CHAPTER IV.
"There follows a mist, and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again!"
Ishbel might have thought of these words, if she had known them, on the morrow and on many morrows that followed. For Rory MacPhee was not the man to come back, or to speak lightly. He sailed with the agent to Glasgow—was believed to have started for New Zealand within the week. There, as far as his Skye friends were concerned, he vanished. They were the days of rare and slow communication, and Rory never wrote.
But Ishbel did not marry her cousin, as everyone expected, including MacLeod. She answered him "No," listlessly, but quite doggedly, and nothing that he could say, or that Catriona could threaten, served to change her. Once the old woman muttered vengefully that she would never see the fairies, for she had lost her luck, and Ishbel turned on her almost fiercely.
"It is all false," she cried in Gaelic, "for there are no green folk at all, and I do not care!"
The mystery and the charm had fled; she no longer dreamed on the green grass circle, no longer wondered at the night-song of the burn, no longer watched for the kelpies under the boulders in the burns or in the Rowan Pool. Belief in the fairies had faded on the night in which Rory left her. Except in the little bald, white kirk on the hill-side, Ishbel never sang. Song dies on the lips when care and sorrow lie heavy on the heart.
It was five years now since that fatal visit to the Gave of Gold—Ishbel never mentioned it—and she was returning, in the soft, golden haze of a September evening, from the castle. Catriona was growing feeble, and Ishbel did everything; the old woman only spinning a little, and wandering out to gather sticks and twigs for the fire. The girl had been taking up carded wool to the castle, and giving the great London ladies there a spinning lesson.
Before the cottage came in view, with its surrounding field of poor and thinly growing oats and yellow daisies (there being, indeed, a far more plentiful crop of the latter), she paused to look up the fairy knoll. There, on the top was the fairy ring. Something made Ishbel suddenly turn and mount the little hill.
The sea-loch lay beneath her, tinged with red; the sky was a wonder and a glory, but Ishbel was not looking at the sky, or at the loch. She was thinking how strange it was that she should go on living, and living much as usual, when all that was best and fairest in life was gone.
She sighed, looking down at the burn, plashing and leaping over the grey boulders. There was that story about the kelpies; her grandmother rarely spoke of them now. Were there really no kelpies—no brownies? And yet——
A step behind her made her start violently, and she gave a sharp cry. A man's tall figure was there, not ten yards off, and there flashed across Ishbel suddenly the thought that perhaps, after all, it was all true, for this was a ghost! And if there were ghosts, why not wee folk and kelpies?
"I believe it is Ishbel, herself. Do you not know me, Ishbel?"
He spoke in a new voice. The fluent Gaelic was gone, and the stiff, translated English; he spoke easily, with a strange accent. And yet, ah! she knew him at once! It was Rory! Rory, well-dressed, handsome, upright, with a different and more independent carriage, but Rory all the same!
Ishbel rose and stood quite wordless for a moment. And then—"You are a great stranger," she said. "It is a very long time, I believe, since you hef been in Skye."
He almost smiled. He was looking down at her earnestly, intently. Was it possible that she should be so little changed? Had the five years been a dream? Just as he remembered her—with the pale, clear skin, the deep sloe-eyes, the ruddy crisp hair, the little droop of the head! Ishbel! The girl he had turned his back on, and been furious with, and quite forgotten—oh, yes! quite forgotten, though he had come back to the Winged Island—well, just to see how all the old folks were!
"It is five years," he said deliberately, "five years! Are you—are you married, Ishbel?"
The girl raised her eyes and looked at him. It was getting dark, and the burn was beginning its night-song. Ishbel noticed that, and remembered just how the water used to sing, quite suddenly. The lovely, indescribable breath of the muir wind swept in their faces. How sweet it was—how entrancing! And oh! me, the velvety deeps of her eyes, the little half-sad, half-humorous mouth!
Was she married? Was she?
He repeated the question, but with a new and eager ring in his voice, and Ishbel shook her head.
"Though there will have been a good many marriages since you left. There was Mari MacLean and Dougal Nicolson, and there was Colin——"
"What about MacLeod, your cousin?"
"He is to be married this year," she said, "to an English lass."
"So you did not marry him, after all, Ishbel?"
"Who said that I would?" she cried, as if stung. "You knew better than that! Who said that I would?"
