A narrative followed which helps to explain his good spirits, or at least discovers the powers of endurance on which they rested. I said, "We have passed the shortest day—that's a comfort." He stopped sweeping again, to answer happily, "Yes. And now in about four or five weeks we shall begin to see the difference. And that's when we gets the bad weather, lately."
He stood up, the watery sunshine upon him, and leaning on his broom, he continued, "I remember one winter, after I was married, we did have some weather. Eighteen inches and two foot o' snow there was—three foot, in some places. I'd bin out o' work—there was plenty o' work to do, but we was froze out. For five weeks I 'adn't earnt tuppence. When Christmas Day come, wehadsomethin' for dinner, but 'twa'n't much; and we had a smartish few bottles o' home-made wine.
"Christmas mornin' some o' the chaps I'd bin at work with come round. 'What about that wine?' they says. So we had two or three cupfuls o' wine; and then they says, 'Ben't ye comin' 'long o' we?' 'No,' I says, 'not 's mornin'.'" Here he shut his mouth, in remembered resignation, as if still regarding these tempters. "'What'sup then?' they says. 'Comeon!' 'No,' I says, 'not to-day.' 'Why not?' 'Cause I en't got no money,' I says. 'Gawd's truth!' they says, 'if that's it...' and I raked in six shillin's from amongst 'em. I give four to the old gal, and I kep' two myself, and then I was right for the day."
He made as if to resume sweeping, but desisted to explain, "Ye see, they was my mates on the same job as me; and they knowed I'd ha' done the same for e'er a one o' they, more 'n once.
"My old mother-in-law was alive then, over here" (he looked across the hollow to the old house), "and they wanted we to go and 'ave the day with they. But my temper wouldn't have that. I says to the old gal, 'None o' their 'elp. We'll bide away, or else p'r'aps by-'n-by they'll twit us.' I'd sooner ha' gone without vittles, than for they to help and then twit us with it afterwards, talkin' about what they'd done for us at Christmas."
One of Bettesworth's swift short tales about his neighbours interested me considerably at this time, as illustrating the half-sordid, half-barbarous state of the people amongst whom he had to hold his own when not at work. I did not suspect that the same tale would put me on the track of a curious discovery relative to his own past history.
January 23, 1902.—It was a quiet, windless morning, and the sound of the knell reached us through the still air. Bettesworth said, "I s'pose old Jerry's gone at last, then."
"Old Jerry?" I asked.
"Ah, old Jerry Penfold. We always called 'n Old Jerry. He bin dead several times—or, 't least, they thought so. Rare ructions there bin over there, no mistake. They got to sharin' out his kit. One come an' took away his clock, and another his chest o' drawers, and some of his sons even come an' took away his tools. But the oldest son got the lawyer an' made 'em bring it all back."
"Rare ructions"—yes: but Bettesworth used the word "rare" as we should use "great," and didnot mean that the affair was very unusual. He was not scandalized so much as amused by it. For my part, knowing nothing of the family, who dwelt in another quarter of the parish, I sought only to identify Old Jerry. Some years previously an old man who walked along the road with me one night had interested me with a tale of his shepherding and other labours on a certain farm. I had never learnt his name, nor had seen the man since; but now it occurred to me that perhaps he was old Penfold. I asked Bettesworth.
Bettesworth decided in the negative. Old Penfold had never been a shepherd, or worked for the farmer I named.
Yet another old man then came into my mind: a diminutive man, upwards of eighty, who was still creeping honourably about at work. Frequently I met him; but he seemed so shut up in himself that I had never cared to intrude upon him with more than a "Good-day" when we met. But now I named him to Bettesworth: old Dicky Martin. Could the missing shepherd have been he?
Bettesworth shook his head emphatically. It turned out that he and old Dicky were chums in their way: they knew all about one another, and with mutual respect. "Couldn't ha' bin old Dicky," said Bettesworth. "He never worked anywhere else about here 'xcept in builders' yards. Forty-four year ago he started for Coopers, and bin on there ever since. He was a sailor beforethat. He come out o' the navy when he come here."
Out of the navy! And to think I had been ignorant of such a thing as that! I had not found my shepherd; but to have discovered a sailor was something. Scenting romance, in the foolish superficial way of outsiders, I resolved to improve my acquaintance with old Dicky, little dreaming that the sailor was going to show me a soldier too; little supposing that Bettesworth's information about this old man would be capped by information from him, quite as surprising, about Bettesworth.
How I fell in with old Martin, early in February, is of no moment here. He talked very much in Bettesworth's manner, and especially about cruising in the Mediterranean sixty years ago. But when I said at last, believing it true, "I don't suppose there is another man in our parish has travelled so far as you," his reply startled me.
"No, I dessay not—without 'tis your man, Fred Bettesworth."
"He? He never was out of England."
"Yes he was. He bin as fur as Russia and the Black Sea, at any rate."
"You must be wrong. I should have heard of it if he had."
"I dunno about that. P'raps he don't care to talk about it, but 'tis right enough. I fancy he did get into some trouble. He was a soldier though, in the Crimea."
Old Dicky was so convinced that I held my peace, though far from convinced myself. A vague sensation crept over me of having heard some faint rumour of the same tale, years ago; but what might have been credible then seemed hardly credible now. I thought that now I knew all there was to know about Bettesworth's life; and I could not see where, among so many episodes, this of soldiering was to find room. Besides, how was it possible that, in ten years or so, during which Bettesworth had prattled carelessly of anything that came uppermost in his mind, no hint of this had escaped him? It would have slipped out unawares, one would have supposed; by some inadvertence or other I should have learnt it. But, save for that forgotten rumour, nothing had come until now. Now, however, the man who spoke of it spoke as from his own personal knowledge. It was very strange.
One thing was clear. If there were truth in this tale after all, Bettesworth's silence on the subject must have been intentional. Was there something about it of which he was ashamed? What was that "trouble" to which old Dicky so darkly alluded? Eager as I was to question Bettesworth, I was most reluctant to hear anything to his discredit. And the reluctance prevailed over my curiosity. Feeling that I had no right to force a confidence from him, I tried to dismiss the subject from my mind; and for a time I succeeded.
April 17, 1902.—We pass on to April, when bird-notes were sounding through all the gardens.
"Hark at those starlings!" I said to Bettesworth. And he, "Yes—I dunno who 'twas I was talkin' to this mornin', sayin' how he liked to hear 'em. 'So do our guv'nor,' I says. I likes 'em best when there's two of 'em gibberin' to one another—jest like 's if they was talkin'. An' they lifts up their feet, an' flaps up their wings, an' they nods." The old man's words ran rhythmically to suit the action he was describing; and then, dropping the rhythm, "I likes to hear 'em very well. And I don't think they be mischieful birds neither, like these 'ere sparrers and caffeys" (chaffinches). "They beggars, I shouldn't care so much if when they picked out the peas from the ground they'd eat 'em. But they jest nips the little green top off and leaves it. Sims as if they does it reg'lar for mischief."
April 28.—This sunny, objective side of Bettesworth's temperament may be remembered in connexion with some other remarks of his on a very different subject. There was at that time a man living near us whose mere presence tried hispatience. The man belonged to one of the stricter Nonconformist sects, and had the reputation of being miserly. "Looks as miserable, he do" (so Bettesworth chanced to describe him), "as miserable as—as sin. I never see such a feller."
