CHAPTER XXXI

IN WHICH WE MEET A WARDEN AND HER CHARGES, AND HEAR TWO OR THREE STORIES OF STORMY VOYAGES ON LIFE'S WATERS BEFORE HAVEN WAS REACHED

Two pretty maids having arrived, one to take away the tea and the other to be with the little girls, Mr. Harberton suggested that we should go and see the Warden. This he said with a slight smile that made the invitation very pleasant, and I joined Mrs. Harberton with thoughts of Trollope in my head and visions of the white-haired president of a college. Judge, then, of my surprise when a little shy woman met us not far from the gate and we were introduced to Miss Mitt, the Warden of the Pink Almshouses. Again I anticipated wrongly, for instead of the rose-tinted building which these words led me to expect, I found a very beautiful edifice in grey stone with a long, warmly-tiled roof, the founder of which was a Mrs. Pink, a friend of Mrs. Harberton.

There are beautiful almshouses all over England, and someone ought to write a book describing them, especially as almshouse architecture is almost the best indigenous domestic architecture that we have. Such temptations as beset modern architects when they build private houses seem for the most part to be absent when they build almshouses. Another triumph for humility, perhaps. For the time being even the most ambitious designer, remembering the purpose of the building, is forced to be simple.

The most amusing almshouse I know is at Chichester, where, under one great dark red roof with pretty dormers in it, dwell several old ladies, each in her own apartments, like an undergraduate or a nun, with a nurse at one end of the central passage and a chapel at the other. But I like the more usual plan better--the row of tiny domiciles like a terrace for fairy godmothers, the little gardens, the muslin blinds, and all the evidences of security. Such a building was that which a young architect in a soft flannel collar (as I guess) had put up for Mrs. Harberton with Mrs. Pink's legacy.

Mrs. Pink's almshouses are all that she would have desired: a long, low façade with two wings at right angles and a flagged garden in the intervening space. Quite a suggestion of "The Harbour of Refuge," but no harm in that. By using old materials the architect had prevented any appearance of crudity, and creepers were already high on the walls. There are thirteen little houses under this long roof, three in each wing and seven in the main building, of which the Warden's house is the middle one. The twelve old women have to be either spinsters or widows and to be fifty-five or over, and it makes not the faintest difference whether or not they have ever been in receipt of parish relief. Each has ten shillings a week, light, and coal. On this allowance they find their own meals and dress; but in both respects they are often a little helped out by other friends or their own relations.

That anyone meeting Miss Mitt, in London, say, would guess her to be the Warden of twelve pernickety old women, is unlikely; and this not because London seldom or never estimates provincials at their true worth, but because she was so small and unobtrusive. But in her own abode of authority there was no doubt, for, though still small and unobtrusive, she wore there, on her brow, the sign manual of responsibility and control. I had a long talk with her about her duties and difficulties.

"I love the work," she said, "but it's not too easy. I'm not complaining, you know. I don't think things ought to be easy."

"Why ever not?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't know," she said, "but I've always had that feeling ever since I was a child."

Of course she had, poor little Nonconformist, or, shall I say, poor little Anglo-Saxon?

"Lotus-eating would give you a terrible stomach-ache," I said, "wouldn't it?"

And the plucky little creature had the hardihood to reply, "I hope so."

What can you do with people like this? and England is full of them. Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.

"Tell me about the old pests," I said.

"Oh no, Mr. Falconer," she replied, "they're not old pests. They're dears. Only now and then, as old people will, they have troublesome ways. I really believe that the worst of all is jealousy. It makes it so difficult for me to be quite open, and I hate not to be. If I show a little more attention to one than another I'm sure to hear about it or notice the effects of it."

"Ah, jealousy!" I said. "That's the real blot on mankind. You know the origin of it, of course. The good God first made man, and then, as you remember, He extracted woman from man's side. He was so much occupied in gazing at this new work of His hand, so suddenly thought of and created, that He forgot that the aperture was not closed, and before He could close it a little poisonous reptile had crept in. It has been there ever since, and no human blood is free from it. Look how much of it Cain at once inherited!"

