<SPAN name="vol_1_chap_04"></SPAN>
<h3>Volume One--Chapter Four.</h3>
<h4>The Child-Man.</h4>
<p>The origin of the tear on the aged cheek of Mr Shushions went back about forty years,
and was embedded in the infancy of Darius Clayhanger.</p>
<p>The earliest memory of Darius Clayhanger had to do with the capital letters Q W and S.
Even as the first steam-printer in Bursley, even as the father of a son who had received a
thoroughly sound middle-class education, he never noticed a capital Q W or S without
recalling the Widow Susan’s school, where he had wonderingly learnt the significance
of those complicated characters. The school consisted of the entire ground floor of her
cottage, namely, one room, of which the far corner was occupied by a tiny winding
staircase that led to the ancient widow’s bedchamber. The furniture comprised a few
low forms for scholars, a table, and a chair; and there were some brilliant coloured
prints on the whitewashed walls. At this school Darius acquired a knowledge of the
alphabet, and from the alphabet passed to Reading-Made-Easy, and then to the Bible. He
made such progress that the widow soon singled him out for honour. He was allowed the high
and envied privilege of raking the ashes from under the fire-place and carrying them to
the ash-pit, which ash-pit was vast and lofty, being the joint production of many
cottages. To reach the summit of the ash-pit, and thence to fling backwards down its steep
sides all assailants who challenged your supremacy, was a precious joy. The battles of the
ash-pit, however, were not battles of giants, as no children had leisure for ash-carrying
after the age of seven. A still greater honour accorded to Darius was permission to sit,
during lessons, on the topmost visible step of the winding stair. The widow Susan, having
taught Darius to read brilliantly, taught him to knit, and he would knit stockings for his
father, mother, and sister.</p>
<p>At the age of seven, his education being complete, he was summoned into the world. It
is true that he could neither write nor deal with the multiplication table; but there were
always night-schools which studious adults of seven and upwards might attend if business
permitted. Further, there was the Sunday school, which Darius had joyously frequented
since the age of three, and which he had no intention of leaving. As he grew older the
Sunday school became more and more enchanting to him. Sunday morning was the morning which
he lived for during six days; it was the morning when his hair was brushed and combed, and
perfumed with a delightful oil, whose particular fragrance he remembered throughout his
life. At Sunday school he was petted and caressed. His success at Sunday school was
shining. He passed over the heads of bigger boys, and at the age of six he was in a Bible
class.</p>
<p>Upon hearing that Darius was going out into the world, the superintendent of the Sunday
school, a grave whiskered young man of perhaps thirty, led him one morning out of the body
of the Primitive Methodist Chapel which served as schoolroom before and after chapel
service, up into the deserted gallery of the chapel, and there seated him on a stair, and
knelt on the stair below him, and caressed his head, and called him a good boy, and
presented him with an old battered Bible. This volume was the most valuable thing that
Darius had ever possessed. He ran all the way home with it, half suffocated by his
triumph. Sunday school prizes had not then been invented. The young superintendent of the
Sunday school was Mr Shushions.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother. It was the winter of 1835,
January. They passed through the marketplace of the town of Turnhill where they lived.
Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of Bursley. One side of the market-place was
barricaded with stacks of coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw
bread. This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and haughty
officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of shivering, moaning, and
weeping wretches, men, women and children—the basis of the population of Turnhill.