At this I laughed, admitting that our neighbour certainly did not look as if he knew how to enjoy himself.
"Hedon't. Don't sim to have no pleasure, nor 'sociate with anybody. There! I'd as lief not have a life at all, as have one like his. I'd do without, if I couldn't do no better'n that."
Bettesworth's judgment was possibly in error; for there is no telling what mystical joys, what dreams of another world, may have illuminated this man's inner life, and made him suspicious of people like Bettesworth and me. But if there were such compensation, Bettesworth's temperament was incapable of recognizing it, and the point is instructive. His own indomitable cheerfulness was of the objective pagan order. The field of his emotions and fancies had never been cultivated. His thoughts did not stray beyond this world. From such deep sources of physical sanity his optimism welled up, that he really needed, or at any rate craved for, no spiritual consolation. Like his remote ancestors who first invaded this island, he had the habit of taking things as they came, and of enjoying them greatly on the whole. He half enjoyed, even while he was irritated by it, the odd figure presented by this Nonconformist.
May 7.—A week afterwards he exhibited the same sort of aloof interest, annoyed and yet amused, in a jibbing horse. A horse had brought a ton of coal a part of the way down the lane, and then refused to budge farther; and Bettesworth could not forget the incident. It tickles me still to recall with what a queer look on his face he spoke of the noble animal. The expression was the result of his trying to say his word forhorse(not'oss, but'awss), while a facetious smile was twitching at the corners of his mouth. This was several days after the event. At the time of its occurrence, someone had remarked that the horse had no pluck, and Bettesworth had rejoined indignantly, "I'dsee about his pluck, if I had the drivin' of 'n!" But after a day or two his indignation turned to quiet gaiety. "Won't back," he said, "and he won't draw."
I suggested, "Not bad at standing still."
Then came the queer expression on Bettesworth's face, with "'Good 'awss toeat,' the man said." Truly it was odd to see how Bettesworth's lips, grim enough as a rule, arched out sarcastically over the word'awss.
And it was in a temper not very dissimilar that he commonly regarded our Nonconformist neighbour. The man amused him.
A pagan of the antique English kind, ready to poke fun at a bad horse, or sneer at a fanatic, or be happy in listening to the April talk of the starlings, Bettesworth had quite his share too of the pugnacityof his race. Years ago he had said that a fight used to be "just his clip," as a young man; not many years ago he had promptly knocked down in the road a baker who had got down out of his cart to make Bettesworth move his wheelbarrow out of the way (I remember that when the old man told me of this I advised him not to get into trouble, and he pleaded that it "seemed to do him good"); and now during this spring—I cannot say exactly when—the fighting spirit suddenly woke up in him once more.
The circumstance takes us out again from the peace of the garden to the crude struggle for life in the village. Looking back to that time, I can see our valley as it were sombrely streaked with the progress of two or three miserable family embroilments, squalid, weltering, poisoning the atmosphere, incapable of solution. And though Bettesworth was no more implicated in these than myself, but like me was a mere onlooker, he was not, like me, an outsider. He was down on the very edge of these troubles, and it was the momentary overflow of one of them in his direction one night that suddenly started him fighting, in spite of his years.
I may not go into details of the affair. It is enough that during this April and May our end of the parish was looking on, scandalized, at the blackguard behaviour of a certain labourer towards his family and especially his own mother. Of powerful build, the man had been long known for a bully; and if report went true, he had receivedseveral thrashings in his time. But just now he was surpassing his own record. He was also presuming upon the forbearance of better men than himself, and could not keep his tongue from flouts and gibes at them. Speaking of him to me, Bettesworth expressed his disapproval and no more. Others, however, were less reticent; and there came a day when I heard of a quarrel this man had tried to fix upon Bettesworth at the public-house one evening. He was summarily ejected, my informant said; and something—I have forgotten what—caused me to suspect that the "chucker out" was old Bettesworth. That was not explicitly stated, however. Nor did Bettesworth himself tell me at the time any more than that there had been a disturbance in the taproom, the man being turned out, after insulting him.
May 15.—But, alluding to the affair some time afterwards, he placidly continued the story. "I cut 'n heels over head, an' when he got up, and made for the doorway and the open road, I went for 'n again. They got round me, or I should ha' knocked 'n heels over head again. I broke my way through four or five of 'em. 'If I was twenty years younger,' I says to 'n, 'I'd jump the in'ards out of ye.' Some of 'em says, if he dares touch the old man they'd go for 'n theirself. 'All right!' I says, 'you no call to worry about me. I can manage he.' And they told 'n, 'You got hold o' the wrong one this time, Sammy.'"
During these months, the story of Bettesworth's having been a soldier in the Crimea remained unverified. I was watching for hints of it from him, and he gave not the slightest; for opportunities of asking him about it without offence, and not one occurred. And slowly the tale receded from my mind, and my belief in it dwindled away.
By what chance, or in what circumstances, the mystery suddenly recurred to me is more than I can tell now. But one rainy May afternoon—I remember that much—the old man was in the wood-shed, sitting astraddle on one block of wood, and chopping firewood on another block between his knees. He looked careless enough, comfortable enough, sitting there in the dry, with the sound of rain entering through the open shed door. What was it he said, or I, to give me an opening? I shall never know; but presently I found myself challenging him to confess the truth of what was reported of him.
And I remember well how at once his careless expression changed, as if he had been taxed with a fault, and how for some seconds he sat lookingfixedly before him in a shamefaced, embarrassed way, like a schoolboy who has been "found out." For some seconds the silence lasted; then he said reluctantly, "It's true. So I was." And the circumstantial talk that followed left me without any further doubt on the point.
It was at the Rose and Crown—a well-known tavern in the neighbouring town—that he 'listed. His "chum" (I don't know who his chum was) had already enlisted at Alton, and "everybody thought," as Bettesworth said, that he too had done so at the same time, for he had the soldier's belt on, there in the Alton inn. But he had not taken the shilling there. He returned home to his brother Jim, "what was up there at Middlesham, same job as old Stubby got now—seventeen year he had 'long with the charcoal-burners up there"—and Jim urged him to "go to work." Bettesworth, however, was obstinate. "No," he said, "I shall go to Camden Fair." "Better by half go to work." "No, I shall git about." "And I come down to the town" (so his tale continued), "and there I see my chum what had 'listed at Alton day before. 'Come on,' he says; 'make up your mind to go with we.' ''Greed,' I says. And I went up 'long with 'n to the Rose and Crown...."
"How old were you then? It must have been before you were married?"
"Yes; I was sixteen. I served a year and eight months."
"Ah." I looked out at the May foliage and the kindly rain, and thought of the Crimean winter.
"You saw some cold weather, then?"