"Oh dear, how terrible!" said Miss Mitt. "And is that really true?" and she clicked her tongue. "Well, there's plenty of it here. I can do with their ordinary tantrums and their ailments and their grumblings: but it is so hard to have to keep away from the nicer ones because the others can't bear it, and to have to do things surreptitiously."

I asked her which were the worse, the single or the married women. She was forced to give the palm to the single. "I suppose," she said, "it's because the married ones have been married and are therefore--therefore----" Here she was at a loss.

I helped her out. "--are therefore," I said, "more inured to trouble and vexations."

"Yes," Miss Mitt agreed, "if you don't mind my thinking so."

"Men are a nuisance, aren't they?" I said.

"Oh dear, I didn't mean exactly that. Not exactly," said the little Warden. "What I meant was that married women understand give-and-take better than the others who have lived alone. But you mustn't think that all the single ones are cross, or all the widows are always good tempered. It isn't so. This one, for example"--and she knocked at a door--"is the sweetest spinster you could wish to meet. Her name is Selina Still. Isn't that pretty?"

Miss Still let us in--a little grey woman. Her room was a marvel of radiant precision. "Mr. Falconer has come from London all the way in a motor-car," said Miss Mitt.

"It's very wonderful," said the little grey woman. "But I should be frightened to go in one;" and indeed, how could a Selina Still be in a motor-car? It would be a sin against Nature.

The others now joined us, and Farrar laughed at the notion of fear. "What about flying, then?" he asked.

"Oh," said Miss Still very solemnly, "I think this flying's dreadful, and I don't believe it's going to last. For I can't help feeling there's One above Who won't much longer brook those things getting so near Him."

Miss Still expressed a wish to see London again, but did not expect to. She was last there in 1860, when she was a lady's maid. Her two most prized recollections were the Crystal Palace and Spurgeon's preaching.

Next to Selina Still lived Gipsy Woods, who must in her long-ago youth have been a beauty. Her mother had named her Gipsy for her black eyes. She was now nearing eighty, and was very rheumatic. She had married a gentleman--that is to say, one who would walk about as if he had money in his pockets and do no work, while she was toiling day and night bringing up eleven children. For her belief was that so long as you kept a roof over your head nothing else matters, and that is what she always told the children. She had twins when she was fifty-one, and brought them up too! Her husband disappeared, and most of the children dropped away, and a few years ago she had to go into hospital because her legs were so bad; and when she came out the people in the house where she had a room had vanished with all her few things, and had it not been for these almshouses she would be in the union.

Quite a typical story, this, not only as illustrating the wife's dogged courage and the husband's unthrift, but also the uselessness of so many children. It would seem indeed to be the exception rather than the rule to find sons and daughters of the poor growing up to help their parents, poverty being so hard put to it to provide any spring-board from which to take off for a better position.

Apropos of twins, another of the old ladies who was not otherwise interesting, a mournful body in black, with pink cotton wool in her ears which gave her head the appearance, seen hurriedly, of being hollow, boasted of having had "two couple of twins twice." This works out, if we are exact in the use of the word twin, to eight at a birth or sixteen in all. But she meant only that she had had four altogether. I congratulated her on her achievement, but she was apathetic about it. "Mrs. Nottidge," she said, "the wife of the landlord of the 'Jolly Bricklayers,' had triplets and got the Queen's bounty." The heroine of the twins, the Warden told us, liked to keep a bottle of gin, which was always referred to tactfully as medicine. It was supplied to her by a neighbouring lady who once sent a pound of tea in the same basket, and the gin bottle breaking, the tea was saturated. An ordinary person would merely have deplored a loss; but this recipient was more resourceful. She dried the tea in the oven and found it vastly improved for its drenching. That old women like a drop of something strong in the teacup, we all know; but here is possibly an idea for the tea trade which might enormously increase its profits. When consuming her gin in a more normal manner, Miss Mitt told us, the old lady always stirred it with a sprig of rue. It made it "healthier."