"He did; and that you would go with him that night, if he asked you. And you did, Ishbel! It was very cruel, but——" Rory paused then, and suddenly spoke in Gaelic, as if it all came back to him. "But I am beginning to think that I was cruel, too. Was I?"
He waited, watching her.
Ishbel nodded gently. She also spoke in Gaelic, as if they had parted only yesterday.
"Yes, you were cruel, Rory, and you were very hasty. It is true that I was a foolish lass, but you might have given me another chance. I believed in my grandmother's stories. I wanted to see the good folk." She looked away, and sadness and disillusion crept over her face. "But I do not believe in them any more, not any more."
"Poor little Ishbel. Poor wee lassie!"
It could not be five years. It could not! They had only parted yesterday!
"But it does not matter," Ishbel said, rousing, "and now perhaps you will call and see my grandmother? Are you on your way to Uig?"
He did not answer that.
"Ishbel," he said, "I was very cruel, and I was just as angry as a man could be, and for five years I have been mad and sore; but deep down, deep down, I never forgot you. I hated him, but I loved you. I will come and see your grandmother; but—first—first, will you give me a kiss, Ishbel, for the sake of the old days?"
Would she? Perhaps, after all, he did not wait for her consent. He had her in his arms, and they closed round her, and Isabel's head fell on his shoulder with a little sob that was an epitome of all the five years' sorrow and heartache.
Catriona heard his story in silence.
"Muirnean (darling)," Rory whispered, "I love you; and when I leave Skye, you will come too, or I will be staying on here with you. You shall choose Ishbel—you shall choose; and to-morrow I will buy you something better than the claymore brooch that I was cruel enough to throw away!"
They walked down to the cottage, and Catriona, who was never surprised at anything, shook hands sourly with him; she heard his story in silence, and nodded consent when he told her that he and Ishbel were to be married, after all. He could look after the croft, she said, or buy Colin MacDougal's farm, just above, if he had money enough. Would he have money enough? For Duncan kept her very close now. Rory laid a packet smilingly in her lap, and said he thought he had money enough.
Next forenoon Catriona saw him coming up the road; Ishbel ran to meet him, and together they wandered off to the burn-side. They came back by-and-by, and Ishbel stood smiling in the cottage door, her arms full of rowan branches; Rory had a spray in his coat, and the red berries nestled under her chin.
"I have brought you back luck," the girl cried happily. "We found the rowans down by the pool. And Rory says that there are maybe good folk in the world, after all! Who knows, grandmother?"
Catriona's peat-brown old face was bent over her wheel. She allowed there might be one or two, with a half-grunt of satisfaction.
THE REAL EAST LONDON.
By the Lord Bishop of Stepney.
(Photo: H. V. Hornville, Gawber Street, E.)
THE "MOTHERS'" GARDEN PARTY GROUP.
(Showing the Bishop in the Background.)
East London is a very different place from what many people expect it to be. There are not a few who still think that they will have their throats cut if they venture into it, and I remember one visitor who turned up very late for dinner one night at Oxford House, and gave as the reason for his lateness that his landlord had got one side of him and his landlady on the other, and had held him by his coat-tails to prevent him coming to be murdered in Bethnal Green.
OLD "OXFORD HOUSE."
As a matter of fact, East London is probably, by daylight or by night, one of the safest parts of London, except in a very few selected streets, well known to the police; and one of my predecessors, the much-lamented Bishop Billing, was quite right when he used to say to the West-End mother, anxious about her daughter's safety, if she came to work in East London, "See her as far as Temple Bar, and then she will be all right."
What strikes one at first is the extreme brightness and cheerfulness of the people, often under very adverse circumstances. I remember giving a series of garden-parties when I was Rector of Bethnal Green, in the little garden attached to the rectory. There was not much room for anything, and the only amusements were skittles and races, whilst tea and cake and bread-and-butter were the simple refreshments; but not only—as you will see by the photograph—were the visitors very content with themselves, but one of them, from one of the poorest streets, met me the day after a "party" and said:
"Rector, we did enjoy ourselves yesterday."
"I am very glad of it," I replied.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
"OXFORD HOUSE"—THE PRESENT BUILDING.
"But we very nearly didn't come."
"Why not?" I asked.