"No mistake. Two winters and one summer." He was, in fact, before Sebastopol, and now that the secret was out, he hurried on to tell familiarly of Kertch, the Black Sea, the Dardanelles, so glibly that my memory was unable to take it all in. What was most strange was to hear these places, whose names to stay-at-home people like myself have come to have an epic sound, spoken of as the scene of merely trivial incidents. As it was only of what he observed himself that Bettesworth told, this could hardly have been otherwise; yet it is odd to think that Tolstoi, writing his marvellous descriptions of the siege, may have set eyes on him. To this harum-scarum English plough-boy, ignorant, rollicking, reckless, it was not the great events, on a large scale, that were prominent, but the queer things, the little haphazard details upon which he happened to stumble. Through the narrative his own personality was to the fore; just the same dogged personality that I was to know afterwards, but not yet chastened and made wise by experience.
It was here in the Crimea that, carrying that letter to post to his brother, as already told in "The Bettesworth Book," he met his "mate," and, opening the letter, took out the "dollar" it contained, and spent it on a bottle of rum, tossing the letter away. "In those days," said he, "I could drink as muchrum as I can beer now. We had rum twice a day: rum and limejuice. That was to keep off the scurvy. Never had no cups nor nothing. We had knives, same as that old clasp-knife I got now, and used to knock off the necks o' the bottles with they."
He remembered well the hard times, and the privations our troops endured. "Sixteen of us in one o' they little tents. We had a blanket and a waterproof sheet—not the fust winter, though; and boots that come up to your thigh, big enough to get into with your shoes on. There was one little chap named Tickle, he got into his boots with his shoes on, and couldn't git 'em off again. He was put under stoppages for 'em. Fifty shillin's for a pair o' they boots. You got into 'em—they was never made to fit no man—and bid in 'em for a month together—freezed on to ye."
Again, "It was starvation done for so many of our chaps out there. Cold an' starvation. I've bin out on duty forty-eight hours at a stretch; then march back three mile to camp; and then some of us 'd have to march another seven mile to fetch biscuit from the sea. Andthenyou only got your share, same as the rest.... Sometimes the biscuit was dry; and then again you'd on'y git some as had bin trod to death by mules or camels.... That was the way to git a appetite.... But there was plenty o' rum; good rum too; better 'n what you gits about here." The system of pay, or rather the want of system, appears to have made this abundanceof rum a more than usually doubtful blessing. The men went sometimes "weeks together without gettin' any pay; and then when we got it, it was very soon all gone." Sixpence a day—four and twopence a week—(Bettesworth figured it out)—a very handy sum was this week's pay, I gathered, for buying rum by the bottle. The price of a bottle of stout was half a crown.
Reverting to the terrible weather, Bettesworth told how he had seen "strong men, smoking their pipe," and four hours afterwards beheld them carried by on a stretcher, to be buried. Ill-fed, I inferred, they succumbed thus suddenly to the fearful cold. Green coffee was provided, and the men had to hunt about for roots to make a fire for cooking it. And then, just as they had got their coffee into their mess-tins, they would be called out, perhaps, to stand on duty for eight hours together.
The dead were buried "in their kit," with their clothes on. Sometimes, Bettesworth hinted, money would be found on them and appropriated from their pockets, but "we wan't allowed no plunder," he added. As for the graves, "I've see 'em chucked into graves eighteen inches or two foot deep, perhaps—just a little earth put over 'em; and when you go by a fortnight or so after, you might see their toes stickin' out o' the ground. You never see no coffin." The only coffin that Bettesworth saw was Lord Raglan's. "That was a funeral! Seven miles long...."
At the close of the war Bettesworth came home "among the reductions," yet not for several months, during which he was employed on "fatigue parties" in collecting old metal—guns, ammunition cases, and so forth—for ballast to the ships in Balaclava Harbour. He described the Harbour: it was "like comin' in at that door; an' then, when you gets inside, it all spreads out...." Storm in the Black Sea overtook the troop-ship, where were "seventeen hunderd of us. Three hunderd was ship's company.... And some down on their knees prayin', some cursin', some laughin' an' drinkin', some dancin'.... And the troop-ship we come home in—might 's well ha' come in a hog-tub. She'd bin all through the war, and he" (the captain) "reckoned 'twas great honour to bring her home, and he wouldn't have no tugs. Forty-nine days we was, comin' home. And she leaked, an' then 'twas 'all hands to the pumps....' Great pumps...."
Yes, of course he remembered the pumps. It was Bettesworth all over, to take a vivid and intelligent practical interest in anything of the kind that there was to be seen. He had had no observation lessons at school, and had never heard of "object studies"; he simply observed for the pleasure of observing, instinctively as a cat examines a new piece of furniture, and if not with any cultivated sense of proportion, still with a great evenness of judgment. On one other occasion, and one only in my hearing, he reverted to his Crimean experiences; and as will beseen in its proper place, the narrative again showed him observing with the same balanced mind, never enthusiastic, but also never satiated, never bored.
But what of the "trouble" into which he was alleged to have fallen? I may as well tell all I know, and have done with it. From Bettesworth himself no breath of trouble ever reached me. But his avoidance of this period as a topic of conversation often struck me as a suspicious circumstance; so that I was not quite unprepared for a statement old Dicky Martin volunteered when Bettesworth had been some three weeks dead. He had been "rackety," and had been punished: that was the substance of the tale. "He got into trouble for goin' into the French lines after some rum—him an' two or three more. They never stopped, he told me, to ask 'n no questions, but strapped 'n up and give 'n two or three dozen for 't."
I suppose that Bettesworth's Crimean reminiscences occupied in narration to me something less than fifteen minutes of his life, so that obviously the space they take up in this volume is out of all proportion to their importance. For my theme is not this or that recollection of his, but the way in which the old man lived out these last of his years, while the memories passed across his mind. It is of small consequence what he remembered. Had he recalled the Indian Mutiny instead of the Crimea, it would have been all one, by that wet afternoon of May, 1902. He would have sat on his block dandling the chopper just the same, and the raindrops from trees outside would have come slanting into the shed doorway and splashed on my hand as I listened to him.
And as they are disproportionately long, these day-dreams of Bettesworth, so also they become too solid on the printed page, side by side with the reality which encompassed them then, and is my subject now. They provoke us to forget the old man, alive and talking. They take us back fifty years too far. From the hardships of the Crimean War it is awrench to return to the reality—the shed in this valley, the patter of the rain, the old gossipping voice. But all this, so impossible to restore now that it too has become only a reminiscence, being then the commonplace of my life as well as of Bettesworth's, was allowed to pass by almost unnoticed. I let slip what I really liked, took for granted the strong life that alone made me care for the conversation, and saved only some dead litter of observation which was let fall by the living man and seemed to me odd.
Need I explain how of this too I was gradually saving less and less? The oddness was wearing off; only the more exceptional things seemed now worth taking care of. Unless there was something as surprising to hear as this talk of the Crimean War—and such exceptions of course appeared with increasing rareness—I hardly took the trouble, at this period, to set down in writing any of Bettesworth's daily gossip. The naturalist, having noted in his diary the first two swallows that do not after all make a summer, has no record save in his brain of the subsequent curvings and interlacings in the summer sky; and I, similarly, find myself with little besides a vague memory of Bettesworth's doings in this summer of 1902. In fact, it is not even a memory that I have. There is only an inference that day by day he must have done his work in the warm weather, and I must have talked to him. But I am unable to restore this for a reader'sbenefit. "Imagine him going on as usual," shall I say? Why, it is more than I can do myself. A row of asterisks would serve the purpose equally well.
