Gertrude Bone

“ There was something in the multitude of worn objects, their solidity, their position in the room, each accommodating the other so that one could think of no other place for any of them, in the polish which had worn into the heart of the wood by constant rubbing which betrayed the presence and passage of many people through the room for many years; a used, comfortable, taken-care-of appearance, very pleasant to feel around one, a room from which one would not easily take oneself away at night and which seemed to Anne Hilton to set around her the company of many cheerful people. ”

“ Then it walked to the door, waiting until it was dragged open grating on the sand of the floor. The cool morning air came in like a visitor. The old dog pushed against Anne as she stepped outside, sneezed, yawned again, and lay down in the sunshine to finish his nap.
"Haven't you had enough sleep yet, Lion?" said Anne. "Look, what a beautiful day it is! Why, there's Mary on the road already," she added, looking over the low gate.
Mary was coming straight down the middle of the road, her black-and-white terrier sniffing on all sides and pulling the cord by which she held him. ”

“ Spare a ha'penny!"
"Now then," interrupted the Matron, taking two of the women and leading them back to their places. "What good would a ha'penny do to any of you?" She touched two other women, and they retired grumbling to their seats, all except one tall, bony old creature, with a frightful palsy, who kept hold of Anne by the arm, repeating in a voice which was more like an angry scream than the whisper which her deaf ears imagined it to be.
"Those other women'll all beg from you. They'd take the bread out of anybody's mouth. ”

“ Anne opened the door many times and looked out to see always the same grey sheet before her. The gutter on the shippon splashing its overflow on the flags of the yard, the hens crowding dejectedly within the open door of the henhouse, and the water lying green between the cobble-stones of the path. Nothing could be done in the garden. The sodden flowers would not be fit for to-morrow's market. The pony had cast its shoe and must be shod before next day. ”

“ She saw the girl again, seated by the fire in the Infirmary ward, with that strange division between herself and all living, removed, as it were, to a distance which could not be bridged. Then Jane was no more to be found. There was the boy-child instead, who knew nothing except his desire to be kept alive; who met all reservations and pity by a determination to be fed. Throughout the whole evening, Anne had been struck by the fact that the other women scarcely thought of Jane any more than the baby did. It remained to them a very simple matter. There was a baby to feed and bring up. ”

“ What was so sad to me, was that a girl brought up as she was by her grandmother should have so little sense of her position."
"She's happy, I suppose," said Mary, "and there's no need to look further. She'll find it hard to earn a living if he gets tired of her."
"He's not an ill-natured man," said Anne. "You feel as though if he'd been brought up to have a respect for good behaviour he wouldn't have got loose so easily. He thinks he's doing a generous thing, and giving Jane a good time, without thinking what the result must be to her good character. ”

“ There's a good deal you think none of us can understand, but He can if you tell Him." She wiped her eyes. Jane did not seem to have heard.
"I don't want to worry you," continued Anne; "you've got a good deal to bear and to think of, and you've got to keep up for the sake of the child. He'll need you to be father and mother both. Matron thinks you'll be better here for the present, but you mustn't give up and think you're to stay in the Union all your life. But try to think of the child, and how God'll help you if you try to do the right." ”

“ Aren't you going to begin?" said one of them.
"She's a funny old thing, this one," said the Matron to Anne, stopping to watch, as the old woman, holding her skirts to her knees, her clogs clacking, and with a smile of imbecility fixed on her face, began to hop from one thin leg to the other, stamping slowly round on her heels in the artless manner of a child. All at once she stopped, and, pulling up her apron, put a corner of it in her mouth, hanging her head and giggling.
"They're all looking at me, all them men," she giggled. "Fancy me dancing with all them men looking." ”

“ I seem to see myself, a child with a child's imagination, standing on those wet sands, looking out over their purple immensity to the glittering line of the tide on the horizon, and to see again the sun in such a wide heaven that it seemed to have the world to itself, and to watch the changes in the sky as it sank, drawing with it the light. ”

“ Anne turned to Jane, who was sitting flushed and resentfully embarrassed in the satin armchair, looking expectantly to Richard to see her through, shocked, too, and ready to cry at this first contact and opinion of her neighbours upon her doings.
"Where's your sister Lizzie, Jane?" she asked.
"Out at service," replied Jane, unwillingly, fidgetting with her hands and feet.
"So your coming here has meant that she's got no home," said Anne.
"She could have had one if she'd liked," said Burton. "The house is big enough for us all." ”

