“O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum,
O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem.
Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantes
Accestis scopulos; vos et Cyclopia saxa
Experti. Revocate animos, moestumque timorem
Mittite; forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.”
He wandered down to the water and saw a ship cleared for some port across the Atlantic. A longing seized him to go with her. Over the sea—he thought there he would be at rest. So we all think, and as we watch the vessels dropping below the horizon in the sunset cloud, we imagine them bound with a happy crew to islands of the blest, the truth being that the cloud is a storm, and the destined port is as commonplace and full of misery as the one they have left. Zachariah, however, did not suffer himself to dream. He went diligently and systematically to work; but this time all his efforts were fruitless. He called on every printing-office he could find, and there was not one which wanted a hand, or saw any prospect of wanting one. He thought of trying the riverside; but he stood no chance there, as he had never been accustomed to carry heavy weights. His money was running short, and at last, when evening came on the third day, and he was faint with fatigue, his heart sank. He was ill, too, and sickness began to cloud his brain. As the power of internal resistance diminishes, the circumstance of the external world presses on us like the air upon an exhausted glass ball, and finally crushes us. It saddened him, too, to think, as it has saddened thousands before him, that the fight which he fought, and the death which, perhaps, was in front of him, were so mean. Ophelia dies; Juliet dies, and we fancy that their fate, although terrible, is more enviable than that of a pauper who drops undramatically on London stones. He came to his lodging at the close of the third day, wet, tired, hungry, and with a headache. There was nobody to suggest anything to him or offer him anything. He went to bed, and a thousand images, uncontrolled, rushed backwards and forwards before him. He became excited, so that he could not rest, and after walking about his room till nearly daylight, turned into bed again. When morning had fairly arrived he tried to rise, but he was beaten. He lay still till about eleven, and then the woman who kept the lodging-house appeared and asked him if he was going to stay all day where he was. He told her he was very bad; but she went away without a word, and he saw nothing more of her. Towards night he became worse and finally delirious.
XIV
The School of Adversity: The Sixth Form Thereof
When Zachariah came to himself he was in a large, long, whitewashed room, with twenty beds or more in it. A woman in a greyish check dress was standing near him.
“Where am I?” he said.
“Where are yer?” she said; “why, in the workus infirmary, to be sure, with me a-looking after yer. Where would yer be?”
Zachariah relapsed and was still. The next time he opened his eyes the woman had left him. It was true he was in the workhouse, and a workhouse then was not what it is now. Who can possibly describe what it was? Who can possibly convey to anybody who has not known what it was by actual imprisonment in it any adequate sense of its gloom; of the utter, callous, brutal indifference of the so-called nurses; of the neglect of the poor patients by those who were paid to attend to them; of the absence of even common decency; of the desperate persistent attempts made by everybody concerned to impress upon the wretched mortals who were brought there that they were chargeable to the parish and put there for form’s sake, prior to being shovelled into a hole in the adjoining churchyard? The infirmary nurses were taken from the other side of the building—sometimes for very strange reasons. The master appointed them, and was not bound to account to anybody for his preferences. One woman had given him much trouble. She was a stout, lazy brute, who had no business in the House, and who went in and out just as she liked. One day something displeased her, and she attacked him with such fury and suddenness that he would have been a dead man in a few minutes if she had not been pulled off. But he dared not report her. She knew too much about him, and she was moved a few days afterwards to look after the sick. She it was who spoke to Zachariah. She, however, was not by any means the worst. Worse than her were the old, degraded, sodden, gin-drinking hags, who had all their lives breathed pauper air and pauper contamination; women with not one single vestige of their Maker’s hand left upon them, and incapable, even under the greatest provocation, of any human emotion; who would see a dying mother call upon Christ, or cry for her husband and children, and would swear at her and try to smother her into silence. As for the doctor, he was hired at the lowest possible rate, and was allowed a certain sum for drugs. It was utterly insufficient to provide anything except the very commonest physic; and what could he do in the midst of such a system, even if he had been inclined to do anything? He accordingly did
