Charles Dickens: The Uncommercial Traveller

32. CHAPTER XXXII--A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST (continued)

He looked up at his wife again. 'Gentleman says are you in work, John?'

'In work!' cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his wife, and then working his vision's way very slowly round to me: 'Lord, no!'

'Ah, he ain't indeed!' said the poor woman, shaking her head, as she looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.

'Work!' said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler, first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features of his second son at his knee: 'I wish I WAS in work! I haven't had more than a day's work to do this three weeks.'

'How have you lived?'

A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his thread-bare canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, 'On the work of the wife.'

I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it had gone to; but he added some resigned information on that head, coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never coming back.

The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in hand, and spread it out upon the bed,--the only piece of furniture in the room on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she made, and how much was afterwards finished off by the machine. According to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence half-penny, and she could make one in something less than two days.