The receptivity of the man's brain was what struck me. One pictured it pinked and patterned over with thousands of unsorted facts—legions of them jostling one another without apparent arrangement. Yet all were available to him; at will he could summon any one of them into his consciousness. A modern man would have had to stop and sift and compare them, and build theories and systems out of all that wealth of material. Not being modern, Bettesworth did not theorize; his thoughts were like the dust-atoms seen in a sunbeam. But though he did not "think," still a vast common-sense somehow or other flourished in him, and these manifold facts were its food.
September 26, 1896.—Nor was it only of current topics that he could talk with such fullness of detail. Getting shortly afterwards into the reminiscent vein, he succeeded in paralyzing my memory with the tale of things he had observed many years before in just the same unsystematic yet thorough fashion. My hasty jottings, made afterwards, preserve only a few points, and do not tell how any of them were suggested. The talk was at one time of Basingstoke Fair, "where they goes to hire theirselves for the year." Of "shepherds with a bit o' wool in their hats, carters with a bit o' whipcord, and servant gals," and so on. "I went once," said Bettesworth, "when I was a nipper—went away from Penstead; but I never got hired.... There's the place for games, though! They carters, when they've jest took their year's money, and be changin' 'racks,' as they calls it. 'You bin an' changed your rack, Bill?' 'What rack be you got on to?' 'You got on for old Farmer So-and-so?'... There they be, hollerin' about. And then they all got their shillin', what bin hired...."
I did not stop then to consider whether this hiring shilling, and the token in the hat, might have any relationship, in the world of old customs, to the "King's shilling" and the bunch of ribbons of the recruit for the army. Bettesworth was talking; and presently it was about a certain Jack Worthington, of a neighbouring village, who was known as "Cunnin' Jack," and played the concertina at fairs, clubs, and so on: "Newbury Fair, Reading Fair, Basingstoke Fair"—Bettesworth essayed to catalogue them. Cunnin' Jack "learnt it all by hisself, but I've heared a good many—travellin' folk and the like—say as they never heared anybody play the concertina like him. He's the on'y one 's ever I heared play the church bells—chimes, an' fire 'em, and all—wonderful! Blue Bells of Scotland, too—to hear him play that, an' the chimes, jest exact! No trouble to make out what 'tis. Oh, he's a reg'lar musician! He've trained all his sons to same thing. One of 'em plays the fiddle; another of 'em got a thing what he scratches along wi' wires, sounds purty near like a fiddle.... 'Ten't no good for 'n in a town, 'less 'tis a fair or summat o' that; but in any out-o'-the-way place. 'Relse, if he gets to a fair, there'll be three or four landlords about tryin' to get hold of 'n; and they'll give 'n five shillin's and supper, and his drink an' a bed, an' what he can pick up besides. Very often he'll make as much as five-an'-twenty shillin's in a night(?). And when he comes 'ome, he bring p'r'aps a gallon o' ha'pence along with 'n. Never no silver, o' course. Often, when his wife thought he hadn't got nothing but a pound or so, he'd chuck her five or six pound. Then in the winter he'd go gravel-diggin', onless there come a fair, or anything o' the likes o' that. At these pubs where they dances, too, he'd put round the hat after every dance, an' if there was a good many stood up, p'r'aps he'd pull in half-a-crown or so."
Cunnin' Jack had a contrivance of musical dancing-dolls, about which I did not clearly understand. And I have quite forgotten how Bettesworth spoke of the man's brother, a deaf-mute, who refused to work, and "lived about at Aldershot, along o' the soldiers."
Afterwards another "dummy" was mentioned: "terrible big strong feller.... Spiteful.... Goes gravel-cartin' with his father." At a difficult place in the gravel-pit the father reached out and struck his son's horse. The "dummy" springs on him, throws him on his back, making a noise "'bu-bu,' like a calf.... Sure way to upset 'n—if you was in the gravel pit, touch his hoss...."
Bettesworth had once seen "a dummy, talkin' with a friend of his," in the finger alphabet. "Can't you understand it?" said the friend to Bettesworth. "'No,' I says; 'how should I?' But, law! to see him! And then write, too! Purty near as fast as you can talk. And all the time his eye 'd be on ye, watchin' ye. But to see him write on his slate—wonderful fast! and then" (here Bettesworth breaks into dramatic action, licking his hand and smudging out slate-writing)—"and then, when he'd rubbed it out, to see him write again! Spiteful, though, he was. So they all be, I s'pose." There was another dumb man, for instance, who had been apprenticed to a shoemaker....
Unfortunately, I cannot reconstruct this instance. I only remember that the man had become "a wonderful good shoemaker, but didn't sim to care about follerin' it," and had "took to gardenin' now," instead.
May 5, 1898.—On a morning early in May it was raining, quietly, luxuriously, with a continuous soothing shattering-down of warm drops. In the doorway of the little tool-shed I stood listening—listening to the gentle murmur on the roof, on the long fresh grass of a small orchard plot, and on the young leaves of the plum and the blossoming apple which made the daylight greener by half veiling the sky.
Beside and beyond these trees were lilacs, purpling for bloom, small hazels, young elms in a hedgerow—all fair with new greenness; and farther on, glimpses of cottage roof against the newly dug garden-ground of the steep hillside. Above the half-diaphanous green tracery of the trees, cool delicious cloud, "dropping fatness," darkened where it sagged nearer to the earth. The light was nowhere strong, but all tempered moistly, tenderly, to the tenderness of the young greenery.
I ought to have been busy, yet I stood and listened; for the earth seemed busy too, but in a softened way, managing its many businesses beautifully. The air seemed melting into numberless liquid sounds. Quite near—not three trees off—there was a nightingale nonchalantly babbling; from the neighbourhood of the cottage came, penetrating, the bleating of a newly-born goat; while in the orchard just before me Bettesworth stooped over a zinc pail, which, as he scrubbed it, gave out a low metallic note. Then there were three undertones or backgrounds of sound, that of the soft-falling rain being one of them. Another, which diapered the rain-noise just as the young leaves showed their diaper-work against the clouds, was the all but unnoticed singing of larks, high up in the wet. Lastly, to give the final note of mellowness, of flavoured richness to the morning, I could hear through the distance which globed and softened it a frequent "Cuckoo, cuckoo." The sound came and died away, as if the rain had dissolved it, and came again, and again was lost.