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All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Walter Besant
Читать онлайн.Название All Sorts and Conditions of Men
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4057664591548
Автор произведения Walter Besant
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
"What is your name, my dear?" asked Angela softly, and without any inspection of the work on the table. She was wondering how this pretty, fragile flower should be found in Whitechapel. O ignorance of Newnham! For she might have reflected that the rarest and most beautiful plants are found in the most savage places—there is beautiful botanizing, one is told, in the Ural Mountains; and that the sun shines everywhere, even, as Mr. Bunker remarked, in an almshouse; and that she herself had gathered in the ugliest ditches round Cambridge the sweetest flowering mosses, the tenderest campion, the lowliest little herb-robert.
"My name is Ellen," replied the girl.
"I call her Nelly," her father answered, "and she is a good girl. Will you sit down, Miss Kennedy?"
Angela sat down and proceeded to business. She said, addressing the old man, but looking at the child, that she was setting up a dressmaker's shop; that she had hopes of support, even from the West End, where she had friends; that she was prepared to pay the proper wages, with certain other advantages, of which more would be said later on; and that, if Captain Sorensen approved, she would engage his daughter from that day.
"I have only been out as an improver as yet," said Nelly. "But if you will really try me as a dressmaker—O father, it is sixteen shillings a week!"
Angela's heart smote her. A poor sixteen shillings a week! And this girl was delighted at the chance of getting so much.
"What do you say, Captain Sorensen? Do you want references, as Mr. Bunker did? I am the granddaughter of a man who was born here and made—a little—money here, which he left to me. Will you let her come to me?"
"You are the first person," said Captain Sorensen, "who ever, in this place, where work is not so plentiful as hands, offered work as if taking it was a favor to you."
"I want good girls—and nice girls," said Angela. "I want a house where we shall all be friends."
The old sailor shook his head.
"There is no such house here," he said sadly. "It is 'take it or leave it'—if you won't take it, others will. Make the poor girls your friends, Miss Kennedy? You look and talk like a lady born and bred, and I fear you will be put upon. Make friends of your servants? Why, Mr. Bunker will tell you that Whitechapel does not carry on business that way. But it is good of you to try, and I am sure you will not scold and drive like the rest."
"You offended Mr. Bunker, I learn, by refusing a place which he offered," said Angela.
"Yes: God knows if I did right. We are desperately poor, else we should not be here. That you may see for yourself. Yet my blood boiled when I heard the character of the man whom my Nelly was to serve. I could not let her go. She is all I have, Miss Kennedy"—the old man drew the girl toward him and held her, his arm round her waist. "If you will take her and treat her kindly, you will have—it isn't worth anything, perhaps—the gratitude of one old man in this world—soon in the next."
"Trust your daughter with me, Captain Sorensen," Angela replied, with tears in her eyes.
"Everybody round here is poor," he went on. "That makes people hard-hearted; there are too many people in trade, and that makes them mean; they are all trying to undersell each other, and that makes them full of tricks and cheating. They treat the work-girls worst because they cannot stand up for themselves. The long hours, and the bad food, and the poisonous air—think a little of your girls, Miss Kennedy. But you will—you will."
"I will, Captain Sorensen."
"It seems worse to us old sailors," he went on. "We have had a hardish life, but it has been in open air. Old sailors haven't had to cheat and lie for a living. And we haven't been brought up to think of girls turning night into day, and working sixteen hours on end at twopence an hour. It is hard to think of my poor girl——" He stopped and clinched his fist. "Better to starve than to drive such a mill!" He was thinking of the place which he had refused.
"Let us try each other, Nelly," she said, kissing her on the forehead.
The captain took his hat to escort her as far as the gate.
"A quiet place," he said, looking round the little court, "and a happy place for the last days of improvident old men like me. Yet some of us grumble. Forgive my plain speech about the work."
"There is nothing to forgive, indeed, Captain Sorensen. Will you let me call upon you sometimes?"
She gave him her hand. He bowed over it with the courtesy of a captain on his own quarter-deck. When she turned away she saw that a tear was standing in his eyes.
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