Women of the Country

by Gertrude Bone

The little grey chapel at the corner of two roads was lighted and already hot with steam on the windows. The wooden pews, set on steps which rose evenly to the window-sill at the back of the tiny building, seemed to precipitate themselves upon the mean wooden pulpit. Three benches set endwise to the platform served for the choir, and there was a small harmonium. The girl (a daughter of a prosperous farmer) who played it was already in her place, and a group of children had taken possession of the front pew. These were playing under the book-rest and frequent giggles burst from their number. At last one of them threw a hat so much too high that it dropped into the next pew, and a preter-natural silence fell upon the group, who all wriggled themselves erect on their seats and looked apprehensively round. The girl at the harmonium bent back to look at the clock and then pulled out her stops and began to play. The door clicked, and burst open to admit a cold breeze and a big farm boy in his Sunday clothes, whose head and shoulders came in before the rest of him was ready to follow, and who held on to the door as he entered as if for protection. Every child turned its head and watched him while he ducked his head on to the book-board for a second, and then sat upright, adjusting his neck into his collar. The farmer, whose daughter played the organ, came next with his wife, who made her way with an air of ownership to her seat, and having covered her face with her hand for a moment, untied her bonnet-strings and fanned her hot face. Every other moment now the door burst open, and admitted someone from the dark blue outside—a group of clumsy youths who flung themselves upon the pew doors as if they had formed the deliberate purpose of keeping them out, some girls in their finery nodding to acquaintances as they entered, some labourers in unaccustomed clothes, and last Mary Colton who walked with her calculating step to the nearest choir bench. Then a larger group hesitated at the door and the evangelist entered, mounting the pulpit with a confident tread, the minister taking a seat in the choir benches and the stewards sitting behind him. There was some whispering between the evangelist and the minister, then the evangelist remained seated and the minister rose and gave out a hymn—

"Rescue the perishing, care for the dying."

Those who did not know the words knew and shouted the chorus. It was a rousing beginning. As the hymn came to a final shout, Anne Hilton in a black bonnet and old-fashioned mantle with a bead fringe at the shoulders, with one black cotton glove half on and the other wholly off, entered the chapel and sat just within the door.

The evangelist glanced round his congregation and found himself able to believe the report that the country districts were apathetic. He was an ugly little man with straggling brown whiskers and unruly hair, and had no great appearance of illumination, yet he was a true evangelist, labouring hard to pull souls from the pit of social and moral corruption. That was why he had been sent to the task of addressing the country congregations. He was not working with an eye to romance, nor for the glory which comes to those who work in the slums. He thought with the thoughts of those among whom he worked. He had known what it was to be hungry. He had known the crucifixion of standing idle when every limb ached to be working. He knew that pregnant women are sometimes beaten and kicked by the clogs of their husbands. He knew what little children felt like when they cried from cold. His heart was incessantly burning, but he had worked now for fifteen years and it was no longer burning with indignation. He had found others, not Christians, as he thought, who would be indignant, who would plan with pity and sympathy and with more efficiency and foresight that he could ever control, build up and organise ways of escape for much that he saw. He could meet them too. But his work was to understand, and from his understanding to attract and heal. The others had nothing to say to a woman whose husband died, or whose son became crippled at work, to a man who lost his right hand, or a girl whose sweetheart was drowned two days before the wedding, and these things were always happening.

He looked round. He thought of his various speeches. It was no use telling these people how many more women were arrested for drunkenness in the streets this year than last, nor how many families lived in cellars, nor how many men were without work. Their imaginations, never straying into large numbers, would be blank. He would tell them stories of men and women like themselves, and of how they managed when calamity came. He had sheaves of such stories and a ready tongue. He might strike a spark of understanding. His voice, as he began to speak, belied his appearance. It was sonorous and beautiful and it immediately controlled his audience.

"My dear friends! Just round the corner from the house where I live, there's a street called 'Paradise Street,' but I can tell you as I came along here this morning in the lanes by the chapel, it seemed to me a good deal more like Paradise than that street. It was a treat to smell hawthorn hedges again, and to see some clear sky again, after the foundries of stone-work, and I don't know what it is that makes people give names like Angel Meadow, Paradise Row, Greenfield Street to the dirtiest and smelliest streets in all the town. But I've got some very good friends in this particular Paradise Street I was talking of, and if they don't get an abundant entrance into the Paradise of our Saviour when their time comes, I've mistaken His loving-kindness very sadly.

"Now, you'd hardly think that an old woman could be very happy living in a cellar, without even a proper window to put a plant in, and six steps to come up and down every time she went out and in, and drunken men cursing and blaspheming up above in the street! Well! I'm going to tell you a tale of one of the happiest old women I know, but I'm afraid it's got to be about a day on which she wasn't happy at all.

"Her name's Jane Clark, and she lives in that cellar I'm speaking of on 2s. 6d. a week she has from the parish. She's a widow, and some of you women know what that means. She pays 1s. 3d. for her share of the cellar, for you know in towns such as I come from, we're building so many factories, and railway sheds, and what not, that we've no room left to live in, so Mrs Clark had to share even her cellar. Many a time when I passed down that dreadful street and hadn't time to go in, I'd just shout down the cellar and she'd have an answer back in no time. I used to go down for a few minutes, just to cheer myself up a bit, for there's a lot of discouraging things happen in our sort of work, and she always made me ashamed. She was so content, never wanting more and always thankful for what she had.

"Well! one day I was in Paradise Street. It was wet and cold, and the beer-shops were full of drunken men and women, and even the children were shouting foul language.

"'O God,' I said, ready to cry out in the street, 'How long will the power of the devil last in this town?' However, I thought of Mrs Clark down there, and how she had to live in it all, so I went down the steps, and there she was, but I could see that even she had been crying.