Crying for the Light: or, Fifty Years Ago. Volume 1 of 3. James Ewing Ritchie
Bill had just time to get a drop at the White Horse and return in an unwonted state of sobriety before the Vicar and his curates entered.
‘Dear me,’ said the kind-hearted Vicar, ‘what wretchedness! How is it you are so badly off?’
‘Wife ill, and I got no work to do. It’s very hard on a poor fellow like me,’ said our carroty friend.
‘Ah! it is indeed,’ said the Vicar.
‘Yes, I little thought as I should have come to this,’ said the man, in a desponding tone.
‘Ah, well,’ said the Vicar, ‘perhaps we can help you a little.’
‘Thank you, sir, kindly,’ said the hardened hypocrite.
‘Dear me!’ said the Vicar, ‘what wretchedness – not a stick in the place! We must do something to relieve this distressing case. What say you?’ said he to his companions.
‘Oh, a pair of blankets and a hundredweight of coal at the least.’
‘Yes, and a loaf of bread.’
‘Oh yes! and a little warm clothing for the wife and child in the corner. That’s a bright little fellow,’ said he, pointing to Joe; ‘is that your eldest?’
‘No, sir, he ain’t one of ours,’ said the woman. ‘We keep him out of charity. His mother is dead.’
‘Dear me!’ said the Vicar; ‘who would have thought it? What true benevolence! How it does shame us who are better off! How beautiful it is to see the poor so ready to help one another!’
‘Ah! it is little we can do, but we allus tries to do our duty,’ said Carroty Bill, with the look of a saint and the courage of a martyr, while the forlorn woman seemed the picture of resignation and despair.
‘I am sure we might leave a little money here as well,’ said the Vicar.
‘Oh, certainly,’ said both the curates who declared they had never seen more unmitigated poverty anywhere.
And then they went off.
And thus relieved with a little ready cash and food, and cheered with the prospect of blankets and coals and clothes, for which tickets had been left, Carroty Bill was enabled at leisure to rejoice over the effects of his artful dodge, which was told to a crowd of applauding vagabonds, as rascally as himself; while the landlord of the public, already referred to, could not find too much to say on behalf of that Christian charity by which he expected to benefit more than anyone else in that dingy and poverty-stricken locality. The Vicar was quite justified so far as appearances went. It was an unhealthy habitation which he visited, and all the inmates looked sad and ill.
As the Vicar left the apartment of Carroty Bill he knocked at the next door, inhabited by a hard-working shoemaker of freethought tendencies, who hated him and all his ways. The Vicar beat a hasty retreat, as he knew the sharpness of the shoemaker’s tongue.
‘We don’t want none of your cloth here,’ said the disciple of St. Crispin. ‘If there were a God, should we be as wretched as we are?’
‘Yes, there is. I am His servant,’ said the Vicar.
‘You His servant? Why yer father bought yer the living, and a nice living it is; you are yer father’s servant, not the Lord’s.’
‘But, my good man – ’ said the Vicar.
‘Don’t “good man” me,’ was the angry reply.
‘But we come for your good.’
‘That’s what you all say; and I’ll believe it when I see you and the likes of you give up that part of the tithes which was intended for the poor.’
‘I come in the name of the Lord as His messenger,’ said the Vicar in his most commanding tones.
‘The Lord’s receiver, I think,’ said the shoemaker cynically, ‘for you get all you can in His name.’
‘It is no use leaving anything here,’ said the Vicar to his curates.
Nor was it. The shoemaker had been made an infidel, as many are, by hard work and poor pay, by want of human sympathy, by the greatness of his life-long sorrow. Wounded and bruised and fallen among thieves, the Jew and the Levite had passed by, and no Samaritan had come to his aid. The Gospel of glad tidings has been preached for ages by the Churches, chiefly to the rich and the respectable as they are called, and the poor have been sent empty away. Christian ministers of all denominations have hard work to do to make up for the shortcomings of the past.
As the Vicar and his curates were leaving – and they were anxious to get out into the fresh air, as the smell of the place was awful – a door opened, and a thin and worn and weary elderly woman entered, who had to earn her living by needlework, and was one of the many to be met everywhere, who have seen better days, and who, friendless and alone, have to die in a garret, while the rich thoughtlessly array themselves in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day. Surely there is something amiss in our nineteenth-century civilization when such is the case. It is well to tell such suffering ones that there is a better world, and a Father in heaven who shall wipe all tears from every eye, and where sorrow shall be unknown. But surely our rich need not be so very rich nor our poor so very poor, nor the cup of human suffering be, to many, so overflowing. Surely we need not wait till we have entered the golden gates and walked the pearly streets of the new Jerusalem to set such matters right, or till the Saviour, as some Christians tell us, comes to reign as a temporal Prince, in a world He once blessed with His presence and brightened with His smile. Human laws and misgovernment have had a good deal to do with the appalling inequality which meets us on every side, and which jars strongly with the Bible lessons read at our churches on a Sunday and the utterances of our pulpit orators. But let us return to the poor woman, weary with hard work, with disappointed hope; weary of the bitter past and of contemplating the dark future, on the black cloud of which she could see, as she gazed at it steadily from year to year, no silver lining. She makes no complaint, utters no moan, is never visible in the streets; yet her lot is hard – harder than she can bear – harder than that of the improvident and thoughtless and vicious. All the sunshine is gone out of her, and her heart is broken, though mechanically she accomplishes her daily task. She had a husband, but he died, and it was to give him decent burial that she had to part with her little all; her son had been lost at sea; her daughter had married, and had gone to live in a far-off colony, and a voyage thither would kill her, as she had no stamina left in her emaciated body. Look at her shrunken form, her pale cheeks, her lacklustre eye, her hand worn to the bone! Her hold on life is slender indeed. One of the silent ones is she, who accept their sorrow, and never speak of it as of a burden too heavy to be borne.
‘Good-morning, my friend,’ said the Vicar with a benevolent smile. ‘We have just been visiting your poor neighbours and relieving their distress. They seem in a very bad way – nothing in the house. It is sad to think what would have become of them, if we had not called in the very nick of time. It is really shocking, the amount of misery in this unfortunate neighbourhood.’
‘Yes, there is indeed a lot of it here,’ said the poor woman. ‘It is hard work to be happy here.’
‘But you look as if you had employment.’
‘Yes, sir, I have, I am thankful to say, though it brings me in but little; at any rate, I earn enough to keep me off the parish. Perhaps, gentlemen, you would like to walk in.’
They did so.
‘How neat! how clean!’ said the Vicar, as he looked admiringly around. ‘What a view you have! Positively good; quite commands the place.’
‘Yes, sir, but the chimneys give me a little more smoke than I care for. It is rarely I dare open my window, for fear of the blacks.’
‘Ah, my good woman, it is so with all of us! There is always something amiss – something we should like to get rid of – a fly in the ointment,’ as Solomon says. ‘Now, there are my curates: they are happy young men, but I have no doubt they would like to be in my shoes’ – a remark so true that the curates could not contradict it, only by a deprecatory smile and shake of the head. ‘Dear me!’