All Men are Ghosts Part 19

The din increased, and in great bewilderment of mind he began to seek for its cause. Now it was one thing, now another. "This sound," he thought, "is the grind and roar of colliding ice-floes and the crackle of the Northern Lights." The sounds thus identified immediately became something else. They seemed to scatter and retreat, and then, concentrating again, returned as the tolling of an enormous bell. Nearer and nearer it came till the quivering metal lay close against his ear and the iron tongue of the bell smote him like a bludgeon.

A warmth pa.s.sed over his face and a troubled thought began to disturb him. "I am sleeping through the summer; I must rouse myself before winter comes back." And with a great reluctant effort he opened his eyes.

A scarlet veil hung before them. He tried to thrust it aside with his hands, which seemed to fail him and miss the mark. Succeeding at last, he saw a vast creature standing motionless above him, its hot breath mingling with his, its great eyes, only a hand-breadth away, looking with infinite tenderness into his own.

He tried to recollect himself, and something in his hand gave him a clue. "This thing," he mused, "is surely my handkerchief. It belongs to John Scattergood. It is one of a dozen his poor drug-sodden wife gave him on Christmas Day. And here, close to me, is Ethelberta. How red her feet are!" And he stared vacantly at a deep gash on Ethelberta's chest, and watched the great gouts that were dripping from her knees and forming crimson pools around her hoofs.

The crimson pools were full of mystery; they fascinated and troubled him; they were problems in philosophy he couldn't solve. "Surely," he thought, "I _have_ solved them, but forgotten the solution. I have lost the notes of my lecture. Dyed garments from Bozrah--red, red! The colour of my doctor's gown--I have trodden the wine-press alone. The colour of poppies--drowsy syrups--deadly drugs! The ground-tint of the Universe--a difficult problem! Strange that a friendly Universe should be so red.

Gentlemen, I am not well to-day--don't laugh at a sick man. The red is quite simple. It only means that someone is hurt. Not I, certainly. Who can it be? Ah, now I see. Poor old girl!" And he feebly reached out his handkerchief, already soaked with his own blood, as though he would staunch the streaming wounds of Ethelberta.

As he did this, the great bell broke out afresh. It fell away into the distance. A second joined it; a third, a fourth, a fifth, until a whole peal was ringing and the air seemed full of music and of summer warmth.

Then Scattergood began to dream his last dream, ineffably content.

He stood by the open door of a church: inside he could see the ringers pulling at the ropes. And Ethelberta, young and happy as himself, was leaning on his arm.

"Sweetheart," she whispered, "let us behave ourselves like rational beings."

He laughed and would have spoken. But a din of clattering hoofs, which drowned the pealing of the bells, struck him dumb. The swift image of a grey-headed man, riding a maddened horse, shot out of the darkness, pa.s.sed by, and vanished; and the wedding-party stood aghast.

"Who is yonder rider?" he said, with a great effort, bending over Ethelberta.

"A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," said a soft voice in his ear.

A thousand echoes caught up the words and flung them far abroad. Then thunders awoke behind, and rolled after the echoes like pursuing cavalry. "_A man of sorrows_," cried the echoes. "_He has come through great tribulations_," the thunders shouted in reply.

On went the chase, the flying echoes in retreat, the deep-voiced thunder in pursuit. Then Scattergood saw himself swept into the torrent of riders, and it seemed as if the solid frame of things were dissolved into a flight of whispers and a pursuit of shouts. A fugitive secret, that fled with unapproachable speed, was the quarry, and the hunters were billows of sound, and the rhythm of beating hoofs gave the time to their undulations. A tide of joy awoke within the dreamer; he was horsed on the thunder; he was leading the field; he was close on the heels of the game; he was captain of the host to an innumerable company of loud-voiced and meaningless things. Then would come expansions, accelerations, and sudden checks. Fissures yawned in front; mountains barred the way; the time was broken, and voices from the rear were calling a halt. But the thunders have the bit between their teeth; they are clearing the chasms; they are leaping over the mountain tops; and clouds of witnesses are shouting "Well done!" The wide heavens fill with the tumult; myriads of eager stars are watching, and great waters are clapping their hands.

"Who is this that leads the chase?" a voice was asking. "Who is this that feels the thunder leap beneath him like a living thing?" "It is I--John Scattergood--it is I!" And ever before him fled the secret; it mocked the chasing squadrons, and the wild winds aided its flight.

