It was September, and they were moving to Crabb Cot for a week or two’s shooting. The shooting was not bad about there, and the Squire liked a turn with his gun yet. Being close on the Michaelmas holidays, Tod and I were with them.

When the stay was going to be short, the carriages did not come over from Dyke Manor. On arriving at South Crabb station, there was a fly waiting. It would not take us all. Mr. and Mrs. Todhetley, the two children, and Hannah got into it, and some of the luggage was put on the top.

“You two boys can walk,” said the Pater. “It will stretch your legs.”

And a great deal rather walk, too, than be boxed up in a crawling fly!

We took the way through Crabb Lane: the longest but merriest, for it was always lively with noise and dirt. Reports had gone abroad long before that Crabb Lane was “out on strike:” Tod and I thought we would take a look at it in this new aspect.

There were some great works in the vicinity—I need not state here their exact speciality—and the men employed at them chiefly inhabited Crabb Lane. It was setting-up these works that caused the crowded dwellings in Crabb Lane to be built—for where a number of workmen congregate together, habitations must of necessity follow.

You have heard of Crabb Lane before—in connection with what I once told you about Harry Lease the pointsman. It was a dingy, over-populated, bustling place, prosperous on the whole, its inhabitants as a rule well-to-do. A strike was quite a new feature, bringing to most of them a fresh experience in life. England had strikes in those past days, but they were not common.

Crabb Lane during working hours had hitherto been given over to the children, who danced in the gutters and cried and screamed themselves hoarse. Women also would be out of doors, idling away their time in gossip, or else calling across to each other from the windows. But now, as I and Tod went down it, things looked different. Instead of women and children, men were there. Every individual man, I believe, out of every house the lane contained; for there appeared to be shoals of them. They lounged idly against the walls, or stood about in groups. Some with pipes, some without; some laughing and jeering, apparently in the highest spirits, as if they had climbed the tree of fortune; some silent and anxious-looking.

“Well, Hoar, how are you?”

It was Tod who spoke. The man he addressed, Jacob Hoar, was one of the best of the workmen: a sober, steady, honest fellow, with a big frame and a resolute face. He had the character of being fierce in temper, sometimes savage with his fellow-men, if put out. Alfred Hoar—made pointsman at the station in poor Harry Lease’s place—was his brother.

Hoar did not answer Tod at all. He was standing quite alone near the door of his house, a strangely defiant look upon his pale face, and his firm lips drawn in. Unless I was mistaken, some of the men over the way were taking covert glances at him, as though he were a kangaroo they had to keep aloof from. Hoar turned his eyes slowly upon us, took off his round felt hat, and smoothed back his dark hair.

“I be as well as matters’ll let me be, young Mr. Todhetley,” he then said.

“There’s a strike going on, I hear,” said Tod. “Has been for some time.”

“Yes, there’s a strike a-going on,” assented Hoar, speaking in a deliberate, sullen manner, as a man resenting some special grievance. “Has been for some time, as you say. And I don’t know when the strike ‘ll be a-going off.”

“How is Eliza?” I asked.

“Much as usual, Mr. Johnny. What should ail her?”

Evidently there was no sociability to be got out of Jacob Hoar that afternoon, and we left him. A few yards further, we passed Ford’s, the baker’s. No end of heads were at the shop door, and they seemed to be staring at Hoar.

“He must have been dealing out a little abuse to the public generally, Tod,” said I.

“Very likely,” answered Tod. “He seems bursting with some rage or other.”

“Nay, I don’t think it’s rage so much as vexation. Something must have gone wrong.”

“Well, perhaps so.”

“Look here, Tod. If we had a home to keep up and a lot of mouths to feed and weekly rent to pay, and a strike stopped the supplies, we might be in a worse humour than Hoar is.”

“Right, Johnny.” And Tod went off at a strapping pace.

How it may be with other people, I don’t know: but when I get back to a place after an absence, I want to see every one, and am apt to go dashing in at doors without warning.

“It won’t take us a minute to look in on Miss Timmens, Tod,” I said, as we neared the school-house. “She’ll tell us the news of the whole parish.”

“Take the minute, then, if you like,” said Tod. “I am not going to bother myself with Miss Timmens.”

