Two years went by, and I neither saw nor heard anything of her, when, on Christmas morning, I received a letter which contained no address or name; but it was from her. This is the letter:
‘Dear Sir,
‘I hope this will find you and all your family quite well. I hope this Christmas will be a happy one, and that in the New Year God’s blessing may be with you in all your labours. That you may have good health and happiness, I sincerely pray; that your life may be long spared, I earnestly hope, for you to cheer the oppressed and the broken-hearted. You will, I know, continue to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked and to visit the sick, for you have done it to me many a time. Sometimes, when I have lain helpless on my bed, waited on by a little child, with only thin water-gruel, without sugar, to eat, you, sir, have come in with your helping hands, and have said: “You must have something better”; and you would bring it. Had it not been for you, my children would have gone hungry many a time, for often the last slice had gone, and the last bit of coal had been burnt, when you would again come in and bring more. I do not ask anything from you. I shall not let you know who I am. I am almost past help in this world, but I feel that I must let you know that your kindness to me is not and cannot be forgotten. May God answer the prayers I have offered for you. They shall be answered, for the King Himself shall answer, and say unto you: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto Me”; and you shall enter into joy. May God bless you!
‘From a Poor Well-wisher.’
And that was from a slum woman, but not born in the slums. To me there is no cant in that letter. I know it is permeated through and through with heartfelt gratitude. I never found her or heard more from her, but I feel that she no longer dreads the return of her brutal husband, no longer makes blouses at tenpence per dozen, no longer makes the machine fly eighteen hours for one-and-eightpence; for ere this the weary woman is at rest, and the wicked cease to trouble her.
This awful life of the slums, how strangely it acts and reacts upon our poor humanity! It brings out the worst, it brings out the best; it debases men and women, it ennobles them. Vice and misery ramp and crawl, but purity, love, and gentleness are not absent. Outstretched hands and suppliant looks tell that many are eager for the least boon that pity can bestow; but stern, unyielding independence is by no means an absent quality.
But I must tell another story of the same summer-time and of the same locality, for my unknown friend, my match-box widow, and the poor blouse-maker lived within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and close by is a horrid, unclean court, and the sun poured its torrid rays into it. It is a very narrow court, and frowsy women from their doorsteps on either side can bandy words with each other. Sometimes they meet in the roadway, and fights are not unknown. Women of a positive character live in that court, and, coming home at two o’clock in the morning, make it hideous with their lewd and drunken blasphemies. Labouring men live there too, some of whom, on returning from work, find their wives drunk, and no semblance of an evening meal; then, heigho! for the crashing blow, the brutal kick, and the yell of the trampled wife. In a room on the ground-floor of one of the houses lies a woman waiting for death—death that tarries, for she has lain there for months—and was so long, so ‘unconscionably long in dying’ that her husband, by assaulting her, had tried to expedite the process, and was sent to prison for six months for his pains. Her little bed is underneath the window, close on to the pavement, and she can hear the wrangling of the women, the crying and quarrelling of the children, the blasphemy of the ‘unfortunate,’ the maudlin talk of the drunken wife, and the blow of the brutal husband. She has no respite from these things; neither has she any respite from pain, for she is in the last grip of internal cancer. She has been operated on twice in a London hospital, but there was no hope, so she said: ‘I will go home and die among my children.’ She has four of them, and the eldest is a girl of fourteen, who earns four shillings a week at a laundry. The husband no sooner receives his well-merited six months than out of a neighbouring workhouse comes an old woman of sixty-five, mother of the cancer-stricken woman. She enters into an agreement with a working-man, who has lost his wife, to keep house for him and look after his five children. Four shillings a week she is to receive for her onerous task. And every Saturday afternoon the old woman’s four shillings are added to the four earned by the girl, and not till the cancer has done its worst (or its best), not till the grave has closed over her daughter, not till the husband has come back to his children—not till then does the old woman seek again the shelter of the workhouse, there to wait for the rest and oblivion that has come to her daughter.
Week by week for six months I visited the cancerous woman, giving her such help and comfort as I might; but what a six months for her! Unable at length to take food, she starved slowly toward death; but she lasted till the husband came back to her, and he came—drunk! He had earned a gratuity of seven shillings while in prison, and he was violently drunk at mid-day, when I arrived on the scene. I soon drew his attention to myself, and as he followed me along the street, and was grossly insulting, he again got taken into custody, and was remanded for a week to give his wife time to die. Poor woman! she cried after him, and with her failing breath told me she wanted to see him once more before she died. She had her wish, for after a week’s remand he was discharged, and I saw to it that he went home sober, for I went with him. In a week’s time there was a parish funeral from that court, attended by an old woman of sixty-five and a girl of fourteen. Brave old woman! the five pounds you so hardly earned shall be appraised at its proper value by Him who noted the widow’s mite. You can go back to the workhouse, and there die, cheered, comforted, and strengthened by the knowledge that you enabled your daughter to die outside, and the memory of that shall come to you as an angel’s smile when the time comes for you to join your daughter.
