Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 16

XXVII

_September 19, 1904._--Because they can so little afford to be ill, it is habitual among the very poor to neglect an illness long after other people would be seriously alarmed at it; and the habit had been confirmed in Bettesworth with regard to his wife's maladies, by her having so many times recovered from them without help. It was almost a matter of course to him, when about the middle of September, and less than a month after his return from the hospital, she became once more exceedingly unwell. So she had often done: it was not worth mentioning, and was not mentioned, to me. I knew of no trouble. If I had been asked about his welfare at that time, I should have said that the old man was rather unusually happy. I should have said so especially one Monday morning (it was the 19th of September); because on that day we were picking apples, and his conversation was so delightfully in harmony with the sunshine glinting among the apple-boughs. He told of cider and cider-making; and then of shepherds he had known on the Suss.e.x Downs, and of their dogs, and their solitary pastimes upon the hills. Hearing him, no one, I am sure, could have supposed that at home his wife had been dangerously ill for nearly a week, and that consequently his own comfort there had for the time ceased to exist.

Later on that Monday his wife's condition (not his own) was somehow made known to me. I suppose Bettesworth consulted me on the step he was contemplating, of going to the relieving officer to-morrow to get an order for medical attendance for old Lucy. At any rate, by Monday night that is what he had resolved to do, and I knew it and approved, remembering what the policeman had said to me. It seemed a wise precaution to take, but evidently it could not be urgent. Bettesworth was choosing Tuesday, because on Tuesday mornings the relieving officer is in attendance in the parish, and the order could therefore be got without a five-mile walk for it.

From various circ.u.mstances it may be inferred that the early part of Tuesday was an unhappy time for Bettesworth: a time of fretful watching for the dawn, perhaps after a wakeful night; of impatience to come and begin his day's work, and then of impatience for eleven o'clock to arrive, and of brooding obstinate thoughts, until at eleven he might go and get the miserable interview over. For it made him miserable to have to sue in the form of a pauper, and he was prepared, as poor folk generally are, to find in the relieving officer a bully if not a brute. I may say at once that he was agreeably deceived, and said as much afterwards--he was treated humanely and with appreciation; but the relieving officer's account of the interview sufficiently proves that the old man went to it in but a surly temper.

I imagine him standing up as straight as his crooked old limbs would let him, rolling his head back defiantly, with tightened lips and suspicious eyes, and answering as uncivilly as he dared. A compliment was offered him, on his haste to get away from the infirmary in the spring. "_I_ en't no workhouse man!" he answered brusquely. And he did his best to persuade the relieving officer that he would never want relief for himself, a.s.serting that he belonged to a club, and concealing the fact that he was a superannuated member of it, no longer ent.i.tled to benefit from the club funds.

And then, the interview over, and the order obtained, his cheerfulness for the rest of the day is suggestive of an ordeal successfully pa.s.sed. True, I have lost record of how he pottered through the afternoon--it was, of course, useless to go to the parish doctor at that time of day--but he seemed to have suddenly lost the weakness still lingering from the operation in the hospital; and being short of money, he proposed an extra job for the evening. He wanted to clear out a cesspit in my garden. I urged that he had better rest, and take care of himself as well as of his wife. "_I_ be gettin' bonny!" he said happily.

He carried his point, too. As if he had no wife ill at home, at about eight o'clock, which was usually his bed-time, he came back and began his self-imposed task, with a young labourer to help. And he must have been in merry spirits, for he kept his mate amused, so that from the house I could hear the man laughing, in frequent bleating outbursts of hilarity, at some facetious saying or other. One of these sayings I heard, on going out to see how the work was progressing. "He must be a greedy feller as wants more 'n one or two whiffs o' this," Bettesworth remarked; and his companion let out another good-tempered laugh. From the old man's manner I argued that his wife must be doing well; but probably it indicated only a reaction from the moody temper of the morning. The job was finished at about half-past nine, and conscious of a good day's work done, Bettesworth once more crept over the hill and across the valley, home.

But not to go to bed, or to sleep. While he was at work in the moonlight and making his friend laugh, I did not know, but he did, what was in store for him. Having no spare bed, he began his night downstairs and dozed for a while in an easy-chair; then roused and went out into the moonlight to smoke a pipe; and so he got through the night. Tobacco was his solace. He smoked, he told me, a full ounce in the ensuing twenty-four hours. At seven in the morning--his usual hour--he was here beginning work: at nine he left off, to go into the town and present his order at the doctor's.

