, and if you don't stop I'll not say another word."
I drew my handkerchief across my eyes and admitted to a cold in the head.
"Shortly afterward I received notice to leave the High School. I did not mind--I always hated teaching, and I found that I had the power of writing; an article that I could flash off in a few hours would keep me for a week, and I could create my own paradise for half a crown--now, Peg, you are crying again. But of late life was not so bad. I enjoyed writing, and shall always be thankful I can read Greek; besides, I was not always drunk; the craving only takes me occasionally, and at its worst alcohol is a kinder master than love. I shall be well enough to go out in a few days; bring me some pens and paper, and my editor will advance me some money. I am going to write an article on workhouse infirmaries that will startle the public. What do you know of workhouses? You are only a Guardian; 'tis we musicians who know."
The article never got written. The next day I found Eunice very ill; she was unconscious and delirious till her death, reeling off sonorous hexameters from Homer and Virgil and stately passages from the Greek tragedians.
We spared her a pauper funeral, and a few old school and college friends gathered round the grave. A white-haired professor of world fame was there also, and he shook hands with us as we parted at the cemetery gates. "Poor Eunice!" he said, his aged face working painfully. "One of the best Greek scholars of the day, and the daughter of my oldest friend. Both of them geniuses, and both of them with the same taint in the blood; but I feel I ought not to have let her come to this."
I think we all felt the same as we walked sadly home.
An unusual sense of expectancy pervaded the young women's ward; Mrs. Cleaver had gone down "to appear before the Committee," and though the ways of committees are slow, and pauper-time worthless, it was felt that her ordeal was being unduly protracted.
"Them committees allus turn me dead sick, and, being a stout woman, my boots feel too tight for me, and I goes into a perspiration, and the great drops go rolling off my forehead. Well, 'e's kept 'is word, and got the law and right of England behind 'im."
What reporters call a "sensation" made itself felt through the ward; the inmates gathered closer round Mrs. Cleaver, and screaming infants were rocked and patted and soothed with much vigour and little result.
"Well," said Mrs. Cleaver, sinking on to the end of a bed, "I went afore the Committee and I says, 'I want to take my discharge,' I says; I applied last week to the Master, but mine got at 'im first, and Master up and says--
"'No, Mrs. Cleaver, you can't go,' he says; 'your 'usband can't spare you,' he says, 'wants you to keep 'im company in 'ere,' he says.
"'Is that true, Master?' says the little man wot sits lost in the big chair.
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