“Bill, dear Bill, I do wish you would give up these Chartist goings on. No good will come of it.”
The speaker was a pretty young woman, who would have been prettier, had not premature care traced deep lines on her forehead, which Time, more gentle, would not have done for years to come yet. Her dress was very poor, and the scanty furniture of the attic in which she and her husband lived, and the small embers of the fire over which a few potatoes were boiling for their meal, seemed to say that want had helped care in its work.
Bessy White had been the belle of her native village down in quiet Hampshire. A wilful, merry, coquettish little beauty, knowing her power, and using it; with a bright, fresh colour, and a 170happy ringing laugh. It seemed hardly possible that four years could have changed her to the thin, pale, careworn woman she now was. Yet it was only four years since William Holl, a journeyman joiner, had on his wanderings passed through the village, and had stopped to do some work at the Squire’s, which had occupied him for several weeks. There he saw her, fell in love with her, and carried her off in triumph from his rustic rivals, who, with the village in general, had marvelled much what pretty Bessy White could see to fancy in the pale, quiet, young carpenter, when so many stout young fellows were laying their hearts at her feet. However, Bessy had laughed at their wonder and their warnings, had gaily married, and gone off with her husband to busy London. For the first two or three years of her marriage her life was as happy as she had hoped that it would be. About eighteen months after she had come up to London, she had a baby, which only lived a few weeks; but this had been the only cloud to her happiness. Her husband earned good wages, for he was a capital workman, and was sober and industrious. He loved his wife fondly, and was very proud of 171her, and of the prettily-furnished neat little rooms which constituted his home.
But after a while, strange murmurs of discontent buzzed about among the workpeople of the metropolis, and William Holl, with his talent and enthusiasm, threw himself heart and soul into the movement, and soon became one of its recognised heads.
Then came Bessy’s evil days. Her husband, who had been considered one of the best and steadiest hands at the shop where he worked, was now constantly away, and at last lost his place altogether. The pretty furniture they once had, had gone piece by piece. They had moved from the snug lodgings they formerly occupied into the bare garret they now lived in. The rent even of this was frequently in arrear, and a crust of dry bread was often all the food they had. William Holl was ready enough to work now, but he had great difficulty in getting employment. Good workman as he was, masters looked shy at a man whom they considered as a sort of firebrand among their men, and it was only now by doing jobs at home for other hands that he earned even the most scanty living. 172Still his heart was in the cause, and although he acutely felt his changed position, and his wife’s altered looks, he never wavered for an instant in his course. For himself, indeed, he hardly felt it; the applause which nightly greeted his impassioned speeches at the club to which he belonged, was enough for him, and he would return to his wretched home with a flushed cheek and a proud bearing. He was a pale, sickly-looking man, with a high intellectual forehead, and a clear and expressive eye. Few who saw him at ordinary times would have supposed him capable of filling a large hall with his voice, pouring out bursts of real eloquence, and moving hundreds with his impassioned utterances.
To his wife he answered with a faint smile, “It is too late, Bessy; it is too late, my girl. I must go through with it now; I cannot draw back, and I would not if I could. We have the right with us, Bessy, and we have the strength; we must triumph in the end and get our Charter.”
His wife shook her head sadly.
“My poor Bessy,” he went on, “my poor girl. It is hard on you, you had better have 173stayed down in Hampshire, quiet and happy. It was a sore day for you when ever I saw you. But yet, Bessy, I can’t help it. I must struggle for our rights even if I die for it. But I am sorry for your sake, Bessy, that I feel as I do.”
“Never mind me, Bill,” his wife said, “I can bear it if you can, but I am so afraid it will never come right. I do so fear the future—I am so frightened lest you should get yourself into trouble.”
“Never fear that, Bessy, we are sure to win. We must get our Charter, and then things will be all changed again, and we shall be better off than ever.”
Again his wife shook her head doubtingly.
“Ah, Bill, if they were all like you, I should not fear—no, not one bit—but they are not. Look at the men you take up with now—men you would have been ashamed to be seen walking with in the old days; men who spend half their time in the public-house, who are seen drunk in the middle of the day—men who beat their wives, and let their children go about in rags. Oh, Bill! with such men as these you will never make 174things better than they were before. I have no doubt you are right, Bill, and that things ought to be changed, but, for my part, it seems to me we were very happy as we were before, when we never thought that we were, as you say, only slaves.”
“You women don’t understand these things, Bessy,” her husband said, a little impatiently; and then, with a slight shade on his face, went on, “I know that the men I work with are not the sort I should choose, but for a cause like ours we must work with the tools which come to hand. The better sort will soon come. Let them only hear the truth, and they will join us. They are doing so now—every day we get stronger, the Charter receives thousands of fresh signatures, and the Government, which grinds us down, trembles. Yes, Bessy, we are sure to succeed, and then, my poor girl, your troubles will be over. But it is nearly time for me to be off, let us have our potatoes. I must not miss our meeting to-night, for I expect we shall have an important discussion.”
The scanty meal was eaten in silence, for William Holl could not help comparing it in his 175mind with the snug, cheerful tea which he had always found waiting for him at the end of his day’s work in the old times.
When he had gone out his wife sighed heavily, and then continued the work at which she was engaged, and on which indeed their scanty living at present greatly depended.
William Holl lodged in a small street in Pimlico, close to Vauxhall Bridge, across which his shortest route lay. But a penny now was a serious matter, and he accordingly kept along Millbank, in front of the maze of scaffolding of the new Houses of Parliament, and over Westminster Bridge, straight on to the Elephant and Castle. Then turning off from the bustle and roar of traffic in Newington Causeway, he passed into the heart of Bermondsey.
