For eight months after this the account of Bettesworth's sayings and doings is all but a blank. There was one summer—and perhaps it was this one of the year 1900—when he joined an excursion for his annual day's holiday, and made a long trip to Weymouth. Need it be said that he enjoyed the outing immensely? He came back to work the next day overflowing with the humour and interest of what he had seen and done. Had not old Bill Brixton lost his hat out of the train? And some other old chap sat down on a seat on Weymouth front, and stayed there all day and seen nothing? Bettesworth, too, had sat down, and had a most enjoyable conversation with a native of the place; but he had also taken steamer to Portland, and there got a drive to the prison and seen the convicts, and had a joke and a laugh with the driver of the brake, and a drink with a party of excursionists from Birmingham, who appreciated his society, and called him "uncle," and whose unfamiliar speech he imitated well enough to make me laugh. And then he had persuaded a seaman to take him out to the fleet and show him over a man-of-war; and finally had enlivened the homeward journey by chaffing old Bill, and sharing with him "a quarten o' whisky," which he carried in a medicine bottle.
This, I am inclined to believe, was an event of 1900, but I cannot verify it, and in any case it accounts for but one day. The dimness of the remainder of those eight months is but faintly illuminated—and that, it may be, for me only—by two memoranda mentioning Bettesworth as present at certain affairs, and by one all too short scrap of his own talk. He was speaking of Irishmen, no doubt in reference to some gallant deed or other in South Africa, and this is what he said:
"Ye see, they makes as brave soldiers as any.... All I got to say about Irishmen is, when you be at work with 'em, you got to think yourself as good as they, or a little better. 'Relse if they thinks you be givin' way they'll trample on ye. 'Xcept for that, I'd as lief work with Irishmen as Englishmen.... I remember once when I was at work on a buildin' for Knight, a Irishman come for me with his shovel like this." Bettesworth turned his shovel edgeways, raising it high. "He'd ha' split me if he'd ha' hit me; and as soon as he'd missed me I downed 'n. Little Georgie Knight come down off the scaffold to stop us; I'd got the feller down, an' was payin' of 'n. 'I'll give 'n 'Ome Rule!' I says; and so I did, too. He'd ha' killed me if he'd hit me. I s'pose I'd said somethin' he didn't like."
A March note, this last. As there is nothing else, I take it that the daily conversation was of the usual kind, about being forward in sowing seeds, and allowing enough room for potatoes, and so on.
June 10.—A note of June names Bettesworth among other interested spectators of an event no less singular than the death of a donkey. To me, the name of him on the page of my journal, coupled with one of his dry remarks, brings back vividly the whole scene: the glowing Sunday afternoon, the blue loveliness of the distant hills, the look of the grass, and all the tingling sense of the far-spread summer life surrounding the dying animal. But the narrative has little to do with Bettesworth, and would be out of place here. It just serves as a reminder that one more summer was passing over him; that, among the strong men who felt the heat in this valley that season, he was still one.
Carry that impression on, through the harvest time, and yet on and on until the end of September, and you may see him (or I, at least, may) one dark night, entering, all dazzled by the naked lamp, a little room where the Liberals have summoned an "important meeting of Liberal workers." He has come, like the present writer, in the expectation of hearing some "spouting," as he said afterwards. But though he is disappointed, and finds himself,—he, the least fanatic of men—the witness only of excited efforts to arrange for canvassing the district in readiness for the approaching election, still, conforming to his own rule of "behaving," he sits respectfully silent, though looking disconsolate and "sold," and his grey head, the home of such steady thoughts, has a pathetic dignity in its dark corner, and surrounded by the noisy politicians.
VII
So cramped-in as it was between sandbank and stream, Bettesworth's garden had no place for a pigsty; and as his wife could not be happy without "something to feed," he had bought her a few fowls to amuse her. With stakes and wire netting he made a diminutive "run" for them, which really seemed to adorn the end of the cottage, being stuck into the corner made by the whitewashed wall and the yellow sand-cliff. The fowls, it is true, had not room to thrive; but if Bettesworth made but little profit of them, they afforded him much contentment; and the afternoon sunshine used to fall very pleasantly on the little fowl-pen.
Needless to say, he was not exempt from the common troubles of the poultry-keeper. I remember smiling to myself once at his gravity in mentioning that one of the hens had begun to crow. He did not, indeed, own to thinking it a sign of bad luck, but his looks seemed to suggest that he was uneasy. As everyone knows, a crowing hen, if it does not portend death, is neither fit for gods nor men; so Bettesworth realized that he must kill the ill-omened bird, "as soon as he could find out which of 'em 'twas." Another time there were some little chicks, and his cat became troublesome; and, worse still, there came a rat, which had to be ferreted out.
And were there marauders besides these? I have stated that beyond Bettesworth's own cottage there were others of the same class, one of which was inhabited for a little while by a family whose honesty was not above suspicion. Would these people interfere with his fowls? It was a point to be considered.