So there is a void for two months—nay, with one exception, for more than three, from the middle of May to the end of August; in which one surmises that the summer flies buzzed in the garden, and Bettesworth did his hoeing and grass-cutting, and was companionable. The one exception, fortunately, has the very life in it which I am regretting. It is but a short sentence of six words, yet they are as if spoken within the hour, and are the clearer for the void around them.
On the afternoon of July 15, the grape vine on the wall near my window was being attended to by the pruner. He stood on a ladder, which was held steady by Bettesworth at the foot; and presently through the open window the old man's voice reached me, complaining of the recent blighty weather: "There en't nothin' 'ardly lookskind."
"No; not to saykind," the pruner assented.
That is all. But precisely because there is nothing in it, because it is a piece of normal instead of exceptional talk, it has the accent of the season. Bettesworth's voice reaches me; the light falls warm through the vine-leaves; the lost summer seems to come back with all the accompanying scene, almost as distinctly as if I had but just written the words down.
August 28, 1902.—The harvest, of course, could not go by without remark from him. From the garden we could see, beyond the meadow in the bottom of the valley, a little two-acre cornfield, which had stood for several days half reaped—the upper side uncut, the lower side prosperous-looking with its rows of sheaves. Then there came a morning when it was all in sheaves, and Bettesworth said,
"Old Ben" (meaning Ben Turner) "done it for 'n" (the owner) "last night. Made a dark job of it."
I realized that in his cottage down by the lake, Bettesworth, going to bed, had been able to hear the reaping in the dark, across the meadow.
He proceeded, "Ben took his hoss and cart down into Sussex a week or two ago, to see if he could get a job harvestin'. Was only gone three days, though: him an' four or five more. But I reckon they only went off for a booze—I don't believe they made e'er a try to get a job...."
"Our Will" (his brother-in-law) "says down there at Cowhatch they had a wonderful crop of oats. But he reckons they've wasted enough with the machine to ha' paid for reapin' it by hand. Stands to reason—where them great things comes whoppin' into it over and over, it shatters out a lot. Will says where they've took up the sheaves you can see the ground half covered with what they've wasted."
Not knowing what to say, I hesitated, and at last muttered simultaneously with Bettesworth, "'T seems a pity."
"It's what I calls 'pound wise,'" added he, misquoting a proverb which possibly was not invented by his class, and was foreign to him.
September 20, 1902.—I turn over the page in my note-book, but come to a new date three weeks later. Quiet autumn sunshine, the entry says, had marked the last few days, breaking through with a limpid splash in the mornings, after the mist had gone. Amidst this, under the softened tree-shadows, Bettesworth was cutting grass with his fag-hook.
And "Ah," he said, "it's purty near all up with charcoal-burnin' now."
This was in allusion to the indifferent crop of hops just being picked and the consequently small demand for charcoal; but it was a digression too. We had begun talking of a wasp sting. From that to gnats, and from gnats to a certain tank where they bred, was an obvious transition.
And now the tank suggested charcoal. For, according to Bettesworth, a little knob of charcoal put into a tank is better than an equal quantity of lime, for keeping the water sweet. Further, "If you got a bit o' meat that's goin' anyways wrong, you put a little bit o' charcoal on to that, and you won't taste anything bad. I've heared ever so many charcoal-burners say that. And meat is a thing as won't keep—not butcher's meat; partic'lar in the summer when you sims to want it most—something with a little taste to 't." So, charcoal isuseful; but "Ah! it's purty near all up with charcoal-burnin' now."
A good deal that followed, about the technicalities of charcoal-burning, has been printed in another place, and is omitted here. One point, however, may now be taken up. It is the curious fact that all the charcoal-burners of the neighbourhood are congregated in one district, and the numerous families of them rejoice in one name—that of Parratt.
"I never knowed anybody but Parratts do it about here," Bettesworth said; and the name reminded him of a story, as follows:
"My old brother-in-law Snip was down at Devizes one time—him what used to travel with a van—Snipthey always called 'n. And there was a feller come into the fair with one of these vans all hung round with bird-cages, ye know—poll-parrots and all kinds o' birds. So old Snip says to 'n, 'Parrots?' he says, 'what's the use o' you talkin' about parrots? Why, where I come from,' he says, 'we got Parratts as 'll burn charcoal, let alone talk. Talk better 'n any o' yourn,' he says. 'You give 'em some beer andthey'lltalk—or dig hop-ground, or anything.' Lor'! how that feller did go on at 'n, old Snip said!"
Bettesworth knew something of charcoal-burning by experience, but he owned himself ignorant of its inner technical niceties. Moreover, he felt it right to respect a trade "mystery," explaining, "'Tis nouse to be a trade, if everybody can do it. 'Relse we should have poor livin' then."
October31, 1902.—A memorandum of October 31 gives just a foretaste of the approaching winter, and just a momentary searching back into the experience gained when Bettesworth worked at a farm. For there must have been hoar-frost lingering on the lawn that last morning in October, to evoke the old man's opinion, "the less you goes about on grass while there's a frost on it the better" for the grass. "If anybody goes over a bit o' clover-lay with the white frost on it you can tell for a month after what course they took."
November 11.—Amid some personalities which it would be difficult to disguise and which had better be omitted, I find in November another reference to the harsh social life of the village, and it is in connexion with that same bully whom Bettesworth had previously chastised. As before, details must be suppressed; I only suggest that in these dark November nights the labourers in want of company of course sought it at the public-house. There, I surmise, the bully was boasting, until Bettesworth shut him up with a retort brutally direct. Even as it was repeated to me his expression is not printable. Bettesworth was no angel. He seemed rather, at times, a hard-grained old sinner; but he always took the manly side, whether with fists or coarse tongue. In this instance his fitting rebukewon a laugh of approval from the company, and even "a pint" for himself from one who was a relative, but no friend, of the offender.
December 16.—One dry, cloudy day in December Bettesworth used his tongue forcibly again, but in how much pleasanter a connexion! A little tree in the garden had to be transplanted to a new position, on the edge of a bed occupied by old sprouting stumps of kale. One of these stumps was exactly in the place destined for the tree, and Bettesworth ruthlessly pulled it up, talking to it:
"You come out of it. There's plenty more like you. If you complains, we'll chuck ye in the bottom o' the hole for the tree to feed on!"
The Old Year, so far as my notes show it, had run to its close without event for Bettesworth, just as the New Year was to do, excepting for one big trouble. Yet he was not quite the man at the opening of 1903 that he had been at the opening of 1902. The twelve uneventful months had, in fact, been leaving their marks upon him—marks almost imperceptible as each occurred, yet progressive, cumulative in their effect. On this day or on that, none could have pointed to a change in the old man, or alleged that he was not so the day before; but as the seasons swung round it was impossible not to perceive how he was aging. It is well, therefore, to pause and see what he had become by this time before we enter upon another year of his life.