And now the pursuer perceived himself pursued. A swarm of troubled thoughts, on winged horses, was overtaking him. They swept by on either side; they forged ahead; they pressed close and jostled him on his rocking seat. There was a shock; the thunder collapsed beneath him, and he fell and fell into bottomless gloom.

Suddenly his fall was stayed. A hand caught him; a presence encircled him, something touched him on the lips, and a voice said, "At last! At last!"

Professor Scattergood was sitting on the stones, his body bowed forward, his hands feebly clasped round the head of his motionless horse; the breath of life was leaving him, and his heart was almost still. Then the dying flame flickered once more. He opened his eyes, gazing into the darkness like one who sees a long-awaited star. His fingers tightened; he seemed to draw the head of Ethelberta a little nearer his own; and it was as if they two were holding some colloquy of love.

In the twinkling of an eye it was done, and the pallor of death crept over the wounded face. The clasped hands, with the blood-stained handkerchief still between them, slowly relaxed; the glance withered; the arms fell; the head drooped. It rested for a moment on the soft muzzle of the beast; and then, with a quiet breath, the whole body rolled backwards and lay face upward to the stars.

Clouds swept over the sky, the winds were hushed, and the dense darkness of a winter's night fell like a pall over the dead. Not a soul came nigh the spot, and for hours the silence was unbroken by the footfall of any living creature or by the stirring of a withered leaf. And far away in the dead's man's home lay an oblivious woman, drenched in the sleep of opium.

It was near midnight when a carrier's cart, drawn by an old horse and lit by a feeble lantern, began to climb the silent hill. Weary with the labours of a long day, the carrier sat dozing among the village merchandise. Suddenly he woke with a start: his cart had stopped.

Leaning forward, he peered ahead; and the gleam of his lantern fell on the stark figure of a man lying in the middle of the road. A larger ma.s.s, dimly outlined, lay immediately beyond. Raising his light a little higher, the carrier saw that the further object was the dead body of a horse.

FARMER JEREMY AND HIS WAYS

Mr Jeremy's system for the regulation of human life was summed up in the maxim, "Put your back into it"; and a lifetime of practising what he preached has endowed that part, or aspect, of his person with an astonishing vitality and developed it to an enormous size. Not without reason did our yeomanry sergeant exhibit his stock joke by informing Jeremy on parade that if only his head had been set the other way he would have had the finest chest in the British army.

But the full significance of Jeremy's back was not to be perceived by one who looked upon it from the drill-sergeant's point of view. It was not only the broadest but the most expressive organ of the farmer's body, and a poet's eye was needed to interpret the meaning it conveyed.

For myself, I should never have suspected that it meant anything more than great physical strength employed in a strenuous life, had not a poetical friend of mine taken the matter up and enlightened me. My friend and I were crossing a field by the footpath, and Jeremy, walking rapidly in the same direction, was a few yards ahead.

"There goes a man," I whispered, "who is worth your study. You could write a poem about him. He's one of the few remaining specimens of a type that is becoming extinct. He represents agriculture as it was before the advent of science and Radical legislation. He is the most honest and prosperous farmer in the county: a man, moreover, who has endured many sorrows and conquered them. Let us overtake him, for I should like you to see him face to face."

"Not so," said my friend. "The man's history, as you have told it, and much more beside, is written on his back. Let us remain, therefore, as we are, and study him where such men can best be studied, from the rear. His back, I perceive, especially the upper portion of it, is the princ.i.p.al organ of his intelligence. Observe, he is thinking with his back even now--he hitched his trousers up a moment ago. His thoughts are pleasant--you can see it in the rhythmical movement of the muscles under his coat. He has some great design on hand and is sure he can carry it through--see how his shoulders, as he swings along, seem to be tumbling forward over his chest. He has had great sorrows--the droop in the cervical vertebrae confirms it; he has conquered them--hence that forward plunge into his task. He understands his business; of course; for the back is the organ by which all business is understood. He is honest; he is temperate; he has never broken the seventh commandment. You can read his innocence in the back of his head--I wish mine were like his." And my poetical friend turned round and showed me his villainous cerebellum.

Thus enlightened, I began a closer study of the farmer's habits. I saw a new significance in an odd trick he had of suddenly swinging round on his heels at the interesting point of a conversation and delivering his remarks, and sometimes shaking his fist, with his back to the interlocutor. I say his back, but functionally considered it was not so; since at those moments the functions of the two sides of his body were interchanged, the organ of expression being the side now towards you, with every smile and frown accurately registered in the creases of the coat as they followed the movements of the muscles beneath. So, too, when Jeremy laughed. No doubt his face, while laughing, was expressive enough, but you couldn't see it, because it was turned the other way.