Although they were all endeavouring to make a noise they made scarcely any noise, from
mere lack of strength. Nothing could be heard, under the implacable bright sky, but faint
ghosts of sound, as though people were sighing and crying from within the vacuum of a huge
glass bell.</p>
<p>The next morning, at half-past five, Darius began his career in earnest. He was
‘mould-runner’ to a ‘muffin-maker,’ a muffin being not a
comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a mould. The business of Darius
was to run as hard as he could with the mould, and a newly, created plate adhering
thereto, into the drying-stove. This ‘stove’ was a room lined with shelves,
and having a red-hot stove and stove-pipe in the middle. As no man of seven could reach
the upper shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, and up these he had to
scamper. Each mould with its plate had to be leaned carefully against the wall and if the
soft clay of a new-born plate was damaged, Darius was knocked down. The atmosphere outside
the stove was chill, but owing to the heat of the stove, Darius was obliged to work half
naked. His sweat ran down his cheeks, and down his chest, and down his back, making white
channels, and lastly it soaked his hair.</p>
<p>When there were no moulds to be sprinted into the drying-stove, and no moulds to be
carried less rapidly out, Darius was engaged in clay-wedging. That is to say, he took a
piece of raw clay weighing more than himself, cut it in two with a wire, raised one half
above his head and crashed it down with all his force upon the other half, and he repeated
the process until the clay was thoroughly soft and even in texture. At a later period it
was discovered that hydraulic machinery could perform this operation more easily and more
effectually than the brawny arms of a man of seven. At eight o’clock in the evening
Darius was told that he had done enough for that day, and that he must arrive at five
sharp the next morning to light the fire, before his master the muffin-maker began to
work. When he inquired how he was to light the fire his master kicked him jovially on the
thigh and suggested that he should ask another mould-runner. His master was not a bad man
at heart, it was said, but on Tuesdays, after Sunday, and Saint Monday, masters were apt
to be capricious.</p>
<p>Darius reached home at a quarter to nine, having eaten nothing but bread all day.
Somehow he had lapsed into the child again. His mother took him on her knee, and wrapped
her sacking apron round his ragged clothes, and cried over him and cried into his supper
of porridge, and undressed him and put him to bed. But he could not sleep easily because
he was afraid of being late the next morning.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>And the next morning wandering about the yards of the manufactory in a storm of icy
sleet a little before five o’clock, he learnt from a more experienced companion that
nobody would provide him with kindling for his fire, that on the contrary everybody who
happened to be on the place at that hour would unite to prevent him from getting kindling,
and that he must steal it or expect to be thrashed before six o’clock. Near them a
vast kiln of ware in process of firing showed a white flaming glow at each of its mouths
in the black winter darkness. Darius’s mentor crept up to the archway of the great
hovel which protected the kiln, and pointed like a conspirator to the figure of the
guardian fireman dozing near his monster. The boy had the handle-less remains of an old
spade, and with it he crept into the hovel, dangerously abstracted fire from one of the
scorching mouths, and fled therewith, and the fireman never stirred. Then Darius, to whom
the mentor kindly lent his spade, attempted to do the same, but being inexpert woke the
fireman, who held him spellbound by his roaring voice and then flung him like a sack of
potatoes bodily into the slush of the yard, and the spade after him. Happily the mentor,
whose stove was now alight, lent fire to Darius, so that Darius’s stove too was
cheerfully burning when his master came. And Darius was too excited to feel fatigue.</p>
<p>By six o’clock on Saturday night Darius had earned a shilling for his
week’s work. But he could only possess himself of the shilling by going to a
magnificent public-house with his master the muffin-maker. This was the first time that he
had ever been inside a public-house. The place was crowded with men, women, and children
eating the most lovely, hot rolls and drinking beer, in an atmosphere exquisitely warm.
And behind a high counter a stout jolly man was counting piles and piles and piles of
silver. Darius’s master, in company, with other boys’ masters, gave this stout
man four sovereigns to change, and it was an hour before he changed them. Meanwhile Darius
was instructed that he must eat a roll like the rest, together with cheese. Never had he
tasted anything so luscious. He had a match with his mentor, as to which of them could
spin out his roll the longer, honestly chewing all the time; and he won. Some one gave him
half a glass of beer. At half-past seven he received his shilling which consisted of a
sixpenny-piece and four pennies; and leaving the gay, public-house, pushed his way through
a crowd of tearful women with babies in their arms at the doors, and went home. And such
was the attraction of the Sunday school that he was there the next morning, with scented
hair, two minutes before the opening.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Four.</h4>
<p>In about a year Darius’s increasing knowledge of the world enabled him to rise in
it. He became a handle-maker in another manufactory, and also he went about with the pride