That journey on the Wednesday morning proved the beginning of a period of intenser wretchedness for the old man. He set out in apparent equanimity; but the fatigue of the night was upon him, the glow of yesterday's contentment had died out, and his nerves must have been all on edge to take as he did a remark of the doctor's--"What do you want of an order? You're in constant work, aren't you?" It seemed to him that he was being insulted for coming as a pauper, and it was all he could do to refrain from a rejoinder that would have resulted in his being summarily ejected from the doctor's presence. And was he as submissive as he fancied? It is more likely that the ungraciousness of his manner was to blame for what he regarded as pure heartlessness in the other. That he must be at home to meet the doctor was self-evident; but it was important to him not to lose a whole day from his work, and he desired to know whether the visit would be made before his dinner-time or after it? I hazard a guess that he stated the case in tones of defiant bargaining; at any rate, he could get no answer but that the doctor would call during the day. With that he returned here--a quivering ma.s.s of resentment; and in that temper, to which nothing is so repugnant as waiting, by my persuasion rather than by his goodwill he left his work and went home to wait.

With what increasing bitterness he wore through the day, with what fretfulness and final despair as of a man despised and forgotten, must be left to conjecture. For the doctor did not come, after all.

Conjecture, too, must picture if it can the night that followed--the attempts to sleep in the chair, the restless wanderings into the garden to smoke, the repet.i.tion, in fact, of the preceding night's misery, but with a great addition of weariness and distress.

Bettesworth, when he came round the next morning to tell me how he was situated, did not so much as mention all this; he only let fall one pitiful detail. Some time in the night he had given his wife a little brandy; and about daybreak he went out to draw fresh water into the kettle "so's not to have it no-ways stale," for making her a cup of tea. But, partaking of a cup himself at the same time, he "hadn't had it above five minutes afore he was out in the garden" to let the tea come back again. After that, he appears to have abandoned the attempt to get sustenance elsewhere than from tobacco. It was a dismal story to hear: but there was nothing to be done; and having heard it, I sent him home again to go on waiting. This was Thursday, two days after he obtained the relieving officer's order for medical a.s.sistance, and by now the state of his wife was causing him grave fears.

But why had the doctor not been near? To Bettesworth's wounded feelings the explanation needed no seeking: he was being made to wait for richer people, because he was poor and unimportant. Meanwhile, happening to meet with the relieving officer, I laid the case before him, and heard that a call to a distance had obliged the doctor to leave his work for a day or two in the hands of a _loc.u.m tenens_, who must have blundered. And this proved to be the fact. On Thursday afternoon a doctor who was a stranger at last found his way to Bettesworth's cottage, and the unhappy old man's long suspense was so far over. At once all his bitterness died out. The doctor "was as nice a gentleman as ever I talked to," he affirmed. "He said she was very bad. She wasn't to have nothing but only milk an' beef-tea an' brandy, an' she wasn't to be left alone." Bettesworth therefore did not leave home again that day. He got his niece, whose young family prevented her from giving much help, to go to the town and bring home the medicine, and so he settled down for another night like those that had gone before.

It was on the next morning (Friday) that he told me these few particulars, and how his wife seemed a trifle--only a trifle--better; how, too, he had "washed her as well as he could," and, being asked, how he had not been to bed himself. And now he was on his way to the town to buy a few necessaries. Who was with his wife meanwhile? That was a question I dared not ask, because I knew that the distressful old woman was a by-word for s.l.u.ttishness among the neighbours, so much that they would hardly go near her; and I knew that Bettesworth, though silent on the subject, was sore about it. Without doubt the old woman was quite alone, whenever circ.u.mstances compelled him to leave her.

The "necessaries" he was going to buy included beef-tea "and some cakes," he said. At the mention of cakes I exclaimed, but he protested reproachfully, "Well, but she en't had _nothin'_ to eat!" Clearly he did not regard milk as food, or indeed anything else that was not solid. In the matter of beef-tea, "I can't make it myself," he said, "but you can buy it, can't ye, in jars?" He was perhaps thinking of Bovril, or something of the kind. Fortunately there were those at hand who knew how to make beef-tea, and undertook at once to relieve the old man of this burden.