“ Everything that had budded had a world to itself and could be seen. Radiant, innocent, carolling, self-revealing, the movement and action of spring were in the earth. The running and glittering water, in winter so vivid a feature of the fields, had become insignificant in comparison with the splendid and vigorous sky. ”

“ On each side of the square, with their backs to the stalls and facing the shops whose goods and attractions overflowed to the pavement as if offering themselves at the feet of the passers-by, stood a row of countrywomen and girls with market baskets of butter and eggs, plucked fowls, red currants, plums, curds, tight nosegays of pinks, stocks, wall-flowers, or anything else saleable or in season which a cottage garden produces. ”

“ She had had little time for sentiment in her married life, but now, still active, strong, and with only the work of her house and garden, the meals for her four sons who still lived at home, and their mending and washing, she had leisure to express her opinions, and always having been obliged to hold her imagination within the visible realities of life and death, with which all her life had been concerned, she had arrived at a definiteness of judgment, and an honesty of speech which one frequently finds among women of her class out of reach of poverty, but not beyond the necessity of work. ”

“ So you want Jane to go back to starving at dressmaking, Miss Hilton? She's a lot more comfortable here, I can tell you. She's got a servant, and she can have her dresses made out. She's no need to do anything but fancy work."
"It's the sin of a good, respectable girl taking such things for a price," interrupted Anne, "and of you, Mr Burton, to entice her to it, and keep her like this. It's not on you the judgment'll fall, but on her. How's she to face the neighbours and everybody she's known from a child when you've done with her?" ”

“ The noise of the wind, too, beat in one's ears louder than the water. One had no time for meditation. One was hurried as the wind, speeding as the sunshine. Yet the spring more than any other season is the time when one thinks of the generations that pass—perhaps from the very transitoriness of the visual images, their evanescence and momentary changes reminding one so of the dead. ”

“ Under a sky that is infinite and a heaven accessible to all, the poor "work for their living," bowed always a little towards tragedy yet understanding joy, from the bitterness of life and death and the added anguish of ignorance drinking often their safety. ”

“ A week is not a very long portion of eternity. It is so painful to think of two people separating for ever in hatred. You have one week left. Could you not make the most of it?"
"It's a week too much!" said the woman, with careless brutality. "Are you always so fond of making long calls?" she added, staring at Anne.
Anne turned to the bed-ridden woman, saying, "On Thursday I shall be going in to market and I'll call at the Union Infirmary and see the Matron. ”

“ When Anne arrived at the door of the dairy, she found its mistress seated before a tin pail containing a mass of butter which she was dividing into prints. With white sleeves and apron, a bucket of scalding water on one side of her and a pail of cold on the other, her ample knees spread apart for balance as she sat on a low chair, her bulky and capable hands moved with decision and practice about her work. ”

“ The sun had risen without mist and set in a sky without a cloud, seeming, as it sank, to draw with it all the colour from the heavens, as if it had cast a golden net in the morning and now drew it home again behind the hill. ”

“ Just round the corner from the house where I live, there's a street called 'Paradise Street,' but I can tell you as I came along here this morning in the lanes by the chapel, it seemed to me a good deal more like Paradise than that street. It was a treat to smell hawthorn hedges again, and to see some clear sky again, after the foundries of stone-work, and I don't know what it is that makes people give names like Angel Meadow, Paradise Row, Greenfield Street to the dirtiest and smelliest streets in all the town. ”

“ Beyond the misfortune of her blindness she had no defect, and her mind was alert and cheerful.
"She calls it 'looking,'" said the Matron with a laugh. "Just you see her knitting, Miss Hilton. She's re-footing those stockings. See if you can tell where she's patched them." She took up a bright blue stocking from the bench. The blind woman took the other end and felt it carefully.
"That's not my work," she said with amused contempt. "It's too like patchwork. Here's mine."
Anne took the stocking and looked. "It's beautiful," she said. ”

“ She was a woman who had had "experience"—that experience which comes to each as a kind of special revelation, a thing so surprising, that it appears impossible to think of its having happened before, or to withhold the telling; the cynicism, which declares this to be an overwhelming interest in one's internal self, being only partially right, it being rather the excited and surprised mental condition which is the deep well from which all art, all expression, breaks forth. ”

