User:Samwilson/The Unclassed/Chapter 3

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User:Samwilson/The Unclassed
by George Gissing

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1840468User:Samwilson/The Unclassed — Chapter 3George Gissing

CHAPTER III.

ANTECEDENTS.

It would not have been easy to find another instance of a union of keen intellect and cold heart so singular as that displayed in the character of Abraham Woodstock. The man’s life had been strongly consistent from the beginning; from boyhood a powerful will had borne him triumphantly over every difficulty, and in each decisive instance his will had been directed by a shrewd intelligence which knew at once the strength of its own resources and the multiplied weaknesses of the vast majority of men. In the pursuit of his ends he would tolerate no obstacle which his strength would suffice to remove. In boyhood and early manhood the exuberance of his physical power was wont to manifest itself in brutal self-assertion. At school he was the worst kind of bully, his ferociousness tempered by no cowardice. Later on, he learned that a too demonstrative bearing would on many occasions interfere with his success in life; he toned down his love of muscular victory, and only allowed himself an outbreak every now and then, when he felt he could afford the indulgence. Put early into an accountant’s office, and losing his father about the same time (the parent, who had a diseased heart, was killed by an outburst of fury to which Abraham gave way on some trivial occasion), he had henceforth to fight his own battle, and showed himself very capable of winning it. In many strange ways he accumulated a little capital, and the development of commercial genius put him at a comparatively early age on the road to fortune. He kept to the business of an accountant, and by degrees added several other distinct callings. He became a lender of money in several shapes, keeping both a loan-office and a pawnbroker’s shop. In middle age he frequented the race-course, but, for sufficient reasons, dropped that pursuit entirely before he had turned his fiftieth year. As a youth he had made a good thing of games of skill, but did not pursue them as a means of profit when he no longer needed the resource. He continued, however, to love the games for their own sake, and still delighted in chess. It was but seldom, however, that he indulged the liking, and for the simple reason that he could not support a defeat. To be beaten roused his vile temper to such a fearful pitch that he with difficulty refrained from physical violence. Few people who knew him ventured to play with him and win; at the same time very few were capable of defeating him.

He married at the age of thirty. This, like every other step he took, was well planned; his wife brought him several thousand pounds, being the daughter of a retired publican with whom Woodstock had had business relations. He would have told you, in his brutally ingenuous way, that his wife was doubly profitable to him; she helped him to capital, and saved him the expenditures which had hitherto been rendered necessary by his bodily temperament. For Abraham was typical of that class of men in whom, though they are utterly devoid of sentiment, the lusts of the flesh rule strongly. And he had at no time crucified his appetite. He was acquisitive, but not miserly; absolute confidence in his own powers had always held him free from the pressure of miserable economies. The history of his amours de jeunesse, to say nothing of those which had succeeded upon the death of his wife, would supply an instructive, though perhaps scarcely edifying, chapter. In another man such a life might have been called dissipated; to Abraham Woodstock the word would in no sense apply. Never for a moment did he lose his sense of the fit adjustment of means and ends; never did he throw away a halfpenny. At his present age of three-score his habits had not greatly changed, except that he was perhaps a trifle more fastidious than he had been twenty years back. He felt as yet none of the forebodings of old age, and talked of another twenty years to be spent in very much the same way.

This house in St. John Street Road he had occupied since he was five-and-thirty, having gone to it shortly after his wife’s death. The accommodation was all he wanted, and he had been led to take the premises in consequence of having been employed as a lad in this very office. The thought flattered him; he liked to compare that day with this; for the love of power ever in the last resort proved his ruling passion, and he was not above gratifying it in the most ignoble ways. His former employer, who had lived here, failed in business just when Abraham was beginning to flourish, and the latter had gone out of his way to be appointed receiver of the estate, in which capacity he had bullied and humiliated the unfortunate man to his heart’s content. Thereafter he had lent him money, had exercised a horrible tyranny over the poor bankrupt for many years, and had only seen the end of his sport when the man was happy enough to die. And all this out of no definite motive of revenge; merely in brutal exultation over one who had once employed and paid him. The house was at present solidly furnished in the dwelling part, though, as a matter of course, without any display of taste. The ground-floor consisted of offices; above were eating-room, bed-room, and study; on the second floor the sleeping-room of the two servants he kept, and chambers used for storing miscellaneous goods, which came into his hands in the way of business. One of these chambers communicated by a door with the adjoining house, which tenement was also rented by our friend. Its ground-floor was a pawnbroker’s shop, the business being in the hands of Mr. Woodstock, though another name was painted up. To this shop he owed very much of his wealth.