Neither perhaps should I, after that, for Tod swayed me still; but in passing the door it was opened wide by one of the little scholars. Miss Timmens sat in her chair, the lithe, thin cane, three yards long, raised in her hand, its other end descending, gently enough on the shoulders of a chattering girl.

“I don’t keep it to beat ’em,” Miss Timmens was wont to say of her cane, “but just to tap ’em into attention when they are beyond the reach of my hand.” And, to give her her due, it was nothing more.

“It’s you, is it, Master Johnny? I heard you were all expected.”

“It’s me, safe enough. How goes the world with you, Miss Timmens?”

“Cranky,” was the short answer. “South Crabb’s going out of its senses, I think. The parson is trying to introduce fresh ways and doings, in my school: new-fangled rubbish, Master Johnny, that will bring more harm than good. I won’t have it, and so he and I are at daggers drawn. And there’s a strike in the place!”

I nodded. While she spoke, it had struck me, looking at the room, that it was not so full as usual.

“It’s the strike does that,” she said, in a sort of triumph. “It’s the strike that works all the ill and every kind of evil”—and it was quite evident the strike found no more favour with her than the parson’s fresh ways.

“But what has the strike to do with the children’s absence from school?”

“The strike has carried all the children’s best things to the pawn-shop, and they’ve nothing decent left to come abroad in. That is one cause, Johnny Ludlow,” she concluded, very tartly.

“Is there any other?”

“Don’t you think that sufficient? I am not going to let them appear before me in rags—and so Crabb Lane knows. But there is another cause, sir. This strike has so altered the course of things that the whole order of ordinary events is turned upside down. Even if the young ones’ frocks were home again, it would be ten to one against their coming to school.”

“I don’t see the two little Hoars.” And why I had been looking for those particular children I can’t say, unless it was that Hoar and his peculiar manner had been floating in my mind ever since we passed him.

“‘Liza and Jessy—no, but they’ve been here till today,” was the reply, given after a long pause. “Are you going, Mr. Johnny?—I’ll just step outside with you.”

She drew the door close behind her, keeping the handle in her hand, and looked straight into my face.

“Jacob Hoar has gone and beat his boy almost to death this morning—and the strike’s the cause of that,” she whispered, emphatically.

“Jacob Hoar has!—Why, how came he to do it?”—I exclaimed, recalling more forcibly than ever the man’s curious look, and the curious looks of the other men holding aloof from him. “Which of his boys is it?”

“The second of them; little Dick. Yes, he is black and blue all over, they say; next door to beat to death; and his arm’s broken. And they have the strike to thank for it.”

She repeated the concluding words more stingingly than before. That Miss Timmens was wroth with the strike, there could be no mistake. I asked her why the strike was to be thanked for the beating and the broken arm.

“Because the strike has brought misery; and that is the source of all the ill going on just now in Crabb Lane,” was her reply. “When the men threw themselves out of work, of course they threw themselves out of wages. Some funds have been furnished to them, weekly I believe, from the Trades union League—or whatever they call the thing—but it seems a mere nothing compared with what they used to earn. Household goods, as well as clothes, have been going to the pawn-shop, but they have now pledged all they’ve got to pledge, and are, it is said, in sore straits: mothers and fathers and children alike hungry. It is some time now since they have had enough to eat. Fancy that, Mr. Johnny!”

“But why should Dicky be beaten for that?” I persisted, trying to keep her to the point—a rather difficult matter with Miss Timmens at all times.

“It was in this way,” she answered, dropping her voice to a lower key, and giving a pull at the door to make sure it had not opened. “Dicky, poor fellow, is half starved; he’s not used to it, and feels it keenly: resents it, I dare say. This morning, when out in the lane, he saw a tray of halfpenny buns, hot from the oven, put on old Ford’s counter. The sight was too much for him, the temptation too great. Dicky Hoar is naturally honest; has been, up to now, at all events: but I suppose hunger was stronger than honesty today. He crept into the shop on all fours, abstracted a bun with his fingers, and was creeping out again, when Ford pounced upon him, bun in hand. There was a fine outcry. Ford was harsh, roared out for the policeman, and threatened him with jail, and in the midst of the commotion Hoar came up. In his mortification at hearing that a boy of his had been caught pilfering, he seized upon a thick stick that a bystander happened to have, and laid it unmercifully upon poor Dick.”

“And broke his arm?”

“And broke his arm. And covered him with weals beside. He’ll be all manner of colours tomorrow.”