“ CHAPTER XIX The habit of working for another is so fixed in the lives of poor women, that the interruption of it becomes a kind of second death, almost as difficult to bear as the death of the affection which is itself almost a kind of habit. When Anne returned from market, and sat down, her house seemed to have become a little emptier, because the girl whose welfare she had carried with her for so many months was beyond her reach. ”

“ Like the rest of mankind he earned a reputation for generosity by being liberal with those things by which he set little store. He was neither avaricious nor surly, and, being in full health and vigour himself, was able to spare a rough chivalry to women which made allowance for their weaker bodies and greater difficulty in coping with existence. It was probably this soft-heartedness which, in the first place, had stirred a vague pity for the pretty blonde dressmaker, and this quality which the pliable girl had interpreted into the hope that he'd do her justice. ”

“ No one considered that it was "doing a charity" to Mary to drive past her cottage on the way from market to give her news of a football match or fair about to be held in the district. Women would send their children on their way to school to give similar news, and the boy who brought her the roll of newspapers, which she sold at the station every morning, would often wheel her barrow for her. She had a large, clumsy chest on the frame of an old perambulator, in which she wheeled about her store of aerated waters, toffee, and newspapers. ”

“ I was talking to Mrs Hankworth the other day—she's done better than me, she's had twelve—'I never was one for much whipping,' she said. 'I never found you did much good by it. You can break the spirit of a horse by whipping, but you can't change its character. Give 'em all plenty of occupation at home, and they'll not want to go out in the evenings.' I was glad to hear her say so, for I've always felt like that myself. There was Ted had his fret-saw, and William was always one for making collections of butterflies or birds' eggs, and John was always one for politics. ”

“ If a girl had made a mistake, that was no reason why everyone else should make another, and her good sense revolted against a perpetually drawn-out punishment for any fault. Her disgust at this fault, not very deep, being submerged almost as it arose, by the immediate necessity for doing something, and a reminiscent understanding of the timidity and dread with which the first child-bearing might be regarded by an ignorant and forsaken girl. ”

“ She knocked down a hymn-book and several pennies rolled under the feet of the out-going congregation. A young woman, with roses in her best hat, nudged another and laughed. A big boy stooped to pick up two, and restored them with a purple face. Anne replaced them in the linen pocket, shook her skirt down again, wrapped something in a piece of an old envelope, and beckoning the steward gave it to him, then followed the others through the blue square of the doorway. The steward approached the evangelist with a rather embarrassed smile.
"Our good sister's a bit queer," he said. ”

“ Yet one day the sun which has risen, stirring the only emotion in the landscape, will rise upon a tragic, significant, or patient human group, for whom sun and seasons and the wide heavens are small, whose emotion is yet contained within the room of a mean dwelling and whose destiny is accomplished within a tilled field. ”

“ It was like speaking to a person a very long way off, and Anne desisted.
"She's very quiet, isn't she?" said the Matron. "That'll have to break down soon. The doctor thinks she'll be all right when the child comes. The labour'll give her a shock and rouse her. She comes of a better class than the usual ones. It's the disgrace she can't get over. She'll do anything she's told to do. I sometimes get tired of making the other women do as they're told, but I wish sometimes she'd be a bit more like them. You'll be ready for your tea soon, won't you, Jane?" ”

“ But it might be that the girl had by this time felt her need of outside friends. It was fully three months ago. As Anne was returning from the nearest village one afternoon in the solemn winter sunshine, she determined suddenly to pay a second visit to Jane. And she would try to be less hard on Burton, which would perhaps draw Jane to her. It might be that she needed a friend by now. Half a mile from her own cottage she came to a three-cornered patch of the way where several roads met. By one side was a pond with two posts painted white as a mark for drivers at night-time. ”

“ I hope the baby's a boy. It'll be sooner forgotten about if he is."
"I'm afraid," said Anne, growing expansive beneath the good sense which attacked every practical side of the matter, and dissolved difficulties as soon as they arose, "that she'll get little work to do when she comes out. People talk unkindly, and say that you must make a difference between her and other girls."
"Oh! there'll always be some clever folk like that," said Mrs Hankworth, drily. "The difference that anyone can see if they use their eyes is, that she'll have a child to keep and they won't. ”