I have spoken of his “study,” and thereby hangs another item of character. On entering this room one was puzzled to account for its peculiar appearance. A table in the midst was entirely covered with a great litter of newspapers and periodicals; the same kind of literature was heaped about the floor here and there. Two walls were quite hidden by book-shelves, the library presenting anything but an attractive appearance. There were several hundreds of Blue-books, a complete set of Hansard, a complete series of the Annual Register, and other volumes of the same character. The remaining free space around the room was covered with maps of various countries, statistical charts, almanacks. The explanation of this singular phenomenon lay in the fact that, from his earliest manhood, Abraham Woodstock had devoted himself with astonishing zest to the study of contemporary politics. His ardour had increased with knowledge, and at the present time he was probably unsurpassed among laymen in intelligent familiarity with the details of English and foreign political life. Not a statesman of the leading countries with whose history, actual policy, and probable prospects he was not well acquainted. La haute politique was the playground of his imagination; he seized his Times every morning with a vehement interest in the latest telegrams from the various capitals. In home affairs he could have instructed many a cabinet minister; the blunders of leader-writers were his repertory of humour; the incapacity of members was the stock subject of his scornful comment. No Bill found its way into either House without his making himself more or less familiar with its details; so-called “great” measures were the delight of his—I was going to say soul, but will ask the reader to substitute some other word. In short, the engrossing actuality of current politics was ideally adapted to the man’s mental and moral nature. Here he was dealing with power, power in what was, to him, its highest manifestations. He liked to imagine himself a party-leader, a prime minister, nay, a monarch. He devised ideal policies for this state or that; he schemed for wars; he elaborated treaties. At election times he was a leading man in his borough, as active practically in the petty details of registering, canvassing, bribing, polling, as in fancy when higher spheres were concerned. What a worthy citizen was Abraham Woodstock! What an enlightened, free, and independent elector! What a patriot! How unfortunate that he was not born Emperor of all the Russias!

To return to his domestic affairs. He had not been a bad husband. True, his wife dreaded him too much to ever provoke him in the least. During her lifetime his infidelities were of comparatively rare occurrence. Two years after his marriage was born his first and only child, a girl whom they called Lotty. Lotty, as she grew up, gradually developed an unfortunate combination of her parents’ qualities; she had her mother’s weakness of mind, without her mother’s moral sense, and from her father she derived an ingrained stubbornness, which had nothing in common with strength of character. Doubly unhappy was it that she lost her mother so early; the loss deprived her of gentle guidance during her youth, and left her without resource against her father’s coldness or harshness. The result was that the softer elements of her character unavoidably degenerated and found expression in qualities not at all admirable, whilst her obstinacy grew the ally of the weakness from which she had most to fear.the weakness from which she had most to fear.

But we are not greatly concerned with Lotty Woodstock’s early life, and must pass on quickly to later days. Her story was destined to be vulgar and commonplace in many of its features, though her subsequent conduct in some degree f redeemed it. She was sent to a day-school till the age of thirteen, then had to become her father’s housekeeper. Her friends were very few, none of them likely to be of use to her. Left very much to her own control, she made an acquaintance which led to secret intimacy and open disaster. Rather than face her father with such a disclosure, she left home, and threw herself upon the mercy of the man who had assisted her to go astray. He was generous enough to support her for about a year, during which time her child was born. Then his help ceased.