of one who could form the letters of the alphabet with a pen. In his new work he had to
put a bit of clay between two moulds, and then force the top mould on to the bottom one by
means of his stomach which it was necessary to press downwards and at the same time to
wriggle with a peculiar movement. The workman to whom he was assigned, his new
‘master,’ attached these handles, with strange rapid skill, to beer-mugs. For
Darius the labour was much lighter than that of mould-running and clay-wedging, and the
pay was somewhat higher. But there were minor disadvantages. He descended by twenty steps
to his toil, and worked in a long cellar which never received any air except by way of the
steps and a passage, and never any daylight at all. Its sole illumination was a stove used
for drying. The ‘throwers’’ and the ‘turners’’ rooms
were also subterranean dungeons. When in full activity all these stinking cellars were
full of men, boys, and young women, working close together in a hot twilight. Certain boys
were trained contrabandists of beer, and beer came as steadily into the dungeons as though
it had been laid on by a main pipe. It was not honourable even on the part of a young
woman, to refuse beer, particularly when the beer happened to arrive in the late
afternoon. On such occasions young men and women would often entirely omit to go home of a
night, and seasoned men of the world aged eight, on descending into the dungeons early the
next morning, would have a full view of pandemonium, and they would witness during the day
salutary scenes of remorse, and proofs of the existence of a profound belief in the
homeopathic properties of beer.</p>
<p>But perhaps the worst drawback of Darius’s new position was the long and
irregular hours, due partly to the influences of Saint Monday and of the scenes above
indicated but not described, and partly to the fact that the employés were on
piece-work and entirely unhampered by grandmotherly legislation. The result was that six
days’ work was generally done in four. And as the younger the workman the earlier he
had to start in the morning, Darius saw scarcely enough of his bed. It was not of course
to be expected that a self-supporting man of the world should rigorously confine himself
to an eight-hour day or even a twelve-hour day, but Darius’s day would sometimes
stretch to eighteen and nineteen hours: which on hygienic grounds could not be
unreservedly defended.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Five.</h4>
<p>One Tuesday evening his master, after three days of debauch, ordered him to be at work
at three o’clock the next morning. He quickly and even eagerly agreed, for he was
already intimate with his master’s rope-lash. He reached home at ten o’clock
on an autumn night, and went to bed and to sleep. He woke up with a start, in the dark.
There was no watch or clock in the house, from which nearly all the furniture had
gradually vanished, but he knew it must be already after three o’clock; and he
sprang up and rushed out. Of course he had not undressed; his life was too strenuous for
mere formalities. The stars shone above him as he ran along, wondering whether after all,
though late, he could by unprecedented effort make the ordained number of handles before
his master tumbled into the cellar at five o’clock.</p>
<p>When he had run a mile he met some sewage men on their rounds, who in reply, to his
question told him that the hour was half after midnight. He dared not risk a return to
home and bed, for within two and a half hours he must be at work. He wandered aimlessly
over the surface of the earth until he came to a tile-works, more or less unenclosed,
whose primitive ovens showed a glare. He ventured within, and in spite of himself sat down
on the ground near one of those heavenly ovens. And then he wanted to get up again, for he
could feel the strong breath of his enemy, sleep. But he could not get up. In a state of
terror he yielded himself to his enemy. Shameful cowardice on the part of a man now aged
nine! God, however, is merciful, and sent to him an angel in the guise of a
night-watchman, who kicked him into wakefulness and off the place. He ran on limping,
beneath the stellar systems, and reached his work at half-past four o’clock.</p>
<p>Although he had never felt so exhausted in his long life, he set to work with fury.
Useless! When his master arrived he had scarcely got through the preliminaries. He dully
faced his master in the narrow stifling cellar, lit by candles impaled on nails and
already peopled by the dim figures of boys, girls, and a few men. His master was of
taciturn habit and merely told him to kneel down. He knelt. Two bigger boys turned hastily
from their work to snatch a glimpse of the affair. The master moved to the back of the
cellar and took from a box a piece of rope an inch thick and clogged with clay. At the
same moment a companion offered him, in silence, a tin with a slim neck, out of which he
drank deep; it contained a pint of porter owing on loan from the previous day. When the
master came in due course with the rope to do justice upon the sluggard he found the lad
fallen forward and breathing heavily and regularly. Darius had gone to sleep. He was
awakened with some violence, but the public opinion of the dungeon saved him from a torn
shirt and a bloody back.</p>
<p>This was Darius’s last day on a pot-bank. The next morning he and his went in
procession to the Bastille, as the place was called. His father, having been too prominent
and too independent in a strike, had been black-listed by every manufacturer in the
district; and Darius, though nine, could not keep the family.</p>
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