But there are poor people outside the slums, and suffering is borne with marvellous endurance in many respectable streets. Unfortunately, married men well placed will commit crimes, and have to pay the penalty, or, rather, their wives and families pay the penalty. Mercy! how they suffer! If the crime, one against property, be repeated, as it often is, then the very perfection of suffering is felt and endured by the wives and families left behind. Their friends cast them off, for the lustre of their respectability must not be soiled, even by contact with a suffering wife and innocent children. Down, down they go; bit by bit the home disappears, until there are only a few relics left of a once comfortable home, and these are worthless. Pass along some of these streets, and you will find cards in some of the basement windows announcing ‘Plain needlework done by hand,’ or ‘Pianoforte taught on moderate charges.’ My life for it, there are tragedies being enacted in those breakfast parlours down in the basement.
To such a place I went one Christmas Eve. A man who had held first-class positions was sent for trial on a charge of embezzlement. Three terms of imprisonment for similar offences had not sufficed to cure him of dishonesty. When he was convicted, I saw weeping at the back of the court a decent-looking woman, who carried a sickly-looking child. I had some conversation with her, and found that the prisoner just committed was her husband. She lived two miles away, and had walked to the court, carrying the child, two years of age, because she had no money to pay her fare, and the child was too ill to be left at home with the other children. She wanted to see what became of her husband, who, to use her own expression, had ‘been so good’ to her. I saw that the child was dangerously ill, and that she herself was faint; so I gave her a few shillings and sent her ‘home’ in a cab, promising to call upon her.
About a fortnight elapsed before I did so, and as I descended the steps that led to her breakfast-parlour I heard the strains of an old worn-out piano and the sound of children’s voices. Curiosity prompted me to stand outside a moment before I rapped, when I learned that children were dancing and singing within. I thought at first I would go without seeing her, for I came to the conclusion that things were looking up and my assistance would not be wanted, but I ultimately decided otherwise; so I rapped, and she came to the door and asked me in. ‘You are merry to-night,’ I said to her. ‘Hush!’ she said, as she led me into the room among the children, of whom there were twelve. They were all nicely dressed, and had slippers on. There was not much in the room. On the floor was a very worn and faded carpet, that had been a good one; and, as I have said, the pianoforte was a very old one. I could not understand, so I said: ‘You are having a party, I see.’ She did not speak, and I could see that her eyes were swollen and red. Presently she lit a small lamp and beckoned me to follow her into a small bedroom, divided from the front-room by folding-doors. As we went in she closed the doors carefully behind us, and, with the little lamp in her hand, went up to a small bed and turned down the sheet, and then looked at me. I took the lamp from her and looked. There lay the two-year-old child that I had seen at the court, but its sufferings were over, for it lay cold and still. ‘And you are having a children’s party?’ ‘Oh, no, no! I must do it or starve. The children pay me sixpence a week, and come three evenings to learn dancing and a little singing.’ Yes, she sat at the old cracked instrument playing whilst happy children danced and the child of her own body lay dead within six feet of her. Yes, and she also went to respectable houses to teach music, playing and singing, where they paid an accomplished woman threepence per lesson of one hour’s duration. So she lived and worked and hoped for her husband’s return, for he had ‘been so good’ to her. I gave her such clothing as enabled her to appear respectable, for ‘respectability’ demands that a music-teacher, even at threepence per hour, shall not appear poor.
But some streets are so ‘respectable’ that Mrs. Grundy will not allow the music-teacher or the plain sewer to exhibit their cards in their windows, either in the basement or the third floor up. It must not be known that poor struggling women pay exorbitant rents for single rooms in such houses, but they do, nevertheless. ‘Whited sepulchres’ are many of these houses, and the cheap lace curtains at all the windows and the artificial plants make pitiful pretence of comfort within. To such houses and the various rooms in such houses I am no stranger. I have seen old women hugging their respectability, and ready to perish; I have seen younger ones living lives that have filled me with wonder; I have seen husbands and wives hoping against hope, and trying to comfort each other, for not always does love fly out at the window when poverty comes in at the door.