One day I watched a man very leisurely inspecting a thistle in a meadow by the weir, and then, with a deliberation that was most restful to a harried, hustled, war-time Londoner, he tenderly and carefully cut it off near the ground with a scythe. After he had decapitated about twenty thistles in this way, he naturally needed a little time for recuperation, and sat down on the river bank to meditate. I hadn’t liked to interrupt him when he was working, because so far as I could roughly estimate, there were thirteen thousand four hundred and fifty-three thistles in the meadow—approximately, you understand—and we don’t work according to trade union hours here; sometimes we start an hour later and leave off an hour earlier, and miss out several in between. But since he had evidently reached his rest-hour—and remembering that one of my own fields was plentifully dotted with thistles at the moment, and feeling quite equal myself to that gentle picturesque swish of the scythe—I asked him whether that process killed the thistle right out? (My business instinct forbade my wasting time on the job if it would all have to be done over again later on.)
No, he said, he didn’t think as how it would kill the thistles right out.
Then why did he do it that way? I asked, instead of spudding the thing right up by the root?
“Well”—and he scratched his head thoughtfully—“doing it like this jest diskerridges of ’em a bit, and isn’t sech a deluge o’ trouble as mooting ’em right out would be.” And with that he promptly dropped thistles, and proceeded to discuss the fiendishness of the Germans.
He had a long talk (there wasn’t room for me to say anything), and gave recipes for annihilating completely everything connected with them (excepting thistles; I presume they have some; they deserve a good crop, anyhow), finishing up with—
“But thur—what I says about ’em I won’t exackly repeat in yer presence, m’m; for my wife often says to me, ‘It won’t do nobody no pertickler good,’ she says, ‘if you gets yerself shut out o’ Heaven by yer langidge,’ she says, ‘just to spite they Huns, what don’t even hear it!’”
For a full two minutes he worked that scythe with real zest, as though onslaughting the enemy.
Perhaps his method is right (in regard to thistles, I mean), perhaps it is wrong; I’ve never gone sufficiently deep into the subject to be competent to pass an opinion. But I do know that the larger proportion of handy men who have honoured me with their patronage (though there are conspicuous exceptions) invariably weed on these lines of least resistance, and “jest diskerridge ’em”—though I own it takes a lot to discourage our weeds!
Not feeling like diskerridging weeds at the moment, I asked Ursula to suggest some occupation for my idle hands, though I didn’t put it like that; I inquired which of the many jobs needing urgent attention I had better tackle next. (It came to the same thing in the end; but instead of advertising my natural indolence, I hoped it would convey an impression that I was rushing pell-mell through an endless succession of tasks.)