“What a brutal fellow Hoar must be!”

“To beat him like that?—well, yes,” assented Miss Timmens, in accents that bore rather a dubious sound. “Passion must have blinded him and urged him further than he intended. The man has always been upright; prided himself on being so, as one may say; and there’s no doubt that to find his child could be a thief shook him cruelly. This strike is ruining the tempers of the men; it makes them feel at war with everything and everybody.”

When I got home I found them in the thick of the news also, for Cole the doctor was there telling it all. Mrs. Todhetley, sitting on the sofa with her bonnet untied and her shawl unpinned, was listening in a kind of horror.

“But surely the arm cannot be broken, Mr. Cole!” she urged.

“Broken just above the wrist, ma’am. I ought to know, for I set it. Wicked little rascal, to steal the bun! As to Hoar, he is as fierce as a tiger when really enraged.”

“Well, it sounds very shocking.”

“So it does,” said Cole. “I think perhaps it may be productive of one good—keep the boy from picking and stealing to the end of his life.”

“He was hungry, you say.”

“Famished, ma’am. Most of the young ones in Crabb Lane are so just now.”

The Squire was walking up and down the room, his hands in his pockets. He halted, and faced the Doctor.

“Look here, Cole—what has brought this state of things about? A strike!—and prolonged! Why, I should as soon have expected to hear the men had thrown up their work to become Merry Andrews! Who is in fault?—the masters or the men?”

Cole lifted his eyebrows. “The masters lay the blame on the men, the men lay it on the masters.”

“What is it the men are holding out for?”

“To get more wages, and to do less work.”

“Oh, come, that’s a twofold demand,” cried the Pater. “Modest folk generally ask for one favour at a time. Meanwhile things are all at sixes-and-sevens, I suppose, in Crabb Lane?”

“Ay,” said the Doctor. “At worse than sixes-and-sevens, indoors and out. There are empty cupboards and empty rooms within; and there’s a good deal of what’s bad without. It’s the wives and children that suffer, poor things.”

“The men must be senseless to throw themselves out of work!”

“The men only obey orders,” cried Mr. Cole. “There’s a spirit of disaffection abroad: certain people have constituted themselves rulers, and they say to the men, ‘You must do this,’ and ‘You must not do that.’ The men have yielded themselves up to be led, and do do what they are told, right or wrong.”

“I don’t say they are wrong to try to get more wages if they can; it would be odd if we were to be debarred from bettering ourselves,” spoke the Squire. “But to throw up their work whilst they are trying, there’s the folly; there’s where the shoe must tighten. Let them keep on their work whilst they agitate.”

“They’d tell you, I expect, that the masters would be less likely to listen then than they are now.”

“Well, they’ve no right, in common sense, to throw up their wives’ and children’s living, if they do their own,” concluded the Squire.

Cole nodded. “There’s some truth in that,” he said as he got up to leave. “Any way, things are more gloomy with us than you’d believe, Squire.”

You may remember that I told you, when speaking of the Court and my early home, how, when I was a little child of four years old, Hannah my nurse, and Eliza one of her fellow-servants, commented freely in my hearing on my father’s second marriage, and shook me well because I was wise enough to understand them. Eliza was then housemaid at the Court; and soon after this she had left it to marry Jacob Hoar. She was a nice sort of young woman (in spite of the shaking), and I kept up a great acquaintance with her, and was free, so to say, of her house in Crabb Lane, running in and out of it at will, when we were at Crabb Cot. A tribe of little Hoars arrived, one after another. Jacky, the eldest, over ten now, had a place at the works, and earned two shillings a week. “‘Twarn’t much,” said Hoar the father, “but ’twas bringing his hand in.” Dick, the second, he who had just had the beating, was nine; two girls came next, and there was a young boy of three.

Hoar earned capital wages—to judge by the comfortable way in which they lived: I should think not less than forty shillings a week. Of course they spent it all, every fraction; as a rule, families of that class never put by for a rainy day. They might have done it, I suppose; in those days provisions were nothing like as dear as they are now; the cost of living altogether was less.

Of course the Hoars had to suffer in common with the rest under the strike. But I did not like to hear of empty cupboards in connection with Eliza; no, nor of her boy’s broken arm; and in the evening I went back to Crabb Lane to see her. They lived next door but one to the house that had been Lease the pointsman’s; but theirs was far better than that tumble-down hut.

