husband’s elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon
appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of
about thirty.
‘What was he by trade?’
‘Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?’
‘I am a boilermaker;’ looking about him with an exceedingly
perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.
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‘He ain’t a mechanic, you understand, sir,’ the wife put in: ‘he’s
only a labourer.’
‘Are you in work?’
He looked up at his wife again. ‘Gentleman says are you in work,
John?’
‘In work!’ cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his
wife, and then working his vision’s way very slowly round to me:
‘Lord, no!’
‘Ah, he ain’t indeed!’ said the poor woman, shaking her head, as
she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.
‘Work!’ said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler,
first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features
of his second son at his knee: ‘I wish I WAS in work! I haven’t
had more than a day’s work to do this three weeks.’
‘How have you lived?’
A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be
boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his threadbare
canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, ‘On the work of
the wife.’
I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it
had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head,
coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming
back.
The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did
slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in
hand, and spread it out upon the bed, – the only piece of furniture
in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she
made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine.
According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her
trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence halfpenny,
and she could make one in something less than two days.
But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it
didn’t come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come
through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand
took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money
enough to pay the security deposit, – call it two pound, – she
could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not
have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second
hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to
tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great
intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or
murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband’s side
at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as
the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups,
and what not other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was in
dress, and toning done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of
nutriment and washing, – there was positively a dignity in her, as
the family anchor just holding the poor ship-wrecked boilermaker’s
bark. When I left the room, the boiler-maker’s eyes were slowly
turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that
vanished boiler lay in her direction.
These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that
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was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.
Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor.
The woman apologised for its being in ‘an untidy mess.’ The day
was Saturday, and she was boiling the children’s clothes in a
saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she
could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or
bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken