Lancelot could not help, even at the risk of detection, investing capital enough in sugar-plums and gingerbread, to furnish the urchins around with the material for a whole carnival of stomach- aches; and he felt a great inclination to clear the fairing-stall in a like manner, on behalf of the poor bedizened sickly-looking girls round, but he was afraid of the jealousy of some beer-bemuddled swain. The ill-looks of the young girls surprised him much. Here and there smiled a plump rosy face enough; but the majority seemed under-sized, under-fed, utterly wanting in grace, vigour, and what the penny-a-liners call "rude health." He remarked it to Tregarva.
The keeper smiled mournfully.
"You see those little creatures dragging home babies in arms nearly as big as themselves, sir. That and bad food, want of milk especially, accounts for their growing up no bigger than they do; and as for their sad countenances, sir, most of them must carry a lighter conscience before they carry a brighter face."
"What do you mean?" asked Lancelot.
"The clergyman who enters the weddings and the baptisms knows well enough what I mean, sir. But we"ll go into that booth, if you want to see the thick of it, sir; that"s to say, if you"re not ashamed."
"I hope we need neither of us do anything to be ashamed of there; and as for seeing, I begin to agree with you, that what makes the whole thing most curious is its intense dulness."
"What upon earth is that?"
"I say, look out there!"
"Well, you look out yourself!"
This was caused by a violent blow across the shins with a thick stick, the deed of certain drunken wiseacres who were persisting in playing in the dark the never very lucrative game of three sticks a penny, conducted by a couple of gipsies. Poor fellows! there was one excuse for them. It was the only thing there to play at, except a set of skittles; and on those they had lost their money every Sat.u.r.day night for the last seven years each at his own village beer-shop.
So into the booth they turned; and as soon as Lancelot"s eyes were accustomed to the reeking atmosphere, he saw seated at two long temporary tables of board, fifty or sixty of "My Brethren," as clergymen call them in their sermons, wrangling, stupid, beery, with sodden eyes and drooping lips--interspersed with more girls and brazen-faced women, with dirty flowers in their caps, whose whole business seemed to be to cast jealous looks at each other, and defend themselves from the coa.r.s.e overtures of their swains.
Lancelot had been already perfectly astonished at the foulness of language which prevailed; and the utter absence of anything like chivalrous respect, almost of common decency, towards women. But lo! the language of the elder women was quite as disgusting as that of the men, if not worse. He whispered a remark on the point to Tregarva, who shook his head.
"It"s the field-work, sir--the field-work, that does it all. They get accustomed there from their childhood to hear words whose very meanings they shouldn"t know; and the older teach the younger ones, and the married ones are worst of all. It wears them out in body, sir, that field-work, and makes them brutes in soul and in manners."
"Why don"t they give it up? Why don"t the respectable ones set their faces against it?"
"They can"t afford it, sir. They must go a-field, or go hungered, most of them. And they get to like the gossip and scandal, and coa.r.s.e fun of it, while their children are left at home to play in the roads, or fall into the fire, as plenty do every year."
"Why not at school?"
"The big ones are kept at home, sir, to play at nursing those little ones who are too young to go. Oh, sir," he added, in a tone of deep feeling, "it is very little of a father"s care, or a mother"s love, that a labourer"s child knows in these days!"
Lancelot looked round the booth with a hopeless feeling. There was awkward dancing going on at the upper end. He was too much sickened to go and look at it. He began examining the faces and foreheads of the company, and was astonished at the first glance by the lofty and ample development of brain in at least one half. There were intellects there--or rather capacities of intellect, capable, surely, of anything, had not the promise of the brow been almost always belied by the loose and sensual lower features. They were evidently rather a degraded than an undeveloped race. "The low forehead of the Kabyle and Koord," thought Lancelot, "is compensated by the grim sharp lip, and glittering eye, which prove that all the small capabilities of the man have been called out into clear and vigorous action: but here the very features themselves, both by what they have and what they want, testify against that society which carelessly wastes her most precious wealth, the manhood of her ma.s.ses! Tregarva! you have observed a good many things--did you ever observe whether the men with the large foreheads were better than the men with the small ones?"
"Ay, sir, I know what you are driving at. I"ve heard of that new- fangled notion of scholars, which, if you"ll forgive my plain speaking, expects man"s brains to do the work of G.o.d"s grace."
"But what have you remarked?"
"All I ever saw was, that the stupid-looking ones were the greatest blackguards, and the clever-looking ones the greatest rogues."
Lancelot was rebuked, but not surprised. He had been for some time past suspecting, from the bitter experience of his own heart, the favourite modern theory which revives the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria, by making intellect synonymous with virtue, and then jumbling, like poor bewildered Proclus, the "physical understanding"
of the brain with the pure "intellect" of the spirit.
"You"ll see something, if you look round, sir, a great deal easier to explain--and, I should have thought, a great deal easier to cure- -than want of wits."
"And what is that?"
