Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance · Chapter 5 (1/2)

V

What It All Came To

For two years or thereabouts, M’Kay and myself continued our labours in the Drury Lane neighbourhood. There is a proverb that it is the first step which is the most difficult in the achievement of any object, and the proverb has been altered by ascribing the main part of the difficulty to the last step. Neither the first nor the last has been the difficult step with me, but rather what lies between. The first is usually helped by the excitement and the promise of new beginnings, and the last by the prospect of triumph; but the intermediate path is unassisted by enthusiasm, and it is here we are so likely to faint. M’Kay nevertheless persevered, supporting me, who otherwise might have been tempted to despair, and at the end of the two years we were still at our posts. We had, however, learned something. We had learned that we could not make the slightest impression on Drury Lane proper. Now and then an idler, or sometimes a dozen, lounged in, but what was said was strange to them; they were out of their own world as completely as if they were in another planet, and all our efforts to reach them by simplicity of statement and by talking about things which we supposed would interest them utterly failed. I did not know, till I came in actual contact with them, how far away the classes which lie at the bottom of great cities are from those above them; how completely they are inaccessible to motives which act upon ordinary human beings, and how deeply they are sunk beyond ray of sun or stars, immersed in the selfishness naturally begotten of their incessant struggle for existence and the incessant warfare with society. It was an awful thought to me, ever present on those Sundays, and haunting me at other times, that men, women, and children were living in such brutish degradation, and that as they died others would take their place. Our civilisation seemed nothing but a thin film or crust lying over a volcanic pit, and I often wondered whether some day the pit would not break up through it and destroy us all. Great towns are answerable for the creation and maintenance of the masses of dark, impenetrable, subterranean blackguardism, with which we became acquainted. The filthy gloom of the sky, the dirt of the street, the absence of fresh air, the herding of the poor into huge districts which cannot be opened up by those who would do good, are tremendous agencies of corruption which are active at such a rate that it is appalling to reflect what our future will be if the accumulation of population be not checked. To stand face to face with the insoluble is not pleasant. A man will do anything rather than confess it is beyond him. He will create pleasant fictions, and fancy a possible escape here and there, but this problem of Drury Lane was round and hard like a ball of adamant. The only thing I could do was faintly, and I was about to say stupidly, hope⁠—for I had no rational, tangible grounds for hoping⁠—that some force of which we are not now aware might some day develop itself which will be able to resist and remove the pressure which sweeps and crushes into a hell, sealed from the upper air, millions of human souls every year in one quarter of the globe alone.

