South Riding (47 page)

“It’s not comfort you want. It’s a bit of fun,” said the disconcerting Miss Roper. “Lonely? Not me. Why, there’s Mrs. Snagg, as nice a lady as you could wish for. Reads the teacups and can tell a story as good as any one in Yarrold. There’s her daughter and her grandchildren popping in an’ out. I keep an eye on them for her when she needs it. Then there’s the whist drives. I always go when I can get someone to pay my ticket and we divide the prizes. I’m awful lucky with cards. You’ve no idea. And then there’s my gentleman friend, Mr. Barnes, you know.”

“I’m afraid—I don’t,” muttered the chairman.

“Not know old Ricky Barnes of Newbegin, the carrier? Why, every one knows Ricky. He goes to Cold Harbour Colony and Pandy Creek way in a covered cart with an old piebald horse. Many’s the time he calls for me and I ride with him. We’ve been keeping company for nearly thirty years.”

“Then why don’t you marry him?” asked Mrs. Brass. “He’s a widower, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but you see, it’s this way. He promised his dear wife— Mary Ellen Barnes, as nice a little woman as I ever wish to meet—he’d never marry again if she was taken from him. So he can’t, can he?”

“But really”—to Mrs. Brass, to Colonel Whitelaw, to other members of the committee, it seemed preposterous that just because of a minor point of delicacy the ratepayers should have to provide for Carrier Barnes’ beloved, when he possessed a good-sized cottage and a business which, if modest, was certainly adequate to support a couple.

Miss Roper fully appreciated their position.

“You see,” she said disarmingly, “I don’t say Ricky wouldn’t help me. But I’m a Primitive and a Christian and I don’t believe in ladies taking presents from their gentlemen friends. Do you now? All this modern compassionate marriage and what you read in the papers, it may suit some! But I’ve always paid my own rent and been self-respecting, and if you’d let me have my rent and a bag of flour, and a grocery order, and perhaps a sack of coals to see me through the winter, I should get on nicely, no trouble to any one.”

“Has—has any member of committee any further questions that they would like to ask Miss Roper?”

No other members had. They were defeated.

“Then perhaps, if you’d wait outside, Miss Roper.”

“Good-bye all, and cheerio, I’m sure.” And out she shuffled.

“The judges of society faced each other. What could they say?”

“Well, dash it all,” stammered the colonel, “we can hardly ask the woman to live in sin to save the ratepayers’ pockets, can we?”

It was agreed, reluctantly, that they hardly could.

“I never believe,” commented Mrs. Brass, “in these submissions to a Dead Hand.”

The decision was recorded that Miss Roper should receive eight shillings a week and a grocery order.

The members’ door opened and Carne entered.

“Sorry, Whitelaw.”

He slumped down into his chair.

Astell regarded him with disapproval. It was harvest time, yet a not too prosperous farmer could attend committees to cut down the meagre grants by which society staved off the scandal of coroner’s verdicts: Death from malnutrition. To Astell, Carne’s presence there meant only one thing. As for himself, he was not much better. He was acquiescing in something that was all wrong.

He watched his enemy across the table.

But Carne that day took no active part in the proceedings. It seemed as though by bringing himself to the committee he had exhausted his energies. He sat with his arms folded, his eyes on the papers before him, in a dream, while his colleagues considered the case of Mrs. Timms. Her husband had just been disallowed transitional, then fallen ill, then she couldn’t manage on her daughter’s earnings and five shillings a week from a son in Manchester.

They had next before them an old couple on the old age pension. The husband was suffering from diabetes, and his special diet and bus fares for treatment in the hospital left them behind in their rent and without fire or lighting.

“It’s warm now,” said Carne. “And the days are long. You can’t want as much coal or lamp oil as in winter.”

“Maybe not,” replied the little woman with dignity. “But my husband can’t sleep if we go to bed too early. This illness makes him cold and nervous-like. You can’t sit hour after hour in the dark. No one could stand it, let alone a diabetic.”

“Still——”

“Carne,” thought Astell, “draws his dole from the Government, his wheat quota, perhaps a grant for sugar-beet. Yet he wants a sick man to sit in the dark.”

He felt the slow surge of anger like poison in his veins. As though with sympathy for the diabetic, he began to cough— furious because Carne had noticed him and looked across the room at him with kind concern. His treacherous body exposed him to the insult of his enemy’s compassion. He rose and, muttering something, left the room to get a drink.

When he returned they were discussing the case of a man, wife and three dependent children. The man was a hawker by trade, but having spent his capital had now no goods to hawk. He let one room for three shillings a week. His rent was fifteen shillings, his insurance ninepence, and his light a shilling. He was granted a nine-shilling grocery order, two shillings’ worth of coal and his rent. Astell fought for more money instead of the grocery order. He was defeated.

An unemployed casual worker who used to pick up odd porterage at the docks and who also had a wife and three dependent children was offered thirteen shillings and sixpence cash, and thirteen shillings and sixpence grocery orders and two shillings a week for coal. This time it was Carne who intervened. Surely the thirteen-shillings-and-sixpence cash order was excessive?

“But they must have boots, bedding, cleaning materials,” broke out Astell.

“This brings their income to twenty-nine shillings. I have good men doing a full week’s work for thirty shillings,” said Carne gravely.

“All the more shame!” Astell began, but the chairman cried, “Order, order! The next applicant—Frederick Mitchell. I understand that you know something of this case, Astell, don’t you?”

It was Mrs. Beddows who had sent him out to the Shacks to see the Mitchells. Sarah Burton had suggested to him that Mrs. Mitchell might look after the Holly baby and Lennie when term had started, in order that Lydia might get to school. Mitchell himself had confided in him. He had been shown “Bella Vista,” and the walnut bureau, Peggy Mitchell, who had not yet got measles. Mrs. Mitchell, small, large-eyed, inclined to be hysterical.