There was one silent witness to the increasing decay of his powers that could not be overlooked. The garden gave him away. People coming to visit me and it were embarrassed to know what to say, or they even hinted that it would be an economy to allow Bettesworth a small pension and hire a younger man, who would do as much work, and do it better, in half the time. As if I needed to be toldthat! But then they were not witnesses, with me, of the pluck—better worth preserving than any garden—with which Bettesworth sought to make amends for his vanished youth. His tenacity deepened my regard for him, even while its poor results almost wore out my patience. He who had once moved with such vigour was getting slow; and the time was coming, if it had not come, when I had to wait and dawdle while he dragged along behind me from one part of the garden to another. A more serious matter was that with greater effort on his part the garden ground was less well worked. I don't believe he knew that. He used a favourite old spade, worn down like himself, and never realized that "two spits deep" with this tool were little better than one spit with a proper one; and he could not make out why the carrots forked, and the peas failed early.
But the worst trial of all was due to another and more pitiful cause. I could reconcile myself to indifferent crops—after all, I had enough—but exasperation was daily renewed by the little daily failures in routine work, owing to his defective sight, which grew worse and worse. There were the garden paths. With what care the old man drew his broom along them, working by faith and not sight, blindly feeling for the rubbish he could not see, and getting it all save from some corner or other of which his theories had forgotten to take account! Little nests of disorder collected in this way, to-day here,to-morrow somewhere else, surprising, offensive to the eye. Again, at the lawn-mowing, never man worked harder than Bettesworth, or more conscientiously; but he could not see the track of his machine, and seams of uncut grass often disfigured the smoothness of the turf even after he had gone twice over it to make sure of perfection. It was alarming to see him go near a flower border. He would avoid treading on any plant of whose existence he knew, by an act of memory; but he could not know all, and I had to limit his labours strictly to that part of the garden he planted or tended himself.
What made the situation so difficult to deal with was that his intentions were so good. He was himself hardly aware that he failed, and I rather sought to keep him in ignorance of the fact than otherwise. I felt instinctively that, once it was admitted, all would be over for Bettesworth; because he was incapable of mending, and open complaints from me must in the end have led to his dismissal. For that I was not prepared. He would never get another employment; to cut him off from this would be like saying that the world had no more use for him and he might as well die out of the way. But I had no courage to condemn him to death because my lawn was ill cut. With one exception, when I sent him to an oculist to see if spectacles would help him (the oculist reported to me that there was "practically no sight left"), we kept upthe fiction that he could see to do his work. And his patient, silent struggles to do well were not without an element of greatness.
But though the drawbacks to employing the old man were many, and such as to set me oftentimes wondering how long I should be able to endure them, it must not be thought that he was altogether useless. If he was slow, he was still strong; if he was half blind, he was wholly efficient at heavy straightforward work. During this winter, in making some radical changes which involved a good deal of excavating work, Bettesworth was like a first-rate navvy, and eagerly put all his experience at my disposal. There was a trench to be opened for laying a water-pipe. With a young man to help him, he dug it out and filled it in again, in about half the time that the job would have taken if it had been entrusted to a contractor. In one place a little pocket of bright red gravel was found. This, of his own initiative, he put aside for use on the paths which he was too blind to sweep clean. But, in truth, a sort of sympathy with my desires and a keen eye to my interests frequently inspired him to do the right thing in this kind of way. He had identified himself with the place; was proud of it; boasted to his friends of "our" successes; and like a miser over his hoard, never spared himself where the good of the garden was concerned, but with aching limbs—his ankle where he had once broken it pained him cruelly at times—went slaving on for his own satisfaction,when I would have suggested to him to take things easily.
I have said that there were those who considered him too expensive a protégé for me. There were others, I am sure, to whom he appeared no better than a tedious old man, opinionated, gossiping, not over clean. Pretty often—especially in bad weather, when there was not much he could be doing—he went on errands for me to the town, to fetch home groceries and take vegetables to my friends, and all that sort of thing. At my friends' he liked calling; they owed to him rather than to me not a few cookings of cabbage and sticks of celery, for which they would reward him with praise, and perhaps a glass of beer or the price of it. Afterwards I would hear lamentings from them how long he had stayed talking. Once or twice—hardly oftener in all these years—I had to speak to him in sharp reprimand for being such a prodigious long time gone; for the glass of beer and the gossip where he delivered his cabbages did not always satisfy his cravings for society and comfort: he would turn into a public-house—"Dan Vickery's" for choice—and come back too late and too talkative. It was a fault, if you like; but the wonder to me is, not that he sometimes drank two glasses where one was enough, but that, with his wit and delight in good company, he did not oftener fall from grace. Those two or three occasions when he earned my sharp reproofs, and for half a day afterwards lost his sense of comfortin me as a friend, were probably times when his home had grown too dreary, his outlook too hopeless, even for his fortitude. Some readers, no doubt, will be offended by his taste for beer. I hope there will be some to give him credit for the months and years in which, with these few exceptions, he controlled the appetite. Remember, he had no religious convictions, nor did the peasant traditions by which he lived afford him much guidance. Alone, of his own inborn instinct for being a decent man, he strove through all his life, not to be rich, but to live upright and unashamed. Fumbling, tiresome, garrulous, unprofitable, lean and grim and dirty in outward appearance, the grey old life was full of fight for its idea of being a man; full of fight and patience and stubborn resolve not to give in to anything which it had learnt to regard as weakness. I remember looking down, after I had upbraided a failure, at the old limbs bending over the soil in such humility, and I could hardly bear the thought that very likely they were tired and aching. This enfeebled body—dead now and mouldering in the churchyard—was alive in those days, and felt pain. Do but think of that, and then think of the patient, resolute spirit in it, which almost never indulged its weaknesses, but had its self-respect, its half-savage instincts toward righteousness, its smothered tastes, its untold affections and its tenderness. That was the old man, gaunt-limbed, but good-tempered, partially blind and fumbling,but experienced, whom we have to imagine now indomitably facing yet another year of his life, and a prospect in which there is little for him to hope for. Nay, there was much for him to dread, had he known. A separate chapter, however, must be given to the severe trouble which, as already hinted, overtook him in the early weeks of 1903.
While the advance of time was affecting Bettesworth himself, another influence had begun to play havoc with his environment. A glance in retrospect at this nook of our parish during this same winter of 1902-3 shows the advent of new circumstances, of a kind full of menace to men like him. Things and persons of the twentieth century had begun to invade our valley, where men and women so far had lived as if the nineteenth were not half through.
The coming of the new influence was perhaps too subtle for Bettesworth to be conscious of it. Perhaps he marked only the normal crumbling away of the old-fashioned life, by death or departure of his former associates, and failed to notice that these were no longer being replaced, as they would have been in former times, by others like them. Of our old friends close around us four or five were by this time dead, and others had moved farther afield. We missed especially old Mrs. Skinner. Since her husband's death in 1901 her domestic arrangements had not been happy, and in the autumn just past she had disposed of her little property, and was gone tolive across the valley. But note the circumstances. Only some ten years previously her husband had bought this property—the cottage and nearly an acre of ground—for about £70. He may have subsequently added £50 to its value. Now, however, his widow was able to sell it for something like £220. The increase shows what a significant change was overtaking us.
I shall revert to this presently. For the moment I stop to gather up some stray sentences of Bettesworth's which, perhaps, indicate how unlikely he was to accommodate himself to new circumstances.