At first his way was through narrow streets inhabited entirely by the working classes. The clocks have just struck six, and the men are turning out from the neighbouring tan-yards and skinneries. Women are standing in front of their houses talking to each other, and looking out for their husbands’ return, and through the open doors can be seen the tables laid with white 176cloths, and the little trays with the tea-things standing there, and the bright fires with the kettles singing upon them. The men come trooping along boldly, and lustily whistling snatches of popular airs, laughing and joking together. All is bustle and cheerfulness. Now William Holl has turned off into a narrow lane, and has at once entered another atmosphere. There is no sound of whistling and light laughter here. Heavy surly men lean against door-posts and look sullenly out—men with heavy eyebrows and low foreheads, square jawbones and bull-necks—men on whom crime seems to have set a stamp, and whom instinct would lead you to avoid as you would a wolf or a tiger. Through some of the windows come sounds of quarrelling and blows, and foul imprecations of unspeakable horror, but no one heeds this; the men at the doorways do not even turn their heads to listen. The few women who are about, have for the most part an air of boldness and degradation indescribable. They are dressed in dirty tawdry garments, their faces show deep marks caused by misery and drink; whilst their mouths are full of language even fouler and more horrible than 177that of the men. The men seemed all of one stamp, but of the women there were two distinctly marked classes. A few were very different from those just described. Poor creatures, timid and shrinking; wretched worn-out women, who only a few years before had been bright happy girls in some quiet country village far from the misery and crime of London. They had seen their husbands, originally perhaps honest and industrious, go with rapid steps down the social ladder, beginning with drink and ending in a life passed in violence and crime. Through all this the wives had never once thought of leaving them, but had clung to them through good report and evil report, through curses and blows, through desertion and shame, through want and misery. These women looked with trembling and horror upon the life they were bound to. To them death would have been a relief, oh, how welcome! Their early life seemed to them now a glimpse of some far off, long lost Paradise upon which they hardly dared even to cast a thought back.
There were a few children, precocious and old-looking, treading rapidly in their father’s steps, born to people these wretched dens, and to fill 178the reformatories and gaols of their native land. These nests of crime, these social ulcers, which eat into the heart of this London of ours, defy alike the efforts of benevolence and the sword of the law to cure or eradicate them. But one hope, one resource remains—to cut off the springs by which they are fed, to send the children to schools and reformatories before they are utterly hardened and debased, to make them useful, industrious men, and to show them the happiness of honest labour, and the inevitable misery of crime. Thus, and thus only, can the evil be reached. For the men, reformation is hopeless. They must be treated as savage beasts, and caged as such. And that not merely till the first paroxysm of rage and evil is past, to be then turned loose under the protection of a ticket-of-leave, to prey upon society. The tiger who appears to sleep in his cage, with his glossy paw extended and these terrible claws folded up, is the same tiger who in his native wilds slew men and beasts and drank their blood. Who would think of letting him loose again, to range with unrestrained freedom? Why, then, should these men-tigers be permitted to work their savage 179wills? Should they not rather, when once, by repeated crimes, they have shown that their nature is thoroughly evil, be taken for ever from the world, of which they are scourges, not to be confined for life in a cell, but only until they learn that labour is a boon. Then they should be put to pass their lives in labouring for the good of that society to whom their existence has hitherto been a curse.
Through this den William Holl went. Beyond it the dwellings became, scarcer; but the lanes were bounded by high walls, or large rambling buildings, the odour of tan and hide from which sufficiently indicated the trade carried on within them.
In a lonely corner of one of these lanes stood a public-house. It seemed at first sight a strange position for it, but doubtless the landlord knew his own business. It was a quiet out-of-the-way spot for men who did not care to enter the full light of more-frequented houses; besides, being in the midst of the tan-yards and skinneries, it obtained a fair share of custom from the men working in them. When William Holl passed the door he glanced in. A solitary gaslight was burning in the bar, but the place seemed entirely empty and 180deserted, and no lights in the upper windows betrayed any signs of life and activity. There was a small court by the side of the house; down this he turned, stopped at a door, and knocked in a quiet and peculiar way. The door was opened a little, and some one behind it asked, “Who knocks?” to which he answered, “The People and their Charter.” The door was then opened wide enough for him to enter, and he passed through into a small court behind the public-house. This he crossed, lifted the latch of a door, and went into a small passage with a staircase leading up from it. He mounted this and knocked at a door, and the same question and answer were exchanged before it was opened for his admission.
The room which William Holl entered was a large one, and had probably been used at one time for a penny concert room or singing hall, for at the end was a sort of raised platform. The roof was black from the smoke of years, and from it hung two chandeliers for gas. Neither of these however was now in use, as the room was lit by some candles fastened to a hoop hanging immediately over the table, at which fourteen 181men were seated. The shutters were closed, and strips of paper pasted over the cracks to prevent the light within being seen from the street. To these men there was an indescribable charm in all this mystery, in these closed windows and secret passwords, this obscure meeting place, and this rough illumination. It seemed to raise them to the grandeur of conspirators. They pleased themselves by imagining themselves watched and tracked by the agents and spies of Government. While Government, secure of the unanimous assistance of the middle classes and the fidelity of the troops, troubled itself little with the ramifications of the plot, although it looked with some little anxiety upon the increasing murmurs and disaffection of the working classes, stirred up as they were by the violent orations of their demagogue leaders. These men, for their own selfish aims and ends, assured them that they were down-trodden slaves, pointed to the scenes then enacting on the other side of the water, and called upon them to make one united eff............