Machines lowered wages, machines glutted the markets. Men could get no work, masters could sell no goods. On the top of this came bad seasons and dear bread. Presently hundreds of thousands were living on public charity, long lists of masters were in the Gazette. In the gloomy cities of the North, masses of men heaved and moaned as the sea when the south-west wind falls upon it.
All but the most thoughtless saw danger as well as unhappiness in this, and called on their gods. The Chartists proclaimed that safety lay in votes. The landed interest thought that a little more protection might mend matters. The Golden Rulers were for shorter hours. But the men who were the loudest and the most confident cried that cheap bread would mend all. The poor, they said, would have to eat and to spend. They would buy goods, the glut would cease. The wheels would turn again, there would be work and wages. The Golden Age would return. So preached the Manchester men.
In the meantime the doctors wrangled, and the patient grew a little, not much, better. And Mary Audley and Etruria walked across the moorland in the evening sunshine, with a light breeze stirring the bracken, and waves of shadow moving athwart the stretches of purple ling. They seemed very far, very remote from the struggle for life and work and bread that was passing in the world below.
Presently they dropped into a fern-clad dingle and saw below them, beside the rivulet that made music in its bottom, a house or two. Descending farther, they came on more houses, crawling up the hill slopes, and on a few potato patches and ash-heaps. As the sides of the valley rose higher and closed in above the walkers cottages fell into lines on either side of the brook, and began to show one behind the other in rough terraces, with middens that slid from the upper to the lower level. The valley bent to the left, and quickly tall chimneys became visible, springing from a huddle of mean roofs through which no other building of size, no tower, no steeple, rose to break the ugly sameness. This was Brown Heath.
“It’s a rough place,” Etruria said as they picked their way. “But don’t be afraid, Miss. I’m often passing, and they know me.”
Still it was a rough place. The roadway was a cinder-track, and from the alleys and lanes above it open drains wormed their way across the path and into the stream, long grown foul. The air was laden with smoke, coal dust lay everywhere; the most cleanly must have despaired. Men seated, pipe in mouth, on low walls, watched the two go by—not without some rude banter; frowsy women crouching on door-steps and nursing starveling babes raised sullen faces. Lads in clogs made way for them unwillingly. In one place a crowd seethed from a side street and, shouting and struggling, overflowed the roadway before them and threatened to bar their path.
“It’s a dog-fight,” Etruria said. “They are rare and fond of them, Miss. We’d best get by quickly.”
They passed in safety, passed, too, a brawl between two colliers, the air about them thick with oaths, passed a third eddy round two women fighting before a public-house. “The chaps are none so gentle,” Etruria said, falling unconsciously into a commoner way of speaking. “They’re all for fighting, dogs or men, and after dark I’m not saying we’d be safe. But we’ll be over the moor by dusk, Miss.”
They came, as she spoke, to a triangular space, sloping with the hill, skirted by houses, and crossed by an open sewer. It was dreary and cinder-covered, but five publics looked upon it and marked it for the centre of Brown Heath. Etruria crossed the triangle to a building a little cleaner than its neighbors; it was the warehouse, she told her mistress, of a sack-maker who had failed. She entered, and her companion followed her.
Mary found herself in a bare barn-like room, having two windows set high in the walls, the light from which fell coldly on a dozen benches ranged one behind the other, but covering only a portion of the floor. On these were seated, when they entered, about twenty persons, mainly women, but including three or four men of the miner class. No attempt had been made to alter the character of the place, and of formality there was as little. The two had barely seated themselves before a lean young man, with a long pale face and large nose, rose from the front bench, and standing before the little congregation, opened his book. He wore shabby black, but neither surplice nor gown.