XVII
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 a wrench 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's benefit. "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 looks kind."
"No; not to say kind," 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 is useful; 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—Snip they 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 and they'll talk—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 no use to be a trade, if everybody can do it. 'Relse we should have poor livin' then."
October 31, 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 rebuke won 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!"