Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile. “No,” he said. “No, I suppose I’m not. It hadn’t occurred to me, until you said it. But I suppose I’m not. No.” He laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself.
“‘What law is it?’ ’e says. ‘The Croolty to Animals law. That’s what it is,’ ’e says.”
The smile of mockery and suffering appeared and faded. “One of these days,” said Mrs. Viveash, “you may find them more absorbing than you do now.”
“Meanwhile,” said Shearwater....
“I couldn’t find a job ’ere, and ’aving been workin’ on my own, my own master like, couldn’t get unemployment pay. So when we ’eard of jobs at Portsmouth, we thought we’d try to get one, even if it did mean walkin’ there.”
“Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.”
“‘’Opeless,’ ’e says to me, ‘quite ’opeless. More than two hundred come for three vacancies.’ So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ’arder still, when it comes.”
From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing.
“Look here,” said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. “This is really too awful.” He was consumed with indignation and pity; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh.
“There are two wretched people here,” and Gumbril told them breathlessly, what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. “All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot; without proper food; and the woman’s with child.”