But the case was not one which deeply moved him. These people with their treasured china tea-set, their respectability, their contempt for “lower classes,” grated against his most darling prejudices. He had handled his visit badly. He was aware that the Mitchells regarded him as a worse inquisitor than the self-deprecating Thompson. He could hear, in his over-sensitised imagination, their comments when he had gone, “These Socialists are harder on you than the gentry. Carne, now, he
is
a gentleman. He does know how to treat you.”

Astell disliked these families who had seen better days. . . . He did his duty. In his harsh, unsympathetic voice he retailed the details of the Mitchells’ case. He knew what arguments appealed to the committee. He despised himself for displaying them.

Thompson opened the door and called:

“Mr. Mitchell.”

Mitchell entered.

Everything about him signified the black-coated worker— his hair neatly sleeked with water, his well-pressed, shiny, pinstripped suit, his white collar, his jaunty yet humiliated manner.

“You were in the Diamond Insurance, Mr. Mitchell?”

These were the representatives of society—the solid family men—income-tax payers, before whom Fred Mitchell had laid the well-worn arguments for security. Have you thought of your wife’s future? Your little daughter, what is she worth to you?”

His familiar slogans now returned to mock him. They rap round and round his brain. He fidgeted with his tie.

The chairman repeated his question.

Mitchell started. His mouth contracted with dumb effort He saw Astell’s face, stern with dislike and forced benevolence.

He croaked out his confession: “I had a book.”

He had reached the bottomless pit of humiliation. A pauper. On the rates, begging for food tickets. He remembered his office in Kingsport where he had had two clerks and a boy under him. He had been going to buy a car.

He could not speak. This was a nightmare in which his feet were chained so that he could not flee from horror.

May I put a little scheme before you?

Oh, God, how are we going to live?

A choked groan, half a sob, shook his body.

This was the worst of all. He was going to make a fool of himself.

A deep voice from one of the places to his right made him start violently.

“You know, Mitchell, it’s a hell of a feeling asking for money, but it can’t be as bad as for the chap I met last week who went to Harrogate to borrow a hundred quid from his younger brother.”

Nothing more surprising had ever been heard at that table. If the ink-pots themselves had spoken, the committee could hardly have been more taken aback. All faces turned to Carne.

“And did he get it?” smiled Whitelaw, ready for any diversion.

“No,” drawled Carne. “Before he could even ask, his brother touched him for fifty quid and he went home and sold some furniture an’ lent it.”

“Well, Mr. Mitchell,” the chairman took up the cue, “at least we shan’t try to borrow from you, at the moment. Wait for a year or two—then you may be in our shoes and we in yours.”

They laughed—Fred Mitchell shakily; but the crisis was passed. He was a man among men, a human being—a pariah no longer.

He withdrew from the dreaded inquisition comforted. The temporary order for groceries which Thompson had given had been confirmed; in addition there was to be milk for Peggy, oil for the lamp and stove and a cash grant of 15s. Little enough, God knows, but they would manage. The committee, Colonel Whitelaw had explained, had to work within strict legal limitations; they could not go beyond their powers; but Carne’s little joke, the friendliness, the personal sympathy, had taken the sting of humiliation out of pauperism.

He cycled back to the Shacks in better spirits than he had known for weeks. If Peggy did not get measles, and she showed no symptoms yet, life might be tolerable.

But Astell was left staring at the ink-splashed table, chewing the bitter cud of self-contempt.

I’m no use, he told himself. I’m no use. He had set out to comfort Mitchell, but Carne had done it. Carne, who grudged pennies and shillings from the shameful pittance of the very poor, Whitelaw the suave snob, without an ounce of imagination, who had the easy popular company commander’s way with privates. These men who profited by injustice, who perpetuated anarchy, who had never risked one hour’s discomfort to relieve oppression, could yet by a feeble anecdote, a trick of laughter, do something that Astell, who had given health, ambition, happiness and half his life to man’s service, could not do.

Mitchell, he thought with scorn, the black-coated worker. Deep had called to deep, middle-class to middle-class. So Carne had saved his vanity.

It did not occur to him that Carne would never recognise in Mitchell a member of his own class. Carne never thought of himself as belonging to any class. He was Carne of Maythorpe. Mitchell was a poor devil down on his luck.

Carne had a slow mind and little sense of humour. But the thought had touched his mind that he and this fellow were in the same boat, asking for public assistance for their private needs. But Mitchell seemed to be making the better job of it.

It was half-past one when the committee adjourned for lunch. Astell went off through the crooked street, shimmering in the hot sun, for his meal—a glass of milk and a sandwich at the baker’s. Three men marched in single file beside the pavement, playing a drum and two mouth organs. “Genuine Welsh Miners” proclaimed a notice on their collecting box.

Suddenly Astell’s patience failed.

I’m through, he said. I’m off. This is no place for me. These local committees. You can’t fight on them. You can’t alter things here. Once the laws have been passed, we only can administer them. He saw his work here as something worse than useless. Why struggle to get another Labour man on to the U.D.C.? Why lecture on “Imperialism or War” to twenty bored old women of the Co-operative Guild in Unity Hall? Futile, futile, futile. Why should he do it, when he might be back, fighting not to mitigate but to change the system? To save his life? What did his life matter?”

He turned and dropped sixpence into the miners’ collecting-box, despising his weak-kneed bourgeois philanthropy.

It was his lunch money.

“
Resolved
—
That the following Report made by Members of the Visiting Committee after their Statutory Visits be received and entered on the minutes:
—

“
We have visited the Hospital to-day and found all the patients quiet and comfortable. Few complaints were raised, except the usual ones from those who ask to be sent home.