The Veteran
One week about the middle of February, when they were in very sore straits indeed, old Jack applied to the secretary of the Organised Benevolence Society for assistance. It was about eleven o'clock in the morning when he turned the corner of the street where the office was situated and he saw a crowd of about thirty men waiting for the doors to be opened in order to apply for soup tickets. Some of them were of the tramp or the drunken loafer class; some were old broken down workmen like himself; and others were labourers wearing corduroy or moleskin trousers with straps round their legs under their knees.
Linden waited at a distance until all these were gone before he went in. The secretary received him sympathetically and gave him a big form to fill up, but as Linden's eyes were so bad and his hand so unsteady the secretary very obligingly wrote in the answers himself, and informed him that he would enquire into the case and lay the application before the committee at the next meeting, which was to be held on the following Thursday.
Linden explained to him that they were actually starving. He had been out of work for sixteen weeks, and during all that time they had lived for the most part on the earnings of his daughter-in-law. There was no food in the house and the children were crying for something to eat. All last week they had been going to school hungry, for they had had nothing but dry bread and tea every day; but this week, as far as he could see, they would not get even that. After some further talk the secretary gave him two soup tickets and an order for a loaf of bread, and repeated his promise to enquire into the case and bring it before the committee.
As Jack was returning home he passed by the Soup Kitchen, where he saw the same lot of men who had been to the office of the Organised Benevolence Society for the soup tickets. They were waiting in a long line to be admitted; the premises being so small, the proprietor served them in batches of ten at a time.
On Wednesday the secretary called at the house, and on Friday Jack received a letter from him to the effect that the case had been duly considered by the committee who had come to the conclusion that as it was a 'chronic' case they were unable to deal with it, and advised him to apply to the Board of Guardians. This was what Linden had hitherto shrunk from
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