"Oh! You see, a man down our street, 'e said, 'Don't go—the Rector only wants to show you a few old gravestones.' But we tell 'im now we couldn't have enjoyed ourselves better if we'd been at Marlborough 'Ouse."
Then the children of East London are truly delightful. Poor little bairns! they often get pale enough spending the year in those crowded courts and alleys—and few things are doing better work in London than the Children's Country Holiday Fund, which sends about thirty-one thousand each year for a fortnight into the country—but still nothing daunts their spirits or dims their affection. Often have I been cheered through an afternoon's visiting by a group of children who would spend their half-holiday afternoon in waiting quite quietly outside a sick-room in order to knock at the door of the next sick case to which they were quite 'cute enough to know that I was going, and so on right down the street. Many of the clergy organise Band of Hope entertainments, and teach the children to act little plays of their own, and there are no quicker and apter pupils than the children of East London, as the prizes carried off yearly at the Crystal Palace will show.
The East-End boy, again, is quite a character; we had four hundred at Oxford House in one club, besides some hundreds of others in brigades. When you told an East-End mother that fact, she would generally say, "My word, I find one quite enough!" And certainly, on a Whit Monday, when one had at least a hundred and fifty to convoy to London Bridge and get safely down to some friend's house and back again, they were a fine handful.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
THE PEOPLE'S PALACE.
One day I noticed the express stopping pretty often, and wondered why, as it was not advertised to stop anywhere. At last the guard came to see me at a wayside station, with a very red face, and said he would hold me responsible for what my boys were doing; he said that they had pulled the danger connecting-rod three times. I went round to see what was happening, and asked whether any of them had done it. "Oh, yes," said a little chap at once; "it was me; I was only 'anging my 'at up on it!"
Few things abash the East-End boy. At the end of the journey, my friend, who lived near a very magnificent house, was showing us through the rooms, and I heard a little boy say confidentially to his neighbour, without meaning to be overheard, "'Em! just like our little back parlour at home!" The good result of all the trouble which such expeditions involved, was shown by the contempt they displayed—as they marched back crowned with flowers, with horses curveting round them, and cabs charging through them, in consequence of the inspiriting notes of the band—for the groups of drunken men and women we used to meet, who had spent their Bank Holiday in quite another way. Once implant in a boy the love of a "better way" of spending a holiday, and you have got a long way on the road to make him love "a better way" of spending his life altogether. Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, but if those hands are employed in handling a musket, or playing a flute, or clinging on to a horizontal bar—they have ceased to be idle at all.
But space will soon fail me if I go through all the component parts of the population in detail. The young girls, with their limbs aching for active recreation after long confinement in factories or workshops, have been graphically depicted by Sir Walter Besant, and few people are doing more good in the district than those ladies who, at great trouble, often with real self-sacrifice, are running girls' clubs every evening for the girls after their work.
As, of course, is well known, it was one great object of the People's Palace to provide this sort of innocent recreation for the people, and though it has thrown its strength lately rather into its excellent technical classes, it has not left out of sight its original mission.
The gymnastic instructor at the People's Palace told me a year or two ago that he had no better and more spirited class than a large factory girls' class; and I have seen the magnificent Queen's Hall filled to overflowing for a nigger entertainment on a Saturday night, and more than half-full for a sacred concert on Sunday afternoon.
When one is asked, then, what is the matter with East London, and what lies behind those great thoroughfares, which look so broad and inviting on a fine summer's afternoon, one can only reply by taking one's questioner away from the broad thoroughfares into the crowded streets and alleys which lie behind them and between. Here is a photograph of a crowded back street, which gives an idea of what is going on, say, of a Sunday morning during the Bird Fair in Slater Street, or the Dog Fair at the top of Bethnal Green Road, or the old clothes sale down by Petticoat Lane. We are too thick on the ground, that is what it is; the census does not rise, because it can't rise: we are crammed so full that we can take no more.
I remember once a young ladies' school used to send roses once a week from a pretty suburb of London; they used to bring them to school in the morning from their gardens, make them at twelve into bouquets, send them up by three, and they were in East London homes by five. As I used to take the bouquets of beautiful flowers round on trays—followed, I may say, by a mob of children yelling for a flower, for old and young have a touching love for flowers in East London—I always found that I required four bouquets for each house, for each house contained at least four families. This is a fact which escapes the notice of the casual visitor, who sees a harmless-looking house outside, but does not know what is inside.