What you did see was the farmer's coat, _a tergo_, twitching up and down as though pulled by a cord and then suddenly released like a Venetian blind; and this was quite enough to ensure your hearty partic.i.p.ation in the merriment.

I also managed to take several interesting photographs from the rear; and (may the saints forgive him!) a young gentleman of my acquaintance once attempted to snapshot the hinder parts of Jeremy while in church.

Unfortunately the light was bad, and the negative proved a failure.

Otherwise my poetical friend, for whom I intended the photograph, would certainly have found in it material for a new poem. Be it recorded that Jeremy when engaged in devotion did not kneel, but stretched his body forward from the seat to the book-rest, presenting his back to the heavens and his face to the inner regions of the earth; and, as his body was very long and the pew very wide, the back formed a solid and substantial bridge over which you might have trundled a wheelbarrow laden with turnips. No photograph, indeed, save one of the cinematograph order, the apparatus for which was too large to lie concealed beneath the young gentleman's waistcoat, would have reproduced the creepings, ripplings, and dimplings of the farmer's coat. These gave animation to the picture; but even without them, the mere contour of the ma.s.s, thrust upwards like the back of a diving whale, was a spectacle of vigour and concentrated purpose of which my poetical friend would not have lost the significance.

Jeremy was the oldest of the Duke's tenantry, and the land he farmed, which was of high quality throughout, had been held by his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and by ancestors of yet remoter date. If there is any calling in which heredity is of importance to success it is surely the farmer's, and Jeremy was fully conscious that he "had it in the blood," and recognised the debt he owed to his fathers before him.

People are wont to criticise the old-fashioned farmer as a stiff and unadaptable person; but what struck me about Jeremy, who was old-fashioned enough, was the adaptiveness and flexibility of his mind in dealing with the ever-varying conditions the farmer has to face. He had an extraordinary instinct for doing the right thing at the right time, and handled his land as though it were a living thing, with a kind of unconscious tact which seemed to me the exact opposite to that blind and mechanical following of habit which so often, but so mistakenly, is said to be the standing fault of his cla.s.s. Obstinate and incredulous as he seemed to the new teachings of veterinary or agricultural science, I yet noticed that Jeremy managed to absorb enough of these things to produce the results he desired; and though he never absorbed as much of them as the experts required, his crops were always larger and his stock healthier than those of his neighbours whose farming was strictly according to the modern card.

I have read one or two books on the nature of soils, and it is not without significance to me that the little, the very little, useful knowledge I have of these things was derived not from the books but from Mr Jeremy. There was a bit of ground in my garden where I could make nothing grow, and I hunted in vain through all the gardening books I could find for a remedy, and even went the length of consulting some of the gifted authors, two of whom were ladies. I sent them specimens of the soil for examination; they teased them with formulae and tormented them with acids; they boiled them in retorts and pickled them in gla.s.s tubes; they sent me the names of marauding bacteria whose lodgings they had discovered in that morsel of earth: and I, following their instructions, dosed the land with atrocious chemicals, until the earth-worms sickened and the very snails forsook the tainted spot. Still nothing would grow.

Then came Mr Jeremy. He picked up a handful of the soil; gazed at it as a lapidary gazes at diamonds; smelt it; felt it tenderly with his forefinger; spat upon it; rubbed the mixture on his breeches; inspected the result, first on his breeches and then on his hand--and now my barren patch is blossoming like the garden of the Lord. The others had advised me to try I know not what--nitrates of this and phosphates of that, sulphates of the other and carbonates of something else. Mr Jeremy said, "Chuck a cart-load o' fine sand on her and then rip her up."

Mr Jeremy, I have said, was aware that his roots struck deeply into the past, and this consciousness, I believe, helped to give him that confidence in himself without which no man can successfully till the earth or battle with destiny--the two things, I believe, being at bottom much the same.