The purchaser of Mrs. Skinner's cottage was a man named Kelway—a curious, nondescript person, as to whose "derivings" we speculated in vain. What had he been before he came here? No one ever discovered that, but his behaviour was that of an artisan from near London—a plasterer or a builder's carpenter—who had come into a little money. I remember his telling me jauntily on one occasion that he should not feel settled until he had brought home his American organ (I was heartily glad that it never came!), and on another that he had made "hundreds of wheelbarrows" in his time, which I thought unlikely; and I cannot forget—for there are signs of it to this day—how ruthlessly he destroyed the natural contours of his garden with ill-devised "improvements." He pulled out the interior partitions of the cottage, too, wearing while at the work the correct garb of a plasterer; and itwas in this costume that he annoyed Bettesworth by his patronizing familiarity. "He says to me" (thus Bettesworth), "'I suppose you don't know who I am in my dirty dishabille?' 'No,' I says, 'and if I tells the truth, I don't care nuther.'He's dirty dishabille!... He got too much old buck for me!" Shortly afterwards he asked Bettesworth to direct him to a good plumber. "'I can do everything else,' he says, 'but plumbing is a thing I never had any knowledge of.' So I says, 'If I was you I should sleep with a plumber two or three nights.'"
January 27, 1903.—Again, in the end of January, Bettesworth reported: "That man down here ast me about peas—what sort we gets, an' so on." (Remember that he had nearly an acre of ground.) "So I told 'n, and he says, 'What do they run to for price?' 'Oh, about a shillin' a quart,' I says; and that's what theydorun to. 'I must have half a pint,' he says. I bust out laughin' at 'n. An' he says he must have a load o' manure, too! He must mind he don't overdo it! I wasobligedto laugh at 'n."
Of course, such a neighbour would in no circumstances have pleased Bettesworth. I believe the man had many estimable qualities, but they were dwarfed beside his own appreciation of them; and his subsequent disappointments, which ultimately led to his withdrawal from the neighbourhood, werenot of the kind to engage Bettesworth's sympathy. Indeed, he had no chance of approval in that quarter, coming in the place of old Mrs. Skinner, with her peasant lore and her pigs.
But if this egregious man was personally offensive to Bettesworth, he was not intrinsically more strange to the old man than those who followed him or than others who were settling in the parish. There were to be no more Mrs. Skinners. Wherever one of the old country sort of people dropped out from our midst, people of urban habits took their place. These were of two classes: either wealthy people of leisure, seeking residences, and bringing their own gardeners who wanted homes, or else mechanics from the neighbouring town, ready to pay high rents for the cottages whose value was so swiftly rising. The stealthiness of the process blinded us, however, to what was happening. When Bettesworth began, as he did now, to feel the pressure of civilization pushing him out, neither he nor I understood the situation.
Right and left, property was changing hands. A big house in the next hollow, but with its grounds overpeering this, had been bought by a wealthy resident, and was under repair, already let to some friends of his. There went with it in the same estate the hill-side opposite this garden, with two or three cottages visible from here; and everybody rejoiced when the disreputable tenants of one of these cottages had notice to quit. It was hopedthat the new owner was sensible of the duties as well as the rights attaching to property.
Meanwhile, Bettesworth's hovel, too, was in the market, the landlord of it being lately dead; and in the market it remained, while Bettesworth clamoured in vain for repairs. At last he gave up hope. By the beginning of 1903 he had resolved to quit his old cottage as soon as he could find another to go into.
He waited still some weeks, however—property was valuable, cottages were eagerly sought after—and then what seemed a golden opportunity arose. The cottage with the disreputable tenants has been mentioned, adjoining the grounds of the big house. It must have been early in February when the whisper that it was to be vacant reached Bettesworth, who forthwith announced to me his intention of applying for it. Too big, perhaps too good, for him and his wife I may have thought the place; but there was no other in the neighbourhood to be heard of, and it was not only for its pleasantness that the old man coveted it. With his wife there he would be able to keep watch over her while he was at work here, and there would be almost an end to those anxieties about her fits, which often made him half afraid to go home. I remember the secrecy of his talk. He wanted no one to forestall him. The thing was urgent; and I had no hesitation in writing a recommendation of him as a desirable tenant, which he forthwith took to the owner. Why, indeed,should I have hesitated? Between Bettesworth's punctiliousness on such matters and my own intention of helping him if need be, there was no fear as to the payment of the rent. And the improvements he had made to that place down by the stream argued well for the care he would take of this better cottage.
My recommendation did its work. Bettesworth was duly accepted as tenant; he gave notice to leave the other place, and began preparations for moving; and then, too late, it dawned upon me that perhaps I had made a mistake. I had forgotten old Mrs. Bettesworth. I had not set eyes on her for months; for much longer I had not been inside her dwelling, to see the state it was in. I only knew that outside the walls were whitewashed, the garden and paths orderly.
The first doubts visited me when I saw that repairs to the new abode were being done on a scale too extravagant to fit the Bettesworths. The next resulted from an inspection I made of the cottage at Bettesworth's desire. He was beyond measure proud to have a place into which he could invite me without shame; and he took me all over it, and described to me his plans for improving the garden, without suspicion of anything amiss. Probably his eyes were too dim to see what I saw. Some of his furniture, already heaped on the floor in one of the clean new-papered rooms, had a sooty, cobwebby look that filled me with forebodings oftrouble. However, it was too late to withdraw. There was no going back to that abandoned place down in the valley. There was nothing to do but hope for the best.
Hope seemed justified for a week or two, while Bettesworth's new garden, heretofore a wilderness, assumed a new order. He had sowed early peas—probably other things too—having actually paid a neighbour to help him get the ground dug; and he was extremely happy, until a day came when he said, cautiously and bitterly, "I thinks I got a enemy." He went on to explain that some one, he suspected, wanted his cottage, and was trying to get him out of it. I have forgotten what raised his suspicions. He did not even then realize that himself, or rather his wife, was the only enemy he had to fear.
That was the miserable truth, however. Down in that other place, secluded from the neighbours, the old woman had grown utterly squalid, though Bettesworth had not seen it. And now the owner of the new cottage, perhaps from the grounds of the large residence destined for his friends, had caught sight of old Lucy Bettesworth, and had been, as anyone else would have been, horrified at her filthy appearance. But he did not act on that single impression: it was not until kindly means had been taken to ascertain the truth of it that he first expostulated, and then told Bettesworth that he could not be permitted to stay. Nay, I was allowed totry first if persuasion of mine could remedy the evil.
Unfortunately, remedies were not in Bettesworth's power, or he would by now have employed them, being alarmed as well as indignant. He listened to my hints that his wife was intolerably dirty, but (I write from memory) "What can I do, sir?" he said. "I knows she en't like other women, with her bad hand and all." (She had broken her wrist some years before, and never regained its strength.) "But I can't afford to dress her like a lady. I told 'n so to his head: 'I can't keep a dressed-up doll,' I says." Neither could he, being so nearly blind, see that his wife was going about unwashed, grimy, like a dreadful apparition of poverty from the Middle Ages. To her it would have been useless to speak. Her epilepsy had impaired her intellect, and any suggestion of reform, even from her own husband, seemed to her a piece of persecution to be obstinately resented.