We are overcrowded, and what overcrowding means from the point of view of health and morality only those who reside in the district and the local medical officer really know. I used to have sent me by the excellent Medical Officer for Bethnal Green—Dr. Bate—the death-rate each month compared with the death-rate for the whole of London, and there is no reason that I know of to account for the 22-27 per 1,000 registered for Bethnal Green compared with the 18 per 1,000 of the rest of London, except the overcrowded and sometimes insanitary conditions in which the people live.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
A CROWD IN PETTICOAT LANE.
Things, however, are much better than they used to be. The London County Council has done a good deal in pulling down rookeries and rehousing large areas—as, for instance, the famous Boundary Street area between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. The Mansion House Council for the Dwellings of the Poor has done much through its local committees to stimulate local effort; and the district authorities are far more active than they were, and alive to the responsibilities which fall upon them.
Many an afternoon have I spent with the Sanitary Committee of the Vestry of Bethnal Green, condemning insanitary property, and many are the sad sights which I have seen when I have been round with them.
I remember vividly one or two large houses abutting on a little court. As we went with difficulty through the narrow passages and looked into the different rooms, we found women sitting silent and patient, too busy to say much to us, pasting match-boxes together, for which they were to get twopence-farthing a gross. Needless to say that these houses had to be condemned; but the difficulty is by no means over when such dwellings are condemned. As a man said caustically and truly at a meeting held on the subject, "A rat in a hole is better than a rat out, any day"; and great consideration has to be shown in not turning out too quickly those who have found these poor tenements their home before provision has been made elsewhere for them.
If those in the West-End and other places who have property in the slums would only look after it themselves, and not be content with taking the rents without seeing that the places for which they take their money are fit to house men and women, and not mere animals, great progress would be made. We should be happy to show them the best models on which to rebuild their houses, or they may see for themselves by observing the pretty two-storeyed houses now built, which constitute Hart's Lane, abutting on the Bethnal Green Road, and which, being always in demand, pay, we hope, the intelligent landlord who built them.
But it is not merely that we are too thick on the ground; for a long time we were too much left to ourselves. Those that ate jam lived in one place and those that made it lived in another, and naturally therefore the "city of the poor," left to itself, generated standards, habits, and traditions of its own, some of which are the reverse of edifying.
Take, for instance, the prevalence of drink and gambling. A young man came to me one night in East London with a face as pale as death. I had known him as a boy, but he had dropped out of our club system on growing too old for the boys' club, and had got drawn into a drinking set. "Save me!" he cried, as he fell upon his knees and took my hand. He had, he said, been led in the public-house to put his money on horses of which he knew nothing, and had finally spent nine pounds belonging to a shop club, of which he was treasurer. He had to meet his mates next morning; he was only twenty-one, of respectable parents, and engaged to a respectable girl, and with only three months to run out of his apprenticeship. "If you don't help me, sir, I am ruined for life!"
I did lend him the money, to be repaid by instalments, but the story will show the dangers to our young population, and the need of strong and definite work among them from their earliest years. With a public-house at every corner, and a bookmaker's clerk waiting for them during dinner hour, what chance have the poor lads and girls unless someone will go down and live among them and teach them better things? I remember running-in a man who had the insolence to stand outside Oxford House and take money from boys and girls, as well as men and women, during dinner hour, and though he was fined five pounds at once, he had more than twenty pounds on him in coppers and small silver. The fine ought to be raised, as the present maximum—five pounds—is easily paid, and they think nothing of it, and go on again just the same next day.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
THE GREAT HALL AT THE PEOPLE'S PALACE.
It was no doubt the growing necessity of bringing a higher standard of life into the "city of the poor" and bridging over the gulf between rich and poor, establishing counter-attractions to the public-house and the gambling-hell, which led Canon Barnett, some fifteen years ago, to suggest the formation of settlements among the poor. His visit to Oxford in 1884, backed up by Bishop Walsham How and Miss Octavia Hill, led to the establishment of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, and later on in the same year of Oxford House in Bethnal Green. Of the former excellent institution, which still owes so much to its founder and present Warden, Canon Barnett, much has been written in past years, and, as space is limited even in The Quiver, I have only room to say a few words more about Oxford House. It was founded on a definite Church basis, and its workers were and are members of the Church of England, but it threw open its clubs and its doors to men of all creeds and all kinds.
