Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 11

XVIII

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, c.u.mulative 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 embarra.s.sed 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 told that! 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 gra.s.s 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 up the 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 h.o.a.rd, 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 protege 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 comfort in me as a friend, were probably times when his home had grown too dreary, his outlook too hopeless, even for his fort.i.tude. 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 appet.i.te. 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.

XIX

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 circ.u.mstances, 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 a.s.sociates, 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 to live across the valley. But note the circ.u.mstances. 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 circ.u.mstances.

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 part.i.tions of the cottage, too, wearing while at the work the correct garb of a plasterer; and it was 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 they _do_ run 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 was _obliged_ to laugh at 'n."

Of course, such a neighbour would in no circ.u.mstances 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, were not 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 cla.s.ses: 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 hoped that 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 of trouble. 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, a.s.sumed 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 to try 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 and the 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? Wherever _shall_ we go?'" and he, trying to rea.s.sure her that they would "find somewhere to creep 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 invented that 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--an unmarried labourer and his mother--knew Bettesworth's record, and regarded him as a veteran to be cared for; and not many weeks pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 another man'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."

XX

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 the period, 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 leaf.a.ge--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 gra.s.s was already looking after a threat of drought; how the hedgerows were odorous with the pungent scent of nettles; how the l.u.s.trous opaque white of horse-daisies starred certain gra.s.sy 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.