Taking him apart then, I asked if he needed a shilling or two. He almost groaned in deprecation, "I owes you such a lot now, and keeps on gettin' into debt. I'd sooner rub along with jest as little as ever I possibly can." It was of his rent he was thinking, which of course was payable for those weeks of his own illnesses, as well as for his absence from work now, when he was not earning any wages from which the rent could be deducted. Perhaps he was unaware that I had no account of the debt; in any case, it seemed to be preying upon his mind. I did not press the point, therefore, and he started off for the town without aid from me.

In another way, too, the old man's reluctance to be a burden manifested itself. What he had told me so far was told because I wished to hear it, and he wished me to understand. He made no long tale: he was brief, unaffected, and as for seeking compa.s.sion, it was far from his intention. Of one thing only did he complain: a near relative's indifference. "He was over by our place twice o' Sunday,"

Bettesworth said scornfully, "and couldn't look in to see how the poor old gal was. He was ready enough to send to me when he had his mishap"

(falling from a rick, and finding himself in agony at night), "and I run off an' went all down to the town for 'n, late at night. But now _I_ wants help--no: he won't come anear. That's the sort o' feller _he_ is." So Bettesworth, uttering his sole complaint. But he did not demand from others the sympathy he looked for from a relation, or seek to inflict them with the tale of troubles which, after all, he would have to bear by himself.

At this point, if the actual course of this over-crowded Friday were to be followed strictly, the narrative would suffer a strange interruption. For, having business of my own in the town, I set off at the same time with Bettesworth, expecting little cheerfulness from him on the way. But I had failed to appreciate the man's stoicism, or the strong grip he had over his feelings. For several nights he had not rested on a bed; he had taken during the same period next to no food; he had been hara.s.sed by suspense, worn by indignation, baffled constantly by the obstacles which his poverty set in his way; and it would have been pardonable if he had proved himself but a gloomy companion for a walk. Yet from the moment of our setting out he put aside all his difficulties, and not only did he not distress me, but for the half-hour before we separated he kept me interested in his sensible conversation on local topics, or charmed by the pleasant rustic flavour of some of his reminiscences. Here, therefore, would be the natural place for inserting some fragments of this talk, which I wrote down in the evening. It happened, however, that in writing I gave precedence to an important change which by then had come over the situation at Bettesworth's home; and as I propose to take the account of this development and the issue of it straight from my note-book, the bits of gossip too had better come in just as they stand there.

It appears, then, to have been at about six o'clock in the afternoon that I was writing, as follows:

Bettesworth has just been over (from his home) to consult me, and perhaps to have a chat and relieve his overburdened soul. When he got back from the town this morning, he found the doctor paying another visit, who was "wonderful nice," and offered to give him a certificate for admitting the old woman to the infirmary, if he would care to have it and would call for it at the surgery. Bettesworth only wanted my encouragement. He is going down this evening for the certificate, and hopes to get his wife removed to-morrow.

It will be none too soon. The watching is wearing him out. Last night he had left her and gone downstairs, and sat dozing in the chair, when she tried to get out of bed, and fell heavily on the floor. He ran up--and forgot to take the candle back with him, thereby adding to his difficulties--and somehow managed to get her back into bed again and covered up, without aid. But now, says he, "I said to Dave Harding as I come up the road, 'What I should like to do 'd be to crawl up into the fir-woods where n.o.body couldn't see me, and lay down an' get three or four hours' sleep.' 'You couldn't do it,' he says; "t'd be on your mind all the time. You might get off for ten minutes, p'raps, an' then you'd be up an' off again.' But that's what I sims as if I should like, more 'n anything: jest to crawl away somewhere, where n.o.body wouldn't come, for a good sleep. Then wake up and 'ave a floush--'t'd freshen me up."

Certainly he is overdone. Upon my renewing offers of a little help, he became tearful, almost sobbing: "You be the only friend I got.... I bin all over the country," and have faced all sorts of things, "but I _be_ hammer-hacked about, now, no mistake." His grief consists in being able to do so little for his wife. He has given her since his dinner-time her medicine, then a sip of brandy "to take the taste out of her mouth.... And then I said, 'Now here's a cake I bought for ye in the town; have a bit o' that.' So she nibbled a bit, and I says, 'Eat 'n up.' No, she didn't want no more. 'But you got to _'ave_ it,'

I says. I a'most forced it down her throat. I do's the best I can for her; but I en't got n.o.body to tell me what to do."

