The well-paid artisan class furnish not a few wife-beating cases, caused not by mental disease, nor yet by innate cruelty, but by regular and systematic drunkenness. These men work regularly, or nearly so, during the week, but Saturday brings to their families only added misery and sufferings, and Sunday no peace or rest. The scope for missionary work among such is very great, as one or two examples shall show.
On Easter Sunday six years ago a man lay drunk on his bed. The house in which he lived with his wife and family almost closed up to one of our large and popular churches, for the rolling of the organ and the glad strains of the Te Deum could be heard in their rooms. As the man lay there, his wife, a big-eyed and big-hearted woman, sat on a chair contemplating him. It was the twenty-first anniversary of their wedding. Twenty-one years before she had looked forward to married joys and domestic comforts, but twenty years of sorrow and suffering, unceasing toil, and untold cruelties had been her lot.
Presently there was a loud scream, but the man lay still. A woman, however, from another room ran in, and saw the wife holding a bottle that had evidently contained poison. She ran to the man, shook him violently, and called out: ‘Get up! Get up! Your wife has taken poison’ ‘Let her die, then! Let her die!’ was the only response. A doctor close by was fetched, and he shook the man, but got the same reply: ‘Let her die, then! Let her die!’ Emetics were procured, the stomach-pump applied, and the woman was carried by the police to the nearest infirmary. I heard, of the case, and I knew she would, as soon as possible, be charged with attempted suicide, so I went to see her. As I sat by her bedside in the infirmary, the story of the years came out. Her joy had been all bitterness, for the love she hoped for had turned to cruelty. Children had been born to her, but every child meant extra work and misery.
In a fortnight’s time she stood in the dock, and the evidence of the woman and doctor was taken. The husband was in court, and heard his own words, ‘Let her die! Let her die!’ repeated by both witnesses. There stood the big-eyed woman, silent and sorrowful, for not a word could be got from her. But there was a daughter in court who was not disposed to be silent, and she came forward to tell of her mother’s toil and pains, and of her father’s drunkenness and cruelty. And the big-eyed woman looked pleadingly at her, as if to tell her to hold her peace.
The husband was called up, and asked by the magistrate whether the evidence given by his daughter was true. He replied: ‘Some of it.’ The woman was remanded for a week, and I was asked to make some arrangement for her. I found the husband earned good wages, and the only arrangement I could think of was an agreement between them for a separation, the wife to have a weekly allowance from him. This he agreed to, and was willing that his wife should have the home, he promising also to allow her fifteen shillings per week, to be paid to me. This arrangement met with the approval of the magistrate, who, on the remand, accepted sureties for the wife and let her go.
I got the agreement legally drawn, and wrote for the husband to meet me at the wife’s home to sign it. I took witnesses with me, and none of us are likely to forget what followed. I read the agreement, and the man signed it. I put the pen into the woman’s hand, and tremblingly but silently she signed it. The man put fifteen shillings on the table, saying: ‘Here is your first week’s money.’ Then she stood up and looked him through and through. All the wrongs and disappointments of her married life were concentrated in her eyes, and he quailed before her. For a moment she stood, and then, with a sweep of her hand, she sent the money flying over the room, almost screaming: ‘Take your money! Take your money! Give me back my twenty-one years!’
As the man went down the stairs she stood over him, and the cry followed him—‘Give me back my twenty-one years!’ Week by week I carried the fifteen shillings to her, but no comfort could I give to her. I sent her to the seaside, and she came back none the better. Hope was not for her, and in a few months the gates of a lunatic asylum closed upon her. But that fearful cry for the lost years rang ever in the husband’s ears. His wife being in the asylum, he had to look after the children or go to prison; he had even to contribute to his wife’s support. So he had to drink less, and, drinking less, he became more human and a better parent. Twelve months passed away, and the gates of the asylum were opened to her; and he went to receive her and to take her home. There, with her children about her, she still lives, a great-eyed, sad-faced woman. No thrilling joy is hers; her heart and pulses never bound with it, for the sufferings of those years cannot be forgotten, the effects of them cannot be wiped out, but she has home comfort, if nothing more; for with the absence of drink there is the absence of cruelty. And after the darkness and storms of the mid-day of her life, I humbly hope there may be the quiet after-glow of the evening; and when time has laid its healing touch upon her poor, sore heart, the heart that yearned for love and sympathy may in some measure be compensated, and a chastened happiness be her lot.
A volume itself would fail me to tell half the stories of tragedy and pathos connected with this branch of my work. At many an inquest, if the dead could speak or the suicide come to life, worse tales would be told; for, broken in health of body and mind, with every nerve shattered, with not a spark of hope in their hearts, many women seek to end their sufferings by death. Numbers of such women are rescued from it, and are charged with attempted suicide before our magistrates. Sometimes it has been a half-hearted attempt; at others a determined attempt; sometimes, dazed and half conscious, in a helpless, hopeless kind of way they have sought their doom, at other times with fury and despair, and others still with cool, calculating determination. But, whatever the method or the mode, when the law has released its hold upon them, such poor creatures become a sacred charge upon the police court missionary. There is only one way of ‘giving Christ’ to these, and it means weeks or months of kindly sympathy and the consecration of brain and self. I do not for one moment wish it inferred that most of our female ‘attempted suicides’ are driven to it by their husbands’ drunkenness or cruelty, for this is not so; but quite a number of them are, and a sufficient number to make them an important part of any police court missionary’s work—at any rate, they have been an important part of my work.
The sufferings of married women at length got some attention from the State, and in 1895 a law was passed, or rather an addition was made to an old law, for the purpose of affording them protection and giving them some relief.
As soon as this Act came into force our police courts became thronged with women applying for protection. Briefly the Act provides that any woman having a persistently cruel husband may leave him, and, having left him, may then apply to the magistrate within whose jurisdiction she lives for a summons against her husband for separation and maintenance. These the magistrate is empowered to grant, provided the woman proves her case, that the cruelty has been persistent. An order being made upon the husband, he must pay or go to prison. A large number of women have been protected by this Act; men have learned the power of the Act, and many have found to their cost that cruelty to a wife does not go unpunished. They have found, too, that they must either work or starve, and that, having wives, they must either support them or go to prison, and in some degree, though only a small degree, women have been protected.