At No. 8 was Martha Drax. Mrs. Drax was now nearing seventy, and all the time that she could spare from her household duties she devoted to meditating upon a letter to the King. Not that she was exactly mad--although this occupation might suggest it--but a little enfeebled in intellect, as indeed all poor old women have every right to be, considering what most of them go through in their long lives of penury and struggle; but in her case there was more than enough reason. Martha's story was this:

As a girl in service she had become engaged to the son of the local baker. All had gone well until they took a day's holiday to visit a seaside resort, where he became wholly and dangerously intoxicated, and so terrified her that she broke off the match. He did all he could to win her again, but in vain; and after some years he married another girl from the same place, a big, strong creature who was cook to the doctor. They lived in the village, where the man worked as a gardener and attended the same chapel as Martha, who also had remained there, although only too eager to get away, tethered to it by an epileptic brother and bedridden mother, on whom she had to wait. At last the dislike of seeing the man and his wife together so told upon her that she left chapel and began to go to church; the man himself she avoided, exchanging the time of day with him when they met, but no more, and though not jealous of his wife, she intensely resented her.

So things went on for sixteen years, when she was at last able to leave the village and take service in a neighbouring town, and cease to be reminded of the man's existence.

One evening, two years after, there was a knock at the back door, and when she went to it there he was. His wife had been dead six months; he was very lonely and unhappy; he had never really loved anyone but Martha, and would she marry him now? Partly from the suddenness of the shock; partly from a feeling that here was the finger of Fate; not a little from pleasurable excitement and pride to think of the power she exerted; and partly, in her own words, because "it seemed more natural like to die a married woman," she consented. "The thought," to quote her again, "of his coming back after all those years and saying he had never wanted anybody else took my breath away, and made it impossible to say no."

Anyway, they were married, only for her at once to discover that her husband was a secret drinker of the worst kind, and had been so for years. He made no disguise of it to her, and even told her that his first wife had helped to keep it dark by locking him in the house till the orgy was over and then thrashing him with his own leather belt--a feat to which Martha refers in envious admiration, for she is a little meek woman. She had no power to cope with the situation, and her husband became worse. The secret was a secret no longer; he lost his work, and, during a period of distress, died of pneumonia three years after his second marriage.

Martha, who was now a woman of over fifty, went back to service and became housekeeper to a country clergyman, an old bachelor, where for two weeks she was in transports of delight, only to be plunged in misery and anxiety by the discovery that her new master also was a drunkard, and that the real reason of her engagement to him was to assist in keeping this fact from the parish. This, with the assistance of a curate, she did her best to accomplish; the poor old gentleman during his periodical outbreaks was confined as much as possible to one room. Again and again she made up her mind to run away, but she was restrained, partly by pity for her employer, who, when not in his cups, was the sweetest of characters, and partly from the knowledge that her age was a bad one for re-engagement. The clergyman, who knew all about his unfortunate malady, further enlisted her sympathies by telling her that it was after his wife's death that he had begun to give way.

For seven years the deception was maintained, when one day the scandal could be hidden no longer; the parish rose, the Bishop interfered, and the unhappy invalid was removed to closer restraint. Martha for a while lived on her savings, such as they were, and assistance from the clergyman's friends, who knew how hard she had toiled to preserve his good name, and then Mrs. Pink's almshouses being set up in her neighbourhood, she entered that haven, and is now in security for the rest of her days.

She is perfectly sane except for the obsession that it is her duty to write to the King, calling upon him to prohibit the sale of alcohol anywhere in England, and so save millions of homes. But although she is convinced that a letter sent to the King always gets to him and cannot fail of its purpose, the missive has never gone, for the simple reason that she cannot compose it to her satisfaction, being too little of a scholar, and she will not allow anyone else to write it for her. It is because of vicarious assistance in such matters that similar letters have not had the desired effect, and she will not prejudice her case in that way. Such is the life story of Martha Drax at No. 8.

I came away, again wondering what Spanton would say of all this serenity and comfort. Foolish sentimentalism, probably. Wanton and anti-social waste of money to cosset these old, unproductive women. Let the back-numbers either perish or look after themselves. And so on. But to talk like that is to disregard human nature and the kindlier feelings. A state that deliberately refused the responsibilities of protecting and caring for its old might achieve miracles of scientific housing, profit-sharing, and so forth; but it would be fossilized at the core. Sentiment and emotion cannot be left out.