XXXV
ARRIVED at Lower Binfield, we sprawled for a long time
on the green, watched by cottagers from their front gates.
A clergyman and his daughter came and stared silently
at us for a while, as though we had been aquarium
fishes, and then went away again. There were several
dozen of us waiting. William and Fred were there, still
singing, and the men who had fought, and Bill the
moocher. He had been mooching from bakers, and had
quantities of stale bread tucked away between
his coat and his bare body. He shared it out, and we were
all glad of it. There was a woman among us, the first
woman tramp I had ever seen. She was a fattish,
battered, very dirty woman of sixty, in a long, trailing
black skirt. She put on great airs of dignity, and if any-
one sat down near her she sniffed and moved farther off.
"Where you bound for, missis?" one of the tramps
called to her.
The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.
"Come on, missis," he said, "cheer up. Be chummy.
We're all in the same boat 'ere."
"Thank you," said the woman bitterly, "when I want to
get mixed up with a set of
tramps, I'll let you know."
I enjoyed the way she said
tramps. It seemed to show you
in a flash the whole of her soul; a small, blinkered,
feminine soul, that had learned absolutely nothing from
years on the road. She was, no doubt, a respectable widow
woman, become a tramp through some grotesque accident.
The spike opened at six. This was Saturday, and we were
to be confined over the week-end, which is the usual
practice; why, I do not know, unless it is from a vague
feeling that Sunday merits something disagreeable.
When we registered I gave my trade as "journalist." It
was truer than "painter," for I had sometimes earned
money from newspaper articles, but it was a silly thing
to say, being bound to lead to questions. As soon as we
were inside the spike and had been lined up for the
search, the Tramp Major called my name. He was a stiff,
soldierly man of forty, not looking the bully he had been
represented, but with an old soldier's gruffness. He said
sharply:
"Which of you is Blank?" (I forget what name I had
given.)
"Me, sir."
"So you are a journalist?"
"Yes, Sir," I said, quaking. A few questions would
betray the fact that I had been lying, which might mean
prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down
and said:
"Then you are a gentleman?" "I suppose so."
He gave me another long look. "Well, that's bloody bad
luck, guv'nor," he said; "bloody bad luck that is." And
thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even
with a kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the
bathroom he actually gave me a clean towel to myself-an
unheard-of luxury. So powerful is the word "gentleman"
in an old soldier's ear.
By seven we had wolfed our bread and tea and were in our
cells. We slept one in a cell, and there were bedsteads and
straw palliasses, so that one ought to have had a good
night's sleep. But no spike is perfect, and the peculiar
shortcoming at Lower Binfield was the cold. The hot pipes
were not working, and the two blankets we had been given
were thin cotton things and almost useless. It was only
autumn, but the cold was bitter. One spent the long
twelve-hour night in turning from side to side, falling
asleep for a few minutes and waking up shivering. We
could not smoke, for our tobacco, which we had managed
to smuggle in, was in our clothes and we should not get
these back till the morning. All down the passage one
could hear groaning noises, and sometimes a shouted oath.
No one, I imagine, got more than an hour or two of sleep.
In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor's inspection,
the Tramp Major herded us all into the dining-room and
locked the door upon us. It was a
limewashed, stone-floored room, unutterably dreary, with
its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison
smell. The barred windows were too high to look out of,
and there were no ornaments save a clock and a copy of
the workhouse rules. Packed elbow to elbow on the
benches, we were bored already, though it was barely
eight in the morning. There was nothing to do, nothing to
talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolation
was that one could smoke, for smoking was connived at so
long as one was not caught in the act. Scotty, a little hairy
tramp with. a bastard accent sired by Cockney out of
Glasgow, was tobaccoless, his tin of cigarette ends having
fallen out of his boot during the search and been
impounded. I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We
smoked furtively, thrusting our cigarettes into our pockets,
like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.
Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in this
comfortless, soulless room. Heaven knows how they put
up with it. I was luckier than the others, for at ten o'clock
the Tramp Major told off a few men for odd jobs, and he
picked me out. to help in the workhouse kitchen, the most
coveted job of all. This, like the clean towel, was a charm
worked by the word "gentleman."
There was no work to do in the kitchen, and I sneaked
off into a small shed used for storing potatoes, where
some workhouse paupers were skulking to avoid the
Sunday morning service. There were comfortable packing-
cases to sit on, and some back numbers of the
Family
Herald
, and even a copy of
Raffles from the workhouse
library. The paupers talked interestingly about workhouse
life. They told me, among other things, that the thing
really hated in the workhouse, as a stigma of charity, is