His farmhouse, so far as I could judge, was built--and built of almost imperishable stone--in the later years of the reign of Charles II., and had never been structurally modified since its erection. Some of the out-buildings were of yet earlier date. Scattered about in odd corners were not a few interesting relics of the past. For example, there was a case of coins, which had been arranged for Jeremy by the late Rector's wife, representing every reign from Charles I. to George IV., every one of which coins had been dug up on the farm. In the big courtyard there was a block of hard stone scored with grooves and notches, where the troopers in some forgotten battle were said to have sharpened their swords; on the outside wall was a row of rings and stables where the same troopers had tethered their horses. In the cellar there was a collection of large shot, which there was reason to think had been stored there at the time of the forgotten battle; and with these were a lot of iron buckles, and broken tobacco-pipes of ancient form, which had been dug up in a mound on the hillside through which Jeremy was cutting a drain. A good pint-measure of human teeth, in excellent preservation, had been discovered in the same place, and these were kept in an old tobacco-box. Connected with all this, I suppose, were the names of several of the fields on the farm: one of which was called "The Slaughters"; another, "Horses' Water"; another, "The Guns." And besides these, which reminded one of "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago," there were two other fields, the names of which were also interesting to me. One, a beautiful meadow with a southern slope, was "Abbot's Vineyard," and the big pond with the aspens beside it was "Benedict's Pool." Of these names the explanation was utterly lost; nor could I invent a theory, for the nearest religious house of pre-Reformation times was many miles away. The other field was called "Quebec," and the coppice at its upper end was "Monckton Wood."

These latter names I am able to explain. Several of Jeremy's ancestors had been to the wars, among them his great-great-grandfather Silas Jeremy, who had fought under Wolfe at the capture of Quebec, and probably under Monckton in some earlier campaign. In the house there were several mementoes of this man: the identical George II. shilling he had received on enlisting--proving, as Jeremy would often say, that his great-great-grandfather was a "sober" man; a gold watch with a beautifully executed design of the death of Wolfe engraved on the case, said to have been presented to Silas on his return from the wars by the reigning Duke; and, above all, a flint-lock musket, with bayonet attached, which Jeremy a.s.serted his ancestor had used in the battle, but which I judged on examination to have been of French manufacture, and therefore most probably a relic picked up from the battle-field--perhaps the identical musket along whose barrel some French grenadier had taken aim at the n.o.ble heart of Wolfe--who knows?

Another memorial of this ancestor--a pretty obvious one--I can myself claim to have identified. It was an obstinate rule of the farm that the annual "harvest-home" should be held on September 13; and even if the harvest was much belated and only a portion then gathered in, still September 13 was the date, provided only that it did not fall on a Sunday. September 13, I need hardly say, is the anniversary of the battle of the Heights of Abraham. The coincidence had been entirely forgotten by the Jeremys, and was unrecorded in the traditions of our village; but not many days after I had pointed it out, the gossips having been at work in the meantime, an old man came in from a neighbouring parish and told me "as how" his father had talked with a man who knew another man who had been present at the Jeremys'

harvest-home in 1760, when Silas Jeremy, who had just come back from foreign parts, and whose tomb was in the churchyard, sang a song about the taking of Quebec, which the old man's father used to sing--though he himself couldn't remember it--and declared that for all time to come the feast should be held on Quebec Day, and on no other.

This little circ.u.mstance, I may say in pa.s.sing, was the beginning of my friendship with the Jeremy who forms the subject of the present story.

My discovery of the coincidence gave him a most exaggerated opinion of my abilities and worth. To quote his own words, it proved me to be "a gentleman as knows what's what"--a characteristic which, so far as I am aware, has never been revealed to anybody else. And Jeremy's good opinion of me was yet further enhanced when he learnt that I had twice visited the Plains of Abraham; that I knew the place by heart; that I had climbed up the goat-path by which his ancestor had scaled the heights, and had laid my head on the spot where Wolfe met his most enviable death. He would have me into his house that very night to tell him all about it; showed me the George II. shilling and the gold watch; took down the old musket and let me handle it and put it to my shoulder and even pull the trigger; spent two hours in rapt attention while I read out Parkman's account of the battle; and finally summed up the whole campaign and its significance in one sweeping comment, "By Gum, sir, them fellers put their backs into it, and that's _just_ what they did!"

The same held true, I should think, of Jeremy's grandfather, to judge by another relic carefully treasured in the house. This was an enormous iron crowbar, the mere lifting of which was a challenge to "put your back into it." With this weapon the Jeremy of that day had successfully defended himself against a crowd of rascals who came out to burn his ricks in '32. Some memories of that fight were still extant in the village, and a bonny fight it must have been. My informant, an eyewitness of the scene, was too nearly imbecile to stand cross-examination; but what he remembered was to the point. Aware of the impending danger, Jeremy had built his ricks that year within the defences of his courtyard, the walls of which he had rendered unscalable by various devices. It only remained, therefore, to defend the gate; and here were posted Timothy Caine with a maul, Job Henderson with a flail, an unnamed woman with a cauldron of flour to fling in the face of the enemy, and the farmer with the crowbar. These won the day; and more I cannot tell you, because my informant's language, which I could never induce him to vary, became extremely metaphorical at this point: "Master Jeremy, he give 'em pen and ink: pen and ink is what he give 'em with the crowbar, sir, that he did; there was none on 'em wanted hitting twice, no, not one; and, my eye! to see the flour a-flying! What a steam it made! I can see it now."