And he is galled by turns, by turns amused, at her behaviour towards himself. "I can't do nothink right for her. She's more stubborn to me than to anybody else: keeps on findin' fault. Last night, in the night, she roused up an' accused me o' goin' away. 'You bin away somewheres,' she says. 'Oh yes, you 'ave; I heared ye come creepin'

back up the road.' And I'd bin sittin' there all the time."

This and much more he told. I tried to get away (we were in the garden), for I was busy; but he followed me, to talk still, and wandered off into recollections of his experiences at Guildford Hospital.

_7.30 p.m._ Bettesworth has called once more, coming from the town, to show me the doctor's certificate (gastritis, it says), and to let me know that to-morrow morning he will not be here at his usual time. He proposes going to the relieving officer to obtain his order for a conveyance to move the old woman. "I shall be over there by seven o'clock," he says. The c.u.mbersomeness of all these formalities is sickening. Having got the order, he will probably need to go right back to the town to arrange about the conveyance.

He was very tired, and rather wet, the night having set in with showers coming up on the east wind. So I got him a chair in the scullery, for the wet was making his old corduroys smell badly, and gave him a small gla.s.s of brandy-and-water. He refused a biscuit; "I couldn't swaller it," he said. "I can't eat, for thinkin' o' she."

He is not without a kind of pitiful consolation. "Seven or eight," he says, have professed their willingness to receive him into their homes, if need should be. One, even now, on the road from the town, has said, "Don't you trouble about _yerself_, Freddy; you can have a home with me, if you should want one." But the idea a.s.sociated with this, of parting from his wife, breaks him down. The doctor who granted the certificate--the right doctor, this time--was sympathetic.

"He come out to me because he see I was touched, and says, 'You no call to be _oneasy_, old gentleman; she'll be looked _after_ up there.

Everything 'll be done for her as can be done.'"

But these nights, in which he does not go to bed! His ankles and calves get the cramp, for he seems not to have thought, so little practice has he had in making himself comfortable, of resting his feet on another chair, while he is lying back in the easy-chair downstairs.... He has gone home now, to make up a fire and get what rest he may. "But then," he says, "she'll holler out, an' I got to run." He told me again how she "fell out o' bed flump" last night, and he stormed upstairs and found her on the floor, for "she didn't know how to get in again, not no more'n a cuckoo."

The group of cottages where he lives stands high above the road, which is reached by steps roughly cut into the steep bank. On one of these recent nights, having gone down the steps meaning to buy his wife sixpennyworth of brandy, Bettesworth felt in his trousers pocket for the shilling he had put there, and--it was gone. "Oh, I was in a way!

I went back, an' crawled all up they steps, feelin' for it," the hour being eight o'clock, and moonlight. "As I went past old Kiddy's, I called out to 'n, 'Kid!', 'cause I wanted to tell 'n what trouble I was in, and I knowed he'd ha' come and helped me to find 'n, if he'd bin about. But he was gone to bed, 'cause he starts off so early in the mornin'." Thus the old man got back home, disconsolate, without the necessary brandy for his wife; and, calling upstairs to her, "Lou, I've lost that shillin'," he began to prepare for his night in the easy-chair. But, first feeling in his pocket once more, he discovered there (fruits of his wife's incapacity) "a hole," he said, "I could put my finger through."

He pulled up his trouser legs to the knee, "because I always ties my garters up above the knee," and, with his foot on "the little stool I always puts 'n on to lace up my boots--I've had 'n ever since my boy was born--I thought I felt somethin' in the heel o' my shoe, and as soon as I pulled 'n off it rattled on the floor. _Wa'n't_ that a miracle? My hair stood bolt upright! I gropsed an' picked 'n up, and hollered up the stairs, 'I've found 'n!' 'Oh, have ye?' she says. 'I thought you'd bin an' spent 'n.'" Quickly he was off again to the public-house--Tom Durrant's--and "I says, 'I lost that shillin' once.

I'll take good care I don't lose 'n again!' And I chucked 'n up on the counter. Durrant says, 'Oh, did ye lose 'n?' So then I come back 'ome with my sixpenn'oth o' brandy. But wa'n't it a miracle? My hair stood reg'lar bolt upright, and I was that _contented_!"

There was much, very much, that I am missing; but I must not quite pa.s.s over the old man's talk on the way to the town this morning. He did not once mention his trouble. All the way it was his ordinary chatter--the chatter of a most vigorous mind, which had never learnt to think of things in groups, but was intensely interested in details.