So there was nothing to be done. The prospective tenants of the big house near by could not be expected to endure such a neighbour; the cottage itself, which had cost £20 for repairs, the owner told me, was no place for such a tenant. The Bettesworths therefore must go. They received formal notice to quit; then, as nothing appeared to be happening, a more peremptory notice was sent limiting their time to three weeks, yet promising a sovereign as compensation for the work done andthe crops planted in the garden. In the meantime they had probably done more than a sovereign's worth of damage to the cottage interior, with its new paper and paint.
But though nothing appeared to be happening, the two old people were secretly in a state near to distraction. The reader will remember the peculiar topography of this parish, with the tenements dotted about for a mile or more on the northern slope of the valley. All up and down this district, and then on the other side, where he was less at home, Bettesworth hunted in vain for an available cottage within possible reach of his work: there was not one to be found. And now he realized his physical feebleness. Years ago, miles would not have mattered; he could have shifted to another village and defied the demands of our new-come town civilization; but now a walk of a mile would be a consideration. His legs were too old and stiff for a long walk as well as a day's work.
For several days—and days are money, especially to a working-man—he searched up and down, his despair increasing, his dismay deepening, at every fresh disappointment. I began to fear he would break down. He could not sleep, nor yet could his wife. She had been crying half the night—so he told me after the misery had endured the best part of the week. "She kep' on, 'Whatever will become of us, Fred? Wherevershallwe go?'" and he, trying to reassure her that they would "find somewhere tocreep into," seemed to be face to face with the workhouse as his only prospect. So they spent their night, and rose to a hopeless morning.
It was time, evidently, for me to take the matter up. Besides, the old people's trouble was getting on my nerves. Across the valley there was an empty cottage—one of a pair—which the owner had refused to let on the strange plea that the tenants who had just left had been so troublesome and destructive that he was resolved against taking any others. Such a dry, whimsical old man was this landlord that the story was not incredible. A retired bricklayer, and a widower, he lived by himself on next to nothing, not from miserliness but from choice, and his chief object in life seemed to be to avoid trouble. He had, however, worked with Bettesworth in years gone by, and was, in fact, a sort of chum of his, so that it seemed worth while to try what persuasion would do to shake his resolution of keeping an empty cottage. And where Bettesworth had failed, I might succeed.
So, one fine morning—it was near the middle of March by now—I hunted up this old man—a man as genial and kindly as I wish to see—and made him a proposal. He showed some reluctance to entertain it. Why? The truth came out at last: he did not want the Bettesworths for tenants; he knew the indescribable state of the old woman; it was to her that he objected; and it was to spare his old chum's feelings that he had inventedthat story about being unwilling to let the cottage at all.
But the case was desperate. How I pleaded it I no longer remember, nor is it of any importance. I think there were two interviews. In the end the cottage was let, not direct to Bettesworth, but to me with permission to sublet it to him; and two, or at most three days afterwards, Bettesworth was in possession, and the other cottage once more stood empty.
So the squalid episode was over. After such a narrow escape from the workhouse, it was as it were with a gasp of relief that the old couple settled down in their new abode, safe at last. The place, though, was not one which Bettesworth would have chosen, had there been a choice. Down there by the meadow where he had come from, though the cottage might be crazy, the outlook had been fair. He had been peacefully alone there; in summer evenings he had heard the men mowing; on winter nights there was the wind in the withies and the sound of the stream. But from this time onwards we have to think of him as living in one of a mean group of tenements which exhibit their stuccoed ugliness nakedly on a bleak slope above the meadow. As to the neighbours—some of them resented his coming, for of course the scandal of his wife's condition was public property by now. With a certain defiant shame, therefore, he crept in amongst them. Fortunately, the people in the next-door cottage—anunmarried labourer and his mother—knew Bettesworth's record, and regarded him as a veteran to be cared for; and not many weeks passed before the old man felt himself established in their good-will, and was trying to persuade himself that all was for the best.
Of course, he was only partially successful in that endeavour. Occasional bitter remarks showed that he still harboured a resentment against the owner of the cottage from which he had been turned out, and, in fact, there were circumstances which would have made it difficult for him quite to forget the affair. Perched on one of the steepest of the bluffs, high above the stream, the cottage in which he was not good enough to live stood beside the path he now had to travel to and from his work every day. Often, as his legs grew weary and his breath short with ascending the footpath, he must have felt tempted to curse the place. Often it must have seemed to taunt him with his unfitness. Even when he was at work, there it was full in sight. In bad weather, and as he grew feebler, it stood there on its uplifted brow, not sheltering the wife to whom he wanted to go at dinner-time, but like an obstacle in his way. Instead of being his home, it cut him off from his home; and he took to bringing his dinner with him, wrapped in a handkerchief; poor cold food which he frequently left untasted, preferring a pipe.
Yet it was not his nature to be embittered. When the peas he had sown came up, though for anotherman's benefit, he looked across at them from this garden and admired them. They were a fine crop and remarkably early. If, however, they made him a little envious, he was generous enough to be pleased too. Perhaps the sight comforted him, proving that he would have done well there, at least with the garden, if they had let him stay. And certainly he was flattered when the new tenant, wholly grateful, asked him what sort of peas these were. "Earliest of All," he replied, giving the name by which he had really bought them. And by-and-by a joke arose out of the answer, because the other man would not believe that the peas were really so called, but thought Bettesworth was "kiddin' of 'n" with a name invented by himself. The old man had many a chuckle over this piece of incredulity. "I tells 'n right enough," he laughed; "but he won't have it."
As may be imagined, the troubles through which Bettesworth had thus come did nothing to rejuvenate him. On the contrary, they openly convicted him of old age, and made it patent that he was no longer very well able to take care of himself. In fact, the man's instinctive pride in himself had been shaken, and though I do not think he consciously slackened his efforts to do well, his unconscious, spontaneous activity was certainly impaired. It was as though the inner stimulus to his muscles was gone. He forgot to move as fast as he was able. Sometimes he would, as it were, wake up, and spur himself back into something like good labouring form; but after a little time he would relapse, and go dreamily humming about his work like a very old man. In these days, my own interest in him reached its lowest ebb. I found myself burdened with a dependent I could not in honour shake off; but there was little pleasure to be had in thinking of Bettesworth. Only now and again, when he dropped into reminiscence, did he seem worth attention; only now and again, in my note-books of theperiod, does he re-emerge, telling chiefly of things the present generations have forgotten.
To the earliest notice of him for the year an irony attaches, since it begins by recording with extreme satisfaction the first of those summer rains which were to make 1903 so memorable and disastrous. How little did we guess, on that June 10, what was in store for us! My note describes, almost gloatingly, "one of those gloomy summer evenings that we get with thundery rain. There is scarcely any wind; grey cloud, well-nigh motionless, hangs over all the sky; the distant hills are a stronger grey; the garden is all wet greenness—deep beyond deep of sombre green, turning black under the denser branches of the trees. Now and again rain shatters down into the rich leafage—a solemn noise; and thrushes are vocal; but these sounds do not disturb the impressive quietness."
So the entry proceeds, noting how stiff and strong the grass was already looking after a threat of drought; how the hedgerows were odorous with the pungent scent of nettles; how the lustrous opaque white of horse-daisies starred certain grassy banks; and at last, how all my neighbours who have gardens were as well pleased as myself with the weather.