"How different-looking the young ones are from their fathers, and still more from their grandfathers! Look at those three or four old grammers talking together there. For all their being shrunk with age and weather, you won"t see such fine-grown men anywhere else in this booth."
It was too true. Lancelot recollected now having remarked it before when at church; and having wondered why almost all the youths were so much smaller, clumsier, lower-brained, and weaker-jawed than their elders.
"Why is it, Tregarva?"
"Worse food, worse lodging, worse nursing--and, I"m sore afraid, worse blood. There was too much filthiness and drunkenness went on in the old war-times, not to leave a taint behind it, for many a generation. The prosperity of fools shall destroy them!"
"Oh!" thought Lancelot, "for some young st.u.r.dy Lancashire or Lothian blood, to put new life into the old frozen South Saxon veins! Even a drop of the warm enthusiastic Celtic would be better than none.
Perhaps this Irish immigration may do some good, after all."
Perhaps it may, Lancelot. Let us hope so, since it is pretty nearly inevitable.
Sadder and sadder, Lancelot tried to listen to the conversation of the men round him. To his astonishment he hardly understood a word of it. It was half articulate, nasal, guttural, made up almost entirely of vowels, like the speech of savages. He had never before been struck with the significant contrast between the sharp, clearly-defined articulation, the vivid and varied tones of the gentleman, or even of the London street-boy when compared with the coa.r.s.e, half-formed growls, as of a company of seals, which he heard round him. That single fact struck him, perhaps, more deeply than any; it connected itself with many of his physiological fancies; it was the parent of many thoughts and plans of his after-life. Here and there he could distinguish a half sentence. An old shrunken man opposite him was drawing figures in the spilt beer with his pipe- stem, and discoursing of the glorious times before the great war, "when there was more food than there were mouths, and more work than there were hands." "Poor human nature!" thought Lancelot, as he tried to follow one of those unintelligible discussions about the relative prices of the loaf and the bushel of flour, which ended, as usual, in more swearing, and more quarrelling, and more beer to make it up--"Poor human nature! always looking back, as the German sage says, to some fancied golden age, never looking forward to the real one which is coming!"
"But I say, vather," drawled out some one, "they say there"s a sight more money in England now, than there was afore the war-time."
"Eees, booy," said the old man; "but ITS GOT INTO TOO FEW HANDS."
"Well," thought Lancelot, "there"s a glimpse of practical sense, at least." And a pedlar who sat next him, a bold, black-whiskered bully, from the Potteries, hazarded a joke,--
"It"s all along of this new sky-and-tough-it farming. They used to spread the money broadcast, but now they drills it all in one place, like bone-dust under their fancy plants, and we poor self-sown chaps gets none."
This garland of fancies was received with great applause; whereat the pedlar, emboldened, proceeded to observe, mysteriously, that "donkeys took a beating, but horses kicked at it; and that they"d found out that in Staffordshire long ago. You want a good Chartist lecturer down here, my covies, to show you donkeys of labouring men that you have got iron on your heels, if you only know"d how to use it."
"And what"s the use of rioting?" asked some one, querulously.
"Why, if you don"t riot, the farmers will starve you."
"And if we do, they"d turn sodgers--yeomanry, as they call it, though there ain"t a yeoman among them in these parts; and then they takes sword and kills us. So, riot or none, they has it all their own way."
Lancelot heard many more sc.r.a.ps of this sort. He was very much struck with their dread of violence. It did not seem cowardice. It was not loyalty--the English labourer has fallen below the capability of so spiritual a feeling; Lancelot had found out that already. It could not be apathy, for he heard nothing but complaint upon complaint bandied from mouth to mouth the whole evening. They seemed rather sunk too low in body and mind,--too stupefied and spiritless, to follow the example of the manufacturing districts; above all, they were too ill-informed. It is not mere starvation which goads the Leicester weaver to madness. It is starvation with education,--an empty stomach and a cultivated, even though miscultivated, mind.
At that instant, a huge hulking farm-boy rolled into the booth, roaring, dolefully, the end of a song, with a punctuation of his own invention--
"He"ll maak me a lady. Zo . Vine to be zyure.
And, vaithfully; love me. Although; I; be-e; poor-r-r-r."
Lancelot would have laughed heartily at him anywhere else; but the whole scene was past a jest; and a gleam of pathos and tenderness seemed to shine even from that doggerel,--a vista, as it were, of true genial nature, in the far distance. But as he looked round again, "What hope," he thought, "of its realisation? Arcadian dreams of pastoral innocence and graceful industry, I suppose, are to be henceforth monopolised by the stage or the boudoir? Never, so help me, G.o.d!"
The ursine howls of the new-comer seemed to have awakened the spirit of music in the party.
"Coom, Blackburd, gi" us zong, Blackburd, bo"!" cried a dozen voices to an impish, dark-eyed gipsy boy, of some thirteen years old.
"Put "n on taable. Now, then, pipe up!"
"What will "ee ha"?"
"Mary; gi" us Mary."