When I was myself called to be Head of the House in 1880, it was situated in a back street in Bethnal Green, and consisted of a disused Church school knocked into rooms. As residents increased, we found so small a house quite inadequate, and the present Oxford House was built on a disused site in the next street, and opened by the Duke of Connaught five or six years ago. It has had a full complement of twenty men ever since, and the acquisition of the rectory of Bethnal Green when I became Rector of Bethnal Green in 1895, enabled us for some time to have thirty workers—all laymen with the exception of myself.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
A VIEW OF BETHNAL GREEN MUSEUM.
The residents do whatever work is entrusted to them by the Head, in the daytime working at the Charity Organisation offices, Children's Country Holiday Fund, Sanitary Aid Committee; in the evening running boys' clubs and men's clubs and Church Lads' Brigades, visiting in the London Hospital on Mondays, visiting the sick and others in the parish of St. Matthew's, now specially connected with the House, and doing innumerable odd jobs for the parish clergy round, with whom they are all on the most friendly footing.
And that brings me lastly to the definitely religious work of East London. It is here that the result of leaving for so long one million people to themselves shows itself in the most disastrous form. The habit of church-going or chapel-going has been almost entirely lost, and it is only after the most patient efforts on the part of the clergy and others that it can be brought again into the district. After sampling on several occasions eighty men (invited to the garden parties spoken of above) out of different streets taken in turn, I discovered that only about one in eighty went either to church or chapel, and out of a thousand boys of the age of fourteen or fifteen who were questioned on entering one of our large boys' clubs, nine hundred were found to have "g.n." written after their names, which means "goes nowhere." Now, to the readers of The Quiver I know that this will seem a very appalling thing, and will show that we have what is practically, from a religious point of view, a pagan population at our very doors.
On whom, then, does the great stress and strain of converting this pagan population fall? Let us give all credit to the good work done by Nonconformists in the district, with whom we are on excellent terms: let us acknowledge the wonderful gatherings in Mr. Charrington's Hall: and in the Pavilion, under the preaching of Mr. George Nokes; the good work by Dr. Stephenson in his Children's Homes; and by Dr. Barnardo in his boys' work at Stepney Causeway; and by other workers scattered up and down the district; but I think all would admit that the great strain and stress of the work falls upon those who actually live in the very midst of the people, each of them with their seven thousand to ten thousand, and sometimes twenty thousand, souls to look after.
It is they whose door-bell rings continuously; it is they to whom everyone comes in the hour of distress, whether they attend the church or not; and it is they and the band of workers they have gathered round them who are laying deep the foundations of the future City of God, and who are working, with a few exceptions, day and night to bring wanderers into the fold.
The people are not irreligious, only non-religious, and all they need is patient and loving work in their midst. To attend a parish gathering is like going to a happy family party, on such excellent terms are the clergy and their workers with the people, and when in some churches you find five hundred East-End communicants in the early morning on Easter Day, no one can question the self-sacrifice and earnestness of those who have once been thoroughly converted.
The great need, of course, is more workers and it is to supply more workers that the East London Church Fund exists. It is spent wholly on workers, not on buildings at all; and it is my earnest desire, with the help of the Bishop of Islington, who is an experienced East-End worker himself, and who has now taken over the North London district, to raise that fund to £20,000 this year to meet the urgent appeals for more workers which come to us from the poorer parts of East and North London. The Fund covers an area of 1,800,000 people, most of whom are poor.
(Photo: C. E. Fry and Son, Gloucester Terrace, S.W.)
CANON BARNETT.
(Warden of Toynbee Hall.)
Such, then, so far as it can be described in a short article, is East London, with all its virtues and its vices, its aspirations, its hopes, its possibilities, and its failings. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, with the milk of human kindness and the honey of human love; but, like the old Canaan, it is not yet fully occupied by the host of God. When Christianity is, however, fully "in possession," we shall see a great deepening and ripening of all the good that lies there, and the East London Church of the future will have a character of its own, and will shed a new glory on the Christianity which has slowly converted the world.