The familiar choice lay before her—home again, the streets, or starvation. Hardship she could not bear; the second alternative she shrank from on account of her child; she determined to face her father. For him she had no affection, and knew that he did not love her; only desperation could drive her back. She came one Sunday evening, found Mr. Woodstock at home, and, without letting the servant say who was come, went up and entered his presence, the child in her arms. Abraham rose and looked at her calmly. Her disappearance had not troubled him, though he had exerted himself to discover why and whither she was gone, and her return did not visibly affect him. She was a rebel against his authority—so he viewed the matter—and consequently quite beyond the range of his sympathies. He listened to all she had to say, beheld unmoved her miserable tears, and, when she became silent, coolly delivered his ultimatum. For her he would procure a situation, whereby she could earn her living, and therewith his relations to her would end; the child he would put into other hands and have it cared for, but Lotty would lose sight of it for ever. The girl hesitated, but the maternal instinct was very strong in her; the little one began to cry, as if fearing separation from its mother; she decided to refuse.

“Then I shall go on the streets!” she exclaimed, passionately. “There’s nothing else left for me.”

“You can go where you please,” returned Abraham.

To do her justice, she did not take this course at once. She tried to obtain work, but was far too weak to succeed in this attempt, the hardest of all tasks in our most humanitarian age. She got into debt with her landlady, and only took the inevitable step when at length absolutely turned adrift.

That was not quite ten years gone by; she was then but eighteen. Let her have lost her child, and she would speedily have fallen into the last stages of degradation. But the little one lived. She had called it Ida, a name chosen from some tale in the penny weeklies which were the solace of her misery. She herself took the name of Starr, that being the name she would have borne, had Ida’s father dealt honestly with her. Poor thing, she had a hard, hard problem before her, and the success with which she managed to solve it might, perhaps, make some claim upon the sympathies of even the most virtuous readers. Balancing the good and evil of this life in her dark little mind, Lotty determined that one thing there was for which it was worth while to make sacrifices, one end which she felt strong enough to keep persistently in view. Ida should be brought up "respectably"—it was her own word; she should be kept absolutely free from the contamination of her mother's way of living; nay, should, when the time came, go to school, and have good chances. And at the end of all this was a far-off hope, a dim vision of possibilities, a vague trust that her daughter might perchance prove for her a means of returning to that world of "respectability" from which she was at present so hopelessly shut out. She would keep making efforts to get into an honest livelihood as often as an occasion presented itself; and Ida should always live with "respectable" people, cost what it might.

The last resolution was only adhered to for a few months. Lotty could not do without her little one, and eventually brought it back to her own home. It is not an infrequent thing to find little children living in disorderly houses, and the sight of them arouses strange speculations. But Ida's lot was to be a better one than that of the average prostitute's child. In the profession her mother had chosen there are, as in all professions, grades and differences. She was by no means a vicious girl, she had no love of riot for its own sake; she would greatly have preferred a decent mode of life, had it seemed practicable. Hence she did not associate herself with the rank and file of abandoned women; her resorts were not the crowded centres; her abode was not in the quarters consecrated to her business. In all parts of London there are quiet by-streets of houses given up to lodging-letting, wherein are to be found many landladies, who, good easy souls, trouble little about the private morals of their lodgers, so long as no positive disorder comes about and no public scandal is occasioned. A girl who says that she is occupied in a workroom is—alas!—never presumed to be able to afford the luxury of strict virtue, and if such a one, on taking a room, says that "she supposes she may have friends come to see her?" the landlady will understand quite well what is meant, and will either accept or refuse her for a lodger as she sees good. To such houses as these Lotty confined herself. After some three or four years of various experiences, she hit upon the abode in Milton Street, and there had dwelt ever since. She got on well with Mrs. Ledward, and had been able to make comfortable arrangements for Ida. The other lodgers in the house were generally very quiet and orderly people, and she herself was quite successful in arranging her affairs so as to create no disturbance. She had her regular clientèle; she frequented the roads about Regent's Park and Primrose Hill; and—she supported herself and her child.

User:Samwilson/The Unclassed/Chapter 3

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