Agricultural experts who visited our parish, though forced to admire the excellence of Jeremy's farming, were wont to criticise him for being "too slow." Now there, I think, they were distinctly wrong. I have nothing to say against Agricultural Science: I wish there was more of it; but if it has a weakness it lies in a certain tendency to be "quick"

precisely at those points where Jeremy was triumphantly "slow." His slowness was simply the instinctive timing of his action to the movements of Nature, who is also "slow" in relation to yet higher powers. You would often think that he was dawdling; but if you looked into the matter you were sure to find that just then Nature was dawdling too, and that Jeremy was beating her at a waiting game. So, too, if you watched a python creeping from branch to branch or lying coiled in a gla.s.s case you would judge it to be the slowest of beasts; but not if you saw it springing on its prey. There was much of the wisdom of the serpent in Mr Jeremy, as there must be in every man who earns his living by battle with the natural order of the world. "I wakes regularly at five o'clock," he said. "But I never gets up till a quarter past. What do I think about in that quarter of an hour? Why, I spends it in _cutting out_." By "cutting out" he meant the process of mentally arranging the day's work for himself and for every man on the farm. The python on the branch, I imagine, is often engaged in "cutting out." "In farming," he added, for he was giving a lesson, "you ought to cut out fresh every day, and not every week, as some farmers do--though I've knowed them as never cut out at all. And cutting out's a thing you can never learn in books and colleges. It comes by experience--and a light hand. Sometimes you must cut out _rough_, and sometimes you must cut out _fine_--mostly according to the weather and the time o' year--and always _leave a bit somewhere as isn't cut out at all_. And when you've done the cutting out, take a look out o' the window and tap your gla.s.s. Do it the minute you jumps out o' bed. And if there's been a change in the wind during the night, cut out _again_ while you're pulling your breeches on and tear up what you've cut out already. And don't give no orders to anybody till you've had your breakfast--leastways a cup o'

tea; it clears a man's head and lets you see if you've been making any mistakes. I've often cut out six or seven times between waking and giving the day's orders--what with the tricks of the weather and my head not being as clear as it ought to have been." And I wondered how often Napoleon had done the same thing.

Indeed, if I may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. Such slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in farming, in war, and in many other things. And of Mr Jeremy we may say that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. This gave him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being "slow." At the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in Agricultural Colleges.

I have to confess that my acquaintance with Mr Jeremy has not been without a certain demoralising effect. It has corrupted the brightness of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my youth. I will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether vanished; but, thanks to Mr Jeremy's influence, I have learned to see them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land and its uses I have entirely lost the very little effectiveness I once had. There was a time when if anyone mentioned the land I always wanted to make a speech. Now I feel--what no doubt I ought to have felt then--that I must hold my tongue. To be quite frank, my views on the land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. That a farmer owning his own land was _caeteris paribus_ necessarily better off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth discussion. But if I had to speak on that point now, I should hesitate and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience to regard me as a fool. Instead of speaking out loud and strong for peasant proprietorship, I should be thinking all the time of the three peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood--George Corey, Charles Narroway, and Billy h.o.a.re, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most underhand and generally despicable rascals I have ever met. Were a resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the townspeople back on to the land, I should say in support that while it is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it is yet worse to see people like Prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. I should want to tell the audience all about Prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told me to go to the devil when I begged him not to build his abominable house where it would spoil the view: and then I should want to add a few details about his personal habits which I am afraid would cause the ladies to walk out of the room. And I should wind up by saying, amid the derisive laughter of the audience, that one reason, at all events, why the real peasants go _into_ the towns is to escape from slavery to these pinchbeck fellows who come _out_ of the towns. I should want to quote--but I am afraid my courage would have already broken down--what Jeremy once said to me:--"The Dook--when did you ever hear of any man going into the town as worked on _his_ estate? But as for this 'ere Prendergast, I wonder the very pigs stop in his stye."