It began at once, with reference to a cottage--a sort of "week-end"

cottage--we were pa.s.sing, into which, Bettesworth said, new tenants were coming. "How they keep changing!" said I; and he, "Well enough they may, at the price." "What is it, then?" "Four pound a month.

Furnished, o' course; but there en't much there. And," he added, "I can't see payin' a pound a week for a place to lay down in."

Next--but what came next had better be omitted now. It related to the family affairs of a certain coal-carter, and so led up to discourse of other carter men who lived in the village. From them, the transition to the employer of two of them was easy. He "got the two best carters in the neighbourhood now," said Bettesworth; but as for horses, "he en't got a hoss fit to put in a cart, 'cause he en't never had anybody before as understood anything about 'em. Somebody ought to put the cruelty inspector on to him, to go to his place and see. He _did_ go, once; but he" (the horse-owner) "got wind of it and," as far as could be gathered from Bettesworth's talk, is suspected of having "squared"

the inspector. But "there's a lot talkin' about the condition of the hosses down there," and, indeed, things "down there" seem to be generally mismanaged. The premises are "a reg'lar destructive old place": the carts, "he won't never have 'em only botched up, an' they be all to pieces;" and the harness is treated no better. "The saddles, they says, the flock 's all in lumps: _sure_ a hoss's back an'

shoulders 'd get sore. That's where they do's all the work, poor things. When I had hosses to look after, as soon as I got 'em in I always looked to their back an' shoulders first. I'd get a sponge, or a cloth...."

One of the two good carters above mentioned "can trace up a hoss's tail, you know, with straw. There en't one in ten knows how to do that. I've earnt many a shillin' at it." But Bettesworth had known one man who used to earn as much as thirty shillings in a day at this work, at horse-fairs. Him Bettesworth has occasionally helped, I understand; and also, "Old Bill Baldwin--I've sometimes bin down an'

done it for him."

Now, I had thought Bill Baldwin knew all that was worth knowing about horses and horse management; so I asked, surprisedly, "What, can't he do it?"

"He can do the tracin', in a straight run; but he can't tie up. I could do it all: the tails, and the manes too--you've see it. I'd get a bit o' live" (lithe?) "straw ... 't was when I was a boy-chap, a little bigger 'n that 'n" (whom at the moment we were meeting) "down at Penstead at Farmer Barnes's. I used to be such a one for the hosses; and I could do it, because my fingers was so lissom." (Poor old stubbed, stiff, bent fingers! to think of it!) "And then, I took such a delight in it. And Mrs. Barnes--she was a Burton--she was as proud o' them hosses! Used to get up at four o'clock in the mornin', purpose to see 'em start off. And the harness was all as clean--the bra.s.s used to shine as bright as ever any gold is, and she _was_ proud. Twenty thousand pound, was the last legacy she had. She was just such another woman to look at as old Miss Keen, what used to live down in the town; and a better woman never was.

"That's where I got all my scholarship.... Well, I could read--a little--but not to understand it. But she--she give me shirts, an'

trousers--'cause we wore smock-frocks then--but she give me shirts an'

trousers to go to night-school in. Course, I couldn't have had proper clothes without. 'Cause 'twas only thirty shillin's a year besides grub an' lodgin'.... And 't wan't no use to talk about runnin' away. I hadn't got no home. Besides, we was hired from Michaelmas to Michaelmas."

We spoke again of various neighbours, and thus drifting on (I am omitting vast quant.i.ties) Bettesworth presently told of a recent attempt at starting a village football club, or rather, of the subsequent discussion of the affair at the public-house. An enthusiast there wished to get "as many members as ever they could." "But how be ye goin' to pick 'em for play?" asked another. "Oh, pick the best."

Bettesworth tells me this, adding, "I don't call that fair do's at all. I can't see no justice in that, that one should pay to be a member of a club, purpose for somebody else to have all the play.

That's the way they breaks up a club. Break up any club, that would."

_September 24._--Word was brought this afternoon (Sat.u.r.day) that Bettesworth was at the kitchen door, wishing to see me. Of course he has not been to work to-day. I found him standing outside, patient and quiet, until, being asked how things were going, he began to cry, and shook his head, so that I feared something had miscarried and asked, "Why, haven't you got your wife away?"