“The men only obey orders,” cried Mr. Cole. “There’s a spirit of disaffection abroad: certain people have constituted themselves rulers, and they say to the men, ‘You must do this,’ and ‘You must not do that.’ The men have yielded themselves up to be led, and do do what they are told, right or wrong.”
“I don’t say they are wrong to try to get more wages if they can; it would be odd if we were to be debarred from bettering ourselves,” spoke the Squire. “But to throw up their work whilst they are trying, there’s the folly; there’s where the shoe must tighten. Let them keep on their work whilst they agitate.”
“They’d tell you, I expect, that the masters would be less likely to listen then than they are now.”
“Well, they’ve no right, in common sense, to throw up their wives’ and children’s living, if they do their own,” concluded the Squire.
Cole nodded. “There’s some truth in that,” he said as he got up to leave. “Any way, things are more gloomy with us than you’d believe, Squire.”
You may remember that I told you, when speaking of the Court and my early home, how, when I was a little child of four years old, Hannah my nurse, and Eliza one of her fellow-servants, commented freely in my hearing on my father’s second marriage, and shook me well because I was wise enough to understand them. Eliza was then housemaid at the Court; and soon after this she had left it to marry Jacob Hoar. She was a nice sort of young woman (in spite of the shaking), and I kept up a great acquaintance with her, and was free, so to say, of her house in Crabb Lane, running in and out of it at will, when we were at Crabb Cot. A tribe of little Hoars arrived, one after another. Jacky, the eldest, over ten now, had a place at the works, and earned two shillings a week. “’Twarn’t much,” said Hoar the father, “but ’twas bringing his hand in.” Dick, the second, he who had just had the beating, was nine; two girls came next, and there was a young boy of three.
Hoar earned capital wages—to judge by the comfortable way in which they lived: I should think not less than forty shillings a week. Of course they spent it all, every fraction; as a rule, families of that class never put by for a rainy day. They might have done it, I suppose; in those days provisions were nothing like as dear as they are now; the cost of living altogether was less.
Of course the Hoars had to suffer in common with the rest under the strike. But I did not like to hear of empty cupboards in connection with Eliza; no, nor of her boy’s broken arm; and in the evening I went back to Crabb Lane to see her. They lived next door but one to the house that had been Lease the pointsman’s; but theirs was far better than that tumble-down hut.
Well, it was a change! The pretty parlour looked half dismantled. Its ornaments and best things had gone, as Miss Timmens expressed it, to adorn the pawnshop. The carpet also. Against the wall, on a small mattress brought down for him, lay Dicky and his bruises. Some of the children sat on the floor: Mrs. Hoar was kneeling over Dicky and bathing his cheek, which was big enough for two, for it had caught the stick kindly.