English folk don't 'cotton' to their poverty at all; they don't cat
humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign
folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other,
always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his
rights. To me it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do
people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I
hope they never will be; an evil day that - if it ever came - for the
Anglo-Saxon race.
One girl prided herself very much upon belonging to a sort of club or
insurance-if she died, her mother would receive ten pounds. Ten pounds,
ten golden sovereigns was to her such a magnificent sum, that she really
appeared to wish herself dead, in order that it might be received. She
harped and talked and brooded on it constantly. If she caught cold it
didn't matter, she would say, her mother would have ten pounds. It seemed
a curious reversal of ideas, but it is a fact that poor folk in course of
time come to think less of death than money. Another girl was describing
to her mistress how she met the carter's ghost in the rickyard; the
waggon-wheel went over him; but he continued to haunt the old scene, and
they met him as commonly as the sparrows.
'Did you ever speak to him?'
'Oh no. You mustn't speak to them; if you speak to them they'll fly at
you.'
In winter the men were allowed to grub up the roots of timber that had
been thrown, and take the wood home for their own use; this kept them in
fuel the winter through without buying any. 'But they don't get - paid -
for that work.' She considered it quite a hardship that they were not
paid for taking a present. Cottage people do look at things in such a
curious crooked light! A mother grumbled because the vicar had not been
to see her child, who was ill. Now, she was not a church-goer, and cared
nothing for the Church or its doctrines - that was not it; she grumbled so
terribly because 'it was his place to come.'
A lady went to live in a village for health's sake, and having heard so
much of the poverty of the farmer's man, and how badly his family were
off, thought that she should find plenty who would be glad to pick up
extra shillings by doing little things for her. First she wanted a stout
boy to help to draw her Bath chair, while the footman pushed behind, it
being a hilly country. Instead of having to choose between half a dozen
applicants, as she expected, the difficulty was to discover anybody who
would even take such a job into consideration.