M’Kay’s dreams therefore were not realised, and yet it would be a mistake to say that they ended in nothing. It often happens that a grand attempt, although it may fail⁠—miserably fail⁠—is fruitful in the end and leaves a result, not the hoped for result it is true, but one which would never have been attained without it. A youth strives after the impossible, and he is apt to break his heart because he has never even touched it, but nevertheless his whole life is the sweeter for the striving; and the archer who aims at a mark a hundred yards away will send his arrow further than he who sets his bow and his arm for fifty yards. So it was with M’Kay. He did not convert Drury Lane, but he saved two or three. One man whom we came to know was a labourer in Somerset House, a kind of coal porter employed in carrying coals into the offices there from the cellars below, and in other menial duties. He had about fifteen or sixteen shillings a week, and as the coals must necessarily be in the different rooms before ten o’clock in the morning, he began work early, and was obliged to live within an easy distance of the Strand. This man had originally been a small tradesman in a country town. He was honest, but he never could or never would push his trade in any way. He was fond of all kinds of little mechanical contrivings, disliked his shop, and ought to have been a carpenter or cabinetmaker⁠—not as a master but as a journeyman, for he had no ability whatever to control men or direct large operations. He was married, and a sense of duty to his wife⁠—he fortunately had no children⁠—induced him to stand or sit behind his counter with regularity, but people would not come to buy of him, because he never seemed to consider their buying as any favour conferred on him; and thus he became gradually displaced by his more energetic or more obsequious rivals. In the end he was obliged to put up his shutters. Unhappily for him, he had never been a very ardent attendant at any of the places of religious worship in the town, and he had therefore no organisation to help him. Not being master of any craft, he was in a pitiable plight, and was slowly sinking, when he applied to the solicitor of the political party for which he had always voted to assist him. The solicitor applied to the member, and the member, much regretting the difficulty of obtaining places for grown-up men, and explaining the pressure upon the Treasury, wrote to say that the only post at his disposal was that of labourer. He would have liked to offer a messengership, but the Treasury had hundreds of applications from great people who wished to dispose of favourite footmen whose services they no longer required. Our friend Taylor had by this time been brought very low, or he would have held out for something better, but there was nothing to be done. He was starving, and he therefore accepted; came to London; got a room, one room only, near Clare Market, and began his new duties. He was able to pick up a shilling or two more weekly by going on errands for the clerks during his slack time in the day, so that altogether on the average he made up about eighteen shillings. Wandering about the Clare Market region on Sunday he found us out, came in, and remained constant. Naturally, as we had so few adherents, we gradually knew these few very intimately, and Taylor would often spend a holiday or part of the Sunday with us. He was not eminent for anything in particular, and an educated man, selecting as his friends those only who stand for something, would not have taken the slightest notice of him. He had read nothing particular, and thought nothing particular⁠—he was indeed one of the masses⁠—but in this respect different, that he had not the tendency to association, aggregation, or clanship which belong to the masses generally. He was different, of course, in all his ways from his neighbours born and bred to Clare Market and its alleys. Although commonplace, he had demands made upon him for an endurance by no means commonplace, and he had sorrows which were as exquisite as those of his betters. He did not much resent his poverty. To that I think he would have submitted, and in fact he did submit to it cheerfully. What rankled in him was the brutal disregard of him at the office. He was a servant of servants. The messengers, who themselves were exposed to all the petty tyrannies of the clerks, and dared not reply, were Taylor’s masters, and sought a compensation for their own serfdom by making his ten times worse. The head messenger, who had been a butler, swore at him, and if Taylor had “answered” he would have been reported. He had never been a person of much importance, but at least he had been independent, and it was a new experience for him to feel that he was a thing fit for nothing but to be cuffed and cursed. Upon this point he used to get eloquent⁠—as eloquent as he could be, for he had small power of expression, and he would describe to me the despair which came over him down in those dark vaults at the prospect of life continuing after this fashion, and with not the minutest gleam of light even at the very end. Nobody ever cared to know the most ordinary facts about him. Nobody inquired whether he was married or single; nobody troubled himself when he was ill. If he was away, his pay was stopped; and when he returned to work nobody asked if he was better. Who can wonder that at first, when he was an utter stranger in a strange land, he was overcome by the situation, and that the world was to him a dungeon worse than that of Chillon? Who can wonder that he was becoming reckless? A little more of such a life would have transformed him into a brute. He had not the ability to become revolutionary, or it would have made him a conspirator. Suffering of any kind is hard to bear, but the suffering which especially damages character is that which is caused by the neglect or oppression of man. At any rate it was so in Taylor’s case. I believe that he would have been patient under any inevitable ordinance of nature, but he could not lie still under contempt, the knowledge that to those about him he was of less consequence than the mud under their feet. He was timid and, after his failure as a shopkeeper, and the near approach to the workhouse, he dreaded above everything being again cast adrift. Strange conflict arose in him, for the insults to which he was exposed drove him almost to madness; and yet the dread of dismissal in a moment checked him when he was about to “fire up,” as he called it, and reduced him to a silence which was torture. Once he was ordered to bring some coals for the messenger’s lobby. The man who gave him the order, finding that he was a long time bringing them, went to the top of the stairs, and bawled after him with an oath to make haste. The reason of the delay was that Taylor had two loads to bring up⁠—one for somebody else. When he got to the top of the steps, the messenger with another oath took the coals, and saying that he “would teach him to skulk there again,” kicked the other coal-scuttle down to the bottom. Taylor himself told me this; and yet, although he would have rejoiced if the man had dropped down dead, and would willingly have shot him, he was dumb. The check operated in an instant. He saw himself without a penny, and in the streets. He went down into the cellar, and raged and wept for an hour. Had he been a workman, he would probably have throttled his enemy, or tried to do it, or what is more likely, his enemy would not have dared to treat him in such fashion, but he was powerless, and once losing his situation he would have sunk down into the gutter, whence he would have been swept by the parish into the indiscriminate heap of London pauperism, and carted away to the Union, a conclusion which was worse to him than being hung.

Another of our friends was a waiter in one of the public-houses and chophouses combined, of which there are so many in the Strand. He lived in a wretched alley which ran from St. Clement’s Church to Boswell Court⁠—I have forgotten its name⁠—a dark crowded passage. He was a man of about sixty⁠—invariably called John, without the addition of any surname. I knew him long before we opened our room, for I was in the habit of frequently visiting the chophouse in which he served. His hours were incredible. He began at nine o’clock in the morning with sweeping the dining-room, cleaning the tables and the gas globes, and at twelve business commenced with early luncheons. Not till three-quarters of an hour after midnight could he leave, for the house was much used by persons who supped there after the theatres. During almost the whole of this time he was on his legs, and very often he was unable to find two minutes in the day in which to get his dinner. Sundays, however, were free. John was not a head waiter, but merely a subordinate, and I never knew why at his time of life he had not risen to a better position. He used to say that “things had been against him,” and I had no right to seek for further explanations. He was married, and had had three children, of whom one only was living⁠—a boy of ten years old, whom he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning. Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely⁠—crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was almost impossible to tell. There was no particular character left in him. He may once have been this or that, but every angle now was knocked off, as it is knocked off from the rounded pebbles which for ages have been dragged up and down the beach by the waves. For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk. The neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o’clock, crawled downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that “she was very bad, and he could not go to sleep.” The father, then, had to keep his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and manage in the best way he could. Over and over again was he obliged to sit by this wretched woman’s bedside till breakfast time, and then had to go to work as usual. Let anybody who has seen a case of this kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband and her child. John hardly bore up under this sorrow. A man may endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when his day’s toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he falls. Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days, whose close nevertheless he dreaded! Beaten down, baffled, disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope. It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will relieve us; but when with all our searching we can see nothing, then at last we sink. Such was John’s case when I first came to know him. He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he confided his story to me. He found out that I might be trusted, and that I could sympathise, and he told me what he had never told to anybody before. I was curious to discover whether religion had done anything for him, and I put the question to him in an indirect way. His answer was that “some on ’em say there’s a better world where everything will be put right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true.” That was his reason for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him. He found out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.