Well, it was a change! The pretty parlour looked half dismantled. Its ornaments and best things had gone, as Miss Timmens expressed it, to adorn the pawnshop. The carpet also. Against the wall, on a small mattress brought down for him, lay Dicky and his bruises. Some of the children sat on the floor: Mrs. Hoar was kneeling over Dicky and bathing his cheek, which was big enough for two, for it had caught the stick kindly.

“Well, Eliza!”

She got up, sank into a chair, flung her apron up to her face, and burst into tears. I suppose it was at the sight of me. Not knowing what to say to that, I pulled the little girls’ ears and then sat down on the floor by Dicky. He began to cry.

“Oh come, Dick, don’t; you’ll soon be better. Face smarts, does it?”

“I never thought to meet you like this, Master Johnny,” said Eliza, getting up and speaking through her tears. “’Twas hunger made him do it, sir; nothing else. The poor little things be so famished at times it a’most takes the sense out of ’em.”

“Yes, I am sure it was nothing else. Look up, Dick. Don’t cry like that.” One would have thought the boy was going into hysterics.

I had an apple in my pocket and gave it to him. He kept it in his hand for some time, and then began to eat it ravenously, sobbing now and then. The left arm, the broken one, lay across him, bound up in splints.

“I didn’t mean to steal the bun,” he whispered, looking up at me through his tears. “I’d ha’ give Mrs. Ford the first ha’penny for it that I’d ever got. I was a-hungered, I was. We be always a-hungered now.”

“It is hard times with you, I am afraid, Eliza,” I said, standing by her.

Opening her mouth to answer, a sob caught her breath, and she put her hand to her side, as if in pain. Her poor face, naturally patient and meek, was worn, and had a bright hectic spot upon it. Eliza used to be very pretty, and was young-looking still, with smooth brown hair, and mild grey eyes: she looked very haggard now and less tidy. But, as to being tidy, how can folk be that, when all their gowns worth a crown are hanging up at the pawnbroker’s?

“It’s dreadful times, Master Johnny. It’s times that frighten me. Worse than all, I can’t see when it is to end, and what the end is to be.”

“Don’t lose heart. The end will be that the men will go to work again: I dare say soon.”

“The Lord send it!” she answered. “That’s the best we can hope for, sir; and that’ll be hard enough. For we shall have to begin life again, as ’twere; with debts all around us, and our household things and our clothes in pledge.”

“You will get them out again then.”

“Ay, but how long will it take to earn the money to do it? This strike, as I look upon it, has took at the rate of five years of prosperity out of our lives, Master Johnny.”

“The league—or whatever it is—allows you all money to live, does it not?”

“We get some, sir. It’s not a great deal. They tell us that there’s strikes a-going on in many parts just now; these strikes have to be helped as well as the operatives here; and so it makes the allowance small. We have no means of knowing whether that’s true or not, us women, I mean; but I dare say it is.”

“And the allowance is not enough to keep you in food?”

“Master Johnny, there’s so many other things one wants, beside bare food,” she answered, with a sigh. “We must pay our rent, or the landlord would turn us out; we must have a bit o’ coal for firing: we must have soap; clothes must be washed, sir, and we must be washed; we must have a candle these dark evenings; shoes must be mended: and there’s other trifles, too, that I needn’t go into, as well as what Hoar takes for himself——”

“But does he take much?” I interrupted.

“No, sir, he don’t: nothing to what some of ’em takes: he has always been a good husband and father. The men, you see, sir, must have a few halfpence in their pockets to pay for their smoke and that, at their meetings in the evening. There’s not much left for food when all this comes to be taken out—and we are seven mouths to fill.”

No wonder they were hungry!

“Some of the people you’ve known ought to help you, Eliza. Mrs. Sterling at the old home might: or Mrs. Coney. Do they?”

Eliza Hoar shook her head. “The gentlemen be all again us, sir, and so the ladies dare not do anything. As to Mrs. Sterling—I don’t know that she has so much as heard of the strike—all them miles off.”

“You mean the gentlemen are against the strike!”

“Yes, sir; dead again it. They say strikes is the worst kind of evil that can set in, both for us and for the country; that it will increase the poor-rates to a height to be afraid of, and in the end drive the work away from the land. Sitting here with my poor children around me at dusk to save candle, I get thinking sometimes that the gentlemen may not be far wrong, Master Johnny.”