And so the note comes round to Bettesworth. He too, with his head full of recollections of past summer rains, and of hopes of rich crops to result from this present one, was glorying in the gloom of the day.As the old wise toads crept out from hole and wall-cranny and waddled solemn and moist-skinned across the lawn about their affairs, so Bettesworth about his, not much regarding a wet coat. He had theories as to hilling potatoes, or rather as to not hilling them until the ground could be drawn round the haulm wet. And here was his chance. In the afternoon he took it, joyfully, and the earth turned up rich and dark under his beck.[2]
The tool set him talking. For hilling potatoes he reckoned, a beck is much better than a hoe: "leaves such a nice crumb on the ground." He was resolved to have his "five-grained spud" or garden fork turned into a beck—the next time he went to the town, perhaps, "'cause it wouldn't take 'em long, jest to turn the neck, and then draw the rivets an' take the tree out an' put in a handle. 'T'd make a good tool then—so sharp!
"This old beck I'm usin'," he went on happily, "I warrant he's a hunderd year old. He belonged to my wife's gran'father afore I had 'n; andI've had 'n this thirty year or more.... He's a reg'lar hand-made one—and a good tool still. That's who he belonged to—my old gal's gran'father.
"He" (the grandfather) "had this place over here o' Warner's—'twas him as built that, you know." The property mentioned is a large cottage andgarden, adjoining that from which Bettesworth and his wife had so lately been turned out. "And he was the one as fust planted Brook's Field. He had Nott's, down here, and Mavin's, and Brook's Field—and apurtybit that was, too! He was the fust one as planted it. Dessay he had a hunderd acres. Used to keep a little team, and a waggon shed—up the lane here, an' come down this lane an' right in there...."
But we need not follow Bettesworth into these topographical details. Returning, in a moment, to the prosperity of his wife's grandfather, he hinted at the basis of it. The man was a peasant-farmer, producing for his own needs first, and enjoying certain valuable rights of common.
"He used to keep two or three cows," said Bettesworth. "Well, moost people used to keep a cow then, whatwasanybody at all. Ye see, the commons was all open, and the boys what looked after the cows used to git so much for every one; so the more (cows) they could git the better their week's wages was for lookin' after 'em.
"Theywassome boys too, some of 'em—when there got two or three of 'em up there in the Forest together, 'long o' the cows!" The old man chuckled grimly. "I rec'lect one time me an' Sonny Mander and his brother went after one o' the forest ponies. There was hunderds o' ponies then. Deer, too. And as soon as we caught 'n, I was up on his back. I didn't care after I gotupon'n. I clung on to hismane—his mane was down to the ground—and off he went with me, all down towards Rocknest and"—well, and more topography. "He tore through everything, an' scratched my face, and I was afraid to get off for fear he should gallop over me.... And they hollerin' after 'n only made 'n worse. He run till he was beat, afore I got off.
"Purtytannin' I got, when I got 'ome! 'Cause me clothes was tore, and me cap was gone.... Oh,Ihad beltinker! They had the news afore I got 'ome, 'cause so many cowboys see me."
Smiling, Bettesworth resumed work with his ancient beck, by dexterous twist now right and now left turning the dark wet earth in to the potato haulm.
It was about this time that, our talk working round somehow to the subject of donkeys, Bettesworth remarked, as if it were a part of the natural history of those interesting animals, and indeed one of their specific habits, "Moost donkeys goes after dirty clothes o' Monday mornin's." I suppose that is true of the donkeys kept by the numerous cottage laundresses in this parish.
From this he launched off into a long rambling narrative, which I did not understand in all its details, of his "old mother-in-law's donkey," named Jane, whom he once drove down into Sussex for the harvesting. "She drinked seven pints o' beer 'tween this an' Chichester. Some policemen giveher one pint when we drove down into Singleton. There was three or four policemen outside the public there," Goodwood races being on at the time; and these policemen treated Jane, while Bettesworth went within to refresh himself. "That an' some bread was all she wanted. I'd took a peck o' corn for her, but she didn't sim to care about it; and I give a feller thruppence what 'd got some clover-grass on a cart, but she only had about a mouthful o' that." In short, Jane preferred bread and beer. "Jest break a loaf o' bread in half an' put it in a bowl an' pour about a pint o' beer over 't.... But she'd put her lips into a glass or a cup and soop it out. Reg'lar coster's donkey, she was, and they'd learnt her. Not much bigger 'n a good-sized dog—buttrot!"
How she trotted, and won a wager, against another donkey on the same road, was told so confusedly that I could not follow the tale.
In Sussex, Jane was the delight of the farmer's children. "'May I have a ride on your donkey?' they'd say, twenty times a day. 'Yes,' I'd say, 'if you can catch her.' And she'd let 'em go up to her, but as soon as ever they got on her back they was off again. 'You give her a bit o' bread,' I'd say; 'p'raps she'll let ye ride then.' And they used to give her bread," but she would never suffer them to ride her.
People on the road admired the donkey—nay, the whole equipage. "Comin' home, down FernhurstHill, I got up—'cause I rode down 'ills—I walked all the rest—and says, 'Now, Jane, there's a pint o' beer for ye at the bottom of the hill.' So we come down" to the inn there, named by Bettesworth but forgotten by me, "and three or four farmers there says, 'Here comes the man wi' the little donkey!' And I called out for a pint, and she thought she was goin' to have it; but I says, 'No, this is for me. You wait till you got your wind back.'"
We spoke afterwards of other donkeys, and particularly of one—a lady's of the neighbourhood—which, as Bettesworth had been told, was "groomed and put into the stable with a cloth over him, jest like the other horses.... Law! if donkeys was looked after, they'dkillall the ponies (by outworking them), but they don't get no chance."
The harvesting expeditions into Sussex, and the keeping of cows on the common, were parts of an antique peasant economy now quite obsolete. In August of this year a further glimpse of it was obtained, in a conversation which, I grieve to say, I neglected to set down in Bettesworth's own words.
August 21, 1903.—There was a time shortly after his marriage, and, as I guess, between forty and fifty years ago, when he rented a cottage and garden quite close to this house. The price of wheat being then two shillings the gallon, he used to grow wheatin his garden; and his average crop was at the rate of fourteen or fifteen sacks to the acre, or nearly twice as much as local farmers now succeed in growing.
In making this use of his garden he was by no means singular. Many of his neighbours at that date grew their own corn; and it was Mrs. Bettesworth's brother (a man still living, and now working a threshing engine) who dibbed it for them. The dibber ("dessay he got it now") was described by Bettesworth—a double implement, made for dibbing two rows at a time. It had two "trees," like spade handles, set side by side, each of which was socketed into an iron bent forwards like a letter L. On the under-side of each iron, four excrescences made four shallow holes in the ground, "about like a egg"; and a rod connecting the two irons kept the double tool rigid. Walking backwards, the man using this implement could press into the ground two rows of egg-shaped holes at a time, as fast as the women could follow with the seed. For it seems that two women followed the dibber, carrying their seed-corn in basins and dropping one or two grains into each hole. The ground was afterwards rolled with a home-made wooden roller; and as soon as the corn came up the hoe was kept going, the rows being about eight inches asunder, until the crop was knee high.