Seeing the poor quiet faces lifted to me, from which every bit of spirit seemed to have gone, I wished I had my pockets full of buns for them. But buns were not likely to be there; and of money I had none: buying one of the best editions of Shakespeare had just cleared me out.

“Where’s Hoar?” I asked, in leaving.

A hot flush overspread her face. “He has not shown himself here, Master Johnny, since what he did to him,” was her resentful answer, pointing to Dick. “Afraid to face me, he is.”

“I’d not say too much to him, Eliza. It could not undo what’s done, and might only make matters worse. I dare say Hoar is just as much vexed about it as you are.”

“It’s to be hoped he is! Why did he go and set upon the child in that cruel way? It’s the men that goes in for the strike; ‘tisn’t us: and when the worry of it makes ’em so low they hardly know where to turn, they must vent it upon us. Master Johnny, there are minutes now when I could wish myself dead but for the children.”

I went home with my head full of a scheme—getting Mrs. Todhetley and perhaps the Coneys to do something for poor Eliza Hoar. But I soon found I might as well have pleaded the cause of the public hangman.

Who should come into our house that evening but old Coney himself. As if the strike were burning a hole in his tongue, he began upon it before he was well seated, and gave the Squire his version of it: that is, his opinion. It did not differ in substance from what had been hinted at by Eliza Hoar. Mr. Coney did not speak for the men or against them; he did not speak for or against the masters; that question of conflicting interests he said he was content to leave: but what he did urge, and very strongly, was, that strikes in themselves must be productive of an incalculable amount of harm; they brought misery on the workmen, pecuniary embarrassment on the masters, and they most inevitably would, if persisted in, eventually ruin the trade of the kingdom; therefore they should, by every possible means, be discouraged. The Squire, in his hot fashion, took up these opinions for his own and enlarged upon them.

When old Coney was gone and we had our slippers on, I told them of my visit to Eliza, and asked them to help her just a little.

“Not by a crust of bread, Johnny,” said the Squire, more firmly and quietly than he usually spoke. “Once begin to assist the wives and children, and the men would have so much the less need to bring the present state of things to an end.”

“I am so sorry for Eliza, sir.”

“So am I, Johnny. But the proper person to be sorry for her is her husband: her weal and woe can lie only with him.”

“If we could help her ever so little!”

The Squire looked at me for a full minute. “Attend to me, Johnny Ludlow. Once for all, NO! The strike, as Coney says, must be discouraged by every means in our power. Discouraged, Johnny. Otherwise these strikes may come into fashion, and grow to an extent of which no man can foresee the end. They will bring the workmen to one of two things—starvation, or the workhouse. That result seems to me inevitable.”

“I’m sure it makes me feel very uncomfortable,” said the Mater. “One can hardly see where one’s duty lies.”

“Our poor-rates are getting higher every day; what do you suppose they’ll come to if this is to go on?” continued the Squire. “I’d be glad for the men to get better pay if they are underpaid now: whether they are or not, I cannot tell; but rely upon it, striking is not the way to attain to it. It’s a way that has ruined many a hopeful workman, who otherwise would have gone on contentedly to the end of his days; ay, and has finally killed him. It will ruin many another. Various interests are at stake in this; you must perceive it for yourself, Johnny lad, if you have any brains; but none so great as that of the workmen themselves. With all my heart I wish, for their own sakes, they had not taken this extreme step.”

“And if the poor children starve, sir?” I ventured to say.

“Fiddlestick to starving! They need not starve while there’s a workhouse to go to. And won’t; that’s more. Can’t you see how all this acts, Mr. Johnny? The men throw themselves out of work; and when matters come to an extremity the parish must feed the children, and we, the rate-payers, must pay. A pleasant prospect! How many scores of children are there in Crabb Lane alone?”

“A few dozens, I should say, sir.”

“And a few to that. No, Johnny; let the men look to their families’ needs. For their own sakes; I repeat it; for their own best interests, I’ll have them left alone. They have entered on this state of things of their own free will, and they must themselves fight it out.—And now get you off to bed, boys.”

“The Pater’s right, Johnny,” cried Tod, stepping into my room as we went up, his candle flaring in the draught from the open staircase window; “right as right can be on princip............